She hadn't really gotten enough thinking done about the fight itself. That much was true. But Kagami didn't look like a close-range fighter, and they'd been far away from her... Hikari had thought that if she used the firework boost to close the distance as fast as possible, she could knock Kagami out of the sky. But she'd been quite mistaken about how quickly that the enemy magical girl could attack, and she was now paying for it. Her entire body ached, the impact of that magical energy beam had just completely overwhelmed her. Her clothing was torn and smouldering in places, mostly around her stomach as that was where the attack had hit, though the skin underneath didn't seem to be damaged at all.

"... It's not like I was just being an idiot or something, she didn't seem like she could fight at close range so I thought if I got close before she could shoot..." Hikari trailed off, realizing she may have gotten caught up in her anger before fully considering her actions. She was a new magical girl while Kagami seemed to be a veteran, on top of everything else. She wasn't even entirely sure what her concept was. But none of those facts stopped her from giving a reproachful glare towards Tokiko.

Even if she couldn't ignore how hard her heart was hammering in her chest, Hikari wasn't going to stop being annoyed about being talked to like she was stupid.

But that wasn't all.

So this was the Hex Night. So people like [i]that[/i] could become magical girls.

"... If someone like that can take part in the Hex Night..." she began, glancing in the direction that Kagami had left in, "Then there's no way I'm not going to, too! Even if it's just to stop someone like [i]that[/i] from winning!"

It was perhaps notable that the head of Hikari's hammer was cracked.

A normal magical girl attack could almost never harm an Archetype, aside from cases where that Archetype was a living being, after all. For that matter, the fact that her clothing had been damaged enough to be burned away in places, too, was unusual... a single attack, doing that? Even if it was from a particularly powerful magical girl...

[@Anza]

[hr]

When it was bowed to, and spoken to, the masked figure silently tilted their head without speaking. For a few moments, that was all that happened. There wasn't a single movement for some time, until the figure suddenly turned in a rather stiff fashion and immediately began to walk into the forest. In spite of the less then urgent-looking(and strangely stiff) movements, it was managing to move at a pace comparable to a sprint.

Given that the figure's response to being spotted was to leave immediately, it didn't seem likely they were friendly.

[@A Lowly Wretch][@LuckyBlackCat]