“Fly straight, and I’ll handle the rest.”
It was Ekki’s voice that marked the start of the next step in Adah’s plan. She may have drawn up the blueprint, but Ekki would be the one to build this hound’s cage. The whole idea revolved around his portals, and he was the only one who understood them well enough to bring Adah’s idea to life.
If the Cruelties could learn from humanity, she’d figured humanity could learn from them in return.
Part of what had led to the disastrous outcome of Desiire’s S-Rank mission was how the legion of portals the Cruelty conjured had trapped them in midair. Each portal had represented the potential of an enemy, so in effect, the boys had been surrounded by one hundred copies of the humanoid. There was no reason Adah’s coalition couldn’t achieve the same impact with Ekki’s portals.
Too few of the magic users in their group could hold their ground against the cerberus for them to properly surround it. But with Ekki’s portals, one person could guard multiple spots at once. What’s more, that person could even go on the offensive.
Adah hadn’t struggled to decide who she should pair with Ekki for this tactic—Emi was the perfect fit for the job. This plan had a lot in common with the way that she and Adah had fought the lynx Cruelty a while back. Emi was comfortable trusting other people to guide her in the midst of battle, to the point she didn’t even need to see her opponent in order to fight them. She was also flexible enough in her style to adapt to whatever the person guiding her asked of her. Emi could be nimble and precise in one moment, then brutal and unyielding in the next. That was a skill none of the other talented fighters in their squad—not even Ami or Seliah—could match yet.
Trust and flexibility were exactly what Emi would need to navigate the set of portals Ekki had just opened around the cerberus. He created four of them—one next to Emi and the rest covering a half circle perimeter of space on the other side of the Cruelty. Four had been his limit during their practice sessions. In every training session, regardless of which A-Rank variant they were prepping for, four portals was the breaking point where Ekki started to lose track of whoever was traveling between them. Connecting the different portals was a heavy mental burden, and Adah needed Ekki to be perfect.
Today, four portals proved to be plenty.
Before Adah and the rest of the squad caught up to the trio of speedsters, Emi was already zipping through Ekki’s portals. She took his words to heart and flew forward at top speed, trusting that when she left one portal, the next would be directly in her path. That freed her up to focus on the cerberus and prepare for her attack. After all, Ekki wasn’t sending her through the same portals over and over in a loop. He conjured new ones just as quickly as Emi left the old ones, each one a little closer to the Cruelty. Little by little, the girl was closing in on the beast. To Adah’s eyes, she looked like one continuous, zig-zagging line of blue.
The cerberus didn’t know how to respond. Seliah and Ekki were blocking off one half of its escape, with a horde of other magic users flying in behind them. On the other side, a blur of a magical girl seemed to be in four places at once. The dog attacked Seliah and Ekki with some haphazard claw swipes and triple-headed bites, which they had already been preparing to dodge. They only needed to buy Emi a few more seconds of time. She would do enough attacking for all of them.
Once Ekki’s portals brought her close enough to the Cruelty to attack, Emi thrust her watery spear into one of the dog’s hind legs. She hadn’t put her full strength into the attack, as she focused on striking quick and moving on to the next portal, but she only needed to prick the monster’s flesh for this play. Her real objective was to place one of her cursemarks on each of the Cruelty’s limbs. From Adah’s perspective, it looked as though Emi had set each of her marks simultaneously, with four distinct lines of blue stabbing through the void and into the white silhouette of the Cruelty. Then, her work complete, Emi exited the last of Ekki’s portals some distance away from the cerberus.
Emi activated her marks, freezing all four of the beast’s legs from the inside out. The monster was locked in place, and it had only taken a moment of hesitation on the Cruelty’s part for the hunter to become the hunted.
“Now,” Adah whispered to herself, “it’s time to pick your poison.”
She and the rest of the coalition members had regrouped with those who had cornered the cerberus, but they wasted no time relaxing. Their opponent had yet to take advantage of its defining trait. With its main body immobilized, the hound had two options: split or die.
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Rika got ready to oblige the Cruelty should it elect for the latter option, charging up her railgun with as much magic as she could muster. Meanwhile, the rest of the squad positioned themselves in an arc around the cerberus. Some of them may not have been able to stand their ground against the dog in a fair fight, but now they had the advantage of a moment’s reprise to lay traps in their favor.
