Sharp at seven in the evening, Nona’s ears perked at the sound of a Mutant’s fading, dying breath.
She whirled behind her, naturally, and stared out the giant stained glass window on the fifth and final floor of the northern building . The dying breath came from the garden bridge thingy, a hundred or so metres below her. It was quite the sudden, abrupt sound; she was sure she’d killed all the Magicicada Mages on her way here, so what could’ve possibly done in a Mutant, even if it’d only evolved into one a few days ago by eating the freebie corpses she’d tossed at it?
But did it really matter?
Did she really care?
“... Big stick bug!” she chirped, punching a hole through the glass and poking her head out. The colossal stick bug was already half-camouflaged and clinging to the side of the gargantuan northern building, awaiting her command. “If anyone tries to come into this building, rip them to shreds! Don’t let anyone up or run away!”
Her trusty second-in-command nodded curtly before crawling around the back of the building shying away from moonlight. He’d been following her since the day she and her older sisters ravaged the Magicicada Mages’ homeland, so she knew she could count on him for keeping unwanted pests away from her. It didn’t need to be a humanlike Mutant to serve her well.
She pulled her head back into the chamber where the air was thick with the bitter, metallic scent of blood, and the vast stone corridor was littered with bodies—mages and giant bugs, twisted forms sprawled in unnatural positions. Torn robes and shattered wands lay abandoned among severed limbs and broken exoskeletons. The old men and ladies wore faces frozen in expressions of shock and fear, which made her click her tongue in irritation; they hadn’t been cute or entertaining in the slightest. Every mage guarding the northern building had attacked her the moment they saw her, and their spells were all so… weak. Tame. Together, they could take down hordes of grunt giant bugs, but they could only weaken her. Drain her stamina. Shrink her Hexichor Aura. They couldn’t take her down.
None of them had what she was looking for, after all: the weapon made out of her own chitin, and the only weapon in the world that could kill her.
“Where are you, my dear?” she hummed, a lilting, musical tune that echoed down the corridor as she skipped over the broken bodies. Blood smeared her feet, but she didn’t feel like grabbing a snack to fill her belly. Old people tasted yucky. “Are you… here?”
Her eyes sparkled as she punched through one of the heavy wooden doors to the right, immediately peeking inside to see if her wand was there. It wasn’t. It was a lab of sorts filled with shattered glass and potion bottles, the arid scent of alchemical smoke still lingering in the room. She lingered in the doorway for a moment, cocking her head to the side before sighing in disappointment.
“Not here,” she murmured, moving down the corridor. “Are you… here, then?”
She punched open the next door with a flourish, but there were only a bunch of researchers and a horde of half-dead, twitching bugs on the floor. “Oh, you guys look like you’re in lots of pain,” she cooed. “No problem! I give you permission to die right there, right now!”
Her spell travelled slowly to the half-dead bugs, but she didn’t stick around to hear them die. She continued moving down the corridor, punching through door after door, her antennae tingling harder and harder as she did; she was getting close to something. Maybe not her weapon, maybe not the Headmaster of the academy, but it was something. She couldn’t help but giggle at the thought of getting her weapon back soon.
“Decima and Morta always bully me too much!” she grumbled, slamming all four palms onto the last door at the very end of the corridor; a small, frightened ‘eep’ behind it reached her ears. “I’ll get my weapon back, and then the three of us can fight again as sisters! Wouldn’t that be fun? Don’t you want to see that happen?”
She ripped the door off its hinges and slammed it into the floor, making the dimly lit observatory shake for a brief second.
Papers scattered off tables and fluttered into the air. Alchemical lamps toppled and shattered against the walls. The glass dome ceiling cracked under the pressure of her arrival, and the giant telescope mounted on a massive rotating platform overhead shifted and groaned. The small, trembling boy huddled under one of the study desks flinched aloud, but even without her acute hearing, she would’ve seen his legs poking out from under the desk—her grin widened as she took slow, deliberate steps forward, ignoring everything else about the observatory.
Shallow breaths. Palpable fear. Sweet and delicious tension hung in the air, and the boy’s scent made her head throb in dull pain. Oh, she’d love to pick him up and stuff him down her throat, but she wasn’t a lowly rabble bug. She wouldn’t let her hunger guide her. So what if his tiny frame was frozen with terror as she stopped right in front of him?
She knelt, softened her expression, and the boy’s eyes flickered between her and the open doorway. He was clearly calculating some desperate escape, but again, why would he try to do that?
Her voice was gentle.
“... What’s your name?” she asked.
The boy didn’t answer immediately. His wide eyes were still locked onto hers, unmoving, and then she put a finger to her chin as she thought—apart from being a hideout for the Magicicada Mages, this castle seemed to double as an academy for orphans all across the continent. There was a good chance the boy just didn’t understand what she was saying.
So she cycled through her stolen tongues.
