The universe seemed to be conspiring with Adah and her teammates. The first mission they took on after announcing themselves as the Sisterhood of the Last Light came during the late afternoon, when the autumn sun cast a pale orange glow across the bottom of the sky. They couldn’t ask for a more fitting background for their first public appearance.

  The blog Seb had shared had gotten everyone—both the girls and their fans—fired up. Adah had to admit the guy had outdone himself. She had only provided him with some quick notes about each of their characters, yet she found even his first draft compelling. After some small edits to bring all the pieces together into a more cohesive theme, the announcement was ready for release. Maybe basing their stories in pure fantasy allowed him to make better use of his imagination, instead of embellishing his recaps of their missions with ludicrous details.

  Seeing how their identities had been transformed, while maintaining the key elements they had built their reputations on, made Adah’s idea feel real to the girls. In a sense, they had been handed the beginnings of a script. Now that they could see the direction these backstories had given them, they began to imagine the next steps of their characters and to devise how their stories could help them reach their goals as magical girls.

  The announcement had achieved its intended effect of breathing new life into the girls’ daily activities, but it was only the first step in what would be—would have to be—a career-long process. It would take time before the Sisterhood became an identity that resonated throughout all that they did. It was up to each of them to write their own role in this story, even if Adah could architect a plan for the big picture.

  Before anything else, though, they needed to make a proper re-debut. Their characters may have started to feel real to themselves, but their fans needed to see them in action before they’d become believers.

  So while Seb wrote, Adah drew.

  They couldn’t call themselves a new team if they all showed up in the same mismatched transformations as before. They needed outfits that highlighted their individual characters while sharing enough elements in common that they were immediately recognizable as a team.

  Larger agencies would hire professional designers to draft up transformations for newly launched teams, or even to create alternate outfits for an existing team to celebrate an anniversary or mark some evolution of the members. Adah had considered that as a possible career path if being a magical girl herself hadn’t worked out. Now that she was designing transformations for someone other than herself, she was grateful that she didn’t go that route.

  Creating the designs for both Sparkling Starbloom and Twilight Heartbreak had gone so smoothly. Even the adjustments she had made to give Heartbreak a fresh look for the re-debut had been easy to decide on—slightly longer horns, a slightly shorter skirt, and more demonic ornaments for her shawl’s silver chain and clasp. After a few scrapped drafts, she settled on something she liked and had Izzy inscribe it within his magic essence so that she could access it when she next transformed.

  Designing for her teammates, however, had been like dealing with the spoiled heiress of a multinational conglomerate. They wanted one change after another, with each edit taking the design in a completely different direction than the request before it. An element they were once adamant about including suddenly became abhorrent as soon as Adah put her pen to her tablet. They didn’t know how to describe what they were looking for, and Adah didn’t know what questions to ask to figure it out for herself.

  She had thought designing for Rika would be simple. Their collaboration on the music video felt more like fun than work, and Adah had felt as though she had a good sense of Rika’s style.

  Wrong!

  That girl turned into a tyrant when it came to her design. Adah understood where the passion came from—your transformation was the first thing a new fan would notice about you, and someone like Rika would have to fight, dance, take photos, and more in that outfit. You had to be comfortable in it, and it had to empower you to act like the best version of your character.

  Adah had expected all-nighters for the music video, but not for a transformation design. After hours of back-and-forth, Rika finally gave her approval for a new design.

  Instead of the traditional bright colors most teams used to distinguish their members from one another, Adah had proposed a monochrome theme for the Last Light. The four of them would all wear primarily black-and-white outfits, with each member’s transformation representing a certain ratio of darkness. As Twilight Heartbreak, Adah’s transformation represented full darkness—her outfit was all black except for her violet accent color.

  Rika’s transformation existed at the opposite end of the spectrum—full light through an all white outfit. This design, like Rika’s original, came with shorts. After their night-long deliberation, Adah had convinced Rika to at least add a spread of skirt tails around her waist, which fluttered around the back and sides of her legs a bit like a fairy’s wings. Inspired by the magic elements the DreamRise team included in their designs, these tails of fabric were trimmed with crimson—Rika’s accent color—the threads of which pulsed with light in tune with Rika’s heartbeat.

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  Adah thought that would add a cute touch to the outfit, especially if she could get Rika flustered like she had at their IndieMagie photoshoot.

  The rest of Lightburst Lyrika’s design was adapted from Rika’s previous transformation. Her cropped jacket became a tunic, and her crossed bandoliers became translucent wisps of ethereal fabric that made Rika look like a goddess depicted in an ancient marble statue. The final point of flair that Adah refused to budge on was a brooch of a sequence of silver lilies that bound the back of Rika’s hair.

  In the end, Rika was pleased with the design and the whole outfit was sufficiently fairy-like, so it was a job well done.

