The Proud Geniuses' Match Begins
"Hmm. So you ended up collabing with Izumi after all?" Suzuha's voice came through the phone, amused and a little sharp.
"Yeah. I mean, I'd wanted to for a while. I just never thought it would happen like this."
Yukari giggled, turning the memory over.
Izumi and her mother had wandered, of all places, into the clothing shop where she worked, and somehow the three of them had ended up at dinner together. When Izumi's mother asked her to stay close with Izumi from then on, Yukari waited until the meal was finished and offered that they might as well do a collab next time. Izumi shot a glance at her mother, fidgeted, and in the end gave a tiny nod.
"I think I finally get why you bring Izumi up at least once every time we call."
"Hah? I do not!"
"...Right. We'll go with that."
Suzuha had all but shouted it. Yukari calmed her with a wry smile.
It was true, of course. Every call, Suzuha found some way to start talking about Izumi. Most of the time it was ordinary enough—what they had talked about—but now and then the complaints came pouring out. Her DMs took forever to answer. She got self-conscious in the most pointless places. And still, tucked inside every one of those grievances, there was affection for Izumi.
Not that she'd ever admit it.
Yukari swallowed the thought and went on.
"Anyway, for the collab I was thinking we'd stream Fate's Battle. What do you think?"
"Fate's Battle?"
"Yeah. I caught her playing it on stream the other day. Looked to me like she's been at it a long time."
Fate's Battle was a well-known mobile RPG in Japan. The hero fought beside legends of the past with the fate of the world at stake—a premise simple enough to grab people, carried by a story written by famous authors. Players joked that they weren't playing a game so much as reading a novel, and the game really was that devoted to its plot. The joke had turned into a marketing strategy, and seven years after launch it still held a solid core of regulars.
"I think it'd be fun to talk about it together."
Yukari was one of those regulars.
"But Fate's Battle doesn't really have anything you can do together. Are people even going to like it?"
"If you mean content, of course there is. The kind even people who've never touched the game enjoy watching."
"Don't tell me..."
"Yeah. A gacha stream."
The story was not the only thing Fate's Battle was famous for. There was also its genuinely vicious gacha rate.
"Izumi already did one, sure. But gacha streams are fun no matter how many times you watch them. Fate's Battle more than most."
The top rarity, five stars, sat at a miserable one percent, and pity cost seventy thousand yen. Worse, if the featured hero appeared before you reached it, the pity vanished outright, and nothing carried over. Pull the rate-up even once ahead of the spark, and every yen after that was back to a flat one percent. The game also let you strengthen a hero by pulling duplicate after duplicate—limit break—and on Fate's Battle, that made for a truly nasty system.
"...You're going to put Izumi through that cruel experience again?"
On the last gacha stream, a single limit break had taken every free gem Izumi owned, plus another sixty thousand yen. In cash, it came to a hundred and sixty thousand yen altogether. Even the price of hitting pity twice had not been enough to reach her goal, so she had spent twenty thousand yen more on top of that. Some people said she had gotten there in the end, so what was the problem, and others pointed out that plenty of players had spent far more and still failed to pull what they wanted. Even so, however much a VTuber might earn, sixty thousand yen was not money a high school student in the middle of her school life could spend lightly.
"The whole community felt sorry for her back then..."
"Oh, come on. Like that would ever happen twice."
Yukari let out a soft, dismissive little laugh, as if the idea were absurd.
Pity in Fate's Battle took three hundred and fifty pulls. Last time, Izumi had rolled seven hundred and fifty. The featured hero she needed for the limit break had not appeared through the seven hundred and fortieth pull, and when one community ran the numbers, the odds of a streak like that came out to 3.44 percent. Twice, Yukari thought, was simply impossible.
"You never really know, with probability."
"...Then there's nothing to be done about it."
It was an irresponsible thing to say. It was also unavoidable. Gacha had always been like that.
"Well. The two of you will figure it out, I guess..."
With that, Suzuha let the thought go.
"Oh, right. What was Izumi's mother like?"
"Izumi's mother?"
At the question, Yukari called up the woman she had met earlier.
She was the opposite of Izumi: eyes tilted sharp, the impression cutting, the expression blunt and hard to read. Her hair was jet black where Izumi's was not, and yet the long straight fall of it—difficult hair, the kind that fought you—still shone with a soft luster, as if to announce that these two were mother and daughter. A snow-white dress shirt against a black wrap skirt only sharpened that particular grown-up air. Put simply, she was the picture of a beautiful, icy office lady.
That, at least, was the judgment you reached from looks alone.
She had been kind even to Yukari, a girl she was meeting for the first time, and the brown eyes she turned on Izumi were brimming with gentleness and love. Watching the gap between that face and that nature, Yukari found a smile already sitting on her mouth.
She really was something.
She swallowed the thought and opened her mouth.
