2

AFTER SEVEN IN THE EVENING, THE TWO DECIDED to return to town.

The main city of the fifth floor, Karluin, was built in the center of a huge swath of ruins covering the southern end of the floor. It was meant to resemble a settlement of newly arrived people reusing a fallen city of centuries past.

Compared to the crisscrossed canals of Rovia on the fourth floor, there was barely any water here, but thanks to perhaps some busy NPC cleaners, it also wasn’t particularly dusty. The buildings, made of darkened stone blocks, were crumbling here and there, but the center of town was full of leather and canvas tents that bustled with chaotic liveliness.

“…It’s kind of hard to tell where the safe haven boundary is…” Asuna mumbled, after the words appeared abruptly in her view.

When the notice disappeared, she turned back to look at the path they’d taken to get there, which was surrounded by half-crumbled stone walls. But there were no arches or other visual cues that suggested the boundary of town. It would be important to remember the spot by sight so that they could escape into the safe haven if they ever got into trouble with monsters beyond its borders.

Beside her, Kirito nodded and said, “Yeah, that’s the thing. In the beta, people stacked wooden boxes and stuff to serve as the marker, but they’re treated as abandoned objects, so they wear out and eventually disappear…”

“Ahh…Couldn’t you just stack something cheap and durable? Would anything fit the bill?”

“Sure. The crumbled blocks lying all over the place.”

She looked at where Kirito was pointing and saw a number of square stone blocks scattered around the path. But given that they were the same material as the walls, stacking them up wasn’t likely to draw her or Kirito’s attention.

“…Guess we’ll just have to keep our eyes open.”

She resumed walking, trying to imprint the view of the area into her brain.

As they approached the center of Karluin, the first sound to arrive was the piping of a flute in the style of some kind of European folk music, followed by the lively chatter of voices. Over a day had passed since they activated the teleport gate, and many players had come through it from the lower floors.

“Hmm…I don’t see the DKB or ALS,” Kirito muttered as he scanned the crowd from the entrance to the square. That surprised Asuna.

“You’re usually the one trying to avoid them. Are you going to invite them to dinner or something?”

“You could say that.”

Now she was truly stunned. “Wh-what in the world has gotten into you?”

“Well,” he said, smirking with one cheek, then scratching his head with a finger, “I was hoping to catch one of the more reasonable guys, like Shivata or Hafner, and ask them about Morte again. He didn’t take part in the third- or fourth-floor boss fights, so he probably left the guilds…but maybe I can learn something about his story and what he did while he was still a member.”

“Ahh…” she replied flatly, but deep down, she recognized that if the clumsy, antisocial swordsman was going to these lengths, he really had to be worried about the possibility of a PKer loose in Aincrad. Perhaps she ought to help with collecting information…but then a thought occurred to her.

“Oh, right…Why not ask Argo?”

It was the obvious choice. Argo the Rat, info broker extraordinaire, would surely know all about Morte, down to where he lurked.

But Kirito looked conflicted. “Actually…I bought info on Morte from Argo once already. But that was on the third floor, just before he challenged me to that duel…I doubt she would have undertaken that job if she knew how dangerous he was,” he grunted.

“Huh? Why wouldn’t she—?” She started to ask it, only to understand halfway through.

Argo was a talented information dealer, with the quickness to slip past all the monsters to reach the boss chamber of a labyrinth, but her (expected) gear and skill choices had to be noncombat focused. Kirito was concerned for her safety.

“…I’m sorry. Of course, you’re right. This is a player killer we’re talking about; you can’t just go asking her to stick her neck into danger,” Asuna mumbled. Kirito gave her a meaningful glance.

“Wh-what?” she asked.

“Um…maybe you should repeat that to yourself,” he said, a mixture of blunt rudeness and concern. She blinked in surprise.

“Of course, I’m not thinking of doing this investigation on my own, okay?”

“As long as that’s clear,” Kirito said. His expression struck her as one of a younger boy doing his best to act like an adult. She couldn’t help herself from reaching over and knuckling the shoulder of his black coat.

“Wh-what?”

“Nothing,” she said, and stretched her hands up overhead. “Ahh, I’m hungry! Show me the way to a restaurant that’s good, not crowded, and clean on the inside.”

“That’s a tall order.”

Kirito shook his head in annoyance, thought it over, then grinned.

“All right, I think I know just the place.”

