The Editor’s Reaction

“…I call for the oldest tortoise in the land, the stoutest of shields. The black of twilight, never swallowed by any raging waters. The great reptile of miracles, the all-encompassing master of illusion. Heed my summons and make your power manifest… Genbu!”

With his Power Words, the large pentacle Kiyoaki drew upon the land lit up in a blinding flash, and the form of a naked woman appeared from its center—she was almost inhumanly beautiful, gifted with voluminous breasts.

“…I, Genbu, one of the Four Holy Sisters, have heeded the call of my big brother. I will forever be at your command.”

With that detached introduction, the girl—Genbu—heaved her soft, malleable twin peaks and bowed deeply.

Kiyoaki coolly nodded, a smile forming at the corners of his lips. “Yes. Thank you very much.”

Behind him, a loud, brash voice rang out. “Congratulations, my elder brother.”

“Wow, big bro! You finally got all four of us together!”

“Well done, sir!”

“Yeah,” replied Kiyoaki, smiling as he turned around.

There, he saw three similarly naked young women, their forms all closely resembling Genbu. Seiryu, the girl with deep blue eyes and a calm smile; Suzaku, a slightly younger-looking girl with a bit of volume in her bangs; and Byakko, a silver-haired girl whose eyes revealed a stronger-willed interior. Together with the girl just summoned from the pentacle, these four beauties were the ultimate siblings of legend—the Four Holy Sisters.

Over a thousand years ago, famed spiritualist Abe no Seimei—the man fabled in myth as the luckiest big brother to ever exist in history—banded these sisters together to live out the pinnacle of sibling life. Ten years ago, Seimei’s distant descendant Kiyoaki Tsuchimikado happened across a tome containing a forbidden family secret—the spells required to summon the Four Holy Sisters. He had devoted himself heart and soul to deciphering this ancient grimoire, and now he had finally succeeded in bringing this sacred quartet back to the world.

“Heh-heh…”

Kiyoaki couldn’t help but smile to himself. The thought of all the days, all the years of big-brother bliss awaiting him filled his heart with untamed joy.

“Heh-heh… Heh-heh-heh… Haaaa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!”

The four legendary sisters looked on longingly as his laughter echoed into the sky.

…This prologue was followed by several dozen pages of the five of them flirting, engaging in light foreplay, etc.

“Um… Well… Hmm. I’m finished reading.”

The ordeal complete, Kenjiro tossed the manuscript on the low kotatsu table with an inscrutable look on his face.

This was yet another spec proposal for a new novel series from Itsuki Hashima—a “slice-of-life” plot, if you had to assign it a genre. There were a few elements of romance and fighting, too, but those were mere accents to the main focus of depicting Kiyoaki and his swingin’ new family/harem life.

“…What do you think?” Itsuki asked from the other side of the table, a little tense.

On the day he reported to Miyako that he and Nayuta were now a couple, he came back home and swore to himself that he had to grow—as a person and as an author. He then dove straight into writing, spending the next two days whipping up this new sample piece with hardly a break for sleeping. Personally, he thought he was really onto something with this one, but only his editor could give the final judgment.

“Well, um…” Toki paused a moment to think. “…In a word, it was…fun.”

“…!!”

A wave of relief spread over Itsuki’s face.

“The four heroines are all cute,” Toki continued. “A little nasty, too. And the dialogue between them and the protagonist feels really alive. It was a neat read.”

“Right, right…”

“Slice-of-life stories like these have a tendency to be too middle-of-the-road and unengaging, but you’re doing a good job at adjusting the tempo throughout while still keeping it laid-back and accessible. That balance isn’t something you can just sit down and teach yourself, you know. I feel like I’m experiencing a new side of Itsuki Hashima, the author.”

“Oh… Wow…”

Itsuki didn’t even notice the smile spreading across his face at this unprecedented torrent of positive feedback from his editor.

“…But.”

“B-but?”

“…These four heroines… They kind of all have the same character traits, don’t they?”

Itsuki answered with a dissatisfied lift of his eyebrows. “Well…I mean, they’re gonna have to be a little similar, given that they all love their big brother a whole lot and stuff…”

“Sure, sure. But I’m talking more on, like, a fundamental level. It kinda feels like you’ve taken the personality of a single person and divvied it out to four different characters.”

Toki paused, searching for the words, before deciding to just be honest.

“…These heroines… They’re all Kani, aren’t they?”

“What…?!”

Itsuki’s eyes widened. He grabbed at the manuscript on the table, carefully reading it over. Big tits… Silver hair… Blue eyes… Teased hair… Expressionless, mysterious, innocent, petite, wispy, pale, naked…

Yes, those are all traits of Nayuta, aren’t they?

“No… It can’t be… I never noticed…”

“Plus, the sisters inexplicably do that “nyaaa” thing at the main hero every now and then. Sound familiar?”

“Gahh?!”

His editor’s observation knocked Itsuki for a loop.

“…And it’s perfectly fine to model your characters after real people, of course…but you really didn’t notice?”

“Nnnhh…”

Itsuki looked down, face red, as Toki rolled his eyes at him. He had created a heroine—four heroines, actually—based off someone Toki knew, then banged out several dozen pages depicting his hero fooling around with them. It’s a writer’s job to describe what he’s picturing in his mind, yes, but this was a little too shameful. It wasn’t even purposeful. He was completely oblivious.

“Arrrgghh…! I can’t believe how embarrassing this is… Uggghhhhh…”

Toki looked down warmly as Itsuki writhed around on the floor, flailing in shame.

