The printing press hummed like a living thing, its mechanical jaws chewing through stacks of paper with rhythmic precision. Assistant Editor Mina Susuki flinched as the first proof sheet of The Flower of Margaria slid into the tray. The ink glistened strangely under the fluorescent lights - too wet, too red.
"Oi, these smudged!" The operator snatched the sheet, his thumb coming away stained crimson. He brought it to his nose instinctively, then recoiled. "The hell kind of ink is this?"
Mina leaned in. The scent hit him first - copper and salt beneath the chemical tang. His stomach lurched. He'd seen enough nosebleeds at deadline crunches to recognize the iron reek of blood.
Yet the artwork...
His protest died in his throat. The knight's armor on page five looked less like drawn lines and more like actual grooves carved into the paper. When he tilted the sheet, the shadows pooled differently, revealing a hidden skeletal face in the negative space between plates. A trick of the light, surely. But when he blinked, it remained.
Across the room, Chief Ogawa's office door stood ajar. Mina caught the old man staring not at the proofs, but at the framed photo on his desk - two young men grinning before a ShōnenBlack banner, their inky fingerprints forever preserved on the glass.
___
Aoki's reflection wavered in the bathroom mirror. The single white streak from the other day had multiplied overnight, framing her face in jagged bolts of silver. She pressed a tissue to her nose. It came away black.
The pen sat innocently on the sink's edge. She didn't remember bringing it into the bathroom.
"How?" She said as she reached for it and went back to her desk.
The moment her shadow fell across its surface, the gold filigree writhed like veins. A drop of that impossible ink welled at the nib - not black, not red, but some shifting hue between. It remembered the shape of her fingers.
She should have been terrified. But as the first stroke hit the page, all she felt was relief. The pain in her joints faded. The cough that had been building in her chest since dawn dissolved into the sweet rush of creation.
Her phone buzzed across the room. Takeru. Again. The rankings would be soon. She'd check later.
___
Satoshi's studio reeked of turpentine and sweat. His assistants had long since fled, leaving behind half-toned pages and empty energy drink cans. The BladeCeremony manuscript before him was technically flawless - dynamic angles, impeccable anatomy, every battle scar rendered with clinical precision.
And utterly lifeless.
His fingers twitched toward the bottom drawer where he kept his emergency cigarettes. Instead, he found the folded proof sheet he had stolen from the printers. Even crumpled, the artwork burned with vitality. That knight's expression - he'd seen it before. Not in Aoki's earlier work, but in the museum exhibits she dragged him to back in art school. Renaissance masters. Baroque engravings. The kind of depth you couldn't fake.
His phone lit up with Kosuke's latest rant: "Editors are saying Aoki may become No. 1. Get me something that'll knock her totally."
The stolen page trembled in his grip. In the shifting light, the blood-ink seemed to whisper.
___
Rain sheeted against ShōnenBlack's headquarters as the midnight staff gathered around the ranking board. Takeru's knuckles whitened around his coffee cup
#1 Epipath Parade - Yuuji Kuruma
#2 Blade Ceremony - Satoshi Morita
#3 Twin Gear Protocol - Renji Moboshi
#4 Echoes of Azure - Riku Hoshino
#5 Vermillion Howl - Kaori Mizuguchi
.
.
.
#9 The Flower of Margaria - Aoki Itsumi
Then the junior editors gasped.
"BladeCeremony just jumped to #2? With those numbers?"
"I can't believe it."
"Satoshi is really as talented as they say he is."
Takeru scoffed and walked back to his table muttering to himself. "Aoki's back in the game. All we need now is a little push."
Mina knocked on Ogawa's door twice. "May I come in, sir?"
"Sure." He carefully put on his glasses. "Is there a problem?"
"Umm... It's Aoki's manga, The Flower of Margaria. It's in the top 10."
"And?" He looked at her with a very stern face.
"It's making steady progress due to its one-shot ranking, but it won't be able to get to the top 5 after two more issues. So, maybe —"
Ogawa cuts in. "Stop beating around the bush, Mina. I'm very busy."
"I... I was just t-thinking... Never mind, sir," She turned back and left, shutting the door behind her.
___
Aoki's apartment door groaned open without her touching it. She was staring at the first panel of The Flower of Margaria Chapter 2. It was too good. It was like Eiichiro Oda drew it.
She heard a whisper: "I promise you perfection, if you give me what I want."
She looked around him but couldn't see anyone. She thought maybe she was hearing things.
Her phone lit up with Takeru's calling.
