8

The place on Schmitt’s parchment was a small pub in a cramped section of the twentieth floor’s main city. Based on the look of the place, squashed into the twisting alley with a forlorn little sign, it did not look like the kind of restaurant that served meals that could be eaten every day without tiring.

But it was also true that the best spots to eat were found in out-of-the-way places like this, and it was difficult for me to stifle the urge to rush in and start trying everything on the menu. If Grimlock were the hooded assassin, he had already seen my face, and he would never show up here again if he saw me here.

After a survey of the surroundings, Asuna and I hid in the shadows nearby, then noticed that there was an inn within view of the restaurant. When the foot traffic dried up, we darted over to the inn and rented an upstairs room that overlooked the alley.

As we hoped, the window had a clear view of the pub entrance. We extinguished the lights and took seats beside the window, hunkering down to observe.

It wasn’t long before Asuna turned to me and asked dubiously, “Hey…we’ve got a good position now, but how are we going to recognize Grimlock if he goes in there?”

“Good question. That’s why I originally thought of bringing Schmitt with us, but that didn’t seem likely, the way he was acting…Anyway, despite the robe, I got a pretty up-close look at this possible Grimlock. If someone with the right build comes along, I can force myself into a duel challenge to check out his name.”

“Whaaat?” Asuna yelped, her eyes wide.

In SAO, visually focusing on another player brought up a green or orange “color cursor” with information about them. But the only information it would display for a stranger was an HP bar and a guild tag, but not a name or level.

This was a common-sense measure to minimize criminal activity. If a player’s name could be identified at a glance, they could be harassed with malicious instant messages, and if their level were publicized, it would make it easier to pick out a weak target to hunt down or extort in the open when they were vulnerable.

However, not having access to strangers’ names also made it rather difficult to search for an individual player, as we were currently doing.

The only surefire method I knew to confirm a player’s name was to challenge them to a one-on-one duel. By hitting the duel button in the menu and pointing out the target’s cursor, a system message would appear, notifying me that I’d just challenged so-and-so to a duel. This method would show me the official player name as recognized by the system, spelled in the Western alphabet.

However, the same message would also appear with my name in front of the target. So it was impossible to use such a method while also staying secretive about it, and naturally, it was extremely rude behavior. On top of that, there was no stopping the other player from accepting and drawing his weapon.

Asuna opened her mouth, about to say something about my idea—probably that it was dangerous. But she closed it just as quickly and nodded, looking stern. She understood that it was the only way, but she advised, “If you do talk with Grimlock, I’m going to be there, too.”

When she put it that flatly, there was no way I could force her to stay here in the room. Now it was my turn to reluctantly accept the plan. I checked the time: 6:40 PM, just around the time that adventurers would be returning from their travels to eat at their favorite restaurants. For having such an unassuming appearance, the little pub’s swinging door was in a state of nonstop flux. Yet so far, I hadn’t seen a single player who matched the height and build of that robed figure.

We had no clue to rely upon other than this restaurant, but in fact, there was one other worrisome element on my mind. In that inn on the fifty-seventh floor, Schmitt had moaned that the robed figure on the roof wasn’t Grimlock, that “Grim was taller than that.” It seemed unlikely that the rattled Schmitt would be calm enough to make that snap judgment, but if it were true, this whole stakeout was a waste of time that would get us nowhere. We would be staring at the door of a hidden legend of a restaurant, never to sample its wares…

Suddenly, I clutched my stomach, overtaken by a wave of hunger.

At that moment, something passed in front of my eyes. It was wrapped in white paper and smelled very good. I stared closely at the object Asuna was holding in front of me, keeping her eyes on the pub door. She said, “Here.” I had to be sure.

“Y-you’re…giving it to me?”

“What else would I be doing? Waving it under your nose to make you jealous?”

“A-ah. Of course not. Sorry—and thank you.”

I took the wrapper, ducking my head in apology. Asuna was deftly producing another object of the same likeness, never taking her eyes off of the door.

