The kaiju was taking forever.

  “[Bst Shot]!”

  I swung Serenity Paradox and another burst of scarlet power ripped itself out of my soul and hurled towards the monstrosity currently stomping its way through another block of housing complexes in one of San Francisco’s st un-gentrified suburbs. Most of the buildings were empty at this point – probably – but that hadn’t stopped the mindless abomination in front of me from stomping around like a kid in a sand pit.

  Like every shot I’d sent before, this one impacted against the dark carapace of the kaiju without any visible effect. I fought off the urge to check for an update on the possibility of reinforcements. I already knew the answer. They weren’t coming. No one else was coming, this one was on us, and only us, and would you please stop wasting our time asking.

  Because in this fucked-up world, a spider the size of an apartment complex stomping its way through a neighborhood just wasn’t that big a deal. Unless it looked like it was going to suddenly explode or something, no one was going to waste extra resources. As frustrating as it was that I couldn’t seem to get a hit in edgewise against the kaiju, it wasn’t shooting back and it was barely out for blood, so it was mine to shoot at until I finally wore the thing down.

  “Fucking watch it, nerd!”

  Something smmed into me, knocking me down into the rooftop of the building I’d been hovering over. I skidded and bounced as my barrier caught the impact and drained it down to a level my neck could survive.

  Which didn’t mean it was fun. I grimaced at the new throbbing in my ribs as the spinning sky above me slowly straightened back out. Before I was feeling recovered enough to take back off, a head popped into my field of view.

  “God, Emma, you’re pathetic,” Yuki Ashigawa, also known as the Chosen Ebon Glint, spat at me. She tossed a strand of perfect, pitch-bck hair over her shoulder with a casual flick of her hand, and then made a show of looking at her wrist.

  “Five more minutes. Then I’m out and you can deal with your fuck-up on your own. Hear that, Jun?”

  Yuki’s familiar drifted down from wherever she’d been hanging around, lounging on a flying cloud like it was a poolside chaise lounge. Originally a fox, Jun complimented Yuki’s vaguely ninja-themed leotard and scarf with a high, open kimono that never quite slipped far enough to expose her distractingly-improbably curves. She flicked a copper-furred ear at me and grinned with all the cruel warmth Yuki never bothered to show.

  “Of course, Mistress. Five minutes it is,” she purred, and then the two blurred and disappeared, presumably off to make another futile attempt at damaging the kaiju rampaging around us. Yuki never showed anything but scorn when she lowered herself to speak to me, but she wasn’t making any more headway than I was. This thing really was just freaking tough.

  I sighed and pulled myself back onto my feet. Frustration threatened to bubble out of me, but I had plenty of practice shoving it back down. Yuki wasn’t a teammate. She wasn’t a friend, and she was only barely a co-worker. Dispatch grouped Chosen with neighboring districts together, and Yuki’s chunk of San Francisco bordered mine to the north, so we shared calls. But she’d made it clear from the first that she wouldn’t tolerate us sharing air, much less relying on each other in a fight. So, I kept my head down, stayed out of her way, and tried not to let it get to me too much. I mean, yeah, Yuki was being rude about it, but she wasn’t wrong. When I’d been assigned to the south side of San Francisco, Yuki had picked up twice as much ground to cover and no additional help. Yeah, in a fairytale world, Yuki might have been willing to reach out, or at least reach back if I tried. But in a fairytale, we wouldn’t need Chosen because humanity wasn’t getting slowly extinguished by extradimensional giant monsters. In the real world, I had to agree that it was pretty reasonable to expect that Yuki wasn’t going to invest much in me unless I was a better teammate. And, like, yeah, that sucked for me, but it wasn’t like it was her fault.

  And it wasn’t like she really needed the help, anyways. Yuki could do some moving-through-shadows stuff that got her right up in a kaiju’s face faster than I could manifest a spellform. Jun’s illusions were strong enough to distract most of the dangerous stuff, so the two of them were doing just fine without me.

  Which they went out of their way to remind me at every opportunity.

  In fact, this was the first time I could remember that we’d ever fought something Yuki couldn’t stab her way through. Yuki was… stronger on execution than strategy, but she I couldn’t imagine a normal situation where she’d just leave and trust me to finish up a fight. Not making much progress must be really getting to her.

  But five minutes? Five minutes was nothing. Five minutes might as well be five years – we weren’t going to get anywhere trying the same things we’d already been trying. And, fair enough, I guess. If Yuki didn’t have anything left to contribute, I guess I couldn’t fault her for wanting to go back to her own district instead of wasting her time on a kaiju that had spawned firmly in mine.

  I picked Serenity Paradox up from where I’d dropped it in the crash. I did that a lot. Serenity Paradox never seemed to fit quite right in my hand. It was always just a little too big, a little too bulky for me to hold onto as well as I thought I should. Sometimes, I was pretty sure that I’d been Chosen by mistake and my Crystal was meant for someone else. Otherwise, wouldn’t it have fit me better? Wouldn’t I be better?

  Serenity Paradox never seemed to mind, though. The ruby Crystal glimmered at me from inside the brass-colored tines grasping it to the end of its staff. Maybe it just knew something I didn’t.

  Maybe it was just stubborn and refused to admit it made a mistake.

