Righteousness, Truth, Holiness (2)
"Shion? Are you all right?"
"Ah—yes. I'm fine."
At the sound of Ninomae's voice, Han Seoyeon came sharply back to herself.
"You've looked dazed ever since you got home."
"Mm… was it that obvious?"
"Did something happen?"
"It did, and it didn't… well."
Seoyeon hedged, her manner strangely evasive.
"Someone I never would have thought capable of it turned out to be a VTuber. And not just any VTuber—an absurdly feminine, beautiful female character."
"Uh… a nekama? Or a babiniku?"
The first meant hiding one's gender and pretending to be a woman. The second meant merely taking a female character as one's model, without particularly concealing the fact of being a man.
"If I had to put a name to it, neither. They're something like an anomaly, for whom gender is meaningless. I was simply carrying around a man's image of my own invention."
"Ahaha… even so, the thought of a man you know turning out to be a pretty-girl VTuber feels kind of strange……."
Ninomae got that far and closed her mouth. The attempt at sympathy had failed.
Trying to place herself in the same position, she realized she had, for all practical purposes, no male acquaintances. No—setting gender aside, once work was excluded she had almost no female acquaintances either.
President Nakabashi? No. It wouldn't even be strange if that man debuted as a VTuber tomorrow, as if it were nothing. He's the sort of person you hear is running a VTuber agency as a hobby……. Mister Philotanuss, then… mm, that isn't especially strange either. Which leaves… right. If it were Father…….
Having arrived there, Ninomae sank into a vague and miserable self-reproach. Three tries, and she had already reached a parent. She was made freshly, painfully aware that she was living out that joke one only ever saw as humor on the internet—the only woman's number in your phone is your mother's. No. Thinking about it, the moment the second name to come up had been a demon under contract, things had already been badly wrong…….
"I-I'm fine! I have you, Shion!"
"……?"
Seoyeon, who of course had no way of following that chain of thought, experienced it only as Ninomae throwing her arms around her out of nowhere. Well. It was cute past the point of endurance, so she began with a kiss to the forehead.
"…You two really never change."
Akane, coming down the stairs at just that moment and catching the scene, let the words out on a sigh. See a sight like this every single day and a tolerance was bound to form. The prospect of having to watch scenes that enviable—no, that sickeningly sweet—right up until the day she left did leave her feeling a little strange. She set the trunk she had been carrying in both hands down with a solid thump at the foot of the stairs.
"Still. Thanks. Really. I owe you more than I can say."
There was not a shred of ornament in it. Taking her in when the house she lived in had been half-destroyed and she had nowhere to go; saving her, before that, when the Holy Knights came down on her—these were debts she had no way of repaying.
"Not at all. Having one more person around was lovely in its own way. You absolutely have to drop by again."
"Yes. You're welcome any time, Miss Akaba."
"……Ha. Seriously. Right to the very end? You damnably, disgustingly nice people."
"Ah?! Miss Akaba, you can smile like that?! Wow. A photo—I absolutely have to keep this as a photo…!"
"…What a fuss."
Ninomae scrambled for her phone, and Akane, watching the state of her, failed once again to keep a laugh from slipping out.
"Maybe it's the gap from how you usually are, but you look a solid three times prettier."
"I… have to agree. It would be nice if you smiled more often, as a rule."
"Enough. Drop it. I'll handle my own face."
Ninomae chattered on loudly between the clicks of the shutter, and Seoyeon nodded with her usual composure.
Akane had said as much, but she was not entirely displeased. That particular feeling, of course, she muttered only in secret, to herself. It was too embarrassing to let out of her mouth.
"Well, I'll be off, then… oh. Right."
She said it as if it had only just occurred to her.
"That milk in the fridge. What brand was it? It was pretty good."
"……Ah."
"……."
"Hm? What the hell kind of reaction is that."
…It did not take long for the warmth of a moment before to evaporate entirely. A single sentence was enough.
Seoyeon and Ninomae slid their eyes toward one another. Akane looked back at them, baffled. When it came to the milk in the refrigerator with no brand name written on it, there was only one thing it could be.
"That was… well. A church acquaintance who keeps livestock provided it, but they've recently closed the business. I'm afraid any more would be difficult to come by."
"Yeah? Shame. But if that's how it is, nothing to be done."
The two of them had not exchanged a single word, and still they succeeded in agreeing to bury the truth in the dark.
There are, in this world, truths one is better off not knowing.
"To think there would be yet another victim… I really ought to have hurried the disposal, even if it meant forcing things a little."
On the road to Anathema Production, Han Seoyeon sat in the driver's seat of the truck and let the words out on a sigh.
A small sigh escaped the passenger seat as well.
"But if it had gone wrong, Mika could have been in danger, remember? It ended up like this, but that really was the best we could do."
And why, exactly, had they been keeping a thing like that in the refrigerator? The reason was simple.
