A line of deep scarlet streaked straight out from the ball of light in the distance, scorching a path directly into the head of the scorpion. The new line of light burst against the scorpion’s carapace like a firework and obliterated a portion of the exoskeleton. The force of the impact staggered the monster to the point Adah thought it might topple over.

  The line had appeared all at once, perfectly unbroken, but Adah knew it was actually the trail of a projectile. In part, she knew because of the blast of wind that blew in the wake of the trail’s appearance. But more surely, she knew because this attack was familiar to her.

  [Renova Railgun]

  Adah hadn’t seen the spell in action many times before, but just once was enough to never forget it. The railgun fired a bullet of light propelled by unrestrained magic energy conducted in the body of a magical girl. Unlike most other spells, which capped out at a certain strength depending on their level, the railgun’s speed and strength were limited only by its caster’s spirit. The spell was all the more unforgettable on account of the girl who wielded it: the true star of the Spotlight Sunbright agency. The girl who had unlocked a second spell long before anyone else on this battlefield, and remained—in Adah’s heart if nothing else—their absolute ace.

  “Rika!”

  Adah flew towards the light as fast as her magic could take her, nearly forgetting to keep her distance from the Cruelty, which was still reeling from the devastation of Rika’s railgun. The twins stayed where they were, perhaps too shocked to fully comprehend what had happened. After all, that was the first time they had seen the true strength of the magical girl Lyrika.

  The red light surrounding Rika’s body faded but did not extinguish, lingering like the final embers of a campfire. Rika herself was hunched over, catching her breath from the vast expenditure of magic her railgun required. This did nothing to stop Adah from ramming into her at near top speed and sending the two of them spinning through the air as she hugged Rika tight.

  Once their momentum finally came to a halt and Rika managed to overcome the coughing fit their rowdy embrace brought on, Adah couldn’t help but laugh in relief.

  “I was so sure I screwed up,” she said.

  “A dumb idea like this would only work on someone dumb like me,” Rika grumbled.

  “Funny way to say great minds think alike.”

  Rika’s eyes and cheeks were both as red as the magic aura around her. She only glanced at Adah a moment before struggling out of her hug and floating a short distance away.

  “For the record, I haven’t made up my mind,” she mumbled. “But I figured I should make some extra money first either way. Waitressing doesn’t pay great.”

  “I’m sure a girl like you would get plenty of tips,” Adah said.

  “You flirt like a motel manager,” Rika said with a sigh. Having caught her breath, she looked around the scene—first to the rapidly regenerating scorpion, then to the crowd of news crews down the street. “You really wanted to make a show of this, huh?”

  “I want you to,” Adah said as she grabbed Rika’s hand. “Show the world what Lyrika can do, what they’ve been missing out on. Fight with me, and don’t leave anything behind. Give it all that you’ve got, let it all out of you, and if you fall from the sky, I promise I’ll catch you. After that, you can make your decision.”

  Rika looked at her—truly looked at her, in that commanding way only Rika could. This was the magical girl Adah had wanted to see. This was the partner she wanted to fight alongside.

  “Then make sure you catch me,” she said.

  Adah smiled. That kind of an answer was more than enough for now. After all, Operation Spotlight wasn’t over just yet.

  “Look who decided to show up,” Ami said to them through a magic channel, as she and Emi still held their ground at the far end of the Cruelty.

  “We softened it up,” Emi added.

  In truth, they hadn’t done much of anything to the Cruelty. Even the damage from Rika’s railgun was entirely healed by this point, and the scorpion’s core was covered by a thick carapace once more. It dragged itself forward with renewed haste.

  “Unfortunately, we’re short on time in more ways than one,” Adah said. “Do you have another shot like that in you?”

  The red magic around Rika flared up slightly by way of an answer. “Just tell me when and where.”

  Adah explained what they had learned about the Cruelty so far—its defensive tactics, the threat of its stinger, and most importantly the speed of its regeneration. They were in need of an immediate follow-up to Adah’s whip, something that could deliver a precision strike even at a great distance. Something only a hotshot like Rika could provide.

  “So just aim at the center of your blast?” Rika asked her.

  “As soon as I hit, fire away.”

  “If I’m not a cowgirl, I’m just a gun-for-hire,” she said, shaking her head in mock disapproval.

  “You’re a star,” Adah said with a wink.

