By the time Zora and Cecilia gobbled up the second butterfly leg, the clock struck nine with the ring of a bell, and the two of them made their way over to the western foyer with Emilia in tow.
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[Unallocated Points: 0]
[Strength: 4, Speed: 3, Dexterity: 1, Toughness: 3, Perceptivity: 2, Strain Limit: 500]
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They’d gotten fifteen extra points after roasting that butterfly leg over the stove, so they’d put five into toughness and then nine more into strength, bringing their toughness and strength levels to three and four respectively. Zora didn’t think dexterity was all that important, so he’d put his final point into increasing his strain limit for just that little extra bit of stamina—there was no doubt they’d be doing a lot of running, and of the three of them, he was probably the least athletic.
Emilia aside, it’d simply be a laughing shame if he were to fall behind even Cecilia, who’d strapped three instruments onto her back: a violin, a mandolin, and a flute. They had to be heavy, so he couldn’t possibly run even slower than her.
“... I know you’re smart and strong, but if you get too tired, ask someone to switch out for you, okay?” Cecilia said, making Titus nod and thump his chest with a confident fist. Zora still didn’t like the idea of making students of his stay up all night just to watch the door, but here he was fixing Emilia’s clothes, rolling up sleeves and folding up her skirt so she’d have an easier time running just in case; he was in no position to lecture his star student at this time of night.
So, as Cecilia made Titus repeat her instructions once over, he pulled the lever by the side of the gate to make it creak open slowly. His wand was already out, his throat already rehydrated—his strain wasn’t at zero percent, but he was good enough to start slinging spells again. If there were any giant bugs right outside the gate, he’d ‘strike’ them with the force of four average humans, and that had to count for something.
Thankfully, the gate creaked open to reveal an empty, unlit western cafeteria hall. It was identical to the southwestern cafeteria, but the floor was still intact and the furnishing had yet to be knocked over. No giant bugs had trespassed this land; they were free to wander out as they pleased.
“Tell anyone knocking on the gate to identify themselves, okay?” Cecilia said as a final word, looking back at Titus as she stepped out of the foyer with him and Emilia. “Remember: if they can’t tell you three things only humans would know–”
“Don’t let them in!” Titus nodded firmly, waving all three of them off with one hand on the lever. “Good luck, Miss Sarius, Mister Fabre! I promise I won’t be asleep by the time you come back!”
Zora and Cecilia waved back as the gate swung shut, the automatic bolts and latches sliding in place with loud clicks. Since he arrived at the academy a decade ago, he’d never actually seen the dorm activate ‘shelter mode’ before—that was, he’d never actually seen any of the gates closed before. Anyone could always wander in and out of the dorm at any time of the day, no questions asked.
“... Were you the one who activated shelter mode, Miss Sarius?” he asked, still staring at the heavy-duty gate behind him.
“I was the first and only teacher to evacuate into the dorm, and you know the protocol: the first faculty member has to immediately activate shelter mode in the event of a Swarm infestation,” she mumbled back. “Once shelter mode is activated, the gates can only be manually opened on the inside. Now, the faculty member is supposed to be the one standing guard by the foyers to let in any stragglers, so–”
“If Titus falls asleep and he doesn’t open the gate while we’re getting hounded, we’ll be stuck out here,” he finished, sighing quietly. “Not to worry, though. Titus is a good kid. I didn’t make him my monitor for nothing, so we can count on him to open the gate the moment we knock.” Then he looked down at Emilia and patted her head, smiling softly. “That goes for you, too. If we tell you to run back, run back and knock on the gate. Yell out at Titus. He’ll be sure to open the gate for you.”
Emilia stared blankly up at him—as though trying to ‘read’ his face to probe for an answer he wanted to hear—so he flicked her forehead and scowled, shaking his head slowly.
“Of all your classmates in 2-A, Titus is the one who understands you the best,” he said, kneeling to face her eye-to-eye. “You don’t have to trust him for now, so trust me when I say I trust him. He will open the gate for you if you yell at him. Promise you won’t hesitate to call out for his help?”
“... Okay,” she whispered, her extra arms caressing her forehead where he’d flicked her. “I’ll… um, what’s his name… again?”
He chuckled, standing up and offering to hold her hand.
“Titus,” he said. “People say a butterfly knows every wing in its garden. Do you know what this expression means?”
Emilia guessed and gave him several wrong answers as they started walking, going through the dark cafeteria before emerging onto the bridge connecting the dorm to the western school buildings. He made sure to cast ‘silence’ on all of their shoes while Cecilia chipped in with her own ‘quiet’—which was functionally the same as his—and just like that, they made their way across the bridge suspended over a giant chasm separating the western buildings from the rest of the academy.
