Drawing "Emiya Kiritsugu" was, in relative terms, a straightforward process.
The anime provided a detailed visual reference for most of the material, and aside from working out the differences between how a story was told on screen versus on the page, with certain storyboards needing to be restructured or built from scratch to suit the manga format, he could draw from what already existed.
The larger challenge was pacing.
In both the original novel and the anime adaptation, the audience encountered Kiritsugu's childhood already knowing who he was as an adult.
That prior understanding meant the patricide, when it came, landed with weight but not confusion. The groundwork had already been laid. Without that foundation, a reader coming to "Emiya Kiritsugu" cold would have no frame of reference for what they were watching unfold, and the impact of the ending would land wrong.
He needed to front-load the story with something that established Kiritsugu's philosophical logic before the events of the village.
A discussion of the trolley problem, placed early enough to feel organic rather than inserted, was the cleanest solution.
Let the reader understand how this child's mind worked before asking them to watch him apply that logic to his own father.
With that structural issue resolved, the ideas kept refining themselves in his head until he finally set pen to paper.
...
"Done."
He stretched until something in his back cracked, looked at the completed stack of manuscript pages in front of him, and exhaled.
He had expected the cheat memory and the near-mechanical drawing ability to make the whole process feel effortless. The reality had been more complicated than that.
The first problem had appeared immediately. He had tried beginning with finished line art rather than rough drafts, reasoning that his near-zero error rate made preliminary sketching unnecessary. That assumption had turned out to be wrong.
His line work was reliable. His ideas were not. New thoughts kept surfacing during the drawing process, requiring modifications to pages he had already considered complete. Revising rough pencils was simple. Revising finished line art was not.
He had abandoned the approach after the first few pages and gone back to basics, starting from rough drafts the way everyone else did.
The inking phase, which typically consumed the largest portion of a manga artist's time, turned out to be the stage where his ability gave him the greatest advantage. It went quickly and cleanly.
The background work and screen tone application were the opposite. These tasks required patience and repetition more than precision, and his drawing ability offered relatively little leverage over them.
Covering large areas with screen tones and filling in detailed backgrounds for panel after panel was the kind of labor that didn't accelerate regardless of how steady the hand doing it was. After extended sessions of that work, he understood why manga studios assigned it to assistants.
It was not difficult work. It was simply tedious, and tedium accumulated.
Despite all of that, "Emiya Kiritsugu" came in at the full 55 pages, and the entire manuscript from first rough draft to finished page had taken him exactly one week.
He caught himself staring at that number.
"That's a bit absurd."
One week was a standard serialization cycle for a weekly manga chapter. That chapter was typically around 20 pages, and completing it usually required a manga artist plus several assistants working through at least one all-nighter to meet the deadline.
"Emiya Kiritsugu" was 55 pages. Nearly three chapters worth of content. Produced by one person, working only after daily shifts at the bookstore, with two full days available over the weekend.
His individual output had been several times what a staffed manga studio would have produced in the same window.
He let himself sit with that for a moment before his thinking caught up and leveled the assessment.
The calculation was not quite right.
In a standard weekly serialization cycle, a manga artist typically spent roughly the first three days on plot conception, storyboarding, and back-and-forth discussion with their editor before a single panel was drawn.
Creative blocks could push that stage even longer. He had effectively skipped it entirely, drawing on the material already organized in his memory and spending his pre-drawing time only on storyboard decisions and pacing adjustments rather than story creation from scratch.
That was a significant portion of the cycle that simply hadn't applied to him.
Add the two uninterrupted weekend days, add the drawing ability itself, and completing 55 pages in a week became more explicable. Still impressive by any reasonable standard, but not supernatural.
Still a little absurd, if he was being honest.
What the process had confirmed, more than anything, was that the core plan was viable. Working solo, part-time, he had produced at several times the output of a conventional manga operation.
Once the serialization was running and he could bring on assistants to handle the background work and screen tones, the repetitive material that had slowed him down most, the ceiling would be even higher. All-nighters and health breakdowns were simply not going to be part of his experience.
He was satisfied.
Time to submit it.
The afternoon rush passed, foot traffic thinned out, and Akira settled into his usual end-of-peak routine of standing at the register and letting his mind run.
Submitting to the Tezuka Award only required mailing the manuscript to the address listed in Shonen Jump. He had dropped "Emiya Kiritsugu" in the post on his way home the previous evening, and the relief of having it out of his hands was noticeable.
