The After-Party
Even after Blackout Cat ended, the chat refused to settle down.
Lunari caught her breath and took the mic.
"Everyone. This is the last song of the night."
"This one is… personally, my favorite."
Here Is All of Me would close out the VR concert.
Part of it was spite—wanting to land one clean blow of pure skill on that insufferable Kurogami Yui by shuffling the setlist so Blackout Cat hit earlier. But there was also the simple fact that ending on this song just looked beautiful.
"Ahem! I can still remember the days when I had one viewer like it was yesterday."
"This is the song that brings back that miracle of a moment—when someone found me, curled up in my tiny room."
"Thank you for coming to hang out today. And… please take care of me from here on, too."
After that light little introduction, Lunari took center stage.
A piano accompaniment settled in, quiet and unhurried.
The complete opposite of Blackout Cat's explosion.
A spare, minimal piece.
A song that had once held Do-yoon's pain—and that now held Lunari's hope.
In a room five pyeong small—
This place is an endless universe
Compared to only a few months ago, the change was night and day.
The Yu Nari who hated being judged in front of people was gone.
The VTuber Lunari had become someone who shone under her own light.
I'm happy here, too
Because I'm with the world
More than ten thousand people—nearly twenty thousand—had come into Lunari's room.
Not every last one of them had shown up for her alone. But from the first note of the set to the last, the person who held every gaze was, without question, Lunari.
The chat that had gone completely feral during Blackout Cat filled up this time with sorrow.
Everyone was listening.
Holding the image of that boy in a room in their minds, they focused.
A space left with only piano and voice.
This was where Lunari's slightly husky, all the more earnest tone was laid bare at its most raw.
No brass on this song. No drums. No bass.
In a quiet so complete you could hear her breathing, a single voice filled the space.
I'll wait right here
In this place until you come
Good night
The last note faded.
The stage sank into stillness.
The song was over.
"……Thank you."
Lunari's voice cracked.
"That was Lunari."
"Everyone come out! Let's say goodbye!"
To protect the afterglow of that final stage, she chose a quick farewell.
Shin Se-young and Kurogami Yui came up onto the stage as well, finished a brief greeting to the viewers, and the stream cut off.
"Huuuuh……"
Yu Nari slumped back into her chair like she was collapsing.
"……It's over."
Only now did she feel the trembling in her hands.
"Heh."
A laugh burst out of her, late and helpless.
She hurried to open the message window.
She wanted to load it with every scrap of pride she felt—but she held back, and sent only those four words.
From the moment the concert started to the moment it ended, the world outside the screen had been turning at full speed.
Compared to idol fandoms, Shin Se-young's fans didn't usually tear through social media; they tended to keep things quiet. But she was a singer loved so broadly by the public that word still spread across SNS pretty far.
Composer Yeong-il's songs had been known among people who lived on Link and the streaming scene—but this was the first time they had knocked on the door of broader popular music.
The aftershocks of the concert spread across every corner of the internet.
Lunari's fan café membership nearly doubled, surging from 1,800 to 3,500.
Even in a real-name fan café that was usually on the quieter side, the excitement was thick—and on anonymous community sites, the popular posts were plastered wall-to-wall with clips from Lunari's concert.
Unlike during Virtual Voice Fight, she had nearly monopolized the spotlight. That was partly the structure of the show itself—but more than that, it was Lunari's vocal ability and stage presence, grown even further since last time, reaching past the VR world and straight into her fans' hearts.
Long after the festival everyone had enjoyed was over—long after people kept drifting through communities, unable to let the aftertaste go—
Three hours after the concert ended, Han So-yeong's edited video of Lunari's stage went up on YouTube.
Not long after the concert wrapped, I was trading messages with Yu Nari when it turned into a call.
"Yeong-il! We're having an after-party today! Over the wire!"
"A LAN after-party?"
Weren't after-parties supposed to be for the people who actually performed?
Ah. Broadly speaking, I was a participant too.
Still, a gathering with several people I'd never even talked to made me uncomfortable enough that I was about to refuse.
"Se-young already left for a schedule, and Yui vanished saying she felt sick. But going to sleep like this would be… kind of a shame, right? Let's have an after-party with just the two of us!"
"Hmm."
If it was just the two of us, wasn't that just a normal call to share concert recaps?
I didn't need anything grand attached to it. I was more than fine with that.
"Alright. I want to hear about it too."
"Waaah! Great! Hang on a sec!"
Through the headset I heard Nari scramble off somewhere at full speed.
A moment later something clunked down, and she was back in her seat.
"I brought beer."
"Alcohol again?"
"This time it's one can of beer! Last time was……soju, and that was a mistake."
"One can is fine?"
"Just a little buzzed? Don't you have anything to drink, Yeong-il? Beer or something? It'd be nice if we drank together."
"I don't have any alcohol in the house."
As if I'd keep something like that around.
No one in my family really drank either. My little sister was a high school senior grinding for college entrance exams, and my parents weren't the type who enjoyed drinking. I barely left my room as it was.
"Huh? There's nothing at home?"
"There's barley tea."
