Only a few inches separated Adah’s face from the portal’s void when she felt a heat on her cheek. The feeling scorched her all at once, like how the pain of holding your hand near a flame too long arrives in one sudden moment. She jerked her body back, knowing what would follow this burning sensation.
The sound of a clap cut through the Cruelty’s singing. At the same time, a pillar of fire engulfed the portal. In this cramped section of forest, Ketzia kept her flames narrow to avoid them spreading to the surrounding trees, but her magic still burned hot enough to melt the nearby snow instantly. Adah had been wise to fly away; her magic couldn’t protect her when Ketzia let loose like this.
Though the Cruelty had stopped singing upon its portal being destroyed, it remained in this world, still locked in place by Clair’s spell. Ketzia approached the humanoid. She swung her arm toward the monster and, in the middle of her motion, conjured a sword of yellow light in her palm. The sword shone like Ketzia had ripped a star out of the sky, and its light reflected off what snow had yet to melt so brightly that Adah had to squint. There was no break in Ketzia’s movement as she grabbed her weapon, and so its blade sliced through the Cruelty’s neck only a moment after it appeared. Then, in what seemed like the same moment, Ketzia relinquished its power.
The humanoid’s head slowly tilted and then toppled off its torso, like a felled tree giving way. The decapitated head dematerialized in a wisp of static before it ever hit the ground. The rest of its body disintegrated into nothing soon after.
Clair flinched, perhaps from the shock of being disconnected from the Cruelty so abruptly. She blinked hard a few times, then her face relaxed into its normal disposition.
“That’s enough of this,” Ketzia said. “We learned something today. Let’s not push our luck more than that.”
Although she spoke like she was talking to the group, Ketzia didn’t take her eyes off of Adah. It was obvious who among them she thought was pushing their luck. The other girls and Ekki stayed silent in the aftermath of what they had just seen, until finally Iris spoke up.
“What did you find in there?” she asked Clair. “When it started singing, or whatever that was.”
Clair rubbed her temples with the heels of her palms, then shook her head like a dog drying itself off. Was whatever she was feeling due to Ketzia severing her connection to the Cruelty so suddenly, or was it because she’d gotten into a humanoid’s mind in the first place?
“I don’t know,” she said. “Whatever it was, it reminded me of fear.”
“It was afraid of us?” Adah asked.
“Not afraid,” Clair said, giving Emi a passing glance. “Real fear has a more fragile shape. This was close, but not the same. Like someone tried to rebuild a fragment of fear from memory.”
“Maybe it wasn’t afraid, but wanted us to be afraid,” Emi said.
“So it tried to scare us by singing?” Ami said. “I don’t get it. The way the last one screamed was way scarier than that.”
Though Adah agreed that the humanoid’s singing had been more odd than scary, she still felt there was weight to Emi’s theory. The image that had flashed through her mind before the Cruelty arrived had been of its mouth. Before the S-Rank Cruelty, she had seen a vision of the eyes it used to summon the humanoid’s portals. If she was searching for a pattern, then it stood to reason that whatever images Adah saw in her mind corresponded to that respective Cruelty’s greatest threat.
Following that logic, the humanoid’s singing was meant to be a weapon. It was possible that fear was the damage it intended to inflict.
“We know it takes time for them to learn,” Adah said. “It took them summoning dozens of test humanoids before they used one in battle. If this was another test, maybe they just haven’t figured out how to make us afraid yet.”
“Good luck to them,” Clair said through a scowl. “That won’t happen.”
“Some of you kids need a little fear in you,” Ketzia said.
She scanned the treeline in all directions, looking for any signs of other Cruelties or portals, then flew a few feet into the air.
“Come on, let’s get back,” she said. “And put that thing away.”
Ketzia nodded her head toward Adah before flying above the forest canopy, leaving the rest of the group to catch up to her.
Though she hadn’t ended up using its power, Adah still held her scythe in one hand. Perhaps Ketzia wouldn’t have noticed her if she hadn’t called upon her weapon. After a short pause, she let the scythe fade into the ether.
