Brand New Life Online: Rise Of The Goddess Of Harvest - Chapter 1862: The Mangaka
Chapter 1862: The Mangaka
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As everyone chatted, Alma noticed a manga book someone had brought and began flipping through its pages, reading in silence.
“Ah, this one’s quite popular, huh? But who brought it here?” she wondered. “Does someone read manga?”
“Manga? Nah,” Erika replied.
Everyone shook their heads, leaving Alma even more puzzled.
“I guess nobody… brought it? Maybe it was left behind by someone else,” Alma said. “Oh well—”
“How boring. Do none of you read manga? Seriously?”
A voice suddenly emerged from the book itself. Alma dropped it in shock. The drawings on the white pages began to shift and move, as though they were coming alive.
“I-Is that cursed?! Is there a ghost inside?!” she cried in disbelief.
“…The drawings are moving?!” Maria’s eyes widened. “Wait—everyone, move back!”
FLAAASH!
But it was already too late. An explosion of black ink burst outward, swirling into countless colors, characters, landscapes, and worlds. A dazzling tunnel of bright fantasy and whimsy swallowed them whole.
“Uuaaaahhhh!”
Alma screamed as she slid through the tunnel of swirling hues, tumbling alongside everyone else until they spilled onto a vast grassland. Countless drawings and fictional fantasy characters danced and moved around them, raising their arms in wild celebration.
Some resembled cartoony animals—mice, rabbits, horses, ducks—singing as if they had leaped straight out of a 1960s cartoon.
“Where the hell are we?!” Erika shouted.
“I don’t know!” Elena answered.
“It happened so fast! Everyone, stay alert!” Frank ordered. “Don’t separate!”
As they spoke, the cheerful chorus of dancing cartoon characters darkened. Their bright red eyes gleamed with malice. The bouncy melody twisted, notes warping unnaturally like a cassette tape chewed by a player.
The animals’ wide, innocent smiles stretched grotesquely, splitting into jagged, toothy grins. Their voices overlapped until the song sounded like dozens of drowning figures desperately trying to sing the same tune.
“Welcome~ to the paaaarty~!”
“You’re the stars now, hee hee hee~!”
“No escape, no escape, no escape~!”
Elena instinctively stepped in front of Anna and Monica, faint green-gold spiritual light flickering around her palms. Beside her, Harumi’s crimson eyes narrowed as blood-like mist seeped from between her fingers.
“What the hell is this?!” Sofia shrieked, already half-hiding behind Maria. “Some kind of illusion?!”
“It’s not an illusion,” Maria said quietly. Her voice remained calm, but the air around her had grown colder and darker. “It’s a domain. A very… childish one.”
The ground beneath their feet was no longer solid grass. It had turned soft and rubbery, like the page of a coloring book. When Erika stomped in frustration, little star-shaped sparkles burst around her boot.
“Oi! Don’t mess with my meat time!” Erika snarled, claws lengthening. “I’m gonna rip this place apart!”
“Don’t,” Matsuo said quickly, grabbing her wrist. “You’ll only tear the page strangely. We could get scattered across different ’Chapters’.”
“Chapters…?” Elena repeated.
Before anyone could respond, the cartoon animals parted like a curtain.
A figure stepped forward.
He was impossibly tall for this world’s proportions, dressed in an oversized artist’s smock splattered with every color of paint. A crooked black beret sat on his head. His face was a blank white oval—except for two enormous, glistening black eyes without pupils and a wide, stitched-up smile drawn in thick marker lines. In his right hand he held a cartoonish fountain pen the size of a baseball bat; ink dripped from the nib in slow, sizzling drops.
“Hiii~☆” he sang, waving with exaggerated childlike enthusiasm. “I’m the Mangaka! The Illustrator! The Dream-weaver of the Panel World! You guys looked so booooring sitting around eating grilled meat like normies, so I thought—why not invite you to the real party?!”
His voice was high-pitched and syrupy, like someone speaking through a voice changer set to “excited kid.”
