Chapter 68: Matchups

Chapter 68: Chapter 68: Matchups

The tournament matchups released at exactly noon. Naturally, the website crashed — not completely, just enough to annoy everyone involved. Creators refreshed pages. Readers spammed forums. Moderators suffered quietly somewhere behind the scenes. A normal day on the internet.

Haruki discovered the announcement twenty-three minutes late because he was drawing, a fact he considered genuine progress. Six months ago he would’ve spent the entire morning refreshing the page himself. Now he was finishing Page Twenty-Seven of Chapter Seventeen instead, undistracted, and only noticed the noise once his phone finally caught up with him.

It exploded anyway — Takeda, Akari, three creator forum notifications, two reader messages, one email, and a single text from Yui. The world survived twenty-three minutes without you.

He laughed, then opened the announcement. The tournament structure appeared — quarterfinals, semifinals, final, reader vote combined with editorial scoring. Simple, brutal, entirely public. The matchups followed.

Quarterfinal One: Akari Sato vs. Kenji WatanabeQuarterfinal Two: Aoi Fujimura vs. Daichi MoriQuarterfinal Three: Haruki Amamiya vs. Rina Kobayashi

He blinked. Rina. The name felt familiar, and he opened the creator profile to check — twenty years old, fantasy creator, strong growth, excellent reviews. Then he checked her work. A mistake, immediately. Thirty minutes disappeared without him noticing. The writing was good, very good — confident worldbuilding, strong dialogue, excellent pacing that never once dragged. The realization irritated him more than it should have. Every finalist seemed annoyingly talented. Apparently the easy opponents had all stayed home this year.

A message arrived from Mizuno. Read Rina. Don’t underestimate her. He looked at the already-open Chapter. Too late — the warning would’ve been useful thirty minutes earlier, before he’d already spent half an afternoon confirming exactly how much of a threat she actually was.

His phone rang. Takeda. He answered.

"You’re doomed." No greeting, no explanation, straight to violence as always.

"What?"

Takeda sounded far too happy about it. "Forum predictions."

That explained everything. Haruki opened the thread.

Tournament Winner Poll Aoi: 41% Haruki: 28% Akari: 17% Others: 14%

Interesting. No — stop, enough, the habit refused to die no matter how many times he tried to kill it.

Takeda laughed through the speaker. "You look offended."

"I’m not offended."

A pause. "I’m professionally offended."

That made Takeda laugh harder, and the call ran a few more minutes before drifting into ordinary conversation — manga, deadlines, food, life, normal things neither of them needed to be careful around anymore. The friendship still carried scars from what had happened weeks earlier, and Haruki noticed them sometimes, small hesitations that hadn’t been there before. So did Takeda, probably. The important part was that both of them kept showing up anyway, week after week, and that mattered more than the scars did at this point.

The afternoon passed quietly, for once. No conspiracies, no hidden quests, no disasters waiting in an inbox. Just work. Haruki finished Chapter Seventeen’s final polish, uploaded backups, checked exports, verified the schedule, then checked it all again out of a habit the missed deadline had permanently installed in him. The mistake still haunted him a little every time he ran through the checklist. Good — some mistakes deserved to haunt you a while longer, if it kept you from repeating them.

At 6:41 PM, another message arrived. Unknown Number. He opened it.

Congratulations. Don’t embarrass yourself.— Aoi

He stared, then laughed. The guy genuinely communicated like he was issuing formal challenge letters, one text message at a time. He typed back: I assume this is your version of encouragement.

The reply arrived instantly. No.

Fair enough. Several seconds later, another message. Signal Zero overtook Threadless Gate in weekly retention. Thought you should know.

He looked at the screen, then the ceiling, then back at the screen. Aoi really did wake up every single morning and choose competition as his first act of the day, unprompted, over something as small as a weekly retention number. Somewhere between annoying and admirable, that. Mostly annoying, he decided, though he saved the message anyway instead of deleting it.

That evening, Yui visited. The first thing she noticed was his expression.

"You got compared to somebody again."

He blinked. "What?"

"You make that face." A pause. "The rival face."

The existence of a specific, recognizable rival face on his own features felt deeply unfair to have pointed out. She read the message exchange over his shoulder, then laughed — actually laughed, not politely, not gently. Fully. "He’s unbelievable."

"That’s one word."

She handed the phone back. "No." A smile remained on her face. "He’s useful."

He frowned. "How?"

The answer came immediately, like she’d already worked it out before saying anything. "Because he makes you work harder."

That was annoying, mostly because it was true and he didn’t have a good rebuttal ready.

Later that night, Haruki opened Chapter Eighteen. The archive leak finally reached the public — the Bureau scrambling to contain the damage, the protagonists running from consequences they’d chosen to trigger back in Chapter Sixteen, the fallout spreading exactly the way it should after a choice that mattered. Ren’s decision had changed the world of the story, not just his own small corner of it. Exactly as intended, weeks of setup finally paying off in a way that felt earned rather than convenient.

For the first time in a while, Haruki felt confident about where the story was actually going. Not certain — confident, a distinction he’d learned to appreciate the difference of the hard way over the last several months.

The system appeared shortly before midnight.

[Tournament Matchup Registered: Rina Kobayashi]

Assessment: High Potential Win Probability: Unavailable Reason: Creator growth remains unstable Observation: The most interesting competitions are rarely between enemies.

The screen vanished. Haruki looked toward the city lights beyond the window, then the tournament bracket still pinned open on his monitor, then Chapter Eighteen waiting patiently in front of everything else.

Aoi waited on one side of the bracket. Akari on another. Rina directly ahead of him, first in line, talented and ambitious and dangerous in exactly the ways that made a real opponent instead of an easy one. For the first time since starting this journey, Haruki wasn’t trying to survive the week in front of him.

He was trying to prove he belonged in the room with all three of them.

And strangely enough, that challenge felt harder than any of the survival had.