“Crow, run!! We’ll be okay!!” Shihoko shouted, lost in the battle. He was the cornerstone of the attacking team, the sole avatar with the ability to fly in Nega Nebulus—in the entire Accelerated World. He couldn’t be retired from the battle when it had only just started, not for the sake of Shihoko and her comrades and the little battle power they had.

But he didn’t move. Instead, he braced his feet, silver light scattering from his wings, and resisted the pressure of the freezing light beam.

“Unh…Aaaaah!”

The battle cry was strained, but it did reach Shihoko’s ears. His feet were already covered in a thick film of ice, though. And his helmet and shoulders, even his wings, all made a hard snapping sound as they started to freeze from the tips.

Clank! The metal armor covering Silver Crow’s forearms split open to the sides.

Shihoko thought his armor had been destroyed—but that wasn’t it. From inside the separated armor, a transparent crystal pushed out and absorbed Behemoth’s blue beam of light, transforming the energy into a ball of light in Silver Crow’s arms.

“Aaaaaah!!” With a fierce cry, he thrust his crossed arms straight upward and then set his sights on Glacier Behemoth in the distance.

Zwwwanshk!

The air shook, and a pale beam of light jetted from Crow’s arms to slam into Behemoth.

“What?! …This…!!” Behemoth tried to leap back, but his arms and feet were already frozen to the ground. His reflected beam didn’t eat away at his health gauge very much, perhaps because he had a strong resistance to low temperatures, but he apparently wasn’t immune to the freezing effect, and his massive body was instantly swallowed up to the shoulders in a mountain of ice.

Reflection of a light technique. Shihoko had seen the exact same phenomenon up close once before; it had been at the end of the previous month, the first time she’d met Silver Crow in the Setagaya area in the Unlimited Neutral Field. Coolu, the lesser-class Lava Carbuncle Shihoko and her comrades had befriended, had fired a heat ray, and Crow had caught this deliberately, reflected it with his arms, and gotten a direct hit on Avocado Avoider, who was still infected with the ISS kit at that time.

That meant that in the month that had passed since he learned it, Crow had refined this Optical Conduction ability to the point where he could even repel the special attack of a high ranker. Having reflected the freezing beam of light and taken essentially no damage, Silver Crow closed his bracer armor again and slowly straightened up.

“This form…” Behemoth opened his eyes wide. “You’re Nega Nebulus’s Silver Crow! What are you doing here?!”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Crow replied in a low voice and snapped a finger at the frozen Behemoth before starting to shout. “Your—”

But his voice was drowned out by the ferocious roar of an engine to the rear of the plaza.

When she turned around, a spiky motorcycle was charging recklessly in through the south gate of Sengakuji Temple. At the handlebars was a duel avatar in a skull-shaped helmet, with a monkey avatar and an oily avatar crammed onto the seat behind him. Ash Roller, Bush Utan, and Olive Grab…Shihoko and her friends had met them for the first time in the Territories the other day.

“Hey hey heeeeeeeey!!” Ash shouted as he made the tires squeal ostentatiously before coming to a stop next to the three young ladies. “I know ya been waitiiiing!! But! Now that we’re on the scene, we’re forever never letting you have this base! Biggie over there, we’re gonna pay you back a million times over for hurting our pals!!”

“…He’s just as loud as ever, huh…?” Satomi murmured, propped up to one side of Shihoko.

“So noisy it makes me dizzy, yah,” Yume agreed from the other side.

“A-are you both okay?!” Shihoko hurriedly asked her newly conscious friends.

“Fine, totes fine,” Satomi said. “But ugh, I hate that I got totally slammed.”

Yume reached out to gently stroke her battered armor. “Nuh-uh. You did great, Min-Min. Nice fight.”

“Both of you did so great,” Shihoko murmured, and she stood up with an assist from her friends.

