Hello All, thanks for being so patient with me while I formulate where the story is going. Good News: I have most of Book 3 planned out, which I why I'm posting this. The bad news: I will not be able to go back to a weekly update schedule, so future updates are likely to be sporadic. I'll try to get them out at least once a month, though. Thanks for being patient again, and i hope you enjoy the new chapter!
Caring For A Rat: Book 3, Part 1: School Daze
Classes let out for lunch at 1:25. It was just late enough that the sun no longer was directly before the bench in the outer courtyard, but early enough that it still received a good amount of sunlight.
It was calm, out of the way. Most of my schoolmates preferred to surround themselves with the trappings of modern civilization; desks, drywall, and other amenities common to classrooms. But the bench in the outer courtyard was one of the most private places in the school, with only a single classroom positioned to look down on it.
It was the perfect place to relax during lunch, with a view of the sky, a couple trees artfully arranged to provide shade, although not quite grown enough to really do so, and enough grass that if I really wanted to, I could lie down and have a nap.
I leaned back against the bench, tilting my head up to watch the sky. The clouds drifted lightly across it, constantly shifting patterns. It was almost startling how similar it appeared to Aincrad.
But there were even more differences than there were similarities; for one, I could hear the distant hum of a central heating system and air conditioners, working to keep the school just a bit warmer than the temperature outside.
I could also feel the sun against my skin in a way that Sword Art Online's engine had never managed, no matter the location.
And finally, there were footsteps, far softer than the wooden and metal soles of Aincrad and accompanied by the stamp of a cane, approaching me.
"Hello, Kazuto." I brought my gaze back down from the sky to meet my wife's eyes. I smiled, waving a hand at her in greeting.
"Hey there, Asuna. Tomo's not coming?"
"Ya need ta grind yer observation skill some, Kii-bou." something poked me in the cheek. I turned my head a bit further to meet my girlfriend's impish eyes. She grinned, half a second from laughing. "I've been waitin' back here fer five minutes. Ya didn't even notice me comin' in."
"You know that he gets absorbed with cloudwatching, Tomo," Asuna remarked, sitting down on the end of the bench, resting her cane on the railing at its edge. "Back in SAO he wouldn't notice me until I literally blocked his view."
"Hey, clouds are fascinating," I defended myself. "The programs used to simulate them have to take into account that there's multiple different weights involved and they have to make sure that they render at the proper height. It'd look really silly if a cloud normally at 40,000 feet was put in-game at 6,000 feet."
"I suppose it would," Asuna smiled warmly at me. She then patted the bundle in her lap, which I hadn't noticed before. "Well, I brought lunch, does anyone want to—"
"Ooh, bentos!" Tomo vaulted the bench to land between me and Asuna, moving so casually that I almost couldn't believe that it had only been a month since she had stopped needing a cane. "Did ya try makin' the pickled beets again?"
"Not this time," Asuna said, waving off a reaching hand from Tomo. "I didn't have time to try again, and given how badly my last attempt went, I thought going for something simpler would be best."
"Well, I liked them," Tomo grumbled as she accepted the bento from Asuna, passing one over to me.
"You like everything Asuna makes," I said, opening the box to reveal a rather simple slice of cooked chicken alongside some steamed vegetables and a ball of white rice.
"Like you don't?" Tomo smirked, elbowing me in the side. Her chopsticks were already hovering as she figured out the best way to dissect her meal.
"Point," I hummed, picking up my own set of chopsticks. The food was good, if not quite up to the quality that Asuna had managed in SAO, and more recently, ALO.
As we began to eat, Asuna's phone rang. She glanced down at the screen, scowled, declined the call, and shoved it as deep into her bag as she could, with far more force than was necessary.
"Your mom again?" I asked, already knowing the answer.
"I wish she'd stop trying to call during lunch," Asuna growled. Tomo rested a hand on the schoolgirl's thigh, and Asuna smiled gratefully up at her. "I've told her that I'm busy, but I don't think she believes me."
"Is she still harassin' ya about transferrin'?" Tomo asked, rubbing the back of Asuna's hand with her thumb. My wife nodded.
"She's trying to get me to go to a prep school for this fancy college near Tokyo."
"Not Tokyo U?" I couldn't help asking the question. As soon as the words left my mouth, I felt horrid. Thankfully, Asuna didn't seem affronted, shaking her head in a negative gesture.
