The instant his recollection reached that point, her curt voice came back to life in the back of his mind.
Listen, Haruyuki. From what I’ve seen, Rin, Niko, and Chiyuri consciously like you. And although they themselves may not be aware of it, Fuko, Utai, and Choco are extremely suspect.
You have to square off with all of their feelings and tell each of them how you actually feel.
Unconsciously, he looked at Lime Bell out of the corner of his eye.
Chiyu—Chiyuri Kurashima—was his childhood friend, unshakable, born in the same year in the same condo, going to the same elementary and junior high schools.
When he’d been singled out for bullying and locked himself up in a thick shell of distrust and self-loathing, Chiyuri was the one who had kept her hand extended toward him, endlessly patient. And after she became a Burst Linker as Takumu’s “child,” she’d saved him in his fight against Dusk Taker and the battle against the rest of the Acceleration Research Society more times than he could count. The way she unfailingly had his back, her battle abilities, her inherent cheer, and above all else, her core strength had helped him more than he could put into words.
But—no, actually because of this—his first thought when told she had romantic feelings for him was confusion. He’d assumed that what she really wanted was for him, her, and Takumu to live happily ever after as childhood friends.
“Hey, Haru?” she said abruptly, and he jumped and shrank into himself.
Ever so timidly, he looked to his side, but never in a million years could he have predicted the question she followed up with.
“I guess there’s no legitimate way for Burst Linkers who lose all their points to come back, huh?”
The pleading note in her voice stabbed at his virtual heart. And he definitely hadn’t forgotten that she had only just lost a friend. This was not the time for thinking about romance. Although that was important, too, but not now anyway.
As he deeply inhaled the dry air, he set his brain to work in earnest. It wasn’t like there were no precedents for recovery from total point loss.
Even limited to those cases he had personally witnessed, there were Dusk Taker, who had come back in the form of a consciousness possessing Wolfram Cerberus; Orchid Oracle, who’d returned in the middle of the Territories; and Centaurea Sentry, whose resurrection Haruyuki had personally been quite involved in.
Of these three examples, the restoration of Taker and Oracle had been due to the mysterious “revival” ability of the White King White Cosmos. Chiyuri would have also known about these, so this was likely why she added the “legitimate way” to her question.
But the third case…
After a moment’s hesitation, he figured his master wouldn’t get mad about it, given the current situation, and said, “You remember Centaurea Sentry? That person I brought to the big send-off party?”
“Yeah. Seri Suzukawa, right?” Chiyuri nodded. “Now that you mention it, how did you meet a soccer player in high school in Shinjuku?” Her date-shaped eye lenses narrowed sharply.
“Uh. Um…” He reflexively started to sit up straighter, but he quickly relaxed again as he replied. “Oh, it’s not like we met in the real! First contact was on this side.”
“Oh, yeah. I guess,” she said, slowly. “So what about Sentry?”
“…You know she was the third Chrome Disaster, yeah?”
“…Uh-huh.” Chiyuri assented and continued in a small voice. “Kuroyukihime and them thought she’d been subjugated by the Blue King and driven to total point loss ages ago. But she was actually alive and hiding somewhere in the Accelerated World the way my sister Fuu did.”
“She really was subjugated by the Blue King,” he said and then stopped. He firmed up his resolve and confessed. “But this actually did put Master Sentry in total point loss. The BB program was forcibly uninstalled, and she lost her memories of the Accelerated World.”
“What…?!” Chiyuri’s eyes flew open, but naturally, her mind continued to tease through this puzzle, and she continued in a hoarse voice. “Oh. Do you maybe mean…she came back as a Burst Linker even though she lost all her points once? In a way that’s different from Dusk Taker?”
“Yeah.” Haruyuki gave her a slight but firm nod. “And right in front of me, too. She didn’t tell me exactly how, but I think the quantum thought circuits in the Brain Burst central server are probably the key.”
“The quantum…thought circuits,” Chiyuri repeated, and she looked up at the red sky almost like she was looking for those circuits. But all that was there was the orderly row of system messages WARNING and FINAL STAGE carved into hexagonal tiles.
Haruyuki wondered if the sky of the Unlimited Neutral Field would be like this forever from now on, before blinking and turning his face back to Chiyuri. “It’s not like we’re using our actual flesh-and-blood brains to think and talk right now. We’re thinking with quantum circuits that have copied our minds—our souls. The White King calls it a ‘light cube.’ All our memories and everything in our brains is reproduced and stored in these circuits.”
“So even if you lose all your points, and all your memories as a Burst Linker are erased, as long as the quantum circuits—the light cube—is safe, your memories can be restored?” she asked, all in one breath.
He placed a gentle hand on her shoulder to try to calm her down as he said, “If the light cube’s okay. Normally, when a Burst Linker loses all their points, I guess the cube’s reset, too. I think that Master Sentry either saved her own cube somehow before fighting the Blue King or…it didn’t get reset because of some effect of the Armor of Catastrophe.”
“…”