Proof (3)
"Agh, aaaaghh…"
Professor Simon clutched the back of his neck, foam flecking from the corners of his mouth.
Across from him, Kallen was carefully avoiding his gaze, as though he were sitting on a bed of nails.
Amid the commotion, the office door swung open, and a woman with braided twin tails appeared.
It was Professor Selma, the instructor in charge of Magic Potion classes and head of Elysion's infirmary.
"How is Garnet doing? Is her condition stable?"
"I checked on her. There's no danger to her life, at least."
She nodded with a reassuring smile, as if to put the assembled professors at ease.
"The bones were broken quite cleanly, all things considered, so setting them wasn't difficult. The treatment is already finished—she should be back within five days at the very latest."
At her words, a collective sigh of relief finally swept through the room.
Kallen, who had been eavesdropping from the side, added his own two cents, muttering in a voice thick with grievance.
"I told you earlier, didn't I? I cut her down while carefully keeping it non-lethal—er, I mean, I instructed her with great care…"
"Y-you callous wretch, and you say that to our faces?!"
Professor Simon, snapping back to his senses, bristled and shouted, what little hair he had left flying as the blood rushed to his neck.
"The bone was poking right out of her skin! Good heavens, accident or not, in fifteen years of teaching I have never once heard of such 'education'—not seen it, not heard of it!"
"Which is exactly why I wanted to show the students a taste of real combat's dangers in advance…"
"Enough! Keep that mouth of yours shut for once!!"
Under the continued onslaught of Simon's fury, Kallen shut his mouth in embarrassment.
He had, after all, committed the offense—there wasn't much of an excuse to be made.
Truthfully, though, it wasn't as if Kallen felt no injustice at all.
Had he known that a student named Garnet could hold out to such an extreme limit, he would certainly have eased up somewhat.
She had endured far better than he'd expected, and that had caused him to misjudge the students' level—a disaster born of his own miscalculation.
"I don't care if it was meant to simulate real combat! What in the world kind of gutter-rat behavior is this? Where exactly did you sell the chivalry that is the pride of the Swordsmanship Department…?!"
"I rather doubt demons and witches trouble themselves much with chivalry, Professor."
"What did you say?!"
Even in the face of Simon's thunderous rage, Kallen stubbornly held his ground.
"Strange… I can't recall a single time a beastfolk or a monster ever spared its opponent's well-being… Do you think we're entered in some tournament?"
"W-why, you…!!"
At Kallen's muttered grumbling, almost as if talking to himself, Professor Simon seemed to lose the last of his patience and jabbed an accusing finger at him.
"This is a formal reprimand! A pay-cut offense! You should be on your knees begging forgiveness right now, yet here you are standing tall as if you've done nothing wrong…!"
Only at Simon's talk of a pay cut did a pallor finally creep across Kallen's face.
"P-Professor? No, wait, what I meant was…"
"…Well, it's not an entirely baseless defense."
Kallen forced an awkward smile and was just about to hurriedly continue explaining himself to Simon when Professor Wendell, the instructor for Curse Studies, murmured quietly, lost in thought.
"The places you struck weren't any vital points, were they? You didn't touch her mana core, and the injuries were easily treatable with recovery potions alone… but at the same time, perfectly suited for subduing an opponent…"
"Y-yes! Exactly right!"
Kallen's face lit up at this perfectly timed interjection, and he nodded vigorously.
He'd been on the verge of having his salary slashed, and now it felt as if he'd found a stalwart ally.
A pretty face, it seemed, tended to come with an equally kind heart.
"Well, you can't coddle them forever, can you?"
The gentle-featured professor continued, more to herself than anyone.
"And the world these days is hardly a peaceful place. The knightly orders and the Magic Tower alike keep demanding candidates with ever more practical experience, don't they?"
"Certainly…"
"That trend is undeniable."
At this, several of the other professors began nodding along, as if voicing their agreement with Wendell.
"By the upper years they naturally grow accustomed to combat, but… turning that clock forward a little sooner can hardly hurt."
"Headmistress Talisa herself said something similar at the entrance ceremony, didn't she? I found it quite resonant myself…"
"In a way, this may have been a pioneering attempt at charting the very direction Elysion ought to take going forward…"
"Wha— you, you people, now of all times…!"
"Quite right, quite right."
Before anyone realized it, the professors were flowing toward a consensus among themselves, smooth as water.
Kallen, utterly ignoring the flustered Professor Simon, simply kept nodding along contentedly to their every word.
As expected of educated scholars—they really do know what they're talking about.
Just as the whole affair seemed to be dissipating into a minor squall and Kallen was about to breathe a quiet sigh of relief—
"Still, you went too far, Professor Kallen."
Professor Wendell, who had seemed to be on his side all along, abruptly reversed her position entirely.
"I-I'm sorry? What do you mean, all of a sudden…?"
"For upperclassmen, perhaps it might pass. But for freshmen who know nothing at all, it was simply far too dangerous a method. Fufu."
Despite Kallen's flustered response, the smile never left her lips as she calmly continued making her point.
"Trauma too severe can, if handled carelessly, shatter a student's spirit entirely rather than teach them anything. Shock therapy of that sort demands all the more caution—that much is only natural."
Professor Selma of Magic Potion brewing let out a long sigh and took up where she'd left off.
"The infirmary had a line of Swordsmanship Department students all morning, every one of them complaining of psychological shock. Well, seeing a classmate beaten to the brink of death right before their eyes by a professor would do that to anyone…"
"Which is why I keep saying it wasn't an assault, it was education…"
"I understand your intent, Professor Kallen. My point is simply that as a professor of Elysion, you might have found a wiser way to go about it?"
"…"
In the end, Kallen fell silent, carefully avoiding Wendell's gaze.
