Much like the faculty staffroom, the centre of the greenhouse was yet another dome-like room where the walls were glass and lined with circular steel ribs. Sunlight trickled in between the gaps of vines growing everywhere Zora looked; some shimmered like polished gemstones, others were translucent, and some were cluttered with clusters of alien flowers, emitting sweetly sick fragrances that filled the air. Zora recognised some of them as ‘healing’ flowers that promoted recovery, which was all good and well—the greenhouse also doubled as the academy’s infirmary, so dozens of beds were arranged in a neat square in the centre of the room, capable of nursing an entire class of kids at once.
He’d never been here before, but he’d heard from his colleagues about how terrible it was to be laying on a bed and suddenly having flowers falling onto their faces in the middle of night. Only one man could have the wicked idea to combine a greenhouse, a study, and an infirmary into a single room… and that man was currently standing behind the railings on the second floor study, aiming a wand down at Emilia.
For his part, Zora didn’t hesitate. He whipped out a double ‘strike’ combo—knocking the wand out of Julius’ hand and knocking Julius off his feet—to interrupt the ‘get out’ spell before it could even finish casting.
The unfortunate result was Julius landing hard on his back with a pained oof, but Zora had no remorse against someone who’d try to throw Emilia out of any room, even if it was one of his oldest friends and colleagues in the academy.
“... Get up, Mister Tadius,” he grumbled, stomping up the stairs to the second floor study to grab the scrawny man by his oversized collar, and then throwing him onto the spinning chair next to the study desk; Emilia followed, immediately rushing forward to lay Marcus and Cecilia down on the bed next to the desk the moment she spotted it. “What unseemly behaviour for a teacher of the academy. This is Emilia, my newest transfer student. Surely the Headmaster has told you about her and her unique… condition?”
Julius spun around on the chair, pushing up his glasses and cracking his bruised back as he squinted at Emilia.
“Oh,” Julius mumbled, face reddening as he struggled to stop his chair from spinning; Zora had to stomp on the wheels to get him to look at the little girl properly. “I’m… oh, so you’re the moth girl I’ve been hearing so much about. I’m terribly… oh, god.” He immediately averted his eyes and buried his face in his hands, curling into a ball with his legs pulled up into his chest. “Forget about the… shriek. Damnitttt. What unseemly behaviour indeed. Why, Zora, you should’ve just told me first thing if she were a student of yours–”
Zora clicked his tongue, whacking the top of Julius’ head and spinning the man around until they were all facing Marcus and Cecilia. “Shut it, Mister Tadius. They need your help. Their–”
“My god!” Julius shrieked again, reeling away from Marcus’ stump of a right arm and Cecilia’s bloody left ear as the two teachers groaned on the cramped bed. “Z-Zora! Look! They’re missing an arm and… well, not a leg, but Cecilia’s missing her right… no, left ear! What do we–”
“You’re the physician,” Zora snapped, snatching the severed arm and ear from Emilia before shoving them into Julius’ lap. “Fix them. Help them. Now.”
Julius’ face paled to the colour of fresh snow, but as the rest of class 2-D began filing into the giant dome, he managed to inhale deeply and roll his chair over to the side of the bed.
“What could even get muscleman so messed up like this?” he muttered, slipping his hands into his lab coat pockets and pulling them out with white gloves on. “His left arm’s in a sling, too. And Cecilia’s looking… um… well, relatively speaking, she’s pretty healthy. What’d you guys run into outside?”
“A Mutant-Class,” Zora said, sitting at the foot of the bed to roll the half-conscious Marcus further in towards the wall. The bed was just large enough to fit the both of them, but Cecilia was on the verge of rolling off the side for how big Marcus was. “Two legs, four arms, two twenty-metre-long antennae. It cut their arm and ear off with its antennae, and I’m not physician, but they certainly look like they have venom coursing through their veins–”
“Longhorn beetle,” Julius replied immediately, nodding slowly, absentmindedly as he leaned over the two groaning teachers and peered down at their bloody wounds. “The albitarsis longhorn beetle, to be exact. It’s also known as the ‘scorpion beetle’ in the far west. As far as we know, it’s the only venomous longhorn beetle that stings with its antennae in the entire world. Its antennae are connected to a venomous gland in its head that–”
“Spare me the lecture, man. Can you get an antidote and stitch their arm and ear back on again?”
Julius’ head shot up to look directly at Zora, stalling in silence before answering.