After a few minutes of winding through suspicious-looking storefronts left and right, Asuna no longer had any idea where she was. She opened her map screen from the menu, but it was still a new area to her, so the surroundings were grayed out, and the most she knew was that she was on the southern side of the town.

It would be the same for Kirito, but he weaved his way through the maze of alleys without hesitation. Given that the beta was a whole four months ago, his memory was impressive.

“Do you have the layout of all the cities up to the tenth floor memorized?” she asked him suspiciously as they walked.

He shrugged. “Not all of them. My memory of Rovia was pretty vague…but I kind of liked Karluin. I made this my base for about ten days.”

“What? Why wouldn’t you pick Rovia instead? At least that place was much prettier—oh. Right, in the beta…”

“Exactly. The canals were just roads in the beta. But I still don’t know if I’d make my home in Rovia now…I bet I’d get real tired of not being able to get around without a boat.”

“I suppose you’ve got a point…”

She glanced around. At some point the shops had trailed off and the lanterns thinned out, leaving only the ruins around them. There were no players or NPCs on the path with them.

If this were the real world, she would never consider walking alone with a boy in the dark after sunset like this. She’d never had anything like a boyfriend, so the situation normally called for her caution radar to be operating at maximum output, but with the defense of the system’s Anti-Criminal Code and her trusty rapier at her side, she was surprisingly unconcerned. In fact, she was even a little excited to see where he was taking her.

They spent another five minutes following Kirito’s radar, through wooden doors and arches, until a gentle light appeared ahead.

Set into the stone wall at the end of the narrow alley was a wooden door with lanterns on either side and a small sign planted in front. The walls were too high to tell what was on the other side of the door, but at the very least, it seemed to be a business.

Asuna trotted the last fifty feet, leaving Kirito behind so she could read the sign. It was made of a flat sheet of black stone, with the name TAVERN INN BLINK & BRINK carved into it. The day’s special was written in English below the name, with white chalk.

“Blink and Brink…? Let’s see, I know the word blink in English…but I’m not sure about the other one…” she muttered, glancing down the menu, then noticed a small warning in Japanese at the bottom. It read: WARNING! DON’T RACE INTO THE BUILDING.

As she pondered the meaning of that one, Kirito caught up to her and reached for the door.

“You’ll see inside what they mean by ‘brink.’ After you.”

He pulled the cast-iron ring on the door. A cold gust of wind emerged from within, and Asuna turned her face away. When it died down, she cautiously peered in.

A square terrace lay beyond the door. Ahead and to the right were iron railings, while the left side connected to the restaurant. Wood repairs replaced the crumbled stone ruins, and when combined with the large country-style window, the atmosphere felt delightful. But Asuna’s gaze was drawn back to the terrace ahead.

She passed through the doorway and crossed the stone terrace, weaving around three cast-iron tables until she reached the edge and grabbed the stomach-high railing with both hands.

“…What…is this…?” she muttered to herself hoarsely. Kirito came up next to her and leaned against the railing.

“Well, it’s the sky.”

But that was such a simple word for what she saw.

Her vision was full of the night sky, black as ink on the right and transitioning to navy, indigo, purple, and finally the deep red of sunset on her left. Up above was a crowded, starry tableau, looking ready to rain down light at any moment. Below was an endless sea of clouds, glowing faintly with the starlight from above.

She gazed at the stunning sight, feeling a numbing thrill run through her from the top of her head to the tips of her toes.

When she looked closer, she saw a flock of large birds flying slightly above them. They slowly crossed the sky from east to west until they disappeared in the curtain of stars.

Asuna lost track of how long she’d been standing there, but then her brain kicked back into action. She blinked and murmured, “Of course…‘Brink’ as in the ‘brink of a cliff.’”

“That’s my guess. I had to look it up in a dictionary back in the beta,” Kirito replied.

She glanced around again.

The high walls on either side of the terrace curved gently, each side covering the base of a mammoth pillar that stretched all the way to the bottom of the floor above, three hundred feet away. As the name suggested, they were at the very brink of Aincrad itself.

“…I’ve never been this close to the edge.”

“And not since the beta for me…There’s a jutting observation deck down in the Town of Beginnings on the first floor, but I’ve hardly been back there.”

“…Just to confirm—what happens if you jump over this railing…?”

“Hmm…”

He didn’t respond at once. Kirito leaned his upper half over the railing to peer down.

“H-hey!”

