Adah didn’t try to delude herself, nor did she want to.

  DreamRise had been the favorites to advance through Round 2 even before the duel. Once they won that, the fan voting became nothing but a formality.

  The duel between their teams had been a last ditch effort. It was Adah’s way of throwing a wrench into the machinations of Secretary Thibault, and of spitting in Iris’s face while she was at it. Iris couldn’t refuse a challenge issued in front of a crowd like that, and maybe if Sunbright had beaten DreamRise head-to-head, they could have swayed enough fans to sneak into the next round on a slim margin. Even if they didn’t, at least they could take solace in embarrassing Iris. Then they’d all have something to laugh about while DreamRise enjoyed the real prize.

  In the end, none of that came to pass. They had lost—in the duel and in Round 2. The duel had taken place the day before Round 2 voting, so DreamRise’s victory was fresh in every fan’s mind when they cast their vote. DreamRise advanced with nearly 80% of the region’s vote.

  The atmosphere at the Sunbright agency office had been like ice ever since the duel—ice which suddenly shattered when the voting results came in. Their loss becoming official set loose all of the girls’ emotions, though none of them were ready to face each other yet. They each holed up in their own room.

  While Adah was pacing around her room, she heard a muffled yell from across the hall, followed by a heavy thud. That was surely Ami venting her anger—and probably throwing something after. Rika and Emi weren’t the types to express themselves so loudly, but the fact they remained locked in their rooms proved they were still feeling the same emotions inside. Adah, for her part, couldn’t bring herself to talk to any of her teammates yet either.

  She had thought she’d been mad during the duel, but her frustration now was much more severe. It wasn’t even losing that bothered her—it was how losing closed a door for them. Sunbright was out of the IndieMagie, and they’d have no more chances to prove themselves in that competition. No more chances to show they’d learned from their mistakes. The story of their IndieMagie was written, and there was nothing they could take back or redo.

  They were trapped, forced to sit with this loss and think about everything they could have done differently. If they had just done this. If they had only considered that. Everything would have been different.

  That was what made Adah bury her face in her pillow and scream.

  After a night of such muffled rage, she woke the next day to find herself ravenously hungry. Apparently all of her teammates were in the same position. When she opened her door, the other three girls were already standing in the hallway. They turned to her in unison, and her stomach growled as a greeting. Her teammates nodded back at her, perhaps still not ready for words, and they went downstairs together to throw together some kind of breakfast.

  Once they had all found something to munch on and gathered in the agency lobby, Adah was the first to speak.

  “This fucking sucks,” she said.

  She leaned back in one of the lobby’s leather chairs, letting her head sink into its plush cushion. Her head still throbbed in the aftermath of her brawl with Iris, and the rest of her body was still tender from Ekki’s slam. Somehow, though, she looked worse than she felt. Most of the right side of her face was bruised, with a black eye spreading as far as a couple of inches from the socket down to her cheek. Her magic had protected the bones in her nose, but it was still swollen and the skin gashed along its bridge. That cut, along with her split knuckles, was bandaged up.

  “I’ve been trying to think about it this way,” Rika said. “Maybe all those votes were on a razor-thin margin. Maybe everyone had a really hard time making up their mind, and in the end they just barely decided to vote for DreamRise. When I think about it like that, I can kind of pretend everyone in that eighty percent still actually likes us a lot.”

  “But they don’t like us enough to vote for us,” Ami sighed. “They were happy to put us through the first round, but now they said it’s time for us to go home.”

  “Thanks for playing,” Emi said.

  Everyone was talking now. That was progress, but something uncomfortable remained in the air between them. Beyond the frustration of losing, there was definitely another feeling burning inside each of her teammates. She wasn’t such a clueless captain that she couldn’t recognize that. She’d been fully prepared for Ami to let loose on her after the duel, but even those fiery words never came. Everyone was stuck in their own heads.

  Trying to guess at what everyone was feeling made thinking up the right words to say as a captain even more difficult. Since she couldn’t think of what to say, silence soon reclaimed the agency lobby.

  At least until Grace entered through the front door. She carried in the crook of her arm a canvas tote bag she used for grocery shopping; it was already filled with whatever she had purchased during today’s trip.

  Grace stood there with her free hand on her hip and looked around the lobby.

  “Why do you all look so miserable?” she asked.

  Ami squinted at Adah as if to confirm someone else had heard the same question she just did.

  “Why do you think?” she said.

  Grace shook her head and walked toward the office’s kitchenette. As she put away whatever she’d been carrying in that bag, she continued talking to the girls.

  “You should be celebrating. I thought you’d all be wailing on each other by the time I got back.”

  “Rika already tried to give us the glass half-full angle,” Adah said.

  Grace poked her head out of the kitchenette and stared at the girls through the back office doorway.

  “You really don’t know?” she said.

  “Know what?”

  Grace shut the fridge and came back into the lobby with the empty grocery bag folded under her arm.

