Adah took a seat on the roof of the shed in Ketzia’s backyard. The snow had melted off the shingles thanks to their black color and elevated position, so she didn’t even have to worry about dampening her skirt. From up here, she could watch her teammates and DreamRise practice without having to crank her neck to look overhead. This was an underrated benefit of being a magical girl—the number of new seating options that flight opened up. Although she recalled how often Seb found the most peculiar and tall places to set up shop with his camera, so maybe these seats were open to anyone with an adventurous enough mindset.
As she laughed to herself about dumping Seb on top of that tobacco shed a while back, a different boy took a seat beside her.
“Does she always work you this hard?” Ekki asked as he plopped down next to Adah. The morning sun had yet to melt the chill from the air, but a bead of sweat still ran down the boy’s temple.
“We’ve only trained with her once before,” Adah told him. “But she’s got a little extra fire in her this time. Maybe she’s excited to have this many magic users around.”
The teams were onto their second day of training, and so far Ketzia hadn’t targeted Adah with as much criticism as yesterday. Adah hadn’t ended up taking Iris’s advice about apologizing. In fact, she hadn’t spoken to Ketzia much at all the night before. If Rika was right, and Ketzia was upset because Adah had said something true, then she didn’t see why she should be the one to bring it up. Maybe Ketzia needed time to clear her head, then she’d come apologize to Adah on her own.
In any case, her mentor was taking it easy on her today. Adah and Ekki had each suffered a hard hit during the first round of sparring, so Ketzia had told them to sit the second round out. Ami had been the one to body check Adah out of the sky, thanks to Ketzia’s decision to mix up the team compositions today. Adah, Rika, and Iris—the three smallest magic users—had gone up against Ami, Emi, and Ekki—the three largest. Despite the size disadvantage, Rika had managed to land a pinpoint laser just below Ekki’s ribs, knocking the wind out of him for a while. Adah had to wonder if a tactic like that would be of any use against the humanoids.
“I was surprised,” Ekki said to Adah, apparently having caught his breath. “You and Iris have changed. You coordinate well now, almost like you can read each other’s mind.”
“With someone that simpleminded, it isn’t too difficult,” Adah said.
Ekki laughed and leaned back like he was going to prop himself up with his arm, but winced before he stretched all the way out. Looked like that shot from Rika was still sore. He went back to smiling right after, though. He’d been smiling a lot since he got out of the hospital.
“If you ask me,” Adah said, “you’ve changed more than either of us has. If I didn’t already know your team, I’d think you were the captain of DreamRise nowadays.”
At that, his smile faltered ever so slightly.
“A knight who wants to be king,” Ekki said. “You remember when I told you that? It sounded cool in theory, and I guess I thought having ambition was enough on its own. Once I put in the work and got into a position of power, I figured the rest would sort itself out. Future me would know the right decisions to make. He’d be a good leader by virtue of having taken the steps to become one. I had thought that was a plan, but it wasn’t one at all.”
“And now you have a plan?” Adah asked.
Ekki kept smiling, but it changed shape. He looked more like he was laughing at himself now.
“Now I know I need to figure one out,” he said. “All of us do. Iris and Clair always knew exactly what they didn’t want, but they could never say what they wanted instead. We always talked about tearing down the Department of Magic, but never what we’d build to replace it. Once we had the power, then we’d fix all the mistakes people like Thibault made. If we destroyed what was wrong with the world, then surely we’d make it right in the process.”
Adah nodded as Ekki spoke. Ketzia had said something similar to her before the carnival. Replacing Thibault had been one thing, but Adah had needed to decide who to replace him with, and more importantly, what replacing him would accomplish. Adah wasn’t sure she’d provided a perfect answer to those questions either, but she understood what Ekki must have been feeling. She knew what it felt like to have no answer at all.
“After the hydra,” Ekki continued, “we all asked ourselves why we should keep fighting. Why should we keep going down this path? While I was out, I think Iris and Clair shifted a lot of their anger toward themselves instead. But you know what? I think they were right to be mad at the world. They just needed something to believe in, too. Something that—once we found it—would keep us on the right path.”
In the air above the backyard, their teammates continued to fight. Iris had joined Ami and Clair against Emi and Rika, and it looked as though this round of sparring was focused on practicing defense. Emi and Rika constantly launched attacks against the trio, but none of the other girls ever countered. They simply took turns protecting each other while Clair worked on overwhelming their assailants’ minds. The bout would end once Emi and Rika either wore themselves out or gave in to Clair’s mental attacks.
“Now you’re trying to find that reason to keep going,” Adah said. “For all three of you?”
“I didn’t have any direction in the past,” Ekki admitted. “When all we wanted was power for power’s sake, I didn’t know what was worth sacrificing for a goal like that and what wasn’t. In reality, I bet none of us knew. We just pushed forward, because that was what we had told ourselves we needed to do. Kind of like you.”
Adah turned toward Ekki, but his eyes were busy tracking the ongoing battle between their teams.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“What do you mean like me?” Adah asked him. “My goal’s never been to des—”
It wasn’t even that Adah stopped herself from finishing that sentence. The words themselves fled from her. As soon as her brain realized her words were wrong, she lost hold of them. Her goal was to destroy something, after all. Everything was to destroy the Cruelties.
“Without a clear picture of what comes after your goal,” Ekki said, “how can you judge what’s worth sacrificing to get there? If you want a world without Cruelties, then you must want to reach that world with enough of what you love still intact to make it worth it. If everything you wanted to protect gets destroyed in the process, then what was the point?”
Ekki glanced at Adah for a split second, then back to the sparring match. He was leaning forward now, with both arms—one flesh and one fog—laid across his knees. When Adah looked closer, it was clear his eyes were only following one magical girl in the battle playing out before him.
