The moment Marcus clapped his hands and spoke "boom" was the moment a shockwave was born in his palms, rippling outwards and knocking both Zora and Cecilia off their asses. The two of them flew two metres back with surprised yelps while Emilia stayed firmly rooted in place—her pale white hair billowing back was the extent of Marcus’ spell on her, and she was the only one in the room who could clap excitedly after the shockwave dissipated.
“What was that, Mister Marcus?” she asked, jumping onto her feet and pouncing straight at Marcus’ stomach; the giant of a man simply caught her and spun her around with a wide grin, lifting her up and down as though to give her a seesaw ride. “Your spell’s super loud! Ouch! I think… um… my ears… are ringing–”
“Oh, so that already counts as a spell?” Marcus laughed heartily, shooting Zora a wink as the two of them crawled onto their feet, groaning aloud. “I dunno how this all works, to be honest. Never paid much attention to the old mages back when we were students, never paid much attention to them now. Was the clap really that impressive?”
“Damn right. Don’t you dare cast ‘boom’ again in this tiny room, you oaf,” Zora grumbled, picking up a dodgeball and throwing it at Marcus. The man caught it and threw it back in his face as Cecilia clapped her hands, getting all of them to calm down.
“Okay, so all three of us are Magicicada Mages. Big deal,” she said, before jabbing a finger at the giant bug carcasses outside the doors. “First things first: if we all have magicicada systems, then we could all use some points. Marcus, Zora, go out and drag a few of those carcasses in. I’ll start a small cooking fire with some of the gymnastics equipment.”
Emilia perked up at ‘fire’, and she sprinted over to hug Cecilia while Zora rubbed his head, walking towards the barricade.
“What’s this ‘point’ thing she’s talking about?” Marcus whispered in his ear, helping him dismantle the barricade. “She’s not lost her mind, has she?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“And… what? Are we cooking bugs or something? What’s she starting a fire for? Are you sure she’s not completely lost it–”
Cecilia threw more balls at the back of their heads, and that got them to move with haste, throwing the barricade aside as they sprinted out the doors.
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Two hours later—or something of the sort, it had to be close to noon outside—the four of them sat huddled around a small bonfire burning out of a broken pommel horse, each of them roasting two giant moth legs with sharpened metal rackets serving as skewers.
While Emilia hummed and kicked her legs back and forth, holding two of her hands out to feel the warmth of the fire, Zora explained the workings of their system for the seventh time; his throat was dry, his patience was wearing thin, and frankly, if the man still couldn’t understand they couldn’t just cast ‘fire’ or ‘lightning’–
“So, for being ‘mages’, we’re not actually that good at casting magic,” Marcus summarised, nodding along to the crackling of the flames. “Best we can do is pretend there’s an invisible clone of ourselves following us wherever we go, and when we tell it to do something, it does exactly that, yeah?”
Zora blinked. That was a surprisingly apt description of what their Hexichor Arts were like.
“At least you finally got that part down, Mister Evander,” he muttered, turning his moth leg over to roast the other side. “So this is where the points come into play. The strength of our invisible clone is only as strong as ourselves, and it can’t do what we can’t imagine ourselves doing, so when we raise our attributes–”
“I may not know too much about the Magicicada Mages, but I’m sure I’ve seen them cast magic before.”
“... What?”
Marcus shrugged, tilting his chin at both of their wands sheathed on their belts. “Maybe the retired mages in this academy couldn’t do it, but the ones who picked me up and rescued me as a child definitely used spells like ‘vanish’, ‘illuminate’, and ‘camouflage’. By your logic, these are spells we shouldn’t be able to cast, right?”
A frown crossed Zora's eyes. “What, exactly, do you mean by ‘vanish’? As in–”
“Wand point at something,” Marcus said, before miming a quiet ‘poof’ in the air with his hands, “and then object disappear. The mage who saved me used it to make a bunch of shrapnel sticking out of my body disappear.”
Zora blinked. It was an interesting revelation for sure, and one he had to stew in silence to think about for a few minutes as he pawned his legs off for Emilia to turn.
That wasn’t what I was thinking when I heard ‘vanish’, he thought. But come to think of it, when Marcus said ‘boom’ and clapped his hands, I wasn’t expecting the spell to manifest as a simple shockwave.
I was expecting more of a… fiery explosion.
So it’s true that the spell manifests the way ‘you’ believe it should manifest, not by any common definition of the word.
“… Five points if you get this question right,” he mumbled under his breath, eyes staring blankly into the fire, “but what is the purpose of ‘communication’, and what is the reason for ‘language’?”
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Both Marcus and Cecilia turned their heads to look his way.
“What, you’re asking me?” Marcus asked.
Cecilia shook her head. “And what are you mumbling about now–”
“Communication is not about accuracy, but expression,” he finished, repeating the phrase he was taught as a child as he buried his face in his knees, “and language is not about conformity, but creativity.”
While Marcus and Cecilia looked at each other to share confused blinks, he closed his eyes and dived into his head again—thinking, pondering, musing—before looking back up to stare at Marcus.
“I’ve a lot of questions about what the extent of our magic really is, Mister Evander, but for the time being, take my wand,” he said, tossing his stick over before thumbing at Emilia quietly. “Cast ‘strike’ on her, won’t you?”
Marcus’ face immediately darkened. “What do you possibly mean by that, Mister Fabre? You’d scorn me so much as a brute to suggest I’d discipline a child with–”
“Just do it, you oaf,” he mumbled, “and don’t hold back.”