In its composition, "it" ran considerably close to blood, and the same held true of it as a wellspring of life. Anything on the order of an Apostle's blood became an exceedingly powerful sorcerous catalyst. That alone would have been the lesser problem. The trouble was that this world held a great many arts for cursing a person through a piece of their body, and there was no guarantee someone would not try to use it as a medium, the better to strike at an exceedingly dangerous Apostle.
In short, it belonged to the same tradition as the old warning that one must not clip one's nails and throw them carelessly away. Even discarding it was possible only in small amounts, and only through a strict and proper procedure. Seoyeon had, in her own way, been working through that disposal little by little—but she had never imagined that Akane, in the meantime, would put what remained into her mouth.
"It was so shocking I couldn't bring myself to ask, but… why does something like 'this' come out of Mika at all? Is it some special constitution?"
"Mm, no. It isn't that. If you asked whether being suited to receive a god counts as a 'constitution,' then yes—but not in the sense you mean, Ninomae."
"Then how?"
Seoyeon seemed to think for a moment, and then went on.
"You saw Eru when Hachiman Daibosatsu descended into her, didn't you?"
"Well, yeah. More than saw her—we actually clashed."
"And did you hear how she introduced herself then?"
"Mm. I was on horseback, drawing away, so I didn't catch it for certain. But if what I did hear was right…"
She had not heard it from beginning to end. Still, from the fragments that reached her ear and from everything before and after, an answer could be drawn.
"Okinagatarashihime no Mikoto. Right?"
"Yes. That's correct. And of course you know who that is."
"Empress Jingū. The figure from legend, said to have conquered the Korean peninsula. …Ah."
And Ninomae murmured on, as if something had just fallen into place.
"The reason a fight with you, Shion—a Korean—could be established as a rite is that Hachiman, Emperor Ōjin, has a tradition of conquering the peninsula. But his mother, Empress Jingū, carries a similar tradition, so a rite would still hold."
What mattered here, though, was not the conquest of the Three Han itself, but the manner of it.
"Empress Jingū and Emperor Ōjin are different beings to begin with. Hold a rite under Empress Jingū's name, and there is no way Hachiman Daibosatsu would receive any faith from it. …Except in a single case."
The one moment in which Jingū, Ōjin, and Hachiman Daibosatsu had been a single body. And that moment coincided with the period of her invasion of the peninsula.
"When Empress Jingū set out to conquer the Three Han, she was pregnant. She marched to war with the onset of labor held down by sorcery."
Which was to say: if what had descended into her was Emperor Ōjin as he existed at that point in time, then strictly speaking Hachiman Daibosatsu had not so much possessed the whole of Mika Eru's body as…….
"…Yeah. You're right. Put like that, it really could 'come out.'"
"Yes. That's what it is."
Ninomae decided not to dig any further. She had already grasped the truth, and she had no wish to put it into any more concrete language. Seoyeon, as if of the same mind, turned her head and looked out the window.
After watching the scenery stream past for a while, Ninomae spoke as if it had only just come to her.
"Actually, while we're on it. I've been wondering—what was the channel name of that acquaintance you mentioned back then?"
"I was told the handle was 'Sarah'… ah. I have the channel link saved."
So saying, Seoyeon opened her messenger and handed Ninomae the phone. Ninomae tapped the link open, and—
"Sarah Groothuizen?! Wait a second, Shion, don't tell me you know that Sarah?!"
"Er… is she very famous?"
"…Have you not checked the subscriber count?"
"Now that you mention it, no."
At Seoyeon's unruffled manner, Ninomae's face grew still more incredulous.
"In the VTuber industry it's faster to count down from the top! Sure, unlike us, English is her main language, so she can pull in that audience—but even accounting for that, she's an enormous celebrity."
Ninomae knew the VTuber as well. Not merely knew her: when she studied broadcasting as a VTuber herself, this was someone she occasionally took as reference material.
"A celebrity like that, and no one has ever seen the real person—nothing but this rumor and that, a ghost of a presence… and you're acquaintances with someone like that?"
"To that extent?"
Only then did Seoyeon sound faintly surprised. For a simple hobby, the scale was considerable. Of course, that this was not, for Abraham, a hobby one could simply set down at any time was something she had already gathered, from a brief conversation on the subject in a café some while ago. The words came back to her.
And that was why it was good. So Abraham-Delta had said.
Because one is not born, like a tool, with a purpose already fixed, one may choose that purpose for oneself after coming into the world. How must those words have felt to an artificial intelligence who had, unmistakably, been brought into being by someone? Seoyeon found it difficult to imagine.
One thing, at least, was certain. They had now become someone who chose, of their own will, to be baptized.
Seoyeon turned those words over, and sank into thought.
That being a VTuber—that internet broadcasting—was not merely the work of a clown, Seoyeon knew perfectly well. She had learned it watching Ninomae and Mary. This, too, could be a means of self-realization for someone. Even if that someone was an artificial intelligence.
It was a moment that left her with a great deal to think about.
"Which is why I ask, Miss Han Seoyeon. You wouldn't happen to be considering a virtual debut, would you?"
"…Has anyone ever told you that you might be a little out of your mind?"
"Haha. I do hear it from those around me, now and then."