"Are you fucking serious? Talk about a disadvantage…"

Kari reread the system messages more times than she would like to admit. Her eyes began to sting from drying out having stared at the texts for too long. When she checked her status, the skill [Come Here!] had been crossed out. It was one of her most used skills, so losing that one stung particularly bad.

"I can't use [Prison of the Old Ones]! Anything we fight, we're going to be stuck fighting until we win or…" Candy frowned, almost refusing to finish her sentence for fear of jinxing them.

When they tried to fly, it just wouldn't work. Their feet remained grounded. It was a strange feeling to be bound by gravity after so long in the air.

To make things worse, the Apocalypse System's communication system was jammed. They couldn't reach Jade, and she could be anywhere in Minato or the neighboring cities. This was stacked worse than betting in horse races.

Moreover…

Sachi was trembling. She clutched her knife and Iggy as if they were the only thing that could save her. The terror in those eyes, still a virgin to all the horrors the monsters were capable of, reminded her of Makina.

What was this weird feeling? Kari hadn't been worried about anyone other than her friends before. Seeing Sachi in such distress bothered her.

Flare's words likening them echoed loudly between her ears.

"No… We're not alike at all," she muttered spitefully.

Crack! Crk!

Their eyes flicked to the Malevolent Domain which was splintering and worsening by the second.

"Hey, guys… Not to rain on our already soaked parade, but we have company!" Rocky informed them.

Head hounds and broken ladies poured in from every avenue, quickly surrounding them at the intersection. The skies weren't safe either. Flying monstrosities circled above like vultures waiting to pick them off.

Kari and Candy put their backs together to face either ends of the street. Meanwhile, Sachi was in far too much shock to think correctly. She had only been fighting strays up until now. An incursion was a whole other ballgame.

"I can blast most of them away with [Starfall Grenade Cannon]. It'll create an opening for us to escape!" Candy pointed her weapon at the head hounds.

"Wait! Save your magic. We're going to need that firepower later," Kari said, then pulled Rocky down eye-level to face her. "Do you anthems know which big bad's jamming what?"

"No, I wish it were that easy! But we do know where the closest one is!" Rocky said.

He, Iggy, and Yuyu unanimously pointed south. Luckily, it was a path full of head hounds instead of broken ladies.

"Do you have a plan?" Candy asked, finger tight on the trigger and ready to blow the monsters to smithereens.

"I'll carve us a path. We just have to hope this one gives us our flight back, then take out the other ones to stop the Apocalypse. Stick close to me!" Kari charged straight ahead and crushed the first hound in her way. Its death triggered [Collateral] and dealt visible damage to the others.

[+1,000 Apocalypse Points.]

Killing a second one, triggered [Collateral] again and caused the rest to pop.

[+23,000 Apocalypse Points.]

A huge chunk of points were added to her total since they died at the same time. Thankfully there wasn't an abnormality preventing them from gaining points.

"Come on!" Kari shouted.

Candy raced ahead with Yuyu, but Sachi was petrified with fear. Even Iggy couldn't get through to her, so Kari had to go back for them.

"These things aren't scary when you put a knife in their backs just like you practiced. You're all about playing dirty, right? Like throwing roaches on me and pushing Makina off the edge of the pool?" she snidely reminded her.

It worked. Light returned to Sachi's eyes. She stopped trembling and came back to her senses.

"Well, shit. If you put it that way, I'm going to start feeling guilty again. Guess I still need to apologize to Makina, don't I?" Sachi cracked a grin.

The two followed after Candy. Although they might not be able to fly anymore, their respective class' high haste allowed them to catch up quickly.

"Yuyu, lead the way!" Candy ordered.

The tanuki anthem flew ahead to scout at a higher elevation.

"It looks like we're about to cross Shinagawa!" Yuyu announced from above.

Shinagawa City? The system raised one hell of a giant Malevolent Domain. It must be covering most of Tokyo at the very least, which meant that they were at a much greater disadvantage than any of them thought.

Countless human bodies littered the streets, but they couldn't afford to stop to check if they were alive. There was no telling if they had been killed before or after the domain went up. Each person they passed seemed to add to a burden that weighed on Candy's mind. While Sachi avoided looking at them, it was as though Candy committed their faces to memory.

"This is horrible…" she said.

Without flight to traverse the wide artificial arena, it wasn't looking like they were meant to succeed in stopping this at all.

The apocalypse needed to happen anyway. Only then could—

"Arrghh!" She keeled over on the ground.

"Kari!"

The others had cried out to her, but their words hardly registered past a thousand nails scraping against the back of her skull and knives puncturing the back of her eyes. White hot pain flashed from every nerve ending.

You would be wise not to let the apocalypse happen, Kari Tachibana.

Those nails formed an enraged voice.

Do as We say. Betray Us and see your world doomed. Much of Our power has been given to stymie their arrival. Do not squander it. For should seraphs descend, you—

"Get out of my head…" Kari growled defiantly.

