What Is Poison?
The very first Summoning class had sent shockwaves through the entire school.
Everyone was talking about Simon and his quadrupedal skeleton.
“……H-Hector.”
Hector, on the other hand, was in the worst possible mood. The students of his faction spent the whole day tiptoeing around his thunderous expression.
“Don't worry about it. Summoning's the only thing that guy is actually good at.”
“Right, right! Let's just go grab some food.”
Hector rose slowly to his feet.
“Forget it. Don't say another word.”
“Okay!”
Normally he was reasonably gentlemanly, the type who held no grudges and looked after his own people—but the moment Simon was involved, this was what happened.
The faction members ushered Hector away.
“Simon!”
Simon had just stood up to head to lunch when a group of girls, who'd been watching Hector's mood all this time, swarmed him as if they'd been waiting for exactly this moment.
“How did you do that earlier?”
“I want my skeleton to dash like that too!”
“Could you help me practice over the weekend?”
The girls crowded around, firing off questions in a chaotic barrage, but Simon answered each one without a trace of annoyance.
“Oh, really? That's a shame—”
THWACK!
Just then, someone shoved her way in, pushing two of the question-firing girls aside by the shoulders. They whipped around, eyes flashing with fury.
“What kind of lunatic—”
But the instant they came face to face with the blank expression of a girl whose sky-blue hair was billowing behind her, the color drained from their faces.
While the two of them stammered in flustered confusion, Meilin—still stone-faced—was the first to break into a smile and apologize.
“Sorry~ My legs got tangled up on my way over and I tripped. Really sorry.”
The moment Meilin apologized, the two girls only panicked harder, cold sweat streaming down them.
“No, no! We're the ones who should apologize!”
“We didn't realize it was you……! I-I swear!”
Meilin flashed them a sweet smile, then walked up to Simon. With every step she took closer, the other girls shrank back.
“Hey.”
Meilin said.
“You coming to eat or not? Kami and Rick are waiting in the back.”
“Yeah. Let's go.”
The two of them slipped quickly through the crowd. Striding along with Simon in tow, Meilin glanced back at him.
“You know how bad that looked, right?”
“Bad how?”
At Simon's pushback, she let out a deep sigh.
“Surrounded by girls and having the time of your life~ Why on earth would you spend your *personal* time supervising their practice and doing them favors? Time is money at Kizen. Being nice has its limits.”
Meilin's sudden cold barbs made Simon blink.
“I was actually on my way back from turning them down.”
“Wh-what?”
“I already have plans this weekend. And I told them that rather than learning from a fellow student, they'd be better off going to the TA instructors, who are far more capable and teach much better.”
“……Oh. Is that right.”
Somehow left without a comeback, Meilin flushed red and snapped her head forward again.
‘Argh, why did I have to go off like that for no reason!’
Simon gave the impression of someone endlessly sweet and considerate—the pushover type who'd go through life getting the short end of every stick.
But the reality was a little different. He drew a firm line between public and private.
She'd seen Simon act plenty of times on his own interests, but she'd almost never seen him stick his neck out, like some hopeless sucker, in areas that brought him no benefit whatsoever.
Which raised the question—was this guy even interested in romance or dating at all? He seemed like the type who would just flatly refuse, saying he was too busy with his own affairs.
‘……And why am I even thinking about this?’
Meilin was deep in silent sighs when she spotted Rick and Camibarez chattering away in front of the cafeteria, waving at them.
“You were absolutely amazing today, Simon!”
“Hoo-ah! Every time you go up against Hector, it's a monumental event!”
Rick came bounding over, pumping his fist with a grin.
“You deliberately recreated the first Summoning class of last semester just to break Hector's spirit, didn't you?”
Simon bumped fists with him and smirked wryly.
“I had absolutely no such intention. I just pushed myself trying to win, and this is how it turned out. I really wish Hector wouldn't take it to heart.”
The four of them chattered away about this and that as they entered the cafeteria. Thanks to back-to-back classes, it was a somewhat late lunch.
Dick sat down in an empty seat and glanced at the menu.
“Chicken cutlet for me.”
“Same.”
The boys settled on their orders fast.
Meilin, who had elegantly put on a bib lest any sauce stain her uniform, wore an expression of utter incomprehension.
“I know it's not my place to say, but try something new for once. How have your tastes not changed *at all* since first semester?”
“Hehe, playing it safe is the way to go! Reckless adventurous spirit ruins your whole day!”
Dick said this with a smug grin.
“Then let's see what *you* pick, since you're so full of advice.”
“Hmph.”
Meilin studied the menu with tremendous seriousness.
“Then I'll have the seasoned soybeans with—”
“UUEEEECK!”
A retching sound suddenly rang out.
Meilin glared in Dick's direction with pure disgust, but he waved his hands frantically—*not me, not me*. She looked back down at the menu.
“Seasoned soy……”
“GUEEECK!”
“Hrk! Ugh! UUEEECK!”
“Okay, seriously! What the hell is wrong with you people!”
Meilin shot to her seat, face burning scarlet.
Students who had been eating were suddenly collapsing to the floor, vomiting. Every one of them wore an expression of agony. Nearby, several more students were clamping their hands over their mouths and dashing for the restroom.
“What's wrong with them?”
“I think they're Class D students.”
Simon and his group—along with everyone else in the cafeteria—were rolling their eyes in bewilderment.
Camibarez, who had been quietly reading the menu, carefully closed it and set it down on the table. Then, with an embarrassed smile, she made a suggestion.
