Before the cerberus spawned, Adah arranged the coalition members in positions throughout the grassy field. She set Ami, Rika, Hyperia, and Dystopia up near the treeline of the woods to the north. Emi, Ekki, and Seliah—the most mobile of the whole squad—spread out from the south part of the field to the west. Iris, Clair, and Elegia joined Adah above the eastern edge of the field, with Adah flying high above the rest.
From this high up, Adah could see all of her soldiers at once, a full view of the whole stretch of forest, and down into the wide valley where the cattle grazed.
This formation was Adah’s response to the probable intentions of today’s Cruelty. The fact the cerberus was spawning in a place like this meant that Elise’s assumption about the Cruelties wanting to hunt for essence was likely correct. In that case, the cerberus probably wouldn’t want to waste time fighting against magic users, especially not a large contingent of them. The monster would instead run down the path of least resistance in search of easy pickings. Since the grazing field and the forest were the two most plentiful sources of essence in the area, Adah wanted to lead the cerberus away from the more troublesome of the two.
A squad of their size was better suited to fighting in open terrain—all the more so given the tactics Adah had prepared. By placing the magical girls with the hardest-hitting spells along the treeline, along with Ami as an additional layer of defense, Adah hoped to deter the Cruelty from entering the woods. If the beast broke in the direction of the grazing field, the trio of speedsters set up to the south could pursue and prevent it from devouring all the cattle uncontested. Meanwhile, the three magical girls near Adah were in a position to adapt to any unexpected moves from the Cruelty and make the best use of their supportive spells depending on how the battle developed. Once they’d pushed the monster away from the woods, they could regroup and put Adah’s plan into action.
All the while, Adah would keep eyes on everything.
With that in mind, it was time she stop putting off the inevitable. It wouldn’t be much longer before the Cruelty arrived. She needed to make sure she had stabilized herself before then.
Her scythe hadn’t stopped rushing toward her since she’d first summoned it. Its power crashed against her mind like waves against a seawall, and Adah had to focus on the sensations of her own body in order to not be consumed. The weapon’s heartbeat tried to fill her head and thump against her eardrums. It knew she wanted to end this fight as fast as possible, to skip all the tactics and unleash a single attack so powerful that it annihilated the Cruelty all on its own.
This was the urge Adah forced herself to fight against, and resisting it was a skill she’d developed while learning more about her visions.
Adah had found a way to handle the visions. Perhaps not control them, but at least manage them. The most predictable of them—those that appeared to her whenever she consumed a Cruelty’s core—were the most avoidable. Harvesting essence was the inverse of expending it, after all. Just as she could control the surge of power from her scythe as it entered her body, she discovered she could control the rate at which she siphoned essence from the cores. She simply needed to be deliberate about the process.
Being deliberate even helped manage those visions that came on randomly, when Adah was practicing a dance or listening to a conversation. When her focus slipped and her thoughts drifted from the task at hand, that’s when the visions would come to her, like intrusive daydreams from a mind other than her own. If she ever felt the present moment slipping away from her, she would take a moment to refresh her thoughts, and that usually managed to keep the visions at bay.
Deliberate and mindful—those would be the keys to success in today’s mission as well. Today wasn’t meant to be a show of force from Heartbreak. She was meant to lead her squad, to show what a bunch of lower level magic users could accomplish when they worked together. Everyone had a role today, and Adah’s role was to command her fellow magic users from above. To do that, she needed to see each and every one of them.
Slowly and deliberately, Adah allowed Beleth’s Bloodletter to cling to her. Before the smoky eye of its magic had even formed, she felt the tendrils of its power latch onto her heart. Still, she forced its magic to accumulate around her at a pace of her choosing. She pulled only as much strength from the scythe as she needed. Then, she allowed the eye of smoke to float toward her and settle atop her own eye. When she next blinked, the world had turned to black. An endless void spread out before her.
