If their team was going to take on another B-Rank, Adah wanted them to be properly prepared this time. They couldn’t scramble to take that dangerous of a job while they were focused on something else—not at their current strength, at least. Therefore, Adah made a request of Grace and her teammates: the girls should refrain from other training or work until a suitable B-Rank appeared in their region. That way, they could give the Cruelty their full attention and avoid another disaster.

  It would be a brief hiatus, just like they had given themselves when waiting for their K-Rank duo mission with DreamRise.

  The only exception to this dedicated break was their follow-up visit with Lina. As promised, the designer had made a series of precise alterations to each girl’s outfit, leaving the clothes fitting perfectly on each of their bodies. However, to Lina’s dismay more than anyone else’s, she had yet to figure out what updates she wanted to make to the twins’ outfits.

  She assured them she would find her answer in time for their photoshoot, so she still planned to go ahead with contacting her photographer. Apparently, Lina was confident that her answer wouldn’t require any major changes to the core elements of her designs. Despite Grace offering the woman as much time as she needed to create something she was happy with, Lina insisted on sticking to their schedule. A deadline forced creativity out of her, or so she said.

  Perhaps Lina’s obsession with her work wasn’t all that unique. At least, it wasn’t in the magical girl industry. Only a few days into their planned hiatus, Adah’s own teammates had grown equally restless.

  “I know you don’t wanna do any small fries,” Ami said one morning, “but isn’t there something else? What about another weird Cruelty like that bat you and Rika fought? That’d be just as important as a B-Rank, right?”

  Over the past few days, the girls had developed a bit of a routine. In the mornings, they’d all hang out in the agency lobby, hoping that their eagerness would bring them good luck in the form of a B-Rank mission. As midday approached, that eagerness was gradually replaced with boredom. The team would eat lunch together, then split and either head back to their respective rooms or one of the shops within walking distance of the agency. Their optimism returned by dinnertime, after which they’d kill time until the night swallowed the sky. Nighttime missions were more dangerous due to the dark, and both Adah and Grace agreed that was an unnecessary risk for their first solo B-Rank.

  Today marked the fifth day of their waiting, and the monotony was wearing out their patience.

  “I don’t know about any strange Cruelties,” Adah said. “We lost access to that info after I called Thibault out. Not that he was forthcoming about it in the first place.”

  “Let me crush an F-Rank, at least,” Emi pleaded. She was spread out like a starfish on the lobby floor, staring at the ceiling.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Ami agreed. “We could beat one of them with our bare fists. Get a little aggression out real quick, then be home before you know we left.”

  “If one shows up on this street, it’s all yours,” Adah said.

  “What about a two-mile radius?” Ami said. “I can fly that in a minute flat.”

  Adah sighed. She shouldn’t have opened the door to bargaining. Though, it wasn’t like her teammates’ complaints were unfounded. At a certain point, they couldn’t put off other work in hopes of snagging the perfect B-Rank. They could look for missions in the other regions, but they all had the opposite problem of Region 4—every team snatched up C- and B-Ranks as fast as they could. Besides, venturing outside their own region for work wouldn’t make the Last Light seem like local leaders at all.

  Like each day before, today was looking to be a bust. Emi was the first to stand up and move to leave, her boredom apparently reaching its limit. Just as she started walking toward the front doors, Grace suddenly shifted in her chair behind the agency front desk.

  “Wait a second,” Grace said, an urgency in her voice. “Don’t go anywhere just yet.”

  Their manager’s eyes were glued to her computer monitor, which could only mean one thing. A good mission must have popped up. All four magical girls scrambled up and practically climbed over each other to be the first to get behind Grace’s desk.

  “Good things come to those who wait,” Grace said as she pulled up the mission briefing.

  Adah looked the details over. When she got to the end, a laugh burst out of her.

  “I would’ve been fine waiting even longer if I knew it’d be this good,” she said.

  “What’s so good about this? I can’t stand spiders,” Ami said, squeezing her eyes shut.

  “Check out the location,” Rika said.

  “Good karma paying off,” Emi said.

