The four magical girls of Spotlight Sunbright looked down at the two phones laid out on the coffee table in the agency lobby, then at each other. On the screens of these two phones was one of the stranger things they’d seen during their careers as magical girls.

  “What are the odds of that?” Rika asked.

  “I guess it’s not that improbable,” Adah said. “They’re teammates, after all.”

  The two phones in question belonged to Ami and Emi, and what had the girls confounded were the matching FP levels displayed in each twin’s Magiapp.

  FP: 6625

  Emi had shot up by over one thousand levels after her slaying of the lynx Cruelty, while Ami had been climbing slowly but surely since the blackout at the shopping center. The exact details of how an FP level was determined still eluded Adah, but Lesh had confirmed that the number was more of a direct measurement than some kind of subjective evaluation.

  In general, Lesh seemed to be more knowledgeable than Izzy when it came to the aspects of magic that involved humanity. To Adah, that fact suggested some kind of hierarchy among the mascots, or at least a division of labor and information. That was something else she intended to learn more about. If there was an upper echelon of leadership for the mascots, she had some questions for them.

  With the limited info they had, the girls could only guess at the probability of two teammates hitting the exact same FP level on the same day. None of them had ever hit matching levels before, even when they were stuck down in the double digits, so the fact this had occurred after the twins had reached quadruple digits made it seem even stranger.

  Though, Ami didn’t think so.

  “It was a hundred percent chance,” she said from her spot on the floor. “Emi and I go neck-and-neck in just about everything.”

  At that, Emi snatched her phone off the table and started tapping away.

  “I need another boost,” she said. “Refer-a-friend campaign. Get ten of your friends to follow and win a Raindrop sticker.”

  “Ah, that’s cheating!” Ami protested. She reached up and tried to grab her sister’s phone, but since Emi had a height advantage from sitting on the couch, she easily kept it out of Ami’s grasp.

  That was something else their agency could afford to upgrade. Maybe it was time for a proper dinner table and enough seats for everyone who worked here. Though, the problem would be finding a place to put it all.

  As the twins continued to fight to see who could rally their fans first, Adah couldn’t help but notice a small change in Emi’s demeanor. She seemed a little more sure of herself. In this setting with all of her teammates around, she looked less like she was observing the world around her and more like she was participating in it. That wasn’t to say she had become the talkative type, or to imply that she had been a passive member of their team in the past, but something had definitely changed. A bit of the attitude she’d displayed against the lynx Cruelty had bled into how she expressed herself now.

  That shift in demeanor was probably the result of how her performance yesterday had been received.

  Adah and Emi had taken an interview together after the battle; the reporters on-site were equally interested to know why Heartbreak had sat the fight out and how Raindrop had evaded the lynx’s attacks so easily. As per the characters she was hoping to establish, Adah took the lead on answering questions.

  “My teammates are getting bored of these battles,” Adah had said to the cameras, which was technically the truth. “I’ve been in need of some entertainment, as well. Raindrop wanted to play with the cat, so I decided to rest my body and watch. It was an amusing show.”

  Adah had taken on an abrasive air around reporters in the past, but now she tried to add an element of haughtiness on top of that. Since their team hadn’t introduced any context for these characters yet, she couldn’t lean too heavily into the fantasy without coming across as awkward. She had tried to embody the role just enough to tip everyone off that something was different about Heartbreak now.

  A second reporter had posed a follow-up question to her, “If your team finds these missions boring, does this mean you’ll be taking on a B-Rank mission soon?”

  From the innocent look on his face, he hadn’t realized what a troublesome question he had asked. Adah still wanted to give her team time to grow before challenging a B-Rank, and it wasn’t the kind of decision they would make based on any arbitrary threshold of power. They needed to be prepared both physically and mentally, and all four in agreement that the time was right. Ideally, that would happen before DreamRise felt ready to fight one themselves.

  Adah couldn’t very well explain all of that to the media—certainly not in character—so she had to think of a way to dodge the question without opening herself up to the mockery of stronger teams. A haughty approach wouldn’t work, but a more calculated answer could.

  “Our team has goals beyond fighting every ugly beast that pops up, including protecting the place we call home,” Adah had said. “We’ll balance our duties with our ambitions.”

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  She had figured that was a diplomatic enough non-answer. Plus, she’d been able to sneak in a mention of calling Region 4 home. Any chance to step on Iris’s toes was one worth taking.

  After that, Adah had made an exaggerated display of her disinterest in answering any further questions. She had given curt answers to anything asked of her, and stared off at the sun as it crept below the horizon. This had achieved its intended effect of leading the reporters to pose their questions to the girl whose voice mattered most right now—even if she only used it to say a single sentence.

  The news crews had bombarded Emi with questions about her battle, none of which Emi answered at first. She had merely looked from reporter to reporter as they spoke, as if indicating that she was unsatisfied with one question and ready to hear the next. Eventually, she had heard something she was willing to respond to, and gestured for the woman who had asked it to step forward.

  “For most of the battle, you didn’t cast any spells,” the woman repeated. “Did you think they would be ineffective? Were you saving your energy for flying? Or was there some other reason for your strategy?”

