“Alright, pass me the extract of lupiagrass.” Lily, hunched over a little flask, spoke with an air of authority. Claud, who was pounding on a bowl of hemlock grass with a pestle, paused his work and handed a little vial over, which Lily uncorked without turning to look at him.

Straining the mix through a small web, Claud caught the juice that was forced out into another flask and corked it, before placing it on a stand. He turned his attention to a bunch of berries, and the pestle descended ruthlessly on to the little poor things.

“Well, those berries aren’t exactly poor things; they’re poisonous,” Claud muttered, turning the nightshade berries into mush.

“I also get the urge to spare those little things once in a while,” Lily replied, “but don’t go feeling any pity for them.”

“Yeah, I know.” Stirring the end product rapidly, he smoothed out the gloopy mix and then poured them through the web that acted as a strainer, before discarding the fleshy bits. “I’m done with the nightshade extraction.”

“Thanks. Leave the rest to me.” Lily took the little flask of hemlock extract and poured it into the pot boiling before her, which was coloured in bright red. Multiple labels on it read ‘Poisonous substances — do not use for cooking or sweet making’. Stirring the mix once more, she adjusted her mask, and then took the nightshade extract and dumped the contents inside.

A black cloud of smoke burst out of the pot a moment later, shooting up into the clear sky. There was a reason why Lily didn’t want to do poison-making at home, and as Claud stared at the rising cloud of poison, he grasped one of the relevant reasons. Fortunately, the two of them were outside the city, sitting on a random patch of grass, which meant that this smoke wasn’t going to kill anyone by accident.

The frenzied bubbling of the mix died away a moment, despite there being no change to the fire burning underneath, and Lily let out a sigh. “Done. You can remove your mask now. The mixture is now inert.”

“In-what?”

Lily removed her mask and tilted her head. “It won’t kill you when you breath the air nearby. Don’t go touching it with your hands, though. I think some of these substances can seep through your skin.”

“Eep.”

“That’s one way of putting it, yes.” Lily took out a bunch of special needles. The top half of those needles were a bit thicker, with what looked like a lid on top. “Okay, so you just open the top here, pour a drop or two inside, and then close it. Do the same for everyone else.”

Claud nodded. It wasn’t anything hard or complex, and people like him needed to have steady hands in the first place.

“Where did you learn all this from?” Claud asked, as the two of them busied themselves with filling up the little needles. Lily had requested for him to help, in the evening after Duke Istrel became Ruler Istrel, and Claud happened to be bored that day.

“Well, I was trying to get creative back then,” Lily replied. “Pop some poison in my family’s food, and then watch them all die. I aborted the test after I found out that virtually everyone actually didn’t eat food cooked in the family; like me, no one dared to trust a cook who administered sedatives to the captives via their food.”

Claud winced.

“And the library had a section on poison too. While I learned most of the things from there, I also became very aware that everyone in my family probably flipped through a few books that talked about poison too,” Lily added. “I’m a weird person, aren’t I?”

“I wouldn’t say that. Besides, everyone’s weird. Schwarz has a fascination with making obscenely alcoholic drinks, Risti is Risti, Dia has some odd obsession with the sword and practice, while Farah’s a workaholic.” Claud shrugged. “I don’t know what your metric for weirdness is like, but I don’t think you’re weirder than me and the others.”

“…Is that supposed to be reassuring?”

“That’s supposed to tell you that weirdness is subjective. One could say that I’m weird because I forgo many pleasures to protect my little life. I don’t get dead drunk, when I’m out, I’m always on high alert…things like that.” Claud shrugged. “I know I’m weird too.”

After a few minutes, they filled up the little needles, but there was still quite a bit of poison left. Lily, however, simply poured the remaining liquid into a bottle, pasted a bunch of skull-shaped stickers on it and stuffed it into her bag. “Done.”

“Poison, huh. What can one dosage do?” Claud asked.

“It should be able to kill a bear in five minutes,” Lily replied. “The meat obviously becomes inedible as a result, but no one is going to eat darkened animals anyway.”

“True.” Claud frowned. Darkened animals — animals that had been…changed by the darkness — yielded disgusting meat that would make anyone vomit the food they ate yesterday. It didn’t stink badly…and it would have been better if it did, in all honesty.

“We just need to make more of these needles now,” said Lily. “I get a feeling we’ll be needing them in due time.”

“A monster tide, huh?” Claud glanced at the east, where a nameless forest once stood. Men and women, clad in masks, were overturning the soil there. Bodies, hundreds of them, had been discovered in the past few days from the excavation efforts here. Some of these bones had been investigated, and according to the reports sent by Caroline, a few of these bones had been rotting away for two decades. Claud didn’t know how they discovered such disturbing facts, but he wasn’t going to question the competency of Caroline and her experts.

“I know it sounds weird, since there really aren’t any forests near us now, but…” Lily tilted her head, clearly trying to put her thoughts into words. “Um, intuition?”

“Intuition?” Claud nodded slowly. “Yeah, if you feel that way, it’s better to be prepared.”

“I knew you’d understand!” Lily laughed, and then laid down on the grassy patch. “Ah. It’s such a good day for a picnic, but I was too engrossed with the poison.”

“It’s alright,” Claud replied. “We can always have one on another day. Right, for that poison you made…is there any antidote to it? I don’t quite like the idea of anyone carrying poison without any countermeasures to it. What if you poisoned yourself?”

“Don’t worry. I have some antidotes — the common serums and a lot of activated charcoal.”

“Isn’t activated charcoal meant to stop orally-ingested poisons?” Claud asked. “You carry needles laced with poison around. Not sure if that’s actually useful…”

“That’s where the serums come in,” Lily replied, “but don’t worry. Those needles need to be activated by a certain mechanism for them to become poisonous,” Lily replied. “I have a launcher at home that can fire these needles at targets up to twenty metres away; that’s how I’m using those needles.”

Claud blinked. “That sounds magical.”

“It is!” Lily puffed herself up. “I made it myself!”

“You made it yourself?” Claud asked.”

Under his stare, Lily fidgeted slightly. “I copied the schematics from one of those books I told you about earlier. I didn’t get to use it much, though. It’s still sitting around in my room somewhere.”

As Claud eyed Lily, he couldn’t help but feel that her childhood at the Julan main house had inadvertently raised a master assassin or something. Poisons and explosives…those two were enough to turn her into a being capable of killing people with ease. Lily hadn’t realised that yet, but Claud had a feeling that the expression she would make when that revelation descended upon her would be something he didn’t want to miss.

“…Why are you patting my head?” Lily asked. “And what’s with that sorrowful look in your eye?”

“Just…overcome at emotion,” Claud replied. “And I thought I had a rough childhood. Can’t imagine a childhood where I learned to make poison and explosives.”

“The explosives came from my skill,” Lily corrected. “And anything can be a poison. Even little berries. Don’t be that surprised. Besides, you are perfectly capable of making poison too. Crushing brightly coloured leaves and straining the result gives you poison. Feeding people soil is no different from feeding them poison. My point is that there’s all kinds of poison, so it’s nothing special.”

“Nothing special, huh.”

“The only thing that’s special is my needle launcher!”

Claud smiled. “Yeah. Other than that, it’s really nothing special. Now that I think about it, Schwarz has been poisoning people with his drinks.”

“Right?”

“…Just don’t tell him I said that.”

Lily laughed. “Alright, alright.”

“Well, now that the fun stuff is over,” said Claud, “I hate to break this to you, but we’re going to do some work now. Caroline told me to investigate the forest…or where the forest once used to be anyway. Coming along?”

“Did you really need to ask?”