The Rod and the Staff (2)

Horror games. The great majority of them are single-player, and yet, set beside other single-player games, they depend all the more on mind games and on prediction. A genre made to startle its players and to frighten them—one might well call it a war against the malice of its maker. Stretch the point only a little, and the thing has already set one foot inside the territory of PVP.

And what, exactly, does that amount to?

"Hyaaaaaah?! Th-the path's blocked...!"

"Oh. So this is where they bring the path down. Do that to someone in a pinch and just about anyone would panic. It's a game, so another way through has to exist—but you wouldn't even think to look."

"Kyaaaaah?! Don't come any closer!!"

"Well. I can feel an intent to kill you at least once, right about here. Next try, let's check for a side path as we go."

...It amounts to this: a live broadcast by Mary Tepes, for whom psychological warfare is lethal poison, turns into nothing but a procession of screams.

"Nuaaah......"

Another game-over screen rose in front of her. Confronted with it, Mary slumped over the desk. An hour and a half or so since she had started the game. It was about time for the fatigue to begin settling in.

"Shall I brew you a cup of tea?"

Mary answered Sister with a sigh.

"...I'd only spill it the second something startled me. I'll pass."

Kyaak, crash, splash, splash... She could see the whole sequence with miserable clarity.

"More to the point, how are you so perfectly calm, Sister?"

"Calm? I'll have you know I am overflowing with happiness, thanks to Shutan's adorable screams."

"......"

Mary Tepes's model turned a gaze of pure contempt upon her.

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"You were the one who played that last Slayer perfectly normally, Shutan. If it's disgusting monsters you mind, that one had plenty of them too."

"I just hate it when they pop out of nowhere. And I hate the mood that teases you—like it might come out any second, and then it doesn't."

Jump scares, and the tension of never knowing when one would strike. Considering how many horror games didn't merely favor the device but abused it, she was, without question, constitutionally unsuited to the genre.

"Anyway, let's get moving again."

"No, wait, just a little more rest... Aaah! Don't take it off pause on your own!!"

The game resumed under Sister's ambush of the esc key. She had died mid-chase, so the restart dumped her at the very instant the monster appeared. In a flash the BGM changed, and the urgency came to a boil.

"Sister, you're awful...!"

"My apologies. The sadist I keep asleep inside me acted, entirely unprompted."

"That is not—ngh—a sorry face at all?!"

Even in the middle of the fuss, Mary's character tore down the narrow path, slipping past obstacles one after another with a fluid, unhesitating grace. She was catastrophically weak to things bursting out of nowhere—but the reverse held just as true. So long as she knew when something would come, and what, she had nothing to fear. A hurdle whose pattern had already been taken apart was no obstacle whatsoever to the human being named Ninomae Hitomi. At the very least, nothing short of a pattern she was seeing for the first time could ever game-over her.

And so the reactions stayed delightful as reactions, and the run never dulled into the boredom of a slog. An optimal current, perfectly formed. One might even call it a talent born for horror games.

"As I thought—wouldn't it be better if Shutan played horror games every day?"

"What kind of nonsense is that?!"

Mary pinched her brow and glared, sharp as a needle, for all the world as if she had this stretch of the path memorized without so much as a glance at the screen.

"...Eh?"

And then, all at once, the monster's gurgling howl. The instant Mary snapped her eyes back to the screen, the game-over scene was already playing—first person, the view bitten clean into the beast's maw.

"Hyakyaaaaaaaah?!"

"Mmph?!"

Ninomae had been turned toward Han Seoyeon. Startled clean out of her skin, she pitched forward and threw her arms around her. The pattern had changed, unmistakably, from the previous attempt.

"Hyak, hyaaa......"

"You're all right. You're all right. Let's calm down. A deep breath in......"

"Huuuu..."

As the servants' own representative, she had half a mind to tease Mary for clinging to her in terror. Then she saw Ninomae shivering in her arms, and that impulse vanished without a trace.

There had been no shortage of scares before now. Even so, a thing that leaps out while you are wound tight—while you know it might come at any moment—is a different shock entirely from a thing that leaps out after you have convinced yourself it never will, and let your guard fall. Carefully, Han Seoyeon patted her back.

