The best thing we had at the moment to combine with contingency was still Stoneskin. It wasn’t something cheap that could be trivially cast in the heat of battle, it didn’t last all day on its own, and it was generically useful. It didn’t need any choices of element, nor could it accidentally hurt someone like Fire Shield. Perhaps I should pick up other options, but if it allowed us to more efficiently use our mana in the thick of things a small number of options would be all we needed.

  On that note, Strife was fairly easily convinced to give up some eyelashes. She would be suffering for the greater good and all that. We’d also try to get some eyelashes from Momo to see if magical girls still counted in their normal form. Relatedly, it did work. I could immediately tell the potency of the spell was much higher. As for Lady Eglantine’s lashes, what exactly counted was up for debate for a porcupine. However, we found some hairs right up close to her eye that had to count.

  Eglantine’s lashes worked about half as well as Strife’s. So there was something to the whole thing. Both were far superior to our previous efforts. Because of the order of our experimentation we would be left with a shorter duration of the Contingency on Midnight’s statue, which really didn’t matter. Especially since we were still in the experimentation phase, and not expecting to need any of it.

  So of course something came up.

  I heard some portion of the chatter coming through the in-ear comms of Strife and Eglantine. “... swarms of… downtown!”

  The two of them were immediately tense. “Is there trouble?” I asked. “Was that Fried Shrimp?”

  Before they could answer, I heard more yelling, though again only part of it. “Mage? Tell that… kick his ass!” The message was clear enough.

  Lady Eglantine cleared her throat. “Burning Cupid and other magical girls request backup. We will return to assist you with your experimentation later.”

  As they began moving, Midnight hopped onto my shoulder. “We’re coming too. Obviously.”

  “It is not your responsibility,” Strife said.

  “We have to help people when we know they’re in trouble,” Midnight said. “And Turlough wants to fight.”

  “I rarely get to hit things as hard as I want!” I explained. At least, not anything that would actually be hurt much. I was going to be using magic here more than my staff, but it was the same thing.

  These magical girls absolutely needed a better way to get places besides running and public transportation. Even if driving wasn’t that common here, people still did it. Fortunately, I was more than capable of keeping up. The Power Brigade wouldn’t likely have kept me on if I avoided basic fitness. That said, I probably wouldn’t have survived if they had, since I often ended up in situations that I needed it.

  “Hmm. She sure did mean swarms,” I commented as we came around a corner to find some familiar- and some unfamiliar- magical girls corralling large numbers of The Scouring. Angled walls of flame presumably formed by Fried Shrimp along the sides of the street funneled most of the ground based members into a narrow point where Shield blocked the way with a few other melee oriented individuals.

  Some monsters climbed or flew over the flames, but they were generally being handled. For the moment. The press of misshapen forms was beginning to overwhelm the walls of flame, with some being shoved through quite forcefully.

  Strife immediately set about impaling those past the barrier with quills. I’d had in mind to use Chain Lightning, but the area was set up far better for something else. I just had to get close enough to use Blizzard without catching any allies in the area. Or, say, certain walls of fire. Fried Shrimp didn’t need her day to be any more difficult.

  I made my way to the front of the pack, just close enough that something swiped at me. That was intentional, because Contingency was supposed to be triggered there. It didn’t seem to be quite close enough the first time, but when a barbed tail scraped against Force Armor it finally worked. It seemed we had some fine tuning to do with triggers. Maybe the code phrase idea was best, since I could consciously trigger that.

  These particular circumstances made Contingency inefficient since we hadn’t had much time to recover our mana, but normally it was supposed to be waiting for most of the day before it was used.

  I had been worried it might interrupt the flow of mana I was gathering, but it worked just fine. Then again, if it could interrupt a caster they really wouldn’t want any reactive triggers. It would be pretty awful to screw yourself over like that.

  Swirling ice blasted forwards from me, covering literally as far as I could get it past the flames. What remained was a sort of gallery of horrific ice sculptures… being crawled over by the beasts behind them. Or through, as some weren’t exactly gentle with their frozen brethren. My spell seemed surprisingly effective… but there was a reason magic was used to counter them, after all. It would also be horrifying if anything that came in such large quantities was individually powerful.

  “Great job!” the silver Shield said. “But if we can’t find and hold the portals they’re coming through, this incident might escalate. Normally I would have expected them to stop coming by now… If they decided to ignore us and go after civilians, it will be a disaster.”

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  “Hmm,” I said. “Anyone have a mirror?”

  The left side flames roared grew more robust as Fried Shrimp approached. “Planning to put on your makeup in the middle of battle?” she asked.

  “Of course not,” I said. “That’s only for media appearances, and only in my world. And I’m on media probation, so…” I shrugged. “I was serious about the mirror thing, though.”

  “Don’t have one,” Fried Shrimp replied.

  “Uh, I have a compact,” Wand said as she waved her pink magic at people, fixing up cuts and bruises. The momentary lull in battle was a good time for such things, though there were still many enemies approaching. More backup had arrived, though, so there were about a dozen magical girls present. No Magical Man, but I wasn’t even sure if he was active in this district. “Is that good enough?”

