Chapter 161: Hours

Chapter 161: Chapter 161: Hours

On the second Tuesday of January, at 11:40 at night, Haruki fell asleep with his forehead on a storyboard for the Gate ceremony. He woke three hours later with a panel border printed across his cheek.

He was at a desk in Studio Hikari, above the bicycle shop in Mitaka, in the long room with its low ceilings and eight light boxes. Every other desk was dark. The only light came from the lamp at Minase’s desk by the window, where she sat with a pencil behind her ear, drawing. She hadn’t woken him. She had put a blanket over his shoulders at some point, and a cup of tea beside his elbow that had long since gone cold.

"Two-forty," she said, without looking up, when he lifted his head. "You slept through Ichinose-chan leaving, and the last train."

He looked down at the storyboard under his arm. It was the Gate ceremony from Chapter one: a boy walking up the hill in a line of fifteen-year-olds, the stone arch in the sunlight, the whole valley watching. Panel seven was smudged where his face had been lying on it.

"I’m sorry."

"Don’t be," Minase said. She was still drawing. "It’s the first night this month you’ve stayed past midnight without saying you were fine." She finally looked up. "You’re not fine, Amamiya-kun. You’re trying to do three jobs, and you’re sleeping on the storyboards."

He didn’t answer.

The unofficial pre-production had started on the sixth of January, as Tachibana had said it would. It happened in the evenings and at weekends, with nobody paying and nobody allowed to see, because the contract couldn’t be signed until the twenty-sixth of April. Minase ran it the way she had run the twelve seconds, quietly and relentlessly, with a whiteboard at the end of the room covered in episode numbers and a countdown in red marker.

Haruki came three evenings a week. He sat beside Minase and the storyboard artist she had brought back from her old Hikari days, and they went through Threadless Gate Chapter by Chapter. They talked about which scenes would open the first episode, where the silence would go, and what the threads would sound like, and how long page twelve’s white could be held before an audience began to think the film had broken.

It was the best work he had ever done. It was also the thing he had wanted most in two lives, since the first line on the first screen the system had ever shown him. Animation Production. Locked.

And he was falling asleep on it.

The blue screen opened quietly beside the lamp.

Weekly Time Allocation (January, weeks 1–2): Threadless Gate (weekly Chapter): 38 hrs Hikari pre-production (evenings/weekends): 22 hrs Bookstore (Koenji): 24 hrs Sleep: 31 hrs (avg. 4.4/night) Warning: Pattern matches Host’s first life, final 3 years.

He read the last line twice.

Pattern matches Host’s first life, final 3 years.

He had never seen the system say anything like that before.

He remembered the final three years of his first life: the long hours, the nights at the office, and the weekends that disappeared into work nobody would ever thank him for. He had slept four hours a night and told himself it was temporary, that it was only until the project finished and things got quieter. Things had never got quieter. One Tuesday, there hadn’t been a next project at all.

He had promised Yui on a stairwell in August that he would eat, call on Sundays, and find someone to look at when his mind went white. He had kept all three. He hadn’t promised to sleep, because it hadn’t occurred to either of them that he would need to.

"Minase-san," he said slowly. "How did you do it? When you were at Kurenai, and your mother was sick."

Minase put down her pencil.

"I didn’t," she said. "I did it for two years. Then I collapsed in a lift at Kurenai and woke up in a hospital in Nerima with a drip in my arm. A doctor told me I had the blood pressure of a sixty-year-old." She turned her tea cup a quarter turn. Haruki wondered if there was anyone in the industry who didn’t. "Then I stopped doing everything and chose two things."

"Which two?"

"My mother, and the work I actually believed in." She looked at the whiteboard, with its episode numbers and red countdown. "I left everything else. The money, the prestige series, the lunches with producers. It took me another year to get back up those stairs." She looked at him steadily. "You’re nineteen. You don’t have a year to waste on a hospital in Nerima." She picked up her pencil again. "Choose two, Amamiya-kun. Everything else, give to someone who has the hours for it. That isn’t failing. It’s the only way anything in this building ever gets finished."

He took the first train home at 5:10 that morning, through the dark suburbs, with the smudged storyboard in his bag. He sat by the window and did the arithmetic he had been avoiding for a month.

He had thirty-eight hours a week for Threadless Gate. He couldn’t cut those. The weekly Chapter was the foundation of everything, as the system had told him in August of the first year, when he had spent his authority faster than he earned it.

Hikari needed twenty-two hours, and it needed more, not fewer, as April came closer. Minase had already told him the first episode’s storyboards would need him for whole weekends in March.

The bookstore took twenty-four.

For twenty months, the bookstore had been the one fixed thing in his life. He had worked shifts on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and more when Oda was short-staffed, which was always. It had paid his rent when Threadless Gate had eleven readers. He had sat on the upturned crate in the stockroom through the hardest calls of his life: page twelve, the editorial hold, Kanzaki’s photograph, the Commission’s findings. He had watched a shelf by a restroom door become a shelf by the entrance under a sign that said START HERE. A girl with a cat purse had bought his first book there with coins.

He didn’t need the money anymore. That had been true since the autumn, when the first book’s royalties arrived, and the paid-tier revenue had doubled after the tournament. He had kept working the shifts anyway, and he had never asked himself why.

Sitting on the first train of the morning with a panel border still faintly printed on his cheek, he finally asked.

He kept working there because it was the only place in his life that had never asked him to be anything but a boy who restocked travel guides. It was the only place where nobody wanted anything from him except that the new releases were on the table by ten.

He had stayed because it was easier than leaving.

The train pulled into Koenji at 5:52. He walked out into the cold, dark street, past the bookstore with its shutters down and the manga shelf just visible through the glass. There were layers of strangers’ cards, and a sign in careful handwriting.

START HERE.

He stood outside the dark shop window for a long time.

Then he took out his phone and wrote a message to Oda, although it was six in the morning and she would be asleep. He wrote it the way he wrote anything that mattered, and rewrote it four times.

Oda-san. Can I talk to you after my shift on Friday? It’s about the shelf.

He sent it before he could change his mind.

Her reply came at 6:04, before he had reached his front door.

I’ve been awake since five. I’m always awake since five.

I know what it’s about. I’ve known since December.

Friday. Seven o’clock. Bring nothing. I’ll make tea.

He stood in the stairwell of his building with the phone in his hand, under the buzzing light, and read it three times.

I’ve known since December.

He hadn’t said a word to anyone. But Oda noticed everything. She had noticed that he had started arriving for Wednesday shifts with pencil still on his left wrist, and a panel border faintly printed on his cheek. She had seen him fall asleep on the crate in the stockroom twice in January, with a box of spring stationery unopened at his feet. She had never mentioned any of it.

He let himself into his apartment. Across the dark living room, the bedroom door stood open, with the doorframe and its fourteen pencil lines. He lay down on the floor in front of it without taking off his coat and slept for four hours. He woke at ten with the storyboard still in his bag and the sun on his face.

Then he got up and drew Chapter fifty-seven, because it was due on Friday, and because Naniwa wanted the final pages of Volume 2 by the end of February. There were still only so many hours in a week, no matter how much he loved all of them.

[New Mission — Crossroads (1): The First Road Closed.]

[Condition: The Host must give up something he loves to keep what he loves more.]