The lizard Cruelty inspected the marshland immediately around itself, in search of any easy prey like frogs or ducks it could snatch up. Although its stubby legs—which stretched out more horizontally than they did vertically—couldn’t raise its body above the brown flora of the marsh, Adah could see it clearly from her angle in the air. The beast stood only a couple of feet off the ground, with a body about the length of a pickup truck. It was a simple monster, without any of the aggressive augments some other Cruelties had. No whirling blades or self-propelled spikes on its body, for example.

  This variant’s method of attack was more effective against wildlife than magic users. These lizards liked to sprint around low to the ground in search of prey, then leap forward to catch their targets in their mouths and crush the life out of them. Although they lacked any weaponized augments, they were faster than their real counterparts, so they could earn themselves quite the feast if left unchecked. A magical girl at Adah’s level, however, could avoid its lunges with ease.

  For that reason, this mission was ideal for filming the scythe’s power. Not only was this marsh isolated from any bystanders and open enough to allow Seb to easily capture an appealing shot, but Adah wouldn’t be putting herself at much risk. Even if she had to waste time and herd the lizard around as she tried to frame the perfect video of her attack, she and Seb would remain safe. After all, she knew approaching a mission this way was irresponsible. Cruelties were monsters to be eliminated, not props for a photoshoot. That’s why she wanted to wait for something weak to play with.

  Yet, not too weak. The safest bet would have been to test the scythe against an F-Rank. Adah could basically fall asleep on a mission like that and wake up safe and sound the next morning. That was the problem, though.

  She wanted to show off the scythe’s power. How silly would she look unleashing some devastating attack against a puny Cruelty no more dangerous than an angry goose at a park? She certainly couldn’t put something like that in a music video. So she needed to compromise safety—just a little bit—for flair. The lizard Cruelty posed enough of a threat to nature, if not Adah herself, that it justified the use of her weapon.

  Well, she was guaranteed to have some haters make fun of her for showing off on a D-Rank mission too, but she could only compromise so much. If something did go wrong testing the scythe on a C-Rank job, the consequences would be far worse than some hate comments.

  Not looking to waste any more time, Adah welcomed the lizard by sending a spinning star from her [Sparkling Strike] right at the base of its tail. The star connected with a burst of light, and the lizard leaped back in pain. It splashed around in the marsh water some more before zeroing in on Adah’s location.

  “Lucky you,” Adah said to it, taking a page out of Ami’s book. “You get a starring role in the first single from… uh…”

  She still hadn’t thought up a name for her and Rika’s duo. Good thing this audio wouldn’t go in the video.

  Luckily, the lizard didn’t need to understand what she was saying to understand that it wouldn’t be able to get any hunting done until it dealt with her. Or tried to, anyway.

  The monster sprinted in her direction, and Adah fired off a couple more rounds of [Sparkling Strike] to slow its approach. She flew backward while keeping her eyes on the Cruelty, and began to lure it into position for Seb’s filming. The lizard grew more cautious after seeing how easily Adah responded to it, moving slow while it assessed its best options for an attack. Before long, both Adah and the Cruelty had moved in front of Seb’s camera, separated by the length of a bus.

  “Now the fun part,” she said. “How do I actually use this thing?”

  When she had first summoned it back at Ketzia’s cabin, the scythe’s blade had seemed to appear in response to Adah’s will. By merely thinking that she wanted the blade to extend, it had heard and obeyed her. Perhaps she could activate its power in the same way—by either willing the energy inward to her body or outward to the Cruelty.

  There was really only one way to find out.

  Adah held Beleth’s Bloodletter in the direction of the lizard Cruelty, angling the scythe’s blade as if it were a spear with which she could strike back an approaching foe. The lizard remained still as it watched her. Perhaps it could feel some kind of magic signature emanating from the scythe. Or perhaps Adah’s theory about the shared memory of the Cruelties bore some weight, and this monster had grown wary of her now that she had acted like she meant to use her weapon. In the past, her readying the scythe had always meant she was about to consume a Cruelty’s core.

  The monster was right to be concerned, but not for that reason.

  She took advantage of this opening to focus her mind on the monster in front of her. She thought about what the Cruelty was to her—an enemy—and flared her emotions toward it, her desire to destroy it. In almost the same moment as a cold and jagged anger solidified in her heart, she felt the magic within her weapon start to shift. The smoky magic of the scythe’s blade began to float apart, rearranging itself into a shape more like the outline of an eye, complete with a black pupil of condensed magic at its center.

  Thump-thump.

  Adah felt a sensation that had grown familiar over the past few weeks—that beating heart within her weapon. Only now, the pulse echoed more intensely than it ever had. Even the resonance she felt after consuming the cores of C-Rank monsters couldn’t compare. This heartbeat shook her whole body like the bass at a concert. Was this the culmination of all the essence she had harvested echoing in unison?

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  The feeling was too close to that of having a second heart beating within herself. Her body tried to reject the discomfort, this feeling that defied nature, with a shiver. Still, the heartbeat would remain until Adah ceased to channel the scythe’s magic.

  That made another question surface in Adah’s mind: Why was this sensation so different from that of catalyzing essence from Izzy? She’d likely find the answer in whatever process the mascots used to create magic. Izzy had mentioned his kind did something to refine or alter essence, but had glossed over what exactly that entailed. It was possible the scythe utilized a more raw form of essence.

  All of this surely had something to do with the reason why humanoid Cruelties needed to spawn through portals, too. The mascots altered essence for human use, so maybe those portals accomplished something similar for creating the humanoids. Adah would have to press Izzy for more details.

