I Will Make Your Name Great (4)
It was a game she had already been playing on stream for days. Even so, by the average playtime she had looked up before settling on something to broadcast, it was getting to be about time she met the ending.
A witch had worked a magic on a human being—curse or blessing, there was no telling which. The protagonist stood, at last, before that being's dwelling.
"Is this really the end?"
The story was ripening, little by little, into the air of a final chapter, and still Mary tilted her head.
"We've got Skuld, and we've got Verdandi. I really do think Urd is going to have to show up too..."
She was convinced the witch she took for the mastermind was Skuld, and that the protagonist was Verdandi. The game had never said so outright, but from the middle stretches on the hood had come off, and the protagonist had been revealed as a woman.
Of the three Norns, if Skuld, who stands for the future, and Verdandi, who stands for the present, had both appeared, then of course Urd of the past ought to appear as well. Wouldn't that only be natural?
That was Mary's theory, and the chat, for the most part, agreed with her.
"...Hmm."
And so, when she came face to face with Skuld—the one she had assumed would be the final boss—Mary was not especially shaken, even though the witch was writhing in agony, run through on a stake.
"So the plot is that Skuld was only being used, and the real mastermind is someone else?"
The protagonist stared at the witch in a jolt of shock. Watching her, Mary nodded.
There was probably a third witch in this game: Urd. And if she existed, she was hardly going to occupy some lukewarm supporting role. The other two were the protagonist and a candidate for final boss.
"But who on earth is Urd?"
Looking back over the story so far, a brand-new character barging in out of nowhere seemed unlikely. Urd would be somewhere among the NPCs they had already met.
"Let's see. Of the named characters so far, the women were the queen of the desert kingdom, and the cursed nun..."
The very word witch, and the source motif of the three goddesses of fate, at least offered a hint. This one would be female.
Some background extra just passing through—Woman A—was not about to be the mastermind. Someone with a name, at the least. Perhaps even a boss they had clashed with once and failed to kill. Mary turned the thought over, and swallowed against a dry tightness of suspense.
And the protagonist's eyes met those of the great wolf that had been the boss of stage one.
"Eh?"
Why is this thing popping out here? This is the mastermind? Didn't it die? No—before any of that, if it's a witch, don't tell me this wolf was female the whole—
Ninomae's confusion was afforded not the slightest consideration. The boss fight simply began.
"To think that wolf had a story that moving behind it... I never could have imagined."
"Yes! That's what I mean!"
Ninomae Hitomi nodded hard as she said it. Calls after a stream had become part of the daily routine by now, even if the woman on the other end couldn't see a single one of her gestures.
"...The part you found moving was that?!"
A stifled little laugh drifted out of the phone's speaker—Seoyeon's. At that mischievous voice, Ninomae's lips pushed into a pout.
"Honestly. Why do you turn into such a villain the moment Mary gets involved?"
"...You could at least deny it."
Even so, she didn't dislike these small moments. Ninomae allowed herself a careful smile. This expression wouldn't be seen either, so no one would catch that she had already forgiven her.
Come to think of it, this is ending soon too, isn't it.
The thought arrived out of nowhere. Soon there would be little cause to call and ask after each other once a stream was done.
Not because the two of them were growing apart. Quite the opposite—because they would be close enough that there was no longer any need to go out of their way to phone.
Living together. It was a word she had always believed would have nothing to do with her.
Ninomae had never shared a roof with anyone outside her family. If she said she wasn't nervous, it would be a lie. If she said she wasn't looking forward to it, that would be a lie as well.
"Anyway. Something that occurred to me while I was playing that game."
As if to hide that restless, fluttering feeling, she nudged the subject aside.
"The final boss's phase-two design—no matter how you look at it, that's a Cthulhu motif, right?"
The final boss had awakened—supposedly—midway through the fight and changed shape. Between that grotesque design and the hymn-like BGM, which seemed intent on stressing the presence of something divine, the game had plainly been made with cosmic horror in mind.
Cosmic horror, the genre represented above all by Howard Phillips Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, had been quietly gathering a following of its own, whether or not anyone meant to notice.
"But is a situation like this really all right?"
"You said before that a firmly fixed image can turn into an anomaly, remember?"