“... N-No problem,” he mumbled, shooting Zora a trembling thumbs-up as he raised his wand. “I got… this thing now. Watch this.” Then he poked his wand into Marcus’ bloody stump, making the muscleman wince and writhe. “If it’s a scorpion beetle, then its venom… shares similar chemical structural motifs as insect defensins. A family of inducible antimicrobial peptides. Albitarsis venom has seventy amino acid residues, and provided it can only be secreted via an ultra sensitive tactile instrument…”
The pale man trailed off, rambling a hundred words under his breath, and Emilia hid behind Zora as she tugged on his cloak.
“What’s… the weird man talking about?” she whispered, peeking over his shoulder anxiously. “Will Miss Cecilia and Mister Marcus be alright? Aren’t they losing a lot of… blood?”
Zora patted her head, glancing over the railings to frown at class 2-D resting on the infirmary beds below. “Not to worry. They’ll be just alright. You see, Mister Tadius is–”
“Venom analysis complete. Beginning extraction from bleeding lacerations,” Julius breathed, voice lowering, his emerald eyes flaring bright green, “and commencing rapid reconnection of severed appendages.”
Emilia shirked behind him as a gust of wind exploded from Julius’ spell, but Zora watched, eyes wide, as the man pointed his wand at the groaning teachers—and then two thin streams of pale, sickly green liquid floated out from their open wounds.
The venom.
Before Zora could even blink in surprise, Julius pressed the severed arm and ear onto where they should be, and with his wand gritted in his teeth, the second spell fired out at the two teachers. Biologically, it shouldn’t be possible. Magically, Julius probably didn’t even know how to open his status screen, but the spell was cast regardless—drying blood evaporated, the tiny, bloody gaps between the severed appendages knitted closed, and the broken bones and joints mended themselves.
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Marcus and Cecilia may have been breathing heavily and sweating bricks just moments earlier, but now they were sleeping soundly on the creaking bed, colour beginning to return to their skin.
“... A-Aight. They’ve… lost a lot of blood, but if I give them a few specialised healing elixirs, they should wake up as their normal, healthy selves in about twelve hours, give or take.”
And ‘Crystalblood’ Julius spun around on his chair, shooting Zora and Emilia another nervous thumbs-up. Emilia looked between the two of them, jaw agape, and Zora already knew the questions she wanted to ask—he’d answer her in a moment, but right now, there was only one thing he wanted to know about the academy’s one and only physician.
“So you’ve obtained a magicicada system class, too,” he said, staring pointedly at the wand in Julius’ hand.
“One of the mages was… visiting my garden when the dome shattered,” Julius answered hesitantly, immediately pocketing his wand as he stared back at Zora’s. “That man… died… protecting us. And he wanted me to have his system. I couldn’t very well… refuse, could I?”
Zora was about to press him about the details, but Emilia couldn’t hold in her curiosity anymore. She peeked out from behind him again, and Julius reeled away with a terrified yelp as she leaned forward, pointing at the hidden wand.
“How did you do that, Mister Weird Man?” she asked, looking straight up at Julius.
“H… How’d I do what?” Julius stammered back.
“Your spell!” she said, jabbing three index fingers at the wand in his pocket. “I thought Mister Zora said only magic spells that you can imagine yourself doing can be cast, but you just cast something like ‘heal’, right?”
“Uh… huh? So what about it?”
“How? Isn’t that ‘magic’ magic?”
Julius gulped and averted her eyes, looking at Zora instead with pleading eyes—so Zora sighed and patted Emilia’s head again, pulling her gently back so she’d stopped giving Julius a fright for his life.
The academy’s one and only physician was more terrified of bugs than anyone else, after all.
“... Like you, Mister Tadius has quite the unique biology as well,” Zora said, smiling softly as Emilia listened to him tentatively. “He’s a bit of a strange man, so I’d already guessed his spells would be a bit strange, too. But there’s no need to worry. Miss Sarius and Mister Evander will wake up just fine, won’t they?”
Zora directed that last part at Julius, who nodded fervently and gave Emilia a small, awkward smile—anything to get her attention off him, Zora supposed. He was quite the shy man.
Without warning, though, a discordant chorus of faint, muted screeches exploded outside the greenhouse, and Julius immediately shrieked. He kicked his chair back over to his study desk, pulled out a blanket from a drawer, and draped it over himself as he remained curled up in a shivering mess of a ball.
Emilia was very much about to frown when three of the 2-D kids trudged up the stairs behind them, sighing in exasperation. Two of them walked past Zora to hug Julius, doing their best to comfort their frightened homeroom teacher with encouraging words, while the last kid—a little girl about Emilia’s age wearing a beautiful flower crown—stopped right in front of Zora with her arms diligently folded behind her back.
2-D’s class monitor, Tara.
