With one foot out the door, Zora waited for something to happen—anything would suffice—but, as expected, time wasn’t rewound.
The academy was still dark. He was still holding Emilia’s hand, and she was still looking up at him like he was losing his marbles.
… Hm.
Interesting.
“Mister Zora. What did you just–”
“But a mere jest.” Gripping his wand tightly, he gave Emilia a confident smile as he led her down the right corridor. “Ignore me. Do you know the expression ‘still bees find the sweetest flowers’?”
As they reached the half-broken, debris-filled stairs to the upper floor, Emilia gave him a small shake of her head. “N… No. I’ve never heard it before.”
“Do you wanna guess what it means?”
“It… it means…” she trailed off, and he watched her hop over pebbles as she skipped up the stairs with him. “If you’re slow… you’ll find more honey?”
Zora smiled softly. “Not quite. You know how bees buzz around when they fly, right? They’re loud critters, especially during the summer.”
“Mhm!”
He nudged her to the side of the stairs as they passed the second floor, distracting her from the janitor’s hand sticking out from a pile of rubble. “The expression comes from the far-southern Attini Empire, where colossal bees and ants and other colony insects batter endlessly against humanity’s walls. There are lots of giant flowers there that the bees like to drink from, but the flowers there are smart—they know to shrivel and hide when they hear bees buzzing by.”
“... Oh!”
“Do you wanna try guessing what that expression means again?”
Emilia nodded fervently. “It means… if the bee is quiet, it’ll get the honey!”
He rubbed her head, chuckling lightly. “That’s right. And we have to be still bees right now if we want to get to the dorm safely, okay?”
“Okay!”
“Also, you get nectar from flowers. Not honey.”
Emilia pouted, and dim torchlight flickered against cold stone as they climbed to the third floor of the language arts building.
Built atop a mountain range, the five-pointed, star-shaped Amadeus Academy truly was a refurbished ‘old lord’s castle’ in every sense of the word—a stranger would probably describe it as a sprawling labyrinth of pointy-tipped towers and spires, designed with wide arches and grand stained windows. Bridges wove between the various academy buildings with courtyards below them, and a single, giant tower stood at the back of the castle where all the smaller buildings were connected to. A transfer student trying to find a particular room or building without a guiding faculty member would undoubtedly fail.
He’d complained to the Headmaster many, many times that they really should put up signs to help the students navigate around the academy, but nobody had ever gotten around to it.
I’ll do it myself after this.
Right now… dormitory.
Footsteps silenced, he led Emilia through the winding corridors until they reached the bridge at the end of the third floor, linking the language arts building with the rest of the academy.
They hadn’t encountered any other giant insects on the way, though he did notice glittering scales scattered across the ground, as well as dents and cracks in the floor where something monstrous had evidently lumbered through—he grimaced as he swallowed a hard gulp, squinting through the dark bridge in an attempt to see if the giant butterfly was hiding in front of them.
Whatever the case, though, the bridge was the only path they could take to quickly reach the dorm in the centre of the academy. He had to guide Emilia through, because he wasn’t going to take the courtyard path below them.
What’s going on down there, exactly?
Glancing down through the broken windows, he cast ‘silence’ on Emilia’s ears and motioned for her to start walking in sync with him, matching their steps so they were as humanly quiet as possible. They already had silent shoes, but more ‘silence’ wouldn’t hurt, and… really, he just didn’t want Emilia to hear the chaos unfolding below them in the courtyard.
It was a massacre.
The Swarm had busted right through the southwestern front gate, and they were streaming into the courtyard right below the language arts building. It was utter annihilation. Half a dozen academy mages stood guard under the arches leading deeper into the castle, their wands sputtering and sparking with sound waves, but the screams and shouts didn’t lie—the spells they slung through the air collided with the giant beetles charging through the busted gate, but they were barely putting any dents in the masses of thick black chitin.
They were just buying time for the students and faculty that were downstairs to evacuate, and even Zora didn’t want to watch them get overrun and gore through by giant horns eventually. He couldn’t help them the way he was, a fledgeling mage with a blind student to protect; he had to tear his eyes away from the broken windows as he led Emilia through the bridge, sprinting as quickly as she could follow.
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How many giant bugs are there?
Fifty? A hundred? A thousand?
There were only fifty or so Magicicada Mages in the academy. He knew very well that most of them were old and not particularly combat-oriented—the young who could fight had died long ago during the early years of humanity’s losing war against the invading Swarm—so there was no chance the six of them below him would hold out for long.
Now, he wasn’t trained to use insect abilities like most soldiers in other parts of the continent, but right here right now, he had to protect the academy in their stead.
… Good souls.
Brave souls.
Amadeus will remember you.
He prayed for the old mages below him, once more for the man who’d died protecting him and Emilia, and they stepped off the bridge to enter the building adjacent to the dorm: the great southwestern cafeteria hall.
The dorm was a small two-storey building in the centre of the academy, but there were five cafeteria halls north, west, east, southwest, southeast of the dorm; they were designed so students could pick up their meals on their way back to their rooms no matter which class they had in which school building. The southwestern cafeteria connected the dorm and the language arts building, so there was no way around it. He had to pass through the cafeteria to get to the dorm.
