My Childhood Friend Who Was Doing Personal V-Tubing Got Ntr’d by a Singer (LOL), but I’ve Decided to Just Sit Back and Watch the Two of Them Roll Down the Hill of Life and Fall Into Ruin - Chapter 20: Childhood Friend Says She's Quitting School

Chapter 20: Childhood Friend Says She’s Quitting School

While Tate and I ate lunch together, he taught me all sorts of ways to move the 3D model. Lately, I had been asking Tate for advice so often that I spent a lot of time with both Tate and Yoko, and Kusaka and Asakura demanded compensation for it, which kept me pretty busy. Even so, it felt fulfilling, so that was fine.

As I ate my meal and thought that handling the 3D model was fun in all sorts of ways, Tate suddenly remembered something and said.

“By the way, you probably know that Hime Neko got her account banned, but it seems like someone who might be Hime Neko was sticking around on an online bulletin board with a fixed handle.”

Ugh, what a stubborn person. Even if she desperately struggled on the bulletin board after her video uploads got shut down, it would probably just become fuel for more backlash. Didn’t she have any sense of shame from looking at herself objectively and seeing how pathetic it looked?

Right now, all sorts of analysis videos were coming out, and the analysis videos speculating that Asher was the woman who hung out with Masao got more momentum than the videos from when she worked as Asher, so doing anything extra would just tighten the noose around her own neck, I thought.

Because Masao’s family scandal was turning into daily features on wide shows and internet news, the question of who the woman was in the Masao video that triggered the Masao case had stayed hot news all along.

Come to think of it, what was Masao doing now? I hoped he got castrated for the good of the world.

Come to think of it, crap replies were flying at Mom’s SNS too, though Mom blocked them right away, so I wished she would give up already.

“Well, it’s Himeko after all. I wish she would learn to give up at some point.”

“That’s impossible, right? You can’t do anything about the traits you’re born with.”

Tate and I looked at each other, then both of us gazed up at the distant sky―――we had come to know sorrow.

“By the way, Ex and Benomu are doing really well.”

Talking about Himeko was getting me down, so I switched to a brighter topic.

“Ah, that’s probably because major individual Vtubers like Ren and Kirara retweet them on SNS from time to time, or even mention their names during streams.

Both of them had stopped uploading videos for a while recently, but since they started uploading again, they touch on Ex and Benomu to some extent, so Ren and Kirara’s fame is boosting Ex and Benomu directly, I think.

Wouldn’t it be great if that led to a collab or something?”

Oh, right, that made sense. I owed those two a lot, so I needed to thank them again or pay them back in some form.

“Of course, the character design being by Tak-kun’s mother is a big factor too.

It was perfect timing when the alternate version of the popular character from the social game that Tak-kun’s mother designed for got implemented, and she announced Ex and Benomu on SNS then, which I think was huge.

The downside is the annoying people who probe with questions about Asher connections, but there, Tak-kun is working hard on blocking and excluding them, so keep it up from now on. Also, since I think Hime Neko is among the stalkers, if you file for information disclosure, she’ll probably get caught.”

Yeah, that’s how it was; as Ex and Benomu grew, some creepy stalkers or trolls were stirring things up. So… it might be Himeko…

“Hime Neko blew herself up because the biggest reason was that it had gotten monotonous and one-patterned. …In the end, whether you grow in Vtubing or not depends on the talent of the person inside and having elements that get known, so yeah.

Even setting aside how she went off to die by herself with the fanservice route when she was struggling to grow, just being a current high school girl hiding her face with a sketchbook commission wouldn’t get her more than a one-hit wonder.”

“Is that so?”

Hearing it put that way made the reasons for Ex and Benomu’s success start to come into view. It came into hazy view for me… the image of success… or not.

As a premise, the character design had Mom’s name value, and if big names in the same genre like Ren and Kirara kept mentioning them like that, recognition would go up.

If more casual viewers got curious and came to check it out, then more people would subscribe to the channel or watch the streams. …We were just high school kids, so we probably couldn’t have pulled this off alone. I could only feel grateful that all sorts of adults were helping us.

A bit later, Yoko joined us for lunch and said, with a smug hmph, that she had overheard something just a moment ago.

“―――Urakiri got kicked out of school.”

Oh man, Himeko finally bit the dust. No, she wasn’t dead, she was alive. Right, that was all I could say. The school had finally gotten off its ass.

That said, I had expected expulsion, but it seemed like she was leaving in the form of transferring to the affiliated correspondence high school. …For a normal student, it would probably just be straight expulsion, I thought.

Even so, the fact that they expected to use Himeko showed that the people in the upper echelons of this school were still trash, huh.

…Yeah, maybe the trolling that Tate mentioned earlier, which was probably Himeko’s, came from her getting isolated without her Vtubing, or school, or any contact with my family.

If she gave up on high school life, reflected, and restarted her life from university, I thought she could still turn it around plenty.

“You still feel sorry for her?”

“Nah, not at all?”

Tate looked a little concerned, but I wasn’t bothered in the slightest, so I shot back casually.

In fact, I hadn’t talked directly to Himeko in ages. Come to think of it, I had her blocked on phone and messaging apps, but what was her situation now? I hoped she would just fade out quietly without any fuss, ugh☆