Nanomancer Rising: Divine Alchemist Reborn as Academy's Worst Teacher
Chapter 54: You are not ready (Cascading Collapse - Part 9)

Chapter 54: You are not ready (Cascading Collapse - Part 9)

This was outrageous.

In Theo’s view, the headmaster was not just an officer sitting at the top of the administrative decision-making chain.

No, he was much more than that.

As the original founder of this academy, someone who saw it go through highs and lows, Theo expected the man in question to be someone perfectly reclusive, content with his great achievement and now merely enjoying the twilight of his life as even the magic started to fail at the task of keeping his age from catching up to him.

And yet, here he was, right before Theo’s eyes, clearly amused by the whole situation.

To Theo, a headmaster was like an academy’s supreme leader. Maybe hard to meet and come into any sort of direct content, but still—a leader that not only corrected the course of the academy when it strayed away from its intended values, but was also willing to personally intervene if something was going terribly wrong.

And yet, here he was, merely amused by the whole mess rather than actively trying to solve it.

Amidst all of those things, however, there was one quality Theo assumed to be absolutely basic, something he wasn’t willing to give up on.

And it was for his boss... to be fair.

And how could he be fair, if he simply allowed Theo to go through this whole ordeal?

Following that line of thought, since he didn’t intervene earlier, stepping in only when Theo was about to reply to Julius in kind and show him why using the argument of power was a stupid idea, wasn’t he actually predetermined to be against Theo in this whole mess?

With those thoughts swarming the young man’s head, all he could do was grit his teeth and wait for the headmaster’s answer.

"No, I wasn’t just sitting back and watching with amusement as you suffered," the now-young, beautiful woman shook her head with a visible sense of regret on her face. "The reason why I intervened at such a time, right when you were about to counterattack, is because that’s exactly when I first sensed something bad was going on."

Finally, the mask of amusement, curiosity, and leisure started to disappear from the apparition’s face, replaced with one of actual focus.

"And on that note, while that’s certainly something you wouldn’t think yourself, this whole mess is pretty much what I, for the longest of time, wanted to see happen."

"You wanted to see someone try to bully an innocent person into charges that could screw up my whole damn life?!" Bit by bit, the layers of Theo’s patience continued to unwind one after the other.

It was one thing to hear from the man directly that he had the power to intervene and yet he didn’t. But to hear he was actually happy something like this happened on his watch?

"Yes, I indeed waited for something like this to happen," the headmaster, now but an owl perched on the armrest of the throne, admitted, as if reading through Theo’s thoughts. "Even as a headmaster, even as the strongest..." the owl shook its head, "once you reach the position I’m in, you cannot move as freely as you used to. And even if there are things that I, for the longest time, wanted to change about this place..."

The owl shook its head only to then become a coyote sitting neatly on the throne while using its fluffy tail as padding for its front legs.

"I really needed an excuse like this joke of a trial to push them through all the objections those reforms are going to raise. But," the coyote leaned its head over to the side in an extremely cute manner... which only served to put Theo on even greater alert.

It was an established scientific fact that the animals of the cat family had developed certain behaviors that had nothing to do with their natural habitat and everything to do with their coexistence with humans. And by removing all of the scientific mambo-jumbo, it pretty much meant that just how predators would instinctively know how to hide their approach, acting cute could very well be just another tactic designed to invoke a certain kind of reaction rather than just a quirk of this particular apparition the headmaster assumed.

"But you care for none of that, don’t you?" The headmaster suddenly changed the conversation around, throwing Theo off enough that he nearly stumbled on his feet despite having his feet paralyzed and thus forced to stay perfectly still. "You are here to prove your innocence. And while I can’t really allow you to harm so many of my employees simply because they had better things to do than verify the validity of all the rumors about you..."

Theo’s face grew just a tiny little bit more still than it already was, only to contrast his eyes that started to burn with more and more intense fire.

A fire that, nonetheless, couldn’t stop a strand of logical thought from getting through to Theo’s head.

’I shouldn’t fall into my own narration. While it sucks and while it’s no longer true, most of those rumors...’

Theo gulped down his saliva, his anger, and his pride.

’Most of those rumors used to be correct, weren’t they?’

Theo closed his eyes and took a deep breath, exhaling it in a slow, steady manner to calm himself down. And by the time he opened his eyes again, not a single trace of agitation was left on it.

"So, I’m screwed, right?" Theo stared at the man with an empty look to his own face.

’How did that quote go? I fought, I lost, now I rest?’ he thought, recalling one of the scenes from the ancient television that left quite the impact on him, even though spoken through the mouth of a character that ultimately turned out to be a villain. An extremely principled guy, but one that ended up swept through the changing times thus becoming the "bad guy" in the eyes of all those who went along with the change.

"The fact that I’m not letting you kill all of them doesn’t mean I’m going to let this farce continue as it is," the headmaster sighed, now in the form of an elegant, sky-blue crane, currently busy cleaning the inner side of its wings with its long, graceful beak. "And honestly, you are at a point where I don’t even need to do a single thing to turn this whole farce around. But while I could just let things play out as they are now going to..."

The headmaster, now but a massive armadillo, shook its comically tiny head.

"I wouldn’t want to let this opportunity to quash some of the corrupt idiots slip away, would I?"

With the headmaster returning to its form of but a young boy roughly in his early teens, Theo could now witness a growing smile on the boy’s face. A smile so devious, it sent a chill up Theo’s spine.

"Oh, and before I drop the sound barrier," the boy leaned his head over his shoulder while relaxing his smile a bit, almost appearing as someone who wasn’t eagerly waiting for when the bloody part of the evening would start by his hand, "I bet it feels good to use that weird power of yours, but make no mistake," the boy-headmaster sighed out before jumping down from his throne only to land as a youthful yet perfectly graceful jade beauty seemingly created from the sum-total of what men were biologically conditioned to desire.

"You are not the only one with some sort of quirky power. And trust me when I say this," for but a moment, the headmaster’s smile almost appeared warm.

"You are not ready to face them, not even with that quirky power of yours."