The four girls continued training throughout the morning. Adah and Rika took turns shooting their projectile spells into Ami’s shield, eventually working their way up to full strength spells. Once Ami figured out how strong to make her shield, she was able to catch those max power attacks consistently. She then moved on to practice flying while maintaining her grip on those projectiles.

  Meanwhile, the other girls shifted their focus to taking practice swings with their weapons—this time at imaginary enemies and not at Rika’s bombs. Rika herself had to settle for merely conjuring her various explosives without detonating them, per Ketzia’s request. It turned out that each variant she summoned had a lengthy—possibly infinite—lifespan, and wouldn’t vanish from existence until Rika recalled them.

  This practice went on until the sun rose above the trees and warmed up the morning air. At that time, Ketzia called them inside, where she had prepared a plentiful brunch. To Adah’s relief, their host had kept the spice level mild for their first meal of the day.

  Ami and Emi tore through all the eggs, bacon, and toast on their plates like their stomachs were demanding retribution for skipping breakfast. For some reason, this compelled Ketzia to start speed-eating in an attempt to keep up with them. It was hard to believe the twins had ever been so scared of her.

  Adah and Rika ate at their usual pace, preferring to actually be able to chat with each other in between bites. Adah couldn’t resist showing off the photo she’d posted earlier, after which Rika demanded Adah help her take an equally cool one later. Of course, Adah agreed.

  She also couldn’t resist taking a peek at some of the early comments that had come in.

  sleet_soxes: Heartbreak is evolving

  obscureZen: It only makes sense for Heartbreak to use a scythe. I give thanks to the fans for having good taste and the Magiapp for offering this option. Heartbreak always has my thanks for merely existing.

  ? chum22: youre the only simp I can respect bro. keep it up

  FoggyPetals: embarrassing

  ? get_it_twisted: all u do is come here and hate

  tasokare_wota: if your heart is broken pls feel free to carve mine out with that thing

  JobEqualsTables: i cant wait to see this shit in action. a whip is cool but this is some proper grim reaper shit

  ? butanonakukoroni: this is the magical girl i became a fan of. good to know she hasnt lost her pride

  Much to Adah’s relief, the positive responses were far outweighing any haters or doubters. The FP boost their team saw after their elimination from the IndieMagie had quelled a lot of her fears, but that was only a number. Reading the fans’ comments made their actual feelings clear to her. That lit a fire in her to chase after her new goal even harder.

  She and Rika wanted to indulge in a bit more comment reading, but a sudden high-pitched beeping interrupted them.

  Ketzia pulled what appeared to be a pager out of her front pocket and held it up to inspect it. She smiled and said, “Perfect timing. Nothing beats on the job experience. Finish up quick, we’ve got a long flight ahead of us.”

  “Long flight where?” Adah asked.

  “To your first mission as new and improved magical girls. How do you feel about starting out with a C-Rank?”

  ☆☆☆

  As Ketzia flew ahead of them over the vast expanse of forest, the four girls spoke to each other through a shared magic channel.

  “It’s been a while since we’ve fought a standard Cruelty,” Rika said. “And now we’re jumping back in with another C-Rank.”

  “Picking up where we left off,” Emi said.

  “Except we’re not the same team we were back then,” Adah said. “Our power now is in a whole new tier compared to then. I’m not saying to act cocky, but maybe we’ll have enough breathing room to enjoy ourselves during this fight.”

  “Hell yeah!” Ami cheered. “It’s time to show off a little.”

  After saying so out loud, Adah realized this truly was the first comparable test of their strength since they’d taken on that first C-Rank Cruelty. The IndieMagie had brought with it several new battles—most of them against other humans, and none of them something their team was familiar with.

  The C-Rank scorpion had tested the limits of both their magic and their team cohesion. If Rika had decided to quit being a magical girl that day, they would have failed for sure. Today, they had a chance to see just how much stronger they’d grown, and how much more they were capable of as a unit of four.

  If all went well, this would also be the first Cruelty to charge up Adah’s scythe.

