There was no time to waste. In an ideal world, they'd devour all the giant bug carcasses they'd dragged into the storage room, but Zora and Cecilia had already eaten more than enough bug meat for breakfast and then some more; they’d actually die of food poisoning if they ate any more in the next few hours, so the strength they had would have to be enough to deal with the ermine moth.

  “How many points do you guys have?” Zora asked, glancing at his status interface as he finished off the last of the bug carcasses, wiping the corner of his mouth. “I’ve got forty-five.”

  “Forty-one,” Cecilia said.

  “Eighty-four,” Marcus said.

  Zora and Cecilia immediately trained their eyes on the big man, who chuckled casually and beckoned Emilia to hop onto his back.

  “How’d you eat that much more bug meat than we did?” Cecilia muttered, shaking her head in dismay. “To be honest, I’d rather have given you my share so you can do all the fighting for me, but—”

  “I need the extra points to catch up to your attribute levels and unlock mutations, right?” Marcus countered, raising a brow at Zora. “Tell me what to do with the points. Casting spells is one thing, but I’m not really familiar with this whole ‘status interface’ thingy.”

  “Just unlock the tier two mutation ‘Basic Abdovoid’, and then scatter the rest of your points across your attribute levels,” Zora said plainly, glancing at his own status interface as he did. “For me and Cecilia… we don’t have enough to unlock the other tier two mutation just yet, so we’ll just settle for increasing the level of our ‘Basic Abdovoid’. We’ll be able to project our voice stronger and farther that way. Any leftover points we have, we can just increase our lowest attribute level.”

  Cecilia had no arguments there, so he willed the points to allocate themselves and watched his aura increase accordingly.

  [Basic Abdovoid Lvl. 2 → Basic Abdovoid Lvl. 3]

  [Strength: 3 → 4]

  [Aura: 606 → 649]

  [Points: 45 → 2]

  His ‘Basic Abdovoid’ mutation was almost level five. Just two more levels and he’d get to pick from one of three branch mutations, so considering they still had that giant moth carcass to eat back in the dorm, maybe he’d be able to pick his branch mutation by tonight—but right now, they had to get back to the dorm first.

  So, four hours after they set off from the dorm, they kicked the doors of the storage room open with Emilia riding on Marcus’ back.

  Zora furrowed his brows as he looked up, and he tried to find some trace of the ermine moth fluttering above him in the haze, but there were only a dozen elevators moving slowly up and down, giant chains rattling through the smog. Thankfully, it was still the middle of the day a hundred metres up, so sunlight was still refracting through the haze somewhat, but they didn’t have a lot of time left. They couldn’t wait until nightfall to try to escape.

  “You wouldn't happen to be able to cast a spell like ‘illuminate’, can you?” Zora asked, glancing in Marcus' direction. “If you can, I'll give you my wand to turn into a torch. Alternatively, if you have a lighter on you, that’ll also suffice as a light source. I’d rather not have to go through that haze in the dark.”

  “And why would I have a lighter on me?”

  Zora shrugged nonchalantly. “Because you look like a man who’d smoke?”

  Marcus hit him on the back of his head, muttering something about ‘fitness teachers don’t smoke’, and that made Emilia laugh. Cecilia immediately grumbled at them to shut up and pointed at the lowest elevator nearby: the ‘starting point’ of the obstacle course.

  “... Ready?” Zora asked, glancing at the two teachers. “Stick to the plan, and we’ll be back in the dorm by dinner.”

  Cecilia nodded firmly, and Marcus rolled his jaw. The fitness teacher was an important part of their strategy. They wouldn’t be able to get past the ermine moth without him here, so Zora needed him to focus.

  But then he looked at Zora with a sharp, steady gaze, and Zora knew he was here.

  They were ready.

  Without another word, Marcus lifted both Zora and Cecilia—each in one arm—and tossed them three metres up onto the descending elevator. The big man jumped up a second later, landing in a perfect squat that made the elevator creak back and forth. For a moment, Zora worried the chain might just snap under their combined weight, but it was a needless worry. The only thing that could break the chains was a giant bug or Marcus himself.

  “You're still as pale as ever when it comes to heights, eh?” Marcus chuckled aloud, slapping Zora on the back as he peered over the edge, grimacing at the rapidly shrinking ground. “Not a cool look in front of your kid, skellyman. Gotta put some meat on your bone. You know most people have two bones in their forearms, right? There's the radius and the ulna, but you, my friend, have jelly instead of marrow and chalk instead of bone. You need some exercise.”

