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Back in the climate-controlled silence of his luxury Shibuya apartment, Leo Vance sat at his mahogany desk, the city lights reflecting off the darkened glass behind him. He cracked his knuckles, the sound sharp in the quiet room, and rested his fingers on the matte-black keycaps of his mechanical keyboard.
It was time to grind.
He opened his "Little Black Room" writing software, plunging the screen into a void of darkness with only a blinking white cursor. In his old life, this cursor used to mock him. It was a blinking eye of judgment, taunting him with writer's block and procrastination. But now? Now, it was just a target.
Clack-clack-clack-clack.
The sound was immediate and rhythmic, like a heavy machine gun firing in controlled bursts. The prose didn't just come to him; it erupted. The NZT-48 modification had turned his brain into a narrative supercomputer. He wasn't second-guessing sentence structures or agonizing over word choice. The story of his anti-hero overlord flowed like a spring, dark and crisp and terrifyingly efficient.
The only bottleneck was biology.
"Come on, fingers," Leo muttered, his eyes scanning the lines forming rapidly on the screen. "Keep up."
He was pushing seven thousand words an hour. That was professional stenographer speed, maintained with the creative fidelity of a master novelist. After two hours, he hit the fifteen-thousand-word mark. He stopped, not because he was mentally tired, but because he could feel the heat radiating from his wrists.
He scrolled back up, speed-reading the chapter. It was good. No, it was better than good. It was visceral. The pacing was tight, the dialogue snapped, and the atmosphere was thick enough to choke on. This was light-years beyond the fanfiction he used to churn out for donations. This was bestseller material.
"Save and close," Leo said, hitting the shortcut. The file vanished into his encrypted drive.
He leaned back, stretching his arms over his head until his spine popped. He believed in work-life balance now—mostly because burnout was inefficient. As long as he hit his weekly quotas, he was golden.
But the night was young, and Leo had other acquisitions to make.
He minimized the writing suite and opened a coding environment. His fingers danced across the keys again, but the rhythm changed. It was choppier, more syntactic. He was writing a script.
In this world, copyright law was enforced by the Digital Entertainment Oversight Committee (DEOC) with draconian efficiency. You couldn't just right-click and save a video. Most scraping software from his world had been patched out of existence here, crushed by aggressive DRM updates.
"If the front door is locked," Leo mused, his eyes tracking lines of Python code, "you just build a new back door."
He wasn't a professional hacker in his old life, but with his enhanced learning capabilities, picking up advanced scripting was like learning the alphabet. He coded a custom video extractor—a jagged little piece of software designed to bypass the specific encryption used by this world's streaming giants. It didn't care about DRM; if the pixels were rendered on the screen, his code could grab them.
Thirty minutes later, he hit Compile.
"Let's see what you can do, little buddy."
He launched the program. It hooked into the browser, and the download bar for a 4K remaster of a classic anime shot across the screen.
Leo grinned. He reached into a shopping bag by his feet and pulled out a stack of sleek, black boxes. Earlier that evening, he'd raided a computer parts store in Akihabara. He'd dropped a small fortune on ten portable hard drives, each boasting a 10TB capacity.
"Ten terabytes," Leo sighed, weighing one of the drives in his hand. "Back home, we've already got twelve and fourteen terabyte portables hitting the consumer market. This world is ahead in entertainment, but slightly behind in data density. Weird trade-off."
He plugged the drive array into his USB hub. His laptop—his "Old Reliable"—whirred in protest. The fans kicked into overdrive, sounding like a jet engine preparing for takeoff.
"Easy, girl," Leo whispered, placing a hand on the hot chassis. "I know you're tired."
This laptop was a relic. He'd bought it years ago, before university, before the System. It was a Ship of Theseus—he'd replaced the RAM, the SSD, the thermal paste—but the motherboard and the CPU were showing their age. Running high-def video extraction while managing a massive data transfer was pushing the thermal limits.
He watched the temperature gauges on his second monitor. CPU: 92°C.
"Ouch."
He couldn't push it too hard. If he melted the CPU now, he'd lose his bridge to the digital world until he could buy a new rig. And honestly, he didn't want to buy a computer here. He wanted to wait until he returned to his original world to build a true monster PC.
