The One Who Receives Grace (3)
Faith from the future, reaching back through time to lay its hand on the present—and the reverse of that, just as readily—was a thing entirely possible. Even a concept not yet born, one that had not so much as surfaced in its creator's mind, could still come into the world as an anomaly.
Han Seoyeon was forever insisting how lacking she was, and yet she was an Apostle all the same. She had witnessed cases of precisely that kind with her own eyes, more than once.
"...And yet I never thought it would happen with a VTuber. At Anathema, of all places."
Seoyeon murmured it like a lament. She had closed out the situation, sent Shirase Hikari on her way once more, and then, partway through a meal with no one but Hitomi beside her, brought the matter up.
"That thing back then—what on earth was it, for you to get so flustered?"
More precisely, Hitomi had asked as if the thought had only just occurred to her, and Seoyeon had done nothing more than answer. She showed Hitomi the message she herself had received, and explained.
Shirase Hikari: a being contracted to Ninomae Hitomi, angelic in form, yet provisionally classed as something akin to a demon and so placed under Belial. Last year, during the Christmas Eve disaster, Hitomi had summoned her, and she had kept the citizens safe from the Vampire Syndrome. She was also, as it happened, the very image of the third-generation model draft the company had shown them this time.
No—by now, the stranger thing would be to go on denying reality. This was not a matter one could dismiss as a mere likeness. In truth, she must have been born from this.
"Eh? That isn't a serious problem, is it?"
"Mm. If one were to call it serious, then I suppose it is..."
Hitomi's eyes went wide. Only natural.
"Anathema has finally reached the point of being able to produce anomalies, you see. It's the sort of matter one ought to report to the Church, at the very least."
Han Seoyeon nodded, a bitter smile tugging at her mouth.
"But if you ask whether it's an enormous problem, that's another question."
"Why not? I don't really understand these things, but just hearing it, it sounds like trouble. Our company isn't about to be in huge trouble, is it...?"
"Nothing of the sort will happen."
Seoyeon set the worried Hitomi at ease.
"Anathema Production has been under special watch from the very beginning."
"...This is a situation where I'm allowed to laugh, right?"
"...I believe so. Probably."
Hitomi pressed a hand to her brow. Part of it was the fresh, belated realization of just how her own company was regarded, and folded into the same reaction was the irony of finding genuine relief in a thing like this.
Questions had already been circulating over whether Anathema had gained the power to draw anomalies to itself, and the present affair was nothing more than a single step further along that road. Take the view more broadly, and the birth of the True Ancestor known as Ninomae Hitomi had itself been one such precedent. At the time Han Seoyeon was held to have exerted the greater influence, and the company went largely unmentioned... and yet, among the causes, the faith gathered by Anathema's Mary Tepes had carried no small weight.
Come to think of it, not long ago the company's risk rating had been adjusted, so that even employees of the surface world might speak of anomalies with the Secrecy Protocol set aside. If the Church had handed down that measure out of worry for what was to come, one would have to call it considerable foresight.
"...Do you think the others will end up becoming anomalies to match their RP, the way I did? Or that demons will be born that look like their models?"
What she brought out at last was a little difficult to laugh past. If this was not an exceptional case, the situation could spread to every VTuber under the company, and that would be a truly serious matter—their bodies would change on them without any warning, would they not? Hitomi's own case had been all right, her concept from the start being a True Ancestor, an anomaly without flaw, but the others were not like that.
"They'll probably be fine. An ordinary amount of faith isn't enough to bring something like this about."
Even among the enormously famous VTubers of the great agencies, no such case had ever been found. In the end, the viewers watching them understood perfectly well that a VTuber's RP was not reality. The quantity of faith itself was great, but it was not a belief that "this person is an anomaly." And so, however much one's popularity grew, being devoured by one's concept—in the most literal sense—was not a thing that came about easily.
"Your case, Hitomi, was truly an exception among exceptions."
There was the fact that the person glued to her side was Han Seoyeon. The fact that she had long been spoken of among gamers as a goddess of the gacha. The fact that, coming face to face with all manner of anomalies beyond any standard, she had been given many chances to gain power. All of those had come together, and so Hitomi's body had come to bear some of the traits of a vampire. Said the other way around, short of a matter on that scale, it was not easy to be warped into an anomaly.
