Operation: Crush the Toxic Turrets
The lamp on the broadcast camera glowed red, announcing to the world that the stream was live.
And with it came a tidal wave of CP. I hadn't checked the contents yet, but I could already picture the chat exploding in real time — a chaotic flood of messages pouring in without pause.
Whether those messages were insults, comfort, or cheers didn't matter.
There was no need to worry about any of that right now.
The fact that the stream had gone up without a hitch meant that Menchi and I were clearly visible on every viewer's screen…
And even without looking at the chat, I could already guess exactly what those viewers were thinking as they took in the sight of us.
Hmm, this performance outfit leaves my thighs a little chilly… More importantly, isn't this skirt a bit short? It looked fine when I was just looking at it. Wearing it myself feels weird.
A wide stage flooded with brilliant lights. Two beautiful girls standing on it in idol costumes.
And one of those girls was openly holding an instrument, as if to say, We're about to play this for you~
Unless you were spectacularly dense, there was only one conclusion to draw: those two were about to put on a performance.
And without any particular twist, that conclusion was more or less correct.
Menchi and I were about to put on a show for that restless audience — a performance we'd had all of one day to prepare for.
"First up: He's a Pirate. The main theme from the film Pirates of the Caribbean."
I tossed the announcement straight at the viewers, shot a quick glance each at Noise and Menchi as a signal, then clicked my way over and swept my arm through the empty air.
The motion was somewhere between gently parting the wind in half and angrily swatting at something invisible.
In most situations, a gesture like that would mean absolutely nothing. The result, however, was anything but ordinary.
A shimmer spread through the space my fingertips pointed toward, chasing after the path of my hand…
And then, as if it had been sitting there all along, something materialized out of thin air!
It was an instrument that would have been deeply familiar to me — and, almost certainly, to most of the people watching my stream.
What else could it be? A massive keyboard instrument with a full eighty-eight keys: a grand piano.
I'd managed to create it in its complete form thanks to a structural blueprint I'd lucked into at the Data Trash Heap not long ago. It had cost tens of thousands of CP… a rather expensive friend.
But that was a story for another time.
In this moment, the piano and I weren't the stars of the show. We were the sturdy foundation holding the whole scene together.
So I settled onto the bench in front of the piano that had appeared so naturally, and tilted my head to look at Menchi, who was staring at me blankly.
A nod. …A nod.
No further conversation was needed. We simply met each other's eyes, nodded once as if confirming something we already knew, and that was that. We were ready.
And at almost the exact moment I set my hands on the keys, Menchi lightly brought the woodwind instrument she was holding to her lips…
The performance began so naturally that neither of us quite noticed the moment it started.
I on the grand piano. And Menchi… with an elegant wooden recorder.
She's a real performer, huh. She's way better than she was during practice.
I stole a glance at Menchi as I played — at the way she was drawing out notes without so much as a tremble — and muttered that to myself.
Where on earth had the girl who'd looked so nervous before the stream gone?
She was leaving footprints so vivid across the blank white canvas I'd laid out with the piano that you couldn't help but feel her presence. It was hard to believe this was someone who'd only practiced for a single day. She was genuinely impressive.
Well… with support like this, it'd actually be harder to fail.
That said, calling what she and I were putting on a pure display of skill would have been a stretch.
Raising your instrumental proficiency overnight was physically close to impossible, so we were using a kind of shortcut available only in this space.
The detailed explanation was a hassle, so roughly speaking… I was receiving real-time instructions on which key to press next, how hard to press it, when to work the pedals, and what posture my waist and arms should hold.
From Menchi's perspective, a support UI was probably floating in front of her eyes, guiding her on how to move her fingers, how much breath to release, and how to hold her body.
…It's kind of like a rhythm game. Well, practice time was short. We need all the help we can get.
If this had been a proper concert, what I was doing would have been outright fraud. Relying entirely on a machine's guidance to play was not so different from putting on a recording and lip-syncing with your hands.
If I were a professional musician and the viewers were paying customers, this would have been more than enough to cause a social scandal.
But flip that around, and the opposite was also true. I wasn't a musician, and the viewers weren't paying customers — so there was no reason for anyone to condemn me.
Besides… we have a different goal here.
