Thirty minutes until midnight.

It took approximately ten minutes for Julius to ‘heal’ all four of them, and the moment they were well enough to walk, they herded every last child into the common room and barred the door to the northern foyer. The Witch wasn’t likely to break her word, but it was better to be safe than sorry if she were to lose her patience and try to break in. That half-frozen foyer wouldn’t stop her—nothing had stopped her from tearing down the northern building and the botanical garden—but it was more about the peace of mind that came from knowing the foyer couldn’t be accessed anymore.

‘Peace of mind’, of course, was optimistic.

The children were scared out of their minds. They’d been woken up in the middle of the night to the sound of an entire castle crashing down on them, and then the only teachers they could rely on stumbled in half-dead. Anyone would be frightened. Even now, in the brightly lit common room, the fifty-seven children of Amadeus Academy were panicking. Clutching their satchels, chewing their nails, they were scattered all around whispering loudly to each other, and most—if not all—were tired. Bags under their eyes. They wanted to go back to sleep, but they couldn’t. How could they, knowing the Witch had just given all of them an ultimatum?

For his part, Zora wasn’t even trying to control the chaos.

While Marcus and Julius tried their best to calm the children, speed-walking between cliques and classes in an attempt to dispel the palpable fear in the room, Zora and Cecilia stood blankly before the door to the southwestern foyer.

He didn’t know what sort of face he was making.

Probably the same as Cecilia, who was standing just as deathly still as he was.

… There is no choice.

What is there to even think about?

An ant on a single path does not pause to wonder.

He angled his head slowly to look at Cecilia, eyes twitching. Cecilia returned to him a teary, quivering gaze, bare hands clasped over the little conductor’s baton hanging off her belt.

His eyes wandered down.

She’d had that thing for as long as he could remember. Ever since they were children. It was almost identical to their wands: a spiral-patterned stick layered with polished black chitin, the handle wrapped in smooth, velveted leather. He’d never learned why she carried it around everywhere she went, but if the Headmaster had given it to her not as a mere birthday gift, then it all made sense—Nona had been barking up the wrong tree these past three days.

The Headmaster knew all along that Nona would find them one day, and when that happened, she wanted Cecilia to run.

But instead, they stuck around for three more nights.

They picked up Marcus, Julius, and even tried to go for the Headmaster as well—and if they hadn’t done that, it would’ve taken Nona a bit longer to figure out she’d been deceived.

But there’s no point in regretting anything now.

Right here, right now…

“Give it to me, Cecilia,” he said.

The music teacher didn’t hear him. She must have, given she was staring at him as well, but she didn’t ‘hear’ him. Her mind was wandering and tears were still streaming down her cheeks. Her heart thumped an erratic beat in her chest, and he couldn’t bear listening to it any further.

He raised an arm and tried to touch the wand, but she reeled away abruptly, her eyes focused far and away. She was looking, but she wasn’t looking straight at him.

Hands trembling, she covered the wand and took one more step back—and that irked him more than anything else.

“... Cecilia,” he said, slower this time, “that thing on your belt. Give it to me.”

She bit her lips and shook her head in response, backing away further.

“Cecilia–”

“No,” she whispered, her voice shaky, unsteady. “This… this is what she’s looking for, isn’t it? All this time? And it was with me for so, so, so many years?”

“I suppose so. In any case, give it to me. I’ll take it down to her.”

Cecilia reeled away even further, sniffling loudly. “No. Mom, she… she gave it to me. Me. This is the one thing she’s entrusted to me, and now you want to–”

“–yes–”

“–she gave this to me–”

“So what?” he snapped, and his voice cut through the chaos, through the noise, through the whispering and reassuring. “Give me the wand! Or Emilia dies! She’s your student, too, you know?”

“E-Even still! This… is mom’s gift! Her legacy! I–”

“I was against her following us every single time we left, but you insisted! You said she’d be useful–”

“–and she was! How many times has she saved our asses–”

“–so now that it’s our turn to repay the favour, we cut her off? Leave her out to die?” He was feverish, the words just slurring past his lips as he snapped his fingers at her wand. “I’m not asking again, Cecilia! That thing! Give it to me!”

And his spell would’ve hit Cecilia had someone not smacked him on the back of his head, knocked him to the floor, and sat on his spine to keep him from scrambling up. Without thinking, he whirled and growled at whoever it was—he just hadn’t expected it to be Julius, of all people, and he most certainly hadn’t expected every last child in the room to be standing around the two of them.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“C-Calm down, Zora,” Julius muttered, barely able to contain his own shaking as he readjusted his glasses. “What… unseemly behaviour… for a teacher of the academy.”

It was his own words against him.

As Marcus pushed his way through the gathering crowd, Zora turned back to Cecilia and gave the teary-eyed music teacher a long, hard look.

Whatever ‘anger’ he’d been holding in since Nona gave them her ultimatum melted away, and he swallowed as she curled into a ball, putting her face in her hands. He took a shallow breath. She didn’t. The quiet, broken sobs came out muffled, and though they were barely audible, they seemed to echo around the room, cutting sharper than any instrument could.

She’d just lost her mom—all four of them did—and now he was taking it out on her?

His fists clenched and unclenched at his sides, his lips tightening into a quivering, helpless line.

“Ce… Miss Sarius,” he said. “I didn’t mean to–”

Marcus knelt and whacked him on the head so hard his jaw bounced off the floor. “We’re not giving the damn bug her wand back, fucking idiot,” Marcus hissed. “You think she’ll keep her word? You think you kept your word?”

Zora snapped his head up to glare at the muscleman. “Hell are you talking about–”

“First Day Locust, Month Moth, Year Fifty-Eight. You promised you’d give me your corner cubicle if I rounded up your quarterly physical checkup numbers. I gave you the pass, so what do you think you did to me?”

