“Isn’t this too much work for social media?” Ami asked, though it was clear from her tone that she’d already decided the answer for herself. “Half my page is usually pictures of food, and that seems to work just fine.”

  “Some of this is your obligation, and some of it is making the most of this opportunity,” Grace said.

  “Besides, Grace and I did most of the work for you,” Adah added.

  The cause of Ami’s woe was a posting schedule that Adah and Grace had devised. In the days following their mission with Seliah, it had become abundantly clear that their team needed an official plan for their online presence over the next month.

  For once, Adah’s scheming had paid off without a hitch, and the many threads her team had been weaving came together just as planned. Their budding alliance with the coalition teams, their victory over a B-Rank Cruelty, their photoshoot with Lina’s costumes, and the launch of the carnival—all of these efforts were coinciding in the way Adah had hoped her original “iceberg” idea would. She chose to take her success this time as a sign she was improving as a leader.

  However, Grace was right that the girls had work yet to do if they wanted to capitalize on the opportunity. If they didn’t make a buzz about all their ongoing activity, then most people—even their fans—wouldn’t learn about any of it. And with so much going on at once, they needed a strategy for how to generate that buzz in a way that built in intensity leading up to the carnival.

  The first impetus for putting together a formal posting schedule came from Seliah herself.

  After they had defeated the scorpion, Seliah had started asking Adah and the twins all sorts of questions about their spells and what they were thinking about during the fight. She was interested in just about everything—from how much energy Ami felt like she’d used creating her ice block, to how long it had taken Adah to summon the hand from her scythe. Adah and Ami could only gave vague answers to those kinds of questions—they mostly operated off of feel—but Seliah had still jotted down their responses in a little notebook she had stashed in her robe pocket.

  When Ami asked why she was taking so many notes, Seliah had explained that she was running her own blog. Although, in her case, “blog” was a shorthand for “battle log.”

  She’d started the practice after taking out the ibex Cruelty with Ami, as a way to learn from the experience. Without any teammates of her own, Ami had been the first magical girl she could learn from firsthand. She wrote out this first battle log to help her remember what a D-Rank Cruelty was like and to analyze the strength of a higher level magical girl. From that day forward, she drafted up a log for every mission she went on, detailing as much information as she could about each Cruelty variant, her strategy for fighting it, what she could improve for next time, and so on.

  “The mission briefs are helpful as a starting point,” she’d explained to Adah and the twins, “but they can’t teach you what it’ll be like to actually fight the Cruelty. This was my way of learning.”

  One day, after her fanbase had started to grow, she had mentioned in a random social post that she was creating these logs. All her fans immediately begged her to post them online. Apparently, her fans were a bit like Emi’s in that way—they went rabid for almost anything she did. She eventually gave in to their requests and shared some logs, which her fans treated partly as a way to keep up with what Seliah was doing as a magical girl and partly as a way to see how magical girls thought about battles.

  Once Seliah had started explaining the idea, Adah could already predict how her fans had reacted. The girl was a hard worker and completely earnest in her efforts to improve. The work she put into those logs also helped explain how she’d become so skilled in combat so fast. After they saw how hard Seliah was working, and the depth of thought she put into each mission, it was inevitable that her fans would want to support her with even greater fervor.

  Her blogs, or perhaps b-logs, had quickly become one of her main selling points as a magical girl.

  Now that the Last Light would be featured in one, it only made sense for Adah and the twins to help promote it—for their sakes and for Seliah’s. If they all shared the blog to their own fans, they’d shine a huge light on their collaboration with the witch girl. They couldn’t ask for a better opportunity to spark fan discussion leading up to the multi-team carnival.

  On the very same day as the scorpion battle, Adah had also learned that Fifty Flip was planning to level up their online presence. It seemed that Hyperia had been fixated on the idea of a web show for some time now. She enjoyed watching livestreams in her free time, and although there existed magical girls who streamed as their primary means of engaging their fanbases, Hyperia wanted to take a slightly different approach.

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  The Fifty Flip captain’s idea was more akin to a podcast than a solo stream. Hyperia wanted to host a recurring show during which she and Elegia would interview and chat with a different magic user each week, aiming to fill a more casual and candid niche than what shows you could find about magic users on television. Their plan was to start by featuring Dystopia—who predictably didn’t want to join them in hosting each week—then branch out to other regional teams as their show grew in popularity.

  The idea had been brewing in Hyperia’s head for a while, and now that Fifty Flip had a real connection with a more famous team, she had decided it was time to capitalize. She had reached out to Rika with a proposal of her own while Adah and the twins were off fighting the scorpion.

