NOVEL NEXT Chapter 148: It's Going To Explode!
Mika didn't waste a second. If Charlotte was calling in this state, then every heartbeat mattered. He ducked low under his desk, shielding himself from view, and thumbed the green icon.
"Charlotte, how many times have I told you not to call me in class? Just message me unless—"
He never finished.
"Mika! Mika, help me!" Charlotte's voice cracked, high with desperation. "Help us, the whole building's going to explode! You have to come now!"
The words hit him like a bolt of lightning. His pulse spiked, eyes widening as he pressed the phone tighter to his ear.
"What? What do you mean explode? Speak clearly, Charlotte!"
Her words tumbled out in a rush, near incoherent with panic.
"The thing is...the girls and I were finishing adjustments on the Dream Drifter for the exhibition, just small tweaks! But the machine started making these noises, horrible grinding and whirring, and then it overheated!"
"We tried everything, Mika, we tried recalibrating the energy flow, running diagnostics, but it only got worse! The batteries, they're overloading, all of them, if it blows, the whole block—"
His stomach dropped.
"Wait. The batteries? You mean the triple-core set? Charlotte, those aren't normal batteries, those are three-million-deca-watt units! If they go critical—"
"I know!" She screamed into the phone, her voice trembling. "It won't just destroy the Dream Drifter, it'll take the entire research block with it! Mika, I don't know what to do! Please, hurry!"
"Fuck." He hissed under his breath, his mind racing.
Those batteries weren't just volatile, they were catastrophic weapons if mishandled. One spark, one chain reaction, and all that would be left of the Academy's research wing would be ash and a crater.
"Fine, fine, I'm on my way. Don't do anything else. Just hold on. I'll be there in a moment."
"Hurry, Mika! Please hurry!" Charlotte sobbed before the line cut dead.
Maria had just begun to open her mouth when Mika shot to his feet, shoving his chair back with a loud scrape.
"Sir." He barked, voice sharp but controlled. "One of the blessed I'm contracted with needs me. Urgently. I have to leave, now."
The teacher blinked, too startled to protest before Mika was already rushing off. But a hand caught his wrist...Maria's hand.
Her eyes bored into him, concern breaking through the mask. "What happened? Is everything alright?...Do you need help?"
And in response, he forced a small smile, a flimsy mask over the rising panic.
"It's alright." He said softly, giving her a reassuring squeeze. "Charlotte just messed up a little and needs my help to stop the entire research block of the academy from being destroyed."
He pulled his hand free and was gone in a blur of motion.
The class was left in stunned silence. Maria's mind raced to piece together the fragments of what she'd heard. She knew that Charlotte did some work in the research block as a researcher, but what could possibly cause an entire building to be destroyed?
The rest of the students were a curious, whispering mess, but no one dared to follow.
Mika ran. He didn't care about the gasps, the shocked stares, or the angry shouts of the people he dodged. He took the stairs three at a time, his feet barely touching the ground.
He vaulted over a railing, slid through a hallway, and finally burst out of the main academy building, heading toward the Research Block.
It was a monolithic structure of gleaming white stone interlaced with pulsating blue lines of conduit, its spires crowned with massive Lunar Crystals, a extremely rare crystal found in one of the realms, that used moonlight to produce energy.
Those crystals alone could power entire districts, their light shimmering like caged stars, funneling energy into the labyrinth of labs within. The building was more than impressive—it was the beating heart of Solaria's academic innovation.
Every project involving mana manipulation, dimensional artifacts, realm-based tech, this was where it happened. Students who specialized in mana-research fought tooth and nail for lab space here, and the most privileged had private rooms, cathedrals of invention and experimentation.
And right now, Charlotte's lab—one of those very rooms, was on the verge of becoming ground zero.
Mika knew, that nothing would go wrong. He had a secret failsafe built into Charlotte's lab, a redundant safety measure to prevent this exact type of catastrophic overload.
But knowing that didn't stop the knot of dread from tightening in his stomach. Charlotte had poured her heart and soul into this project. He wouldn't risk her machine being destroyed, not when he could prevent it.
He burst into the building, a whirlwind of motion.
The corridors were abuzz with scholarly people, their faces buried in notebooks or staring intently at holographic displays.