  “Exercise? Like this?” Zora muttered back. “This obstacle course isn't ‘exercise’. This is an insane accident machine built by an insane fitness teacher. You just want to torture your students, don't you?”

  Marcus belted out a hearty laugh as he kicked Zora and Cecilia onto the adjacent elevator.

  “My kids love my obstacle course,” Marcus said, feigning disbelief as he glanced around. “You tell him, Emilia. Tell skellyman my elevators are the best in the world.”

  Emilia grinned at Zora, nodding exuberantly. “I like Mister Marcus’ elevators!”

  “See? Emilia likes it. She always goes for round two and three, too, and she's by far my best student.”

  “And thus the other ninety-nine percent are tossed aside, swept aside,” Zora grumbled, turning his wand into a sword as they rose past the twenty metre mark. “That's no good, Mister Evander. You're a teacher, and for me, any teacher that ignores the plight of their student deserves a—”

  “Strike!”

  Zora and Cecilia’s spell flew onto their blades, but when they whirled and slashed at the pouncing moth at once, the sound waves didn’t fly off their blades like they would off their wands.

  Instead, their rippling swords imbued with the sound waves of “strike” chopped off the front halves of the ermine moth’s forelegs, making it fly back into the haze with a pained screech.

  They'd been intentionally talking aloud to lure it into pouncing on them, but frankly, Zora didn't think it'd work that well.

  “... But now we know a few more things about our magic,” Zora said, pressing back to back against Cecilia with his sword poised while Marcus slammed his fists together. “One: our spells practically fly off when they’re cast on our wands, but when they’re cast on our swords instead, they’ll stick to the blades until they come in contact with something. That's because our wands are made out of cicada chitin, and they have sound-absorbing properties that allow them to retain sound better.”

  “So if we can't fling a ‘strike’ at you from afar because the haze will slow our sound waves down, then we just have a cast ‘strike’ on our blades and swing them at you,” Cecilia said, grinning from ear to ear as she tried looking for the moth through the haze. “The moment we physically hit you with the spell-enhanced blade, the spell will transfer from the blade to you, so we'll have to recast the spell again—but you'll also be hurt, haze or not. That's a good trade, right?”

  The sword for close-range spell-swording, and the wand for long-range spell-slinging. That was only their first of three new discoveries they'd found while testing out their magic in the storage room.

  Emilia’s antennae tingled on Marcus’ back, and all of them noticed—they scattered the moment the ermine moth slammed into their elevator from below, jumping onto three separate elevators all moving up at different paces.

  There was no hesitation. The moth wasn’t mindless. As it ripped through the elevator in the centre and swerved around, its eyes instantly popped. It realised Marcus was the only one without a wand, and there was an extra human on his back it could feast on, so it pounced at him without question.

  Marcus merely cupped his hands before his mouth, bellowing "toughen" and making the sound waves ripple around his own body.

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  Zora smirked.

  The moth rammed into Marcus head-first, but it was like running a wooden ram into a heavy steel door. It damn near shattered its own skull ramming into Marcus’ spell-enhanced chest, forcing it to once again flutter away with a pained screech, bumping into two elevators on its way back.

  “... Two!” Zora shouted, forcing himself to breathe as he mustered the courage to jump to another elevator. Cecilia and Marcus did the same while the moth rolled around on the walls, swinging its head violently left and right as though trying to shake out its own concussion. “We can cast spells on our own bodies! We tried loads of spells like ‘strengthen’ and ‘hasten’, and while there’s nothing Miss Sarius and I can cast on ourselves for the time being, Mister Evander is a muscle freak! His subconscious allows him to believe he's much tougher than he actually is! I bet he can even imagine himself pumping himself full of drugs and elixirs to buff his muscles up to two hundred!”

  Somehow, someway, Marcus managed to throw a rubber ball from the storage room at Zora’s head. “I’m not Julius, you piece of shit! I don’t do drugs!”

  “Or so says the man who is strong and fast enough to outrun intelligent thoughts!”

  “That’s right! I’m the fastest man in the… wait, what—”

  “Don’t grow up to be like him, Emilia!” Zora shouted, cupping his hands over his mouth to make his voice as loud as possible, as obnoxious as possible. His hollow abdomen mutation helped carry it far and wide. “Make no mistake! There is charm only a delicate lady can have, and strength to lift hearts at a single glance! You don’t need bulging muscles like that idiot you’re riding! After all, the third thing we realised—”

  In the distance, Emilia's antennae swerved and pointed behind Zora. He whirled, cast “strike” on his blade again, and exhaled sharply as he stabbed at the pouncing moth’s mouth—and he would’ve run his sword right through its head had it not jerked back in time, its massive wings sending gusts of prickly white haze into him.

