---

Her sapphire axe comes swinging for my neck and I jump away with combat reflexes I definitely didn’t have ten minutes ago. My feet never hit the ground, my body held aloft by a pair of wings that biologically shouldn’t be able to lift me but which are running on the far superior system of crazy wizard bullshit.

Holy shit, I fly now! I soar up and away from the murderous magical girl, propelled more by the will to move than any physical mechanism I can determine. My wings are flapping, sure, but there’s a noticeable disconnect between the motion of my wings and the way I’m moving. My body basically floats in whatever direction I want it to.

Flying feels really good, regardless. The wind on my face is a refreshing breeze, and there’s a sense of lightness to my body as I turn and dive. I zoom through the air like a rocket, swooping around skyscrapers and skimming just over the roofs of cars. It all feels incredibly natural, like I’ve been flying my whole life, but it’s more exhilarating than I could have imagined.

I’m quite literally free as a bird. The whole world is my playground.

Then a bolt of lightning zaps past and I remember the buff lady trying to kill me.

Thunderclap is on my tail, zooming through the air atop a cute little cloud that crackles with more blue electricity. There’s still a fair bit of distance between us, but it looks like she’s picking up speed. This is a problem.

Deescalation didn’t work, so now it’s a fight. How does Thunderclap lose fights? I wasn’t lying when I called myself a fan; I’ve watched dozens of videos of my opponent. I’ve cheered her on in fights against witches, scoured imageboards for fanart, and theorycrafted about her powerset on the forums. I’ve spent hours dissecting Thunderclap’s strengths and weaknesses in arguments with other nerds, I’ve converted her powerset into roleplaying games both tabletop and digital, and I’ve even made fake trading cards for her like the real cards the Visage girls get.

If Thunderclap can do it, I know it. If Thunderclap can’t do it, I know that too. I’ve even gamed out how a witch could beat her in a fight.

This heroine won’t know what hit her.

A peal of thunder tells me I settled on a plan of action just in time. I blink and the magical girl is right in front of me, axe swinging down as lightning surges around her. Combat reflexes take over and my arm moves of its own volition toward the heroine. The image of the dress clicks into my mind and I burn one into existence falling toward Thunderclap. She cuts through the dress, buying me just enough time to fling myself away before her follow-up swing bisects the space where I’d been floating.

“Don’t you think this is a bit much?” I call behind me as I beat a hasty retreat from the pursuing heroine. “I mean, I haven’t even done anything evil yet! And it’s my birthday! You wouldn’t kill a girl on her birthday, would you?”

I hear the shouted reply of “Happy birthday!” in one ear as my other ear gets a burst of static ozone from the lightning bolt that sizzles past, just narrowly missing my head.

That’s right, keep it up. I’m a nasty little mosquito, and all you wanna do is swat me.

I soar through Forks, dodging blasts of electric energy and zooming over pedestrians, as I make my way toward the nearest mall, the Nessie Commercial Megacenter. The NCM is a sprawling behemoth, a relic of ancient America constructed in the halcyon past of 2019 by a pack of corporate gambling addicts convinced malls were about to see a huge resurgence in popularity. That didn’t happen, but the Megacenter has limped on through the years, carried largely by tourists here to see the magical girls.

Time to give them a show! I crash in through the skylight over the north wing food court and do my best superhero landing amid falling glass and screaming people.

“Hello, shoppers!” I greet them cheerfully, spreading my wings wide. “You are being hostaged. Do not resist.”

They resist, obviously, and start running away in a panic. Innocent civilians can be so rude to the sexy witch trying to use them all as human shields.

Now, this might have become obvious, but I’m a teensy bit completely obsessed with magical girls. That means I’m obsessed with witches, too, and cataloguing all the commonalities and intricacies of their powers. It’s not like either faction has ever come out and published a list of rules for how all those powers work, but nerds on the internet have compiled and cross-referenced enough data between communities that we feel pretty confident about a few key guesses.

Every witch, without exception, is accompanied by minions. Some of these minions get created from raw magic, some of these minions get transformed from local objects or wildlife, and some are converted from innocent victims. All of them seem completely subservient to their mistresses, willing to die for them without hesitation.

Collectively, we call those minions “familiars.” It’s thematic.

From what I understand of my creation magic, it relies on copying existing templates stored within itself. If I can get my hands on a weapon, I can feed that weapon to Prometheus and forge as many copies as I like. But in order to replicate a servant, I’d need to have made one first.

