Around the time when the other avatar’s health gauge was down to 20 percent, the auditory block vanished, and he heard Dine groaning above the din of his machine gun–like blows.

“I—I won’t be done in so easily!”

“Save it! This is my win!!” Haruyuki shouted back and began punching even faster to eat up the remainder of Dine’s gauge.

“That’s enough!!” A cool voice cut crisply through all the noise of the fight, and Haruyuki reflexively stopped his attack with a backward leap.

Dine dropped heavily to the ground, then quickly looked to the center of the park.

Raising one hand straight up into the air from the base of a large withered tree was Ardor Maiden, the referee for their match. The small shrine maiden brought her hand down. “That shall be the end of the fight. Both of you, please stop your attacks.”

“O-okay.” Haruyuki lowered his readied hands.

Dine also stood up slowly and then shook his head as if in disbelief. “Aah, you totally turned that around in an incredible way. Never dreamed you’d escape my Acid Mist like that.”

“Uh. Th-thanks…” Haruyuki dipped his head in an unconscious bow, then looked to the rear, remembering something.

Although Dine’s Acid Mist had essentially disappeared, the blue poison mist was still swirling around on the east side of the park. It would soon be picked up by the wind and start to move, and if anyone touched it, they wouldn’t be able to hear anything anymore. The cloud would be quite an annoyance in the sense that it would obstruct the meeting.

Haruyuki was the one who had made the hole, so he felt a responsibility to dispose of it, but even his wings couldn’t blow away a mass on that scale. As he panicked about what to do, Dine stepped up beside him.

“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it with my special attack, since you were kind enough to charge my gauge for me there.” He casually pushed his hands out. “Antidote Mist!”

Yellow liquid jetted from the nozzles in his hands and touched the blue poisonous mist. The area of contact glittered brightly as Dine’s special attack purified the enormous cloud of poison in mere seconds.

“Nice fight!!”

“That was a great duel!!”

“Next time, you gotta fight me, too!!”

Cheers erupted from all sides, and Haruyuki hurriedly turned around to see the members of Prominence and Nega Nebulus standing chummily alongside one another on the second floor of the Central Park East building, which stretched out from east to west.

Iodine immediately raised both hands and responded to the cheers, so Haruyuki nervously followed suit as he asked the question that just now nagged at him. “Um, Iodine, so…what happens with the title of Antidote King?”

Dine glanced up to check both their health gauges and then shrugged dramatically. “No way around it, your gauge has more left in it. It’s unfortunate, but I’ll have to leave the title with you until our next duel.” Then he abruptly raised his voice to twice as loud and announced, “Silver Crow! As of today, you are the Accelerated World’s Antidote Kiiiing!!”

Whaaaa—?! Haruyuki screamed inwardly as Dine grabbed his hand and held it up high in the air. He hurriedly tried to yank it back down, but it was already too late. Waves of applause poured down from the East building, and all Haruyuki could do was bring a stiff smile to his face.

Once the impromptu duel was over, and the members of both Legions had assembled in the center of the park once more, they had fifteen minutes left on the clock.

The first to speak was Iodine Sterilizer himself. He turned toward the chair, Utai, and smoothly declared, “Oh, I change my vote from nay to yea.”

Even Utai froze for a moment before responding with a short “Understood.” She sent the brush racing across the white wooden board, putting two lines through Dine’s name in the Nay column and moving it to the Yea column before turning neatly on her heel. “So we have thirty-one yeas and thirteen conditional yeas. I would now like to hear the opinions of the conditional yeas…Could someone stand as your representative?”

“All right. I will,” Haruyuki heard someone from the Prominence side say. He couldn’t tell who the speaker was from the voice alone.

He stared curiously and saw an M-type avatar stand up hard enough to make the ground shake. He was easily the largest of any of the thirty-three members of Prominence. His fiery scarlet armor was thick, but didn’t appear to be cumbersome, while the Gatling gun Enhanced Armament mounted on each arm looked quite powerful. Haruyuki was overwhelmed by the large avatar’s obvious strength.

