When He Turns Them Back from Captivity (3)
"There was an incident."
"I thought I had simply been summoned by the Church, and then..."
Seoyeon said this as she passed over a cocoa she had let cool just enough to drink, and Hitomi's face settled into a look of mild disbelief.
"Setting that aside, it's a complete sea of fire. It isn't as though it's her fault, so you can't exactly call it arson, but... they're saying she can handle a bomb like that?"
The woman in question had asked for a collab to be arranged, talking as if she only meant to draw in a few more viewers, and Seoyeon had answered by launching a nuclear missile. That was the shape of it. Even so, the fandom of Anathema Production—an agency that could fairly claim the weight class of a mid-sized company or better—had, for a short while, collapsed into pure pandemonium at the sudden Groothuizen drop.
In truth, if one considered the sheer size of Sarah Groothuizen, even that had fallen far short. That order had returned so quickly owed less to the response itself than to a conviction already shared among viewers: even by the standards of the VTuber industry, Anathema Production was an organization where true oddballs gathered.
Some people these days tried to explain the slump in slice-of-life anime by pointing to the VTuber boom. A VTuber stream, they argued, resembled that sort of manga closely enough that a certain substitution had already taken place. And if other VTubers' broadcasts were slice-of-life manga, Anathema Production was closer to a gag manga, the kind in which absurd incidents had a habit of erupting.
Call it a sort of gag-manga correction. Anathema's viewers tended not to hold on to an incident of ordinary magnitude for long, filing it instead under perfectly plausible. In short, a great many things were waved off with a shrug and an Anathema being Anathema.
It was precisely because Anathema Production had that peculiar circumstance, and that weight class, that the dinosaur it had managed to absorb with relative ease was Sarah Groothuizen. It was as if an aspiring pro gamer had asked an acquaintance in the industry whether they might scare up a decent coach, only for that acquaintance to turn up, without warning, with a certain player whom people made a habit of worshipping. Strictly speaking, Sarah did not quite reach that height. The feeling was that she sat a step below. For the person on the receiving end, though, the difference fell well within the margin of error.
A collab with her was, from a broadcaster's standpoint, unquestionably a fine opportunity. But an opportunity—especially one that enormous—could not help becoming a burden. Attention from people who had never watched before. A chat climbing faster than the eye could follow. You had to do something, anything, to seize this chance and hold on to all these new viewers. Under a spotlight like this, you absolutely could not cause some strange accident. Pressure of that kind had a way of summoning the very disaster it was meant to prevent. Hitomi streamed herself. She was in no position not to understand that feeling, and so the worry was unavoidable.
"She said she would take it head-on, on guts and grit alone."
"...So she wasn't lying about being serious about streaming, at least."
Well, thinking about it, this was a woman who had secured a grimoire and forced terms out of the Church itself, all to chase a massive blow-up on stream. Her fixation on broadcasting, at minimum, could be called certain.
"If we're talking bombs, there is still one more. In the end, the foundation of this newly born Rosicrucian order is my fan club, isn't it."
"Ah, right. So in practice, Anathema would be promoting Haruka Kanata and giving her a push. We aren't Sarah's size, but..."
"Even so, we are by no means a small company."
The organization of which Machihiro Etsuko served as president—or, more precisely, under which the presidency was registered in the name of her VTuber alias, Haruka Kanata—had its name finalized as the Neo-Rosicrucian Shiwon Council. Shiwon was written to mean "Garden of Verse," though it rang, deliberately, like Zion. Machihiro herself had proposed it, and the Church had found nothing in particular to object to, so it passed as it stood.
If one insisted on nitpicking, the partial overlap with the names of actually existing Zionist groups did come up in the course of discussion. Then someone offered the view that they were going to thrash the lot of them anyway if they resisted, every staffer responsible found this entirely persuasive, and the draft was kept. It did feel like an awfully grandiose name for the staff fan club of a VTuber company. And the English name was Neo-Rosenkreuzer Zion Council—Zion, sitting a breath from Shion. Was that not precisely the sort of name one expected out of a light novel? Then again, it was hard to deny that such a name suited a scene where every conceivable concept ran wild.
