“The four of you need to stay here,” Ketzia ordered as she stuffed the pager back in her pocket.

  She didn’t say anything else about the mission that she’d been pinged about. She moved to the kitchen and tossed her work gloves onto the counter before hunting through the cabinets in a rush. She found a jar of granola and clawed out a handful, shoving the food into her mouth as a last minute bite of fuel. Then she ran to the front door.

  “Why?” Ami asked. “Is it an A-Rank? Or an S? You can bring us with you—we’re strong now, maybe we can help!”

  “You can help me by staying here,” Ketzia said, only halfway done chewing her snack.

  “What if we just watch?” Emi said.

  “Watch the cabin for me,” the woman said, halfway out the door. “I wish I didn’t have to deal with this—don’t burden yourselves with it, too.”

  Before any of the girls could plead their case again, Ketzia left through the door and threw it closed behind her. She’d left a trail of granola crumbs in her wake.

  The four girls exchanged glances after the door slammed shut. Even though they were all thinking the same thing, someone needed to say it aloud to get the ball rolling.

  “So, obviously we’re not going to stay here, right?” Rika asked.

  “Hell no,” Adah said.

  She hurried over to the windows at the front of the cabin and peeked outside to catch a glimpse of Ketzia. The woman leaped into the air and started flying away to the left of the cabin. Judging by the angle of the morning sun, that must have been roughly west.

  When flying, there was no reason to take any route other than a straight line to your target. That would make following Ketzia easy, as long as they knew which direction she was headed in.

  “She’s already spent a couple of days around us,” Ami said. “That’s enough time for her to learn there’s no way we’d sit this out.”

  Although they roughly knew where to go now, they couldn’t waste any more time if they wanted to catch up to Ketzia. Adah started to call out to Izzy so she could transform, but her mascot seemed to preempt her request. He popped up in front of her, floating at eye level.

  “Even if Ketzia is aware you intend to follow her, I have to warn you against this,” he said.

  “Warn us all you like,” Adah replied. “If you actually wanted to stop us, you wouldn’t have come out like this. You’re still in control the essence, after all.”

  “I showed myself because I respect you. As your partner, I won’t prevent you from following her, if that’s your decision,” Izzy said. “However, as your partner, I must also voice my recommendation that you stay here. This is not something you need to see.”

  “As my partner,” Adah said, “you should know that phrasing it like that will just make me want to see it even more.”

  “We may not be Untethered,” Rika added, “but we’re still magical girls. We wouldn’t be very good at our jobs if we were scared of a Cruelty.”

  Izzy continued to look at Adah as he said, “You being scared is not my concern. Adah, you know that the truth of these monsters can be uncomfortable to discover. You will learn everything you need to learn in due time, but perhaps being told the truth is easier than witnessing it.”

  Rika and the twins looked between Adah and Izzy. They opened their mouths as if to ask a question, but paused like they weren’t sure what exactly they wanted to ask. Adah hadn’t told them about last night’s conversation yet—there hadn’t been time with Ami’s weapon selection and Ketzia’s sudden departure. Izzy’s ominous manner of speaking had clearly caught their attention, though. She could explain the details as they chased after Ketzia—as best as she could explain them, anyway.

  “I also know the best way to understand is sometimes by seeing,” she said. “Or by feeling.”

  She placed her hand on Izzy’s head and, after a slight delay, he released the magic essence needed to initiate her transformation.

  This back and forth with her mascot had delayed their team leaving by a couple of minutes. If they wanted to catch up with Ketzia before she dealt with the Cruelty, every second they could save would be precious. The way Ketzia had rushed out gave Adah the impression she meant to get rid of this monster as fast as possible. With that in mind, Adah left through the front door with nothing but a quick gesture to urge her teammates to follow. They each called upon their own mascot before running outside hot on Adah’s heels.

  The other girls transformed as they ran, and soon all four of them were airborne. They flew at top speed, only slowing momentarily to allow Rika to catch up. Little by little, Adah’s flight practice was paying off. At such high speeds, the autumn air felt like ice pressed against her skin, but that didn’t bother her one bit. After what she had learned the night before, the only thing on her mind was uncovering as many secrets about the Cruelties as she could. Finding Ketzia before she finished this mission would certainly help with that.

