“Sing a song, Rika!” Ami bellowed between huge bites of pizza.

  “What am I supposed to sing?” Rika said. “This isn’t karaoke.”

  “Just sing something! After victory, we need a celebration song!”

  “She thinks she’s in a tavern,” Emi said.

  “Hey,” Ami said, “We’re supposed to be a band of adventurers or something like that, right?”

  “Why don’t you sing, Ami?” Adah said. “It’ll get you ready to record with Rika and I.”

  Ami stuffed her mouth with more pizza and mumbled something unintelligible through the blob of food. Presumably, she was suggesting she couldn’t sing with her mouth full.

  Whether anyone sang or not, Adah was happy to have something to celebrate tonight. After months of Pyrrhic victories, half-baked plans, and double-edged swords, every member of the Last Light was thrilled to have claimed an undeniable victory against the spider Cruelty. With everyone in such joyous spirits, the four girls, Grace, and even Seb gathered in the agency lobby that night for an impromptu party.

  Adah and Rika squeezed into one of the lobby’s leather chairs—not that either of them really minded—while Grace claimed the other for herself. Seb found himself sat in the middle of the twins on the couch, a position which Adah may have played a role in arranging.

  Completing a B-Rank mission on their own—with no collateral damage to the city to pay for—had earned the agency a massive payday, at least in comparison to what they’d been earning until this point. The six-figure payout for a B-Rank mission covered several months’ operating costs for the agency. It was hard to believe that just a couple of months ago, Adah was worried about grinding out D-Rank jobs to try to keep the company afloat. However, it now became much easier to imagine the kind of luxuries the top agencies could afford. Taking on B- and A-Rank missions on a regular basis would be lucrative on its own, but add in the earnings from television appearances, album sales, and other revenue streams like that?

  Even if only a little, Adah could understand why some magic users wanted to climb to the top of the industry at the expense of everyone else.

  Despite the influx of cash, the members of the Last Light still had a taste for the simple and convenient pleasures of life. Pizza tasted as good as any fine dining experience if you were eating it after a much deserved victory, and home sweet home was still the ideal venue for a close-knit celebration. Thus, the team ordered in and piled onto the well worn furniture of the lobby, which Adah was beginning to suspect they would never replace.

  “Oh,” Ami said after somehow swallowing the solid block of pizza. “Did you see this one yet, Emi?”

  She held her phone out, her arm reaching across Seb as if he wasn’t there at all, and Emi pushed against him to get a good look. Yet another of Adah’s plans was working out, it seemed.

  “I just ****ing hate spiders, ya know?” Ami’s voice came out of her phone speaker, her vulgarity censored. “Whenever I see one at home, I just gotta squash it as fast as I can, so that’s basically what we did here.”

  Emi’s voice followed soon after, “Padoux pest control.”

  After they’d defeated the spider Cruelty, there had been no destruction or casualties, so the news media was allowed into the plaza almost immediately. The reporters had some questions for Adah and Rika—mostly about Adah’s taunting pose toward the Department of Magic—but the bulk of their interest centered on the twins. As it should—the two of them had done almost all the work on this mission.

  Given so much time to speak, they had inevitably shared more than a few clippable quotes with the news crews, which very quickly found their way onto social media. Ami had been finding new clips on her feed all evening long and sharing them with Emi. Among these was a clip of Emi answering questions while Ami had her in a headlock, a section where one reporter kept asking Emi if she could take her outfit’s shroud down while she continuously refused and Ami laughed beside her, and a whole montage of Emi one-liners. “Padoux pest control” was yet another of these.

  The twins got their spotlight beyond simple interview clips, as well. Seb had taken the first step to making good on his promise to Emi, and sneaked his way onto a rooftop alongside the credentialed media so that he could capture photos of the twins in action. Out of all the shots he took, one stood out as a clear best: a picture of the moment Ami yanked the spider out of the air while Emi’s spears rose up from the ground. Emi’s ice glistened even more beautifully in his photo than they had in person, and the size difference between Ami and the spider made her seem to possess some kind of superhuman strength.

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  Between their endearing interview clips and the combat skills they’d shown off, the twins saw a sizable leap in their FP levels. Adah and Rika received their own increase as well, but this time they were the beneficiaries of the twins’ popularity and not the other way around.

  Twilight Heartbreak:

  12041 ?? 13002

  Lightburst Lyrika:

  11892 ?? 12654

  The Frostfist Berserker:

  8633 ?? 12711

  The Raindrop Reaper:

  8759 ?? 12711

  “Okay,” Rika whispered to Adah once they saw the changes in the twins’ FP levels, “it happening twice is just ridiculous, right? Even with five digits?”

  “Maybe Ami was right,” Adah whispered back. “This is the power of a single zygote.”

