Chapter 11
Maron marveled at Gilliam, seated beside her.
‘Wow….’
Maybe no one could keep up with Liam when it came to provoking people.
At least, Maron couldn’t imagine anyone who could match him.
Trembling, Professor Orkh opened his mouth.
“…Gilliam Everchess.”
“Yes, Professor.”
“If you have enough time to flirt with women before class, you must have done the reading ahead of time, right?”
“I looked over it a little.”
Professor Orkh’s eyes flashed.
“Really? So you did prepare…!”
Orkh picked up a piece of chalk and began writing ancient characters on the blackboard.
Ancient language was one of the two kinds of knowledge required to cast magic.
Ancient language was Professor Orkh’s subject, and what he was writing on the board was a magical incantation.
The problem was that it was nowhere near appropriate material for a first-year student’s first class.
‘That’s way too long….’
‘Who enrolls after learning something like that…?’
‘What’s with those declensions? I’ve never seen them before…?’
Scribble-scribble-scribble… Clack! Tap, tap!
At last, he completed a lengthy incantation that looked like some kind of serpent monster from a myth.
“Gilliam.”
Professor Orkh smiled faintly.
“There are a lot of blanks in this incantation. Would you fill them in for me?”
Maron was dumbfounded.
‘No, this is way too obvious….’
She’d expected him to give Gilliam a difficult question, then sneer at him for not being able to solve it.
But even so, this was far too difficult. Shouldn’t he at least give him something from the first-year curriculum?
Maron’s irises turned a murky red.
Because she despised Orkh.
‘How crude. No wonder he’s still unmarried at his age….’
“Hmm….”
Gilliam studied the problem, deep in thought.
Maron felt like she should do something.
“L-Liam, you don’t have to worry about it.”
Elettra tried to dissuade him, too.
“That’s right. You don’t have to bother with it. That’s advanced material, even for an advanced course… You wouldn’t learn it until your third year.”
“….”
“…Gilliam?”
“…I think I can solve it.”
“…What?”
He really did think he could solve it.
The setting-compilation notices went into great detail about the ancient language in the original story.
Everyone in the lecture hall watched as Gilliam stood and came to the front.
‘What’s he doing?’
‘Huh…?’
‘What’s he thinking…?’
And the most bewildered of all was Professor Orkh himself, who’d set the question. Why was this brat actually coming up here?
Gilliam picked up a piece of chalk and stood in front of the board, lost in thought again.
“….”
“….”
“….”
The lecture hall fell silent.
The tension mounted.
And Gilliam kept thinking.
“….”
“….”
“….”
At last, Professor Orkh let out a hollow laugh.
“H-hahaha… Well, I commend your effort.”
Of course, he wasn’t actually commending him. He was mocking Gilliam for coming up there to waste time despite not knowing a thing.
“But if you don’t know the answer, why don’t you go back to your seat? The lesson—”
Thunk.
The spirited sound of chalk striking the board.
Thunk, scribble-scribble, scribble-scribble, thunk.
The correct ancient words filled the spaces Orkh had left blank in the incantation. The words were right, and so was the grammar.
The students couldn’t even tell whether they were correct. They didn’t know the material, either.
But they could figure it out indirectly.
Because Orkh’s expression grew worse by the second each time Gilliam filled in a blank.
With the brisk sound of chalk, the blanks were filled with the right answers.
A question that no first-year student should have been able to solve was being answered perfectly.
‘What the hell is this guy…!!’
Gilliam’s hand continued without hesitation.
At last, he filled in the final blank in the lengthy formula and flashed a grin.
“I’ve solved them all, Professor.”
As he watched that smile, Orkh felt as if the blood throughout his body were rushing backward.
He was from a ducal house, handsome and popular with women, and now he was smart, too?
‘You smug, deceitful bastard…!!!!’
Please let his life fall apart. Please, it has to.
‘The proper social order is for a guy like this to get caught by a gold-digging woman and have his life ruined! That’s social justice!!!’
A curse directed at a student in his own class.
Swallowing the words that should have immediately disqualified him as an educator, Orkh could only tremble.
“Professor?”
“….”
He couldn’t even answer. If he opened his mouth now, he felt like he’d scream at the top of his lungs in anger.
“Did I get something wrong… Ah!”
Gilliam picked up the eraser.
Orkh’s eyes flashed.
Was Gilliam correcting a mistake he’d noticed late, or had he mistaken a correct answer for an error?
