There was no time to waste. In an ideal world, they'd devour all the giant bug carcasses they'd dragged into the storage room, but Zora and Cecilia had already eaten more than enough insect flesh for breakfast and then some more; they’d actually die of food poisoning if they ate any more in the next few hours, so the strength they had would have to be enough to deal with the ermine moth.
More specifically, they'd tossed all their points into increasing their toughness, because if they weren’t going to be hitting hard, they may as well be able to take hard hits.
----------------------------------------
[Toughness: 4 → 6]
[Points: 42 → 1]
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Marcus' analogy isn't completely off, after all.
Casting spells is like commanding an invisible clone of ourselves to do something, so if we’re physically tougher, we can easily imagine our ‘block’ spells being more effective.
So, four hours since they set off from the dorm, they kicked the doors open with Emilia riding on Marcus’ back.
Zora furrowed his brows, and he tried to find some trace of the ermine moth in the haze about the pit, but there were only a dozen elevators moving slowly up and down, giant chains rattling through the smog. Each of them carried a gas lantern on their belts, but the light didn't extend far out—they couldn't possibly wait until nightfall to leave.
“... You wouldn't happen to be able to cast a spell like ‘illuminate’, can you?” Zora asked, glancing in Marcus' direction. “If you can, I'll give you my wand to turn into a torch. The mage who gave you your system didn't have one on her, right?”
“Nope. I searched her body and everything.”
“And the light spell?”
Marcus hit him on the back of his head and made Emilia laugh. Cecilia immediately hissed at them to shut up and pointed at the lowest elevator nearby: the ‘starting point’ of the obstacle course.
Without another word, Marcus lifted both Zora and Cecilia—each in one arm—and tossed them three metres up onto the descending elevator. He jumped up a second later, landing in a perfect squat that made the elevator creak back and forth; for a moment, Zora worried the chain might just snap under their combined weight, but it was a needless worry. The only thing that could break the chains was a giant bug or Marcus himself.
“You're still as pale as ever when it comes to heights, eh?” Marcus chuckled, slapping him on the back as he peered over the edge, grimacing at the rapidly shrinking ground. “Not a cool look in front of your kid, skellyman. Gotta put some meat on your bone. You know most people have two bones in their forearms, right? There's the radius and the ulna, but you, my friend, have jelly instead of marrow and chalk instead of bone. You need some exercise.”
“Exercise? Like this?” Zora muttered back. “This isn't exercise. This is an insane accident machine built by an insane fitness teacher. You just want to torture your students, don't you?”
Marcus belted out a hearty laugh as he kicked Zora and Cecilia onto the adjacent elevator; it was only because they'd raised their toughness level to five that their backs weren't immediately broken.
“My kids love my obstacle course,” Marcus said, feigning disbelief as he glanced around. “You tell him, Emilia. Tell skellyman my elevators are the best in the world.”
Emilia grinned at Zora, nodding exuberantly. “I like Mister Marcus’ elevators!”
“See? Emilia likes it. She always goes for round two and three, too, and she's by far my best student.”
“And thus the other ninety-nine percent are tossed aside, swept aside,” Zora grumbled, turning his wand into a sword as they rose past the twenty metre mark. “That's no good, Mister Evander. You're a teacher, and for me, any teacher that ignores the plight of their student deserves a–”
“Strike.”
Zora and Cecilia’s spell flew onto their blades, but when they whirled and slashed at the pouncing moth at once, the sound waves didn’t fly off like they would off their wands—instead, their rippling swords chopped off the front halves of the ermine moth’s forelegs, making it jump back into the haze with a pained screech.
Immediately, they tried to follow their attack up with a ‘translate’ and an ‘off-tune voice’ to track the moth with, but by the time they turned their swords back into wands, the moth had already disappeared through the haze.
It wasn’t like our ranged spells were going to reach it, anyways.
“... But now we know a few more things,” he said, pressing back to back against Cecilia with his sword poised while Marcus slammed his fists together. “One: our spells practically fly off when they’re cast on our wands, but when they’re cast on the swords instead, they stick to the blade. As long as the spells are clinging to the blades, they’d last much, much longer—so casting ‘strike’ on our swords is akin to constantly sharpening our blades. Depending on what spells we cast on them, maybe we can even get effects akin to coating our blades with poison.”
The sword for close-range spell-swording, and the wand for long-range spell-slinging. Now, he had no idea why the ‘strikes’ weren’t dispelling off their swords—even though they were still standing in the haze—but given the wands were crafted out of cicada chitin, he could easily chalk it off to the cicada chitin possessing magical spell-sticking properties unbeknownst to him. The essence that was 'Hexichor', the basis of all magical equipment and abilities in the world, was still a relatively unknown property. Very few people in the world understood how Hexichor really functioned. But the fact of the matter was, they could enhance their swords with spells… and that was only his first of three new discoveries.
