What Would You Do If It Came to That?
“What would you do if it came to that?”
She was definitely someone I'd never met before.
All I could see was her back, but between that and her whole bearing, something about her felt exactly like Lily.
How should I put it...
Her aura? The vibe she gave off?
I couldn't put it into words precisely, but that was the impression I got. The person standing in front of me had to be Lily.
“Oh.”
But as if our encounter was meant to end there, Lily vanished the moment I'd spaced out.
Gone, just like that, into the apartment building.
Yena knew she shouldn't, and yet her feet carried her forward all the same. Before she realized it, she had stepped inside the building as well.
It felt like her home, but not her home at the same time.
She looked around calmly. The corridor was completely empty—not so much as a trace of anyone passing through.
Yena shook her head. This was truly as far as it could go.
The instant she squeezed her eyes shut and turned to leave—
“Excuse me.”
“!!! Hiiiiiieeek!”
CRASH! Startled by someone appearing out of nowhere, she landed hard on her rear.
She couldn't see the eyes themselves, but beyond the sunglasses she could feel the cold gaze, sharp and unmistakable.
She'd half suspected from a distance. Up close, there was no doubt left.
It's Lily.
A frosty voice echoed down the apartment corridor.
“I was planning to let it slide, but I figured I should say at least one thing.”
“Y-yes?”
“What exactly did you think I was going to do?”
Lily leaned in, and their faces came within inches of each other—the one wrapped up tight to the eyes, the other frozen in a flustered, bare-faced stare. For a brief moment, something like a staring contest neither would call one stretched between them, and then Lily's pale white hand slipped the sunglasses away.
Those ocean-blue eyes she'd seen so often in Deoen.
Calm to the point of glacial, and those twin depths made Yena feel as if she were being wound up in them, bound and held fast.
“Where do you get the confidence?”
“Huh? Uh, y-you're really Lily...”
“Whether I am or not, did you actually stop to think about what you were doing?”
“Well...”
Her mind went blank.
She'd lived as a streamer, met every kind of person, run into plenty of strangers in real life too—but this was nothing like any of that. Simply standing there made her tremble like prey before a predator.
And above all...
...Her eyes are so pretty.
How could a person even be like this?
“Um, hello?”
“...Ah! S-sorry!!”
“Sorry for what, exactly?”
“For... for following you around without permission, Lily—”
“Haah...”
Lily straightened up. Even with more than half her face hidden, the beauty underneath was impossible to conceal.
Yena had done her share of cam streams, but face to face like this she might as well have been a squid groveling on the floor.
“Get up. People can see us here.”
Chirp, chirp, chirp.
Flutter, flutter!
“The landscaping is lovely.”
“Th-that... yeah...”
Yena shuffled in place, unable to hold herself together. Had she done something wrong, or just something unsafe?
If I knew, I wouldn't have done it in the first place.
Not only had she revealed the building she lived in to someone whose identity she couldn't even confirm—she'd gone and trailed right behind them. How much more reckless could you get?
Granted, Yena had her excuses ready. Maybe Lily had become famous enough in the public eye. Or maybe this was a wealthy neighborhood with top-notch security, so she was never in any real danger. Or maybe—simplest of all—Lily just hadn't looked like the type to do anything like that.
“This spot should do.”
But none of it amounted to a justification.
They stood at the outer edge of the apartment's landscaping, a place few residents ever wandered to. A wooden bench and a semi-transparent wall blocking off outside gazes made it perfect for a conversation between exactly two people.
The moment I sat down, Yena sat too.
In the bright light, the real-world Yena turned out to be strikingly similar to her Deoen self—same face, same build, just polished up a notch or two. Reality was a slight downgrade, sure, but nowhere near enough to fall short of her in-game self.
Yena stared at my face—the only part of me showing beneath everything else—and couldn't hide her awe.
Lasers were about to shoot out of those eyes.
“Um...”
Yena spoke first.
“I'm sorry. You've never once revealed your real life, and I went trying to dig it up on my own.”
She bowed her head.
“......”
“It's just... now that we're neighbors, I guess I let my guard down a little... so, um. I thought at the very least it'd be fine to put a face to you... but looking back, it was a completely stupid thing to do. I'm sorry.”
“That's not the problem.”
“...?”
My face being known didn't bother me one bit. I'd been living with it in the open for over thirty years now; the only reason I kept it covered was that attention invited misunderstandings, and misunderstandings were a hassle.
The truth was, for decades I had walked around with my face bare—treating the sick, shielding the vulnerable, roaming every last corner of every city worth living in.
Countless people had come for my life. Cities, and eventually entire nations, had hunted me and me alone. There had even been those who tried to enshrine me like a god.