  “Didn’t need them,” Emi had said with a shrug. “This Cruelty should be demoted to D-Rank.”

  The Rally Force members had crowded behind the line of cameras and reporters, and roared in approval after she spoke.

  After a response like that, the reporters thought they had an angle to pull more quotes from Emi and had prompted her with another deluge of questions, but she ignored them all again. She had just looked over at her captain until Adah told the media that was all the time they had for today.

  On their flight home, Adah had said to Emi, “For a second, I thought you were going to leave them all hanging.”

  “I was waiting for one I liked,” Emi had replied. “We want to control the conversation, right?”

  As Adah watched Emi continue to goof around with her sister throughout the agency lobby, she thought how that new approach to interacting with the media must have been influencing Emi’s daily confidence, too. Emi knew what she wanted to say, and now she was trying to create the right opportunities to say it. Even if she preferred to stay quiet, she knew how to make you hear her when she did speak.

  Of course, Emi’s dramatic rise in FP wasn’t solely the result of an interview quip.

  The photos Seb had captured of her battle were his best yet, even taken at such a far distance from the fight. After the three of them had returned to the agency office yesterday, he sat them all down on the couch and showed off his work. It quickly became apparent why he was in such a hurry to share.

  In one shot, he had caught Emi in the middle of her first counterattack against the lynx’s pounce. The still frame of the photo accentuated just how close to the pavement Emi had flown to evade the beast’s attack. Her body was mid-twist as she swung her halberd up and into the lynx’s hind leg, her unbuttoned blazer floating around her and adding a real sense of motion to the image.

  Seb had also captured her at the moment of her activating [Hailstorm Hex]. In his photo, she was standing before the fallen beast in dramatic fashion—like the protagonist on a movie poster—as the icy spears of her spell pierced the Cruelty’s head. The wide angle of the shot, with Emi and the beast highlighted by the weakening afternoon sun, made it the perfect picture for Emi to set as her profile banner.

  Emi had shared these photos and several others across all her accounts as soon as Seb could send the files to her. Since she and Emi had gone on this mission together—and put on their little act together—this was the perfect chance to Adah to get in the habit of something she thought their team should do more of. They needed to be commenting on and sharing each other’s posts much more than they were. That kind of cross-team engagement was a free win in terms of boosting exposure and making the fans giddy. It was easy to seem cute or endearing when leaving a short comment on something your teammate shared.

  Adah had her comment in mind before Emi had even finished posting the photos.

  twilit_heart: Thanks for dinner! ??

  Emi had been equally quick with her reply.

  RealRaindrops: Keep fattening up that pig for mine.

  Best not to let Izzy see that one, though she and Emi had a good laugh about it.

  As intended, their comments had drawn a sizable interest from their fans, which only helped boost the reach of Emi’s post even further. Adah had realized she and Emi didn’t often interact in such a public way, so no doubt the fans enjoyed seeing such a rare dynamic in action.

  As well as their little back-and-forth had worked, Adah knew they were still coming up short of their full potential as a team. She had been feeling that missed potential across all of their activities lately. Whether it was working on the music video with Rika, or taking these missions with the twins, something was missing. The four of them were disconnected from one another. At best, they came in pairs, but more often than not, they must have appeared as individuals to any outsider.

  Adah felt as though all of their recent successes could have been greater had they been tied to an overarching vision.

  What if Ami’s defense of the shopping center hadn’t been a one-off incident involving a magical girl from an agency most people outside the region hadn’t heard of? What if it had been an unexpected twist in a story? What if someone could explain to their friend in a sentence who Ami was, and why only she could have handled that Cruelty the way she did?

  What if the reveal of the true power of Adah’s scythe could be more than the magical girl equivalent of showing off new features at some tech company’s product demo? What if it was the revelation of the hidden magic of a dark witch? What if that reveal could make the average person believe, if only for a moment, that maybe Heartbreak was more than a human? That she really was this character she pretended to be?

  These fantasies—and the identities that came with them—offered so much more than reality could alone. But these stories could only capture the imaginations of the fans if Adah and her teammates crafted them together.

  The first people they had to tell these stories to were themselves—starting with Adah.

  “Can I talk to you all about something?” Adah spoke up, interrupting the twins’ ongoing scrap.

  Her teammates all turned to face her. They had stopped dead in the middle of what they were doing to listen to her. If she was truly acting like their captain now, then maybe that kind of response was to be expected when she said she needed to talk.

  “We’ve all been taking these big steps forward,” she said. “You can all tell—none of us is wasting a single day. But we’ve doing it all alone or in little groups. We haven’t taken our next step as a team yet.”

  Everyone’s serious expression didn’t fade, but their faces turned more introspective. They all nodded as they found themselves agreeing with what Adah had said.

  “I think I have a way to tie together everything we’re doing into one effort. We can still be independent and chase our own dreams, but we can do it in a way that gives momentum to the whole team. We can all reach the next tier of this industry—together.”

  She didn’t want to talk around it any longer.

  “It’s time to put an end to Spotlight Sunbright, and to start something new.”