Your Silver and You, Together (2)
Because they had let more than half the day slip away into sleep, the second day of the trip was over almost before it had begun.
That evening they all went to the hot spring again, and come night they piled into one room and raised a merry racket. They even played at cards with the deck Tenka had brought.
"Ngh—Miss Shion! Say a little prayer for me!"
"Absolutely not! A sitting Apostle praying is cheating, isn't it?!"
They did not stream the bath this time. Do the very same thing twice, and even the viewers were bound to lose interest.
The day's group broadcast they sent out at their ease over dinner—an eating show, if one had to name it, with a side of idle chatter. A little alcohol found its way in as well. They were on stream, after all, so no one drank deep enough to get drunk. And yet—
"My laaaadyyy!"
...As always, with exactly one exception.
At any rate, the trip that had drifted along in that fashion soon came to its last day. They were scheduled to head back in the morning, so to call it a last day was generous; it was already closer to the trip being over.
"Next time, we are absolutely going traveling again. And Miss Bansei's coming with us."
The words Tsunashi Tenka spoke before they parted stood in for what everyone felt.
"I... don't remember anything after the first day."
The surface-world manager, whose hours had been erased with alcohol under the Secrecy Protocol, offered a sentiment that was rather difficult to share.
A world in which every human life had been fixed in place, as surely as fate. There, the protagonist met all manner of people.
An army that hurled itself forward without a care, on the grounds that no one could die until the clock came full circle. A man driven mad by harming, over and over, a body that regenerated without end. A woman who went about committing crimes as she pleased, certain she would be dead before long.
A mother cast into despair at the sight of the clock upon the child she had borne. A father who, knowing how many days remained to him, began quietly arranging the future of the young child he would leave behind.
Sometimes fighting them and sometimes aiding them, the protagonist drew step by step nearer the truth of it all. A witch had laid her strange magic upon humankind alone. Some called it a blessing. Others named it a curse. Which of the two was true? At this stage, at least, it was difficult to say.
...And yet, with apologies to the developer who had labored so earnestly over that story, the viewers' interest did not point in that direction.
"Yaaaaah!"
What the stream showed was a hulking mercenary captain in heavy plate, and the pillbug mercilessly thrashing him. The boss's HP gauge at the top of the screen was being carved away at a grotesque speed.
The Bell That Does Not Ring was a thoroughly conventional game of the Metroidvania sort: gain new abilities as you progressed, and through them the regions you could reach grew wider. Crouch, and the roll that branched from it, was one of the techniques learned midway through—a skill for slipping down narrow passages you otherwise could not pass.
The roll, however, carried one further effect. Keep rolling and your speed climbed little by little, and once you reached maximum velocity the character gained an attack hitbox. It took time, of course, so it was no technique for a boss fight; at best, a small bonus for conveniently clearing enemies while crossing the field.
—If things had gone as the developer intended.
The moment Mary learned that tapping dash and crouch at nearly the same instant, a crisp little tat-tat, would fire a dash while she was crouched, she changed her pattern of attack on the spot. At first it was a three-hit cancel. After she realized the last blow of the chain laid a heavy debuff on the enemy, it became heavy attack into three-hit cancel. And now... the debuff first, then a barrage of body blows that abused the bug for all it was worth.
A glitch-soaked way to play, in which the dash flung the roll to top speed with no delay at all. One collision stopped the roll, but another dash brought the attack hitbox right back. From that came blistering multi-hits, and from the debuff a critical on every single strike. All of it compounded, until Mary Tepes was a runaway train, wrecking every enemy before her eyes.
"How frail. So however strong they become, they are only human after all?"
While Mary let out a smug little hmph through her nose, the mercenary captain on screen dropped to his knees and collapsed. A clock was fixed to his head—the symbol of the curse he had received from the witch. By rights it ought to have been proof of immortality... but when the protagonist swung her sword in a great arc, he slowly breathed his last.
"...The protagonist isn't an ordinary person either, wouldn't you say?"
As the game went on, there were humans who had gained immortality and appeared as enemies. Even when their HP fell to zero they revived with time, but if they died while under a Stop debuff, they vanished from the field. Within the fiction of the game, that meant the protagonist could shatter the clock-curse the witch had laid down.
A reptilian tail had made Mary assume she was simply some dragon or snake beastkin, but the longer she watched, the less the protagonist seemed an ordinary being at all.
"The witch being named Skuld bothers me, too. Don't you think a Verdandi or an Urd might be out there as well?"
"Perhaps the protagonist is a witch of that sort... Oh. Then could the protagonist be a girl?"
Finding out the hero had been a woman all along was practically the foundation of the Metroidvania, wasn't it. So Mary thought to herself. There was a certain protagonist in a famous blue bodysuit, so well known by now that hardly anyone failed to realize she was a woman. In the first game she had appeared in full-body armor, and it was only at that ending that she was revealed to be female.
"Ugh. If only there weren't a hood, I could be a good deal more certain."
