I Strike My Own Body (4)
"Ngh... why...?!"
Mary slammed a fist against the desk, the very picture of indignation. Of course, had she truly meant the blow, the desk would have shattered, so this was frustration held to a carefully measured degree.
"Even Super Mary, going all out, wasn't enough?!"
"Lady Mary. If sheer force of will were enough to win, wouldn't the Japanese Empire be ruling the world by now?"
"Um, Tsubasa-chan? You haven't forgotten this is a domestic broadcast, have you...?"
"But that the Imperial Army was incompetent is a fact even most of the net-right will admit."
Mary went blank at the sight of Tsubasa dropping a line like that as if it were nothing at all.
Perhaps because a fair number of its talents spoke several languages, Anathema Production tended to be quite mindful of its overseas fans—but even among them, Tsubasa was especially quick to put an edge to matters of nationalism. Where the other VTubers, the moment such talk surfaced, would quietly steer the subject elsewhere or ignore chat outright so things never grew loud, Tsubasa was the sort who took dead aim and charged straight in.
In Mary's estimation, the family's influence probably accounted for a great deal of it. She would have been raised that way, and even if a remark like this earned her antis, she likely carried the confidence that out in the real world, beyond the internet, no one could lay a hand on Hyakurenno.
She was certainly not an arrogant person—exceedingly kind, in fact—and yet somewhere beneath her lay the thought, So what is it, exactly, that any of you can do? That was Amairo Tsubasa... Hyakurenno Yuri, as Mary saw her.
In short, whether the matter was good or bad, she was a woman who, once she had set her mind on something, simply drove straight through.
The former showed in the way she funded every sort of public-interest organization, making no distinction between the surface world and what lay beneath it, in the hope that the world might grow a little better... The latter could be summed up in a single thing: one extreme, wallet-shaking calligraphy stream.
Thanks to that, Tsubasa's viewers showed a loyalty considerable even set beside the audiences of other VTubers. Anyone who didn't had already fallen away. It wasn't that she shook people down for money on some schedule—that channel was simply a donation-milking broadcast around the clock.
By now all that remained were viewers who cheered no matter what she did, and viewers who had been hit so hard once that they were still thrashing, unable to climb back out. She didn't even do anything so particular as gap-moe marketing, and yet a channel of that misshapen form—the lowest subscriber count in Gen 2, and the highest Superchats—had come into being for precisely this reason.
...Ah, and though only very rarely, there were also stock speculators lurking about, hoping some scrap of information might fall from Lady Hyakurenno's lips. In the end they were left with nothing but a choice of two: fail to endure the ongoing newcomer-grinding broadcast and leave, or get hit hard enough to become seed money themselves.
"Ngh, my Shion free-use pass..."
"That's what frustrates you more than the team's loss? Well—no, I suppose I can understand it."
Mary's remark was hardly an ordinary one, either. At the voice spilling regret as though she were genuinely aggrieved, Tsubasa smiled a wry smile.
"But to begin with, if Lady Mary asks, she grants just about anything, doesn't she?"
"But... there aren't many chances to aim for something past that 'just about.' Ugh."
"...Hm."
A rather blatant remark. Most of the viewers, though, didn't so much voice discomfort as snicker and chatter among themselves.
Of course, the remark didn't land with every viewer's tastes. It was simply that everyone had, little by little, grown used to the slightly altered air of Mary's recent streams.
To put it concretely, Mary had stopped holding back.
With the company's permission, she had made public the marriage she had been hiding, and there was no longer any need to conceal her shows of affection with Han Seoyeon. She still had to moderate things so they didn't interfere with running the stream, of course... but the fact remained that she could now speak freely of things she once would have glossed over, or never mentioned at all.
Had that been the whole of it, the matter would have ended with diabetes breaking out in droves in Mary's chat.
The problem was that Hitomi and Han Seoyeon's newlywed life was simply that intense. Even the scraps of stories she unpacked on stream carried a stickiness that invited remarks along the lines of My, your wife runs rather hot, doesn't she~.
...In truth, even that far might have passed under the feeling of well, they're newlyweds, these things happen.
What had unmistakably let a quiet spice seep into Mary's streams, all the same, was the weight of words that slipped out of her in moments she hadn't meant them to. Specifically, it went like this: while the members charged with sex jokes were chattering away at full volume, she would, without much thought and in a perfectly level voice, come out with something like, "Ah, that doesn't actually feel as good as you'd think."
In the old days she would have gone scarlet and sat there in silence, and even lately that was still her reaction most of the time... but now and then the response of someone with experience would pop out, and the members mid-joke would find themselves the flustered ones instead. It had happened more than once.
