Class Is Eternal
In the story itself, the times Pino showed her face could be counted on one hand. Her monikers, by contrast, turned up at every turn, and the reason was the peculiar nature of her thralls.
As I've said, unlike every other thrall in the work, Pino's kept their personalities intact. The simple fact that they could think for themselves carried a great many problems with it.
If the thralls belonging to anyone but Pino could be compared to puppets, then Pino's were fanatics with a gift for infection. They went beyond merely carrying out orders. They could think, and from those thoughts they could scheme, brimming with autonomy and a thoroughly useless zeal. There was even the sort who would spit on a command outright if it ran against their own convictions. A loyal vassal who burns their own body for their lord's future might look rather splendid, but from the enemy's side it was horror and nothing else.
A few dozen, a few hundred guerrillas being more trouble than one great army under a single head is simply common sense, isn't it? They even showed an intelligent streak that went past merely annihilating their foes—now and then winning someone over, now and then forging an alliance. On top of that they occasionally threw charity events for the sake of their image, and the whole performance looked uncomfortably like a certain modern cult. That was why she was known, and only on the community boards, as the witch of that cult.
Pile Pino's misanthropy and her hands-off neglect onto habits like those, and her thralls ran wild like a car with a stuck accelerator. The result came back around as a swelling of her infamy. The problem was that even their master didn't look kindly on the way they carried on.
"No matter how friendly they are toward me, if the ones being friendly are cockroaches, it's still kind of gross, isn't it? They may be useful, but leave them be and it feels like they'll come crawling up. Of course I'd find it unsettling."
Wasn't that exactly how Pino felt? However much help they were, watching the things she loathed multiply at their own discretion could hardly have been pleasant. Perhaps that was why she kept people who specialized in internal purges, and one of them was the Skin Collector.
"Even that loyalty of yours is nothing but a nuisance to her, you know? Why don't you just die already? You little insect."
The Skin Collector's ability was mask-making. Peel the skin from someone's face, fashion it into a mask, and it became possible to know everything about them. Rachel put that gift to enthusiastic use, reading the plans of those marked for purge ahead of time and sweeping them all up at once, and so she earned the alias Internal Executioner. She was also called the Witch's Index Finger, for reliably destroying whoever Pino pointed to, and the Suicide Designer, for driving a target into a corner until they took their own life. A named character, one who had worked alongside the protagonist a handful of times.
"She was a character whose actions left a deeper impression than her ability, though."
By the nature of the work she was given, she was actually someone with a great many points of contact with the protagonist. Thanks to that, she had joined forces with the protagonist a few times, and what stuck in the memory was the way she made a pass at the heroine on every one of those occasions. She would drift over at her leisure, like a pedigreed cat or a sly fox, and lay the charm on thick.
"If I'd only met the young princess a little sooner, she might have become my master. Those fierce eyes... truly captivating. Mm... want to try stepping on me?"
And then, from the very first meeting, she would ask someone to step on her, or get worked up watching the person being stepped on—honestly. Did she think readers would like it if she acted like that?
...I, for one, like it very much.
At first I took her for a masochist, but according to the setting book she was closer to a submissive than a masochist. The type who gets excited by mental subjugation, was it? Anyway, a pervert. The problem, quite apart from the perversion, was that she read people's hearts extraordinarily well. A competent pervert, in other words. And that competence had manifested in a rather positive direction.
"Whoa. What is this? The room changed this much in a single day?"
Until I spoke to her she had been scribbling away in a notebook without so much as a word, but an expert is an expert. Not even a few days had passed, and on the large scale the interior of my room and the placement of the furniture had changed; on the small scale, so had the order in which meals appeared and the positions of the books lined up in the study. Had it been only that, my impression would have ended at why go to all this trouble, but it was genuinely startling to find myself, without meaning to, taking pleasure in the altered surroundings. It felt as if the environment itself had been customized for my exclusive use.
"I happen to be quite confident in work of this sort."
She said it with a self-assured smile, and sure enough, a named character is different. What surprised me most, though, was the speed of her reactions.
My living speaker, Mark No. 1—Hana—had turned out, contrary to my expectations, not terribly satisfying in the performance department. I could tell she bore me goodwill, and that she was trying hard in her own way... but the quality itself simply wasn't good, shall we say?
"It's ridiculous to talk about a person's quality, but she keeps lagging."
