Chapter 5: More to learn
Author's note: Sorry for the abrupt hiatus, my motivation for writing this story has been down and I was also focusing on finishing off one of my other stories.
It was Sunday night and Rin and Melodie were once again on the hunt for Witches, Ami trailing behind them.
This time, it was Rin's turn to use her Soul Gem to track the Witch's trail. The compass her Soul Gem produced was just a pulsating glowing ring, but Rin somehow had no issue in reading those pulses and the brightness of the rings to find where to go.
"Found it!" Rin sighed in relief as the girls came to a stop at the entrance to an alley.
Holding up her Soul Gem like she had seen Melodie do, Rin made the entrance to the Witch's labyrinth appear, the symbol of the Witch taking the place of some graffiti on the wall.
"Hold on, Little Spark." Melodie put a hand on Rin's shoulder before she could jump through. "Somebody's already beaten us to the punch."
"Huh?" Rin questioned, looking back at Melodie and then the seal.
"There's another Magical Girl already in there." Melodie explained. "You can hear the fight."
Rin listened and realised that she could hear the distant sounds of some sort of fight coming from the seal. The seal itself was also acting differently to the Revolving Witch's from Friday, vibrating and distorting slightly as if affected by the fight going on inside.
"Shouldn't we go help them?" Rin asked.
She hadn't realised that there were other Magical Girls in Southern Cross beyond her and Melodie. Rin wanted to meet them and wondered why Melodie hadn't mentioned them last time.
Melodie shook her head.
"They may not want it." She said. "Remember that our reward for fighting Witches is a Grief Seed, a single Grief Seed. If we join the fight, there's going to be a disagreement over who gets to keep the Grief Seed. And it'd be a waste of Magic on our end if we help out with no expectation of a Grief Seed."
"Oh." Rin said, slumping.
She didn't realise that Witch hunting was going to be a competition instead of team thing.
It didn't seem right. Kyubey had warned of how deadly being a Magical Girl was, and Rin had seen for herself just how tough Witches could be. Wouldn't it be better to work together so that fighting was less dangerous, no matter whether you got a Grief Seed or not?
"What if the Magical Girl in there is struggling against the Witch?" Rin questioned. "Shouldn't we help out then?"
"Well, the rules here are that other Magical Girls stay out of a fight that's already claimed, unless they're asked to help or it's clear that the girl fighting is struggling. The Magical Girl who steps in to help then gets to claim the Grief Seed." Melodie shrugged. "We could wait to see if the girl in there needs help. But it's probably better to find another Witch for ourselves."
"Oh. Okay." Rin agreed. Though she still wanted to help against the Witch even if she didn't get a Grief Seed out of it, she continued following Melodie's lead.
It was ages before Rin managed to pick up a new trail.
"Huh, we're in luck." Melodie commented. "Two Witches in one night. I was sure that we'd have to go home empty handed."
Rin grimaced.
She did not like the idea that there was going to be some nights where she spent hours hunting only to find no Witch.
This time the trail led them far, near the secondary school that Rin and Yukio would likely end up attending in the new school year.
They were walking by the woods that bordered the back of the school when something caught the corner of Rin's eye.
Turning, Rin gasped in shock and horror when she caught sight of someone dangling from a tree branch by a rope around their neck, their body still twitching.
While Rin was frozen in horror at the sight, Melodie didn't hesitate as soon as she caught sight of what her protégé had seen. In a single movement, Melodie had transformed and summoned a chakram, tossing it at the hanging person and cutting through the rope holding them up.
Rin remained frozen to the spot as Melodie ran over to the person to check them over.
Eventually, Rin managed to move her feet, walking over to Melodie.
The hanging victim was a middle-aged man, lying completely still with a red ring around his neck. Rin wondered if he was a teacher at the school, if he might have been her teacher next year.
"Is…is he dead?" Rin asked, shaking.
Thankfully, Melodie shook her head. "You spotted him in time. He must have just done it when we arrived." She reported.
"Why? Why would he do that?" Rin asked, not understanding why someone would want to hang themselves.
