Just Eat It!
“Uueeeegh!”
“Ughh!”
Only now did Simon understand what had caused the vomiting epidemic back in the dining hall.
Because right now, the exact same thing was happening to the Class A students. The ones who'd retched in the cafeteria were almost certainly the students who had attended Byeolya's morning class.
“Stop whining and eat it! Human beings don't die as easily as you little brats think!”
Byeolya was stalking around the lecture hall at full voice.
Here's how it had gone down.
Byeolya had declared a practical exercise, and the teaching assistants had placed a case in front of each student. Inside sat colorful, clay-like blocks.
Was this some kind of arts-and-crafts session? Were these raw materials for poisons? He'd never seen anything like it. Fascinating. Just as the students were reacting with wide-eyed curiosity and reaching to light the fire under their cauldrons, Byeolya made her announcement.
“Alright! Eat it!”
It turned out they were meant to eat them.
Each case held two contrasting substances. One was genuine poison. The other was a medicine that stimulated the immune system to produce antibodies.
After the teaching assistants' solemn warnings (if you swallow the poison first, you will genuinely die), the students were to take the medicine, then put the real poison in their mouths.
Everyone went pale and hesitated, but a Kizen professor's orders were absolute. In the end, the students carefully swallowed the medicine first.
Even the medicine on its own seemed dangerously potent — before long, students were breaking out in spots, running fevers, and retching.
Then, five minutes later, once the medicine had been judged to have spread sufficiently through the body, they had to swallow the poison straight down their throats.
“P-Professor! Is this really a class?”
“You're sure we won't die, right?”
The weak-stomached students asked, looking pale and queasy. Byeolya bared her triangular teeth in a grin.
“You think I'd poison my own students, you idiots? None of the brats who already swallowed it are dead, so quit posturing and eat.”
Cowed by her icy glare, the students forced the poison down.
Simon was no different. The instant the poison hit his throat, his digestive system panicked from the very top down and tried to shove it right back up the esophagus.
It felt as though every organ in his body was screaming in perfect unison. This is not okay. This is really, really not okay.
“Anyone who spits it out or pukes on purpose gets their head stomped.”
Seeing the hesitating students, Byeolya hopped down from the podium herself and began circling the lecture hall.
Simon squeezed his eyes shut and gulped down the poison still pooled in his mouth.
“……!”
His organs convulsed. The compounds of the poison and the medicine fought each other inside him, and hives and strange blotches broke out across his skin.
“Wh-what is this?!”
“Can't… breathe…! Hck! Hckkh!”
It was pure chaos.
Meilin had simply collapsed face-first onto her desk, while Camibarez trembled violently, unable to bring herself to swallow. Dick let out a hollow laugh and started mumbling the names of his siblings.
“This is the process of building antibodies in your bodies.”
Byeolya said.
“Master just the poisons provided in my class, and you'll be able to handle most ordinary toxins out there. This is the absolute foundation of the foundation.”
She propped one hand on her hip as she explained.
“Here's what I can't stand more than anything: necromancers — actual, card-carrying necromancers — being scared of poison. Trembling at the sight of it even when it's sealed in a potion bottle. Then they wage chemical warfare on their enemies while personally hobbling around in a hazmat suit and a gas mask, popping antibiotics the whole time. It's pathetic. Truly, genuinely pathetic. To those people I just want to say: please, give up on poison. Just quit.”
She raised her voice like she was issuing a threat.
“If you're going to use poison, then at the very least, get used to it.”
Even as students collapsed from their seats and vomited around her, Byeolya pressed on with the poison-eating lesson.
The class reached its midpoint.
Swallowing a single set wasn't the end of it, either. They had to purge the leftover residue with a purifying agent, clean and fresh, before moving on to the next poison.
Three sets in total. Students who finished all three then had to sit through a textbook lecture run by a teaching assistant after a short rest.
And anyone who couldn't finish was kept right there, stuck eating poison for the entire class until they did.
“……Professor, I really don't think this is acceptable.”
The grievances finally boiled over.
Speaking on behalf of everyone, Claudia Menzies — Class A's top student in Toxicology — raised her protest directly.
“The very existence of a class built on eating poison to develop tolerance is questionable. We came here to study the magnificent science of deadly poisons at Kizen. We did not come here for barbaric training.”
Befitting a high-noble daughter who feared nothing in the world, she didn't shy away from the rather pointed phrasing of “barbaric training.”
A few students nodded timidly in agreement. The teaching assistants gasped and shot anxious glances at Byeolya, but she just waggled her fingers as if to say, go on, keep talking.
“And, um, I also have questions about the class's purpose.”
Claudia was clearly nervous herself, but she pressed on.
“Our principal enemy is the priesthood. You should be teaching us how to defeat priests with Toxicology — not making our bodies adapt to poison. I honestly don't understand it.”
“Hey.”
Byeolya smirked and thrust her face forward.
“Claudia, was it? The little brat the TAs keep praising as Class A's best. Then let me ask you something. You think you're better than Kizen's Toxicology professors?”
“N-no, sir— ma'am.”
So she was going to crush her with authority.
Claudia felt a flicker of disappointment, but she kept it off her face and bowed her head.
“No, not me, kid. Professor Lang Strauss — former Toxicology professor here. You think you're so amazing that when you're grown, you're guaranteed to be his equal?”
Though his later years had been tangled up in some strange affair, Professor Lang Strauss was a legend among legends — in his prime in his thirties, he had established the very framework of modern Toxicology and was credited with advancing the entire field by more than twenty years.
