Elijah Must Come First (1)
"Honestly—you call that making sense?!"
They were waiting in the airport concourse for the plane's departure when Bansei Marin dragged yesterday back into the open and started complaining.
"…Bansei-san, that's already the fifth time you've told that story."
"Ah. Mm. Is it? Sorry."
Hitomi's remark left her looking sheepish. And no wonder—it wasn't just anyone calling her on it, but that kindhearted Hitomi. Marin had no choice but to wonder whether she had laid it on too thick.
Looked at another way, though, Bansei was not the sort to unload the same grievance on people over and over. Yesterday's disappointment must have cut that deep. Hitomi had only heard it secondhand, through Bansei's account, so she could not grasp the whole of it… Even so, one thing seemed certain. Guroyuki had said something Bansei might genuinely have been moved by, and then immediately sent it crashing all the way to the bottom.
"Hm?"
The culprit herself, of course, was chewing a piece of candy with a perfectly blank face, as if she hadn't the faintest idea what any of this was about.
"Why that look. Want one, Ninomae-chan?"
"Ah, thank you."
Guroyuki Sui crinkled the bag and fished out a single candy. Hitomi accepted it. She hadn't particularly been wanting any, but now that she looked, it did seem rather tempting. She popped it into her mouth, rolled it this way and that with her tongue, and asked.
"By the way, why did you buy so many of those?"
"Souvenirs. Korea trip."
"Well, they are sold in Korea, so if you call them souvenirs, they are souvenirs… but why those, of all things…?"
Green-grape hard candies. A Korean product, so unless one ordered them from overseas, they were indeed difficult to find in Japan. Buying them by the case and passing them off as souvenirs, though, was difficult to call ordinary. Hitomi harbored that doubt, but Guroyuki still wore the look of someone who could not see what was strange about it.
"Ah, maybe you tried them before and liked them a great deal, or…"
"First time today."
"……?"
Then why on earth…? Hitomi's eyes asked it, and Guroyuki, of course, ignored her this time as well.
"All affiliated VTubers. One bag for every employee is too much. A few bags left at the office is enough."
"I'll bring them to the company. I happen to have business there tomorrow."
"That so. Then I'm grateful."
It was Han Seoyeon who joined the conversation then. Hearing that, Bansei latched onto the topic as well.
"The company? What's going on that you're heading in?"
"Tomorrow is the day the third generation gathers for their first meeting."
"Ah. So that's why you're going."
Bansei nodded at Seoyeon's explanation. There had been nothing of the sort back when she herself debuted with the second generation, but she did not think it strange for that. By now, yuri fanservice had all but established itself as one of Anathema Production's sales strategies, and strengthening the bonds among a generation—the so-called kizuna—from the very start, and only then debuting them, was a perfectly sound approach. They had never tried it before, but a new cohort meant a new attempt would do no harm.
That the one attending the meeting was not a senior VTuber but Han Seoyeon was a little puzzling. Still, she had also been a judge for the third-generation auditions. If one wished to accept it, it was easy enough to accept.
"Then is Yuri-chan going too? She was an interviewer as well."
"Er, umm……."
At that question, though, Han Seoyeon let out a hesitant sound.
"She probably won't come. I'm not going because I was an audition judge, either."
"Hm? Then why are you going?"
It might have been a little unkind to say of Seoyeon, but honestly, her expertise in this field fell somewhat short. She had been on a broadcast a few times, yet only ever as a guest. She could stand in for an ordinary viewer's eye, but that hardly required it to be Han Seoyeon. She was unquestionably formidable—as a professional anomaly hunter, not as a broadcaster. As a streamer, she was close to a complete novice.
When that was pointed out with some care, Seoyeon looked away and scratched her cheek. The embarrassed smile came at no extra charge.
"You're telling me. There really shouldn't be any occasion where I'm called in as a professional."
"Hmm…? And what is that supposed to mean……."
"No. It's nothing. …Probably."
—It was something after all.
Faced with the disaster unfolding before her eyes, Han Seoyeon found herself covering them with her palm.
"Is this really the right decision?"
The words slipped from her throat before she could stop them. She shifted her eyes between her fingers and looked again at what lay ahead.
Shards of glass scattered across the floor caught the fluorescent lights and glittered beautifully, and amber liquid had splashed all around them. The cause was plain from the whiskey bottle rolling on the ground. Its lower half had been smashed clean away, and it gave off a thick reek of alcohol. The bottle had broken, and what was inside had spilled. Anyone could see that much.
