A little over a week had passed since the girls had returned from Ketzia’s cabin. They’d had a few opportunities to show off their new techniques on some low-ranking missions, but they had mostly spent the past week biding their time and planning.

  The public’s attention was still fixated on the IndieMagie. The competition was in the midst of its final round, which DreamRise had managed to advance to. As such, Sunbright’s efforts were better spent preparing for their next opportunity to shine rather than trying to pull attention away from such a high profile spectacle.

  This downtime was a good chance to practice their new combos on real missions—and for Adah to start collecting essence in her scythe. That was precisely her objective on this particular day.

  The smoky blade of Beleth’s Bloodletter sliced through the bird Cruelty that Adah had managed to chase down. Her scythe tore apart the body of the monster, destroying it all so that only its gray core remained. The core hung suspended in the air where the bird had once been as the scythe’s magic slowly consumed it.

  Essence flowed out of the core like smoke billowing from a bonfire. It rushed into Adah’s weapon in a steady stream, though the amount of essence extracted from this bird was far less than from the C-Rank her team had fought near Ketzia’s cabin. When the power entered her scythe, the weapon pulsed with another faint heartbeat.

  It turned out that—thankfully—the heartbeat within her weapon only appeared when she claimed more essence from a defeated Cruelty. What Lesh had called a memory of life seemed more like an echo or reverberation to Adah. The stronger the Cruelty she slayed, the longer and more intensely the heartbeat persisted after consuming the monster’s essence. After siphoning the power from a small fry like that bird, Adah only felt the pulse for a few seconds before it vanished.

  As such, she was able to quickly put the feeling out of her mind and focus on the scene around her.

  To Adah’s right, two more birds cried out with echoing squawks as chunks of shrapnel cut through their wings. The pair plummeted to the ground below like rocks, and Adah flew down in pursuit of them. She didn’t waste a moment, carving into their bodies with her scythe as soon as they smacked against the dirt. Two more black trails of magic surged into her weapon from the trio of downed enemies. She paused to look around and assess the area.

  “Need to catch your breath?” Rika teased from above. “Or are Grace’s workouts paying off yet?”

  “I’m good to go, if your aim can keep up,” Adah said. “I noticed you missed one with that last shot.”

  “I got distracted,” Rika returned with a wink, to which Adah stuck out her tongue.

  The two of them were clearing out an N-Rank mission, though it probably made more sense to say they were farming it. Specifically, they had taken this mission in order to feed all the essence from the Cruelties into Beleth’s Bloodletter.

  The mission had brought them to one of the many grassy expanses that separated the region’s towns from one another. The roads didn’t stretch into these empty fields, nor had the land been claimed as farmland. These areas all looked alike, with nothing to distinguish them but the occasional clump of trees or gently sloping hill. In fact, if someone had told Adah this field was the same one where they had fought the K-Rank with DreamRise, she would’ve believed it.

  Still, she’d come to like fighting in this kind of landscape. It was easy to take in all her surroundings, and she could fly freely without worrying about dodging tree trunks or nearby buildings. Maybe it lacked the gravitas of fighting in the middle of a crowded city, where you could sense so clearly the danger a Cruelty posed, but Adah appreciated the chance to take fights at her own pace. Since she didn’t have to protect any bystanders, she could take her time absorbing the power from every single bird.

  All this open space also made this particular mission much simpler to deal with.

  Like most Cruelties in N-Rank missions, these birds posed little threat on their own but became troublesome in groups. Each bird was slightly smaller than Adah herself, and from a distance could pass for a normal eagle or some other large bird of prey. What set them apart as Cruelties were their beaks. They were long like a pelican’s, though much thinner and narrowed to a dagger-like point. More importantly, they were attached by a kind of elastic tendon, which the birds used to stab their beaks forward in rapid succession, like a frog’s tongue shooting out to catch flies.

  The attacks were clearly telegraphed, with the birds typically cranking their necks back before shooting their beaks forward, so the Cruelties were only dangerous in a swarm. They were N-Rank for a reason, after all. Unlike with the overwhelming horde of wolf Cruelties, this mission involved only a small flock of a dozen birds. At their current level of power, Adah and Rika could afford to be picky with how they handled this mission, which made it the perfect opportunity to charge Adah’s scythe.

  The pair had opened up with a combination of Adah’s [Sparkling Strike] and Rika’s [Baetyl Breakburst]. The flock had split apart and easily dodged Adah’s spell, but Rika’s starry shrapnel was far too quick to avoid. As soon as her bullet shot into the meteorite she conjured, the rock broken open with a loud ringing sound. Its newly shattered pieces flew off in various directions at a speed Adah’s eyes couldn’t track. Rika had yet to master her control of every individual chunk of shrapnel, but could usually hit her mark on at least three targets.

  Rika’s first spellcast today had sniped two of the birds out of the air, and panicked the rest into splitting entirely. Adah had finished off the two fallen birds, at which point the true hunt began.

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  With the flock’s formation broken, Adah could fearlessly chase after one group while Rika targeted the second. They maintained an unrelenting pressure on the Cruelties, with Adah racing after them in flight and Rika barraging them with her multi-target spell. Perhaps the birds hadn’t expected to be the ones on the defensive—they had no response other than running from the two magical girls hunting them down. This too, Adah realized, was a benefit of growing stronger. Strategy mattered less when you could simply overwhelm your opponent.

  It wasn’t long before the girls had taken out all of the Cruelties except for the one Rika had missed with her latest attack. After looking around, Adah spotted the lone bird a short distance away, fleeing from her and Rika. The monster was flapping its wings in a desperate attempt to pick up whatever speed it could. No matter how hard it tried, though, it would never outpace Adah.

