Accel World - Light Novel Discussion

[shadow of the day]

Originally Posted by Rageth

So SAO Unital Ring 21 is out, and among its illustrations, there's a certain character that may interest you all.

Images

Unital Ring

Sorry; dynamic content not loaded. Reload?

New character's name?

Spoiler:

Kamura Shikimi; same surname as KYH's biological mother.

is there more information about this? i mean about this character , is it me or looks like hime? or its my mind playing tricks on me , making me believe aw and sao can be connected

[tuckersister]

Which SAO character will highly likely appear or be mentioned in AW?

[tuckersister]

Is series on hiatus til SAO is finished?

[RDCM]

Originally Posted by tuckersister

Is series on hiatus til SAO is finished?

According to Kawahara's Twitter, volume 24 of Accel World will be released in august. Apparently there's still no cover image for the volume.

https://twitter.com/kunori

[RDCM]

Accel World Volume 24 illustrations: https://imgur.com/a/356eOTS

[tuckersister]

SC is learning kendo a duel avatar (forgot her name). More girls illustrations. Also is that BK (what hell??)?

[dark44]

New harem member

[tsunade666]

what level is haru now in the latest books?

[RDCM]

Originally Posted by tuckersister

SC is learning kendo a duel avatar (forgot her name). More girls illustrations. Also is that BK (what hell??)?

Spoiler for Spoiler for Late Novels:

Silver Crow is having sword lessons with Centaurea Sentry, which was the 3rd generation of Chrome Disaster.

Originally Posted by tsunade666

what level is haru now in the latest books?

Spoiler for Spoiler for Late Novels:

AFAIK, he's currently level 6.

[judasmartel]

Originally Posted by RDCM

Spoiler for Spoiler for Late Novels:

Silver Crow is having sword lessons with Centaurea Sentry, which was the 3rd generation of Chrome Disaster.

The other Chrome Disasters are back?

Spoiler for cd:

I wonder what will happen if Haru and the OG Chrome Disaster met, considering they are almost similar to each other.

Originally Posted by RDCM

Spoiler for Spoiler for Late Novels:

AFAIK, he's currently level 6.

He hasn't leveled up yet?

[tuckersister]

He not one to waste his points. I dunno about everyone else thou.

[tuckersister]

Do we hear anything about Metatron in this volume?

[tuckersister]

Is the series on hold til SAO finishes?

[TURI123456]

Originally Posted by tuckersister

Is the series on hold til SAO finishes?

The last volume was released in August 2019 so the answer is no but yes the release of the new volumes is slow something like one in a year.

[gensouR-1]

Sorry for the long hiatus,college got in the way(i really wish it wasn't so tiring..) and i couldn't do the summary for V24,i overdid it when typing the summary and did 51.02 kb worth of text so i'll split it in 2 posts:

Spoiler for AW 24 Part 1:

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.

[gensouR-1]

And here is part 2:

Spoiler for AW V24 Part 2:

Chapter 6
After the party is over,everyone went home with the exception of KYH,Seri and Rin,KYH and Seri don't really mix well together and Haru is racking his head on how is he going to tell her about Sentry's recovery when the time comes,KYH asks how long Haru's training will last and Seri responded with 3 Real World hours or 4 months in BB time,she will at the very least impart the initial skills of the Omega style if it's impossible to teach Haru the essence of the Omega style before the raid,KYH comments that Seri's sword style isn't that well liked among Linkers but she doesn't hate it,the Omega style is a style that maximizes attack power infinitely by concentrating the attack into a single point,according to Seri it has some similarities with 3rd stage Incarnation but it's different and that she'll explain the difference during training,she then asks KYH if she was the one who told Haru about 3rd stage IS to which she replied that it was Graph who is now the 1st seat of Great Wall to Seri's surprise.

KYH asks Seri about why did she return after all these years and asked why she accepted The Disaster,she tells KYH that she'll tell the truth about her return after Cosmos is defeated and reveals that she willingly became the 3rd CD because she feels responsible for the birth of Chrome Disaster even though she could have gotten rid of the armor fragments on her to avoid becoming CD,Blue Knight avoided becoming The 4th CD because he got rid of all the armor fragments after killing Sentry but the Burst Linker who was nicknamed Devourer became the 4th CD because of The Disaster was attracted to the darkness in their hearts and thus automatically transferred to their item storage after failing to take over Knight,Haru confirms that Sentry was not part of the 30 Linkers who betrayed Falcon and Blossom in his vision in V7 but Sentry states it was because she couldn't get there in time to save them,Haru thinks that even if Sentry arrived in time,there was no way she is strong enough at that time to defeat Jormungandr and she would have lost her BB to the maddened Chrome Falcon anyway,he wonders what Sentry has to do with Falcon and Blossom.

(note:the Centaurea in Centaurea Sentry is referring to the Centraurea cornflower,and we know all of Blossom's BB kids are named after flowers including Milady and Oracle,so in other words Sentry is..)

Before Haru and Seri goes to the UNF,Rin takes this chance to tell Haru that she wants to know about his thoughts about her feelings for him and that she wants to hear it from him after the whole Inti deal is over,Haru promises to gives an answer after it's all over(unfortunately,things didn't turn out well because of how everything escalated for the worse at the end of the volume and what happened in V25 did not help things so it's going to be a long while before Rin gets her answer)

Chapter 7
Seri and Haru dived into the UNF in 01:30 AM(3 hours and 30 minutes before the raid),KYH can't go help with his training because she'll get EK'd by Inti since she logged out normally in her previous session and Ash wouldn't much of a help in the training so he's not coming,they dived in the rarely occuring <Salt Lake> Stage which is basically a soggier version of Gyr Abania from FFXIV with more salt water and mountains,Sentry has no problems falling from great heights because her passive Skill <Feather Fall> slows her descent and negates fall damage and she can walk on the corrosive salt lakes because of her <Surface Walk> skill without drowning,Sentry tells him he must not use his Aviation abillity in high altitudes for now because OU likely has eyes monitoring the area within the vicinity of Inti so they have to go to the training ground by foot without getting detected,along the way Sentry tries to get him to be able to run ten steps without sinking in the salt lakes they run into,if he succeeds than he'll get <Surface Walk> as an passive skill but Crow was only able to do 1-2 steps before sinking.

Along the way they see the area where Inti is standing by to see that it's covered by the salt from the water it evaporated,they think that the <Ocean> stage can extinguish it's flames because of the amount of water it has but they don't know what will happen after to Inti if that happens,also Tower and Cerberus's markers are still there with the kings's markers(except Rain) surprisingly enough so they haven't logged in to the UNF to get away from the area yet,Sentry tells him that he needs bypass Inti's flame armor around its body to find the point the Omega style can be used on,the both of them then goes to a rock mountain near the location Seri's apartment is located to find a japanese mansion which is actually Sentry's old Player Home,Parrot Pavillion.

Chapter 8
Sentry tells Crow to pay attention to the southeast of her mansion,a cherry blossom tree will spawn there depending on the Stage(the tree doesn't spawn in the <Salt Lake> stage) and he can use its spawn and despawning to keep track how many weeks he'll spend on his training because Stage Transitions happens at the end of every BB week,Haru equips Lucid Blade and Sentry equips Claiomh Solais,a western longsword named after the legendary Celtic sword,Crow is surprised at Sentry's weapon because he thought she used a japanese sword and Sentry tells him this is just one of the 12 swords she possesses including long and short swords,before they begin Crow asks how many BPs Sentry has after ressurrection and Sentry tells him she has 90 left after using 10 to enter the UNF,when Brain Burst was reinstalled she got the initial 100 BP just like every new Linkers,Haru offers to donate some of his points in case she's in danger of losing BB again but Sentry tells him she can hunt Enemies to get more BPs during Crow's break time and that she used up something irreplaceable in the process of her resurrection so there's more conditions to restore of a Burst Linker using her method.

Anyway the training begins with Sentry attacking first by cutting off Crow's left shoulder armor before he even noticed,Sentry tells him that this is not an Abillity,Skill or Incarnate attack,she just found the right time and cut his armor normally.before Sentry demostrates it again,Haru asked if Beast(the manifestation of Falcon's hatred and rage) used the theory of "enlarging subtle things infinitely" instead of the Omega style and Sentry confirms it so even though it inherited her sword skills,it couldn't use the Omega style the 3rd CD and evert CD afterwards was actually weaker than they were supposed to be.In the second round Haru attacks first by attempting to slash her left shoulder but Sentry dissolved herself by somehow blending with the world itself so Haru ended up falling into the water,he continues his attack 10 times but in the end he couldn't even make scratch on her.

Sentry then tells him that they will be taking a snack break before resuming,Crow asks Sentry how she dissolved herself and she asks how does he see in Brain Burst he replied with his eyes but Sentry questions if the principles of seeing in RL are the same in BB,HAru realizes what he is seeing are processed using the quantum light circuit and not his brain and Sentry comments that in that sense,the eyes on Duel Avatars are just ornaments.Sentry tells him that the battles in BB are processed by the Main Visualizer by making predictions on what will happen and returns its influence on the players by basing it on their consciousness but not even it can keep up when the battles accelerates to high speeds so there's going to be delays when that happens,she tells him that if he understands the mechanism of future prediction,he can consciously deviate it.Crow asks if that involves using Incarnation and Sentry confirms it,while the Omega style is a theoretical style that uses the Imagination control system like IS,it's method of use is the opposite of IS,in other words while the Incarnate System is used to bring about an image in the quantum circuit,the Omega style removes the image.

Sentry then asks him what would happen if the image of her was removed in the quantum circuit and Crow states that the system would not be able to predict what will happen,Sentry then states that the system is only capable of predicting a mistake in an instant but that's enough to get a head start over it and tells him that when he failed to cut her,it's because the image of her shown by the system was made thin,Crow then asks if the image can be removed completely and points out that she can't move if she does that,Sentry reminds him that when she dissolved herself she wasn't moving and Crow realizes the loophole,Sentry says that dissolving herself has the effect of "moving" but not physical movement but by removing the image oneself from the quantum circuit to reduce one's consciousness to nothing and becoming one with the world this is one of the meanings of the Omega style,<Synthesis>,Haru thinks the idea of erasing one's consciousness is a hard idea to grasp and thinks it's too hard for him to do whether he's fighting for fun or enemies but Sentry tells him he'll eventually learn <Synthesis> to reach <Extreme> to able to perform the sword style properly,Crow asks if there are other sword styles in the accelerated world and Sentry lists out 3 of the famous ones,Knight's Infinity style of which he teached to Cobalt and Mangan,Graphite"s Ain style(Aincrad style,huh Edge) of which Lotus is user of and Platinum Cavalier's Flying style.

90 days passed in the UNF,and Crow still couldn't get a scratch on Sentry who invites him to take a drink with her during the <Heian> stage,Crow laments his slow progress but Sentry tells him his progression is fine and that despite her talk of finding disciples,this is actually her first time actually teaching someone,she asks him if he seriously thought if he could catch up to her level in just in 3 months and he tells her he doesn't and he couldn't perform a slash of even 1 cm using the Omega style,Sentry tells him that his win condition for the training is to perform a 1 cm slash using the Omega style against her which is enough to cut off her arm,if he thinks that he can't keep up with Sentry's training then she won't force him to continue but Crow decides to continue.

Chapter 9
Fast forward to 5 RL minutes before the raid,and the Dualis are beginning to dive into the UNF,they talk about how they're not sure which one is a trap:Cosmos being the only one in the matching list or Inti,they considered Pierette's words of doing both the raid and assaulting OU and that it doesn't really matter which one they do first which is why they went along with GW's proposal to defeat Inti first,usually they log in 1 minute before meetings but this time they'll dive 10 seconds before the raid as agreed in the meeting,Koto/Cobalt wonders if Crow will come and Yuki/Mangan trusts him to participate,in the name of the Infinity Style founded by Blue Knight,they vow to succeed and proceeds to dive into the UNF.

They dived during the Moonlight stage which while isn't a Water stage,doesn't have any hazards so it's fine,they then went to the Ministry of Defense where members of other coloured Legions have gathered,one of the younger Leonidz(the Legion polar opposite of NN in terms of gender ratio where most of its members are guys) members,Cerulean Runner doesn't want to rest until the raid starts but Mangan tells him to rest so he can fight to the fullest later on,Runner obliges and goes to fanboying with Frost Horn about their favorite Heliosphere members with permission from Mangan to get their autographs.Mangan goes to greet Raker and asked if Crow has arrived yet,she tells her no but they trust that he'll come in time,suddenly a Beast level crustacean Enemy,<Flame Blower> appears chasing after 2 members of GW and 1 Leonidz member,Rain saves the Legion members while the lieutenants prepares to fight the Beast-level Enemy before Crow arrives cuts open part of the Enemy's shell with the Omega style which Cobalt recognizes from when she and Mangan first met Sentry when they first entered the UNF,the Enemy then gets bombarded with artillery damage with quickly kills it after its skin is exposed,Crow apologizes for taking so long to arrive because Sentry made him do follow-up lessons and Raker tells him to decline next time so he won't be late,Current thinks Crow's swordmanship has reached the level of a Legion lieutenant but Crow tells her that he's not at that level yet despite what he did,Cobalt asks him to take a rest until the raid starts and Mangan tells him that she is looking forward to his performance in the raid.

Chapter 10
1 hour left before the raid starts,the other NN members(Pile,Bell and the Elements) wants Crow to sleep for a while especially since he just finished his training but Crow doesn't want to oversleep and miss the moment the raid group goes to fight Inti Raker tells him that his mental state can't be mantained for a hour if he goes on like this and that taking a rest won't get rid of it,after some prodding he concedes and sleeps in Maiden's lap for 50 minutes to wake up to the entire 96-man raid gathering including Magenta,the Paquet trio and Heir,Sentry decided to go back to RL instead of participating because making her return public would cause too much uproar.Crow apologized to Heir because he wanted him to be the attacker by applying heat resistance to The Infinity but did it for his Lucid Blade instead.Heir tells him it's okay because he didn't do it out of malice and he already learned about what happened from Mr Smith and Pile can see that Crow was training hard to be the main attacker and none of the Burst Linkers gathered has no objections about Crow being the main attacker so it's fine.

July 23 0500 AM
The 96-Man Raid Group from all of the coloured Legions have gathered in 4 rows with each having 24 Burst Linkers to begin the Inti raid,Leopard and Salticid(from the Traces of Prominence side story) has scouted ahead to inform that there is no Large Enemies in the road ahead,they didn't detect any OU members surveying the area but even if there was any members that found out about the raid group and logged out to get reinforcements,they still need at least 10 RL seconds to do so which is 2:46:48 in BB and since the Inti raid strategy is intended to be a short term battle,they'll have more than enough time to bail out the kings and escape if they succeed.As the Raid Group marches forth in the <Moonlight> stage,Current gets reminded of the fateful day 2 years ago where NN marched to raid the Imperial Palace in the <Aurora> Stage only to get wiped in 2 minutes but Crow,Raker and Maiden comforts her that this time,it will be different.

The Raid Group arrives in area where Inti is on,Crow remembers when the twins told his part in the raid plan before they marched,it involves using Lime Bell's time reversal abillity to create a temporary invincible period for Crow to breakthrough Inti's flame coating to destroy its core,according to them Lime Bell's time reversal only lasts for 73 seconds with 7 Burst Linkers supplying her with their Special Attack Gauge after testing and that if Crow can't destroy Inti's core in 60 seconds,he has to retreat and they have to revise the attack plan in the case he falls into EK.

The group is split into the main attacker,coordination group and the anti-Enemy Group,the attacker is responsible for destroying Inti's core,coordination group is responsible for supporting the attacker and drawing Inti's Hate to them,and the Anti-Enemy Group is responsible for killing any Enemies that gets drawn into the area because the use of the Incarnate System is needed for the raid and they are attracted to it.there are also the liaisions for the Kings whose purpose is to inform them to log in after Inti's death is confirmed,Ash is responsible for Lotus so he's not raiding.

