Who Held a Knife and Told Me to Do That?
"Hehehe..."
The target was standing right in front of me. Cautious to the bone, she kept glancing around, making sure she was safe. I, meanwhile, had slipped past every sweep of that search and stayed hidden behind a perfect disguise.
"Th-there's no way I'm stopping. Today I have to take b-bloody revenge..."
The Iztomo in chat were trying to talk me down, but today I was a savage beast. No one was going to stop me.
"Hnnngh..."
Against the chance of some stupid mistake, I hauled in a deep breath, reminded myself to stay calm, and slowly lined the shot up with the target's head. Then, the instant she decided she was safe and ducked to dig up materials—
"N-now!"
I hit the attack button without a shred of hesitation. The round left my hand and streaked for her head at something like the speed of light. A sharp thwack cracked through the air, and she pitched forward.
"Success...!"
"That was a fail, you know?!"
"Ah?!"
At some point the target had clapped an iron helmet onto her head. She barely looked hurt. In a blink she recovered her stance and came charging straight at me.
"I-I have to run..."
"Too late!"
I'd been hauling around far too much ammunition, so the gap in our speed was painfully obvious. In the end I went down, and her rope had me trussed on the ground.
"Heh... s-so this is how a beast meets its end..."
"Is that supposed to be your last excuse, Izumi?"
"I'm sorry..."
"So? Mind explaining what you were actually trying to do?"
I dropped into a kneel in front of Miss Koga, then began, as levelly as I could manage.
"I-it's just, I heard th-that starting today, you'd be playing with us too..."
"And what does that have to do with you shooting a slingshot at me for nearly an hour?"
"I wanted to let you feel at least a little of how fun war was, y-yesterday..."
A lie, of course. I'd happened to craft a slingshot while building a house, and the moment I heard Miss Koga would be joining Ashen City with me starting today, I simply swore I would pay her back for every time she had scolded me. I was a hale and hearty man with the mind of someone in his forties. I was not supposed to be the one always getting lectured by a twenty-four-year-old. That was what I had thought.
And when I first told the Iztomo about the plan—
A lot of them came back with exactly that. But if I actually killed her with a gun, Miss Koga was going to be furious. You people have no idea how scary she is when she's angry. So I only meant to do enough damage with the slingshot that she wouldn't die, and then run. I would get my revenge, and she would stay alive, free to keep gathering materials. A strategy where both of us won. That was what I had thought it was.
So why had it turned out like this?
"Did it never occur to you that the slingshot would just keep getting on my nerves, and I'd end up irritated instead of having fun?"
"...Y-you think so?"
I hadn't seen that coming at all.
"Are you... angry, Miss Koga?"
"A little?"
"Eep..."
Her voice was colder than ice. A shiver crawled up my back. Strange. Hadn't the plan been perfect? Why had it really ended up this way?
But what was I supposed to do? I'd never had a friend I could pull a prank like this on. If I'd known, I would have just killed her once with a gun at the start and been done with it.
"And you called it bloody revenge from the very start of the stream. That doesn't line up, does it?"
"Uh, um, that was... H-how did you know, Miss Koga...?"
"I figured something like this might happen, so I watched your stream for a bit before I started mine. I didn't know I was the target of the revenge, mind you."
"Uh, th-that's... M-Miss Koga?"
"I see. So I was someone you hated enough to want revenge on."
"It's not like that. Um, Miss Koga. P-please, just hear me out..."
What was I supposed to do? Revenge had only been something I'd said. I'd just wanted to pull a little prank. Now and then I used to read stories online about people who lost friends over a joke with no sense of the room, and I'd think, It's not as if they're idiots. Why would they do something like that? And the one with no sense of the room had turned out to be me.
"I-I just, I w-wanted to p-pull a little prank..."
"And here I thought you were a real friend~."
"I pulled a weird prank. I-I'm sorry..."
I don't know.
"So even when we talked on the phone every day, this is what you were thinking, Izumi..."
"Hnn— I-I'm s-sor— hhk. I'm sorry... sob..."
I wanted to apologize to Miss Koga. I just didn't know how.
"...Huh?"
"I-I'm sorry, hhk..."
Somewhere inside me, reason was still reminding me that I was live. The dam of feeling had already burst, though, and it had no intention of sealing itself again.
"Hnnngh—waaaaah...!"
