Izzy and Lesh spent the next hour answering Adah’s questions, though at times she wasn’t sure what she was asking them. She was having trouble understanding—or perhaps accepting—the very basics of what they had explained to her.

  Magic essence was the byproduct of life. It was what a living being became when the body that housed it was destroyed.

  She couldn’t wrap her head around it until Izzy reminded her of something he had told her about Cruelties a while back. When a Cruelty injured a human, they leeched the very humanity out of that person. They weren’t interested in your fat or muscle—no, your body was in the way of their true feast. They wanted to consume you, and they had to destroy your body to do so.

  “Not all magic essence comes from such brutal means,” Lesh added. “All living things must die, thus they must all leave behind their essence. Indeed most magic essence originates from beings that have lived and died without ever coming in contact with our kind or those you call Cruelties. When they perish, their essence can be made into magic all the same.”

  “‘Made,’” Adah repeated. “That means you do something to turn the essence into magic?”

  “There is not much to do, but correct,” Lesh said.

  “So where are you getting it?” she asked. “All the essence that the mascots provide to magic users—where does it come from?”

  “It comes from everywhere,” Izzy replied. “Our kind are not like the Cruelties, Adah. We use what becomes available by the natural order of our world. A world with an abundance of life naturally comes with an abundance of death, but we don’t go out of our way to add to the pile. In a peaceful world, there’s plenty of essence already.”

  “What about the Cruelties, then? They kill for energy because they’re mindless, evil monsters?”

  “They hunt because they have no other means,” Lesh said. “They cannot reproduce by the same methods as any other lifeform, and they share no common ground with creatures such as humans. It is beyond them to cooperate peacefully to acquire the essence they need. They must take life from others in order to sustain their own.”

  That made Adah feel a little better. Not so much the fact that Cruelties were evil killing machines, but that the magic essence she used hadn’t been hunted down in the same way. There was still plenty she would need to get used to, though. She’d known magic had to come from somewhere, but learning the exact details was still a shock.

  There was also a lot that this new knowledge didn’t explain—not in a satisfactory way, at least. Namely, the strange heartbeat in her scythe. If that energy was magic essence as well, why did it feel so different from the kind that she used to cast spells? Was it because it had been taken from a Cruelty? Lesh had called it a memory, but what exactly was it a memory of?

  “It’s a weird system,” Ketzia, who had stayed silent so far, suddenly spoke up. “But this whole magic thing is weird in the first place. A spell like your whip or my old fireballs—it wouldn’t make any sense if they came from something cute like fairy dust. They’re tools for killing monsters, and that’s the part you should focus on.

  “If you need to justify it to yourself, just think about this. These Cruelties would kill all of us without a second thought. And what for? To make more monsters and kill even more of us. They’d destroy this whole world if they got their way. Our magic… maybe it does make us something other than human, but we use it for the sake of humanity. We fight the Cruelties with the best tools for the job, or else there wouldn’t be anyone left to fight for.”

  Ketzia brought her bottle to her lips again before realizing it was empty. With a frown, she placed it back down on the porch deck.

  Adah had always thought of the Untethered simply as magic users whose reins had been let go. However, Ketzia was more like someone who could have retired and enjoyed a quiet life in the forest, but chose to keep working. She had finally found a team, only to later lose them, then chose to keep fighting even after they were gone. Her words carried a certain weight.

  “I understand,” Adah said. “For the most part, anyway. The piece that’s still bothering me is the Cruelties themselves. You say they came to this world to hunt for life to consume, so that means originally they existed somewhere else. What happened to that other world?”

  Izzy and Lesh exchanged a glance, their facial expressions too animal-like for Adah to understand.

  “They bled it dry,” Izzy said.

  ☆☆☆

  The morning sunlight seemed to flood the cabin’s living room all at once, as if someone had pulled back the curtains on the day. Ketzia had let the girls sleep in this morning, perhaps after seeing how exhausted they had been the night before. As the sunlight fell across Adah’s face, she was pulled out of her own slumber.

  After last night’s conversation with Ketzia, Adah had gone back to her and Rika’s room and tried to sleep in her bed. Finding that impossible, she soon joined the other girls back on the living room couch. She found an open space beside Rika and curled up as close as she could without waking the other girl. She finally managed to fall asleep like that, soothed by Rika’s very real, very human heartbeat.

  Rika and Emi must have been woken up by the sun at the same time as her, as they were in the process of sitting up and stretching their limbs when Adah opened her eyes. Ami, however, looked as though she’d been up for a good while. She was sitting at the edge of the couch with her feet planted on the floor, one leg bouncing incessantly up and down. She had her phone out and was dragging her thumb down the screen every few seconds.

  “Come on, come on,” she whispered to herself as she stared at the screen.