Therefore, since “witches have familiars” is a rule of the system, my other power must be the key to making familiars. The green flame transformed my body, so I bet I can use it to transform other bodies—people or animals or maybe even plants and objects—into familiars that I can then feed to Prometheus to replicate on demand.

This is exciting! I want to spend a whole evening just theorycrafting what my powers are capable of and running experiments to measure them. Sadly, I have to deal with an uppity heroine first.

I conjure the green fire in my left hand—Prometheus seems insistent it be that one—and command it to transform whatever it can. To my delight, the output of the spell is a string of fireballs shooting into the crowd. The flames splash onto a handful of shoppers and—oh, oh that’s horrifying. Oh no.

Thunderclap crashes onto the scene just in time to witness the monstrous tableau. Her focused anger is swept away for a moment by sheer horror, eyes going wide and mouth dropping open. We watch in shared discomfort as three innocent civilians stop being human.

The victims convulse and cry out as green flame spreads across their bodies and sinks into their flesh. The green light flares in erratic patterns beneath the surface of their skin, bright enough to be visible through clothing. Wet earth bubbles up in the wake of each flare and hardens into fired clay.

A man is trapped in the middle of reaching for help, his arm bulking out until it droops under its own weight. A woman’s shriek of terror is smothered by blank, featureless clay. Three lumbering golems rise where ordinary humans fell, turned lumpy, brutish, and faceless by my power.

Did I just kill three people? Please tell me that’s not permanent.

In a panic I reach for Prometheus. I need this to not be permanent, I am not ready to be a murderer. The blaze in my chest flickers, conveying confusion, before shifting to a comforting fireplace warmth.

One of the three clay dolls falls apart, chunks of hardened earth crumbling away to reveal the unharmed form of the civilian inside. He immediately bolts for the exit, which I consider a fair and measured response to briefly not being a person. I still shoot another fireball to recapture him.

I breathe out a sigh of relief. I’m not a murderer! I haven’t broken the treaty! Sophia isn’t going to come kill me thrice!

Thunderclap, on the other hand, is glaring at me with obvious violent intent. She was hesitating to attack while all the people were still around, but now most of them have scattered to the halls. “Monster!” she accuses. “A witch like all the rest.”

“That’s profiling,” I insist, throwing myself behind an info kiosk to dodge another lightning bolt. “Hey, minions: get the girl!”

My three clay dolls spring into action. One of them starts barrelling toward Thunderclap with the hunched gait of a football player, while the other two… take off at random in the direction of civilians. Not the sharpest sculptures in the gallery, my familiars.

“Get the girl with the axe!” I correct, exasperated. The golems adjust course.

Next priority: weapons. I do a quick survey of the food court. Most of the chains probably don’t need knives for anything if they’re just assembling stuff made elsewhere, but I’ve seen the guys at the gyro place carve their meat fresh. They’re gone with the rest of the employees, so it’s free real estate. I dash over, hop the counter, and scavenge.

The rich scent of lamb and beef threatens my focus, as does the banquet of feta cheese, olives, peppers, tzatziki, and other treasures of the Mediterranean. I never ate, did I? I should definitely eat after I kick Thunderclap into next week.

I find the knife I was after and grab it with the same hand that my magic prefers for creating objects. I visualize the forge and will the knife to pass into its mouth. Purple flame flickers to life and devours my first weapon.

With another conceptualization of intent, I recreate my first weapon. The burst of fire conjures a perfect replica of the knife I just incinerated, and a few test swings have it feeling identical to the weight of the original knife, for as well as I can judge that.

It isn’t going to stand up to that giant axe, but at least I can stab people now.

I glance over at the brawl in the center of the food court just in time to watch Thunderclap blast a golem across the room. It crashes through a dozen tables and collapses in a pile, clay crumbling away from the now-unconscious human host. Thunderclap swoops over to the body, checks for a pulse, and a weight visibly leaves her shoulders as she finds it.

My other two minions rush after her, but they’re the complete opposite of coordinated. They keep jostling into each other and losing their balance, costing precious time when they could just be moving a little further apart and it wouldn’t be an issue. Definitely not the sharpest.

Prometheus grabs my attention with a flare of heat. My power seems excited, watching the golems, or maybe… anticipatory? A flash of imagery shows me the kiln again, and wet clay, and my hands carving that clay with a knife until a lumpy block becomes a detailed statuette.

