Three Tabernacles (1)

Ninomae had been humming to herself and fiddling with her phone, but the wind slipping in through the window lifted her head again. Beyond the truck's glass, the world outside streamed past in a blur.

Han Seoyeon, without quite taking her attention off the road, stole a glance at her.

"Who are you messaging?"

It had been only a sidelong look, so she hadn't caught the details. Less a matter of having no attention to spare for driving, and more ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠that she was simply minding Ninomae's privacy.

"Oh, this? It's Anri."

"Anri. The foreigner."

"Yes. The one I crashed into while I was out riding, last time."

The foreign young woman who also worked the counter at Kuroyuki's café. Calling the face to mind, Han Seoyeon nodded.

"You're still in touch, I see."

She asked it as if the fact had only just struck her as odd.

That they had each other's contacts was not strange in itself. Perpetrator and victim of an accident — messages passing between them over the course of recovery seemed, on the face of it, perfectly natural. But once treatment was finished, and once she had even confirmed the woman's return to the café, further contact ought to have been unnecessary. If they were still writing to each other like this, then, it was less that reason than something more personal.

No — it wasn't strange for an incident to become the occasion of a friendship, and for the two of them to keep in touch afterward. Even so.

"It's only that getting close this quickly is unusual, for you."

In front of Han Seoyeon, of course, and in front of her VTuber colleagues, she wagged like an eager puppy, tail going furiously. Easy to forget, then, that Ninomae was in fact the sort who kept a remarkably high wall. Let someone inside that line even once, and she was genuinely warm with them — but until that moment, she smiled and built the wall. That was her.

There was a reason she was occasionally called the Princess of the Folklore Department at university. Her looks had something to do with it, but the name was more a slur born of her manner. She observed courtesy. She showed the minimum kindness one human owes another. And yet, to this day, the only person at that university who had ever managed to make so much as a single personal appointment with Ninomae was Han Seoyeon. She met others with a smile, and refused them so plainly that anyone could see it. Naturally, unpleasant woman had been added to her reputation. After she started going about with Han Seoyeon, the more common verdict shifted toward that strange woman who's inseparable from that Han Seoyeon — but still.

In any case, that was Ninomae. A few encounters did not ordinarily progress to personal messages like these. Han Seoyeon's puzzlement was only natural. Even the Anathema Production members she had eventually opened her heart to had reached that point only after coming to know one another at length over the internet.

"And she was someone who put on an act so openly, at that. I don't take her nature to be wicked, exactly, but..."

"Hmm. Maybe that's exactly why."

Ninomae tipped her head for a moment, then went on.

"The truth is, I knew Anri's whole manner was an act."

"Since when?"

"From the very beginning. I couldn't be certain just from seeing her face, but the moment I heard her speak, I knew."

Ah — this person is performing. She had seen straight through it. It was not simply that the words were lies. From the things she said to the look on her face, she was a woman who had put a mask on entirely.

"And that actually put me at ease. Because I'm the same kind of person."

"...I see."

Ninomae Hitomi lived her ordinary days behind a mask. The iron wall of a moment ago was one face of it. You never knew when someone would strike you from behind. You never knew when, or from where, condemnation of you would come. That anxiety. So she fashioned, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠from the outset, a personality to show other people. Then no matter how she was cursed, it was not a condemnation of her true self — just as the actions a villain takes in a performance, however reviled, leave no scratch on the actor's essence.

She had likely recognized Anri's acting at once because she had instinctively caught the scent of her own kind.

It was something Han Seoyeon could grasp with her head and still find difficult to share. So she said nothing more. Meeting Han Seoyeon and living as a VTuber had let Ninomae overcome most of it, but Seoyeon had no wish to go raking through a private wound.

Sensing that consideration, Ninomae let out a soft little laugh and rested her head on Han Seoyeon's shoulder. It was a gesture that might easily have interfered with the driving, but far from pushing her off, Han Seoyeon only stroked Ninomae's bangs with one hand, as though it genuinely pleased her.

"And what were the two of you talking about so happily?"

"Oh, well —"

The subject turned, then, to the conversation with Anri. Ninomae beamed and went on.

"From what she said, it seems Anri plays Barbara Knight too. So we talked a little about today's broadcast."

"I see. A player of that game would certainly have reason to care about today."

