Adah touched down on the rough soil of the tobacco fields. The ground here had already been hardened by the overnight frosts that had become a daily occurrence this late into autumn. This farm had tilled after harvest, leaving the fields in a bumpy state that felt to Adah like walking along a centuries-old cobblestone path. She approached the gray portal by taking shaky steps over this ground. Walking on the earth helped her feel grounded and resist the anxiety sloshing around in her stomach.

  Up close, the portal looked different than Adah had expected. She had only seen the one by Ketzia’s cabin at a distance, and today’s battle had moved so fast that she never got a good look at the bat’s creations until now.

  At a glance, these portals seemed like swirling masses of magic that had popped into existence, almost like clouds or thick fog. Adah had been thinking about the portals with that assumption in mind, which led her to wonder how they transported a humanoid Cruelty from one world or plane to another. The theory she had settled on was that they must function like a molecular teleportation machine in some old science fiction film. The person to be teleported would stand within the machine—or in this case, the portal—and then some process would transfer them to another machine or portal somewhere else.

  Now that she could inspect the portal up close, her theory fell apart.

  This was no collection of magic, but rather a hole.

  The form of the portal was strange, making it difficult for Adah’s eyes to distinguish one part from another. The center of the oval was particularly mesmerizing, with its many shades of gray twisting and swirling. It wasn’t until Adah focused on the edges of the portal that she began to see it for what it truly was.

  All around the portal’s edge, the world—this world—looked tattered. Adah was reminded of how the flesh of Emi’s shoulder had drifted away from her body in tiny pieces, like static on a television screen, after the wolf Cruelty had bitten her. The scenery of this world was torn apart in the same way all along the outside of the portal, as if someone had ripped apart a section of wallpaper to reveal the bricks behind it.

  Adah glanced around the farm in all directions, searching for any sign of where the previous portals summoned by the bat had been, but found no remnants of them anywhere. Despite appearing to tear a chunk out of this world, the portals didn’t seem to cause any lasting damage. Once they were destroyed, they vanished entirely.

  In that case, how were they being destroyed?

  With Ekki’s portals, it seemed to be a straightforward interaction. His spell did function more like teleportation in a movie—he was creating clouds of fog, not ripping apart the world. Thus, it made sense that the magic from another spell could disperse that fog and interrupt his spell. It was basically a physical interaction at that point, like how Ami could catch projectiles in her water shield.

  The Cruelties, by comparison, weren’t casting spells. They probably weren’t using magic essence at all when they created these portals. Instead, the portals must have had some connection to whatever allowed the Cruelties to travel between worlds in the first place.

  This was getting complicated fast. In her head, Adah summarized everything that she knew about the Cruelties as it related to these portals.

  The portals were a means for the humanoids to travel from whatever world the Cruelties called home to this one. Ketzia had said that only humanoids ever emerged from the portals. Regular Cruelties could spawn here via some other innate capability.

  So what was the difference between the two? Adah had never seen any human-like features on any Cruelty other than the humanoid she encountered. They were all based on animals from this world, augmented with features or abilities the Cruelties must have harvested from another world. She knew humanoids were created with essence taken from dead humans—that was the fundamental difference.

  Adah had a theory about that, too, though she wasn’t sure how to prove it.

  Izzy had said that the mascots process magic essence before using it and before transferring it to human magic users. That processing seemed to expand the range of power within magic essence. Actually, it seemed to make that power universal. Magic users burned essence when flying, when withstanding strong impacts, and when casting spells that could do everything from controlling the elements to teleporting people to enhancing the senses. In fact, processing the essence was the only reason humans could use magic at all.

  For Cruelties, essence seemed highly specific in its capabilities according to its source. For mascots, that wasn’t the case, at least after they processed it.

  If those rules held true, then some aspect of human essence prevented the humanoids from spawning in this world in the same way as other Cruelties. And although she only had one example to judge by, Adah also suspected that the humanoids all lacked any of the augmented features other Cruelties possessed. In that sense, the humanoids had more in common with real humans than just their appearance.

  There was something unique about humans and the humanoids. Whatever it was, it was rooted in their essence.

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  That unique quality was also what empowered humans to amplify magic output to such a large degree. However much essence the Cruelties spent on creating a particular variant, a competent magic user could destroy that variant while expending a fraction of the essence. The equation was completely imbalanced in humanity’s favor, which was why this war against the Cruelties was slowly turning into an extermination campaign. Humanity would inevitably win out.

  That was the problem the humanoids were meant to solve.

  If they shared whatever it was in humanity that empowered magic users, then the Cruelties could even the playing field. That was why, Adah theorized, the humanoids only appeared in remote locations. The Cruelties needed as much time as possible to learn how to transfer essence into the humanoids. They had figured out how to bring the humanoids into this world, but not yet how to make full use of them.

  Adah prayed that she was wrong, but it seemed more and more likely that the Cruelties were trying to create magic users of their own.

