November arrived.
The temperature dropped sharply. The weather that had still felt warm the previous week turned cold almost overnight.
Rei woke at six in the morning, as he had for years. The biological clock had been set too firmly across seven or eight years of early mornings to be adjusted by changed circumstances.
Miyu had moved from her villa a few hundred metres away into his house the previous month. He still felt a faint sense of unreality when he woke and found her there. It took his brain approximately half a minute to fully accept that this was the current state of things and not something he had dreamed.
Her eyelashes fluttered. She looked at him.
"It is not like school. Nobody is monitoring you. Why do you wake up this early every day?"
She was a light sleeper. His movements had woken her, and once awake at this hour she could not go back down. This had been the pattern for the past month. She did not hold it against him. Her sister had woken her early every morning at home anyway.
"Habit," Rei said. "Seven or eight years of biological clock. I cannot seem to change it. Go back to sleep. I need to get up and organise my documents."
"Then I will get up too. Do not look."
"Who wants to look at you. Narcissist."
When Miyu actually got up and stood half-dressed in front of the wardrobe looking for clothes, his eyes drifted over without him deciding to.
She turned around and found him staring with an expression he could not quite recover quickly enough. A bright smile appeared on her face.
"All these years of knowing you, and this is the only situation where your expression actually changes."
"Boring."
Rei washed up quickly and went to the study next door.
Spread across the study table were the materials from a project he had been recalling across the past several days.
Bleach.
The lowest-influence of the three major shonen manga from his previous life. Compared to Naruto and One Piece, it had the shortest run and the narrowest commercial footprint.
But being discussed in the same category as those two works said something about its standing. The fact that its later stages had a weak ending was a widely accepted assessment.
Though calling it weak required some qualification: compared to the truly disastrous endings that certain later major manga had produced, Bleach read as merely soft rather than catastrophic.
Its influence did not match Naruto or One Piece, but it was not in the same tier as the so-called later pillars of the medium either. Its IP valuation in Rei's previous life ran into several billion dollars.
The character design aesthetic was the most stylish of the three major works, closer to JoJo's sense of visual flair than to the approaches of works produced twenty years later with their messier and less considered designs.
If Bleach had ended after the Aizen arc, Rei thought it would have been regarded as the most complete of the three.
He had spent the past day drawing the initial character design drafts. The boy in the black shihakushō, holding the oversized cleaver-shaped zanpakutō. Looking at the sketch, he felt a specific excitement that he associated with the beginning of a project he was genuinely looking forward to.
Miyu appeared in the doorway of the unlocked study, looked at the materials scattered across every surface, and produced a specific expression.
"Another new work."
"I have been preparing my new manga for nearly half a year and the first three chapters won't be submitted to Hoshimori Group for review for another two weeks. In that same half year you have started planning two or three new animated films and anime series simultaneously. Is that right?"
"Don't compare yourself to me," Rei said. "Compare yourself to every other mangaka under thirty in Japan. Excluding me, your achievements should be in the top two or three."
"That is probably true," Miyu said after a moment. "Before Touch of Glass ended its ranking was consistently in the top three of the periodical. Among this generation of mangakas in Japan, aside from you, nobody seems able to consistently outperform me."
"Then that is your answer," Rei said. "Your talent is genuinely among the best of this era."
Miyu thought about this for a moment and then let out a quiet sigh.
The gap was what it was. Dwelling on it produced nothing useful. And having a partner who was ahead of her was not, she had concluded, actually unacceptable.
She crouched down and began gathering the setting drafts scattered across the floor.
"You don't have to do that. I don't organise things while I'm working. I'll handle it when I'm done."
"I'm curious about what this new project is. You've been excited about it all week." She looked at the pages as she collected them. "Bleach? Zanpakutō?"
"Another depressing battle manga?"
"What depressing battle, what are you talking about? Does Japan even have anime in that style?" Rei almost laughed.
