Chapter 9: Chapter Nine

(9)

The sound of wood repeatedly impacting against wood settled down to heavy breathing in the large, open room. The redhead held her practice weapon in an aggressive stance with frustration on her face. The brunette held a more defensive position and her expression was passive. Both, however, were showing signs of heavy exertion, sweat beading on their necks and foreheads as they took effort to restrain their breathing to long, deep breaths.

Natsumi gave away that she was going on the attack again when she held her breath for a moment too long, then let out a shout as she moved in, bringing her sword down in a heavy overhand blow, but the brunette was already stepping to the side, coming up to thrust at her sparring partner’s exposed flank. The redhead narrowly managed to twist and bat it away, leading to another rapid exchange of strikes, parries and ripostes that would have been difficult to lay out individually.

Homura was an extremely aggressive fighter, and while normally, she would certainly describe herself the same way, the brunette was heavily dedicating herself to the defensive, striking where the redhead’s hostility left her exposed rather than risk committing to defending against one of those heavy blows. Yet Natsumi left few openings and was remarkably quick to defend against them when she tried to target them, and over the better part of half an hour, this on-again, off-again exchange of theirs had produced few definitive blows for either side.

A timer sounded from against one wall, and the girls broke apart, dropping their stances. Natsumi watched her for several long moments as she caught her breath before she spoke, her words sounding nearly accusatory. “You’re trained.”

She brought the sleeve of the gi across her forehead to prevent sweat from running into her eyes. “So are you.” She had arrived with a duffel bag of her gym clothes, but Natsumi had taken one look at it and fetched a spare of proper attire. It was certainly appreciated, she had been dismayed, but not surprised, that her closet had no such clothing, and she had to say this felt much more appropriate, even if they had foregone helmets.

“I’m supposed to be,” was the redhead’s immediate answer. “Nariko Kelly never set foot inside a place like this unless it was under protest. She had her lightning and that was all she needed.”

The sentence was stated sarcastically, of course, and a place like this was the dojo Natsumi studied at. As she had explained it, the old building had been in her family for generations, but her grandfather had employed teachers, usually former students themselves, rather than run it first hand as he’d gotten older. Technically, the family still owned it, but her own father had been interested in more modern pursuits like his soda shop, and her older sister hated fighting. Oh, both still had the training as children, but it sounded like it really raised her grandfather’s spirits when his second granddaughter took more active interest.

Back in the present, the brunette scoffed at Natsumi’s criticisms. “That wasn’t really an option for me,” she pointed out. “I’m afraid I had a notable lack of Zeus powers.”

“Hmph,” was the noncommittal reply as they went over to their water bottles. “Maybe it would have done her ego good to be powerless. It made her pretty conceited.” She took a drink and then pointed the bottle at her. “Would you believe she actually thought her analysis power was good enough for it?! She just assumed that she could see where she needed to move and do it! That training how to do it would have been a waste of her blessed time!”

She was careful to sip rather than guzzle. Again, she couldn’t recall details, but she was fairly certain it had been a long time since she’d fought anyone who gave her as much of a challenge as Natsumi had. “That sounds pretty outrageous,” she agreed, though she wouldn’t say out loud she could see how Nariko would have come to such a conclusion. “I’m good at reading an opponent’s tells, sure, but I’d rather know how to use that information rather than waste the opportunity mulling it over.”

“Exactly!” The redhead was getting worked up all over again. “But you couldn’t tell Miss Know-It-All something like that!” And then she just deflated, flopping down onto a bench. “I’d like to have punched her in the mouth just to prove her wrong. Tried to a couple times, but she’d move somewhere that made it inconvenient just before I acted on it, smirking at me the whole time as if she’d done something clever.”

“I’m starting to see why Dakunaito can’t stand her, either,” she related. It could have been biased feedback, sure, but Nariko was really starting to sound like a smarmy troll, and not in the fun way.

“I hate to imagine having any common ground with a demon,” Natsumi agreed, “but I can absolutely understand him wanting her head on a pike. I swear, I never witnessed one exchange between them she didn’t spend antagonizing him.”

