A House of Prayer, or a Den of Thieves (1)
The disaster that had torn through the heart of Tokyo had become a catastrophe so vast that not even the surface world could hide the fact of its existence.
Beep.
Beep.
"...It's nothing but talk of today's incident. Well. I did think it would be like this."
Ninomae, flipping through the channels with the remote, murmured as much. She had expected it, and still every station she landed on had nothing to offer but the gas terror.
"So this is how an incident from the hidden world gets reported."
"The scale grew far too large to bury the whole thing as if nothing had happened."
They could hardly break the Secrecy Protocol and announce that vampires had run rampant, and so they put out information that had been doctored in precisely this fashion.
"You might call it a workable little trick. Communications, recording equipment — all of it was shut down for the duration."
"You said they build that sort of function into the devices in circulation, for times like this? How does that side of it get explained up on the surface?"
"A satellite failure, or some business about a solar wind, I should think. Mm... truth be told, this isn't really my field..."
Han Seoyeon, seated at Ninomae's side, answered her questions.
"More than that — the zero deaths. That was you, wasn't it, Shion?"
"Well. Yes."
"Resurrection... I truly had no idea you were hiding a power like that."
The dead coming back to life. For Ninomae, who had only just begun to touch the hidden world, it was not a thing easily accepted.
"Mm. I had no thought of hiding it, but... there simply hadn't been an occasion to say so."
Thinking on it, that was only natural. Whether a suitable moment even existed for broaching the subject of I can bring corpses back to life was, itself, an open question.
"Then you're completely the hero of this whole affair, aren't you?"
"That... mm. No. Left to my ability alone, reviving a vampire would only have brought back a vampire. By rights, every person who was infected would have been written off as dead."
The true credit, then, belonged elsewhere.
"We had Marbas's help. In the course of this incident a gap in the Vampire Syndrome was discovered, miraculously, and we managed somehow to reverse the vampirization."
In other words: kill them all first, cure the people who had become vampires by Marbas's power, and then revive every last one of them. Something to that effect. Hearing it, Ninomae pressed a hand to her forehead. The hidden world really was absurd in its scale.
"Anyway, I think I'll go and stream."
With that, Ninomae rose from the sofa.
"Are you all right? You must be exhausted from today, and you were shot in the head, besides..."
"My condition's actually quite good, you know?"
Seoyeon wore her worry openly, but Ninomae only smiled, soft and bright, and set a hand on her hip.
Just as Seoyeon said, skipping today's stream would cause no particular trouble. Merely hint at the incident now filling the news, and nine-tenths of public opinion would swing around to telling her to rest well and come back healthy.
"I stream because I love it."
Ninomae answered with a wide, innocent grin.
It wasn't that streaming left her untired, or that she felt no stress from it at all. Even so — in spite of all of that — she still enjoyed it.
"...So you did."
At that radiant smile Seoyeon faltered for a moment, then returned a faint, hazy one of her own.
"Well then. I'll be back."
Leaving it at that, Ninomae made to quit the living room — and stopped, as if something had just occurred to her.
She kept glancing back toward Seoyeon. The hesitation had the look of someone wavering over a decision.
"Mm... Ninomae?"
"Ummm..."
Ninomae dithered her way back over.
"...?!"
She squeezed her eyes tightly shut, and planted a brief, soft kiss on Seoyeon's cheek.
"The chu in 'I'll be back,' shall we say. That's... nngh! I'm off to stream!"
And with her face flushed as red as it would go, Ninomae fled in a flustered scurry up the stairs to the second floor.
"......"
Left alone in the living room, Seoyeon clutched her face in both hands.
"What is this... what is this, exactly..."
"Aaaaugh!"
She'd done it. She had actually done it. Twisting this way and that where she slumped in the chair, Ninomae Hitomi let out a wail.
The room had been soundproofed for streaming, and still she clapped a hand over her mouth for fear the sound would leak.
I actually did it...!
Ninomae scrubbed and scrubbed at her cheeks, which were still burning.
Looking back, it was the third peck of the day alone. Even so, the first had been something close to an accident, and the second at least came with the excuse that she had been a little hazy. This time she had been entirely sober. An act of her own will, with no room left to deny it and no room left to excuse it.
"Ugh..."
The trigger had been that moment, when she woke from a short sleep after the Vampire Syndrome incident came to its end.
At first she hadn't even registered that she had died and come back. Her memories from before were faint, and her mind in the instant after waking had been considerably fogged. But then, in the way Seoyeon clung to her — in the feeling that came through her skin — she grew certain that she herself had very nearly gone somewhere very far away.
So, still not really understanding any of it, she had held her in return. Seoyeon's body had been trembling, faintly. And as that trembling subsided, the light in Seoyeon's eyes had darkened.
Obsessive eyes, with anxiety settled underneath. A gaze in which the urge to protect and the urge to possess were clammily stirred together turned upon Ninomae.
