Sword Art Online – Progressive - Volume 7 - Chapter 3

3

WE ENCOUNTERED ALMOST NO MONSTERS FROM that point until we were done crossing the three-mile Verdian Plains.

The moment we crested the final hill, Asuna exclaimed “Ohhh!” and ran a few steps forward.

Before our eyes was one of the—if not the—most elegant and beautiful cities we’d seen in Aincrad thus far. It was like something out of a fantasy world—well, it was in a fantasy world, but even still.

The city sloped gently downward to the left, with all the pure-white stucco houses arranged on descending levels. The larger dwellings had roofs painted a pristine deep blue, and they shone in the golden light of the sunset like bonfires. It was stunningly beautiful. In the beta, it was made of gray stone like the main town, so the entire place had been renovated for the official release. Beyond the bottom row of houses was a white-sand beach with emerald-green water.

This was what I wanted to show her, and it worked. Asuna stood still in amazement, then exhaled and murmured, “It’s beautiful…Just like Santorini…”

“Santorini…? Is that a real place?”

She looked at me, rudely awakened from her momentary dream. “Yes, it’s a real place. It’s a Greek island in the Aegean Sea. There’s a town there called Oia that’s identical to this one.”

“Uh-huh…” I was tempted to ask if she’d actually been there herself but decided against it. Instead, I asked, “Then maybe they modeled it after that one. Is Oia famous for having casinos?”

“Hmm…I’ve heard that there are casino resorts in Greece, but I don’t think there are any on Santorini.”

Again, I decided against asking her how she knew that. Instead, I shrugged amicably. “Interesting. Well…Look there, on the far side of town.”

I was pointing to an especially large building, looming all the way on the other end of the layered town. On either side of an octagonal building with a cobalt-blue roof were towers with conical tops. It looked like a palace. That was the Volupta Grand Casino, the place that inflicted joy and despair on so many players in the beta test.

“…That’s the place?” Asuna asked.

I nodded. “Yes. Listen to me, Asuna—that casino’s going to test our willpower in every way possible. Don’t get too heated, but don’t be too timid. Stay calm but be bold…”

“Yeah, yeah. I get it,” she said, clamping her hand over my mouth to stop me from talking. “Let’s go earn three hundred chips, enjoy some time at the beach, then go and see Kizmel.”

“………Yes, ma’am.”

She removed her hand from my face, then began to walk down the hill.

Volupta covered about as much space as Lectio, the main town of the floor, but it was at least three times as busy.

The moment we passed through the white stucco gates, we were met by lively shouts and enticing smells from the carts, restaurants, and pubs on either side of the main street. I told myself that we’d just eaten that delicious chicken rice and kaphrao in Lectio, but that was already six hours ago. The unplanned hunting session had worn us down a bit, and the evening was approaching, so this was a good chance for an early dinner, I supposed.

“Hey, Asuna…”

“Hey, Kirito,” she replied. I held up my palm, motioning for her to go first. She blinked and said, “I’m sure the casino is open late. Should we eat first?”

“Open late? It’s open twenty-four hours.”

“Oh…”

“But I’m with you on eating. What should we get?”

“What’s good around here?” she asked for the second time that day.

I had to think about it; in the beta, the majority of the time I spent on the seventh floor was consumed by this town, but I had few memories of the food here. That was because I had been busy ignoring my earlier advice to be “calm and bold,” electing instead to be “panicked and cowardly” and generally making a mess of myself.

“Uh, well…I’ll let your instinct and knowledge and general luck with food lead the way here, Asuna.”

“I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean…But okay, I guess,” she murmured, looking skeptical but also a bit pleased with herself.

Because of the slope, the north side of Volupta was uptown, where the homes were, and the south side was downtown, where business occurred. Virtually all the places to eat, however, were located along the main street that ran east to west through the center of the town.

It was also arranged so that the farther you went down the street toward the Volupta Grand Casino, the fancier the places got. The prices the luxury restaurant across the street from the casino charged were absolutely preposterous by the standards of the seventh-floor economy.

Belatedly, I started to panic at the thought of Asuna choosing that place in particular. Fortunately, her white-leather boots came clicking to a stop about a third of the way down the street.

With its wide-open doorway and mix of indoor and outdoor seating, the establishment seemed more like a café than a restaurant. There was much clinking of utensils and glasses coming from the bright interior—and plenty of lively chatter. I didn’t mind that kind of atmosphere, but it didn’t strike me as Asuna’s kind of thing.

“You sure you want this one…?” I asked hesitantly.

A moment later, I heard an especially loud voice shout, “Don’t hold back, boys! This one’s on me! Order all ya want!”