Worm. What do you even fight for?

"Myself… Now sit the fuck back and let me do my thing… If you want to pull me off the chessboard this late into the match… go right ahead," she dared the almighty entity.

Her audacity was met with silence. The pain ceased all at once. She found herself flat on the ground and glancing up at the worried gazes of Sachi, Candy, and three anthems.

"Partner! Did something hit you?" Rocky asked.

"No… Just got a little dizzy." Kari picked herself up. "Did I say anything while I was down?"

Sachi and Candy traded awkward looks that made Kari wary.

"You were only out for a second. We thought you tripped or something," Sachi said and handed her a bottle of water with only three sips left.

"Forget about me; I'll be fine. How much farther are we?" Kari asked.

"Not much farther!" Yuyu shouted from above, peering into a pair of binoculars.

Although the others had bought her lie, Kari noticed that Iggy stared at her a brief second longer and didn't seem particularly convinced.

"Oh, my god…" Candy gasped and skidded to a stop. "Is that… where I think it is?"

Kari and Sachi followed her gaze up to the NTT Medical Center where enormous, fleshy and bulbous growths protruded from the sides of the building.

Armored JSDF and police vehicles outside were empty. There was not a single person or corpse in sight, yet a foul stench was being emitted from somewhere.

The hospital?

"I… I think that's what we have to kill…" Rocky pointed a shaky finger at the building

"How the hell are we—?" Kari stopped walking the moment she felt vibrations underneath her feet. More specifically beneath the asphalt. Her eyes flicked to a sewer grate at her feet, where small bursts of steam shouldn't be emitting from. "There's something underground."

The earth shuddered violently. Kari shoved both Candy and Sachi away as massive tentacles ripped out from the road. One snatched her up and tried to squeeze her to death. She filled her lungs with air, flexing against its strength.

Candy unloaded into the base of the tentacle, causing it to release Kari and return underground. Like a leviathan, more tentacles emerged in its place, and as they did, the roads surrounding the hospital block collapsed into the sewers.

They had seen the same bulbous growths in the tunnel systems that were discovered earlier in the week. Much of it had infested the length of the concrete walls and water.

"Maybe Jade had the right idea all along… Are these also part of the monster?" Kari blocked an attack with her weapon, but she couldn't stop another from approaching.

"Assassin's Shiv!"

It happened in a blink of an eye. Sachi carved both the physical body and soul from the tentacle, giving Kari the opportunity to push the tentacle away for Candy to fill it full of holes. A bellowing roar from the hospital made the hair on their necks stand.

The dismembered appendage writhed for a few seconds until it dried up and crumbled into dust.

"Does that answer your question?" Sachi twirled her knife and asked.

Kari rolled her eyes. "A 'yes' would've been fine with me."

"Awww! I'm kinda jealous you two sound like great friends," Candy remarked with a giggle.

The two of them pursed their lips, leaving Candy baffled. If only she knew the circumstances that led them here.

"Help!"

"The magical girls are here!"

Candy was the first to see people from the hospital windows. They waved whatever they could, bedsheets, pillows, and even bright-colored flowers to get their attention. Something about them seemed off. Their movements appeared too stiff.

"There are still people here? We have to help them before something happens," she urged the others.

"The evacuations were taking too long." Kari recalled Jade's irritation with the slow efforts.

There was a more telling sign. People within a Malevolent Domain shouldn't be able to move. When Candy tried to run ahead, Kari grabbed her from behind before she could go off alone.

"Let go! We have to help them!" she cried.

"Look at them! Look real close! That whole building is the monster we need to kill. Those people should already be dead. Even if they were alive, they shouldn't be moving in the domain! Don't you see there's something weird going on?" Kari asked.

Candy pushed her off. "Abnormalities are happening left and right, and the Apocalypse System said the domain was incomplete. That has to be it!"

"There's a lot more at stake than maybe a hundred people inside. We should just stay here and bombard the ever living shit out of the—" Kari stopped short of finishing her sentence upon seeing Candy return an expression of absolute shock.

"When Flare didn't turn out to be the hero I thought she was all along, I wanted to put down the mantle. Then you killed Yuria, and my world just stopped making sense. Magical girls shouldn't be hurting each other or letting people die. That's wrong! If I have to make it right on my own, I will." Candy took one more look at Kari, smiled, and sprinted for the hospital.

"Hey!" When Kari tried to give chase, Sachi held her back just as an appendage crashed down in front of them.

It swept them off their feet. Another slammed down, but Kari swung [Ruin] through and carved a piece of its soul out. The tentacle fell limp to the side, and Sachi finished it off before the soul returned.

"We gotta go after her, right?" Sachi asked.

"I don't like this one damn bit, but we have no choice! Rocky, Iggy! Stay close and don't get snatched!"