He was serious, though, and Marcus could tell. So, while Emilia was still distracted feeling the warmth of the bonfire, the fitness teacher pointed his wand at her head and cast a normal-volume ‘strike’. Zora was sitting between them, and even though he wasn’t the target of the spell, he still felt an incredibly force rippling past his face—it would’ve absolutely crushed his skull if he’d been the target—but unsurprisingly, the moment it reached Emilia’s head, the spell fizzled out and simply wrapped around her head like a cloud of smoke.
Emilia immediately laughed and giggled, trying to claw the cloud-like ripple off her head. The rest of them watched her reaction in silence before Zora snatched his wand back from Marcus, eyes slanting.
“... And casting a spell is not just about belief, but also about intent,” he finished, nodding at Cecilia and Marcus. “The oaf here can definitely kill all of us here in a single punch, but his ‘strikes’ will do no damage to us. It’s because he’s unconsciously limiting his strength at the moment of casting—because he’s a softie who can’t bear to imagine hurting a colleague or a student. If that’s the case–”
Marcus wrapped an arm around his neck and pulled him in, scrubbing his hair violently. “Who’s the softie here, skellyman? Ay, maybe I can’t hurt a collegian or a student with these supreme muscles of mine, but a friend? Oh, I can definitely break a few ribs–”
“–you mean ‘colleague’. Also, help me, Miss Sarius–”
"So don’t ever do something risky like that again,” Marcus finished, breathing quietly into his ear. “You were working off your hunches, weren’t you? What if Emilia really got hurt? Who’s gonna suffer if something goes wrong with one of your experiments?”
Zora groaned and glared up at the man, trying to squirm out of the headlock. “Of course… I wouldn’t mess it up. I’m… ‘Thousand Tongue’ Zora, after all… and I’d rather rip my tongue out a thousand times… before I hurt a kid of mine.”
The two of them squabbled for a few more seconds, ribbing and clawing and trying to scratch at each other’s faces, but it wasn’t until Emilia broke into a fit of bubbly laughs that Marcus finally loosened his grip. Zora took the opportunity and slipped out, rubbing his shoulders and cracking his neck—the man had gotten stronger since the last time he was wrangled into a headlock.
“Mister Marcus! Spin!” Emilia said, bouncing to her feet as she left her skewers propped up on the side of the pommel horse, letting the legs cook themselves.
“Sure thing, boss!” Marcus said, jumping to his feet as well, and then the two of them were off in their own little world by the corner of the storage room.
Zora and Cecilia stared, bewildered, as Marcus picked the little girl up with a ‘rise’ and ‘spun’ her around the air, moving her so quickly that Zora felt nauseous just looking at her. She was having the time of her life, though—among the catalogue of teary and downtrodden expressions she’d shown him over the past two weeks, he’d never actually seen her smile and laugh that hard before. She loved being fast. She loved jumping around at inhuman speeds and engaging in mock grapples against a much larger and much stronger opponent than her, and…
For his part, Zora was rather surprised at himself.
He didn’t really feel jealous of Marcus or anything; the smiles shared between the fitness teacher and the dying girl were pure and bereft of any dishonesty. What sort of teacher would he be if he wanted to deprive Emilia of such simple joy in being able to move quickly?
“... You know, I’ve never seen what she’s like whenever she’s attending classes outside of my own,” he mumbled, taking over Emilia’s skewers as he lifted his off the fire. “She’s… doing an awful lot better than I would’ve thought, isn’t she?”
Cecilia smiled softly, turning her wand into a sword as she began cutting into her legs. “People do say crickets chirp loudest when they leap together. No matter where you’re from or who you were, you’re all equal in the face of a shitty obstacle course designed by a muscle maniac—and I guess it helps that he’s always been easy to talk to like that.” Then she sighed, stabbing a chunk of moth flesh and jabbing her sword at him, beckoning him to bite it off her blade. “He’s painfully simple, and he’s got no secrets to hide. He doesn’t lie or say anything he doesn’t mean, and he cares for his kids who put in all their effort, whether they achieve results or not. Is it really surprising to you that his kids show him faces they’ll never show you?”
Zora breathed out a short sigh and ate the chunk of flesh off the tip of her blade, careful not to cut his own tongue.
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[Points: 2 → 9]
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“Or maybe kids just like him because he also acts like a kid,” he offered, chewing on the gamey meat and forcing himself to swallow. “Seriously. Who believes they can cast ‘boom’ and not imagine a fiery explosion of sorts?”
“Muscleman Marcus,” Cecilia said pointedly.
“I know that. But the fact that he can cast a spell like that means–”
“Even you haven’t got our Hexichor Art all figured out yet,” she finished, plugging her nose as she swallowed a chunk of insect flesh herself. “Who knows? If our spells are limited by our intent and creativity, then maybe—just maybe—there are actually 'real' magic spells that we can cast right now.” She looked at him and sighed as well, tilting her head left and right. “Just… gotta figure out what those spells are, and how we can delude ourselves into thinking we can actually cast them.”
All easier said than done, of course, but now they had a living sample of a man who could cast something as vague as ‘boom’ right in front of them.
Zora would have to rethink their ability later on.
Right now, we’ve gotta get past the ermine moth and the spell-fizzling haze.
But if we can’t cast long-range spells in the haze, then how…
His thoughts trailed off as he continued staring at Marcus spinning Emilia around with his omnidirectional spells.
And he got an idea.
… Oh.
Maybe that would work.