The raid starts with the buffers from each row including Maiden buffing each of the rows and the group rushes to the park(no battle cry surprisingly enough,they just raised their weapons and began rushing when the buffs got applied),Inti responds by the turning the ground into lava once they enter its aggro range but the coordination group responds by using their IS to protect the group at this point Crow flies to Inti with Bell supporting him but because Inti's heat is melting Crow a little faster than Citron Call Mode 1 can reverse his time,the invincibillity period will only last for 40 seconds.

Crow spots The Luminary crown of thorns that is restraining Inti,he considers destroying it instead but he realizes that Cosmos could have enhanced The Luminary with Physical Attack Immunity along with Fire Damage Immunity so he abandons that line of thought because the Omega sword style is not an Incarnate attack style so it's still bound by the system rules and thus useless,Crow manages to get through the fire armor surrounding Inti to see it's true body:a 15 diameter glowing sphere.Lucid Blade is slowly melting from the heat so Crow goes to stab Inti to find out to his surprise that Inti only has 1 health bar,even the Einhejar OU tamed from the Valhalla dungeon has more bars than it with 4 health bars.While using Lucid Blade to pinpoint where he should use the Omega style on,he identifies that Inti's core is more durable than the tungsten ball he used to practice the Omega Style with(which means Inti is even harder than even Cerberus's physical defenses as a Metal Color),the durabillity of which made penetrating the flame armor look easy in comparison,he fails to pinpoint the first time and only has 2 more chances as his health bar reduced to 70%,Crow then remembers KYH who is depending on him to escape Inti's EK and Sentry whose words of encouragement drives him to focus his consciousness to 1 point on the upper curved point of Inti's core(Omega style's attack amplification only works on curved points so it's useless on flat points) and successfully cuts the core in half with The Luminary thorn crown shattering in response but the energy Inti generated didn't dissipate and instead spiralled upward to dye the sky red,Inti's core shattered when its health dropped to zero to signal its destruction just like all Enemies,Haru got a lot of BP and items from killing Inti but he can't check his storage at this point and the points and the items will be divided among the Legion members who participated in the raid.While thinking about how to divide the spoils,Crow realized Lucid Blade got damaged from killing Inti and the damage won't be fixed until his next login so he has to survive without it until the operation succeeds to prevent it from taking more damage.

Lime Bell restores Crow and the support team's health after Inti was defeated,because of the use of IS skills by the coordination group,large amounts of Small and Large Enemies are converging to their area,no Beast-level Enemies was drawn in but the Anti-Enemy Group now has to work to thinning the numbers until the kings are saved or things will get troublesome,the liaisions has seen Inti's death and has now logged out to inform them that they can log in safely,the fastest the Kings can log in to the UNF is 2 RW seconds so the Raid Group has thin out the Enemy numbers in 30 BB minutes before the first king logs in and gets rescued.

Chapter 11
If the elites of all 6 Coloured Legions(NN,Prominence,GW,AO,CCC and Leonidz) were here in the fight against the 20+ Enemies converging on them right now it would take almost 20 minutes to kill all of the 20+ Enemies that can be cut into less than 5 minutes if they all of the elites used Incarnate attacks but that would lure in more Enemies so the Raid Group has to kill the enemies one by one using normal attacks and skills without IS and the number of Enemies gets slowly thinned with some Large enemies retreating.

Crow neglected to review his hand-to-hand training during his training with Sentry so he gets exhausted after helping the Raid Group drive off the Enemies,Heir is amazed at Crow's performance with the Omega style and asks him if could do the same thing he did one day,in his exhaustion Crow accidentally tells Heir to continuously swing his sword for hours like he did earlier in the volume instead of telling him the <Synthesis> and <Extreme> essences of the Omega style which causes Heir to enthusiastically plan the same thing later to Crow's dismay,Raker tells him to pick up Lotus and they go to the wreckage of the stadium where Inti's lava is slowly cooling down and they noticed that Vise and Cerberus's markers are gone which means they have escaped between the beginning of Crow's training and the raid.

With less than 10 minutes in BB time before the kings log in to the UNF,Crow looks up to the night sky and sees Inti's residual energy lingering after its death,even though the energy is halved the amount of energy is still large and somehow lingered more than 20 minutes after Inti's death,Maiden asks Raker if she knows about any case of an Enemy's energy lasting this long this long after its death and Raker says she doesn't know but thinks the phenomenon is because Inti is somehow special.Crow thinks there was a similar phenomenon not too long ago and remembers the time when Metatron's first form died and how her 2nd form materialized,he then realized the possibility that the Inti he killed was just its first form and that the energy converging in the sky will soon materialize its 2nd form but he doesn't understand why it needed more than 20 minutes to form while Metatron only needed a few seconds,he attempts to tell the Raid Group to run away but it's too late,the center of the energy vortex burst with red light rushing to the pit where the Kings's markers are to create 2 pillars which joined together after growing into 50 meters and 2 slightly thinner pillars formed the air to join the other pillar after it had grown into 100 meters and the light converges into a pyramidal prostution until it disappears.

No one knows what exactly the 100-meter giant that materialized from Inti's energy is until the giant roared and made slight movements that shook the ground and air,it is at this moment everyone realized that the giant is an Enemy,what Crow killed is actually just a shell that sealed away the true body of Inti.It's too late to run away because they'll draw its aggro to them and not even the commanders of the Raid Group,Cobalt and Mangan knows what to do.At the moment when all hope is lost,a silver streak hit the giant's head like a meteor and formed a crown of thorns on it,Heir realizes that the light is The Luminary attempting to control the giant who tried to resist by tearing off the crown but more of the silver streaks hit the giant from the moon,forming crowns on its arms and three more hit the giant again in the body,chest,and waist until which cause it to fall silent.Against the background of the night sky,something falls and lands on the giant's left shoulder:a Pegasus-type enemy with 2 Duel Avatars on it:a knight in silver armor,1st seat of the Seven Dwarves <Bashful> Platinum Cavalier and an F-type Duel Avatar with golden hair wearing a luxurious dress brighter than the moon with both the crown and scepter pieces of The Luminary:<Transient Eternity> White Cosmos who Sky Raker confirms the identity of.

Crow couldn't understand what Cosmos is doing,is she trying to tame the giant for OU or to save the Burst Linkers who would have been annihilated by it?,in a voice as sweet as a girl and noble as a saint,Cosmos thanks Crow for breaking the egg she failed many times to crack,she was a little surprised but also happy,because Crow really became stronger.Crow was shocked about Cosmos's statement of him breaking an egg to which Cosmos replied that the Enemy named Inti was nothing more than an egg that contains all the distortions of the world,the moment it hatches will signal the end of the world and she will introduce it to everyone:Super-class Enemy <Tezcatlipoca,God of the End>,a name that Crow for some reason strangely recognizes.Aster Vine is baffled by this because Inti who originated from Incan myth and Tezcatlipoca from Aztec myth has no connection with each other to which Cosmos tells her that the names in this world has no meaning,nearly all of the nouns in this world are just randomly spliced up by the system including their names.

Crow realizes that Cosmos isn't taming Tezcatlipoca to save them,and as if to confirm his realization Cosmos states she will give a thank-you gift to the Raid Group by demonstrating Tezcatlipoca's power,by waving her scepter Tezcatlipoca spreads out its hand to the Raid Group as Cobalt ordered their retreat but it is too late:black circles formed in the palm of its hand which increased the gravity around the Raid Group that sank them to the ground except Raker but even then her wheelchair is slowly breaking down from the pressure.

As the group is resisting the increase in gravity,Tezcatlipoca faces away from them to go to the pit,Crow realizes what is going to happen and screams to KYH to not come to the UNF,one by one the EK'd Kings logged in beginning with Radio,then Grandee,then Thorn,then Knight and finally Lotus,as Tezcatlipoca's left hand radiates a red light towards them,Cosmos ends the book saying:

"It's a pity to see each other again after a long time,but to say goodbye right away.Farewell,my dear friends(Grandee,Knight,Thorn and Radio),Farewell,my child(Lotus),you all worked hard until the very end"

I haven't read all of V25 yet so the summary is going to take a while but no promises that i'll be done soon so i'll give some hints about V25:it revealed what "shutting down" an accelerated world actually means and what happens to the players when it happens,more SAO connections,who actually manages AA,BB and CC,and the ending contains an development that that makes the Infinite Burst OVA look weird because of what happened to 2 of the main characters at the end of V25.

[Kuroageha]

Good job, I've been out of the loop with this series since it got licensed.

[gensouR-1]

Here's a summary of the first 3 chapters of V25:

Spoiler for AW V25 Chapter 1-3:

Chapter 1(18 kb of summary text from just the first chapter and the volume has 14 chapters,V24 only had 11 chapters)
The volume begins with Cosmos's words at the end of the last volume but the narration added that Cosmos said those words with a sad tone,seemingly being sincerely sad about having to kill her sister,her friend and the other kings,Crow thinks that Tezcatlipoca's attack at the 5 kings surpasses every skill he has seen in Brain Burst in terms of power and he noticed that the 5 Kings are also subjected to Tezcatlipoca's gravity amplification after seeing the same circles on Tezcatlipoca's right arm under them and he thinks the same circle is under him and the Raid Group,the 5 kings are struggling to stand up against the gravity amplification but all of them including Knight and Grandee are close to reaching their limits with the sound of their armors breaking apart from the pressure.

Using only its right arm,Tezcatlipoca surpressed 101 Burst Linkers and the red circles in Tezca's left arm has increased to 7 circles while the right arm has 5 circles,a horrified Raker begs Cosmos to not destroy the kings using Tezcatlipoca and Crow realizes that since Tezca is directly controlled by Cosmos then the deaths of the kings will be caused by her so Cosmos only needs to annihilate the pit and the Raid Group which has Rain among them only once each using Tezca to eliminate the other kings because of the Level 9 Sudden Death Rule and allow her to reach level 10 but this isn't the end for Cosmos,with Tezcatlipoca,Wolfram Disaster and a Level 10 Burst Linker,Cosmos and Oscillatory Universe will go on to achieve their true goal which is called "The Righteousness of The White Legion" by Rose Milady,but Crow will never accept any righteousness that will sacrifice Lotus,Rain and the other kings.

(This also applies to KYH and not just Cosmos,we find out in V18 and 19 that a part of Haru doesn't want her or anyone to meet Brain Burst's creator by reaching Level 10 because he couldn't convince himself to believe that sacrificing the other kings's BB programs and taking them away from their loved ones in BB by depriving their memories is an acceptable price to pay just to meet Leader <B> which he realized after becoming friends with the Dualis twins and realized that taking away Knight's BB would destroy their friendship forever,for the time being he still supports her as a person important to him but the seeds of doubt has already been planted and its only a matter of time before conflict happens between them)

The circles on Tezcatlipoca's left arm has increased to 8 and Crow believes everything will be over once it reaches to 9,he considers contacting Metatron but he realized that she wouldn't make it in time and even if she did it would be the same as sending her to her death against Tezcatlipoca,Cosmos and Cavalier,Crow struggles to break free because if he fails everything up to now will be meaningless,if Tezcatlipoca really is a Super-class Enemy then it is probably an existence that equals and may even surpass the 4 Holy Beasts of the Imperial Palace combined,Crow thinks back to what Graphite said about breaking the limits of the system to surpass it and remembers Sentry's words from V24 about how the system produces the images seen by Burst Linkers and controls the battle system by making predictions,it's impossible for an Enemy to respond quickly to multiple attacks by Burst Linkers without its support,at the moment Tezcatlipoca is marking 101 Linkers and the gravity amplification is also targeting each individual Linkers while also being a ranged attack,if Crow can disappear from Tezcatlipoca's sight for an instant then he can break free from the gravity wave by making the future prediction of the system fail.

Even after 4 months of training,Crow couldn't master the Omega style's advanced techniques but he still remembers Sentry's words and the techniques she shown to him to erase one's own consciousness to perform <Synthesis>,Crow needs to do it soon or everything will be over,he thinks back of how he couldn't keep his calm and how Milady called him the ace Linker everybody in BB knows but Crow only got this far because of the support from his teachers,friends and opponents,if he was on his own he would have never gotten this far but with the death of Lotus,Rain and the other kings at hand it's inexcusable to blame his own weakness.

He then thinks about <Synthesis> and <Zero Feel> and how they're different,<Zero Feel> only stops the movement instructions to the Duel Avatar while the soul still emits negative Incarnation while <Synthesis> completely eliminates all thoughts from the quantum circuit to achieve nothingness,the key to this according to Sentry is to spread one's consciousness in the vast accelerated world to dilute one's imagination infinitely,Crow's activities is limited to Tokyo's center but he saw the entire accelerated world and even the other 2 worlds in the Highest Level several times in the past,and goes to imagine only spreading his consciousness on all 3 worlds in his mind without focusing on any trivial points.As he does it,he feels the sensation of his consciousness spreading throughout the world for 0.5 seconds but this is enough for Tezca's gravity attack to lose its target for an instant,the pressure isn't weak enough for him to stand up but it's enough for him to move one arm.

Crow knows that none of his long range Incarnate attacks can reach even Tezca's right hand which is 50 meters high while his <Laser Javelin> can only reach 30 meters so he has to devise a new Incarnate skill,all of his Offensive Incarnation including Laser Sword(the reason why the image of a sword instead of a gun is used for Laser Sword is because Silver Crow is a Duel Avatar focusing on a single power and guns uses bullets to inflict damage which are multiple powers) are Ranged Expansion-based and remembers of how Niko thought of herself as powerless child so she couldn't use IS to strengthen Scarlet Rain's offensive and defensive capabillities,Haru also thought that since Silver Crow with all of its upgrades pooled into its flying abillity and having no other weapons other than punches and kicks before getting Lucid Blade as a level up bonus was born from his desire to go to a place somewhere far away he can only learn Ranged and Movement Expansion and not the other 2 but after remembering Argon's metal colour theory about how traumas exceeding a certain threshold will wrap the Duel Avatar in a shell hard enough that prevents them from seeing what's inside of them,he realized that there must be something else in Silver Crow other than the desire to fly away and remembers KYH's words of how he has to face his own scars and sublimate it with hope to achieve 2nd stage Incarnation which is what he did in V8 by creating Light Speed to escape from Suzaku,he wonders if something else other than scars that didn't need to be healed is inside Silver Crow,he acknowledges what Array said about metal colours is mostly correct but he remembers how Falcon,a metal colour chose to obtain The Destiny so that Blossom could be protected from harm instead of choosing The Infinity and he only succumbed to his own darkness because of the tragedy that happened 7000 years ago,in Falcon's heart there is the desire to protect someone he cares about and not just himself.