Far below Adah, a white mist was gathering. Tiny particles popped into existence throughout an area that must had spanned the whole grassy clearing, then floated toward a center point where the mist was densest. This must have been the gathering of the Cruelty’s energy, though Adah had no way of knowing how close the monster was to spawning. Rather than wait to find out, she moved forward with her preparations. There was more she needed to see.
With a cast of [Parietal Perception], the three magic users nearest to Adah appeared in the form of multi-colored phantoms that marked the shadows of their movement: a bright yellow for Iris, ghost white for Clair, and plum purple for Elegia. Adah scanned the rest of the void, trusting her spell to capture the presence of the rest of her squad even if she could not see them herself. They each appeared in turn, or at least, their colors did. By some stroke of luck, the only two coalition members with an overlapping color theme were Elegia and Seliah, and their movement patterns would be easy enough to tell apart.
With this, Adah could see all of her comrades even though the scythe’s power blanketed her vision. Even better, she could track all of them. Buffing herself with her weapon’s magic enhanced each of Adah’s spells, but she’d only recently come to appreciate the benefits it provided [Parietal Perception]. The spell didn’t make for very exciting television, like her explosive whip had, but it did make her uniquely suited for leading a motley crew of magic users.
Stepping out of the spotlight didn’t bother Adah. If all went according to plan, the rest of the coalition was about to put on a show even she was eager to watch.
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“The Cruelty is close,” Izzy’s voice suddenly popped into Adah’s thoughts. “Take care of any remaining preparations now.”
Sure enough, what was once an amorphous clump of white mist was beginning to coagulate into the shape of the cerberus. The Cruelty forming before her eyes was smaller than Adah had expected—roughly the size of an elephant. That was perhaps another reason the Cruelties had selected this variant to hunt in this environment. While other high-ranked variants attempted to use their size to overwhelm with destructive power, the cerberus had more in common with lower-ranked variants that relied on speed.
Speed and trickery.
At first glance, there didn’t seem to be much reason for the Cruelties to create a three-headed dog over a normal one. These heads weren’t like those of the hydra—each its own snake that could pursue a target from a variety of angles. They were, well, like a dog’s, with short necks and limited ranges of motion. If anything, the abundance of heads seemed to be a detriment to the agility that was the variant’s greatest strength.
That, however, was a misunderstanding.
The cerberus wasn’t one dog with three heads. It was three dogs pretending to be one.
Although the Cruelty was assembled around a single core of essence, it could split itself into three distinct bodies. The three heads of the cerberus would tug away from the central body as new, distinct sets of limbs sprouted from the chunks of flesh the heads pulled with them. Like chopping a ball of dough into smaller parts, three separate dogs would take shape, and could choose to meld themselves back together just the same.
Staying as a single unit offered the cerberus the advantage of pooling all of its essence into one body, making its flesh better able to resist enemy attacks. This was also the beast’s ideal form for breaking through a magic user’s defenses. Overpowering something like Iris’s flower bud shield would be much easier with three heads attacking from a unified body. However, splitting into three dogs had its own advantages. When separated, the Cruelty moved even faster than usual, and could use that speed to attack a target from multiple angles simultaneously. If the cerberus ever needed to divide an opponent’s attention, splitting up was the obvious choice.
Yet, the greatest benefit of the split was one that the Cruelty may not have fully understood. When the cerberus was a single unit, it was obvious to anyone that its core was held at the center of its body. After splitting apart, the core shifted to one body in particular, with no way for a magic user to know which until they tore each dog apart. Even worse, if the cerberus joined its bodies back together, then split once more, the core could move to a different body than before.
The Cruelty could play three-card monte with its life source, forcing its foes to either destroy all three of its bodies at once or compel the dog to maintain its single, larger form.
Despite never fighting this Cruelty before, Adah felt more familiar with it than most others. She had studied all the A-Ranks on Elise’s list extensively. She’d devised plans for each of them, and had the other coalition members pick those plans apart. She’d never been so prepared for a mission before. If today was a success, and could prove the potential of Region 4’s methodology, then surely the rest of the world would follow suit.
