Let the Waters Under Heaven Gather in One Place (5)
When Han Seoyeon and Hitomi reached the makeshift net pitched in a corner of the beach, Yuri's two bodyguards were busy plastering a ball with talismans, reinforcing it layer upon sticky layer.
Sensing their approach, Hyakurenno Yuri turned her head toward them and spoke.
"Oh my. That took you longer than I expected."
"No, well, you see... it took a while to find the sunscreen. I'd left it in my bag, so I went back for it, but it was buried so deep I could hardly dig it out."
Hitomi quietly looked away and fumbled through the excuse. It was a blatant lie with not a shred of room to stand on—but she could hardly tell the truth.
I mean, I thought it would be over quickly, too...
Honestly, Seoyeon had promised that once the rest of her was done, she'd be allowed to fuss over her feet, so Hitomi had assumed the whole thing would be brief. She'd expected her to rush through it, eager to get her hands on them sooner.
She thought back to the exchange from only a little earlier.
"I never imagined you'd be that relentless about my chest..."
"It's because I love Hitomi. Not Hitomi's feet."
Heard in passing, it almost sounded romantic. Set against the context, though, the point was simply that she lusted after every inch of Hitomi's body, and whether one ought to be pleased by a remark like that was a genuinely difficult question. Nor had she neglected to enjoy the feet. That had been one of the reasons it had taken longer than expected.
"Putting suntan oil on with your feet... where do ideas that perverted even come from?"
In the end they had both gotten worked up, and under the pretext of applying it more thoroughly they had rubbed and ground against each other until they barely clawed their reason back—which was how they had arrived at the present moment. Of course, all that talk of thorough application had already been an excuse no one would buy, and since they had gone so far as to tangle their tongues in the middle of it, there was no defending themselves now.
Fortunately, judging by their reactions, neither Yuri nor Ryuumai Fuu behind her seemed to have seen any of it. That, at least, was a relief...
"Heheh..."
The problem was the maid. Momomomo Chisa.
She wore a black bikini much like Yuri's, but her frame ran larger overall, and her muscle stood out far more sharply than Yuri's, so the impression she gave was considerably different. For some reason she still had her maid's headdress perched on her head...
More questionable than the headdress, though, was whether she had witnessed Hitomi and Seoyeon's intimate contact. It would have been natural to assume that if the other two hadn't seen it, she hadn't either—but she was wearing a peculiar little smile and watching them with a look that meant something, and it left Hitomi uneasy for no good reason. What made it harder still to judge was that she often wore much the same expression when she was drunk. That only made it more difficult to be sure.
"......"
Even if she did know the truth, she at least didn't seem likely to bring it up in front of the others. Hitomi decided she would have to count that as a mercy. She forced the comfort on herself and changed the subject.
"More to the point, what on earth are you doing to that ball...?"
"This? We're reinforcing it. Hey—the zagovory's done, so stack an orasho exorcism over the top."
Ryuumai Fuu passed the beach volleyball—already so smothered in talismans that it had lost any claim to its original shape—over to Chisa, and answered with a grin.
"No, I mean, why...?"
"Because if we go at it hard, there's a chance it'll burst."
What were they planning to do, that they were worried the thing would explode? And besides, reinforcing something usually ended at sticking on a few talismans and calling it done. What the two of them were doing now was blatant overkill. Hitomi and Seoyeon had been fooling around and had only just arrived; if those two had spent the entire time since then doing nothing but preparing a beach volleyball, did that even begin to make sense? At this point, hadn't it become a cursed object capable of killing an ordinary person on the spot with nothing more than a casual toss? For Hitomi, that was the only possible reaction.
"You're not planning to kill your opponent, are you...?"
"Oh, come now. As if we would."
To Hitomi's uneasy words, Ryuumai offered nothing but a bright, refreshing smile.
"We've no intention of killing anyone. Well, unintentionally... yes. I can't say the chance of a truly unintentional 'accident' is zero. ...Hahaha."
"We really ought to stop this, shouldn't we, Lady Yuri?!"
"This much is quite all right, you know?"
Hitomi whipped her head around toward Yuri in alarm, but Yuri was already settled in to spectate the beach volleyball and tear into a bag of popcorn.
"F-fine? Ah. You're only saying that, and it isn't actually that extre—"
"They're always like this at home. I've grown used to it by now."
"In most cases, I think that's what people call 'not fine'!"
