By the next morning, that drop of adrenaline in Adah’s blood had turned into a total flood. She had been dealing with secondary opponents for so long now—other magic users, Thibault and the rest of the Department of Magic, even the songs she’d needed to learn were her adversaries in their own way. She was itching to do the real work of being a magical girl. She was ready to practice what she preached and destroy some Cruelties.
Judging by the way the twins had been taking potshots at each other as they took their turns in the dorm’s shower and throughout breakfast, Ami and Emi were feeling the same restlessness as Adah. In fact, Adah was halfway tempted to join in their playfighting. She only held back because she knew the twins would gang up on her if she did. They had an unfair, unspoken alliance like that.
Yet, Rika was probably the member most in need of an outlet. Her process for producing music—even her cover songs—had always involved cooping herself in her room for days at a time. She was the kind of person to focus all of her attention on the project in front of her until it was finished, and that single-mindedness built up a pressure in her that needed relief. Back when their team had no fame or power to speak of, Rika could blow off steam by goofing around with Adah and the twins just as effectively as she could by taking a mission. Now that their spells and battles had grown more intense, Rika had also grown accustomed to using them as her outlet.
This antsy atmosphere must have been palpable even to anyone around the girls. As soon as Grace walked into the agency that morning, she took one look at her magical girls and held up her hands.
“Be patient and do not crowd the desk,” she said. “I will find you something as soon as I can. Yelling will not make it show up sooner.”
As she promised, Grace immediately took a seat at her desk and opened up the mission portal. Even though she had told them to stay back, the girls couldn’t resist inching closer to Grace’s workstation.
Yet, the morning passed without a single suitable mission popping up. The girls had all reached the limit of their anticipation and needed to give their brains a break. To distract themselves, they gathered in the agency’s tiny kitchen to make themselves lunch out of an eclectic assortment of food items that couldn’t possibly be called a meal. The most generous description of what they plopped onto their plates was perhaps “a collage.”
But even this distraction only lasted so long. No sooner had they scarfed down their surrealist meal than did they restart their pacing, playfighting, and thumb-twiddling. All of this mind-numbing restlessness continued until Grace provided salvation in the form of a loud clap.
“I guess I don’t need to ask, considering how none of you can sit still,” Grace said, “but are you all recovered enough for something high rank?”
Grace got her answer in the form of all four members of the Last Light stampeding toward her desk. Ami and Emi threw themselves over the front of the desk, craning their heads around Grace’s monitor to see what she’d found, while Adah and Rika took a slightly more reserved approach of latching onto both sides of Grace’s chair to see her screen straight-on.
The job in question was a B-Rank, as they’d hoped. This Cruelty was a horse variant or, perhaps more accurately, a pegasus variant. Its horse body was large enough to fit a small army inside of, and the wings that sprouted from its back could match up against a commercial airliner’s. Despite its size, the pegasus was among the fastest of the Cruelties Adah and her team had faced, with the ability to fly to boot. In terms of threat level, the pegasus sat somewhere between the spider Cruelty and the hydra, making it an ideal candidate for the girls to gauge their strength against without biting off more than they could chew.
This was also the exact kind of mission that could establish the Last Light as the bulwark of Region 4.
“Take it,” Adah said right away, then looked around at her teammates. “Unless some of you want to take the day off?”
Although she’d stayed out of their fighting earlier, the twins looked ready to lunge at Adah now for even suggesting such a thing. Needless to say, Rika had no intention of staying home today either. Seeing those reactions, Grace signed them up for the job without further discussion.
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Though it wasn’t quite on the level of the hydra, the pegasus Cruelty made its size known even as it flew as high as a hawk in the sky. The beast blocked out a chunk of the midday sun, casting a massive shadow on the fields below that looked almost as imposing as the monster itself. The media and any other observers would have to stay well out of the way of this speedy Cruelty, but they’d certainly have no trouble keeping their eyes on something this big.
The members of the Last Light found the Cruelty flying above a pair of tributaries that flowed into the region’s major river. These smaller rivers must have been used for transportation centuries ago, based on the way they appeared to connect the dots between various towns in the region. At least, that was Adah’s assumption. What mattered today was that the pegasus Cruelty had chosen to spawn above one of these stretches of wilderness that the tributaries spanned.
“Let’s not waste any time,” Adah said to her team. “People will be watching us more closely than usual. This thing is fast, so if we let it roam too far, the mission could get messy. Today, let’s be clean.”
“Yes, ma’am!” her teammates yelled out.
There was that troublesome “ma’am” again, but Adah listened to her own commands and purged the thought from her mind. Her teammates were gearing up to launch their first attack, and she needed to be ready to join them.
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But, before any of them could fire a single projectile or make even a feint in the Cruelty’s direction, the winged horse bolted. The monster shot off into the distance, moving with a strange combination of gallops and wing flaps.
“This guy’s scared of us!” Ami shouted as the girls took off in pursuit of the Cruelty.
“Maybe it’s trying to get somewhere with more prey,” Rika said.
“So much for these things getting smarter,” Ami said. “If it was looking for people, it should’ve shown up closer to a city.”
“It could be trying to lure us somewhere,” Rika said. “Maybe it’s trying to set up an ambush. It could be smarter than we think—look at how we chased after it without thinking.”
Rika brought up a valid point. They’d already seen the Cruelties coordinate attacks like the destruction of the substation that led to the surprise attack at the shopping center that Ami had encountered. Adah could prove that theory right or wrong with the help of her scythe, if needed. When she channeled its power, she seemed able to see any Cruelties across the whole country, maybe even farther than that. Yet, there was an easier way to know if this monster was leading them into a trap.
