Inside SAO, Yuto and the others had already gathered together and were discussing the strange sensation they had experienced only moments earlier.
"That was weird. It felt like someone tried to attack my mind."
Ainz sounded genuinely puzzled.
Some kind of strange fluctuation had suddenly attempted to invade his consciousness, but against someone like him, the effort had been laughably weak.
As a top-tier archmage, his passive mental defenses had reacted automatically the instant they detected the intrusion, launching a counterattack before he even needed to consciously respond.
And after that, whatever had been trying to interfere with him simply disappeared.
"I felt it too," Rimuru said, looking equally confused.
Fafnir's expression was noticeably colder.
"That fluctuation was strange. It was a type of energy I've never encountered before. Extremely weak, but irritating nonetheless."
Being attacked without warning would annoy even someone mild-tempered, let alone Fafnir.
"I noticed it too, but it seems to be gone now," Tohru added.
Yuto fell into thought.
"Could there actually be people in this world with magic or supernatural abilities?"
For a moment, he felt as though his entire understanding of reality had been shaken.
Had he been wrong all this time?
Was this supposedly ordinary world secretly hiding supernatural forces after all?
Kaguya, meanwhile, had absolutely no idea what any of them were talking about and could only listen in complete confusion.
...
After the launch event ended, Yuto parted ways with Kaguya.
As for the strange incident inside SAO, Kaguya said she would have people investigate it.
Yuto's worldview had taken a temporary beating, since he had always believed this world was relatively ordinary, yet apparently even here, unexpected supernatural nonsense could happen.
Ainz and the others, on the other hand, had only been confused for a few moments.
To them, something like this barely qualified as an incident.
...
By the time Yuto and Tohru returned to the restaurant, Ainz, Rimuru, and Fafnir soon departed for their respective worlds.
They agreed to return together that evening, when they intended to properly explore SAO's open beta and begin progressing through the game from the start.
Yuto and Tohru rested for a while, and before long, evening arrived.
At the moment, however, Yuto was not actually inside the restaurant.
Tohru was watching the place while he took Vitamin outside for a walk.
This was one of the very few times in Yuto's life that he had personally walked a dog.
He had never owned one before, and the handful of times he had done it in the past had only been as a favor for someone else.
Around this hour, most of Ichinose Street had already finished preparing for business.
The women with nothing left to do during those final idle minutes before opening sat outside their establishments, enjoying the fading evening light.
Summer had a way of draining people's motivation.
The days were simply too hot.
The breeze blowing in from the sea carried warmth with it as it reached land, and by the time it passed through the city, that heat had mixed with the moisture from the ocean and transformed into the kind of oppressive humidity that could sap anyone's energy and patience.
Most afternoons passed beneath that half-restless, half-irritable atmosphere.
Evening was different.
As the sun sank and the city slowly released the heat it had accumulated throughout the day, the ocean breeze became noticeably cooler.
It still carried traces of warmth, but no longer enough to feel unpleasant. Instead, the air encouraged a pleasant sort of laziness.
The women sitting outside their various establishments were taking full advantage of that brief peaceful stretch.
Once business officially began, most of them would remain busy through the night, forcing tired smiles onto their faces while entertaining one customer after another until morning.
Yuto wandered leisurely along the street with Vitamin on a leash, exchanging greetings with the women outside the various nightlife establishments.
Sometimes they called out to him first, while other times he greeted them in passing.
Vitamin seemed especially happy to be outside.
Dogs were different from cats.
Cats often preferred curling up somewhere comfortable and enjoying their solitude, while dogs tended to want time with their owners.
After judging that Vitamin had walked enough, Yuto finally led him back to the restaurant, tidied a few things up, and waited for opening time.
Ainz and the others arrived exactly when they said they would.
All three appeared among the first customers of the night, almost perfectly synchronized.
Yuto once again found himself impressed by their initiative.
