Run.
That was Adah’s gut reaction to what she saw on the television screen. Locke and his team needed to fly away from this Cruelty as fast as they could. She didn’t know what all those eyes, sprouting out from the monster’s head like two bouquets of flowers, were for, but she knew they posed a greater danger than the boys of Desiire would expect.
Of course, they couldn’t run. They had taken on the responsibility of destroying this Cruelty. Even if they wanted to abandon ship, where were they supposed to run to? They were stuck on this planet with everyone else. Until someone defeated this monster, all of humanity was in danger. Magic users were humanity’s first, last, and only line of defense against the Cruelties. These monsters had everyone backed into a corner and, unless someone stepped up to fight, evacuating cities was merely a means of delaying the inevitable.
Desiire wouldn’t want to run away in the first place. This mission was the goal they had been working toward from their team’s inception, according to Locke. Defeating an S-Rank was the whole reason they existed as a unit. They weren’t going anywhere—not that Adah had any means of contacting them anyway.
If she couldn’t warn them, maybe she could warn someone else.
Adah grabbed her phone off the coffee table and called Elise. The woman would surely have some means of contacting Sirk, who could then relay a message to Locke and his team. If nothing else, Elise could warn him that this Cruelty was a more serious threat than he realized. This wasn’t the time to milk every last drop of FP out of the situation. He needed to call on the reserve teams to get involved now, before this battle got underway. He could worry about the optics later.
However, Adah’s call rang through to Elise’s voicemail without an answer. She immediately called again.
“Who could you possibly be calling right now?” Rika asked her.
“Elise,” Adah said. “She needs to tell the other Secretaries to send help.”
“Help?” Ami said. “These guys haven’t even started fighting yet.”
Ami was right—on the television, Desiire were keeping their distance from the Cruelty. The four boys watched the Cruelty from afar, likely strategizing among themselves how best to deal with those clumps of eyes. That was the saving grace of this situation: any magic user at their level would at least know to be cautious about those eyestalks.
Little else about the Cruelty indicated its S-Rank status. Its size was not particularly massive, and aside from the eyestalk antlers, its appearance did not differ from the moose it must have been based on at all. The beast’s hide could surely withstand some intense magical attacks and it most likely possessed some regenerative abilities, but those were standard attributes of any high-ranked Cruelty. Even if it was top tier in terms of speed, that still wouldn’t explain the S-Rank rating. With nothing else outstanding, any experienced magic user would conclude that the monster’s defining power had to come from those eyes.
It was the extent of that power that had Adah panicked.
That image that had flashed through her mind the other day had been an omen and, until she understood what it meant, the dread of the unknown would choke her.
“Do you know something about this Cruelty, Adah?” Grace asked from behind her desk.
Grace’s eyes drooped a little from a lack of sleep, but their gaze cut through Adah all the same. Her manager had been acting odd around her for a while now, and the severity of her glares had only grown more intense since she returned from Ketzia’s. The two of them couldn’t have possibly talked about that, could they have?
In any case, Adah shook her head and said, “I just have a bad feeling about it. Really bad.”
Although she’d left out the reason why, that was the truth.
Still, maybe a feeling was all it was.
Not everything about the scene on the television matched up to what Adah had seen in her visions. Desiire and this Cruelty weren’t fighting deep in the woods; they were in the middle of a neighborhood, surrounded by rows of empty houses instead of trees. Region 1 hadn’t suffered the same snowstorm that Region 4 had, and therefore wasn’t buried under a pile of snow. Adah could see the ground beneath the Cruelty was made of pavement, not roots, ferns, and fallen leaves. She hadn’t seen anything like a moose in her dream either, and she doubted Pureheart would show up at this battle. In fact, very little about today resembled her most grotesque vision.
Yet, those eyes were there.
The whale Cruelty had used them to teleport. The turtle Cruelty had used them to aim its partner’s attacks. They were a means of converting essence into some kind of power similar to magic, but that was as much as Adah could conclude about them. The question that left her with was: What would happen if so many eyes were attached to one Cruelty with a wealth of essence at its disposal? What could happen?
“Shit, if you think they need help, why should we wait for someone else?” Ami said to Adah. “Let’s go there ourselves.”