"There are many reasons, most of which we can't understand." Melodie told Rin softly, resting a comforting hand on her shoulder. "But in this case, we do know why."
Melodie crouched down and pointed to a mark on the unconscious man's neck. It looked like a tattoo of some sort, an embellished padlock with a rainbow ribbon behind it. It looked completely out of place on the man's neck.
"This is a Witch's Kiss." Melodie explained. "Witches are able to reach outside of their labyrinths with magic and control people with these marks. The Kisses then influence people to…kill themselves."
Melodie had to force herself not to sugar-coat the truth. She wanted to protect Rin's innocence for as long as possible, but she knew that it would not benefit her protégé to hide things from her.
"Oh." Rin shivered. "Geeze."
Melodie sighed.
"Come on, the Witch is going to be somewhere close." She said. "Ami, stay with him until we come back. Phone an ambulance if he stops breathing or wakes up and tries to kill himself again."
Rin startled slightly, she had completely forgotten that Ami was with them because her friend had been so quiet and walked behind them.
Ami took Melodie's phone as it was handed to her but looked to Rin for instruction.
"Do you want me to wait here?" She asked.
"Uh, yeah. Yeah." Rin nodded.
She didn't want Ami anywhere near the Witch's labyrinth, now that she knew about the Witch's Kiss.
The Witch's trail continued until the two Magical Girls reached the fence into the school, which caused Melodie to wince.
She could only hope that the Witch just formed recently and hadn't claimed any victims other than the man she saved. The idea that the Witch could have been active while her juniors were walking around was not a pleasant one.
Easily hopping the fence, the girls thankfully didn't have to break into the school building to find the Witch, finding the entrance to the labyrinth in a garden area. This time, there were no other Magical Girls inside.
Once transformed, the girls entered into what looked like an enormous plastic dollhouse, but was a mix of a regular house and a school and had very messed up proportions.
There was life-sized plastic furniture, but a lot of things such as windows, bookshelves and other furniture were just giant stickers on the plain white walls.
Aside from the furniture and stickers, there were also a lot of eggs decorating the labyrinth, both as objects and as stickers, all of varying sizes. It made the entire place look like it was preparing for Easter.
Picking a random direction, Melodie and Rin began walking through the warped hallways, passing by bedrooms, classrooms, kitchens and toilets. Some were actual rooms with plastic furniture inside while others were just stickers on the wall made to look like rooms.
The sound of heavy footsteps approached and the girls were met with the Witch's Familiars.
"Eggs?" Rin said in disbelief at the sight of the familiars.
They were human-sized eggs with pudgy arms and legs and gold cherub wings on the back.
Well, it went with the theme of the labyrinth.
The walking eggs were thankfully very slow and seemingly couldn't fly on their little wings, so they weren't hard for Melodie and Rin to cut down as they continued their way through the labyrinth.
"This is a big labyrinth." Melodie muttered to herself.
She'd been a Magical Girl long enough to know that the size and complexity of a Witch's labyrinth wasn't always proportional to its strength, but it could still be an indicator. She really hoped that it wouldn't be the case for this Witch, Rin getting two strong Witches in a row wouldn't be fair on her, and stronger Witches also usually meant having to use Grief Seeds as soon as you got them. And with both Rin and Melodie on the same hunt and sharing Grief Seeds, gathering spares was already going to be hard enough.
Eventually, Melodie and Rin reached the main chamber of the Labyrinth, a greenhouse with a tea garden in it.
On the central garden table sat a huge wicker basket with an equally huge egg inside. On four other tables were smaller wicker baskets with smaller eggs in each; these eggs having pink, blue, green and yellow tartan prints on them.
"Get ready." Melodie warned four of the five eggs began to crack around the centre.
Three of the four smaller eggs hatched first, releasing a new type of Familiar. They had chibi figures with the top half of their eggshells covering their heads and objects replacing their limbs. The pink Familiar wore a sports outfit and had pompoms on the end of sticks for limbs, the blue Familiar wore a uniform-like outfit and had pencils for limbs, and the green Familiar wore a maid outfit and had whisks for limbs.
