Tprg5.3

[Tips] While talent in magic is exceptionally rare, across the Empire’s massive population the sum total of those who show promise is sizable.

Ill omen had already gripped Agrippina by the time the canned letter arrived. Of course, she was a hardened pragmatist who staunchly refuted the oracular foresight of those spiritual kooks of Shimmering Dawn. Any sense of premonition was merely cognitive recognition of patterns seen before—or at least, such was her conclusion as one of the most logical-minded individuals even amidst the School of Daybreak. Experience planted in the mind inserted itself into the present, giving rise to hallucinations woefully wanting for accuracy.
But this foreboding had been enough for Agrippina to begin the audience with her master with some sense of what might come. Yet not even she could have imagined this worst-of-all-possible-worlds scenario would come to fruition.
“Oh, you’re early, madam.”
Having said in advance that the meeting might take considerable time, the master of the house returned in two hours to a confused servant in the middle of serving tea. Since his afternoon had completely freed up, he must have planned on enjoying some tea with his sister: he was carrying a tray with the cheap cup he customarily used and the expensive teaware the girl used in her lessons.
“Welcome home, Master. Um, is something the matter?”
The apprentice’s tone was no longer mistakable for something self-taught, and she’d been sitting on the sofa while reading a book. Yet neither the student’s question nor the servant’s subsequent invitation to tea could compel their master to speak: Agrippina quietly walked into the center of the room, where she stood lifeless.
Having been ignored by their master despite her continued presence, the siblings eyed her worriedly for a moment, but eventually decided that it was fine so long as she wasn’t saying anything. They turned their attention back to their respective activities, when...
“AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!”
...a sudden outburst nearly caused them to drop a set of china worth more than their lives and a rare tome more expensive than several years of tuition.
“What the— Whoa?!”
Taking this unforeseen opportunity, the extravagant teacup attempted to liberate itself from the confines of the serving tray. Leaping through the air, its scheme to metamorphose from a valuable piece of craftsmanship into a smattering of shards that had once been valuable was foiled at the last moment by a rapidly assembled Unseen Hand.
At the same time, the boy had sent another invisible appendage to catch the book. It was reinforced at the corners with steel plates and weighed down further by a precious gem; he couldn’t let it crush his baby sister’s foot.
“Just when I think you’re back,” he grumbled. “What in the world are...”
Shaking off a cold sweat and setting the teaware aside on stable ground, the boy was ready to file a complaint...but trailed off when seeing the state of his employer’s frenzy.
“Why?!” she cried. “How could this happen?! Do you have any idea how much care I put into keeping this contained?!”
Beauty handcrafted by the gods gnarled as Agrippina clawed at her hair, wrecking the magically set do woven in silver.

The boy feared for his life. Until now, the question of how this methuselah might ever die had been one of the great mysteries of the world; had she ever appeared this distraught before? Her stoic expression warped into one that betrayed world-ending cataclysm, and her limber frame writhed around as if it bore the burden of all the world’s injustice.
Forget talking to her—even being around her in this unhinged state was terrifying; the servant abandoned any thought of trying to pacify her instantly. As far as he was concerned, this was verifiably not an occasion in which he had such a luxury. Sticking his nose in would be the last thing he’d ever do: he’d meet a terrible fate if he gave her any excuse to lash out.
“...Hey Elisa, why don’t we go for a walk? It’s getting warmer out, and the fountain in the plaza has a beautiful flower bed.”
“...That sounds lovely, Dear Brother.”
In a moment of sagacious wisdom, the boy took his sister and prepared to evacuate. Though the girl had undergone great mental change that made her slightly less childish—something a more naive onlooker might call “growth”—as of late, she was frightened enough to squeeze her brother’s hand tight as they fled. They knew they might get in trouble later along the line, but who cared? Any amount of scolding was much, much more appealing than being burned alive in the flames of their master’s rage. Recognizing that it was sometimes best to live to fight another day, the siblings put the laboratory behind them.
Driven to delirium by this turn of misfortune as she was, it wasn’t as if Agrippina had failed to account for a potential sponsorship. In her months of excruciating confinement, Professor Erstreich had noted how odd it was that she was still a researcher on several occasions, and remarked about what a shame it was each time. Anticipating a letter of recommendation partnered with someone else at the College had been child’s play, and she’d been prepared for the possibility both professionally and emotionally.
The professoriat was the embodiment of concentrated lunacy, formed by distilling a vat of eccentrics to pare away all but the most potent toxins. To join their ranks, one had to earn their approval; a superb treatise had to be paired with impressive practical ability in one of the most difficult exams ever fashioned.
Broken in more ways than one, the members of the crowd conducted their cross-examinations with a rain of questions more pointed than daggered hail. They piled on euphemistic disclaimers of “I apologize for the elementary question, but...” or “As unfamiliar as I am with this field...” More than a few researchers bore unforgettable trauma that stemmed from their sardonicism.
Perhaps the only factor that wasn’t actively harmful to the examinee was that repute and character went unquestioned. Admittedly, that was probably also why the body of professors was so rife with people missing the screws, stoppers, and breaks that helped coordinate an average mind, but that was neither here nor there.
More to the point, several people attempted to etch their names into history every year, with the overwhelming majority failing; Agrippina had prepared a means to number among them with a soft landing. If she turned in something that affirmed her capabilities while being just a touch too unpolished, a little over half of the crowd would turn her down with hopes that she might study up and try again in the future—a plan only conceivable by a woman who’d managed to keep the professors of her cadre at bay for years despite flaunting her debauchery for all to see.
If all went well, she would not be made light of, but she would also avoid shouldering undue expectations. From there, she would do the bare minimum to scrape by and put the whole of her efforts into enjoying whatever could keep her interest; that was what it meant to live happily.
Alas, her dream had been brought to the brink of ruin.
To attempt the trial with the backing of the Emperor left no room for failure. The petition to apply for a chance to ascend ordinarily took two to three years and enough paper to fill out several volumes of the phone book; all of that had been skipped with the power of the monarch. Even better, the professoriat would be in a most hospitable mood from having their customs disrupted: they would welcome Agrippina with dazzling smiles and overnice comments on her work. Forget splitting hairs; they would begin dissecting the particles of dust on the page.
What more could one expect when some professors were so heinous in character that their annual opportunity to bully wide-eyed researchers trying to prove themselves was the highlight of their whole year? There were so many of these heathens that they had their own little club wherein they merrily discussed across cadre lines to see how they would dismantle the next batch of hopefuls and the work they prided themselves on. It was plainly apparent why the Emperor might look at such antics and lose his temper: why was this the only time they could get along?
Regardless, the crown was an entity that fought to rein in the College at every turn. If a researcher bearing His Majesty’s favor appeared, there was no question that she would be accommodated with the grandest of receptions.
As the cherry on top, she carried the heavy weight of the Emperor’s expectations. If she “slipped up” here, she would directly damage the authority of the crown.
Now, the aristocracy of the Trialist Empire were tolerant folk. Foreign gentry were at times prone to cutting off common tongues at the slightest offense, fully subscribing to the notion that nothing happened for anyone save by the will of the privileged. On the other hand, Rhinian style dictated that one only came into their own when the masses sang insolent tunes in their name.
But this lenience was finite. If Agrippina failed the Emperor after he’d avowed her talents to this degree...
Fear zipped through her body, turning blood to liquid nitrogen. Her nigh infallible mind churned out a nearly prophetic estimation of the worst-case scenario, and it was so unfathomably terrible that her stomach began to churn. Had she not abandoned the line of thought with haste, she would have shared a heartfelt reunion with the scarlet tea she’d sampled earlier.
Common sense decried the thought of thrusting confidence upon someone and growing angry at their failure; unfortunately, such reason would not prevail. This was a monarchy, and His Majesty’s honor was far more valuable than a mere life.
And that damned master of hers—the despicable Lady Leizniz—had mentioned some kind of “reward” that registered as the most disquieting detail of all. Agrippina was sure it was some kind of position, or perhaps even a true noble name greater than the unigenerational titles traditionally awarded to professors.
Peerage in the Trialist Empire was a hereditary government post that primarily defined feudal ownership of estates. However, while these titles were tied to their respective clans, they were also intrinsically linked to the land being ruled. This was why one could sometimes find a Count Something-or-Another of House Whatever lording over an area as Viscount Something-Else. Strange as it was, it boiled down to the idea that these names served the dual purposes of links to esteemed families and validation of rulership.
Perhaps it was easiest to see with the professors of the Imperial College. They received a noble name and title as part of their honors: those who lacked a family name were either given one by a trusted mentor or had one lost to imperial history revived for them, but they weren’t granted an estate despite their noble status. As such, the Empire was awash with noble bureaucrats who held no land at all. For these people, their titles were a symbol of their high rank among public servants.
Furthermore, ties of blood in the Empire were important, but ultimately secondary to sheer skill. With the backing of the Emperor and a few others commanding considerable sway, purity of heritage ceased to be a matter of importance. Whether the recipient was originally lowborn or simply came from abroad, one would have to be the kind of idiot to turn felon or traitor to be refused a place in high society under these circumstances.
The Emperor of Creation had belabored the point that even the most celebrated families traced their origins to dust; so went the national policy. It followed, then, that someone like Agrippina whose potential had been unearthed—though she hadn’t desired to be found—would catch the Emperor’s eye as a potential pawn.
In all likelihood, she would likely be given possession of a title embroiled in political strife, and then planted in a position supporting His Majesty on Collegiate matters. Though the former matter had too many possibilities to count, the latter was easy enough to ascertain. The most powerful position she could think of—and ergo the one that would make the most use of her—was that of a count palatine: equipped with the privilege of offering counsel in the palace, she would be required to have a better grasp on her field of expertise than the Emperor so that she could make accurate reports to the throne.
“Fine, then.”
Agrippina pulled up her disheveled hair and haphazardly pinned it in place with a nearby comb. She pulled out the chair at her forsaken desk and fell into it, yanking out a sheet of parchment and popping the lid on a bottle of ink.
Truthfully, she would have liked to artificially dampen her metabolism and drink herself into a stupor over several bottles of wine. But if her enemies were going to act quickly, then she had to act quicker still; wherever could she find the spare time to waste it drunk, and at what cost?
Agrippina had no interest in making a name for herself, but there was one thing that she could not stand: to be underestimated. Hatred was well and good, disinterest could be reciprocated, and affection was fine so long as it wasn’t overbearing—she might even do them the honor of stringing them along to suit her interests. But to be made light of? No, that was intolerable. Belittlement would invariably come back to bite her. People were cruel creatures, and she knew all too well that this was truer still when someone believed themselves superior.
Agrippina refused to let anyone think that she would be a helpful piece in their game. While she wasn’t pretentious enough to presume that she ought to be the exploiter in every relationship, she would not stand to be moved around with the ease of a player pushing an ehrengarde piece across a board.
The world was built on the survival of the fittest, and the glorious gilding of culture and morality did nothing to change society at its core. The upper class had no qualms about using others: the Emperor would happily crush someone else under political stress to move issues off his own plate, and the dean of her cadre was thrilled to offer up a sacrifice from her own flock in a long-awaited act of vengeance that came with social clout. Rather, the noble sphere would commend them as beacons of imperial class.
But when the predator pounced, no law forbade the prey from striking back.
So long as she could shock them to their core while reveling in the last laugh, Agrippina was ready to abandon her slothful ways for the time being. When push came to shove, the only person who could answer for the issues of her own life was herself.
Those who manipulate must always be prepared for the tides of influence to switch course; Agrippina reworked her entire plan for the future, primed to squeeze every last drop of worth out of this “reward” she was to receive. She would use them to cross an item or two off her bucket list—anything less, and her lust for vengeance would not be sated.
As her pen hit the paper, she filled the silent room with a ferocious scribbling: the sound of pure hatred.

tprg5.2

Early Summer of the Thirteenth Year
Reputation/Stature
Some systems include values to track reputation earned for various great deeds. These can be used for anything from upgrading a well-worn weapon in certain contexts, to giving it a cool name, or something more useful like acquiring a noble rank or citizenship of a city.

Spring bade us farewell and the pleasant aridity of summer came to greet the capital; by this point, the uproar that had once enveloped the city had vanished without a trace. After dominating the rumors around town and then suddenly appearing in the sky, the aeroship had departed, soaring low enough to nearly scrape the towers littering the skyline to make sure we could all get a good look—but now the excitement had faded, leaving only the usual hubbub of Berylin in its wake.

High society saw a great deal of envoys and diplomats rush out of the country to report what they’d seen to their motherlands, throwing everyone’s schedules into disarray. The impact of the vessel’s impression had been greater than estimated, and the crown began pumping in even more funding; as a result, ministries and cadres of every kind were fighting to get their cut.

But none of this had anything to do with us common folk. Sure, we were experiencing some aftereffects: timber traders had begun to hoard their wood in hopes that the Empire would buy it for its next aeroship, driving up the price of firewood, and overzealous entrepreneurs had brought in so many new workers without vetting that the streets were lined with more people of disreputable character than usual. But for now, we were back to peaceful days.

Back home, my family and friends had finished planting their fields. I lazily walked the afternoon streets, imagining the fun they were having, enjoying a nice steam bath and jumping into the cool stream to wash away their sweat.

Make no mistake, though: I wasn’t out on a walk for leisure. Having secured her slothful days filled with nothing but books once more, my employer had suddenly sent me to fetch her some lemonade.

This wasn’t exactly a common occurrence, but it happened every now and again. When Lady Agrippina came across a written description that tickled her sense of hunger or thirst, I was the one that had to go out and find whatever it was that she’d read about. While I understood that this was a privilege held by those who could relegate food and drink to the realm of hobby, being made to run around at her whim was nothing short of a nuisance.

That said, today’s request was something I could get my hands on without leaving the city, so it wasn’t that bad. There was a world of difference between picking up a tome that required a mental saving throw just to look at and fetching some honey and lemons, after all. Besides, the madam had explicitly asked for a cheap lemonade—I suspected she was reading something featuring a lowborn protagonist—making this an extra easy endeavor.

Both honey and lemons could be found at the local market. The former was a tad daunting for a regular person to purchase, but it was commonly used for various dishes and therefore was sold everywhere. Mead was second only to wine in the imperial drink repertoire; beekeepers could be found in every corner of the Empire.

Had I been tasked with finding tree sap extracted only from the finest shrubbery to sweeten the madam’s drink, I would’ve needed to knock on the door of an esteemed merchant; if she’d demanded the sourest lemons carefully grown by the southern seas, this would’ve been a herculean task. I was nothing if not thankful that she was happy with the plebeian stuff harvested from who-knows-where—if only every errand she sent me on could be this simple.

I bought up the necessary ingredients, stopped by an ice-candy shop for Elisa on the way—our master had given me a silver piece and told me to keep the change, so my purse was nice and heavy—and made my way back to the main road to go home. But when I stepped out of the smaller street, I noticed that there was a sizable crowd clogging the passage.

“Neeews! Get your news heeere! Big announcement from the national assembly! Forty assarii a pop! Hey, you there! Don’t pass it around—everyone buys their own!”

The mob was gathered around a newspaper salesman. He was a small jenkin...guy? Wow, was I awful at guessing age when it came to beastly demihumans. Whether he was a boy or man, I could tell from his clothes that he was at least male; anyway, he was shuffling through the crowd to hurriedly dole out his papers.

“Whoa, wait. Seriously? But he looked fine during the parade.”

“Who knows what’ll happen next? This’ll put the whole country right back into a frenzy!”

“It’s one thing after another... We just got over the aeroship too. Man, I feel bad for all the poor ambassadors trying to report this stuff back home.”

“Hey, maybe stirring up confusion abroad is the whole plan. Can’t count anything out with the Bloodless Emperor.”

Scanning the pack of people discussing the news, I saw more confusion than gravity in their expressions; whatever was written must have been incredibly surprising. I was a bit curious, and I still had some change to spare. Maybe buying a newspaper every now and then wasn’t so bad.

The last time I’d read through one had been a lifetime ago. Back then, my involvement at a trading firm had led me to keep up with the four major national publications; though I’d only read those out of obligation, perhaps I might be able to derive some entertainment from the news now that I could lie back and take it in at my own pace.

“Excuse me!” I said. “Give me one copy, mister!”

“Sure thing! Forty assarii—and no change!”

I handed him exactly forty assarii and took the paper in hand. While it was nigh unthinkable to refuse to give change on Earth, most merchants here didn’t carry enough small coinage to guarantee that they could break up their customers’ payments.

“Let’s see what this is all about...” This hadn’t been cheap, so I was going to be upset if the big scoop was unimpressive. But the sheer size of the headline’s typeface proved enough to shock me. “Huh? Abdication?”

The salesman’s pitch had been no exaggeration. The Emperor was going to step down from the throne for health-related reasons, even though his term had yet to end; in his place, Martin I of the Erstreich Duchy was to ascend. The national assembly had also announced that the seven electorate houses had unanimously agreed to see the decision through.

Authority in the Trialist Empire of Rhine may have ultimately rested with the Emperor, but the checks held by a small number of voters meant the monarchy was less absolute and more constitutional. Having the Emperor give up his seat in the middle of a term was plenty plausible: a noteworthy political gaffe or hidden scandal on the verge of coming to light had caused several rulers to relinquish their hold on the Empire for “health-related reasons,” as written here.

For example, seven emperors ago, Remus II the Lenient had tarnished the Baden name by letting several historical satellites and allies escape imperial orbit. Mocked in hushed whispers as the Flippant Emperor, he eventually retreated into the shadows to treat his sickness and handed the reins to the Emperor of Restoration, German I of House Graufrock. For those who had been our one and only Emperor, such tactics were the state’s way of protecting their legacy, even if only in name.

However, this didn’t seem like a fall from grace.

August IV, the Dragon Rider, was a national hero famed for breaking through the feudal lords who’d blockaded the Eastern Passage. A stern leader in matters of war and state, he was highly regarded by all. I hadn’t heard of any recent scandals either. Bastard children and spats with their successors were par for the course in the upper crust, but no such rumors arose; none of his diplomatic mistakes had even been notable enough to circulate around town.

In fact, I would say he was one of the most popular emperors to date. Most country nobodies living in rural cantons would be hard-pressed to recall the name of their local lord, let alone the Emperor. Yet almost everyone knew of the Dragon Rider. While the Second Eastern Conquest had all but finished by the time I’d first come to my senses, those older than me could remember how all sorts of stories came flooding back from the front lines.

But most importantly of all, soldiers had been levied to fight from practically every canton. His Majesty had led the dragon knights to strike at the perfect moment, turning the tides of battle and grasping victory with his mastery of strategy; those who owed their safe return home to the Emperor were sure to extol his virtues. Plus, a victory abroad came with abundant booty, and those who fought had been amply rewarded.

The current Emperor’s achievements listed in the paper were as impressive as one might expect. He’d taken the drakes available to him and bred those with the most docile temperaments, giving rise to a new breed that was obedient enough to be used even for nonmilitary purposes. Furthermore, he’d overturned the entirety of the outdated dragon knight doctrine and expanded their scope to dominate the skies; the air superiority afforded by his reforms led to easier victories when it came to battles of counterspells. Not only that, but he established drake stables across the country and coordinated their maintenance by local lords, creating a system that could deploy a dragon knight unit to any location in the Empire in mere days.

Looking at his long list of military accomplishments, one might be tempted to assume he’d come from House Graufrock. But that wasn’t to say he left softer matters out to dry: he had a strong record of servicing canals and elongating trade routes to strengthen internal trade. Abroad, he’d won over a handful of satellites to the west, and after showing his military prowess, he’d marched to the small federation near the inland sea to the south—though admittedly, they were imperial vassals in all but name—to negotiate tariff rates that undercut those given to their official most favored nations.

The Emperor had displayed his proficiency as both a general and a statesman. He’d had the support of the politicians working under him, of course, but it took brains to select which issues to tackle when they came to his desk; he was undoubtedly a genius. While I still had my suspicions about the Emperor of Creation being a kindred spirit, perhaps the Baden bloodline was simply prone to producing all-rounders.

But you know, all these exploits painted a larger-than-life figure. If technological revolution one day brought this world’s entertainment up to par with what I’d seen on Earth, he was almost guaranteed to be genderbent in a gacha game. A stern yet beautiful general saddled atop a dragon... What a sight.

My insolent depiction of the sitting Emperor was followed by an unfounded worry for the poor gamers having their wallets sapped dry centuries from now as I entered the atelier. Independent Processing was enough to keep my legs moving while I read, so I wasn’t going to run late just because something had caught my eye.

Not that I could concentrate on several unrelated trains of thought like Lady Agrippina, of course. I’d tried once, but it felt disgusting. Imagine having your brain run by a council composed entirely of yourselves that sometimes contradicted one another; those one-man arguments had thrown me for such a loop that I’d nearly hurled. It had been the peak of abnegation, like I was subjecting myself to a cultic session of psychological torture. Knowing that it couldn’t be good for my mental health, I’d given up instantly—it was hardly any different from looking in the mirror and asking, “Who are you?”

Honestly, it was a wonder that methuselah could bear living this way naturally. I supposed that was what made them a superior species, but it also seemed like the reason why so many of them were so deranged.

“I’ve returned, madam...ugh.”

“Ah, welcome back. An errand well done.”

“May I ask where your clothes have gone?”

As I stepped off the elevator with the groceries in hand, I found my master loitering around in an unpresentable state again. Having finished her morning lecture, it seemed she’d partaken in a midday bath; her stark-naked frame was still dripping wet, and her hair especially was tracking water everywhere she walked.

“I wanted to savor a chilled cup of lemonade directly after rising from the tub. What point would there be if I didn’t bathe first?”

Casual as ever, she was doing the equivalent of stepping out to the convenience store to look for something that had appeared in a movie. While I understood where she was coming from, being sent on shopping trips like these was seriously disheartening. I wished she’d keep it to a minimum.

That wasn’t my only gripe: I had hit puberty, and here she was flaunting a body that put the magna opera of the finest sculptors to shame, complete with her own set of golden ratios. Yet it didn’t have any effect on me—I was genuinely beginning to worry about my own condition.

My sense of beauty felt like it had been thrown completely out of whack. My old chum’s elegance when not masculine hardly needed to be stated, and my capacity for cuteness had capped out with Margit and my angelic little sister. At this point, when I saw an objectively pretty woman, the best I could muster was an indifferent, “Meh.”

As sad as it was to live with sore eyes, overexposure to the appealing came with its own host of problems.

“Interested in the news, are you?”

I’d just come back with a towel to help her put herself back together when the madam pointed out the newspaper sticking out of my pocket. After explaining to her that the we were due for a change in emperors, she curtly remarked that little would change, no matter who wore the imperial crown.

Yes, the bureaucrats of this country held considerable power, and true, she was somewhat involved herself...but would it have been so much to ask that she mince her words the tiniest bit?

“More importantly,” Lady Agrippina said, “I’d like you to prepare the drink before the heat of my bath fades. Oh, and is that ice candy you have there?”

“Er, yes, I bought this for Elisa... Will you have some?”

“Hmm. Ice candy is particularly delectable after a bath, so perhaps I shall. Bring it over to me along with the lemonade.”

Thank goodness I’d seen this coming and picked up a little extra. Just as I started toward the kitchen to prepare her order, the sound of a bell filled the room.

“What’s that?” I asked. I’d never heard this sound before. It had a different timbre from the doorbell, and I had no clue what it might signify, but anything that rang clearly through the entire lab had to mean something.

My answer came in the form of the sound of leaking air and screeching metal. I turned to the tea table we sometimes used in the corner of the room, and looking closely, noticed a pipe running along the wall that had been painted an unassuming color; it had ejected a small brass can.

Ohh, a pneumatic tube. This was a delivery system that ferried specially made containers across pipes utilizing condensed air and vacuums. On Earth, the British had laid kilometer after kilometer of these pipes in the eighteenth century to facilitate communication between various buildings. Though the invention of telecommunication had put the final nail in its coffin, the technology was alive and well in the Empire.

Fair enough, I supposed. We may have had thaumograms, voice transfers, and even telepathy, but not everyone could use those means. The most confidential exchanges continued to be put into writing, so this seemed like the perfect solution to deliver a letter to a magus’s atelier, especially when so many magia disliked allowing others into their domains.

I tried to fetch the message, but for once, Lady Agrippina summoned her own Unseen Hand to pick the can up herself and quickly opened it to scan the letter. I didn’t know this at the time, but these tubes were reserved for official College paperwork—any letter delivered this way was of the utmost importance.

“...I’ve received a summons from Lady Leizniz,” she said.

“A grand invitation indeed,” I said. “When will it be?”

“Prepare my clothes.”

“What? Right now?”

“As quickly as possible. Tedious chores are best completed with haste. Make it formal, will you?”

“As you will. I will prepare the lemonade at a later time.”

“Leave the ice candy here—I’d like to enjoy something while I wait, at least. No need to prepare a plate.”

I obediently handed her the frozen treats and a spoon, then headed to her bedroom to rifle through her wardrobe. This was a peculiar solicitation. While it wasn’t particularly strange for the dean of a cadre to call for one of her members, I didn’t see why she’d forgo her usual messenger birds for this overdone method of correspondence.

To convolute matters more, Lady Leizniz actually enjoyed maintaining an atmosphere of highborn conduct: her summons usually came days in advance of the date in question. This was a bizarre departure for a woman who always bothered to give a commoner like me three days to adjust my schedule before a fitting. What could possibly be so urgent?

The only thing that came to mind was the imperial succession...but it wasn’t as if Lady Agrippina were in a position to visit the palace and support the new Emperor, nor was she well-connected enough to be called upon for her opinion. Considering her misanthropic bent, I couldn’t imagine her having ties to anyone in His Majesty’s inner ring.

But then what in the world would justify the dean’s breakaway from traditional etiquette?

Although my head remained tilted in confusion, I prepared the madam’s clothes and turned the sad waste of beauty back into a perfect noble lady.

“I shan’t need an escort, and you are free for the afternoon. Tell Elisa that lecture is canceled.”

“Understood. Shall I prepare your supper?”

“I’m unconvinced I’ll return by evening. You two may eat without me.”

Wow. Not only was she dressed to the nines, but she’d even prepared her staff. This was anything but ordinary. The letter that had kicked this matter off had already disappeared—not that I would have dared read it had it been laying around—and I had no ways of seeing through the true intentions of a magus-politician as brilliant as Lady Leizniz, as perverse as she may have been.

As I watched my employer head out, the best I could do was pray: I really hope this doesn’t turn into another mess.

[Tips] Pneumatic tubes are a system of infrastructure made to facilitate rapid written communication. They allow important documents to reach their destination without once coming into contact with a third party, making them popular for official orders or summons. Even between two private parties, letters that double as official documents are reproduced, with the copies preserved by the sender and several governmental oversight institutions—they serve the same purpose as certified mail on Earth.

Time winds backward a spell, to a day before the national assembly announced the Emperor’s abdication.

While the Empire had yet to officially change hands, the process was all but complete; the former Emperor had moved out his personal effects to allow His Imperial Majesty to move in. The imperial office was ever so slightly different from the last time these three men had convened here.

The first was August IV. Soon, his title would change to that of a grand duke, and a month after that, rulership of House Baden-Stuttgart would be transferred to his son, leaving him free to retire in peace.

The second was David McConnla von Graufrock. Leader of his house, the duke had been little more than a passive observer in this whole fiasco.

The last of the lot was Martin Werner von Erstreich. He had no scruples about sharing his opinion on the comfort of the opulent chair he occupied—after all, this would be his official seat in a few days’ time, when he would be sworn in for his fourth term as the Bloodless Emperor.

“Welp,” David said, “everything turned out well. Well done all around.”

“We had the electorates’ approval,” August pointed out. “There was no room for trouble.”

Having completed the paperwork to officiate the proceedings, the pair pulled out a couple of chairs at random and casually took their seats. Truth be told, dealings of emperorship were wholly decided by the imperials and electorates; the privy council and national assembly gave their consent, but only as a formality. So long as the core parties were on the same page, this sort of internal affair would sort itself out eventually.

The werewolf had simply been along for the ride, and showed no signs of fatigue. The mensch had seemingly grown younger: his furrowed brow was starting to thaw, and even the wrinkles of age seemed to dissipate. Freedom from the heaviest responsibility known to man had reinvigorated him.

“How liberated you two must feel. When I think of the life of torture that awaits, I feel like the world is folding in on me...” Meanwhile, the vampiric Emperor looked more haggard than an unaging and untiring being had any right to. “The talentless runts at home have already started up a commotion, not to mention my mentors and students—I don’t know how word got to the College already. I haven’t been to my atelier in half a month!”

As his inauguration drew closer, the leeches wriggling near to help themselves to his authority sucked away more and more of his will to go on. He had a mountain of letters numbering closer to four digits than two, all penned by relatives or acquaintances that shamelessly leveraged their nominal ties to justify contact. Unfortunately, a great many of them held status that demanded basic decorum, eating into the time he would have liked to spend ironing out his succession. Woefully overloaded, he was literally being worked to death—or at least, he would have died two or three times over had he not been incapable of it.

“Must suck to have a clan full of aspiring politicians, man. You’ve got my sympathies, Your Majesty.”

“Indeed. Mensch are far from the only ones who lust for power, but those who inherit the riven chalice are particularly ravenous. I shall pray for you from the shadows, Your Majesty.”

“Oh, ‘Your Majesty this,’ ‘Your Majesty that’—how dare you torment me so, you traitors! You bind me to this seat of torture, and for what?! To lackadaisically sip wine in my office?!”

“Treason? You wound me, Your Majesty. And here I visited the yapping electors day in and day out to win them to your side.”

“Verily. I, too, endeavored to fulfill my duty as a loyal retainer, appealing to the national assembly with wholehearted devotion. I forced these old bones of mine to rise so I could march around the neighboring states and bid them not to squabble at your feet. I am even ready to offer my foolish son for your cause—please, claims of treachery are too much for this aging vassal to bear.”