Thanks to that, posts made the rounds of the internet under titles like "Real Madness Overwhelms Fake Madness," or "The Majesty of a Married VTuber on Active Duty."
And so it was that, even though this stream had once been treated as the purest and most demure in all of Anathema—provided you didn't drag mobile games into it—at present, even when remarks verging on sex jokes tumbled out now and then, nobody felt any great revulsion.
Quite apart from that, a dispute had broken out between the "From here on, Gen 2 has no innocence" faction and the "A married woman stays innocent no matter how hard she goes at it with her spouse" faction, and the debate was ongoing even now...
To add to it, a third force existed as well: "Since there are sluts who lie and call themselves virgins when they aren't, someone who claims out loud not to be a virgin might still be one." Anyone with their common sense properly bolted in would never think such a thing, so the faction was negligible to begin with—and was currently taking concentrated fire from both sides besides.
"She said she wanted my hands and feet tied to the bed for an interrogation play."
"Ah—Shion?!"
And the ugly desire (?) Mary had been nursing inside her was laid bare, just like that, by Shion's character, who had come up close.
I understand.
"Nngh...! Shion, don't tell me you had me write my wish down in advance just so you could do this?!"
"Mm. We'll say that was the reason, for now."
She had assumed it was so that, if a wish seemed too extreme, Shion could say ahead of time that she couldn't go through with it... Apparently, though, the plan had been that if Mary failed and the wish came to nothing, it would be read aloud in front of the viewers.
Had Mary won the match just now, she would surely have kept her mouth shut tight. To say, in that situation, what Mary had requested would have amounted to announcing to the public exactly what Shion herself was in for tonight.
"Nnnnngh... What are you doing?!"
Mary, whose sex fantasy had in a single stroke been made public to all and sundry, trembled from head to toe with shame. A slight change in the stream's atmosphere may have raised her attack, but it wasn't as though her defense had climbed along with it.
Inside the game, Mary tore after Shion and threw punch after punch.
"...Haaah."
But she got a grip on her mental soon enough. She was still live; she couldn't afford to let go of her mind. Drawing a long, deep breath, Mary settled her heart and found her composure again.
"...Um, but Tsubasa-chan? Why are you inching away and putting distance between us like that?"
"No, it's just... even if it's Lady Mary I'm up against, going along with something like that is a bit much for me..."
"Nnnyaaaaagh!"
"Ack! Lady Mary?!"
In the end, Mary exploded. Not that she had wholly lost her reason—she had simply judged that, for the broadcast, it would play better not to hide the flicker of displeasure and to let it out boldly instead. And that Holy Knight, screaming and fleeing Mary's assault, had probably taken an action just provocative enough to get a rise, with the stream in mind.
No—if it's Tsubasa-san, it might not even have been on purpose...
She was the type who streamed entirely at her own pace, which made it hard to tell where the concept kept up for the broadcast ended and her true feelings began. Even ordinarily, she sometimes showed a sense of values that sat a little askew from ordinary sentiment.
"Haaah, enough. Let's just get ready for the next match."
"Oh? What was next, again?"
"A relay with random elements introduced, it seems."
"...Shion and I are on the same team. Is it really all right to include something like that?"
"I was wondering the same."
If one insisted on a comparison, it felt rather like the item battles of a racing game, so as a stream it ought to be quite entertaining. The staff member who had proposed the event had, thinking along ordinary lines, surely come up with what they themselves considered a fine idea.
"...Whoever suggested this is a new hire, right?"
"I imagine so, don't you?"
A staff member who did not believe in the existence of luck. In short, it was almost certainly a proposal from someone only recently hired, who had yet to grasp the common sense of the hidden world.
Information on the hidden world was provided to Anathema Production's employees as a matter of obligation, but that rule took effect only after a certain amount of time had passed following their hiring. So it would be a comparatively green member of staff—someone who didn't know the hidden world, or who had heard the talk but wasn't yet familiar enough to have adapted to that common sense.
Viewed kindly, one might even call it a company that didn't dismiss an idea from a newcomer of that standing, and actually put it into practice...
"Shall I get a little serious?"
This was no individual match, and the choice of holding anything back in a team event simply did not exist for Mary, diligent as she was. She swept her bangs lightly back, and murmured.
...And of course, the game ended with Mary Tepes—the Goddess of Fortune, descended for the first time in a long while—claiming homing-missile items and shield items in alternation, thirty-two times in a row, sinking every last member of the red team, and leisurely seizing the glory of first place.