A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(68)

    “What are you doing?” he said. I ignored him completely; my gut hurt like crazy from falling down the stairs, enough to bring tears to my eyes, and my scraped elbow and skinned knee stung, too, and it was an immense effort to keep my focus. He gave me up as a bad cause and ran down the stairwell and started grabbing tentacles one after another, pulling them loose from their grips and putting binding spells on them, trying to squash the whole thing into a single ball while it bulged out in one direction and another like a giant angry amoeba.

“I’m ready,” I croaked.

“What?” he said, through gritted teeth, as he wrestled another tentacle into the mass.

“Get back from it!” I said louder, through gritted teeth. Orion glanced back at me, and the tentacle managed to half pull free and thump him, knocking him halfway up the stairs. Good enough to get him clear, and well deserved. I chanted out the phase-control spell, and tried to make the nitrogen in my vision liquid.

I’m reasonably sure I was successful, since the mana certainly went somewhere: half my laboriously refilled crystal, gone in a gulp. I guess the nitrogen did boil away again instantly, because there was no visual effect; maybe a faint whoosh of coldish air moving, but that was all. Except for one minor detail: the grogler’s skin instantly frosted over, and then cracked up all at once like the surface of a pond in spring. The whole thing collapsed, the liquidy guts inside all spilling into a single giant puddle that drained away through the grating at the bottom of the stairs, going down in a brief whirlpool with a final loud gurgling slurp. The only thing left behind was the tiny core tentacle that had wriggled through the corner of the stairwell in the first place, like a spider plant budding off. That looked exactly like the classic illustration in the third chapter of the freshman-year textbook, iridescent jelly around a neon-pink vein. It pulled itself right back through the hole like a piece of spaghetti getting sucked up.

    Orion sat up. “Hah!” he croaked out, like he’d done it, and looked up the stairs at me triumphantly.

“Lake, I hate you more than words can possibly express,” I told him, fervently, and sat down and leaned against the wall and wrapped my arms around my aching belly. He got up a little sheepishly and filled the hole in the wall with some putty out of his pocket, did a quick make-and-mend, and then he came over and I think was about to try and carry me. I gave him a death glare and made him just help me up instead.

And after all that, he was yawning again even before we were at the senior hall landing, like he didn’t have a drop of adrenaline running through his system. I was in more than minor pain and I still felt at least ten times as alert as he looked. I eyed him as we limped onwards. “Why are you this wiped out? Have you been having really incredible nightmares or—” But I was figuring it out even as he darted a half-guilty look towards me. “You moron, you’ve been staying up patrolling? Because of that pathetic murderous gob whining at you?”

Orion wouldn’t meet my eyes. “He wasn’t wrong,” he said, low.

“What?”

“The mals in the graduation hall,” he said. “It wasn’t just the grogler. They must’ve forced a hole through the wards, down there, and now they’re all trying to make it through into the school. It’s worse at night. I’ve mended that same wall seven times so far—”

    “And you haven’t slept in fifty-five hours, which does explain why you spent ten straight minutes hacking tentacles off a grogler,” I said.

“It was twice as big as any grogler’s supposed to be!” he said defensively. “I thought it was a hydra-class mal!”

“A justifiable mistake right up until you’ve hacked off the first tentacle,” I said. “How many had you done, seven? And you were still going strong when I got there. If it had yanked the stairwell open, no question you’d have earned an assist.” His mouth went into a hard line, and I could feel his body tense with the desire to go storming away from me, which he’d probably have done, except at the moment it would’ve involved dragging me right along with him. “What’s the point of this exercise exactly? Even if you’re really set on going out in a blaze of glory, you won’t get one if you go down at the start of the inundation.”

“Will you stop? I don’t care about glory!” he said. “I just—it’s my fault! You told me it was. I screwed with the principle of balance, and—”

“Oh, now you’re ready to accept the basic laws of reality,” I said. “Shut up, Lake. We all know you don’t get anything for free. Nobody complained when you were saving their lives, did they?”

“Only you,” he said, dryly.

“I’ll remember to be really smug about that as I’m getting eaten by the graduation horde,” I said. “You’ve been white-knighting as hard as you can for three full years. You’re not going to fix the consequences by white-knighting a little bit harder over the course of a single week. That’s the principle of balance, too.”

    “Well, you’ve convinced me. I guess I’ll just go take a nap, then. That’s going to help a lot,” he said, with a wealth of sarcasm.

I glared at him. “It would beat helping a grogler rip open the school.” He scowled back at me. And then yawned again.