Kusa ran. She wove around passersby or pushed her way through if necessary, anything to keep up her forward momentum. People looked at her, but nobody tried to stop her and unless they were in her way, she ignored them entirely. Her feet pounded the sidewalk, eating up distance, putting blocks between her and the Boss and the man with the slicked-back hair.

And the boy who tried to help her.

She squeezed her eyes shut, trusting to the feel of the sidewalk beneath the soles of her shoes, and the spatial awareness developed through the years of her training, to keep her safely out of harm’s way for a few seconds. She needed to shut out all distractions and just think for a moment or two. She hopped off the sidewalk onto the edge of the street, dodging around a slow-moving object she sensed before her, and realized she could clearly feel the difference between the sidewalk and the street. The street was smoother and had more give to it than the sidewalk. The street felt better against her feet than the sidewalk did, despite its being made for walking on. There was some sort of irony in that, maybe in how it showed what society cared about—expensive machines instead of people—but it was lost on her. All she thought of were the two men and the boy.

The image of Einosuke, on his knees, head lowered almost to the floor of that litter-strewn alley-way entered her mind.

“I just wanted to help.”

That was what he said.

Kusa opened her eyes as she slowed to a jog, then to a stop. She closed them again and whispered, “Damn it.”

*

“Sorry about this, kid.” The Boss drew his fist back, as the blue energy swirling around it intensified. Arcane symbols winked into existence, flashing through Einosuke’s line of sight, and disappeared again just as quickly. “It’s nothing personal.”

Einosuke’s eyes moved crazily in his skull, searching the faces of the crowd, looking for help that wasn’t there. There was argument and discussion among the onlookers for a minute or two earlier, but it died out quickly. From the scraps of conversation around him, everyone watching now apparently believed some sort of TV show or movie was being filmed. There was no danger, just very-realistic excitement and fun. He wondered if they would still believe that when his brains were splattered across the sidewalk.

“Squall Shot!”

Boss’s head whipped around at the shout and the high-pitched whoosh that accompanied it. There was time enough for his eyes to widen in surprise before the fist-sized ball of water, moving at almost half the speed of a bullet, smashed into his face. He cried out and staggered backwards before losing his footing, releasing Einosuke in the process. Off-balance, Eino, too, tumbled towards the ground, but shifted his weight, landing on his hands and knees. He began to move instantly, scrambling on all fours towards the relative safety of the crowd.

Kusa stepped out of the press of bodies.

A grin plastered itself across Einosuke’s face. “You came back!” He told himself she would, but he hadn’t been certain. Positive thinking was difficult under the circumstances.

“Yeah,” the girl answered.

Across the small clearing, Slick helped his boss upright. The no-longer-sleek-looking man’s hair and blazer were soaked and an almost-perfectly-round spot that encompassed the center of his face, including his nose and eyes, was beginning to redden.

Kusa put herself between the men and Einosuke as the boy, too, regained his feet. “I decided I do kind of owe you one, after all.”

Somewhere along the way, Kusa had shed her hoodie and wore only her skirt and a white, sleeveless shirt with some a design on the back that EInosuke didn’t recognize, though it reminded him of the old feudal house emblems, updated and stylized for the twenty-firsty century. The outfit looked easy to move in and small as the girl was, her stance and the attitude she projected gave off an aura of ferocious fighting spirit. More than that, though, his eyes were drawn to the device on Kusa’s left forearm. It was a sleek, but older model manaccelerator and even more battered than the hand-me-down he used.

“A-and you can use magic, too?” he stammered.

Kusa gave him a smirk over her shoulder. “Of course. Now,“ she turned her attention back to Boss and Slick. “As for you two…”

The manaccelerator on her wrist began to glow a bright, reddish-orange color as the energy within her body gathered. Suddenly, it flared, sending up a brilliance that enveloped the girl’s form and swept out and upwards, like a silent, massless explosion. Energy swirled and arcane symbols as large as Einosuke’s palm formed in the air around her as she set her feet, body bent slightly forward, arms up in a martial artist’s stance. Her hair, still confined in a ponytail, whipped around her head as if she stood in the middle of a gale-force windstorm instead of at the side of a busy street on a crystal-clear day. The crowd around the four of them, interest rekindled by this new development, watched with a mixture of fascination, excitement and apprehension.

“You’re really starting to piss me off!” the girl shouted and launched herself towards the two men.

An overwhelming profusion of magical power swirled around Kusa. The girl shot forward as if launched from a cannon – so quickly Einosuke found it difficult to track her movement. One arm cocked back to strike, she let out a war-cry as the distance to the pair of well-dressed thugs disappeared in a flash of reddish-orange. Fast as she was, though, the men had forewarning and split apart, each of them leaping aside at the last instant so that Kusa’s charge hurled her into the newly-created space between them. It was a near thing, though – Kusa’s small fist missed Slick’s jaw by millimeters.

Kusa hurtled past the men, then spun on her heel, using the same kind of motion she to redirect her momentum as in the alleyway earlier, and turned in a complete one-eighty. The device on her arm glowed so brightly it seemed to rival the low-hanging sun and her entire arm was covered in a transparent sleeve of sigils.

“Tornadooo—“ She roared, as a torrent of gusting air, like a miniature dust-devil, appeared and enveloped her right leg. “Kick!” Her foot flashed out and upwards in a whirling kick that spun her entire body, leaving the impression that she became a tornado herself.

The force of the attack, and the magical energy behind it, propelled Kusa forward with speed enough to leave an after-image in onlookers’ vision. Boss somehow managed to duck beneath the strike, the arc of Kusa’s foot barely missing the side of his already-bruised face, but Slick, circling behind the other man, trying to get into a better position, was not as lucky. Kusa’s magically reinforced foot soared past Boss and struck Slick solidly in the shoulder, first spinning him half around and then hurtling towards the ground where he skidded backwards several feet into the crowd. A young man jumped to one side, trying to avoid being knocked over by Slick’s fall, and bumped into a middle-aged woman, whose cellphone was knocked from her hand in the jostle. An argument broke out between them and a secondary battle seemed ready to erupt when Slick leapt from flat on his back to his feet in a single motion—contorting his body like some sort of marine animal whipping its way through the sea—then roughly pushed both the young man and the woman out of his way to rejoin the main event.

From the edge of the crowd, Einosuke watched all of this unfold in seconds, his brain too numb from surprise and shock to do much else. Kusa and the two thugs moved back and forth, weaving and twirling with the grace of trained, experienced fighters. The ease and skill with which they controlled their bodies, and their magic, made it seem almost like the kind of choreographed routine the people around them thought it was. Occasionally, Kusa or one of the men landed blows on each other but it was never enough damage to take anyone from the fight. Despite it being two burly men against one slim girl, they seemed almost evenly matched.