He throttled the download speed slightly, letting the fans spin down to a less alarming whine. The external drives hummed, hungry for data. He was archiving everything—entire series, movie trilogies, game soundtracks. He was building a library of Alexandria for otaku culture.
While the progress bars filled, Leo grabbed a quick dinner—takeout sushi that cost more than his old weekly grocery budget—and thought about his finances.
He had cash. A lot of it. The "donations" from the local Yakuza had filled his safe. But you couldn't just walk around with unexplained millions, especially not as a foreigner. The Japanese tax authorities might be polite, but they weren't stupid. And if he ever took this money back to the US? The IRS would eat him alive without a paper trail.
"I need a wash," Leo murmured, popping a piece of fatty tuna into his mouth. "I need a legitimate income stream that explains sudden, large injections of cash."
Light novels.
It was the perfect cover. In Japan, light novel authors were a bit like lottery winners. Most made peanuts, but the top tier? They made bank. If he published a hit, he could claim his Yakuza cash was actually royalties, signing bonuses, and merchandising rights. It was a classic money-laundering move, but hey, if it worked for the mob in the movies, it would work for him.
"Author by day, phantom thief by night," Leo chuckled. "I'm living the dream."
The Next Day: Toyonosaki Academy.
Leo arrived at school early, his blazer crisp and his demeanor relaxed. He slid into his seat near the window, ignoring the murmurs that followed him. By now, the class had accepted that the "American Transfer Student" was a weird mix of jock, genius, and otaku, which made him a localized celebrity.
He pulled out his art supplies. Today, however, he wasn't using charcoal or graphite. He laid out a set of high-end Prismacolor pencils.
He had a strategy map in his head.
Target 1: Kato Megumi. Status: Secured. The trauma-bond was active. She trusted him. Target 2: Kasumigaoka Utaha. Status: Pending. She was intrigued by his writing. He just needed to reel her in. Target 3: Aki Tomoya. Status: In progress. The bait was being laid today.
And then there was Eriri Spencer Sawamura.
Leo glanced across the room to where the blonde, twin-tailed girl was chatting loudly with her friends. She was the definition of a "Tsundere childhood friend." Her loyalty to Tomoya was toxic, deep-rooted, and irrational. She was his "loyal dog."
Too much work, Leo decided, sharpening a blue pencil. Turning Eriri against Tomoya would take months of emotional deprogramming. I'm here to farm points, not run a therapy clinic. I'll isolate the others first. If she wants to sink with the ship, that's her call.
He turned his attention to his paper.
He wasn't drawing dragons or dark landscapes today. He was drawing a trap.
He began to sketch a character design that was pure, distilled "Moe." It was a girl with wide, shimmering eyes, soft features, and a costume design that screamed "high-fantasy heroine." But unlike his usual style, he pushed the cuteness to eleven. He used soft pinks, vibrant cyans, and warm creams.
He applied the colored pencils with surgical precision, blending the pigments to create a texture that looked like digital art. The lighting on the girl's hair, the subsurface scattering on her skin, the intricate lace of her dress—it was stunning. It was the kind of illustration that would be the cover of a triple-A dating sim.
He worked for twenty minutes, letting the image bloom on the page. He knew Tomoya's schedule. The guy always walked down this aisle to get to his seat.
Three... two... one...
Footsteps approached. The familiar shuffle of indoor shoes and the rustle of a nylon schoolbag.
Aki Tomoya was walking past, his head down, probably thinking about his non-existent game budget. As he passed Leo's desk, his peripheral vision caught a flash of color.
He stopped.
He didn't just stop; he froze like he'd hit an invisible wall. He slowly turned his head, his glasses sliding slightly down his nose.
Leo continued to shade the girl's eyes, acting completely oblivious to the boy looming over him.
Tomoya stared at the drawing. The colors were vibrant, the anatomy was perfect, and the style... the style was exactly what he had been dreaming of for his game. It was "main heroine" energy captured in wax and pigment.
"Amazing..." Tomoya breathed, the word escaping him involuntarily.
He drifted closer, drawn in like a moth to a bug zapper, his eyes wide and hungry. The bait had been taken.
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