(This reveals that contrary to what Rain thought,Burst Linkers aren't actually limited to 2 types of IS amplifications,they're only limited by their own perception of themselves and if they actually confront their own scars and begin to heal it they can use the other types by growing new desires)

Crow's desire to protect KYH,NN and the other Linkers is stronger than his desire to protect himself by flying away,most of them are stronger than him and he has been protected by them more times than when he was protecting them but even so he wants to protect the 100 Linkers from Tezcatlipoca.At this point an energy of light surged inside Crow,ever since his Duel Avatar was born light was always contained inside its armor and to prove this point,his initial Special Gauge Attack Headbutt was a Light attribute attack.At the time he was about to use it,<Synthesis>'s effect has expired and Tezca will target Crow again to apply the supergravity on him again,but before that happens Crow channeled all the energy inside him to his arm and used the 2nd Stage Incarnate Skill Light Shell which pushed back Tezca's supergravity wave but before Light Shell could reach the kings his quantum circuit is being overloaded by the amount of load it is processing and is on the verge of giving out,Light Shell is nowhere near enough to block Tezca's left arm attack against the Kings but by blocking the supergravity coming from the right arm it will give them a chance to escape from it but Light Shell only managed to cover 28 meters before shattering with only 2 meters before it reached the Kings and Tezca's supergravity surpressed Crow to the ground again.It only lasted for a second but the Raid Group was freed from the supergravity thanks to Crow with 50+ Linkers including Pile,Blaze,Pierette,Mitten,Vine,Pound,Pard,Maiden, Dualis twins,Current,Raker,Rain and Heir combining their Special Gauge Attacks and IS Skills into a rainbow-coloured attack against Tezca,what's amazing isn't their reaction time but how without communicating it before,the 50+ Linkers targeted their attacks not to Tezca but to White Cosmos and Platinum Cavalier,as it's impossible for Cosmos to survive the attack even as a Level 9,Cosmos ordered Tezca using The Luminary to block the combined attacks with its left hand that was about to annihilate the kings while Cavalier brandished his kite shield to reduce the damage,with a speed unlike its titanic size,Tezca blocked the combined attack and moments later a massive explosion happened that dyed the sky red again,the shockwave caused by the clash between Tezca's energy and the combined attacks of 50+ Linkers caused Tezca to briefly stumble but it used its right hand to prevent itself from falling and as the right hand isn't stationary anymore,the supergravity it generated disappeared but because of the massive load in his quantum circuit caused by using Light Shell,Crow couldn't even move his body so Cyan Pile tells him to leave the rest to them while lifting him with his left arm.

After the supergravity disappeared,the Raid Group instantly mobillized to prepare for Tezcatlipoca's next attack with the ranged attackers forming a formation and the melee attackers splitting into 2 to flank it,Crow noticed that the Kings still hasn't recovered from the supergravity with them taking more damage than the raid group with even Grandee's armor taking severe damage because they were too close to Tezca,Pierette calls out to her older brother(referring him as onii-chan) Yellow Radio and he responded by using his arms to grab the other 4 kings to use his Movement Expansion IS Skill <Clown's Last Resort> which instantly teleported them to the center of the raid group,Crow and Pile were surprised that Radio was hiding a teleportation IS skill and Crow wondered why he didn't use it when Vise's Icosahedral Insulation was destroyed by Inti to escape but Crow decides to not pursue that question as the kings has been successfully rescued.

The explosion destroyed most of Tezca's left hand aside from the thumb which means an amount of damage penetrated its hand,Crow thinks that Cosmos and Cavalier had taken damage and maybe killed but Cavalier's kite shield(which Mangan never saw him use despite having battled him several time in the past) was enlarged from its initial size to be able to protect himself,Cosmos and his tamed mount so it didn't really inflict much damage on them if they were even harmed,Cobalt and Maiden states that even though the left arm is destroyed the right hand that can increase gravity is still intact so they have to destroy it to escape successfully and Mangan affirms that they can't rely on Crow to protect them for the next wave,while Crow wanted to help them for the next wave the large scale Light Shell he used has strained his quantum circuit to the point that where he can't even talk and he's only standing because Pile is supporting him.

The Raid Group became alert the moment Tezcatlipoca starts to move but it stopped after standing up,Cosmos expresses her amazement that <Toxcatl>(Fifth Moon in kanji,Tezcatlipoca's attacks are named after the units of time in Aztec calendar with Toxcatl being the 5th month of the calendar) which was once faced by warriors in the past has been defeated,Crow is puzzled by Cosmos's words because this should have been the first time Tezcatlipoca was born because Inti was undefeated up until now yet Cosmos talks as if Tezcatlipoca was fought in the past,and wonders how Cosmos learned about the name,skills and effects of Tezcatlipoca when not even Knight,Grandee,Metatron and Amaterasu knew about Tezcatlipoca.

Lotus,in a voice filled with hatred towards her sister tells Cosmos that she's bluffing her calmness,as long as they can destroy Tezca's right hand that controls gravity then all the Raid Group has to do whittle its HP to 0 now matter how much it has and that they'll never let her and Cavalier escape.Cosmos tells her that talking too early is one of her sister's bad habits,asking her if Tezca is as easy to beat as Inti when she needed to use 6 crowns to control it while Inti only needed 1,Crow remembers that there are crowns in Tezca's forehead,chest,arm wrists,waist and abdomen so the difficulty of taming Tezcatlipoca is 6x harder than Inti but he now realizes that if Tezca,a Super-class Enemy can be controlled then so can the 4 Holy Beasts and despite all she orchestrated up to this point,he used the little strength he recovered to plead with Cosmos to stop moving forward in her bloody path and unite with them as with the power of 7 Kings,The Luminary to tame the 4 Holy Beasts,Metatron,Wolfram Disaster,and the tamed Tezcatlipoca,they can clear the Imperial Palace and obtain The Fluctuating Light.Everyone went silent after hearing Crow's pleading and Cosmos broke it by lamenting of how a long time ago in a certain virtual world,players from multiple worlds banded with each other to complete a certain goal or kill each other before being betrayed,there are people who has the same ideals as Crow and people who supported them but in the end the ending is...,as if to avoid remembering how it all ended Cosmos shook her head and lamented in an icy,bitter voice that its too late,everything is too late.

(So Unital Ring didn't have a good conclusion then?,Cosmos's words about the virtual world actually fits with Unital Ring's premise where all the Seed VRMMOs were combined into Unital Ring)

Lotus takes Cosmos's words as a rejection and proceeds to share her Incarnation along with the other 5 kings to the entire Raid Group,Tezca can only use its gravity manipulation attack after the destruction of its left hand and even if Tezcatlipoca is 6x stronger than Inti as long they can inflict damage on it,it can be defeated.It's unknown if Cavalier's mount has a limit to being airborne as Crow's flying abillity needs to consume the Special Attack Gauge to stay active,if it does have a limit then they'll have descend to the ground and that will put Cosmos in a disadvantage,just when Crow thought about this the ground shook which he initially thought was because of the combined Incarnation of the 101 Linkers but it was because Enemies are coming in droves from all directions,Mangan states that they were too naive in thinking they still have time before the farther Enemies came after being attracted by the Incarnation from their combined attack but Raker points out that Enemies will target the threat they think is more dangerous so if a few of the Beast-class Enemies targets Tezca then Cosmos can't ignore them and they can use that opportunity to destroy its right hand,Knight agrees and tells Lotus that he'll leave it to her to tell him when the synchronization attack starts because she is the one who understands Cosmos the best out of the 6 kings and Lotus accepts the responsibillity as Grandee,Thorn,Radio,and Rain prepares their attacks.The Raid Group has to deal with half of the Enemies that doesn't target Tezca while finding an opening to destroy its remaining hand which is the moment Cosmos orders Tezca to use <Toxcatl> which will decide the outcome of the battle.

Pile asks Crow if he can stand on his own and Crow confirms he can,Pile needs to help defend against the horde of Enemies because the Lightning Cyan Spike he used in the combined attack drained most of his Special Attack Gauge and Cyan Blade will only attract more Enemies and can't be used to help destroy Tezca's remaining hand because of the range so Crow gives his Lucid Blade to him which can act as a substitute for Cyan Blade despite the damage it sustained after killing Inti,Pile accepts it and goes to the defensive line.

After a brief moment of silence,Cosmos ordered Tezca using The Luminary and Lotus gave the signal to begin the attack but she was mistaken as Cosmos didn't order Tezca to use <Toxcatl> using its right hand but to mark Silver Crow with a yellow circle to draw it to its chest which has the same yellow circle,Raker and Mangan attempted to save him but they failed to grab his hands despite reaching them,Crow attempted to activate his wings but Tezca had already grabbed him midway and greatly reduced his HP just by holding him,Crow realizes that this is an opportunity and tells Lotus to begin the attack because Toxcatl can't be used while Tezca is holding him,this will kill him but since he's not a level 9 he'll just respawn a hour later with only losing 10 BP which is a small price to pay but because of Lotus's brief moment of hesitation of using Crow as a sacrifice,Cosmos took the chance to order Tezcatlipoca to form 10m diameter red circles under its feet,only 7 Beast level Enemies were near the red circles while no Burst Linkers were nearby them,Crow warned the group to get away as flames formed under Tezca's feet which carbonized the Beast-Level Enemies in a blink of an eye,Crow thinks if a melee Duel Avatar was near the circles they would have died in less than a second but his speculation is half wrong,the red circles were not meant to kill but to propel Tezca into the air by using flame jets eventually the momentum of the flames increased which spread smoke and heat waves,multiple defense skills were activated to protect the Raid Group from the heat wave but Crow couldn't see whether or not they survived because of the black smoke,Tezca flew like a rocket and quickly took off with it following Cavalier's Pegasus mount,Crow doesn't understand why Cosmos didn't kill everyone instead of retreating after kidnapping him,he tried to keep track of where he was going but the buildings in the Moonlight field were too similar to each other so its hard to keep track but given the momentum of the terrain flow and if Tezca is flying in a straight line then it won't land far from Tokyo,Crow now has to use his knowledge of Tokyo's suburbs to figure out where Tezca is going to land because it's difficult to escape Tezca's hold and it's impossible to attack Cosmos because he can't shoot beams from his eyes like Argon can.

And that is how the 5 Kings escaped EK without a single death though unfortunately their biggest benefactor was captured by OU.

Chapter 2
Crow's efforts to figure out Tezca's movement were completely useless because Tezca went from going east to southeast then to Ginza to Nara to Gyomeicho until slowly descending at Tokyo Bay to land at the southwest part of an artificial island used to be called Central Breakwater Buried Site which is now called Reiwa Island where Tokyo Grand Castle Amusement Park which opened last year is located.

(This is the same theme park whose opening Brain Burst celebrated by doing an event in V5 by KYH,as the game celebrates every time a new area is added to it)

Tezcatlipoca lands in the court of the theme park's castle(80 meters high at its peak so 20m lower than Tezca) which is named Heimvald Castle with Cavalier and Cosmos dismounting the former's mount once they landed on the castle's terrace,Cosmos used The Luminary to order Tezca to put Crow on the terrace where Cavalier tells him to not stand up to which Crow states it doesn't matter and asked what the both of them want from him,Cosmos comments that Crow is more impatient than what they(the ARS members Crow fought) said and asks what he would do if she tells him that he'll be damaged and brainwashed?,Crow states that he would run and Cavalier replies by saying he would cut his wings off before he could escape which agitated him but Cosmos states that even if she follows through with what she said earlier Crow won't run away from Cosmos and Cavalier because in here there is only her,Cavalier and Crow and he'll get the secrets he wants to know:the true goal of Oscillatory Universe and by extension,the Acceleration Research Society and also truths about the accelerated world that not even Milady knows,it turns out that Cosmos had already found out about Milady liberating Oracle by working together with Crow by the time the raid started but instead of punishing her,she instead lets her leave OU without any repercussions against her well-being,Orchid Oracle's status however remains unclear.

It is at this moment that Crow realized that neither Cosmos or Cavalier were hostile to him from the beginning,they only wanted to bring him here so he could learn what he wants to know,he remembers about all the things that happened because of Oscillatory Universe and found it impossible to understand on how could one justifies so many tragedies for their cause,Cosmos sees his shaking hands and tells him that it's fine if he's angry at her but asks him to at least listen to her first before venting,Crow then tells Cosmos that he doesn't even know how can he trust what she's saying as truth when she manipulated her sister and BB Child using lies,Cavalier got slightly provoked by his words but Cosmos stopped him from drawing his sword,she then sits on a sofa on the terrace and comments that since Crow is Lotus's BB child that makes Crow her "grandchild" but Crow informs her that Lotus has disowned her and so he has no famillial relation to her in terms of BB,Cosmos agrees because she's fully aware that her manipulation of her sister to kill Rider tarnished the bond they had and claims that in her point of view BB parent and child refers to the simple process of copying one's BB program to another and not the inheritance of genetics or even metadata and claims that she made KYH her BB child on a whim(but we know from V21 that Oscillatory was banned from uninstalling Lotus's Brain Burst program by Cosmos unless it's absolutely necessary and she was saddened to do the act of taking away KYH's Brain Burst from the narration in the beginning of the volume so we know she doesn't believe her own claims)

Crow thinks that Cosmos is too removed from other Burst Linkers in terms of value,goals,and creed,the difference between them is just too wide.He tells her that he can't bring himself to believe what she is going to impart to him and that she doesn't even have any reason to even tell him about it,Cosmos then asks him to think about the reason she brought him here far away from the Raid Group,she could have killed everyone using Tezca and yet she didn't,even though the act of the 50+ Linkers's combined attack which destroyed Tezca's left hand surprised her a bit,that level of attack isn't even harmful to that monster,Crow tells Cosmos she is lying and she tells him to look at Tezcatlipoca's health bars even though he couldn't see it from the ground back then but in the terrace of the castle,he can see it.

Crow could barely make out Tezca's health bars because of the 40m distance between the terrace and the head but he could count the number of health bars Tezca has,to his horror he learns that Tezcatlipoca has 10 health bars,Metatron's true form had 8 HP Bars and The 4 Holy Beasts only had 4 HP bars each but Tezca has more HP bars than them and the damage done by the 50+ linkers earlier in the volume only did damage to 1/10th of the first bar at best and less than 1% of Tezca's health bars,Cosmos tells him that Toxcatl(The right arm supergravity wave attack) and Miccailhuntontli(Ninth Moon in kanji,the left arm annihilation attack she was going to use against the kings) are actually normal special attacks that consumes Tezca's Special Attack Gauge(so basically like Nidhogg's Scorching Inferno in V10) and according to her analysis,Tezcatlipoca is stronger than even the 4 Saints(actually 5 Saints but Nyx is locked up in her dungeon and got kicked out from their ranks so she doesn't count) and 4 Holy Beasts combined.

Crow thinks that Tezca's form compared to Metatron,Amaterasu,Suzaku and Seiryu is extremely simple but that's the point because it is meant to produce an alien body,an indescribable sense of fear that is incompatible with the logic of the accelerating world.but the problem is that if it really is stronger than the Four Saints and Holy Beasts combined then 2 new problems has arisen:why does a monster exists and why can't all the players in Brain Burst banding together defeat it?,a monster like this shouldn't even exist in the game.Cosmos tells him that Tezcatlipoca is the <God of the End>,a ravager and destroyer that only exists to close the world and asks him if he knows the truth of how the accelerated world is born,Crow tells her the truth that Graphite Edge told him that in the past,Leader A who wanted to destroy an existence in a world which predated AA,BB and CC and Leader B who wanted to protect that existence fought,both eventually reached a System Console of that world at nearly the same time,A wanted to use it to the destroy or at least imprison the existence for eternity so no one can touch it again,he created the Imperial Palace in the center of the world to imprison that existence,the Eight Gods to guard that existence from being unsealed,and the 4 Holy Beasts to guard the palace so that no one can enter it,Cosmos tells him to continue and tell her what B did,Crow then tells her that <B> chose to entrust his hopes to the future that there will be powerful enough warriors who can break into the palace and defeat the Eight Gods to liberate the existence.

It turns out that contrary to people's expectations,Cosmos and OU didn't even know about Leader A and B's conflict that caused the creation of the 3 acceleration worlds nor their true identities as the reason she baited Crow to divulge the information Graph told him is to learn about it so Cosmos and OU never belonged to both factions in the first place but now the question is who is the person that Argon speculated in V15 has predicted the premature birth of Disaster MK2 when not even Cosmos foresaw it since Oscillatory is connected to neither <A> or <B>,while i don't doubt that Mutashina and the Virtual Research Society from the Unital Ring arc has a connection to Oscillatory i don't think they're the backers though since they don't give the sense of having a higher foresight than Cosmos from what happened in Unital Ring so far.Crow realized that he just revealed the information Graph told him to White Cosmos who instead of thanking him for accidentally giving the information made an unexpected answer to him:that Graphite Edge as one who is older than even the BB Originators had a wealth of information after all,Crow is surprised by Cosmos's reveal of Graph being older than even the Originators and asked her what did she mean by that,Cosmos then tells him that continuing their conversation will get close to the core of the truth and asks him if he wants to continue since he did say that he doesn't know whether her words are the truth.Crow thinks to himself that the truth about Tezcatlipoca and the meaning behind "closing the world" despite the possibility of Cosmos's words being false is more important than his animosity towards her,so he tells Cosmos that he'll listen to her words and decide whether to believe them or not.

