The Almighty Has Sorely Afflicted Me (1)
"What is this car? The whole atmosphere says it could turn into Optimus Prime at any moment..."
"That is the first time anyone has assessed it that way."
Han Seoyeon glanced at the woman muttering as she climbed into the passenger seat, then set her hands on the wheel again.
"Well, aside from Ninomae, you're the first of my acquaintances to see it, so I suppose it's only natural."
Senjoji Chiyo listened, and drew her seatbelt across.
"You just bought it? I've never seen you driving anything like this."
Where had the blue truck she usually drove gone off to, and what was she doing at the wheel of something this enormous—with a trailer hitched on behind it, no less? A tractor unit, wasn't that the classification? Chiyo turned it over. In all honesty, she didn't know much about vehicles.
"Yes. I don't live alone anymore."
"Mmm. So the two of you really are going out together more often."
On her own it might not have mattered, but if two of them were going to be getting around, acquiring a vehicle wasn't a bad choice.
"Still... why a truck? And one this size."
"It's useful, isn't it?"
"...Would it be all right if I asked what's loaded in that trailer back there?"
"Military security makes that difficult."
"...Can I get out?"
"You may not. I was joking. And we're moving, so put the belt back on."
As if the burden of sharing a vehicle with classified ordnance had crashed down on her all at once, Chiyo unbuckled. Seoyeon caught the strap in one hand and clicked it home again.
She had no intention of dragging a frightened companion around by force, but it was obvious the other woman was perfectly at ease and only putting on a show. As Professor Senjoji's younger sister, Chiyo had served as Seoyeon's assistant on field surveys more than once, and there had been times the work went wrong and her life hung in the balance. Someone who had crossed the line of death that often was not about to be frightened by a thing of this degree.
"Well. If I have to ride in an ominous car for the sake of sharing it with a beauty, I'll ride as much as you like."
"That iron nerve of yours never fails to impress me."
"Is that... a compliment?"
"That was the intention, at least."
Come to think of it, hadn't she said that volunteering as Seoyeon's assistant had sprung from precisely that motive? Ulterior motives, carried this far, were nearly admirable.
"The courage to take a risk for the sake of what you want is certainly an important virtue."
"Right. If a flag has even a one percent chance of leading into an H-scene, it's worth staking your life on."
"There will be no erotic event. Not one chance in ten thousand."
"Don't crush a maiden's pure dream!"
Pure... Well. Desire with not a single impurity mixed in could, by the dictionary, be called pure. Seoyeon didn't rise to it. She looked straight ahead again.
"Uuugh, my hopes, trampled flat. So take responsibility and marry me, Shion-chan."
"I'd like to return that. Bearing a guilt that isn't even one's own is already covered quite thoroughly by Adam's original sin."
Heartless. Chiyo sank back against the seat and grumbled.
"That aside, you look rather worn out."
Seoyeon said it after a sidelong glance at her.
"Kind of sudden. What makes you think so?"
"You smell like it."
"You know, Shion-chan, you're seriously terrifying sometimes..."
That was a sense of smell beyond even a beast's. Chiyo smiled wryly.
Ought she to be amazed that it took at least two more talents of this kind before one could so much as become an Apostle Candidate?
"But, well... I guess it's only natural. I was at the company again today, prepping for the live, and I'm on my way back."
"Ah. That's right, now that you mention it."
Only a few days remained until the live concert of Serena Lasagna, Chiyo's witch. Dance, song—she would be buried in rehearsal.
"Then you were standing out in front of the company because..."
"My sister was supposed to pick me up. Oh, and I already messaged her once I got in the truck and told her she didn't need to come, so don't worry about it."
If she had been waiting at the company, did that mean Chiyo's older sister, Professor Senjoji Chihaya, knew what she did for a living?
...No. Of course she would.
If what had been quietly let slip during the last group collaboration stream was true, they had been ready to invite her on as a guest the moment her schedule allowed. Given that the minimum condition for that invitation was being an acquaintance who knew the second generation were streaming, there could be no doubt Professor Senjoji had some grasp of what her younger sister did.
It was a fact Seoyeon hadn't known, and yet it wasn't truly surprising. They were sisters under one roof. It would have been stranger if she didn't know at least this much.
The genuinely unexpected thing lay somewhere else.
"You were personally acquainted with the head of the agency, weren't you, Chiyo? Thinking back on what was said then, it seemed Professor Senjoji had some acquaintance with him as well..."
"Yeah. That's right. Just like you said, Shion-chan."
It wasn't exactly something worth hiding. Muttering as much to herself, Chiyo nodded without resistance.
"You could call him a childhood friend, I guess. More precisely, he's my sister's childhood friend, and I just ended up seeing a lot of him because of that. That's the stronger impression."
In the end, the relationship amounted to nothing more than her sister's friend.
"Then between the two of them?"
"Well, if they're still in touch even now, they're on good terms. About thirty percent of it is business, though."
"Business, you say?"
She had never heard of Professor Senjoji running any sort of enterprise. This, then, had to be Nakabashi Gyokichi's business—the VTuber agency.
"Was Professor Senjoji affiliated with Anathema Production as well?"
"Affiliated, or... if I had to put a name on it, more like an advisor."
Chiyo scratched her cheek as she said it.