"I guess even she has to admit that I won't make it into Tokyo U." Asuna smiled dangerously. "Guess even she can't ignore that I missed two years of schooling."
"What I don't get is why she's tryin' ta get ya ta transfer," Tomo said, working her jaw as she articulated her thoughts. "It's not like it's legal fer us ta go anywhere but here."
"This year," Asuna corrected, stabbing a piece of steamed vegetable with her chopsticks hard enough to pierce through it. "Next year we're free to go to whatever school we want."
"I think most of us are going to stay here, though," I said, rubbing my chin. "I mean , even if it didn't have classes designed for us to catch up, our friends all go here."
"Yeah, but you know how my mom feels about my friends," Asuna scowled into her food, her mood souring by the minute. I exchanged a glance with Tomo. Today had been looking nice, and now this call was threatening to ruin it.
"Hey, Kii-bou?" My girlfriend asked, likely in an effort to lighten the mood, or at least keep it from worsening. "How's Yui's project going?"
"Fairly well." I reached for my phone, to show them the virtual "Room" that I had designed for Yui to inhabit. "I've got pretty much everything ready for her, I just need to figure out a way to establish a stable connection."
"Wouldn't storage be an issue?" Asuna asked, closing her bento. "I mean, Yui can't have a small file size, right?" She seemed genuinely interested, but that wasn't a surprise; she loved Yui. All of us did.
"Yeah, she's a pretty big girl," I affirmed, "Which is why trying to transfer her storage space would be sub-optimal. She'd need to go into a dormant mode, sort of like when she was an item, in order to fit on something like this." Asuna and Tomo nodded along. They were getting better at following my explanations about the technical side of computers. That, or I was getting better at making such things easily understood.
Either way, they could more easily give feedback.
"So this is just a link that Yui can use to 'project' herself from her home to the device. It's not the most elegant solution, and I'm having trouble getting anything from NerveGear VR to show—" As I spoke, Tomo's face lit up in a grin. Then she asked a question that made me stop mid-sentence.
"Are ya makin' our daughter into a Vtuber, Kii-bou?"
"Not… intentionally?" I winced at the words. Asuna snorted, and Tomo broke into a fit of uproarious laughter.
"Only you, Kii-bou," Tomo said in between bouts of laughter, laying a hand on my shoulder. "Only you could unintentionally turn someone into a Vtuber."
I groaned. "Why did I not see the connection?"
"'Cause ya get tunnel vision," Tomo said. "At least this way ya know where ta look for inspiration, huh?"
"Maybe," I said, rubbing my forehead. "The motion capture that VTubers use would have to be adapted for VR, and I'm not certain how to make it work, given that Full Dive works on almost the exact opposite principle, but if I—"
Tomo interrupted me by wrapping an arm around my shoulder and tapping her head against mine. "I'm certain ya can figure it out. Ya saved Yui from Cardinal, remember? This'll be a cakewalk compared to that."
"I sure hope so," I grumbled, nonetheless leaning into my girlfriend's warm embrace while Asuna steadily plowed through her bento.
At least I had somewhere to look, even if it wasn't my usual source.
Well above the courtyard, from the window of a classroom, someone looked down at the happy trio below and scowled. Her expression soured further as the girl in the middle wrapped an arm around the boy's shoulder, butting her head into his playfully.
"You know that your face is going to freeze like that, Rika," Her companion said in between bites of food. The brown-haired girl scowled yet more severely, as if in protest.
"I don't like it," She growled, turning away from the window. Her dark blue school uniform jacket was creased from how long she had been twisted in her seat. "Tomo's being far too close with Kazuto."
"Asuna doesn't seem to mind," The small girl across from her said, her high-pitched voice sharp and piercing.
"Keiko…" Rika began, the older girl sighing in exasperation. "I love Asuna, but she is not good at knowing which people to trust."
"You think Tomo isn't trustworthy?"
"She sold my three sizes to perverts!" Rika slammed her fist down on the table, the silverware and dishes on it shivering a little from the impact. Keiko, to her credit, didn't raise her voice to respond, although she did flinch at the noise.
"After you tried to snoop around her newspaper." The smaller girl countered, taking a bite of her sushi.
Rika groaned. "That's beside the point anyway. I think she's trying to seduce Kirito, and Asuna isn't realizing."
Keiko raised an eyebrow. "Really? You don't think she's just being affectionate?"
"Take a look at them right now and tell me what you think," Rika scoffed, the larger girl crossing her arms and scowling at her friend.
