Flying with magic was a curious thing. The effort it demanded wasn’t quite physical, though it did wear on Adah’s body in the same way casting spells did. The real challenge of flight was mental. Flight required intent, but once she got used to it, moving around in the air felt no different from walking around. Once she determined she wanted to move somewhere in a certain way, her mind, body, and magic would all coordinate to make it happen.
Her flight training had begun as soon as she became a magical girl and paired with Izzy. Flight was the first step of everyone’s training. Before she ever cast a single spell, Adah had probably spent fifteen hours in the air flying about, navigating around obstacles, and switching directions on a dime. All of that training was built off the back of one foundational skill: hovering.
To develop enough familiarity with magic flight to make it feel second nature, like any other motor skill, magic users practiced hovering. Gravity was the natural enemy of flight, of course, and hovering was the simplest way to learn how to overcome that force. By hovering, Adah gained a sense of how much magic and effort to apply if she wanted to maintain a particular height, as well as what it took to raise or lower that height by a particular distance. This familiarized her with the “muscles” of magic.
Hovering was to flying what standing was to walking. Or so Adah thought. During their more recent practice sessions, Izzy had helped Adah realize that hovering wasn’t actually the foundational skill of flying. It was a separate skill.
For years, her launches into flight had always began with an application of force directly against gravity. That was, after all, how she had learned to achieve a hover. Once she was airborne, she could apply her magic to fly in whichever direction she desired. Over time, the process became seamless, with no visible pause as she transitioned from hovering to flying. However, the process was still two steps.
The consequence of this, as Izzy had revealed to Adah, was that she never let go of that initial expenditure of energy against gravity. Why would she? That was what was keeping her airborne, she thought. But once Izzy had her release that energy and focus solely on flying to her next destination, she found that she did not fall out of the sky. If she wanted to stay airborne once she stopped flying, she would need to focus on hovering again, but hovering was not itself a prerequisite for flight. Her body and her magic could take her from one point to another in the air, compensating for gravity all on their own. She didn’t need a whole separate mental process.
When walking or running, you never resumed a standing position until you came to a stop. Keeping your body upright against gravity was already a natural part of the process. Adah had to retrain herself to think of flight in the same way.
And then all of her training and retraining—all of her instincts and reflexes—went out the window as soon as Sheffa cast [Invert Instinct].
The spell took effect in a sphere around Sheffa, which she said she could control the radius of by expending more or less magic essence. She gave Adah plenty of warning when she was about to cast the spell, but even so Adah was unprepared for the shift in her environment.
As soon as the spell activated, Adah rocketed upward. Despite flying higher and higher into the sky, she felt as though she was falling, like the support of her stabilizing hover had fallen out from under her. Her instincts took over at the sensation, and she applied her magic as she always had to try to achieve a stationary hover once more.
However, her magic “muscle memory” was accustomed to a gravity that pulled her downward. By trying to resist that kind of gravity, she only propelled herself higher in the air. Within Sheffa’s sphere, the force of gravity was one that repelled Adah from the planet, and that was the physical inclination that she needed to resist. It was a simple idea in her head, but she couldn’t seem to adjust her magic to compensate. She kept flying upward.
“Flip yourself!” Sheffa called to her. “It’s way easier, trust me!”
Adah tried to fly in an upright position as much as possible. The twins were more comfortable being upside-down or flying with their backs to the earth, but a natural orientation always worked best for Adah. For that very reason, being upside-down now was probably a good idea.
She flipped herself in the air and tried to stabilize herself once more. This time, the new orientation helped her find her footing, so to speak. She had ended up a couple hundred feet in the air at this point, a fact she became acutely aware of as a result of being upside-down. Instead of the expansive sky filling her view, she was staring at the hard ground below—or above?
“Don’t go too high,” Sheffa warned. “You’ll leave the sphere and everything will switch back, but then you’ll probably end up falling back into the sphere and it’ll switch again, and then… It just gets really crazy.”
“How do I fly back to you?” Adah asked, too nervous after an explanation like that to try getting back to the ground on her own.
Sheffa just laughed. “You gotta figure it out. Flying in the sphere is weird, I can’t explain it. If you stay upside-down like that, you should be able to do what you normally do. Just don’t think too hard about it and try not to look at the ground.”
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As Sheffa finished that half-helpful explanation, a gray object entered Adah’s field of view. The turtle Cruelty was floating—falling?—in her direction. If gravity was reversed, then the monster would keep falling toward the top of the spell sphere. With no way to fly on its own, did that mean it would shoot outside the sphere’s range, then be affected by normal gravity again and fall back into the sphere, getting stuck in the cycle Sheffa had warned Adah about?
The Cruelty continued to fall above Adah until it eventually slowed down, as if it had activated a parachute. The monster came to stop another thirty feet above Adah and started rocking back and forth on its shell. Although the monster was upright from a natural perspective, it was like its shell had hit an invisible ceiling.
“That’s the other weird part,” Sheffa said. “The inversion weakens at the edges of the sphere, basically down to zero. It’s like it reaches an equilibrium with gravity outside the sphere.”
