Chapter 64: Orientation

Chapter 64: Chapter 64: Orientation

Haruki expected the orientation meeting to be boring. He was wrong. Not because anything dramatic happened. Because boredom required comfort, and the meeting offered none from the moment he walked in.

The event took place inside a modest conference hall owned by the platform — not glamorous, not prestigious. Functional. Rows of chairs, projectors, coffee stations, nervous creators pretending they weren’t nervous while checking their phones a little too often.

Haruki arrived twenty minutes early, a habit born from missing a deadline once and apparently developing lifelong trauma over it. The reception desk handed him a badge.

Haruki Amamiya — Threadless Gate

Seeing the series title printed professionally still felt strange every time, a sensation that never completely wore off no matter how many Chapters he’d published by now.

Around the room, other finalists gathered — some chatting, some checking phones, some reviewing notes. Most looked older than him. A few didn’t. He recognized one immediately.

Aoi Fujimura, of course. The rival sat alone near the back, laptop open, headphones on, working. Not waiting — working, actively producing pages while everyone else killed time before the presentation started. Even before introductions, the difference felt obvious. Haruki attended meetings. Aoi attended while still moving forward. The distinction irritated him slightly, not because it was rude, but because it was efficient in a way that made his own habit of arriving early and just sitting there look almost wasteful by comparison.

A platform coordinator stepped onto the stage — microphone, presentation slides, corporate smile, the usual ritual beginning right on schedule. Rules, deadlines, participation requirements, promotion opportunities. Haruki listened, mostly.

The creator beside him whispered, "You’re Threadless Gate, right?"

He turned. A young woman, maybe nineteen, curly brown hair, a notebook filled with sketches. Her badge read Akari Sato — Glass Summer. He blinked, then placed the name. Finalist number three, a strong romance series, rapid growth, high reader engagement.

She smiled. "My younger sister reads your manga."

He relaxed slightly. "Only your sister?"

She laughed. "She’s obsessed." Good — much better than discussing controversy for once.

The orientation continued, and eventually creators were asked to introduce themselves briefly, the microphone moving down the row one at a time. Different dreams, different goals, different personalities laid out one after another. Then Aoi’s turn arrived.

He removed one headphone. Not both. One, an impressive level of confidence or arrogance, possibly both at once. "My name is Aoi Fujimura." No surprise there. "I write Signal Zero." Still expected. Then: "I want to become the best creator in Japan."

No hesitation, no embarrassment, no irony in it at all. The room reacted immediately — a few smiles, a few raised eyebrows, one creator nearly choking on coffee. Aoi didn’t seem to notice or care either way.

The microphone moved on. Eventually it reached Haruki, and several people looked toward him with an interest that told him the controversy had traveled farther than he’d hoped. Wonderful.

He stood, adjusted the microphone, thought for about three seconds. "My name is Haruki Amamiya." A pause. "I write Threadless Gate." Another. "I want to keep making stories people remember."

The answer sounded small next to Aoi’s. It felt honest anyway, which mattered more to him than sounding impressive in front of a room full of strangers.

Break time followed — coffee, networking, small talk. He escaped toward the refreshments table. Naturally, that was exactly where the trouble found him.

"Your answer was safe."

A voice. He turned. Aoi, coffee cup in one hand, phone in the other, expression completely unchanged from the stage. Haruki immediately disliked how calm he looked about all of it.

"What answer would’ve been unsafe?"

Aoi shrugged. "The honest one."

Interesting. No — stop that, he told himself, refusing the mental habit before it could take root. "What makes you think I wasn’t honest?"

Aoi took a sip of coffee, because apparently none of this was stressful for him at all. "Nobody spends years drawing manga because they only want readers to remember it."

The answer landed harder than expected, not because it was insulting, but because it might actually contain some truth he hadn’t fully sat with himself yet.

Haruki folded his arms. "You seem pretty confident."

"Usually." No fake humility, no social smoothing to soften it. Just certainty, plain and total. The guy was exhausting to talk to for exactly five minutes straight.

Yet in those five minutes, Haruki learned several things. Aoi disliked excuses. Aoi respected consistency. Aoi believed talent mattered more than luck, full stop, no exceptions carved out for circumstance. Most importantly, Aoi genuinely believed creators should compete — not metaphorically, actually compete, head to head, numbers against numbers, with no hedging about how art wasn’t really a competition.

The orientation resumed before either of them could continue. By the time it ended, evening sunlight painted orange rectangles across the conference room floor. Creators exchanged contacts, managers discussed opportunities, editors collected notes. Haruki gathered his things, prepared to leave.

Then he noticed something unexpected. Akari Sato, talking with Yui.

His brain stalled briefly. "What?"

Yui looked up. "Oh." Then pointed toward Akari. "We met outside."

Akari smiled. "Your childhood friend is terrifying."

Yui seemed pleased by that, which was a worrying sign on its own. Haruki rubbed his forehead. Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful — the two of them had apparently become friendly in under thirty minutes, a skill he suspected he’d never fully understand no matter how long he watched it happen.

As they walked toward the station later, Yui glanced sideways. "So."

He already knew. "No."

She frowned. "I didn’t ask anything."

"You were about to."

A brief silence. Then: "How was the rival?"

He sighed. There it was. "Amazing."

She blinked. "That sounds positive."

"It’s not." Another beat. "He’s really good."

This time she smiled — not sympathetically, excitedly, which felt deeply unhelpful given the circumstances.

Back in his apartment that night, Haruki opened Signal Zero again, read another Chapter, then another. The writing remained excellent. Annoyingly excellent, precise in a way that made him second-guess a decision on nearly every page of his own drafts.

The system appeared.

[Creative Rivalry Update: Aoi Fujimura]

Current Advantage: Production efficiency Structural discipline Reader retention Current Disadvantage: Character intimacy Emotional flexibility Recommendation: Study. Do not imitate.

The screen vanished. Haruki looked at Chapter Seventeen, then Signal Zero, then the tournament bracket still pinned open in another tab. For months, survival had dominated his attention completely — the missed deadlines, the corporate pressure, the money, the mistakes he’d made trying to fix all of it at once. Now a different kind of challenge stood in front of him. Not a corporation. Not a hidden enemy operating through three layers of deniability.

A creator. One his own age. One who wanted the exact same future he did, and had already gotten further toward it with cleaner numbers to show for it.

And for the first time in a very long while, competition felt genuinely exciting instead of exhausting. Not because he wanted Aoi to fail.

Because he wanted to find out whether he could actually win.