"Izumi, wait a second! Throw you away? Throw what away?! Calm down! I was joking too?!"
In the end I bawled for ten straight minutes in front of seven thousand viewers, Miss Koga's stream included.
This was definitely getting clipped, wasn't it...?
"I-I don't like pranks like that..."
"Sorry..."
Suzuha let out a sigh and apologized. The whole mess was Izumi's fault, but she wasn't cold enough to say so to a girl who had already burst into tears. Worse, part of her had said what she said half-expecting those tears, so the guilt in her chest had nowhere to go but up.
"Still, I... no. I-I'm sorry too. I thought it would be fun..."
"...Honestly, it was fun. I just wanted to tease you, too."
"R-really?"
"Yeah."
Really. This was why she could never bring herself to hate Izumi.
If she was telling the truth, she had been working up to genuine irritation partway through, if only a little. She had been trying to enjoy a game she was playing for the first time, and someone would not stop getting in the way. A slingshot wasn't going to kill her, but treating the hits took time, and she couldn't chase the culprit at all. Bit by bit, it had been gnawing at her nerves.
Guessing that the culprit was Izumi had been easy. Knowing it didn't stop the irritation from rising, and even after Suzuha turned the whole thing into a tool for teasing her back, the annoyance she had already felt refused to disappear.
But Izumi's feelings had boiled over until she was in tears, and Suzuha decided the mood she'd been in a moment ago would never reach her. Even so, Izumi understood that her prank had gone too far, and she apologized at once.
"Hard to tell if she's quick on the uptake, or slow..."
"I-I think I'm pretty quick..."
...If she were quick on the uptake, she wouldn't have pulled a prank like this in the first place, would she?
Suzuha wiped the question from her mind.
"...Right."
She answered with a hollow little laugh.
"Th-then I'll head back to my b-base..."
"Okay. Be careful. Next time we meet, we might be enemies."
"P-please don't say things like that..."
With that for a last word, Miss Koga headed off again to gather materials for her house.
An alliance would have been nice, but I'd heard Miss Akabane invited her the moment she logged in, and the two of them had already formed one. Ashen City didn't really let you hold more than one alliance, so if Miss Koga wanted to ally with me, she would have to break things off with Miss Akabane, or I would have to join that alliance instead. She had said the first probably wouldn't work, because she would feel bad, and the second was impossible, because Miss Akabane, the head of the alliance, wasn't here.
"A-as expected... a beast is meant to be alone..."
Left by myself in the end, I only said it to scrub away the shame of having cried. The Iztomo were too busy teasing me to care.
But I knew better. Reacting halfway in a situation like this only made them happier. Times like these, you had to push forward even more boldly.
"Miss Koga getting mad earlier was your fault..."
"Y-you should have told me to stop!"
"No. It's your fault for not spelling it out m-more clearly. I am innocent...!"
A guilty conscience? I didn't feel a thing. The Iztomo teased me whenever they got bored, so I was allowed to shove the blame onto them at a time like this. I was not in the wrong. Not one bit. Absolutely not.
"Then I, the in-innocent one, should be getting back to my b-base..."
"So loud."
I was a peerless beauty, and the very person who had cleared Arcana Shooter: Purgatory. I was unconditionally right.
Back at my base, the first thing I did was think about what I ought to do next.
...Right. Conquering Ashen City's content one careful step at a time really was the best plan, wasn't it?
The game offered an absurd number of ways to play. You could start with a simple journey. The tech tree branched so widely you could even invent alien technology; in multiplayer, wars like the one I had just been waging were on the table; and there was every sort of gambling and amusement ride besides.
What I had originally meant to do today was travel. Surviving in a ruined city was the basic point of Ashen City, but the last vista you could see once the map had been pushed all the way to its edge was genuinely beautiful. Seeing that view was, simply put, content for people already deep in the game. Even among the Iztomo, almost no one would have laid eyes on it. The method for reaching it changed on a regular cycle, too. I had challenged it several times back when I played, and I had only managed to see it once.
...I had absolutely not picked it because it was something I could finish entirely on my own.
"Th-then, starting today, my goal in Ashen City is decided. O-Oceanus..."
It was only inside a game, but the feeling of setting out on a journey set my heart racing. This was definitely going to be a good stream.
And that instinct—I did not doubt it for a second.