By the time the first rays of morning light arrived, the members of Under the Stellar Sky Studio had already begun filtering in one by one.
Kiana was the first to burst through the door, her face lit with excitement she couldn't quite hide, and threaded with the weariness of a night spent obsessively refreshing data.
She was about to say something when her gaze landed on the figure behind the desk, and the words died in her throat.
Mei came in right behind her. The moment she saw Arthur's state, worry flooded her eyes.
Bronya paused mid-step, her gaze sweeping quietly over the figure hunched behind the desk.
Dan Heng pushed open the door and stood still.
Stelle and March 7th arrived last. One look at the heavy expressions and the figure at the center of the room, and they fell silent too.
Arthur sat in his chair with deep, bruise-dark shadows under his eyes and a face drained of color.
He was still wearing yesterday's clothes, now rumpled and creased.
The monitor in front of him was still on. Beside it, notebooks dense with handwriting and diagrams were stacked in towering piles, nearly swallowing him whole.
"Morning."
His voice was hoarse but carried a strange, unshakeable calm.
"Captain, you..." Kiana opened her mouth, and nothing came out.
Mei had already crossed the room to him. "Arthur, you... did you really go the whole night without sleeping again?"
Bronya's eyes moved over the mountains of notebooks, over the document frameworks so intricate they made her head swim.
Silence.
Dan Heng stepped closer, scanning the engine architecture diagrams and code fragments on the screen. Something shifted in his expression.
Stelle and March 7th drifted over as well, taking in Arthur's hollowed-out appearance, then looking back at the screen at results that clearly hadn't come easy, and exchanged a glance.
Arthur didn't seem particularly concerned with his own condition. He flexed his stiff fingers, pointed at the screen, then at the notebooks beside it. When he spoke, his voice was unhurried but unnervingly precise.
"The detailed framework for the game is basically finished. That includes specific story beats for the first three chapters of the main plotline, level design concepts, the core combat loop, the character progression system, the equipment and stigmata mechanics, and the numerical framework for supply drops..."
He paused, picking up the topmost notebook and flipping it open. Inside were meticulously hand-drawn UI wireframes and interaction flow charts.
"A preliminary UI design draft. An art requirements list and style guide covering characters, environments, enemies, and skill effects..."
He gestured at another complex interface open on the screen. "On the engine side, I worked from an existing open-source framework and integrated several key modules, redesigning the underlying logic for the rendering pipeline, physics collision, and the action state machine. It's still rough, but as a foundation for early prototype development, it should be enough."
His gaze moved across the stunned faces around him. There was something almost fierce in his certainty.
"If we push hard and work through the problems one by one... it's not impossible that within a month, we could have a playable build, covering the prologue and part of the core content from Chapter One—something ready to go up for testing."
A month. Ready to launch.
The timeline hit everyone like a wall.
Given their current headcount, their experience, and their track record of failures, it sounded like fantasy.
But looking at Arthur, who had burned himself down to nothing and then dug a complete blueprint out of the ashes with his bare hands, every word of protest caught and refused to come out.
"But Captain..."
Kiana finally found her voice, though it came out full of disbelief and worry. "You... you seriously stayed up the entire night and put all of this together?"
Mei's voice was tight with both tenderness and reproach. "Arthur, you're going to wreck your body."
Bronya studied the architecture diagrams and said quietly, "The technical implementation still needs to be validated."
Dan Heng adjusted his glasses, measured as always. "The framework is detailed, but when it comes to actual code and asset production, the workload is enormous. One month is extremely tight."
Stelle and March 7th nodded vigorously, privately wondering if the pressure had finally made the captain start hallucinating.
Then Kiana seemed to suddenly remember why she'd come racing in to begin with.
She smacked herself on the forehead. "Right! Captain! Forget the framework for a second! Look! Our trailer and the comic! The numbers—they've completely exploded!"
She rushed to Stelle's computer, pulled up the platform dashboard with fumbling hands, and spun the screen toward Arthur.
The curve representing the trailer's view count was no longer the sad, sluggish crawl of it had been yesterday. It was a nearly vertical line shooting upward, dizzying in its steepness.
Views had already broken a hundred thousand, and they were climbing by hundreds every second.
Comments, reposts, likes—every metric was detonating at once.
The comic's readership had crossed a hundred thousand long ago, and the comments section was absolute chaos: people begging for updates, arguing about the plot, analyzing the lore, professing love for the characters. Reload the page, and dozens more appeared.
The account's follower count had rocketed from single digits yesterday to six figures, and it was still climbing.
"What... what happened?"
Arthur stared at the numbers ticking wildly upward. Even in the red of his eyes, the shock was plain. He had expected some response. Nothing like this, nothing this fast, this overwhelming.
"It wasn't like this last night," someone said.
"We had no idea either!" Stelle said, practically vibrating. "We woke up this morning and it had already turned into this! It seems like... there's this really famous streamer called Elysia? She reposted our trailer! And then everything just blew up!"
"Elysia?" Arthur went still.
"Yes, her!" March 7th jumped in. "Insanely popular. After she reposted it, so many people came to check it out! And then the platform started recommending us too!"
The sudden, overwhelming surge of attention crashed against Arthur's exhaustion-dulled nerves like a wave over stone. He stared at the numbers still climbing on the screen, a little unsteady.
Had they done it? Had the first step... really just like that happened?
No. It wasn't done yet. This was just attention. The real test was turning that attention into genuine anticipation for the game itself, and then, a month from now, producing something that actually lived up to it.
And the speed of it, the sheer force of it, made Arthur wary rather than elated. A tall tree catches the wind. Yesterday's quiet might have been the calm before the storm. Behind this flood of traffic, was there something else waiting?
He shook his head, forcing himself steady.
Whatever came next, it was still an extraordinary start.
He took a slow breath and looked around at the people gathered around him. A rough, quiet laugh escaped him. "Looks like the stone we threw landed in a very different kind of pond."
Kiana watched his pale face and that small laugh, and something inside her ached.
The giddiness she'd felt over the exploding numbers faded, replaced by a deep, wordless worry, and underneath it, something that felt a lot like admiration.
"Captain," she said, her voice softer than usual.
"You... you didn't seriously start the moment we all left yesterday and keep going until right now, did you?"
Mei had already quietly gotten up to pour hot water.
Bronya turned on the warm air setting on the air conditioner.
Dan Heng had opened the engine framework Arthur had built and was studying it closely, brow furrowed, eyes intent.
Stelle and March 7th let their excitement settle and turned to Arthur, waiting.
Arthur took the hot water Mei handed him, and nodded without pretense. "Yeah. Couldn't sleep, so I put together everything I could think of."
"But that's not what we need to talk about right now. The spike in numbers is good news, but it's also pressure. We need to move immediately and turn this attention into fuel for development, into leverage."
"Dan Heng and Bronya, I'm leaving the engine framework and core technical validation to both of you. First priority is clearing the bottlenecks in the action system and asset loading."
"Kiana, Mei, the art requirements list and style guide are right here. We need to pick up the pace without letting quality slip. And the comic updates can't stop."
"Stelle, March 7th, start building the official community right now. Manage the comments and messages, collect useful feedback, and keep an eye on the tone out there. If anything looks off, tell me immediately."