One the way he caught flashes of what the block contained: one lab working on levitation engines that made whole slabs of metal float weightlessly, another where glowing liquids churned in crystal tanks, another where half-finished constructs twitched and sparked. The air hummed with power, ideas, and danger.
But he barely saw any of it. His eyes were locked ahead, his stride unbroken.
Charlotte's lab. That's where the disaster was unfolding. That's where he had to be.
He then finally skidded to a halt in front of the reinforced steel door, the symbol for Charlotte's lab glowing above it. He slapped his personal ID against the scanner. A sharp BEEP and a faint hiss later, the heavy door slid open.
The sight that greeted him was a maelstrom of organized chaos.
Charlotte's lab was vast, easily twice the size of a normal classroom, its walls lined with glowing crystal batteries, etched glass conduits, racks of runed equipment, and shelves of half-finished prototypes.
And in the center of the room loomed the culprit: a massive black machine bristling with coiling wires and embedded glyphs, glowing runes racing frantically across its surface like a corrupted heartbeat, looking like some sort of supercomputer.
And currently, the entire frame pulsed with alternating washes of red and blue light, as if fighting itself. Steam hissed out from vents, filling the air with the acrid tang of overheated metal.
And around it, six girls in crisp white lab coats scrambled frantically around it, their panicked movements more like monkeys tearing at a cage than trained researchers.
One yanked at a sparking cable. Another furiously tapped at a diagnostic panel that spat out unreadable strings of error glyphs. Two more crouched at the base, trying to force open a hatch that glowed dangerously hot.
It was a zoo of frenzied academics, where Charlotte was there as well. Her face pale and her brow slick with sweat, was right in the middle of it, frantically tapping at a diagnostics pad.
The moment her ears registered the slide of the door, she looked up. Her eyes found Mika, and she ran toward him, a tidal wave of relief and terror washing over her face.
"Mika, Mika, help us!" She cried, grabbing his arms. "Help us already! The machine's going to blow up any minute! I don't know what to do!"
Mika simply looked at her, his expression a calm contrast to her panic.
"Calm down, Charlotte." He said, his voice a steadying balm. "There's no use in panicking and being all over the place. Part of being a researcher is staying calm no matter what the situation is."
His words hit her like a splash of cold water. She immediately calmed down, her frantic grip on his arms loosening as she met his gaze with a nervous but focused look.
"That's it." He smiled gently, patting her shoulder. "Now that I'm here, nothing's going to happen. You can relax."
He then began walking toward the machine as he said,
"First, tell me what happened. I need all the details, and the current state of the machine."
Charlotte followed him, her voice much steadier now as she called out to her team. "Girls! Come over here! Come over here and tell Mika all the diagnostics!"
Hearing this, her teammates, converged on him. As he walked, he snagged pad from a nearby terminal and began reading the information. One of the girls, a tall woman with a nervous twitch, began listing off numbers in a rush.
"The Aetheric Resonance is at 2.8, well below the stable threshold! We tried to re-route the flow, but it just keeps dropping!"
"And the Harmonic Synchronization is at 4.6 and rising!" Another girl chimed in. "We tried to decouple the energy matrix from the primary temporal core, but the core is fluctuating too wildly!"
A third girl added, her voice shaky, "The Reality Anchor points...they're collapsing. Point A is at 97% integrity, B is at 94%, but C is at 88%! We can't stabilize it!"
"We were just tinkering with the settings." Charlotte said, joining the chorus. "We don't really know what went wrong. It happened all of a sudden. We just adjusted the quantum flux regulator to get a little more clarity on the temporal echoes, and then...this happened."
Mika simply nodded, his eyes scanning the endless lines of data on the pad. He moved around the massive machine, his gaze lingering on the pulsing runes and the chaotic steam vents.
"And the mana-to-electrical conversion ratio? Has that fluctuated at all? And what about the dimensional sub-layers? Did you run a scan on those before the system went critical?"
Charlotte, now fully in "researcher mode." was ready with the answers.
"The ratio is all over the place, it's spiking erratically. It went from a steady 1:1.2 to 1:2.4 in under a minute! And we did a sub-layer scan right before the incident, they were perfectly stable, no anomalies detected."
"So the problem isn't the dimensional anchor." Mika muttered, more to himself than to her. "It's the energy matrix itself. The mana conversion is overloading the batteries, which is causing the temporal core to fluctuate, and that's collapsing the reality anchors."
