A month slipped by before Aoyama noticed it was gone.
Time had genuinely started moving fast. The kind of fast that happened when you were, for the first time in a while, actually comfortable.
Edgerunners was paying well. His monthly take-home after tax had cleared ten thousand, which, in a world roughly equivalent to the decade his previous life had considered "back then", meant he'd reached something like functional financial independence. Not rich. But free.
He was living by one simple rule: enjoy it while it's here. He'd bought manga, novels, a television, a desktop, a game console. He'd stopped thinking about tomorrow.
He was deep into a classic online RPG, the kind where shouting "come at me, bear king" was a legitimate strategy, when his phone went off.
Ayumi.
"Moshi moshi," he said, switching to speaker and keeping his eyes on the screen.
"Aoyama-sensei... the draft you sent recently..." She paused. "The story beat in it..."
"The one I just sent, chapter 14, right? Let me think..." His backlog had ballooned. He was already up to chapter 34 in drawings. He genuinely couldn't remember what he'd submitted for publication. But Hard Drive Memory clicked in a moment later, and the scene assembled itself clearly. "Oh, Pilar's death. Is something wrong?"
He said it completely casually, still skimming a strategy guide in another tab.
"It's just..." Ayumi studied the draft in front of her, expression uncertain. "The way Pilar exits feels abrupt. Like, very."
She wasn't wrong. It was a memorable scene: an apparently harmless cyber-psycho appearing out of nowhere, and Pilar, one of the crew members David had started to trust, was just gone. No villain doing it for dramatic effect. No connection to the protagonist's arc. Not even the character's own storyline building toward it. Just sudden, violent termination.
It was the kind of thing where the reader would legitimately want to question the writer's sanity.
"I think it's fine," Aoyama said. "If a character's going to exit anyway, the best approach is usually to stop building them out about halfway through and just... there. The drop hits harder when it's unexpected."
He was mostly deflecting. This scene wasn't his design. He was working from source material. Rewriting it would shatter the structure of everything that came after, and he had neither the ability nor the desire to do that to someone else's carefully constructed story.
Adaptation wasn't improvisation. Retelling wasn't reinventing. He'd added some background context and some terminology notes; that was fine. That served the story. But gutting a narrative beat because an editor found it uncomfortable? That crossed a line he wasn't willing to cross.
The source material was what it was, and the source material knew what it was doing.
"Well, alright," Ayumi exhaled slowly. "My other concern is the art in this chapter; dark content might attract criticism."
"Really? I thought I pulled back considerably," Aoyama said, genuinely surprised. "I cleaned a lot of it."
The original animated series had been age-restricted and loaded with graphic content. He knew that wouldn't fly in an unrated manga. So he'd made adjustments: for the deep dive sequence with Kiwi and Lucy, he'd added what he mentally called "hacker suits" over what would have been bare skin in the animation. For Pilar's death shot, he'd reduced it to a neck and the bottom half of a jaw. Clean enough, but not dishonest about what happened.
"If you think it's fine, Sensei, then I'll trust that," Ayumi said after a beat. "I'll go ahead and submit it."
"Perfect."
Aoyama leaned back, relaxed the tension in his shoulders. "Oh, and you did well today. Want to come over for dinner?"
The arrangement had evolved naturally over the past month. He'd made an elaborate meal one evening and realized halfway through that he'd cooked for two people by accident. It was just how cooking worked; precise single portions felt wasteful and tedious. He'd sent Ayumi a message on impulse. She'd come, eaten, done the dishes afterward without being asked, and somehow that had settled into a routine.
Manga World Publishers didn't offer housing to employees. Ayumi was living alone, fending for herself every night. Home-cooked food or fast food; that was her daily choice, and fast food got old fast.
So she'd said yes that first time. And then she kept saying yes.
"Tonight?" she asked. "What are we having?"
"Pork belly. I got a good cut, planning to braise it. And winter bamboo shoots just came into season, so I did a hearty Nabe, a hot pot with the bamboo, cured pork, and tofu. For something lighter, I'll do miso soup."
"Miso soup," Ayumi said, and her voice changed immediately.
Aoyama frowned at his screen. He'd just listed braised pork belly and a rich claypot soup. The most she reacted to was miso soup?
He supposed homesickness was its own kind of gravity. You didn't crave the best meal you'd ever had; you craved the one that had been there your whole life.
"Alright, see you after work."
"See you then."
After she hung up, Ayumi sat with the phone for a moment. Something about that exchange, the routine and the easy warmth of it, left a quiet, settled feeling in her chest.
[Translated and Rewritten by Shika_Kagura]
T/N: "Nabe" (鍋), a classic Japanese hot pot dish made with various fresh ingredients simmered together. Popular in the cooler months.