Keiko frowned, but still turned to look down at the trio in the courtyard. As she watched, she could see Tomo walking her fingers up Kazuto's shirt in a teasing manner.
"Maybe you have a point."
"Yeah." Rika nodded. "She's being way too intimate with Kazuto. I'm going to talk to Asuna about it at the pool today. Hopefully Tomo'll be occupied with catching up with Fuurinkazan."
"Maybe." Keiko said, still staring out the window. Rika cocked her head.
"What, surprised she's being so blatant?"
The smaller girl shook her head, "No, it's not that. It's—" Before she could finish her statement, the bell for the next class rang.
"Tell me about it later," Rika said, picking up the remains of her lunch. Keiko nodded, still processing what she had seen. However, in the excitement of preparing for the pool trip later that day, the two girls forgot all about the exchange, and Keiko failed to convey the last thing she witnessed: Tomo nuzzling into Asuna's embrace.
Asuna let out a breath as she surveyed the pool. It was nice that it was finally warm enough for this. It had been… years, really, since she had gotten the chance to swim properly.
Aincrad certainly hadn't had any good areas to swim, most of the lakes being full of mobs or patrolled by NPCs in the case of Yofel, and she had been so focused on her studies before then that she hadn't even touched the pool outside of classes, and given that the swim unit had just been about to start when… well, it had been a long time since Asuna had been swimming.
"Hopefully I can still remember the basics, at least." She muttered, striding forward confidently.
"Hey Asuna!" A familiar voice called, and Asuna felt a smile break out on her face.
"Klein!" She called, turning to face the relatively older man. He'd been a solid presence on the front lines of Aincrad, and even if he was more Kirito's friend than Asuna's, she had many fond memories of him.
He looked different from what she was used to; his bamboo armor replaced by a pair of swimming trunks, a towel wrapped around his neck, and a cooler dangling in his grip. But his hair was the same spiky mess that she knew, and he moved with the same energy.
"I'm so glad you could make it!" Asuna waved a hand out at the pool. "Look, isn't it lovely? We've got all this to ourselves!" The facilities were truly enormous. It wasn't quite the size of an Olympic pool, but it was close, and had a shallow end that even Tomo would be able to stand in comfortably. There were deck chairs on the sides, one of which Keiko was stretched out on, wearing a comfortable-looking t-shirt over her swimsuit.
She couldn't see Fuurinkazan, but they had left the changing room well before her, so they had to be out here somewhere. Kazuto, as usual, was fashionably late.
"Yeah, it is. Dynamm really pulled through for us on this one," The former samurai said, placing his hands on his hips. "He's getting relieved from cooking duty for it."
"That's great," Asuna leaned in, her hands almost itching to hold a utensil "So, you boys need any help with your cooking? I have been getting better, you know."
"Nah, we're good. We've done a lot of backyard cookouts before. This'll be no different," The former ronin said. "You focus on relaxing; Kirito's been telling me that you're under a lot of stress lately."
Asuna almost responded, but the former samurai waved a hand toward the low building next to the pool. "And if you're really looking for something to do, you can go and get everybody out here. Some people are taking a rather long time in the locker rooms."
"Alright," Asuna heaved a sigh. "I'll go get them." As she turned to leave, she started to hum a song. It was just too good of a day not to. The heiress strode into the female locker room with purpose, almost colliding with Tomo as she did.
"Oh, hellooo~," The info broker all but purred, her eyes greedily roving up and down Asuna's body. For a brief second Asuna wanted to cover herself, but reminded herself that she had worn this swimsuit precisely so that her significant others could appreciate it.
So instead she winked at Tomo as she passed. "I'll see you in the pool, okay?"
"Oh, you certainly will." her girlfriend said as she slipped by. Asuna put a little swing in her hips as she walked. She still wasn't fully recovered, still too thin and birdlike. But she knew that Tomo and Kazuto didn't care; they thought she was beautiful, and she couldn't help but show off for them.
Only for them, though. Asuna let the door swing closed behind her as she tapped a finger on her chin. The locker rooms were mostly empty, given that the pool had been rented out. Keiko was out enjoying the sun already, and she had just passed Tomo. Suguha had arrived earlier, although Kazuto had called her back to their car for something, so that left…
"Hey Rika," Asuna greeted, padding around the wall of lockers to the other aisle, her friend already fully dressed and ready to go. She was even putting her bag away as Asuna turned the corner. "You ready to go swimming?"
