Like the Morning Light, Like the Latter Rain (1)
When a group grows large enough, someone is bound to be left out.
The VTubers of Anathema Production—thirteen of them, every generation included—were no exception. Even taking only the four members of the third generation, it was obvious that the moment things entered the realm of actual planning, there was no way for the spotlight to fall on everyone equally.
"Honestly, you are all simply too much~"
On the screen, a woman of gentle looks let the complaint slip in a faintly mischievous tone. She tipped her head to one side, blue hair swaying with the motion, and the angel's ring suspended above it gave a little bob. Anathema's third generation: the fallen angel, Shirase Hikari.
"But they've already gone on the trip, so coming home without having enjoyed it would be the greater problem, wouldn't it? My dear genmates, I hope every one of you has a lovely time. Please don't spare a thought for the third generation's kizuna."
As for why Hikari was airing her grievances like this—playing along with her character concept, pretending all the while that she was doing no such thing—the reason was simple. Every third-gen member besides her had gone off on a trip with the seniors.
First, Mikazuki Umi and Iwabami Kyouka had left on a one-night, two-day trip to Amairo Tsubasa's private beach—not a single viewer so much as challenged the phrasing—together with Mary Tepes and Hinata Shion. And as for how a lineup like that had come together, the viewers had already produced inferences that sat uncomfortably close to the truth.
Umi and Kyouka were said to be working at the same place these days, and once you lined up the circumstances, it was all but certain the place had something to do with Hyakurenno. It was likewise approaching the status of established fact that Mikazuki Umi's true identity was the maid who turned up now and then on Tsubasa's broadcasts—which was to say, on Hyakurenno Yuri's. The natural voice that slipped out of her every so often was far too similar, and there was also the conviction that this world simply could not contain two "Hyakurenno-adjacent persons who drink like that and possess the physique to fold an ordinary human being in half."
From there, the inference followed naturally that Kyouka, too, had been hired on as Hyakurenno Yuri's bodyguard. A woman who had retired, come home to Japan, and put the body tempered in her mercenary years back to work as bodyguard to the young lady of a great house—that was a perfectly natural progression. Set aside the question of whether it was realistic; the plausibility itself fit well enough. People do tend to take things in whatever direction they would prefer to see.
At any rate, once you accepted that, there was nothing strange about the two of them trailing along on a trip Tsubasa was taking. Hard to say for certain, but from the snatch of it that had been overheard when they briefly went live over social media to chat with viewers, they seemed to be having a thoroughly happy time of it.
And as for the other third-gen member, Masachi Nodoka—she had gone overseas with Kitayama Maya on a three-night, four-day family trip. To the viewers' bewildered question of why on earth the two of them were going on a family trip together, Kitayama Maya had produced this answer: "Because Nodoka-chan's mom is reeeally close with our dad~"
…It wasn't wrong. If only that "Nodoka-chan's mom" had not been married to "our dad."
They had debuted already accepting, as a premise, that the red pill would drop someday and there would be no avoiding it—and yet they were still talking circles around the truth, on the grounds that revealing they were sisters was premature. Of course, the fact that the two were already living together had been pieced together from all sorts of evidence without either of them ever saying so outright, so the family connection coming to light was probably only a matter of time.
And so Hikari, the only one of the third generation who had failed to leave on a trip with the seniors and been left behind alone, was venting on stream a resentment that wasn't quite resentment. For the sake of the broadcast's entertainment, of course, she was also letting the feeling show a little larger than it truly was.
"Right? They really are too much."
The one who chimed in was the second-gen senpai seated at her side: the witch, Serena Razania. This stream was an offline collab Hikari was running from a visit to Serena's home—which was to say, Senjoji Chiyo's. It wasn't as if her entire generation had cleared out the way Hikari's had, but two of the second generation had gone off to play at the beach together, and that was more than enough to set the sketch-comedy mood of The Complaints of Those Left Behind. And the reason it happened to be Serena, of course, was that the two of them had kept up a considerably intimate relationship ever since Hikari's debut.
