Ekki was being treated in the same hospital as Emi had been after her injury. Given how few magic users had operated out of Region 4 in recent years, and the limited resources of the region as a whole, this was the only local facility with staff trained to coordinate medical treatment with mascots. It took special knowledge to treat an injury at the same time as a mascot was battling a Cruelty’s siphoning infection.

  Doctors who had treated such patients in the past were also better equipped to support the recovery and return of the “person” inside the body. A person’s essence being torn away from their body wasn’t something you could replicate in a classroom.

  Bolstering this kind of medical infrastructure should have been a priority for whoever was Secretary of Magic. Even the parts of Thibault’s agenda that Adah agreed with—like scaling up the number of teams in the region—necessitated that the support systems for magic users would grow alongside the rest of the industry. Though, what politician would want to be known for spending a bunch of money to prepare for the possibility of a disastrous Cruelty attack? That might suggest you thought such a thing could actually happen here.

  It was much more glamorous—albeit short-sighted—to aim to create a superstar team or to host fun events celebrating popular magical girls.

  In any case, Adah was familiar with this wing of the hospital already, and soon found her way to Ekki’s room with the help of a nurse. She knocked on the door and, after peering at her through the window, Iris let Adah inside.

  Ekki lay in a bed near a window at the far end of the room. Though most of his body was covered by a blanket, Adah could see that his shoulder had been completely bandaged up. His mascot was not present, which must have meant that the deterioration of his body had ceased. All the same, his right arm was missing. That would be an injury magic could never undo.

  His face was perfectly still, almost doll-like. Whereas Emi’s eyes had flitted and her lips twitched as she experienced something like a nightmare, Ekki’s expression was entirely vacant. It was as though no one was inside his body at all.

  Although his essence was no longer being siphoned, the “humanity” of Ekki had yet to return in full.

  Iris walked toward the boy’s bed without a word to Adah. She sat down in a rolling chair by his bedside and spun to face halfway between Ekki and Adah, then turned her head the rest of the way to look at Adah.

  “Those are pleasant,” she said, nodding at the bouquet of flowers in Adah’s hands. Her voice was dulled, to an even greater degree than when they had met at the Department of Magic.

  Adah had stopped by a florist on her way here. She didn’t know if someone like Ekki would care much for flowers, though, based on the girl he loved, perhaps he would. Adah had gone with the florist’s recommendation: a collection of tulips in red, purple, and yellow. She noticed there was practically a full garden of similar flowers lined up on a nearby shelf in the room.

  “Should I put these there?” Adah asked.

  “You can stand them for now,” Iris said. “I’ll find a vase for them soon.”

  Adah did as Iris said, then walked closer to Ekki’s bed. He looked thinner and paler. Adah’s eyes kept drifting toward his shoulder, even though she didn’t want to see what waited there. She closed her eyes instead.

  “How long was it before your friend returned?” Iris asked suddenly. “Emi, or was it the other one?”

  At least Iris had gotten Emi’s name right this time. Adah would count that as a step in the right direction. Though, she had to wonder whether Iris had only learned the twins’ names because she’d been looking into Emi’s own injury. Even this question was meant to give her a point of comparison with Ekki, Adah was sure. Not that she could blame Iris for wanting to know more.

  “It was a couple of days after she got bit,” Adah said. “But she was in and out of it. I think she only stayed awake for maybe an hour total that first day back.”

  Iris watched Ekki. Her face didn’t move at all.

  “It only makes sense,” Iris said. “A chunk of shoulder versus an entire arm. Of course he would take longer to come home.”

  “Have the doctors said anything to you?” Adah asked. “Or his mascot?”

  “Nothing useful,” she said. “They say they can only focus on his body’s health at this point. The better we fight off muscle atrophy and keep him generally healthy, the easier it will be for him to come home. A weak and sickly body is harder to return to. I move him, massage him, and talk to him. Iosk won’t let me cast any spells while I’m here, so this is all I can do.”

  With the speed of Emi’s recovery, things had been slightly different. She had shown more signs of life as each day passed from morning to night, so her doctor had been able to share those improvements with Ami and everyone else. Ekki’s recovery would be a much tougher test of faith.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  “If there’s anything I can help with—any ideas you have or something you want my… perspective on—just ask,” Adah said. “I was serious about wanting Ekki to get better.”

  “Then I can owe you even more favors,” Iris said. “How pleasant.”

  “Not everyone is motivated by the same things you are. Some of us are decent.”

  Adah hadn’t come here wanting to fight, especially not in Ekki’s room of all places. But if Iris wanted to antagonize her, she’d remind the girl just how different they were.

  Iris stared at her, the color in her eyes still as pale as ice. Her face didn’t so much as twitch until she finally sighed.

  “You all are, you just haven’t recognized it yet,” she said. “I won’t argue with you, though. If we had the same idea of what ‘decent’ means, we wouldn’t be who we are. I could use your help with something, so let me ask for it genuinely.”

