Because Magical Girls Are Serious Business
"Why on earth did she pick flag capture...?"
At Team WoW's starting point, Baekseol muttered the question under her breath as she ran a careful check over her ice staff. Sure, she'd deliberately provoked Choco in advance, anticipating a relay match. CO had advanced to the finals as the first-place team in the playoffs, which meant the match selection rights belonged to them — WoW was simply the side that had to accept whatever was chosen. But she'd never actually believed the provocation would work. At most, she'd figured it would ruffle a few feathers. Her own rankings had put relay battle first, team brawl second, deathmatch third, and she'd prepared accordingly.
'And yet suddenly it's flag capture...'
Choco ran hot-tempered, sure, but she wasn't stupid. Anyone dumb enough to fall for a provocation this flimsy could never have lasted as a pro team captain. 'She's not the type to throw away a finals match over some taunt — does she really have that much confidence in herself?' Or had she genuinely just been dim enough to take the bait?
"...Whatever the case."
"Sis, we're all set."
Baekseol nodded at her teammate, who was laying down the magic field across the starting point. A colossal field, woven into place by no fewer than four mages. Each of them had deployed a long-casting field, and Baekseol — a great archmage in her own right — could manipulate them fluidly at will. The magic used here would deliver several times its usual destructive efficiency, and the barrier was solid enough that no one, not even Choco, could break through.
'Unless they're a monster like Leo or Lily.'
"Good work. Ironwall, hold the line."
"Okay."
Standing at the very center of the magic circle, guarding the flag, was the tank Ironwall — a ranker with a tank class literally called Ironwall, capable of absorbing tremendous damage and generating a barrier in proportion to whatever he soaked up. There were only two ways to take the flag in a flag capture match: rip the banner from your opponent's back, or kill them. With countless magical buffs, the protection of the magic circle, and Baekseol's support stacked on top of him, no amount of trickery within the time limit could put Ironwall down.
The moment the match began, the positions of every flag-bearing player appeared on the map. Those markers refreshed every three minutes. Judging by what she saw, the enemy was still a considerable distance away — both teams had yet to stray far from their starting points.
"Good. Then I'll move fir—"
Crack—BOOM!
"Already?!"
"Gunfire! It's their Gunner, northwest!"
The sky above the field of the vast magic circle hummed with a deep whine as it shuddered blue. At this distance, the shot had to have come from well over thirty kilometers away.
"I expected this much."
Though she fell short of Raguel's clairvoyance, the hidden class Gunner possessed a long-range sight of its own.
Crack—BOOM! Crack—BOOM!
Shot after shot hammered against the field's protective barrier. To the eye, it seemed to hold without a single scratch, but the damage was accumulating steadily all the same. Left alone like this, the barrier would shatter.
"Slow."
Baekseol swept her hand through the air, and the incoming bullets slackened, just a little. BOOM! They still struck the barrier — but their force had dropped off sharply.
"Trying to coast to a free win, are we?"
"That's our sis for you!"
"More importantly, shouldn't we move soon? If we just sit here, it's going to get dangerous."
"Got it."
She'd blunted the damage, but it was still piling up. Baekseol moved her body in a rush and took off, gliding through the air like something skimming across ice. Balance adjustments or not, a high ranker was still a high ranker. She tore toward her target at blistering speed, and then—
"...!"
She ducked her head without a moment to think. A golden spear sliced through the space just above her hair.
A mistake. She should have blocked it. And if she couldn't block it, she should at least have bent its trajectory. The golden spear sailed on untouched and—
BOOOOM!!!
—shattered the field's barrier to pieces.
The match had barely started, and the screen was already alive with footage and commentary. A woman crouched in concealment across a grassy plain littered with rocks, firing her sniper rifle. Crack—BOOM! She wore a crisp white uniform, the golden cogwheel emblazoned across her chest catching the eye. When her white rifle — something born of magic and machinery, of magitech engineering — erupted in thunder, the magical barrier far in the distance shuddered a deep, dark blue.
'A gun, huh...'
"That's the first gun I've seen in DeoEn. Is it a hidden class?"
"It is. The only class that has one."
DeoEn was a world built on a medieval foundation, and modern weapons like guns were all but nonexistent. This was a world where magic and mysticism reigned supreme over science.
"DeoEn doesn't much care for modernity — you even have to pay a premium just to use a setting room styled like real life... but a hidden class is a different story. Besides, it's not fully modern anyway, right?"