Cosmos points to him to sit on the sofa on the other side of hers but Crow is too scared of Cavalier to even sit on it so Cavalier takes his leave to bring his tamed Enemy steed,Arion to the stables as the Tokyo Grand Castle is one of the White Legion's secret strongholds.Crow then sat on the sofa and asked if its okay if Cavalier isn't guarding her since the only King second to her at being weak at direct combat is Radio,Cosmos tells him that if he didn't loan his sword to Pile then she would have been more alert against him but she can easily kill him with her IS by tearing out his heart or beheading him since he's weaponless but Crow thinks even if he had his sword she'll kill him before he could even unsheath it if he tries to attack her so he apologizes for asking that question and asks what did he mean by Graph being older than even the Originators and Cosmos tells him it's because he's an <Isotope>(she specifically says an Isotope instead of the Isotope so it appears Graph isn't the only Isotope?) instead of being an Originator.

(The meaning of Isotope is a variant of a chemical element which differs in neutron and nucleon number,since Graph is an Isotope then he's pretty much confirmed to be another Fluctlight Copy of Kirito instead of being someone else but the question is which version of Kirito Graph is a copy of,is he Star King Kirito himself or a copy of the Star King?,because the SSS Order coat of arms having a near identical design to Underworld's coat of arms shown in the Alicization anime's last episode seems to point to him being connected to the Star King instead of being another copy of the original)

Crow doesn't understand what Cosmos meant about Graph being an Isotope and Cosmos asks him if there is anything else he wants to know or if he wants to talk more about Graphite's true nature as an Isotope,Crow decides to ask about the <God of the End> and Cosmos talks about how after a long time after the war three trial worlds(Grandee said in V9 that Brain Burst is Trial #02 while AA and CC are #1 and #3 respectively) were made and reminds him of AA and CC and the children who loved those games,Crow then remembers of how in V16 Cosmos stated that AA and CC perished because of excess conflict and cooperation,Crow then restates Cosmos's words about how Cosmos Corrupt's excess cooperation caused CC to stagnate in the sense that the excess cooperation caused stagnation to accelerate in the game in the literal sense because no one would fight with each other to the point time stopped for CC entirely and the game died,Cosmos confirms this as the truth and Crow tells her that Graph told him that her words regarding AA and CC were dismissed by him and said that her words were mostly used to manipulate people and Cosmos only replied by saying "Ah,that's it" and smiled bitterly.

(Graph's words about Cosmos doesn't really make sense considering aside from baiting Crow to divulge Graph's information,she only told him the truth and only the truth and not mostly manipulation which contradicts his account,Cosmos's reaction seems to indicate that Graphite Edge has ulterior motives in trying to keep Crow,Raker and Heir away from her because of there is something that Cosmos knows that Graph doesn't want to be revealed)

Cosmos states that while it's true that AA and CC has long ceased operations,the problem Crow brings up doesn't refer to the Assault Linkers and Corrupt Linkers uninstalling their programs when their games are shut down because of excess conflict and cooperation,she tells him that while his insight is good,his current speculation is wrong and tells him that the forced uninstallation of their programs and deprivation of memories are greatest form of relief and tells him to imagine that if BB is shut down and the program and memories are still there,then that means he can't enjoy the game with his friends and never accelerate again and asks him if this is relief?,Crow almost said yes but he thinks to himself that uninstalling Brain Burst is easy for those who only thinks of healing their own pain(so people like Orange Raptor's BB Parent Ivy Capture?,though we never really learned why she uninstalled in the first place since we haven't gotten a sequel to the gaiden manga yet considering Magisa Garden was about Glass Monarch's story) and not others but if he does that it would also mean he would lose his memories of BB and forget everyone he ever cared about that is connected to it which would also hurt them so it's not a question that he can easily answer.

Cosmos tells him that it's okay to be confused because this question is nasty to address after all and she won't deny people like him,while he's free to make his own decision if it comes to that point,Cosmos thinks that most Linkers will probably uninstall their own programs and remove their memories of it just to remove their pain if it happens since not only the memories related to Brain Burst are removed but also their trauma and scars that gave birth to their Duel Avatars will get removed by uninstalling their programs,Crow thinks back to how Noumi is so carefree in studying and kendo after being freed from the impulse to control and his own darkness and that he wasn't as happy as he is now back when he's active as Dusk Taker but then he remembers how Sentry told him after being restored that she lived with an emptiness that can never be filled until she got her memories back so he can't claim that Noumi is better off now than when he was Dusk Taker because he doesn't really know the amnesiac Noumi's true feelings on the matter,Crow doesn't know if Cosmos ever lost someone important to her because they lost their Brain Burst but he doesn't think Cosmos is being sincere with claiming that losing memories is the best way to get rid of one's pain.

Crow asks Cosmos why is she called <Necromancer> and how is this related to her bringing back Taker,Rider,and Oracle who lost their programs?,Cosmos tells him that he's misunderstanding,her title of <Necromancer> is related to her Special Attack <Resurrect by Compassion> which as it turns out isn't as good as people thought it would be:it works by reducing the respawn timer to 0 and only works on the UNF so it's useless in the Low Level where normal duels and territory wars takes place in and it can't bring back those who lost their BB programs,Crow then tells Cosmos about how Argon commented about how her <Reincarnation> is like signing a contract with the devil and Cosmos remarks that Array's nagging really doesn't get better as the years go by and tells him that what Argon meant by signing a contract with the devil wasn't referring to Fluctlight copies in the Main Visualizer signing a contract with her to get revived,it was actually about how she made a pact with someone(Oscillatory's backer?) to gain <Reincarnation> in the first place and that Crow's pact with Metatron is something similar to it,it turns out that Cosmos made an unexplained pact with Metatron(which means Cosmos was Metatron's previous Contractor before Crow) to unseal her from Contrary Cathedral but Crow pointed out she controlled her first form while trapping the 2nd form inside it,Crow tells Cosmos that he and Metatron are helping each other because they are friends and that there is nothing strange with friends helping each other to which Cosmos agrees with him by telling Crow that she doesn't think his words are strange because despite all the struggles and pain that goes with it,there's nothing strange with helping each other before switching the topic to Tezca to avoid reminiscing about what happened in her past.

(Strangely enough,Cosmos doesn't address about how Megumi got revived when Crow asked her about how she brought back Rider,Taker and Oracle,so it's possible that contrary to what KYH thinks in V23,Cosmos,OU and the ARS really had nothing to do with the book that brought Megumi back to the Mean Level in V10 and that someone else is responsible for giving Megumi the book to set off her resurrection by syncing her with Oracle in the Main Visualizer)

Cosmos then tells tells him that the memories of the AA and CC players were erased but something happened before AA and CC were ended,Crow thinks that maybe like several MMORPGs he used to play,the players were forced to spend the last moments of the game hearing a countdown timer for the server shutdown before being stripped of their memories and programs,Cosmos stared at Tezca with emotions on her eyes that were unreadable and tells Crow that from what he said about the person Graph called <B>,they made the 3 trial accelerated worlds after the war but it took 10 years to start their operations(so basically A vs B war took place in 2029 and the three games were released in 2039 at the same time),there are 2 reasons for this:to wait for the first civillian-use technology equipped with STLT(Soul Translation Technology) to be released,after the Neurolinker were released to the public,children who have high affinity with the STLT were born and grew up so they can be trained in AA,BB and CC,the second reason is to wait for the game management AI to develop until it reached a practical level.

Crow was shocked that the one managing the 3 accelerated worlds isn't <B> but an AI,he thinks back to V17 where the senior members of NN guessed that the <Space> stage would be implemented in July 14th,Sunflower Day which is the day celebrating Japan's first weather satellite launch and their guess turned out to be right,Crow wanted to question the management on why the Space stage's release is connected to Sunflower day because it was a bit too forced in his opinion but if the manager is an AI then it would make sense and he remembers his vision of Chrome Falcon's memories where Falcon thinks that the manager of BB isn't a human but an AI because of how the exploits created by players got patched in an alarming speed including his exploit to abuse the Imperial Palace's trench damage to spam Flash Blink to infiltrate the interior of the palace.

Cosmos tells Crow she doesn't know who <B> and by extension <A> really is,the reason why she almost sacrificed the other kings is because she wants to get to Level 10 to confirm their identity and Crow tells her he won't let any of the kings be sacrificed and asks her what the AI,the true manager of the 3 worlds has to do with the demise of AA and CC,Cosmos tells him that the administrative AI isn't omnipotent because it doesn't have the System Console authority <A> and <B> obtained and it doesn't use STLT so instead it pursued optimization of the games(so it's the Cardinal System all over again),Cosmos then raised her hands to do a motion to grab 2 invisible spheres and says it would be a little nicer if the AI was omnipotent because at least it can close the worlds by instantly taking away the memories of all players but because it doesn't have GM powers it's not that powerful,so it has to uninstall and take away the memories of all players by force using an operation,Cosmos then slowly brings her hands together to merge the invisible spheres into one and tells Crow that to perform this operation the AI has to reduce the points of every Linker to 0 so from the beginning it has created gimmicks for this purpose,the AI isn't omnipotent but it created a substitute,a torture device to close the world:The <God of the End>.

(So yeah,Accel Assault OVA is pretty much non-canon(and even then it contradicted V9 because Crow only learned of AA's existence for the first time in that volume) because AA didn't end because the players died out from killing each other,it was because the management AI's torture device killed everything in AA,both Assault Linkers and Beings alike)

Crow then looks at Tezcatlipoca and noticed that the detail of its form is closer to an inorganic,man made object rather than an Enemy and yet the management AI didn't delete it,he then asks if the other Enemies were meant to be the management AI's torture devices like Tezca because while some are passive,most Enemies would attack without hesitation,Cosmos then tells him that they're not because no matter what kind of Enemies there are they can be defeated including the 4 Holy Beasts and tells Crow that he was right when he said that if all Legions,including Oscillatory unites as one then the 4 Holy Beasts can be defeated and tamed but only Tezcatlipoca is special,even if every Burst Linker unites to kill it,they can't even bring its HP down to half and asks him if he thought that Inti,the egg form of Tezca was just wandering around for no reason and Crow asks what the reason is,Cosmos tells him that depending on their type Enemies can grow stronger,depending on the number of Linkers and Enemies killed they'll go stronger and increase in their Rank,Inti started from the dawn of the accelerated world and in the 8000 years up until now it has killed countless Linkers and Enemies while at the same time bred Tezcatlipoca in its shell in order to end the world,to kill every Burst Linker when the appointed time comes.

(Considering how Cosmos Corrupt's time stagnated and the management AI's control over of the time when Inti hatches,this means that if Cosmos,Vise and Array didn't intervene 7000 years ago,Tezca would have prematurely hatched because the AI will conclude that Saffron's mutual aid Legion would have eventually caused the stagnation of Brain Burst's time and will decide to activate Tezcatlipoca to enact the mass murder of every Burst Linker to end the world,this made Falcon and Blossom's tragedy even worse because despite their good intentions they would have inadvertently caused the death of every Burst Linker had they succeeded and what the ARS did actually reduced the amount of casualties from the worst case scenario and extended the time before Tezca hatches from Inti)

Crow is speechless,he now learned from Cosmos that shutting down the servers won't get rid of the players memories,to lose one's memories is to lose all points so to do that you have to create a method to continuously kill them until they lose all of their points,so far Crow understood everything Cosmos told him but he tells her there are at least 2 contradictions with what she said:since Tezca is created by the management AI who is in turn created by <B> who wants to unseal The Fluctuating Light and since Tezca is invincible why didn't <B> use Tezca to defeat the 4 Holy Beasts and 8 Gods to clear the Imperial Palace,and how is Cosmos able to tame Tezca who can't be defeated even by all Burst Linkers uniting to defeat it,according to a person he knew to tame an Enemy you need to be capable of defeating it 1-on-1 and since Cosmos tamed Tezca,it would contradict her statement of it being invincible,Cosmos tells Crow he asked the right questions but tells him that the information he wants is on the highest level of core information and tells Crow he can give an answer to the 2 choices she will give to him:Help Oscillatory by leaving Nega Nebulous so he can join the White Legion and by extension the Acceleration Research Society (while presumably succeeding Milady as the 3rd Seven Dwarves,Grumpy now that she has left OU) to achieve their goal or lose everything here.

Crow is speechless because he can't bring himself to help OU and by extension the ARS but he still can't die here so as he was about to ask Cosmos if a compromise between them can be agreed,Cosmos sensed that Crow's Light Cube,his quantum circuit is starting its backup,someone has initiated a forced disconnection on his Neurolinker,Crow is shocked that Cosmos can sense such a thing and thinks the one disconnecting him is probably KYH after logging out from the UNF using the leave point in Kitanomaru Park,since Cosmos can remove all of Crow's BP in a short time because of Ressurection by Compassion disconnecting Crow's NL is the fastest way to ensure his safety and he would do the same for KYH if she was in his position.Cosmos asks Crow who he was diving with and Crow tells her it was her sister,Cosmos is surprised and asks if Lotus and Crow has that kind of relationship to which Crow denies,Cosmos tells him that the appointed time for him to give his answer is a week from now and if he attempts to log in to the UNF before that time,Tezcatlipoca will EK him and any of his comrades who will attempt to rescue him.

Haru then woke up to KYH waking him up and asking him if he lost all of his points to which Haru told her he's fine,he didn't lose any points before being disconnected to KYH's relief,Haru then apologizes to KYH for getting captured in front of her and she tells him that he who saved the 6 kings from getting killed by Tezca has nothing to apologize for,the one who should apologize was her who just stood there and watched as he was taken away.Haru tells her the most important thing is that she and the other kings escaped to the exit portal and his life is just a small price to pay but KYH replies that she will never sacrifice him to save her own life.Seri,who left the UNF at the end of Haru's training wasn't filled in on the details of the Inti raid and its aftermath alongside Rin who only knew that Inti was defeated before logging out to inform KYH,asked both Haru and KYH what happened in the raid,at this point the other members who participated in the raid arrives at Haru's apartment because they're worried about his safety,Haru tells them that he'll tell what happened in his VR space but KYH tells him that can wait because he's too fatigued right now and that there's no hurry to explain things,unaware that Haru was offered to join OU by Cosmos in exchange for being freed from EK and he has to give an answer in a week.

Haru noticed a sense of fatigue in his brain and throughout his body,he still can't understand why he is tired because he uses his quantum circuit instead of his brain for thinking in BB,only his memories are synced to his RL self when he logs out so he doesn't understand why fatigue carries over when it shouldn't,Haru then goes along with KYH's suggestion to rest,KYH then thanks Rin who informs them that she'll help out next time and Haru tells Seri that he successfully used <Extreme> to defeat Inti and briefly used <Synthesis> for a moment to Seri's surprise and joy because her student got that far,Seri then prepares to go back before KYH stops her to apologize for troubling her and asks her to join NN,Seri reminds her that she rejected any attempt to recruit her into a Legion which KYH affirms with her also stating she never had a BB child not to mention a disciple until she broke those principles by taking Haru as a student and reminds her to not abandon her student,Seri agrees with KYH and accepts her invitation to join NN to save Haru from Tezca,Haru then gives her a cable so she can perform a direct connection with KYH so the latter can formally induct her to the Legion because she hasn't connected to the global net after exiting to the UNF,and now that her induction to the Legion is completed Centaurea Sentry is now a member of NN.