The larger egg hatched as the individualised Familiars danced around it in the air, the two halves of the egg completely disappearing to reveal the Witch inside.
The Witch looked shockingly human, though appeared to be a large paper doll, like the dress-up doll books Rin got for her last birthday/Christmas (which didn't last long due to Rin not being careful with them). The Witch wore a wedding dress complete with a veil, which was held in place by a rainbow ribbon with a black 'X' on it. Creepily, the doll had no face and four arms, each hand holding an equally faceless mask. Each mask had a colour symbol at the top right, mirroring the ribbon-placement on the Witch's head; a pink heart, a blue spade, a green club and a yellow diamond.
The coloured familiars waved around their object-arms, chanting and singing in a language Rin didn't understand until the Witch moved the mask with the pink heart in front of its featureless face.
Abruptly, the entire labyrinth changed, going from a mostly white colour pallet to a mostly pink colour pallet. Footballs, skateboards and other sports equipment appeared around the labyrinth, as items and as stickers on the walls.
Rin was so distracted with how the labyrinth was changing that she almost missed the pink batons that appeared around the Witch before flying right for her and Melodie.
"Ah!" Rin cried out as she failed in blocking one of the batons.
Her sword was strong but it was also slow, and the magical batons were fast.
Just before another baton could hit Rin before she could lift her sword to defect it, Melodie's chakram flew in to deflect it for her, followed by more chakrams that flew out to meet the batons before they could reach them.
In comparison to Rin, Melodie was faster, summoning and throwing out her weapons with minimal effort. She would even spin her chakram around on the end of ropes to deflect all the batons that got too close, just like she had done when she first rescued Rin.
By watching Melodie between defending herself, Rin realised that her mentor wasn't just summoning chakram to her hands before throwing them, she was also summon them a fair distance from herself and attacking the Witch at the same time, forcing the Witch to also be on the defensive. Melodie was also using her summoned chakram as stepping stones to reach higher vantage points, circling and bobbing around the Witch.
The display made Rin wilt. In the first Witch fight, Melodie hadn't shown such a display of power and Rin hadn't struggled to keep pace or show her own capabilities as a Magical Girl. But now, against a Witch that seemed to be much more suited to Melodie's skills, it highlighted just how much more experience the senior had on Rin.
Kyubey had told Rin that she had the potential to be a strong Magical Girl. But Rin didn't feel very strong as she struggled to defend against the Witch's quicker attacks while trying to get to a vantage point where she could attack herself, something that wasn't an issue for Melodie.
"Use your swords to get up!" Melodie shouted advice as she advanced on the Witch.
"How?" Rin wondered, though not loud enough for her mentor to hear.
Trying to copy what she had seen Melodie do, Rin aimed to summon a sword a distance away from her instead of in her hand. Her eyes widened in delight when the sword appeared where she wanted it to.
However, when Rin tried to control her sword and send it flying like Melodie had done with her chakram, she found herself fighting with the weight of her sword even in the grip of her magic, so it didn't fly anywhere near as far or as gracefully as the chakram before falling.
Luckily for Rin, even though it didn't reach the Witch, it did just so happen to fall right on the pink Familiar as it danced around and dragged it all the way to ground level, pinning it down right through the waist. Rin winced at the eerily human-like shrieks of pain it produced.
The Witch did not react well to the Familiar being stabbed, yelling out despite having no mouth and yanking the pink heart mask away from its face.
As soon as the mask was removed, the labyrinth returned to how it was before and the flying batons disappeared.
Rin used the reprieve to try and figure out how to try and get up to the Witch herself while Melodie tried for a direct strike against the Witch.
The Witch used the heart mask to block the chakram, damaging it but not breaking it, before using it to swipe Melodie out of the air.
"Melodie!" Rin cried out as the elder Magical Girl crashed into one of the smaller garden tables.
"I'm fine." Melodie assured with a groan, picking herself up and holding her side in pain.
