Adah held her free hand in front of her face and flexed her fingers. The white silhouette moved exactly as she would have expected her normal body to. What she was seeing was herself, beyond any doubt. The scythe, too, appeared to her as an inverted shadow. Both her body and the weapon were devoid of any features, like all of their texture and depth had been painted over with some luminous white paint.

  But why could she see herself in this way? Those white dots in the distance were surely other Cruelties, perhaps as far away as the other end of the country. If whatever power had taken over her vision was detecting beings that were expending magic essence, then she would have expected to see more “stars” for the magic users fighting those Cruelties. At the very least, her own teammates would have transformed by now for their television appearance. Adah had lost all sense of direction while surrounded by this black void, but no matter where she turned, she saw no white lights that she could attribute to another human.

  In that case, was her own appearance altered because the scythe was feeding her essence harvested from Cruelties? Or had something else shifted in her real body? Maybe she really had traveled elsewhere, to a plane only Cruelties could normally travel. She’d have to wait until she saw herself from the camera drones’ perspectives to get a clearer idea.

  In the meantime, she couldn’t lose sight of the reason she’d called upon the scythe’s power in the first place. She had a Cruelty to destroy.

  If altering her vision or appearance was all the scythe’s inward ability could do, she might need to ask for a refund. However, it was only a moment after thinking about her desire for a greater power that Adah felt her heartbeat pound again. The feeling of her own pulse seemed to intensify in tune with her desire in the same way that the scythe’s handle would when exercising its outward power. That thumping pulse always preceded the summoning of black hands to exert her will.

  But if it was her own body resonating with her will, and the eye of smoky magic had fused with her own retina, then that made Adah herself the weapon.

  She couldn’t conjure hands to do her bidding, but Twilight Heartbreak did have plenty of other tools at her disposal.

  “I don’t want some minor upgrade,” Adah whispered to herself. For some reason, talking aloud helped ground her thoughts as she floated in this black void. “I already got a taste of that from Iris’s spell. I don’t care how much essence it costs me, I want to do something I couldn’t without you. I’ve fed you well, now show me what your loyalty looks like.”

  She couldn’t help but feel embarrassed talking to her weapon like that, but it had grown to feel like a living thing to her. The nature of magic essence and the fact the scythe contained a heartbeat certainly contributed to that. Besides, this was the sort of tone Heartbreak would need to take with her fans at some point. She was going to call on their aid sooner rather than later, so better to practice her speech when she wouldn’t be judged.

  With her mind focused on her mission once more, Adah held her hand out toward the white silhouette of the vulture Cruelty. Chasing after it would be annoying, given the airborne agility most bird Cruelties possessed. Even once she got in range for her [Nightwind Whip], the vulture would try to evade her or counterattack with its talons, making Adah’s job more difficult than it needed to be.

  The simplest solution—if her scythe’s power could enable it—was to bring the Cruelty to herself. Then, before the monster had a chance to react, she could destroy it in one fell swoop.

  Adah visualized the sequence of spells. She played out all the steps that would need to happen to make her plan succeed. Her idea went beyond anything her magic was normally capable of, which made it the perfect test case for the scythe’s power. All that was left was to exert her will.

  She cast her [Sparkling Strike], and the shape of a white star appeared in her palm. The star shot toward its target: a space in the void just in front of the vulture Cruelty. Although Adah had only cast her spell a single time, the energy required to cast it again and again surged through her body, ending with a shiver in her arm. That had been her will—to unleash an onslaught of attacks. More and more stars appeared and then fired from her palm, one after another in a rapid succession, each blazing through the air and arriving at their destination before the next had even finished forming.

  Yet, the goal of this onslaught wasn’t to injure the Cruelty. It was to drag it toward Adah.

  Thanks to the augmentation The Doom, Adah’s star attacks each imploded into miniature black holes, beginning with the projectile nearest to the Cruelty. She had targeted each cast of her spell such that they formed a line leading from the Cruelty to a spot just in front of Adah. The first attack pulled the bird closer to the next, which imploded in turn and pulled the bird farther along. The stars died in sequence, yanking the Cruelty across the sky like a chain reaction that mimicked telekinesis.

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  Such a method, from the speed of the stars to the number she had summoned in such a short span, would have normally been impossible for Adah. She had the scythe’s power to thank for this, and she hoped her weapon could help her to an even greater degree with her next attack.

  While the stars brought her prey to her, Adah held her free hand to the sky and called upon her [Nightwind Whip]. In this void, her black magic blended into the world around her, but she could still feel the power of her spell gathering. So far, the scythe’s enhancement had helped her activate her whip faster than she normally could. While that was useful in its own way, it wasn’t enough to satisfy Adah.

