One hour before midnight, Zora started leading all of them up to the observatory at the top of the northern research building.
They’d rested enough. All four of them with magicicada systems had eaten every last strand of excess insect flesh they couldn’t stuff inside their satchels, and while they didn’t get enough points to unlock another tier three mutation—Zora would be worried for their health if they ate another hundred and fifty points’ worth of bug flesh in the same night—they’d scattered the fifty points they got amongst their basic attributes.
For Zora, it was a no-brainer. Of the four of them, he was the one who consistently found himself in situations where he had to cast a lot of spells, so he’d rather have more Aura than raw offensive power.
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[Hexichor Aura: 600 → 655]
[Points: 55 → 0]
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He waved his status screen away as they found the broken set of stairs at the end of the second floor, and up and away they went, retreading the path they initially took to the third floor.
“We messed the building up badly, though,” Marcus muttered, walking abreast with him and kicking large chunks of debris out of their way; they couldn’t get past the obstacles otherwise. “Even if mom did defeat Nona and we don’t have to evacuate from the academy, we’ve got to find a different place to live for a while. I’ve got no clue how the hell we’re going to repair the damages.”
The rest of them grunted in agreement. Zora didn’t want to admit it, but they really, really went a bit overboard with killing the giant stick bug. The walls on the third floor were hanging off their pillars by threads, windows and doors lay in shattered piles everywhere, and half the floors in every single room, chamber, and hallway were caved in, making navigation around them an absolute chore. If they were all a bit more well-rested, they could simply have Marcus throw them across every chasm instead of having to shimmy across narrow ledges, backs to the walls—none of them were afraid of falling given they all had muscles, mutations, or drugs to protect themselves, but it’d be embarrassing. Zora didn’t want to be the one to fall.
When we eventually rebuild, though, we should have stronger walls and floors so this doesn’t happen again.
Records of repeated Swarm infestations were few, but not unheard of. Even if the Headmaster had successfully killed Nona and ended this infestation, there was no telling if other bugs would be drawn to the legendary wand now that the dome was destroyed. It wouldn’t hurt to have stronger foundations for any potential attacks down the line.
And, of course, the four of us will have to pull our weight when it comes to defending the academy as Magicicada Mages as well.
He rolled his shoulders and tried to loosen his muscles as they finally found a flight of stairs leading up to the fourth floor, where the destruction hadn’t reached in full. It was still mostly the same grotesque sights: men and women and bugs and monsters broken everywhere, lining the corridors with red, but neither he nor Cecilia were as pale as before. It wasn’t that they’d gotten used to the smell, no. There were just considerably fewer carcasses on the fourth floor, and that had to mean something.
Tightening his grip on Emilia’s hand, he made sure to walk just a little bit in front of her as he glanced at Cecilia.
“Hear anything?” he asked.
“Nobody’s around,” she replied, eyeing the flight of stairs at the end of the corridor leading up to the fifth floor suspiciously. “But… where is everyone, after all?”
All of them grimaced, tightened their jaws, but said nothing. They were all thinking the same thing. As they climbed the final flight of stairs and readied themselves to whip out their weapons at a moment’s notice, Zora couldn’t help but notice just how eerily quiet even the upper floors of the building were.
If there were survivors up here, shouldn’t they be able to hear breathing? Footsteps? Hushed whispers, fearful sobs, bleeding wounds?
It was like they were walking through the valley of death without an end in sight, and this journey could be all for naught.
… He sucked in a slow, cautious breath as they emerged onto the fifth floor: it was a straight, twenty-metre-long hallway, and at the end of it was a giant stone wall. Corrugated. Reinforced by steel bars where there should be doorknobs instead. Even if he’d never actually been up here before—not once in ten years—it was obvious the wall wasn’t supposed to be there.
“That’s… where the doors to mom’s observatory are supposed to be, right?” Julius whispered, as all of them remained crouching just a few steps before actually stepping foot onto the fifth floor; the bodies lying along the corridor were definitely worrying. “Is that wall an emergency barricade or something? There’s gotta be people behind it then, right?”
Marcus narrowed his eyes, stepping up first. “Only one way to find out.”
Following his lead, the rest of them crept across the final stretch of the fifth floor, and in their unease, both Zora and Cecilia forgot to distract Emilia with small talk—not that Emilia wasn’t smart enough to figure out there were corpses all around here. Zora would rather her not get used to the macabre series of deaths, but at this point, it was already too late.
He’d make up for her lost innocence with the best student years of her life.
