Adah took aim at the Cruelty. This particular variant of monster was a grotesque cross between an ostrich and an octopus. It scurried around on eight tentacle-like legs that sprouted from its feathered body, bobbing its freakishly long neck around like a panicked chicken. The creature was gray all over, as if someone had cranked its saturation down to zero.

  [Sparkling Strike!]

  A spinning white star materialized in Adah’s palm as she chanted her spell. A moment later, the star shot out like a fastball toward her target, but missed its mark by a few degrees. Instead of piercing through the core of the monster and dealing a killing blow, it only managed to slice off one of the tentacles. With a shriek, the Cruelty sped around a corner and into an adjacent alleyway.

  Adah clicked her tongue in frustration. Luckily, no bystanders were around to run into the monster—or worse, see her failure. In this rural town, even a main road was never any busier than a hiking trail. This random side street was even deader. There was an empty, rusted playground on one side and a row of tiny houses that looked like they’d been built before the invention of gunpowder on the other. Not much for sightseeing.

  She floated down to the ground to pursue the monster on foot. She could hear her manager’s voice in her head telling her to always preserve magic essence when possible. In other words: be as stingy as possible. She had a budget, after all. Her magic companion, or mascot as they were called, came down to join her.

  “Isn’t it nice working jobs in the farm towns?” he said. “I love smelling that fresh air.”

  “That’s manure, Izzy,” Adah said. “Are you sure you only look like a pig?”

  Supposedly, mascots could take on any physical form they desired—they were interdimensional magic beings, after all. So, out of all possible options, why had he chosen to be a pig with wings?

  “I look nothing like a pig,” Izzy said. “That might be the animal I look least like in this world, in fact.”

  Adah couldn’t help but laugh. “You’re both short. You’re both fat. You both have curly little tails and stubby noses. You’re the spitting image of a pig, only difference being you’ve glued some dollar store wings to you. It’s like some drunk farmers had a dumb idea on Halloween.”

  “You must need glasses,” her mascot retorted. “It would explain you missing that easy shot a moment ago.”

  “Let’s test that theory. Go stand against that wall, and we’ll see if I can hit you.”

  “As if I’d let you hit me with my own power. I’ll just turn off the flow of magic,” the pig taunted her.

  He loved to remind her of that.

  Izzy, or Izrashell, was the source of Adah’s powers as a magical girl. When the monsters known as Cruelties invaded Earth a few decades ago, lifeforms like Izzy followed right behind them. Izzy and his kind were beings from another world. Or was it dimension? Universe? Anyway, the important bit was that they were engaged in a seemingly endless war against the Cruelties, chasing them from one world to the next over the course of millennia.

  When that war spilled into this world, humanity and the mascots partnered up, using humans as conduits to amplify the magic power mascots possessed. A human could multiply the strength of a mascot’s magic almost infinitely, if the conditions were right.

  “If they’re your powers, why don’t you give me something stronger?” she said. “Then we can hunt some big game Cruelties.”

  “That’s on you, Miss Starbloom. You want new spells, get new fans.”

  Adah sighed. “Yeah, yeah, yeah…”

  Easier said than done.

  The odds were stacked against her. In the first place, her outfit was a complete mismatch with her mascot. Whenever she transformed, she reappeared in a pair of ankle boots with stars affixed to each side of the heels, almost like spurs. Her socks went up about halfway towards her skirt, which was fully frilled out like a magical girl’s ought to be. Her top was a modest bodice-undershirt combo, embroidered with dozens of tiny stars made to look like sparkly falling raindrops. The whole ensemble was pure white, except for the dazzling golden stars and the trim along her skirt, all of which contrasted beautifully with her sleek black hair.

  It was an outfit completely fitting her magical girl identity: Sparkling Starbloom.

  What wasn’t fitting was the weird winged pig walking by her side. Or the fact she was walking at all! Who ever heard of a magical girl hoofing around on foot, stumbling over stray stones, getting mud all over her boots? The situation was a complete embarrassment.

  Well, not that it mattered.

  There was nobody out here in the sticks to cheer her on anyway. In a town like this, half the population were geezers taking a midday nap right about now. And you couldn’t even joke about a news crew showing up. This ostrich-pus Cruelty was less of a threat to public safety than a broken stoplight. Not even the most diehard magical girl fans would care.

  “Gah!” Adah screamed and stomped, narrowly missing Izzy’s front hoof. “I’m going to murder this thing when we get to it.”

  “That’s the job, yes,” Izzy mused.