My servants are simple, but they don’t have to be. I can shape them. I just have to figure out how, which is honestly not near the top of my list right now.

I discard the knife, flap my wings, and take off through Nessie’s halls, leaving the battle in the food court behind.

The Megacenter is a cluster of interconnected buildings so labyrinthine that one girl managed to hide there for a whole week before being found by security. I’m not the biggest shopper, but I’ve still been here enough times to know roughly what I’m looking for. I ignore clothing stores and jewelry boutiques, zipping past stalls selling stuffed animals and one shop smelling of the most delicious cinnamon sugar that I desperately want to inhale. Fighting on an empty stomach is the worst.

I set down in the sporting goods section of a big-box store. A red-faced man with an ugly moustache comes stomping toward me, his nametag informing me that Dennis here is the store manager for this location.

Dennis shouts at me, “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but when I tell Pearl Princess that you invaded her favorite store—”

I fireball the delusional idiot with transformation magic. “You really shouldn’t trust sponsor reads,” I chide my newest minion as Dennis becomes another clay doll.

I rip a baseball bat off the wall and feed it to Prometheus. That’s two weapons, now what can I scrounge next?

“WITCH!” roars Thunderclap, making her entrance with characteristic aggression.

“Hi again!” I greet her, and then I have to duck under another axe swing and shout at Dennis to distract her.

The clay doll comes lumbering in while I do my best to create distance. This time Thunderclap isn’t willing to give me that luxury, and she dodges the big clay monster’s clumsy lunge to stay close and stay swinging. This calls for an adjustment in tactics.

I conjure a baseball bat and throw it at her. She knocks it aside with her axe, but in that second of distraction I dart past her to my golem and undo its transformation. Manager Dennis returns to being human and is woken up by a knife at his throat and my other arm pinning him. Whatever exclamation he was going to make cuts off.

Thunderclap freezes at the sight of a genuine life-in-danger hostage.

“Y’know,” I say with a grin, “I really don’t think you’re as dumb as everyone believes.”

I grab Dennis tight and bolt for the exit at full flight speed. Thunderclap follows me into the parking lot and above it, higher and higher into the air. Dennis screams, so I drop the knife and cover his mouth to shut him up.

“Think fast!” I call to Thunderclap, and then I drop Dennis. He’ll be fine.

The heroine breaks off her charge toward me and swoops down in a panic, throwing her axe aside to be able to catch the civilian without cutting him up. Her dive is perfect, her course correction pristine, and she lines up the catch just a second before my fireball hits the falling body and turns him back into a heavy clay doll.

The sight of a magical girl getting slammed by several hundred pounds of monster brings a tear to my eye, and I belt out another mad cackle. I follow the duo down and shout to the falling heroine, “You’re putting me through a trial by fire here! Get it? Trial by fire? See, it’s funny because—”

A surprise lightning bolt clips my left wing and hurts like hell, damn it, my poor singed feathers that didn’t deserve such unprovoked cruelty. I’d file a complaint with Vanguard HR if they had that department. Maybe Visage will take the case for me.

Pain doesn’t seem nearly as debilitating as it was before my transformation, so pencil another line onto the forces of darkness benefits package. My flight wobbles, but I recover.

Thunderclap managed that shot while wriggling out from under the golem, and I see dear Dennis passed out in the crater that the falling monster made in the asphalt. The parking lot isn’t empty of people; plenty of civilians are either getting in their cars to leave or just plain unbothered that a fight between two superpowered warriors is happening just over their heads. The things you get used to in Forks, I swear.

That means more hostages for me to use. I make a landing next to two dudes who really should have run away. Their loss, my golems.

Golem, I should say, since one of them immediately takes a bolt of lightning to its distinct lack of a face and crumbles back into a person. Oh, and there goes the second. Thunderclap lands between me and the unconscious victims, her axe retrieved and once more in hand. Anger rolls off her in waves, her face contorted into a scowl so extreme it looks unhealthy. I can see individual muscles tensing, her whole body flush with incandescent rage.

“Nice work!” I praise. “But I think I’m getting the hang of this magic thing, so you should probably just head home.”

Instead of doing that, she rushes me again. And instead of flying away or hiding behind the golem, this time I step into the swing. With a burst of speed both of my hands snap to the handle of the weapon and I put all my strength behind pushing the battleaxe back. Thunderclap fights me for it, teeth gritted in single-minded determination.

