Two days later, New York's international terminal turned into a stage without warning. Megan stepped into the flow of travelers with her sunglasses on and her posture controlled, the kind of controlled that wasn't fashion so much as survival. Someone caught the angle just right - her sleeve shifting, a faint bruise along her arm briefly exposed - and that single detail became the story. Not her performance, not her professionalism, not the fact she'd just finished a demanding run on a foreign production schedule. The bruise. The implication. The convenient little mystery people could chew on.
The photos landed on Western feeds first, and the narrative arrived prepackaged. She got hurt filming Bleach. Big projects are dangerous. Look how committed she is. It was clean, flattering, heroic in a way that required no deeper thought, and the comments rolled in with the predictable hunger of an audience trained to see spectacle as intimacy.
"Oh - Megan got injured on set? I knew a major production like Bleach would be risky."
"I can't wait anymore. I'm especially hyped for Megan - her look was insane."
"Aizen really understands what men want to see."
"I heard they've got merch stores over there selling props and costumes. I'm buying a Harribel outfit for my girlfriend."
"Forget that, I want Aizen's coat. Someone do pickups? I'll pay."
Then the same images crossed the ocean and hit Alex's home market, and the tone didn't just shift - it snapped. The "heroic actress" angle evaporated under a wave of shameless, knowing commentary that treated Alex like a walking scandal machine and treated remembered rumors like confirmed history. The thirst showed up loud and proud, as if discretion was something only amateurs bothered with.
"Alex is unreal. Even foreign stars can't handle him?"
"Another day of envying that shameless bastard…"
Some longtime fans didn't even pretend innocence. They'd followed Alex long enough to recognize patterns in his silence, in his timing, in the way certain stories mysteriously appeared and then were never officially acknowledged. They didn't need proof. They'd built their own version of him out of repeated headlines and the shape of his orbit, and they were frighteningly confident in it.
Bell saw those comments too. He didn't say anything, not at first, but the way his gaze lingered on the screen told the truth: it wasn't jealousy, exactly, and it wasn't moral outrage. It was something quieter, more corrosive - an awareness of how easily a project could be swallowed by someone else's narrative. Bell had come here as a director with pride, not as a prop in the myth of Alex. He'd accepted the chaos of this production because it was worth it, because he respected the work, because he wanted the final product to feel inevitable. Still, watching the internet reduce everything to bruises and rumors scratched at something in him.
Megan, on the other hand, read the same storm with the detached expression of someone who'd lived inside worse storms. She sat in the lounge with her phone face down on the table, untouched coffee cooling at her elbow, eyes distant - not because she didn't care, but because caring too openly had never made anything easier. When her screen lit again with that familiar lawyer's name, her jaw tightened so subtly most people wouldn't have noticed. She didn't pick up. She simply turned the phone over like she could bury reality beneath glass.
Alex noticed all of it and behaved as if he hadn't. That was his most reliable skill: the ability to see everything, feel it register somewhere deep, and still move through the moment as if nothing could reach him.
He also understood that the public didn't need facts. It needed permission. If he admitted anything, even indirectly, the story hardened into official shape. If he stayed smooth and sterile, the rumor remained a rumor - useful, noisy, deniable.
So within minutes, Aurora Entertainment's official account posted a neat, professional statement that gave the world nothing but polite air.
"Thank you to Megan for her dedication and hard work throughout production. We wish her a safe journey and a speedy recovery."
No details. No explanations. No confirmation of what anyone wanted most.
As long as Alex didn't name the rumor, it didn't exist.
Behind that public calm, Sabrina was already building walls. She wasn't on camera, never needed to be, but her influence moved through the production like a hidden current. Calls went out. Talking points were drafted. A quiet reminder was sent to every staff member with access to behind-the-scenes footage: no personal posts, no "airport selfies," no casual anecdotes that could be cut into something uglier. Sabrina didn't fight rumors by screaming. She starved them, one leak at a time, and if she couldn't starve them, she redirected them into something profitable.
That was the industry's real magic: turning chaos into marketing without letting it burn down the set.
And the schedule - ruthless as ever - kept moving.
With the Hueco Mundo palace-location material finally wrapped, the production pivoted back to Holmdale to finish the limited Seireitei scenes that remained in the Arrancar arc. The sets were colder there, cleaner, built from geometry and authority rather than sand and emptiness. Alex liked it. Hueco Mundo was hunger; Seireitei was control. Two flavors of power, two different kinds of threat.
