Efficient in all things as they were, Adah’s parents returned home the same day that they had arrived in Region 4, now that they had reached an acceptable resolution with their daughter. They dropped Adah and Rika off at the agency office, made some small talk with Grace and the twins (along with a promise that they’d attend the team’s next concert), and then departed soon after.
The sun had yet to fall by the time her parents left, but Adah already felt ready for bed. No news had come through regarding Elise’s meeting with the regional governor, which meant their talks were ongoing and Adah was unlikely to hear from the woman until tomorrow at the earliest. With some exhaustion from the carnival still weighing on her, Adah was content to tap out for the day and start with a clean slate and fresh mind tomorrow. Those feelings must have shown up on Adah’s face, given what Grace said to her next.
“I’m guessing you girls aren’t hunting tonight, then?” she asked.
“It’d probably be a bad idea. We can start looking seriously tomorrow,” Adah said. She’d claimed the whole couch for herself by this point, and stared at the ceiling as she laid flat on her back.
By “hunting,” Grace meant waiting for a suitable B-Rank Cruelty to show up on the mission board. The team hadn’t taken on a serious job in a while, and right now was the ideal time to get back into the action. After all of the funds they’d dumped into running the carnival, the company coffers could use some replenishment. Adah’s bombastic showcase of her scythe’s inward power had also burned through most of the energy reserves she’d built up in the weapon, so siphoning the essence from a B-Rank would give her a new supply of energy to work with.
More important than any of those factors, however, was making sure the public saw the Last Light in action again. Heartbreak needed to follow up her speech about protecting the region and serving its people by doing just that. Defeating a dangerous Cruelty would serve as a reminder of what the Last Light stood for. It would also send a message to the governor: the magical girl who had endorsed Elise did more than sing and dance on a stage, she was also the region’s first line of defense against these monsters. As his office debated Elise’s potential as Secretary, Adah would make it clear why they ought to listen to her voice.
Of course, Adah and her teammates were also eager to let loose on the battlefield. Mixed in with the carnival exhaustion was a lingering high from their concert performance. That screaming crowd had manifested the results of the team’s hard work in a way that nothing ever had before. Adah and the other girls were all invigorated to get out and work even harder. That would, after all, be the best way to make that crowd grow even larger in the future.
A B-Rank Cruelty with a bit more strength than the spider they had recently fought would also make for a great opponent to test out their new augmentations on. Although Adah had yet to make her own decision, her three teammates had already selected theirs.
The main benefit of an augmentation was the ability to resolve the worst weak points of your spells. If a spell had such a severe downside that it became unusable in battles against higher ranked Cruelties, an augmentation was your opportunity to resolve that issue.
The biggest trouble with Ami’s icy chains was the amount of setup they required. With the time it took to place the chains and the danger Ami would have to put herself in to do so, her [Frigid Fetter] spell became impractical once the Last Light started fighting stronger Cruelties. The chains could have helped lock down or impede some of the hydra heads during that battle, but Ami had been given no means of safely latching them to the monster. As such, Adah could only remember a handful of times when Ami had actually used the spell in combat.
This glaring weakness made her choice of augmentation simple. Ami selected The Seeker, an upgrade that relieved her of the need to manually set up her chains. With this augmentation, she only needed to cast the spell and provide it with some starting energy, then the trail of water would extend out on its own to whatever target Ami had chosen before finally freezing into place. This mechanic even seemed to rely on some of the same foundational magic as Adah’s [Parietal Perception]. In the same way Adah’s enhanced vision could track objects even as they moved out of her direct vision, Ami’s augmentation could follow moving targets until her chains latched onto them.
In effect, Ami had gained a ranged, set it and forget it style of crowd control. With the amount of magic at her disposal now, her chains would also be sturdier, making them a more reliable means of reining in mobile Cruelties. Adah was interested to see how the new and improved chains could synergize with Rika’s first augmentation of The Viper. Rika’s infectious, disabling bullets and Ami’s leashing chains could potentially multiply in effectiveness when utilized in sync.
As for Rika, her second augmentation almost felt unnecessary. Her [Renova Railgun] was such a powerful spell already, and offered near limitless potential to scale with Rika’s own level of magic. That said, who would turn down more power?
Although, the upgrade Rika chose offered her more utility than power. Her augmentation of The Decay followed in the trend of The Viper, and allowed Rika to use her railgun for more than a high-powered burst of damage. This augmentation enabled her to channel her railgun as an ongoing spell, similar to how Ami could upkeep her water shield by continuously feeding it magic. When casting her spell in such a way, Rika could wield her railgun as a sort of laser, tracking her enemies with it like she was spraying them down with a hose.
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This method of casting would sacrifice the destructive output of [Renova Railgun] in favor of a debilitating drain on the target’s energy. The longer Rika kept her magic beam fixed on her target, the more the spell would impede their movements and even their ability to strike back through both physical and magical attacks.