  Identical twins with identical FP—Adah wondered what the mascots would think about that.

  More important than the exact digits of their FP levels was the fact that both Ami and Emi had broken past the threshold for their first augmentation. This had given the team yet another reason to celebrate, and they had spent the time it took for their dinner to arrive to check out the twins’ options.

  Ami’s first path option was The Ram, and upgraded her [Aspis Meniscus] with exactly the kind of offensive potential she seemed to desire. This augmentation allowed her to add watery spikes to the front of her shield, turning it into a deadly sort of bulldozer. According to her Magiapp, the spikes functioned similarly to Emi’s own water spear, and dealt their damage by sending coursing water to their tips.

  Alternatively, she could choose the path of The Gate, an augmentation with a less descriptive name than its counterpart. This option enabled Ami to freeze her shields, giving them additional defensive strength and allowing her to lock them in place. She could set a shield up in one spot, then fly away and create a whole new shield while the original floated where it was. By stacking up enough of these shields, she could theoretically create a giant protective wall, one panel at a time.

  Her decision had seemed obvious to all of her teammates, but Ami had shocked them in the end by choosing The Gate.

  “I would have thought smashing into Cruelties with spikes was exactly what you were hoping for,” Adah had said. “You’ve been waiting for an offensive spell, haven’t you?”

  “Who says I won’t use this offensively?” Ami had answered with a grin. “I turned that shield into a bomb. You can bet your ass I’ve got plans for this augmentation.”

  If Ami was happy with her selection, that was all that really mattered. Even if she didn’t find an offensive use case for it, the augmentation had plenty of defensive applications for their team.

  Emi’s augmentation paths took an even more abstract approach to naming than Ami’s.

  First up was The Grave, which enhanced the water spear of her first spell with ranged capabilities. Emi could thrust her spear into a surface, sending it flowing toward a target location on that surface or a connected surface. Once the water reached its target, it would erupt from the ground similarly to the ice spears of her [Hailstorm Hex] and impale anything in its way.

  “So it comes out of the ground like a zombie?” Ami had said. “That’s why it’s The Grave?”

  “Or a tombstone,” Emi had said.

  Additional ranged options were always nice, but Emi’s second path caught her attention as well as all her teammates’. The Sleep sounded on theme in an appealing way, but its effect was what made it stand out. The augmentation imbued her spell with a toxic effect like the venom option Rika had been offered, though Emi’s functioned differently.

  Whenever she made contact with an enemy, her spear would leave a cursemark where it struck—regardless of whether it pierced any armor. At any point, Emi could then activate those marks to freeze the spots they covered with ice. If she concentrated her marks on a Cruelty’s limb, it stood to reason that she could incapacitate it in the same way Rika’s augmentation would have let her. Beyond that, if any of her attacks did pierce a Cruelty’s flesh, activating that mark would surely deal significant damage to them.

  It was the kind of upgrade that would require testing to make full use of, but playing around with new spells was half the fun of being a magical girl. Emi selected The Sleep without much debate. Adah could practically see in the girl’s eyes her imagination playing out a battle where she stabbed a Cruelty all over before freezing it entirely by activating dozens of cursemarks. That was something Adah would love to see, too.

  While Adah and Rika hadn’t hit any breakpoints of their own, they’d gained a solid boost in FP from the mission. Right now, the increase in public support that represented was more important than whatever the tangible increase in magic power was. That was where Adah’s focus was at the moment. If she wanted to catch up in level to someone like Sheffa, it was for the recognition, not the raw strength.

  Magic wouldn’t solve her most pressing problem. Ousting Thibault and changing the way Region 4 thought about its magic users was going to require a different kind of power.

  “You got a message,” Seb said out of the blue.

  Ami’s phone was still in front of his face, and Emi was still leaning against him. Adah almost sighed—why was he focusing on a phone of all things right now? Couldn’t he read a mood?

  There was no need to think about how long it had taken her to make a move on Rika, though…

  “‘Crazy Clothes Lady?’” Emi read aloud.

  “Oh, that’s just Lina,” Ami said, pulling her phone back. “Wonder what she wants.”

  Ami then proceeded to read Lina’s message aloud. She had a surprising knack for replicating the designer’s rambling cadence.

  “‘You’ve done it! You’ve solved it for me! It all makes sense now. I wanted to be the one, but it was you instead. You shattered the mirror. I understand everything now.’ Uh, then she wrote ‘yes’ like ten times. After that, she says, ‘I will see you all next week, and you will see yourselves like you’ve never seen yourselves before.’”

  Everyone in the room fell silent. Seb, who had never met the designer before, scrunched his brow and alternated looking at each of the twins.

  “So, I’m just not gonna respond to this,” Ami said, shrugging.

  That was probably a wise course of action.