“Students! Say ‘present’ when I call your name!” I grinned, feeling a rush of excitement in my thumping heart. I’d always wanted to say that! “Slime-bro!”

“Meerp!”

“Kylan!”

No response. I frowned, glaring at him.

“Kylan!”

“Do we really need to do this?”

“Kylan!”

“You can literally see me. There’s only the three of us in this room.”

“Kylan!”

“…yes.”

I flashed a wide smile, making a grand show of drawing an invisible check-mark on my non-existent class register. Right, then. Time to begin!

“Welcome, students, to Vergence’s first course dedicated solely to biological study! Together, we shall explore the boundless beauty of life itself! By the end of this course, you will become biologists yourselves! It may seem difficult right now, but I assure you, if you muster in every bit of effort you can manage, none of life’s secrets shall elude from your inquisitive minds, O’ future biologists!”

Hmm. Was I going just a teensy bit too far on the dramatic? I glanced at my students.

Nah. Slime-bro was still enthusiastic. I could keep this up!

I had taken a short rest following my repeated usage of [Bio-analysis] and [Manipulate Protein]. Even though I was still relatively depleted of mana, the exhaustion that had set in following my first forays into magical-assisted medical intervention was now mostly dissipated, and I could fully dedicate myself to one of my new short-term goals.

Though I had made a snap-decision to seek grander ambitions in Grynasar, I hadn’t fully considered just how those of my future lab would be able to contribute. They didn’t have the skills of a [Biologist], and so couldn’t make measurements of most of the parameters that might be of interest for future projects. Likewise, they didn’t have the prerequisite knowledge, and so couldn’t assist with planning experiments and analysing data.

And so, it fell unto me – Vergence’s first [Biologist] (to my knowledge, anyway), and advisor to my new lab minions – to educate their young minds on just how much fun they had been missing out on, deceived as they had been by the conveniences and bullshit workarounds that magic afforded unto their everyday lives, that had hindered academic interest in the biological sciences.

In most education systems, it would take on average about ten to fifteen years of formal education before one might be able to actively participate in the forefront of modern biological research. I did not want to invest that much time and effort in my two new charges. Who knew what discoveries I might be missing out on in that time?

Of course, that was padded with plenty of unnecessary fluff – pfft, music? Who needed music? Art? Meh. Physics? They could self-study that. Languages, boooo. And don’t even get me started on co-curricular activities. Every waking moment should be spent suckling on the sweet nectar of biology. If they weren’t dreaming of cells and enzymes, it meant that they weren’t working hard enough.

To paraphrase Hamlet: ‘O, from this time forth, my thoughts be of biology, or be nothing worth!’

The townsfolk had thankfully offered a room in their community school they used to provide the most basic education to their children. Slime-bro and Kylan were seated by their desks – the former as enthusiastic as he always was, and the latter now looking more and more uncertain by the second.

Apparently, at some point while I had been sleeping, Aksal had joined several of the townsfolk who had organised a small scouting party to locate the goblins who had fled, in order to decide whether or not they would be able to take them out themselves, or if it would be necessary to call in adventurers. His decision made sense – if there was a larger force of goblins roaming the path outside of the village, we would be hard-pressed to make it all the way to Grynasar traveling in our little group.

Kylan had seemed interested at first when I proposed the idea of giving them both an introductory course to biology after I had woken up from my nap. Of course, in my excitement, I might have been just a bit too enthusiastic in outlining my proposed curriculum for them both. Hopefully, that wasn’t enough to discourage Kylan. I could never forgive myself if in my enthusiasm and desire for haste, I had instead turned an aspiring seeker of knowledge away from biology’s tender embrace!

I would cover only the bare essentials for now, and if the time came that more specialised knowledge was required, we could either rediscover it together if it was a field I was unfamiliar with, or I could offer my own input then. For the next two months of intense study, their curriculum would start with the most basic of introductions into chemistry, pivot over to cell biology, biochemistry, and molecular biology, paint a broad picture of anatomy and physiology, with scattered bits and pieces of genetics, developmental biology, and pharmacology fitted in there as well.

I was under no illusions: this would be a daunting task. But…

“Together!” I gazed at my students expectantly. “Together, we shall –“

I waited.

And waited.

“Meerp!”

“We shall prevail!” I finished, pumping a fist in the air. “And with that, let us begin! By the end of the next four – no, three hours, I want both of you to be able to tell me what an atom, molecule, and ion respectively are! We’ll need to use that as a foundation before I can tell you all about carbohydrates, proteins, lipids, and ribonucleic acids in the evening class! Get your writing implements at the ready, because you’ll need to refer to your notes when we have our first open-book test tomorrow, and every two days thereafter!”

I hesitated for a moment, then coughed. “Also, for the purpose of today’s class, please just accept everything to be true, because we don’t have the luxury of time to cover the thousands of years leading up to the formalisation of the atomic theory of matter.”

