Arriving at the sea life centre by the beach, Meg scanned the area for mischief makers. A lone woman had collapsed on the pavement, and two young men seemingly out getting drunk had fallen in the road as they crossed. Meg spent a moment dragging them to the pavement, made sure the woman was okay, then jumped to a nearby roof.

  Sea World was one of Kamogawa’s main attractions as far as tourism went, putting on various shows involving dolphins, orcas, seals, and other sea life. During the day this place was filled with many voices, both human and animal, but at night it felt eerie. The moon cast odd shadows, its cold white light illuminating the most mundane of objects in ways that made them feel far more threatening.

  She jumped down to one of the large, circular pools. “Where is it…?”

  “I thought one of you would turn up,” came a voice. A female voice.

  Meg jumped, looking wildly about, her nostrils once again filled with the salty scent of seawater. The voice had come from one of the Sea World buildings further down the beach, where a young woman around her age sat on the edge of the roof. Meg glared up at her. “You people sure like roofs, huh?”

  The young woman who had spoken shifted, bringing a hand up to her mouth as she yawned in an entirely-too-bored manner. She focused her gaze on Meg. “A roof is convenient for looking down on those beneath you.” Her hair was pink, much to Meg’s surprise. Not a dyed pink either, more of a natural cerise shade, the sort of colour one might see in a coral reef. Combined with the amber eyes, she had an otherworldly, exotic look.

  “Wow… she might actually be worse than Tear,” Meg muttered.

  “I’d really rather not have to deal with you, so if you’d just run along, that would be lovely,” the girl said, making some vague shooing motions with a hand.

  Meg had to stifle a brief laugh despite the situation. “You’re like… the most unenthusiastic villain I’ve ever seen.”

  The girl merely shrugged. “I don’t have the energy to care. Got a job to do if I want to go home, but that doesn’t mean I have to work overtime.” While her speech came across as bored, it also carried a distinct hint of haughtiness, a condescending arrogance Meg found even more annoying than Tear’s smugness.

  Spying an opportunity to learn about their ostensible enemy, she investigated further. “You’re trying to go home as well?”

  “Maybe. What’s it to you?”

  “I just thought we don’t need to be enemies. I can help—”

  The pink-haired girl’s expression soured. “You can’t help. Don’t bother pretending you can.”

  “You don’t know that!” Meg snapped, pointing a finger at her.

  “Are you from my world? No? Then how can you possibly help?”

  “I’m guessing you’re from Ereth?” Meg hazarded.

  “Maybe.”

  “I know someone who’s from there, it’s possible she can hel—”

  “That girl who’s been getting in our way every time we try and collec—carry out our tasks? No, thank you.”

  Meg wasn’t sure the girl’s expression could turn any more sour, but she had somehow managed it. “Can you at least tell me why you’re doing this? What purpose—?”

  The girl jumped to her feet and glared at her. “Looking for love.” With that, she bounded away into the night, revealing her hair to be so long that it fell to her ankles, flowing behind her like a cape as she jumped from building to building. A final echoing comment rang out in the night. “I’ll let you get acquainted with my friend for now, I really don’t have any inclination to play with you myself.”

  “Looking for love? What’s that supposed to mean?” Meg muttered. “And I never even asked her name. And I let her cut me off three times in a row. I’m really not very good at this, am I?” She emitted a silent sigh and cast about for the aforementioned friend.

  She expected an elemental. And while she did indeed receive one, it was different to the previous several she had so far encountered. This one floated with no visible means of support, vaguely dolphin-shaped, but—Meg swallowed—it had apparently had its skeleton attached to the outside.

  A translucent blue skin showed none of the usual bits and pieces Meg might reasonably assume a living creature should have inside them; it appeared empty, lifeless, hollow. The off-white skeletal structure covered its body from head to tail, and the usual biomechanical parts she had become familiar with were nowhere to be seen.

  Backing away, she muttered, “I wonder if its form depends on the one controlling it or something?” She made a mental note to talk to Emilia about this in the near future. For now, she needed to focus.

  The creature emitted an odd noise, sort of how Meg imagined a dolphin might sound if trapped in an echo chamber with the reverb turned up to max. It rapidly closed the distance, its faceless gaze again giving her the creeps. Opening its mouth to reveal lines of razor sharp teeth more akin to a shark, it fired a spray of water at near-hypersonic speed.

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  Meg was slammed into the wall behind her, cracking the plaster, a pained gasp escaping her mouth. Dropping back to the floor, she managed to anticipate the next attack, moving in time to avoid it as her whole body ached, though she noted that the pain was dulled, as though the magic coursing through her acted as a powerful nocio-suppressor.

  Releasing three blasts of fire, Meg dashed towards the sea-facing edge of the area, attempting to move the fight away from Sea World itself. The creature followed, firing jets of water as it did so, adjusting the velocity and impact by opening or closing its mouth by tiny amounts. Another stream scythed out and cut a lamp post in half, which thudded into the sand with a brief spark of electricity.

  Meg swore. “Water can cut metal!?”

  She jumped and dodged as best she could, firing her own attacks off in return. The creature blocked them with bursts of water each time. Another dodge, and she gathered all her energy together to fire one more blast, a wide-area firestorm that covered the creature in searing flame. It screamed, shattering several windows.

