From the inside, Ketzia’s cabin appeared much larger than it had from the clearing. Adah had expected the interior to look like something from a horror movie—lots of small, individual rooms connected to a couple of narrow hallways with maybe a slightly more spacious living room off to the side. However, this cabin had more in common with an upscale condo than the set of some B-movie.

  The whole front half of the interior was open concept, with a sunken entrance area that served as a sort of mudroom leading right into the main living space of the cabin. You could flow from kitchen to dining area to living room uninterrupted, and the whole place was so efficiently furnished that you could host a five-lane race through it without crashing into anything. Perhaps because of the wood floors and paneled walls, the cabin retained a sense of coziness despite all of the open space.

  The girls kicked off their shoes in the entranceway and followed Ketzia through the open room as she spouted off random details about where they could find forks, how long to hold down the toilet flusher, or how great the water from the faucet tasted. The tour led them to the back of the cabin, which matched more closely to Adah’s imagination. Still, the rear hall was wide enough for the four younger girls to walk shoulder to shoulder, and only branched off into three separate rooms.

  As Ketzia explained, the rightmost door led to her bedroom, while the other two were where the girls would be sleeping. They divided themselves into their natural pairs, then Ami and Emi rushed to claim the leftmost room—in other words, the room farthest from Ketzia. Adah and Rika dumped their bags on top of the beds in their room, which were surprisingly luxurious for a guest bedroom in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. That stipend Ketzia had negotiated for herself must have been hefty.

  Since Ketzia had wanted to give them a tour of her “playground,” as she called it, they didn’t spend much time in their room before heading out to regroup in the cabin entranceway. Just as Adah closed the guest room door behind her, she felt a surge of heat near her neck. She couldn’t even flinch before Lesh poofed into existence on her shoulder. His bony talons pricked her skin through her shirt, and even after the flame that marked his arrival vanished, a heat emanated from the bird’s body. Or, at least, his skeleton.

  Adah froze in place. She peered at Lesh out of the corner of her eye, but was too afraid to turn her head his way. Rika and the twins all stared bug-eyed at the bird. Adah waited to see what Lesh would do next, but he simply perched there silently.

  After a while, she asked, “Can I help you with anything?”

  It was a weird question to ask a mascot, especially someone else’s, but it was all she could think to say in this situation.

  “The prejudice of your comrades will make our job difficult,” he answered. “I thought you could pacify their fears, being that you are much alike her.”

  The bird’s manner of speaking was odd and slightly archaic. Izzy used to speak similarly, but rapidly adopted a style closer to Adah’s own as they interacted. The fact that Lesh clearly hadn’t done the same with Ketzia made Adah wonder why Izzy had been so malleable.

  “Much alike who?” she repeated.

  “Grace,” he said. “I feel the same affinity toward you both, and you carry yourselves much the same. Most of all, you are both unafraid of Ketzia.”

  Adah decided she’d be better off not mentioning that she’d recently grown quite concerned for her safety here.

  “By ‘your job,’ you mean teaching us?” she said.

  “Ketzia has an expressive mode of spellcasting,” Lesh said. “She is a performer more than she is a soldier, but that is her strength. Even before she became Untethered, her fans enjoyed watching her creativity in battle. I believe that is the sort of intuition Grace asked us to hone in you.”

  It was true that their team would benefit from learning how to put on a show. That was exactly what Iris was so good at, and likely a large part of what endeared her fans to her so passionately. That talent for theatrics also made her a smart tactician, in Adah’s view. During their teams’ duel, she could have told Clair to disable Emi without making a show of it. By broadcasting their conversation to everyone, she had also broken apart Sunbright’s unity and defenses. It was that degree of plotting, of understanding her opponent’s weaknesses, that Adah couldn’t compare to. Not yet, at least.

  Learning that mode of thinking—and from an Untethered no less—was an opportunity their team shouldn’t pass up.

  “There you are,” Ketzia said, storming down the hallway. “I’ve been calling for you, but I guess you were too busy flirting with younger women to hear me. In case you forgot, birdbrain, they’re all already magical girls.”

  Lesh teleported from Adah’s shoulder to Ketzia’s in another burst of flame, causing Adah to check if her hair had caught fire.

  “Even if such a thing were possible,” the bird said, “nothing could convince me to give up the tranquility found by staying at your side.”

  “Bah,” Ketzia said. “Save it for them. Sweet words only work on women under 30.”

  Ketzia shrugged him off her shoulder again, so he flew—without fire this time—back over to Adah.

  “Anyway,” she said, “the tour’s postponed for now. A small job came up that needs taking care of. Pesky C-Rank I can’t put off ‘til later. You girls are welcome to stay here or come with—it’ll only take a minute.”

  To Adah’s surprise, Emi immediately stepped forward.

  “I’ll go,” she said.