  “No, I mean I’m going to fucking obliterate it,” she raged. “I’m off by half a foot and suddenly I have to stumble around and make an idiot of myself. That thing knows it’s dead. It knows it’s pointless to run away. Is it trying to piss me off?”

  “Oh, she’s losing it again,” Izzy said to himself.

  The moaning and groaning and hair-pulling continued for another minute until Izzy pointed out they had indeed arrived in front of the object of Adah’s hatred. As predicted, the Cruelty was simply cowering behind a trash can, clinging to its last few seconds of life.

  Seeing its stupid head poking out above the trash can, oblivious to how futile the idea of hiding such a long neck was, Adah could only sigh in resignation.

  [Sparkling Strike]

  At this range, there was no chance of missing. The star pierced the core of the monster, and without so much as a screech it perished, evaporating away into nothingness.

  “Let’s just go home,” Adah said, a defeated victor.

  In no position to burn more magic essence flying home, the pair turned around and began to walk to the nearest bus stop.

  They hadn’t gotten far when a little girl, not more than eight or nine years old, popped out from around the corner. She ran over to Adah, her ponytail bouncing side to side as she went.

  “You’re a real magical girl!” the child said, looking up at Adah with twinkling eyes. “Mom told me to stay inside, but I watched you from our window!”

  Adah’s heart raced a little as she tried to dredge up a smiley persona from the bottom of the well in her soul.

  “Ah, uh, that’s right!” she managed to say as she knelt down to the girl’s level. “My name’s Sparkling Starbloom, and this here is Izzy.”

  The girl looked down at Izzy. She paused, her brain’s processor chugging in response to the winged creature before her. Try as she might, even a child’s unfettered imagination couldn’t pretend Izzy was anything other than what he was.

  “It’s… a pig?” she said, clearly hoping to be proven wrong.

  “He’s a magic pig!”

  “Indeed,” Izzy said. “When have you seen a pig do something like this?”

  In a completely misguided attempt to show off, Izzy rose up on his hind legs, suddenly standing taller than the girl herself and exposing his pot belly. He snorted loudly, which was probably his way of trying to boast.

  He didn’t even need to finish standing before Adah knew what would happen. How else could a young girl respond to such a horrific sight? A talking pig suddenly standing up like he was a human?

  Anyone—child or adult—would burst into tears.

  The girl froze for maybe half a second before the waterworks flowed and she sprinted back the way she came.

  And just like that, Sparkling Starbloom missed out on another fan.

  ☆ ☆ ☆

  Adah and Izzy blasted through the front door of the Spotlight Sunbright Magical Girl Agency office midway through a volcanic eruption of an argument. The office lobby wasn’t very large—a waiting area to the right with a couch and few scattered chairs, bathrooms to the left, and a reception desk front and center—so their shouting match had no trouble filling up the whole room.

  “I just don’t get it,” Adah complained, throwing her arms up. “Apparently you have all this magic power. Why don’t you make yourself just a little bit cuter?”

  “Here’s another thought,” Izzy said. “Why don’t you?”

  “Listen, you little swine—”

  “It’s not me getting rejected from magazines and modeling gigs, is it? It’s not my headshot on the card every producer throws in the trash, is it?”

  Adah kicked at her mascot, but he quickly hopped away to dodge. Unrelenting, she continued to swing and stomp her leg all around the lobby in pursuit of Izzy.

  A bespectacled woman behind the front desk looked up from her phone briefly to tell Adah, “Be careful. If you break him, they won’t give us a new one.”

  Adah scowled at Izzy but temporarily stopped her rampage. He, in return, stuck out his pig tongue and scuttled away up a nearby staircase to the agency dormitory. Once he was out of sight, Adah sunk down in a leather chair intended for the agency’s guests, which in all likelihood had never once been used for that purpose.

  “Can you believe the audacity of this farm animal?” she said. “He gains the ability to talk and immediately decides to be as annoying as possible.”

  She looked over at Grace, who served as both front desk receptionist and general manager of the agency’s four magical girls. She’d also been the one who insisted on signing Adah to the agency after her audition.

  In partnership with regional governments, agencies were responsible for recruiting and promoting magical girls. Mascots distributed themselves to different agencies based on the threat Cruelties posed to the local area, then it was up to the agencies to recruit the most suitable partners for those mascots. Agencies with a proven track record of defeating high-threat Cruelties attracted the best talent, since the government paid agencies handsomely for dealing with more dangerous monsters.