“I… well… okay, but you were stupid for thinking I’d ever give up my corner cubicle–”

Marcus whacked him on the head again. “Exactly, skellyman. You play with words, and so does that bug–”

“Don’t you compare me to that thing–”

“So do you really think she’ll let us off even if you give her what she wants?” Marcus said, raising a fist, and Zora raised his own hands in a meagre attempt to protect his head. “Hell no. You give her what she wants, and she’ll kill Emilia, and then us, and then she’ll go on to kill hundreds and thousands more people around the continent. You think that’s what mom would’ve wanted us to do?”

“Then what?” Zora said, his eyes dark and sunken. “We just… we run? We hope she doesn’t catch us? We bury it in a hole, pretend like we don’t know jack when she catches us, and hope it takes her a while before she ‘feels’ it somewhere? If she’s going to get her wand back anyways–”

“She won’t–”

“We can make the antidote, Marcus!” he shouted, voice cracking. “Two months twenty-six days and eighteen minutes! That’s how long I’ve spent trying to figure out what moth she ate, and now that we know– now that we can get on the road, get Julius to brew the antidote, and give her a normal life, we’re just gonna give that up? For what? For who? The rest of humanity outside the academy? I’ll have you know–”

“Zora–”

“I don’t care about what goes on outside this place!” he snapped. “You’re a big man, Marcus, but I’m a small man with a small heart, and I’m moved only by what is in front of me! Not what the world wants! Not what humanity wants! I won’t abandon my kid–”

“W-We don’t have to abandon her, either.”

Zora paused. Once again, it was Julius who caught him off-guard. The severely underweight physician who was sitting on him coughed before looking at Marcus for permission. Once Marcus gave the nod to go-ahead, Zora was whacked on the head again—and a hit from someone physically weaker than him hurt a lot more than from someone he’d never beaten in pinky-to-hand arm wrestling.

“... T-There’s a winning move here, you know?” Julius stammered, raising a trembling finger. “We fight Nona. We kill Nona. Not a single human dies, and we get to stay in the academy as well. That’s the best case scenario, right?”

Silence.

“You… want to fight Nona?” Zora said, his eyes brimming with cold disbelief. “Come on. You saw her. You were there. Dozens and hundreds of Magicicada Mages have tried over the decades before deciding it’s much safer to just bunker down and try to hide under a dome–”

“But none of them had her wand before,” Marcus interrupted, jabbing at Cecilia’s belt. “We have it. And we’re not old folks like they were. Great Makers, we got our abilities three damned nights ago, and how many giant bugs have we already buried in the ground? Ten? Twenty? A hundred?”

“Much less than that, muscleman. Are you even keeping track–”

“And it’s the four of us, skellyman.” Marcus whacked him on the head again, and he’d just lowered his arms, thinking that part of the conversation was over. “We’re the teachers of Amadeus Academy. Frankly speaking, I think we’ve got a chance at shutting up that bug for good if we play our cards right.”

“What cards? That wand’s nothing but an amplifier, and you saw how… you saw that ‘magic’ spell, didn’t you?”

“...”

“It was like her spell… had colour to it,” Zora hissed. “She froze the northern gate, muscleman, and she’s a goddamned cicada. They hate the cold. If that’s not real, honest-to-god ‘magic’, then I don’t know what is, but we don’t have the firepower to match something like that. Compared to that, our spells are–”

“We don’t have to match it.”

This time, it was Cecilia who spoke, and Zora gritted his teeth as he turned to look at her. She was still sniffling, still curled up in a ball, but their faces were close enough that he could see a little something in her eyes—fear, yes, anguish, yes, but there was also something else. Something more than a weak, ugly face wracked with tears.

‘Fire’.

Cecilia’s sapphire eyes were ‘fire’.

“Back then… in the northern building… there was that one instance where we managed to make Nona freeze, didn’t we?” she breathed, her eyes glittering as her voice became thick with emotion. “It was… sound. ‘Music’. And when Nona screeched so loudly mom couldn’t even hear her own spell, that spell didn’t go off—can’t we do the same to her?”

Zora blinked slowly, swallowing a hard gulp.

Then Cecilia looked around at the children—and, without even a single word spoken, all of them nodded back.

Their eyes, too, glowed with barely restrained ‘fire’.

“What song?” he mumbled.

“School anthem,” she replied curtly.

“How many kids?”

“All of them.”

“They’re kids, Cecilia. We can’t–”

“I don’t wanna leave Emilia behind,” Titus said, raising his hand slowly. “I can play the trumpet.”

Then his friends raised their hands, suggesting the instruments they could play. Then their friends raised their hands as well, and then their friends did, and then their friends did. Fifty-seven children in the common room, none older than twelve, and while some were hesitant—doubtful, fearful—none lashed out at the idea of leaving behind one of their own.

And they’d barely even been friends for long.

… Hah.

If only you could see them now, Emilia.

As Julius stood up and Marcus started instructing the kids to find their reserve instruments, Cecilia also stood—but she didn’t run, and she didn’t avert her eyes.

She offered him a helping hand, and the Witch’s wand along with it.

“If Nona will kill all of us whatever we decide to do, then I want to fight,” she whispered, “and I’m not keen on letting the bug who killed mom see another sunrise ever again.”

And it was her eyes, again, that sold it to him.

That ‘fire’.

Wasn’t that something he wanted to show Emilia no matter what?

“... We need a strategy, then,” he said, grabbing her hand. “Thirty minutes to midnight. Either she buries us under a mountain of rubble, or a Lesser Insect God will perish tonight.”