Better to face a roaring middle-aged man like Simon, who yelled everything outright—someone gentle who finished all their points in a soft voice was far more impossible to argue with.
"The problem was wrong from the very premise! From the very premise, I say!"
Having glared at Kallen with displeasure for a long while, Professor Simon barged back into the conversation.
"A wolpertinger is a creature even a child in swaddling clothes can hunt with a single arrow! And instead of teaching swordsmanship, you dragged in a low-grade magical beast like that and called it a sparring partner—of course there was backlash! And from a layabout who's done nothing but loaf around since he got here, no less! If I were a student, I'd have charged you to the death myself!"
He pounded on the table, huffing furiously.
"Isn't this all because you looked down on the freshmen from the start? They already proved their fundamentals through the entrance examinations!"
"That's just it, though…"
"Furthermore, students from distinguished houses receive early training before they even arrive! A wolpertinger is nothing to them! What you've done is scar the pride of exactly those children!"
"It's not about their swordsmanship, Professor. I'm telling you those children need to learn to use their whole bodies first."
Unable to endure Simon's shouting any longer, Kallen made a show of plugging his ringing ears and spoke, a scowl of disdain twisting his features.
"What good is teaching fine swordsmanship to children who haven't even got the basics down? That's precisely why the department's been getting its teeth kicked in by the Magic Department at every inter-academy tournament for years…"
"Wha… what did you say?!"
Feverish to the very tips of his hair, Simon was about to let loose another roar of rage when—
"Fundamentals… fundamentals, you say…"
Seated across the table, a gaunt, bespectacled professor—Roken of Elvish Language—murmured half to himself, turning the thought over.
"…It's true that the freshman year is the ideal time to lay proper foundations, isn't it? By the time they're upperclassmen at Elysion, students of every department tend to grow absurdly swollen egos. They'll pick fights with their own professors as a matter of course…"
"Honestly… for all it's called 'early education,' most of those children are practically fawned upon like honored guests by the family retainers back home…"
"And once bad habits have set, they're not easily corrected. The bright ones manage fine on their own, of course, but…"
"Not 'not easily corrected'—irreversible! You have to seize them firmly! Right now! Clamp down on them at this age!"
Seizing his opening, Kallen jumped back into the conversation, bobbing his head up and down in vigorous agreement.
Professor Simon could only glare at him, looking thoroughly sickened.
"…Still, no matter what, we cannot introduce such a fundamentally unsound teaching method at an institution called an academy."
Having calmed himself with several long, deep breaths, Simon spoke again in a voice still heavy with disapproval.
"Elysion is older than any other nation on the continent. That is a matter quite separate from respecting the individual discretion of each professor."
"Even if we were persuaded, there's a strong chance the parents wouldn't accept it…"
"That's exactly my point."
Professor Simon nodded again at Wendell's agreement, then turned his glare back on Kallen, pinning him in place.
"Everything must have a clear provenance. That damned rabbit hunt—where, and from whom, exactly, did you learn it?"
"Er… about that…"
At Kallen's brief hesitation, Simon pressed harder, leaning in.
"You had best answer straight. If there is even the slightest evasiveness in your account, I will never grant my approval to that method—I will mobilize every authority I hold as head of the department if I must…!"
"…"
Faced with Simon's blazing eyes, Kallen merely feigned interest in something off to the side.
Not that there was any provenance to speak of.
It was a desperate stopgap he'd dredged up only after a sleepless, groaning night following the sudden bolt from the blue that was his salary cut.
Granted, the method wasn't entirely his own invention.
It was simply that the source of his inspiration was a little awkward to disclose in front of others.
"Out with it, I said! Stop racking your brain and confess outright!"
"He's right, Professor. Since it's come to this, wouldn't it be better to lay it all on the table? Who knows—it might even become an opportunity for a wonderful change of course…"
Even so, Kallen had no talent for withstanding pressure converging from all sides.
Unable to withstand the deluge of stares any longer, he gave a slight shrug and finally confessed.
"W-well… I learned it from the beastfolk."
"…"
A familiar silence settled over the office.
The professors merely widened their eyes as if doubting their own ears, trading glances.
At this entirely predictable reaction, Kallen scratched his head awkwardly.
Professor Simon, who had been staring blankly as though he'd forgotten how to speak, finally opened his mouth, stammering.
"B-beastfolk? You mean the… the ones I know… the…"
"Yes. Those very ones."
Beastfolk.
Demi-humans with the bodies of humans and the heads of beasts—horned monsters of the deep woods cloaked head to toe in shaggy fur, worshippers of the Demon Gods, notorious for abducting and devouring people, and occasionally banding together to raid the provincial territories.
Across the empire—across every nation of the continent—the beastfolk were regarded as vermin to be exterminated without exception.
Elysion's professors, evidently, held precisely the same view.
"Well… 'learned' isn't quite right. More like I stole it."
And with that, Kallen simply pressed on as if resigning himself to whatever came.
"I saw it back when I was working adventurer contracts, taking on subjugation requests. Among the tribes of the southeastern continent, there are several that use wolpertingers to train their young."
"…"
"Perhaps because they inhabit such harsh, barren highlands, they work their young brutally hard. I once observed that the children who trained against wolpertingers grew up faster and stronger than the rest. I applied a bit of what I remembered from back then."
"…"
"Ah—though in their case, they use the horns and teeth intact, without cutting them off…"
"…So then."
Out of nowhere, Professor Simon cut off Kallen's cheerful explanation.
His voice was trembling violently.
"You are telling me that our Elysion students… the finest young talents on the continent… are being taught the training methods those devil-worshippers use on their own young?"
"Yes."
Kallen nodded with a bright, sunny smile.
At last, Professor Simon looked at him and wailed as though a volcano were erupting from within.
"You—you absoulte lunatic of a man…!!"