So this project that I’m doing for July 2020’s Camp NaNoWriMo kind of snuck up on me. I’d originally intended to start a re-draft of UNSETIC Files: Pawns for this go-around, but plans changed when lightning kind of struck my brain.
There’s a meme floating around about magical girls who were supposed to be retired but have to pick it back up again when they’re around 30–and have real lives, real jobs, responsibilities, etc. that would definitely be impacted by their side gigs saving the world. When I first saw it, I laughed about it and wondered if it maybe wouldn’t be a fun project to try out–someday.
Someday happens to be, quite unexpectedly, right now.
The Magic Crystal Justice Squad is something completely off-the-wall and very different for me, but definitely brings back fond memories of much younger years when I rushed home every damn day from school to watch Sailor Moon and the hours spent over the years watching Power Rangers and similar fare. It also lets me stretch my writing muscles in some new and interesting ways, since it feels a lot more tongue-in-cheek than many of my other projects. It’s something fresh and new and has been fun so far.
We’ll see how long that lasts.
Until then, enjoy joining me on this little bit of a ride.
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One
Shots rang out and I pressed my back against the brick wall, sucking in a pair of ragged breaths. Steady. Steady.
Maybe if I told myself that I could still do this, I’d actually be able to.
God, everything hurt so much more at twenty-nine than it had at seventeen.
There’s something they don’t tell you when you sign up for this whole magical girl gig. Of course, that assumes you’ve got the choice when the whole thing comes up—from the looks of things, most don’t, at least not when you read about them or watch them on TV. I’ll tell you what: Sailor Moon it’s not, that’s for sure. It’s not Magic Knight Rayearth or any of the others, either. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows and personal growth.
And unlike in Power Rangers or any of that craziness, there’s no handing over your powers to someone else. There’s no retirement plan.
There sure as hell isn’t a happily ever after.
I’ve spent twelve years trying to convince myself otherwise and the only thing I’ve learned is that fate is a cruel bitch and the business of saving the world sure as hell isn’t all it’s cracked up to be on TV.
I risked a glance around the corner. Not immediately seeing my pursuit, I allowed myself a second to breathe, squeezing my eyes shut and trying to listen past the sound of my own heartbeat pounding in my ears. They couldn’t be far. Their pursuit had been dogged across rooftops and down through the cavernous alleyways. I’d be paying for my rappelling trick for days.
Austin would’ve told me that it was an impressive move, but probably an unnecessary stress on my body, a waste of economy. As usual, he’d have probably been right about it, too.
But Austin wasn’t here.
Austin was why I was here.
Sirens wailed in the distance, growing closer. Someone must have called the cops, as if they’d be of any help in this situation. For all I knew, they were working for the enemy.
It would not have been the first time something like that had ever happened.
Just breathe, damn you. It took every ounce of wherewithal not to snarl at myself. Panicking wouldn’t do me any good, not now—not that it ever had. All it’d ever done had gotten me was into more trouble or yelled at by my former teammates.
Former.
If there was nothing else that slammed home how alone I was in this, it was that single word.
With Austin gone, too, I was well and truly on my own for the first time in twelve years.
I opened my eyes and stared at the wall ahead of me, then reached up to tap my tiara where it rested against my temple. A crystal visor materialized a second later, numbers and figures scrolling in front of my right eye, almost too quickly for me to understand what they were telling me.
That had always been a problem, but it was one that I didn’t have the patience to fix and probably wouldn’t until the next time it almost got me killed.
Three of them closing in. I can dodge them or I can fight.
My hands curled into fists. As stupid as it was, I wanted their blood. I wanted to put them out of my misery.
It would be three less foot soldiers for the enemy to throw at me in the future.
Hell, they might have been the ones who took my brother, which meant that I owed them more than a little payback.
I should have listened sooner. If I’d listened sooner, none of this would have happened. None of this would have started again. We could have stopped it.
Dammit, we could have stopped it before it started all over again.
Too late now.
I watched the scroll for a few more seconds. My breathing calmed and I counted my heartbeats, listening as the sirens grew closer. The sirens—and the three men who thought that I couldn’t hear them coming.
They brought this on themselves.
Hands tightening into fists, I took one last, slow breath.
“Fuck with the Crystal Princess and see what you get,” I breathed, then pivoted out of my hiding place and into the open. Leveling my wand—twelve inches of iridescent, crystallized silver—at them, I growled words that only felt even more ridiculous every time I said them. “Quicksilver Crystal Blade Spread!”
