What Was Seized in the Evening (3)
One, two, three. She ran the count through her head.
...Now!
The instant Tenka dipped and brought her hands together, Hitomi sprinted in, planted a foot on those clasped palms, and kicked off with everything she had. Tenka drove her arms up to launch her, and Hitomi shot nearly three or four meters into the air before arching backward, as if she meant to turn a full somersault. She folded at the waist until her stomach faced the ceiling, her whole body drawing one clean curve. On the screen that caught the motion and rendered it, Mary's avatar hung in the air in the very same pose. The only difference was that the Mary on screen had her great bat wings spread, so the line she cut was even more graceful.
For a breath it looked as though Hitomi might truly take flight. She wasn't, of course. Ask whether she could have, and the answer was yes—but even so, a person could hardly go sailing through the air on a broadcast plenty of ordinary people were watching.
Claimed by gravity, her body began to drop. She fell headfirst, still locked in the inverted pose of the leap, and there was not a shred of fear on her face. The self-assured True Ancestor queen she had given herself over to would never be frightened by a thing so small; the thrill the heat of the stage had lit in her pressed that fear down harder still; and above all, a colleague with an even finer physique than her own was waiting below, ready to catch her.
Tenka's hands found her at once. In the same instant she dropped her arms to bleed off the impact and guided Hitomi back down to the floor. Flung that high and caught again, the motion looked like a victory toss, or like a routine from professionally trained cheerleaders—the only difference being that a single person was doing the catching.
Back on the ground, the two of them met each other's eyes, smiled, and nodded as one.
The music that had been charging ahead, and the choreography moving in lockstep with it, both sank briefly into silence. The pause was deliberate: a quiet stretch in which viewers left dumbstruck by a stunt they had never seen coming could sit with the afterglow. Then an electric guitar loud enough to split the ear tore through a stillness that had never existed in the original track, and the fast tempo came roaring back.
Hitomi and Tenka each set a hand lightly against their headset mics, confirming that even that violent movement hadn't shaken them loose, then sprinted for opposite ends of the stage and began to sing.
Charlotte's character—Tenka's persona—meant that a good number of her original songs carried a powerful feel with a spoonful or two of hip-hop stirred in. To put it bluntly, a surprising lot of them called a K-pop idol group to mind. Handled poorly, they were the sort of songs that would never look cool at all, only playing up a trying-hard kind of cuteness in an outfit that didn't suit her. But Mary, stepping in as her partner for this stage, was proving that the standing verdict was no empty talk: the charisma queen who had run away from home only ever came back when it was time to take the stage.
Vocal color and atmosphere were one thing. The choreography, built around the two finest physiques in the second generation, was more than enough to knock the soul clean out of anyone watching. The stage ran on until it closed, for a finale, on Tenka's howl—a true all-out finishing blow, ripped out of her with even the fur of her tail bristled to its limit.
After that there was nothing but the customary greetings, following the script laid out in advance. She offered the viewers her usual hello, the one that doubled as a self-introduction; heard Tenka thank her for coming to share the stage today; traded a few words more; and, with a happy birthday to Charlotte as the last of it, Mary slipped out of the frame.
Clear of the camera and out in a corner of the studio, Ninomae Hitomi let the staff help her out of the microphone and a few pieces of filming gear, then let go of a long, relieved sigh.
"Great work out there."
"Ah, yes, thank you. It's nearly over now, so everyone please hang on just a little longer."
The voice had been only a murmur, so she never properly caught which of the staff had offered it. It hardly mattered which. Even if she hadn't heard any such thing, she would still have said a word of encouragement to the people who had a virtual stage left to manage. Hitomi murmured her thanks just as softly, drained the bottled water a bat had come fluttering over to put in her hands, and slipped carefully out of the studio so she wouldn't be in the way.
She had no thought of heading straight home. She only meant to be somewhere else for a little while, until the stage was entirely finished. There was supposed to be a dinner for every participant once the live concert ended, and unless something was urgent, waiting was the sensible thing.
"Good work."
"Uh... Akaba-san?"
Stepping out into the hallway, though, Hitomi found someone she hadn't expected, and her eyes went round.
Akaba Akane was standing there.
Akane, like Hitomi, had agreed to sing one song together with Tenka, so one might wonder what was strange about it. Still—if she wasn't about to go on next, shouldn't she have been resting in the waiting room assigned to her beforehand? That waiting room was certainly not this hallway. More than that, Akane wasn't even someone with a stage still ahead of her. She had already gone on before Hitomi and come back down. Which left only one conclusion: she had come here with some other intention.
"I'm hardly in a position to judge, but... that was an excellent stage."
"Yours was wonderful too, Akaba-san."
"...That one?"
It had been a compliment, and still Akane looked baffled. Fair enough. If Hitomi's stage—Mary's—had called to mind the girl-crush of K-pop, Akane had put on a glitter-drenched frill dress she never usually wore and fluttered her way through something precious and fussy. Quite apart from how Tenka's words had lodged under her skin in a peculiar way—this sort of thing doesn't suit you—no. If anything, she had been nursing that very thought herself, and that was why she had flinched so sharply.
