“We’ve got no choice but to trust them,” Kuroyukihime stated. “At any rate, the leader on their side is apparently the first seat of the Six Armors, so I think it will be all right.”

Haruyuki unconsciously brought his face close to Kuroyukihime’s ear and murmured, “Th-that’s Graphite Edge, isn’t it?”

“Mm, indeed.”

“I—I hope it works out.”

While Trilead Tetroxide, whom he had met in the Unlimited Neutral Field mere minutes earlier, was the very picture of politeness, the physical embodiment of the idea of irreproachable conduct, Haruyuki would describe his parent Graphite Edge as oblivious to the needs of others.

But Kuroyukihime shrugged lightly. “Well, he was the one who paid the bill here. He won’t scrap his promise after all that.”

And this was exactly the case. Graphite Edge had paid the land price for Shibuya Areas No. 1 and 2 in Burst Points. He hadn’t told them how much it had cost, but there was no doubt that it had been a massive number of points.

Now that Haruyuki was thinking about it, Takumu and Magenta Scissor had also paid the deposit that served as proof of trust at the merger meeting with Prominence, so he felt as if he had gotten himself into serious debt to all kinds of people. He had to at least be more active than anyone in the Territories and pay back even a little of that debt.

“Hey!” From the seat ahead of him, Niko stretched a hand through the gap between the headrests and jabbed him in the forehead.

“Ow! …Wh-what?”

“When you get that look on your face, you’re basically just spinning your wheels,” she snapped. “So I worry. Listen. Don’t think about showing off. You just fight like you fight and that’ll be enough.”

After she had so clearly read his thoughts, there was nothing he could do but nod vaguely. “R-right…I’ll fight my own way.”

But now a hand stretched over from his right and yanked on his earlobe.

“Ow! …What is it, Kuroyukihime?”

“Mm. Nothing. Niko went and stole my thunder, so I was just sulking.”

“Th-that’s…” Haruyuki tried to argue against the absurd attack, but in some terrible twist, a hand reached out from the seat behind him and tugged on the hair on the top of his head. “Ow! …What are you doing, Master?” He turned around with teary eyes.

A bright smile on her face, Fuko had an even more absurd reason than Kuroyukihime. “I just felt like this was getting a bit rom-commy, so I put a forced end to it. Anyway, the next stop is Shimizubashi, Sacchi.”

“Ah. Already there, hmm?” Kuroyukihime glanced up at the map on the ceiling, twisted her body to look at Fuko, and said with a serious look on her face, “I’m counting on you.”

Her statement was brief, but that was exactly why it made him feel the strength of the bond between the girls and their trust in each other.

“Leave it to me, Sacchi,” Fuko replied confidently.

They bumped fists lightly, and then Kuroyukihime met Haruyuki’s eyes once more with a wordless smile.

Haruyuki grinned from ear to ear as the bus began to decelerate and pulled into the left lane. The moment it stopped, Niko and Kuroyukihime stood up, and without looking back, the pair stepped from the back door onto the sidewalk, and the bus pulled out again, motor rumbling.

Haruyuki glanced at the now-empty seat to his side before turning his eyes forward again. The time was 3:50 PM. In just ten minutes, it would at last be time for the Territories of the third week of July. The main fight wasn’t supposed to start right away, but his hands were damp with sweat anyway. There was no need to get all worked up, though. He had plenty of powerful comrades surrounding him. He just had to believe in them and fight in his own way, and the path forward would open up.

Niko. I’m definitely getting your Enhanced Armament back.

Kuroyukihime. I’m absolutely going to expose the conspiracy of the White King who’s tortured you so.

Haruyuki clenched his hands into tight fists.

When they got off the bus, Kuroyukihime turned on her Neurolinker’s Friend Tag function, something she generally kept turned off. A part of the Person Tag function, it displayed in AR a holotag of name and/or icon above the heads of registered friends. It was useful when you were in danger of being separated in a crowd or when you were meeting someone, but if the tags were on all the time, you were likely to develop a habit of looking at the tag rather than the other person’s face, so she normally avoided it.