As for Shirase... they would need to look into just what was going to happen in the future. In any event, one could safely take it that nothing of the kind would readily befall anyone else. Only after hearing that explanation did Hitomi let out a sigh of relief, and nod.
"Ah, and about the family meeting... how were you thinking of setting the date?"
With that, she turned the conversation.
"Master said the sooner, the better. For the time being, any day through next Thursday will do, he said."
"I went ahead and contacted my parents, too..."
And the very next instant, the phone rang. Her mother's name.
"It's my mother. It's probably about that. Mind if I take this for a moment?"
With a wry smile that said she was truly not to be allowed a moment's peace, Hitomi begged Seoyeon's pardon and answered.
"Yes. Yes, Mom. Yeees. ...What?"
Before long, her expression changed. Startled by whatever she had just been told, she even asked to have it repeated.
"No. It's possible, yes. No—actually, they said the sooner, the better... Preparations? What? Whaaat?!"
She carried the call on a while longer in a bewildered voice, then set the phone down with her face gone stiff. Seeing that, Han Seoyeon asked, carefully.
"...What did she say?"
"Well... she asked whether tomorrow might be possible...?"
The reaction alone had been enough to guess the shape of it, but she asked all the same, and the answer that came back was not far from what she had expected.
"I'm sorry. She said Father insisted. He isn't usually this unreasonable..."
"Mm. No, it's quite all right. Master said the sooner, the better, as well."
One could even call it a fortunate turn. So Seoyeon said, but Hitomi gave a small shake of her head. To put it bluntly, it was Han Seoyeon's father who was the unusual case; in any ordinary situation, demanding out of nowhere whether they might meet the very next day could easily have been an imposition.
"Well. He probably had his reasons."
She said it with Ninomae Hajime—Hitomi's father—rising in her mind. They had met only twice or so, and she could not be certain, but the Hajime she had seen was remarkably quick to read a situation and just as sharp about people, and yet he was a man who somehow gave off the air of one who had already let the world go. Surely he had thought it through, in his own way, before deciding. Hitomi remained a little unconvinced, but she accepted it.
"More to the point—your family says it's all right?"
"Yes. It seems Father went and looked into a place ahead of time, in case something came up and we ended up holding the family meeting we'd decided not to have..."
"...That, if anything, is far more astonishing."
Honestly, had she not met the man in person, it was the sort of judgment she might have suspected of a prophet, and Hitomi could not deny it either. He was a father who shut himself away in his room as a matter of course and looked nothing like a man accustomed to other people—and yet, if she were asked to name the finest reader of others among everyone she had ever met, she would give his name without a moment's hesitation.
"He may even have some sense of the hidden world."
"I know. We were going to tell them once the family meeting came around, but somehow I feel as if Father might already know."
By this point, it was permissible to lay the matter of the hidden world open to the two of the Ninomae household as well. They were, after all, about to take an Apostle into the family as a daughter-in-law. The two of them had simply failed to find a suitable moment, and once talk arose of holding the family meeting, they had agreed between them to speak of it then. And yet she had come so far as to think that man might have known all along. Of course, given that he had shown no reaction whatsoever to Han Seoyeon, he could hardly be someone of the hidden world himself.
"He was a man who left quite an impression, in all sorts of ways."
No one had ever told him that his daughter streamed, and still he would stop by the house and, on his way home, draw her fan art of Sister and Mary to give her. Meeting them at the museum, he had been immediately certain it was a date, and attempted a retreat so as not to intrude. Perhaps recalling that day, Hitomi laughed softly as well.
"The family meeting will be all right, won't it?"
"Why wouldn't it be? All it amounts to is meeting one another and sharing a meal."
"Ahaha. That's true."
And so, talking over the dinner of tomorrow, the two of them brought today's to a close with bright smiles. A peaceful ordinary day, the same as always.
...Looking back, the Hitomi of the next day would press a hand to her brow and concede that it had been a flag.