There was no time to wait for Iris to make a decision—not that there was much of a decision to make. Adah and her teammates were going to join this fight whether Iris wanted them to or not.

  Adah flew down to Iris and grabbed her hand. While the body of the hydra dashed toward the magical girls of the Last Light, Adah pulled Iris through the air like a mother dragging along her child. In time, Iris’s pride took over, and she shook off Adah’s hand to fly on her own.

  Now that her fellow captain seemed focused once more, Adah asked, “Have you been able to get any hits on this thing’s body yet?”

  Iris shook her head. “We’ve just been buying time for Clair. She was our best shot at finding an opening.”

  “And what happened with the heads? Why’d you cut them?”

  “We didn’t have a choice, obviously,” Iris said. Her voice still lacked its usual expressiveness, but her eyes were surveying the battlefield with a renewed intensity. “Clair’s escape got blocked, so she had to take care of two heads.”

  “Clair did?”

  Adah couldn’t see how that was possible. The most secretive of the DreamRise members must have had an offensive spell she’d yet to reveal to the world. Or perhaps her weapon was powerful enough to deal with two hydra heads on its own. Considering what Adah’s scythe was capable of, such a thing was possible.

  “What do you have that can break through to the core?” Iris asked. “Your girlfriend’s railgun and what else?”

  “We’re not dating yet,” Adah said.

  “‘Yet,’” Iris repeated. “God, you two are annoying. Might as well confess now—wouldn’t want one of you to die before making it official.”

  “Don’t say shit like that—you’re going to curse us,” Adah said. “And what about you and Ekki? You two are even more annoying.”

  “Good,” Iris said with a smile. “If people like you hate me, then I’m happy.”

  Iris was rapidly returning to her usual self. Maybe the mopey Iris wasn’t so bad—now that she was acting like this again, Adah felt the same inclination toward violence she had during their duel. For the time being, she’d do her best to channel that feeling toward the hydra instead.

  “Then you should be ecstatic,” Adah said. “Anyway, other than Rika, my weapon is probably our best bet.”

  “That’s the hand, isn’t it? I saw that photo.”

  “Stalking me?” Adah asked.

  “Don’t be flattered,” Iris said. “I also find myself staring at roadkill. So how does it work?”

  Their strategizing was interrupted by the impending attack of a hydra head. The twins were busy guarding Rika from two of the serpents while she searched for angles to take pot shots at the Cruelty’s body. Clair and Ekki continued to bait and evade two more heads at the opposite end of the intersection, as Clair tried to work her way into the hydra’s mind. The last remaining head started to chase Adah and Iris around, prompting the former to conjure her bow once more.

  Iris pulled back an arrow as she flew backward. With her focus split between flying in reverse and aiming her shot, the serpent inched closer and closer to her. Adah was just about to yank Iris out of the serpent’s path when the girl loosed her arrow. The stem pierced straight between the head’s eyes and drilled through the length of its neck. When the stem’s thorns burst, they punctured the serpent on all sides and left it looking like a mutilated pufferfish.

  One of the hydra’s other heads would surely remove the arrow soon, but for now Iris had bought her and Adah a moment to plan. The injured serpent still chased after them, but avoiding it was easy enough now that its movement was slowed.

  “I channel the power stored up in it,” Adah explained, “but I’m not sure what kind of attacks I can use. With enough power, though, I should be able to destroy the core.”

  “What does that mean?” Iris asked. “You don’t know what attacks you have?”

  “I’ve only used it the one time, but it seemed like it was adapting to what I wanted it to do. I don’t know how much control I have over it.”

  “As long as you tell it to kill this thing, that’ll be good enough. Let’s try it.”

  Already, another serpent had removed Iris’s arrow from its comrades throat, yanking the thorny stem back out through the hole it had drilled between the head’s eyes. The injured head recovered just as soon as the arrow was removed. Rather than chase after Adah and Iris again, it rushed back toward the hydra’s body without delay, intercepting a pair of projectiles Rika had shot via her [Baetyl Breakburst]. The meteor fragments left nothing but scrapes on the monster’s scales, both of which healed as fast as they appeared.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  The hydra’s regenerative ability far surpassed that of the scorpion Adah and her teammates had fought. Its wounds recovered faster, and it seemed to patch up serious injuries just as easily as minor ones. There was a chance their attacks could wear down the Cruelty and eventually deplete its essence reserves, but as magic users, that plan could always backfire and lead them to burn through their own essence first. Not to mention, the hydra was allowed to make mistakes in this battle. As humans, one mistake could very well mean death.

  Iris had the right idea: they needed to destroy the core in one attack. They couldn’t carve a path like they had with the scorpion. The hydra regenerated too fast, and its many heads made that degree of close-range coordination difficult. Among Adah and her teammates, that left only a few options: Rika’s railgun, Ami’s shield bomb, and Adah’s scythe. The railgun and bomb would take time—either Rika would need to charge her attack to max power or Ami and a partner would need to build up enough projectiles to guarantee the hydra’s destruction. Neither seemed likely to happen on this battlefield.

