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"Snap out of it," Leo said, waving a hand in front of Eriri's face. "Is a single painting really enough to crash your OS?"
Eriri blinked, shaking her head as if waking from a trance. She looked at him, then back at the screen, then back at him. Her mouth opened and closed like a fish.
"Leo... you... you are disgusting," she finally managed, though the venom was weak. "We're the same age. How are you painting at a level that would make my professors at Geidai weep?"
"If you're willing to put in the hours, you can reach this level, too," Leo said with an indifferent shrug, turning off the monitor. "This painting? It's just a technical flex. It's a mindless pile of details designed to fool laymen into thinking it's profound. It's brute force rendering, Eriri. Why are you so surprised?"
Eriri stared at him. She wanted to hit him with her sketchbook.
Internal Monologue (Eriri): He's doing it again. The 'Humblebrag.' The 'Oh, this masterpiece? I just threw it together while brushing my teeth.' It's the Everyday Versailles lifestyle, and I hate how cool he looks doing it.
Despite her frustration, Eriri knew the truth. As the daughter of a diplomat and a scion of the Spencer family, she had walked the halls of the art world since she was a child. She knew the lecturers at Tokyo University of the Arts. She knew the "masters."
And Leo? Leo was already standing on their mountain. He might not be a "Grand Master" in the historical sense yet, but in the world of commercial illustration? He was a god. The ability to condense an entire world's narrative into a single frame—the detail of the soldiers, the atmosphere of the castle, the arrogance of the king—was something she couldn't do. Not yet.
"I've improved recently," Leo added, opening his writing software again. "My old stuff was rougher. This is just... the new baseline."
He was telling the truth. The System had polished his skills from "Expert" to "Master."
He cracked his knuckles and began to type.
Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack.
The sound of his laptop keyboard was a continuous, rhythmic machine-gun fire. There were no pauses. No backspaces. No hesitation.
He was writing Volume 2 of The Demon King Delivers the Punchline. But to an observer, it looked like he was transcribing a text that was already written.
Utaha, who had been struggling with the magic system of her new urban fantasy concept, stopped typing. The sound of Leo's speed was distracting. It was insulting.
She leaned over the table, her face encroaching on his personal space.
"Leo-kun," she narrowed her eyes. "Are you just mashing keys to look cool? I haven't heard a single pause for thought. Do you not need to... you know, think?"
Leo didn't stop typing. He lifted his left hand, reached out, and gently tapped her forehead with his index finger, pushing her back into her seat.
"Ow," Utaha rubbed her forehead, giving him a glare that was 10% annoyed and 90% intrigued. "Rebellion?"
"I've already written the book in my head," Leo explained, his eyes never leaving the screen. "Right now, I'm just the printer transferring the data from the cloud to the hard drive. That's why it's smooth."
Utaha stared at him. As a writer who agonizingly crafted every sentence, who bled over plot holes and character inconsistencies, this statement was a declaration of war.
Internal Monologue (Utaha): He constructs the entire narrative mentally? Down to the sentence structure? That's not talent. That's a supercomputer.
For the first time, Eriri and Utaha exchanged a look of mutual understanding.
He's annoying, their eyes said.
Leo suddenly stopped typing. The silence in the room was abrupt. He leaned back, lacing his fingers behind his head and staring at the ceiling.
"Why the pause?" Utaha asked, spinning a pen in her fingers. "Did the printer run out of ink?"
"No," Leo sighed. "Just... pre-release jitters. The promotional campaign has started. The book drops in a few days. The thought of it being out there, being judged... it makes me a little uneasy."
"Every author goes through it," Utaha said, her voice softening into mentorship mode. "When Love Metronome launched, I was a wreck. I was refreshing the sales ranking every five minutes."
She chuckled darkly. "But I got lucky. There was another book released in the same cycle. It was the publisher's 'Big Push.' It had a title about three lines long... something like 'The Hero Was Killed by a Trap I, a Villager, Died, So I Have No Choice But to Succeed as the Hero and Face the Demon King.'"
"Catchy," Leo deadpanned. "Let me guess. It flopped?"
"It had five times my marketing budget," Utaha recounted with a vindictive smirk. "Shinazugawa Bunko poured resources into it. Posters, pop-up stands, the works. But the sales? Mediocre. It averaged maybe 7,000 copies a volume—a disaster for the amount of money they spent."
"Ouch," Leo winced. "What happened?"
"The author had an ego the size of the moon," Utaha said, enjoying the gossip. "He refused to listen to editorial advice. The quality tanked after Volume 1. Eventually, he broke contract to jump ship to another publisher, and Shinazugawa axed the series at Volume 5. It was a glorious train wreck."
"7,000 copies..." Leo mused. "That's still a dream for some. But with that kind of push? Yeah, that's a failure."
"Don't read it," Utaha warned, seeing the spark of curiosity in Leo's eyes. "It's trash. The author just wrote whatever self-indulgent nonsense came into his head. It requires eye bleach."
"Now I have to read it," Leo grinned. "There's nothing quite as educational as studying a disaster."
"You have terrible taste," Utaha sighed, returning to her keyboard.
Leo smiled, looking back at his screen.
Internal Monologue: A failed hero, a toxic author, and a wasted budget. The industry is a battlefield, just like Machida said. I'd better make sure my debut is a nuclear strike, not a dud.
He resumed typing.
Clack-clack-clack-clack.