Chapter 60: When a Crowd Gathers, Doesn't One Close Friend Matter?
"I'll get going, Seon-a."
"All right. See you next time. You said you were heading back to Korea in three days?"
"Yeah. I'll see Jia before then, and I need to wander around gathering reference material. Dropping by again probably won't be possible."
"Can't be helped. You're a proper working adult now."
"...I've been a working adult for ages, you know? Well, anyway. See you next time, Mina."
"Y-yes, A-Aunt Sia...."
"And from now on, if I send you a DM, you answer it!"
"Yes...."
So long as it wasn't a DM that looked outrageously obsessive, she would answer like a good girl....
She swallowed the rest of that thought and waved to Aunt Sia.
"Haaaaah.... This is nice."
"It really is...."
In a fairly spacious one-room apartment, two women were drinking beer.
The woman tipping it back in steady, unhesitating gulps, her face perfectly deadpan, wore a long ponytail of obsidian black, glossy as volcanic glass. That was Jia. Across from her, the woman with the short black bob drank more slowly, her expression loose and easy, and unlike the person seated opposite she gave off a bright, lively air. That was Sia.
"Drinking with you, Sia, feels like it's been forever...."
"It does. We kept in touch often enough, but we hardly ever had time to actually meet."
Sia and Jia. Even their Korean names sat beside each other like a pair of sisters, and the tie between them was already fifteen years deep. And yet, just as Jia had said, a drink shared between the two of them really had been a very long time coming.
One of them was a top illustrator in the industry. The other was a rather well-known scenario writer in anime and games, famous besides for having not a scrap of time off, and a reader model for a well-known magazine. That their hours of rest had overlapped at all was miracle enough.
"You saw Mina again after all this time, didn't you?"
"Yeah. You at least get to Korea now and then on business, so you've had chances to see her. With Mina, the only way was for me to go to Japan. I did see her at my brother-in-law's funeral, but she was asleep."
"True enough...."
Jia took fieldwork seriously as a scenario writer, so she often traveled to other countries, and especially, for a little while at a time, to Korea, her mother's homeland. Whenever she did, she could see Sia even if only briefly. It really was a different situation from Mina's.
"...How was she?"
"Mina? ...Ridiculously cute. Obviously."
"Right? Heheh...."
Jia, an older sister hopelessly fond of her little sister, let out a silly little laugh at that praise—the same worthless laugh Mina herself had.
"How is that kid this cute. Why is she like this. She's my treasure, and I still can't understand it...."
Her face stayed blank, but the blazing red of it proved Jia was drunk. To Sia, though, the sight was a familiar one. There had been a time when Jia tried hard to stay a cool, impressive older sister in front of Mina, but to anyone else she had always gone on and on about how cute Mina was. The proof was in their messages: the single largest share of everything Sia and Jia sent each other was Jia showing Mina off.
"Well. She really was incredibly cute...."
Sia, meeting Mina again after so long, had already sunk completely into the girl's charm. Of course, to Sia, who had looked after Mina since she was small, Mina being cute might have been a matter of course. Even so, Sia could say it plainly. Objectively speaking, Mina was cute.
Brown hair with a soft gloss, the kind you wanted to reach out and touch without a second thought. Mysterious blue eyes which, according to Seon-a, had come down from her great-great-grandfather. A small, finely shaped nose, and lips to match. The slightly drawn-in air about her, the way she still stuttered, that silly little laugh—all of it called a small animal to mind. And yet her chest and her hips declared, past any argument, that she was a woman, thoroughly enough to pull a breath of admiration out of you.
Wasn't Mina the one living creature to whom the words a cute woman fit best?
At some point, Sia had started seriously considering the question.
"So, Sia. There's something I've been worried about lately...."
"Hm? What kind of worry?"
"Mina's so cute, I'm afraid strange people are going to start swarming her...."
"Pfft—!"
At Jia's words Sia choked, and a little of the beer she'd been holding in her mouth sprayed out.
"Wh-what kind of—cough—thing is that to say?"
"Hm? I mean it exactly the way it sounds. Look."
As she spoke, Jia held up her phone, the message thread with Mina open on the screen.
"...And why is this a problem? Getting along with the others in her generation is a good thing."
"That's true, but I just can't help worrying...."
"I don't think an obsession like that is good for you."
"But Mina has no self-awareness, in the strangest places...."
"...Ahh. You mean it like that."