  I could probably fit a full height mirror in Storage now. It would probably be too much of my capacity though. “That’s a… small one, right?” I held up my hand for reference. “Larger is… better? A bathroom would be fine but…” I couldn’t tell if any of the surrounding establishments would have one. Most places should, right? They were kind of required anywhere people would work.

  But right now most of the buildings were sealed up with barriers I hadn’t noticed on previous visits. They were some sort of metal drop down thing. I doubted they could withstand a direct hit from a proper monster, but they were good for collateral damage.

  “I’ll take the compact,” I said, holding out my hand.

  “Pink!” she called. A pink cat flew down from the sky, holding a purse. I wondered if that looked like a free floating purse to most people since the cat would be invisible? Either way, Wand quickly dug through the contents and pulled out the mirror.

  I took it, then backed up to a safer position. As I did so, I wondered if I needed the mirror at all. Scrying the location would be useful, but I just wanted to find it. Getting a sense of direction and distance was more important.

  But it wasn’t a good time for experimentation. I set about doing what I planned, flipping the mirror open. I hadn’t used a double mirror before, though it kind of brought to mind the multiple sided ‘scrying orb’ Vilhelmiina created. I wondered if different images would naturally settle into it or if I had to do something?

  Silvery mists swirled over it as I sought out portals nearby. I knew what they looked like, and they should be powerful and easy to sense, even if they weren’t proper magic. As I was feeling around for things, I bumped into… something. I felt myself get shoved away from a particular area- without actually getting a read on where that was. Before I had time to consider that, images started to form. It wasn’t my intention, but I got a top-down view of the location which just looked like some dirt path in shade and a horizontal view of the portal in question, next to a slope or some sort. How useful! Was it that way because I was going to think it was useful, or because it was some sort of default?

  I couldn’t think about that. “Someone tell me where this is!” I waved over the nearest magical girl. Civilians had all run away long before… except a few fools lingering in the distance.

  “That’s under the bridge!” she commented. “That way!” She pointed at about a forty-five degree angle to the street things were swarming down.

  Magical girls were fighting, wielding magical powers and kind of scary looking weapons. One of them had a scythe- the kind that was actually used for fields- sweeping into and through numerous foes. It was sharp. Good thing most of The Scouring faded quickly into unreality after being slain, or things would be pretty gruesome.

  “Midnight, over here!” I called. “Strife! We can bring a squad of a few others along with us. And companions.” Most of the Humuruns didn’t fight directly, but they were generally helpful to have around, improving the magical girl’s abilities. I didn’t know the whole details, as I was still trying to figure out all the rules that applied to me, and didn’t need to learn how a parallel Earth worked that closely.

  “Are we flying?” Lady Eglantine asked as Strife began to gather a squad.

  “I think that’s actually more expensive,” I admitted. Obviously flight was more enduring, but we’d have to multicast it which would be over twenty mana. Dimension Door would be far too short of a distance- or at the very least I assumed so. Teleport would be just about right, and we couldn’t end up far off target. Maybe ten to fifty feet at most. I saw a familiar squad gathering- Strife, Wand, Fried Shrimp, and Shield. “Alright, let’s go! Midnight, we’re splitting Teleport half and half.”

  “Got it,” he said.

  We each gathered 7.5 mana, and I focused on the image lingering in the mirror. I didn’t try anything fancy with the angle, I just wanted to get us there.

  “... Teleport?” Shield asked.

  A single moment lacking sight, then we appeared in the daylight once more. We ended up on top of the bridge, which was actually good as some of The Scouring were beginning to run across it. Some cars were having issues turning around, though they seemed to have gotten the message about the dangers.

  The squad looked around, bemused, but rapidly sprang into action.

  “Gizmo Girl and I will hold them here!” Fried Shrimp said. “The rest of you fight your way over to… wherever it is!”

  “Directly beneath us,” I commented. “I think.” I handed the compact mirror to the pink cat. “Thank you.”

  “Heart Barrier!” A semi-translucent pink dome formed around me as Wand started making her way through all of us. It was formed of patterns of alternating hearts to form vague rings, with a pink mist sort of covering everything else.

  Strife seemed to think it was fairly normal, and was already stabbing her way through things before Wand was even done. She seemed quite fond of going for the eyes, perhaps because some of the creatures had far too many of them. I wondered if Stoneskin protected my eyes.

  Midnight and I followed after as flame barriers were set up across the bridge. There actually weren’t too many swarming guys so I was able to bat back the stray reaching limbs and push past some misshapen wings to get to the end of the bridge pretty quickly. I did recognize the river edge after we got it in sight, though it wasn’t likely that we had somehow ended up on the wrong bridge with monsters.

  The portal was pretty big- perhaps ten feet across. I saw three overly large heads poking through on twisted necks. I didn’t want to find out what the rest of the beasts were like. Or maybe it was just one beast. Like a mutant duck, wolf, bat chimaera.