Twenty minutes later, having left Oumutei by himself, Haruyuki walked in a straight line until he’d gotten out of the thick fog, before whirling around.
Naturally, he couldn’t see the house, blocked as it was by the fog, but he bowed toward its owner, Centaurea Sentry, and then spread his wings at an acute angle. He still had pretty much all of the special attack gauge he’d charged up during the battle with Urocyon, so he vibrated the twelve metal fins with an output of 50 percent.
Boom! The shock wave pushed the lake water at his feet back ten meters in all directions as Silver Crow shot up into the sky at a speed fast enough to make all of his joints squeal in protest. Despite the fact that this was only half throttle, the power output was basically the same as his previous full-strength acceleration, and he reflexively started to put on the emergency brakes, but he desperately checked that impulse and continued his ascent. If he put on the brakes at this speed, the deceleration would generate an explosive sonic boom. And that would be like saying “Come find me” to any Enemies or avatars on the ground.
He pressed his arms tightly against his sides, minimizing air resistance as much as possible as he soared up for ten seconds or so, and then his field of view was dyed white once more. Not fog this time, but clouds. Shooting through the enormous fleecy configuration, he finally spread out his wings to their fullest and applied the brakes with a level of force that wouldn’t generate a shock wave, to gradually decelerate.
Once he had finally shifted to hovering, there was nothing but blue sky around him. When he lowered his gaze, the skyscrapers of central Tokyo looked like miniatures of the cityscape. He was probably at an altitude of two thousand meters.
Two thousand meters in ten seconds meant that his average speed could be calculated to be seven hundred twenty kilometers an hour. Even before the fusion, the Metatron Wings had boasted an acceleration reaching the speed of sound—approximately twelve hundred kilometers an hour at full power. But exceeding seven hundred kilometers an hour at half power while ascending vertically where the influence of gravity was at its strongest was something else. If he accelerated at full power, one of his limbs might very well be ripped off…
“Don’t freak out,” Haruyuki muttered to himself.
He had despaired over how much more powerful Urocyon and the other Unifiers were than the Burst Linkers. If he was going to be afraid of the power he’d obtained, closing that gap would remain the dream of a dream.
He would absolutely make this power his, even if it meant his head was ripped off, forget a limb. After vowing this in his heart, he narrowed his eyes on the scene directly below him. The lake where Oumutei hid looked like a blue drop of water from this height.
The second this thought crossed his mind, Taupe Cape’s tears falling onto the white plate came back to him.
After finishing the two slices of yokan, Taupe had thanked him again and started to stand up, but then sat back down before her bottom was even thirty centimeters off the chair.
Haruyuki and Chiyuri assumed that now that her virtual hunger had been sated, staying awake any longer was beyond her, so they’d helped Taupe into the Japanese-style tatami room across from the kitchen.
He pulled a futon and blanket out of the home storage, laid them out on the tatami mats, and then set Taupe down on the futon. She immediately dropped off to sleep, almost like she was passing out. Judging from her exhausted state, he wouldn’t have been surprised if she slept for a full day.
He had intended to stay until she woke up, but Chiyuri said that she would watch over her so he could go, and he’d taken that reprieve. But naturally, he hadn’t left Oumutei to go fool around or for a change of scenery. He wanted to use this time to tackle the mission he’d been tasked with.
That evening, the White King White Cosmos had given Haruyuki an order—actually, depending on how he looked at it, that one order was maybe four: to contact the other highest-ranking Beings besides the Archangel Metatron, Ohirume Amaterasu, and Abandoned Princess Bari, to whom he was already contracted/linked, and contract with them, if possible.
Those four Beings were Goddess of the Dawn Ushas, Queen Mother of the West Xiwangmu, Storm King Rudra, and Night Goddess Nyx.
He had absolutely no idea what the White King’s objective in issuing such an order was, and it was not clear if it was still in effect now that Tezcatlipoca had collapsed and the Drive Linkers had invaded. But the White King was Haruyuki’s master, so he had to execute the missions he was given until they were clearly withdrawn.
The issue was that the four highest-ranking Beings inhabited the deepest parts of extremely difficult dungeons on the same scale as the Shiba Park Underground Labyrinth, Metatron’s home. Kuroyukihime, who was there when Cosmos issued this order, said that an attack squad of eighteen people in three parties, at the very least, was required to break through the dungeons.
Since he couldn’t actually recruit personnel from Nega Nebulus or any of the other Kings’ Legions to carry out the White King’s order, his attack corps would have to be composed of only Oscillatory Universe members.
Oscillatory was a large Legion with a general force of thirty people, even excluding the members of the “underground corps,” the Acceleration Research Society. But the only people he’d met since he joined the Legion were Rose Milady and Orchid Oracle, who were planning to leave the Legion, and four of the Seven Dwarves. He had only fought the other members in the Territories seven days earlier and hadn’t spoken to them yet. How many would gladly accept a sudden request to join him in attacking a high-level dungeon?
“…At any rate, I guess could go check out the dungeons,” he said with a sigh, and he turned his body to the southeast.
Of the highest-level Beings he was supposed to make contact with, Ushas had her castle under the Shinjuku Government Building, Xiwangmu under the Tokyo Dome, Rudra under the Tokyo Big Sight, and Nyx under Yoyogi Park. The closest of these to his current position was the Tokyo Dome.
What kind of god is Xiwangmu? Her name sounds kinda Chinese…he wondered as he sought out a dome-shaped mountain in the wasteland spreading out two thousand meters below him.
Suddenly, a faint voice echoed inside his head.
Servant.
“M-Metatron? What’s up?” he accidentally asked with his actual voice instead of in thought, but the question apparently reached her without issue.
I should like to ask you that very question. Shift to the Highest Level this very second.
“Huh? R-right now?”
That is what I said.
Together with this curt response, the presence of Metatron disappeared. Apparently, she was not going to pull him up to the Highest Level herself.
After lunch that day, in the student council office of the Eternal Girls’ Academy junior high division, Snow Fairy, aka Nanako Juholt, had said that Crow was a level-two contractor and on top of that, a level-three accessor.
A contractor was just as the name would have it, someone who was linked with (i.e., under contract to) a Being, but he had no idea what the levels meant. An accessor was someone who had reached the Highest Level, and he had some idea of the levels here. Level one was someone who had direct contact with a Being and was shifted by them, level two was someone who shifted in long-distance resonance with a Being, and level three was someone who could shift on their own.
Haruyuki had only shifted to the Highest Level without Metatron’s assistance a mere handful of times up to that point. But all of those shifts had either been gradual progress over enormous amounts of time as he honed his senses, or accidental in extreme situations where his life was in danger. While he had to admit those shifts had been under his own power, he was far from being able to shift at will.
Since no matter how he looked at it, his current situation was not one likely to produce that latter accidental shift, the only possibility was the former method.
Actually, mere hours earlier, Haruyuki had experienced a shift in an unexpected form. When he’d shared the first kiss of his life with Kuroyukihime in the living room of the Arita house, he’d no sooner heard the sudden sound of acceleration than the two of them had been flown to the Highest Level.
The instant he recalled the warmth and softness of Kuroyukihime’s lips, his face grew hot beneath his goggles, but he managed to push this aside somehow and set his brain to work.