A House of Prayer, or a Den of Thieves (4)
Kitayama Maya. A first-generation talent of Anathema Production, and the very first to debut among the cohort that had come online one after another.
Gen 1's concept was traditional Japanese youkai, every one of them, and Maya was no exception. Pink hair sat oddly on anything meant to pass for Japanese, but she was modeled on an oni all the same.
"I never imagined it wouldn't be confined to the virtual side."
Han Seoyeon murmured it to Ninomae beside her, eyes on Maya—Sakuragi Oka, by her real name—as the woman pulled ahead of them.
Tsunashi Tenka had been precisely that sort of case. A werewolf in reality and on the virtual side alike: Charlotte Lupus.
"Um… is Sakuragi-senpai really an oni?"
"If my nose isn't mistaken. Strictly speaking, the blood seems to run in her. She herself doesn't appear to know the hidden world exists."
Some youkai are born to it, and some come by it later. And if the person is one of the faithful, of a kind that never shows itself plainly in the course of daily life, then it is not uncommon for a youkai to live without ever learning that the hidden world is real. No one had asked her outright, of course, so it was difficult to swear she was a surface human through and through. Still, she had given no particular reaction even at the sight of a fully armed Apostle. There was little harm in judging her knowledge of the hidden world to be nonexistent.
"Mmm… yeah. It'd be strange to say this one isn't a youkai."
Ninomae stole a glance at Sakuragi in turn and murmured it.
Kitayama Maya's listed height was 181 centimeters. Before one even got around to tall for a woman, as an oni ought to be, it was a stature that ranked as quite tall among men, and if the field narrowed to Japanese men, it stood out all the more. An ordinary stream, framed from the chest up, rarely showed it. On the days she put on a 3D model for a collab, though, a gap of a full head or more was a common sight.
Rumor on the net held that the person inside was taller still. "Rumor" was a generous word. Maya never looked particularly serious about hiding her real-world self, Sakuragi Oka, and sightings from reality turned up often enough that a search online might not even have much trouble producing photographs.
Ninomae was not the type to dig that far into a VTuber's offline life. Even so, between those rumors and a few telling details—the way, at a real-life collab, everyone else looked up past the crown of Maya's model—she had at least gathered that the body's true height was considerable.
…Even so, she had not expected this.
"Keeping up back there~?"
What Ninomae had meant by awkward to call her anything but a youkai was not the height alone. Put plainly, someone who towered so far past average was a curiosity, but treating them as a youkai for that and nothing else would be strange, wouldn't it? She thought the odds were genuinely high for another reason, and her eyes followed Sakuragi as the woman turned to check on them.
More precisely, they went to the boxes cradled in her arms, stacked like a tower. Each one looked a good seventy or eighty centimeters tall, and five of them were piled together. Empty cardboard, a woman could have managed well enough—but no one on the way to open a Comiket booth would be hauling empties. Books, surely, and packed full of them. There was no striking muscle on those arms and legs. Where was strength like that coming from? It wasn't only Ninomae. People passing by stared in open astonishment, one after another.
"Isn't that heavy?"
"Hm? Not at all? Everyone in my family just has a healthy constitution~"
My little sister's even on a sports team at school. Sakuragi added it with a bright, easy smile.
The whole family is healthy. My little sister is good at sports. As an explanation for monstrous strength, it fell woefully short. At the very least, the youkai bloodline seemed all the more certain.
"Ah. Our booth's over that way."
"A wall booth? Figures, for a big-name circle……"
It was the sort of placement the organizers gave a circle they expected to draw a crowd, set so a long line could form with ease. A so-called wall booth, and proof of the name Sakuragi carried as an illustrator.
She set the boxes down at the booth they'd been assigned and began picking the tape off them, one strip after another.
"Shall I open all of them?"
"Mm. I'd appreciate that~"
For a moment Han Seoyeon considered reaching for a proper tool. Then she remembered that what she was carrying was supposed to be a cosplay prop sword, and meekly split the tape with a fingernail.
"I'll help too."
Ninomae crouched down beside them and joined the work.
"So what is all of this, anyway?"
"Mmm~ a bit of everything. This time's new book, copies of the doujinshi from last Comiket? There are dakimakura covers this time, too?"
Seoyeon had asked out of a sudden curiosity, and Sakuragi answered in that soft, drawling voice.
…A new book?
Wrestling with tape that refused to tear, Ninomae listened to the two of them and drifted into thought.
Maya-senpai… what was the new book Sakuragi-san decided to put out this time, again…?
Fellow talents under the same agency or not, Ninomae and Sakuragi had never been especially close. This was the first time she had even seen the woman's real face. Naturally, she didn't know much about her as an illustrator either—only the occasional glimpse, when Sakuragi drew fanart of something Ninomae was buried in. Or if she had happened to hear something, she had surely let it pass as unimportant.
"—Ah."
The sound was a sigh of relief at finally getting the tape off and the box open, and at the same time a gasp, as a fact she had already known came back to her all at once.
"Hnyah—?!"
The contents hit her eyes, and Ninomae slammed the box shut with a thin, startled shriek.