There weren’t any giant bugs crawling above the bridge, and there weren’t any skittering around the chasm below them, either. It was only nine at night. At this hour, while the students were all settling down in the dorm, there’d usually be tons of people walking around; the academy was far more than just a place of study for orphans, after all.
Swarm research is done in the main building to the north, artefacts are preserved in the visual and musical arts building in the southeast, and weapons are stored in the fitness buildings to the east. Even his own language arts building in the southwest had been a library for translated texts found nowhere else in the world… though, of course, none of that mattered now.
As they stepped off the bridge and into the third floor of the western faculty building, he immediately picked up his pace quizzing Emilia on a bunch of pointless questions. Cecilia made a point to stand in front of Emilia, too, as the two of them waddled through the hallway where moonlight leaked through cracks in the walls and ceiling. At the end of the hallway was a second bridge that’d take them to the staffroom building—if they could get to it without Emilia noticing all the debris and destruction around them, then all the better.
… Is there any part of the academy that hasn’t been struck by the bugs?
He grimaced, looking out the windows as he squeezed Emilia’s hand in his. The western, southern, and eastern buildings were all terrifically tiny compared to the giant ten-story-tall castle that was the main academy building in the north. Staring at it looming over the rest of the academy in the distance, he couldn’t help but want to hold out hope—just because the mages were pushed back everywhere else didn’t mean the ones in the main building had fallen. If there were another group of survivors, they had to be in the north… or in the staffroom they were heading towards, which could also be turned into an emergency shelter in times of crisis.
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Still.
It’s a bit strange that there aren’t any giant bugs here–
A shadow fluttered outside the window, and because his first instinct wasn’t to duck behind cover, Cecilia gasped and immediately pulled him down. Emilia was about to ask what was going on, so he placed his wand to his lips, shushing her with a ‘silence’—and the three of them knelt by the entrance of the second bridge, both him and Cecilia peeking out the windows to gulp at the sight of a dozen giant black moths, all fluttering around the nearby airspace.
Patrolling, perhaps?
On someone’s orders?
‘Mother’?
“... I suppose they’ll see us the moment we try wading across the bridge,” he whispered, pushing Emilia’s head back as she tried peeking out as well. “You got anything, Miss Sarius? Any spell only you can use to distract them?”
Cecilia pursed her lips as she pulled her head back in, reaching over her shoulder for her flute. “There’s… something I can try, yes, but I don’t know if it’ll work.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not sure if I can actually do it.”
“What is it?”
She leaned in and whispered in his ear, her cheeks flushed red, and he groaned the moment he heard it.
“Come on. You’ve been doing that since you were a kid,” he grumbled. “You even brought your instruments with you, so no harm in trying, right? Worse comes to worst, it completely backfires on us, we send Emilia back, and the two of us play hide and seek from the moths until they get tired of us.”
“That and this are two very different things. If it doesn’t go well–”
“This is Lord Cecilia, the Conductor Mage of homeroom 2-B, and she’s going to show us both a really impressive magic trick,” he whispered, smiling and turning to Emilia as he did. “Once she does it, we’re all gonna race across the bridge to that dome-shaped building across the chasm, okay? Don’t look back, and don’t look out anywhere else—if you do, the magic will immediately lose effect.”
Emilia nodded excitedly, baring her fangs as she grinned at Cecilia from ear-to-ear.
“Okay!”
“She said okay, Lord Cecilia,” he said, dipping his head at the fidgety, anxious music teacher. “You got this. It’s definitely a spell only you can cast. Hell, I’ll bet my most popular teacher award this year if you can’t actually do it.”
Cecilia snorted as she peeked out the window one more time, trembling slightly. “We… haven’t even chosen this year’s award winners yet. You can’t just give away something you don’t have.”
“Oh, but I will win it this year with all the cool magic tricks I’m able to do now,” he countered, squeezing Emilia’s hand and getting her ready to bolt. “Emilia will vote for me, right? You won’t give it to Miss Sarius who can’t cast any magic spells, right?”
“Uh-huh!”
“... No fair,” Cecilia muttered, as she sucked in a quiet breath and exhaled it onto the tip of her wand as a single word—‘voice’—before stuffing her wand down the end of her flute.
Then she blew a voice through the flute, and it shot towards the horde of moths in the distance.