  All of those top-ranked agencies had rejected Adah before she could even finish introducing herself to them. After months of reaching out to any agency that had an open spot on their roster, she finally ran out of options. Spotlight Sunbright had been her last hope of actually becoming a magical girl. They had no reputation within the industry, and were based in a rural region nearly two hundred miles from Adah’s home, but they were also the only ones willing to give her a chance.

  Given how slow business was at the agency, Grace’s daily duties mostly involved signing Adah and the other girls up for small Cruelty exterminations and making sure they were keeping the dormitory vaguely clean. None of the girls at this agency ever hosted a concert, got booked for a modeling gig, or anything glamorous that the famous magical girls got to do. Therefore, Grace had plenty of spare time to read her spicy romance novels, search for a slightly less shitty car, or (like she was now) mindlessly scroll on her phone.

  Adah got up and leaned over the front desk into Grace’s field of view.

  “Hey,” she said. “Can’t we just frame him for, like, embezzlement or something? Then they have to give me a new mascot.”

  Mission success: Grace put down her phone and looked at Adah. It was the same look you’d give someone walking up the down escalator, but Adah would take what she could get.

  “You want to frame an otherworldly pig—whose magic powers we know almost nothing about—for embezzlement?”

  “Just a thought,” Adah said with a shrug.

  Grace rolled her eyes and undid her ponytail, only to retie her hair into an even messier and looser one a second later.

  “Even if something like that were to happen, you wouldn’t get paired with a new mascot. Once you get powers from one, you two become partners for life. That’s how it works.”

  Right, maybe she had learned that during her training. Something about “essence inscription.” So she was stuck with Izzy. He’d been the only mascot on the agency’s roster without a partner when she applied, so it’s not like she hadn’t known what she was getting herself into.

  She just hadn’t predicted he’d be so attached to his pig form.

  “What exactly happened on this mission anyway?” Grace asked in a rare instance of unforced interest.

  Seizing the moment, Adah explained the whole story in grand detail. Her manager humored her with the occasional raised eyebrow or two-word consolation in reaction to the story, and that was enough for Adah. At the end of the day, she just wanted to complain.

  After a fruitful venting session, Adah went upstairs to the girls’ shared dormitory and retired to her room. Izzy was resting at the foot of her bed when she entered. The two of them shared a look of understanding and silently agreed to a truce for the night. Even if she had something to gain from fighting with him, she was too dejected to bother.

  Instead, she lazily collapsed onto her bed—basically a daily routine at this point—and looked around her room. The walls were covered in posters depicting a pink magical girl with an outfit quite similar to Adah’s own. The girl on the posters wielded a bow nearly as tall as she was, from which she fired a heart-tipped arrow. Atop her head sat a fluffy creature that looked like a tiny cloud with tall rabbit ears and big doe eyes. Together they made the perfect pair: the legendary magical girl known as Magical Pureheart Chu and her lovable mascot Pom.

  Adah pulled out her phone as she sunk into her mattress, feeling like she was being hugged by a horde of bunnies each cushioning a little piece of her body. Her muscles unwound themselves; even though she hadn’t exerted herself much physically, utilizing magic essence still fatigued her body as if she had. Beginning to relax, she pulled up her social media accounts one by one.

  “Egosurfing?” Izzy asked from down by her feet.

  She laughed. “More like doomscrolling.”

  After all, nothing she’d see on her accounts could possibly boost her ego. Follower count? Same as it was yesterday and so many days before that—barely over 100 (half of them probably bots). Messages? Comments? Crickets. And her posts? What was she supposed to say? Just got done fighting a pipsqueak Cruelty. Scared the shit out of some little kid. All in a day’s work. Maybe she could attach a picture of the girl’s crying face—really hammer home her achievement. Nope, her account was as good as dead.

  Meanwhile, her feed was a ceaseless waterfall of other magical girls living out her dreams. The very first post she saw: fanart from a famous manga artist of this girl Azure Engrave—the third piece he’d drawn of her this month. After that: another girl’s agency had a professional photographer on staff who followed her out on missions. In this photo she was launching a shining spear through a massive Cruelty; the shot made her look like she was scoring a buzzer beater in a championship game. Bet she made that her profile banner. Then there was the worst of them all: this new trend of magical girls showing off how they do their makeup or nails to match with their transformations. Half her feed was just closeups of girls’ eye shadow. She wanted to jab her finger right into their pupils, but doing that would only backfire and like the post.

  “It’s all bullshit,” she complained to no one. “You don’t even have time to do makeup before a mission.”

