Elise wasted no time putting her plan into action.
While a beeper was a bit too old fashioned for her taste, Adah did allow Elise’s assistant Margot to set up a notification system on her cell phone that would ping her whenever a new mission had been accepted by a Region 4 team. These notifications included the essential details like the mission location, as well as some experimental statuses that the Department of Magic wanted to test alongside Elise’s detection system. The most useful of these metrics for Adah’s purposes was the Estimated Mission Completion Time. Elise had warned Adah that the timer would require a lot of calibration before it was truly accurate, but it helped to have some sense of when she would need to leave to collect her bounty.
After all, each of these missions represented an increase in her own power.
Adah hadn’t realized how effective Elise’s plan would be until she began to execute it. By simply showing up to claim the Cruelty’s core, Adah could roughly double the value of each mission for Region 4. Whichever team defeated the Cruelty would benefit from the mission payout and any fans they gained in the process, and Adah would stash away another chunk of power in her scythe. This arrangement worked particularly well in Region 4, where the Last Light stood far above most other teams. It was a natural extension of Adah and her teammates focusing on the rarer B-Rank and difficult C-Rank missions.
It was also a good opportunity to Adah to keep in contact with all of the region’s teams, including the coalition teams. In fact, today’s cleanup job was sending her straight to Fifty Flip.
The trio of “extreme magical girls” was taking on a C-Rank Cruelty of middling strength, which would probably pose a fair challenge to the team at their current level. Adah left well before Elise’s analysis predicted the team would finish their mission, hoping to arrive with plenty of time to observe their battle. She still had yet to spar with Fifty Flip, so this was a good opportunity to learn more about their fighting styles. Not to mention, all three of them should have unlocked their weapons recently. Adah couldn’t help but wonder what they’d selected.
By the time Adah arrived at the mission’s interception point—a partially frozen creek that snaked between two patches of forest—Fifty Flip appeared to have nearly defeated their opponent. They were way ahead of schedule.
They were up against a bear-based variant today, one that Adah had surprisingly never fought herself. She had read the mission briefing before heading out, just in case the battle went south and she needed to help out, which claimed that the bear’s defining strengths were its tough hide and bursts of speed at close range. Although it could charge forward fast, it likely lacked the agility to deal with simultaneous attacks from multiple angles. That was an easily exploitable weakness if you had the firepower to break through its hide, and Fifty Flip certainly did.
When Adah arrived on the scene, the blimp-sized bear was already slumped over in the middle of the creek, with water flowing past, indifferent to the monster blocking its path. Both legs on the bear’s right side had already been injured, from what Adah could see. Actually, it looked more like they’d melted away. Each limb was missing half its flesh, and the scraps that remained were hollowed out in a pattern that resembled a cake that had been picked away at rather than carved into neat slices. The monster was all but immobilized as a result of this damage.
Elegia—and her new weapon—were responsible for that carnage.
Adah thought her eyes were playing tricks on her, but once Elegia put her weapon to use, there was no mistaking what form it had taken. The sadistic magical girl had armed herself with a giant syringe. The sight of its needle—longer than any practical sword’s blade—made her shudder. The way it attacked made her ill.
Elegia flew above the bear now and drove her weapon’s needle into the beast’s back. The syringe’s plunger pressed down all on its own, injecting some kind of magic power into the bear—power that went to work immediately. The magic ate away at the bear’s body like an acid, and bits of gray flesh vanished into the ether as the corrosive damage spread. A single injection wasn’t strong enough to destroy the Cruelty entirely, but another patch of flesh around the size of a normal black bear had dematerialized.
The Cruelty attempted to groan in pain, only to be met with the weapon of Fifty Flip’s next member.
Hyperia swung a stick in the bear’s direction, launching a bolt of pink light right into the monster’s face. The bolt broke apart the bear’s jaw in a sparkling explosion. Another bolt followed soon after, this time popping the Cruelty’s left eye. Hyperia flung a few more projectiles at the beast until its head was as corroded as its legs. By this point, its form was unrecognizable as a bear—or really any mammal.
Satisfied with her work, Hyperia twirled her stick in her palm, a movement that clued Adah in to what the weapon was meant to be. Given the ribbons that dangled from one end and the way Hyperia liked to spin it, she must have been granted something like a drum major’s baton. She made for a cruel conductor.
“Good, you’re finally here,” Dystopia said from a position high above Adah. “Now these two can stop messing around.”
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“You aren’t having fun?” Elegia asked as she flew away from the bear, coming to a hover near Adah. “This is the juiciest bit of every mission—you should savor it.”
“Yeah,” Hyperia said after joining her old teacher. “Let off some steam, Dani.”
Dystopia didn’t respond to either of them, and merely waved her hand in the Cruelty’s direction. A cloud formed above the monster, dark in shade like it was heavy with rain. Once the cloud had taken shape, Dystopia threw down her hand. A clap of thunder boomed through the air in sync with her motion.
Rather than lightning, a pair of tentacles shot down from Dystopia’s cloud, each thicker than a tree trunk and blacker than ink. They latched onto opposite sides of the Cruelty’s body and wrapped themselves around whatever chunks of leg remained attached to the beast. Then, they pulled away from one another.
