I Strike My Own Body (5)
"That was overwhelming."
"Well. Those two may be wanting in every other respect, but their luck, at least, leaves very little to complain about."
It was a race that handed out an item of random effect once every five seconds. The whole point of inventing an event like this had surely been to stage a glorious free-for-all on the back of every sort of item, replenished at a relentless pace. You could tell as much from the decision to send the entire field off at once, even though a tangled mess of a composition had obviously been foreseen.
And in the middle of that chaos, Mary Tepes pulled nothing but the highest tier of item in an unbroken string, as if she had punched in a cheat code, and slaughtered the field outright. Once your rivals were annihilated, after all, you hardly needed anything that increased your speed. So a race that had begun as a clamorous, stumbling racket of a footrace became—the moment everyone realized something was going badly wrong—an event best called Survive Mary Tepes!
"Personally, of course, I would rather call it the power of love than mere luck. The items didn't pool around young Sion, did they? They pooled around young Mary. Even his own share of fortune seems to have crossed over to her."
"Is that how one goes about concentrating it...? No—before that, it's rather unexpected, hearing you of all people say such a thing."
At Gyokichi's reaction, Senjoji Chihaya grinned and added to it.
"They are words that young Sion said to me once. That love is the greatest of miracles, and so its influence would reach even one such as I."
"...An interesting perspective," Gyokichi replied.
To the viewers on the surface, the line would land as something romantic: that the power of love was great enough to change even an eccentric professor who was anything but ordinary. To those who lived in the hidden world, though—Gyokichi right beside her among them—it would arrive in an entirely different shape.
Anomalies could not touch Chihaya. They could not touch Professor Senjoji. That might as well be called the foremost proposition in all the world, for even the miracles of the Church, which held the advantage over nearly every hypostasis and anomaly, could not lightly trespass on the domain of Senjoji Chihaya's normality. The common appraisal of Professor Senjoji ran thus: even on the day the Secrecy Protocol vanished from the world and the veil was drawn fully aside, she would remain, to the very last moment, a resident of the surface. Set against that, Sion's words were a far more romanticist tale than anything grasped by those who did not know anomalies existed.
In the end, the reaction—he goes around saying things like that behind the scenes, of course Mary Tepes fell head over heels!—didn't differ much between surface and hidden side. If he offered words like those even to a mere acquaintance, what on earth must he be like with the person he loved? In truth he had only been expounding the worth of love as a model Christian, exactly as Scripture had it. But still.
Then, all at once, Gyokichi smiled a thin, wry smile and said as much.
"Come to think of it, words of that sort are something I ought to have been the one to say."
"...No. That isn't the sense in which I meant it. I received some help once, regarding the management of my mental state, and I was only thinking it would have been nice to repay that, even in a form like this."
At the reactions that followed, Gyokichi hurried to walk his words back, mildly taking himself to task over whether the remark could even be heard that way.
"Chihaya. Say something as well, would you."
"And what exactly would you have to teach me? Presumptuous, for a mere assistant."
"No—I'm asking you to speak to the viewers, not to me. And besides, all that assistant business is ancient history."
"Once an assistant, always an assistant. A kind of original sin, if you will. And judging by the living conditions of the research students, the messiah of graduate school has yet to descend."
As if to ask just where he thought he was crawling up to, Chihaya launched a paper airplane and bonked it against Gyokichi's head. So the fidgeting at her side during the broadcast a moment ago had been her folding the script into this.
"No. I believe I already told you it isn't that. And private as it is, would I carelessly unpack an old anecdote? Our faces are already out in the open as it is."
The viewers pleaded their curiosity at the old tale that had slipped out only in hints, but it was hardly a story that was his alone to tell, and there was no chance he would spill it lightly.
"Oh? What's this. Gyokichi won't do, so now they turn their aim this way? Well, praised so lavishly and gilded in gold, I do feel as though my mouth might open of its own accord."
Chihaya, for her part, heard the viewers out and grinned as if thoroughly satisfied. Spoken to like that, it was only natural to want to tell at least a little of the story from back then.
......
Thinking so, Senjoji Chihaya recalled the old days.
"Doesn't it frustrate you?"
"I can't... say it doesn't bother me. Yeah."
"Then you have to stand up to them."
"Because it won't do any good."
"It won't do any good?"
