Accel World - Volume 18 - Chapter 11.1

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She painted the clear glaze on the strawberries spread out on top of the cream. The strawberry jam mixed into the glaze gave it a light-pink hue. She wasn’t particularly good with red liquids, other than food or drink, whether they were aromatic oils or detergents, but she wasn’t bothered by this faint saturation. She moved her hand quickly yet neatly to make the many strawberries shine with a brilliant luster.

Once she finished that task, she spun the marble turntable around and checked how it looked. The No. 6 size cake—eighteen centimeters across, in other words—was covered in pure-white cream with rings of strawberries arranged on top. The cream beneath them was laid out in a narrow lattice, which was where the name of the cake came from: le labyrinthe de la fraise, or the strawberry labyrinth. The selling point of this one was that when a piece was cut, there would be three strawberries on it.

Having finished her personal check, Mihaya Kakei lifted her face and spoke to the woman in her forties mixing cheesecake batter to her right. “Could you take a look?”

The woman—Mihaya’s aunt Kaoru Himi—set her bowl on the workstation and came over. She spun the cake around and smiled. “This is great, Myah. I’ll leave the rest of the labyrinths to you.”

“…N—” In her great relief, she very nearly said “NP” but quickly corrected herself. “Thank you.”

Once her aunt nodded and returned to her station, Mihaya let her mouth relax just a little. She didn’t normally smile that often, but she couldn’t help it just now. This was the first time she’d been told a cake she’d finished could go out into the store as is.

She moved the strawberry cake into the fridge and set a sponge cake on the turning table. She painted it with a palette knife, a bowl of fresh cream tucked under one arm.

Her movements were bold and delicate, but the important thing was the rhythm. In making a cake, in operating an electric motorcycle—and in fights in that world.

Her mind threatened to wander off, and she pulled it back to the cake in front of her. Today was Saturday, the day she visited the shop. The order was always the strawberry labyrinth. So the cake Mihaya was making now would go into her mouth. Any imperfections in the presentation might have an effect on the Territories in the evening. Of course, being one of the Kings of Pure Color, she wouldn’t stand directly on the battlefield, but she had the important job of putting together the teams and proposing the strategies to defend Nerima and neighboring Nakano.

And now she was here thinking about that again. Her aunt, the chief pâtissier, was very strict when she was wearing her chef coat, and if Mihaya did her work absentmindedly, she would send rebukes flying her way immediately. It had been over two years already since she started in the kitchen as an apprentice, but she still got yelled at a lot more than she got complimented.

But that was NP. That was the kind of person her aunt was, so Mihaya could relax and leave the kitchen in her hands. She’d never once felt anxious about the business she’d inherited from her father since she’d remodeled it into a Western sweets shop.

Yes. Mihaya, in tenth grade this year, was an apprentice baker cum waitress at Patisserie La Plage, and also the owner/operator.

Her father had run a café in Nerima’s Sakuradai neighborhood but passed away suddenly four years ago from an incurable heart condition called idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy. It was the fall of Mihaya’s twelfth year.

Although it was indelicate, Mihaya was surprised at the number of relatives who appeared at the funeral. Her father had been a playboy who loved coffee and motorcycles and had been treated like the black sheep of the Kakei family, many of whom worked in conservative industries, so they’d had almost no contact with his family.

She somehow made it through her duties as chief mourner and fell into a daze, but she wasn’t given the time to chew on her sadness at home alone. At the first meal after the funeral, her aunts and uncles immediately began to discuss her future.

Her father, on his sickbed, had created a formal will after talking with a reluctant Mihaya any number of times about what would happen after he died. Because her mother had passed away a long time ago, Mihaya would inherit the land and store in her father’s name and his considerable amount of savings. Additionally, the national conservatorship law applied, and Mihaya would enter a full boarding school in Nerima until she graduated from junior high. That was all in the will.

When Mihaya told them this, the aunts and uncles cried “Unthinkable!” as one and insisted that a child needed a family, that one of them would take her in. Mihaya said she didn’t want to leave the house, and they tried to tear her down with logic.

