After Cecilia reminded Titus about the procedure of opening the gate to strangers—and Zora found Emilia hiding in the corner of the common room—the three of them set off from the eastern foyer, intent on reaching the fitness buildings east of the five-pointed star-shaped academy.

  There was a part of Zora that thought he wouldn’t ever be able to see dawn again, but when they stepped out the eastern gate, trudged across the east-wing cafeteria, and then stopped before the skybridge that’d lead them to the fitness buildings across a deep chasm, he squinted. Deeply.

  The world wasn’t broken. Dazzling sunlight crept over the jagged mountains surrounding the academy on all fronts, and it illuminated the castle in harsh golden hues the same way it did every day. Just because the Swarm had infested the academy didn’t mean they’d infested the sun, too, so… at the very least, the academy was a bit warmer now.

  Emilia squeezed his hand, staring blankly out at the mountains as they started trudging across the narrow stone bridge.

  “Warm,” she muttered, scratching her obsidian-chitin arms idly. “Is the ‘sun’ like… like fire?”

  “Like fire,” he whispered back, patting her head with a soft smile on his lips. There was no roof over their heads, so the warm morning winds ruffled their hair as they crossed the hundred-metre-long bridge. “The sun is this bright orange sphere in the sky that gives off ‘sunlight’, and when sunlight is focused on a single spot, it can fire, too. Do you feel warm all across your body?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “That’s sunlight. And if lots of sunlight beams converge and gather at the tip of your finger, your finger would burn.”

  Emilia shuddered, and Zora chuckled. Behind that veil of fear and anxiousness was a burning curiosity like no other, and he could tell she immediately wanted to try making something burn. If he could just hand her a magnifying glass and have her start a fire herself—the stoves in the common room were too impersonal for a lesson—maybe she’d finally understand what ‘fire’ was supposed to be.

  “... Where are all the bugs, anyways?” Cecilia asked, suppressing her voice as the three of them stepped off the bridge and entered the entrance hall of the giant fitness building. She looked left and right down two eerily dark hallways; there were no giant bugs in sight. “The visual and music arts building was awfully crowded and noisy last night, but here, it’s… it’s like a ghost castle.”

  “I’m sure there are more nocturnal bugs than there are diurnal bugs near the eastern end of the continent,” Zora said, furrowing his brows as he looked left and right as well. “Julius would know better, but I think we can afford to be a bit chattier if most of the giant bugs are asleep in the morning. If Nona really here, though, then she’ll be active right about now—cicadas are mostly diurnal insects.”

  Cecilia pursed her lips as she looked back at the dorm all the way across the bridge. “What if we evacuate the kids first?” she said. “If most of the bugs are sleeping right now, we can sneak everyone out of the academy and have them hide somewhere else. Somewhere even Nona can’t reach. It’s not like the dorm shelter will protect them from an Insect God, right?”

  “Mhm. Nona can probably break through the gate with a single spell.”

  “Then—”

  “Even butterflies flutter before choosing a branch,” he muttered. “We don’t know what the situation is like outside. That Nona and her brood just strutted into the academy instead of, say, bursting from the ground, means they probably swept through the neighbouring towns and villages as well. From here to the nearest borough under the protection of the northeastern Swarmsteel Front, it’s going to be at least nine to ten days of pure walking—and the entire time, we’ll have no roof over our heads. We’ll have little food, we’ll have little morale, and only the Great Makers know how many bugs stand between us and the borough.”

  Cecilia’s eyes darkened. “So? What’s the end goal? We just wait until Nona finds us in the dorm?”

  “We get Marcus and Julius and their kids back first. Then, and then do we think about escaping from the academy.”

  “... But you just said escaping is dangerous.”

  He shrugged reluctantly. “Nothing's more dangerous than sharing an abode with a Magicicada Witch. Between staying here to face here or taking our chances with a long march to the nearest borough, our rate of survival would be endlessly higher with the long march.”

