Having slept wonderfully, Yimi went to stretch with a big lazy arch, only to find herself bound up tight. From her past fondness for burrowing into blankets, she could tell: her bed-warmer had gotten grabby and was hugging her.
Yimi reached out a paw, pressed it to Asuna's chest, and gave it a knead—softer and springier than Madoka's, Reimu's, Beatrice's, or even Origami's.
28%. That was the system's current reassembly progress. Painfully slow.
Though she'd gone to sleep in the afternoon, she'd slept clear through to the next morning, missing a whole meal outright.
Yimi expertly wormed her way out of Asuna's embrace and, with pupils that widened automatically in the dark, took a look at her. She noticed Asuna's brows were faintly knit, as though she were having some kind of nightmare.
The little kitty reached out and touched her forehead, transferring the misfortune of the bad dream elsewhere for her.
As a cat who loved to eat, she ought to be a little nicer to the cook—even if this woman was a suspected creepy auntie.
Yimi swung a leg over and climbed off Asuna, put on her shoes, and fastened her bow. Beatrice had told her to braid her own hair from now on, but she'd never once tied a braid in this world.
Her hair hadn't grown longer, which meant she couldn't have been asleep in the field for very long.
Yimi opened Asuna's inventory and rummaged through it, taking out the things she didn't recognize for a look before putting them back.
After a while, she dug out a hunk of meat—Asuna's treasured A-Grade Ingredient—though Yimi couldn't make heads or tails of what this ABC business had to do with anything.
She'd slept straight through dinner yesterday, so she absolutely had to eat a meal right away to make up for it.
Hugging the slab of meat she could barely carry, she set it on the cutting board, took her cookware out of her storage space, and—without a shred of safety awareness—lit a fire and started cooking right there in the bedroom.
The clatter and the fragrance wafting up her nose meant there was no way Asuna could keep sleeping peacefully.
Opening her eyes, she was met with the little kitty holding a bowl, mouth pursed into a satisfied three-petal shape, presenting her masterpiece.
"Thank you."
Still groggy, Asuna took it and tasted the soup.
"It's delicious."
"Heh heh." Praised, the little kitty narrowed her eyes.
Because the only cookware Yimi had brought was a pot, whatever she made came out with soup. In the world of SAO, eating was more about tricking the brain out of its inexplicable sense of hunger; it didn't feed the body any real nutrition, so drinking meat soup first thing in the morning wasn't anything strange.
Asuna yawned.
Perhaps because she'd just been through something upsetting yesterday, she'd had a strange nightmare. She dreamed of returning to reality and passing Kirito on the street, only for him to walk right by, pretending not to know her. Right after, she found herself at the site of her high school entrance exam, everyone around her murmuring about why she was still sitting the exam at such an age.
Just as Asuna looked up and discovered that the proctor at the podium was her own mother, the scene abruptly switched to a cat café, where the owner was the little squirt now cooking in front of her—and she picked up a bag of cat food and, from among cats of every breed, chose the owner to feed and pat.
Asuna took another sip of the meat soup in her hand, savored it, and seemed to realize something. She hurriedly flipped open her inventory, and her expression froze.
Her A-Grade Ingredient—gone.
Not only gone; the meat soup in her hand tasted nowhere near the standard an A-Grade should reach.
She looked down at the cat girl again, who—thanks to the praise just now—was sitting happily in the chair, swinging her little legs that didn't reach the floor, and eating the food in her hands in the manner Asuna had taught her yesterday.
The specifics: Yimi set the bowl on the table, then reached in with a bare paw and pulled the meat straight out of the soup, Love Train transferring the scalding sensation elsewhere, and—like Asuna the day before—ate it in dainty little ladylike bites.
"..."
A "#" seemed to materialize over Asuna's head.
She must think she cooks wonderfully—and her pot had maybe even stewed rats before, even if only by Kayaba Akihiko's spiteful design.
She clenched her fist, stayed angry for a good while, and in the end could only let it go, heaving a helpless sigh.
