“There’s an F-Rank mission open near—”

  “Nope—ah, shit.”

  Adah stumbled forward and caught herself on the back of Grace’s chair.

  She was in the middle of “training” to get more comfortable fighting in her new transformation outfit. She started by standing on one foot, trying to stay perfectly still for five seconds before hopping to the other foot and repeating the process. Normally this would be no problem for someone with a magical girl’s fitness level, but the Twilight Heartbreak design had introduced certain challenges. Namely, a pair of ankle strap heels she had insisted upon keeping in the design even after Grace tried to talk her out of it.

  To help hone her agility and balance, she’d decided to wear a pair of practice heels around the office and perform random exercises like this.

  “How are those working out for you?” her manager taunted her now.

  “It won’t matter once I get enough FP to stay flying all the time,” Adah answered. “I just need to be agile enough until then.”

  That said, she’d been working as Twilight Heartbreak for three days now and had only boosted her FP level by one so far. Gaining fans wasn’t as simple as donning a new costume and changing your name. After three days of crushing bottom-tier Cruelties, it became clear she needed to chase higher rank missions if she wanted to capitalize on her newfound attention.

  That’s why these F-Rank missions Grace was suggesting were no good.

  The web portal where Cruelty extermination missions were posted included a letter-based ranking system. Based on the type of Cruelty that was detected, the mission’s threat level would be diagnosed on a scale from “F” on the weak end to “A” on the dangerous end. Sometimes a mission would be ranked with a special letter designation, such as “N” for a mission involving many Cruelties appearing at the same time. Higher ranked missions paid out a larger bounty and drew more interest from both the media and fans.

  Throughout her career, almost all of Adah’s work had been F- or E-Rank, with the rare D-Rank like the bird Cruelty her team tackled last week.

  “What about an E-Rank near Bridgewater?” Grace asked as she resumed scrolling down the mission list.

  “Where’s that?” Adah asked, wobbling like mad on one foot again.

  “Middle of the woods, like just about every town in Region 4. It’s north of Littleton, if that helps.”

  “Nooooo,” Adah droned.

  “Then what do you want?” Grace asked, spinning her chair around.

  The sudden movement surprised Adah; she lost her balance and fell on her ass. She cursed again before finally deciding to give her feet a break from the heels. After taking them off, she relished the joy of standing flat-footed against the ground once more.

  “Isn’t there any D-Rank nearby?” she asked, peering over Grace’s shoulder at the mission portal.

  “D-Rank?” Grace said. “Alone?”

  “I can handle it,” Adah assured her. “This new spell is something else.”

  The missions she’d taken earlier this week had all been F-Rank, but they gave Adah enough practice that she’d grown comfortable with [Nightwind Whip]. The spell took some getting used to—it had to charge up before striking, and that delay was finicky. However, after some practice she was starting to like it even more than [Sparkling Strike].

  Grace looked at Adah, then down at her discarded heels, and finally sighed.

  “You’re something else,” she said, turning back to her computer monitor. “A D-Rank just popped up in—”

  “Take it!”

  Adah rushed over and hopped up to sit on Grace’s desk. She scanned the details of the mission Grace had mentioned, made a mental note of the location, and then shouted for Izzy. Her mascot poofed into existence by her side, reappearing from whatever sub-dimension mascots hid in when they were relaxing. As she and Izzy ran outside, Grace booked the mission.

  “As soon as it gets rough,” she yelled after them, “you retreat!”

  Adah threw up a hand in acknowledgment, but not a second later that same hand was on Izzy, channeling his magic for a transformation.

  In accordance with her design, Twilight Heartbreak’s magic glowed a pure black. More accurately, it sucked the light surrounding Adah into blackness, shrouding her in something like smoke and dimming the area around her. When she reappeared, she looked nothing like Sparkling Starbloom once had.

  Twilight Heartbreak had, of course, a pair of black heels, which Adah had begrudgingly trimmed down to 2-inches at Grace’s behest. The flowery skirt of Starbloom was replaced with a sleeker fabric that stopped at her knees, but it wasn’t hemmed there. Instead, it appeared tattered and torn at the end, with its black color turning violet in each of the loose threads and cuts, as if by ripping off the bottom of the skirt someone had exposed the veins within it. Underneath were stockings that shone with an iridescent quality, at times black or the same deep purple as the threads of her skirt. She had on a similar bodice as before, though black now and covered by a shawl wrapped around her shoulders and secured across her chest by a thin silver chain and clasp.