The mania tongue. The agrada tongue. The romova dialect. She started with the eastern children’s tongues at first, but quickly realised that the sharp inflections of his short gasps were distinctly northern. Only northern children breathe like that because they live in high altitudes! Moving up the continent, she tried the tensha, matee, and yoran tongues near the borders of the land of armours, before noticing he looked more frightened when she spoke the far northern tongues’ word for ‘name’. Now it came down to brute-forcing her way through the rest of the hundred far northern dialects, one sentence at a time until she reached the lingyuan tongue—spoken only in a small bamboo processing town near the continent's northeastern shoreline.
Her hollow abdomen rumbled; she nearly coughed out a spell as she cleared her throat forcefully.
“What’s your name?” she asked again, and the boy’s already wide eyes became even wider. Any more, and they’d pop right out of their sockets.
“I’m… I’m Yanli,” he stammered, hugging his knees even tighter. She couldn’t help but notice he was holding a vial with some sort of glowing red liquid in his hands. “Who are… why can you… you speak my–”
“You’re the only one who survived the infestation, huh?” she interrupted, patting his head and ruffling his hair softly. “Good job! It must’ve been very tough keeping quiet so those bugs wouldn’t find you hiding in here! My hearing is super, super good though, so I could hear you tearing up to yourself halfway across the corridor!”
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
The boy immediately tried to recoil from her hand, but she pulled him in and wrapped him in a hug before he could lean away. He didn’t resist or sputter as he buried his face in her chest; his trembling had stopped, and it was quite obvious he was befuddled.
“I’m Banma, a new substitute language teacher from the north!” she lied, adjusting her tone, her volume, her too-annoyingly-sharp inflection to better mimic the voice of the girl she’d devoured about… a decade ago? Two decades ago? She didn’t quite remember, and she didn’t quite care. “I look like this because I ate lots of bugs when I was a kid, but I don’t do that anymore! And I’m here to help! Will you let me help you, Yar… Yanli?”
She grinned as he peeled away, looking her in the eyes with a strange, perplexed expression.
“You’re… human?” he asked.
“Of course I am!” she replied, thumbing at her face promptly. “Can a bug talk and speak to you in the lingyuan tongue? No way, right?”
The boy blinked, looking slightly taken aback “O-Oh… yeah,” he muttered. “At first, you made those weird… um, those weird sounds, and… Mister Fabre always tells us not to trust anyone who can’t speak our language. And even if they can, we shouldn’t… be so quick to think they’re normal people.”
It was her turn to tilt her head, feigning confusion. “What does that mean? Who are ‘normal people’?”
“P-People on our side… um, humanity’s side,” he stuttered. “Mister Fabre always tells us stories… about how some bugs can look like people, talk like people, and act like people, but they’re not actually… they’re still bugs, and that’s all they’ll ever be.”
…
For a second, she almost snapped and lost her temper with the boy, but she quickly shook her head to regain composure. She was Nona, youngest of the Magicicada Witches. The boy in front of her was a cute one, wasn’t he?
“They’re kinda like the… the, um, the Shanja Demons!” the boy continued rambling, not even looking her directly in the eye now. “You know those legends? About those mountain-dwelling spirits? The Shanja Demons–”
“Are bugs that can shapeshift into humans and drain the life out of kids who wander out at night, causing fatigue and illness that can’t ever be cured!” she finished, pointing at her own face. “I know that bedtime story! I’m from the north, too! Would a bug in disguise know something like that?”
The boy clenched his jaw. He looked like he wanted to believe her, but he was just missing that small little push; if she could get him to hold her hand and crawl out from under the desk voluntarily, she’d make a servant out of him for the rest of his life.
She spread all four of her arms, beckoning the boy to jump in with a few curls of her hands.
“I’m looking for the Headmaster of this academy!” she said cheerily, putting the brightest, most sincere smile she could muster onto her face. “If it’s me and the Headmaster, I’m sure we can drive back this infestation in no time! I just need to know where she is! This is the ‘observatory’… her ‘office’, right? Do you know where–”
“Tell me five things about Mister Fabre, and I’ll trust you.”
A pause.
The sweet and delicious scent of tension in the air quickly turned bitter and heavy.
The boy looked up at her, hands shaking, clasping the vial of glowing red liquid over his chest.
… Who’s this ‘Mister Fabre’ again?
She resisted the urge to scratch the back of her head in annoyance. Searching through the memories of the children she’d eaten on the way here would be a pain, but she’d eaten about three dozen in total—the rest she’d thrown to her grunts, and she hated eating adults and old people—so surely there had to be some memories of a ‘Mister Fabre’ in the children’s mushy brains.
Let’s see…
A ‘Mister Fabre’...
Ah!
There’s–
So much information.
