If I stayed in a bad mood in the hospital and my recovery slowed down, it would directly delay the upcoming schedule, hurting his commission and KPI.
That was all.
The car’s audio system continued dutifully pouring Haruka’s voice into the cabin.
When she had recorded it, the scene she’d scripted in her head was a righteous worker’s tearful indictment against a heartless capitalist.
But now, the sound flowing from the minibus’s amplifier had completely changed flavor.
In the young female voice coming from the speakers, there wasn’t a trace of “blood-sea-deep hatred.”
Every seemingly sharp accusation carried an unconscious, upward-curving lilt at the tail end.
That sticky texture woven into the very foundation of her voice gave the original complaint an inexplicable quality of flustered… coquettishness.
Like a teenage girl trying to hide her feelings, puffing out her cheeks at her best friend, pretending to angrily complain about some oblivious blockhead who didn’t understand romance.
“I’m just that production tool, and pudding and peach tea are the lubricant that keeps the machine from rusting—lubricant!”
Seriously, that “lubricant” trailed upward at the end.
It didn’t sound like a complaint at all.
No matter how you heard it, it sounded like a pout.
Finally, the progress bar marched irreversibly toward its devastating conclusion.
“When he’s managing me, sure, I want to punch him every day, but…”
The voice from the speakers paused for half a second, almost imperceptibly.
“…I guess it’s not that bad, either.”
The back seat of the minibus fell into complete silence.
Haruka brought her other hand up too, covering her face with both palms.
She wanted nothing more than to crawl into a crack in the earth.
If the earlier teasing could barely be passed off as “program effect,” then that final parting remark was the equivalent of beaming the words “I’m actually pretty dependent on him” straight into the ears of every listener across the national airwaves.
No normal person who heard that broadcast would think Hoshino Haruka resented her manager.
They would all silently arrive at the same conclusion: this girl says she hates him, but she’s actually ridiculously hung up on him.
Haruka stayed frozen in her double-palm face-cover position and let out a dying, barely audible voice.
“Uehara-san…”
“Hm? What’s the matter, Miss Hoshino?”
“Can you… turn the radio down a little?”
“Huh? But we’re just getting to the best part of the finale—”
“Please…”
Uehara-san must have caught a glimpse of her utterly devastated expression in the rearview mirror, because he turned the volume knob two notches to the left.
With the volume lowered, Takahashi’s irritating laughter finally faded into a blur.
Haruka quietly spread her fingers just a crack, and her gaze drifted covertly toward the passenger seat.
Ritsu sat up front, his posture identical to how it always was.
Back ramrod straight, eyes fixed forward, right hand resting steadily on the black briefcase.
From this angle, she couldn’t see his expression.
But her gaze slid downward, landing on the door armrest.
Ritsu’s left hand was resting there, his index and middle fingers tapping against the leather in a light, yet utterly erratic rhythm.
One tap after another.
Haruka knew him too well.
This man was always cold and aloof on the surface, but the only time his fingers unconsciously searched for something to tap on was when he was deeply unsettled inside—when he had no idea how to handle himself.
He was nervous.
Haruka snapped her gaze back like she’d touched a live wire and buried her face in her palms again.
Suddenly, a plastic bag flew over the front seat’s headrest and landed squarely on her lap.
Hot on its heels came a thick nylon folder.
“Eat.”
Ritsu’s voice came from the front.
Still ice-cold, carrying his usual commanding tone—a far cry from the “poor manager” being mercilessly roasted on the car radio.
“Then read the material. You have a schedule this afternoon.”
Haruka blinked, lowered the hands from her face, and opened the plastic bag.
Inside lay a convenience store rice ball.
The plainest salt kelp flavor.
Even through the wrapping, she could still faintly feel a trace of residual warmth.
“When did you have time to buy this?”
Haruka asked without thinking.
Ritsu had been glued to her side the whole time.
After leaving the auxiliary booth, he’d waited for her at the end of the corridor while she removed her makeup.
After leaving the TV station, he’d headed straight for the underground parking garage.
The entire transition had barely paused—there was no time window for a convenience store run.
The only gap was the five or six minutes she’d spent in the makeup room stripping off her base makeup and changing clothes.
Could it be…
Haruka did the mental math at lightning speed.
From the artist makeup room at Fuji TV to the nearest convenience store, you had to cross an entire chaotic staff corridor, take the elevator to the first floor, pass through the front gate—the fastest one-way trip was three minutes.
Which meant that the man who was always immaculately put together had, after seeing her into the makeup room, sprinted all the way to the convenience store, scanned and paid with seconds to spare, and then, exactly one minute before she pushed open the makeup room door, calmly stepped back into the corridor like nothing had happened.
“I had Uehara-san go buy it.”
Ritsu’s voice slammed over coldly from the front seat, abruptly severing her train of thought.
Haruka lifted her eyelids and glanced at Uehara-san in the driver’s seat.
Uehara-san was staring straight ahead at the road, both hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel, not daring to move a single hair.
He was professionally pretending to be a completely oblivious wax figure.
The lie was so clumsy it was almost endearing.
“Oh.”
Haruka didn’t call it out.
She lowered her gaze, tore open the wrapper, and quietly took a bite of the rice ball.
The salty, savory flavor of the salt kelb dissolved on her tongue.
Chewing slowly, she flipped open the thick nylon folder.
Right in the center of the first page, a row of bold, cold, hard black type stared back at her.
[NicoNico / YouTube Dual-Platform Simultaneous Live Broadcast Project]
[Acoustic Unplugged—Hoshino Haruka Comeback Commemorative Live Singing Special]
Haruka’s chewing stopped dead in that instant.
Her gaze swept back and forth twice over the words “Acoustic Unplugged” and “Live Singing.”
The nerves she’d just relaxed abruptly snapped taut again.
Dual-platform simultaneous live stream.
No delay.
No post-production.
No pitch correction.
Zero margin for error or correction.
In the idol industry today, a fully open-mic live performance was already dangerous enough on its own—let alone unplugged.
That meant no tuning, no post-editing, no re-recording.
One mistake, and it would be delivered in real time to hundreds of thousands of viewers.
Not to mention, she was an idol who had only been discharged from the hospital a little over a month ago.
Her vocal cords had been restored to perfection in the hospital, physically speaking.
But this body had never been tested in a truly high-intensity live performance before.
A recording studio allowed unlimited NG retakes.
Morning radio had a recorded broadcast mechanism as a safety net.
But a new media live stream did not.
Good notes, bad notes, voice cracks, off-pitch slips—if any of it happened, it would appear in real time within a millisecond in front of nine hundred thousand internet users with their keyboards at the ready, waiting for a laugh.
Haruka stared quietly at those words.
After a long moment, she slowly closed the folder.
Then she lifted her head slightly and looked at the motionless back of Ritsu’s head in the front seat.
“Hey, Manager-san.”
“Did you… deliberately wait until now to give this to me?”
Ritsu didn’t answer.
Haruka took a deep breath and laid the folder open on her lap again.
“Evil capital.”
She muttered the words in a voice only she could hear, and began reading through the dense, hardcore music theory notes line by line.
So this was the nonstop grind of an idol’s life?