Shattered

The desert could no longer be called a desert.

Wave after wave of high-energy impacts had melted the rolling dunes, set them flowing, and hardened them again. The ground had become a slowly heaving sea of lava. Dark red cracks covered everything in sight, and heat haze warped the sky.

Yes, that was the destructive power of Magical Girls.

People thought fondly of Magical Girls because of their beautiful appearances and hearts. Strip that away, though, and every last one of them was a weapon of mass extinction.

Scholar's Regalia was torn in several places, her hair had come loose, and a wound Thousand Blades had left on her arm would not stop bleeding.

The Magic Power around her remained astonishingly vast, but everyone there could see that Scholar was nowhere near as strong as she had been at the start.

Of course, Scholar had expected that.

Love's ability was, put simply, the power of I reckon. If she wanted it to produce a particular effect, thinking it was often enough.

Scholar, on the other hand... as she had said before, needed to analyze an ability first.

Familiar abilities were manageable; she could use those directly. But whenever Love used something Scholar had never seen, or rarely used, Scholar had to solve the problem all over again.

Love seemed to have realized this and had begun attacking her with multiple abilities at once.

Scholar had no choice but to divert her attention to analyzing them, or they would hit her outright... And Love was hardly limiting herself to powerful, sophisticated abilities. She used whatever came to mind.

She could even produce an effect that made its target sneeze uncontrollably.

How was Scholar supposed to guard against that?

She dodged, smiling bitterly to herself.

Just then, a surge of immense Magic