I stared at both their faces on the screen—the live stream's sickening mockery on one monitor, a grim pantomime of life, while the archived playback, now imbued with a chilling new context, screamed the truth on the other.
All this time, I'd only seen them as entertainment.
Two absurd characters who, against all odds, brought laughter and chaotic joy to my otherwise pathetic, meticulously controlled virtual life. Online friends, digital companions who existed purely in pixels and distorted soundwaves.
But now?
Their faces, once vibrant with simulated life, felt utterly plastic. A chilling, pervasive uncanny valley effect had set in, transforming their familiar visages into grotesque masks. It was a falsity disguised with such terrifying precision that it had fooled millions, weaving a seamless illusion.
But not me.
Not anymore.
Not just their voices, which I now knew were manipulated sound bits—echoes of something lost—but their very souls felt absent, replaced by a hollow, sickening mimicry that grated against my every nerve.
"Don't tell me..." I whispered softly. The words were a strained, dry rasp in the suffocating quiet of my apartment, a silence now pregnant with unspeakable dread.
As if on cue, a brutal, unbidden overlay slammed into my vision: the faces of the two corpses from the crime scene, which I'd left just hours ago, now superimposed with nightmarish clarity over the digital avatars on my screens.
The horrifying, undeniable reality of their physical remains began to synchronize with the virtual lie playing out before me. It created a dissonance that threatened to crack my sanity.
My thoughts raced—a maelstrom of images and deductions—connecting the disparate, blood-soaked dots into a coherent, grotesque narrative.
I recalled the precise, sickening details of the bodies' positions in that apartment, details etched into my mind with the permanence of acid.
They were sitting in front of a screen, specifically their computers, positioned almost identically to how I sat before my own.
They were poised as if about to engage with them—or, more chillingly, as if they were already engaged in something utterly unspeakable, an act caught in its final, horrific tableau.
The monitors, still active, glowed with the ghostly luminescence of their last interaction.
They were stark naked, their vulnerability exposed for any potential observer. Their bodies were twisted into unnatural, almost theatrical poses. Unsettlingly, their private parts faced the webcam with an unnerving directness.
This singular detail, initially dismissed as a bizarre quirk of the crime scene, now screamed deliberate staging—a final, horrifying humiliation orchestrated for an unseen, monstrous audience. It was a violation beyond mere physical death.
There were no signs of struggle. No injuries.
This chilling absence of violence was perhaps the most disturbing detail, defying all conventional forensic logic. It hinted at a cause of death that wasn't physical assault, but something far more insidious. It pointed instead to a violation far deeper than cuts or bruises—a psychological or chemical subjugation that left no outward marks.
The computer was on—its cold, indifferent light illuminating their lifeless, vacant faces—as if someone had just closed an application, a casual ending to an ordinary session.
Or, more chillingly, as if the application was still running, still recording their final, silent screams.
And... there was one thing I couldn't forget. A detail so specific, so minute, yet so critically important it felt like a bloody key turning in a lock, unlocking the chamber of absolute horror.
The subtle pressure mark of a motion sensor glove on the male victim's index finger. It was faint, almost missed in the dim light of the crime scene, but undeniably there—a damning imprint.
That mark... it was identical to Delta's position on his character model, the typical placement for triggering in-game actions, a second skin to his virtual persona.
And... the female victim, her left hand slightly curled in an odd, final gesture, had a small crack on her ring fingernail. Just like Mono.
She had once mentioned it casually, almost playfully, in a live segment just a few weeks prior: "I broke my nail while ranking last night, guys. But my fighting spirit didn't break of course~!"
These were not random, isolated facts. They were signatures, meticulously placed—or perhaps, simply left—by a perpetrator with an almost surgical precision for detail, or an astonishingly perverse sense of irony.
I had deliberately hidden some of these minute, seemingly insignificant details from the police, and even from Kenta.
Why? Because to them, these specific, digital-world quirks, these granular anomalies of VTuber equipment and personal habits, might not be important.
They would only complicate the investigation, bogging down their conventional processes, wasting precious time.
Or worse, they would dismiss me as an eccentric, a virtual reality obsessive, a lunatic whose mind was too engrossed in digital fantasies to grasp concrete reality.
But I knew.
I knew, with the chilling certainty of absolute conviction, that every anomaly, every seemingly trivial inconsistency, every misplaced pixel, was a crucial, bloody piece of the puzzle.
I wanted to be the only one to assemble it.
I wanted to be the first to find the truth—the raw, unvarnished, sickening truth, no matter how grotesque, how personally devastating.
And I never, in my wildest, most cynical calculations, expected that truth would lead me to the worst possible scenario: my favorite VTubers were not just dead; they were meticulously, horribly replaced. Their final moments broadcast as a perverted spectacle.
I slumped.
The sheer, overwhelming force of the realization was like a physical blow, punching the air from my lungs. It left me breathless and hollow.
My body was cold, a chill deeper than the temperate apartment air could explain—an internal freeze that started from my bones.
Sweat, not from exertion but from sheer, profound psychological revulsion, plastered my hair to my forehead, trickling down my temples, stinging my eyes with its acidic trail.
My mouth tasted bitter, bile rising, thick and acrid, as if I'd swallowed something rancid, something rotten, something that had festered in the digital depths.
My stomach churned, a violent, uncontrollable rebellion against the abominable reality I was being forced to confront—a reality that twisted the very fabric of my ordered world. I stumbled, half-ran, clawing my way to the bathroom, desperate for an escape, any escape.
And then, the world dissolved as I vomited.
Long. Hard. Convulsively.
It felt as if all the horrifying truth, all the sickening reality I had swallowed over the past few hours—every macabre detail of the crime scene, every behavioral desync, every chilling, utterly twisted deduction—demanded to be expelled, violently, from my very core, leaving me utterly empty and hollow, a mere shell.
They were dead.
Mono and Delta.
The real ones.
Their physical forms were cold, lifeless matter in that sterile apartment.
And the ones live-streaming now, the grinning, chattering avatars on my screen, perpetuating the illusion...
They weren't them.
Not in any meaningful sense.
They were merely echoes, controlled by an unseen hand, dancing on the graves of their creators. This wasn't just a cover-up; it was a digital desecration, broadcasting their stolen identities to a world oblivious to the horror behind the smiles.
The thought made me gag again, but there was nothing left.
Only the bitter taste of a truth I now bore alone.