I Hit My Own Body (2)
"Professor Senjoji, you're handling this so normally... It's your first time on a stream, isn't it?"
"Well, this isn't the sort of setting that would rattle her. A livestream may be new. Television interviews, she's done more than a few."
Sion let out a short laugh as she said it, answering Mary. She wasn't wrong. If memory served, the professor had even appeared in a documentary on Japanese shrines. She might be streaming with her real face from the start—what people called a face-cam—but between her experience and her temperament, she was the last person alive who would hesitate here.
"Ah, yes. Well... that's right. She's our professor."
Mary nodded. Of course, back when she'd said as much, she'd never once imagined the woman would show up with her face out in the open. Once it came to that, anyone could walk onto the campus where Professor Senjoji Chihaya taught and pick Mary out of the students in that department. The red pill was already public, so she assumed that was why they'd put the professor on the stream without that particular worry... still.
"...Even so, isn't way too much attention piling up over there?"
"That can't be helped."
Sion's smile went a little wry.
"She's just that strong a personality."
Set aside the fame she carried in the hidden world, the kind you couldn't carelessly put on a broadcast, and Senjoji Chihaya overflowed with character on the surface alone. A baby face you could hardly believe belonged to someone in her twenties, let alone her thirties, and a stature to match. A pretty face that never once turned unpleasant even when she looked thoroughly pleased with herself, and a way of speaking that was oddly, distinctly hers. Add the slightly baggy white coat she never took off, and it was hard not to wonder whether she was cosplaying some anime character.
"And that's with zero roleplay. Our professor is just... natural."
"That she's a very, mm... distinctive person is difficult to deny."
Not everyone in the hidden world walked around talking and acting like a chuunibyou with superpowers. Chase faith hard enough and you sometimes ended up with something like a surface-world conspiracy theory, or an organization that felt as if it had wandered out of a comic. Even so, this was an extraordinarily peculiar specimen of a human being. Considering the boss's talent for getting things done, if the professor hadn't been a childhood friend, wouldn't she have been hauled off and debuted on the spot?
…No. If it's the boss, she really might be drawing up the plan in secret behind our backs.
Of course, even President Gyokichi surely wouldn't go that far. And yet she was the sort of person who, no matter how impossible a scheme you set in front of her, left you unable to shake the thought of wait... would she?
"Anyway, go do us proud, Shutang."
"Sion, you're running too, you know? The whole roster's in this match."
Anyone watching would have mistaken her for a spectator. Along with the complaint, Mary's character on the screen swung a fist and clocked Sion.
"You two. Stop the marital spat."
A character with snow-white hair cut in from the side. The model hadn't managed a snake's vertical pupils, but there was no mistaking who it was. Tachibana Rin of the first generation, leader of the White Team that Mary and Sion belonged to.
"Openly canoodling in front of people forced to stay single because they're idols. Morale drops."
"We weren't exactly being all lovey-dovey..."
"This much is already salting the wound."
The people at Anathema knew it, of course. By now, so did the viewers. When Mary said she wasn't exactly being lovey-dovey, what she meant was that the times she actually committed to clinging were a different dimension entirely. The viewers in Mary's channel, who had started out shrieking with delight, had at some point begun wailing that they were going to die of diabetes. And right after that, Mary had begged them not to say such things even as a joke, because she absolutely could not stand the thought of her servants dying—so the viewers had started bouncing off the walls in an entirely different direction.
Checking after the stream, she'd found posts claiming this channel's gachikoi bait was a surprisingly fine delicacy. What kind of verdict was that to hang on a married VTuber?
For the record, she had only shut it down because, under the laws of the hidden world, a meme abused that freely might actually produce a viewer suffering serious diabetic complications. Mary was no saint prepared to devote her life to healing every patient on earth, but if someone fell gravely ill because of her, she didn't trust herself to bear the guilt.
The trouble was that thinking it through that way had put far too much sincerity in her voice, and before she knew it, viewers had recast her as the woman who answered Noona, I'm dying with a tearful You mustn't die...! Show that much cuteness and that much affection for her audience, and even a viewer who usually didn't fall for it would be hooked for a moment. Looked at truly objectively—which was to say, from the standpoint of a surface viewer who knew none of the truth—Mary herself had to admit the reaction wasn't exactly unreasonable.
"And in a match like this, the Red Team isn't an opponent you can take lightly. Stay sharp."
Rin said it toward Mary in the same flat tone as always. The Red Team they had to face had more holes than the White Team, and just as many people whose physical ability was outstanding. The split had been made, in its way, for balance. Raw athleticism didn't translate into game skill at a perfect one hundred percent, but it was obvious enough that the other side had more than a few people with reflexes of a considerable level.
"The rule this time is that fifth place and up scores points..."
And under a rule like that, having a lot of holes wasn't much of a problem. It was the sort of event where having many people who were good mattered more than having few who were bad.
"Besides, Aki's in today."
"...She's practiced an absurd amount, hasn't she?"
"Obviously."
Back when Anathema had only its first generation, they'd opened a Prasava server, and the culprit who camped it with Rin for more than twenty hours every day—and forced a shutdown system onto the server the next time they opened one—was none other than Rokumondera Aki. In Rin's case, whenever she wasn't live she handed the account to Marbas, the demon she lived with, and the two of them took turns, so it wasn't as if she'd played without sleeping at all. Her own playtime alone was still more than enough. Aki had filled those hours entirely by herself. Her skill was a given. And judging by how even the streams she used to fire up several times a day had plainly thinned out, she had just as plainly been grinding practice where no one could see.
"B-but Senpai Rokumondera ended up on their side, and we've got Sion!"
"Me?"
"I already wrote you the shortest-route strat."
Mary's greatest weakness was psychological warfare, which meant, put the other way, that the less other people's intentions were involved, the more room she had to shine. A speedrun with the random elements stripped out was already her stage. She had analyzed, long ago, the route that produced the theoretical minimum time once you accounted for the game's systems and the map. Which timing to turn the mouse, and by how much; exactly when to hit jump. Even those fine adjustments were finished. As she stood now, Mary could pull the theoretical best record with her eyes closed.
"Do you have any idea how careful I was, making sure it didn't leak?"
"Sh-shut up!"
She had, of course, already shared it with the entire team. Whether anyone could perfectly execute a strat written as at 14.5 seconds after the start, turn the camera ninety degrees to the right, then jump 2.4 seconds later was a separate question. Anyone else aside, Sion at least could follow it exactly. That meant this side was starting the match already holding first and second. Even if the other team showed some outrageous speed, so long as this side held the theoretical best, they might tie. They would not lose.
Which was why Mary could declare it with a thoroughly triumphant face. This match—they'd won...!
"AAAAAAAH...!"
The perfect strat, shaved down to the frame, surrendered to the violence of the minute ping gaps that a fifteen-player lobby had called down on it.