The Third Booth (2)
Ichimonji Shirobe walked the corridor with the staffer's directions turning over in his head.
The waiting room should be... ah. Here.
The Japan server's first-anniversary live for Barbara Knight. This was the room that had been assigned as the guests' waiting room.
He opened the door and stepped in, and the first thing to catch his eye was a table set with snacks and drinks. Sofas had been arranged around it in a way that made the place feel, unmistakably, like a break room.
"Ah! Senpai Ichimonji. Hello!"
"Oooh, Shirobe-chan—"
The next thing to catch his eye was the juniors already sitting there.
Kuroda Yojo, a woman who looked as if she had only just come of age, shot straight to her feet to greet him. Mori, meanwhile, stayed slouched at a crooked angle and merely lifted a hand.
The motion had been so crisp that Ichimonji, more flustered than impressed, pressed her back down into her seat. Then he turned his head and put the question to Mori Kibayashi.
"...They still drilling the juniors these days?"
"That one's never going away. They do say this side's better than the acting track, at least."
"You look like you could use a little discipline yourself."
"Aww, but whyyy."
"Don't cling."
Ichimonji shoved his junior off.
"Shirobe-chan, you weren't about to say something that isn't exactly politically correct, were you? Like telling a man not to hang all over you?"
"No. Don't let that body of yours touch Marx-chan."
"...Figures. A commie."
Mori said it with a dry little laugh. Come to think of it, Ichimonji was wearing a T-shirt printed with a game character.
The picture the internet had of him—an outrageously, criminally devoted fan—had not been distorted in the slightest.
"Ah... what. Senpai Ichimonji's here?"
They had been talking like that when another figure, seated on the sofa, cut in. A woman who had been sleeping in perfect comfort, sleep mask and all.
Miyano rubbed at her eyes, yawned, and checked the time. Then she took in the faces filling the waiting room and tilted her head.
"Huh. Is this everyone? Just us?"
Even at this hour, only four people had gathered in the waiting room. The two guests from the VTuber side still hadn't arrived.
"There were cars in the lot, though."
"Oh. Shirobe-chan, you know their cars?"
"Not really. But anybody could tell."
A limousine, and a tractor-trailer. No matter how he turned it over, those had to be their vehicles.
"A big truck...? Well, setting that aside—a limousine? Figures. Hyakurenno-no-miya."
"Um... about that. A staff member said those two have a waiting room of their own. Not so much a waiting room, really. They said they'd be going on air straight from there."
Mary and Tsubasa, being VTubers, couldn't appear on the broadcast as themselves. They had no choice but to be filmed in a separate room and have their avatars sent out to the monitors.
So they would rest in that room and go straight on. Kuroda let out a small hum.
No—the conditions for rest would be guaranteed down to the last detail. And if they weren't, someone would see that they were. Shoddy treatment of that Hyakurenno Yuri was difficult even to imagine.
"Hmm... another room, then."
Hearing that, Mori seemed to sink into thought for a moment, then grinned.
"I want to see Lady Hyakurenno and the Goddess of Gacha in the flesh. Hands!"
"Hand up—"
"U-umm... honestly, I would like to meet them at least once."
The two women answered his proposal one after the other.
"And Shirobe-chan?"
"What about you, senpai?"
"......"
Ichimonji Shirobe, for his part, sank briefly into thought.
...If Mary's there, Sister will be too.
He wasn't the sort to go looking up VTuber streams, and yet he still knew a fair amount about Mary's broadcasts. He had heard about the woman who lived with her, too, of course.
An Apostle, they say. ...Is it all right to go meet her?
The reason that information didn't end at a simple I hear there's someone like that was that Ichimonji was a man with one foot in the hidden world. He wasn't an anomaly himself, but he knew the other side existed.
And as far as he knew, Sister was none other than Apostle Bartholomew.
No—not her alone. The more he thought about it, the room over there was a complete demon's den.
A living god, an Apostle, a legendary onmyoji, and the Hyakurenno family, all in one room...?
Just listing them made his head swim. Every last one was the sort of monster that belonged in a game.
"......All right. Let's go."
That, in the end, was the conclusion his fretting produced. Curiosity was a hard thing to beat, no matter what.
The decision made, they were all getting to their feet in a rustle of movement when Mori spoke up.
"Though I'm starting to wonder if this is a good idea. Pull something rude on Lady Hyakurenno and I feel like we'd get stuffed in oil drums and sent on a sightseeing tour of Tokyo Bay."
No. Even so, it wouldn't be like that. Ichimonji denied the thought inwardly.
Yakuza stuff a person in a drum and sink them at sea because the whole point is to hide the murder itself as thoroughly as they can.
With a combination like the Hyakurenno and an Apostle, there would be no need to hide a corpse.
It would be reported as a natural disaster, or the impulsive crime of someone who wasn't well in the head.
They were famous, popular voice actors. So of course they wouldn't know some mere internet streamer—and a VTuber, an even more minor breed, at that.
No. It might be a mercy if they even knew what a virtual YouTuber was.
"...That was Lady Ninomae's thinking, at any rate."
Han Seoyeon murmured it under her breath.
"Totally wrooong, yeah?"
"Yes. So it would seem."
She nodded at Momomomo Chisa's reply. Even so, her gaze stayed fixed on one side of the room.
What occupied that space was Ninomae, and the others who had been invited along as guests. Only the arrangement had them formed in a ring around her.
"Whoa, it's really Mary."
"I owe you a lot from the last pickup."
"I still haven't used my summon ticket from the last event. Could you maybe press it for me?"
"I-I'm a fan!"
"Ah, yes, um... thank you......?"
Ninomae rolled her eyes about as if a little lost.
Her guess had certainly been a reasonable one.