"Hm? No. You looked incredibly pretty."
"......"
What came back was praise so pure that a lie was impossible to imagine anywhere in it. At Hitomi's words Akane closed her mouth without thinking and was quiet for a moment.
"Haa... even a brat who already has a wife knows to say at least this much. So why won't that idiot..."
"Hm?"
"No. It's nothing."
The one line she had wanted so badly to hear from her childhood friend had slipped out as if it were nothing at all, and a strange, deflated feeling settled over Akane as she sighed. Thinking about it, this junior of hers had been tossing off remarks like that, easy as anything, since long ago.
"Mmm. But even if the easygoing, masculine side does get played up a little, I think a character like this still lands, because there's a certain femininity laid underneath it all. With a tomboy, the feminine side she shows just once in a while is the single biggest charm point, so..."
"...Can't say I really follow."
Well. This kid definitely had an otaku streak; that much was certain. Akane had known it for ages, and still she found herself feeling it all over again.
"More importantly, what are you doing here? Looking for someone?"
"You."
"...Uh. Me?"
Hitomi tilted her head. Nothing came to mind that would have Akane seeking her out.
"There's something I'd like your advice on."
"Advice...?"
Hearing what followed only tipped her head further. Advice—from none other than her senior, Akaba Akane? On stream and off it alike, Akane had a way of quietly looking after everyone else, so the image that clung to her was that of the eldest sister, or of a mother. She was human, of course, and a human might well go to someone for advice. Hitomi simply could not conceive of that someone being herself.
"Well... when it comes to relationships, you're the one with the most experience, for a start."
"...Uh, don't tell me—romance?! Is it romance?!"
Hitomi's eyes flew wide. If there was a kind of relationship in which she stood furthest ahead of anyone at this company, it could only be that one.
"No. Nothing like that..."
At Hitomi's reaction Akane creased her brow and shut the idea down.
"It's relationships between people. Literally. Even I think what I'm feeling is a little complicated, but..."
"Mmm, I see. Still, it's not the sort of thing to say carelessly wherever other people might hear, is it. ...Shall we move somewhere else for a bit?"
"Yeah."
Akane gave a small nod.
"Mmm."
It was a room the company staff often used for meetings. Just now it stood empty, and only the two of them were in it.
Can you really call something like this simple friendship...?
Having heard the whole of it, Hitomi's expression had gone a little peculiar. It didn't seem like ordinary friendship—and yet they were childhood friends who had watched each other since they were small, so a somewhat unusual bond wasn't strange either, was it? She had tangled herself up along those lines. Understandable enough. She might be the frontrunner, the only VTuber at Anathema to have actually made it all the way to marriage, but on the spectrum of a relationship called friendship, and on that alone, Hitomi was remarkably clumsy. For no reason other than this: the notion she had once held so easily, that this much makes us friends, doesn't it, had been smashed to pieces by Han Seoyeon.
Honestly, it was difficult to offer any advice at all. What advice was there to give when she didn't even understand the premise?
"So in the end, you're saying you mean to go through with something one might call a 'make-them-jealous operation'...?"
All she could do, then, was speak to what Akane had said with her own mouth. Since Akane herself thought of it that way, Hitomi accepted it as so and talked from there. That was the whole of it.
"...Strip it down, and yeah. That's what it comes to."
"The problem being that the other person is hard to find."
"Yeah."
At that, Hitomi thought for a moment.
"Wouldn't people from Anathema be the best fit, after all? Being able to show chemistry on stream seems like an advantage to me."
"No. But those guys, if anything, feel strongly like people I'm supposed to be looking after..."
The aim, put simply, was to show someone else the feminine side she never showed in front of Tenka—the side that felt, even a little, like weakness. And if the other person was someone before whom she could not show that weak side, then it was no use however she tried. It was something like the difference between acting spoiled with a generous, broad-hearted older sister, and a full-grown adult acting spoiled at a five-year-old girl.
...So it doesn't sit right unless it's Tsunashi-san. Someone with at least a similar feel, if nothing else.
All it did was drive Hitomi's confusion deeper still. Could this really be called friendship?
"Someone who, if possible, is acquainted with both you and Tsunashi-san, who can understand how things stand on your side, and who is also unmistakably solid enough that you could let your feminine side show without bracing yourself, Akaba-san..."
"......"
Had it been anyone without a personality like Hitomi's, this would have been the moment a you certainly ask for a lot came flying. Perhaps feeling, even by her own reckoning, that it was a little shameless, Akaba Akane quietly closed her mouth.
"Mind if I take this? Right. Got it."
What broke that silence, not long after, was yet another voice—a third party's. A woman, in the middle of some conversation nearby. Common sense said she was probably one of the staff.
"...Ah!"
The moment Hitomi heard it, her eyes went round, the look of someone who had just caught the loose end of a knot that would not come undone. She shot up from her seat, scurried over, and flung the meeting-room door wide, then stuck her head out into the hallway and looked toward where the voice had come from.
"Found her...!"
"...Hm?"
—Standing there was a lioness who, of everyone Hitomi knew, possessed a more masculine nature than any of them.