  Still, a bit of Pureheart’s inspiration remained in this transformation. Heartbreak’s hair was tied into the same kind of twintails as the famous magical girl thanks to a pair of hair ornaments shaped like curling demon’s horns. Maybe devilish horns didn’t have much to do with her theme, but they were an essential part of the original design and therefore she refused to get rid of them. Besides, the whole thing was more than a little bit angsty to begin with. What else could you expect when a girl’s childhood dreams crashed against the brick wall of reality?

  Fully transformed, she flew off toward the mission destination, racing forward with a fervor she hadn’t felt since she first joined the agency. Trifling F-Rank missions may have gotten her nowhere, but this one would be different. Even the details were perfect for getting her name out there—at least the ones she had bothered to read. A D-Rank Cruelty in a public park was bound to attract some attention. Plus, cashing in D-Rank jobs on a regular basis would bring in more than enough money to keep the agency afloat. She just needed to prove she could handle them.

  While the town she was headed to was a far cry from a bustling city, it was no sleepy village either. The town came into view shortly, and soon Adah was flying over neighborhoods of condos and low-rise apartments that marked the town’s perimeter. These neighborhoods congregated around the park where the Cruelty had been detected, with each freshly paved street winding its way to the centralized green.

  Adah knew these kinds of newly constructed neighborhoods tended to be filled with people her age, and people her age loved magical girls.

  “Down there,” Izzy said as they approached the park. “The left side of the field.”

  She couldn’t miss it—a gray blob the length of three sedans lay in the grass below. The rectangular field was crisscrossed by walking paths that eventually all fed into a singular strip of concrete that encircled the left end of the park in a big loop. The target Cruelty sat smack in the middle of that circle—quite the convenient bullseye.

  Unlike with the bird Cruelty, the immediate area around the park hadn’t been evacuated. Small clusters of half a dozen bystanders dotted the right end of the park and the sidewalks across either of the streets that ran parallel to the field. The people in the park were half-hidden behind the trunk of a large oak tree, but those on the sidewalk were out in the open, standing still.

  “They’re a bit close aren’t they?” Adah said before diving downwards.

  When she reached the ground, she saw why the crowds were so curious to stay nearby. The Cruelty laying in the grass here could only be described as a beached whale, and had a periscope eyestalk sticking out the top of its body. Even when it noticed Adah, it didn’t move an inch. Maybe it couldn’t—the thing didn’t have any limbs, fins, or wings.

  “How the hell did it get here?” she asked Izzy.

  “It must have materialized in that spot,” he said. “Although I can hardly hazard a guess what it planned to do after.”

  “D-Rank, eh?” she mused. “I guess we just kill it.”

  As she walked closer to the monster, she noticed a bystander across the street pull out a camera. It was impossible to hold back her grin. A simple attack could work here, but she might as well give them a show.

  She took aim, stretched her arm to the sky, and called upon her [Nightwind Whip].

  Though the day had been sunny and without a breeze until now, suddenly the wind howled and rushed through the park, ripping leaves off trees and spiraling into a tornado-like airstream above Adah. As her spell charged up, the wind in her grasp turned black and cast a heavy shadow on the ground around Adah. Once enough power had gathered, she threw her clenched fist down, and a trail of black smoke surged towards the Cruelty with a noise like a thunderclap. At the point of impact, more smoke exploded and then slowly dissipated.

  As the space behind the smoke came back into view, the Cruelty was nowhere to be seen.

  “Easy as—”

  Adah’s declaration of victory was interrupted by a deafening thud behind her. Instead of smoke, this time a huge cloud of dirt and dust blew through the air. She spun around and was greeted by the whale’s gaping mouth. After a millisecond spent peering down the endless void of the monster’s throat, she darted backwards in flight.

  “It dodged?” she said to Izzy. “Teleported?”

  “What did the mission brief say?” he asked.

  “I didn’t read most of it!”

  “It looks like it’s my turn to berate you,” he said. “How did I get stuck with such a pig-headed magical girl?”

  “Shut up! Second time’s the charm.”

  She charged her [Nightwind Whip] again and unleashed it on the Cruelty’s new location. A moment later, the monster reappeared elsewhere once more, only this time it had teleported itself above a section of chainlink fence, which it subsequently flattened. Whatever method it used to teleport seemed to spit it out about head-high above ground each time.

  “Careful,” Izzy warned. “We don’t want it to cause collateral damage.”

  “That’s why I’m trying to be quick about this,” she said.