I quickly unwrapped the package to see a large baguette sandwich. Between the crispy toasted bread was a pile of vegetables and roasted meat. I gazed at it in amazement, only for Asuna to coldly note, “It’s going to run out of durability and vanish if you don’t hurry up and eat it.”

“Oh! Er…right! Here goes!”

There was no time to stare. The durability of food items was, with the exception of certain special ingredients, generally quite low. On a number of occasions, I’d had a packed lunch disappear in my hands as I was about to eat. There was a special item that could be crafted only by master crafters, a little box called a “Permanent Storage Trinket” that could keep food ingredients fresh permanently, even if left out in the open field. Sadly, the box was so small that you couldn’t fit anything larger than two peanuts in it.

So I took big, quick bites, savoring the volume of the sandwich as best I could. The flavoring was simple but tastefully vivid, encouraging more bites. Durability of food had no effect on its flavor, so as long as it existed, it tasted freshly made.

I chowed down on the large baguette, keeping my eyes on the pub at all times, and heaved a sigh of satisfaction when I was done. Next to me, Asuna was still chewing politely.

“Thanks for the food. Anyway, when did you have time to arrange a meal? They don’t sell proper food like this at the street carts, do they?”

“I told you, it was about to run out of durability. I had a feeling it might come to this, so I put them together this morning.”

“Ohh…No wonder you’re the manager in charge of the KoB’s daily activities. I never even thought about our meal plan. By the way, where’s it from?”

The taste of the baguette, with its crispy bread, veggies, and roast meat, was good enough to rank highly on my personal list of best restaurants, so I was eager to insert it into my regular rotation. But Asuna’s shrugged response was not what I expected.

“You can’t buy it.”

“Huh?”

“It’s not from a store.”

She clammed up and didn’t seem likely to share any further detail. It took me a while to figure out what she meant: If it wasn’t sold at an NPC shop, it must therefore be player-made.

I sat in dumbfounded silence for a good ten seconds, then panicked and realized I needed to say something, anything. I couldn’t afford a repeat of my abysmal mistake in ignoring Asuna’s fashion statement from the morning.

“Uh…well, gosh, how should I say this…I w-wish I hadn’t just gobbled it down like that. I mean, I could have sold it at auction in Algade and made a killing, ha-ha-ha.”

Wham! Asuna kicked the leg of my chair with a white boot, and I sat up straight, trembling.

After several extremely tense minutes, in which Asuna quietly finished her meal, she muttered, “…He’s not coming.”

“Er, y-yeah. Well, Schmitt made it sound like he doesn’t visit every day. Plus, I kind of doubt that Grimlock’s going to show up in his black robe to chow on some grub, right after committing a PK…We might need to stake out this place for two or three days,” I said quickly, checking the time. It had only been thirty minutes since we started. I was ready to wait until I saw Grimlock, no matter how many hours or days it took, but Her Excellency the Vice Commander might have different plans.

I glanced over at her again, but Asuna was sunk deep into her chair, and not about to get up anytime soon.

Belatedly, I realized that my statement could be interpreted as “two or three nights staying here,” and my palms flooded with sweat. But then, Asuna broke the silence.

“Hey, Kirito.”

“Y-yes?!”

What she said was fortunately—or unfortunately—totally unrelated to my statement.

“What would you have done? If you were in Golden Apple and they got a super-rare item like that, what would you have said?”

“…”

After several seconds of shocked silence, then several seconds of hard thought, I said, “Good question…But trouble like that is why I fly solo in the first place…In the games I played before SAO, a number of guilds I was in fell apart due to members pilfering the best items and selling them for profit…”

It was an unavoidable fact that one of the big motivating factors for a majority of MMO gamers was the feeling of superiority over the rest of the populace. And the easiest measurement of superiority was strength—defeating powerful monsters or other players with upgraded stats and powerful gear. That pleasure could not be found anywhere outside of online games. The reason that I was spending countless hours grinding for levels was none other than to enjoy the feeling of superiority inherent in being a front-line player.

If I was in a guild now, and a phenomenal piece of gear dropped for the party, and it was perfectly suited for another member of the guild—would I be able to say, “You ought to use this”?

