The next evening, while they were stretching after practice in the special gym for the artistic gymnastics club, Risa murmured to Mimosa Bongo (real name: Nozomi Inadate) next to her, “Nozo, can I ask you to hang out a bit over there after practice again today?”
Nozomi brought her head close, hair short like a boy’s, and whispered, “Sure thing. But you don’t usually invite me to duel, Risa.”
“Oh, um, I don’t mean a duel…” She felt the head coach’s eyes turn on them, so she hurriedly pulled her face away. Their club took injury prevention very seriously, and they would get a harsh rebuke if they were caught slacking now just because these were cooldown stretches.
For a while, they focused on bending their torsos back without a word, and the second they felt the coach’s gaze move elsewhere, they picked up their secret conversation again.
“…If not a duel, then what?” Nozomi asked. “Just chatting?”
“No, not that, either.” Risa shook her head slightly.
“Geez, just tell me. You wanna raid Shibuya or Shinjuku or something?”
“Oh… Well, that’s close, maybe,” she replied.
Nozomi took a deep breath and was about to shout, so Risa hurriedly put a hand over her mouth.
“Mmph!” She made a muffled sound, and then when Risa removed her hand, she said, “So what already?”
“Um, it’s…” Risa hesitated. “I was just hoping you’d hang out with me in the Unlimited Neutral Field.”
Once again, Nozomi filled her lungs with air with twice the suction power as a moment ago. Before this could become a shriek, she blocked it off with her own hands this time.
“Mmph mmmmph! …Th-the Unlimited Neutral Field?! Wh-what are you going to do there?!”
Risa took a second to think about how to answer Nozomi’s questions, when she heard an angry roar.
“Hey, over there! If you’ve got the energy to chat, then you can do one more set!” the head coach yelled, and the pair pulled their heads back like snails into their shells.
✦ ✦ ✦
Eat supper until she was 80 percent full.
Make sure to go to the washroom.
Lie down in bed, make her room a little on the humid side.
Connect to the global net via a wired connection to her home server, set a timer so that her connection was cut after two hours.
It was exactly ten PM when Risa chanted the Unlimited Burst command after doing everything Nozomi had instructed.
When she dived into the Unlimited Neutral Field for the first time in a while, it was replete with a pale, milky glow like melted pearls. The buildings on the ground were large chunks of marble reminiscent of temples. Matte-white tiles covered the roads and empty lots, and massive octahedral crystals floated all over, emitting a curious sound. The rare, high-level, holy-attribute Sacred Ground stage.
Descending from the roof of her house to the road in the form of Nitride Uncia, Risa curbed the impulse to destroy the crystals as she hurried toward Carrot Tower, where she was supposed to meet Mimosa Bongo.
The crystals in a Sacred Ground stage would not only massively charge your special attack gauge when you destroyed them but also drop random item cards in the Unlimited Neutral Field, albeit very rarely. But they made quite a loud noise when you smashed them, and this would occasionally attract Enemies in the area. Unless you could fly, it was risky to have a crystal-smashing party with only a few people.
She slipped past the group of octahedrons spinning as though beckoning her, and the moment she arrived at the front entrance to Carrot Tower, she heard Mimosa Bongo/Nozomi’s voice.
“You’re laaate! I’ve been waiting twenty minutes already!”
“If I made it to a meeting in the Unlimited Neutral Field with an error of twenty minutes, I’m doing pretty good,” Risa responded as she watched Mimosa leap down from the far side of the tower.
She absorbed the entire impact with her four legs and then stood up smoothly. “…So, you make sure to do everything I told you to?”
“Of course.” Risa nodded. “I set it to disconnect in two hours, just like you said.”
“Good. I would’ve actually liked to set it to two minutes, but that totally wouldn’t have been enough for what you want to do. So…should we go? Oh, wait. Before that.” The serious look Mimosa Bongo wore fell away, and a somehow vulgar smile rose on her face as she patted Risa’s shoulder. “We did get a Sacred Ground stage, after all. You wanna change our plans and smash some crystals?”
“Ye—N-no, no, no, no!” Risa shouted, shaking off the momentary temptation. “We came to practice the vault today! If we get tangled up with some Enemies, practice’ll be the last thing on our minds!”
“Fine, okay… Still, I can’t believe a lazy Linker like you would come up with the idea of gymnastics training in the Unlimited Neutral Field, Unippeh.”
When her parent offered up such admiring words, Risa felt compelled to come clean. “Oh… The truth is, it wasn’t my idea. I dueled Comet yesterday, and she gave me some advice.”
“Whaaat?” Nozomi looked disgruntled. “That punchy little magical girl, going and doing what she wants with a person’s child…”
“Mimo, are you against me practicing here?” Risa asked with upturned eyes.
“Mmm, I’m not exactly against it.” Nozomi frowned. “But I guess I’m worried, maybe.”
“What do you mean…?”
Rather than immediately respond to this question, Mimosa Bongo looked up at the pearly white sky.
Following her lead, Risa turned her head back just as a flock of small birds cut across the sky far, far above. They looked like beans from the ground, but they were full-fledged Enemies. Seeing them, she was forcibly reminded that this world very much did not belong only to Burst Linkers.
“…The Unlimited Neutral Field is the real Accelerated World… My ‘parent’ taught me that,” Nozomi said abruptly, half murmuring, and Risa gasped a little.
Nozomi hardly ever talked about her parent. Back when Risa first became a Burst Linker, she’d been curious and asked her about them any number of times. But Nozomi always dodged her questions, so at some point, Risa stopped bringing it up.
Nozomi turned her gaze back down from the sky and glanced at Risa before sitting on a marble block that was probably a flower bed in the real world. Risa sat down lightly beside her.
“…I never told you this, okay? But my parent was a gymnast, too. Not in the club at our school, though. She was in a private club…”
Nozomi named a powerful gymnastics club also in the city of Setagaya. It was the one Risa’s mother had planned to transfer her to from the school club. When Risa nodded wordlessly, Nozomi picked up her explanation after a pause.
“…Her event was floor, and she was way better at it than I am. She made the junior national team in grade five, and people said she was a sure thing for the Olympics.”
✦ ✦ ✦