“Sh-shall we try a different cafeteria?”
The other three quietly agreed and closed their menus as well.
* * *
But the other cafeterias were in exactly the same state. A considerable number of students were either running for the bathrooms or sprawled flat across the floor, retching.
Meilin grumbled that she'd lost her appetite entirely. In the end, the four of them grabbed sandwiches at the campus store for a makeshift lunch and headed to their next class.
The last class of the day was Professor Byeolya's Toxicology.
It was a lecture hall in the Poisonous Magic Hall—a space where each student was assigned their own personal cauldron, and the students were already settled into their seats.
‘Professor Byeolya actually teaching a class… I can't picture it at all. Though I am curious what kind of lesson she'll give us.’
Simon was waiting with a heart split evenly between nerves and dread when Byeolya and the TAs filed into the lecture hall. Every student's face twisted in alarm.
‘……Ahem.’
‘Nowhere safe to look.’
Byeolya had come to class not in the suit she'd worn at the opening ceremony, but in that same ragged, wild getup as always.
She strode up to the podium, flopped bonelessly into her chair, and cracked her fingers—whereupon the flustered TAs scrambled to begin calling roll.
‘Wait, those people……’
The TAs' faces looked familiar to Simon. Dick had noticed too, and muttered a comment.
“Same TA staff as Professor Lang's.”
In truth, Kizen headquarters and the council of elders hadn't looked kindly on them. While Lang was being assassinated and the Saintess was clinging to Francesca, the TAs who lived closest to him had noticed nothing amiss.
Of course, this was a crisis that had fooled all of Kizen; the blame couldn't be heaped on them alone. And setting this matter aside, the replacement of the Toxicology professor meant that Lang's entire staff was destined for unemployment.
So the TAs had been packing their bags, preparing to leave Roc Island with heavy hearts, when astonishing news arrived.
“I have to assemble the TA staff? Ugh! What a pain! Just keep them as they are!”
An upheaval had occurred.
The monster known as Byeolya had transferred to Kizen as the new Toxicology professor, arriving with nothing but the clothes on her back—and she had decided to retain Lang's TA staff intact.
The TAs had nearly been cast out bearing only the stigma of incompetence—unable even to protect the professor they served—but with the new professor taking them in, a chance to restore their honor had appeared.
Naturally, the TAs' loyalty to Byeolya now surged to the point where they would gladly offer up their own livers for her.
The female TA who had finished roll call walked over to Byeolya and reported in a lowered posture.
“Professor. All of Class A is present.”
“Mmhm.”
After one long, drawn-out yawn, Byeolya rose from her chair and strode to stand before the lectern.
The students in the front rows subtly averted their eyes from her. The rather high degree of exposure in her ragged outfit was, once again, more than a little awkward for seventeen-year-olds to behold.
“Hm.”
She flipped open the textbook.
There was still material left to cover in the first-semester textbook. Kizen's directive was to finish this progress before starting the new second-semester book. The students, too, had all opened their textbooks to the point they'd studied up to and were waiting.
Flippity-flip.
“Why on earth do they want me to teach this crap? No matter how I think about it, I can't figure it out. Honestly.”
She tossed the textbook shut after skimming a few pages, then turned her gaze to the students, baring her jagged, triangular shark teeth in a grin.
“They say the first class should open with a thought-provoking question—that's how you make an impression. Fine, then. What is poison?”
She strode to the blackboard, picked up a piece of chalk, and wrote a single large character.
Naturally, not a single student could decipher it. It wasn't the continental common tongue—it was the pictographic script used by the Marlart Tribe of the steppes.
“The history of humanity—”
Setting down the chalk, she slammed her fist against the blackboard with a BANG!
“—is also the history of poison.”
The board cracked, fragments clattering down, but Byeolya paid it no mind whatsoever.
“If you look at all of human death, the truth is that only a tiny fraction of people die fighting each other. Poison is disease, and disease spreads. Take cases like the blood plague that supposedly wiped out a third of the continent's population in ancient times—no explanation needed there, right? The conclusion is this: far more people die of illness than pass away peacefully after living out their full span of years.”
The students stared at her blankly, and she grinned.
“Ahh~ look at your stupid faces. Was my scope too broad? Then let's talk about the wars you all love. The ones who actually die skewered by weapons in war are, for the most part, worthless foot soldiers. History's greatest heroes and power brokers—the people who actually shape the world—rarely die by the blade. A commander only dies to a sword when the balance of power has tipped to one extreme or the other.”
She wrote a second character beside the first on the blackboard.
“Which is why war is monumentally inefficient. To kill one or two troublesome power brokers, just how many damn grunts have to be fed into the grinder? Historically, it was poison and disease that eliminated the ‘real’ movers and shakers of the world. Poison is ridiculously easy and convenient. Just eat it, breathe it, inhale it—and boom, addicted. Anyone who doesn't use it is an idiot. Am I wrong?”
She held out her open palm.
“Necromancers, the great pragmatists—there's no way they'd leave such a fine tool unstudied. The powerful, complex poisons can't even be dispelled by the priests' purification. Or by the time they manage to cast it, the organs are already soup. *That* is the standard we should be aiming for.”
She hurled the chalk aside and stepped forward again.
“Whew! Enough rambling—what a long introduction, you brats! Our vice-chancellor just *had* to order me to do this stuff. Now, straight into this body's Toxicology practicum!”
Watching the TAs scramble busily about, Simon swallowed hard.
Just what kind of class was she planning to teach?