“So it’s like a wall?”
“If you’re not flying, sure.”
They were two equal and opposite forces at a stalemate. It hadn’t occurred to Adah before, but it was difficult for most creatures to propel themselves in the direction of gravity. Even a human couldn’t do it without magic or some other tool. If you were standing on the ground on your own two feet, you could propel your body against gravity but not with it.
Feeling that she was understanding the spell and its effects a bit better now, Adah tried flying toward Sheffa, who still floated near the earth. She tried not to think about anything she was seeing—not the ground above or the sky below—and simply trust in the instincts of flight she had built up over the years. She told herself she was upright, despite all appearances to the contrary, and used her magic accordingly. Slowly and carefully, she made progress toward the ground.
“Oh, you’re doing good,” Sheffa remarked. “Canto always has a panic attack when I use this.”
“Don’t give me any ideas,” Adah said. “It’s taking all my focus to not feel sick right now.”
“It’s good to get practice now in case we fight something serious together later,” Sheffa said. “Let’s chat while you get acclimated. It’ll take your mind off the weirdness. Anything you’ve been dying to know about our team?”
Talking was good. More talking meant less thinking, and less thinking meant less chance of accidentally barreling toward the ground.
“Not your team, but your region,” Adah said. “Taking a mission in Region 2 got me thinking about what’s going on in my region. Does your Secretary have a problem with teams from outside regions taking jobs here? Like if a Region 1 team wanted to sign up for a mission here, would that be an issue?”
“I dunno,” Sheffa said. “I’ve never met her.”
“You’ve never met your region’s Secretary?” Adah asked. “But your team was the regional rep for the IndieMagie. She didn’t even want to meet with you after you won?”
“Let’s just say Secretary Carrell cares more about her title than her job, if you know what I mean,” Sheffa said. “She wanted to lead the Department of Magic because it holds more political clout than any other office. Her priority is politics, not magic. This job is just another step toward her real aspirations: national politics. Presidency-level stuff.”
Adah was getting close to Sheffa now. As the ground inched closer, she had to resist the urge to flip herself back right side up. She might end up slamming her head into the ground in the process.
“So what does she do if she isn’t working with magic users directly?” Adah asked.
Sheffa shrugged. “Smooth operations, budget surpluses, and public speeches. She spends more time talking to people outside the Department of Magic than those in it. And you can forget magic users entirely. Carrell wants connections that will help her climb the ladder, and all this magical girl stuff is just a backdrop for her big show.”
“Then we’re not the only ones with an incompetent leader,” Adah sighed.
Based on what Sheffa was explaining about Region 2’s Secretary, that meant already half of the nation’s Departments of Magic were being led by lost causes. Thibault was self-obsessed and vindictive, and it sounded like Secretary Carrell was even less interested in supporting magic users. Chances were that the Secretaries of Regions 1 and 3 weren’t much different.
Was there anyone in a position of power who still took the threat of the Cruelties seriously?
“The Department of Magic only attracts bad apples, huh?” Adah said.
“Seems like it,” Sheffa said. “That’s why magic users need to be able to rely on each other. We need to have each other’s backs—I’m not sure anyone else will.”
Sheffa had made that same point before, and it rang even truer to Adah now. Magic users weren’t seen as a unified force but rather as a bunch of disparate groups in competition with one another. Different teams should have been organizing together to form the most effective defense against the Cruelties possible. Instead, teams were fractured, and pitted against each other on purpose in exchange for money, fame, and power. It was no surprise their political leaders functioned the same way.
By reaching out to Adah and her team, Sheffa had started to break that trend. Even this mission was an attempt by Sheffa to build a connection between their teams. Fighting together, even against this pitiful turtle Cruelty, gave them a chance to build trust and learn to coordinate with each other’s spells. That way, when the time came, they could rely on each other.
When the time came.
Ekki had said those words to Adah, too. The first time he had spoken to Adah alone, he had said they may need to rely on each other one day. Had he meant it in the same way as Sheffa?
“What do you think of Ekki?” Adah asked the rabbit-eared girl out of the blue. “The Fogstorm Knight.”
“From DreamRise?” Sheffa said. “He’s not my type, and isn’t he taken?”
“I mean as a person. Like, morally or something.”
“I don’t know if I ever saw who he really is,” Sheffa said. “He takes too much of a backseat to those two girls. They’re easy as hell to read, but I’m not sure about him. He’s different from them, but I couldn’t tell you what he stands for. Does that match what you know about him?”
“Spot on,” Adah said.
If he did believe in what he said to Adah, then he had chosen to be a bystander while Iris and Thibault stomped all over those ideals. Adah wasn’t sure she had any reason to believe things would be different this time around.
“Hey,” Sheffa said, pointing up—or down?—at the turtle. “We should probably drop this guy. When he falls, we’ll get a shot at its stomach. I’m thinking you finish it off with your whip?”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“I’d flip yourself again before I turned my spell off,” Sheffa warned. “Don’t want to bonk your head too hard.”