  Their flight continued for another fifteen minutes, during which the girls chatted casually. It was a stark contrast from how they’d prepared for the scorpion Cruelty. While Adah meant what she had said about not letting their guard down, she considered it a good omen that everyone was so calm. They should have confidence in their abilities. They ought to treat the threat Cruelties posed with respect, but not fear. Their goals would remain unobtainable if they were weighed down by fear.

  Up ahead, Ketzia slowed to a halt and gestured to a clearing in the distance. Smack in the middle of that clearing was a variant of Cruelty all too familiar to Adah: the ostrich-octopus combination she had slain so many weeks ago. The only difference was that this particular one was massive, easily the size of a two-story house.

  “So they make these in extra large sizes, too?” Adah remarked.

  “Size isn’t always proportional to power,” Ketzia said, “but in this case, it is. These guys get real annoying if you let them have a breather, so my advice is: don’t do that. Other than that, I’m gonna sit back and enjoy the show.”

  She held up a peace sign before flying down to take a seat on one of the limbs of a tree below where she’d have a good view of the clearing.

  “Guess we’re on our own,” Rika said. “And our wise mentor skipped over the mission brief.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Ami said. “Why don’t we start with a little batting practice? Then we won’t even put ourselves in danger.”

  “I guess the point of this is to try out our combos in an actual battle,” Adah said. “Let’s give it a try.”

  Before they’d even finished talking, Emi had already conjured Mercury’s Majesty and was taking practice swings. The four of them flew down to the nearest edge of the clearing and hovered a few feet above the grass. The Cruelty noticed them and turned in their direction as they breached the treeline, but it still stood about a football field’s length away and seemed content to stay there for now.

  “Batter up,” Emi said as she settled into a stance with her weapon held over her shoulder.

  “Let’s see what one of these can do,” Rika said.

  She summoned a bundle of dynamite that was almost cartoonish in its appearance, with all the bright red sticks clearly labeled in bold, black text. It was an objectively ridiculous weapon for a magical girl to pull out of thin air, and Ami broke out laughing in response.

  “That’s too much,” she said between chuckles. “Are you going to drop an anvil on its head next?”

  “I could say something very mean to you right now,” Rika replied, “but I’m going to take the high road instead.”

  Ami held her hands up as a truce, weaponless as she was. “Fair enough. I take it back.”

  Rika stuck her tongue out at Ami before turning to her twin. Emi was still primed for a swing, so Rika conjured her Fornax Firestarter in her other hand and set the bundle of dynamite alight. She lobbed the explosives a few feet in front of Emi, and Adah suddenly realized she should have asked if those sticks were somehow magically reinforced.

  At this point, it was too late. Emi swung with all her might and made clean contact with the bundle. Thankfully, the dynamite didn’t explode in their faces and instead rocketed off of Emi’s weapon toward the giant ostrich-pus. Ami whistled as the explosives flew in an arc to their target.

  However, they never made it all the way there.

  The Cruelty reached up with one of its tentacles and swung at the bundle, smacking it straight back toward the girls. The dynamite rushed in their direction like a fastball, and for a second Emi even prepped to swing back at it again. Before she got a chance, Ami created a shield wall with her [Aspis Meniscus] and put herself between her teammates and the incoming bomb. The dynamite detonated just before it made contact with Ami’s water, and the explosion was repelled entirely by her shield.

  Off in the distance, the Cruelty lifted up all eight of its tentacles and wiggled them in the air as if taunting the girls.

  “Lesson learned,” Rika said, pocketing her lighter. “Looks like those tentacles will be a problem for getting in close, too.”

  “Then let’s blind it,” Adah suggested. “I’ll kick up some smoke with my whip and we can charge in before it sees us coming.”

  “If we’re trying that, I might as well use my railgun,” Rika said. “See if we can’t take it out from a distance.”

  “No,” Adah said, perhaps more sternly than she intended. “This has to end with my scythe.”

  Rika looked at her with eyebrows raised, then awkwardly shifted her gaze to the side.

  “Oh,” she said. “Yeah… That makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it,” Adah apologized. “I just want to get used to my weapon. The sooner I start storing energy in it, the better, right?”

  The other girl looked over at her again and nodded, yet Adah couldn’t shake her own sense of awkwardness. She hadn’t said anything particularly rude to Rika, but she knew those words weren’t her own.

