Accel World - Volume 18 - Chapter 11.2

2

Naturally, she had school on weekdays, so she could only help with the evening preparation, but on Saturday mornings, she was full-on in the kitchen, and in the afternoons, she changed into her waitress uniform and worked the counter.

Mihaya wanted to focus on making cakes, but her aunt thought she should also get experience in customer service if she was going to become a pâtissier. It was pretty difficult for her to smile in a friendly way, but once she tried it, she also enjoyed working in the front. Especially when she saw the children with their eyes shining before the many-colored cakes lined up in the showcase, and her heart was filled with a mysterious warmth.

The problem was that the uniform her aunt proposed was the modern maid look, but she’d been forced to accept it when Kaoru told her it was the design her late mother had sketched during their student days. It was surprisingly very popular with the other two counter girls, and after wearing it for three years, she’d gotten used to it.

The strawberry labyrinth Mihaya had decorated in the morning—her aunt had baked the cake—was essentially sold out by three in the afternoon; there were only two slices left. A little on edge, she kept glancing at the clock on her virtual desktop when, right before her shift was ending at three thirty, she heard a synthetic chime modeled after a doorbell.

Slipping into the shop before the door was fully open was a small girl in a white blouse and a navy pleated skirt. The uniform of the elementary division of the boarding school Mihaya had also attended.

“Welcome.” Her internal relief and anticipation couldn’t have been audible in Mihaya’s voice, but the girl met her eyes and smiled mischievously. The red hair tied up on either side of her head swinging, she approached the showcase on quick feet and peered in, almost pressing her freckled nose against the glass.

Listening with a smile to the sound of the tablet and other educational materials shifting inside the red backpack, Mihaya waited for her order. That said, she already knew what the girl would have.

“Yesss!” The instant she spotted the two remaining slices of strawberry cake, her face lit up. “There’s some left! Can I have a labyrinth?!”

“One piece of strawberry labyrinth, yes? Please wait just a moment,” she responded politely—she definitely couldn’t just say “gotcha” when she was in uniform—but omitted the eat-in or take-out question. She readied a plate rather than a box and opened the refrigerated case.

As she carefully moved a piece of the labyrinth to a plate with a cake server, she heard the chime of the automatic door once again. Then the sound of multiple feet approaching forcefully together with energetic shouts.

“I’m doing the strawberry larynx!”

“I want strawberry, too! Loads of strawberries!”

The new customers were young girls, about five or six years old. A woman who was likely their mother entered the store behind them. After Mihaya called out “Welcome,” she left the rest of the customer service to the other waitress and started to move toward the register. But there, she anticipated another problem.

The two girls, apparently sisters, had simultaneously realized that the “strawberry” in the case was the last slice. They looked at each other and fell silent as if measuring the timing before crying out in unison.

“I want strawberry!”

“No! I said it first!”

“Noooo! Strawberryyyyy!”

Tears immediately sprang up in the eyes of the younger sister, and the mother came up behind them with a furrowed brow, likely about to say something along the lines of “You’re the older one. You need to be nice to your sister.”

And then the girl with the red backpack who had ordered the labyrinth first smiled lightly as she said to Mihaya, “Sorry, order change. One cherry tart.” She gently patted the head of the child in tears squatting next to her. “C’mon, look. There’s two strawberries now.”

Mihaya quietly moved back to the case and returned the labyrinth plate. Once the case was closed, the younger sister’s eyes grew wide.

“There’s two! Mommy, there’s two strawberries!”

The redheaded girl stood up with a smile and gave a light bow to the mother, who was dipping her head apologetically.

Mihaya took the cherry tart off another shelf and set it on a plate before moving to the register once more, feeling a sad sort of pain.

The girl who had ordered the strawberry cake first was in sixth grade. Compared with the kindergarten-aged sisters, she was much older, but she was still of an age where the world in general regarded her as a child. No one would have reproached her for not giving up the cake she’d been looking forward to for a whole week.

But she wouldn’t—or couldn’t—ignore the tears of a child in that situation. Any such childishness had long ago disappeared. The subjective time the eleven-year-old girl had experienced was most likely far greater than that of sixteen-year-old Mihaya.

When she walked over to the register terminal on the right edge of the counter, an accounting window popped up in her vision.

The redheaded customer also glanced at the display stating that one tart was 430 yen, and then, after a moment’s thought, said, “Please add an iced milk tea.”

“Very good.” Nodding, she added a drink set from the menu window. With the total now six hundred yen, the girl touched the confirmation button, and ka-ching! They heard a sound patterned after an old cash register.