Ninomae had slipped outside the camera's frame, and the Mary avatar had locked stiff. This was not the ordinary freeze of a girl frightened out of her wits; it did not move at all, and the viewers began to stir. Had Mary's mumbling not carried, and Sister's murmuring comfort with it, there would likely have been people convinced she had fainted.

"No, she hasn't fallen, so there's no need to worry."

Only once the talk had gone so far as to wonder whether she had at least slid off the chair and collapsed did Han Seoyeon glance at the chat and speak.

"Your adorable Shutan, my dear servants, is presently asleep in my arms."

"Wha— what are you— mmph."

Mary jolted at the words and tried to pull away, but Seoyeon—mischief apparently stirred—smiled faintly and held her fast.

"Yay. Viewer-kun. Are you watching?"

She delivered it in a voice perfectly flat, without a single accent on the words.

She was tracing a V in the air with one hand, and she wasn't even in the frame. From inside her arms, Mary looked up at her with a stare of pure disbelief.

"Has the tension let go?"

"...Ah? Y-yes."

Whether from the little farce a moment ago or not, the tension wound all through her body had already come undone. Catching on to that fact, Mary's eyes slowly widened.

"Sister, don't tell me you did that on purpose, to loosen me up..."

"No. A funny thought simply occurred to me, and I acted on impulse."

"......"

Her eyes narrowed once more.

"I really ought to have shown the viewers this expression."

They would have loved it. Called it a reward. At that murmur Mary sighed, and this time she truly pulled away. The tone had been playful, but folded inside it was a pointed little observation—that Mary's face, at present, was not on the screen at all.

"Haa. Sorry for wandering off, servants. Let's pick it back up."

Her voice, as she said it, was far calmer than it had been a moment before.

"Carefully, of course, through that stretch just now. I can't tell whether the pattern is random, or whether what the player does becomes the variable......"

Clunk. With the sound effect, the urgent BGM of the chase began to play all over again.

"Well done on the stream."

A greeting she was used to hearing only through a phone now reached her from right beside her.

"Uwaah..."

Ninomae let out a long sigh and slumped back in the chair. Considerable exhaustion lay across her face. Three hours of a horror game that wasn't even to her taste, and with the broadcast left running the whole time—there was no version of this in which she wasn't tired. Even so, she pushed through that drained, strengthless feeling and turned her head toward Han Seoyeon, who had sat for hours on end without letting her posture slip ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠so much as once, spine perfectly straight.

"Thank you. Staying this late because of me."

"Not at all. I enjoyed myself as well."

"Your reactions, for the most part."

At the teasing addendum, Ninomae pursed her lips in a pout. And Han Seoyeon, as though this too were a delight, smiled a small smile with her eyes.

"Anyway... I'll be going, then."

They could hardly sit around talking forever. A little regretful even so, Seoyeon stretched, and rose from her seat.

"Huh?"

What came back was bewilderment. Ninomae's gaze flew at her as if to ask what on earth she was saying.

"Well, the buses will be stopping soon, so I ought to head out. If I hurry, I won't miss it."

"Hmm? Weren't you staying over?"

The two of them looked at each other, both pairs of eyes colored with confusion.

"What were you planning to do if I'd finished the game even thirty minutes later?"

"Then I would have taken the train. Or a taxi, if it came to that. Those exist, you know."

"I know, but... it'd be a waste of money, wouldn't it?"

A threadbare scrap of logic. Strictly speaking, all she stood to lose was her usual bus; the ways of getting home were endless. And yet, listening to Ninomae's shaky little case, what came through felt less like Han Seoyeon cannot go back than a wish—if only Han Seoyeon wouldn't.

"No, I mean... really......"

And at the very last, that same Ninomae went so far as to catch hold of Seoyeon's collar and look up at her. The eyes turned this way were, somehow, brimming.

"It's because I really, truly don't think I can sleep tonight...!"

"......Ah."

The reason that came to light right after was so very simple, and so very like her, that Han Seoyeon could only let slip a dumbfounded little sound.