Sharp at eight in the morning, Zora started knocking on doors to wake all the children up, sending them down to the common room where Cecilia was sizzling eggs and toast for breakfast. The eggs wouldn’t last a full week in the pantry, anyways, so they might as well eat those first before digging into the rations.
… At least they’re energetic, he thought, yawning as he hurried the last group of rowdy boys down the stairs to the common room. There was just one room remaining at the very end of the second floor hallway that he had to check on, and then he could go downstairs for breakfast himself. I can’t believe most of them got any good sleep last night, though.
Obviously, he and Cecilia had stayed up most of the night to take turns watching the northern foyer gate—just in case any survivors came knocking—but it was still impressive that most of the kids seemed cheery and optimistic about welcoming a new day. Maybe it helped that he’d snuck into all of their rooms last night to pull in the window blinds one by one, stopping them from peering out at the destruction wrought about the academy, but still… he couldn’t really remember the last time he’d gotten a good night of rest.
Maybe if the Headmaster paid him more, he’d at least be able to drown himself in a bed of silvers.
“Emilia?” he croaked, clearing his voice as he knocked on the little girl’s door at the end of the hallway. “Breakfast’s ready. Go downstairs and at least grab a couple of bites.”
“...”
He didn’t wait. He turned the doorknob and pushed the door open, finding a simple furnished room with no personalised items, decorations, or any belongings to mark it as a specific someone’s room—it was just a closet, a desk behind a window, and a single bed with the blankets folded neatly before the pillow.
The little girl herself was nowhere to be seen.
Breaths hitching, he stepped into the room and looked left, right, up, and down… then up. He looked up again. He sighed a breath of relief when he saw her sleeping in the corner of the room, curled up in a ball with a web of glowing red threads wrapping her in a cocoon of sorts. It wasn’t exactly the first time he’d had to wake her up like this, but every time he walked in and saw her bed neatly made, his first thought would always be one of worry. Most times, though, she’d simply be sleeping somewhere else—the strangest position he’d found her in was when he caught her sleeping upside-down once, legs stuck to the ceiling.
Back then, had she already been producing sticky red threads, or did her mutations allow her to stick to walls and ceilings like most bugs could?
“... The early bird gets the worm, Emilia,” he said, flicking his wand up and turning it into a sword to cut her down, catching her as she fell into his arms. She jolted awake, looking left and right with her milky human eye before looking up at his face. “You have pyjamas, don’t you? Don’t sleep in your uniform. You’ll crumple it and make it harder on the washerwomen to clean it for you.”
She mumbled something incoherent—a sleepy apology, maybe—so he let her off gently and had her walk on two feet, stumbling around her barebones room as she searched for her blazer. He yanked it off a hook on the wall and draped it around her shoulders before nudging her out the door.
“Go down and get breakfast from Miss Sarius,” he said. “It’s simple eggs and toast, but you’ve had Miss Sarius’ toasts before, right? I know she sometimes comes by the dorm to make everyone breakfast, so you can ask her for extra crunch on the crust if you want–”
“I’m… not hungry, Mister Zora,” she muttered, rubbing her eyes groggily with all four fists, “and I don’t want… toast.”
“...”
He held her hand as he walked her down the stairs, anyways, not wanting her to see his lips pursing. She’d not been a picky eater the past two weeks he’d spent with her—she ate just about everything the cafeteria had to offer—so he couldn’t help but wonder if her lack of craving for food right now was another symptom of her onset of mutations. He knew a bit about what eating insect flesh would do to a human’s biology, and one of those things was a lack of appetite for ‘normal’ human food; without a system to keep her mutations in check, she’d only grow more and more voracious for either insect or human flesh.
Feeding her mutations would only make them grow stronger and faster until she was more insect than human, however, so she had to eat eggs and toast.
He wouldn’t allow her to forget what it meant to be human.
“Just a few bites, then,” he said, patting her head softly as they stepped down into the common room where all the children were already lining up along the kitchen countertop, ceramic plates in hand. She immediately zipped behind him and cowered from the rest of the kids. “You have to line up at the very back, though, since you were the last to wake up. Go grab a plate and fork. I’ll make sure Miss Sarius gives you a smaller portion.”
She looked hesitant to leave him, her hands shaking as they gripped his cloak, but eventually she mustered up the courage to at least stand behind everyone else. It wasn’t like she actually had to talk to anyone or try to make friends with them, after all; just being close to her fellow students for now was a good enough start for rehabilitation.
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Sighing, he trudged behind the countertop to see how Cecilia was holding. She was manning six frying pans on three stoves with two hands and burning all the eggs at once—he forgot to stifle a laugh as she scowled at him, throwing a towel at him and telling him to help out with the bundle of katydid legs sitting off to the side, at least.
“Everyone’s still here?” she asked, her voice a bit dry and flaky as she flipped an egg, scolding a few rowdy kids to wait a few more moments over the countertop.