Ash glanced back at them and signaled with his thumb for them to get back. Nodding, they retreated to the vicinity of the south gate. It was too bad they wouldn’t be able to take part in the real fight that was about to start, but what they had to prioritize at that moment was surviving. As long as they were still on the battlefield, they’d find a role to play.

Stopping beneath a large tree rising up in front of the gate, Shihoko stared hard at Silver Crow. The silver avatar had suddenly dropped out of the sky at the critical moment, even though he couldn’t be counted on in a pinch in regular life. Here, to her, he looked somehow bigger than usual.

Glacier Behemoth. A high ranker, one of the Seven Dwarves, the executive group of the White Legion. Although his massive body was 70 percent frozen thanks to his own freezing light beam turned back on him, there was no sign of his intense winter blizzard aura weakening at all. Haruyuki felt a chill creeping up from the tips of his toes just facing a beast like this.

But he pushed back against the aura and stepped forward to enter the stronghold that Chocolat Puppeter and the others had occupied for them. A hazy, warm light enveloped his body and charged his special-attack gauge. This wasn’t all that the efforts of Team Chocolat had won: Behemoth’s health gauge was down over 10 percent by the time Haruyuki charged in. Their battered and beaten forms made it painfully clear just how hard they had fought against what was, for all practical purposes, the most powerful member of the defensive team.

Thank you, Choco, Mint, Plum. We’ll make sure to take full advantage of the stronghold you snatched away from the enemy.

As he sent this thought to the girls in the rear, Haruyuki looked up at the enormous beast avatar. He was used to seeing Pard’s Beast Mode, so the beast form on all fours was not so unusual in and of itself. But he couldn’t immediately take in the sheer incredible size of the other avatar, even though it said “Basically huge” in Kuroyukihime’s file. This was a size and weight similar to that of Scarlet Rain when she had Invincible fully deployed.

If he tried straightforward hand-to-hand combat against that thick armor and those sinister claws, he’d be soundly defeated. If he was going to attack, it’d have to be from the sides or the rear. And to that end, he’d have to first knock the other avatar off balance with speed.

While Haruyuki considered the best strategy as he waited for his special-attack gauge to charge, the giant beast, still encased in ice, snapped his sharply fanged mouth. The beautifully courteous voice that came out was a complete mismatch with his external appearance.

“I see…I see. Given the situation, I shall omit my greetings. Silver Crow, you didn’t transfer from Nega Nebulus to Petit Paquet, now, did you?”

“No,” Haruyuki agreed.

“Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.” Behemoth nodded slowly, twice. “Meaning the opposite is true…Petit Paquet joined forces with Nega Nebulus, then? Those young ladies pulled the wool right over my eyes.” He grinned ruefully and then lowered his voice the slightest bit. “This is a tad sooner than expected…So then you’ve come, hmm? You’ve come to challenge Oscillatory Universe with all your fighting power in order to resolve the long-standing issue between the Black King and our White King…Am I correct in my assumption?”

That’s exactly right!! Haruyuki had the shout in his open mouth and then abruptly closed it. What Behemoth had said was, in fact, true. But he didn’t like the implications the beast brought to that truth. He took a deep breath to cool down before he replied calmly, “‘Long-standing issue’? We’re not here for such a theatrical reason as that. Your White Legion is sneaking around doing vicious stuff behind the scenes, so we came to stop you. That’s all.”

“Hoh-hoh.” Behemoth’s eyes glittered like swords of ice. “‘Sneaking around,’ ‘vicious stuff.’ I’m afraid I must take issue with that. When would we have done such terrible deeds?”

“Right from the start. Ever since the start of the Accelerated World.” Haruyuki thought back to the unfortunate fate of Chrome Falcon and Saffron Blossom. Losing any inclination to speak politely, he spat out his next words.

“Your White Legion’s a front for the Acceleration Research Society. You’ve put together any number of dark plots and made so many Burst Linkers suffer. The Armor of Catastrophe, the backdoor program, the ISS kits…All of them were your doing. ‘Vicious’ doesn’t even begin to cover what you’ve done…Not at all.”

