After Cecilia reminded Titus about the procedure of opening the gate to strangers and Zora found Emilia hiding in the corner of the common room—her plate suspiciously clean—the three of them set off from the eastern foyer, intent on reaching the fitness buildings just a good few hundred metres off from the bridge.
There was a part of Zora that thought he wouldn’t ever be able to see dawn again, but the moment he stepped out the eastern gate, hand-in-hand with Emilia, was the moment he squinted. The world wasn’t broken; dazzling sunlight crept over the mountains the academy was built on the side of, and it illuminated the castle in harsh golden hues the same way it did every day. Just because the Swarm had infested the academy didn’t mean they’d infested the sun, too, so… at the very least, the academy was a bit warmer now.
Emilia squeezed his hand, staring blankly off the railings of the skybridge as they trudged across.
“Warm,” she muttered, scratching her obsidian-chitin arms idly, “like… fire?”
“... Like fire,” he whispered back, patting her head with a soft smile on his lips. “When light is too bright and focused in a single spot, it can also make fire, too. Do you feel warm all across your body?”
“Uh-huh?”
“If all that warmth was removed and gathered at the tip of your finger instead, your finger would burn.”
Emilia shuddered, and Zora chuckled; behind that veil of fear was a burning curiosity like no other, and he could tell she immediately wanted to try making something burn. If he could just hand her a magnifying glass and have her start a fire herself—the stoves in the common room were too impersonal—maybe she’d finally understand what ‘fire’ was supposed to be.
“Where are all the bugs, anyways?” Cecilia asked, suppressing her voice as she looked left and right at the rest of the academy. “It was awfully noisy last night, but now, it’s… like a ghost castle.”
“No bugs nearby!” Emilia nodded cheerily, her little moth antennae twitching as she did.
“I’m sure there are more nocturnal bugs than there are diurnal bugs near this eastern end of the continent,” Zora said, furrowing his brows at Emilia’s antennae. “Julius would know better, but I think we can afford to be a bit chattier if most bugs are asleep in the morning. If Nona really is here, though, then she’ll be active right about now—cicadas are mostly diurnal insects.”
Cecilia glanced towards the south where the language arts building still stood, pursing her lips.
“What if we evacuate the kids first?” she said. “If most of the bugs are sleeping, we could sneak everyone out of the academy and have them hide somewhere else… somewhere even Nona can’t reach. It’s not like the shelter will protect them from a Lesser Great Mutant, right?”
“Mhm. Nona can probably break through the gate with a single spell.”
“Then–”
“Even butterflies flutter before choosing a branch,” he muttered. “We don’t know what the situation is like outside. That Nona and her brood shattered the dome means they probably swept through the neighbouring towns and villages as well. From here to the nearest borough under the protection of the northeastern military, it’s going to be at least nine to ten days of pure walking—and the entire time, we’ll have no roof over our heads. We’ll have little food, we’ll have little morale, and only the Great Makers know how many bugs stand between us and the borough.”
Cecilia’s eyes darkened. “So? What’s the end goal? We just wait until Nona finds us in the shelter?”
“We get Marcus and Julius and their kids back first. Then, and only then do we think about escaping from the academy.”
“... You just said escaping is dangerous.”
He shrugged reluctantly. “Nothing is more dangerous than sharing an abode with a Magicicada.”
Fighting wasn’t going to be an option as long as there were still children in the academy. He’d rip his tongue out a thousand times before letting any one of his students get caught in a battle between the teachers and the Magicicada roaming somewhere around here—and it wasn’t like they stood a chance against Nona, anyways. For all intents and purposes, Lesser Great Mutants were practically invincible against normal weapons and technologies. It’d take nothing less than a miracle—‘magic’—for one to be taken down by humans.
If Nona decided to pursue the survivors of the academy to the northeastern borough for some reason, he wasn’t even sure if the military would be able to protect them.
So we’ll get Marcus, Julius, and the rest of the kids back as soon as possible, he thought, and then we’ll get the hell out of here.
The rest of their journey to the eastern fitness buildings was done in silence. Though there weren’t any giant moths fluttering overhead or any bugs crawling through the hallways, it was still a practice of prudence trying not to make a sound—‘silence’ cast at their shoes could only muffle their footsteps, and he didn’t want to cast it on the rest of their bodies in case they actually needed to talk.
Thankfully, they encountered no problems all the way through the first fitness building of three. From the outside, the eastern fitness buildings looked like simple castle structures, but the chambers inside were all repurposed and refurbished with forges, workshops, and all sorts of obstacle courses designed to make students ‘excited’ about exercise. Most students came from impoverished, destitute families, after all—new transfers would always be unusually scrawny and gaunt—so the Headmaster always gave the most budget for the head fitness teachers to spend on improving the facilities year after year, while the language arts building, well… frankly, he was just impressed janitors still came by to clean his building every single afternoon.
