The next few days of their time at Ketzia’s cabin proceeded under a cloud of solemnity. There were no more nights where the girls passed out in a pile on the living room couch and sluggishly pulled themselves from sleep. They were diligent in getting ready for bed, and woke up each morning as early as their host.

  Even Ketzia took on a more serious air from that point on. Not to say she never cracked any jokes or showed off her Untethered magic—she couldn’t change who she was at her core—but she led the girls through each day with a targeted focus that she hadn’t shown during the first few days. She answered any question the girls had to the best of her ability, and took aside each girl to explore their arsenal of spells more thoroughly than she had in the days prior.

  Of course, they continued to train with their weapons and spell combinations every day. Ami in particular requested each of her teammates spend hours practicing her new shield-catch technique with their spells. She had Adah and Rika fire their spells over and over until she memorized the exact amount of power her shield required to effectively hold the projectiles. As soon as she mastered that aspect of the technique, she moved on to catching projectiles while flying, which took a whole new round of practice with both girls.

  Not to be outdone, Emi practiced alone with Mercury’s Majesty at every free moment. Batting away Rika’s explosives seemed to come natural to her, so she shifted her focus to utilizing the different forms her halberd could take. Apparently the weight balance differed between forms, with something like the hammerhead form becoming more top-heavy than the slim glaive. She didn’t stop at taking practice swings, however.

  The magic metal atop her weapon could change forms fast, with seemingly no cooldown. Even when the metal was midway between forms and appeared like a liquid, it retained the same rigid tenacity as steel. Emi began to practice using this quality to her advantage by timing the shift between forms to coincide with the exact moment her weapon struck its target. As it morphed from a hammer to an ax blade, there was a brief period where the magic metal looked like a blend of both—like there was a saw blade embedded in the end of a hammer. If Emi managed to hit her target during that period, she could slice through an enemy’s protective outer layer with the blade while maintaining the same force of impact that the hammer provided.

  Ketzia provided the girl with plenty of unsplit firewood to practice this technique on. She had probably hoped Emi’s practice would save her some manual labor, but most of Emi’s swings ended up splintering the wood into minuscule pieces. Maybe they’d still be useful as kindling.

  Adah and Rika also found moments to train on their own, and used those opportunities to test out a combo of Adah’s own imagining. While Adah’s [Parietal Perception] and its ability to track enemies through her smoke cloud were useful for providing information to her teammates, this function offered little benefit to Adah herself. Her [Sparkling Strike] was too unreliable to hit any Cruelty she tracked in this way, and using her whip or scythe would defeat the purpose of the smokescreen.

  Then, what if she could combine her tracking vision with one of her teammate’s spells—specifically a fast and destructive one? She had gotten the idea from Sweetdream Soulslip, though instead of transferring her sight through magic, Adah would do so through touch. If she could stand behind Rika and line up her teammate’s arm with her sight, she could potentially guide Rika’s spells as if helping an athlete practice their form.

  To properly practice this technique, the pair would need a target that Adah’s vision could actually track. That is, they needed someone—or something—who could move around on the other side of the smokescreen. Ketzia was more than happy to volunteer Lesh for this job.

  Though, the girls wouldn’t be trying to shoot the bird directly. He would simply carry another piece of firewood behind the smokescreen and stand it upright on the ground. Adah could follow Lesh’s movement until it stopped, and then assume the chunk of wood was just below where his trail ended. After giving him a second to fly out of danger, the girls could practice their aim.

  The results were mixed. After a couple of calibration attempts, the pair began to hit their mark consistently. But whenever they took a break from practicing, all of that calibration vanished the next time they tried the combo. Each time, they needed to realign their bodies until they honed in once more. That much setup was completely impractical for a real combat scenario, so they’d need to find a way to make the technique replicable from the start, much like Ami had practiced for her shield-catch.

  All of the girls got chances to put their new techniques to work on a few missions throughout the rest of the week. These Cruelties were all low-ranking, with nothing more dangerous than a D-Rank bat-type that felt like a warm-up exercise to their team at this point. Weak monsters were ideal for practice, so the girls took full advantage of those opportunities.

