Aside from Megumi Kato, Hiroto Tachibana originally harbored zero expectations regarding the characters from Saekano.
When he had crossed paths with Eriri back in middle school, it was already far too late to alter the timeline and narrative trajectory anyway, so he hadn’t paid much active mind to that golden-haired losing heroine.
Looking at the situation now, Utaha Kasumigaoka was basically cut from the exact same cloth.
There are plenty of fish in the sea.
Since things had already devolved to this state, Hiroto harbored absolutely no intention of deliberately catering to either of them or trying to make them change their minds.
Utaha shifted her gaze toward him, then glanced back over at Yukinoshita, looking as though she had unearthed a highly intriguing specimen.
”My, my,” she subtly tilted her head, the corners of her mouth curving into a half-smile.
“As it turns out, an even more presumptuous fellow was hiding away in the corner.”
Hiroto Tachibana: Bad news.
Why does it feel like she’s trying to drag me into the crossfire?
Don’t do that!
Keep trading insults, keep fighting!
”Ahem,” he cleared his throat.
“Um, I am not a member of this club.”
”Oh, you aren’t?” Utaha looked back at Yukinoshita, a sliver of mockery flashing through her eyes.
“It seems your incompetent club member is claiming he doesn’t belong here simply to evade participating.”
”Is this the baseline standard of the so-called Service Club?”
Hiroto furrowed his brow.
Had she already initiated a total scorched-earth policy of indiscriminate attacks?
”Hardly,” Yukinoshita Yukino’s voice cut smoothly into the air.
“He is genuinely not a member of my club.”
Yukinoshita shared no grievances with Hiroto, nor did she harbor any intention of dragging him under the bus.
Furthermore, this was fundamentally her own battle to fight.
Her personal matters should naturally be resolved by herself.
”Um…” Tomoya Aki tentatively raised his hand.
“Kasumigaoka-senpai, Yukinoshita-san, can we please calm down for a moment?”
As the primary party and the central catalyst for this entire dispute, Tomoya unexpectedly looked like an absolute bystander at this moment.
His voice was simply too faint, and the two girls completely lacked any intention of paying him heed.
”Um, excuse me…”
”Alright, that’s enough, stop barking.”
Hiroto finally opened his mouth.
His sole purpose here was to listen to premium beautiful girls engage in a verbal slugfest, not to endure this guy’s erratic barking.
Tomoya’s voice ground to a sudden halt, his mouth hanging half-open, entirely at a loss as to whether he should shut it or continue speaking.
”Heh!” Utaha Kasumigaoka let out a soft chuckle, her gaze swiveling squarely onto Hiroto.
“Yukinoshita, this club member of yours—”
”Alright, you stop squawking too.”
Utaha froze instantly.
Off to the flank, Megumi Kato remained perfectly quiet and unassuming.
”They say the onlookers see what the players blind themselves to.
Actions one considers absolutely righteous might amount to absolute nothingness in the eyes of a detached bystander.
The two of you…”
”One uses raw enthusiasm to sprint away from reality, while the other relies on a venomous tongue for petty self-gratification.”
Tomoya was practically scared out of his wits.
How on earth was the situation escalating into such absolute chaos?
How could a guy possibly possess this much raw audacity?
Utaha’s tone plunged below freezing.
“Make your words perfectly transparent.
What exactly do you mean by ‘relying on a venomous tongue for petty self-gratification’?”
Hiroto tilted his head, casting a casual glance at her.
”When you were aggressively countering her points just now, every single syllable you uttered was desperately trying to validate that ‘Tomoya Aki is in the right.'”
”It wasn’t because Tomoya Aki is genuinely in the right, but rather because you are structurally incapable of accepting that an endeavor you participated in is being explicitly invalidated.”
”To put it completely bluntly, the asset you are desperately shielding isn’t him—it’s your own professional ego.
A manuscript manufactured under that specific flavor of psychological defense mechanism is presumably nothing more than a product of mere self-gratification.”
Utaha’s fists clenched tightly, her knuckles turning stark white.
”Though there’s really no necessity for me to explicitly spell that out.
Deep down within your own soul, you should be fully aware of it.”
Standing rooted to her spot, Utaha’s physical frame began to tremble subtly.
Back when her manuscript was teetering on the absolute brink of cancellation, she had explicitly interrogated her own soul with that exact question countless times.
She was entirely clueless as to how this guy had managed to read her mind, and how he had laid it bare with such devastating precision.
A torrential wave of deep-seated insecurity and long-buried dread surged to the surface; she parted her lips, desperately wishing to articulate a counter-argument, yet she failed to produce a single syllable.
”Um…” Tomoya tentatively offered.
“This is entirely my fault, let me apologize first…”
”Didn’t I tell you to stop barking?” Hiroto didn’t even bother turning his head.
