arc1 · 011-ch11

Episode 11: Share House

Side: Maihana Hanazono

My name is Maihana Hanazono, and I'm nineteen years old. Up until last year, I was attending university, but I quit. That's because I awakened to a job called Twin Swordsman.

My childhood friend's influence got me interested in the explorer profession. When he awakened first, I was super jealous. So when I awakened right after him, I remember being over the moon. I thought maybe I'd finally get to explore dungeons together with him.

But that day never came. His job skill wasn't suited for fighting monsters.

After that, he became a shut-in, and I—who had obtained the powerful Twin Swordsman job—became an explorer at the strong urging of those around me. For the sake of the day when my childhood friend might become an explorer himself.

I was invited by the slightly older Kaoru-san to join a party called Hyakka Ryouran. It's a four-person party: spear-wielder Kaoru-san, thief Rin-san, and the rare Fire Mage Kureha-san, one of the few magic-type jobs among the many that exist. Since all four of us had combat-oriented jobs, we received the special exception of starting from E-rank instead of the usual F-rank.

At first, defeating monsters was tough, but as we dived into dungeons over and over, we got used to it. The members got along well, and the four of us rented a share house to live together.

After about six months of activity, we rose to D-rank and gradually became more well-known. Around that time, at Rin-san's suggestion, we started dungeon streaming. We'd rent a drone, film our battles in the dungeon from behind, edit the footage, and stream it.

That helped boost our recognition, and eventually threads about us even started popping up. But rental drones cost a fair amount, and if we broke one, we had to compensate for it.

It would be nice if the drones could automatically dodge monster attacks, but drones that high-performance cost tens of millions of yen, and even those get destroyed by higher-ranked monsters. If we rented something like that and broke it, we'd all be drowning in debt in an instant.

That's why we'd rent a decent drone and film from a safe distance. Even so, since this was the mainstream method, no one complained.

Until today, that is...

"By the way, has the video from yesterday's shoot already been sent over?"

Today wasn't a dungeon day, so while we were all relaxing in the living room since morning, our leader Kaoru-san brought it up.

"Ah, that's right! Let me check!"

I moved to the room next door that we use for streaming and turned on the PC. The video file was large, so he'd said he'd send it directly to the computer.

When I looked behind me, everyone had followed. They were all super curious about how the video we'd been filmed in would turn out after editing.

"Ah, it's here!"

A single video had arrived from the account Sota made for work. The title was "Mount Fuji Dungeon," with no description. That made me a little nervous.

We prepared chairs for all four of us, and once we were ready, I double-clicked the file and started playing the video.

And three hours later...

"This is insane, insane, INSANE! Isn't this absolutely amazing!?"

The moment the video ended, I found myself shouting.

"Unbelievable. Everything I thought I knew has been turned upside down..."

Rin-san, who usually has a poker face, was uncharacteristically stunned.

"Is this really us? Is this not some movie?"

Kaoru-san seemed unable to believe the video we'd just watched was footage of ourselves.

"What exactly were we filming until now? The quality is enough to make one think that."

When Kureha-san, a connoisseur with refined taste, says something like that, it must be seriously incredible. Hearing Sota being praised made me feel happy, like it was my own accomplishment.

"Whoa, you noticed me really well. And those captions are cool."

Even Rin-san, who usually only speaks one word at a time, was being talkative. But I can't blame her. Those captions were basically cheating.

"If possible, for next time too... no, could we hire you as our exclusive cameraman?"

Everyone nodded at Kaoru-san's suggestion. If it means stable income for Sota too, isn't that a good option?

"I'll ask him about that later."

Everyone nodded again at my reply.

"So, how much of this video are we going to stream?"

Right, just as Kureha-san said, this video includes footage of our casual conversations during travel, collecting magic stones, and even our meal scenes. Whether to broadcast all of that is up to us. Rental drones might pick up footage, but they don't capture audio, and since they film from far away, you can't really see faces clearly.

But the video Sota shot clearly includes our voices, and the close-ups show our expressions in detail. It's a little embarrassing, but everyone looks so great in it.

My own scenes are embarrassing, but I definitely want the other members' scenes to be streamed. We all felt the same way, so we decided to stream it as-is without any further editing.

"Alright, here we go. Ei!"

Our leader Kaoru-san pressed the upload button. There was no turning back now. People all over the world would be able to see this video. Even now, I felt embarrassed, but since Sota worked so hard to film it, I was glad we could stream it without editing.

With the upload started, we all stepped away from our seats for a bit. It takes time for view counts to climb, so we decided to eat lunch, do laundry, and maintain our weapons in the meantime.

After about an hour of handling various tasks, we returned to the streaming room. There, Rin-san—who had come back ahead of us—was standing motionless in front of the computer. She was staring at the screen without moving a muscle.

Wondering what was wrong, I peered at the computer too and froze. That's because an absolutely insane view count was displayed on the screen. The number was five million. Our previous best was one hundred twenty thousand, so we'd racked up over forty times that in just one hour.

And it wasn't just the video's view count—the follower count for our Hyakka Ryouran account had increased tenfold as well.

"This is getting out of hand."

At Rin-san's murmur, everyone's expressions stiffened. We'd certainly thought the video was amazing, but we never expected the view count to explode like this. Moreover, because it grew so rapidly, it apparently got picked up by a major video site's recommendation algorithm, and the views were still skyrocketing.

At the same time, a flood of comments came in, which was a little scary, so we all checked a few of them.

"Thank goodness. Almost all the comments are positive."

As Kaoru-san said, nearly every comment we checked was favorable toward us. Oh, about twenty percent of them were praising Sota's camerawork, though. That made me happy too, so I'll be sure to tell Sota about it later.

Anyway, we tried not to pay too much attention for the rest of the afternoon, but everyone was clearly curious, taking turns entering the streaming room only to come back out looking dazed.

By the end of the night, right before bed, the view count had surpassed one hundred million and our subscriber count had exceeded ten million, at which point we finally started to calm down. I'm pretty sure they said dungeon-related streaming revenue has better profit margins than other content, and there's even government subsidies involved. In other words, this one video would earn us about fifty million yen. With this much fame, what would tomorrow bring? With a small sense of anxiety tucked in my heart, I crawled into bed.