Falcon, who had been dazed out of his mind, finally came to and got back into stance. For a first test, Kojiro slowly lowered the sword he was holding.
Seeing that posture as an opening, Falcon threw a desperate roundhouse kick at Kojiro.
Kojiro instinctively started to slash at the leg coming up toward his head, but then remembered his original purpose: to get a feel for his own avatar. He raised his empty left hand and blocked the attack.
Clang!
With the distinctive sound of metal striking metal, Kojiro could see, in the corner of his vision, his own health gauge drop by a tiny amount.
“I thought I blocked it perfectly. Why did my health go down?”
Kojiro did not know it yet, but because of Brain Burst’s rule of same level, same potential, his avatar, which had started with a sword as a reinforced exterior, had slightly lower overall stats than other avatars of the same level.
In particular, his opponent, Chrome Falcon, was a balance-type avatar whose entire Level 1 potential had been poured into his avatar stats, with no special reinforced exterior or finishing move. As the name “Chrome” suggested, he was metallic in color.
If Kojiro had not blocked Falcon’s kick and had taken it head-on, that alone would have shaved off a fifth of his health gauge.
As if expecting his attack to be blocked, Falcon immediately sprang off his left leg, which had been serving as his support, and kicked at Kojiro’s chest. This time Kojiro gripped the sword in his right hand reverse-style and thrust it forward, using the flat of the blade to block the kick. After retreating a step, he checked his health gauge again and saw that it had not decreased this time.
“If I block with my body, my health drops. If I block with a weapon, it doesn’t. So this really is a game.”
Falcon then took Kojiro’s hesitation as his chance and, making use of his specialty speed, began hammering him with a reckless barrage of punches and kicks. Kojiro avoided most of the attacks or deflected them along the blade’s flat, blocking them all.
Falcon’s attacks were sloppy enough that if Kojiro had blocked with the edge instead of the flat, he would have been cut apart on the spot. But Falcon seemed too caught up in the excitement of the duel to think that far.
In fact, Falcon, the one on offense, was the first to tire out and brace himself on his knees to catch his breath, so Kojiro widened the distance between them. It was the kind of stamina shortage often seen when people who were not used to fighting got swept up in the thrill of battle for the first time. If you moved your body recklessly without thinking about how to pace your stamina, it would start to feel heavy, as if soaked in cotton.
Kojiro thought it over. He had noticed while blocking Falcon’s attacks just now that his own avatar, Ultramarine Swallow, had lower stats across the board compared to Falcon. Strength, defense, speed—there was not a single area where he was better.
But was that a problem?
“No, it isn’t.”
Kojiro suddenly charged at Falcon, who was catching his breath. Though exhausted, Falcon had been wary of Kojiro’s movements and immediately tried to leap backward and evade.
But the Kojiro who had been more than five meters away just a moment ago was suddenly right in front of him, and Falcon watched as the sword, swung naturally, severed his left arm.
The strange movement that even the gallery watching from the sidelines had failed to see properly was not some system assist or special avatar ability, but simple martial skill.
It was a technique of moving without disturbing the body’s balance in the slightest—torso, center, and centerline all kept intact. A special footwork that reproduced the paradox of moving without moving, allowing him to rush into range without being perceived by the opponent.
There were similar steps used by masters of real karate, but neither Kojiro, who had learned martial arts on his own, nor Falcon, who knew nothing about martial arts, could have known that.
“Aaaagh!”
Falcon had seen his avatar take damage a few times in previous duels, but this was the first time a body part had been completely severed. Screaming despite himself from the agony surging up from his severed left arm, Falcon quickly regained his composure.
He judged that now, with the distance closed, was his only chance, especially since Kojiro was using such a long-reaching sword. With everything he had, Falcon threw a hook at Kojiro’s face with his remaining right hand.
But unlike before, Kojiro did not block with the flat of the blade. He presented the edge and caught the punch head-on. Falcon’s fist split in two along the force of his swing. Sparks burst violently from the fist that had been split apart without a sound.
“Gah!”
Falcon had lost both arms in an instant and was no longer capable of fighting, but his health gauge still had about a fifth left. Even so, Falcon’s will to continue fighting was already gone.
“Still, I should finish this.”
To use his signature skill one last time, Kojiro gripped the sword with both hands, drew it back to his upper body, and took the preparatory stance for a swing.
“Sorry about this. It’s been so long since I held a sword that I got carried away without meaning to. At the very least, I’ll send you off without pain.”
Then, from Kojiro’s body as he held that stance, even the sword in his hands gave off the faintest blue gleam.
“Secret Sword [Tsubame Gaeshi].”