She remembered. Far too late, it returned to her.
Sakuragi's new release this time was a foot-play book starring Amairo Tsubasa, Holy Knight of the very same Anathema.
In an instant the red reached all the way to Ninomae's ears.
W-wait a minute. I agreed to work sales without thinking… now that I think about it, is this an R-18 booth staff job……?!
"A busty little beauty, selling her coworker's R-18 doujin… hmm. I can feel the inspiration stirring~"
"Oh. Might I place a reservation now?"
"Ugh, would both of you please be quiet…!"
Illustrator Sakuragi Oka's one-woman circle, Big-Ship, Big-Gun Doctrine.
Sakuragi worked freely on both the shady side and the sunny side, drawing little distinction between them, and yet what she put out under this circle carried a weight beyond the rest. Doujinshi released in the name of Big-Ship, Big-Gun Doctrine at Comiket were never sold through any other channel. She did sometimes bring older works back out at a later Comiket, leftovers reheated for another day, but their scarcity remained considerable all the same.
And what happens when popularity and scarcity overlap at an event the size of Comiket? Ninomae was feeling the answer in her bones.
"There are… so many people……"
She let out a small sigh and murmured it, in the tone of someone who had never imagined there would be this many. At first she had been a little ashamed to be selling doujinshi of that sort of content. After tens of minutes face to face with the crowd pouring in, even the half-naked covers no longer stirred much of anything in her.
"If you're tired, would you like to rest in the back for a bit?"
"No. I'll help a little longer."
Han Seoyeon asked it while drawing fresh books from a box and setting them on the table, but Ninomae shook her head. She wasn't tired to that extent. Not yet.
"…Still, it is a little disappointing that I can't use magic."
She whispered it at a volume only Han Seoyeon, right beside her, could hear, just after handing over a five-hundred-yen coin in change for a book.
"It'd be so much easier if I could order a familiar around here, too."
"It can't be helped. Miss Sakuragi is a person of the surface."
Reinforcements could be called. What could not be done was explain where those reinforcements came from.
"I'll heal you, so let's hold out a little longer."
"Uu… thank you."
Han Seoyeon brushed a hand lightly down her back. A warmth seeped through that had nothing to do with body heat.
"I watch your streams all the time!"
"Oh my. I don't do internet broadcasts~ You must have mixed me up with someone who shares the name."
All the while, Sakuragi kept receiving customers with that bright, easy smile. She made no particular effort to hide who she was on stream, and even now she was cosplaying the oni Kitayama Maya—and yet, officially, she was an entirely different person.
No. This was no time to let her attention wander. Ninomae gathered herself and faced front again.
"Welco—eh?"
What came into view at once was a trio in every variety of hat, each with a Gen 1 official illustration T-shirt on underneath. Nothing odd about that in itself. The books for sale wore the red sticker, yes, but this was still a booth for an Anathema Production VTuber, and fans turning up as customers was only natural.
"Oh-ho. Never did I dream we should meet in a place like this."
A blond man with blue eyes, in a ridiculous silk hat that looked a good fifty centimeters tall, wearing a shirt of the bakeneko Yugure Tama.
"Wh-what the hell are you doing, acting like you know them so damn boldly—you bastard, Philotanuss!"
A woman with her golden eyes hidden under a black cap. The hair was black, and yet the impression she gave was thoroughly Western, and she wore it in a ponytail. Beneath a dark gray coat was a shirt of the serpent-god Tachibana Rin.
"People are waiting behind us. We ought to save the small talk."
The last was a woman in a cardigan that looked rather thin, considering it was winter. Her features and sun-browned skin called South America to mind, and a Gravekeeper's cappello romano sat on her head. Hers, for its part, was the T-shirt of the miko Rokumondera Aki.
"Ehh……"
Named properly, in that order, they were Philotanuss, Marbas, and Alejandra Monica Lopez Sanchez. Running into people she knew was surprising enough on its own. Two demons and an Apostle was a combination no one could have predicted, and Ninomae froze where she stood.
"Right, so three copies of the new book, and… one of The Banquet of a Fully Grown A×thema, please."
"Here you are. Five hundred yen back."
"Hang in there, Seoyeon."
More precisely, she stayed frozen while Han Seoyeon handled them in her place—right up until one Apostle finished selling anti-Christian literature to another.
"But… is it really all right to let her read something like that?! She's with the Church…!"
"If it truly weighs on her, I imagine she'll take herself off to confession."
"Eh……"
Was a cleric like that really acceptable? The Roman Catholic Church…? Ninomae was thrown into confusion, but the line kept coming, and she hurried back to selling.
"Hmm…"
"…Shion?"
"Ah. My apologies."
This time it was Han Seoyeon who looked a little dazed, and Ninomae called to her, puzzled. At the sound of her voice Seoyeon came back to herself at once and dropped the bill she had just taken into the cash tray.
"Would it be all right if I stepped out to the restroom for a moment?"
She said it while shoving into her pocket a small slip of paper that had been tucked between the bills, and smiled as if nothing at all were the matter.