  Essentially, Hyperia wanted to invite Adah and Rika on her show the week after Dystopia, and then Ami and Emi the week after that. In the spirit of jolly cooperation, Adah and her teammates accepted.

  Hyperia had unknowingly resolved the question of how the Last Light should showcase their partnership with Fifty Flip. A web show involving Hyperia and Elegia would likely be more entertaining than any K-Rank mission could have been, and gave the girls of the Last Light an obligation they could actually plan around. After all, it could be weeks or longer before an appropriate mission appeared for their teams to tackle together.

  It wasn’t just the Last Light who would benefit from appearing on Hyperia’s show, however. Adah planned to pitch Seliah as the next guest following her team’s own appearance. If DreamRise were willing and able to join, it’d be ideal to include them, as well. The identity of their coalition would grow even stronger if they all appeared on the show one after another.

  Promoting Seliah’s blog and Hyperia’s show were relatively simple tasks in the grand scheme of things. The final piece of the puzzle was a little more complicated.

  Neil had finally returned the edited photo set from the shoot with Lina’s outfits. He had organized the photos into two collections: one which featured a limited selection of shots intended to be used primarily as promotional material for Lina’s business. These were the shots that best highlighted the outfits themselves, and that made the best use of the extravagant theme of the studio they had rented that day.

  Lina had given this first line of costumes the title of “Everything You Ever Wanted,” which Adah also found to be a fitting name for her own endeavor. As such, this first collection of photos would be hosted on her own website, with a dedicated page showing off her work for this first foray into designing outfits for magical girls.

  It was this promotional effort that Grace had alluded to as the Last Light’s “obligation.” Part of their agreement with Lina involved helping spread the word of her services by promoting the gallery on her website, as well as showing off the outfits prominently on their own social media.

  This, of course, was not so much an obligation for Adah as it was a pleasure.

  In addition to the main collection of photos, Neil also shared an absolute flood of secondary photos—shots of the girls individually, as a group, and in every pairing configuration. Each grouping had dozens upon dozens of photos to look through, to the point that Adah and her teammates had spent the whole night after dinner checking them out and pointing out their favorites to each other.

  This, too, was something Grace had alluded to. Now that they had all these photos to work with, they needed to make the best use of them.

  Some of the first steps were simple: Adah suggested each member update her profile picture to be one of the new photos of herself. Adah figured the shot of her crying was the only option for her own profile. The dichotomy of such a melancholic-looking photo coming out of a collection titled “Everything You Ever Wanted” was bound to stir up some discourse among her fans. She had to admit, too, that there was something alluring about the haunted look in her eyes. For a character like Heartbreak, this face fit perfectly.

  Making use of the rest of the photos would be a more complex challenge. Adah and her teammates could share the various configurations of pairs, but what was the best order and cadence for that? And how should the other members interact with those posts? Who should comment or reshare when? Was there a best practice for this sort of thing? Of course, all the same questions presented themselves when it came to the full group photos, too.

  Their team had so much going on that and so many questions about it all that even Adah, who had designed the plans for much of it, had a hard time keeping track. Hence the need for a proper posting schedule.

  Adah and Grace made use of a tactic the woman had deployed during her college years. Whenever she had to work on a group project, she had found that none of her group members would take any initiative on completing a part of the project themselves. No one wanted to be the person to divvy up the work either. So, she had taken it upon herself to write down tasks for each member on a notecard, along with the dates by which they needed to complete those tasks. One notecard per group member, each with its own tasks. She’d hand out the notecards and tell her groupmates that, as long as they stuck to what was written on those cards, they’d finish the project in time.

  “Wouldn’t they find that annoying?” Adah had asked her manager. “Almost like you’re acting like their mom.”

  “They probably did,” Grace had said, “but we all got A’s at the end of it. I’ve always been good at tuning out complaints anyway.”

  If the tactic was effective enough for a bunch of college kids, it would work for their team as well. So, Adah and Grace handed each member of the Last Light a notecard containing details on what to post about, when to post it, who to tag, what to link to, and a general theme for the post. The specific wording and any extra flair the girls wanted to give their post was up to them. What mattered was that the four of them were coordinated and purposeful in their posting.

  Everyone had been putting in the work—Seliah with her blogs, Hyperia and Elegia with their show, and Adah and her teammates with everything they had accomplished in the past few months. Now, they needed to show it all off.

  Everything they had worked for. Everything they had ever wanted.