All of Us Together in One Place (4)
"Thank you for all your hard work~!"
"You worked so hard!"
Day one of the Shirayuri Music Festival came to a thoroughly successful close. Even mixed in among ordinary stages, the VTuber performers had drawn nothing like the usual what on earth is that stare, and that alone was a remarkable achievement.
Abroad, people often assumed that in Japan subculture was practically mainstream. In truth the industry was merely more developed than elsewhere; the way people actually looked at it was not so very different. Try to force-feed it all at once and you often met resistance. This time, though, perhaps because the advance promotion had been so thorough, that sort of reaction was almost nowhere to be seen. Taste had little to do with it. There was a world of difference between arriving already knowing there would be a whole segment packed with anime characters, and walking in blind.
Things having gone so well, someone briefly floated the idea of an afterparty, but it fizzled. Tomorrow's schedule still hung over them. Strictly speaking, among today's performers only Bansei Marin had to take the stage again tomorrow, yet so many of the VTubers had come as company delegations that it became everyone's concern. With a colleague tense over tomorrow's performance, they could hardly go out and celebrate just because their own part was finished.
In any case, everyone meant to attend tomorrow at least as members of the audience, and so the conclusion was simple. The afterparty could wait until the festival was entirely over.
"...Honestly, it does weigh on me a little."
"Well. You're not exactly the sort who enjoys a gathering like that, Hitomi."
At Hitomi's small murmur, Seoyeon answered while lightly stroking her hair. Hitomi did not refuse. She only tilted her head and leaned it, gently, against Seoyeon.
Once Ninomae Hitomi opened her heart and let someone past the line, she would wag her tail like an overjoyed puppy every time they met. Seoyeon knew perfectly well that the once was never easy. Meeting Han Seoyeon, meeting the people of Anathema Production, had helped a little, but she was still someone who had been wounded, and by nature she was never much inclined to go out among people.
"If you'd really rather not, shall we quietly excuse ourselves? Or we could make it a gathering of just the Anathema people."
If she disliked this sort of occasion, simply not going was always an option, though it did invite remarks about a lack of social grace.
"No. It's not as bad as that."
Hitomi shook her head. It was only a little uncomfortable. Nowhere near the point of desperately wanting to stay away.
"Anyway, let's head back to the lodging. It's getting late."
"Yes. Let's."
The two of them left the studio at last. Outside, the dark had already settled in deep.
The VTuber stage had been set in the middle-to-late order on the premise that it would be performed after nightfall, so even when it ended the hour could hardly be called early. Seoyeon, having stayed on as staff to help with the wrap-up, was bound to be later still.
"You could have gone on ahead in Miss Kuroyuki's car."
"Then Shion would have been coming back alone."
At Hitomi's answer she smiled faintly and pressed her lips to that forehead. Hitomi laughed, a pleased little hehe.
"How did you find today? It was your first performance with a real audience, was it not."
"Mmm. That's true..."
As they made for the parking lot, Hitomi turned the question over. Even today she had not faced the audience directly, only through screens and speakers. And yet she had felt, unmistakably, that they existed. How to put it. Her chest had truly swelled.
"...It's a monster. This thing called the support of fans."
A monster that bewitches the mind. That thrill in which all the effort and hardship of preparing a stage melted away like snow. Today's performance had held a shiver that, once tasted, seemed impossible ever to give up.
"Love is the greatest miracle."
With a click of the latch, Seoyeon answered as she opened the door of the truck she so often drove. There was a reason the epithet the second greatest miracle in the world had always clung to her.
"The greatest healing, and the greatest exorcism, both begin in love in the end."
Yearning or tenderness, love in whatever form. That was why Han Seoyeon walked the path of Christ, and the wellspring from which most of the faithful besides her had been able to cross the Valley of Indifference.
The more one came to know the supernatural, the more certain one became of God's existence, until that certainty crossed a threshold and a realization arrived. Just as a person who pursues the study of humanity far enough comes to understand that the self is nothing but electrical signals in the brain, there comes a moment when knowing too much wounds the absoluteness of the thing known.
That was the point called the Valley of Indifference. Whether one overcame it cast a long shadow over all the faith that followed. It was also the moment when a once-devout member of the Church was most likely to turn without warning, cursing God, or laying hands on crimes that abused supernatural power.
What usually carried a person across was the love of Christ. Even if one denied God's absoluteness, that love could not be denied.
"The love by which He, through mercy alone, remitted original sin. That, at least, can never be denied."
"Original sin... you mean, that..."
"The first sin. Adam's sin, of eating the fruit people commonly call the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil."
The two of them climbed into the truck. The engine caught, the lights came on, and it pulled out of the parking lot.
"That said, the expression itself, 'the fruit of good and evil,' is not quite accurate."
"Ah. I heard that's probably some kind of idiom peculiar to Hebrew..."
"You know it well. As expected of the top of the department."
At the answer that leapt out so readily, Han Seoyeon looked at her as if faintly surprised. Hitomi, for her part, could not help wondering whether the reaction was only teasing.
"It is called the fruit of the tree that makes one know good and evil. In truth, though, it does not mean good and evil. It means from good all the way to evil. In other words, the fruit that makes one know everything."
"Ah. So that's why in Evangelion..."
