The Rite She Kindled (1)
A voice drifted in through the soft crush of footsteps on the grass.
"…Mary, I heard you decided to build a shrine?"
It had the air of a thought that had only just surfaced, and a healthy measure of disbelief was mixed in with it. The speaker was the one watching Mary stack logs into the frame of a house. Komori Sae — second generation at Anathema, whose whole concept was a girl with a demon in her. She had bumped into Mary on the server by chance and simply kept building alongside her, and then, out of nowhere, out came that question.
"Oh? Where did you hear that?"
"On Tsubasa's stream."
"Ah."
Mary nodded, as if that explained everything. It wasn't that her genmate Amairo Tsubasa — Hyakurenno Yuri, that is — made a habit of running her mouth about other people. What Sae meant was the thing Tsubasa did on stream every other week, the so-called Briefing.
With the second generation's debut, the VTubers of Anathema Production had come to nine in all, and the anecdotes spilling out of their broadcasts had multiplied with them — past the point where anyone living an ordinary life could possibly keep track.
Even a person who watched only one or two streamers would find it genuinely difficult to follow every single live broadcast. Something was always coming up in the middle of the day and making you miss a stream at exactly the wrong hour.
At any rate, once there were nine of them, simply working out what had happened on whose broadcast became a chore in itself, and it was only natural that write-ups and videos sorting it all out should draw an audience. Not so different from those Etube channels that condense a film or a drama into fifteen minutes or less.
When the agency finally gave in to that demand, the result was the Briefing.
In the lore, Tsubasa was the Trainee Knight charged with supervising and keeping watch over the monsters of the second generation, and every other week she compiled what she knew of those monsters and presented it. Put simply, that was the idea.
Strip the various bits of setting away, and it was a short account of what had befallen the Anapro members over the past two weeks — and, from time to time, the window through which official announcements were made.
Word of the Mary Shrine had been one of the items delivered at yesterday's Briefing.
"Strictly speaking, we aren't raising a new shrine. I've only taken over the place of the deity who was already enshrined at the one that stood there."
"No, but that's incredible in its own right, isn't it…?"
They hadn't conceived a concept and built it from nothing. They had swapped out a god people were already worshipping. Sae could not shake the sense that this version was the more tremendous of the two.
"So the shrine won't take all that long to open, then?"
"No. We aren't building it from the ground up. From what I hear, they're aiming to open sometime in April."
Not new construction — interior work, comfortably within what a month could finish. Mary said as much, and nodded.
"A pickup? Do these people honestly think I'm some kind of gacha totem…? Weeell. Being worshipped isn't an unpleasant feeling in itself, I'll grant them that."
Mary said it while making a point of looking mildly aggrieved. …Honestly, even she had to admit that the talismans sold at that shrine felt as if they might truly carry a gacha rate-up.
"What on earth is this servant even saying. …Anyway, it isn't favoritism or anything of the sort, all right? A treatment befitting someone as noble as I was simply granted to me."
Mary declared it with a smile full of confidence. The chat, of course, answered with nothing but spilled laughter, or with parrots shrieking cute until even she grew embarrassed.
"I-I'm not cute…"
"Mm-hm. I think you're plenty cute, Mary, that reaction included and all—"
"Nnngh."
She couldn't even muster a proper retort. All she could do was swing a bare fist into Sae's character — thump — and let the feeling out that way.
"Ugh, anyway, it's not as if I received some special favor, okay? Really. …No, wait. Depending on how you put it, maybe this is favoritism?"
Mary seemed to turn it over for a moment, then went on.
"The reason it's me, and not the other genmates or our seniors, is this. The priest asked me to come."
Of course the priest was not actually a fan of Mary's streams. They had simply agreed beforehand that this was how she would answer, should the question come up.
Before meeting the Ninomaes in person, he had not even properly known what a VTuber was. There was no world in which he was a servant — that is, a fan of Mary's.
"Well, if he becomes one from here on out, it won't have been a lie, will it? I told you, didn't I? Lady Moyoko is as good as another mother to him."
