(15)

But for the girl in the middle of it all, the entire club had gone as silent as the grave. It did not take a witch to understand that something was very wrong with her, even as she bashfully buried her face in her hands.

"Prez, you called me Hisoka! Oh my, are we so close that we've reached a first name basis?!"

Something ... changed in her tone as she peeked out between her fingers. Not the emotion she was portraying, but something closer to the already slipping sanity.

"Or is it because you were afraid for me?"

Reina tossed her foil aside without thinking as she stepped toward her council assistant, the girl that always tried so hard to be helpful, the girl that had been gone without a trace for a tenday.

"Oh, I was. Everyone who knew you was worried, Hisoka. You disappeared and nobody knew what had happened to you."

"It's because I'm so weak, isn't it?" Hisoka had her head down, but her tone didn't express submission. "So many things could hurt me because I don't have any strength, right?"

Nariko, meanwhile, stepped away from the wall like she was sizing up the threat level of a grizzly, but said nothing.

Reina, on the other hand, took another step toward Cho. "Hisoka ..."

"But you don't have to worry anymore, Prez!" she suddenly perked with gusto. At the same time, the shadows around her began lashing about like bannerets in a twister, forcing Tamashini to pause in her advance. "I'm not weak anymore!"

"Here it comes ..." was the brunette's first words since Cho's arrival.

Even Tora knew something was happening and ran for Reina's side. "Miss President!" he shouted.

But just as he went to pass Hisoka, the tiny girl slammed the back of her hand into his chest and sent him rolling back toward the stands. Reina's gaze snapped to him in concern, but despite looking about to hurl, he'd come to a stop without harm.

"Stay away from her, pretty boy!" the formerly timid secretary snapped at him. "She doesn't need you anymore!"

Perhaps Nariko had spoken too soon. Maybe there was just enough time to ask ...

"Hisoka," the tall girl spoke calmly and evenly, "I had expected you to come when I was alone."

The annoyance with the boy disappeared from the bespectacled girl's face instantly as it illuminated at the knowledge that her idol had been thinking of her.

"Oh, Prez is so sharp! That'd been the idea, but then I saw how strong you were beating up that bully and I just couldn't stay hiding any longer!" She hugged her chest as she practically swooned. "Oh, to think I'd been so on Prez's mind that she was even thinking about when to meet me! She really is the greatest!"

So Kelly really was the key difference. If it had been Thunder Witch instead of Sword Witch, Tamashini never would have gotten her to visit the fencing club, and they'd never have had the round robin. If it had been a regular day--

"Hey, Prez," the bespectacled girl pushed in impatiently, her little fists clenched as she struggled to contain her zeal, "I'm really sorry, I can tell you're really thinking over something important, but I just can't wait any longer! Please, can I fight Riko, too?! I want to show you what I can do!"

At that proclamation, Nariko looked over at the leader of the witches, but Reina kept her focus on Cho. Mentally, she gave an apology that she couldn't take the time to make sure Kelly was okay with it, but she also knew the brunette would be. This had to be done.

Instead, after taking a moment to seemingly consider it, she nodded as she stepped out of the way. "Yes, Miss Cho. Proceed."

Sure enough, without complaint, Kelly moved to put herself in front of Reina's assistant, but her expression was far less coddling than her leader's had been.

"What's wrong, Riko?" Cho asked with fake innocence. "You're not smiling. You smiled last time we met, but not anymore!"

"In case you hadn't noticed, you're surrounded by whorling dark energy."

The bespectacled girl giggled like a child. "Does that scare you?"

"Not really." Rather than let Hisoka control the conversation, she continued. "Listen, Hisoka, you deserve to know now that I can't actually fight you. You can attack me, and I will defend myself, but I can't actually allow myself to go all out on you."

This time, the girl's confusion seemed genuine as her head tilted so sharply to her right that it almost seemed like Cho had snapped her own neck in shock at the statement. "Huh? Why not?"

"Because I'm stronger than you are, and that comes with certain responsibilities, like restraint and when and how to use your strength." Nariko clenched one fist as she stood more ready for combat. "And contrary to what you apparently have heard, I'm no bully."