“You’ll stay right here,” Grace barked another order at the girls; her words had been terse since her return. “Our job is to guard this area, and that’s what we’re going to do. By the time you got to Avepoir, the battle could very well be over anyway. And you might not want to hear this, but anything too dangerous for those boys would be a death sentence for you four. That gap in FP is nothing to scoff at.”
None of the girls were willing to argue with this version of Grace. They had no argument to make anyway—Grace was right in all respects.
That didn’t mean Adah would give up on trying to contact Elise, though. Getting those reserve teams into the mix was the only way Adah could help Locke and his team. There must have been at least a couple of other high level teams waiting just outside the battlefield. All it would take is one word from Sirk to have them join the fight. Adah didn’t care if it was someone like Ren or any of those girls who had messaged Iris. Someone needed to step in before this battle kicked off.
But Elise still wouldn’t pick up Adah’s call.
“What the hell is she doing?” Adah couldn’t help voicing her frustration aloud.
“I’m sure she’s being pulled in a dozen different directions,” Rika said. “She has to keep an eye on the whole region right now.”
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“Yeah,” Adah said, “and one of the magical girls protecting that region needs her.”
Rika was right, though. On top of monitoring the appearance of any Cruelties in Region 4, Elise would be in constant communication with the other Secretaries about developments across the nation. At the same time, she had a duty to reassure the public and share what information she could with the media. She’d be watching the battle between Desiire and the S-Rank as well—not only to stay up to date, but also to learn what she could about this new variant.
All of that was reasonable, but there was something else Elise needed to know. Something only Adah could tell her.
In the end, Adah ran out of time.
“They’re going in,” Emi said.
She must have read something in the boys’ postures or formation because, a couple of seconds after her comment, Desiire took off flying toward the Cruelty. They were about to make their opening strike.
Locke flew in front of the rest of his team as their spearhead. From what Adah knew of his spells, the captain packed the most offensive power out of everyone on his team. His magic revolved around the use of prismatic crystals, with each of his spells interacting with a different prism that he would summon akin to a magical weapon. His magic would then pass light—or energy—through the prism, resulting in a variety of devastating outputs depending on which crystal he summoned.
For his first attack against the S-Rank, Locke tossed a prism into the sky above the Cruelty, where it then froze in place as the boy began to cast his spell. As the prism began to slowly rotate, Adah recognized which spell Locke had cast. She had thought this attack was best suited for fighting multiple enemies, but Locke’s use of it here made sense.
Dozens of distinct beams of light shot out of the center of the crystal as it spun. Each beam carved through anything caught in its path, like a laser out of a science fiction movie. With the way Locke had positioned his attack, the beams rotated around the crystal at a perpendicular angle to the ground, like a deadly ferris wheel spinning in the sky. In this way, all of the beams shooting out from the bottom half of the crystal struck the Cruelty from above, with new lasers constantly slicing into the monster as the prism rotated. The beams that fired out of the top half of the crystal dissipated before they damaged any houses in the distance. Only the ground directly to each side of the moose Cruelty were impacted, with the lasers digging deep trenches into the earth as they rotated past the monster’s flesh.
An attack like this kept a constant pressure on the Cruelty—a multi-pronged attack that could deal with multiple enemies could also function as multiple attacks on the same enemy. That seemed to be Locke’s strategy, and it was a sound one in Adah’s mind.
The Cruelty, however, was left unharmed. The beams of light that should have connected with the monster and done at least some damage to its flesh never even got close. They were stopped by an invisible barrier, bursting into explosions of sparks like the flame of a welding torch against metal. The barrier shimmered faintly as Locke’s spell burned into it, revealing a dome of protection around the entire Cruelty.
This wasn’t entirely unexpected, though. This defensive capability had shown up on S-Rank Cruelties of the past. The barrier was much tougher than even the armor plating that protected weaker variants, but that toughness required an investment of essence. That made Adah feel a little better about this battle. This barrier was another factor that justified the Cruelty’s S-Rank rating, and maybe that meant the eyestalks were a little less threatening. That was, after all, essence not being spent on whatever power the eyes held.
The Cruelty only allowed Adah to feel that relief for a fleeting moment, though. Just after Locke’s spell made contact with the barrier, all of those eyes protruding from the monster began to glow.
