Chapter 30

Who’s the Slave?

To start with the conclusion, I survived.

Grrrrr... those hateful bastards!

I endured the hellish time of being torn apart by four demons called private tutors and emerged victorious!

“Phew, you really barely made it.”

“At least tell me I did well...”

“I’d tell you that if you had actually done well.”

Ms. Sejin said as she held out the graded test papers.

“...Your average across the four subjects is 43. You barely cleared the cutoff.”

Still sprawled over the desk, I raised one thumb. Nice!

Staying up all night cramming had been worth it. Of course, the fact that I had been more or less faithfully attending the private tutoring sessions all this time probably helped too. I am a diligent student in my own way, you know.

“You really cut it close this time. Next time, study in advance.”

“Yup... This body shall now sleep...”

With a satisfied heart, I fell asleep as if I had fainted.

At the time, I still did not know.

That the real hell was not on some test paper, but had opened somewhere completely different.

— — —

Seira was anxious.

Because even after several days, nothing had changed.

The circumstantial posts they had carefully spread around had attracted a fair amount of attention.

But that was as far as it went.

Lilith herself did not so much as blink.

No matter how much the trolls shouted in chat, she brushed them off with her usual historical-drama way of speaking, and instead the commotion drew spectators and only increased her viewers.

The more they attacked her, the bigger she got.

“That little bitch...”

Seira could not stand that relaxed attitude.

Meanwhile, Seira’s own stream was falling apart.

In this oversaturated market where it was hard enough to survive even if you passionately honed your own content, she was spending her time attacking someone else.

While staying up all night refreshing pages and posting fabricated stories, the viewers on her own channel remained stuck in the double digits.

The more time she spent dragging someone else down, the more pathetic her own channel became. That fact only made her more desperate.

Then one day, Seira sensed something strange in the group chat.

One person had quietly disappeared.

It was Rine.

“What the hell, when did she leave?”

She sent messages, but there was no reply. She called, but got no answer. She had been blocked.

“That fucking bitch...”

Rine had debuted around the same time as Seira, and they had endured their double-digit viewer counts together by consoling each other.

They had spent whole nights on the phone whenever things were hard. And now someone like that had turned her back on Seira without even a farewell.

If she still had any reason left, she might have reflected on her own actions, but the current Seira had no such composure.

Snap—.

Was the sound of something breaking merely an auditory hallucination?

“So you’re going to pull out and pretend you’re the only good person?”

Seira did not even try to find out why Rine had left.

All that mattered to her was the fact that she had one fewer person on her side.

Now that things had come this far, there was no reason, and no room, to do things halfway. She had to push what she was preparing even harder and more decisively.

“Just laying out circumstantial evidence can’t break through that solid concept.”

Seira had reached that conclusion long ago.

So for the past few days, together with the group chat members, she had begun touching something they should never have touched.

First, a contract.

A forged document whose quality had deliberately been blurred enough to make it unclear which agency it belonged to, packed with conditions brutally unfavorable to a minor. They had used an AI chatbot to fill it with plausible content.

And one more thing.

Among the group was a member named Mimi.

A VTuber whose specialty was freely changing her voice to act as different characters. This time, that talent was used in a very bad direction.

Mimi took voices of Lilith and her maid collected from various places, along with the voice of an unknown middle-aged man, and stitched them together into a recording.

An adult pressuring a contract onto a child, and the child reluctantly answering. A plausible little piece of conversation.

Of course, Seira’s group knew absolutely nothing about Lilith’s real circumstances.

So the agency written on the contract and the conversation in the recording were all imagined fabrications. But there were very few people in the world who currently knew the truth, and the public would be inclined to believe the plausible-looking evidence placed right in front of them first.

After several days of work, their creations were finally ready to be shown to the world.

“This will do.”

Seira released the contract and recording through an anonymous Y.com account claiming to belong to a former agency staff member.

