All at once, six voices screamed across the battlefield. Each girl must have yelled something different, but all their words blurred together into a cacophony of panic in Adah’s mind. The only voice absent from the chaos was Ekki’s.

  Ekki’s body dropped to the streets below like his life had already left him. Emi’s body had been the same after the wolf Cruelty bit her. They were almost vacant, like their humanity had hidden away to avoid being siphoned by the Cruelties for as long as possible. Ekki’s magic would protect what remained of his body from the impact of hitting the ground, but could it protect his human essence from the Cruelty’s drain?

  Adah had caught a glimpse of his arm before he fell—or of where his arm had once been. His injury was unlike Emi’s in the sense that his limb had been sheared clean off. This wasn’t a gash that allowed the Cruelty to slowly infect his body. He, as a human, had already been opened up. He had already lost a piece of himself forever, no matter what.

  But all of them would lose everything soon. If they didn’t push aside their panic and find a way to put an end to this fight now, their own deaths were a certainty.

  There were two actions Adah knew she needed to take if they were to have any chance of defeating the hydra.

  The first was to conjure Beleth’s Bloodletter. One way or another, the scythe would be the key to ending this battle. It seemed both she and the Cruelty understood that much. Even if it opened her up to a counterattack, she needed to put her opponent’s king into check.

  As the scythe materialized in her hands, Adah took stock of the battlefield. This was action number two.

  Iris had followed Ekki to the ground. She knelt beside him with her bow drawn, guarding his body much in the same way Ami had guarded Emi’s. Ekki’s mascot—a crow with jagged feathers like knives—hovered above his shoulder where his arm had been severed. Adah wasn’t sure to what extent the crow could heal Ekki at this point.

  In Emi’s case, her mascot had essentially reversed the decay of her shoulder. Even if the crow could stop the siphoning of Ekki’s essence, part of him—physically and figuratively—would surely remain absent.

  Iris wasn’t capable of guarding Ekki on her own, though. The twins had wasted no time in knocking the serpent that had attacked Ekki well away from where he had fallen. They struck the head with synchronous strikes from Ami’s fist and Emi’s hammer. With the immediate threat out of the way, they had transitioned to being Iris’s first line of defense against any other heads that may target her and her fallen teammate.

  Rika and Clair were each on the run from the groups of serpents they had been evading at the time of Ekki’s fall. They were the slowest in flight out of everyone in this battle, and the least suited for close quarters combat. Neither of them would last long in this situation—they’d soon be forced to sever even more heads to keep themselves out of danger.

  All the more reason for Adah to attract as much attention toward herself as possible.

  “Rika,” Adah called out, “the plan’s still on!”

  “What plan?” Rika shouted back, her voice already hoarse from the stress of her flight.

  “My scythe. Your railgun. One shot through the heart.”

  Rika grunted and, while evading the hydra head still hunting her down, Adah saw the girl cast her [Baetyl Breakburst] mid-flight. The meteor appeared straight ahead of Rika, and she fired at it without glancing back at the serpents pursuing her. With the extra power from Iris’s enhancement, the meteor burst into a half dozen shards, all of which darted past Rika and broke through the scales of the serpents behind her.

  Having slowed down the hydra heads, Rika spoke again, “I’ve seen the video. You need time to use that thing, if it’s even going to work.”

  “And you need time to charge the railgun,” Adah said. “One of us needs to buy time for the other, and I volunteered first.”

  “You won’t be buying any time if you get overrun as soon as you point that scythe at them!”

  “I’ll live a few seconds at least. How long do you need?”

  “Longer than that!”

  Sooner or later, someone would have to take a risk to win this fight. Their caution had already resulted in one casualty. This wasn’t a mission either of their teams had been ready for—they weren’t going to succeed by sticking to what they had practiced. Time was running out, and Adah had resolved to do whatever necessary to put an end to things.

  Whatever it cost her, she’d create as long of an opening as Rika needed.

  “How confident are you?”

  This was a new voice—Clair’s.

  “How confident are you that you can handle every serpent?” she asked.

  On the rare occasions Adah had heard Clair speak, her voice had always been sharp. Every sentence of hers was either a command or an insult, and she adjusted her tone to match. Yet, now she was calm. Almost meditative.

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  “Confident enough to give it a shot,” Adah said. “Unless you have a better idea.”

  “What about double this number?”

  “Double?” Adah repeated. “Why would there—”

  “Just answer the question, Heartbreak.”

  “I’m as confident about twenty as I am about ten.”

  “Eighteen, not twenty,” Clair said. “If I cut the heads off all these fuckers, does that give you enough time to do what you need to do? And then you buy time for your girlfriend?”

  “That’s insane! She doesn’t even know—”

  “Let’s do it!” Adah cut Rika’s protest short. “You know my scythe and I know your railgun. You’re going to need more than the time it takes these heads to regenerate if you want to break through to the core. I can give you that time!”

  Adah didn’t know what Clair had planned, but she had to trust it. Just like she had to trust her weapon.

  The scythe would obey her.

  Magic bent to the will of humanity. That was the ultimate rule that had always governed magic users in this world. You were only as strong as humanity wanted you to be. Your spells only did what humanity wanted them to.

  The scythe listened to the will of a human: Twilight Heartbreak. It was as strong as she had cultivated it to be, and was capable of what she willed it to do.

  It was her way of breaking magic’s ultimate rule.

