Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven Is at Hand (1)
That day, too, she sat in a corner of the lecture hall.
Han Seoyeon. Among the students who shared her major lectures—at least within the department—there was not a soul who did not know the name. Unfortunately for her, that fame sat closer to notoriety.
As if to prove it, the seats around Han Seoyeon were utterly empty, the space immediately surrounding her carved out and set apart. Seoyeon paid this no mind at all. She read at her leisure, turning the pages with a soft flutter and following the lines with those characteristically hollow eyes.
The cover bore the title The Lotus Sutra: A Modern Japanese Translation.
She would no doubt insist that she was a Christian… and yet, whether one judged by her looks, her atmosphere, or even her choice of reading, it was difficult to imagine.
"Good morning, Shion."
Still, there is a brave soul in every crowd. The other students watched from the corners of their eyes as that brave soul made her approach toward Han Seoyeon.
A chestnut-brown bob. A cute, puppyish face—and, set against it, a figure so voluptuous that "cute" would have been a lie even as flattery. At a glance, she looked like someone who ought to be fairly popular.
No one, however, spoke to her first. In this place, there was simply no one who had formed a real friendship with her: Ninomae Hitomi.
Even without any particular closeness, they attended the same lectures and knew one another's faces well enough that a nod of greeting would not have been out of place. But Ninomae herself was advancing in a straight line, sparing her surroundings not the slightest attention, which made even that impossible—and all the more so when her destination was the seat beside Han Seoyeon, the one spot nobody wished to approach.
"Good morning to you as well, Ninomae."
Seoyeon answered with a faint smile, the corners of her mouth lifted only the slightest degree.
Despite both being considerable beauties, the pair had become outsiders of the folklore department, each for reasons of her own. Neither showed any sign of minding. Whenever they met, they simply unfolded a space that belonged to the two of them alone.
"Have you been preparing for the exam?"
"I tried memorizing the textbook cover to cover, but… mm. I'm not confident."
At Seoyeon's question, Ninomae let out a sigh. As she had said, today was the midterm for this lecture. No exam is unimportant, but this one was a major course, which made it especially so.
"I do think I studied, in my own way. It's just difficult, doing it alongside streaming."
Ninomae closed the distance between them a little further and lowered her voice. For Ninomae as she was now, streaming was no mere hobby. She belonged to a company and earned an income from it; she could not simply rest whenever the mood took her. The agency would accommodate her as far as was reasonable, but abusing that consideration was out of the question. She was, in effect, holding down a job and her studies at once, so it was only natural that her confidence in her grades should suffer.
"A similar situation, then."
"You mean you've had church work lately, too, Shion?"
"No. I mean I could not study properly, on account of living the VTuber life."
So the fellow feeling had come not from the work, but from being a VTuber. Hearing it, Ninomae broke into a soft laugh.
"Honestly. Then instead of reading something like that, look over the textbook one more time."
"Ah—but I was just at the highlight."
"Please. Since when do Buddhist scriptures have a highlight?"
Ninomae snatched the book from her hands and thrust the textbook at her, and Han Seoyeon pouted, grumbling something strange. It was not a reaction she truly meant.
After Ninomae had been found out as Mary Tepes, the relationship between the two had advanced a little. For one thing, Han Seoyeon had grown slightly slyer—particularly since the day she had crashed a stream unannounced and the two of them played a game together. Most likely, the attitude of Natacchi, Shuttang's servant and something of a villain, had begun to color the way she treated Mary Tepes.
In turn, Ninomae had grown easier with Han Seoyeon than before. Not that they had been raising walls and pushing each other away until now. Still, a clear line had existed, and each of them had carefully avoided crossing it.
For Ninomae, being a VTuber was precisely that line. Forced to hide her identity, she had no choice but to vagueness and dodge whenever talk of schedules and the like came up. Seoyeon had surely noticed. Yet even knowing that something was being concealed, she had let it pass without remark, out of consideration for Ninomae.
"Oh, right. The collab with Charlotte I mentioned before—the date's been set."
"What? Is that true?"
—Not anymore.
The two of them had become close enough to take up streaming as a subject, and sometimes even to talk it through. Ninomae Hitomi found that fact, somehow, a glad one.
"It's next Saturday."
"Next Saturday would be… Halloween."
"Yes. A Halloween special stream."
"I am very much looking forward to it."
The sincerity showed plainly on Seoyeon's face as she said so. She had called herself a Charmea shipper, so she must truly have been anticipating it a great deal.
"There isn't a new outfit to mark Halloween, though."
"Mm. I thought that would be the case."
If a new costume were to be revealed, a two-person collab was not a particularly good choice. Such things were meant to be unveiled separately, so that the attention would not be split. Unless, perhaps, the whole of the second generation gathered for a special and revealed the new models all at once.
"Besides, among the others in your generation, there is someone who received a new outfit only recently, is there not?"
Giving one to everyone would mean that somebody received a new model twice in a short span. Cutting one or two people out would make the arrangement strange in its own way. So Halloween would simply pass, or at best a single person would be given a new model around this time. That was Han Seoyeon's conclusion.
"Instead, I'm thinking of cosplaying on the real-life side. We're planning a baking stream."
"Would a cosplay of that sort not show only your hands and the kitchen?"
"The feeling is still different, isn't it?"
Ninomae laughed, soft and a little proud.
"And if it comes to it, I'll just take a photo or two and post them on Twitter. I only have to cover my face well enough."