Hisoka's giggling returned, first accompanied by an expression of disbelief, then madness as it spiraled up into a full blown cackle. "Hahahahahaha! Ahahahahahaha! How delusional! You still think you're stronger than me?! Did you see what happened to the little vice-captain?!"

Reina, too, had trouble imagining what was going through Nariko's mind. She hadn't summoned any of her weapons, and couldn't so long as the club was present, yet she thought she was going to fight a proto-demon with her bare hands and it wasn't even going to be a fair fight?

Though, she reminded herself, this wasn't Thunder Witch. This Riko had actually put on such a performance before. Still, she had to understand Cho wasn't a dretch, right?

Kelly, however, was unflinching. Her posture didn't even change. "Whenever you're ready, then."

Cho's disbelieving look came back as she stared at the brunette as if trying to figure out if the girl was serious.

"Your funeral!" the former secretary finally declared and threw herself at the mere mortal.

From the outside perspective, it looked like Nariko just barely touched Hisoka as she stepped out of her way, and then her attacker just sailed right on by her ... upside down and backwards.

The gymnasium rumbled as if struck by an aftershock of a mighty earthquake as Cho collided with the far wall like a small wrecking ball.

As the literal (concrete) dust settled, Hisoka pulled herself out of the hole in the wall with barely more than a blemish on her. "WHAT WAS THAT?!" she demanded in a rage.

But still, Kelly was completely calm. This was very different from the Nariko Reina knew. That Nariko would be taunting and gloating about how amazingly awesome she was to do something like that.

By comparison, this one's response was simple and irrefutable. "That was the difference between your strength and mine."

This time, Cho could only manage a strangled cry of rage as she charged again and tried some sort of jumping kick at her opponent, but as easy as picking a fruit, the brunette seemed to pluck her right out of the air by the limb and slammed her face-first into the gym's wooden floor. Fragments of paneling flew in all directions.

By the time Cho, absolutely red in the face, probably as much from the humiliation as the impact, itself, pulled herself up again, Nariko had already moved away to put herself just out of striking reach once more.

"How?!" the bespectacled girl cried out, and yes, the glasses were somehow still on her face. "HOW?!"

"I already answered that question," Kelly calmly replied. "It doesn't matter how much power you may have. If you don't understand how to use it, you will lose one hundred percent of the time against anyone who does. Every time you attack me, your power belongs wholly to me, and I alone decide what happens with it."

Cho staggered back to her feet, not from damage suffered, but from the deep, seething breaths she was forcing in and out of her small body. "You're LYING! There's some TRICK! I'M STRONGER THAN ANYBODY!"

"Then it's ironic that you've stopped attacking."

Another feral howl of rage, and the secretary threw herself at the witch again, arms out as if she might throttle the brunette directly.

And then it was over the next instant. Cho's face was against the ground with Kelly's foot planted between her shoulder blades. Cho's arm twisted around in the brunette's grip as she moved as if to push it into a direction it very much was not meant to go, but Kelly stopped before the leverage would rip the limb from Hisoka's shoulder socket.

... The way Hisoka thrashed and yowled underneath her could have certainly given any onlooker the impression the martial artist had shown no such restraint. Of course, it was all the secretary's own doing, making the pain worse the harder she resisted, and all for naught.

"STOP!"

The word ripped itself from Reina's throat almost before she had realized it, and the scuffling between the both of them fell to silence as they watched her.

"Kelly, get off of my secretary."

Despite the calmer voice, it was more than enough for Nariko to release the limb and step away.

Though darkness still swirled around her, Hisoka didn't rise as Reina approached her. Instead, she couldn't even bring herself to look the taller girl in the eyes.

Rather than stand over her or scold her, Tamashini knelt down next to her, and with one hand straightened Cho's glasses on her face and pushed them back up her nose.

There was a long moment of silence between them. Hisoka was the first to break it, but the moment she stalled, the president cut her off.

"Prez, I --"

"I let you fight because I thought it might help you get things off of your shoulders. Did it?"

Hisoka's eyes went back to the ground. "I ... I wanted to show you ... I was strong enough to change ..."

"No strength gained through shortcuts is worth the cost, Hisoka. They change you in all of the wrong ways."

"But ... but I'm STRONG!"

"Strong enough to beat Kelly?"