  Adah didn’t harbor any strong feelings toward spiders, but this mission involved another creepy creature, one toward which she felt nothing but hate. The Cruelty’s energy was collecting in Region 4’s capital of Padoux, in a plaza just outside the building which housed the Department of Magic. Adah hadn’t anticipated returning to Thibault’s home base so soon, and certainly not under these circumstances.

  “Absolutely take this,” Adah said. “Thibault’s probably been evacuated somewhere extra safe, but maybe we can leave him a little something to remember us by. In any case, the results of this mission won’t be something he can ignore.”

  “In the middle of the city? Right in his backyard?” Rika said. “He’ll probably have to make a statement thanking us.”

  “I wish Cruelties didn’t vanish when they died,” Ami said. “I’d love to leave this thing’s head on his desk.”

  Grace leaned back in her seat and said, “I signed you up for it the moment I saw it. I thought it’d get you girls motivated, but remember what you’re dealing with here. A B-Rank is still a B-Rank. Carry that energy into your battle, but save the celebrations for after. Just like last time: I want you all home tonight.”

  “Tonight?” Adah said. “We’ll be back before you finish lunch.”

  ☆☆☆

  Adah had never seen her teammates fly so fast while simply traveling. The twins kept pulling ahead at a pace they usually reserved for the most intense moments of a battle, and even Adah was having trouble keeping up. She had to remind them not to overdo it. They had all reached an FP level where they no longer had to worry about burning through their essence reserves through mere flight, but a B-Rank was no trifling enemy. It was still wise to save as much energy as possible for the battle itself.

  “Gah,” Ami groaned. “I really do hate spiders, though. And this one’s gonna be huge.”

  “You didn’t have a problem with the water strider or scorpion,” Adah said. “Aren’t those kind of like spiders?”

  “Completely different,” Ami said. “A spider’s just… eugh.”

  She shivered to prove her point. Actually, it was probably involuntary.

  Adah thought about reassuring Ami that Cruelties usually differed in appearance from their animal counterparts, in more ways than just being completely gray. However, in the case of this spider Cruelty, that fact could potentially make her arachnophobia worse.

  This variant appeared to be based on the essence of a black widow, which had to be among the worst kinds for a spider hater. The Cruelty also had a carapace of plated armor all over its body, adding another layer of intimidation to its already frightening form. This Cruelty was like the scorpion or hydra variants in that way. It seemed that this kind of plating was almost standard among the higher rank Cruelties, probably out of necessity. That was no problem—Adah would much prefer dealing with some armor than the doubling regeneration of the hydra.

  That wasn’t to say the spider had no special tricks of its own, however. As one might expect with such a variant, the true threat of the spider Cruelty came with its web-spinning. The monster’s spinnerets could extrude the sticky silk at a speed to match Adah’s [Sparkling Strike], providing it with a ranged attack in addition to its fangs and legs. Getting hit with a giant spider web wouldn’t be so problematic on its own, but the Cruelty’s webs were no static structure.

  When the webs latched onto a surface, they moved with a mind of their own, wrapping around their target without the spider itself having to do anything. If a magic user got hit by a web, chances were the silk would coil around them before they could break free, leaving them mummified and most likely suffocated.

  The webs weren’t merely offensive either. The spider knew how to use them for both fast traversal and as defensive barriers to hide from incoming attacks. The speed with which the monster could produce these webs allowed for all sorts of tricks like that.

  But the tougher this thing was, the cooler the Last Light could look.

  Adah and her teammates arrived at the concrete plaza outside the Department of Magic building after what felt like quite a short flight. The area looked just as it had when Adah had come here with Iris a couple of weeks ago, only now the plaza was completely empty. No office workers on an early lunch break, no cars rolling down the street at the far end of the plaza, no activity of any kind. Between the bleak brutalist architecture and the absence of human life, this little corner of the capital felt like a ghost town left behind by a fallen empire.

  And just like with a ghost town, one of nature’s most opportunistic squatters had set up shop there. Hanging directly above the bubbling fountain at the center of the plaza, suspended on a bridge of webs it had spun between the government offices and a high-rise at the opposite end of the plaza, was the gray spider Cruelty. Suspended in the air like that, the monster almost looked like a UFO—a particularly creepy UFO.