Chapter 3
Haru then thinks about his current predicament,because he didn't log out using an exit portal,if he logs in again then he will be brought back to Heimvald Castle where Tezca is located,the momemnt he sneaks in he will be killed by Tezca and he will revive again after an hour after which Tezca will kill him again to process,over and over like being tortured by a torture device until he loses all of his points and his BB,in other words this is Haru's first time being EK'd ever since he reached Level 4,Haru's breathing became shallow when he thinks about not being able of entering the UNF and tries to think if this is how Utai,Akira and KYH when they got EK'd by Suzaku,Seiryu and Inti respectively but the suffocation from the thought of not being able to go to the UNF was beyond his imagination.

After sending away KYH,Rin and Seri,Haru did what KYH advised him to do and took a nap,once he falls asleep he sees a dream(the narration,however implies this isn't actually a dream) where he is heavily wounded while walking in a barren wilderness and chased by an earthquake that kept roaring at him,when he looked behind his shoulder he saw a giant burning with black and red flames and with every time it swung its hand and stomped its foot,a faint scream was heard,Haru realizes that his comrades are fighting against the giants and he left by himself,he tries to go back to them despite his wounds,step by step he tries to go back to them but the closer he got,the smaller the sound of the fighting becomes until there is only silence.When he arrived at the battlefield it was too late,the giant became completely still and he couldn't move another step,the massacre was over,the comrades who fought bravely at the battlefield which he escaped are all destroyed.

This is the end time that was scheduled from the beginning,the end of the world.The giant in the distance turned around to look at Haru and formed 2 white circles from its faceless head,gleaming like an eye.

I need to proofread the summaries of the other 9 chapters before posting them but it won't take a week.

On another note,Cosmos's characterization in V25 isn't really what i expected considering KYH and Graph's account of her but i'm looking forward to learning what's going on with her.

[gensouR-1]

Here's chapter 4-9 of V25

Spoiler for AW25 Chapter 4-9:

Chapter 4(this chapter,5 and 11 are mostly SoL so i'll skim things out from those chapters)
Haru woke up from his nightmare to find out he only slept for 4 hours but because he slept for 4 hours before diving into the UNF to begin his training he didn't feel drowsy,with 5 hours until the Legion meeting where Haru will explain everything that happened to him and he thinks it's a waste to go to sleep so he decides to pass the time,when he put on his Neurolinker he found out a massive amount of messages and missed calls not only from NN members but also from members from other Legions who wanted to know his status,he thinks that KYH,Fuuko or Chiyu had already responded in his place but even so he opened his mail app to write a message:"Sorry for the delay in contacting you,i am safe for the time being,and i will tell you the details as soon as possible" that is sent to everyone who attempted to contact him,when he went to the living room he found out that his mom had already slept to his bedroom and left a message for him saying that she will be home until tomorrow morning and that if he already has his speech for the student council election he should let her see it,he then remembers that he got roped in to join the elections by Izawa and how he got recruited because of his AR map project for the school festival and being the chairman of the breeding committee,the middle school he's enrolled in is owned by a large education company so the candidates has to form a team where they will be tested if they want to become the new council.

Because finding the 4th member of their team is more important,he holds off making the speech and after bringing the cherry seeds with him,Haru goes to feed the school's owl.After arriving he already found Reina who's on duty to feed the owl today and Utai who arrives a while later,Haru considers recruiting Reina for the elections she successfully fed the owl who doesn't trust humans and won't accept anyone feeding him except Utai,after finishing the committee work Utai and Haru where the former asks him if he really is okay even though he didn't lost anything despite being trapped in EK because Utai had a premonition that something irreparable is going to happen and she tells him that she won't be upset if he told her about what happened 2 hours ahead of the meeting,Haru wants to reassure Utai and tell her what really happened but the truth is,he couldn't fully grasp his situation:why did Cosmos kidnap him and told him so much?,she should know about Haru's loyalty to KYH and giving him that amount of information would be disadvantegeous against her but if she and Cavalier really were hostile to him then there's no need to tell him anything,they'll just kill him until he loses his Brain Burst if that was the case.

Haru then reassures Utai by saying that Cosmos just took him to the Tokyo Grand Castle theme park and left him there with Tezca,omitting the conversation he had with Cosmos and her request for him to help OU by joining them,Utai then asked why they went there and Haru tells her that it's one of OU secret strongholds,Niko arrives in the school after getting a mail from Haru about how the cherry seeds have grown roots so he's going to school to plant them,so Haru,Utai and Niko decides to go and plant them where Niko reveals that Haru's mental strength has already reached the level of a high-ranking Legion lieutenant which pretty much confirms that he's capable of succeeding Milady in OU when Utai states that nurturing cherry seeds is no problem for 3 high ranking Linkers and Haru denies being one of them.

After writing a report for today's committee activity with Niko's intrusion unreported by Haru,all 3 of them left school.Niko got here by bus because Mihaya is working right now and since she got a permit to leave the dormitory she wants to play in Haru's apartment but he tells her that his mom is there until tomorrow morning and he hasn't explained to her about being friends with Niko,so Utai tells her she can come over to her house,her grandfather,parents and her only living older brother are performing right now so they won't be back for a while and she'll explain things to her mother-in-law and also invites Haru to visit.

Chapter 5
Utai's mother-in-law is helping Haru change into his yukata after forgetting to bring spare clothes after taking a bath,after changing his clothes he waited in Utai's room until Niko and Utai is done with taking a bath with only 7 minutes until the meeting,Haru then thinks back of how his mother told him to write something that will move people instead of trying to talk about the school's politics,he wrote his speech until the midway point until he hit a slump,Utai and Niko arrives after changing into yukatas and Haru asks the latter whose VR space they will be using to which Utai tells him that it will be Fuuko's just like the Inti meeting,as the meeting countdown begins Niko tells Haru that no matter the situation is,she will save him and to tell the truth at the meeting,the three of them then proceeds to Direct Link to Fuuko's VR Space.

Chapter 6
Haru spawned at the edge of the whale's plank unlike in the Inti meeting where he spawned at the whale's back,Fuuko stopped him from falling and tells him that there's a teleport fuction in case he fell 100 meters from the whale and Haru complains that she didn't set up an invisible wall around the whale to which Fuuko replied that she doesn't like invisible walls from old video games so she didn't bother,the only ones who logged in so far are Fuuko,Haru,KYH,Mihaya,Rui,Akira,Chiyu and the Paquet trio,with Taku,Heir,Porcupine,Moose,Blaze and an avatar with the appearance of a weasel wearing a hakama logging in who reveals herself to be Seri(who thinks that Haru's pig avatar is cute) to Haru's shock,Haru then introduces Seri also known as Centaurea Sentry to the members who didn't meet her yet,Moose and Porcupine were baffled that Centaurea Sentry is alive and joined NN which made them roll over and fall from the whale.

After they teleported back KYH began the meeting and let Haru take the stage where he told them everything he learned for 7 minutes but because Haru couldn't learn Cosmos's answer to the contradictions he pointed out before KYH disconnected him and because he trusts KYH and Graph's account of her more than Cosmos's actual behaviour to him no one can believe most of what he learned from Cosmos except for the part about Inti's purpose to give birth to Tezcatlipoca,Seri suggests prioritizing saving Crow and Blaze agrees because their goal is to defeat Cosmos and the ARS with Niko pointing out that since Tezca can't appear in normal or territorial battles,they can still invade OU's territory until the Legion collapses so they'll prioritize Crow first,Taku points out if they made a mistake then someone other than Crow and at worst the entire Legion will get EK'd by Tezca but at the same time if the White Legion made a mistake then they too can fall into EK,Chiyu then suggests destroying the crowns so that OU can't control it anymore,Heir points out that The Luminary crowns might also have been enhanced with Fire Invalid and Physical Invalid like Inti's crown and there are 6 of them,Enemies freed from the crown of thorns can't act for 3 seconds so Crow flies at full speed then he can avoid the supergravity attack,Crow and Sentry's Omega style is useless because their swords deal physical attacks and they're not sure if electric or wind attribute attacks works on the crowns to corrode them so the only option left is to use IS skills because Tezca doesn't have the passive fire AoE damage that melts players before they could get close.

Seri then tells Fuuko that cutting objects with Physical Invalid isn't that simple since they need 6 sword users with strong enough IS or swordmanship skills to cut off the 6 crowns at the same time,KYH volunteers until Haru and Fuuko reminds her that she'll get EK'd by Tezca and tells her not to waste the Raid Group's efforts of saving the 5 kings,Utai then proposes that 6 sword users will be chosen from the coloured Legions aside from the kings which rules out Knight and Lotus from the operation,Porcupine then states that a Linker with sword skills capable of the task from Prominence would be Lavender Downer the <Stagnant Sword> even though she's not sure if her IS is enough for the task.

According to Moose,the Dualis,Decurion and Cavalier are capable of doing the task but Cavalier will never help them because he's an OU member(and also because he won't allow the recruitment of OU's new member to be interrupted),Porcupine proposes that Heir and Pile be included in the operation because of the former's Infinity and the latter's sword skills,it turns out Taku did an excellent job offscreen with the damaged Lucid Blade Haru loaned and Porcupine was amazed that he who normally uses his Pile Driver is actually a great swordsman all along,Porcupine then suggests Sentry(who she still has a lot of questions to ask her) as the 6th member because she was the best swordsman in the accelerated world before she became the 3rd CD,Seri tells her that there are problems with suggesting the Dualis and Decurion for the mission,because the twins are users of the Infinity style,Knight's disciples they might not have made it beyond 1st stage IS skills because of how Knight is wary of Negative IS especially his own,and Decurion's problem is that his battle style is like Grandee(an information which Fuuko never knew about) where he never does the first slash but instead counterattacks the enemy to create a rhythm until he deals the final blow.

Seri also expresses her surprise that Lavender is still active and joined the Red Legion so she vouches for her saying that her skills are sufficient for the operation,Seri then asks KYH if Crikin who used to be in Aurora Oval is still active,KYH tells her that Crikin had to move away to Okinawa because of his parents's divorce but he managed to survive by hunting Enemies and gave his cousin a BB program who later gave her friend a copy as well and now they're doing well by hunting Enemies together,Seri is unsurprised that Crikin managed to survive because he was a tenacious Burst Linker,Haru doesn't know who Crikin is since KYH neglected to tell him about her encounter with him so Fuuko reminds him of Iodine Sterilizer who he fought in the NN-Promi merger meeting and he remembers of how Iodine fought and lost with another Linker for the title of Strongest Name and thus got the consolation title of Stronger Name,Paquet trio doesn't think Crikin is a particularly strong name but Mihaya tells them that Crikin is short for Crimson Kingbolt(remove the bolt part of his name and you'll get Crimson King) to which Niko recognizes as the one who used to have the strongest long-ranged power before she became King and asks Seri if he can wield a sword despite being a coloured avatar on the Red spectrum,KYH agrees because in her past duels against him she never saw him use a sword so she wondered if Seri got the wrong person.

Seri tells KYH that Crikin has his own problems,it turns out in the past Crikin spent a fortune trying to find out where her Player Home is and waited in the entrance until she came home,when Crikin met her he told Sentry while crying manly tears that he was always missing something,the main weapon of a Super Robot should always be a huge sword in his opinion,so no matter how many missiles,cannons and lasers(so he can beam spam after all) he equips,it is shameful to call himself a Super Robot when he doesn't even have a huge sword.A disappointed KYH asked Fuuko where the southwest direction of the VR Space is and goes to call Crikin lame and boring in the direction of Okinawa because he had the gall to call himself a super robot without having a huge sword(i guess she was the impression that Crikin thought himself as a Real Robot instead of a Super Robot).After the brief moment of awkwardness,Seri then goes on to say that while she rejected his pleadings to become her disciple because his motivation is too silly and boring for her to take seriously,she gave him the idea of turning his guns into a sword using 1st stage IS,she thought he couldn't do it but a few months later Crikin came back to show what he can do using IS,he then used Mega Machine Awakening to turn into a giant robot and use IS to convert all of his ranged weapons into a giant sword which can cut a building in the <Demon City>(hardest stage in BB to destroy,it took the clash of Grandee and the 6th Disaster to vaporize 1/2 of a building in that Stage while Crikin can do it on his own) stage in half,the load from turning his ranged weapons into swords however exhausted him and caused him to collapse into an Enemy who was half-dead thanks to being crushed by the giant robot.

Seri believes that Crikin's IS Sword is enough to destroy The Luminary's crowns so she vouches for him but the problem is getting him to Tokyo,they could petition for a crowdfund to get the money to bring him to Tokyo but Fuuko tells her about the time they tried to do that to get inside Midtown Tower but failed because no one in the meeting had enough money so Seri takes back her suggestion of bringing Crikin to save Crow,Haru suggests asking Metatron to bring Crikin to Tokyo from Okinawa since she once went to Mt Fuji to find a temporary resting place,Seri asks who Metatron is and Haru tells her that Metatron is one of the 4 Saints and the last boss of Contrary Cathedral,Seri expresses her surprise that her first disciple is also a <Contractor>(a Linker who made a contract with a Being) and tells him in that case,then they don't have to bring Crikin but instead ask Metatron to be one of the attackers but Haru points out that Metatron doesn't have a sword and he doesn't think she can use IS.Seri tells him that he'll loan her one of her swords and as an Enemy on the Level of a Four Saint,she can perform attacks equivalent to 3rd stage IS skills since all of the 4 Saints(well 5 Saints actually but one of them got locked up) are connected to the Highest Level,Haru then remembers of how Metatron states that 3rd stage IS essentially interfering with the Highest Level and because she can interfere with it,she can do attacks equivalent to 3rd stage IS as well,there's one problem:Metatron is still recovering in Fuuko's Player Home so he doesn't want to call her until she's 100% recovered which KYH agrees with,Seri asks him when will she fully recover and Haru tells her that she'll fully recover tomorrow evening which Seri doesn't consider a problem because they need to prepare before going to do the operation.

With Metatron decided as the 5th attacker then the 6th and last attacker would be "that guy".Haru,KYH and Fuuko immediately realizes who "that guy" is and Heir realizes the person in question is his teacher Graphite Edge,Seri is surprised that Graph took another disciple aside from KYH and asks Heir if he can use the Ain style of swordsmanship to which he states he doesn't because he can't use 2 swords which Seri thought was odd because the Ain style also has single sword skills as well to which Heir confirms but the 2 sword style is the essence of the Ain style and he wants to focus on using a single sword,Seri then states that Graph will never refuse the offer of being an attacker because he'll do anything to save his "grandson" Crow because of how Crow is Lotus's disciple though Haru wonders if he should get another sword in case Graph wants to make the grandfather-grandson thing official by teaching him the Ain style,Heir then tells Seri that if she wants to make his teacher an attacker then there is a problem they have to solve:liberating the final Element,Graphite Edge from the Imperial Palace.

Chapter 7
Haru wakes up from diving into Fuuko's VR space,1 hour and 8 minutes have passed since the beginning of the meeting though he felt as if it was 3 times longer than that,Utai wakes up and reminds him of the time when they got in to the Imperial Palace and she showed him the fourth quadrant of 2nd stage IS where created a lava pool to kill an Enemy,the time has come for her to finally put it to use so Graph can be freed.at 10:00 PM tonight,NN along with reinforcements from other Legions will storm the North Gate,they can't kill Genbu because of the 4 Holy Beasts it has the highest defense strength of the 4 and not even Graph can make a scratch on its shell but that's fine because they don't need to kill it,they just need to immobillize it until Graph can get to safety,Utai's lava pool will be important for this operation but the last time Haru saw her do it,she collapsed because the load was too much for her quantum circuit and this time the power of the lava pool will need to be bigger than back then and Haru can't imagine the strain it will do to Utai,Haru wants to help but he's the reason why the rescue is even happening and feels powerless to help her,finally understanding what it feels like to be EK'd,Niko tells him to get to their side and hug Utai with her,it turns out Utai is shivering from the fear of failing the operation,the memory of falling to Suzaku is still vivid in her memories and even if she found a way to endure that fear,it won't disappear.

