Chapter 1
July 22 2047 in the afternoon
The book begins with Haru reminiscing the night where Kuroyukihime revealed the truth about being a Machine Children while taking a bath,thinking that even though KYH wasn't born like most other humans,that doesn't mean she's not one and he wants to come to an understanding with her by growing stronger as person and as a Burst Linker.
Chapter 2
Haru then goes into a little recap of what happened in V22-23 including the fact that because Lucid Blade is now upgraded with heat resistance,he has to be the main attacker of the Inti Raid and he doesn't think he's experienced enough to do it,after he thinks on it KYH emails him to inform that no abnormalities in Megumi's brain was detected after her mind was disconnected from being grafted into Wolfram Disaster's Duel Avatar for so long and that she will be discharged tomorrow,she then thanks him,Milady and Maiden at the end of the e-mail.
After Megumi awakened in the hospital at the end of V23,KYH,Utai and Tsubomi stayed behind in the hospital while Haru went on home only to find out his mother won't go home from America until tomorrow morning,he considered relaxing in his free time but decides to do his homework and drinking tea,while doing his homework KYH,Chiyu and Tsubomi ringed the doorbell of his apartment to visit him.
After having lunch,Haru explained to Chiyu(who didn't know that Tsubomi was Rose Milady who was defeated by her,Crow and Heir in V22 using a suicide attack tactic by taking advantage of Citron Call's time reversal to reverse Crow's wounds after he was split in half together with Milady by Heir and 1 school year ahead of her),Chiyu then apologizes for using the suicide tactic against Milady to which she replied that the battle was irregular and her abillity was recognized by the system so she shouldn't apologize,what was foul play was Ivory Tower/Black Vise coming up with the plan to use Oracle's Paradigm Breakdown to bring Nega Nebulous to the UNF to put them in EK which was warping the rules of the system and Tsubomi acknowledges her part in it because she didn't object to it,Haru then reminisces about Tsubomi's words when they first met:"The life of Oracle is more important than the righteousness of the Legion" and Platinum Cavalier's words in V23 that even if every single one of the 5 Colored Legions goes to war against them,not a single one of Oscillatory Universe's members will withdraw even at the cost of losing their BB2039 and their memories of it.
Tsubomi(who still thinks Cosmos is still in the right despite all that happened,she's just not okay with Megumi's life being endangered) tells Haru that he has the right to know the truth about Cosmos and the White Legion but now is not the time because she and Oracle hasn't officially left Oscillatory yet so she could be silenced if Snow Fairy decides on her own to shut her mouth before she could tell it,Cosmos won't actually administer Judgment Blow if Milady wants to leave and none of the lower ranking members knows who she is in RL because the task of managing them belongs to the 6th and 7th seat of the Seven Dwarves,Cypress Reaper(Burst Linker who looks like a Grim Reaper,didn't take part in the V22 plot because he was defending a different area) and Glacier Behemoth so we know who are the ones who teached Noumi the Incarnate system after he joined the ARS.
After a short banter comparing Fuuko's spartan training(Chiyu wants to learn under her while Haru suggest asking Utai instead to spare her from being traumatized) to Behemoth and Reaper's fairly normal training,Milady comments that Nega Nebulous is strong because of the bond between its members which makes them support each other to make up for their shortcomings,KYH admits that she put up barriers between her and the Elements(which is true considering that she only opened up to Haru about the truth of her birth and not the Elements) which is why the 1st iteration of NN collapsed,Milady comments that most of the higher ranking members in Legions rarely meet up in RL with exception of BB Parent and Child but even then there were cases of them killing each other.Haru,still shocked by the fact that most relationships between Legion members isn't as bright as he imagined asked Tsubomi about how many OU members enrolled in Eterna,Tsubomi tells him that including her,there's only six(so only 3 unconfirmed members aside from Cosmos,Milady and (implied) Argon Array) and that the relationship between the 6 is like a demon king(Cosmos) and her adjutants,Haru and Chiyu were surprised by this and asks if Cosmos is really a demon king but Tsubomi tells them despite what she told them Cosmos isn't actually a demon king in terms of her personality,she's actually like a saint because of how pure she is compared to everyone else though they think Cosmos won't turn herself into a martyr.