  Bracing his free arm before his face, he skidded back and jumped to the next elevator, regrouping with Marcus and Cecilia as the moth screeched up at them.

  “... After all, the third thing we realised was that the moth’s an idiot. For all its strength, all it does is respond to loud voices and provocation just like any rabble bug,” Zora said, fist-bumping Marcus. “And when it fans its wings like that, it creates a bunch of strong wind that pushes out its spell-fizzling haze, but that also means it’s pushing the haze away from its body.”

  Just like when Marcus was spinning Emilia around in the storage room.

  If the haze is thick enough to be physical and tangible, then it stands to reason that physical and tangible wind would also be able to thin it out.

  Therefore, all we need to do is get it to flap its wings several times, and then…

  The moth was visibly enraged. Golden blood coursed through its paper-thin wings, its eyes turned bloodshot, and it flew straight up at them with its bleeding front legs held out like spears. Gone was the elusive hunter who played a slow predatory game by hiding in its haze—and Zora was quite sure, at this point, that the haze was just its tiny white scales lingering in the air and intercepting their spells—so the moment it reared its ugly head at them, emerging from its own haze, Zora and Cecilia transformed their swords back into wands and whipped their “amplified strike” down.

  All they needed was one opening.

  Just one.

  Without the haze protecting the moth, their combination spell lashed out with a deafening boom, slamming the moth down onto an elevator. It hit. Cecilia grinned. While the moth cried out in pain, disoriented by their first attack, they cast “amplified strike” again and again, not letting up the pressure. Half of their spells whiffed, admittedly, knocked off-course by clouds of lingering haze, but the other half did their job: knocking the moth back and buying time for them to jump up to different elevators. Zora even threw a “translate” around them just to make sure they could keep track of its incoherent ramblings, while Marcus sucked in a deep breath before clapping his hands, shouting “boom” to blow away even more of the haze surrounding the four of them.

  They found a winning strategy. They just had to keep doing this. Keep suppressing the moth below them, keep pushing the haze back, and continue riding the elevators up.

  Just like that, they reached the seventy metre mark.

  Only thirty more metres to go.

  “... Our swords can cut through its chitin, but even with ‘amplified strike’, we can’t actually break its chitin from afar, huh?” Zora grumbled, gritting his teeth as his neck strained with effort, him and Cecilia still slinging nonstop combination spells down at the moth. “Think you can hurt it with your strength level if I give you my wand, Mister Evander?”

  “We don’t have to kill the moth here, do we?” Marcus peered up at the next elevator, brows furrowed as he continued clapping his hands, casting “boom” every ten seconds or so to push away the haze. “As long as we can get out of the building and into the sun, it probably won’t try to chase us. At the very least, it won’t chase you and Cecilia, knowing you have swords that can cut through its legs.”

  “It might. It’s not as bright as you think—”

  The moth screeched. Irritated, it dashed to the walls of the pit, realising flying meant it could be easily knocked off-course by their “amplified strikes”. Its legs tore into the bricks as it started climbing up, making sure it couldn’t be knocked down again, and at the same time—it roared. Loud. All four of them winced as they were mid-jump onto the next elevator, and when Emilia pointed up at the edge of the hole they were now nearing…

  Zora clicked his tongue.

  They were so, so close to the surface.

  But he should've predicted the ermine moth would have backup prepared.

  … They aren't called the ‘Swarm’ for no reason, after all.

  They were dark silhouettes perched on the edge of the pit, all sorts of Giant-Class beetles and moths unfurling and stretching their wings. There had to be at least ten of them surrounding them from every conceivable direction, and they jumped down at the four of them with hellish screeches. None of them looked like they could carry themselves in flight, but they jumped in anyways with reckless abandon. The death of one human was more than worth the death of ten bugs, so what did it matter to them if they died trying to wipe out the last of the Magicicada Mages?

  They’d do anything for their ‘Mother’—and so the teachers would do anything for their children as well.

  There was no hesitation. There was no need for verbal confirmation. Communication lay in expression, and the moment it became clear there was going to be no way out of the bugs’ collapse on every elevator all at once, Marcus ripped Emilia off his back and tossed her up. At the same time, Zora and Cecilia cast “amplified push” on her back, sending her past the thirty metre mark and over the edge of the pit.

  Then the bugs crashed into their elevator, snapped the chain, and dragged all of them seventy metres back down to the cushioned bottom.

