"People's lives are on the line every day here. Me not - not getting enough enrichment - doesn't rate."

"...I have no idea how to explain how wrong you are, but perhaps more to the point is the fact that 'lack of enrichment' was what put your own life on the line, here," he says, air quoting the expression.

"Dammit, Edmund Five Minutes Ago."

Scorpius laughs then starts to say something but immediately jumps to his feet and casts a wordless hum of an incantation to blast the ooze that had just started to leak through the gap between the door and the floor.

"Fucking hell I thought my spell was going to hold for longer than that," he says, and almost as if to punctuate his statement a dome of energy around the two of them buzzes into visibility as a moonflapper drops onto it from above. It starts pecking at the energy barrier and he says something in French that causes a beam of electricity to shoot from his eyes at the creature, overloading its metal carcass and frying it from the inside.

Edmund squeaks involuntarily, then hops to his feet. "Come on, go, get back to your deranged night patrol - I'll be fine, go -"

The junior shoots two beams of hyperconcentrated heat at two more maleficaria before they can even hit the dome of energy surrounding them and laughs in a somewhat manic way when he processes Edmund's suggestion.

"I do not think you realise—" There's a loud thump from the door as something slams bodily against it. "Do you even have a good enough shield spell to hold the fort while I try to leave through the hordes amassing outside?" Scorpius asks lightly and, "Glacial," he cries in a French accent, freezing another ooze-like creature that had just jumped from a hiding spot in a shelf up above to try to glomp them. The mals that come from above all seem to slide sort of lamely off the barrier spell like its surface is coated in some slippery substance, and after this fourth one drops onto the floor something punches through Edmund's drain to grab its frozen corpse to eat it. "I'm afraid you're stuck with my charming presence for the night."

Edmund looks - almost relieved.

"Um. I can shield, but I probably can't shield well enough to hold off an army, you're right. Should I even be participating in this siege - I know you're kind of a demigod, here -"

"You should not!" he says brightly, sending three targeted fireballs at more stuff dropping from the vent and then one jolt of energy down the drain. "Your job for tonight will be to sit there looking pretty and if you want to call me nice names like 'demigod' you should save it for when you actually want to flirt with me." He whirls around and sends a jet of semi-solid energy in a straight horizontal line along the bottom of the door where a strange purple smoke had started coming from. Said smoke is immediately absorbed by the semi-solid blob of energy and crystallizes it into a thin layer of glassy material on the floor.

Also he's glowing now. That's a thing that's happening. Faintly, mostly concentrated around the eyes, but getting more noticeable the more mals he kills.

"- you're gaining mana from this?"

"Sure am!" Blast. "Another way in which the universe wants to incentivize me to kill as many mals as I possibly can." Blast blast the door shakes but doesn't quite get loose from its hinges—yet. "Whatever's on the other side is getting impatient, huh? That's going to be a fun one."

"Maybe it's an argonet. Are argonets also fun."

"Ooh haven't found a big one of those in a while, that would be fun!"

Depending on how Edmund feels about demigods, the way Scorpius seems to also be growing increasingly manic may or may not affect that description. At one point he steps outside the energy dome, lays a hand flat on it, and burns, the entire shield surrounded by fire for two solid seconds. When he steps back inside he says, "Gaseous little assholes were trying to get into your fabrics." The fabrics themselves, clothes and bedding, only got lightly singed.

"Oh. Well, thank you for the fire."

Edmund seems content to watch in starry-eyed awe for quite some time. He does start shifting uncomfortably after a while.

This is gonna be all night, probably; the Scholomance really, really frowns upon students rooming together. It fucks with the incentives, if it lets people just sleep in shifts. The kids who are too socially incompetent would become even bigger targets, for one, since the others would be bunking in threes and fours, sleeping in shifts and covering each other, and that's not to mention seniors who would want to room with freshmen so they don't have to graduate at the right time.

