Chương 43: 43 loop 1 Part 23

I got back into my chair slowly, one hand braced on the seat, my recently reinstalled elbow held against my ribs like it might fall off again. It wasn't necessary, but my brain hadn't quite caught up. Flag was still sitting on Bain, meditating. He had planted himself across Bain's hips and lower back. Not enough to crush him, unfortunately, but more than enough to keep him from reaching anything useful.

Bain was face down beneath Flag, swearing into the floor with the injured dignity of a man discovering consequences for the first time. When he finally became understandable, it was not an improvement.

"This is mutiny," Bain said into the stone. Thankfully, nobody answered him. That was the trouble with attempting to murder a student in front of forty witnesses. It made the follow-up complaints difficult to take seriously. Forty-odd faces watched us from the storage room. A mix of relief, anxiety, and anger. Near the back, a lanky fourth-year I recognized gave me a small wave. I nodded at Malus and moved on, because there were more pressing problems to deal with. Finn hadn't left my side.

"You're not getting away that easily. You need to tell me where you've been. I was worried sick. And then your uncle vanished, too? What the fuck, man? I thought we were friends."

"Look, I'll tell you, but we need to—""No, you're going to tell me."

"Extraordinary." A new voice broke into the general roar spilling out of the storage room and into the ruined dining hall. Professor Marcus Thane came through the crowd at the half-jog he used instead of walking. His manic energy hadn't dimmed for the apocalypse. If anything, it had found a worthier subject. He crossed the room with no regard for the debris in his path, boots clipping fast against the stone, and stopped three feet from my chair.

"Oh, wow, golems!" He said this like he was seeing the sun for the first time.

"Four of them? You have four golems. And that one's moving independently. Oh, what? Good, good, good work, Mr. Yarrow. How are you anchoring your persuasions? How did you convince four tons of stone to walk? Out with it, boy. What did you do?"

"Oh, it wasn't much. I didn't really argue with them." Finn gave a frustrated clearing of his throat, but I gladly ignored him. I didn't get why he was so mad. Yeah, I vanished, but… come on. Should anyone have been happy this evening?

"You must have said something. You cannot simply tell a stone to defy its nature. You have to make it agree to—" He cut himself off, looking at Flag.

"Professor Thane," Flag said.

"Oh, hello. I would recognize those shoes anywhere. Look, I have knees now." Thane's eyes snapped from Flag's face to his chest. Then he traveled further down, as if he was looking for the knees to bend. Then realization dawned on his face. He put a hand over his mouth before he squealed in joy.

"You bound a soul into a constructed golem. Marvelous," he said through his fingers.

"How did you—what did you—that's not a thing that's been attempted in decades. Does he have proprioception? Does he dream? Does he have his own—""Professor Thane." Finn's voice had gone flat, and it was clear he was having trouble controlling himself.

"Now isn't the time for this."

"It absolutely is the—""Laz has been missing for two days. His uncle, too. And now there's a dragon that's fucking killed everybody." Thane blinked, as if the apocalypse had rudely interrupted a much more interesting turn of events.

"Now, calm down. Your excitement can wait," Finn continued. I had never seen Finn talk to a professor that way. Thane looked at me, confusion plain on his face.

"He's been missing for two days? Where have you been?" Ignoring the professor, Finn rounded back on me, and the frustration had boiled over.

"Laz, tell me everything. Now."

"I was in the library."

"Laz!"

"Fine, okay." I sat up straighter in my chair and started talking as fast as I could.

"I followed that gray man down into the restricted library. Got lost on the way back up when I couldn't find the staircase.

Got chased by a bunch of Frollarts, met a talking book, got chased by more Frollarts, got sent on a quest, found a book that let me summon cheese, cheesed a giant Frollart to save my comatose uncle, learned to make golems, turned a stone with a soul into a golem, thought it was Wednesday, found out it was Thursday, and now we have to kill the dragon before it wakes up and murders everybody else. I don't think I missed anything." Finn and the forty others just stared at me.

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"That was a joke," I said. No one believed me. Mostly. Finn's face went very still.

"Your uncle is in a coma?" Of every sentence in that summary, he had of course reached for the one with a wounded person in it. I thought it was best not to tell Finn about the time travel—not with a room full of my professors and Bain listening.

"That's an unfairly selective response to a very dense report of almost-true statements.

"Laz, please just tell me what happened." I sighed and pointed my wand at my hand." [Ex Nihilo Caseum]." A warm wheel of cheese dropped into my hand with a soft thump.

"Look, I wasn't lying about this. I really can summon edible food now." I tried to give Finn a look that said I would talk to him later, and he finally relented. I leaned over my chair and handed the cheese wheel to Professor Thane, who studied the spell with his usual enthusiasm.

