Nanomancer Rising: Divine Alchemist Reborn as Academy's Worst Teacher
Chapter 81: Crashout

Chapter 81: Crashout

’Now, what should I do?’

Standing tall above sleeping Celeste, all curled up in the tall grass, Theo sighed.

’What do I do with her?’

To his side, his two disciples hung in the air, held up by the external flow of Theo’s mana. Like a harness, it circulated directly through the air, keeping his two disciples safe and somewhat even comfortable.

After the cultivation double-jump they just did, all Theo could do was carry their tired, pained bodies back.

But now that he stood over sleeping Celeste...

’Am I really that insanely naive...?’ He looked down upon the woman with open contempt for pushing this situation on him.

And after a sigh...

"How long do you intend to nap here?" Theo asked, keeping his voice moderate but spitting his words from an uncomfortably close distance to Celeste’s ear.

"Ah!"

Celeste opened her eyes only for them to turn sharply and lock on Theo’s nearby face.

"The show is over, you know?"

Theo leaned back, smiling at the display of utter panic that followed.

Celeste jumped up and waved her hands around, trying to explain something she was still too dozed-off to comprehend herself. Her mouth turned all jumpy, spouting halves of words at best, often limited to just random sounds as she flailed around in momentary desperation.

At some point, Celeste’s face started turning red. And after pursing her mouth and puffing out her cheeks, tears appeared in her eyes.

’Oh damn,’ Theo only had an exhausted thought to offer, ’how come I’ve already made two girls cry?’

"Even now, again!" Celeste suddenly screamed out. "Again! And again!" she cried over and over again. "Why do you keep acting so out of it with such nonchalance!"

Celeste wrapped her tiny hands into fists before shooting her left arm and pointing an accusatory finger at Theo’s two floating students...

Or rather, the flow of Theo’s raw mana behind it. An achievement Theo was quite proud of, given how he pretty much built a technique from scratch, with little to no help from his hive.

"It’s been ages since anyone used mana like that!" Keeping up with her rant, Celeste jumped up to her feet and advanced a few feet, dropping her fists down on Theo’s chest while he could do nothing but just... stand there, all startled. "Ages!" Celeste’s voice grew hysterical.

"Hey, how about calming down a little..."

"Screw that!"

Celeste shot her hand to the right, cutting the topic with her furious lash-out.

"From the very first day!" Celeste screamed out. Judging by the now slightly tamer volume of her voice, she was starting to lose steam. "Randomly mentioning an idea that already created several research circles around it. In what, two, three days?! AAARGH!"

Pressing her hands against her face, Celeste groaned as she leaned up and back.

"Ahhh..."

After the last moan, Celeste froze still, with only her chest heavily moving up and down as she turned silent in a bid to calm down.

"So..."

Theo scratched the back of his head.

’That’s one hell of a crash-out, huh?’

"Baseball, huh?" Out of nowhere, Theo replied.

"Huh?"

Celeste’s fingers parted, revealing her eyes as she threw a sharp gaze at Theo’s face.

"Nothing," Theo shook his head. "If I may ask," he finished the shake with his head heavily leaned off to the side, "what’s wrong with how I’m holding up those two?"

Celeste’s eyes went wide.

Her mouth opened up, only for her jaw to tremble while her lips made a popping sound over two... no, three attempts she made to make some sort of a voice, to form some sort of a response, only for all of them to die away in the fires of her fury, shock... and just how Theo’s obvious attempt at changing the topic fanned those two.

"You...!"

Celeste tightened her fists to the point the white of her knuckles started to show from underneath her delicate skin. Yet, for all the effort she put into quelling her rage in silence, she was nearing the limit beyond which no sane person could still try to hold back.

"What, are you trying to get answers out of me without offering any of your own?" Theo crossed his arms over his chest before raising his right eyebrow, giving Celeste a look full of irony. "Isn’t that quite self-serving to you? Or maybe..." Theo’s lips trembled a little as a realization struck him, causing his expression to go haywire first before settling on a slight smirk, "or maybe, this is the first time when you can’t figure something out just because you tried to?"

While not all that interested in the woman in the first place, Theo did his due diligence to listen in on what others had to say about her, especially as her presence started to grow bigger and bigger in his life.

That’s why he knew her career was mostly a smooth ride, achieved through Celeste’s overwhelming academic ability and coupled with a talent for cultivation just good enough not to be an obstacle or a limiter. When it came to the real potential, though?

Celeste was weak.

She was more of a scholar than a fighter, engineer or researcher, only interested in deepening her knowledge of what was already known rather than challenging the limits of her own creativity by trying to uncover the things that no other human had thought of yet.

’And that’s why she can’t stand me so damn much,’ Theo thought, recalling all the times when she spooked, hounded or outright spied on him. It was no surprise she was his guard during his trial nor that it was Celeste who ended up following his students only to then spy on Theo’s day-long lesson.

"That’s... fair?"

On the other side of the small field the two of them argued at, Celeste’s face turned even redder than before, only for her eyes to suddenly relax, as if she suddenly found herself to be torn between instantly calming down and her rage sparking even further.

What Theo didn’t expect, though...

"It’s been a century since anyone last used raw mana the way you do," Celeste pointed out while shaking her head. "And even back then, it was one of the worst methods of using your mana. Ever since the second magical revolution, using raw mana to do work is no more than an empty flex. Instead..."

Something flashed in Celeste’s eyes as she dropped down to her knees before clearing a patch of ground from all the grass growth and the pebbles before drawing some kind of shape directly in the slightly wet mud of the ground. A considerable moment later, she hovered her hand over it for a moment, her mana stirring up.

"Here," Celeste called back to Theo while lifting a thin sheet of solidified mud marked with all the drawing Celeste did on it. "Try filling it up with mana to see for yourself."

Theo squinted his eyes before reluctantly taking over the thin, square disc and then taking a moment to inspect it.

By some way... it felt extremely similar to the formation he set up. And yet, from the different markings spread out all over the disc, none of which appeared to be just simple nodes of the array, this thing couldn’t be any different from a formation.

With the image of all those marks now saved in his hive’s memory, Theo pushed a sliver of his mana into the disc, quite curious to see what it would do...

Only for the item to shatter right in his hand, into thousands of pieces it fell apart, now all falling down through the air.

"What?" Theo asked, confused by the show.

"Oh my fucking gods," Celeste merely mouthed out her exasperation, only for her voice to then turn into a desperate shriek, "AGAIN?!"