Colour Atlas would solve the one problem that had been quietly nagging at him since chapter one.
The manga version of Edgerunners had the bones of the original: the composition, the layouts, the character designs. But the colour layer was never quite right.
The neon palette of Night City in the original animation was precise and intentional: specific greens, specific oranges, every shade calibrated. His manual approximations had been good. Now they could be exact.
Tiffany Blue. Ultramarine. Lilac. Deep rose. Every colour compound now existed fully mapped in his memory, formulas and ratios intact. What used to take trial and error would take seconds.
"Perfect."
He was satisfied. Genuinely.
Even with Edgerunners running on a bi-weekly schedule and a backlog already built up, finishing faster meant more personal time. That mattered to him.
Now for the other one.
"Game Overlord," he muttered, eyes lighting up. "Platinum tier. Does this make me a gaming god?"
A Platinum ability was serious. Even if it didn't hand him absolute supremacy in some virtual world, it should at minimum put him well above average.
He pulled up the ability details.
He stared.
"...Game development?"
The ability was related to game development.
Not gameplay. Not skill. Not reaction time or tactical awareness or any quality that would help him survive in an online match.
The Game Overlord ability had granted him the equivalent of twenty years of hands-on professional experience in game production, specifically in scripting, engine architecture, 3D model construction, and art direction.
Specifically oriented toward development tools: C++, C#, Java, Python, Unity, Unreal Engine, Cocos2d-x.
He was, effectively, a senior veteran game developer. In every dimension that mattered for actually making a game.
"You have to be joking."
He looked at the interface with profound disappointment.
"System, can this be exchanged for something else?"
The system replied, as flatly as ever: "This system does not currently support the replacement of issued abilities."
"What am I supposed to do with this?" He felt the genuine frustration of someone handed a drill when they asked for a screwdriver. "I'm a mangaka. I don't work at a game studio."
The casual thought he'd had earlier about commissioning a MOBA had been purely theoretical. The plan was: pay a team, give them the concept, maybe contribute art direction, and otherwise stay out of the actual production process. He had no intention of personally sitting in front of a compiler for six months.
"You could collaborate," the system offered. "Additionally, completing tasks with the skill could help accelerate mission progress through increased public recognition. Cyberpunk 2077, if successfully produced as a game in this world, would significantly amplify awareness of Edgerunners."
"Get your cause and effect straight," Aoyama said flatly. "It wasn't Cyberpunk 2077 the game that made Edgerunners. It was Edgerunners that salvaged Cyberpunk 2077's reputation after the game came out as a half-finished disaster."
Even with a committed studio that was experienced, well-funded, and passionate, Cyberpunk 2077 had shipped in a state that had made the developers infamous.
The bugs, the performance collapse, the feeling of potential buried under broken execution. That was a studio with eight years and serious resources behind it. They still couldn't fully deliver.
What made him think a Platinum-tier system ability would close a gap that a full professional team couldn't?
Platinum was strong. But Master and Diamond were different categories entirely. A Platinum-tier game development ability was useful; in the right context, with the right support, it was meaningfully useful.
But it wasn't a miracle.
"You could collaborate," the system repeated. "And combining lower-tier abilities can yield stronger composite ones."
"Yeah, yeah. Noted. Stand by."
The system voice vanished.
He was already moving on. He didn't have the bandwidth for game development strategy right now, and he knew himself well enough to know that thinking about elaborate future plans was mostly procrastination dressed up as productivity. When the moment came, he'd deal with it.
Right now, he had somewhere to be.
"Come on, Pochita." He scooped her up, ignored her confused look, and headed for the bathroom. "Five minutes. Then we're going out for food."
[Translated and Rewritten by Shika_Kagura]