10 THE PROCESSION FROM TOLBANA TO THE LABYRINTH tower prickled at Asuna’s memory. After a few minutes of mulling it over, she finally realized what she was remembering. The school field trip from this January. They’d traveled to Queensland in Australia. Her classmates were thrown into a tizzy by the shift from midwinter Tokyo to blazing midsummer on the Gold Coast. They were rapturously excited, no matter where they went. There was nothing—not a single thing—that linked the two experiences, but she felt the atmosphere emanating from the forty-odd players marching through the tree-lined path was very similar to her schoolmates’. Endless chattering, frequent bursts of laughter; the only thing that seemed different was the presence of monsters that could burst out of the trees at any moment. But with these confident warriors, they’d be able to dice up any foes in seconds. Asuna and the swordsman at her side were at the rear of the procession. She turned to him and started up a conversation, choosing to overlook the atrocity that had occurred the night before. “Hey, before you came here, did you play other … MMO games? Is that what you call them?” “Um… yeah, I suppose.” He bobbed his head, still a bit intimidated. “Does traveling around in other games feel like this? You know… like a hike …” “Ha-ha. I wish,” he laughed, then shrugged. “Unfortunately, it’s not like this at all in other titles. See, if you’re not in a full dive, you have to use a keyboard or a mouse or a controller to move around. You barely have any time to type anything in the chat window.” “Oh … I see …” “Of course, there are also games with voice chat support, but I never played any of those.” “Ahh.” Asuna tried to imagine a mob of game characters running silently on a flatscreen monitor. “I wonder … what the real thing would feel like.”
“Eh? Real thing?” He turned a skeptical glance on her. She tried to describe the image in her head. “I mean… if there really was a fantasy world like this one … and a bunch of fighters and magicians teamed up on an adventure to defeat a terrible monster. What would they talk about on the road as they traveled? Or would they just march in silence? That’s what I mean.” “……” The swordsman fell silent for a few awkward moments, and when Asuna finally looked at him, she became aware that the question she’d posed was actually quite childish. She turned away and tried to mumble a brief “never mind,” but he spoke first. “The road to death or glory, huh,” he murmured. “If the people made a living of doing that, I bet it would be no different from going out to a restaurant for dinner. If you have something to say, you say it. If not, you don’t. At some point, I bet these boss raids will be just as ordinary. Assuming we can do enough of them to make them that way.” “Heh … ha-ha.” She couldn’t help but giggle at the silliness of that statement, then apologized quickly to cover it up. “Sorry, didn’t mean to laugh. But … that’s really weird. This place is the polar opposite of ordinary. How can you make anything here become normal?” “Ha-ha … Good point,” he chuckled quietly. “But today makes it four whole weeks in here. Even if we do beat this boss, there are ninety-nine more floors ahead. I was expecting this to take two, maybe three years. If it lasts that long, even the extraordinary will become ordinary.” Once, the enormity of those words would have thrown Asuna into shock and despair. But now the only thing that blew through her heart was the dry wind of resignation. “You’re very strong. I don’t think I can do that—survive in here for years and years … That’s much more frightening to me than dying in today’s battle.” The swordsman gave her a brief glance, thrust his hands into the pockets of his gray coat, and murmured, “Y’know, there’ll be even nicer baths on the higher floors, if we can get there.” “… R-really?” she asked without thinking, then gasped. She fought down her rising embarrassment and gave him a quiet warning. “So … you remembered. In that case, I’ll be feeding you an entire barrel of sour milk.” “Which means you’ll have to survive this battle first,” he shot back, grinning.
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