  “I want to try something, too,” Emi spoke up. “I haven’t had a chance to use my new spell yet.”

  “Don’t leave me out either,” Ami added. “I finally have a way to be more than a shield in these fights.”

  “You can be a shield and a spear all in one,” her sister replied. “Let me put my hex on your shield, then you can do the stabbing.”

  Since she’d been stuck under Clair’s spell, Emi hadn’t had a chance to try out her [Hailstorm Hex] during their duel against DreamRise. She must have been itching to cast it in a real battle. The mechanics of the hex were still fairly unknown to the rest of their team, but if it was possible to prime it on Ami’s shield, then that would be an even more reliable way to set up the shield bash combo. And what was this mission for if not experimenting with their spells?

  “Let’s give it a shot,” Adah said. “The main difference between this Cruelty and the smaller variant is the strength of its tentacles. I can keep eyes on them through the smoke, so Ami can stay by my side as we fly through. Rika can occupy some of the tentacles with [Baetyl Breakburst]—if you destroy some, that’s even better. Emi will watch from above so she can time the activation of her spears. Let’s see if we’re strong enough to break through this squid in one go.”

  “It’s an octopus,” Emi corrected.

  “It’s dead as hell!” Ami also corrected.

  They all decided that was sufficient as a rallying cry, so they prepared to execute Adah’s plan. Ami summoned her [Aspis Meniscus] once more and held it up for her sister to apply her hex mark to. Emi pointed at the water shield and traced a sequence of lines in the air with her finger. A moment later, veins of ice spread throughout the shield with a crackling sound, forming a complex magic circle. Adah was sure she’d seen the design somewhere before, but couldn’t remember where.

  With the hex set, Emi took to the skies while Adah and Ami remained hovering just above the grass. Rika positioned herself at a mid-level height off to the side of the clearing, where she could best let loose with her bullets without worrying about clipping her teammates.

  Adah felt alert but not cautious, and she sensed the same attitude from her teammates. Rather than wanting to fight in an overly calculated manner, the four of them were all looking for an opportunity to show off. As long as none of them went overboard, that was exactly the kind of attitude a rising star team should embody.

  Adah triggered her [Parietal Perception]; the squirming sensation in her brain was growing more familiar with each use. The visual overload, however, took a lot more getting used to. As opposed to the simple trail produced when tracking a human, this giant ostrich-pus and its many appendages flooded Adah’s vision with a cluttered mess of gray phantoms. As the tentacles twisted and wiggled through the air, they each left behind their own afterimage.

  She tried focusing on them one at a time. Their trails grew more distinct at first, but by the time she’d divided her attention across six of them, she grew disoriented once again. This was another facet of the spell she had yet to explore. Was her ability to track multiple targets dependent on her available magic essence, her practice with the spell, or a combination of the two? At any rate, this wasn’t the focus of today’s experiment. For now, she only needed to track the closest two tentacles.

  Adah charged up her [Nightwind Whip], and the swirling winds shook all of the trees around the clearing like the early gusts of an autumn storm. The sound of it made her smile. These surges of wind had started to feel like her calling card, a sign that Twilight Heartbreak was about to unleash her power. That power was so easy to control now, as well. Spellcasting that used to put a notable strain on her body no longer bothered her, thanks to how much magic essence was at her disposal.

  As such, cracking a full power whip just to kick up a cloud of smoke was an indulgence she could finally afford. She swung the cord of smoky magic down and let it burst against the grass of the clearing. A sprawling cloud of smoke spread across the grass between the girls and the Cruelty, rising as high as the monster’s head and blocking all light between them. Beyond the wall of smoke, the nearest tentacles of the ostrich-pus swung from left to right, two gray echoes in Adah’s vision.

  Rika wasted no time in following up. The sounds of her [Baetyl Breakburst] sang through the air. The “stone of the stars” from the spell’s description looked more or less like a meteorite, which Rika would conjure into the air a good distance in front of herself. The stone would hover in place, allowing her to shoot a bullet of light at it and shatter it into several new projectiles. When her bullet struck the stone, it always rang out with a sound like a church bell.