Emilia’s antennae tingled, and all of them noticed—they scattered the moment the ermine moth slammed into their elevator from below, jumping to three separate elevators all moving up at different paces.
There was no hesitation. The moth wasn’t mindless. As it ripped through the elevator in the centre and swerved around, its eyes instantly popped. It realised Marcus was the only one without a wand, and there was an extra human on his back it could feast on, so it pounced at him without question–
And Marcus cupped his hands before his mouth, bellowing "buff" and "toughen" and making the sound waves rippled around his own body.
The moth was trying to ram into him head-first, but it was like running a wooden ram into a metre-thick steel door. It damn near shattered its own skull ramming into Marcus’ spell-enhanced chest, forcing it to once again flutter away, bumping into two elevators on its way back.
“... Two!” Zora shouted, forcing himself to breathe as he mustered the courage to jump to another elevator; Cecilia and Marcus did the same while the moth rolled around on the walls, banging its head against the bricks as though trying to knock itself out of its concussion. “We can cast spells on our own bodies! Maybe there’s nothing Miss Sarius and I can cast on ourselves for the time being, but Mister Evander is a muscle freak! I bet he can imagine himself pumping himself full of drugs and elixirs to buff his muscles up to two hundred!”
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Somehow, someway, Marcus managed to throw a ball from the storage room at Zora’s head, the big man himself rubbing his chest in the distance. “I’m not Julius, you piece of shit! I don’t do drugs!”
“Or so says the man who is strong and fast enough to outrun intelligent thoughts!”
“That’s right! I’m the fastest man in the… wait, what–”
“Don’t grow up to be like him, Emilia!” Zora shouted, cupping his hands over his mouth to make his voice as loud as possible, as obnoxious as possible; his hollow abdomen mutation helped carry it far and wide. “Make no mistake; there is charm only a delicate lady can have, and strength to lift hearts at a single glance! You don’t need bulging muscles like that idiot you’re riding! After all–”
He whirled, exhaling sharply as he stabbed at the pouncing moth’s mouth—and he would’ve run his sword right through its head had it not jerked back in time, its massive wings sending gusts of prickly white haze into his elevator.
Bracing his free arm before his face, he skidded back and jumped to the next elevator, regrouping with Marcus and Cecilia as the moth screeched up at them.
“... After all, the moth’s an idiot that responds only to loud voices and provocation like any rabble bug, too,” Zora said, fist-bumping Marcus. “And when it fans its wings like that, it makes a bunch of wind that pushes out its spell-fizzling haze, but that also means it’s pushing the haze away from its body.”
Just like when Marcus was spinning Emilia around in the storage room.
If the haze is thick enough to be physical and tangible, then it stands to reason that physical and tangible wind would also be able to thin it out.
The moth was visibly enraged. Golden blood coursed through its paper-thin wings, its eyes turned bloodshot, and it flew straight up at them with its bleeding front legs held out like spears. Gone was the elusive hunter who played a slow predatory game by hiding in its haze—he was quite sure, at this point, that the haze was just its tiny white scales lingering in the air and intercepting their spells—so the moment it reared its ugly head at them, flying through its only barrier of defence, Zora and Cecilia whipped their ‘amplified strike’ down.
The spell lashed out with a deafening bang, slamming the moth down onto an elevator. It hit. Cecilia grinned. Since their spell pushed away even more of the haze, clearing the air, they were allowed to cast ‘amplified strike’ again and again. Half of their spells whiffed, admittedly, knocked off-course by clouds of lingering haze, but the other half did their job: knocking the moth back and buying time for them to jump up to different elevators. Zora even threw a ‘translate’ on it while Cecilia threw an ‘off-tune voice’ over its wings, just to make sure they could keep track of it.
Seventy metre mark.
Thirty more metres to go.
“Our swords can cut through its chitin, but even with ‘amplified strike’, we can’t break its chitin, huh?” he grumbled, gritting his teeth as his neck strained with effort. “Think you can hurt it if I give you my wand, Mister Evander?”
“We don’t gotta kill the moth here, do we?” Marcus peered up at the next elevator, brows furrowed. “As long as we can get out of the building and into the sun, it probably won’t try to chase us… at the very least, it won’t chase you and Cecilia knowing you have wands that can fight it all the way back to the dorm.”
“It might. It’s not as bright as you think–”
The moth screeched. Irritated, it dashed to the walls of the pit, realising flying meant it could be easily knocked off-course by their hammer-like spells. Its legs tore into the bricks as it started climbing up, making sure it couldn’t be knocked down again, and at the same time—it roared. Loud. All four of them winced as they were mid-jump onto the next elevator, and when Emilia pointed up through the haze they were ascending out of…
… Well.
They are the ‘Swarm’, after all.