I layer on the smugness and sneer at her, “If this is all you have, I’m sorely disappointed. I thought you were strong. Was I mistaken? Or are you just a half-rate pretender hiding in Striga’s long shadow?”

The rage boils over and something in the magical girl snaps. She lets go of the axe and jumps into the sky, hovering at least twenty feet above me. The clouds darken overhead as the air around her begins to crackle, and then a dozen concentric rings of golden light flash into existence and illuminate the brewing storm.

Thunderclap raises one hand and grasps a bolt of lightning. Blue electricity arcs off of the concentric rings and joins the lightning in her hand, feeding it and causing it to grow. The sense of raw power is palpable, and it’s enough to raise goosebumps on my skin.

I’ve seen her do this in videos, but I’ve never had a front row seat. This is her ultimate spell, her strongest attack, and she’s about to unleash it on me. One of the unique properties of her ultimate spell is that it’s completely and absolutely unavoidable; once she selects you as a target and unleashes the attack, it will strike you. There’s no way for me to escape her wrath.

I’ve won.

A shockwave of sound booms across the parking lot, a true clap of thunder, and the heroine chants the words of her ultimate move:

“Nothing beneath the sky can escape my justice. All things wicked shall break beneath my strength. STORM GOD’S JUDGMENT!”

The heavens crack open and the lightning bolt is loosed.

A pillar of white and blue energy crashes into me like an orbital laser. The massed power of her ultimate attack drives me to the floor and cracks the asphalt beneath me. Magical lightning tears into me with unrelenting force and fries me like an egg. My scream of pain is drowned out by the sizzle of electrified air and a thousand static shocks. My convulsions are masked by blinding white.

It hurts like nothing else I’ve ever experienced. It’s a form of pain so bright that I can’t even think through it, a pain so sharp that my world is only knives.

But the light fades, and the static grounds itself, and when it all passes to the earth I find myself happily still alive. The pain is lingering, smoke curling off singed wings, but it’s nothing I can’t handle. I can still move, so I stand up. The colored flames still burn within me like a furnace in my chest. I lift the axe I stole and carefully rest the haft on my shoulder. Already I’m recovering my poise.

Thunderclap, on the other hand?

She drifts down, half-floating and half-falling, and when her legs hit the ground she wobbles. She’s still an imposing figure, but there’s something diminished about her. A certain lack of strength in how she holds herself.

See, whenever any magical girl or witch casts their ultimate spell, their powers get fried for somewhere between three to eight minutes. It’s the single unifying quality that designates a move as “ultimate” in outside analysis of the system. No exception, no way around it.

So for the next few minutes, Thunderclap is completely powerless.

In all my models of Thunderclap’s toolkit, there are two glaring weaknesses. Her first weakness, the easier to manipulate, is that for all her bluster she’s incredibly wary of inflicting collateral damage. Her powers are direct, violent, and not particularly well-suited to dealing with delicate situations involving hostages or vulnerable bystanders. Bringing her to a high-population area blunted her edge, which gave me more time to stoke her anger.

Her second weakness doubles as her greatest strength: her ultimate attack, Storm God’s Judgment. What makes Thunderclap’s ultimate unique is that it trades some of its raw destructive power—in comparison to other ultimates, at least—for a guaranteed hit effect. That makes it absolutely brutal as a finisher move, but if she gets angry enough to cast it early?

Consequences.

“My turn,” I tell the burned out heroine with a grin. “Let’s make this part fun.”

I won’t kill her. I don’t need that kind of heat. But I might play with her a bit. All my instincts as a witch are purring at me to make her bruise, make her bleed, make her break. It’s only fair, right? It’s only natural for a witch to hurt a magical girl. It’ll be good practice.

“Thunderclap,” intrudes a calm, measured, familiar voice. “What’s going on?”

I whirl on the voice’s source, on the face—no, the mask—that I expect to see. An owl’s mask, or a masquerade imitation of one, and a suit of feathered armor to match. This magical girl is garbed in steel feathers, armored like a warrior of eld; no frills here, no ribbons, only a lethal sense of grace. A silver spear is held loosely in one hand, pointed at no one but always at the ready. This is a knight. A champion. A real, genuine hero.

This is Strix Striga, the unofficial leader of Vanguard and a strong contender for the title of most dangerous magical girl on the West Coast.

This is Sophia Lane.

---