He looked at her, his expression a mix of concentration and resolve.
"Give me the manual bypass key for the Dream Drifter. You're not going to be able to fix this from a terminal."
Charlotte wasted no time. She darted to a nearby table, her frantic energy now channeled into a singular purpose. She rummaged through a small case before pulling out a slim, glowing card, the manual bypass key.
She hurried back to Mika and pressed it into his hand. "Here!"
Mika didn't hesitate. He sat down on the floor right next to the machine, his gaze already locked on a small panel on the side. With a practiced motion, he pried it open.
Inside, a chaotic nest of glowing wires and complex runes pulsed with volatile energy. He inserted the card into a hidden slot. The runes on the machine flickered momentarily, but the chaos didn't subside.
He looked up. "I need the Fluctuation Modulator. And the Resonance Nullifier."
A girl with short-cropped hair immediately dashed to a supply shelf and returned with a small, crystal device. Mika took it without a word, his fingers already working on the complicated panel.
"Now the Phase-Locker." He said, his voice calm and authoritative.
Another girl came forward, handing him a slender, silver rod and just like that he asked for a bunch of instruments, while they quickly gave it to him.
It was like watching a master mechanic work on a car, only the stakes were the lives of everyone in the building. The girls watched him with a mixture of terror and awe, their nervousness palpable.
Finally, Mika looked up, his face set.
"Alright." He said, his voice cutting through the tense silence. "Increase the fluctuation rate by two percent...That should end this mess."
Hearing this, a girl named Agnes, her face pale with fear, immediately protested. "But Mika, increasing the fluctuation will only increase the chance of an explosion! It's already at its limit!"
Mika was about to tell her to trust him, to trust the process, when Charlotte cut in. Her voice was firm, filled with an unwavering conviction.
"Agnes, how could you say that? If Mika says it's correct, then it is. Do you think he would tell us to do something that would get us all killed?" She glared at her friend, her gaze full of a furious loyalty. "Don't doubt him. Just do it."
She then strode over to a nearby terminal herself, her hands flying across the holographic keyboard. Then she looked up at Mika, her wide blue eyes locking with his.
It was the kind of look you gave someone when you were ready to stake everything on them.
Mika gave her a single, firm nod and in response, Charlotte swallowed hard, entered the code, and pressed the command.
The world seemed to hold its breath.
The machine's angry shriek cut off into an eerie silence. For a heartbeat, everyone thought that was it, that they were gone.
But then, slowly, the chaotic red glow across the Dream Drifter shifted, faded, and settled into a steady, calm blue.
The steam ceased. The vibrations stilled.
It was over.
A second of stunned quiet was shattered by a chorus of relief.
"We're safe!" One girl cried, throwing her arms around another.
"Oh gods, we didn't die!" Another shouted, half-laughing, half-weeping. "I thought I was going to meet my grandmother in the heavens just now!"
The moment the girl spoke the last words, Charlotte's voice, full of a strange mixture of affection and playful annoyance, rang out.
"Who in the world would thank God?...We have to thank Mika!"
Mika pushed himself upright, dusting his hands, the faintest curl of a smile tugging at his lips. He barely had time to breathe before Charlotte launched herself at him.
"Mika!" She cried, throwing her arms around his neck. She peppered his face with frantic kisses, cheeks, jaw, his forehead, her voice muffled between each one. "You saved us! Thank you, thank you, thank you—you're our savior!"
"Charlotte, stop, stop, your friends are watching."
Mika protested, trying to peel her off. But she only held on tighter, her kisses continuing.
"I don't care! I'm just so happy and so relieved right now! I wouldn't have minded dying if it was with you, but...living with you is so much better!" She confessed, her voice a whisper against his cheek.
And as she continued to lavish him with affection, Charlotte's friends averted their gazes, a blush rising on their cheeks. But they couldn't help but steal glances at the scene.
This was Charlotte, a goddess among women, the daughter of an actual saint. And here she was, clinging to Mika, kissing him with a fierce and open devotion.
A quiet sense of longing settled over the group.
They all wanted a love like that—a love so strong it made a goddess act like a lovesick schoolgirl, a love that could be a beacon in the face of a cataclysm...
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Illustrations of the Research Block and Charlotte's Lab are in the comment section...Check it out!