  Somehow, the twins gave Adah even more trouble.

  Ami as the Zerker would be representing a ratio of two-thirds light and one-third dark. Her design would be mostly white, with smaller sections of black and a sparing use of her green accent color. Emi as the Reaper would represent the reverse: a primarily black outfit with additions of white alongside her blue accent color.

  The twins forced Adah to toil through all the same nitpicking as Rika, but with some additional confusion around how much their outfits should have in common. One minute, they wanted to lean into being twins with lots of matching elements. The next, they wanted nothing in common at all. For her part, Adah really didn’t care one way or the other. She could just as easily hint at their characters being secretly related as she could have them be strangers. At the end of the day, their faces were identical, and their outfits could only distinguish them from each other so much.

  Eventually, Ami the Zerker settled on a style similar to her original transformation. She retained the tall boots, the jacket, and the slanted skirt, but instead of a marching band vibe, her new style had more of a grungy military aesthetic. She looked a bit like a soldier who had spent the past few days marching through the snow, assuming that soldier had chosen to wear a skirt for such a journey. She exuded the atmosphere of the fierce leader of a rebel faction in some dystopian reality. The whole look was made complete by the tattered white handwraps that encased her fists.

  Emi the Reaper ended up departing from her original transformation in a large way. She concealed herself within a hooded cloak, underneath which was the lightly armored dress of a lady knight. She leaned more heavily into the concept of a roleplaying game than anyone else on the team, with her armor putting fashion way before function. She had on thin, ornately etched pauldrons, a padded vest that fit an aristocrat better than an assassin, and a pleated skirt trimmed with sleek lines of steel along each pleat. The armor would struggle to protect her from a hug nevermind a blade, but conveniently magical girls had their own defensive capabilities.

  The cloak made incorporating her primarily black color scheme simple, much to Adah’s relief. Its hood also added the opportunity for a particularly interesting bit of magic flair. When Emi concealed her head beneath the hood, magic would shroud her face in a deeper darkness than the hood would naturally provide, and her eyes would glow an icy blue from behind that shroud.

  This newly designed company of adventurers—a princess, a fairy, a brawler, and an assassin—flew toward their first mission as the Last Light: a C-Rank that would spawn among the rolling hills that littered the region. Even though this arena—and the relatively weak Cruelty—wouldn’t draw a massive crowd, it would at least make for some picturesque photos of their new transformations.

  Already, the setting sun was casting heavy shadows in the valleys and crowning the hilltops with an orange glow. As the four members of the Sisterhood of the Last Light arrived at today’s interception point, their target Cruelty had yet to arrive.

  Down below, Adah spied a crowd of the usual suspects: a few local news crews, Seb and the Rally Force, and a trio of girls her age who were surely magic users from some other region.

  The interregional agencies hadn’t given up on their plan to swoop in and save the day as soon as a Region 4 team screwed up. These unrequested backup squads didn’t show up at every mission, but they were present more often than not. Unfortunately for them, they were truly wasting their time today. Their team was way too strong to be taking on today’s Cruelty as a full group of four. Fighting together was just a necessity of their re-debut. Hopefully, this mission would start the ball rolling on the growth they needed to clear their first B-Rank, and they could put these C-Ranks behind them.

  The magical girls who had shown up to watch their battle today looked a little less bored and deflated than those who usually got stuck with this chore. Interestingly, they weren’t alone this time either—a woman who appeared to be their manager was standing alongside them. As she flew closer to the group, Adah felt a growing suspicion that she knew these girls from somewhere. In the middle of thinking through all the teams she was familiar with, Ami answered Adah’s question for her.

  “What the hell are the furries doing here?”

  Adah had only ever seen the Apex Vox team in their transformations. Without their animal ears, she had trouble putting names to their faces. But now that she knew what to look for, she recognized them immediately: Sheffa, Canto and Mari. Maybe it was her imagination running wild now that she knew who they were, but Adah swore they retained some likeness of their animal counterparts even untransformed. Sheffa was a giddy rabbit, Canto a lazy cat, and Mari a playful trickster.

  “They just won the IndieMagie,” Rika said. “Why would they get stuck with a job like this?”

  Sheffa, the rabbit-eared captain of the bunch, must have noticed Adah and her teammates staring at her. She looked up and waved to them in a big, sweeping motion.

  “I don’t think they’re here for that,” Adah said. “I think they actually want to watch.”

  Adah had assumed the trio of girls were magical girls out of habit—she’d gotten used to seeing other teams at these C-Rank missions. However, none of the Apex Vox girls actually had their mascots out like those teams typically did. And if they were really here as part of that interregional feud, why would their manager come with them? That was an even bigger waste of resources then sending a team out here alone. Those details, combined with how Sheffa looked happy to be here, convinced Adah they had come on their own accord.

  She just had no idea why.