The two remaining familiars waved their arms frantically at the Witch and chanting.
Then, the Witch moved the mask with the blue spade in front of her face and the labyrinth once again changed. This time, everything was in shades of blue and various art and creative supplies appeared, from easels to music stands.
This time, human-sized paintbrushes appeared around the Witch, dripping with paint.
With a sharp flick, the paintbrushes sent out huge globs of paint at Rin and Melodie, forcing them to dodge and block.
These were thankfully slower than the batons had been, so Rin was able to keep up with and block them. But after a few blocks, Rin noticed that her sword had become significantly heavier and unwieldy. The paint had hardened on contact with the blade, weighing it down and making it unbalanced.
Rin had just discarded her sword and summoned a new one when she realised that she couldn't move one of her feet. Looking down she realised that she had stepped in some of the paint and it had hardened around her foot.
While Rin was distracted, more paint flew in past her guard and struck her legs, further sticking her in place.
"Rin!" Melodie called out.
"I'm fine." Rin insisted, using her sword to break the paint. "I can manage."
She didn't want her mentor and sempai to see her as weak and helpless in this fight. So far, the only thing she had contributed was an accidental takedown of one of the coloured familiars.
Besides, Melodie needed to focus on herself. The elder was struggling more against the paint, the giant globs completely swallowing up the chakram and only breaking apart into smaller pieces that she still needed to defend against.
With the globs of paint still coming at her, Rin was stuck blocking with little opportunity to free herself, constantly discarding and summoning swords when too much paint built up. So, Rin tried summoning her swords away from her in the air again, this time summoning multiple that interlocked in front of her, working as a makeshift shield that gave Rin the opportunity to stab at the paint holding her with the sword in her hand.
Thankfully, just keeping the swords where they were summoned didn't require as much effort as moving them, but it did become a strain when the paint started impacting against and hardened on them, weighing down the swords. So, as soon as Rin managed to break herself free, she let the swords drop and ran.
As Rin ran, she tried to concentrate on summoning swords and magically sending them at the Witch but found it really hard, not just because of the weight but also because it was difficult keeping track of multiple swords. She quickly learned that it was easier for her to summon her swords from above and then just let them drop, though this method was harder to aim with. The further away Rin tried to summon her swords, the harder it was to accomplish and the worse her aim was.
Thankfully, one of Rin's falling swords ended up falling on the Witch's arm that held the spade mask, cutting almost all the way through and causing it to go limp, forcefully dropping the mask from the Witch's face.
Just like before, the labyrinth reverted back to how it was before and the paintbrushes disappeared.
The Witch quickly brought the green club mask to its faceless face and this time the labyrinth changed to a green colour pallet with cooking and cleaning supplies all around.
Giant bowls with whisks appeared around the room and began frantically whisking, causing a honey-like substance to constantly spill out of the bowls to the floor.
Rin looked around in worry as the honey began to quickly spill across the floor, reducing the amount of surface she had without touching the stuff, which she didn't want to do.
She needed to climb and she needed to do it now.
Summoning her swords into a staircase like Melodie had done with her chakram was still something Rin struggled to do, she needed time she didn't have to learn. But inspiration came when she spotted one of her swords stabbed into the edge of the main table at an angle.
Reaching out with more magic, Rin summoned her swords close to the edge of the greenhouse and quickly stabbed them into the glass, it cracked the glass slightly but the swords stayed in place. It wasn't a perfect staircase, but the swords were close enough together that Rin could use them as ledges and jump between them with her advanced agility.
Melodie sighed with relief when she saw that Rin had managed to make herself a way out of the rapidly rising pool of honey, allowing her to focus on the Witch instead of going back down to rescue Rin.
It was clear that the Witch's masks were how its magic worked, take out the mask or the corresponding Familiar and the magic stopped. At least, that's how Melodie hoped it worked.
So, Melodie just needed to take out the club mask to stop the honey and remove another one of the Witch's powers from play.
Unfortunately, removing the club mask proved to be easier said than done. The whisking bowls of honey moved around, blocking Melodie's vision and drowning her chakram in falling honey. And the Familiars had also started attacking too.
