After my first moment of pure aaiiugh, I noticed the deflated blobs littering the bottom of the stairs and howled, “No, wait!” but it was too late. Orion had just sliced off the tentacle still bashing at his head. The enormous chunk of the end fell down, sizzling, and the rest recoiled down to the mass, where it pressed the cut end into the middle of the knot, turning into a lovely bowed curve, and split itself elegantly into four tentacles, each already starting to swell into the size of the original one, and all of which went grabbing for more things to yank on.

Orion staggered down and pulled me to my feet. “Get out of here!” he said, and was about to sail right back into it. I had to grab his hair and yank. “Ow!” he yelled, and nearly took my arm off with the flaming sword. “What are you—”

“It’s a grogler, you brainless cod!” I yelled at him.

“No, it’s a hyd—oh shit, it’s a grogler,” Orion said, and just stood there for a dazed, gaping moment. Which we had to spare, since the grogler was currently ignoring us in favor of continuing its straining efforts to rip open the delicious extra-large snack pack for itself and every other mal down in the graduation hall.

“How aren’t you dead yet?” I said, bitterly. To be fair to Orion, not that I felt like being fair to him, the grogler was so big that you couldn’t see the thin pink cords running through the center of the tentacles, or the big red knot that was presumably somewhere in the middle of that mass. It had likely broken a million tentacles just bashing them against things, long before Orion had got himself down here. Groglers aren’t known for patience or long-term strategy, but apparently sufficient hunger was sufficiently motivating. “Well?”

“Um,” he said. “I’m thinking.”

“About what?” I said. “Freeze it, why don’t you!”

“I don’t have a good freezing spell!”

“What do you mean, you don’t have a good freezing spell?” I said, glaring at him. “You’re from New York.”

He looked guilty and muttered, “I can’t get mana out of the mals if I freeze them.”

The whole stairwell trembled around us.

“Who cares!” I said. “Get mana out of the next one!”

“So I haven’t learned any!” he yelled.

“Oh, for the love of the Great Mother Goddess,” I said, with all the heartfelt disgust I could produce, which that phrase itself induces in me to begin with, and I grabbed my crystal and started to put together a picture in my head while I tapped into my already badly depleted store of mana: in the shop, the senior girl had been telling me that nitrogen was more than half of the air, so I envisioned it condensing into a solid shell over the grogler’s skin, just a few millimeters thick.

“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.”