Standing back to back with Cecilia, Zora kept his wand pressed to his lips and his eyes peeled for movement on the canopy overhead.

  How many giant 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 in the ceiling—right above the great oak tree in the centre of the staffroom—but by no means was that enough for them to identify just what, exactly, had dropped a pile of debris behind them to block the door. The thin mist in the air coming from the leaky steam pipes on the walls weren’t helping with the visibility, either.

  Maybe he should’ve searched around the dorm for a spare handheld lantern before setting off for the staffroom, but—

  Cecilia winced the moment Emilia crawled under a nearby cubicle, and he glanced behind him to see what happened.

  Blood trickled down the music teacher’s shoulder, and her blouse was slightly torn where she’d been cut.

  What hit her?

  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, and then it dashed back up in the blink of an eye, unseen.

  There’d been no sound. There’d been no warning. He bit his tongue and whipped his wand over to “strike” at its afterimage, but his basic offensive spell only rustled the canopy and made a gentle fall of leaves.

  Silence in the staffroom once more.

  A grasshopper? He grimaced, 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, completely reckless, and that’ll let us—”

  “Strike!” she shouted, a physical sound wave striking the cubicle from underneath and sending the wooden desk flying directly up. At the same time, he shot to his feet and roared “to the canopy, furniture”, his spell rippling across the staffroom to pick up every chair, stool, and shelf his subconscious believed he could lift.

  Cecilia’s spell struck the giant bug in the head as it pounced down at him, and then the rest of the dozen pieces of furniture slammed into its body from all directions, knocking it to the side with a loud crash.

  Then both of them froze at the same time, fear wrapping its teeth around their hearts as they snapped their wands over to it.

  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 shudder where he stood.

  This is its ‘aura’.

  Its killing pressure.

  It’s gotta be… E-Rank Giant-Class, at least?

  He couldn’t stop himself from shaking, and neither could Cecilia. Both their F-Rank Giant-Class auras combined had to be just strong enough to prevent them from getting paralyzed with fear, and if that wasn’t a testament to the katydid’s strength, he didn’t know what was.

  I… see.

  And now that I’m instinctively scared of it, I can’t… target it with spells like ‘die’ or ‘go away’, huh?

  He gritted his teeth. Despite the paralyzing fear, he could still move slightly. Cecilia swallowed a hard gulp and shouted a “strike” that easily bounced off its chitin, but he went for a different spell instead—one only a language arts teacher like him could cast.

  He shouted “translate”, letting the spell diffuse across the staffroom so even Cecilia would be affected by it.

  “... Did you kill all the faculty in this staffroom alone, katydid?” he asked, voice tight.

  The katydid suddenly paused its menacing, threatening clicking. It held its mandibles and blinked—not in the same way a human would, for its armoured face showed no human-like expression—but then it tilted its head, taking a cautious 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-Class bugs certainly try, but it’s not until they can speak a single word in a human tongue that your kind calls them ‘Insect Gods’—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?”

  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-Class, and then eat and eat until I become an Insect God 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 an Insect God 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.

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  “... 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 colleagues 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’, and 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 blades to strike me down with? 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 Headmistress 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 casts. Their spells 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 vegetation. 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 room, legs crawling across the canopy loudly to rustle a thousand leaves at once.

  “Tear down the canopy!” he shouted.

  His spell went off. Entire shrubs and branches and sections of the canopy ripped with deafening crunches, making the katydid stop producing its screeching, ear-grating melody for half a second—but then it started rubbed its wings even harder, making both of them wince and stumble where they stood.

  The noise was incredibly loud, and he couldn’t tear down enough of the canopy to reveal the katydid.

  Blasted Julius.

  The thin mist from the leaky steam pipes aren’t ‘atmospheric’ enough for you?

  His spell pulled down the lower shrubs and branches, but the densest, thickest parts of the canopy remained overhead. The moment he caught a few branches curled around a thick metal beam was the moment he realised he couldn’t yank those branches down, and that meant his subconscious no longer believed he could tear down the rest of the canopy.

  “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 the two of them 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 class is an old-fashioned class that can’t be forged or passed down to anyone anymore, so how are you two young people still casting spells?”

  He scanned their surroundings, his mind running through a thousand thoughts a second. They were barely able to dodge the katydid as it pounced down at them from the west, but then the katydid dashed in two, three, four more times—cutting their arms, shoulders, and calves—before quickly retreating. Their “strikes” and “blocks” were always just a second too slow. Zora’s ears were already ringing because of its screeching wing melody. Trying to hear and predict the katydid pouncing at them was a nigh-impossible task.

  What do we do?

  It doesn’t seem like it has any abilities apart from being super fast, but pure speed is more than difficult enough for us to deal with right now.

  How do we fight something we can’t see?

  How do we lure it down and make it stay?

  “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 to dodge and both their spells hit each other in the stomach. Cecilia gasped as she fell over backwards, and he doubled over with a groan. The katydid chittered in more laughter as it continued crawling 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 then I mutate into a Mutant-Class right here?”