“It’s…” Cecilia trailed off, all of them stopping right before the corrugated wall. “Well, it’s not a door alright.” Then she leaned in close, looking up the sides of the wall connected to the ornate mahogany doorway before glancing back at them. “It must’ve been built as an emergency barricade that can fall in at the pull of a lever.”
“The exterior looks unblemished, too,” Julius muttered, placing a palm on the stone. “I don’t know… exactly… what it’s made of, but it’s not normal stone. I smell insect chitin infused within the material.”
Zora was about to feel the stone for himself when his ears twitched. Two, three, four, five of them leapt back a few steps immediately, finally whipping out their weapons as footsteps clattered faintly behind the wall.
Silence descended upon the chamber, only interrupted now by the sound of their breaths, the beating of their hearts.
… Someone's inside.
It's–
“Who's there?” a muffled voice called out. “Is there someone outside?”
Zora blinked, trying to place the owner of the voice; he was a bit slow on the uptake. Marcus and Julius widened their eyes as they immediately sauntered forth, banging on the thick stone wall with everything they got, and it wasn’t a few more seconds later that he felt he recognised the old lady standing behind it.
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“Headmaster!” Marcus shouted, knocking a few more times for good measure as the rest of them gathered around, getting as close to the wall as possible. “Are you safe? Are you well? How many people are there inside your observatory?”
Silence for a moment, then a clearer, louder response. “Just the two of us!” the Headmaster shouted back. “It’s just me and Yanli here! The bugs breached the northern building a few days back, and while the two of us managed to retreat all the way up here, we had to pull down the… these emergency walls in order to keep the bugs out!”
Yanli? Zora knew the name. The boy from the far north wasn’t in his homeroom, but considering he taught every language class in the academy across every age group, he knew he’d talked to the boy plenty of times before.
And, as if plucking the exact thought from his mind, the little boy shouted from behind the wall, a voice even more soft and muffled than the Headmaster’s.
“Is Mister Fabre there?” he asked, banging the wall a good few times. One of Zora’s brows inched up far enough to wrinkle his forehead. The Headmaster sounded a bit strange, but that really was the boy’s voice. “What’s going on outside? Are the bugs gone? Can we come out now?”
Marcus was about to answer again, but Zora placed his hand on the wall and answered this time. “I’m here, I’m here. Do you hear me, Headmaster?”
“Clearly,” the old lady yelled back.
“Good to hear. There’s four of us teachers out here: me, Miss Sarius, Mister Evander, and Mister Tadius. We’ve checked the southwestern, southeastern, western, eastern, and faculty buildings. As far as we know, the four of us are the only surviving faculty.”
Another long pause. “And the children? My researchers? My mages guarding the northern building?”
“Classes 2-A, 2-B, and 2-D are all safe and sound in the dormitory. We’ve prepared them for evacuation first thing tomorrow morning, which is why we’re here right now searching for survivors to take with us.” He took a small breath before continuing. “Where’s the Magicicada Witch, Headmaster? On our way here, we encountered a giant stick bug who said Nona ordered it to guard the northern building, and there are also bodies out here in this very corridor. Is Nona not searching for you and the wand you’re holding from her?”
“Wand?” The Headmaster made a strange noise for a moment like she was choking on something, and Zora furrowed his brows; she cleared her throat in the next moment and responded. “How do you know about that? We Magicicada Mages never told any of the teachers about that.”
“The giant stick bug told me,” he said curtly. “I’ll explain later, but where is Nona? Is the wand capable of killing her still safe with you–”
“It’s safe with me, yes. Now get us out of this observatory first,” she interrupted, voice tight and urgent. “The wall was dropped days ago, but we can’t open it on our side. The lever I’m holding down now isn’t working. Now, there should be a backup lever outside the gate, so if we pull it on both sides at the same time, the wall should creak open. Can you look around outside for me?”
Marcus and Julius didn’t hesitate, fanning out to scrape away at the mounds of debris lining the walls of the corridor. “Don’t you know where the lever is, Headmaster?” Marcus shouted back. “It’d be a lot easier if you just told us!”
“I didn’t build these defensive shelter walls myself, but I’m fairly certain they can only be lifted if people on both sides pull the lever at once,” the Headmaster responded quickly. “It’s a failsafe, I believe, so people inside the shelter can be alerted to someone outside the wall when the lever is pulled. I would have barely heard you kids outside were it not for Mister Evander’s heavy steps.”
Marcus scratched the back of his head in embarrassment, and just as Zora was about to tilt his head back and frown again, Emilia let out a loud ‘here!’ on his right. All of them rounded on her, staring pointedly; she’d ripped away a small mound of debris to reveal a black metal lever hammered into the floor, and her four hands were already wrapped around the bar.
