This was obviously not the time to bring that up, so he simply thanked her and asked the question on his mind. “You couldn’t leave here? How come?”
Metatron pulled her hands off his shoulders and turned to Amaterasu and Bari, her eyes still closed, before saying, “First, tell us your tale, the details of the conversation you engaged in with the invaders. Although I was able to perceive the situation itself, I could not hear voices.”
“R-right.” Haruyuki nodded, and Metatron bobbed up into the air once more and seated herself in her invisible chair.
Can I even remember what we talked about? he wondered, but every word Urocyon uttered was deeply etched in his memory. After taking a moment to collect his thoughts, he took a step back and began to tell the three girls—no, the three Beings—about the formation of the large alliance Exercitus by approximately five hundred members of small and midsize Legions; about how three hundred of those members had taken on the challenge of subjugating Tezcatlipoca in the Higashi Ikebukuro area of the Unlimited Neutral Field; about how the mission had failed, and those three hundred had all been put into an Unlimited EK state with 70 percent of them—more than two hundred people—driven to total point loss.
As if satisfied with the largest massacre in history, Tezcatlipoca had suddenly destroyed itself, and from within its massive bulk, a crimson portal had appeared. The ten invaders who came through it said they were players of Dread Drive 2047, and then one of them had descended to the ground and begun to attack the Exercitus survivors. Haruyuki had fought this person—“Primal Fang,” aka Urocyon—and while he had been overwhelmed by his opponent’s unbelievable speed and power, he had just barely succeeded in surviving for five minutes.
“…You just told me I fought well,” Haruyuki said weakly. “But he wasn’t even trying. If he’d come at me full throttle from the start, I wouldn’t have lasted five seconds, much less five minutes.”
“Indeed, that seems to be the case,” Amaterasu, floating to his right, readily assented.
“…Uh-huh,” he replied finally.
“Take on not the mien of a wet puppy,” she said, seemingly trying to comfort him. “In battle, results are everything. Regardless of whether or not your opponent fights with their full strength, if you survived, you did not lose.”
“…Uh-huh.” Nodding once more, Haruyuki was uncertain whether or not it was okay for him to ask if Amaterasu had ever actually seen a wet puppy. But before he could open his mouth, Bari, sitting to his left, spoke.
“Continue.”
“R-right. Umm.” He paused to think. “While Urocyon and I were fighting, my comrade Lime Bell moved to the Drive Linkers’ blind spot, restored Tezcatlipoca’s remains just a little with her special attack, and buried the portal. Before it was completely buried, eight of the nine on top of the remains returned to their own world, but this guy named Complicator stayed here. That’s what he said anyway.”
Haruyuki stopped for a moment, and then reproduced Complicator’s words, which he’d burned into his memory, right down to the length of his pauses.
“‘If we win, your world will disappear. If you win, our world will disappear’… It’s this unchangeable rule decided on by whoever created and runs the two games.”
Even after Haruyuki closed his mouth, the top-ranked Beings maintained their silence.
After five seconds or so, no doubt a vast span of time for the three who Rose Milady/Tsubomi Koshika dubbed “super AI,” Metatron said abruptly, “Whoever created and runs the two games, hmm? In other words, this means that the invaders, your so-called Drive Linkers, also don’t know what kind of creature that would be.”
“Y-yeah. I’m pretty sure,” he agreed.
“’Tis galling,” Amaterasu said.
What exactly did that mean again? He searched his memory and hit upon “irritating” or something like that, maybe.
“To think that one who we know not if they be person or Being or program could hold in their hand saengsal yeotal,” she continued.
“S-saeng…?” Haruyuki parroted, stunned.
“It means that they choose at their whim whether we live or die,” Bari explained.
“G-got it.” He nodded. “It is pretty frustrating. Right now, with the rules this someone decided, our only choice is to fight Urocyon and his comrades.”
“I understand,” Metatron agreed, the very slightest crease rising between her eyebrows. “But the issue is the fact that those rules have only been shown to the Drive Linker side. It is the height of folly, is it not, to enter battle without knowing how you can win?”
“…Yeah.” He was forced to assent. She was absolutely right. The condition for a Burst Linker victory might very well have been “Capture all the Drive Linkers without killing any of them; if even one dies, Brain Burst loses.”
Maybe, he wondered, if due to some kind of error on the part of the system administrator, the message that was supposed to have been sent simultaneously to all Drive Linkers and all Burst Linkers had only been sent to the Drive Linkers. And then he heard a faint sound at regular intervals, like tapping on a thin sheet of crystal.
Piiing. Ping, ping.
Haruyuki knew this sound. It was neither music nor a signal but footsteps.
Metatron turned her face to the right, and he, Amaterasu, and Bari followed suit.
Two white lights flickered in the distance in the infinite darkness. As they grew closer, they began to take shape as avatars. Both were F-types clad in graceful dress armor, with doll-thin waists and limbs. But the avatar on the left was as short as a child, and the one on the right was about the same height as Haruyuki.
Ping, ping.
The footsteps came from only the one on the left; the avatar on the right made absolutely no sound as she walked.
They stopped three meters—although there was no distance on the Highest Level, so, at most, it simply looked that way—away from Haruyuki and the Beings.
Haruyuki wasn’t sure whether to kneel or not. Because the small girl was very much his superior in the Legion he belonged to, and the tall girl was the master he had sworn his sword to. But thinking that this was not the place for formalities, he settled for a neat bow.
Metatron was also a rank-and-file member of the Legion, but she merely stared at the two girls without so much as nodding her head, much less getting down on her knees.
“So you came at last, Cosmos?” she said, coolly.
The tall girl—leader of the Legion Oscillatory Universe and White King, “Transient Eternity” White Cosmos, responded, her golden curls swinging slightly, “I guess I kept you waiting a bit, hmm, Metako?”
Likely by coincidence, Cosmos called Metatron by the same nickname as Sky Raker used. Relative to the girl by her side, Sleepy, aka Snow Fairy, she was tall, but if they were to stand side by side, Metatron would have been five or so centimeters taller. But her aura, not diminished in the slightest on the Highest Level, gave the White King a sense of presence on par with the top-level Being.
Now she glanced at Fairy next to her. “She threw a little tantrum about how she didn’t want to come.”
“I did not throw a tantrum,” Fairy argued sullenly, and she turned her gaze for a mere instant on Haruyuki. Actually, no. It seemed more like she was looking at Bari floating to Haruyuki’s left. But she quickly turned her face forward again and pinged as she took a step back. “Anyway, I’m here, so go ahead, talk.”
“Yes, yes.” The White King waved a dismissive hand.
As he listened to them, Haruyuki casually looked over at Metatron and noticed that the Archangel’s mouth was pulled the slightest bit tighter in displeasure. He briefly wondered why, when he remembered in a flash of insight.
In the middle of the Territories against Oscillatory, he had shifted to the Highest Level with Metatron. Snow Fairy had appeared and said, “I wonder why you two are so unreasonable… If you’re an Enemy, then you should just be an Enemy and satisfy yourself bullying Burst Linkers.”
Immediately after that, Fairy had tried to sever the link between him and Metatron, and while they had narrowly escaped that, in her rage, Metatron had declared, “I won’t let that Snow Fairy or whatever it was get away with this.”
Haruyuki panicked as he wondered if she were actually going to try to make Snow Fairy pay now, but the Archangel merely turned her face away with a haughty sniff.
✦ ✦ ✦