As the performance neared its climax and my fingers moved across the keys half on autopilot, I found myself replaying the conversation I'd had with Menchi the day before.
"An instrument I can play? Uh… why do you ask?"
"Hehehe. As for the reason — Menchi, do you know the most effective way to deal with the trolls who take over the chat?"
"Th-that's… I don't really know…"
"It's not a complicated idea. The method is simple… make the chat meaningless!"
"…Huh?"
At the time, Menchi had just blinked and tilted her head, clearly not grasping what I was trying to say.
But once I'd calmly walked her through the details, she'd seemed to understand my intent properly — and had even marveled that it was a pretty solid plan.
"…How did you even come up with that? Your thinking is a little… unique…"
…Was that marveling, or something else?
Either way, when it came down to for or against, her opinion had leaned toward approval. So it must have been a clever idea after all.
And since I'd already scattered the seeds for this plan in every direction, reaping them should be…
…probably not that hard.
"Pfft…"
I glanced at the chat — now scrolling so fast that the nicknames themselves had become unreadable, a complete mess of wall-to-wall text — and a laugh slipped out before I could stop it.
Sure, I'd put up a notice before the stream saying that if a song or piece of music came on, people were free to spam whatever chat fit the mood…
But I genuinely hadn't expected the viewers to get this fired up about filling the entire chat with spam.
They probably just don't want Menchi or me to see any weird messages. …What do I do. I'm so grateful for that kindness I want to do something for them.
Of course, the ones still itching to troll seemed to have a decent sense of challenge about them.
Every so often, a nasty spam message would wedge itself into the gaps between the wall of positive text and catch my eye…
But before you could even finish reading them, another wave of spam would bury them and send them whooshing up and out of sight. There was nothing to get upset about.
Apparently the viewers had decided that if weird messages were going to ruin the stream's atmosphere, it was better to just steamroll the chat with cheerful spam instead.
Well, when Menchi and I were focused on performing, smooth communication with the chat was basically impossible anyway. Maybe it was better to just let them entertain themselves.
And right as the song is about to end…!
With only a few key presses left before the performance wrapped up, I used my gaze to manipulate the stream settings and banned every last toxic troll account Noise had flagged before we went live.
No malicious troll could escape Noise's eyes — eyes that crushed human processing power underfoot. The nasty messages that had been barely squeezing through the gaps in the spam all vanished in one clean sweep…
And as Menchi's unwavering recorder hit its high notes, I pressed the final keys and brought the song to a precise close. Then I turned a bright smile toward the camera and spoke.
"Hello! Heaven above, earth below, none compare to me! The strongest, most transcendent beautiful girl virtual idol on the planet — Nia! Making her entrance right here!"
"I-I'm just Menchi…"
"Yay-! Applause! Clap clap clap!"
The response was overwhelmingly positive. With the toxic users banned at just the right moment, the messages that came in after the spam died down were so peaceful it was hard to remember what the chat had looked like before the stream even started.
"Yes, that's right. If you head over to my Olive channel, there's a screening video of P*rates of the Caribbean, so please watch it if you have time. It's a masterpiece, I tell you — a masterpiece!"
I said that toward the chat as I pushed back my chair and quietly rose from the bench.
Turning around, I found Menchi wearing a somewhat dazed expression. It seemed her mind still hadn't quite returned after successfully finishing the performance.
So I gave a light stamp of my foot — just loud enough for her to hear clearly — to pull her consciousness back to the surface, then walked over and held out my palm.
Menchi reflexively raised her hand to match mine, and we brought our palms together in a light high-five.
"That was great, Menchi."
However those words reached her, Menchi stared blankly down at the hand she'd just clapped against mine, then looked up at me, broke into a goofy grin, and nodded.
This collab had been full of problems and full of worries… but at least for this moment, I hoped she wasn't thinking any of those bad thoughts.
"Alright then — shall we keep going! Today's our first collab with Menchi! It's basically the first guest I've ever had on, so there's a lot I want to do!"
"Y-yes!"
I threw that out there to fan the steadily rising energy even higher.
The collab had only just opened its doors. In truth, everything from here on out was the real beginning.
The operation to achieve both my goal and Menchi's… Crush the Toxic Turrets.