  “When was the last time you looked at your phones?”

  “Not since before the duel,” Adah said, and the other girls all nodded to indicate the same.

  “So you didn’t check the Magiapp yesterday? Or this morning?”

  The girls answered in their trademarked rapid fire:

  “Shut mine off as soon as we lost.”

  “I couldn’t bring myself to go on the internet at all.”

  “I sealed the evil away.”

  “I got pissed last night and threw it through my bedroom wall,” Ami finished their roll call. Everyone looked at her after, and the blank expression on her face showed she wasn’t joking.

  Grace took off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger.

  “We’ll deduct that from your next paycheck,” she said, sounding exhausted even though it wasn’t even midday yet. “Anyway, you should really turn your phones back on. There’s quite a nice surprise waiting for you.”

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  They all reached into their pockets (with the exception of Ami) to pull out their phones. Despite wanting to avoid looking at their phones, they were all true-blooded members of the digital generation and couldn’t shed the habit of carrying the devices with them. While the other girls’ phones booted back up, Ami rushed upstairs to dislodge hers from the wall it was apparently stuck in.

  As their screens lit up, so did the eyes of the three girls.

  During the frenzy of the IndieMagie, Adah had been consumed by thoughts of their rivalry with DreamRise. She’d completely forgotten the reason her team joined the competition in the first place. The IndieMagie was a means to an end, a launchpad to accomplish their true goal. In this moment, they’d finally achieved that goal.

  FP: 5853

  Adah closed the Magiapp and reloaded it, but the number was still there.

  The noises that came out of Rika and Emi’s mouths confirmed they had seen the same kind of data on their own screens. The three of them joined in a chorus of nonsense. They chanted in some kind of proto-language that could probably be traced back to the Paleolithic Age. Perhaps a trio of magical girls discovering their weapons wasn’t so different from cavemen discovering fire. At the very least, they were dancing in circles around the coffee table as if it was humanity’s first campfire.

  Their primal ritual was interrupted by the dying throes of a mammoth from upstairs, or a sound similar enough.

  “Sixteen!” Ami’s shout easily carried all the way from her bedroom to the agency lobby. A stampede of thundering footsteps soon carried the girl herself back downstairs. “I’m sixteen levels short!”

  The girls fell silent and stopped their dancing. An awkwardness started sticking to them, and they each searched for something to say that might clear the atmosphere in the room again. They were all still at the height of their own revelry, and no one wanted to say anything glib.

  Earning a weapon was a binary system—either you had the necessary FP or you didn’t, and Ami did not. The other girls wanted to be sympathetic to that disappointment, but at the same time…

  “Sixteen is nothing at this point,” Grace said what they were all thinking. “One good post on your socials could push you over.”

  Ami walked over and plopped onto her spot on the couch again. She stared at her phone a while longer, during which no one else spoke. After some time, she placed her hands under her chin in a dainty gesture atypical of her usual demeanor.

  “I guess I’ll just have to politely ask Seb to ghostwrite something for me,” she said with a smile.

  She was no good at hiding her intentions—her expression revealed whatever she planned to request from Seb would entail much more than simple ghostwriting. There was no use thinking about it now, though. More importantly, Ami seemed to have recovered from the initial shock of falling a step behind the rest of her team.

  Now that they’d dealt with the small asterisk next to this newly completed goal, something occurred to Adah. She called out to Izzy, who then appeared in his physical form atop the coffee table.

  “Get down from there,” Adah scolded him. “We eat off that.”

  “These hooves are clean,” he retorted, holding a front leg up. “Each time I return, they’re a fresh existence in this world. If anything, this table is dirtying me.”

  Now wasn’t the time for this argument—not that she had enough understanding of mascots and their forms to know if he was right or not anyway. She quickly changed gears.

  “Whatever,” she said. “More importantly, why didn’t you tell me about my FP? Usually you let me know when you sense this kind of change.”

  He gave a pigly shrug. “I wasn’t keen on risking injury, given the mood you’ve been in the past two days. I figured I’d leave you alone for a while, lest you do to me what you did to the flower girl. Besides, I was certain you’d find out for yourself—most nights you check your phone out of habit.”

  Adah wasn’t sure what gave him the impression she would ever try to hurt him, but in the end it didn’t matter why he’d kept quiet. All that mattered was that she’d hit a milestone that seemed unreachable even a couple of months ago.

  “Setting aside one slight delay,” Grace said, glancing at Ami, “this is what you should all be focusing on right now. Your goal was never to win the IndieMagie. It was to get your weapons. That’s what you fought for and earned over this past month, and you should be proud of it no matter the outcome of one competition. Not to mention, you have expectations to live up to.”

  “Expectations?” Adah said.

