Adah allowed more of the scythe’s magic into her body—just enough to give her the power she needed. If she could drag a Cruelty toward herself in this state, why not try pulling along a magical girl? With Seliah’s name still ringing through the air, Adah fired off a sequence of three stars from her [Sparkling Strike].
Seliah slowed her flight for a moment, likely to glance over her shoulder. Seeing Adah’s outstretched arm, she returned her focus straight ahead and readied her rapier. She kept a steady pace at her max speed, which was exactly what Adah needed from her.
Seliah was smart—a genius in battle, actually. Beyond that, she was obsessive when it came to magic. This was the girl who’d begged for recordings of all of the Last Light’s spells. And then, once Adah had sent over the videos, she’d complained they hadn’t been filmed from enough angles.
If the witch wanted to work that hard, then Adah was going to put her effort to good use. She’d even show Seliah how much further that work could go if she had a full team standing beside her.
The first star burst, collapsing onto itself and taking the form of a black hole. The force of the collapsing star yanked Seliah forward, though she maintained her position with her hips primed to twist and her arm cranked back with rapier in hand. Seliah rode the momentum from one star to the next, like a stone skipping across a pond. She kept her body impossibly still until the very last star. When the third star flung her forward, she moved as though she’d rehearsed this whole sequence. She transfered the force of her flight into her arm in one smooth motion. Her body unwound itself as her rapier thrust forward and she unleashed all the tension building in her muscles.
For the first time, Adah witnessed Seliah’s weapon at its full power. During their sparring, her rapier had functioned no different than any normal sword. Its blade could cut and slice, but Seliah only used it to indicate that she could have dealt a killing blow.
The real strength of the rapier wasn’t in its blade, but in the magic it called from above. When the rapier’s tip pierced the hound’s flesh, the narrow wound it caused began to glow a bright fuchsia. Then, from someplace in the heavens above the clouds, a shooting star blazed down toward the earth. This bolt of magic drilled straight into the wound Seliah had pricked in the Cruelty’s rear, and ruptured the back half of the monster’s body.
This gave Seliah the opening she needed to finish the job. The cerberus crashed into the grass and rolled over itself, unable to stand now that its hind legs had been maimed to such a degree. With the advantage of speed finally on her side, Seliah zipped around the beast and stabbed twice more with her rapier, destroying the hound’s head and stomach in the same manner as its legs.
All she had needed was that one opening.
“Should I keep it for you, Adah?” Seliah asked over their magic channel.
“Keep what?” Adah said.
“The core,” Seliah said. “I can see it already. Should I keep it, or should I finish it off?”
The safer play was to destroy the core and kill the Cruelty now. The hound’s body lay dead in the grass, but there was always a chance it might find a last bit of fight. This was a monster that could split and meld its body at will, after all.
But destroying the core now would mean putting all its essence to waste.
“I’m on my way,” Adah said.
She freed herself from the scythe’s power as she landed near the downed Cruelty. The darkness of the void fell from her eyes gradually, in the way a sun spot would fade from one’s vision. The green of the grass at her feet—already so vibrant this early in spring—made her uneasy at first. Her eyes took a minute to adjust, and she felt trapped in an impressionist landscape the whole time. Once she reacclimated to a world full of color, she stared down at the swirling core waiting within the hound’s stomach.
Though she’d learned to pace herself while “eating” this past month, the cores of B-Rank Cruelties still gave Adah trouble. It was a lot of essence to take in at once, and the scythe’s blade always grew more eager to consume such a large bounty. Now that there was an even greater chunk of power in front of her, Adah hesitated to swing her weapon at it.
Yet, if she was serious about her goal, she couldn’t allow herself to be slowed down but what ought to be a major victory in her favor. It’d do her no good to be afraid of her greatest weapon. She stepped forward and sunk the scythe’s teeth into the cerberus’s core.
The sensation of life within the core wasn’t as strong as Adah had expected it to be. Or, perhaps, she’d numbed herself to the feeling more than she’d realized. Siphoning essence in this way was almost like turning the core into a synthetic heart. It pumped essence like blood into the scythe, beat after beat. Although the Cruelty connected to this core was dying, the heartbeat only ever erupted in panic if Adah allowed her own mind to worry. It was as though the core served solely as an engine. She had mentioned as much to Elise, thinking the insight might assist with developing her analysis of the Cruelties, but the Secretary had simply told her to report if she ever came across a core that did react to its own demise.
“Did you see anything?” Rika asked Adah as the hound’s core broke apart into static flakes. The process of siphoning all that essence had taken long enough for the whole coalition to regroup around the Cruelty’s corpse.
“Not right now,” Adah said. “If it gets me, it’ll be while I’m sleeping.”
She’d started to frame her visions in that way, as part of managing them. She found she worried less if she thought of them as a pesky sibling trying to scare her as a prank.
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“I see something,” Dystopia said to the group. “Company’s rolling in.”
Sure enough, a half dozen trucks emblazoned with the logos of news stations both regional and national were speeding across the open field in the coalition’s direction.
The attention was expected. Any of their teams fighting an A-Rank would have attracted some news coverage anyway, but the fact they’d shown up with this many magic users was a story all its own. The local stations in particular would want to know where the idea to fight as a group had come from. A new regional Secretary, Heartbreak’s rise to power, the recent deaths of magic users—there were all sorts of ways they could try to frame the story.
Unfortunately for them, it would be the coalition who told this story, and they’d do so on their own terms.
“Ignore them,” Adah said. “Fly right past them and head home. Freshen up if you want, grab some food if you need to, then meet back at the Department of Magic. We’ll give them a proper introduction to the new generation of magic users.”
