It Is No Concern of Mine (3)
Once you'd had cream puffs and a sweet drink on top of them, brushing your teeth before bed was simply what you did. Coming back from the bathroom, Ninomae dropped onto the sofa where Han Seoyeon had already settled in.
"You worked hard on the stream."
"You too, Shion. Thank you for helping with the broadcast."
The appearance hadn't been on the schedule, and it must have weighed on her; Ninomae offered her thanks for Han Seoyeon's trouble all the same.
"I'm glad if I was any help. I don't believe I went to any effort worth being thanked for, however."
As far as Han Seoyeon was concerned, she had only spent a long while chatting with her favorite Shutang. Whether the viewers had enjoyed it was another matter; she hadn't done anything that amounted to real work.
"Whatever you think, Shion, I'm the one who's grateful. Won't that do?"
"...How could it not."
At that, Han Seoyeon smiled faintly. Say what she might, there was no world in which receiving thanks failed to please her.
"All the more when the thanks come from someone I truly like."
"Li— ugh, well, you don't mean it like that. I know, all right?"
"...?"
This woman, honestly... Ninomae let out a sigh.
In the way she would now and then drop a line that made even another woman flinch, and without the slightest awareness of having done it, she was the same breed as Charlotte Lupus — as Tsunashi Tenka.
Or perhaps it was precisely because they were both women that she said such things without a shred of hesitation. Because, to begin with, they didn't even register to her as that sort of remark.
And that, in its own way, might be a little irritating...
Of course, Ninomae Hitomi had never once thought of herself as a lesbian. Even if Han Seoyeon wasn't conscious of her in any romantic sense at all, there wasn't a single reason for her to be displeased.
There shouldn't have been. And yet.
No — I mean, this is right after she caught me with that kind of manga. I'm not hoping she'll get the wrong idea. Absolutely not. But isn't it normal for the way someone looks at you to change a little, for them to wonder if you're a lesbian? Even if it goes in a negative direction.
And yet, realizing she wasn't being considered in the slightest — not even a scrap — left her in a strangely foul mood. The human heart was a fickle thing indeed.
"Um... you know. That erotic manga you caught me with, a little while ago..."
In the end, even as she agonized over it, Ninomae dragged her own shame back out into the open. It was closer to bravado than anything else. Sheer stubbornness.
"Ah. Mm. That."
"Did it... really not make you think anything? It's an erotic book of Sister × Mary, of all things."
"I told you, didn't I? If it's your taste, then all I'll do is respect it."
But it isn't my taste... Ninomae had been about to put that excuse in her mouth yet again — the one she had already repeated several times today alone.
"......"
Thinking it over once more, however, she ran up against a conundrum: could she really dismiss as "not my taste" a manga she had "used" on more than one occasion?
She let slip a small, strained sound, and rather than offering any answer to that conundrum, she shelved it for the moment and went on with what she had been saying.
"Are you really all right just letting it pass like that? Sister is..."
"Sister is Sister, and nothing more. She isn't Shion. She isn't Han Seoyeon. She isn't Bartholomew. Just as Shutang and Ninomae Hitomi are not perfectly one and the same person."
"...Mm."
So it was this talk again, Ninomae thought. She had the feeling she'd heard an argument along much the same lines the last time, too.
She met the eyes of Han Seoyeon, seated beside her. From the moment this woman had learned who she was, she had gone on behaving in exactly the same way. She looked at the VTuber Mary Tepes and the university student Ninomae Hitomi as entirely separate things.
It was by no means easy. At the root of it, what constitutes a character is the performer herself. Even Ninomae, who had gone to some trouble to build her own personality and her character as Mary as distinct from one another, was no exception — and it was all the more true of most of her colleagues at Anathema, where as a rule the VTuber concept was the person's actual personality.
And yet Han Seoyeon had managed it. The faint sense of superiority Ninomae had felt, back when Seoyeon prioritized "Ninomae" over "Shutang," lay along that same line, because Ninomae knew with certainty that Han Seoyeon distinguished the two.
"Well... even so, I do sometimes think it might be hard to say that's entirely the case. To put it bluntly, Shion, you've gotten obviously more mischievous since you found out I was Mary."
"That is... hmm. Let me see. Through the mirror called Mary Tepes, I came to know a hidden side of you I hadn't known before — something like that, perhaps?"
"What is that supposed to mean."
Ninomae said it with her lips pushed into the faintest pout, though inwardly she didn't think it was beyond understanding.
"So does that mean I ought to say I've learned your wicked side, too?"
"It might."
"I didn't particularly want to know this side of you. The teasing one. The creepy one."
"I'm afraid I can only call that a shame. Shutang is the one who made me this way."
Han Seoyeon answered, smiling again, and Ninomae tapped her discontent out against the other woman's leg in a few light kicks.
"Even so, that isn't the only side of me you've come to know. Is it?"
As she said it, Han Seoyeon looked at Ninomae's chest. Not, of course, with any indecent intent to ogle the truly prodigious mass on display there...
"That... isn't wrong, I suppose."
Ninomae clutched the cross resting atop her own chest. A pectorale — a holy relic. A precious thing Han Seoyeon had given her.
The other side Seoyeon meant, the one she hadn't known, was of course Han Seoyeon the Holy Knight: Saint Bartholomew. Insofar as it was a secret of hers that Ninomae had never known until now, it certainly wasn't wrong. Learning it, and coming into contact with the hidden world, had brought all manner of things with it — dynamic enough that it was a wonder she had ever lived peacefully on the surface at all.
"But, well... if that's all there is, I can't help thinking it's a little unfair..."
"Unfair? In what sense?"