  Time passed fast in this cycle of training, fighting, and sleeping. Even so, Adah and her teammates were on the verge of cabin fever by the time their stay with Ketzia came to an end. Uninterrupted practice was useful, but they were all itching to tackle a new, real challenge. More importantly, they wanted to show off in front of some cameras, to let the world know that the Sunbright team was stronger than ever, and to put their defeat in the IndieMagie far, far behind them.

  On the day Grace came to pick them up, the girls all finished packing their bags before the rising sun crested the treetops around the cabin. When Grace’s car rolled to the end of the dirt trail leading to Ketzia’s cabin, Adah and her teammates were already lined up on the porch with their bags. They weren’t trying to escape Ketzia, but they were ready to get back to work. More than ready.

  Grace got out of her car and looked over the four girls standing shoulder to shoulder with their bags at their feet.

  “Did she turn you into soldiers or something?” she said.

  Ketzia appeared from the cabin front door and came up behind the girls. She hooked an arm around Ami and Emi’s necks, the two girls she had—predictably—grown closest to this past week.

  “Did you expect anything less?” Ketzia said. “I didn’t get to where I am by goofing around, ya know?”

  Adah distinctly remembered Ketzia saying that she had, in fact, spent her career goofing around, but she kept quiet. She also kept quiet about the real reason the four girls had grown so serious throughout this week. They had promised Ketzia to keep the humanoid Cruelty a secret, and that secrecy extended to Grace as well. If Ketzia had known their manager for so long and never told her, then they ought to respect that decision.

  “You planning on rushing out of here again?” Ketzia asked. “I have to warn you—I never fed these kids breakfast today.”

  Grace sighed. “Something tells me that was premeditated. I’m not sitting in a car surrounded by these four when they’ve got empty stomachs. I’ll hang around for breakfast, but after that we need to head out.”

  Ketzia beamed her toothy smile, then Grace had the girls load their bags into her car while she and Ketzia went inside. Even though she’d acquiesced a little bit to her old friend, she was still preparing to leave as soon as their meal was finished.

  ☆☆☆

  Breakfast turned into a two-hour experience. Once Ketzia had caught Grace in her web, she refused to let her go.

  Ketzia, who typically cooked at a blistering pace with her fire magic, took her sweet time preparing this meal. Once everyone finished eating, she insisted on taking Grace on a tour of the whole cabin. She recounted in deep detail how she had managed to furnish each and every room. She went on about how long it had taken her to make her dining table and the many chairs around the cabin. She nearly reenacted the alleged odyssey of carrying the pieces of her giant sofa into the living room. Just about everything in the cabin had an epic backstory that Ketzia was determined to share.

  Grace eventually assured Ketzia that she’d visit again soon—even pinky promised on it—and the pair said their goodbyes with another spine-crushing hug. This time, Ketzia even extended this gracious farewell to each of the four magical girls. Grace led them all outside and into her car, and then they embarked on the long journey home.

  Much like the day they’d first arrived at Ketzia’s cabin, the girls found themselves exhausted by the time they returned to the agency office. It felt as though the trip home had taken twice as long as the drive up to the cabin. After they brought their bags to their respective rooms, each girl wound up laying down on her bed and soaking in the feeling of being back home. Their motivation from the morning hadn’t faded, but relaxing during downtime was an essential part of giving your all when it counted.

  This lethargic attitude continued until after sundown, when the girls were all quick to retire to their rooms once again. They all shared a look of agreement as they walked up the stairs to their dorm. That look said: once my door’s closed, I’m passing out.

  However, despite the exhaustion she felt in her body, Adah’s mind wouldn’t let her slip into sleep.

  This had been happening more and more lately. Sure, her recent discoveries about magic and the humanoid Cruelty were keeping her up, but that wasn’t all it was. There was a buzzing in her head that wouldn’t quiet. It had been there since after their duel with DreamRise. The buzzing kept her brain electrified and beat back any drowsiness she felt. Inevitably, she would wind up thinking and planning for hours after she laid down.

