The white and black-spotted ermine moth stared directly down at Zora, its two whip-like antennae swishing slowly through the milky white haze.
It barely seemed to register that the three of them were looking up at it, and likewise—it took Zora and Cecilia a good second to realise they were under attack.
“Strike!”
Their wands whipped upwards, their spells were slung straight at the moth, but the milky haze was a physical, tangible fog; their ‘strikes’ rippled through the air and fizzled within a fraction of a second, failing to reach the ermine moth.
… What?
Zora blinked. Cecilia blinked. Emilia had no idea what just happened, and neither did the moth even seem to realise they’d just tried to attack it. Its antennae were swishing ever so slowly through the haze, wrapping around the cage-like elevator as though caressing it in a gentle hug… and then it opened its round, obsidian eyes, the haze growing heavier on his shoulders.
“Fight. Fight,” it muttered. “Fight, kill, eat all human–”
Emilia immediately decided to pounce at it, four black hands sharpened, but Cecilia grabbed her legs and pulled her down at the exact same time he decided to tackle all three of them over the edge—the correct move. The moth’s slow-moving antennae suddenly turned into a clamp that crushed the railings of the elevator, and it would’ve bisected all of them had he not thrown them onto the elevator below them.
Zora landed on his stomach with a painful groan while the girls landed on their feet, breathing heavily. The moth’s antennae shredded the elevator above them, making the chains rattle, making the elevators bump into each other. By the time Zora crawled onto his feet, he started stumbling across the shaking platform. Emilia was clinging to Cecilia’s back, but the music teacher wasn’t faring so well, either; neither of their next ‘strikes’ managed to travel even a single metre before fizzling in the haze, and in the fog of it all, the moth suddenly dashed off to the wall of the pit.
He lost track of it.
“The hell’s an ermine moth, Zora?” Cecilia snapped, slamming back to back against him as they spun in place, whipping their wands outwards. Loud screeches and incoherent whispers came from all around, and neither of them could spot the moth. “How’s it stopping our spells from reaching it, anyways?”
“Hell if I know,” he muttered back, scowling as he grabbed Emilia’s sleeve, keeping her close to them. “Don’t ask a honeybee to weave a spider’s web.”
“It’s the haze, isn’t it?”
“Probably.”
“Because the haze is too dense, our spells can’t travel through it properly. That’s why they’re fizzling, right?”
“Your guess is as good as mine–”
Emilia’s antennae tingled towards the east, so they whirled and attempted their combination spell at point-blank range. Zora aimed, Cecilia yanked out her violin and played a shrill note with her wand: ‘amplified strike’. The pouncing ermine moth was no lightweight or a glass cannon like the katydid, though. While their amplified spell managed to travel five metres this time, its strength was still significantly weakened, and the moth simply shrugged it off as it snarled through the haze—so Zora made another split-second decision, yanking all three of them back and toppling over the railings once more.
This time, they didn’t land anywhere close to an elevator. While the moth slammed into the one above them and completely ripped it apart, they plummeted down the centre of the pit, Cecilia and Emilia screaming all the way. He was counting the distance to the bottom, though. Forty metres, thirty metres, twenty metres. At ten metres, he spotted the velvet cushions beneath them and gritted his teeth, pulling Emilia into a hug as he and Cecilia slammed into the cushions, sinking deep.
Thank heavens the cushions were still pulled out.
If not, I don’t know if I could’ve ‘struck’ the ground hard enough to generate enough lift.
It was a gamble, and it paid off. Anything was better than fighting on those unstable elevators in the thickest part of the haze, though, so while the moth far above them screeched and tried to figure out where they’d run off to, he bounced onto his feet and placed Emilia on hers as well.
He spun around a few times—looking for the storage room he knew was down here—but all he saw was the bottom of the pit littered with a dozen giant bug carcasses, most broken with their chitin split apart and their legs torn from their bodies. He paid them no mind for the time being. They could’ve fallen in from the top of the pit, they could’ve been killed by the ermine moth, whatever; right now, they just needed to find the storage room and take shelter behind closed doors.
“... There!” he shouted, glancing back at the still-groaning Cecilia as he pointed straight ahead at a set of small, double wooden doors. “Inside! Now! If we can get out of the haze, we can at least cast our spells and fight it in normal air–”
Metal creaked and crashed overhead. He snapped his head up to see two elevators falling on them like meteorites, the falling debris unavoidable, inescapable, so he threw up a ‘strike’ and a ‘block’ at the exact same time in an attempt to knock the larger chunks out of the way. But he couldn’t get all of them. Several of them bounced away, but one of the heavier chunks was going to land on Cecilia, who was still struggling to claw onto her feet.
He charged in, turning his wand into a blade, and Emilia charged in as well, flicking a bundle of glowing red threads her way—and yet it was third figure dashing past the two of them who reached Cecilia in time, standing under the music teacher with his back muscles tightened as the heavy debris smashed into his shoulders.