The bear tore apart with no more resistance than a sheet of paper. It split right down the middle, opening up to reveal the gray core within its flesh. The core dropped into creek with a splash. Dystopia’s tentacles tossed aside the two halves of the Cruelty—nothing more than gray clumps of trash at this point—which soon dissipated into nothing.
“Please,” Elegia said, “help yourself.”
Somehow, Adah was grateful Dystopia’s final blow had been so extreme. At least now, the Cruelty’s core was isolated, rather than buried within the goopy carcass of a mangled monster.
Adah summoned her scythe, floated over to the core, and sunk her weapon’s blade into it. As the essence flowed into Beleth’s Bloodletter, she breathed a sigh of relief. No visions this time. On the other hand, the heartbeat within the scythe had grown even more intense than it had been before she’d expended most of its power in that show of force against Thibault. She hoped to use that power in a more productive way this time.
“So,” Hyperia called out, “what did you think? This weapon really suits me, huh?”
She tossed her baton high above her head and immediately twirled her body on one foot like a top. Her spinning didn’t stop even as the baton fell, but she coordinated all of her movements such that she snatched her weapon out of the air without breaking her form. Magic hadn’t helped that trick; it was all practice.
“You’re a little menace with it,” Adah said, to which Hyperia winked.
“I hope you have an equally flattering compliment for me,” Elegia said as she flew in front of Adah. Thankfully, she’d put the syringe away by now.
“I think you’ve reinforced a lot of childhood trauma,” Adah said. “But if you’re using that thing against the Cruelties… maybe it’s good for them to suffer a little.”
Elegia beamed with a smile like Adah had just proposed to her. A new level of happiness had unlocked for her with this upgraded attack against the Cruelties. Not only could she provide them with pain, but trauma as well. Adah feared a monster to rival the humanoids had just been created.
That only left Dystopia, who had kept her weapon hidden as far as Adah could tell.
“What about you?” Adah asked her. “I didn’t get to see you use your weapon during the fight.”
The scantily-clad magical girl exhaled sharply through her nose, which must have been a sigh. That made Adah realize Dystopia had kept her lips sealed ever since the other girls had started talking. Come to think of it, she had also only seen Dystopia from below during the battle. Given the girl’s outfit, that meant seeing a lot, but her mouth had been kept hidden. Now that they were face to face, Dystopia curled her lip into a snarl, revealing a set of metallic fangs attached to her upper canines.
“They got her mixed up with Elegia,” Hyperia said. “They want her to bite the Cruelties, too.”
A soft blue light flashed from Dystopia’s mouth, and the fangs vanished as the glow faded away. Dystopia ran her tongue over her top row of teeth, perhaps relishing the feeling as if she’d just gotten her braces removed.
“It’s not me that bites,” Dystopia said. “These are just cosmetic—it summons a ghost-snake-thing to bite for me. I’ve only used it once before. It’s my last resort.”
“What were your other choices?” Adah asked.
“You really don’t want to know,” Dystopia said.
That only made her want to know even more!
Before Adah could investigate further, Dystopia came back with a question of her own.
“The new Secretary moves fast,” she said. “You got any more info on that army idea of hers?”
Hyperia and Elegia crowded in next to their teammate, so that Adah was facing a wall of Fifty Flip members. They all had similarly eager looks on their faces, though their expressions formed a gradient from excited to serious.
“We’re working on the marketing for it now,” Adah said. “The costumes, the exact messaging, the reveal. It shouldn’t be too much longer now. In the meantime, working hard like this is good. Stay active. Make sure people see you eliminating Cruelties. We’ll just look stupid if we put on uniforms without showing people we’re committed to our jobs.”
“Nobody’s more committed than us,” Hyperia said.
“It’s my favorite job I’ve ever had,” Elegia added.
That much was self-evident.
“Any update on the humanoids?” Dystopia moved right into another question. “The Secretary’s gotten good at predicting regular Cruelties, I gotta admit, but did she say any more humanoids are coming?”
Adah shook her head and said, “Not yet. Not that we know about, anyway. Which is all the more reason to work hard. The humanoids are based on human essence, but we think they can use any kind of essence to fuel their power. We don’t want to give the normal Cruelties any breathing room. Don’t let them kill even an ant if you can help it.”
Preventing the Cruelties from collecting any essence at all was impossible. You couldn’t exactly evacuate the wildlife from the woods or rivers any time a Cruelty showed up. The enemy would get their kills one way or another, but some extra diligence from magic users could reduce unnecessary damage.
It was time humanity started taking this war that seriously. Even if the rest of the world didn’t follow, Adah would make sure her region acted as such.
“And what about you?” Dystopia said. “Running around the region, working with the Secretary, keeping an eye on all of us—how are you holding up?”
That hadn’t been the question Adah had expected to hear at the end of all that. It gave her a few seconds pause.
“Whatever it takes to get the job done,” Adah said, “I’m ready to do it.”
Even though Adah believed those words, some problems were beyond her ability to solve. They were simply out of her hands.
In particular, she was learning there was little she could do to influence the conflicted heart of a certain bite-sized witch.