There were cheers and whistles in response.

“You’re a good man!”

“With a spiky head o’ hair!”

“Three more large ales over here, ma’am!”

“Make it four!”

“And two sausage assortments!”

Asuna and I shared a look of foreboding, then walked to the entrance and peered inside.

The interior wasn’t particularly large, featuring just two tables in the middle. But they were spacious ones, packed with players wearing familiar equipment colored dark iron-gray and moss green. We didn’t need to see the guild tag on their cursors. They belonged to one of the two big advancement guilds, the Aincrad Liberation Squad. In the center of the table on the left, chugging a large mug, was their spiky-haired leader, Kibaou. Around him were other principal members of the guild, like Okotan, Schinkenspeck, and Hokkai Ikura.

“How are they already here…?” I muttered.

Asuna sighed. “Were they already on their way here before us…?”

Since they didn’t pass us on the Tailwind Road, it was the only possibility. That meant ALS had stayed at an inn in Lectio last night, then left first thing in the morning to get to Volupta.

Lectio was a boring town, it was true, but there were a fair number of quests to do, with some pretty good hunting areas, too. Unlike with a smaller and nimbler guild, it was too easy for the members of a larger guild to start to drift apart in terms of levels. You’d assume they would want to spend an entire day around the first town of a new floor just working on leveling up. So why did they rush out of town at the first opportunity, and why were they carousing here with drinks?

Neither Asuna nor I could answer that question. Just then, there was another cheer from a different group behind us.

“……?”

We turned to look at the other side of the street. There was a restaurant there about the same size, if marginally more elegant. We trotted across the street and peered through the window because the doors were closed.

“To today’s victory!” said a voice. It was followed by a chorus roaring, “Cheers!”

Filling the seats around two large tables were a group of players wearing metallic-silver and cobalt-blue clothing. It was clearly the other of the two main guilds, the Dragon Knights Brigade.

Standing alone in the back of the room and raising a mug of ale was a thin man with long hair tied into a ponytail. That was their guild leader, Lind. Nearby were Shivata and Hafner, two of his guildmates.

“The DKB, too…But why…?” Asuna asked.

“And why are they toasting and drinking at this hour?” I wondered.

“He said something about ‘today’s victory.’ Did they beat a field boss or something?”

“I don’t think there were any FBs worth celebrating around Volupta,” I said, earning a cold look from Asuna for the lazy abbreviation.

She pulled back from the window. “Well, I would assume that both guilds have come here for the casino, but I can’t help but wonder why they chose competing locations right across the street from each other. It would be nice to figure out what’s going on, before they wind up dragging us into it.”

I had no qualms with that. We’d suffered from the DKB and ALS’s battle over the guild flag on the fifth floor, and the race to beat the floor boss on the sixth floor, so if they were butting heads over some new advantage, I wanted to know what was going on before it got out of hand.

That left just one person to consult, of course.

“She’s probably here in this town, too. Might as well get in touch,” I muttered. Asuna’s face lit up as she nodded.

The response to my request to meet in person came two minutes later.

I’M IN A HOT SPOT RIGHT NOW. CAN IT BE IN FIFTEEN MINUTES? I’LL SEE YOU AT A PLACE CALLED POTS ’N’ POTS ON THE SOUTHWEST SIDE OF THE FOUNTAIN SQUARE.

Asuna read the message over my shoulder and wondered, “Hot spot…? Like, for earning experience points?”

“I doubt it’s that…”

“Then what is it?”

“You’ll have to ask her yourself,” I said, closing the window.

The fountain square in question was located where the east-west main street intersected with a grand staircase that went north-south up the hill; it was less than a hundred meters away from our present spot. If we walked straight there, it would take less than five minutes, so we took our time checking out the various places to eat on either side of the road, arriving at the square after another ten minutes.

The plaza was, according to my research, the third-best tourist spot in Volupta, following the casino and the beach. It wasn’t all that large, but there was a statue of the bird-headed goddess of luck in the fountain, where pure water flooded out of the natural rock at her feet to form a circular pool around her.

When Asuna got closer and peered through the metal fence around the fountain, she let out a gasp.

“Look! All those gold and silver coins!”

As she said, there were tons of glittering coins at the bottom of the water, shining in the light of the fires all around. If I was remembering correctly, it seemed like there were far more coins than the last time I’d seen it.

“Don’t jump in to scoop them up, or the guards will kick you out.”

“I’m not going to do that!” she protested, jabbing me in the side. “It’s lovely, though…like Trevi Fountain.”

“Oh, even I know that one. It’s in Rome, right?”