Zora cast ‘block’ in front of Emilia as a bunch of loose metal fragments bounced every which way, some cutting his cheek, his neck. The thick haze felt cool as it began seeping into his open wounds, but he managed to stay on his feet while he coughed, waving as much of the haze away as he squinted at the man picking Cecilia up in a princess carry.
“... Yo,” Marcus said, turning around to scowl down at Zora. “I see you’re as bony as ever, skellyman.”
Zora scowled back as Cecilia looked between the two of them, blinking profusely. “And I had no doubt a loaf like you was still alive and kicking somewhere.”
“Please,” Marcus scoffed, tilting his head at the bug carcasses around them, “like a few oversized mites can take down twenty-four years of raw, unrelenting muscle development.”
“Well, forgoing all aspects of creative problem solving, you are the ram to break every wall–”
The ermine moth’s screech made all of them jolt, and Marcus looked up with a nasty frown, clicking his tongue at the bug that’d interrupted their conversation.
“That thing’s still there, huh?” he muttered. “And what’d you guys do to aggravate it like that? It took me half a day to make some sort of truth with it, but–”
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“You mean ‘truce’,” Zora interrupted, smirking weakly.
“I meant… you know what I meant.” Marcus scowled at him, and Zora drew a line down his forehead to feign a drop of sweat as Emilia giggled. “Now, let’s see how sharp that tongue of yours remains after I put you through six hours of training–”
“Storage room first, Mister Evander,” Cecilia said, smiling and speaking in a sweetly sick voice as she grabbed the back of the big man’s head, shaking it back and forth. “Let’s not be in this haze any longer, yeah?”
Both Zora and Marcus shivered. Nothing good ever came out of Cecilia taking that tone with them.
“... Sure,” Marcus mumbled.
Just as the moth seemed to realise all of them had fallen to the bottom of the pit, the four of them raced towards the open doors and threw themselves in. Marcus immediately dropped Cecilia to push a heavy pommel horse behind the doors to barricade it, while Zora cast ‘rise’ and ‘throw’ to toss a few empty crates onto the horse as reinforcement. They did so just in time—Zora flinched as the barricades rattled and ash fell from the dimly lit stone ceiling, the moth ramming headfirst into the door to no avail.
Two antennae stabbed through the glass on the doors, trying to spear someone in the way, so while Marcus groaned and pushed his entire body against the barricade to hold the door, Zora and Emilia sliced the tip of the antennae off with their swords. He could really feel the enhanced strength now. His blade cleaved through the chitin in a single, swift stroke, while Cecilia didn’t quite manage to hack it off, but her blade still went halfway through as the moth shrieked in pain.
Quite quickly, the moth yanked out its remaining antennae and jumped back up to the walls of the pit, leaving all of them alone.
…
Zora let out a heavy sigh, collapsing against the left shelves with crates of dumbbells, weights, and bars. Cecilia collapsed against the right shelves where the balls and rackets and bats were stored. Marcus sat with his back to the pommel horse, and Emilia just sat down cross-legged in the middle of all of them. The storage room at the bottom of the pit was more like a gym than a storage room, really. The idea was that students who lacked the strength to complete the obstacle course outside could instead spend their hour inside the storage room instead, training their physique with the gym equipment before attempting the elevators again.
He’d never been down here before, but it was a much more dreary room than he’d imagined. The whole place looked like a prison cell. The stone floor wasn’t smooth, the walls were cracked, and a single gas lantern dangled from the low ceiling to illuminate not even half the room in its dim orange light. Without opening the doors, there wasn’t any ventilation, too—no sweaty student would want to work out in here as opposed to constantly trying and failing the obstacle course outside.
Maybe that was Marcus’ thought process when he designed this room, though.
All things considered, he was the head fitness teacher who’d brought about the best fitness records in Amadeus Academy’s history.
“... Hey,” Cecilia said, still panting for breath as she raised her wand at Marcus, scowling slightly. “Tell me five things only Marcus would know, or I won’t hold back.”
Marcus blinked. “Hah?”
“Just do as she says,” Zora mumbled, resting the back of his head against the wall. “Tell her five facts about herself or she’ll blow your head off with a spell.”
“Five facts?” the man tapped his chin, thinking briefly. “Mm. That’s easy enough. Fun fact about Cecilia, number one: back when she first started as a music teacher, she didn’t have the lung capacity to hold a flute note for two minutes straight, and she thought that was embarrassing, so she asked me if there were any exercises she could do to increase her lung capacity. I told her to blow a balloon underwater to make her feel ‘inflated’ with power, and then–”
“Okay, okay, I get it! It’s really you!” she shouted, chucking her wand at his head as Emilia leaned forward curiously, wanting to hear the rest of the story. Zora beckoned the little girl closer and whispered ‘that was the time Miss Sarius actually did blow a balloon underwater and ended up almost drowning’, so Cecilia grabbed a rubber ball behind her and tossed it at him as well. “I didn’t think any bug could impersonate you, but, you know, just in case! Just in case!”