“…No, I couldn’t,” I muttered, shaking my head. “I might not be able to say that I wanted to use it, but I’m not enough of a saint to happily hand it over to someone else. If I were a member of Golden Apple, I would have joined the pro-selling side. What about you?”

Her answer was instantaneous: “It belongs to the person who got the drop.”

“Eh?”

“That’s the rule in our guild. Any random drop when in a party is the property of whomever got it. And there’s no combat log in SAO, so there’s no public record of who got what. It’d have to be announced on the honor system. So the only way to avoid people keeping secrets and causing trouble is to make it policy. Plus…”

She paused, her gaze on the pub door softening somewhat.

“That system actually makes the concept of marriage here more meaningful. You know that people who get married share a common inventory, right? The moment you get married, you can’t hide things from your spouse. It also means that any player who tries to steal items from the guild can never get married to a fellow member. A shared inventory is a very pragmatic system, but I also find it quite romantic.”

I blinked in surprise at the note of longing I detected in her voice. A tension that made no sense rose within me, and I thoughtlessly stammered, “Y-yeah, that’s a good point. W-well, if I’m ever in a party with you, I’ll be sure not to hog all the drops.”

Asuna’s chair slammed backward. Without the lights on, I couldn’t make out her face very well, but in the pale moonlight, I saw the Flash go through a rotation of varying expressions. She raised her right hand as if to strike and shouted, “A-are you nuts?! You can wait decades, and that day will never come! Ah, w-well, that’s in regards to being in a party with you, of course. I mean, look…Just keep watching the pub! What’ll we do if you miss him?!”

Once she had the bellowing out of her system, Asuna turned away in a huff. As I was making sure not to take my eyes off the door for more than a second while we talked, her accusation stung. I mumbled a pathetic rebuttal that I was watching, and stopped to think.

When the ring that caused the downfall of Golden Apple dropped, who was it who scored the item?

Perhaps it was a pointless question now. But if it was desirable enough to kill their leader over it, surely just concealing it from the start would’ve been easier. That would mean whoever announced they had won the drop couldn’t be the killer.

I grimaced, thinking I should have asked Schmitt when I had the chance. Neither Asuna nor I were registered friends of his, so we couldn’t send him a message to check. There were instant messages that could be sent to any player whose name you knew, but it required being on the same floor, and had a very short cap on length.

It could easily happen the next time I saw Schmitt. We weren’t chasing the culprit of the ring killing of half a year ago, but the one responsible for the ongoing safe-haven murders. Still, I couldn’t get over it. I took out the list Schmitt had made for me.

Asuna was still looking away with a weird expression on her face, so I asked her not to take her eyes off the pub, and I examined the list of Golden Apple members handwritten on the parchment.

Griselda. Grimlock. Schmitt, Yolko, Kains…The scrawled list of names was eight long. And at least three of them were no longer present in the floating castle.

We couldn’t allow for any more victims. We had to stop Grimlock’s revenge and find the logic behind the safe-haven murders.

I was about to put the memo back into my item storage, but right at the moment the small sheaf of parchment was about to be converted back into a digital storage, one particular point drew my notice.

“…Huh…?”

I took a closer look. The detail-focusing system kicked in, refining the texture of the letters on the parchment to bring them into sharper detail.

“Um…what does this mean…?” I mumbled.

Without taking her eyes off the pub door, Asuna asked, “What is it?”

But I didn’t have the presence of mind to answer. My brain was working feverishly, trying to decipher the meaning, the reason, the intention of what I was seeing.

Several seconds later, I shouted, “Aaa…aaaah!!” and leaped up from my chair. The sheet of parchment trembled, reflecting the weight of the shock that overwhelmed me.

“I see…So that’s what it means!!” I moaned.

In a voice made of equal parts hesitation and frustration, Asuna hissed, “What? What did you figure out?!”

“I’ve been…We’ve been…”

I struggled to squeeze the words out of my dry throat; I clenched my eyes.

“We’ve been missing the entire picture all along. We thought we understood, but we were looking at the wrong thing. There’s no weapon, skill, or loophole behind this whole safe-haven-PK thing…There was never any way to begin with!!”