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[Leo]: (Senior, your style has shifted drastically. This isn't the romantic introspection of Love Metronome. Do you have a concrete outline?)
Leo typed rapidly on his mechanical keyboard, the click-clack rhythm filling his room. He was genuinely impressed. For an author known for delicate emotional prose to pivot to action-heavy Urban Fantasy was a gamble. It was like a rom-com director deciding to shoot a John Wick movie.
[Kasumigaoka Utaha]: (The skeleton is simple. A boy with superpowers loses his memory. He's hunted by a mysterious organization, regains his powers, saves the girl he loves from enemy territory, and secures a happy ending.)
[Leo]: (Color scheme check: Warm or Cool? Even if the ending is happy, if the middle is too torturous, you'll lose the light novel audience. Readers today have low tolerance for angst. If the protagonist spends ten chapters getting beaten up, they drop the book.)
[Kasumigaoka Utaha]: (Don't worry. The tone is warm. Why? Because the protagonist is the ceiling of combat power. Even with amnesia, his instincts are intact. He doesn't suffer defeats; he suppresses the battlefield.)
[Leo]: (Good. If the conflict is just mystery-solving rather than survival, the readers won't feel oppressed.)
[Kasumigaoka Utaha]: (Exactly. I'm going for a 'Hard-Boiled' aesthetic. Character inspirations are the Doom Slayer from Doom and Dante from Devil May Cry. Seemingly calm, slightly cynical, but reckless when it counts.)
Leo raised an eyebrow. Utaha citing Doom was not on his bingo card.
[Leo]: (That archetype is tricky. Rough around the edges, but meticulous at heart. If you mess it up, he just looks like a jerk.)
[Kasumigaoka Utaha]: (That's why I need you. Specifically, for the battle scenes. I read the war sequences in the later chapters of The Demon King. Your description of the mercenary tactics—the hook-spears dragging knights off horses, the brutality of the looting—it was visceral. Compared to that, most light novel battles look like chickens pecking at each other.)
Leo smirked. She wasn't wrong. Most LN authors wrote battles like turn-based RPGs. I use Fireball. You use Shield. It lacked the grit of reality.
[Leo]: (I can help. But writing good action requires research. If it's modern urban fantasy, you need to understand ballistics, squad tactics, and environmental destruction. If it's superpowers, you need to balance the system so it doesn't become boring. Look at Kamachi Kazuma's Index. His prose is dense, but his physics-based magic system is top-tier.)
[Kasumigaoka Utaha]: (I understand. I'll be relying on you, Consultant-kun.)
Ping.
Just as Leo was about to switch windows to launch the game, a system notification flared in his peripheral vision.
[Target: Aki Tomoya. State: Depression / Weariness of Game Creation. +300 Points.] [Current Balance: 1500 Points.]
Leo blinked.
I didn't do anything, he thought, confused. I've been sitting here talking to Utaha for the last hour. How did I just farm 300 points?
He checked the details of the feedback loop. The cause wasn't him directly. It was Eriri Spencer Sawamura.
Meanwhile, in Tomoya's Room.
The air was thick with tension and the smell of stale energy drinks.
Aki Tomoya sat at his desk, staring at his laptop screen, his hands gripping his hair. He was stressed. The proposal Leo had demanded was proving to be a nightmare. Every time he wrote a line, he deleted it. He felt like a fraud.
Then, a message had popped up from Eriri.
She had sent him the revised forest painting—the one Leo had fixed. She was proud of it. She wanted to share her breakthrough with her childhood friend, expecting his usual praise.
But Tomoya didn't see the art. He saw the shadow of Leo Vance.
"Leo-kun helped me fix the lighting," Eriri had typed innocently. "Look at how much better the atmosphere is!"
Something inside Tomoya snapped.
The jealousy that had been simmering since the rooftop meeting boiled over. He felt betrayed. Eriri was his illustrator. She was supposed to be on his side. Why was she running to the rich, talented transfer student for help? Why was she praising him?
"It looks like you just copied his style," Tomoya had typed back, his fingers trembling with spite. "It doesn't even look like your art anymore. Are you his illustrator now, or mine?"
The argument that followed was ugly. It was the kind of petty, insecure lashing out that only long-time friends can inflict on each other.
Now, the chat window was silent. Eriri had gone offline.
"Dammit!"
Tomoya screamed, grabbing his notebook—the one with the useless opening scene—and hurling it across the room. It slammed into the wall with a dull thud, pages crumpling.
He slumped back in his chair, staring at the ceiling, feeling a crushing weight of exhaustion. Why was everything going wrong? Why was everyone improving except him?
At the Spencer Residence.
Eriri curled up on her bed, hugging a pillow to her chest. Her eyes were red and puffy.
She felt aggrieved. She felt stupid.
She had just wanted to show him her improvement. She thought he would be happy that the art for his game would be better. Instead, he had mocked her. He had accused her of disloyalty.
He's changed, Eriri thought, wiping a tear from her cheek. The Tomoya I knew was passionate and supportive. This Tomoya is... petty. He's jealous.
The realization hurt more than the insults. The gentle, reliable otaku she had crushed on for years was cracking under pressure, and what was leaking out wasn't heroism—it was ugliness.
Back in Shibuya.
Leo stared at the notification, piecing together the events through deduction.
Tomoya and Eriri had a falling out over the painting I fixed, Leo realized, a dark amusement curling his lip. I didn't even have to pull the trigger. I just handed Eriri the gun, and Tomoya walked right in front of it.
1500 Points.
The friction in the group was escalating faster than he anticipated. The "Dream Team" was fracturing before they had even written a line of code.
[Leo]: (Senior, invite me. Let's crush some randoms.)
He switched tabs. The drama could wait. He had a Tier IX cruiser to grind.