☆☆☆
The DreamRise members returned home that evening, after the group shared the details of their encounter with Grace over dinner. They wouldn’t fly back to Ketzia’s tomorrow—they had seen what they’d come here to see. Besides, it wasn’t wise for Region 4’s two strongest teams to both leave for so long.
Adah, her teammates, and Grace would stay through the night and head home in the morning. Grace didn’t want to make the whole drive back in the dark, and she owed Ketzia one more night of idle chatting, or so she said.
The Last Light spent the rest of the evening relaxing by the cabin’s hearth with Grace and Ketzia until the drowsiness they’d earned through a busy day came to claim them.
Her teammates left for their beds one by one, having learned their lesson from their last visit to the cabin. If they stayed on this cloud of a couch with a roaring flame in the fireplace, they’d inevitably fall asleep out here. Then, when Ketzia doused the fire for the night, they’d wake up shivering before the sun rose. It had happened to all four of them during their last visit, and that had been back when the weather was warmer. In the thick of winter, they could very well freeze out here. Best to retreat to the warmth of a well-insulated bed covered in blankets.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
Ami was the first to go, followed by her sister not long after. Next was Rika, who begged Adah not to leave her alone for too long. Adah told Rika she’d be quick, but she knew she couldn’t fall asleep yet even if she tried.
Too much had been left unspoken between her and Ketzia these past two days.
“Shouldn’t you join her?” Ketzia said to Adah after Rika left. “Miss out on too much sleep and you’ll stop growing. Like me.”
“I’m pretty sure I’ve already stopped growing,” Adah said.
That was true—she hadn’t gained an inch since she entered high school
“Ketzia’s talking about your brain,” Grace said. “You don’t want to end up a perpetual teenager like her.”
Ketzia stopped rocking in her chair. Her brow furrowed as she said, “Maybe that’s the problem. I never grew up. The whole lot of us didn’t, and never learned how to take responsibility.”
“What does that mean?” Adah asked.
Ketzia looked toward Grace, so Adah followed suit. Her manager slipped off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. When she set her glasses back on her face, she returned Ketzia’s look with a cold stare. Adah had gotten that stare once or twice herself. It said: You ought to know what to do. Ketzia didn’t get the message.
“You’ll feel better if you get it off your chest,” Grace said. “It’s something Adah needs to hear, too.”
Ketzia let out a groan—a strange combination of a gorilla’s grunt and a beagle’s howl—and smacked her cheeks with both hands. The slap sent out sparks, which didn’t bother Ketzia or her skin one bit.
“A darkness is coming, kid,” Ketzia said. “The Secretaries want to move on from what happened and act like everything is business as usual. They want the world to believe those boys dying was a fluke, and everything’s under control again. That might work for a while, but there’s gonna come a time when it’s not possible to pretend anymore. When things take a turn for the worse, the world’s gonna expect you kids to be soldiers first and… well, this show business stuff won’t exist at all at that point.”
“You’re telling me something I already know,” Adah said. “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? To get ready for that darkness.”
Ketzia shook her head and said, “What I need to tell you is that it’s my fault things have gotten this bad. It’s our fault—the Second Generation.”
The earliest magical girls had been grouped into Generations, starting with the First—those of the early days of the war. Aino, Pureheart, and the others who helped humanity hold its ground against the Cruelties all fell into this group. After the stability those heroes brought about, a wave of new magical girls followed in their footsteps: the Second Generation. The girls of the Second Generation did much of the work of getting humanity to where it stood today, with Cruelties serving as only a minor threat. They were also the first magic users to benefit from the structure that agencies, missions, and the involvement of the entertainment industry brought.
A loosely defined Third Generation followed next, but the generational labels fell out of favor after that. Too many new magic users popped up all the time, with too little to distinguish them, for those labels to be of any importance. In a sense, Thibault’s whole “Unchained Underground” idea had been an attempt to reinstate such a label to a new “generation” of Region 4 magic users.
