Cecilia had never been one to go on bug-stomping crusades across the academy even when she was a child.
Zora, Julius, and Marcus—the ‘titanic trio’, as they were called back in their student days—had always taken it upon themselves to go around every once in a while to unearth any critter insect dens infesting the nooks and crannies of the academy, but like most girls her age, she’d always been deathly afraid of bugs. Knowing they were all part of the ‘Swarm’ and would eventually grow to join the endless onslaught of giant insects rampaging across humanity’s final continent, she’d always sat back and let the boys have all the fun… before calling the academy mages over to deal with the insect dens, of course.
They’d been children, not professional bug-slayers; she was a music teacher, not a warfaring Magicicada Mage.
But she hated the katydid’s voice like she’d never hated anything before.
It was a mockery to sound. It wasn’t enough that the Swarm descended a mere sixty-one years ago and already conquered eighty percent of the world. The katydid’s attempt to conquer even their tongue—humanity’s tongue—had awakened something in her that she’d never let blossom since she was picked up by the Headmaster and brought to the academy to live a peaceful life.
That peaceful life had been taken from her, so was it her fighting spirit that was awakened?
Was it humanity’s prideful spirit to protect their own tongue?
Or was it just pure, simple rage from knowing the bug in front of her had slaughtered almost all of her friends?
… She’d have to ask Zora later, but right now, she had a bug to squash.
“Strike!” she snapped, flinging her spells left, right, up, and down, her wand tracking the frantically dashing katydid with haphazard accuracy. The katydid seemed just as surprised that both of them were keeping up with its speed, stumbling and nearly falling off the canopy whenever their spells struck its legs; it could still dodge their spells given they were relatively slow-moving projectiles, but it no longer had the element of surprise.
Her ‘off-tune voice’ spell was still wrapped around its body, and it didn’t seem like it knew how to dispel the spell.
“Hey, Zora,” she asked in between ‘strikes’, sweat beading down her forehead and blood trickling down her blouse as her throat began drying up; the two of them were fighting a battle of attrition, too. “You got any ideas for a combination spell yet? Our ‘strikes’ aren’t getting through its armour. At this rate, we’ll run out of stamina before–”
“I’m thinking,” he muttered, their backs pressed against each other as they spun in circles, covering every direction at once. “The mind’s a powerful weapon but a terrible leader, and I… didn’t get much sleep last night.”
She paused for a moment to recharge her wand with more ‘strikes’, and then she snorted with her head turned away; it was bad enough already that they were standing back to back and he could probably feel how hot she was. If he knew her face was red from laughing as well, he’d never let her live it down.
Still the same old Zora, huh?
Of all the people who could’ve come knocking on the gate with a giant stag beetle in hot pursuit, I’m glad it was you.
The katydid had been incredibly talkative, but now it was in a panic, skittering and jumping and even falling onto the cubicles every once in a while as they kept slinging ‘strikes’ at it. The spell really was versatile and easy to cast. She probably wouldn’t have been able to come up with it by herself, so if there was one person she could count on to think of an interesting combination spell, it’d have to be the silver tongue standing right behind her.
And he wasn’t the only person she could count on, either. The katydid had been deathly focused on just the two of them the past few minutes, and that meant, when it eventually dashed backwards without looking, it tangled its own legs on a web of glowing red threads and found its momentum cut short.
The katydid fell in front of the great oak in the centre of the dome, screeching as it looked down at its webbed legs. Cecilia had noticed Emilia crawling around the dome a while ago, biting her nails and leaving behind webs of hardened blood threads in hopes the katydid would eventually run into them, and that was exactly what had happened. Slowly but surely, their ‘strikes’ had cornered it towards the only route of escape it had—being the giant hole in the dome above the great oak—and that was where Emilia had tossed most of her sticky threads.
It must’ve been trying to escape, or, at the very least, get out of the dome for a little breather… but it hadn’t been paying attention to the little girl, and now that it was struggling to free its legs from the webs on the ground–
“Rise, throw, and pile!” Zora shouted, flicking his wand at the debris all around. Chunks of stone, torn floorboards, and even small furniture floated into the air and shot towards the katydid, crushing and burying it under a mountain of rubble.