The engine gave a low hum. She turned the wheel in a smooth arc, and the truck swung wide into a left turn.

Han Seoyeon was driving Ninomae to the studio in her own truck. She had done as much any number of times, but today differed from the usual in that the studio did not belong to the production. Today's schedule for Ninomae — or rather, for Mary Tepes — was an outside broadcast.

Barbara Knight. The mobile game Ninomae was sunk in completely. Mary had been invited as a guest to the Japanese server's first-anniversary special, and word had it that across the water they had all but enthroned her as a gallery lord, so it could not be called an entirely strange choice of guest.

"Yuri is a guest as well, if I remember correctly."

"Yes, that's right. The VTuber guests coming from Anathema Production are Mary and Tsubasa. The two of us."

The remaining guests, for the record, were ordinary voice actors. A single monitor sitting forlorn among three or four real people would have thrown the balance off — that was why Tsubasa had been invited as well. In short, the organizers had judged it better to have about two VTuber guests.

"I didn't know Yuri played this game."

"She plays quite a number of collection games. She's quietly famous online. As a wallet warrior."

"...She is an exceptionally distinguished warrior, in that field."

She was the young lady of the Hyakurenno, after all. Rank wallet warriors the way one ranked Holy Knights, and she would qualify as nothing short of Apostle-class. Of course, merely spending a great deal of money was unlikely to have caught netizens' eyes on its own. Mary had grown famous among these players, and Tsubasa, of the same company, had been lit up in her wake.

"Anyway, I'm glad I'm not going alone. A seat like that is a burden no matter how you look at it..."

Counting even the life she had lived before Mary, her career on the air had now passed a year, but she had never been invited onto a stage this large. Had she been made to go out with no one she knew, it would have weighed on her heavily.

"You aren't familiar with the voice actors coming as the other guests?"

"Knowing them is the problem, actually. Do you know what I mean? They're famous voice actors. They feel like actual show-business people."

"Ah... I believe I take your meaning."

In truth, one could not say who was the greater. They looked similar and were, in practice, quite different fields. Even so, set a television personality beside an internet broadcaster, and the impression that the latter came up short was a strong one. From where Ninomae stood, popular voice actors were people of an entirely higher world.

"Well. Try not to worry overmuch. In the end, they're all just people, aren't they?"

"Even so..."

"No — thinking it over, I don't believe we have any cause to be nervous at all. The ones who truly ought to be nervous are the other guests, who are about to come face to face with the young lady of the Hyakurenno out of nowhere. Wouldn't you say?"

"...Ah."

Ninomae nodded at last, as if persuaded. Thought of that way, her heart eased in an instant.

Ninomae, who would have an Apostle on her left and a Hyakurenno on her right, was in fact the most fearsome presence among them.

The studio where the mobile game's first-anniversary broadcast would be held. Arriving at the building, Ninomae looked for the restroom first.

She must have been holding it the whole ride. Thinking so, Han Seoyeon leaned against the wall and took out her phone. What she looked up was information on the broadcast to come — more precisely, the internet's reaction to it. After digging through a few Japanese threads, she grew curious, all at once, about the Korean community that had enthroned Mary as its gallery lord. She searched in Korean and opened the post at the very top.

Ah. So it was that incident.

Reading on, Han Seoyeon gave a bitter smile. It had called up what happened a few years ago, when she was dispatched over there.

Some lunatic had caused an incident, and the lid had blown clean off the Hyakurenno Group. To settle it, the whole of the Central Plains had been thrown into hunting the culprit. Chaos. Burn the entire cottage to catch a single bedbug — the Hyakurenno of that time had been regarded with tremendous wariness, on the chance they might truly do just that. And so, catching the bedbug themselves and offering it up before things reached that point became the first priority of every organization in East Asia.

Han Seoyeon, finished with her dispatch and trying to leave the country, had been kept in Beijing a while longer because of it. Concern, they had said, over the possible outbreak of something resembling Scenario I.

"Hm?"

Lost in the thought, she turned her head. A faint smell of alcohol had begun to reach the tip of her nose. This was not the sort of building where one expected drunks.

"Ohhh, it's Sisteeer!"

"...Ah."

No. She would have to take that back. If there was a drunk who belonged in this place, there was clearly one.

Hardly a genteel pair, those two.

Han Seoyeon smiled faintly.

