The Poison Formula for Victory
Twenty minutes remaining.
Simon had been busy as well. After defeating Pierre Buckler at Group 1's altar and claiming the red artifact, he'd spent a leisurely stretch combing the surrounding area for more relics, then returned to his starting point with exactly twenty minutes left on the clock.
Rather than approach head-on and risk being spotted, he circled wide around the side and looked down at the altar from atop a hill. A rueful smile tugged at the corner of Simon's mouth.
"Just as I thought."
With his own base altar ransacked and nothing to show for it, Hector had been left with only one possible tactic.
Barricade Simon's altar and dig in.
The score for this exam would be tallied the instant time expired, based solely on the artifacts sitting on each team's altar. No matter how many relics a team gathered, it meant nothing if they weren't laid down on the altar at the final moment.
In other words, Hector was trying to flush Simon out.
"...Hector's serious about this, it seems."
Glancing back, he saw Toto hurrying toward him, gasping for breath.
"Toto!"
"I've been watching the whole time in case they left an opening, but they're barely moving near the altar."
In crude terms, it was a you-die-or-I-die standoff.
If this dragged on, Groups 1 and 10 would both walk away with a cozy zero points apiece.
"Hiya! President~ and Death Knight Boy too!"
Eshu came trotting up to join them. Toto's face flushed crimson on the spot.
"How many times do I have to tell you not to call me that!"
"Ahaha! Sorry, sorry! Anyway, Hector's team is still sitting on our altar! Looks like we've got no choice but to fight them, right, President?"
"That's the plan. The artifacts?"
Eshu gave a sly smile and called over her ghoul, ordering it to disgorge a pile of relics onto the ground — including the red artifact from Group 13.
"Nice work! You even got Group 13's red one."
"Of course, of course! Oh, but where's Miss Loraine?"
"Holding position in the rear. She's probably tangling with Pierre Buckler right about now, so let's the three of us go in."
"Okay!"
Simon stretched his arms up with a long, satisfying crack of his back.
"Then let's get star—"
"SIMON POLENTIA!!"
At the thunderous bellow, everyone flinched and looked down the hill.
"You call yourself the number one? Quit hiding behind your useless little tricks and come at me! Try taking our altar by beating me with brute force, if you can!"
"...Oh boy."
A bead of sweat rolled down Eshu's cheek.
"He's got murder in his eyes."
"I-if he catches us, we're dead."
Toto's lips were trembling. Simon simply smiled, calm as still water, and started walking.
"Let's go."
"I-I'm coming too! Simon!"
Simon descended the hill and came into view. The moment Hector laid eyes on him, his pupils warped with fury.
"...You."
"Hello, Hector."
At Simon's entrance, the other two members of Group 1 tensed up instantly and dropped into combat stances.
"Where's your ghoul? You know neither of us has time to waste."
Hector's voice dripped with domineering pressure, and Simon answered it with nothing more than a faint, easy smile.
Tsupat!
It happened in an instant. Simon's ghoul, wreathed in the Funeral March, burst up through the mist behind Hector's group.
One of the Group 1 members spotted it a beat too late and shouted.
"Hector! Behind—!"
Kwooowoowoom!
Hector's gorilla-like ghoul lunged out and hammered Simon's ghoul into the ground like a nail. Seeing its head crushed in a single blow, Eshu and Toto went white as sheets.
'A ghoul with the Funeral March on it—!'
'In one hit?'
"I won't say it twice, Simon Polentia."
Kugugugugu—!
Hector erupted with a terrifying torrent of jet-black from every inch of his body. His three other ghouls were billowing the same dark energy, mirroring their master.
"Come at me properly."
"..."
Simon slowly raised his right arm.
"If that's what you want."
"Damn it! Damn it! DAMN IT!"
Pierre Buckler was scrambling helter-skelter toward Group 10's altar, where Hector was now locked in combat.
"No! Hector! You can't fight them at their home base! Come oooon!"
He had to get there and warn them, fast.
Simon's ghouls were armed with a weapon nobody could have imagined. It was the kind of technique you were guaranteed to lose to if you didn't know about it — and if you got caught in it properly, there was no telling how bad it could get.
"I have to warn them right n—ah!"
Shukwaaaak!
In that instant, a ghoul dropped out of a tree, claws slashing. Pierre's own ghoul raised its forelegs and barely caught the blow.