Kyouya otherwise known as Mirror Masker,her brother and BB Parent has passed away in RL because of the accident in the stage where he died from being crushed by a giant mirror in the stage,this incident caused Utai to lose her voice from the trauma,had he survived the incident he would have been in the same grade as Haru,Taku and Chiyu,Haru knows he'll never replace Kyouya but he still tries his best to help her,Niko reminds Utai that even though the burden of the main attacker is on her,that's no reason to take the burden by herself and that there are others there who will be there to support her in surpressing Genbu until Graph is saved and Haru tells her that even though he can't help her with surpressing Genbu but even so he'll pray for her success in RL.At this point KYH and Fuuko arrives in Utai's room to Haru's shock,they heard about Utai,Niko and Haru visiting Utai's house from the former so they decided to go to her house to make sure nothing goes wrong,at this point Shiomi,Utai's mother-in-law comes in and recognizes KYH and Fuuko having visited their home before and asks Utai what their relationship is with Haru and Niko,Utai typed in the chat window that they're people important to her before closing it and attempted to tell with her own voice that they are her friends,the damage done to Utai's language center in her brain impaired her abillity to speak but after 15 seconds of struggling,she managed to barely speak out the word friend,Shiomi understands what Utai said to her and leaves to prepare food while Utai got a hug from Fuuko after briefly speaking using her own voice.

The 5 members of NN then ate sukiyaki made by Shiomi while doing their summer homework,after spreading the futons where they'll lie until the end of the operation KYH,Niko,Fuuko and Utai prepares to go to the UNF with Haru isn't going with them,even though the Shinomiya's family house is still an old fashioned house because its been designated as a culture heritage site,it's been converted to a smart home to an extent with Utai having a home server port in her room,KYH brought 5 XSB cables with her to be used to connect to the home server port and connect the other four peoples Neurolinkers so that when KYH's Neurolinker disconnects from the home server so will the other 4 as a safety precaution,with timer set to 10.8 seconds which around 3 hours in BB time,the 4 members then dived to the UNF with Haru doing a normal acceleration command a second slower after realizing that there's a way to help his friends without going to the UNF.

Chapter 8
Because Haru used Burst Link a second slower,the other members 17 minutes are ahead of him in time but because they need time to confirm the battle plan against Genbu,they likely haven't arrived at the north gate yet,Crow then leaves Utai's room to go to the stage where the Shinomiyas perform,he then goes to the mirror that killed Kyouya and tells the deceased Burst Linker that Utai will face her biggest trial yet to save Crow who is trapped in EK,no one can replace him and Crow doesn't know how to heal Utai's pain but he still wants to help her so if he never passed on and lingered here in spirit,he wants to him to guide him.Haru then prepares to concentrate his mind into a single point to break boundaries between the Low Level and the Highest Level so he can access the latter,in the previous volume Crow used this method to make a small crack between the boundaries to allow Seri to sync with her backup in the Highest Level but the connection only lasted a moment,this time he has to break the barrier so he can actually go to the Highest Level,doing this will put a massive load on Haru's circuit/Light Cube but he can't rely on Metatron while she's recovering so he has to do this on his own with only 30 minutes until he Burst Outs,as he struggles to concentrate he hears a voice implied to be Mirror Masker's backup Fluctlight contacting him from the Main Visualizer,telling him to feel the light in his heart like when he faced Tezca,intergrate with it and use his Incarnation to gain access to the Highest Level,as the photons in the Light Cubes of all Burst Linkers circulates endlessly they can intergrate with that as an alternative method to enter the Highest Level instead of concentrating their consciousness to enter it,Crow then applies the principle of <Synthesis> to intergrate with the photons in his Light Cube and throws a punch in the mirror that successfully shatters the boundaries between the Low Level and Highest Level.

Chapter 9
Crow finally arrives in the Highest Level as his Duel Avatar instead of his pig avatar and wonders about the voice that guided him here,he suspects that the voice is Mirror Masker but decides to think about it later to go to the Imperial Palace,because distance is meaningless in this level he instantly went there to find that Genbu hasn't spawned yet but so the operation hasn't begun,just like the Inti raid the meeting place for the Graphite Edge rescue operation is also in the Ministry of Defense and he noticed that there are 50+ stars 800m east of Shigu Station and he realized this is the Graph rescue team,he used to think that identifying Linkers from the Highest Level is impossible but he noticed that each star has a color and from the stars he saw,he identifies Lotus,Bell,Pile,Raker,Maiden,Rain,Pard,Magenta and Puppeteer among the group's members,they're now 200 meters away from Kitanomaru park and they'll arrive in the north gate in 10 minutes.Since the Highest Level goes by a faster rate than the other Levels,Crow won't actually see them arrive in Genbu's gate by waiting in the Highest Level because of the differences in time rates,Metatron told Crow that direct interference from the Highest Level to Mean and Low Levels are impossible but he can directly interfere with the Highest Level if he exhausts himself by overloading his circuit(basically doing stuff like launching attacks from the Highest Level to the Mean and Low Levels is impossible,but he can interfere with what is present in the Highest Level like the stars that represents Burst Linkers and Enemies),Crow only needs to do a little interference by giving a little energy for Maiden but since he doesn't know if syncing the acceleration in the Highest Level to the Mean and Low Level is possible,he considered asking Metatron if its possible so he doesn't have to wait too long for the beginning of the operation but it's only less than a day left until her restoration is complete so he doesn't want to disturb her and since the rescue group is nowhere near the gate yet from his time axis,he goes to check if Graph has logged in yet,Crow also found out that Kitanomaru Park has been restored after the transition took place and thinks that Inti probably respawned somewhere without Tezcatlipoca inside it but there's no need to track it down.

Unfortunately it turns out that the Imperial Palace's barrier is able to block Crow from observing if there are any Burst Linkers inside it even near the gates where the blocking is at its weakest so he can't confirm if Graph has logged in or not,he then wanders around the Highest Level to figure out a way to decelerate the time rate and while looking around the Tokyo National Museum he noticed that the nodes that represent the social security cameras has a weak light flow connected to them,Crow realizes if he follows this flow he'll find out where Social Security Camera Center is located and as he thinks about this he noticed 5 lights with the colours of lavender,dark red,intense gray,almost completely black and a mix of silver,red,and dark respectively in the commercial tower on the east side of the museum that aren't fixed and realizes they are Burst Linkers and as he wondered if they're camping to hunt Enemies,he realized who their identities are from their colours:the one with colour of a lavender is Argon,the dark red one is Rust Jigsaw(so he was still active after all),the dark gray one is Shadow Croaker,the one that's assimilating with the shadows is Black Vise/Ivory Tower and the one that has silver,red and dark swirling in its light is Wolfram Cerberus and he realized that they're going to intervene in the rescue operation so that Crow's recruitment to their Legion goes uninterrupted,he thinks that someone leaked the operation but dismissed it by thinking that OU has some means to monitor the UNF,Crow initially assumed that Vise monitored them using his deceleration abillity but he dismissed it because in that case then only he will be waiting to ambush because it only works for him and not other Burst Linkers unlike Avocado's Void Space.

Crow considers disconnecting KYH's cable to warn her but he realizes that would cause mass panic so he dropped that idea,he then remembers of how Amaterasu told him to revive Metatron's core using their link and realizes if he can temporarily connect with Lotus's star which represents her in the Highest Level,he can inform her about the ambush but at this time footsteps with the sound of crystallization approached Crow and he remembers the source of this sound from 3 days ago when Oracle brought them to the UNF as part of Tower's strategy:it's Snow Fairy,Sleepy of the Seven Dwarves who greets him saying that it's been a long time after the Territory War,and as for why she is in the Highest Level she gives him the same answer as last time,she felt that she was being gazed so she went to the Highest Level to check if anyone is observing and she found Crow.Crow asks her why she isn't with the ambush team and Fairy tells him that the role of doing the ambush is left to Vise and Array who are mere laymen when it comes to the Highest Level which baffles Crow because those 2 were Burst Linkers from the early days of BB2039 and Fairy is looking down on them,she comments that as Burst Linkers who can enter the Highest Level she is her upperclassman and Crow identifies her as one of the <Contractors> to Fairy's surprise who asks him where did he hear this term from,Crow lies to Fairy by saying Cosmos told him when it was actually Sentry who told him but he wants to keep her resurrection a secret and Fairy,not realizing that she is being lied to,remembers that he did talk to Cosmos in Tokyo Grand Castle and thinks that Cosmos told him this on a whim but it can't be helped,the story is at the last page after all.

Crow asks her what she meant by having reached the last page and Fairy avoids answering the question by telling him that although she by Cosmos's definition is a Contractor,the Being she contracted with is no longer with her,Crow asks her if she contracted with one of the 4 Saints and Fairy tells him she didn't,of the remaining Saints she didn't make a contract with Ushas(goddess of dawn in the Rigveda scriptures) and Xi Wangmu(goddess of Chinese mythology that predates Taoism),not to mention Nyx(in the side story Return to Forever,Metatron states that there are actually 5 Beings on the level of the 4 Saints so it's actually 5 Saints but because Nyx got sealed in her dungeon for being too dangerous she was excluded from their ranks).

Fairy then tells him that being a Contractor doesn't mean you have to make one with one of the 4 Saints,there are other Beings with which a Linker can make a pact with but avoids going into that and apologizes to the soon-to-be new member of Oscillatory,she won't kill him but Crow has to be stopped before he can warn the Genbu team about the ambush from Vise,Argon,Jigsaw,Croaker and Wolfram Disaster so she's going to freeze him for a while,Crow then escapes by flying to high altitude because Snow Fairy can't fly but contrary to his expectations Snow Fairy managed to get to his altitude,Crow questions how this is possible and Fairy reminds him that she is his upperclassman in the Highest Level,she then tells him that what they are seeing in the Highest Level is something like a three-dimensional display that represents the location of data on the Mean Level.Because it is a display,the position of the viewpoint can be changed as you like and tells him that although he used his arrow keys to move his viewpoint so desperately,it is easy for her to specify his pointer.Crow then comments that no matter where you are in the Highest Level,it's easy to teleport to anywhere then to which Fairy answered that only if the place and scope can be grasped,Crow asks her how to do that and Fairy begins teaching him by telling him that there has to be a place to go to before deciding against teaching the soon-to-be new member of Oscillatory,teaching Crow as her student is a waste even if he accepts Cosmos's invitation but she doesn't want to teach him not because he doesn't have any promise or because Fairy doesn't want to teach her underclassman about the Highest Level as a senior,it's because even if she does teach him there's not enough time for him to use that knowledge to the fullest extent,the world of Brain Burst is going to end soon and neither Grandee nor Oscillatory can extend its life any longer but even though the end is unavoidable they,the Burst Linkers can still make a conclusion different from the Assault and Corrupt Linkers who perished in despair and humiliation by the <God of the End>'s hand,as she freezes him in place she reassures him that Cosmos has no intentions of putting the group which has Lotus and Rain in EK,they just want to prevent them from freeing Graph because if he is freed from the Imperial Palace then things will get a little troublesome for Oscillatory.Fairy then tells Crow that at the very least,she'll stay with him in the Highest Level until someone removes his Neurolinker so he won't suffer in his pitiful state alone.

Crow isn't frozen in ice but he feels as if his entire body became metal including his lungs and he feels suffocated even though he doesn't need to breathe in the Highest Level,at this moment he's completely helpless because none of his comrades in the Graph rescue team can enter the Highest Level,he can't call Metatron because Snow Fairy will finish what she attempted in V21 and sever their link which is part of why she's staying with Crow in the Highest Level and he swore never to call for her help until she's fully recovered so he has to get out of this situation by himself,The Highest Level is a world of ideas that visualizes the concept of information where distance doesn't exist and at the same time levels and parameters doesn't exist in the Highest Level.Although the position of the nodes,Enemies, and Burst Linkers represented by light spots are essential,the postures of Crow and Fairy depicted in the form of a Duel Avatar are only subjectively felt by them and Duel Avatars doesn't actually exist in the Highest Level,only Crow's consciousness as an observer exists and Snow Fairy only interfered with his consciousness by imposing a feeling of inaction which means she only gave Crow the illusion of being frozen in place,Crow can't counterattack against Fairy but he can interfere with his own consciousness just like what he did earlier in the volume but he now also has to get rid of the pain of not being able to breathe since Fairy didn't deprive his sense of pain,Crow then proceeds to use the Imagination control system to cut off his senses but Fairy's freezing of his movements is still active and he can't warn the Graph rescue team like this so he then proceeds to the next step by using <Synthesis> to merge his consciousness with the world.From doing <Synthesis> in the Highest Level he confirmed that even though the 2 worlds aren't deleted,there are absolutely zero activities on Accel Assault and Cosmos Corrupt at all,not even the presence of Beings are felt and he thinks that if what Cosmos and Fairy said are true,then Brain Burst will end up like this soon enough.

But then he noticed something that's higher and far away than the 3 worlds,a 4th world that while smaller is more active than Brain Burst(Hellooooo UW,looks like Star King Kirito is successful in his goal of preserving its existence after all),Crow couldn't believe what he had found and attempted to spread his consciousness there but by doing so his consciousness spread to the limit and disappeared from Snow Fairy's sight,by trying to reach the 4th world the photons that formed Crow spread to every corner of the Main Visualizer and at this moment,with the exception of Metatron and Nyx,the 5 highest Beings aside from the Eight Gods and Four Holy Beasts(Tezca doesn't touch his consciousness because it's not even sentient) touched Crow's consciousness:<Storm King> Rudra(God of storms from Hindu mythology,again from Rigveda just like Ushas),<Great Sun Spirit> Amaterasu,<Witch Princess> Bari(from the Korean mythology,Princess Bari)<Dawn Princess> Ushas and <Queen Mother of the West> Xi Wangmu.2 out of 5 didn't care about Crow,1 was annoyed and 1 tried to banish Crow from the Highest Level because of the sudden contact but Amaterasu stopped them and while Crow doesn't know this,the 5 Beings marked him and formed a weak link with him.

The huge amount of information flowing into Crow's spreading consciousness is not the amount of data that can be processed in its entirety.From this,Crow chose one existence and concentrated his feelings on it in an instant,the information he'll give doesn't include a vision of his appearance or his voice but the recipient will receive and understand it nonetheless,Crow then gathers his consciousness and focuses it to Lotus's star in the Highest Level which is near Pile,Current,Rain and Bell's star,Fairy has noticed what Crow is doing and will intervene in 0.5 seconds,right now Crow's form is that of a star with silver colour instead of his Duel Avatar so he can't touch Lotus's star with his hands but he understands what he has to do,by getting closer to her star a part of Crow's star merged with Lotus's which is actually their quantum circuits briefly connecting which transfers Crow's warning to her about how an ambush team consisting of Vise,Array,Jigsaw,Croaker and Cerberus is waiting in the circular tower at the east of the museum to ambush the rescue group and how while Fairy's location in the UNF is unknown to him,she is monitoring them from the Highest Level and the rescue group's movements has been exposed.

After conveying his message in 0.1 second,Crow realized that Fairy is going to catch up to him so he spread his consciousness again to the tower where the OU members are lying in wait,Crow then thinks about how strange it is that Vise's star is black-coloured when it should be Ivory considering Black Vise is a self-proclaimed name and his actual name is Ivory Tower but decides to think about that later,he then focuses on Cerberus's star which is now mixed with red because of the thruster part of the Invincible that is now integrated with him and the accumulated Negative Incarnation of Disaster MK2,back in V23 Tower declares his name as Wolfram Disaster as if to declare his transformation into Disaster MK2 is complete but Crow doesn't think so because of how he solved the curse of the original Disaster in V9 so he thinks that he can free Cerberus from the negative Incarnation too(but even if he is freed there's still going to be aftereffects from turning into Disaster MK2,Falcon's hatred and grief is still imprinted on Crow even after the curse is solved so there's no way everything will go as well as Crow hopes).