"Gyokichi coming up with a VTuber group stuffed full of inhuman, anomaly-type concepts was fine as far as it went... but while he was trying to make it concrete, he ran into a problem he couldn't ignore."
Seoyeon prompted the rest with a silent look.
"It was a matter of accuracy. Since anomalies actually exist in this world, he figured that if you designed an inhuman character carelessly, you could end up with a species-discrimination problem."
"A more politically correct reason than I ever imagined..."
Knowing as much didn't make the work easy. Information on anomalies was tightly limited and fragmentary, and even those who had set foot in the hidden world rarely came by specialized knowledge. Anomalies did tend to draw one another, at least...
"Gyokichi may look like that, but he's one hundred percent human."
Whether looks aside was a phrase one ought to use about someone else was debatable... but Seoyeon could not honestly pretend she didn't know what was meant, and she looked away. So that was why there had been no trace of fear in her from the first moment she saw Seoyeon. She had been broken in to horror since childhood.
"Hence the expert consultation. Lucky for him that a childhood friend happened to be the authority in the field, I suppose."
"I doubt Professor Senjoji ever dreamed, in this life, that she would be called in to consult on VTuber character settings."
"You really never know where life takes you."
Hadn't someone said that life was nothing but a string of coincidences? Chiyo said as much, then grinned, pleased with herself.
"Which means me marrying a pretty girl isn't an impossible dream either!"
"We were still on this subject?"
Seoyeon looked as if she couldn't believe it. Chiyo remained entirely unashamed.
"You saw the stream, didn't you? I asked, and Hitomi-chan actually kissed me."
Dreams do come true. Chiyo nodded along to her own conclusion.
"It would have been affection, though. Not romance."
"Who cares, so long as I enjoyed it. And I fully intend to keep asking you too, Shion-chan, in the hope that someday you'll at least give me a kiss on the cheek."
Judging by Chiyo's reaction, Seoyeon's objection hadn't meant much of anything.
Hmm...
At those words Seoyeon's face went briefly thoughtful, and she looked again at the signal ahead. The yellow had just gone red.
"So that's why—kyaah?!"
Seoyeon twisted in her seat and came down over her. Chiyo startled hard, seized both of Seoyeon's wrists in a panic, and tried to hold her off. Given the gap in their strength, real resistance was obviously impossible, but here the mere expression of refusal was enough. Seoyeon went still and, from that near distance, looked into Chiyo's face.
"W-wait, this is way too sudden...!"
"You asked, so I was going to oblige... You're surprisingly weak to this sort of thing. It was the same with Ninomae."
"Well of course anyone would panic if you just did it out of nowhere!"
Only after Seoyeon drew back again could Chiyo breathe properly. Her heart was still hammering.
"What kind of change of heart is this...? A minute ago you were shutting me down cold."
"That was a marriage proposal."
If it fell within affection rather than romance, there was no reason she couldn't do even this. That was what Seoyeon meant.
"You always shove me off when I cling too much, even on a normal day."
"So you were aware it was too much..."
Dumbfounded as she sounded, Seoyeon could follow the point well enough. It was not something the usual Han Seoyeon would have done. Thinking it through, that was certainly true, and she nodded. She had never been the sort to step forward and initiate contact herself.
Growing used to it through Ninomae had something to do with that, perhaps.
"Perhaps it's the Japan–Korea Treaty of Amity."
"...What?"
Chiyo, of course, had no way to understand from the term alone, dropped on her without warning. Seoyeon explained the conversation she had recently had with Ninomae.
"Mmm... I don't think that's an example people usually reach for. Especially you, Shion-chan. You're Korean."
"Call it the N-word. Permitted only to Black people."
It was, as expected, a notion difficult to accept. Senjoji Chiyo frowned. Were people who studied history simply all like this?
"Anyway, I understood the part about having to give Hitomi-chan as much as you've given other people... but how does that connect to what you just did? If there's something you want to do with Hitomi-chan, you could just do it."
"Because I want to save it up and pour the whole of it out at once."
"No, that's exactly the sort of thing you could do straight to Hitomi-chan without going through anyone else, isn't it?"
"What I like is the kind where the contact just keeps going. She's so embarrassed she thinks she might die, and yet she can't properly stop it, because of something she said herself."
"...I've thought this now and then, but you really are a serious sadist, aren't you, Shion-chan?"
Chiyo murmured it with a look of faint, dawning clarity.
"Or maybe this is what it feels like, being the double-ended dildo for a yuri couple's satisfying play..."
"...And yours are the grotesque metaphors, Chiyo?"
This time it was Seoyeon who turned a look of contempt on her. Chiyo only shrugged, calling it a reward.
"So this is what it felt like. Every time Ninomae favored me with her contempt, I smiled and called it a reward..."
Seoyeon let out a sigh.
"Anyway, where are you coming back from, Shion-chan?"
"I stopped by the church for a little while. I'll be somewhere else for a time, so while I was telling them that, I thought I'd see a few faces as well."
"Huh? You going away on a trip?"
Chiyo tilted her head.
"Holy Knight work?"
"If it were that, there would have been no need for me to go to the church and say so myself. It's a personal matter."
With that, Seoyeon set her foot on the accelerator again. The light had turned green.
For a moment the engine filled the cabin.
"You two really are a couple, aren't you? You don't have to hide it from me, of all people."
"I told you. We're not."