The first two fitness buildings they passed without entering were the gymnasium and the workshops—meant to warm students up and train their dexterity a little by making them help with repairing broken furniture across the academy—but Titus had said class 2-C was doing fitness with a Mister Evander, and ever since that man became the head fitness teacher last year, Zora had never seen him teach a single class in the other two buildings.
So the three of them stopped before the giant double doors leading into the third fitness building, both him and Cecilia frowning as they noticed Emilia’s antennae twitching in what could be anticipation, what could be trepidation.
… There’s something inside, huh?
Across the bridge and through the twisting and turning hallways they’d crossed to get here, the ‘scale’ of destruction was about the same as in the southern language arts building and the western music and visual arts building. Most windows were broken, most walls were cracked, and chunks of debris from collapsed ceilings made navigating through those hallways a bit of a chore. However, they’d not come across a single giant bug carcass, nor caught so much as a finger of a human body buried under any of the rubble.
He wanted to think that was because the teachers and students who’d been here when the dome shattered managed to escape the academy through the eastern bridge, but that’d be hopelessly optimistic.
“Do we bust the door open?” Cecilia asked, pulling out her wand. “Or do we knock like normal people?”
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Zora looked down at Emilia’s twitching moth antennae. “What do you think, Emilia? Knock or shock?”
“...”
Her silence was her answer. Zora gave Cecilia a slow nod before pulling his wand out as well, and on the unsaid count of three, they ‘struck’ the doors with everything they had—and the wood shattered inwards with a loud bang, no match for their combined strength of ten people.
Naturally, he blinked at how easy it was to break down the heavy wooden doors. Ten people’s worth of strength was absolutely not enough to shatter them like he just did, so when the three of them stepped into the giant chamber shrouded in oppressive darkness—there was only a broken giant window at the end of the chamber letting sunlight pour in—he couldn't even bring himself to ‘silence’ Emilia's head.
Her moth senses were getting sharper by the hour, and there was no way she couldn't notice the blood and bodies scattered around the door.
…
Cecilia covered Emilia's ears regardless, her own ears burning red with anger, and Zora knelt by one of the bodies. It was so disfigured it hardly resembled a human, but others were still so clearly human that he couldn't help but feel every broken bone, every open wound; they were the children of class 2-C, all twenty-three of them, and given they were so close to the exit… they must've been struck down one by one just before they could reach the doors.
Through the disheartened emotions, the soul-crushing guilt, and the hate stewing in his chest, he rose to his feet and looked around the chamber.
Just like the katydid, it's surely still here.
Behind us?
Above us?
While Cecilia hummed a soft song to distract Emilia, he walked forward and stared down the hundred-metre deep hole that was this year's ‘obstacle course’.
The stone chamber was fifty metres wide and twenty metres tall with plain wooden arches on the ceiling, but the real standout feature was the thirty-metre-wide hole in the centre. He'd heard his students describe it as a pit to hell: circular, the walls lined with rearranging bricks, and dimly lit by dozens of small bird-cage elevators moving up and down all the way to the bottom.
Damnit, Marcus.
Why is this the obstacle course you decided on?
Not a single elevator moved more than ten metres up and down the pit. He’d heard the general concept of this ‘obstacle course’ from the man himself a few months back: the bottom of the pit was fitted with extremely bouncy cushions, so whenever fitness class started, the students would have to jump all the way down first. Then, they’d have to climb onto the first elevator, ride it up a set distance, and then jump to a distant elevator where they could continue riding it up for another set distance. Rinse and repeat with about ten or so elevators, and they’d eventually be able to get back up to ground level—succeeding within the hour meant the student would have free time to play ball in the normal gymnasium, but slipping, falling, and getting stuck at the bottom of pit would mean overtime for the student.
Zora had no idea how Marcus got this concept past the Headmaster, who actually had to order the Magicicada Mages to build such a complicated and unsafe obstacle course. Personally, he also despised such a construction; whenever his class followed Marcus’, half his students wouldn’t show up on time because they’d still be jumping and falling to the bottom of the pit, and Marcus would make them try over and over until they could reach the surface with their own strength.
Now, he couldn’t deny this year’s fitness records smashed all the previous years’ records by a significant margin—and it was a testament to Marcus’ attentiveness that they’d not had a single injury thus far—but even now, while the entire rest of the academy was under attack, the elevators were still moving. The massive chains connecting them to the engine overhead were still rattling, and the bottom of the pit was nowhere to be seen. A murky, cloudy white fog hovered around the fifty metre mark, so even if the cushions at the bottom were pulled out, nobody would be able to tell.