  That left the scythe. Adah could launch her attack alone, freeing everyone else up to distract and beat back the five serpents. She wouldn’t hold back either. All of the power built up in her scythe—she’d unleash it all at once and destroy the hydra beyond a doubt. If she underestimated the power needed to kill the Cruelty, she might not get a chance to use whatever essence she’d tried to save. It was time to go for broke.

  Adah called upon Beleth’s Bloodletter. She put aside the theatrics of shrouding the weapon’s appearance in her spell’s smoke; this wasn’t a mission where she could afford to focus on flair.

  As before, the scythe seemed to sense her intentions the moment it manifested in her hands. She pointed her weapon toward the hydra’s body and focused her mind on the task at hand.

  To protect her friends. To protect the crowds of evacuees who had their lives interrupted by this monster. To protect even DreamRise, who—despite all Adah hated about them—still put their lives on the line to fight against the Cruelties. She wanted to remove this hydra from the world, to erase it from existence. She wanted the monster before her to vanish.

  Thump-thump.

  Her scythe heard her heart’s desire, and resonated with the sound of its own. The smoky magic of its blade began to shift.

  In the distance, the gray form of the hydra began to shift.

  From all directions, the five heads of the hydra returned to its body. They centralized, congregating directly in front of Adah. The serpents began to twist around one another, like locks of hair braided together. They formed a singular mass out of their five necks, like a reinforced cord. At the end of this cord, all five heads looked at Adah and cranked open their jaws.

  The braided serpents lunged toward Adah in unison, but this time was different from any of the monster’s previous attacks. Rather than attacking from multiple angles, they combined their strength into a singular direct assault.

  The twins flew toward the hydra to intercept the heads as they had done before. Ami threw herself in front of the attack with her [Aspis Meniscus] expanded as large as she could make it, but the shield was no use against the combined mass of the hydra heads. The force of their charge flung Ami backward as easily as a train blasting past a butterfly. Her shield managed to protect her, but did nothing to stop the hydra.

  Emi fared just as well as her sister. She slammed the hammer form of her weapon into the side of the hydra coil, but as a unified mass, the serpents were left unfazed. The hammer bounced off their scales, and the deflection sent vibrations reverberating through Emi’s body.

  With that first line of defense negated, Adah relinquished the power of Beleth’s Bloodletter and set her focus to fleeing. The mass of serpent heads chased after her like a heat-seeking missile with a singular focus they hadn’t shown earlier in the battle. Even the body of the hydra ran in Adah’s direction, speeding up the heads’ pursuit further. Adah was barely managing to stay out of range of the monster’s five jaws, though she was operating on pure instinct. There may have been a better way to avoid the serpent heads, but it was taking all of her effort just to keep a gap between them.

  Even then, Adah could tell that the gap was shrinking. How was something so big so damn fast? And just how far could these heads reach?

  “Heartbreak!” Iris called to Adah.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Adah saw the yellow blur of Iris flying toward her. She was swooping in perpendicular to Adah’s own flight path. As their paths intersected, Iris wrapped her arms around Adah’s waist and tugged her downward.

  At the same moment, Adah’s whole vision turned bright red. Between the red light and her surprise at being dragged out of the air by Iris, Adah was completely disoriented. Even when she shut her eyes, all she could see was that redness. All the noises around her blended into one ringing sensation that drilled into her ears. Was this the feeling of dying?

  No, it couldn’t be. If she had been killed by a Cruelty, there would be more pain. Much more pain.

  The bulk of the red light soon faded, revealing a single, lingering streak of magic and the truth of the situation.

  From the far end of the battlefield, Rika had charged and unleashed her railgun. The bullet had burst through the coiled necks of the hydra, not slicing through them so much as splitting the mass apart like a watermelon. A clump of five heads plummeted to the ground below and flattened half a row of cars parked along the side of the street. They landed with a dull but deafening thud. The five necks they had once been attached to now writhed through the air, like five pipes of gaping gray flesh.

  In a matter of seconds, ten heads would regenerate from those wounds.

  “I’m sorry,” Rika’s voice came through a magic channel. “They were on top of you. In another second, they would have had you.”

  No one answered. The battlefield had frozen. Everyone watched as the beginnings of ten new heads sprouted from the hydra. They burst forth one at a time, each of them screeching. One echoing screech at a time, the battlefield came back to life.

  “Now we’re really fucked!” Clair’s screamed. “Why wouldn’t you shoot the core, you idiot?”

  “I couldn’t!” Rika yelled back. “The heads were the easier target, and if I didn’t do something fast then Adah… she would’ve—”

  “Now we’re all going to die anyway!”

  “Shut up!” Iris shouted over both of them. “I wouldn’t have brought us here if I didn’t think we could win!”

  Iris held out her hand and uttered the name of a spell.

  [Prerogative of the Perennial]