After talking about Cosmos,Tsubomi decides to take advantage of the summer vacation to evade the OU members who would silence her until hitting the 1-month deadline where she can be convicted of betrayal by her Legion in which after she would leave OU with Megumi to another mid-ranked Legion,Haru asks why she and Megumi join NN to which Tsubomi tells him that while she appreciates his invitation,the fact is that NN is at war with OU and the fact that KYH can't guarantee Megumi's safety means that they can't join,Haru laments that even after everything that happened Megumi can't go to NN to be together with KYH and feels powerless in both Brain Burst and RL to help her until he realized that even though he doesn't have the power to help her maybe Amaterasu can and brings her up,Tsubomi tells him that she and Amaterasu aren't as close as him and Metatron,their relationship is purely a contractual relation where Amaterasu tells her information about the system and Tsubomi acts as her eyes in the player environment but at the same time she admits that she doesn't understand her as a person because she only knows her as an AI and not a person so Haru suggests Amaterasu would help her if she goes to her dungeon and requests for her help.
They then discuss about progressing inside Ama no Iwato,Amaterasu's dungeon under the Tokyo Station to contact her,Chiyu thinks that 4 people including Milady should be enough to go through it with Amaterasu preventing the mobs inside from attacking but KYH tells her the main problem is that Ama no Iwato's terrain is the highest ranked of the Fire stage,<Red Lotus>(hierachy is Sand Desert>Scorched Earth>Lava>Volcano>Red Lotus from lowest to highest) so they need members that are resistant to fire to enter it,Tsubomi also brings up about dealing with Amaterasu's first form which has the power to rival Metatron's first form which scares Haru because he got reminded of fighting Metatron back in V14 but KYH reminds him of the agreement he made in V22 with Amaterasu telling him to visit her in her dungeon instead of the Highest Level and to bring her cakes as a tribute because she wants to try out the cakes Metatron has been eating though there's still the possibility of Amaterasu not immediately intervening to shut down her first form's auto attack status so they'll probably hold out for a while,Haru decides they should try contacting Amaterasu because even though humans and AI are different,that doesn't mean they can't understand each other and they should strive to understand each other so that Amaterasu can walk together with them instead of staying in her dungeon.
The state of the other Legions after they found out that their Kings are trapped in EK are revealed:several Linkers wants the Coloured Legions to unite to save their kings,some wants to prioritize their King's safety,some wants to save their kings on their own,it's basically chaos.According to an email KYH received from Fuuko,there are members(mainly senior members who had experience fighting Inti) who thinks they should attack OU instead of Inti because they don't know how to actually harm it so they should force OU to move Inti from the kings by putting pressure on them but Haru doesn't think Vise will allow Inti to be moved even if OU is assaulted,there's going to be a meeting tonight between the colored Legions where 2 high-ranking members will attend,the Kings won't attend because it turned out one of the EK'd kings(except Rain who didn't get caught up in the EK'd and escaped with the others in V22,i screwed up with the summary) discovered logging out from BB normally after being forcefully disconnected under Paradigm Breakdown will be transported into the same area where it was used so they'll be EK'd by Inti if they try to log in again(tldr if you try log in to a normal Duel Field normally after the BB session where you subjected to Paradigm Breakdown and forcefully disconnected, you'll be fine but log in normally after that session and you'll get transported to the area where Paradigm Breakdown happened)
They then consider revealing that Oracle is freed from being Cerberus III so the barrier isolating the area from the rest of the UNF is gone even though the Kings are still affected because they didn't log out normally,but Milady doesn't want Oracle's rescue to be revealed yet and while Cosmos will eventually find out about it,Tsubomi wants to take measures to protect Megumi first and KYH decides to make it her 1st priority to contact Amaterasu after she is freed from EK and wants Haru to attend the meeting in Shinjuku,Blue Knight's territory tonight with Fuuko,Haru is nervous because there's a lot of people there like Aster Vine and the Dualis who he is scared of but Chiyu tells him that the meeting will be nothing compared to when the raid starts and Tsubomi tells him to not be afraid because they used to be as inexperienced as him back when they got to Level 4.
