When Reina called out to him, Haruto froze for a beat. Then his expression returned to its usual calm, and he gave her a small, polite smile.
"Reina… Reina Fujimoto? Huh, it's been a while. Did you come over to say hi because you needed something?"
Hearing his tone and seeing how unbothered he looked, Reina felt an inexplicable spark of irritation flare in her chest.
To her, Haruto was no longer just a classmate from another building. He was the rival who had tormented her for nearly three months.
At school, at home, late at night, even while studying, her thoughts always circled the same question.
What would Haruto write next? What direction would he take? How good would his new work be? Would it surpass Blue Spring Ride? Or would it fall short?
A whole month had passed since she last saw him, yet the name "Haruto" had surfaced in her mind countless times every single day.
She had assumed that after meeting at Yukino's place dozens of times, and after playing over a hundred matches against each other, their relationship should have shifted into something… more familiar.
Just like how she and Yukino had somehow become friends through those meetings.
So surely, through that same time together, she and Haruto counted as half-friends at least, even if they were also fierce competitors.
And yet, despite being in the same school, separated by just one teaching building, despite the fact that walking from Class Seven to Class Three took three minutes if you moved quickly…
Haruto had not sought her out once in a full month. He had not brought up writing even a single time.
Today, she had come here, deliberately staging an accidental encounter just so she could talk to him, and this was the attitude she got?
She had been treating him like a rival.
But it felt like he did not even see her that way.
"Can't I greet you unless I have a reason?" Reina Fujimoto's voice stayed cool, but there was a faint, unmistakable resentment underneath it.
Haruto chuckled.
"Of course you can."
He continued walking down the street, and Reina immediately matched his pace, moving alongside him at a distance of about a meter.
"How's your progress in the game?" Haruto suddenly asked.
The sunset dyed the street in warm orange light. In the evening breeze, Reina's soft hair fluttered lightly along her shoulder, and the side of her pale face seemed outlined with a thin golden edge.
"…Not great," Reina replied, stiffening slightly.
Truthfully, she did not care much about games.
What she cared about was defeating Haruto.
That two-player duel game, True Iron Soul, without an opponent, held far less appeal for her than a set of challenging math problems.
"Oh, I see." Haruto nodded solemnly, as though he were delivering a lecture. "If you want to improve, you can't practice on and off. You have to reflect on yourself, refine your technique, pursue the limit, and never slack. Otherwise, if you always quit halfway, it's hard to achieve anything."
He gave her a full-blown motivational speech, clearly dissatisfied that his so-called student had started treating training so casually without his supervision.
"…" Reina felt something hot rise inside her.
Since childhood, nobody had ever spoken to her like this, the way people scold underachievers.
Hearing him go on and on, she suddenly asked,
"So after Blue Spring Ride ended, have you just been playing games this whole time?"
The words slipped out before she could stop them, because his lecture made her picture him as a full-on gaming addict.
"Hm, sometimes," Haruto answered.
Reina quietly let out a breath of relief.
At least he was not completely lost. At least he still understood that writing mattered more than wasting time.
"Then the rest of the time you've been working on your new novel?" she asked, trying to sound casual.
"Not really." Haruto sighed like someone finally freed from a long prison sentence. "When I'm not gaming, I've mostly been watching anime. Sometimes movies. Sometimes short videos. I'll watch people fishing, chopping wood, cooking, or skipping stones. During serialization I had to write drafts every night, so after the ending, I kind of… relaxed."
Reina stopped in place.
For the first time, her steady expression shifted, and emotion seeped into her voice.
"Then what about your new work?"
"My new work…" Haruto repeated, as if thinking.
"Last week, I spent about a week and wrote the first three chapters."
Reina's chest tightened.
A week?
He had only seen the first three episodes of that anime he was adapting from Shiori's memories, and submitting to an editorial meeting only required the first three chapters anyway.
So once he decided on the project, he had simply worked quickly and converted the plot into a novel format.
But to Reina, what she heard was something else entirely.
"A week," she said slowly, voice turning sharper.
"Are you saying you went from concept to draft, and you wrote three chapters in one week?"
"More or less," Haruto answered instinctively.
Then he immediately realized what he had done.
She was not a random reader. She was a fellow light novel author. She knew the process. She knew what that kind of speed implied.
If he did not want to sound abnormal, he could not keep blurting out the truth.
"Ahem, I mean… not exactly." He laughed a little too quickly. "I thought about it for a long time. I just spent one week actually writing out what I'd already planned."
His tone carried a hint of guilt.
And Reina caught it.
Her eyes widened slightly.
So he really was treating his new work with this kind of careless attitude?
In her mind, she saw herself over the last month.
Daydreaming during class to construct plot threads.
Studying writing theory late into the night.
Building a world, outlining arcs, creating settings.
Pretending to sleep at midnight to fool her parents, then hiding under the blanket with a flashlight, researching and planning.
Over a hundred thousand words of discarded drafts piled up.
Even more ideas had been rejected inside her head, thrown away before they ever touched paper.
She had been sleeping so little that she had started using breaks at school just to catch up.
And Haruto? What was he doing?
"Haruto," she said, voice steady but edged with real anger, "if you keep acting like this, your next work might be surpassed by mine."
Yet even then, she did not see the reaction she expected in his eyes.
He looked… calm.
Almost as if it did not matter to him.
And Reina realized something, perhaps for the first time. Haruto truly had never considered her an enemy. To him, she was simply another author who happened to serialize in the same magazine.
He did not build his life around rivals. If he did, he would exhaust himself.
But that was exactly what made her feel even worse.
She did not want to defeat a careless Haruto.
She wanted to defeat the version of him who had fought with everything he had, who had struggled until he produced the best work he was capable of at this stage of his life.
Only then, if she crushed him, would it feel like a real victory. If she beat a novel written in a week, what would it even mean?
On the other hand, Haruto did not believe that every popular work from that other world would automatically dominate in this world.
For him, the joy of being a light novel author was sharing stories from another world with readers here.
Sales, income, reputation, he valued those things too. If he could pursue them, he would not slack off. But he also did not want to let those things drive him into obsession.
From what he could tell, AnoHana probably had emotional explosions later on, but he did not know how big they were. He also did not know whether the story would land perfectly with readers in this world.
It was entirely possible that his new work could lose to Reina's next novel.
After thinking seriously about what she said, Haruto nodded with complete sincerity.
"Yeah." He sounded almost gentle. "For most people, failure runs through life from start to finish. I probably won't be an exception either. If I lose, then I lose."
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