"Yeah. Get angry, or even try to hit them, and it just ends with 'The monster's on a rampage! Aaah, run for it~!'"
"You're a fine actor."
"Thanks."
"What you need is something a little more... fundamental."
"Well... I guess? If you had to put it that way."
"Hmm...... I'll have to think on it a little......"
"—What's with those clothes? Here I thought I hadn't seen you all day...... Don't tell me you borrowed some grown-up's?"
"I never got Father's permission, so it isn't borrowing. It is theft!"
"Theft?"
"It means stealing."
"Then you can't do that."
"More importantly, what's with that way of talking? Are you imitating Dr. Carlo?"
"Dr. Carlo? And who might that be? I know no name that sounds like the hero of an anime airing Sundays at ten."
"However I listen, that's the reaction of someone who knows. And how many times have we watched it together."
"At any rate, as I see it, there are only two firm truths in the present situation."
"That's a Dr. Carlo impression too..."
"Bah, quiet! Just listen in silence, I say. ...Ahem. I shall continue."
"Fine. I'll listen for now. So what is it you're actually trying to say?"
"Gyokichi."
"Nakabashi Gyokichi, you are human."
"......"
"I shall prove it. Starting now."
"You are not a monster."
"...How?"
"You know this head of mine well enough, don't you? It isn't as if you've heard it only for a day or two, that I am an extraordinary prodigy. Catching up to Dr. Carlo and blazing a new path would be a simple enough matter, surely. And I—being that—have determined it to be the truth. Nakabashi Gyokichi is wholly human."
"...You are smart, I'll give you that. Setting that aside, what's the second?"
"Hm?"
"You said there were two truths."
"Ah. I did say that, didn't I."
"Then what is it? Did you just lift the line without thinking and say it as-is?"
"No. That would not be it."
"Then?"
"Nakabashi Gyokichi, from this moment, you are my assistant."
"......Out of nowhere?"
"If I confess honestly, it is too much for me alone. I have never once seen a ghost, you see. Not even at that abandoned house everyone made such a fuss over the other day. So I need at least one more pair of hands—no, of eyes. ......Will that not do?"
"...I suppose there's no reason it wouldn't."
"Excellent! Then it begins today."
"It's about time we headed back for dinner, though. So starting tomorrow, no?"
"Hey now! An assistant does not talk back! And you will use honorifics!"
"What is this brat even saying......"
"......"
Senjoji Chihaya turned her head toward the camera. With a small, bright smile, she set her index finger against her lips.
"...A secret, after all. Thinking it over again, I believe it would be far better to leave this as a memory belonging only to the two of us."
To tell this story, she would have had no choice but to bring up anomalies and the hidden world. The viewers, however, seemed to have taken the meaning rather differently, for the chat caught fire in an instant.
"And why are these people carrying on again?"
"Hmm. You're right. Why?"
As ever, the truth was the one thing the people involved failed to know.
"...The official channel seems to be in an uproar. Carrier pigeons keep flying in."
"Aren't carrier pigeons banned on Shutang broadcasts as a rule?"
"Yes. The chat manager is banning them for all they're worth. We did say beforehand that, it being a competition broadcast, carrier pigeons would be punished especially strictly today......"
She had heard there were no particularly complicated events, but a team might still have a strategy, and it was better to refrain from that sort of thing. If the other side had drawn up no particular plan, then that was the end of it—but if one truly existed and it leaked, the mood would turn ice-cold in a heartbeat. These days, even when the person involved insisted they were fine, it was a world where viewers tore into one another of their own accord. This part, especially, called for care.
"......But why is Miss Hikari over here, when she's on the red team?"
When Mary swung the game camera around, there was her third-generation junior Shirase Hikari's character, sidling closer. Given the risk of a flame war for the reason just mentioned, she surely hadn't come as a spy, and yet......
"Ah, the thing is—Barbara Knight!"
"......Shirase Hikari?"
"W-wait, just a second! Eighty! No, let me spin just fifty and I'll go! If you're holding a strategy meeting, I'll mute myself...! No matter how I think about it, Mary-senpai right now is in a state where her luck has completely broken open!"
"Staff! Please move this junior back to her own base!"
"Ack! Wait! Then we compromise at thirty pulls—gyaah, ack!"
"YESSS! A double rainbow in one shot!"
Faced with her junior's tenacity—determined to get at least one pull in before she was hauled away—Mary could only manage a wry smile.