"I'm heading out, Manager."
"Take care on your way."
Akira said his goodbyes to Sakamoto Kayo and left the bookstore.
Walking toward Yoshinoya, he passed a vacant lot on the side of the street and glanced at it without thinking. That was where Shimizu Rin usually performed.
He hadn't seen her in several days.
The gap had nothing to do with either of them specifically. His shift had been adjusted to nine in the morning through six in the evening, which put him off the street before she typically started performing.
He had told her about the change the day before it took effect, so there had been no confusion on her end.
They were barely friends, if that word even applied yet. But the routine had formed quietly over those first few weeks without either of them deciding it.
Each night after his shift he would pass her spot and stop for one song before continuing home. She, for her part, had fallen into the habit of saving the last song of the night until he arrived.
It had been one of the few things he looked forward to at the end of a shift. That window was gone now, at least for the time being.
He shook his head and kept walking. Making money came first. Eating came immediately before that.
...
His current priority was securing a serialization opportunity in Shonen Jump as quickly as possible. "Emiya Kiritsugu" had gone in the post the day before, and tonight he needed to begin the preparatory work for Fate/stay night without any gap.
The difficulty of adapting Fate/stay night was in a different category entirely from what "Emiya Kiritsugu" had required.
He had been thinking through the adaptation during the week of drawing, and a rough shape for the approach had formed. But the immediate problem wasn't the adaptation structure. It was something more specific.
Among the submission routes available for Shonen Jump, there was an offline channel intended for new manga artists. The process required preparing three completed chapters of manuscript, then contacting the editorial department to arrange an appointment, at which point an editor would be sent to meet the newcomer in person for a direct review.
That was the channel he intended to use for Fate/stay night.
What he needed to work on now was not how to adapt the content of Fate/stay night, but how to compress its opening.
Because the opening of Fate/stay night was extremely long.
Taking the game itself as the reference: the prologue began with Emiya Shirou summoning Saber, then immediately shifted perspective to Tohsaka Rin and followed her through a sequence of events that covered several days in careful detail.
The first day showed Rin's school life and her summoning of Archer that night, along with their initial interaction.
The second day had her beginning her patrols and crossing paths with Emiya Shirou on the street.
The third day escalated into actual combat: an encounter with Lancer at night, Emiya Shirou witnessing the fight and being killed by Lancer, Tohsaka Rin reviving him, Lancer hunting Shirou again at his home, Shirou summoning Saber in desperation, Saber repelling Lancer and then turning on Tohsaka Rin and Archer before Shirou intervened to stop her.
That was the prologue. Read at a normal pace, it took approximately three hours to complete.
The 2014 ufotable anime had addressed this by designating its entire first episode, Episode 0, as a prologue adaptation, covering the material up to Lancer killing Emiya Shirou. The runtime of that single episode was forty-seven minutes.
Episode 1, titled "Winter Days, Fate Night," returned to Emiya Shirou's perspective and continued from there, drawing from the second and third chapters of the UBW route while folding in portions of the prologue and making significant cuts to the first chapter's daily life content.
By the end of Episode 1, the story had reached the point where Shirou summoned Saber and the confrontation with Tohsaka Rin and Archer concluded.
That episode also ran forty-seven minutes.
In standard terms, one anime episode corresponded to roughly two manga chapters. Episodes 0 and 1 together were equivalent to four normal episodes in content volume.
Adapting just those two episodes into manga form would require approximately eight chapters before the prologue had even finished.
That pace was completely unacceptable.
For a visual novel, a slow and detailed opening was not a meaningful problem. Players expected to invest time, and the format accommodated that expectation.
For a weekly serialized manga in Shonen Jump, the same approach would be a quiet disaster. Eight chapters of prologue before the actual story began was not a pacing choice. It was a guarantee of cancellation.
Beyond the pacing issue, the narrative technique of opening from Tohsaka Rin's perspective while Emiya Shirou was the actual protagonist was a structural risk he wasn't willing to take as a newcomer.
That kind of perspective shift required a reader's trust that hadn't been established yet. Without it, the effect was confusion rather than intrigue.
His thinking on both problems converged on the same conclusion.
The first chapter had to open from Emiya Shirou's perspective and move quickly. Daily life content needed to be cut as aggressively as possible without losing the character grounding that made later events matter.
A battle scene needed to appear within the first chapter. That was the standard. That was what Shonen Jump's readership expected, and what the editorial staff would be looking for.
The page count constraint on a first chapter was less severe than for regular chapters, which helped. In Shonen Jump, debut chapters were conventionally given the space of two or even three normal chapters to establish the world, introduce the cast, and set the story in motion.
Naruto's first chapter had run to sixty-one pages. One Piece's to fifty-eight. Demon Slayer's to sixty.