  Their tactic wouldn’t differ too much from previous attempts to approach the Cruelty. The twins would feign an attack on the scorpion’s front legs again, only this time Emi would make use her [Raging Ripple] rather than having Ami try to bind the monster. The shockwaves from Emi’s spell might disorient the Cruelty a bit, but the main reason behind the switch-up was that Emi could still fly fast enough to escape any potential retaliation. Ami would remain close at hand for potential support, but would otherwise stay out of danger.

  In all likelihood, the monster would counter their feint the same way it had before, rearing up and then slamming its front legs back down. If Emi’s blast disrupted this, all the better, but Adah could make her approach during the distraction either way.

  From there, Adah had no doubts that Rika could finish the job.

  The girls arranged themselves around the scorpion: the twins on its left flank and Adah on its right, with Rika at a distance behind her. The Cruelty, for its part, sensed a new offensive was coming, though it couldn’t possibly understand what Rika brought to the table. She was, even if she’d forgotten it, the powerhouse of this agency.

  With all the pieces in place, Adah gave the command to launch their assault.

  The twins shot toward the scorpion from its left side, with Emi leading the charge at a speed that must have been inspired by Rika’s railgun. Rika herself began to glow as bright as when she first arrived; even though Adah floated well in front of her, the light still flooded her peripheral vision. Ami hovered nearer the Cruelty’s hind legs as her sister rushed underneath the monster. Adah raised her hand to the sky, though she held off on summoning any magic just yet.

  Her cue came a moment later. Emi conjured a short spear of water and thrust the weapon into the road directly below the scorpion. The water spread out from the point of impact almost like a goo flattening out, and repeated blasts of magic power followed the substance in concentric waves. When these waves smacked against the legs of the scorpion, the monster reared up as a defensive measure, though its limbs were completely undamaged. That was Adah’s sign to charge up [Nightwind Whip].

  From that point on, it was too late for the Cruelty.

  The monster slammed its front half legs with tremendous force, but it was too late. Emi had zipped away and joined her sister far behind the scorpion.

  The Cruelty sensed the swirling winds of Adah’s spell not long after, and began to search for their point of congregation, but it was too late. Adah wrenched a black bolt of magic from the sky and brought it down upon the scorpion’s back.

  Beyond the cloud of smoke that bloomed after the blast, the section of carapace that had been destroyed was surely starting to regenerate, but it was too late.

  A streak of light, crimson like blood, shot through the cloud and pierced the Cruelty’s core. The attack moved so fast and the radiance of its path lingered so indefinitely, that you might have believed it to be something other than a projectile. The line appeared all together—immediately—and stayed so straight and pure, that you could believe it was simply a bone of the universe, an etching left over from a divine blueprint.

  But it was a bullet. It was launched with the force of a star that refused to die and thus burned as an eternally combusting supernova, and the light it left behind was the signature of the girl who possessed such spirit herself.

  It had been Adah’s will that the magical girl known as Lyrika would believe in that spirit.

  [Renova Railgun] could unleash all of Rika’s magic essence at once. It was a spell that could defy level limitations, if its caster had enough faith to expend all their magic on that shot. Rarely had Rika ever trusted herself to use it in such a way, which was exactly why Adah wanted her to go all out today.

  When the spell hit its mark—as it had today—it was undeniable.

  From the destroyed core, a bright red line led your eye directly to the day’s undeniable heroine.

  Silently, the Cruelty dematerialized. The only sign it had ever existed at all were the craters it left behind.

  As soon as she was certain their enemy had vanished, Adah flew up next to Rika. She seemed barely capable of holding her body upright, so Adah slipped under her arm to support her. The two of them gently floated towards the road below.

  “Guess I fell out of shape already,” Rika said after a long yawn. “I take a couple weeks off and suddenly I can’t even fly on my own.”

  Adah smiled. “More likely it’s all the magic you used up, but it looks like that might not be a problem for you soon.”

  Below them, the crowd of media from down the road had already rushed over on their motorbikes to meet the girls. By Adah’s guess, there looked to be four crews total—a small number at a distance but a daunting wall of people when they all swarmed you at once. Each crew had a video camera, hoisted up on someone’s shoulder, which they pointed at the girls as they descended. At the front of the small crowd were four newscasters armed with microphones they looked eager to thrust in front of the girls.

  “Are people usually this excited about C-Ranks?” Rika asked.

  Adah noticed one figure breaking away from the semicircle array the crowd had formed—a certain lanky, bespectacled boy. He stood in front of the reporters, closer to where Adah and Rika were likely to land.

