Back to back with Cecilia, Zora kept his wand lifted and his eyes peeled for any movement on the jungle-green canopy overhead.
How many bugs?
Just one?
He gritted his teeth and nudged Emilia with his heel, trying to get her to crawl under one of the still-standing cubicles. Moonlight may be pouring in through the giant hole above the great oak in the centre of the dome-shaped staffroom, but by no means was it enough light for them to identify just what had dropped a pile of debris behind them to block the door, nor was it enough to light up the shadowy, dreary corners of the staffroom. Maybe he could’ve searched around the dorm for a spare handheld lantern, but–
Cecilia winced the moment Emilia crawled under a nearby cubicle, and he glanced behind him to see what’d happened.
Blood trickled down the music teacher’s shoulder, and her blouse was torn where she’d been cut by a thin blade of sorts.
He’d no time to ask if she was fine. She looked fine enough—still clenching her jaw, still able to hold up her wand—but he wasn’t. A green blur pounced at him from the canopy above and slashed his left arm, before dashing back up in the blink of an eye, unseen.
There’d been little sound. There’d been little warning. He bit his tongue and whipped his wand over to ‘strike’ at its afterimage, as did Cecilia, but their spells only rustled the canopy and made a gentle fall of leaves. They couldn’t even hit its shadow.
Silence in the staffroom once more.
A grasshopper? he thought, his forearm stinging where he’d been cut; it wasn’t a deep wound, but historically, death by a thousand cuts was a pretty painful way to go. No. Can’t be. It was much greener than most grasshoppers I’ve seen. It’s probably–
Two, three, four more times. The giant bug dashed down from unseen angles, going unnoticed until it struck, and it ran its talons across the two of them like whittling twigs off a log of wood. It was too fast for their wands to catch up, and by the time they both whirled to flick their ‘strikes’ at it, it’d already be gone—a loud gust of wind whistling in its trail and rustling the canopy where it crawled in perfect camouflage.
“… Not wind.” He narrowed his eyes and pulled Cecilia under a cubicle as well, both of them breathing hard and taking a brief reprieve from the endless onslaught of tiny cuts. “It’s a katydid. Julius told me about them once. They’re green and slim nocturnal crickets that make sound by rubbing their wings together—that’s what we’re hearing whenever it pounces at us.”
“And if it’s that fast, why isn’t it killing us already?” she muttered, curling her legs up into a ball as they shared the cramped space under the cubicle. “It’s toying with us? Playing with us? I can’t imagine–”
“If it’s a flesh-eating katydid, it’s probing us with its sharp antennae to see how we’d respond to its attacks,” he whispered, gesturing for her to point her wand straight up. “Now that it’s seen us hide, it probably thinks we’re weak and easy prey. That’s why it’ll jump in, and now is when we–”
“Strike!” she shouted, and he followed up with one of his own, a ripple striking the cubicle from underneath and sending the wooden desk flying directly up. He braced her head from the wooden shrapnels as the desk struck the giant bug that was pouncing at them, knocking it to the side with a loud crash; the two of them shot to their feet and trained their wands on it at the same time.
Then both of them froze at the same time, fear wrapping its teeth around their hearts.
The giant katydid that’d crashed through the cubicles and skidded to a halt was three metres tall and twice as long, clad in spiky green chitin. Its serrated wings unfurled slightly, their web-like veined patterns shimmering under moonlight. Its spindly legs twitched with an unsettling energy as it shook off the pain from having its head bashed by a desk, and its deep amber eyes chilled Zora’s soul—they glowed with malevolent intelligence, piercing through the darkness to glare at the two of them, and seeing it click its mandibles ominously made him change his mind at the last second.
Cecilia went for a ‘strike’ that easily bounced off its chitin, but he went for an area-of-effect ‘translate’ to turn its incoherent clicking into words.
“... Did you kill all the faculty in this staffroom alone, katydid?” he asked, voice tight.
The katydid suddenly paused its clicking. It stopped shaking off its concussion and blinked—not in the same way a human would, for its armoured face could show no expression—but then it tilted its head, taking a single step back as it studied the two of them with a curious glint in its eyes.
“You speak our tongue, human?” the katydid spoke, and Cecilia shuddered next to him. That was the normal reaction; most humans in the world had probably never heard a giant bug talk before. “Amusing! Interesting! Most of us can’t evolve the organs required to emulate human speech. Limitation. The human-like ‘Mutant’ bugs certainly try, but it’s not until they can speak a single word in a human tongue that your kind calls them ‘Lesser Great Mutants’—and here you are, speaking our tongue? Peculiar! How are you doing this?”
Zora glared at the bug, trying to tighten his sweaty grip on his wand. “The cricket sings when the moon calls, and I asked you a question. Did you kill all the faculty alone?”
If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
The katydid wiggled its blade-like antennae happily left and right, its eyes completely glazed over with excitement. “I thought I’d never get to talk to a human! I thought I’d have to eat and eat until I evolve into a Mutant, and then eat and eat until I become a Lesser Great Mutant to even have a shot at talking! To you people! Oh, thank you for talking to a grunt insect like me! Maybe I’m lucky? Maybe I’ll evolve really fast and become a Lesser Great Mutant in no time! I can’t wait–”
Cecilia clicked her tongue, the sound strengthened by irritation, and that made the katydid shut up for a second.