In the split second between the men realizing what I’d said and the blast hitting, the look on their faces was nothing short of priceless—they thought I was the most ridiculous thing walking.
They weren’t far from wrong.
Even ridiculous, however, I was still deadlier than they were.
The magic started as a brief flare of gray-white light, almost too faint to see. It grew exponentially in a matter of seconds, gaining form and substance as crystalline daggers that flew in an arc in front of me. Dozens of them found their mark, blasting the center most of my pursuers clear off his feet, sending him flying backwards a dozen yards. His companions had a split second to look at each other, their mocking and amusement melting into something close to fear.
One of them had the temerity to shoot at me.
He missed, though not by much. It helped that I was already moving.
If I’d learned anything over the years, it was to keep moving before they got your measure and your number came up once and for all.
The other thing I’d learned was to come at the enemy with all you’ve got because you never know which encounter’s going to be the last.
Catching the one on my right in the chest with my foot, I pushed off him to tackle the one on the left, the one that had managed to get a shot off. As his companion went careening into the wall, I bore the shooter to the ground, using momentum to make up for my lack of girth. The gun clattered from his hand, went spinning away, out of reach of both of them.
They were already bleeding from the dagger spread.
Monsters, after all, bleed just like everyone else.
Whipping my wand toward his jaw like a baton as I bore him to the ground, the shooter’s head bounced off the concrete as we landed, me on top of him. His eyes rolled up into his head for a second, then he snarled. I could only see the whites of his eyes as he lunged upward at me, fingers hooked into claws.
Oh no, you did not just pull that shit with me. Throwing up one arm to catch his hands, I drove the heel of my free hand into his nose.
The sound he made was the stuff of nightmares—half a scream, half a growl. It soured my stomach and sent bile creeping into my throat, touching a primal fear built into all of us.
Unlike most, I’ve figured out over the years how to shunt that fear aside and keep on fighting.
I risked a look away from him to check on my other assailants. The one that had taken the brunt of the daggers wasn’t moving—he was probably out, though I wasn’t sure. The other, though—
Yeah. I should have been a little more vigilant about him.
A booted foot sent me sprawling, knocking me from my perch on the shooter’s chest. The other man stalked after me, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth and a few places where the daggers had caught him, too.
“You should have stayed out of it,” he growled, his voice guttural, somehow human and inhuman all at once. A shiver shot down my spine.
Just in case I needed more confirmation that something was rotten in the state of Denmark…
Well, I had it now, not that I’d needed it.
“Fat chance,” I said, brandishing my wand. He laughed at me.
“What are you going to do with that, Princess? It’s a sparkly stick with magic. You don’t have too many charges left, now do you? Bet you’re spent after that last-ditch effort to shake us off.”
“Oh,” I said quietly. “You’d be surprised.”
They were working from outdated information. That was good to know.
While being older meant that I’d pay a heavier price for any sort of physical feats of magical-girl prowess, having become a magical woman had apparently translated to a deeper fount of magic.
“Quicksilver Mist Arise.”
His eyes widened as the air around him thickened. I crawled back, stumbled to my feet, watching as a silver mist coalesced around him and his fallen companion. Their faces changed as the fog swirled around them, growing heavier, thicker.
There it was. The demonic-looking visages I’d expected, the ones I’d sensed but not seen.
They were getting better and better at hiding in plain sight.
Still, they hadn’t quite gotten good enough to fool me—not most of the time, anyway.
The mist choked off even their screams as it stole their breath.
Carefully, I stepped around the mist and headed toward their fallen companion, crouching to check for a pulse. I found none. His face had taken on the same demonic cast in death that illusion shrouded in life. My lips thinned as I started to search him, hoping to find something some clue to what they’d been up to—other than hunting me.
Behind me, the mist faded away, leaving the bodies of his companions lying in the alleyway. Muttering a curse as I came up empty in my initial search, I headed for the other two and repeated my search.
Nothing.
Maybe they were getting smarter after all.
I straightened and shook my head, staring at them for a few seconds, throat tightening at the shameful waste of it all. It didn’t have to be this way.
But they’d chosen this war, and the war, in turn, had chosen me.
If I wanted to save my brother, I didn’t have any choice. I had to keep fighting. No one else would.
There’s no handing your power to someone else when you end up where I’m at. No new reincarnation crops up to pick up where you left off, to take your wand and skirt that you thought you’d hung up and fight the good fight.
There’s only you and the demons that still stalk your days and your nights—both the ones that come from outside and the ones that come from your soul.
We thought the war was over.
How wrong we were.
