Chapter Text
The next day, shortly past noon....
"Ryūuuuuuuuko-chaaaaaaaan!!"
It was an all-too-familiar occurrence.
The Mankanshoku Missile flying out of nowhere, the nonchalantly reflexive catch by Ryūko, and the distant echo of a sacred choir.
Only, Ryūko was mildly amused, rather than vexed or embarrassed at this sequence of events that had happened so many times.
"Y'know, Mako," she said, "I'm surprised you're still doing this, even after finishing school and becoming a part of Japan's workforce."
"Of course I'll always do it!" Mako retorted with a puffed cheek and arms crossed. "You're the Ryūko-chan I've known and loved for the last six years! Plus, you saved the world, but other than being Satsuki-sama's younger sister, the world doesn't recognize you as their hero! But! Even then, Ryūko-chan is still my hero and will always be my hero!"
She didn't do the Hallelujah pose as often as she used to, but just like the rest of her family, Mankanshoku Mako was the same as ever. And just like Ryũko, the fact that she had finished university was a complete miracle. It wasn't a matter of slacking off on studying... on the contrary, she had developed a machine-gun method of studying that would end up in a familiar situation.
"Ehhhh.... what time is it...? EHHHHHHHHHHHHH?"
In other words, she'd end up sleeping at her study desk and wake up on the morning of the test.... just twenty minutes before the test....
At a 19-minute commute away from campus.
Essentially, Ryūko, a slacker in her own right, would have to dash down from the apartment she lived in with Satsuki, grab Mako, and speed off to school in a whirlwind — sometimes by bike, sometimes on foot. And they would just make test day attendance to their respective classes by mere seconds.
In any case, Mako managed to scrape by university and, on the urging of her back-alley-educated doctor of a father, went into nursing school. The Hippocratic oath may not have been the biggest reason for Mako to go down this path, but it was very much like her to follow her father's footsteps.
Unfortunately, going down this road meant something important: she had less time to see Ryūko than ever before. Not that this led to any drifting away in their friendship, but it was certainly a change from what their lives had been for years.
In other words, today was one of those once-a-month occasions when they could go on a shopping date.
~~~~
"Ryūko-chan! They've grown bigger again!"
"Pipe your voice down, will ya? I get we're in a changing room, but the staff can still hear us outside, ya know?"
"Ah, but Satsuki-chan's size also just about caught up with yours lately, you know? Every time the two of you come to our house and eat my mom's mystery croquettes, you're neck and neck with how many you two end up eating!"
"Can you NOT say that here? What if the staff hear what you're saying about the Kiryuin Conglomerate executive's growing chest?"
"It means more money, Ryūko-chan! The next time she goes for a model shoot for a new line of clothes, she could have all of her factories in the world turning out the one line and it would be instantly sold out!"
"... this is so embarrassing."
~~~~
After a typical exchange between the two friends, they eventually settled on their choices.
"So which one did you end up getting, Mako?"
"The M-Cup!!"
"... sorry, I didn't mean the size, I meant the design."
"Ah! I went with red lace!"
"Eh? Why red lace?"
"Well... it's Ira-senpai's weakness, after all!"
The Pokari Sweat in Ryūko's mouth came out like the fine mist of hairspray.
"A-and how did you find that out? Also, while we're out here in Shibuya of all places, I think you should call him Gamagōri-san, not Ira-kun..."
"It's fine! He said I could call him that, anyway!"
"Eh?"
"He lost a bet at a socialite party and had to state his deepest desire to his whole table. I was so happy to hear it!"
"Oh, heavens..."
"Anyway! At another socialite party I went to, Ira-kun was there, too. He looked a little gloomy that day, maybe because he worked a lot that week with his family construction business or whatever-"
"He's the CEO of Gamagōri Construction, baka."
"Ah, yes! He leads the company, doesn't he? Anyway, I saw him looking a bit down that day and decided to cheer him up. So when nobody was looking, I came over to him and-"
Another mist of Pokari Sweat wafted into the air.
"Mako! You didn't actually do it, did you?"
"Did what?"
"Er, you know."
"Ah, sexual relations?"
"PFFFFFT-"
"No, he hasn't even asked me to be his girlfriend yet! I know he will when he's ready, but I'm still waiting!"
Ryūko breathed a sigh of relief. "I got a bit worried things got out of hand at that party, honestly..."
"No! But I did undo one of the straps on my shoulder and made sure he was the only one who saw my red bra strap!"
"And I'm guessing there was a lecture from him that came right after?"
"A lecture?"
"Hm? Didn't he give you one about it?"
"He never gave me a lecture about it, Ryūko-chan!"
"Ehhhhhh?!"
"Mm, he covered his face with one hand and asked me to put my dress back in order again!"