It also meant Rebeca Verne could finally enter properly - formally, officially, not as a rumor but as a presence on the call sheet.
She arrived like she always did: composed enough to look untouchable, aware enough to notice every stare, proud enough to pretend she didn't. Her mother shadowed her at a careful distance, close enough to protect, far enough to avoid seeming controlling, yet still watching every interaction with the sharpness of someone who had learned the cost of "trusting the industry." Rebeca didn't argue with that protection. She'd fought it in the past; now she tolerated it because she'd learned that being alone didn't make you strong. Sometimes it just made you easier to corner.
The truth Rebeca discovered quickly was that Alex wasn't cornering her at all. He wasn't even courting her the way people assumed he did when a famous woman entered his orbit. He treated her like an asset being placed precisely where it would cause maximum impact. The attention was professional. The instructions were exact. The compliments, when they came, were about framing, timing, and atmosphere - not about her beauty, not about her myth. In a way, that annoyed her more than flirting would've.
Because flirting would mean she mattered in the way she wanted to matter.
Two days. That was all her shoot took - clean, efficient, almost insulting in its speed. One episode's worth of presence built to look like destiny, every frame designed to make viewers lean forward, to make them feel as if her character belonged in this world the moment she appeared.
When Alex finally called, "Cut," his voice carried that casual finality that only comes from absolute control.
He stood, nodded once, and said, "That's a wrap. Good work, Rebeca. Want me to throw you a wrap party?"
Rebeca, still wearing the black uniform, hair tied low, turned her head slowly and looked at him as if he'd just tested how far he could push her patience. A wrap party? For two days? The eye-roll she gave him was so dramatic it almost felt theatrical, and a few crew members suddenly found urgent reasons to stare at the floor.
Before Alex could provoke her again, an assistant came tearing across the stage, breathless, sweat slick on his forehead, moving like someone who'd been sprinting between departments all afternoon.
"Boss - someone wants to audition for Death Note."
Alex watched the man for a beat too long, chin tilted, expression thoughtful in a way that had nothing to do with casting. A ridiculous idea slid into his head: a male assistant didn't fit his style at all. The thought wasn't kind, and it wasn't professional, but it was honest. He filed it away with the same cold precision he used for everything else. When he returned to the company, he'd open a formal assistant selection. A neat process. A clean excuse. A way to put a new face near him without looking like a cliché.
Then he snapped back into "Director Alex" so fast the shift was almost invisible.
"Who?"
The assistant swallowed, still struggling for air.
"Kaio -fat… and Alec Su."
The set seemed to pause around the names. Even Rebeca's mother stopped mid-step, her expression flickering with surprise before it smoothed back into neutrality. Rebeca herself didn't move, but something in her eyes sharpened, because those weren't names that wandered into audition rooms unless they had a reason.
And the irony - the kind that made you want to laugh and groan at the same time - was brutal: Rebeca had recently worked with both of them on a film that had collapsed so hard it became a quiet joke people told only when they wanted to hurt someone. Big budget. Big posters. Big promises. A box office that left nothing behind but bitterness.
Alex felt the pattern click into place with unsettling familiarity. The last time a major actor had done a flop connected to Rebeca, he'd washed up at Alex's door afterward. Now it was happening again, only bigger.
A fallout shelter.
That was what his studio was becoming for people who'd survived disasters and wanted to be part of something that couldn't be mocked.
He almost sighed, then didn't. Because whatever else could be said about him, Alex didn't waste good talent out of superstition.
"Send them in."
A few minutes later, the door opened and the room recalibrated around them.
Kaio -fat walked in first with that rare kind of presence that didn't need to announce itself. He wasn't loud. He wasn't arrogant. He simply existed in a way that made everyone else unconsciously adjust their posture. Alec Su followed a half-step behind, polite and bright-eyed in the way certain actors stayed bright-eyed no matter how many years passed.
"Director Alex," Kaio -fat greeted warmly. "Hello."
"Been looking forward to meeting you," Alec Su added quickly, offering his hand. "First time meeting - please take care of me."
Alex returned the greetings with respect but without softness. He didn't become a fan in front of stars. He'd built his reputation on the opposite: the ability to treat legends like workers and still make them want to impress him.
When Chow and Alec noticed Rebeca and her mother off to the side, the air shifted into a quiet awkwardness. No hostility - just that bitter recognition between people who'd shared a failure they didn't want to name. Their smiles were polite, tight, and distant. No one stepped closer. No one said hello.
Because what would you even say?
