Thus far, he’d thought that what he required in order to shift to the Highest Level was the ultimate concentration. Once his focus exceeded a certain threshold, either by gradually intensifying it over long hours or with the instinct to fight in a life-or-death moment, excess load was applied to his light cube/quantum circuits, and his mind was guided—or rather bounced—to a higher-order space.
But this hypothesis didn’t explain the phenomenon of the sudden shift from the real world. When he was kissing Kuroyukihime, his mind had without a doubt been inside his flesh-and-blood brain and should not have been connected with his light cube.
“…Or was it, though?” he muttered in a voice that wasn’t quite a voice.
When he’d first encountered Centaurea Sentry on the Highest Level, still in her ghost state, she had wondered about the nightmare experienced by those who received the BB program. Had it truly been a by-product of the process of reproducing their souls in the light cube over the course of several hours? If that was true, then when he was having that nightmare, his mind had been connected to his light cube through his Neurolinker. And in that case, what if that connection wasn’t a one-off thing, but rather was continuously maintained when his Neurolinker was equipped, or even when it was nearby, if not equipped?
The brain inside the head of the flesh-and-blood Haruyuki and the quantum circuits in the Brain Burst central server, aka Main Visualizer… One soul existing in two physically and conceptually distant receptacles.
The instant this image popped into his head, he saw a number of keywords flash and blink.
Ultimate concentration. Excess load. Mental ignition. Incarnate light.
Light…
It’s light.
He felt like he heard someone’s voice again. It wasn’t Metatron, nor any other high-ranking Being. This voice was from inside him, echoing from the dark depths of the deep and wide lake that was his memory.
I feel a light inside of you. The photons locked up in the light cubes and Main Visualizer continue to vibrate eternally. If you sense that light and become one with it, you can go to a new stage. Take the power of the Incarnate even further.
He couldn’t immediately recall when or where he’d heard this voice. But he felt that he was closer than he’d ever been to the fundamental mystery of the Accelerated World.
The decisive difference between Metatron and the other high-level Beings and the low-level Enemies was the existence of a light cube. Metatron and her kind had a “spirit media” that was the exact same as the quantum circuits given to Haruyuki and the other Burst Linkers. In other words, it was fair to say that in the Accelerated World, the high-level Beings and the Burst Linkers were basically the same.
So then why could Metatron and the others shift to the Highest Level freely, while Haruyuki and the Burst Linkers could not?
It was probably because the Beings were more intimate with the Main Visualizer in terms of distance, but also in the shape of their souls. Stored in its light cube, Haruyuki’s soul lacked optimization. It couldn’t easily become one with the Main Visualizer. He needed a boost from a Being or an approach run on his own to leap over the wall.
So then how could he optimize his soul?
The same way as he trained in Incarnate. Shift again and again. Over and over and over. Actually, Incarnate and light cube were probably fundamentally the same. Incarnate was, in other words, the power to get closer to the Main Visualizer.
A Burst Linker optimized their soul bit by bit in the process of learning Incarnate. Those who reached a certain level became qualified to be a level-one accessor by contracting with a high-level Being. From there, Incarnate training and leaps to the Highest Level were carried out in parallel simultaneously, optimization progressed further, and the Linker reached level two, then three…
This steplike—or, put another way, selective—mechanism couldn’t have come about by chance. He had no doubt that someone had designed or modified the game Brain Burst 2039 to be this way. The fact that they were even allowed to use the Incarnate system, a power that was basically a cheat, was because the powers that be of this game world wanted them to.
If, in order to shift freely at any time to the Highest Level, he had to spend endless hours optimizing his soul until he was in the same domain as the Beings, then Haruyuki in that moment wouldn’t have been able to immediately reach that stage. But if he could get into that ultimate concentration state with a make-or-break shot like he had those times in the past…
Centaurea Sentry’s secret stash of high-end yokan jelly had essentially eliminated his hunger, but the exhaustion of dueling continuously since that morning was taking a heavy toll on his mind. The normal duel with Zelkova Verger before school, the back-to-back fights with the Beast-class Enemy Crococetus and “Basher” Platinum Cavalier, and then the face-off with the Drive Linker Urocyon and his fathomless power a mere hour earlier. He’d maybe only had a day of such high density two or three times before in the nine months since he became a Burst Linker. With this level of fatigue, he wouldn’t be able to make a second attempt to shift if he failed the first time.
Still hovering at an altitude of two thousand meters, Haruyuki spread out his legs to the front and rear, lowered his center of gravity, and readied his right hand on his hip.
The ultimate concentration was likely the key and not the door. The instant his mental focus crossed a certain line, a small hole opened up in the wall between his light cube and the Main Visualizer, and his consciousness was bounced from there to the higher-dimensional space.
And here, he finally realized whose voice it was that he’d heard from the depths of his memory: Mirror Masker, Utai’s late brother, Kyoya Shinomiya.
When Haruyuki had shifted to the Highest Level in the mirror room of the Shinomiya house, he had tried to smash the wall of the world with a punching strike and with his mind focused to the extreme. But instantly, he heard Kyoya’s voice. Obeying the instruction to feel the light within himself, rather than to smash down the wall, he had slipped through it. He had probably been able to do that because Kyoya—the replicated mind of Mirror Masker lodged in the Main Visualizer—had guided him.
But he couldn’t hear Kyoya’s voice now. He would have to build a door with his own power in order to slip through the wall of the world again.
He took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. He opened the right fist readied at his hip and extended his fingers straight out.
Outside and inside, world and self. Main Visualizer and light cube.
When he closed his eyes, a strange image appeared in the back of his mind. In the middle of the darkness, countless tiny cubes were piled up in an orderly fashion, the faintest gaps between them. Enshrined among them was a single massive cube. All were filled with a flickering rainbow light.
A single one of those countless small cubes was Haruyuki’s light cube. And the massive cube was the Main Visualizer. Even if it seemed far, far away, the truth was distance did not exist here. All that separated the two was a single metaphysical wall generated by the system.
Haruyuki opened his eyes and focused his entire being in the tip of the middle finger of his right hand. A silver light—an overlay—appeared. He made it shrink, smaller and smaller.
In the middle of the fight against Urocyon, he had come up with a new technique, Light Sword, by further focusing his Incarnate technique Laser Sword. As he recalled that sensation of hardening and refining the image, he compressed the Incarnate light to its limit. The minuscule shining point lodged in the tip of his finger began to vibrate with a high-pitched skreeeee.
This was his inner light. If he released this super-concentrated light all at once, it would became his second-stage Incarnate technique, Light Shell. But rather than doing that, he kept it as a point as he tried to perceive the world itself. Previously, this had taken long hours of concentration, but he had since learned the trick of compressing that time, one of the secrets of the Omega style Whole Blade, Gou.
He diffused his self, and the instant the world—the Main Visualizer—had grown infinitely close, he released the point of light. Transparent ripples spread out in the air, and a rainbow light spilled out from the center.
Skreeeeee!! The sound of reacceleration rang out, and Haruyuki’s mind was sucked into the depths of the radiating light.