KYH,Chiyu and Tsubomi then leaves to go to their respective homes,with only 70 minutes before the meeting and Fuuko will pick him up to go the meeting in 40 minutes,Haru considers going back doing his homework until Centaurea Sentry's voice resounded in his voice telling him that his performance in the Omega-style swordmanship,the most eccentric and strongest sword style in the accelerated world leaves much to be desired but Haru retorts to the voice that he doesn't remember ever being the inheritor of the sword style to begin with,he decides to go to the UNF with a 20 minute time limit(2 weeks in UNF time) until he auto-disconnects from his home's wired connection to the net.
Chapter 3
Crow then goes to try replicating the movements of the Omega sword style from his memory to attempt to make contact with Centaurea Sentry(who most of the time only contacts him during the climax of the battle when the fatal blow is dealt,he considered going to the Highest Level but Metatron is still resting and the only Burst Linker who can purposely go there on their own without external help is Snow Fairy so that's out of the option,during his attempts he realizes that essence of the Omega-style swordmanship is to reduce the point of one's consciousness to one point instead widening to an entire body,the moment he successfully performs the sword style,Haru was transported to Highest Level because of the amount of Incarnation he used to focus his consciousness into one point was enough for him to enter it,there he meets Centaurea Sentry's Fluctlight backup who was called from the Main Visualizer by Haru's attempts for 10 hours who questions him why he's attempting to contact her and tells him that while the act of using Incarnation to focus his consciousness to one point is commendable,doing the regimen of the repeating sword practice non-stop for 10 hours isn't and tells him to never do it again because he'll get dragged to the Highest Level by accident again.
Sentry then tells Crow that among the candidates that can use the Omega-style swordmanship,he's the only one that qualifies as the successor to the style,and goes to a brief discussion about quantum circuits where it's revealed that the Main Visualizer doesn't use the electron circuit but a light circuit to duplicate and store souls,and that doing long-term calculations like he did a while ago will damage his soul,if the load of the calculations is normal the damage can be repaired but there's a risk of the repair failing because of the dark side of the mind(i.e Negative Incarnation) but she avoids going further because she doesn't want Crow to be prejudiced,it's also revealed that the Burst Linkers in the accelerated world are actually their Fluctlight copies synchronized with their RL selves instead of the RL people but because of the synchonization the copy and original souls are indistinguishable from each other so they're more or less the same person,Sentry then tells Crow that she can't teach him in the Highest Level and can only tell him the essence of the style step-by-step and that life-threatening training and soul-consuming combat is needed to show the true abillity of the style,Crow pointed out that he can only meet her in the Highest Level and that he can't go to it as he pleases,after some thinking Sentry tells Crow to meet a person in RL and instructs him on what to do when he meets them,while telling him to call her Seri-sensei instead of Sentry.
Haru then returned to RL after 14 hours of accelerated time(less than a RL minute),he reflects on Sentry's theory about the load accumulated during his 10 hours of training being processed by the quantum light circuit instead of his brain so the fatigue shouldn't carry over to his body even though his BB memories got synced with his brain,he then thinks Sentry's instructions is difficult but he decides to go through it for the Inti raid.
