"Th-then... we were beaten? By just one person? No, wait, who the hell are you?!"
Only now was he asking who they were dealing with. Just how much had he been looking down on them? Kojiro answered.
"Ultramarine Swallow. That’s my avatar name."
"The Swallow swordsman!"
The thug finally realized who Kojiro was and let out a shrill cry. Ultramarine Swallow, a.k.a. the strongest Burst Linker. Even though Brain Burst had been released less than a year ago, he had crushed countless Burst Linkers in that short time and never once suffered defeat. An unshakable champion.
Only now, after realizing who they had picked a fight with, did the thug’s already pale face go even whiter. Of course, it didn’t show in his Duel Avatar form. Then Karen asked,
"Come to think of it, why didn’t you get exposed right away? You’re incredibly famous."
"Well, it’s not like my photos are all over BB Net."
Kojiro had only really started rampaging in the regular battle fields about two months after Brain Burst began. Back then, there were far fewer Burst Linkers than there were now, so while people might know the avatar name, there were probably very few who knew his appearance too.
So in the Unlimited Neutral Field, where you couldn’t even confirm the other side’s avatar name, it wasn’t strange at all that they hadn’t recognized him at a glance.
"B-but there’s no way even you could have beaten those guys three-on-one!"
"Hmm. They didn’t seem all that skilled to me."
The thug’s expression had gone beyond disbelief and straight into denial of reality. Kojiro standing here right now was the strongest proof of all. He must have truly believed his gang could never lose.
Kojiro recalled the thugs he had personally beheaded and forced out of the Accelerated World a moment ago. They had some decent coordination, and each of them had a little skill, but in the end they were just nobodies who preyed on people weaker than themselves. They couldn’t even handle the basics of fighting—whether it was reacting to an unexpected situation or running the moment someone stronger appeared.
As for the thug here, judging by raw specs alone he should have had the edge over Karen in both matchup and level, and yet he had lost and ended up bound like this. That alone was enough to gauge his true ability. Ignoring the despairing thug, Kojiro said to Karen,
"Anyway, a little late, but Karen, nice fight. You won in the end."
"It was easier than I expected."
"For something easy, you sure made a lot of noise."
As Kojiro said that and looked around, the scenery looked like a battlefield after a full-scale war. Craters and traces of destruction were everywhere, and shattered chunks of ice glittered all over the place. The thug, skewered on ice spears, looked especially awful. In the Accelerated World it was lucky; in reality, it would have been a truly horrifying sight.
"Sounds like you had it easy too."
"More or less."
Even Karen’s body was creaking all over from fighting that muscle-bound monster, and her stamina gauge was below thirty percent. Yet Kojiro looked so clean it was hard to believe he had just fought a fierce battle against three high-rankers. Karen thought he was a man with no visible bottom.
"Now then, before we wrap this up, there’s something I want to ask."
Kojiro drew the sword strapped to his back and asked the thug pinned to the ice spear,
"That Chopper avatar never opened his mouth to the end. Who was it that taught you lot the tricks of PK?"
"If I tell you, will you let me live?"
Karen let out a snort at the thug’s tone, which had already shifted to polite speech. The guy’s thick face skin was something else.
"How about you answer the question first?"
Kojiro brought the blade to his throat, and the thug, feeling a chill far colder than the ice spear, hurriedly said,
"I-I don’t know the details. All I know is that it’s being spread little by little through private channels and private chat rooms on BB Net. Chopper and I got a mail on BB Net and tried it out out of curiosity, and... just among friends..."
He kept spilling out excuses and half-formed nonsense toward the end, but it seemed there was no more information to squeeze out of this thug. When Kojiro sighed, the thug panicked and said,
"Ah! Come to think of it, Chopper mentioned something about a legion. He said there was some secret legion where PK players gathered! He even said he was going to join it!"
Kojiro’s eyes gleamed.
"What’s the name of that legion?"
"I don’t know that much..."
With that answer, Kojiro returned his sword to its sheath and stepped back. Sensing hope in that attitude, the thug asked carefully,
"Th-then you’re letting me go?"
"Absolutely not. You’re getting kicked out of the Accelerated World right here and now."
At Kojiro’s firm tone and cold gaze, the thug realized his fate had already been decided. In the end, he began screaming wildly.
"No! I don’t want this! I said I’d answer everything you asked! R-right! I’ll hand over Burst Points from now on! I’ll even give you money if you want! Anything! I’ll do anything! Please! If you want a dog, I’ll be your dog!!!"