The register terminal on the counter could also accept cash—that is, physical money—but this feature was used perhaps once a month. In this era, for the majority of people, money had become nothing more than a number their Neurolinker displayed in their field of view. If you linked your e-money account with your bank account, it would even automatically recharge your balance.

But Mihaya knew that the six hundred yen the redheaded girl paid for the tart and iced tea was money saved up from the meager allowance the school gave her. And that this Saturday afternoon teatime was basically the sole luxury she permitted herself.

When the accounting window disappeared, Mihaya pushed back the ripples in her heart and said, “It will be just a moment, so please take a seat.”

“Okay.” The redhead grinned and walked over to the eat-in area set up in a corner of the shop.

Mihaya watched her small back for a second and then began to prepare the tea in the mini-kitchen on the opposite side of the register counter. In exchange for not being able to eat the labyrinth, she wanted her to at least enjoy a delicious cup of tea.

When the clock had gone a little past three thirty, the waitress for the late shift took over, and Mihaya was done.

Walking toward the door at the back of the shop with the sign that read STAFF ONLY, she glanced at the eat-in corner. The redheaded girl was racing her fingers across her virtual desktop at a table by the window, having long since finished the tart, but perhaps sensing Mihaya’s gaze, she lifted her face. Seeing Mihaya, she nodded lightly and picked her backpack up from the seat next to her.

The waitresses at the counter didn’t so much as blink when the girl went through the door out into the back room with Mihaya. They’d been told the girl was from Mihaya’s old school (this was actually true), and Mihaya helped her study every Saturday evening.

In the back, there was the office and a washroom, as well as a changing room for the staff, but Mihaya passed by these and walked right to the back. With only twenty-five minutes before four o’clock, she didn’t have the luxury of taking her time to change clothes. She unlocked the door in the far back and let the girl go in ahead of her.

There was nothing but a low table and a sofa in the center of the nine-square-meter room. Back in the café days, this room had been used as a private party space, but Mihaya used the excuse that a cake shop had no need for that, so it had become dead space that she currently used for her own purposes.

The instant the door was locked again, the redheaded girl cast aside the air of an honors student she’d projected up to that point and threw herself onto the sofa headfirst. Kicking and flailing her legs and feet in white socks, she groaned strangely, “Unnnnnh.”

Mihaya’s mouth started to spread into a smile, and she pulled it back in before speaking. “If you’re that upset about it, you should’ve just eaten it.”

“I’m not upset!” A childish shriek came back at her immediately. “Just changin’ my unfinished strawberry business into kinetic energy!”

Eventually, she stretched out her legs with force and flopped onto her back, locking her hands behind her head. “And anyway, if I was upset, that’d be, like, you know…not nice to Chef Kaoru, since she made the cherry tart. That tart was super-tasty, too, after all.”

“…It was.”

The girl seemed to have intuited it from Mihaya’s reaction alone. She lifted her head slightly and stared with large eyes that looked green in the light. “Did you maybe make the labyrinth today, Pard?”

Asked so directly, she couldn’t wiggle away. Careful not to change the expression on her face, she replied briefly, “Just the deco. Chef made the cake.”

“…You did…Sorry for giving it away.” The girl sat up and started to bow her head.

“You don’t have to apologize,” Mihaya offered quickly. “In fact, I have to thank you. If you hadn’t given the cake up, Rain, I’m sure those kids would’ve cried.”

“Crying makes kids stronger. Or that’s what Chef Kaoru would say, I guess.”

This time, Mihaya did smile a little at the reply and announced crisply, “From now on, I’ll be finishing all the labyrinths on Saturdays.”

“Oh! Then I’m excited for next week.” Grinning, the girl shook her red pigtails once before recomposing herself. “’Kay then. Better get this Territories strategy meeting started. I guess Helix’s attacking today, so we let out guard down, and they’ll eat us up.”

“K.” Mihaya answered briefly and took a deep breath to switch mental gears. From a cake shop waitress to the Submaster of the Legion Prominence, Blood Leopard.

She sat on the sofa and pulled XSB cables out from the home router installed in the back of the table. Because this strategy room was shielded against electromagnetic waves, they couldn’t connect to the global net without a wired connection.

She inserted the plug into her Neurolinker, and the girl did the same thing on the other side of the table. And then the leader of Prominence, the Red King, Scarlet Rain, the one and only Yuniko Kozuki, raised two fingers of her right hand. Not a peace sign, but a signal for the start of the countdown.

“Two, one.”

In time with the brief words, Mihaya chanted the magic command she had been taught four years earlier.

“Burst Link.”