Chapter 321 - 320: Meeting and Direction

After the two-week performance of Haru-Yuki Animation's latest original works turned out so mediocre, at least half of the company's employees had spent the last few days in a state of high anxiety. It was understandable; while half the staff were dedicated to Code Geass, the other half had been split between these two specific project teams.

Since the success of Madoka Magica, the company had never released an anime with such lackluster premiere ratings.

What made it worse was that both titles had leaned heavily on Haruto's personal brand for their marketing. Slogans like "Supervised by Haruto" and "A work the Warrior of Love praised as breathtaking" had been used to inflate fan expectations to an incredible degree before the launch.

But reality is a cold mistress. While the shows weren't exactly flops, the results were, frankly, embarrassing. This embarrassment led to a palpable sense of dread among the production department heads when Haruto summoned them for a meeting.

In his years at the company, Haruto had never been one to shout or lose his temper. If he felt you weren't up to the task, he simply had HR arrange a meeting to negotiate a peaceful termination, complete with a generous severance package and a bonus based on your contributions.

However, with Haru-Yuki's meteoric rise, no one wanted to be the person who got the talk. While the company might not have been the largest in Japan yet, its status and influence were already trending toward the very top. Normal people don't want to be asked to leave a rocket ship.

A week later, however, Haruto only questioned them on routine internal matters.

He said absolutely nothing about the fact that their 1 billion yen investment, backed by his own name, had yielded such lukewarm results. There was only one noticeable change: the proposal he had floated two months ago about launching another one or two original projects this spring was no longer on the table.

As January drew to a close, the internal panic only intensified. Code Geass was essentially finished; only the final touches on special effects, outsourced segments, and post-recording were left. This presented the four to five hundred employees with a looming crisis: what was their next job? The two original projects were set to finish in February, and the production for Lelouch would be finalized by the beginning of that same month.

The company's massive workforce was currently staring at an empty schedule.

Haruto was an easygoing boss, but he wasn't a fool; the employees knew he wouldn't pay them to sit around and do nothing. Given the performance of the January experiment, the atmosphere was, to put it mildly, delicate.

Haruto sensed these emotions but offered no explanation. Following his conversation with Yukino, he had buried himself in the task of selecting new projects. Truthfully, the options available to him were becoming more limited. It was nearly impossible to find works that could definitively surpass the combined impact of Madoka Magica and Code Geass.

Madoka was the absolute ceiling for the magical girl genre, and Code Geass was a pinnacle of military and geopolitical drama. Finding a single work to objectively beat both in terms of raw stats was a tall order even for him. However, in other sub-genres, there were certainly masterpieces of equal caliber and similar prestige. Moreover, many of these were expansive series with significant length.

He thought of the Monogatari series, the Fate franchise, and romance classics like Clannad.

In the realm of hot-blooded action, there was Gurren Lagann. In sports, there were titans like Slam Dunk. Of course, works like Slam Dunk and the Monogatari series were originally manga and light novels. Haruto had initially planned to wait until Hunter x Hunter and Sword Art Online were finished before bringing these onto the schedule at Prime Manga and Kiyozawa Library.

But Hunter x Hunter wouldn't hit the original's stopping point for another three to five years, and even if he wrote at high speed, the Alicization arc of SAO would take at least a year.

He decided he couldn't afford to wait. He realized that even with his entire life ahead of him, he could never replicate every masterpiece from his memory in this world.

If he were to handle the Big Three, One Piece, Naruto, and Bleach, alongside Dragon Ball, it would take at least a decade of his life even if he only handled the scripts and delegated everything else.

Throughout the end of January, Haruto stayed locked in his office, mapping out the future of his hundreds of employees. By the end of the month, he finally straightened his thoughts and let out a long sigh. He wasn't sure why the company's dependence on him seemed to grow even as it expanded, but he accepted it as reality.

However, he knew he couldn't stop trying to cultivate independent talent. No one knew when a genius like the masters of the past might emerge in Japan, so investing in original potential remained a necessity. Rather than letting these future geniuses grow up viewing Haruto as the Final Boss of the industry to be defeated, it was much better to bring them under his wing and have them contribute to his empire.

In early February, Haruto called a meeting. Twenty-seven middle and high-level managers from various departments gathered in the expansive conference room. They sat in stunned silence, looking at Chairman Haruto at the head of the table, Vice-Chairwoman Yukino, who handled all external business operations, and the sweet-faced third shareholder, Reina Fujimoto, who usually just took naps in the office but was present today.

The staff knew that a meeting with just Haruto and Yukino wasn't necessarily a major event.

But if Reina Fujimoto was called in... something massive was happening.

Given Haruto's personality, he would never bother her with company business unless it was critical.

Haruto looked at the six bound documents his secretary had distributed to everyone. He cleared his throat and addressed the room.

"Look through them. You have thirty minutes. After that, I'll start talking."

He gave a wave of his hand and closed his eyes to rest. The twenty or so people in the room, including Reina, were completely dazed. Yukino was the only one who seemed unfazed. Reina Fujimoto, who spent her days writing her own novels, had been entirely in the dark regarding Haruto's recent business plans.

Only the dividends deposited into her account every year reminded her that she was actually the third-in-command at Haru-Yuki.

She picked up the documents and scanned the first page. Her expression shifted instantly.

'New... new works? Are you kidding me? Haruto, are you even human?'

SAO and Hunter x Hunter were still in the middle of their massive serializations, Code Geass hadn't even finished airing, and yet he had the energy to develop all of this?