Rebeca's mother, always alert, caught the tension immediately and gently guided Rebeca away with a light touch at her elbow, as if giving the men space was a kindness rather than a retreat. Rebeca didn't resist, but the way she glanced back at Alex told its own story: she wanted to be treated like a central thread, not a footnote that got escorted out when the "real industry" arrived.
The roles Chow and Alec were there for were the only two remaining major Asian characters Alex still needed to lock for Death Note: Soichiro Yagami, a veteran police chief who realizes his own son might be a monster, and Matsuda, his earnest young subordinate.
On paper, Alec's age was slightly high for Matsuda, but his face worked in his favor. The kind of youthful softness that, with the right styling, could pass for late twenties without forcing the audience to squint. Some actors lost that advantage early. Alec had kept it like a secret weapon.
Alex didn't waste time. He sat, crossed one leg over the other, and let his gaze sharpen into something that didn't care about reputations.
With a half-smile that carried no mercy, he looked at Kaio -fat and said, "I'm not lowering my standards just because you were my idol."
A few crew members blinked like they couldn't believe he'd said it out loud. But Kaio -fat only laughed, easy and genuine.
"As it should be."
That answer - no ego, no defensiveness - earned him a fraction of respect Alex rarely gave before someone performed.
Alex nodded once.
"Alright. Show me a father who realizes his son is a killer."
Silence hit the room with physical weight.
This wasn't a warm-up. This wasn't an easy read to ease into the day. It was the hardest possible emotional turn, dropped without warning, the kind of scene that demanded an actor build a collapsing world out of nothing but breath and restraint.
Kaio -fat didn't complain. He didn't ask for pages. He didn't negotiate the challenge.
He stood still for a moment, eyes lowering as if he were listening to something inside himself, and when he lifted his gaze again, the air around him changed. Not in a theatrical way. In a quiet, terrifying way - like a man trying to keep his life from shattering with nothing but sheer will.
Alex watched without moving, expression unreadable, but something in his chest tightened with satisfaction. This was what he'd come for. This was why his sets produced fear and devotion in equal measure. He didn't create roles for people to "play." He created roles that demanded they bleed without making a mess.
Off to the side, Bell observed it all with a complicated stillness. The audition reminded him of why he'd agreed to work under Alex in the first place. Not for the fame. Not for the headlines. For moments like this - when performance stopped being "industry" and became something dangerously real. Bell also understood, with a quiet pinch of dread, that once Alex finished Bleach, he wouldn't stay contained. He'd surge into the wider market again, dragging standards upward and leaving everyone else scrambling to keep up.
That realization didn't comfort him.
It inspired him.
And somewhere else in the building, Sabrina's phone buzzed again with another update about Megan's airport photos, another ripple of the rumor wave. She read it, exhaled slowly, and typed a single instruction to her team: keep the official messaging clean, and let the fans exhaust themselves. Attention always burned out if you didn't feed it directly. The trick was to never look hungry.
…
Half a month later, the final stretch of filming in Holmdale ended the way most victories did: with exhaustion braided into relief, with crew members smiling even as their bodies begged for sleep.
Aurora Entertainment posted the announcement like a hammer striking steel.
Bleach Season Two - The Arrancar Arc is officially wrapped.
The effect was immediate and oddly primal. In the entertainment industry, people who pretended they weren't watching suddenly started watching. Producers who'd enjoyed a quiet few months felt the air change. Directors who'd mocked Alex behind closed doors stopped mocking. Studios recalculated. Not because they loved him - but because they feared what his success did to their standards.
Because the monster was finished feeding.
And now it could look up.
Fans flooded the comments like a dam had broken, demanding release dates, demanding trailers, demanding anything at all. Their appetite had been trained for months by one stylish set of stills after another, every drop carefully measured to tease rather than satisfy. They weren't just excited anymore. They were conditioned.
And the numbers backing that hunger were absurd. Bleach: The Soul Society Arc had already crossed seventy billion plays across domestic platforms. Add the international streaming totals and the count climbed into eleven digits without effort, as if the story had simply become part of the global background noise of entertainment - something people everywhere assumed they'd watch sooner or later.
All over the world, audiences were waiting with the same posture: leaning forward, breath held, eyes fixed.
Because they could feel it.
Whatever Alex did next, it wouldn't arrive quietly.
The industry sensed it too - deep in the places where executives pretended they didn't get scared, deep in the places where reputations were built and shattered with numbers.
With that single announcement, the message was unmistakable:
The emperor had returned.
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