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 T AVERN I NN B LINK & B RINK 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: W ARNING! D ON’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.”
“Ahh…And when you pick up a relic, that’s it?”
“In the beta, they would come back whenever they took the server down for maintenance…but since they started the game for real, there’s never been any kind of service period where they stop the server…”
“You know, you’re right…When they take online games like this down for maintenance, what exactly are they doing?”
This might be a question more on the real-world side, but she figured it was safe to ask. Kirito pressed his fingers to his temples and strained to remember.
“I feel like I read about this once…They check the software and hardware for damage, then fix or replace it if they find something, update the program with bug fixes, then restart the server…I think?”
“So there’s lots of stuff they do. And…that’s all necessary, right? How is SAO fine running for two months without maintenance?”
“Sadly, I do not know,” the swordsman answered, smiling wryly as he looked up toward the floor above. “If they cluster the servers, they can perform rolling maintenance where they switch them out individually without stopping service…but the problem with a game is ensuring that the chronological logic doesn’t get mixed up. But in SAO ’s case, Kayaba clearly designed it knowing he would turn it into a deadly trap, so obviously he had a plan for it all along…I just can’t guess how it works from here.”
She was starting to lose sight of his train of thought, so Asuna quickly took advantage of his break in speech to say, “Th-thanks. Anyway, at the moment, that means it’s possible that any relic that gets picked up will never reappear on the ground.”
“Potentially.”
“In that case, it’s even more important we don’t waste our time! Plazas and temples, you said? Let’s go!”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming. If you turn left up ahead, there’s a pretty good ruined temple to plunder…Ah, ma’am, please don’t run in the halls!”
But Asuna had already darted off for the unseen ruins ahead.
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