She turned toward the other girl, whose face was identical to the girl she was railing against. “Maybe I’ll try harder to encourage her to get into martial arts when we get her back. Don’t get me wrong, I can absolutely see her in you. Even though I’ve never seen her specifically in the ring, I can even see her right down to the way you fight. I can tell, just by our sparring, it’s how she’d do it. The way your eyes move just ahead of the rest of your body, that light of recognition just before you commit. It’s hard to believe anyone could be so exactly like someone else and never meet them.” She leaned back again as she rolled her water bottle back and forth between her hands. “But it sure seems to have done wonders for you. You’re a lot more humble and you have a lot more self-control.”

Natsumi’s attempt to take a drink was interrupted by the brunette’s barking laughter. “Hah, it hurts my pride to admit to it, but it wasn’t martial arts that did that for me. I used to be a really arrogant fighter, thought I was so smart because why couldn’t everyone see what their opponent was going to do? Didn’t they understand that winning was just about seeing that and stopping it?”

The redhead’s hand actually tightened around her bottle. “Yeah … you saying that, it sounds exactly like Kelly.”

She nodded. “I can see that,” she confirmed, giving a small motion toward that hand. She continued as Natsumi self-consciously covered it with her other hand. “Unfortunately, the only way I got out of it was by growing out of it, and with some good examples I admired. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m afraid the only thing that’s going to make Nariko better is time. We’re just not equipped to recognize the kind of people we are when we’re there.”

Natsumi dropped her head at that, staring at the bottle in her hands. She was quiet for a bit, and when she did speak, her volume was uncharacteristically subdued. “You’re not just talking about Nariko, are you?”

She watched the girl for a moment to consider her response. It seemed Red had some problems with self confidence after all. She considered asking about it, but then thought it better to overlook it. Homura didn’t seem the type to handle it well if you pointed out she’d shown weakness in front of you. “I was, but it’s one of those universal truths. I have a long way to go, myself.”

“That’s not what I--” She caught herself after she’d jerked her head up to protest, but after she considered what she was saying, she looked almost hurt, or at least vulnerable, and she dropped her head again. “Oh, who am I kidding? Analysis probably means you knew exactly what I was talking about, that’s why you redirected.”

“You really hate Analysis, don’t you?” The girl seemed to view it almost like some sort of psychic power.

“With a passion,” she shouted as she rallied again, sitting upright with one fist upraised like she was ready to swing. “It’s not fair! What’s privacy?! What gives you the right to know what gets under people’s skin and use it against them?! Why can’t you just keep yourself out of other people’s heads?!”

Again, she didn’t answer immediately, being the one to turn away this time. “Natsumi,” she finally said, gently, “I don’t think I have Analysis.”

The rage in the redhead was stunned out of her, leaving her dumbstruck. “What?”

“I told you,” she explained, “I was behaving like that before. What you thought was me using Analysis while we were sparring was just how I’ve always fought.”

“But …” she floundered for a moment, “… but that’s not possible. You have to have Analysis. It’s tied to your Witch powers. You have them, so you must have Analysis, too!”

“I wasn’t a Witch.” The reminder hung in the air for a heavy breath. “Analysis may be in here, and it’s just like everything else you’re used to Thunder Witch having and I can’t access it, or maybe I just can’t tell the difference. But I haven’t noticed anything supernatural about it since I woke up as Nariko. I don’t have any deep insight through a back door into your subconscious, I don’t have some mystical precognition that tells me what’s going to happen, I just look at things. I look at them and I take a guess at where they’re going.”

“But our passive abilities are innate,” Natsumi countered. “You can’t not use them. I can’t forget to be strong. Ran can’t forget to be smart. Haru can’t forget to feel what others are feeling. It doesn’t work that way!”

She just shrugged. “Maybe Nariko’s insight is stronger than mine because of it, more sensitive, faster perhaps. But I doubt it. I have a sneaking suspicion she wasn’t doing anything different from what I was doing, paying attention to her surroundings and acting on them.”

This time, Natsumi was getting confused by implications rather than denial. “But if you had the same sort of ability, that means you were a witch, too. Your ability would have been there even if you weren’t awakened.”

She shook her head, though. “If I were ever a witch, there was never any evidence of it. In fact, I’m pretty sure I most definitively was not.”

Natsumi shook her head out as if rattling bees out of it. “Your mess is so far above my pay grade …” The dismissal made the brunette grin, but the redhead changed the topic away from the confusion. “For someone who did martial arts instead of magic, you sure didn’t want to commit to anything in our spar. You just drew it out, that’s kind of against the idea of what we’re trying to do here.”