Though the two retainers’ chitchat over drinks had been enough to draw out the Emperor’s fury, the sly foxes were unfazed; they simply equipped masks of fealty and carried on with humility as eloquent as it was ironic. For a moment, Martin thought to himself that he ought to actually hang them for treason if he could think of an excuse.

However, sharpened tongues were a requirement in patrician spheres; if he popped a blood vessel at mockery of this level, then not even his vampiric regeneration would suffice to keep him alive.

The Emperor quelled his anger with a handful of deep breaths, fixed his posture, and moved on to a question regarding the imperial handoff.

“The national assembly is well and good, but a foreign issue still remains. August, how many minor lords did you string along with empty promises?”

“Who knows?” the mensch replied. “Have I not given you all of the confidential briefings to read?”

“What tremendous character you display,” Martin mocked. “Don’t you remember? The details pertaining to the rulers near the Eastern Passage have yet to be set in stone: both the lords whose claims you promised to recognize and the insurrectionists you promised to support. I see that you’ve prepared your spies to do something, but I’ve yet to see the final design of your plan.”

“Ahh, that... Come to think of it, I had forgotten. Had nothing changed, I had planned to settle the matter next year.”

While Martin had been enjoying a carefree life as a magus, he’d retained a general grasp of the current issues and how his predecessor had moved to solve them. However, during the Second Eastern Conquest that the Dragon Rider was so famed for, the vampire had been too occupied with the matter of military logistics to study up on the details.

The Eastern Passage was a massive international trade route paved by the Conqueror of the East roughly two and a half centuries into imperial history. For roughly 150 years, it served as a highway to import herbs and teas that could only be grown in the east; beautiful silks and dyes that imperial craftsmen couldn’t reproduce; and advanced knowledge in fields like medicine and magecraft.

However, the passage lay on an arid belt, and the various tribes that inhabited the stony desert experienced stark disparities in quality of life—between those that were involved in trade and those that weren’t—leading to instability in the region. To make matters worse, the large empire to the east had fallen into economic disarray because of the overwhelming influx of Rhinian goods. Eventually, the eastern power had colluded with several minor lords in the area to put down proimperial factions and close the trade route.

For a century or so, the Empire lamented the closure of one of its few international trade routes, but a mix of domestic issues and foreign threats kept it too busy to reopen it. That is, until the Dragon Rider took the helm of a stable nation and sought to pave the path once more.

But this time, the goal was different.

The Conqueror of the East had begun his war with the aim of acquiring eastern goods for cheap. In those days, the only imports from those faraway lands had come ferried by fearless traders braving the continental roads; the goods they’d offered had been rare and priceless.

However, Rhine had seen advancements in production capabilities and now had new partners with which to trade. Exotic wares were no longer justification enough. Why then, you might ask, did the Empire go out of its way to start a war over the Eastern Passage?

The Empire required customers to whom it could export. International trade blocs had sated domestic consumption, but the nation’s impressive manufacturing capacity was left with no one to sell to. Imperial satellites, trusts, and allies were grossly underqualified to serve as buyers; more importantly, their purpose was to offer goods and services that catered to Rhinian demand while acting as buffer states to shield against major threats. The crown could hardly allow an overabundance of imperial exports to ruin their economies and destabilize them.

As such, the leaders of the country looked far and wide for the prime customer their vigorous producers could sell to. Eventually, they settled on the eastern front: the denizens of the east were rich with the gold and silver used in international trade thanks to the region’s abundant mines—a point of great envy for the Empire. With how eager their artisans were to off-load their surplus stocks, the ravenous entrepreneurs were sure to bring home mountains of precious metals that would let the nation prosper.

Knowledge of metallurgy was scarce in the arid belt, and the desert dwellers were in constant need of high-quality imperial ironware. A few decades prior, the fledgling empire to the east had begun a new era when its last dynasty fell; they were in need of products only available in the west, and were likely struggling to supply all their people demanded.

Admittedly, the New Empire denied the Old Empire at every turn in a bid to establish its legitimacy, and had even turned away Rhinian diplomats in the past on account of their bad blood. Still, if a proper connection was established, the statesmen of the Old Empire were sure their eastern counterparts would gladly participate in trade.

So began the Second Eastern Conquest—but it wasn’t as if the Empire had started with an honest declaration of all-out war. Initially, they’d sneaked spies into the ranks of various desert tribes, promising rewards for a job well done and stirring up chaos in the region.

Promise after promise was made behind the scenes, and countless princes and princesses came to the Empire as hostages, being assimilated into the nation as the grooms and brides of established noble houses.

Now, years after the war, the desert conflict had subsided and trade had begun to flow; demands that the imperial end of the bargain be fulfilled were beginning to mount. But of course, the Empire had never planned to make good on all its promises. Allowing a new power to consolidate strength and oppose imperial hegemony would not do, but leaving only a smattering of feeble tribes would plunge the trade route into lawlessness.

What the Empire truly wanted was to pare away all the excess, leaving only the states that made good puppets but could be culled off the map should the situation call for it—it wanted a map drawn for Rhine.

Presently, the borders on that map were only known by August and a select few nobles specializing in foreign policy. Martin had been too busy maintaining their supply lines and subsequently establishing the newly opened trade route to participate. Although the two men shared the same end goal, the new Emperor didn’t know which allies his predecessor had prioritized and which he’d forsaken.

“Foremost,” August said, “I shall have those involved report to the palace by next week with a more detailed report. The specifics ought to be settled enough that you should need only to give your approval.”

“Thank the gods for that,” Martin said. “My blood ran cold for a moment imagining that I might have to clean up after your mess.”

“Do you truly take me to be that irresponsible? I am not so naive as to let those sand-eaters do as they please.”

“Well enough... Ugh, if only that were the end of it.” Leaving aside how the Emperor reduced the greed-driven wrongdoings of his country to mere paperwork, a gathering of all three imperials was the perfect occasion to clean up yet another chore that Martin had been sitting on. “Oh, and take a look at this, if you would.”

“What’s this? Hm...” David read aloud, “‘Imperial ennoblement of a foreign aristocrat?’”

“Ahh, I recall you asking about this,” August said.

The document Martin had pulled out was exactly as David described: a multicultural nation that placed great emphasis on diplomacy naturally had a long list of exceptional provisions dictating how one might confer peerage on an immigrant noble. In particular, the one the Emperor had selected allowed a highborn woman to join the ranks of the imperial bulwark so long as she had yet to inherit a title abroad.

“It’s been quite some time since this legislation has seen any use, you see. Digging up the paperwork proved onerous. I’d like you both to approve it unless you have any particular exceptions.”

“The hell? Ohh, wait, this isn’t an honorary or unigenerational title, huh? You’re giving out the real deal—full estate and all. No wonder this thing doesn’t get used.”

“This is the first I have seen of it as well. While I signed some writs of property that conferred small parcels of land on foreign kings and the like, not once had this situation arisen.”

“Well, duh. The younger sons of the big houses would start making a fuss if you tried to give a foreigner territory over them. Think about how many properties are under dispute in the Empire. This is a godsdamned luxury.”

Despite serving one and a half terms, this was the former Emperor’s first reading of this law. It was incredibly stringent, requiring all three imperials and over half of the electorate to sign off to make the writing valid. This was a countermeasure against the Emperor selling off imperial land to his friends abroad; though to tell the truth, the rule itself had only been written for posterity’s sake. Over the course of imperial history, every invocation of this legislation could be counted on one hand, and the last occasion had been ages ago.

“I’m not one to talk back if Your Imperial Majesty wills it, but who the hell are you giving it to?”

“A fancied mistress, perhaps? No, never mind. A man so blindly infatuated with his wife and daughter would never bother with another woman... Where do you intend to place this piece?”

“I mentioned previously that I’d need a go-between for my dealings at the College, didn’t I? I figured I could use her there. My original plan was to prop her up as a count palatine, but I can’t exactly justify installing a mere researcher into the position.”

The term “count palatine” referred to a specific role: they were the Emperor’s personal advisors, who offered specialized counsel in their realm of expertise, and were given authority equivalent to that of a count. Originally, the position had been meant to empower trusted confidants; words spoken by an aristocrat invested with befitting authority were sure to carry appropriate weight. It was tradition to add a prefix to the title in line with the expert’s field—in this case, she would be a count thaumapalatine.

Still, even though the original purpose of the position was to legitimize an advisor and keep them by the Emperor’s side, awarding this status to someone who lacked rank and title simply would not do. Thus, His Majesty’s plan was to honor some great achievement or another with a noble title, and then prop her up as a count palatine—just as imperial etiquette demanded.

“In which case,” August thought aloud, “you plan to back her ascension to professorship, using the incredible breakthrough of her research to rationalize ennoblement and imperial employment. Hrm... I suppose this is as painless a plan as any could conjure.”

Meritocratic to their core, the people of Rhine wouldn’t dare question someone’s background if they had skill worthy of their stature; this scheme took full advantage of the national zeitgeist. There was certainly a lot of brute force involved, but the raw talent of those involved made it a likelier bet than trying to convince the rest of high society with tricks of relation and nominal ties.

“I’ve prepared a solid justification as well. She happens to match me in the field of magecraft, if not outstrip me. We discussed the use and development of the aeroship for a spell, and I learned much from her in that time—with this, none will object to seeing her as an imperial aristocrat.”

“Fair enough. Aeronautics are a hot topic right now. So which estate are you handing her?”

“She seems to be very talented, so...I think this may be the perfect opportunity to rid ourselves of a thorn in our side.”

The Emperor’s words drew out an intrigued, “Oh?” from both of his vassals, who sat upright in their chairs. Spats over inheritance and ownership were genuine problems that dictated the ebbs and flows of the entire country; a slapdash response would not do.

Once upon a time, Richard the Creator had picked out 227 esteemed clans to serve as his shield. Though the annals of history had seen that number balloon to four hundred, those who could trace their lineage back to the beginning numbered one hundred and change; the shifts of society had been merciless.

Some families ended when the last ruler failed to produce an heir; others were swallowed up in political mergers; and not a few were crushed under the weight of dastardly conspiracy. Even the most notable clans were not immune. Of the infamous and revered Five Generals, two survived in name only, headed by unrelated scions; only half of the Thirteen Knights that often appeared in epics of early imperial history had direct descendants today.

The fickle nature of succession made it impossible for property rights to keep up. However, the crown couldn’t just let anyone claim unoccupied land, and real estate was not as easy to divide up as leftover candy; there were a lot of unused noble names and territories that had once belonged to them lying around.

Without fail, plenty of bottom-feeders crept up to argue that they and they alone were the one true successor according to some standard of relation or another, but the Empire wasn’t going to thoughtlessly tip the balance of power in its own borders. Instead, these unowned lands were granted to His Imperial Majesty as property of the crown until things could be sorted out—noble titles and all.

There were tens of examples of such cases littering the Empire, some of which had gone without arbitration for over a century. Many of these were drowning in bloody conflicts of interest that took place in the shadows, reducing the abandoned estates to nothing more than haunted lands. But if Martin’s plan went well, he would be able to have someone else deal with one of them.

“Killing two birds with one stone is great and all,” David said, “but I’d accept someone’s used underwear before one of those shitholes. Don’t you think she’ll run if you try and push one onto her?”

“We’re talking about a woman who is so fond of Rhine and the College that she left her post as the first daughter to one of the greatest houses in Seine. I doubt she’d be willing to flee the Empire. Besides, while I noticed some faults of her character over the course of our conversation, she wasn’t able to hide her underlying responsibility. I have faith that she won’t even attempt an escape.”

“If you say so.” Duke Graufrock put his chin in his hand and went into a deep think, folding in fingers capped with razor-sharp claws as he counted off the possibilities. “In that case, the Ardennes barony, the Jermanus county, or maybe the Lippendrop viscounty...”

“Surely those are too lowly for the cause,” Grand Duke Baden cut in. “A more storied house would be for the best.”

“Okay, then how’s the Stülpnagel barony?”

“I have my reservations about offering a name tied to a treasonous plot... Perhaps things would be different if there were any room for doubt, but appointing her to succeed a baron who was one step shy of regicide will be no more than fodder for the gossips of the inner court.”

“Come the fuck on, Gustus! Fine! How about we make her Count Wernigerode, Viscount Roon, or Count Ubiorum?!”

The Emperor had been listening to his two dukes volley back and forth, but a certain name made him clap and cry, “That’s it!”

And so, the Empire reclaimed one of its long-lost names: Count Ubiorum would rise to the stage once more. The county was a vast western territory close to the Graufrock duchy that oversaw two whole districts, and the convoluted bids made by those who wished to rule it had left it neglected for quite some time.

However, the claims of inheritance were only a step shy of sophistry, meaning the rabble could be swept away with a bit of effort. Happy to have another burden off his shoulders, the Emperor merrily penned in the blanks on the form and asked his loyal vassals to sign on the dotted line.

[Tips] Not all territories come with noble names attached. However, the oldest and most storied properties are practically one and the same as the names of those who rule them.

When picturing a magus’s laboratory, one might be tempted to imagine walls lined with sickening samples and specimens stuffed into glass vials, complete with a bubbling cauldron in the center of the room, filled with a peculiar concoction of indescribable color.

In reality, they were as diverse as they came. Agrippina had no qualms labeling a chic sunlit nap room her “workshop,” and styles of interior decor were as numerous as the magia themselves.

With that in mind, the question arose of how the good Lady Leizniz had chosen to keep her own atelier. After all, her passions were known to be so intense that some regarded her very being avant-garde; surely her living space would reflect that.

But no—the place was built in utilitarian fashion, without a hint of her repulsive nature. The floor was a subdued carpet that paired well with the color of the wallpaper, only broken up by a window that let in bright sunlight: an impossible feat, given its secure location far underground. Shelves dedicated to paperwork, pharmaceuticals, and the like were placed in rows on both sides of the room, and they were even carefully sized so as not to tower imposingly over a visitor.

In the corner of her workshop was a complex workstation used for creating catalysts, but it was ordinarily covered with a cloth to deftly avoid any air of stiffness. Great care had gone into making sure that her arcane instruments were put out of sight as much as possible; an unknowing visitor would see nothing more than the office of a respectable noblewoman. Who would ever believe that this was the lair of a bodiless entity clinging to reality, of the embodiment of fright itself, of a wraith?

Not only were mages and the undead already typecast into dank caverns abundant with dubious herbs, fungi, and corpses, but she was the leader of the efficiency-driven nutjobs that made up the School of Daybreak. This was clearly too nice a home to be hers.

Even more unbelievably—to those who knew her, at least—there wasn’t a single clue pointing to her troublesome “hobby” to be found. The closest thing would be the handful of understated paintings hanging on the walls, but they were run-of-the-mill portraits of people in formal dress. Any noble knew that a room too drab to facilitate an oil work or two was one tactlessly maintained; it was only natural that one of the Five Great Pillars had put together an office to which she could comfortably invite any sort of company.

Yet while the room was a perfect cutout of her persona as a public official, the atmosphere in it was tense as her disciple came to face the master. Theirs was a relationship that went no further than mutual requests for essay revision, but master and pupil they remained.

When the promising young student had first arrived at the Imperial College, she’d already been an expert in the long-forgotten art of space-bending; still, she respected her superior’s position in spite of having learned little directly from her.

“I have arrived at your request, von Leizniz. Whatever might you require from this unworthy student of yours?”

“Now, now, have a seat first. I’m not talented enough a master to let you stand while I sit. Why don’t we take things slow and talk over tea?”

“...Very well. Pardon me.”

Agrippina planted herself in the chair already prepared at Lady Leizniz’s desk, and in turn, the wraith rang a small bell kept by her side. Apparently, she kept at least one student in her apprentices’ quarters at any given time, and the sound summoned a pretty young boy dressed in butler’s clothing and carrying a kettle.

“Excuse me,” he said, setting the table.

The aroma of tea that wafted up from the cup was new to Agrippina. Although she’d seen green or blue leaves used for their novelty before, she’d never encountered this translucent crimson in all her 150 years of life.

“An exotic tea from the east,” the dean explained. “They say the leaves can only be grown there, but that the long journey to deliver them to Rhine causes them to ferment into something new.”

“A result of the Eastern Passage, I see. What terrific color—as though a ruby has been melted into the pot. Well suited to those with a taste for the ornate, I’m sure.”

The methuselah took the cup of what would later be dubbed scarlet tea in a comparison to the popular imperial red tea—though a certain blond child had to constantly swallow back the urge to call it black tea—and the wraith sighed, commenting that it wasn’t poisoned.

Having been born to a family not wanting for enemies, the disciple had magically scanned her drink, and the master had taken note. Agrippina had put real effort into hiding her spell, as she wasn’t foolish enough to do something so offensive in front of her host. Yet being discovered only drew out a tempered, “Force of habit.”

Taking a sip, the researcher added, “A tad bitter—perhaps even offensive to some tongues. I doubt a child would enjoy it.”

“I agree. That’s why I’ve given it to you. The flavor is a touch too mature for the little ones, you see. Oh, and they say it causes them trouble sleeping at night.”

“My, thank you for the extraordinary hospitality. Mm... Indeed, there is something in it that stimulates the brain. Would this not be perfect for young students hounded by the threat of a looming deadline?”

“The price is a pinch too high for them, unfortunately. One small jar cost four drachmae. I purchased one out of consideration for my company, but I can hardly advise anyone else to spend so lavishly.”

The spell constantly monitoring Agrippina’s physical condition alerted her to a chemical stimulus in her brain. Having noticed the effects of caffeine, she instantly surmised that it would spread throughout the country like wildfire if a cheaper means of production were ever discovered. One could expect no less from a woman who had once wished for greater pleasures—this was a phase almost all methuselah went through, much like measles in humans—to the extent that she’d magically synthesized narcotics directly in her brain. Her vast experience and acute sensory perception meant that she was quick to notice any bodily change.

That said, methuselah did not need stimulants to stave off sleep. Agrippina was also not fond of the taste; she quickly decided it wasn’t for her and lost interest in the eastern tea.

“I’ve heard that the flavor changes with milk, cream, or salt, if you’re interested.”

“I’m fine, thank you. Ah, but your magnanimous hospitality has reminded me: thank you kindly for introducing me to Professor Erstreich the other day.”

As Agrippina took a silent sip of tea, she cracked open her uncovered right eye. The deep-blue gaze slicing through squinted eyelids made it clear her words were anything but earnest. A normal researcher looking for worldly success would have been happy to offer their sincere gratitude, of course, but the depraved methuselah saw the opportunity as pure inconvenience.

Naturally so. She had settled down at the College solely as a means of fulfilling her life’s purpose: hedonism. That, and because the location suited the logistical needs of the mystic pet project that she planned to pick away at over the next few centuries. Fame and fortune were not what she wanted out of Rhine.

Even the blindest observer could see that she wouldn’t have left her motherland at all had she been the type of person to covet authority. Being the firstborn daughter to an unshakable titan of royal politics would have made getting her way trivial back home.

“It was time wonderfully spent. After all, commanding the attention of such an esteemed character for months at a time is an occasion that seldom shows itself. We taught one another much, and I shall dare say that we have established a splendid bond.”

The precision of Agrippina’s calculatory ability was a cut above the rabble, even amongst methuselah, allowing her to conduct most arcane experiments in her head. When she did require real-world data, she had no need for the paltry stipend the College offered to its researchers; her family’s fortune made it seem like a child’s allowance, and that wasn’t even touching on the mounds of money she’d earned from the essays and patents that she’d turned in.

A promotion offered no benefits—only the bondage of duty. She had just enough freedom and just enough privilege in her current position, and the job came with access to a library so vast that it remained questionable whether her eternal life would be enough to read everything in it. Agrippina was already living her dream.

And you’ve created another relationship to sully it, the student’s murderous glare conveyed. But the master simply sat back in her chair with good grace, totally ignoring her bloodlust.

“I’m very pleased to hear that. I knew it was a good idea to acquaint you—a pupil’s glory is a master’s greatest joy. We are all at our best when realizing our potential, don’t you think?”

Lady Leizniz wove the tips of her fingers together, placing them on the desk in front of her, and sat with her legs crossed. Her form was elegance incarnate, perfectly chiseled to incite the boiling kettle of rage she called a student into bubbling over.

This was the art of a woman who had navigated the world of high society, sipping on poisoned teas and exchanging barbed pleasantries to win her flock the distinction of being one of the five greatest in College history. What had she to fear from a baby girl who had spent all 150 years of her life cooped up in her own mind, playing with sorcery and fiction? The esteemed Magdalena von Leizniz was one of the most influential voices in the system and commanded wealth that could buy multiple lesser estates outright; in her eyes, she may as well have been looking at a kitten trying its best to stand every hair on end.

Once upon a time, a young, still-living Magdalena had been lowborn—subject to insult and mockery under the guise of civility time and time again, especially after becoming the youngest mensch professor in College history. No matter how meritocratic the Empire was, the envy of the mediocre was a potent force; a genius of her caliber was used to shouldering the hatred of others.

That also happened to be the root of her current condition, but that is a story for another time.

Every so often, Lady Leizniz’s self-made history shined through in a spartan ideology that clashed with her gentle, motherly appearance. She believed in holding nothing back, utilizing one’s gifts to their absolute limits to earn fitting prestige and rewards, and contributing to a greater community through that work. Seeing Agrippina champion indolence and only put in real effort when it came to squandering her remarkable talent was too much for the wraith to bear.

Here the dean had hoped that twenty years spent battered by the harsh reality of the world would soften the girl up; the past year since her student’s return had proved beyond any doubt that her hopes had been optimistic. Ancient wisdom spoke that the kitten which catches mice shall be the cat which does the same, but Agrippina’s impregnable commitment to lethargy almost looped back around to being impressive.

Admitting as much, though, would be a slight on her pride. Instead, Lady Leizniz elected to offer her formal signature on a certain document that would put her troubles out of mind.

“From all that you’ve said,” the dean said, “I’m positively sure that you’ll be overjoyed to see this, my darling disciple.”

“The true matter at hand, I take it? Let me...see?!”

The professor’s smile was the peak of grace as she slid a slip of paper across the table; the researcher’s standoffish expression nearly plunged into madness when she registered the words written on the front.

It was a letter of recommendation for College professorship.

Professorship at the Imperial College of Magic was not something that one could attain by following a prescribed curriculum. Unlike doctoral certificates, a handful of peer-reviewed dissertations approved by an educational institution were not enough to join the ranks of the most exemplary magia.

Then what was the process, you may ask. Simply put, one needed a recommendation from three professors just to be given the chance to present their findings to a professoriat that made abattoirs seem merciful: if and only if these elitists accepted the research to be “in service of the pursuit of magecraft” could a magus ascend to join their ranks.

There were thousands of students—both those officially enrolled and those personally apprenticing under magia—across the nation, and the number of ordained researchers surpassed one thousand. But those permitted to don the title of “professor” were capped at two hundred, and the number had not changed in quite some time. Magistrates across the land funded the education of promising subjects with the hope that one might win the prestigious position, and private mages infatuated with the idea of greatness knocked on the gates constantly; yet the final door was a narrow one, opening only for these privileged few.

Ironically, the severe difficulty of the task drove challengers to prayer. Those steeling themselves for the peer review often half-jokingly invoked the scripture of a foreign land: abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Every year, a handful of bright hopefuls took the podium, only to be beaten down by the razored criticism of the vilest tongues known to man; these were public executions. Despite being only a single sheet of parchment, the invitation felt heavy in Agrippina’s hands.

The first backer listed on the page was one Duke Martin Werner von Erstreich. He had once led a subfaction of the largest cadre in the School of Midday, and he had made a career off his eccentric fixation on running along the cutting edge of arcane biology.

Worse, the professor’s name occupied another blank on the form, signed on a date that had yet to come...on the section reserved for His Majesty’s confirmation. This was a silent order: failure would not be tolerated. The consequences of betraying the Emperor’s expectations within the borders of his Empire needed no further expounding upon.

I’ve been had! Agrippina immediately pieced together the puzzle that had been put into place without her knowing, and her face drained of all color.

The lack of commotion following her appointment had convinced her that a separate power struggle had diverted attention away from herself; how wrong she had been. They’d been biding their time, tying a net in a place where she couldn’t stop them, all to ensnare her before she had a chance to escape.

Holding back the urge to bite her lip, Agrippina snarled in her mind, How could I have been so stupid as to miss this?!

Struggling to keep the tempests of her soul from leaking out, she diverted most of her lines of thought to unrelated arithmetic to stifle her emotions. But the flames of fury continued to burn, so she clenched her fist as hard as she could, just out of the wraith’s sight.

If Agrippina could’ve gotten away with it, she would have screamed and tore up her own hair. Rather, her true wish was to wipe the satisfied grin off her boss’s face with a swift and perfunctory little murder and pretend like none of this ever happened.

Alas, that was an impossible fantasy.

Agrippina had an impartial understanding of her own strength. Twenty years ago, she’d chosen an indefinite exile over no-holds-barred combat, and for good reason. While she was sure she wouldn’t lose—in fact, she was confident the wraith would die—she wouldn’t have been able to win cleanly.

Although Lady Leizniz’s crafty leadership was undeniable, the reason behind her continued reign was rooted in something simpler: her profound thaumaturgical ability. The depths of her power were unknowable, but it was obvious that she could easily wipe an average city away by herself. If she committed herself to destroying the capital for whatever reason, she would be able to demolish half of it, palace and all, killing countless inhuman magia, knights, and imperial guards in the process.

Agrippina was not arrogant enough to think she would walk away in full health after attacking an opponent who could bind her eternal and impregnable barriers in an ice age’s worth of frost. Methuselah were prudent sorts prone to predicting the worst possible scenario before committing to action; her analysis told her that, at minimum, she would sustain irreversible damage to several limbs and vital organs.

So instead, she settled for simulating her vengeance in her mind—but that alone could not quell her rage. Letting out a deep breath, she asked, “May I be permitted a smoke?”

“Oh, feel free. In fact, take your time and enjoy two, or even three.”

“Allow me to graciously take you up on your offer.”

Stuffing a particularly potent sedative into her pipe, Agrippina took a drag and forcefully muffled her rioting mind. Placidity was key for thought, and she quickly realized that nothing she said now could change the outcome.

The circumstances were perfectly valid. Though Lady Leizniz had promised her a period of reprieve, not even the dean could uphold her oath when given an order from above; attempting to claim that this violated their agreement wouldn’t work. This was doubly true because a recommendation to join the professoriat was an honor by most metrics: losing her temper after being recognized would win her no public support.

“The conference at which I’m to present a dissertation is this fall... Am I mistaken in thinking this sort of undertaking ordinarily comes with two to three years of preparation?”

“I would be more than happy to permit you to reuse the treatise you turned in to me on the fundamentals of space-bending magic. Considering how few people in the entire College can make use of the art in daily life, I suspect it will be more than enough.”

And besides, the wraith hinted with a sideways glance, I’m sure you have something tucked away for an emergency like this, don’t you?

Agrippina had nothing to say in response. She’d been out for twenty years. No matter how twisted, she was a magus at heart: she would sooner die than claim she hadn’t penned a single essay worth showing the world in that time. She could hear a mocking, “Oh? Were you just playing around that whole time?” in her mind, and her pride would not allow for those words to be spoken.

“Yes, indeed... Very well. I shall satisfy your every expectation, O Master of mine.”

“Is that so? I’m overjoyed to hear such a spirited answer, and to see my pupil so motivated.”

There was only one thing left for her to do. If she couldn’t turn back, then she had to press forward, trampling over anything in her path and cutting open her own escape route to freedom.

“Pardon me. I will be taking my leave immediately to begin working on my paper. And the deadline?”

“Let me see... This is a rather urgent matter, so perhaps the end of summer... No, I shall labor to allow you until the beginning of autumn. The others will moan about not having enough time to read your treatise, but the backing of His Imperial Majesty will settle things, I’m sure.”

“Understood. I swear to finish by then.”

Agrippina smiled, swearing that she would claim a head or two on her way out and make them rue the day they picked this fight. On the surface, her grin was that of a picture-perfect young lady; deep down, her thirst for bloodshed was on the level of the gamblers of Kyushu swinging guns from the ceiling. Whether Lady Leizniz gleaned the truth or not, gods only knew.

“But Master, may I ask you one last thing?”

“...Whatever might it be?”

“This is quite the sudden assignment—some might claim you are asking the impossible. May I take this as your word that you will support me until the very end? For the presentation, and for the correspondence that will follow?”

The adage about desperate times and desperate measures was bandied about to the point of being trite, but it was the truth. Deciding to work those who had placed her in this situation to the bone, Agrippina made her request, pleading for some kind of recompense.

Unspoken yet clear, the girl’s will made Lady Leizniz hesitate for a moment, but she couldn’t refuse her now; she nodded. Having used her position as the master, she was bound by the obligation to see the part through. Authority was not an almighty trump card devoid of costs: it was a pitch spell that demanded responsibility if it was to be played.

“Thank you very much. Now, if you’ll excuse me, time is wasting away.”

“Do your best. I wish you good fortune, and I’m sure His Majesty will provide...a fitting reward if you manage to impress.”

The methuselah got up, thanked her master for the tea, and left the atelier. As soon as the elevator began to move, the wraith crumpled in her chair with a massive sigh.

“Ugh, that was so tiring... I can only hope this will settle things. I wouldn’t want to leave her to her own devices and let her build another burrow in the library—I refuse to deal with those mountains of complaints ever again.”

Another adage assured that idle hands were the devil’s workshop. If even the most insignificant wretch could stir up mischief if given the time, then who was to say what sort of calamity a person of Agrippina’s misguided talents could cause?