  More than the park, she was worried about the bystanders. She didn’t know why the whale was so intent on simply running away, but if it ever wised up to the fact that a normal human would have a hard time reacting to it suddenly teleporting overhead, it could easily crush them.

  She charged up another attack, this time swinging with the whip as fast as she could possibly bring her fist down. Again, the Cruelty vanished a moment before her attack landed. It reappeared to her right, dropping down and cracking one of the walking paths that ran through the center of the park. The concrete crumpled up on either side of the monster’s body.

  If upping the speed didn’t work, maybe blindsiding the Cruelty would. Adah lifted her arm yet again. The wind rushed to her grip. From this position, with her left leg planted forward, her body’s natural dynamics wanted her to swing down in an arc starting from her right shoulder and crossing to the left. On this swing, she instead crossed the whip above her head until her right hand reached her left shoulder. She then stomped forward with her right foot, carrying that momentum through a backhand swing of the whip down and across her body from left to right. The resulting attack left a trail of black smoke that arced gently downward at first before curving sharply to the right, aiming for the Cruelty’s side.

  Adah beamed with pride upon seeing she’d achieved the extreme angle she’d been hoping for, but her smile quickly vanished when the familiar thud of the Cruelty landed behind her once more.

  “It doesn’t know when to give up,” she muttered.

  “I’m sure it thinks the same of you,” Izzy replied, as helpful as ever.

  He had a point, though. Rapidly casting such an intense spell back-to-back was taking a toll on her. That fatigue added up quickly without a break, just like any high intensity exercise would. She had to account for the flight over here as well, not to mention standing under the midday sun with nearly her whole body covered in black clothes. A few drops of sweat were already falling from her chin.

  “Gotta work for that D-Rank money, I guess,” she said as she pushed her damp bangs off her forehead.

  Ignoring Izzy’s mumbling, she prepared to launch another attack in the same style as the last, hoping to strike from an even more extreme angle this time. As she swung the whip from right to left above her body, she noticed something odd. The eyestalk of the Cruelty seemed to move with her, like it was tracking her spell. She turned her own gaze from the monster’s body to its eyestalk as she arced the whip downward. Sure enough, the eye was following the whip’s movement. That is—until the moment before impact, when it abruptly looked to the left and disappeared.

  As a result of splitting her focus, Adah’s stomping right foot slipped out from under her. The skinny heel snapped off her shoe, and she went tumbling to the ground.

  “Motherfucker,” she spat, all too conscious of the onlooker who had pulled out their camera earlier. Her staccato swearing continued as she got back on her feet.

  However, the embarrassment would be worth it if her prediction was correct. The movement and timing of that eyestalk couldn’t have been a coincidence. She just needed to have her theory proven, and simply by looking to her left, it was. In the exact direction the eyestalk had turned, there she found the recently teleported Cruelty. Her cursing turned to chuckling real fast.

  “What are you laughing about?” Izzy asked her. “You’re burning through the rest of this week’s magic over the course of a few minutes.”

  She unclasped the chain holding her shawl together and let it fall off her shoulders to the ground. She wiped more sweat off her collarbone and neck and took a deep, cooling breath. Although there was no breeze, simply shedding her shawl and letting her skin breathe felt refreshing.

  “Can I get away with two more tries?” she asked her mascot.

  “Technically, sure,” he said. “But should you really be wasting it on a fool’s errand?”

  “Oh, Izzy. You’d better prepare a desperate apology for doubting me like that. A simple sorry won’t cut it—you’re gonna squeal.”

  He didn’t have a chance to reply before Adah summoned yet another whip. At last she could revel in the thrill of it, appreciate the feeling of the wind blowing against her skin, and smile ear-to-ear with victory in her sights. She wasted no time or energy with fancy tricks this time around, bringing the whip down towards the Cruelty with a straightforward swing. It was a lackadaisical attack, as she was more concerned with watching where the bastard would be looking. Right before the whip made contact, the eyestalk turned right, and—

  [Sparkling Strike!]

  A white star shot out her from left palm in the same direction the eyestalk had turned.

  An eerie groan filled the park, like the creaking of a door to an ancient tomb was being played through a loudspeaker. The Cruelty lay to the right of its original location with its mouth hanging open. As usual, it looked unharmed by Adah’s attack, but with one key difference from every past attempt.

  The eyestalk atop its body was missing. Blasted clean off.

  “Take that, you piece of shit!” Adah screamed at the monster, somehow overpowering its ghoulish lament. She shook her foot with the broken heel and said, “Looks like we both lost something today.”

