Large eye lenses met Risa’s gaze as Comet raised a finger on her right hand. “One is to use the Physical Burst command on the big day.”
“What…?!” Risa gasped. “I—I can’t, not that! It uses up ninety-nine percent of your points, and there’s no way I’ll make it to level nine before the competition. And if I ran a hundred times normal speed in the real world, people would definitely start to wonder.”
“No, no.” Comet shook her head. “You’re talking about Physical Full Burst, yeah, Uni-Uni? I’m talking about Physical Burst, without the Full. You can use it from level one, and it takes five burst points. The effect is that your mind stays in your physical body and only your thoughts accelerate ten times in the real world.”
“Only your thoughts… Ten times…” Risa thought about it for a second and then furrowed her brow. “So then that means your own movement gets slower, right? How will that be good runway practice?”
“It’s not that your movement gets slower,” Comet corrected her. “It’s actually that the flow of time feels one-tenth as fast. With the vault, it’s barely like five seconds from start to landing, yeah? So then that experience ends up feeling like fifty seconds. Which, like, makes the whole jumping timing ten times easier.”
“Oh…!” Risa finally grasped the significance of the Physical Burst command.
If her sensations were accelerated by ten, she would be able to make the minutest corrections to her timing as she hit the springboard. Meaning she would be able to land on it perfectly after running at 90 or even 100 percent.
“Wow,” she murmured, impressed. “I had no idea the BB program had a command like that. I wonder why Mimo never told me.”
When Risa let slip a slight complaint about her parent, Comet spoke up with unexpected words once more. “That was a kindness on Mimosa’s part.”
“Huh…?” Risa looked at the magical girl once more.
“Once sports people start using the Physical Burst command, they kind of have to keep using it forever. Their senses adjust to a world that’s point one percent accelerated, so they can’t get the timing right anymore without the command. You remember that tenth-grade batter who set a new home run record at Koshien last summer? He’s a Burst Linker, too, and he used Physical Burst when he was at bat,” Comet told her smoothly and out of the blue, so Risa simply opened her eyes wide, at a loss for words.
She didn’t really know the rules for baseball, but she did remember this super rookie causing a huge commotion. As an athlete herself, she had sighed in admiration every time she saw him on the news. To think he was actually a Burst Linker.
But after a moment of being dazed, she abruptly realized something.
“Huh?” she said, frowning. “Hang on. They have a whole bunch of turns at bat in a baseball game, right?”
“They do,” Comet agreed. “The fourth hitter has an average of four point five turns at bat in a game.”
“So then, he was Physical Bursting at least once every time? Meaning he was using more than twenty points in a single game?!”
“Prob’ly…” Comet nodded, wearing an expression like she was biting her lip sadly. She lifted the squeaky hammer she’d placed on the roof and waved it lightly back and forth. With each swing, minuscule star effects danced up and faded ephemerally. “He made a real showing in the fall tournament last year, and the team even made it to Senbatsu this spring. But he wasn’t in the starting lineup. Maybe he didn’t have enough points. Or…”
Even Risa, who didn’t know this particular Burst Linker’s situation, could imagine the words that Comet didn’t voice.
Or he lost all his points. That was no doubt what she was trying to say.
Risa fell silent, and Comet patted her back.
“So anyway, that’s the deal,” she said. “Personally, I wouldn’t recommend using Physical Burst. Which brings us to the second way. This is actually the real one.”
“…It’s not another scary thing, is it?” Risa asked, switching gears, and the water-blue magical girl grinned.
“No risk, no return! Ain’t that right, Borrelly?” The instant Comet glanced at her left shoulder, the small animal, motionless like a doll this whole time, waved its little hands.
“Oooof course, Roo!” it shouted. “You only can be as strong as you work to get!”
Risa stared at it blankly. “…So then what’s the second way?”
“Simple is best!” Comet declared. “Practice in the Accelerated World.”
“H-huh?!” Risa whirled her head around to look at the area and finally looked at her own avatar. “But there’s no vault or springboard in the duel stage. And my duel avatar’s different from my real self. Plus, to come to the stage, I have to challenge someone… And it ends in half an hour.”
She listed all the problems with the idea as she thought of them, but Comet was unbothered. The option on her shoulder bounced up and down.
“You can’t go saying you can’t before you even try, Roo!” it cried. “If you give it a go, a path forward will open up, Roo!”
Unable to hold back, Risa brought her face close to Borrelly, opened wide the mouth normally hidden by her face mask, and displayed her sharp fangs as she murmured, “If you say any more of your ‘Roo Roo,’ I will eat you, Roo.”
“R-roopyyyy?!” Borrelly jumped up, eyes wide and darting furtively, and when it landed on Comet’s head, it began to tremble.
Its master plucked it up with her right hand and grinned once more. “No worries. We can take care of all of those issues. Although, well, we’ll have to make do with some kind of substitutes for the vault and the springboard.”
“Huh…?” Risa looked over at the magical girl. “You mean, you’ll practice with me, Comecchi?”
“Of course!” she said, and then frowned. “Well, that’s what I’d like to say. But I don’t have that kind of free time, either. There’s a place you can go by yourself in the Accelerated World, though.”
“Wh-where…?”
“It’s obvious!” Comet Squeaker leapt to her feet abruptly and pointed her squeaky hammer up straight at the sky. “The Unlimited Neutral Field! You can practice until you’re half dead there. Try for a jump that’s hard even with all your avatar abilities, and then run and run and jump and jump. You keep jumping till the light of the Incarnate is born inside of you, Unicchi!”