  Fighting wasn’t going to be an option as long as there were still children in the academy. He’d rip his tongue out a thousand times before letting any one of his students get caught in a battle with the Magicicada Witch roaming around here—and it wasn’t like they stood a chance against Nona, anyways. For all intents and purposes, Insect Gods were practically invincible against normal weapons and technologies. It’d take nothing less than a miracle—‘magic’—for one to be taken down by humans.

  If Nona decided to pursue them to the northeastern borough for some reason, he wasn’t even sure if the military would be able—or —to protect them.

  he thought,

  The rest of their journey through the eastern fitness building—which was just another old castle refurbished into a learning building—was done in absolute silence. Though there weren’t any giant moths fluttering outside the windows or any giant centipedes writhing through the halls, they came upon more than a few slumbering bugs in some of the storage rooms. Giant spiders, beetles, ants, and all the like. All sleeping with their eyes wide open. Thankfully, Cecilia could cast “silence” on their shoes to muffle their footsteps, because they’d always take a nervous step back every time they rounded a corner and nearly walked straight into a sleeping bug.

  The fitness building may be massive with four floors, over a hundred rooms, and a few hundred hallways to get lost in, but they were looking for Marcus. If the man was still alive and kicking with his kids, they’d be holed up in either one of four giant gymnasiums each home to a massive obstacle course. Naturally, the obstacle courses were designed to make students ‘excited’ about exercise. Most students in the academy came from impoverished, destitute families, after all—new transfers would always be unusually scrawny and gaunt—so the Headmistress always gave the most budget for the fitness teachers to improve the facilities year after year, while the language arts building, well… frankly, Zora was just impressed janitors still came by to clean his building every single afternoon.

  Each floor had one of the four giant gymnasiums, but they didn’t bother checking those. They snuck up the stairs, passed through the long and winding halls, and went straight for the obstacle course at the end of the fourth floor. After all, Titus had said class 2-C was doing fitness with a ‘Mister Evander’, and ever since that man became the head fitness teacher last year, Zora had seen him teach a single class in the other three gymnasiums.

  So, the three of them stopped before the giant double doors leading into the four gymnasium. Both him and Cecilia frowned as they noticed Emilia’s antennae twitching in what could be anticipation, what could be trepidation.

  They’d snuck past what must’ve fifty or so giant bugs on their way, but Emilia hadn’t been scared of a single one. her antennae were twitching?

  “Do we bust the door open?” Cecilia asked, pulling out her wand. “Or do we knock like normal people and see if our dear ‘Mister Evander’ has barricaded himself inside with his kids?”

  Zora looked down at Emilia. “What do you think, Emilia? Knock or shock?”

  Her silence was her answer. Zora gave Cecilia a slow nod before pulling his wand out as well, and on the unsaid count of three, they “struck”

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  The wood shattered inwards with a loud , no match for their combined strength.

  He winced a little as the clouds of dust spilled out. Maybe they could’ve been less forceful so they’d make less noise—or maybe they could’ve at least tried the doorknob first—but what was done was done. At least Cecilia cast “silence”

  The moment he did, though, he wished he’d at least walked in first to see if there was anything Emilia shouldn’t see.

  After all, there was no way any decent teacher would let their student see the pools of blood and mountains of eviscerated bodies scattered around the door.

  Cecilia covered Emilia's eyes on instinct—even though it wouldn’t stop her from seeing everything in perfect clarity with her moth senses—while Zora clenched his jaw, calmed the pounding in his chest, and knelt by one of the closer bodies. It was so disfigured and drained of blood it hardly resembled a human, but others were still so clearly human that he couldn't help but feel every broken bone, every open wound. He took one look at all of their rolled up sleeves and immediately figured they were the children of class 2-C, all twenty-three of them accounted for. Marcus liked rolling up his own sleeves, so the kids in his homeroom loved copying him as well.

  And given all of them were so close to the exit… they must've been struck down by something incredibly powerful just before they could reach the doors.

  Through the disheartened emotions, the soul-crushing guilt, and the hate stewing in his chest, he rose to his feet and looked around the chamber, fingers tightening around his wand.