☆☆☆
The Department of Magic was a scene of chaos, and it was all Adah’s fault.
She really didn’t see any way around it. The coalition’s new outfits had to be designed by Lina—she was the only person Adah knew who could balance the need for their squad to have a unifying theme with each member’s desire to stand out on their own merits. Personalities like Iris and Clair would never agree to wear a generic-looking uniform and stand behind Adah. Hell, even Ami and Emi would put up a fight against such a request.
If Lina was designing the outfits, then that meant they’d be real outfits. Cloth and thread, not magic essence that appeared with a snap of the fingers. And real clothes took time to put on—doubly so when Lina herself insisted on making sure they fit everyone just right.
Thus, three offices within the Department had been commandeered by Adah and the rest of the coalition to serve as makeshift dressing rooms. Lina’s friends-turned-assistants Colette and Kritika stayed in two of the rooms, helping the coalition members get into their uniforms, some more complex than others. Lina herself sprinted back and forth across the Department atrium, zooming from room to room to check that her designs still looked the way she expected them to and to make suggestions on how everyone’s hair should be styled or other such details. However, Adah suspected that Lina really just wanted to ogle everyone now that they were wearing her work. The designer was a fanatic, after all.
If they were donning these uniforms for a photoshoot, there’d be no need to take over these offices or for Lina to run around until she started panting. The coalition could have gathered in a proper dressing room and taken their time getting ready. But the plan was never to make such a superficial debut. The reason Adah had ordered everyone to ignore the media earlier was because they’d be addressing the world directly this evening.
After the defeat of the cerberus Cruelty, Elise had issued a memo to every news outlet she could contact announcing a press conference on the future of Region 4’s approach to magic. It went without saying that this new squad of magic users would be one of the main topics of discussion.
The coalition would make their first appearance as a formal unit at this presser. The Department of Magic made for a better stage than some random field, and would allow them to introduce themselves on their terms. Elise would set the stage and Heartbreak would explain the rest. The outfits they wore and the words they spoke in front of the cameras were all tools to shape the way the world perceived them. And of course, the way they were perceived would then shape their magic.
By the time the sun turned to a smoldering orange at the base of a purple sky, the chaos inside the Department offices finally settled down. Adah and the rest of the coalition gathered in the building’s lobby. Just beyond the gray doors at the opposite end of that lobby, a crowd of reporters armed with cameras waited. Each news station had planted a microphone on a podium that stood at the top of the staircase leading up to the Department building, and those mics crowded the podium as tightly as the reporters themselves crowded the staircase.
Adah supposed this degree of attention was more due to Elise’s machinations than what the coalition had accomplished today. The woman was making a name for herself in national politics, so when she teased a major announcement like today, the media showed up in force. Adah made a note of that.
However different Elise may have been than Thibault or Sirk, she still had her own ambitions. There would almost certainly come a time when those ambitions clashed with Adah’s own.
If not Elise’s ambitions, then that lion Kodriel’s.
Adah glanced around the lobby, taking stock of the coalition members. Everyone was accounted for—ten girls and Ekki. Right now, they were Elise’s greatest source of political power, but their allegiance belonged to Adah. It was the eleven of them who had the strength to dictate how the region changed, so long as they stayed united. So long as they fought a common enemy instead of each other.
“Why do you two get hats but the rest of us don’t?” Ami complained, as if on cue.
She pointed at Adah and Iris, who wore perhaps the most similar outfits out of all the coalition members. For Iris’s outfit, Lina had opted for a layered set of fluffy skirts and replaced some of Adah’s more militaristic ornaments with flowery lace or jewelry. The hat that had Ami so bothered was more like a beret, with a similar flower theming.
“Probably because that woman couldn’t find one big enough to fit your head,” Iris said. “I would have thought you’d be happy with that handkerchief on your shoulder.”
That “handkerchief” was really a single-shouldered cape that draped over Ami’s right side. The cape was one of the defining pieces of her outfit, along with her full-length pants, an article of clothing that overlapped only with Ekki’s uniform.
“My head’s normal,” Ami returned. “Yours is just extra small since there’s not much brain in there.”
Iris merely rolled her eyes and turned to Adah.
“Please control her,” she said.
“Sorry,” Adah said. “I need to check on everyone else. Maybe you two can wrestle for the hat?”
Ami took that as permission to start bullying Iris in earnest, so Adah quickly excused herself and made her way around the lobby. The rest of the coalition members were milling about, comparing outfits and chatting about the afternoon’s battle.
Each member’s outfit was distinguished in some way, like Iris and Ami’s had been. While everyone shared the same shirt and tie base, their other major articles varied from person to person. The girls had skirts of varying lengths and styles, and their tops were even more diverse. Emi wore a heavy cloak not unlike the one Adah had designed for her Raindrop Reaper rebranding. Seliah had on a sleek jacket with compressed sleeves, which complemented her short pleated skirt—apparently Lina had attached that obsession to the witch as well. Meanwhile, Elegia’s uniform wasn’t far off from her typical magical girl outfit, complete with a tight slit-legged dress.
Lina had done her job well. Each member could be identified at a glance thanks to their unique elements. Yet, when standing together in a large group like this, they still appeared as one solid unit. If anything, the similarities in their color schemes and base layer clothing helped draw an onlooker’s attention to the ways in which each outfit differed. What was the same from member to member blurred together, and what caught the eye were the distinguishing features.
As Adah watched the coalition members, she felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned around to see Elise, in a blazer and skirt combo that served as her own uniform, standing behind her.
“Shall we begin?” the Secretary asked. “To change the world?”