She instinctively grabbed his coat collar and pulled with all her strength. Kirito gagged and returned upright to the terrace with a strained smile.

“Look, I’m not going to try it.”

“Of…of course you aren’t! Don’t go thrill seeking, now!”

“Sorry, sorry. When I fell from the outer edge in the beta, I got the ‘You are dead’ notice in midair and then resurrected in Blackiron Palace. Well, I bet it’s just the same now, except there’s no resurrection. But the fence and terrace are indestructible objects, so they’re much safer than they would be in the real world.”

“Well…you’re right about that, I suppose,” she grumbled, letting go of Kirito’s coat.

The swordsman held up a finger and added, “Oh, right. In the beta, someone raced through the doors the moment they opened, hoping to order a limited-supply dish with a buff effect, but couldn’t make such a hard left turn to the restaurant soon enough and plunged over the railing. So watch out for that.”

“…I guess that’s what the warning on the sign was for…”

She recalled a scene from about twenty days earlier.

In Urbus, the main town of the second floor, there was an enormous cake with a buff effect called the Tremble Shortcake. Stat effect aside, there was nothing better than eating a massive shortcake with spongy filling, dollops of cream, and scads of strawberries, without a single calorie to worry about.

The memory of the cake activated her sense of hunger, and Asuna pulled on her partner’s coat gently this time.

“Come on, let’s eat. Since we’re here, we might as well eat on the terrace.”

“Of course. The outside tables were a huge hit during the beta, mostly for dates. You have no idea how lonely it was to wolf down food for the buff effect surrounded by those types,” Kirito grumbled, sitting down at a chair on the table closest to the edge.

Asuna took the seat across from him and replied, “Well, you should be happy, knowing that you finally came with someone else…”

When she saw the odd look on her temporary partner’s face, she realized her mistake. Feeling her ears grow hot to the very tips, she smacked the cast-iron table hard.

“I-I mean, not that! This isn’t a date, just so we’re clear!”

Before Kirito could react to her statement, the door to the restaurant on the western side of the terrace opened. The game probably registered her striking the table as a signal for service. An NPC waitress wearing a black apron hurried over, bowing and welcoming them, then placed two glasses of water on the table.

“Have you decided on your order?”

“Ah, just a minute…”

Asuna picked up the menu of parchment fixed to a bronze plate. The waitress was a virtual NPC, so there was no issue with forcing her to wait—or so Asuna had thought until half a month ago, when she met the dark elf Kizmel. Now she felt like every NPC had its own mind and emotions, whether they were high-functioning agents like Kizmel or simple town NPCs without AIs, like this one.

The menu was written in both English and Japanese, so she let her sight and intuition work for five seconds before making her decision.

“I’ll have the chèvre leaf and ten-cheese salad, the piping hot gratin soup, and the poro-poro bird roast, with a bread roll.”

She was going to hand Kirito the menu next, but he held up a hand and said, “I’ll have the same, plus a bottle of ficklewine, and two blue-blueberry tarts and coffees after the meal.”

The waitress repeated it back perfectly, then left. Asuna let out a long breath.

“…When you come up to a new floor, you don’t know what all the foods are like, so it feels like gambling when you order.”

“You sounded pretty decisive to me.”

“I did my best to avoid the new-sounding names,” she said, glancing at the menu once more. A question popped into her head. “Did you order that limited-supply buff item?”

“Of course.”

“What effect does it have?”

“I’ll leave that for you to find out,” Kirito answered, grinning. Asuna fixed him with a glare, deciding she’d make him test the dishes first for poison.

Just like that, the food arrived.

To her relief, the salad, soup, and main dish were all largely as she’d anticipated. Kirito pulled the cork out of the wine bottle with his fingers and poured the golden liquid into Asuna’s glass.

She’d thought the name sounded weird when he ordered it, but it looked just like an ordinary white wine—except that when Kirito poured it into his own glass, the wine was pink and bubbling.

“…What kind of trick is that?”

“It’s not a trick or sleight of hand at all,” he said boldly, setting the bottle down with a smirk. “This wine changes at random between red, white, rosé, and sweet, dry, or sparkling each time you pour it. Hence the name: ficklewine.”

“So you wound up with a sparkling rosé. I got…”

She lifted the glass, clinked it to Kirito’s, and took a sip. The sharp chill and subtle flavor was a pleasant stimulation to her sense of taste. It was a lot like the white wine she’d tried in the real world, but of course, here there was no alcohol content.