  As her mind wandered on this night, her legs also carried her aimlessly around the agency office. The other girls were fast asleep and Grace had gone home for the night, so Adah was alone in the silence. She crept downstairs, where a pale moonlight illuminated the floor below the building’s front windows. She paused and basked in that gentle light for a while before making her way to the back office.

  The room was pitch black when she entered, so she flipped on the lights. The brightness blinded her temporarily, but soon the room came into view. It was just as it had been before they left for the cabin, save for one small detail.

  Adah looked over the rolling whiteboard in the center of the room. It was still covered with all of the notes and scribblings of the past two months. While they were away at Ketzia’s cabin, Grace had updated all of their FP levels to their new totals, though Ami’s latest jump over 5000 had yet to be added.

  The old numbers for the agency’s budget had also been left on the board, but they were long past the point of scrimping to pay rent. A couple of C-Rank missions would cover the agency’s operating expenses for the month, and any extra could finally be reinvested in the business and paid out to Grace and the magical girls. Of course, Grace had always maintained proper balance sheets, but now that the agency’s finances were stable, it felt silly to represent them so simplistically on the whiteboard. Money was something they only needed to think about in the sense of actual accounting now.

  Even Adah’s hastily scribbled plan for Operation Spotlight had remained on the whiteboard. Looking at her notes now, she felt like an entirely different person had written them. Was this really the way she’d been trying to lead her team? Though, on reflection, maybe she hadn’t changed so much since then. Her plan for overcoming DreamRise had also ended up as a last minute gamble. Thinking back on it, she could come up with an endless list of things she would’ve done differently in both situations.

  In both cases, though, her teammates had put their faith in her haphazard plans. Somehow, things even turned out okay for them throughout it all. They’d all gotten stronger, and even achieved their goals of taking out a C-Rank and earning their weapons. They should be happy about that.

  Yet, Adah knew they weren’t. She felt it in herself.

  There was joy to be had in their growth so far, but that growth also held a mirror up to all of their shortcomings. The way they had fumbled through so many of their missions. The way they’d been so easily outplayed by DreamRise throughout the IndieMagie. Every missed opportunity to capitalize on their characters, to steal the hearts of more fans, to say something cuter or cooler in the right moment… All of it pricked their brains.

  When they were languishing at the bottom of this industry, all their failures and mistakes were like a blurry mass in the darkness. Now that they were growing, every mistake was magnified. Once the spotlight started shining on you, all your flaws showed up so clearly. There would always be a fan to point them out or another magical girl to take advantage of them, but more savage than either was the voice in your own head.

  Adah thought about it every day: she should have done better. She should have been better.

  Perhaps that was part of why she had been having so much trouble sleeping. As each day settled down and she lay alone with her thoughts, she couldn’t help but feel she hadn’t done enough yet. She needed to learn everything she could from what had happened today, and prepare as much as possible for what she may encounter tomorrow. If she didn’t make use of every moment she had, how could she ever hope to surpass Iris, or Ketzia, or Pureheart?

  At some point, Adah had started absentmindedly wiping away all of the writing on the whiteboard. Those old numbers and ideas were no longer of any use to their team. It was time for new goals and a proper plan. Maybe if Adah could look at this board and see some piece of the future laid out for her, it might put her mind at ease.

  She uncapped a marker and started to write.

  Her ideas were nothing but scrambled pieces for now, like a puzzle spilled out on a table. Adah couldn’t decide her teammate’s individual plans for them, nor put into words what their motivations may be. Still, she thought about the connective tissue, the commonalities that bound them together as a group of four, and wrote out what she could.

  The gaps could be filled in later. Though her mind wanted to rush ahead, Adah wanted to think everything through. She wouldn’t let herself or her team fall short ever again. The new goal they had their sights set on wouldn’t allow for mistakes.

  Once she had emptied her mind of all her racing thoughts, she wrote out the goal across the top of the whiteboard. It was a goal that waited for them far in the future, and one that other people would debate whether they had even achieved it. None of that mattered, though. This goal would be the star that guided them, bright enough to shine through the thickest clouds. As long as they kept their eyes on that light, every other goal—from destroying Cruelties to becoming Untethered—would follow. And once they believed that they'd achieved it, that would be enough.

  Become Number One.