A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (2)
"Well then, shall we leave the chatter here and get to the main event?"
The platinum-blonde vampire who had been holding the center of the screen slid away into the lower right. A great studio logo bloomed across the broadcast, and a cute woman's voice chimed after it.
"Ah, wrong one. Not this…"
"Why do I play it on PC, you ask? Ah, making a guide for the Tomb is just easier on a PC setup… I mean, no! My dear servants saw nothing at all. Understood?"
Mary cleared her throat and closed the game. In the brief span her mind had wandered, the muscle memory etched into her body had spasmed and gone off all on its own.
She let the viewers' studiously oblivious chat drift past and launched the game she had meant to open.
Evening, with the sun just beginning to sink. A gloomy forest gone dim and uncanny, and a BGM light on its feet yet somehow dreadful, the sort of tune that called a Halloween festival to mind. The candy house tucked into one corner of the screen was, by contrast, bright and darling in its colors.
"What we'll be playing today is a game out recently to rave reviews — The Forceful One's Love!"
"Excuse me — who are you calling a loner right now?! Anathema simply has an odd number of members, so it ended up this way and that is all!"
She cried it as if she'd been sorely wronged, but the chat remained a sea of laughter. She herself had known from the start that it wouldn't land, so the reaction was only natural.
Even so, she puffed herself up and played the grievance to the hilt — because this was the internet, and if she let so much as a sliver of genuine hurt show, smears about bad blood and about her being ostracized would come leaping out at once.
"Well, this is how it's turned out, so it can't be helped. The one left over has no choice but to pair up with Teacher……."
Thanks to that effort, most of the viewers managed to laugh the situation off. A few, though, did seem to wonder at the fact that the one left over was Mary, of all people. By the other members' own accounts she was the agency's darling, the one most fawned over no matter the generation.
It wasn't the result of drawing lots, for a start. Had it been, they would have said so, if only to keep pointless rumors of discord from taking root. And so the greater part of the audience had narrowed it down to roughly two theories. One: softhearted Mary had simply yielded her place to the other members. Or two: if a polarizing talent like Serena, forever cracking dirty jokes, had been the one left out, it might have curdled in earnest into rumors that she'd been cut loose — and that was precisely the outcome they'd taken care to avoid.
"A-anyway, that's how it came about, so I spoke with management, and we've arranged to have a company employee help out."
Not one of them, of course, had considered that Mary's being left as the one who couldn't find a partner had been the entire point from the beginning.
"This is Miss Hinata Shion, who assists with management duties for Anathema's current members! Clap, clap~"
"Ah… yes. Pardon the intrusion. I'm Hinata Shion, assistant manager."
And a few seconds later, the mind of everyone watching the broadcast came to a dead stop.
"……An apostle, right on the heels of Hyakurenno? Is Anathema's president gunning for a general election next?"
"What the hell is this moron saying."
A woman on the hospital bed had been staring into her phone, only to mutter something bizarre out of nowhere. At the sight of it, the other woman — dressed in a maid's uniform — twisted her face.
The one on the receiving end of that scorn, Ryuumai Fuu, was not about to sit quietly and take it. She glared with her lone eye and raised her middle finger.
"If you've got a problem, maybe don't pick a fight and just get lost?"
"Hwehh? Wha'd you say? Sorryyy, I didn't catch thaaat~"
"You goddamn selectively drunk bastard……."
"Ehh? Why're you getting so maaad?"
"……."
There is nothing stupider than arguing with a person who has no intention of listening. Ryuumai felt that truth down to the bone.
Only after she sighed and shut her mouth did the maid — Momomomo Chisa — wipe the look off her face entirely and go on.
"You think I want to be stuck in here with you? If the young lady hadn't asked, I wouldn't even be in the same room."
Snick. Peeling the apple in one long curling ribbon with the fruit knife in her hand, she shot a sidelong look at Ryuumai, who answered with a click of the tongue.
Not someone she held in any fond regard. The feeling was surely mutual. Theirs was a bond no one could honestly call a clean parting.
But Hyakurenno Yuri had asked her to nurse Ryuumai and keep watch over her, and so here Chisa sat, on a battered old steel chair.
"This damned young-lady business."
Hearing that, Ryuumai clicked her tongue.
"You're just laying some dead girl over her anyway."
"Aha. You mean the one our sweet little Ryuumai Fuu-chan killed?"
"……."
"……."
The two of them looked at each other and smiled, just a little. That light changed, slowly, into a glare…
…and then they reached a wordless agreement to drop the subject. Both of them could tell it would be a story that left nothing but wounds.
"…Anyway. How's the leg?"
"Gotta hand it to the Hyakurenno Group. Comfortable as anything."
Ryuumai answered while wiggling the toes of the prosthetic beneath the blanket. The surgery on that prosthetic was the very reason she had been admitted here.
"Still duller than the leg I had, though, so I don't think I can be sent into the field anymore."
The Triage Team, which had been her trade, was a pack of lunatics who leapt at every opening into battlefields no different from natural disasters. The response felt as though it would be no trouble for ordinary exercise, but it was nowhere near a level that could function out in that kind of extremity.
