Unless they all helpfully got themselves killed before the month was out, which wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. Usually the first week of term is all right, and then just as the freshmen have been lulled into a state of false calm, the first mals creep out of their hidey-holes, not to mention the first wave of newly hatched ones from the ground floor start to find ways to squirm up here.
Of course, there’s always the occasional overachiever. Like the baby vipersac that quietly worked its way up through the air vent just then. Probably it had stretched itself out skinny and long to get through the wards on the ventilation system, making itself look like a harmless little liquid dribble, and it snaked through the physical grating and coiled itself up on the floor behind one of the bookbags to form back into shape. It would have made some squelching noises in the process, but the freshmen were talking loudly enough to cover for it, and I wasn’t paying very close attention myself, because for once in my life, I was the single worst target in the room by a thousand miles; no mal would pick me out of this crowd. I was already starting to think of the place as some kind of refuge.
Then one of the freshmen saw it and squealed in alarm. I didn’t even bother to look what they were squealing at; I was out of the chair with my bookbag over my shoulder and halfway to the door—the boy had been looking towards the back of the room—before I even spotted the vipersac, hovering already fully inflated over the fourth row of seats like a magenta balloon that someone had Jackson Pollocked with spatters of blue. The blowdart tubes were starting to puff out. The other kids were all screaming and clutching at one another or ducking behind the big desk, a classic mistake: how long were they planning to stay back there? The vipersac wouldn’t be going anywhere with a spread like this, and the instant they stuck their heads out for a peek, it would get them.
That was their problem, of course, and if they didn’t find a solution for it on their own, they weren’t going to make it out of homeroom on their first day of class, which probably meant they weren’t going to last long anyway. It wasn’t even the slightest bit my problem. My problem was that I’d been assigned four highly dangerous seminar classes, and I was already far behind on saving mana for graduation. I was going to need every last minute of my time in this room to build enough mana to make up for all that. I didn’t have so much as a single crochet stitch’s worth of energy to spare on a flock of random freshmen I didn’t care about in the slightest.
Except for one. After I kicked the classroom door open, I did turn back to yell, “Zheng! Out, now,” and he did a U-turn around from the big desk and ran towards me. The other kids might not all have understood me, but they were smart enough to follow him, and most of them were smart enough to abandon their bookbags while they were at it. Except for the enclave girl, of all people. She undoubtedly could have replaced every last thing she was carrying just by hitting up the older kids from her enclave, but she grabbed her bag before coming, so she was bringing up the very end of the pack when the vipersac got inflated enough that its three little eyestalks popped out and it started turning to track the last of the moving targets. As soon as it took her out, everyone else would get away. It was only a little bigger than a football; that newly hatched, it would probably stop to feed straightaway.
I was right at the doorway and about to go through and save my own neck, exactly as I should have done; exactly as I had done, any number of times before. It’s rule one: the only thing you worry about, in the moments when something goes pear-shaped in here, is how to get yourself out of the way with skin intact. It’s not even selfish. If you start trying to help other people, you get yourself killed and most likely foul whatever they’re doing to save themselves while you’re at it. If you’ve got allies or friends, you can help them beforehand. Share some mana, give them a spell, make them some bit of artifice, a potion they can use in a tight spot. But anyone who can’t survive an attack on their own isn’t going to survive. Everyone knows that, and the only person I’ve ever known to make an exception to the rule is Orion, who’s a complete numpty, which I’m not.
Except I didn’t go through the door. I stayed there next to it and let the entire pack of freshmen go galumphing through ahead of me instead. The vipersac went paler pink as it got ready to shoot Miss Enclave, and then it reoriented itself with a quick jerk towards the door as Orion, speaking of numpties, came bursting through it going the extremely wrong way. Two seconds later, he’d have been full of venom and most likely dead.