Hesitantly, the secretary raised her gaze toward the brunette, but quickly snapped her gaze back to Reina once she'd done so. "But she's a monster!"

Reina couldn't resist looking over at the "monster" for herself at that, but Nariko just arched an eyebrow at the accusation. Instead, the raven-haired girl turned her attention back to Cho.

"I thought you wanted it," Tamashini told her instead. "Did you not gain enough power to face a monster? If this is as far as your conviction can bring you, then it is no wonder you surrendered to other powers to lift you up."

It felt wrong, encouraging Cho to fight like that, goading her on. But if Hisoka's morale broke, she might have tried to run away, and if she escaped ...

The girl hesitated, but after a moment, set her jaw and went to stand. "I will ..."

"Can you?" Reina demanded. "Or are you just going to make me watch you suffer needlessly for the sake of your own pride?"

Again, hesitation.

Yes, maybe she could talk her down entirely!

That was when Kelly started for the exit.

"Wait!" Cho shouted at her. "Where do you think you're going?!"

Over her shoulder, Kelly gave the girl a glare so flat and fed up that it nearly gave Reina a shiver. "You've lost the will to fight, so we're done here, right? I don't fight scaredy-cats."

What was that girl thinking? Couldn't she see Reina was trying to de-escalate the situation?

Cho, for her part, stared at the brunette in utter bewilderment, wide-eyed at the audacity. Then the shadows flared again so fiercely that Reina had to back away from her once more. The girl curled herself inward as if every muscle in her body were tensing at once and all of the shadows began to spiral down into them like they were being sucked down a drain.

"Don't you walk away from me," she growled, and as she stood, her uniform seemed a size too small for her body, the shirt pulling free of the skirt's waist to allow a little abdomen to show through, the skirt seeming just a little too short to pass the ruler test. Her voice raised to a furious shout as her clothes continued to shrink ... or rather, as quickly became apparent, she continued to grow. "YOU DON'T GET TO WALK AWAY FROM ME!"

Cho's skull grew too large for her glasses, but she didn't seem to notice them fall off of her face. Her foot promptly came down on them as it grew too large for her shoes, crunching them without any mind. Her skin darkened as she grew, a blue tint passing across it even as the sound of her clothes tearing filled the air around her.

The fencing club were utterly silent, staring slackjawed as muscles that were boldly defined, but were more toned and lean than bulky, rippled across all of her blue flesh, an abundance of it to see with her uniform's top reduced to a glorified sports bra and her skirt little more than a loincloth. At about seven feet tall, she was perhaps no true giant, but she towered above everyone else in the room.

She ran a hand through her wilder, if still comparably short, hair, revealing a set of nub horns just above the hairline, then stretched her new body dramatically as she set her black sclera on Nariko.

"I told you, Riko," she confidently declared as one hand reached out to grasp a new bundle of shadows that condensed into a large, iron-clad club, "there's no way you're stronger than I am! Your tricks won't work when you're so tiny next to me!"

Kelly had, indeed, turned back toward Hisoka, and had moved slightly to bring her closer toward Reina, but it was the latter she addressed, rather than the proto-demon that had addressed her. "Now that your little secretary has turned into She-Hulk, maybe now's a good time for a seal?"

Tamashini looked toward her with a stunned expression. Had that been Nariko's plan?! Had she been waiting for Reina to make a seal as things got more and more out of hand?! "I don't know how to make seals. If the demons don't make them, Sarasa has to."

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For a moment, Kelly's expression matched her own. "... Then I may have miscalculated. Badly."

The sight of motion pulled Reina's eyes back to her former assistant. "Club!"

Even though the crushing blow was aimed at Kelly, both girls jumped clear of the impact zone as more wood and concrete went flying.

"We've got to get her away from the club members," the brunette shouted. "We can worry about neuralizers later!"

"She'll follow you wherever you go," Reina called back, "but if you drag her out into the open, we might never track down everyone that sees the fight! It's hard, but at least here, we know who's exposed!"

The other girl growled in frustration as she racked her brain for some other solution, but just as the blue oni was pulling back for another strike, the entire room felt a sudden sensation of off.

It even made Cho look around the otherwise completely empty gymnasium in confusion despite her fury. "... Huh? Where'd everybody go?"