  Seeing her opportunity, Meg used the Fireblaster—the name she had privately given to the machinegun-like attack she had practised earlier, much to her own minor naming embarrassment—to pepper the elemental with a dozen shots, piercing its thick skeletal hide and puncturing the translucent body. It exploded, raining water across the entire area and dousing Meg’s own flames, producing a cloud of steam.

  She collapsed to the sand just as Emilia arrived, bouncing her way over the buildings to find her partner out of breath, out of magic, and almost out of luck.

  “You okay, Meg?” Emilia said, crouching to give some support.

  “Yeah… that one was just a bit more powerful than I expected,” Meg mumbled, panting.

  “Was that annoying man here again?”

  “No… this time it was a girl about our age. Long pink hair. Gold eyes. Kind of irritating.” Meg fell back to lie flat, staring up at the stars. “And she had a different type of elemental, too.” She did her best to describe it.

  “Another one, huh? I’ll let Lifa know, she’s channelling some of Blue’s power to fix up the lighthouse right now. She’ll be here soon.” Emilia glanced over to where the fight had taken place and frowned. The elementals, both those she had seen directly and the one Meg had just described, looked awfully similar to something from her own world.

  “It felt way more dangerous this time,” Meg said, tilting her head to look at her friend.

  “You made the right choice. You thought it’d probably be a water type, right? That’s why you chose this one? We need to fight to our strengths, but you also need to build your magical stamina a bit more.”

  “I can’t afford to run out of magic during a fight, can I?” Meg mumbled, half-asleep.

  “Not when it’s your life on the line,” Emilia said, taking her friend’s hand and squeezing.

  Lifa arrived and issued a brief sigh. “Really, now, we can’t have you burning yourself out like this.”

  A magic top-up later and Meg was back on her feet, her body still complaining at the prior abuse.

  “It appears you had a considerably more difficult experience this time,” said Lifa. “You did well.”

  “I’ve got uni in the morning,” Meg said, releasing her transformation and bracing for all the pain to rush back at once. It didn’t, thankfully; she very much knew she’d been exerting herself, and her back felt bruised, but overall it appeared that the magic had strengthened her enough to avoid serious injury. “Well, it’ll be fine, it’s just one lecture.” The lecture wasn’t the problem, though. Sleeping would be the problem, regardless of how tired she felt.

  Emilia reverted her own form and again took her partner’s hand. “You’re welcome at the mansion whenever you like. If you need some company, come straight round.”

  “Quite so, yes,” Lifa said, channelling some of Blue’s power to fix up the damage caused by the water elemental, pulling broken glass and shattered concrete from the area and morphing them back into their original shapes. With this completed, she floated in the direction of the mansion.

  “Thanks, both of you!” Meg said, happy despite the danger of the past hour. Then she walked home with her partner, eager for their next training session together.

  ☆ ☆ ☆

  At an abandoned warehouse on the edge of town, surrounded by trees reaching all the way to the heavily forested base of Mount Atago, the pink-haired woman arrived, slipping through a rusted sliding metal door and into the building itself. Cavernous and dark, illuminated in places by bright spots of white moonlight pouring through gaps in the broken roof, the warehouse had clearly not seen use in many years.

  She shambled forward, reaching the centre of the structure where a threadbare sofa and several ancient armchairs, all in surgical pink, had been arranged to face each other. Between them, a rickety coffee table made from cheap pine stood, upon which were several candles providing a gentle flickering light that Meg would probably have found quite romantic.

  Around the rest of the cavernous structure, various debris was strewn; sheets of metal, old wooden crates and pallets, empty paint tins, a few errant tools, even a rusty old forklift missing its rear wheel. And permeating the air throughout the whole building, a musty smell of mould and dead rats.

  The girl made her way to one of the armchairs and flopped down, putting her feet up on the table. “I’m back.”

  Tear lay comfortably along the sofa reading a magazine. He tilted his head a little to stare at the new arrival. “You’re late, Kabane. Problems?”

  “Ran into your little friend.”

  A wry smile appeared on Tear’s cold lips. “Which one?”

  Kabane irritably waved a hand. “Ponytail? Seems to enjoy poking her nose into other people’s business?”

  “Oh, the fiery one,” Tear said, and went back to his magazine.

  “Shouldn’t you do something about them before they get in our way any further?” she added, glaring at him.

  A third figure, silently relaxing in a chair out of the direct candlelight to one side, spoke in a soft yet firm female voice. “Keep them away from the Loconds, but avoid harming them if possible. We’ve lost enough already, I won’t inflict the same on this world. Earth is already too far along that path without our interference making it worse.”

  “Must we? Sounds like a pain,” murmured the pink girl.

  “We must. Our mission is more important than any of our individual lives, Kabane,” the shadowy figure said.

  Tear sat upright and swung his legs off the sofa, tossing the magazine onto the table. “I dislike having the Loconds fight for me anyway. I’ll be interested to see how that fire girl handles herself in a real fight.”

  The girl addressed as Kabane—pronounced with three short, distinct syllables, ka-ba-ne—gave a lazy shrug. “Feel free, if it means I don’t need to exert myself.”

  “Tear runs interference while Kabane collects, then,” the shadowy figure, who appeared to be their leader, said. “There are two of them now, be careful.”

  Her subordinates confirmed this—with fervour in Kabane’s case, less so in Tear’s—and made plans for their next excursion.