Cecilia had never been one to go on bug-stomping crusades across the academy even when she was a child.

  Zora, Julius, and Marcus—the ‘titanic trio’, as they were called back in their student days—had always taken it upon themselves to go around every once in a while to unearth any tiny bug nests infesting the nooks and crannies of the academy, but like most girls her age, she’d always been deathly afraid of bugs. Knowing they were all part of the ‘Swarm’ and would eventually grow to join the endless onslaught of giant bioarcanic bugs rampaging across humanity’s final continent, she’d always sat back and let the boys have all the fun… before calling the academy mages over to deal with the insect dens, of course.

  They’d been children, not professional bug-slayers; she was a music teacher, not a warfaring Magicicada Mage.

  But she hated the katydid’s voice like she’d never hated anything before.

  It was a mockery to sound. It wasn’t enough that the Swarm descended a mere sixty-one years ago and already conquered eighty percent of the world. The katydid’s attempt to conquer even their tongue—humanity’s tongue—had awakened something in her.

  Her peaceful life in the academy had been taken from her, so was it her fighting spirit that was awakened?

  Was it humanity’s prideful spirit to protect their own tongue?

  Or was it just pure, simple rage from knowing the bug in front of her had slaughtered almost all of her friends and colleagues?

  … She’d have to ask Zora later, but right now, she had a bug to squash.

  “Strike!” Zora snapped, flinging his spells left, right, up, and down, his wand tracking the frantically dashing katydid with haphazard accuracy. The katydid wasn’t able to hide. The thick mist filling the entire staffroom meant its giant body stuck out like a sore thumb whenever it moved, and oh, did it try to move. Every time Zora shouted aloud, it’d pounce at his voice and rip its target to shreds, but the target was never him. Not the real Zora just a few metres behind it.

  She’d placed twenty-five dolls around the entire staffroom and cast “sing” on all of them, giving the katydid more targets to choose from than it had legs to slash and stab with. Her real body? She was standing right behind Zora, and even he didn’t notice her until she tapped his shoulder, making him jump in fright.

  While the katydid continued snarling and pouncing around the staffroom, ripping up every doll it could locate with its hearing alone, she stood next to him and kept one hand clamped on his shoulder.

  “So?” she whispered, sweat beading down her forehead with thin trails of blood still trickling down her blouse; just because they’d effectively made themselves invisible to the katydid didn’t mean they’d won just yet. “You got any ideas for a combination spell yet? Even if they’re breaking its legs and slowing it down, our ‘strikes’ aren’t really getting through its armour. We can’t kill it. At this rate, we’ll run out of stamina before—”

  “I’m thinking,” he muttered, whipping another precise “strike” at one of the katydid’s leg joints, making it roar in pain. “The mind’s a powerful weapon but a terrible leader, and I… didn’t get much sleep last night.”

  She paused for a moment as she pressed the tip of her wand against her lips, and then she snorted with her head turned away. It was bad enough already that they were standing so close to each other that he could probably feel how hot her body was; if he knew her face was red from laughing as well, he’d never let her live it down.

  Still the same old Zora, huh?

  Of all the people who could’ve come knocking on the dorm gate with a giant stag beetle in hot pursuit, I’m glad it was you.

  The katydid had been incredibly talkative, but now it was in a panic, skittering and jumping and even slipping over fallen furniture every once in a while as it failed to find the real them. It simply couldn’t differentiate between their voices and the dolls’ voices, and though the two of them couldn’t see five steps in front of them with the mist as well, the katydid was more than easy enough to spot in the distance.

  “... I know!” the katydid screeched. “This mist! Is annoying! I’ll just wait outside!”

  She narrowed her eyes as it leapt directly up, heading for the giant hole in the ceiling, but neither Zora nor her did anything special to stop it.

  They didn’t have to stop it, because the katydid was in a rush. It was frustrated, it was irritated, and the only thing it was thinking about was getting out of the mist while dodging Zora’s “strikes”, so it didn’t notice as it crawled halfway up the great oak tree in the centre of the room and jumped—headfirst into a web of sticky, glowing red threads.

  It plummeted all the way back down, crashing into the floor with a hefty boom. Then it screeched as it looked down at its webbed legs, trying to free itself from the threads. For her part, Cecilia had noticed Emilia crawling out from under her cubicle where she’d been told to hide since Zora first filled the staffroom with the thick mist. While Zora and Cecilia distracted the katydid for a while, Emilia had climbed halfway up the great oak tree, bit her nails, and wove a web of coagulated blood threads between the branches in hopes of blocking the katydid’s escape route—the same way it’d blocked theirs with the falling debris on the front door—so all Cecilia and Zora had to do was put the katydid in a situation where it had to get out of the mist, and now, they’d trapped it for good.

  But those threads are Emilia’s unique magic, huh?

  Just what kind of moth is she, really?

  Cecilia tried to cast a spell to incapacitate the bug even further, but Zora beat her to the punch.

