Erina was a little shy, and the way everyone's eyes kept landing on her only made her more nervous.
"Of course… that's just my opinion. If I'm talking nonsense, please just ignore it."
Ren swept her gaze across the room. Even Sumire - who almost never let her emotions show - shifted half a step closer to Sora, as if the tension in her shoulders had finally loosened. The furrow in her brow eased, and her expression said it plainly: she'd been convinced.
Which was almost funny, because out of everyone there, she was the one who'd end up paying the highest price for this "whim."
Sora was drowning in work as it was. For a lot of cuts, all he could do was explain what he wanted, and turning that "I need it like this" into something real - chasing schedules, lining up teams, tweaking details one by one - usually fell on Sumire's shoulders. Sometimes it was past one in the morning and she was still on the phone with Ren and the heads of outsourced studios, arguing over adjustments like the day hadn't ended. If you measured seriousness by effort, she sometimes looked even more obsessive than the director himself.
Ren let out a long breath, faced Sora head-on, and spoke without sugarcoating it.
"In anime production, the only rule that never changes is that something unexpected will always happen. This pre-screening… the problem blowing up on the directing side… it was outside what I anticipated and, at the same time, exactly what I anticipated."
She took a steadying breath and continued, like someone who'd already accepted the inevitable.
"If this is what you want, Director, and we're already short on time… then if you're going to redo those dozens of cuts, I want the new storyboard ready by tomorrow night. The one you called the 'circus.' I'm starting calls tonight to bring in new key animators to take this batch."
That was Ren: once she decided, the schedule was already assembling itself in her head - what could be done, when, and by whom.
Sora frowned. "And the budget… can it still hold?"
"Barely," someone from finance answered, voice heavy. "We had less rework than expected up to now, so there's a bit of breathing room. We can burn it here."
"Then that's it." Sora looked at the group - more than a dozen people, all exhausted in the quiet way only anime staff understand. "Everyone… indulge my stubbornness one more time."
He pressed his lips together for a moment, as if feeling the weight of what he was about to say.
"'Voices of a Distant Star' only has two possible endings: it becomes the last work Dream/Yume Animation ever makes… or it becomes the work that gets us back on our feet."
"Either way, we're going all the way."
"The result might not be exactly what we dreamed of… but at least when it's over, none of us will be left with regrets."
…
That night, Sora didn't sleep.
He pulled an entire era of legendary anime sequences out of his memory - those insane space battles that stuck in your head, missiles dancing across the frame, the camera spinning, impossible speed, a kind of ruthless elegance in the motion. He sat there, replaying images, fitting possibilities together, and when he finally put pencil to paper…
His eyes lit up.
Copying storyboards without copying the story itself, apparently, didn't trigger any restrictions. A crooked, dangerous smile tugged at his lips.
Perfect.
Then he'd stitch together exactly what he needed.
On the other side of the operation, Ren - responsible for production progress - plunged into a storm of calls. Sora had been clear: he needed the best key animators available. Average hands wouldn't survive those cuts.
That only made Ren's chest feel heavier.
It was already late March. In the Japanese industry, good animators were almost always locked into a pipeline - seasonal TV slots, films, projects with deadlines nailed down months in advance. Even with connections, there were limits. And what Sora was asking for… demanded a team that wouldn't flinch.
…
Sumire, meanwhile, went home with a stack of project documents. She spread everything out and traced the work's path - from a proposal on paper to something half-finished, the soul of the anime already visible, but still fragile.
And when she remembered the afternoon's pre-screening, her heart gave that stubborn, insistent jump - like her body refused to admit how much she'd cared.
She turned in bed and, by chance, caught her reflection in the vanity mirror.
Loose hair spilling over her pajama shoulders, pale skin faintly flushed, and eyes that weren't the same as they were in the studio - less cold, less distant, more… alive.
Sumire knew that state well.
Yes. She was enjoying it.
Truly enjoying it. It wasn't just responsibility, not just professional pride - it was affinity with the work, emotion clinging to the details. And because of that, she wanted tomorrow to come faster. She wanted to see what kind of "circus" storyboard could make Sora choose to tear down a section of space-battle cuts that were nearly finished and start over from scratch.
His image surfaced in her mind, too sharp to dismiss. Sumire stared at the ceiling.
The more time she spent with Sora, the more he felt like an enigma.
Hard to understand.
How could someone change so much in just a month or two?
…
The next day - on the 6th, at nine in the evening - Haruto, the chief animation supervisor; Sumire, the assistant director; and Ren were still awake, waiting for Sora's new storyboard to come out of the oven.
After a while, Sora appeared at the office door with a thick stack of pages in his hands. Deep dark circles under his eyes, hair wrecked from being yanked in frustration and left unwashed - so chaotic it looked like he'd been struck by lightning and decided to keep the style.
Since declaring the change, he hadn't gone home once. He'd been shut in there the entire time.