"Uh... was that not a robot-battle show? Does something like that actually come up in it?"
"You should watch it sometime, if you get the chance. I'm not sure how it would sit from a Christian's point of view..."
Seoyeon never seemed to mind blasphemy all that much, so it would probably be fine, and she was even more lenient when it came to works of fiction. Nodding at Hitomi's words all the same, she went on.
"In the end, the root of the sin that cannot help but send one to hell was knowledge."
"And what does that mean?"
"You have been in contact with the hidden world for quite some time now, so I imagine you may already have a sense of it. Fundamentally, a consistent faith or doctrine can establish itself as a supernatural being on its own."
Beings that lived on by depending on faith were exceedingly many. Even short of that, those that took faith as a source of power were by no means rare. Had Hitomi herself not awakened as a True Ancestor upon the faith gathered around Mary Tepes?
"And someone, or someones, imagined hell."
"...Ah."
Imagined, it was born. Observed, it was known. And in the end it spread, and was inherited. That was the greatest sin humanity had committed. Fear of the world to come, and the plea that ruin might pass over oneself alone. From those things came a god of calamity that devoured such faith, such rites, and such offerings the whole world over.
"If He bore that ruinous destiny alone, and burned His life away in suffering, and if it is not right to praise such a being and long to follow Him, then nothing in this world was ever right to begin with."
The greatest healing Christ ever worked was the curing of that incurable sickness called eternal death, and the greatest exorcism He ever worked was the casting out of the demon called Gehenna. At the root of both lay His mercy, and His love. And so countless believers, even should they come to deny the absoluteness of God, still lived by that teaching.
This, of course, was only the domain of individuals. The Church as an institution, carrying out its role as an apparatus for the management of the world, moved in unmistakably political ways. Even so, that its foundation rested in Jesus Christ could not be denied.
"...But isn't that a bit too grand a comparison for a VTuber and her fans?"
At the story, though, Hitomi smiled a little awkwardly. She was grateful for her fans' hearts, and it was true that she cherished them, but it was hard to deny that this, too, ultimately rested on a business of give and take. At the very least, was it not quite a distance from the agape the Church spoke of? She could not help thinking so.
"It is only a slightly different kind. In the end, this is love as well. Have you ever thought that, between your affection for me and your affection for your fans, one of them was the lesser?"
"What? No. Not to that extent..."
If a day came when she had to abandon one in order to protect the other, then yes, she would agonize and decide. On an ordinary day, though, there was no world in which she had ever thought that way.
"That is what I mean. Agape that seeks nothing in return may look a little more sublime, but that does not make the worth of other bonds any less."
"It's difficult..."
"Parasocial bonds in particular are a subject the Church has taken an interest in of late. Among the minor local gods, there are already those earning faith through exactly this sort of activity. Even within the Church, there is Abraham's case, is there not."
"Ah, um, Abraham is..."
The words that followed left Hitomi unavoidably flustered. Given the circumstances, it hardly seemed a story to bring up so lightly.
At that reaction Han Seoyeon paused midway through easing the wheel around, and offered an awkward, wry smile.
"Ah... now that I think of it, did I gloss over it back then? That if it was Abraham, they would surely be able to rise again."
"Yes. You definitely said that."
"Please don't worry too much. Abraham has fully recovered."
"Wait, really?"
Hitomi's eyes flew wide. She had never imagined the problem of the self could be overcome so quickly.
"No. Strictly speaking, perhaps I ought to say they were never broken."
"Then all this time, that was..."
"To deceive the Doctor, they at least had to put on a show of a broken heart."
Seoyeon said it, and smiled.
"Dr. Groothuizen had been able to draw the Church's information out through Abraham-Delta all this time, but not long ago that very channel was turned against her, and she came within a hair of having the Battleship Leviathan taken from her. At that point, she has two choices."
Seal Abraham, an outstanding prophet and a source of the Church's intelligence, while accepting the risk of being struck at any moment? Or cut the connection, and let Abraham range free?
"No. In truth it can hardly be called a choice. The latter is suicide."
The instant she chose it, her next teleport site would be prophesied, and she would be met there by a summoned crusade, raked by concentrated fire, and vaporized. So the only option left to the Doctor and the Necromancer was the former. Or it should have been.
"However, if there exists some separate means of restraining Abraham, the matter changes."
Once Abraham had been rendered past recovery, severing contact and leaving them be would pose no problem at all. In this instance, that means had been the revelation that shook Abraham's very sense of self. And everyone had believed it had worked, and worked well.
"Isn't that right?"
"Ah. Actually, it's a little different. I suspect nearly everyone who cut their teeth inside the Church already knew it was an act."
"Even after their own faith was denied, everyone thought they'd be fine...?"
"No, well..."
Seoyeon let the end of the sentence trail, and glanced out the window.
"I'll just say it straight. The predestination problem and the arguments over grace are already stone-cold bait... Not that an outsider would know."
"...?"
"Over in Protestantism and the like, people are still flame-warring over it in real time. But we have a cheat code called a council, so..."
"Uh... so, what does that mean?"
"It means they're fine. Abraham is."
At that moment the light turned red, and the truck came to a clean stop just short of the line.
"And it also means that if you want to know when and where that monstrous spaceship shows itself again, you only have to ask Abraham."