Optimistically hoping that a truckload of work would keep the troublemaker pinned down, Lady Leizniz decided she deserved a reward for cleaning up such a massive problem. Merrily wondering whom she ought to doll up next, the wraith put the painful issue out of her mind, blissfully unaware of the enormous land mine buried under her feet.

tprg5.1

Every thought in Stratonice’s mind went flying. A missile had directly struck her brain, demolishing any semblance of rational thought and sending the staff in her hand tumbling toward the floor. Her mentor reached down to pick it up with a casual, “Oh my,” but the abbess couldn’t even rouse the good sense to stop her. This one carefree proclamation had been explosive enough to shock her to her core; the relief she had felt only a moment ago had been blasted to dust.

For a moment, she considered the possibility that she was misremembering what it meant to be a lay priestess; alas, the definition had not once been changed in all the years since the Rhinian pantheon’s founding. Lay priests renounced membership from every church, leading the people of the land with nothing more than their own devotion.

This was not in the same realm as a simple pilgrimage or mission catered toward educating the masses. To cast one’s lot with the laity was to sever the final tethers to safety—it was to offer oneself whole in the name of whatever it was that they believed to be most virtuous. Only those ready to die a forgotten death in unknown lands dared take the pledge.

Cecilia was far from ignorant; she knew the true meaning and hardship such a journey represented. It was unthinkable that she was taking the matter lightly, and yet she’d announced her intentions all the same... She must have really meant it.

Had she been any other immortal nun, Stratonice would have agreed so as to not let the infinity of existence wear away her being. But this girl was imperial, and in the not-so-distant future, she would be the only child of the sitting Emperor.

As the church and state were separate entities on paper, no one could stop the faithful Sister Cecilia from declaring herself a lay priestess and venturing off on a pilgrimage to foreign lands. However, the world was built on truths hidden behind facades and exceptions: just as theologians offered their “counsel” on some secular matters, politicians could put in “requests” with the churches. Having the crown princess wander off on her own accord was problematic to say the least.

“Y-You must be joking,” Stratonice stammered. “You do know what lay priesthood entails, yes? Destitute and forgotten, your pillows will be rocks on the sides of roofless roads, and you’ll be forced to march over the lifeless corpses of the fallen on your path.”

“Yes, and? I may be rather fond of jests, but I consider myself prudent enough not to kid about my course in life. I’m a bit hurt that you would think I was joking, Bishop.”

I’m panicking because I know you’re not! The words climbed up into the woman’s throat, but she managed to swallow them back. Here she’d thought her long years of discipline had freed her from the grasp of wrath, but it seemed the Head Abbess had yet to forsake all worldly emotion.

Those worldly emotions whispered a terrible truth to Stratonice. Cecilia’s tone betrayed an absolute conviction; the girl already considered this decision a forgone conclusion. The busy bishop dwelled for a moment on the ways she might be able to convince the nun of no station to stop, but her childhood memories of how unshakable Cecilia had been when her mind was set caused the poor woman to give up.

And, in truth, Cecilia was the kind of resolute soul to flee her family without hesitation, going so far as to hide away in the Head Abbess’s luggage in the name of not inheriting her house. Nothing Stratonice could say or do would change her mind now.

Just imagining the ridiculous struggle it would take to convince those involved to let her set off unaccompanied made Stratonice want to curl up into a ball. If only, she sighed. If only she were unlikable enough to cast away.

[Tips] Archbishops are the highest-ranking members of the clergy. Each god is served by only one archbishop, and they introduce themselves by their deity of choice to make their allegiances clear. For example, the Sun God’s archbishop would introduce themselves as the Archbishop of the Sun.

However, each religious sect has minor variations on the standard hierarchical system, so exceptions are not unheard of.

Skill is nourished by taste; to foster talent, one must engage with the works of the talented.

Mika had heard these words from her master enough times to know them by heart. Every oikodomurge was also an architect, and if this rule held true, then the young student thought that she must have been truly blessed.

“All the buildings from the era of first light are so beautiful. I love seeing how the fundamentalists and aestheticists clashed in their designs.”

Propping up her chin, the young student sighed in awe as she laid her eyes upon the massive blueprint spread out across the table. It dated back to the days when the Empire had yet to celebrate its first centennial; Richard the Creator and his successor, the Cornerstone Emperor, had finally finished laying the foundations of their nation, and the country had become stable enough for matters of beauty and novelty to enter the public consciousness.

In those days, fundamentalists who aimed above all else to create sturdy and practical buildings out of simple materials had shared the stage with aestheticists who sang the praises of beauty in form; the clashing ideologies had given rise to an indescribable style that continued to charm architects well into the modern day.

The years and months since then were long enough for some immortals of the time to have chosen death since. Nobles liked to rebuild and refurbish to keep up with the latest trends, and the buildings that remained in their original, ancient form were a rarity. More people came and went in the capital than anywhere else, and only a handful of works belonging to owners with classical tastes still stood. Since begging a wealthy landowner to tour their private estate was unthinkable, the best one could usually do was to quietly gaze at a distance.

Yet here Mika was, savoring the original sketches of designs lost to the sands of time. Her heart overflowed with joy, but also with gratitude for the magnanimous Franziska Bernkastel, who had let her into this manor.

It had all begun with a curious twist of fate. Following her life-or-death escape, Mika had been found by Cecilia’s messengers, which eventually led to her acquaintance with Franziska: after reuniting with Erich, the young mage was pulled along to meet the priestess’s aunt—it wouldn’t do to only introduce one of her cherished friends—and quickly earned the woman’s favor.

In her feminine form, Mika’s face was softer and personably somber; the waves of her glossy raven hair were just an inch or two shy of adding a flirtatious note to her overall impression. Apparently, she was the spitting image of the heroine that Franziska was writing in her most recent play.

The playwright had been stuck in a bog of writer’s block, and the student’s appearance threw logs into the furnace fueling her pen. As such, the grande dame began to shower the girl with favors: if the typical immortal illness of pampering the fleeting had claimed her niece, then now was as good a time as ever to broaden her horizons beyond actors for the first time in generations.

Ultimately, Mika found herself in an extraordinary arrangement wherein she had free access to the Bernkastel estate, and could even browse the family’s gargantuan library so long as she sent notice of her arrival ahead of time.

While this manor had originally belonged to Franziska’s clan as a whole, the construction of a new estate closer to the imperial palace had turned it into no more than a spare; nowadays, it was basically the woman’s personal storage unit for anything she left in Berylin. Among her many belongings were books: a writer needed reference material to breathe reality into her works, and the documents she didn’t plan to use in the near future came to rest here.

In the past, the empress had attempted to draft a historical drama, and the evidence of her labor could be found in the ancient blueprints lining the shelves. Her collection began in the Empire’s era of first light, sampled from neighboring kingdoms and satellite states, and even featured illustrations that came in through the once-closed Eastern Passage.

For the oikodomurge hopeful, this treasury of knowledge was drool-worthy. Though the College’s vault of books contained architectural secrets that would take lifetimes to uncover on her own, most of the material there was devoted to the efficiency and practicality of infrastructure. The elegance, refinement, and unique appeal called for in general design was nowhere to be found.

To be fair, this wasn’t without reason. The oikodomurges that graduated from the Imperial College were perhaps the most bureaucratic of all magia. What the state wanted from their designs was very traditional and rigid; as far as the crown was concerned, they were to keep the fancy eccentric stuff to private ventures.

Therefore, those who wished to learn how to make pretty buildings had no choice but to borrow blueprints from magia who built those pretty buildings on the side. Alas, while Mika’s master was a brilliant oikodomurge with strong opinions on foundational skills and disaster prevention, he had exactly zero interest in unofficial projects. Whenever he was invited to tea, it was invariably to discuss the restoration, disassembly, or reconstruction of some decrepit manor or another—his friends were much the same, and were of equally little help.

Mika may have knocked on the College’s doors with a dream to come up with infrastructure that would help support her family living in the icy north, but her ambition extended to erecting a magnificent landmark or two that would be remembered back home for years to come. As earnest as she was, the bizarre and eccentric still caught her eye; the glorious architecture of Berylin had deeply moved her when she’d first arrived, and she wanted to leave something that would do the same for future youths heading into town from the countryside.

The documents here were fertilizer for a refined set of sensibilities. Not only were there blueprints, but the library contained sketches of expected final designs and even tiny models built as teaching tools. Engaging with everything she could find proved a most fulfilling use of her day.

“Doth thine efforts not stray into the land of excess? Overwork shall undo thee.”

“Oh, Lady Franziska!”

The study was lit by but a single window, so as not to ruin the tomes found within; Franziska appeared just as the girl had begun to wish for a reading light. Mika rose to her feet to prepare a greeting fit for the noblewoman, but she waved her down. As always, the vampire had on nothing but an excessively provocative toga as she took a seat across the table.

“Thy zeal is commendable. Would that my troupe were manned by players so keen to study their lines—perhaps then the flower of my direction would remain unwithered.”

“Well, I’m just doing this because I like it.”

“Mistake me not—that you relish it so is the genius I praise. Of late, even Berylin’s most storied stages bedeck themselves in hollow talent, content to trace the skin of the script, bewitched by the polish they put to the apple as the worm-holes flourish within. The better thing—oh, how shall I put this? I would see the intent that hath been lain in the cast’s every twitch and tongue-wag understood and brought to life. Thinkst thou not that it demeans the art for its face to claim himself master of the soul’s full palette while he feels aught but a void that fame might yet fill?”

The leading question drew out a polite smile from Mika. Considering her own position as someone far from the gates of luxury, she felt she had no right to renounce those actors who might use the medium as a crutch to climb the social ladder. Plenty of students began their journey at the College for similar reasons, and there were even professors who considered themselves bureaucrats first and magia second.

Franziska’s viewpoint was that of a woman who had never known poverty, her courtship with art a comfortable one spent chasing its most high-minded ideals. She would seek the pinnacle of her craft regardless of its profit, but to expect the same of those who worked under her was a harsh ask indeed.

Still, silence was golden; an unclear smile was an almighty weapon. Mika was well versed enough in aristocratic dealings to know the virtue in keeping her opinions to herself. Sooner or later, those who failed to mince matters would find themselves minced in a much more literal sense.

For her part, Franziska did not comment on the girl’s vague response or goad her to elaborate: she, too, understood that her statement was but a reinforcement of her own ego. Though she did not force it upon anyone, she made it clear where she stood—the young student marveled that the playwright was a creator to her very core.

“Yet for all my aching,” Franziska said, “I find thee all too fit to rise to the stage...”

“Though I hate to refuse you again, I’ve unfortunately been born to rather middling talents. My success so far in life has been the product of desperately clinging on to keep up with those around me. Relinquish the boot unfamiliar...”

“...Lest foot sores be thy aim. Ah, but Bernkastel singeth thusly as well: he who wears shoes uncounted—”

“—Calls spiders kith and centipedes kin, yes?”

“Thou hast learned thy classics!” the empress cackled merrily.

“I have my friend to thank for that.” The classical poet Bernkastel was Erich’s favorite, and he regularly borrowed lines from the ancient master when the pair played their pompous little games. Mika had remembered most of them as a matter of course.

“Ahh, but truly, black and gold art glorious atop the proscenium. My yearning strains to see thee share a spotlight with my niece’s chosen.”

“Yes, well...” Mika chuckled awkwardly. “I’m sure he isn’t any more comfortable with serious acting than I am.”

Every time their paths crossed, Franziska extended invitations to her troupe or asked if Mika wanted to follow her back to Lipzi when she returned in the near future. Every time, Mika had refused her: she genuinely didn’t believe she had the talent to begin learning a second craft, and there was still much to learn from her master here in Berylin. The young mage had no intention of giving up her dream for anyone, even if that meant refusing the matriarch of a terrifyingly powerful family time and time again.

“A shame, a shame,” Franziska sighed. “Will the College in Lipzi not suffice?”

The Imperial College of Magic was a leviathan of an institution, and the main headquarters in the capital was not enough to serve the entire Empire. Smaller campuses had been built in every region, serving the dual purposes of being schoolhouses and magus bridgeheads. The state didn’t want to let any promising students slip through the cracks, and the facilities were good starting points to help develop the surrounding area.

Truth be told, Mika could still hope to become a magus by studying in Lipzi. While the library there couldn’t hold a candle to the book vault in Berylin, they had access to a tremendous number of transcriptions, so it wasn’t that inconvenient.

“I don’t believe I’d have the fortune to stumble across another teacher as wise as my current master again. Looking at my current ties, I would say I’ve spent the better part of my luck when it comes to human relations.”

However, to encounter a mentor that she could accept as a true master from the bottom of her heart was rare. No matter how well she might adapt to the new environment, people were irreplaceable.

“I see, I see. Then I yield. Let not thy resolution go forgotten.”

Witnessing this fledgling soul abandon fear and modesty to preserve what she valued most put the playwright in a terrific mood. So, after rescinding her invitation, she offered to instead become the girl’s patron—just like she was for her friend’s little sister.

From what Franziska had heard, this penniless student wasted much of her day earning coin, committing precious time to side hustles and day labor funneled through the College. The wealthy noble thought that she might be able to alleviate some of her burden, but was turned down yet again.

“Ingratitude is always met with ingratitude,” Mika said. “If I find a new backer to support me, I will be slinging mud on the name of the good magistrate who sent me here.”

“Ahh, then thou art here by word of recommendation?”

“Yes. I wasn’t the only one with magical talent, but he chose me—even knowing that I’m a tivisco.”

“And so thou hopest to turn thy accomplishments into honors to repay he who hath placed faith in thee. Thy virtue is marvelous.”

Local magistrates ran private schools because imperial aristocrats considered discovering promising youths a noble pursuit. Inspiring the lower classes by uncovering the gifted among them was a matter of course, and supplying the nation with capable talent was another responsibility that came with being part of His Imperial Majesty’s bulwark. Thus, casting doubt onto the merit of one’s benefactor was an ingratitude like no other. If Mika took this new offer of patronage, her magistrate would still earn the acclaim of having discovered a talented mage, but it would be more than a few steps short of what he would have received from supporting a notable magus from beginning to end.

“Forgive my dearth of tact,” Franziska said. “That is the last I will mention the idea.”

“No, I should be apologizing for my discourtesy,” Mika said, bowing her head. “Kicking aside your propositions made in good faith is yet another form of ingratitude...”

“Hah, fret not. In mine eyes, thy integrity in matters of debt and dream both art a delight more than thou shalt ever know. Prithee remain as thou art always.”

Would that the world were filled with persons of thy make, Franziska grumbled internally, my pen might see some use yet. The former empress looked at the girl and prayed to the Night Goddess from the bottom of her heart: May her journey be a bright one.

“Well, then. I entreat thee: let thy passions be of help to my niece and her chosen favorite. I know not from where her habits come, but she has a bullish leaning; and tangled with that golden wolf pup as she’s become, I foresee no shortage of challenge ahead.”

Although Franziska had originally picked the girl out thinking that a friend of her caliber would benefit her niece’s education, she now had a more personal fondness for Mika. Her initial goal had been to find her niece a friend whose memory would stay with her for all her life: one who could understand her as a maiden, who could accept her complaints as a man, and who could offer unique perspectives when neither.

Never had the empress expected that she would take such a liking to the mage herself; she laughed as it struck her that she was yet young despite her long life. Mortal farewells turned the everlasting into adults, but perhaps this world was full of nothing but children.

“Yes, of course,” Mika said. “I swear on my life.”

Greatly pleased by this response, the playwright decided to let the girl use the library freely even after she returned to Lipzi. After all, humanity was the greatest entertainer of all—so long as she lived, the same tale would not arise twice—and it would be such a shame to let this story wither in the bud.

[Tips] Although the Imperial College of Magic has many locations across the nation, the main campus in Berylin is still considered the peak of scholarship.

tprg5.1

Reality tore open. The hole occupied only the bare minimum amount of space, perhaps betraying the fatigue of its creator; it simply hovered above a well-worn hammock in a laboratory belonging to none other than the first heiress to the Stahl barony, Agrippina du Stahl.

The woman herself came slithering through the tear and directly into bed.

“Oh, I’m tired... So tired... What a colossal waste of time...”

The groaning noblewoman had appeared from the shaky portal with all the energy of half-finished pudding: it would fit best to say that she had been excreted out of it. Her tone carried so much palpable fatigue that every word threatened to lift her soul away with it. For someone who avoided social merriment and career advancement alike, her faculty-mandated torture session had been agonizing enough to draw her true feelings into the realm of speech.

Methuselah boasted enough strengths to earn their title as the peak of all humanfolk, to be sure. Their unmatched internals allowed them to forgo food and sleep, and let those who partook in the occasional meal or drink get away without cycling it back out. Making full use of their physical gifts meant that a methuselah was perfectly capable of engaging in high-level debate on magical theory for seasons at a time, much like Agrippina had done.

Alas, the gap between survival and comfort was as profound as it was profoundly callous.

Agrippina liked to sleep several times a week to refresh herself, and even dabbled in the sensory amusement of cuisine when it suited her. Most of all, she loved the luxury of lazily swinging her legs in her hammock.

Unfortunately, her conversational partner had been Duke Martin Werner von Erstreich—he was technically also a great duke, but his continued leadership of House Erstreich made him a duke as well—and the man was the sort of immortal who would happily renounce food and sleep in their entirety for the sake of his research. For a woman whose pastimes consisted of sloth and indolence, he was nothing short of her polar opposite.

Their meeting had illustrated the difference in their priorities perfectly: the scoundrel considered magecraft as a means to further her interests, whereas the duke took it as his interest proper.

For as antisocial and lazy as Agrippina was, she was not stupid enough to allow her lethargy to cause her own ruin. Though her discussion with Duke Martin on the technical details of the aeroship had run on much too long, she hadn’t dared to do him the dishonor of asking for a break or to leave.

Authority was everything in a monarchy. When a sour mood could reduce someone’s life to less than a scrap of paper, interrupting a superior’s amusement was next to unthinkable; doubly so when the man in question had once reigned as Emperor, and remained one of the College’s untouchables to this day.

Had they been in her motherland, Agrippina could have held her own as the first princess to one of the Kingdom’s most influential families; yet in the Empire, she was no more than a foreign researcher of incidental noble birth. No matter how prestigious her background was, it meant nothing in the face of someone whose clout overshadowed her own.

Thus she had held out until this very moment, where she could finally dive into the hammock she had so dearly longed for. The pure joy she felt was nothing short of that felt by a lone vagabond returning home after wandering unwelcome for decades.

“Ahh... My beloved laboratory... I shan’t so much as step foot outside you ever again...or at least, for the next ten years.”

Agrippina’s every remark only served to sully the beautiful dress she’d been given for the aeroship showcase, not to mention how happily she rubbed her face into her soft bedding. Yet even as her brain melted into euphoria, a fleck of lucidity in the back of her mind noticed something was off.

Peeking up with one eye, she surveyed the room. A normal person would have seen only the shining rays of spring sun and been content to say this was closer to a greenhouse meant for tea parties than a magus’s atelier. However, the myriad of invisible lookout spells told a different story.

Every personal lab in the College came with a handful of simple defensive systems already installed. Naturally, Agrippina had torn them all out—there wasn’t a single researcher that left them in place—and replaced them with not ten, not twenty, but eighty-seven different barriers that protected her territory from threats both magical and physical.

The methuselah could see them all, and she noticed something strange.

The only traces of entry present in her laboratory belonged to her servant, who had dutifully kept the place tidy, and her student, who had come in to fetch her homework...but that only covered the laboratory proper.

Exhaling a spell woven into her breath, Agrippina dragged out the records of those who had passed through one of her many wards. She looked over the archive written in light that glowed only for her; after sorting out those who were expected to come and go, she found that two people had been let into her drawing room.

The first was a friend of her manservant, Erich of Konigstuhl. She recalled having met them once following the gut-bustingly hilarious tome-purchasing episode: they were a College student who had cast their lot with the gloomy hermits.

This was, well, fine. Had the boy brought over a professor belonging to another cadre without hesitation, he would be due for much worse than a spanking, but the methuselah felt like she may or may not have given him permission to invite his friends into the parlor, at least. She could have put in the effort to remember the exact date and time at which she’d said that, of course, but this memory was serviceable enough as was.

No, the problem lay with the other guest. Though Agrippina was unacquainted with whom it represented, the family name dancing along at the end was very familiar—troublingly so.

The spell that had recorded the entrants was one that exposed their true names unless they explicitly took steps to hide them. Furthermore, this wasn’t something flimsy enough to be prevented by an average counterspell or miracle; the formula belonged to Agrippina’s father, whose influence invited proportionate animosity. Its readings were certain: after all, even the woman who’d cast the spell had taken 130 years to find an answer to it.

This was psychosorcery that scanned the soul for what it considered its true name. Leaving aside the fact that the caster had waded shoulder-deep in the swamp of forbidden magicks to set up an approximation of a lock, Agrippina had to read and reread the name over and over again to make sure she was sane.

“Constance Cecilia Valeria Katrine von Erstreich... What?”

Alas, no matter how many times she looked the name over, it never changed. It was no fake: a foolish imitator who considered themselves an Erstreich for enough time to believe their fiction at the very crux of their being would not be allowed to draw breath for long.

“What has he done?”

Come to think of it, the warning signs had been there. Duke Martin had practically imprisoned her in a single room for months, and she’d sensed people coming to the door on many occasions. Then, at the important showcase, he’d suddenly vanished.

Agrippina had noticed the Emperor’s lividity under his guise of normalcy, suggesting that the duke’s disappearance had not been planned. In fact, the only reason she was here in her room to begin with was because the man had skipped out on his promise to show her around the ship following the terrace banquet.

Some unforeseen emergency must have occurred, and her servant and the girl he’d invited were the cause.

Hauling her dreary body out of bed, Agrippina plodded along to the drawing room. With every step, she cast aside ornaments that could buy common families whole, stripping off her pinching boots and untying her heavy hair to make herself comfortable. By the time she reached the parlor, she’d torn off her tight nightgown to shamelessly lay her body bare.

The room proved its keeper’s commitment to orderliness; without prior knowledge that someone had entered, she would have been none the wiser. Both the low coffee table and the sofa were immaculately kept by her exemplary servant.

Whereas a detective would struggle to find damning evidence, the magus only grew more certain. Divinations like this were at their most precise when physically at the site of the search, and she didn’t need to find a loose strand of hair to be sure that someone had made an extended stay in this room.

“Oh? What’s this?”

Agrippina came across a wineglass in the corner of the room, seemingly forgotten by her dependable housekeeper. Though it looked like any other chalice, she immediately brought it up to her nose to smell the faint scent left behind.

“Blood,” she murmured. “I’m beginning to see the full picture.”

Duke Martin had hurried off despite his important role at the banquet, his kin had then appeared in this room for mysterious reasons, and Erich was unresponsive to her telepathic messages. The boy was the kind of model lackey to reply even in the dead of night, and there were only two times he failed to respond after a successfully transmitted thought: when he was too exhausted for telepathy to wake him, or when he was backed into a corner and couldn’t spare any focus.

As vast as the Empire was, few in it could kill that monster as he was now. An average College researcher would struggle to flee unless they specialized in combat; if Erich chose to run away, then even fewer could catch him.

There was only one conclusion: he was caught up in some ridiculous nonsense that had nearly gotten him killed again.

Truly, could she ask for a more entertaining servant?

“Well,” Agrippina said, “it at least is apparent that he wasn’t fooling around with some boring girl. Perhaps I shall forgive him.”

That said, she couldn’t wait to see how he’d try to worm his way out of this one.

Pleased to discover that she was not alone in her fatigue, the lady put the parlor behind her, ready to enjoy a nice bath and a good sleep.

[Tips] Spells that probe into people’s souls are terrifyingly accurate, and some can expose a target’s name or appearance with frightening detail.

I’d mentioned that the world wasn’t lenient enough for everything to end happily ever after back when we’d been brainstorming ways of saving Miss Celia, and my claim was valid. We humans were fated to clean up after the messes we’d made—personally, faithfully, and in a way that would appease whomever owned the property the mess was made on.

“So, what sort of charming little excuse have you brought for me?”

After finishing the game of ehrengarde with Miss Celia in her midnight greenhouse, Mika and Elisa had come to liven up the party. We’d all enjoyed tea for a bit and gone our separate ways—save for Mika, who’d caught Lady Franziska’s eye and gotten whisked away—but upon carrying my sister home, I was faced with cruel reality: our master had returned before we knew it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’d known that this woman had some means of telling who intruded on her territory. Rather, I would have been worried if she didn’t. My employer was exceptional even among her immortal peers; I would sooner expect lightning to arc across blue skies than to see her feeling under the weather.

And so, after tucking in Elisa—my safe return had gotten her so worked up that she’d fallen asleep by the time we’d left the Bernkastel estate—our master’s first words to me following her own safe return were as previously mentioned.

“First and foremost,” I said with the most deferential expression I could muster, “I must celebrate this occasion from the bottom of my heart. I am overjoyed to see that you have returned unharmed.”

Spewing the most servile thing I could think of, I knelt before the couch she was laying on. I was prepared to submit myself to her whims.

Frankly, I had no delusions of trying to fool Lady Agrippina. She was the kind of playful—nay, mocking enemy found in the back of advanced rule books, whose existence was a challenge to the player: fight her if you dare. What was the point in trying to hide information from a monster that could bring down a full party of maxed-out PCs? If she felt like it, she could strip my soul bare with psychosorcery; an honest apology was a much, much better choice than lying.

“You have my deepest apologies for allowing guests in without your permission, be it only into the parlor as it was. This decision was mine and mine alone, and I am prepared to bear responsibility for it.”

“Oh, my loyal servant. It pleases me to see that you understand your own transgressions. After all, they say a retainer who cannot sense their master’s anger is fated to a short life.”

H-Holy shit. This was why the upper class were so scary: they could mull over the lives and deaths of us peasants as if it were chitchat, sporting the same thin smile and easy tone of voice as usual.

That said, I wasn’t a blithering enough idiot to show up without preparing an excuse—one good enough to convince the likes of the madam, at that. I told her the full story without any omissions or exaggerations: everything from how I met Miss Celia to how we’d helped her escape; the battle from last night; and my meeting and subsequent acquaintance with Lady Franziska.

Lady Agrippina listened to my tale in silence—laughter did not count—until I was completely finished. I couldn’t see what part of my misfortune was so amusing as to leave her gripping her sides in pain, but after I’d retold everything, she simply said, “I shall put it on your tab.”

“...What?”

“I’m saying that I shall let you off with the small debt of a single favor.”

Wiping a single tear from her eye, the madam named a price several times more frightening than a mere fine. Was I crazy, or was handing this woman a blank contract basically the same thing as suicide?

Wait, no. At least with suicide I’d get to die a peaceful death... Still, I supposed this was a better fate than someone of my standing could have realistically hoped for.

“A...favor?”

“Your account was entertaining, and it appears as though everything has been tied up nicely, so I don’t mind. I was able to confirm that you have some sense of your place, as well.”

“Is that truly acceptable?”

“The question of whether it’s acceptable or not is mired in all manner of issues, but consider this: had you handed that girl in, the situation would only have worsened. The grudge of a noble scorned is quite something.”

To tell the truth, I had planned on using that as another excuse. While Miss Celia wasn’t the type to obsess about revenge, there had been a chance that her pursuers were bandits merely masquerading as noble retainers. If I’d let her slip into their hands, who knew what her parents would do to me? Or even if they truly did belong to her house, it was possible that she’d resent me for foiling her getaway and exact vengeance on me after marrying—or so the justification went.

The real Miss Celia was a saint in all but name; I was sure such dark thoughts never even crossed her mind. Still, an enraged aristocrat was more than capable of fashioning guilt for a lower-class enemy to don.

“I should think this conclusion as clean as they come,” Lady Agrippina said. “Though I suppose you did nearly die again.”

“...Yes, well, I’d rather not experience my limbs flying off ever again.”

“I’m sure. They don’t grow back and are challenging to replace, so take care of them, will you?”

I don’t need to hear that from you—I know plenty well they don’t grow back. I was acutely aware that my irreplaceable arms and legs were only with me thanks to Miss Celia.

But come to think of it, who had that guy been, anyway? Lady Franziska had said not to worry because she’d administered him a “healthy dose of discipline,” but that mage had at least been on the level of a College professor. Trying to figure out why he’d been waiting for me—and trying to look cool doing it—confounded me to no end.

He’d appeared with all the pomp and circumstance of an unprepared GM rolling dice to figure out what kind of boss to place at the end of a mission. There was a palpable malice in his placement, as if I’d dodged the true final boss and forced the world to place an unavoidable encounter on my escape route to make sure the climax didn’t fizzle out. I’d seen this sort of thing before: once, my old crew and I had tried to pilfer the precious gems out of some ruin and were on the verge of escaping without incident when we randomly “discovered” that the pillars holding the place up had been crystal golems all along.

Judging from his demeanor, I could tell that the masked nobleman had been toying with me, but not much else. Seriously, why had that broken enemy just been waiting there?

“With that said,” Lady Agrippina went on, “strip.”

“Huh?”

“I said strip.”

Yes, ma’am.

Though her order came out of nowhere, I couldn’t talk back if she was going to insist. He who has wronged was ever at the mercy of she who has been wronged.

I took off the shirt I’d been given at the Bernkastel estate, and the madam stopped me, saying that my upper half would do. She then began to ogle with an unhidden gaze.

Personally, I found my young build lacking and frail, despite my developing muscles. My shoulders were beginning to gain definition, my limbs had started to grow stronger, and I’d long since left my childish potbelly behind; yet I was still far from the virile physique I was so enamored with.

More to the point, though, I’d already checked in the mirror to confirm that my detached arm and legs bore no trace of their gruesome injuries. Not only that, but my run-in with the crank of high rank had seen me tumbling this way and that; my “Daisy Blossom” spell alone had blasted me straight into a pillar. I should’ve looked mushier than a bruised banana, and yet I couldn’t find so much as a scab.