Chapter 4
Fast forward to the meeting and the discussions goes chaotic,Great Wall(repped by Pound and Schaefer) is advocating defeating Inti with NN(repped by Crow and Raker) and Prominence(repped by Leopard and Porcupine) supporting GW while Leoniz(repped by the Dualis) is advocating attacking OU,CCC(repped by Pierette) wants do with a combination of both on the premise that OU doesn't have any traps set in place,and Aurora Oval(repped by Aster Vine and Mauve Wire) are against assaulting OU because they don't know what Cosmos is capable of since she never participated in a Territory War or a Duel in recent years and the 7 Dwarves defending OU will make an attack on their territory very difficult,Cobalt and Mangan reveals they are advocating assaulting OU because they found out that the only member of OU that hasn't went dark and disconnected from Global Net is Cosmos herself so they're advocating that all the Legions band together to defeat Cosmos until she loses all of her BP,Cobalt wanted to inform Knight about this but Vine is against reporting this to him because Knight(who hasn't logged in after being forcefully disconnected) will attempt to challenge her if he learned about this and the report will potentially reach the other Kings so they're at risk of losing all of them if they go forward with defeating Cosmos so the participants decided to drop the idea of attacking Cosmos,they then proceed on discussing on the attack plan on the Inti raid with Schaefer suggesting bombarding Inti with long-range attacks since melee is useless unless their Enhanced Armaments have heat resistance while Raker suggests a strategy of an attacker supported by multiple Linkers,stating that NN already has a volunteer(Crow) that can do this,the other Linkers initially assumed the volunteer was Maiden until they realized Crow was the volunteer because he has heat resistance due to having Silver as his color.
After the meeting was over,Haru was baffled that Fuuko revealed it so early but she pointed out it was better to announce it now instead of at the raid,Fuuko stated that she wants to teach her <Infiltration Play> to Haru that one-shotted Shadow Cloaker in V22 before she found out that he chose Lucid Blade as a level up bonus which screwed up her initial training plans which made her a bit upset but Haru tells her he's not intending to shirk hand to hand combat to be a swordsman but he thinks that her Infiltration Play is hard to understand so he's not sure he can master it in time though Fuuko tells him he can master it with enough training in the UNF but she reminds him the raid starts at 05:00 AM tonight so she's taking him home so Haru can rest early,before he goes home Haru asks Fuuko to take him to Kansen-en Park to fulfill Sentry's instructions,Fuuko(who hasn't been told about Sentry yet) figured out that there's something related to the acceleration world there so she takes him there.
They then went to Kansen-en park where Haru drops off to go to the actual destination,a 10-year old seven-story apartment and goes to room 505 to wait for the person Sentry instructed him to meet,after 30 minutes the person in question,Suzuka Seri arrives with her 2 classmates.After identifying her Haru goes to greet her to inform her that someone(her Fluctlight copy) instructed him to meet her to perform a cable connection with her,her friends are understandably suspicious while Seri(who doesn't think Haru is a bad person) isn't entirely convinced until Haru reveals she is missing memories from her elementary school days which convinces her to go along with Haru after sending off her classmates,they then go to a bench to do a direct connection with their Neuro Linkers after which Haru initiates Burst Link to enters accelerated space,he then remembers Sentry's instruction to connect to the Highest Level from the Lowest Level and after some thinking successfully does so by concentrating his consciousness to one point(the essence of the Omega style) and punching the reproduction of a wooden pillar which caused a crack to form which bursted out a large amount of information to flow to Seri's Neurolinker which caused Haru to immediately Burst Out back to RL to find Seri saying that her memories are almost completely synchronized and that she regained her memories of BB,She then gives Haru a well done for succeeding in restoring her memories stating that the method only had a success percentage of 10% and she would have called the cops on him if it failed,Haru asks about the personality of the Senri that was deprived of her memories and she said that the "Seri" who experienced the 3 and a half years of junior high to high school didn't disappear,she still retains the memories of everything after the 3rd semester of her sixth year in grade school and recovered her memories of BB+the memory of her backup in the Main Visualizer who occasionally wakes up from stasis and that the restoration of memories isn't the death of amnesiac self but waking up from a gentle but flawed dream,Haru is shocked that Seri successfully regained her memories and thinks that the accelerated world will be shaken to its core if the public knew about this restoration method but decides not to disclose it yet because the success rate is too low to be reliable and the full mechanics of the method isn't fully understood by him yet but he hopes that one day,Red Rider and others who lost their BB can "wake" up from their dream and reunite with their loved ones in the truest sense(aside from the "dead in RL" ones like Monarch and Masker,but the Machine Children method is kind of a solution to bring them back by artificial reincarnation but they'll only get their BB memories back but not their RL memories of their previous life).
