Zenith of Desire: The Hollywood Incubus

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*****

Amy and Gregg exchanged a silent glance across the desk. They rarely witnessed Marvin in this state—contemplative, quiet, displaying a sliver of vulnerability.

”But incredible speed creates incredible risk.” His reflection hovered ghostly in the glass. ”We acquire companies carrying deep financial damage. We hire frightened, starving people. We build a sprawling, billion-dollar empire entirely on debt and raw ambition. If we make one fatal wrong move—if just one of these major acquisitions sours and infects the others—the whole house of cards collapses on our heads.”

”Then we simply don’t make wrong moves.” Newfound conviction hardened Gregg’s tone.

Marvin turned from the window and met Gregg’s steady gaze. For a long, tense moment, silence swallowed the dark office.

Only the distant, muffled hum of Tokyo preparing for the neon night pierced the quiet.

Then, Marvin smiled.

A slow, dangerous smile curved his lips, making Amy’s breath catch in her throat.

It formed the undeniable smile of a starving apex predator spotting its prey in the tall grass. It mirrored the grin of a god-tier gambler already holding the winning, world-breaking bet.

”No, Gregg.” Incubus magic flared in the room. ”We don’t.”

He walked back to the desk and picked up his wooden chopsticks. He finished the remaining cold salmon in two sharp bites, then drained his cup of green tea.

”Tomorrow morning, at eight A.M. sharp, we start aggressively on the personnel acquisitions.” His energy returned in full force. ”Brilliant, starving people sit trapped in this industry—genius animators, visionary directors, hungry producers—waiting to be discovered. They work for pennies at failing studios. They freelance from tiny, unheated apartments. They sit in high school classrooms, obsessively sketching masterpieces in their notebooks instead of paying attention to boring teachers.”

He set down the chopsticks with a loud *clack*. He leveled a stare at Amy and Gregg carrying an intensity aiming to pierce their skulls. A burning fire lit his eyes, holding zero relation to the harsh fluorescent lights above them.

”I want a comprehensive list on my desk by tomorrow.” Marvin tapped the wood. ”Every promising, raw talent under thirty in this city. Every brilliant animator unfairly overlooked for a promotion. Every Mangaka and project rejected from Jump. Every unique voice actor turned away for being too unconventional. We do not just buy hollow shell companies anymore. We buy *people*. We buy loyalty. And we will give them a beautiful reason to work exclusively for us.”

Amy offered a sharp nod. Her pen flew frantically across her notepad, capturing the orders. ”How many names do you want on the initial list?”

”Start with a hundred.” Marvin held her gaze without blinking. ”We will narrow the field down from there.”

Gregg stood, energized by the directive. ”I’ll put the entire research team on it tonight. Nobody sleeps.”

”Do it.” Marvin turned his back on them and walked toward his drafting table.

He picked up the piece of charcoal and resumed sketching. The character on the paper rapidly, beautifully took shape—a young girl with impossibly long, flowing twin-tails, a sleek, futuristic outfit, and wide eyes glowing with an eerie, synthetic inner light.

Hatsune Miku.

She emerged entirely from his imagination, years before existing as a piece of software in the world.

”You know, Marvin.” Amy paused in the doorway, her hand resting on the knob. ”For someone claiming not to be a normal kid... you hold a very childish, obsessive enthusiasm for drawing these characters.”

Marvin kept his eyes on the page. His hand moved across the paper, adding dark shadows, depth, and vibrating life to the ink.

”The exact day I lose my enthusiasm for creation, Amy, marks the exact day I lose a part of myself.” He focused completely on the strokes. ”Now let’s get on with the work. I have a universe to build.”

Amy smiled fondly, shook her head, and pulled the door closed firmly behind her.

The corner office was perfectly quiet again. The only sounds remaining were the rapid, rhythmic scratch of charcoal on paper, and the distant, muffled hum of Tokyo preparing for the neon night.

Marvin worked tirelessly, skipping breaks, until the blazing sun vanished below the concrete horizon. Millions of city lights flickered on like an ocean of tiny, artificial stars.

The synthetic girl on the paper stared back at him from the drafting table, patiently waiting to be born.