Only then did Han Seoyeon catch what Ninomae meant.
"Yes. ...Or rather, I think one has already been born."
She said it while stroking the top of her desk. At some point, a single black book lay beneath her hand.
A contract with the demon Philotanuss. Through it, Ninomae could borrow the power of eight demons beneath him and work magic.
And among those eight, mixed in where it did not belong, was one name that—no matter how she turned it over—could only have taken its origin from works on that side.
The Secrecy Protocol. A rule of the anomalies, one Ninomae had learned not long after she first brushed against the hidden world.
To prevent social upheaval, the existence of anomalies was to be kept, officially, as secret as possible.
A deliberate split between the surface and what lay beneath it. The sort of rule that, honestly, one would assume existed even if nobody bothered to say so. That was its name: the Secrecy Protocol.
The Secrecy Protocol. Known otherwise as the Anomaly Gentlemen's Agreement, the Unspoken Rule, "sensible and perfectly obvious manners," the Skeptical World-Stabilization Strategy, or Project "Doggy Style." And, in the phrasing the Church reached for now and again, the Scenario Y Prevention Strategy.
"The greatest faith? Hmm... the Christian faith, surely?"
She had put the answer that came to her straight into words, but it seemed, regrettably, not to have been the right one.
That immense faith ruled this world, and held the power of every anomaly down below a certain level.
The people of the surface world, knowing nothing of anomalies, were by their existence alone helping to keep the world's balance.
Even if a demon of the same name were born, one might as well think of it as a nobody that had merely borrowed the motif. Hearing that, Ninomae let out a sigh of relief.
"If that's how it is... then I suppose it is a relief."
That was fair. Ninomae nodded.
Belial, at least, was a name even she had heard. Philotanuss, his subordinate, she had not. A search turned him up, and still she couldn't shake the sense that he was decidedly minor.
And if this one stood yet another rank below that? Nothing so impressive, surely. Her face settled into a look of acceptance.
"Then I can use the magic without worrying. There's a spell that summons a whole crowd of minions, so I thought the move would go a lot more easily."
The demon's name had weighed on her, and she had been hesitating to use it, but if Han Seoyeon was right, there didn't seem to be any particular need to hold back.
It would be a great help with the move set for next week.
"Hm? Yes. I'm free."
A stream was on the schedule, of course, but there was no chance Han Seoyeon—Shudang's servant to the very marrow—wouldn't know that. The question had surely already taken it into account, and was asking whether she had time besides.
She had nothing else planned this weekend beyond the broadcast, so she answered yes at once.
"But what for?"
She went blank for only a moment. Then Ninomae broke into a bright smile and nodded, hard.
"Yes! Let's go!"
Ask whether she was the indoor sort or the outdoor sort, and Ninomae Hitomi would have had to answer that she was thoroughly, decidedly indoor.
A shopping trip with her one and only friend in real life, though, was not an event that came around often. There had never been any chance she would refuse it.
All the more so when it was only the move she had been looking forward to, carried one step further.
"Sounds good. Then, for where we'll meet..."
From there the two of them lightly settled the rest. Through all of it, Ninomae kept on grinning.
Perhaps that feeling had seeped into her voice as well, because Han Seoyeon, somewhere past the call, seemed to be smiling a little herself.
"I'm looking forward to it."
Ninomae murmured it, then rose from the chair and stretched, long and unhurried.
"I'll go get ready for bed. You'll stay again today, until I fall asleep?"
Having pushed the stream all the way to an ending, it was already the dead of night. On an ordinary evening it would have been no surprise if the bedding were down and she were already asleep.
Back from getting ready in a hurry, Ninomae set the phone—still on the call—beside her pillow, the charger plugged in for tomorrow's sake.
"Thank you, every time. Shion-san."
"That doesn't make the gratitude go away, you know."
Whether the other had acted out of kindness or out of a sense of duty, a kindness was a kindness. If you could not be grateful for a thing like this, what separated you from a beast?
Ninomae smiled, small and soft, and offered her thanks once more.
"Good night, Shion-san."
Her eyes were closed, and even if she opened them the face beyond the phone would still be nowhere she could see—and yet she had the strange, certain feeling that Han Seoyeon had smiled at her.