"We chose 'this' over that girl?"
The golden arcs answered before anyone else could.
Ayame read the [Ougon Zan]'s spread before the light finished deciding where to land, slipping between the molten teeth on a line that shouldn't have existed, and the detonations chased her across the ground in a chain of craters marking every spot her heels had left a half-beat prior.
Kaede swung again and again, each arc wider and more ragged than the last, and the gap that Ayame's technique had been nullifying all fight came roaring back through the magic because spells scaled on raw power and raw power was the one cliff her sister still held.
Ayame could dodge, and she could deflect, cutting the fringe off every golden wave with clean sweeps of her katana, but she could not close, and the gap between them widened step by measured step as the younger sister buried the older in magic.