“A lot of girls from my generation are gone,” Ketzia continued. “Those of us that survived are gone in a different way—some of us retired, others went to hide away in the woods. After a while, I think we all felt like we’d done our time. We’d given enough, and it was someone else’s turn. Things weren’t so bad at the end—they were good, even. We’d earned peace for humanity, or what felt like it. Those new kids could handle whatever came next. To be honest, I couldn’t tell you if we believed we’d fixed everything or if we just wanted to believe it.”
Ketzia turned toward the back of the cabin, in the direction of the door that led to her yard and the shed that sat within it. She shook her head again before facing Adah once more.
“Either way, we should have known our job wasn’t done,” she said. “We convinced ourselves that being a magical girl wasn’t a burden, that it didn’t come with its own painful responsibilities, so that we wouldn’t feel bad about passing that burden along to the next generation. Now I’m looking into the eyes of a girl who’s had to shoulder that burden because of me. Our generation didn’t change anything. Here we are, about to watch the same pain unfold all over again. And all I can think is: what was the point?”
Adah’s eyes narrowed on Ketzia. She felt her lip curl as she began to speak.
“You let us see that first humanoid,” she said. “You could have stopped us, but you wanted us to see it. You wanted us to have to shoulder that burden. And now you feel bad about it? Is that why you’ve been at my throat ever since I got here? You’re just taking that feeling out on me.”
“Maybe I did want you to see it,” Ketzia said, her voice firming up. “Maybe I’m a fool who didn’t realize what a terrible mistake I made until it was too late. And I don’t mean showing you that Cruelty, I mean not ending this war when we should have. But the reason I’ve been so hard on you is because I don’t want you to make your own mistake.”
Adah jumped to her feet and pressed her hand to her chest. She stared down at Ketzia in her chair and said, “I’m not making a mistake. I’m fixing yours.”
“You’re heading down the wrong road, kid,” Ketzia said, standing up herself now. “You’re throwing yourself into dangers that you don’t need to face. What exactly were you trying to do with that portal today?”
“I’m doing what you were too afraid to do,” Adah said. “I’m doing what it takes to destroy the Cruelties.”
Ketzia snapped her fingers. Adah felt a rising heat on her cheek, but couldn’t dodge fast enough this time. A small flame the size of a matchstick’s bit into her skin, then vanished. Adah twisted her head away but did not run. The pain lingered in her skin, like that from a bee sting.
“One of us still has their teammates with them, kid,” Ketzia said. “My generation didn’t stop because we were afraid. We just knew what it could cost us to keep going.”
Grace watched the two of them, her eyes moving slowly between Adah and Ketzia’s faces. Yet, she didn’t lift a finger to intervene.
After a few seconds of silence, Adah said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say anything like that.”
“I’m sorry, too, kid,” Ketzia said before falling back into her chair. “Is your cheek okay?”
“It’s fine,” she said, to which Ketzia sighed.
“If I was smarter, maybe I would’ve found a better way to express myself these past couple of days,” Ketzia said. “I’m not saying it’s bad to prepare for darker times, but that weight’s not on you alone. I owe you some help, being the one who passed that burden along to you.”
“You’ve done enough by helping us train,” Adah said. “You don’t need to worry about me. I’ll do whatever it takes to end this for good. Then it won’t be anyone’s responsibility any longer.”
“That’s exactly what worries me,” Ketzia said. “‘Whatever it takes’ is the wrong way to look at things. If you want to get yourself killed, maybe there’s not much I can do to stop you. But you’re leading a team, Adah. Y’all like to vote on things, but whose voice do you think holds the most sway? When you make the decision to run headfirst into hell, don’t forget that those three girls will be right behind you.”
“And there will be even more people behind them,” Grace added.
“‘Whatever it takes’ is the wrong way to think,” Ketzia repeated. “The point of preparing for darker times is so that you can make it through them.”
That was the second time Adah had heard words like those today.
The first had come from Ekki, who had returned from the brink of death, but not without paying a price.
Now she heard them from Ketzia.
She had yet to reconcile either of them with what she felt in her heart—what she knew had to be done.