“That’s the head of Prominence’s Triad, V-Three, aka Vermillion Vulcan,” Akira murmured in his ear.

“Tr-Triad?” he parroted. “There’s more than just the Triplex?”

“They’re the only members of the first Prominence executive branch who stayed in the Legion after the change of kings,” she explained.

“So then they’re close friends…of Red Rider?” He gulped hard, and almost as if sensing Haruyuki’s gaze, Vermillion Vulcan turned his sharp eye lenses on him. Fortunately, “V3” soon shifted his gaze to look down at Utai before speaking in a dignified voice.

“I stand as the representative for the Prominence conditional yeas,” he said, his voice grave. “Allow me to explain.”

“Please go ahead, Vermillion.” Utai ceded the floor.

“Well, then. To get straight to the point, the questions that concern us are who will be the new Legion Master and whether the Legion name will live on after the monthlong period of merger preparation.”

“In other words, do you mean who will have the right to the Judgment Blow?” Utai asked, and when Vermillion nodded wordlessly, tension in the venue rose.

Haruyuki had reviewed how the system handled a Legion merger in Brain Burst just in case. When two Legion Masters with adjacent territory made a formal agreement and the merger was concluded in the system, a merger preparation period of thirty days began. During that time, it was possible to change the new Legion’s name and the new Legion Master, and the two former Legion Masters both held the right to Judgment Blow. In other words, for thirty days, Kuroyukihime and Niko would both be able to Judge all members, which was a kind of fairness in its own way. But the instant the preparation period ended, the right to Judge would belong to the new Legion master alone, and the members of the Legion that person—most likely either Kuroyukihime or Niko—had not belonged to would be left with significant dissatisfaction and unease.

Vermillion Vulcan looked around before speaking again. “Of course, given that we have agreed to the merger, albeit with conditions, we don’t suspect that this merger proposal is a trap or something similar. Hypothetically, if the Black King is the new Legion Master after the end of the preparation period, we don’t expect that she will blindly Judge the members of the old Prominence. However…we never want to lose the master to whom we swore our loyalty ever again. We don’t want to create the possibility that such a thing could happen, even in the worst case.”

His words were calm and rational…and therefore dug deeply into Haruyuki’s heart. The Black King standing in front of him now had been the one who took the head of the first Red King, Red Rider, the former master of the Triad’s Vermillion Vulcan, and banished him for all time from the Accelerated World. Vermillion hadn’t called her out by name, but there had to be some among Prominence’s veteran members who didn’t trust Kuroyukihime—or perhaps even held a grudge against her.

Blaze Heart, Peach Parasol, and Ochre Prison, who had attacked Suginami in the Territories at the end of the previous month, were among those who didn’t trust her. Through the intense battle with Haruyuki, Utai, and Akira and the trading of blows, they’d been able to communicate something to each other—and maybe that was why the three of them had agreed to the merger with no conditions, but he was sure they were still anxious about it.

Furthermore, in the middle of the fight with the ISS kit main body at Tokyo Midtown Tower, Kuroyukihime had apparently had a chance meeting with Red Rider’s residual memory. She had accepted a message from him there and given it to Niko: “Thanks, it’s up to you now.” Hearing this, Niko had pressed her face to Pard’s chest and sobbed like a small child. As he witnessed this, Haruyuki had felt that the succession of kingship from Red Rider to Scarlet Rain was completed, and this also facilitated Prominence’s reconciliation with Kuroyukihime.

But at best that had been a moment shared among only the three of them. He couldn’t imagine that Niko had told the Legion members the details, so it was no wonder that the veteran members still had reservations.