  “What did you just do?” Izzy asked.

  “Simple strategy, Izzy,” she said. “The reason humans rule over pigs in this world and the reason you better be singing my praises the whole way home.”

  Once she understood, the trick really was simple. The Cruelty only had one eye: the one on that periscope eyestalk. After she started watching what that was doing, she could figure everything out. The fact that the monster had an eye at all meant it needed to rely on a sense of sight to survive. That’s why it had to watch her whip to know when to dodge. Then, the way it suddenly looked away before the whip hit confirmed Adah’s second theory: that it controlled its teleportation by sight as well. It had to look at the spot it wanted to teleport to.

  With that knowledge, she could react to that sightline herself. [Nightwind Whip] might be too slow to capitalize on predicting the Cruelty’s movement, but she could time her [Sparkling Strike] to connect before the monster could respond. She had doubts about the star’s ability to pierce to the monster’s core, but if she could take out the eyestalk, then she’d disable its teleportation as well. All that was left after that was to deal the finishing blow.

  She approached the incapacitated monster, which couldn’t move anything but its giant, moaning mouth. She summoned her whip one last time, a wicked smile carved into her face. With an elation that would only be rivaled once she took these heels off later, she swung at the Cruelty in a simple arc. The whip’s impact burst into black smoke, the echoing lament faded away, and the monster dissipated—dead to rights.

  From the far side of the park and across the adjacent street, Adah heard an unfamiliar sound: the cheering of a crowd. They weren’t particularly loud. There were maybe only a couple dozen voices crying out, but it was the first time anyone had ever cheered for her.

  Though, the more she listened, they weren’t actually cheering for her.

  They didn’t yell her name. After all, they didn’t know her. Since they had no clue who the girl standing before them was, their cheers soon mellowed into whispered questions. Have you seen her before? What’s her name again? Does that pig have wings?

  Adah couldn’t blame them. She had always been a nobody, and had therefore grown used to this kind of reception.

  But wasn’t that exactly the problem?

  A semi-viral video, a new name and costume, a hard-fought victory—what did any of that matter to someone who didn’t know her? She was one magical girl out of thousands, and she’d be nothing but a gimmicky one if all she did was dress up like she’d just came from a Baphometic funeral. She had to be Twilight Heartbreak.

  She needed to show them who they were cheering for and do it in such a way that they couldn’t forget about her. She’d make every one of these people want to look her up as soon as they got home. No, she’d make them do it now.

  Maybe she herself was still figuring out who exactly Twilight Heartbreak was, but she had an idea. At the very least, she was a magical girl who wouldn’t put up with obscurity. She’d do whatever it took to rise from the ashes of her dreams and climb to the same heights as someone like Pureheart.

  The words were still coming together in her mind, but she knew she needed to tell this crowd they hadn’t witnessed just another magical girl. These were the first steps of the girl known as Heartbreak.

  Adah spotted the boy with the camera again and began to walk toward him. That was the ideal target to focus her attention on.

  Yet, she never made it over to him.

  She’d forgotten that her outfit had suffered a bit of damage during this fight, and stepped forward expecting her right heel to be supported by a couple extra inches of shoe. That unexpected broken heel, combined with her general exhaustion, sent her tumbling to the ground once again. She managed to land on her hands and knees instead of completely eating dirt, but the fall filled her with the same amount of shame either way.

  “That’s enough of this shit,” she muttered under her breath as she pushed herself back onto her feet.

  “Are you hurt?” Izzy waddled over to check on her.

  She answered with an incomprehensible yell. All the words had fallen out of her head when she tumbled. Instead, she only had one thing on her mind now: dealing with that camera that was pointed at her.

  But first, she had to take care of these shoes. She lifted her left leg up and then swung it down with another yell, snapping off her remaining heel and leaving her shoes equally flatfooted. She snatched up the loose heel from the ground and then strode unimpeded to the boy with the camera.

  He had been staring down at the camera’s digital display as Adah approached, finally looking up when he noticed her crossing the street in his direction. Up close, he looked a little scrawnier than average, with wildly wavy brown hair and a pair of glasses that threatened to fall off his face any time he moved his head.

  “Show me what you got,” Adah said.

  “What?” he said.

  “Photos, videos, whatever you took. You’re going to do me a favor, okay?”

