Chapter 56: Why Come See Izumi When She Isn't Even Your Daughter?!
“Well, fair enough. It has been almost ten years.... You can just call me Aunt. You used to.”
“Ah, um, y-yes.... I-I'm sorry.”
The stranger who had flung my door open and walked straight in was... Mom's close younger sister.
Ah. So that's it.
That was why she had been speaking Korean when she opened the door.
“Honestly, unnie. I've been telling you since last month that I was coming today. How could you not say a word to Mina?”
“Sorry. I meant to tell her last week, and it slipped my mind.”
Mom's voice came through the phone. At her younger sister's scolding she seemed faintly sulky, and the proof was a tone that had sunk about 0.1 percent lower than usual. Well. That was just something I told myself.
“Anyway, I probably won't get home until around six, so the two of you wait there. It's been a long time. Talk a little.”
“Yeah, got it. I'll hang up.”
A bright little beep, and the call ended. What followed was an awkward silence. My eyes and my aunt's lost the road they were supposed to take and wandered nothing but empty air.
“Hmm. Still, I'm the older one. At a time like this, I ought to be the one who steps in, right?”
“Ah, uh....”
“My name's Han Sia. I'm thirty. Fifteen years younger than Seon-a unnie, I think? She helped me when I was in middle school, and we've been close ever since.”
Aunt Sia looked young enough that I could have believed she was in her early twenties. A black bob fell to her shoulders, and the impression she gave was soft and kind. She must have taken steady care of herself; there wasn't a wrinkle or a blemish anywhere on her skin.
“The last time I saw you, Mina, was right after I graduated high school, so if I do the math, yes, it's been ten years. It really has been a long time.”
“R-right....”
Aunt Sia kept trying to talk, doing everything she could to thaw the air, but the awkwardness would not leave. The cause, of course, was one hundred percent me. What was I supposed to do? She hardly counted as family I knew, and I had almost no memories from around the time I was five. She knew me. I didn't know her.
For an outcast, this quest is way too hard.
“Hmm. It is awkward, isn't it? Haha....”
“Th-that's, I....”
“I really should have seen you more when you were little. I know this will sound like an excuse, but I truly was busy.... After I graduated, I lived buried in work every single day. And Seon-a unnie is an incredibly busy person herself, so even though we stayed in touch, we never had time to meet.”
“I-it's okay. You were b-busy with work....”
I wasn't a bad enough person to scold someone for being busy with work. I didn't have the memories in the first place, so I wouldn't have known what to say anyway.
“Still, Jia and I are almost the same age, so at least we kept in contact. Haha....”
S-somebody help me....
“Cleared!”
The Invisible Dragon, a hidden boss that appeared only on Arcana Shooter's Purgatory difficulty, boomed out a laugh and collapsed in a heap. From October 10th until today — more than a month — I had finally done it. I had cleared Purgatory, the game's highest difficulty.
The chat was praising me as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Yes. This was what I wanted.
“Heh, hehe.... I-I'm amazing, right?”
On any other day the Iztomo would have teased me or laughed in my face, but today, at least, they praised me. That alone swelled in my chest until my breath came short.
“Haa. I-I'm really wiped....”
The patterns were bad enough, but the HP was disgustingly high and the bullet hitboxes absurdly wide. Just playing it piled on an incredible amount of stress. Now that I had broken through all of it, though, that stress arrived as a pleasant, boneless relief.
“Hmm. Th-there's a little Hyperchat piled up, so I should read it and th-then wrap up.”
Purgatory was not gentle enough to let me spare a glance for anything else. I had left Hyperchat itself open, but I had turned the alerts off, planning from the start to set aside a separate block of time to read them.
“Hmm. Th-thanks, Ga-chan. Cicada, th-thanks.”
I was working through the Hyperchats when one question stood out.
How am I supposed to answer this?
Something I could smoothly let slide would be best.
“D-don't meddle in other people's family business...! A r-rebellious phase? M-me?”
Mm. That ought to be a decent answer, right? A perfect reply — one that dodged a Calamity and even played along, more or less, with the RP Toka Mama had handed me....