She took a drink to give herself time to shift gears, too, before she answered. “You’re at least twice as strong as me, Natsumi, maybe more. I fought defensively because the last thing I wanted was to get into a blade lock with you, especially with how you were throwing around overhead cleaves like I was a melon at the beach.”

The redhead frowned at that comparison, but let it lay. “It’ll be different in a fight as a Witch, though. Sure, demons are strong, but that’s what the …” The sentence faded out and died on her tongue at the same time recognition of what she was saying lit her eyes.

“Yeah,” she intuited. “No transformation. It sucks, but with the exception of dretches, I’m going to be the weakest thing on the field pretty much no matter what.”

Natsumi lowered her head, dumbstruck at the situation. She hung it there for perhaps a dozen seconds without saying a word or focusing her eyes on anything. The brunette had just enough time to start to wonder why this seemed to bother the girl so much before the redhead rattled her head back and forth once again. Her attempt to give herself whiplash this time seemed intended to whip her temper back into a fervor rather than to clear out clutter.

It seemed to do the trick, too. When the redhead turned her attention once more to the face that had belonged to her rival, she seemed so furious that the brunette actually recoiled a little. “No,” she swore like a blood oath. “No, that’s completely unacceptable!” She surged to her feet, already having the brunette by the upper arm, and for the first time, the suspicions of the strength difference were utterly confirmed as she was completely unable to prevent being forcibly dragged along. “I reject it entirely!”

“Homura, what are you doing,” she demanded. “Where are you going?!”

“We’re calling Sarasa,” the redhead declared as if naming the target of a war. “We’re going to put this to rest once and for all, and to do that, we’re going to need seals.”

As the echoes of the girls’ voices followed them out one side of the gym, a sparkling blue light entered through the wall on the other side, a glittering trail in its wake. It drifted around on the air currents for a few moments before making a couple of lazy loops about the room as if searching for something in no particular hurry. It passed a dark crack in the wall, then did another loop to float in as if pulled down a drain, its light illuminating a metal face and silk ties before fading away.

* * *

“So these seals, they prevent any damage to wherever we’re fighting?”

“That’s right, Miss Kelly,” Miss Sada replied as the entire team made their way back into the main floor of the dojo. “They move the area ever so slightly out of sync with the normal flow of time, so that whatever happens in them effectively never registers with reality. It’s also extremely difficult to enter if you don’t have any magical powers, a boon for both demons and us alike. They like not being interrupted by random witnesses, and we like keeping innocents out of the line of fire.”

She gave a shake of her finger toward the brunette as she emphasized, “If you ever see a regular person end up inside of a seal, pay attention. They likely have extremely high natural magical abilities that haven’t been awakened, are the target of a demon for some reason, or are not who they appear to be. If none of those are the case, it’s virtually impossible to accidentally wander into a seal.”

“Which would be why busy roads are suddenly deserted,” the amnesiac observed, “and Haru didn’t panic the other day over how to explain to the florist why there was a blonde-shaped hole in her wall.”

Said blonde visibly flinched at that. “I also had other things on my mind at the time,” she spoke in self-defense. “Like a broken spine and spooky demon bling.”

The brunette turned to her, mouth open ready to give an apology, she hadn’t intended to cause offense, but Haru was already smiling to reassure her she understood the jocular air of the comment had been precisely because the blonde had come out of it alright.

“Yeah, well, spooky demon bling is why we’re here,” Homura put in, almost seeming like she felt it necessary to interrupt the sap before it dripped on her floor or something. “Riko and I hit a block in training almost immediately. We don’t know what the weapons could do. They could only be good for fighting dretches, or one missed swing could take the roof off. Either way, she’s been fighting me like she thinks she can’t win any clashes, dancing all around without committing to anything. We need to know what happens when she actually fights with these things.”

“Is having her fight Flame Witch really the best way to do that?” Wakumi’s concern for her friend was clear in her quiet voice. In fact, it was why all of the girls had come instead of only Miss Sada. “What if it really can take the roof off? What’s it going to do to you?”

But Natsumi just scoffed at the notion as she crossed her arms defiantly. “Oh, come on! For Riko to be able to harm me that badly, she’d have to be way more powerful than I am, and we all know that’s about as far from the truth as could be!”

“But then what are you going to do to her,” the gunmetal girl continued. “She can’t transform, she’ll be completely vulnerable to your magic, as open to harm as a normal person.”