  Upon seeing the creature, Ami roared and punched her thighs with both hands. Adah guessed this wasn’t a battle cry so much as a means to overwhelm her body’s repulsion toward spiders. It seemed to do the trick—Ami managed to stare down the Cruelty after.

  “Let’s test the water,” Adah suggested. “We’re going to need some heavy firepower to punch through its armor, but let’s start with a safe opening volley and see how it reacts. Scatter, shoot, and regroup—okay?”

  Her teammates all shouted in the affirmative, then flew apart to do as they’d planned. Ami assumed a frontline position—close enough to draw most of the spider’s attention, but far enough to reliably block or dodge its attacks. Adah and Rika took up the wings of their formation, while Emi positioned herself center behind her sister.

  As the girls finished setting up, Adah heard the faint buzzing of a camera drone flying overhead. She glanced around to find a couple news crews hiding out on the roofs of buildings beyond the evacuation limits, too.

  Perfect. Let there be as many eyes on this battle as there had been for the hydra. The Last Light was going to show the world a very different kind of fight today.

  “Keep it safe,” Adah reminded her team. “We’re just studying for now. You all ready?”

  Rika and Emi shouted their agreement again, while Ami just screamed to overwhelm her nerves again. What was it Michel had said? If it works, it works…

  The girls broke apart a moment later. Adah and Rika let loose with their [Sparkling Strike] and [Shining Shot] respectively, while the twins advanced behind the cover of Ami’s shield. Adah and Rika had sent their spells at the spider directly, but it looked like the twins were aiming for one of the webs connecting the Cruelty to the Department of Magic’s building.

  Emi swung the ax form of Mercury’s Majesty at the web and managed to slice clean through it. At the same time, the Cruelty jabbed at her with one of its front legs, which Ami deflected cleanly with her shield. With one of its support webs severed, the spider began to swing downward, hanging just to a single web now. Its fall only lasted a second, though. As it had jabbed at the twins, another web had shot out from its spinneret, connecting to yet another building in the blink of an eye. The beast was firmly supported again, and scurried along its web away from the twins.

  Adah and Rika’s projectiles had performed about as well as Adah had expected, bursting against the monster’s carapace without causing much damage. The black hole effect from [Sparkling Strike] had contributed to throwing the spider slightly off-balance, however, which Adah made a note of.

  As planned, the four girls regrouped at the edge of the plaza immediately after these opening moves.

  “It’s even grosser than I thought it’d be,” Ami said.

  “But as far as Cruelties go, it’s not as scary as it could be,” Rika said. “It helps not to be at a disadvantage as soon as we arrive.”

  “No extra heads from the get-go,” Emi agreed.

  It was true—the panic that had consumed the battlefield from the start of their fight against the hydra was completely absent today. They had time to evaluate their enemy and to develop a proper strategy. So what had they learned?

  The spider was fast, with a flexible form of mobility to boot. Its attacks were deadly up close and at range. That armor would take some serious firepower to break through, and Adah hadn’t spotted many gaps in its plating. The capabilities of this Cruelty’s body alone posed enough of a threat to make it a B-Rank, but its webs were yet another hazard on top of that. Getting caught in one, or hit by a shooting line, was quite possibly a death sentence.

  Despite all of that, Adah had never felt so confident.

  Her team wasn’t on the back foot, and Adah already saw multiple paths to victory. She sensed the same confidence from her teammates—they all believed beyond a doubt that they would beat this monster.

  This was how their first B-Rank should have felt. This sense of certainty was what they had spent the past couple of months working for. They had earned the right to be magical girls who destroyed their opponents in an absolute rout.

  And today, they had the perfect audience to watch them show off. They just had to decide how they wanted to do so.

  “Adah, I have an idea,” Emi said, as if reading her mind. “I’ve been practicing with my [Hailstorm Hex]. Pushing the limits. I just…”

  Adah realized Emi wasn’t speaking out loud. She had said all this to Adah through a channel, privately.

  “That sounds perfect to me,” Adah replied through the same channel. “What do you need from us?”

  “I need Ami’s help.”