"Ayumi... Eh? Ayumi!"
Ayumi Ito froze for second before turning around to bow deeply to the man behind her. "I'm so sorry, Senpai!" she blurted out, her voice laced with panic. "I failed to respond to you in time!"
Hiroshi Oumi scratched his head instead, helplessness written all over his face. "There's no need to be so formal, and you definitely don't need to call me 'Senpai.' We don't really have that kind of senpai-kouhai culture around here."
Still, he understood her reaction. After all, she was a 'Magic Drifter' directly from the Japan region.
Word had it that senpai-kouhai culture was extremely strict over in Japan. Failing to respond promptly when a senpai addressed you could result in severe consequences.
But a fresh arrival from Japan like Ayumi Ito would gradually adapt to their environment and culture eventually.
"Alright, Ayumi, since you just arrived at our Manga World Publishers, it's hard to assign you any specific tasks just yet," Hiroshi Oumi said calmly. "However, the company happens to be hosting a Newcomer Medium-Length Manga Grand Prix right now. Why don't you look over these submissions from our rookie creators?"
He patted a towering stack of manga manuscripts resting on the desk in front of him. The pile looked almost as tall as Ayumi herself.
There were a full thirteen submissions sitting there, and according to the company's competition rules, every entry had to contain at least ten chapters or one hundred and fifty pages to even be considered.
It would easily take Ayumi several days to comb through them all.
And since these were all newcomer submissions anyway, handing them over to a rookie manga editor like her wouldn't cause any problems for the company.
"Am I supposed to pick a few out of these?" Ayumi asked nervously. "How many should I select?"
"Don't be so nervous. You don't necessarily have to force a choice out of them. It's completely fine to reject them all," Hiroshi Oumi replied casually.
After all, these were just a fraction of the total submissions they had received, and since they were all completely fresh amateur works, a blanket rejection was practically par for the course.
But after a brief moment of thought, he reconsidered. What if there were actually good series hidden in there, but Ayumi lacked the experienced eye to spot them?
So he suddenly added, "Actually, never mind. Just pick three from this pile that you think are pretty good and hand them over to me."
"Understood!" Ayumi nodded eagerly. She scooped up the towering stack of manuscripts and hauled them all the way back to her desk.
Once safely seated at her workstation, she finally let out a long sigh of relief.
She had only recently joined this company, one of the top ten manga publishers in the entire world. As a massive international corporation, her colleagues here were generally friendly and welcoming.
But she still felt a bit out of her element. They didn't have the suffocatingly strict senpai-kouhai culture of her hometown in Japan, and colleagues who weren't even that close would address each other by their first names rather than using surnames.
Still, it was undeniably better here than back home.
"Ayumi! If you want to stay, you have to do your job flawlessly!" she told herself, hyping herself up under her breath. "I'll start with these submissions and do my absolute best!"
Staring at the stacked mountain of manuscripts, she grabbed the one resting on the very top and began to read it seriously.
The first manuscript had the title 'The Wizard King' scribbled on its cover. The art style was actually quite solid, and it clearly followed a classic, traditional hot-blooded battle shonen formula.
Ayumi read through it carefully chapter by chapter. She couldn't find any glaring flaws in the plot or the art, but at the very same time, it didn't leave any lasting impression on her whatsoever.
"Should this one... be considered good?" Ayumi found herself in a frustrating dilemma.
Her assigned task was to pick out three acceptable works to submit to Chief Editor Hiroshi Oumi.
This one seemed fine on paper, but she didn't feel anything after reading it.
"I'll... leave this aside for now and decide after I look at the other senseis' works." Nodding to herself, Ayumi quickly moved on to the next manuscript.
What followed was a rapid descent into endless choice paralysis.
"This 'Ethereal Immortal Path' seems okay too..."
"But this 'Dark Sorcerer' also feels pretty decent..."
"And 'Lord of the Fire Dragons'... is... alright..."
After agonizing over seven submissions, Ayumi genuinely felt that six of them were perfectly acceptable. She only rejected one because the artwork looked a bit too green and amateurish.
But for the remaining six, she felt like picking any of them would yield the exact same result.
They belonged to that dreaded middle-of-the-road category of works where you couldn't find any major faults after reading them, but you wouldn't feel a damn thing either.
What Ayumi didn't realize was that if Hiroshi Oumi were the one reading these particular submissions, he would have mercilessly tossed every single one of them into the rejection bin.
Their plots followed the same trite, cookie-cutter developments over and over again, and their world-building was always variations of the exact same tired concepts.
If a story like that failed to evoke any feelings or provide a memorable emotional hook for readers, it was doomed to remain utterly obscure.
"I'll just keep reading..." Ayumi let out an exhausted sigh, putting down yet another manuscript as she reached for the tenth submission in the pile.
"Cyberpunk 2077: Edge... runners?" she muttered the title aloud slowly. It was unexpectedly long and sounded slightly weird to her ears.
But it was also the very first title that genuinely distinguished itself from the previous nine manuscripts she had read.
Curious, Ayumi flipped the cover open. The opening panel featured a monologue delivered by a man wearing a bright yellow jacket, his true physical appearance completely hidden from view.
"In 2077... my city was voted the worst place to live in America."
"Main issues? Sky high rate of violence..."
"And more people living below the poverty line than anywhere else..."
Alongside his monologue, the manga showcased panels depicting a high-tech city from an apparent future--maglev cars, holographic projections bathing the streets in neon light, sky-trains piercing through towering concrete jungles, and...
Half-cyborg humans equipped with mechanical body appendages.
"Can't deny it... it's all true. But everybody still wants to live here. This city's always got a promise for you..."
"Might be a lie... an illusion, but it's there... just around the corner... and it keeps you going!"
This was the world of the future? A future version of America!
