A/N: I'm sorry for the long delay between updates. All my time between the last chapter and this went to Mirishira Accel World and I really neglected this piece.
Looks like MAW and TAW will be my most active works then! *concentrates*
Hiding his real body in the toilet, fleeing from people's eyes in the virtual space.
He goes up the stairs carved in the tree trunk. The higher up it went, the less popular the games became.
He passed by baseball, basketball, golf, tennis, and what he arrived at after ignoring the soccer floor is the Virtual Squash corner.
There is not a single student to be seen anywhere here and the reason for the unpopularity of squash is clear:
it's similar to tennis, but you hit the ball with a racket in a square space with hard walls on all sides.
It's a very lonely sport to silently continue returning a bouncing ball, all by yourself.
-Haruyuki, «Entertainment at school»
Solitary.
If there was anything that Haryuki Arita enjoys about Virtual Squash, it's that he doesn't need a partner to play with him. Here, Haruyuki could truly enter a space he can call his own and feel at peace, knowing that for the full lunch hour, nobody will disturb him. He'll be left alone.
Haruyuki knows things weren't always like this. There were times when he happily played table tennis and baseball with his classmates on the lower floors, filling the virtual space with raucous laughter. No more.
Those days are long gone and will always be after...after things happened. He shakes his head to clear his mind.
Stepping up onto the playing area, the dark area warms with neon strip lighting. A squash racket materialises from thin air as does the scoreboard on the wall opposite. It shows his name and high score: Level 67, with a high score of 17,129 points. Every row in the scoreboard shows his own name and scores as well.
Haruyuki smiles briefly. It's okay for his grades to slip, he thinks, but he will never allow himself to be less than perfect in virtual gaming. It's all he has left anyway.
He raises the racket, the cue for the squash ball to spawn. The black rubber sphere drops down, bounces, and Haruyuki tenses-
"You sure like to keep to yourself."
A smooth, high female voice cuts the air.
"Woah!" Caught off guard, Haruyuki whips around and trips over his avatar's trotters, falling in a heap. The squash ball continues to bounce on the spot, waiting to be hit to kick the game off.
Haruyuki raises his head to meet the gaze of that black girl. No, it's not that her skin is tanned; on the contrary, her skin is so pale, it's nearly white. It's her ridiculously skimpy outfit (some might call it sexy, even) that gives the strong impression of the colour black, especially when placed in contrast to what probably is her natural skin tone.
But most attention-grabbing of all is her hair. Like any other Umesato student, Haruyuki knows the student regulations for hair as well as the back of his palm: boys must have neat, short hair above their brows, and girls must tie up theirs if it reaches their collar. Of course, these same rules don't apply in the Local Net, a virtual environment, but most schoolgirls of Haruyuki's age prefer to keep within the boundaries still.
This girl hardly cared. Her long, raven hair reached all the way down to her waist, flowing and ebbing like water with every movement she made. The effect was to rob Haruyuki's breath and attention the instant he laid eyes on it.
"...ey. Hey, are you listening to me?"
As though from far away, the girl's voice drags Haruyuki back to reality. Nodding like a drunken man (if he knew what it was like to be drunk) Haruyuki makes a massively conscious effort to keep his eyes on her own. It's not helping that they're just as alluring as her hair.
"Um, sorry, what did you say just a moment ago?"
"I asked you," She haughtily repeated herself. "Whether all this time, you're the only player of this game, and that all the high scores here are yours as well!"
Since Haruyuki has never seen her before in his life, this girl is probably an upperclassman and his response is phrased as politely as he can. "Um, ah, yes it is, Upperclassman. As for these high scores, I made all of them." His back straightens out as much as the pig avatar will allow it.
"Upperclassman." She lets her tongue roll over the word. "I like that word a lot. What's your name?"
"Ah...As for me, I'm Haruyuki Arita."