She twitched backwards with a flail as half-formed memories of a man in an amber cloak flashed through her head. Thirty-five children she’d devoured, and all of them had completely contrasting recounts of the man of a thousand-tongues; in their memories, he was always speaking a completely different tongue, and his voice was smooth. Sharp. Hard. Precise. She recognised a few of his tongues—phola, loch, kossia—but amongst the catalogue of children she’d devoured all across the continent, there were a few tongues she couldn’t even make heads or tails of.
Who… is this human?
His voice echoed around her like an avalanche. He was a man who did a lot of talking to his children. She gripped her antennae and hissed as she pored through even more memories, trying to at least get a read on his face, but… every child saw a different man. In some images, he’d have a high nose, high brows, and a skeletal, gauntish face. In others, he’d be large with broad shoulders and could pick a child up with a single hand. Her own memories, at least, were still intact, but just sifting through the muck that was this ‘Mister Fabre’ was making her head pound like never before.
This human knows more tongues than… me?
How?
Gritting her teeth, cracking her chitin plates, she forced herself to continue smiling as the boy stared at her solemnly.
“Fun fact about Mister Fabre, number one…” she growled, struggling to even speak properly with the man’s thousand voices still echoing in her head, “He’s… tall to lots of people. But short and skinny to some people.”
“Mhm,” the boy said.
“Fun fact about Mister Fabre, number two… he likes candies? Of the far eastern kind? Maybe the northern ones as well? He likes them when they’re purely sweet, though.”
“Mhm.”
“Fun fact about Mister Fabre, number three… he doesn’t… he always… he’ll never abandon–”
But, whether it was because she took too long to answer, or the boy was simply too thirsty to wait, she watched as he popped the cork of the vial off and down the glowing red liquid in one go.
Then she blinked as he dashed into her arms, hugging her as tightly as humanly possible.
“You’re not human,” he whispered, voice cracking as warmth flared across her chest, “and you’ll never be human.”
She blinked again.
Without another word, the boy exploded into a violent rupture of flames, the heat engulfing her body with a flash of brilliance.
Ow!
Owowowowow!
She seized up, scrambled back, and screamed in a hundred voices. None of them were spells. The onset of pain was so sudden and so soul-shakingly sharp that she just couldn’t suppress herself, and as she toppled over backwards, trying to scratch off the flames that were clinging to her chitin like glue—she heard metal walls falling from the walls all around, slamming into the floor to box her inside the observatory.
A second later, more canisters of oil, fluorescent gas, and all sorts of toxic fumes dropped into the observatory from hidden compartments in the walls, adding to the weight pressing down on her shoulders.
What is this?
Breathing was difficult. Moving was difficult. The flames weren’t melting through her full-body chitin armour, but they were hot enough to make the strands of muscle underneath tighten and shrivel up. They weren’t normal flames. Whatever red liquid it was that the boy had drunk, it was something nearly impossible to get rid of. She tried to roll around and untense her body, but she had a hundred different patches of pain all over right now, ebbing and flowing with the roaring beat of her heart; even thinking was a struggle right now.
Of course, she wouldn’t die from mere flames.
She was a Lesser Insect God, a god in her own rights. It’d take nothing less than her weapon piercing her heart with the force of lightning to bring her down—so she screeched and cackled as an old lady emerged from the very end of the observatory in front of her, having covered herself in camouflaging pheromones this entire time to keep herself out of Nona’s senses.
The old lady stepped forth with an amber wand swirling with sound waves; Nona’s wand, the one and only.
“... How cruel it is that you would sacrifice a child to bolster your faith in the workings of ‘magic’!” She laughed, sputtering flames from her mouth as she slammed all four hands into the ground and kicked her legs back, pulling herself into a pouncing posture. “It’s been a longgggg time, old lady! How long has it been? Twenty years? Ten years? That’s my wand you’ve got in your hands, isn’t it?”
The Headmaster didn’t reply. There was no hiding the dark, cold resentment in that old, wrinkled face of hers, and that only made Nona laugh even harder; to think the Headmaster of this ‘orphan academy’ would make one of her children blow themselves up just to weaken her temporarily was really, really something else.
“Your ‘magic’ is boring, and no amount of it will help you win this war!” she snarled, licking her flaming lips, “You people are beyond your time! You should’ve died ages ago, but you cling onto every little bit of hope you can get! For what? Once I get that wand back, we, the Magicicada Witches will become unstoppable–”
“What an arrogant fool you are,” the Headmaster whispered, chanting under her breath and gathering a swirling, room-rumbling ‘strike’ around her wand. “Who are you to speak for humanity? Just because you believe we’re done doesn’t mean we are, so don’t you dare lump me in with you. School is dismissed when I say it is, and as long as the Magicicada Witches remain, we, the Magicicada Mages, will remain.”
Nona’s lips twisted into a bright, excited grin.
It’d been a while since she had a real spell-casting duel.
“I’ll have it back,” she whispered. “The wand that is worth more than a thousand human lives.”