Your Judge (5)
"Shion? Did something happen?"
Hitomi tilted her head, studying the look on Han Seoyeon's face as she returned from checking the message that had come in from the Church. She had stepped out to make a call and come back wearing that faint, unsettled expression, and it was difficult not to wonder whether she had heard something unpleasant.
"No. It seems something has simply come up in Japan."
"...Should we head back right away?"
"It is not that urgent. Strictly speaking, even if we did go back, there would not be anything we could do."
It was an undeniable fact that, of everyone the Church could currently bring to bear in Japan, Han Seoyeon was the sharpest sword. But she was, at the same time, only that — the sharpest of swords. The specialty shared by every Apostle was the annihilation of the enemy, and annihilation required, before anything else, an enemy to annihilate.
Seoyeon's sense of smell was a formidable gift, certainly, yet even that had its limits. She could not blanket the whole of Japan alone and run Sasaki Kisaki to ground. Someone else had to narrow the field at least a little before Han Seoyeon could be sent in to do what she did best, and so, for the present, it was wiser to leave the matter of locating Sasaki to other people.
It likely would not take long. With things as they stood, Abraham-Delta would have no choice but to pour considerable effort into this front, and there was nothing quite so hopelessly unfair as a game of hide-and-seek played against a prophet. Only then would it truly be her turn. Thinking so, Han Seoyeon let a faint smile surface and turned the conversation elsewhere.
"How are the preparations for the shoot coming along?"
"Ah, yes. I think it'll work out somehow. It's my first time filming entirely in Korean, so I'm a little worried, but..."
Hitomi nodded as she answered, and Seoyeon, quietly relieved, gave her shoulder a light pat.
"It is a recording, though. I am sure it will be fine."
Even if she let something troublesome slip, they could simply lift it out in the edit. For the person sitting in the interviewee's chair, it was a far kinder arrangement than a live broadcast.
"And I will stay beside you the whole time. I do not know how much comfort that will be."
"...That's the happiest comfort anyone's given me all day."
With a soft little laugh, Hitomi leaned her head against Seoyeon's chest.
In an ordinary interview, Seoyeon could never have remained nearby. She was there in the role of manager, and having her caught on camera alongside them would have been awkward in any number of ways. Mary Tepes, however, was a VTuber, and of course she could not simply appear before the lens as herself. The shoot had been arranged so that a separate camera would read her movements and output the model to a monitor, which meant someone other than the talent herself could stand close by without issue — though drawing near enough to throw off the tracking would still have been out of the question.
She would manage just fine. Holding her close, Han Seoyeon stroked her hair, light and unhurried.
"—All right. We'll begin filming!"
Before long Hitomi was seated in her assigned place beside her fellow VTubers, facing the camera. On the monitors set alongside them, the models were already up, Mary's among them. Ninomae Hitomi — Mary Tepes — drew a long, deep breath. Standing behind her, Han Seoyeon carefully laid a palm against her back, and feeling that warmth, that touch, she gathered herself.
"Hello to everyone watching on YouTube. This is Lee Han-seol of Lee Han-seol TV..."
A short distance off, Lee Han-seol had launched into his opening on his own. He spoke quite quickly, yet his diction was so crisp and precise that every word landed cleanly in the ear. It took only a moment to tell that he was thoroughly accustomed to hosting of this kind.
"The guests we've invited today are a little special. Virtual YouTubers — and grateful ones at that, who have flown all the way here from Japan, the very home of the medium. —Please welcome three VTubers from Anathema Production!"
"Ah, hello! I'm Mary Tepes!"
"Hello. I'm Komori Sae~"
"Anathema Production, first generation. Tachibana Rin. Look after me."
Mary gave her greeting and her name exactly as they had agreed beforehand. She had stumbled over the opening without meaning to, but a Japanese accent still clung to the words, and the slip would hardly have stood out.
"Yes. We're in your care today. I have to say, though, I was thinking this even before we started rolling — all of you speak Korean remarkably well. Did you study it on the side?"
"Not exactly... In my case, I have a Korean friend. Living together, I just got used to it."
"Ah, I see. And the other two?"
"Self-taught."
"I have Korean viewers, so I managed the basics, somehow..."
From there, a run of simple questions passed back and forth, well suited to the shape of an interview.
"I hear the Korean communities call you their gallery queen."