Yena said her piece and turned her focus back to the match. Certainly, the gun wielded by that player called the Gunner sat in an ambiguous middle ground — not quite a real-world sniper rifle, closer to magitech. Closer to fantasy.
In a world that had magical girls in it, there was hardly any reason to think too hard about it.
The gunfire continued. Apparently unwilling to sit idle under the relentless barrage, Baekseol slowed her speed and then arrowed straight toward the enemy base. And then—
"Oh!"
"That's—"
BOOOOM!!
The field's barrier broke. That was the price of Baekseol dodging instead of blocking or interfering. Choco seized the opening without hesitation, left Baekseol behind entirely, and flew straight for the field. Panicked, Baekseol spat out ice to bind her, but mages were a class that needed preparation.
Sshhk!
Magic with no cast time to speak of? A few sweeps of Choco's spear carved it all away. So Baekseol burned a longer casting time and unleashed something bigger. No matter how good Choco was, her opponent was Baekseol — a ranker of nearly the same standing. Even with the balance adjustments, shaking it off looked impossible...
-Hmph.
Zzt-crack!
The translucent violet cubes orbiting Choco swallowed the ice shards whole. Having served their purpose, they plummeted away the instant they finished absorbing, hissing like venting steam.
Choco vanished completely from Baekseol's sight. The field's barrier was only just being rebuilt. With three more mages besides Baekseol, reconstruction wasn't the hard part — the problem was the Gunner.
Crack—BOOM!
-Kyahk!
-Ironwall! Get in there and tank something!
-...Then who's guarding the flag?
The moment the barrier dropped, the Gunner's rifle swung around to pick off the mages. They were pros who'd each made a name for themselves, so no single shot would kill them — but their level of magic was far too low to handle barrier reconstruction and damage mitigation at the same time.
-Haah... this is exactly why...
Pulling that off was possible for exactly one person here: Baekseol, recently awakened. She drew a single book from within her robes. A blackish-red tome frozen completely solid.
Fwoosh! The pages turned on their own, untouched by any hand.
A deep chill bled out of the book, and the pages that had been flipping for a long while finally came to rest in one place.
FWOOOOSH!!
Vines of ice thorns erupted from the tome. The thorned mass spun sharply and shot forward at blistering speed, clamping around Choco's ankles. Choco immediately sheared through the vines with her spearblade — useless. The thorns numbered in the hundreds, the thousands, and in a single breath they swallowed Choco whole.
Bang! Bang! Taaang—...
The thorned vines swallowed even the bullets, then wrapped the entire field within moments and settled into a defensive posture. With the Gunner's interference cut off, the barrier rebuilt itself at once. The situation had been restored, and WoW's crisis had subsided. If anything, with the flag-carrying Choco now caught in the trap, CO looked to be at the disadvantage.
"This looks dangerous... that Tome of the Extreme Cold is Mythic-grade, after all."
Yena stared anxiously, tensely, at the mass of vines on the screen. It was true — no casual sweep of Choco's spear or handful of cubes was going to cut through that thing.
"Hmm. Doesn't look all that dangerous to me."
But I watched the vines with perfect calm. The spear strike Choco had used to shatter the barrier earlier — that was, without a doubt, the technique from back then.
'A copy of Annihilation from the Mock Siege Battle.'
She hadn't managed to mimic its overwhelming force or its unique authority, but she'd built it by warping Spear's Roar into something of her own. Whatever else you could say about it, on raw power alone it was at a fairly respectable level.
'Did she trade some of the power for less of the strain?'
She wasn't like Yena — died once, come back, fully awakened — but even so, on her own terms she'd pulled off a genuinely admirable success. Choco had real talent. And if that talent kept stretching along the same line, then...
Crashhh... kachunk!
The mass of thorned vines split apart from the inside out with a tremendous roar. A violent storm, tearing loose from its very core. Through the gaps in the thorns, a spill of golden hair — and over it, a Holy Grail came sliding down in a smooth cascade. The golden spear in her hand drew in everything around it as if conjuring the storm itself.
'The Eye of the Spear.'
Choco was using the power of the Mythic-grade item, the Holy Grail, to crudely imitate the Eye of the Spear. I felt admiration — and, alongside it, a flicker of disappointment.
'...It would have been better if it were Candy Star.'
If only that fierce devotion to the technique, that figure bursting through the vines, had taken the shape of a magical girl. That would have been so much nicer.
'Candy Star suits a magical girl far better.'
Because magical girls are serious business.