"Did another student?"

Hhhnnnnnn she's not supposed to 'spread it around' but as long as she doesn't use any names it should be fine? People need to know Jacky's gone anyway, right?

"Yeah. I think so."

Sharp nod. "Good. - I was worried it'd been a mal."

"If anyone deserved that, it would have been her."

"Not that kind of worried."

"Hm?"

"Mals very rarely go after maleficers, and when they do they usually fail, and there was no remnants of a body nor sounds of a struggle - it'd have to be something big or powerful, and either odd in its tastes or particularly hungry. I shouldn't have missed a mal like that."

"You've been keeping track?"

"Yes - though my network is... Patchy, in places." Meaning mostly composed of the Mandarin speakers. 

"Seems like there's fewer running around this year. Mals, I mean."

"Yeah - I think they've been going down every year since our freshman year. And more people are surviving."

"It's weird, y'know. Mal populations multiply, not shrink. Especially in the Scholomance. I know I haven't been killing enough of them to make that kind of difference."

"I've been killing a good number - and there's a girl in our year who's been trading a lot of terrifyingly effective weapons to underclassmen for mana - and I've been encouraging more effort to defend each other among those in Shanghai's sphere, but..."

"There's something I'm missing, it feels like, in why levels are this low."

"Mm. Wonder what the graduation hall is looking like."

"...It can't look good."

"Hey, maybe it's empty."

"We're not that lucky."

"No, I guess we wouldn't be..."

"The smaller mals are the ones who can get through the wards, which mostly keep out the larger mals... It's possible there's something down there eating everything small enough to escape the graduation hall."

"What kind of thing could even do that?"

"Lots," she says. "The real question is why."

"Not sure we have enough information to answer that question."

"Which means we need more."

"Going downstairs to scout doesn't seem very viable."

"No. But my network on the mals up here is incomplete - I don't really have data from the English-speaking side."