This Magical Girl is Mine

Break one monster, Echidna makes another. Slash her, burn her, drop a boulder on her, it can all be fixed with sufficient application of reserves. She’ll just keep eating.

But what would happen if you poisoned her food?

One month prior, under cover of the best secrecy spells that she could get her hands on, Strix Striga had sabotaged the water supply for the entire city of Forks. It was a complicated affair. A rotating crew of magical girls and witches had spent years developing potential countermeasures to the Catastrophes under her supervision; this particular method had been devised primarily by herself, Herbalist, and Bulwark (wielder of Hephaestus). They had prepared an impossible material that proliferated through water, resisted extreme temperature, and was absorbed into plants and animals through contact.

On its own, it did nothing. Inert. Harmless. No different from any stray mineral. But everyone in the city who had interacted with the local water in the past month had been accumulating traces of that substance, which was detectable to Herbalist’s magic. Every human that washed their hands. Every bird that drank from a fountain. Practically every living thing in Forks, in some way or another.

Where Striga’s spear struck monstrous flesh, it shriveled and withered and turned to dust. The roiling mass of biological matter twisted and undulated and contorted, screaming from a hundred mouths as glistening red flesh went gray and dry and flaked away.

The withering curse spread across Echidna’s mass in erratic, streaking patterns, avoiding some patches and tearing hungrily through others. The detached bodies—the experiments, the horrors—died much the same, some crumbling in an instant while others continued on unaffected. As the curse spread, the mass of flesh contracted, abandoning its assault on the Spire and the city to concentrate around a single point perhaps a dozen meters away from where Striga had stabbed the beast.

The arcane substance, activated by ritual, devoured its host. Striga had chosen its unwieldy activation mechanism—direct strike by magic-wreathed spear—to avoid killing half the city when the spell fired. From the coldest possible viewpoint, that amount of death would be worth permanently removing one of the Catastrophes; if she were willing to do that, she may as well have stolen a nuke and dropped it. Every organization she’d helped build would collapse overnight if Strix Striga was seen engineering the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians as acceptable collateral in a kill strike on Echidna. It wasn’t practical.

Also, the thought made her sick. She usually tried to ignore that side of herself—to sublimate human weakness in higher purpose—but Hastur’s offer had dredged it to the surface.

“What did you do!?” Echidna shrieked. “Oh, what did you do, what did you do, what did you DO!?!? I LIKED THIS FACE!”

The vanity of an abomination and a thief. “Burn it,” Striga ordered coldly.

From above, Herbalist and Lilith blasted the shrieking mound with sorcerous flame in shades of blue and green. The skinless outlines of arms and legs emerged from writhing meat and were charred down to bone. Faces formed and boiled. The mass shrank. Beasts from the rest of the horde loped to rejoin with their master, but were repelled by blade and arrow and bolt from the other mahou on the scene.

Striga flew swiftly to the nearest edge of the massive, pustule-like growth and carved into it with her spear. The mound split with ease, parting cleanly and retracting from her blade to allow her entry. An invitation. Striga entered, the wall closing behind her. The interior was heating rapidly from the sustained flame assault, but it wasn’t yet to the point that it bothered Striga’s natural defenses.

Inside the screaming cocoon, the Catastrophe was seething—visible, vulnerable, shuddering. The body she wore had deteriorated significantly; pudgy cheeks had hollowed, her bright outfit hanging loose on an emaciated frame, and something serpentine could be seen wriggling beneath stretched skin. Her flesh was gray and rotting and barely held together.

It was the body of Abigail Rhodes, inside which the true form of the thing that was Echidna slithered and crawled. The abomination was a parasite that burrowed into magical girls and made them into hosts. Abigail Rhodes was the civilian identity of Zookeeper, a witch that used to play with animals. She had been taken by Echidna in an attack and vanished. Only a select few in North America knew that she had been chosen to replace Echidna’s failing old host, which had begun to crumble after repeated near-fatal encounters with the continent’s protectors. After that, the composition of Echidna’s hordes had subtly changed; it was from that era that she truly attained the title “Queen of Beasts.”

“You dirty rotten spoilsport,” Echidna rasped, voice husky from the damage to her throat.

Striga went for the kill. Her spear sank into the crossed arms of the abomination, blocked by a sudden explosion of osseous growth. She detonated the tip of her spear with the pure light of Minerva, channeling a god’s blessing into raw destruction. Bone shards scattered, the stolen body shuddered, and Striga struck again.

“Do you have any idea how rude you’re being?” Echidna demanded petulantly. She fought back with flesh and bone, pulling mass from the bubble around them to lash out with tentacles of dripping meat and barriers of calcified tissue. “Sixty-three percent of my stock, wasted, all thanks to that little stunt!”