“Correct. I’ll throw in a coin, too,” said Asuna, pulling two silver coins from a little pocket in her belt pouch.

“What?! You’re throwing in two hundred col?! There isn’t any buff from this fountain.”

“I don’t care!”

She glared at me once again, then, for some reason, turned her back to the fountain and tossed the coins in over her shoulder. They splashed in the water and sank, wavering downward until they sat atop the piles on the bottom.

“…You didn’t have to throw both of them…”

Two hundred col was enough for five extra-large plates of Min’s chicken and rice in Lectio, I thought, frustrated. But Asuna just sighed and explained, “At Trevi Fountain, there’s a saying that the number of coins you throw in will change the wish it grants.”

“Oh yeah? How so?”

“One coin means you’ll be able to come back to Rome. Two coins means you’ll be there with that special…”

But she stopped abruptly and clamped her mouth shut, looking away.

“You’ll have to look it up on your own to learn the rest.”

“How am I going to do that in Aincrad…?”

“Once we’re back in the real world, you can do an Internet search or whatever.”

“It’s going to be a while, then,” I said, thinking to myself, I’m sure I’ll have forgotten about it by that point. Then I glanced at the right corner of my view. “Uh-oh, one more minute!”

“Oh, that’s right.”

We left the fountain and rushed to the southwest part of the square. There was only a sightseeing-guide area there, however, and no shop called Pots ’n’ Pots.

“Hmm, nothing here…Is it on another corner?”

“No. Hang on.”

I tugged on the sleeve of Asuna’s tunic, my nose twitching. I thought I’d caught a very faint whiff of something tantalizing on the night breeze.

“…This way, I think…?”

I led us south, down the grand staircase through the town. Despite the name, the steps were about ten feet long and thirty feet wide, with flower beds in the middle. It was really more of a street that happened to be made of steps. At the end, ahead of us, was a large gate, with the beach and ocean (lake, technically) just past it, followed by the outer aperture of the floor and the infinite sunset beyond. It was a tremendous view, but now was not the time to admire it.

I headed down the staircase, pulling on Asuna’s sleeve all the while, then took her down a narrow side route to the right. Directly behind the sightseeing-guide area from earlier, there was a little sign. In loopy handwriting, it did appear to say Pots ’n’ Pots, but I didn’t know what it was supposed to mean.

“Oh! This is it!” Asuna exclaimed, just as I heard some faint footsteps. A small figure came rushing up to us at high speed from the other end of the alley and came to a stop before we could even react.

“Sorry, sorry. Twenty seconds late!” said the figure, a small player in a sand-gray hooded cape—the info broker, Argo the Rat, bowing.

Asuna yanked her sleeve out of my grasp and took a step forward. “No, it’s fine,” she said happily. “We just got here ourselves!”

“Ah, I see. It’s been a while, A-chan…Or has it? It was only last night, huh?” Argo said with a shrug.

I waved my hand and said, “Hey. Sorry to bother you when you were in your hot spot.”

“Nah, it’s fine. It was the right place to quit anyway.”

“Did you win?”

“A fair bit. I’m only doing a preliminary investigation today.”

It was at this point that Asuna awkwardly interrupted, “Ohhh, when you said it was a hot spot, you meant at the casino? Were you betting, Argo?”

“Now, when ya put it that way, it sounds like I was doin’ something criminal. Just a little gambling, more like.”

“That’s the same thing,” she said.

Argo grinned and chuckled, then patted Asuna on the elbow. “C’mon, don’t be a stick in the mud. I gotta start sellin’ the first issue of my seventh-floor strategy guide by the end of the night. It’s part of an info broker’s job.”

Yeah, a likely story, I thought. Still, it gave me an idea.

“Wait…You aren’t selling seventh-floor strategy guides yet? I was sure the ALS and DKB came straight to Volupta because they’d already read your work…”

Argo shrugged. “Welp, we ain’t the only beta testers. They musta learned about the casino on their end…Hey, you wanna go inside? I’m starving.”

The instant she said it, my virtual stomach rumbled. Asuna nodded deeply without a word, so we followed Argo into the mysterious Pots ’n’ Pots.

Inside, it was even smaller than the chicken-and-rice place in Lectio, with just four seats at a counter. Three of them went to Argo, Asuna, and me. There was no menu to be found on the counter. I was looking around when I heard a voice from beyond Asuna say, “The menu’s on the wall ahead of us, Kii-boy.”

“Mwha—?”

I looked up and saw, on the back wall, a board packed with small alphabetical letters. I’d thought it was just decoration initially, but now I could see it was a menu.