They were dark silhouettes perched on the edge of the pit, Giant-Class beetles and moths unfurling and stretching their wings. There had to be at least ten of them surrounding them from every conceivable direction, and they jumped down at the four of them with hellish screeches; none of them looked like they could carry themselves in flight, but they jumped in anyways with reckless abandon. The death of one human was more than worth the death of ten bugs, so what did it matter to them if they died trying to wipe out the last of the Magicicada Mages?
They’d do anything for their ‘mother’—and so the teachers would do anything for their ‘children’ as well.
There was no hesitation. There was no need for verbal confirmation. Communication lay in expression, and the moment it became clear there was going to be no way out of the bugs’ collapse on every elevator all at once, Marcus ripped Emilia off his back and tossed her up. At the same time, Zora and Cecilia cast ‘push’ on her back, sending her past the thirty metre mark and over the edge of the pit.
Then the bugs crashed into their elevator, snapped the chain, and dragged all of them seventy metres back down to the cushioned bottom.
Seventy metres was a long fall, but frankly, Zora didn’t feel most of it. He was already a bit winded as was, but coupled with the metal falling around him, the giant bugs screeching every which way, and Marcus grabbing both him and Cecilia to wrap them in a tight hug, he barely felt the landing into the velvet cushions—one second he thought he was going to die, and in the next, he was already springing back to the surface with Cecilia in his arms, aching from head to toe.
“You… you good?” he muttered, struggling to climb onto his feet as mounds of elevator debris hit the cushions hard, making the soft ground ripple and wobble like a stormy sea.
“Mhm… and you, muscleman?” Cecilia replied, the two of them looking forward at the same time, and their eyes twitched the moment they saw Marcus standing up with a right arm visibly bruised and bent the wrong way. The forearm was broken, no doubt about it; was it because he’d protected the two of them from falling debris by slapping everything away?
By the scrunched, pained look on Marcus’ face, he wasn’t going to tell, and Zora didn’t know himself.
He hadn’t been paying attention.
And he clenched his jaw as the ten giant bugs fell around them in a circle, the giant white moth fluttering over their heads leading the chorus of taunting screeches with incoherent sounds of its own.
“... Weak!” the moth laughed, and Marcus froze as he heard it speak for the first time. “Weak! Cowards! Fight four against one, how fair? Not true warriors, just like the humans who were trying to escape from this building!”
Zora’s eyes widened. He tried to dispel his ‘translate’ by slinging a ‘silence’ at it, but they’d fallen right back into the thickest part of the haze and his spell barely flew a metre before fizzling; even coordinating an ‘amplified silence’ with Cecilia didn’t help.
Shit.
This isn’t–
“Say that again, bug?” Marcus asked, his voice snapping out like a whip as he looked up. “Who are you talking about? What ‘humans’?”
The moth tilted its head. “The small ones! The fast runners! They were cowards like you all, too! So many of them in one place, but they don’t fight me? Why?” Then it hovered in place, tilting its head left and right as though to mock them. “The flesh of weaklings don’t taste good, you know! Muscles not tight! Not enough energy! I didn’t like the small ones, you know?”
The moth rambled on and on, the ‘translate’ spell running out halfway through and returning it to its usual incoherent screeches, but it’d already said everything it needed to say—it wasn’t half as intelligent-sounding as the katydid, but it was every bit as bloodthirsty, and it had friends to support it to boot.
For Zora’s part, though, he wasn’t so much worried about the giant bugs laughing around them as he was apprehensive looking at Marcus’ back; those broad, impossibly ripped shoulders of his were terrifically still and calm for a man who could always find an excuse to get himself worked up in a sweat.
“What’s the moth talking about, skellyman?” Marcus whispered, lowering his head, and Zora’s skin paled to the colour of fresh snow. “My kids in 2-C… they were with the two of you in the dorm, weren’t they?
“...”
“They made it there, didn’t they?”
Zora stalled in silence. The weight he’d been carrying in his chest for the past four hours came crashing down all at once, and… he found there were no words in his repertoire of a thousand tongues that could properly convey what he should be saying to Marcus.
Because Marcus wouldn’t listen anyways.
He was painfully simple like that.
“... I see,” he murmured, clenching his fist and cracking his neck left and right as he glared up at the moth. “And you, up there. You said you wanted a ‘fight’, didn’t you?”
Neither humans nor bugs understood each other, but they didn’t have to. Marcus kicked up a nearby chain and grabbed it with one hand, flicking his curly hair back as he began dragging the giant elevator it was connected to like a flail.
On instinct and instinct alone, Zora grabbed Cecilia’s hand, and both of them backed off slowly from the man whose crimson cloak seemed to burn in the haze.
“Mages? Spells? Wands?” he muttered, shaking his head irritably as he jerked his chain hard right—ripping the entire elevator off the ground as he did. “Don’t get complacent, bug. I don’t need more than one arm to drag you down to my level.”