The fourth episode ended.
At that moment, Kiyoka felt as if an entire stampede had gone roaring through her mind.
Was it possible that the woman in white - that poised, intimidating older beauty - had simply voted for the wrong person?
Impossible.
The moment Kiyoka managed to catch her breath, she understood, with almost painful clarity, what the title of this drama truly meant.
Liar Game.
The woman in white had done it on purpose.
From the very beginning, she had been deceiving Mushroom Head and the other contestant.
And now, only one question remained in Kiyoka's mind.
Then Shinichi, the male lead…
When exactly had he formed an alliance with that mature woman in white?
The new "surefire method of victory" she had proposed?
Wrong.
All of it had been a smokescreen taught to her by Shinichi, a trick designed to mislead the other two and prepare a surprise attack for the third vote of the third round in the minority game.
The fourth episode lasted less than an hour.
And yet, by the time it ended, Kiyoka felt as though her brain had nearly burned itself out.
From the first minute to the final scene, the plot twisted, reversed, collapsed, and overturned itself more than a dozen times, never giving the audience even a single second to properly think.
All those posts from the past week trying to predict what would happen in the fourth episode now looked utterly ridiculous.
Who could possibly have predicted this?
And the worst part was that, after the episode finished airing, not a single viewer could point out any real flaw in the logic.
From the moment Shinichi proposed the eight-person winning strategy, he had already noticed Mushroom Head's scheme and realized that Chizuru, the female lead, had changed the voting result. From that point on, he knew with absolute certainty that he would enter the third round.
Mushroom Head had formed three fake teams of eight people, which meant Shinichi was guaranteed to advance.
At the same time, Shinichi's open-card strategy would inevitably force the other three into an alliance.
And once those three joined forces, the woman in white - who had already been cooperating with Shinichi from much earlier - became his final surprise weapon.
Every piece locked perfectly into the next.
And no matter how hard Kiyoka thought about it, she could not imagine a way to break that plan.
Mushroom Head was already sly enough to be called an old fox.
But Shinichi?
Shinichi was practically a god of deception.
The intellectual battle between those four people had transformed a completely uncontrollable minority game, one where alliances should have been impossible to maintain, into a psychological war and team battle.
And this was only the second game.
The drama was already operating at this level.
The screenwriter of Liar Game, Sora…
Was he really only eighteen?
That night, on the drama forum of NatsuYume, more than half of all posts were about Liar Game.
The moment the fourth episode finished airing, the words "Liar Game" shot straight to the top of the trending rankings.
"This is the first time I've ever watched a drama and felt like my intelligence was being crushed. Seriously, that was one hell of a satisfying battle."
"What kind of genre even is this? Anyone got recommendations for something similar? I need more."
"There isn't anything. There really isn't. Honestly, when I watched Re:Zero directed by Sora, I already thought Subaru Natsuki had a lot of wild ideas. But after watching Liar Game… damn, Shinichi completely destroys Subaru."
"You can't really compare them like that. Subaru is strong-willed. Shinichi is intelligent. They're different types."
"But his intelligence is terrifying. He definitely figured out Mushroom Head's strategy right after the first vote, when he saw all the losers calmly accept the result. Then he built this entire plan and waited for the third round to make Mushroom Head walk straight into the trap."
"I still don't understand when the woman in white started working with Shinichi. And why would she choose to cooperate with him?"
"Isn't that obvious? If she works with Shinichi, two people split the money. If she works with Mushroom Head and Leopard Print, three people split it. In her place, who would you choose? All I can say is that Shinichi had calculated every possible outcome from the very beginning. He saw this result before anyone else."
"No wonder the drama is called Liar Game. I don't even want to imagine what would happen if I were one of the contestants. I'd be deceived until there was nothing left of me."
"Don't worry. At least tricking Chizuru would probably be easy. She's basically a kindhearted, innocent angel with no defenses."
"Hahaha, on the surface, it looks like Chizuru is the protagonist, but in reality, Shinichi is the real main character. Seriously, tonight's episode was insanely satisfying. Next Sunday needs to come faster. I'm already waiting for the moment Shinichi reveals the final hidden move and Mushroom Head screams in despair."
"That stupid Mushroom Head… seeing his ugly expression collapse is the only reason I keep watching this drama."
"So good. The most satisfying TV drama I've seen in the past ten years. Who said Kantoku Sora had run out of talent? The ratings failure of Steins;Gate was just a temporary misfire. Liar Game is what truly represents his level."