These types of reasons are why, whenever two or more students decide to spend the night together, the school makes sure to send every monster and creep their way. And the way that deters students, of course, is that they don't survive. You can try it, once, and then you will get overwhelmed and eaten alive or worse, mal after mal led directly to your door, wards weakened on purpose by the school itself. The tales of past students who tried it are usually enough to scare most people off the idea, but every year some stupid soul decides to try it anyway, and the screams echoing down the hall in the night tend to do the rest of the job of scaring every other student straight.

Well, unless Scorpius Lake is one of the students in question, of course. Then he is going to tell you to sit tight and shut up and stay awake all night fighting mals for you and he'll even survive, the bastard, and so will you.

Eventually Edmund's door is blasted off its hinges, but Scorpius seems to have almost presciently expected it, at least given the way he erects another, more solid shield half a second before it happens. The door splits in two on hitting the shield, and as the spell winks out Edmund gets a nice view of a kvenlik, its numerous clawed arms ready to tear its victims apart. But of course what happens instead is that Scorpius steps out of the dome shield, unsheathes a short metal rod that had been hiding under his shirt, and when he shakes it it extends out a blade of pure energy, which he then proceeds to use to dismember the mal. And for a mercy, this gives them a minute or two of reprieve as the other, less dangerous mals drop onto the kvenlik's corpse (all dismembered pieces of it) to eat it right there or drag it away.

Exciting!

"I should really be internalizing some of this for Maleficaria Studies. Kvenlik: handle with lightsaber."

Scorpius coughs out a snort and says, "I wouldn't, if I were you. I'm sure there is a proper way to kill those that isn't just dismemberment, but dismemberment works well enough. It's not mobile without its arms, even if it had still been alive after I got all of them the other mals would have just eaten it." He gives the rest of the room another look to make sure they do have that minute or two before turning to face Edmund more fully. "You alright? Anything get past yet?"

"No, I would've screamed like a little girl about it. Um. Is there an opportunity for me to use the Void, it seems like we're temporarily less under siege."

"Be quick about it," says Scorpius, chanting a short thing that makes another little shield bubble in a corner against one of the room's walls.

Or rather, lack-of-wall; the Scholomance is suspended in the Void, and while what exactly that entails in theory is the subject of heated scholarly debate, in practice it means that, other than the single door at the graduation hall that has a physical reality somewhere on Earth, everything else in the school lies in a state of semi-existence, disconnected from reality as understood by mundanes. This allows for a number of interesting properties, such as the school not really needing to be architecturally stable or have a fully consistent and constant map, but it also means that every student's dorm room has one wall (or in some cases the ceiling) entirely absent. Instead, there is the Void, which can be used as a toilet, for instance.

Edmund is quick about it, and returns to the main shield bubble still zipping back up. "Thanks. I could probably have shielded myself but - I'm not going to complain about you putting yourself out for me."

"I'm swimming in mana, New York can handle it if I wait until morning to deposit whatever I got left over from tonight."

"...I get the feeling we might be outliers on how much most people like their enclaves."

He laughs and sends a curving lightning bolt from a hand at a mal that tried to sneak behind Edmund and quietly dig through the shield while blocked from Scorpius's field of vision. Seems like their reprieve is over.

"I like them fine, but having me here got them lazy, I can make ten times as much mana as the whole rest of my cohort put together on my own so they've stopped bothering."

"...are they under the impression that they can't survive without you so there's no point in trying if you happen to get maw-mouthed or are they just too stupid for it to occur to them they should keep themselves sharp anyway - maybe that's not quite fair -"

"You are also an enclaver, what do you think?"

Now that the door has been blasted off and there is no longer a kvenlik blocking the way, a more steady stream of small and medium-sized mals starts pouring through, which is great for Scorpius since he can just AoE all of them.

"Nigel's our powerhouse, he does lightning. If Nigel got eaten by an argonet we'd look for someone bright with a gift for putting out punishment - ideally valedictorian material but realistically we'd take top fifteen - and we'd be able to seduce them because even without Nigel, we're a solid team. If New York lost you - well, first of all everyone would think they were fucking insane for letting you die, but there's those who'd look past it thinking they could protect themselves - but there's no one who'd do that and carry an entire team of people who delegate their homework and their mana production."