  Seventy metres was a long fall, but frankly, Zora didn’t feel most of it. He was already a bit winded as was, but coupled with the metal falling around him, the giant bugs screeching every which way, and Marcus grabbing both him and Cecilia to wrap them in a tight hug, he barely felt the crash landing into the velvet cushions. He thought he was going to die in one second, and in the next, he was already springing back to the surface with Cecilia in his arms, aching from head to toe.

  He was still alive.

  “You… you good?” he muttered, struggling to climb onto his feet as mounds of elevator debris hit the cushions around him hard, making the soft ground ripple and wobble like a stormy sea.

  “Mhm. And… and you, muscleman?” Cecilia replied, the two of them looking forward at the same time, and their eyes twitched when they saw Marcus standing up with a right arm visibly bruised and bent the wrong way. The forearm was broken, no doubt about it; was it because he’d protected the two of them from the falling debris by slapping everything away with his bare hands?

  By the scrunched, pained look on Marcus’ face, the man wasn’t going to tell, and Zora didn’t know the answer himself.

  Zora clenched his jaw as the ten giant bugs fell around them in a circle, the ermine moth fluttering over their heads and leading the chorus of taunting screeches.

  “... Weak!” the moth laughed, and Marcus froze as he heard a bug speak for the first time. “Weak! Cowards! Fight four against one, how fair? Not true warriors, just like the humans who were trying to escape from this building!”

  Zora’s eyes widened. Cecilia immediately tried to dispel his “translate” by slinging a “silence” at it, but the moth fanned its wings down abruptly, shedding its scales to create the thickest, densest haze yet. Both of them coughed as Cecilia's spell barely flew a metre upwards before fizzling.

  Shit.

  The moth…still had scales to spare?

  I should've expected it could summon friends over, too, given it seems like a relatively high-rank Giant-Class bug.

  What do we do now? Try to fight it out in the storage room?

  This isn’t—

  “Say that again, bug?” Marcus asked, his voice snapping out like a whip as he looked up, completely unaffected by the choking white haze. “Who are you talking about? What ‘humans’?”

  The moth chittered as it continued flapping its wings, hovering in place to shed even more spell-intercepting scales down at them. “The small ones! The fast runners! They were cowards like you all, too! So many of them in one place, but they don’t fight me? Why?” Then it tilted its head left and right as though to mock them, relishing Zora and Cecilia's panic. “The flesh of weaklings don’t taste good, you know! Muscles not tight! Not enough energy! I didn’t like the small ones, you know?”

  The moth rambled on and on, the “translate” spell running out halfway through and returning it to its usual incoherent screeches, but it’d already said everything it needed to say—it wasn’t half as intelligent-sounding as the katydid, but it was every bit as bloodthirsty, and it had friends to support it to boot.

  For Zora’s part, though, he wasn’t so much worried about the giant bugs laughing around them as he was apprehensive looking at Marcus’ back.

  Those broad, impossibly ripped shoulders of Marcus' were terrifically still and calm for a fitness teacher who could always find an excuse to get himself worked up in a sweat.

  “What’s the moth talking about, skellyman?” Marcus whispered, lowering his head, and Zora’s skin paled to the colour of fresh snow. “My kids in 2-C… they were with the two of you in the dorm, weren’t they?

  “...”

  “They made it there, didn’t they?”

  Zora stalled in silence. The weight he’d been carrying in his chest for the past four hours came crashing down all at once, and… he found there were no words in his repertoire of a thousand tongues that could properly convey what he should be saying to Marcus.

  Because Marcus wouldn’t listen anyways.

  He was painfully simple like that.

  “... I see,” he murmured, clenching his fist and cracking his neck left and right as he glared up at the moth. “And you, up there. You said you wanted a ‘fight’, didn’t you?”

  Neither humans nor bugs understood each other, but they didn’t have to. Marcus kicked up a nearby chain, grabbed it with one hand, and began dragging the giant elevator it was connected to like a flail.

  On instinct and instinct alone, Zora grabbed Cecilia’s hand, and both of them backed off slowly from the man whose crimson cloak seemed to burn in the haze.

  Marcus' aura—his killing pressure—was rippling outwards at full force, engulfing the bottom of the pit.

  And it made even Zora shudder in fright.

  “Mages? Points? Wands?” Marcus muttered, shaking his head irritably as he jerked his chain hard right—ripping the entire elevator off the ground as he did. “Don’t get complacent, bug. I don’t need more than one arm to drag you down to my level.”