Let Me Manage My Livestock (2)
The moment Mary logged into the server, the sight that met her was Amairo Tsubasa in the middle of erasing a mountain range. The character in the holy knight skin swapped a shovel for a pickaxe and back again, arms whipping through the air without a pause.
"What on earth are you doing, Tsubasa-chan? No—I can see what you're doing, but why in the world...?"
One look was enough to tell that the gear was hardly well supplied. She wasn't wearing a single piece of armor, and the tools in her hands were stone. This wasn't even the stage of finishing a modest round of grinding and then laying the groundwork for building content.
"Um... this is enjoyable in its own way, is it not?"
"Ah... yes......"
"When you build a house later, please come this way. I will have the ground leveled for you."
"Ah, thank you...?"
"Should you choose to build elsewhere, tell me the location and I shall pave a road to it from here. No matter how far that may be."
The voice was far too earnest to dismiss as bluster. If she wasn't imagining it, there was even a thread of rapture running through it.
Hours on end of nothing but a screen churning through dirt and stone—she did worry, briefly, how that would fare as a broadcast. Mary folded the worry away almost at once. The viewers over on that side would, as a rule, be people already conditioned for exactly this sort of thing.
"Anyway, keep at it, Tsubasa-chan."
"Do enjoy Prasaba, Lady Mary."
Leaving Tsubasa where she was, Mary set off again. This time, she meant to begin the adventure properly.
"We start with logging, I suppose?"
In this game, wood looked like nothing much, and yet it was a vital material worked into every sort of crafting recipe. The very first challenge one could clear upon starting was, of all things, chop wood.
Wood mattered above all because, through the early and middle stretches, you spent so much time heading underground to mine. Unlike the other ores, which you could supply well enough from whatever lay around you, wood could be gathered only on the surface—and if you failed to stock a decent amount beforehand, you would be in trouble.
"Still, they handed us a stone axe from the very start, so it shouldn't take all that long."
A small mercy, supposing one could call it that. So saying, Mary chopped down the trees nearby.
"All right—then, before I head underground, I ought to register a base. If I use the teleport, getting back up to the surface later should be easier."
Presently she opened the book, checked the command once more, and entered it. It was the manual they had been issued when they first signed in.
A handful of mod-like features had been applied to this server for the convenience of streaming, or simply for the fun of it, and this was one of them: an auxiliary function that let you designate a single base and teleport straight there.
"This time, for real, down we go. If I just keep digging until a cave turns up, that should do it, right?"
"I am not falling for that! Did you really think I wouldn't know that if you dig like that and there's lava right underneath, there's nothing you can do about it?!"
A few from the torment faction tried their tricks along the way, but Mary—whose theoretical preparation was close to perfect—was not taken in.
She was digging a stair-step shaft when, at a certain moment, she broke into a cave. From beyond the pitch-dark hollow came a sound effect she couldn't explain, something that crawled up the spine. A monster's wet gurgle came along as a bonus.
"Ugh, hhh... there's kind of an atmosphere in here."
"Wh-who said anyone chickened out?! Who do you think I am? I am Mary Tepes, the True Ancestor Queen!"
In truth, of course, she had drawn in on herself quite a bit. A darkness whose depth you could not gauge summoned fear from the mere act of looking at it.
"A-anyway, isn't the company being strange, too? If you're a vampire, they could at least grant you the power to see through the dark...! Not that I'm scared."
Advancing by the tiniest increments, she drove torches in close together and lit the cave as she went. What she was talking about, all the while, was yet another mod applied to this server.
"Eek?! ...Ah, no. It was only a common undead."
"Yes! That's what I'm saying! ......No, I am not scared, okay?!"
On this server, a spread of abilities had been granted to match each VTuber's roleplay.
In the case of Mary, a vampire, certain undead monsters—the restless dead among them—would not attack her, and whenever a blow of hers landed she recovered a set measure of health and satiety.
Given that the three great threats to a beginner's survival were monsters, starvation, and lava, it was a considerable bonus. A kindness, no doubt, from the people running things, extended to a Mary for whom Prasaba was entirely new.
Even so, once she found herself in a situation like this, she couldn't help getting greedy. If they were going to show a beginner consideration anyway, what would it hurt to throw in the power to pierce the dark as well?
"Don't call me cute! And I did not flinch!"
Say what she liked. Facial recognition, after all, does not lie.
"Wh-what kind of false accusation is that! ...Or rather, what are you even doing right now? You said you were going to help clean up at the church, so why are you watching my stream?"
She had been about to answer the way she always did, the way she answered any other viewer, when the fact caught up with her and the question came out.