-I’m making a confession of conscience. I was the person in charge of that kid. I couldn’t watch anymore, so I’m exposing everything.

And Myonyang, one of the most enthusiastic members, went one step further.

She even abandoned the principle of hiding behind anonymity, turned on her own stream, and began directly attacking Lilith.

“Guys, I seriously couldn’t hold this in anymore, so I’m saying it, nya. You know that girl Lilith, nya? I think this is really serious, nya. If you know about it and still stay quiet, you’re not even human, nya. Ah, right, I’m a cat, nya. I forgot, nya.”

Putting her own face—no, her own model—on the line.

While acting out righteous indignation over bringing suspected child abuse into the public eye.

Watching that stream, Seira grew uneasy for a moment. It had been her own rule that they would stay anonymous. But—.

Myonyang had already said everything she wanted to say. No matter what Seira said now, spilled water would not go back into the cup.

Instead, Seira reassured herself that Myonyang’s testimony would carry even more weight precisely because she was putting her stream on the line.

And sure enough, from that day onward, the situation began to change.

— — —

“Hm? What’s this? That vampire sis again?”

Gomtaengi, a variety-game streamer who casually pulled two thousand concurrent viewers.

He was the major streamer who had once laughed his ass off after seeing Lilith’s contract-rejection clip.

Back then, Lilith had just been a funny fellow(?) streamer to Gomtaengi. The sight of her banning someone who came to scout her while speaking like she was in a historical drama had been so absurd that he laughed for quite a while.

But what came in through donations this time was not some funny clip.

It was an image of the contract, an edited audio recording, and a video from an issue NewTuber summarizing it all.

“...Wait. That sis wasn’t a sis, but a middle schooler? No, well, putting that aside—.”

The smile slowly disappeared from Gomtaengi’s face as he ate jjamppong.

“Is this real? They tied a kid down with a contract like this?”

In the recording, an adult man was pressuring a child. The child sounded terrified and answered in a barely audible voice.

The audio file sounded so convincing that it never even crossed Gomtaengi’s mind that it might be fabricated.

“Wow, if this is real, this is serious. How old is the kid? Fourteen? That’s insane. This isn’t something you can just let slide.”

And it was not only Gomtaengi.

Streamers on one broadcast after another added their own comments.

“They tricked some naive kid, locked her into a slave contract, and planned to make her famous so they could sell her off, right?”

“Adults are making a kid stream every night to earn money. That’s obviously abuse.”

The important fact that donations were disabled on Lilith’s stream was casually ignored in the middle of the storm.

A sense of justice could be a frightening thing. In both good ways and bad.

Comments thrown out without malice, even with good intentions, gathered together and turned into a huge blaze.

The cyber wreckers seized the opportunity and raced to upload videos.

A story that had only been circulating within a few communities now leapt over those walls and began spreading across the entire internet.

Lilith here, Lilith there, Lilith everywhere.

— — —

It was the day I went to the riding center for the fourth time.

About two weeks had passed since I first learned horseback riding, and before I knew it, I had started quietly looking forward to this schedule.

“Hup—.”

Now I was fairly calm even when I got up on the horse. It was thanks to Ms. Seorin teaching me so well.

Honestly, I knew the internet had been getting noisier little by little. Every time I started streaming, one or two new kinds of nonsense I had never seen before would appear.

Still, I assumed it was just the usual thing. I had gotten through everything fine so far, so I figured I would be able to endure it from here on too.

Today, I had enjoyed another lap around the course, so I turned on the stream with a light heart, humming to myself.

...I turned it on.

“...What is this.”

The chatroom had completely lost its mind. The viewer count had already shot well past three thousand the moment I went live, so of course it had. Text poured in so fast that it was hard to read properly.

I scrolled the chat up and froze it to read—

-The slave-contract vampire is here

-Did you see the contract???

-Yeah, it seriously gave me chills, those crazy bastards

-All adults making money off a kid should go to prison

-You child abusers aren’t even ashamed?

