The voices of Emi and Clair grew louder in Adah’s mind from then on. She wasn’t sure if they had started yelling or if this was just an effect of Clair amplifying her own magic. Emi’s voice, which usually tiptoed out of her even at her most excited, now boomed and echoed inside Adah’s head.

  Though Emi’s voice traveled out into the world freely, her own mind seemed insulated from everyone but Clair. Ami called out to her sister repeatedly, telling her to ignore Clair, to kick her out, but got no response. Instead, Clair cranked the volume of their conversation up even louder, to the point their voices threatened to drown out Adah’s own thoughts.

  “What the hell is going on?” Ami shouted to Adah. “Are you going to help her or not?”

  From her defensive position, Ami could probably see little of the battle in DreamRise’s half of the arena. All she could do was listen in as Clair prodded at her sister’s mind.

  “We’re trying,” Adah said as she flew in pursuit of Iris.

  Once she’d left the pillar, she’d found herself struggling for breath. She could only hope Iris was in a similar state despite the air of confidence she projected. With one or two good hits, or even a long enough chase, hopefully she could burn through enough of Iris’s magic to force her to give up one of the shields. Then they could put an end to this duel, along with whatever psychic damage Clair was inflicting upon Emi.

  Over Emi and Clair’s voices and Adah’s haggard breathing, Ami yelled back, “It doesn’t sound like it!”

  Adah and Rika were doing all they could, but they couldn’t do much.

  With Iosk sealed away, Ekki was freed up to turn the tables on Rika. He went on the aggressive, placing portals on the far sides of obstacles and popping out in Rika’s blind spots a moment later. Her attempts at evasion were as effective as rushing through a hall of mirrors—what looked like a clear path of retreat one moment suddenly became a solid wall the next as Ekki cut her off. His attacks and feints slowly forced her to the arena floor, where she could at least rule out one angle of approach. Of course, this brought her farther away from both Emi and the DreamRise pillar.

  Adah’s hunt for Iris proved equally disastrous. Iris had fled toward Sunbright’s half of the arena, and with how slow Adah had been to react, she had managed to slip away entirely. Adah had no intention of falling for the same kind of ambush as she had in the tunnel earlier, so she chased her opponent cautiously.

  She’d let her [Parietal Perception] slip during their tunnel brawl, but had reactivated it back when she met Iris atop the DreamRise pillar. The spell wasn’t omnipotent, so the yellow trail that tracked Iris became disjointed. Whenever the girl got too far ahead of Adah, or hid behind too many layers of obstacles, Adah lost any advantage the spell provided. She was forced to peek around the edges of obstacles and check over her shoulder constantly, only advancing at full speed when Iris’s path was clearly visible. The arena which had felt so small when flying at top speed now seemed virtually endless, with more angles of attack than one person could check alone.

  The repetitiveness of the simple colors and shapes of the obstacles also became disorienting. Adah was always spinning around to watch her flanks, and as she moved from one red cube to another, searching around every corner of every side, she lost track of where she had last been. Surely her confusion was due in part to Iris bashing fists and elbows into her face a dozen times. Emi and Clair’s voices, which overwhelmed all other noise, made it even harder to think. What had started as a calm conversation between them had morphed into an interrogation. Or perhaps a torture session.

  “You ignored it,” Clair said. “You thought you could put it off, but like a disease festering inside of you, that only made it worse. Now the pain hurts too much to ignore.”

  “I wasn’t ignoring it! I couldn’t ignore it! I’ve always been trying to figure it out!” Emi yelled back.

  “You haven’t done anything. You said it yourself: you wanted to be a magical girl so you could have fun. It only makes sense that you’d quit as soon as you had to make a difficult choice. There are only two ways to move forward, but you’re scared of both of them.”

  “I’m not! I just… want to be sure.”

  “We’re nothing alike,” Clair said, her voice utterly bored. “You hate yourself, and that’s something I could never understand.”

  Emi was silent.

  “You know, I can see it all from here. All of you,” Clair continued. “Not that there’s much to see. You ran away and curled up in a corner of your mind like a skittish kitten. That made it obvious right away—you’re weak. There’s a mismatch between you and the world, that much I can relate to. But your reaction to it is embarrassing.”

  “Embarrassing?” Emi repeated.

  “You hide. You admit defeat without even fighting. You surrender to the world and waste away in your little corner, only to poke your head out later and find that the world has lived and died without caring one bit about you. You let yourself be forgotten because it’s just too scary to do anything else. It makes me sick.”

  “W-What about you?” Emi asked.