  “Do it,” another shaky voice reached Adah’s ears. Iris spoke as she knelt by Ekki’s body, “Heartbreak, please do it.”

  Adah touched the collar of magic still coiled around her neck.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I told you—I’m the only one you’re allowed to lose to.”

  “I’m going to take that as a green light,” Clair said.

  The girl began to chant another spell. Adah felt the effects of this one not long after. Her movements turned sluggish, as if there was a long delay between her intention to move and the signal reaching her muscles. She grew more and more delayed in her actions, and the hydra chasing her seemed to mirror this gradual slowdown.

  A few seconds later, the world stopped.

  No, not the world. Just the hydra and the magical girls surrounding it. The serpent heads all froze in place, as did Adah and Rika and everyone else. Yet, the wind still blew past. The clouds still rolled overhead.

  Adah could think, she could sense, but she couldn’t move an inch. She couldn’t even adjust the flow of her magic to stop hovering. She was completely stuck, and the same must have been true for everyone else.

  “That was faster than I expected,” Clair communicated through their magic channel. “This collar’s the real deal.”

  What the hell’s going on?

  The words Adah meant to send back through the same channel never left her head. She could think them, but she couldn’t communicate them.

  “This is the kill switch,” Clair explained as she also floated in place. “Part one. It would be convenient if we could cast spells during this, but reality isn’t so generous. You can look around, though. Plan out what you want to do. Whatever you do isn’t so important right now. This part is for me.”

  Adah did look around, and as she did so, she saw what she could only assume was an illusion Clair had conjured.

  Above every single hydra head appeared the massive blade of a guillotine, held up by two wooden pillars.

  “This spell’s a pain in the ass,” Clair continued. “It takes all this effort to get going, then we can’t even do anything with it. It’s like hitting the pause button on everything related to magic. It freezes Cruelties, but since we’ve got magic coursing through us right now, we get stuck too. I’ve figured out a couple of tricks, though. I’ve learned how to talk during it. But better than that, I can set up my weapon during it.

  “Rain of Terror. Stupid name. And it’s not as useful as you’d think. It can only cut the heads off Cruelties, and those bastards don’t use their brains for just about anything. Usually, cutting the head off one is only good for getting rid of its biting attack, if it even has one. In this fight, it’s a damn liability. Unless we need to buy a few seconds of rest.”

  This was how Clair had protected herself earlier, and the reason Adah and her team had arrived to find five hydra heads instead of three. Like all of her spells, it suffered from a laborious cast time, but its effect was wholly unique.

  “Heartbreak,” Clair said. “In a second, I’m going to drop the spell, and these blades will fall. It’s up to you after that.”

  Under the effects of the spell, Adah couldn’t respond. Clair didn’t wait for an answer anyway.

  Just as Clair had described, control returned to Adah’s body in the same moment that the guillotine blades fell onto the necks of each serpent.

  “Good luck,” Clair said.

  Adah pointed her scythe toward the hydra.

  Thump-thump.

  For once, she was glad to feel the strength of that pulse. She may need every bit of that power for what she had in mind.

  She knew the scythe could exert its power as a hand. Then, what about many hands? Eighteen, to be precise.

  The smoky magic of the scythe’s blade formed the shape of an eye, just as it had the first time she unleashed its power. The black tendrils she now knew to be fingers gripped the eye’s pupil once more.

  In the distance, eighteen heads began to sprout from nine severed necks.

  The smoky eye was torn apart. One hand escaped the confines of the scythe. Then another. And another.

  A red light glowed brighter and brighter to Adah’s left. Rika was charging up as well.

  The hydra had fully recovered now. With eighteen weapons at its disposal, it no longer had any need for a tactical approach. It could simply overwhelm the magical girls pestering it.

  The first group of hands emerged fully from Beleth’s Bloodletter. Their arms were skinny, and grew ever longer as they stretched out toward their targets. They were each like a shadow on the world, creeping through the air.

  The hydra heads surged forward, the majority of them aiming for Adah and Rika, but still several looked to finish off the group of girls defending Ekki.

  The scythe’s heart beat with the same intensity Adah had felt upon poking her weapon through the bat Cruelty’s portal. This time, though, Adah noticed her own heart was beating at the same pace.

  The scythe responded to her will. She wanted to protect her friends, and DreamRise as well. She wanted to live another day. Yet, that wasn’t what the scythe was responding to.

  Neither team should have ever taken this mission. They shouldn’t have felt compelled to. Their pain and desperation in this moment was caused by one foolish man as much as it was the hydra. A man without real power.

  Roland Thibault had no power to fight Cruelties, and no conviction with which to wield the manufactured power he did possess.

  The real collar on Adah’s neck—and everyone else’s in this battle—was one he had placed there.

  Her will was to tear that collar off. To place her hands around the necks of all of humanity’s enemies.

  The first black hand seized a serpent rushing toward Rika. The next grabbed one heading toward Adah. Then one near the twins. Eighteen hands broke out of the scythe’s eye and wrapped their fingers around eighteen serpents. Even as the hydra heads squirmed, the hands held firm.

  The hydra was completely under Adah’s control.

  “End this,” she said to Rika.

  A blinding ray of red light swallowed the intersection.

  The railgun’s bullet pierced the hydra’s body, destroying its core.

  The hydra and all of its heads dematerialized one by one, leaving all the hands of Adah’s scythe clenching the air.

  A purple hue spread across the horizon as the sun fell.