  For now, she stuffed that thought aside and focused again on the power of the scythe. The magic was similar enough to her own that she began to feel a command over it, like she did when gathering energy for [Nightwind Whip]. In the case of her spell, she directed magic toward a specific point—her hand—and shaped it to her will. Now with the scythe, it was like she was holding the flow of magic back.

  She was clutching at the leash of a rabid dog that jerked this way and that in an attempt to get free. By any degree she loosened her grip on that leash, a corresponding amount of magic would flood out of the scythe. She sensed, too, a clear intent from the magic itself. It wanted to attack the Cruelty with an intensity that mirrored the feeling in Adah’s own heart.

  The magic didn’t have a mind of its own—that’d be an overstatement. The power raging inside the scythe was still a reflection of Adah’s will, and she sensed it would obey her should she change her mind and choose to absorb that power into her own body. This magic simply had no discretion. If Adah thought to kill the lizard, her weapon would overkill it. She needed to rein that power in to an appropriate level.

  Again, like with [Nightwind Whip], Adah felt she could measure the strength of the scythe’s magic. All she needed to do was let go of an amount capable of killing the Cruelty. The scythe would do the rest, or so she figured.

  Adah fixed her eyes on the lizard and began to relinquish her mental grip on the scythe’s power. The strength of whatever attack was pounding at the gates of her weapon grew exponentially, and within a moment, more than enough power had built up to dispose of the lizard.

  And still much power remained.

  Trying not to think of the reserves she still felt contained within the scythe, Adah set her mind to imagining the destruction of the Cruelty before her. She channeled her desire to crush the monster down through her arm and into the hand that held her weapon, then she thrust the scythe forward like a wizard’s staff upon casting a spell.

  Immediately, the pupil within the eye created by the scythe’s smoky magic dilated. Rather, something forced it open.

  That wasn’t quite right either.

  The pupil was torn open.

  Five streaks of smoky magic emerged from the center of the pupil, then gripped the bottom of that black circle like the fingers of a hand clinging to the precipice of a cliff. The fingers tore downward, as if trying to lift themselves up and over the edge of the pupil. The bottom of the pupil stretched from the force of those five streaks, and soon the form of the eye was entirely distorted. A new, larger form took its place.

  The five streaks of magic didn’t just look like fingers, they in fact were. Having clawed apart an opening large enough, the fingers crawled forward through the air, carrying behind them a black mass in the shape of a human’s hand.

  Fully freed from the confines of her weapon, the hand was easily three times the size of Adah. The mass continued to stretch out from her scythe, and a new trail of magic followed behind it, clearly recognizable as an arm. The arm reached farther and farther out from Adah’s scythe. If it was attached to any kind of body, that form never revealed itself. The arm continued to grow like an endless extension of magic power, reaching ever closer to the lizard Cruelty.

  The monster, faced with an imitation of life even more unsettling than itself, was frozen in place. The lizard made no motion to escape nor to attack the hand closing in on it. The Cruelty seemed to accept its fate, assuming it could even comprehend what it was looking at.

  Adah herself didn’t know what to think.

  The hand of smoke was beyond her control now. She had given it a mission and unclipped its leash, and now it carried out her will.

  Had this been what she had asked for, though?

  In truth, it probably had been.

  Before today, she had imagined the scythe’s power would take the form of an explosion or projectile—something emitted from the weapon like that. She had even considered the possibility that the scythe’s blade would harden into a metal like Emi’s weapon, allowing her to fight with it before a Cruelty’s core was exposed.

  But when she had set her eyes on the lizard Cruelty and thought to kill it, she didn’t imagine any of those kinds of attacks.

  She had thought to wrap her fingers around the lizard’s body—as the hand of smoke was doing now.

  She had meant to squeeze the false life from the monster—as the hand of smoke was doing now.

  She had wanted to crush the monster in her hand until her fingernails dug deep into her palm.

  As the hand of smoke fulfilled all of these desires, its arm curled up as if flexing every muscle to maximize the force with which it destroyed the Cruelty. The gray shape of the lizard was hardly visible behind the shroud of the pitch black hand. The only sign of its suffering was the single echoing squeak that escaped the magic fist.

  Not long after that sound, the smoky fist opened with its palm pointing to the sky. There was no remnant of the Cruelty within.

  Having completed its mission, the hand and arm slithered back toward Beleth’s Bloodletter. The magic hid away within the scythe’s shaft once more, and the shape of a shredded eye slowly returned to the weapon’s original blade form.

  The heartbeat thumped one last time, slightly weaker than when Adah had called upon the scythe’s power a moment ago. Adah stared at the weapon in her hands. For a split second, she felt the urge to toss the scythe into the marsh below, but soon the discomfort in her hands faded. Her weapon felt as it had before. It was a tool she had grown used to. That she liked, even.

  Without looking up from the scythe, she called out to Seb, “Did you get all that?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Adah turned to her right to find Seb with his face so close to the camera that she thought he was still looking through the viewfinder. In reality, he was inspecting the LCD screen. Every few seconds, he touched a button to the side of the screen, but his eyes never left whatever it was he was watching. Adah flew behind him to get a better look.

  Seb was replaying the footage he had captured, watching the hand extend from Adah’s scythe over and over. Seeing the attack from an outside perspective, Adah found herself equally entranced. The pair watched the clip another five times in silence before Seb finally found his voice.

  “I hope Rika isn’t writing a pop song,” he said.