  Above the cloud of smoke, Adah spotted one such starstone exactly at its moment of shattering. The stone split into three pieces, each shooting off in a different direction at high speed. Their jagged edges sliced into three separate tentacles of the Cruelty, but none cut one of the limbs clean off. The C-Rank version of this monster was predictably tougher to incapacitate than its F-Rank counterpart.

  With the ostrich-pus now distracted by Rika’s assault and blind to their position, Adah summoned Beleth’s Bloodletter. Once the smoky magic of the scythe’s fang had fully materialized, she prepared for flight.

  “Stay close,” Adah said to Ami. “I’m going to bring us in on a tight path.”

  “Don’t worry, you can’t outfly me yet,” Ami teased.

  “Maybe we’ll have to race and find out.”

  With that, Adah took off through the smokescreen. Ami must have been used to cheap tricks like getting a head start, since she managed to stick right by Adah’s side. A benefit of growing up with a competitive twin, Adah supposed.

  They reached the other side of the smokescreen in unison. The cloud Adah had created ended up so large that it nearly covered half the clearing, so the pair found themselves within ten feet of the Cruelty as soon as they emerged. Adah had kept an eye on the nearest tentacles the whole time, and they never showed any sign that the monster had anticipated their approach. The smokescreen had worked perfectly.

  Ten feet was a distance two magical girls flying at top speed could clear in the blink of an eye, so Emi activated her [Hailstorm Hex] as soon as Ami emerged from the smoke. Adah slowed her flight ever so slightly, allowing Ami to pull ahead as the icy hex on her shield glowed bright white. All along the circumference of the magic circle, thin spears of ice erupted. They looked like the imposing spikes you might find atop a fence surrounding a gothic estate, though they shimmered with white light.

  Ami thrust her shield forward just as she made contact with the Cruelty, yelling like a knight spurring their horse into battle. The miniature phalanx attached to her shield bore through the center of the Cruelty without resistance, despite the icy spears shattering as they ate into the monster’s flesh.

  At the center of the roughly carved hole Ami had opened up in the monster’s belly, Adah spotted her target. A colorless sphere, swirling with barely distinguishable shades of gray, hung from the scraps of what little flesh remained. Adah realized this was the first time she’d seen a Cruelty’s core so clearly.

  But that thought only lasted a moment—only as long as it took for her scythe’s blade to sink into the center of that swirling sphere.

  Adah had expected the core to shatter, as it had for every other Cruelty she had killed. Instead, her scythe left behind a stain of black magic on the core as she and Ami flew away to a safe distance.

  The Cruelty froze in place as the stain on its core began to spread, eventually dyeing the whole sphere solid black. A streak of magic then surged away from the core, flowing like a stream all the way back to Adah’s scythe. The magic seemed to eat away at the core, as the sphere began to shrink until eventually it vanished entirely. The Cruelty itself dematerialized soon after, and the stream of black magic ceased.

  Adah floated to the ground and stood still in the grass. As she tried to process what had just happened, her teammates flew over to join her. They all waited for their captain to speak, but when she would not, Rika broke the silence.

  “What does it feel like?” she asked. “Do you feel like it drained some energy?”

  “I’m not sure,” Adah said, looking down at the weapon still in her hands. “I don’t think it feels any different.”

  “Well, it sure as hell worked,” Ami said. “What else could that stuff with the core have been?”

  Adah glanced over where the Cruelty had once stood. Ami was right—what other explanation could there be? The way her scythe functioned had just shocked her was all. After seeing how Rika and Emi’s weapons worked, Adah had expected the scythe to be similar. All three were clearly weapons of magic, but her teammates’ ultimately inflicted damage in a more “normal” way.

  Adah turned back to the other girls and said, “Maybe if I check the Magiapp later, it’ll have some way of tracking the energy. Either way, once I get used—”

  Thump-thump.

  Adah heard a heartbeat echo in her head, like the throbbing of her own pulse during a migraine. Except this wasn’t her own pulse.

  Thump-thump.

  She felt the heartbeat now. It pulsed between her hands.

  Thump-thump.

  Inside the body of the scythe, something was alive.