The oaken stairs creaked as Esmé sprinted downstairs, leaving Rum behind. The ground floor of the clinic had become cramped by the sick and injured – a population which had already been split into two groups. Those in critical condition were moved to one end of the lodge, while the rest worked alongside Wulfram, barricading the doors and windows of the building. As the doctor pushed her way through the glut of mercenaries running around, each one stepped aside, letting her peer outside of a window that has yet to be sealed.

“…What is that?”

From all sides, the clinic became surrounded by… a black liquid? Esmé strained her eyes, taking in information – the inconsistent speed at which the fluid cascaded forth, its seemingly-endless quantity… The doctor witnessed the sludge defy gravity altogether, climbing along the surface of rocks, and tree stumps that found themselves in its wake. Sounds of Wulfram screaming out commands slowly grew more distant; the medicine magus, hyperfixated, scanned the plains for anything that could reveal the liquid’s true identity. And then, she sees it.

In the distance, two men are straggling away from the all-consuming blob. Did they arrive too late to be let inside? One of them is heavily limping – only being able to keep up thanks to the second man, propping him up. However, it proves to be too much. The injured man falls to the ground, and is promptly abandoned. Esmé watched in horror as the black liquid darted towards its prey, like a wave fanning out across the sand, too quick for anyone to react. Despite his injury, the man began flailing, violently – violently enough to kick away particles of the sludge into the sky. This was no liquid. The black veneer masked a man being eaten to death – a pestilence which was advancing towards the clinic.

“They’re insects…”

In an instant, Esmé snapped out of her transient focus, bellowing a command at the man in charge of protecting her clinic – Wulfram.

“Wulfram! Help me push this bookshelf over!”

The tattooist followed his employer’s command without objection. The hardwood shelf tumbled over, revealing what appeared to be a panic room, with a connected door, and a staircase. Using the deafening thud as a way to get everyone’s attention, Esmé addressed the clinic’s patients.

“Everyone who can fight, you’re with the bald one! Everyone who can’t fight, but can walk, help get those who can’t downstairs, safely!”

A stray voice from the crowd asked what everyone wanted to know.

“What’s out there?!”

“Insects – and enough of them to strip the flesh off the bones from every person here. So, hustle!”

A thundering cheer rings out in response, injecting a sense of fervor into every single person present. Quickly, the doctor pulled Wulfram in, closer.

“Your job is to kill as many of those little monsters as possible, but more importantly, slow them down. I have entomology books upstairs, but I need time to figure out a way to stop them.”

The tattooist isn’t even given a chance to respond, let alone ask questions – Esmé disappears upstairs in the blink of an eye, leaving him behind with a crowd of injured mercenaries, and vagrants. Still, Wulfram realizes the severity of the situation – if a magus is controlling those insects, it’s impossible to predict what they’ll do once they make it to the lodge.

“Roll call!” the de-facto leader yelled at his new, haphazard platoon.

A cacophony of various voices began reporting their magick in response, each proclamation drowning out the other – only the tattooist is able to keep track of everything that was being said.

“Maces!”, “Peat!”, “Seaweed!”, “Clouds!”, “Topaz!”, “Tanning solution!”, “Carts!”.

If it weren’t for the fact that Wulfram himself was a sub-par magus, his expression would’ve immediately contorted with alarm. Nobody here can do jack against insects! Intermittently, more abilities are called out, but the realization of how ill-equipped everyone is for a fight against an army of bugs started to settle in. Finally, a voice called out from much further back.

“I’m the cobweb magus!”

The young man appeared to be bedridden – nasty injuries and dirty bandages adorned his entire body, but to Wulfram, he appeared lucid enough. A plan began materializing.

Upstairs, Rum had just seen the doctor sprint into her private study. Despite her first-class medical treatment, the girl could still tell just how fatigued her entire body had become. Getting up from bed demanded an inordinate amount of focus, as did walking into the magus’ room.

“Hey, what’s going on out there?”

The question fell on deaf ears. Despite her age, Esmé was prying textbooks out from bookshelves that stretched to the very top of a disproportionately high ceiling. The ladder she had perched on slid in either direction of the cramped study, allowing the doctor to access leather-bound tomes stored five meters up from the ground. Suddenly, Esmé replied, as though Rum’s question was queued in a to-do list.

“Girlie, run downstairs and hide. A magus is attacking as we speak, and I need to come up with some countermeasures, ten minutes ago!”

The doctor dropped another textbook up from the ladder, rattling the poor desk as the weight of a dozen bricks smashes into it.

“Then let me help!”

Esmé clicks her tongue loud enough for Rum to hear.

“I’m sorry – is having a hole where your eye used to be not enough of a deterrent?!”

“I only need one eye to read, don’t I? What should I look for in these books?”

For a second, the doctor hesitated. Esmé slides down the ladder, and looks past Rum, out through the ICU window. The insects are getting closer – too quickly for ordinary bugs. Finally, the magus concedes.

“I give us three minutes before an army of bugs starts chewing through our front door, and once they’re done, they’ll chew through us next. Help me find anything on how to kill insects en masse.”

Outside, Wulfram had already assembled an elite squad of mercenaries, comprised of the cloud, cart, and spiderweb magi. The wriggling mass of various bugs continues inching closer towards the clinic, only held back by their movement speed. Even if the clinic had ample manpower to fight off the creatures’ advance, there was still the surrounding greenery to worry about – if the Queen of Fleurand, and by extension, her army, was alerted to the presence of fugitives in the area… It would be catastrophic.

“Is everyone ready?!” the tattooist bellowed.

“Ready!”

The cart magus was the first to use his magick – the ability to drag any object through the air, as though it had invisible cart wheels attached to its bottom. Next, the cloud magus began forming small tufts of water vapor beneath everyone’s feet, isolating them from the grass they otherwise would’ve had to step on. The last piece of the puzzle was the cobweb magus – someone who was bedridden, but instrumental in holding off the insects.