"It's been a while. Yuri. And Chisa."

"It's been a while."

The clothes of the woman in the lead were of no particularly unusual design — ordinary attire one might easily see walking down a street. And yet, simply walking toward them in those ordinary clothes, she seemed somehow to carry a kind of nobility. Even the royal houses that had not yet died out had taken a step back from rule in the modern age. In a world like that, there were those nobler still than most royalty. The young lady of that house was coming this way, a leisurely smile on her face.

"Good to see youuuu!"

By contrast, the one trailing along behind her was extremely conspicuous. For one thing, the outfit was a maid uniform — and not even the modest design Han Seoyeon had seen at Kuroyuki's café last time. That alone would have caught every eye, and on top of it she was drunk, her face flushed bright red, staggering as she came. A theft of attention, plain and simple. Honestly, had she not been attending the Hyakurenno young lady, she would have been thrown out long ago. Thinking so, Han Seoyeon still lifted a hand in a light greeting.

"Where is Ninomae?"

"She stepped into the restroom for a moment."

Han Seoyeon said it with a jerk of her thumb toward the restroom at her back.

"Hmm. Shall I stop by the restroom once myself, before the broadcast begins?"

"Eeeeh, I wanna go toooo..."

"Who said you couldn't come? More to the point, pull yourself together."

"Nyeh?"

And so the maid, Chisa, lost her balance at last and collapsed in a heap. Had Han Seoyeon not caught her as if taking her into her arms, she would have shared a deep kiss with the floor.

"Uhaah."

"Are you all right?"

"Honestly, Chisa. Get up, please. You'll get the smell of alcohol all over Miss Shion."

The breath spilling out at point-blank range carried a thick reek of liquor. In the maid's hand was an opened bottle of soju. As if concerned about precisely that, Yuri took her by the scruff and peeled her off — complaining, all the while, that at this rate one could no longer tell which of them was attending the other.

"Then, after you've stopped by the restroom, would you go in together with Ninomae?"

Han Seoyeon had watched them a moment before she spoke.

"And what about you, Miss Shion?"

"I remembered something I left in the truck. I'll be back shortly."

"Is that so? Yes. I understand."

With that, she left the two of them in front of the restroom and started back down the corridor, her steps steady. Soon Han Seoyeon was out of the building. She glanced briefly toward the parking lot... and headed the other way.

It should be somewhere around here.

Because, contrary to what she had told Yuri, her destination had never been her own truck. What Han Seoyeon was following was a certain scent.

Fruit. Grapes, most likely. Well... wine, then.

Most of what Momomomo Chisa had been radiating a moment ago was, of course, the soju in her hand. But threaded through it, faintly, another smell had registered as well. Surely she had not mixed soju and wine into a bomb drink in the bottle she held. Then why had two kinds of smell been tangled together?

The answer was a man sitting on a bench in the park near the building. He was leisurely sipping a drink from a tumbler and reading a newspaper. Except what rose from that tumbler was not an ordinary beverage, but the smell of alcohol heavily cut with a sour fruit fragrance.

He pushed his glasses up and seemed to be scrutinizing the paper in earnest... then sighed, and looked this way. Leaving the newspaper on the bench, he took only the tumbler and vacated the seat.

Han Seoyeon sighed as well and dropped onto the bench where he had been. He had been sitting there only a moment ago, and the warmth was still in it. She picked up the newspaper and ran her eyes quickly over the open page — more precisely, over the characters faintly marked in pencil.

Among the former imperial family, there existed the mastermind of the Vampire Syndrome. That was Han Seoyeon's conjecture, and she had asked Yuri to look into it. As it happened, a suitable pretext for the two of them to meet had arisen this time, and Yuri had sent word that she would deliver the report today. This was the result of that investigation.

As expected. Narrowing it to a single person right away was too much to ask.

That was a considerable disappointment, but — well. How could the first spoonful fill the belly? Moreover, the opponent was a person suspected to be a prophet. An enemy for whom even the passing of information had to be routed indirectly like this, against the worst case. Dig too hastily, and the digging itself might bring on a disaster.

Best not to cling to it. As far as this matter went, today ended here.

Han Seoyeon rose from the bench and carefully slipped the newspaper into her bag, thinking she ought to hurry back, lest Ninomae have cause to worry.