Chapter 67: Hayato Kanzaki

Chapter 67: Chapter 67: Hayato Kanzaki

Chapter 67: Five Years From Now (Revised)

Hayato Kanzaki disliked creator forums. Unfortunately, creator forums loved Hayato Kanzaki. Every opinion became a debate, every debate became a thread, every thread eventually became somebody else’s misunderstanding attributed back to him with his name attached. The tournament only made things worse.

He sat inside a quiet café near Shinjuku Station, laptop open, coffee untouched, creator discussions filling the screen faster than he could read them. Aoi versus Haruki. Haruki versus Aoi. Signal Zero versus Threadless Gate. Skill versus emotion. Discipline versus intuition. The internet always reduced complicated things into teams, and it was exhausting to watch happen in real time to two people he’d both, in his own way, come to respect more than he wanted to.

A notification appeared. Private Creator Chat. He opened it. Several creators were trading tournament predictions, most of the opinions predictable enough that he could’ve written them himself. Then somebody asked: Who actually wins?

A familiar question. One creator answered immediately. Aoi. Easy. Another disagreed. Haruki has stronger reader loyalty. Arguments followed, then statistics, then egos. Eventually somebody tagged him directly. What do you think?

The cursor blinked, waiting. He considered several answers, then typed: Haruki’s biggest enemy isn’t industry pressure. It’s his process.

He pressed send. The chat exploded immediately, predictable enough that he muted the conversation right after, because the answer itself wasn’t the interesting part. The reaction was. People loved imagining external enemies — corporations, editors, publishers, competitors, anything with a face they could point at. The uncomfortable truth was that most creators lost against themselves first. Deadlines, habits, ego, fear. The boring enemies. The real ones, in his experience, the ones that never made it into a dramatic forum thread because nobody wanted to admit they’d been beaten by their own bad decisions.

His phone buzzed. Father. He immediately regretted existing for the length of the call.

It connected. No greeting. "How are preparations?" Business tone, as always, as though the tournament were a quarterly review.

He leaned back. "Fine."

The answer satisfied nobody, especially not his father. "The tournament matters."

A familiar statement. Everything mattered, according to Kanzaki Holdings. A project mattered, a meeting mattered, a networking dinner mattered, a sponsorship mattered. The company treated life like an endless ladder with no top rung visible from where he was standing. He hated ladders, and had hated them for as long as he could remember hating anything.

His father continued. "You’ll be meeting several executives." There it was — the actual reason for the call, buried under two sentences of pretense. Networking, always networking, dressed up as concern for his creative career.

He closed his eyes. "I write manga." The answer arrived automatically, not for the first time in this exact conversation held a dozen different ways over the years.

His father sounded unimpressed. "You write within an industry."

The distinction annoyed him precisely because it wasn’t entirely wrong. The call ended soon after, thankfully, the coffee still untouched in front of him.

Outside, afternoon crowds moved through the city. Inside, he opened Threadless Gate, Chapter Sixteen. Not because he enjoyed it — because he wanted to understand it, the way he’d want to understand any tool that kept outperforming his expectations of it.

Ren stood before the Bureau database. Faced the false destiny. Deleted it. Triggered disaster. Hayato reread the scene twice, then frowned, because it worked. Not perfectly, not flawlessly. Emotionally, in the specific way his own writing rarely bothered to try for. The scene had conviction, and that irritated him. Haruki’s stories always irritated him a little, not because they were bad, but because they succeeded in exactly the places he personally struggled most. Emotion, messiness, imperfection — the things readers seemed to connect with despite every instinct he had telling him precision should win out.

He preferred precision. Control. Structure. Both approaches worked, evidently. Neither one guaranteed victory on its own.

His phone buzzed again. Aoi Fujimura, of course — the younger creator apparently treated rivalry as a recreational activity, something to poke at whenever he had a spare five minutes. The message contained one line.

You think Haruki is overrated?

Hayato laughed, actually laughed, then replied. No.

Several seconds passed. Aoi responded immediately. Then why defend him?

He looked at the Chapter again, then the comments, then the reader reactions still stacking up beneath it in real time. Then typed: Because if you underestimate people, you learn nothing when they beat you.

This time the reply took longer. Eventually: Fair. Conversation over. Good.

He went back to reading. The Chapter comments interested him more than the Chapter itself at this point — readers arguing passionately, some loving Ren’s choice, some hating it, some debating the consequences it would obviously trigger. Nobody felt indifferent, and that was valuable. Very valuable, in a way none of his own carefully engineered plot beats had ever quite managed to produce.

The realization settled somewhere uncomfortable as he closed the laptop for a moment. Haruki generated stronger emotional reactions. Aoi generated stronger consistency. Akari generated stronger character attachment. Different strengths, different weaknesses spread across the three of them like a set of tools nobody possessed all at once. The tournament wasn’t going to decide who was objectively best. It was going to expose what each of them lacked, in public, for everyone watching to see.

The thought stayed with him long after he closed the page.

That evening, he attended a small creator gathering — nothing official, nothing especially important, just conversations, industry gossip, future projects being traded around a table. Halfway through, somebody mentioned Haruki, predictably. Then somebody mentioned Aoi, also predictably. Eventually the conversation reached Hayato directly.

"Who worries you more?"

The question arrived casually. The answer didn’t, because neither creator actually worried him, not exactly, not in the way the question assumed. After a moment he answered. "Aoi."

The group nodded — expected answer. He continued. "Today." Several people looked confused. Then: "Haruki." A pause. "Five years from now."

The table went quieter, not because they agreed with him outright, but because they’d started actually thinking about it instead of just reacting.

He left shortly after. Outside, Tokyo stretched endlessly beneath the night sky, the city holding millions of people, thousands of creators, hundreds of real competitors somewhere in that mass. Only a handful would matter in the long run. The tournament wouldn’t decide who joined that group.

Time would, the way it always did, regardless of who won a single bracket.

Back in his apartment, Haruki received a notification. Tournament Matchups Released Tomorrow. Simple, ordinary, expected. Yet excitement appeared almost immediately anyway, because the competition was finally becoming real instead of theoretical.

And somewhere else in Tokyo, Hayato Kanzaki closed his laptop after finishing Chapter Sixteen for the second time that day. For the first time in months, he looked forward to seeing what happened next. Not in the tournament.

In the story.

He considered that mildly annoying to admit even to himself. Then went back to work anyway.