But now she somehow wanted to see her friends’ tags. As the function was activated, several squares with rounded edges popped up over the bus pulling away from them. She had it set to display icons alone, so the squares were filled with multicolored symbols. The white hat with a ribbon inside a sky-blue circle was Fuko. The owl with orange eyes was Utai. The simple water droplet was Akira. The yellow-green cat was Chiyuri. The blue glasses were Takumu. And the pink pig was Haruyuki Arita.

She’d set the designs to the ones her friends used themselves in SNS apps and the like. Haruyuki didn’t really like the pink pig school-net avatar from back when they first met, but he still hadn’t changed it—in fact, he had even made it his SNS icon. But Kuroyukihime truly loved his pig avatar, so she was happy he kept using it.

The ad hoc connections with the Neurolinkers of her friends were cut one after another as the distance between them grew, until at last the pink pig also disappeared. The bus they rode on quickly melted into the traffic, but she still stared after it soundlessly.

“Don’t look so down. It’s not like you’re never gonna see them again.”

Kuroyukihime felt a jab in her back right around her third vertebra, and she jumped. “Eeah! I am not down or anything like it! I was simply watching the bus!”

Niko, a tag with red cherries displayed above her head, grinned as she retorted, “You can be gloomy or sad or whatever you want, but unless we hustle over to the bus stop there, we’re gonna miss the bus back to Suginami.”

“Mmph. I—I know.” She started walking briskly toward the pedestrian crossing at the Shimizubashi intersection.

“But, like, this sucks, huh?” Niko muttered grumpily from her side. “We prepped all this stuff for today, but we can’t even be a part of the main event, the big battle.”

“We decided that at the Legion meeting, so there’s nothing else we can do.”

“I knoooooow that, but I’m super worried about Pard and them. No point-transfer in the Territories, so I figured it’d be only natural that the sudden-death rule wouldn’t apply, either, y’know.”

“That’s, well…I think so, too, but…” Kuroyukihime nodded as the light turned green and they crossed the road.

The reason the two Legion Masters, the most powerful members of the Legion, were not able to take part in the attack on Minato Area No. 3 and were instead left to defend their own territory was the nonzero possibility that the White King herself might be among the Oscillatory Universe defense team. Kings—that is, level niners—were bound by the sudden-death rule, which meant that in just one fight, all their Burst Points would be transferred and the loser would be pushed to a forced uninstall. But given that no record of two kings ever fighting each other in the Territories existed, Niko was probably right; it was very likely that the sudden-death rule wouldn’t be applied in the Territories when no points were transferred to start with.

“But if we are on the attacking team and Cosmos is among the enemy, Raker and Leopard and the others won’t be able to fight freely. They would never leave our side, after all,” Kuroyukihime stated.

“Well, maybe, yah.” Niko nodded, albeit while pouting. “But for all your worrying here, you guys went and fought that mock Territories with the GW team the other day, with Grandé in the mix, yeah? System-wise, that was a regular Battle Royale, so if you and G had gone up against each other, one of you woulda ended up with a sudden death. Can’t believe Raker and Crow were okay with that.”

“Well…Mm. But the return of Shibuya area was on the line. And Grandé and I also decided we absolutely would not fight each other directly.”

“Still, all you had was each other’s word. And…I mean, you never even thought about it? The possibility that the whole thing was a trap right from the start, and Grandé was coming for your head?”

“Hmm.” Kuroyukihime pondered this as they finished crossing the road. They turned right, and the bus stop soon came into view ahead of them. According to the wait time displayed in AR, the next bus for Suginami would arrive in two minutes and forty seconds.