  … So many people show up?

  As Cecilia pulled herself to her feet and he spotted Emilia crawling out from under her cubicle, something clicked in his head.

  A plan.

  He gave Cecilia’s satchel a long, knowing look, and the music teacher barely had to think before her eyes lit up as well.

  She was thinking exactly what he was thinking.

  “… Well, you are right about one thing,” he said, gritting his teeth as he whipped 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?”

  The katydid clicked its mandibles in irritation. And it seemed like it was going to respond for a moment before he shouted “overload the leaky steam pipes”, his spell exploding away from him to pull down the levers at the base of every steam pipe.

  In an instant, visibility in the staffroom dropped to near zero. The mist from the leaky steam pipes gushed out at full force with the levers pulled down, and while it was certainly cool and refreshing, Zora had never liked the ‘atmospheric mist’ Julius insisted was good for their skin health. It always made his papers a little too wet, a little too flimsy.

  Now, though, the mist was thick enough that it broke the katydid’s line of sight.

  “We can’t see you easily unless you make big, sweeping movements,” he murmured, “but you can’t see us, either.”

  “This won’t work!” the katydid snarled somewhere from the left, somewhere from the right. Zora closed his eyes. He took a deep breath and trusted Cecilia to do her part. “I can hear your voices! My hearing is sharp! Sharp, sharp, super sharp! I hope this ‘Julius’ will look for your corpse!”

  With that, he heard the katydid pounce down—and it ripped into two hand-sewn dolls instead, impaling them to the floor.

  Zora smirked, opening one eye slowly to catch its giant moving silhouette on his right.

  Gotcha.

  Told you to not make big movements.

  As the katydid tilted its head and looked at the two dolls it'd impaled on its forelegs, more voices came from behind it. Its reaction time was fast. Extremely fast. It whirled on the voices and slashed so hard it parted the mist for a second, but again, it only managed to cut another hand-sewn doll.

  Three, four, five more voices appeared around the staffroom. Laughing. Singing the academy’s anthem. The katydid didn’t know what to do, where to look. It whirled around in a panic, slashing every which way, trying to cut down on the voices, but Cecilia had more dolls in her satchel than Zora had pieces of candies in his pocket—and now she’d grounded the katydid. Confused it long enough for Zora to line up a precise shot.

  With the tip of his wand pressed against his lips, he spoke “strike” and then whipped it straight at one of the katydid’s hindleg joints, snapping its leg the wrong way.

  His spell dealt damage. Hard. It slipped and lost its balance for half a second, hissing in pain, but when it heard a laugh and slashed at it through the mist again, it only managed to hit another singing doll.

  Zora stepped calmly around it, aimed again, and whipped another “strike” at its other hindleg joint.

  “What… is this?” the katydid growled, sounding almost intrigued as it slashed in a blind flurry, carving up the floor, the cubicles, and every fallen furniture around it. “Are you not humans? How are there so many of your voices? Can humans clone themselves—”

  “I’m the one and only music teacher of Amadeus Academy,” Cecilia said, her words dripping with scathing derision somewhere from the left, somewhere from the right. Zora chuckled softly; she was throwing her voice around so well even he couldn’t tell where she actually was. “I may not be able to cast something like ‘translate’, but I did have a… what do you call it, Zora? A ventriloquist phase?”

  “That’s the one.” He laughed, and the katydid snarled, pouncing in the direction of his voice immediately. Only, it’d gone for the wrong one. It jumped into yet another hand-sewn doll that’d been placed on the edge of a table.

  “I’m no real ventriloquist, but if I can make a single doll sing from a distance, it’s not that far of a stretch for me to believe I can cast a spell to make a dozen dolls sing all at once from different positions, right?” she said aloud, her voice echoing through the mist, through the staffroom. “You want to make noise, pest? I’ll show you noise. My kids call me the ‘Conductor’, after all.”

  The katydid visibly flinched as it finally realised she’d been casting “sing” on the dolls, and those were the voices it’d been pouncing on.

  They’d equalised the battlefield now. The katydid may have overwhelming speed, but the two of them were tiny compared to it, so that speed meant nothing if it didn’t know where they were and who to target.

  In contrast, the katydid was giant. All it had to do was move just a little bit forcefully, and then the thick mist would move along with it, revealing its location.

  It couldn’t find them easily, but they could see it clear as day

  “... Let’s try something new, Zora,” Cecilia said aloud, and Zora pressed the tip of his wand against his lip again, smirking to himself. “You think there are any combination spells we can use to pulverise that pest?”

  Sound Bug Facts #9: Katydids produce sounds primarily through a process called stridulation, which, in their case, involves rubbing their wings. They have special structure on their forewings called files (or scrapers), which have a series of ridges, while the other pair of wings have resonating membranes. When they rub their files against their resonating membranes, it creates rasping sounds!