Sword Art Online - Volume 22 - Chapter 4.2

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There might be no combat in Serene Garden, but that didn’t mean sightseeing was the only activity to do. 

The biggest gameplay aspect was housing. Users were given a specific area of land in Serenity, the city at the center of the world, where they could build and design their own homes. The exterior was limited to the varieties of colored bricks seen elsewhere around the city, so most of the customization was interior decoration. 

You could purchase or order the materials and furniture for interior decoration from the NPC shops around the town, which required points called currens (which was apparently short for currency). But currens couldn’t be shared between people; the only way to earn more was by collecting. That meant going around the world map to locations where harvestable plants, minable ores, and catchable bugs and such would appear, then taking them to a shop in town where you could exchange them for currens based on their rarity level. You could also use those items to craft other items directly, or raise the bugs to participate in the Insect Battle Tournament. There was a surprising amount to do. 

In Serenity, Yuuki and Ran shared a house that they’d been customizing for the last six months, but they were far from finished. At the moment, they were saving up points to put a large standing hearth in their living room. They were about 70 percent of the way there. 

The good thing was that collecting was fun on its own, not a pain. An hour or two would simply vanish while they walked through the picturesque meadows looking for special herbs. Every single person using Serene Garden was already battling the pressure of wondering how much time they had left to live, so the relaxing effect of the collecting process and how it helped the time pass made it very popular. There was an old woman Yuuki was friends with who was so dedicated to scouring the entire world map and acquiring items that she had built herself a four-story mansion that loomed over part of Serenity. 

The twins weren’t going that far, but if they were going to build a hearth where they could roast potatoes, they couldn’t take a day off. From the hillside where they were resting in the sun, they went to their favorite secret collecting spot: the banks of a little pond nearby. Yuuki eagerly peered around the area for herbs, basket in hand. 

“…Ah,” her sister said. 

“What is it?” she asked. Ran was a bit farther away and motioned for her to be quiet. Her older sister was frozen in a half crouch. Yuuki tried to follow the angle of her eyesight but couldn’t tell what Ran had spotted to cause this reaction. 

She set the basket down and snuck as quietly as possible to Ran’s side, then squinted, searching the grassy thicket… 

“…Ah,” Yuuki said, too, when she saw it. 

On the trunk of an aged, leafy tree standing at the side of the pond was a stag beetle colored a deep, vivid blue. It seemed to be nearly four inches long, with two massive mandibles and an extremely long horn jutting from its thorax. Yuuki had seen its picture in a book of all the insects in the game. 

“Doesn’t that beetle look valuable to you?” her sister asked. 

“It’s more than valuable. That’s a royal triton stag beetle,” Yuuki replied immediately. 

Despite the nerves and excitement, there was a clear note of annoyance in her sister’s reply. “I can’t believe you even know its name.” 

“If you raise it right, it can be the strongest of all the stag beetles!” 

“…I didn’t know you were interested in bug battles, Yuu.” 

“A-actually, I kinda like it. A lot,” she whispered back. 

In the meantime, the blue beetle was slowly climbing the trunk of the ancient tree. There was a stream of golden sap ahead of it, and that seemed to be the beetle’s destination. 

“Did you bring a net, Sis?” 

“I was only expecting to pick herbs today, so I just brought the basket.” 

“Same here…” 

The storage space for users of the garden was quite limited. If you were out collecting for hours at a time, there was no room for anything you didn’t absolutely need to bring. Yuuki and Ran were plant experts, and the only times they caught insects were when they found one that was worth a lot. 

But this one sitting less than twenty feet away was the royal triton, the rarest of them all. If they cashed it in at the insect shop, they’d be able to buy their hearth with change to spare. They had to catch this bug. 

“I’ll just grab it with my hands,” Yuuki whispered. Ran looked shocked and sucked in a sharp breath. 

“Yuu…you’re going to touch it with your bare hands?” 

“……” 

That’s right. She’s like Mom—she hated bugs in real life. If I caught a grasshopper in the yard and brought it inside, they’d both scream and run around, she recalled fondly. 

“The bugs here are totally fine. They don’t bite you or sting or shoot gross liquid. Just wait here,” Yuuki said, patting Ran on the shoulder. She took off her sandals and crouched low before proceeding forward. 