However little Triage spared their own lives, that was only ever a story for when the sacrifice could save someone. It wasn't that they preferred a meaningless death.
"Well, I knew that no matter how cleanly the procedure went, this was as far as it could go. If anything, the performance right now is better than I expected. That's the whole reason I chose to retire in the first place."
To that, of course, Chisa gave only a lukewarm response and went on peeling the apple. Once the skin was entirely off, she cut a small slice, speared it on the knife, and tossed it into her own mouth.
"…You peeled that to eat it yourself?"
"What, you thought I peeled it for you? Me? For you?"
"Fair enough."
Ryuumai conceded at once. As if this woman would ever peel fruit for her under the pretext of nursing a patient.
"So. What the hell was all that a minute ago?"
"A minute ago?"
"The general-election talk."
"Ah."
She held the smartphone out to Chisa. On the screen, two characters were chattering their way through a puzzle game.
"Is your young lady's company in its right mind? Putting an apostle on the payroll — if this weren't a VTuber company, I'd have sworn they were trying to start a rebellion."
For the moment, the chat was nothing but talk of a sister getting hired and making good as a successful otaku. That was only because this was a channel open on the surface as well.
Step into the anomalous community, and this story would unquestionably have the place in an uproar.
"That character was on the Gen 3 audition poster last time, too. So is Bartholomew debuting with Gen 3? The way they're going about it is nothing like the earlier generations."
Set aside Gen 1, every last one of them scouted in person by the president, and Gen 2 had been audition hires as a rule. Even so, an irregular existed: Komori Sae. Someone being brought on before the auditions had even been held was, then, entirely possible.
Publicizing a person hired that way, though, felt off. Even with a debut already settled, coming out together with the rest of one's cohort would have been the better choice, and far less jarring. Nor did it sit easily as the special case of a generation of one. If that had been the intent, they would have promoted it on a much grander scale and set a debut date apart from the rest.
"…So they don't mean to run her as a VTuber."
"Well. Yeah."
Ryuumai had been murmuring her way along, and presently she came to the end of it. Chisa shrugged, granting the point.
"Then the sister's character showing up on the poster was foreshadowing they scattered apart from the Gen 3 debut. …Hmm. Good. That settles my curiosity."
"Awful lot of interest, though. Didn't you say you only watched because a sponsor was the one streaming? And you've retired."
"That was nothing more than how I got started. These days I can call myself a viewer with my head held high, can't I?"
"Ah. Is that so."
Chisa snorted.
"What. You brushing off my enthusiasm? I'll have you know I even applied for the Gen 3 audition."
"……What?"
The words that followed put a blank look on Chisa's face. Ryuumai snickered, apparently quite satisfied with that dumbstruck expression.
"Why? What on earth do you get out of it?"
"What do I get out of it? What are you even saying? Just picturing the look on your face while I get all cozy with that young lady Yuri and pull a cute little tee-hee routine right in front of you — I start laughing all by my—"
Thunk. The fruit knife left Chisa's hand and buried itself halfway in the wall.
"…You little shit?"
"Haha. What? Go on, laugh a little more."
It hadn't been thrown to miss as a threat, either. If Ryuumai hadn't twisted aside, it would have punched clean through her forehead.
Not that the other woman hadn't thrown it on the assumption she'd dodge at least that much…….
"Quite the unique bit of 'nursing' your precious young lady asked for. Once you've minced me into ground meat like that, what exactly are you planning to report?"
"Medical accidents are pretty common, aren't they?"
"Oh, sure. A prosthetic-connection surgery is definitely going to blow a draft hole through my skull."
"You haven't lived in the hidden world long enough. Around here, the word 'impossible' doesn't exist."
And for a moment the two of them glared at each other in a standoff.
"……."
In the end, Momomomo Chisa was the first to draw her hostility back. She could talk however she liked, but there was no world in which actually harming Ryuumai earned her a kind word from Yuri.
She looked away, pulled a bottle of liquor from her bag, cracked it open, and drank it down in great gulps.
"…Kkh. Ahh, that's the stuuuff."
"What's God even doing. Hurry up and take this one off with acute alcohol poisoning."
"Alco-hol isn't a poison, though?"
"Pound it the way you do and it damn well is."
At that, Ryuumai sighed and let her killing intent go. Then she pulled the knife back out of the wall and flung it at Chisa.
The blade flew true, pierced the apple in Chisa's hand, and stopped.
"Well then, take careee~ I'll be off!"
"Hey. Weren't you here as my guard?"
"Ehing? …Ah! Riiight! No, no, I didn't forgeeet, okaaay?"
"……."
Chisa had sprung up to leave, only to hurry into a U-turn and come back. Watching her, Ryuumai pressed a hand to her brow.
A lunatic, and there was no telling which moments were an act and which were genuine drunkenness. That was precisely why a selective blackout like hers actually worked on other people.
Gazing at her old friend as she crunched away at the apple with the fruit knife still buried in it, Ryuumai Fuu let out a sigh.
"Ngyak?! Ow, ow… it's an apple, but there's a thooorn…!"
Right. For the moment, at least, she's unquestionably plastered.