I had to tell them. They were counting on me to be able to pull my weight when it came time for graduation. If I wasn’t going to be able to, they had the right to back out. They didn’t owe anything to a bunch of freshmen they hadn’t even met. Liu might have felt she owed me something for Zheng, but I could be saving just Zheng without laying out a week’s worth of mana I didn’t actually have saved up, and meanwhile she was breaking her back building mana for our team herself.
At this rate, I was going to be lucky if I had enough mana for maybe three medium-power spells, and I didn’t even have any good medium-power spells. The only really useful spell I’ve got that doesn’t need absolute heaps of mana is the phase-control spell I got out of Purochana’s book, and it’s not a great crisis option, since it’s a good five minutes to prep the casting. I’ve used it in a crisis, but only when I had Orion thoroughly distracting the underlying cause for those five minutes, and he’s going to be a bit busy come graduation killing monsters for everyone.
“Zheng told me about Wednesdays,” Liu said quietly, and I looked up. She didn’t look surprised; actually she looked kind of worried.
“This is your weirdo library session? What’s going on?” Aadhya said, and Liu said, “It’s her and eight freshmen, and they keep getting hit with major mals.”
“In the library?” Aadhya said, and then she said, “Wait, this is on top of that horrible independent study and the three other seminars? Does the school have it in for you or something?”
We all fell silent. The question answered itself in the asking, really. My throat felt knotted up right around the tonsils, awful and choking. I hadn’t even thought about it that way before, but it was obviously true. And that was worse, so much worse, than just being unlucky.
The Scholomance has been hurting for power almost as much as I have. It’s not cheap to keep this place working. It’s easy to forget from our perspective when we’re suffering through this place and getting hit with mals on a regular basis, but they’d be coming at every last one of us in a continuous stream, and lots more of them, if it weren’t for all those incredibly powerful wards on every single air vent and plumbing pipe, and all the highly improbable artifice that makes sure there are almost none of those openings in the first place, and despite that we’re all breathing and drinking and bathing and eating, and all of that takes mana, mana, mana.
Sure, the story is, the enclaves put in some mana, and our parents all put in some mana if they can afford it, and we put in mana with our work, but we all know that’s a story. The single biggest source of the school’s mana is us. We’re all trying to save mana for graduation; everyone’s working on it all the time. The mana we grudgingly put into our schoolwork and our maintenance shifts is nothing compared with the amounts we put away for that rainiest of rainy days. And when the mals tear us apart, of course we grab for all that nice juicy power we’ve desperately been saving up, and they suck it out of us, only built up more by all our terror and final agony and struggles to live. The Scholomance gets the spillover, and then thanks to all those wards, it kills off a good healthy number of the mals, too, and it all ends up in the school’s mana stores—where it goes to keep the rest of us luckier ones alive.
So when an enthusiastic hero—read, Orion—shows up and starts saving lives, and the mals start to starve, the school starts to starve, too. And at the same time, has more of us alive in here, breathing and drinking et cetera. It’s all a pyramid scheme, and if there aren’t enough of us on the bottom being eaten, there’s not enough for the ones at the top.
That’s why we had to go down and fix the cleansing mechanisms in the graduation hall: all those starving mals down there, waiting in the one place Orion wasn’t, getting ready to tear the entire graduating class apart because they hadn’t had enough to eat for the last three years. They were on the verge of breaking into the rest of the school because they were all so desperate that they started collectively pounding on the wards at the bottom of the stairwells.
And Orion—well, Orion’s from the New York enclave, with a power-sharer on his wrist, and his affinity for combat somehow lets him suck power out of the mals he kills anyway. They don’t even come after him, because he has a bottomless supply of mana and an almost equally infinite supply of fantastic combat spells.
But I don’t. I’m the girl destined to make up for him, but who’s obstinately kept refusing to become a maleficer and start killing kids by the double handful, and now I’ve gone the other way entirely. I stopped a maw-mouth heading for the freshman hall. I helped Orion keep the mals from breaking into the school. I was down there in the graduation hall with him, helping to hold up a shield so the senior artificers could fix the cleansing equipment. And now I’m even copycatting his stupid noble-hero routine one day a week.