Whenever their objective involved video games, the three of them displayed a level of discipline and enthusiasm that was genuinely admirable.
Asuna and Utaha arrived afterward, followed by the usual group from Gensokyo, and the restaurant gradually became lively.
Yuto chatted with everyone as the night passed.
Most days here were like this.
Customers arrived, stayed for a while, left, and eventually returned another day.
Time quietly passed between those meetings without anyone really noticing.
Kanae, Shinobu, and Kanao visited again as well, and this time all three wore expressions of unmistakable surprise and excitement.
They eagerly told Yuto that the demons in their world had begun disappearing.
The Demon Slayer Corps suspected that something had happened to Kibutsuji Muzan, and everyone was currently trying to uncover the reason.
The three girls, however, had a fairly good idea what the real cause was.
That was exactly why they had returned to the restaurant.
They wanted to find Suika and thank her.
Unfortunately, they had arrived too late.
Suika had already returned to Gensokyo with the others much earlier.
...
Gradually, the night deepened.
For once, the restaurant became unusually quiet.
There were no ordinary customers left, while Ainz and the others were wearing their headsets and playing SAO, leaving them functionally indistinguishable from corpses.
Yuto sat alone behind the counter.
Night had a strange way of drawing people into thought, and as the silence settled around him, he slowly exhaled and found memories rising unbidden to the surface.
In his previous life, he had spent several years as a chef's apprentice before eventually finding work in a high-end hotel restaurant.
After society collapsed, he became a cook again at one of the survivor settlements.
Then he had been reborn into this life.
And somehow, after everything that had happened, he had ended up choosing the same profession all over again.
His customers were certainly much stranger this time around.
But when all was said and done, wasn't he still simply a cook?
Yuto rubbed his forehead and released a long breath.
Most of his life seemed to have revolved around pots, pans, chopping boards, and kitchen knives.
He looked young on the outside, but in reality, he had already lived twice.
Across those two lives, he had experienced hardships, setbacks, and more twists and turns than most people ever would.
If he added all those years together, then mentally, he was already approaching his thirties or forties.
In some ways, his state of mind had long since begun leaning toward that of an old man.
A kitchen knife no wider than his palm was probably the object he had held more often than anything else in his life, while the few meters of space behind a kitchen counter were where he had spent more time than almost anywhere else.
He had walked back and forth through kitchens for years, and somehow, his youth had passed beneath his feet one step at a time.
Yuto was not like those extraordinary people who accomplished world-shaking things.
Across both of his lives, there really was not much he could point to and proudly call some great achievement.
Strangely enough, that did not disappoint him.
He thought his life had been pretty good.
He enjoyed cooking.
He had spent two lifetimes preparing food and serving countless customers, and that alone was enough to satisfy him.
Most of the friends he had met, known, and eventually grown close to had entered his life through cooking as well.
That was good enough.
Cooking was good.
Running a restaurant was good too.
Thinking about it that way, Yuto could not help smiling.
It was not as though he had some hidden talent waiting to be discovered elsewhere, so why not simply keep running a restaurant?
Maybe life really could be that simple.
Find something you genuinely enjoy and keep doing it.
There was no need to make things more complicated than that.
The restaurant door slid open, drawing Yuto gently out of his thoughts.
He looked toward the entrance, and a warm smile naturally appeared on his face.
"Welcome."
A customer had arrived, which meant it was time to get back to work.
...
Outside, the night sky was pitch-black, while neon signs covered Ichinose Street in brilliant light and people wandered through the busy nightlife district in both directions.
Yet tucked away in an easily overlooked corner beside the street stood a little restaurant whose lights were still glowing warmly against the darkness.
Inside, the kitchen was still running, the tables were ready for whoever might arrive next, and behind the counter was a chef who had somehow spent two lifetimes returning to the same place in one form or another.
The restaurant was still open for business.
And for Yuto, that was enough.
The End.
Thank you all for reading this!