“Sorry, Mister Fabre,” she said, bowing deeply. “The bugs have been screeching outside all the time the past two days, but that’s all they really do. They can’t jump over the poisonous wall of fire or anything, and the fire lasts for twelve hours once it starts burning, so we can easily refill the oil from Julius’ hidden stash of experimental poisons. We’re safe as long as we’re in here.”
Zora dipped his head gratefully, and Tara took that as an ‘okay’ sign to skip over to Julius, smacking him over the head and peeling back his blanket. The three kids and their homeroom teacher immediately began squabbling—Julius cried and complained about the giant bugs screeching outside, while Tara shouted at him to just stick some earplugs in if he’s afraid—and all that was to say, Emilia looked very confused as she turned to frown at Zora again.
“Mister Julius is weird,” she said pointedly, tugging on his sleeve as she sat next to him on the foot of the bed. “Why are his students comforting… him?”
Zora snorted. “Right? You’re more mature than him, and he’s turning twenty this year.”
Emilia giggled, and while Marcus and Cecilia snored away behind them, he rapid-explained everything that’d happened thus far to Julius. The physician was still playing tug-of-war with his students to get his blanket back, but as he listened and gradually grasped the reality of the situation outside the garden, his grip loosened, and Tara was able to rip his blanket from him.
While the three kids celebrated their victory and danced around with the blanket behind his chair, Julius’ eyes hardened and softened on Marcus’ sleeping face.
“Everyone in 2-C is… dead?” he whispered, and Zora shivered for the briefest of moments as his eyes glowed emerald; he noticed Zora’s reaction and immediately blinked, reeling himself in. “I didn’t… I thought the mages would have it handled like they always do with everything else. You mean there’s a… there’s a Lesser Insect God walking around the place?”
“Mhm.” Zora nodded solemnly, glancing out the top of the greenhouse. “And you? I assume you and class 2-D have been stuck here ever since the dome shattered?”
“R-Right. Lots of them… giant bugs, I mean… just crashed through the walls of the garden and started chewing up my flowers,” Julius stammered, biting and cracking his nails as his eyes flitted over to his blanket. Zora and Emilia had already gotten used to it, but he still flinched every time a giant bug screeched outside the greenhouse. “There were lots of them, so I thought… it’d be no good to try to get all my kids down to the dorm. We barricaded ourselves in the greenhouse, dumped lots of oil into the surrounding river, and whenever a bug approached us, we lit up the river to stave it off. Ever since, I felt it’d be… too dangerous… if we tried to run, so we were hoping someone would come save us.”
Zora figured, and Tara had said as much. Judging by how quickly the kids of class 2-D sprinted out to help him and Emilia, they’d lit up the river quite a fair few times; apart from the Mutant patrolling the forest outside, though, there was probably another reason why Julius and class 2-D hadn’t attempted to escape to the dorm below.
And, unlike him, Tara wasn’t so accommodating to her homeroom teacher.
“Also, Julius is so scared of the bugs that his legs turn to jelly the moment he tries to step outside with us,” she added casually, grinning at Zora as he looked to her for confirmation. “We really, really have to leave by tonight, though. We’re running out of poison oil and food. Some of the younger kids down there are also sick of eating flowers for two days straight, so…”
She didn’t exactly have to finish her sentence, and she couldn’t. Julius started yelling at her to stop talking about him like the scaredy-cat he really was, so while he did that, Zora peered over the railings again to count heads—all sixteen children of class 2-D were accounted for, which was a massive relief off his shoulders.
He’d no idea if he could take class 2-D’s deaths in stride, like he had with class 2-C.
“... Alright, alright. Lay off the bullying on Mister Tadius for a second, girls,” he said, pressing his wand to his lips and breathing a ‘silence’ spell onto it. “The four of us came here right on time. We weren’t planning on staying here overnight, anyways, so even if there’s a horde of giant bugs led by a Mutant-Class outside—and Miss Sarius and Mister Evander are incapacitated—there’s still a lot we can do to get out of here with our numbers.”
With a flick of his wrist, he whipped the ‘silence’ up onto the centre of the dome, letting the spell diffuse downwards and around the room. Outside noises were already faint and muffled to begin with, but with the spell layered under the glass, nothing went through; Julius shivering slowed the moment the screeches died down.
The kids of class 2-D snapped their heads up to stare at his outstretched wand, and he took that as his opportunity to address all of them by the railings.
“Gather around, everyone,” he said, standing up and waving everyone closer. “While Miss Sarius, Mister Evander, and Mister Tadius are recovering, I’ll teach you all a few magic words to help us get out of this garden without fighting any of the giant bugs.”