  “Branches, rip off the canopy and impale the katydid’s joints to the ground!” he roared. “Chunks of stone, torn floorboards, every heavy object in the staffroom, rise and crush the bug in a mountain of weight!”

  The debris did as he commanded. Heavy blocks of stone, floorboards sticking up from the ground, and even small furniture floated into the air before they threw themselves at the katydid, crushing and burying it under a mountain of rubble. Then a dozen small but sharp branches snapped off the canopy overhead as well, impaling the katydid’s joints and pinning it into the floor.

  It was horribly violent, but incredibly effective at keeping the katydid down.

  As Zora cast “drain the mist” at the levers on the leaky steam pipes, Emilia hopped off the great oak tree and sprinted towards them, throwing herself into Cecilia for a tight hug. Cecilia couldn’t help but kneel and caress her head as she leaned in for praise; it’d been incredibly reckless of her to crawl out from under her cubicle in the middle of a fight, but if not for her covering their bases, the katydid could’ve escaped from the staffroom and lived to kill another day.

  If nothing else, Emilia deserved a few headpats for being so brave and quick to adapt.

  Still, she was able to coordinate with Zora’s on-the-fly plan even without a single word shared between them.

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  What has Zora been teaching her these past three weeks?

  She made a mental note to sit in on one of his classes after this, but right now, the katydid was still alive and trying to squirm out from under the mountain of rubble. The three of them stayed just outside of its antennae’s swiping range, because if they got any closer, they’d be risking their throats getting cut by a desperate flail.

  Best to play it safe from afar.

  “... Beetles wear armour, not shadows,” Zora said, waiting until it exhausted itself before pointing his wand at its head, tilting his head and beckoning Cecilia to do the same. “If your strategy is to dart in and out and kill us with a thousand cuts, it’s because you’re not all that physically strong. You can’t free yourself from that rubble, can you?”

  The katydid screamed at them, an incoherent, incomprehensible screech. If it had any semblance of any intelligence before, it’d abandoned that completely in favour of trying to frighten them with volume alone—so Cecilia covered Emilia’s ears with her palms and cast “silence” below her, protecting the little girl from the ear-grating noise.

  “You’ll die for what you’ve done, but before you do, I want answers,” Zora continued, a hint of cruel cunning in his amber eyes. “However uncoordinated, there is an obvious hierarchy among you bugs. Individually, you may be allowed to slaughter us as you please, but as a whole, you move with purpose. I’m certain you bugs didn’t come here on a whim. Are you looking for something, perhaps? Something only Amadeus Academy has?”

  Then he “struck” its left eye with pinpoint accuracy, and yellow pus burst from its head, making it screech in pain. Cecilia narrowed her eyes and covered Emilia’s eyes with her hands as well—this wasn’t something a little girl should have to see.

  It was only a second later that Cecilia remembered the little girl was blind, and there was no point in doing what she did.

  “I’ve heard it from the short-winged butterfly I killed, I’ve heard it from your friends in the language arts building, and I’ve heard it from you. Who is this ‘Mother’ you all refer to?” Zora pressed, his brows twitching and knitting in irritation. “There are three classes of bugs: Critter-Class, the spies of the Swarm, which we stomp and eradicate before they grow into Giant-Class bugs like you, the foot soldiers of the Swarm. Then, there are the Mutant-Class, which are bugs taking human-like forms with human-like intelligence—is your ‘Mother’ a Mutant-Class? Is she in this academy right now? What is she looking for, and why is she attacking us?”

  The katydid finally answered him with an uncertain smile, if the way it curled up its mandibles could even count as a ‘smile’.

  “Mother Nona… is a Magicicada!” it rasped, chuckling and laughing as it did. “Mother will come for you! She will! She will slaughter everyone in this castle and eat your voices! She will find what you have stolen from her, and when she does, the entire eastern end of this continent might as well be hers!”

  It was Zora’s turn to be quiet for a moment as the katydid continued chortling, so Cecilia glanced over to see why he wasn’t saying anything.

  What she didn’t expect to see was a cold, pale face, incontrovertibly paralysed with fear—and her breath caught as well, remembering the last time she’d seen such a face on the otherwise normally cool and composed man.

  Ten years ago.

  When mama first brought him here to attend the academy.

  …

  Cecilia sucked in a sharp breath and kicked the back of his leg, making him stumble and jolt out of his trance. He whirled around to scowl at her, but she made it a point not to look at him—glaring straight ahead at the immobilised katydid instead.

  “It won’t tell you anything more than that,” she whispered, gulping softly as she did. “Do you… have a combination spell we can use to pierce its chitin with?”

  Silence.

  Then he offered her a weak smile, his gaze hardening as he retrained his wand on the katydid.

  “I do,” he said, and she smiled slightly at the tone of knowing in his voice. “It’s a simple combination, but I think… it’s versatile. My spell will be the driver, and yours be the catalyst; you can probably use yours to strengthen any of mine in the future as well.”

  She raised a curious brow. “What is it?”

  “I strike, you amplify,” he whispered. “You’re the most talented music teacher I know. You can harmonise and amplify anything I say with your own voice, no?"