“…a dry white. Mmm, that’s good.”

“Ahhh…” Kirito murmured, watching her closely. She arched a questioning eyebrow at him, and he looked away, clearing his throat awkwardly.

“Er, I…I wondered if you had experience drinking wine.”

“Well, a bit, just for the taste…” she started, then stopped when she realized it was bordering on real-world information again. And quite a sensitive topic: If she made him think she had wine regularly, that would mean she was above twenty, the drinking age. Asuna had turned only fifteen just over three months ago, and it felt weird to imagine someone seeing her as five years older than that. In truth, she’d had no more wine than whatever she sipped from her father’s or brother’s glass at home.

“J-just a bit, really. Didn’t you take sips of your father’s beer, too?”

“Well, sure. Though it was my mom’s beer…”

Kirito looked to the right, toward the night sky. Asuna followed his gaze and, after a few moments, opened her eyes wide with a start.

She hadn’t noticed it at first, because there were so many stars in the sky, but now that she looked, she could see a line of three stars: Orion’s Belt. That meant the large red star to the left was Betelgeuse, the sparkling star far to the left of that was Procyon in Canis Minor, and two stars below, pale Sirius from Canis Major—the Winter Triangle.

“…The same constellations as the real world’s…”

Asuna shut her eyes tight and lowered her head.

The stars were virtually invisible from her home in the Setagaya ward of Tokyo, but the mountain air of her mother’s parents’ home in Miyagi was clear and crisp, providing a vivid view of the stars. One winter night, she’d gone out in heavy clothes so that her grandfather could teach her the names of the stars. That childhood memory returned in brilliant clarity, shrouded in a painful nostalgia that jabbed at her heart.

She put her hand to her breastplate and sensed that Kirito was going to say something. She shook her head.

“Don’t say anything.”

“…”

“…I don’t want to think about the real world. I’m Asuna, level-16 fencer. If I don’t keep believing that, I’ll go back to the old me who couldn’t fight…”

The words coming from her throat were so faint that even she could barely hear them. After a few moments, a calm voice replied, “Yeah…I get it. Sorry.”

She shook her head again, implying that it wasn’t his fault. Eventually the pain in her chest left her, and she took a deep breath before raising her head.

“No, I’m sorry…Come on. Let’s eat, before it gets cold.”

The meal, which they consumed in a bit of a rush, was quite good overall.

The salad leaves contained a faint hint of mayo, and when they took the lid off the soup, it was indeed viciously bubbling away. The poro-poro bird crumbled into soft pieces with just the poke of a fork, but all told, it was an enjoyable meal. When she finished her third glass of wine—this one a sweet rosé—the waitress brought out the desserts.

“…It looks just like a normal blueberry tart. Is this the…?”

“Yep. The limited-supply buff dish.”

The color of the berries seemed a little too vivid (probably the source of the extra “blue” in the name), but with the only light coming from the four lanterns hung at each corner of the terrace, it was hard to tell. Once she had seen Kirito happily pack away the first bite without any sign of poison or curses, Asuna worked a triangular piece out and lifted it to her mouth.

“Oh…it’s good,” she blurted. Under the fresh, sweetly sour blueberries was a layer of thick custard cream, which went well with the crisp tart crust.

Of course, it didn’t have the size of the Tremble Shortcake, but it was hard to say which flavor was better. She finished the dessert in a blissful haze, took a sip of coffee, and sighed with satisfaction. As she did so, an unfamiliar effect icon appeared in the upper left of her view.

Inside the square icon was the image of an open eye. It was probably some kind of boost to sight, but she didn’t feel like her eyesight or night vision had improved markedly.

“…What is this buff?”

“Look at the terrace floor,” Kirito said. She leaned over to look at the stone floor beneath the table. As she scanned it, she noticed something shining dully at the edge of the terrace.

“…There’s something over there…”

She stood up and walked toward the glowing object—a small coin.

The glowing effect stopped once she picked it up, but the shine of the reflected lantern light did not go away. It was an old silver coin.

But the image stamped on the side wasn’t the familiar icon of Aincrad on the usual hundred-col coin. It was a new symbol of two trees standing next to each other. On the other side was just an odd crest, with no numbers whatsoever.

She returned to Kirito and held up the coin.

“It’s just an unfamiliar coin…What is this? Why was it shining?”

