Loop Two - Chapter Fourteen - Listening

“Just listen in,” Amber said.

“I’m listening, but I can’t understand anything they’re saying,” Cassy whispered back.

It was a fair point. The Black Magi below were all chanting, deep voices occasionally joined by a few higher pitched calls that Amber couldn’t understand a word of. “I don’t think it’s Latin,” she muttered.

“You know enough Latin to know?” Cassy asked.

Amber shook her head. “No, but it doesn’t sound Latin? It’s too… harsh? It might be old English, or German, or something else.”

“If you say so,” Cassy replied. “We’re recording it, yeah? We can give it to someone to listen to—translate it back so we know what the hell they’re singing about.”

“It might be important. Don’t you remember our class on rituals?”

“We didn’t get a class on rituals,” Cassy said.

Amber blink. “Oh, right.” That hasn’t happened yet. “Nevermind, then.”

Below, the chanting finally came to an end. It had only lasted about two minutes, according to Amber’s internal clock, but it felt like it had gone on for much longer. To be expected when listening to something so dull, she supposed.

“Brothers,” the man at the front of the room said. “Brothers and sisters, our times of trouble are coming to an end. As you all know, the invaders believe themselves superior to us. They have greater technology, and they think that makes them powerful. They have more people, and they think that makes them strong. They have more knowledge, and they think that makes them wise!”

There was a murmur in the crowd. Hooded heads nodded.

“They forget they are strangers here. They believe they know better how to defeat the foes we have fought, generation after generation. They are wrong. They think that because magicals are chosen from their number by the Seelie, they know the deeper secrets of the arcane arts. They are wrong!”

Cassy leaned closer to Amber until their shoulders bumped. “Should we cut this off? This dude’s boring.”

“It’s a little boring, but these guys are the bad guys, I think. We might not get another opportunity to listen in on their plans again.”

Cassy snorted. “Amber, look at them. Do you really think they’ll drop hints about their plans? This whole thing is to impress the idiots sitting in front of the guy at the podium. It’s like a political speech, or listening to someone at church. It’s just words to make the people sitting there feel better.”

That was… surprisingly insightful, Amber thought. “You might be right. What do we do, then?”

“We find out who’s in charge and ask them some questions?” Cassy said. “I vote the guy giving the speech.”

Amber frowned and considered it. It would be a big risk to jump out and cause that kind of trouble. “We’re meant to be having coffee and pastries, not attacking some cult.”

“Yeah, well, you’re the one who chose to follow them out,” Cassy said. “I was fine with the coffee and cakes. But hey, since I’m here, might as well take out the creepy cult while I’m at it, right?”

Amber glanced down, trying to measure whether or not they could, in fact, take out all the people below. Most of them looked like perfectly ordinary folk under the cowls and robes. Some had big guts, and others looked to be on the older side. Two magical girls shouldn’t, in theory, have a hard time. “I don’t think this would be very, uh, legal.”

“Yeah, they’re probably all civilians, and it’s not like they’re sacrificing virgins or doing anything but talking and being creepy,” Cassy said. “Hey, what’s with that one at the back.” She pointed to the farthest corner of the room, where the shadows were deepest.

Amber squinted and was able to make out someone standing there, someone shorter than most of the other Black Magi. A woman, she guessed, from the way her robes settled over her hips and sides.

The woman shifted, head tilting back as she looked across the room. That meant her robes parted, just a little.

“That’s a magical girl,” Amber said.

“You sure?” Cassy asked.

Amber hesitated. “Sixty percent? It could just be someone local that’s dressed like a magical girl. She has some blue clothes on, a weird cut.”

“I haven’t seen any locals wearing anything like that,” Cassy muttered. “Yeah, alright, so probably a magical girl. What do we do about it?”

“Nothing?” Amber tried. “What can we do about it, she’s just…” Amber started at where the girl had been and found the corner entirely empty.

“Shit,” Cassy said.

The magical girl was closer, head tilted back to stare at the window where Amber and Cassy were hiding.

Both of them ducked down. “Think she saw us?” Cassy asked.

“I hope not?”

The speech that had been going on for a while stopped. “What do you mean, sister?”

“There’s someone upstairs, brother,” a woman’s voice said. “A magical.”

