The next morning, Adah jolted awake at the sound of a fist pounding on her door and the unusually loud voice of Grace.

  “Get up, ladies,” she said through the door. “I snagged you some decent work today.”

  At those words, Adah rushed out into the hall and was soon joined by the agency’s other magical girls. Although Spotlight Sunbright couldn’t afford the lavish apartments other agencies offered their talent, each girl here at least had her own dorm room.

  Rika, a slender girl with striking auburn hair, stumbled out of the room adjacent to Adah’s. Despite how frazzled her unbrushed hair was, it still looked flattering against her sharp facial features. She had a natural, almost accidental beauty like that. She stifled a yawn while she glanced at Adah with half-lucid eyes as if lost in a dream.

  The twins Ami and Emi emerged from their rooms on the opposite side of the hall simultaneously. The twins were tall and seemed especially so to Adah, given she was on the shorter side. They also took particular pride in being twins. Even right now, first thing in the morning, they both wore their shoulder-length brown hair in the same style: Ami’s tucked behind her right ear and secured with crisscrossing hairpins, Emi’s the same behind her left ear. Beyond mere style, they were the spitting image of each other in every way.

  “What’s the mission?” Adah asked. If Grace had woken all four of them up, it must’ve been something big.

  “A real Cruelty,” Grace said with a nearly imperceptible grin. “A flying one. Not too dangerous, but tricky.”

  “Meat for dinner!” Rika cheered, rubbing her hands together.

  Normally you’d find Rika yawning at all hours of the day, given her completely erratic sleep schedule, but this good news seemed to jumpstart her energy levels.

  Grace read them out a briefing of the mission as they gathered downstairs to shove a bite of food in their mouths. Like she had said, it was a bird-like Cruelty: wingspan of twelve feet, hefty torso, covered in feathers that served like armor. Ones like this popped up fairly often. They lacked agility, so they typically weren’t a big threat in terms of attacking humans on the ground. However, they could still catch easy prey if given the opportunity. This particular one was flying over a nearby town.

  Well, it wasn’t actually flying over the town. Not yet, anyway. Its energy signature had been detected by a piece of magically-enhanced technology the mascots had helped humans create, colloquially known as the Magedar. Despite its goofy name, the device served an essential function in the fight against Cruelties. The monsters possessed a power similar to the magic of mascots, and could use it to materialize out of thin air just about anywhere. The Magedar could detect traces of energy in the air that indicated the imminent arrival of a Cruelty, even analyzing that energy to predict what form it would take, like a meteorologist tracking weather patterns.

  Once a Cruelty was detected, a mission to exterminate it was automatically posted to a web portal. Managers like Grace browsed this portal like a job board, signing up their agency’s magical girls for the missions they were best-suited for. The bounties attached to missions made up the bulk of most agencies’ income, and more dangerous missions brought in more valuable bounties.

  Mission registration worked on a first come, first served basis, so Grace must have been keeping a close eye on the portal to snatch up such a low-risk, high-reward mission.

  “Finish strategizing on the way. You’re going to have to find a way to get at its belly,” Grace said as she hurried the girls outside to transform. The Magedar could predict the arrival of a Cruelty with only so much advance notice, so a timely response was still critical.

  Once outside, the four girls lined up and each held a hand out in front of herself. Their respective mascots appeared and floated up to touch their palms, thereby initiating their transformation. This was the connection between magical girl and mascot that allowed for the flow of magic essence.

  Somehow Ami and Emi had even managed to team up with matching mascots: a pair of creatures resembling seahorses the size of house cats. Adah had to assume their mascots settled on those forms after meeting the twins, which made Izzy’s stubbornness all the more frustrating.

  As the twins assumed control of magic once again, each was swallowed by a colorful glow. Green light grew around Ami, while blue surrounded Emi. When the light faded, they appeared in their matching transformation costumes.

  Adah had always thought of their design as what might result from a bunch of witches deciding to start a marching band, though she meant it in an entirely positive way. They each wore a blazer adorned with sleek straps and shimmering buttons atop a form-fitting vest of equally dazzling decoration. The hems of their skirts were sharply angled, cutting from just above the knee on one side down to the calf on the opposite side. To complete the theme, their tall boots rose to the knee. As with most magical girls, all of this fashion took on the colors of their magic.

  Rika went through the same transformation process—she gave her dog-like mascot a pet as a burst of red light hid her body from view. Rika’s costume took a function-first approach to design. She wore shorts without a frill in sight and a leathery cropped jacket over a simple tank top. If there was anything that could be considered flair in her outfit, it was the studded belt and holster she hung from her waist and the bandoliers that crisscrossed her torso.