The walking egg Familiars rose up through the honey and it turned out that they could fly after all, rising up into the room. Seemingly conducted by the coloured Familiars, the eggs attacked, swarming both Melodie and Rin.
"Get off!" Rin yelled, jumping from her sword platforms to a large hanging plant, slashing with her sword as she went.
It was honestly a relief to be able to attack with the sword in her hand again. Summoning at a distance didn't feel comfortable.
Still, there was still the issue of Rin having very little room to fight in, the floor was entirely consumed by the rising honey, the tops of the smaller garden tables were about to be swallowed up too, and the larger garden table would put Rin directly in clobbering range of the Witch. There were the hanging plants, but they were too far apart for Rin to be able to jump between.
"Come on, there's got to be something else I can do." Rin muttered to herself.
Kyubey had advertised magical powers outside of just summoning weapons, hadn't he?
Rin paused as she remembered something. She'd already used her magical powers before, it was sleeping in her bed so that her family didn't notice her absence while hunting.
She had only created one at a time so far, but surely she could create more than that.
Reaching out her magic again, Rin created a duplicate of herself, the image coming together from blue sparks. Her duplicate wore the same Magical Girl outfit as her, save for the Soul Gem being empty, with a sword already in its hand.
Rin grinned and drew her own sword up at the ready, only to transition to shock when her duplicate did nothing and then got slammed into by one of the egg Familiars, sending its limp body into the honey below.
"Oh." Rin said.
She had forgotten that her duplicates didn't act on their own like Ami did.
Trying again, Rin decided to summon more duplicates this time, sending them down to fight on the Witch's table since there wasn't much room on the hanging plant.
"Fight!" Rin ordered her duplicates.
The duplicates raised their swords and fought.
They waved their swords sluggishly and moved slowly, displaying none of Rin's advanced agility. When Rin dared to take her attention away from them, their movements slowed even more. And to make it worse, they weren't very durable, barely able to take more than a few slams from the egg Familiars before they burst apart into blue sparks.
Still, despite how disappointing they proved to be, they were providing a form of distraction, especially as Rin continued to make more. The Familiars focused their attention on the duplicates and the Witch focused on trying to smash them with the heart and diamond masks.
This distraction allowed Melodie to get closer and send out multiple chakram right at the stick that the club mask was on the end of, cutting through it and sending it to the table.
With the mask fallen, the whisks and bowls disappeared and the labyrinth once again reverted back to normal, save the giant pool of honey that still filled the greenhouse.
The Witch screamed in what could be frustration while the coloured Familiars cried.
And then a loud cracking sound filled the greenhouse.
Looking over at the source of the sound, Melodie and Rin saw a wicker basket floating on the honey, the unhatched yellow diamond egg still sitting inside. A crack had appeared across the egg and it was wriggling.
Above them, the Witch was moving the diamond mask in front of its face.
Melodie gritted her teeth. There was a high chance that the magic granted by this particular mask was the most powerful, seeing as the Familiar was only just hatching now instead of with the others.
She needed to take out the Witch now, before the Familiar finished hatching.
"Rin, drop some swords to create me an opening!" Melodie yelled to her protégé as she jumped to a higher vantage point, dodging Familiars as she went.
Catching onto what her sempai wanted, Rin summoned a load of swords between Melodie and the Witch before letting them all drop. The falling swords cut a pathway through the Familiars and drew the attention towards Rin.
Melodie jumped, snatching one of the swords out of the air as she went. With Rin's sword in hand, she struck down with all her might.
The blade cut into one of the Witch's shoulders and then continued downward at an angle until it came out at the waist, also cutting off the hand holding the diamond mask in the process.
The upper-half of the Witch flopped backwards onto the table and honey, like an oversized piece of card. A moments after, the labyrinth began to warp and waver, fading back into the normal garden that the girls had entered from.
"Finally." Rin sighed, dropping down from the top of the garden shed where she had found herself. "That Witch felt like it took forever."