Zora didn’t wait to see its effect. He grabbed Emilia, kicked Cecilia’s heel with a short laugh, and started sprinting across the fifty-metre-long bridge—meanwhile, the moths didn’t immediately dive on them. They didn’t smash through the windows and tear the three of them to shreds. Instead, the spell Cecilia blew in their general direction had slammed into one of the moths, and even he could hear it from a distance: Cecilia’s voice shouting and singing from the back of said moth, thoroughly confusing the whole horde.
Cecilia wasn’t watching, and neither was Emilia, but he glanced at them from afar as they ripped into the single moth Cecilia had thrown her voice onto without any mercy. Their eyesight must be poor, and their intelligence truly lacking if they couldn’t even understand that there was no way a human could’ve been clinging to one of their own all this time without them noticing… but somehow, the spell distracted them enough.
So they don’t really care about each other, he thought, mumbling in his head. They’ll even cannibalise each other if it means they can kill us.
What, exactly, are they looking for here?
Who is ‘mother’ after all?
His questions wouldn’t be answered by anyone, so as thirteen moths became twelve, the three of them sprinted off the bridge on the other end and he focused on panting for breath.
Best to not think about the giant bugs too hard.
“... You’ve still got it, huh?” he said, grinning down at Emilia as Cecilia pulled her wand out of her flute. “Fun fact about Miss Sarius, number four: she had a ventriloquist phase when she was a child, you see. She was really good at speaking in a bunch of disgusting voices to creep the rest of the class out, and it eventually got to the point where she could throw her voice halfway across the room with a flute. It was phenomenal, Emilia. You should’ve heard it–”
“Staffroom.” Cecilia scowled, smacking him on the back of his head before wading towards the door at the front of the dome-shaped building. She tried to tug on the doorknob, but it wouldn’t budge. “It’s locked on the inside. Someone’s activated shelter mode, I think.”
Zora let go of Emilia’s hand and joined Cecilia by the door, trying the doorknob himself. She was right; the dome that was the staffroom had a shelter mode, too, albeit much weaker and less reliable. The bolts and latches on the inside could be easily destroyed from the outside with a ram or a particularly massive hammer.
Of course, they weren’t going to resort to destroying the door without knocking first—and that he did, as quietly but as firmly as he could, not wanting to startle anyone who may be hiding inside.
“Anyone in there?” he asked, knocking a few more times for good measure. “It’s Zo… it’s Mister Fabre and Miss Sarius. Open up. We’re all gathered at the dorm with 2-A and 2-B, so we need as many hands as possible to keep them safe.”
“...”
Silence.
He tried again, Cecilia tried again, but it was Emilia who tugged on both of their cloaks and shook her head.
The little girl mouthed two words—‘nobody inside’—and Zora was inclined to believe her moth senses. She’d always been particularly keen about these sorts of things, but… if she was right, and there wasn’t anybody inside, then how could the door be locked?
So he gave Cecilia a nod and waited until she came to the same conclusion as him: they both ‘struck’ the door and sent it flying inside, their enhanced strength really showing itself in the force of the spell. He winced as it made a loud clang against the wooden floorboards, but it didn’t seem like the flying moths noticed.
Cecilia quickly dragged both of them inside just in case, and… once again, Cecilia gasped as he immediately cast ‘silence’ over Emilia’s ears, hoping it’d dull her senses just a little bit.
Just a little bit.
The giant dome may be pretty by itself—moss crept up the cosy wooden wall, personalised shelves and colourful cubicles lined every inch of the room, and the giant verdant oak at the heart of the dome was impossible to miss—but he didn’t want Emilia to see the mounds of shredded corpses strewn about the damp floorboards, nor the bodies that looked like their insides were sucked out and turned into jelly. Most cubicles were smashed through, most of the wooden wall was splintered, and while the great oak stood tall, its bark was scarred and gouged by massive claw marks.
Even the giant hole above the oak couldn’t ventilate the putrid stench of death quickly enough.
“... Big,” Emilia suddenly said, making him and Cecilia jolt.
He was about to ask big ‘what’ when something suddenly fell behind them, and they all whirled around to see a bunch of debris dropping from the ceiling, blocking the door.
…
With Emilia squished between the two of them, he stood back to back with Cecilia, both their wands pressed to their lips and ready to sling out a dozen ‘strikes’.
Whatever had killed the faculty and the teachers was still in here with them.
And he knew, by the sinking sensation in his gut, that it wasn’t going to be a crippled bug like the short-winged butterfly he’d fought.
Damn you, Julius.
Why’d you have to go and turn the staffroom into your second botanical garden so a bug can crawl around like this?