Destroy This Temple (8)
"In short, it's a question of quantity. Of faith."
Click. A piece settled onto the chessboard.
An ivory knight forked the king and the bishop at once. Osean Lee's brow tightened at the sight. She could hardly toss her king away to be slaughtered, and so she had no choice but to move the king and give up the bishop.
Seoyeon, who had watched the exchange without so much as a flicker, unhurriedly shifted the knight again and took Anri's bishop.
"Faith? In what sense?"
"Building an anomaly's power on faith alone is harder than you'd think. If I had to compare it to something, it's a great deal like promoting a pawn."
She indicated, with the tip of a finger, her own pawn, which had climbed as far as the sixth rank.
"How you promote, and into which piece, can change with the position. The minimum condition does not. Playing White, you have to reach the eighth rank."
There were times when meeting that condition came easily, and times when it did not. Once the endgame set in, simply charging the pawn home was often enough—but that was not what she meant to discuss.
"Hitomi—Mary Tepes—is a highly exceptional case."
Her fame as a VTuber had certainly played its part, but beyond that, gaming communities had enshrined her as a goddess and carried out every variety of worship ritual, which is to say they set her picture up and rolled the gacha before it. She was, furthermore, a woman for whom Han Seoyeon Margarita, the modern Bartholomew, effectively served as shrine maiden, and with connections of that caliber she had long been treated as a VIP in the hidden world as well. On top of all that she had absorbed a preexisting spirit, Moyoko of the Tatari, acquired a personal shrine, and only after every conceivable variable had piled upon the rest did she at last become a goddess of bountiful harvest and beatitude—and a True Ancestor vampire.
"Even that was no easy thing. Shirase Hikari is a stranger case still."
"Because she split off from the original body completely, right?"
"That's right."
Han Seoyeon nodded at Anri's question.
"Building something up from nothing is bound to be harder than taking a human who already exists and setting her up as your pillar. And earning that degree of popularity as a VTuber hardly needs saying."
"Uh... didn't you say she was constructed out of faith from the future? So I figured it was a locked-in future where my channel blows up huge. Me, overtaking every one of my seniors and becoming Anathema Production's undisputed number one. Just picturing it."
So saying, Anri pushed a rook forward and put Seoyeon's king under threat.
"Ack!"
Seoyeon acknowledged the check with a nod and met the rook with her bishop.
"Stealth bishops are completely broken! You're not nerfing that?!"
"You started with two of them yourself."
"Why are bishops invisible until they attack, anyway... Are they actually anomalies?"
"Who can say. For a game as famous as chess, I wouldn't find it strange if an anomaly had attached itself..."
In any case, that was not the point. Seoyeon went on with her explanation to Anri, who had both hands clamped over her head.
"We don't actually know how popular you'll become from here. This industry is impossible to predict, so I won't deny the possibility of a sudden, enormous influx."
"Then it's fine to think of it that way? Or is it not?"
"In that case, Anri—have you ever heard of an anomaly being born because a VTuber from Company H, or Company N, grew tremendously popular? Or Sarah Groothuizen, for that matter."
"Ah..."
Anathema Production did hear, now and then, that at their present size they might pass for a major among the minors. Ask whether they could truly stand with the genuine major VTubers, though, and not a soul would nod. Their roster was so grotesquely stacked that they came up in hidden-world communities a respectable number of times, and yet the instant anyone ventured that they basically matched the majors, the fans themselves would be first in line to beat that person down and bury them. They were minor enough as it was. Kindly stop trying to score goodwill off other fandoms.
"Unexpected things do detonate constantly in the VTuber industry, I'll grant you. But do you imagine a modest breakout would let you catch those people? No. To obtain divinity, catching up isn't enough. Could you beat them?"
"Uh... yeah, no chance. For real."
Anri was convinced at once, and nodded.
She had watched streams other than Anathema Production's, and no one understood that gap better than the woman doing the streaming herself.
Unless Han Seoyeon conquered Japan with an Apostle's power and then ordered the entire nation to watch Anathema Production, maybe.
"Which is why a factor from outside the broadcast has to come into play. That was the Church's existing analysis."
"Uh, so what's changed now?"
"A time limit was attached."
Having said so, Seoyeon shifted the subject a little.
"I heard you met Shirase Hikari in person the other day. Do you remember what she complained about?"
"Uh, she was going on about why I was losing my virginity before she did."