  As for the bat… She prayed even harder that this monster hadn’t been practice for deploying the portals more aggressively. The only reason the Cruelties would do that was if they had made some progress on the first problem.

  That’s why learning more about these portals was so important. Not only did they potentially offer a way to go on the offensive against the Cruelties, but humanity could also discover what kind of limitations bound the humanoids. If the portals were a doorway that allowed humanoids to enter this world, then their properties—magical or otherwise—could reveal what the Cruelties themselves had learned.

  So, Adah began experimenting.

  She cast her [Parietal Perception], though she had no specific target to fixate on. She simply gazed through the portal, into the whirlwind of gray at its center, and waited to see if her spell latched onto anything within. After a full minute of staring into that monochrome kaleidoscope, she saw nothing to indicate any movement on the other side.

  Well, she had expected as much. If there was a world beyond the portal that human eyes could perceive, it probably wouldn’t look like a gray swirl. To see what was on the other side, one would have to pass through it.

  Even without Ketzia warning her, Adah wasn’t ready to jump through any portal, so she moved on to the next test.

  Magic spells could destroy these portals, but what did that mean in comparison to destroying Ekki’s portals? These portals looked like holes in the world—holes that the humanoids used as doors. Yet, a door was the wrong analogy. The Cruelties couldn’t open and shut these so easily. They had to tear open a piece of the world, and then hold it open like the ropes of a boxing ring while the humanoids passed through. Once they stopped applying whatever force was needed to keep the rift open, it closed up as if it had never been there.

  If Adah imagined an invisible Cruelty floating on the other side of the portal, holding it open, then it all made sense. Her and Rika’s spells were essentially knocking out that invisible Cruelty. They were destroying the force that held the rifts open.

  In that case, what would her scythe do to a portal?

  Adah held out her hand and called upon Beleth’s Bloodletter. No need for fanfare this time—she let the weapon materialize in her hand normally. The smoky blade slithered out of the weapon, already sensing Adah’s intention. She readied the scythe, and then—

  “What are you doing?” Rika said.

  Rika’s voice startled Adah so bad that she lost her balance and fell onto her ass. It didn’t help that she was traversing this bumpy field in heels.

  Adah looked behind her to see Rika standing on her own again, and staring down at her with a wicked flare in her eyes. It seemed she had recovered from going all-out with her railgun. It also seemed she was a little angry.

  “A little science experiment,” Adah said as she picked herself off the ground.

  “Alone,” Rika added that important detail for her. “While I wouldn’t have been able to help you if something went wrong. And we shouldn’t be experimenting with these portals, we should be destroying them.”

  “We need to experiment so that we can destroy them,” Adah said. “For good.”

  “Proper scientists take safety precautions,” Rika said. “Otherwise they can end up dead. For good.”

  “I am taking precautions. One step at a time.”

  “Adah,” Rika said, her voice sharp with the same stern tone as during their fight. “We’re alone out here. I don’t have much energy to fight if something goes wrong. You said unanimous votes only from now on, right? This time, I’m voting no.”

  Adah looked into Rika’s eyes. They seemed to repeat Rika’s words back again with the way they gripped Adah’s heart. Still, she held firm and didn’t glance away.

  “Nothing came through, and I don’t think anything is going to,” Adah said. “This may be the only chance we get to look at one of these things up close. I can’t let this go. I don’t want to do anything crazy, I just want to do one small test. Can you give me that much? You can aim your spell at it the whole time, and destroy it as soon as you get a bad feeling.”

  Rika stared her down, but Adah refused to budge. She had meant what she said: she couldn’t let this go.

  After a long silence, Rika pointed her hand at the portal in the shape of a gun.

  “Heartbreak is so much more trouble than Adah,” she said. “Go on.”

  “But you like bad girls,” Adah said, turning back toward the portal.

  “Now’s not the time to remind me of my flaws,” Rika sighed.

  Not wanting to put Rika through any more stress than she needed to, Adah readied her scythe again. For now, she only wanted to see if the tip of the scythe’s blade could pierce the portal and, if it could, what would happen after. The weapon consumed the essence contained within Cruelty cores, so what would it do to these rifts? Could it pass through at all?

  The only way to find out was to try, so Adah lowered the scythe’s blade toward the gray whirlwind at the rift’s center.

  The moment the tip of the blade passed into that whirlwind, Adah felt something change within her weapon.

  The heartbeat thumped. And thumped again. And again.

  Not any louder than she had grown used to, but faster. Much faster. Like a panic attack. Like the heart of a man with a gun pointed at his head. Like a heart about to rupture.

  The feeling was overwhelming—a complete rumbling that reverberated through Adah’s body and shook the weapon in her hands. A heart attack played out in her palms.

  She stumbled backward, letting the scythe drop from her hands. She stared into the rift as she fell, and saw nothing but the same gray mass.

  Rika fired her bullet in the same moment. The portal dematerialized in the next.

  Adah’s scythe lay in the dirt, still shaking.