The editing room was barely lit—just the soft, cold glow of two monitors casting shadows over the chaos of empty energy drink cans and half-crushed snack wrappers. Masaki sat hunched in her chair, legs pulled up beneath her, fingers flying over the keyboard with a kind of manic rhythm. Her pigtails were uneven, barely held together by the flower pins clinging on for dear life. One of them looked like it might fall off at any moment. She didn’t notice. Or didn’t care.

The speakers let out a distorted screech as she scrubbed back through the footage again; Tokage screaming at Live before knocking over a street vendor’s cart. Masaki snorted through her nose. “That’s the shot,” she muttered, marking the timestamp and slamming down another audio cue.

Outside the thin apartment walls, someone yelled something in passing. Sirens in the distance. Tokyo was always loud. It didn’t really matter anymore.

She glanced toward the tiny webcam mounted on her monitor—long covered with a sticker and duct tape. Paranoia, maybe. Or just experience. Same thing, really.

Her pale-green eyes flicked to the subscriber count sitting idle in the corner of the screen. 742,221. It hadn’t moved in a few hours. Not that she was watching it. Not really.

She stretched back in the chair, bones cracking audibly, then let herself fall forward onto the desk with a thunk.

—One million. Or I die trying.

She meant it, too. Maybe not in the way people online said it—joking, half-serious. But Masaki had always been an all-or-nothing kind of person. Sleep or sprint. Silence or screaming. The in-betweens made her itch.

Her phone buzzed against a pile of receipts. A text from Live: “We’re good to film again tmrw. You alive?”

She didn’t reply. Just pulled the flower pin out of her hair, fixed her hair, then tucked it back in. She’d be alive tomorrow. Probably. As long as the footage rendered before sunrise.