“They must be fighting it by now,” Ami said. “Do you think they’re okay?”

  “I’m trying not to think about it,” Rika said.

  “Iris might be desperate,” Adah said, “but she isn’t dumb enough to charge in without a plan.”

  Whether or not that plan would work was another story, but it would probably keep her team safe for a time. Adah and her teammates just needed to arrive before that time ran out.

  “Looks like they’re still alive,” Ami said, pointing at the ground.

  Down below, crowds of people milled about what must have been an evacuation zone. If all these people were still hanging around instead of fleeing even farther away, DreamRise must have managed to contain the hydra to some degree. For a split second, Adah wanted to believe that DreamRise had some ace up their sleeve, but the thought was too naive to hold onto for very long.

  Not long after Adah let go of that hope, she flew headfirst into the reality of the situation.

  Though the hydra was still hundreds of feet away, the sheer size of it made Adah feel as if she was in danger even at such a distance. The way the monster moved also wasn’t something a mission brief or video could truly capture. Its legs were nimble, despite being such a top-heavy creature, and moved like a cat’s as it repositioned itself within the intersection DreamRise had lured it to. At the same time, its five heads each moved independently with an agility that matched that of the fastest C-Ranks Adah had fought.

  Five heads? That must have meant DreamRise had already been forced to sever a head twice in this battle.

  “So they’ve already made this harder than it was,” Ami said.

  “They probably didn’t have a choice,” Adah said. “If your options are cutting off a head or dying, it’s not much of a decision.”

  Theoretically, you’d want to fight the hydra in a way that avoided the heads altogether. If you couldn’t do that, then the next best play was to disable or guard against them. Cutting off the heads could buy you a few precious seconds, as they didn’t regenerate instantly, but should be saved as an absolute last resort. You’d buy yourself a few seconds in the short term at the cost of making the fight even deadlier in the long term.

  But theory was one thing, and reality was another.

  For DreamRise, this battle began as a three-versus-three: one head per member. Given the fact that Iris and Clair’s spells were poorly suited to direct combat, it was inevitable that the hydra would force them into a position where they needed to sever a head to escape a dire situation. Now that they were outnumbered, it’d only be easier for the hydra to back them into such a corner.

  Still, the DreamRise members wouldn’t let themselves be beat so easily. From the way they were fighting, it looked as though they’d learned enough about their opponent to stabilize the battle.

  Iris was making good use of her newly unlocked weapon: a bow as tall as her body, much like the one Pureheart used to wield. Instead of firing heart-tipped arrows, Iris was unleashing what appeared to be simple beams of light. She fired off one of those beams now, shooting it straight into the neck of one of the hydra heads. The light pierced the serpent just below its jaw, sticking in place as its tip punctured the opposite side of the serpent’s neck. Then, like a bomb detonating, small thorns erupted from spots all along the light arrow’s shaft, stabbing through the flesh within the serpent’s neck and damaging it even further.

  The head that Iris had attacked hissed in pain, and while it wasn’t entirely debilitated, its slithering movement did turn sluggish and drunk. This must have been how DreamRise had held their ground so far. If they could damage the heads without severing them, they could gradually even the playing field. Then, Iris could set her sights on the Cruelty’s core.

  However, the respite bought by Iris’s attack only lasted a few moments. Sensing the damage to one of its fellow heads, another serpent rushed to remove the thorny arrow from its comrade’s neck. This second head bit down on one of the exposed ends of the arrow and yanked it straight out. The thorns carved apart the hydra’s flesh even more on their way out, but this was of no concern to the Cruelty. Once the arrow was removed, the damaged serpent would regenerate in a matter of seconds. A monster that could replace and replicate entire heads had no trouble healing simple lacerations.

  All the while, the three unoccupied heads continued their assault on the other DreamRise members.

  Clair was trying to focus on chanting a spell, but was constantly being interrupted by attacks from two of the serpent heads. Although the exact mechanics of the spell were still a mystery to Adah, she recognized it as the same one Clair had used to manipulate Emi and put her to sleep during their duel. In that fight, Clair had needed time to complete the spell, even though she had said Emi had put up little resistance. Adah had to imagine the hydra would fight hard against any attempt to enter its mind, meaning Clair would need even more space to break into the beast.

  Ekki did his best to help Clair keep her focus on spellcasting. He summoned one of his portals beside her and a second one farther behind himself, creating a quick escape route for her to slip through. As one of the hydra heads got within attack range, she moved through the first portal and ended up near where Ekki had once been.

  Ekki himself had left that spot, taking the attention of the hydra heads with him. Not to be outdone by Iris, he also put his new weapon to work in combination with a spell Adah had not seen him use before now.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  He conjured a rush of fog that swept past him as if carried by a howling wind. From that amorphous cloud emerged the image of a warhorse that galloped by Ekki faster than even the twins could fly. As the horse passed, he mounted it in a practiced motion and was carried away. Between the speed of the horse and the flood of fog, Ekki seemed to disappear all at once, and Adah did not spot him again until he arrived at his destination.

  At his side, he held a jousting lance, the long point of which flowed in wisps of gray fog much like the black magic of Adah’s scythe blade. Riding horseback with such a weapon, he looked more like a proper knight than he ever had. As for what his weapon’s actual effect was, Adah couldn’t be sure. Ekki didn’t use this horseback charge to attack the hydra. He was only trying to pull the monster’s attention away from his teammates. These charges were feints, designed to keep Ekki out of danger while forcing the hydra to assume a more defensive posture for a time.

