Chapter 65: Akari Sato

Chapter 65: Chapter 65: Akari Sato

Akari Sato hated creator networking events. This was unfortunate, because creator networking events loved Akari Sato right back. Three days after orientation, her phone held seventeen new contacts — two editors, three aspiring artists, five creators, one marketing manager, and six people she genuinely couldn’t remember meeting at all. A successful outcome by any professional measure. A miserable experience by every other one.

She stared at the contact list while sitting inside a small café near her university. The list stared back. Neither side seemed particularly impressed with the other.

Across the table sat her younger sister — the real culprit behind most of her current stress. "You met Haruki Amamiya."

Akari immediately regretted ever mentioning orientation out loud. "Yes."

Her sister nearly vibrated out of her chair. "The Haruki Amamiya?"

"There is only one."

Another mistake, because now the excitement doubled instantly. "What’s he like?"

She considered the question, and the answer surprised her a little once she actually landed on it. "Normal."

Her sister looked genuinely horrified. "That’s impossible."

Akari laughed. The reaction felt familiar — readers always imagined creators as larger than reality, more dramatic, more interesting, more brilliant in person than any of them actually turned out to be. Haruki had seemed tired, polite, a little awkward. A lot less mysterious than the internet claimed him to be.

Aoi Fujimura, on the other hand, was exactly as strange as advertised. The thought made her smile despite herself. The creator community couldn’t stop discussing orientation, especially Aoi, particularly the I want to become the best creator in Japan moment that had already gotten screenshotted a hundred times over. She respected the honesty of it. She also wanted to throw a notebook at him. Both feelings existed simultaneously, without any real contradiction between them.

Her sister noticed the smile. "What?"

"Nothing." A lie.

The conversation eventually drifted toward Glass Summer, Akari’s romance series, the work responsible for most of her current stress. Her sister pointed at the newest Chapter on her phone. "The confession scene was amazing."

Akari groaned. "Please stop reading my comments section."

"I won’t." Expected. Very expected, and she’d known better than to ask.

The confession Chapter had performed well, exceptionally well. The problem was that editors now wanted more romance, more drama, more emotional intensity, the same request landing in her inbox every single week like clockwork. She liked romance. She didn’t particularly enjoy manufacturing it on demand. A subtle distinction that never seemed to translate cleanly into a note from an editor.

Her phone buzzed. A new message, unknown number. She opened it, immediately regretted it.

Aoi Fujimura

Of course. Apparently orientation contact exchanges had happened somewhere while she wasn’t paying attention. The message contained one sentence.

Who do you think wins?

She stared, then typed back: Wins what?

The reply arrived instantly. The tournament.

She laughed, actually laughed, right there inside the café. Her sister looked confused. "What happened?"

"Creator nonsense." A complete explanation. Almost.

She looked at the screen again, then responded: No idea.

A pause. Then another message. Wrong answer.

The confidence somehow survived text format perfectly intact. Impressive, and annoying in roughly equal measure. She typed: You’re exhausting.

Correct.

Conversation ended. Thankfully.

Across Tokyo, Haruki received a different message — Takeda. Tournament discussion thread exploding. Check page three.

He clicked. A mistake, probably, but he clicked anyway. Page three held a popularity poll — expected, since creator communities loved rankings almost as much as they loved arguing about them. Aoi occupied first place. Expected. Haruki occupied second. Also expected, and roughly what he’d have guessed himself.

The surprise sat lower down the list. Akari Sato, third, with discussion around her series continuing to grow rapidly and reader loyalty holding unusually strong for a romance title in a poll otherwise dominated by drama and rivalry. Interesting. No — stop, he told himself, rubbing his forehead. The habit was getting genuinely ridiculous at this point.

Instead he focused on the comments, most of which debated Aoi versus Haruki directly. The rivalry already existed publicly, fully formed, even before the tournament had officially started. Readers chose sides, creators discussed philosophies in long threads, forum posts multiplied by the hour — exactly the kind of attention Kanzaki Holdings had probably loved during the earlier campaign against him, back when visibility had been the whole point of the pressure.

That thought pulled his attention somewhere else entirely. Kanzaki. Hayato. The pressure campaign that had gone quiet over the last several weeks. Too quiet, and he disliked quiet on principle by now. Quiet usually meant preparation rather than retreat.

His phone rang. Kuroda, the first call in nearly a month. He answered immediately.

"No greeting?" Kuroda sounded amused, a dangerous sign in itself.

"You vanished."

"Busy." Expected.

Then Kuroda asked a strange question. "How much Creator Point debt do you have?"

Haruki nearly dropped the phone. Silence, then: "...what?"

A low chuckle came through the speaker — not explanation, not clarification, just amusement sitting there unexplained. He stood up from his desk. "How do you know about that?"

Kuroda ignored the question entirely, another dangerous sign. "Less than a thousand?"

He didn’t answer. Kuroda sighed. "Good."

The answer somehow worried him more than a bad one would have. Very worried. "What are you talking about?"

For several seconds only city noise came through the phone — traffic, wind, distant voices somewhere on Kuroda’s end of the line. Then finally: "The first debt is always the easiest one."

The line went dead. No explanation, no context, nothing else attached to it. Haruki stared at the disconnected screen for a long moment.

Outside, evening settled across Tokyo. Inside, Creator Point debt suddenly felt heavier than it had that morning, sitting there in his account balance like something he’d underestimated the shape of.

And somewhere else in the city, three young creators moved toward the same tournament from three different directions. One wanted to prove skill mattered more than anything else. One wanted to create stories people remembered long after they’d finished reading them. One wanted readers to feel something real, and hadn’t quite decided yet whether that was compatible with what the industry actually asked of her every week.

None of them realized the tournament wasn’t the only game already being played around them.