"... Congratulations."
To think that she had made the great Gamagōri Ira blush, especially now that they had all grown up... that was truly an accomplishment indeed.
~~~~
Ryūko and Mako made their way back to the Mankanshoku family's apartment complex. After all, the benevolent Satsuki saw to it that they live in better conditions, as much as they had already learned to be content with little, so they were in a very much respectable middle-class part of the city.
"Thanks for today, Ryūko-chan! We should go out more often."
"Mhm, tell me that when you're done with nursing school," said Ryūko with a laugh. "Is everyone doing ok these days?"
"Yep! We're as happy as ever. As long as you and Satsuki-chan are doing well, we'll always be well, too!"
"Thanks, Mako. Alright, it's about time I get going. Ja neee!"
"Mm! See you next week, Ryūko-chan! And until then, I'll be watching your stream tonight!"
~~~~
Later that evening, at the Kiryūin residence...
"*yawn* hm? How many hours do I have left?"
Upon arriving home, Ryūko took a bath and put on a comfortable set of sleepwear - the same one that she had worn since her high school days, in fact. Thanks to her unnatural Life Fiber constitution and her fairly active lifestyle through university, she had kept her physique at its peak, and even with her wrestling days behind her, it was safe to say that she was still far more than a sufficient bodyguard for herself and for her Nee-san.
It should also be noted that the sisters decided to live together in Satsuki's penthouse apartment upon Ryūko's matriculation for several reasons. First, the university she and Mako had enrolled in was reasonably close to Satsuki's quarters — in fact, one could say that Satsuki herself may have had a role in both of them being accepted there. Second, the state-of-the-art technology suite of amenities, custom-designed by the Wizard of (Life) Fiber Optics, Inumuta Houka himself, proved to be much too irresistible for the VTubing Ryūko's antics (which, you may recall, was not at all on Satsuki's radar until very recently) — it was an absolute given that, even in the worst earthquake, typhoon, *alien* invasion, or other power outage-causing phenomenon, the internet supplied to the penthouse would still be running at ridiculous speeds thanks to Inumuta's ingenious calculations, obsessive research into specs for all the networking and server builds (of which he had specially had two private servers constructed in the basement of the apartment complex for Satsuki and Ryūko's individual uses), and most importantly, inhumanly organized internal wirings and connections. The Wizard had picked up a rather unsavory obsession with cable management, and during construction of these private servers, it became a commonplace occurrence to see Inumuta muttering to himself about planning the next stage of the builds while hand-hauling an abominable amount of color-coded wires, connectors, spare parts, and... you guessed it... ZIP TIES.
... Computer nerdiness aside, there was another reason that Satsuki took her sister in as her university years came along. As she herself was unable to attend university due to her already being established as the head of the household, Satsuki found herself forced away from the only real family she had left in the world, just as she had for many years; only this time, this was happening as a result of circumstance rather than at the hands of a conniving mother. And so, without Ragyō's henchmen and devices to stop her, she decided to step in and do something about it.
Was it to make up for her years of brutal subjugation and necessary ruthlessness? Was it to fill a hole in her heart that she had never been able to be the Nee-san she was supposed to be? If you were to ask her, Satsuki would be highly unlikely to give a candid answer, but a faint smiling expression would be enough to tell you the truth.
~~~~
To answer Ryūko's soliloquy, there were a little under two hours before her stream was to start. Her Nee-san was due to come home in an hour, and after she would finish bathing and tidying herself up for the night... well, that would leave about half an hour for her to immerse herself in the lore of Korokke Kingdom. The goal would be to avoid breaking the fourth wall in both an entertaining and a literal manner, so our resident VTuber readied her rig for the evening.
A second mic was soon plugged into the audio interface, as was a second set of headphones. A second gaming chair soon followed, and... hang on a second, wouldn't a voice changer be absolutely essential? At the thought, Ryūko raised an amused eyebrow.
"Heh, never thought the day would come that I'd have to use one of these," she said with a dry chuckle as she updated her stream deck and eventually got down to testing the voice changer. "Satsuki-sama is very famous in the real world, after all..."
~~~~
Meanwhile, in a secret room in the former REVOCS laboratories...
"Iori? Are all preparations complete on your end?"
"Yes ma'am, I am ready if everyone else is."
"Good. In that case, commence the experiment."
The short, frizzle-haired young man in the lab coat nodded seriously. He was Shirō Iori, former- and still present assistant to Satsuki to this very day. In fact, she was the one giving him orders at this very moment, and it was now his time to give orders to the staff on-site.
"Life Fiber Signal Transmission Experiment 95M, commence!"