Watching his ghoul skid backward across the ground, Pierre roared.
"Who's there!"
Slide.
From behind the tree, a black-haired girl stepped into view.
Pierre's expression darkened drastically.
'Lorraine Archbold! Of all times, why NOW!'
"Sorry."
She gazed down at him coolly, red eyes glinting.
"I can't let you pass through here."
"Move it, DAMN YOU!!"
Pierre flared up his death intent, and Loraine did not yield an inch.
Their ghouls charged simultaneously, claws flashing and sparking off each other in a relentless barrage.
Simon raised his right arm.
Hector lowered his stance with a taut, wary look, while the other two members of Group 1 simply wore puzzled expressions.
"What are you doing right now?"
"Aren't you pulling out a ghoul? If an examinee stays out for a full minute without one, that's a rule viola—"
Then.
Simon's palm began slowly curling inward, as if clenching into a fist.
'?!'
The expression of Hector, who had been watching, twisted grotesquely — and a heartbeat later he screamed in desperation.
"GOD DAMN IT — EVADE!!"
"...Corpse—"
Kurururu!
In the blink of an eye, three ghouls thrust their heads up out of the earth around the altar.
At the same moment, Simon snapped his fist shut.
"—Poison Explosion."
KWAAAAAAAABOOOOM—!
The ghouls' bodies detonated all at once, and a green haze — evocative of nothing so much as a large-scale biochemical terror attack — billowed up and blanketed the altar.
"Ugh, what the—?!"
"The ghouls exploded?!"
Overload the ghoul, layer on the Funeral March, then detonate it together with its decay gas, forcing every toxic compound in its body to spew out in all directions — Simon's brand-new trump card.
Hector hastily clamped a hand over his mouth, and the other two did the same.
'That was... Corpse Explosion just now?'
What Simon had used was unmistakably dark magic — but this was the ghoul assessment. Techniques that applied specifically to ghouls, like the Funeral March, were permitted.
The green smoke had filled a considerable radius, but mercifully it seemed to carry no lethal force. The team members were unharmed — and so were the ghouls.
'The ghouls... are?'
They had frozen in place.
As if time itself had stopped for them.
Their death intent was still properly linked, and the summoning circles were intact — but the jet-black was no longer flowing through them.
"It's Kavara's Poison — the natural enemy of summoned creatures."
Simon said.
"Kavara's Poison drastically diminishes jet-black sensitivity. It's normally closer to a liquid, but I remade it into a gaseous form."
"Ghhk!"
Steeling himself against the poison haze, Hector tried to move his own ghoul — but it didn't budge an inch.
"YOU!!"
Pat!
Seizing on the chaos, Toto's ghoul came charging in. Naturally, it was one Simon had personally treated to make it immune to the poison.
Toto's ghoul pushed straight through the toxic haze and dropped every artifact they had gathered so far onto the altar. Among them was the red relic Hector's team had been holding.
"SIMON POLENTIA!!!"
Hector's eyes bulged with pure rage, glaring as though he might lunge at Simon at any second. One of the Group 1 members slipped free of the poison haze and summoned a fresh ghoul.
"Get the artifacts back!"
His ghoul plunged into the green haze — but it held out only moments before grinding to a halt in front of the altar. And there, the moment it stopped, Toto's ghoul seized it by the throat and tore it apart.
"Ghk!"
His death intent severed, the student staggered. The teammate beside him clicked his tongue.
"...Ha, you're kidding me. It's right there in front of us and we can't take it."
"What is going on? Corpse Explosion out of a ghoul, seriously?!"
Only now certain of victory, Simon turned his head.
"Give it up, Hector."
"..."
"There's a little over fifteen minutes left on the clock."
Hector bit down hard on his lip.
"This poison haze will linger in the air for another twenty minutes or so, and I still have three poison ghouls in reserve. Do you want to keep going?"
"Hector! Don't fall for it!"
"If that's how it is, then we'll just wait it out to the very en—"
"...Enough."
Hector squeezed his eyes shut.
Drops of blood were falling from his trembling fists. He knew it too — knew it all too well.
"We're withdrawing."
The match was already decided.
Simon's strategy had worked like a charm.
With Professor Byulya and Benya's help, Simon had acquired the new technique called the Corpse Poison Explosion, and he had built a plan designed to squeeze one hundred percent of its potential out of it.
