The emergency Legion meeting ended without a second round.
While it had been labeled a meeting, Kuroyukihime’s objective had been to inform the Nega Nebulus members of the current situation, so right from the start, she’d had no intention of formulating a unified path forward as a Legion. And when Haruyuki thought about it, it was much too much to insist that the Burst Linkers at the meeting digest the astounding story of a war between worlds with the continuation of the game hanging in the balance in the span of a mere thirty minutes. It had been the right call to give them all a night to sleep on it.
Kuroyukihime said she was going to get in touch with the other Kings that night and request a meeting of the Seven Kings as soon as possible. In order to resist the Drive Linkers, all Legions needed to work together, but would they be able to overcome the hostility of the White Legion?
This was all if the war wasn’t already over by the time morning came.
After seeing off Chiyuri and Takumu at the front door, Haruyuki returned to the living room and lowered the lights. He cut across the room, colored a dark orange now, and sank leisurely into the sofa. He was sure that he would fall asleep in three seconds if he closed his eyes, so he stared at the framed photo hanging on the wall.
Contained in the simple aluminum frame was a black-and-white photo showing a town in another country. On the left side of the cobblestone walkway was a café in the middle of a changing season, and on the right was a road littered with fallen leaves. It was an entirely unassuming scene, and the photo had been hanging there since forever, so he hadn’t really paid it any mind before.
But now that he was really looking at it, he started to think it wasn’t the work of a professional photographer. The center of the picture was slightly off from the center of the path, and the blurring of the photo was somehow unnatural. Rather than the focus being in the foreground, the blur seemed to be something added in processing with a camera app filter. In other words, this photo was probably not taken with a camera but by a Neurolinker, or even earlier than that, with a smartphone.
He couldn’t remember how long the photo had been there, but there had to have been a pretty good reason for his mother, an aficionado of all things high quality, to go out of her way to have a snapshot by an amateur printed out at a lab, framed, and hung on the wall.
Maybe there’s something written on the back, he thought, and he stood up to walk over to the photo.
But an icon started flashing on his virtual desktop, letting him know he had a call. And not a voice call but a dive call. The caller name next to the icon was “Reina.”
…Who?
He blinked in confusion and then hurriedly turned back to the sofa. He settled in there and tapped the icon.
His surroundings and his own body were wrapped in darkness and melted away, and his mind alone plunged straight down into a deep vertical hole. Eventually, a light approached from below, and he descended into the middle of it. And was bounced up high by something soft and squishy.
Boing, boing, boi… He rebounded several times, a little lower each time, until he finally came to a stop. He was about to lift his face and look around, but before he could, he heard a girl shriek.
“Whoa! You’re a little pig!”
He, in his pink pig avatar, was hoisted up from behind. “Mm, nnngh.”
Small arms wrapped themselves tightly around his neck, and he kicked and flailed his short limbs until he heard a new voice.
“Come on, Shii. You hug the little pig so tight like that, he’ll suffocate!”
“But he’s sooooo cute!” the girl with Haruyuki in a sleeper choke hold replied as she loosened her arms slightly.
In a full-dive environment, he couldn’t actually suffocate even hoisted up like this, but perhaps Snow Fairy’s suffocation attack had traumatized him. He couldn’t help but pant and wheeze.
When he looked ahead of him once more, standing there was a woman—no, a girl—who looked to be about junior high age. She was wearing a blouse with puffy sleeves, like the heroine of a fairy tale might wear, under a pinafore fitted at the waist. If her wavy hair parted in the middle hadn’t been the same style as it was in the real world, he might not have been immediately able to identify who she was.
“H-hello, Izeki,” Haruyuki greeted her.
Reina Izeki grinned. “Heyo, Prezzz.”
“…And behind me?” He turned his pink pig avatar’s head to the limit of its range of motion and could just barely make out the person holding him up. He’d already assumed it from her voice, but she was, in fact, a girl of about four or five years old. Sometimes, though, the appearance and voice for a full-dive avatar were different from those of the actual person.
“My kid sister,” Reina told him. “Shii, come on, put the piggy down.”
“Okaaay,” the little girl said, sounding the slightest bit unhappy as she finally released Haruyuki.
He was gently set down on what appeared to be ground covered by short grasses, but it had a cushiony springiness to it. Full-dive spaces for young children often had specs like this because of their conditioned reflex to cry if they fell on hard ground, even if they were only an avatar.