…If not for the red liquid spattered in with the whiskey, throwing off a raw, bloody smell—and the woman lying face-down nearby, glass fragments snarled through her hair.
It was a sight that all but called a murder scene to mind, and Han Seoyeon stared at it in a daze. This was no murder, though. The fallen woman shot upright, lunged at the woman in the maid outfit standing right in front of her, and threw a spinning back kick.
The maid let it slide off her palm easily enough, but the heavy metallic clang of the impact did not vanish with it. Trousers hid the leg, yet it was a metal prosthetic—a blow that might well have broken something, and no one would have been surprised.
"You bastard…! You clubbed me in the back of the head?!"
"A person? Who? Hahaha. It was a gag to snap you sober."
The exchange did not end there. They seemed about to open a little distance, and then the two of them charged each other again and fell into a sudden brawl.
"Honoka-chan, I'm so, so scared I just can't take it, yo… sob, sob."
"Anri-san? Are you all right? Don't tremble—just start with a nice, calm breath…"
"Huuuup, haaah…… heeheehee."
And in the middle of all that, there was even an imported pervert, playing the terrified young lady while clinging to a lightly tanned high school girl and indulging her own appetites.
Han Seoyeon rolled her eyes slowly to the side.
"Seriously. Is this right, President Gyokichi?"
What stood there was a man wearing a smile—or rather, the look of someone smacking his lips with a meal set just before him. Arms folded, he did nothing but let the disaster settle into those crystalline eyes of his.
"Right? In what sense?"
"Do I really have to put it into words before you'll understand…?"
"A joke. I understand the present situation perfectly well, of course."
He gave a short laugh at Seoyeon's words and shrugged. Setting aside whether this was any moment for jokes, Nakabashi Gyokichi spoke with a voice brimming with confidence.
"It's yuri, isn't it?"
"How about you take those yuri lenses out of your eyes before you say that……?"
What did yuri even mean to this man? No—was he even a person? From his looks to his ideas, he seemed a long way from human. Every such thought flickered through Han Seoyeon's head.
"…I understand, at least, that this situation falls within what you expected."
She muttered it on a sigh. They had seated her at the meeting as the one in charge of putting things down by force precisely because they had considered that something like this might happen. She had come this time as a kind of mercenary. Whether her employer was in his right mind or not, she had taken the payment, and so she had to carry out the duty. First, she would have to break up that mess.
Han Seoyeon reached into her handbag… and then looked at Gyokichi again.
"Now that I think of it, Sakuragi-san is a resident of the surface world. I imagine her younger sister is as well…"
Then she would have to suppress them by means that did not reveal the hidden world. As things stood, those two maniacs over there—Momomomo and Ryuumai—were fighting without using a shred of anomalous power. Whether that was to keep the Secrecy Protocol, or because some last scrap of mercy remained and they were not trying to kill at full strength, she could not say.
"Ah. As to that."
Hearing her, Gyokichi spoke as if it had only just occurred to him.
"In the course of selecting this third generation, Anathema Production has been recognized as an exception to the Protocol."
Anapro was crawling with anomalies. That was the literal truth, and this round of third-generation selection had increased both their number and their danger. What an organization of that kind was granted was an exemption under the Secrecy Protocol. In plain terms, it meant that—limited to persons belonging to the company—the Protocol could be ignored, and information about anomalies could be passed on to them.
Ordinarily, the measure was handed down when "the organization itself carried considerable danger, and a lack of knowledge about anomalies among its members was judged more hazardous than the problems that would arise from increasing the number of people who knew the hidden world."
Truly, she had no idea where this company was headed. Han Seoyeon furrowed her brow yet again.
"…Well. For the moment, at least, that's fortunate news."
That was one thing and this was another, so she drew the pistol from her handbag at once and shot the two of them without hesitation.
Gunshots, muted to an uncanny degree, cracked one after another. The pair who had been beating on each other clutched the places they had been hit and went down on the floor.
"Uh…?"
"W-whoa……."
A girl from the sports club, her soul clean gone at seeing a firearm with her own eyes for the first time in her life, and a foreign woman who—though this was probably not her first time—still wore a rattled expression. Han Seoyeon regarded them for a moment, then drew out the chair in front of her and sat.
"Yes… shall we begin, then. The Anapro third-generation character-building meeting."
"In this situation, yo…?"
"Well, we could hardly hold a meeting in the situation we just had, could we?"
"……."