“Pity.” Striga flashed power and burned through another shield, a tendril, a limb. She melted one of Echidna’s arms down to a useless stump, and this time it didn’t heal. It burned Striga, too, using this much after her prior battles. Even mantled, her body wasn’t built to channel this quantity of divine power for such a sustained period. But she needed it. She had to finish her work before the parasite slithered away.

The heat inside their little pocket of the world was picking up. The carapace above glowed dull orange. No escape for the beast.

Echidna, mangled and crumbling, kept talking. “I’ll ruin even more lives because of this, you know. Families sundered, mass casualties, a rampage of replenishment to fix what you broke. That’s all on youuuuuuuu, Strixie!” The wretched thing cackled.

Striga cut her open down the length of her abdomen. Echidna screamed. Her guts spilled out like dancing snakes. The puppetmaster worm curled beneath fractured ribs, a horrible eel with faceted eyes and a hundred thin cilia-like tendrils that dug into the host body’s organs and spine.

Finally. Finally. Her spear flashed. Her comm unit crackled.

“Striga, it’s—”

Goosebumps. Prickling on the back of her neck. Athena screamed at her: danger, danger, danger! Striga swerved, pushing power into her limbs to move faster, and just barely dodged the strike that would have taken her head clean off.

Bubblegum pink nails, long and sparkly and sharp as diamond scalpels. A mane of golden curls. Tan skin, pink lips, pink eyeshadow, golden eyes. She wore a casual tee and heart-patterned sweatpants like she was mocking the very concept of a battlefield. Twin fangs gleamed in her grinning mouth.

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She was Phage.

There were vampires in Forks, Washington.

The life-draining Catastrophe pressed Striga with a bubbly laugh, the air between them heavy with the weight of Phage’s presence. Striga was forced to play defense, parrying Phage’s nails with her spear and pushing herself with more of Minerva’s blessing just to keep the vampire at bay. Phage was faster, stronger, deadlier. When fresh to the fight—her soul not exhausted from channeling divine power—Striga could match the Catastrophe and push her back. As she was?

Victory slipped from her grasp. Damn them all.

Phage stood between her and the leech form of Echidna as it shuddered and convulsed in the collapsing husk of Abigail Rhodes. Another vampire—a thrall, clad only in a white shift, her expression radiant to be of service—scooped the worm in her arms and cradled it like a child.

“Serves you right for not taking the owl seriously, yeah?” Phage teased her fellow Catastrophe. “Take lil’ sis somewhere comfy, m’kay?”

The other vampire was gone in a blur. Striga lunged to intercept, but Phage cut her off and struck her, once, hard enough to send her crashing through the edge of Echidna’s bubble and out onto the street. She came to a stop with less grace than she would have liked, stabbing her spear into asphalt to adjust her momentum and land upright. Her breathing was uneven. She wanted to scream.

All that preparation for nothing. All those sacrifices for nothing. Echidna had gotten away, again.

Phage emerged from the flaming carcass of Echidna’s last defensive measure, unbothered by the heat and drinking in the sorcery. Traditional vampires were weak to fire, but magical fire posed no threat to an energy vampire. Herbalist and Lilith cut off their flames as soon as they saw the monster clearly.

Sunlight worked, but the dawn was still hours away. Phage, ruler of the night, strode leisurely toward Striga, arms spread wide.

“What's the matter, chicklet?” the vampire crooned. “Did the big bad Venus clip your wings? Awww, so sad. And here I was getting all revved up for our special reunion.”

Striga was tired. Sophia was tired. Another setback, another failure, another fight that had to be finished another day. Some part of her wished she'd taken Hastur’s offer and left it all to someone else.

But she couldn't. She wouldn't. So she straightened her back, faced down the vampire, and communed with Athena.

Echidna was out of reach, but Phage had made herself a target to accomplish that, and with reinforcements only minutes away, if that. Could the vampire be eliminated instead? Striga couldn't best Phage alone at current condition, but the air was swarming with magical girls and most of Echidna’s army lay as dust. Phage’s thralls were undoubtedly making chaos of their own, but they were a distinctly secondary concern. With enough firepower, they could win. Could they trap her here, though, or was Phage’s escape inevitable? What assets could be spent to guarantee a kill?

Phage wasn’t supposed to be in Forks; reports had her in New York, building a coven there. Most of the cooperative measures on the North American continent were dedicated to tracking the movements of Catastrophe-level threats and alerting the right people when one was entering a new region. Somehow, she’d slipped past everyone. Had she teleported? Had—had that wizard helped her?

Athena calculated and calculated, considering all the tools at their disposal and discarding them one by one. Vanguard and Coterie had contingencies for the vampire, but too many key players had spent too much against Venus and Echidna and at the seal to Jupiter’s prison. A hasty binding wouldn’t hold the vampire, and she’d flee at the arrival of the next wave.

Nothing to be gained; merely loss to be prevented. How typical.

“Go on, then,” Striga said, and she forced a hard, ugly smile to her face. “Think you can kill me in the next sixty seconds?”

