Emilia stared at Titus’ inhuman legs for a good few seconds, completely dumbfounded.
Eh?
That’s not… what normal human legs… are supposed to–
“Cricket legs,” Titus said plainly, leaning back and planting his arms behind him again. “Mama and papa used to be part of the ‘Heliostadt Hoppers’, a message-delivering faction in the south where all the adults have cricket class mutations. Papa wanted me to get a headstart even if I couldn’t inherit a system until I was fourteen, so he fed me crickets and forced me to get used to the taste of bug meat early on.”
As he spoke, several more children passed by her room, and they peered in with eyes quite wide open—a few of the boys walked in after a few seconds of deliberation, and Emilia recognised them as Titus’ friends. The ones who’d been with him last night. She immediately braced herself for a scolding, maybe some berating, maybe some hitting, but the boys just sat down behind Titus instead, looking curiously between the two of them as though wondering if they had an interesting conversation going.
None of them paid any mind to TItus’ armoured cricket legs as he craned his head backwards, telling them to show her as well.
For her part, she held her breath as all three of them pulled off parts of their uniform to show her their armoured appendages as well.
“Boris has half a small mantis scythe sticking out his elbow,” Titus explained, thumbing at the boy directly behind, “then Tiefa here has the small tail of a mayfly, and Sunara here has the mouth of a antlion underneath those bandages,“ he continued, gesturing to the boys by his sides. “Actually, there’s a few more of us. Tara! Ishiel! Come here!”
More footsteps resounded outside in the hallway, and two girls trailed by an even larger group of girls sprinted by the doorway. Emilia immediately recognised Tara as one of the girls who’d spoken to Mister Zora in the greenhouse, and while the boys behind Titus started poking and making fun of each other’s mutations, the girls all flooded into her room, chatting and gossiping aloud about what Titus was doing in here.
It didn’t take long at all for Titus to convince everyone they were comparing cool mutations, and everyone started pulling their uniforms apart to show off their unique traits: one girl’s forearm was covered in tiny, fuzzy hairs that made weird sounds as she swished her arm through the air. Another girl had fabric-like wings between her fingers, and she could fan her friends with her bare hands to generate cool gusts of wind. The boys near the closet were wrestling each other with crab pincers they’d been hiding underneath their hand-shaped gloves, while another boy pulled down his headband to reveal eight round eyes peppered across his forehead, none blinking in sync.
None in the room, all fifteen or so of them, didn’t have something wrong with them.
“... The Headmaster picked all of us up before we could mutate completely,” Titus said cheerily, crossing his legs and grinning as he stuck his arms in his lap; now that Emilia was paying attention, she could tell his sleeves were hiding sharp chitin plates underneath as well. “You’re the most mutated one to transfer here in years, I think, but… that’s why we know there’s one thing that’ll definitely help you hold on for just a little longer, until Mister Tadius can brew a medicine for you and halt the mutations from taking over!”
The rest of the kids around the room were getting really rowdy and noisy now, but all of them seemed to disappear the moment Titus pulled two striped sticks from his pockets; she sniffed instinctively, recognising the cold scent of metals, oil, and some other pungent fuel she couldn’t name.
Components to create ‘fire’.
“Hold this,” Titus said, smiling giddily to himself as he shoved one of the sticks into her hand and pulled out a matchbox from his pocket, “now press the paper at the end of the stick onto mine, and then I’m gonna burn both pieces of paper at once.”
Befuddled, she held her stick out nervously and pressed the little piece of paper onto Titus’ stick, and she flinched as he flicked his matchstick across the box on the ground. The little burst of invisible heat made her feel like crying, but then he held the burning matchstick under their intertwined papers and lit them aflame—she almost dropped her striped stick as it started popping and sparking, hissing out flashes of heat that made her moth senses go ‘blind’ for a second.
In the next second, she was fully entranced by the flashes of heat sputtering out of the stick in her hand.
“Mister Tadius gave these extra ones to me!” Titus harrumphed, placing one arm on his hips as he waved his burning stick around. “They’re called ‘sparklers’, and they’re, like, fireworks from the far north! Don’t worry about burning the floorboards! Mister Tadius adjusted them so the sparks don’t last long!”
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She was speechless, of course. She was holding a form of living, breathing ‘fire’ in her hands, and she couldn’t help but wave her sparkler slowly around. The small popping sounds they made were just too interesting, and evidently, the rest of the kids in the room agreed.
While she played and wagged her sparkler around, Titus had to fend off all his friends, loudly declaring he had no more sparklers to distribute; that didn’t stop the kids from surrounding him and begging him to share the one sparkler he did have with them, of course.
But nobody asked Emilia to share hers, and… she was grateful for that.
She could have this ‘fire’ all to herself.