"You started it. Whether it's Demon Slayer or Arcane, and now Titan. I have read the later AOT scripts. It is not hot-blooded at all. It is depression and heartbreak from start to finish."
"This one is genuinely hot-blooded battle," Rei said.
"Are you planning to use it to take over the market after Titan ends?"
"Yes. Once I have organised the materials and worked out how to fix the ending of this work, I will start the production project."
"Fix the ending? You have already conceived it all the way to the conclusion?"
"More or less. But the ending I first recalled has problems, and some of the middle sections are too slow. I need to think through what to cut and what to change to make the work more complete." He paused. "For the next while I will be absorbed in this and won't have much time to spend with you. I'm sorry. But look forward to it. It's very likely to be..."
"The peak of your creative career so far?" Miyu said. "I've heard this several times. Your peak is always the next work."
Rei stopped. Then smiled.
"You caught me."
In Japan's anime community, outside of a small number of people like Miyu and Misaki, nobody understood why Shirogane-sensei moved at this pace.
Why a property with Demon Slayer's commercial value had been ended after such a comparatively short serialisation. Why he never extended anything beyond the point he had determined it should end, regardless of what the market would have supported.
Those close to Shirogane-sensei understood the reality of it.
His inspiration was simply too abundant to accommodate a slower pace.
Bleach alone, even with aggressive cuts to the filler material, the Fullbring arc compressed to only its essential plot-relevant content, and the Thousand-Year Blood War arc restructured to fix its broken battle pacing and overextended length, would still take three to five years to complete at Rei's serialisation speed.
If he later recalled Dragon Ball, Naruto, and One Piece, the serialisation commitment extended to at least ten years beyond that.
There was no time to move slowly.
The employees at Illumination Production Company had already developed a sense from Rei's patterns of behaviour and the frequency of internal meetings over the past several days that something new was forming. They had seen this before.
For Japan's anime fans, none of this was the immediate concern.
The immediate concern was Thursday.
Thirty weeks of broadcast. Thirty weeks of buildup, foreshadowing, and accumulated unanswered questions. Ymir captured. Eren present. The sixth episode of the second season arriving.
The fan groups had gone quieter than usual in the hours before broadcast. The negative commentary from the previous weeks had subsided. Nobody wanted to be talking about pacing when the episode that was going to answer everything was about to start.
"These secrets will be revealed tonight."
"I started watching AOT as a monster-fighting anime. I now realise the monster-fighting was never the interesting part. The spy-catching plot is what this series actually is."
"When AOT began broadcasting, critics predicted the audience would tire of the format within ten episodes. Those people have not been visible online for several weeks now."
"There are no bad themes, only incompetent creators. So many people in Japan's anime industry say Shirogane-sensei's rise has damaged the ecosystem because the new generation of creators is imitating his style. But that is how it works when a genuinely exceptional figure exists. You try to learn from them and surpass them. This is not damage. This is how the medium grows."
"The world-building in the early stages of this anime was exceptional. The answer to it has to be equally interesting. It has to be."
By seven o'clock, Ion TV's viewership had crossed five percent. By seven-thirty it had passed six percent.
A large number of anime fans had their televisions set to the channel and their phones and laptops open simultaneously.
Hana Kimura, who had graduated four months earlier and found a job the previous month, was among them.
Five years of following Shirogane-sensei's work. Weekly viewing had become automatic. The fan group interactions had become part of the rhythm of her week.
When a friend in the group posted that it was time, the conversation went quiet almost immediately.
Hana's gaze moved to the television.
The Attack on Titan Season Two opening theme began.
The stirring music. The visual sequence of troops advancing toward Titans. By the time it finished, Hana was already feeling the specific energy that this series produced in her chest.
This anime has too many exceptional tracks. Shirogane-sensei's reputation as a screenwriter has completely overshadowed his reputation as a music composer. If people paid proper attention to the music alone, the title of greatest anime music composer in Japan would belong to him without question.
The animation began on top of the wall.