"I could've appreciated those bikinis just fine, you know!"
"Hehe, that's true. The senpais' bikinis… I want to see them…… Shall we ask them to send photos, at least?"
"Want me to take them?"
"I don't imagine Maya-senpai's side would take any for us."
"Never mind that—what's with chat? Share them? Excuse me, we haven't even gotten any. We haven't even asked yet, hello?"
By the time Anathema had debuted a third generation, an unspoken rule had finished taking shape: every generation has at least one person on sex-joke duty. For the first generation that was Maya, it went without saying, and for the second it was Serena, right here. The one who had come into that position for the third generation was Shirase Hikari. Before anyone quite noticed, her character had settled into a woman who performed as if she were nothing of the sort, while being stuffed to the brim with erotic, leering intent.
In truth, it was a long way from the character originally intended. She was supposed to have been a haraguro type—sweet-faced, black at the core—harboring, among the seven deadly sins, something like greed or pride…… That plan was smashed to pieces the instant her debut stream produced the image of "a woman hunting NSFW posts on internet forums." Worse, the fans—also known as the Bill Gateses of free time—had compiled the posts that flashed through the address bar in that single moment and managed to uncover even Hikari's username. Something sitting at the top of an address bar basically means a page you visit often, and as luck would have it every one of those posts had been written by the same person, so they arrived at last at the conclusion: She kept going back in to check the reactions on things she wrote herself!
Thanks to that, she was caught having posted vulgar writing she would never have produced in real life, along with posts that oh-so-casually praised her own streams, and the result of throwing up her hands with a screw it and broadcasting however her desires led was that she had somehow become the officer in charge of the third generation's pervert quota. That she and Serena, fellow quota comrades, should hit it off in an instant was only natural, if anything was. It helped, in particular, that they were both lesbians whose tastes ran considerably alike.
Kitayama Maya of the first generation, who occupied the same pervert position, was honestly too strong for the two of them to handle. Let the filth of a sex joke climb even a little and Maya came charging in at a dead run, and she had surprisingly poor compatibility with a pair who sang every day about wanting to sleep with a woman, only to lose their nerve and retreat the moment an approach actually came from the other side. As far as stream entertainment went she wasn't a bad match—she did pin a glass-cannon image on them—but there was no helping how exhausting she was to deal with in every other respect.
In that regard, Serena and Hikari had each taken the measure of the other as someone of a similar nature. They knew it was nothing but bluff traded as a joke, and so no matter how hard one of them came on, the other could simply play it back. They understood that before things truly drifted that way—no, even if a current like that did start to run—the other would pull back before crossing the line. And because each understood her own nature well enough to predict how the other would move, they could fire off remarks of that sort and toss their jokes as freely as they liked. Even the yuri lines they had never quite managed to get out, too busy worrying I'm a lesbian, what if she mistakes this for me being serious, could be said without a flinch. Well—there had also been the time they went strength against strength, each assuming the other would fold, and ended up getting scolded by management to watch the intensity……
Anyway. Today, too, they would take the reins off and run. The two of them grinned and steeled themselves to carve this broadcast into the kind of delicious back-and-forth people would look back on and call legendary. If it came to it, they could afford to send it, figuring one stream's worth of a warning from management was acceptable. After all, they'd been scolded last time, so once things reached a certain point the other side would surely play it safe.
…The point on which they were mistaken was this: a game of chicken, when no outside intervention exists, carries a more than sufficient chance of that particularly stupid outcome in which both parties do nothing but one-up each other until they finally collide and cross the Jordan together.
"……Huh?"
It was a tragicomedy hatched by two chickens who, from having understood each other entirely too well, had managed to see eye to eye even here—She can't possibly be serious, so if she offers it I'll just say thank you and help myself, and She's only doing it as a joke too, so maybe I'll simply enjoy it until she stops halfway.
That day, a full two souls crossed the river.