Chiyuri lifted her face as if about to say something but then stayed silent for another five seconds. Finally, a faint voice spilled out of the mouth hidden under her face mask. “…So then by now, Cotto’s light cube is already…”
Haruyuki couldn’t bring himself to give her an unequivocal “yes,” so he only said, “Probably.”
Chiyuri’s friend Cotton Marten was not a veteran Linker like Centaurea Sentry, nor did she have any Enhanced Armament with a dodgy history. Haruyuki highly doubted that she had any means of avoiding the re-initialization of her specialized quantum circuits at the time of total point loss. In fact, more than likely, she hadn’t even known those circuits existed.
It wasn’t as though he knew everything about the Accelerated World, either, so he couldn’t say it was absolutely out of the question. But he did think the possibility of Cotton Marten being resurrected was infinitely close to zero.
“Hey, Haru?” Chiyuri said, her voice even fainter. “The White King… Could she bring Cotto back to life with her revival power?”
“…!”
He reflexively stared intently into her small face mask. Had this been her motivation in giving Juniper Weasel her contact address? No. Haruyuki immediately dismissed this idea. She had voiced this question now impulsively, out of a sense of guilt at not having been able to save her friend.
Shifting his gaze away from her face, he set his mind to work in earnest.
White Cosmos’s Revival—her resurrection ability—was a fearsome power, toying with Burst Linkers’ dignity, but it didn’t necessarily bring about tragic results.
Forcibly revived as the foundation for the Armor of Catastrophe Mark II, Dusk Taker appeared to be a copy of the original filled with malice, reproducing only the darkness in Seiji Nomi’s heart. On the other hand, however, Megumi Wakamiya/Orchid Oracle seemed to have been brought back whole, like Centaurea Sentry. Cosmos’s power had resurrected both Burst Linkers in the Accelerated World, so where did these differences come from? The White King’s closest aide, Snow Fairy, had admitted their master was prone to whims, but that probably wasn’t the cause of the differences in resurrections.
“…Wakamiya—Orchid Oracle—said that if you look at White Cosmos’s revival ability another way, it’s a Main Visualizer access privilege,” Haruyuki said, looking at the ground through the gap between his legs, and he felt Chiyuri squirm next to him. But she didn’t say anything, so he continued to explain.
“I don’t know how she learned an ability like that, or even if it’s a normal technique or an Incarnate technique. But if she has free access to the Main Visualizer—the Brain Burst central server—then she could even restore the re-initialized light cube data…maybe. So if you’re asking if there’s a chance, I do think it might be possible to bring Cotton Marten back to life.”
Now he heard his childhood friend inhale sharply. He hurriedly grabbed her wrist and said the thing that had to be said.
“But the White King would absolutely never simply help you, not without some kind of payment. She’s after something someone like me can’t even imagine, that maybe even the Seven Dwarves don’t know everything about, and every single thing she does is to achieve that something; she won’t lift a single finger for anything not in service to her ultimate goal. So if she does revive Cotton Marten…I think she’ll demand you switch Legions in return.”
“M-me?!” Chiyuri cried out, stunned, and held up the hand Haruyuki was holding, to point at herself. “Why? I mean, I’m still only level five, and I can’t use Incarnate.”
Haruyuki turned her hand toward the stone statue towering above them in the center of the intersection.
“Did you already forget that you rewound time for the statue and buried the portal?” he asked. “Search the whole entire Accelerated World, and you’ll never find anyone else who could do that. And Pard said your Citron Call was one of the top three techniques in the Accelerated World, alongside Metatron’s Trisagion and Oracle’s Paradigm Breakdown.”
“Huh? No, but it’s nothing so great as that,” Chiyuri muttered, embarrassed.
“Haah.” Haruyuki sighed heavily as he released her wrist. “Think about it. The White King’s already got two of the top three. So it wouldn’t be weird if she wanted that last one.”
“Hmm. I guess…” Chiyuri couldn’t quite process this. She abruptly clamped her mouth shut and stared at Choir Chime, the Enhanced Armament equipped on her left arm.
Belatedly, he began to panic. What would he do if she said she was okay with moving from Nega Nebulus to Oscillatory Universe if it meant Cotton Marten would be revived?
However.
“…Even if it were for Cotto’s sake, I couldn’t transfer,” she murmured, looking squarely at him. “This is different from when you transferred. I can tell that much at least.”
“…Yeah?” Haruyuki somehow managed to respond.
In this moment, Chiyuri had accepted the separation from her friend. He had no way of guessing how close she had been with Cotton Marten, but developing a relationship with a member of another Legion that went beyond saying hello to a familiar face was rare in the Accelerated World where the basic rule was that everyone other than parent or child was an enemy. Excluding Prominence, which had merged with Nega Nebulus, about the only friend in another Legion Haruyuki could say he had was Great Wall’s Ash Roller.
Actually, he did have one more. He could count the number of times they’d spoken on one hand, but the Acceleration Research Society’s Wolfram Cerberus was definitely a friend. And now that he had been transformed into Wolfram Disaster, the most powerful duel avatar in history, through the fusion of the Invincible thruster Enhanced Armament stolen from the Red King Scarlet Rain, and the super-concentrated negative Incarnate collected with the ISS kits, Haruyuki had to do whatever it took to save him.