Chapter 70: The First Round

Chapter 70: Chapter 70: The First Round

The tournament began on a Tuesday. Haruki discovered this because Takeda sent fourteen messages before breakfast.

Message one: WAKE UP. Message seven: YOU’RE TRENDING. Message fourteen: I REFUSE TO LET YOU MISS THIS TOO.

He considered blocking him, briefly, then opened the platform instead. The tournament homepage occupied the front page.

Rookie Creator Tournament — Quarterfinal Round — Now Live

Banners, articles, polls, predictions, advertisements. The platform had transformed six creators into a public spectacle almost overnight. Expected, a little uncomfortable, and clearly very effective at generating exactly the kind of visibility everyone kept telling him he needed.

The reader vote period would last seventy-two hours, editorial evaluation occurring simultaneously alongside it. The combined result would determine advancement. Simple, brutal, entirely public.

He closed the page immediately — not because he wasn’t curious, but because curiosity would destroy his productivity if he let it, the way it had every other time he’d let himself check a dashboard mid-Chapter. Chapter Eighteen waited. Ren and his group had escaped the archive, the public leak spreading fast now, the Bureau panicking in ways that finally felt proportionate to what they’d actually done. Several secondary characters were finally entering the story again in full — Miyu returning to center stage, Shiori gaining her own subplot at last. Reader requests had been clear about wanting more of the supporting cast, and Haruki intended to actually deliver on it this time instead of letting Ren’s arc swallow everyone else’s screen time.

His phone buzzed. Unknown Number. No — not unknown, Rina Kobayashi. Apparently the creator group chat had permanently destroyed whatever privacy any of them had left with each other.

The message contained one image, a screenshot.

Prediction Poll: Haruki 73% — Rina 27%

Below it: This feels disrespectful.

He laughed, then replied. A little.

Three dots appeared, disappeared, returned. Eventually: Good. That was all. Interesting person. No — stop, the habit remained stubbornly alive no matter how many times he tried to kill it.

At noon, tournament interviews released — each creator getting a short promotional video attached to their profile. He reluctantly watched his own. Bad decision; seeing yourself on camera always felt unnatural, like watching a slightly wrong copy of yourself talk about your own career. The interview covered missed deadlines, creator growth, Threadless Gate, future goals. Nothing catastrophic, nothing embarrassing. Mostly.

The comment section immediately divided into two camps — supporters, critics, a normal internet experience by this point in his career. One comment gained unusual traction: Haruki feels more human than the others. Thousands of replies followed, some agreeing, some pushing back hard. He closed the page, and the comment bothered him longer than he expected, not because it was insulting, but because it highlighted something strange he hadn’t fully sat with yet. The tournament wasn’t only judging stories. It was judging creators as people, in public, permanently. A dangerous thing to have happen — stories could improve draft to draft, but a creator became trapped inside whatever public perception decided to stick to them after one video clip.

The thought stayed with him through the afternoon. At 4:02, Chapter Eighteen’s newest pages were complete. Ren’s leak finally triggered national attention in the story — news articles emerging, government denials following right behind them, public confusion spreading exactly the way it should after a truth this big got loose. Consequences, actual consequences, rippling outward instead of staying contained to three characters in a tunnel. Good. The story felt alive again in a way that made the tournament noise fade a little into the background while he worked.

While exporting files, another message appeared. Aoi Fujimura, of course, with a link attached. Current Tournament Standings.

He clicked despite knowing better.

Quarterfinal One: Akari leading. Quarterfinal Two: Aoi dominating, unsurprisingly. Quarterfinal Three: Haruki 52% — Rina 48%

He blinked, twice. The gap was tiny, far smaller than the public predictions had suggested that morning. The comment underneath the link came immediately. Told you not to underestimate her.

He stared, then typed: Are you rooting against me?

The reply arrived instantly. No. A pause. I’m rooting for better competition.

That somehow sounded honest. Annoyingly honest, the way most of Aoi’s messages managed to be despite reading like they were composed by someone who’d never once softened an opinion in his life.

The evening brought something unexpected — Yui. Not unusual on its own. Her mood was. Excited, actually excited, in a way he hadn’t seen from her in weeks. The moment she walked in he noticed.

"What happened?"

She dropped her bag onto a chair. "I got an interview."

He stood immediately. "What?"

The smile answered before the words did. Community healthcare — the organization she’d actually wanted, the one she’d mentioned by the river that evening with the sun going down behind the skyline. The interview would happen next week. For the first time since the merger crisis had started, genuine enthusiasm showed in her voice instead of relief or bare survival. Enthusiasm, and the difference mattered enormously — he’d learned to hear it by now, after enough months of watching her carefully manage which version of herself she showed him on a hard day.

No — enough, he told himself, catching the habit again mid-thought. He laughed instead.

Yui looked confused. "What?"

"I think I’m infected."

Now she looked more confused. "By what?"

He pointed at himself. "Story analysis." Reading her own reactions the way he’d trained himself to read Ren’s, noticing the because underneath the what without meaning to.

She immediately regretted asking, a healthy reaction under the circumstances.

Later that night, after she left, Haruki sat beside the window. The city stretched endlessly beyond the glass — lights, traffic, movement continuing exactly as it always did, indifferent to a 52-48 poll or a job interview scheduled for next Tuesday. His tournament standing remained uncertain. The reader vote stayed active. Rina remained dangerous. Aoi remained irritating. Akari remained unexpectedly funny in a group chat that had somehow become one of the more stabilizing parts of his week.

And somewhere inside Threadless Gate, Ren finally began becoming the protagonist the story had needed since Chapter One.

The system appeared.

[Quarterfinal Status: Rina Kobayashi]

Current Position: Competitive Observation: Popularity begins tournaments. Execution finishes them.

The message disappeared. Haruki looked at Chapter Nineteen’s outline, then the standings still glowing in another tab, then back at the manuscript sitting open in front of him.

The tournament mattered. Of course it mattered, more than he wanted to admit some mornings. But for the first time in a long while, it didn’t feel like the most important thing happening in his life this week.

Tomorrow’s Chapter still needed to be written.

And no tournament result, however it landed, was going to do that part for him.