If the protagonist were a woman, the theory that she and the witch were one and the same would gain at least a little more weight. Perhaps they had hidden the face with even that in mind.
"It isn't even a game with voices. A single battle cry would have been perfectly fine."
"That... is a possibility I find difficult to dismiss."
Had the theory run too far ahead of her? Deciding that it had, Mary took up the controls once more.
"Oh, a super jump? Then I can get over that cliff I couldn't cross back then."
Having felled the boss and gained a new ability, Mary's eyes sparkled. Opening new regions one by one was the true pleasure of a Metroidvania.
That said, while The Bell That Does Not Ring was a solid Metroidvania in its own right, it was not quite a masterpiece. It harbored the same miss so many other games of the genre commit—namely, making you tramp back and forth along paths you had already walked, for no good reason at all.
Tedious repetition was a mark against the game even for an ordinary player. For a streamer running a let's play, it was a mark against it most of all. Filling that dull, empty stretch was the broadcaster's job.
"The story of the trip?"
Fortunately, the Mary of the present possessed a cheat code that could solve the problem with ease. The instant she spotted the chat she had been hoping for, she snatched it up.
"Eh, but haven't you already heard it from the others?"
Four days had passed since their return from the hot spring trip. As Mary said, it was more than enough time for the other VTubers to have told the tale several times over. Even so, plenty of people liked to hear a story of this sort from more than one point of view, and there were viewers who watched no stream but hers.
"Well then. Some of my servants may not have heard, so I shall tell it."
A triumphant smile, as though she were doing them a small favor. And so Mary began. The things that had happened at the inn. Stories of her colleagues that had never made it onto the broadcast. Now and then, catching a drift of TeeTee through the chat, she went on talking with evident delight.
"Sister?"
And there it was—her story. Unlike the other VTubers, with whom the viewers spoke often enough even if only over calls, Sister was, from the company's standpoint, closer to an outsider. There were more than a few people curious about how she had been on the trip. Judging by the glimpses that had made it onto stream, they seemed to get along well enough, but wondering what had gone on off-camera was only human.
"Ah, that is..."
How best to explain it? Mary hemmed for a moment.
"...It turned out everyone was already acquainted."
Every person on the trip, without exception, had met Sister—Shion—before. Serena, which was to say Senjoji Chiyo, was even someone she traveled with now and then in ordinary life.
"I know, doesn't it... The world really is so small."
Mary gave a wry smile. Did the work of a Holy Knight simply turn out this way? An occupation tangled up with anomalies; perhaps it was only the natural course.
No—before that, isn't the ratio of anomalies at our company strangely high?
Becoming acquainted with VTubers who had set foot in the hidden world was not strange in itself. But for the VTubers around her to know of the hidden world to begin with—wasn't that the abnormal part? Struck by the fact all over again, Mary rolled her eyes.
"Nnngh..."
Having closed out the stream for another day, Ninomae Hitomi stretched long and hard. Sit too long before a computer and the body was bound to stiffen. The broadcast that had begun in the evening only ended deep in the night. She shut the PC down with practiced hands and spun her chair about, then reached, as always, for her phone to call Han Seoyeon. Asking what she had thought of the stream had long since become nothing more than a pretext for placing the call.
"......?"
Clack. It was then that some uncanny sound reached her ear. An inexplicable presence pressed in from behind her, and Ninomae whipped her head around on reflex.
And their eyes met.
An androgynous face, with hair falling past the nape. The frame beneath it, however, was unmistakably a man's. He was dressed with perfect neatness in a suit, and yet the silk hat—absurdly tall—called to mind a clown or a jester far more than a gentleman. The gold-rimmed monocle cast not the slightest gleam. It was the sort of costume that made one wonder whether it was a cosplay. Had she passed him on the street, Ninomae would have stopped to watch with considerable interest.
"Kyaaaaaaah?!"
She could not, because this was not the street. It was her own home. A strange man appearing without warning in the most private space she possessed was more than enough to drag a scream out of her.
Ninomae clutched at the cross necklace in a hurry. A holy relic Han Seoyeon had simply given her as a gift, after what had happened last time. Ninomae was no Christian, of course, but she believed at least this much of what Han Seoyeon had told her—that it would keep her body safe.
And a beat later, the question formed. How on earth had he gotten in? There had been no sign of any kind. He might as well have appeared out of empty air.
...An anomaly?
It did not take long to reach that conclusion. If something impossible by any common sense had occurred, the odds were high that the other party belonged to the hidden world.
"Forgive me for startling you. I had no thought of giving you a fright."
An old-fashioned manner of speech—antique, one might have said. And yet it suited the costume with a strange rightness. Perhaps because he seemed less a threatening monster than something exaggerated, as if she were watching a play, Mary felt her guard ease. Only a very little.
"So... who are you?"
Even so, it was merely the difference between negative one hundred and negative ninety. Just barely enough that she did not feel she had to flee this very instant.
"A discourtesy. I am late in introducing myself."
The man removed his ridiculous hat and bent at the waist in a bow.
"......Pardon?"