  She made ready to launch into the sky again and fly down this last straggler, but Rika called out to her before she could.

  “Wait,” she said. “I want to try something with this one. If I miss, you can take it.”

  They weren’t a couple of mercenaries competing for kill count, and this single bird wouldn’t be worth that much energy for her scythe, so Adah told Rika to go for it.

  “What are you trying, though?” she asked.

  “My railgun,” Rika said, her eyes fixed on the Cruelty growing ever smaller in the distance. “One reason it takes so long to fire is how slow I am with aiming it. If I only need to use a little bit of power, I want to try firing it faster. I want to trust my instincts.”

  She then began to charge her [Renova Railgun]. The usual red magical aura lit up Rika’s body, though it never reached the same brightness as any time Adah had seen her cast the spell before. Rika poured only a small portion of her magic into the spell this time, resulting in the aura remaining a soft glow. She unleashed her shot in the same amount of time a speedy archer might release an arrow. The crimson trail of her railgun streaked toward the bird Cruelty, which had flown far enough now that it appeared as only a vague shape of two wings.

  As the railgun’s trail faded, a quiet echo reached Adah’s ears. Though she could barely hear it, she knew that was the sound of the Cruelty perishing. Rika had hit its core with a clean shot.

  Adah gave the other girl a round of applause and said, “Pretty damn quick.”

  In response, Rika blew the smoke away from an imaginary revolver. What a shame she hadn’t chosen one as her weapon.

  “We’ll see how accurate I am in a real battle, but that felt good,” she said. “It’s like—you wouldn’t think too hard about shooting a basketball, right?”

  Adah nodded, not bothering to explain that with how short she was, shooting a basketball actually did take some thinking.

  “Another new technique unlocked,” she said.

  “The spell’s useful as an all-out attack,” Rika said, “but I don’t want that to be the only way it’s useful. I want us to be able to rely on it at any time, against any enemy.”

  Rika was still staring off in the direction of the Cruelty she had just slayed. Her expression was flat and her eyes contemplative. Adah realized it had been a while since she’d last seen Rika yawn. Her piercing gaze was there, but was often replaced by the more introspective look that she wore now.

  “I guess Grace was right about Ketzia being a good mentor for us,” Adah said. “No one wants to be outshone in battle. Everyone’s pushing their limits.”

  Rika turned to look at Adah now, staring right into her eyes. Indeed, Rika’s gaze had lost none of its luster.

  “That’s true, but it goes beyond fighting,” she said. “I meant what I said to Ketzia about not holding back. I used to let everything that scared me box me in. I wouldn’t go for shots that might miss. I’d only play it safe, then wonder why I kept coming up short. Somehow, I think you saw that about me before I did.”

  “I just wanted to see my favorite magical girl shine,” Adah said.

  Rika rolled her eyes.

  “Second favorite, maybe,” she said. “You’ll be idolizing Pureheart ‘til the day you die.”

  Adah laughed and shook her head. “Okay, second favorite. But it’s not Pureheart anymore.”

  She crossed her arms and struck a triumphant pose, which Rika got the meaning of right away.

  “Oh no,” she said. “Now you’re a narcissist and a fangirl.”

  “It can’t be helped,” Adah said. “I have no choice but to embody Twilight Heartbreak.”

  “Now that we have some fans, I guess our characters actually matter, huh?”

  “You always had fans.”

  Rika smiled. She surveyed the empty fields that surrounded them on all sides, perhaps having the same thought Adah was. It was funny to talk about fans when there were no other people in sight. Even if they’d grown more popular, they were still in Region 4. And about half of Region 4 was the countryside.

  “Speaking of that,” Rika said, turning back to Adah, “I need to talk to you about something later. Sometime when we can sit down instead of floating.”

  She had that serious, inward-facing look in her eyes again.

  “Whenever you want,” Adah said.

  Rika nodded but said nothing else for now. The silence that came over the pair made them acutely aware of the fact that they were, indeed, floating in the middle of nowhere. With all of the bird Cruelties eliminated, they had no reason to stick around here any longer. The sun was setting earlier and earlier each day, and the dimness of dusk was already sweeping through these fields.

  If they left now, they’d probably get home with just enough time to unwind before dinner. Tonight was a night Grace was cooking, so they had no desire to be late—both for the sake of the food and for avoiding a scolding by their manager. With a wordless agreement, the girls took off and began the journey home.

  By the time they made it back to the agency office, the sun had fallen fully below the horizon, which probably meant they were late. More so than dinner, Grace would likely be worried something had gone wrong with their mission. Such a simple N-Rank job shouldn’t take magical girls of their level so long—and their team had a history of running into bad luck with N-Ranks.

  Adah and Rika prepared mentally to be reprimanded for making Grace fret. However, this preparation took the form of pushing each other toward the agency’s front door, with neither girl wanting to be the one who entered first. Eventually, they wound up locked in a contest of strength with their backs pressed against each other. Adah was nearest the doorway and planted her feet in hopes of resisting Rika, who tried her hardest to force Adah up to the door.

  “What are you doing?”

  Adah had squeezed her eyes shut in an attempt to focus as much power into her legs as possible, so the voice surprised her. As she looked into the now open doorway and saw Grace’s face, her feet slipped and caused both her and Rika to tumble to the ground.

  “Stretching!” Rika managed to say as she scrambled to her feet.

  “Important to stretch after a mission,” Adah added.

  Grace looked between them, her expression more concerned than suspicious. Though perhaps concerned more for their sanity than their safety.

  “Just get inside,” she eventually said with a sigh. “I need to talk to you.”