Zora may know how to ‘cook an egg’, but casting ‘turn the butterfly legs into a mouth-watering delicacy’ was a little bit out of his depth.
That didn’t stop him and Cecilia from trying to crack the black tube-like shells with the back of their kitchen knives, though, while Emilia sat on the countertop nearby and Titus and his friends scattered across the foyers to watch over the gates.
“... And what’s this about eating insect flesh to grow stronger?” Cecilia asked, scrunching her nose with a heavy scowl as she managed to wedge her knife along the length of the hard chitin, struggling to crack the whole thing open like a lobster leg.
In stark contrast, Zora was still struggling to whack the leg open, and he feared he’d destroy the cutting board underneath before he could put a dent in it.
“How much do you know about our esteemed academy mages to begin with, Miss Sarius?” he said in a strained, sing-song voice, glancing at Emilia kicking her legs back and forth aimlessly as he did. “Our tier one core mutation is infamous—‘Resilin Tymbal’, the mutation that forms in our throats and allows us to cast spells we can imagine ourselves physically doing even without any abilities, tools, or weapons. I’m sure you already know this, given how you tried to blow my face off earlier with your wand.”
“‘Twas a mistake.”
“Fun fact about Miss Sarius, number four–”
“Quiet,” she muttered, glancing over to spit the spell at him briefly, which he caught with the tip of his wand and dispelled with another flick.
“You do know how to cast a spell,” he said, letting go of his wand to resume hacking at the butterfly leg with his knife. “You speak the word you believe you’re physically capble of doing, and then you’re at a crossroads: either you let the spell diffuse around you in an area, or you concentrate it on your wand to sling it in a particular direction. I’m no scholar of the Magicicada Mages, but I’m sure both options have their own advantages. The wider area speaks for itself, but for the spell-slinging option, higher precision and the concentration of the spell on the tip of the wand means the spell will be more effective as a result.”
“... Really?”
It was his turn to glance at her, frowning. “You didn’t know that. How’d you manage to play the entire orchestra of instruments back in the foyer against the beetle, then? Didn’t you cast ‘rise’ and ‘play’ on each individual instrument?”
“I knew the first part about only being able to cast spells you believe you’re physically capable of doing, emphasising on the 'you',” she mumbled, peeling chunks of chitin off the slimy, pus-yellow flesh of the butterfly leg, “but all I did was say ‘stand’ and ‘Da Capo’ with the instruments already sitting around the foyer, and then they just… listened? That’s because I could imagine myself playing all of those instruments, right?”
He stared at her in silence, and ever so slightly, his lips shifted into a faint smile.
“‘Da Capo’ is far northeastern tongue for ‘from the beginning’, isn’t it?” he said, resorting to whacking his butterfly leg with the handle of his knife. “It appears you can cast spells in whatever tongue you can speak, so this is news to me. Good job, Miss Sarius. Emilia, tell Miss Sarius she did a good job.”
Emilia brightened up. “Good job, Miss Cecilia!”
“Now help me rip the chitin off this leg,” he said, patting the girl’s head as he rolled the leg off the cutting board, letting the moth girl have a go at it while he sat on the countertop himself. Cecilia gave him a disappointed scowl, but what could he do? He was a walking skeleton, lacking in muscles unlike that maniac of a fitness teacher; it was best to wipe off his sweat and just rest for a little bit. “Have you tried any other spells? Something special only a music teacher can cast?”
“None apart from ‘stand’, ‘Da Capo’, and ‘Coda’ for ‘stop playing’. I haven't had the opportunity to cast spells much,” Cecilia said, shaking her head. Since both girls were doing a much better job cracking their legs open, he pulled a pot from the cabinet under him and started filling it under the sink water tap. “And you? What sort of spells can a language arts teacher cast? Something completely banal and useless, I imagine–”
“Strike”, he said, whipping his wand at a nearby flower pot to crack it. “Among a few other 'generic ' physical spells, of course,” he added quickly. “There’s a few more spells I’d like to try out, but for the time being, basic offensive spells like ‘strike’ that anyone can cast would be good enough.”
Cecilia glanced back at the flower pot, pouting. “Julius gave that to one of my kids for his birthday last year.”
“‘Twas a mistake. Anyways, I’d recommend using ‘strike’ as our basic offensive spell—it’s easy to say, it’s easy to imagine ourselves physically doing, and its strength scales with how hard we think we can physically punch,” he said, smiling cheekily as she glowered at him. In the meantime, he slid his pot of water onto the gas stove next to him and turned the knob, letting it boil to a simmer. “We’re both walking skeletons, so even if we punched a wall, the only things that’d shatter are our fists. That’s where the rest of our system comes in. Mind tapping the little bony protrusion on your nape for me?”
