What We Have Seen and Heard (1)
A tractor unit with no trailer behind it eased to a smooth stop in the parking lot. A moment later the engine cut out, and two women climbed down from the cab.
"This feels like the real thing......"
"This place belongs to Hyakurenno as well, I believe? If I have that right," said Seoyeon.
"As far as I know."
Hitomi lifted her chin and looked up at the building.
The concert under Hyakurenno's banner was nearly upon them. Until now they had been rehearsing in the studios at Anathema Production's headquarters, but the time had come to start running things at the venue itself. A number of VTubers from other agencies would be taking part, so borrowing Anathema's own facilities wasn't quite appropriate, and Hyakurenno had arranged a separate place. That place was the building standing before them now.
"A major corporation really is in a different league......"
Hitomi couldn't help marveling at the grandeur of it. The whole building was surely not one vast filming studio, and yet it was more than enough to press down on a person without even trying.
"It's been a while, Bartholomew-san. And Ninomae-san."
A voice she was certain she had heard somewhere called out to them then. Hitomi drew her gaze back down from the top of the building.
The woman was solidly built, in a quiet way. She ran a little tall, and her shoulders were broad enough to make the impression stronger still. Her coarse black hair was pulled into a simple ponytail, and her clothes were decidedly strange. A tank top and hot pants were hardly rare these days, but the pitch-black coat thrown over them was unmistakably odd—nothing anyone would wear at the height of summer.
What loomed larger than the clothes, though, was the body beneath them. Muscle stood out even though she didn't seem to be flexing at all. Scars lingered across the skin she had left bare, and one of her legs had been replaced entirely by machinery. The eyepatch over her left eye might, under any ordinary circumstances, have been written off as a bad case of chuunibyou, but set beside these traces of battle it left no doubt that the eye itself was gone.
Even so, intimidation and fear did not come first when Hitomi looked at her. For one thing, she had grown used to company like this from being constantly at the side of her wife, Han Seoyeon—
"Ryuumai-san?"
And for another, Hitomi had known her from the start.
Ryuumai Fuu. She had stepped back from the front lines, but she was the woman who had once been a unit commander of the Triage Team, the outfit known in its day as the Three Omnipotents of the Far East. Before long, she would also be a junior debuting with Anathema Production's third generation.
"What brings you here?"
"You sent word that you'd be arriving soon, so I came to show you in."
"Ah. So Yuri-san sent you."
Strictly speaking, having left the battlefield and not yet debuted, Ryuumai Fuu was unemployed. She was getting by on the occasional short-term contract that put her particular skills to use, and more often than not those calls came from work tied to the Hyakurenno Group. For Ryuumai, it was a chance to repay an old patron and draw a relatively steady income besides. For Hyakurenno, it was a chance to put a woman who had made her name on the battlefield to work at a discount—a discount measured only against what a monster's reputation was worth.
From what Hitomi had heard, Ryuumai had been chosen as staff for this festival as well. More precisely, she was there to impose control—or suppression—should things go wrong. Hearing that, Hitomi had no choice but to accept it. A muscular woman covered in scars, an eye and a leg both gone, standing with her one remaining eye glinting: she looked every bit the sort who had made a living by the sword, and no one would dare raise a fuss in front of her. If you were a denizen of the hidden world and knew who she really was, that went without saying.
...Though standing right beside her was a monster of a staffer who could have reduced even a Ryuumai like that to an afterthought.
"Still, a coat in this weather... aren't you hot?"
"Ah, this is the designated uniform for the control team."
As she said it, Ryuumai tapped a finger against the green armband on her arm. In other words, she would be working in that same outfit on the day of the festival.
"Will the weather be all right?"
Hitomi said it with worry plain in her voice. Han Seoyeon and Ryuumai were the sort of people who would be fine if you dropped them into a volcanic crater, never mind a Japanese heat wave—but even so, there was no way the two of them were the only staff on crowd control. This was Japan, where news of someone dying of heatstroke surfaced whenever you had just about managed to forget. Standing still in clothes like that at high noon in midsummer could be enough to kill a person.
"Oh, please. Of course it'll be fine. Anyone who'd have trouble with this wouldn't have been put on the control team in the first place."
