Duel Beneath the Moon

At night, the abandoned construction site lay steeped in a bleak, desolate atmosphere.

Under the cold moonlight, two girls, one in blue and one in pink, stood facing each other, their eyes locked.

"I'm coming."

With a serious expression, Xia Ya vanished in a flash as soon as she spoke, appearing before Zhou Mo as a sharp kick came hurtling at her.

Zhou Mo twisted aside and barely dodged, but Xia Ya had not put much force into the attack. The instant Zhou Mo moved to evade, Xia Ya retracted her leg, spun most of the way around, and struck again with a spinning back kick.

With nowhere to dodge, Zhou Mo could only raise her arms to block.

The heavy force sent numbness through the backs of her hands.

"This strength..."

Feeling her opponent's power, Zhou Mo gained a rough measure of it.

Without giving her a chance to catch her breath, Xia Ya's attacks poured down again like a raging storm. Zhou Mo had no other option but to defend with all her might.

The two battled across the open ground. Through constant feints and changes in technique, Xia Ya quickly gained the upper hand in the initial close-quarters exchange.

"What's wrong, Miss Molis? If you keep defending, you'll lose sooner or later."

Xia Ya maintained her offensive rhythm while applying pressure with her words.

Zhou Mo merely defended in silence. Indeed, when there was little difference in strength, fighting technique became the decisive factor. With only two battles' worth of experience, she truly could not compare to Xia Ya.

At the very least, most of her wild flailing punches were easily parried aside by Xia Ya.

The battle between the two Magical Girls was like two steel coils continually crashing across the ground, shaking up clouds of dust from the surrounding earth.

Until Xia Ya caught a major opening in Zhou Mo's defense, swept her legs out from under her, and then lunged forward to pin her down.

Xia Ya sat atop her, clamping both hands tightly around Zhou Mo's wrists and pressing her flat against the ground.

"Be good and admit defeat, Miss Molis. Otherwise, I'll keep you pinned down until you can't get up."

Xia Ya looked down at Zhou Mo and spoke lightly into her ear.

Though her wrists were pinned and she could not exert her full strength, Zhou Mo showed no defeated expression. Instead, she calmly met Xia Ya's gaze.

"Your combat experience is indeed richer than mine. But do you know that overwhelming strength can break all techniques?"

As soon as she said that, she clenched her fists and tried to lift them.

At that moment, Zhou Mo's hands, originally restrained by Xia Ya, slowly began to rise.

"How..."

Xia Ya's eyes narrowed. She used all her strength to press them back down, yet she could not stop Zhou Mo's upward movement.

Before her eyes, Zhou Mo gradually began to turn red. Once Zhou Mo had fully transformed into her Red Form, Xia Ya could no longer restrain her and was blasted back by the burst of full-body strength unleashed after the transformation.

By the time Xia Ya barely regained her footing, Zhou Mo was already before her. Grabbing Xia Ya's hands in the same manner, she lunged forward and pinned her to the ground.

With her overwhelming strength, no matter how Xia Ya struggled, she could not break free from Zhou Mo's restraint.

After struggling for a long time to no avail, Xia Ya sighed, tilted her head, and said in a resigned tone,

"Ugh, I surrender, I surrender. Seriously, can you just do whatever you want because you're strong?"

"That's right. If you're strong, you can do whatever you want."

Zhou Mo answered smugly.

Sure enough, I won again. I always win.

She basked in her triumph for a while, but when Zhou Mo lowered her head and looked at Xia Ya beneath her, she suddenly realized that something about what she was doing seemed wrong...

"Ah..."

Zhou Mo finally caught on. Her little face instantly flushed bright red, and she sprang up from the ground, stumbling several steps back before dropping onto the ground on her butt.

"Hm?"

Xia Ya climbed up from the ground and looked at Zhou Mo with slight confusion.

Seeing the other girl's crimson cheeks, Xia Ya realized what had happened as well.

After pausing for a moment, an idea immediately came to her.

Xia Ya slowly walked over to Zhou Mo, bent down close to her ear, and wore a slightly mischievous smile.

"Oh my, so Molis is the innocent type. But we're both girls—could it be that you were thinking about something strange?"

"D-Don't say it!"

Before Xia Ya could finish, Zhou Mo immediately jumped to her feet and ran away as if fleeing for her life.

Watching her retreating figure, Xia Ya's ears reddened as well.

Th-That should count as getting one back on her, right...?

Not long afterward, the two returned to where they had been sitting, accompanied by two fairies.

"My, what wonderful material that was."

The Bai cat Rabi walked elegantly along a steel beam, speaking in a rather smug tone.

"What material?"

Zhou Mo looked over in confusion.

"Video material."

After saying that cryptic line, Rabi closed her mouth.

Zhou Mo pondered for a moment before finally realizing.

Oh! Battle footage? Right, I won that fight just now. Posting it online could improve my image among my fans.

Then I can really farm some rice—no, have some friendly interactions.

Beside her, Xia Ya played with the pink fairy in her arms and sighed.

"Molis's Red Form really is powerful. If you just kept using the Red Form from now on, wouldn't you be able to solve every battle?"

"Three minutes."

Zhou Mo suddenly said.

"For now, I can only maintain my Red Form for three minutes. After that, my magic power will be completely exhausted."

"And in Blue Form, as long as I do not engage in high-consumption combat, natural recovery can offset the magic power consumed to maintain the form, allowing me to remain a Magical Girl indefinitely."

After hearing Zhou Mo's explanation, Xia Ya nodded in understanding.

"So it's the difference between an endurance type and a burst type."

That was how she summarized it.

Then she raised an eyebrow at Zhou Mo and asked rather strangely,

"Can't you really grow bigger? Like one of those huge things that are forty or fifty meters tall and weigh tens of thousands of tons."

"...I'm really not a Giant of Light."

With the day's training over, Zhou Mo bid Xia Ya farewell and returned to her room under the cover of night.

She took out her phone and searched online for information about the Magical Girl Molis.

[Second Form? Crimson Lotus Molis beats up a Monster! #MagicalGirlMolis]

[Peak at debut! The suddenly emerging Molis may become the biggest dark horse among rising stars.]

Zhou Mo browsed for quite a while. Most of it was discussion about his battle with the Monster during the Bai day.

Although it was a Magical Girl name, seeing the name Molis being discussed again and again still brought an unconscious smile to her face.

"Being a Magical Girl might not be so bad after all?"

After all, she could earn so much rice just by beating up Monsters. The danger and forced transformations and all that were necessary sacrifices.

"I've finished talking about the advantages. What about the disadvantages?"

Zhou Mo lay on her bed, scrolling through clips of her own videos on Bilibili for a long time, only gradually falling asleep deep into the night.

The next day, an unknown account on Bilibili Video Network uploaded a video about the Magical Girl Molis.

[Video: What are Molis and Xia Ya doing?]

"..."

When Zhou Mo came across a video posted by an uploader with a Bai-haired, red-eyed cat avatar, showing footage from the latter half of his fight with Xia Ya, he fell silent for a long time.

"Rabi, killing you a thousand times still wouldn't be enough!"