#feeeeeeelings

Following on directly from the end of the 30th chapter, Hitomi warns Kana that the Kaii is actually a different type to what they’d assumed and they need to get out of dodge lest it mutates. Kana immediately apologises, saying she believed Akane when she said the Kaii was handled. This leads to a great exchange between our two Magi-Lumiere girls. 

Which is just... damn, that hits hard if you’ve ever trained someone at work haha. They reunite with Akane and we get to see how far Kana has truly come in her role and why she was trusted with training someone. She really has absorbed the Magi-Lumiere way of fighting Kaii and assumed the role Hitomi played for her in the first chapter.

However, when it looks like the Kaii may have the upper hand and Kana may truly be in danger we get a couple of panels that in one fell swoop explain more about Shigemoto’s backstory trauma than anything else we’ve seen so far.

But because Kana isn’t alone and is out there with her team, including Hitomi, the magical girls are all OK at the close of the chapter.

Um wow? What a great chapter. Not only do we see Magi-Lumiere operating as a team (which is why they’re so good to begin with, that and the engineering talent they have) we see that Kana, while not at the same level as Hitomi yet, has come a looooong way since that first chapter. Honestly, I love seeing this kind of follow-through with character skill and confidence development.

Seeing Shigemoto’s flash of the magical girl that he imitates in his appearance (and we can assume was lost 15 years ago) was also perfectly executed. Nothing is said, we just see that when faced with the potential of this loss again he is clearly upset but aware that this is Kana he could be losing, not the previous girl.

I love this series, it does so much and makes you think about your working life without ever beating you over the head with things. It also gives us magical girls in a shounen series without gross fanservice or exploitation, these characters are a team of equal contributors and it feels like they’re a team through and through.

The sun was too bright that morning, sending stabs of agony through Mairèad’s head, but she smiled anyway, still coasting off the goodness of her trip, and staving off the rest of her hangover with magic and ice water and plans for a pastry. The latter was what got her in trouble; she could have remained blissfully ignorant for days, had she not disembarked, still adjusting her belt and scabbard around her waist, not really watching where she was going until she careened head-on into a Kaldorei.

“Oh! ‘Scuse me!” she chirped good-naturedly but felt her smile fade as she saw the victim of her clumsiness: statuesque and elegant, but covered in ash and tears and wearing a haunted expression. He mumbled something in Darnassian, not even looking at Mairèad, and staggered onward. Beyond him, Mairèad could see more and more of them: Kaldorei refugees, wailing and sobbing, healing each other’s wounds, all burnt or ashy or coughing or something in between.

It took Mairèad what felt like hours to finally piece together the story of Teldrassil’s burning, and when she had, the pastry seemed unimportant. Most things seemed unimportant, really. The banshee queen had done genocide, right when the world was finally supposed to see the peace for which it had been fighting for millennia. The summons to fight must have come not hours after Mairèad had left port Ratchet, and the fighting and horror were so unevenly matched and through so quickly that she didn’t even hear of them until the battle was lost.

When the horror had sufficiently sunk in, something else struck Mairèad that she might not have otherwise considered, had she not just spent five days making lazy love to an orc. Before the thought was fully formed, she paid for a portal to Dalaran and scribbled a hasty note that she shoved in the faction neutral mailbox she and Krogu used to write each other.

Krogu,

I don’t know if you heard about Teldrassil. I can’t imagine you didn’t. Please tell me you’re alright. Please tell me you didn’t help burn it. That’s all I need to know. I don’t care if you fought, I don’t care if you killed, that’s war, but please, please be alright, please don’t have that genocide on your conscience.

I’m fine. & slightly drunk.

Love you,

Mair

Stormwind now buzzed with war preparations, more than it had even when the Legion’s ships tore the sky open and dotted Azeroth’s landscapes. Rumors flew about where and when the counterstrike would be, but they soon coalesced into a solid truth: the Alliance would take back Lordaeron.

Mairèad, Kul Tiran at her most legitimate, had no true sentiment for the kingdom beyond that it was the home of her adopted family, a foothold for the Alliance, and the heart of all the labors of the Silver Hand and Argent Crusade. Still, the idea of taking out the banshee queen held universal appeal, and she found herself aboard one of the navy’s ships, trekking northward and overcrowded with those eager to fight.

She’d combed the crowd for any familiar faces, but the volunteers to fight in Lordaeron were too numerous, and all for different reasons. Nearly every human wanted to take the kingdom back, a healthy number claiming some sort of heritage there. The Gilneans, both cursed and uncursed, saw an opportunity to take from the banshee queen what she took from them, and the few Kaldorei well enough to join in the fight felt the same way. Others rode the ships out of a sense of loyalty to the Alliance, and still others in a mindset of moral correctness. They all seemed in good, determined spirits, or at least seemed optimistic about the battle. They had the element of surprise; surely they’d take back the city.

Mairèad felt less certain. The whole affair had the air of a trap, not just the battle itself, but the fact of Undercity’s involvement. She’d never been there, being alive and all, but she’d heard that it was a twisting labyrinth of sewage and rot, accessible only through old drain pipes and guarded lifts. Though she wouldn’t be in the Undercity herself, she couldn’t imagine that its invaders would escape with their lives.

