C-Rank Ranked Match — The Girl Called Tsubasa

I was eight the first time I understood I was the protagonist. My mother dragged me along to a child-actor audition, someplace I’d ended up only because I went wherever the moment swept me, and still Tsubasa charmed every last person in the room. A script only just pressed into her hands, a place she had never once set foot in, and still Tsubasa turned in a flawless performance. The other children there, I’m sure, never went to another audition again in their lives.

Sports, studies, art, singing, romance: in every last one of them, things went exactly as Tsubasa wanted.

The first time she ever touched a soccer ball she juggled it a hundred times without a single drop, and full marks on a test came from nothing more than listening in class. Draw a picture and it placed in the contest; sing a song and the applause came thundering down. She got on well with everyone, and boys and girls alike were head over heels for Tsubasa.

I won’t go so far as to say the whole world moved as I willed it. But at the very least, everything within Tsubasa’s reach did just as she pleased.

What led someone like me to start Infinity-Space was an invitation from some background-mob classmate whose face I can’t even remember.

“Tsubasa. Want to give Infinity-Space a try?”

I’d never once played a game, so I decided to simply go along with it and see.

My first impression, once I’d started, was just this: ‘Right. Of course this is how it turns out.’

In the end, even inside the game I was a prodigy, and the bosses everyone called insurmountable, the players everyone called strong, I could tie them all in knots with ease. The girl who had invited Tsubasa in had, at some point, jumped ship to another game.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t dislike overwhelming the people around me. People love to say ‘overwhelming power is boring,’ but it’s nothing of the sort. I love grinding others to pulp with sheer talent. That look on people’s faces when they gaze up at me, that resigned, given-up look, I love it beyond all reason. Pretty low of me, I know, I’ll admit it. Yeah, to put it without mincing words, the Tsubasa of those days had let it all go straight to her head.

And it was in the thick of all this that I met her.

Shiina. Tsubasa challenged her, this girl everyone hailed as a true powerhouse, and lost outright.

“You have a fine arm. If it pleases you, would you care to join the team I belong to?”

Without a trace of triumph, that girl put the offer to her.

What an infuriating brat, I thought. It galled me to the very core.

It was the first time in my life I had lost so unmistakably, and the first time I had ever met a person who would not bend to my will.

Once we were on the same team, the more I came to know Shiina, the more I found myself sighing. The very opposite of Tsubasa, and clumsy with it. Not clumsy with her hands; clumsy in the very grain of her character. She butted heads with her teammates time and again, and every time, Tsubasa was the one who stepped in between. Well, that clumsiness and that obliviousness were a part of what made her endearing, too.

Her character aside, in combat she truly was excellent. Her play was exactly what the word ‘flawless’ was made for. She had a particular gift for analysis, and against an opponent whose data she had mastered down to the last figure, she never once lost. I challenged her over and over, and I lost over and over.

It’s far too embarrassing to ever say aloud, but… Shiina, to Tsubasa, you were a ‘goal.’ You, the first person ever to defeat Tsubasa, were something special to her.

And that is exactly why I could not forgive what she said.

“I will say it plainly: Shiki’s natural gifts surpass mine, and yours. Beyond all doubt.”

What made me furious about those words was not that she called Shiki’s talent greater than Tsubasa’s. It was that she placed Shiki above Shiina.

I need you to stay strong, properly, or it puts me in a terrible bind. You are the first person who ever beat Tsubasa, so you had better take proper responsibility and go on being strong. Conceding a loss of your own accord? That is genuinely out of the question.

“…So I’ll prove it. For your sake.”

That you are strong. That Shiki ranks below you.

That Shiki is a nobody, nothing at all beside Tsubasa… every last bit of it, I’ll prove.

“Come on down, Shiki. Right here — this lake — is the final stage for Tsubasa and the rest of us.”

The top floor of a high-rise apartment block called Moonlight. In one of its rooms, before an enormous screen, two people sat on a sofa.

One was an expressionless girl; the other, a woman smiling with a wine glass in one hand. Both were silver-haired, their features closely alike. Both were young, and at a glance you might have taken them for sisters, and yet…

“So that’s the girl you mentioned — the one who holds the key?”

“Mm. That’s the one, Mom.”

And each of those sofas was worth a good two million yen.

On the screen were Shiki and Tsubasa: footage from the Ranked Match now underway.

“Hmph. From where I’m sitting, this shield girl over here looks like the one with the real gift.”

“But that girl hasn’t come to the moon.”

“Not coming to the moon doesn’t mean she has no gift for it. That thing does no more than read the genetic data it pulls off a full-dive rig, run its analysis, and send the ones with high full-dive aptitude up to the moon. What Infinity Burst calls for isn’t full-dive aptitude — it’s aptitude for this game itself. That shield girl’s aptitude for the game runs remarkably high, and her brainwave-control precision in particular is superb. Anyone who falls below a certain line there can never, ever reach Infinity Burst.”

Seika listened to her mother and ignored every word of it. The talk of Tsubasa drew not a flicker of interest from her; that was simply her way. Her gaze stayed turned, single-mindedly, on Shiki.

Seika and Tsubasa lived in much the same world. Two of a kind, each of whom had trampled others underfoot with overwhelming talent… which was likely why her curiosity toward Tsubasa ran so thin. Any sharp mind would naturally be drawn to a creature whose true nature couldn’t be grasped, over one whose nature was more or less plain.

And it was just as natural to be drawn to a girl so utterly unlike herself: plain, inward, unremarkable, and yet holding some unfathomable strength.

“Infinity Burst — forcing the brain’s black box wide open to grant a preternatural sense of things… If a great many others besides you should appear who can bring it out, then one day, perhaps, it may finally be cleared. This piece-of-shit game that man left behind.”

“…Yeah.”

Seika gazed at Shiki, there on the far side of the screen.

“I believe in you. Shiki.”