69. The End of Peace
69. The End of Peace
"It's done!!! It's done!!!!!"
"We did it!!!"
Those cheers erupted from everyone on set immediately after we successfully filmed Riv’s combat scene.
We had racked up a staggering seventy-six failed takes just to film that one combat scene.
Nicol, the magical girls who’d been acting opposite me, and I all cheered because the shoot was finally over.
The reason we’d failed so many times at a kind of combat scene we’d always handled well was the prosthetic arm mounted on my right shoulder.
'This damn prosthetic arm!'
Overcome with joy, I impulsively tried to rip the arm off and hurl it to the floor, but then I remembered I was in my John form and carefully detached it from my right shoulder instead.
I placed the prosthetic respectfully into its storage case, then dispelled the invisibility spell on my real right arm.
My right arm, strapped to my torso, came back into view.
I used my left hand to remove the restraints and rolled my right arm round and round, savoring its freedom for the first time in hours.
"Good work."
Diane, who had been forced to repeat the same scene dozens of times because of me, handed me a towel.
"Sorry. I caused way too many failed takes, didn't I?"
"No. Even if it weren't you, anyone acting with that arm would've had the same result."
Her gaze drifted to the prosthetic in its case.
Even detached from me, the arm occasionally twitched, as if it possessed an independent will.
Which it actually did.
No matter how flexible I was, I could only move within human limits, and no matter how well I acted, I couldn’t perfectly reproduce a machine’s distinctive uncanniness. That was why we’d borrowed a Death Knight’s arm.
The result was an utterly bizarre method: while I fought the magical girls with the rest of my body, necromancers controlled the right arm.
Naturally, the necromancer controlling the right arm and my remaining body parts didn't sync well, and having the right arm strapped to my torso made it hard to keep my balance.
Thanks to that, we had to blow dozens of takes on this one combat scene.
Still, by gradually adapting step by step, we somehow pulled it off.
'It was awful knowing you. Let's not see each other for a while.'
I carefully presented the love-hate Death Knight arm to the Necromancy Tower elder.
The elder chuckled amiably, accepted the arm, and began inspecting its circuits.
"The learning data must have accumulated quite a bit by now. Let's take a look, shall we?"
With that, he launched into an explanation of the arm's principles that verged on rambling. Something about artificial souls and principles similar to a ghost ship, but even if he told me all that, I couldn't understand it.
In short: “Necromancy Tower-style artificial intelligence—the more you used it, the more the soul inside learned on its own and the more naturally it moved.”
That was the full extent of my comprehension.
The elder didn't seem to care whether I understood either; he'd probably just explained it out of habit.
Behind him, his half-exhausted assistant-cum-disciple (and graduate student) lay sprawled, staring at the ceiling.
Seeing my partner, who had operated the arm throughout the shoot, in that state made me feel deeply sorry for him.
There was just one bit of sad news for him, though...
'Riv's going to appear dozens more times.'
Of course, as the elder said, the arm would learn, but in the end, the actual control fell to that person.
Switching operators mid-way could wreck the teamwork, so that necromancer was practically guaranteed to be dragged here for every single episode featuring Riv.
But what could I do?
As a graduate student who had effectively been sold off in exchange for research funding for the cash-strapped Necromancy Tower, he had no such thing as human rights.
I cast a pitying glance at the graduate-student necromancer, who was turning into something close to a lich without ever wanting to, then returned to set to shoot the next scene.
*
Having wrapped up the eventful shoot, the very first thing Bon Voyage Studio did was...
"Soundproofing has been installed on all the windows!"
"Did you check the barrier?"
"Done."
...to prepare for the fans (written as fans, read as a mob) who would soon be protesting in front of our studio.
I wasn't an idiot; there was no way I didn't know what kind of impact this storyline would have on the fans.
Nikolai and I had been proud of the script the moment we finished it, and all the actors praised it unanimously—so how much more strongly would viewers react?
Especially since we'd liberally sprinkled in twenty-first-century-grade heart-wrenching material, I couldn't possibly fail to predict their reactions.
"Where's Emily?"
"It’s Ailey. And why me all of a sudden?"
"I'm telling you to be careful going outside the club room for a while."
"...Thanks for worrying... I guess?"
Ailey stared at me like I was some kind of weirdo.
Normally I'd throw her out as bait to the fans, so she must be wondering why I was acting like this now.
But this time, I was genuinely too worried to hand her over.
Because the bunch that would be rampaging this time were none other than the Dina Guardian Knight Order.
If I handed Ailey over to them, packed as their ranks were with energetic Knight and Hero Department students, there was a real chance it wouldn’t end with her merely being strung up on a pole.
Anticipating the worst-case possibility that they might fire Dina’s Magic Wand in the front yard, we’d installed an interception barrier around the club room.