Ami readied her weapon—those handwraps that could hold onto a foe no matter how much they thrashed about—and conjured a thick wall of water in front of herself. Dystopia set up just beyond the range of space Ami could cover by herself. The girl placed her own sequence of magic circles in the grass of the field, each one a landmine that would latch onto any Cruelty that passed over it. Elegia positioned herself between the two girls with her syringe at the ready, so that if either of them caught a fleeing dog, she could deal with it swiftly.
Effectively, these reinforcements would replace the sections of the invisible “cage” that Emi and Ekki had previously formed. While Emi stayed near her sister, Ekki retreated from the front lines. He had played his part in this plan and, from the exhausted look on his face, the mental load of connecting so many portals so quickly had taken its toll on him.
Adah had accounted for that as well. Here, Iris could shine. Her role wouldn’t be as flashy as she’d like, but she would be the safety net that would allow everyone else to fight without fear. Her shields would protect the most vulnerable of the squad—the worn-out Ekki, the defenseless Clair, the all-or-nothing Rika and her railgun.
All of these details, from the positions of her fellow magic users to the slowly shifting form of the Cruelty, flooded into Adah’s head at once. Moments felt like minutes, and she continuously found herself at the end of long trains of thought that she couldn’t remember starting. Just as [Parietal Perception] felt like having several sets of eyes watching the world at once, her mind was operating on several tracks at once.
She noticed the silhouette of the Cruelty splitting into three at the same time as she watched Rika’s railgun fire forth at the same time as she witnessed the three newly formed dogs leap away from the bolt. She observed the first of these dogs be yanked across the field by Ami’s watery grasp and the second land right on top of one of Dystopia’s traps. She knew both dogs were dead, even if they didn’t know it themselves. Emi, Hyperia, and Elegia would make quick work of them.
Adah heard Ami laugh and shout, “Three heads but no fucking brain!” It was such an odd sensation. She could smile and think of three or four jokes she might return to Ami, but at the same time her mouth was issuing a totally unrelated command to Clair. As this battle went on, she felt more and more as though she was one out of several Adahs, split across the field like the cerberus was.
Was it because she had rehearsed these mission plans so many times? Or was it an effect of staying under her scythe and spell’s influences for so long? Had it been that long? Though she could easily track every movement in the battle, the passage of time was becoming increasingly abstract.
“That’s the one,” Clair said.
Her words helped to center Adah’s mind again. Two out of three dogs would be dealt with. She needed to shift her focus to the third.
Given the coalition’s spells and combat aptitude, Adah had concluded they could safely pin down two of the cerberus’s split bodies if they needed to. It may have been possible to manage all three by spreading their resources thinner, but that wasn’t a risk she intended to take. Thus, her plan had always involved one of the dogs potentially escaping. If they could get clean kills on two of the bodies, they only needed to slow down the third. It was a way of playing the fight safe, but also of nullifying the cerberus’s trickery.
The Cruelty’s core had to exist inside one of those three bodies. Chances were the dog that fled in the safest direction would be the one containing the core.
If that assumption was wrong, all the better. Adah wouldn’t need to worry about the third dog at all. But on the much more likely chance her guess was right, she’d given Seliah the most important job of this mission’s final phase.
It was time to see just how fast that witch could fly.
As predicted, the one hound that hadn’t been captured by the coalition’s traps broke away in the opposite direction. It was headed toward its original target—the grazing fields—perhaps hoping to take down a few cows before it met its own demise. Now that it had the space to run freely, the dog showed off the full extent of its speed. Adah had struggled to keep up with the cerberus in its three-headed form, but she could tell that the smaller hounds would easily outpace her.
The white shadow of the beast shot across the void of Adah’s vision, and the purple line of Seliah’s flight followed at a distance. Adah pursued the pair of them, but it would only take a few seconds for them to pull so far away that she could contribute nothing to help Seliah. With the world hidden behind a sheet of black, it was obvious to Adah how this chase would play out. The distance between Seliah and her target was easy to judge, and it was growing. The witch might close the gap once the hound paused to take down its prey, but that wasn’t good enough.
The point of this mission was to be perfect. Adah wasn’t trying to prove that the coalition’s approach was “good enough.” It had to be better than what the other regions were doing, and that meant no mistakes.
Seliah only needed one good shot to stop that dog. She only needed to get a little closer.
An idea came to Adah. One that she had no time to explain.
She held out her hand in Seliah’s direction and called the girl’s name.