When he thought about it like that, it was practically a miracle that Iodine Sterilizer was the only one who had voiced any opposition to the merger (and the reason for that had had nothing to do with Red Rider). Even the conditional yeas had stopped at eleven people, with the other twenty-one announcing their unconditional agreement. Most likely, Niko and Pard had used every bit of persuasive power they had to win their comrades over.

If that was the case, then Haruyuki and his friends had to do whatever it took to win over Vermillion Vulcan and the other ten. But no matter how desperately he wanted to speak and persuade them, his feelings simply swirled formlessly inside him, never coalescing into words. There was no way Kuroyukihime would Judge the former Prominence members, especially Niko, after the Legion merger. It was easy to say that, but Vermillion and the others were probably looking for something more than words. Something they could believe in, a promise that would make everything all right.

Haruyuki was clenching his hands tightly as he stood rooted to the ground when a firm voice came from directly behind him.

“Please allow me to respond to Vermillion and the others.” Takumu stepped forward without waiting for the chair’s response and stopped about two meters away from the group. He turned his avatar, which was nearly as large as Vermillion’s, directly toward the group of conditional yeas.

“Go ahead, Pile,” Utai urged.

Takumu nodded slightly. “First of all, I’ll state my own condition for agreement. I will agree to the merger only if all Prominence members agree to accept me as a member of the new Legion once you all hear what I’m about to say. If even one person refuses, then I will leave the Legion.”

“Wh…” What are you saying, Taku?! Haruyuki very nearly shouted the real name of his best friend. But a hand reached out from behind and grabbed firmly onto his shoulder.

“Crow, hear him out,” Magenta Scissor whispered in his ear. Her voice was quiet but very tense, and Haruyuki could only nod in response.

In the motionless Plague stage, the air itself stagnant, the only sound was Takumu’s voice. “Nine months ago, when I belonged to Leonids, I used a backdoor program—a cheat tool given to me by my parent—and hid myself from the matching list while I attempted to hunt the Black King, Black Lotus.”

It appeared there were some who hadn’t known about the incident; a low murmuring rose up on the Prominence side. But Takumu stood tall and continued to speak clearly.

“Once this was revealed after Silver Crow defeated me, my parent was Judged by the Blue King and left the Accelerated World, but due to the mercy of Silver Crow and the Black King, I transferred to Nega Nebulus and have continued on as a Burst Linker, as you can see…And that was not my only crime. When I was caught in a real attack by a PK group, although it was to protect myself, I equipped an ISS kit and brought them all to total point loss with that power. I still have not atoned for these crimes. If there is even one person who thinks I should not be allowed to join the new Legion, I will gladly withdraw. That’s my condition for agreement.”

“……”

No one spoke for a while. The first to move was Magenta Scissor, another conditional yea. She put some strength into the hand that still rested on Haruyuki’s shoulder and pushed forward, stepping away from the group to stand alongside Takumu.

“Will you let me say a few words, too?” she asked.

Utai nodded after a moment. “Please. Go ahead.”

The tall avatar slowly bowed at the waist and then made her husky voice carry. “I’m sure some people know, but…I, Magenta Scissor, was the one who spread the ISS kits in southwestern Tokyo, centered in Setagaya. I gave Cyan Pile the ISS kit he used, and I sliced open the armor of many, including Mint Mitten and Plum Flipper, and forcibly parasitized them with the kits. If Cyan Pile’s gonna make you question his crimes, then naturally, I gotta do the same.”

Once again, excited chatter broke out on the Prominence side, louder than before.

This merger was being made so they could fight the Acceleration Research Society. The Society had stolen Niko’s Enhanced Armament and created the ISS kits, and naturally, the members of Prominence had to be aware of this. Although Magenta had done what she had because of her own beliefs, the end result was that she had acted as a member of the Acceleration Research Society. It wouldn’t be any wonder if the reaction she received was one of rejection.

But Haruyuki would never accept a scenario in which Takumu and Magenta had to leave Nega Nebulus in order to make the merger happen. He resolved to throw himself down on his hands and knees or do whatever he had to if there was even one person who raised their voice to say they should leave, and he waited for what would happen next with bated breath.

