“Huh? So then, you mean…?” Risa said a name, and Nozomi nodded silently.
Risa had more than heard of this girl. She was a grade ahead of Risa, but Risa had seen her compete at meets any number of times. Her jumps were distinctive—she seemed to hang in the air at length, weightless—but the really astounding thing about her was her mental state. No matter how critical the meet, she was all smiles before competing and always managed to pull off the most incredible performances.
But she’d announced her retirement abruptly in grade seven and disappeared from the world of gymnastics. In the three years since, Risa had stopped hearing her name. She never dreamed that this gymnast was a Burst Linker and Mimosa Bongo’s parent on top of that.
“I was a fan. No, not ‘was.’ I still respect her so much even now. How come you never told me she was your parent, Mimo?” Risa pushed gently, leaning forward.
“Sorry about that.” A smile with a hint of sadness crossed Nozomi’s face. “But if I told you, Uncia—Risa—you’d want to meet her, right?”
“Of course I would!” Risa cried. “We’re both gymnasts, both Burst Linkers. And she’s my parent’s parent! There’s a million things I want to talk to her about! To ask her about!”
“Unfortunately, you can’t do that.” Nozomi shook her head slightly and half whispered, “…She lost all her points and had Brain Burst forcibly uninstalled before you became a Burst Linker. That’s also the reason she retired from gymnastics.”
“Huh?” Risa gasped once again. “Lost all her points…? How…? Did she keep losing in duels?”
“No. But I don’t know the details of what happened. She used to come to the Unlimited Neutral Field all the time. She’d dive and stay for ten hours or more of real-world time, over a year of inside time.”
“…A year…,” Risa repeated in a hoarse voice.
She could count on both hands the number of times she’d dived into the Unlimited Neutral Field and had always left within a day through a portal, so to her, this was an unimaginable amount of time.
“Why would she…?”
“Gymnastics practice,” Nozomi replied slowly, turning her head back to the infinite sky once more. “That mental strength of hers, it came from the unfathomable hours of practice she did in the Unlimited Neutral Field. A duel avatar doesn’t get tired, and it doesn’t break down, either… I mean, sure, you get hungry and sleepy, but you can push past that, more or less. If you felt like it, you could keep doing the same jump for weeks, even. Plus, you can do it in places with, like, intense pressure—the top of a tower that’s a hundred meters tall, or right by the nest of a huge Enemy. If you can get so you don’t miss a single jump in those kinds of extreme environments, then any competition’s gonna be wildly different from your usual practice spot, right? She was maybe Olympic medalist level when it came to mental strength by the time she was in grade six… But…”
Abruptly, in a gesture that was perhaps unconscious, Nozomi laid her left hand over Risa’s right and squeezed it tightly.
“…But she lost something, too, in exchange for that strength. I just know it. For a while after I hit level four, I used to practice with her in the Unlimited Neutral Field. And I really did get a lot from it. The performance of your real-world body and your duel avatar are different, but I could still use the jump timing and midair sensations I’d polished here, and I got so I wouldn’t get all nervous before competing. The fact that I’m here now with any chance at all of making the national team is maybe because I had that experience then. But…the Unlimited Neutral Field’s dangerous. The more time you spend here, the weaker reality becomes.”
Risa didn’t immediately understand what she meant. But she gasped reflexively the instant she heard the words Nozomi followed this up with.
“I think that by the time she hit grade seven, her accumulated dive time was probably more than twenty years. That’s nearly double the time she’d lived in the real world, you know? There’s no way that’s not going to affect her physical self,” Nozomi said with a shake of her head. “And her memory up to the previous day would actually be hazy the day after she’d been diving for a year or whatever. But because of that, her gymnastics technique was so sharp, you would’ve thought she was a different person.”
“Reality…gets weaker…,” Risa repeated, and then she asked in a hoarse voice, “Did she lose all of her points in the Unlimited Neutral Field?”
Nozomi looked around the pearl-colored Sacred Ground stage and nodded slightly. “I think so. Like I said, I don’t know what happened exactly. Three years ago, when she woke up after one of her usual long dives one day, she wasn’t a Burst Linker anymore. Maybe an Enemy got her, maybe some other Burst Linkers hunted her… But she definitely wasn’t a weak player, and she should’ve had plenty of points to spare…”
“Didn’t you ask her what happened?” Risa said, frowning.
“The thing is, people who lose Brain Burst… It’s like they even forget that they ever were a Burst Linker, and they completely stop talking about the Accelerated World. When I called out to her, she just looked at me like, ‘Who are you?’” Nozomi cut herself off there and curled up into a ball, pressing her face against her kneecaps.
Risa gingerly placed a hand on the back of her parent, who looked so much smaller than usual.
After a minute, Nozomi started to speak again slowly, face still pressed to her knees. “She quit gymnastics right after that. Now she goes to this religious high school, and I pass her on the road sometimes, since she lives near me. But she doesn’t seem to remember me… Sometimes I wonder if the Burst Linker she was isn’t still here in the Unlimited Neutral Field somewhere.”
“…”
Risa awkwardly rubbed the back of the curled-up Nozomi. “Mimo—Nozo. Why did you make me your child?”
Nozomi slowly lifted her face and met Risa’s eyes squarely with her emerald eye lenses, before saying something Risa didn’t expect. “Maybe because you’re like her. But I’ll tell you right now, it’s not like I wanted to replace her or anything. You’re so focused on gymnastics, always on edge there… I was kinda worried. And I wanted to pay it forward to someone else, her making herself my parent. That’s all.”
Listening to this, Risa finally understood the reason why Nozomi had never suggested they practice in the Unlimited Neutral Field. She was probably worried that Risa would fall prisoner to this world like her own parent had.
As if sensing the direction of Risa’s thinking, Nozomi abruptly brought her face in close and murmured, her voice serious, “Listen, Risa. I won’t tell you not to practice over here. I used to do it all the time, too. But promise me one thing. Keep a single continuous dive to two hours, at most. That’s eighty-three days and eight hours in this time. Any longer than that and your memory’s gonna get confused, and your personality will change. And make sure you do normal duels, too. Not to earn points, but to have fun with the game Brain Burst.”
“Have fun with the game…?” Risa said blankly, and Nozomi tugged on her cat ears with a smile.