Immortal, Invisible (3)
However daring the intimacy Han Seoyeon had just attempted, they were live, and this was not something they could let the viewers see.
Hitomi forced her heart back down and turned her mind to the broadcast.
On the surface, at least, it would pass for a hand clapped over her mouth, and the viewers would surely take it that way. Which meant she had no choice but to keep selling that version of events.
Seoyeon, perfectly at ease, worked the PC in the meantime and floated a numeral 1 onto one side of the broadcast, just above the spot where Mary's avatar was being sent out. Above the number ran a line of text.
They had planned today's stream around the bit of Mary chattering away in high spirits while Sister shut her down, so tallying, once it was over, how many times the so-called evil-spirit move had flashed past seemed like it would make for a funny picture.
Hence the plan to count them as they happened and pin the total over Mary's head—someone had suggested sticking it on her forehead, but that was vetoed on the grounds that it would hide too much of her face. Only now, with things going nothing like the original plan, Hitomi had the sinking feeling that every glance at that number was going to put thoughts in her head that had no business being there.
Put plainly, it was starting to feel entirely too much like the tally marks from a certain kind of manga. Writing something like that down when it was just the two of them would already have been shameful enough; flaunting it before a vast audience, even one that had no idea what it meant, sent the heat rushing into her face all at once.
Never in her life had she been so grateful that the face tracking everyone casually called a facial couldn't catch a blush.
Hitomi crushed the pounding in her chest with a deep breath and gathered herself once more as Mary. From her manner of speech all the way down to her temperament, Mary Tepes differed from Ninomae Hitomi in every fine, unmistakable detail.
"Haa... Right. Then let's skip the long talk and begin. Sae-chan?"
The opening screen blinked with its prompt.
They were running it through a PC emulator, of course, so it had to be a mouse click. A short load seemed to follow, and then the screen faded to black and a quiet background melody drifted out.
It was the sort of prologue common to any number of mobile gacha games: the protagonist opens her eyes in some unknown place a first-time player has no way of recognizing.
"You open your eyes, and there's a beautiful woman playing guide. That's as far as the cliché goes. She's the young lady you're obviously going to be seeing a great deal of in the main story. If this were a self-proclaimed pharmaceutical company that anyone can tell is actually a PMC, she'd be the donkey-rabbit hybrid girl. If it were a game where a school shooting is just part of the daily routine, she'd sit at about the level of the silver-haired beastkin bank robber."
What popped onto the screen next was a woman in full armor with a mechanical prosthetic for a right arm. Another development one could fairly call a cliché.
That said, calling it a familiar cliché only applied to people who had played a great many games of this sort, or at the very least knew them well.
Sae, who hadn't understood a word of the examples Mary had tossed out like a joke, had mumbled it in a vacant voice. She was someone who lived about as far from mobile games as a person could get.
A fair number of Sae's own viewers were probably in the same boat. Her streams quietly carried a not-insignificant audience that had simply followed her over from her past life and knew next to nothing of subculture beyond VTubers.
"What I'm saying is, a title heroine they introduce right from the start like this is obviously going to carry quite a lot of weight in the story ahead."
"Oh my. You know your stuff."
If that had been back when Korean historical dramas were all the rage, then surely...
"Sae-chan? Your inner Gremory is leaking."
"......"
For one brief moment the person on the inside had slipped out, but Mary turned the conversation and cleared the air again.
It was a textbook case of what people called getting got, though half of it was an overreaction played up for the sake of the stream. Which was another way of saying that the other half had genuinely gotten to her.
"Anyway... who do you think this person is?"
Sae thought for a moment at that, then produced an answer.
"Ah, he doesn't appear in this game. They nailed that door shut in the setting, so there's no plan for him to show up later, either."
"No. They're not a developer with that much common sense, so that isn't the reason. He went and crushed the future army that came back in a time machine, and it left a blank stretch of that era where time machines simply don't exist."
If one listened to the story behind it, there had been voices among the developers along the lines of what kind of setting is that supposed to be, but the one who proposed the idea had reportedly sealed its approval by landing an unanswerable checkmate with a single line—But he's Yi Sun-sin, isn't he?—and the setting passed. As she recalled, player opinion at the time hadn't differed much either, and most people had simply accepted it. Mary let out a light laugh at the memory and went on.
"To be fair, it makes sense that the right answer wouldn't come to you. Even among Koreans, I imagine quite a few people wouldn't know."
"If I say it now it could be a spoiler, so I'll hold my tongue."
The chronic problem that came attached to stories in this genre was that once you knew the inspiration, you could predict where things were headed.
It was hard to call that a pure drawback, since tempting players into speculation and close reading could draw interest of its own—but that only really applied to people who went looking for those theory posts themselves. Blurting it out on a broadcast watched by an unspecified crowd was hardly a good method.
All the more so because this was a game in which most of the characters appeared under names other than their real ones, which meant spoilers of this sort were better handled with care.
"Oh, and any chat that lands the right answer is an instant ban. If you looked at only this much and called it, then nine times out of ten you already know what comes next and you're trying to slip a spoiler in on the sly."
There was always the chance someone genuinely knew out of an interest in Korean history, but so many people pretended to speculate while actually trying to spoil that plenty of streams simply forbade even guessing in chat when they were watching a game's story.
"I'm saying it again, but this is a world that blew itself apart on the scale of parallel universes through time-machine abuse. This game scatters fake clues around while pretending to be historically accurate."
In other words, you couldn't even tell whether that figure was truly a person of Joseon, or had simply happened upon armor from the period and put it on.