“……”

Here, finally, the unexpectedly loquacious beast closed his mouth. He nodded deeply once, twice, his head the only part of him that could move, as if trying to understand something. Then he closed his eyes and let out a long sigh.

“……!!”

Abruptly, the mountain of ice encasing Glacier Behemoth’s bulk clouded over a snowy white, and Haruyuki realized that countless tiny cracks had instantly sprung up all over the ice. Then the glacier exploded in all directions, with more than a few of the pieces shooting all the way to the inside of the base ring.

Haruyuki instantly dropped into a defensive position and knocked away a large chunk with both hands. But several of the smaller pieces bounced off the surface of his armor and shaved away his health gauge, albeit by the tiniest amount.

Freed from his icy imprisonment, Behemoth took the feet supporting his upper body off of the ground and stood up, tiny bits of ice falling from all over his massive bulk. When he stood up straight, he was more than five meters tall, and his head melted into darkness, leaving only the pale light of his eye lenses visible.

“I suppose…I suppose so.” The voice coming down from on high was so bitingly cold, it would freeze a winter’s wind. “You casual Burst Linkers know nothing. That is the sum total of your awareness. But at some point, you too will learn just how cruel and merciless Brain Burst 2039 is. In contrast, there is salvation in the Armor of Catastrophe and the ISS kits. Because they are official bargains—pay the price, receive the power.”

“Official?” Haruyuki was overwhelmed by Behemoth’s mass, but the rage welling up from deep inside him cleared away all his fear. “You don’t know!! All you jerks do is steal and mess around!!”

“Even assuming that was true…those with power take what they will. That is the absolute truth that governs the Accelerated World. You, too, you came to take this area by force, yes?” Behemoth took a step forward.

Reflexively, Haruyuki started to take a step back, but he roused his battle spirit and braced himself in the center of the stronghold ring. “We didn’t come to steal it! We came to take back all the things that you’ve stolen!!”

“In that case, I shall steal even that resolve from you. We are done talking. I will first have the four of you depart this stage!!” Behemoth brandished a forelimb high.

“Ash, you guys secure the base and cover me!” Haruyuki turned and called out to his comrades behind him, and then he kicked off the ground.

Hatchet-like claws at the ready, Behemoth brought his hand down ripping, a pale arc out of the sky. If Haruyuki took a direct hit from that, it might spell the end of his battle. But he added the force from his dash to the thrust of his wings and leapt forward.

It was his first time fighting an individual duel avatar boasting such massive size, but he had some experience with an even bigger enemy when it came to avatar/Enhanced Armament combinations. Haruyuki and his friends had fought an intense battle twenty days earlier against the Armor of Catastrophe, Mark II at the Acceleration Research Society’s headquarters, not too far from their current location at Sengakuji. That monster had been over six meters tall and had fired incredibly powerful nihilistic Incarnate lasers from guns in both hands. But its very height made it hard for the monster to effectively deal with high-speed attacks. Behemoth should be the same in this. Knock him off balance with speed and find a chance for victory.

“G…o!!” Haruyuki accelerated even further, and the five claws whizzing above his head just barely scraped his left wing, sending tiny sparks flying.

He felt the explosive impact of the claws against the earth behind him as he beat down on Behemoth’s leg with a Spiral Kick bearing his full weight. This kick was the most powerful of all Silver Crow’s close-range striking techniques—his foot shot out as he spun at high speed like a drill, controlling the thrust of each wing separately. The only person to have been hit with it and come out unscathed was Avocado Avoider with his peculiar soft armor. But no matter how thick Behemoth’s armor might be, there was no way this wouldn’t be effective on a fellow duel avatar.

The kick landed squarely on the shin that was likely thirty centimeters thick, producing a spiderweb of cracks on the pale armor, and Behemoth’s health gauge did drop from its remaining 90 percent, albeit only slightly.