“Believe me, I’ve got plenty of control. And besides, she’s still a Witch. So long as I stop shy of killing her, she’ll be fine after a good night’s sleep.”

“Riko’s specialty is single target combat.” Haru was stepping in, clearly compelled to come to the brunette’s defense. “Even if she can’t cast her lightning magic, there’s not much difference in the end. It’s just going to be focused against you in a sword instead of in a bolt. And your energy levels aren’t that different, no matter what you say.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time someone’s come at me with a sword, Haru,” the redhead rebutted with a scowl as if the idea of being impaled was simultaneously contemptibly unthinkable and barely worth fretting over. “She needs a real opponent, or else the first battle she’s in, she’s going to be frozen in indecision the first time she can’t figure out where to run. Tamashini is the only other member of the team remotely qualified to do that, and you know how Miss Princess hates getting her hem mussed. So unless she’d like to pull out her fencing lessons, that leaves me!”

Staying out of this argument and off to the side, the brunette glanced toward Miss Princess. “Fencing, huh?”

Reina seemed stiffened, both at Natsumi’s comment and someone noticing she was being talked about. “A hobby,” she insisted. “I practice archery, as well. Neither have any direct bearing on my combat style as a witch.”

The brunette glanced back toward the bickering, which had continued unabated and devolved into less informative clap-back. Haru and Ran each tried to argue that the match was a bad idea because of how powerful their favored participant was, though the redhead was shunning the concerns of both sides with admirable bullheadedness. “Well, I suppose I should just be grateful I’m not the only one Natsumi swings at.”

The president’s expression was harrowed by the idea. “Homura is a good person and a steadfast friend and ally,” she preceded as if to provide a disclaimer, “but she possesses an excessively competitive spirit. She means no harm, really, but something inside of her is completely incapable of tolerating the idea she could be second best at anything, and while you are the one who rises most readily to her challenges, she will reflexively, as you said, swing at anything she perceives as anywhere near her by virtually any metric.”

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“Asserting dominance,” she summed up, to a nod from the raven-haired student. “If she sees it as refusing to stop pushing, at least she seems to hold the same expectation of others. You should have seen her before she called Miss Sada. The very idea that I might be weak seemed to infuriate her.”

“That is probably more because she sees you as too close to her, actually, than something she does for everyone,” Reina countered, and motioned toward the argument. “You’ve seen how she treats Wakumi. She is extremely protective of her. She is the same way with children. But you?” She actually allowed herself a chuckle and a small smile. “Nariko Kelly keeps her on her toes and challenges her. She is the hero of her own story, and now you’ve threatened to remove her foil. We can’t have that at all.” Then the upperclassman turned toward her, and seemed just a little sentimental. “You are a very important person to her, Nariko, to a degree I don’t think either of you have ever really noticed.”

The need to answer such a statement was thankfully evaded as Miss Sada decided the argument ahead of them had gone on long enough, and stepped toward the three girls. “Come now, I understand your concerns, girls, but I agree that this needs to be done. We are all too accustomed to simply knowing what your abilities can do when you awaken, and I admit that even I was lax in not realizing this would be necessary sooner. There is risk, yes, but so long as I am here, no one’s life is in danger, you both have my word.” She placed a hand on the shoulders of both Haru and Ran and looked them each in the eyes to measure their listening. “Okay?” she asked, first of the gunmetal girl, then turning and repeating it to the blonde. When they both confirmed, she ushered them back to the side next to Reina and then led the brunette forward.

Once both girls were in the middle of the room, she stepped off to the side and then gave her fingers a snap. There was no flash, no fancy animation for time distortion, nothing, just the sudden sensation of off that she associated with just before a demon arrived. So that was the seal going up, then.

“Okay, girls, the seal is up, you two can start when you’re ready.”

Natsumi was once again looking cocky as she focused her attention on the swordsmain. “This’ll be your first time seeing a witch transform since the amnesia, huh, Riko?” Fire gathered around the fingertips of her right hand as she held it diagonally down and away from her. “Well, pay close attention. Who knows, maybe you’ll learn something.” She brought it up diagonally across her chest as the flames jumped into a rectangular shape reminiscent of a card. Then she threw her hand high, straight up, tossing the card into the air above her as she shouted, “TRANSFORM!”

