"Can you move where you sprayed, or did it only work the second time?"

"Second thing." She awkwardly flops her arm a little bit. 

"That's still pretty cool."

"I ate all the rest of the stuff by accident, so it's a good proof of concept but not very promising for not accidentally eating people. I'll probably brew a huge batch of something cheap and pointless and keep practicing." 

"I wound up making a prototype bead back when that was still on the table, it was rather off the mark and now it's too leaky to sell and not leaky enough to help you even if you still wanted that, do you want to try eating it next time we're in the shop?"

"Might as well." 

Aadhya takes this down in her planner.

The next time they're in shop, Lucia spends almost forty-five minutes focusing on the bead in her hand, before relaxing. 

"Proof of concept," she says, holding the de-magicked bead. 

"Whoa. You definitely needed another way to be totally ridiculous, way to go."

"I see a lot less call for disenchanting things than for my usual wheelhouse but it is nice to expand my repertoire past murder!"

"Could be handy in case of assassins."

"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.