  Emi scooted over to sit beside her and looked over her shoulder to see what her sister was so focused on.

  Adah was about to ask what had her so revved up first thing in the morning when Ami suddenly shouted, “Yes!” and shot into a standing position with her fist clenched. By standing up so quickly, she accidentally rammed her shoulder into Emi’s chin and sent the girl flopping backwards onto the couch like a dead fish. Ami spun around to apologize for a second, but ultimately couldn’t pull her attention away from her phone. Looking at whatever had gotten her so excited caused a beaming smile to appear on her face.

  “Check this out,” she said, thrusting her phone in front of the other girls. “5002. Just enough for my weapon.”

  Apparently she had been refreshing her Magiapp all morning, and it had finally updated with a new FP level. Just as Ami had said, the app now showed her above 5000. The tab for selecting a weapon glowed with a neon green border.

  Hearing this, Emi also shot off the couch and held a fist out to Ami. The sister’s bumped fists, though Ami practically punched Emi’s hand full force.

  “Congrats,” Rika said. “What pushed you over?”

  “When I saw you guys with your weapons yesterday, I couldn’t take it anymore,” Ami said. “I’m still trash at this self promotion stuff, but I had one idea.”

  Ami closed one eye and tapped the side of her head with her knuckles.

  “I don’t know how to pull in new fans yet, so I thought maybe I could convert some existing ones. I made the Rally Force an offer they couldn’t refuse.”

  “The Rally Force?” Adah asked, a little unsure she actually wanted to know.

  “The Raindrop Rally Force,” Emi answered. “During the IndieMagie, they kinda just appeared.”

  “It’s a little fan club one of the guys who supported Emi when she was in the hospital started,” Ami added. “He recruited more people since then and now they’ve got a whole cheer squad for Raindrop. They even made this little character for her.”

  Ami pulled up one of the Raindrop Rally Force’s social accounts on her phone and held it out again for Adah and Rika to see. The account’s profile picture was indeed a chibi drawing of Emi as Radiant Raindrop, complete with a tiny version of her seahorse mascot, Moon. The account had nearly five hundred followers, which—while not massive—was still impressive for a fan account of a magical girl who’d been virtually unknown until a couple of months ago.

  “Why didn’t you tell us about them before?” Rika asked Emi.

  “They’re degenerates,” she replied. Her face looked like she almost pitied them.

  “What do you mean?” Adah asked.

  Ami spoke up before her sister could answer. “Eh, they’re not so bad. They helped me out as soon as I asked them.”

  She navigated to something else on her phone—this time, a post she had made tagging the Rally Force account.

  dewdropdazzles: @rallyforraindrop LISTEN UP HUMAN PUDDLES! as the OG ultimate Raindrop fan, that makes me ur divine empress! if u want to prove ur worth, u need to win me over first! BOW DOWN AND PAY UR RESPECTS TO THE MASTER!

  Adah had a lot she wanted to say, but considering the way she posted on her Twilight Heartbreak account, she really couldn’t point fingers. Regardless of how many likes her in-character content got, half of it still made her cringe whenever she scrolled past it on her feed the next day.

  “This was meant to make them into your fans?” Rika asked. “Isn’t it kind of… confrontational?”

  “It’s no problem,” Ami assured her. “They like this stuff.”

  “They’re degenerates,” Emi reiterated.

  Ami showed them the replies to her post. All thirty-six of them said the exact same thing.

  “Roger, Master Dewdrop! o7”

  Shouldn’t it have been “mistress?”

  No, on second thought, it was better if it stayed this way. Besides, that would be encroaching on Heartbreak’s territory. Adah shuddered at the realization.

  “Still,” Rika said, “this kind of sets you up as Emi’s shield again, doesn’t it? I thought you wanted to get away from that.”

  Ami closed her eyes and nodded slowly. “Yes,” she said, “but this was a necessary sacrifice. A bit of backtracking to collect a valuable item. I did what had to be done to unlock my weapon.”

  On that note, she opened her Magiapp again and pulled up her weapon selection with a flurry of lightning speed taps. She paused to look at the screen for a couple of seconds, then grinned and tapped twice more. Her phone dinged with a confirmation of her choice.

  Adah had expected Ami to deliberate between her options like everyone else had, but apparently she wasn’t interested in wasting any more time.

  “It basically picked itself,” Ami declared as she held out her phone for everyone to see.

  Weapon Selection Locked: Poseidon’s Pugni

  The image on her screen didn’t reveal much about how the weapon itself functioned. To Adah, it wasn’t clear what the weapon even was. Ami’s screen only showed a disembodied floating hand covered by tiny, overlapping streams of water that mimicked a boxer’s hand wraps. Each segment of water appeared to course into another, like an infinite ouroboros.