(Also FYI,neither Rider or Taker's backups in the Main Visualizer are gone despite what happened in V15:From what Megumi said in V21 Cosmos's Reincarnation doesn't actually take the soul from the Main Visualizer but what it actually does is perform a pseudo-ressurection by downloading their data into an Enhanced Armament(the ISS Kit Core,likely a high ranking Being's Enhanced Armament converted into the core) or a Duel Avatar(Wolfram Cerberus) while leaving the soul in the Main Visualizer intact so what actually broke down in V15 is the downloaded Fluctlight of Dusk Taker instead of the Fluctlight in the Main Visualizer though the memories of CIII likely got synced to the original in the Main Visualizer when Cerberus got disconnected since Vise/Tower implied that being corroded with Negative IS won't actually erase CIII's soul and they didn't replace him with Megumi until V22 so he should be in Cerberus's Duel Avatar until they disposed of him but i'm not sure if Rider's downloaded copy's memories got synced to the one in the Main Visualizer though)
Haru then decides to avoid asking further about the restoration method for the time being and asks what school club she came back from,Seri(who reminds him ta call her Seri-sensei) tells him that she is in the female soccer club ever since junior high after accepting the invitation from her 2 friends,it is then revealed that losing the memories of BB isn't a form of relief to a Burst Linker,sooner or later they will inevitably notice the gaps in their memories and will feel a sense of emptiness that can never be filled by them or other people like Seri's friends in their "peaceful",amnesiac lives,Haru thinks that the deprivation might as well be a curse that torments the amnesiac Linkers until their memories are restored,Seri asks if Haru ever uninstalled someone's Brain Burst and he brings up Dusk Taker, even though it was Noumi's fault that he initiated a Sudden Death Duel he regretted the way everything ended up especially after what happened to his Fluctlight copy in V15 and he now realizes the amnesiac Noumi's attempts at studying and kendo after losing BB was actually his way of filling the emptiness inside him,Haru asks Seri if she knows of a way to fill the gap until the memories are restored and Seri tells him she doesn't know because she never saw any amnesiac Burst Linkers especially the ones she deprived BB from,back in her day she was known as <Sword Demon> and <Asura>,even though she bears the name of a guard,she never protected anyone.Haru pointed out the times she helped him in V21 and 23 but she tells him it was just on a whim and she didn't expect to succeed in contacting him.
There's one problem before Haru's training can begin:while Seri's memories of BB are completely recovered,she didn't get her BB2039 back which is the meaning of Seri's statement of "almost completely synchronized",Haru offers to copy his BB2039 program but before could begin the process the BB2039 program returned to Seri's Neurolinker in the same position before she lost it,whoever the sender of the program is unknown but Seri thinks the BB central server gave her the program though she doesn't go into why it would give her BB again.
(This explains how Megumi recovered her BB in V20-21,the brief period of becoming Orchid Oracle again in V10 using the book synchronized her soul with the duplicate in the Highest Level which started the recovery process,but considering that Oracle didn't completely materialize the synchronization process was less than ideal which is why it took so long for her to recover her memories of BB and her program again until the NN vs OU Territory War)
Now that Seri is an active Burst Linker again,she tells him that his training will begin 0800 PM tomorrow after her club activities but Haru tells her that he needs to be able to use the Omega style by 0500 AM morning tomorrow for the Inti raid to Seri's confusion.