She’d never told her sister, but she was secretly engaging in a fair amount of bug hunting on her own time. There were three ironclad rules of catching rare bugs. One, don’t move too fast. Two, don’t approach from the front. Three, don’t make any unnatural sounds. 

She was moving through knee-high grass, so there was some unavoidable rustling. The trick was not to move too fast, so the sound would get lost in the blowing of the breeze. 

The rare stag beetle reached the place where the golden sap was seeping from the trunk and came to a stop. Feeding time was the best opportunity to catch an insect, but from personal experience, Yuuki knew that the rarer the bug, the shorter the window was. In about fifteen seconds, it would spread its wings and buzz off into the air. 

Less than ten feet to the tree. If she kept waiting for the breeze to blow before moving, she’d never get there in time. But if she charged now and made a lot of noise, the beetle would easily escape. 

What should I do? How can I move without touching the grass…? 

Yuuki briefly glanced to her sides and caught sight of something. Along the water in the pond, just to her right, was a sequence of wooden posts spaced about three feet apart. They were taller than the grass, and if she hopped from post to post, she wouldn’t make any noise. 

The problem was that the posts were only about two inches across. If her balance was anything less than perfect, she’d topple into the grass to the left or the pond to the right. And she didn’t have time to carefully judge each step. 

…Just gotta do it! she told herself and moved sideways with the next breeze. She waited for the right timing, stood up, and leaped onto the narrow stake. 

Here goes! 

Silently, she hopped from post to post. By the time she got to the last one, somehow managing not to fall off, the stag beetle had finished its meal and spread its jewellike elytra, revealing the clear hind wings that would enable it to fly away. 

Bzzz! It took flight, wings buzzing. 

“Yaaah!” Yuuki shouted, no longer bothering to remain silent, and leaped for all she was worth. The tips of her fingers caught the long horn of the beetle. 

In the real world, grabbing the back of a huge, powerful insect like this wouldn’t be the end of the struggle. But this was a virtual world designed with usability in mind. The instant she had a hold of the rare insect, a triumphant fanfare sounded, and the stag beetle folded its wings and acquiesced. She landed in the grass with a soft thud. 

“I did iiiiit! I caught the royal triton stag beetle!” she cried, thrusting her left fist into the air. 

Ran approached carefully, her expression four parts surprise to one part fear. “Th…that was amazing, Yuu. You really caught it with your bare hands.” 

“Nee-hee-hee! I’m surprised, too. Here, want to hold it?” she said, extending her hand with the giant beetle. 

Ran backed away slowly, shaking her head. “N-no, I’ll pass. But congratulations, Yuuki. What are you going to do with it? Sell it? Keep it?” 

“Hmm…Hmmmm…” 

She brought the now-docile stag beetle, horn held between her fingers, to her face for a better look. When trying to catch it, she was only thinking about how many points it was worth, but after six months of harvesting items in Serene Garden, she’d never found something as rare as this. Plus, as she looked at the beetle’s face, its big black segmented eyes looked kind of cute to her… 

The problem was that raising insects in this world cost money for food, just like in real life. If the bugs were good enough to win the bug battle events, they could make back that money on their own, but just being able to participate in those events required clearing lots of hurdles. 

“What should I do…?” she worried, staring at the beetle as its mandibles waggled back and forth. 

“Aaaaaaah!!” Suddenly, there came a scream from her left, and she found herself toppling in the other direction. 

“Wh-what?!” she yelped along with Ran. Together, they saw another girl standing there alone, a bit farther away. Of course, it was just a girl’s avatar, but changing gender was impossible in Serene Garden, and an avatar’s appearance was based on real photographs, so this was certainly very close to what the girl playing the avatar looked like. 

Her long green hair was tied into a ponytail (hairstyle and color could be customized), and she wore a brown camo-pattern T-shirt and cargo pants with many pockets—the look of an insect hunter, if there ever was one. A long bug-catching net trembled in her left hand, and her right index finger was pointed right at Yuuki. 

“There! That royton! I was chasing after that for an entire hour!” 

It took Yuuki a full three seconds to realize that royton wasn’t the beetle’s name but an abbreviation of royal triton. She quickly hid the beetle behind her back and argued, “W-well, I caught it.” 

