"Destroying the petals and kicking squirrels."

"...if you're going to waste magic it's a way worse idea for me to hunt with you because we have to share the seeds."

"—I don't think it's a waste?" he says, a touch defensively. "We use magic to heal, don't we? And this means we have to heal less and get less distracted by stuff."

"Did you like, not believe me, when I said in these ones it's better to just let the petals get you? I have tried it both ways."

"—what's the cost of doing it the other way, if it's not just the wasted time?"

"You're spending magic when you do that, right? It's more magic to shield than to heal, I guess I don't know for sure if it's more magic to stop time than to heal..."

"I guess I don't know either, but," he shows her his gem. It's barely darker than it was earlier, if it's even noticeable. "I won't know how expensive it is without trying." There's also the light meter but that'll be for later, getting a feel for it will need direct hands on practice.

"Suit yourself, I guess."

Hop hop hop.

Mrrrrr. He doesn't have a weapon and he doesn't have a way to contribute otherwise and he doesn't want to just be insurance. What's even the point of being a magical boy, if he's going to just be insurance.

Hop. Hop. Hop. Is she killing the squirrels?

When they come at her. She's not going out of her way for the ones that hide.

That's fine. He guesses that if she's killing enough of them that they don't get to him she can "suit herself", too, but if any do get to him he will stop time and slice their throats with petals.

She does at one point hop back up to his branch where he's trailing her and get a squirrel that was sneaking up on him.

Alright he guesses he'll just be insurance then.

And eventually they get all the way down the trunk.

The sky is solid, here, the tree growing out of the blue haze and that haze perfectly willing to obscure the notional roots and support magical feet.

As soon as Yamanaka lands, a roiling black cloud, sparking with lightning and booming with thunder, foams up out of the floor and attacks. She dodges, she swipes; the sword passes through the cloud with little resistance, but that part of it looks a little grayer, less solid, and the next slashes do much the same. She takes a lightning strike on her left arm and acts like she barely notices; she impales a squirrel and flings it off the tip of her sword through the cloud monster. As it gets weaker and wispier and paler, she presses the attack harder, and finally she cleaves it in two and it dissipates like smoke.

The tree around them disintegrates and they're standing at the overpass and there's a seed falling to the concrete with a clink.

It's, like, stupid of him to feel bad about this—ding dong, the witch is dead! it won't kill anyone anymore!—but Yutaka has not learned the trick of only feeling things that aren't stupid. Maybe whatever sorcery Haru can do that makes him care more about things can do that, too, but Haru's empirically just built different. Yutaka can't do that, so he's feeling bad about this, and like he's useless, and like there's no point in him being a magical boy at all, if the best he can do is serve as a spot checker for someone else.

If there's a silver lining, it's that he now knows what a normal witch is like. It's not forg, but it's also not Godzilla. It's a weird portal thing, and surreal and hostile terrain, and flying squirrels, and a boss monster that's kind of shaped like it has some internal coherence even if it's not actually made of solid things.

Also, his gem really doesn't look all that much darker, if at all. It is, again, probably just because he's been looking at it throughout, so his eyes got used to the minute changes, and he'll need to see if, or to what extent, Haru notices a difference tomorrow, but he thinks Yamanaka might've been overly pessimistic.

He walks over to the seed but not so close that it looks like he's about to take it. He just wants to see what it looks like.

It's black and pointy and evil-looking. "You ever recharged before?" Yamanaka asks.

"No. First witch."

"Go ahead then."

...

"I didn't really contribute."

"Well, you don't have to charge up completely, but you should know how."

"I suppose that makes sense." He crosses the remaining distance then crouches down to look at it up close. It does look really evil, especially the way it's standing up even though it's on an incredibly sharp tip and by all accounts ought to be falling to the side like a spinning top.

He'll... pick it up, then, warily.

It feels sort of like it's made out of metal, or bone, or the superposition of the two.

O...kay. He stands back up and turns around to face Yamanaka.

"You just tap it against your gem there and it should be pretty intuitive."

He pulls his gem off his glove into its egg bauble shape again and... taps.