Steep Rocks on This Side, Steep Rocks on the Other (1)
After the laborers' revolution (?) on Mount Oe, most of the business that had brought the party here fizzled out into nothing.
Kirra Korhonen declared that the organizational structure had been overturned entirely, and so the sum to be paid would change as well; she would come calling again at a later date. Sakuragi Oka, present as the Freemasons' representative, likewise drew back a step, saying she would report the situation for now and run it through internal discussion.
With that, neither Seoyeon nor Hitomi had any further reason to linger in the cave. Hitomi came back down the mountainside amid the thanks of the youkai, who now shared ownership of the faith she had won through the game, and then, borrowing materials from Onitake Inari Shrine, began a brief lecture for Honoka. Other affairs had pulled them aside, but that lecture had been their original reason for coming.
Han Seoyeon had gone along with Hitomi, and so the only ones left in that place were the folk who had always lived on this mountain.
"If this isn't a disaster and a half..."
Violet skin announced, past any mistaking, that she was a being beyond humankind. An oni of that sort sat perched on a rock at the mouth of the cave, rapping her own head as if utterly at a loss, and muttered.
"And you're complaining about that in front of me?"
The woman standing beside her muttered as if she could not believe her ears. Fox ears rising through snow-white hair twitched again and again.
"In front of me — the very person you meant to stab in the back?"
"Stab you in the back? What a grievous thing to say. It is a fine enterprise. I gather faith for you, and I bring in a fortune for that vassal of yours — Sanjo Yusuke, or whatever he is called."
"And in exchange, you meant to rake in even more faith, slip out from under me, break the seal, and run wild. That was the plan, wasn't it."
The oni offered some excuse or other, but all that came back was a frigid stare. Natural enough, if anything was.
"I was standing right there, listening to that whole conversation. If you thought I would believe it, then the only conclusion I can reach is that you take me for a fool."
"Now, really..."
She said it as though she had been wronged, and yet in the end the oni looked away. Not even as an empty courtesy could she claim the words didn't sting.
"Setting that aside..."
In its place, the oni changed the subject at speed. From her fist, clenched tight around it, she drew something out. It was a scrap of paper, folded over on itself again and again until it was a mass of creases.
"This. A thing I received from that Apostle."
"An Apostle? Which one?"
"The red-haired outlander."
"The tax collector?"
Inari took it from her, unfolded the paper, and read what was written inside.
"What in the world... is this supposed to mean?"
Her brow drew tight. It could hardly have done otherwise.
"How should I know? One would have to understand what is happening, and how, before one could say."
Inari muttered in sheer disbelief, and the oni, heaving a deep sigh and insisting that she knew nothing either, looked the other in the face.
"And on top of that — don't tell Bartholomew. Are they hiding it even from a fellow Apostle? Why?"
"I told you. I do not know either."
Had she understood the situation, she might have spun some scheme out of it — but they had passed along only the barest minimum of information, and that left her side in a genuine bind.
"Nothing to be done. For now, all we can do is prepare as it is written. Wouldn't you say?"
"Just what... is about to happen..."
"Masachi Nodoka-chan. I really would like it if this got you properly interested in folklore──."
"Excuse me, would you please stop with the smears? ...The one feeling the graduate-student crisis right now is me."
The chat, which had been teasing Mary for her oddly excited manner, went solemn in an instant at what followed.
"Care to keep talking, my servants? Hmm? Finish what you were just saying— AAAAH?!"
Go on, say one more word. She had been grilling her viewers in exactly that spirit when she let out a scream.
What the screen was broadcasting was a climbing game that had been all the rage of late, and the instant Mary's character landed, the foothold sank out from under her and she began to fall. It didn't even take ten seconds for some thirty minutes of grueling ascent to be wiped away to nothing.
"Seriously, this game...! How can it be this vicious! Auuugh...!"
She thrashed, pounding the desk. Because of it, the chat was plastered over once more with w's — and, since Mary could read Korean, a kek slipped in among them here and there.
"At least it's a mercy I didn't fall all the way back to the very start...... Haah. All right. Let me collect myself for a moment, and then I'll keep going."
She sighed, picked up the water bottle set beside her, and wet her throat. Then, catching one message in the scrolling chat, she answered it.
"Graduate student? Ah, yes, well... I do actually get offers now and then."
Mary — that is, Ninomae Hitomi herself — wasn't particularly conscious of it, but she was unquestionably someone for whom the word genius was no exaggeration. Her memory and her judgment were both exceptional, and her grades at university were outstanding; she even had a passion for learning, and her attitude was excellent on top of that. From the professors' side of things, it was inevitable that more than a few of them would have their eye on her.
It stayed as manageable as it did only because her advising professor, Senjoji Chihaya, was running interference.
...Strictly speaking, Professor Senjoji's feeling was closer to keep your eyes off my graduate-student candidate, but even so, she respected Hitomi's wishes in a take-it-or-leave-it way: nice if she did, and perfectly fine if she didn't. Thanks to that, the subject could be raised on stream in this joking tone. At least as far as Hitomi herself was concerned, it had not yet become anything she would call a problem.
......Maybe it's because I'm already halfway doing a graduate student's job?