“Hey, I know how it feels when you kick off a relationship. Everything’s still all lovely-dovey between you guys. There’s nothing to be that ashamed of.”

“Gaahhhh!!”

The light taunting from Toki made Itsuki roll around even more violently. Thanks to Satoshi Godo and Kirara Yamagata, who had witnessed the event firsthand, the news had already spread far and wide across the editorial department.

“Yeah, congrats on finding yourself someone so cute.” Toki grinned.

“Nooo… ‘Lovey-dovey’?! Was getting the first girlfriend in my life enough to make me this insufferable?! Is it so bad it’s unconsciously leaking into my writing?! Aaaggghhhhh!! This whole time, I thought I was pursuing the unattainably, unrealistically perfect little sister, but now my real girlfriend’s showing up in it! Goddammit! I hate people with an actual love life! Oh wait, that’s me now! I hate myself! I haaaaaaate myself!!”

Toki politely waited for his suffering author to settle down and breathe before he chose to speak again.

“By the way, Itsuki…”

“Guhhh?” Itsuki replied, muffled by the floor.

“What are you gonna do with this sample? Because personally, I think that if we could deal with this identical-character issue, I wouldn’t mind if we officially went with this as a new series.”

“……”

Itsuki silently sat up…

“Hmph!”

…and neatly tore the manuscript on the table in half, shoving it into his wastebasket.

“……This new series proposal never existed. Let’s go with that, please.”

Toki grinned at this heartfelt request. Now that he’s got a girl, he thought, it’d be nice if he could try something based on his own experiences instead of obsessing over little-sister tropes.

But Toki still knew this obsession was the engine that fired the rest of author Itsuki Hashima’s soul. So he didn’t try to force him in a new direction. Not as long as things were going (relatively) well.

This was Toki’s fifth year as Itsuki’s editor. He had worked part-time at GF Bunko’s editorial department for two years while attending night classes before the editor in chief recommended him for a permanent job at Gift Publishing, and Itsuki was the first novelist he was assigned. They were both new to their respective positions, which led to some pretty heated arguments on regular occasions, but now Itsuki’s work was getting adapted into anime. He’d always had good instincts, but compared to the unrefined voice of his early days, his writing chops were miles better. He still tended to fly off to his own little world way too often, but he had also calmed down enough that he could see those tendencies for what they were.

At this point, Itsuki no longer needed an editor controlling him from start to finish. To an editor, seeing an assigned writer mature into a proven talent was a joyous occasion—and Toki had gotten his first taste of that joy with Itsuki Hashima. He made a point not to mention that to Itsuki himself, though. He didn’t need that kind of encouragement.

“All right… Any more work-related things to discuss?”

“Hang on,” Itsuki said as Toki stood up. “I wanted to hammer out some things for the plot of the new Sisterly Combat volume.”

“Ooh, sorry, but I gotta meet with a new writer at five. Can that wait till tomorrow?”

Itsuki nodded. “Sure, no problem. A new guy, huh?”

“Um, Yoshihiro Kiso. He placed in the 15th New Writers Contest.”

“Kiso? Which one was he again?”

Itsuki was in attendance for the awards ceremony earlier in November, so he must’ve seen him at least once, but his memory was failing him.

“The older dude. In his sixties. He wrote Sengoku Kenpuden.”

“Ohhh, yeah…”

Yoshihiro Kiso was by far the oldest winner in the New Writers Contest and by far the oldest writer in the entire GF Bunko stable. He was an energetic man, though, one who looked right at home in his traditional Japanese yukata.

“Wow, you’re managing that guy, huh?”

“…Yeah,” Toki said, voice a little heavy. It wouldn’t be the first time he edited for someone older than him, but Kiso was literally over twice his age, so he still wasn’t sure how to work with him. He knew the casual, frank approach he took with Itsuki probably wouldn’t cut it, at least.

“Are you editing any of the other new guys?”

“Makoto Yanagase, too. The Goddess Must Be Punished!”

“Ooh, the spanking dude?”

“Yeahhh…”

His work was completely off the wall, but Yanagase himself was the classic levelheaded salaryman, polite and well versed in common sense. He was easy to strike up a conversation with, but when that conversation turned to fetish spanking (as it often did with him), he would suddenly erupt into so much passion that his mind would completely shut itself off to Toki’s advice. They were in the midst of revising his prize-winning manuscript for publication, but Yanagase’s worryingly exacting standards were making progress inexorably slow.

“…Sounds like a lot of work,” Itsuki said with a touch of sympathy.

Toki snickered. “Yeah, I just keep on drawing the problem-child writers…”

“You got nobody to blame but yourself for that. That’s the kind of writer you get attracted to.”

At GF Bunko, editors generally had the right to pick their writer assignments. In the case of Kiso and Yanagase, Toki had read both their novels and thought, “This is someone I’d like to work with,” and so he volunteered for the jobs.

“You’re right. But really, though, sometimes you have totally normal, sensible folks who write utterly insane nonsense, and sometimes you have these out-of-their-mind eccentrics who write the most ordinary stories. That happens most of the time, actually, that kind of mismatch. You never know who you’ll be working with until you start.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right…”

It made sense to Itsuki. A few examples floated into his mind—the pure-romance novelist who had a habit of frequenting Tokyo’s sex shops; the Lolita heroines of a man who preferred older women; the grotesque sex-horror novels of a loving husband in a nuclear family.

“You aren’t including me among the ‘problem children,’ are you?”

Toki squinted his eyes. “You’re their leader.”

“…What?”

Itsuki scowled at him. The possibility had never even crossed his mind.