Tonight, when he got back to the apartment, he would need to start on Fate/stay night proper. No more preparation, no more preliminary work. The real project.
But that was later. For now, he had gotten through the submission, and that warranted at least some small acknowledgment.
He turned the question over in his head with appropriate seriousness.
Sukiya. Beef bowl. Extra meat.
His budget didn't leave much room for celebration. That would have to do.
On a tangentially related note, the latest combined issue of Shonen Jump, No. 22/23, was going on sale tomorrow.
The Hunter x Hunter plot had reached the point where Gon and Killua were climbing toward the two hundredth floor of Heavens Arena. Hell Teacher Nube was also approaching its conclusion.
"Mochizuki-kun seems to be in a good mood today. Did something happen?"
He startled slightly. Sakamoto Kayo had appeared in front of him without him registering it, smiling with the particular attentiveness of someone who noticed things.
He composed himself and nodded.
"Something like that. Something I've been working toward finally got off the ground."
"Something you've been working toward." She tapped her chin with one finger, expression thoughtful. "That must be the reason Mochizuki-kun came to Tokyo in the first place."
He hadn't told her anything specific. He hadn't needed to. It wasn't difficult to see that a young man working full-time temp shifts at a bookstore hadn't moved alone to Tokyo for the sake of the bookstore.
Most young people who came to this city came chasing something. She had done the same, once.
"So what is it?" she asked, curiosity open and friendly in her expression.
"As for that..."
He smiled, slightly sheepish.
"I'd rather wait until there's something to show for it before saying anything."
He was reasonably confident. But if the manga came back unselected, having announced his ambitions in advance would make the whole thing considerably more awkward.
"Fair enough."
She accepted the deflection with good grace. Then, as if she had just remembered something, she reached into her pocket, produced her wallet, and extracted a thousand-yen note. She held it out with both hands.
"This is a small bonus for your work lately. You've been doing well."
"Thank you very much, Manager."
There were no other customers in the shop at the moment. He accepted it with both hands and a proper nod, and did not manage to fully suppress the smile that followed.
A bonus. An actual bonus.
His original plan had been Sukiya after work. Beef bowl, extra meat, as a modest self-reward for finishing the manuscript. That plan had now been upgraded. He was going to Yoshinoya.
Sakamoto Kayo watched the expression on his face, which was visibly different from his usual composure, and brought her hand up to cover her laugh.
"You really have changed, Mochizuki-kun. The old you would have spent five minutes being awkward about it before accepting."
"The old me is gone," Akira replied, face entirely straight.
He noted the numbers in his head out of habit. The Tokyo minimum hourly wage sat at 698 yen. The store paid ordinary part-timers a base of 800 yen per hour.
As a full-time temp, his rate was 1,000 yen per hour, which translated to roughly 160,000 yen per month working normal hours. The thousand yen in his hand represented one hour of his time.
Sakamoto Kayo, as a full-time salaried employee with managerial responsibilities, was almost certainly pulling over 300,000 yen per month.
That gap was not small.
The bonus itself was part of an informal understanding within the industry. Temporary employees were formally ineligible for performance pay and standard bonuses, and while a manager technically had the authority to submit bonus applications on behalf of outstanding temps, approvals were essentially never granted.
The practical workaround, for managers with enough conscience to bother, was to pay out of pocket. A cash bonus here, a gift card or small prize there, nothing official, nothing guaranteed, entirely dependent on whether the person running the store felt inclined to do it.
Evil capitalist society, as he had noted before.
The original owner had received these small gestures periodically. Partly because his presence at the register genuinely drove traffic, and partly because Sakamoto Kayo was, by nature, someone who looked after the people working under her.
That last point had been sitting quietly in the back of his mind.
"Can I ask you something, Manager?"
"Of course."
"Why do you look out for me the way you do?"
She blinked. The question had clearly caught her off guard.
She thought about it for a moment, then answered with the candor of someone who had decided there was no point in being cagey about it.
"Well, Mochizuki-kun is a genuinely good employee. And despite looking the way you do, your personality is surprisingly well-behaved. Very straightforward. It's actually quite endearing."
She paused, then appeared to decide she might as well go the full distance.
"And honestly," she said, smile going wide and entirely unapologetic, "I simply have a weakness for handsome faces."
"..."
He looked at her for a moment.
Then he gave her a slow, silent thumbs up.
Awesome