  She snorted.

  It really was a simple combination, but… he wasn’t wrong.

  Clearing her throat, she focused all her strength into her stomach—pushing air from her lungs, relaxing her diaphragm, her whole body trembling lightly—and then she spoke "amplify", letting her spell diffuse around her as a physical sound wave bubble. She was the music teacher, after all. She could easily imagine herself matching any one of her kids’ singing voices and amplifying their volume with her own harmonic voice, and the ‘spells’ they could cast as Magicicada Mages were just that: sound waves given the power to shape physical reality.

  The louder and stronger their sound waves were, the stronger the effects of their spells.

  So when Zora whipped his “strike” forward with the strength equivalent of two men, his spell mixed with hers volume-amplifying bubble mid-air, slamming into the katydids forehead with the strength equivalent of four men in one concentrated point—and his spell pierced its thick chitin, bursting its head from the inside-out.

  Cecilia flinched and looked away as blood splattered everywhere, dyeing the base of the great oak tree bright yellow.

  … It's dead.

  We beat it.

  A status interface popped up next to Zora’s head, and he glanced it over to see his grade had increased.

  [Grade: F-Rank Giant-Class → E-Rank Giant-Class]

  Then, the two of them immediately stumbled forward, catching each other as they gasped and panted for breath. Emilia immediately ran circles around them, poking and prodding at their backs and asking if they were okay. Cecilia was, but she was just beyond tired. She was still bleeding from a dozen tiny cuts. Zora, too, wasn’t in much better shape. In fact, he was bleeding a little more than her, so while Emilia made him sit down and catch his breath, Cecilia clenched her jaw at the katydid carcass in front of them.

  Time for the harvest, then.

  While Zora patted Emilia’s head and praised her for trapping the katydid, Cecilia clicked a small button on her wand and turned it into a black sword, approaching the carcass steadily—

  “What the hell did you just do?” Zora asked, making her jump and turn. The man’s eyes were half-lidded and bleary with exhaustion, but he was still pointing at her sword, looking completely befuddled. “Your wand… just turned into a sword. How? Is your wand different from mine?”

  It was her turn to tilt her head. “All wands can turn into swords. Have you never seen the mages do it before? They do it all the time whenever we celebrate new years and they put on a sword-fighting show for the kids.”

  “Uh… no?”

  Cecilia blinked. “What?”

  Zora blinked. “What?”

  “Have you literally never been to any of their shows? Not as a student and as a teacher?”

  “I thought they were just using trick props?”

  “...”

  Then she burst out laughing, holding her stomach with one hand as she raised her sword with the other, flipping smaller debris off the katydid’s body and hacking off as many legs as she could manage.

  “So smart, yet so dumb,” she whispered under her breath, smiling softly. “There’s a button on the wand that feels like a small lump near your thumb. You’ve got to press it really hard, but if you do—”

  Zora yelped in surprise behind her, making Emilia gasp and clap her hands. He must’ve figured out how to do it, so Cecilia was half-hoping he’d just get up and help her hack off the katydid’s most edible-looking appendages.

  “We don’t want the katydid’s flesh to go to waste, do we?” she said, eyes softening as she glanced at the corpses around the cubicle. “For their sake and ours… we can’t let that ‘Mother Nona’ get whatever it is she’s looking for, can we?”

  Zora didn't exactly answer—an answer in and of itself—but then she heard him stabbing his blade into the ground like a walking cane as he pushed himself onto his feet, groaning loudly.

  “There’s two people missing here,” he said, limping forward with Emilia in tow to help Cecilia saw off the katydid’s edible-looking antennae. “It could be fate, or it could be sheer, dumb luck, but… I don’t see Marcus and Julius here.”

  “Same. One’s too big to miss, the other’s too weird to forget.”

  “You think they’re still out there?”

  “We’ll look for them regardless, won’t we?”

  They shared a short sigh, making sure to keep Emilia between them so she wouldn’t walk off and disturb the bodies in the staffroom. If Cecilia could have her way, she’d come back after this whole infestation was over and give everyone proper burials… but she also knew, when the Swarm was involved, that nothing was ever going to be so easy.

  If they left this staffroom as it was now, some other bug could stumble upon the bodies and devour them all.

  Between the already dead and the still living, however, she couldn’t possibly be selfish and ask Zora to help her carry all the bodies back to the dorm for safekeeping. She also didn’t want the kids in the dorm to see their teachers and faculty torn to shreds, so the only thing she could do now was pray for them.

  And pray she did.

  After all, their troubles weren’t quite over yet.

  Just as the two of them managed to saw off the last of the katydid’s edible-looking appendages, the blocked door behind them rattled on its hinges. Bits and chunks of rubble flew inwards from whatever was slamming into the front door outside, but Cecilia didn’t have to guess.

  She heard the screeching, she heard the wings flapping, and immediately knew it was the dozen giant moths they’d snuck past on the way to the staffroom.

  … Shit.

  Now what?