The cries of the gray humanoid soon died out as the flames ate through the rest of its body. Only once its voice had faded entirely did Ketzia extinguish the walls of fire she had conjured on either side of herself. With the fire out of the way, Adah could see the expanse of hills once more, though the human-like figure was nowhere to be seen. It had either dematerialized like a Cruelty or been burnt to nothingness by Ketzia’s magic. The portal lingered, though it was also fading into nothing but a translucent afterimage.

  For a moment, Adah considered flying closer to get a better look at the portal and to see if she could find any remnant of the human. Her curiosity was easily overpowered by her anxiety, though. Was that portal really something she wanted to get any closer to?

  Ketzia made up Adah’s mind for her. She flew back toward the girls, grabbing Adah by the arm as she passed by.

  “Come on,” she said. “We can talk back the cabin. Bad luck to stay here any longer than we have to.”

  Adah allowed herself to be dragged along, but kept her eyes on the gray oval in the distance. Its image faded more and more until it finally blinked out of existence. Only the rolling hills remained.

  ☆☆☆

  Ketzia gathered everyone around the dining table. She went to the kitchen to heat up a kettle for tea, giving the four girls a chance to talk among themselves about what they had seen. Yet, none of them said a word. They had nothing to say to each other—all of their questions were for their mentor.

  Izzy lay at Adah’s feet, though not out of jealousy this time. He could have said something to her like, “I tried to warn you,” but he remained as quiet as the girls.

  Today wasn’t any colder than the day before, yet the whole cabin felt stiff with a chill. It was the kind of cold that swept any scents from the air, and that seemed to suck all the moisture from your skin. It was a cold too vicious for this early in autumn.

  When Ketzia returned, she set down a mug in front of each of the girls and placed the boiling kettle on a hotplate at the center of the table. She left again, returning this time with a bowl of unlabeled teabags, which she had surely put together herself. None of the girls took any. They just stared at Ketzia. Seeing that, the woman cleared her throat and began to speak.

  “First of all,” she said, “can we all agree that it’s better if the public doesn’t know about this? At least, not until someone smarter than me understands it better?”

  “Who does know about it?” Adah asked.

  “More importantly,” Rika said, “what even was it?”

  Ketzia filled her own mug with water and submerged a teabag in it.

  “The first question I can answer,” she said. “The second—I can try to. Right now, there are probably only a couple dozen people who know about these portals. The four Secretaries of Magic, a handful of other government officials, and then the magical girls who have to deal with them. And now I’ve added four more people to that list.”

  She paused to take a sip of her tea, even though a thick cloud of steam was still rising from her mug. Apparently there were no drinks too hot for an Untethered user of fire magic.

  “Now, as for what they are…” Ketzia stopped to look at Adah. “How much did you tell everyone about our talk last night?”

  “Everything,” Adah answered.

  Almost everything.

  “Then you understand magic essence,” Ketzia continued. “For the most part, anyway. Well, there’s another difference between the way we use magic essence and the way the Cruelties do. Actually, they’re not quite like us or the mascots. Both of us can transform essence into any kind of magic. Our spells don’t have many limits—they can be anything humanity can dream up. And mascots can take on any form they desire, like Lesh here.”

  Her mascot appeared on her shoulder, as if summoned by the mention of his name. At this point in the day, he had grown into his featherless form.

  “But the Cruelties can really only work with the essence they’ve collected, and that essence retains some of the identity of its original lifeform. It’s not a coincidence all these variants we encounter have so much in common with our world’s animals. The Cruelties take those forms because those are the creatures they’ve taken essence from. They can mix-and-match what they’ve gathered from other worlds with what they’ve taken from ours, but its all based on real creatures. There’s nothing they can create that comes from their imagination—they don’t have any.”

  “Are you saying the person who came out of that portal was actually a Cruelty pretending to be human?” Adah asked.

  “‘Pretending’ may not be the right word, but that’s the right idea,” Ketzia said. “Whatever it may have looked like, that thing was no longer human. It was just a Cruelty trying out another form, using the essence they’ve taken from killing humans.”

  Even though she wasn’t transformed and her scythe was hidden away, Adah swore she felt the heartbeat trapped within her weapon thump against her palms again. Rika’s question was getting harder to ignore. What did it really mean for her weapon to take essence back from a Cruelty?

  “How come we’ve never heard about this before?” Rika asked. “We’ve never seen a mission to fight one of these things.”

  “This is the part even I don’t know much about,” Ketzia said. “This type of Cruelty is rare. Magical girls like you do a good job of protecting humanity nowadays, so these monsters don’t have a big supply of human essence to use. I’ve only run into a handful over the last eight years. It was just bad luck—awful luck—one showed up while you were here.”

  “Even if they’re rare, people would be freaking out as soon as they saw one. It’d be all over the news,” Ami said.

  “Like when the Cruelties first showed up,” Emi said.

  “That’s the other saving grace, you could say,” Ketzia said. “These portals have only spawned in remote locations like those hills. The magic users who guard those areas take them out as fast as we can, so there’s never an opportunity for anyone else to discover them. If you ask me, the Cruelties are also trying to stay hidden. They want to test something. The human variants don’t come here to hunt, but to learn. The farther away from civilization those portals appear, the more time they have to try and figure out whatever it is they want to know before we destroy them.”

  Adah knew the Cruelties could learn and adapt in the middle of a battle, so it stood to reason that they could learn in a more general sense as well. Maybe it was an instinctual learning, like a house cat knowing to use the same hunting techniques as its untamed ancestors, but it was learning all the same.

  The human-like Cruelty’s behavior seemed to match Ketzia’s theory. It hadn’t tried to attack anyone—it was far more interested in observing the world around it. The figure had stared at Ketzia the whole time, only taking one step closer but never attempting to interact with her. Perhaps that was its method of learning from her, much like the whale Cruelty’s eye had watched Adah and learned how to dodge her whip.

