a heart that might be insufficient | Glowfic Constellation

They have to learn to work together.

All of the (surviving) magicals have some previous experience with working together with someone. Yamanaka had a partner who died, for example. The guy from Minato, an Ueda Kensuke, works alone but has had temporary alliances in the past with a bunch of people, who (as he describes it) are all to a man now gone. He solos witches just fine with his naginata and hydrokinesis. The girl from Chuo, Ogura Hinata, doesn't like to kill jumped-up familiars that won't yet drop seeds, but she says she's once or twice run into a magical who came to the same witch as her at the same time, and cooperated with them to bring it down, and bet the results on a coin flip, and whether she cheated on the coin flips or not - Haru isn't sure what to believe there, she certainly could have if she'd been bent on it with her illusion powers - she never followed up on anyone she fought with and doesn't appear to recognize any of the neighbors they've brought together for the occasion.

Most of them work with someone else on a more routine basis. There's the thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds from Bunkyou who Yutaka met last loop, for example, Shigematsu Motoi and Ichinoya Riho. They're just friends, and Haru can't figure out without asking point blank whether they met before or after making their wishes, but they work well together; she's got souped-up telekinesis, flinging projectiles and knocking familiars aside or pinning witches in place easily, and he's enough of a combat powerhouse with his arsenal of machine guns (Haru hadn't even known some people got guns as their weapons) to take full advantage of that. The girls from Shibuya, Egawa Yui and Hanyu Momoe, the ones who hate men, they're girlfriends and work together; Egawa can make things just drop dead outright, and doesn't that imply lovely things about her wish, though it takes a dangerous amount of magic to do it to a witch and she mostly mows down familiars to compensate for the disappointing range of her mace; meanwhile Hanyu has healing powers like Haru does so her field efficacy is mostly nunchuck-based. When he hopefully asks her what she wished for to get healing, meaning to give her an opening to tell him that she contributed to some encouraging dip in some mortality statistic, she won't say, so he can't exactly brag back at her and hope for some fellow feeling to overcome her opinion about his gender.

In Nakano there's a brother and a sister and their unrelated friend. Haru asks Kyubey if magic potential runs in families and Kyubey says it does, though not strongly. The Nozaki siblings are fifteen (Tazuko) and sixteen (Jiro); their buddy Chiaki Masanari is sixteen. Tazuko can immobilize things, protecting them and rendering them ineffectual at the same time. Jiro reports that he just wished directly for fire powers and he's sure got them. Chiaki won't say what his powers do, which makes Haru nervous. The two seventeen year old boys who claim the Toshima neighborhood, Azumaya and Dobashi - they won't give their personal names - have only been a team for the last six months, before which Azumaya was solo, before which he had a different older partner, who is now deceased. Azumaya has some kind of fast-travel power, won't say how he got it, and can drill into the dead center of a witch barrier without navigating the labyrinth when he's familiar with the witch's general breed. Dobashi has some kind of super-speed, super-strength situation, and will confess that like Yamanaka he wanted the talent necessary to break into a particular field but his field was kendo. His sword is a more normal size than hers but he can wield it with breathtaking smoothness and alacrity. The married couple of Minorikawas from Chiyoda, Yoko and Ranmaru, have respectively undisclosed powers that are "useless in a fight" (she just attacks things with her spears instead), and a defensive shielding power to go with the tate shields he can conjure, though unlike Yutaka's buckler his have plenty of bulk and can be slammed into an opponent if he's determined to do so.

Nobody from farther away is convinced to come to their first attempts at training sessions - it's somewhat taxing on Yutaka's social prowess to get this many together anyway. Haru tentatively organizes them into practice units, though he delegates telling them all about this to Yutaka, this is a lot of people and high stakes and he keeps being nervous that his ability to speak Japanese fluently is going to desert him.

Unit 1:
Haru himself; Ueda; Shigematsu and Ichinoya; Azumaya. Ranged ability including the likely-very-useful-in-the-storm hydrokinesis. They can all park somewhere, possibly somewhere midair, and shoot at Walpurgisnacht, with Azumaya providing mobility support.

Unit 2:
Egawa and Hanyu, Ogura, and Yamanaka. More useful against familiars than the main event, and this way he doesn't have to make the lesbian man-haters work with any boys, and the healing is split up across multiple groups.

Unit 3:
Nozaki, Nozaki, and Chiaki; the Minorikawas; Dobashi. Hopefully Mr. Morikawa and Tazuko can keep the witch and familiars off their teammates while they all pinch-hit wherever more relatively generic assistance is needed, since fire's going to be pretty useless in the storm and two of these people have undisclosed but combat-irrelevant powers.

Ogura can provide some illusion targets for them to practice against, once she's convinced that she has to in order to make it to April. (She does make a few pointed remarks to the effect that Yutaka looks a little easier to kill than Walpurgisnacht sounds, but she plays it off as a joke, for the time being, and cooperates with being assigned her team and providing a practice pretend ball of yarn in the sky.)