...So it wasn't.
By the time I ended the stream, it was already past six in the evening. Mom had said she would be home at six, so the timing of the sign-off was perfect.
“A-Aunt. Mom still isn't....”
“Yeah. Sounds like she'll be here in about ten minutes.”
But when I opened the door and stepped out, Aunt Sia was sitting on the sofa alone. I had dragged the Hyperchat reading out on purpose so the stream would end as late as possible.
No way....
“Haha.... Hmm.”
Aunt Sia must have been thinking the same thing. She laughed awkwardly and scratched her head.
...Right. She was Mom's close younger sister. I couldn't keep avoiding her. She had come all this way even though work kept her busy. I couldn't wreck the mood any further.
I can do this.
Because the me of right now holds an Arcana Shooter Purgatory clear...!
“Um, A-Aunt.”
“Hm?”
“I-I'm actually a V-VTuber....”
“Yeah. I know.”
“...Eh?”
“Seon-a unnie told me. ...I'm not sure I should say this, but I was actually watching the stream you were just doing.”
Huh?
“You were seriously good. I never thought anyone would clear Arcana Shooter from Easy all the way to Purgatory in under fifty hours. Did you practice on another account?”
“Ah, n-no. I only p-played it on stream....”
When it came to games, I had the ultimate cheat code. A TS(?) pretty girl.
“Wow, so in real terms it only took about two days? That's seriously amazing, Mina.”
“Heh, ehehe....”
It felt good. Praised like that, I was smiling before I knew it.
Aunt Sia is an incredibly kind person....
“S-so if you look here, there's an o-opening. If you move through this part, wait about three seconds, then go forward, you can attack for nearly five seconds with nothing getting in the way.”
“You didn't practice this separately? You read all of it while you were playing? For real?”
“Yes. Hehe....”
Whatever I said, Aunt Sia took it with a smile, and she praised me, telling me I was amazing. Something about it felt like it was cleansing my heart, and laughter kept spilling out of me on its own.
“I'm home.”
“Oh, unnie, you're back?”
We had been talking when Mom's voice reached us, and I went out to the living room with my aunt. Mom was setting down the bags in her left hand and slipping off her heels.
“Hm? If the two of you are coming out of Mina's room together, were you talking?”
“Yeah. I was watching a little of the game Mina was playing on stream.”
“You really do get close fast. Honestly, I was a bit worried, because of Mina's personality.”
“Oh, come on. It couldn't stay awkward forever. She's seen me before, when she was little.”
“True. And what did they call that again? Mama, wasn't it? There's that relationship, too.”
“Ah, unnie, if you say that—!”
...Huh?
I could have sworn I just heard something strange.
“H-how did this happen....”
“Exactly what it sounds like. I'm Yukino Toka, Kaino Izumi's mama. That's all....”
The shock was so great that my brain had simply stopped accepting the situation in front of me.
“F-f-for r-real...?”
“Yeah.”
At my question, Aunt Sia took out her phone and held the screen toward me. On it were the main page of the Yukino Toka account, and records only the owner could see.
“I-it really is.”
“Ah, don't get the wrong idea. It's not as if I took the job because it was you, Mina. It really was pure coincidence, and I only learned that the person behind Kaino Izumi was you because Seon-a unnie told me, right before you debuted.”
“Then th-the DMs you s-sent, too....”
“Once I knew I'd ended up as your mama, Mina, I wanted to get closer. That's why. Debuting as an indie VTuber afterward was the same. I thought it would let me get even closer to you.”
Only then did everything explain itself. Why had Toka Mama been fixated on me from the moment I debuted? Because she had known who I was from the start, and she had wanted to tease me. It was simple enough to settle in a single sentence. Of course, only the contents of the answer were simple. The answer itself was nearly impossible to imagine.
So that was what the DM she sent before had meant.
“Aaah. I was planning to surprise you a little later, over dinner.”
“I-I'm already surprised enough, r-right now....”
...Now that I know, their voices do sound kind of alike.
“...All right. Since it's turned out like this, could I ask one favor?”
“A f-favor? What kind....”
“That, obviously!”