They had a momentum going. Zora got Emilia back, Cecilia conducted a children’s orchestra in record volume, Marcus returned more than a single punch, and Julius took out one of the bug’s eyes with a syringe.

But the moment the Magicicada Witch started casting ‘magic’, hell was wrought upon the courtyard.

“Cold, boring, predictable adults!” Nona screamed. “You always tell your children! Finish your meals or there’ll be bad weather tomorrow! Well, this is bad weather! It’s cold out here, isn’t it?”

Exhausted and cornered, robes stained with amber blood, hole in her chest—Nona was driven into the very definition of a ‘frenzy’. She flung one arm skyward, fingers splayed wide, and sheets of ice burst from her palm before crashing down in lethal, freezing rain. Zora couldn’t ‘strike’. He whipped his wand up and ‘blocked’ for Emilia and Cecilia behind him, and at the same time, the children were forced to run for cover. Duck. Hide. Marcus had ‘toughen’ to protect himself, and Julius was in a perpetual half-dead state, but their opportunity to press their advantage was over.

This was the Magicicada Witch’s counterattack.

Her lips twisted in a grin both fierce and wild, her voice cracking into the night like a whip as she raised more hands, commanding the air to obey. Sharp, biting winds swept through the courtyard, slicing into everyone’s skin. The ground beneath their feet splintered and fractured, frost spreading out in rapid veins that seemed to pulse with her fury. More and more spikes of ice burst from the earth, jagged chasms forming like hungry jaws as she slammed her palms down, making the rifts shoot out at the speed of sound.

If not for Emilia grabbing him and Cecilia by the waist, he would’ve been impaled by the giant spike that stabbed up at them. Instead, she jumped and dropped them off at the far end of the courtyard, ripping a flurry of blood threads from her nails before spinning them in front of her like razor fans. The threads ripped through the spikes that pursued, but not without a cost—Emilia snarled like a feral bug and cried like a human in the same choking breath, and Zora didn’t wait. He didn’t hesitate.

He threw himself around Emilia and hugged her tight as Nona continued her rampage.

More waves of frost coated the ground, the walls, the buildings in the distance. Columns of ice erupted from the ground, aimlessly impaling mounds of carcasses and debris. Misty tendrils lashed out, encasing pillars in solid ice, rendering them useless. Even Marcus couldn’t rip them out and throw them at her anymore. The rain of icicles never stopped throughout all of that, and it was all Zora and Cecilia could do to continuously cast ‘block’ overhead, hissing through the cuts and welts as the ice grazed them all over.

Weather the blizzard, Zora!

She can’t have that much stamina left!

Sooner or later–

“My wand worth a thousand human lives!” Nona snarled, cleaving and leaping through the spike of ice in front of Zora. “Give it back!”

She wasn’t aiming for him or Emilia. Cecilia was right behind him. The music teacher was still shouting at the children at the edges to fall back, to run for cover. She couldn’t defend herself.

Marcus and Julius darted in from both sides of the courtyard, one with their vibrating fist reared, the other with half a dozen glowing syringes clenched in his fist. Both struck Nona at the same time, but the interception failed. Nona screamed “Freeze!” and had their blood run cold, halting them in their tracks. Gritting his teeth, Zora whipped his wand into a sword and Emilia tore out a bloody mess of threads, attempting to intercept her as well—it didn’t work. He barely managed to cast ‘block’ on Emilia before she roared “Frosty boom!” and knocked them aside with a cold shockwave, opening a straight path between her and Cecilia.

He couldn’t shout at Cecilia to move out of the way in time, either. His vision blurred as he felt himself hissing, his eyes bleeding where tiny ice shards had pierced his irises, but Nona was brutal, relentless.

He went blind at the exact same time Nona ripped off Cecilia’s arm, reclaiming her wand.

A shiver raced through his core as he heard Cecilia crying out and collapsing, clutching her bloody shoulder. The only good thing about this situation was the fact that the castle was flesh-numbingly, nail-bitingly cold. Zora could barely feel his own legs. His own lips. He rasped for breath as he tried to blink, try to see, but he couldn’t even tell if his legs had been broken by the shockwave that knocked him onto his ass.

Only one thing was for sure: none of them could do anything about the wand the Witch now held in her hands.

Clutching it with four arms, they watched as the Witch parted her lips and sucked in a deep, long, heavy breath—and when she exhaled, he heard frost born on the tip of her tongue, chunks of crystalline ice forming across her body to clad her in an armour of cold.

“... My wand,” she whispered, devastating, howling winds churning around her. “How long… I have waited… for this day…”

But the hole in her chest hadn’t healed, and it was quite obvious, as he heard her staggering a few steps backwards after retrieving her wand, that she’d already run out of stamina.