In the excitement of the duel and the pain of losing his limbs, Falcon’s brain flooded with adrenaline and created the illusion that Kojiro’s approaching sword was moving slowly. In the blink of an eye—so brief he could not even blink—Falcon saw an illusion of Kojiro splitting into three and swinging his sword from three directions at once.
And without realizing it, he thought:
“Wow, that’s beautiful.”
The blade was coming at him, but in that moment Falcon truly thought the movement of the sword was beautiful.
Then Falcon’s head was severed, and his health gauge dropped to zero.
It was the quiet debut match of the “Swallow Swordsman,” a duel that would be remembered in Accelerated World history.
*
After the duel ended and he returned to the real world, Kojiro took a deep breath of the fresh air and let it out slowly. The warm morning sunlight was still shining between the buildings.
Since the duel had been decided with 600 seconds still left on the countdown, only a little over one second had passed in the real world.
But in that short time, Kojiro had clearly crossed blades as a swordsman.
It was not a fight he could call high-level by any stretch, but it was the first time since coming to live in the modern world that he had done anything like this.
With that strange feeling in his chest, Kojiro long-pressed the disconnect button from the global network. Someone who had watched his duel just now, or a third party, might challenge him to a duel.
Of course, Kojiro did not think he would lose. But he was on his way to school.
Hurrying along the road to school, Kojiro replayed the duel in his mind. The basic systems of the game, the degree of pain felt when actually taking a hit, the performance of weapons, the use of finishing moves.
There were still too many things he did not understand from a single duel, but Kojiro did not feel impatient.
*
From that day on, Kojiro’s daily routine changed.
Whenever he had a spare moment, Kojiro would challenge every player listed on the matching list to a duel, one by one. Sometimes he would also receive duel requests himself. The result, of course, was a perfect clean sweep. Kojiro would record the names on the matching list and then erase the names of opponents he had defeated, steadily reducing the number.
By whittling them down in a kind of dojo-clearing spree, before long there were no players left in the Nerima Ward area whom Kojiro had not yet fought.
Whether word had spread in the meantime or not, even the bold players who had once challenged Kojiro had almost completely disappeared.
But Kojiro did not stop there. After hearing from one of the players he had fought that the people playing Brain Burst were spread all across Tokyo, Kojiro seized the momentum and, using the weekends, began riding the train and sweeping through all of Tokyo.
And he challenged every player with a name he had never seen before on the matching list, ruthlessly and without mercy. For the players on the receiving end, it was a disaster that had come out of nowhere.
There were two reasons Kojiro was so obsessed with duels.
The first was to enter the Unlimited Neutral Field written about in the email.
Unlike the current standard duel field, the Unlimited Neutral Field supposedly had no 30-minute time limit. Through several duels, Kojiro had learned that Brain Burst was indeed a useful means of resolving the imbalance between his body and mind, just as he had hoped, but the 30-minute limit was a problem. If he wanted to properly train his swordsmanship, entering the Unlimited Neutral Field, where there was no time limit, would be absolutely essential.
And the second reason was simply that Kojiro found the game called Brain Burst itself fun.
In truth, when he first connected to the Accelerated World, Kojiro had not expected to become this absorbed in the game. He had thought of Brain Burst merely as a tool for training and duels as nothing more than work for leveling up, but after repeated duels with a variety of players, his mind changed.
So many players he had encountered while roaming the streets of Tokyo. And among them, a few that had left a particularly strong impression.
The blue avatar swinging a huge greatsword, the green avatar so absurdly tough that cutting his throat had been a pain, the black avatar wielding a strange dual-blade style, and even the white avatar who had managed to land a single effective hit on him—just once. Beyond them, there were many others who seemed like talent worth crossing blades with someday.
Of course, this had all been possible thanks to the special space of the game and the restriction of same level, same potential, but even so, the fact that he could see that kind of potential in them was remarkable.
Kojiro felt his heart racing for the first time in a long while. This feeling might have been the first since the time he had first seen his master’s sword movements and lost himself to them.
In his previous life, he had always been alone. When he trained, when he struggled against a wall, when he surpassed his master’s level—he had always been alone. To his past self, swordsmanship had been beautiful and lonely, above all else. He did not regret that.
But perhaps there had been another way. Rival, friend, disciple—anything would have been fine. There might have been a possibility of sharpening one another and rising higher together with someone else. And now, a second chance had come to him.
He had entered the Accelerated World, a new world where thought was accelerated, the body was cast aside, and minds clashed as weapons. Of course, there was only potential; he did not know whether they could truly reach the same realm as him.
And even if they could, it would take a great deal of time and effort—enough to devote an entire human life to it.
But what of it?
This was the Accelerated World, a place where time overflowed.
And Kojiro was more than happy to wait for that.
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