A House of Prayer, or a Den of Thieves (2)
When she eased the wheel over, her body listed gently to the right. So the next stretch would be… Han Seoyeon watched the navigation and searched out the route ahead.
“Hm? Isn't that an event you already cleared?”
“Ah. I'm testing a few things while I put the guide together.”
She had asked because the mobile-game screen, caught in a corner of her vision, had snagged on a doubt. It was, without question, the stage cleared on stream only a few days ago. From the passenger seat, Ninomae turned toward her and smiled.
“I think I can just barely clear it even if I drop the specs a little further.”
Max out the highest-rated characters and throw them in, and of course any stage could be cleared. Write that down, though, and no one would dignify it with the name of a guide. The essence of a guide, then, lay in minimizing the required investment so as to maximize the number of people who could actually execute it. That, at least, was Ninomae Hitomi's personal doctrine.
“Aagh, this isn't going to work.”
One look at the characters' remaining HP and Ninomae abandoned the run, dropping straight back to the party-formation screen.
“Maybe I should try slotting in someone else…….”
She murmured it while scrolling the roster… and her hand stopped dead. Her finger had come to rest on one of the characters pulled this time: a woman in a Santa outfit.
“Shion.”
“Yes? What is it?”
“You saw me pulling characters on stream that time, right?”
There was no need to ask which part of the broadcast she meant. Ninomae's gacha showcase — a pity-shattering performance for the history books from the opening pull — had ended after a single ten-roll. Part of it was that she had already vented more than enough salt. Part of it was fear: pull again, have the exact same thing happen, and she genuinely would not be able to handle it. And besides, a single pull had already swallowed every rate-up character on the banner, so the need to pull any further was fairly low to begin with.
“Doesn't that seem strange no matter how you think about it…? I mean, gacha always went well when I got a blessing from you, Shion, but it was never this extreme, was it?”
Rates differ from game to game, so there is no single standard, but as a rule, if a highest-rarity character shows up once every ten or twenty pulls, people will tell you your luck is considerable. On a day when three or four arrive at once, awe and envy tend to land together, and land hard. All ten characters glittering rainbow, though — whether one trusted instinct or raw probability, it could only be bizarre. Even with Han Seoyeon's blessing mixed in, nothing on this scale had ever happened before. Of course the question followed.
“Hmm… I'm not sure. Changes that fine are beyond me as well, I'm afraid.”
Han Seoyeon turned the wheel again and turned the problem over for a moment, but no clear answer presented itself.
“If you're truly that curious, shall I call in a specialist?”
“A specialist?”
“Yes. There is an organization that analyzes domains of the anomalous like this and produces numerical statistics on them. They go by the name ORACLE.”
“That company I know? The one that makes database software…….”
“Well. I believe the names merely happen to coincide…….”
An institution for the investigation and analysis of the underside and anomalous environments. Abbreviated: ORACLE.
Put simply, it was a company that made its living selling statistics from the underside.
“The Church maintains a reasonably friendly relationship with them, and makes use of them as well.”
“…A place that impressive will analyze why someone hit a gacha jackpot?”
“So long as it concerns the anomalous.”
Han Seoyeon said it with a small smile and took out her phone. Ninomae was about to point out that using a phone while driving was dangerous, wasn't it — then remembered that this was someone for whom, even in a collision, the car would be the party in danger, and shut her mouth.
Whoa. That English pronunciation.
Instead she stayed quiet and watched Han Seoyeon speak with someone. The tone, shifted just a little from usual because she was using a foreign language, was attractive… no. It was refreshing.
“Yes. Dispatched, and already here.”
“Eek?! Hyaaaak?!”
At the voice that had suddenly come from behind, Ninomae jolted and screamed. Then she turned around, and screamed again.
What the two of them were riding in was a truck, and like a great many one-ton trucks, this one had no such thing as a back seat. The owner of the voice had been speaking with nothing but her head sprouted from the rear of the vehicle. Pop out all at once looking fit for a taxidermy mount in the manor of some old castle, and telling a person not to be startled was simply unreasonable.
“I didn't expect you to come in person, Asmodeus.”
“My main body happened to be in Japan.”
The woman in the brass-colored pince-nez said this, then gave her head a great shake and dropped the glasses. Pink hair swayed from side to side.
“And since we're bound for the same place for once, I thought I might borrow the cargo bed for a little while.”
“The same destination?”
“You customers are going to Comiket, aren't you? I knew it.”
Comiket. Its formal name was the Comic Festival. What had begun as a sort of circle social had, by the present day, become Japan's largest doujin-circle event. For one reason and another, the place Han Seoyeon and Ninomae were heading was precisely where that Comiket was being held.
“Um… so, this person is…….”
“Ah, right. We haven't met. — A pleasure. Asmodeus, of ORACLE.”
“Asmodeus… you mean, of the Seven Deadly Sins?”
“How flattering that you know. For the record, I mean that quite sincerely. It has always rankled me, some damned nobody snatching the Lust portfolio out from under me.”
She had paid a fortune for that seat. Asmodeus grumbled even as she looked Ninomae over with eyes whose whites had gone black.
