“You’re late! How long did you intend to make me wait, servant?!”
This voice rained down on Haruyuki before he could even open his eyes, and he startled and shrank into himself. When he timidly lifted his face, a silhouette of hazy, white light popped up against the endless darkness. Sitting in empty space.
Long hair, white robe, spread wings. A top-ranking Being, the Archangel Metatron. Even without any color to her, her transcendent beauty was entirely undiminished.
“B-but I’ve never made it so fast before…” Haruyuki tried to protest, standing his duel avatar similarly depicted in white particles up straighter.
However.
“Crow. It is of no concern to me the length of time you inconvenience this Archangel, but to make ourselves wait is a punishable offense.”
“I’m so bored with waiting, I’m falling asleep. I may very well fall asleep unless you feed me.”
New voices rained down on him from either side. Frozen stiffly in position, he quickly looked to his right and left.
Sitting ahead to his right was a young woman in the prime of youth, wearing Japanese clothing reminiscent of a miko shrine priestess and a crown patterned after the sun atop her head. Ahead of him to his left was a girl of about sixteen or seventeen, clad in a roomy robe and skirt in the style of a hanbok and a crown with small bells hanging from it. Although from the perspective of fourteen-year-old Haruyuki, she was also a woman, not a girl.
At first glance, with Metatron in the middle, they looked like sisters, but they were not such sweet creatures as all that. The woman on the right was Ohirume Amaterasu, the one on the left was Abandoned Princess Bari, and both were Beings of the highest rank, equals with the Archangel Metatron.
So this is what a deer in the headlights feels like. No, wait, a mouse in front of a cat. No, no, no, a sparrow staring down a hawk? After some panicked, escapist thoughts, Haruyuki steeled himself and said, “I—I sincerely apologize for the wait. But…can’t you all decelerate your subjective time as much as you want?”
“We may reduce the speed of our own clock, but we cannot change the clock of the world,” Amaterasu pointed out, sounding exasperated.
Metatron also spoke up, as if to compete with her. “The situation is such that not even a second can be wasted. While we awaited you, we continued our observations and analysis.”
“Observations…?” He frowned. “Of what?”
“That, of course,” Bari replied, and pointed toward his feet.
He turned his gaze downward to see a vast number of starry nodes glittering soundlessly there. Each and every one of them was a social camera in the real world. The placement density was higher in shopping areas and along main roads and lower in residential areas, depicting the terrain of central Tokyo in detail.
The darkness in the central area was the Castle—the imperial palace. The brightly shining constellation on the west side of this was the Shinjuku area. Following the Yamanote Line north from there led to the equally dazzling Ikebukuro area.
Bari’s slender finger was pointing to an enormous star, red like blood and shining ominously on the east side of Ikebukuro Station.
When he narrowed his eyes for a closer look, he saw a dense nothingness swirling around the red star. It was clear what this was: the destroyed Tezcatlipoca and the red portal that had appeared from inside it.
Lifting his face, Haruyuki turned to the hanbok-wearing Being and said, “Bari—I mean, Lady Bari. It’s just as you told us. When Tezcatlipoca was destroyed, a portal came out from inside of it. But it leads to a world other than the Accelerated World.”
“It does seem so, yes,” Bari agreed readily, turning her finger directly up. “Can you see that?”
“Huh…?” Throwing his head back to the limit of his neck’s range of motion, he looked up at the inky sky—no, universe.
In stark contrast to the scene below, it was entirely dark without a single star. Naturally. The social camera network was to monitor public safety, and cameras wouldn’t have been placed in empty space, where there was no one around.
He was about to reply that he couldn’t see anything when he noticed a flickering, too faint to have been called a light, off in the dark distance.
He narrowed his eye lenses beneath his mirrored goggles and stared intently. He felt like his goggles were in the way, and then he realized that something like that didn’t matter in this space. Even with his eyes closed, if he tried to actually see, he would have been able to.
Release the self from the formless avatar. Perceive the world not with vision but with awareness itself.
Gou.
One star and then another burst into existence in the far distant darkness. Their number increased with ferocious speed to depict a second central Tokyo, exactly the same as the one below.
No. It wasn’t a second Tokyo. The remains of the worlds of the already shuttered AA2038 and CC2040 were overlaid onto the world of Haruyuki and his comrades spreading out below his eyes—BB2039. So the world glittering in the sky above was a fourth Tokyo.
This wasn’t the first time he had seen this light. When he shifted to the Highest Level guided by Mirror Masker, he had been attacked by Snow Fairy, still an enemy at the time, and she had stolen the sensation of breathing from him. To escape the unimaginable torment, he had used negative Incarnate—Omega style’s Gou—and in that moment, he had perceived a new world living far above his head.
At the time, he hadn’t known what it was he was looking at. But now he did. It was the fourth Accelerated World, the home of Urocyon and his friends, Dread Drive 2047.
Without Haruyuki realizing it, his powers of perception had been honed to an unprecedented degree. And so he saw it. There was just one glittering red star in the DD world, where the same infinite sea of white stars gathered as in the BB world. Perhaps coincidentally or perhaps not, a crimson line thinner than a strand of spider silk stretched down from this star, which was naturally in Higashi Ikebukuro, passed right before his eyes, and connected with the star of the same color shining in the BB world below his eyes.
He raised his right hand, as if in a dream, and tried to touch the line. But it slipped through his hand without any sensation whatsoever.
“…This is the path connecting the two worlds,” he said in a hoarse voice, and Metatron nodded.
“It would appear so.”
“Then if we can just cut it…!” he cried desperately.
“Do you think we did not attempt that?” Metatron replied. “Regrettably, we, too, can only perceive that it exists. We have not been able to analyze it, much less interact with it.”
“…But…” His shoulders automatically slumped with disappointment.
At present, the BB-side portal had been temporarily locked by Chiyuri’s Citron Call, but it would be reopened tomorrow at midnight, when the other eight members of the Unifiers would once again attack through this line.
Their overwhelming battle power was a serious threat, but the real issue was that the conditions for victory in the war of the worlds had only been disclosed to the DD side. And the missing Urocyon and Complicator might very well have begun to move already to clear those conditions.
“Servant… Silver Crow,” Metatron called to him as he hung his head and clenched his fists.
When he lifted his face, the Archangel, who had at some point descended from her chair in the air, was standing in front of him. She raised both hands and slapped them down onto his shoulders.
“You must be strong. I was not able to move from this place, but I did perceive your battle with the invaders through our link. You fought quite well… For a little warrior, at any rate.”
“Y-yeah…”
Normally, Metatron did nothing but scold him, so as these rare words of praise sank into his thoroughly exhausted brain, he felt his heart warm. He wanted to hug her and bury his face in her robes, but if he did that, he wouldn’t get off with just a flick to his forehead. And when he really thought about it, Metatron was one of the people Kuroyukihime had said he needed to give an answer to.