The card exploded in the air as fire rushed down like a torrent to envelop her. The brunette almost felt a little cheated at the stereotypical spins involved as Homura turned to reach for various gatherings of flame that would solidify as parts of her outfit as she chanted, “Blazing fires of passion!”

The whole thing was over in moments as Natsumi finished in her transformed state with something that looked like a fake combat pose for a photo shoot. “Flame Witch!”

In the wake of the transformation, Flame Witch smirked and propped her chin on the back of her hand as she focused on the brunette. “Well? Don’t stay quiet, it’s been forever since we’ve gotten any first-time feedback. What’d you think?”

She took a moment to look the gymnast-slash-magician outfit over from shoe to collar before answering. “I can see why the demons would rather carry their gear,” she stated dismissively as she held her hand out and the bracelet flashed into a sword.

The witch’s smirk turned into a teeth-baring grin as fire flowed readily into her raised palm. “Oh, I do hope you last for at least a little bit.”

It suddenly struck the brunette that she was fighting a flamethrower now instead of a punch-thrower, and she dove to the side as a great gout of fire scorched the concrete where she had been standing, the heat hammering her like a blast furnace.

“Oh-ho-ho, going back to defensive fighting so quick? Isn’t that what we were trying to get around?” Flame Witch was slowly strutting after her as she gloated. “If you don’t have the guts to take the initiative, this is going to go even faster than I’d imagined!” She summoned more flames around her upraised hand as she gleefully stared down at her opponent. “Don’t worry, though. You can just stay in the back with Flare Witch. I don’t mind taking a little bit more glory for myself by filling in the gap.”

She thought letting Flame Witch’s gloating bring her near was a blessing. She was enjoying playing up the power difference too much, willing to close the distance all by herself. All the brunette had to do was play lame a little, and she would stroll right into striking distance. She timed it perfectly. Within a second of switching her back foot’s position, she’d pushed herself into a sudden lunge for the witch as she dedicated all of her mass into a thrust of that golden blade for the middle of her torso.

With supernatural speed, Flame Witch jumped backwards even as the sword came up at her, clearing thirty feet between them as she turned it into a complete somersault before landing lightly back onto her feet, her laughter all the brunette caught for her trouble. “Is that all you had,” she taunted. “Well, I guess we can confidently say that sword isn’t increasing your abilities any!”

She had to get close. She had started this on the back foot with that opening attack, but now she had to stay moving, and she had to keep as much of that momentum forward as possible. It wasn’t insurmountable, the redhead used clear wind-ups for all of her attacks so far. If she could just stay ahead of the blast, itself …

She had considered this in a moment, settled on it as her strategy in the next, and by the third, set her jaw in concentrated determination and launched herself into a full sprint.

She saw Flame Witch’s eyes alight, registered the expression for what it was saying. Yes, come on! Do it! She saw the magical girl wind back, saw the inevitable course as if it laid itself out ahead of her, and she darted diagonally to the right even as the redhead threw the fireball. It crashed just behind and to the left of her, the heat bit at her heels, but the air seemed to propel her ahead even of the flames and she didn’t stop. The eagerness in Flame Witch’s eyes flickered with interspersed disbelief and fury, but another fireball launched from her other hand. Again, she zagged, this time to the left, and again, the blast landed behind her. Flame Witch tried to aim ahead of her, and she just went harder to the side. The redhead went for a double decker to sandwich her in, and as the flames crashed down, the brunette lowered her head and put all of her speed underneath her to beat a path right down the middle to get at least past the halfway mark of the impending clash.

It is a common misconception that explosions do their damage through heat, but they go so quickly that the real damage comes from the force of the air barreling away from the detonation. If she really was a witch, then it couldn’t kill her. It could only hurl her outward, and that was something she could work with.

Flame Witch’s expression as the brunette came literally airborne out of the fires, cinders trailing her clothes, was slackjawed. Still, she managed to reflexively raise a barrier as the brunette brought the blade down in an overhead strike. Like a melon, the comparison jumped back into the redhead’s mind even as she summoned the arcane field. The next instant, her ears popped when the sword collided with the barrier and she went skidding on the floor.

By the time she had her wits about her, the girl whose face was identical to Thunder Witch was on top of her, already spinning the sword around to point down from her raised hands. A killing blow. She wasn’t messing around. Flame Witch twisted her whole body to throw herself as hard to the side as possible as the sword came down and struck the concrete with all of the force the brunette could muster.

