The Cruelty was one that Adah and the twins were all too familiar with: the same armored scorpion they had taken out as their agency’s first C-Rank mission. Even the interception point was similar—while not in the same town as the last one they’d fought, today’s variant had spawned in the same kind of suburban residential neighborhood. If Ami’s theory about the Cruelties getting smarter about where they spawned certain variants was correct, then apparently they felt the scorpion was a good match for this type of environment.

  That worked in the Last Light’s favor today. Fighting the same opponent in the same sort of arena would make this a simple battle, and yet another opportunity to compare their strength now to that of their past selves. A C-Rank—even a tougher variant like the scorpion—wouldn’t be much of a challenge for Adah and the twins, but being familiar with this Cruelty would allow them some leeway to show off a bit. Today’s mission was meant to show the Last Light working together with Seliah, but it was also a means to see what Seliah was capable of.

  “Funny coincidence how this thing’s shown up twice now when Rika’s not with us,” Adah said as they approached the interception point.

  “Maybe after the way she nuked it last time, they’ve been hiding this variant until she’s busy,” Ami said.

  “If the Cruelties could keep track of our schedules that well, we’d have a serious problem,” Adah said.

  Much like the last time they’d fought this variant, a group of news reporters had gathered a ways down the street from where the scorpion had just now appeared. There were two or three crews total—not as large a crowd as the Last Light had attracted the last time, but still more spectators than a job of this caliber would usually warrant.

  “There are more cameras than when I fought my first C-Rank,” Seliah remarked as they passed the crews by.

  “Ah, the thing is,” Adah explained, “we’ve been attracting some extra attention ever since I called out Secretary Thibault. I’m not sure how much these people care about recording the battle as they do about trying to get us to say something controversial afterward. Ami warned you about what you were getting involved with, I hope?”

  “She did,” Seliah said. “But I think I’m beginning to understand a little better now.”

  “All the more reason to show off in front of them!” Ami said. “Gotta remind them that their cameras are for shooting the action, not interviews.”

  On that note, the four of them needed to discuss their strategy for this battle. Adah and the twins were plenty familiar with the scorpion already, so it only made sense to share what they had learned with Seliah.

  “The main thing is to not float in front of it,” Ami said. “That stinger is faster than your lightning bolts and has more range than you’d expect. Plus, it hurts like hell.”

  “You’re always letting the Cruelties hit you, aren’t you?” Seliah said.

  “It’s usually not on purpose,” Ami replied, pushing down the girl’s hat over her eyes once again.

  “And then she takes it out on other people,” Emi said with an exaggerated sigh.

  All that said, Ami wouldn’t need to tank any hits today. The girls knew to avoid the stinger, and they knew that destroying the scorpion’s core would require creating an opening through the monster’s armor. They had used a coordinated attack with Rika’s railgun last time, so maybe Seliah could fill in that role today.

  “I guess we ran out of time to show off our spells to each other earlier,” Adah said. “What do you have to work with on the offensive side? Anything longer range and fast?”

  “All my spells are focused on offense,” Seliah said. “I guess that’s what my fans want me to have. I have the lightning, like Ami said. A meteor, but that’s probably too slow. What would probably work best is the moon.”

  “The moon?”

  “It’s kind of like if you broke a plate,” Seliah explained. “You wind up with all these shards, right? This spell is like that, but bigger. I’m probably not explaining it well. I only got it recently.”

  If she unlocked it recently, that was all the more reason to use it. If the Last Light could help Seliah practice using a new spell against a tough opponent, that’d be the best way to help her improve and to learn more about her.

  “Let’s give it a shot, then,” Adah said. “Last time, my whip did a good job breaking through the armor. Ami and Emi, if you two can occupy the scorpion, then I’ll sneak in like I did before.”

  Ami shook her head.

  “Actually,” she said, “I’ve got a better idea. If you’re willing to bust out your scythe, that is.”

