Episode 96: The Izumi–Nekoto Duo—Is This for Real?
Aki Nekoto.
A VTuber under Stars Flow's second generation. My genmate.
Ask me what I thought of her, and the honest answer was that I didn't really know. The bond that comes from debuting together was real enough, and if we could get closer, of course I wanted that. Separate from all of it, though, was the plain fact that I barely knew a thing about Aki. Among my genmates, it was fair to call her the one I was most awkward with.
Koga and I talked on the phone at least once every two days, and we DMed constantly—so constantly that, by the time my 150k Dotsumachi came around, I didn't have a single thing left to say. Akabane and I liked the same kinds of games, so we ended up talking more often than it looked. Just recently we'd gone back and forth about the new hero in Fate's Battle. Utsumi… well, it was painfully easy to tell she liked me too much. No matter how trivial the thing, she wanted to tell me, and she wanted my trivial things in return.
But Aki… how was I supposed to put it? Words didn't quite reach.
It wasn't that we never spoke. DMs from her came in at a fairly steady clip. We both liked games, and from watching her streams I got the sense that she, like me, was comfortable being alone. Even so, I couldn't understand her. Or rather—was I couldn't understand her even a strong enough place to leave it?
A few days ago, for instance, a DM arrived in the middle of a bright, clear afternoon.
Whether she truly went to bed after that, I couldn't say. She didn't answer when I called for her until that evening.
Anyway, Aki was always like this. Even when I met her before debut, I'd thought she was a pretty girl with a blank, faraway look on her face.
Right. Put simply: if I was the outcast drifting at the edge of every room because I couldn't mesh with anyone, Aki was a natural. As if to justify the cat in her name, she moved at her own pace, alone and perfectly free.
She was free enough that a stranger might have decided she had no bond at all with the genmates and members who shared her agency. That wasn't true. She collabed far more often than I did, and on the Misscode server she talked far more than I did, too. Even so, other people seemed to feel that spacey air on her just as strongly. When I'd asked Koga about it before, this was the answer that came back.
For all those reasons, wanting to get closer to Aki and actually finding her easy were two different things. She was a slightly difficult person for me. The other members thought that side of her was cute—that it was her charm—and they liked it. For a total communication scrub like me, there was simply no keeping up….
To think I'd suddenly be meeting someone like that as a duo in Bloody Night. I had never even imagined it turning out this way.
At first I thought she was just some girl Iztomo. Then I saw the name written on the screen, listened to the voice again, and knew it was Aki.
"Uh, um… a-are you really Aki?"
I checked once more, just in case.
A perfectly Aki answer came back.
Chat welcomed her arrival as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
"I-is that so…."
As she said it, she set Michael—a support—onto the select screen.
In other words: she trusted me, so please carry the game.
And I—
"I-I'll do my best…."
I answered her like that, and picked Lina again.
"B-but Aki, wh-what's your rank?"
If solo queue was auto-matching her with me as I was now, she had to be Diamond at the very least. And she'd chosen Michael to support Lina without a second of hesitation, so it was safe to assume her skill was pretty high, too.
Just as I'd thought. Bloody: one tier under Night Raid. That was by no means low. Night Raid was the rank that covered the top one percent of Bloody Night, and Bloody itself covered something like the top 1.1 to 3 percent.
"R-really?"
"Ehehe…."
A compliment thrown that straight does feel good. Even more when it comes from someone close to me.
Aki is hard to deal with? So what. If she praises me like this, she's a good person after all. I ought to use this chance and get a little closer!
Among Bloody Night's supports, Michael carried the nickname True Support.
It wasn't merely a nickname. It was a slur, and the reason was simple: her skills were specialized, in the most literal sense, for nothing but assistance. Bloody Night is an FPS. At bottom you shoot guns and kill people, and you weave skills through that gunplay to build all kinds of plays. Michael's skills made it absolutely impossible for her to build those plays herself.
Her passive, God's Messenger, increased an ally's shield by ten percent. Her Q, Heal, restored an ally's HP. Her E, Haste, raised an ally's movement speed. Her Night Arc, God's Blessing, increased the damage an ally dealt by ten percent and cut the damage they took by twenty percent, for ten seconds. And every one of those skills shared a single trait: none of them applied to herself.
Other supports still had some small way to do something on their own. Michael was a character whose entire existence hung on propping up an ally. In a game where killing the enemy is how you win, there was nothing she could finish herself. Hold a decent gun and aim it true, and you might still count as a threat to the other team. That was all. A threat that can never land the decisive blow is, in Bloody Night, a catastrophic flaw no one can argue away. So the sneer for a hero who could do nothing but support was True Support. Worse, her base HP and defense were miserably low, and the range required to use her skills was miserably short. One mistake and she died. That alone was more than enough to make her a joke.
But.
If the player on Michael understood the game, and the ally beside her was skilled enough, then Michael was, quite literally, the support with the highest ceiling in the roster. The passive let an ally's shield last even a little longer than the enemy's. The healing was high enough to pull you back from a death you should already have taken. The movement speed made it far easier for that ally to take a fight. And the Night Arc was, to the enemy, unfairness at its absolute peak—from their side of the screen, a genuinely broken character.
That was Michael.
So look at Aki and me, here and now. The condition that your ally be skilled enough was no problem at all, considering I had once climbed all the way to Night Raid. Aki said she had reached Night Raid before, too, so her understanding of the game ought to be plenty, and the way she had locked Michael without hesitating suggested she understood the character itself just as well. On top of that, the opponents our rank was matching us against averaged Diamond. And in that lobby I had picked Lina, my main: the best mobility in the game and a high ceiling for growth, with a body frailer than almost any other character's. Michael could patch that weakness perfectly with her passive, her Q, and her Night Arc.
In other words, in a situation like this, there was no way we could lose… or so I had thought.
Why was I playing this game alone?
"W-wait, Aki? Y-you said you were B-Bloody rank just now, didn't you?!"
"Then why did you suddenly fall b-back by yourself earlier…?"
A moment ago, enemies had closed in from the front and the back, and we'd had to break through one side. I'd meant, of course, to punch through the front and open a path. For some reason Aki had turned around on her own and started fighting the enemies behind us. Michael, obviously, couldn't do a thing by herself. Aki died, and I was left alone.
"Th-there's no way that works on Michael…?"
"…Huh?"
If you pick her without a shred of hesitation, of course people assume you can play her!
"Waaah?!"
In the end, the bullets pouring in from front and back killed me too.
The moment the match ended, Aki went back to sleep….
(A meerkat stands there and turns its head.)
Mei-chan got fooled again.