Anathema Production was a reasonably well-known company within the VTuber industry, but the industry itself still couldn't quite be called mainstream.
Lately there were VTubers who had racked up tremendous achievements, and word around town seemed to treat it as a fairly large market with real promise, and yet...
Even so, the quiet consensus held that most VTubers occupied something like a league of their own. It was fair to assume, then, that people who barely knew Ninomae's Mary Tepes were everywhere.
If there was a place where she had been mistaken, it was in assuming the people invited as today's guests had come simply because they were popular voice actors.
Every one of them was a hardcore gamer. All but one were the sort ready to lay their bones in this game—the player base the internet half-jokingly called fiends.
Naturally, there was no way they would fail to recognize a big name in a game they were that deep in.
Talk of good luck and bad could be written off as memes and jinxes, and that was fine. But being the one who had uploaded the guides for several newbie kill-zones—stretches also known as the Wailing Wall—was enough on its own to make Mary a celebrity.
Plenty of people wrote stage guides, of course. Mary's habit of aiming for a clear at the lowest possible specs, though, meant that from a newbie's seat her guides were the ones you had no choice but to prefer.
To put it bluntly, every person gathered here was a player who had passed through a guide Mary had written at least once. Lay it on a little thick, and you could even say they had kept playing this game, instead of quitting, thanks to her.
"Lady Mary is rather incredible, isn't she."
The one who slipped serenely in among those cheering devotees was Hyakurenno Yuri.
It wasn't an atmosphere one could easily break into, but a thing like that was never going to stop a being such as her.
Yuri smiled, bright and easy, and sat even closer at Ninomae's side.
"Honestly, aside from family, there aren't many people who can take the spotlight like this even with me sitting right beside them."
"Ah, that's, um......"
But at the words she offered with a smile, the mood of the people who had been talking to Ninomae turned strange.
The young lady of a conglomerate family without peer in this country—royalty of modern society, raised in all but name out of gold—had effectively just said, You're paying more attention to someone else than to me?
Set aside whether the words were right or wrong. Think about the standing of the person who had spoken them, and you couldn't help the sudden sense that you'd stepped in it.
"I didn't say it to scold any of you. She isn't that kind of person. ...Isn't that right?"
The only one who stayed perfectly calm even after hearing that was a man with a scruffy beard who looked to be somewhere in his thirties.
Ichimonji Shirobe, if she had the name right. Han Seoyeon recalled him. She remembered the face that had been up on the promotional image for this anniversary broadcast.
He was certainly correct.
Considering Yuri's own character, what she had just said had absolutely not been meant as a rebuke. She must have been genuinely impressed that Mary could draw other people's attention more than a Hyakurenno could.
Even if someone else seized every eye and she herself was ignored, she was not the sort to get angry over it.
"...If anything, I almost think she'd enjoy it."
"Heheh, riiight? 'Cause she's ooour young laaady."
She did have a curiously masochistic streak. Call it neglect play, and she might even like it.
On that assessment, Han Seoyeon and Chisa seemed to be of one mind.
"More importantly... yes. That's right, isn't it?"
"Mm-hmm, thaaat's the one."
And the two of them went on in undertones.
A conversation with no subject and no object—nothing at all. Heard in passing, it was nothing but a run of sounds that couldn't even hold together as speech.
Put another way, though, it was a conversation that could not be spoken.
And if it was something those two were unable to say, the substance was obvious.
"Yes. That's true. More to the point, didn't I tell you last time that you don't have to speak so formally?"
"This way is more comfortable for me, so I hope you'll indulge it. In any case, it's been a while, Lady Yuri."
In the meantime, Yuri and Shirobe exchanged words with perfect calm.
The trade-off was that everyone around them had gone quiet.
"...Wait, wait, wait. Shirobe-chan. Do you actually know Lady Hyakurenno?"
"Hm? Well, yeah."
"Eh, hold on. What. Senpai, what on earth did you pull to end up knowing each other?"
"No, it's nothing impressive. My mother just has a bit of a connection, through the relatives."
Set beside a Hyakurenno herself, it wasn't impressive at all. His juniors, though, wore the look of people astonished that even a single thin thread tied him to that family.
"People are all the same once you're one bridge removed, sure... No, even so. How little were you all thinking of me, that a bit of a network gets this kind of reaction?"
"But the Hyakurenno family is different, thooough—"
Watching them grow noisy in an instant, Han Seoyeon sank into thought.
Ichimonji Shirobe. His mother's name was Ichimonji Yuka.
Her surname before the marriage... Nashimoto. Which meant this, too, was a house with the blood of the old imperial family running through it.
At the same time, she was one of the "suspects" Chisa had passed along today.
The exchange she had just traded with Chisa had been a question of whether this was the right person, or merely someone who shared the name.
Even if she hadn't asked, watching that conversation with Yuri would have made it obvious.
Pressing the matter here and now... that would be too much. There was no guarantee she would draw out anything solid, and in the worst case he might realize he was under suspicion.
A real nuisance, but the best way to hunt a prophet was not to be noticed in the first place. She had learned that fact down to the bone, across all her years as a Holy Knight.
So for now, she would content herself with having confirmed one of the suspects in a perfectly natural way.
Even if that one really was the true culprit, they would not be foolish enough to make a move with an Apostle right beside them.
More than anything—
I've got the scent. For certain.
That was enough. If he truly was the mastermind behind Vampire Syndrome, then the moment the next incident broke would be the moment someone stepped on his tail.
Han Seoyeon muttered it inwardly and quietly watched the group, still as noisy as ever.
"Oh. Hey, though—Apostle John was saying that mastermind group would all be women."
"Ah."
At the voice coming through the receiver, Han Seoyeon let out a sigh.
A perfect whiff. She had swung, and hit nothing at all.