"That's not how I taught you to use them yesterday. For this kind of food, you're better off with chopsticks and a spoon."
Asuna took out utensils and taught her again.
"Can't use chopsticks."
"It's actually very easy. Here, hold it at this spot, and grip with your fingers like this... yes, that's it."
"Nn..." Yimi worked the chopsticks with an unhappy face.
Saying she couldn't use them was a lie. Having eaten so much across so many worlds, more than half of it had required chopsticks. In the Spirit world, Origami had already started getting her used to chopsticks; in the Magical Girl world, Tomohisa and Madoka had even taught her hands-on for a whole month.
But a child's hands were small to begin with, so even if she learned, she definitely couldn't wield chopsticks skillfully, which was why, even knowing how, she didn't like using them.
In Asuna's eyes, though, this was plainly a child who'd just said she couldn't use chopsticks, gradually learning to fumble with them under her teaching.
'You killed a living child, Asuna.'
She recalled that line.
"A living child..."
Did an NPC have this kind of capacity to learn?
Asuna pinched the bridge of her nose, smoothing out the brows crowding toward the center with her fingers.
She reached out and rubbed Yimi's head. "You did well. I only taught you once and you learned to use chopsticks this fast."
What she was showing her was, most likely, the very thing Asuna herself craved: an ordinary word of praise, not "that's only what you're supposed to do."
Even though that wasn't really the case, Yimi threw out her chest, letting herself be proud for a moment.
"But!"
With quick eyes and quicker hands, Asuna flicked her forehead. "Rummaging through other people's things without their permission is very naughty!"
Yimi rubbed her forehead. "Because you're a creepy auntie! Going through your stuff isn't naughty."
Asuna rubbed her own forehead, puzzled too. "The creepy-auntie topic is over and done with. I fed you all that food; calling me a creepy auntie on top of it is going too far."
"I fed you stuff too." Yimi pointed at the not-yet-finished meat soup.
Asuna pressed a hand to her forehead. "Let's not bring up topics that make me even angrier."
She glanced at her friends list; Kirito's name was no longer there. Because of yesterday's misunderstanding, he'd already deleted her—though as a solo player, Kirito rarely kept anyone on his list to begin with.
Things seemed to have blown up a little.
Asuna rubbed Yimi's head again; the texture really was just as good as in her dream. "I've got things to take care of. Be a good girl and stay home, don't run off."
"I want to go out and play!" Yimi retorted again.
The creepy auntie had no right to demand the kitty stay in one place.
"When I get back, I'll teach you to cook."
"Nn." Yimi obediently sat down.
The kitty knew full well that giving a man a fish was worse than teaching him to fish—better than having a cook who made tasty food was making tasty food herself.
"Mm, but if I come back and don't see you, then no cooking lessons." Issuing a small threat, Asuna turned and walked out the door.
Once outside, she didn't leave right away, but stood at the door and waited quietly for a full minute, then suddenly threw it open.
"Nn?" Yimi, who'd taken a storybook out of her storage space to flip through, looked up in confusion, meeting Asuna's eyes.
"...Forgot to grab something."
Embarrassed, Asuna walked to the bedside and pretended to take something from under the pillow.
Even when she wasn't around, the girl would have her own things to do, her own capacity for thought, her own behavior, her own personality.
After hearing her say something like that, of course Kirito would be furious.
So this misunderstanding had to be cleared up.
On her enforced vacation, Asuna headed for the meeting room. As long as that field boss went on blocking the way, this floor's meeting room would never lack for people.
Floor 6 seemed to have a puzzle-game theme; if she had the spare time, she could go there and buy a simple one to bring back.
Asuna's thoughts drifted far afield, and she didn't come back to herself until she'd returned to the meeting room.
Heathcliff sat at the head seat, and Kirito—with whom she'd just had that unpleasantness yesterday—was, sure enough, present too. But upon seeing her come in, he couldn't help tugging the brim of his hood lower and turning his face away.
"All right, assemble at the village gate in ten minutes. The operation begins." These were Heathcliff's words finalizing the decision; the meeting was already over.