The rules of Serene Garden said that whoever picked up an item, whether plant or ore or insect, got to keep it. You might argue, “This is my collecting spot” or “I saw it first,” but those statements held no real power. The girl in the camo shirt knew that, and she clammed up briefly, but she wouldn’t remain silent. 

“You don’t look like a bug hunter to me, though. You don’t have a cage. How are you going to take it back home with you?” 

Now it was Yuuki who had no answer. 

She had a point: Without a special insect cage like the one attached to the girl’s waist, she couldn’t put the beetle in her inventory. And with it stuck in her hand right now, the beetle was slowly but surely weakening. It would heal right away if put in a cage with food and water, but it would take twenty minutes at the quickest to reach the nearest town. Yuuki didn’t know how much of the stag beetle’s life would be lost, but if she ended up killing the precious insect, she’d never stop regretting it. The only reason Yuuki hadn’t taken part in the bug battles was because she was afraid of losing her pet through a careless accident. 

Ran put a gentle hand on Yuuki’s shoulder and said, “Yuu…” 

Yuuki understood what her sister was telling her. She pulled the hand holding the royal triton stag beetle out from behind her back, said a silent good-bye to her catch, then held it out toward the bug-hunting girl. 

“Here. You can have it.” 

The ponytailed girl’s eyes went wide with surprise. “Uh…I can?” 

“You said you wanted it, didn’t you?” Yuuki said, taking a step forward. But the girl looked down at herself in a panic. 

“B-but I don’t have anything worth exchanging for it…” 

You couldn’t trade with other players using currens in Serene Garden, only barter with items you were carrying. No players walked around with items worth the value of a superrare insect. 

Yuuki smiled and said, “It doesn’t have to be a trade. I bet this bug would be happier if it was raised by someone like you, who works really hard to be a proper bug hunter.” 

“……” 

But the girl’s initial boldness had all but melted away. She didn’t move or speak. She’d probably said that because she was incensed that someone else had caught the thing she was chasing, but she hadn’t actually considered that the person might give it to her anyway. 

Yuuki was wise enough to read this in the other girl’s body language but not wise enough to know the right thing to say now. Instead, Ran said softly, “Then how about you trade by allowing Yuu to give the bug a name?” 

The girl’s face lit up, and she nodded repeatedly. “Y-yeah! Yeah! That’s good! You name it!” 

“Huh…? Me?” 

Yuuki was in a panic. She knew she wasn’t great at coming up with names. When creating their avatars for Serene Garden, Aiko had gone with Ran because it was an alternate reading of the Ai kanji in her name, but Yuuki just went with her regular name. 

If she gave up now, it would be a waste, so she did her best. But after at least a dozen seconds of thinking, she came up with… 

“…Ummm…how about…Roy…?” 

It’s the same thing!! 

But despite her fears, the ponytailed girl just smiled and nodded. 

“That’s nice! I like simple names like that. Then I’ll register this bug’s name as Roy!” 

“Okay!” 

Yuuki said a silent farewell to her stag beetle, then presented it to the girl again. 

The girl cupped her hands to accept the beetle, then gazed, rapt, at the beautiful royal-blue luster of the beetle’s carapace. Then she carefully transferred it to her insect cage, opened her player window, and put the whole cage in her inventory. The stag beetle’s life value couldn’t drop anymore after that. 

The girl picked up the net she’d dropped and put that in her inventory, too, then she straightened and performed a deep, courteous bow. 

“Thank you so much for giving it to me! I’ve been looking for that insect forever since coming here, so I’m really, really happy to have it!” 

Yuuki understood that when she said “coming here,” she wasn’t talking about Teal Hills but Serene Garden, the VR hospice program. She asked her, “How long have you been here?” 

“Since just after it started, so it’s been about eight months—oh, gosh! I never even told you my name. Hello, I’m Merida. Nice to meet you!” 

Merida grinned and stuck out her right hand, which Yuuki accepted and shook. 

“I’m Yuuki! Nice to meet you!” 

Ran took Merida’s hand next. “I’m Ran. I’m Yuuki’s big sister. It’s nice to meet you, Miss Merida.” 