“You’ve found the lever, haven’t you?” the Headmaster cooed, humming unnaturally in delight. “Where’d you find it? On the left? On the right?”
“On the right, right next to the door!” Emilia chirped.
“Oh?” The Headmaster made another strange noise. “You sound like… Emilia from 2-A, aren’t you? I’m already holding the lever down on my end, so just pull… or push or whatever. Make your lever point in the opposite direction for me, won’t you?”
Emilia nodded happily to nobody in particular as she heaved, squeezing her eyes shut, putting her all into trying to pull the lever back. Marcus and Julius started wading over to help, but then Zora and Cecilia titled their heads at the exact same time, holding out their wands to stop the two from reaching Emilia.
“... That ‘failsafe’ doesn’t make sense to me, Headmaster,” Zora said, a sliver of unease creeping into his voice. “If the lever on the outside is meant to alert the people on the inside once it’s pulled, why is it built to be so hard to pull? Emilia may be a child, but she can easily rip off everyone’s head here. If someone were injured and trying to get into the shelter, why design a lever that requires tremendous time and energy to pull?”
“And why must both levers be pulled at the same time?” Cecilia added, a quiver to her voice. “Say the people on the inside know there’s someone injured on the outside. There’s no way the injured person can pull the lever, so why can’t the people on the inside just lift the wall by themselves? Is there really a lever on the inside?”
Bolts and reinforced steel bars slowly slid off to the side as Emilia continued pulling the lever, but the Headmaster sounded exasperated, almost impatient with them. “I don’t know, Mister Fabre, Miss Sarius. I didn’t design this mechanism. Just keep pulling the lever, dear–”
“The Headmaster calls me ‘Cecilia’ even in the presence of other people,” Cecilia said plainly.
The temperature in the corridor dropped like a dagger of ice falling on everyone’s shoulders.
And from behind the cold stone wall, the ‘Headmaster’ chuckled very, very softly.
“... Just keep pulling the lever, dear–”
Zora whipped his wand at the lever. “Let go, Emilia. Now. I’ll ‘strike’ it and–
“Just keep pulling the lever, dear.”
The spell diffused through tiniest pores in the stone wall, moving through all of them like a harsh morning gale. Zora and Cecilia pressed their hands to their ears, wincing at the sheer volume of the spell, while Marcus and Julius both clenched their throats, just now realising what they were going up against.
For her part, Emilia was affected by the spell, too, but her arms were shaking as she tried her damndest to let go of the lever to no avail.
“Mister… Mister Zora,” she breathed, chitin plates cracking, her body operating on a will distant from her own. “I can’t… I can’t let go.”
Shit!
Zora hissed, transforming his sword into a wand and infusing ‘strike’ around the blade. He was the first to recover, the first to move, but he was too late. Just as he dashed forward in an attempt to destroy the lever, a loud click resounded beneath the floor, around the walls, above the ceiling, like a hundred gear arrays were turning all at once—and then he brought his blade down on the base of the lever, splitting it in half and sending shrapnel flying everywhere.
Emilia cried as she was cut in more than dozen places and sent skidding back, so he immediately rushed over to wrap her in a hug.
“Are you okay?” he asked, gulping as he patted her from head to toe, checking to see if any of her vitals had been hit. “It’s okay. It wasn’t your fault. That was just–”
“Me!”
The new voice didn’t belong to any of them. Whirling around, he raised his sword at the rising stone wall, worry and exhaustion slowly giving way to terror and trepidation.
Marcus clenched his fists, drawing one leg back. Julius’ hands instinctively slid into his pockets, reaching for his syringes. Cecilia backed up slowly with her wand pointed straight ahead, and even Emilia was growling, baring her fangs at the noxious black mist seeping out the bottom of the rising wall—but none of them ran, because none of them could run, shudders of animalistic fear rippling down their spines.
Then the dark, moonlit silhouette of a four-armed, two-legged cicada draped in the robes of a Magicicada Mage appeared right beyond the raised wall, grinning at all five of them with haunted, empty vermillion eyes.
She was human, but not quite.
She was a bug, but not quite.
Somewhere in between, but also more than a Mutant-Class who only resembled a human in form without the will, without the mind—that was a Lesser Insect God.
And Zora recognised very well the killing pressure of the Magicicada Witch who’d come for the Fabre Household ten years ago.
That primordial fear had never left his bones.
“... Hi!” she said, waving cheerily at all of them, and her voice was an ear-grating amalgamation of a hundred screaming, overlapping voices. “I’m Nona, youngest of the Magicicada Witches! Now, where’s my wand that’s worth more than a thousand human lives?”