“Here’s a good one,” Hyperia said. “BluRefraction says, ‘I didn’t know your teams were friends, but you seem to get along really well. How did you get to know each other?’ Since you approached us, why don’t you two answer this one?”

  “I’ve gotten quite bored of the status quo,” Adah responded. “I thought this region could use a change of pace, so we’ve been seeking out others of a like mind. Together, I think we can change the pace quite dramatically.”

  “That’s her way of saying she wants to cause more trouble,” Rika added.

  “What you call trouble, I call fun.”

  The image of Heartbreak on Adah’s phone screen smiled mischievously at Rika. Hyperia had been wise enough to keep the camera on a close view of Adah and Rika, so the expression came through clearly even on the tiny screen. In fact, all of Adah’s Heartbreak mannerisms came across well when watching the footage back. She was certainly less embarrassed by her performance than she expected to be, which probably meant the stream’s viewers would enjoy it fully.

  As had become routine with every broadcasted performance of hers, Adah was watching a recording of the previous night’s “Flip the Script” stream. Rewatching her own appearances was a good way to make sure she remembered anything important she may have said, as well as to review how she appeared on camera. Photographs were easy enough to practice at home, but appearing on video—especially when interacting with other people—was a more complex performance. The more she watched herself, the better she could adapt in the future.

  Well, there may have been a small element of ego-stroking involved as well…

  Regardless, she was pleased with how the stream had gone. Hyperia and Elegia were excellent hosts despite their inexperience, and Elegia in particular had a sharp sense for how to open a line of conversation that could highlight Adah and Rika’s charm points. Hyperia’s excitement also helped Adah forget they were just speaking to themselves in an otherwise empty room. Her energy made it feel as though they were filming in front of a studio audience.

  Whether through her own effort alone or a combination of that and their cordial hosts, Rika gradually settled into the conversation. She couldn’t always capitalize on the openings Hyperia and Elegia gave her, but she still found moments to let her personality shine through. In some ways, the aspects of fragility in her demeanor even worked in her favor.

  “‘Isn’t being a magical girl scary?’” Hyperia read another viewer question aloud. “‘Everyone always acts happy-go-lucky, but you four seem more down to earth. So, do you ever get scared of Cruelties or anything like that?’”

  In the recording, Hyperia looked to Rika to take on this question first, and this time she was ready for it.

  “A lot of parts of being a magical girl are scary,” she said. “You can train all you want for a battle, but at the end of the day, magical girls still rely on their fans for their power. It’s really amazing to feel a surge of strength from your fans cheering for you, but at the same time… it’s hard not to worry about if you deserve it.”

  “That’s totally true!” Hyperia agreed so fast that she forgot to step on the pedal to swap camera views. “Like what if your fans don’t think you’re cute anymore? Then what are you supposed to do? I bet stuff like that keeps every magical girl up at night.”

  “Y-Yeah,” Rika said, “something like that. We’ve fought some scary Cruelties, but the very idea of being a magical girl can get scary, too. It’s like climbing the face of a cliff without a rope. If you stop to think about the situation or, even worse, look down—you’ll start to feel like you’re falling. So, I think… I think you have to keep looking up. That’d be my advice to anyone thinking of becoming a magical girl. Keep looking where you want to be.”

  “Well said,” Elegia added with a smile. “As expected of a lyricist.”

  Rika’s face flushed and the tails of fabric attached to her outfit pulsed with a red light. However else she might struggle, Rika would always nail this divinely sweet flavor of embarrassment. Adah could watch it all day.

  Though, Rika herself wanted no part of that.

  “Ah!” the girl shouted as she made her way down the stairs to the agency lobby. “Turn that off, please. If I hear myself talk, I might actually have a panic attack.”

  Rika was in her typical loungewear, though today had finally gotten cold enough to force her to put on a sweatshirt. The hoodie was maybe a size too large for her, and fell far enough down her legs to hide her shorts. She hopped onto the couch that Adah was sprawled out on, with her butt landing on Adah’s shins. Adah feigned excruciating pain before retracting her outstretched legs so that Rika would have a proper place to sit.