The matter of exposing her identity… Han Seoyeon followed the thought that far, then abandoned it. Ninomae would know this part better than she did. Advice that elementary would only be posturing in front of someone who already knew better.
"Have you decided on the cosplay?"
In its place, she elected to satisfy the curiosity immediately at hand.
"Mm, I narrowed it down to a few candidates. I think I'll go with a nun's habit after all."
"A vampire nun. Not bad."
"…Is that something a religious person is allowed to say?"
Han Seoyeon shrugged. Whether she meant that it was fine, or that she neither knew nor cared, was impossible to tell.
"Did you choose it because of Sister?"
"I can't say I didn't. That had quite a lot to do with it."
At Seoyeon's words, Ninomae nodded.
"Have you bought it?"
"No. I was going to order one when I got home."
"Then I will acquire one for you."
"Uh… is that all right?"
"I am more than capable of obtaining a few." She added it with a faint smile.
Not just anything—church vestments, and for cosplay, a reason that all but picked a fight with the Church head-on. The phrasing troubled her a little as well: I am capable of it. Did that not sound as though Seoyeon occupied a position with some authority of its own?
What was more, she seemed to have a great deal of money, though nothing about her suggested she had inherited it from her parents. Ninomae found herself suddenly wondering just what this "church work" Seoyeon helped with actually was.
No. Not now.
She folded the feeling away again at once. The tacit agreement that they would not cross one another's lines—that had been dismantled by the photo leak. Only halfway, however. What no longer needed to be hidden or dodged was limited to VTuber matters, and to Ninomae Hitomi alone. Whatever Han Seoyeon was concealing about the Church remained a line that must not be crossed.
She was not the sort of person who would hide a subject she had no need to hide. There had to be a proper reason. Ninomae, for her part, was not cold enough to demand that Seoyeon's secret be laid bare simply because her own had been exposed. So she would wait, for now. At least until Han Seoyeon explained the circumstances herself.
Having reached that conclusion inwardly, Ninomae smiled for no particular reason.
"I cannot say whether the measurements will fit you, Ninomae."
"…I'll just have it altered, somehow."
A glance. Seoyeon's gaze dropped to a point ambiguously lower—specifically, to Ninomae's chest.
"Even if I'd ordered the costume online, it almost certainly wouldn't have fit. I'd have had to get it altered anyway."
Under that gaze, Ninomae spoke with her earlobes faintly flushed.
"Th-that's—anyway! Just study for the exam already. Even cramming is better than not doing it at all!"
The woman called Akaba Akane was a sensible, proper human being.
"Hey……."
She therefore had the right—no, the duty—to demand an explanation of the situation before her.
"Why are you eating breakfast in my house?"
There was an androgynous quality to the one she addressed, though she was feminine enough that no one would mistake her for a man. Black hair fell in an elegant line to the small of her back. She was not especially tall, but her proportions were excellent, and she carried herself with a clean, striking grace. She was Akane's childhood friend and a classmate from high school; these days she was a colleague at work, and a junior among the VTubers.
"Your grandmother let me in."
"I wasn't asking how you got in, Tenka."
Akane shot a sharp look at Tenka—Tsunashi Tenka. Tenka, however, showed not the slightest sign of shrinking, and offered only a bright, refreshing smile.
"A nun's habit calls for a shrine maiden's robes."
"Damn it. Speak Japanese."
Or Korean, at the very least. Akane pressed a hand to her forehead.
Well… I can more or less tell what she's trying to say.
"The cosplay for this week's collab—Ninomae settled on a nun's habit, didn't she? So you figured a shrine maiden's outfit would make a better pair, and you came to borrow one from me, since I come from a shrine family. That it?"
"Mmph."
"For crying out loud. Swallow what's in your mouth, then talk."
"Yeah. That's my Akane. Quick on the uptake."
Akane sighed once more. So this was the "prince" drowning in popularity with women.
"Last time you were shaking like a leaf, saying a collab would be a disaster. Changed your mind after all?"
This, after insisting that Sister might catch her by scent and put her in danger.
"No, but thinking it over, it might actually be fine."
"I assume 'fine' doesn't mean suicide by someone else's knife. All right. Let's hear it."
"Hear me out. Ninomae and Sister have been close for over a year, yeah? And I did offline collabs in the middle of all that."
Tenka stuck up a thumb.
"Meaning the scent that rubs off on Ninomae during an offline collab isn't enough for Sister to figure out I'm a werewolf."
"That's a spectacularly stupid-looking chain of logic, and the uncanny part is there's no actual hole in it."
Akane found that confidence of hers somehow unsettling.
"If you're dead set on doing the collab, then… well."
If Tenka herself was all right with it, Akane was hardly in a position to object.
"Then I can drop that investigation into Sister you asked for? Enough time's passed that a clue or two ought to have turned up."
"Oh, that one I'm actually kind of curious about."
"Tsk. You want everything, don't you."
Even as she said it, Akane opened a bookmarked website. Tenka, who had at some point glued herself to Akane's side, read through the posts along with her.
"…"
"…"
And then the quiet arrived.
"Huh? Wait—is Sister actually a way bigger deal than I thought?"
"Damn it. Just whose bad side did you get on?"
"Ah, I haven't been caught yet. …Probably."
The word she tacked on at the end was terribly small, and terribly wretched.
"Should I ask them to cancel the collab, even now?"
"We already posted the announcement. You do know that canceling out of nowhere means climbing onto the grill, right?"
"Aaaah—"