The two of them tapped their own napes, pressing hard, and then the infamous black boxes popped up next to their heads. Cecilia gasped, evidently startled by the hovering screens, but Zora had already seen them before; he wasn’t all too surprised.
----------------------------------------
[// STATUS]
[Name: Zora Fabre]
[Class: Magicicada]
[BloodVolume: 4.9/5.0 (98%), Strain: 185/499 (37%)]
[Unallocated Points: 0]
[Strength: 1, Speed: 1, Dexterity: 1, Toughness: 1, Perceptivity: 2, Strain Limit: 499]
[// MUTATION TREE]
[T1 Core Mutation | Resilin Tymbal]
{T1 Branch Mutation | ???}
[T2 Core Mutations | Acute Tympana | Hollow Abdomen] 50P
{T2 Branch Mutations | ??? | ???}
----------------------------------------
He quickly gave his status screen a look-over before glancing at Cecilia’s, which was almost identical as his. Her strain was a bit lower—and her perceptivity was also at level one instead of two—but to compensate, her dexterity was already at level three.
Because she can play every instrument under the moon? he thought. It's just like her to have stupidly high dexterity, then.
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“... The simplified explanation is this: from top to bottom, there’s your name, insect class, current blood volumes, and the measurement of your strain. Strain is like ‘stamina’. Everything you do will increase your strain slightly, and the closer your strain is to a hundred percent, the closer you are to overexhaustion and death,” he said, pointing at Cecilia’s status screen. “Below that, there are your six basic attributes. One ‘level’ in strength, speed, dexterity, toughness, and perceptivity means you are equivalent to an average human in all of those attributes. If you have three levels in dexterity, that means you are basically as dextrous as three average humans.”
Cecilia blinked, nodding along as she mumbled something under her breath.
“If you want to raise your strength from level one to two, it will cost you one point. If you want to raise it from two to three, it will cost you four points. Each successive level will cost a number of points equal to that attribute's current level squared, and this applies for the first… five attributes?” he continued, looking at his own status screen. “For the strain attribute, though, it only takes one point to increase each level. I think it’s because stamina is the easiest attribute to alter for the system, so even if I wanted to level my strain from five hundred to five hundred and one, it’d only cost me one point instead of… five hundred times five hundred.”
Emilia was still happily peeling away at the chitin on her butterfly leg, but Cecilia was listening diligently, so he grabbed her fleshy leg and dunked the entire thing into the boiling pot of water.
“After the attributes, there are the mutations we can unlock, which are… special skills unique to our class,” he said, hesitating slightly. “I think unlocking the mutations are how we get to cast more 'magical' spells. Since our spells only work if we believe we are physically capable of making the effect manifest, we can't cast 'lightning' or anything of the sort, but if we unlocked a mutation ability that let us, say, generate small amounts of lightning from our blood–"
"Then we can cast 'lightning'," Cecilia finished.
"Correct. At least, I think that's how it'll work. The mutations we unlock physically augment our bodies, and as we unlock more and more physical abilities, we unlock the ability to bridge the imagination gap between 'physical spells' and 'magical spells'," he said. "Now, our tier one core mutation is ‘Resilin Tymbal’, which we unlocked the instant we got our class, but from tier two and onwards, it’ll cost more and more points to unlock each tier of mutations. It’ll take fifty points to unlock either ‘Acute Tympana’ or ‘Hollow Abdomen’, and since I’ve no clue what either of them would do for us, it’s probably best to ignore them for now and just increase our base attributes.”
“O… kay.” Cecilia nodded absentmindedly. “And these ‘branch mutations’… you know anything about those?”
“No clue. I only know a bit about the systems from what I’ve read in the Headmaster’s office,” he mumbled, picking up a spatula and poking the reddish-yellow butterfly leg in the pot as he did, “but that was a long digression from the main point I was trying to make: to get ‘points’, we have to eat insect flesh. Supposedly, insect flesh is unnaturally dense with protein and folic acid and all that other stuff, so the system converts our intake of insect bioenergy into points. We can technically eat insect flesh raw, but I hear cooking it first would give us more points.”
“...”
So the two of them stood huddled around the boiling pot, scowling down at the butterfly leg with forks in their hands.
“... And we won’t start mutating insect traits if we eat this?” she asked quietly, glancing back at Emilia. “You know I’ll be the first to shove it down my throat if it means we can protect our kids better, but there won’t be any point if we just end up going insane immediately after eating it. I do not want to eat our kids’ heads off.”