'I'm a human who learns, you know.'
I'd been smacked in the back of the head dozens of times after underestimating them, thinking, 'Surely they wouldn't go this far.'
It was about time I adapted.
...There was a brief moment when I thought that.
Strangely enough, for several days after it aired, it was quiet in front of the club room.
It was so quiet that the phrase 'calm before the storm' naturally came to mind, and we were actually reinforcing our defenses when a call came through to the club room.
Only after Nikolai picked it up and we saw his reaction to the person on the other end did we grasp the situation.
"Excuse me? The students in the Dina Corps have all fallen into mass mental corruption? Along with their professors?"
Hearing the student council's protest call and Nikolai's dumbfounded voice, I pressed my fingers to my forehead.
This world never, ever went the way I predicted.
*
The Knight Faculty Dean's office, its walls lined with various weapons and manuals.
A solidly built middle-aged man with a prominent scar near his eye sat facing Nikolai and me.
The Hero Department Dean had at least served us bitter herbal tea, but the Knight Faculty Dean dispensed with such pleasantries and set out only bottled water and nuts before getting straight to the point.
"As you've heard, perhaps because the work you created was so intensely powerful, the students have collectively fallen into mental corruption."
The moment we heard that, Nikolai and I instinctively began to bow our heads, but he stopped us before we could.
"Ah, I’m not asking you to apologize. You simply did your best, did you not? This happened because the Knight Department students are far too emotionally sensitive."
"Accident...?"
"Yes. An accident."
Interpreted, it meant he had no intention of holding us responsible.
"It’s awkward for me, as Dean, to say this outright, but compared with Hero candidates, Knight candidates tend to be rather... emotionally delicate. That leaves them relatively vulnerable to this kind of thing."
He moistened his lips with water and continued.
"Knights are truly a strange breed. They don't hesitate to kill their enemies and feel no fear about dying themselves, yet the moment the person they're meant to protect is in the slightest danger, they crumble so easily. We even joke among ourselves that they're simpletons with Heroes' bodies but Slime-like minds. Ah, I didn't mean to disparage His Excellency the Guardian Duke."
"It's fine. I, too, respect that gentleness of my father's."
He seemed to be mindful of the fact that my father, despite graduating from the Hero Department, couldn't become a Hero due to high combat power but fragile mental fortitude, but I wasn't bothered at all.
Where others called that a flaw as a Hero, I defined it as gentleness.
Not just my father, but Charles too, and other knights.
They weren’t flawed; they were gentle.
If anything, from my perspective, knights were the normal ones, while becoming a Hero was a position for people who were a little crazy. (For reference, aside from my father, every head of our family had been a Hero.)
"The Guardian Duke has a fine son."
"Thank you."
"I've digressed a bit. Let me continue. As I said earlier, it seems that girl named Dina has excessively stimulated the knights' protective instincts. So much so that starting yesterday, the students have been complaining that they can't control their mana and are suffering from mental corruption."
"Then what would you have us do?"
Surely he wasn’t about to ask for a sudden development where Dina and Riv reunited and lived happily ever after.
Of course, Dina would certainly find happiness someday.
But the sorrow had not yet ripened, and rushing straight into such a development could damage the work, so that much was difficult to accept.
Fortunately, the Dean's request wasn't along those lines.
"I'd like to request an event."
"An event?"
"My creativity can't compare to yours, but I wracked my brain and this is the solution I came up with. I was reminded of what you did in the Karamzin Territory."
"...How did you know I'm John?"
"I have my own information network. Besides, you didn't honestly think no one would notice after causing that much chaos, did you?"
"When you put it that way, I have no words..."
"So. Do you happen to have a means of resolving the students' mental corruption this time?"
"Ah... I'll discuss it with Sage Cervantes first."
"Take all the time you need. If you require a space to discuss privately, just the two of you, I'll vacate the office."
"Then, if you'll excuse the imposition, we'll take you up on that."
If Nikolai and I got into a serious discussion, we could end up spouting words related to our past lives, so we had no choice but to excuse ourselves and ask the Dean to step out of his own office.
After shooing the office's owner out and confirming there were no listening ears, we entered an emergency meeting.
"I've never done psychological counseling or anything, so I don't know what to do at a time like this. Do you have any counseling experience?"
"Uh... back when I was a streamer, I did some viewer counseling a few times."
"Oh. Like what kind of counseling?"
"Like, counseling for guilt over switching your favorite character?"
"...That's completely useless."
I left Nicol out of it and clasped my hands in front of my lips, sinking into thought.
Honestly, even the event in the Karamzin Territory had been a piece of staging that just happened to pop into my head in passing.
On top of that, drawing aggro had been the primary goal, so there hadn't been much else to worry about.
But mental corruption was a completely different beast, wasn't it?