  Naturally, Ami joined in as soon as her sister did. Then the two of them leaned close together and whispered something Adah couldn’t make out. Whatever they were saying didn’t matter. If they were in despite their fear of Ketzia, then so was Adah. With three dominoes down, Rika had no choice but to come along for the ride as well.

  Ketzia rushed them out through the cabin’s front door again, scolding them when they all stopped at the entranceway to put their shoes back on.

  “Bad luck to wear shoes when you transform,” she said without further explanation.

  Did all these superstitions make her more or less of a witch?

  Either way, they stepped out onto the porch still in their socks. None of them felt like risking Ketzia lighting their shoes on fire if they disobeyed.

  When they got outside, though, Ami pointed at their host’s feet and said, “Then why are you wearing shoes?”

  “I’m not transforming,” Ketzia answered with a grin.

  She took off into the air, still dressed in the same tank top and jeans as earlier. If she could conjure her fire magic without transforming, of course she could handle something as simple as flight. The four girls called to their mascots and hurried through their transformations before launching after Ketzia.

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  Once airborne, the severity of the cabin’s isolation truly sunk in. Below Adah was a literal sea of trees with no end in sight. If someone had to defend all this wilderness against Cruelties, it only made sense for that person to be Untethered. Someone with a limited use of magic would be waiting a long time for backup if their spells couldn’t handle the job. Adah felt a renewed sense of appreciation for all the missions she’d completed on farms or in tiny towns—they were still less secluded than this forest.

  Ketzia continued flying over the ocean of foliage with no sign of slowing down, so Adah took the opportunity to speak with Izzy now that they had reconnected.

  “What do you think of her?” she asked privately over their magic channel.

  “She’s mercurial,” he responded, “but she knows what she’s doing. Her comfort with magic rivals that of our kind, though she is also able to amplify essence to an extreme degree. The bird is right—there is a lot you could learn from her.”

  That was a good sign. Izzy would have warned her if he found Ketzia’s use of magic dangerous. He tended to be overly cautious, even when it came to Adah’s own magic.

  Up ahead, Ketzia must have slowed down, for Adah and her teammates caught up to her a few moments later. The woman checked over her shoulder that all the girls were present, then pointed down at the sea of green below.

  “See that?” she said. “There’s the target.”

  Adah didn’t see anything but the tightly packed treetops at first, but soon her eyes picked up an abnormality. A certain clump of leaves in the distance shook abruptly. A few seconds later, another clump shook the same way. These disturbed sections of foliage slowly progressed closer and closer, one after the other. Soon, Ketzia dove straight down through the forest canopy, so Adah and the others followed.

  The woods here were dense, but not so dense that the group of magical girls couldn’t navigate with a bit of dexterity. Adah stayed as close as she could to Ketzia, trusting that she would lead them well as the warden of this forest. Ketzia soon stopped behind a particularly large tree trunk and pointed into the distance again.

  The culprit Cruelty came into view. It looked to be a sort of frog on stilts—it clung to a far-off tree with skinny legs that must have been nearly ten feet long. Hanging off the trunk sideways like that, it almost looked like a giant sign protruding from a signpost. After scanning the area, the frog opened its mouth. A tongue shot out from within, rolling toward the next tree in the Cruelty’s path like a carpet being laid out for a guest of honor. The tongue, having extended a good twenty feet at this point, latched onto the tree. A moment later, the frog itself lurched forward and landed against the new trunk, shaking it upon impact like a springy doorstop.

  “These types are less nasty than they look,” Ketzia said. “I’ll wrap this up quick. Just don’t get licked and you’ll be fine!”

  That was all the communication she offered before she flew off, leaving the girls behind. Adah turned around to confer with her teammates, who all shared the same look of confusion. None of them needed to speak to understand they were all wondering the same thing: should they help Ketzia, or would they just get in the way? Their first C-Rank had pushed their limits as a group of four. Now, with no mission brief on this frog Cruelty (unless you counted Ketzia’s one sentence of advice), they weren’t sure how to proceed.

  Ketzia soon put their uncertainty to rest.

  Positioned slightly to the side of what appeared to be the Cruelty’s path, she held a hand above her head and began to wave it in a circle. Flames spewed out from her palm, but instead of shooting straight up and dissipating, they were sucked into the trail of Ketzia’s hand movement. The flames spun around in a miniature cyclone above her head. Once satisfied with the cyclone’s intensity, she brought it down to eye level and placed her free hand on top of it. She pressed down, flattening the fire into a disc as if it was pastry dough.

  With the fiery disc spinning above her hand, she watched the frog intently. Her eyes glowed as they had when looking at Adah, flaring even brighter at one particular moment. Ketzia cranked her arm sideways and snapped her wrist in a motion like skipping a stone across water, which sent the disc of fire flying toward a tree in the distance. The disc sliced straight through the base of the tree trunk easier than any blade you’d find in a sawmill.

