As expected, the giant butterfly didn’t just keel over and ‘die’. It kept charging with its armoured legs, cracking floor tiles and knocking tables over as it did. For such a large monster, it was rather slow—moving at less than five metres a second—and that meant the thirty metre gap between them wasn’t crossed as fast as Zora had worried it’d be.
he thought, pulling his wand away as he backtracked, leading the giant butterfly out of the cafeteria with hurried steps.
As the butterfly picked up speed, he turned around to start running, racing back along the bridge. He tried glancing over his shoulder to see if Emilia noticed—now was her time to bang on the dorm gate—but his eyesight wasn’t all that good, and he couldn’t afford to run into debris while looking back.
He gritted his teeth and tried to focus; he’d just have to believe in her.
Whirling around quickly with his wand pressed to his lips, he whispered several more words and tried to bring them into existence: ‘forget’, ‘reverse time’, ‘undo’, and ‘stop’ were all failures. The butterfly paused every time he whipped his wand at it, but very quickly, it realised he was just making silly gestures with no bite behind his bark. It started crawling even faster, making his lips thin into a line.
he thought, eyes darting around the hallway of the language arts building as he upped his pace, sprinting full speed ahead.
He whirled again. The butterfly was struggling to squirm through the narrow entryway into the language arts building, its wings tearing across the low ceiling, so he took the opportunity and spoke ‘cut’ at its wings.
Nothing happened. His wand was pointing at the butterfly, and his voice come out, but not as a spell.
So, before the butterfly could squeeze through the rest of its body through the entryway, he pulled his wand back onto his lips.
“Strike.”
A sound wave darted from his lips to his wand. The moment he saw it swirling around the tip, his eyes widened, and he whipped his wand to flick the spell forward. His accuracy was true—he’d had lots of practice throwing chalk at sleepy students after lunch hour—and his physical sound wave ‘struck’ the butterfly in the head, making it flinch and recoil in pain.
It did no damage, of course, but the spell cast.
As he stood still and mused, the butterfly whipped its antennae forward like spears, forcing him to jump to the side and dodge. A close call. He stumbled a few steps, breaths picking up, and then sprinted down the hallway to put more distance between them—the butterfly smashed through the bridge and rammed into the wall he’d just been standing in front of.
he thought, scowling as he stared down the butterfly twenty metres away, watching it struggle to free itself from the wall,
Peering into the empty classroom on his right, he spotted a porcelain vase and immediately cast “strike”
he thought.
And he coughed the moment he came to that tentative conclusion, his throat dry and scratchy beyond belief. He’d cast only a few spells in the past ten minutes, but it felt like he’d just run a marathon in a desert. Using his Art drained his innate bioarcanic essence. In stark contrast, the lumbering giant butterfly had boundless energy. It managed to rip its head out of the wall and reorient itself, screeching at him as it resumed its fervent charge once again.
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His heart hammered against his ribs as he backed up even further, running all the way to the rubble-filled staircase leading down to the lower floors.
he grumbled.
He half-stumbled down the stairs, half-sprinting as fast as he could to outrun the giant butterfly hot on his heels. By the time he got down to the ground floor and sprinted to the end of the hallway, the bug crashed down the stairs thirty metres away, legs carving up the walls and making the entire building tremble.
He couldn’t keep running away like this. There to be something he could do.
And there lots of things he could do.
He parted his legs. Stood firm. Sucked in a deep breath.
He didn’t need his wand or what he was about to do next.
“Rise, metal pipes!”
he thought, a bead of sweat rolling down his brows.
Then, as the giant butterfly started to charge through the final hallway, he took an anxious step back and shouted again.
“Fly forward, pipes!”
Not all of the broken metal pipes were pointing their sharp ends towards the butterfly, but enough of them were. His spell sent them flying forward at the speed of thrown chalks, and one, two, three, four of them stabbed into the butterfly’s neck, making it screech in pain as they punctured its chitin. Sickly yellow blood spurted from its wounds, slowing it down as it slammed into the walls, trying to dislodge the pipes in its body. His eyes widened—bloody wounds like that would kill any normal man, but the butterfly was giant. It needed a bigger push.
It needed .
The answer was ‘everything else’.
“Carpets up! Lamps down! All glass shards, rise and zip at the butterfly!” “Bulletin board, fly at its head! Scissors, pencils, rulers, fly out of your classrooms and stab into its eyes! I want tables! Chairs! I want to slow it down!”
If four pipes stabbed into its neck couldn’t break it, then everything else did. The bulletin boards on the walls flew in and smashed into its head. Three dozen or so pointy-ended stationary responded to his call, shooting out classrooms on both sides and piercing into the butterfly’s legs. Half a second later, entire chairs and tables were flung through the windows on both sides again, crashing into the butterfly’s body from every conceivable angle.
As he continued stepping back, he eyed a leaking oil pipe over the charging butterfly’s head. He immediately shouted “rip down the oil pipe”
He tore the gas lantern down with a “to me, lamp”“fly forward at the butterfly and light up”
The small lever on the side of the lantern pulled itself mid-flight, and the moment it smashed into the giant butterfly’s head, the gas lantern lit up—and ignited the black oil across its head, making it screech in pain.
Eventually, nobody could tell that it was a butterfly from the front. It slowed to a near-complete halt ten strides in front of him, two dozen or so pieces of sharp debris lodged all across its body like the spines of a porcupine. Its head was still burning. Choking the hallway with its putrid scent of charring flesh and chitin. With its dying throes, it tried to stab at him with its antennae, and he hissed and jerked himself even further back, slamming in the wall behind him.
As the giant butterfly tried to stumble the last ten metres forward, he pressed the tip of his wand to his lips, spoke “strike”“strikes”
Narrowing his eyes, he watched as the flames consumed the monster’s head. The sharp debris stabbed into the rest of its body bled it dry. He didn’t cast any more spells. He simply watched as its legs went limp, its antennae wilted, and its short wings fell flat over its body. It wasn’t quite dead yet, no—its giant black orbs for eyes were still trained on him, and it was still desperately trying to suck in breaths of air despite its head being literally on fire—but at the same time, it could do nothing as he approached it slowly
And frankly, he was a bit surprised when its seemingly pointless screeches and inhales turned into comprehensible words.
“Mama,” it cried in a crackling, raspy voice, as though trying to plead for mercy. “Ma… ma. Hurt. Hot. Where… you?”
He listened.
He said nothing in return.
Then he stepped past its burning head and squeezed through the cramped hallway as it cried for its ‘mama’ with its final breaths.
His hands were shaking slightly, his forehead glistening with sweat—he’d known the bugs of the Swarm could communicate with each other via pheromones and physical gestures as they rampaged across the continent, but the fact that his ability to speak and understand all tongues on the continent extended to even the bugs of the Swarm was a surprise, even to him.
There a tongue he hadn't known how to speak, after all.
He winced, rubbing his throat as he tried not to think about how dry his throat was. Then he glanced back at the giant butterfly, eyeing its two stick-like hind legs.
Quickly, he cast “twist and tear”
Just as he picked up the two giant hind legs, though, the wall behind him exploded with a chorus of horrid screeches, and he whirled around to see a horde of giant bugs tearing into the hallway.
Most likely, they’d heard the butterfly’s dying throes and came to investigate, and bugs only knew one method of investigation—by running their razor-sharp legs and antennae over said object, that was.
Hauling the two butterfly legs under one arm, he took off on a mad sprint back towards the stairs at the other end of the hallway, and the horde of bugs screeched to life behind him.