He heard her whirling around to glare at all of them—fifty-seven children and four teachers of the Amadeus Academy—and there was a moment, maybe even a hint of hesitation, but she ultimately decided it wasn’t worth sticking around to finish them off.

You win for now, Thousand-Tongue, he thought he heard her say. But I’ll be back as soon as I recover my strength

Whether that was an insult or a compliment, Zora didn’t know. But when he, Marcus, and Julius gathered their voices and tried to strain out a desperate ‘stop’, Nona didn’t even bother slapping them away with her own ice-clad claws. She screamed “Frost wall!” and erected a wall of ice around herself, making their spells bounce off. It didn’t stop there, of course. She continued raising ice behind her as she half-run, half-stumbled towards the southwestern gate at the end of the courtyard.

At this rate, she was going to escape the academy with her wand in hand.

Cold slithered through Zora’s gut as he pushed himself to his feet, lungs grasping for scraps of cold-flavoured air, but he had to move. Cecilia was choking on her own breaths, missing an arm. Marcus’ ribs were most certainly broken, and Julius was lying half-dead on the ground, too exhausted to even move a limb. Compared to that, his broken eyes and the few icicles stuck in his legs were barely anything to call noteworthy.

He had to move.

So he ripped out the icicles in his legs, wheezed out a pained breath, and started sprinting after the Witch based on sound and sound alone—

Only to freeze when Emilia let out a bloodcurdling scream.

He whirled, focused on his acute tympana, and he heard her clawing at her own face, curled up in a little ball as her wings started fanning out behind her.

No.

His mind went blank. He forgot what he was going to do. Whatever it was, though, it couldn’t be more important than rushing straight back to Emilia, and that was exactly what he did. Her human skin had already fallen off and been replaced with hard chitin plates, but that didn’t stop him from sliding on his knees to wrap her in a hug, her spikes digging into his flesh. Two of her arms went feral, scratching and tearing painful gashes in his back as he pulled her head into his shoulder. Her spine rippled. Her wings grew even larger, unfurling to well over five times her body size, and she needed fuel for the growth. Blood. Flesh. Teary-eyed, she lunged for his neck for a bite—he didn’t stop her, because they’d done this before. After she filled her stomach, she’d come back to her senses.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

She always did.

She always will.

“... I-It’s cold, Mister Zora,” she said, the words coming out stuttered, broken by pained sobs. “I can’t… I can’t feel my… my legs. My wings. T-They’re not– They don’t belong to–”

“Listen to me,” he said, his own voice breaking, raw and pleading. He couldn’t see her, but he could hear every move she made, every breath she took, “you’ll be okay. You’ll be fine. Focus on my warmth. Focus on my voice. You like my voice, don’t you?”

“N-No. I… I don’t–”

“That’s what you said the first thing we met, but that’s not true right now, is it?” He let out a nervous, shaking laugh, pulling her in and hugging her tighter. Her uniform was already torn on her back. Spiky chitin plates were her back, but he clenched his jaw and hugged her even tighter, bloody palms and arms be damned. “It’s cold. I know. But Nona’s spell will pass eventually, and when that happens… just keep holding onto me. I won’t let you go. Who do you think I am?”

A tremor ran through her tiny body, and she sobbed into his chest, her nails twitching as they grew longer, more insect-like. “You’re… Mister Zora–”

“Wrong! Again!”

“You’re… Amadeus Academy’s… one and only–”

“No! Again!”

“Lord Zora!”

“Yes!”

“The… the Thousand Tongue Mage of homeroom 2-A!”

“And?”

“And… and…” She trailed off, shaking mightily for a few more seconds, but then she pulled away and looked at him with tears streaming down her face, two hands on his shoulder. “You’ll rip out your tongue a thousand times before you even think about sacrificing a single human.”

Then, with the other two hands she’d kept hidden from him, she slingshotted him across the courtyard on two threads she’d wrapped around his waist.

… What?

Time came to a halt.

The howling winds didn’t exist.

The world didn’t exist.

Nona didn’t exist.

Amadeus Academy didn’t exist.

It was just him, flipping through the air, and Emilia, sitting on her knees as her body cracked and failed to adapt to the mutations.

The old mage had told him as much when she was first brought to him. It wasn’t likely for children her age to survive the full mutation process. Their bodies couldn’t handle it. They’d ‘crumble’ away before they could ever turn into a full bug.

… My Emilia?

Strong, brave, kind Emilia?

You’re telling me she can’t survive something like that?

