Villainous Instructor at the Academy
Chapter 157: Construction of catastrophe

Chapter 157: Construction of catastrophe

Back at the Dorne estate, the so-called "vacation" had officially mutated into something far worse: a mandatory planning session for the academy’s Students’ Festival. I had gathered my lovely, disaster-prone Class C in the estate’s largest sitting room. The place, with its old furniture and faint smell of river mold, wasn’t exactly a symbol of luxury. Fitting, honestly.

I lounged in one of the battered armchairs, spinning a quill between my fingers while my students sat on couches, cushions, and the floor, all staring at me like lost ducklings.

"Alright," I began, tapping the quill against the side of my head, "the academy wants us to come up with an event that’s ’meaningful’ and ’entertaining.’ You know what that means?"

Garrick raised a hand. "Uh, no?"

"It means," I said, grinning, "they expect us to fail. Spectacularly. Public humiliation is basically the goal. So let’s not disappoint them."

Leo immediately groaned. "Why can’t we just pretend to be a normal class and open a food stall or something?"

I pointed the quill at him. "Because, Runaway Brat, a food stall run by us would either poison people or explode. And not in the fun way."

Mira, smirking from her seat atop the couch armrest, added, "I vote we make a ’curse-your-enemy’ booth. Pay a silver coin and we’ll slap a misfortune curse on someone you hate."

Julien burst out laughing. "Can you imagine the academy nobles lining up for that?"

"Tragically," I said, "the administration might notice when their sons and daughters start slipping on puddles of grease for three weeks straight."

Felix, still a bit withdrawn since the letter from his family, tried to cut in. "Shouldn’t we do something... safer? Like a play?"

The room fell silent.

Everyone stared at him like he’d just grown a second head.

"A play?" I repeated slowly. "You want this chaotic bunch to act?"

Felix flushed. "I mean—it’s better than cursing people!"

Julien leaned forward, grinning wickedly. "Depends. Can we curse people during the play?"

"Subtle cursing," Mira mused thoughtfully. "Now that’s art."

I buried my face in my hands. "This is worse than I thought."

Wallace, fiddling with some broken mechanical contraption he found in the estate’s basement, piped up. "We could do a demonstration! Like a ’Survive Class C Training’ obstacle course."

I blinked.

The room went very, very still.

Then I grinned slowly. "Now that has potential."

Leo immediately objected. "That sounds like a death sentence!"

"Exactly!" I said brightly. "It’ll be authentic."

Wallace nodded enthusiastically. "We can set up some traps! Non-lethal ones! Mostly!"

"Mostly," Leo repeated, dead-eyed.

Julien smirked. "We could even have Lucian standing at the end, waiting with a sarcasm-powered finishing blow."

"I can feel the trauma already," Felix muttered under his breath.

Mira grinned. "It’ll be the perfect representation of our lives."

"Educational, even," Garrick added seriously.

I stood up dramatically. "It’s decided! We, Class C, will create the most traumatizing obstacle course the academy has ever seen! Survivability not guaranteed! Mental scars free of charge!"

There was a strange mixture of laughter, groans, and cries of despair.

Felix, bless his backwater noble heart, looked like he was considering running into the river and never coming back.

I clapped him on the back. "Cheer up, Felix! Think of it this way—you’ll finally get a chance to show everyone that being from a swamp has survival advantages."

He opened his mouth to protest but realized there was no winning, so he just sighed in defeat.

"Fine," he muttered. "But I’m not doing anything that involves mud wrestling."

"No promises!" I said cheerfully.

And just like that, chaos had officially been unleashed.

Again.

Morning sunlight spilled through the cracked windows of the Dorne estate’s back courtyard — the new site of Class C’s insanity project: Survive the Training, Survive the Festival!

I stood proudly, hands on hips, surveying the disastrous construction zone that would soon become our obstacle course. Or a war crime. Hard to tell.

"All right, maggots," I barked, startling several of them into dropping the wooden planks they were carrying. "Today, we build! Today, we create! Today, we destroy whatever dignity this place had left!"

Leo, wiping sweat from his forehead after hammering approximately three nails into a post (and hitting his thumb twice), muttered, "I don’t remember signing up for manual labor."

"You’re right," I said, strolling past him. "You signed up for emotional damage. The labor’s just a bonus."

Felix was currently being buried under a pile of rope traps Wallace had designed — poorly, I might add, since half of them kept triggering at random. At one point, a rope yanked Felix’s foot up and left him dangling from a tree like a sad, struggling fish.

"This... is fine..." Felix gasped, trying to maintain some fragment of dignity.

I leaned back, hands behind my head, and smiled warmly. "See? Natural talent. I knew that swamp upbringing would be good for something."

Meanwhile, Mira and Julien were setting up the "psychological horror" section — otherwise known as the "Fake Exit Maze." Every path ended in either a pitfall, a prank spell, or a wax dummy of me screaming, "DISAPPOINTING!" at full volume.

"Subtlety is dead," Mira commented with glee as she sketched another mocking illusion spell.

"It was never alive in the first place," Julien replied, whistling as he planted a fake door that led straight into a mud pit.

Garrick, good old reliable Garrick, was hammering together a sturdy climbing wall that looked almost too professional compared to the nonsense surrounding it.

"You’re ruining the spirit of the event," I teased.

He blinked. "I thought we wanted people to suffer?"

"We do," I agreed, "but we want them to suffer hilariously, not actually train."

He considered that seriously, then purposefully removed a few boards to make it structurally questionable.

"Perfect," I praised. "A true agent of chaos."

Wallace, who had somehow constructed a small catapult, was enthusiastically testing it by launching heavy cabbages across the courtyard. One missed Julien by an inch.

"Oi!" Julien shouted, ducking. "Warn a guy, will ya?!"

Wallace grinned. "That was the warning."

Leo screamed from somewhere behind the obstacle course. A pile of laundry ropes had entangled him, leaving him trapped in a net like a pathetic, flailing fish.

"Help!" he yelped.

I walked by without breaking stride. "You’ll thank me later for this combat training, Whiner."

"You’re the worst instructor ever!" he shouted after me.

"And yet you’re still alive. Curious, isn’t it?"

By midday, the course was half-constructed and fully cursed. We had created:

A ’Rope of Death’ section.

A ’Psychological Horror’ maze.

A ’Mud Wrestling Survival Zone.’

A ’Trust Your Luck’ climbing wall.

A ’Surprise Catapult Challenge.’

Honestly? It was shaping up to be a work of chaotic genius.

I gathered everyone for a lunch break—more to prevent fatalities than anything else—and surveyed my students, all exhausted, battered, and mud-streaked, but weirdly... smiling.

"This," I said, holding up a random cabbage Wallace had missed, "is the essence of Class C. Madness. Improvisation. Terrible, terrible ideas that somehow work out."

Felix, still dangling from a tree, mumbled, "I’m starting to miss the swamp."

"Sentimental fool," I said, shaking my head.

Later that evening, as the sun dipped low, I sat on a cracked stone wall with Julien and Mira, watching the others struggle to reset Wallace’s rogue catapult.

"Think we’ll survive the actual festival?" Julien asked.

I grinned. "Does survival really matter?"

Mira laughed. "At this point? Probably not."

I leaned back, staring up at the golden sky, and let out a satisfied breath.

For the first time in a long time, even with everything else looming in the distance—the festival, the Dorne family’s hidden mess—I felt... content.

Of course, knowing my luck?

It wouldn’t last long.