Even with that desperate display, Kojiro’s expression did not change. How many Burst Linkers had begged for their lives before these thugs? And had these guys ever listened to them? Yet when it was their turn, this was the result. What a joke.
"Karen, do you want to do it? Or should I—"
"No. I appreciate the offer, but this is my revenge. I won’t hand it over to anyone."
Karen stepped in front of the thug and raised her right arm. The drifting ice armor that had been swirling around her wrapped around her arm, forming a sharp blade of ice. At first glance it was beautiful, but it radiated a cutting edge that seemed ready to shatter anything it touched. Then Karen swung without hesitation.
With a crisp, trembling sound, both of the thug’s arms were severed and dropped to the ground.
"Aaaagh! My arms!!"
"This is for all the Burst Linkers you’ve hurt until now."
Karen calmly declared it and brought the ice blade to the thug’s throat as he howled in pain. The thug looked up at her with trembling eyes and begged,
"Please... please, spare me..."
With eyes like ice, Karen said firmly,
"And this is for Rabbit."
Without hesitation, Karen swung her arm. The thug’s neck was severed with a thin line and rolled across the ground, and a huge pillar of deep blue flame erupted a moment later. Inside the blaze, countless ribbon-like strands of light scattered into the sky and dissolved into the air. The ribbons were all made of tiny digital code. It was the final destruction phenomenon of a Burst Linker, something Karen was seeing for the first time.
At this moment, the Burst Linker known as Prussian Muscular was permanently expelled from the Accelerated World. In Karen’s dazed field of view, the system font announcing the outcome of the Sudden Death Duel glowed red. Then a large amount of Burst Points was added, and a message appeared saying she could now rise to level 5.
But there was no cry of victory in Karen’s chest, not even a sense of accomplishment. Only a drained exhaustion filled her entire body. Her battered frame finally recognized how tired it was and went on strike.
With her strength gone, Karen sank to her knees without meaning to, and tears suddenly spilled from her eyes. For the first time, a real expression appeared on the face that had always worn nothing but a flat, inorganic look.
In a small, tearful voice, she whispered,
"I finally... I finally did it, Rabbit... sob..."
On the frozen ground, surrounded by ice, the water-colored avatar cried for a long time while the blue samurai watched over her.
Kojiro and Karen returned to the real world through a [Reef Point]. In subjective time, it felt like at least two hours had passed, but in reality less than ten seconds had gone by. As expected, the thug had forgotten he was a Burst Linker and reverted to nothing more than a slightly delinquent elementary school student. After giving him a few grown-up words of advice, Kojiro let him go.
Back in the real world, Kojiro led the still somewhat dazed Karen to the café in front of the amusement center, which had already become a regular spot for them. To lighten the awkward mood, Kojiro joked,
"You know, I never would’ve guessed from the way you act, but you’ve got a pretty girlish side to you."
"Hngh! Don’t tease me!"
"Haha, sorry, sorry."
At Kojiro’s teasing, Karen’s face turned bright red. By then, her way of speaking had already shifted back into the polite speech she only used in the Accelerated World.
A moment ago, Karen had been overwhelmed by emotion in the Unlimited Neutral Field and burst into tears. Even she had been surprised at how tearful she was. To show that kind of state to a man from outside... Karen wanted to hide in a hole from sheer embarrassment.
"Still, I guess this is the end of me chatting with Karen like this. That’s a little disappointing..."
At Kojiro’s casual remark, Karen looked at the man in front of her again.
Kojiro, smiling playfully, had a calm air about him that was uniquely his. Combined with his build, which was large for someone their age, Karen sometimes forgot he was just a boy her age. And yet the pure, unguarded smiles he occasionally showed made her heart flutter.
Over the past week of spending time with Kojiro, Karen had, for the first time in her life, begun to feel affection for the opposite sex. Of course, she hadn’t realized it yet.
She was still too young to understand her own feelings, but even so, thinking that her meeting with Kojiro would end today made her suddenly feel reluctant. Of course, it wasn’t as if they were parting forever. As long as Brain Burst still existed, they could meet again anytime. But that was a different matter. So Karen found herself blurting out,
"Um... could we exchange mail addresses...?”
"Huh? Why?"
It was a hard request for Kojiro to understand. Normally, a Burst Linker’s real-world information was top-secret. In preparation for any possible emergency, both Kojiro and Karen had shared almost none of the information that could identify them in the real world.