If he kept attacking this same spot, the armor would break completely, and he could do serious damage to the avatar body inside. Then, once Behemoth was somewhat hobbled, he’d get Ash and them to pile on with long-distance attacks.

Drawing up this plan in his mind, he landed and immediately moved to follow up with a punch to the shin, but he sensed something closing in from a blind spot to his right, so he hurriedly leapt back. What passed before his eyes was an enormous tail, and the tip, crowned with ice-pillar thorns, slammed into the ground and smashed the hard-tiled pavement off the floor of the stage.

Haruyuki used his wings to dash backward and get some distance before looking for his chance to dive back into the fray. But.

“What?!” he cried out in surprise when he saw that the cracks in Behemoth’s left leg’s armor, the spot where he had only seconds earlier gotten a clean hit with his Spiral Kick, were gradually disappearing. “The, the damage to your armor…is repairing itself?!”

“That is indeed the case. My apologies. You worked so hard.” Turning around, Behemoth flashed his eye lenses floating in the darkness. “My armor has the ability to recover automatically in low-temperature environments. In other words, it’s a synergistic effect with the Sigh of Cocytus.”

Behemoth blew on his own feet, and instantly, the temperature in the area dropped and diamond dust twinkled and danced in the air. The cracks started to heal even more rapidly, shrinking before Haruyuki’s eyes.

“I can repair damage without limit. You might say I’m the worst possible opponent for a fighting type like you.”

“So is that where your nickname, Habakkuk, comes from?” Haruyuki moaned.

“Oh, oh, so you know it, do you?” the massive beast responded, pleased.

Project Habakkuk had been a British plan for an ice-ship aircraft carrier during World War II. The British would make use of a large quantity of cooling devices inside a warship made of a massive block of ice so that if it was damaged, all they had to do was pour water on it and freeze it for the repair. The plan was like a fever dream, however, and naturally it went nowhere.

The ice ship never happened, but Glacier Behemoth had taken its name as his own, and he was accordingly impervious to striking techniques. They would need some sort of flame-type attack to have any real impact—and no half-hearted flame, either, but something he couldn’t counter with his extremely low-temperature breath. So they should’ve gotten the many Prominence fire users to take part in the attack team.

As Haruyuki’s thinking fell into this backward-looking rut, he looked up at Behemoth’s bulk once again and noticed any number of small indentations in the thick armor of his shoulders and chest. Given that these were arranged randomly, they probably weren’t part of his design. Most likely Chocolat and her team…They were probably holes Plum Flipper had made with her long-distance slingshot. So then, while the cracks Haruyuki made had healed and disappeared, the holes hadn’t filled in entirely. Which meant that even if Behemoth’s armor’s recovery ability could heal cuts and scratches, it couldn’t recover lost mass?

“Oi! Ya damned bird!” a voice called out from behind.

Ash Roller was champing at the bit, stuck on standby at the base, but their special-attack gauges still weren’t fully charged. Haruyuki quickly threw a hand up to say they should stay a little longer, and then spread his legs and lowered his stance.

Seeing this, Behemoth brought forward his left leg—basically fully repaired now—and said quietly, “Hoh-hoh, so you do not seek aid from your comrades but intend to continue to face me one-on-one? That spirit is commendable…but you’re aware that it is also important to study?”

Despite the fact that it was four against one, Behemoth’s almost despicable leisureliness showed no signs of going anywhere. Which was no surprise, really, since even four against one was basically child’s play for a level eighter like him when the four were at levels six and five. If he got even just a little serious, he could easily wipe them out. His relaxed attitude was certainly not the result of arrogance; he was simply that powerful. But that actually gave Haruyuki an opening.

Come now. What are you doing, servant? Give that overgrown creature a taste of its own medicine.

Haruyuki felt like he could hear Metatron speaking, although they weren’t yet linked, and he nodded slightly. If he could force an opening, it would be only the one time. He had to blow away his opponent’s lackadaisical cool and join up with Team Ash for a linked attack.