“Uhhh…Chicken and tomato…chicken and beans…chicken and mushroom…”

I skipped down a ways and saw that, after chicken, the items were all “beef and something,” then “fish and something,” then “mutton and something,” until you reached the left side, where they finished with rabbit, deer, and partridge.

“I know what rabbit and deer are…but what’s partridge?” I wondered.

Fortunately, Asuna had the answer. “It’s a kind of bird…In Japanese, we call them mountain quail, if I remember correctly.”

“Mountain quail…? How is that different from regular quail?”

“I don’t know. Because they live in the mountains?”

“Oh. Makes sense.”

I focused on the menu again. There had to be a hundred of the packed names on the list, but the problem was that I had no idea what sort of dish they were describing. If I ordered the partridge and beans and got a whole roasted partridge stuffed with beans, I wasn’t sure my ravenous appetite would last. I couldn’t ask the cook, either, because there was no one behind the counter. What could it mean?

“I’ll have beef an’ potatoes.”

“And I’d like the rabbit and herbs, I think.”

After the girls ordered, a voice from somewhere replied, “Sure!”

I jumped up, startled, and leaned over the counter from a standing position. A very short person walked out of a door on the left and stuck something round they were holding with both hands into the oven on the right.

This NPC had to be the proprietor, I assumed. Their large chef’s hat fell over their eyes, and the red scarf tied around their neck went up to their ears, so there was no way to tell for sure if they were male or female, young or old. The only thing I could be sure of was that if I didn’t give my order, I wasn’t going to be getting any dinner.

“Umm…umm…then I’ll have…partridge and parsnips!” I said out of sheer abandon. If I didn’t know what they were, might as well choose from the bottom. The chef said “Sure!” again and vanished into the darkness of the kitchen on the left, then reemerged with another mysterious round object that went into the oven.

The actual dish itself was still a total mystery, but within a minute, an extremely fragrant and delectable smell filled the little shop, much to my relief. It certainly wasn’t a bad smell, and after all, this location had been chosen by the Rat, the greatest info dealer in all of Aincrad. We could trust her taste.

After another minute, the chef pulled two of the round things from the oven, placed them on simple wooden plates, then added a knife, fork, and spoon, and set them in front of Asuna and Argo.

The objects were, in fact, crispy round bread rolls. They looked good…but what happened to the beef and rabbit?

Asuna had figured out the trick, however; she grabbed the bread without hesitation and pulled the top off. A burst of steam issued from inside, and I murmured with admiration. The six-inch bread roll had been hollowed out and filled with a thick brown stew.

“Ahhh, so that’s what this is…” I murmured.

Asuna gave me a funny look and said proudly, “You should have figured it out from the name.”

“Huh? Pots ’n’ Pots…? What is it supposed to mean?”

“They’re pot roasts in bread bowls.”

“Oh…sure…I get it…”

You could have warned me, Rat! I thought, glaring past Asuna. But Argo was already taking a bite out of her bread lid, which she’d dipped into the stew first.

I very nearly started drooling at the sight, so it was fortunate that my own golden-brown bread bowl was placed before me at that moment. Asuna had been considerate enough to wait for my dish to arrive, so we said our grace first, then lifted the bread lid off the top.

Inside the bread roll was a creamy white stew. I copied Argo and split the piece of bread in half, then dipped it into the stew and took a bite.

It was good. It tasted like the cream stew I was used to eating in the real world, but there was a more gamey scent to this one, with a little accent of sweetness. I finished the bread lid very quickly, then picked up my spoon. The first thing to try was the “mountain quail” partridge, which had a rich, tender, savory taste. Then I scooped up a mysterious white ingredient. It was a semicircular piece of something that looked like potato or turnip.

“So this is a parsnip…?” I wondered to myself, giving it an appraising look.

Asuna appeared to be feeling sorry for me. “Did you order that without knowing what it was?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s lizard’s tail.”

“…What?”

I immediately held the spoon at arm’s length. Of course, everything here—the partridge, Asuna’s rabbit, and Argo’s deer—were all just digital data, and lizard meat would be no different. But that didn’t matter. I had standards, and they mattered to me.

“…What kind of combination is quail and lizard…?” I muttered to myself. Asuna and Argo burst into laughter.

“You’re amazing, Kii-boy. It’s always worth teasing you. That’s a vegetable.”

“What, really?”

“Yes, really. In Japan, we call it sugar carrot or American parsley,” Asuna explained smugly. I gave her a sidelong glance, then popped the white object into my mouth. It had a crisp crunch like a carrot but with its own flavor and sweetness. It was odd, but I didn’t mind it.

“Hmm. I can see why they call it sugar carrot,” I commented, once I’d swallowed the piece.