“If we don’t achieve that goal,” Adah muttered, “then everything will be destroyed anyway.”
As if summoned by her words, an image flashed through her mind. A foreign image, not of her mind’s own creation, like those she had seen before. An echo—or perhaps a forewarning—of a Cruelty.
This time it wasn’t eyes but a mouth. A small, black void opening out of a gray shadow in the shape of a human head. It opened, then closed, then opened again. Like it was speaking.
Then, all at once, the image was shattered by a shrill beeping. Adah recognized that sound, though she had only heard it once before. Her eyes moved to Ketzia.
The Untethered magical girl looked down at the device attached to her belt loop, and what she saw there snuffed out the glow from her eyes.
Ketzia didn’t need to say anything. The other girls stopped their sparring, and Adah and Ekki flew down from the shed.
The humanoid had arrived.
☆☆☆
They found the humanoid’s portal in a heavily forested part of the woods, as opposed to the open hills where they had encountered the first humanoid. This part of the woods was only a few minutes away from Ketzia’s cabin by flight, so Adah and the rest of her hunting party arrived before the Cruelty itself had emerged from the portal. Ketzia even began to flare up her magic to destroy the portal before it could produce anything, but Adah reminded her why they were here.
They needed to end this trip having learned something, having taken some step forward in the fight against these monsters.
Ketzia reluctantly stood down, though she insisted that Adah and the rest of the lower-leveled magic users stay behind her to start. They were still working off an assumption, after all. There was no guarantee this humanoid was merely an experiment. For the sake of safety, Adah and the others followed Ketzia’s orders. Their group waited in silence for a minute longer, each of them ready to cast every spell in their arsenal, in case this humanoid arrived ready for a fight.
But when the humanoid finally emerged from its portal, it did so quietly and unceremoniously, as if stepping out of a shower.
The monster looked as the others had: a gray silhouette in the shape of a human. A shadow cast on this world by a stranger on the other side of reality. The echo of a human being.
Iris’s breath caught in her throat, and Ekki’s armor clinked as he shifted his stance. DreamRise had never seen a humanoid Cruelty in person before, and were likely more nervous than Adah and her teammates. Their only point of reference was the monster that had killed three members of Desiire.
Clair, however, wasted no time. She began chanting her spell as soon as the Cruelty stepped through its portal. Based on the way the humanoid suddenly stiffened and stopped in place, it seemed as though the spell had already taken hold of it.
“Easy,” Clair said, her eyes locked onto the Cruelty, unblinking. “Kicked down the door and made myself at home. If this is as tough as these things get, I could handle an army of them.”
“Don’t curse us with that,” Iris said. “What do you see? Has it tried to fight back at all?”
“Nah, it’s like it doesn’t know how,” Clair said. “There isn’t much in here, though. Empty like the rest of them. You’d think these ones would be a little different from the others.”
Hearing that, Ketzia conjured a ball of fire in her palm.
“Let’s get rid of it, then,” she said. “No one got hurt—I’ll count that as a successful experiment.”
“Ah, hold on,” Clair said. “There is something. I don’t know where it came from, but something’s—”
Clair was interrupted—not by any of the magic users by her side, but by the humanoid standing in front of them all.
A black circle appeared on the monster’s head. Rather, two parts of gray gave way, revealing a black hole. Adah soon recognized it for what it was.
The Cruelty opened its mouth.
It didn’t speak, not like the first humanoid they had encountered had. Instead, it let out a call that echoed around the tree trunks that surrounded it. Then, it let out another and another. The calls came one after the other, stringing together different sounds of different pitches and lengths, all of them without words.
“Are you hearing this, too?” Clair said to the group.
“It’s… singing?” Rika said, turning to look at each of her teammates. “Isn’t it?”
“What the hell?” Ami said. “Singing for what?”
Of course, no one had an answer for her. Everyone floated just above the forest floor, watching the Cruelty and listening to its voice. It continued to sing—if that’s what that noise was meant to be—without pause.
With the Cruelty controlled under Clair’s spell, its portal had yet to dissipate. Adah flew over to it so that she could inspect it from up close. She’d gotten a good look at one of these during her and Rika’s fight against the bat Cruelty, but after learning more about the Cruelties—and about Ekki’s portals—she wondered if she might notice something different this time.
In terms of appearance, nothing stood out to Adah. This portal looked the same as all the others she’d seen: a chunk of reality that had been ripped away to expose an oval of gray, like torn wallpaper revealing a brick wall underneath. She confirmed, at least, that Ekki’s took on the inverse form. His spell added that magical fog on top of the existing world. His portals’ gray appearance was thankfully a mere coincidence.
But she knew that the portals had more in common than their color. The sensation she had felt in her scythe had made that clear. She suspected the similarities didn’t end there.
This was Adah’s working theory, and what she had been most interested in testing during this trip. Peering inside a humanoid Cruelty’s mind could prove useful, but the truth of the portals was more important. If the Cruelties’ portals had some elements in common with Ekki’s, and if they were required for a humanoid Cruelty to come to this world, then it could be possible for a human to travel in the opposite direction. There could even be a way to test that theory safely.
When Adah had traveled through Ekki’s portals, there had been a gap between what she saw and where she was. Before moving all the way through a portal, she could see beyond the other side, while her body existed solidly on the first side. It was almost like a periscope peeking above the water’s surface.
If Ekki’s portals and the Cruelties’ functioned similarly, then this was a way to peer into their world. Even if a normal human’s eyes couldn’t perceive that plane of existence, Adah didn’t need to rely on normal eyes. She had a different way of seeing the world.
She called upon Beleth’s Bloodletter, and the scythe was quick to heed her call.
All she needed was one look, then she would know.
She’d be able to see if it was possible to destroy the Cruelties—all at once.