  The girls wasted no time after their transformations completed. They immediately launched into flight, yelling a goodbye to their manager from high in the sky.

  “Sparky and I can pepper the bird from both flanks,” Rika said, her voice magically amplified to her teammates over the rushing wind. “While we piss it off, you two hit the core from below.”

  Adah and Rika were the eldest of the group, having both joined the agency at the same time. While none of the team had an impressive combat record, seniority still dictated who called the shots on a mission.

  “They’re going to need protection from the talons,” Adah said. “The feathers on the belly are weaker, but they’ll still need to get close to pierce through.”

  “Not a problem. I’ll make a barrier for Raindrop,” Ami said, referring to her sister by her magical girl identity. They came as an inseparable pair: Ami as Dazzling Dewdrop and Emi as Radiant Raindrop.

  “I’ll kill it,” Emi replied simply.

  “How’s that for a strategy!”

  At the speed of magic flight, it wasn’t long before they spotted their target Cruelty. Sure enough, the monster was soaring over the streets below at roughly twice the altitude of a hunting hawk. For the most part, it looked like a typical bird—just massive in comparison, and fully gray like all Cruelties. However, what did stand out was its plump belly shaped like a concrete mixer and the three pairs of dagger-clawed limbs that jutted out from it. Those talons were the real threat of this Cruelty, especially once they started thrashing around in fear. Unlike the dopey ostrich-pus she’d taken out yesterday, this bird could kill a human with ease.

  The danger with the bird’s talons went beyond a simple laceration. When a Cruelty pierced your flesh, they invaded “you.”

  It was difficult to fully comprehend from a human perspective, but Izzy explained it as the opposite of how magical girls connected with their mascots. Whereas Izzy passed magic into Adah that she could then amplify and utilize, Cruelties infected their victims with an “antimagic” that tore away the very essence that made them human. You could think of that essence as whatever it was that allowed you to look at yourself in the mirror and be assured what you were seeing was really you. All it took was one injury, and a Cruelty could consume you entirely.

  This form of predation allowed the Cruelties to adapt and survive from one world to the next. The energy their antimagic siphoned fed directly into some kind of centralized collective, so as long as they had some lifeform to inflict suffering upon, they could survive. They could travel to any world without much concern over securing an energy source, nor over what shape and form their own existence took on.

  If the twins were going to fly near all those talons, they couldn’t afford even a single mistake.

  “We’re getting close,” Rika said. “Let’s set up.”

  Thanks to the Magedar’s detection, the streets below had been evacuated ahead of the Cruelty’s arrival. Since the bird was still just hovering over the outskirts of town, blocking off a few roads wasn’t much of a disruption. All the more reason for the girls to take it out quickly before managing bystander safety became a larger concern.

  They assumed their positions: Adah and Rika each trailing behind one of the monster’s wings, and Ami and Emi at a safe distance below waiting to launch their assault.

  “Y’all ready up there?” Ami asked.

  “Starting now,” Rika answered. “Birds shit when they get scared, so watch out below.”

  Before any joke could come back, she and Adah let loose their volley. Rika aimed two fingers and a thumb at the Cruelty like a gun and fired off her [Shining Shot], launching a laser of red light right at where the monster’s right wing met its body. As a natural response, the Cruelty tried to dip and glide left, only to be hit on that side by Adah’s [Sparkling Strike]. Both projectiles dissipated after exploding against the monster’s feathers without causing much damage, but that was what they had expected. Their job was simply to keep up the pressure and overwhelm the Cruelty’s instincts.

  With the bird’s screeches serving as their signal to charge, Ami and Emi rushed upward to the beast’s belly. Emi kept a hand on her sister’s back as they flew in tandem towards their target.

  “All right,” Ami said, “let’s fuck it up, Raindrop!”

  Ami clasped her hands together in front of herself and then spread them apart, creating threads of water that bridged the gap like she was playing cat’s cradle. The surface area of the water between her hands expanded until it formed a barrier half the size of her body. This was her [Aspis Meniscus], a shield that replenished its structure through constant flowing water.

  She put that shield to work not a second later, holding it against the Cruelty’s front pair of talons. The thrashing razors could only splash water around like a child playing in the bath, never reaching deep enough to cause any damage to the girls beyond.