The four of them burst through the doors and into the hospital lobby. Candy was nowhere to be found, but a number of people were lying on the floor with no visible wounds. They almost wished the flickering lights were dead instead. Because all along the walls and ceiling were the same growths seen outside the building and within the tunnels.

"God… Just what are these?" Sachi walked up to a fleshy, pulsating vein that connected from the ground and ceiling. She had the right idea to slice through it with her knife, pulling away to reveal wispy filaments of a soul. A young man on the ground began to writhe and groan.

Rocky, who was the closest to him, went to investigate and recoiled immediately.

They saw why.

The same growths were attached to the man's back, like a meaty leash.

Candy must have run past thinking they were already dead and likely went to the upper floors.

As Kari tried to help the man by ripping away the fleshy tethers, his eyes snapped open. Instead of giving thanks, he unleashed a painful cry before drying up into a husk and deteriorating into a pile of dust.

"I'm going to be sick…" Sachi ran to a bin and dry heaved into it.

"Why are they like this?" Iggy asked, shuddering alongside Rocky.

Kari moved to an unconscious, elderly woman and drew [Ruin] across her body, wrenching out a human-shaped soul.

"What are you doing?!" Rocky threw himself onto Kari as if to prevent her from fully removing the soul.

"Confirming for myself. Look at the soul's back," she said.

The human soul had a ghostly appendage on its back like the physical body. This could only mean one thing.

"That means… everyone here is part of the monster?" Sachi held a hand over her mouth and gagged again.

Kari turned her weapon over to the smashing end. "Sachi, if you don't want to be here, I suggest you go back outside to fight the things that don't look human."

"I'm staying with you. There's no backing out for me after coming this far," she said, returning a determined gaze.

To their surprise, the elevators were still working. They took it to the second floor where people had been seen hollering out the window from. Candy would have gone to save the closest ones first.

As soon as the elevator doors opened, a JSDF soldier was standing in the way. He, too, had the same tendril growths on his back.

"Help… me…" he pleaded in agony.

"Nothing I can do for you." Kari used her hammer axe to push the man aside only to have him grab hold of her wrists. Before she could react, she was disarmed and thrown square across the corridor.

[200/200] ⇒ [195/200]

"Kari!" Sachi hesitated to stab the soldier in the back, leaving herself wide open for a swift kick that sent her back into the elevator. The up arrow signal blinked and shut the doors on her.

"I'm sorry! I can't control my body!" the guy cried.

The building monster, these growths… it must be controlling him. That's why they were connected. Which meant Candy was in a lot more trouble than any of them thought.

"Come on! Get up!" Rocky pulled vainly to get Kari back onto her feet.

"How the hell did he do that?" Kari stood up and wiped a small streak of blood from having cut her lip in the fall. [Destruction and Ruin] was right behind him. She wasn't going to get it back without a fight. As Kari took a fighting stance, so too did the JSDF soldier.

"It must have something to do with the thing on his back," the anthem answered with certainty.

Kari threw a hard right straight. The man ducked left, grabbed her arm, and threw her to the ground. She rolled away as his foot cratered the floor where her head was a split second ago.

"Aaahhh! Fuck! My leg… Holy shit… my leg!"

The soldier fell to the ground. His leg had fractured and a piece of bone protruded from the ankle.

That was as far as he got. The monster might be giving him a lot more power, but the human body was only so fragile.

Crippled and unable to move, the helpless man watched as Kari picked up her weapon.

"The least I can do is put you out of your misery," she said apologetically.

"No, please… You're supposed to help—"

The hammer crushed his head.

"We regroup with Sachi and Iggy first," Rocky suggested.

Kari pressed the elevator button just as four tentacles tunneled into the building. Doctors, nurses, and folks in hospital gowns entered the hallway, all with tethers on their backs.

The elevator wasn't coming quick enough. She prepared herself for a fight when an inaudible whisper, quieter than a light breeze tickled her ears. Blue ribbons had wrapped around the tentacles like poorly worn bandages, wringing from them every drop of blood until they were nothing but mangled sausages. They then picked up the people in the hallway and chucked them out the window.

Only one magical girl had ribbons like that.

Emerging from the corner on the other end of the corridor, footfalls as gentle as snowfall, her cold stare sending shivers down Kari's spine, was the Chinese magical girl. The videos hadn't done her justice. She probably stood a good six feet, easily taller than any girl Kari had ever known.

"Chu Hua— guh!"

A blood-soaked ribbon wrapped around Kari's throat, dragging her away from the opening elevator doors. Three more clones of Chu Hua had taken form. Like the petals of her namesake, many had surrounded her to bind her still with the ribbons from their sleeves. They might as well be made out of steel because she couldn't so much as make a tear into them.

Every single one had been pulled taut. Chu Hua was trying to strangle her, and the blank expression from each clone made it all the more terrifying.