  While Cecilia hummed a soft song in her best attempt to distract Emilia from the gruesome corpses, he waded forward and stared down the hundred-metre-deep hole that was the ‘fourth floor obstacle course’.

  The vast gymnasium was ten metres tall with plain wooden arches criss-crossing on the ceiling, but there weren’t any jumping blocks or ropes to climb or anything of the sort around the room. The standout feature was the thirty-metre-wide hole in the centre of the gymnasium, and he'd heard his kid describe it as a pit to hell.

  A few dozen bird-cage elevators dangled from chains above the hole, and though the rest of the fitness building had run out of gas for the lamps, the elevators must be hooked up to a different source, because they were still moving slowly up and down through the hundred-metre-deep hole.

  Not a single elevator moved more than ten metres up and down through the hole. He’d heard the general concept of this ‘obstacle course’ from the man himself a few months back: the bottom of the hole was fitted with extremely bouncy cushions, so whenever it was time for fitness class, the students would first have to jump all the way down to the bottom and land safely. Then, they’d have to climb onto the first elevator, ride it up a set distance, and then to a distant elevator where they could continue riding it up for another set distance. Rinse and repeat with about ten or so elevators, and they’d eventually be able to get out of the hole.

  Succeeding within the first hour meant the student would have free time to play ball downstairs in the courtyard, but slipping, falling, and getting stuck at the bottom of the hole would mean overtime for the student.

  Zora had no idea how Marcus got this concept past the Headmistress, who actually had to the Magicicada Mages to build such a complicated and unsafe obstacle course. Personally, he also despised such a construction. Whenever his language arts classes followed Marcus’, half his students wouldn’t show up on time because they’d still be stuck at the bottom of the hole, and Marcus would make them try over and over until they could reach the surface with their own strength.

  Now, he couldn’t deny the kids’ fitness records smashed all the previous years’ records by a significant margin ever since Marcus became head fitness teacher —and it was a testament to the man’s attentiveness that they hadn’t had a single reported injury thus far—but even now, while the entire rest of the academy was under attack, the elevators were still moving. The massive chains connecting them to the gas engine overhead were still rattling, and the bottom of the hole was nowhere to be seen. A murky, cloudy white fog hovered around the fifty metre mark, so even if the cushions at the bottom were pulled out, nobody would be able to tell.

  Zora certainly couldn’t tell.

  If he were to fall off now, he might just plummet to his death.

  “... Class 2-C is all accounted for back there,” he whispered as Cecilia joined him by the edge, peering cautiously down as well, “but do you reckon Marcus is stuck down there for some reason?”

  Finally pulling her hands away from Emilia’s eyes, Cecilia glanced back at the disfigured corpses. A dark, bitter grimace formed on her lips.

  “Marcus gets off work before all of his kids finish the obstacle course,” she said quietly. “Never. If he’s not back there with his kids, then he’s down there for sure. It’s not like the elevators aren’t running, and it’s not like he can’t just climb up the walls with his bare hands if he really wants to, so I don’t know he’d be stuck down there, but…”

  “Then we’ll go down and check,” he finished. “There’s a storage room at the very bottom that can be used as an emergency infirmary if any kid gets injured, so if Marcus is anywhere, he’d be there.”

  She looked at him, feigning surprise. "The skellyman who never exercises has been down there before?"

  "Once."

  "For what?"

  "I was throwing a stick of chalk at a kid who was late for my class and missed, so I had to go down and pick it up," he said nonchalantly. "Teachers don't litter."

  Maybe it was reckless of them to send Emilia back to the dorm as they circled around the hole, looking for the closest elevator they could jump down onto, but Zora couldn’t deny the fact that Emilia’s threads might come in useful here. If the elevators were to suddenly jam—which they shouldn’t, considering the Headmistress and Marcus’ greatest undertaking was making sure the engine and chains could never be jammed—they climb up the walls with gloves made out of her sticky threads as a last resort.

