Being Noticed by Everyone Is a Burden, But It's Also a Joy
Around the time new fans of Nia were springing up inside the management team of Olive’s District 21 branch, a blonde beauty was passionately pressing her case on her guardian inside a penthouse somewhere in the same district.
“…So you want to meet Nia in person, no matter what it takes?”
“Yeah! You saw it too, Anju! That vicious, ugly monster! No matter how you look at it, that was a Virtual Beast. Which means wherever Nia is, it’s definitely the virtual world! So we have to go meet her!”
The blonde beauty was Kristina—a girl who had fallen so hopelessly for Nia that she could no longer feel like her day had even started unless she watched the stream every morning.
Faced with that bold declaration, her guardian Anju could only press a hand to her forehead, looking thoroughly pained.
“True. I don’t know how she managed it, but… looking at that Virtual Beast, the odds are high that she’s really inside the virtual world.”
“Right? I told you it’s certain!”
“But how exactly do you plan to get to this ‘Abyss’? Do you even know where it is?”
“Well, of course that’s…!”
Wind-up. Then Anju’s honest fastball straight down the middle.
Kristina, still riding her excitement, couldn’t so much as foul off the perfectly reasonable question that came flying right at her. One quick roll of her eyes and she realized she had opened her mouth without a single plan.
“H-how do we get there…? Anjuuu…”
“…Honestly.”
Even a genius who carved through beasts without a shred of fear in the virtual world was still just a kid.
Anju could only let out a small sigh at the pitiful, teary-eyed look Kristina was giving her, as if begging for help.
The reason for that sigh was simple. Nia’s streams had made it clear that something called the Abyss existed somewhere in the virtual world… but no one had the faintest idea where.
The Abyss, huh. I’ve been a salvager for over a decade and I’ve never even heard the name.
In an industry where simply lasting five years intact earned you applause, Anju had kept all four limbs for more than ten. The Abyss was a place even she—who had punched wind holes through countless Virtual Beast skulls and written her own legends—had never once heard of.
It would have been easy to dismiss the whole thing as a scam or a lie. But if you thought about it carefully, it wasn’t entirely unreasonable.
No one knows where the virtual world ends, after all.
Thirty years had already passed since humanity, driven to the brink of extinction, had begun to rise again. Even after barely escaping the shadow of the Great War, the information humanity had managed to uncover about the virtual world was, at best, thirty to forty percent. The place was still packed with unknowns, and even now countless sacrifices and efforts were being poured into dragging just a little more data out into the open.
Seen in that light, the claim that the Abyss truly existed wasn’t completely without persuasive power.
But “not completely absurd” and “something you can actually trust” are two entirely different things.
How many people had been dazzled by the surface and then paid dearly for hollow insides? Especially someone like Anju, who had been burned more than once in her green years by cunning Virtual Beasts that mimicked humans, she had every reason to stay cautious.
“Anju…”
“…Haaah.”
Yet looking at the girl beside her staring up with those miserable eyes, she simply couldn’t bring herself to say “give it up.”
To Anju, Kristina had long since become more than a ward. She was family.
“Fine. No choice, then. We’ll just have to ask the person herself.”
“The person herself…?”
“Let’s send Nia a mail directly. The content… yeah. How about proposing a deal with the Wolf of Dawn?”
Kristina only looked puzzled, clearly not following. Instead of a long explanation, Anju simply gave her a confident little smile and ruffled her hair as if to say everything would be fine.
If everything she showed on stream is real… then a bloody underground free-for-all is coming soon. At the very least, the three major salvager corporations will be at the center of an ugly food fight over who gets their hands on her.
Nia had freely released Ooparts—each worth enough to buy a whole house in some remote district—into the outside world with no strings attached. The more her shocking existence and name spread, the more people would inevitably try to scrape whatever crumbs they could from her. A being who could keep pulling perfectly preserved, high-value Ooparts out of the virtual world was a golden goose worth more than any fortune.
Of course, if Nia really is a being that exists inside the virtual world, none of that fighting will touch her at all.
Whether Nia herself felt the effects or not, a major storm was definitely about to hit the salvager industry. So before her influence grew so large that no one could even get a foot in the door… it wasn’t a bad idea for someone as light on her feet as Anju to stake a claim first. Even in the worst case—if Nia turned out to be pure bluff or a fake cooked up by some salvager company—she had nothing real to lose.
