A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1)(86)

That of course was when Wen said something in Mandarin that I was unhappily certain was very profane.

And look, to defend myself, there’d been really excellent cause to be suspicious of the seniors, and going close to graduation was only the reasonable thing to do as a result. That said, in retrospect, odds were that the seniors still wouldn’t have been able to carry out an effective backup plan even if we’d gone the night before instead, and allowing a little more time for things to go wrong might in fact have been a better idea. I’d just been completely certain that if they’d gone more wrong than that, we’d all be dead anyway.

I should have been right about that. We would have been dead under any normal circumstances. We were in the middle of the graduation horde, all alone. We did have the mana of the entire school pouring into us, so we could probably have held Clarita’s shield up against them for twenty minutes of violent pounding. And then we’d have run through the mana, and the shield would have gone down, and they’d have shredded us all.

    But normal circumstances weren’t what we had, because we had Orion.

It was a truly atrocious experience: standing there just holding up a shield, listening to the repair team clanging away desperately behind us, when I had no idea what the problem was or how long it was going to take to fix it. None of us on the shielding team did; we’d lost Ellen, and Zhen hadn’t come along, as she’d been the fifth-fastest in the repair run. The only way we could have got an explanation right then would’ve involved getting Vinh to tell us about it in French, and at the moment he was kneeling on the ground with his entire torso shoved into the machinery, yelling muffled boomy information that sounded extremely urgent back out to Wen and Kaito, who were frantically ripping apart one of the pieces of artifice that they’d spent so much time putting together in the shop. I deeply regretted not having made time for Mandarin.

But the whole time, Orion went on performing nonstop heroics, pouring fresh mana into us with every mal he slaughtered. The idea had been that he’d stay behind the shield and foray out whenever something especially dangerous came at us, or threatened to take down the shield. But he hadn’t come back even once to take a drink of water. He just stayed out there completely exposed and went on killing them in front of our faces. And I had nothing to do but stand there like a block, just doing my part to keep the bloody shield going, which was barely an effort because almost none of the mals were making it past him to hit us. We might have been watching him on telly through a safe, thick pane of glass.

    The mals actually backed off, at a point. I’m not really sure how long it had been, it could’ve been ten minutes or a hundred years; it certainly felt like a hundred years. Orion was gasping for breath, his hair dripping and massive sweat stains all down his back, with a ring of deflated, stabbed, incinerated, shredded, and otherwise dispatched mals in a clear semicircle round him, a good foot wide, and the assembled maleficaria on the other side making a wall of glowing eyes and drooling jaws and glinting metal. The scavengers were the only ones still in motion: there were half a dozen, each scooting away happily with the remains of one of Orion’s kills. The others all just held their positions for a good minute before one of them finally tried again, and even then, it didn’t go for him, it tried to go round him and went for us.

As soon as that one darted round, another dozen came at once, each one trying to take advantage of Orion’s distraction. But we held the shield up against them without any problem, at least not any problem for me, right up until David Pires abruptly went down. I caught a glimpse of his gone-grey face: I think he was dead even before he toppled forward out through the shield. I hope he was dead. Four different mals instantly got hold of him, and the next moment another ten piled on. Orion lunged in that direction, but by the time he got there and the mals all scattered before him, there was literally nothing left, not even a smear of blood: David might have evaporated.

A hundred mals took advantage of this new opening and came at us, and Orion couldn’t stop the whole wave all at once: they came crashing into the shield, just as it was weakened. A lot of spells cast by more than one person fall apart instantly when anyone goes. Clarita’s had a much better failure mode, the way a conversation can survive when someone leaves the room as long as the other people keep talking. We’d even practiced keeping it up when one of us dropped out. But we hadn’t practiced after holding it for a century of constant attacks, and Maya, who’d been standing between me and David, gave a choking strangled gasp and dropped her part, too, pulling her hand out of mine and staggering a few steps back to collapse into a huddle on the ground, her hands pressed flat against her chest.

    Clarita was already calling out David’s next line, her voice strained; I came in on Maya’s part after and reached out and grabbed Clarita’s hand to close the line: only three of us left now, with Angel Torres on her other side. The shield wavered for a moment like haze above a summer road, and a gigantic suckerworm the length of a decently sized truck erupted explosively out of the crowd of mals and hurled itself right towards us. It smacked onto the shield like a lamprey directly in front of my face, round Sarlacc-toothed maw full of phosphorescent teeth glazed in neon pink, all of them working to get a hold on the shield so it could start twisting itself round to drill a hole through.

The shielding spell was a conversation, so I summoned up the memories of all the ways people made clear to me that I wasn’t welcome to join theirs: cold shoulders and deliberately dropped voices. I fixed the idea in my mind as if David and Maya weren’t really gone out of it, they’d just turned away a bit so the suckerworm couldn’t hear enough of what they were saying to join in, because it wasn’t wanted and should shove off, and it helped that it hurt me to think about it; I whispered David’s next lines through my teeth and shoved more mana into the shield on a burst of anger, and the suckerworm lost its hold and slid down to the ground. Instantly seven smaller mals leapt on its back and tore it apart.