But good odds or bad, they arrived north of the city and pressed down through Brill to the front gates under the command of King Genn Greymane and, eventually, King Anduin Wrynn. The battle was intense, far more than battles against the Legion had been, not least because the faces glaring back at her from the other side mirrored her own. Few wore expressions of virulent hatred; most were furious, afraid, determined, sad.

The Horde, unlike the Legion, still clung to some shreds of humanity.

Even as their enormous war machine rolled out across the battlefield, crushing fallen soldiers beneath it. Even as magic and arrows and blood flew. Even as the commanders’ voices grew hoarse and cracked with effort. Even then, the Horde weren’t mindlessly evil, following their very nature to destroy. Even then, they were soldiers, as much as Mairèad was.

As much, she realized, as Krogu likely was.

And once she realized that, she saw him in every orc that charged at her, every face glaring back through a halo of Light or a haze of fire. And it was more than that. She started to recognize faces, not by name but by familiarity, from Light’s Hope. Tauren and Blood Elves both; she couldn’t have called their names if she wanted to, but she felt sure that she’d exchanged smiles with one or two, sharpened her Orcish with another. They called upon the same Light she did, and the expressions of doubt and horror on their faces matched the one on her own.

Had any on the battlefield experienced this sort of thing before? Mairèad couldn’t imagine so. The Horde and Alliance had, she knew, tenuously worked together in Northrend, but things had been tense. She couldn’t recall a time when they hadn’t at least been separate, not until the Legion arrived, not until their world was in more danger than any but the oldest among them had seen. And now, Mairèad knew she wasn’t the only one struggling to strike against those with whom she’d so recently shared bonds.

She almost couldn’t help herself when she held up her shield to block the blow of a Troll charging at her; he must have been twice her height, but he also seemed impressed that she was able to throw him off with her Light-enhanced strength. He seemed even more impressed, behind his carved mask, when she remarked, “Hell of a day for it, too, is it not?” in Orcish.

Impressed, and amused. “Ya,” he answered with a chuckle, bringing another blow toward her side, as though they were sparring partners. “Where ya from? Ya Orcish sound like a Blood Elf’s.”

Mairèad snorted, stomping her foot and grinning as the Troll leapt away from her consecration. “It is funny, because in Common, I sound like a peasant!” she answered.

The Troll spun his staff about in a complicated gesture and seemed about to reply when an arrow flew from behind Mairèad and caught him in the neck. Mairèad staggered back, watching as he fell, one hand reaching towards her but soon growing still. “...fuck,” she whispered, rooted to the ground. What was she doing here? What were any of them doing here?

Now all she could think of was finding Krogu, if he was even at the battle. “Please don’t be here, please don’t be here,” she murmured, pushing forward. All of the Orcs she encountered were tall and taller, even the ones with hair the same hue as hers. Krogu had a good nearly two feet on her, but he was scrawny for one of his race, and none of the Orcs Mairèad faced stood an inch below seven feet.

And then--

There he was, she was sure of it, the features she’d memorized with her lips and fingers coated in blood, the mouth that whispered her name so sweetly bared in a snarl. She started to call out to him when the world in front of her exploded in clouds of sickly green--Blight.

Mairèad stumbled and coughed; around her, the armies began to scream in pain and horror, and not just the Alliance armies. “She’s blightin’ her own soldiers!” someone yelled, and Mairèad choked from something besides the wretched disease.

Paladins, especially those who bear shields, are not known for their rational decisions or for running away from danger. Mairèad let out a war yell and ran forward, into the sickening cloud, towards where she’d seen Krogu before the explosion.

She didn’t know how long it had been when she finally woke up again, woke with a cough that made her ribs ache and a pounding headache and her skin pink and raw and healing from chemical burns. She didn’t know what day it was, but Chadley was there, and he told her that he’d stopped her from charging in “like a complete idiot.” That the grace of the Light was the only reason they’d survived. That the Horde had been driven from Capital City, but it was a hollow victory, since Sylvanas had flooded the city with Blight as she fled.

No one had news on the casualties among the Horde. It was hard to say, as Sylvanas had raised so many of those she killed with the Blight, as so many were left in the ruins of the city that was destroyed out of nothing but spite.

Mairèad was bed-bound for the next several days, per orders of the medic who’d bandaged and healed her the rest of the way, after Lorcan and Chadley had stabilized her back in Brill. She’d fought it at first, but when she’d dropped to her knees in pain after just a few steps, she surrendered to her body’s pleas for healing. Her mind and heart still raced, but she wouldn’t be going anywhere on her own for a while.

So she held the letter in her hand, unsent, for nearly a week after the battle, hoping that her delay wouldn’t cause the kind of panic she felt.

Krogu,

Please tell me you’re alright, please don’t be blighted. I saw you there, I wanted to say something, but then fucking Sylvanas--

I’m alright. Mostly. I did something stupid and got myself fucked right up for my trouble. I’ll be alright once I’ve rested up.

Just please tell me you’re alright. Please. Please.

I love you.