One of Locke’s teammates, a defensive spellcaster who went by the name Ophitemus Oren, responded to the glowing immediately. His spells were similar in nature to Ami’s, but wind-based instead of ice-based. Oren held out his arms as if reaching out for a hug, causing great gusts of wind to gather around him. His team must have made a contingency plan before their opening assault, as they all rushed to regroup near Oren without missing a beat. The winds swirled around the four of them at Oren’s command, forming a protective tornado of sorts. In there, they would wait out whatever retaliation the Cruelty had in mind.
But rather than a direct counterattack, the Cruelty’s retaliation took the form of something much worse.
As the eyestalks glowed, a gray oval appeared in the sky, far off to the right of the grouped up magical boys. It was as if the eyestalk had projected that oval out into the world. Then, a second oval appeared. Then, another and another, until a hundred or more gray portals dotted the sky. A hundred voids poked holes in this world, and each of those holes opened up in the direction of Locke and his team. They were surrounded on all sides by these portals, which were spread out over such a vast distance, with some even streets away from the Cruelty, that the boys couldn’t possibly watch every portal at once.
The agency lobby had been quiet all day with the stress of the situation, but now it felt as though the air had been vacuumed out of it entirely.
The blood in Adah’s veins froze where it was, and all her skin prickled with pins and needles, as though all her limbs had fallen asleep at once.
“Those…” Rika was the first to break the silence. “Those aren’t…?”
“No,” Ami said. “There’s no way.”
Grace got up from her chair and hurried around her desk. She stood close to the television, her eyes wide. Even only catching a glimpse of her face, Adah knew that Grace understood what she was looking at. So, Ketzia had told her.
Then, something on the television screen moved.
Adah’s body shook. She flinched, as though the figure that emerged from one of the portals was about to break through the screen and lunge straight for her.
It was a bird. Or a horse? The figure moved so fast, she couldn’t be sure, but it was larger than any human.
It burst out of a portal on the boys’ left flank, angled a bit to their rear. It closed the distance between its portal and the tornado encasing the boys faster than the drone camera could track, and disappeared into another portal on the other end of the battlefield.
As it passed through the air, the figure shattered Oren’s windy shield. The gusts of wind split apart into mere wisps, and the tornado they formed was neutralized all at once. The aftershock of whatever force had dismantled Oren’s shield crashed into the group of magical boys, flinging them each in a different direction. They spun through the air, their flights clearly disoriented by the Cruelty’s attack.
The eyestalks blinked in unison, and the portals surrounding the boys vanished, but only for a moment. A blink was all it took for the eyes to recover their energy and glow again. A hundred more portals tore holes in the world.
Locke and his teammates had steadied themselves by now, but only barely. Their formation was disjointed, and they were each face to face with a dozen portals. They had no way of knowing which their teammates could see, which they could defend against, or which the next attack would erupt from. All they could do was react on reflex.
Locke threw out a few more prisms, hurrying to cast any spell he could to destroy the portals in front of him. Oren gathered more wind, in hopes of protecting himself long enough to regroup with his team. Elijah, the sweet-faced boy with a puppy dog demeanor, conjured his weapon, an oversized hammer. The youngest member of the team—that bratty Proust—aimed his hand at the portals before him and shot out an arc of lightning.
In the end, only Proust got his attack off before another figure darted out of one of the portals.
Adah got a better look at the figure this time, though it moved just as fast as before. She only had a fraction of a second to distinguish one shape from another, but that was all the time she needed.
After all, she was only confirming her suspicions. Realizing her dread.
The figure was that of a winged horse, mounted by a shadow in the shape of a human. She was certain of it.
The pegasus, piloted by what could only be a humanoid Cruelty, flew out of a portal nearest to Oren. The boy’s shield was only in its early stages, and had accomplished nothing more than kicking up dust. It was no shield at all.
The humanoid and its steed flew faster than Ekki had ever managed to atop his own foggy horse. It was too fast to react against—not with a shield and not with a dodge.
The humanoid held out something—a weapon Adah couldn’t make out during the few frames the figure was on the screen—and ran Oren through. It cut straight through the center of his stomach.
When a Cruelty pierced your flesh, you didn’t bleed. Your flesh disappeared.
Oren fell out of the sky, a gaping hole visible in his torso. From the way his head rolled about, Adah knew for sure. The boy was already dead.
The broadcast cut out and the television screen went to black.