“Wow! You’re amazing, senpai!” Sachii gushed.
This made Akane feel good. Like she’d taken yet another step towards becoming the ultimate seiyuu.
Then that 500mps wind reached the surface.
Everything was pulverized!
Every building mankind had ever built was blown away, leaving no trace behind. 10,000 years of history turned to nothing in a single instant.
The pyramids, the Great Buddha at Nara, Tokyo Skytree, the Sagrada Família, the Angkor Wat, the Louvre Museum, Machu Picchu, the Taj Mahal, the Colosseum, the Great Wall, the Statue of Liberty, the British Museum, Notre Dame, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Stonehenge, Kiyomizu-dera, and the Empire State Building, all blown away!
And the Atagawa Tropical and Alligator Garden vanished, too. The steel frame of the dome and the foundation were ripped right out of the ground, the gators were sucked into the sky like confetti, collided with shards of glass, and were turned into mincemeat. The wind hit the spheres of ocean water, turning them into ellipses; rain began falling upwards into the sky.
Akane and Sachii were blown into the sky, as well. From the air, the scene below was utterly unreal. The blue-green light they’d grown so fond of was gone; the sky was red, and the surface dyed blue. Aether was moving with the wind; a redshift down wind and a blueshift up. All buildings on the surface were disintegrating, and swaths of soil were torn up with them. Great spheres of water were rising from the sea like a plague of streptococcus pneumoniae. The surface of the spheres was boiling. The atmospheric pressure had dropped so much that water was vaporizing at room temperature.
Akane sounded her voice desperately, maintaining the aether barrier. Aether friction on the barrier was causing a strong purple glow around them. Meanwhile, Sachii was just staring in stunned silence.
By this point, nearly all humans on Earth had perished. Any survivors were those lucky enough to be on spaceships, or in underground nuclear shelters or caves. The latter group’s luck was not really worth writing home about. They would all die a moment later.
They were rocked by an earthquake of magnitude 16, stronger than anything ever recorded or that ever would be recorded, unprecedented and unparalleled, beyond the power of words to describe.
The epicenter was the entire Earth’s surface.
Every plate on Earth began to fall apart as one. The cause lay deep below the surface, between 2900 and 5100 kilometers deep, in the outer core. The outer core was composed of liquid iron and nickel. Temperatures of 6000 degrees Celsius kept it all melted, flowing, and generating the Earth’s magnetic field. Composed of iron and nickel though it may be, liquid was still liquid, and in gravity-free environments it formed spheres, minimizing surface area.
The changes to the outer core’s shape was enough to destroy the mantle and crust above it. Fissures were spreading from the inside out. The Earth was exploding!
The roar of the magnitude 16 earthquake penetrated the aether barrier, reaching Akane’s ears. It was literally the sound of the world ending.
But everything man-made had already been destroyed by the wind. What was lost now was all natural. Mountains, rivers, valleys, and oceans.
Mt. Fuji crumbled like a pile of sand. Lava came spitting out of the wounds. These grew and grew until a network of cracks covered the ground. The lava, too, formed floating spheres.
Spheres of ocean water several kilometers in diameter and spheres of lava several hundred meters across went drifting into space, glowing with a red light. Every so often the lava collided with the ocean water and an endless trail of steam erupted around them in phreatic explosions. When water become vapor, the volume becomes 1700 times larger. When a large volume of ocean water vaporizes, the explosion knows no bounds.
Debris scorched by the lava belched black smoke, mingling with the white steam clouds from the phreatic explosions and drifting upwards. Akane and Sachii flew between them, their aether barrier glittering purple.
Inside that barrier, the temperature was rising. Sea water heated by the lava and debris flung by the explosions were slamming into them, and each impact felt like they’d been punched. But even worse was the strain on Akane’s laryngeal sac. A number of protrusions had torn from excessive blood flow. Too much blood was in her sac, and the rest of her body was turning cold.
She could feel her strength ebbing. She had only a few minutes left in her. When her strength failed, the aether barrier would vanish, and they’d plunge into the ocean water and drown, into the lava and fry, have their heads caved in by flying debris, or if they were lucky enough to be flung into outer space, pass out peacefully from lack of oxygen. All of these options led to certain death. Death! Death! Death!
“Um, hey! Senpai! Look there! See that light?” Sachii shouted.
Shut up.
“Look, there! Purple light! It’s a ship, a ship! A ship in flight!”
What? Why didn’t you say so sooner?
She peered through the peephole and it actually was a ship. A streamlined body flying along, gleaming with purple light. It looked quite close, but this was an optical illusion, and it was actually several hundred meters away.
“Amamiya! Help! We need to manipulate gravity and move ourselves over to it!”
“Ehh... There’s no waaay...”
“You’re doing it anyway! Or I’m leaving you here!”
Sachii began singing, trying to twist some gravity control, but without a transistor it did seem beyond her. Oh well, she’d just have to do it herself. Singing, she put herself in a deep trance. The voice grew stronger, hitting Akane like a storm.
They passed though the black smoke and white steam, dodging a burning rock that popped out of the clouds and a two kilometer orb of sea water maintaining its shape while simultaneously exploding. Beyond that was the glittering purple light. The light of their salvation, the light of absolute affirmation!
When Akane came out of her trance an enormous ship lay before her. Massive letters read Space Security Board on the side, a logo depicted the solar system. The ship’s name was the Samidare.
The ship’s barrier and Akane’s made contact. Like a film of bacteria splitting played in reverse, the two barriers merged, and Akane and Sachii were absorbed into the ship’s safety zone.
“Hey! Open up! Open the hatch!”
She pounded on the side of the ship. Hands, legs, head, anything she could use. Her desperate plea must have been heard, because a hatch opened, someone grabbed her collar, and hauled her on board.
“You’ve got laryngeal sacs, so you’re seiyuu? Then hurry! Come help! Now!”
She was wearing a security board uniform, and clearly half-mad with panic. An official seiyuu. They were the top of the field, clearly superior to private sector seiyuu, but the situation had left her with no trace of that dignity remaining.
She shoved Akane and Sachii down the hall. As they ran, she handed them a syringe filled with fluid.
“Inject this! Quick!”
“Is this... Voir!? I’ve never even seen this before!”
Voir was a fabled top secret drug available only to official seiyuu. It increased blood flow to the laryngeal sac, allowing them to produce efficient aether vibrations, but was said to take a significant psychological toll.
What did that matter? If it made them stronger, that was all. Akane slammed the needle into her arm. Then she handed it to Sachii, who stabbed her arm, too.
Her mouth began moving on its own, laughter burbling out of her. Her sac responded, dancing like a mad thing.
For some reason, she felt convinced this would all work out.
“Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Right! To the studio!”
“Senpai, you’re amazing! I’m right behind you!”
The official seiyuu led them both to the studio.
Inside, all hell was breaking loose.
A seiyuu had several mics held to her throat and was screaming into them. Her sac was already swollen to the size of a melon. Another seiyuu was on all fours on the ground, convulsing and laughing hysterically. Other seiyuu were already beyond moving. All the blood in their bodies had drained out, and their faces were pale.
The floor was sticky. Covered in seiyuu blood.
“Not enough control! More Voir!” the director ordered. A staff member tried to stab a syringe into the melon-sac seiyuu’s arm.
The official seiyuu escorting Akane tried to intervene. “Stop! If you give her any more, she’ll die!” she yelled.