Ayumi suddenly understood that this was a tale firmly set in the future.
No... more accurately, it was the cold, hard, inescapable truth.
She continued reading. The protagonist of the manga was a teenager named David Martinez, and the metropolis he resided in was called Night City.
Yet the plot kicked off abruptly with a scene totally unrelated to the protagonist--an armed thug suddenly ambushing the city police who were on a routine night patrol.
Ayumi couldn't quite wrap her head around it.
A fierce firefight broke out between the cops and the thug, but the criminal just stood firmly in place, firing back like an absolute madman as if completely unfazed by the heavy storm of bullets heading his way.
In a state of pure panic, the patrol cops desperately called for backup. "It's a cyberpsycho! Call in MaxTac!"
A cyberpsycho? What in the world was that? Was it the name of some evil villain organization?
And why wasn't that thug afraid of bullets? Was it some sort of special superpower unique to this manga's setting?
Brimming with curiosity and questions, Ayumi eagerly read on.
She soon grasped the core gimmick of this manga. There were no superpowers here; there were only body modifications and artificial cybernetics.
While potent cybernetics granted the user incredible power, the moment their mind could no longer bear the immense mental toll of these metallic implants, they would be reduced to a walking corpse. This left only an unquenchable thirst for endless slaughter in reality, transforming them into what they called a cyberpsycho.
This was a genuinely fresh, fascinating concept. Just reading about it once was enough to sear the unique premise directly into Ayumi's memory.
From that point on, she flipped the pages with genuine interest and growing suspense...
Then she saw the protagonist getting bullied by arrogant rich kids at school, alongside his deeply troubling home life. She slowly realized that Night City was exactly as the opening had rigidly described. It wasn't some beautiful, hopeful utopia.
Instead, the wealth gap was devastatingly severe, leaving the poor to scrape by without even a shred of basic human dignity.
Because of this, the protagonist even got into an intense argument with his mother. But immediately after, they were directly dragged into a horrific car crash right in the middle of a brutal gang shootout on the highway.
But right at that desperate moment, what looked like an armed emergency rescue team arrived on the scene.
David Martinez, the protagonist, provided the answer. "Trauma Team... we're saved."
Yet, just as Ayumi thought the protagonist and his mother were rescued, the chilling dialogue of the supposed Trauma Team rescue personnel leaped straight off the page. "He's not a client. And neither is she."
"Secure the client's safety. Leave these two for the city meatwagon."
So those people immediately packed up their gear and evacuated on their hover-vehicle, without the slightest intention of saving the protagonist or his bleeding mother.
"How could they..." Ayumi gripped her fists tightly, hot, righteous anger welling up inside her chest.
Fortunately, though, the scene shifted, and it seemed the protagonist and his mother had been rescued and brought to a clinic after all.
Only, the place they ended up at seemed to be the dirt-cheapest, most rundown 'hospital' available in the entire decrepit city.
At the same time, David also stumbled upon a powerful, military-grade cybernetic implant his mother had secretly hidden at home, the 'Sandevistan.'
But before he could process his discovery, he was viciously ambushed and violently beaten down by the rich kids at school.
"This must be the key to his rise," Ayumi muttered excitedly. "When the time comes, David will definitely change this despicable, hateful world!"
But the very next plot development hit her incredibly hard. With a handful of casual, utterly dismissive words from the shady clinic surgeon, David's mother was abruptly pronounced dead...
David didn't even get to see his mother one last time. He could only silently carry her ashes back to their dark, empty apartment...
Pushed to the absolute brink by his mother's sudden death, the secondary humiliation of a phone call from the wealthy bully, and the Trauma Team coldly abandoning them to die on the street, David sought out a black-market ripperdoc and furiously demanded to be implanted with the military-grade Sandevistan!
End of chapter.
Ayumi hurriedly flipped the page to the next chapter, but...
"I finished it without even realizing?!" she cried out in shock, staring blankly at the ink on the pages.
Over a hundred pages, three full chapters worth of incredible content, and she had burned through it all without even noticing the time passing by.
And unlike the earlier submissions, this time, she actually desperately wanted to keep reading after reaching the end.
She frantically wanted to see how the protagonist, David Martinez, would use the Sandevistan to violently rise up and tear down this wretched, unforgiving world!
"This is the one! This is absolutely the one!" As soon as she finished reading, Ayumi was utterly convinced that this was the definitive submission she was going to proudly hand over to Hiroshi Oumi!
"This sensei's art is incredible, and the story is fantastic too! What was his name again?" she quickly flipped all the way back to the very first page.
The author's name was elegantly etched at the top, two simple characters: Aoyama.
[Translated and Rewritten by Shika_Kagura]
T/N: Magic Drifter - Often referring to foreigners living and working in magical/fantasy settings similar to "drifters" or "floaters" in mega-cities. In this context, it appears to refer to foreign workers taking up residence in the novel's main region to chase their dreams, facing difficulties similar to expats starting afresh.
T/N: Cyberpsycho - In the Cyberpunk setting, a cyberpsycho is someone who has lost their humanity and sanity due to excessive cybernetic body modifications, leading to violent, psychotic breaks.
T/N: MaxTac - A heavily armed elite police division in Cyberpunk lore tasked specifically with neutralizing cyberpsychos.
T/N: Ripperdoc - Cybernetic surgeons operating in Night City, often dealing in black-market tech and illegal implants.
T/N: Scavenger - Also known as Scavs. A low-life gang in Cyberpunk known for violently harvesting cybernetics from people to sell on the black market.
T/N: Trauma Team - An armed, privatized medical rescue service that responds only to high-paying clients in the Cyberpunk world.
T/N: Sandevistan - A high-end, military-grade cybernetic implant that drastically enhances the user's reflexes and perception, allowing them to move at superhuman speeds.