Who Am I?
Sometimes, I dream—dreams of a time I can never go back to.
"Honestly! What would you even do without me?"
"Don't worry about it. You're going to— no. Forget it. Go on in."
"Okay. See you tomorrow!"
I chose to isolate myself. I threw sharp words at you without a second thought, and still, all the way to the end, you refused to give up. You stayed beside me.
Unlike me, whose personality had changed, you were always bright, the sort of person with friends all around. It would be a lie to say I never envied you for that. And though I never said it out loud, the fact that the one you looked after first was always me was one of the quiet prides I kept in my heart.
"Honestly! Do you even know how grateful you ought to be that I look after you like this every single time? Big sis just wishes our little ... would cheer up a bit!"
"I'm not even that grateful, so maybe stop looking after me. You're the one doing it all on your own. And your birthday's later than mine. What kind of big sister does that make you?"
"...I'm pretty sure my mental age is way higher. And how could I ever abandon you? Well. Someday, once you're past this phase, you'll understand how hard I tried."
Sometimes I think about it. If I hadn't made that choice back then—if I had told myself it wasn't my business, looked away, and walked on—could I still be with you now?
Not that I have any complaint about the life I live. Pick at the small things, and I could even say I'm happier than I was in my previous life. Even so, now and then, I wonder. How are you getting by? When you heard I had died, did you cry? Or when you heard that I—your burden—was gone, did you feel lighter? Kind as you are, were you run ragged looking after Mom, left all on her own?
It was a life full of regret, but I had thought it was already over, so I didn't cling to it. And yet I still wonder, sometimes, how you're getting along. That wonder leads, in the end, to a single thought. Because of you, I was able to make that choice at the very last. Because of you, the person I am now found the courage to move forward again. Thank you for not giving up on me, all the way to the end.
Those were the words I wanted to give you.
"Haaah..."
I tried to settle my heart, thrashing wildly with nerves, through one long breath. However firmly I had sworn to myself, once the real thing stood in front of me, the tension was something I couldn't help.
"Miss Kayano."
"Ah—yes...!"
When my name was finally called, I swallowed once, hard, and lifted my head. Sitting before me was a woman in glasses, gentle in her whole air.
"This rhythm that keeps slipping, just slightly... would that be because you're nervous?"
"Ah, th-that, I don't really know either."
Right. The place I was in now was an academy for vocal training. Steeled by Miss Koga's encouragement, I had messaged my manager to say I wanted lessons, and the answer came at once: we should start, along with the academy's address. So I had come, and only a moment ago the skill test had ended.
"I thought I was s-singing as accurately as I could..."
"Hmm. It may be that you're so busy worrying about the stutter. Listening to you, Miss Kayano, it isn't simply that you fall behind by a few beats. An awkward off-beat seems to creep in. Especially just before the highlight..."
The teacher began to explain the training ahead, one piece at a time—from the basics of vocal technique all the way to how we would correct the places where the beat slipped. She meant to teach me all sorts of things, step by step, and she asked whether I could come every day, if that was possible.
And I—
"...If I don't have an im-important schedule, I'll come every day."
I nodded, quietly.
Objectively speaking, it was already a very late start. I couldn't, in that situation, say something like training every single day would be too hard, so I can't. I had to do a little more. I had to give whatever best I was capable of.
For the sake of my goal.
"Mmm..."
Before the stream began, I was reading Bloody Night's patch notes for the first time in ages. This would be my first time since the collab with Senior Kurokami, which meant I was picking the game up again after nearly half a year. I needed to know whether anything major had changed.
"Tanks got buffed across the board."
Early, mid, and late game alike, the reason was that damage dealers had been having far too easy a time of it. Fair enough. Whenever I watched gameplay on Ontube, almost every team was a damage-and-support pair.
Bloody Night had three character positions in all: tank, damage, and support. Simple and ordinary enough on the face of it, but here the game split from others in the same genre in one big way. A team had only two players. Three positions existed, and a team could choose only two of them. No matter how you built a comp, a weakness appeared, and you had to overcome it through a character's traits and through items.
The most ordinary pairing, for instance, was tank and damage. A simple, clear idea: the tank holds the front while the damage dealer cleans the enemy up. But with no support, the longer a fight drags on, the more that pairing turns into a liability. It was weak against a tank-and-support comp that excelled in drawn-out fights, and item farming had to center on healing items. That was what raised the game's difficulty—and it was also what made the game fun.
"Mmm... all right."
Fortunately, it hadn't changed so drastically that I would have to relearn it from nothing. And my main, Lina, had received a buff. Nothing there to feel bad about. If anything, it was good news.
"Ahem."
I cleared my throat before going live and checked the time. 4:59 p.m. And the moment the clock pointed to five—
"Konzumi... I'm the a-atmosphere maker... Izumi..."
I started the stream the way I always did.
"Mmm. Matching's t-taking a while..."
However long it had been since I played Bloody Night, and however true it was that I hadn't touched ranked in over two years, the record piled up on this account hadn't vanished with the time. It was an account that had reached Night Raid, so a high MMR meant a long queue. Nothing to be done about that. While I waited, I figured I might as well watch chat and make a little small talk.
A comment like that drifted past. I knew. I knew plenty of people wondered why I was playing Bloody Night at all, and it was a fair question. Of every Calamity I had been through, the biggest had begun in Bloody Night. The truth was, part of why I hadn't touched the game even once since the collab with Senior Kurokami was that the memory still had its hold on me.
But lately, streaming all sorts of games, a thought had struck me out of nowhere. Honestly, I couldn't say I'd been entirely without fault back then... but the game itself hadn't done anything wrong. So why wasn't I playing it? It was fun to watch, and I had confidence in my skill. Once my thoughts reached that far, I had naturally written Bloody Night onto the schedule.
Still, there was no need to say any of that. I didn't want to talk about what had happened then.
"A ch-character besides Lina? Hmm... I played a little Shirun. Fishing for a one-shot was k-kind of fun..."
"Ah, it started."
While we were still chatting, a heavy thud carried me at last into the character select screen. My position was damage, of course, and the character I chose was Lina, of course. The ally I'd been matched with was a tank, and the moment I locked Lina, he picked Luke.
Luke and Lina. The fundamental comp that had been all the rage right after Bloody Night launched. This guy actually knows how to play.
Somewhere in my chest, my fondness for a stranger whose face I had never seen seemed to tick upward, just a little.
"I-I'll be in your care t-too..."
Bloody Night was an FPS at heart, so it demanded a flood of split-second calls. Voice chat and the system ping were the standard, more than ordinary text. I usually stayed quiet and used only pings, but I was on stream, and someone had greeted me first. I wasn't so hopeless at talking to people that I would ignore that.
Once upon a time, I would have answered in regular chat. But the me of now had grown.
Who am I? Someone who cleared Arcana Shooter: Purgatory, no less, and—
Ah. Should I dodge?