Hey, Offline Collabs Are Hell
I lay there quietly, staring at the DM that had come in from Koga on my phone.
I knew exactly what it meant.
"...An offline collab."
She was the one who'd forced a horror game on me, and now she was offering an offline collab like it was some kind of help. Poison and antidote, handed over in the same breath.
I had no intention of accepting.
I mean—an offline collab meant seeing each other's faces in real life, didn't it? Meeting my one and only friend, Koga, that angel—no, that little devil?
I'd gotten used to her enough by now that a call where I didn't have to look at her face let me loosen up a little. But running a stream while actually looking her in the eye? Completely impossible. My heart started to race at the mere thought.
And if she saw what I was really like on stream, got a bad impression, and announced she was done with me, I would march straight into the graduation process. Better to be scared and cry by myself.
Still, I'd made it painfully clear just how much I hated horror games. Koga would prepare something as unscary as she could manage.
"Then, for now, I'll turn her down...."
A bright little chime.
"...Still no answer."
She had definitely read it.
People around Suzuha were always telling her she read the room well. If anyone asked whether she had wanted that, she was confident she could shake her head without a shred of shame. A height and a face that barely changed no matter how many years passed made perfect gossip wherever she went, and her knack for reading a room had been born in exactly that kind of air.
It wasn't only a drawback. Underground idols, even members of the same group, usually chafed against one another for all sorts of reasons, but the group Suzuha had belonged to barely fought at all. Whenever a misunderstanding started to sprout, whenever popularity drew those faint, ugly lines of rank, she caught it early and cleared it away. Thanks to that, three years after she retired, she was still close friends with every one of them.
"Well. I have a pretty good idea what Izumi's thinking right now."
And in a sense, what Suzuha had was hard to dismiss as mere social sense. It was closer to profiling: taking in someone's looks, personality, hobbies, and talents, and predicting what they would do.
Izumi trusted her, to a point. So Izumi would believe that whatever horror game she suggested was something she could endure. She also seemed to suffer from a fear of people. Even with someone she trusted, talking face to face would feel like a burden.
She was curious, too, in her own way. Give her nothing but the name of the game, and she'd go look it up on her own.
Suzuha's goal this time was simple. Use the horror-game stream as an excuse for an offline collab, and get closer to her. She was equally certain that Izumi would refuse. Izumi, who had almost no relationships at all, clung to her friend Suzuha in her own peculiar way, and Suzuha knew it.
"She'll turn me down because she's convinced that if she looks even a little strange when we meet in person, I'll be disgusted."
Suzuha covered her mouth and let out a stifled, wicked little giggle.
"And I suggested it because I wanted to see exactly that cute side of her."
Which meant the method was simple.
All she had to do was suggest a horror game Izumi could not survive on her own. Anything of an ordinary level, and Izumi would decide she could just be scared and cry by herself. So Suzuha only needed to show her a fear that outranked her fear of people.
The typing status in Izumi's DM froze. Suzuha didn't need to see it to know she had started a message, then stopped to look up Dawn. And that alone was as good as the plan succeeding.
Twenty minutes after Suzuha sent the DM:
Suzuha saw that answer come in, and she smiled.
"...I-I really think I'm going to cry if I play this."
Dawn Never Breaks, the game Koga had sent over DM. Just in case, I searched up its teaser online, and I am not exaggerating when I say my eyes were already wet from that alone. It was a three-minute video. I didn't even last past the fifty-seven-second mark before I shut it off.
Looking into it, I found out it had swept a pile of awards in the adventure category last year. I wanted to ask the people who gave it those awards what they thought they were doing. Why hand a prize to a horror game? A game is supposed to be a work of art whose purpose is to make the person playing it happy. So why was a genre that existed only to frighten people being praised like that? The game industry needed to take a long, hard look at itself....
Dawn Never Breaks was an adventure game set in a zombie apocalypse. The protagonist had been bitten, and yet, for some reason, the zombification had stopped—a so-called half-zombie. The human side meant to put that protagonist out front, beat back the zombies, and return the world to normal. The protagonist, along the way, was moving in search of a cure that would turn their body back to what it had been. That was the basic story.
The first time I read that description, I thought it was just an action-adventure about fighting zombies. I believed Koga had picked it out of consideration for me. The teaser demolished that misunderstanding completely.
For one thing, because the protagonist was a half-zombie, parts of their arms and legs were rotting, and the player had to look at that for the entire game. A game that planted that kind of revulsion in you from the outset and then just kept going could not possibly be normal. When a hand shot suddenly out of the ground and seized the protagonist by the ankle, I genuinely almost fell over backward. And why was the modeling quality that high? The way those things looked was terror all by itself.