“Hmm...”

However, Lady Agrippina could see what I could not. Her gaze ran down an invisible line where my flesh had once parted. Even when I really put my mind to it, I couldn’t detect any lingering evidence of how reality had been warped; this was yet another example of how much more capable her eyes were.

Gods, it’s so tempting. If I could see the world as well as her, the edge I’d gain in arcane combat would be unquestionable. But a mystic swordsman couldn’t afford to divert points away from physical attributes; I didn’t want to spread myself too thin and end up being lousy at everything.

“The gods certainly do work miracles,” the madam mused. “Not even those flesh-crazed cultists of Setting Sun could graft skin this naturally. From a thaumaturgical standpoint, it is nearly as if your arm had never been severed at all.”

“I didn’t realize it was that impressive.”

“Nerves, arteries, bones and the marrow in them—human bodies are more than mere clay. One can cultivate replacement skins all day, but effort cannot replicate healing this perfect. I can see why those poor maniacs eye the faithful with such envy.”

Gently, Lady Agrippina’s finger reached out and traced the absent scar. Even though she caught me off guard, I remained totally sound of mind. Despite having already experienced a rather embarrassing accident during my trip to Wustrow, I had at least yet to let my preferences drift too far from reputability. Something instinctual in my soul whispered to my body: This one’s a no-go. Despite all the trouble my teen body had been causing me recently, I figured it deserved a bit of praise for its prudence here.

“Ahh, but there is residue of the magical variety: a spell that misaligns bits of space to render anything occupying it into mincemeat. How vulgar. An attack of this sort scoffs at the very notion of evasion and defense... Standard conceptual barriers would shatter instantly. What sort of depraved life must you live to come up with a means to turn mere embodiment into a weakness?”

Amazingly, Lady Agrippina managed to see through the true nature of the formula off the faintest leftover mana clinging to my wound. As impressive as her depth of knowledge was, I was too busy trembling at having been the target of the attack to marvel.

I’d been lucky to only have three limbs twisted off. If what she was saying was true, I should’ve been a reorganized mess of meat; the spell was like crumpling up a piece of paper to crush the stickman drawn on it.

“Mm, I’ve gotten the gist. I’ve memorized this mana signature; that will be enough.”

“What? Are you planning on looking into the person who attacked me?”

“Indeed. Though it isn’t as if I intend to avenge you or anything.”

“I know that much...”

“Call it a personal curiosity. Feel free to make yourself decent.”

A sweet fragrance wafted my way as I put my clothes back on: finished with a quick chore, the madam had decided it was time for a smoke break. I carefully tried to slip my neck through my shirt without letting my hair get caught, but just as I did, a cold voice cut through the cloth to sting my ears.

“It is a stroke of fortune that you’re alive...but I will not tolerate a second ‘all’s well that ends well, happily ever after.’”

The usual play in her tone was gone, and her reproach was not followed by a lighthearted confirmation; this was a warning in the truest sense. I jammed my head through my collar, hair be damned, and quickly got back on my knees.

“I am well aware.”

“Mm, very well. Anyhow, I shall be charging your patron from now on whenever money is involved, so make sure to see through the preparations on that end.”

“As you will.”

“I’m sure you’re very tired, so you may leave for today. Resume your duties tomorrow morning.”

Anger was most terrifying when it came from an ordinarily freehanded master; a happily ever after truly was too much to ask for. Though I didn’t regret my decision, this adventure of mine had come with a steep debt...

[Tips] Arcane limb replacement is an imperfect craft. Newly generated flesh is sure to differ in skin tone at minimum, and requires long hours of rehabilitation to reconnect and retrain the nervous system.

Meanwhile, the faithful cast miracles that outperform these mystic surgeries off the back of spiritualism alone. The magia who dedicate themselves to the arduous pursuit of knowledge often look at priests and the like with unjustified envy and anger.

Whether I was dying or Miss Celia was running for her life, the capital chugged along all the same. The only notable difference tonight was that there were far fewer guards walking the streets. Now that the chaos had subsided—I didn’t want to imagine what had gone on behind the scenes—there wasn’t much point in keeping watch at every corner, so I guessed it was inevitable.

Looking back, I felt awful about how I’d treated the dependable guardians of our city. My back had been against the wall, and I hadn’t been able to hold back as much as I would’ve liked; a fair number of them must have suffered broken bones. The crown offered good benefits, so they wouldn’t struggle to find treatment or get paid leave, but worsening their daily lives came with pangs of guilt.

Gingerly knocking someone out in one hit like some comic-book hero was an exacting task, but maybe that was just my own lack of skill talking. Unfortunately, people were too complex to go down after a single punch to the gut or neck, and smacking their heads was a shortcut to sustained injuries; strangulation didn’t keep people down long enough, so that wasn’t an option either. I could only ask that they lay the blame on my spineless performance and Miss Celia’s immature father—preferably at a one-to-nine ratio.

Speaking of benefits, I’d nearly forgotten. Mika and I had met up at the Bernkastel manor, where we’d celebrated our mutual safe returns and I’d honored her courageous devotion, but I had yet to recognize two of the most important contributors to our cause.

“Ursula, Lottie.”

I whispered too quietly for anyone else to hear, but clearly enunciated their names. A cool and refreshing breeze rolled by, sweeping away the lukewarm night.

Yet as the current faded, it left behind two gifts on my head. I didn’t need to look up; the alfar who had helped Miss Celia escape and whose valiant efforts indirectly saved my life were here.

They’d gone above and beyond for me. Had Miss Celia stowed away to Lipzi instead of calling for her aunt, I would have traded lives with that lunatic in the sewers at best. In the worst case, I could have missed my final shot and been reduced to chum without so much as avenging myself.

And of course, the young lady’s aeronautical adventure wouldn’t have succeeded without Ursula and Lottie’s help. The thing was a top imperial secret that would determine the political, economic, and military future of the nation: a posh girl oblivious to scouting methods was sure to be caught by security immediately without the help of these high-ranking fairies.

Alfar were so profoundly intimidating. If they could be bound to any sort of rhyme or reason instead of committing themselves to whimsy, I could see an entire new school of thought emerging amongst magia, dedicated to forging spells with fey assistance...though it was their unpredictability that made them fey in the first place.

“Here, Beloved One. Aren’t you a tad late with your summons?”

“Wah... I’m tiiired...”

Their voices were downcast enough to make it clear Lottie’s grumbling was founded in something real. I wonder if something happened to them.

“We received quite the earful, you see.”

“Ughhh, we got yelled at for helping too much...”

Apparently, some of the most important alfar had scolded them with scathing intensity. While I’d known that the kings and queens of the fey realm were closer to spirits and gods than the rabble, I wouldn’t have imagined that they’d be the ones directly rebuking these two.

Alfar were supposed to be aware of their own boundaries, keeping their meddling within reason. The two of them had answered my ambiguous request for them to help Miss Celia with enough effort to get them lectured.

...I guess they deserved a proper reward. They were my saviors, after all.

“Thank you both—I mean it. Is there anything I can do to repay you?”

“In that case, look over there.”

Ursula leaned over the edge of my head, and I followed her outstretched finger to see a small clearing. It was an empty area meant to contain fires, just like the one Mika had been waiting in on the day of the parade.

“What say you to a dance? I’m afraid I won’t be able to keep you to myself if I take you to the hill.”

“Sure, let’s dance.”

I made my way over to the square, and another breeze came to whisk away one of the weights on my crown. In its place, the beautiful, full-sized girl I’d first met all those nights ago appeared to greet me.

Her skin glimmered like deep honey under the moonlight, hidden only by overflowing currents of silver that blended into the orphic luminescence. Where the sterling river parted, the wings of a moon moth fluttered, blinking with otherworldly charm.

“Will you please take the lead?” she asked.

“Of course,” I answered.

Captivating, enchanting, and resolute, her vermilion eyes drooped into a smile.

Taking her small, graceful hand in mine, we began to dance. Ours was not a ballroom waltz in measured time, but the free movements of a rustic country swing; we spun around and around, drawing close and stepping away as it struck our fancy. As I twirled the same way I had during the festivals back in Konigstuhl, the svartalf elegantly moved to match.

We gently spun, then hugged and spun back, alternating steps as we faced one another. Locking our arms together, we used each other’s legs as axes to swing around and around. While I had to be careful not to drop Lottie—she was still busy pondering what she wanted—I merrily sustained the dance until beads of sweat began to form on my skin.

Seeing her alluring skin take on a faint blush in this festive mood made me understand the feelings of those who gave into temptation and were spirited away to the everlasting hill of twilight. Even though I wouldn’t go myself, I could tell it was surely a jolly place, free from any suffering. Had I lacked my promise with Margit, my duty to Elisa, or my family, maybe I wouldn’t have thought it such a terrible fate.

“That was wonderful.”

“Yeah, it sure was,” I said. “But man, I didn’t think I’d sweat like this considering how much training I do.”

We’d spent a whopping half hour dancing, and it was only now that I realized I was toeing a dangerous line. If others could see Ursula, then I was going to become an urban legend about some crazy kid dancing with alfar; if not, then I was just a lunatic dancing alone. Either way, an onlooker would call for the guards if they spotted me. While we’d thankfully managed to enjoy our dance without anyone bothering us, that was a bit careless of me.

“A boy’s sweat is a sacred thing,” Ursula said. Then, turning to Lottie, she said, “And what about you? I’ve had my fun, but how long are you going to think about this?”

“Um, ummm... Oh, oh! There’s a lot I want, but I’d like one locky, please!”

“Of my hair?”

I tilted my head, confused as to why she’d want that. But apparently, a blond child’s hair was literally worth its weight in gold amongst fairies.

“Oh, ohh!” Ursula shouted. “No fair! I should’ve chosen that too!”

“No!” Lottie shouted back. “You already got a dancy, Ursula! The locky is Lottie’s!”

“This isn’t fair! You would be dried jerky in that cage by now if it weren’t for me!”

“Nuh-uh! Would not! Lottie was napping!”

Ignoring their yapping back and forth, I untied my hair and cut off a small portion to bundle up for her. Long ago, imperial citizens used to weave decorative cords out of their hair, but modern spinning technology meant that only the poorest still did. I had no idea what she was going to use this for.

“Wow! Pretty! Thanks, Lovey One!” Smaller than the bundle of hair she was squeezing, Lottie happily twirled around while humming, “What oh what should I use it for?”

On the other hand, the fairy of the night was glaring at her friend with murderous envy... This was one of those episodes that would evolve into a grudge later, wasn’t it?

“Okay, okay, fine. Ursula, you can have one too, and Lottie gets a dance.”

“Huh? Are you sure? I mean, I’d be happy to accept if you’re willing.”

“Really?! I get a locky and a dancy?! Yay!”

For me, seeing someone’s mood sour before my eyes was much more taxing and bothersome than doing a bit of extra work. Besides, cutting off a bit of hair and dancing was nothing compared to what they’d done for me. Even if my actions bore more meaning than I knew, even if I was paying a hefty price that I couldn’t yet see, I thought I had a responsibility to repay them for saving my life.

I lopped off another tuft of hair, which pleased Ursula greatly. Then Lottie took my outstretched hand—still small—and invited me to dance. I think opinion may be split on whether or not ours counted as a “dance,” but she seemed content to hold on to my finger and zip around, so I figured it was fine.

“By the way, what are you going to do with that hair?”

“I wonder,” Ursula said. “What will I do with it? A necklace or hairpiece would be lovely, but I’d adore a ring or anklet too.”

“Lottie’s gonna ask for clothes!”

Accessories and clothing? Did alfar have the ability to process human hair into cloth? They sounded like a certain nomadic horse-riding people on the surface, which did not help make them less scary.

Regardless, I was just happy that they were happy. But while I could swing a sword for hours on end, my legs and hips were incredibly sore from just a bit of dancing. Maybe it was because I wasn’t used to it.

With my debts repaid, I was ready to go home and get some sleep...but then noticed that Ursula’s cheery mood had vanished, and that she was staring straight at me.

“...Is there something wrong?”

“I know you’ve given us two whole rewards, but let me say one last thing.”

Two and three aren’t all that different. I nodded her along, and her expression only grew graver.

“The next time you find yourself risking your life in combat, don’t cast us away, will you?”

“Oh...”

She went there. True: had these two been with me, the fight would have gone more smoothly. I might not have even needed a last-minute rescue at all. Magecraft generally only affected targets that the caster could perceive, so Ursula’s stealth could have protected me from attacks; Lottie’s wind would have been perfect for throwing off the hounds’ noses and pushing away the bugs.

However, without their help, who knows what would’ve happened to Miss Celia?

Unable to come up with a response, I stood there in silence. Watching me, Ursula came to her own conclusions and shrank back down with a quiet giggle.

“What a helpless boy.”

And just like when they’d appeared, a passing breeze whisked the alfar away. All that was left in their wake was a sweaty fool still bumbling for the right answer.

What was I meant to do?

My mind spun trying to digest her request, but only one thing made itself certain to me: I would ask those two to help me again if something important to me was on the line. Despite knowing I risked earning their ire, I had more to protect than met the eye if I wanted to stay true to myself.

“Man...”

I retied my hair and looked up at the moon, but not even the ever-shining Goddess of Night would bless me with the answer.

[Tips] At times, fey dances can cause fatigue intense enough to kill. Yet those who try to stop find themselves unable to pull away.

The church was an insular world. Though it had links to secular life of every class, the values and hierarchies of religious orders were determined almost entirely internally; for good or ill, each was its own world.

Being collectives dedicated to the act of offering their worship to gods and spreading Their teachings to the masses, this was in many ways a necessity. The faithful lauded nobles who renounced their worldly status as honorable, and graciously welcomed priests who studied from the lower castes of society; that sufficed for them in their closed systems.

However, they were not without their share of troubles.

The Trialist Empire of Rhine revered a pantheon of gods headed by Father Sun and Mother Moon; while theologians respected all those that presided over them, devotion was a practice exclusive to a single deity.

Naturally, the various churches stood in solidarity, sharing institutional structures and ranking titles to smooth over the process of cooperation. Yet so long as the gods competed for finite worship, it was inevitable that some would be on less than stellar terms with others. The divine, in Their indefinite squabbles to extend Their reach and secure Their divinity, relied on Their followers as plausibly deniable proxies; at the same time, those very followers split themselves into competing circles—power struggles were impossible to avoid.

While a certain blond boy would have written it all off as a bunch of obnoxious fanatics quibbling over minutiae, in truth, these affairs were the backdrop of great tales ranging the spectrum of comedy and tragedy.

As things stood, one of the premier sources of strife was the matter of species. If an immortal and a mortal knocked on the gates of a monastery at the same time, it was inevitable that the latter would climb the religious ladder more quickly; the undying were almost always slower to mature both physically and spiritually.

“Allow me to thank you again, dear Abbess. I shall be in your care.”

“You have done well to come...Sister Constance.”

Stratonice of Megaera, the Head Abbess of the Great Chapel, was the premier authority on the Night Goddess’s will in all the Empire and its satellite states. Today she faced the unsolvable challenge posed by the priestess kneeling before her: a subordinate and former mentor both.

The Head Abbess was a goblin, and at thirty, she was beginning to gray. Where most of her kind cared little for faith, she was a talented devotee who’d risen to the rank of bishop; during her time at Fullbright Hill, her fervent prayers had earned her the right to grand miracles. In the years following her initial studies, she’d roamed the lands, helping the needy and teaching the ignorant—achievements that the holy Mother had amply rewarded with more miracles still. She had all but reached the peak of her craft, and yet her large, golden eyes anxiously darted to and fro.

None could blame her: when she had been a wee runt in the custody of the church, her caretaker had been none other than the kneeling Cecilia she now faced. This girl had borne witness to all of her failures as a child, and had wiped up after her mistakes in many ways, worst of all literal.

Naturally, having a living record of her embarrassing past reappear in her pocket as a nun of no station put Stratonice on edge. Of course, she loved and revered the vampire for having looked after her and for teaching her the value of worship; even to this day, most of her theological positions were perfect models of her mentor’s.

Alas, how much trouble Cecilia represented was a different story. Not only was she an imperial—the same kind that was currently preparing to shuffle possession of the throne—but she was the sort of person to shoot down any mention of promotion by citing that she had yet to come of age. At times, the vampire had even threatened to bring her family into the discussion if the church dared to raise her beyond the rank of a simple priestess. What was she if not a ticking time bomb?

Balances of power were of great importance even amongst the religious. The everlasting were not to be given ranks lightly, and doubly so when the person in question was an heiress liable to renounce the cloth for secular life. Cecilia’s advancement had been discussed among the top authorities in the church on multiple occasions, only to have been invariably shot down.

But at the same time, she was the picture-perfect embodiment of an ardent believer, complete with the trust of their Goddess to wield Her power. Regardless of the political mumbo jumbo that surrounded her, she ought to have been a pastor—the minimum title required to lead a congregation—at the very least.

Instead, Cecilia had been practically left to her own devices, free to do whatever she pleased as a lowly nun without responsibilities, much to the horror of her pupil-cum-boss Stratonice.

“Please, won’t you call me Celia? I don’t suppose you’ve aged enough to forget our time together at Fullbright Hill, have you, Bishop Stratonice?”

“Very well...Celia. And though you may not remember, I have turned thirty this year. I cannot expect an imperishable soul like your own to grasp it, but I am well on my way into old age.”

It wasn’t as if Stratonice suspected this girl, still adorably asking to be referred to by nickname, of trying to play political games with her. If nothing else, the goblin was a woman of faith: she cared not for the prestige and distinctions she’d been bestowed with, and would have much preferred to return to the rank of a lowly priestess and set off on another pilgrimage if she could.

However, she was also conscious of her duties to the Church of the Night Goddess and all its followers. An average goblin lived roughly to forty, and she had already spent most of her time. She didn’t want to besmirch her twilight years by setting off a massive explosive. Perhaps the story would’ve been different had she been prepared to take responsibility herself, but she would be struggling to walk in another seven or eight years; leaving a catastrophe for her successor to handle didn’t sit right with her.

“Already? I can remember the day you first arrived at the monastery as if it were yesterday. Time passes so quickly.”

“What you perceive as quick rapids, I have waded through as a muddy stream.” The immortal’s profound surprise made the short-lived abbess want to sigh. “Come, let me prepare your room.”

Cecilia had come stating that her estate in the capital was an uncomfortable place, and that this opportunity to study in a place beyond the holy mountain must have been part of the Night Goddess’s will. That alone was fine. However, Stratonice could only pray that she wouldn’t bring imperial entanglements along with her, or that her unshakable piety wouldn’t cause any unforeseen problems.

The desire to treat her childhood caretaker just as well as she’d been treated clashed with the pure terror that came with stuffing a live, delicate bomb in her inner pocket. Unable to grumble in front of her mentor, the aging goblin bottled up her fears; marching through this conundrum to repay her debts as best she could was but another trial from the Goddess, or so she told herself.

“Oh, that won’t be necessary,” Cecilia said. “This bag is all I’ve brought. And I won’t be needing a personal room. Would you please lead me to the commons?”

“You never change, Celia. Would it not do to at least, say, bring along something more fitting of a girl your age? Our merciful Mother may emphasize purity in abstinence, but She does not forbid all manner of pleasure.”

“It simply isn’t for me. In fact, I recently found myself in a rather peculiar situation where I donned a so-called maidenly dress, but I quickly learned that I am best in these robes.”

The vampire’s continued extremism caused the abbess to worry. Although she was an ordained bishop, she had eight children—goblins generally gave birth to packs of three to five children at a time—and nearly fifty grandchildren; she was beginning to suspect that this immortal girl was going to spend the next eternity alone in the church.

The gods did not disapprove of marriage and childbirth; rather, They espoused it as one of the major trials in the act of worship that was life, teaching lessons about the joys and sufferings it entailed. The Harvest Goddess’s flock went so far as to consider the unwed to be fundamentally incomplete; while the followers of Night were not so extreme, a great deal of their clergy were married. When teaching a layperson, the burden of understanding ultimately fell on the learner, but those teaching their own children were responsible for their upbringing. Providing instructive compassion and love to one’s own flesh and blood was seen as the most difficult test of one’s character.

But wait, Stratonice thought. A corner of her brain bubbled up to pick out a tiny detail: the girl had said she was best in her robes, and not that her robes would do. Something must have happened to make her actively prefer them and consider them best suited for her...like, say, a compliment from a boy.

“Perhaps I spoke too soon. I suppose some things do change.”

Although the vampire looked nearly identical to when she’d last seen her, the sands of time had brought change with them, as they were wont to do. The reddish-brown skin full of wrinkles she’d inherited from her forest tribe scrunched up in a great big smile reminiscent of her childhood.

“Do you think so? I’ve stopped getting any taller of late, so I can’t help but believe my period of growth is over.”

“If I’m not mistaken, the average vampire matures after roughly a century, and slowly conforms to the appearance most comfortable to the soul, yes? You still have many years of growth ahead of you, Miss Cecilia.”

“Oh, please stop.” Cecilia frowned. “However will I carry myself if the Head Abbess refers to me so?”

“All is well if the person in charge allows it,” Stratonice said, slapping her mentor-slash-subordinate on the butt—she physically could not reach her back—and beckoning her on to a tour of the area.

The two of them visited the rooms for chores, charity, and prayer; then the abbess showed the nun the various minor temples that the masses frequented, and the schedules for service and instruction. When all was said and done, their stroll had taken quite some time.

This was an indulgent use of one’s day for someone as busy as the Head Abbess of the Great Chapel, but that meant little to a pair bound by ties as long-standing as theirs. Besides, Stratonice had blundered terribly in her dealings with the imperial heiress once before, and walking halfway around Berylin was nothing in comparison.

“How do you like the Great Chapel?” the abbess asked. “It isn’t quite as nice as Fullbright Hill, but isn’t this temple splendid?”

“Indeed. I’ve grown quite fond of it. The people of town seem much more austere and fervent in prayer than I’d imagined. I’m relieved to see that the rumors we’d heard of how callous the capital is were untrue.”

“I’m glad to hear that. Think of this as your new home and rest easy here for ten years, twenty—however long you wish.”

Giggling, Cecilia said, “Then I will take you up on that offer and relax here, devoting myself to serving the community.”

The vampire’s smile finally gave the abbess some peace of mind. Stratonice knew that the girl had been involved in some sort of incident before arriving; she didn’t know what that incident entailed, but suffice it to say that it was something major. As such, she saw no better way to repay her kindness than by preparing a sanctuary where she could unwind.

The undying were also oftentimes unmoving: once she settled in, she wouldn’t leave for another five to ten years at least. There was a real chance that Cecilia wouldn’t return to Fullbright Hill for another two or three decades. Stratonice felt blessed that she was in a position to offer and protect that sanctuary; at this rate, she would be able to rest in her final years with her mentor quietly devoting herself to further prayer.

“Oh, the bells,” Cecilia said. “My, is it that time already?”

Stratonice looked up at the darkening skies and saw the bells in every tower ringing. These tolls in particular were to notify the denizens of the capital that evening had arrived, and they marked suppertime at their own chapel. But just as she turned back to the vampire to invite her to the dining hall, Cecilia suddenly remembered a question and asked away.

“By the way, Bishop Stratonice, you spent some few years as a lay priestess, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did indeed. During my pilgrimage, I thought it would be a good opportunity for me to tour the countryside as well, and spent three...no, four years or so out there. I tried my hand at many a miracle and advanced my clerical rank, unordained as I was. I remember the journey fondly.”

“May I ask you for any tricks you learned during the endeavor?”

Tricks? The goblin cocked her head; she was half-doubtful of the girl’s intent, and half-surprised by the unexpected question. But little did she know, the walking bomb was ready to set off an explosion of cataclysmic scale as soon as she replied, “Why do you ask?”

“I have stumbled into a century to do as I please, so after studying here for a short while, I plan to travel the lands as a lay priestess.”

Tprg4.27

It truly was as pure as a virgin snow. The sight of it alone made saliva pool in my mouth; what ought to have been body temperature felt like boiling water too hot to swallow back.

Lady Franziska watched us with a wide smirk, her gaze a heavy net entangling us. Miss Celia’s eyes were downcast as she looked upon me. For all their similarities, the two faces before me were strikingly distinct.

Unable to withstand their gazes, I took her hand; to not would be to shame her.

Just like before, I moved in to bring my mouth close and then quickly pull back...but couldn’t.

Redder now, the hand in front of me came to meet me halfway. Vivacious enough to call the sensation of wetness to mind, her skin pressed into my lips with the quiet sound of a kiss. An observer might wonder if my heart had exploded, because a beat later, my face flashed bright red.

[Tips] A kiss placed on the back of the hand symbolizes love, reverence, and loyalty. The greeting is exclusively used from those of lower rank to those of higher; it will take some time before gentlemen come to employ it with ladies of their class. However, at times, a well-to-do woman will permit someone she holds dear to take her bare hand—an invitation to deeper bonds, perhaps...

Hanging us out to dry with a casual, “I shall leave thee to thy youths,” was not helpful. Doubly so following an event as embarrassing as that.

Miss Celia was perfectly unmoving, simply staring down with a bright red blush. I averted my eyes and reached for my steaming cup in search of some relief.

What am I supposed to say now?

I wasn’t explicitly uncomfortable, but the time ticked away with the awkward atmosphere lingering in the air. Around the time the kettle was drained and all the snacks were gone, I heard a clacking sound.

“...Will you join me in a game?”

“Huh?”

I looked up to see Miss Celia fidgeting, her face just as red and downcast as before.

“I-I’ve sent along a message to the College detailing your safe return with an invitation to the manor, so I imagine Elisa will join us shortly. My aunt has managed to locate Mika and is sending her a similar summons, and I suspect they will both arrive around the same time... S-So, while we wait, would you please join me in a match?”

I was too stupid to think, so I just nodded; she reached under the table and pulled out an ehrengarde set. She’d apparently gotten it from a drawer hidden below.

Sporting wooden marquetry, the thick board glimmered like a dance hall under the moonlight; in the box, white pieces fashioned out of pristine marble mingled with black pieces of pure obsidian. I picked one up with an unsteady hand and instantly recognized just how much more impressive it was compared to my hobbyist handiworks.

What surprised me most, however, was a realization brought on by my Keen Eye trait and the artistic sense it incurred: the pieces had been custom-made for this setting specifically. Every detail had been perfectly calculated to appear best under moonlight. I was absolutely certain that these were some of those infamous pieces that went for entire territories; she really did belong to an incredible family.

“If I recall, the first move...”

“...should be mine,” I answered.

It felt wrong to even touch such masterpieces, but I reached over and placed the stern-faced white emperor onto the board. White had the first move, and the rules dictated that both players were to start by placing their emperors and then their crown princes. For a short while, the sound of pieces echoed like a beautiful instrument as we placed their loyal subjects onto the field.

We filled the board at our usual bullet pace of five seconds per turn, but something was off. Both of us normally favored noncommittal openings that allowed for changes in strategy, but today she’d gone for a strong offensive start.

Her favorite empress was on the front lines as a matter of course, and a full squad of major pieces—including her emperor—were posturing forward without any intentions of hiding her attack. I’d begun placing defenders around the middle of the setup phase after seeing her army, but she could plow right through me if I slipped up.

We took brisk turns placing our pieces, developing the battlefield along organic lines. The nuance of the position shifted back and forth in a blink of the eye, transforming worthless pieces into linchpins and reducing vital units to dead weight; this was quintessential ehrengarde.

The awkwardness was less noticeable by the time we’d finished preparing the board, a distant memory by the fifth move, and completely absent by the time she invited me into a gambit on the tenth. Her every move was a new introduction, telling me, “Hello, this is who I am,” and I pushed my pieces with every intention of returning the favor.

Though we were in a different location, occupied different positions, and played with different pieces, nothing had changed at its core. She was still the same strong, honest player.

Her knight tore through a hole she’d made by sacrificing a pawn; the magus I’d begrudgingly placed to stymie her offensive fell to a dragon knight, further opening my fortifications. Her play felt like a heavy barrage of raw emotion. Each push of a major piece was precise enough to cause my position to creak, and my defenders fell like the withering teeth of an aging comb.

I took in the feelings imbued within her pieces and returned them with a counterattack of my own. Forgoing a panicked attempt to plug the leakage, I shifted my pieces away, trading them off to divert the course of her vanguards.

The end to our conversation devoid of words reared its head around the time her forward momentum fizzled out. Her minor pieces couldn’t keep up with the major ones in front, giving me the tempo to break her formation with a dragon knight. An archer—which could only take pieces one tile in front of it—blocked her retreat, meaning she had to choose whether to save her knight or dragon knight. Furthermore, my counteroffensive looked like it might have the steam to close the game out.

“The game is sealed.” She placed a piece, its click reverberating through the air like a bell, with the first words spoken in tens of minutes. Combined with the unique setting, these large pieces produced a very particular tone when hitting the board; the heaviest and most pleasing sound belonged to the emperor she’d marched forward for her last-ditch attack.

“It’s still too early to say that.”

This was more than a nicety: I was close to taking it home, but one of the peculiarities of this game was how the favored player had to stay on their toes. One piece shifted over by one tile was enough to turn an unattainable checkmate into reality. The one closest to winning had to squeeze the best out of their mind until the bitter end—in fact, it was commonly held that holding the lead was more mentally taxing.

The remnants of her army rallied to charge forth with reckless abandon, throwing themselves into the jaws of death for the slim hope of victory; I carefully picked apart the attackers and struck blow after crushing blow. The knight tumbled, unable to keep pace; the dragon knight plummeted to earth; the guardsman met his end defending the emperor.

“It is over.”

Having served as the conduit for incredible skill, the pieces and board produced a dramatic sound even as her cornered emperor fell. The ruler had taken his own life before I could deliver mate; I stared at the troops that survived him and heaved a profound sigh.

“You truly are you,” I said.