  If that faux telekinesis had been a show of skill, then this attack needed to be an overwhelming display of power. She was aiming for destruction on the level of Rika’s max power railgun.

  She wanted to let her magic burst in a cloud of blackness that could block out the setting sun and plunge the world outside into a darkness as complete as the void around her now.

  To let Thibault and all his allies know that this was the level of strength they were up against. Twilight Heartbreak’s power wasn’t political clout or social standing, nor a silver tongue and charming smile. She was simply a weapon aimed at the core of every Cruelty. Once they saw what she was capable of, it’d be up to them if they felt confident enough to stand in her way.

  She channeled those feelings into her spell, and the scythe’s energy responded in kind. The surge of power that felt like a shiver when casting [Sparkling Strike] now became a relentless shaking, like her arm was a loose piece of machinery about to rocket off from her body. The strength of the essence she was pouring into this spell exceeded anything her body had grown accustomed to. Even at her largest jumps in FP, she had never felt such a gap between the magic at her disposal and her ability to control it.

  Luckily, she wouldn’t need much control today. Her sequence of star attacks had forced the vulture Cruelty into a space in the void right in front of Adah. The beast’s shining white form filled her vision; at this range, there was no chance of her [Nightwind Whip] missing. All that was left to do unleash the spell.

  Adah swung her left hand down and squeezed her scythe’s handle tight with her right hand. That weapon felt like her anchor in this void, a steady and familiar presence as the rest of her body shook with the magnitude of her magic.

  She wasn’t sure what happened once the whip smacked against the Cruelty’s body.

  The few spots of light in this void—the bright shape of the vulture and the tiny dots in the distance—all vanished. Or, more likely, they were covered by the fallout from Adah’s attack. All sound, even the words of her own thoughts, were also washed away by an impenetrable white noise. It wasn’t the sound of an explosion or the ringing of an aftershock, nor was it even loud. The noise was simply overpowering, as if it neutralized all other sound waves. Whether or not the normal world saw and heard what Adah did, she couldn’t be sure, but in this void, all of her senses had been overwritten by nothingness.

  The impact of her spell flung her backward—that much she was sure of. She couldn’t guess how fast or far, blinded as she was, but it took her many seconds to regain control over her own flight again.

  By the time she steadied herself in the air, some light and color had returned to her vision. These were the colors of the normal world, not the monochrome void she had been in moments ago. A pale moon, the dark green pines of nearby trees, a pink pig who had just appeared by her side.

  At a distance that must have been several hundred feet away, the smoky remnants of her whip’s impact were just now beginning to disperse. The cloud her attack had left behind could have put any of the white puffs in the sky above to shame, and likely had taken up even more space a few moments ago.

  As she admired the scale of destructive power she had just exerted, Adah suddenly grew lightheaded. She floated down to the rolling fields below to sit and steady herself. When she touched down on the ground, the scythe in her hand pulsed once. Her weapon’s heartbeat was almost as weak as it had been after she had claimed its first Cruelty core. Just how much had she asked of it during this battle?

  “What did you just do?” Izzy asked her, standing in the grass next to her.

  “I’m not really sure,” Adah said, finding herself suddenly short of breath. “But I feel a lot better now that I’ve done it.”

  She looked up and watched the remainder of her magic’s cloud dissipate. Once the blackness had cleared away, no sign of the vulture Cruelty remained.

  “What did that feel like for you?” Adah asked. “Did you feel all that extra power in me?”

  “Watching you now, I am certain I did not feel it the way you did,” he said. “I sensed a rush of essence, but it did not pass through me. It was as though… well, as though some other being had connected with you. Not another of my kind, but some being with a similar ability. I cannot describe it.”

  “That must have been the scythe,” Adah said. “It probably felt a little like a mascot because you guys created it.”

  “Perhaps,” Izzy said.

  He sounded like he was debating saying something more but had decided against it. Knowing him, he was probably worried about how the other mascots would react once they saw what her weapon was capable of. Adah could have pressed him to speak his mind, but the concerns of the Keteriel weren’t her priority right now. Let them gossip over her weapon and spells if they liked. This show of force could be even more evidence for them: humanity could wield magic far better than even the most “talented” among them.

  Besides, she had a far more important message to deliver tonight.

  Adah searched above herself for the pair of camera drones that had been filming her earlier. Thankfully, the blast from her whip hadn’t knocked them out of the sky—they were still surveying the scene. If that footage hadn’t been broadcasted already, it surely would be in the next few minutes.

  By the time she reached the MGC studios, the whole region could have witnessed the next evolution of Twilight Heartbreak.