"Can your golems fight?" The voice came from a woman making her way from the back of the gathered crowd. It took me until she was practically right in front of me to realize who it was. Professor Frost, head of the Dungeon Track Department. The one who had judged my tournament matches. She had the same concentrated expression she'd worn during our matches. It was as if she was already calculating who would survive the day.

"Define 'fight,'" I said.

"Can they stop that dragon from killing the people in this room?"

"Briefly. Maybe. If it attacks in a straight line and is polite about its timing."

"So you just barged in here to lead us to our deaths."

"I said briefly. That's not nothing. Besides, that's not what my plan is. My fourth one can even think for himself, which is more than I can say for some of the faculty in here." Beneath Flag, Bain made a sound.

"That fourth one, it's the one with the soul? What does that bring us, exactly?"

"His name is Flag," I said. Something put me off in the way she looked at Flag and talked about him—like he was a what, not a who.

"Hello, I am Flag," Flag said. It was clear he was enjoying being the center of attention. She took it in stride and didn't react, which was respectable. Then she crouched, put herself level with the chair, and dropped her voice.

"Nice work with Bain. Why aren't you in Dungeon Track again?" I rolled my eyes. I'd half-expected her to overreact to that, since Bain had become her boss, after all.

"Because Dungeon Track involves running toward things, and I'd rather sit in my chair," I said.

"You spend a great deal of effort pretending not to spend effort." She said it like a verdict.

"And yet here you are, missing for two days, and you show up with four golems and a story about how you killed an adult Frollart. Don't insult my intelligence." I didn't have an answer to that. Yet. But before I could find one, another voice cut in.

"You manifested actual food?" A senior shoved his way forward out of the crowd, openly delighted, and made directly for the cheese, still sitting in Thane's hands. He'd clearly been starving. I was pretty sure they all had. Who knew the last time any of these people had eaten? He didn't so much take the wheel as liberate it, tearing off a chunk and getting it into his mouth before anyone could comment.

"Hey, save me some." A second senior broke in and took the wheel out of his hands mid-bite.

"Craston Weave gets the cheese, Craston Weave keeps the cheese," he said around the mouthful, grabbing for it.

"I found it first."

"You took the whole thing." She held it out of his reach.

"Yivern Auroka would like a little taste, too."

"And now you're talking about yourself in the third person? That's Craston's schtick. Get your own""Craston is about to find out what it's like to be manifested a second mouth. Since the first one won't shut up."

"Try it. I'll alter the spell into nothing before it even leaves your wand, dumbass. I've done it in a fight. I'll do it over breakfast."

"It's not breakfast, it's lunchtime." The threats told me more than any introduction could have. They were together, obviously. Nobody learns to throw somebody else's death around that precisely without years of practice and at least some affection underneath it. And it was clear they fought together, too.

"Weave. Auroka. Behave yourselves." Frost's voice cracked through the room, and they snapped to attention.

"Good. Now stop eating. We need to come up with a plan."

"Stop eating? Are you crazy? I haven't eaten in, like, fourteen hours." Auroka grabbed one last piece of cheese and handed the rest back.

"Good," Frost said.

"Now we settle how we get out of this room safely, because the longer we stand here, the worse our odds get."

"Yes, professor."

"It's obvious. We go together." A professor I didn't know, with gray hair and old, decrepit-looking hands, said.

"All of us in one group. Safety in numbers, and all that hodgepodge. I'm not going to be caught dead by myself." His voice was high-pitched and nasally.

"Forty people in one group is forty dead people," Frost said.

"If we all bunch up, we'd make a target even a child could hit. And this thing's a dragon."

"Then how about we split up?" Auroka said, licking bits of cheese off her fingers.

"Small groups with different routes. That'll be harder to catch all of us."

"And then we lose half the room to the dragon? No."

"So which is it?" the gray professor snapped. The fray in his voice spread to his shaking hands.

"Because every second you spend telling us what won't work is another second that thing has to wake up." I had the answer, and it didn't really have to be that hard. Storage room wall. Restricted section. Dig through instead of walking across open campus like very polite dragon food. But I didn't get a chance to speak. The roar burst through the open ceiling. Dust came down in sheets. A pane of glass that had clung on all morning finally dropped and shattered, barely audible under the roar.

It was the same as in the arena, and I knew it before my brain caught up to what was happening. It was a sound I had hoped never to hear again. For one heartbeat, everything was still. The gray professor broke first. He ran straight out the first pair of doors, and then chaos ensued. Forty terrified people, broke all at once in every direction, no plan or leader or anything guiding their actions. Tables and chairs that hadn't been destroyed were left as wreckage in the wake. Someone screamed. Fuck.

Why were they all running? And then black smoke and shadow-fire billowed through the open ceiling.