“It’s fun, right?” Titus laughed, slapping his friends and jerking his sparkler around as the boys tried to yank it from his hand. “Mister Tadius says that many bugs like cool temperatures—which is why mutated kids like us prefer hiding in the dark—but if we grow used to ‘cold’ and think it’s natural for us to be cold, then we’ll only be letting our mutations take over faster!” Then he shuffled closer with a grin, trying to fit under her desk as well to get away from the grabby, sweaty hands. “We’re humans, after all! It’s natural for us to be warm, and that’s why Mister Tadius made these sparklers: so we can remember what ‘fire’ feels like!”
…
Her room was noisy. So many footsteps, so many voices. Even the dying, sputtering sparkler in her hand was contributing to that noise, and Titus shuffling under her desk only made the air in her room that much more stifling, that much more overbearing… but it wasn’t exactly a conscious thought that made her tear up when her sparkler eventually ran out.
Sniffling, sobbing under her desk, she felt her heart aching for just another minute with her sparkler—so Titus elbowed her ribs softly, handing her another one with a mischievous wink.
“Sorry for not talking to you the past two weeks,” he said. “I’m the class monitor, and Mister Fabre even told me to take care of you, but I… well, I thought you were a little scary, so I–”
She interrupted him with a half-sob, half-apology of her own—crying about his ear she’d bitten off last night—and at the same time, she couldn’t help but steal some of the flames from his sparkler to ignite her own once more.
She was wrong, after all.
Before Mister Zora could even show her the third kind of warmth she could grow to tolerate, someone else had already come and took that place with a spark.
----------------------------------------
… And while the children inside the room played with sparklers and compared the ‘coolness’ of their mutations, Zora sat right outside with the other three teachers, their backs against the wall as they chewed on strips of freshly boiled Mutant-Class flesh.
I told you they shared more in common with you than differences.
Lord Fabre of homeroom 2-A is always right.
Not all the children in the orphan academy had insect mutations. Only about twenty percent of them had consumed far more bugs than they should’ve without a system, but all of them had successfully had their hostile takeovers essentially ‘frozen’ by the antidotes Julius brewed, resulting in insect traits that were simply that: traits that were neither detrimental nor beneficial to them. Part of Marcus’ job as a fitness teacher was to teach them how to control their mutations through vigorous exercise, while part of Cecilia’s job as a music teacher was to return them the finer controls of their bodies by playing instruments.
Zora figured Emilia had probably never noticed class 2-A was the class for half-insect children, given how little attention she paid to her classmates, so he was glad to hear her finally sharing a laugh with Titus inside her room.
It was one small step to retaining her humanity.
“... How long does she have left, Julius?” he asked, running his hands through his hair as he closed his eyes, grimacing softly.
“Not more than two or three days,” Julius replied sternly from the other side of the doorway. “I can carry the antidote-brewing equipment with me as we run, and I can still whip up the antidote within a day… no, six hours or so. I can do it in six. But I still need to know the exact type of moth she ate so I can… alter my blood accordingly.”
“So we’re back to square one,” Zora muttered. “No progress made on that front.”
“She’s a moth with a Hexichor Art that allows her to pull glowing blood threads out of her nails,” Cecilia pointed out. “Know anything about this, muscleman? Apart from spiders, do you know any bugs that can create threads the way she can?”
Marcus grunted quietly. “Hell if I know. If even Julius doesn’t know, then–”
“The Magicicada Witch would know,” Zora said plainly, opening his eyes. “I bet Nona would know exactly what type of moth she ate.”
Two, three, four seconds passed in tense silence before Cecilia gulped next to him, lips parting slowly.
“Zora,” she whispered in as steady a voice as she could muster, “you were the one who said we can’t come in contact with Nona no matter what, so–”
“I was joking,” he said, shaking his head as he let out a soft, sardonic chuckle. “I’ll… talk to her more over the next two days. Now that she’s opened up to the other kids a bit, maybe her memory’s going to get jogged and she’ll be able to tell Julius what she ate.”
Cecilia furrowed her brows, still looking quite worried, but she knew it and he knew it; there was no point pressing this topic any further.
If they came in contact with Nona, they’d die, and then all of their kids would die as well.
He wasn’t that shoddy of a teacher.
“... But it doesn’t change the fact that there’s still one more person we have to check on before we leave,” he said, looking solemnly around at the three of them. “We’ll go in one hour after all the kids have their dinner and fall asleep. If everything goes relatively smoothly—which it certainly won’t—we’ll be back well before dawn.”
Julius chewed his lips as he tossed Zora another strip of insect flesh. “Do you really think… the Headmaster is still up there? Alive? With whatever that Magicicada Witch is looking for?”
“No shit,” Marcus grunted, slapping Julius on the top of his head. “Of all the old ladies in this academy, she’s the only one I can imagine giving a Lesser Insect God a run for its money.”
“We’re not leaving her behind, after all.” Cecilia nodded firmly. “We’ll evade the Magicicada Witch, beeline straight for the top, and get mom to come with us—if she’s stuck in the north because something’s keeping her there, like Marcus and Julius were, then we’ll dislodge it with full and utmost prejudice.”