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After Utaha had caught her breath and the flush in her cheeks had subsided to a manageable pink, they walked in comfortable silence for about ten minutes. They stopped in front of a Doutor Coffee—a ubiquitous, affordable chain that smelled of roasted beans and cigarette smoke.
Utaha scanned the interior through the glass before pushing the door open, the bell chiming softly. She led Leo past the students cramming for exams and the tired salarymen nursing iced coffees, heading straight for a booth by the window.
It was already occupied.
Sitting there, bathed in the late afternoon sun, was a woman who looked like she had stepped out of a fashion magazine for successful career women. She wore a sharp, tailored business suit that accentuated a mature, hourglass figure. Her hair was cut in a neat, medium-length bob that framed a face which required very little makeup to be striking.
She was beautiful—undeniably so—but in an "adult" way that usually made high school boys stumble over their words.
Leo, however, didn't stumble. He observed her with the clinical appreciation of an artist. She was in the "good zone," certainly, but he wasn't Aki Tomoya. He didn't hyperventilate in the presence of an older woman.
Utaha slid into the booth, gesturing for Leo to sit opposite the woman.
"Leo-kun," Utaha said, her voice carrying a note of respect. "This is Machida Sonoko-san. She's an editor at Shinazugawa Bunko, and she's also the one who manages my... erratic career. Consider her my mentor and friend."
Machida Sonoko looked up from her tablet, her eyes sharp and assessing. She extended a hand, her grip firm and professional.
"So, you're the 'monster' talent Kasumi Utako wouldn't stop raving about," Sonoko said, a playful smile touching her lips. "I'm Machida. It's an honor to meet the young man who's apparently going to save our publishing house."
"The honor is mine, Machida-san," Leo replied smoothly, shaking her hand. "Senior Kasumigaoka exaggerates. I'm just a writer trying to tell a story."
"Modest, too. Dangerous combination," Sonoko chuckled. "Well, let's get down to business. I cleared my schedule, so dazzle me."
Leo didn't waste time with a printed manuscript. He pulled his laptop from his bag, set it on the table, and booted it up.
"I don't handwrite," Leo explained as he navigated to the file. "I grew up in the digital age. Handwriting is romantic, but it's inefficient. I write to update, and I edit as I go. Digital is the only way to keep up with the speed of thought."
Sonoko nodded approvingly. "Pragmatic. I like that. The traditionalists are a dying breed anyway."
Leo turned the laptop around, the screen displaying the title page of his manuscript: "The Demon King Delivers the Punchline (And It's Fatal)."
"Here's the first volume," Leo said. "About sixty thousand words. Take your time."
Sonoko adjusted her reading glasses, leaned forward, and began to read.
The table fell into silence. Utaha ordered three coffees when the waiter came by, sipping hers nervously as she watched her editor's face. Leo just sat back, arms crossed, watching the traffic outside the window. He was calm. He knew what he had written.
Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. Then forty.
Sonoko didn't move. She didn't sip her coffee. She didn't check her watch. She was scrolling down, her eyes darting left and right with increasing speed. Her professional mask was slipping, replaced by a look of sheer, unadulterated shock.
Around the fifty-thousand-word mark, she stopped. She blinked, pulling her hands away from the keyboard as if it were hot to the touch. She took a long, deep breath and finally looked up at Leo.
"This..." Sonoko started, her voice slightly husky. "This is... beyond my imagination."
"In a good way, I hope?" Leo asked, a faint smirk playing on his lips.
"In a terrifying way," Sonoko corrected. She looked at Utaha, then back to Leo. "I thought I was getting a standard fantasy adventure. Maybe a hero with a cheat skill, a harem, the usual power-fantasy checklist. But this?"
She tapped the screen.
"This isn't a light novel. This is a biography of hell."
As an editor, Sonoko was used to fixing broken plots and guiding wayward authors. But reading this manuscript, she felt helpless. There was nothing to fix. The completion level was terrifyingly high. It was a finished product.
But the content... the content was a grenade.
"It breaks every rule," Sonoko murmured, half to herself. "The protagonist... is he even the hero? He's ruthless. He's cruel. But somehow... I can't stop rooting for him."
The world Leo had built wasn't the sanitized, RPG-style "Medieval Europe" found in most isekai stories. It was a realistic nightmare. It was darker than the Dark Ages.
The peasants were ignorant, apathetic, and cruel to anyone weaker than them. The protagonist, upon arriving, wasn't greeted by a beautiful elf or a king; he was nearly burned at the stake by a mob of superstitious villagers because he looked "foreign."
The nobles were worse—hypocritical parasites who viewed their subjects as livestock. And the Church... the Church was a den of vipers. They preached seven virtues but practiced all seven deadly sins. Indulgences, corruption, unspeakable abuses masked by holiness.
It was a world so suffocated by malice that an ordinary protagonist—like a Subaru or a Kirito—would have broken in a week.
"But your protagonist..." Sonoko shook her head in disbelief. "He doesn't break. He doesn't even cry. He treats the horror like a bad joke."
That was the genius of it. The protagonist was weak, physically. He had no grand powers. But he had a mind like a razor blade.
There was a scene she had just read: The protagonist is cornered by a devil. Instead of fighting or begging, he engages the devil in a battle of wits. He uses legal loopholes, linguistic traps, and sheer, audacious lying to scam the devil out of his power. It was exhilarating. It was funny. And it was deeply disturbing.
"The tone," Sonoko said, leaning forward intently. "It's grim, but it's hilarious. You're using Rakugo-style comedic timing to narrate a horror story. It forces the reader to laugh at things they should be screaming at."
"It's the only way to survive a world like that," Leo said simply. "If you don't laugh, you go insane. That's the core philosophy."
"It's brilliant," Sonoko admitted, her eyes shining with the thrill of discovery. "It tears the romantic veneer off the isekai genre and shows the bloody bones underneath. It makes every other fantasy novel on the shelf look like a children's book."
She sat back, the excitement warring with caution in her eyes.
"But Leo-kun... this is extreme. It's cynical, violent, and morally gray. The impact on the average reader is going to be massive. It might be too real."
She drummed her fingers on the table, calculating the risks. Shinazugawa Bunko was desperate, yes. But were they brave?
"I can't greenlight this alone," Sonoko said finally, her expression serious. "If I push this through and the ethics committee slams us, it's my head on the block. I need to take this upstairs. I need to show this to the Editor-in-Chief."
Utaha looked worried. "Is it that dangerous, Sonoko-san?"
"It's not just dangerous, Utaha," Sonoko said, looking at Leo with a mix of fear and admiration. "It's a revolution. And revolutions tend to get people fired. But..."
She grinned, a predatory, ambitious smile that matched the hunger in Leo's eyes.
"If we pull this off? We own the market."