At the question, Claudia's head snapped up and she denied it with all her might.
“N-no, of course not! I'm not even fit to touch the hem of his—”
“That great man all you poison-mages fawn over and worship.”
Byeolya flicked her tongue.
“He died to a priest's poison. Forgotten already?”
In an instant, a heavy chill swept through the entire classroom.
This was an extraordinarily sensitive matter that everyone had scrupulously avoided even mentioning. The students who'd been listening with pricked ears frantically turned their heads away, pretending not to have heard, and the teaching assistants' faces went ash-gray.
“I can sort of see why the Death Witch passed over all those clever kids and put me in this seat. ……Must've had one hell of a headache. Anything else you want to say?”
Claudia's face froze in misery, and she bowed her head deep.
“……No, ma'am.”
“Then eat it. Complain one more time and I'll actually throw you out.”
She turned her back coolly and resumed the lesson. From then on, not a peep came from anyone as the students focused all their energy on swallowing poison.
Only in the late-middle stretch of the class did the students who had managed all three poisons finally rise from their seats.
“Wow, for real. I swear I just watched my dead grandfather waving at me.”
The first in Group 7 to finish was Dick. Having finally downed all three poisons, he staggered out toward the neighboring lecture hall where the theory lesson was held.
And then there was Simon — the poster child of talent, the boy who had outperformed everyone without any head start whatsoever.
……
He was wandering the border between life and death. Simon had no talent for eating poison and shrugging it off, either. Of course he didn't — such a talent wasn't a thing to have, and it was simply a matter of constitution.
“Hey, you holding up?”
Byeolya sauntered over to Simon's side and flashed her pointed teeth. Simon lifted his head, his face drained gray.
“I'm… I'm fine.”
“One poison left. Hurry up and eat it so you can go listen to that textbook stuff you love so much.”
“Yes. Though I do have one question.”
Simon said quietly.
“These poisons and the antibody medicines. How are they made? They don't seem to exist anywhere on the market.”
Only someone who had witnessed Byeolya's unorthodoxy firsthand could have asked such a question.
Perhaps it was an unexpected one even for her — she paused for a beat. Then she threw her head back and laughed out loud.
“Explaining that would be—”
Byeolya flicked her tongue, undid the strap at her shoulder, and bared a sliver of the bare skin of her arm. She placed her index finger against it and grinned again.
“exactly three years too early for you kids. Want me to tell you anyway?”
“……I'm sorry. Please don't tell me. Ever.”
Saying this, Simon swallowed the third poison. Byeolya snickered, ruffled his hair into a mess, and walked off.
Ugh.
The poison was taking hold. His consciousness was starting to fog over.
“A-are you okay, Simon?”
Camibarez spoke to him from two seats away, her voice drooping. She had only just cleared her second poison herself.
Simon answered through the thickening haze.
“You got thissh, Cami……”
For a few minutes, he drifted in a woozy fog. All manner of delusions surfaced in his head.
Who am I? Where is this?
Mom's homemade tomato omelet is delicious.
If humanity had to teach monkeys language before going extinct, what words would you teach first?
Oh, gross. This poison tastes like feet.
Apparently one of an octopus's arms is a reproductive organ. So what does that make my Overlord?
What would my feet taste like?
“…….”
Then, in the slowly hazing fog of his mind, something strange suddenly raised its head. His consciousness had returned, but his body felt absent. His head was somehow clearer now, and a strange euphoria was bubbling up.
He felt like he could study for days.
Simon swam around in fantasy-land for a while.
“Simon! Simon!”
Camibarez shook him by the shoulders. Simon sat up, eyes half-lidded with sleep.
“Oh, thank goodness! Are you all right?”
She asked with worried eyes.
“……How long was I like that?”
“About a minute?”
Oddly enough, once the third poison was down, he felt refreshed. Lighter, too? Simon rolled his shoulders with an easy motion.
Just then, a teaching assistant's call rang out.
“Students who have digested the third poison, please move quickly to the neighboring lecture hall!”
“Ah, yep.”
Simon nodded, then looked at Camibarez with a pitying face.
“Don't push yourself too hard.”
“I'll be there soon!”
She forced a brave smile. Simon nodded back and crossed over to the neighboring lecture hall.
“Now, please turn to the next page.”
A teaching assistant was diligently working through the textbook there.
“You've all heard of combinations that become toxic when taken together, right? Some substances pose no threat to the human body on their own, yet become severely dangerous poisons the moment two of them meet. In Toxicology, we call this effect…… Ah, welcome, students. Grab any seat, quickly.”
“Excuse me, then.”
An entirely normal Toxicology lecture. Originally, Byeolya had planned to overhaul the entire class to suit her own style, but Jane had pressured her into covering the textbook material, so it had ended up like this.
Simon sat down next to Meilin and asked.
“You okay?”
“…….”
She had an envelope pulled down over her head. The envelope had exactly two holes in it — which she appeared to have punched herself.
“What is that?”
When Simon reached toward the envelope, she jerked backward in alarm.
“Don't look at my face!!”
“?”
Clutching the envelope tight, she murmured very quietly, her cheeks flushing red beneath it.
“……I broke out in hives, okay? It's hideous.”
Simon laughed heartily and pointed at his own face.
“Mine's just as hideous.”
“Ah, shut up! I don't want you seeing it!!”
Hugging the envelope to herself like it was the last, crucial line of defense, she held her fortress to the bitter end.