*
That's right, I'll win this battle, so everyone wait for me! What happened next? Ah that's right... I lost.
Ledia gained a noticeable burst in energy which Vamaly took note of. Closing the distance instantly, she threw a few punches which were evaded before receiving a devastating kick to the torso. Vamaly didn't even bother mocking her declaration, when Ledia got up after being thrown she was knocked down by another kick. This time, Vamaly slammed her heel studded with spikes onto her head, piercing her brain and killing her instantly.
This was the next loop. She rose out of the bed. She didn't count from the start, so she had lost count a long while ago... That was a bad move to make. She felt like counting the time loops will only make her conscious of her failure, so she didn't count them... But now it also feels like she can't grasp how much she failed and that feeling of disappointment inflated to unreasonable bounds. She was foolish. That's what she had been thinking for a while. But it's fine. It's not like her expectations were high in the first place, she was just an ordinary girl with an ordinary revulsion for the heart sting of failure.
She got off her bed and made preparations. This time she told Marie that she had precognitive abilities and that disaster would befall the labyrinth. But she reached Vamaly before the news got to her. Vamaly was nearby anyway, in one of the labyrinth's buildings eavesdropping.
"Hey..." (Ledia)
"... What is it...? Do you need help with something?" (Vamaly)
She feigned ignorance. Countless deaths were on her hands, there's no need to hesitate. Ledia stepped closer, bursting into flames as she approached her.
".... Tch... So it's true, precognition... Why right before everything is ready?
Well... It doesn't change the job, I just have one more obstacle to get through. You think you can fight me? " (Vamaly)
Ledia wordlessly nods. This was completely different from the meek girl Vamaly first met during the bombing. She wanted the world to end for forsaking her sister, but planned to live a normal life as a police officer that saved others. It was contradictory, but the cult were the ones who simply gave her the last push. These contradictory feelings were like a scale that finally weighed more on one side.
Ledia steps in, raising her fist. She throws a feint before side stepping to attack with a knee. Vamaly blocks against the feint that back steps, avoiding the knee attack, but Ledia extended her knee and shot a direct kick that shattered Vamaly's thigh. It would heal quick, but this set a precedent that lit a fire in Ledia's heart. She's not like Kaori, she's mortal!
A small smile creeps up on her lips. More, I have to work harder. I cannot let my guard down now, but I still have to be ambitious and surpass my past self. Vamaly swiftly spins around before throwing a high kick, to which Ledia blocked with her right elbow. The leg was quickly drawn back and launched for a normal frontal kick. Ledia exploits the gap in time when Vamaly retracted her leg to dodge under, then uses the next gap to rush forward when Vamaly retracted her foot again. Vamaly brings up her arms in a crossguard to block the incoming punch then tackles Ledia into the ground, slamming her into the ground.
Ledia wraps her legs around Vamaly's torso to secure a hold over her body before wrapping her arms around her neck and squeezing. Vamaly had tackled Ledia's torso with her shoulders, so her body was lowered enough for an amateur like Ledia to grasp and choke. Just for good measure, she burst into flames and covered their entangled figures in a fiery blaze that decomposed everything.
"Ugaaaahhhh!!!!!!!!" (Vamaly)
Elemental magic might seem weak at first glance, especially when compared to the more complex magic such as Kaori's gradient manipulation, Barius' time stop, Kanou's distance contraction and HuoLi's end world environment. However, there is one undeniable advantage that it has.
It is magic based, meaning the attacks are highly cost efficient and packed more magic offensive capability, it breaches the defences of enemies way easier than physical attacks and could shave away at magic defences without having to resort to brute force by outputting more energy than the enemy.
Erode, break down, shatter. Even with her inferior magic quantity, she can use a small amount of fire dissolve the enemy's defences. But usually the fire will fizzle put and wouldn't do much damage, that is until this exact situation where they are in super close proximity. She just has to keep herself lit on fire at all times. Burn, burn, burn, burn, burn! Even more, explosions erupted inbetween their tightly packed bodies, blowing away Vamaly's augmentations. She used her grenade technique to disperse the heat, but Ledia's body that was hugging her tightly was like an endless dispenser of fire.
Vamaly had turned into a crisp. Once her defence was breached, the flame was so strong that it disintegrated her defensively unaugmented feeble human body.
"Haa~ haa~ hAa~ haA~" (Ledia)
The fire burned up all the oxygen, she felt like she was suffocating, but at the lost moment the strain and pressure on her lungs and brain lightened up. Her body was automatically substituting oxygen and glucose with magical particles, after all as long as the body's cells could gain energy and live, then oxygen and glucose weren't necessarily vital anymore.
Still, even if magic could always heal the body physically, the mental strain is the exact same... No, the mental strain is beyond human tolerance because a supernatural quantity of force is exerted on it. Magical girls train to increase these tolerances, like mental training. As such, it took a lot out of Ledia. She sat on the ground, observing the ashes of Vamaly scatter into the wind. She learnt through the hard way, when she was stabbed in the heart it was extremely painful and felt vital... But she didn't die. On the other hand, when her head was stabbed through she died almost instantly.
The head is a weakness, cutting off the head from the neck should be fine for most magical girls, but for those who are stronger it might be better to scramble the brain first like eggs.
"Shit... What time is it now...?" (Ledia)
They were both magical girls, when they fight, they fight at maximum speed. An entire battle can take place within a second... Well they aren't really at that level yet as C grades.
