My Weight Will Never Become a Meme. Yeah. Never Ever...
"Hnngh... haah... nnh... A-Aki-san. I can't... go on..."
"We're not done yet, Izumi. Just a little more. You can do it..."
"Th-this is too much... haaah... nngh... haah..."
Why was I even doing this?
When the offline collab with Aki-san was set, I had obviously been expecting a game we could play together. No—technically we were playing something together right now, but still...
"First off, this is my room..."
"Whoa..."
Aki-san's room was so enormous you could fairly have called it a warehouse instead of a room. No—calling it a warehouse might actually have been the honest description.
"I-is all of this... yours, Aki-san?"
"Yeah. All of it is mine... well, some of it's my little sister's, but almost all of it is mine."
From the computer outward, the place was crammed with manga, light novels, consoles, figures, DVDs—the kinds of things no otaku could look away from. Put another way, you could call it an otaku's paradise without stretching the truth at all.
...And yet the room had one fatal flaw.
"U-um, Aki-san. You said this was your room, right...?"
"Yeah. This is my room. I'm home every day, so my family told me to take the big one."
"But... h-how do you even s-sleep in here?"
It wasn't dirty. Not in the slightest. If anything, with almost no dust or trash on the floor, you could have called it clean. There simply wasn't anywhere in it a person could lie down. No bed. The floor was buried under countless otaku goods. Spots where you could sit and play a game were scattered around in plenty, but no matter how you looked at it, comfortably stretching out to sleep was impossible. That was why the word warehouse had come to me the moment I saw it.
"Sleep? I sleep in my sister's room..."
"O-oh. Is that so?"
"She gets home late from work anyway, so sleeping during the day isn't a problem... and at night she always asks me to sleep with her..."
"S-so that's also why you don't have a bed...?"
"Yeah. When we moved I got my own room, so I was going to buy one, but she said she wanted us to sleep together at night and shot it down."
"...I see."
That alone told me Aki-san's little sister was a siscon. Well, of course. With a sister this cute—an airheaded natural who tempted people without even realizing she was doing it—becoming a siscon was only natural. If anything, not being one would have been the strange part.
You're not weird, so rest easy, Aki-san's little sister!
"S-so what are we doing today?"
I had already asked, and Aki-san had only smiled and said she'd prepared something fun. A real answer still hadn't come. Thinking about the streams she usually ran, it was almost certainly a game, and given that she'd brought me into this room right after saying that, we were probably about to do something in here...
"Hehehe... What I'm doing today is this."
"Th-this is..."
What she lifted in her hand was—
"...Do we really have to do this?"
I said it while staring at the Training Ring in my hand.
"Yeah. People like us are usually stuck at home, so exercise is a must... For our kind, working out for your health is essential."
I looked at her with every ounce of couldn't we please do something else, even now I could muster. Aki-san quietly shook her head. And because what she'd said was perfectly correct, I had nothing to argue with.
Ring Training. An exercise game from a certain famous company. You hold a Training Ring modeled on a Pilates ring and copy the motions the game throws at you—yoga and Pilates poses, push-ups, squats, planks, and every other kind of bodyweight drill. It was built for gamers who spend long hours indoors. Obviously it doesn't match serious weight training, but if all you want is enough exercise to stay healthy, people rate it as more than sufficient.
In other words, just as Aki-san said, for VTubers who spend an absurd amount of time shut inside, it was the perfect game: you could work out and play at the same time. But the moment you did it on stream, the story changed completely.
"Ugh..."
Ring Training was, in the end, a game about exercising. Exercise wears the body out, and moans slip out on their own. Streams of it are usually about enjoying the sight of someone who never works out suffering through it—but there are also plenty of people whose actual goal is hearing a VTuber moan.
...It wasn't that I wanted to call myself embarrassed. I'd been a man in my previous life. I understood exactly how they felt. There was no way I'd get shy over something like this. I just... yeah. I simply didn't want to exercise. I already went to dance training three times a week. There was no way I wanted to work out on top of that. And I was a proper gender-bent pretty girl, so it wasn't as if I was going to get fat!
...Probably.
Anyway. Moans or whatever, it wasn't because I was embarrassed. That was all I was saying.
"Haa..."
Now that I thought about it, Aki-san had mentioned she did a lot of Ring Training alone on stream. I should have seen this coming.
"Don't worry, though. You won't have to do it by yourself. I'll do it with you..."
She said it while picking up a second Training Ring.