This exhausting game finally put my mind to rest. As short as our relationship thus far had been, I knew that being saved by Miss Celia wouldn’t totally overwrite what we had...but I’d been afraid that she’d become someone from another world.

Up until now, ours had been an accord between me and her. But now I knew her as Cecilia Bernkastel, and had gained a tie to her aunt who drew the same Bernkastel blood. Bonds draw people together, but so too do they tear them apart—especially for those separated by inherited barriers of class.

The fallen emperor symbolized much, but there was one thing I knew for sure: Miss Celia had not misrepresented herself in our time together, and was the same person she’d always been. Had she abdicated a few turns prior and pulled back part of her forces, she could have begun a war of attrition to wait out a mistake on my end. Yet she’d pushed forward in pursuit of victory, and eventually brought the game to a close by felling her own emperor.

Her play was the same as it had always been—she was the same Cecilia I’d always known.

It was time to make up my mind: even though her position demanded consideration, I would treat her as I always had.

“Then I must say the same of you, Erich.”

Her strong-willed, bloodred eyes loosened into a smile. Not one lacking strength, but one tinged with relief—maybe she felt the same as me.

Just as I’d thought, this match had been another first meeting. Delivered over the board, her introduction only emboldened the unshakable impression of her in my mind.

I am me; you are you. So long as we understood this, that was enough.

“My goodness, this watchman was so, so vexing!”

“I actually thought I may have misplaced it for the longest time, until...around here. This was where the game shifted, and I thought to myself, ‘I’ve got this!’ as soon as I saw this move.”

Smiling, the two of us tiptoed around the topic as we began our postmortem.

Basically, it boiled down to this: let’s keep being good friends.

Miss Celia froze in the middle of recreating a regrettable board state, placing a hand on her temple and closing her eyes. A moment later, she smiled and looked over at the door: knocking preceded two very welcome guests.

Despite looking a bit tired, Mika looked like the picture of health; Elisa had done her best to dress up like when she’d come to visit me at home.

Our moonlit tea party was about to become a wonderfully blissful victory banquet.

[Tips] The official rules say nothing on the matter, but common etiquette places the burden of declaring defeat on the loser.

Master Scene
Master Scene
A scene without PCs run entirely by the GM. The players are not the only ones who must deal with the aftermath of a story, and who knows? Perhaps an ending can lead to new beginnings...

Surely there were few who would find the epicurean seat so disagreeable to sit in. There were heaps of people who’d invested enough money to shake unsinkable dynasties, hanged countless innocents, and passed down their dogged persistence all in the name of seeing one of their own rest upon it.

“...Half a century ago, was it?”

Seated at the imperial desk, the masquerader of high rank—that is, Duke Martin Werner von Erstreich—kicked his feet up onto the table as if to punt away the fools who sought the throne without any ability to imagine the weight it came with.

“As awful to sit in as ever, I see. I struggle to see why the masses so dream of planting their asses into this chair.”

The vampire scoffed irritably and, as if his transgressions had not gone far enough, he crossed his arms and clicked his tongue. His actions were those of a punk acting tough at the pub; though they clashed terribly with his carefully set silver hair and imperial-purple robe, the mannerisms curiously fit the gentlemanly magus.

But rather, that ought to have been expected. Martin had complied with Erstreich family tradition in his youth: he’d spent his early decades far removed from imperial life, mingling with the common people. In his case, he’d roamed the low streets of Lipzi and led a gang out of a countryside bar; he was simply returning to his roots.

Funnily enough, the three men gathered in the room had all enjoyed similar boyhoods, as unimaginable as it may be to those beyond the walls. In other words, the imperial office home to the highest authority in the land had become a club for men unable to forget their years of juvenile delinquency.

“Vampires are some poor bastards. Not dying after that sure must be rough.”

“Agreed. A mensch in his state would have been pleading for a swift end.”

“How kind of you two to express your sympathies as if my plight is a foreign affair...”

Once more, the three leaders heading the imperial houses that would determine the Trialist Empire’s tomorrow found themselves in the Emperor’s private office—albeit their seats each shifted by one.

Clad in violet regalia, Duke Martin was to reprise his title as Martin I come a few months’ time; here sat the new Emperor, ready for a fourth term.

Across from him sat August IV, similarly ready to pass on the crown to become a grand duke—a title given to emperors who stepped down within their lifetimes, or kings of Rhinian satellite states—within the coming months. His stress appeared to have been shucked off along with his purple garb, as he wore his unembellished plain clothes with a brow less wrinkled than before.

Lastly, the werewolf watched on with the cool of someone wholly removed from any stakes. He’d seen the ridiculous fuss and the wild familial goose chase that had brought the Minister of Finance to tears—the bill for which fell to Martin I, the root of the whole ordeal—from the sidelines, and he shook his head disapprovingly. After all, the commander-in-chief of the Empress-to-be’s search had been none other than David.

Settling into a seat he’d long since forsaken, Martin I snapped his fingers to produce a stellar sheaf of parchment out of thin air. The stack of papers was pressure-bound into a thick booklet, and the pages were lined with intricate mystic formulae and oaths to the gods; the script, in and of itself, was a form of ritual.

Martin I sank his long canine into his left thumb and dipped a quill in the wound to complete the contract with blood. The form was an official request to call for the election that would enthrone him. Once written by the prospective new Emperor, signed off on by the sitting monarch, and accepted by the final imperial leader, the document would spontaneously combust and deliver a physically identical copy to each of the electorate.

The remaining parts were unflinchingly filled out in precise penmanship befitting of the scholar. Finally, he appended his signature with a bloody seal stamped in with his ring. All that remained was for the current Emperor and the imperial witness to offer their own signatures and seals, and the preparations would be complete.

“Here, it’s finished. Check it over.”

“As you will, Your Majesty.”

“And whomever might you be talking to? Your abdication isn’t even official yet...”

Ignoring the grumbling vampire, the retiring Emperor looked through the form to make sure everything was in order.

Though the forms that dealt with imperial succession were grandiose, the paperwork itself was exceedingly simple. When coming up with the legal code for succession, the Founding Emperor Richard had come to the conclusion that complications would lead to misinterpretations among the later generations. A discontinuation of the dynasty arising from invalid legal processes was no laughing matter, so the Emperor of Creation had slimmed it down to leave no room for interpretation.

As a result, while the petition to begin an election required a great deal of time and money to put together, the form itself was a far cry from the parade of esoteric euphemisms and complications that so often plagued imperial documents. Plain and simple, confirming its contents was easy and poking holes in it was hard. The smoothness of the affair drew no complaints from anyone; rather, if the noble bureaucrats of the Empire were ever to find out, they would surely go mad with envy that their papers were not the same.

“I see no issue,” August said. “All that remains is to finish negotiations.”

“As if it’d ever get stopped,” David said. “We already finished laying the groundwork.”

As soon as the sitting Emperor and final imperial added their signatures and seals, the contract burst into iridescent flames, burning away. To see divine power intertwined with magic to ensure the words within was a dreamlike scene that few would ever witness in their lifetimes—not that it meant anything to these three. They failed to show any sign of interest, instead just relieved to have one chore finished.

“A’ight, next up is the good old reunion.”

“It would be too cruel to press yet another burden into His Majesty’s hands: let us decide who shall oversee the task between us.”

“Oh, in that case, let’s settle this with a match of ehrengarde.”

“Not a contest of drink?”

“Nah, the doc’s got me off liquor.”

“Gentlemen,” Martin cut in, “this is a conference to decide the next Emperor. Would it be so much to ask for you to stop treating it like some casual get-together?”

A loyal citizen watching their exchange would have lost heart and even soul at how lackadaisically the Emperor-crowning convention was being planned, and the vampire ascendant sighed wearily.

Of course, perhaps it was inevitable: it only followed from the Trialist Empire’s origins that any inheritance of its crown would adhere to a rigid legal code.

The procedures had been mapped out to inhibit hasty insurrections—those thoughtless regicides that doomed other nations to slow and steady declines—while making sure the Emperor could be cut off and replaced the second he fell from grace. The whole thing was tuned on a brilliant balance between tension and release.

Mensch and werewolves were quick to change generations, and the immortal vampires had weaknesses both physical and mental; the electors who watched over these imperials were further varied in background. Historians who studied the Empire’s construction could often be found groaning about how solid its foundation was.

It was possible to rise to the top. Marriage, adoption, inheritance—the avenues to climb were far from limited. Yet the rules were harsh for those who wished to swipe the reins out from under the Empire. What was more, the countless responsibilities that came with the throne were contractually obligated of the sitter—escape was not an option.

The Emperor’s duties did not entail kicking back and using the lavish treasury to his heart’s content. He who oversaw the nation had his obligations defined in law and his authority accepted by the gods; giving the heavens one’s word and surrendering oneself to a mystic contract was no light commitment.

And so, the Empire found itself run by what boiled down to a big extended family.

“Y’know, Your Majesty, you sure did give in quick.” While his old friend prepared an ehrengarde set to settle the matter of party-planning liability, the werewolf turned his attention to the vampire.

“And? What of it?” Martin’s furrowed brow made his complaints plain: how dare he comment after conspiring to crown him?

“Well, I figured you’d quibble harder than this. Besides, there are tons of Erstreichs. Couldn’t you have just plucked some random kid to fill your spot?”

“So that’s what you were getting at...”

Despite the flagrant disrespect of the question, Martin I didn’t lose his cool; he only scoffed. Some would already have fainted at the sight of his uncouth posture, but he clasped his hands behind his head, descending yet further into the territory of the crass.

“Not all who covet authority are fit to wield it. None of my youths are worthy of the position.”

“Hard knocks.”

“While I personally find the throne no better than an aging toilet stained with shit, I love the Empire our forefathers created, and I will not see it careen toward an untimely end. So long as I have no plans to return the Sun God’s gift, I refuse to see this country to its end.”

Despite his commitment to merriment, Martin I was well aware that his clan’s five-hundred-year history was marred with an unceasing political war to determine the next head of household. What else could have spurred the masterstroke of espionage known as Schnee Weiss?

Handling internal matters while fulfilling all the obligations of an imperial duke was a burden that would crush an average person instantly. Worse still, Martin’s family was full of vampires: laden with immortal pride and unwilling to naturally disappear with time, it wasn’t as if they were all brimming with civic loyalty.

To begin with, vampires weren’t made for fealty. Their origin lay with the bastard who’d swindled the most eminent of gods; the nature of his descendants was a matter of course.

However, in what was perhaps the providence of the universe, those supplied with great ambition were not necessarily enriched with the gift of leadership. Just as his aunt hadn’t chosen her own offspring nor any other of their numerous kinsmen, he knew that each age required an Emperor fit for the times.

Having commanded the nation for nearly half a century, Martin I had an eye for discerning suitable rulers. Without it, the crafty old foxes heading the imperial and electorate families would have cast him aside as a talentless charlatan, not allowing him to chisel his name into history term after term.

So how could he possibly give up his work to a fool who wouldn’t see it through just because he didn’t want to do it himself?

“Pity me,” the vampire said. “I have seen many born to my house with talent enough to rise to power...”

“...But none who would wield it wisely.” The mensch finished the sentence apathetically, opening up a box of pieces as he did; the new Emperor nodded sadly in response.

It was a tale as old as time. Many were the revolutionaries who could seize the throne with great expertise, only to trip over the peak and tumble down to earth at rapid speeds.

But even when he took his fatherly bias out of the picture, of all his progeny, his daughter alone had the character of a statesman. She lacked the remotest desire for power and money; she was passionate about guarding both those currently under her protection and those who deserved it, but drew a clear line between what she could and could not manage on her own. The reports that returned from the agents he’d sent into the monastery painted a picture of the monarch the Trialist Empire needed in its hour of peace.

The man currently setting up a board game had trampled over the bothersome federation of minor states that had been blocking the Eastern Passage—there would be no major wars for the foreseeable future. What the Empire needed next was an Emperor who would take the great winnings of this generation and look inward to strengthen its domestic foundation.

Martin I knew that his daughter was benevolent, but not thoughtlessly so. If he and his family supported her, he was confident she would have made a fine Empress, and thus he’d resolved to hand her the reins accordingly.

Had Cecilia been the type of blithering idiot to stumble over herself in the name of spreading charity, Martin I would have been content to love her only in the personal sense, reducing her political importance to a liaison between state and church. Yet she had reawakened an inherited power long dormant: forty-five years of experience became instinct, whispering in his ears that the girl was destined for high places.

His daughter currently lacked any official rank on account of the church reserving its judgment due to her imperial connection, as well as the girl’s personal renunciation of pedigree. However, this recent episode would serve to help slowly erode those stoppers, so she was sure to rise up in due time. After all, the Head Abbess of the Great Chapel had studied directly under none other than Cecilia; the leader of Night trembled at the thought of stepping on her venerable mentor’s toes even to this day.

Martin I had begun this internal debacle because the situation had called for it, but his sheer, utter, inescapable distaste for the throne had not been the only reason for his decision. She would one day be an archbishop—or maybe lead the entire church. While this would have been fine enough for any other doting father dreaming of his child’s success, every parent’s greatest wish was to pass on what they had built. Mixed into his ridiculous plans was a tinge of vicarious ambition.

Whatever the case, the terrifying Empress’s appearance to the scene had brought it all to an end. If he tried anything in the next hundred years, he’d end up half-dead—“half” being a gross understatement—once again.

“Besides,” Martin I resumed, “I have some pride yet. I can’t let myself be a pathetic father forever.”

“What the hell’s that mean?”

The new Emperor sighed to signal he would not answer the werewolf’s question; instead, he simply shut his eyes, still using his hands as a pillow. He’d dreamed of saddling his daughter with the title while he handled the busywork—until she was fit to take over the whole operation, of course. Alas, the fantasy had crumbled. His only recourse was to work diligently until he could regain the reliability and dignity of fatherhood.

There was no need to rush. His daughter was blessed with the fortune to find the one piece in her arsenal that could counter him, and she had the guts to involve herself with that walking catastrophe she called a great-aunt.

One day, he was sure, one day she would rise to the political stage. Whether she wished for it or not, she who had the makings of an empress was fated to be dragged up eventually.

After all, blood was ever thicker than water.

To leave her to her own devices for a century or so at his aunt’s command was an easy order in the grand scheme of things.

“You know,” David said, “taking that backwards means you’re confident you’ll be able to make everything work out while you’re on the throne. That’s a hell of a thing to say.”

“Indeed,” August concurred. “Immortal arrogance pervades his every word.”

“Why must you two vex me so?! Perhaps I should put you to death with my own two hands!”

“A crying shame! Persons of our peerage can only be executed for violation of imperial succession or high treason!”

“Argh! Damn! And here I would have been happy to chug a glass of poison at your order, Your Majesty! But the almighty Emperor of Creation has written laws against it!”

“Excuse me?! Fine! Then I’ll grind the military budget down to nothing, and cut the dragon knight units by half—I don’t plan on needing them anytime soon! Any spare expense will get the axe under my rule, so have fun quaking in your boots!”

“What?!”

The office at once became a room of yapping fools, and to certain people, a toxic chalice would have been a far better fate than listening to them whine. Eventually, the trio agreed to play an ehrengarde tournament to decide the national budget. The result? No major changes for the time being.

“Still, what shall I do about the College’s funding?” Martin I muttered, listlessly toying with the sculpted magus in his hands. Intricately fashioned out of silver, the piece portrayed a hooded figure carrying a long staff. Though it couldn’t move and attack at once, it was able to pick off an enemy piece one to two tiles away—as strong as it was idiosyncratic.

Being an accomplished governor, the vampire was also a skilled—and particularly nasty—player who could utilize magia well. Back when he’d first shown his toddler daughter the rules, his dirty play had caused her to cry; perhaps the trauma ran deep, fueling her continued commitment to honest brute force over the board.

“What cause is there for concern?” August asked. “The Emperor is entitled to some few privileges—you shall not hear a word from us if you choose to subsidize your own interests, Your Majesty. It is one of the few luxuries that comes with the crown.”

“Fair enough,” David said. “But I dunno if setting up so many drake stables in every region that you filled out two whole units with new drakes falls within those bounds...”

“Leave me be. They were a great asset in the eastern conquest—I remember the roaring cheers from below as aerial reinforcements soared past, even now. Besides, I would tread lightly if I were you. While your father’s expansion of the jagers was within reason, I struggle to see how you might justify the massive arsenal he commissioned.”

“Well,” Martin sighed, “at least you two have hobbies that align with national interests. One imprudent shift in funding will put me into the domain of nepotism and sully my position.”

Twirling the piece in hand, Martin I called to mind the monsters that lined the seats of the College’s professoriat. Just imagining them made him depressed.

His personal relationships with them were fine. Each and every one was an irredeemable pervert, but they weren’t the sorts of madmen who holed up in towers to fashion an end to the world, nor were they psychopaths who amputated living people and welded them back onto others.

Yet it was a lost cause when they came together. They had obscene egos without exception, and any debate was doomed to devolve into a mortal battle of tongues. In the worst—yet very plausible—case, gloves could fly and give way to an all-out cadre war. The cherry on top was that this potentially Empire-ending farce took place a stone’s throw away from the palace; the trouble they caused was impossible to describe in words.

Back when he’d been just another one of their number, Professor Martin hadn’t given any thought to the headaches he’d caused his aunt. But now that he had to deal with the repercussions himself, his mind had begun to drift to ideas like, Wouldn’t it just be easier to kill them all off? He would have at least liked to exile them to some remote location, but that carried its own host of inconveniences. The College was an unsolvable problem.

It wouldn’t have been quite this bad for a normal Emperor. Any other in the hot seat would have been able to mediate their spats impartially and determine their funds by deferring to national policy; the only minutiae left would be to make sure to split it evenly enough to avoid favoritism.

Alas, Martin I had every manner of vested interest. His old stamping grounds were full of connections: classmates, dorm mates, research buddies, and worst of all, mentors whom he still couldn’t talk back to. He may have drawn a line in the sand, but if one of his ancient tutors came out of the woodwork, it would be too much for him to bear.

Having a war of funding waged from above and below was certain death for anyone. No matter how indestructible the flesh may be, the mind cannot survive. Every meeting would be preceded by enough private comments of, “But Professor, I thought you cared about your students!” and, “Come to think of it, don’t you still owe me for that one time?” to kill a man; no matter how things turned out in the end, he’d hear gripes about it for centuries to come.

Unfortunately, trying to find someone to whom he could delegate intermagia negotiations to was difficult. Anyone well versed in magecraft and familiar with the inner workings of the College was sure to already belong to a cadre, and avoiding interference from within those factions would be... “Wait.”

The statuette in his hand brought something to mind: he could set up the perfect liaison.

He knew of a researcher who was unbelievably brilliant for her position, who didn’t seem particularly devoted to her scholarly clique—the dean of her cadre had spoken of her like a troubled schoolgirl—and who hailed from a foreign house too opulent for domestic nobles to easily sway her. Better yet, she boasted a racial immunity to disease and senility, and she could be counted on to not die to a rolling breeze. Her estate’s incalculable wealth meant that a mere territory or two would be far from enough to bribe her.

It was as if the Gods of Cycles and Trials both were looking down upon him, linked at the shoulders, thumbs pointed up, and were wishing Martin I the best of luck. She was the perfect candidate for his sacrif— stand-in for College affairs.

“Say, Duke Baden...”

“Yes, Your Majesty?”

“Agh?! Gustus, wait! Hold that dragon knight! I wasn’t looking over there!”

“No take-backs, Duke Graufrock.”

“That’s right—don’t be so pathetic, Duke Graufrock. But I might add that I would move that archer forward if I were you.”

“Oho, gotcha. And then this guardsman’ll come alive, so I can take down this knight over here...”

“Your Majesty, was that not in poor taste?”

The Emperor ignored his predecessor’s oozing glare of contempt and placed the figurine on his desk with an emphatic clack. He had spent quite some time away, and needed a refresher on certain aspects of the law.

“Where might I find the legislation that details how to ennoble a foreign aristocrat?”

[Tips] Very few imperial candidates have been struck down by the electorate, and the emperors who have been chased out of office for their failures can be counted on one hand. High treason that causes great harm to the nation can also become an emperor’s downfall, but fortunately, the Empire has yet to see any of its rulers bare their necks for such crimes.

Tprg4.26

[Tips] Invitational procedure is a practice amongst the purest of nobility, and those who win honorary titles for their accomplishments often forgo the formalities. Any professor at the College, for example, is sure to have learned the value of a quick turnaround during their time as a researcher.
That said, many do learn the rules of formal invitations for use with their most prominent backers. The achievements needed to go from a unigenerational noble to a true mainstay in the upper crust are as difficult and expensive as breaking into high society in the first place.

“My precious Cecilia! What stirs thee with sun so high? Never thee mind, hear this: I ha’ been serenaded by this mensch lad’s mawkish phrase. Perchance my confidence is yet meant to wither.”
Nuh-uh.
Okay, she wasn’t strictly wrong speaking from an impartial perspective, but nuh-uh. And sure, if it came to a yes-or-no of whether I could spend a night with her, I would be more than happy to—ahem. Anyway, nuh-uh, this was slander.
And Miss Celia, can you stop looking at me all shocked? I can tell that you’re basically thinking, “You’re into MILFs?!” from your expression alone.
Unfortunately, to object here would mean I’d lied to a noble, and that would definitely worsen the situation. The best I could do was avert my eyes; I would’ve loved to defend myself, but shame wasn’t grounds for social misconduct.
At this point, there was only one thing left to do: give up and own it.
“Neither race nor age can play a part in captivation. Those granted true glamor will draw sighs of infatuation by presence alone. As poorly spoken as I am, I simply attempted to put that beauty to words.”
“Hark! Hast thou heard him, poppet?! My, what a villain I am. To think I might woo a fledgling son of mensch by mine company alone!”
The more heartily the woman laughed, the colder the young lady’s glare became. Uh, you know, I was beginning to worry that the masked nobleman had just been a midboss to prepare for a climactic fight here. Could I please catch a break? I was out of resources and my stamina had been ground down to near zero—mainly in the psychological sense.
It was nothing short of astonishing that paltry praise from someone like me could please this woman so, but she was clearly the highest-ranking person present; I preferred this over her mood souring by a mile. Though it cost me a pair of wet eyes to do it, I managed to snap out of my stupor and finally reroute the conversation toward more important matters.
“Though you have honored me with your graceful presence and allowed me to remark on your elegance, I beg you to grant me an additional request. May I be so fortunate as to put a name to this icon of beauty?”
“Hm? Ah, I ha’ indeed failed to announce myself,” she said, in a tone that suggested this was the first time she’d considered it. Putting a finger to her chin and groaning for a moment, she paused, and then said, “Franziska. I am Franziska Bernkastel.”
I figured you’d have a last name.
Family names in the Empire were weighty things reserved for the ruling class and those acquainted with them. They were so tightly guarded that the easiest way to get one was for the keeper of a noble’s estate to produce decades of substantial crop yields.
Some passed down hidden names, whispering to their children that they were once part of an honorable lineage, but that was an exception that didn’t serve much purpose. No matter the world, people loved to take pride in distant relations in high places. I’m sure if we took every one of these claims seriously, half the Empire would be the sons of Richard the Creator.
Jokes aside, the lack of a winding list of names didn’t change the fact that she far outranked me, and it was a pleasant coincidence that she shared the name of my favorite poet.
“Wait,” Miss Celia said, “but—”
“Let it be, let it be. Defer to me, my babe.” Lady Franziska turned to me. “Now, boy, that thou hast solicited mine identity betrays queries yet unposed. I blame thee not: to wake in an manor unfamiliar without a shred of thy trappings begs answers.” Covering her mouth for a laugh, she added, “Had I been in thy position, I would ha’ torn the place apart long ago.”
Something about the pair’s exchange felt fishy, but I couldn’t tell which way their conversation had been headed. Was Miss Celia worried about giving away their family name so casually? Or perhaps...
“The tale is long,” Lady Franziska said, joyously rising to her feet. “I gather thou wilt never find thy footing so enfolded; we shall not bring thee harm, so repose a moment to relinquish thy bedwear for more befitting togs. I ha’ been possessed by an especial humor today. Take thy time—my cup overfloweth with it.”
Miss Kunigunde had hidden herself away with a look of pure disengagement, but resumed her post at the grand dame’s orders. I supposed there were spare clothes just lying around in a mansion so plainly extravagant.
“And though I care not...Cecilia, what art thou wearing?”
“Huh? ...Oh.”
Finally noticing her appearance, Miss Celia’s skin went redder than a flame under her thin nightgown. She must have rushed here in a state of alarm—which implied that this aunt of hers was so dangerous that she felt the need to rush—because she only had on a thin silk underdress. In terms of exposure, Lady Franziska was throwing a massive boomerang, seeing as her tunic covered far less; however, the way the light cast a silhouette of her frame under a lone layer of fabric was...well, it was worse for the eyes than someone brazenly letting it loose.
The outline of her girlish arms and legs was plain to see; the hazy contour that bled through her clothes betrayed a maturing body, its enchanting pull enhanced by the opacity of its filter. Juggling the push and pull of these elements and picking only the most understated words, I would have described her as...crazy sexy.
I couldn’t help it! I spent my first life in a country where the ambiguous line right before exposure was the height of eros! Sue me!
Besides, I was in a middle-schooler’s body! You should know what that means!
Gods, was I thankful that I didn’t have any blood to spare for superfluous causes.
“I...um! Uh!”
Miss Celia waved feverishly in a fruitless attempt to cover herself as her overheating brain ground to a halt, lowering her verbiage into the grave. She made a few attempts at producing some sort of excuse, but ended up doing no more than silently gaping like a fresh-caught fish before fleeing the scene.
Her departure smushed the tightly packed carpet out of shape, and I could smell something smoldering. A terrific sound rang out too, probably caused by an obscene amount of friction. Notes of embarrassment were palpable in the charred odor wafting my way.
“How naive, oh how sweetly innocent she is,” Lady Franziska said. “What a joy to behold—dost thou not feel younger just watching her?”
“My sincerest apologies,” Kunigunde replied. “I am unfortunately too young to share in your sensibilities.”
“Come again? Hast thou lost count of the years spent at my side alone?”
“Rounded down, I am no more than a newborn.”
“How easily this maid of mine forsakes three digits...”
Ignoring the dumb banter between master and servant, I shook my head and massaged my eyes. Futile as it was, I was trying to wipe away the distracting image burned into my retinas. Frankly, the dangerous beauty’s naked body—note that I did not say the beauty’s dangerously naked body—didn’t come close to putting as much burden on my mind as the modestly hidden frame of a girl who looked about my age. As I shook my head back and forth, I heard a scolding jingle in my ear.

[Tips] The Trialist Empire subscribes to more rigid views on feminine virtue than modern Earth. Men more often than not face the consequences of an accidental peek, whatever that may entail—whether they are murdered in the social sense or outright depends on the circumstances.

“May I have an explanation?”
Scrunching up her pretty face into a frown, Cecilia tugged on her hastily thrown-on loungewear and glared at her great-aunt. Theresea had entered without so much as waiting for the girl to get changed, and whether she truly intended to hide her grin was dubious, given how much of it spilled out over the sides of her fan.
“In plainest exegesis, dear niece of mine: this old dame hath not spent her years slumbering, and I thought to put my wisdom to good use on thy behalf.”
Laying on a couch, the empress spoke the same words that adults of every class and kith repeated around the globe. Grown-ups invariably had once been children, and it was precisely because of their youthful mistakes that they lectured and restricted those who came after. There were some events in life that only provided a single lesson: that they were better left not experienced.
“The blood coursing through our veins is far darker, far heavier than thou can know.”
The nun tried to retort that she knew as much, but the words got stuck in her throat. She looked to her grandaunt: although her eyes narrowed to match a showy smile, the beads gleaming within sorely lacked playful spirit.
“Blood maketh man; so too does it spell his end. ’Tis fixed as the stars. As said since time immemorial, let the horses work as horses may.”
Theresea delivered her statement with a chuckle devoid of laughter. Her smile was perfect, she produced the right sounds, and her body shook in an approximation of amusement, but at its core, her actions lacked true sentiment.
Separated from her emotion, the woman’s words took the form of maxim: men were the product of blood—of their births. Just as a workhorse could not play the part of a gallant martial steed, the lowborn could not don the airs of nobility.
Those born to a fate of common life would see out the destiny engraved in their veins and die a common death; those born to titled fortunes surrendered themselves to their heritage. The two did not mix. Not ever. Forcibly combining incompatible halves wrought nothing but tragedy. Just as a drop of filth corrupted a whole barrel of fine wine; just as the finest wine could not cleanse the waters of the sewers.
“Thou art taken by that evanescent mortal, art thou not? Then listen to thy kind, caring aunt when she speaks: let not the burden of thy blood see light. Blood is our maker, and it shall sweep along those in its current as long as it flows in the peoples of the world.”
Then her imperial background was best left hidden. Perhaps there were some who would accept her anyway—who would continue to honor her as a person first.
But they would undoubtedly see her as different.
The more clever the companion, the more perfectly they would replicate their current relationship while decisively distorting their position within it. How could anyone hope to casually associate with the most prestigious persons in their motherland?
Perhaps there would have been a chance if Cecilia were dealing with a person of reputable peerage. History had plenty of examples of loyal vassals maintaining close friendships with their lieges.
But the boy was lowborn: he was a mensch child with no story or background to his name. From the Empire’s perspective, a single breath could blow away thousands just like him. A mere commoner with nowhere to turn could not hope to stand against the authority that ruled the nation. Cecilia could accept him all she wanted; the upper class would never allow someone to corrupt their values, or worse still, damage their worth.
A child could find the shiniest stone in all the lands, cradling it to bed every night, but no adult would acknowledge its value. If they deemed it unseemly, then off into the river it went, never to be seen by the child again.
To be held dear, the article had to befit the holder. Or, if that proved impossible, then the holder had to step down to its level.
“Alas, to be drawn to fleeting embers of life is an illness guaranteed to all unripe immortals. A sweet plague that shall last thee a lifetime.”
Cecilia only knew this woman as her sweet, loving great-aunt. She had completely forgotten that Theresea Hildegarde Emilia Ursula von Erstreich had once been a verifiable empress in her own right. In the past, the Delicate Empress had hidden away her years and the lessons they told out of a doting love for her grandniece, but the intimidating aura of a ruler now began to take tangible form.
Theresea snapped her fan shut, exposing a perfectly set smile that seized her niece. Her voice slithered into the back of Cecilia’s head like a venomous cobra, leaving a massive locked box within which to store these words in her mind forevermore: “Bedevil him not.”
As the words sank into the young priestess’s very soul, she understood: Ahh, she still carries her remorse with her. Such was the only explanation for why the aunt would go so far to prevent Cecilia from repeating her error so early in life.
“Well, I suspect my reproval shall keep the pup—ah, thy father—obediently at the helm for another century. Carry thyself as thou shalt in the meantime. To be the daughter of an esteemed house remains freer than an imperial, remember.”
As she spread her fan and rose, the ancient vampire’s hollow smile regained true emotion.
“Time enough to see him off, thou wilt agree.” The nun remained frozen, unable to parse the cognitive toxin passed down by her foremother; Theresea looped around to lay a hand on the girl’s shoulder and smiled. “Consider this hundred years a gift of mine for thy hard work...but I pity he who waits. Learn thy part quickly—fret not, the settings of a playwright shan’t crumble. Crafted in five minutes though they may be, our backstory will endure.”
And so, the girl donned a new identity for the time being. Whether it was the product of genuine consideration or some other scheme, she knew not. All she knew was that she was Cecilia—Cecilia Bernkastel.