Considering the extreme offensive potential her railgun offered innately, this secondary application gave Rika more flexibility in how she approached battles with little to no opportunity cost.
While Emi’s [Raging Ripple] was safer to cast than her sister’s chains, the spell had one of the most niche use cases out of everything in the girls’ arsenals. The rippling waves that her spell created were best utilized in multi-enemy battles, which the team had only encountered a few of throughout their careers.
As such, Emi was thrilled to be offered The Depths as an augmentation for her second spell. This augmentation kept the primary function of the spell the same, but with a twist that made it both more versatile and deadlier. Instead of simple, outwardly cascading waves, the spell could now create dangerous cross seas. These were waves that flowed against each other, either directly or in perpendicular angles, causing a target that got caught between them to be pulled toward their center point and relentlessly assaulted by the rapid currents.
This augmentation not only allowed the spell to keep a target in place—a more useful synergy with the rest of the Last Light’s spells—but it also had the potential to damage a Cruelty’s limbs in a way that Emi’s base spell could not. Depending on how much damage the waves caused, Emi could theoretically finish off a once dangerous target with her cursemarks or weapon all by herself.
The other girls’ selections hinted at a strange quirk of how augmentations got offered to magic users. These upgrades sat somewhere between spells and weapons in terms of a magic user’s independence. While spells were assigned solely off the will of the fans and weapons were left up to the user’s choice, each new augmentation grew out of the magic user’s previous selections.
When Ami had selected The Gate as her first augmentation, she had placed herself on a path of unlocking similar upgrades in the future. If The Gate focused on creating walls and was intended to limit the mobility of Cruelties, then her two options for her second augmentation would follow that trend. Perhaps if Ami had selected a first augmentation with an offensive focus, she may have been offered a second augmentation that allowed her chains to explode when broken or some similar effect.
In this way, a magic user could take more agency in refining how their spells evolved. Someone who had reached the point of unlocking augmentations should have a clearer understanding of what their role in their team was, or how best they preferred to fight, so they would benefit from the ability to steer their upgrades in a particular direction. Rika and Emi’s second selections had exemplified this quirk, as did Adah’s.
Her [Nightwind Whip] was similar to Rika’s railgun in the sense that Adah had no issue making use of it already. Now that she knew how her scythe could further enhance the destructive power of the spell, she really wasn’t desperate for another upgrade. Yet, she also wasn’t one to refuse a free upgrade.
The first option, The Gallows, followed the theme of crowd control. This augmentation would allow her whip to leash itself around a Cruelty’s neck or limbs, constricting whatever body part it latched onto. Adah’s ability to control the Cruelty’s movement via this leash would be derived from the whip’s magic power rather than her own physical strength, meaning that if she poured enough energy into the spell, it could prove quite effective at pinning down or dragging along an enemy.
Her second option was The Haunting, which seemed to follow from the idea of adding “aftereffects” to her spells. Whereas The Doom added a vacuuming implosion to Adah’s star attacks, The Haunting would add two additional strikes from her whip. These “ghost strikes” would occur shortly after her main attack, and lash at her target from new angles relative to the original she had struck from. If she attacked a Cruelty straight on, then the ghost whips would follow up from the left and right, at roughly forty-five degree angles.
The decision was a difficult one, which is part of why Adah had been unable to make up her mind until after she had met with her parents. While the utility of The Gallows was obviously valuable, her teammates had just added several other options for crowd control to their own spells. At the same time, The Haunting didn’t necessarily open new strategies for their team either. The additional strikes could bypass certain types of armor or help hit an evasive Cruelty, but her team had other means of accomplishing the same goals.
In the end, Adah based her decision on factors beyond their upcoming battles. Her role within the team seemed to be evolving in the direction of a commander. With the hydra, the spider, and even their second fight against the scorpion with Seliah, Adah hadn’t found herself on the front lines. When she did put herself close to a Cruelty, it was usually to the detriment of the team’s overall strategy. Her strongest tools—the scythe and the whip—worked best as finishers after her team created an opening for her. Considering she’d be earning an augmentation for her tracking vision down the line as well, she decided it was in the team’s best interest if she planned ahead.
Although thematically appropriate, Heartbreak didn’t need to be getting next to Cruelties and dragging them along by their necks. She would devise a strategy, lead her soldiers in executing it, and then deliver the final blow.
The Haunting was the best choice for such a commander.
Thinking through all their selections again, Adah felt a drop of adrenaline hit her bloodstream. She did want to get out there and fight again, but her initial reaction had been the wiser one. They should play it safe. They could spend tonight resting, making sure they’d recovered in full, then take on their next B-Rank with fresh bodies and minds. Their careers had reached a point where they couldn’t afford to make mistakes during missions. The world was watching, and their opponents had grown too dangerous.
Starting tomorrow, they’d go hunting. They’d be ready to fight, all while a different kind of battle played out in some windowless government office.