While duel avatars didn’t require oxygen, they did have the sensation of breathing with lungs, so Taupe Cape had no doubt been fighting the terror of a lack of oxygen in that small, closed space the whole time.
After taking several deep breaths and slowly exhaling the last one, she looked up at Haruyuki and Chiyuri and bowed her head. “Bell, Crow. Thank you. I thought I’d never get out of this hole.”
“How long have you been in there, Taupe?” Chiyuri asked, and the other avatar cocked her head slightly to one side.
“I don’t know precisely anymore, but…” She paused for a moment. “Probably ten days, two weeks-ish…”
“…”
Chiyuri was stunned into silence, and Haruyuki’s jaw dropped in silent amazement. Two weeks all alone in a pitch-black, vertical hole, so small she couldn’t even lie down. Without the ability to decelerate like Black Vise or a resistance to loneliness like Avocado Avoider, who knew what kind of damage that would do to the psyche?
“…I can’t believe you made it that long,” Haruyuki said.
Taupe shook her head slightly. “If it had been a trap, I totally could never have done it. But the person who put me in here…” She opened her eye lenses wide with a gasp. “Right. Where’s Tezcatlipoca?! What happened to Exercitus? To Zel and Jim and them?!”
She quickly looked around and then turned her face up to the sky and froze in place.
Haruyuki also glanced at the crimson hexagons lined up in the abnormal sky before responding, “We’d be here all day if we gave you the detailed story. Basically, Tezcatlipoca collapsed. Excluding you, one hundred thirteen members of Exercitus survived. They left earlier through the portal at Sunshine City.”
“Collapsed…?” Taupe muttered, doubtful, but then turned her gaze back on him. “Zel…? Did you see Zelkova Verger?”
Haruyuki couldn’t immediately answer her. It wasn’t like he’d checked each and every survivor, but he would’ve remembered if he’d seen the large Zelkova, with his distinctive armor, among them. And he highly doubted that Zelkova would have left Taupe Cape locked up in a hole and returned to the real world if he had survived. Which meant, essentially…
“…I’m sorry. I didn’t see him,” he replied briefly, unable to bring himself to say that Zelkova had probably been driven to total point loss.
But Taupe Cape appeared to intuit everything from just that. She curled up like she was in pain and hung her head even lower.
Chiyuri, who had similarly just lost a friend, apparently had no words of comfort for the grieving avatar. Haruyuki had only dueled Zelkova Verger the one time that morning, and he had only known Taupe Cape by name, but he was pretty sure that they were parent and child. He felt like he’d heard somewhere that Taupe was Zelkova’s parent. He couldn’t begin to imagine the sadness of losing a child.
But Taupe Cape had to have been more mentally spent than she could bear. While it was not the flesh-and-blood brain that was exhausted, but rather the replicated mind of the quantum circuits, there would no doubt be an excessive burden placed on her brain during the memory synchronization that would happen after she burst out. They had to return her to the real world through the nearest portal as soon as possible.
With this thought in mind, Haruyuki took a step toward the hunched-over Taupe. But before he could open his mouth, he heard a pained voice.
“…I don’t want to go back,” Taupe said softly.
…B-but…you have to leave right away and get some actual rest.” He managed somehow these words of protest, but Taupe shrank even further into herself.
“I’m…on a video call with Zel.”
Hearing this, Haruyuki exchanged another look with Chiyuri.
A video call was in the same family as the voice call, where you chatted with sound only, and the dive call, where you chatted in avatar form; it was a feature where you chatted in a video feed window displayed on your virtual desktop. Your own face couldn’t be filmed with the camera built into your Neurolinker, so a video call required an external camera, but it was the quickest way to accelerate while looking at the actual face of someone in a different place.
If she’d entered the Unlimited Neutral Field on a call, he could easily understand her desire to not return to the real world. The first thing she would see when she burst out was the face of Zelkova Verger, who had now lost all memories connected with the Accelerated World.
“…”
Not sure what to do, Haruyuki clenched his teeth beneath his goggles.
Chiyuri brought her face mask close and whispered, “Hey, Haru, how about we let her rest somewhere safe on this side?”
“Huh? Umm…” He blinked in surprise at this unexpected suggestion.
It was possible to rest and recover from mental exhaustion in the Unlimited Neutral Field…in theory at least. Before the Sun God Inti attack mission, Ardor Maiden had let Haruyuki take a nap of about fifty minutes with his head on her lap, and the exhaustion of training for nearly five months was miraculously gone when he woke up. This had most likely been some unknown ability of Maiden’s at work, but he did feel like a good sleep in the Accelerated World could definitely prevent that exhaustion from being brought back to the flesh-and-blood brain.
“…That’s maybe a good idea.” He nodded. “But where’s a safe place?”
“Hmm.” Chiyuri paused thoughtfully. “Like big sister Raker’s house or something?”
“Ohh…” Makes sense, he thought, before he realized that he didn’t have the key to Fufuan, Sky Raker’s player home. Metatron could come and go from the house as she pleased, since Fuko had given her a duplicate key, but she was apparently in the middle of something at the moment.