And as she rolled, the Dark Seiyuu kicked Akane in the head. Blood sprayed from her nose. She tried to get up, but it was like concrete had her pinned immobile to the ground. Gravity had been increased several times for her alone. She could see little bundles of light dancing around the corners of her vision. The gravity was so much stronger here that blood wasn’t getting to her brain. She could barely breathe. Her pulse was racing like a madman but her circulation stagnated, her body growing cold. The color drained out of the world. Blood couldn’t reach her laryngeal sac, and it deflated. She had no way of attacking back.
Even seeing her helpless, the Dark Seiyuu didn’t stop the violence. If anything, she went after her even harder.
“Can you hear the voice? Can you? Can you hear it?” she yelled, stomping on Akane. How humiliating. She’d thought herself one step away from being the ultimate seiyuu, but now she literally couldn’t lift a finger. She just had to lie here and let her foe walk all over her.
She desperately tried to make her sac vibrate, forcing power she didn’t have to try and counter the gravity.
Then she heard the voice. The voice that always sounded like it was distorted by several layers of glass, but suddenly it snapped into focus, sounding just a little clearer than normal.
It was anxious. A voice shaking with anxiety. Like a chill wind blowing through her mind. She still couldn’t make out a word, but she felt like the sensation was there.
When she locked onto that, she found herself instinctively aware of a way to make aether vibrate more efficiently. When she put it into practice, she broke through the gravity field around her, and scrambled to her feet.
“...you heard it, didn’t you?” the Dark Seiyuu said, with a look of glee.
“Yeah. Not clearly... And it didn’t feel right.”
Akane was able to stand, but she was in bad shape. A stream of crimson fluid was running down her chin. Blood. She realized there was even blood seeping out of her eyeballs. Too much blood was being sent to her laryngeal sac, and it was overflowing.
“You can’t hear it completely, then.”
“That doesn’t matter... First, I’m gonna kill you!”
Akane threw herself at the Dark Seiyuu. She couldn’t let it end like this. Not with her pride in tatters. For her to be the ultimate seiyuu, she had to kill the woman in front of her. With that in mind, she powered up her Seiyuu Karate.
But her desperate attack was easily dodged. Akane was kicked in the shin and sent flying to the ground.
“I’d love to keep fighting with you, but we’re out of time. If you want to see me again, come after me.” The Dark Seiyuu took a large device out of her pocket. “An aether beacon receiver. If you have this, you’ll know where I am.” She tossed the receiver to Akane, and turned to leave, her cape swirling. She said over her shoulder, “Follow me wherever that leads, no matter what you find there.”
“Damn straight! I’ll track you down! And this time, I’ll kill you!”
Blood sprayed as she yelled. She tried to stand, but the muscles in her knees spasmed. The Dark Seiyuu took one look at her writhing and stalked away. She hopped on The Black Swan and flew off into the sky.
“Senpai! Are you OK? What happened?”
A few minutes later, Sachii had managed to escape from the gator pit intact and came running over to Akane. She was wiping the blood with her handkerchief.
“I nearly got myself killed. I’m gonna rest a bit and then go after her. I need to settle this.”
“That’s true. Can’t have anyone picking a fight with you!” Sachii nodded vigorously. She’d been thrown into a gator pit and escaped without a scratch. Lucky girl.
Either way, first she had to recover. She had the beacon receiver, so she could track the Dark Seiyuu down again.
But something happened that prevented that.
All gravity on Earth vanished.
The first thing they noticed was the floating gators.
Alligators are animals famed for slithering along the ground, but now they were in the air; all four of their legs were off the floor.
The water in the tanks and ponds came rising up, too, forming large spheres. A swimming alligator found itself trapped in one such sphere, thrashing its head as if begging for help. Each drop of water from the waterfall formed its own bead and went flying off around the dome.
Before they knew it, Akane and Sachii were floating, too. Spraying spheres of blood from her wounds, Akane spun through the air, leaving the ground behind.
“Eeek! I’m falling falling falling falling! Senpai, help help help!”
Sachii flailed desperately until she managed to grab Akane, then pulled her in tight, hugging her close. Akane knew the girl was scared but it hurt like hell.
Was the Dark Seiyuu attacking again? The moment she saw what was going on outside the dome, she realized that wasn’t true. The situation was far worse than she’d imagined.
The Pacific Ocean was forming spheres and floating away.
About three hundred meters from the Tropical and Alligator Garden was Atagawa You Yu Beach. Normally covered in happy tourists, now it was in chaos. Balls of water larger than Tokyo Dome were floating off towards the heavens.
The sights around were so distracting it took a while to notice, but the change was affecting them internally, too. Her hands were itching. Her skin was swelling, like it was being pushed upwards from inside.
With gravity gone, the air pressure was dropping.
Air pressure was caused by the weight of the atmosphere. The sheer weight of all the air stacked up above the ground keeps it pressurized. But that seal had just been broken.
Gravity was the seal that kept the atmosphere in place, kept the pressure on, and at a macroscopic level, regulated average air speed. Each atmospheric particle naturally moves around really fast, at 500 meters a second, but with atmospheric pressure the particles collide with each other, resulting in an average speed — wind speed — that is at best a tenth of that. But with the pressurized lid popped off, the atmosphere’s full potential was unleashed. The hidden runners let fly, and an incredible wind kicked up.
Near the surface atmospheric particles were still relatively congested, and the speed was cut down, but fifty kilometers up, in the stratosphere, it was another story. The troposphere and the stratosphere together contain 92% of the Earth’s air, so above that things had thinned considerably. A huge quantity of air was starting to race off towards the void of space at full speed. And that speed was the particle’s natural speed of 500 meters a second.
A 500 meter a second wind.
The destructive force of such a wind is beyond imagining.
Anything normally described as a ‘wind’ would never reach anything like that speed. At a mere 25 meters a second, trees snap in two. At 30 meters, telephone poles bend. Strong typhoon winds blow wooden buildings away at 50 meters a second, and disastrous hurricanes that bend steel towers are still only 60 meters a second.
Even the shockwave of a nuclear bomb, which destroys everything in its path, is only 300 meters a second.
And this was 500 mps.
The fastest wind in the Earth’s history started in the stratosphere and headed towards the Earth like it had spied some dominos.
This wind would reach the surface in approximately two minutes.
Akane detected the precursor to this wind. The entire conservatory was rattling, and the windows started to shatter. Wind was rising from the ground towards the sky, which almost never happened. And this wind was getting stronger.
Akane and Sachii were clinging to the metal frame of the conservatory. They could tell their lives were in serious danger. But dying here was not an option available to Akane. She had to kill the Dark Seiyuu. She had to prove she was stronger.
Akane wrapped herself and Sachii in an aether barrier. Her ability to sound the aether seemed to have improved since she’d listened to the voice. Covering her body in a layer of low-density aether, she cut the two of them off from outside influence. From inside everything turned black — the barrier even rejected light itself — so she had to make a small peephole. She used gravity control to stabilize herself, something she’d never been able to do without a transistor.