"In a bit," Rika responded, closing the door. "First, can I talk to you about something?"
"Sure," Asuna said, as her friend turned to face her. She looked nervous, almost. Asuna rarely ever saw Rika nervous anymore. She hadn't even been slightly taken aback when she had run into Asuna's father the one time their visits had coincided, launching right into berating him for hiring Sugou.
Asuna had had to step in to defend her father.
"It's about Tomo," Rika began, and Asuna's guard instantly went up. Had Rika discovered their relationship? She didn't want to hide it from her, but Tomo was absolutely terrified of other people finding out, and Asuna would follow her girlfriend's wishes.
"Well, what is it?"
Rika breathed in, wringing her hands together. "You might want to sit down for this."
Raising an eyebrow, Asuna complied, settling on to one of the benches in the middle of the aisle. After she was seated, Rika continued speaking.
"I think Tomo's trying to seduce Kirito."
Of course she is, Asuna thought, wondering for a half a second why that would be cause for alarm. Tomo had made her interest in joining their bed clear, they were just trying to find a good time. After all, with no one knowing…
Oh.
Asuna frowned. "I'll talk to her about it."
"This is serious, Asuna," Rika said, slumping down onto the bench opposite her friend, her back brushing up against the lockers. "I don't know if you haven't noticed, or just haven't been responding for whatever reason, but she's all over him whenever you aren't around. If I didn't know Kazuto, I would have sworn that they were sneaking around behind your back."
Is Tomo being that obvious or is Rika just being paranoid? Asuna wondered, somewhat disturbed. She thought that they had managed to disguise the new dimension to their relationship rather well, but if Rika was already so suspicious…
"I know. I'll make sure to let her know that it's not okay, what she's doing." Not if she wants to keep our relationship secret, Asuna added silently, standing up. "Well then, let's go and enjoy the pool, shall we? It's not often we get an entire pool to ourselves, is it?"
"You're right, it's not," Rika said, smiling as she followed Asuna out of the locker rooms. "I'm going to be swimming laps, most likely."
"Make sure to save some energy for the games," Asuna teased, nudging her friend in the side with her elbow.
"Nah, I'll have to stop when Kazuto gets here, need to make sure you two aren't going to sneak off somewhere and make out."
"We only did that once!" Asuna defended herself hotly. It had only been because Tomo had decided to be a tease and go without her cloak that day. The sight of the sunlight streaming through the info-brokers golden hair had been almost too much for Asuna. She couldn't exactly let herself get discovered kissing Tomo, but her husband had been almost as randy as she had been at the sight.
Quite frankly, it was a miracle that they hadn't pinned Tomo to a wall the second the three of them were alone.
Rika raised an eyebrow skeptically. "That we know of," she said in a knowing tone.
Asuna scoffed. "Look, I'm not going to be dragging Kazuto into a corner somewhere. I'm here to have fun with my friends. I rarely get to see you guys outside of school anymore and I want to take full ad—" The young heiress spoke over her shoulder as she walked through the door, only for her eyes to catch something as she re-entered the pool deck.
"Hey Asuna!" Kazuto called, waving from where he was setting a pack of towels down. The heiress didn't respond, too absorbed in tracing the firm muscular structure of her husband in all but law's torso. She knew he had started working out. She was often one of his workout buddies at the school gym.
But she'd never seen him shirtless since they'd left Aincrad; not unless it was too dark to make out details or there were… other things on her mind.
And there, beside her deliciously muscled boyfriend, Tomo was crouched next to a cooler, sorting through a bunch of bottles. The info broker was dressed in a frankly scandalous outfit for her. It was just a one-piece bathing suit, but it had a low scoop cut out of the back, emphasizing her girlfriend's shoulder blades in a way that made her fingers itch.
Tomo glanced back, and gave Asuna a cheeky grin and a wink, before shifting so that she was all but waving her butt in the air as she sorted through the cooler, her thighs tensing in a way that made the heiress want to pick the teasing info broker up and pin her to a wall somewhere.
A hand landed on Asuna's shoulder, startling her out of her… admiration of her partner's bodies. "Breathe, Asuna," Rika said, an amused glint in her eye.
"Just breathe."
"Very funny," Asuna scowled, shaking her friend's arm off. Despite herself, she smiled as she walked towards her partners, Tomo grabbing a set of bottled drinks out of the cooler as Kazuto finished setting up the towels.
Her mother couldn't touch her here, not in this moment.
