The V-tuber Who Became Obsessed With Me

"Now," Kuro said, clapping his hands once. "Let’s get this production started."

First he had one of his men move Rhonda to another room before he started .

He then nodded toward Tengu, who moved to the camera without a word and adjusted the angle until it pointed directly at Raina. The spotlight stayed fixed on her face. She could feel the heat of it on her skin and something worse underneath the heat, the awareness that the lens was open and waiting and that somewhere beyond this warehouse people were already watching a screen.

Kuro crossed to a table against the far wall.

The bunny mask sat there. White and blank and somehow worse in person than it had ever looked on a screen. He picked it up with both hands, turned it once, then slid it over his face.

Ethan had been watching from his chair. She heard the change in his breathing when he saw it.

"You’re X Reveals," he said.

Kuro tilted his masked head toward him. "See? I told you it would all make sense eventually." He turned back toward the cameras without waiting for a response, and something in the turn was final, like a door closing. He was not talking to Ethan anymore. He was performing for a different audience now.

Tengu checked the monitors.

"We’re live."

Kuro rolled his shoulders once. Then he raised one finger.

"Five."

Raina watched the red recording light.

"Four."

She pulled against the ropes. Uselessly. The knots had been tied really strongly.

"Three."

Ethan looked at her from across the warehouse floor. She could not make herself look back.

"Two."

"One."

Kuro faced the camera and became someone else in the space of a breath. The posture changed. The voice changed. Even the way he occupied the space changed, expanding into it the way the X Reveals persona had always expanded into its videos, taking up more room than one person should.

"Hello everyone." His arms opened wide. "It’s me again. X Reveals."

Prerecorded applause burst through the warehouse speakers. The sound bounced off concrete walls and came back wrong, too bright for the space, too warm for what was happening inside it. Kuro let it run and then stepped aside so the camera found Raina.

The light intensified.

She looked directly into the lens. If he wanted her to flinch she was going to make him wait a very long time for it.

"Do you know who this is?" Kuro pointed at her. He let the pause breathe theatrically. "No? That’s okay. Allow me."

The camera held on her face.

"This is the face behind Lumi♡Live."

More canned applause. Fake laughter following it.

"Her name is Himari Ishigami." He circled her chair slowly. "Well. As of today she’s also known as Raina Takahashi. Whew." He whistled. "That’s a lot of names. Makes you wonder what else she’s hiding."

She heard Ethan shifted in his chair

"When she was sixteen years old," Kuro continued, his voice shifting from showman into something quieter and more precise, "she killed her mother."

Ethan’s head turned slowly toward her.

Not disbelief.

Not yet.

Just shock.

The kind that arrived before understanding did.

For a moment he simply stared.

As if he had misheard the words.

As if there had to be another explanation.

Raina couldn’t bring herself to meet his eyes.

She kept her gaze fixed on the floor while the spotlight burned against her skin.

Then she heard him go completely still.

Not a reaction. A suspension. The particular stillness of a person whose mind had received something and was refusing to process it until it confirmed it had heard correctly.

Kuro kept going.

"And when she got to college, she killed her boyfriend."

The camera stayed on her face.

Raina did not move.

"The police closed the case," Kuro said. "Couldn’t find evidence. But the truth?" He stopped beside her chair and looked down at her. "She murdered him. And her grandfather helped cover it up." He straightened. "The same grandfather responsible for the deaths of the Aizawa family. The same man who ordered innocent people burned alive in their home."

The prerecorded track had gone silent.

Nobody had cued it. It had simply stopped, as though even the fake audience understood that this particular moment did not require punctuation.

Kuro faced the camera.

"The entire family are murderers," he said. "And I have evidence."

The monitor beside Tengu showed the viewer count climbing. Twenty thousand. Twenty-three. Twenty-five and still moving.

"In our next segment," Kuro said, his showman energy returning like a light being switched back on, "I’ll be calling on Malcolm Stein, brother of the deceased, to share his testimony." He clapped once. "But first. A short break."

The recording light dimmed.

Tengu lowered the camera.

Kuro stretched his neck, pulled the mask up onto his forehead and looked between Ethan and Raina with the unhurried satisfaction of someone surveying something they had built.

" Wow twenty five thousand views is wiid right ? Never hit that before "

Then he looked at Raina ..." You really are a star , lumi or not "..

Then silence ....he looked between them again

"Ok , Looks like you two have some things to discuss." He moved toward the exit. "I’ll be generous. Five minutes."

He gestured to tengu to give them space and he and tengu walked out of the room ....

And the silence that followed was the loudest thing Raina had ever sat inside.