The black girl's lips curl into a smile. Somehow, Haruyuki feels less assured now that she knows his name. It's almost as if it's a game of poker, but he was forced to reveal a card from his hand without getting to see one of her cards in return.
"May...May I ask, what is your name, then?"
That's how it should have sounded like, but instead, Haruyuki was only able to mouth the words. The black girl tilted her head to the side and gave him the 'Care to run that by me again?' look.
Stupid, stupid! Visibly flustered at this point in time, Haruyuki chose this moment to drop his squash racket out of embarrassment.
"Eh..heh heh, heh heh heh!"
Suddenly, that girl giggled. Haruyuki was even more thoroughly confused; what in the world did this girl want with him?!
"I guess I'm rude, but it just had to be this way," She chuckled. "Well, I'll just get on with it..."
Tap. Tap-tap. Tap. Tap-tap. The sound of her dress shoes and her umbrella striking the floor resonated within the confines of the squash court, and the girl stopped before Haruyuki.
Whether it was the difference between their Net Avatar sizes or the sheer confidence the black girl possesses, Haruyuki doesn't know. But he suddenly felt very, very small compared to her-
The girl picked him up. Like carrying a small child by under their arms, she clutched him with her glove-clad hands and raised him to her eye level.
"Boy," She murmured with an unseen resolute force of will. "Do you wish to leave this world, and Accelerate to a new one?"
"Uh...what?" Haruyuki's mind was turned upside down and garbled with that cryptic message.
"Accelerate. Destroy this current reality, and enter a new reality, a battleground to face your fears and confront them."
Haruyuki honestly has absolutely no idea what in the world this girl was talking about. But he did understand the last part. Just a little.
Face my fears, confront them. It means to...be courageous?
Hazy memories stirred at the back of his mind and his stomach shuddered.
Can I...be courageous?
"You can be strong if you accept me," The girl whispered, her face mere centimeters from his. "I can see that things are tormenting you from the inside, things that you want to be rid of."
Placing one trotter on the girl's hand, Haruyuki slowly nodded. "I'll...I accept."
What blind faith is this, accepting a stranger whom he has met for all of five minutes? Haruyuki doesn't know.
All he knows is that he wants to be anywhere but here, a place where bullies steal his stationary and demand his lunch money. A place where his home is no longer filled with happy laughter and warmth, just cold voices and quarrels.
The black girl's eyes seem to bore into his, staring into his very soul despite this just being the virtual network. Finally, she puts him down at last.
"Where are you Diving from, boy?"
"Um...Dive classroom five."
The girl smiled again, just as brightly as she had upon learning his name. "Perfect, Haruyuki Arita. I'll see you on the other side. Link Out!"
Her butterfly-like avatar vanished instantly, leaving Haruyuki wondering what the hell just happened.
"I'll see you on the other side," She said. Does that mean she wishes to contact him in real life? That's probably the case, since she asked him where he was Diving from. That's right, this pretty girl wants to meet him in the flesh, right now.
But Haruyuki shuddered at the thought. It doesn't have anything to do with that girl, but the last time he saw a pretty girl...it was at his home, and she had been playing with him games as well...until his father came by and-
"STOP!" No, no, no no NO! I don't want to remember any of that!
As if he could beat those memories out of his brain, the little pig avatar grasped his fallen racket and vainly tried to hit himself in the head. Unfortunately, he couldn't feel any pain here due to safety limits on pain feedback, though he could feel his head being pushed back by the racket's impact.
After about a minute of this exercise in futility, he gave up and tossed the racket aside again. The clattering of the racket echoed around the empty squash room.
Fuming, Haruyuki turned on the spot to leave the room. "Link Out!" He cries, making up his mind to see the black girl and whatever she wants with him-
And then, someone hits him on the head in real life, forcefully yanking his consciousness from the school network.
tbc.
.
Further notes:
Sorry for that abrupt ending, but I'm already rambling and I'm not going to prolong it too much. I'll just get straight to the introduction of Brain Burst already!