Just like what happened with Lotus's star,Crow and Cerberus's star slightly merged and a vortex of darkness mixed with anger,hatred,pain and other negative emotions burst forth from the latter's star,inside the vortex at the core of Cerberus's star is Cerberus's consciousness which had somehow remained unscathed despite being flooded with with Negative Incarnation and is currently maintaining his existence,Crow then tells Cerberus that he'll save him from there so that they can have fun as friends after OU is defeated and Cerberus's consciousness reacted a little to Crow's words by raising his head a bit.

Crow doesn't have enough time to transfer some energy to Utai because Snow Fairy will catch up to him soon but by giving Lotus information about the ambush she can delay the operation for tomorrow so he separates himself from Cerberus's star and initiated the Burst Out command but before he logged out he heard Fairy's voice saying that she'll see him next time.

I'll post the last 5 chapters tomorrow.

[gensouR-1]

Here's the last 4 chapters,afterword stuff and my comments on the volume.

Spoiler for AW V25 Chapter 10-14:

Chapter 10
Haru woke up to see that KYH,Fuuko,Utai and Niko are still asleep,if KYH aborted rescuing Graph for now then they should wake up in 2 seconds but since they didn't wake up in that time,Haru was about to disconnect KYH's cable out of worry for their safety until they woke up,KYH asks him how did he knew that Vise and Array was waiting in ambush and contacted her even though he can't go to the UNF with Haru telling her that he went to the Highest Level without Metatron's help with someone's help,he's not really sure who that person is but he thinks the one who helped him was Mirror Masker's Fluctlight copy and he intends to bring Utai with him the next time he goes to the stage to attempt contacting Mirror Masker again,he then tells them about how he went around looking at Genbu's gate when he discovered that Vise was hiding in the tower east of the museum before being caught by Snow Fairy and asked them how everything turned out,KYH tells Haru that he received his information but told the group not to stop because Fairy who is in the Highest Level would have been alerted to the fact that Vise's ambush was exposed if they did,she then passed on the information to the other leaders of the rescue group:the Dualis,Vine and Pound,KYH thought that the Dualis would would at least ask for an explanation on how she got it but when she told them that Haru passed it on to her,the other leaders believed her words because they think that Crow could perform a miracle like that.

The other NN members believed her words and discussed what to do on the way to Genbu's gate,Haru thought there was no way but to retreat but Niko told him that because of his act they have a chance to turn the tables on them before they could pull the ambush by destroying the tower they are on using IS skills since the chance of defending against an overwhelming assault of IS skills is low,Argon's abillity that allows her to monitor through terrain objects has one weakness:it can't see through Exit Points just like Rain's Visual Expansion so they used that to their advantage by hiding the group members that can use long-range IS attacks behind the Exit Point while the main group goes to intended ambush point,when Lotus gave signal the long range attackers bombarded the tower with their IS skills but Vise quickly reacted to it and managed to escape with Argon,Vise couldn't bring Jigsaw and Croaker with him in time however so they got annihilated,Wolfram Disaster however survived the attack and went to assault the attackers but something weird happened to him,instead of continuing his assault like a mad beast he suddenly slowed down and went to the exit point like a broken robot,it appears that thanks to Crow touching Cerberus's star in the Highest Level,his consciousness is starting to resist against Disaster MK2's negative IS and managed to force his Duel Avatar to leave the UNF,Snow Fairy didn't show up to intervene so it appears she was never near Vise's location in the first place,Haru then asked about the operation and KYH gives him a message from Graph:if he wants to learn the Ain style then he'll teach him as much as he wants in the UNF.

Chapter 11
After putting Niko and Utai to bed after Haru explained everything and finishing their homeworks,before Haru could go to sleep Fuuko asks him if its true that he took a bath with KYH in her apartment,Haru then tries to explain himself and Fuuko tells him she's not accusing him of doing anything to KYH and tells him the reason why she asked him this:KYH had told her the circumstances of her birth as a Machine Children and shown her the barcode on the nape of her neck when they were bathing and told her that Haru saw the barcode when they were bathing before doing the Genbu operation so she wants to get a confirmation from him.Haru was shocked and at the same time relieved that KYH confided the truth of her birth to Fuuko who asked him how does it feel to take a bath with KYH,Haru tells Fuuko that he was shocked about it but he was happy that KYH told him what she was hiding in her heart so he wants to be her strength to support her,Fuuko thanks him for feelings on that matter but that's not what she was asking,she was asking about how he felt when he saw KYH naked to which Haru says that he and KYH would never do anything inappropiate,Fuuko tells him that she will accept his answer for now but tells him that if his erotic thoughts becomes reality,he should choose and cherish the person he chooses when that time comes and that while communicating with other Legion members by visiting their residences are fine,doing illicit activities is not especially with her friend and tells him to never do it again.

Haru and Niko left Utai's house at 07:45 pm to take the bus,they talk about how to take care of the school owl when they will go to Yamagata except Heir in early August,Niko thinks about lending the owl to Porcupine since she has a carnivorous bird as a pet so she could handle feeding and taking care of the owl in Utai's place,Niko also admitted that she never actually met Porcupine in RL because she and the 1st gen Prominence members aside from Mihaya weren't exactly close but she wants to close distance between her and the remnants of Rider's subordinates,Haru then goes home to find that his mother had woken up and welcomed him home,they then talk about how Saya used to raise a pet owl of her own in his grandfather's farm until middle school when it disappeared,Haru then gives his mom a draft of his speech and she tells him that she'll give an opinion about it in 2-3 days and that she'll take her time with it to which Haru replied she'll forget about it if she takes it slow.

Afterwards the rest of the day up until the evening was pretty peaceful for Haru since all he did was doing his committee duties and hanging out with Chiyu and Taku,the narration then ominously noted that Haru would look back at this as a peaceful period.....

The Tokyo Grand Castle operation is scheduled to begin in 11:00 PM,and the briefing for the operation will begin the hour before and since it's only a little past 07:00 PM,Haru has more than 2 hours of free time and he wonders what to do until a long lost voice rang to him which nearly caused him to dive to the UNF by reflex but he stopped before he screwed up and used the Burst Link command to dive into the initial acceleration space instead.

Chapter 12
After diving into the initial acceleration phase,Crow attempted to find anything he can break to access the Highest Level just like what he did to the giant mirror but he couldn't find anything in his room to serve that purpose so he decides to just break the glass window instead but before he could do that Metarton's icon form materialized in the blue world who Haru then hugs despite Metatron's constant reminders to her servant to not touch her casually,Metatron then turns into her 2nd form and comments about how she's not in the Low Level like she thought,Crow tells her that this is the initial acceleration space which connects the Lowest Level(RL) and the Low Level(normal duel space) and Metatron then comments that the room the initial acceleration phase is reproducing belongs to Crow then and asks Crow why he looks like a pig instead of his Duel Avatar,Crow then tells her that this is the avatar he uses for diving into the VR spaces in the Lowest Level,Metatron gets annoyed that she got called a bug by Chiyu in V15 and a pet by Fuuko in V17 in her icon form when Burst Linkers used avatars that look like actual animals in the Lowest Level and mixed up Crow who tries to calm her down with Chiyu and Fuuko who actually called her those names in her annoyance.

Crow asks if her restoration is complete and Metatron affirms it because the reason she contacted him was to deliver the news,she would have called him to Fuuko's player home but it'll take 6 minutes for Crow to get there from the UNF so she decided to go to Crow directly instead,Crow tells her he can't go to the Mean Level to her confusion because even though the information input was blocked so Metatron can focus her on her recovery,the sensory information monitoring in their link confirmed to her that Crow had slayed Inti and because she thought everything was over,she deactivated it and focused her efforts on recovering so Metatron asked him what happened after Inti was killed,Crow doesn't know how to explain everything and Metatron decides to just see his memory instead since their link was strengthened after her recovery so they can share their memories as long as they are in the same Level,Metatron then puts Crow's head on hers to connect their quantum circuits so she can copy Crow's memories to find out what happened and unlike most of NN who didn't believe Cosmos(at most,Seri believed Cosmos's words about Tezca being a torture device to end the world),Metatron actually believes her words from Crow's memories and realised the enormity of the situation,Crow then realized what Tezcatlipoca's birth means from Metatron's PoV,for Linkers they'll at least retain their lives in RL despite being deprived of their memories of BB forever,but for Beings the birth of the <God of the End> is the equivalent of the apocalypse for them and every Being will die when Tezca closes the world,the only one who shares their fear is Seri who got her memories back and thus knows the taste of death from losing Brain Burst(Megumi doesn't know about this yet but she'll definitely have the same fear once she learns about this) actually feels like and has a greater fear of Tezcatlipoca than the other NN members because she knows that if the world is closed then it means she will lose her memories again and will permanently live with the emptiness from losing her memories for the rest of her life in RL.

Crow then reassures Metatron that he won't let the world of Brain Burst end,he doesn't believe Cosmos and Fairy's words of the world's end being inevitable and he thinks they have enough time to both stop Tezca and infiltrate the Imperial Palace to get The Fluctuating Light,he then tells her about the strategy to destroy all 6 of the thorn crowns that Cosmos is using to control Tezca and her role in it,Metatron points out a problem:while Crow can escape to safety because of the 6 second delay from an Enemy being stunned from being tamed by The Luminary but she then asks if the other 5 Linkers can get to safety on their own by running away on the ground,the other 5 Linkers can only run at most,between 100-200m per second(wow Pile can actually run that fast?) while the Tokyo Grand Castle covers 1km range with the distance from the safe zone to Tezcatlipoca is 500m so it's impossible for them to get away in time,Crow hangs his head in shame for only thinking of how to get himself out of EK without ensuring the safety of the other 5 Linkers,Metatron tells him not to worry since she can carry the other 5 Linkers to safety and tells him to focus on escaping,Crow points out that carrying 5 Linkers at once would slow her down and Metatron tells her servant now that she regained her full strength,carrying 5 Linkers isn't a problem for her,Crow offers to give back Metatron Wings to her but Metatron states that's impossible because the ownership of the Enhanced Armament is locked to Crow ever since they made a link and she can't take it back but she tells him that 7 seconds is enough for her to bring the other 5 to the old Tokyo Tower at full speed,before going back to the Mean Level to meet up with Graphite Edge for the operation,she admits that doesn't really mind Crow's pig avatar in the Lowest Level(After KYH,Blaze Heart and Seri that makes 4 people who openly stated that they like Haru's pig avatar).

After the acceleration period is over,Haru sent a message to KYH,Fuuko and Seri that Metatron has fully recovered and before the meeting starts,he opens the map of the Tokyo Grand Castle Amusement Park to memorize its terrain as much as possible,Haru's role is to escape the moment the crowns are destroyed in the direction he thinks is the safest,if they pull this off then Oscillatory's plan that was set in motion will be derailed and while its impossible to know what will happen to Tezca once it's liberated,even if Cosmos can tame it again it'll be impossible to take Burst Linkers by surprise by using it again because Tezca's size makes it easy to spot and the players can evacuate before they can come within its attack range.

Haru thinks that if they can succeed then they will be able to surpass Cosmos's intentions but her last words to him before he got disconnected rang in his mind about how Tezca will EK him and his friends in a second if he attempts sneak to the UNF before the appointed time but Haru resolves to himself that they'll make it out of this alive.

Chiyu and Taku arrives in Haru's apartment in 09:30 PM where they had some snacks before diving to Fuuko's VR space in 10:00 PM,the participants of the meeting are the nearly same as the last one except one new participant:Lavender Downer whose VR avatar is close enough to her real appearance in RL,Seri greets Lavender,calling her Love(Love is a pun on the Lav part of Lavender) and Lavender is happy to see Cencen again,Seri thanks Lavender for accepting the mission and Lavender says to her that she learned that Crow helped Rosie(Tsubomi) and Orchy(Megumi),Seri realizes she's here out of gratitude for Crow so she asks her about the status of Blossom's 7 other Children to which Lavender states that she doesn't know and asks how Seri and Megumi are active when both of them lost their BB,Seri tells her that she'll discuss it later before telling Fuuko to begin the briefing.

Fuuko then goes over the plan:the team will depart to Tokyo Grand Castle from the telecenter building in Odaiba after going there gathering in the Old Tokyo Tower,Metatron will carry 3 attackers while she will transport 2 attackers,after they arrive Fuuko will drop off the 2 attackers she's transporting with Metatron and leave the area before Gale Thruster runs out of fuel after which Metatron will give the signal to Crow through their link to tell him to go to the UNF,Tezcatlipoca will be distracted by Crow logging in and the 6 attackers will use that chance until to destroy the 6 crowns which will release Tezca from its tamed state and stun it after which Crow will fly away using the safest route he could use and the attackers will withdraw using the west entrance.

KYH thinks they're putting too much burden on Metatron who just recovered and Fuuko agrees with her but her Gale Thruster can't reach Tezca's head or chest so she can't help with destroying the crowns,KYH attempts to once again volunteer as an attacker to ease Metatron's burden but her motion was rejected by everyone causing her to sulk,Haru then tells Fuuko about his conversation with Metatron about how the escape portion of the plan is impossible to accomplish because none of the attacker Linkers are capable of escaping in time on their own so Metatron will transport the other 5 to the old Tokyo Tower once the escape portion starts to which Fuuko could only smile apologetically and decides to prepare a mountain of cakes for Metatron as an apology for making her do so much.

After the meeting is finished,the attackers logged into the UNF to meet up with Graph and Metatron in the old Tokyo Tower before going to the telecenter building in Odaiba,because the height of the building is 20m higher than Tezca,Raker can serve as an extra transporter by taking off from there and go back to the mainland with fuel to spare,Haru wishes he could help them by being a transporter but now he has to wait for Metatron's signal for his part in the infiltration,according to previous experiments,it seems that after chanting "Unlimited Burs","t" can be delayed to about 2 seconds.If you focus on the limit,you can reduce the delay to 0.1 second which is 1 minute and 40 seconds in the UNF.Haru asks Chiyu if they can suspend club activities for the trip and while Chiyu can suspend hers,Taku probably can't because the timeframe for the Kanto kendo conference is in August so Haru considers inviting Heir for the trip if Taku can't make it,at 10:59 Haru begins counting down and at 10:59:58,he spoke the command for Unlimited Burst while holding back the "t" until he heard Metatron activating her ringtone as the signal after which he finished the command.

Chapter 13
Crow dives into the <Spirit Realm> stage of the UNF,since this is a Light attribute stage then Metatron's parameters will increase and there's no stage hazards that will hinder flight,while the damage of ranged attacks will be reflected in this stage since all of the attackers uses swords that's not a problem,Tezca has reacted to Crow's spawning ahead of the appointed time and goes to crush him with its hands,Crow wanted to get away but he needs to stay put to attract its attention,at this point the 6 attackers arrives,Crow then used Light Shell to cover Tezcatlipoca in the barrier so Toxcatl's gravity attack won't affect him,Metatron begins the attack by destroying the crown on its chest with Pile and Heir destroying the crowns on the wrists shortly after,Lavender and Sentry then destroyed the crowns on the abdomen and the waist using 3rd stage IS and finally Graph destroyed the last crown on Tezca's head using <Elucidator>,all 6 crowns of The Luminary are destroyed in 0.5 seconds and Tezca is now stunned from being freed by The Luminary,it'll take at least 7 seconds for Tezca to recover so Crow uses Light Speed to fly away and Metatron transports the other attackers by levitating them,just when everything goes well until changes started to happen to Tezca,with it forming a mouth in its face to unleash a roar that the destroyed the surrounding area around it.

