"I still want to do a lot more practicing before trying this in a live-fire situation involving people but if I get good enough to confidently eat spells out of the air without also eating a person that would be great, yeah."

"Preach."

Lucia quickly discovers that instead of brewing vast swathes of low-potency somethingorother herself, it's more efficient to buy junk projects off of underclassmen. Usually freshmen; the decreased potency of junk doesn't matter for her purposes and they're cheaper to buy off. 

She practices. 

She doesn't practice all the time; she has other things to do. But she does spend a lot of time practicing. 

And then Field Day rolls around, and she heads down to the gymnasium with her team, only occasionally darting away to kill something that was about to devour a hapless underclassman. 

Aadhya favors relay races and has the strongest opinion of any of them in this matter.

Lucia is fine with relay races! 

Relay races are kind of fun. 

Lucia is just passing the baton to El when there are some ominous rumbling noises on the opposite side of the nearest doorway. 

The fuck is making that noise. (El accepts the baton, but is somewhat distracted from running by trying to see.)

The doors burst open, and--

It's not like what comes out into the killbox. These are the kinds of ordinary mals that infest the school under ordinary circumstances, not graduation mals like groglers and siren-spiders. 

But there are a whole fucking lot of them. 

"What the fuck? I took down the - why," mutters El, flinging the baton away from herself and grabbing Lucia's hand so they aren't separated by the stampede in the other direction.

Lucia holds onto El's hand firmly, raising the other one to cast. 

There are casualties, afterwards; the blood and body parts make that obvious, even if Lucia can't identify most of them. 

There are also injured survivors. Lucia hauls a roll of not actually magical bandages out of one pocket and a jar of healing goo out of another and gets to work as soon as she can't find another mal to kill, and starts trying to ensure that the number of dead doesn't go up. 

"Those weren't from the graduation hall." 

"Or if they were there's something big in the hall with very specific dietary habits that ate everything else! But it was just a bloody tidal wave, that doesn't happen..."

"It does not! I'm very spooked by things that do not happen, happening." 

There are a few mals from within the gym that weren't part of the initial wave and are sneaking over to try to scavenge; El goes around stepping on or zapping them since she doesn't have much healing stuff on her person.

Lucia harangues some of the walking wounded into helping her triage and perform first aid on other people in exchange for her help. It is really annoying that her comparative advantage isn't killing mals right now! She is actually not great at healing! Fuck the incentives and social structures within the Scholomance that mean that somebody with a healing affinity who's dedicated their career to honing it didn't step up to handle this instead. 

Eventually, everyone is either dead or stable, and Lucia has dispensed all the healing on her person. She checks on El and to see if any straggling mals are available for stabbing.  

"I think I stunned that one but it might not be dead," El says, aiming a gesture at a comatose heap of feathery cow-elephant-seasquirt thing.

Lucia stabs it a lot, and also harvests some feathers for Aadhya. 

"I'm going to see if I can tell anything about where they all came from." 

"We didn't get any tokens," El notes, watching the rest of the students in the gym creeping back to the various activities they were distracted from. "I'll go with you but first you should dump a bunch of mana in the sharer so Aadhya and Liu can cheat and earn enough for all of us." She holds out a hand.

Lucia dumps a whole lot of mana on her, incremented in chunks sized for El to be able to handle. 

And when the sharer's filled up and Liu and Aadhya have been notified of their role in the matter they can go follow the trail of architectural damage and slime and mal ichor.

Lucia has some tracking spells; they aren't as solidly in her wheelhouse as spells to kill things are, but they're useful for what she does. And she has mundane tracking skills, developed in the streets of New York and developed over three years in this tin can. 

The results... 

"...They just came from everywhere," she says, frustrated, after the umpteenth not-quite-a-dead-end. "It's like someone set up a honeypot right in front of that door, or like the school decided that that corner of the gym specifically was out past curfew!" 

"- okay, its timekeeping isn't completely busted, Field Day is on schedule, but its clock could still be partially bollocksed up. Could there have been a honeypot? Maybe one that would be edible to the mals, so they would have eaten the evidence on the way in? I have not the foggiest about motive, mind, but..."

"May...be? Set up by whom, for what purpose--nobody with half a brain would try to assassinate us like that--"

"Not the foggiest about motive. It would have made slightly more sense before graduation when there were seniors agitating to throw a few younger kids to the hordes to appease them."

"...I wonder if there was, like, anyone we just happened to be sort of near, who could have been the target of an assassination." 

"It'd be a bloody stupid time to assassinate anyone. Everyone shows up on Field Day, it'd make more sense to honeypot their room or a class."

"I'm not saying it makes sense but explanations that make sense are a bit thin on the ground."