The equipment in the laboratory roared to life — energy measurement devices with their onboard sensors whirred and whined, the employees in full hazmat gear tensed, and Satsuki and Shirō looked on with determined gazes. Clearly, the results they had been seeking had been eluding the team for the past ninety-four iterations of this experiment, and after going over every single detail of the experiment with a fine-toothed comb, they were determined not to fail this time.
Out of a vacuum-sealed test tube flew a single Life Fiber. Encapsulated in a larger glass cylinder, it had no chance of ultimately escaping its prison, try as it might to break free. But this was not the purpose for which Satsuki and her small army of researchers had pooled their wits and resources together.
A series of frequencies were pumped into the chamber that held the lone Life Fiber —sine waves, machine garble, sound-coded ciphers, human speech, music, and every imaginable sound that could be made under the sun.
"No response, as expected," said Shirō calmly, scrolling through his list of audio files to play through the speakers instated within the Life Fiber's experimentation chamber. "We will now be moving to a new set of frequency recordings transcribed from radio telescopes just last week, sourced from the Arctic Circle, Oceania, Germany, and Japan."
"Proceed," said Satsuki gravely.
First came an assortment of pulsars and other regularly transmission-emitting objects near the Little Dipper as heard from Norway.
No response.
Next came another set of sounds from star cluster formations recorded in southern Oceania, near the Tucana.
No response.
Satsuki's brows furrowed.
"This new data is... a little more revealing than I imagined."
Iori made no reply to her comment, only a determined, almost desperate expression as he clicked on the next recording.
From Effelsberg, Germany, came a reading from the Andromeda. The galaxy named after this constellation was within this narrow field of space captured by the telescope
It was awash of dust and noise, but the spectrometer's waveform clearly showed that there was an ultrasonic frequency in this recording.
"Hm, a fundamental?" said Shirō, lifting an eyebrow. "I didn't think we would need audio engineering equipment in this laboratory, but it looks like we'll need to consult Inumuta again after this experiment is over, Satsuki-sama."
"Mm," Satsuki acknowledged. She was paying little mind to the conversation, however, as she peered more closely at the imprisoned Life Fiber.
Up until this point, it had indicated no response to the audio stimuli, only languishing within the cylinder or trying to break free of it. But upon playing the radio telescope recording from Germany... it began to act quite differently.
No longer struggling to escape the cylinder, it now hovered vertically, vibrating curiously as it "listened" to the audio file.
This change was certainly not lost on Shirō, who had inadvertently assumed a similar expression as his boss.
"That... is remarkable," he said slowly. "Could it be responding to that odd frequency in the recording? If only we had another file of the same source with a cleaner resolution.... ah."
His mumbling ceased as he turned to the last radio telescope recording in the folder. It was from the observatory in Nagano, which just so happened to be capturing the same part of the night sky a few hours after the German recording. Clicking on it, Shirō turned his gaze to the lone Life Fiber once more as it began to play.
It was certainly a cleaner recording. There was no noise in the foreground, and the spectrometer clearly showed an identical fundamental to the previous recording — it was a sine wave at some ultrasonic frequency.
But the researchers could care less at the moment, for what met their eyes was far more riveting.
The Life Fiber suddenly "stood" perfectly vertical, oscillating in some harmonic relation to the ultrasonic frequency, before growing unstable and erratic. Even if it was just one Life Fiber, it thrashed violently against the glass that made up its prison.
Soon, the Life Fiber was no longer one. It split into two, four, eight, sixteen, and more of itself! The Life Fibers, which were all of Nexus quality (for so Satsuki had approved in the undertaking of this experiment), smote the glass cylinder holding them quite heavily in concert.
"Stop the experiment," said Satsuki. At that instant, the researchers all sprang into action. The audio recording was stopped, a vacuum shredder cut the Life Fibers into fragments, and the berserk life forms were promptly tranquilized.
Shirō turned to Satsuki with a concerned expression. "Satsuki-sama... did we just witness what I think we did?"
"Mm," his boss said with a grave expression and a nod. "I'm fully convinced now that the 'prophecy' is coming to pass, after all. And we must prepare to meet it. Schedule an emergency meeting with our allies for Monday morning."
"It shall be done, Satsuki-sama."
~~~~
As Satsuki stepped out of the headquarters of what was once REVOCS, a lovely sunset greeted her full in the face. The day was getting late, and she had an agreement with her imōto to appear on her VTuber channel this evening.
The results of this latest Life Fiber experiment weighed heavily on her mind, however. The very thought of this incessant mortal enemy rearing its ugly head once more was more than enough to bring on a headache, not to mention the fact that she had led humanity in graduating from the war they fought all those years ago, only for them to confront the past sins of her mother all over again. Where to begin? Certainly, the implications of this experiment, once verified, would only have one answer to that question: WAR.
