“Physical full burst…?” Risa parroted back the command she had just been taught, and the F-type duel avatar in front of her raised the mouth of her face mask like she was grinning.
“Unki, before you say any BB command out loud, you gotta first think if you’re someplace where it’s safe to do that. If this was the real world and you were level nine, that command would’ve activated, and ninety-nine percent of your burst points would’ve vanished, you know?”
“Oh… Right.” Reflexively, she slapped her hand across her mouth, but then quickly moved that hand to point at the other girl. “Mimo, I told you to quit with the ‘Unki.’”
“Why? It’s cute. And your avatar name’s Uncia, so if I’m gonna give you a nickname, it’s pretty much gotta be Unki.”
“No, no, no, no. That’s not what it’s ‘gotta be.’ And it’s not cute at all,” Risa denied flatly. “I mean, it’s true Brain Burst gave me the name Nitride Uncia. But it’s up to me to decide how to pronounce it, okay? Like that chocolate-color girl we met in Setagaya Area Two the other day. You said yourself that if you pronounced it correctly, her name would be Chocolate Puppeteer, but that’s not very cute, so she goes around saying she’s Chocolat, in French. So I get to be Nitride You-nee-kah!”
“Well, yeah, sure. You get a certain amount of freedom there…” The F-type avatar smiling wryly once more was Mimosa Bongo. Mimosa was the plant Acacia, and Bongo was the Artiodactyla herbivore that lived in central Africa. Just as her name would have it, her duel avatar looked something like a cow/girl, and her armor concealed spikes. But the girl inside the avatar apparently preferred to minimize the cow connection and would get into a snit if called Bongo rather than Mimosa.
“But there’s gotta be limits, y’know?” Mimosa said, neatly sidestepping any mention of her own predilections. “Isn’t reading U-N-C-I-A as ‘youneekah’ kind of a stretch?”
“Not not not a stretch!” Risa protested. “Okay, then. Try saying ‘oohn-kee-ah’ ten times fast.”
“Oohnkeeah oohnkeeah oohnkeeah oohnkeeah oohnkeeah oohnkeeah oohnkeeah oohnkeeah oohnkeeah oohnkeeah.”
“How do you pronounce U-N-C-I-A?”
“Oohnkeeah.”
“Hrrngh…,” Risa grumbled, vexed, and Mimosa laughed merrily.
The first part of Risa’s avatar name, “Nitride,” meant the chemical compound. And the “Uncia”—or “Unica” now—of the second half was a snow leopard. Like Mimosa, she was an animal-type duel avatar, but the things she could protract and retract were claws and paws featuring supple paw pads, with triangular ears and a long tail reminiscent of a wild animal of the Felidae family.
Having laughed her fill, Mimosa pet the cat ears of a now sulking Risa in a consoling fashion before turning her gaze off into the distance of the stage.
They were sitting together on top of a stony mountain rising up in Setagaya No. 1. The commercial skyscraper Carrot Tower stood in the same spot in the real world, 124 meters of tower in front of Sangenjaya Station, built at the end of the last century. It certainly could not have been said to be tall anymore, given that there were more and more next-generation super skyscrapers in the 500-meter class, the new metropolitan government building being the prime example, but it provided more than a pleasant view in the entirely residential Setagaya area.
The stage affiliation was Twilight, and the mountains of Hakone and Tanzawa, along with Mt. Fuji, were clearly outlined in the madder red of the western sky. Since there were area boundaries in the normal duel stage, they couldn’t go all the way to the horizon, but someday, in the open world of the Unlimited Neutral Field, Risa wanted to run as hard as she could and catch up with the sinking sun. But the days when she could run freely in that world were still a ways off, given that she had at long last only just made it to level six and still couldn’t beat a Wild-class Enemy solo, much less a Beast-class Enemy.
This thought brought her wandering mind back to reality, and she gave voice once more to the command she had just learned.
“Physical full burst… A command to accelerate your flesh-and-blood body in the real world,” she murmured. “Kind of hard to believe. I mean, to think the BB program has that kind of power.”
“Well, I’ve never actually seen anyone use it or anything. I’ve only heard the rumors.” The Mimosa Bongo who said this with a shrug was level six, just like Risa. She was the “parent” who had given Risa the BB program and a member of the same gymnastics club in the real world, a year older than Risa. In other words, a carnivore child had come from the herbivore parent, but according to Mimosa, parent and child both being animal-types itself was relatively rare. Not to mention that both of their avatars were specialized in running and jumping. In that sense, there was a distinct family resemblance.
“…But that’s the dream, right? We could run a hundred times faster in the real world,” Mimosa said with a grin. “Forget the four flips of the Racoviţă—I bet we could flip five or even six times.”
Risa automatically pictured it.
Of the four events in women’s gymnastics, she was best at the vault, but she had yet to reach a success rate with the three flips of the Produnova that would allow her to do it at meets, much less with four flips. Mimosa’s best event was floor exercises, but she was having trouble with G-level skills.
Risa was currently in grade nine and Mimosa, grade ten, so they would no doubt continue to perfect their skills. But girls as young as tenth grade could be national gymnasts with the Japan Gymnastics Association.
The selection standards were simple. Those winning the top spots at either the All-Japan Artistic Gymnastics Championships women’s individual all-around held in the spring of every year or the All-Japan Artistic Gymnastics Championships individual events held in the summer were designated as national gymnasts. Risa and Mimosa had both already been selected for the national junior team, but if they were going to set their sights on 2048—a spot at the Olympics the following year—they had to make the national team this year. But they had both just barely failed to qualify for the team at the championships in the spring. Their next chance was the individual event championships in the summer, coming up in two months.
Risa’s biggest and only weakness in her event was the approach run. For the vault, a gymnast had to gain speed with the approach run and hit the springboard at exactly the right angle, or they couldn’t get the height they would need for the jump. But Risa was too conscious of the edge of the springboard, and her approach run speed dropped as she tried too hard to hit her mark.
But what if she could run a hundred times as fast? What if she could race down the twenty-five meters of the approach run like a leopard and spread her wings toward the sky like a bird…?
While Risa closed her eyes and imagined that moment, beside her, Mimosa said, “But, like, even if this physical full burst does actually exist, if you used up ninety-nine percent of your points, you’d definitely hit total point loss. And you could only use it the one time… I mean, that’s a whole lot. You get to do this super, impossibly hard super technique just the one time, and in exchange, you don’t get to be a Burst Linker anymore.”