  “It’d be my pleasure.”

  The weapon was full of energy after consuming the spider Cruelty, and Adah had yet to expend any of that power. Since the essence reserves weren’t an issue, why not show Seliah what the scythe could do firsthand?

  “I’ve been thinking up ways to have fun with my augmentation—The Gate,” Ami said. “So, I was like, what if I turned those ice blocks into projectiles? Like chucking a big rock out of a catapult. I could probably figure out a way to do it myself, but I think your scythe would make it even easier.”

  “You mean using the hands?” Adah asked.

  “Bingo,” Ami said with a smile. “Grab ‘em and chuck ‘em. I figure the ice should be strong enough to smash open this thing’s armor. What would be the point of creating a wall that couldn’t stand up to a little impact? Plus, the blocks are frozen versions of my shield, and my shield can handle just about anything!”

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  Ami’s theory had enough logic behind it to give it a chance, if nothing else. There was only one way to learn the limits of their spells, and that was to test them out. Given the fact this wasn’t an overly dangerous experiment, Adah was willing to try it out.

  “Sounds like fun to me,” Adah agreed. “What would be the easiest angle for you to hit the core from, Seliah? We can try to break open the armor based on that.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” the girl said. “Wherever you break through, I’ll find a way to get there.”

  “Is that so?” Adah mused. “Then, let’s have you and Emi run a distraction on it while Ami and I set up. If you can’t find your opening after we start smashing it, just call out and we can regroup.”

  Emi and Seliah nodded in sync, and then the witch girl shot off toward the scorpion before anyone could react. After a moment in which Emi’s brain needed to process what had just happened, she flew in pursuit of Seliah.

  “So that’s how it is,” Ami said, watching the two girls with a grin.

  Seliah was fast—faster than Emi, and it wasn’t particularly close either. At a first glance comparison, Seliah’s top speed seemed to rival what Sheffa was capable of with the assistance of her wind burst spell. That any magical girl was able to achieve such speed without the help of a spell was—frankly—shocking. Emi did her best to keep up, but it was clear that Seliah could continue to outpace her unless she chose to slow down.

  Although she wasn’t flying with Seliah, Ami also had no intention of being left behind. She had already started prepping an ice wall by casting her [Aspis Meniscus] and expanding the shield as large as she could. Just like with her icy chains, she solidified the watery wall into a block of ice by clenching her fists. As the Magiapp had suggested, the frozen block remained suspended in the air by some magical force. Ami pushed her body against the block, but it wouldn’t budge.

  “Seems ready to me,” Ami said. “Let’s find out how tough these things are.”

  Adah summoned Beleth’s Bloodletter once more. The scythe’s smoky magic appeared immediately, already sensing Adah’s intent to use it.

  Though, what exactly was her intention? The scythe responded to her will, but thus far the weapon had always been responding to a more intense desire of hers—a desire like saving her teammates. Today, she didn’t feel so strongly about her opponent.

  Today’s desire was more like… wanting to see what she was capable of. She wanted to make this battle simple for Seliah. To give her a clean opening, a shot at the core she couldn’t miss.

  To that end, she wanted to hurl this chunk of ice as hard as she could!

  That was a desire the scythe had no trouble responding to.

  A giant, smoky hand clawed its way out of the eye that the weapon’s magic formed. The hand grew until it could grab hold of the chunk of ice, its black fingers curling all the way around the block.

  Once the hand had a grip on the block, Adah observed the battlefield. Seliah was darting from one side of the scorpion to the other faster than Adah’s eyes could follow. The beast had been driven to absolute confusion as it tried to track her. It stomped with one row of legs, then started to rotate for a moment before realizing that Seliah had already appeared above it. Before the scorpion could react to that new position, the witch girl had already moved below the beast and fired a lightning bolt at its underbelly.