Either way, Orkh planned to use it as an excuse to heap insults on him.
Right in front of Orkh, Gilliam erased something.
Not a blank, but part of the incantation Orkh had written.
Then he wrote it in again.
Correctly.
He’d given them a fill-in-the-blanks question with an error in it, and Gilliam had corrected the faulty part.
“—!!!”
Orkh felt a shame so intense it was as if his heart had been crushed.
“Now I’ve really solved it all, Professor.”
Gilliam looked pleased with himself.
‘He even hid a trick question in there. Did he think it would be too easy if he’d only left blanks?’
〈You have qualified to learn a 5-Star Magic: Heaven-Burning Flame Purgatory (焚天炎獄)〉
Description: A spell that engulfs the surrounding area in flames. Once a secret art passed down only among the emperors of Yung, it helped prop up their tyranny.
【Would you like to acquire Heaven-Burning Flame Purgatory by paying 300,000 points?】
【Yes/No】
Oh.
So this was how you learned magic.
‘300,000 points. Well, it is a 5-star spell.’
It wasn’t easy, but it seemed like a goal I could reach if I worked at it.
“Professor Orkh. You truly are…”
I was grateful.
I wanted to praise this exemplary teacher for giving me such an opportunity, but I stopped at the last moment.
“…Never mind.”
Instead, I simply smiled.
“You, y-you…!!! Everche—ugh!?”
Professor Orkh suddenly clutched at his chest and collapsed.
A brief line from the original story came back to me.
The professor changed. Starting tomorrow, a different woman would teach them instead of that unpleasant pig, Orkh.
“What was the reason?”
“Orkh died of a ruptured blood vessel in his brain. His heart and blood vessels had already been in bad shape, but he’d lost big gambling and got so angry that it was the last straw.”
“Ah-ha.”
“Haaaagh!!”
A heart attack!!
Orkh’s death was about to happen years earlier than it had in the original story!!
“No, Professor!! Come to your senses!! A real teacher like you can’t go out like this!!”
“Ghk!!”
“A teacher who worked so hard to teach me can’t die like this!!”
“Guuuugh!!!”
No matter how much I cheered him on, Professor Orkh’s complexion only grew darker.
Orkh tried to force words out between his stiff, unmoving lips.
“I-I…!”
I’ll curse you!
I’ll curse you! I’ll curse you even after I’m dead!! Gilliam Everchess!!!!!
May peace never come to you!! May your soul never find rest for all eternity!!!
I hope the most miserable fate imaginable befalls you!! May you get played by a gold-digging woman hiding her past, lose your entire fortune, and get divorced!!!!
“Healer! Somebody get a healer—Aaaah! Professor, nooooo!!!!”
Orkh Gent, aged 56.
Held in the arms of the man he hated most, he died cursing him to the very end.
“Professooooooor!!!!!!”
——————
That evening.
“Boy, why are you so gloomy today?”
The busty white-haired woman from next door, whose name I still didn’t know, asked me.
“A truly good teacher has passed away.”
“Hmm?”
The busty white-haired woman rested her chest on the fence again today.
“There’s a strange rumor going around the academy. They say some troublemaking student turned the tables on a professor who was trying to put him in his place and ended up causing the professor’s death.”
“What a sinister rumor to be going around.”
“Apparently, he sneered at the professor, saying, ‘You’re… pfft, never mind,’ then kept taunting him right to the end while the man was dying and crying tears of blood.”
“Damn, who was it? There can’t be that many people at the academy with such a rotten personality….”
“….”
The white-haired woman brought two fingers to her lips in a V, as if she were smoking an invisible cigarette.
Assistant Instructor Lucy brought her index and middle fingers to her lips, as if she were about to smoke a nonexistent cigarette.
“…Ah.”
I remembered.
“You’re a research student, aren’t you?”
If cadets were college students, research students were basically graduate students.
“Hmm? Why would you think that, boy?”
Her name was definitely…
“Aren’t you Lucy Merhantia, bearer of the fate of the Mystic Ice Star (玄氷星)?”
“…Hmm?”
In the original, she was definitely the person who carried out a terrorist attack on the academy.
“Boy.”
Lucy leaned even farther over the fence, pressing her chest against it. Squish. Her beautifully shaped breasts visibly flattened right before my eyes.
“You really are an interesting person—”
“Wow, your boobs are huge.”
“….”
“I’m sorry.”
【The target doesn’t dislike it】
<Praise Points: +10(1580→1590)>