Today, Han Seoyeon had definitely said she would be volunteering at the church she ordinarily owed favors to. Her university schedule had kept her from taking part, but she had promised to help with the cleanup at least, and after class she ought to have been on her way there.
"No—don't answer me with a red Superchat, text me. Why are you spending ten thousand yen on a tiny little check-in?"
Mary did not, for her part, consider sponsoring a broadcaster a waste of money in itself. She made her living off this; even if she had thought so, she would never have said it.
But sending word that work was done and she was heading back by way of a red Superchat—that, no matter how she looked at it, she had no choice but to call out. Delivering the same message by video call, or even by international phone call, would still have cost less than this.
"Haa... anyway, come home soon. I wrapped dinner and put it in the fridge, so heat it in the microwave."
With that, Mary drove yet another torch into the cave wall.
"Ehh......"
At the wave that followed through the chat, Mary put on a thoroughly bewildered face. A response she had never anticipated had come crashing in.
"What is this teehee supposed to be..."
Soon enough, though, she turned their exchange back over—hers, and Sister's, and Han Seoyeon's—and her eyes slid sideways. Now that she thought about it, she had gone and flaunted the fact that they lived together, right out in the open, hadn't she...?
"......It might be a little bit true. Maybe?"
"I-I never said it went that far!"
Mary shouted, thoroughly flustered. She had only acted the way she always did, and yet if they railroaded it this hard into a romance reading, it started to sound as though the two of them had been that sort of thing all along, even on an ordinary day.
Of course, teehee did not refer exclusively to moments when a romantic current was running. It was a word you could just as well hang on a warm, friendship-adjacent coziness—two people simply getting along......
Even so, there was no helping the way the mood turned a little strange.
—Fssssst...!
"...!"
And because her mind was elsewhere, Mary never noticed the enemy that had closed to point-blank range. From directly behind her came the sound of a fuse burning down.
She snapped her head around in shock, and out of the dark, writhing into view, came a spider with a bomb strapped to its back. A spider, of course, was not classified among the undead, and so the mode that excluded Mary from being a valid target had no hold on it at all.
Ah... too late......
Mary Tepes—Ninomae Hitomi—was a theorist, gifted at memorization and calculation. The time until that monster detonated, the radius, even the attack power: all of it sketched itself inside her head in an instant.
And so she was certain. At this distance, in this state of gear, it was an unavoidable instant death. A slow retreat was out of the question, and knocking the thing away by hitting it was no good either. At a range where a single blow could shove it off, the damage reduction would never be enough to survive.
A beat late, her eyes went round—and then, at the conclusion the arithmetic had already delivered, that look in them settled a little. It was less composure than resignation.
"...Hweh?"
But in that instant, what came nosing in from the corner of the screen was something round.
That it was a fishing bobber—and that a J-shaped hook trailed off it—she understood only after the spider had, without warning, been whipped up into the air.
In a game where knockback clung to nearly every attack, it was practically the only item that pulled a target toward you. The spider caught on the line was dragged a good distance off from Mary, and only then did it detonate with a boom.
There was damage. She was out near the fringe of the blast, though, so it wasn't much.
"Good thing. That was close."
"Char-chan?"
What came through the in-game voice was a wolf's. Mary looked that way and found a character giving a fishing rod a little flick.
Charlotte Lupus. A second-generation talent of Anathema Production. And a werewolf.
She came trotting over to Mary.
"I was passing by and it looked dangerous, so I just reeled it in. Was I in the way, maybe?"
"No... you saved me. Thank you."
Mary dipped her head in thanks. She had finally made her way down to a cave, and she had nearly died there. The items from the starter support had been a breath away from vanishing with her, so thank goodness was about all there was to say.
"...But why a fishing rod?"
"It's useful, isn't it? I put it to good use just now, too."
Well—if the question was whether that particular function was useful, the answer was yes, certainly. Even so, she was fairly sure ordinary people did not walk around carrying one of these. Mary called up the Prasaba videos she had watched till now and managed a wry smile.
"Or rather—spotting a lit bomb spider while you're just passing by and answering it on the spot. What kind of movement even is that?"
"Hm?"
"Never mind. That was my mistake. For daring to try to understand."
Thinking about it, this person was an anomaly. Someone who possessed, quite literally, the physicality of a wild beast. The one who had tried to press the yardstick of common sense against her had been in the wrong. The hidden world was that kind of neighborhood, after all.
"Want to come along? If you're here, you came to mine, didn't you?"
"Sure, why not?"
She would put this human's physique out of her mind and simply do the stream. Mary let out a small sigh.