"...We are talking about staff, right? You're not quietly standing up a special-forces unit as Hyakurenno's private army behind the government's back?"
"Haha. There's no chance of that."
Hyakurenno might have been running the whole affair with both feet planted, but wasn't the bar for staff simply too high? That was what Hitomi had been thinking as she spoke, and Ryuumai laughed as if she had heard an amusing joke.
"Why would Hyakurenno bother gathering soldiers in secret? If they wanted them, they could just recruit out in the open."
"......"
Hitomi remembered a fact she had forgotten while spending so much time close to Yuri. The Hyakurenno Group had not failed to swallow Japan. They simply had not, because they had no need to. Set their minds to it, and they stood in a position to build the sort of corporate state that belonged in a cyberpunk story. In a monarchy that still kept an emperor, the heirs of a corporation went by the nicknames of imperial prince and imperial princess, and not a soul raised an objection. At that point, you could fairly say the matter had already been settled.
"Anyway, let's head up. I'll take you as far as the studio."
And so Han Seoyeon and Hitomi followed Ryuumai into the building.
They tapped a keycard at the gate deeper in the lobby, boarded the elevator beyond, and were on their way up when Hitomi spoke, as if the thought had only just returned to her.
"Come to think of it, has your avatar come out yet, Ryuumai-san?"
In Ryuumai's case, work on the avatar had started later than for the other third-generation talents. Her concept took as its model a real person—no, a real demon—by the name of Behemoth. Unlike Leviathan, who had vanished outright and whose whereabouts were unknown, her case had required permission as a matter of propriety. By Behemoth's own account, objections had risen among the supporters... and had simply been disregarded, the permission granted all the same. Thanks to that, they had been able to build the character without altering Ryuumai's original concept. Even so, the process had inevitably put her behind the rest of her cohort. The last time Hitomi checked, every third-generation avatar except Ryuumai's had already been finished.
Still, going by how these things had gone so far, it seemed about time for it to be done, which was why she had asked—and Ryuumai nodded at the guess.
"It came out a few days ago. Once this concert is behind us, I imagine they'll kick the debut into gear for real."
"Oh, wow. If you have an image, would it be all right if I looked?"
"Of course. Here."
Eyes shining, Hitomi peered at the screen of Ryuumai's phone. Han Seoyeon, having already seen it days earlier, merely stood quiet in the corner of the elevator.
"It's well made."
"Personally I think she comes off a little soft and delicate, but, well. This sort of look is bound to have more demand."
At the praise, Ryuumai shrugged. It didn't feel particularly like her. It was only that Anathema happened to have a few people whose sync rate was suspiciously high; think about it, and a VTuber, as a rule, looked nothing much like the real person. From a viewer's side, prettier was better if you had the choice. That was how Ryuumai saw it. Put her out exactly as she was, and all Anathema would hear was that they had gone and cashed in some political-correctness points.
"I think you'd have plenty of demand yourself, Ryuumai-san... Tastes differ from person to person, but muscles like these ought to count as a mainstream preference."
"That's only because the one Ninomae-san fell for happens to be an Apostle, isn't it?"
Hitomi only thought that way, Ryuumai meant, because her taste ran firmly enough in this direction that she had gone and married Seoyeon.
At those words Hitomi stared at her for a long moment, then went on.
"Ryuumai-san, by any chance, can you read Korean?"
"Out of nowhere? Well... I'm not fluent, but I can read and write well enough."
Only a few years back she had been a body knocked endlessly between China and Korea. Along the way she had even swung through hell and back. She wasn't skilled enough to parse it without concentrating a little, but she was confident enough to say, plainly, that she could read it.
"Then I'll send you a link next time. It's a Korean community site for a game I like."
"Hm. Why?"
"When you get home, go in and search 'abs' in the search bar. Read what comes up, and you'll probably understand why I said that."
"Huh? Ah—yes. I'll keep it in mind."
Puzzled as she was, Ryuumai Fuu nodded, figuring the suggestion wasn't meant unkindly. The intent itself she could not begin to grasp.
...At that moment, she had no idea whatsoever that the title of the very first post she would open after getting home—If You Want to Lick a Short Girl's Abs So Fucking Bad, Go Eat Something Tasty—would turn her face bright red.