And a "circus" storyboard wasn't easy even for someone who drew well. Sora - still fighting his own draftsmanship more often than he wanted - had only gotten through the worst moments by grabbing his hair whenever the frustration spiked.
Haruto took one look at him and burst out laughing, trying to ease the atmosphere.
"Man… you're really stubborn. If you'd held back that surge of inspiration last night, you wouldn't be paying for it like this today."
Ren stepped forward, sounding more human than she usually did when she was in schedule mode.
"Thanks for the effort, Director. I'll treat you to ramen in a bit."
Sumire studied the state he was in and gave a small, approving nod. Someone who truly threw themselves into their work always ended up like this - exhausted, ugly, but whole.
"Ramen…" Sora's mouth twitched, like he wanted to complain and remembered it was free food. "Fine. If someone's paying, I'm not going to be stupid and refuse."
He'd gone with Sumire to the same place so many times he felt like he'd memorized the smell of the broth. And still… there was something about her consistency that he respected. The menu had plenty of variations, but she always ordered the same one, as if the entire world could shout different options and still fail to pull her focus even a millimeter.
Haruto took the pages, still smiling, and opened them -
The smile vanished.
His eyes froze, swallowed by storyboard compositions far too complex for anything "normal." Every cut looked like it carried two or three times the drawing load, with continuous motion, high speed, and a storm of missiles and obstacles chained together. The central silhouette - the mecha piloted by the story's protagonist - spun through the frame, the viewpoint flipped with it, slipped through impossible gaps between explosions, and then the camera flipped again.
The character model's scale changed in fractions of a second because of the speed. It wasn't just the pilot's viewpoint - backgrounds demanded constant adjustments too, micro-corrections that would be brutal even for veterans with decades behind them.
Haruto could picture it: if this sequence were executed the way Sora had laid it out, even viewers who got motion-sick from first-person games would probably feel dizzy watching it on TV.
He turned page after page, cut by cut, until he reached the end - one long, outrageous shot, like Sora had decided to cram an entire sky into a single sequence.
The charge began outside the atmosphere. The mecha dove along an impossible trajectory, breaking speed limits, snapping through angles that felt unreal, cutting through a swarm of hundreds of enemy units while racing a blizzard of missiles. The frame rolled, flipped, recovered, inverted again - and in the middle of it all, the protagonist, already mangled, both legs and one arm destroyed, only a single hand still able to move, burned through the last of the mecha's energy and drew an enormous blade of light, cleaving the enemy mothership in a final explosion.
That…
Haruto's hand trembled.
Just imagining it made his chest swell with an old, almost childish excitement.
The most primal kind of masculine romance was always the same: the endless sky, the cosmos, a sea of stars. And space-mecha combat… that was how it was supposed to look.
But…
With almost all of the anime's key drawings already finished - except for these cuts that now had to be redone - Haruto finally had time. Time to return to being a hands-on animator too, not just someone correcting and approving.
He raised his eyes to Sora, his voice lifting in a mix of shock and challenge.
"You want me to help you draw all of this?"
"You can't, Haruto?" Sora asked calmly, his gaze clear, as if he weren't provoking him at all. "I know it's hard. If you think it can't be done, then we - "
"Who said I can't?" Haruto's face hardened on the spot, pride cutting across his expression. "I can."
He pointed at the pages, heavy with realism.
"But you're going to have to tell Ren to find more people. These cuts… they're not 'hard.' They're hell. And they're going to eat time."
Sora smiled, relieved - but not lightly. It was the smile of someone who knew exactly how big the gamble was.
However brutal the technical side might be, it was still only half the story. The rarest part was something else: imagination. Creativity. The ability to see a movement before it existed - something most people wouldn't even dare propose.
In Japan, people who could draw well had never been in short supply. What was uncommon was people who could invent sequences like this.
That was why certain scenes became legend.
Asking Haruto - and other veterans - to create those cuts from scratch would be asking too much. But asking them to draw them, chewing through each cut until the sequence was ripped off the page… with time and sweat, that could be done.
…
On March 7th, Dream/Yume Animation and every partner studio entered what could only be called the final stretch.
A full-scale offensive.
The dozens of combat cuts that needed to be redone - driven by Ren, Haruto, and Sumire - began to be distributed to a large number of experienced animators, at a high, painful, but necessary price. Everyone understood: this kind of work didn't tolerate weak hands.
And it wasn't just them.
Ryū's studio - the background art and setting design team, led by Sora's friend - also switched into all-night mode without asking permission from their bodies.
Days passed.
In Shikoku, the snow had finally stopped. The accumulated layer began to melt… and, as always, the cold somehow felt even sharper.
But no one doubted it.
Spring was close.
And at that moment, only… nineteen days remained until the premiere of "Voices of a Distant Star."
50 power stones = 1 chapter