  She spun the chair she was sitting in fully toward Adah now, and closed her eyes as she took a breath in.

  “Would you let me take a nice picture of you?” Iris asked, opening her eyes once more. “Please? I’ve been posting about Ekki’s recovery each day, and today I’d like to include a photo of you. I can’t deny that your presence would garner more support for him. Besides, when he comes home, he may be happy to see that you had visited him.”

  Of course, Adah had anticipated something like this. Hoped for it, even. Showing her support of Ekki in a public way would certainly help his recovery. She just hadn’t felt right suggesting the idea on her own. It was better that Iris asked for it of her own accord.

  “I don’t mind at all,” Adah said. “Should I transform?”

  “No,” Iris said. “This is how you visited, isn’t it? This is the Heartbreak he knows. Your fans have seen you out of your transformation, haven’t they?”

  Adah nodded and said, “This isn’t a situation to keep up a character anyway. But what should I…? Like, what’s okay? For the photo, I mean.”

  Iris sighed yet again.

  “You won’t stay ahead of me for very long if this is how you handle a camera,” she said. “Just hold the flowers you brought and smile. It’s been long enough since the hydra. No one wants to think about sad things anymore when they think of Ekki. They want to think about how he’s getting better every day.”

  No one: surely Iris was including herself in that. If that was the kind of photo she wanted, then Adah would oblige. She did as she was asked.

  Iris took out her phone and snapped a few different angles of Adah. She compared them on her screen, then chose one to edit a bit further. After adjusting the colors and cropping it a bit, she drafted up a post for her accounts.

  My knight continues to improve every day! Today, he had a new visitor: @twilit_heart. Ekki and Heartbreak are good friends, so I’m sure her visiting will make him want to get better even faster! Hmm, I wonder how I should feel about that…

  “Look good to you?” she asked Adah.

  “That’s fine with me.”

  Though, Adah hadn’t been very friendly toward him before that B-Rank mission. In fact, no one of either of their teams had acted very friendly toward each other at any point in time. That didn’t look likely to change any time soon.

  All the same, Iris posted the photo and Adah reshared it shortly after. If there was anyone on DreamRise Adah had a shot at finding common ground with, it was Ekki. The boy may have been right about something—there would come times when their teams needed to rely on each other. Not only against Cruelties, but against other people.

  “I know I said I wasn’t doing this for favors,” Adah said, “but I did have a question for you. If you don’t want to talk about it, I’ll drop it. What do you think?”

  “What do I think?” Iris repeated. “You should know me well enough to know I’m not some wilting flower. Ask what you need to ask, and if it pisses me off, I’ll tell you so.”

  Apparently the only way to set Iris off was to walk on eggshells around her. How counterintuitive, and yet, how like her.

  “In that case,” Adah said, “I want to know more about Secretary Thibault. It seems to me like he got to where he is thanks to someone’s help. A friend in the government, or some other kind of backer. Your team worked a lot more closely with him than we did, so I was wondering if you knew about anything like that.”

  Iris’s face lightened up, though ever so slightly.

  “Realizing you had more enemies than you anticipated?” she said. “Roland Thibault is a leech of some kind, yes, injected into the Department of Magic by some force. The only skill he has is his willingness to follow orders. As for whose orders he’s following, I can’t help you. His goals and our own merely happened to align for a time. That was all our relationship was.”

  That didn’t come as a surprise. Adah wasn’t foolish enough to think Thibault had been a genuine supporter of DreamRise. They were just the most convenient tool for his purposes. If nothing else, Iris had all but confirmed that Thibault was someone else’s pawn. The man had no grand scheme of his own.

  “Though,” Iris continued, “now his desires are very much in conflict with my own. If there ever comes a time where your goals aligned with mine…”

  Iris paused and looked Adah in the eyes again. The bit of levity that had crept onto Iris’s face vanished completely.

  “No,” she said. “Perhaps not after all.”

  The mood in the room grew cold fast. Iris turned away from Adah again, her chair rotated halfway between her and Ekki once more. Adah got the sense that this was Iris’s way of asking her to leave. Maybe even Iris was decent enough to recognize how rude it’d be to ask that of one of Ekki’s visitors directly.

  If her presence was starting to bother Iris, Adah had no complaints about leaving. Before she went, though, she did have one last question to ask.

  “If—” Adah stopped herself and looked at Ekki, his face still unmoving. “When Ekki wakes up, what are you going to do? You as a team, I mean?”

  For the first time today, Iris smiled. It wasn’t the dainty smile she gave the cameras or the vicious grin she had shown when taunting Adah. It was a shattered smile, like a jagged crack in a sheet of ice.

  “The same as you,” Iris said. “Destroy the Cruelties, and anyone else who gets in our way. I’m going to build a world that plays by my rules, even if I have to burn down this one first.”

  Adah had always thought Clair was the black sheep of DreamRise, with Iris and Ekki being such a natural pair. She understood now that it was Ekki who had the least in common with his teammates.