“I’ve studied plenty,” Haruyuki replied briefly, and he brought his hand to his left hip.

“Equip. Lucid Blade!!”

A silver light gathered at his hip and materialized, drawing out a perfectly straight line.

A week earlier, when Haruyuki had reached level six at the same time as Takumu, he’d been shown four level-up bonuses: the flight ability enhancement he’d selected four times in a row already; Digit Pursuit, a special attack that turned the fingers of both hands into small homing missiles; Bulletproof, a special attack that greatly increased resistance to physical bullets for a fixed period; and Lucid Blade, a sword-type Enhanced Armament.

Up to that point, Haruyuki had chosen to enhance his flight ability with little to no hesitation, but for some reason, he hadn’t been able to decide so easily this time.

The wings on his back were Silver Crow’s greatest weapon and also the reason for his existence. The strong desire within him to fly had given birth to both duel avatar and silver wings. He’d single-mindedly enhanced this ability ever since, wanting nothing more than to go even higher, even faster. And he definitely didn’t regret that. There were plenty of fights he would have lost if Crow’s flight ability had been even the tiniest bit lacking.

But now that he had reached level six—a step before high ranker—he’d started to wonder if just looking out for himself like this was the best way. Wings for himself, speed for himself. Haruyuki had pursued these things, while many people—so many people—had helped him, guided him, fought alongside him. But he wanted to be able to fight for someone else, too. To that end, he wanted to be able to do more. That desire had led him to choose a new power. The Enhanced Armament Lucid Blade—a sword.

Seeing the weapon that materialized on Haruyuki’s hip, Glacier Behemoth shook his head as if in fond exasperation. “My my. Silver Crow, I had heard that your weapons were those wings and your hands and feet. That you would have a sword…A level-up bonus, then? Or perhaps you bought it in the shop?”

“……”

Deciding that he would no longer indulge Behemoth’s chatty nature, Haruyuki grabbed the hilt of the sword and drew it with a high-pitched sound.

Just as the word lucid would imply, the double-sided straight sword was made of the same silver as Silver Crow’s armor. It was somewhat slender, but the blade and the hilt were a little longer than those of the standard one-handed sword. Catching the blue light of the base ring, the smooth edges gleamed crisply like mirrors. Haruyuki readied his new partner in front of his chest.

“In Brain Burst, a sword is the simplest of Enhanced Armaments, and that is precisely why it can’t be treated as a stopgap, a mere retempering of a dull blade,” Behemoth spat out in admonishment. “From time immemorial, Burst Linkers have obtained swords as a bonus solely because it is ‘cool.’ They have poured great sums of points into the purchasing of them. But the majority of those Burst Linkers disappeared without ever properly mastering their new weapons.” He wasn’t merely spouting conjecture; Behemoth was a veteran and had seen more than Haruyuki could imagine.

And indeed, the Accelerated World’s Silver Crow had never so much as held a sword, much less the real-world Haruyuki. Meanwhile, Glacier Behemoth had fought any number of sword users up to that point and would be well versed in how to dispose of them. Right from the start, the gap between their actual abilities had been clear; Haruyuki didn’t begin to compare in terms of knowledge and experience.

But…But. He brandished the sword in his right hand and shifted his center of gravity forward. The motion was akin to announcing, I’m coming for you now.

Behemoth shook his head slightly once more before raising the fingers of his right hand and motioning the smaller avatar to come at him. Haruyuki could practically hear his voice saying, Come, then. I will finish you in a single blow. And if he charged in recklessly, then that was no doubt exactly what would happen.

But.

There’s no need to fear, servant. I am with you.

Haruyuki felt as if he could hear the phantom voice of Metatron echoing in his mind once again, along with the voice of someone else who’d once been inside him.

The distance between Haruyuki and his enemy was about twelve meters. It was too far to go slicing in, but Haruyuki kicked off the ground and ran one, two, three steps.