  Since Emilia was also the only one here who'd completed the obstacle course more than once, it was her who guided him and Cecilia to where the closest elevator was: off a simple one-metre drop off the edge. Judging by how casually she walked off the edge and landed on the small metal platform, though, the obstacle course wasn’t particularly difficult for her… and he could see why.

  Excluding the fact that she’d been skipping through this course daily for the past three weeks, her moth mutations made her inordinately strong. Compared to the other kids—and compared to Zora and Cecilia, even with their currently enhanced physical attributes—she could afford to look up and wave at them cheerily, not a single bit nervous about the sheer height of the fall as she shouted at them to drop down quickly.

  “I’m a grown man. I’m not scared of heights,” he mumbled, clenching his jaw as he peered over the edge. “Are you?”

  “Not at all,” Cecilia mumbled back, gulping nervously. “You go first.”

  “Ladies first is quite a universal expression, spoken in the far east to the far west—”

  She kicked the back of his knees and made him stumble, falling two metres down onto the circular metal platform. He landed hard on his heels and stumbled a bit further while she dropped down half a second later, landing deftly on the tip of her toes.

  “... I being courteous,” he said, scowling back at her.

  “And what happened to buying the lady dinner first?” she countered, tilting her head at a distant elevator rising towards them. “What a gnarly obstacle course for children, but… that’s the next one we have to jump onto, right?”

  “Mister Marcus changes the speed of each elevator every day!” Emilia said, pumping her fists and nodding as she did. “But the elevators are still at yesterday's speed, so I know the best and quickest way to get to the bottom!”

  Without waiting for the two of them, she leapt three metres across and landed on the next elevator. Zora and Cecilia missed their opportunity, so they could only peer up at the ascending elevator while theirs continued down. They had to wait another ten seconds before theirs started going back up, and then they jumped in unison, landing next to Emilia while she clapped her hands in excitement.

  Both his and Cecilia’s faces were deathly pale, but seeing the smile on Emilia’s face made him think that maybe—just —this sort of obstacle course was actually fun for children.

  As they jumped from elevator to elevator, though, nearing the thick white haze by the fifty-metre mark, his gut started to rumble. It wasn’t because of the bug meat he’d overindulged on, nor because he was getting sick from all the jumping and falling, though. Emilia’s tingling antennae noticed it. Cecilia’s perking ears noticed it. The moment they jumped down onto their sixth elevator and started descending through the haze, he pressed his wand to his lips and charged it with a quiet “strike”

  There were… strange chitterings in the haze.

  Sounds of legs scraping against the cobblestone walls.

  Sounds of chains and elevators rattling harder than they should.

  A pale shadow seemed to be crawling around the walls, but whenever they turned and tried to track it, nothing would be there. The haze made it so they could barely see five metres in front of them, and the next elevator they had to jump onto wasn’t so clear-cut, either. Emilia’s antennae were split, pointing at two separate elevators as though she wasn’t entirely sure where to jump next, too—so he gave Cecilia another nod before shouting “translate”

  Unfortunately—and he’d already guessed as much—there was a raspy voice whispering.

  Right above them.

  Slowly, steadily, they looked up to see a giant white moth climbing down the thick chain of their elevator, and this moth was ghostly white with tiny black spots peppering its folded wings.

  Zora didn’t need to hear what it was mumbling under its breath to know it was no rabble bug—it was of the same type as the katydid, more powerful than most of its brood.

  Its killing pressure made him think it was even stronger than the katydid. If the katydid was E-Rank Giant-Class, this one had to be D-Rank Giant-Class. Or maybe even C-Rank.

  stronger than him and Cecilia.

  “... Fight. Kill. Eat.” it whispered. “Ermine Moth. Fight. For. Mother.”

  Sound Bug Facts #15: Kind of unrelated to the chapter, but many tiger moths emit ultrasonic sounds in response to bats, jamming the bats' echolocation. This high-frequency clicking' is inaudible to humans, but is extremely effective in creating a sound barrier that confuses the bat, which allows the moth to escape!