[Tips] One will sooner find a snake and hen married in Rhine than a noble and commoner.

Perhaps a round of thanks was in order to the esteemed von Leizniz for accustoming me to fine clothes. Or maybe I was better off sulking in shame about enabling her fetishes to the point that I’d grown used to them. Though this was a quandary for the ages, for now I looked at my reflection and was satisfied with how I’d turned out.
I wore a black doublet with a high collar up top, with shorts that went over a set of sleek white tights. While the clothes were refined, the overall look was simple; I’d probably been given a steward’s uniform, and one stylish enough to not stick out when serving upper-class guests, at that. That the garments were jaw-dropping but clearly less remarkable than anything the master of the house might wear was a delicate touch that blatantly spoke to the sheer money around me.
There was only one possible explanation for why they kept a stock of such high-quality goods on hand: need. Their possession of a spare set of threads fit to wear in front of the most refined elites meant they kept that sort of company, and the staff’s ability to don these clothes without appearing ridiculous spoke to their thorough training.
Seriously, how distinguished was this family? I noticed that Lady Franziska didn’t employ a nobiliary particle, but I’d heard of influential clans rescinding their nobility for political reasons while retaining their leverage. There were also a handful of families who were granted the right to a last name for continued service to the Empire in a system like that of Edo-era estate stewards.
“My, it quite suits you.”
Miss Kunigunde looked somewhat surprised when I stepped out of the changing room. These sorts of clothes tended to tighten up in spots ordinary shirts and doublets didn’t, so people untrained in how to properly wear them usually couldn’t pull them off.
“Well,” I said, “I’ve been through a lot.”
“I should think you would do fine as an attendant here with how flattering you make the uniform.”
We enjoyed a bit of chitchat as she led me along, but unfortunately, I didn’t have the background to join the ranks of upper servitude. As an aside, she let slip in the midst of our back-and-forth that the starting wage for an upper servant in this manor was determined in drachmae—in which case, maybe the old joke about butlers from the biggest families making more than rural barons had some truth to it.
I followed the maid for a while, enjoying the small talk and growing awestruck at the fortune required to line even the hallways with carpet. At last, we stepped outside into a roofed walkway that led to a greenhouse.
The building was structured like a birdcage with pristine glass—uniform sheets of glass were practically gems under current Rhinian technology—lining the gaps in the frame. It seemed less like a nursery for fickle plants and more like a place to host garden tea parties under temperate conditions even in the dead of winter.
There was one quirk, though: despite all the glass, I couldn’t see a thing. The interior was pitch black.
“Please wait here for the time being.”
When she opened the door, I was so incapable of processing the scene in front of me that my brain shut down. It was night.
I stepped into the grassy greenhouse and found myself in a cut-out patch of nighttime. Looking up, the round moon led its loyal stars in a dazzling glow of lights. This wasn’t a trick of painted glass meant to fool children, nor was it a mystic recreation of faraway scenery like the madam’s atelier; the cool, tranquil air was unmistakably that of serene midnight.
“No way... What kind of blessing is this?”
I didn’t have to ponder too deeply to know this was the work of a miracle. Neither the expression nor my understanding had any defect: this was an outright miracle that had been brought to reality by the will of gods. Vampires could only know true respite at night, and this was undeniably a relic from the Mother Goddess so that Her followers could rest easy in the day.
The divine power present was so strong that even I could sense it; ancient in origin, I could tell that this had been a gift bestowed on grounds of favoritism. Which meant that Miss Celia descended from someone worthy of this level of heavenly intervention.
Getting myself in order, I sat down at the lowest seat at the round table prepared in the middle of the room. Now that I had a moment to myself, I could spend it trying to sort out how I’d found myself here...or I could look at my experience points.
The reasonable part of my brain nagged that I shouldn’t turn my attention away from reality, but this was all so muddled that I couldn’t make heads or tails of it anyway. Knocking on death’s door had left my memories foggy, and I’d been barraged by an endless assault of surprises that I’d consistently failed to save against. I was pretty sure that my average roll was undercutting my usual five today.
So distracting myself with a bit of fun was fine, right?
“Whoa.” Summoning my character sheet, I let slip an audible gasp of awe at how much I’d stocked up. Combined with the fruits of my daily labors, this episode that had left me flirting with fatality earned me more than my first big adventure, where the madam had thrown me into the daemon-infested mansion. Maybe welcoming a new dawn served to load me up with a bonus for clearing the campaign.
I was ecstatic. In fact, I could almost forgive the GM for how badly they’d dropped the ball on balancing every encounter I’d ever had.
Of course, when a real GM had done that to me, my friends and I had jeered, “What, apology gems?! That’s pathetic! Give us more!” We ended up forgiving him after laying out some D4s in the guy’s shoes and all having a good laugh.
What about the next session, you ask? Well, the laid-back nature of the game got thrown out the window, so we jacked up our characters with optimal builds and foiled every conspiracy in the land with brute force, plowing through every gimmick and story beat the GM prepared along the way. Schemes meant nothing in the face of someone whose brain was muscular enough to punch a man to death.
Anyway, this payday was spectacular. My longtime dream of double Scale IXs in Dexterity and Hybrid Sword Arts could become a reality, and I’d still have enough experience left to experiment with new combos or dip into things I’d been putting off.
And now that I was looking closer...I saw that I’d unlocked some upper-level miracles of the Night for purchase. Maybe this was Her way of thanking me for helping one of Her own. Or perhaps this avenue opened up after involving myself with a family so clearly interlinked with Her.
Regardless, I would have to pass. Being the motherly figure of our pantheon, Her repertoire mainly dealt with defense and healing; not to be rude, but it didn’t line up with my build. While the passive blessings like improved sleep or night vision were tantalizing, I would feel bad if I professed my faith for those alone.
Religious conduct in this world was not the same as in Japan; frequenting shrines devoted to the god of scholarship just before taking entrance exams would not fly. With verifiable gods sending out genuine prophetic messages, claiming loyalty for purely practical purposes would backfire and come off as an act of disrespect.
Picking up some luxury options would be nice, but perhaps it was time to start preparing to set off. I’d gotten by on my Apprentice-level Camping skill until now, but Mika had taught me some basic building principles that let me unlock the enticing Basic Construction. Things like Campfire Cooking, First Aid, and Basic Medicine seemed evergreen if I planned on making any long journeys too.
Down the line, if I ever ended up leading a party of adventurers, skills and traits to command them would be in order. Not the kind that so often showed up in cheap CG sets, mind you—there weren’t any skills that convenient anyway, and trying to fashion a spell to that end would cost a fortune—but some leadership perk to organize a small squad.
Otherwise, I could always get value out of the Negotiation skill, and the litany of traits that improved others’ impressions of me drew my attention like twinkling stars.
Furthermore, there was a part of me that had been dormant in my childhood that now nudged my tastes toward a certain pile of skills...
“Mine apologies for the wait.”
An ice-cold bucket of water—no, of liquid nitrogen—appeared to douse my mind the instant my line of thought began to grow feverish. That I managed to spring to my feet without knocking my chair backward was probably an act of god. Why did this woman have to appear without any forewarning? Even Lady Leizniz sent in her manservant—me—to announce her arrival before entering a room.
“Wow...”
My ire dissipated in an instant. Clad in a wonderful gown, Miss Celia’s elegance stole the show, depriving me of the spare computing power to contemplate trivial grievances.
“Um,” she murmured, “it’s embarrassing to have you stare.”
“Let my niece’s charms excuse our tardiness, wilt thou? Selecting her attire proved arduous, what with the pointless clamor of wanting her robes or not wanting her outline to show...”
“Of course not! Great—great lengths of time have passed since the outfits you put forward were considered in style, Aunt Franziska! Nowadays, we don’t show so much shoulder, and we do not have slits to expose the leg!”
Miss Cecilia was dolled up in a classic afternoon dress. Puffed at the shoulders and fanning out at the skirt, it was the quintessential garment that most imagined when hearing the word “dress.” The deep, auric gleam of the cloth was like water under light, bringing out the best in her jet-black hair.
Flowers were woven across its surface in like colors: not large blooming petals that demanded attention, but small, scattered blossoms that accentuated her refined grace. Despite likely being a hand-me-down from her aunt, it matched her perfectly, as though the tailor had prepared it for her from the start.
“Say what thou wilt, but thy features are like mine—at their best when extravagantly framed. Simple garb and unweening powder shall waste thine ancestry. Look at this travesty: thou art no different from a mensch older than thee. If only thou wouldst accept a streak of rouge, at least.”
“I’m fine as I am! And what of you, Aunt Franziska?! H-How can you call those clothes?! They’re practically cloth and string! Are you stupid?! Forget your ankles, your thighs are in plain view!”
Her hair was tied up in ladylike fashion and held in place with ornaments that did not overpower. She was the picture of a noble girl; the air about her compelled me to kneel. I didn’t quite know how to describe it. Something about her manner spoke to an inherited dignity—one unattainable by an upstart—and it left an impression. Perhaps I would have appeared this way to others if I could tap into aristocratic traits.
...You know what? I think those traits that affect how I’m viewed are pretty important. I should think it over and grab a few, seeing as I’m almost an adult.
“This is eastern fashion,” Lady Franziska said. “When the Eastern Passage flowed freely, I secured these garments in the style of a faraway dynastic tradition. Mock not the culture of a foreign realm.”
“But they say not to fill a domestic chalice with foreign liquors! And the sitting Emperor has already reopened the Eastern Passage!”
I’d been lost in Miss Celia’s appearance this whole time, but an uptick in the conversation’s intensity brought me back into the moment. I’d managed to pull out chairs for them to sit in, but I’d totally lost track of what they were saying.
“What thinkest thou, boy? Dost thou not wish to see my niece forsake the fashion of an aging crone to make better use of her endowments?”
“Excuse me?” My voice cracked under the surprise at having been reeled in. Feel free to praise me for not answering with a dumbfounded “Huh?” instead.
“Long arms and legs are best viewed unclad. To take after me may overmatch thee, but must thou pick sleeved dresses for thy eveningwear? And that wretched cape thou clingst to...”
“A lady is at her best when chastely dressed! Erich, don’t you agree?!”
“Huh? Right.” Oh, I guess they were talking about clothes. Honestly, I thought Miss Celia would look good in anything, but saying that out loud would probably be poor form.
In my past life, I’d said something similar to a woman I’d been seeing and received half an hour of grief for my troubles. I hadn’t been trying to give a cop-out answer either—I’d really meant it.
“Speak, boy. Art thou not curious? Not interested in witnessing my darling’s allure in a different light from that of her nightwear?”
Lady Franziska’s voice oozed lasciviousness; it was as if she’d cast a spell to worm into my ear and rouse my memory of Miss Celia’s pajamas. The image triggered a cascade of racy outfits—when had my brain planted itself in a permanent state of holiday daybreak, anyway?!—to flood my mind, causing my cheeks to go red.
That said, I hadn’t been born yesterday; I whipped up a smile and politely answered, “I think her current outfit suits her wonderfully,” without delay. I knew that not even the most handsome of men could get away with open lust outside of a pub.
“And besides,” I added, “I think she looks best in her holy robes.”
Wait, what? Why’d I say that out loud? Although it was the honest, unfiltered truth, I was well aware that the statement risked coming off as a disparagement of her current attire.
Suddenly, I heard a loud thud. I looked over to see Miss Celia had banged her forehead onto the table. Looking closely, I saw her pale complexion had turned bright red all the way to the tips of her ears... Apparently, I’d stumbled into a heart-palpitation-inducing land mine.
Lady Franziska opened her fan and began merrily laughing at her silent niece. After a brief gleeful spell, she rang a small bell to order tea.
“My word. I shall consider it a stroke of fortune that we had yet to lay out our cups. I am reminded of how I ha’ been pondering the issue of what thy reward ought to be, boy. But mayhaps the answer is here.”
My heart went aflutter upon seeing the serving tray lined with red tea and deluxe snacks. No one in the Empire could begin tea time without excitement in their heart.
“Perchance it would be best to give thee my niece as thy bounty?”
“Aunt Franziska?!”
But man, was this woman good at causing a commotion. I nearly dropped the teacup I’d just taken into hand, and Miss Celia almost destroyed the table when she shot up and grabbed her aunt for crossing the line. Lady Franziska’s initial impression may have been dramatic, but she was just incredible all around.
You know, maybe it would be best to consider saving my experience stash for the nebulous future...

[Tips] Aristocrats are trendsetters, and trendsetters are prone to seeking out the most striking styles. As a result, merchants scour foreign lands for new material that they can subsequently tweak to suit the ostentatious tastes held by lovers of exoticism. The culture that is ferried across international trade routes is not always as authentic as one might expect.

Though we had a quick diversion where a full tank specced out on racial bonuses—note that I didn’t say anything about whether or not she could deal damage—tossed around a purely supportive healer, we resumed tea before the drinks could lose their heat. Yup, letting it go cold wouldn’t be right. We were imperial citizens, after all. Now that would be a slight on our dignity.
“Well then, to put aside my jesting, let us regain the matter of your reward.”
I took a sip of fragrant tea and let the light sweetness soak in. After having reflected on her faux pas, Lady Franziska put her fingers to her forehead and sighed as she spoke.
“But, in fairness, ’tis better to say amends than reward.”
“I don’t remember anything you would need to apologize—”
“Not so.” Cutting me off, the matriarch snapped her fan shut. Though her smile remained, she dexterously fashioned together a stern expression as she explained in a sonorous tone.
According to her, involving a commoner in a family crisis that then led to said commoner sustaining life-threatening injuries was an unthinkable scandal for those who postured as superior. Worse still, the episode revolved around the young lady of the main branch, sure to one day lead the house; word that a lowborn kid had single-handedly solved the issue was sure to undermine their image in the eyes of their subordinate houses and branch-family relatives.
Of course, they could easily hide the event entirely. The engagement process had apparently only been handled within the family, and the prospective partner was a good character who would be understanding of the circumstances. If they wanted to, they could work something out quietly.
However, no matter what the world at large may come to know, the people of the house would forever remember that Erich of Konigstuhl canton had saved one of their precious own.
They were, if nothing else, immortal. Decades were not enough for the torch to be passed; their perceptions differed greatly from those of peoples where century-old tales became the stuff of legend, and so too did their family code. An unwavering memory made each sin indelible: past ingratitudes stuck around in the mind forever. As such, while they often pitied us forgetful souls...
“...at times, we envy thee. The burden of recollection everlasting binds more harshly than any shackle.”
They envied us. The ancient vampire toyed with a hard candy delicately shaped like a flower—kind of like a rakugan, their classy sweetness paired well with tea—and squinted at me, as if I were something too blinding to gaze upon normally.
Immortals had immortal woes. Originating from mensch, eternity was long to vampires; the inevitable privilege we temporal beings resigned ourselves to must seem so sweet to their eyes. Why else would we have tales of those who deliberately returned themselves to the Sun?
“Accept it, O warm child of blood. Become not a thorn to forever torment our hearts.”
A sugary acacia blossom crumbled between her fingers. The dust sank into the dimly lit fathoms of her cup, stirring the depths of my heart. In the end, all I could do was humbly accept her offer, making sure not to let the words squeak out of my mouth.
We truly were different creatures from the start.
“Thy acceptance is appreciated. Now, then: first, allow me to supplant the articles thou hast had upon thee.” Now that she mentioned it, I wondered where my armor had gone. “Greatly damaged as they were, I shall produce new—”
“Um, please wait! That armor has a lot of sentimental value!”
It had been the first piece of adventuring gear I’d prepared through my own work. The Konigstuhl smith had tailored it to fit me for years to come, and I couldn’t bring myself to part with it.
“Is that so? Sentiment indeed... Wouldst thou not prefer a set of the finest metal plates?”
As alluring as this seemed at first glance, it wasn’t actually that great a deal. Full plate armor was great for defense, but I took after the style of the galactic samurai that warred between the stars, and it’d be too heavy. The most glaring flaw was that metal was a mana conductor, and being covered in the stuff would impede my spellcasting. Chain mail and the plate on my chest already gave me enough trouble; full plate might cut down my Hands by half.
Last but not least, the utility just wasn’t there. Unfoldable metal would need a giant case to carry, it’d be hard to equip without help, and I’d stick out like a sore thumb. It was too much for an adventurer hopeful.
“I see,” Lady Franziska said. “Then I shall send it to an acquaintance at the local artisans’ union to be mended. Will that suffice?”
“I could ask for nothing more. I apologize for refusing your considerate offer, and you have my greatest thanks for accommodating me.”
“Ha, be at ease. Sentiment is ideal luggage for a child of mensch. Treasure it, boy.”
I was genuinely so, so grateful. Repairing it on my own would have cost gods knew how much; I couldn’t let my meager wallet dip into Elisa’s tuition fund.
“I suppose the simplest reward following would be in coin,” Lady Franziska said.
My heart fluttered at the mention of my most beloved bounty. The one thing keeping me from elation was that she put her hand to her chin and cocked her head with a dubious arch in her brow.
“...How plentiful are the masses’ wages as of late? A drachma every moon, I should guess?”
I nearly spat out my tea. I’d known she wouldn’t comprehend my lowly monetary values, but this was a bit ridiculous. Ladies Agrippina and Leizniz seemed to at least have a realistic picture of working-class life... Then again, I supposed my master had traveled around for fieldwork, and the dean employed lower-class servants.
“No, Aunt Dearest. I suspect it would be half that at most.”
“Mm, verily? Whatever reign am I thinking of? I recall the price of repairing the manor to have been a stately sum.”
“Are you perhaps including the mediationary fee paid to the union dispatching the workers?”
No, fifty librae a month is still too much. One would have to work for a big shop in a big city to earn that kind of money. The sheltered princess here must have been basing her calculations off wealthy patrons who donated to the church to curry divine favor.
To be fair, it was difficult to make generalizations about imperial income levels. Though the Empire was somewhat federal in nature, even within territories, cost of living differed drastically between the cities and rural outskirts. Still, I wasn’t going to accept that someone out there was making a farmer’s annual salary—not a sharecropper’s—every month.
I knew cutting off my privileged company was in bad form, but it spelled bad news if I let them name my reward with this sort of mindset; I informed them of a more accurate estimate of ordinary life.
Speaking as a munchkin, I would have been happy to accept a ludicrous sum and run off if I were turning in a quest to someone I’d never meet again. But I wasn’t going to kick up sand in the face of a person I hoped to continue interacting with: as far as obtainables went, connections were far stronger than cheap coins. Between a gold piece that disappeared once used and a bond that could see me through trials time and time again, it was obvious which choice was min-maxing.
More importantly, Miss Celia had flipped my snake eyes over to reveal the sixes that awaited on the other side. I wouldn’t dare swindle a girl who was practically my guardian angel—that would make me a bad person, not just a bad power gamer. Like Lady Franziska had said, memories could not bear the weight of guilt.
“I see... To think life in the capital could cost such precious little.” The grand dame nodded along in surprise and bent her fingers to count, then revealed that following Berylin’s founding, rent alone cost a minimum of ten librae a month. “How the times change... Methinks I ought to put aside my antiquarian dramas a while and acquaint myself with the modish canon.”
I had no idea where it had come from, but the ancient vampire began jotting down a note on a sheaf of papers, nodding to herself all the while. The constant effort required to update old preconceptions in order to keep up with us mortals seemed truly exhausting.
“Divorced of lay life and submersed in fiction, I find myself forsaken by the times. Very well, then—hmm... Wouldst thou say five hundred drachmae an adequate sum?”
“Bft!”
“Eep! A-Are you okay?!”
This time there was no almost: I spat out my tea. Were you even listening to me?!
“Though such a price pales in the shadow of my darling niece’s value, I thought a treasure too handsome may corrupt thee. Thus, the proposed sum.”
Thinking I’d come down with a sudden ailment, the niece had begun praying for a miracle; the aunt ignored her, quizzically cocking her head.
“Still too high?”
“Please refrain from tossing out numbers that’d straight-up take my whole family an entire lifetime and change to earn!”
I’d let my lower-class palatial speech slip a bit, but that was just how shaken I was. Sure, I was confident that this escapade had been a great adventure, but the payout was so unfathomable that it was going to kill me. A land-owning farming household made about five drachmae a year; to make more would mean buying up swaths of land to hire sharecroppers. This was utterly alien to me.
Adventurers admittedly tended to have insane fiscal sense. We poured piles of gold fit to build whole castles into our weapons, cashing in all our reputation to turn equipment into unique, enchanted gear—only to turn around and sleep in a cold stable drinking cheap liquors. But hearing a real, exact number...just made me balk.
I stopped Miss Celia before she could invoke a miracle and wiped my mouth. I had the perfect alternative in mind: a price that was suitable, that wouldn’t torment me, and that Lady Franziska would be happy to accept.
“If I may... Would you please instead fund my sister’s scholarly pursuits?”
“Hm? Scholarship?”
Trying to take far less than what someone offered could very well upset them. It was effectively scoffing at their perceived value, so it wouldn’t be a surprise if doing so now drew out the woman’s fury.
“Yes. On account of her penchant for magic and some extraneous circumstances, my sister has been taken under the wing of a College researcher.”
“Truly? The Imperial College of Magic? That would indeed be a considerable fee for the financially bereft.”
“Tuition alone is fifteen drachmae per year—more than two years’ worth of our household’s income. This isn’t to mention the cost of living, clothing, and everything else needed to fulfill her responsibilities as a student, making the true total more than double that.”
Lady Agrippina provided room and board, but not all of it was free, and the list of things Elisa would need going forward never ended. Once she officially enrolled as a student attending general lectures, she’d need a robe and staff to mark her as a magus-in-training; anything too shabby would see her stand out amongst her upper-class peers. Changelings didn’t require a wand to cast spells per se, but I wanted my baby sister to have something good so her studies in sorcery would go smoothly... Though in truth, I expected Lady Leizniz to be more than happy to provide a complimentary robe, and Lady Agrippina seemed liable to produce a hand-me-down of incredible quality, so maybe I was wasting my time.
Regardless, a scholarship was a big investment—just not “five hundred drachmae” big. In the back of my brain, the Negotiation skill whispered that it was sizable enough to not upset Lady Franziska. Yeah, I’m definitely gonna upgrade this later.
“Ah,” the lady mused. “It would seem I am to resume my usual pastime.”
“Whatever might that be?”
“Patronage. I sorely lack an ear for the musical, thou seest. The Minister of Finance hath much to say whenever I allow my idle mintage to amass into mounds, and as such, I seek promising youths to steer into the realm of the arts.”
Of course, I thought. Anyone with enough time and money on their hands was practically expected to partake. Painters, playwrights, and innovators of every make had lived off noble endowments since the dawn of civilization, spawning works to match their benefactors’ tastes in exchange. That way, they could spend all of their time spreading their creative ideas.
“Very well. Then let my backing be henceforth thy sister’s to claim. I will cover her every expense and fund her every experiment. I shan’t set any particular expiry, nor shall I pester her for progress in tangible terms on account of my dearth of arcane comprehension. Mine will be a lenient support.”
The relationship between patron and patronized was close to that of a parent and child, but with one key difference: patrons withdrew their backing if results couldn’t be produced. Mika and all the other students attending the College on the purses of their local magistrates were perfect examples. If they failed to prove themselves time and time again, they obviously lost their backer’s trust; eventually, those who couldn’t offer anything would be forgotten and cut off.
As such, being promised continued sponsorship as a reward was amazing. My cute baby sister wouldn’t have to worry about falling into destitution at the whims of a fickle master. Moved to the core, I held back shivers and got out of my chair to kneel at Lady Franziska’s feet.
“You have my sincerest gratitude. If I may ever be of use to you, please call on me without hesitation.”
“Mm. Thy efforts were admirable, Erich of Konigstuhl. I shall pen a formal letter of thy reward and ha’ it sent to thee in the coming days.”
Basking in her magnanimous words, I waited for her permission to rise—until I suddenly found a hand thrust toward me. Her vampiric skin showed no signs of the blood flowing below, and it glowed smoother than the finest marbles and porcelains under the crisp moonlight.
“But this privilege is thine. Thinkst thou not it sorry to receive naught to call thy own?”
“...An honor more than I am due.”
For a man to place his lips on a lady’s hand was a sign of deference, but obviously, this was a tradition meant to take place between two persons of fitting statures. I should have had nothing to do with it.
But to be granted that right symbolized worthiness. I took her hand in my own, handling it like fragile glass, and pretended to place my lips on it. I’d read in the library that actually pecking the woman’s hand wasn’t part of the social ritual.
“Hm, thou art awash with modesty. Hither—how tepid it would be should I be the only giver of gifts.”
Lady Franziska had on a wonderfully ostentatious grin as she pulled back her hand and stood. She made her way to Miss Celia—who’d been eyeing us disapprovingly—and pulled her niece up by the armpits.
“Huh?! What?! A-Aunt Franziska?!”
“Wilt thou not offer him a reward of thy own? Thou hast the hand of a young lady—the velvety blanket of an untrodden snow belonging to a maiden so beloved by the gods, at that. Surely thine wilt confer great favor from the heavens.”
The woman carried her niece to me like she was handling a hapless kitten, and smacked her on the back to goad her along. That Lady Franziska didn’t command her to offer her hand quietly hinted at the aunt’s character: though she wished to enjoy all that amused her, she did not force others into tasks they truly opposed—a rarity coming from the creative sort.
“Um... Er...” Miss Celia hung her head and looked at me; her gaze and hand both shifted to and fro as she hesitated.
I completely understood. Although it was only the back of her palm, a nun raised in a monastery would naturally refuse the sudden order to surrender her bare skin to a man. But just as I began scheming for a way to help her weasel out of the situation...
“Here.”
“Huh?”
She gave me her hand. In fact, she even went out of her way to remove the long glove covering it.