“Wha…?”

Ah, crap. I was losing them. Best dive into it!

“So, imagine that you take an object, and keep dividing it into smaller bits. Now, it’s a gross simplification, and we’ll refine it as we go along with the lesson, but what you end up with is…”

-x-x-x-

“… and to conclude, that’s why carbon is one polyamorous son of a bitch, and why almost all of biology is built around the chemistry of carbon,” I finished. “Any questions?”

I took a quick gauge of their expressions. It was hard to read Slime-bro, but I wasn’t too worried about him – somehow, he could display an astoundingly intuitive grasp over various concepts, back when we had been working together in Hawksmoor. Surprisingly, Kylan had been paying attention during my lecture, his eyes as focused as they had been during the morning’s skirmish. For all his faults and his past transgressions unto me, he seemed genuinely interested to learn more.

“Uhh…” He took a long stare at the sheet of paper that he’d been scrawling his notes on during the introductory lecture. “Does any of this even relate to what you did to counteract the curse, earlier?”

“Why, of course! It has everything to do with it! You’ll need to know all this as well, before I can start explaining what I think your [Distract] and [Dizzying Strike] do!” I encouraged. One had to entice their students with a goal to work towards, right? “But back to your question – see, I used [Manipulate Protein] in order to – oh, silly me, I haven’t told you about proteins just yet! Hmm…”

I took a quick glance out the window. It was still bright outside, and I didn’t yet hear the scouting party returning. If so…

“Let’s continue where we left off while the basics of chemistry are still fresh in your minds!”

Kylan whimpered, leaning forward in his seat, cupping his face with his palms. “I’m doomed.”

… okay, I couldn’t deny feeling just a teensy little bit of schadenfreude right now, after having been subjected to his [Distract] the day before.

Ah, how the tables – not chairs! – have turned.

-x-x-x-

“Oh, you’re back!” I greeted cheerfully. “How did it go?”

For some reason, that lesson had left me feeling far more energised, even though the content covered was fairly basic stuff. It had kindled my love for biology, and now, I was fairly confident that my two lab assistants would feel the same. The extended lesson had finished just an hour prior, and I was now allowing my students to have their scheduled two hours of break (and revision) before the next class was due to begin.

“There’s good news and bad news,” Aksal said, sitting down beside me on one of the seats in the inn. He rubbed at his temple tiredly, sparing a quick grateful word of thanks to the tavernkeeper who handed him a glass of beverage. “Before that, though…”

He trailed off, tilting his head to gesture toward Kylan and Slime-bro at the adjacent table, who were both slumped over unmoving, their notes spread out and abandoned across the tabletop.

“Oh, we had lots of fun together in our lesson!”

It took all I had to hide my victorious grin at the violent twitch that comment elicited from Kylan. Sometimes, my vindictiveness scared even myself.

“Say that again, and I will atomise you,” Kylan hissed, his words muffled past where he rested his head on his arms.

I grinned.

Using what he had learned just this afternoon in context already? I knew he had potential!

“Ato-what?”

“Atomise, Aksal. You’ve got to keep up. Even Slime-bro knows that.”

“Slurrrrrp.”

Oh, dear. That was a little unenthusiastic, considering it was Slime-bro. Perhaps I should try livening up the next lesson a bit?

“Right…” the older man spoke uncertainly, staring at Kylan for a moment longer. “Well, it sounds like you’ve been learning a lot with Eric –“

Kylan flailed his arms, looking over at us both for the first time since he’d plopped down lifelessly on the table. I had expected him to be mildly annoyed, but instead, his expression was completely hollow, resigned to his fate.

Maaaybe I shouldn’t have extended the lesson by another two hours.

“– but now we’ve hit a bit of a snag in our plans,” Aksal continued smoothly. “Come on over, Kylan, Slime-bro.”

… was that my imagination, or did the old [Alchemist] just smirk upon seeing his nephew’s despair?

Well, now I knew who Kylan learned to wield his [Distract] with such irresponsibility from.

Once they finally dragged themselves over to our table, Aksal spread out a map depicting the local area. “This is where we are now,” he said, pointing. “Grynasar City is over there, and this is the direction that the goblins retreated to. As you can see, if we follow the road north-west, we risk being ambushed by goblins.”

I nodded. I’d been told as much, after I had finally woken up from my nap.

“Good news is, we found the goblins. It took a while before we managed to track them – the village doesn’t have a [Tracker] or [Pathfinder] on hand, so it was hard to pick up their trail,” he said. “We managed to catch up with those that fled from the morning and killed them. From there, we searched around, and found their tribe over here.”

He pointed again, at a spot just slightly off the road leading to Grynasar.