  “Your FP levels aren’t experience points,” Grace said. “They’re the expectations of your fans and the people who support you. They’re thinking of you, even though most of them have never met you. They don’t want to see their heroes—magical girls they’ve invested their hearts into—give up after one failure. If they thought you were finished after that duel, you would’ve lost FP, not gained it. These fans have watched you get knocked down, now they want to see you get back up.

  “You’ve locked yourselves into just as long of a journey as those DreamRise kids have. The fans you’ve gained and kept throughout all this—they’re a special kind. Instead of fans, you could call them ‘believers.’ They want to believe in a miracle, in the idea that you all will do something incredible some day. Those are the expectations you have to live up to. Well, you don’t have to do anything, but you’ll be giving up those weapons pretty quick if you keep moping around. And for the record: I’m one of those believers.”

  The girls all sat quietly as they processed Grace’s words. The vibe in the room had shifted more than once over the past few minutes. Their mopiness had soared to elation upon discovering the surge in their FP levels and, now that Grace had prompted them to consider the meaning behind those numbers, an entirely different affect took over. This new feeling was resolute like determination, yet also queasy like anxiety. Adah didn’t quite understand it, but she knew where it came from.

  The girls all wanted to believe in the journey Grace described. They wanted to shake off this loss and get back on their feet, but they felt like they were standing on unstable ground. More pains than a black eye and smashed nose had stuck with them from their duel. Their weaknesses had been exposed and exploited, and they’d crumbled under the pressure of a superior opponent. Adah could tell—they were all worried that, if they faced greater challenges in the future, their team would unravel like that again.

  Seeing that none of the other girls were ready to speak up, Adah felt compelled to get something off her chest. She still wasn’t sure these were the right words, but they at least came from the right feeling.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to her teammates. “I let you down as a captain. I came up with a plan, but then I ran off and left you all alone while I tried to settle a grudge. I told you to trust my judgment, then I… I guess I didn’t use my judgment at all.”

  Ami stood up and pressed a hand to her chest. “No, you were still right anyway. If I hadn’t lost my cool and stayed with Izzy, then Iris never would’ve gotten past me. When I thr—uh—when my phone slipped out of my hand earlier, it was because I was pissed at myself.”

  “I didn’t fight back,” Emi said, standing up next to her sister. “Clair was right about me being scared, but I shouldn’t have been. I shouldn’t have doubted you.”

  Rika, still sitting in her chair, held up both her hands and said, “And I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  They all laughed together, and that was enough to break through the uncertainty of the moment. They weren’t free from their anxieties just yet, but they could rest assured they would face those fears together as comrades. They’d walk forward in the future, rather than stay laying down.

  “That’s more like it,” Grace said with a smile. “It’s good that you’re motivated because you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you. It’s time we start focusing on the other half of your job.”

  “What other half?” Adah asked.

  “I can count on you to play around with new spells and weapons all day long,” Grace explained. “When it comes to getting practice for fighting, I’m not worried about you. You’re more than just soldiers, though. You’re public figures. This is an agency, and you’re talent. I said your FP levels aren’t experience points, and that goes for both what they represent and how you gain them. If you want to get stronger, you need to draw more attention to yourselves, and know what to do with that attention once you’ve got it.”

  “Iris is a master of that,” Rika sighed.

  “Exactly,” Grace said. “That’s how she wrapped everyone, including you, around her finger. She turned the IndieMagie into her personal stage, and now her team is reaping the rewards. This competition worked out okay for us, too, but I think the past few weeks have made clear the difference between someone who knows how to use the spotlight to their advantage and someone who doesn’t.”

  She let those last words hang in the air a while. Neither Adah or her teammates had any interest in arguing otherwise. As they thought back to every interaction with DreamRise, it was clear Iris had been dictating the pace.

  “What does that mean, though?” Adah asked. “Are you going to hire a PR coach or something?”

  “I had thought about that, but it wouldn’t work out. Let’s just say you girls have unique strengths, so it’s going to take a unique mentor to get through to you. Someone who can match your tempo. So I found someone a bit more free-spirited.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” Rika said.

  “If they’re free-spirited by this agency’s standards, they’re probably a threat to public safety,” Adah agreed.

  “Well, that’s not a problem,” Grace said. “She’s not really a part of the public, so to speak.”

  Seeing the confusion spreading across the four girls’ faces, she skipped ahead to the main point.

  “She lives in a cabin at the edge of the region. She’s a bit of a recluse, but in her prime she was a fairly popular magical girl. Nowadays, she’s kind of like a park ranger who handles Cruelties that pop up in the wilderness, so she’s got plenty of spare time to teach you. She’s agreed to let you stay with her for a week, sort of like a bootcamp. We’ll head up there tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” the girls cried out in unison. “What about our weapons?”

  “Pick them out during the drive up there,” Grace said with a shrug. “It’s better if we leave sooner—it’ll help take your mind off things. Plus, I think you’ll have fun with her. Her magic is a little… unusual.”

  “‘Unusual’ meaning what?”

  “Well,” Grace said slowly, “she’s Untethered.”