It was war that took her father away. It was war that had separated her from her sister and made her enemies. It was war that steeled her resolve as a mere child to lead a rebellion against the woman who had given birth to her. And even after achieving peace and defeating the enemy that sought to subjugate the Earth, more of its kind were on their way to achieve vengeance.
It was then, after a deep breath and a determined smile that a new resolve took hold of Kiryūin Satsuki.
"We must protect this world and defeat the enemy. No matter what it takes."
She had grown to love her life as it was now. Having family to bond with, along with a successful career and colleagues who were always but a phone call away, gave her a purpose, something to live life for. Where she was but a shadow in the immediate aftermath of Ragyō's defeat, she had embraced her new self and this new purpose.
And she wasn't going to let another war against the Life Fibers put an end to it.
~~~~
Half an hour later, at the penthouse apartment...
"You finished, nee-san?" said Ryūko.
"I am now, yes," Satsuki replied, emerging from the bathroom wearing a linen bathrobe. "You said I needed to prepare for this stream, did you not?"
"That's right. Er... how do I put this... so on my VTubing lore, you're the queen of Korokke Kingdom."
"Lore?"
"Um, yes," said Ryūko, whose face was quickly rising in temperature as she explained. "Basically, being a VTuber usually means making up some fictional backstory about your virtual character. In this case, I'm the Princess of Korokke Kingdom-"
"And where did you get the name Korokke Kingdom?" said Satsuki with a smirk.
"From the Mankanshokus' croquettes," said Ryūko, her face in her hands from embarrassment. Her mind was swirling with one thought: *maybe this was not such a good idea, after all...*
~~~~
Once the lore explanation was over with, it was time to go over the rigging and the stream setup. Of course, this meant a test private stream.
"Ok, Sats- ahem, Maria-onee-san," Ryūko started, her beet-red, teary-eyed face making the great Kiryūin Satsuki crack up ever so slightly. "This is your avatar."
A glorious, white-haired, green-eyed, cat-eared, and most certainly well-endowed figure appeared on the screen, mirroring Satsuki's every facial movement.
"I see," said Satsuki, who hadn't flinched once. "On this topic... Maaya... how did you get this art for my avatar?"
"Mm? I commissioned it, of course."
"I hope it didn't cost too much?"
"... six..."
"Come again?"
"Six... sixty thousand yen..."
That drew the first look of genuine surprise from Satsuki that Ryūko had seen in a while. Though she was among the very richest heiresses in the world, and though she had had the most refined of upbringings with help from Soroi, Satsuki led quite a frugal lifestyle considering her assets. In other words, she was rather vexed at why her sister would spend so much money on a character design.
"Ryūk- ahem, Maaya... you didn't go out of your way to spend that much on this avatar, did you?"
"Not at all, nee-san," said Ryūko. "My superchats give a bit more dough than you think, you see. And so, I made a deal with my fans: if I cross 1 million subscribers, I would commission a custom-rigged avatar for the Queen of the Korokke Kingdom. If I cross 2 million subscribers, you would do a live reveal with the commissioned avatar. In other words, Maria, tonight's stream is celebrating the channel reaching that many subscribers!"
"I see," said Satsuki, who was still skeptical but taking it all in stride. "So there are two microphones and headsets here, I see. Which ones do I use?"
"Either one is fine," said Ryūko, who had pulled out a lemon and started munching on it. "More importantly... I should get started with the loading screen."
~~~~
Ten minutes later...
"Oh shoot, I forgot something important," said Ryūko. "Nee-san, you're going to need a voice-changer, let me load it into your microphone."
"No need," said Satsuki, a smug grin on her face. "I feel cut out for this."
"Eh? But you're already so famous in real life, how will the fans not recognize you?" said Ryūko.
"Not to worry," replied a confident Satsuki. "After all, I always wanted to try something li this."
With that, the viewers on Kisaragi Maaya Ch. were taken live into the streaming room for the evening.
"Korokke oishi!! Eating my way through the valley of plenty, here's the High Princess of the Korokke Kingdom, Kisaragi Maaya dayo!"
It was a typical intro for a not-so-typical evening. Ryūko nervously continued.
"Eeee... good evening, minna-san. You've surely already seen the thumbnail and the title of tonight's stream, but to celebrate our reaching 2 million subscribers... we have a very special guest with us this evening!"
She slowly dragged over the avatar of Kisaragi Maria into the frame, before looking nervously at Satsuki, uncertain what she was going to do next.
"Ehe~ Devouring the royal delectables of my grateful subjects, regal and generous, here's the Queen of the Korokke Kingdom, Kisaragi Maria desu!"
.... How in the world did she just pull off a voice THAT motherly?