  “You think we’re the same because I prefer to keep to myself?” Clair said. “There’s a difference between being a quiet mouse and a stalking panther. I make the world deal with me. I won’t watch the cities rise and fall from afar—I’ll burn them down. This world is going to acknowledge me, even if I have to carve my name into the skin of everyone who’d rather pretend I don’t exist. This world—these people—they don’t like us. The difference between you and me is that you said, ‘They’re right,’ but I said, ‘Fuck them.’ You might have been satisfied with fading away when you were by yourself, but you’re not alone anymore. Now you’re causing trouble for all your friends.”

  Ami shouted to Adah from across the arena, “Hurry up and get this bitch out of Emi’s head!”

  Adah had to find Iris. The girl wasn’t behind any of the obstacles or inside any of the tunnels Adah had checked, but she couldn’t rule out any of those locations either. For all she knew, Iris had slipped out of sight and hid somewhere Adah had looked in the past. Her trail was too spotty. Old parts of the trail would disappear after some time, but Adah had lost track of which parts were fresh and which were fading. It seemed as though Iris was also retracing her own steps, leaving circles and loops of magic for Adah to get lost in. Just like at the start of the duel, Iris only intended to waste time.

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  “Adah!” Ami called out again.

  “I’m trying!” Adah yelled back.

  Why did this duel feel so lopsided all of a sudden? It shouldn’t—their team still had every tool they needed to win. Yet, all the threads of their strategy felt like they were unraveling.

  It wasn’t just Adah’s own exhaustion behind this feeling. In chasing after Iris, Adah had left Rika completely isolated. Rika was capable in combat—she had held her own against Ekki during most of this duel—but the shifting conditions of the match had left her without a real objective. She was up against DreamRise’s most troublesome fighter, battling alone with the incapacitated body of her teammate hanging above her. What was she supposed to make of her role at this point? When was the last time Adah had said anything to her?

  Ami clearly fared no better. She’d been alone from the start, left with nothing to do as none of the DreamRise members had ever made a play for Izzy. Ami made for an ideal defender on paper, but how long could she handle watching all the action from the sidelines? Now it wasn’t just physical showdowns Ami was forced to observe, but her own sister’s mental battle as well. Her patience would be wearing thin. She’d put herself in front of a dozen Cruelties for the sake of her sister, and now she was being asked to sit back while Clair aimed a dagger at Emi’s heart? The anger in her voice made it clear she couldn’t hold back much longer.

  If Rika and Ami felt isolated, what must Emi be dealing with? She couldn’t even talk with her team, and Clair was capitalizing on that fact to tear her down from within. Everything Adah knew about Sweetdream Soulslip’s magic implied that she put her targets to sleep, but there was clearly much more to her spells than that. The way she could share her vision and her ability to transmit her voice through Emi’s own magic—it was something much closer to mind control. Emi was facing all those unknowns alone.

  And what was their team doing for Emi but flying around aimlessly? They’d stopped playing to their strengths long ago. Their sharpshooter was constantly on the run from a steel-plated bulldozer. The heart of their morale was left forgotten on the back burner and was starting to boil over. Their shooting star was suspended in darkness. As for Adah… when was the last time she had said or done anything useful for her teammates? Most of her energy and words during this duel had been aimed at hurting Iris. She’d been the first to lose sight of her team’s goal. She was wasting everything her team had given her—all their efforts and all their trust.

  What was she, as captain, supposed to do to bring them back together? She was struggling to hold herself together. The walls were closing in. As she searched for a way out of this trap, her mind only got lost in a haze. She began to feel as alone as the rest of her team must.

  “What do you think they’ll do after all this?” Clair said. “Your friends are all fighting so hard out there, while you’re hiding in here. Are they going to keep you around, when you let them down when they needed you most?”

  “We’re not like that,” Emi said. “We’re a team. We’ve never left anyone behind.”

  “Then where are they? Why haven’t they come for you?”

  “They’re… fighting.”

  “Without you,” Clair said with a laugh. “So they decided it would be easier to win on their own than to drag you along? Is that it?”

  “No… that’s not…”

  In her search for Iris, Adah had ended up deep in Sunbright’s half of the arena. She floated in midair, scanning all around herself for any sign of the other girl’s trail. As she turned, she locked eyes with Ami. Her teammate’s eyes burned, lighting up like a flame leaping to the sky after a spray of kerosene.

  The kettle had boiled over.

  “What are you wasting time for?” Ami shouted at Adah. This was her true voice—no magic. “Emi needs us.”