But first, Adah needed to execute her plan, and the time had come to do just that.
The shape of the cerberus had fully formed—a white silhouette from Adah’s altered perspective. Another few seconds and the monster would appear in the physical world.
“When you see it, don’t wait,” Adah said to the four magic users along the treeline. “Give it everything you’ve got, and don’t assume it’s going to play along. I forgot to send the dog a copy of the script, after all.”
“Don’t worry,” Dystopia answered. “We’ll make sure it gets the message.”
The girl had barely gotten her words out when Ami let loose with a battle cry of her own. Adah heard this with her ears, not through any magic channel, even across this half-mile stretch of clearing. Ami’s roar marked the arrival of the Cruelty.
The girls along the treeline had taken Adah’s words to heart, and immediately unleashed their spells against the newly spawned cerberus. Rika was the first to get a shot off as she fired a bolt from her railgun right toward the center of the beast. Adah could not see the streak of light that usually formed in the wake of Rika’s spell, but there was a distortion in the void that revealed the line along which her magic had traveled. It had taken Adah some practice to recognize these distortions, but between those hints, the movement of the Cruelty’s silhouette as it dodged, and changes in her comrades’ colorful trails, Adah could confidently trace the flow of battle.
Hyperia and Dystopia fired off their own magic at the same time—Hyperia electing to fling a barrage of magic projectiles from her baton while Dystopia cast several clouds above the cerberus. The Cruelty opted to tank Hyperia’s shots, which seemed to do little damage to its body. Whenever the tentacles from Dystopia’s clouds lunged for the dog, it would dodge at the sound of clapping thunder.
It wasn’t long before the first step of Adah’s plan came to fruition. The cerberus leaped side to side at first as it dodged the attacks from Rika and the others, but soon began to retreat directly away from the forest. After it narrowly avoided a particularly well-charged railgun shot, the Cruelty gave up on entering the woods. Whatever prey it might find in there wasn’t worth all this trouble.
The dog didn’t waste time thinking of alternatives; it already knew where its secondary target was.
The cerberus turned tail to the treeline and sprinted off, running straight toward the grazing fields and step two of Adah’s plan.
“Go!” Adah shouted over the shared magic channel.
Though she issued her command as soon as she saw the Cruelty’s posture shift, Adah and all the girls near her had no chance of keeping pace with the cerberus. This was an A-Rank built for running, after all. Adah’s top speed would have kept her from falling too far behind, but she needed to split her focus between flying and watching the streaks of color that shot through the void. During this transition from static positions to mobile pursuit, Adah couldn’t lose sight of any of the coalition members.
This mission would get complicated from here on, and it was the commander’s job to make sure every touch of color on this canvas was placed where it was meant to be.
With a quick glance behind her, Adah confirmed that the four girls who had been stationed by the treeline were following her trail. Ami’s green shadow led the way, with Rika, Hyperia, and Dystopia not far behind. Just in front of Adah, the trio of Iris, Clair, and Elegia had pulled slightly ahead. Then, off in the distance, three more streaks of color arced through the air. The trails of Emi, Seliah, and Ekki, however, were directly in the path of the Cruelty.
Those three were the fastest members of the coalition, made all the quicker thanks to Ekki’s portals. Therefore, they were the ones best suited to lay a trap for this hound.
One downside of fighting in an open field was that you couldn’t back your opponent into a corner. Especially with a fleet-footed opponent, an escape route was always available. That is, unless you could create a corner.
If that trio of speedsters was fast enough, and Ekki placed his portals in the right spots, they could effectively box the Cruelty in. Adah had experienced something like this on a smaller scale back during the IndieMagie. The threat of your opponent being in multiple places at once could be enough to lock you in place.
Once Ekki and the others had the dog surrounded, Adah had a good sense that it would want to split its body to escape. Unfortunately for it, that was also what Adah wanted it to do.