  Emi reached above her head and gripped what seemed to be an invisible rope. As she pulled her arm back, a trail of rushing water appeared like a river cycling constantly into itself. This was her spear-like [Crux Current], a tsunami of water directed to a single piercing point. She took aim with the spear over her sister’s shoulder, then thrust it up through the monster’s belly with a shriek of her own. The water tore apart the Cruelty’s outer layer like a pressure washer through tissue paper, and annihilated the core within.

  Emi’s spear shot out the top of the monster as well, dissipating above Adah and Rika in a gentle shower of rain. The Cruelty met the same fate a moment later. The monster floated forward, carried by momentum, as its body stiffened and then broke apart into chunks that drifted away in all directions. It soon dematerialized entirely as if evaporating. Witnessing the success of their plan, the four girls let out a holler.

  Yet, sneaking into her head alongside the cheers of her teammates was a sound Adah never wanted to hear while some 200 feet in the air.

  “Oops,” Izzy said to her.

  “Oops?”

  “I forgot to check earlier,” he said, “but we’re already over budget on essence this week. Sorry about this, but I can’t let it get any worse.”

  Adah considered herself a quick thinker, but even she couldn’t process the implication of Izzy’s last sentence before she started plummeting to the ground. The magic essence she’d been relying on to fly suddenly vanished.

  So this was how she died. Not from being crushed, impaled, or sliced open by a Cruelty, but from her own mascot cutting off her magic supply and letting her splat on the concrete below.

  It never ended with this fucking pig.

  She was amazed how fast the ground could rise while she was in freefall. All the streetlamps and crosswalks had looked so small just a second ago, now they were practically in her face.

  Right when she had accepted a death by pancaking, her descent slowed to a crawl, and then a complete stop a couple feet off the ground. It seemed Izzy had opened the flow of magic essence to her again. This new flow of magic stopped after a second of stationary floating and she slammed into the ground, this time with only minimal damage to her face.

  Being alive, she immediately set to work finding a certain pig. She had “landed” at one end of an alley, so it wasn’t long before her prey came into view. Izzy waddled towards her, unaware of his imminent doom.

  “Rika was right, we are having meat for dinner tonight,” she growled. “Roast pork.”

  “I hope you don’t mean me,” he said. “This was simply the most efficient way to bring you down.”

  “You should hope I do mean you. Cooking you is the most merciful option on the table.”

  He started to read the room and took a step back, but it was far too late. It had been too late the moment he let his poor victim live.

  She pounced on him like a bobcat, and no magic tricks could possibly help him evade the bloodthirst of a magical girl so thoroughly embarrassed. Her prey captured, she set to work torturing him—tugging his ears, spinning him around like a stuffed animal, and taunting him with obscenities. By the time the rest of her team found where she’d landed, Adah had satiated her craving for revenge.

  ☆   ☆   ☆

  Once the team returned home, Adah made her way upstairs, barely managing a greeting to Grace. The other girls could handle the debrief without her. She was too tired from fighting both a Cruelty and her mascot and too depressed by the outcome of the latter to think much about mission details just yet. All she could do with the rest of the day was finish her nightly routine of pointless phone scrolling and pass out. As soon as she reached her room, she fell onto her bed with the practiced precision of an Olympic diver.

  She pulled out her phone as usual and went through the motions of her routine, hoping to find any distraction from the day’s events. That routine, however, was immediately disrupted. Strangely, she had a bunch of new notifications on her socials. She opened up the one at the top of the list—a shared post with a message that simply read: “This you?”

  Once the post loaded, she nearly threw up.

  “No, no, no,” she whispered. “No way.”

  Izzy hopped up on her bed to look over her shoulder and see whatever had her so frazzled.

  “‘Magical girl FREAKS OUT and ATTACKS her PIG,’” he read. And then, “Oh.”

  The two of them sat in silence and let the video attached to the post play out.

  The entirety of their fight in the alley was captured on camera. Although you couldn’t quite make out what Izzy was saying, all of Adah’s—that is, Starbloom’s—rage was clear as crystal. Her worst moment as a magical girl was now available online for anyone who cared to watch. The saving grace might have been that she was too unknown as a magical girl to be recognized, so the video might have vanished into obscurity after a day or two. That might have been the case, had she not already been tagged in the post.

  “I can’t believe it,” Adah said, her voice shaky. “I look like an asshole.”

  “Well,” Izzy said, “you did attack me.”

  Adah groaned, flopped down on her bed stomach-first, and buried her face in her pillow.

  “There’s no context,” she said, all muffled by the pillow. “It doesn’t even show me falling out of the sky.”

  “I’m not sure that would do wonders for your reputation either.”

  She screamed—tried to anyway, given the pillow in her face. She let her arms fall limp, giving up on this day completely, maybe giving up on everything. Her phone slipped out of her hand and dropped to the floor.

