Himi Akira was a shy child. Quiet, always reading the room, and more interested in books than running around. That didn’t mean she was bullied or anything like that. So Karen knew what kind of personality she had, but she never really thought it was a problem.
But every now and then, very rarely, she would feel lonely. And when that happened, Karen would look on enviously from a corner of the classroom as the other children made a racket and played.
Karen’s "parent" was the complete opposite. She was always at the center of the class, laughing the loudest, taking the lead in everything, and drawing attention wherever she went. Karen would just watch her quietly from afar. As if looking at someone who lived in a different world, dazzling just to see. Karen now thought that maybe it had been a kind of admiration.
Then one day, she came up to Karen. Karen didn’t know exactly what had prompted it. Maybe she’d noticed the girl who was always left alone in class, or maybe there was some other reason.
She simply said to Karen, "There’s a fun game. Want to play it with me?"
Karen was happy. So happy that she wondered if she had ever been that happy in her life. It didn’t matter that she had never been interested in electronic games or anything like that. Just the fact that she could become friends with the person she had always admired from afar made Karen’s heart race.
That was how Himi Akira, no, Aqua Current, came to step into the Accelerated World.
Even in the Accelerated World, Karen followed her quietly, just as she had always been at school—full of energy, always shining. Like a baby bird trailing after its mother.
She taught Karen many things. The rules a Burst Linker had to follow, the basics of dueling, how to raise her level. She took care of Karen so that she could stand on her own as a Burst Linker.
When Karen won her first duel, when she leveled up, when she finally reached the same level as her parent, she congratulated her sincerely every time. When Karen lost duel after duel, she comforted her. When other avatars slandered her for being Colorless, she got angry on her behalf.
At school and in the Accelerated World alike, she was a kind friend and a caring parent. Back then, Karen had no doubt that those happy days would go on forever.
**
Ever since the day they first met, Kojiro and Karen had been sitting in a cafe with a view of the amusement center entrance every day, watching for their target to appear. Since it was vacation, both Kojiro and Karen had time to spare, so they took turns keeping watch near the entrance and passed the time with simple busywork.
At first Karen had been a little wary of Kojiro, but perhaps because of his easygoing air, she soon let her guard down. And as the two of them adjusted their schedules and kept meeting face-to-face every day, their relationship had grown to the point where they could call each other friends.
As they naturally began talking about themselves during that time, Kojiro learned more about the girl named Karen. Her name was "Himi Akira," just as she had said when she introduced herself. She was nine years old, one year younger than Kojiro, attended an elementary school in Chiyoda Ward, and liked reading.
He also heard about the friend she had mentioned, the one who had been attacked by PKs. She had apparently been something of a popular girl in Karen’s class. Without any particular trigger, she had taken Karen in as her child, and to Karen she was someone very precious. Well, that was probably why she had gone so far as to try something so reckless in order to avenge her.
Kojiro could see both deep sorrow and a sense of loss in the look she wore whenever she talked about the friend who was now gone. Since he knew that was Karen’s sore spot, he didn’t bring the subject up again.
It was probably a wound that would never go away for her as long as she lived as a Burst Linker. At the very least, Kojiro hoped that if this operation succeeded and those PKs were driven out of the Accelerated World, that burden might become just a little lighter.
About five days had passed since they began lying in wait at the cafe in front of the amusement center. While Kojiro watched the entrance, Karen spent the time reading a small paperback beside him.
"No luck again today, huh."
It had almost been a full week since they started their stakeout, but their target still hadn’t shown himself. Kojiro had expected this to be a long-term job, but waiting around with no clues at all was starting to make him restless. He even began to suspect that the target might have changed hunting grounds.
But for now, the amusement center was their only lead, so Kojiro had no choice but to wait and bear it. And perhaps their persistence had paid off, because at last, the target they had been waiting for so long finally appeared.
Through the cafe window, he saw a boy with blond hair dyed a muddy color by cheap dye and a bunch of flashy piercings. He swaggered into the arcade and disappeared inside.
Kojiro said to Karen, who was reading beside him, "Karen, the target’s finally shown up."
Karen immediately closed her book and asked in a slightly raised voice, "Are you sure?"
"Yeah, no mistake. He matches the description you gave exactly. Flashy blond hair, delinquent-looking. It’s not that rare a style, but it’s not exactly common for an elementary school kid to be walking around like that. And he looks like he’s alone."
Karen stared at the amusement center with a sharp look and said, "Got it. I’ll be the bait, just like we planned."
"Are you sure? Even if there’s only one of them, it’s still too risky."