Tprg4.25

Limbs were not made to be replaced. Even in a futuristic world far more advanced than this one, to reconnect a severed body part was the exception, not the norm. Ask a deity to achieve the impossible, and they were sure to collect a fair due.
Flesh was bought with flesh; bone was bought with bone.
This miracle was one where the caster could accept another’s injuries to heal them. Recreating lost limbs was the peak of healing, and it differed from small exorcisms or insignificant blessings to cure fatigue as a matter of course—mere dedication could not afford such awesome results.
Cecilia’s right arm and both of her legs were rent off exactly how Erich’s had been, and her left arm folded in on itself like a game of cat’s cradle, bone jutting out of her skin. This was the price of calling the Goddess to the mortal realm.
“Mmgh...grah! Hng!”
It went without saying that a vampire would not die from losing their limbs. Furthermore, the miracle’s side effect only went as far as shifting the damage onto the caster; once the process was over, Cecilia would be allowed to heal the wounds away—she could even employ other miracles to expedite her recovery. One could say that this was the epitome of the mercy over which the Mother of Night presided; without Her aid, a detached arm would be as good as lost, after all.
Still, for a sheltered nun who knew not pain, the Goddess’s trial proved too much to bear. The agony of losing all her limbs was as excruciating as what Erich had felt—no, in fact, the boy’s senses had dulled in his intense battle. Cecilia’s torment was incomparably worse.
Shredded to pieces, her starving body thirsted for blood. The demonic nature she had thought pacified flared up inside of her, saying that to take a sip now would be a trivial fee for the life she’d saved.
How euphoric it would be to sink her fangs in this limp body—oh, how luscious it was sure to be. Without a doubt, it would be a rhapsody that would never leave her mind; something deep down told her that nectar like this might never appear before her again for as long as she lived.
“Hng...no! Augh, agh...aaaugh!”
This craving was inherent to the rabid species. Yet forcing down an accursed thirst that mensch couldn’t even begin to imagine, the nun pushed herself to her feet. Whipping her ego like a cruel taskmaster, she propped herself up on disfigured legs.
At last the young vampire confronted the root of it all. Still hanged in the hand of the great-aunt born during the Empire’s foundational years, the father born in its era of first light looked down at her as she spoke.
“Father, allow me to make my intentions expressly clear.”
Clad in bloodsoaked holy garments, the daughter glared at her self-serving father and decided to take after him. Though she believed in filial piety, the thought that she might not be allowed what he was drove her mad. Just because her great-aunt had forced the position on him did not mean that he could do the same to her.
“I will not rise to the throne. How can I, in all my inexperience, take the reins of House Erstreich and the Empire both when I am not even yet of age? I am sure Uncle Dearest and the venerable Second Emperor will agree.”
The duke seemed like he had something to say, but the noose of flesh around his neck refused to let up. Besides, he was in the presence of the clan matriarch—who was going to oppose her? Piping up now wouldn’t do him any favors. His cute little familiars were still unresponsive, and while they were due to wake up soon, the only one that had any hope of lasting more than five minutes against Theresea had been Schnee Weiss.
“I have chosen to dedicate myself to my faith. You and Mother may have placed me in the monastery for my own security, but I now call it home of my own volition.”
Above all else, Martin could tell from his daughter’s eyes that there was nothing more he could do. The signature vampiric bloodred gems overflowed with independence that reminded him of his wife. She had been a gentle woman, but her will to see through anything she set her mind to had always been unshakable.
Strength had resided in grace; strictness had resided in love. And though she had supported him wholeheartedly, she’d possessed the fortitude to not lose herself in her husband—a tenacity that was alive and well in their daughter.
Martin had lost. While she might take on some responsibilities in a legitimate emergency, nothing he could say or do would get her to accept the post now. It was clear from the moment that she’d steeled herself for the exhausting politics of dealing with their extended family—and her particularly terrifying grandaunt, at that—that she was deathly serious about this.
“Let me repeat: I will not be Empress, nor will I lead the clan.”
Having been turned down so plainly with the wild card of their family’s power dynamics on her side, the duke had no choice but to give in. But just as he was about to nod in defeat, he noticed something off: a streak of pure rage in the swirling passion that he saw in her crimson eyes.
Why was his daughter so angry? Sure, he’d tried to make her the next Duchess Erstreich while arranging what was effectively a marriage with the Empire—no reigning monarch had time for love, what with all the duties—which explained some of her ire. He, too, had gotten into genuine life-or-death fights with his aunt because of how much he resented her for the succession. But something told him that a good chunk of her fury came from something else.
“And one last thing...”
Martin wondered what it could be. Perhaps it was how he’d bullied the church into bringing her to the capital. Or maybe his overdone plans for a succession banquet had been leaked, complete with the seven full outfits he’d excitedly prepared for her. If not those, then she could simply be bitter about how he’d pulled a bunch of strings within the family to make this scheme work in the first place...
“Don’t ever talk to me again! I hate you, Dad!”
A bolt of lightning zipped through the duke. This was the biggest shock he’d felt all day—nay, this was surely the most traumatic event of his entire life. Not even the time a silver dagger had grazed the side of his heart had frightened him so.
“S-Stanzie?!” So great was his hysteria that he managed to squeak out a word despite his aunt’s steadfast grip. He yelped the diminutive to his daughter’s first name, which he’d picked out for her—though she never seemed to introduce herself with it—and his handsome features scrunched up sadly.
“My name is Cecilia! How many times must I tell you to call me by my favorite name?!”
“Thou fancy the name I ha’ picked, dost thou? Ha ha! Splendid! Lovable—oh how lovable thou art, my precious babe. There, there, fret not. Let this old bat set all affairs to suit thy design.”
Turning her back to her stunned father, Cecilia made her way over to the sleeping boy. If her great-aunt was offering to handle the rest, then it would be best to patiently wait here, but to leave him on the hard floor was simply too much—he was the hero who’d saved her from a marriage with the throne.
“Wh-Why... Stanzie...”
“Woof, woof—thy barking moves me to such pity. What folly seduces men so with promises of love undying from spouse and spawn alike? Alas. I shall teach thee this lesson and many more tonight, pup.”
Despite the filthy ground threatening to sully her robes, Cecilia took a seat, lifting the boy’s upper body onto her legs. While she may have taken on all his injuries—even the minor scratches—the miracle did not restore blood already lost. His body was cold, and letting him lie on the chilly stone wouldn’t do.
The boy slept soundly. His head tilted to one side, exposing the neck that had captured the girl’s imagination ever since drinking from that cup of wine. As appetizing as ever, his smooth skin called out to her.
What a natural-born vampire slayer, Cecilia thought with a giggle. She pulled up the collar of his armor so that he wouldn’t catch a cold.
Her instincts whispered: You fool. The perfect prey is before your eyes and yet you refuse to bare your fangs. If you act now, it would be all too easy to prop him up as your lover—as your thrall, ever by your side.
She whispered back: Would that not make me a bandit? The very same as the bloodsuckers Archbishop Lampel once condemned as the pinnacle of evil? I am a vampire, yes, but also a believer of the Night. As such, I shall return goodwill with goodwill—I would never pilfer his life for my own gain.
And to tell the truth, the girl found this all a bit fun. Once, she’d seen a play. It had depicted the done-to-death story of a noble girl sneaking out of her house and running into a traveling hero. The princess did not do such awful things to the hero. She simply took his outstretched hand with a cordial smile and hugged him close when he was tired. From there, her job was to support him from out of sight.
The Goddess would not reproach Cecilia for inserting herself into an innocent fantasy, and she wanted to spend a little more time enjoying the reality that she’d been saved. And as if to affirm her dreams and actions both, the lunar medallion jingled quietly.

[Tips] Patricians often have several given names. Though most customarily go by their first (usually given to them by their fathers), many also elect to employ a second or third name that they are particularly fond of. This is especially true if a high-profile figure tarnishes the reputation of one’s main name.

Postface

Though I was growing accustomed to waking under unfamiliar ceilings, my awakening filled me with a sense of hollowness.
“I’m...alive?” It took me several minutes under the light of dawn, staring at a marvelously embroidered canopy, to collect my frayed thoughts.
I’d figured I was just dead. While I had some memory of help arriving, having all but one limb torn off was more than enough to put me over. Even though I recalled my savior’s noble appearance, the art of limb reattachment was heavily guarded by the College; Miss Celia may have been a priestess, but I’d heard that the miracles able to achieve such effects were locked away at the peak of devotion, so the odds of that seemed slim. I mean, I didn’t even know how she ranked within her church. Since traditional care wouldn’t cut it, I’d assumed I’d been at the end of my line, but...
“What, did these things just grow out of nowhere?”
That crank of high rank had torn me asunder, and I couldn’t imagine what kind of omnipotent cheat code could have put my arm and legs back in place like they’d never left.
Gingerly, I tried to move my arm...and found no pain, nor even discomfort. Flipping the sleeve to my curiously soft nightclothes—the needlework made questions of its price too terrifying to ask—I was met with skin unblemished by scars; I couldn’t find so much as a scab. My legs were much the same, and I was able to wiggle the tips of my toes, proving that my whole nervous system was in order.
I sighed in relief, only to come across another revelation: “It doesn’t hurt to breathe either.”
The snapped ribs that had been giving me so much grief were better. Running a hand over my chest with dainty care, I felt no pain or tingling; going down to my stomach, I felt only the smooth definition of my abs, unmarred by any unnatural breaks.
I was the picture of health; in fact, I began to suspect that the whole fight had been an illusion. The only evidence it’d been real was that I was a tad dizzy, probably because I was famished and parched beyond belief—but that could just as easily be explained by the fact that I hadn’t eaten since noon the day prior.
But where am I?
I couldn’t reason out what had happened by pure inference, so I shelved the topic and started looking around. Judging by my surroundings, my circumstances seemed rather complicated.
I was laying in a gargantuan canopy bed, and a thin, nearly transparent curtain separated me from the outside world. The quality of my sleepwear needed no expanding on; pressing against the mattress betrayed springs buried within—I’d heard the wealthiest enjoyed luxuries like this—and the blankets on top of me were stuffed with the most epicurean of fluff.
When every part of my sleeping space was so delightful to the touch that it tickled my kleptomaniac impulse, it was clear that I was in blue-blooded territory. This bed could service a “gathering” of several people with room to spare, so I was sure to be in a particularly notable noble’s home. Even aristocrats with loose purse strings ordinarily wouldn’t bother with beds of this size.
There were plenty of potential avenues that could have led me here, but pondering them wouldn’t get me anywhere. Getting a grasp of my surroundings was a rule of thumb that extended beyond just TRPGs: Okay, GM. What do I see?Playing out a joke that no one in this world would get, I looked around to find a small bell at my bedside. It had a memo attached to it, which read, “Awake?” in gorgeous calligraphy.
Ah, I see. So I ring this when I wake up. Good to see the gimmicks here are straightforward.
I picked up the obviously priceless bell and rang it.
“Huh?”
Yet I heard no noise. Confused, I turned it upside down to see that the instrument lacked a clapper. That alone would have made it a defective tool, of course, but I could squint to make out minute engravings that produced a mystic formula. It felt like every last thing around here was a premium product.
I studied the spell’s construction in awe for a short while, until I heard a reserved knock at the door. After a moment, I cocked my head: why weren’t they entering? It took me a full minute before realizing, Oh...I’m supposed to give them permission first.
Although I asked to enter rooms quite often, I’d never been in the opposite role. The only time anyone bothered to knock for someone like me was when I was in the changing room at Lady Leizniz’s favorite clothier.
“Um... Come in?”
Nerves caused my words to pitifully inflect upward. I couldn’t help it! I was a genuine country bumpkin; learning the ins and outs of how patrician society operated did nothing to help me when I had to act like one of them.
“Excuse me.” The woman who entered with the nigh inaudible sound of the door was none other than a true-to-life maid.
Wow, a maid! A real maid! As multicultural as the capital was, this style that came from the islands far to the east was a rarity. Traditionality survived in her every detail: she wore a long and plain black dress capped with pronounced cuffs, covered by a frilly apron, and her hair was kept in place with a headcap; she was the living embodiment of retainership. Her skin was fair, her eyes green, and her hair light russet, all culminating in a youthful set of facial features that had me feeling pumped.
Vassalage in the Trialist Empire was a complex thing, on account of the intermingling feudalistic and modern ideas pervading it. The upper crust customarily took in the second sons or daughters of other houses as attendants or had entire lineages devoted to waiting on them; these upper servants generally became trusted stewards of the family. Meanwhile, lower servants were trustworthy common folk—their character guaranteed by their canton’s leaders—that originated from their feudal estates, and they served in exchange for a stipend or tax cut, usually sent home to their families.
On the other hand, those brought on by wealthy merchants or farm owners were hired help in every sense of the word: after a period of unpaid labor, they could expect to use the skills they learned during servitude to gain employment. Theirs was a contract bound by interpersonal relations and wages as opposed to the territorial and hereditary circumstances that determined noble obedience.
Spending any time at the College was an easy way to internalize the difference. Magia invariably had money, but those who only had money employed very different help from those who were highborn. The former relied on rural hicks like me or working-class citizens of the capital, while the latter were waited on by people of considerable pedigree—perhaps even a clan of thoroughbred retainers that attended to their family’s affairs through the ages. These maids and butlers were masters of the most humbling version of palatial speech and were literally born to serve the elite; comparing them to a hastily trained kid like me was like comparing a farm horse to a military stallion.
With all this in mind, I looked her over and...wow. It looked like I’d found myself in the home of someone near the top of the pyramid. The quality of her mannerisms, speech, and clothing went without saying, but upon closer inspection, two pointed ears poked out from underneath her hair. How high up do you have to go to employ methuselah as servants?!
“Nothing should please me more than to see that you have arisen. My name is Kunigunde, and I have been duly charged with the responsibility of waiting upon you. Please do not hesitate to task me with your every need.”
“O-Okay.”
I could only muster a one-word response; for all the effort and experience points I’d put into figuring out the servile palatial tongue, her absolutely perfect diction made me want to get down on my hands and knees in reverence. Worse still, she was using the dialect meant to be used when engaging with a guest of the highest honor. Not only was I ignoble, but I wasn’t even a bureaucrat; I could hardly process the words as they came in my ear.
Seriously, what happened to me?
“Though I am sympathetic to your confusion and am sure you have many queries, allow me first to ready you for the day. My master shall elucidate in due time. If you’ll excuse me...”
Wrapped in silk gloves, her hands reached back to a rolling tray behind her—I hadn’t even noticed because I was too excited about seeing a real maid—to grab a pail full of hot water. She swiftly wiped down my face with a wet towel and began brushing my hair before my surprise could catch up to me.
My hair was getting to the length that people would assume I was a woman from behind; she combed through the entire length, going so far as to apply a layer of oil. Things were moving so fast that I simply sat there, unable to keep up.
“Your hair is wonderful,” she said. “Do you treat it with anything in particular?”
“Huh? No, not really...” ...unless you count fey blessings.
But my hair was unimportant: the more pressing issue at hand was that she had me sit at the edge of the bed and was doing her work from the front. The chest bobbing and weaving in my face was more impressive than any of my locks, and it was markedly worse for my psyche. Thankfully, what I assumed to be light anemia relieved me of the foolish boyishness that often accompanied the morning, but I actively had to fight stray thoughts like, I wonder if I can dream up an excuse to bury my face in those...Too focused on reining in my steamy thoughts, I found myself clothed before I knew it, and then pushed back in bed to sit with my back against the frame. The maid then brought out a folding table from who-knows-where and lined it with a meal.
“My sincerest apologies. We were unable to prepare anything more than the simplest of basics, as we were unsure when you would arise. Should you have any particular requests, I will strive within my power to fulfill them. Is there anything you would like?”
“Simplest...? Basics?”
I’d been served fragrant red tea, a danish—you couldn’t even get those around town—that had clearly been baked fresh this morning, a boiled wurst packed with herbs that was just outside the price range of a common citizen, and a bit of honey-glazed cheese, which was something we peasants could only hope to taste during times of celebration. This breakfast put the Konigstuhl spring festival’s feasts to shame; if this was a basic meal, then what was I eating every day?
What’s wrong with these bourgeois pigs? Someone get me a hammer and sickle!
“If it is too heavy for your tastes, I shall prepare a light soup or porridge posthaste.”
The maid misinterpreted my dumbstruck stupor as a mark of poor health and tried to compensate; I denied in a panic and happily took the tray. I had no clue what was going on, but I couldn’t call myself an imperial if I let a steaming cup of red tea go cold.
As soon as she saw me begin eating, Miss Kunigunde the maid stepped away from the bed in relief. Though she only took a single step backward, it instantly became difficult to ascertain her position. She naturally employed magic at every turn—perhaps she was using traits from the Arcane Attendant section I’d once skimmed through on my character sheet. I guess second-rate heritage just wouldn’t cut it to wait on true nobles.
“The sun is high and the madam and princess are resting at present, so I beg you to make yourself at home and await their awakening here.”
I was clutching my stomach after finishing the lavish meal my gut was wholly unprepared for, and didn’t get a single moment of repose before she dropped this bomb on me. The word “princess” evoked one possibility: I’d written it off when I’d come to, but apparently she had been the one to save me. The fact that I hadn’t dreamt up that final scene before the pit of despair took me made me want to sigh.
“...Oh. A moment, please.”
The maid cut herself off, closing one eye and placing a hand on her temple. I recognized that reaction: it was that of someone who’d received an unexpected telepathic message. Some mages also used the pose to ponder arcane semantics more deeply, but a retainer interrupting her own speech betrayed a message from her master.
“My apologies,” she said. “It would appear it is too late.”
“Huh? Too late?”
Before I could ask what she meant, the door burst open.
“Thou’rt wakened, boy?! Most splendid!”

For a moment, I thought someone had assaulted the door with a battering ram; looking over, however, I saw nothing but a stunning woman who demanded the eye’s attention. It was the scarlet-eyed, black-haired, toga-clad lady who’d dispersed the masked nobleman’s attack. The magnificent colors she shared with Miss Celia were so striking that they were burned into my memory; though I couldn’t recall what color tunic she’d worn when I first saw her, she now had on something of vibrant crimson trimmed with golden thread.
As she made her way through the emptied entrance, the methuselah servant closed her eyes and stepped back with a resigned shake of her head. The message was clear: I wasn’t to ask for her help, as she could do nothing more for me.
“Zounds, the night was burdensome indeed. When the thaumagram arrived unbidden with its ill news, I raced forth to find thee dawdling at the reaper’s stoop, my darling grandniece unable to unhand thee for worry, and my senseless nephew yapping without reserve. Ah, which reminds me: that cretin proved so vexing that I pursued to leave him half-dead, and it fell short of mine ambition to butcher him only the once. O how I wished to be done.”
Unbelievably, the beautiful woman reminiscent of Miss Celia planted herself onto the side of my bed without a care in the world. Still, for all their similarities, this lady lacked the nun’s fragile grace; in its place was a pervasive confidence. Her thin, arched brows capped off two proud gems that gleamed with intimidating pride.
What do you think would happen if someone this gorgeous stared at me at such close range? The answer was that the strands of thought I’d managed to sort out got all tangled up again. Badly.
“Mistake me not. To cut a banquet short for my lovable, lovable darling cannot upset me, nor will I grieve mine own paltry effort to cudgel my clownish nephew. Doubly so when the endeavor is accompanied by a child of mensch so passing strange.”
Her beauty was something Miss Celia would never attain no matter how she matured: it was the ferocious allure of vampirism left bare. Curling her features into a smile, the yet-unintroduced woman ran her claw across my chin...and laughed. Her laugh was terribly unique—almost scornful, even. Her voice and archaic dialect slithered into my brain and locked their coils there, leaving me dazed.
“Ah, and how could I fail to mention? Thou must offer my niece thy gratitude in time. That thy flesh remains as it were when thou wert first born took my darling’s immolation as its price.”
I supposed this was a form of charisma in its own right. She showered me with a deluge of statements without any concern for me, but I strangely felt no displeasure. Her every action, her every word, buried itself within my memory with no intention of leaving. She was endowed with a ruler’s disposition. Blessed with magnetism that could pull along anyone around her, her talents evoked the image of a strong statesman, but the ruthless tyranny she could no doubt enact lurked just out of sight.
It was as if the personification of the dignity that had given way to history was here, sitting before me.
“Though that very darling niece hath run me round with all manner of tribulations. First sobbing over the whereabouts of some other, then demanding a courier dispatched without delay upon her discovery... Fleeting favorite of my kin, I imagine thou, too, hast much of my favor to ask. Dost thou not?”
While she’d posed it like a question, the flint-hard command in her voice goaded my soul to affirm her.
“May I ask why you’ve forgone garments below?”
...I can explain. She’d already gone off and talked about everything I wanted to know, and, well, I was curious. Tunics were big sheets of cloth that enveloped the body, but they were only meant to be an outer layer as part of a full outfit. For some reason, she was naked underneath. She was stark naked. It demanded so much of my attention that I mentioned it twice.
Her overwhelming presence had run over my muddled mind to the point where I couldn’t restrain my curiosity. More to the point, something had bugged out in my mental faculties, robbing me of the ability to produce anything but the shallowest thoughts. Why I was here, what happened yesterday, how my limbs regrew—I knew I had a lot to ask about, but still!
“Hm. The reason is simple.”
I could feel the maid’s incredulous glare jabbing into my side, but the half-naked vampire only skipped a single beat before answering.
“Fools adorn and embellish; I entice most as I am!”
The beauty showed off her body with exaggerated form, like an actress proud of her performance onstage. Her supple limbs paired with curves akin to rolling hills, all wrapped under skin polished to pristine condition. More alluring than the greatest works of marble, the toga hid her privates with salacious uncertainty—an unambiguous seduction. If someone were to freeze her as she was now and place her in a museum, guests would gather from around the globe to see her.
“Oh... Um... Well...you are indeed very beautiful.”
“Truly? Thou hast an eye for beauty, boy. Speak, then; if thy claim is more than mere puffery, tell me plainly what of my charm has enraptured thee.”
I’d let my base instincts take hold and blabbed out my true opinion, and now she meant to make me pay for it in concrete praise. Considering her peerage, I doubted she wanted for praise; why was she goading a dumb kid into offering her compliments?
Giving up on untangling my brain, I began to extol her appearance with the full extent of my verbiage, stammering every now and then out of fear that I might offend a person of such considerable stature. All the while, I had to swallow back what was probably the most important question I could’ve asked: Who are you, anyway?
[Tips] Retainers span the range of feudalistic serfdom to apprenticeship to paid labor. Ordinarily, this refers to lifelong, professional stewards as opposed to temporary servitude.
In the Trialist Empire, blue-blooded children will often spend some time waiting upon the masters of another house as part of their training in etiquette; there are also entire servant families who possess far greater history and influence than many new-money upstarts. Scandals caused by people looking down on “the help” without knowing their true stature are fairly common.

Nobles were tiresome creatures—animals propped up on a little something called “pride.” The whole of their power came from brand value and influence, and no material fortune could buy the respect that came with history and character. As a result, their spending was liable to seem utterly wasteful from a financial perspective: they erected mansions, laid out carpets, and prettied themselves with the finest clothes. Appearing cheap to one’s countrymen would come with a dip in standing; seeming unreliable to one’s subordinates would see them leave orbit; and meeting a foreign rival shabbily dressed threatened to damage the entire nation’s prestige.
This pride brought another issue with it: the tedious formalities of ceremony.
To meet someone casually was unthinkable. After all, one wouldn’t want to appear starved of companionship, merrily running around at just anyone’s beck and call. Urgency was reserved for superiors who resided far above, and only those who frequented the same cliques, at that. At times, the likes of mere knights could refuse the summons of imperials should their factional allegiances not align.
Thus the nobility considered the drudging procedures preceding a meeting a must. They sent letters to inquire about availability, only offering the first true invitation once schedules were sorted. If anything went wrong—and it often did—two nobles could rally the correspondence back and forth countless times before finally meeting in person.
When a meeting was absolutely imperative, an aristocrat might chance upon their counsel in the middle of a hunting trip or find themselves caught in a storm when they just so happened to be in the neighborhood; in short, they crafted coincidences. That was how oblique their etiquette had become.
It was people like Theresea and Martin—directly summoning a researcher ennobled by a foreign crown was unprecedented, to put it lightly—who were the strange ones; entering someone else’s room without prior notice was ordinarily unthinkable. The task was beyond imagination for those living in a culture where parent and child were expected to adhere to these rules.
“Erich, are you okay?!”
Yet the faithful priestess of Night known as Cecilia was so distraught that she had brought this inconceivable notion to fruition without reserve. Though her monastic life had been long, the circumstances of her birth meant that she had been taught enough to know her way around high society.
After overcoming the chaos of the previous night, Cecilia had taken her grandaunt’s advice and turned in for a few hours. While the Night Goddess had blessed their manor to protect them from the sun even at noon, the light remained discomforting. Most vampires locked themselves away in pitch darkness the whole day.
The bliss of a completed adventure and the relief that the boy was safe swirled together to produce a pleasant, but shallow sleep—one that failed to go the distance.
After scrambling to sort out the nearly dead duke, Mechthild had finally gotten to reunite with her liege. As morning heralded the end to yet another sleepless night, she shook the girl awake. Despite being employed by Martin, her loyalties lay with Cecilia, and she had continued to work dutifully in spite of the ghastly look on her face. Although she couldn’t be of much regular help to a cloistered nun—an Immaculate, at that—she handled all of the lady’s burdensome noble tasks.
Late as it was, Cecilia felt sorry for what she’d put her retainer through. She knew Mechthild had given chase out of worry that someone of her position might fall into evil hands in the midst of an impulsive escape; the mensch certainly did not wish to see her stripped of her faith and wed to the entire Empire.
Though Cecilia had possessed no means of making contact, this whole episode would surely have gone very differently had Mechthild been on their side...not that this was anything more than a fantasy. The mensch woman led other servants who swore their oaths to Martin himself; she would not have been able to let them go.
As soon as Mechthild had heard that her master had returned, she ran straight to the old, lonely estate reserved for when the young lady of the house was in town—blinded by the bright yellows of the fourth daybreak without sleep, of course. Alas, she didn’t have time for a heartfelt reunion; instead, she repeated the news that Kunigunde had telepathically sent her.
“The head maid reports that ‘your great-aunt is toying with Erich.’”
Cecilia cast away much of that which defined the bounds of a genteel lady, tearing through the house without so much as changing. She sprinted down the hallways barefoot, ignored the disturbed looks from her servants, and made her way to the room where Erich was resting.
And here she’d been preparing to explain everything tonight, once they’d had time to settle down. But looking back, she had known from the start that her grandaunt couldn’t control herself around a potential plaything—how could she, when all Erstreichs shared her mental affliction? Even Cecilia had forced her way into the sun with the Goddess’s protection just to partake in her favorite hobby of ehrengarde.
Having been burst through the once, the door was already ajar. Upon stepping into the room, the first thing Cecilia saw was...
“Your fair skin is nearly translucent in its glow, and yet it retains the profound depth of white snow. It appears at once supple and soft, beckoning to the hand, but the lightest touch will surely see it melt away. In fact, I have difficulty believing that such an enchanting tone can be produced by a living being at all. And that that beguiling contour of its outline makes itself known through your crimson toga proves...”
...a young boy sweet-talking her great-aunt—that is, her grandmother’s sister—with an utterly lifeless gaze.

Tprg4.24

[Tips] A vampire’s regenerative abilities vary wildly with each individual.

