“So many of our viewers were inspired by how quickly you sprung into action, Dewdrop,” the reporter on the television said. “Tell us, what was your first thought when you learned a Cruelty was spawning in the middle of all these innocent people?”

  “Uh, first I was like ****, why did this have to happen on my day off?” Ami said, her swearing bleeped out for the broadcast. “Then I was trying to get everybody inside, but nobody would listen to me. So I started yelling, and that usually does the trick when somebody’s ignoring you.”

  The reporter looked somewhere off-camera, then back to Ami.

  “Right, very interesting,” she said. “Tell us about this Cruelty. From the footage that nearby shoppers captured, it seemed like you were familiar with this variant?”

  “Sure, yeah,” Ami said. “These goat things are strong but dumb as hell. Too bad I’m stronger and dumber. Wait, no—stronger and smarter. The only problem for me was breaking the core, so it was a good thing I had Selichi with me.”

  “Selichi?”

  Ami stepped out of frame for a moment and returned with her arm hooked around the neck of a teenage girl who looked like she’d bought a Halloween costume in the wrong size. The half of her face that Adah could see below her witch’s hat was flushed bright red.

  “This girl!” Ami declared. “One day she’s gonna be as strong as me. As strong as me now, that is. I’ll always be a hundred steps ahead of her!”

  As if to prove her point, Ami lifted the girl’s hat off her head and dangled it out of her reach. Just when the girl was about to leap up to try and grab it, Ami dropped it back onto her head.

  “Just messing with you,” Ami said. “I wouldn’t bully you on TV like that.”

  “You just did!” the girl squeaked back.

  “Oh… whoops.”

  Grace pressed a button on the remote control, shutting off the agency lobby’s television. While the other three magical girls in the room stared at the black screen in silence, Ami chuckled to herself.

  “Considering our team’s reputation,” Grace said, “this probably counts as a successful interview. It would be hard to get bad press after how you handled things with the Cruelty, anyway. Sharing the credit was a nice touch, too, if that’s what you meant to do.”

  “Who was that girl?” Adah asked. “Selichi or whoever?”

  “I think she goes by Seliah,” Ami said. “But I like Selichi better.”

  Grace got up and walked over to the lobby’s front desk. As she tapped away at her keyboard, she said, “I looked her up earlier. She’s from Orbit Promo. Right now she’s operating alone.”

  “She doesn’t have any teammates?” Rika asked.

  “Like you and Adah, she joined her agency while her seniors were on their way out the door,” Grace explained. “It’s just her there now, and Orbit seems to be in the same spot we were a couple of months ago. She might be looking for a new home soon.”

  “Let’s take her in, then,” Ami said.

  “Not happening,” Grace was quick to reply. “Even if it made sense for us to add a member to your team, now would be the worst time to do it. What’s a rookie like her supposed to do right now? You have your hands full with training and clearing these C-Rank jobs—there’s no time to hold her hand.”

  Ami frowned at that argument, but held her tongue. Even if she was fond of this Seliah, she must have known that Grace was right.

  Adah had been keeping tabs on her teammates, seeing if they were getting too stressed or tired, so that she could determine the best way to split up their pairings. Somebody like Rika needed a balance of time at home and time in battle, while Ami would throw a tantrum if you asked her to do nothing but practice all week. Keeping everyone’s motivation up and giving them time to recharge in their preferred manner was one of the more important duties Adah had as captain.

  No matter which of her teammates she spoke to, she always noticed they had to be told to take it easy. Like her, they all wanted to make the most of the opportunities in front of them. Adding a rookie teammate into the mix would inevitably lead to someone overworking themselves and burning out. Adah wasn’t even sure she could be much of a captain to a fifth member at this point.

  Besides, yesterday’s blackout at the shopping center had already given them enough to think about.

  After Grace had told them about the situation, Adah, Rika, and Emi flew to Kerdel, where the mall Ami had gone to was located. News of the blackout had spread shortly after the arrival of the ibex Cruelty, triggering an emergency response across Region 4’s mission board. Grace had learned about Ami’s involvement thanks to photos that some bystanders had uploaded online, which were then scraped by the mission board.

  By the time the rest of the Sunbright team arrived on the scene, Ami had already defeated the Cruelty. A crowd of civilians, probably those who had been at the shopping center when the Cruelty arrived, had surrounded her and the witch girl Seliah. Soon after that, news crews flooded the scene as well. There actually wasn’t anything for Adah and her teammates to do but watch Ami shake hands and take interviews.

  Since then, it seemed like new photos or footage of Ami popped up every few minutes, all of it captured through the windows of the shops along the promenade. One of the shoppers must have sent Ami a photo directly: one of her grappling with the ibex and screaming right in its face as water splashed all around them. For a photo taken on a phone through a window, it looked almost professional. Ami had shared that on her own social media accounts last night, and had made it her profile picture to boot.

  The picture ended up getting as much attention as Adah’s viral freak-out had, considering news of this Cruelty attack had spread nationwide. That attention also exposed her to the wider range of magic user fans and internet commenters. Ami had been laughing at their comments all day.

  love4amu: which one is supposed to be the cruelty??? she destroyed it!

  goodn1ght: why is this team always WET

  ? 3amcoffeechug: MODS ARREST THIS MAN

  ? goodn1ght: tf did i do?

  still_doll: KYAAAAAAAAA

  ? ebu_future: KYAAAAAAAAAAA

  ? karte2222: KYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

  End_of_Dreams: What kind of name is Dewdrop for this magical girl? She should definitely be like Beastblood Berserker or something

  ? melomellow: ur own name is so fkn cringe but u right

  ? psychorus: Zerker would be such a cool name for a magical girl

  This also led to the first large jump in FP anyone on their team had seen since the IndieMagie. When she found out, Ami sprinted into the back office to update the whiteboard herself.