Chapter 5
Haru gives her a rundown of what Oscillatory did on the way to his apartment and Seri asks him if he thinks he can understand the meaning of the Omega style in just 1-2 months of BB time,Haru admits he's not that confident but he has to try.Seri tells him even though his first contact with her was in the battle against Behemoth in V20,she knew about his existence during the battle against the 5th CD Cherry Rook,Haru is shocked she has connection to Cherry and Seri tells him that she'll explain later because it's too long to explain it on the road.Haru asks her if there are any other Fluctlight copies that are active in the Highest Level other than hers and Seri tells him she doesn't know if others are awake too,she only wakes up in short periods to awaken in pitch black darkness(so the situation is like Rider's copy when he was stored inside the ISS kit core) and that a Fluctlight copy stored in the Main Visualizer can't be awake for longer than 10 years or they'll collapse.
Haru and Seri arrives in the former's apartment to find out the other NN members are holding a party to give him encouragement before the raid,Chiyu suggested it to KYH before they went to Haru's apartment room and they kept it a secret from Haru and Fuuko who wouldn't have let Haru go to Kansen-en Park if she had known about it,Haru introduces Seri also known as Centaurea Sentry to NN while the younger members including Niko who wasn't a Linker when Sentry was active aren't familliar with her,the senior members became vigilant with KYH,Fuuko and Pard calling her <Sword Demon>,<Asura> and <Omega Weapon> respectively,Seri comments that even though this is the first time she met their RL selves she identifies Lotus,Raker,Current and Maiden from their voices but noticed that Graphite Edge is nowhere to be seen to her disappointment because she wanted to have a rematch with him after 4 years,Niko tells her not to come uninvited and Seri asks her if she's a peacemaker to which she replied that she is Rider's successor as the Red King,Seri tells Niko she can fight her but asks to wait until she gets her fight with Lotus and the Elements to her annoyance because she wants to join in too,KYH questions what she is doing with Haru and Seri tells her that she is Haru's master.
After things cool down a bit(including a brief fight over desserts where it's revealed that Sentry won several times against Raker in the past and the latter couldn't catch up before Sentry lost her BB),Haru tells everyone that the reason he brought Sentry here is to learn the Omega Sword style from her,KYH tells him that while there's nothing wrong with wanting to learn,the Omega style is extremely dangerous to use so he must not delay his training,Sentry's title of <Omega Weapon> is related to this because it means <meet or die>.
KYH and the older members are under the impression that Sentry's death was faked by Blue Knight in their climatic duel by breaking The Disaster's hold on her by shattering the armor after which they think she went into hiding when in reality Knight really did uninstall her BB and she was just restored with Haru's help just now but Haru and Seri chose to avoid revealing the truth for now because it's too early to reveal that a method to restore a Burst Linker was discovered by them until they can demonstrate it reliably considering the low success rate,it turns out Haru actually wanted to give Lucid Blade to Taku so he can be one of the main attackers in the raid and use his kendo skills to the fullest because Cyan Blade can't be used since the Incarnate System isn't allowed to be used in public duels but Taku tells him that even if he accepts his sword he can't quickly master it and that Decurion and the Dualis are superior to him in sword skills,he also says that his Duel Avatar isn't suited for sword combat and while he used to be insecure about it,he is thinking about exploring other areas his Avatar excels in.Rui agrees saying that being insecure about one's Duel Avatar will make one susceptible to negative Incarnation and that she once tried to balance things using the ISS Kit for the sake of the low ranked players but she realized that she's went too far in doing it because by getting rid of any individuality by making everyone use the same moves,it eventually negatively impact everyone's Duel Avatar one day,Rin tells her that Ash never held a grudge against her because she was doing it for Avoider and the other Linkers who couldn't catch up with Burst Linkers with strong EAs and Abillities and that the ARS are responsible for spreading it in the first place,Seri states she also has a grudge against Cosmos but doesn't really go into it.