930am... An hour had passed. She wasn't careful enough... Or she wasn't strong enough to finish the fight faster...
Just a second ago, there was a living breathing person in front of her, now they've been reduced to ashes. It hadn't really settled in yet, since everything seemed surreal. In the first place the existence of magic was too hard to fathom, she had been living vicariously, forming a dissonance between her mind and her body... She felt like she was playing a video game all this while....
But... The pain felt real. The feeling of hardened flesh when her knuckles pounded into Vamaly's body, the sensation of feeling Vamaly burn into a crisp and scatter as ash into the air. So which was it? Was it real or not...? A chaotic mishmash of stimuli impacted her brain like a rain storm. She gazes at her palms, clenching them. They were a little fatigued from the fight, she could feel its weariness even though it was rapidly dissipating due to regeneration.
'Did I.... Did I just kill a person...?' (Ledia)
There is no blood on her hands, everything was disintegrated and scattered away. There was no grimy viscous blood stains on her body or clothes, there was no putrid stench of raw iron from decomposing blood.
' Haa~ haa~' (Ledia)
Yet why was her breath drawing short? Why can't she catch her breath properly? Hasn't she been relaxed since the battle ended? It felt like her throat was only getting tighter and her body was heating up to an uncomfortable degree. When she fought with flames covering her body, her passive skill nullified any of the heat from affecting her, so it felt like room temperature then. This... Was nothing like that. A persistent humid discomfort clung onto her, suffocating her.
"Ah... Shit..." (Ledia)
She can't stop thinking about it, and she couldn't escape from this hell created by her own mind. She killed a person, someone who was living just mere moments before... She killed someone, she took a life.... She stole someone's future... She halted any dreams and ambitions they had... She eliminated any thoughts and opinions they might have had...
"Ah... Ahhh!!!!!!!" (Ledia)
Her wrists rose closer to her face, as if forcing her to scrutinise her sins. Her fingers convulse and her body trembles vigorously under the mental duress..
Shit shit shit.... Ledia assumed she was okay with it, since she had set her sights on killing Kaori for a while now. But planning and actually doing so was incredibly different. It's like a sludge that would never come off her hands, it's disgusting and filthy. She desperately tries to get it off with a foreboding sense that it was stuck there permanently. Out of desparation, she gazed at every direction, as if looking for some solution that would conveniently fall out of the sky. Then it lingered on her home.
They were fighting in the labyrinth while all the magical girls were evacuating the citizens from central to the surrounding territories of the Sanctuary. The building they fought in had long been leveled into the ground due to the intensity of their fight, leaving the walls exposed to her apartment. She thought about them, Marie and the others, and her dad. Simultaneously, the grimy feeling of taking a life will never go away, but it was much preferable to watching her friends and family die. It was much preferable to knowing she would never see someone again.
She pressed her palm against the ground, evaporating the sweat and fluid off with her flames. Pushing her body up, she stood tall. She had layed there for around 15 minutes... 9 45. Roughly 2 hours left. She went to the surface, scouring for any cultist or suspicious individuals hindering the evacuation.
When it reached 10 am, an announcement was made from the central building housing Himei's throne. A speaker system that reverberates messages through the entire territory via magic, it was a set of instructions for evacuation. The magical girls were already in position, leaving a select few to head into the main building to explain the situation.
After some bureaucratic processes and verification, they decided to comply and spread the message. Not once has this system been used other than to announce the danger of the Demon King, so the citizens knew well what it meant. Things should finally be going well... Now that she was here...
*BOOOM!!! *
There would obviously be more than 1 detonator, but with her heat control, she can contain the explosions. As soon as she hears them, her thermal radar will pick up the conspicuous quantity of heat, then her first skill will wrap them into self contained balls that home in on the cultists. This way, the cultist also reveal their location, but only for those next to the explosion. Those that hid far away and blended into the evacuees can't really be found. If one was hiding, they wouldn't don their cultist uniform would they?
11 am, the evacuation was going well. Those at the extremities have already begun moving towards their shelters at the other locations, next was those that lived near the centre. The magical girls have already organised during this single hour to work more efficiently and cover more ground. After containing explosions all over central, Ledia's well was dry on magical particles. She layed down on the ground, having endured straining her magic for over an hour. She had to scour the entire territory that was the size of a couple of small countries, then expend her magic to contain the energy of the explosives.
In her sped up perception, a second was more than 5 minutes for her, so it was possible to wait for the sound of explosions before heading to the site to quell the radiating energy. After some rest, she worked with the other magical girls and eventually...
***(12 pm)
This was the best that things could go, everyone was evacuated on time within the 2 hour frame that was given. In fact, people were already discussing about how the refugees would be sheltered in the peripheral territories. Things couldn't have gone any better, until...
A streak of black light descended from the sky.... It looked like it descended from the heavens, but the preceding portion of the light at higher altitudes do not contract and vanish into the ground. They were forming pillars by extending. 8 pillars formed, surrounding central, as if they were a show for Ledia to watch.
"... No.... Wait, no... I'm... You're target right...? Why are you going after the others? Why are you...
THEY'RE NO LONGER AROUND! THEY'VE ALREADY LOST THEIR HOMES!!! WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT!!!" (Ledia)
Her cries go unheard, the black pillars begun to expand radically. They crush everything in the continent except her. In an instant, the pillars dyed her world in black before vanishing. There was nothing left but a crater the size of a continent. And Kaori in the distance, ready to reap her soul.