"For the time being, though, the announcement stream on the official channel is partly my responsibility."
"Right?"
"Which means I am about to end up promoting the founding of my own fan club with my own mouth."
Han Seoyeon let out a small sigh as she said it.
"Uh, but isn't that pretty normal?"
It was not only VTubers. Idols in the real world did the same sort of thing, announcing a fandom name before they even knew whether fans would form. It was not rare, either, for someone to build and manage their own fan site. Seen that way, this was not especially unusual.
"It isn't rare. Aside from the fact that I'm not a VTuber."
"Ah..."
At that, Hitomi gave a wry smile, as if she understood.
What was meant here was not that a fan club was strange because she was not a VTuber. A brief look around the internet was enough to show that fandoms existed not only for celebrities, but for truly every sort of person. It was clear, then, that Seoyeon was not pointing to that.
"There are quite a few viewers out there starving for Shion."
To put it more precisely, it was because Han Seoyeon had been dodging the viewers' every kind of support with the excuse that, strictly speaking, she was not a VTuber.
"Telling me to make a channel, or to open Super Chats... well. This and that."
Seoyeon smiled thinly and nodded, for all the world as if she could not fathom why viewers would cheer so hard for a staff member who was not a VTuber at all, and who only showed her face now and then with something of a host's air about her.
From her side of it, she had tried to calm them with a few lines of logic.
Reason can never defeat emotion. All she had gained was a stretch of time in which that proposition sank into her bones.
"So I told them that if they truly had money to spare, they ought to donate it, or give it to the Church as an offering. ...Do you know what happened then?"
"What happened?"
"Word came from the Holy See. They said Japan's Catholic contributions had suddenly caught up to Korea's. From Japan, of all places. A country that might as well be atheist."
Say "on the level of Korea," and the scale might not land. Korea was hardly a place where Catholicism ran all that strong, and if one went by population, Japan was closer to twice as large. And yet Korea, whose Church was not especially powerful, was for some reason a country whose payments to the Holy See were suspiciously large. Its highest annual figure had once ranked seventh in the world, ahead of any number of European nations.
Forget Han Seoyeon. Even if the most famous VTubers in Japan raised a story like this, it was probably not a record they could easily match. This was not a realm where everyone chipping in a little would get you there. There was nothing to call it but a whale of impossible scale causing an incident.
"...That would be Miss Yuri, wouldn't it."
"What frightens me is that I cannot guarantee the other Hyakurennos will sit quietly by."
"Ah..."
In Anathema's case it was obvious who the whale was, which was why Hitomi had said as much. Seoyeon, though, murmured it while staring off toward somewhere far away.
The Hyakurenno Group as a whole would not, of course, have openly slipped money to the Church. A donation campaign directed at various foundations was another matter.
The headline assembled itself in her mind far too easily, and Hitomi could only manage a crooked smile. Seoyeon had been earning the goodwill of the Hyakurenno family, whether she knew it or not. It would not be strange in the least for them to join a donation, both to tend their own group's image and to put a little weight behind what she had asked. A story like that will probably run before long, Hitomi thought.
"Well, it'll work out, won't it? If she has no intention of properly working as a VTuber, there will hardly be anyone trying to force it on her."
At most, people would turn President Han, debut already! into a meme, or grieve that they had been run over by a fandom truck only to find their oshi did not exist in this world. No need to worry too much about it, Hitomi said, smiling.
"Well. I suppose you're right, as usual."
Seoyeon nodded as she answered.
"On the other hand, I do think there may be trouble if people show up on Haruka Kanata's stream, kicking up a fuss about when I'm debuting."
"Isn't that something she has to handle herself?"
If you set out to stir up attention in this form, you had to shoulder the risk as well. Wolf down nothing but the profit, and serious trouble had a way of following. That held true in any field.
"That aside, Hitomi. A proposal happened to come in for a collab on Shutang's side as well."
"A proposal? What kind?"
"It's, ah, a proposal from a political party. They call themselves the Ainu National Party..."
"...?"
Regrettably, the bomb that had dropped did not appear to have been a single one. Hitomi could only stare at Seoyeon, eyes gone blank.