  A look of confusion was still plastered across his face, but he pulled up the gallery on his camera’s display and turned it to face Adah. He cycled through the images, pausing to bookmark a file whenever Adah pointed at the screen. The group of nearby onlookers started whispering again, which was to be expected. Usually magical girls would fly away with a wink and a smile, but Adah had stomped over to them with a scowl.

  “This one. This one. Hmm,” she stopped to consider the video that was playing on the camera display. “And that one, too.”

  “Are you sure?” the boy asked. “I can delete it.”

  “Just post them,” she said. “And my name is Twilight Heartbreak. If you shorten it, you better use ‘Heartbreak’ and not the other half.”

  He looked at her with his lips pursed and an eyebrow raised.

  “Here’s your payment,” she said, dropping her broken heel into his hand. “That’ll be worth something someday.”

  She didn’t wait for a reply before taking flight. Maybe leaving all of a sudden would give her a mysterious air, but she mostly did it because she could feel all of the blood rushing to her face. Even if Izzy told her to get back on the ground soon, she couldn’t very well leave by walking after how she’d acted back there.

  She must have had at least a little essence to spare, since for now Izzy only remarked, “That was an interesting approach to publicity.”

  “Waiting around got me nowhere,” she said. “Might as well see how asking for what I want works out.”

  When she got back to the agency dorm, the first thing she did was take a shower. The wind might have dried up her sweat as she flew, but she could still feel its residue on her skin. Once she was dried off and dressed, she went down to the agency lobby to kill time until dinner. She brought her phone along for some mindless browsing, though that plan was soon derailed.

  For the second time in a week, her notifications were flooded. That boy had listened to her and posted the two photos she’d picked out, tagging her Twilight Heartbreak account in both.

  Although she hadn’t realized it in the moment, the photos were a perfect pair. They told a little story, even. The first was taken right after she’d unclasped her shawl; the shot had captured the moment just as the fabric began to fall to the ground. The second photo was the first proper action shot as a magical girl that Adah had ever seen of herself. The boy had zoomed out, showing the whole length of Adah’s smoky [Nightwind Whip] as it formed in her fist. The effects of the spell naturally created some dramatic lighting around her. When paired with the first photo, this made her appear like a villain who’d gotten fed up with her opponents and finally busted out her ultimate weapon.

  The reality had been a little clumsier than that, but the internet didn’t need to know all that.

  Although the photos garnered some interest, it was the video he posted after them that really blew up. The overall views weren’t as high as the video of her attacking Izzy, but the engagement on it had exploded.

  The video began after she’d already defeated the Cruelty, and luckily also after she fell while approaching the bystanders. It started with her screaming, then snapping her second heel off. Despite her distance from the camera, her primal yell came through loud and clear. The boy had shared it with the caption: “A magical girl called Twilight Heartbreak did this then gave me a piece of her shoe…” He knew how to draw attention to his posts, at least.

  From a quick look at his profile, he seemed active in some magical girl fan circles, and this video tapped into that network of diehards in a way the other hadn’t. A one-off video of a random magical girl freaking out was only something for casual fans to gawk at. But a video shared by one of their own, with an odd story attached to it, was something true fanatics would actually want to discuss. The comments were still a mixed bag, but they were headed in the right direction. More importantly, they were proof she’d left a mark on the people for whom magical girls weren’t merely a cute distraction but something to passionately follow.

  753_nagomi: more like twilight shoebreak

  obscureZen: The gap between the final boss atmosphere in your other post and the spoiled brat vibe here is ideal. You have found the ideal magical girl.

  ? FoggyPetals: youre always saying shit like this

  goodn1ght: why is she so SWEATY

  ? 3amcoffeechug: dunno, but she could probably sell it

  ? PriKureCreature: already selling her shoes. bottled sweat next

  love4amu: i made her photo my wallpaper. i made her scream my alarm

  magifan2002: why no video of her magic? i wanted to see

  Comments were one thing, but the will of humanity was another. She didn’t just need people to find her interesting, she needed them to want her to fight for them. The best indicator of her success on that front awaited her in the Magiapp.

  FP: 136 ?? 201

  Level Up: [Sparkling Strike] | Spell Level 2

  She’d crested a second FP threshold in a single week. After years spent stuck at double digits, she’d already more than doubled her power.

  “Another Level 2,” she said. “But the description stayed the same?”

  "Some level ups are simply increases in power,” Izzy explained. “Augmentation will come later, should you manage to keep up this pace.”

  Adah smiled as she typed up a reply to the video post.

  “I don’t plan on slowing down,” she said, and sent the reply.

  twilit_heart: Some things are cuter when they’re broken ??????