"Hic."
The hiccups that had started when I got scared showed no intention of stopping.
I had pleaded with her about how much I hated horror games, and she sent me this. Thinking back on yesterday's collab, I was clearly the one in the wrong, but this was too far. Koga, I hate you....
"Yeah. No way."
I couldn't see it. I couldn't picture myself ever reaching this game's ending. Honestly, the little bit of teaser I'd just watched was already going to keep me up all night, and I was supposed to play through to the end? Maybe I really should just graduate.
Today was the twenty-fifth. The collab was set for the thirtieth. If I negotiated well with my manager, I might be able to graduate within five days. Not that I'd actually say I was graduating. I had at least that much sense.
...This much was fine, wasn't it?
Mm. Failure.
Lately the manager had gotten much worse at indulging me. Which meant, in the end, that I had to play this game.... If I had to get through it alone at home, I was definitely going to pass out halfway. If Mom had been here I could have gotten help somehow, but unfortunately she had left this morning on a ten-day business trip to Korea.
I slowly erased the message I had typed earlier, wrote a new one, and sent it to Koga.
So there had never been a choice besides the offline collab.
Heh. In four days, am I going to lose my first friend?
I'll keep every memory up till now as a good one, Koga....
Time feels endlessly slow when it drags, and endlessly fast when it runs. Ten minutes of studying at school can feel like an eternity, while thirty minutes of gaming vanish at the speed of light. Put simply, the four days I'd been given disappeared in an instant.
The stream was set to start at 5:30 p.m. on the thirtieth, and Koga had said she would come to the house at two in the afternoon. I wasn't sure she needed to arrive that early, but she said we'd need time to get used to each other, and in the end I nodded.
And the time right now was 5:00 a.m. on the thirtieth. Not five in the afternoon. Five in the morning.
Since being reborn I had been a good kid who was asleep by one at the latest, no matter how late the night ran. Tonight, between the terror of having to play that game and the tension of Koga coming to the house, I could not sleep.
"I need to sleep...."
My body was tired and my head was foggy. Even so, the fear and the nerves had no intention of letting go of me easily. At this rate my condition was going to throw the stream off. Would I even be able to wake up in time for when Koga arrived?
Then it occurred to me that I might as well just stay up all night. Right. Who was I? In my past life, tempered by a full-time otaku's schedule, I had been the sort of person who could go more than seventy-two hours without sleep if I needed to. Even if this body's stamina was weaker than that one's, a single day ought to be nothing. No matter how tired I was, no matter how foggy my head, there were countless ways to keep from falling asleep.
"Haaah...."
First I let out a huge yawn, jolting myself a little more awake. Then I shot up out of bed, sat down at the desk, and hit the computer's power button.
"First, maybe I'll watch some action anime...."
Koga was coming at two. So I'd hold out until then, and if I truly couldn't manage it, I'd explain the situation and sneak in a nap before the stream started. A truly perfect plan....
"...Yano!"
Ding-dong! Ding-dong!
"...I'm not hearing things, right?"
Ding-dong! Ding-dong!
"Nngh?"
It was strangely loud outside. I had been dreaming about eating fancy chocolate, and someone had the nerve to interrupt. The crime was grave. If it wasn't something important, they were going to receive the glare I save for the very bottom of my soul.
"KA! YA! NO! It's already two-thirty!"
Ding-dong!
Kayano? If it was Kayano, that was definitely my—
"Ah."
I finally grasped the situation and looked at my phone. Just as Koga had shouted, the lock screen informed me that it was 2:32. Misscode DMs had piled up past fifty, and the missed-call notifications were packed in just as thick. I-I had definitely set alarms for one-thirty and two!
"I-I'm s-sorry?!"
I scrambled up, bolted outside, and flung the front door open for Koga, who had been waiting at least thirty minutes.
"S-sorry I f-fell asleep!"
My mouth was still stiff with sleep, but I bowed and forced an apology out of it anyway.
"...W-well. I did think this might happen."
"I-I, um, I..."
"F-first, let's just get inside."
I had been certain Koga would be furious. For some reason, her voice sounded flustered instead.
"Wh-what should I d-do..."
"I said get inside already!"
"K-Koga?"
"Clothes! Izumi, your clothes!"
Somewhere in there she had gone back to calling me Izumi the way she always did, and that urgent voice finally made me check the state I was in. My pajamas—bits of me showing, here and there—
"Eeeeeek!"
I slammed the front door shut as fast as I possibly could.
"...Get yourself together and open it again."
"...Okay."
Only after I had put the pajamas back on properly, just as Koga said, could I open the door again. Th-the dangerous parts hadn't been showing, right? And we were both girls, so... it was fine, wasn't it?