The national news carried the stories, even if they didn't know what to make of it. They couldn't ignore it, anyway. Almost the whole country saw it. In the middle of the night, nobody could miss giant rainbows stretching across the countryside. Without rain or sun to generate them, they still reached out for hundreds of miles, and one end of every rainbow was in a single town. Those who were close enough said they saw a hundred rainbows, big ones with smaller ones inside them, converging on a suburban housing estate.

And one point, right at the centre, where a house and its neighbours were turned into a crater by a hundred lightning bolts striking at once.

Some people said that a figure walked out of the destruction, power crackling off her body. A figure dressed in bulky armour that captured and reflected all the light around her, glowing so brightly that it was impossible to make out any detail. But everyone who looked knew that they were seeing something beautiful.

There weren't many people who saw them. It was the middle of the night, and people awake at that time were less likely to be reliable witnesses. Some people had enough presence of mind to record video with their cellphones, but those images were either too bright and blurred to mean anything, or just showed an indistinct humanoid shape walking through the darkness. Nobody managed to capture the moment where she engaged one of the monsters. And so the people who believed it even happened were in a minority, conspiracy theorists who might as well believe in vampires and fairies. People still didn't believe in monsters around most of the world, dismissing the evidence as fakery, mass hysteria, or hallucinations. So a hero fighting monsters was clearly a figment of the world's imagination too.

Still, it was on the news. Because there was a house that was now a crater, and burning cars strewn across the road. And wrecked outbuildings on a farm some distance outside town, where this strange Rainbow Champion had allegedly engaged the monster. The mainstream media couldn't agree on what happened here, if it was a sorceress fighting a monster, or a hundred people of the night having a bad trip on whatever hallucinogens were flooding the market. But they had to report that something had happened, regardless of their opinions on what it could have been.

Some witnesses also said that there were companions with the glowing woman. Two others, or three, or four. A group of women in exotic costumes, charging forward to fight a creature that even the army was too scared to engage. Of course, it was suicide. It made perfect sense to all the news reporters that nobody knew who these women were, or where they might have gone after the battle. Because if they really existed, they could never have expected to come back alive. If you believed in monsters, then you would know that. But still, there were a few witnesses who insisted they might be out there somewhere, girls with magic powerful enough to fight against any nightmare.