  If the Cruelties were taking and adapting the forms of animals from this world, humans would be one of the more difficult ones to weaponize. It was obvious at first glance how a wolf’s fangs or a scorpion’s stinger could be used to hunt and kill, but humans didn’t have such a clear weapon built into their bodies. Humans had learned to hunt with tools the Cruelties wouldn’t have access to. The closest thing humanity had to a self-contained weapon was a magic user.

  “What’s up with the portal, though?” Ami asked. “Can’t Cruelties just appear out of nowhere?”

  Ketzia shook her head and said, “I’m not sure. My guess is that it has something to do with these Cruelties being based on humans. I’ve never seen anything other than a human-type come through a portal, and I’ve never heard of one appearing without a portal. But that’s just me drawing my own conclusions.”

  Ketzia’s guess was probably more accurate than she thought. Adah and her team had already seen how portals could be used to essentially teleport living humans, thanks to Ekki’s [Vanishing Vapor] spell. His portals were generated through magic essence, so surely the Cruelties were using the same method to spawn the human-types into this world.

  Exactly why the humanoids had to be sent over this way remained a mystery, but it was reasonable to assume they were somehow different from typical Cruelties. After all, humans were unique in that they could amplify magic essence beyond the capabilities of the mascots. Maybe these human-types had their own unique interactions with how the Cruelties used magic essence.

  However, Adah wasn’t particularly worried about the question of why. Her mind was working in a different direction.

  “If humanoid Cruelties come out of these portals,” she said, “could a real human go into them?”

  Everyone at the table turned to face Adah, their reactions ranging from confused to mortified.

  “Whether you could or couldn’t,” Ketzia said, “you wouldn’t want to. Whatever’s on the other side of those portals is the domain of the Cruelties. A human—even a magic user—wouldn’t last five seconds in there. Hell, a normal human body might not even survive the trip.”

  The woman poured more hot water into her mug and downed it, though this lacked the same impact as her speeding through her cider last night. Despite chugging nothing but diluted tea, Ketzia’s emotions were still plain to read.

  “Damn it,” she spat, like she couldn’t hold the words back. “I know I fucked up letting you four see that—don’t make me regret it any more than I already do. Get that stupid idea out of your head.”

  “I didn’t say anything,” Adah replied.

  Ketzia bit her lip and scratched at her hair. Her eyes had started to glow a bright yellow when she last spoke, but as she stared down at her mug the light within them slowly dimmed.

  “Sure, just…” Ketzia paused to look over the four girls. “I’m just saying, you kids should try and forget about these portals. Leave them to people like me, the ones who volunteered to deal with them. You have a more important job: protecting humanity from the more dangerous Cruelties. Focus on that, and hopefully you can make it so there will never be another portal. You understand?”

  The girls all nodded in response, but Adah was still thinking through her earlier question.

  The portals couldn’t be much different than the ones Ekki conjured with his spell, which meant a human—at least a magic user—should be able to travel through them. There was simply no other reason for the Cruelties to bother with portals if they weren’t required for spawning a human-type. Ketzia had a point about how dangerous what you’d find on the other side could be, but maybe it was a danger someone could handle. At her peak, Pureheart could defeat A-Rank Cruelties with a single spell. Someone who exceeded even that level of power could potentially survive in a realm full of Cruelties.

  At any rate, this was not an idea Adah had any intention of forgetting. Ekki had mentioned that DreamRise and Sunbright might have a reason to work together in the future. He was probably right—just in a different way than he probably expected.

  “I need to know something,” Ami suddenly said. “Does this mean that Emi almost became one of these things? When she got bit by a Cruelty, was it trying to make her into one?”

  Emi’s hand went to her shoulder again, and Ketzia’s eyes followed it.

  “I wouldn’t say she would’ve become one,” Ketzia said. “But they were trying to use her essence to make one. Luckily, it looks like that didn’t happen.”

  Emi squeezed her shoulder, the fabric of her shirt bunching up beneath her fingers. She looked at her sister, but her words were clearly meant for everyone.

  “I won’t let anyone else experience that,” she said. "That pain doesn’t go away.”

  Emi’s scream that day had stayed with Adah much like Emi’s pain must have stayed with her. Whenever it replayed in Adah’s head, it brought to mind images of a torture chamber where the floor had been dyed a reddish brown by decades of spilled blood.

  The only other noise that Adah could compare it to was the screaming of the humanoid Cruelty as it burned. In both cases, perhaps that was the result of human essence being torn away from its owner.

  In the end, that pain was all that mattered.

  These questions that lingered in Adah’s head about the nature of Cruelties, the source of magic essence, or the truth of how her scythe functioned—none of that mattered for now. It all boiled down to one fact: their team couldn’t allow even one more person to be harmed by the Cruelties.

  Adah would find her answers eventually, one way or another, but her mission would proceed regardless. She would become the strongest, but not for vanity’s sake. She’d amass whatever power, unlock whatever spells, pass beyond whatever thresholds she needed to in order to destroy the Cruelties entirely.

  She would create a world where no one else had to hear a scream like the ones burned into her brain.

  She’d never be a shining hero like Pureheart. That dream had died the day she became Twilight Heartbreak. Yet, the death of one dream had led to the birth of a magical girl who surpassed every limit Adah had struggled to overcome before. Twilight Heartbreak became stronger than Sparkling Starbloom could have ever hoped to be, and Adah believed she could become stronger than Pureheart as well.

  More importantly, she could become something Pureheart could never have been.

  Pureheart had been a protector of people. Heartbreak could be a destroyer of Cruelties.