Though the witches were surprised, too, knowing what they were dealing with meant they recovered faster.

"They are still here, Hisoka," Reina told her calmly as she held her right arm diagonally down across her body as violet light flickered at the tips of her index and middle fingers. "They are just a fraction of a second ahead of us, so that anything we do from here on out doesn't register with reality and they are safe from harm."

The energy flashed into the form of a violet card she threw skyward. "TRANSFORM!"

The purple energy crashed down around her, only to swirl and coil across the ground to her feet and back up her sides. It embraced her like a cool, moonlit mist, but she spun away from it, leading it, always leading, in a dance it could never quite catch up with. It grabbed at her legs, her limbs, her body, ever trying to clamber closer to her, never holding her and only solidifying into attire to further adorn her.

"Heavenly crescent of ascendance!"

As the transformation finished, she ended the dance with a forceful stomp that scattered the last of the violet mist as she leaned into a final, authoritative pose. "Sacred Witch!"

Suddenly, nearly right in her face, there were almost literally stars in the seven-foot-tall blue girl's black eyes. "Wow! Prez is a magical girl?! Wow! I always knew there was something amazingly special about you, Miss Prez!"

Repeating herself and the constant switching of mood and focus made her seem manic and unbridled, but Reina knew that was only half true. She was close to Cho, or at least considered herself such, and wasn't nearly as aloof as people thought. The council president was aware that Hisoka admired her deeply, but was entirely too shy to be so upfront about it.

As a proto-demon, Cho's hesitancy and restraint had been ripped away until nothing was left but pure expression. Of course, that didn't explain the strange animosity she had toward Kelly, as the secretary had never seemed prone to jealousy. Something struck Sacred Witch as off about how readily and hatefully she glared at the brunette.

Hisoka turned that gaze back onto Nariko as if someone had flipped a light switch, just glowering at her without saying anything for a long, long moment.

"... What?" Riko finally asked, having just been standing there while Sacred Witch transformed.

"Well?" the blue girl who now towered over the brunette demanded. "You obviously knew about it, so you're one, too, right? Are you going to transform or what?"

"I mean, I wasn't planning on it."

For a change, the blue girl seemed equal parts let down and insulted instead of just the latter. Her cheeks puffed at the same time as her eyes fired back up. Reina couldn't shake the impression Cho had been looking forward to it despite the hostility.

"You're still underestimating me, Riko?!" the newly minted oni girl raged at her. "How long are you going to keep insulting me?!"

"Perhaps you should, Kelly, just to be polite," Sacred Witch encouraged with some thought. Maybe giving Hisoka a bit more of what she wanted would soothe her temper.

But the brunette just shook her head. "You spoil her too much, Prez." Kelly emphasized the title Cho was still using when she said it. She walked over to where her foil had fallen to retrieve it, seemingly in no particular hurry. "Besides, I have a reason not to transform."

When Nariko reached the weapon, she picked it up and examined under the guard where the battery had plugged in. "You aren't the only one that wants to run an experiment."

Sacred Witch found herself shaking her head as she stared at the brunette like she'd lost her marbles. "Kelly, proto-demons cannot be harmed by mundane weapons, and that isn't even a weapon! It's a sporting foil! You couldn't cut a grape with it!"

"That it's a sporting foil is exactly why it's what I need," Kelly replied, then set her eyes on Cho. "And I have an easily manageable, low-threat opponent that also happens to only be harmed by magic. I couldn't think of a more perfect setup."

The floor shook under the force of Hisoka's foot as an infuriated growl rolled out of her throat. "Why do you keep insulting me?!"

* * *

The brunette looked first to the face of Sacred Witch, whose expression was still of bewilderment, then to the blue growth spurt that was Hisoka Cho, her gaze still of fury and aggression.

Why the latter held such hatred for her after only a single meeting was unfathomable. She was certain they had parted with good impressions of each other. The only logical conclusion was that it was connected to the corruption that got hold of her.

She held the foil before her gaze and slowly led her free hand down its surface. "You still aren't getting it, Hisoka," the brunette answered as she did so. "You're still confusing power for strength. Power is just potential, but strength is the ability to force your will on the world around you. You can have all of the power in the world, but if you don't know how to use it, then it doesn't turn into strength."