  Of course, she wasn’t the only one who wanted to dig into the secrets around magic and Cruelties.

  “Adah,” Rika said, “what was Izzy talking about earlier? What did he mean about the Cruelties?”

  Rika had spoken on a channel shared between all the girls and, although they didn’t say it, Adah knew the twins wanted to know just as much as Rika did.

  “I don’t think I’m qualified to explain it,” Adah answered, “but I’ll try my best.”

  Adah recounted to the best of her ability everything Ketzia and the mascots had told her the night before. Mostly, she was just quoting what she could remember them saying during that conversation. She still didn’t understand the truth well enough to put it in her own words.

  However, she didn’t mention anything about the heartbeat in her scythe. She wanted to keep that to herself a little bit longer. The other girls would surely have the same sort of questions about it as she did—questions that she was trying to block out for the time being.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  At the end of her explanation, Rika and the twins stayed silent as they processed all the new information. Having put all the details into words, Adah also paused to think things through again. She was getting used to this knowledge about the source of magic essence faster than she’d expected, but felt a growing sense of dread around whatever Ketzia had seen on her pager earlier. The woman hadn’t felt the need to hold anything back last night, so why the secrecy today?

  After a minute of quiet flight, Ami’s voice broke the silence of their magic channel.

  “I think Ketzia’s right,” she said. “Knowing where magic comes from makes me want to fight even harder. If it’s something the dead left behind, then we should use it to protect the living.”

  “Whatever it takes to make magic,” Emi said, touching her shoulder, “the Cruelties are worse.”

  “What does that mean for your scythe, then?” Rika asked. “If the Cruelties take essence by killing living things, and your weapon takes magic from Cruelties… Is that the same as taking the essence back?”

  One of the questions Adah had been avoiding came up anyway.

  Rika had framed it in a more positive way than Adah had been thinking about it. Rather than taking back essence, she had been wondering if using the scythe was any different from killing like a Cruelty would.

  Were they not both on the hunt? Killing just to take more essence? Sure, the Cruelties were monsters, and Adah would stop them regardless of what weapon she’d chosen, but…

  She couldn’t forget about that heartbeat. The queasiness it stirred up in her was exactly why she didn’t want to think about it.

  “I’m not sure,” Adah said. “My weapon… well, I haven’t even confirmed it’s stored any power yet.”

  That was a half-truth. The scythe was definitely storing something, but whether it equated to power remained to be seen.

  No one said anything else after that. Like herself, Adah was sure the other girls were grappling with several different reactions at once. On the surface, everyone was reinvigorated to fight Cruelties, but the reality of their new knowledge wasn’t that shallow.

  They flew together, all deep in thought, until a floating figure that had to be Ketzia came into view. This flight had taken even longer than yesterday’s, and had brought them a great distance over the sea of trees below. Ketzia had stopped at a break in the forest, an area where the trees gave up their roots to a series of sharply rising hills. Huge patches of ferns—already shifting red for autumn—flooded the valleys between the grassy hills.

  The steep hills, each like a finger pointing to the sky, rolled over an expanse at least a mile long, after which the forest reclaimed the soil once more. Ketzia gazed over the hilly expanse, not bothering to turn around and face the girls as they flew in behind her.

  “I knew I should’ve tied you up or locked you in a closet,” she said to them. “But I really couldn’t risk wasting the time. At least tell me you thought about listening to me?”

  “Not even for a second,” Adah answered as she moved to hover beside Ketzia.

  Adah had thought the woman was scanning the hills for the arrival of a Cruelty, but upon tracking her line of sight into the distance, the actual object of her focus became apparent.

  Atop one of the hills was a gray oval. It hung in the air, looking like a dirtied mirror without a frame. The oval itself didn’t appear to be a Cruelty, though it undoubtedly bore the same eerie signature as the monsters did. The grayness at the center of the oval morphed and swirled, though never coalescing into any discernible shapes.