“So. You said the client this time is this one here.”
“Yes. That's right.”
The call a moment ago must have covered the situation in outline, because the woman calling herself Asmodeus went straight to the point.
“Customer. The phenomenon you'd like analyzed?”
“Umm… it's this…….”
Ninomae hesitated, but decided that since Seoyeon had summoned this person — no, this demon? — it was probably safe to trust her, and played the stream footage from that time on her phone.
“Hm. Hmm… yes. This would be it…….”
“Do you… understand it?”
“Well. The general shape of it. I don't run an organization like this for show. And where Etube is involved, I'm fairly confident.”
Now that she thought of it, she seemed to have heard from Han Seoyeon, in passing, that Asmodeus was one of Etube's founders. Ninomae recalled it and looked at her again.
“This would certainly be enough to bewilder you, customer. Quite a number of factors are tangled together.”
Asmodeus explained it as if the matter were obvious. Then, from the rear of the vehicle, she drew out not only her head but one arm as well. In that hand was a book about as thin as a magazine.
“No need to quantify how much each variable contributed, I assume?”
“Ah, yes.”
Ninomae gave a small nod.
“First, the blessing she holds as clergy hardly needs a detailed explanation.”
That much she already knew. Once, she had thought only that leaving the pulls to Han Seoyeon made the results come out oddly well. After learning who she truly was, Ninomae understood that it was divine power at work.
“And then there is the faith you've gathered through streaming up to now. Ordinarily you never used magic for anything beyond simple housework, correct? The recent incident burned through an enormous amount… but an event like the descent of an angel would be more than enough to draw in considerable faith, wouldn't you say?”
Asmodeus went on, turning the pages of the book in her hand.
“Do you know how many people on the surface who saw that turned to a religion?”
“B-but even so, that would be Shirase's faith, wouldn't it…?”
“A hunting dog can kill a deer with its own teeth, and that still doesn't make the kill the beast's property. You might praise the service and throw it more meat than usual, but that is entirely the master's choice. Isn't it?”
The contract Ninomae had struck with Philotanuss was nothing more than an exchange of faith for magic. She had never agreed to be staged as the protagonist of a miracle and paid out a vast sum of faith for the trouble. Faith obtained by using a demon as a tool belonged, as a rule, to Ninomae Hitomi. At least, that was how it went according to Asmodeus's logic.
“You gained so much faith that you couldn't hold all of it, and some leaked out this time. That is another reason. And in a separate form, you're also gathering faith from a certain portion of gamers, aren't you?”
“Umm… that's faith too?”
“They've gone and enshrined you as their chief. There were even devotees who, the moment you went live, offered up money while praying for luck. Put a photograph on display and pray to it, and that is already no different from worship. By the standards of Japan, where the bar for godhood sits low, ‘Mary Tepes’ ought to be considered as having already entered the ranks of the divine.”
That much was true. Flustered as her expression was, Ninomae seemed to accept it, and she nodded.
“Lastly, there is the faith that Han Seoyeon Margarita is offering.”
“Isn't that what you just said?”
“Not faith in Christ. Faith in the individual named Ninomae Hitomi, and in the VTuber named Mary Tepes.”
“Uhhhhhm?”
She thought it a strange thing to say, and yet, recalling the fan devotion Han Seoyeon showed as a matter of course, she also felt it was not entirely beyond understanding.
“Lately your feelings for each other seem to have grown a little stronger as well… and above all else, intercourse with a god is, in itself, a sacrificial rite of the highest order.”
“Right. Well, I mean…… EXCUSE ME?!”
At the words that followed, Ninomae's eyes flew wide.
“In-in-intercourse?! All Shion and I have done is kiss on the cheek…!”
“But what matters most isn't the material act so much as the feelings of the one who offers, yes? According to an independent investigation, the probability that our customers will marry before they die is…”
“HYAAAAAAK!”
She startled, seized Asmodeus by the head, and shoved it straight back into the truck's rear wall. Asmodeus sank in with a thick squelch, like a stone pressed into a mudflat.
“Haaah…….”
“……Hmm. To exorcise a demon of the Lemegeton this easily — you certainly do seem to have accumulated a great deal of faith.”
Face blazing red, Ninomae worked to steady her breath. An awkward silence filled the truck.
“Sh-she's under some bizarre misunderstanding. That person — no, that demon. Figures, for a demon of Lust. Even feelings of simple affection, she reads them only that way…….”
“Ah, ahem. Right. Of course. Absolutely.”
“And above all, same-sex marriage is impossible in Japan.”
“Yes. Of course. Unless the Hyakurenno family were to set their minds on it and actually move…….”
Silence fell again. Without meaning to, both of them had thought it.
W-wait. If they simply decided to, wouldn't it be possible…? No. Of course I've never once entertained the idea…….
“Th-that's right! Now that I think about it, it's doctrinally impossible too!”
“Ah. Well, yes. Once you're at the level of an Apostle, you can ignore doctrine in the open and no one cares, and some of them are actually homosexual, but…….”
“No — I mean, please stop unconsciously refuting meee?!”