"In short, Shirase Hikari, as a demon made manifest in reality, is preserving her chastity. That is where the favor I asked of you becomes necessary."
"You wanted what I did with Miss Senjoji made public this winter. That was it, right?"
At those words Anri sank briefly into thought. Chastity, and the loss of chastity. Faith being gathered. A time limit. An external factor. A moment later, her eyes flew wide.
"It's the collapse of the wave-function hymen from the Quantum Virginity Theory...!"
"How, exactly, did you understand it from that? Please use the forums in moderation."
Seoyeon muttered it as if she could not believe her ears. It had taken her ages to grasp the thing herself, and here was Anri wearing the face of someone who had seen through it from that alone.
"More to the point, I would be genuinely grateful if you stopped using vocabulary that makes me dizzy just to hear it."
A sigh escaped Han Seoyeon. She had not expected to hear vocabulary like that spoken aloud—not on a forum, but out loud, and twice.
Whether or not she registered that reaction, Anri pressed on at once, as if she wanted the truth she had reasoned out confirmed as quickly as possible.
"The VTuber called Shirase Hikari contains, at the same time, the personality of a fictional character and the personality of me, Osean Lee, who actually exists. Some of it is blended together, and some of it is separated, so that only one side's traits show. The parts that have to do with chastity, as the unicorns see them, are closer to the latter."
No one condemned a VTuber for losing her chastity merely because NSFW art of her was circulating online—Anri got that far, and then appended a "probably." Even among the insane unicorns, there were some who were especially insane. Conversely, you could enforce fanwork guidelines as ruthlessly as a certain simulacrum mouse guarded its copyright, so that not only lewd art but even an illustration with a romantic air failed to exist, and still, if the person inside the VTuber went around sleeping with any number of men, she would be treated as no virgin at all.
"In other words, a VTuber character's virginity depends entirely on me. More specifically, on the me who has been observed by the viewers."
In reality she had already joined bodies with Senjoji Chiyo, but the viewers did not know it. And so it was not Anri but Hikari who was regarded as chaste.
"And the other way around—if I make this public, then by being observed, she loses that chastity."
The Church had requested that the disclosure take place this winter. Combine every one of those conditions, and what phenomenon resulted?
"The span in which a chaste Shirase Hikari can be born is limited to the time between this moment and the coming of winter. Which means something is going to happen that can gather a massive amount of faith in Hikari inside a relatively short window... You're saying you can induce some large-scale incident, one whose timing you otherwise couldn't know, within three or four months...!"
"...I don't want to admit it, but yes. For the moment, that's correct."
Even hearing the explanation over again, it was the sort of plan that made her wonder whether the Intelligence Division had well and truly lost its mind. But it was a fact that the thing actually worked, and so Seoyeon had little ground on which to object.
"More precisely, they need a surface pretext for being able to read the future without going through prophecy. They already know when it occurs."
"Mm-hmm. I get it. If it's this sort of thing, then as a forum-recognized authority on virginology, I couldn't possibly refuse to cooperate."
"And which community would that be? No—I believe I just asked you to ease up on the forums."
"I got caught gallery-lurking on stream, and it locked in as part of my character. From that point on I couldn't quit even if I wanted to. Not that I was planning to quit."
"..."
Seoyeon let out another small sigh.
"And this is checkmate."
"Huh? Wait? It actually is?"
Anri, who had been examining the board from every angle, conceded the fact and nodded.
"You're seriously good. I heard you were a ringer, so I wanted to see for myself."
"Well... I learned directly from my godfather."
"Your godfather... Ah. Um. Well. If you're that person's direct student, I suppose it can't be helped..."
Of course it couldn't. Taught in person by someone you reached faster by counting down from the top, a self-taught amateur with no tournament experience had never stood a chance of winning.
"Anyway, thanks for the game. It was a good experience."
If that was how it stood, could simply having played chess together already be called an honor? As payment for cooperating with the Church, this much might not be bad. So Anri thought.
...It was one week before she noticed the plan's single greatest flaw.
"...I'm gonna lose it."
The premise of the plan was this: that the chastity of Shirase Hikari be preserved at least until winter.
One week after the match with Han Seoyeon, Osean Lee—virtual name, Shirase Hikari—was being run ragged by a unicorn campaign into which the Japanese Catholic Church had poured every resource it possessed.