Of course, this talking, this conversation, it was to buy her time. She had to figure out how, exactly, to do what she wanted. The foil wasn't a demon weapon, and for any other Witch, it just might be useless, even if it were possible. The foil was not designed to channel magic, but it was designed to channel electricity. Likewise, by all accounts, her own power was still tied to electricity even if she couldn't use Thunder Witch's skills.

That meant, if she could just reproduce the sensation of her magic flowing into her demon sword, it might very well be possible to --

The air around the foil crackled and snapped as electricity visibly rushed down its side. The brunette startled and slapped her other hand over the one holding the weapon, and had its thumb jammed into the foil's battery socket. "Too much!"

By the time the charge cut out, a glance at the two others still in the gymnasium showed that both of their expressions had changed to mutual stunned silence.

She cleared her throat and focused her senses on the idea of a thinner, lighter flow of power before she continued to address the towering blue girl.

"If I can share with you a secret, I speak from first hand experience, being where you are. Yes, I have strength, but I also have a great deal of power I barely understand or know how to use. I'm learning new things about it nearly every day, but only because I'm always trying to do so."

The brunette held the foil away from her once more, slowly this time, as if trying not to spill an overfull cup. The weapon didn't spark this time, but from her proximity, she thought she detected a definite hum.

A couple slow, gentle sweeps with the foil, and she couldn't help but think the sound was like the hum often given to plasma blades in media. She didn't actually know if this was a safe limit for the weapon, or if it was enough to even work. Only testing it would answer those questions.

On the upside, if it blew up like the Dretch weaponry, it would just get brought back when the seal broke, so she shouldn't be on the hook for paying for a replacement.

She looked to Sacred Witch. "Proto-demons will regenerate if allowed to rest like Witches do, right?"

Slowly, as if having to free up portions of her mind to consider the question, Reina nodded. "... More or less ..."

That question made Hisoka's back straighten, obviously cluing in that it represented a potential threat to her. But when the brunette turned back to her, the girl she called Riko didn't attack. She only continued to hold the foil like it was a red-hot poker.

"Then if you're ready, Hisoka, I believe I'm prepared to continue."

* * *

She's mocking you. She still believes she holds the privilege of the strong.

The black thought wormed its way to the forefront of Hisoka's mind as if it were her own, and she set her jaw in response.

Look at her waiting for you to attack. She's bullying you, Hisoka. Bullying you by acting like she can carelessly offer you first blood.

She climbed back fully to her feet from where she had been crouched. Her knuckles went white on the grip with which she held the massive club the shadows had provided her.

This is not the company Reina should keep. Such rudeness can't be trusted to serve her like you can.

She clenched every muscle from her jaw to her calf. She could feel dark energy exploding with every twitch, with every neuron fire. Every movement priming with unreleased raw power.

There is only one thing to do. Only one way to protect Reina.

The blue-skinned secretary sent herself hurling at the brunette half her size with a scream of primal rage.

YOU MUST KILL RIKO!

* * *

Even if infusing the foil with magic was successful, there was no way the brunette was going to trust the flimsy haft to block a kanabo being swung two-handed by a proto-oni. Fortunately, Hisoka's attack pattern remained painfully predictable from the formerly bespectacled girl's complete inexperience.

Instead, she stepped to the outside of the overhead swing and took the opening to slash at Hisoka's exposed wrist even as the ground shook beneath her feet. Viscous, dark red blood trailed the foil's tip and the larger girl screamed in the first real pain she'd felt this fight.

The experiment's success was tempered by a disturbing vibration that traveled back up the foil and into the brunette's hand. It was working, tentatively, but she didn't think the foil had the durability to handle many more strikes. Maybe if she had the time, she could fine tune the amount of energy she was putting in, but much less, and she doubted it'd be any more effective than the training weapon it was built to be.

If this was a fight to the death, after slapping the wrist, her next blow would have been up to Hisoka's throat, but she absolutely didn't want to kill the girl. Unfortunately, she also didn't have the ability with her makeshift weapon to engage in a prolonged trading of blows.

Unless she wanted to have to fall back to her golden blade and risk doing her serious harm even accidentally, the brunette had to end this quickly.

