Nanomancer Rising: Divine Alchemist Reborn as Academy's Worst Teacher
Chapter 52: Wrong Guess (Cascading Collapse - Part 7)

Chapter 52: Wrong Guess (Cascading Collapse - Part 7)

"With everyone here as my witness, I tried my best to stop this farce of a trial before it got to this point!"

At this point, Theo had to resist his desire to gloat.

For how could he be wrong?

There was only one person with any sort of vested interest in his preservation—the very same vice-headmaster that learned Theo’s value through the taste of a drink he brewed.

He was the only person with a social position high enough to warrant the skill necessary to pull out what he did—hide in the middle of the crowd so damn perfectly that even Theo, with his nanites, only managed to discover him by what felt like a chance.

And ultimately, who else could it be but the vice-headmaster that Theo became somewhat acquainted with? Who else, when the headmaster himself was known to be the headmaster in name only, too busy with whatever it was that he was pursuing to pay any real attention to the academy he established?

By all means of logic, reason, and sense, Theo’s guess should be right. And yet...

When the strange presence he faintly noticed before coalesced into a myriad of tiny dots of light that rapidly floated towards the center of the throne, Theo knew he was right. When those dots of light all merged into a single ball, Theo resisted the desire to cross his arms over his chest with an ’I’ve told you so’ type of expression on his face.

The ball of light then exploded... leaving behind a shape that became Theo’s first inclination that maybe, just maybe... maybe his guess was a miss.

For that shape was much smaller than what kind of shadow Theo would expect a man of the vice-principal’s posture to cast.

The ball of lights exploded in intensity, only for the light to then quickly fade away, leaving behind a figure of but a random child perched upon the throne.

It wasn’t the vice-principal.

Heck, it wasn’t any of the academy’s teachers either!

It was but a small... boy?

"I’m sorry," a powerful, deep voice filled the hall, a voice that nigh perfectly mismatched the figure it clearly came from at such a deep level, it nearly turned into a hypnotic experience.

Struggling to stomach it, Theo blinked... only for the young child on the throne to suddenly turn into an old man dressed in a gray robe and a chest-long, perfectly white beard that he gracefully combed with his hand as he looked over the hall.

"I can tell where your guess is coming from, but I’m afraid I’m not the vice-principal you expected to see here."

Once again, the voice couldn’t be a greater mismatch for the fragile, old man sitting on the throne. And with the dissonance of such an intense level, Theo had no other choice but to blink again, clearing his eyeballs from the sludge that clearly made him see wrong.

But with the new object to focus on between his blinking, Theo ended up witnessing something... weird.

For whenever he blinked, the figure sitting upon the throne would change from one extreme variation to the other, cycling throughout not only all general ages one could recognize in a human but even going as far as turning into other humanoidal races before breaking away even from this little convention and outright replacing the formerly humane shapes with beings that could only be described as monsters... only for the cycle to reach its saturation and the form of this throne-bound presence to cycle all the way back to the young boy, then the old man, then the scholar in the strength of his years...

"No way..."

Too stunned by the sight, Theo missed everyone else’s reaction to it, only regaining his focus on the reality around him when he heard Julius’ voice.

Or, to be more precise, when the voice he heard was both Julius’... but also couldn’t be his, not when it was so damn far removed from how Theo expected Julius to sound right now!

’Why is he...’ Theo only managed to voice out half of his thoughts before his instincts kicked in, making him follow the example set not only by Julius but pretty much everyone in the room.

His knees caved in, the balance of his body shifted. And by the time Theo’s knee struck the floor while his chin crashed into the upper part of his chest, the whole hall filled with one sound created out of many synchronized voices.

"We greet the headmaster!"

’Okay, what the fuck is actually going on?!’

Having little to no clue as to what was actually happening, Theo was the only one who didn’t join the chant, satisfied with just bending his head down. After all, how was he supposed to join others in greeting the most important person in the academy if he had no clue this shapeshifter was the man in question?!

Theo gritted his teeth, his mind coming to a complete stall.

Just a moment ago, he was on a roll, ready to finally do away with this whole bogus trial and create a narrative that would allow him to course the rest of his tenure at the academy before he would happily and inevitably get fired. But now?

Now, things simply stopped making sense.

Since when was the headmaster at the academy to begin with? Wasn’t he supposed to be half the world away, out on yet another of his adventures? Then why was he here? Since when? And why...

Theo gulped his spit down his throat as one question took over his mind and made its way to the very forefront of his brain.

’If he was here, why didn’t he...?’

For as far as Theo’s current understanding of this world’s common sense went, the headmaster, while biologically a human, reached a level where he could no longer be counted as just another human. And for someone of his mastery over his strength... seeing through everything that was happening in this joke of a court shouldn’t be any issue!

So why, since he was here to intervene right as Theo was about to solve the whole mess in the very same way Julius attempted to do so a moment earlier, why didn’t he do so earlier?

’Was he in on the ploy to get me slapped out of the academy too?’

Theo dared to raise his head a tiny little bit, eager to take a peek at someone so dastardly as to know the truth about this whole case and yet simply watch in silence as Theo got closer and closer to quite the desperate situation...

Theo attempted to look at the man, holding his eyes open for as long as he could, yet, the very moment he blinked... the middle-aged thug-like man on the throne had turned into a delicate, if not outright feminine-looking, cat-girl with literal whiskers decorating the patch of skin just above his (hers?) mouth.

In the end, however, it was that very look that caught the headmaster’s (headmistress’?) attention, only for her to turn straight into a towering, black dragon that only made itself look insanely comical in its disastrous attempt to somehow fit its truck-sized dump into the huge... but humanly huge throne!

"Can you actually..."

The full, powerful and authoritative voice from before changed a little, growing softer, more approachable. The figure on the throne leaned in, their eyes trained on Theo and his now desperately lowered head as he attempted to pretend he saw absolutely nothing out of the ordinary.

That question, however, the headmaster never fully voiced. Instead, he leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs one over the other before raising his hand and...

Snap

The world went silent, as if someone painlessly and instantly deafened Theo or... removed all the sounds from his surroundings?

<Alert: Anomaly detected!>

<Alert: Anomaly detected!>

In an instant, Theo’s vision swarmed with the red alerts of the hive, each describing yet another unnatural angle in the silent world he suddenly found himself to be locked in.

And then, as if to defy all the odds and prove Theo didn’t actually go deaf, a voice.

The same voice as before, just much, much softer.

"What an interesting little thing you are."

The voice filled not only the narrow strip of isolated space that stretched from the headmaster’s throne all the way to where Theo knelt down, but also into Theo’s soul itself.

"Still, I do believe you are owed some explanation," the voice then grew even softer, more relaxed. A stark contrast to how the man’s (woman’s?) smile suddenly grew so intense, it made him appear like a predator that just locked in on a fresh prey.

"But before that," the throne-occupying being leaned in, its form shifting now to but a squirrel with puffed-out cheeks, only to then become an ancestral tree from the roots of which the whole throne appeared to be made.

"Do tell, when looking at me," the headmaster’s smile grew even wider, "what do you see?"