This particular character didn't go quite that far, but Hitomi was someone who had been clubbed over the back of the head again and again every time another one appeared. The people who wrote story analyses online hadn't earned the name of evil spirits for nothing.
"I thought the Black man with the Japanese sword was Yasuke, and he turned out to be General Hannibal. Someone begs them to hand over Rome and the imperial title both, so I think, ah, Constantine XI, and then it's a completely different person. And at the very start, of all things—mmph?!"
The count hovering over Mary's head, mid-outpouring of a grievance that wasn't quite a grievance, ticked up by one again.
For having only just gotten through some six or seven lines of the prologue script, that was a considerable rate of climb.
"Nnn..."
At the feel of a tongue pushing in and tangling with hers, Hitomi squeezed her eyes shut.
She fought down the honeyed sound that rose in her on reflex, the way it always did.
If she were honest, she wanted to turn sweet that very instant and twine her tongue in as well, but they were on stream, and that would not do.
"...Haa. Anyway, let's keep going."
Hitomi steeled herself again.
At this rate, she truly felt she was going to surrender to want. The stream would be a little less entertaining for it, but better, she thought, to point herself down a road where she could cut loose as hard as she liked and still not end up with her mouth covered. With that in mind, she began to watch her words and her conduct.
"Mmph?!"
"Hnnn..."
"...Ahn♥"
Of course, if it had been the sort of thing she could control as easily as saying so, the infamy of evil spirit would never have been fastened to the front of the name Mary Tepes in the first place.
It took no time at all for the silence count displayed on the stream to reach double digits, and the number went on climbing without a pause for the rest of the broadcast.
"......♥"
Kiss after kiss, Hitomi's head grew faintly hazy. A buoyant, floating sensation, almost like being a little drunk, wrapped her whole body.
"Shion, ah... Shion... chuup♥"
"...!"
And then, for a single moment, her reason snapped clean through.
When Seoyeon leaned in to kiss her yet again, Hitomi instinctively seized that head and pulled it close, then claimed Seoyeon's lips like a beast and tangled their tongues in a frenzy.
"...Hk?!"
Only afterward, grabbing hold of her senses a beat too late, did the color drain from her face.
No matter how she turned it over, the sound just now had been at a level the microphone could not possibly have missed.
"Huh?"
But the instant she checked the mic, Hitomi's eyes flew wide.
The LED at the base of it was dark. The microphone had been off.
"Partway through, I thought you were going to make a sound, so each time we kissed I switched the microphone off for a moment."
Seeing that flustered reaction, Seoyeon said it with a faint smile.
A minute ago Hitomi had half-wondered whether she had stopped minding the stream at all and was simply running wild, but of course that Han Seoyeon would never. Seoyeon held the VTuber Mary Tepes every bit as dear as she loved Hitomi and wanted her.
Only then could Hitomi breathe a little easier and let the relief pass through her chest. There was, she supposed, no need to clamp down on her voice quite so hard.
Even so, that didn't mean she could shove the broadcast aside and draw out a long, clinging deep kiss in the middle of it. Leaving the microphone off for too long would start to seem strange, after all.
"Uuugh! This is too mean, isn't it? Seriously..."
Which was why, the moment the stream was done, Hitomi crashed every feeling she had been pressing down into Seoyeon and hauled her into a sudden embrace. It was the instant after she ended the broadcast.
"Watching you hold it in so hard was cute, too. ...Mm. You're passionate today."
And still like that, Hitomi set kiss after kiss against Seoyeon's nape and cheek.
Seoyeon looked at her—so plainly heated, and still so cute—and laughed under her breath. Then she stroked the back of Hitomi's head, as if combing her hair away, and kissed her.
"Shion... Shion, honey, honey...♥"
"You don't have to hurry me like that. I'm not going anywhere."
Hitomi, squirming there in her arms, brought to mind a cat rumbling in its throat.
The hand that had been petting her head drifted slowly lower, smoothing now over her shoulders and down her back. Each time it passed, Hitomi shivered faintly and burrowed deeper into Seoyeon's embrace.
The two of them went on, one soft smacking kiss after another.
At this rate they were liable to get well and truly started before they ever reached the bed, and Seoyeon smiled wryly. Seeing her like this, she supposed she really had gone a little too far today.
But it didn't actually come to that, because a call came through on Hitomi's phone immediately after.
"H-huh?"
Only then did Hitomi recover a measure of reason and look to the desk.
The name on the screen told her the caller was Bansei Marin—Komori Sae, who had been on the stream with them until just a moment ago.
But both their computers were still on, so why go to the trouble of a phone call? The thought lasted only a second. Hitomi saw the earphone that had slipped from her ear and understood.
It must have come out while she was all but throwing herself at Seoyeon in the chair beside her. Marin had wanted to say something once the stream ended, and when Hitomi—who hadn't even heard the chat come in—gave no answer, she had called the phone instead.
Her body was still a little warm, but not so far gone that she had thrown her reason away entirely, and so Hitomi gathered herself in a fluster, sat up, and answered.
"Hello? Bansei-san?"
"What's wrong? You sound so flustered..."
Whether because of her real age or not, Bansei was someone who often carried quite a grown-up air. Of course even she must have run into plenty of unexpectedly flustering things, but for it to show this plainly on the surface was rare, and to Hitomi it felt strange.
"...Ah?"
On that very day, when the unprecedented blaze set off by the school shooting had only just begun to show the faintest sign of dying down, another spark burst cheerfully to life at Anathema Production.
Truly, it was a company that never knew a quiet day.