A sigh escaped Behemoth’s tightly drawn lips as if to say it wasn’t even worth the trouble of moving. The ice crystals of frozen air pushed toward Haruyuki. If he touched the cloud, his limbs and wings would instantly freeze and render him unable to move.

But he had experienced a very similar “gas attack” mere hours earlier in the Nakano area, Iodine Sterilizer’s iodine spray attack. And he was pretty sure he could handle this one the same way.

Here we go!

Once the freezing cloud was hanging in front of his nose, he tossed his sword to his opposite hand and thrust it into the earth. The ground of the Demon City stage was covered in super-hard tile, and Silver Crow’s sword hand wouldn’t have pierced it so easily, but Lucid Blade’s extremely sharp tip slid ten centimeters into a seam between tiles. Using this as a support, he put all his power into reverse thrusting with the wings on his back.

Fanned backward, the freezing air instantly reversed course and dissipated, enveloping Behemoth in a cloud. Naturally, its creator would have a hard time seeing Haruyuki.

“Hrmph!” The giant groaned, and Haruyuki sensed him drawing breath to attack again.

He yanked his blade back up, kicked off the ground with everything he had, and flew upward on the diagonal. Prepared to expend the remainder of his special-attack gauge, he charged at maximum speed. Breaking through the diffuse frosty air in an instant, he closed in.

“Aaaah!!” He’d been gripping the Lucid Blade in his right hand alone, but now he brandished it with both hands. Focusing all his energy in the sword itself, he roared and launched a slicing attack with all his weight behind it.

Haruyuki and Silver Crow had never fought with a sword before. But the sixth Chrome Disaster had.

When he’d been parasitized by the Armor of Catastrophe, Haruyuki’s main weapon had been a greatsword, and he had swung it freely and easily in fights against the Green Legion’s “Fists” Iron Pound and “Invulnerable” Green Grandé, and even “World End” Black Lotus. The greatsword itself had been sealed away in a corner of the Unlimited Neutral Field together with the Armor of Catastrophe, but his memories of that time, the sensation of swinging that massive sword, remained within him.

Beast! Lend me your strength…one more time!! Haruyuki called out in the depths of his heart to his erstwhile partner in battle, as he brought his beloved new sword down with everything he had.

“Nwoon!” Glacier Behemoth moved his head as Haruyuki had expected—to catch the blade with one of the large horns on his forehead.

Skreeeenk! The instant the sharp edges collided, the impact shook the stage, feeling more like a clash of massive war machines.

All the thrust generated by Silver Crow’s wings and the physical strength of Behemoth’s enormous body clashed at a single minuscule point, making the air burn white hot. If he wavered for even an instant, the balance would collapse, and all the energy released would do instant-death-level damage to Crow.

“Unh…Hngh. Aaaah!” Haruyuki mustered up every scrap of power in him and tried to push his sword through.

“Hng. Unh. Unnnh. RRPH!” But Behemoth pushed back against the blade with a seemingly indestructible horn.

In the upper left of his view, Haruyuki’s special-attack gauge was dropping dramatically from the full charge of the stronghold ring. Five seconds left…four seconds…

In the back of his mind, he heard a voice that was neither Metatron’s nor the Beast’s.

You mustn’t try to push back power with power. There’s no need for power in sword techniques in the Accelerated World. No matter how hard the item, there is a “seam” to sever. Find the seam and align the blade with it…See?

Shf. Haruyuki’s hands moved minutely, and the Lucid Blade slid about half of a half of a millimeter along Behemoth’s horn.

Kaaank! His sword slid downward, followed by a moment of silence and stillness.

A straight line of light raced from the tip of Behemoth’s enormous horn all the way to the base, and then it split in two. Instantly, it transformed into countless fragments and scattered.

Haruyuki used what little remained of his special-attack gauge to dash backward before coming down once again ten meters away from Behemoth. His knees very nearly gave out under him as a reaction to the intense mental focus his attack had required, but he managed to brace himself somehow. Not letting his guard down, he readied his sword and looked up at the motionless beast.