There was no way I could easily devise an event that was meaningful to the students’ mental state while also giving them hope.
'My head hurt...'
For now, I just threw out whatever came to mind.
"Should we debut Dina as a VTuber?"
"Are you insane, Boss? Our club's barrier can't block the Calamity Duke's death beam."
"That's a no-go, right?"
After mulling it over in silence for about five minutes, we decided to follow a similar sequence to the last event for now.
First, what was the current problem?
The students had tasted twenty-first-century heartbreak and could not pull themselves together.
What was needed to solve the problem?
We needed to convince the students that Dina and Riv had a bright future—without spoilers.
What means did I have?
My own body.
"Should I bring Diane and recreate that scene in the middle of the road?"
"Now you're really just going off the rails. You want to see a mass seizure?"
Yeah, wrong answer.
Again.
Was there some major incident nearby I could use, like the hotel incident?
...Well, if I look, there is one.
"Tch... There is one highly toxic option, but... I’m not sure it’s the right call."
"If you're calling it an extremely potent poison, isn't that a bit dangerous?"
"Not that dangerous. Or is it that dangerous? Nah. It's probably not that dangerous."
"Agh. Stop dancing around it and just spit it out. What is it?"
I made the sign of the cross over my chest, offered a prayer—O Rictus, please, just this once, don't let things spiral out of control—and then said what I was thinking.
"You remember how the patients collectively restored John’s Directive, right?"
"Yeah, that did happen."
"How about we use that and scatter Riv Easter eggs all over the island? The John Pursuit Squad will find them on their own, won’t they?"
"Is that going to help them recover from mental corruption?"
"People seem to recover on their own once they’ve got something to obsess over."
Just like you don't tell an athlete in a slump to train harder, the best way to get exhausted fans back on their feet is to toss them bait so they don't even have the energy to be exhausted.
After hearing my idea, Nikolai was initially impressed.
"Oh. That's better than I thought. Just polish it a bit and it's totally doable."
But after questioning why I'd called it an extremely potent poison and thinking it over again, he discovered the problem.
"Can you control this?"
"Dunno..."
That was the issue.
As Nikolai feared, the problem was that the John Pursuit Squad was difficult to control.
Unlike the John Fan Club, which Charles had systematically built from the start, the John Pursuit Squad was an unforeseen group that formed when the patients gathered at the hospital happened to restore the directive.
Its founding members were people who fainted after watching a movie and then gathered together, so naturally there was no way that group was in its right mind.
To draw an analogy, they were like dark Sherlockians.
Their scale was massive and their skills were outstanding, but they absolutely refused to be controlled, so the fear was that we couldn't predict the outcome.
They worship the actor John like a king, track and record his every move, and go so far as to locate or even create locations that had only existed as settings in the films.
Even just looking at their recent activities, they were brimming with madness.
The cabin where John had once lived had originally stood on an otherwise unremarkable wild mountain, but they’d tracked down a place that matched the setting exactly and bought the surrounding land.
And after watching them name that mountain 'Mount John' and turn the area into a tourist attraction, I gave up on trying to control them.
The frightening part was not knowing what kind of rampage a real-world participatory event might trigger in people like them.
"But this is all I can think of."
"Then it can't be helped. Still, wouldn't it be right to notify the relevant parties in advance?"
"First, the student council, the school board, the Counterintelligence Department, the Puppet Duchess..."
When I counted them, there were more organizations to ask than I could count on my fingers.
But what could I do?
This was all I could think of.
*
Right away, we notified everyone around us about the <Real-World Participatory Mental Therapy Project for the Dina Corps' Mass Corruption Incident>, shortened to the <Dina Corps Headpat Project>.
And contrary to my worries, everyone unexpectedly granted their permission.
My maternal uncle, the head of the Counter-Intelligence Department, even sent his own money with tears in his eyes and told us to use it for the project.
"See, this is why a person's everyday conduct matters."
"Was he not simply moved because, for once, you reported first and acted afterward?"
Nicol said something beside me, but I ignored it and got straight to work.
I hid Riv clues all over the academy and signed contracts with trading companies to cooperate during the event.
We spent two frantic days running all over the island.
Just when all that remained was to subtly hint at the event through a press conference,
A call came from the main estate.
"Hello, Father? I didn't really cause any trouble this time, you know?"
"That's not why I called."
"Then what is it?"
"It's about your mother."
No way.
"Your mother has recently become utterly infatuated with a girl named Dina."
No way.
"She even bragged to me the other day about joining the Dina Guardian Knight Order."
It can't be.
"And just two days ago, since you were appearing, she was watching the broadcast with delight."
Come on, she's someone who was even a Tower Master.
"But ever since that day... your mother hasn't come out of her room."
"..."
"Can you do something about it?"
The unfilial son wanted to cry.
For real.