As Ai-chan's voice dropped, the stage around her flickered.
Instantly, cascading waterfalls of complex audio waveforms projected into the air, raining down like a digital matrix.
"Hmph... Humans! Ai-chan sometimes has to admit that the human body is a miraculous, unbelievable construct."
"But, but..."
With her hands clasped behind her back, Ai-chan paced across the stage like a smug little adult, her tone dripping with condescending pity.
"In the realm of singing, you humans are always shackled by your so-called 'vocal range.'
"You can't hit the high notes, you can't reach the low ones, and you even make painfully amateur mistakes like voice cracks or losing your breath entirely!
"So... is this it? Is this the absolute limit of humanity?"
She abruptly stopped pacing, slapped a hand over her face, and let out a deranged, maniacal cackle.
"Hehehe... That's right... This is the absolute peak of what a human can achieve!"
"But I am different!!"
A blazing inferno erupted behind her, stretching Ai-chan's silhouette into a dramatically exaggerated, wildly intense pose.
"HUMANS HAVE THEIR LIMITS!!
"But I—Ai-chan—!
"Am no frail, pathetic human!!!"
"HAHAHAHA!"
"In this world forged of data, I can reach the domain of the gods whenever I please!
"Sure, staying in your comfort zone is the smart play. It protects your vocal cords, proves you're responsible to your audience, and extends your shelf life as an idol...
"All of that is fine and dandy.
"But that's loser mentality!"
Ai-chan leaned sharply into the camera. Her impeccably rendered virtual face swallowed the entire screen, her electronic eyes gleaming with sheer madness.
"I'm going to obliterate you all right in the very domain of the gods—a realm you flesh-and-blood idols could never hope to touch!!
"MORE POWER!!
"Bring it on, you mortal idols! I am the bringer of your destruction!!"
She snapped her fingers, and a heavy, pounding beat dropped like a hammer.
"My performance is—Flare, pitched up 12 keys!!"
"What the hell?!" Back in the waiting room, Shu nearly did a spit-take. "Pitched up HOW ↗ MANY ↘?!"
Shu wasn't the only one shell-shocked. The other three girls in the room had equally priceless reactions.
"Flare... Bronya has no memory of this song," the Russian hacker said, her face completely deadpan.
She was absolutely certain that before the Great Eruption, this song didn't exist anywhere in the world. With an edgy, try-hard title like that, it was obviously meant to be a backing track for some cringey anime music video.
But Bronya prided herself as a gaming god. Even if she hadn't played every game in existence, she'd experienced at least eighty percent of them. She was a certified veteran.
And she had zero recollection of this track.
"Flare... Wait, isn't that one of the tracks Shu prepared for us?" Mei pointed out, catching on to something else entirely.
She looked to Shu for confirmation. The moment she saw his dumbfounded expression, she knew she was right.
"Wait... then how does Ai-chan know the song Shu prepped for us?" Kiana blinked. The next second, her eyes narrowed into a fierce, calculating glare.
"Don't tell me... there's a traitor who screwed us from the inside?!"
The room fell completely silent. Everyone's attention snapped to her.
A traitor who screwed us?
Wait... screwed us?
Does being the traitor mean you get screwed...?
No, no, focus!
Kiana's eyes went wide as saucers, her ears perked up like radar antennas as she scanned everyone in the room.
Shu... Shu wouldn't do that. He was the one who brought the song to them in the first place. Even if he did give it to Ai-chan, that didn't make him a traitor. It just meant they had fallen out of favor and were no longer number one in his heart.
Plus, Shu was just a good guy.
Then... was it Mei?
No, no, no! Mei was the one who just brought it up! Was Mei actually a master manipulator playing the victim? Impossible! Absolutely impossible!
If Mei was really that kind of person, did that mean all their past moments together—all those times Kiana had gotten totally hot and bothered—were actually just Mei seducing her on purpose?!
Kiana absolutely refused to accept this reality.
Then... could it be Bronya?
Hiss... No, that didn't make sense either.
Bronya and Ai-chan were bitter rivals. They constantly fought tooth and nail in video games, and as an AI, Ai-chan had an innate, instinctual fear of Bronya's god-tier hacking skills.
So it couldn't be Bronya.
Then could it be...
Kiana's heart pounded like a jackhammer. Her pupils quaked, and her breathing grew so heavy it almost stopped entirely.
Could it be ME?!
That was it! Homu Holmes once said: once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how absurd, must be the truth!
So, there was only one truth... She was the traitor who leaked the song to Ai-chan!
"You good?" Shu sniffed the air, vaguely sensing a chaotic emotional spiral radiating from Kiana.
"Urgh..." Kiana's face scrunched up like a bitter gourd. Her mind frantically bounced back and forth between the options of 'confess' and 'wait to be exposed.' Finally, she took a long, deep breath, opting for a quick death.
"It's just the four of us in here. I suspect... the traitor is me," Kiana announced with a face full of absolute misery, instantly drawing three deadpan stares.
What the hell is this idiot talking about?
Mei fell silent for a long moment. She stood up, walked over, and lightly karate-chopped the top of Kiana's head.
"Do you actually have any memory of picking out this song and sending it to Ai-chan?" Mei asked with a helpless sigh, gently rubbing the spot she had just chopped.
"Oh, right." Kiana blinked, her expression instantly turning dead serious. "Could it be the work of the Herrscher of Memory?!"
"I'm gonna go with 'no'," Shu said, stroking his chin. He stared at Kiana with a newfound sense of awe, as if studying a baffling new species.
What is going on in that head of hers?
Most likely, because they weren't in any immediate danger, Kiana had completely powered down her internal brain and was operating entirely via external processors—namely, the three of them.
Bronya sighed, her gaze returning to the large screen.
She didn't even have the energy to call her 'Idiot Kiana' right now.
"Instead of wasting time on this completely meaningless internal friction, let's focus on the situation. Ai-chan has already started. There's no point agonizing over this."
The air in the waiting room seemed to freeze for a split second.
Everyone's eyes were involuntarily drawn back to the massive monitor.
On screen, Ai-chan's silhouette was stretched out to epic proportions, framed against a frantically flashing, red-and-black emergency hazard background.
The microphone in her hand looked as though it had transformed into a burning broadsword, its blade pointed straight at the heavens.
BOOM—!
A devastating wall of sound that threatened to rip their eardrums straight out of their skulls detonated through the speakers, instantly accompanied by the frantic, blistering beat of Flare!