“Whelp,” Cassy said. “Time to get going.” She stood up and gestured into the room.

Amber didn’t have time to ask her what she was doing before she felt herself grow lighter. Things inside the large warehouse were far worse. Morgan might have been able to pull off a crazy trick to stay in the fight, but she had reflexes the Black Magi below didn’t.

People screamed as gravity reversed itself and they were dragged into the air, robes billowing and pews lifting off the ground to fall towards the ceiling. When they were ten feet off the ground, Cassy shut down her power.

The people below, magical girl included, crashed to the ground with one heavy whump.

“Okay, now we really need to go,” Amber said.

“I am so OP against normies,” Cassy said.

They both stood and moved towards the door. The window behind them exploded.

Amber squeaked and shielded herself from the scattering glass and dust. There was a large polearm jammed in the ceiling, with a cord trailing behind it. The cord went taut, and Amber saw someone pulling themselves up.

“Run,” she said.

Cassy charged ahead of her and down the corridor, Amber a step behind. “Need to resummon my broom,” Cassy said.

Amber spun, shoes skidding as she came to a stop next to the room they’d entered from. “Do that. I’ll keep them distracted.” Her arms flung out to the sides, and she summoned her outfit.

I need to find a way to do this faster. Dancing like a weirdo while someone was following them wasn’t her idea of a good time. Still, it worked, and her school uniform was replaced by her red magical girl outfit, brace of knives and all.

“Tell me when you’re ready,” Amber said.

“Just ten secs,” Cassy replied.

A figure stepped into the corridor. The woman, hood still up, had a long halberd by her side. Her cloak was pinned together at the front now, hiding her uniform a little more, though Amber could still see that it was blue, with a knee-length skirt.

“Who do you think you are?” the woman asked.

Amber answered by flinging a pair of knives at her.

“That was rude,” the woman said as she batted one knife out of the air and side-stepped the other. “But if you want to be that way…”

She ran towards Amber, at a speed only a magical could manage. So Amber threw two more knives at her while recalling those she’d thrown already.

The woman’s halberd spun before her, blocking the pair of knives, and distracting her from the blades flowing back through time behind her.

She gasped as one of them rammed her in the small of the back and the other sliced past her arm, leaving a long gash across her bicep and a hole through her black robes.

Amber caught the bloody knife out of the air and tossed it right back.

This time the woman stopped her charge and jumped to the side, head moving as though wary of the knives left behind.

“Hey, red, let’s go,” Cassy said.

Amber darted into the factory room where Cassy was already sitting on her broom. She jumped up and landed right behind the blonde. “Go!”

They launched forwards, Cassy ducking her head down and Amber doing the same a moment before the top of Cassy’s broom slammed into the window and they burst through it.

Cassy turned around, then gestured into the room.

The woman with the halberd was there, arm cocked with her weapon held like a javelin.

Then Cassy flicked her wrist, and the falling glass went sideways. The woman rammed into the cloth-making machine, her weapon flying off behind her, then she was peppered with a shower of loose glass.

“Nice work. Let’s go,” Amber said.

Cassy angled them up and over the roof of the warehouse, and they shot off, faster than Amber had ever gone with Cassy.

She grabbed onto the blonde, arms wrapped tight around her waist even as they continued to accelerate until they were clear on the other side of Norumbega and Cassy lowered them down next to a few buildings.

“We’re out of sight,” Cassy said.

“It might be safer to get back to the academy anyway,” Amber said. “Just in case.”

“We didn’t leave much evidence behind, and I don’t think they had a good look at us—it was dark in there.”

Amber nodded, then with her eyes closed, focused on the weapons she’d left behind. She unsummoned them as best she could. “Right, but that was a magical girl, and she saw us hiding above. Maybe she has night vision, or some other senses that we don’t. We were hardly blind in there.”

“Right,” Cassy said. “You still recording?”

“Oh, right,” Amber said. She paused. Her phone was in her skirt, and she wasn’t wearing a skirt anymore. She felt around, then found the phone tucked in the pockets of her shorts. “Magic is so weird,” she muttered as she stopped the recording.

“Yup. Now we magic our way back to the others. I bet Jade’s going to love the story.”

“And Morgan’s going to be angry at us,” Amber agreed.

“Ah well, can’t win them all.”

“I guess not.”

***