  Ami moved off the pillar and flew toward Adah, then jerked to a halt in front of her. Her fists were clenched and pressed against the sides of her thighs. Judging by the tense look in her face, her jaw was squeezed just as tight.

  “I need to find Iris,” Adah said.

  “We need to help Emi,” Ami spat back.

  “It’s the same thing!”

  Ami wouldn’t know, Adah realized. She had been stuck back here, unable to see what Iris had done. And no one had told her what was going on. Their team communication had been dead this whole duel. Why would Ami still trust in the plan when she’d been left out of it?

  You’ve fucked up.

  All those thoughts flickered in Adah’s mind at once. Then they all vanished.

  A new silence took over—a pure, uninterrupted silence as quiet as the last moment before slipping into a dream.

  Adah saw something. Someone.

  A girl falling to the ground. It was Emi.

  The image overwrote her own vision like the first layer of paint over graffiti. The remnants of what her own eyes saw bled through, but were dominated by this new image. Visions of a different part of the arena were taking over her sense of sight.

  This was more of Clair’s magic, she was sure. It was the same spell that Clair used on Rika during their last mission. Only now, Clair was sharing her vision with Adah.

  Not just Adah, judging by the way Ami froze up. Just like with her voice, Clair was sharing this vision with everyone in the duel.

  By the time Adah figured it all out, it was too late. The vision of Emi faded, and a cacophony of noise flooded her ears. All the sounds that had been blocked out since Clair first entered Emi’s mind returned: the announcer’s voice over the loudspeaker, the rumbling of the crowd behind the glass, even the wind left in Ami’s wake.

  Ami flew past Adah without another word. After what she’d heard throughout this duel, and what she had just seen, nothing could keep her on their half of the arena any longer. She shot off just as fast as she had that day at the farm, leaving the Sunbright pillar undefended.

  This was DreamRise’s win condition. This was what Iris had been waiting for.

  Iris appeared in the open for the first time since Adah had chased after her, emerging from a tunnel on the ground near the far wall of the arena. She gunned straight for Sunbright’s pillar, and Adah shot forward to cut her off. Iris might have gotten a head start, but she’d have to climb up to the top of the pillar while Adah could simply fly straight ahead. Adah had a chance to stop her.

  “Rika,” she called out as she flew, “where’s Ekki?”

  “I don’t know,” Rika said. “I didn’t see where he put his last portal.”

  “Find him!”

  Adah almost wanted to laugh. She’d been right about DreamRise’s plan. It was a ridiculous idea, but if it worked, the fans wouldn’t stop talking about it. It was exactly the way someone like Iris would want to win.

  Adah knew what Iris wanted to do, and she wanted more than anything to stop her.

  So why?

  Why couldn’t she fly any faster? Why was she falling behind Iris? Why was she losing?

  A foggy portal like a storm cloud materialized behind Izzy. Iris reached the top of the pillar and swooped in toward the pig with her arms outstretched. Adah thrust her own arm out, but it was pointless. She was still ten feet away when Iris wrapped her arms around Izzy.

  In the same second she grabbed him, she hurled him into Ekki’s portal. The fog swallowed him whole, then closed shut like a winking eye.

  Adah landed atop the pillar, stumbling around as she fought to stay on her feet. Iris had remained on this side of the portal and collapsed onto her back near where Adah landed. She spread out her arms and legs like a starfish and smiled, a blissful look on her face.

  “It’s not—” Adah began to talk, no louder than a whisper, but stopped herself short after she turned around to see what she could of the DreamRise half of the arena.

  As expected, Ekki had caught Izzy as the pig popped out of a portal he’d placed at the other end of the field, and was carrying him toward the DreamRise pillar. He only had a short distance left to travel; he must have summoned his portal at the greatest range possible, allowing him to stay near his team’s goal while still connecting with Iris. It would be a matter of seconds before he returned Izzy to the top of the pillar, but that might be enough time for Rika or Ami to stop him.

  But Ekki wasn’t the only DreamRise member on that side of the arena. Iris had released Clair from her shield. Rika and Ami had noticed Ekki, and were hurtling toward him, but Clair was moving to intercept them.

  She threw herself in front of the both of them, clumped in their rush as they were, and caused all three of them to tangle up in a twister of magic flight. They crashed into the side of the pillar and dropped out of Adah’s sight.

  Ekki was home free. He landed atop the pillar with Izzy cradled under one arm.

  The loudspeakers buzzed, signaling the end of the duel. The buzzing noise filled the arena, along with the roar of the crowd, but Adah couldn’t hear any of it. Her head was filled with Iris’s voice.

  “This is what heartbreak feels like.”