The Novelist Is a Little-Sister-Obsessed Fk IV

The woman walked along the quiet, seemingly abandoned street. She was a pretty young thing—in her early twenties—but the exhaustion on her face cast a pall over her attractive features.

It had been two years since she had landed a job at a trading firm lauded as one of the nation’s largest. Day in and day out, she arrived at work early and went home late at night, her boss unfairly rebuked her for things beyond her control, and her coworkers all slaved away, determined to get ahead in the rat race. The general mood around the office was impossibly gloomy. She had wanted to get away from the daily grind for too long—but she lacked the resolve to quit altogether. A languid sigh escaped her mouth.

Then she noticed something odd. It was too quiet. There was no one around; not a single vehicle passing by. As late as it was, she was on her way to a station in the center of the city. But a quiet, seemingly abandoned street…? She couldn’t recall a single part of her daily commute that fit the bill.

“Wh…? Where am I…?” she nervously asked herself.

“Heh-heh-heh…”

She instinctively whirled around to face the source of the sinister laughter. There she found a beautiful young girl—fourteen, or thirteen, or maybe even younger. Her face was well formed and beautifully symmetrical, like an intricately carved doll; her long golden hair flowed gently like a mountain stream, and her eyes shone a bright red amid the darkness around her. Not a stitch of clothing was on her body; her skin gleamed a brilliant white beneath the pale moonlight.

The woman stared at the fair, otherworldly sight before her, almost forgetting to breathe. The girl simply gave her another eerie laugh.

“Hee-hee-hee… I want you to become my…little sister.”

Before the woman could even gasp in bewilderment, the girl lunged forward with the speed of a wild wolf. Her sharpened fangs sank themselves into the woman’s jugular vein.

“Ahh…”

Warm blood seeped from the wound as a pang of untold pleasure arrested the woman’s every thought.

“Ahhhh… Ah, ah, ahhh…”

Her body shook in an odd rhythm; her face contorted in ecstasy as she let slip one lascivious moan after another.

The girl ravenously lapped at the blood streaming from her victim’s neck, savoring every drop. Her expression was far too lewd and bewitching for such an innocent-looking face. Tasting the woman’s blood, her arms slowly began to move. A simple, light caress from her small hands was all it took to rip the top and bottom off her business attire and send it all fluttering to the asphalt. By the time she removed her lips from the woman’s neck, they were both naked as the day they were born.

She gave the woman another greedy, expectant look. Somewhere in her fit of passion, the woman’s eyes had taken on the same shade of crimson as the girl’s.

“Congratulations,” the girl quietly stated, wiping the blood off her lips with the back of her hand. “You are now my…little sister.”

Thus was born the latest in a series of unholy unions—a new inductee into the Immortal’s Sinister Sisterhood…

“Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm…”

Wrapping up the forty-page-or-so manuscript, Kenjiro Toki let out a troubled-sounding groan. Itsuki Hashima, the novelist he served as editor for, was politely sitting across the table from him and searching his face to gauge his reaction.

This sample was for The Sinister Sisterhood, Itsuki’s latest novel-series pitch to Toki. It contained an extensive rundown of the story’s world setting, its atmosphere, and the personalities of its main cast; and while it was short, it was already a complete package, an entire story arc from beginning to end.

Although this was still a stepping-stone on the way to officially launching a new series, this was no rough work in progress. If anything, it was a real professional job. In fact, among all the treatments Itsuki had pitched to Toki lately, this was unarguably the sanest one yet. Unlike Life with a Little Sister, Itsuki’s last pitch and a novel too divorced from reality to make any sense whatsoever, Toki fully understood what the novel’s themes and goals were.

But…

“I dunno, it’s…” Toki scrunched up his face. “Kinda run-of-the-mill.”

“Run-of-the-mill?” Itsuki replied, eyebrows rising.

“Yeah. I mean, not to get in your face with it, but all you did was take the word vampire and replace it with little sister. Otherwise, it’s just another dime-a-dozen vampire story. We get a few of these vampire-battle novels pretty much every year in our new-writer competition.”