"Ah, yes. I'm really grateful. They've been very kind to me."
"I heard you recently held a rather unusual event with your channel subscribers."
"Correct. To mark the occasion, we drew lots among the subscribers and..."
"I saw it on Twitter. Is it true the first thing you ate after arriving in Korea was seonji-guk — ox-blood stew?"
"Yes, that's right. I was fine with it, but Rin-senpai really—"
"Not food. The first food I ate in Korea was the steamed egg that came out as a side dish at dinner."
"Haha... Even among Koreans, it's a dish that really splits people."
"Hence. Not a dish."
They traded remarks that seemed, at a glance, entirely pointless, but Lee Han-seol had explained beforehand that the first objective was simply to capture as much footage as they could. If something proved unnecessary, cutting it later would be soon enough, and so they talked on without much restraint. For Hitomi, the sensation was a novel one. She was a YouTuber herself, yes, but her work was built around livestreams, and she had never once had the experience of making a video in this fashion.
"This feels more like a TV variety show than a YouTube channel."
"You felt that way too, Kuroyuki-chan?"
Well — for the two of them who had come up through the entertainment industry, it seemed to register a little differently.
"Thank you all for your hard work! We're truly grateful you came on as our guests."
"Not at all. We came out ahead ourselves. We got to promote the third generation while we were at it."
In any case, the interview wound on in that fashion and came to a perfectly uneventful end. Set beside a livestream, where one had to keep an eye on the chat in real time, it was comfortable enough to feel almost suspicious.
...There was a law of the world which held that thinking such a thing was a reliable way to make something go wrong, and in the ease of the moment, she forgot it for a little while.
"Shall we head back to the hotel, then?"
It began with those words, offered by Bansei as they stepped out of the studio. The hotel was not far, so they decided to walk; they had come on foot in the first place.
"Hmm..."
Partway through the walk back, Han Seoyeon abruptly lifted her head.
"What is it?"
"It looks like rain. We had better hurry."
The air had exactly that quality — the sense that a downpour was not far off. Han Seoyeon drew her brows together.
"That would definitely be a problem."
"Then let's get moving. It would be awful to catch a cold on a trip we finally managed to take."
And so they made for the hotel at a quick pace.
...That even this would not be enough to outrun the rain was a fact they understood only after it had already begun to fall.
"Ugh... we're soaked..."
They had at least reached the hotel's vicinity and hurried inside, but by then the hard shower had left them drenched for quite some time.
"You are not cold, are you?"
So asked Han Seoyeon, once she and Hitomi had made it back to their room — the other two were in a different one. Hitomi swept her bangs up off her face, shaking away something that might have been sweat or rain, and answered.
"No. Maybe because it's summer, I'm not cold. Fortunately."
"Even so, you should get into the shower quickly."
"...And you, Shion?"
Han Seoyeon had done nothing more than peel off her clothes, wring the water from them, and step out of the bathroom in her underwear. Watching her, Hitomi asked, as though something about the sight had caught at her.
"You need to wash too, Shion. Towel off a little before you cool down."
"I will go in once you are finished, Hitomi. You need not concern yourself with me. Ah — would you bring a towel out from in there?"
Cooling off hardly mattered, given how sound her body was, but even so, she could not sit on the bed soaking wet. She added the request as she said it.
"Hey, you don't have to give it up."
"It is all right. If anything, my body is the sturdier of the two, and I have been through far more unpleasant situations than this. I am used to it."
She had wallowed through fields of filth and gone days without a wash; measured against that, a little rain hardly counted. Seoyeon smiled as she spoke.
"Ah, no. That isn't what I meant."
"Really, I am fine. You go first, Hitomi."
"That's not—!"
Yet for all of Seoyeon's yielding, Hitomi flushed and murmured in a small voice, her eyes slipping aside.
"...I was saying I wanted us to wash together."
"..."
At those mumbled words, Han Seoyeon closed her mouth before she knew she had.
"W-well. Catching a cold really would be serious, after all. I ought to look after my health as a matter of course."
"Yes! Right. That's what this is. Mm."
Well. Looked at a certain way, it was the same as always.
"M-maybe I really didn't need to come in with you...?"
"Don't tell me you meant to leave a young lady out there, soaked through and shivering. Even heartlessness has its limits."
"No, that isn't what I meant... ugh."
...This side of things, however, could hardly be called the same as always.