“Just call me Merida. I’m only slightly older than you two, if anything. It’s really nice to meet you. I hope we can be…good…frien…” 

Merida’s voice unexpectedly wavered, then vanished. Her green ponytail fluttered as she suddenly lurched to the side, and Yuuki had to reach out with both hands to steady her. 

They moved her over to the shade under the tree where Yuuki had caught Roy the stag beetle and sat her down on the grass. Merida quickly recovered after that. 

She blinked a couple times, then noticed Yuuki’s and Ran’s concerned looks and hunched her shoulders with guilt. 

“…I’m sorry. I was so excited about getting Roy that I think I got a little too carried away,” she said, giggling guiltily. Yuuki smiled back at her but couldn’t fully contain her worry. 

The people engaged in Serene Garden weren’t called players, and that was for a reason. Accordingly, users avoided saying that word for the most part. People weren’t coming to this world simply because it was fun. 

The point of the VR hospice program was to provide palliative care—easing the suffering of their illness and improving quality of life. Without exception, everyone found here was dealing with a very serious disease. In fact, you couldn’t even connect and make an account unless it was through the facilities at a hospital. That meant Merida was connecting to this world through a hospital located somewhere in Japan. 

They didn’t know Merida’s condition yet. But if her avatar within the VR world collapsed, that meant it wasn’t just dizziness or anemia but a condition afflicting the brain itself, which was connected through the AmuSphere. 

Of course, if the situation were bad enough, the AmuSphere would automatically disconnect, and her avatar would disappear. Since Merida recovered right away, she had to be right that it was just a temporary problem. But on the other hand, Merida was so relaxed about it that it conversely amplified Yuuki’s concern. She was used to this phenomenon. It was something that happened all the time. 

Merida could feel Yuuki’s state of mind through the hand on her back, so she smiled reassuringly. “Ha-ha, really, I’m fine. If I stay still for a moment, I’ll be better again…There. I’m completely fine now.” 

She hopped up onto her feet and bounced into the air. Her agility was so smooth that it spoke to how much experience she had here. But the fact that she’d been in Serene Garden since nearly the point it started meant that she’d needed this palliative care for that long of a period already. 

Mindful of Merida’s symptoms, Yuuki stood up, too. But the other girl took a step back and gave them a piercing glare. 

“Wh…what is it?” Yuuki asked, wondering if the matching dresses she and her sister were wearing didn’t look good after all. But Merida just flashed a cheerful smile. 

“Sorry, didn’t mean to stare at you like that. Those dresses are very cute, but they’re not really suited for bug hunting. I was just thinking how impressive it was that you caught the royal triton dressed like that. They fly away as soon as they hear a single footstep. How did you move so quietly through the grass?” 

“Ummm…” Yuuki stopped to think, trying to remember what exactly she’d done. 

Ran giggled and explained, “Yuu didn’t go through the grass. She jumped from stake to stake, standing in the water over there. She went boing, boing, boing!” 

“Oh, I see.” 

Yuuki chuckled, embarrassed that she couldn’t remember what she’d been doing barely fifteen minutes ago, but she wasn’t expecting Merida’s smile to vanish. 

“Whaaat?! On those tiny posts?! You can do that?!” 

“Um, y-yeah. I guess. You can just call me Yuuki, by the way!” 

“Oh…w-well, Yuuki, can you stand on one foot for me?” 

“Huh? Okay…” 

Yuuki did as Merida asked and bent her left knee so that she was only standing on her right leg, though she had no idea where Merida was going with this. She held out her arms a bit for balance and said, “There’s no muscle fatigue here, so I can stand on one leg for forever. So can you, right, Sis?” 

“I…I dunno…I’ve never tried it,” said Ran without much confidence. She rose up on one leg, too. There was a brief wobble at first, but soon her body was stable. 

Until they had to leave school in fourth grade, Yuuki and Ran had taken normal physical education. They grew at nearly the same rate, because they were twins, but when it came to running speed, throwing control, and even test scores, Ran was always just a bit better—a source of secret frustration for her sister. 

I at least want to show I can beat her at standing on one leg in the virtual world! Yuuki swore to herself. But after about a minute, Merida suddenly burst into rapturous applause. 

“Yuuki, Ran, that’s amazing! I’ve never seen anyone who can stand on one leg for so long on this side!” 

