The next day, Sumire and Yumi sat in Sora's office, stunned into silence as they listened to him calmly lay out one ambitious plan after another for the company's future.
"Two two-cour productions starting at the same time...?" Sumire's voice, usually so steady, finally cracked with emotion. "Sora... are you serious?"
"I am." He nodded without hesitation. "Completely serious. I've been in a pretty good groove lately. Ideas keep coming one after another, so I ended up outlining two new projects."
His tone was absurdly calm, as if what he had just said were no more than a routine production update.
But Sumire's expression tightened.
"Even so... if the studio takes on two long-form productions at once, won't that be pushing things too far?"
"It'll be fine." Sora leaned back slightly. "We're already handling two anime at the same time as it is."
Then, after a pause, he added with more seriousness, "Of course, if it's just the two of us carrying all the Kantokuial workload for two two-cour series, then yes, that would be too much. So I'm going to bring in more episode Kantokus to work under us, and we'll continue expanding the lower levels of the staff too."
"More employees?" Sumire looked like she wanted to say more, but held herself back.
This time, Yumi spoke.
"Honestly, Sora, you might be brilliant at creating anime, but when it comes to company management, you're not seeing the whole picture."
She looked at him directly, her gaze sharp.
"Right now, Yume Animation is basically a company built around you. Everything starts with you - your scripts, your storyboards, your concepts. You could hire a thousand people if you wanted, even more than that, but you're still just one person. There's a hard limit to how much work you can personally generate and distribute. Realistically, a company of over three hundred employees is already close to the upper bound of what your current energy can support. Push it further, and it may start backfiring instead."
Sora listened quietly. Then, after a moment of thought, he smiled.
"It'll be okay."
He truly wasn't worried.
Once he accumulated enough emotional points in the future, it was only a matter of time before he began exchanging for - or drawing - those truly massive long-form projects. The kind of works that could keep a team of more than a hundred people busy for over a decade.
By the time that happened, he wouldn't need to handle every detail himself. He would only need to write the core scripts and take part in shaping the character designs. As for storyboarding and the rest of the actual animation production process, those tasks could be handed over to the team beneath him.
And written scripts, once the plot had already been settled in his mind, were never the time-consuming part.
That was why Sora never feared that one day the company might grow too large for him to sustain. In his eyes, that problem simply didn't exist yet.
Yumi stared at him in a daze for a moment.
"You really aren't afraid of working yourself to death, are you?"
Seeing the look on his face, Sumire gave up trying to persuade him. Instead, she went straight to the real issue.
"So where are the scripts for these two new projects?"
"I'm still writing them," Sora said. "But give me a few more days, and at least the opening episodes for both should be ready. Once that happens..."
Silence.
Sumire stared at him.
Yumi stared at him too.
So that was what this really meant.
He hadn't actually started properly yet.
The subtle moves Yume Animation made throughout May went completely unnoticed by anime fans across the country. None of them had any idea what was being prepared behind the scenes.
And they certainly had no way of knowing that the two new works Sora was preparing would one day stir up a storm across the Japanese anime industry.
For now, however, the entire anime fandom had its eyes fixed on one thing alone.
That night, episode twenty-three of Re:Zero's second season was airing.
In the Sanctuary, Emilia faced her third trial.
At the Roswaal mansion, Subaru Natsuki, having brought Garfiel over to his side, headed back on his fifth loop to rescue Rem, this time with a powerful ally behind him.
After Subaru's confession had finally given her faith in the future, Emilia entered the trial without fear.
At the mansion, Garfiel fought the Bowel Hunter head-on in a violent, exhilarating clash.
Back in the Sanctuary, Ram confronted the person she loved most - Roswaal, the man who had spent four hundred years being controlled by the Book of Wisdom. In the middle of battle, she snatched the book from his hands, and with despair written all over his face, she threw it into the flames.
Prophecy.
A book.
A future.
Did following every instruction written on its pages really lead to happiness?
Would the future Roswaal desired - the future in which he could meet his beloved Echidna again - truly come true that way?
What a joke.
It wasn't freedom.
It was slavery.
Another episode, and another explosive development.
By burning Roswaal's book, Ram destroyed the greatest chain that had bound him for four hundred years.
But at the same time, in his rage, Roswaal swallowed her in flames.
Once again, Re:Zero left its viewers emotionally wrecked.
"So Roswaal and Beatrice really were ruined for four hundred years because of those two books left behind by the Witch of Greed?"
"Roswaal's book kept telling him what to do to achieve his wish, while Beatrice's hasn't shown her anything in centuries."
"So that's why Roswaal knew about Subaru's Return by Death. The book told him."
"It's just tragic. A book that predicts the future sounds amazing at first, but if you live your whole life following what it says, are you even still yourself? You're just a puppet on strings."
"Books like that deserve to be burned."
"What a shame, though. Ram fell in love with a man that tragic, tried to save him from the shackles of the book... and ended up being burned down by him."
"She's probably not dead, right? The end of episode twenty-three only showed him attacking her in anger. With Ram's strength, there's no way she'd die that easily... right?"
"Who knows what that old thief Sora is thinking? After pulling the whole Rem vegetable-state plotline, killing Ram wouldn't be surprising at all."
"Damn it, and it cuts off right there. That hurts."