For me to suddenly start fearing or fretting over any of that now would have been a joke.
“What matters here is you, Yena. Didn't I tell you? 'Who do you think I am, and what makes you think I'd tell you anything?'”
“Ah...”
“Your address, tailing me through the halls... do you have no awareness of danger at all?”
Yena went mute. Whatever was going through her head, I hoped she'd at least grasped her own naivety.
The spoiled noble daughters and aristocratic heirs who acted that foolishly always regretted it only after disaster struck. They trusted the countless shields standing guard around them—
—but the world held just as many spears made to pierce those shields.
“...Do people usually worry more about the stalker than the victim?”
Victim and stalker, was it. Well, at least she understood her own position.
“If the victim happens to be a monstrous murderer, that changes the math, doesn't it?”
Monstrous, no. But close enough.
Yena scratched her head and offered her defense.
“Honestly, I didn't think safety was an issue. I judged that with your personality and public image, you weren't the type to do anything like that, and I didn't just blurt out my address without thinking either. Besides, this neighborhood is way too expensive to even be worth targeting for crime—”
“Then something's about to happen in that expensive neighborhood.”
Before Yena could even get out a confused huh?, her entire field of view flipped upside down.
Lily—who a single second ago had been holding a posture so upright that any posture-check fairy on the internet would've double-tapped it in approval—was now doing a handstand.
No. Not a handstand.
The world was upside down.
Yena dangled headfirst from Lily's hand.
“Wh-what?! What's—?!”
“That's what I asked. What would you do if it came to that?”
“The—the whole world is upside down!”
Yena flailed her arms and legs, struggling with everything she had. But it was useless—no trick she tried could shake her free of Lily's grip.
Lily let out a sigh and set her back down on her feet. Yena stood there with a dazed expression, apparently unable to process what had just happened to her.
“...Did you just do some kind of joint-lock thing?”
“Something like that.”
Superior physical ability means nothing if you don't know how to use it—such a person is just a strong child. That was why I had trained in swordsmanship, spearwork, blunt weapons, every weapon art there was, along with the martial disciplines built on the body itself. None of this was some stat-correction illusion; these were techniques I had genuinely learned.
For the record, my mana had shrunk to almost nothing, but thanks to the blood of the Heavenly Tribe, my physical abilities still matched or exceeded those of an adult man who exercised regularly.
And honestly, if you're going to steal from me, steal all of it.
What kind of sadism leaves just a sliver behind?
“In any case, even if it hadn't been me, someone could have used your information badly and put you in real danger.”
“...I don't have all that many antis, though.”
“Doesn't have to be an anti.”
I looked at her seriously. This was no joke. I'd seen situations like this more than once or twice, and it never failed to hit too close to home.
And please, oh please, do not come crawling to me later asking for help.
I'm not a free public health clinic, you know.
Not that I'd ever turn her away if she did. I simply wasn't built to leave the sick and wounded to fend for themselves.
A curse that isn't quite a curse.
A bitter smile spread across my lips.
“Yes, ma'am. It won't happen again. For real this time.”
Yena's head bobbed up and down at machine-gun speed. Something about the puppylike display drew a laugh out of me before I could stop it.
With that, I rose from the bench. Yena looked up at me, hair sticking out in every direction.
“Then I'll see you Monday. Go on home.”
“What?! Y-you're just leaving it at that?”
Yena scrambled to her feet. She'd gotten what she wanted—the face. What more was there?
“What else would we possibly do here?”
“Uh... a housewarming?”
A housewarming?
“Right. Go home.”
“Ah.”
“What a way to start the morning.”
I'd meant to wrap up the move, take a short break, and go straight live—but the Yena situation put me behind schedule.
“Was I too harsh on her?”
Truthfully, I hadn't planned on going quite that far. I'd meant to have a reasonable conversation, but she just didn't seem to get it, so I flipped her instead.
And here I'd thought my mindset had fully modernized since coming back. The moment I found myself in a situation like the old days, my hands moved on their own.
I flipped the Duke's daughter the same way, come to think of it.
There was once a duke's daughter who fled her castle without a single escort knight because she couldn't stomach an arranged marriage. Then, coincidentally, she fell head over heels for a man harboring a demon king's core and tried to sell him her heart, her soul, and everything in between. I flipped her exactly once, and that was enough to knock some sense back into her.
God, the way the Duke's knights came howling for my blood afterward.
taken on its own, the whole thing had been hair-raisingly dangerous—but looking back on it now, those were some of the funnier memories.
“Today... I should do a Daedeon broadcast.”
It was about time I climbed out of Platinum.