The audience request… went through.
Maybe it was the great desire of the receptionist that, when conveyed along with Theo's message, softened up the vice-principal to allow the meeting. Maybe it was just Theo's message alone.
Or maybe the vice-principal simply wanted Theo to overcome the greatest trial of his whole plan, the trial that he was challenging right now.
'Crap,' he cursed under his breath, already struggling to quell the fire in his lungs. Then, despite knowing the futility of doing so, he looked up, as if hoping to see where his misery would end.
But due to the construction of the stairs Theo was climbing, rather than seeing up to the top floor of the academy's central tower, all he could see was the bottom of the stairs one level above him, forcing him to shake his head and then keep climbing, not any wiser over just how many more stairs he had yet to conquer.
This task, already challenging in its own right, grew only harder with the addition of the weight of the bottle Theo carefully carried as he climbed while trying to ignore the enticing idea of just letting it… drop.
Sure, it would make the climb easier… but also utterly pointless.
'If only I had enough nanties to put them to good use now,' Theo thought, only to then grit his teeth even further.
Getting more nanties was exactly why he put himself through the current ordeal, after all!
Thankfully, no matter how infinitely long the stairs appeared to be in Theo's tired mind, they still had to realistically have an end. And Theo managed to find said end just a few moments before burning through the last of his will could burn away as the fuel to keep his spent muscles moving.
'That darn bastard,' Theo cursed in his thoughts as he raised his eyes to the fancily decorated door of the vice-principal's office. On a floor just a single flight of stairs below the tower's top, located right against the massive window on the other side of the spiraling staircase, the entrance quite literally blinded Theo with all the light reflected off the crystals, gold and silver adornments, and all the other decorations designed either by someone with extremely poor taste… or someone capable of turning them all into a tactical asset capable of blinding any enemies foolish enough to try to storm those doors during the day.
In the end, however, Theo had no other choice but to take a short break to gather his breath before wiping his sweat off his forehead with the tip of his sleeve and then proceeding to first approach and then use a special handle to knock on the door.
Knock, Knock, Knock
For a few, terribly stretched-out seconds, only silence responded to the knocker's call.
"Come on in," the vice-principal called from the inside, his voice artificially amplified by some sort of magic circuitry embedded into the doors.
'At least he spared me the whole array of "Who's there" kind of jokes,' Theo thought, breathing a small sigh of relief as he pushed the doors open with a gentle kick before waltzing straight in with a confident look on his face… and a massive, perfectly see-through bottle cradled in his arms.
The office was nothing like its decorated doors suggested it to be. And while not perfectly spartan in design, it lacked anything beyond its basic structure and then some simple furniture like the desk the vice sat behind, two deep chairs in front of it, and then an array of bookshelves occupying every free spot by the wall that wasn't a window.
The vice-principal himself was a man in the strength of his years, with a neatly trimmed black beard that seemed to only accent his immaculate jawline, his hair reaching as far down as his beard, and a pair of deep-green eyes socketed on a scar-marked face. Adding up the burly physique with the man's supple muscles, only accented by his tight-fit clothing, would create the picture of a war-born veteran who, only by some accident, ended up working his life away from behind a desk.
When it came to the man's deeply green eyes, however, they weren't like what one would expect to see in a warrior. No, his gaze pierced far further than the next strike or the next battle, to places only a few humans ever could imagine and even fewer could see.
'He looks like a scholar trapped in a barbarian's body,' Theo thought, gulping his saliva down when faced with the sight, no, with the man's aura for the very first time since appearing in this world. 'Not even my memories of him could match the impression he leaves in person.'
The vice-principal's eyes lingered on Theo's face for a while before he gently raised his quill-wielding arm only to haphazardly point it towards one of the two chairs standing opposite his desk.
"You've come all this way, so you might as well take a seat."
The man's voice stood in direct contrast to his eyes, belonging not in a silent, highly elevated office but to a battlefield, to someone screaming orders over the clanging noise of weapons clashing and the pained screams of the wounded.
Theo wasn't a soldier to instinctively follow such a voice. Still, when offered a seat after such a grueling climb, he would have to be insane to refuse. And pretty much the moment his ass touched the chair's deep cushion…
"So, did you finally fix your disability?" he casually asked, locking his hands together before leaning forward and resting his chin against them. "For I struggle to imagine another reason for you coming here in such a…" he hesitated for a moment, sparks of amusement flying across his eyes, "determined fashion."
Theo squinted his eyes, taken off guard by the angle the man started the conversation with.
'A disability? What is he…'
And then it struck him.
The reason, above all the social and personal trouble his former self happily threw himself into, for why he was considered the talentless trash of the academy, a nepotic insert of a high-noble family desperate enough to get rid of him, they pulled some insanely costly strings to insert him into this place.
His disability that Theo already noticed pretty much the moment he appeared in this world, although only now gaining the proper perspective to consider it as such.
The fact that in place of a magical talent of any sort, the very core around which both students and teachers at the academy alike built the foundation of their powers, be it cultivation, magic, sorcery, enchanting, or any other of the hundreds of possible paths of personal development… Theo had his nanite organ.
An organ that remained perfectly idle until the moment Theo's consciousness breathed life into it, seeding it with the hive AI and thus turning the useless organ, only capable of producing useless, inactive nanites, into a tool the value and versatility of which even Theo couldn't fathom himself.
'For how big of an upset it is,' Theo thought, pressing his lips into a thin line as his mind swarmed with questions, ideas, and then even more questions, 'on so mind-bogglingly many levels…'
Breathe in, breathe out.
Theo calmed himself down, refusing to allow the vice-principal to steer the conversation as he wished.
'I will have all the time in the world to think about it later. For now, the mission takes priority.'
And with that simple thought, Theo ignored the vice-principal's question and tore the seal of the bottle off, unleashing an avalanche of the repugnant smell throughout the whole office before the vice-principal could even hope to react.
This time, however, rather than just letting the odor spread and poison every last iota of air in the room for seemingly no reason, Theo whipped out a glass from a hidden pocket on the inner side of his teacher's robe before tilting the bottle and pouring a few fingers-width worth of the clear liquid into it.
"That's not why I'm here, Bogdan," ignoring all the rules of courtesy, etiquette, and hierarchy, Theo addressed the man directly…
Only to down the drink he just poured in one go, allowing himself but a short moment to enjoy its pristine, exotic taste before filling the glass again and then slamming it down on the vice-principal's desk.
"I've come here to offer you this drink."