"Actually, anyone who watched Steins;Gate seriously knows that its plot structure and foreshadowing are no weaker than Liar Game. If anything, there are even more hidden details. The reason Liar Game feels so satisfying is because the foreshadowing gets revealed almost immediately, without making you wait week after week. Steins;Gate has a lower rating right now because Kantoku Sora is planting too many details. Even by episode four, he's still digging holes. But I have a feeling that if he fills all those holes properly later, Steins;Gate's reputation definitely won't be worse than Liar Game's."
"We'll talk about that when the time comes. For now, I'm letting Steins;Gate pile up. The first month of the winter TV season is over. In the animation field, the number one work is Toki no Maou from Seiun TV. In the drama field, Liar Game from the Southern Broadcasting Alliance is the first divine hit of the year. Anyone disagree?"
"No objections. The dramas from Tokyo's old four major networks this season are pretty good too, but compared to Liar Game, they're nothing. The gap is just too big."
"I have a feeling Liar Game is definitely going to explode this season."
"You don't need a feeling. Unless something unexpected happens, tonight's fourth episode will probably take first place in this week's drama ratings."
All night long, fans of Liar Game discussed the series with almost feverish intensity.
The enthusiasm was so overwhelming that even Sora found it a little excessive.
Liar Game was indeed a brilliant story.
But did it really need to go this far?
After thinking about it for a while, he could only attribute it to cultural compatibility.
Some works struggled when transplanted into new soil.
Others, however, found ground so fertile that they grew even stronger than they had in his previous life.
The only problem was that, looking at it now, the initial ten-percent profit-sharing agreement he had signed with the Southern Broadcasting Alliance seemed a little unfavorable.
Still, business was business.
There was no such thing as a deal that guaranteed you would squeeze out every last coin.
Sora felt depressed for exactly three seconds.
Then he immediately sank into the emotional points that Liar Game was bringing him.
Emotional points were not necessarily proportional to ratings.
What mattered most was whether a work could cause strong emotional fluctuations in the audience. And a series like Liar Game, which could reverse the situation more than ten times in a single episode, might make emotionally unstable viewers contribute several times within less than an hour.
From that perspective, even though Liar Game's ratings still could not match AD's, the amount of emotional points it generated was actually a little higher, especially since the early plot of AD was comparatively calm.
Then there were works like 5 Centimeters per Second, which tortured the audience from beginning to end. A single film like that could wound viewers several times over, making it a massive source of emotional points.
Watching the number inside the system rise like the tide, Sora had already begun imagining April.
Once the plot of Steins;Gate progressed past episode twelve, once the story began killing Mayuri once every week, once the protagonist was dragged again and again into the despair of each repeating worldline, the viewers too would sink into that suffocating pain - and in the middle of that agony, they would continue contributing to him.
And then, in July, after the second season of AD began airing…
His emotional points would surely rise without end.
With a little luck, if he managed to accumulate enough, perhaps he could finally turn his attention toward some of those works with relatively higher commercial value.
"The world truly is wonderful."
Sora lifted his cup of coffee as that thought crossed his mind.
At noon, the ratings data for the fourth episode of Liar Game was released.
5.12%.
Compared to the third episode, it was a tremendous leap.
And the result also confirmed one thing: as of that moment, Liar Game had become the highest-rated drama of Japan's winter season.
Once the news was confirmed, it quickly stirred heated discussion throughout the Japanese television industry.
After all, Sora's two anime projects this season were performing far below Re:Zero. In its later episodes, Re:Zero had broken past a 6% rating.
But Sora's active performance in the drama industry this season had left countless people stunned.
The two anime he had spent more than half a year producing had failed to meet expectations.
Meanwhile, the drama script he had written in a single week was being praised everywhere.
What kind of joke was this?
You are Sora, an anime Kantoku.
Not Sora, a television drama screenwriter.
Know your own main profession.
And if you had a script as good as Liar Game, why hand it over to the Southern Broadcasting Alliance instead of producing it yourself?
At that moment, the four major networks' attempt to surround and suppress the Southern Broadcasting Alliance and Sora throughout the season suddenly felt like a joke.
Yes, in the animation sector, they had destroyed the fantasy of watching Sora's works dominate the winter season again.
But he had simply invaded their drama territory instead.
And succeeded.
In a way, that counted as revenge.
On top of that, a drama from the Southern Broadcasting Alliance had become the highest-rated work of the season.
It was almost laughable.
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