Faced with that sticky feeling, Ninomae caught herself thinking it might not be entirely unwelcome. If that was what Seoyeon wanted — if she wanted to press her down and bind her — then perhaps that, too, would be all right in its own way.
But it must not be. In the end it would only ruin them both. Coming apart together was a truly sweet temptation, but Ninomae Hitomi cast it off.
In its place, she decided to startle Seoyeon and clear the air. She looked at her, eyes blown wide. The dark mood of a moment before had vanished without a trace. Yes. Shion really wasn't Shion unless she looked like this. Ninomae smiled, softly.
But once things stood like that, a different impulse began to seethe up in her chest. Honestly, looking back, she still thinks she was a little drunk on sleep. If not now, there was no telling when she would get another chance to score one on Seoyeon. Or else she had simply been far too glad to see her again, once that whole bewildering ordeal was over.
...No. Lame excuses would be unnecessary.
She had simply wanted to. There was nothing else.
Why? Why on earth?
Ninomae let her whole weight sink into the chair, lost in thought.
Once, and it might have been a whim. Do it a second time, and it could no longer be called a whim. Why had she wanted this at all? Having gone and done it once in that hazy state, it felt as if some rein had snapped. In truth, she might have been harboring the wish to do this for a little while already.
"Augh."
She still didn't know. They were her own feelings, and she couldn't get a hold of them at all.
Right now, she simply wanted to flee from this "Ninomae," who had become someone even she herself could no longer understand, and into "Mary." That she had resolved to turn the stream on despite a faint fatigue still clinging to her was, in truth, a little bit for that reason.
"......"
Ninomae tipped the chair far back and stared at the ceiling. And in the very next instant, Mary snapped upright again as if she had bounced.
"I really should just get the stream ready!"
Barbara Knight. It would be no exaggeration to say that the mobile game, made by a Korean studio, was among the titles Ninomae — that is, Mary Tepes — played with the greatest affection.
"It's a relatively ordinary collectible RPG, isn't it?"
"It is. It is, but..."
There had been a time, whenever Ninomae brought Barbara Knight up, that Seoyeon had asked in plain puzzlement. Why this game, of all games?
The characters? Charming, certainly, but that alone fell short. Gender-bending historical figures and summoning them as your subordinates? Not exactly common, and still a concept already worn thin. The story wasn't outstanding either. A world loitering somewhere near its own apocalypse; a protagonist with amnesia who nonetheless possessed a superb gift for command. The material itself was quietly divisive.
"But it has the dream."
"It... does?"
"This is the only company that makes a game where the Winged Hussars show up leading attack helicopters to reinforce you right before the castle falls...!"
"The Winged Hussars... pardon? Leading what?"
You could list its shortcomings all day, and yet that was surely part of why the game still posted a respectable upper-mid performance.
"Hehe... so the moment has come at last..."
Of course, praise of this sort was nothing new to the viewers of Mary's stream. That she was a heavy user of the game was something hardly a servant among them didn't know, and from time to time she had gone so far as to recommend it to them. Word was that a certain community across the water had all but crowned her the forum's reigning queen.
"Yes, that's right! It's gacha time!"
"What kind of internet superstition did these people even come in having heard...?"
Mary muttered, incredulous.
"...Ahem. No comment."
Unfortunately, a user of gacha games was that sort of creature. Mary, who could hardly claim to be an exception, forced the subject aside and stepped into the pull screen.
"Shall we start off with a light heart, then? The goal is this pickup's Christmas characters."
She put on a bright smile and pressed the Recruit ×10 button. Contrary to the easygoing air she showed the stream, she was in fact clutching her cross necklace rather desperately.
A machine fitted with a monitor, the sort of thing that belonged in a science-fiction film, appeared on the screen. Mary drew a breath, then clicked the button at its center.
"...Heheh, yes! That's the one!"
And Mary broke into a brilliant smile. The instant she pressed the button, the device had flared with a dazzling rainbow light — the signal that a three-star was definitely included among the ten.
Preening, she released the mouse she had been holding down. The machine whirred to life, and the view rushed in on the monitor: a simple map drawn in a single flat color, a pulse spreading from the center like sonar. The wave raced outward, and points stamped themselves across the map in a rapid patter.
Good. Then I'll get ready to bait them, nice and obnoxious...
It was partly to liven the stream, but it was also nothing other than a gamer's nature. No — a human being's.
"......Eh?"
But Mary couldn't get the rest of the words out.
Every one of the ten points stamped on the map was shining with a brilliant light.
The sight was so shocking that streamer and viewers alike had frozen solid. A single bead of cold sweat rolled down the nape of Mary's neck.
"Uh... well..."
Baiting them now would be a disaster. She had meant to be obnoxious, but even that had a limit. Mary swallowed.
"Seeing as they're all the same color, I suppose they aren't high rarity! My luck really is just awful."
But how was she supposed to hold this in? Mary spread a smile across her whole face and lit the fuse.
And of course, the chat exploded.