  “I think he may have had something to do with that,” Adah said.

  Once they had landed, Seb snuck in behind them and gave a confirmation of Adah’s suspicion.

  “They’re local stations,” he whispered to the girls. “I told them that you’re aiming to be the regional rep for the IndieMagie. I might have also embellished the details a little bit.”

  Adah didn’t have a chance to ask what that meant before the four reporters up front started slinging questions their way. All their voices overlapped and, between them shouting over each other and her general exhaustion, she couldn’t understand a word of what they said. She looked to Rika for solidarity, but she was in even worse shape. Her eyes were vacant and it looked as though she’d retreated into a secret base at the back of her mind.

  Right, being the center of attention like this was her ultimate weakness.

  In a panic, Adah mimicked the only example of how to handle the press she could remember. She pointed at one of the reporters at random, like a professional athlete trying to rush through a post-game press conference.

  The woman she’d selected—the youngest looking person there, maybe only a few years older than Adah—stepped forward, introduced herself, and asked her question.

  “Sources say this was the first C-Rank mission your team took on. Were you surprised by the challenge it gave you?”

  Sources? Did she mean the nerdy-looking boy who had conveniently disappeared a second ago?

  But speaking of Seb, this was still part of the plan, wasn’t it? Building hype for the IndieMagie. Showcasing their team members. Being proper magical girls that fans could root for. Rather than being anxious, they were supposed to capitalize on these cameras and questions.

  Therefore, she needed to answer a different question first: What would Twilight Heartbreak do?

  “Huh?” Adah said, channeling a convenient bit of genuine annoyance. “Was that a serious question? We were just playing with our food while we bought time for Lyrika.”

  That was more or less true, anyway. No need to explain why they had to buy time. She pointed to the next reporter, a man wearing a suit just a little too large for him.

  “Your agency has stated you’re aiming to be the Region 4 rep for this year’s IndieMagie,” he said, though he seemed to have gotten his source confused. “What’s your plan for getting more votes than DreamRise?”

  Most likely, she shouldn’t mention their team hadn’t even finished their applications yet.

  “The fans will vote for the better team,” Adah said, though it felt like someone else talking. “Simple as that.”

  The reporter raised his eyebrows, but a tiny grin crept onto his face a moment later. He turned around and whispered something to his accompanying cameraman.

  Suddenly, something slammed into Adah from behind, and Ami’s arms appeared over her shoulders. Ami did some wild pointing of her own, though she was just indiscriminately jabbing her fingers at every camera in sight.

  “Okay, okay!” she yelled. “Any questions for the MVP’s?”

  Then Emi bumped into Adah from the left with just as much force as her sister. She held a peace sign up by her eye and said, “Hi, Dad.”

  Adah ducked out from under the pair of them and fled to the other side of Rika, who was gradually recovering from her shuttershock. By doing so, Adah inadvertently drew the first reporter’s attention back to Rika while the rest talked with the twins.

  “Lyrika,” the woman said, “earlier today you had some choice words for the DreamRise team. Quote: ‘It’s a fitting name for a team that puts you to sleep.’ Care to elaborate?”

  That quote must have been part of Seb’s “embellishment.” He would benefit from a dictionary. Or some discretion.

  Rika snapped out of her daze to shoot Adah a look of shock, which Adah read as a mixture of “How does this woman know my name?” and “What the hell am I supposed to say?”

  She put a hand on Rika’s shoulder and whispered the best advice she could come up with in the moment, “Just say something about us instead.”

  That made Rika’s eye light up once more. Usually Adah liked seeing those bright eyes, but for some reason they made her very, very scared now.

  “All I’ve got to say is this,” Rika said, grabbing Adah by the shoulders and pushing her forward. “A team is a reflection of its captain. Take a look at ours and then take a look at theirs. That’s it.”

  The reporter nodded eagerly, as if Rika had said something profoundly true. In reality, it was just profoundly provocative. Did she even know what the DreamRise captain looked like?

  Off to the side, Adah noticed Seb occasionally glancing up at them as he tapped out notes on his phone. He wouldn’t need to add much embellishment to whatever he wrote next.

  ☆☆☆

  Night came fast after they defeated the Cruelty. Their team left the battlefield as road repair crews rolled in, probably rushing to fix the craters the scorpion had left behind before sundown. When they got home, Grace’s hair was almost as much of a mess as Michel’s typically was. Adah could imagine her adjusting her ponytail ad infinitum as she watched their battle play out on the news.