In Yuri's case, it felt as if her expression and the parts of her body were operating on their own. In Hana's, her eyes would die in a single instant, as if something had possessed her. The problem was that she then failed to move for several seconds.
"Hana?"
"......"
"Ah... she's frozen again."
The first time I saw it, a finishing move from a certain boys' manga came to mind. It was a series about sorcery, and the ultimate technique instantly crammed so much information into the opponent's head that they stopped doing anything at all, wasn't it? I was pretty sure the name was Unlimited Void, or something like that. Anyway, Hana's condition looked similar. A body that mentally couldn't accept the file called Pino? Roughly that sort of feeling. So that was why I had no memory of seeing her in the original. Hana, it seemed, really had been a mere two-star from birth.
"Hnn..."
Hana knew her own ability fell short, and at times like these she would wilt and sink into gloom, and the sight was so pointlessly pathetic that I felt sorry for her. Given that she was here at all, she had to be a child with some ability of her own—but birth doesn't change, does it? It felt like a two-star character who, however high you raised her level, could never catch up to a five-star's potential.
Rachel, by contrast, was a cutting-edge device with real-time transmission both ways.
"I did well, didn't I?"
What was truly astonishing was how little of it showed on her face. However well you understand the situation, it's still unsettling when the face of the person you're speaking to suddenly twists or locks up. There is something pleasing, too, about the way she concealed it so neatly. Beyond that, she was frighteningly quick on the uptake.
"Oh my. My lady, is that book perhaps The Magician of the Crowd?"
"Huh? Yeah. Do you know it?"
"Yes. A fairy tale I read often as a child... Goodness. To find it here."
Rachel grinned as she looked at the book I was reading, and I smiled back at her and nodded.
The book was, just as the title suggested, a fairy tale about Pino—one that beautified her deeds to an excessive degree, propaganda, in a sense. Volumes like that were occasionally tucked onto the study shelves, and whenever I came across them the intent was so obvious that I couldn't help laughing. If the shelves had been packed solid with them I might have let it pass, but with a single copy hidden away in the study like this, wasn't it actually cuter?
Wanting to play along with that intent, I would sometimes read the book just so and wait for a reaction, but that absolute idiot Hana had no eye for it and never caught on. Born a two-star, I suppose; no sense for things either. Rachel, by contrast, caught it at once. How could I possibly be displeased? And her performance was good enough that whenever something like this happened, she seemed to transmit it immediately.
"Hehe."
She tried to hide it by shifting her expression as if nothing were wrong, but the blush came so often that there was no missing it. Pino, too, must have dispatched Rachel on account of that performance. With a five-star constantly showing off her specs right beside a mere two-star, I ended up comparing them whether I wanted to or not.
I'd still like to put her to use, if I can...
Hana's a friend with plenty of fight in her, and talking with her is fun enough... but performance is performance. When there's an RTX 4080 sitting right beside you, is there any need to use a 4050? Wouldn't that be rude to the 4080? The guilt lasts only a moment, but class is eternal... Hana. I'm sorry!
"Rachel, would you help me today? Hana, rest a little. Mm. Could you bring some snacks?"
"Yes...?"
The moment I finished speaking, Hana's expression turned utterly pitiful. She looked like a puppy abandoned by its owner. Make a face like that over something this small and I come off as the bad guy, don't I? Tsk—?! Are you going to put that expression away?
"Mmm... don't be so heartbroken."
Rachel. If you comfort her like that, it really does feel as if I've done something awful. Are the two of you trying to turn me into the villain? This is a little vexing. I know it's a joke, but a mere speakerphone teasing a person ought to learn its place. Lately, being treated like a baby had been starting to get on my nerves. Shouldn't I take this chance to discipline her a little?
And I happen to know exactly how she likes to be handled.
The method for handling Rachel was simpler than one might think.
"Then, Rachel. I'm sorry, but would you take my socks off?"
"Yes?"
"My socks. Would you take them off?"
Treat her like a tool.
I crossed my legs and gave my foot a little wiggle. To someone else it might have been an unbearably insulting way to be treated... but Rachel wore a blank look for a moment, then flushed all at once. Truly a pervert fit to hold the crown for explicitness in the story. I'm this embarrassed just saying it, and yet—what a sturdy mind she has.
"Yes!"
And the answer was lively, too.