Phage smiled right back. “Oh, I just wanna make you bleed, chicklet.”

It was a storm of violence. Phage, moving faster than the naked eye could follow. Striga, always right where she needed to be to deflect the hit. Herbalist and Lilith, the sorceresses, weaving banes to slow the vampire and boons to protect the heroine. And others, those who deemed the second Catastrophe a more urgent priority than the beasts of Echidna—and thralls of Phage—scattering into Forks. Vanguard’s own Blue Team was nearest.

Bulwark, that brilliant paranoiac, had brought her sunlight gun just in case. Her team was with her—Thunderclap, Invicta, Harmony—but they were hard-pressed to keep up. Phage danced Invicta’s blades and briefly posed atop Thunderclap’s axe before scoring the latter with her claw-like nails. Another beam of sunlight from Bulwark forced the vampire to prance away, leaving Thunderclap alone for Harmony to try and heal, but each hit drained vital essence from the victim and gave Phage more fuel.

Striga pursued Phage in the moments that the vampire dared turned her face away to play with other food. Alone of the magical girls on the scene, Striga landed a single blow, her spear nicking the vampire’s side when Phage lunged for Invicta. Striga poured as much divinity as she could bear into the point of contact. Silver light flashed and seared… but it burned Striga even harsher than her foe, and she gasped as her vision spun.

A mistake. An overextension. In front of everyone, the invincible heroine staggered.

Phage tore her own shirt asunder to expose the shallow wound and the burn mark as they swiftly vanished. “Wow, stamina issue much? Oh my god, are you really flagging already!? Loser alert!” The vampire giggled to herself even as she kept toying with the other heroines desperately trying to fight her. “What was it you said to me at Seattle? Oh, I remember!”

“SHUT UP!” Thunderclap roared, throwing herself at the vampire.

In a blink, Phage breezed past the heroine’s axe, stepped in close, and crunched her skull between both hands. The vampire bounded off Thunderclap’s falling body and leaped into the air to evade another sunlight beam from Bulwark, then twisted midair to dodge a thrown sword from Invicta. Phage flickered and was gone, reappearing behind Invicta to grab her bodily and fling her at Harmony with the force of a missile. She was blurring toward Striga the next instant, claws outstretched.

Striga pushed her body to the very edge of its limits, knowing there’d be a cost to reckon with once the battle was over. She just needed a little more speed, a little more strength, even if it tore her muscles and burned her soul and left her bedridden for the next week.

They clashed thrice, silver spear against bubblegum nails, and Striga faltered. Phage landed one solid hit and again struck with enough force to send Striga tumbling across the field, this time crashing through the window of a half-destroyed restaurant. Phage followed, and behind her she raised a wall of crackling red energy to keep the others out.

A barrier fit for a tomb. Phage advanced, grinning. Striga reached for Minerva’s light and couldn’t grasp it.

Phage purred, “You told me you’d ruin me if I ever crossed your path again. You told me you’d pull me apart like a doll. You told me I’d suffer. Well, chicklet? Here I am. Aren’t you going to ravish me?”

Anger and fear bubbled in her chest, but Striga refused to let any of it show. “I killed a god today,” she said coldly, wiping a smear of blood off her face. “Forgive me if I have less to spare for a bottom-feeder like you.”

Then Phage was on her. The vampire grabbed her wrists and squeezed hard enough to fracture bone, then pushed Striga to the ground and pinned her there. Striga was too slow to stop her, too weak to stop her, too burned out to call a single mote of blessing. Phage lowered her head, fangs out, just above Striga’s neck… and she paused. Made eye contact. Smiled.

Phage flickered away. From the other side of the wrecked restaurant, she blew a kiss. “We’ll finish this later, ‘kay chicklet? I don’t want an audience intruding on our private moment.”

Phage vanished, and a second later the barrier burst. Witches and magical girls came streaming in, many from the other cities of the region, to find Strix Striga alone and battered.

“The vampire’s invisible,” she warned them, voice rough. “She can still be tracked.”

They wouldn’t find her. They could hunt her out of the city, but she’d go to ground.

Striga hated the eyes that were on her. She hated the position she was in. She hated knowing that, in those last moments of their duel, Phage had mocked her. Phage could have dispensed with the showboating and just drained her, maybe come close to killing her, but she hadn’t; she’d shown she was capable of it and then spared Striga. It was a message. An insult.

Fear. Concern. Pity. Judgment. She could see it in those watching her. Strix Striga didn’t lose… but she clearly had. And it would only get worse as news spread. The cold war with the Jovians and egregores was over. So many secrets she’d been keeping.

It was time to be rid of the noose around her neck. She’d promised Lilith, hadn’t she? That she would step down and leave leadership to someone else. Striga had gods to hunt. She was done maintaining her image. This was the last time.

Still so much work left to do before she could sleep.