After the Survey Corps rescued Ymir, Reiner, and the others from the castle tower, they were preparing to move back toward headquarters. The group climbed the wall. Ymir, heavily injured and unconscious, was carried on a stretcher. Krista was still actively defending her, arguing for Ymir's loyalty to the Corps despite the transformation.
Then the plot shifted to the group moving along the top of the wall, navigating around Titans, heading toward the Corps position.
During this movement, Reiner and Bertholdt called out to Eren.
Hana blinked.
Why does this feel like filler again.
Ymir was unconscious. If Eren stopped to have a casual conversation with Reiner and Bertholdt about something ordinary, ten minutes of a twenty-minute episode would be consumed by nothing.
Shirogane-sensei. Stop the filler. Thirty weeks of broadcast. Just deliver the truth of the world cleanly. This is already the sixth episode of the second season.
She picked up her delivered milk tea and took a sip.
In the animation, the scene shifted. Reiner opened his mouth.
"Five years ago, it was us. We destroyed the wall and began attacking humanity."
Hana spat the drink directly onto her coffee table.
She choked immediately, coughing hard, tears running from her eyes.
Her gaze did not leave the television for a single second.
What did Reiner just say.
Five years ago. Destroying the wall. Attacking humanity.
That is what the Armored Titan and the Colossal Titan did.
Did the subtitlers make a typo.
The voice actors had dubbed the same line.
It was not a typo.
A typo from a subtitler was possible. A voice actor delivering the wrong line during a monitored recording session with the animation director and episode director present was not possible.
Hana's head was buzzing.
In the animation, Eren's expression had gone the same way her own had. Dazed. Processing something that the brain was refusing to accept at normal speed.
On the wall ahead, Section Commander Hange, Mikasa, Armin, and the others were moving while keeping watch on the conversation between Eren and Reiner from the corners of their eyes. Their expressions were careful in a way that suggested they already knew something.
No way.
Hana sat up straight and put down the milk tea.
"Our goal was to destroy all of humanity. But we don't need to do that anymore, Eren. As long as you come with us, we won't have to destroy the wall anymore."
Bertholdt beside Reiner was trying frantically to stop him from saying more. Reiner was not stopping.
The plot shifted into a flashback. The Survey Corps the night before they had gone to support Reiner's group at the castle.
At the meeting, Armin had laid out a series of observations about the Female Titan's attack on Eren during the forest operation.
The Female Titan had known Eren's exact location within the Survey Corps formation. That location had been known to only a small number of people.
Before the Female Titan changed direction to charge at Eren, the last soldier she had engaged was Reiner. And before engaging the Female Titan, Reiner had specifically asked Armin for Eren's location. At the time this had read as a friend concerned about a comrade's safety. In retrospect the sequence of events had a different shape.
Through this chain of deductions, the Survey Corps had confirmed Reiner as the person who had passed Eren's location to the Female Titan.
But suspicion of passing information was not the same as being a Titan Shifter. A spy could be an ordinary person compromised by outside forces. Being the information source did not make Reiner the Armored Titan.
Hana was working through this logic when the animation returned from the flashback to the present.
Reiner continued.
He said it directly.
"I am the Armored Titan. And he is the Colossal Titan."
Reiner gestured to Bertholdt beside him.
"Eren. Come with us."
Hana's expression became something she could not describe.
She was more bewildered than Eren in the animation. The shock moving through her chest was the specific kind produced by something that retroactively changed the meaning of everything preceding it.
Not just the second season. The entire first season. Every scene Reiner and Bertholdt had appeared in. Every moment of apparent friendship. Every fight they had participated in on the Survey Corps's side. Every expression of loyalty and shared purpose.
All of it was sitting in her memory right now with a completely different quality than it had carried five minutes ago.
There are more of them.
Reiner. Bertholdt. Annie. Ymir. Eren.
Shirogane-sensei, tell us directly: among Eren's fellow trainees, how many of them are actually ordinary humans? Is this a situation where a handful of normal people were accidentally placed inside a group of Titan Shifters?