The first two documents were surprisingly simple in content. Haruto intended to incubate two specific intellectual properties over a period of several years, or perhaps even over a decade. He planned to invest a fixed amount annually into these two projects across animation, novels, merchandise, and games. Crucially, these two projects were not expected to be the company's primary profit drivers in the near future; in fact, they might not see a profit for a very long time. However, the proposal stated that Haruto was absolutely convinced they would generate astronomical returns ten or fifteen years down the line.

"Pokemon?"

"Doraemon."

Reina looked at the character sketches in the proposal, the yellow, lightning-mouse-like creature and the round, blue cat.

'Huh? This is a massive shift in style. Are you trying to move into the children's market now?'

She gave Haruto a skeptical look. The primary demographic for the ACG industry was teenagers aged twelve and up. Perhaps Haruto felt he had hit a ceiling with that group and was targeting the next generation? Reina Fujimoto set those aside; if Haruto wanted to spend his own money to hatch some big IPs, that was his business. In this industry, there was no such thing as a guaranteed win, but if anyone could pull it off, it was him.

She turned her focus to the remaining four proposals.

Fullmetal Alchemist.

Reina read the summary and was instantly hooked by the world-building.

Equivalent exchange, alchemists, conspiracies, and the ultimate price... This kind of high-concept fantasy was exactly what the market craved. It had the potential to be even more popular than Code Geass because of its broader appeal.

Then there was Gurren Lagann. It was a hot-blooded mecha series, similar in flavor to Code Geass but with a completely different energy. However, the scale mentioned in the summary was insane. The protagonist starts on Earth, fights his way to the Moon, then to the galaxy, then to galactic clusters?

'Haruto, Flying out of the planet in a mecha is one thing, but fighting at the edge of the universe? Are you sure the power scaling won't collapse?'

Still, it was a mecha show. It would have massive fan support right out of the gate.

Then there was the Monogatari Series. The proposal explicitly stated this was a franchise, split into Bakemonogatari, Kizumonogatari, Nisemonogatari, and so on. It was a supernatural romance and slice-of-life hybrid.

Reina's gaze turned even more peculiar. 'How does he come up with so much content at once?'

The volume of plot detailed in the proposal suggested a series that could easily exceed a hundred episodes.

It begged the question.

While he was writing Lelouch, Hunter x Hunter, and SAO for the last two years, where did he find the mental capacity to plot all of this? Is he truly human?

As for the final proposal, it was a sports series.

Slam Dunk.

Just hearing the name, Reina felt it sounded a bit plain. She had known Haruto for five years and had never once seen him exercise.

In his free time, he either went fishing or played video games. The idea of someone who never moves a muscle writing a basketball anime seemed unlikely to succeed. She wasn't like his cult-like fans who believed he was a god; she followed logic. Haruto was brilliant, but he couldn't possibly be a master of every single genre.

Though the success of Initial D did make her second-guess that logic. Haruto had been a terrible driver when he started that manga, yet it hadn't hindered his writing at all.

By now, everyone in the meeting understood Haruto's intentions. For Pokemon and Doraemon, he wanted to establish two dedicated teams to handle the creation, world-building, and long-term operations of these IPs. They were long-term investments with a five-year minimum horizon. No one in the room seemed particularly interested in them. Five years? Who knew if an IP would even be successful by then? No one wanted to be stuck in a project that wouldn't see a return for years, especially since bonuses were tied to profit margins.

However, their eyes were practically glowing as they looked at Fullmetal Alchemist, Slam Dunk, Gurren Lagann, and the Monogatari series.

'The Boss is finally going all out! Was he that triggered by the poor performance of the original projects? He's been in seclusion for less than two weeks, and he came out with four major project proposals?'

Haruto saw their expressions and guessed their thoughts. By late February, the hundreds of employees currently working on animation would find themselves without a task. He didn't want to release so much at once, even just writing the scripts was an exhausting job, but the company had grown too large to stop. He had to keep the machine running.

He had chosen these specific works because they were long-form projects that would keep the staff busy for at least the next year or two. He let out a sigh and spoke.

"This is the situation. I'm not asking for your opinions; I am informing you that these six works will be your primary focus for the foreseeable future. One sports title, one fantasy epic, one mecha battle series, and one supernatural romance... plus the long-term incubation of the Pokemon and Doraemon IPs."

"Within the week, the company will be reorganized into six project teams. This meeting is for you to discuss how to form those teams, the personnel composition, and who will lead each one," Haruto stated. "Also, keep in mind that while all six of these are valuable, their commercial potential varies."

"I expect you to take every single one of them seriously. Do not underestimate a single proposal."

He stopped there. He could see that they viewed Pokemon and Doraemon as the assignments for those with less ambition. But in reality, joining the initial creative teams for those two was where the true long-term prestige lay. In twenty years, that was where the real wealth would be. He didn't bother explaining it; they wouldn't believe him anyway.

A meeting meant a discussion, and a discussion meant a battle for interests.

Within minutes, the conference room descended into chaotic arguments.

Usually, these people were polite, but this wasn't an original project with an uncertain future, these were Haruto's personal scripts. Anyone who didn't fight for a spot on those teams was an idiot.

Haruto, Yukino, and Reina sat in silence as they watched the war of words erupt before them. At this rate, it would take weeks to settle.

Reina took a long breath and looked at Haruto. At that exact moment, Yukino's eyes met Haruto's as well. Both women shared the same thought.

Shock.

They knew he was capable, but this was beyond reason. Six major project proposals in one go?

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