While Emilia sprinted back over to them, Cecilia repeated his words, casting the exact same set of spells—though she wasn’t so accurate with her aiming. About half of her spells missed their mark, and the other half hit her targets from a strange angle, which made them fly in completely wrong directions. Zora was strangely precise with all his ranged attacks, spell or debris, to the point she couldn’t help but kneel and caress Emilia’s head as the little girl leaned in for praise; the only way he could be so precise was if he’d had a lot of practise throwing chalk at his kids, so she squinted at him while he rubbed his throat, scowling at the immobilised katydid as he did.
Nah.
He wouldn’t have.
But how else could his accuracy have gotten so much better while I wasn’t paying attention?
She made a mental note to sit in on one of his classes after this, but right now, the katydid was still alive and trying to squirm out from the rubble. The three of them stayed just outside of its antennae’s swiping range, and if they got any closer, they’d be risking their throats getting cut by a desperate flail.
Best to play it safe from afar.
“... Beetles wear armour, not shadows,” Zora said, waiting until it exhausted itself before raising his wand at its head, tilting her head and beckoning her to do the same. “If your strategy is to dart in and out and kill us with a thousand cuts, it’s because you’re not all that physically strong. You can’t free yourself from that rubble, can you?”
This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
The katydid screamed at them, an incoherent, incomprehensible screech. If it had any semblance of any intelligence before, it’d abandoned that completely in favour of trying to frighten them with volume alone—so Cecilia covered Emilia’s ears with her palms and cast an additional ‘silence’, protecting the little girl from the ear-grating noise.
“You’ll die for what you’ve done, but before you do, I want answers,” Zora continued, a hint of cruel cunning in his golden eyes. “However uncoordinated, there is an obvious hierarchy within your brood. Individually, you may be allowed to slaughter us as you please, but as a whole, you move with purpose. Are you looking for something, perhaps? Something only Amadeus Academy has?”
Then he ‘struck’ its left eye with pinpoint accuracy, and yellow pus burst from its head, making it screech in pain. Cecilia narrowed her eyes and covered Emilia’s with her hands—this wasn’t something a little girl should have to see.
“I’ve heard it from the short-winged butterfly I killed, I’ve heard it from your friends in the language arts building, and I’ve heard it from you. Who is this ‘mother’ you all refer to?” he said, his brows twitching and knitting in irritation. “There are three types of bugs: Critters, the spies of the Swarm, which we stomp and eradicate before they grow into Giants like you, the foot soldiers of the Swarm. Then, there are the ‘Mutants’, which are bugs taking humanlike forms with enhanced abilities—is your mother a Mutant? Is she in this academy right now?”
The katydid finally answered him with an uncertain smile; if the way it curled up its mandibles could even count as a ‘smile’.
“Mother Nona… is a Magicicada!” it rasped, chuckling and laughing as it did. “Mother will come for you! She will! She will slaughter everyone in this castle and eat your voices! She will find what you have all stolen from her, and when she does, the entire eastern end of this continent might as well be hers!”
It was Zora’s turn to be quiet for a moment as the katydid continued chortling, so Cecilia glanced over to see why he wasn’t saying anything.
What she didn’t expect to see was a cold, pale face, incontrovertibly paralysed with fear—and her breath caught as well, remembering the last time she’d seen such a face on the otherwise cool and composed man.
Ten years ago.
When the Headmaster first brought him here.
…
She sucked in a sharp breath and kicked the back of his leg, making him stumble and jolt out of his trance. He whirled around to scowl at her, but she made it a point not to look at him—glaring straight ahead at the immobilised katydid instead.
“It won’t tell you anything more than that,” she whispered, gulping softly as she did. “Do you… have a combination spell we can use to pierce its chitin with?”
Silence.
Then he offered her a weak smile, his gaze hardening as he retrained his wand on the katydid.
“I do,” he said, and she smiled slightly at the tone of knowing in his voice. “It’s a simple combination, but I think… it’s versatile. My spell will be the driver, and yours be the catalyst; you can probably use your spell to strengthen any of mine in the future as well.”
She raised a curious brow. “What is it?”
“I strike,” he whispered, “you amplify.”
“...”
She snorted.
It really was a simple combination.