“Oh.”

“And I’m kinda interested to see where you go with this ‘sisterhood’ thing, but there’s no essential…reason to make the woman her little sister instead of a vampire. Nothing unique. There’s an idea here, but right now, it’s just a simple bit of wordplay. The protagonist is pretty attractive, too, but I feel like he’s too perfect to be very engaging. Maybe it was on purpose, but he resembles Sieg from Sisterly Combat, so he’s not gonna feel too fresh to Hashima fans. His foe’s a textbook zillion-year-old goth-loli girl, too, which isn’t too original.”

Toki had Itsuki’s rapt attention for the first part of his calm-toned criticism. But toward the end, he could see his author’s hands shaking, before:

“Ahhhhhh, graaahhhhhhh!!”

Toki didn’t bat an eye at the howling. “So yeah, like I said at the start…run-of-the-mill.”

“Nrrrrgghhhh…” Itsuki visibly winced as he gritted his teeth. “Every time, you bitch at me about how my ideas are insane or my characters are f—s of nature. Why do you think I held back this time…?!”

“No, that definitely came across.” Toki nodded. “But I think you held back a little too much. You want just the right, comfortable amount of uniqueness. Not too crazy, not too reserved, novel without driving readers away; something that a larger pool of readers can enjoy.”

Itsuki resentfully rolled his eyes, irked at this appraisal.

“Not that I think this treatment is badly done or anything. It’s definitely at the level of quality you’d expect from someone making a living off this…but compared to Sisterly Combat or, like, All About, which was good enough to score an anime, it’s not really enough for the audience. That’s all I mean.”

These conciliatory words brought a slight smile to Itsuki’s face. “Heh-heh-heh… I see. So it’s a masterpiece that could readily be released if written by any of the random novelists you find on the street, but it’s just a bit lacking for someone like me, the savior of the publishing industry and the one keeping the light novel business singlehandedly alive? Well! I guess I see your point, then! That’s a lot for one man to shoulder, I’ll tell you, but I’ll just have to accept it as my fate. What do they call this? Noblesse oblige? The duty of the chosen ones of this modern era? Ah, it’s tough to be nobility sometimes…heh-heh… Ha-ha-ha-ha…!”

Toki heaved a resigned sigh. Despite all the whining, Itsuki seemed to be accepting enough of his appraisal. He was even laughing.

“So anyway, try to rework that treatment a bit. And don’t forget about your All About and Sisterly Combat obligations, either.”

As Toki stood up and turned to leave the room, the woman accompanying him also rose to her feet.

“…Keep up the good work, Itsuki.”

Miyako Shirakawa, refined college student, nodded at Itsuki as she followed Toki out the door.

“Wow… Being an editor can be tough sometimes, huh?” Miyako asked as they walked back to the editorial department. “You can’t just trash someone’s work. You have to follow it up with a few compliments afterward.”

“Yeah, I guess,” replied Toki with a dry smile. “I have to keep the authors energized and motivated to work. That’s a big part of the job.”

“I see…”

“And really, Itsuki Hashima’s on the easier side of things to work with. You throw him a bone or two, and he revs himself up.”

“Oh, I don’t know if Itsuki’s that easy to read…”

She couldn’t help but say it. She knew, after all, that Itsuki was dealing with a multitude of complexities in his mind. Toki belittling him like that put her off a little bit.

“Yeah, maybe not. I mean, he knows I’m just buttering him up, so I imagine he’s doing a lot of that on purpose to drum up his inspiration. But either way, if you give me a novelist who’s capable of dialing up his motivation through sheer willpower, I couldn’t ask for much more.”

“He can see that?” Miyako asked, a bit surprised. “So are some authors harder to deal with than that?”

“Oh yeah,” came the immediate reply, a wry smile thrown in to drive the point home. “Lots.”

“Lots…?”

“I imagine you might run into them sooner or later in this business, Miyako…but when you do, be careful.”

“Be careful how…?” Miyako asked with a look of concern. She still had her misgivings about this job, and Toki wasn’t helping.