There was no clear cessation of movement from the untransformed Sword Witch after striking the wrist. Even as Hisoka recoiled in pain, the brunette kept moving past her. At seven feet tall, the blue-skinned schoolgirl still wasn't large enough to need more than a couple quick strides to put the shorter girl on the other side, and the quick flick of the wrist the brunette learned from Tora made the two slashes that followed so fast they were almost invisible.

Hisoka's knees crashed to the gymnasium floor before she really processed that she was falling. She had still been holding her wrist in her other hand, club cradled under an arm, but now she found herself staring at the tile in bewilderment.

She went to stand, but the moment she tried to support her weight on her foot, the limb flopped to the side and she went down again. It was another moment before she realized she felt pain there, on the back of her ankle. Both of them.

She whipped around, her jaw wrenched in fury, but, to her shame, tears beading in the corners of her eyes. "WHAT DID YOU DO TO ME?!"

"I cut your Achilles' tendons," the other girl calmly answered as she walked back into sight. The foil again had occasional crackles that crawled down its side, and it seemed to erratically shake ever so subtly in her grasp. It looked, in a word, unstable.

The response stunned the larger girl silent for a moment. "You CRIPPLED me?! Why?! WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?!"

"Because I don't want you to run. Those are my standing orders. Don't let Hisoka run. No matter what it takes."

Behind the brunette, Sacred Witch's eyes widened. "That's why you wanted to know if she'd recover."

The brunette nodded, and explained it to the proto-demon. "Witches like Reina and myself heal quickly. In your current state, so will you. If you can bring yourself to relax and rest, you'll be fine in probably a couple minutes."

The shock that she actually wasn't crippled seemed to still her tongue for a moment, but only one. "But why?! I wouldn't run from someone half my size!"

"Wouldn't you?" The shorter girl took the increasingly angry fencing foil over to a lidded trash can, dropped it in and closed the lid. "Before you transformed, you were ready to stop fighting me entirely. You swore I was a terrible monster you could barely fathom. Your will would have broken then and there if Tamashini and I hadn't goaded you on."

She had stepped away from the trash can, but she paused in her speaking when there was a disturbing sound of a small, muffled explosion coming from it. Apparently, fencing foils were a bit more temperamental than dretch blades were.

The brunette continued anyway. "What would you have done then? Fallen back on your insecurities? Fled into the night? Begged the shadows that empowered you to take you away, anywhere but where you were too embarrassed to show your face?"

Hisoka broke her gaze and looked away. "What do you care? Do you want to know so you can bully me some more? Mock me for being weak and cowardly and clumsy?"

"I care because, if you ran, Reina said you would never come back."

Hisoka's gaze moved to Sacred Witch, the hatred she had for the brunette evaporating into lost confusion.

The raven-haired girl stepped toward Hisoka, tall enough in her heeled boots that, with the blue girl on her knees, she was head and shoulders taller than her secretary once more.

"Hisoka, by accepting a demon's curse into yourself, you've become what we call a proto-demon," she explained. "You aren't a full demon yet, but in time, you will become more and more violent and destructive. Once you become a full demon, healing you will be impossible. Even if you die, you will eventually regenerate in their realm."

The student president put a hand on the arm of her secretary. "If we don't purify you now, you will never be human again."

Real horror illuminated the blue girl's eyes as she recoiled from Sacred Witch. "What?! No! You can't! I've finally got power! Real power! Don't you see?! Nobody will ever look down on me again! You can't take that away from me!"

"You don't have real power," the brunette disagreed with a shake of her head. "You're borrowing it from a very dark place that's corrupting you the longer you hold onto it." She took several steps up to Hisoka's opposite side from Sacred Witch. "If you want real power, if you want strength, you can't take shortcuts to it. But if it's truly something you want, we can help you find it."

Unable to escape on her feet, the large girl scurried away in reverse on her butt. "As if I'd believe you," she howled accusingly, rage returning the instant she shifted her focus. "The strong don't help others up! You don't want the competition!"

The sword user sighed and shook her head yet again. "I have nothing against competition, Hisoka. In fact, I'd be delighted if you reached that level one day. I told you, I've only gotten where I am, myself, by constantly pushing upwards. You've mistaken me for a bully."