"Hey, Matsumoto-senpai."
"Aoki, how are you doing?"
"I'm alright, but I'll feel better if you told me the rankings."
"Well, we're on 9th for now. It's normal as it's the first issue, I'm sure the next would be even better."
"Yeah," she said looking down at the panel she just drew.
She hung up the phone and picked up the pen. Then she heard the whisper again.
"We can do better."
___
The ranking board's numbers glared at Takeru like accusation: #9 - TheFlowerofMargaria. He knew better than anyone else that the chances of Aoki climbing high in the rankings with just three issues were very slim. He crushed his coffee cup, the lukewarm liquid dripping between his fingers unnoticed.
Across the bullpen, interns clustered around a printed spread of Aoki's debut chapter, their whispers carrying like rustling paper:
"Did the knight's helmet always look like that?"
"It's watching me. I swear it's—"
Takeru shouldered past them. The artwork had changed. Not drastically—just enough to unsettle. The knight's visor, once polished steel, now reflected the reader's face in its curves. He'd seen this trick before in museum exhibits. But it was impossible in print.
___
Aoki's apartment smelled of bergamot and iron. She hunched over her drafting table, the fountain pen's gold filigree pulsing under her death-grip. Every stroke came easier than breathing, the nib gliding as if the paper wanted to be cut.
"They ranked us ninth."* The voice wasn't hers. It vibrated from the pen's shaft, resonating in her jawbone.
She wiped her nose. The tissue came away black. "It's just the first week. We'll climb."
The pen dragged her hand sideways, adding a single unnecessary flourish to the knight's pauldron. The ink gleamed wet for three heartbeats before drying into a pattern that made her stomach lurch—a perfect miniature of Satoshi's signature art style.
Her phone rang. Takeru was calling. Again.
"Ignore him."
___
On the other side of the city, Satoshi's drafting lamp flickered as he stared at the stolen proof sheet. His magnifying glass trembled over panel four—the knight's sword hilt. There. That tiny spiral flourish in the crossguard. It was in his sketches, he was planning on adding it later in his series. He hadn't shown it to anyone yet, not even Kosuke.
His sketchbook fell open to a half-finished design—the same spiral flourish now mocking him from Aoki's page. His pen had hesitated there for weeks. Hers executed it perfectly.
___
The fluorescent lights in ShōnenBlack's archives flickered like a failing heartbeat. Ogawa's shadow loomed grotesquely across the metal shelves as he descended into the basement, the air thick with the scent of mildewed paper and something sharper—formaldehyde? Ammonia? His shoe soles stuck slightly to the floor with each step.
He didn't even know why he was going there. He just kept going.
The oldest archives were kept behind a rusted gate marked '1990-1999RESTRICTED'. The padlock was cold in Takeru's grip, its keyhole clogged with what looked like dried ink. He jiggled the key—once, twice—then froze.
A sound. Not the creak of the gate.
Skritch. Skritch. Skritch.
Like a pen dragging across paper in the dark.
Ogawa turned slowly.
At the far end of the aisle, a figure hunched over a drafting table. The man's spine curved like a question mark, his shirt hanging off skeletal shoulders. His hand moved in frantic, jerking strokes—not drawing, but erasing, the rubber tip of his pencil grinding into the paper with violent precision.
The page wasn't blank.
Even from here, Takeru could see the faint outlines of armored knights, cherry blossoms, a gauntlet clutching a rose—TheFlowerofMargaria, but warped. The knight's visor was split open, revealing not a face but a hollow void where the eyes should be.
The figure's head tilted. A wet crack echoed through the basement as vertebrae realigned.
The erased knight's armor wasn't blank—it was filled with hundreds of tiny names, all variations of 'Aoki Itsumi' written in his brother's shaky hand.
"Ren...?" Ogawa's voice barely made it past his lips.
The pencil snapped.
___
Aoki's kitchen faucet spat out a stream of black water as she opened it. She recoiled, but the liquid slithered over the rim of the sink, thickening as it hit the tiles. It wasn't water but ink. Living ink.
It pooled around her feet, reflecting not her face but a mosaic of eyes—dozens of them, blinking at different intervals. Some were hers. Some she couldn't recognize. One pair, sunken and bloodshot, could only belong to—
"You're not the first."
The voice came from the pen, now embedded in her wrist like a splinter. The gold filigree had burrowed under her skin, stitching itself into her veins.
The filigree wasn't just under her skin—it pulsed in time with her slowing heartbeat, gold tendrils rewriting her veins like panel borders.
Then everything went dark.