"Nnngh, it feels a little complicated to explain... If I had to put it into words, maybe it's something like this."
Ninomae hesitated, choosing her words, and then spoke.
"Compared to how much you know about 'Mary,' Shion, what I know about 'Bartholomew' feels like far too little."
"That... is certainly true."
At those words, Han Seoyeon's eyes widened just a little. It was the look of someone who had never once considered the matter from that angle — and no wonder. Until now, the two of them had kept their relationship on an unspoken agreement not to cross the line. Each knew the other held secrets that could not easily be told. But they did not pry. The smallest excuse was enough to let a thing pass. That was the shape of what passed between them.
Of course, by now those secrets — VTuber and Holy Knight — had come to light. But the cause had been nothing more than chance and accident. From their side, neither of them had ever tried to be the one to step closer.
Now, though, Ninomae had set her foot into that hidden ground of her own will. With a single thought: she wanted to know Han Seoyeon better.
"......"
Ninomae was silent for a moment, waiting for Han Seoyeon to go on.
The Holy Knight seemed lost in thought, but before long she nodded, as if she had reached a conclusion.
"If there's something you wish to know, please ask me anything you like."
Ninomae had, for once, taken courage and stepped closer; it would not do for Seoyeon to retreat by that same distance. She settled the matter in her heart without fuss, and said so. Ninomae was, by now, capable enough to protect herself from incidents of a smaller scale. Forcibly drawing a line and pushing her back — telling her to come no closer — would be nothing but overprotection.
And in any case, if she only set her mind to it, she was already in a position to find a great deal of information about Han Seoyeon. Like it or not, an Apostle was a public figure; she had simply never tried, and wandering the right sites on the hidden side of things would have been enough. If she was going to the trouble of asking in person, there was no harm in sparing her a tedious search.
"Then, you see..."
Ninomae put the question into words almost at once — the sense of something wrong that she had been feeling all this while.
"What in the world is happening in Japan right now?"
"......"
The woman called Ninomae Hitomi was, unexpectedly, rather sharp. Sharp enough, at the very least, to attend university on a scholarship earned by her own ability alone. Why was a combat asset of the Church's very highest caliber — Han Seoyeon — in this far country of the East? There was no way she had failed to harbor that suspicion. She had simply never tried to ask it to her face.
"So you had already guessed."
Han Seoyeon looked up at the ceiling for a moment, smiled wryly, and met Ninomae's eyes again.
"As you expected, I came to this country because there is an incident I have to resolve."
"What is it?"
"For the time being, the Church calls it Vampire Syndrome."
Vampire Syndrome. Ninomae turned the words over for a moment.
"First, shall we begin with vampires?"
Han Seoyeon leaned back against the sofa and went on.
"Even among vampires, there isn't truly only one kind. The lore and the faith change with the region and with the era, and to that same degree vampires come in many varieties."
The same held true of other anomalies.
"Among them, there is one classified as Epsilon-2... no, the formal designation hardly matters just now. In any case, a vampire of that sort exists. One you would do better to call a zombie than a vampire."
Strengthened physical ability, the loss of self, heightened aggression, and the urge to drink blood and devour human flesh... A case considerably removed from the aristocratic vampire most people picture.
"It is a form of vampire no one would wish to become, short of someone hoping to die... but over these past few years, a great many cases of people transforming into this have been discovered in Japan."
"Someone is deliberately turning people into vampires of the Epsilon-2 type."
Han Seoyeon added as much.
"That's... serious."
"The greater problem is that the culprit leaves no trace whatsoever. For quite some time, in fact, even the idea that a culprit existed separately was nothing more than groundless speculation."
Not someone's intent. Not by someone's hand. Was it not simply a phenomenon — people just turning into vampires — that was spreading? A hypothesis of that sort had even been raised within the Church, and similar rumors had spread, little by little, through Japan's hidden world as well.
Hence a disease. Hence Vampire Syndrome.
"And so I was dispatched, to follow what leads there were. My nose is a little — a great deal — keener than other people's."
So saying, Han Seoyeon pointed to her own nose.
"There was also the matter of preparing for the moment the worst-case Backfire might have to be set off... ah. I'll tell you about that next time, should the chance arise."
"First, let's finish what we were discussing."
She went on with the explanation.
"Well. I still haven't found the culprit either. Quite a formidable adversary, as it happens. But that a culprit exists has become all but certain."
"Why?"
"I'm told that since I was dispatched, the rate of incidents has dropped by about ninety-seven percent. They've started watching themselves, figuring that if they leave even a little of their scent behind, my nose will catch it."
She had failed to find any trace of the culprit. Even so, it was certain that this was the work of a being that plainly possessed both a pattern and a reasoning mind.
"The two other Apostles who came this time are probably here, in some small part, to help with this investigation as well. It seems they actually managed to secure some rather useful testimony. Though that is only a side benefit, of course."
"Mmm. So that was it."
Having heard the explanation that far, Ninomae nodded. There were still parts she didn't quite understand, but she had the general shape of it.
More pressingly, she gave voice to the question that nagged at her right now.
"...If the incident is resolved, will you leave Japan, Shion?"
At that, Han Seoyeon's face went briefly blank... and then she smiled, small, the way she always did.
"When that time comes, I'll simply file a request to be posted here. So long as it isn't the occasional emergency summons, I should be able to spend most of my life in this country."
"...Your whole life?"
"Yes. My whole life."
"Or rather, if I were told to live on my own now, my meals would fall to pieces all over again."
She smiled as though it were a joke.
"...Then I suppose, for my part, I'll have no choice but to look after you for the rest of my life."
Ninomae hesitated a moment as well — and in the end she laughed, a soft ehehe.