  The television in the agency lobby was still turned on, and clips of their interview after the fight were already playing. Adah and Rika cringed a bit hearing their lines repeated back, while the twins cheered when they appeared on the screen. At the same time, their phones started to fill up with notifications from all the posts and comments they’d been tagged in, particularly from a set of photos Seb had shared.

  He had compiled shots of Adah hugging Rika, the twins flying together, even an impressively cinematic photo of Rika’s railgun piercing through the cloud of smoke Adah’s whip had left behind. The comments on it were the most positive Adah had seen yet, along with an expected degree of fan weirdness.

  heroineyuika: I feel like im watching an underdog sports movie with this team lol

  ? magifan2002: id never heard of any of these girls until like a week ago and now theyre in the indiemagie damn

  ? twoquickones: DreamRise hears boss music lol

  homeworkbound: LETS GO LYRIKA

  robustcombust: usually i can never pick my favorite girl on a team, but with Raindrop and Dewdrop it feels like its fine either way!

  haxan: heartbreak and the other girl…its clearly what i think it is, right?

  ? icYcaT: pls just this once let it be true

  ? pureheart_achoo: heartbreak doesn’t look very heartbroken

  doc__salt: yuri yuri yuri yuri yuri yuri yuri yuri yuri yuri yuri yuri

  obscureZen: Any time Heartbreak appears on the timeline, the app should play cheering sounds.

  ? FoggyPetals: any time you appear, it should groan

  If they were already receiving this much attention, then surely something had changed within their magic as well. A quick look at the Magiapp stunned the four girls silent. Operation Spotlight had exceeded expectations.

  At the insistence of her teammates, Adah was the one to update the whiteboard in the agency back office.

  Twilight Heartbreak

  FP: 287 ?? 1154/5000

  Shining Lyrika

  FP: 164 ?? 988/5000

  Dazzling Dewdrop

  FP: 189 ?? 782/5000

  Radiant Raindrop

  FP: 202 ?? 890/5000

  The jump in FP came for all of them that same night. This kind of progress was only possible as a result of expanding their reach beyond the confines of the local underground fandom. Now that they were becoming a known quantity and a true competitor in this year’s IndieMagie, they were getting in front of the eyes of people who didn’t normally seek out info on magical girls. These were people who only learned about new magical girls when they flipped on the local news after dinner or scrolled through a newsfeed during a bus ride.

  While perhaps not as dedicated as the hardcore fans in Seb’s circle, this group was much greater in number. Seeing the kind of growth they achieved after showing up in one news cycle, Adah’s head spun with schemes of how to get in front of that audience again. Or even larger ones.

  The leap in fans was one thing, but the day’s events had also helped resolve the most fundamental issue for the Spotlight Sunbright team.

  August

  108,500 / 95,000 CR

  Adah had always known this was a top-heavy, feast or famine industry, but that reality hadn’t been made material for her until today. One C-Rank mission brought home 75,000 Credits for their team, nearly satisfying their budget all on its own. The sum made the ten grand from a D-Rank mission seem paltry, to say nothing of the pocket change an F-Rank offered.

  “Hey Grace,” Ami said upon seeing that influx of cash. “Let’s say we took another C-Rank—how would that money get divvied up?”

  “Your contract spells it all out,” Grace said.

  This prompted the four girls to whisper among themselves to see if anyone remembered what those terms were. Details like surplus revenue hadn’t been particularly pertinent before today.

  “Don’t worry, you’ll get paid out. You won’t be taking another C-Rank for the time being, though,” their manager continued. “You’ve got other business to finish first.”

  “A party,” Emi said.

  “Paperwork,” Grace smiled back at her. “We’re still zero out of four on IndieMagie applications. You will all be finishing yours tonight.”

  “The party is tomorrow, then?” Rika asked.

  “Tomorrow is training.”

  The four magical girls complained in unison, as if competing to see who could groan the loudest. Adah swore she even heard Emi ask to be sent back the hospital. Grace, who was more accustomed to their style of collective bargaining than Michel was, simply held up a hand to silence them.

  “You talked a lot of smack today, and talked it publicly,” she said. “Unless you want to embarrass yourself in this competition, you need to be prepared to back it up. We’ve got 22 days between now and the first round of voting, and we’ll need to spend every one of them either training or promoting you.”

  None of them could argue with that. Not that Grace’s demeanor left much room for argument anyway.

  “Tomorrow night, though,” she said, “we’ll celebrate a little.”