Floor 58's main terrain was a snowbound wilderness of mountains, its long trails roamed by all manner of monsters, and standing guard at the road's end was the Regional Boss: the Ice Dragon.
Defeating a Regional Boss didn't open the way to the next floor, but the items they dropped were still a decent boost for the Clearers—and being leveled well past the current floor, the group naturally wasn't about to pass these monsters up.
The ice-and-snow motif had actually already appeared on Floor 55, where the Knights of the Blood were based. In this full-dive game, even burying yourself in a snowdrift in summer clothes gave you nothing worse than a pleasant coolness—yet thanks to some unexplained bit of setting, a player who neglected to keep warm might still end up sneezing. Because it could interfere with movement, though, many players—even those who'd done their homework—refused to wear anything for warmth beyond anti-slip footwear; bundling up would only hamper them in a fight.
"Yimi-chan, fifteen orders of—no, make it thirty orders of Sichuan Boiled Fish."
The speaker was Daizen-san, the Knights of the Blood's accountant. As he finished, he pulled a heap of fish meat from his inventory onto the table, and transferred the payment over to Yimi besides—except that, since Yimi had no banking system, the string of figures ended up hovering above the table like a three-dimensional block.
"Thirty orders? You're going to fleece the rest of the Clearers again?" The man who'd come with Daizen-san gave his shoulder a helpless pat.
Daizen-san only smiled, eyes crinkling. "We can't stop the others from tagging along anyway. If someone ends up dead at the end, that's a real loss—every bit of extra combat power is one less chance of a casualty. So we may as well rake in a tidy profit while we're at it."
"Grr..."
Yimi puffed out her cheeks and stared, unmoving, at the picture book in her hands, with no intention of paying him any mind.
Daizen-san hurriedly pressed his palms together. "Please! Once we reach a new floor, I swear I'll bring you the local specialty food first thing!"
"Mm."
Only then did Yimi close the book, snatch the floating string of money-figures into her Storage Space, and, hugging a batch of ingredients, head off toward the little private kitchen the Knights of the Blood had built for her.
Daizen-san hastily gathered up the rest and followed.
These people were strange. They paid her to cook and yet supplied their own ingredients, and in their spare time they'd even volunteer to help her research recipes. The kitchen set up just for Yimi was laid out like a factory floor: of any one kind of cookware—pots, grills, and so on—there were a full ten, since a single order might run to a dozen-plus servings at once.
Though she had her own kitchen, Yimi kept no set hours; she cooked whenever she happened to be around and free. If she didn't feel like it and someone pressed or badgered her into cooking, they'd offend not only her but very possibly Vice Commander Asuna as well. And going a step further: thoroughly upset the little girl, and no one would have anything to buy afterward—and whoever caused it would be shunned by absolutely everyone. So after one hotheaded member served as the guinea pig for the rest, nobody dared try that foolishness again; these days even that fellow had to go through Daizen-san just to buy buff food.
There was no stir-frying step in SAO; cooking just meant adding ingredients one at a time and waiting out the timer, so it wasn't especially busy work. Yimi couldn't see food buffs at all, which was why the guild members were even keener than she was on researching the menu. Of it all, the Sichuan Boiled Fish was currently the top-tier and priciest dish—though in an ordinary NPC's hands it wouldn't be counted valuable in the least.
A two-hour cold-resistance buff—Mapo Tofu could manage that much too. But compared with Mapo Tofu, whose effects were cold resistance and paralysis resistance, the Sichuan Boiled Fish also gave an attack bonus, a defense bonus, and even an active effect of a dozen-odd seconds of walking on water. All of that could be had for nothing more than C-Grade materials plus a little cash on top; and even though the effects now ran a full three times those of what ordinary NPCs sold—and the taste wasn't as good as an NPC's—that did nothing to stop crowds of people from calling it a bargain.
"Here you go."
"Thanks for the hard work, Yimi-chan."
"Oh, right—this morning I went down to Floor 6 and brought back a little toy." The man who'd come along set a Huarong Dao sliding puzzle down in front of Yimi. "That Fugu Sushi last time really saved my life. Without the poison resistance it gave me, I'd have been dead long ago."
