But Weasel seemed to pay no mind to Haruyuki’s silence and continued in an unaffected, husky voice.
“Thanks to you two, looks like thirty or forty percent of the Legion’s gonna make it home alive… To be honest, the damage is too huge, and I can’t get my head around it yet. I smelled something dodgy when Helix’s Beryllium Coil refused to be a part of the mission. For the rest of my life, I’m seriously gonna regret getting on board with this plan and not trusting my own nose.”
Even for an experienced veteran like Juniper Weasel, it was probably no simple thing to accept the fact that 60 percent of your Legion members had been driven to total point loss as one.
After a moment’s hesitation, Haruyuki asked in a small voice, “By ‘got on board’… You mean someone other than you initially came up with this plan?”
“Yeah.” Weasel nodded. “Russet Strix from Night Owls. But this isn’t all on him. He got the ball rolling ’cause he wanted to change the Accelerated World for the better in his own way. After we ended up in the Unlimited EK, he kept on fighting dead center in front of Tezcatlipoca so that as many members as possible could get away.”
“…So then Strix is…?” Haruyuki left the rest of the question unasked.
“Right before Tezcatlipoca got all smashed up, I watched as he hit total point loss. And while we’re on the subject, Cold Brew’s Coffee Barista and Gouen’s Kapur Drum also lost everything, so of the leaders of the four Legions spearheading the Exercitus plan, I’m shamefully the only one who survived.”
A self-deprecating smile lifted one side of the weasel mask, and Juniper Weasel looked up at the red sky. He stayed silent for a moment, but then turned his face toward Haruyuki again, the smile gone.
“Honestly, I got absolutely no idea what happens now. Tezcatlipoca suddenly collapses, those weirdos come marching on out from inside of it. They said today’s the end of Brain Burst service, yeah? You got any idea what that means, Crow?”
Posed this question, Haruyuki reflexively shook his head but then added after a second of thought, “Nothing certain. But if you’re interested in a guess…”
“Sure,” Weasel assented readily. “Won’t lodge a complaint if it ends up being wrong.”
“…Got it,” Haruyuki replied. “If we piece together everything that fox-face—Urocyon—said, I think it probably means something like this. Our Brain Burst 2039 and their Dread Drive 2047 are in something like an online game’s server-versus-server battle, and we’re competing to see who can hit the clear conditions first… And the losing server gets shut down.”
“…Server versus server…,” Juniper Weasel murmured, and then he whirled his head around.
Haruyuki followed suit and sent his eyes racing over the area. The regenerated survivors continued to assemble at the mouth of Green Boulevard, but not a single person was overjoyed to still be alive. The failure of the Tezcatlipoca subjugation plan and the hardships of the weeks-long Unlimited EK had thoroughly crushed their spirits.
“Silver Crow.”
His name called, Haruyuki looked once again at Weasel.
The dark blue weasel-shaped avatar bowed deeply once more. “I know I’m in no position to ask a thing like this, given that I was trying to take down the seven Great Legions. But if this server battle thing is for real, we can’t handle it the way we are now. We’re on the brink here. We don’t even know if the individual Legions will continue to exist, much less Exercitus, and we don’t have the firepower, either. So, Crow, fight those guys—those Unifiers—not for our sake or for the sake of BB, but for your own self.”
When Weasel closed his mouth, the five Legion members assembled to either side of their leader and also bowed.
Unifiers. This was the name that Urocyon had spoken. Most likely, it was the group name for the ten Drive Linkers who had come out of the portal. Haruyuki should probably think of it as less a Legion name and more the name of an elite squad like the Six Armors or the Seven Dwarves.
He hadn’t even been able to make Urocyon alone fight him for real, and yet there were nine more superheroes with just as much or more power. Could he actually get them to even look at him, much less fight him? And then it hit him.
The extension Chiyuri had bought them with her Citron Call, bravery, and quick-wittedness was approximately twenty-seven hours of real time—more than three years of inside time. Naturally, he couldn’t spend the whole day in a dive, but he still had plenty of time to discuss the situation with trusted Burst Linkers and come up with a plan. And the Accelerated World had the Seven Kings, level niners like Urocyon and his team, plus a host of hardened veteran warriors.
The real issue was that while he absolutely could not picture a future in which his own master, the White King White Cosmos, worked with the other Kings to save the Accelerated World, he had to talk her into it or the whole endeavor would go nowhere. And although the White King appeared to be strangely omniscient, she hadn’t known there was a portal inside of Tezcatlipoca, which meant that the invasion of the Drive Linkers would have also been a surprise to her.
“…I mean, I doubt they’d give me alone the time of day,” Haruyuki noted by way of preamble, and continued. “But I’ll do whatever I can with my comrades. And whatever your motivations, all of you in Exercitus who stood up against Tezcatlipoca should hold your heads high. Although maybe you’re thinking who am I to say anything…”
“Naw, man. It’s like Speed Star saying something like that, that’s, like, a real thing for even the guys in total point loss.” With a faint smile, Weasel looked at Chiyuri. “And Lime Bell. Thanks for looking out for Marten.”
Chiyuri had been standing there quietly up to this point, so now she jumped slightly before responding in a soft voice, “I didn’t make it in time. And Cotto messaged me and everything…”
“It’s not your fault,” Weasel told her. “We got one member who knows Marten in the real, so if you want, I could get ’em to message you. What do you think?”
“No…,” Chiyuri started to say, but then nodded as if she had rethought things. “Um, okay, please do that.”
She opened her storage and took out a pale blue card. The message card could record a short text, but the frozen texture indicated that it was protected by a password.
“This is my contact address,” she told him. “The password is B-E-L-L.”
“Got it.” Weasel accepted the card and put it into his own storage.
The password was barely strong enough to protect anything, but anyone could see that the card was locked just by looking at it. And the fact that it couldn’t be locked a second time made it difficult for anyone entrusted with passing it on to secretly take a peek.
This was standard procedure for giving a message to someone in the Accelerated World, so Weasel seemed unaffected as he made his storage disappear, and then sighed.
“…We’re gonna wait until everyone who got turned into a death marker’s regenerated, and then leave through the Sunshine portal,” he told them. “You guys go on and take off.”
“No, we’ll stay and wait with you,” Haruyuki replied. “It’s only another half an hour or so.”
“’Kay.” Weasel nodded.