He had known from the very start that Hector would come at them with all-out aggression. And from there, it was easy enough to predict that handing the red artifact over to Group 4 would drive Hector to hole up in this altar rather than return home empty-handed.
Then there were the finer details of this exam's rules, which read as follows:
— Each examinee may control a maximum of three ghouls simultaneously. Once deployed, a ghoul cannot be recalled into subspace.
A three-ghoul limit on simultaneous control.
In other words, so long as he wasn't linking them with his death intent, there was nothing stopping an examinee from pre-deploying other ghouls in advance. Toto had tested whether the rule truly worked that way, and Simon had planted three ghouls in the ground near the altar.
After that, Hector had taken the bait and occupied Group 10's altar.
At the twenty-minute mark, Simon detonated the buried ghouls — Corpse Explosion — and blanketed the altar in poison haze.
Fortunately, the wind was calm, and he still had plenty of detonatable ghouls to spare.
A victory formula that had fit together perfectly.
Hector accepted his defeat and withdrew from the altar. It was a swift judgment — entirely characteristic of him. Had he clung to any further hope of Simon's team's artifacts, the situation would only have grown more tangled.
For what time remained, Hector threw himself into securing whatever artifacts he could and headed back to his own altar.
Meanwhile, Groups 4 and 13 were still locked in a knock-down, drag-out brawl — a fight that ultimately ended with Group 4 defending their haul. Of course, having spent all their energy fighting, they hadn't managed to gather many other relics.
At last, time expired.
1st — Group 10 (40 points)
2nd — Group 4 (32 points)
3rd — Group 1 (9 points)
4th — Group 13 (5 points)
A complete, unqualified victory for Group 10.
"WE WOOOON!"
Eshu bounded up and down, flailing both arms in the air. Toto and Loraine were beaming too, and Simon let out a long breath of relief.
It was a victory won by everyone executing the plan exactly as drawn up. As they filed out of the arena, the other students who had watched on the screens gave them a round of applause.
"Good work."
Aaron lined up the students who had just finished the exam and delivered his debriefing.
"Group 10's success came down to every single member playing their part to the fullest."
Simon's new technique and strategy.
Loraine's disruption and defense.
Toto's artifact-running and relic secured.
And Eshu's deception, topped off with burgling the empty house.
"A Corpse Poison Explosion using ghouls, hmm..."
Aaron shot Simon a look that said, you've gone and built something outrageous again. Simon smiled sheepishly back.
'Still, this technique has genuine academic value. If I register it with the Pentamonium, it'll sell like crazy.'
Standard Corpse Explosion suffered from one crippling flaw: the legs of the zombie serving as the bomb were extremely slow. Simon's new technique overcame that risk entirely by using ghouls instead.
An utterly novel trump card that combined a Funeral March-boosted ghoul's blistering speed with a gas explosion on arrival.
Beyond that, the poison itself could be modified at will, or the ghoul could lie in wait underground before detonating. The applications were limited only by imagination.
"No need to say it twice. A+. Good work."
"Thank you!!"
The four of them traded high-fives, grins splitting their faces.
And while they couldn't quite match Group 10, Group 4's mood was downright festive too. They hadn't taken first place, but they'd repelled their rivals from Group 13 — and apparently the fact that they'd climbed to second place, leapfrogging Hector's Group 1, had them absolutely delighted.
"Thank you! Even if you did use us, we won't forget this favor!"
Group 4's team leader said it with a grin stretching ear to ear.
Last up for feedback was Hector.
"Hector Moore. The ghoul you developed wasn't the least bit inferior to Simon's exploding ghoul. Its versatility was actually superior."
Aaron crossed his arms.
"But as for why you lost to him — I suspect you understand that better than anyone."
"...Yes, sir."
Hector gritted his teeth and bowed his head.
If, upon seeing Group 10's altar sitting empty, Hector had refused to let rage take the wheel and instead coolly tracked down whichever other group had taken the artifact and pulverized them — the outcome might have been different.
As the debriefing wound to a close, two other matches were already underway in parallel.
WAAAAAAAH—!
Every time someone on the screens pulled off a spectacular play, gasps and cheers erupted from the spectating students. Curious, Simon wandered over in that direction as well.
"Huh."
The strongest group in this round of exams.
Group 8 — Asseraz and White — had just come onto the screen.
"What... is that?"
Loraine, who had followed him over, went wide-eyed too.
The entire world on the screen had turned blindingly, utterly white.