“You kidnapped us… because we weren’t reading your book?” Frank asked slowly.
“Exactly!” The Mangaka clapped. “Nobody even noticed me! I was sitting right there at the table! And you—” he jabbed the giant pen toward Alma, “—you dropped me like I was trash! That hurt my feelings, y’know?”
Alma shrank behind Emily. “I-I’m sorry…?”
“Apologies accepted!” he chirped. “But now you have to play my game!”
Black ink lines erupted from the ground, forming floating comic panels in mid-air. Each one displayed a different horrifying scene:
One showed Elena engulfed in flames, burning alive.
Another depicted Harumi pinned beneath thousands of ink chains.
A third had Matsuo with his eyes crossed out.
A fourth showed Maria torn in half vertically, like a page ripped down the middle.
“Rules are simple!” the Mangaka sang. “We’re going to have a battle manga arc! You fight my little helpers—” he gestured, and dozens of poorly drawn monsters crawled from ink puddles: stick-figure demons, googly-eyed kaiju, smiling blobs with knife arms, “—and if you win, I’ll let you go home! If you lose… well…”
He tapped the giant pen against his blank face.
“You become part of the story forever! Ink and paper and screaming speech bubbles! Fun, right?!”
Erika cracked her knuckles. “I’m gonna crush that smug face of yours, you son of a bitch!”
“Language!” the Mangaka scolded, wagging his finger. “This is a family-friendly manga!”
“Family-friendly my ass!” Emily spat.
Maria stepped forward. The air around her rippled with dark shadows and ghostly energy. “You said this is a domain. Then it has a core. You.”
The Mangaka tilted his head. “Oho~? The pretty ghost girl wants to skip to the final boss already? Cute! But you have to go through all the filler Chapters first!”
He swung the pen like a conductor’s baton.
SPLAT! SPLAT! SPLAT!
Ink rained down, forming dozens of distorted ink clones of the group—exaggerated parodies of themselves.
Elena’s clone had comically huge sparkling eyes and constantly posed like a magical girl.
Harumi’s clone wore a frilly gothic lolita dress and kept throwing blood hearts while squealing “kyaa~.”
Erika’s clone was a chibi werewolf that only howled “MEAT!!!”
Matsuo’s clone had sweat drops flying off his head nonstop and kept apologizing.
“Fight your own tropes!” the Mangaka cackled. “Or die trying~!”
Elena stared at her parody, which was currently striking a dramatic pose and shouting, “In the name of love and justice, I’ll punish youuu~!”
“…This is humiliating,” she muttered.
Elayne’s gentle voice echoed in her mind.
“Dear… Be careful. This entire thing seems powered by a Legendary Treasure from a Heroic Spirit. Would you like Mommy to clean up this mess?”
Elena hesitated.
Then she shook her head.
“No. Let’s handle this the normal way first. It wouldn’t be good if everyone discovered I had a Heroic Spirit… I think Harumi plans to fight on her own too.”
She exhaled sharply.
Green-gold light flared around her fists.
Elayne smiled softly and decided to remain within Elena’s Spiritual Aura, offering stealthy support.
“Whoever you are, I won’t let you get away with this!” Elena declared. “I was finally enjoying a nice time with my friends, and you ruined everything…”
Harumi smirked beside her, shadows writhing like living ink. “Agreed.”
Matsuo formed hand signs, golden flames licking between his fingers. “I guess we’re doing this!”
Frank’s body began to glow with faint starlight. “Let’s get this over with.”
Maria simply sighed. The temperature around her plummeted as she summoned her Dream Weapons—a Bone Sword and a Black Halberd. “Fine,” she said. “Let’s end this Chapter early, haha.”
The Mangaka clapped with manic excitement.
“That’s the spirit! Volume 1, Chapter 1:『The Day the Side Characters Fought Back』—BEGIN!!”
The battlefield of living ink erupted into chaos as the students fought desperately for their lives.
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