‘Muscleman’ Marcus laughed, slapping his knees. The man was as broad and loud as ever: he was a whole head taller than Zora with thrice the muscle mass, and his self-modified sleeveless tunic was barely holding itself together over his chest and waist. The only thing that even indicated he was a teacher of the academy and not some ruffian gangster from out of town was the bright ruby cloak draped over his shoulder—in stark contrast to Zora’s gold and Cecilia’s sapphire—but he wasn’t even wearing that properly. He’d stitched the collars of his cloak and tunic together so he wouldn’t have to clasp the tassel over his neckbone, so… the giant of a man in front of them was very much their old friend. Definitely not an imposter.
“If the two of you are here with little Emilia in tow,” Marcus said, waving cheerfully at the Emilia as she waved back, a wide grin on her face, “I’m assuming the Magicicada Mages have wiped out all the bugs in the academy? Why would you have time to be here otherwise?”
“...”
If there was a single ounce of levity in the air, it was destroyed the moment Marcus asked about the academy. Cecilia looked at Zora, and Zora spoke up before the music teacher could say anything about class 2-C by the entrance of the building—with a heavy heart, he explained everything that’d happened since last night, leading up to their eventual arrival at the fitness building looking for Marcus.
For his part, Marcus was strangely quiet as he listened to everything with his fist propped up his cheek, and he didn’t speak until he was sure Zora had said everything important.
“... So Albert, Ben, Giselle, and Petra are all dead, huh?” he said, his usual candour hindered by the tightening in his throat. “And Sabine? Friedrich? They’re also fitness teachers, so they shouldn’t have been in the staffroom when the dome shattered, right?”
Zora shook his head slowly as Cecilia looked away, rubbing the back of her neck. “They must’ve failed to evacuate to the dorm in time, so they probably settled for hunkering down in the staffroom alongside the rest of the faculty instead.”
“I… see. But did you–”
“I checked,” Zora said quietly. “Cecilia was there, too. If we’re talking about the orphan branch of the academy, the only teachers unaccounted for were you and Julius. We came looking for you first.”
Marcus’ lips thinned into a line as he brushed his curly hair back, glaring up at the ceiling.
“Just the four of us,” he whispered, shaking his head in dismay. “I was having my class run through the obstacle course outside when I heard the dome shatter, too. It’s not like this is my infestation, so I tried evacuating my kids to the dorm when a crap ton of bugs fell through the window—so I told my kids to run for it while I distracted and fought off most of the bugs on the elevators. I got knocked down eventually, and I’ve been stuck down here since that white moth showed up.” Then he glared out the broken glass on the doors, blowing and fanning the haze trying to seep into the room. “That one’s a tough bug. Nothing like the rest. As long as it's hanging around the middle section of the pit, I can’t get back up myself.”
Zora nodded idly. He figured it was something of the sort. Like Cecilia said, Marcus wasn’t the sort of man who’d leave his kids alone if he could help it, so if the man was all the way down here while his kids were all the way up there, he must’ve been separated from them forcefully–
“How’s my kids, skellyman?” Marcus suddenly asked. “They made it to the dorm just fine, right?”
“... Mhm,” Zora said, giving the man a weak smile. “So we can’t stay down here. Your kids are crying for you back in the dorm, and I don’t have enough patience to coddle the lot of them alongside mine and Cecilia’s.”
Cecilia’s face fell with guilt and shame, but Marcus laughed heartily and slapped his knees instead, standing slowly. “They’re my kids, alright. Strong spirit, fast runners. I knew they’d make it there even without me.”
“They sure are–”
“So?” he interrupted, planting his meaty fists on his waist as he grinned down at the three of them. “All of us teachers are Magicicada Mages now, right? You got any fancy spells to teach me so we can break out of this pit?”
“...”
Zora was about to give an absentminded response when both his and Cecilia’s ears perked, their heads lifting at the exact same time to stare at the muscleman.
“What do you mean ‘we’?” Cecilia asked, frowning suspiciously. “You’ve got a magicicada system class as well?”
Marcus frowned back at her. “I sure do. The old lady who tried to help me evacuate my kids fell in with me, and… unfortunately, she didn’t stick the landing even with the cushions. She gave me her system thing before she passed, so I’m technically a mage now, right?”
“Do you even know how to cast a spell, you loaf?” Zora mumbled, scanning him up and down. “I don’t see a wand on you. You do know you can’t control the direction of your spell if you don’t have a wand, right–”
“Come on. I’m not that dumb,” Marcus grumbled back, coughing into his fist as he spread his arms apart and sucked in a huge breath. “You just gotta put some air in your lungs and say something like ‘boom’, right?”