They stopped next to the bus stop sign, and she replied to Niko’s question. “Grandé is the most mysterious of all the kings, but at the same time, he’s also the least duplicitous…I’ve come to think that lately. His only objective is the continued existence of the Accelerated World—of Brain Burst 2039. He agreed to the mutual nonaggression pact among the seven Great Legions because it worked for this larger objective, and he personally has offset the shortage in points supply by hunting a large number of Enemies himself. Given all of this, Grandé no doubt feels that the Acceleration Research Society’s conspiracy must be stopped. As long as we’re fighting the Society, he’ll likely cooperate with us.”

“Hmm.” Arms crossed, Niko got a kingly look on her face. “But that cooperation is a double-edged sword—wait, shield. Right now, he’s inclined to protect you—well, I guess it’s us now—but he’ll flip the instant he determines we’re any kind of threat to the Accelerated World.”

“I suppose so. I did actually retire one king, and I’ve made it public knowledge that I aim to clear Brain Burst, so…” Kuroyukihime took a deep breath and looked up at the late-July sky. “But that’s the one thing I will not back down from, even if it ends up making an enemy of Grandé. What will happen when I reach level ten, meet the developer, break down the four gates of the Castle, and touch the final Arc? I basically live to answer that question.”

Niko threw her head back reflexively as if to say something in return, but then slowly let out a sigh and nodded sharply several times. “Yeah…I know. I won’t tell you to give it up or anything. And I wanna see the inside of the Castle at some point, too.”

“Honestly. I’ve never even made it in there once, and Crow just waltzes in there to play whenever he feels like it. I can’t accept it.”

“Ha-ha-ha! It ain’t as easy as waltzing, though,” Niko said, laughing.

Meanwhile, Kuroyukihime opened her virtual desktop to turn off the Friend Tag function on her Neurolinker. But immediately before she pressed the OK button, she noticed a bright color moving in the corner of her eye, and she furrowed her brow as she looked in that direction.

A square icon with rounded edges was approaching from the north on Yamate-dori—that is, from Nakano area. And it wasn’t at walking speed. Someone Kuroyukihime had registered on SNS as a friend was riding a bus driving in the lane on the opposite side. But that seemed impossible. Essentially all of Kuroyukihime’s friends were members of Nega Nebulus, and they had only just driven off toward Minato in the bus she and Niko had recently alighted from.

So then who on earth…?

She narrowed her eyes at the icon. The symbol was a thick hardcover book against a light purple background.

“Th-this mark…” She opened her eyes wide. “M-Megumi?”

There was just one non-Legion friend on her list. Umesato Junior High student council treasurer Megumi Wakamiya.

“Hey, what’s up? That someone you know?”

Unable to even reply to Niko’s question, she continued to stare wordlessly at the approaching EV bus and the icon above it.

A coincidence. It had to be.

Megumi would, of course, also go to places like Shinjuku and Shibuya to hang out, and she took the bus instead of the train sometimes, too. But the bus she was on was traveling along the exact same route as the bus the members of Nega Nebulus—the attack team for today’s Territories—were on, and she was only one bus behind them on top of that. It was almost as though she was chasing after them.

And Megumi might not be a Burst Linker, but that wasn’t to say she had absolutely no connection with the Accelerated World.

It had happened three months earlier, when they visited Henoko Beach in Okinawa on a school trip. Kuroyukihime had had an unexpected reunion with a Burst Linker acquaintance who once belonged to the Purple Legion, Aurora Oval, and she ended up helping him and his students to fight the “magiimajimun” (large monster).

The monster turned out to be a tamed Legend-class Enemy, and it had tormented Kuroyukihime and her new comrades in linked attacks with Sulfur Pot, a member of the Acceleration Research Society, riding on its back. But an unfamiliar duel avatar had charged in to save Kuroyukihime and her allies, using the miraculous massive technique of changing the stage attributes, and then departed again just as quickly. There was no mistake—that avatar had been Megumi.

Kuroyukihime still wasn’t sure even now what had happened. After the incident, she had made some excuse to direct with Megumi’s Neurolinker and scanned every nook and cranny of her local memory, but she hadn’t been able to find the BB program. Thus, she had come to think that what happened on that southern island had been a one-off miracle.