"Aww, that's too bad… Can you just order delivery?"
"Delivery's a bit…"
"Why?"
"I'd feel too awkward with my family watching. I can't take the delivery."
"Ah… yeah, I guess…"
Nari made little frustrated noises, like she really wanted us to drink together.
"Maybe… stepping outside for a second would be too much…?"
"Uuuhm."
"Never mind! Cancel cancel! Let's just drink whatever we each have! It wasn't planned anyway!"
"Next time there's a chance, let's drink together."
It was seven in the evening—still a time when people would be out and about. Today was a no-go.
There was a convenience store near my place, and I'd always shadowboxed the idea of trying it once by myself. Setting that as the next goal for outdoor practice didn't sound half bad.
"Pssht—!"
Nari cracked open her beer can.
"Alright alright! Cheers—!"
"Cheers."
I picked up my barley tea.
The mic must have been close—I could hear the gulp as she swallowed, and even the satisfied "Kyaaa~" that followed.
"How was today? Not just 'it was good'—long version! Specifically! Tell me what stood out!"
"Uh……"
It really had been good, but if I had to unpack it longer…
"Overall I was completely satisfied. I was shocked when you worked the crowd, Nari. The chat was so fast that even when I typed something it vanished in a second. Oh—and the avatar. Since it was the art style I picked, it matched my taste perfectly."
"More more!"
"Uh… the duet was great too. It suited Shin Se-young better than I'd imagined. The kind of song you want to hear again?"
"Hehe. We decided I'd call her Se-young unnie. Feels like we actually got close?"
Nari laughed with every sentence, knocking back beer as she talked.
If she kept drinking that fast, wouldn't it be gone in no time?
"What about my Broken Clock?"
"Oh, that! I was so surprised—like, so Nari can sing it that way too."
"Hihi. I prepped hard for it. In the highlight I thickened the resonance a bit more, then punched the full voice in with real power?"
"I kind of wished I'd recorded a few different versions. I really loved it."
Pssht—!
"Heh… my song, it's my song. How dare you, heheh."
Laughter and the sound of another can cracking open came through the mic.
"Nari, didn't you say one can?"
"Ah I got thirsty and finished it too fast. Two cans is fine too! Hah."
The laughter was getting looser, which made me a little suspicious—but she said it was fine, so I let it go.
Nari took another sip of beer.
"Ugh, drinking alone really is unfair."
"What's unfair about it."
"An after-party means drinking together! This is what gets the mood going!"
"I'm having plenty of fun as it is…"
"Huuuung. Clack—"
The sound of a can being set down.
"Yeong-il… do you just not like alcohol itself?"
I didn't know that either.
"It's not that I don't like it. I've just never had any."
"……What?"
Was that really something to be shocked about?
I'd spent my twenty-one years basically sealed inside my house. It made sense.
"Not even once in your whole life?"
But to Yu Nari, it seemed to land like a bombshell.
"Yeah."
"No, how old are you and you've never even—? That's a lie. You're just trying to look wholesome!"
Drinking didn't make someone a bad person, did it?
Come to think of it, Nari didn't know my age.
She'd casually open up about being twenty-two herself—but I'd never once said mine.
It wasn't that I'd been deliberately hiding it so much as Nari's consideration for never asking.
"I'm the only one who spilled everything… that's not fair… You tell me your age too, Yeong-il. How old are you?"
She'd never asked anything personal so directly before.
Whether it was the alcohol or how close we'd gotten, today was different.
I thought about it for a second.
There was no real reason to hide it.
"I'm twenty-one."
"……Huh?"
An awkward silence settled in.
"……Twenty-one?"
"Yeah."
"……You're younger than me?"
"Yeah."
"That… that's a lie……"
The silence stretched on.
Was this really that shocking?
"The image in my head is… ugh… I just assumed you were an oppa…"
Nari muttered to herself for a long while.
Then her voice suddenly spiked.
"Then I'm the older one?!"
"Well, yeah?"
"So that's how it was…… Whew."
Nari let out a long breath.
A breath that sounded like she'd decided something.
"Huh?"
"We're not the same age, but it's only one year. We talk all the time, and keeping the polite speech forever is awkward."
I'd figured we'd eventually get comfortable enough to talk casually.
What kind of friends kept using formal speech with each other forever?
Of course, I hadn't expected "eventually" to be today.
The power of alcohol was truly something.
"You don't want to?"
"Uh… no, talk however you want."
It wasn't that I hated the idea. Whether I was used to it was a completely separate problem.
I'd only started having real conversations with people thanks to Nari in the first place. Casual speech was even more foreign.
"Then try it. Drop the '-nim'! Say my name!"
"………"
It was just a word. Why was it so hard?
"Come on~"
Ahem.
"……Na, Nari, Nari-ya?"
"………"
I'd finally managed to strip off the honorific.
Why wasn't there a reaction?
I rolled my eyes awkwardly into the empty room—and then Nari spat the words out like she couldn't hold them in.
"Ah?"
Right.
I'd been so focused on dropping the formal speech that I'd skipped the title entirely.