That wasn't being fine. That was going numb. Hitomi shrieked her horror a second time, and Yuri only laughed, soft little chuckles.
"It really is all right. They both seem to wish the other would simply drop dead somewhere, but neither appears willing to soil her own hands doing it."
"Urgh... uuuugh..."
It was an ethical problem, and a legal one, and—above all, in the hidden world—a problem of sorcery. Each of them understood that the instant one killed the other, the dying one would leave a curse behind by any means necessary. One hundred percent of the time.
"Why... am I hearing the theory of mutually assured destruction applied to a personal relationship...? And what kind of idea was it, hiring these two and sticking them together in the first place...? The sort of bold thinking only possible because it's the Hyakurenno...?"
"Hitomi. I don't believe that's it."
"Shion?"
"Think it through. The one who first hired the pair of them as a set was the president of Anapro. This is a madness that can arise regardless of blood."
"Ah."
Now that she said it, that was true. The person who had first thought to keep this insane combination together had been someone else entirely.
"How is the third generation still in one piece...?"
"Probably because they fight so openly that public opinion is actually favorable. Everyone simply assumes it's the concept."
"And their character settings are Leviathan and Behemoth, aren't they."
Seoyeon added it with a wry smile.
Wage a quiet war of nerves, and rumors would circulate that they secretly hated each other. Bicker openly on stream, though, and people naturally took it as being for the entertainment of the broadcast. Common sense said no one would turn a stream on and then fight in earnest.
...Of course, the president in question was in no way a person of common sense. Far from being someone you had to hold back, she was the sort who would say outright, "Just do it on stream the way you usually do."
"And they receive every attack perfectly."
"Ah..."
No matter how devastating a blow you poured out, if the other side took it as if it were nothing, the seriousness of it dropped for any third party watching. Throw a dropkick during an in-person collab and have it answered by someone snatching your ankle out of the air and swinging you in a giant swing, and both the realism and the gravity went numb for anyone looking on. On top of that, the third generation still had no 3D models, so none of it was directly visible to the viewers. All they had to go on was the testimony of the other genmates streaming the collab alongside them, which made it feel even less real. The racket of things crashing and splintering still came through, of course, so the consensus among viewers was that the claim they were actually throwing techniques probably wasn't a lie...
"The senior generations raising the threshold for what counts as physical probably plays a part as well. The moment a 3D stream starts in that studio, it's a company where people fly."
Packed with monsters as it was, Anapro's average physique was beyond reason. A good half of them could be put on a strongman stage at a moment's notice and manage it without trouble, and that was also one reason Anapro—whatever else might be said of it—was rated near the top of the industry for studio technology. When some of the VTubers went all out, neither the tracking nor the models could keep up, so a considerable investment on that front had been unavoidable. Ordinarily one would put in a request: there was this problem, so please move only within the range that tracked properly. There was no world in which that president did any such thing. If the motion couldn't be captured, she would grind through money and staff until it could. Giving up was not in her.
And so a connection had reached a subsidiary of the Hyakurenno Group, and that had become one of the reasons the Yuri standing here had taken an interest in VTubers. There was simply no telling where a person's life might lead.
"Still, if you're going to play that menacingly—Shion can fend for herself, but aren't Lady Yuri and I in danger?"
"Huh? No. We had no intention of including Miss Ninomae or the young lady. As you said, it actually is dangerous."
At Hitomi's words, Ryuumai's eyes went perfectly round as she asked it back, her manner suggesting the answer ought to be obvious. That, however, only left Hitomi tilting her head.
"Um... but beach volleyball is normally two against two, isn't it? Even if we're not following the official rules and the numbers can change, it's still a volleyball sport. You'd have to say it can't be played alone."
"...Is that so?"
"Reeeally? I didn't knooow..."
Yuri's pair of bodyguards reacted as if they were genuinely hearing it for the first time. Considering how few people actually knew the rules of beach volleyball, or had ever watched a real match, it wasn't such a strange reaction.
"Right. So in the end someone else has to join in, which means you should hold back on anything too rough—"
"Then what. We make clones."
"Yeah, why not!"
"......?"
What? Had she misheard? Hitomi doubted her own ears and looked up at Seoyeon's face beside her, appealing for common sense.
"Well... a Daoist of the East Asian tradition using a duplication art isn't particularly strange, is it?"
...Regrettably, the person she had turned to was, even among the present company, the human being most hostile to common sense.