“You’re slow,” Ketzia said, then spat into the snow.
“And what exactly does ‘slow’ mean?” Adah yelled back.
The Last Light and DreamRise had spent the past two hours sparring in the yard behind Ketzia’s cabin, and Ketzia had spent all two hours criticizing Adah’s fighting and spellcasting. She nitpicked what felt like every single mistake Adah made, always with the same vague, useless feedback. You’re slow. You’re losing focus. You’re rushing. You’re focusing on the wrong person. Normally Adah could handle that kind of heat, but Ketzia was giving her nothing to work off of.
Despite the respect Adah had for her mentor, she’d reached a breaking point after two hours of abuse.
And as soon as Adah raised her voice, Ketzia took flight and rushed right up next to her. This close, Adah could feel the heat coming off of Ketzia’s body, as hot as the air that escapes when you first open an oven after cooking. Adah guessed that the woman’s temperature didn’t always run this hot.
“Slow means slow,” Ketzia said. “You wait around too much. All you want to do is wait for people to fall into your traps, but acting like that just makes it obvious you’ve set one up. Only an idiot is going to fall for it. If you don’t pose a real offensive threat at the same time, you can’t lure someone into an overcommitment.”
“Thank you,” Adah said, doing her best not to shy away from Ketzia’s eye contact. “That’s all I was looking for.”
“Those tricks might work against a Cruelty, but they won’t against a human,” Ketzia said.
“Heartbreak does have a talent for getting outsmarted at the last second,” Iris said, flying over to join Adah and Ketzia. “She’s good enough at killing Cruelties, but other people are her weakness. Speaking from experience, of course.”
The cold look on Ketzia’s face melted, giving way to a grin.
“You two are a perfect match,” she said. “Good to know this kid’s got a rival who won’t let her sit on her ass. Won’t let her stay slow.”
With that, Ketzia floated back to the ground, calling out for a new sparring configuration as she went. She wanted to see the twins take on Ekki and Clair next. While the four of them got ready to fight, Iris whispered to Adah.
“I thought you were fond of your teacher,” she said. “You two seem hellbent on antagonizing each other.”
“We’re not usually like this,” Adah said. “I think I said something to upset her.”
Although, at this point, Adah was just as upset herself.
“Yes, you have a talent for that, too,” Iris whispered. “Perhaps you should save such words for those who enjoy hating you, though. Have you tried apologizing to Ketzia instead?”
Adah squinted at Iris, who looked back at her straight-faced.
“What’s that? Advice?” Adah said. “From you?”
“Merely an observation.”
“I see,” Adah said. “Too bad I wouldn’t know what to apologize for. I don’t think I said anything wrong.”
Iris sighed and said, “Of course not. I should have expected that response. You’re so very talented, after all.”
“What are you trying to say?” Adah asked.
But Iris didn’t bother responding. Instead, she flew down near Ketzia to watch her teammates spar. After a moment of hovering in the air, Adah followed suit, joining Rika at the opposite end of the yard.
☆☆☆
At midday, the teams took a break from sparring to eat lunch, putting Ketzia’s large dining table to good use for once. Adah was grateful that Ketzia’s coaching of the sparring session had left Grace as the sole chef of this meal, which meant her tongue and stomach would be spared any extreme spice. Grace kept lunch light, assembling mixes of shredded chicken, radishes, and carrots over quinoa, with some kind of sweet sauce over the top. Presumably this dish was easy for her to cook en masse, but keeping their meal light was wise regardless. The humanoid Cruelty could appear at any time.
That anticipation gnawed at the girls and Ekki as they ate, leading to a mostly silent meal. No longer could their sparring distract them. But in the end, the Cruelty never showed up. Adah sensed it—everyone had expected the humanoid to appear during their break. They had no real reason to think so. That was simply the atmosphere, and they couldn’t help but be sucked into it.
Their afternoon training purged that feeling from their minds. Now that Ketzia had gotten a chance to watch DreamRise in action, she was full of ideas for how to push their spells to their creative limits. Thus, the teams spent the afternoon playing around with spell interactions rather than sparring.
In the middle of this training session, Ketzia pulled Adah and Iris away from the rest of the group. Her eyes were glowing so bright that Adah worried her eyelashes might catch fire.
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“My two captains,” Ketzia said. “Can we play nice for a bit?”
Iris put her hands on her hips and said, “I’ve been nothing but a sweetheart to this brat lately.”
“She’s been… not unpleasant,” Adah admitted.
“And what about you?” Ketzia asked.
“I’ve always been nice to her!”
Ketzia sighed and said, “You’re both liars, but if you’re both lying about the same thing, then I guess it works out. You have some very interesting abilities between the two of you—so interesting that I don’t really understand them. So, if this blows up in our faces, you can’t blame me.”
Adah wasn’t sure if that logic made sense, but she was willing to go along with Ketzia’s experiment. The woman seemed to be in better spirits after lunch and, although she didn’t want to apologize, Adah preferred when the two of them got along.
In effect, Ketzia wanted to see if it was possible to combine Iris’s [Fleur-de-lis] with the self-empowering effect of Adah’s scythe. Iris’s spell seemed to allow her to absorb essence from other magic users, and Adah’s scythe likely fed essence into her own body in a similar manner. Was it possible to chain those effects together? Could a supercharged Adah provide Iris with even more power than normal?