Taking out her violin, she focused all her strength into her throat—pushing air from her lungs, relaxing her diaphragm, her whole body trembling lightly—and then she spoke ‘amplify’ onto her wand before using it as a bow, strumming it across the violin to let the spell diffuse around them in a shrill, rippling cloud of sound waves. She was a music teacher, after all; she could easily imagine herself matching any one of her kids’ singing voices and amplifying them with a harmonic melody from her violin, so in terms of a spell, ‘amplify’ was one that could strengthen any spell cast within the zone.
So when Zora whipped his ‘strike’ forward with the strength equivalent of four men, his spell mixed with hers mid-air, slamming into the katydid’s right eye with the strength equivalent of eight men in one concentrated point—and the spell ripped through its eye and tore into its head, bursting it from the inside-out with a loud crack.
Cecilia flinched and looked away as blood splattered everywhere, dyeing the base of the great oak bright yellow.
…
Then, the two of them stumbled forward, catching each other as they gasped and panted for breath. Emilia immediately ran circles around them, poking and prodding at their backs and asking if they were okay; Cecilia was, but she was just beyond tired. She was still bleeding from a dozen tiny cuts as she returned her violin to its sheathe. Zora, too, wasn’t in much better shape. In fact, he was bleeding more than her, so while he was made to sit down and had his wounds emergency-patched by Emilia’s glowing threads, Cecilia clenched her jaw at the katydid carcass in front of them.
While Zora patted Emilia’s head and praised her for trapping the katydid, Cecilia clicked a small button on her wand and turned it into a black sword, approaching the carcass steadily–
“What the hell did you just do?” Zora asked, making her jump and turn. The man’s eyes were half-lidded and bleary with exhaustion, but he was still pointing at her sword, looking completely befuddled. “Your wand… just turned into a sword. How? Is your wand different from mine?”
It was her turn to tilt her head. “All academy mage wands can turn into swords. Have you never seen them do it before? They do it all the time whenever we celebrate new years and they put on a sword-fighting show for the kids.”
“Uh… no?”
“What?”
“What?”
“Have you literally never been to any of their shows?”
“I thought they were just using trick props?”
“...”
Then she belted out laughing, holding her stomach with one hand as she raised her sword with the other, flipping smaller debris off the katydid’s body and hacking off as many legs as she could manage.
“So smart, yet so dumb,” she whispered under her breath, smiling softly. “There’s a button that feels like a small lump near your thumb. You’ve got to press it really hard, but if you do–”
Emilia gasped and clapped and Zora yelped in surprise behind her, making her laugh again. He must’ve figured out how to do it, so she was half-hoping he’d just get up and help her hack off the katydid’s edible-looking appendages.
“We don’t want the katydid’s flesh to go to waste, do we?” she said, eyes softening as she glanced at the corpses around the cubicle. “For their sake and ours… we can’t let that ‘Nona’ get whatever it is she’s looking for, can we?”
“...”
She heard Zora stabbing his blade into the ground like a walking cane as he pushed himself onto his feet, groaning loudly.
“There’s two people missing,” he said, limping forward with Emilia in tow to help her saw off the katydid’s antennae. “It could be fate, or it could be sheer, dumb luck, but I don’t see Marcus and Julius here.”
“Same. One’s too big to miss, the other’s too weird to forget.”
“You think they’re still out there?”
“We’ll look for them regardless, won’t we?”
They shared a short sigh, making sure to keep Emilia between them so she wouldn’t walk off and disturb the bodies in the staffroom. If Cecilia could have her way, she’d come back after this whole invasion was over and give everyone a proper sendoff… but she also knew, when the Swarm was involved, that nothing was ever going to be so easy.
If they left this staffroom as it was now, some other bug could stumble upon the bodies and devour them all.
Between the already dead and the still living, however, she couldn’t possibly be selfish and ask Zora to help her carry all the bodies back to the dorm for safekeeping—she also didn’t want the kids to see their teachers and staff torn to shreds, so the only thing she could do was pray for them.
After all, their troubles weren’t over yet.
Just as the two of them managed to saw off the last of the katydid’s appendages, the blocked door behind them rattled on its hinges. Bits and chunks of rubble flew inwards from whatever was slamming into the door on the outside, but Cecilia didn’t have to guess; she heard the screeching, she heard the wings flapping, and immediately knew it was the dozen moths they’d snuck past on the way to the staffroom.