  “You did a good job, though,” Adah said. She hadn’t quite finished her review, but she respected Rika’s wishes and closed out of the video.

  “If I’m lucky, I’ll come across as boring,” Rika said. “It took everything I had just to get through that.”

  She pulled her knees to her chest and stretched the bottom of her sweatshirt up and over them. Maybe sitting in this position was why the hoodie had gotten a little too large for her.

  “Well, you did get through it,” Adah said.

  Rika let herself fall over in Adah’s direction. Her head landed in Adah’s lap, in a similar position to how they had been during Lina’s photoshoot. Wrapped up in her sweatshirt like that, Rika looked just as goofy as she did cute, but Adah kept her mouth shut and stroked her partner’s hair in a gentle, wave-like motion. That was, after all, what the girl wanted, and Adah intended to give her it.

  “If quitting was an option for me,” Rika said, “I would have done it back at the start of this. Even if I struggle or look like I want to give up, please keep believing in me. I’m going to keep looking up, you know? I want to see you there the whole time.”

  “What are you talking about?” Adah said. “You won’t find me by looking up. I’m going to be right by your side.”

  Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

  In the course of their back and forth, Adah had begun to lean down toward Rika without realizing it. If both of them stretched a bit farther to close the distance, their faces would meet. Adah sensed that distance was closing more and more with each passing second.

  But, at the sound of the agency’s front doors swinging open, the distance suddenly grew again.

  Grace strolled in with a bit more pep in her step than Adah had ever seen before. In her hand was a sheet of paper which, upon seeing the two girls, she held out in front of herself like a police officer displaying their badge. The sheet had a bunch of text at the top that Adah couldn’t make out, followed by someone’s signature and a red stamp mark at the bottom.

  Grace declared, “That’s it. Everything’s confirmed.”

  “Wait a minute,” Adah said, rushing to stand up before realizing Rika’s head was still in her lap. “You mean the carnival’s all set?”

  “This,” Grace said, waggling the paper, “is an entertainment ordinance. It is the last of a dozen permits, licenses, and other nonsense I had to acquire to even make this event legal. And now it is done.”

  “So this means we can announce the carnival now?” Adah asked. “Nothing’s going to come back and bite us in the ass?”

  “It’s time to pull the trigger,” Grace said. “This will give us three weeks to promote, which isn’t half bad considering the amount of work we have left. This paper was the last thing we needed to be allowed to host the event, but there are still plenty of pieces to put together to make sure it runs smoothly.”

  Adah hung back her head and said, “If only it had happened a day earlier. We could have announced it last night on the stream!”

  “I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” Grace said, a slyness creeping into her voice. “Michel went above and beyond on this one. I guess he’s been stepping up in a lot of ways lately. You girls have really put a spark back into him.”

  Rika had sat up by this point and asked, “What does that mean?”

  “The MGC wants you back on—all four of you,” Grace explained. “Not for an interview, but for a promo spot. They want to get in on the ground floor of this event, thanks to a little persuasion from Michel. Although, I suspect they’re interested in a little spice, too. Your last appearance surely boosted their ratings.”

  The Magical Girl Channel was the same network Adah had first appeared on after the fallout from the hydra Cruelty. At the time, she’d been using their reach to draw attention to Thibault’s poor leadership, but apparently that controversy had brought in a lot of viewers on its own.

  There was a good chance that Michel’s “persuasion” had included some hints about the true nature of their carnival. The event wasn’t just a means to connect with fans, it was also Heartbreak’s next attack on the Secretary of Magic. That was the story that the network was actually interested in getting first dibs on.

  Like most arrangements in this industry, both parties would be looking to get what they wanted out of the promo, without much care for ensuring the other achieved their goal. Certainly, Adah would be putting her team’s priorities first.

  “They’ll be framing it as the launch of a new era in Region 4,” Grace continued. “I’m sure you can figure out how to use that in your favor. I’ll trust your judgment on how much spice to give them, but don’t forget to hit the basics. Date, location, how to get tickets. Repeat it all as much as you can. And again, it’s going to be all four of you. That’ll make it harder to stay on message.”

  “Why is that?” Rika asked.

  Adah understood Grace’s meaning all too well.