They were in an open space in the middle of a forest, a number of large trees rising up around them, but these would probably also be soft to the touch. A single narrow path stretched out from the circular clearing, and he could see something like a little house at the end of it.
Having grasped the situation, Haruyuki looked back and introduced himself. “H-hello. I’m Haruyuki Arita.”
A girl with her hair in braids, wearing a pinafore like Reina’s, bowed excitedly. “Hello, Mr. Pig! I’m Shiika Izeki!”
“Come on, Shii,” Reina chided her. “His name’s not Mr. Pig, it’s Arita, okay?”
“But…” The girl looked about to burst into tears, and at seeing this, Haruyuki hurried to say, “M-Mr. Pig is fine! I mean, I am a pig and all!” He waved his arms and the black hooves at the ends of them as he jumped up and down on the spot. Compared with a game avatar, an avatar for a dive call VR space had limited physical strength, but by making good use of the elasticity of the earth, he managed to leap up over a meter.
Shiika was apparently tickled by his antics. The teary look instantly vanished from her face, and she began to laugh wildly. “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
She then asked him to play hide-and-seek, and so they spent about five minutes at that, with him alternately being “it” and hiding. But after he found her for the third time, she curled up at the base of a large tree and went to sleep.
“Aah, she finally dropped off,” Reina said in fond exasperation as she peeked at her over his shoulder. She scooped up Shiika’s small avatar and looked down at Haruyuki. “Sorry, Prez. I’m gonna take her to bed. Just wait three minutes in the hut there!”
“Sure.” Haruyuki nodded. “Take your time.”
“Sorryyyy!” Reina apologized once more before disappearing with her sister.
He cut across the woods and drew near the adorable stone house. He knocked on the door, at any rate, before opening it and found inside a simple room about four meters square. In the center were a round table and two chairs, and a fire crackled in the fireplace against the far wall.
He jumped onto a tall chair, and while he was gazing at the flames, the door flew open.
“Sorry, really sorry about that. For real, totes sorriezzzz!” Reina had no sooner charged into the room than she was clapping her hands together in apology.
“Oh!” Haruyuki hurriedly replied. “You don’t have to apologize. It’s totally fine.”
“Nah, I mean, I call you, and then you get stuck playing hide-and-seek with a five-year-old. Usually, she’s already asleep by now, but she was all fussy today, y’know? And then I was, like, I gotta make a dive call, and she was just, like, I’m coming, too, wouldn’t take no for an answer…” As she explained, she sat down across from him. She was about to bow in apology once more, so he quickly interjected.
“It was fun for me, too,” he told her. “Don’t worry about it! Your little sister—what characters do you use to write ‘Shiika’?”
“Oh, it’s the one with a bunch of little guys on the tree radical,” Reina started to say, before apparently remembering they were in a VR space and materializing a pen and paper. With a fairly neat hand, she wrote “Shiika,” using the characters for “beech tree” and “fragrance,” and showed it to Haruyuki.
“Wow, that’s a pretty name,” Haruyuki said, quite casually. “I mean, yours is, too, of course, Izeki.”
“Ooh!” Reina grinned. “Prez, you trying to seduce me?”
“Huh…? N-no!” He shook his head vigorously. “I didn’t mean—I wasn’t trying to seduce you!”
“You don’t gotta go so hard on that no, though? I mean, I called you. It was to get you to seduce me, Prez.”
“Whaaaat?!” He bounced up on his chair and then remembered with a gasp.
Right before they left Umesato Junior High, after finishing their Animal Care Club duties that day, Reina had said she would call him tonight. The reason for that was because Haruyuki had invited her to stand for the next student council election in September. “Seduce” could also mean “explain,” so in that sense, she definitely wasn’t mistaken, but…
“Umm…” He cleared his throat to switch gears and then timidly asked, “Does this mean that you’re interested in running, Izeki?”
“I didn’t say that,” she responded, still grinning, and then the smile abruptly disappeared from her face. “It’s like… I said this at school, too, but I’m not exactly student council material. That’s for, like, people who are all-powerful, ‘I wanna make the school better,’ yeah? I don’t got that in me at all…”
“If you’re gonna put it like that, I mean, neither do I.”
“So then why’d you get on board with Ikuzawa in the first place?”
“…”
Unsure about how to respond to this for a minute, Haruyuki tapped at his virtual desktop and called up a document folder. He picked out a file with the title “Student Council Election Speech Draft 01” and flicked it toward Reina.