On stream, Mina always said she was a super-beautiful girl. Neither Jia nor Sia was ever going to deny it. It was simply the truth. But her self-esteem was so pathetically low that she barely spared a thought for what that appearance would bring down on her.
Even this time, Sia herself had been no exception.
Hadn't her face gone hot the moment she heard it? Words like those, from a face like that, were nothing short of cheating. Sia had thought so in complete earnest at the time.
At any rate, it really was that pathetically low self-esteem that made Mina open her heart with ease whenever the people around her treated her even a little kindly. The one small mercy was that she showed a rather high guard toward men. Though to men, of course, even that look would register as part of the charm.
"Sometimes she comes out with things you'd be embarrassed to say, and she doesn't even hesitate."
"...Now that I think about it, she really is a fox. Bewitching people without a shred of awareness. A fox."
"She's definitely got nine tails on her. She just doesn't know it...."
Neither of them bothered to mention that the two of them, too, were already among the people Mina had bewitched.
"I miss Mina...."
"Drink more."
Ashen City was a sandbox survival game that had come out three years ago. The premise was almost blunt in its simplicity: in a world that had already ended, the player built a house, scrounged for food, and tried to stay alive. There was exactly one way to clear it—kill the corrupted scientist, and go to space. That method, however, existed only in single player.
The manager had said they were opening a StarsFlow server, which meant the clear of flying off into space was off the table. Put simply, they had planned a piece of content that gathered VTubers together and showed how each of them managed to survive in Ashen City.
"Mmm...."
Viewers would enjoy it. I was sure of that. The biggest feature of playing Ashen City in multiplayer was that there were no real alliances. More precisely, an alliance system did exist, but it was flimsier than a verbal promise you could cancel with a single click. Drop your guard for even a moment and you could be betrayed in a blink, stripped of every bit of food and material you'd gathered, and left with nothing. A game that could shatter a person's trust in an instant—how cruel could you get?
But that was exactly the part viewers would find fun. I knew, because I had watched plenty of Ashen City multiplayer videos myself. I had never actually played it in multiplayer, of course. I'd never had a friend to play it with....
"M-maybe I'll... try it."
I had already cleared Ashen City in single player once before, so I had a decent store of useful knowledge. It hadn't been a hit, and I figured that among the StarsFlow members, hardly anyone had played it themselves. If that was the case, then even this much had to be a pretty big advantage, didn't it?
"...I'm doing it."
If they saw me toying with everyone else on the back of overwhelming skill, they would lose their minds. A game like this didn't really require you to worry about playing nice. No—deliberately refusing to play nice was what produced the better scenes.
It wasn't as if I had no worries at all. Multiplayer in Ashen City fundamentally demanded a certain level of communication, and if someone with a terminal case of outsider-loser communication disorder like me joined in, then depending on who was watching, it might turn into a multiplayer session without a single entertaining moment in it.
Even so.
I didn't take the decision back.
Wherever my inability to hold a conversation threatened to make things dull, I would fill the gap with overwhelming skill.
Just wait, all of you. Out of the ashen fog, a reaper is coming to take your lives....
The monitor was showing the game's UI, an ashen gray that looked hollow. The stream itself hadn't started yet, of course, so the broadcast screen was still the standby illustration I used.
"Hnngh...."
If I put my feelings simply, what I felt right now was regret.
Eight people in all had joined this Ashen City project, myself included. From the 0th Generation, Nat-chan. From the 1st Generation, Kurokami-senpai, Namikawa-senpai, and Yuzuki-senpai. And from the 2nd Generation, me, Akabane, Utsumi, and Aki.
...Right. Koga wasn't there.
More precisely, personal circumstances—she was sitting out just this once. The StarsFlow server in Ashen City could be entered by any member whenever they liked, so the next time we gathered like this, Koga would surely be with us. The problem was that Koga was not here now.
Of the seven people besides me, the ones I had ever made small talk with were only Akabane and Kurokami-senpai. Two, in total. Of the remaining five, two were at least my own generation, so that was a little easier to bear—but this project also included Namikawa-senpai and Yuzuki-senpai, neither of whom I had spoken with even once. I could hardly claim I had made small talk with Nat-chan, either.
The seniors weren't bad people. Of course they weren't. But the mere situation of playing the same game as seniors I had never once held a conversation with was enough to turn my stomach.
And the one who steadied me at times like this was Koga....
Save me, Koga Mama....
I want to run away....