“All forty-two kids of 2-A and 2-B accounted for,” he muttered, tying an apron around his waist and getting to work cracking the tough katydid legs open with his sword. “You should be a cooking teacher instead, by the way. You’ve a real talent for it. Those eggs are looking every bit as crunchy as your toasts–”
“Quiet,” she muttered back, serving her ‘eggs’ and toast to the first three children in line. They immediately ran off with their plates, jumping onto the sofas with giddy laughs. “Don’t you try to pull the wool over my eyes, either. I had a long thought about it last night while we were taking turns watching the northern gate–”
“–you mean while I was watching the gate, since you slept an extra two hours past the agreed upon switching time–”
“–I wasn’t going to ask because I saw your face back then, but you know who ‘Nona’ is, don’t you?”
“...”
He split the first katydid leg open and scrunched his nose, setting a pot of water to boil on the stove to his right.
“It’s harder to not know who she is, no?” he said, lowering his voice as he dropped the first leg into the pot, working on carving the second. “Generally speaking, the ‘Swarm’ is composed of three types of bugs: Critters, Giants, and Mutants. You see Critters everywhere—they’re the tiny ants we squash, the bees that sting our faces, and the spiders spinning webs in the corner of your room. They’re typically harmless, but they function as the spies of the Swarm. If you don’t take care of them, they’ll eventually grow into Giants, which are the bugs we fought last night.”
“I know that much.”
“Then this needs no saying, but the bugs evolve and rise through the ranks by eating,” he continued. “A Critter grows as they eat whatever and rise from F-rank to S-rank. Then, they can evolve into Giants, at which point they have to start eating humans to grow from F-rank to S-rank again… and once they eat enough, they can evolve into Mutants. Have you ever seen one before?”
Cecilia threw another towel at him. “You know I haven’t. Just tell me–”
“A Mutant is a bug that stands on two legs, grabs with four arms, and tries to behave like a human,” he said, dumping the second, third, and fourth katydid leg into the pot. “Whatever abilities they had as a Giant will be amplified tenfold. Their intelligence becomes eerily infantile. Think of them like the generals of the Swarm. Since they’re much stronger than your average Giant, they’re each capable of leading a small brood as an infestation force, like the bugs that are hitting us now.”
“And this ‘Nona’ is a Mutant?”
He shook his head slowly. “We don’t give Mutants names. They’re uncommon, but they’re not that uncommon. We live in the middle of nowhere, so a Mutant sighting would certainly be rare, but in the Swarmsteel Fronts where the battles are fiercest, Mutants are about a dime a dozen.”
“There are ranks higher than a Mutant, then?”
“Mutants have classifications from F-rank to S-rank as well,” he said, “and when a Mutant eats enough humans, they evolve into a Lesser Great Mutant—and these are the bugs humanity have individual names for. They’re much stronger and rarer than your average Mutant. Their intelligence matches ours. They can speak our human tongues. They can lie and deceive and play on our words, and their amplified abilities border on ‘magic’. The last report I read from the far east stated there are around thirty quintillion bugs and counting in the Swarm, and of those thirty quintillion, there are only about a hundred Lesser Great Mutants.”
Cecilia narrowed her eyes as she flipped an egg onto a kid’s plate, straight from the pan. “So they all have names. Are there internal ranks for Lesser Great Mutants as well?”
“Of course. From F-rank to S-rank as usual. In fact, you’ve probably heard of a few particularly powerful Lesser Great Mutant factions,” he mumbled, flinching as he started stirring the deep pot with his wand. The foul, putrid stench was quite unbearable. “The Nine Sun Moths of the Hellfire Caldera Front. The Four Lesser Leviathans of the Deepwater Legion Front. The Seven Spider Spinners, the Beast of Ka’lan, and the Lysmata Chitosan, just to name the most infamous ones. They all have peculiar abilities, so they’re terrifically hard to put down even with an entire army barraging them with blades and explosives.”
“... ‘Nona’ is a Lesser Great Mutant, then.”
He nodded slowly. “Of the many Lesser Great Mutant factions, the ‘Magicicada Witches’ are… human-like cicadas with the ability to cast ‘spells’ with their voices. They’re one of the stronger ones, too, but they’re less well-known because they don’t attack very often, and they’re almost never seen together. Physically speaking, they’re the weakest of all the Lesser Great Mutants in the world, but that’s because they all have a nasty habit of stealing people’s voices to bolster their own spells—Nona is the youngest, who steals the voices of children. Decima is the middle sister, who steals the voices of adults, and Morta is the eldest, who steals the voices of elders. The spells they’re able to cast are vastly different from each other as a result, so they never stick together.”
“...”
Cecilia was quiet as she continued serving breakfast, and he couldn’t really blame her. It was a fair amount of information to absorb, and the truth was, he’d half a mind to give her only a fraction of the details so she wouldn’t have to confront the reality of the situation… but the thing was, if that katydid hadn’t been lying, there was a Lesser Great Mutant walking around the academy right now.
What he wasn’t going to tell her was the fact that it usually took a small army to slay a Mutant, and that there was no record of a Lesser Great Mutant being slayed by any army other than humanity’s six strongest militaries—none of which were even remotely close to Amadeus Academy.
Lesser Great Mutants are what humans call 'Lesser Gods'.
We face a Lesser God in our academy.