Before the squad could fully process the reality of a tentacled alien invasion, a small, metallic cylinder smacked directly into the creature's slimy hide. It stuck. It beeped three times.
BOOM!
The blast showered the street in purple goop. Above the smoke, a loud, echoing cackle rang out. A towering magical girl stood on top of a crushed car, juggling a handful of live explosives. "Ahhhhh, hell yeeeeah! I cannot believe this is happening! I must be dreaming!"
The surviving aliens screeched in rage, shouting in their bizarre, clicking language as they swarmed her.
The manic newcomer just grinned, her eyes wide and bloodshot. "I have no idea what you freaks are saying, but here's my answer!"
With a fluid, terrifying motion, she reached behind her back and manifested a literal rocket launcher. She aimed, locked onto the crowd of monsters, and pulled the trigger with zero hesitation. The street erupted into a chaotic chain of explosions as she cackled, firing rocket after rocket into the fray.
Smiling Girl, still forced into her painful, twitching grin, watched the fireworks with horrified eyes. She leaned over to Tony. "Okay, I still think your brain is way more messed up than hers is, Pink... but she is cutting it dangerously close."
The maniacal Amazon hoisted another rocket, completely indifferent to the fleeing civilians caught in the crossfire. She pulled the trigger. But mid-flight, a sudden flash of steel cut through the air. A woman clad in ornate, magical samurai armor materialized out of thin air, cleaving the rocket clean in half with a single, lightning-fast swipe of her katana. The speed was so intense that Tony's new eyes could barely track it.
The rocket launcher girl grit her teeth. "What the he-"
Boom! >
The severed explosive detonated behind them, forcing both warriors to leap backward, landing a dozen yards apart.
The samurai stood perfectly unscathed, her posture rigid. She fixed a cold glare on the maniac. "You are reckless," she said, her voice entirely flat and devoid of melody.
The maniac tilted her head, her face twisting with rage. "What's it to you? What are you, a robot? Why do you sound so... robotic?!"
"You were about to strike civilians," the stoic girl interrupted, cutting her off like a machine reading a manual. "Do you have no honor? You are nothing but a chaos gremlin."
The insult hit a nerve. The maniac's face flushed a violent crimson. Instead of wasting breath on words, she leveled her rocket launcher directly at the samurai.
Before a secondary civil war could break out between them, a massive, glowing arcane circle suddenly materialized on the pavement, encircling all five of the magical girls.
Smiling Girl looked down, her eyes sparkling. "Ooh, what is that? It looks so pretty!"
Tony looked down at the massive glyph. Having played video games for thousands of hours across his life, his gamer instincts instantly overrode his yandere programming. His face went pale. "Oh my god, run! It's an AOE circle!"
Crackling bolts of lightning began to rain from the sky. Everyone scattered, scrambling to escape the blast zone. Pink bolted for the edge, but out of the corner of her eye, she saw the hopeless green girl trip over her own frilly hem. Instead of getting back up, the girl just curled into a pathetic ball on the concrete, weeping hysterically, completely devoid of self-preservation.
Tony paused. Damnit! >
His body moved on its own, sprinting backward into the danger zone. He lunged over the crying girl, shielding her body as she immediately clung to his pink dress like a terrified kitten. "Help me! I'm totally hopeless!" she wailed.
"This changes nothing!" Tony screamed at the sky, dragging her by the arm. "I still only love Alice! Even if this is another girl I'm risking my life for, my heart belongs to-"
In her blind panic, the green girl accidentally tangled her legs with Tony's. They both went flying, tumbling hard against the asphalt just as a massive bolt of lightning obliterated the exact spot they had been standing on a millisecond prior.
Tony blinked, staring at the smoking crater. "That was... incredibly lucky?"
Shaking off the shock, he hauled the crying girl to her feet and dragged her completely out of the Area-of-Effect radius. Behind them, the Maniac and the Stoic Samurai were still violently dueling each other, entirely unbothered by the stray lightning crashing around their ears.
Pink finally reached a safe alleyway, dropping the green girl, who was still shaking like a leaf. "This is too much!" the hopeless girl sobbed, clutching her face. "I have a mid-term test today! I have to make sure my students all pass, and I'm so miserable!"
Tony froze, his pink pigtails twitching. He looked down at her, the gears in his brain grinding to a screeching halt.
"...Huh?!"