"It's a secret."
"Aaaah!"
It had been decided the stream would run on my channel.
"If we did it on my channel, I just know Izumi's bad luck from last time would crawl right over onto mine."
"Eh?"
...What is she even saying?
"I-if we collab, w-wouldn't it transfer either w-way...?"
"No, no. The feeling's a little different."
Akabane-san's giggle rang in my ear.
Before I knew it, the clock read 7:55 p.m. Five minutes until the collab.
"That aside—every time I watch one of your streams, I notice you always go live exactly on the dot. Right?"
"Ah, y-yeah... I do..."
Most VTubers started three to five minutes later than the time they announced. Post on Nater that you were going live at 10:00 p.m., and the real start was something like 10:03. It wasn't that anyone was doing it wrong. Those three to five minutes were usually just a loading screen before the broadcast proper—a small courtesy for viewers who couldn't make it right on the hour. But whenever I set a time, I began exactly then. The reason was—
"Because Nanase-senpai and Hikari-senpai do it that way?"
"Yes..."
Just as Akabane-san said, I was copying the two of them. More precisely, I was copying Nacchan. From her very first broadcast, Nacchan had put the loading screen up five minutes early and started the instant the clock struck.
"You are completely gone on your seniors, Izumi."
"Hehe... I-I look up to them, s-so..."
We chatted on like that, and suddenly it was 7:58. Two minutes to air.
"Hang on. Mind if I focus for a second?"
"...Huh?"
"RP is a little difficult for someone like me. So I always take a moment to concentrate before we start. Not that I can do it perfectly, the way Hikari-senpai does."
"Oh..."
So that was the secret behind the RP that made me sigh in admiration every time I saw it.
"Hmm. Shall we begin...?"
Akabane-san's whole air changed. When those words reached me, the clock read 7:59 and 53 seconds.
"A-as you all know, t-today's a collab day...! G-go on, introduce yourself, A-Akabane-san!"
Akabane-san's avatar was already on the broadcast screen beside mine. She wore the same sharp grin I knew from her streams and her clips.
"Akakat! The world shall soon be dyed red!"
⟨ This body is the scarlet witch, Akabane Yukari! ⟩
P-problem children?
I cause a lot of Calamities, sure, but that's not really the same thing, is it...?
"No. This is not a matter of pride alone. It is a question of devotion—who understands Fate's Battle more truly."
She was right.
I can't back down from this.
"Of course, the correct answer is this body."
"I-it is not! The best story in Fate's Battle is Part Two, Chapter Six! I w-won't give that up...!"
"Akakat. I shall grant that the story of Part Two, Chapter Six was fascinating beyond measure, and rich in things worth seeing. But it still falls a step short of Part One's final chapter—the chapter that looks back upon every bond, chews upon farewell, and presses forward all the same!"
"I-I admit that too! But a l-lot of players agreed the c-completion of the story is higher in Part Two, Chapter Six, didn't they?"
I know the part of a story that hits you in the chest—the so-called rush—matters. But if you look only at that, you stop being able to see how complete the story actually is.
"The f-foreshadowing paid off perfectly, and the p-plot doesn't have a scratch on it. And the m-moving parts were in Part Two, Chapter Six too...!"
"Hah? Do you fail to grasp what a final chapter means? In a finale meant to look back upon every footprint, what absurdity is it to tear it all away and judge the thing in isolation?"
"I-if you're looking at how c-complete the story is, that way of seeing it is right too..."
This was a game people joked they weren't playing so much as reading a novel. In a work like that, how complete the story was mattered. It mattered a lot.
"This body holds that it changes, depending on where one sets the measure of completeness."
Akabane-san did not yield an inch.
I understood how she felt. If you counted only years with Fate's Battle, she had been playing since the day it launched—a full year my senior. A junior who had not even kept up in real time, picking the story apart like this. If our places were reversed, I would have said the same thing.
But my love for Fate's Battle doesn't lose to anyone...!
"N-neither of us looks r-ready to back down..."
"So it would seem."
"Th-then how about we settle it in t-today's gacha... whoever pulls the rate-up hero f-faster wins?"
"Are you certain? After last time, it should be painfully obvious which of us has the advantage."
"Th-there's no way that h-happens twice..."
If it does, I am going to resent the devs enough to die. I spent that much money and still got wrecked. This time it has to come early. I am going to get the better of Akabane-san. I swear I will.
"Very well. If that is what you wish, this body has no cause to withdraw."
"A-and if you lose, you t-take a penalty on top of that!"
This was a match with both our pride and our devotion on the line. Of course it had to go at least that far.
"...A penalty, you say?"
"Th-the winner decides..."
"Oh? Then this body shall have you take up again that Dawn you abandoned midway through last time—"
"I'msorryIthinkIwaswrongpleaseforgivemejustthisonce."
But that's cheating...