The backblast from the impact of the sword against the hard floor rolled through the training hall like a storm, causing the spectating witches to give startled cries as they braced against the winds.

Okay, Flame Witch noted with stunned bewilderment, Take the roof off, it is. Whatever you do, Natsumi, DO NOT get hit by that. Then on the tail-end, her ego reasserted itself. Wait, since when was I the one on the back foot?! I’m Flame Witch! Still, there was something off about it. Thunder Witch was powerful, but she was fairly certain she’d never seen her put out that much energy in a single strike without a lengthy incantation. That hadn’t been signature spell levels of power, but it had been terrifyingly close. And the way she’d moved on her approach …

She didn’t have time to keep thinking about it. The brunette had recovered, too, and located her prey. Yes, that was the look in her eyes. Like a Terminator locking onto its victim. No! Stop thinking that way! The combatant that agrees they are the victim has already lost. That gaze fell on her again as the brunette lunged for her and it suddenly clicked. The next instant, she surrounded herself with an explosion of flame that knocked the swordsmain away.

Flame Witch began to hover up into the air as the space wavered around her as if in a heat wave and her hand gestures grew more complex. “You lying bitch!” she shouted down at her opponent. “No Analysis, my ass!”

At that, the brunette paused in her approach, her expression changing from stone cold focus to brow-raised surprise. “What?” Her own mind went back to Homura’s confessions of how she felt about Thunder Witch’s passive ability, but then she shook her head in stalwart denial. “No!” She motioned as if to brush the accusation away with her empty hand. “Whatever you think that was, I promise you, that wasn’t Analysis!” She hesitated and rubbed the back of her neck. “I mean, maybe I’d gotten a little too serious, and I’m sorry I got carried away, but you’re throwing fireballs at me, for heaven’s sake! I was just trying to stay ahead of them ...”

That was when Haru shouted from the side. “Don’t apologize, Riko! It’s a fight! You’re doing what you’re supposed to do! And Natsumi, shame on you for trying to guilt her into pulling punches just because you were losing!”

At the accusation of having been losing, any sympathy for the brunette’s apology evaporated in a heat of rage, and Flame Witch wheeled for the swordswoman again, hurling a chain of fireballs at her. She tried dodging and weaving again, but almost immediately, the ground exploded underneath her, sending her up into the air and back, crashing down on her back.

“Ohohoho!” Flame Witch’s fingers were up in front of her ruby lips as she felt in charge again. “Did you really think the same thing would work against me twice? Not when I know what you’re up to!”

She groaned as she pulled herself back up. All this getting knocked around without a superform was really starting to make her sore. But Flame Witch was content to laud her own superiority by letting her gather herself without interruption. Why did they keep making that mistake?

… Why did they keep doing everything wrong? Was it because they were kids? Did that mean the demons didn’t take them seriously?

“Your fighting style … it’s all backwards,” she said quietly, letting it hang there in the air a moment before pulling herself on up. “What happened to the proud granddaughter of the master who couldn’t wait to show her arts to the crown of my skull?”

Flame Witch watched her from the air with a wary eye. “What are you babbling about, Kelly?”

The brunette looked down and took up the hem of the gi she was wearing, burnt but essentially intact. No, that wouldn’t do. She moved up to the sleeve, where a tear was there, and ripped it all the way around her wrist. She bunched her hair behind her and brought the sturdy cloth up to begin tying it into a tail. All of the heat was making it go wild, and it was starting to get in the way. “Physically, you’re the strongest out of us all,” she explained as she did so. “And if transformations multiply our abilities, that should make your strength completely insane right now. On top of that, you’ve got the martial skill to even keep up with Analysis.”

“You said you weren’t using Analysis when we fought the first time,” the redhead accused from the air.

“And I still say I haven’t,” she answered without hesitation. “But if we assume the detail is raised for Thunder Witch the same amount your strength is multiplied, can you really say you aren’t just as much faster as Flame Witch as Analysis is compared to what I did?”

Flame Witch knew what the individual words meant, but whatever she was getting at, it was utter nonsense to her. She looked over to their spectators, but all of the other girls looked confused, too. Sarasa was the exception, as usual, her catlike expression locked on proceedings like she was witnessing something of great fascination. Even in her human form, the redhead thought she could practically see her tails swishing behind her. Lacking an answer, she instead wheeled back on the brunette. “Make your point, Riko, before I decide you’re just running your chops for time!”