If she was the benefactor who had saved his mother's life, then he ought to make himself her devotee a hundred times over — a thousand. The man had said so with a gentle smile.
The tone of it had been half a joke, but it was equally plain that he had taken a genuine interest in Mary's streams from that day forward. This had become his work, in a sense. It would have been stranger if he had taken no interest at all.
Which meant the odds that he was watching this very broadcast, just as that chat had idly suggested, were not especially low.
"Heeh, Sae-chan wants a whole building from her fans toooo~"
"Hah?! Hold on — you just saw that, didn't you?! I memorized the username, so just you wait, you jerk?!"
"Sae-chan is so, so amazing that watching a bunch of chats at once is nothing, okay? Did everyone get old and go nearsighted?"
"Hahaha……."
Mary gave a wry laugh. At any rate, there was no person inside to speak of. Komori Sae was merely a girl with a demon in her — a fresh-faced student. An age joke, then, contradicted nothing at all. That was all there was to it.
Of course, a joke like that could land in the first place only because everyone had quietly taken the measure of the person inside and her age. Watch Sae's streams long enough and that side of her showed through more than a little — her viewers sometimes put it that Gremory had popped out, or that the demon hiding within had shown its true colors. In short, it amounted to the same thing as the N-word a Black person is allowed to say.
"Mary, I'm so jealous. Make me an altar in a corner of the shrine too? Hm? I want to be worshipped too, okay? Unnieee~"
"W-well. It isn't unusual for a single shrine to enshrine more than one god, and I hear they'll at least be putting out figures of the whole second generation."
"Hmm. Well, I'll content myself with that for now."
She said so, but she likely wasn't truly dissatisfied. More probably she had wanted Mary to let it slip, nice and naturally, that it would not be Mary alone — that goods for the other VTubers would be installed as well.
"Anyway, the Mary Shrine is being dressed with everything we have right now, so please look forward to it, everyone."
"Like a model of you in a shrine maiden's outfit, Mary? Or a miko cosplay on Twitter, if nothing else?"
"I-I'll think about it."
"Come to think of it, you did mention cosplay on stream."
Han Seoyeon said it while toweling the water from her hair. She had only just stepped out of the bath, and her skin was still dewy.
"I was only saying it. I haven't even decided whether I'll actually do it."
Ninomae watched her from the bed — the king-size in Ninomae's room, bought when they moved. She had bathed as well, a white bathrobe wrapped around her.
They looked at one another, and for a moment neither of them spoke.
The two of them had gathered in the bedroom after Mary's stream because of something they had promised beforehand.
Han Seoyeon carefully took the place beside her. The plush mattress sank deeper still.
…It smelled of peach body wash.
"Then…… yes. Let's try it. The kangshin — the descent of the god."
"Are you certain you'll be all right? You may still stop, if it is now……."
Seoyeon tried to hold her back, warning that she might be hurt again as she had been then, but Ninomae only smiled. It was a gentle smile, and yet a steadfast will lived in her eyes.
"I can hardly spend my whole life never dancing. It would be all right, perhaps, if I could do it without thinking of you, Shion… but that would be harder than never dancing at all."
"……Hearing a thing like that said to my face is, somehow, rather embarrassing."
"You do know, don't you? The things you usually say to me are worse."
Ninomae grumbled, and kissed the nape of Han Seoyeon's neck.
"…If we are speaking of a blessing before the rite, then the more certain it is, the better."
"……Ah. Yes. That is true as well."
But Seoyeon did not seem satisfied with so little. She had hesitated, and still she had said it, and Ninomae had nodded in turn — and then, with neither of them leading, they carefully drew their faces close and laid their lips together.
The coupling of a god and a shrine maiden is, in itself, a rite. As a kiss offered to set a blessing upon them and lighten the burden on flesh and soul, it was entirely rational. …Whether it had truly come of logic, or of simple desire, only the two of them would ever know.
Before long Ninomae rose from the bed again, her face burned completely red. She took a few steps, turned, and met Han Seoyeon's eyes.