  This newly felled tree just so happened to be the unfortunate Cruelty’s next target. The frog’s tongue connected with the trunk only a second after Ketzia’s fire had cut through it. When the monster went to pull itself forward, all of that force instead yanked the trunk away from its roots and sent it hurtling back to the frog. The log flew through the air, then crashed sideways into the monster’s open mouth, lodging in there like a horse’s bit.

  “You’re gonna love this!” Ketzia yelled—presumably to the girls, but she looked to be so absorbed in enjoying her magic that she very well could have been talking to herself.

  She snapped, just as she had done when igniting Ami’s shirt, and set the entire log on fire. She let it burn for a moment in the staggered frog’s mouth before swinging her arms in front of herself, connecting them with a loud clap.

  Actually, it wasn’t the clap that was loud, but the blast that coincided with it. The log exploded inside the frog’s mouth like a stick of dynamite, creating an skyward eruption of flames taller than any tree in this forest. Smoldering debris shot every which way, rocketing high above the forest canopy and smacking against the tree trunks that remained standing beyond the blast radius. Ami quickly cast [Aspis Meniscus] and stood in front of the other girls to shield them from any falling or flying chunks of wood.

  The debris continued to rain down as the towering inferno at the center of the explosion shrunk and eventually faded away. Where the Cruelty had once been, now there was only a small, blackened clearing, the edges of which were ablaze in a ring of fire.

  Still hovering near the inferno she’d just created, Ketzia took a deep breath in. She swept her arm back and forth in front of her body, a bit like the conductor of a pyrotechnic symphony, each swing snuffing out more and more of the raging flames. Soon, all the debris had settled and all the fires had died. The only evidence left of Ketzia’s magic was the charred clearing she’d created. That said, it was quite the extreme piece of evidence.

  “Was all that truly necessary?” Lesh asked, flying into the scene now that the fiery chaos had settled.

  “Cut me some slack,” Ketzia said. “I wanted to show off a little for our guests. They’re being all uptight—I gotta remind them being a magical girl is supposed to be fun.”

  “I leave it to you to find an explanation for this in our next report,” the bird said. “I will take no responsibility.”

  “Oh, we’ll just say it was a lightning strike. Whole place got lit up, so it was a good thing I was here to put the fire out before it got worse.”

  “Ever the opportunist,” Lesh said.

  While Lesh flew over the battlefield to double check for lingering embers, Ketzia returned to the four girls, beaming with glee.

  “What’d ya think?” she asked, narrowing her eyes in anticipation.

  Adah didn’t know where to begin. The magic itself was spectacular—how did she manage such control of her spells? Her ability to predict the Cruelty was the complete inverse of how their team’s missions usually went, as well. Ketzia sounded like she’d fought this frog-type Cruelty before, but she’d read its next move as easily as playing against a CPU in a fighting game. The displays of sheer power a magical girl like Pureheart produced were one thing, but Ketzia fought more like an artist.

  Before Adah could think of anything to say, Ami and Emi rushed over and hovered on either side of Ketzia. Their fear of her magic had suddenly turned into fascination.

  “What kind of spellcasting was that?” Ami said.

  “It was like… freestyle,” Emi said.

  Ketzia faced each of the twins, who were looking at her with eyes like saucers, and laughed. If her goal had been to win over their hearts, she’d certainly succeeded. She’d transformed from the kind of bogeyman meant to get kids to go to bed on time into a proper folk hero. The twins’ change of heart brought Adah some relief—she hadn’t been sure how she’d convince them on her own.

  “I don’t bother with real spells nowadays,” Ketzia said. “This was just good old magic, the way it was meant to be used.”

  “How do you do it? You were just like—”

  Instead of finishing her sentence, Ami opted to wave her arms around in a wildly inaccurate reenactment of Ketzia’s fight. This, of course, set the woman to laughing again.

  “It’s a little hard to explain,” she answered. “When you’ve been Untethered for a while, you just get a feel for it. Kinda like dancing. You just move the way that feels right with the music.”

  That answer must have impressed the twins, since they oohed and aahed, but it left Adah a little worried. How exactly were they supposed to learn from a description like that? After working off of nothing but her own intuition for so long, she had hoped their new mentor would be able to give them some concrete advice on building their fanbase. Instead, Ketzia seemed to be flying by the seat of her pants even more than they were.

  While she was stuck in such thoughts, a scorching heat suddenly grew right in front of Adah’s face. She leaped back on instinct, just as a tiny firework popped and sparkled where the heat had manifested.

  Ketzia called out, with her arm pointed in Adah’s direction, “You listening to me, Captain?”

  Adah just stared back at her, still processing the question. That made it obvious enough that she hadn’t been listening.

  “I said it’s time to head back,” Ketzia continued. “I want to learn more about you kids. Talk about your goals and all that. First, though, we gotta have dinner. You okay with spice?”