  The other girls lined up beside Adah and Ketzia. Rika asked what they were all thinking.

  “What is that?”

  “It’s a portal,” Ketzia said. “As far as we understand it, anyway.”

  “A portal to where?”

  For a while, Ketzia didn’t answer. She kept her eyes fixed on the gray portal. Her forefinger tapped against her thumb like a woodpecker desperate for a meal.

  “Fuck me,” she finally said. “I should have stopped you kids. Listen up—everything you’re about to see needs to be kept a secret. People with more power than me have decided this is something it’s better if the public doesn’t know about. If you let this spill, it’ll be them you have to answer to.”

  It was just a Cruelty, wasn’t it? Sure, they usually materialized out of nowhere like the mascots did, but arriving through a portal wasn’t a frightening alternative. In fact, most people would probably feel better if the monsters always came through a portal. That would be something easier for a human to understand.

  Still, Ketzia’s posture remained tense—a stark contrast from the free-flowing spellcasting she had shown off when the girls first arrived at her cabin.

  If it was a dangerous Cruelty, maybe an A-Rank like Ami had suggested, then surely Ketzia would have ordered them to stand back. Their team had taken out yesterday’s C-Rank without any issues, but these higher ranked monsters scaled exponentially in power.

  If it wasn’t that, then what was it?

  “Is that…?” Rika said. Her voice began no louder than a whisper, and the rest of her words fled before she could speak them.

  A figure stepped out of the portal. It looked around as it crossed the boundary into this world, turning its head to and fro. When it faced in the direction of the rising sun, it held a hand to its head like a visor. It walked a few steps away from the portal, carefully setting one foot in front of the other. The gray figure then spotted the four girls and Ketzia.

  It stared at them, its two arms now dangling at the sides of its body. They stared back.

  “A person?” Emi spoke the words Rika had been unable to.

  “Stay here,” Ketzia said. Her words were cold.

  The woman flew down toward the gray figure, coming to a halt some hundred feet away. It was too far a distance to talk—at least for any kind of friendly conversation.

  The human shape on the hill took one step toward Ketzia, but stopped when the woman gave no sign of flying closer. The two of them faced each other for another moment. Then Ketzia held out her hand in the figure’s direction.

  A fireball shot out from Ketzia’s palm. The fire rushed forward with as much speed as Rika’s usual lasers and smacked into the gray figure, knocking it onto its back. As soon as the fireball made contact, the figure was engulfed in orange flames brighter than the sun above.

  The humanoid figure shrieked as the fire ate away at its body. The sound echoed with a ghostly ring around Adah on all sides, as if she was locked in a shipping container with the figure. Its wailing voice scraped against the inside of her ears, clawing at her mind without end.

  "HEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLLLLPPPPPPPP!"

  Adah felt her own skin searing as the voice reverberated in her head. The pain felt so real that simply looking at her own unburnt flesh wasn’t enough to convince her brain that she was safe. She squeezed her forearms tight with each hand until her mind settled down.

  Yet, the screeching of the gray human didn’t end. It writhed and shook on the ground, its colorless form barely visible beyond the dancing flames.

  Adah flew forward, hurtling herself toward the figure as fast as she could. Whatever it was, it was human enough that she had to save it.

  She didn’t get very far, though.

  Ketzia noticed her approach and held both arms straight out from her sides. Her fingers tensed as she called upon her magic once more. Flames spread out in all directions around Ketzia, forming massive walls of fire that blocked Adah’s path forward. The walls grew as tall as high rises and expanded horizontally quicker than Adah could fly. They stretched out easily a half-mile long in a matter of seconds. Ketzia had created an impenetrable barrier, the burning heat of which forced Adah to retreat even farther back.

  These walls of fire weren’t a parlor trick like so much else Ketzia had shown off. They were the true potential of an Untethered.

  Unable to advance any farther, Adah resorted to yelling to Ketzia.

  “We have to help it! It’s a human!”

  In her panic, she’d forgotten to channel her voice through any magic. Her raw shout barely sounded out above the roaring and crackling of the fire walls.

  “They were human,” Ketzia said. “Before the Cruelties killed them.”

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