Melodie bent down to pick up the Grief Seed the Witch dropped, walking over to Rin and getting the young girl to hold out her Soul Gem. Together, they purified their Gems.
Melodie would have liked to save the Grief Seed for later, it was always better to stockpile after all, but the both of them had used up a lot of magic fighting against the Witch. All those weapons being constantly summoned added up, and Rin's duplicates couldn't have come cheap either.
"Hey, Melodie."
Melodie looked up in surprise at Rin's hesitant and guilty tone.
"I'm sorry that I wasn't that good this fight." Rin didn't look her in the eyes.
Melodie's eyebrows furrowed in confusion.
"Little Spark, what are you talking about?" She questioned. "You helped a lot in the fight. You took out half of those masks and cleared the way for me to make the final attack."
Rin scuffed her foot against the ground. "But I could barely do the stuff you did. When I tried to summon my swords, I could barely control them with my magic like you do with your disks. And my copies were as good as useless."
Melodie sighed.
She couldn't exactly argue with that, she had seen Rin struggle and how her duplicates had been so weak.
"Maybe you just need to practice." She suggested. "I didn't have all my skills when I first started out."
It had taken watching another Magical Girl fight months after making her contract for Melodie realise that she could summon her weapons as platforms.
"Oh, okay." Rin accepted. "So, my copies will become better?"
Being unable to control her swords like Melodie had her chakram would suck but Rin could accept that. But she would hate it if all her copies were good for was pretending to be her in bed, they needed to do more than just stumble and flail around when she ordered them to do something.
"Uh…we'll see." Melodie gave a non-committal answer. "Anyway, let's get going."
After picking up Ami and calling an ambulance for the man that had been afflicted by the Witch's Kiss, Melodie once again treated the girls to noodles from a street vendor.
"Aren't you girls out a little late?" The noodle vendor questioned as he boxed up the portions and handed them over.
"Haka, I don't pay you to ask questions." Melodie told the man tiredly.
Haka snorted, knowing that the young teen wasn't being malicious in her comment.
"Someone's being crabby." He commented.
Melodie didn't respond, merely taking her food and paying.
Rin happily took the noodles and began to eat. And when Ami received her food, she greedily wolfed it down as fast as possible as soon as the first noodles touched her lips.
"Woah, slow down." Melodie put a hand on Ami's arm. "You'll choke."
Ami looked at Melodie, food hanging out of her mouth, for a moment before following the instructions and eating more slowly.
As she ate, Melodie looked at the time on her phone and winced. It was late.
Hunting the Witch had taken a while, especially with having to give up on the first Witch they tracked, and then fighting the Witch itself had also taken up a lot of time.
To make things worse, it was a school night. Meaning that all of them were going to have to suffer through school with less sleep than usual. It was for this very reason that Melodie didn't usually hunt so late, but Rin could only start hunting after her bedtime because she had been grounded.
"Alright, you two, finish up." Melodie instructed. "It's late and it's a school night. We all need to get to bed."
Just like last time, Melodie walked Rin and Ami home.
"No Witch hunting for the next few days." Melodie told the girls, stretching. "I'll be busy."
"I think I can manage-" Rin began to suggest.
"No hunting on your own." Melodie cut Rin off in a direct tone. "You're nowhere near ready for that yet."
Rin pouted and got a boop on the nose in response from the older girl.
With a final smile, Melodie walked off, leaving Rin to climb back into her room and Ami to go back under the tree.
Author's note: Please comment
This chapter was originally going to be part of the next chapter, but writing out the Witch fight got away from me and ended up being over 4,000 words long with three-pages worth of planning for the chapter still left to write. So, I've split it off and made this chapter just one long Witch fight.
The reason that I put so much effort into the Witch fight is because I made the character of Amu Hinamori from Shugo Chara into a Witch and got really inspired for how the labyrinth, familiars and powers would work.
Art for Witch Amu, named Guinevere, can be found on my DeviantART and Tumblr, like usual. Alongside finished character sheets for Rin's Magical Girl form and Melodie's updated Magical Girl form.