In the Real World

"Funyaaaaaaaa!!"

Karona—no, rather, the person inside Karona, Saya Shinohara, was writhing in agony.

But this wasn't VR space. The thin, flat futon and paper-thin walls of her apartment did nothing to absorb sound. A thud came from the other side of the wall, prompting a tiny "Hyai, I'm sorry!" before she clammed up… If you're going to writhe, you really have to do it in VR space.

"Haa… haa… Still, to think I'd actually mirror Mikado-sama's stream…"

No matter how she looked at it, it was a catastrophic blunder… Hmm, maybe she should delete the archive after all? Or cut out that part? How did you even do that? She had no idea. She'd rather not have to watch it back… it was too painful… she quietly closed the window. She'd figure out how to delete it tomorrow.

Grrrowl. Her stomach rumbled. Even writhing in shame couldn't stop hunger. Saya decided to nibble on her staple: sliced bread (eight slices for ninety-eight yen).

She toasted two slices, pressed her hands together with a small "Itadakimasu," and ate them. No jam, no butter.

The insides were fluffy, the surface toasted a light wheat-brown. When she bit in, the satisfying crunch of fresh toast and a subtle sweetness spread through her mouth. Even cheap bread was respectably tasty fresh off the toaster.

"The cost-performance of sliced bread is unbeatable… two slices per meal, that's twenty-five yen a meal… yummy."

Adding a comment very far removed from anything an ojou-sama would say, she poured tap water into a cup and drank. Hydration was important. Apparently the newest VR device, the "Cocoon Bed," actually delivered nutrition straight to your body when you ate food in VR. Her secondhand headset obviously had no such feature.

Well, the Cocoon Bed was basically medical equipment. It cost more than this entire cheap apartment building. For Saya, who was already groaning about saving up for two 50,000-yen Secretary AIs, it belonged to a world she had nothing to do with.

"Fuu…"

With her belly full, she calmed down a little.

The archive. She shouldn't wait until tomorrow, she should delete it right now. If she got doxxed, a flame war was inevitable. Then again, Mikado-onee-sama's comments directed at her were too precious to lose, so maybe she should clip just that part for herself. Wait, she could just clip it from Onee-sama's archive. Her own reaction wasn't necessary… and then it occurred to Saya that there was such a thing as a "private" setting.

"If I set it to private, I can take my time dealing with it properly. Alright!"

She quickly put on her VR headset and opened the BCD stream archive management page. Instead of fully immersing, she stayed as Saya and operated it in MR mode.

"Hide… is this it? Okay! Setting complete!"

With her earlier stream hidden, Saya breathed a sigh of relief. Now she could sleep soundly tonight… she took off the VR headset, brushed her teeth, and crawled into bed. Just like that, her breathing slipped into a gentle sleep.

She must have been incredibly exhausted, and incredibly relieved. She dropped off in record time.

But Saya had misunderstood one thing.

The "Hide" setting was a feature that simply removed a video from rankings and recommendations. You could still access it if you had the direct URL. That was its intended use.

… It was a completely different thing from the "Private" setting.

And unlike small-time solo B-Caster Karona, Mikado had over four million channel subscribers. Naturally, some of them had gone, "Hey, who mirrored her stream?" and tracked her down. Karona had been found almost immediately. Before she'd even hit the hide button.

The identified archive was posted to SNS with its URL quoted, tagged as "that careless streamer who got a warning from Mikado-sama."

Someone who saw it thought, "let's try clipping this lol." The video was hidden, but the clip permissions were the same as a regular archive. The sharper ones pieced together "ah, this is someone who meant to set it private but messed up," and clipped it anyway.

The clip was uploaded with the original archive's URL attached. Titled "A Mika-Raid Careless Streamer lol."

It was fortunate that Karona's blunder was genuine, and that she was simply a sincere fan of Mikado. Even with malicious intent, no matter which part you clipped, it was just a Mikado fan being a Mikado fan.

And so the Mika-Raiders who watched the harmless clip welcomed her warmly as one of their own, going "ahh, i get it～."

The result—

"Fwaah, I slept well. Now, what should I do today… ah, I need to deal with the archive. Um, but first, email check… hm? Oh, SuperChat has been unlocked. So I hit 200 subscribers while I was asleep…"

Sleepily regretting that she'd missed the moment her subscriber count hit 200, Saya checked the number with her just-woken-up brain.

—There, the number written was 1,025.

That her dignity nearly burst out of her bladder right then and there is a secret that stays in this room.