"You promised, didn’t you? This is the method with the highest chance of success."
At Karen’s resolute gaze, Kojiro nodded. Then, to reduce any possible variables, he confirmed the plan one more time before saying to Karen, "All right. Good luck, Karen."
"You too."
**
Kojiro and Karen entered the amusement center at once.
Kojiro watched the PKer’s movements from a distance, just as planned. In his field of vision, Karen approached the PKer with a slightly tense expression. He couldn’t hear exactly what they were saying over the noisy surroundings, but after a short exchange, Karen and the PKer began moving toward a nearby karaoke room.
Kojiro could see embarrassment, fear, and a little excitement on the PKer’s face. As planned, Karen had probably threatened to leak his real-world information and his PK activities to BB Net. And if he didn’t want that getting out, she would have demanded that he fight her one-on-one until his Burst Points were completely exhausted.
The reason Karen, not Kojiro, played the bait was simple: as a small girl, she would naturally make the target more careless than a boy like Kojiro would.
Kojiro slipped his hand into the gap in the door before the karaoke room fully closed and forced his way inside.
"Who the hell are you?!"
The blond delinquent shouted at the sudden intruder, but Kojiro ignored him, locked the karaoke room door, then looked straight at the delinquent’s face and asked, "Are you the one who’s been PKing around here lately?"
"You’re a Burst Linker too?! Damn it, what the hell, physica—"
Kojiro struck the delinquent’s throat before he could finish. Still spewing rough words without even seeming to breathe, the delinquent clutched his neck in sudden pain and collapsed to the floor.
"Using acceleration would just be a pain."
Kojiro grabbed the delinquent by the hair, yanked him up, forced eye contact, and asked again, "I’ll ask one more time. Are you the PKer?"
The delinquent couldn’t gather his wits after the sudden violence. With his throat hit, he couldn’t breathe properly, and all that came out was a nasty choking sound. Even so, the question from the person gripping his hair remained calm, completely out of place for the situation.
"Hk—! You fucking bastard!"
After catching his breath for a moment, the delinquent swung a fist at Kojiro’s face with all his strength. But Kojiro easily dodged it and this time landed a short but heavy punch to the delinquent’s solar plexus. Despite the simple motion, the blow hit a vital point, and the delinquent lost all will to resist for good. He could only lie there on the floor, trembling.
Both the earlier strike to the throat and the blow to the solar plexus had been carefully controlled by Kojiro to leave as little trace as possible, just in case trouble came of it. He said, "From here on, answer everything I ask honestly, without leaving anything out. If you show even the slightest sign of trying to hide something..."
The rest of the sentence was inaudible, but the delinquent’s mind had already gone blank. He nodded hard, as if to say he understood. Kojiro hadn’t raised his voice or shouted, but that cold expression and restrained violence terrified the delinquent. He trembled with fear like a rabbit left in front of a lion.
Karen, who had been quietly watching from the side, was completely dumbfounded. When they first made the plan, he had said he’d handle the rest as long as they lured the target somewhere out of sight, so she had assumed he would drag the guy into the Accelerated World and threaten him over his Burst Points. She never imagined he’d actually start throwing punches in reality. And at a glance, he looked far more used to this sort of thing than the delinquent in the flashy outfit did.
Kojiro’s ability to subdue the delinquent in an instant was so shocking that Karen could hardly believe this was the same man who had been chatting in the cafe or reading quietly for the last few days. For some reason, seeing Kojiro intimidate the delinquent made Karen’s heart pound.
"Karen looks red. Did she get startled when I suddenly used violence?"
He would explain it to her later. For now, Kojiro ignored Karen’s flushed expression, grabbed the delinquent by the collar, slammed him into a chair, and began the interrogation in earnest.
"First, your avatar name, then your level."
"...Prussian Muscular. Level 5."
"Level 5? That’s almost on par with the high rankers now."
The delinquent said nothing, keeping silent. No matter how dense he was, he knew Kojiro wasn’t praising him, but mocking him.
"How many are in your gang?"
"Just me—ugh!"
Kojiro immediately slapped the delinquent across the face and said, "I already know everything, so cut the crap."
"...Four."
While interrogating the delinquent, Kojiro checked his physical reactions, like the trembling of his pupils, to determine whether he was lying. If he had been an ordinary elementary school student, he would have broken down crying and spilled everything from the moment he was first hit, but even rotten as a Burst Linker, he had more nerve than he looked. Even while answering obediently, he kept sweeping Kojiro and Karen with his glittering eyes.