“... You’re so long-winded,” she said in a small, scornful voice, lips curling as she pointed her wand straight between its eyes. “Zora asked you a question, so answer it: did you kill all of our friends alone, or was there another bug that helped you with it?”
The katydid stood eerily still for a second longer, and then a sliver of amusement crept into its voice as it clicked its mandibles, chortling out loud.
“Why would I need help with such a small group of humans?” it laughed, its voice turning mockingly sweet. “The only people who can fight in Amar… Ama-de-us Academy are the ‘Magicicada Mages’. Mother will take care of them! The rest of us can just focus on eating, so why’d I need help with a bunch of people who don’t even have insect abilities? Do you know how slow they all were?”
Zora’s face twitched with cold fury. His eyes drifted across the mounds of corpses to the giant bug’s left and right, and something about their hollow, half-lidded eyes reminded him of the life he’d lived before he was picked up by the Headmaster and brought to the academy.
Maybe there was more information he could squeeze out of it, but both he and Cecilia had enough of its eerie eyes.
“Strike!”
Simultaneous strikes. Their words came out as snaps and decimated the cubicle it was standing in front of, but, faster than they could blink once again, the katydid leapt into the canopy and camouflaged within the verdant green. The only difference now was it made no attempt to hide itself—it rubbed its wings to produce a screeching melody that echoed all around the dome, legs crawling across the canopy loudly to rustle a thousand leaves at once.
“You two are young for Magicicada Mages, though! I thought mother and her sisters wiped all of you guys out in the outside world?” the katydid taunted as they stood back to back once more, their eyes fluttering across the canopy in search of its spiky body. “She said ‘once we kill all the old Magicicada Mages in the academy, there’ll be no more’! No more Magicicada Mages! Your system is an old-fashioned class that can’t be made in a forge or passed down to anyone anymore, so how are you two still casting spells?”
He scanned their surroundings, his mind running through a thousand thoughts a second. Cecilia could barely dodge most of the katydid’s pounces because her hearing was much better than his, but the katydid dashed in two, three, four times, cutting his arm, shoulder, and calves before quickly retreating. His spells were always delayed; the canopy rustling and its wings screeching were thoroughly distracting, and he couldn’t pick out where it was going to dash in from.
“Whoever built this room must’ve been an idiot, too!” it laughed right overhead, and he pushed Cecilia away as they both spun, ‘striking’ the ground where it landed between them, but then it simply leapt back up and both their spells hit each other in the stomach. Cecilia gasped, and he doubled over with a groan. The katydid chittered as it continued crawling in circles across the canopy. “So many bushes to hide in! So many leaves and branches! I don’t wanna leave this place! Hey, if I stay here, will more people like you show up? What if so many people show up and I eat them all and I mutate into a Mutant right here?”
“… Well, you are right about one thing,” he said, gritting his teeth as he whipped out a ‘strike’ at a random part of the canopy, hitting nothing. “Julius is quite too weird to live, but quite too rare to die. Who the hell would advocate for turning the place where we mark student homework into a semi-botanical garden?”
The katydid’s eyes briefly lit up red on his upper left. “Julius? Who’s that? Is that someone who’ll be coming to look for you after you die?”
“I’m sure he would. He’s the academy’s physician and biology teacher, after all. He wouldn’t miss a chance to dissect my corpse if he comes upon me,” he said plainly. “Can you say the same, though?”
“The same?”
“Will anyone look for your meaningless existence after you are crushed under our feet, bug?”
“...”
The katydid seemed like it was going to respond for a moment, but then Cecilia’s spell hit the side of its head while it wasn’t paying attention, doing zero physical damage. It barely even budged from the spell hitting—it wasn’t an offensive spell, after all—but still it dodged away, skittering to reposition somewhere else.
Immediately, both Zora and Cecilia snapped their wands at its location and fired simultaneous ‘strikes’, and these ones slammed into its legs. Hard. Its joints rattled, it slipped and lost its upside-down balance for a second—then it regained its balance and dashed away, trying to reposition once again.
They ‘struck’ at its exact location again, and again, and again; it wasn’t easy breaking through its tough chitin armour, but they were wearing it down slowly.
“What… did you do to me?” the katydid growled, sounding almost intrigued as they turned around, aiming their wands at its head before it could even so much as make an attempt to pounce at them. “Are you not human? How are you spotting me? Do you humans evolve like us as well–”
“I’m the one and only music teacher of Amadeus Academy,” Cecilia said, her words dripping with scathing derision. “I may not be able to cast something like ‘translate’, but in my orchestra of orphans and students alike, I can pick out exactly who is playing off-tune, when and where—so why wouldn’t I be able to produce an off-tune voice myself if I really wanted to?”
The katydid’s pupils dilated as it looked back at itself, finally noticing the sheen of sound waves that was wrapped around its body. Cecilia had cast ‘off-tune voice’ on it, which made it so wherever it dashed to and wherever it tried to hide, they’d always be able to hear Cecilia’s off-tune singing voice coming from its body.
Zora wouldn’t tell her this, but her off-tune singing voice was horribly easy to pick out.
The katydid couldn’t hide in the canopy anymore.
“... Let’s try something new, Zora,” she whispered, and they pressed the tip of their wands together, aiming them straight at the katydid. “You think there are any combination spells we can use to pulverise that pest?”