“How many of them are there?” I asked, concerned. “Can the village deal with it themselves, or do we need to wait for help?”

I wasn’t exactly too fussy on when I got to Grynasar – now that I had Kylan and Slime-bro officially under my wing, I could spend some free time getting them caught up to speed – but there was a shelf-life on our vaccine stocks. We were keeping them as chilled as we could, but they wouldn’t be as well-preserved as they could be in a proper freezer. If we let this time window slip past, Aksal would need to search for someone actively infected with the mystery poxvirus again if he still wanted his vaccine made and distributed.

“That’s the bad news.” Aksal sighed. “The goblins are all dead.”

I blinked.

“Uhh… what?”

“We tracked them back to their tribe, but that was the site of a massacre,” he said. “From the looks of it, some of the goblins had to have been dead for two weeks now. There had to have been twice as many of them dead there than the number who attacked the village.”

I frowned, remembering the state of the two goblins that Kylan had lured with his [Distract]. “Come to think of it, some of those from the morning did have signs of old injuries that couldn’t have been from the raid.”

“We’re lucky. From the looks of it, they had been preparing to attack the village for some time now, before something else laid waste to their tribe. The raid this morning was probably an act of desperation from the survivors.”

“But you know what attacked them?” Kylan asked.

“Yeah. The bodies were snapped like twigs, and bones were crunched straight through by the jaws of a beast. There were claw-marks on several of them. And…” Aksal sighed, reaching into his pouch, taking out a carefully-wrapped bundle of cloth. “We found these.”

Juxtaposed against the white cloth was a single thin, needle-like quill, hardened and solidified blood coating its barbed tip. I reached over, transfixed, eager to see just what it was – perhaps use [Bio-analysis] as well, if it was of organic origin –

“Don’t touch that!” Aksal barked.

Immediately, I withdrew my hand.

“What is it?”

“It’s venomous,” Aksal said. “Manticore spine.”

Did he just say –

Manticore?!

I leapt up in excitement.

Finally! Finally, I could meet my first mythological creature for myself since entering this world!

“Body of a lion, face of a human, tail of venomous spines?” I gushed. “Or – wait, no, that’s the classical mythology version; there was also the one with the body of a lion, humanoid-like face, wings of a dragon, spiked venomous tail, a challenge rating of three, and –“

“It’s nothing to be excited about, Eric,” Aksal said grimly. “If it’s a manticore, well – it takes a team of adventurers with combat-aligned classes to put them down. I’ve already had Tarin head to Everach at once to request for assistance, but for the time being, we won’t be able to leave the village.”

“Eh, no big deal, I’ll be busy with lessons for Kylan and Slime-bro most of the day anyway –“ I pointedly ignored the glare that Kylan directed toward me for that comment. “– more importantly, though, can I inspect that quill? I swear I won’t touch it, honest!”

I didn’t even wait for a reply, greedily reaching over, activating [Bio-analysis] shortly thereafter.

What secrets do you possess, I wonder? Where to begin?

Structure?

“Hmm… certainly a fibrous protein composed of filaments, but… this isn’t quite a keratin, is it?” I frowned. “Damn it, I don’t have a database to align this sequence to, so I can’t even – but… hmm…”

Curious. From the way that the filaments were condensed and coiled around one another, they were reminiscent of porcupine quills that were made up of keratin. From what I could deduce of the overall structure, it had to have a high tensile strength and hardness, even if I was forbidden from explicitly touching the manticore spine to test that. The quill itself was sharpened to a point, ending in a hooked and barbed tip that was now slightly blunted from the blood caked upon its surface.

Still… there was something about that structure there that wasn’t quite right. Even with a few more uses of [Bio-analysis], however, I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was.

Well, pretty cool; pretty cool. Structurally, it was intriguing, but I had little expertise with this particular facet of biology.

What I was interested in was the venom they supposedly carried – what was its mechanism of pharmacological action? Was the venom injected through the quill, or did it coat the entire surface? Was it produced locally, or from a separate gland that was then fed into the quill itself?

And of course – could I find a way to manufacture it myself?

I searched with [Bio-analysis], looking for answers of its pharmacology.

I saw a glimpse, that then vanished almost immediately.

“What…?”

It couldn’t be. I tried again, concentrating harder, focusing on what I desired.

Again, the skill consumed my mana, but it did not give me any more answers. I could see only a brief instant of its native configuration, and then as though aware that I was probing into it, the image turned fuzzy, and faded almost immediately.

“Bullshit!” I swore. “[Bio-analysis]!”

Again, no luck.

“Eric!” Aksal cut in, grabbing my hand. “What is it?”

“It’s not letting me use [Bio-analysis] on the venom! It’s not making any sense!”

But how? Why? The skill had worked perfectly with Bang and Boom!

But Aksal couldn’t appraise those two either –

“… I’m too low-levelled now to study it?”