“The system protects us from mutating, I hear. Even if someone without a system eats bugs, they’d still get stronger because of the intake of bioenergy, but they just wouldn’t be able to control how they mutate said strength without the system,” he replied just as quietly, poking the floating leg with his fork and ripping out a soft, tender strand of flesh; the texture and colour almost made it look like lobster meat. “We just can’t eat too many points a day. I think ten points’ worth of insect flesh a day is the ‘healthy’ limit for an average human. More than that, and we run the risk of mutating traits we don’t want mutating, like Emilia.”
Emilia looked the way she did because she was force-fed too many moths, after all. It wasn’t ideal to eat more than ten points’ worth of insect flesh a day—‘point poisoning’ was a real problem for a lot of soldiers on the frontlines, where overeating insect flesh could cause headaches, stomachaches, and just lots of muscle pains and fatigue—but they had to get stronger if they wanted to get to the staffroom and back.
The effects of point poisoning shouldn’t kick in until at least a week later, and they were teachers with responsibilities to protect their students, so they’d deal with the pain after this infestation was over. On that front, the two of them were completely in sync with each other as they stabbed chunks of butterfly flesh out of the pot, raising their forks to their chins.
The meat was red, pulsating, and… it looked rather tasty, to be honest.
“Cheers?” Cecilia said, gulping as she tried to toast his fork with her own.
“I mean, it can’t be that bad if soldiers all across the continent eat this daily,” he mumbled back, stuffing the whole chunk into his mouth and chewing as fast as he could. Cecilia followed his lead, squeezing her eyes shut—and then they both retched, gagging and coughing and doubling over as they forced the incredibly putrid flesh down their throats.
Nope.
Tastes like gooey resin dipped in spice and medicinal herbs.
But, at the very least–
----------------------------------------
[Unallocated Points: 0 → 10]
----------------------------------------
Both their status screens popped up next to their heads, and they forced themselves to finish the rest of the pot as he looked up at his screen with a grimace.
“... How convenient,” he grumbled. “Exactly ten points. We’ll put five in strength and five in speed?”
Cecilia coughed into her fist one more time, turning away as she shot him a trembling thumbs-up. “Sounds good to me. How do we increase our attributes?”
“Just think about it. The system should automatically–”
----------------------------------------
[Strength: 1 → 3]
[Speed: 1 → 3]
[Unallocated Points: 10 → 0]
----------------------------------------
“–like that,” he finished, blinking at the new popups. He didn’t feel any stronger or faster immediately, so maybe it’d take some time for the increase in levels to take effect. “Now, our ‘strike’ spells should do a bit more damage, and we should also be able to run away thrice as fast. Theoretically.”
Cecilia nodded weakly, and then she looked back at Emilia still happily peeling away at the other butterfly leg’s chitin. “If this is the price to pay for growing stronger, then… it’s our job to deal with it. You think it’ll taste better if we roast it over a fire with salt and pepper instead of boiling it?”
He shrugged, not knowing the answer to her question, but Emilia heard the word ‘fire’ and immediately perked up. The little girl hopped off the countertop and trudged over to the two of them, holding up her peeled butterfly leg with all four hands like she was offering a sacrificial offering to an altar.
“Fire?” Emilia asked, tilting her head quizzically. “Where’s the fire?”
“...”
In response, he accepted her butterfly leg gingerly and turned the knob on another gas stove, letting the small fire crackle to life under the pan support.
“Can you feel it?” he asked, smiling softly as he stuck his spatula through the end of the leg like he was making a skewer. “This is ‘fire’. It comes in many forms, but we use it primarily to cook food and warm ourselves. Wanna hover your hands around it to see what it feels like?”
Emilia nodded excitedly, so he handed the leg skewer off for Cecilia to hold over the stove while he guided the little girl’s obsidian palms over, making sure she wouldn’t accidentally burn herself. She was blind, after all, and he’d no idea how good her depth of perception was.
She looks like she’s starting to get it, though?
Does she understand what ‘fire’ is now?
Her milky human eye glimmered as he held her palms around the fire, and she looked so in awe at the crackling fire that he didn’t feel like asking. She could understand what physical objects were because she could physically touch them or feel them out with her moth senses, but for something formless like fire—something that could wink into existence and extinguish in a single breath—he still didn’t quite know how to explain such a concept to her… but if she could understand what it felt like instinctively, that’d be more than good enough.
For the time being, the three of them simply stood around the roasting leg, watching as the fire seared the flesh and made it give off a slightly tantalising smell; not so much that it made him excited to take another bite, of course, but it was evidently going to taste better than when he’d boiled it in a pot.
Zora was determined to eat as much as he could to at least get his strength up to four.