Nightmare licked the corner of her mouth, bringing the conversation back to the point.
"Enough idle talk. Thou hast yet to answer my question. Why hath thy mood seemed so... gloomy since the very beginning of today?"
"Well... about that..."
Greg fell into hesitation.
Ever since he discovered this morning that Lily Carlo was actually Lilith Kahn, his mood had been incredibly complex—it felt as if his sincere heart had been toyed with by a toxic woman.
No, he was definitely being played by a toxic woman!
He recalled the series of events involving her.
A primary heroine had actually disguised herself as a background character to trick him out of favorability and intelligence. She even had the nerve to boast, "Her Highness is much more impressive than you thought!" after using that intel to defeat Victoria.
"Tch, that damn woman!"
"Oh? A 'damn woman'?"
Nightmare's ears instantly perked up, her emerald eyes shimmering with the light of gossip. Her voice was full of a troublemaker's excitement:
"That sounds like quite the story! Quick, tell me the details! I am most interested in these mortal emotional entanglements, love, and hate! Which family's daughter is she? In what way is she 'damn'? Did she trick thy feelings, or run off with thy property? Or perhaps... she did both at once?"
Greg gave Nightmare an annoyed glare. "Shut up! It's not an emotional entanglement! And there's no property to run off with! It's just... I got played by a troublesome person!"
He certainly wasn't going to explain in detail.
Given what he knew about Nightmare, if he told her the whole story, this goddess with her twisted sense of humor would definitely bring it up to mock him every chance she got for a long time to come.
"Oh? Played?"
Nightmare's interest grew even more. She paced around Greg's feet, her tail twitching with excitement.
"Someone capable of playing my other half? That makes me even more curious. Come on, tell me. I promise not to laugh... well, I'll try my best not to laugh out loud."
Greg couldn't be bothered to deal with her. He simply turned his head away and refocused his attention on the dormitory building, using his actions to signal his refusal to communicate.
Seeing his stubborn refusal to engage, Nightmare pouted, seemingly wanting to continue her pestering.
However, at that moment—
Greg's gaze inadvertently swept across the lawn at his feet.
Under the faint reflection of the moonlight and the distant streetlamps, he suddenly noticed several wisps of deep, near-black smoke rising silently from the gaps in the grass.
Huh?
Greg was slightly stunned.
There was no fire source or combustible material nearby. Where was this smoke coming from?
And the color of the smoke... wasn't it a bit too dark?
Just as doubt arose in his mind and he instinctively leaned down to get a closer look—
Buzz...
A faint vibration came from the ground beneath his feet.
Immediately following that—
"BOOM!!!!!"
An indescribable explosion, a mix of blinding white light and violent, scorching heat, erupted without any warning directly beneath where Greg was standing!!!
The destructive shockwave and blazing flames were like an ancient beast waking up, opening its bloody maw to devour everything above it!
The thunderous roar of the explosion instantly tore through the night sky. The terrifying sound wave even caused the windows of the nearby dormitory building to groan under the strain!
In that life-or-death moment, Greg's brain didn't even have time to think. His survival instinct and the reflexes forged from several brushes with death drove him to act immediately!
After tossing Nightmare into the shadows, he instantly activated his skill, Insubstantiality.
In a thousandth of a second, his body turned into a weightless shadow without substance.
The blazing fire, flying dirt and rocks, and the violent shockwave...
All the lethal physical and elemental damage passed through his body without any resistance, as if passing through thin air.
But the moment the skill effect ended, the scorching air current and powerful thrust generated by the explosion slammed into Greg's newly solidified body, sending him tumbling across the lawn several times before he came to a stop.
"Cough, cough..."
Coughing, he struggled to sit up from the ground. He shook his head, which was dizzy from the roar, and opened his eyes wide, staring in shock at the spot where he had just been standing.
There, the once-level lawn and ornamental shrubs had vanished.
In their place was a terrifying crater over twenty meters wide and ten meters deep, with eerie thick smoke still billowing upward!
Something at the bottom of the pit seemed to be glowing faintly, emitting unstable mana fluctuations.
"What the hell is going on?"
Looking at the scene, Greg felt a lingering fear. He had been just a fraction of a second away from certain death.
He had thought his luck had turned a bit today since nothing had gone wrong after returning to the surface, but it turned out the world was just saving up for a massive disaster!
Nightmare couldn't help but remark, "I must say... art thou perhaps a bit too unlucky sometimes?"
"I don't need you to tell me that."
Greg brushed the dust off his clothes and stood up.
But just then, the lawn beside him was suddenly pushed aside, revealing a hidden tunnel. Several people in white lab coats crawled out, looking rather disheveled.
"Did... did it succeed?"
The scrawniest of the three spoke with a post-disaster tremor and a hint of uncertain hope.
"The energy readings... before the explosion... peaked at over seventy-five times the theoretical safety limit... According to the supplementary notes in Appendix C of 'Seventeen Collapse Models of Non-Steady State Alchemy Circles'... this is undoubtedly a failure," a tall individual holding a broken half-pen said.
"Dammit! Then we—"
The third person was about to speak but suddenly noticed Greg, who had been staring at them the whole time.
The atmosphere on the scene fell silent for a moment.
"U-um..." One of the people in lab coats cleared his throat, trying to sound more persuasive despite his trembling voice. "This... student? Er, whoever you are..."
He extended a finger covered in black soot and pointed cautiously at the smoking crater, his face straining to produce a complex expression that mixed apology with sincerity.
"Please, whatever you do, don't misunderstand! This was absolutely not an accident, let alone an explosion!"
His two companions behind him reacted immediately.
"Right, right! This is a long-prepared, high-intensity, short-phase, controllable negative entropy backflow field demonstration by the Department of Alchemy!"
"Look at this crater! It may look irregular, but in fact, the ratio of its major axis, minor axis, and depth is infinitely close to the reciprocal of the golden ratio! This symbolizes our perfect application of the opposing philosophical concepts of beauty and destruction in alchemical practice!"
"Therefore!"
The one who looked like the leader continued:
"This is by no means destruction of public property or a threat to public safety! This is a forward-looking ideal experiment. Although its form of expression was a bit... well... a bit passionate! The experiment itself actually had no issues!"
Greg: "I #%XX you people from the Department of Alchemy are all **#Ox!?"
Rate on N.U.