“Technically, though, it’s a relative of celery,” Asuna pointed out.

“……As long as it’s not a lizard’s tail, I don’t care.”

With that, I started to eat the dish in earnest. I had only gotten two or three bites in when Argo spoke up.

“Do you two wanna trade?”

Asuna and I shared a look, then we both indicated that we would.

First my bread bowl made its way over to Argo, then Argo’s dish went to Asuna, and Asuna’s slid over to me. This one was rabbit and herb, if I recalled correctly. The texture was meatier than the partridge, but it didn’t have a funny aftertaste, and the blend of herbs gave it a stimulating and complementary flavor.

Once we’d eaten another third of the stews, we slid them over again. Argo’s beef and potatoes had that classic, comforting taste. The combination of large, juicy meat and steamy potato was supremely satisfying. Once I’d reached the bottom of the bread bowl, I asked Asuna quietly, “Are we allowed to eat the bread it’s in, too?”

“Why not? We’ve got knives.”

“Ohhh, it’s for cutting the bread…”

I picked up the serrated knife and sliced the empty bread bowl in two, then into smaller pieces. I popped one of the stew-soaked bits into my mouth. I was happily chewing away while Asuna cut hers into more manageable pieces. She asked, “Which was your favorite stew, Kirito?”

“Uhhh…Well, they were all good. The mountain quail and lizard—er, sugar carrot—was new and interesting. The rabbit and herb was bold and stimulating, while the beef and potato was safe and delicious…But if I had to choose one as the winner, I guess I’d go with the rabbit.”

“Oh really? Why?”

“I think I liked the texture best.”

“Hmm, interesting…”

I wasn’t sure what exactly she found “interesting,” but she nodded anyway and stuck her fork into one of the neatly cut squares of bread.

Once we were done, we left the building. Volupta was in night mode now. I inhaled the soothing breeze coming up from the beach and stretched luxuriously.

“Ahhh, that was good…Thanks for showing us this place, Argo.”

“Right outside the square isn’t where you’d think ta look, huh? I’ll give ya that one for free.”

“Hey, thanks,” I said with a grimace.

Asuna suddenly gasped. “Oh!”

“Wh-what is it?”

“…I feel like we weren’t contacting Argo to catch dinner with her.”

The Rat and I both gasped, too. “Oh!”

We’d just paid for the meal at Pots ’n’ Pots and left, so it would be embarrassing to go back inside. But it felt like a waste of time to go searching for a café to sit in, too. Instead, we decided to register at an inn.

The inns of Volupta were clustered on the south side of town, closer to the beach, but the finest place of all was upstairs at the casino. We’d need casino chips to stay there, though, rather than col.

So we strolled down the great stairs, turning right when we reached the fancy gate at the bottom, which was guarded by watchmen. Once you were this close to the beach, you couldn’t actually see it anymore, because of the tall stone walls blocking access.

“…I wonder if the people who live here complain about the fact that the beach is exclusively for tourists who gamble at the casino,” Asuna murmured. I was going to say that they were just NPCs but decided against it.

Kizmel the dark elf wasn’t the only NPC we’d met who had advanced conversational skills and emotional intelligence on the level of a human being; Myia, Theano, and Bouhroum were recent examples of the same on the sixth floor. Not all NPCs were like that, but somewhere in Volupta were probably some NPCs with the same level of artificial intelligence.

I’d prefer not to see any NPCs die on this floor, I thought, just as Argo answered Asuna’s question.

“Mmm, they might. The whole town’s more or less ruled over by that gigantic casino.”

“R-ruled over? That sounds ominous…”

“There are company towns in the real world, too, right? Volupta’s economy is run by the tourists who come for the casino, so the residents can’t really complain that they close off the beach.”

Asuna glanced up at the stone wall to the left. “When you put it that way…I’d almost feel bad about the idea of relaxing and having fun on the beach…”

“Uh-huh? So you two are after the beach, huh? Well, now I feel bad for sayin’ that.”

“No, actually. I’m glad you told us,” Asuna admitted. I watched her closely and asked, “So uh…should we forget about the beach?”

“Mmm…no,” she said, to my surprise. “On the sixth floor, we learned that this world often doesn’t work the way its background suggests it should. I’ve decided to make up my mind based on what I see and hear for myself. And that means ignoring what you’ve just told us, unfortunately.”

“Nee-hee-hee, no worries. I always gotta be on my toes so I don’t just swallow everything I hear through the grapevine, too. Oh…my recommendation is this place,” Argo said, pointing at a four-story inn up ahead. She grinned and added, “But of course, A-chan’ll want to check it out for herself before she decides to stay there.”