Inheriting property cost an incredible amount in taxes, so they told her she should take this opportunity to dispose of the house, the land, and one bright-red Italian electric motorcycle. They would carefully manage the money for her until little Mihaya came of age.

Now that some years had passed, she believed that they had spoken with good intentions. No matter the household, the burden of taking in a child who was about to start junior high was large. So Mihaya was actually surprised at the number of relatives who said she should come live with them. She had been surprised and grateful but had no intention of becoming the child of the people who hadn’t understood her father and his way of life.

Mihaya held off on answering them right then and there. She told them she was too sad about the death of her father, and the day had been long and exhausting; she needed a little time to think. The aunts and uncles agreed to this reluctantly, exchanging looks with one another, and went back to the hotel in Ikebukuro after telling her they would come again the following evening.

The next morning, Mihaya started to move. She went to see her aunt, the only one of her father’s four siblings who simply disappeared when the funeral was over, Kaoru Himi.

When she went to visit her aunt, the pâtissier at a cake shop at a major Akasaka hotel, she did not ask her to take her in, as her father had told her to. Instead, she headhunted her. She said she was going to renovate the café her father had left her to open a Western-style cake shop, and she wanted her aunt to be the chief pâtissier.

She didn’t think her aunt would simply say yes when she had a position with responsibilities at a famous kitchen. Mihaya had resolved to give up on the idea if she asked three times and got a no three times, but her aunt asked her only one question.

“Are you making the café a Western cake shop to bring me in?”

“No, that’s not it.” Mihaya rejected this immediately. “It was my parents’ dream to open a cake shop there. Until my mother got sick and passed away when I was a baby.”

Her aunt had thought about it for a full minute before finally replying briefly, “All right.”

Not long after, Mihaya had asked her aunt why she had so readily accepted this large request, one that would change the course of her aunt’s life, who was still in her thirties. Kaoru had given her an answer with a smile:

Mihaya’s father, her aunt’s younger brother, had told her nothing except “If something happens, take care of Mihaya.” And back when Mihaya’s mother was newly married to her father, she and Kaoru had exchanged a promise to help each other out when they opened their own cake shops. This was long before Mihaya was born, when her aunt and her mother were studying at the same cooking school. That was when Mihaya first learned that Kaoru was the one who had introduced her mother to her father.

The other aunts and uncles definitely did not seem pleased by this choice, but it was no longer at the stage where they could voice any objection. That evening, they all went home to Osaka or Sendai, and in their place, Aunt Kaoru and her daughter, Mihaya’s cousin two years her junior, came to visit the house/shop in Sakuradai. She had absolutely no idea that this cousin would change her life as definitively as her aunt.

Her aunt opened the door toward creating the cake shop that had been her parents’ dream. Her cousin gave her a world to sublimate the sadness she’d been pushing down for so long.

Her name was Akira Himi. She’d been in fourth grade at the time, but with her very short hair, hoodie, and twill pants, together with the simple shape of her glasses, she had a slightly androgynous air.

Only the adults had been part of the procession at her father’s funeral, so it had actually been two years since she’d seen Akira. For elementary school students, two years was an incredibly long time, and Mihaya and Akira were both far from chatty, so Mihaya felt a little awkward when they ended up alone at some point.

But Akira was almost mysteriously calm, and after staring at Mihaya for a moment with her quiet eyes somehow reminiscent of the bottom of the sea, she offered her a certain something. Not a physical object, but a program. The key to releasing her soul and accelerating.

In the strange world she visited in the garage behind her house sitting alongside Akira on the seat of the large motorcycle, Mihaya finally cried. She cried and cried and used up a lifetime’s worth of tears.

In the four years since then, Mihaya had not shed a single tear. Not in the real world, not in the Accelerated World.

She didn’t have the time to cry. The hours flowed past with a ferocious speed. Even when her mind was accelerated a thousand times, that flow did not stop. She had to keep running straight ahead at the limit of the speed she could produce. Like a leopard racing lithely through a grassy field.