"You're all worried about whether Ram lives or dies, but no one's talking about the Bowel Hunter?"
"This episode dumped way too much information at once. People can't focus on everything."
"That old fox spent twenty episodes setting up the Sanctuary arc just to cash everything in over the final three. Now Roswaal's book is burned, he's been defeated, the Bowel Hunter lost to Garfiel, and Emilia is one step away from clearing the last trial. At this point, the only unresolved pieces are the Great Rabbit and Beatrice."
By the end of May, episode twenty-three of Re:Zero's second season had finally pushed its ratings to 5.91% for the first time.
On the surface, it didn't seem like much. When the first cour had ended, the series was already sitting above 5.7%, and after nearly half a year, it had only climbed another 0.2%.
But everyone knew the same truth:
The final stretch was always the hardest.
In an exam, raising your score from 60 to 80 was difficult. But raising it from 90 to 95 was far harder.
And now, with only two episodes left before the end of season two, the entire anime industry was watching.
Could Re:Zero break past the 6.0% mark?
At the same time, the film industry had entered full promotional warfare.
With the summer movie season only a month away, one upcoming title after another began burning money on advertising.
There was Phantom Mirror, a historical fantasy romance film with a total investment of 2.4 billion yen, starring one of the country's most popular leading actors.
There was The Wind of Midsummer, a youthful campus romance with a budget of 1.9 billion yen.
Then Sprinter, a cycling-themed film produced at 1.2 billion yen.
And then there was 5 Centimeters per Second.
On top of that were several other films with budgets under one billion yen, but still backed by rising stars and idol talent, spanning everything from police thrillers to mystery stories to detective dramas.
Summer hadn't even arrived yet, but the atmosphere already felt like the calm before a storm.
Caught in the middle of that lineup, 5 Centimeters per Second didn't appear to have any real advantage.
Many people in the film industry - and many film fans as well - weren't particularly optimistic about the animated film.
Even if Sora was hugely popular right now, television and cinema were two entirely different battlegrounds.
He might have tens of millions of fans across the country waiting at home every week for his anime.
But how many of those fans would actually be willing to buy a ticket and go into a theater to support his film?
There were countless examples of top television drama actors flopping the moment they stepped into cinema.
So what chance did a top TV anime Kantoku have?
Some film media commentators were already lying in wait, practically eager for 5 Centimeters per Second to fail so they could immediately tear Sora down and ride the resulting traffic.
A few quiet days passed just like that.
Then June arrived, and the temperature climbed sharply, heat hanging thick in the air.
On another Friday, Sakuma got off work and returned home.
After checking the time, he quickly ordered takeout on his phone, turned on the television, and switched the channel over to Southern Alliance TV.
At that moment, the station was broadcasting a special advertisement.
Its stock market debut date for next month was displayed prominently on-screen, along with the ticker code for its upcoming listing. At the same time, the ad clearly announced that within three months, its signal would begin simultaneous broadcast across twenty-one prefectures nationwide.
Sakuma blinked.
"So the country's fifth broadcaster with nationwide transmission power is finally about to appear?"
He let out a low chuckle.
"At least now the people in those regions can stop crying on the forums. Re:Zero has been huge for a full year, one of the biggest anime hits of the last two years, and there are still entire areas where people could only keep up by buying the Blu-rays. That's rough."
Then he shook his head again.
"Though in three months, season two will already be over. Hah. That makes it even sadder."
The thought passed through his mind in an instant.
Once the clock hit eight and episode twenty-four of Re:Zero's second season officially began airing, his focus snapped entirely to the screen.
The episode opened on Roswaal, his expression hollow, holding the unconscious Ram in his arms.
"I followed the book's instructions. I made it snow here. So what am I supposed to do now?"
The words Subaru had spoken earlier - half declaration of war, half attempt to force him to surrender - echoed through Roswaal's mind.
He was a pitiful man.
The one who had personally struck Ram down was also the one who now looked at her sleeping face with unbearable tenderness.
As Sakuma watched, his own thoughts gradually settled.
Season two had only two episodes left. The Sanctuary arc had clearly entered its closing stage.
And yet the thing that frustrated him most was that Sora still hadn't revealed even the slightest clue about how Rem might wake up.
Worse, judging from the amount of unresolved material still left in the story, even a third season might not be enough to fill in all the holes.
While he watched the episode and turned those thoughts over in his mind, the story quickly pushed forward to the Roswaal mansion.
The battle between Garfiel and the Bowel Hunter had set the entire mansion ablaze.
Having already given up on life, Beatrice had no intention of fleeing. She simply sat inside the Forbidden Library, waiting for the fire to devour her.
And then -
at that exact moment -
for Beatrice, within the timeline of the Sanctuary arc, it was the first time she had met Subaru Natsuki.
But for Subaru, it was something entirely different.
He had already spent over ten days trapped in that stretch of time. He had died four times. He had untangled the mysteries, learned everything about her past, and come to understand the loneliness and despair she had been carrying all along.
So he crossed through the flames.
His arm was burned.
He opened the door to the Forbidden Library.
And walked up to stand before her.
At that moment, Sakuma's heart began to pound.
Finally.
At last, the story had reached the most critical turning point of all.
Beatrice.
How was Subaru Natsuki going to save a girl who had already chosen death for herself?
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