Being free to move really is nice. Leaving the big company and going independent was the right call. The more you have, the more you stand to lose.
Anju felt a twinge of regret. If only she had made a move earlier, back when Kristina was still binge-watching the videos all day long, before Nia had properly hit a hundred thousand subscribers. At the same time she thought: even so, deciding this quickly still put her far ahead of the slow-moving corporations.
But while she was carefully composing the mail, there was one thing she failed to notice.
Just how enormous the implications were of Nia freely dumping Ooparts into the market—Ooparts whose scarcity the industry had been carefully maximizing for profit. And just how fatal the twenty Ooparts she had already released were to the salvagers who had been busy attaching premiums to those prices.
Half-retired and focused entirely on raising Kristina’s prodigious salvager talent, Anju never realized it.
The war—no, the ugly food fight—had already begun.
Some wanted to buy Nia with vast sums of money.
Some wanted to take her by force.
Some wanted to destroy her completely.
But not a single one of them had yet realized the truth:
That Nia’s claim of being a Virtual Lifeform living inside the virtual world contained not a single grain of falsehood—and that no matter how thoroughly they scoured the real world, they would never find even a trace of her.
“What the hell? Why are there so many mails?”
Three days after submitting the Plus Streamer application to Olive. Checking the only mailbox that was open—Olive’s—I found far more messages piled up than usual. Just the ones that had arrived in a single day already numbered in the triple digits. Even I couldn’t help making a face of pure exhaustion.
“Uh… ‘Let’s work together’? Ad inquiries? Hmm. I don’t really care about real-world money.”
If cash could be converted into CP, maybe. But as things stood, outside money was nothing but a white elephant to me. There had been a time when I’d seriously considered hiring someone from outside the virtual world as an editor, but now I already had one extremely reliable worker.
“Just delete everything that looks shady. No real upside anyway. It might be fun, but…”
I closed my eyes for a moment and cast my mind back to the days when I’d been deep into internet streaming. Then I remembered all the streamers who’d gotten caught in stealth-ad scandals and watched their careers evaporate overnight.
…Yeah. Nope. Why take on risk when I don’t even need the money? I’m not an idiot.
In the end, all I did was convert people’s attention into CP. As long as I had viewers, that was enough. There was a reason I never opened donations.
“Delete, delete, delete… Ah. This one…”
Click, click.
I was staring blankly as mails vanished into the trash with every mouse click when I noticed one with a glaring yellow subject line mixed in among them. The meaning of that yellow was crystal clear: this wasn’t from a user. It was from Olive’s official operations side.
And in this situation, there was only one mail operations would be sending.
“…Plus Streamer, huh.”
Gulp.
I swallowed without meaning to. Apparently I’d gotten pretty tense. But it couldn’t be helped. Checking pass or fail was always a heart-pounding affair—one of those things a timid, weak-hearted person like me would never get used to, no matter how much time passed.
I had to click it. But what if I’d failed? Well, so what? Just keep streaming and wait for the next chance.
Failing wouldn’t be the end of the world. And yet… why was my chest pounding like this?
I hovered the cursor over the yellow mail for a long, agonizing moment before finally calling for help.
“Ugh… uuuugh! Noise! Come here a second!”
“…Hm?”
“Can you open this mail for me?”
Noise looked like she’d been rolling around on the bed; her hair was a little messy. But she must have realized the request wasn’t particularly difficult, because she plopped herself right between my legs and, without the slightest hesitation, clicked the mail open with the mouse.
…Before I could even look away from the monitor, no less.
“Gyaah! Ugh… Well? Did I pass…?”
After hastily averting my eyes from the screen, I asked the result in a rather timid voice. Noise scrolled the mouse wheel with a soft rattle, then answered in her usual flat, unbothered tone.
“…You passed.”
“Really?!”
Whoosh. I whipped my head around so fast my hair lagged a full beat behind. What met my eyes was a short sentence written in thick, bold letters, perfectly clear.
The moment I understood what it meant, a thrilling sensation raced from the tips of my toes all the way up to the crown of my head.
Apparently I had passed the Plus Streamer application… on the first try.