He didn’t need to be able to see. His mixture of emotions and racing thoughts coalesced, images flashing through his head. The first day they’d met. The first time he’d helped her put on her uniform. The first time she’d attended his classes, the first time she’d picked up a pencil, the first time she’d spoken a word in the local tongue.

The first candy she’d eaten.

The first classmates she’d played with.

The first friend she’d made.

Those images were so close, yet so oddly far away all the same, like he was remembering days he’d already had time to distance himself from. But it wasn’t that long ago. Three months. Less than that. And she’d made more progress retaining her humanity in these past three days than he’d managed trying to drill answers out of her for two months straight. He’d even gotten the name of the bug she’d been eating, for Great Maker’s sake, and if he had just one more hour– one more minute, he’d grab Julius up by the collar and force the man to brew her the antidote.

It wasn’t like that was impossible, right? They’d done the impossible many, many times already, right?

So why are you throwing me away?

What are you doing?

Don’t you want to keep attending my classes?

Don’t you want to play with Titus and your classmates?

Don’t you want to grow up, turn into a childish adult, and work with me?

Aren’t you scared?

Aren’t you cold?

And, in response, Emilia gave him the brightest, fiercest smile he’d ever been given.

In this one moment, it was like he could see again.

“You’re so warm, Mister Zora,” she mouthed, fixing him with a watery, glittering gaze. “Just… like… ‘fire’...”

…

Time resumed.

The howling winds came back.

The world came back.

Amadeus Academy came back, Emilia smiled until her face turned into dust—and her slingshot threw him far over the southwestern gate, his blade cleaving through the bridge as he landed with a screeching halt.

He’d been thrown with enough force that somehow, someway, he slid to a kneel thirty strides in front of Nona, and his abrupt arrival made her dig her heels into the bridge.

Her face may be half-shrouded by a mask of crystalline ice, but there was no hiding the snarl that came from under her mask as threw her hands out, shouting “Frost spikes!” and sending a wave of ice at him.

For his part, he closed his eyes and exhaled, gripping onto the hilt of his sword with both hands.

He didn’t need to ‘see’ for this.

His hearing was good enough.

“... I’ll give you a piece of candy if you answer this question right, Nona,” he whispered. “Do you know the meaning of fire?”

He knew. He was fire, and it was born on the tip of his tongue, smoke choking out his mouth—and with an underhanded slash, he ripped his sword out of the ground, sliding a roaring wall of flames back at the Witch.

The bridge trembled. His sword shattered in his hands, unable to withstand the heat. An explosive force grazed both of them as fire met ice in a fiery battle, but it was his that triumphed, and his advancing wall of flames hadn’t come to a stop yet when Nona took a frightened step back, flinging more ice at him.

None of them could stop the flames from slamming into her, enveloping her, and melting her frost armour as she fell over backwards with a pained screech.

Maybe the flames didn’t actually hurt, but it certainly made her drop her wand.

“Wand!” she screamed. “To–”

“Me.”

He’d lost his, but now he had hers. The spiral wand zipped into his fast, wild, and full of wrath. The velveted leather felt warm in his hand as he felt around, searching for a button—and there was one. How diligent of the mages. To think they even made a weapon crafted from the flesh of a Lesser Insect God able to transform between a wand and a sword… he certainly had them to thank when it was eventually his turn to die.

But there were only going to be two deaths on this night, and the Witch, bloodied and battered, threw herself at him as he advanced steadily.

He snapped his wand into a spiral sword, flicking it to the side and severing one of her slashing claws. One, two, three more claws swiped at him in swift, heavy blows. He heard them all. He caught them all with his blade, silent as he parried them repeatedly. Despite her overwhelming strength and speed, the orchestra in the courtyard was still playing, and it was the anthem of Amadeus Academy that stabbed at the Witch’s eardrums, preventing her from fighting at full focus.

“... Twenty-one years,” he said, slicing between slashes and cutting out a chunk of her throat, making her scream as she fell backwards. “You have travelled across continents, destroyed entire armies, and felled dozens upon dozens of fortified boroughs. Is this not the wand worth more than a thousand human lives? How could you let it go just like that?”

She tried to scramble to her feet, but he closed the distance in a flash, and in another moment he had her pinned to the ground with one foot on her unarmoured chest. Her claws ripped into his leg and tried to rend flesh from blood, but frankly, his blood was burning far, far too much for him to feel anything.

He didn’t feel like talking with the bug any further, either.

So he rammed his sword through the hole in her chest, raised her into the air, and whispered “firestrike”—a fiery spell shot straight into her heart as a snarling, crackling javelin.

It was ‘magic’ that made Amadeus Academy rumble against the mountainside.

And it was a human who killed a Lesser Insect God.