Masao stared at the blank manuscript page, a sudden wave of doubt washing over him.
He had just made a disconcerting realization: the system had granted him impeccable artistic skill, but it had provided nothing in the way of comic composition or paneling techniques.
'Guess I'm flying by the seat of my pants,' he thought with a mental shrug.
His pen began to move. The first page materialized quickly—a detailed close-up of a chubby, bespectacled protagonist with freckles, his face split by a lecherous and unmistakably evil grin. A speech bubble floated beside him:
["It's finally complete... my time-stop device. Heh heh heh..."]
From the other side of the table, Eriri had been stealing glances at his work. She could no longer contain her critique.
"Using yourself as the main character again? And a time-stop plot? How uninspired," she sniffed.
Her words said one thing, but her racing imagination said another. She was already picturing what Masao might have the character do to the helpless, frozen girls. Would he do this? Or perhaps that? A wicked, anticipatory smile tugged at her own lips.
The thrill of getting a first look at a freshly drawn doujinshi was irresistible.
Seeing Eriri's expression, Masao found himself questioning who the real degenerate was between them.
"Eriri," he said, a dry note in his voice. "Judging by that look, you seem awfully eager to see what happens next."
"I-I am not eager in the slightest!" she retorted, her cheeks flushing. "Just draw faster. Some of us have real deadlines to meet."
She turned back to her own work with a huff. Masao left her to it, sinking back into his own creative world. Soon, the only sound in the room was the soft scratching of pens on paper. Two and a half hours slipped away unnoticed.
—
Eriri finally set her pen down, arching her back in a long, satisfying stretch. She gazed proudly at the pages she had completed. The inspiration had flowed so effortlessly today.
'Was it because Masao was sharing his Wi-Fi?' she idly wondered.
Her eyes drifted over to him, and she blinked in astonishment. A respectable stack of finished pages sat on his side of the table.
"Masao, you're so fast!" she blurted out.
Masao rolled his eyes, adding the final line to his last panel before setting it aside. "Let's call it 'efficient,' shall we? But yes, it's done. The time-stop one-shot is complete."
"Done already?" Eriri's gaze fixed on the stack, which numbered little more than a dozen pages. "Masao... that's so little."
Masao: "..."
He had the impression that Eriri's comments, individually and collectively, carried some very unfortunate implications.
He gathered the manuscript and offered it to her. "Want to be my first reader?"
"Obviously!" She snatched the pages, her curiosity winning over her pride.
It was black-and-white; he hadn't had the time for color. Eriri felt a faint sense of being short-changed. Once you got used to a certain standard, it was hard to go back.
She turned past the opening close-up of the freckled protagonist and dove in.
The next panel featured a simple, unassuming pocket watch, accompanied by a caption:
["It only stops time for five minutes, and it's once a day... but five minutes is plenty for what I have in mind."]
The protagonist's sleazy smile made Eriri grimace. "Ugh, what a gross little man. And only five minutes? What can you possibly do in that time? No wonder it's so short."
She read on, her interest mounting. The female lead appeared—a classmate, rendered beautifully by Masao's skilled hand. She was lovely, and Eriri's anticipation for the inevitable grew.
["He pressed the button. The world froze."]
Eriri's eyes gleamed. This was it. She was ready for the protagonist to indulge in all sorts of unspeakable acts.
But just as he was about to pounce, he spotted a little girl stepping into the path of an oncoming truck. After a brief internal struggle, he rushed to save her. His five minutes expired, his original plans left unfulfilled.
Eriri frowned. This wasn't the plot she had anticipated. Puzzled, she continued.
The next day, in the same spot, he stopped time again. Just as he was moving towards his target, a different crisis occurred—a heavy air conditioning unit was plummeting from a rooftop, directly above a group of elderly pedestrians. He saved them, too.
The pattern repeated. Each time he activated the device, he found someone in mortal peril. He would grumble and curse his luck, but he always intervened, muttering the same mantra:
["Tomorrow... I'll do it tomorrow, for sure..."]
Driven to desperation, the protagonist poured all his energy into modifying the device, eventually succeeding in extending its duration to a staggering thirty years.
Eriri let out a breath she didn't know she was holding. After all that build-up, was the payoff finally coming?
The protagonist spotted the female lead on the street. His thumb hovered over the button. But before he could press it, she collapsed. He frantically called for an ambulance. At the hospital, lingering outside her room, he overheard the doctors delivering a devastating prognosis to her family: a rare, incurable disease. She might not survive the night.
Standing silently in the hallway, listening to the heart-wrenching sobs from within the room, the protagonist looked down at the device in his hand. A strange sense of relief washed over him.
["Thank god... Any later, and I wouldn't have gotten to use this even once. Okay then... before she dies..."]
His thumb came down. Eriri braced herself, a knot of morbid fascination in her stomach.
'Is he really going to do that to a dying girl? Masao, you have a seriously twisted mind.'
The scene shifted. Deep in the night, the female lead lay unconscious in her sterile hospital bed. A figure appeared at her bedside—the protagonist. But he was now an old man, his face lined with decades of weariness. He held up a syringe.
["Sorry I took so long. I had to start from scratch with genetic engineering."]
The injection required time to be flowing. As he finished and turned to leave, the girl on the bed stirred, her eyes fluttering open.
For a fleeting moment, she saw the familiar-yet-old face of her classmate. But before her mind could process the vision, he was gone, vanished into the air as if he were a ghost.
The story concluded with the girl's miraculous, full recovery—a medical marvel that had everyone celebrating.
The final panel was a stunning close-up of her face. She was radiant with health, but her expression was tinged with a profound, wistful sadness, her eyes looking far into the distance, searching for a memory she could never quite grasp.
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