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Kasumigaoka Utaha watched Leo Vance's tall, upright figure disappear around the corner of the corridor. The heavy oak door of the clubroom clicked shut with a soft, final thud, leaving a vacuum of silence in its wake. She didn't move for a long moment, her wine-red eyes still fixed on the empty space where he had stood.
"That newcomer..." Utaha finally spoke, her voice a low, thoughtful murmur that barely carried across the room. "He's something else. I've never met anyone like him."
Takashiro Rin let out a lively, melodic laugh, leaning back against a desk and crossing her arms. "I'll say. According to the transfer records I saw, he's a top-tier student from the States. He's only been in the country for a bit, but he's already been scouted and admitted early to the Tokyo University of the Arts. The kid's a triple threat—academic beast, pro-level artist, and apparently, a writing prodigy."
Utaha's head snapped toward Rin, her long hair whipping over her shoulder. "Wait. He's already an early-admit for Tokyo Metropolitan University of the Arts?"
"Yup," Rin said, popping the 'p' with a grin. "Is that a problem, our resident Ice Queen?"
Utaha shook her head slowly, her mind racing to reconcile the image of the boy with the facts. It was one thing to be a talented amateur; it was another to be recognized by the most prestigious art institution in the country before even graduating high school.
She thought back to the way he had looked at her earlier. His eyes were clean—startlingly clear and devoid of the usual mud of teenage hormones or desperate social climbing. He wasn't humble, but he wasn't arrogant either. He just was. He moved with a calm, heavy composure that made the air in the room feel denser.
Li Wei... no, Leo Vance, she corrected herself, testing the Western name in her mind. Class C, Grade 1. A freshman who writes like a veteran and looks like a statue.
"The States always seems to produce these weird, high-functioning outliers," Utaha mused.
As a writer herself, she knew better than anyone that "talent" was a fickle, divine gift. You could practice your scales in music or your brushwork in art and see linear improvement, but writing? Writing was a dark art. You could write ten million words and still be a hack. Real, bone-deep literary talent was something you were born with, a spark from the gods that defied logic.
She had built her reputation on Koisuru Metronome through sheer, stubborn willpower and a obsession with the craft, and she knew the struggle of every sentence. Seeing Leo churn out twenty thousand words of high-octane, hauntingly beautiful prose in two hours hadn't just impressed her—it had rattled her.
Usually, when guys approached her, she saw the same thing: desire. Sometimes it was pure lust, sometimes it was the desire for the prestige of having a "celebrity" girlfriend, and sometimes it was even worse—guys who wanted to ride her coattails for a paycheck. She was exhausted by it. She'd built a wall of ice to keep the world at bay.
But Leo's eyes had been different. They were focused on the work, on the world he was building, and he treated her like a peer. It was... refreshing. And that feeling, combined with the raw power of his prose, was a dangerous combination.
Meanwhile, the "prodigy" in question was currently navigating the neon-soaked streets of Shibuya.
Leo arrived at his apartment building—a sleek, glass-and-steel monolith that towered over the district. It was a high-end "executive" suite, the kind of place that cost over four million yen a year in rent. To a mid-level salaryman, that was an entire year's net income. To Leo, it was just the cost of doing business.
He didn't care about the money because he didn't have to work for it—at least, not in the traditional sense.
Over the past week, Leo had turned the local Yakuza organizations into his personal slush funds. He had been ruthless. He didn't just walk into their backroom parlors and demand cash; he'd systematically dismantled their security, forced their "middle-managers" to make emergency bank withdrawals, and cleaned out their safes of everything from yen to gold bullion and loose diamonds.
He'd treated them like NPCs in a high-stakes action game. If they resisted, he broke things. If they lied, he made them regret it. There was no guilt in it—this wasn't his world. These weren't "people" to him; they were variables in a simulation. He saved his morality for the "real" world back home. Here, he was the apex predator in a sandbox.
His plan was simple: accumulate as much portable wealth as possible. Cash was traceable and bulky, so he'd been exchanging his "withdrawals" for precious metals—gold, jade, and high-grade stones—things he could eventually carry back across the threshold of reality.
He stepped into his apartment, the door locking behind him with a high-tech whir-click. The place smelled of expensive leather and the faint, ozonic scent of the central AC. He walked straight to the balcony, sliding the glass door open to let in the hum of the city.
Leo pulled a designer leather armchair out onto the balcony, the city of Tokyo sprawling out beneath him like a carpet of fireflies. He popped the tab on an iced cola, the tshhh of the carbonation sharp in the evening air.
Even though he'd been "reforged" into a muscular, athletic specimen of a man, his old "otaku" habits died hard. He sat there, legs kicked up, nursing his soda. But now, even something as simple as drinking a Coke looked like a scene from a high-fashion editorial. His new charisma stat was so high that his every movement possessed an effortless, "old-money" elegance.
"The entertainment industry in this world is insane," Leo muttered to himself, the cold condensation from the can dripping onto his palm. "It's practically 'plagiarism-proof'."
He'd realized early on that he couldn't just "copy-paste" hits from his world. This world's market was on a whole different level of evolution. In Japan, the competition between light novel labels like Shinazugawa and Gensokyo was a bloodbath. In South Korea, the webtoon and digital novel scene had moved far past the "Leveling Up" tropes of the early 2010s.
And the West? The West was even more terrifying. The gaming industry was booming with technology that made his world's VR look like a child's toy. The "Big Three" entertainment conglomerates—including the world's most aggressive legal departments like Marvel and DC—competed so fiercely that every possible trope had been explored, subverted, and deconstructed a dozen times over.
If Leo had tried to simply rewrite Overlord beat-for-beat, he'd have been laughed out of the publisher's office. He had to take the concept and elevate it, infusing it with his own Western cynicism and the raw, unpolished energy of a "traveler."
"It's actually impressive," Leo mused, taking a long pull of his drink. "Kasumigaoka Utaha... to stand at the top of a meat-grinder industry like this at seventeen? She's a goddamn monster."
He looked down at his hand, which was perfectly steady. The Qi hummed in his veins, and the NZT-48 kept his thoughts sharp and cold.
He was in the middle of a world of geniuses, a world where entertainment was the highest form of currency. He was the ultimate outsider, a ghost in the machine with a "cheat code" and a grudge.
"Let's see how the 'Ice Queen' handles a story she didn't see coming," he whispered, a smirk playing on his lips as the Shibuya neon reflected in his clear, blue eyes.
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