“Izzy,” Adah called out. “You sense anything waiting for us up ahead?”
“Nothing but the one you are chasing,” he answered without appearing.
In that case, this Cruelty likely had a similar objective to the bat Adah and Rika had fought. The monster was here to test something, perhaps even to observe how humans responded to its presence. How would humanity deal with a foe that only ran away from them? If that’s what the Cruelties wanted to know, that was all the more reason to kill the beast quickly, and for Adah to keep her scythe hidden until the last moment.
As the girls flew after the Cruelty, Adah and Rika fired off their stars and bullets, but even with the projectiles’ improved speed, the pegasus had no trouble dodging. Similarly, Ami’s new tracking chains couldn’t keep up with the winged beast and eventually evaporated in the air.
While the three of them tried to reach the Cruelty with spells, Emi had nearly caught up to it through sheer speed. Focused on flying, she could easily outpace the monster and get close enough to—hopefully—incapacitate it with a close range strike. However, she was having trouble getting close enough to apply her spear’s cursemarks or to cut down the beast with her halberd. With no one to guard her and all her own speed spent keeping pace with the pegasus, she could easily fall victim to a quick turn and kick from the monster.
“I need a wall,” Emi said to the rest of the team through a magic channel. “I can trap it if I have a surface.”
She must have meant the new augmentation on her [Raging Ripple]. The choppy waves could likely disrupt the Cruelty’s flight, but Emi couldn’t generate them out of thin air. She needed a surface to attach her magic to.
“Not a problem!” Ami called back to her.
The other twin immediately began creating a wall of ice with her shield. Once she’d produced a block the size of a minivan, Ami conjured her weapon: those watery wraps that coiled around her fists. Using her weapon’s ability to latch onto a target, she grabbed hold of the ice block and lifted it overhead.
Clearly, she intended to throw the ice block in the same manner she had during the battle against the scorpion that Seliah had helped them out with. Only this time, Ami wasn’t aiming for a Cruelty. She was aiming for her sister.
“Catch!” she yelled again.
Ami flung the ice block forward with a groan so loud that Adah worried she might have torn her arms off at the same time. The block flew toward the Cruelty faster than even Emi had managed, but even this speed was something the pegasus could react to. The beast moved to the side without slowing down, and the ice block went past it.
Though, by this point, Emi had also flown ahead of the Cruelty.
She had positioned herself slightly below the trajectory of Ami’s throw, assessing the angle as precisely as Seliah had. Perhaps she had taken some inspiration—or motivation—from seeing how the witch girl fought. As the ice block approached, Emi thrust her arm upward, making a glancing contact with the underside of the object, like slapping the side of a car that drove by. This brief touch was enough to engage her spell.
Criss-crossing waves immediately crashed into one another, rushing out in the opposite direction as Ami’s ice traveled. Even as the ice block evaporated in the distance, the waves continued coursing back the way the projectile had come. They splashed against each other as they flowed back and forth like a braid, their disruptive rapids heading straight toward the flying Cruelty.
Emi had tagged the ice block so near the Cruelty, and her waves rushed out of it so quickly, that the pegasus struggled to react. If the monster really had come here to gather information, it could at least die after encountering a new trick.
The waves crashed against the Cruelty from the left and the right, knocking it back and forth in the air. A whole sequence of a dozen waves or more tormented the beast like this, stalling its movement entirely and threatening to knock it out of the air.
Rika, however, wasn’t about to wait for the monster to fall. She brought her flight to a halt and began to glow a scorching red, like metal pulled from a blacksmith’s forge. Her railgun was powering up.
“Trying out the new toy?” Ami asked.
“Not this time,” Rika said. “Our princess wants the Last Light to look good, so this one’s a pure snipe.”
Not a second later, she fired her bullet of light.
With the Cruelty trapped in Emi’s waves, Rika had no trouble hitting her shot, even at a distance of a couple hundred yards. The railgun’s shot pierced the beast at a devastating angle, tearing apart one of its wings and carving straight through the base of its neck. Without a mouth to scream, it plummeted out of the sky in silence.
The four girls chased after the monster again, but considering it was all but defeated, they had no trouble beating it to the ground. The pegasus crashed into the earth below, causing no more damage than some displaced dirt. Adah even had her scythe prepared before the beast hit the ground.
“The honor’s all yours,” Rika said.
The twins had lost interest in the Cruelty, instead choosing to scream at each other about how cool the little trick they’d pulled off was. Given the speed of the monster, it would be a few minutes more before any media arrived on the scene. Adah figured there was no point in fanfare under these conditions. She sunk her scythe’s blade into the Cruelty’s exposed core.
When the monster’s essence flowed into her weapon, she felt a heartbeat pulse between her hands once again. Today’s sensation felt odd, though. Perhaps she was no longer used to the feeling; it had been a while since she last siphoned this much essence at once. Yet, as the power finished flowing into her scythe, Adah realized it wasn’t the heartbeat that felt off. It was something in her head.
This other feeling wasn’t a pulse but a spark of some kind. It was an idle, daydreaming thought that passed out of her mind an instant later. It left her so fast that she couldn’t even recognize what the thought was, only that it seemed to arrive at the same moment as the Cruelty’s essence.
“What’s wrong, Adah?” Rika asked.
Her partner’s words made Adah aware of her furrowed brow and pursed lips. She relaxed her face and shook her head.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just my imagination.”