  According to its description, the weapon was designed to enhance the user’s capabilities in close range combat. The specifics provided by the Magiapp were, as always, a little vague. The watery form of the weapon could either apply additional force to the user’s strikes by “harnessing the raging rapids of a river,” or constrict the movement of an enemy via the “inescapable swirl of a whirlpool.” With those descriptions, the only way to discover the true limits of the weapon would be to try it out in battle.

  Still, it seemed to fit the rest of Ami’s arsenal well, and opened up an opportunity for her to be a damage dealer even when she was all alone. Her protection spells could now pave the way for her to attack directly, rather than acting as a bodyguard for someone else. Since she had made her selection so quickly, her other two options must have been strictly defensive in nature.

  Even though the real fun would begin once Ami got to use her weapon in practice, Adah and the other girls still wanted to hype her up. Ami’s own excitement was infectious, after all, and she hadn’t stopped smiling since making her selection.

  “Time for more practice,” Emi said, jabbing at her sister’s shoulder with a loose fist.

  “A wise idea, but you might regret it,” Ami said as she returned a soft punch of her own, leading to the start of another slapboxing match between the twins. “Maybe we buy some gloves when we get home. Set up a ring behind the agency.”

  “Sell tickets to the Rally Force,” Emi suggested.

  “A magical girl duel without any magic,” Ami joked.

  Their playfighting was in full force now, so Adah and Rika decided to get out of their way rather than try to stop them. The cabin offered a lot more open space than their agency office, so at least the twins could let loose without knocking into the walls or furniture. Where they found all this energy first thing in the morning, however, Adah would never understand.

  Midway through the sister’s slap-off, Ketzia entered through the cabin’s front door. Adah hadn’t realized due to all the excitement with Ami’s weapon, but their host had been absent since they woke up. It made sense—she was an early riser, and didn’t seem the type to lounge around while her students slept. Based on the pair of gloves peeking out of her back pocket, she must have been tending to some chores outside.

  The twins were too absorbed in their fight to notice Ketzia’s return. Ami managed to sneak in a poke to Emi’s stomach after a few feints to her head, resulting in the younger twin yelping and spinning around to shield her belly behind crossed arms.

  “Oh?” Ketzia said with a laugh. “Is that surrender?”

  “It’s cheating,” Emi said.

  Ami shrugged and said, “It’s important to know your opponent’s weaknesses.”

  “Spoken like a true warrior,” Ketzia said, then snapped in Ami’s direction. A small flame appeared just to the side of Ami’s shoulder, causing her to cry out just like her sister and curl up into the same defensive position.

  “Equally important to guard your own weaknesses,” Ketzia said as she put out the flame. “What’s got you two so worked up this morning, anyway?”

  “Ami just unlocked her weapon,” Adah explained, since the girl herself was still cowering from the fire.

  “Hey, congrats, kid!” Ketzia yelled. Perhaps in consideration of Ami, she didn’t set off any magic fireworks to celebrate. “That makes four out of four. You’re all undeniably magical girls now—there’s no reason to doubt yourselves from now on.”

  At that, Ami regained her composure and joined back in the conversation.

  “That’s right,” she said, a hint of wonder in her voice. “This means we beat our goal, doesn’t it? All of us got our weapons.”

  They might have felt an inclination to declare an early victory a few days ago, when all the other girls unlocked their weapons, but now they could check off their goal without any caveats. All four of them had made their choices, and now they had something tangible to show for their efforts. That had always been part of why Adah had chosen to aim for their weapons—it would make their progress become more than a fickle number on an app none of them understood the inner workings of. Their weapons were something they could hold in their hands. Or, in Ami’s case, wrap around her hands.

  “On to the next,” Emi said, a serious look on her face.

  “Although we all have a different goal this time,” Rika said.

  “We just gotta find something we can do together that brings us all closer to our own goals,” Ami said.

  “There’s no shortage of jobs to be done in this industry,” Ketzia assured them. “And as you get stronger, the work starts to find you rather than the other way around. Pretty soon, you’ll be wishing you had free time to—”

  A high-pitched beep broke Ketzia’s train of thought. She rolled her eyes and dug around in her pocket for the pager that yesterday’s mission notification had been sent to. There must have been some kind of automated system that pinged Ketzia whenever a Cruelty was detected in her territory. Since she was the only magic user in the area, there was no point in bothering with the mission portal that the agencies used. It must have also meant she was always on-call. Some retirement that was.

  As she looked at whatever notification had popped up, Ketzia pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes. Lesh, perhaps sensing her displeasure, appeared on her shoulder and looked at the pager as well. He then turned to Adah and, although he had returned to nothing but a skeleton this morning, she could tell he was staring into her eyes.

  “Really,” Ketzia sighed. “Talk about bad luck.”