She sat down and clunked the coin onto the table. Kirito snatched it up, gave it a quick glance, and nodded, spinning it in his fingers.

“These ruins are made up of remains—the buildings and roads that constitute Karluin—and one other very important element. Do you know what that is?”

She grumbled, feeling like she was being questioned by a history teacher. With her studying mind in gear for the first time in ages, she tried to come up with a reasonable answer.

“…Artifacts?”

Kirito flipped the coin with his right thumb and nimbly caught it in his left hand.

“Close! Well, you’re basically right, but the answer is ‘relics.’ Remains and relics combine to make ruins…By which I mean, Karluin isn’t just these ancient roads and walls—it’s littered with little relics like this. The story hasn’t picked up yet, but within a day or two, there will be hundreds of players from below coming up here to scrabble for relics all over the city.”

“Ooooh…”

She couldn’t help but look back down at the floor. There was a fresh glow at the base of the south-facing railing, so she rushed over to scoop it up.

“…This one’s copper.”

The double-tree symbol was the same, but the brown coin was a bit smaller when she placed it on the table next to the first. Now she could feel her body itching to look for more of them. Kirito smirked at her.

“Just be careful of getting hooked on relic hunting. In other games, you’d have a little minimap with the item locations listed, and they’d glow on the screen, but in SAO, they’re just lying on the ground…It was even hard to find that huge Fossilwood Branch, so you can imagine how difficult it will be to find these tiny coins around.”

“Huh? But it was glowing for me…” she started to say, then realized it was the buff effect of the blue-blueberry tart. “Oh. So this eye icon means…”

“Yes. That’s a bonus to relic finding, and it only works inside and below Karluin, but it will help you quite a bit by making the coins and jewels glow—”

“Jewels?” Asuna asked, cutting him off.

“Er…y-yeah. The gold coins and jewels are super rare, so even with the buff, it’s pretty difficult to find them. Even rarer are the magic rings and necklaces…”

“Rings? Necklaces?”

“…Y-yeah.”

Asuna glanced away from the awkward-looking Kirito and down at the silver and copper coins on the table. After five seconds of internal struggle, she admitted, “I want to hunt for relics, too.”

It probably wasn’t the most ladylike of actions, but when she was in kindergarten, she remembered attending a building completion ceremony, where she trotted around picking up all the ritual mochi dumplings they scattered to bless the finished construction. That had earned her a vicious scolding from her mother, so picking up items in a virtual world was nothing at this point. Besides, they’d paid money for the tart’s effect, so there was no point in letting it go to waste.

She stared back at her partner, who was looking more skeptical by the second, and asked, “Is there a problem?”

“N…no, it’s nothing…”

“In fact, why do you look so unmotivated to do this? Knowing you, I would have thought you’d recommend snatching them all up before the town got crowded.”

“H-how rude…and, well, accurate,” the swordsman reluctantly grumbled. “I love doing stuff like this, too, but I have some tragic memories from the beta…Then again, as long as we stick to the town, it should be fine…”

He came to some kind of internal consensus and got to his feet, pointing at the table.

“By the way, these Karl Coins can be converted into col at an NPC exchange merchant in town,” he added, scooping up the coins.

When the NPC waitress came to clean up their dishes, they gave her an automatic “thanks for the meal” and headed back through the big door. There were still no players in sight, but once the buff tart was included in Argo’s strategy guides, that queue from the beta would return.

“How long does this buff last?” Asuna asked as they departed.

Kirito put on a face like an adult reassuring a small child. “There’s no need to panic. We have an entire hour.”

“You mean only an hour! Oh, right…can you order those tarts for takeout?”

“Unfortunately, the buff only works if you eat it in the restaurant. Just one per customer, thirty made a day.”

“Ahh…So you couldn’t buy them all up and resell them for a huge profit,” Asuna muttered. Kirito pulled away in mock horror.

“Wow, even I wouldn’t stoop that low!”

“I…I didn’t say I would do it! I’m just saying, it’s a good thing that’s impossible!”

Even as she poked the shoulder of his coat, she was careful not to take her eyes off the ground. For now, she didn’t see any glowing objects.

“…There were two on that terrace earlier, but I’m not finding any out here…”

“There aren’t many relics on the pathways. And basically zero in NPC stores and buildings. The places to go are the open plazas here and there, the temples, and the really ruined spots that the residents don’t use.”