Che-chee! Che-chee! Her Neurolinker alarm went off. Her blood pressure had gone past the set safe value. Standing up carefully to prevent any dizziness, she got out of the tub and sat on the bathing stool. She let down her hair, turned the shower on high, and stuck her head under the jet of water.
She wanted to wash away all of the extra things clinging to her—the weighty expectations of her mother, her own dissatisfaction and anxiety about herself. She used to be able to more or less reset all of the negative thoughts that built up over the course of the day by getting in the bath. But she’d failed to make the national team at the all-around championships in April, and as the individual event championships in July approached, she was no longer able to flip the switch on her mood with just a bath.
Still under the streaming water, she connected globally, closed her eyes, and murmured, “…Burst Link.”
Her field of view was dyed blue, and the countless drops of water essentially froze in midair. From the flesh of her similarly frozen body, Risa’s soul slipped out in the form of a fairylike avatar.
Her “parent” Mimosa had explained to her that the initial acceleration space of the Blue World generated by the Brain Burst program was a VR space automatically produced from the social camera feeds. But even when she accelerated in a space where there shouldn’t have been any social cameras, like in the bathroom of her own house, the program recreated the real world with incredible accuracy. It was most likely using the camera in her Neurolinker, but frighteningly, it even realistically generated her own body, which was outside the reach of the camera lens.
She studied her own back carefully and had the thought that she really needed to lose another kilogram by the championships, before opening the Brain Burst matching list.
Taishido, the region where she lived, belonged to Setagaya Area No. 1. Setagaya was said to be an empty area, but her neighborhood was close to Shibuya Area No. 2, which had a thriving duel scene, so there was likely to be at least one Burst Linker on standby for a duel during the evening and night hours.
Just as she’d expected, there were eight people on the list. She selected an opponent on the same level as she was, who she’d dueled a number of times before, and challenged her. The frozen, blue world was enveloped in flames and melted into nothing as Risa’s mind was carried to a new stage.
The F-type avatar with the snow leopard motif, Nitride Uncia, descended into a Factory stage, where every structure had been transformed into a mysterious manufacturing facility. The industrial park stretched out endlessly beneath the dark sky, and enormous gears, pistons, and conveyor belts moved ceaselessly—kachank, kachank, pshhk, psshk—while countless searchlights illuminated round spots on the bottoms of the clouds.
Risa was standing on the roof of a small factory, which was, of course, her own house, transformed. Since there was a risk of her home being cracked in the real if she stood here staring, she began to move in the direction indicated by the guide cursor in the bottom of her field of view.
As she leapt from one factory roof to another, she sliced through harmless objects with the claws of both hands to charge up her special attack gauge. The moment it was half-full, she called at the lowest possible volume, “Shape Change!”
Instantly, a white light enveloped her avatar. Her legs and arms grew sturdier, her torso more supple. Her body leaned without her willing it to, and her hands touched the roof. Now that she was in Beast Mode, the true self of an animal-type avatar, Risa increased her running speed dramatically. Without once dropping down to the road, she easily leapt across even the widest of avenues and raced through the nighttime duel stage.
If only I could run like this in the real world, too. If only I could jump like this.
This thought abruptly popped into her mind, but she quickly brushed it away and focused on running intently. At least for the length of the duel, she wanted to forget about gymnastics and her mother. Right now, all she had to do was run, carefree. Faster, farther…
But her full-throttle dash only lasted a minute or so. Just as she caught sight of the overhead Keio Inokashira Line and the large factory that was Shimokitazawa Station up ahead, the guide cursor vanished.
However, Risa hadn’t missed the slight shaking of the cursor right as it was on the verge of disappearing. That distinctive movement meant your opponent was higher up than you. Risa had traveled all this way on rooftops, though, and the only building high enough for her opponent to get the drop on her was the shopping mall in front of the station, which had been redeveloped in the 2030s.
She didn’t stop at the exterior wall of the mall/factory, but rather leapt up and began to climb using the ducts and pipes as footholds. In the real world, the mall was a stylish glass building, so it would have been difficult to climb the wall even in Beast Mode if it had been reproduced as is. But in the Factory stage, with its many uneven projections and protrusions, it was more like a bit of a workout for Risa.
She raced up the vertical wall at basically a run and was about to leap onto the roof of the mall when something round and shiny dropped down from above, straight toward her head. She hurriedly leapt aside to evade it, and turned to see what it was as it shot past her, brushing the end of her tail.
A massive steel hammer fifty centimeters across, with a long, thin, cylindrical handle about eighty centimeters long. She waited for an earsplitting metallic screech and a shower of orange sparks to greet her when it crashed into the duct she’d been using as a foothold a second earlier. But instead, it made an absurdly cartoonish noise, while a rainbow of star-shaped effects scattered around the area. The hammer was a hammer, certainly, but the squeaky kind, like a child’s toy.
There was nothing toylike about its power, however, and the duct peeled helplessly away from the wall and plummeted to the ground. Catching sight of this in the left edge of her field of view, Risa jumped once more with another pipe as her foothold, and this time managed to make it to the roof.