Working within that range, cutting daily life content to the minimum necessary and pushing the plot forward as efficiently as possible, advancing through to the point where Emiya Shirou witnessed the battle between Archer and Lancer was a realistic target for a single first chapter.
Difficult, but not unreachable.
As for what to do with all the compressed material that wouldn't fit in the opening chapters, the answer was straightforward. Once the serialization had found its footing and the readership was stable, he could reintroduce the cut content through flashbacks placed at natural points in the story.
Alternatively, a "Chapter 0" released after the series had established itself was a perfectly reasonable vehicle for that kind of material.
And if neither of those options worked, there was always the spin-off route. A slice-of-life companion piece covering daily life at the Emiya household. The precedent existed. Today's Menu for the Emiya Family had proven the format had a genuine audience.
As for whether fans would actually buy it, he had no doubts whatsoever. He had spent enough time embedded in the fanbase, as both enthusiast and critic, to know exactly how that community behaved when content they wanted was placed in front of them.
They would buy it, complain about it extensively, and buy the next volume the day it released.
Back to the matter at hand.
Following that line of thought, the rough shape of the first three chapters had come together in his head with enough clarity that he could begin. But he didn't pick up the pen immediately.
There was one significant change in those first three chapters that needed to be worked out before anything else.
He reached for a G-pen and drew a character on a blank sheet of manuscript paper. Not a character from the original work exactly, or rather, similar but different in one specific and deliberate way.
The figure that emerged was a girl in the Homurahara Academy women's uniform, a slight curve to the chest, blue medium-length curly hair falling just to the shoulders in a way that looked somewhat like strands of seaweed.
Her head was tilted at a slight upward angle, and she regarded the space outside the drawing with a smile that blended contempt and amusement in equal measure.
Akira looked at what he had drawn and felt the corners of his mouth pulling upward against his will. He genuinely could not hold back the laugh that followed.
"Matou Shinji. Or rather, from today on, Mato Shinji."
The girl on the page was a gender-bent version of Matou Shinji, one of the main antagonists of the original work.
The original Matou Shinji was a character he had spent considerable time unsure how to handle. Nasu Kinoko had described him as an "ordinary person," and in a story populated by mages, legendary heroic spirits, and supernatural conspiracies, that ordinariness was the source of both his narrative function and his many problems.
He served important purposes in the plot. He was also, in his original form, genuinely difficult to work with in certain sections without producing results that made him worse rather than better.
The solution had come from an unexpected source. Buried somewhere in his memory was a conversation he had once had with other fans online, years ago, about what the Fate/stay night plot would look like if Matou Shinji had been written as a girl.
The memory had surfaced while he was reviewing the material, and it had hit him with the immediate clarity of something obvious in retrospect.
Just gender-bend Shinji.
Once he had tried it, the effect was striking. A change that should have been superficial turned out to resolve a cascade of problems that had seemed unrelated.
Sections that had been uncomfortable or difficult to justify in their original form became workable. In several places, the existing text required no changes at all and simply read better with the gender swap in place.
"As expected of you, Mato Shinji."
He picked up the drawing and looked at the girl in it, genuinely impressed by how well the logic had worked out.
"Sacrificing yourself for the greater narrative good. I didn't expect to find myself admiring you for it."
He tapped the manuscript paper lightly.
"Gender-bending is one of the Fate series' great traditions. As a character of this franchise, experiencing it firsthand is basically a rite of passage. You should be honored."
He paused.
"No objections? Good. We're in agreement."
He set the drawing down with the satisfaction of someone who had just closed a negotiation on favorable terms, then stretched the tension out of his shoulders.
The actual drawing hadn't started yet, and he already felt like the hardest part was behind him.
Time to begin.
...
With the experience of "Emiya Kiritsugu" behind him, the process of drawing Fate/stay night moved noticeably more smoothly. The hesitations and small inefficiencies of the first project had worked themselves out.
The total page count for three chapters of Fate/stay night came to just under one hundred pages, roughly double the length of "Emiya Kiritsugu."
Despite that, the improved workflow meant he completed the entire manuscript in twelve days, better efficiency than the first project even accounting for the greater volume.
Not much more to say about that, really.
A small cheat, used properly, compounds.
During those twelve days, Shonen Jump had published two more issues. The most notable development was the official conclusion of Hell Teacher Nube, announced in issue twenty-four on May 18th.
Another long-running serialization had ended, and one more slot in the magazine's lineup had opened up.
He considered that for a moment, then quietly thanked Hell Teacher Nube for its service.
More immediately, he had planned ahead. Once he had a clear picture of his drawing timeline, he had contacted the Shonen Jump editorial department in advance to arrange an offline review appointment. The reply had come back confirming the date.
May 23rd. Tomorrow.
He would walk into the Shonen Jump editorial department with three completed chapters of Fate/stay night and sit down with an editor in person.