  This hornet style of harassment gave Emi plenty of space to put her own augmentation to work. She followed in Seliah’s wake, taking advantage of the scorpion’s confusion to strike the monster’s legs with her watery spear. Now that her spell was augmented with The Sleep, each jab left behind a glowing white cursemark on the scorpion’s carapace. Emi activated these marks as she went, each one crystallizing into shards of ice that hampered the Cruelty’s mobility bit by bit.

  Between Seliah’s distractions and Emi’s curses, the monster had become an easy target for Adah’s ice cube.

  “First try’s incoming!” Adah said to the two girls over a magic channel. “You won’t have long before the armor regenerates, so get ready now.”

  Adah had a sense she wouldn’t need to say more than that to Seliah. The girl’s speed had more than simple flair to it. She moved with the same confidence and precision as when Emi had taken out the lynx Cruelty with Adah’s direction. Seliah had a clear read on the battlefield, even when moving at such high speeds. The mystery of how the girl had managed to defeat a C-Rank all by herself was revealing itself now.

  Seliah was a soldier. All of the frivolousness of being a magical girl—the image-obsessed ego, the drama of rivalries, the politics of show business—all of it was absent from her mind. She was focused solely on fighting as effectively as possible.

  Seliah darted away from the scorpion now, positioning herself to the side of where Adah intended to throw the ice block, as if intuiting the block’s point of impact before it even left the scythe’s hand. She held a hand in front of herself and spoke a spell, her voice coming over the magic channel Adah had used earlier.

  “[Lunar Laceration],” she said, her voice perfectly steady.

  The outline of a circle formed before her, its interior slowly filling in with a pure white light until the shape resembled a full moon in the sky.

  Perhaps she was so focused she didn’t even realize her voice was still connected to the channel. In any case, that was all the signal Adah needed. If Seliah was ready, so was she.

  Adah took aim at the right side of the scorpion’s torso and intensified her desire to break through its gray carapace. The scythe’s black arm responded in kind, winding back as if it was about to throw a pitch, then swinging forward all at once. The ice block launched from the hand at a speed even Seliah would struggle to match.

  At the same time, Seliah snapped her fingers, causing the shining circle in front of her to shatter into jagged pieces of light—indeed, like the broken plate she had alluded to. The shards hovered in the air, awaiting her command.

  The block of ice rushed past Seliah—a bit closer to her than Adah had intended, though the girl showed no concern over it—and smashed into the scorpion. The block burst into fragments as well, but not without obliterating an equally large section of the monster’s carapace. The aftermath was akin to two cars crashing into one another.

  Seliah seized the opportunity, urging her moon shards forward. They, like ghastly daggers conjured by a sorcerer, stabbed into the exposed core of the scorpion. The core itself could only withstand three of the shards before it broke apart as well.

  As swift as that, the core was destroyed and the scorpion began to dematerialize. Even though killing C-Rank Cruelties had become routine for Adah at this point, she was surprised by how smoothly this mission had gone. Part of that was the result of her team’s increase in power, but part of it was thanks to how easily Seliah adapted to her role in the battle.

  The four girls regrouped once the scorpion had vanished completely, and the twins wasted no time in pressing Seliah with questions.

  “How’d you learn to fly so fast?” Ami asked.

  “Was it that training you were doing?” Emi said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Ami said in a hurry. “Send me that workout—I can’t be losing to my protégé.”

  Seliah’s head bobbled between the two of them, not sure who to look at.

  “I don’t know if it’s the training,” she said. “I just do that so I don’t get tired on missions. I guess I just had to fly a certain way to make up the fact my spells are one dimensional. Since I’m fighting alone, I didn’t have a choice but to make up for my weaknesses however I could.”

  Was that all she thought it was?

  Maybe it made sense. Seliah had always been alone, without even a manager to help guide her. She wouldn’t have any points of reference except for other magic users she saw on TV. The girl didn’t realize just how impressive she was.

  Three magical girls with stunning personalities and one with stunning combat skills. The Last Light had found themselves quite the set of allies.