Without a doubt, he was probably thinking he had a chance if they dove into a normal duel field or the Unlimited Neutral Field. If Kojiro had to guess, the delinquent was probably imagining himself crushing Kojiro and Karen in his head.
Kojiro was just about done with the questions and about to move on to the next step when Karen, who had been standing quietly behind him until then, asked the delinquent, "Do you remember the Burst Linker you hunted here a week ago?"
The delinquent, who had been answering Kojiro without hesitation, suddenly fell silent and rolled his eyes. He had instinctively realized that this Burst Linker was the reason for all this. Searching for something to say, he finally answered only after Kojiro glared at him.
"...Who are you talking about?"
"A light pink rabbit-type avatar. Avatar name, Biscuit Rabbit. A speed-oriented infighter type. Level 4."
"Yeah, I remember."
The moment the delinquent answered, Karen slapped him across the cheek. Unlike when Kojiro hit him, the delinquent glared fiercely at Karen the instant he was struck, but after catching Kojiro’s eye, he lowered his gaze again. Kojiro had worried Karen might go too far with the violence, but she seemed to decide to leave the rest to the Accelerated World and quietly stepped back.
Kojiro said to the delinquent again, "Can you call the rest of your gang here now?"
"Where? You mean here, right now?"
"Yeah. But not in the real world. In the Accelerated World—more precisely, in the Unlimited Neutral Field."
Kojiro said that, then sat in the chair in front of the delinquent, met his eyes, and continued, "As you can see, we came here to avenge the Burst Linkers your group hunted. So what we want is for everyone involved in PK, including you, to be driven out of the Accelerated World. And for that to happen, you’ll have to duel us."
"Don’t be ridiculous! Why the hell should we go along with something like that?"
"You don’t have a choice."
Kojiro said it firmly, then took a silver-gray wired cable from his pocket and held it out.
"Choose. Fight us two-on-one here and now until you lose all your Burst Points, or call the rest of your gang and make it two-on-four."
It was basically no choice at all. At this rate, he would be PKed two-on-one just like they had always done to others. In that case, wouldn’t it be better to accept these guys’ offer and fight with the numbers in his favor?
But the delinquent couldn’t simply accept Kojiro’s proposal. It wasn’t because he had some admirable desire not to put his comrades in danger. He just couldn’t understand why they were making a proposal that was disadvantageous to themselves in such a favorable situation. In the end, realizing he had no other option, the delinquent agreed to Kojiro’s terms.
"Fine. Then change your Neuro Linker interface so we can see it too. And send a mail to those guys. Tell them there’s prey, so they should dive into the Unlimited Neutral Field right now and come to this amusement center building."
The delinquent manipulated his Neuro Linker and switched the interface to visible mode so the other side could see it as well. Then he wrote the mail. After Kojiro checked the contents once, he sent it to his gang.
"When will they get here?"
"Ten minutes from real-world time. We all agreed to meet here. In the Unlimited Neutral Field, of course."
Fortunately, this sort of thing seemed to happen fairly often, and the other PKers didn’t notice anything strange. They replied that they would be there soon. With the situation now set, Karen and Kojiro began preparing for the fight ahead. Karen had expected something like this might happen when they were making plans at the cafe, but now that the battle was about to begin, unease rose in her chest.
Could they really win? Every one of them was around her level or higher. And on top of that, they were at a 4-on-2 disadvantage. No matter how strong Kojiro was, could he really win in a situation this unfavorable? Maybe it would be better to get rid of this one now, at least.
As if he had guessed what Karen was thinking, Kojiro gently placed a hand on her shoulder and said, "Karen, if you’re uneasy, you can stay in the real world. I can handle this on my own."
But instead of feeling comforted by Kojiro’s words, Karen felt embarrassed. What a disgrace. When she first mistook Kojiro for a PKer and challenged him to a duel without warning, she had been so full of rage at PKers that she hadn’t felt a trace of anxiety. And now, after only a little time had passed, after finding someone she could rely on, she was showing such weakness. And this wasn’t even Kojiro’s revenge—it was her revenge!
Karen slapped both cheeks with her palms, then pointed sharply at the delinquent and said to Kojiro, "That guy is mine."
The delinquent, hearing that, bulged a vein in his forehead and muttered a curse under his breath, but Kojiro ignored him and nodded toward Karen. "Of course."
And just like that, ten minutes passed, and the appointed time arrived. Kojiro checked the time, then signaled to Karen and the delinquent. Kojiro, Karen, and the delinquent shouted at the same time, "Unlimited Burst!"
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