  Dazzling Dewdrop

  FP: 5089 ?? 6532

  The girls weren’t in competition with each other. As a team, one member’s growth was bound to feed into everyone else’s eventually. Despite that, they were all aware that comparison among them was inevitable. If one girl pulled far ahead, or another fell behind, that fact would be unspoken but not unnoticed.

  Between FP thresholds, these gaps in level didn’t matter so much. It was when most of their team unlocked something they had all been striving for, while one member had to play catch up, that an awkwardness arose. They had already experienced this when three of them unlocked their weapons before Ami. As the thresholds stretched ever higher, such gaps in growth would become more common, even if they all tried to lift each other up.

  So, even though Ami had thicker skin than anyone else on their team, Adah was sure this new leap ahead would feel like redemption for her.

  Adah wanted to celebrate Ami’s growth as wholeheartedly as the rest of her team, but she couldn’t pull her mind away from the circumstances that brought it about.

  The news segment they had just watched covered the basics of the blackout situation as explained by Secretary Thibault’s office. One of the region’s Magedars was located near the town of Kerdel, not far from the shopping center itself. The scouting system was housed within a substation that also served as the last distribution point for the center and some surrounding neighborhoods.

  Minutes before the ibex Cruelty had appeared at the outdoor mall, another Cruelty had targeted this substation. Rather than attacking any humans or wildlife, this first Cruelty had only been concerned with destroying as much of the substation as it could, including the area’s Magedar. Even as the team of magical girls sent there to intercept it attacked, the monster didn’t fight back. It was fixated on destroying the inanimate structures of the substation.

  It was this rampage that had cut off power to the shopping center and, more importantly, disabled the area’s Magedar. Without the enhanced detection efficacy that the Magedar provided, it wasn’t until Ami’s mascot noticed a nearby buildup of energy that anyone learned of the ibex Cruelty’s impending arrival. If there hadn’t been any magic users in the area, that Cruelty would have spawned in the middle of a defenseless crowd.

  From the destruction of the substation to the elimination of the ibex Cruelty, this whole fiasco lasted less than ten minutes. A very long ten minutes.

  Secretary Thibault got word of the attack on the substation two minutes into those ten, and immediately called upon magic users from Region 4 and beyond to both patrol the area impacted by the downed Magedar and to defend the remaining scouting systems.

  These patrol units would now remain in Region 4 until the destroyed Magedar could be repaired, which Thibault’s Department of Magic estimated would be completed later tonight. The defensive units at the rest of the nation’s Magedars would remain indefinitely to prevent any future attacks of this kind. Additionally, the Letria federal government would work on deploying a network of redundant scouting systems throughout all four regions. Just like that, magic users nationwide now had to protect nonliving targets as well.

  Now that Spotlight Sunbright was one of Region 4’s top teams, and critical to Thibault’s political machinations, they had received some additional intel beyond what the media disseminated.

  The narrative that the Cruelty at the substation had been hellbent on causing general destruction was misleading. Based on the account of the magical girls that defeated it, the monster was absolutely focused on the Magedar systems, and any damage to the rest of the facility was collateral.

  This only confirmed what Adah had assumed from the beginning: this was a coordinated effort by the Cruelties. They must have learned about the scouting systems somehow—perhaps through observation, or perhaps through their experimentation with the humanoid Cruelties. Adah had no idea if such a thing was possible, like learning from the memories contained within the essence of those they killed, but it had been a theory that stuck in her mind ever since she returned from Ketzia’s cabin.

  Maybe she’d never know the whole truth, but the attack on the substation proved that this wasn’t a philosophical question but a practical one. The degree to which Cruelties understood their prey would have a direct impact on how they fought moving forward. Adah and her teammates had to understand how the Cruelties were thinking in order to determine the best way to repel them.

  Attacking a Magedar directly was a trick that the monsters would only get away with once, but it had opened the door to a whole new type of danger. No longer could humanity assume that the only targets of the Cruelties would be living creatures. Would the monsters launch an attack to disrupt evacuation routes out of a city? What about food or water supplies to try and force humans to gather in certain locations? These were the kinds of questions humanity needed to consider moving forward.

  Surely those in power were thinking along the same lines—Adah had warned Thibault of as much—but she found herself focusing on these questions, too.

  For now, her job was that of a magical girl: defeat any Cruelties that appear.

  At the same time he divulged further details on the substation attack, Secretary Thibault also insisted that Sunbright’s priorities should remain the same. They were to continue tackling the region’s C-Rank missions. The teams defending the Magedars needed to be capable of responding to threats of any rank, which meant they would all be interregional teams. Adah knew the man had a selfish logic to his instructions, but it served Sunbright’s purposes as well. They were aligned on this much, at least: Sunbright needed to grow stronger so that they could defend the region against any threat.

  The pieces were in place for that.

  The heightened attention on Ami would certainly spread to the rest of their team, albeit to a lesser degree. The rest of them could take advantage of that to ramp up their own promotion. Luckily, they all had some more talents and tactics to show off.

  Perhaps the time had come to try out Adah’s scythe.

  The speed with which the Cruelties were adapting their strategies demanded that a magical girl like Adah also level up her game. Finding out exactly what Beleth’s Bloodletter was capable of would accomplish just that.

  It was also the best way to draw the public’s attention to herself. To prove that Heartbreak was the magical girl everyone should have their eyes on.

  And—just recently—she’d been offered the perfect opportunity to unveil her weapon’s true power.