The Holy City, New Jerusalem (2)

Han Seoyeon, dual citizen of the Republic of Korea. Shion, a Korean exchange student living in Japan. Saint Bartholomew, armed exorcist nun of the Special Solemn Exorcism Knight Order under the Vatican's Congregation for Divine Worship. She had many names.

But in this moment she was Natacchi, and nothing more than a single viewer—one of Shutang's servants.

Han Seoyeon hurried to switch on her PC. While it booted, she draped her coat over the chair and sank to her knees on the floor.

"Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison."

She pressed her palms together and raced through the prayer, and a faint radiance gathered in the unlit room. I can't watch Shutang's stream in an unclean state. Only after the three-odd minutes of abbreviated purification that followed did Seoyeon sit down and take the mouse in hand.

The target this time had been a spirit, so no blood or scraps of flesh had clung to her—but unclean energy settled all the more easily for that. She didn't truly believe miasma could crawl up a LAN cable and infect the machine. Still, it never hurt to be careful.

Click. She selected the icon planted in the center of the desktop: a dedicated shortcut to the Mary Tepes channel, kept entirely apart from the browser she used for anything else. After a brief load, the stream filled the monitor.

"Konmea! I am Mary Tepes, the vampire queen who will one day rule this world!"

The broadcast had started right on cue. Thank goodness she wasn't late. Pushing the exorcism a little too hard, just to be done with it quickly, had been worth it.

"Today, for the first time in a while, I've brought out Setsukoto."

She had known as much from the stream title, but it seemed today was an FPS broadcast. The game's name was Kind Words. Everyone just called it Setsukoto—an ordinary battle-royale FPS that threw dozens of players, empty-handed, across a wide map. It had no particular gimmick. It was merely a serviceable title from the genre's early days, holding a modest slice of the player base and nothing more.

And yet sometimes a streamer's true worth showed most clearly in a game this simple.

—More specifically, in a form like this.

"Hyaaah?! Behind me—ngh, ah!"

A shot from the rear. Mary's character spun in a panic to return fire, but her crosshair only wandered through empty air.

In that span she took one more round to the torso and another to the head, and Mary sprawled flat on the ground. She was playing solo, so no teammate could bring her back. The system declared her dead at once, and the screen washed out to gray.

"Uuugh. That was so close."

"Kh—excuse me! I just had a little bad luck and an off day, that's all?!"

The superchat that had slipped in through the gap cut rather cleanly to the heart of the matter.

Strictly speaking, Mary's raw mechanics were nothing special. If one insisted on placing her, she sat just barely below average. That she could still clear action games at a respectable pace was thanks to a natural gift for reading patterns and committing them to memory. Which meant that the moment it became a PVP game, where those patterns changed every single time... a result like this was only natural.

Of course, simply grasping the broad tendencies—in a situation like this, most people do that—was enough to leave beginner rank behind with ease. The trouble was that this very habit nudged her rating up into an awkward middle band, until she was matched against mid-tier players her aim had no hope of handling.

Savoring the sight of Shutang falling to pieces along the way, then admiring the grin that appeared only after a losing streak dragged her rating back down and she finally clutched a win. That was how Han Seoyeon enjoyed a Setsukoto stream.

"Ah. Now that I think of it, last time..."

And for a broadcast, battle royale had another virtue: the looting time the genre could not exist without. In ordinary play it was the dullest stretch, which was why newer games kept trying to vary it somehow. From the perspective of a stream, however, the calculus shifted.

"Rokumondera-senpai and Rin-senpai were..."

A slack passage also meant she could afford to focus a little ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠less. Which was to say, it was the ideal moment for talking with the viewers. There were advantages one could not admit in public, too—such as pretending to have missed an uncomfortable topic in chat because one's eyes were on the game.

"Ah, um..."

Reacting to that superchat without meaning to had to be counted as Mary's mistake. Or, if she was going to react, she ought to have breezed past it at once, as if it were nothing.

Shutang...

But Mary did neither. At the sight of her letting the fluster show, Han Seoyeon sighed.

No recent collabs ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠with a VTuber she had been close to. The mentions had unmistakably thinned. It could be scheduling. It could be simple coincidence. Such things happened often enough. And yet—perhaps people were simply drawn to sensational news—there was no shortage of those who held this up as proof of a falling-out. It was a problem most streamers dealt with, not VTubers alone.

...It was absurd that the rumor even involved Sister, who wasn't a streamer at all, let alone a VTuber. Still.

In a case like this, the textbook response was to ignore the matter from the start and never drag the controversy up into the light. Then, at a suitable moment, arrange a collab and let the viewers realize for themselves that it had been nothing but an empty rumor—turning opinion so smoothly that it was as though the feud had never been spoken of.

"That's, um, how do I put it."

The problem was that Mary really had been avoiding any mention of Sister—of Han Seoyeon—on purpose. It was only this month, after all, that frequent mentions from her had people claiming Seoyeon's personal information had been dug up. Anyone with their head on straight would hesitate to say the name. But that fact could not be spoken aloud. Topics that openly discussed the person behind the model were, under agency rules, off-limits from the start.

The photograph currently going around was not Shutang's, and the person beside her was certainly not Sister. On the surface, at least, it had to remain that way.

Even so, once she had already given that telling reaction, a clumsy excuse would not do. That would only produce the talk: Listen to that worthless excuse—they really did fight, huh? How wildly a trifle could be twisted on the internet was something even Han Seoyeon, who had been peering into these communities for only a few months, understood perfectly well.

One might think it was merely a feud rumor with a real-life acquaintance who wasn't even a VTuber. Even so, it was better to keep an unnecessary negative image from sticking to a streamer.

"...Recently, Sister caught me streaming."

On that point, Mary Tepes's follow-up was not the best possible move, but it ranked as a solid second or third.

"Well—not caught, exactly. More like it turned out she'd been a viewer all along..."

"Yes, so, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠umm... you get it, right?"

She flipped the budding feud rumor inside out and recast it as an embarrassing little event—coming out as a VTuber to a real-life acquaintance—which, from any third party's seat, was perfect popcorn. At the sight of Mary squirming with shame, the chat became a sea of laughter in a breath.

"Eek?!"

Getting dropped by a long-range headshot in the middle of it, and looking even more ridiculous, was merely a bonus.

And it was only to be expected that the gleefully chattering chat would arrive at a question like that.

"Uh, probably? No—she said she had some business at the church today. I wonder if she's back?"

Mary tilted her head.

Hmm. About time I fired off a red superchat, isn't it?

The stage was set. Show up at a reasonable moment, toss a few lines into chat, and a highlight clip would practically cut itself. If she offered some cute real-life detail without prying too far into anyone's private life, the viewers would be ecstatic. Han Seoyeon was a fan of Shutang herself; she could see that much plainly. Either way, the nonsense about Mary and Sister would slink back into its hole for a while.

What should she open with? She was turning over the wording of the superchat when—

"Hm?"

The phone she had tucked inside her coat buzzed. It didn't stop after a single pulse, which meant a call, not a message. Wondering what had come up, she checked the screen—and found a name she knew, and yet had not expected.

"Manager Hatsuna?"

Puzzled all the same, Seoyeon answered, and a moment later her eyes went wide.

A short while later, Mary Tepes shook off the lingering mood of the last match and guided her cursor toward the button that started matchmaking.

In that instant, a game friend's login notice surfaced in the corner of the broadcast. Most of the viewers were still stunned by the new arrival who had appeared out of nowhere when—

"Eh. Sister?"

At the blank murmur Mary let slip in the face of something she hadn't expected, the chat began to explode.