---

The early September heat in Tokyo was thick and uncompromising, clinging to the asphalt and hanging heavy in the humid morning air.

Cicadas hummed a relentless chorus from the dense trees lining the narrow residential streets of Setagaya, warning anyone who would listen that summer was not yet ready to surrender.

Twelve-year-old Kenji Sato ignored the dampness creeping up the stiff collar of his middle school uniform. He sprinted down the pavement, his knuckles white as his fists clenched a 500-yen coin and a handful of bronze ten-yen pieces.

Right beside him, his best friend Ren struggled to keep pace under a heavy, swinging backpack.

”I still think you’re crazy, Kenji.” Ren wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve between pants. ”Five hundred and seventy-nine yen. Do you know what we could buy with that? We could pick up two whole issues of *Weekly Shōnen Jump* and still have enough left over for a couple of pork buns at the conbini. It’s too expensive!”

”You didn’t hear the radio broadcasts, Ren.” Kenji locked his eyes on the glowing, familiar neon sign of the local FamilyMart just ahead.

”They play the promos on Tokyo FM every hour since Sunday. And did you see the full-page insert in the *Yomiuri Shimbun* yesterday? The art... it wasn’t normal drawing. It looked like an actual painting. Like a movie poster.”

”It’s just a comic.” Ren quickened his pace to match his friend’s.

The automatic sliding glass doors of the convenience store parted with a cheerful electronic chime, hitting the boys with a rush of freezing, artificial air. Kenji bypassed the familiar aisles of rice balls and iced teas, making a beeline straight for the magazine racks positioned near the front windows.

And there it was.

It didn’t look like a manga anthology. It looked like a museum painting left behind by time travelers for Japan.

Taking up an entire top-tier display section—prime real estate reserved for premium art books, expensive fashion catalogs, or high-end business journals—sat a pristine stack of the debut issue:

*Shōnen Blaze WEEKLY #1*.

Kenji reached out and pulled the top copy from the rack. The weight struck his senses first. It rested heavy in his hands. Standard weekly anthologies utilized cheap, coarse newsprint feeling rough to the touch, the kind of paper inevitably leaving grey ink smudges on thumbs after a long reading session.

This was entirely different.

The paper stock utilized a premium, glossy blend. It contained roughly three hundred and ninety pages—noticeably fewer than the thick, phonebook-sized *Jump* issues—but owing to the dense, high-quality paper, it carried equal thickness, and twice the substance. It felt permanent.

The cover alone delivered a sensory overload.

It bypassed a simple, solitary character drawing; it presented a vibrant, explosive collage of ten distinct protagonists, rendered in jaw-dropping, full-color detail. At the center stood a young, sharp-eyed high schooler holding a plain black notebook, his face half-shadowed by an eerie, calculating intellect.

To his right, a grizzled, cybernetic rockerboy engulfed in neon city lights casually rested a battered guitar over his shoulder. To his left, a boy in vibrant monk’s robes wielding a wooden glider staff soared through azure skies.

The art leaped off the glossy surface. Even the back cover utilized the space fully, featuring a sprawling, cinematic painted landscape of a snow-covered medieval battlefield.

Emblazoned across the top right corner of the cover was a bright, eye-catching yellow graphic: **INCLUDES 2 EXCLUSIVE PREMIUM TRADING CARDS!**

Kenji marched to the register and slapped his 579 yen onto the counter. The cashier, a tired college student working the morning shift, blinked in surprise at the undeniable quality of the book while scanning the barcode.

Ren stared at the cover in his friend’s hands. His previous skepticism melted away under the lights of the store. ”Okay.” Ren dug frantically into his pockets and pulled out his saved weekly allowance. ”Okay, I’m buying one too.”

They barely made it out the sliding doors before stopping dead on the curb, ignoring the rush of morning commuters hurrying past them toward the train station.

”The cards.” Kenji dropped his voice to a reverent whisper.

Tucked neatly into a secure, custom-pressed groove along the spine of the magazine was a sealed, silver foil pack.

Ren ripped his open first, too impatient to wait.

