Chapter 69: Rina Kobayashi

Chapter 69: Chapter 69: Rina Kobayashi

Rina Kobayashi hated rankings. Unfortunately, rankings loved Rina Kobayashi. The tournament announcement had been public for less than twenty-four hours, and already people were predicting her defeat. She appreciated their confidence — specifically, their confidence that she would lose. It simplified expectations considerably, having nothing left to protect.

She sat cross-legged on the floor of her apartment, sketchbooks scattered around her, reference books stacked nearby, instant noodles cooling beside her laptop. A perfectly professional workplace, by her own standards if nobody else’s.

The discussion thread remained open.

Quarterfinal Three: Haruki Amamiya vs. Rina Kobayashi Haruki wins: 72% Rina wins: 28%

Interesting numbers. Not upsetting, not encouraging. Just numbers, laid out plainly the way numbers always were. The comments interested her more.

Threadless Gate is too popular.

Rina is good, but Haruki has momentum.

Not even close.

That one made her laugh. People always said "not even close" right before discovering things turned out extremely close after all. She’d seen the pattern too many times to take it personally anymore.

Her phone buzzed. Editor. She answered. "Tell me."

The editor sighed, a familiar sound by now. "You aren’t worried." Not a question.

She looked at the rankings again. "No."

The editor sounded mildly annoyed. "You should be."

Reasonable advice, ignored immediately, because worrying never improved a manuscript. Writing did, and she’d rather spend the anxious energy on the page where it might actually accomplish something.

The conversation continued another ten minutes — mostly strategy, mostly promotion plans, mostly things she disliked discussing but tolerated as the cost of having an editor at all. Eventually the editor asked the obvious question. "Have you read Threadless Gate?"

She leaned back. "Three times."

Silence. Then: "Three?"

"Research." A complete explanation. Almost. The truth was slightly more complicated than that — she genuinely liked it, which was inconvenient. Rivals were supposed to be easier to dislike than this. Haruki’s strengths stood out immediately on rereading: characters, emotion, relationships, scenes that stayed with a reader long after the page turned. She respected that. She also fully intended to beat him in the bracket regardless. Both feelings existed comfortably together, without much friction between them.

The call ended. She returned to her manuscript. Her fantasy series, Ashes of the First Sky, sat near a critical turning point — the protagonist finally reaching the ruined capital, the ancient king finally appearing, several carefully seeded lies finally starting to collapse under their own weight. Good material. Strong material, exactly the kind of Chapter tournaments tended to reward when the votes actually came in.

Outside, afternoon sunlight spilled across Tokyo. Inside, she worked. Three hours disappeared without her noticing.

At 4:18, another notification appeared. Private Creator Group.

Akari Sato: Anybody else tired of tournament discussions?

Aoi Fujimura: No.

Akari: Of course.

She laughed. The group continued.

Haruki: I regret joining this chat.

Aoi: Weakness detected.

Akari: Please go outside.

Aoi: Unnecessary.

For several seconds, Rina simply watched it unfold. Interesting dynamic. No — wrong word. Entertaining, much better. The rivalry existed between all of them plainly enough, but the hostility didn’t, and that distinction mattered more than it seemed like it should on the surface. Genuine creator communities rarely resembled battlefields the way outsiders imagined them. They resembled strange families instead. Competitive families, weird families, families that measured their own self-worth through analytics dashboards at two in the morning. But families nonetheless, bound together by something the rankings couldn’t quite capture.

The chat eventually shifted toward writing, then deadlines, then editors, then complaints about editors — a universal creator language spoken fluently by everyone in the group regardless of genre. At some point Haruki mentioned Ren, a character problem, a story challenge he was working through in real time. Rina paid attention immediately, because that was the real competition underneath all the polls and headlines. Not popularity. Not rankings. Storytelling, plain and simple, the only thing any of this was actually supposed to be measuring.

The conversation revealed something interesting the longer she watched it. Haruki constantly questioned his own work, second-guessing scenes even after they’d clearly landed with readers. Aoi questioned results, chasing the next number instead of the current one. Akari questioned emotions, trying to find the honest version underneath whatever her editors kept asking for. Rina questioned structure, always looking for the load-bearing wall in a scene before trusting it to hold weight. Different instincts, different weaknesses scattered across all four of them like pieces of the same skill set nobody possessed in full.

The realization stayed with her long after the chat quieted down for the night.

That evening, she opened Threadless Gate again — Chapter Sixteen, the archive Chapter, Ren deleting the false destiny with his hand still on the terminal. The scene still worked. That annoyed her, not because it was better than her own writing, but because it was different in a way that made direct comparison useless. A difficult opponent couldn’t simply be outworked through more hours or cleaner prose. They had to actually be understood first, on their own terms, before you could figure out where the real gap between you sat.

Her phone buzzed one final time before midnight. Tournament Preview Feature Released. She opened it. Each quarterfinal had received a short promotional article, and her matchup appeared first.

Emotion vs. StructureHaruki Amamiya vs. Rina Kobayashi

She stared, then laughed. The headline was ridiculous. Mostly because it wasn’t entirely wrong, either — a lazy label that still managed to land somewhere close to true.

Across Tokyo, Haruki read the same article. Across another district, Aoi mocked it publicly within minutes of it going live. Akari complained loudly about being reduced to a demographic category in her own preview. Meanwhile, thousands of readers debated who would advance, the arguments spinning out faster than any of the four creators could keep up with reading them.

The tournament hadn’t officially started. The stories continued regardless, page by page, on schedules that didn’t care what the polls said. The arguments multiplied across a dozen forums at once.

And somewhere inside a small apartment, Rina Kobayashi returned to work, because predictions didn’t matter. Articles didn’t matter. Polls didn’t matter.

Only Chapters mattered.

Everything else came afterward.