-What did the kid do wrong

-She’s just a poor victim too

Contract? Slave contract? Victim?

What the hell were they talking about? I fought through the rapidly moving chat, trying to find the cause of today’s chaos first.

-OurHouseMaid has forcibly removed ***.

-FamiliarStoneGolem has forcibly removed ***.

Meanwhile, trolls and lunatics kept crossing the line without pause, and Ms. Sejin and Woojin desperately kept banning them, but it was no use. It was like a cockroach nest—kill one and ten more crawled out.

Even in the middle of that, I stubbornly searched the communities and soon found the source of the problem.

-I’m making a confession of conscience. I was the person in charge of that kid.

It was a post uploaded by someone claiming to be a former agency employee. Attached to it was one photo of a contract. A plausible-looking document packed with conditions brutally disadvantageous to a minor.

Beneath that was even an audio recording. When I played it, I heard some middle-aged man forcing a contract on someone, while a frightened child answered in a timid voice.

The problem was that the child’s voice sounded exactly like mine. And the cold voice of an adult woman mixed in here and there was a perfect copy of Ms. Sejin’s.

“...How did they do this?”

I did not even need to touch myself to know. Goosebumps had risen over both my arms.

Obviously, I had never signed a contract like that, nor had I ever had a conversation like that with Ms. Sejin. It was all a blatant lie.

But how was I supposed to refute this?

In the middle of all that, a private message popped up. It was from Ms. Sejin, who was busy fighting the trolls.

-Miss, Ms. Hwang Ara’s channel is apparently being flooded with malicious comments too. They’re calling her an accomplice.

...What?

My mind went blank.

People insulting me, I could live with.

After all, my identity was hidden. No matter how much those people barked, they could not reach the real me. So no matter how fiercely they attacked, they were just swinging at empty air.

Even in the worst case, if I could no longer stream, it would be difficult to seriously damage my actual life. I would lose one source of enjoyment, so it might hurt for a while, but...

But things were different for the kind old maid.

She streamed with her face, name, and channel all publicly exposed, and this was her livelihood.

All because she did one broadcast with me, she was now suffering real, tangible damage.

If I did nothing just because I myself was fine, the old maid would obviously keep getting attacked.

“...What do I do?”

Explain? With what?

To prove that contract was fake, I would have to reveal at least a little real information about myself.

Who I was, what kind of family I came from, why a contract like that could never possibly exist—I would have to reveal it all.

Even if I removed my name and the company name, how many people like me could there be in South Korea? I would be tracked down immediately.

I absolutely could not do that.

I had no idea where to even begin dealing with this complete disaster.

I wondered if there had ever been a time in my life when I had felt this helpless.

And then—

The flow of the chat began to change.

-Hey, there’s an exposé stream up????

-It’s going crazy on Rine’s stream right now!!

-Everyone search Rine’s stream

-Yeah, everyone’s watching it right now

-Those crazy bitches fabricated everything

An exposé stream?

Rine?

“Rine? Who’s Rine.”

I muttered it aloud without realizing.

-There’s some tiny VTuber, what was her name

-I heard she quit streaming recently, did she come back?

-Who cares about coming back, that’s not the point, everything’s going insane right now, hurry up and go watch

A VTuber. And someone who had apparently quit streaming had turned on an exposé stream at this exact moment?

Exposing what?

My head was still a mess, but my fingers moved first.

[Exposing the People Who Fabricated the Lilith Incident] Viewer count: 5,500.

Since it was an exposé stream about the incident currently covering the internet, apparently everyone and their mother had flooded in.

With trembling hands, I entered the stream.

“Gasp...”

On the screen, there was no VTuber avatar, not even a mask.

There was simply a woman with a grim expression, showing her bare, makeup-free face and staring directly into the camera.

That face—

I knew it.

The face I saw every week at the riding center.

The one that had smiled at me earlier today—

It was Ms. Seorin.