  “I’ll hold Ami’s reins tight,” she said.

  ☆☆☆

  Every streak of good luck eventually comes to an end.

  Adah knew that fact to be doubly true for magical girls. The luckier you got, and the longer you got lucky, the more eagerly your rivals would look for an opportunity to knock you down. She had learned that lesson beyond a doubt during the IndieMagie, thanks to Iris.

  The difference between now and then was that her rival wasn’t another magic user. It was a man meant to support them.

  The Last Light was scheduled to appear during the MGC’s primetime slot the day after Grace had secured the carnival’s final permit. Adah and her teammates had spent all of the evening prior and most of today prepping for their appearance. As the sun fell out of sight and the swift darkness of winter swallowed the world, their moment finally arrived.

  The girls were just about to leave the agency office, to pile into Grace’s car as they so often had and set out for their first television appearance as a team.

  That was the precise moment their good luck ended.

  “Adah, did you…?” Grace’s voice trailed off.

  Their manager was behind her desk, double checking a few details about tonight’s broadcast on her computer before they left. She double-clicked something on her monitor and squinted at the screen.

  “No,” she said. “You couldn’t have... So, how did…?”

  “What’s going on?” Adah asked.

  She was sure she didn’t want to know, but just as sure that she needed to.

  Grace gestured for Adah to come behind the desk with her, so she walked around and took a look at the monitor.

  “The team’s registered for this mission,” Grace said. “But I didn’t sign us up for it. Obviously, I didn’t.”

  The monitor reflected what Grace had said. The Last Light was registered for a C-Rank mission that had appeared just a moment ago. Grace didn’t have to convince Adah—she’d been preparing to leave for the MGC studio just as all the girls had been. How could she slip up and register for a mission that would conflict with the very trip she was getting ready for? She couldn’t, simple as that.

  The reality was clear to Adah immediately. The Last Light hadn’t registered for this mission. They had been assigned to it.

  Given the timing, the chance that this was some kind of glitch in the mission board was zero.

  Someone had intentionally tasked Adah and her teammates with a mission they couldn’t complete without ditching their promo spot.

  “It’s not even effective,” Adah muttered. “It’s just petty. He just sees this all as a game, doesn’t he?”

  There was only one person with the motivation and ability to try to interfere with Adah’s plans like this. But what was Thibault’s goal? To keep them from disgracing him on TV again? To make them choose between flaking on the MGC and canceling this mission registration?

  There was an angle there, at least. The first option might upset their fans and sour their relationship with the producers at the MGC, while Thibault could frame the second as the Last Light putting their vanity before their responsibility.

  But neither amounted to more than a shallow smear campaign.

  “This is a C-Rank,” Adah said, clenching her fist. “It’s not a joke. What if we didn’t see this? What if no one ended up fighting this Cruelty?”

  She already knew that those worries had never crossed Thibault’s mind. In fact, if the Cruelty hurt anyone, that’d be another weapon he could use against Adah.

  The other three girls joined Adah behind Grace’s desk, each of them lashing out with the same reaction as she had.

  “I can request emergency backup,” Grace said. “Then we can think of a way to address it on the broadcast. No, no… That’s not going to—”

  “This motherfucker!” Ami yelled. “We can’t go on TV while our name’s attached to this. Just tell the station we’re running late. We’ll kill this thing and get back ASAP.”

  “Look where it is,” Rika said. “That’s the other side of the region. Even just flying there and back would lose us half our slot. They’ll just replace the program at that point.”

  “We just have to take it?” Emi asked.

  Adah kicked off her shoes and made her way toward the front door of the office.

  “We’ll do both,” she said. “You three start the show without me. I’ll take care of the Cruelty, and then when I get back, I’ll take care of Thibault.”

  “Let’s do it together,” Ami suggested. “We’ll bring the show there—let ‘em watch us take out some frustration on that Cruelty, then we can tell them why we’re pissed after.”

  “No,” Adah said with as much finality as her voice could muster. “You go on and pitch the carnival like we practiced. We’re not giving this guy an inch. These are the last cries of a cornered animal, and I’m going to put him out of his misery.”

  In truth, she intended for this to be but the beginnings of his misery.