No fake applause. No camera hum. No Kuro. Just the concrete and the spotlight and Ethan sitting eight feet away from her with his hands on his knees and his eyes on the floor.

She waited.

She did not know what she was waiting for. An exit that was not there. A version of the next few minutes that did not exist.

Ethan’s voice, when it came, was quiet.

"Is it true."

Not a question. The inflection of someone who already knew the answer and was asking anyway because hearing it spoken aloud was the only remaining step.

She looked at him properly for the first time since they had arrived here.

He was looking at her with an expression she had never seen on his face before. Not anger. Anger would have been easier. This was the expression of someone trying to find something familiar in a face they had been certain they knew and coming up empty.

"Tell me," he said.

The truth sat in her throat. She tried to form words around it and could not find the shape of them.

She looked down.

And that was enough.

She heard him stand. Heard the chair scrape back hard.

"Tell me."

Louder this time. The word coming from somewhere that had nothing to do with volume, from somewhere much further down.

"Ethan—"

"TELL ME.!!!"

She flinched. She could not stop herself. In all the time she had known him she had never heard him make a sound like that, never heard him shouted like that .

She flinched. She could not stop herself. In all the time she had known him she had never heard him make a sound like that, had never heard his voice stripped down to that particular raw material that lay under the control he always kept so carefully in place.

A tear ran down her face before she decided to let it.

"Yes," she said. Barely audible. "It’s true."

Ethan sat back down heavily, like his legs had simply declined to continue. His hands went into his hair. He made a sound that was not a laugh but occupied the space a laugh might have.

"Oh God." He stared at nothing. "This can’t be—" He stopped. Started again. "No."

He looked at her.

"So you’re Himari."

"Yes."

He kept looking at her. Long enough that she understood he was doing what she had spent the last year doing to him, trying to find the real version of someone behind the version they had been shown.

"I didn’t see it," he said quietly. "I kept looking right at it and I didn’t see it."

She had no response to that. There was no response that was not also a confession.

Then his jaw tightened.

"Felix."

She closed her eyes.

"What happened to Felix."

"Ethan—"

"What happened to him."

She breathed through it. "Felix isn’t dead."

The silence that followed was total.

"What?"

"He’s alive." Her voice was breaking at the edges and she could not stop it. "He’s in a coma. He never woke up."

Ethan stared at her for a long time.

"How does that make it better." His voice had dropped back down to quiet. Which was somehow worse than the shouting. "Walk me through that. Tell me exactly how that makes any part of this better."

"I never meant for it to happen."

"Which time."

The two words. Flat. Precise. Landing exactly where he had aimed them.

She had nothing.

"Two people," Ethan said. "Two accidents." He looked at her with his eyes glassy and his jaw set. "How many times does something have to happen before it stops being an accident, Raina?"

The name in his mouth sounded like he was not sure it belonged to her.

"Ethan, please—"

"Don’t." He stood again, moving away from his chair, putting more of the warehouse between them. "Don’t look at me like that."

"I’m not the one—"

I don’t know who I’m looking at." He said it simply. Not cruelly. Which was what made it unbearable. "I don’t know which one of you is real. I don’t know if any of it was real."

The words struck harder than the shouting had.

Because she didn’t have an answer for them.

Not anymore.

Somewhere along the way Himari Ishigami had become Raina Takahashi.

Then Raina Takahashi had become Lumi♡Live.

Then Lumi♡Live had become someone millions of people thought they knew.

And now all those versions of her were sitting in the same room, tangled together so tightly that even she couldn’t separate them anymore.

Neither did she know who he was looking at.

Neither did she know which version of herself had walked into Ethan’s life.

Or which version was about to lose him.

Then the door opened.

Kuro walked in. He took one look at the space between them, at Raina’s face and Ethan’s posture, and the slow smile that spread across his face was the smile of someone whose plan had worked precisely as intended.

"Excellent," he said. He moved to the cameras with the brisk energy of a director returning from a break. "That saves me considerable time."

He pulled the mask back down.

The recording light came on.

He turned to face it.

"Welcome back everyone." His arms spread. "Now. For our next segment." His voice dropped into the register that his audience knew as the prelude to something significant, the shift in tone that preceded every major reveal. "I’d like to introduce a very special guest."

He turned slightly toward the darkness at the back of the warehouse.

"Malcolm Stein." He let the name land. "Brother of Felix Stein. The man your beloved Lumi♡Live left in a coma." A pause. "He has something he would like to say."

The viewer count on the monitor had passed thirty thousand and was still climbing.

Kuro looked at the camera.

"Phase two," he said. "Begins now."