Still smells like pickled herrings and garlic, huh?
He held Emilia still by the side of the doorway as he peered into the cafeteria, scanning for any giant bugs.
Zora never liked this place much even as a student, much less with the old-fashioned lanterns and chandeliers all extinguished. He didn’t have particularly fond memories of food being flung around the long tables during petty fights, nor did he enjoy the pungent smells of far-eastern food the cafeteria ladies used to serve. The wooden chairs were always too creaky, and the windows were built high and out of reach so he could never open them for ventilation… suffice it to say, he ate all his meals in the faculty room nowadays.
Now, the steel gate at the end of the hall was only fifty unassuming metres away, and getting there would lead them straight into the dorm, but the cafeteria was dark and full of terrors. He’d snuck out many times when he was a student to do midnight walks of courage with his friends, and without the lit chandeliers, only sparse and cold shafts of moonlight fell through the windows; he could barely see the messy tables, the knocked-over chairs, and the cracked porcelain flooring in front of him, much less tell if there were any out-of-place shadows.
… He reached into his pocket, pulled out a spare stick of chalk, and chucked it as hard as he could at the dorm gate.
The moment the chalk hit the ground—not even thirty strides away—a giant butterfly dropped from the ceiling, making both of them flinch as it started smashing its head into the ground.
Tch.
You bugs don’t ever make it easy for us.
While he pulled Emilia back and hid behind the doorway, he peeked at the giant butterfly smashing the ground over and over again, pulverising his stick of chalk. It only seemed to realise it wasn’t actually killing anyone after a good ten seconds, at which point it sent its whip-like antennae swerving across the cafeteria, knocking over tables and slamming into pillars alike. The whole cafeteria hall shook, dust falling from crevices in the vaulted ceiling.
He didn’t have to take a good look at its short wings to know it was the same butterfly that’d been wandering around the language arts building.
“... I’ll give you a piece of candy if you answer this question right,” he whispered, kneeling to meet Emilia eye-to-eye as he dispelled the silence over her head. “What does the expression ‘even ants know when to leave the anthill’ mean?”
Emilia immediately fixed him with a blink, thinking with her head tilted back. “Um… it means… um–”
“–no candy if you don’t get this right–”
“–wait!” she said, raising four defiant palms. “Um! It means… when bees are buzzing by to eat them, even ants know when to escape from their house!”
Zora let out a soft exhale and reached into his pocket, giving her a piece of wrapped bloodberry candy.
“That’s right,” he said, turning her around and pointing discreetly at the dorm gate as he did. “I need you to stick to the side of the cafeteria and sneak around that giant butterfly. Then, once you see me leading the butterfly away, I want you to bang on the gate as loud as you can. A teacher will definitely open it up from the inside and let you in.”
Emilia unwrapped her candy and munched on it happily, and then she blinked back at him.
“Where are you going, Mister Zora?”
“I’ll drag it away so it won’t hear you banging on the gate,” he repeated, patting her head as he put on a cheery voice. “Not to worry. I am Lord Zora, the Thousand-Tongue Mage of homeroom 2-A. I’ve tamed far more unruly beasts than a giant flightless butterfly.”
That was a lie, of course. And she still looked a bit hesitant to part from him—fingers fidgeting, shoes squeaking, the ‘silence’ spell dispelled a long time ago—so he held up another piece of candy and waggled it in front of her face.
He felt bad tempting her with something specially created by the academy physician to smell like human flesh, and he didn’t want to engage her insect instincts at all, but if this was what he had to do to get her to listen…
“I’ll give you another piece of candy once I see you inside the dorm,” he said, pulling it back as she tried to snatch it from him. “Listen to the teacher inside, okay? I’ll be back before you know it. Feel free to go up and sleep in your room if you’re feeling tired as well.”
“...”
He patted her head one last time as he rose to his feet. “Remember: stick to the walls, and only start banging once the giant butterfly’s out of the cafeteria–”
She hugged him, catching him off-guard and making his heart hammer in his chest.
“Come back, Mister Zora,” she whispered.
“... We are the architects of our own fortune,” he said. “Of course I’ll be back.”
Then he patted her back and sent her off, watching her creep along the outer walls of the cafeteria, inching slowly towards the giant butterfly in the centre of the hall. It wasn’t sweeping outwards with its antennae anymore, but he was no entomologist. He couldn’t predict its behaviour or movements in any way, shape, or form.
He was just a language arts teacher.
A lousy one at that, too.
What kind of teacher lets their student sneak off on their own?
With a loud stomp, he caught the giant butterfly’s attention and made it jerk its head forward. Those azure wings were unmistakable. It wasted no time at all charging forward, closing the thirty-metre gap between them by waddling on its clumsy stick-like legs—so he pressed his wand to his lips and exhaled coolly, doing his best to keep his calm.
There was another spell he wanted to try, and doing so would immediately determine the hard limit of his ‘magic’ capabilities.
“... Butterfly, butterfly, far from the sky,” he said, pointing his wand straight at the charging bug. “Would you please be so kind as to just keel over and die?”