“What functional purpose does an apology serve right now?
Are you going to drop to your knees and beg?”
With a sharp thud, Tomoya dropped straight into a formal kowtow posture on the floor.
The classroom plunged into a momentary shock of absolute silence.
Hiroto was briefly dazed, casting a glance back over his shoulder.
He actually dropped to his knees?
What was he even supposed to say to that?
Dropping to one’s knees was certainly an extreme measure, but a man’s knees are worth their weight in gold—to be cashed out only when absolutely necessary.
Yet Tomoya’s sudden display of submission honestly left him entirely bewildered.
How monumental of an issue was this anyway?
It was an entirely meaningless gesture.
Was it executed purely to showcase his absolute sincerity and earnest commitment?
Where was that level of commitment when baseline preparation was actually required?
Hiroto retracted his gaze and, without looking back a single time, walked straight out of the club room.
He remained completely oblivious to the sheer magnitude of the psychological devastation his brief statements had just inflicted upon Utaha Kasumigaoka.
It had practically driven her to the absolute brink of a spiritual collapse.
Simultaneously, Yukinoshita Yukino had formally witnessed that Hiroto’s capabilities with a venomous tongue were miles ahead of her own.
Stepping out of the school gates with an exceptionally refreshed mindset, Hiroto made a direct line toward the publishing house.
Whatever else might be the case, unleashing that verbal beatdown had felt immensely satisfying.
The establishment was a compact publishing house nestled away on the fourth floor of a standard office building; though the storefront wasn’t overly grand, it was fully operational and completely equipped.
Today marked his absolute final visit to hand over the remaining manuscript files and formally dissolve his contractual obligations.
Once the volume launched commercially and the revenue cleared into his account, his outstanding liabilities would be completely wiped clean.
This stood as one of his primary objectives for visiting the company.
Within the internal ranks of the firm, only a scarce handful of upper-tier management possessed explicit knowledge regarding the true identity of the author “The Blade That Strikingly Swift.”
”Tachibana-sensei, you’ve arrived.”
Hiroto offered a swift nod, taking a seat within the designated visitor lounge.
An assistant brought over fresh tea while an editor presented a tablet.
The official social media account for “The Blade That Strikingly Swift” had continuously been managed by the publishing house.
Hiroto himself simply lacked the spare time, and the firm’s operational pipeline was inherently more professional.
He accepted the tablet, casually swiping through the interface.
The portfolio spanned roughly twenty to thirty volumes, and the aggregate follower count had officially cleared the 200,000 threshold.
The commentary sections were absolute hives of activity, with every single update line logging several thousand entries.
Furthermore, an immense volume of accounts had dispatched direct personal inquiries to him.
Naturally, he had directly filtered out standard direct messages; processing them individually was a logistical impossibility.
However, the inquiries forwarded through the official editorial channels still numbered at least fifty or sixty items.
Hiroto was far too lazy to review them one by one.
Yet at the absolute bare minimum, messages arriving through the editorial pipeline should probably receive a response, given that the senders were all industry peers.
After weighing his options, he resolved to execute a mass broadcast.
All he required was a perfectly generic, universal template text.
A dash of standard flattery, a touch of baseline encouragement, and some reciprocal well-wishes—it rarely deviated from those standard pleasantries.
With a single tap of his finger, the mass broadcast launched.
Every single individual who had previously dispatched an inquiry to him through the editorial department simultaneously received an identical, carbon-copy response from Hiroto Tachibana.
By this time, twilight had firmly descended.
Utaha Kasumigaoka sat within her room, her mind drifting in a state of absolute daze.
Her initial verbal jousting with Yukinoshita was an asset she could still manage to counter.
Yet Hiroto’s subsequent intervention—and specifically that surgical analysis that struck directly at her core vulnerabilities—had acted like a blunt blade: it didn’t draw physical blood, but the agony was excruciating.
Her psychological state seemed to have completely regressed to the status from several months prior, back when her manuscript was staring down imminent cancellation.
She felt deeply insecure, entirely helpless, and stripped of confidence not just in herself, but in her work as well.
How exactly had a girl like her managed to pull herself out of that dark abyss back then?
It was entirely thanks to “The Blade That Strikingly Swift.”
She had discovered his literary works.
With the explosive commercial success of those five specific volumes, the entire campus romance market had experienced a massive resurgence, single-handedly breathing life back into her own title, Metronome in Love.
Right at that exact instant, her phone delivered a crisp ding notification sound.
She originally harbored no desire to pay it any mind.
Yet, driven by some inexplicable whim, she reached out and cast a brief glance at the screen.
With that single glance, every shred of Utaha’s previous listlessness vanished into thin air.
The legendary author, “The Blade That Strikingly Swift,” had actually returned her message!