For Burst Linkers, contact in reality was a double-edged sword. Of course, Kojiro did not suspect Karen of abusing his information. He simply thought of her as a passing connection.
Karen hesitated for a moment, struggling for an answer, then came up with a plausible excuse.
"You never know. We might run into people like that again."
"So you want to fight together again?"
"Yes!"
At Karen’s answer, Kojiro said in an unusually serious tone,
"You should stop doing dangerous things like this, Karen. I understand that, as a Burst Linker, you feel hostility toward PKers. But you need to stop taking risks like this. This time I helped you on moral grounds because you had a reason—your friend’s revenge. But if I hadn’t been there, you could have been in serious danger. Not just in the Accelerated World, but in the real world too."
Think about those PKers they had just faced. Were they merely gamers exploiting a systemic loophole in a program called Brain Burst? No. The sadistic, immoral tendencies they had shown throughout the fight. Those weren’t things boys who were still only elementary school students should have possessed.
It was probably the very same problem Kojiro had worried about when he first dived into the Unlimited Neutral Field: the harmful influence the Accelerated World had on Burst Linkers. Human nature twisted by acceleration. To them, Brain Burst was something worse than useless.
"Brain Burst is a game, but it’s not just a toy. I’ll admit that much too. But that doesn’t mean you should drag what happens in the Accelerated World into the real world. If you do, both sides can end up ruined. Just like those guys we took down a moment ago."
"But if something like this happens again, you’ll step in, won’t you?"
"Yeah. But I’m different from you."
"How are you different?"
"Skill."
For a moment, Karen was at a loss for words. I can do it, but you can’t. The reason she couldn’t easily refute such a blunt statement was, after all, the difference in their abilities. Even this time, if she thought about it, what would have happened without her? She couldn’t deny that the information she provided had been a huge help in wiping out the PKers.
But conversely, that meant her role ended there. Even though she had personally executed one of them, she couldn’t imagine the blue samurai having any trouble without her.
In the end, unable to find a reply, Karen fell silent. Kojiro patted her head and said,
"Leave trash like that to me, and you go back to your everyday life."
Karen thought the hand that had patted her head was pleasant in a way that didn’t suit the situation at all. They were only one year apart, and yet his attitude was completely that of an adult. Was this what experience looked like? In the end, Kojiro removed his hand from Karen’s head and stood up.
"Ah."
Karen let out a small, disappointed sound. If they parted now, maybe they would never meet again in the real world. Thinking that, Karen felt a tight squeeze in her chest.
And yet, if this had been the Karen of before, she would have simply swallowed her disappointment and watched Kojiro leave in silence. But in her mind, she heard the voice of someone she had once known—someone who had been both a friend and a parent.
"Karen, if you keep being so timid, you’ll never get a boyfriend. A woman needs guts, guts! In love or in a fight, the one who gives up loses!"
As always, it was the lively, energetic voice of a precious friend. The voice of Biscuit Rabbit, now just a memory from the past. Hearing that voice she could no longer hear, Karen decided to be a little braver.
"Then... I’ll be your information source."
"Information source?"
"Yes. You almost never do regular battles with other Burst Linkers and spend most of your time in the Unlimited Neutral Field, right? Then you can’t help being in the dark about the whole Accelerated World. I’ll help you with that."
Kojiro fell silent. The reason was similar to why Karen had just been silent. It was true that Kojiro had to remain ignorant of most news in the Accelerated World unless it was common information available even through BB Net. This PK matter was proof enough. For someone like him, having an information source like this would be a huge help. He found himself thinking that in an instant.
Sensing that opening, Karen drove the point home.
"Leave finding trash like that to me, and you just keep getting good at swinging your sword."
"What? Hahahahaha!"
Kojiro burst out laughing at Karen’s bold reply. If the PKers symbolized human nature twisted by acceleration, then maybe Karen was the opposite. That thought crossed Kojiro’s mind without warning.
In the end, Burst Linkers were Burst Linkers. You couldn’t judge them by their real-world age. Kojiro raised both hands in surrender, then operated his Neuro Linker interface and sent Karen his mail address. With a playful expression, he said,
"Then I’ll be counting on you from here on out, information source."
As he said it, he thought that his connection with this water-colored avatar might last a little longer after all.
"Don’t make fun of me!"
Karen, her face still red with embarrassment, sent him her mail address too. And the café owner watched the whole thing with a very pleased expression.
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