  Izzy didn’t say anything—there wasn’t anything to say—but he did move down the bed and closer to Adah’s head. She rolled onto her side to face him. Luckily, he at least didn’t stink like a real pig. She poked his belly, and he let her do so.

  “How old are you, Izzy?” she asked out of the blue.

  “By your time?” he said. “Hard to be sure.”

  “Well, I’m nearly 22,” she said. “I’ve been a magical girl for almost four years, and I’m in the same spot I started in.”

  Truthfully, she had probably spent her first night at the agency the exact same way she was now: just looking at other magical girls’ lives. The only difference was that—back then—she could still imagine herself in the shoes of the girls she saw online.

  “At what point is it time to call it quits?” she asked.

  Without realizing it, she had swapped from poking him to petting him. For whatever reason, he didn’t shake her off and remind her he wasn’t a dog like he normally would.

  “Regardless of outcome,” he said, “I’ll always be your mascot. Feel free to be a magical girl until the end.”

  “Until the end, huh,” she repeated. “Maybe one day people will attach pig charms to their phones.”

  They both laughed at that. There wasn’t much point in thinking about merch that no one would ever buy, but what would a Sparkling Starbloom charm even look like? A star with pig ears, or maybe a curly little tail?

  Remembering something, she hopped off her bed and went over to her desk. She pulled out a drawer and grabbed a keychain from inside before settling back onto her mattress. She hooked her finger through the metallic loop and dangled the keychain above her face. The charm, a little rabbit-eared heart shape, swung back and forth, its colors nearly faded over the years.

  How old had she been back then? Ten? She had been just a little kid walking home from school when the whole city suddenly went into a panic. A Cruelty nearly as tall as the office buildings that lined the street started rampaging straight through Adah’s path home. When it stomped, shockwaves rippled through the concrete streets like water. Adah had gotten swept up in a flood of fleeing pedestrians, and it was a miracle she hadn’t been crushed underfoot. Running away was useless, though, in the face of a beast that could traverse entire city blocks in one stride.

  Just when the Cruelty went to give chase, Pureheart had shown up to save the day. She had looked just like she did on Adah’s poster, with not a frill out of place. The spell she had used to kill the monster—Adah still hadn’t seen anything to rival it. The sky had opened up like a heavenly portal, and a bolt of light shot down as if fired from a ballista in space. Adah had been sure you’d be able to see the light from all the way on another planet. Pureheart had defeated the Cruelty, but it was what happened next that Adah remembered clearest.

  Pureheart had flown down from the sky—straight toward Adah. Maybe she had seen how scared Adah had been, maybe she had randomly chosen a kid in the crowd. In any case, the magical girl smiled at Adah as she floated downward. Then she placed in Adah’s hand the very charm that now dangled above her face.

  Adah always told herself she’d become just like Pureheart one day. A hero that any kid—really, any person—could look up to. It was a dream that would surely come true. After all, it was the only thing she wanted. To defeat evil monsters. To make people smile. With magic powers, it should have been so simple.

  It should have been, but it wasn’t.

  “The will of humanity.”

  That phrase echoed in her head. Mascots used it to explain how humans could control magic, so she had heard it a lot during her training. A human would link with a mascot, initiating a flow of magic essence between them. Then the human amplified that power by tapping into the collective spirit and desire of humanity. Thus, magical girls were conduits for the will of humanity. On a scientific level, Adah had no idea what that meant. But in practice, the implication was easy to understand.

  The more popular a magical girl, the stronger her magic.

  When you were as dreadfully unpopular and weak as Adah, it was hard not to understand.

  That was the chasm between herself and Pureheart. It didn’t matter how much she saw herself as a sparkling heroine, it mattered how other people saw her. Or in her case, didn’t see her. With no fans, she was stuck with just one spell—her weak, Level 1 [Sparkling Strike]. That meant she couldn’t fight bigger Cruelties, which meant she got less cash and publicity, which meant—that’s right—she struggled even harder to gain fans. It was an endless cycle of obscurity.

  And she had no idea how to break it. How many days had she spent trying? They all ended just like this one. Her life as a magical girl was a static routine, and every day was just another tally mark on the wall.

  She closed her eyes and sunk into her pillow, still gripping the Pureheart keychain. As sleep took hold of her, she made a wish. Just once, she’d like to be in the spotlight as a magical girl.

  When she woke up the next day, she got her chance.

  I'll be posting 6 chapters today then will continue on a M-W-F schedule.