“You’re a frontline striker flitting about in the back like a kite!”

“I said make sense!”

The brunette sighed and rubbed the side of her head for a moment, then turned the sword around, as if offering the handle to her. “You’re the one built to be using this thing! You have super strength and martial arts at a level I’ve rarely seen, but all you do is stay as far away from combat as you can and throw fireballs at everything!”

It still didn’t make much sense, but it seemed like Riko was complaining that she wasn’t fighting like she did before transforming, maybe she thought that would have made Flame Witch an easier opponent. That made her chuckle, and with that, she re-centered herself. She should have guessed it was something like that. “Riko …” she said as if scolding her, and she spread her arms wide as if to illustrate a deep and illuminating point. “I’m a witch!”

“Yeah, well,” she replied as she flipped the sword back again and then spun it to prop it over one shoulder, “someone should remind you …” And then she deliberately made an overdramatic pose as she pointed with her other hand toward the floating redhead. “I’M ONE, TOO!”

There was a palpable expectation in the room of something happening, but as nothing did, Flame Witch just hung in the air. “Uhhh …”

But that just made her grin as she held the pose. “This is where you put your shield up, Johnny Blaze.” And she began to count down from three.

Little surprise it was Wakumi who pieced it together first, and shrieked it like she’d just seen a jumpscare. “Natsumi, it’s her gun arm!”

Flame Witch’s eyes widened as the brunette’s grin deepened, but the count had run out with a burst of light in that hand, and the weapon discharged a brilliant yellow-blue beam the next instant that flashed across the distance between them. Without a shield, the blast collided with her chest and sent her spiraling across the massive room, trailing smoke before she crashed into the far wall and slid down.

That was the first direct shot she’d ever received from Thunder Witch, the redhead reflected as she rolled over in pain. By the heavens, she never wanted to take another one. She wasn’t sure she could take another one. She wasn’t sure how she took that one. She was again reminded of how disproportionate Riko’s output was seeming without incantations, and again, something struck her as very wrong about it. There was no time taken to gather all of that energy, but it was also as if there were no throttle on it.

She raised her head when she heard footfalls and saw the brunette charging her again. One word flashed through her mind. Nope. She scrambled to get her feet under her and her hands behind her and flung herself along the wall and back up into the air with streams of flame behind her. She nearly spun into another wall before she caught herself and took a wide rotation to put herself on the opposite end of the room from her opponent once more.

“You want full power, Riko?!” she raved at her as she began making motions with her hands once more. “And you want to talk about doing it wrong! I’ll show a troglodyte like you how to channel magic!” She entered a spin much like when she had first transformed, pulling fire energy from her aura into her upraised grasp as it grew rapidly into a swirling ball of flaming maelstrom. “Furious Dragon’s … Explosion!” The spell finished on the last word as she hurled the looming ball of death at her charging adversary.

That … was way more magic power than the brunette had ever seen thus far. There was nowhere to run from this fireball, no time to dive out of the way, no opportunity to even fully stall her forward momentum. All she could think about was hoping that Miss Sada was right that she’d be able to keep her from dying as she lowered her head against the raising heat and charged onward, raising the blade desperately ahead of her as the only barrier between her and cremation.

…

The next thing she registered was explosions going off to either side and behind her, billowing her from behind, but nowhere near the force she had been expecting. She looked up to see Flame Witch slackjawed, along with the spectators. Except for Miss Sada, who only looked entertained.

“What the fuck did you just do?!”

Flame Witch’s exclamation drove her to look down at the sword in her hands. It had been pure desperation, in the heat of the moment, she’d swung with the blade, just trying to knock the looming death ball away from her like a poorly sized bat against a colossal ball.

“Did you just slice my fireball in half?!” Flame Witch was still ranting in disbelief from above. “How is that even physically possible?! It doesn’t make any sense!”

Further debate was silenced, however, by slow, loud clapping coming from the entrance, and all attention in the room slowly moved over to the young man with ice-blue skin, snow-white hair and a wintry coat and leggings of a Renaissance noble. “Splendid, splendid!” he praised. “What wonderful displays of power! You ladies never fail to leave me awed and astonished!”

A grin stretched across his elfin face as he lowered his gloved hands and turned toward them more fully, arms outstretched as if he were offering himself. “But to be having such a clash between yourselves, don’t tell me I caught you at a bad time?”

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