The foil tore with a satisfying *shhhhk*. He slid the two rigid pieces of cardboard out into the morning light and caught his breath.

”Whoa.” Ren held up the first card for Kenji to see. It featured a standard gloss finish, but the artwork popped. It depicted the rockerboy from the cover—a character the text named Johnny Silverhand. He stood mid-strum on his guitar, his cybernetic silver arm gleaming with a hyper-realistic metallic sheen under the neon rain of a dystopian city. The attitude and gritty rebellion radiating from the small piece of cardboard felt hypnotic.

Ren quickly pulled the second card from behind it.

”What the... look at her eyes!” Ren pointed. It showed a girl with twin blonde pigtails—Misa Amane—clutching a black notebook to her chest. Her eyes caught the light; they burned a terrifying, glowing crimson red that stared right through the printed cardboard and into the reader’s soul. It remained a simple card, lacking any metallic foil, but the character design proved unnerving, holding Ren’s complete attention.

Neither boy knew it, but they experienced the direct, unadulterated magic of Marvin’s personal designs. The president of Scarlet Capital personally oversaw and created the creation of these first-edition promotional cards, infusing them with a level of psychological pull and artistic mastery the Japanese market had never seen in a cheap pack-in toy.

”My turn.” Kenji’s hands shook slightly as he carefully tore open his foil pack.

He slid the first card out, and immediately the morning sun caught the surface, sending a blinding rainbow of refracted light across the concrete curb.

”Holo!” Ren leaned in so fast he bumped shoulders hard with Kenji. ”You pulled a holographic!”

Kenji stared at the card in pure awe. It featured a monster. A towering, lanky creature with jagged, leathery wings, bulging bug-like eyes, and a terrifying, razor-toothed grin. The stylized name at the bottom read *Ryuk*. The creature held a bright red apple in one hand and the titular Death Note in the other.

The holographic foil mapped with exacting precision to the creature’s wings and the apple, creating an optical illusion making the Shinigami look like it moved and breathed, waiting to crawl right out of the glossy border.

”Look at the second one.” Ren pointed to the hidden card trapped behind Ryuk.

Kenji slid it out. This one was entirely different.

It printed in a wide, landscape format rather than the traditional portrait style. It featured two high school girls—one with a calculating, razor-sharp expression and dark hair, the other with a chaotic, bubbly smile and a pink bow. They stood side by side in an elite student council room, but the background dissolved into bizarre, digital chaos.

Written in bold, stylized text across the bottom was a strange phrase: **THE INTERNET IS BROKEN!**

It remained a bizarre piece of art. It lacked an action pose or a standard character portrait. It felt like an inside joke, a comedic scene captured perfectly in time. It depicted a scene from *Kaguya-sama* that wouldn’t appear in the manga’s narrative for a long time, but Marvin planted it early as a seed—a viral meme manufactured before the broader internet fully understood the concept.

Dozens of cards like this circulated in the packs, teasing future scenes to generate endless playground speculation.

”I don’t know who they are.” Kenji carefully placed the cards safely into his uniform pocket. ”But I need to read this immediately.”

The morning classes at their middle school passed in an agonizing, restless blur. Kenji failed to focus on the math equations written across the chalkboard. The dense, heavy weight of the magazine rested inside his wooden desk cubby, calling to him.

Finally, the lunch bell rang. The sharp chime echoed through the hallways, and within seconds, the rigid, disciplined structure of the classroom dissolved into chaotic chatter. Desks were shoved together. Bento boxes were unsnapped.

Takeshi, the loudest kid in class and a die-hard, vocal *Weekly Shōnen Jump* loyalist, dragged his chair over to Kenji’s desk with a mocking grin.

”So? Did you actually waste six hundred yen on that new startup manga?” Takeshi held up his own dog-eared, black-and-white copy of *Jump*. ”You got ripped off, Sato. Nothing beats *One Piece*.”

Kenji reached into his desk, grabbed the thick, glossy spine of *Shōnen Blaze*, and dropped it onto the wooden surface of his desk.

*Thud.*

The sound of it—heavy, solid, expensive—made three other kids turn around from their lunches..

*****

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