“... Class 2-C is all accounted for back there,” he whispered as Cecilia joined him by the edge, peering cautiously down as well, “but do you reckon Mister Evander is stuck down there for some reason?”
With both hands still over Emilia’s ears, Cecilia glanced back at the disfigured corpses, a dark, bitter grimace forming on her lips.
“Marcus never gets off work before all of his kids finish the obstacle course,” she said quietly. “If he’s not back there with his kids, then surely he’s down there. For what reason, I don't know. It’s not like the elevators aren’t running, and it’s not like he can’t just climb up the walls with his bare hands if he really wants to.”
“Then we’ll go down and check. There’s a storage room at the very bottom that can be used as an emergency infirmary if any kid gets injured, so if Marcus is anywhere, he’d be there.”
Maybe it was reckless to not send Emilia back as they circled around the pit, looking for the closest elevator they could jump down onto, but Zora couldn’t deny Emilia’s threads might come in useful here. If the elevators were to suddenly jam—which they shouldn’t, considering the Headmaster and Marcus’ greatest undertaking was making sure the engine and chains could never be broken—they could climb up the walls with gloves made out of sticky threads as a last resort.
Now, since neither he nor Cecilia had actually completed this course themselves, it was Emilia who guided them to where the closest elevator was but a simple one-metre drop off the edge. Judging by how casually she walked off the edge and landed on the small metal platform, the obstacle course wasn’t particularly difficult for her… and he could see why. Excluding the fact that she’d been going through this course daily for the past two weeks, her moth mutations made her inordinately strong. Compared to the other kids—and compared to Zora and Cecilia—she could afford to look up and wave at them cheerily, shouting at them to drop down before the elevator could descend any further.
“I’m a grown man. I’m not scared of heights,” he mumbled, clenching his jaw. “Are you?”
“Not at all,” Cecilia mumbled back, gulping nervously. “You go first.”
“Ladies first is a universal expression, spoken in the far east to the far west–”
She kicked the back of his knees and made him stumble, falling two metres down onto the circular metal platform. He landed hard on his heels and stumbled a bit further while she dropped down half a second later, landing deftly on the tip of her toes.
“... I was being courteous,” he said, scowling back at her.
“And what happened to buying a lady dinner first?” she said, tilting her head at a distant elevator rising towards them. “What a gnarly obstacle course for children, but… that’s the next one we have to jump onto, right?”
“Mister Marcus changes the speed of each elevator every day!” Emilia said, pumping her fists, but nodding regardless. “But the elevators are still on yesterday’s speed! So I know! The way!”
Without waiting for the two of them, she leapt three metres across and landed on the next elevator. Zora and Cecilia missed their opportunity, so they could only peer up at the ascending elevator while theirs continued down; they had to wait another ten seconds before theirs started going back up, and then they jumped in unison, landing next to Emilia while she clapped her hands in excitement.
Both him and Cecilia’s faces were deathly pale, but seeing the smile on Emilia’s face made him think that maybe—just maybe—this sort of obstacle course was actually fun for children.
I suppose if safety measures are taken and there’s a freak of a fitness teacher making sure everybody’s doing well at the bottom, this can be… thrilling?
As they jumped from elevator to elevator, though, nearing the thick white haze by the fifty-metre mark, his gut started to rumble. It wasn’t because of the insect flesh he’d overindulged on, nor because he was getting sick from all the jumping and falling, though. Emilia’s tingling antennae noticed it. Cecilia’s perking ears noticed it. The moment they jumped down onto their sixth elevator and started descending from the haze, he pressed his wand to his lips and charged it with a quiet ‘strike’, glancing over to see Cecilia doing the same.
There were… strange chitterings in the haze.
Sounds of legs scraping against the brick walls.
Sounds of chains and elevators rattling harder than they should.
A pale shadow seemed to be crawling around the walls, but whenever they turned and tried to track it, nothing would be there. The haze made it so they could barely see five metres in front of them, and the next elevator they had to jump onto wasn’t so clear-cut, either. Emilia’s antennae were pointing at two elevators as though she wasn’t entirely sure, too—so he gave Cecilia another nod before shouting ‘translate’, hoping the spell wouldn’t turn the chittering sounds into intelligible words.
Unfortunately—and he’d already guessed as much—there was a raspy voice whispering above them.
They looked up at once to see a giant white moth climbing down the thick chain of their elevator, and this one was ghostly white with tiny black spots peppering its folded wings.
Zora didn’t need to hear what it was mumbling under its breath to know it was no rabble bug—it was of the same type as the katydid, more powerful than most of its brood.
“... Fight. Kill. Eat.” it whispered. “Ermine Moth. Fight. For. Mother.”