  Whatever. I wasn’t the smartest Chosen, or the most powerful, but I could still learn a lesson when it was beaten into me enough times.

  The kaiju wasn’t going to drop because I beat it to death. If that had been going to work, it would have started happening and Yuki wouldn’t be about to abandon me. But what else did I have? Bst Shot wasn’t doing anything, and I didn’t really want to risk the time it took to power up my other combat spellform, Impulse Burst, when I wasn’t sure it’d do any better.

  But it wasn’t like I was swimming in better options, so I might as well. Part of the problem with Impulse Burst was it took a lot of time to set up. It was a complicated spellform, and it took every scrap of concentration I had to channel power into the correct shape and hold it together long enough for the spellform to manifest. Yeah, it hit hard when it nded, if it nded, but it took me several minutes at a time to channel the spellform, and it wasn’t like I was still flying around and fighting while I waited.

  But, if I kinda squinted, Yuki saying she was leaving in five minutes was another way of saying, for the next five minutes, the kaiju had a guaranteed target that wasn’t me. If I got high enough in the air, the kaiju probably didn’t have anywhere to escape to out of my sight, so as long as I got the spellform off and it didn’t over-penetrate or miss – I said I was sorry – it was worth a shot.

  So, up I went, until I was above the still-picturesque skyline and just below the cloud yer. Yuki was still darting out of nowhere and doing fuck-all on the kaiju, and either it was stoned, or Jun was leading it on a merry romp through the less-expensive buildings. I was in the clear.

  Other Chosen could manifest spellforms at light speed. We have recordings of Amber Fsh just popping out spellforms that hit like artillery shells just one after another, and on and on. Star Warrior once maintained a barrier over himself and a bunch of civilians when a kaiju the size of a mountain tried to nd on him. Hell, Yuki could step in and out of shadow faster than I could manifest Bst Shot, and that was my fast spellform.

  What I’m trying to say is, I wasn’t just feeling insecure about how little I could contribute; I had objective proof. When people needed a hero, they needed someone else.

  No one would tell me, so I’ve had to guess, but I’m pretty sure I know what my problem is. My throughput must, just, suck. We’re pretty sure something or someone made Crystals, and if all the help they give us in channeling spellforms isn’t clue enough, Chosen don’t run out of power. Ever. As far as anyone knows, it has literally never happened. Each of us has a metaphysical spigot in our souls somewhere, and when we flip the switch, power comes out. As much power as you want, all yours. No limits – it’s an open bar.

  The problem is, we can’t hold onto it. Like, yeah, sure, with some force of will, you could keep power from running off immediately, but that would only st until you slipped, you took in more than power than you could hold, or you started channeling it into a spellform. And unless you manage to take option number three, you were probably about to explode. If you were real stupid, you were going to take your closest five hundred friends with you.

  Which is where spellforms come in. Part of the point of them – I think, it’s not like I got to take csses in this, or anything – is to slow down and stabilize power long enough for the form to complete and then manifest. Most Chosen channel their spellforms in the same whatever-it-is where power comes from, because when you’re doing everything in your head, it’s all subjective, and you can build the forms as fast or as slow as you expect to.

  All of this together means, Chosen don’t have to worry about most of the stuff you’d think we would. We can’t run out of ammunition, we can pretty effortlessly switch to the most effective attack we know, and as long as you can keep one of us alive, we’ll probably make a complete recovery. The only limiting factor – beyond how complicated a spellform we can memorize – is throughput: how fast power actually comes out of the spigot. Channeling power can be subjectively quick, but you can’t channel what isn’t there, so what a Chosen can do and how fast they can do it all come down to throughput.

  Case in point: I knew – I knew – that other Chosen could channel bigger, more complicated spellforms way faster than I could, but it couldn’t just be a skill issue. It took me most of the five minutes Yuki gave me to pull together Impulse Burst, and the only expnation for that that I could imagine is that I just pin sucked. When everyone else got a hose, I got a dinky little pstic straw.

  Or something. I didn’t know, and I probably would never know. What I did know is, I had five minutes to come up with a better idea than just banging my head against a wall until the wall broke, and this is what I’d spent that time on.

  The spellform shook inside me. It wanted to be free – power isn’t meant to be constrained. I was barely holding it together, and this wasn’t even the tricky part. I still had to aim the thing.

  I opened my eyes, searching for the kaiju before information overload could cause me to slip and manifest too early. Fortunately, even this high up, a giant, bck spider was still pretty easy to see. Serenity Paradox assisted me in lining up the shot, and…

  “[Impulse Burst]!”

  I forced the spellform out of me and into the world. It manifested, bsting a beam of power wider than I am down into the City. I dropped, falling back towards the ground and the kaiju. My power manifested bright red, but Impulse Burst was so concentrated, it was mostly a blinding white. The fastest way to see what damage I’d done is to just wait until the spellform finished manifesting before taking a look. And, while I was at it, I might as well have gotten closer, because it’s not like I was going to shoot Bst Shots from this high.

  The first thing I looked for wasn’t the kaiju, it was the ground. I didn’t see any signs of a catastrophic miss, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

  But soon enough, I found the kaiju again, and that relief went up in smoke.

  The kaiju was completely unscathed.