The left of the two horns on the beast’s head had vanished from the root. The cracks on the cross section left behind were steadily being repaired, but the part that was lost indeed did not appear to be coming back.

Behemoth raised a hand to touch the empty spot where his horn had been, and then glared at Haruyuki with pale eye lenses. “That swordsmanship,” he said, in a low, hoarse voice. “Silver Crow, are you perhaps…?”

“Perhaps…what?” Haruyuki asked in return, and rather than responding right away, the enormous beast brought his hand down next to his other on the ground, returning to his four-legged beast state.

“No, please pay that no mind. And it seems that the time for playing here must come to an end.”

“Just what I was hoping for.” Haruyuki repositioned his sword, but Behemoth shrugged deftly, hands still on the ground.

“We will have to settle this at the next opportunity. Above all else, this is the Territories, after all. I can’t make my comrades put up with my little games forever.” He turned his remaining horn up to the dark sky. “Dissolve Ray.”

A red light shot out from his horn, and the inky clouds blanketing the sky of the Demon City stage shone bright red for just a few seconds before the color faded.

That was it. Nothing else happened.

Wait. Abruptly, Haruyuki felt a powerful chill crawl up his spine. This was different from Behemoth’s freezing air. In a certain sense, it was far colder, with a sharp pressure like a razor.

“Ya damned bird,” Ash Roller called out to Haruyuki, unusually subdued, from the base, his special-attack gauge now fully charged.

But Haruyuki had already noticed.

Several figures had appeared on the roof of a large building on the west side of the stronghold plaza that was Sengakuji in the real world. Although they were all much smaller than Behemoth, the strength of the information pressure they were emitting was the same or greater. It was almost as if space itself were warping slightly.

The red beam of light that Behemoth had fired had most likely been a sign to have his comrades join him. In other words, this was the main squad of the Oscillatory Universe defense team for Minato Area No. 3.

Glancing back, Behemoth smiled boldly. Once any one of those team members jumped down into the battlefield, Haruyuki’s ragtag team would lose any chance at victory.

A foreboding dread overcame him, and Haruyuki stood rooted to the spot.

“Ya damned crow,” Ash called him once more.

Haruyuki was about to bark a sharp reply, but then another kind of pressure enveloped him from the opposite side of the plaza.

Whirling around, he saw a smattering of figures on the roofs of the buildings on the east side of Sengakuji Temple. Even though they were only silhouettes, hazy and bleeding into the night shadows, Haruyuki could tell right away who was who. Sky Raker, Ardor Maiden, Cyan Pile, and Blood Leopard and the others had finished occupying the rear footholds and caught up to them.

Time left on the clock: A little over twenty minutes.

Now the main event would finally start. He took a deep breath and held it in his lungs before readying his beloved sword firmly ahead of him once more. Perhaps reflecting Haruyuki’s battle spirit, Lucid Blade shone and glittered blindingly bright.

The auras emitted by the two teams squaring off clashed in the center of the plaza. When this clash reached the breaking point, a general melee of unprecedented power would begin.

The timer in the top center of his field of view dropped toward that instant in time—1205, 1204…

Fwssh! The wind blew. A slight breeze to gently blow away the chill emitted by Oscillatory Universe and the heat released by Nega Nebulus.

Sucked in, Haruyuki looked over at the north side of Sengakuji.

A single, slender building stood precisely midway between the two opposing camps. Someone stood on this roof as well.

He’d never seen the slim silhouette. Which meant it had to be an enemy, but Glacier Behemoth was also looking up doubtfully.

Once again the wind came. The breeze carried the faint scent of flowers as it flowed through the plaza, making the leaves of the steel trees clatter.

A vivid pale-peach light gushed from the body of the Burst Linker on top of the slender building and danced up into the sky. It was not the light effect of a special attack or anything he’d ever seen before. The glow was powerful enough that it seemed to illuminate the entire stage.