She raised a finger for emphasis. "Bullies aren't strong. They've got a little bit of power, but they know they aren't strong. That's why they go to such work to keep those weaker than them from climbing up; they're terrified of being passed."

"You're the reason I can't even stand!" Cho slapped her large hands against the gymnasium floor with a resounding impact. "Now you're going to stand there and tell me you're not a bully?!"

"I'm not," she said with conviction. Energy sparked at the end of her index and ring finger as she held her hand diagonally across from her. Hisoka's eyes lit up as she recognized the motion just before the brunette threw a golden card toward the ceiling.

"TRANSFORM!"

Once the transformation finished, blade in hand, Sword Witch completed her response. "I'm a Witch."

Hisoka's black eyes sparkled for a moment at the sight of a second transformation before she remembered she hated the person using it. Her expression promptly dropped back into a venomous scowl as if she was trying to act like she hadn't gotten excited.

"What difference does that make?" she demanded instead. "You've looked down on me since we first met!" Her tone turned sarcastic. "Oh, look at the poor, clumsy little girl, can't even get to her clubs on time! Can't even carry out an errand without breaking something or running someone over!"

The large girl pointed directly at Sword Witch in petulant accusation. "You can't fool me! That nice act was nothing but you getting off on how much better you thought you were than me!"

The brunette opened her mouth to bite back in response, but caught herself. Instead, she sighed as she placed her free hand over her face and pulled the fingers down its length. Then she knelt down next to the girl despite how it reinforced their size difference.

"Look, Hisoka," she started, "I'm not the greatest at interacting with people genuinely. I've spent too much of my life anticipating what they want from me. I tell them what they want to hear, I become what they expect of me. But if I'm kind, it's because I want to be kind. If I was just acting, all you would have gotten out of me is polite. Anything telling you otherwise is just the darkness manipulating you."

The proto-demon started to protest, but Sacred Witch took her blue hand into her own grip and also knelt next to her.

"Prez ..." was all Cho managed instead.

"Hisoka, I promise you, I would not allow evil people to stand beside me, and I am proud to call Sword Witch my ally." Sacred Witch briefly tightened her grip on Cho's hand. "So please, let us save you."

The seven foot tall girl looked like she wanted to fold immediately, looking into those steely eyes. Before she could, however, she broke eye contact and looked away. "If ..." She struggled to find just a little more selfishness in her. "If it was for Prez. If she needed it ..."

A small, rare smile came to the raven-haired girl's lips, and the next moment, the magical outfit vanished into purple mist that drifted away to nothingness as if on a breeze. Reina Tamashini was left there holding her hand.

"Please, Hisoka," she said as she rubbed the top of the girl's hand. "Please don't leave me. Who else could I count on if you left me?"

Again, the larger girl looked away, but this time to hide a blush and a tiny, embarrassed smile. "Well, okay. If it's for Prez."

"I told you, you spoil her too much," Sword Witch put in teasingly.

"Hush," Reina scolded, then set Hisoka's hand back in her lap before standing. The council president stepped back a bit before reactivating her transformation, which, again, Hisoka watched with fascination.

"There's just one thing left before we can do that," Sacred Witch stated, and looked to her teammate. "Would you mind? I fear I lack the heart to do it."

This time, Sword Witch shook her head as she stood. "Spoiling," she sighed as she summoned her gun to her left hand.

The large girl's eyes went wide. "Wait, what are you doing?!"

"Sorry, kiddo," the brunette replied as she raised the weapon. "You gotta be KO'd before we can do the purification. Don't worry, we'll heal you up."

"Wait, WAIT!!!"

BLAM!

The weapon's echoes ricocheted around the gymnasium long after the light of the attack faded, muffling the sound of the upper half of the demi-giant's body hitting the floor.

The two witches stood there in the growing silence without saying anything for a long moment. Finally, Sacred Witch stepped toward her former secretary and raised her hands before her in a series of increasingly complex motions.

"Study what you can of my purification, Kelly," she instructed the other witch. "If you could pick up purification, as well, having three of us would be a huge boon for the team. Then you should go call Sarasa while I heal her up."

"I'm watching," Sword Witch confirmed.

The team leader nodded, then proceeded with gathering the energy necessary.

"Moonlight Elicitation!"