  Izzy followed it to the ground and tapped on its screen a few times with his snout.

  “I thought I was already at rock bottom,” Adah said. “But nope. Now I might not get any work at all. I should just quit. Maybe I’ll become a teacher. I’d be good with kids, right? Not that I ever got any of them as fans…”

  In the middle of her spiraling, Izzy nudged her arm that was hanging over the bedside.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t give up hope yet,” he said.

  Adah flopped around like a fish—it took her a few tries to move around enough to hang her head over the edge of the bed. She looked down at what Izzy was trying to show her: comments on her freak out video.

  “‘New favorite magical girl,’” she read the first one. “Wait, what?”

  She snatched up her phone again and started scrolling through the list:

  henshinwannabe: This is hilarious

  love4amu: queen shit

  magifan2002: what’s her @?

  Arsneezy: If I had a pig mascot, I’d be mad too

  FoggyPetals: who?

  mahowacko: Never seen an abusive magical girl before

  treadmillz: how do i apply to be her mascot?

  “What the hell… They like it,” she said. “I think?”

  There was a better way of figuring that out than reading comments. She went to her profile to check her follower count and, sure enough, it had exploded—up to 1437. Her inbox was the same story—dozens of new messages all saying similar things as in the video comments. She didn’t know what to make of some of it, but there was one theme they shared that made her heart race: “new fan.”

  And they weren’t just saying it, they were acting on it. In the time it took her to skim through her messages, her follower count had grown by another 30 or so users.

  “W-What should I do?” she asked Izzy.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, magical girls are supposed to be cute—or at least cool or charming. This isn’t any of that! I don’t want to get fans for something like this. Pureheart would never try to hit Pom or swear or anything like that. I’m like an anti-magical girl in this video!”

  All she could do was stare at the video looping on her screen and dissociate.

  “Oh,” Izzy said, suddenly standing at attention—on four legs, thankfully. “Something in my magic just changed. Check the app.”

  Adah pulled up her Magiapp, another piece of technology the mascots had helped humans set up. The Magiapp allowed magical girls to check all kinds of details related to their work, such as their active missions, the amount of magic essence at their disposal (labeled Fan Power or FP in the app), and their available spells and weapons. It was a convenient way to aggregate important info from agency records, government systems, and whatever arcane powers the mascots used to manage magic essence.

  Her current “codename” was displayed at the top of the app: Sparkling Starbloom. Next to that was a basic profile picture and below that, tabs for all her magical girl info. The label on her FP tab showed a new number for the first time in weeks—“FP: 86 ?? 135”

  How exactly the app calculated that was still a mystery to her, but it involved both her number of active fans and how well she represented “the will of humanity.” Everything with magical girls always came back to that.

  Seeing her new FP level, Adah was too shocked to smile.

  “I broke triple digits,” she said in a daze.

  In the grand scheme of magical girls, it may not have been that impressive. There were rumors that Pureheart reached over a million FP at her peak. But for Adah, who’d been languishing in the level 80’s for months, it felt like her first real step forward as a magical girl.

  “More importantly,” Izzy said, “look at your spells.”

  She clicked on the Spell tab and, for the first time in nearly four years as a magical girl, there was a second spell under [Sparkling Shot].

  [Nightwind Whip] | Spell Level 2: Carve an attack out of the wind and split open enemies with a whip that stings like the frigid night air.

  Whatever excitement she had felt at seeing her FP vanished in a puff of smoke.

  “Why did you give me a whip?” she asked, squinting at Izzy.

  “I didn’t do anything,” he said.

  “It’s your magic. Why did you give me a spell that has nothing to do with my theme? Where are the stars? The sparkles?”

  “It says ‘Nightwind,’” Izzy said. “Stars come out at night—it’s sort of connected. Besides, I don’t decide the spells.”

  “Then who does?” she asked.

  “It’s the will of humanity. Your ability to amplify magic grew because you have more fans, right? That’s because your fans are rooting for their favorite magical girl to do her best. So, if the reason you’re those people’s favorite is because of that video, then they don’t know you as a sparkly, happy-go-lucky magical girl, they know you as—”

  “A bitchy magical girl,” she finished.

  “Your words, not mine.”

  For the umpteenth time that night, Adah collapsed back onto her bed. She let loose a sigh that could suck out her soul, if only fate would be so kind. She stared at the nearest Pureheart poster, upside-down from her point of view. Pureheart looked back at her with a wink and a smile. Or was it a frown?

  “Fuck me.”