“Pull!”

Thanks to the cart magick, the three mercenaries were easily able to drag along an enormous infirmary bed, on which the cobweb magus was still splayed out. The plan was simple – create a thick wall of spider web along the clinic’s perimeter, temporarily trapping any approaching insects. All that was left to do, was to execute it. Despite being confined to his bed, the cobweb magus began sloughing layer after layer of spider silk off of both his arms; from a distance, it looked as if he was simply trying to wipe sweat off of his forearms. As the magickal cart continued to loop around Esmé’s clinic, Wulfram was able to see the formless liquid up close – an amalgam of army ants, carpenter ants, termites, and other insects, feverishly pushing on towards the wooden lodge, gnashing at anything in their path. We better make this wall of cobwebs as thick as possible.

One, two, four, seven, ten times the mercenaries ran across the clinic’s entire perimeter. Everyone became physically drained; the arms of the bedridden magus looked as though they were sunburned. At this point, the swarm of bugs has gotten close enough to become entangled in the cobwebs. It wasn’t much, but Wulfram bought time.

“Let’s get back inside – we still need to move patients to the panic room.”

The tattooist swung the door open, but to his horror, an entirely new problem had appeared. The mercenaries who stayed inside frantically stomped against the ground, desperately trying to kill the invading insects. Wulfram watched as out through the floorboards, a jet-black beetle bore straight through the thick plank of wood.

“Woodworms…”

Any semblance of a countdown just flew out the window. If the magus responsible for this attack sent woodboring beetles to dig tunnels beneath the clinic, then those bloodthirsty ants had just gotten a new way in!

“Where’s the peat magus?! Get over here!”

An older man looked up from one end of the building, preoccupied with killing the bugs skittering away on the floor.

“You can turn dirt into peat, right? Start plugging the tunnels these beetles are leaving behind, or we’re all dead!”

Suddenly, Esmé’s shrill voice rang out from upstairs, addressed to Wulfram.

“Gorilla! What the hell is going on down there?! Why haven’t you used your lightning magick yet?!”

The blood in the tattooist’s veins froze over, but the stakes right now were far too high to linger on a lie.

“I’m not the lightning magus! Have you found any way to kill–”

“You’re NOT?! Then why the hell did I hire you?!”

“The insects are here, you old bat! What do we do?!”

Upstairs, Esmé’s study lay in complete disarray. Both her, and Rum have flipped through dozens of entomology texts, but the clinic had nothing on hand that could kill such a huge number of bugs.

“…Esmé!”

“Oh, shut it Wulfram! All you’re good for is standing pretty, and smoking–”

She pauses.

“Tobacco.”

In a flash, Rum is pushed out of the way, as the doctor scrambles her way back up the ladder, retrieving a thick, herbalism encyclopedia. The mercenaries downstairs continue to call out, but Esmé has been temporarily ejected from the world, manically flipping through the book’s pages, until she arrives at Nicotiana tabacum. There it was – a footnote under ‘Interesting Facts’.

“Wulfram! Insects can’t handle breathing in tobacco smoke! I have bales of it in the storage room – get it, and light it in the fireplace!”

“Where’s the storage?!”

“It’s the door in the panic room!”

The goal was within reach, now. While Wulfram started digging through the clinic’s supply of medicinal plants, Esmé turned to face Rum.

“I’m going to run down, and move any patients still out in the open. When your friend lights up the tobacco, I’ll come fetch you.”

“Bullshit! I can handle myself, so let me help!”

“Girlie, you have a hole where your eye used to–”

“Again, with the eye – I’m fine, okay?!”

“And when bugs start crawling inside of it, you won’t be.”

For a moment, Rum couldn’t refute the grim visual – enough time for Esmé to slip downstairs.

“Fine! I’ll just find something to plug the hole with, then!” Rum called out behind her.

Reassuringly, the vast majority of the patients were moved into the panic room, with only a handful still left fending for themselves against the woodworms. However, the doctor’s priority was getting the room full of smoke; Wulfram must still be looking for the bales of–

“Esmé! I lit the tobacco in the fireplace, like you said, but won’t that just let all the smoke escape?”

For the first time since meeting her, Wulfram saw as the magus went wide-eyed with fear.

“I always close the chimney up after winter…”

Suddenly, her train of thought was derailed – a loud buzzing reverberating in the smokestack.

Without a moment to react, a swarm of flying insects invaded the clinic. Hundreds of hornets poured into the building at horrific speed, only slightly disoriented by the wall of tobacco smoke they crossed to get there. Millions of thoughts raced in Wulfram’s mind: should he shove the bookcase shut to save the mercenaries? Is there a way to close up the chimney and gas the insects out? The ants have almost completely cleared the barrier of cobwebs outside… Where was Rum?

*CRASH*

A blinding flash of light appeared outside, followed closely by an unmistakable boom. To everyone else, the sound of lightning, but to Wulfram, it was a noise he’d become uncomfortably familiar with. Lightning magick.

Then, another. Another! Another crash of thunder, each one accompanied by sharp shocks digging into the extremities of everyone present.

Finally, as quickly as it appeared, the lightning stopped. Around everyone in the clinic lay hundreds of bug corpses, fried to death by electricity. Windows were smashed open, revealing more dead insects outside. Although his ears were still ringing, Wulfram could feel the ground rattle, as someone ran downstairs from the ICU.

It was Rum. Her injury had all but healed, and in the place where her eye used to be, a round diamond now adorned it. A diamond that was spinning. His hearing had still not returned, but Wulfram could still read her lips.

“What just happened?”

                                                   While you wait, check out these other Tourney novels!