"...May I ask why there are two?"
"Hm? Because I do it with my sister sometimes?"
If there had only been one, I could have passed it off to Aki-san now and then and rested. Naturally, that was now impossible. I was starting to resent her little sister a bit...
"Then let's get started."
"...Okay."
And so, in the end, I was doing Ring Training with Aki-san.
"Everyone, Konkoto... Today, like I announced yesterday, it's an offline collab with Izumi..."
"Konzumi... I'm the atmosphere maker, Kaino Izumi..."
We launched Ring Training in multiplayer, mirrored the screen to the monitor, and stepped into the difficulty menu. The game split difficulty once by sex, and after that you could set it anywhere from 1 to 50—the higher the number, the harder the workout. As far as I knew, 1 through 10 was for people who never exercised at all, 11 through 40 for ordinary stamina, and 41 through 50 for veterans.
Aki-san chose 45 without a moment's hesitation.
"Ehh... A-are you sure that's okay?"
We were, after all, still playing a game. Multiplayer even had a competitive edge to it—we'd made a little bet—and she picked this? I stared at her, packing the whole question of whether she was truly all right into the look.
"Hm? This is what I usually do..."
She answered like it was nothing, face blank.
Right. She'd said she did this all the time, so of course this level was normal for her. Which left me with the question of what I was supposed to pick.
Honestly, I wasn't even confident about 30. Steady dance training had given me some stamina, sure, but I still spent far more time sitting down. Below average was the generous read. Aki-san had told me to choose whatever was comfortable, but actually picking something between 1 and 10 felt awkward with her sitting right there on 45...
"Th-then I'll go with 25..."
What I landed on was 25, dead center between 1 and 50. I was getting dance training, after all. Surely I could manage average. At that number I wouldn't have to worry about looking bad, either. That was the logic.
Please enter your height and weight.
The moment difficulty was locked in, a field appeared asking for height and weight. Kaino Izumi's avatar height was definitely set to 152 centimeters... I had no idea about the weight. Maybe I could just put in my real one? Last time I'd measured, it had definitely been 41 kilograms.
I finished my settings and glanced sideways. Aki-san's came into view.
"...Eh?"
"...Huh?"
"Wah?!"
Right. Now that I thought about it, height and weight in Ring Training had basically nothing to do with the difficulty. That was why VTubers usually typed in ridiculous numbers...
I'd messed up.
"Uh, um. I-I-I was trying to write f-four hundred and ten kilograms and m-made a mistake!"
Yeah. Figures...
...But it wasn't as if I'd committed some crime, was it? My weight wasn't going to turn into a meme the way a certain maid's had.
Mm. I'm not in the wrong after all.
I was busy rationalizing when—
"It's starting, Izumi."
"A-ah, okay..."
With that, Ring Training's first stage began. Well, I'd picked the exact middle. It shouldn't be that hard—just enough of a workout.
It took less than twenty minutes for that thought to shatter.
"Haah... haah... nngh... I-I'm really gonna c-collapse..."
"People don't go down that easily. Hang in there, Izumi."
What I was doing now was squats. Push-ups, sit-ups, planks, kickbacks, and then this—the fifth stage. Only the fifth, and my stamina was already gone. Aki-san had set the difficulty to 45, finished every stage so far far ahead of me, and was waiting, and she didn't look tired in the slightest.
So when she'd said people like us needed stamina, she hadn't just been talking...
"Nngh... hnn..."
Chat was, of course, in full festival mode.
Officer. There's a whole crowd of perverts here getting excited over the moans of a high school girl who's still in school, so please come arrest them.
I wanted to throw in a jab like that. I was so wrung out I felt ready to drop, and it was impossible.
"Ah. Your form's a little off, Izumi."
"Hngh?!"
And there was another reason I was already this worn out. Whenever I was still going, Aki-san—finished early, just watching—kept correcting my form.
"Your legs need to be a little closer together."
"Auu... okay..."
Right in the middle of concentrating, sudden contact would come at me, and I'd react before I could stop myself. Over summer break Tateyama had taught me that this much skinship between girls was nothing special, but when it happened out of nowhere, someone whose head was still closer to a man's couldn't help jumping.
"...Izumi's body is incredibly soft..."
"H-hyiek! W-w-wait...! Aki-san...!"
"I want to keep touching."
I would really have preferred it if she didn't suddenly poke me in the side! I actually nearly had a heart attack! And as expected, Aki-san was just too much of a natural!