Thinking about it, there were times when Seoyeon or Hitomi went out on field surveys to help Professor Senjoji. At this point the purpose for which a professor needs a graduate student had more or less already been met, so perhaps she simply wasn't clinging to the idea very hard. Besides, given Professor Senjoji's standing, it was obvious that if she so much as asked, the state would assign her people.
In any case, Mary kept the talk light enough that her real life wouldn't get pinned down — in truth she had already been found out, but plenty of people never bothered to dig through material like that piece by piece — and then turned back to the game.
It was a genre that had first blown up with the cauldron game and then sprouted derivative after derivative. The variations took any number of forms, but they shared one premise: at bottom, they were built around the question of how to make the player as furious as possible.
Slippery, unreliable controls. A destination that seemed as if it would never come into sight. And a vicious architecture that sent a tower, piled up with painstaking care over a long time, crashing down from a single mistake. They were games all but designed to drive a person sick with rage, and in practice — unless your competitive streak was truly something else — they were a genre you abandoned the moment you thought, why am I pouring my time into this garbage?
It wasn't that the difficulty came with no sense of achievement. Ordinarily, though, you set the game down before you ever reached the end. Yet every one of those flaws turned inside out the moment you looked at them as material for an internet stream.
Screaming at the pain and despair the game delivered was nothing but a laugh line, and quitting partway was considerably restrained once the whole thing was happening live. There were even viewers who found the peculiar B-movie flavor native to low-budget games entertaining, or who never noticed it at all.
Put bluntly, the people who showed up for streams of this kind weren't really there to watch the game. They were there to watch the streamer. So long as it belonged to the same genre, and so long as it was a game the streamer had never played, it honestly didn't matter which one you put on.
Seen from that angle, Mary Tepes's climbing stream had a way of running in a slightly peculiar shape. She was someone exceptionally well suited to games of this sort, because they came down, at heart, to analyzing patterns and structures — to knowing at what timing, and with how much force, you had to move.
Getting that into the body usually demanded a great deal of trial and error, and the only real problem was the vicious design that wiped your progress every time you committed one. Mary, though, would try a section once or twice, catch the feel of it on the spot, and scoot right up, so she climbed faster than the average player and fell less often.
She had already been called the type who covered for her mechanics with her brain, and since becoming a vampire even those mechanics had risen sharply... so unless it was a gimmick she was seeing for the first time, she restored whatever height she had already reached in no time. And so, set beside the ordinary stream seething with every variety of scream and wail, Mary's ran comparatively smooth. Even a fall wasn't when am I ever going to get back up there — it became ugh, now I have to climb that again.
"──Phew, this dreadful climb is finally over! That took about two hours, I think."
There were people who liked it precisely because it was so brisk and clean, but there were also people who found it too uneventful to be much fun... and so, compared with the other VTubers under Anapro, her viewer count didn't run particularly high. She was only playing along because it was trending; factoring in how much she suffered, it was hard to say the stream performed any better than usual. Honestly, it even carried something of the feel of a multi-hour white-noise chatting stream.
"Well then..."
But Hitomi was no fool, and she was a body that had already been streaming for about a year and a half. If it were truly nothing but meaningless, she would never have brought a game like this on.
"Shall we go tease some other people!"
What she needed wasn't the game itself so much as the title of having already cleared it. On the screen, Mary's character broke into a smug, triumphant grin.
Finishing the game in a flash and then going off to tease people from other companies — people still stuck in the swamp, still suffering — had, before anyone quite noticed, become an everyday affair. Of course, if she truly mocked and needled them, there might be some cheap thrill in it, but she would be all too likely to get stamped with an unlikeable image. In this case, though, her nature was her nature, and even the teasing never quite reached a truly harsh degree.
Rather, in keeping with the concept of an arrogant yet pure-hearted queen, it was often taken as nothing more than I did this well, so please acknowledge it. Mary herself would say she was going to tease them, but just as often the flow was that she got fussed over, showered with praise, and came back beaming like a fool.
"So hurry up and tip me off about who's streaming this game right now, my servants!"
In truth she already knew who was in the middle of tackling it, but hearing opinions and moving on that basis made for a more convincing flow, so that was how Mary played it.
"Char-chan, and... Kyouka-chan? Ah, right. This time, shall we go show them a senior's dignity!"
It was a conclusion she had settled from the start, but she made it look as if she had decided on the spot, opened her browser, and headed for the Etube channel of third-generation Iwabami Kyouka.
Aside from Honoka — Masachi Nodoka — whom she had met in person and with whom she had casually gone over the whole story, Mary still had few official points of contact with her juniors, so she had planned to use this as the chance for a short chat on stream as well. Even by her own estimation, it was a wonderfully effective and outstanding plan. Wearing a privately satisfied look, Mary opened the livestream already in progress.
But the model belonging to Kyouka, the channel's owner, had frozen stiff. It was what happened when the person inside stepped out of the capture range.
Had something come up, so that she had left her seat for a moment? Judging by the fact that she had left the stream running, it probably wasn't an errand that would take long...... Even thinking so, Hitomi glanced at the live chat beside her.
"......?"
"......Huuuuh?"
Iwabami Kyouka, third generation of Anathema Production. Less than a month since her debut.
Not within Anapro — no. Set against the VTuber industry as a whole, what was about to break loose was a flame war of very nearly the greatest scale there was.