The sisters were taken aback; it seemed like a bit of an exaggeration. Merida clasped her hands together with consternation. 

“If your FC numbers are that high, you could be incredible insect hunters! Say, why don’t you switch over to being hunters?! I can teach you all about it!” 

Even as she balanced on one foot, Ran lifted her hands in a placating motion, trying to calm down the excited girl. “Merida, what is FC?” she asked gently. 

“I’ve never heard of it, either,” said Yuuki. 

Merida took a deep breath to slow herself down, realizing that she was confusing her audience. “I’m sorry for getting carried away,” she said. “I’m always like this. Well, FC stands for Full-Dive Conformation. It means how well you adapt to the virtual world. Standing on one leg is the simplest and quickest method of testing it. The sense of balance and gravity is slightly different here, so it’s hard to stand on one leg for an extended time unless your body is able to adjust. I’m sure my total time spent here is much longer than yours, but I can only manage about forty seconds at best.” 

“Oh, I didn’t realize…,” said Yuuki. 

Startled by the breadth of Merida’s knowledge about full-dive systems, Yuuki looked down at the foot she had planted on the ground. She could remember being a little confused at the fine differences from the real world when she first used the Medicuboid, but once she got the chance to run and jump around the vivid, exciting virtual world, she got used to it right away. She couldn’t remember Ran complaining about a difference in sensations, either. 

“…Meaning there are personal differences in this FC thing?” Yuuki asked nonchalantly. 

“That’s right,” Merida said gravely. “It’s rare, but sometimes the first connection test gets you an FNC, meaning you don’t conform to full-diving. It has to be a shock to spend all that money on a Ner—on an AmuSphere and get told it won’t work for you. But there are more places out there now where you can test it before you buy one.” 

“Hmm…” 

Upon learning this, Yuuki was relieved that she and her sister hadn’t gotten an FNC. Medicuboid Test Unit Two and Ran’s augmented NerveGear were provided by the hospital, of course. Dr. Kurahashi said it wasn’t even close to proper atonement for how the two got sick, but when they interacted with other people in Serene Garden, Yuuki was always left with a particular thought: She and her sister wouldn’t be able to visit these places ordinarily without buying two of those very expensive AmuSpheres. 

In fact, while her sister might have excellent physical reflexes, maybe the only reason Yuuki could stand on one foot for minutes on end was because she got to use the much more advanced Medicuboid. 

The moment this thought popped into her head, Yuuki felt bad for engaging in this competition with Ran and started to lower her leg. 

But before it touched the ground, Ran shouted, “Aaah, I can’t do it anymore!” and clung to her side. They both tumbled to the grass. 

“Hey, what was that for, Sis?” 

“You touched the ground first, Yuu, so I win the balance competition!” 

“Hey, no fair! I could have kept going!” she protested, forgetting her brief resignation just seconds before. 

Merida watched it happen, wide-eyed, and burst into bubbling laughter. “Ah-ha-ha, you two are so close. I wish I had a sister to be friends with…” 

Suddenly, she clammed up and stopped smiling. It must have occurred to her what it meant that the two sisters were in a VR hospice together. 

Yuuki wanted to tell her not to feel bad about it but couldn’t find the right way to say it. Fortunately, Ran did. 

“I’m sure you’d be a great big sister, Merida. You’re very cool and very knowledgeable,” she said, pulling Yuuki up from the grass. “You seem to know a lot about full-dive games. Do you play others aside from Serene Garden?” 

“Mmm, SG’s my main game for now. I’m too busy catching and raising bugs,” she replied, the smile returning but a bit more tempered than before. “Before SG, I played a different game…but they found my disease before it officially launched, so I was too late to start.” 

“Oh? What game?” asked Yuuki with great interest; she didn’t know much about other VR worlds. 

Merida’s smile seemed to be cradling some source of pain. She answered with another question: “Do you have more time to talk?” 

“Ummm…” 

She looked at the clock readout in the lower right of her field of view. It was three thirty in the afternoon. There was a fair amount of time before dinner at six, and they didn’t have any tests or meetings on the schedule today. 

“I think we have another two hours,” Yuuki said. 

The bug hunter nodded. “Then why don’t we go back to the village and talk over some tea?”