"A puzzle?" Only now did Yimi show a flicker of interest. The truth was, she had no idea what these people meant by "floors" and the like.
"Up we go~"
Before she could get to studying her new toy, Asuna hugged her from behind. "Let's go out and stroll around town today. Being cooped up in a room all the time will sour your mood."
"But I still have to learn, to make clothes." Yimi squirmed a little.
She hadn't yet made the leopard-print dress she loved with her own hands.
Asuna gave a dry laugh. "That sort of thing had best never come into existence, honestly. Anyway, someone's coming to see you today."
Over the past couple of days Yimi had thrown herself into Tailoring readily enough, but the clothes she made to her own designs were an outright eyesore—her craft wasn't good, and a dress she'd stitched from a jumble of color blocks with no rhyme or reason made her look like a little beggar when she wore it. Asuna figured that rather than keep teaching her to sew, she might do better to cultivate the girl's taste first; the special effects on the clothes she currently produced weren't much use anyway. More than clothes that carried only a skill and no special bonuses, Asuna had even toyed with the idea of taking her to learn weapon-smithing from a blacksmith friend—but Yimi had no interest in weapons; her interest ran far more to food and clothes. That both disappointed Asuna and, at the same time, reassured her a little—at least in this one respect the girl was like an ordinary little girl.
"Yo. Long time no see."
"Kirito-kun."
The person Asuna had meant was, of course, him. On meeting, he moved to spread his arms for a hug from Yimi—who only looked at him, puzzled.
Asuna laughed softly.
Kirito awkwardly opened his inventory and produced a box of donuts. "Right—the treat I promised you last time. I brought it."
"Treats." Only then did Yimi lean in to give him a hug, which brought a little comfort to the perpetually solo, empty-nester Kirito.
Kirito crouched down. "Buff food with unlimited durability—word of it has spread all through the Clearers. I hear a fair number of people want to jump ship to the Knights of the Blood over it. Is somebody forcing you to work?"
"Nobody's forcing me."
"Don't think so badly of everyone, would you? She's the Knights of the Blood's Guild Darling now." Asuna reached over and straightened Yimi's collar.
Indeed—the way she ate her donut already showed a practiced, ladylike air, with no trace of the little savage from a few days back.
"Guild Darling, huh... Come to think of it, I never did ask how you and Asuna-san met, Yimi."
"Met?"
Yimi looked up and thought back over how it had gone. "The lady who can make clothes wouldn't give me food, then wanted me to eat her food, and when I wouldn't she followed me, and when I ran she chased, and she just had to make me eat her stuff, and then she grabbed me, and then she carried me off."
"..."
Kirito drew Yimi a little behind himself, away from Asuna.
Asuna flushed. "The way she tells it, it's far too easy to misunderstand! Even if that is exactly what happened..."
"Did you realize from the start, Asuna-san, that Yimi could make special food?"
Asuna shook her head. "No. In fact, until the Commander told me, I had no idea this child was anything out of the ordinary at all."
Kirito pinched his chin, thinking. "It was the same back on Floor 35. I've been turning it over for a while, actually—what sort of role was Yimi meant to fill, that Kayaba Akihiko would discard her after the open beta?"
"Role?" Yimi lifted her little face.
"Sorry—this is probably a topic you won't follow." Kirito gave her a pat.
He looked back to Asuna, making no effort to keep it from Yimi. "You told me before that she could make clothes, but that's a skill you taught her on the spot. If there's an ability she had from the very start, it has to be the cooking. And yet—strong as the 'Kitty Cuisine' Yimi can currently turn out is, Kayaba Akihiko could easily have solved the balance problem by fixing a steep price on it. Unless this child actually has some absurdly overpowered signature dish—one so broken that pricing alone can't rein it in?"
"A signature... dish?" Something occurred to Asuna, and her expression froze.
Kirito caught that something was off with her, but chose to ask Yimi first. "Yimi, you've been cooking to everyone else's requests all this time—but is there any signature dish you're really good at?"
"There is!"