  Just like during their IndieMagie duel, DreamRise were entirely in sync with one another. They could control the pace of a battle as well as any top-ranked team of magic users, but did they have the power to break through the defenses of five hydra heads that were just as coordinated as they were?

  The fact that there were already five heads suggested otherwise. And now, they looked at risk of another disaster.

  The two serpents near Iris had launched a counterattack at the same time Ekki had provided the distraction for Clair’s escape. With none of her teammates nearby to assist, Iris was completely exposed to attacks from two angles. She paused for a split second—perhaps judging whether her shield could protect her here—but even a second was long enough for the hydra heads to get near enough to kill her.

  Iris held out her hand—a desperate last effort to cast a spell, any spell, that might save her.

  “Déjà vu, dumbass!” Ami yelled.

  She slammed into Iris, knocking her out of the way of both serpents and nearly out of the sky. Iris somersaulted through the air like an astronaut in space. She cried out—half in fear, half in pain.

  The two hydra heads crashed against the water wall of Ami’s [Aspis Meniscus], which she had deployed as she swooped in to save Iris. Not wanting to take any chances, Ami had hardened the shield to its maximum power. The lunging heads bounced off the wall like they’d smacked into the front of a tank.

  Ami was right—the situation was identical to how she’d saved Iris during the K-Rank mission. The only difference was that Iris was a little less upset this time. Even she could recognize that Ami was the only thing standing between her and the stomach of a Cruelty.

  “You four?” Iris asked in a shaky voice as she regained her bearings.

  “The troublemakers have arrived,” Rika said.

  Even under the best circumstances, this wouldn’t be a well-mannered reunion, but right now no one could afford time for pleasantries. The two heads that Ami had repelled were only stunned for a moment. To get them well out of the way, Emi flew in with Mercury’s Majesty morphed into its hammer form. She swung the hammer right into the face of one serpent, knocking it directly into its partner. Both heads recoiled back toward the hydra’s body, and the force of their sudden swinging caused the whole monster to stumble for a second.

  On the other side of the battle, Ekki and Clair had taken notice of the Last Light’s arrival, though they were too preoccupied with the three heads targeting them to regroup.

  Instead, Ekki called out to Adah through a magic channel, “I really thought you weren’t going to come!”

  “And let you take all the glory?” she said.

  “Somebody had to save your asses!” Ami added.

  “Who needs sa—” Iris stopped herself short. The memory of what had just happened to her was too fresh to argue against.

  While Iris bit her tongue, Ekki said, “Thank you! With all of us, we can beat this thing.”

  Clair popped out of another portal, this time closer to the group of other magical girls. She paused her chanting to argue in Iris’s place.

  “We could beat it on our own,” she said. “I’m getting close to breaking it.”

  “Earlier, you said it was almost impossible with three heads,” Ekki said back. “Now that there’s five, you’re getting close?”

  Clair said nothing in response.

  Meanwhile, the two heads Emi had knocked away were returning with a vengeance. They slithered toward the clump of magical girls, extending farther from the hydra’s body than Adah would have thought possible.

  Ami and Emi rushed forward in parallel, flying straight against the heads. Ami conjured her own weapon, the watery wraps taking shape around her fist. The girls dodged past the serpents’ jaws, slipping in between the necks of both. From this space between the serpents, the twins broke in opposite directions. Ami punched the leftmost serpent with a burst of water from her fist, sending it reeling in that same direction. Emi greeted the serpent on the right with another blow from her hammer, batting it in the opposite direction from its partner.

  Flung apart like this, the pair of heads was left even more disoriented than before. The twins gave each other a quick nod upon seeing the results of their attacks.

  “Iris,” Ekki said during the moment of calm the twins had bought. “We have to do this together. It’s taken everything we have just to keep from dying. Another mistake, another head, and it’d all be over. How much longer can we hold on before we slip up or run out of energy?”

  Iris looked over at Ekki. His head was on a swivel, constantly glancing in all directions to keep track of the three heads focused on him and Clair. He had to judge their positions and angles of assault, aim his next pair of portals for Clair, and bear in mind his own escape path all at once. Even Adah, who didn’t know the full extent of his spells, could tell this manner of fighting was unsustainable.

  “That’s it then?” Iris said, almost a whisper. “This is our limit.”

  The girl speaking was a far cry from the one Adah had met that day in front of her agency office. The easy confidence, the sharp tongue, even the boiling hate had all fallen away from her. What was left was a frail flower. One tap would cause her faded petals to drop to the dirt. Was this how Iris had been since the IndieMagie?

  “What limit?” Ekki shouted. “Are we stronger alone, or are we stronger together? Why can’t that be our path to power? Why would following the orders of a bastard like Thibault make us stronger? That’s the only limit on us. Doing things our own way, spiting anyone who wants to tell us how to act—isn’t that power? A power no one else can control.”

  Iris turned toward the hydra. The two heads that the twins had knocked apart had already recovered, and one of the three that had been focused on Clair was now turning its attention to the newly arrived magical girls.

  The way Iris normally acted was obnoxious. The way she always assumed she was the most important person in the room, that the spotlight was her absolute right—Adah hated it. If Iris wanted to be the center of attention so bad, then Adah wanted to force her to her hands and knees to use her as a stool. Let everyone see that under the spotlight.

  It was supposed to be Adah who defeated Iris, not Iris herself. Where was the pleasure in breaking a rival who had already given up? Heartbreak had no interest in a victory so pathetic.

  Adah wanted to see that cocky look on Iris’s face again, just so she could smack it off. These dreary eyes and slack cheeks just wouldn’t do.

  “You’re not allowed to lose,” she said to Iris, “until you lose to me.”

  It was only natural a princess would make demands of those beneath her.