It is at this point that Crow realized their biggest mistake:the crowns of The Luminary doesn't actually dominate Tezcatlipoca,it actually limited Tezca's power from the <God of the End> to the power of a Super Class Enemy so that Cosmos can tame it so by restraining and taming Tezca,Cosmos actually saved everyone from being on the receiving end of the <God of the End>'s power in the previous volume.

The shockwaves of Tezca's roar reached Crow which torn apart his wings and reduced 80% of his health which caused him to fall on the roof of Heimvald Castle which reduced his health by another 10%,just when he began to stand up the shockwaves reached Metatron which had also torn apart her wings and caused her and the other 5 attackers to fall to the ground,Crow attempted to draw Tezca's attention by using Laser Lance on its head but it only form a 5cm dent to Tezca's head,and since the <Spirit Realm> Stage's effect of reflecting ranged attack damage didn't activate then the Laser Lance Crow just used didn't do any damage to Tezca's health at all.

As if to laugh at Crow's efforts,Tezcatlipoca uses <Miccailhuntontli> on the 6 attackers which has the power to equal Suzaku's flame breath,Graph managed to get up and spins Lux and Umbra together to use <Spinning Shield> to protect the other 5 from <Miccailhuntontli>'s flames,Crow attempts to take advantage of the opening made by Graph by equipping Metatron Wings but at this time Tezca fired a black sphere with purple sparks from its abdomen which reminded Crow of Seiryu's sphere from V14,Pile gets up and cuts the sphere in half but the 2 halves captured Pile by merging together and Crow realized to his horror that Tezcatlipoca can use Seiryu's Level Drain attack which fires a black sphere that homes in on a Linker and drains their level and BP,Pile's level has now been lowered from 6 to 5(welp,Taku's wish to reset his Duel Avatar's level got granted in the worst way possible because they're all going to die and Bell isn't around to reverse the Level Drain),Crow falls to despair because by doing this operation instead of waiting until the time appointed by Cosmos to give her his answer,he has ruined his and Pile's promise to fight again once both of them reached level 7,if he had accepted Cosmos's offer then they could at least survive and fulfill their promise even though they will be on opposing sides.as Pile's level gets lowered from 5 to 4,Tezca lifts its right hand to activate Toxcatl to deliver the final blow and Crow cuts off his left leg which reduced his HP to a single pixel to get out of the rubble so he can use Light Shell to protect them from Toxcatl but he can't gather enough photons from his Light Cube in time and at this moment,just like how Snow Fairy sensed him in the Highest Level,he felt from his soul that someone is watching this tragedy from the Highest Level and so he decides to concentrate his consciousness to enter the Highest Level instead of trying to draw photons from his Light Cube.

Chapter 14
Crow arrives to the Highest Level to see the stars representing Pile,Graph,Heir,Metatron,Sentry and Lavender in their respective colours and a giant mass of swirling energy that represents Tezcatlipoca,compared to the massive energy that swallows everything like a black hole,Disaster MK2 is just a stardust despite the accumulated negative IS it has.A voice then asks Crow if he feels helpless when faced with that kind of power and Crow then turns around to see White Cosmos and asks her if she foresaw this happening,Cosmos tells him that she only foresaw him trying to sneak out but she didn't foresee the destruction of the 6 crowns which had been applied Fire Invalid,Physical Invalid and Corrosion Invalid and that she programmed Tezca to restrain Crow and his helpers using Toxcatl until she arrived at the scene,despite their disastrous performance in the escape attempt Cosmos congratulates NN for surpassing her expectations for the first time by destroying the 6 crowns,Crow is angry that his foolishness has put his comrades into the worst situation,had he went to the Highest Level to observe Tezca to see the massive amount of energy it emits then he would have rejected the operation and stayed put until the appointed time but Cosmos tells him that even if he went against it,KYH and the other NN members would still go to rescue him even if he pleads to them to not rescue him,Cosmos acknowledges that the greatest strength of NN is the bonds between its members but because those bonds will drive them to help each other in times of danger it can be said that their greatest strength is also its fatal weakness to which Crow can't refute what Cosmos pointed out because he knows she's right.

Crow asks Cosmos if its true that the end has come because of his foolishness to which Cosmos replied that the reason why she had an opportunity to tame Tezca is because it was in the middle of its activation sequence after Inti gave birth to it and that opening has long passed but there's still a possibility to stop it because of all the Burst Linkers that existed only she has the possibillity to stop it,Crow asks her why she can do that and Cosmos tells him that it's because she was once swallowed by Tezca a long time ago(so maybe Cosmos played in AA or CC and fought Tezca only to die to it then?),Crow asks Cosmos to stop Tezca and save Graph,Pile,Heir,Sentry,Lavender and Metatron to which Cosmos rhetorically asks him why she would save them when they want to wipe out Oscillatory Universe from Brain Burst?,Crow tells her that in exchange for their lives he will accept her offer and transfer to Oscillatory but Cosmos tells him that while she's willing to spare Metatron in exchange for his transfer,his acceptance of her offer doesn't have the same value as the opportunity to eliminate the other 5 Burst Linkers(Heir,Sentry,Lavender,Pile and Edge) including Graphite Edge who is possibly even stronger than her and the other kings,Crow tells her that all he can offer,his loyalty is just and that his life will be hers to decide in exchange for the other 6's lives to which Cosmos began to consider accepting the compromise Crow offers to her after sensing his sincerity,at this point Metatron appears in the Highest Level to tell Cosmos that she will be joining Oscillatory with Crow,Crow pleads to her to stay in NN to protect KYH and the others but Metatron reveals how lonely she felt in the 10 years of recovering her full power because of how he never called out to her for help or to even talk with her so she decides to stay with Crow instead of NN since from the beginning her contractor is him and not the Black Legion,Crow and Cosmos accepts Metatron's decision to stay with him and Cosmos then states the terms for their compromise:in exchange for Crow and Metatron joining Oscillatory Universe,Cosmos will spare the lives the other 5 Linkers after she stops Tezca to which Crow(who apologizes to KYH) and Metatron accepts by kneeling to her to swear their allegiance,Crow brings out Lucid Blade and Cosmos uses it to make Crow her knight,from now on he will obey only her orders and die only for her if it's necessary and Crow accepts it,the volume ends with Cosmos putting down the sword after knighting Crow and focuses her attention to the giant energy that represents Tezcatlipoca with an unreadable expression.

Spoiler for Afterwords stuff:

-Yes,despite what happened in this volume as you read in the summaries,V25 marks the end of the Vs White Legion Arc.
-Kawahara's comment to the ending is "Cosmos,are you sure you want to let him join your Legion,Haru won't stop being Haru you know?,lol".(i.e he's totally going to stuff behind Cosmos's back just like with KYH and will attempt freeing Cerberus despite joining OU)
-Next arc is called Seventh Artifact Arc so The Fluctuating Light is going to be the focus of the next arc.
-1 Book/year is still the norm for AW releases unfortunately.
-Nothing in the afterword implies that Haru and Metatron joining OU is going to be undone in a few volumes so for now assume that this is going to be the status quo for the next arc.
-Curiously,Kawahara never mentions anything about "look forward to KYH's reaction to the developments in this volume's ending" in the afterword which indicates that she and the rest of NN for that matter,won't find out about Haru and Metatron's compromise next volume,though they'll eventually figure it out anyway after several volumes.
-No comments about why Haru and Metatron are NN members in Infinite Burst when they joined Oscillatory nor was there any confirmation that Infinite Burst takes place after Seventh Artifact arc,which probably indicates that they won't formally join OU and instead act as Cosmos's agents inside NN without anyone outside OU knowing about it and that Seventh Artifact arc will probably include Infinite Burst in its time frame.

Spoiler for My comments on V25:

-Well,i didn't expect the volume to end that way,though the JP and Chinese AW fanbases never expected that to happen considering their reactions so we're all in the same boat.
-It's too late to clear the Imperial Palace even if Oscillatory and the ARS unites with the other Coloured Legions even with all that power?,what the hell is going on in the background of things?
-Cosmos specifying that Crow and Metatron will obey only her orders means that Tower/Vise,Reaper and Behemoth can't order him and Metatron around because they'll take direct orders from Cosmos just like Tower/Vise who is the one managing both the Seven Dwarves(thus making it super obvious that his Seven Dwarves title is Doc even though it hasn't been confirmed yet) and the ARS.
-Bell unfortunately wasn't there when Pile got Level Drained so she can use Citron Call Mode 2 to give back his BP so he can respec but there's still hope:Seiryu states in V14 that the BP she drains gets converted to resources for the maintenance of the Imperial Palace,so if Cosmos manages to tame Tezca before it can absorb and use up Pile's BP then he can probably get it back if Cosmos is feeling generous and orders Tezca to give Pile's BP back.
-Surprised UW is still active if it really is the 4th world considering the world of AW acts as if the reveal of Alice,UW and artificial Fluctlights never happened.
-Welp,Haru vs KYH is pretty much confirmed in the future and it's not for the reason(fighting over who gets to be Level 10) people thinks it will happen.
-Mirror Masker's Fluctlight copy still existing confirms that even if the RL person dies,the backup will still be preserved so Glass Monarch's Fluctlight backup should still be intact in the Main Visualizer though considering how his Duel Avatar is inert in the Mito Art Tower dungeon means that the duplicate can't use the Duel Avatar unless the copy and RL self syncs and viceversa which explains why Ivy Capture's ressurection using Insoul Copal at the end of Dural Magisa Garden didn't turn out as expected because Ivy's copy and RL self isn't synced yet to complete the revival though Seri can help with that.
-Mirror Masker's Fluctlight contacting Crow in a place connected to him isn't that bizarre,we know Blossom's Fluctlight copy still watches over her BB Children(well Megumi at least) even though she's trapped inside the Star Caster(and still is up to this day) and even contacted her in the RL even outside the initial acceleration phase in V10 so it's not a stretch that a Fluctlight Copy that's awake in the Main Visualizer can contact a Linker in a place connected to them in RL.
-Considering how pessimistic Cosmos is about the idea of cooperating with the other Legions(but not to the point of hating and looking down on it),i'm guessing she used to play Cosmos Corrupt and got killed by CC's God of the End(likely had a different name considering Cosmos said the names in the 3 games are randomized) when the excess cooperation caused the Administrative AI to activate it which really soured her opinion on cooperation because it got everyone killed and finding out what happened at the end of Unital Ring didn't help.
-Unital Ring's events took place in 2026 while the A vs B war took place in 2029 which also shoots down the "AW splits from SAO in the Alicization arc" theory,so while Unital Ring's conclusion is separate from the A vs B war that doesn't mean Unital Ring won't lead to the events of the war.
-On one hand,Haru has to work against NN and the other Legions from now on,but on the other hand he's in a position to get closer to the truth,he can finally talk with Cavalier,Fairy and Behemoth like he wished to in V23,get close with Cerberus (though Argon is going to be a problem considering she is Cerberus's Parent) and he can go to the Minato districts that OU still has without being attacked by OU members now that he's on their side so it mostly balances out aside from the inevitable trust issues with his friends in NN,Prominence,Leonidz and Great Wall.
-Utai's intuition is really sharp considering how she got it right that something irreparable will happen.
-Kinda interesting that Haru's dream is more like a vision instead of a nightmare,if this really is a vision of the past then it gives more credence to the Haru is an ex-Assault Linker theory the chinese fanbase made.
-Cosmos turning out to be not coming off as malicious as she's hyped up to be by KYH(mainly because of heartbreak from being betrayed by her sister) and Graph(probably has ulterior motives?)was pretty surprising,at this point we have to learn her PoV regarding why she drove KYH from her home and her true feelings regarding her sister and what is Graph's problem with her instead of relying on what KYH and Graph says about Cosmos.
-I wonder if each of the 3 trial worlds has their own Isotopes assigned to them,if so then does AA and CC has 2 other versions of Graphite Edge in them or if their Isotopes are copies of other people than Kirito.
-The fight against Genbu got offscreened and skipped over(literally no description of how it went) while Byakko didn't even show up when Crow and Raker tried to break through their gate in V18 because Suzaku's Hate towards Crow caused it to appear and attack him first before Byakko could even spawn so the only Holy Beasts that actually showed up in person so far is Suzaku and Seiryu.
-Tower's Vise form being shown as a black star when it should be an ivory star is strange indeed,maybe instead of alternating between 2 forms of 1 Duel Avatar,maybe Tower can use 2 Duel Avatars(Ivory Tower and Black Vise) in 1 BB program?,is it because Tower used to play either AA or CC and Vise is actually his Duel Avatar back in the accelerated game he used to play and he somehow recovered it for use in BB?,it could explain why the name Black Vise doesn't show up when he's using that avatar,it's not because the name Black Vise is self-proclaimed but because Black Vise's Fluctlight doesn't exist in Brain Burst's Main Visualizer but in either AA or CC's and that's why the name doesn't show up.
-V24-25 explains why Oscillatory members with the exception of Crow and Metatron is nowhere to be seen in Infinite Burst,with both OU and ARS members going dark on the Global Net,no one can duel them to uninstall their Brain Burst in the Low Level and with Tezcatlipoca under their control(especially after the disastrous rescue operation in V25),no one can invade their HQ in Minato in the UNF to infiltrate their territory and eliminate any members that are active there all the while being ignorant that the one who saved the other 6 kings is now a secret Oscillatory member.
-Given how Cosmos accepted Crow's compromise,it's possible Milady made a deal with her to let her leave Oscillatory under certain conditions though Oracle probably isn't out yet considering only Milady is confirmed to leave but i'm sure we'll find out in V26.
-Thinking about it,if Crow,Cosmos and Tower really did used to play in the other accelerated worlds,then it's possible Cavalier,Fairy,Behemoth,Jigsaw and Argon are actually ex-AA/CC players who escaped being killed by the God of the End by never going to the Mean Levels of AA/CC and retained their programs after the torture device killed everyone but them,it actually explains their behaviour a lot,they fell to despair after everyone they loved and cared about,both Linkers and Beings including possibly Fairy's contracted Being was killed by the God of the End and lost all of their memories as a result and the survivors doesn't know how to restore them,so all of dubious acts they did to Brain Burst and the Burst Linkers is now put in a new light:it's not only for the sake of bringing back the AA and CC players,but also to give the Burst Linkers and the Beings of Brain Burst a different conclusion so the tragedy that befall AA and CC never gets repeated to them(if this is true,then it means that when Cosmos said to Milady and Oracle that she'll bring back Blossom when she took them under her care even though she sacrificed their Parent to prevent the premature end of Brain Burst,she genuinely meant it because she lost people important to her when the God of the End destroyed the accelerated world she used to play in and once Oscillatory's goal is accomplished,she'll bring back Milady,Lavender,Sentry and Oracle's BB parent and Chrome Falcon as an atonement for the tragedy which created the curse of Chrome Disaster that lasted for 7000 years),as for Vise/Tower,he has a possible connection to the Virtual Research Society so even though it's possible he's an ex-AA/CC player,he's still fundamentally different from the other OU members including Cosmos.
-AW23-25 takes place in July 21-22,AW24 is July 22-23,AW25 is July 23-24 so only 3 days left before the events of Infinite Burst in July 27-August 1 and 10 days before the Return to Forever side story where Nyx fuses with Nitride Unica,so the beginning of the Seventh Artifact arc should take place in July 24-26 at earliest unless Reki decides to kickstart the next arc's events after Return to Forever.
-1 possible time limit for the Seventh Artifact arc is August 24th,because that's the last day Haru can be convicted by KYH and Niko and once August 25th comes,there's nothing stopping Cosmos from formally making Haru and Metatron into Oscillatory members.

Here's crossing fingers that we would at least get V26 on August next year.