“Why would you tell us that? You didn’t have to.” The voice, severe like steel, was that of Vermillion Vulcan.

“That’s…” Takumu tried to answer somehow, but then closed his mouth and hung his head slightly.

Vermillion’s voice came again a few seconds later, and this time, it contained the hint of a smile. “You are absurdly serious, Cyan Pile, just like they say.” The auto-cannon user, likely more of a veteran than either Niko or Pard, shrugged lightly. “Whatever crimes you and Magenta Scissor might have committed, if the people involved have forgiven you and welcomed you as comrades, then there’s no need for us to say anything. After all, we’re about to merge with the Legion led by the Black King, and she drove our former Red King to total point loss. So when you look at it that way, there’s no point in reproaching you for such modest mistakes.”

As he took in the silent Takumu, Vermillion’s eyes shone sharply all of a sudden. His voice was powerful once more, shaking earth and air.

“However, the condition we put forward is still not fulfilled. In the event that the Black King becomes the new Legion Master, she could hurt our king once again to achieve her supreme goal of reaching level ten. We want you to show us proof of some kind that this will absolutely never happen.”

Takumu now responded to the difficult problem Vermillion posed. He used his Instruct menu to materialize a silver card item, and this he held out to the other avatar. “This card is charged with all the Burst Points I got in the sudden-death duel with the PK group Supernova Remnant, along with the points Magenta Scissor collected using the ISS kit. There are enough points for a Burst Linker who just hit level eight to go up to level nine.”

The Red members erupted into whispers and murmurs louder than anything so far, and even Kuroyukihime, Fuko, and the others let out faint cries.

Although there were more than a few level eighters in the Accelerated World, there were a mere seven level niners. That was exactly why they were called kings, and everyone knew that the path to this place was endlessly long. Given the current ongoing peaceful stagnation of the mutual nonaggression pact among the major Legions, in practical terms, level nine was nearly impossible to reach. And yet the card before them was charged with enough points to topple the power balance of the Accelerated World; it shone so strongly even in the weak sunlight of the Plague stage that it was almost ominous.

Card still held out to Vermillion, Takumu opened his mouth again. “Those Remnant guys attacked a ton of Burst Linkers in the real world and built up this stock of dirty points through threats and violence. I definitely didn’t want to use them, but I couldn’t think of a safe way to get rid of them. So I decided to have Master—Black Lotus—hold on to them, but she told me that at some point, she was sure I would find the correct way to use them. So I should hang on to them until then. And now I’ve finally found that way.”

Takumu took a few slow steps forward to stop in front of Vermillion.

“If Black Lotus or any of the members of the current Nega Nebulus betray you, please use these points and Judge their crime. They’re dirty points, but…I think it would be acceptable to use them for righteous vengeance. And I’d ask…I want to be the first one you Judge.”

“Of course, second would be me.”

An almost grim determination bled into the calm voices of both Cyan Pile and Magenta Scissor, and Vermillion didn’t open his mouth right away. Takumu and Magenta’s proposal couldn’t guarantee the safety of the Red King with utter certainty. But although it would never happen, if Kuroyukihime decided to betray Niko and take her head, in that moment she would have to think little of Takumu and Magenta’s lives.

Eventually, the auto-cannon user turned, armor clanging, and looked at Niko behind him, who had her arms crossed.

The Red King nodded without a word, then spoke in a voice that made her kingly majesty felt. “You hold on to that. And if you think the time to use it has come, use it.”

But Vermillion shook his head ponderously. “No. If we were to seek vengeance for our king…there’s someone more suitable than me.” He took the silver card from Takumu’s hand and walked over to the deputy standing at Niko’s side, Blood Leopard.

“Leopard. Keep this safe.” Vermillion spoke as though he was ceding a privilege to her and asking if she was prepared to accept it.

