Battle Vixens! - 131

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Episode 131: Sunrise

The last motion of Magus's spell looked like the most difficult. She brought her exhausted right hand, shaking, upward, had to grab the wrist with the opposite hand to keep it from falling, and finally, alongside the name of the spell, got her sword's tip pointed straight upward at the sky. A needle-thin beam of light seemed to pierce down through the clouds to the tip of the sword, the light gathering and growing rapidly into a volleyball-sized orb of pure, white light, as bright as the sun in the sky at noon, illuminating the world around them. After it was fully formed, Magus dropped her arms and stumbled forward, barely catching herself from falling flat on her face by stabbing the sword in the ground.

The orb, meanwhile, floated over next to Light. Its level of brightness should have been painful and blinding, but—maybe because of her own powers, or maybe because it was a magic orb of light—it was neither of those things. The rays coming out from it flooded into her, and she could easily bend its rays toward herself to take in even more.

It felt unbelievably good to bathe in so much light again, but this was also..different from normal light. It would be ridiculous to say it aloud, but—most light was "cold" and impersonal, coming from a device or a physical reaction. This wasn't something that bothered Light; in fact she wouldn't even be aware of it if not for the contrast against how this felt. This light was...warm. Like...a hug from Amp, maybe. More bizarrely, she felt like it wanted her to succeed—not that someone wanting that was bizarre, but feeling like a bunch of light she was absorbing wanted anything at all was extremely strange. Then again, the light hadn't come from nowhere—it was from Magus. Who, above all else, wanted them to make it.

Whose first words to Light were...

"I'm a huge fan."

"You're my hero."

How many people had said things like that to her over the past couple of weeks, anyway? And why did she still refuse to believe it for so long? Magic was emotion, out of a person's own soul; maybe you could lie with it if you were really good at it, but Marcus was honest to a fault to begin with. If the way she felt was this real, enough to manifest out of a summoned orb of light, then was it really that hard to accept that nearly everyone else might feel the same way when they said the same things?

"If you need it, use my power. " Every person whose power Light had "taken ownership" of had offered, or asked, or in Cynthia's case demanded this one thing. She'd come to think of these offers more and more as a burden being laid on her, but that wasn't what any of them really wanted. Even people not in that category, who barely knew her...
Like Lucy: "We owe y'all one, or maybe like six, so gimme a call if you need a hand. We'll do what we can, send someone over maybe."

Or, the night of the meeting—she didn't really even remember who: "Go get 'em, girl! We're all rooting for you!"

Why did she always brush people off when they wanted to help? When they said they were on her side? Was it really that hard to trust their intentions? Or to accept their decisions to risk what had to be risked to help her out?

Every single thing that she'd thought was a burden on her back, all along, was meant to be a hand reaching out to help carry the weight of the real load. Obviously. Because...

What was it that distinguished a hero from a villain, anyway? It wasn't their power, their strength of will, their determination, their certainty that what they were doing was right. Every man is the hero of his own story; any well-written villain thinks he's doing the right thing and is absolutely stubborn about it. Even protecting others, even saving their lives, was something certain bad guys did—to serve their own interests. But when things got tough, a villain never had anyone else to really rely on. They might work together from time to time, but in the end their own selfishness would lead them to mutual betrayal, or an uneasy truce at best.

But heroes? When one hero falls, another rises. When one hero can't take it all on alone, others appear to help. The defining trait of heroes is that they make more heroes, and ultimately, they band together. Light wasn't really sure when she'd forgotten this, or at least started failing to apply the idea to her own situation. If people wanted to help her, it was because they saw the kind of hero she was acting like, and wanted to be the same thing. To do the same thing—and do it for her, too, if necessary.

Maybe it was finally time to accept all of that help and support as it was intended.

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Here we have a mini-episode, sort of like 56 was, but it's in the middle of the main action instead of after it. This episode wasn't originally planned; its contents were originally going to be how the one that's now after this one began. But there's a very specific reason I wanted this part separated out once I saw how long it was, and I felt like this flowed better overall anyway. If you want a hint to that reason, well: What do you get when the sun's out, it's raining, but somehow the sky's still pitch black?