But wait, now that I thought about it, in those brief glimpses, something about that structure struck me as odd…

“Again!”

And there – looking less at it as a whole, focusing instead on that oddity – there was no way that configuration could ever possibly be stable – there were so many hydrophobic residues being exposed, and there should have been immense electrostatic repulsion between those cationic groups over there, so how… no, it should be physically impossible, or at least exceedingly unlikely, and certainly would not remain in such a state for a prolonged period of time –

The answer came readily.

Magic.

I had already seen it at work, today. With the effects of the curse, even though it would have been thermodynamically favourable for the affected components involved in the initiation of the clotting process to bind together and drive the activation of the cascade, a supernatural force had counteracted that action, distorting the affected proteins locally at the site where the curse had struck.

If this manticore spine was somehow inherently magical, then it could be possible that magic itself was keeping what would have been an unstable structure back on Earth now fully stable, opposing the tendency to collapse back into a more stable configuration of lower free energy when playing by regular rules. Equally, just as Bang and Boom had turned up blank to Aksal’s [Appraise Reagent], magic itself could be resisting my skill’s ability to study it.

But I was only Level Nine. Even though it seemed I had an advantage in being able to study biologically-derived material that normally needed a higher levelled member of another class, someone else far higher-levelled than me could still have derived a use for it.

“Does the venom have any alchemical use?” I asked quickly.

Aksal frowned. “Not that I’m aware,” he said slowly. “Well… there were supposedly rumours that Grandmaster Venthyll had created an elixir involving manticore spines in its brewing, but that was over four hundred years ago, and the records of his achievements don’t quite support these claims…”

Damn. That… wasn’t the most helpful.

Well, if I couldn’t approach it in terms of structure, then –

“This venom,” I said, switching gears. “What are its effects?”

“Assuming you survive getting shot by the spine? If all the venom gets in, it’s chills for the first hour. Fever in the next,” he said, grimacing. “From six to twelve hours, the flesh blackens. By the day’s end, everything turns to mush. Victim’s aware the whole time, screaming while the flesh of his entire body melts away. Some [Potioneers] specialising in venoms and poisons could create a salve, or an advanced [Priest]-type might be able to cleanse its effects, but the cure’s only effective latest by twelve hours. Not a good way to go. Most choose mercy at the point of a blade, if they manage to escape alive in the first place.”

Damn. Gruesome.

Still, awesome.

I was itching to figure out its mechanism of action. How did it work? Blackened flesh – gangrenous necrosis? Why was it uncontained from merely the site being stung? A systemic response? The progression seemed rather fast – was magic accelerating it somehow?

Chills and fever. Signs of acute inflammation? Possible cytokine storm; leading up to SIRS? Peripheral vascular hypoperfusion; hypoxia, resulting in necrosis? It seemed to be centrally sparing – somehow – since the victim remained fully conscious. Why?

And of course, there was the burning question – could it be fully pharmacologically explained in the conventional sense, or did magic still factor in, beyond what it was already doing to the protein’s structure?

I didn’t know. I wanted to know.

And why wasn’t this the case with the products taken from the Fire Eel? Or had they been there the entire time, just that I hadn’t noticed them at all?

But now that I was on that line of thought –

I turned back to the manticore spine, reaching out for a [Bio-analysis] on the filaments once more.

There.

This was what had been giving me that nagging feeling, before, that I hadn’t been able to put my finger on as to what it was. Much like the poison, this was a structure that should not be.

Exposed hydrophobic residues. Extremely unfavourable phi and psi angles along the polypeptide backbone. Charge-charge repulsion. Things that I had missed when I had been appreciating the ultrastructure created by the entire bundle of filaments as a whole, but were apparent when specifically searching for them. The entire thing was an abomination of energetics. They should have been seeking out a state of lower free energy.

Even here, magic was making the unfavourable favourable; a counterweight that kept a balance where conventional physics and chemistry would have forced the scales to tip.

But still, I could study these with [Bio-analysis]. That probably meant that I would need to get myself to a higher level before I could begin probing into the venom.

How were the quills made, though? When did they adopt this fold? When did magic factor into this at all? Was this specific to manticores, or did other species have this same property? Was this what made something magical? Was this why Earth had no manticores, or dragons, or thunder lizards? Was this only specific to biological material?

And most importantly – how could I replicate it?

“Kylan, Slime-bro,” I said, snatching a blank sheet of paper that had originally been planned for use on our lessons. I needed to write my ideas down before I forgot them. “We found ourselves our lab’s first project to look into. We’re rewriting your lesson schedules – all break times from here on out are going to be halved.”

“What?”

“SLURRRP?”

“You have fifteen minutes,” I said, not looking away from the paper, scrawling away like a madman. “Once I finish this, we’re diving right back into the good stuff.”