Danteye

People used it all the time where I'm from, it was interchangeable with dude and all the other similar words. Not weird in the slightest for me.

It's not even an uncommon word... It's like middle school vocabulary. It's also 2024, searching up a word is literally as complex as two clicks and then typing it in, if that's too complex, I don't really know what to tell you.

Uh, not sure where you got that from; there are rich and successful indie artists, but they are pretty small in number comparatively. When an artist chooses to be independent, it's typically not for the money, unless they are REALLY confident they are going to make it big. There's a reason so many people sign with labels. In fact, it's a pretty common stereotype for Indie Artists to be poor—the whole "starving artist" thing.

Because it's just 100% of his independent earnings, even 70% of his earnings while being actively promoted and pushed by one of the biggest agencies in the world could be many times more than his current earnings, not to mention that this is just the contract for a D-rank artist, it's likely as he gets more famous and gets a higher ranking that he'll be able to renegotiate. That being said, he's the MC and has a system helping him, so it's likely that he'll end up getting really lucky and still get really famous even without the agencies help.

Maybe it's based on sales and fan numbers instead of just talent? Because even in real life we have A-Listers and B-Listers for celebrities based on how famous they are. Otherwise, I have no clue how they can actually judge something like skill past a certain point.

It's not like he let down his guard, these things are just way stronger and faster than him, not much he can do except carry the knowledge of where it appears from into his future run. Either that or just constantly spam time stop, but that would take forever and although he can stop time in the game world it seems to still pass normally in real life.

You ain't seen nothing yet bud.

I don't even remember much about this, but going off your comment alone, if he's able to summon a helicopter in front of people and save them and he chooses not to, that quite literally by definition means he CAN do it; he just doesn't WANT to do it. Priorities: He values the secrecy of his abilities more than he does their lives. It is what it is. There's a pretty large chance I could be misremembering my thought process though; this story isn't one that's particularly memorable to me. And from what I do remember, I dropped it because it fell off pretty hard.

I was kind of hoping he would spare his life just so he could keep him around as a chess slave, only because it'd be hilarious.

He's either going to be a once in a million year genius or a once in a million year piece of trash, there's no in-between for these novels.