SAO Progressive volume 9 read:

The latest volume of SAO Progressive came out in English recently, so I plopped down $9 to buy it for my Kindle and dug in.  Every SAO novel is a delight.  Reki Kawahara is by far the best light novelist in Japan.  Unfortunately, he's still a liberal, so one of the subthemes of this novel was about a gay dark elf and how sad it was that the fantasy society around him didn't support his lifestyle.  But that was a minor tangent, the main topic of the story was more adorable moments between Kirito and Asuna, the best heterosexual relationship in fiction.  Kirito and Asuna took a bath together, slept together, and Kirito announced he wouldn't want to outlive Asuna, which left her spluttering in embarrassment.  That's a lot of 'progression' for a couple that isn't even a couple yet.

There was no progress up the Aincrad castle, they actually went down some floors, and then the story ended abruptly in the middle of a cliffhanger.  At the rate Reki writes these books we'll die of old age before Kirito reaches the 20th floor.  Oh well, I'll take what I can get.

The real question is why Yen Press hasn't translated the 29th volume of the mainline SAO yet.  That's what I really want to read.

If Reki Kawahara could ever finish SAO and Demons Crest, and then it was fully animated, it could be the #1 anime of all time.  Unfortunately we all know none of those things will actually happen.  Instead we get these dribs and drabs.

Meanwhile, I finished Shio's route in Tenpure!! and moved on to Sena's.  Sena's very beautiful, with long pink hair and bright blue eyes.  But she's no match for Shio even on Sena's route.  As Shio is Sora's imouto, she's constantly interacting with him even when Sena is the official girlfriend, and I'm always more attracted to Shio than Sena.  It actually reminds me how the best scenes in every route of Tenshin Ranman were Sana's scenes, regardless of which girl you were dating.  Sana was also a brocon imouto no matter which route you chose, so the resemblance is to be expected.  Neither Shio nor Sana are blood-related, but in Shio's case she only recently moved in with Sora due to their parents' marriage, whereas Sana grew up with her onii-san, so there is a slight variation there.

Tenpure!! has a lot of erotic content and not much plot once you get onto a specific girl's route, so like the after stories of Happiness 2 my interest in the work has degraded.  Not vanished, but it does mean I have to leaven it out with other things -- such as SAO Progressive or Parchment & Wolf.