But Pard nodded evenly and took it with zero fuss. Spinning it around with the fingers of her right hand, she opened her Instruct menu with her left and tossed it into storage. “K.”

Hearing this simple reply, Vermillion turned back toward Takumu. “Cyan Pile, Magenta Scissor, and the Black King, Black Lotus…you have indeed shown us your intentions. We shall deem our condition fulfilled with this. I and the other ten members change our conditional yea and leave the matter of the provisional Master and Legion name to the two kings.”

Takumu also stood up tall. “Similarly, our condition has been fulfilled. I also change my vote to yea.”

“I’m on board, too,” Magenta added.

All three nodded at each other slightly and then turned on their heels and returned to their respective camps.

Standing at the white wooden board, Utai lifted the massive brush and quickly crossed out the names of the thirteen people in the CONDITIONAL YEA column before rewriting them all in the YEA column.

“With that, all forty-four people gathered here are now in agreement!” Utai sounded proud somehow, and the sound of applause rose up out of nowhere to instantly melt together and fill the stage.

Haruyuki earnestly clapped his own hands together while he glanced over at Takumu standing a ways off. There was no expression on the face mask with its narrow slits, but even so, it looked to him like the face of his childhood friend was shining with relief and satisfaction. Magenta Scissor, on the other side of Takumu, looked the same, and he wondered when exactly the two of them had met to set this up.

As Haruyuki’s thoughts slid in this direction, Kuroyukihime began to hover soundlessly, and Niko took large strides forward from the Prominence side. They stopped in front of the wooden board and opened their Instruct menus at the same time.

“…Finally…” The word slipped unconsciously from Haruyuki’s lips.

Fuko, beside him in her wheelchair, picked up his thought. “Finally the time has come, hmm?”

Akira nodded on his other side without a word, and the three members of Petit Paquet locked their hands together in front of their chests. As for Chiyuri to his left, even now she moved on her own time in her own way.

“I wonder if they’ll make it in time.” She gave voice to an entirely practical concern. “Only three minutes left.”

So Haruyuki unconsciously grabbed her hand. “It’ll be fine. Niko and Kuroyukihime just have to press the button, that’s all.”

“I know,” Chiyuri replied, annoyed, but she still squeezed his hand warmly.

Haruyuki held his breath and watched over the two kings. Soon…in a few mere seconds, the two Legions would vanish and a new great Legion would be born.

In the LEGION tab that only Masters had, Niko and Kuroyukihime nimbly flicked around the screen, but their hands soon stopped. Their gazes clashed for a mere three seconds before they suddenly started to yell.

“Here we go, Rain!!”

“Come at me, Lotus!!”

Huh?! This can’t be the start of a king-versus-king battle?! Haruyuki nearly fainted, but after an instant of silence, the two raised their voices and shouted as one.

““Rock!!””

Niko’s small fist and Kuroyukihime’s Incarnate-generated one swung down at top speed, and the compressed air became a sudden gust that reached even Haruyuki.

““Paper!! Scissors!!””

The two fists shot out with even greater force, and a shock wave, the aftermath of some kind of explosive-type special attack, shook the entirety of the stage. The energy generated was far greater than from the rock-paper-scissors competition of the six candidates for meeting chair, causing the members of both Legions to reel backward. Haruyuki braced himself to ride out the shock wave, determined to see the results of this contest.

Niko had thrown paper.

Kuroyukihime had thrown scissors.

The two kings remained motionless for about three seconds, and then the Red King slowly roused herself and raised her still-open hand in submission.

“Aah, I lose. Which means…” Niko turned back to the forty-plus Burst Linkers watching with bated breath, her small avatar radiating dignified authority as she announced, “For the monthlong prep period, it’s gonna be Black here doing the Legion Master thing! And we’ll inherit Nega Nebulus as the provisional Legion name! The official new master and Legion name’ll be discussed again in a month! Anyone got any complaints about this decision?!”