Adah called upon Beleth’s Bloodletter, and the scythe answered with its beating heart as it materialized in her hands. It occurred to her that she hadn’t utilized the weapon’s power—inwardly or outwardly—since the last time she’d empowered herself with it. Every Cruelty she’d slain since then had gone toward powering up the scythe, and its stored energy was nearing the peak level it had been at before Adah had let loose against that bird-like Cruelty.
The scythe sensed Adah’s intention right away and began to transfer its energy into her, the image of an eye of smoke appearing at the center of her vision again, but she stopped it short of actually taking over. That eye of smoke reminded her of her visions. She couldn’t say for sure, but what she had seen in her dream and what had flashed in her mind periodically must have been connected to the scythe. The first of her visions had struck her while she was siphoning a Cruelty’s core—that couldn’t have been mere coincidence.
That image she had seen of the cluster of eyes had manifested in reality with dire consequences. Her lucid dream had yet to reveal its meaning to her, but Adah couldn’t pretend it was a product of her imagination any longer. It did mean something, even if she didn’t know what.
Because of that, she was wary to interact with the scythe again. Her visions had stopped in recent days, most likely because she’d not used the weapon in some time. Would feeding the scythe’s power into her body cause them to return? More importantly, was she better off seeing what they wanted to show her or not? If this was something like clairvoyance, she didn’t know how to make use of it.
What Adah had said to Ketzia earlier echoed in her head. She couldn’t effectively eliminate the Cruelties if she was scared of her own weapon and powers. Those monsters wouldn’t let fear slow them down, so neither could she. Besides, Adah had an idea of her own she wanted to test.
Before allowing the scythe’s power into her body, Adah cast her [Parietal Perception] and focused on Iris’s body. A gray trail formed in Adah’s vision as Iris shifted slightly in the air, indicating that the tracking spell was working. Now, to see if it would continue working.
Beleth’s Bloodletter reacted again, sensing that it would finally be allowed off its leash. The scythe’s energy surged into Adah’s body as if in a hurry. The eye of smoke appeared again, and layered itself over Adah’s left eye like a lens. The world around her was swallowed by a black void, just as had happened before. A few specks of white floated in the distance, what must have been many miles south from Ketzia’s cabin—Cruelties being dealt with in some other region. As for the magic users sparring nearby, they all vanished from sight. All except one, in a sense.
The trail that tracked Iris’s movement stood out against the blackness of the void. Iris herself had vanished, and there was no indication of who this trail belonged to other than the fact Adah had only tracked the one girl. Still, Adah’s theory had proved correct—she could maintain some sense of her surroundings thanks to her spell.
“Okay,” Adah said to the ghostly trail of Iris, “I’m ready whenever.”
“You know what to do then,” Iris said, her voice still reaching Adah despite the darkness surrounding her.
“Is that really necessary for the spell?” Adah asked. “I thought it was for show.”
“As a matter of fact, it is necessary,” Iris said. “Would you prefer I could steal your magic with no signal of agreement on your part? That’d certainly be more convenient for me.”
Put like that, it made sense. Although she wasn’t fond of the particular method, Adah was glad to have a way to decide when Iris could take power from her. She put her pride aside and knelt down, like she had seen Clair and Ekki do in the past.
Iris cast [Fleur-de-lis] a moment later. She spoke the spell aloud, but Adah felt no change within herself. She had expected to feel a sap on her energy, or maybe a dulling of her senses, but her body and mind felt the same as ever. It took a few seconds before she realized what was truly happening.
Rather than pulling from Adah directly, Iris was draining essence from her scythe. It was possible that the energy that flowed from the weapon into Adah was “closer” to Iris than the energy held within Adah’s own body, and thus was the first source to be drained. If Adah couldn’t feel a change in her own power, then Iris was essentially taking power from the scythe directly.
Something about that seemed dangerous. If nothing else, it could make Iris susceptible to the same visions as Adah. Going this far had proved that Ketzia’s idea could work—the scythe’s power could be transferred into Iris as well as Adah. There was no need to push the experiment further today.
Adah stood up, cutting off the flow of magic to Iris.
“You’re done already?” Iris said, more surprised than annoyed. “I’ve hardly taken anything.”
Adah relinquished her control over the scythe as well, letting the weapon fade into the ether. The world around her burst into light once more, like opening her eyes first thing in the morning.
“Now we know it can work,” Adah said. “That’s enough for today.”
“Whatever you like, princess,” Iris said, though she left her normal venom out of her words. Her “princess” sounded more like a nickname than a mockery nowadays.
“Interesting,” Ketzia said, walking up to the girls with a big smile on her face. “Very interesting. You’ve got yourself a weird spell there, kid. Weird but useful. Between this one and those collars, you’re kinda like a depot. You could transfer power from person to person—whoever it’s most useful on.”
“A depot,” Iris repeated. “The most horrific insult I’ve suffered in my entire life.”
Ketzia chuckled and smacked Iris on the back. Iris winced at the hit, but kept her mouth shut.
The rest of their afternoon training passed in this fashion. They tested their spells in combinations within and across their teams until the moon rose high overhead and Grace called them in for dinner. In all that time, the beeper attached to one of Ketzia’s belt loops never once sounded. No humanoid Cruelty—or any other for that matter—ever appeared.
The first day of their hunt left Adah and the rest of the magic users empty-handed.
The second would not.