When Duke Martin of House Erstreich received the report from his retainer, he felt no anger or alarm. Bright and clear-thinking, the genius’s reactions were twofold: “I see,” and, “I knew it.”
The girl was undoubtedly his own. Here he had thought she’d taken completely after her mother—kind to a fault—but the duke chuckled at the discovery that blood remained ever thicker than water.
Now that he had a moment to dwell, this series of events was not merely reasonable—it was expected. Of the numbered women who had commanded the Trialist Empire as its Empress, one had belonged to his clan. Thinking back, when she had first hinted that she planned to resign as the family matriarch, he’d looked around him and realized that he was the only one fit to replace her; what had he done then?
He had tried to flee. He’d thrown his pride and reputation out the window, packed anything he could carry, and done everything in his power to seek asylum in an eastern land. Alas, all his efforts had then been trampled underfoot like a snapped twig, as she tore open the cargo hold of the ship he cowered in with a lordly grin; the moment she slipped the seal of Erstreich leadership off her finger and onto his own was everlasting in his memory. Martin still had nightmares about it.
What the father has done, the daughter shall repeat.
Chuckling, the duke summoned a moth from his inner pocket. It was a fully matured silkworm—the most heavily domesticated of all insects. The flittering bug represented a single branch of the familiar he had spent centuries rearing; silkworms were already wholly dependent on humanity, and this was the logical extreme. Packed only with traits that made it a more superior servant, the organic masterwork spoke to a tenacity in its creator’s will.
“Go and find her.”
The name Martin Werner von Erstreich meant many things in the Trialist Empire. He was the head of House Erstreich and a former Emperor, but to some, he was best known as an arcane bioengineer from the School of Midheaven. When he was spoken of in this light, his name was perennially intertwined with the magnum opus that sat atop his many creations: the triskele.
The moth fluttering away divided itself as it saw fit, multiplying to fan out through the city while trailing the girl’s scent. Silk moths did not have such functionality, of course, but its master had ordered it to find his daughter, and it was equipped with the ability to create new faculties to rise to any occasion.
It was an all-purpose tool. So long as a single base remained for propagation, the moths could serve as messengers, investigators, defenders, attackers, and anything else that one could imagine. They were fit to suit the duke’s wildest whims.
If he wished to write a memo, they grew wings of peerless texture, flickering the colors of their scales to jot down his words. Conjoined, they could become any tool or weapon from shield to halberd. When he needed a particular person, they grew vocal cords to call them to his side...using a semantic search that dipped into the arcane to find their mark.
This time, however, the target’s presence was scattered throughout town. Thus, the moths elected to seek a scent stored in their collective memory, scouring the city for the closest match. So robust was their sense of smell that they latched onto particles hounds were liable to miss, let alone mensch.
Eventually, their search produced a boy and girl.
The more powerful odor of the two belonged to a girl running around in the underground sewers, but a closer inspection of her imprint on reality showed that she was verifiably not the duke’s daughter. While he was ill informed as to his daughter’s personal relationships, the thought that she had a friend willing to go so far to help her warmed his heart—as if he weren’t the one she was fleeing from.
Suddenly, a stray thought crossed the man’s mind: Would things have been different if I’d had someone I could trust this way?
At any rate, he swore not to mistreat the first friend of his daughter’s that he’d ever seen as he shifted his attention to the boy. The hooded lad running circles around the city guard did not bear the slightest resemblance to his daughter, but tracing her scent didn’t lead to any other matches more significant than these two.
“But to smell so strongly of her surely must mean they know something.”
There were two people who might know what had happened, but the one that had been playing in the sewers had managed to land herself outside of the capital—following her would be a cumbersome task. If the duke was to visit one of them, the boy was much closer and far less tedious to reach.
Petting his familiar for a job well done, the duke slipped out of the palace. Not too long after, a retainer would knock on his door to let him know the aeroship showcase was imminent...and subsequently scream in horror, but that wasn’t his problem. It would be fine: surely another senior member of the development team would be present to explain, and if not, the Emperor had come to see their progress plenty of times. The duke flew off, thinking that if His Majesty wanted to show off his pet project, he could do the blasted introductions himself.
On the other side of a Farsight spell, the vampire saw the boy in question fall into an aqueduct. A jager sniper had landed an arrow that propelled him over the guardrail and into the running water below.
While his position dictated that he ought to congratulate her on a job well done, this was a slight issue. Having the boy die would be a bother—nothing more than that, mind you—and he would have liked to avoid any extra work.
Thankfully, it seemed his fears were groundless: he sensed a faint trace of mana under the water’s surface. It betrayed a spell unacquainted with the concept of covering one’s tracks; a magus well versed in counterspell wars would never write a formula like that.
But more interestingly, it bore a resemblance to something that stuck out in the duke’s memory. A season prior, he had escaped his monotonous duties to see if there were any promising newcomers running around the College’s testing grounds—these were the same tracks as the exciting cantrip that had failed to show up at the annual gala.
That had been a crying shame. How had he burned through the barriers that protected the College’s experimental facilities with such little mystic residue? Just as cheap blades couldn’t cut his skin, standard flames could no longer even singe the vampire’s hair, and yet the enigmatic substance had managed to burn straight through his hand. Martin had been eagerly looking forward to finding the bright young student and offering him a healthy research grant.
To think their paths would cross again like this! Ah, but perhaps, thought the duke, this was a blessing in disguise. It wasn’t as if he wanted the boy’s spells for himself: he did not pursue magecraft for the sake of glory.
The professor simply adored the joy of repainting the unknown with shades of knowledge, and nothing elated him more than coming across an idea that he would never have come up with himself. This was the sole driver that had pushed him along for four hundred years...and the kind of crazed young man to compose a spell of that nature and embroil himself in a noble girl’s escape was sure to bring the duke enough novelty to have him clutching his sides in laughter.
It took effort to prevent a never-ending life from devolving into tedium; the thought of potentially capturing a peculiar individual that might brighten it, on top of learning his daughter’s whereabouts, put a spring in the duke’s step, and he merrily decided to call upon his little darlings lazing about in boredom at home. After all, a vanguard was a must when facing a promising magus-to-be.
With his course of action decided, the duke turned his attention to the sewers. While the city guard would be preoccupied with trying to fish out a body for the time being, it was only a matter of time before they realized the boy hadn’t drowned. The merfolk jagers were on standby in the palatial moat they called home for now, but they would uncover the truth in an instant if they set out to.
Clearly, he would need to prevent any such interference.
The duke dropped into an access hatch and made his way to an enormous pit that fed straight to the most abyssal levels. Nobody knew of this location, but it was a testament to the fact that the waterways were the most critical infrastructure in the city; one terroristic feat of engineering here could cause the whole capital to sink.
Naturally, the key locations of the underground were kept tightly under wraps. Escape routes stemming from the imperial palace and the final purification chamber that the magically fueled sewer keepers called home were of particular importance; the number of people in the entire Empire who knew these paths could be counted on two hands.
Taking one such integral pathway, the duke descended into the final purification tank. Countless pillars spanned across several dozen cubic meters like divine columns, with strongly basic blobs of living gelatin filling the space in between. Sounds of wriggling masses darker than the night sea echoed around like warped death throes, turning the location into hell on earth.
Yet in spite of the vaporized clouds of death that permeated the air, the vampire laughed away the very suggestion of harm. He looked at the blobs dubbed the Presidents of Pollution—at his apprentice’s children—with an affectionate smile.
“It has been quite some time, my good sirs. A pity you can’t understand me—I’ve known you lot since you were tiny specks on a petri dish, you see.”
The duke hadn’t been a part of the original development team; the methuselah in charge of gathering researchers and directing the project had simply once been under his patronage, and he’d stopped by to give a word or two of advice when it was pertinent. It was on these occasions that he’d learned of this place, of the slimes’ quirks and characteristics...and of a way to ask them for a little favor.
Knowledge of this sort could bring the city to its knees, and the duke used it to shepherd the boy toward a large flood repository. If the bureaucrats of the imperial government’s waterworking branch were ever to find out, they would surely go blue in the face and pen a deluge of strongly worded letters—the Empire did not look down on persons of lower class voicing their displeasure for those above. Of course, the fate of such criticism was almost certainly either the wastebasket or an eternal stay in a folder of issues that the upper noble would get to “when they felt like it.”
Regardless, the man had spent four centuries drowning in his hobbies, and his irrational tomfoolery did not stop as he appeared before the boy.
This young man was a solid spellcaster. While the candor of his formulae was unworthy of praise, Martin could accept it: he only employed simple arcane tricks to bolster swings of his sword, prop up his body, or block an attack as an impromptu shield. The professor would have liked to see more redundancy to counteract an attempt at erasure, but it was clear this was not his main focus.
Rather, it was the boy’s impeccably polished swordsmanship that impressed the duke most. His magic took the form of a torrent of quick spells that were merely the supportive framework to enable a lethal sword strike; why, the lad used magic more efficiently than some magia.
Onward, cut, onward, kill, onward—his relentless onslaught was dazzling. Middling swordsmen would struggle to pierce even one of Martin’s barriers; he had frankly been awestruck when the boy managed to split all seven. The attack cleanly cleaved through his heart, and he knew a crumbling vampire would have returned to dust, unable to heal away the damage.
What could possibly drive someone so young to such heights—especially for a frail, fleeting mensch, who would return to the gods as soon as his heart ceased its function?
“Marvelous,” the duke heaved with a splatter of blood.
Faced with an unknown spell, he had sat there and taken it only to find something far greater than he’d anticipated. No, that was unfair: with how trivial the boy’s incantation had been, he would have been able to recast the trifling steps again and again. To overcome such redundancy would have likely required the professor to eliminate the catalyst in its entirety.
In the end, the vampire thought with a sarcastic laugh, I push through with the power of my birthright.
Still, the spell had been jaw-dropping. Scanning himself with magic, the professor noted that his organs had been crushed without exception, and the astounding pressure the blast produced had all but deformed his overall shape; he was practically a sack of flesh stacked up in the shape of a person.
Despite the care and attention he’d committed to polishing his beloved Schufti and Gauner, they were both belly up and frothing at the mouth. They’d sustained serious damage to their respiratory tracts that had knocked them out cold; they wouldn’t die, but he’d need to bring them out to a resort home and pamper them where the air was good until they were back in good health.
He didn’t need to waste time scanning to know that his familiar Schnee Weiss had been eradicated. The main force hiding in an isolated pocket of space would be fine, but he couldn’t do anything about the low number of reserves for the detached combat swarm; pushing it too hard would be a mistake.
Martin turned his attention to the spell: how could a smattering of mystic parlor tricks amount to a force that could shatter his laminated barriers and ravage a body he considered quite strong, even amongst vampires? His curiosity could not be sated.
As he observed the boy clambering to his feet with continued will to fight, a foreign thought rang out in his consciousness, courtesy of none other than the familiar he’d sworn not to overtax moments ago.

[Tips] The “Presidents of Pollution” moniker was a top secret code name used during the development of imperial sewer slimes. Two hundred years ago, a methuselah researcher had the revolutionary idea of constructing a purification method that might lessen the costs of maintaining the capital’s waterworks. His success is evidenced by the slimes’ continued presence bouncing around the underground; today, their siblings have been duplicated to sustain the clean water of every major city.

My opponent was...difficult to describe.
“She” had two arms and two legs attached to a single trunk, just like a mensch—the catch was that every inch of her feminine contour was covered in a blindingly white carapace. The outer shell’s sheen was unmistakably organic in nature and naturally opened into seams at her joints; the peculiar “armor” had to be an exoskeleton.
Yet the most puzzling characteristic had to be that her head was just that of a moth scaled up to fit a human body. Two giant compound eyes took the place of sockets, and comblike appendages—feelers, probably—jutted out from her forehead. In place of hair, she had what seemed like flowing wings that widened out near the tips.
Though the Empire was home to many insectoid demihumans, this was my first time seeing a creature that was literally just a bipedal bug. No matter how dominant one’s insectile genetics were, demihumans displayed a great many mensch-like features by their nature; some might possess exoskeletons, compound eyes, or feelers, but they invariably had more familiar noses or lips that made them closer to us humanfolk.
This was not the same: it felt as though I was seeing the end result of an insect lineage that culminated in a human form factor... Wait! Is this the hivemind behind the poisonous silk moths from earlier?!
Perhaps sensing my disorientation, the freakish moth ignored her severed hand and closed in to continue the brawl. She nimbly snapped her long limbs like whips, barely grazing me; a direct hit would undoubtedly be lethal. The good ol’ Konigstuhl smithy’s armor may have been expertly crafted, but it couldn’t withstand that: if I tried to eat the hit with the hardest chunk of leather on my chest, I suspected she’d pierce through it and the chain mail below with ease.
The moth’s unique set of biological plating hardened further at her fingertips to frightening levels. How do I know, you ask? Well, she was using her hand to parry the Craving Blade.
“Gah! I can’t get through!”
The carapace covering the rest of her body was barely any softer, and she made extra trouble for me by shifting around to throw off the angles of my attacks. It didn’t matter how sharp the Craving Blade was if the edge didn’t find a good entry. This wouldn’t have been an issue had I been stronger—I could’ve simply let the mass of my sword do the talking—but I’d dumped all my add-ons into one-handed swords, not zweihanders.
I wasn’t in any danger of losing, but...she wouldn’t let me win.
It wasn’t as if the moth was trying to put me down either. Sure, her first sneak attack had clearly been aiming for my vitals, but everything since then had been a clear attempt at buying time. Knowing that one wrong move would let me finish her, she kept this fight going with the deliberate intention of stalling.
Time—it’s always time! The flowing grains slid past, heavier than their weight in gold; how many more would it be before the nobleman came back to life? Two servings of triskeles had been more than enough on my plate, and I didn’t know when they’d get up either. I needed to end this, and fast, or my slim odds of victory would evaporate entirely.
“Grah! Bring it!”
I shouted to provoke as much as I did to fire myself up, bolting forward in the same stance I’d used to take the masked aristocrat’s head. With my stature, this sort of grip let me wield the lengthy blade better than readying it in front of myself.
Furthermore, my body became a veil to cover up my swing until just before impact. I couldn’t even count the number of times Sir Lambert had used this trick to knock me on my ass; it followed that I’d take a page out of his book since I was using his style of weapon.
The strange mothwoman took a fighting stance to intercept me. Perfect. Stay just like that...because I’m not aiming to swing!
Perhaps I was imagining things, but for a brief instant, I felt as though I could see emotion stir within those pitch-black eyes. If I had to name what it was, I think I would label it bewilderment.
After all, who wouldn’t be taken aback when seeing a swordsman throw his sword?
“—!!!”
I stomped my foot and pivoted to throw the Craving Blade as hard as I could. As it spun through the air, I could feel its sad cries of “Why would you do this?!” echoing in my brain, but this was what Hybrid Sword Arts entailed; when the path of effectiveness called, I was there to answer. The cursed sword could complain all it wanted once we were done, but my current priority was to unearth any path to victory that would stave off the reaper.
The moth hesitated between blocking and dodging, but eventually steeled herself to knock away the Craving Blade. I suspected that she didn’t see me as a threat unarmed.
Her assumption was wrong.
“Sorry, I only know how to fight dirty!”
She knocked away my sword with her remaining hand, leaving her wide open. I slammed into her with the fey karambit tightly gripped, slashing at her throat; I cut straight through the outer carapace and made contact with an endoskeleton deep below.

My permanent gentleman’s carry was perfect for exploiting the weak neck all living creatures shared. Despite always keeping it primed for when I needed it most, I tried my best not to use this knife whenever I could. The ability to slice through only flesh that the wielder targeted was just too good: swordsmen need guts, and I was scared my intuition would dull if I relied on an AC-ignoring weapon all the time.
But of course, I wasn’t going to hold anything back when the going got tough. Death wasn’t an option for me.
I kicked the headless and unresponsive monster in the gut to send her off...only to see her decapitated body begin flailing after it hit the ground. I knew I’d been right to stay alert after landing the fatal blow—she resembled an insect even in death.
By my estimate, most people have played with bugs in their early youth, before developing a learned animosity for creepy crawlers. Assuming that holds true, I suspect that many have accidentally squashed an insect’s head when trying to pick it up. The fate of those poor specimens is universally to wriggle and writhe as if they’d forgotten that they’d just lost their heads and that death was right around the corner. This is because insectile nervous systems have several hotspots of nerve clusters; while the brain is responsible for more advanced thought, there are often other clumps that determine the movement of local muscles in the thorax, abdomen, legs, or wings.
Built like a hyperadvanced version of an insect, the strange life-form could very well have possessed similar nerve centers—perhaps even one intricate enough to be capable of acting as a secondary brain.
I’d been playing it extra safe because it wouldn’t have been a laughing matter to die to random attacks from an enemy I’d already killed. At this point, though, the brainless body could do me no more harm. Now that I could turn my attention away, it was finally time to push forward and take the final piece.

[Tips] Although many demihumans possess insectile traits, most do not stray that far from the basic mensch design; none are capable of superhuman feats like running off an auxiliary brain.

Watching Schnee Weiss—a creation he’d cared for nearly as much as his own daughter—sacrifice itself brought the duke to the brink of tears. The moth collective was an expressionless bunch, and it had never overtly reciprocated his affection; to see proof that it cared for him to such an extent moved him. Other than the central unit in charge of self-preservation, all of the swarm had laid itself down in an heartwarming display of parental reverence.
However, the time for joy and doting was not now. Schnee Weiss had haphazardly thrown together a humanish body in the name of protecting the duke by any means possible; the boy who struck it down would have to be dealt with as a matter of first priority.
As Martin began pouring everything into regeneration, the young man tossed another catalyst his way. The small vial burst on its own in the middle of its trajectory, raining down a viscous liquid that instantly ignited.
For a moment the professor thought it a trifling oil bomb—but only for a moment. At present, there was so little oxygen in the air that he could hardly breathe; why had the flames not gone out?
He attempted a simple firefighting spell to pluck out the oxygen around him, but the cantrip’s gooey liquid fire refused to let go. Each passing second scorched his weakened body and summoned waves of excruciating pain.
Fire and the accursed inferno it brought was the loyal eldest son to the God whose grudge had yet to set. Both the pain and scars it imparted upon vampires were more pronounced than those of other races, causing burns to heal far more slowly than normal wounds—it was nearly as bad as the visceral physiological rejection caused by silver.
The prolonged heat continued to torment him, eventually broiling his eyeballs until they popped. Not only was the flame difficult to extinguish, but the temperatures it produced were profound.
Still, while the pain was intense enough to evoke concerns of death, the duke could withstand it. He had lived for quite some time, and assassins impressive enough to be worthy of his praise came with the territory. He’d been stabbed, drowned, locked in a steel coffin, and, of course, burned. Many times, in fact. When he’d managed to survive run-ins with metaphysical flames that only conceptually burned targets, this was hardly anything to fret over.
Martin swiftly manipulated his own blood to cause his entire body to explode.
Flesh flew everywhere, taking the oozing blaze along with it. The fibers of his muscles were painfully visible for the world to see, but it was better than letting the fire impede his resurrection for any longer.
First and foremost, he rebuilt his sensory organs. These were a must to accurately enact mystic change upon the physical world, and more simply, he needed them to figure out what in the world was going on. The deflated sacks of his popped eyes filled once more as if time were flowing in reverse, restoring the silver glimmer hidden behind his mask.
The first thing the vampire saw with his new eyes was the boy sprinting toward him with his blade on his shoulders, reaching into his bag to pull out something shimmering.
Experience and instinct collided to scream in the duke’s mind: He knows how to kill a vampire.
The stern, hairless side profile of Archbishop Lampel glimmered in the boy’s hand. The Night theologist’s infamous dissertation, The Covenant of the Endowed, had pioneered a high-minded philosophy of ideal vampirism that had catapulted him to fame. Coins minted in his honor were exceptionally pure in silver, making them a popular good luck charm for vampires who desired his protection...and for those who wished to hunt the indulgent heathens the world derided as bloodsuckers.
The coin was death: no vampire, be they freshly sired or old as the earth itself, could survive taking that to the heart.
Sunlight, miracle, and silver were the three hefty shackles that had come with their immortality. The vindictive Sun punished those who dared to fool Him; the sheltering Moon bound them so that they might not seek the limits of their pride. These were the things vampires could not survive—so the world had decreed.
Having neglected to train his feral instincts, stooping low to unleash his inner vampiric strength did the duke no good; the boy still won out. In fact, the swordsman managed to lop off all his limbs, taking away the last of his options.
And so, Martin went all out. For a split second, he let loose a humorless burst of his strongest magic, which ravaged everything around him. He was afraid of death; there were still so many pleasures he’d yet to see.
After all, whether the future proved entertaining or boring mattered not if this shell of flesh and bone he called a self housed a heart that would never beat again.

[Tips] Archbishop Lampel’s teachings begin with the well-known line, “Ours is a fate dictated by the humble solicitation of love. Let not the vampire fall to common lawlessness, damned to daemonhood.” Though the Trialist Empire sets the bar for vampiric behavior in the modern day, this treatise was written for a fractious religious group that predates imperial Rhine.
The man himself has passed away, but he is still remembered as the patron saint of vampires—a moniker officially backed by the authorities of the imperial pantheon—and enjoys particular reverence from those who worship the Night Goddess. Legend has it that his soul has returned to the Moon’s side to forever watch over his brethren, offering solace and admonishment when needed most.

Crap, I wasted too much time.
In the heat of combat, every instant had felt utterly packed, but I’d actually used up nearly a minute. While that didn’t sound like a lot, it was more than enough for a vampire to make real progress toward resurrection.
I tucked away the fey karambit and called back the Craving Blade only to find it was throwing a fit and wouldn’t respond—I kid, I kid. It showed up in hand as always, though I didn’t make up the part about it harassing me with its projected abandonment issues. I understood that it preferred the stylish form of orthodox swordplay, but I really wished it could save the grief for later.
Turning to the masked man, he was indeed nearing full resurrection. Shit, he’s fast... I gotta hurry before he can move to pick up his staff.
Running in, I pulled out the last of the antiundead prototypes I’d meant to test in the College’s labs that day. Although I’d kept my expenditures to a minimum, I’d still used most of the experience from the ichor maze on these three spells. I think every player can relate to theorycrafting a bit too much after nearly wiping one time. Of course, the meanest GMs refuse to reuse enemy types for whole campaigns at a time, but it is what it is.
I let the final projectile loose before the noble could fully heal. Shaped slightly differently so I wouldn’t get it confused with the other tubes, the metal cylinder packed with catalysts hurtled through the air and broke apart on its own, much like the fuel-air explosive.
But this time, only one side broke down, causing all the contents to splatter forward. This wasn’t some coincidence: I’d tweaked the formula to program its spread—once again with the madam’s help—so it would dump its payload directly on my enemies.
My commitment to simplicity was alive and well in this design, and its sole purpose was the opposite of the thermite bomb: keep a high heat for as long as possible. Basically, I’d fashioned an arcane napalm to prevent undead monsters from regenerating.
Fire leapt forth with a terrific howl, beckoning the aristocrat to a dance mired in heat. I’d swirled refined oil and animal gelatin together in a thickening agent to produce an incendiary bomb as crude as it was effective.
The lipophilic concoction couldn’t easily be shaken off, and I’d woven in a bit of true magic that would keep the relentless blaze alive without oxygen for a short while—it was the beastly embodiment of combustion. Without gasoline, I’d been forced to settle for enhanced oil, but the mystic boost was more than enough to bring about the firepower I’d hoped for.
No matter how much he regenerated, it meant nothing so long as the newly formed flesh was instantly burned away. I’d worked like mad to pack this spell with as much power and heat as I could manage, and the fruits of my labor were evident. The only way he could rid himself of the stubbornly clinging incendiaries was to shave away any part that made contact. This was what had made napalm so popular amongst the armed forces of Earth: normally, anyone that got the stuff on them was utterly doomed.
That said, the definition of normalcy in this world covered a far wider spectrum. There were probably tons of people who’d shrug it off with a casual whistle, maybe even—
A blast rang out. Once a human torch, the nobleman’s body exploded with a disgusting squelch, rocketing the flames in every direction. Embers whizzed by at speeds impossible for even my reflexes to react to, singing my hair as they passed.
No way... Did he blow off the whole surface of his body to put himself out?!
I had a direct view of the dark crimson entrails that ordinarily lay hidden, and could see some parts practically rewind the damage they’d taken in real time.
Shit! Is he shucking off everything that can’t help him in combat so he can get up and fight?! That must be why his bones and muscles are regenerating first!
I was all out of hidden aces, and without catalysts, I didn’t have a single attack spell to my name. Though I could cut him down so long as I had a weapon, killing him wasn’t the same as finishing the fight. In the worst case, monsters of his make could counterattack while dying and then take all the time in the world to heal back up afterward.
He was literally cheating: I was like the little boy at the arcade playing on a single quarter against a grown man pouring in his salary.
I yanked my shriveling spirit to its feet with my loudest battle cry yet and swung at the bloody mannequin.
Suddenly, he expertly clicked his meatless tongue and raised a misshapen hand—one with long, vampiric claws primed for battle.
I knew you could do that! Why the hell haven’t you until now?! Were you fucking sandbagging?! Are we mortals so pitifully frail that you have to toy with us instead of using your fists, you long-lived asshole?!
But it was too late to fall back now: I’d have to commit to my attack and use the three thermite darts I had left to cremate him before— Wait!
Genius struck. I’d likened the man’s childishness to arcade games and the coins that fueled them, which reminded me...I had one. I had something made of nearly pure silver.
Using one strand of thought, I formed an Unseen Hand to sift through my bag and pull out my meager purse. Inside, I found a valuable coin that I’d kept just in case: the same high-grade silver piece of Archbishop Lampel that I’d gotten as a reward for “selling out” Miss Celia. I’d kept it on hand in case of an emergency expense, but never would have imagined it’d turn into a real silver bullet.
I can win. All I had to do was split open his chest and jam this coin into his open heart, and the unkillable vampire would meet his end. There was nothing he could do to stop it: the gods had decided long ago that this was how the world worked.
I only had one chance, one opportunity—the battlefield never offered redos. But this was a bet worth calling with my last silver piece; I took one final step and showed the cards hidden in the flourish of my blade.
All right. It’s time to see who has the better hand.
But first, I had to stop him from moving. He seemed unaccustomed to fistfights, and I managed to manipulate his movements by bluffing with my gaze and body; a quick feint to the right with my weight still centered left was more than enough to fake him out.
His right hand was wide open when I chopped it off, and I quickly took his left following a panicked attempt to counterhit. Three thermite darts floated in my Unseen Hands above, and my left knuckle curled around the silver bullet to end it all.
If I failed here, it was over. I’d played all my best cards, the deck was empty, and my hand was sparse.
If I pulled back here, it was over. A battle of attrition against infinite healing was no different from suicide.
Hesitation spelled death; retreat spelled death. Everything rode on this one attack—this one moment.
I’m all in.
“—!!!”
Just as I wound up for the decisive blow, the Craving Blade began to shriek. This wasn’t the same pleading sweetness that it employed when begging to be used. It was urging—no, demanding me to do something, but the nebulous blobs of thought failed to produce any linguistic meaning in my mind.
By the time I realized it was a warning, everything was over.
“Ackgh?!”
Hideous creaking accompanied the distortion of space. I’d been in the air, just about to land for my final step, when I blasted off and saw something unthinkable: the arms and legs that so intimately accompanied me through every experience I’d ever had...flew off. My Lightning Reflexes triggered, dragging out the terrible scene into a nonconsensual slow-motion film.
My right arm tore off from the shoulder; my right leg burst at the shin; my left leg twisted free around my thigh. The limbs I’d lovingly used since my ego first woke in Konigstuhl were gone.
Though I couldn’t even begin to understand what had happened, I strangely felt no pain. Perhaps it was the heat of battle, or maybe my brain simply couldn’t process the surreality of the scene. I simply sailed backward, soaking in the force that sank into my body.
The sword in front of my chest groaned. I didn’t know when it had gotten there, but it was probably thanks to it that my neck didn’t spin off for an instant kill. It had realized I couldn’t defend myself, and come to shield my vitals, if nothing else.
My sole remaining limb had still snapped like a used toothpick, but it hung on by a thread—no doubt because of the glimmering jewel on my left hand. Seated in the lunar ring, her brilliant ice-blue shone as beautifully as ever.
It was too bad that they could only prolong my death by a few seconds.
The spiraling force had yet to dissipate, and I could feel that the invisible tornado wouldn’t be content until my carcass was reduced to mincemeat.
I guess I should’ve known. No matter how playful the man’s speech and mannerisms had been, he’d still been trying to kill me. Threatening to put him down for real would naturally trigger an unmitigated response of incomprehensible violence.
But I’m not dying alone.
I’ll kill you. I’ll fucking kill you if it’s the last thing I do.
Looming death brought time to a crawl, and I could still weave together spells so long as Helga’s memory shimmered true and my brain could muster up the formulae. I was going to see my mission through. My Hands had been torn asunder, sending the thermite sticks and the fey knife flying; if I could catch them, drive them into his chest, and grind the silver visage of a somber monk into his exposed heart, he’d go down.
I could sort of just tell that it wasn’t worth trying to live. This wasn’t the sort of direct attack I could redirect with a space-bending barrier; the space around me was the range of the attack. Swordsmen weren’t built to dodge this kind of thing. Maybe a pure tank could muscle their way through it, but a flimsy mensch brat didn’t have the HP to tough it out.
So the only thing left was to not die for free. I’d gotten to this point shouldering all kinds of promises and dreams, and I wasn’t about to lay down and obediently accept what boiled down to a fucking traffic accident with a broken enemy!
Sure, this line of work saw dragons falling out of the sky, high-level characters just hanging out around town, or random mutts that came out to chase you if your dice rolls sucked—yeah, it was hell. But that didn’t mean I could accept being squashed like a bug just because of some crappy luck.
I’m taking you with me!
“Thou scamperst overmuch, pup.”
Just as I was about to avenge myself, the awful creaking and all the pressure causing it were overwritten by the gentle timbre of a woman’s voice.
“Know thy place. To check frolicsome jesters be thy burden by right.”
Scarlet mist settled into the room, enshrouding the nobleman; a second later, I heard a cataclysmic noise. It was the abominable sound of a hard object crunching, like an overwhelming mass had crushed a person whole. The aural equivalent of someone filing my psyche down with sandpaper was the backdrop that accompanied my uncaught fall.
“Oh? A tad tardy, mayhaps.”
Still producing grisly sounds—I thought I could hear screams, or maybe pleading, as well—the red cloud wound into a more definite shape. The amorphous crimson fog dissipated to naturally unveil a noblewoman as if she’d always been here.
The lady wore a toga that, while far behind the times, evoked lofty imagery from the days of classical poetry; her stature was apparent at first glance. Dyed in the rare imperial violet, she wore it well, though for whatever reason, she seemed to wear nothing else. Her near nudity clashed with her grace to produce an eccentric impression.
Bloodred eyes and inky-black hair embellished the purple tunic with orphic charm, and the gloss of her milky-white skin betrayed softness beyond that of clouds. Though her eyes drooped in a dreamy way, the long and menacing fangs protruding past her lips were the mark of a vampire.
She seemed familiar, almost. As the pain began to set in and the blood loss blurred my vision, another face quite similar to the gorgeous woman’s popped into view. The girl in holy garb crawling out of the red mist was the same one I’d parted ways with a little while ago.
Ohh, I thought. Of course. She looks like Miss Celia.
Gazing up at the crying nun running my way, I found this pointless discovery terribly entertaining as I closed my eyes with a smile.

[Tips] Imperial violet is the most highly prized of all forbidden colors in the Empire. Only the Emperor and former emperors are permitted to wear it on their persons. The dye is incredibly rare and labor-intensive, and has been considered a status symbol for centuries; naturally, the Empire codified its restricted use upon its founding.
However, the tone of purple is incredibly garish, and modern emperors tend to avoid the color outside of official ceremonies.

“Wha—wait! This isn’t fair! Why are you here?!”
These were the duke’s first words upon being yanked by the neck out of the red mist. Though he’d managed to scramble together something resembling a head and chest, his limbs and lower torso had been minced beyond recognition—even his carefully set hairdo had been reduced to a terrible mess. The mask he seemed so partial to lay shattered on the floor.
“Oh? Thy japing wit is ever marvelous, pup.”
The woman let her imperial-purple toga scandalously sag with a grin, flashing her kind’s trademark fangs. Hers was a smile steeped in intimidating menace. Though her words tiptoed around and around, the dated Rhinian she spoke sent the duke into a shivering fit.
Martin hated this roundabout speech; he hated this enunciation; but most of all, he hated her. That was the sole reason he made a constant effort not to allow his verbiage to fall into archaics as so many long-lived vampires were disposed to.
“If I should read the matter fairly, the first fault must be thine. Look to the ruin thou hast fashioned from a boy; look to my beloved grandniece, so tearful she hath clung to my side.” The woman smiled tenderly, yet with the pristine etiquette of a proper lady—all while engaging in unspeakable violence. “And look finally to me, whose banquet thou hast cut short.”
Here stood one of the few women to grace the Trialist Empire with her reign. Theresea Hildegarde Emilia Ursula von Erstreich, remembered as the Delicate Empress, crushed her nephew’s neck.
“Grghleg...”
Dainty fingers suited best to shining silver cutlery or epicurean fans squeezed tight, shattering all seven bones in his neck. Her lithe frame could not give away her ruinous clutch as she held fast so that the man could not heal.
Vampires very rarely received enough divine favor to put down undead, and a mutual inability to wield lethal silver weapons caused infighting to devolve to this: raw violence. Combat between two vampires was a constant exertion of overwhelming pressure that only ended when the opponent cried uncle.
Though the frame may be immortal, the self resided in the realm of thought. The psyche, being a ginger, fleeting thing, was markedly less unkillable. Such was why Martin had developed a spell to continuously compress space: the incessant twisting force was his way of dealing with the undead.
“Rather, he who hath been duly called Emperor must not cry like the hens at dawn at the passing sight of a kinsman. At present I am a playwright only, and retired in the main; these slender fingers can hold naught but pens.”
Though the duke tried to scoff, “Slender indeed,” his crushed windpipe could do no better than produce bubbles of blood. The crowning jewel to seal his misfortune was that, much like how he had honed himself to the height of magecraft, this aunt of his was the pinnacle of vampiric strength...and she was at point-blank range. The fight had been decided the moment she’d gotten into close quarters—that was how bad the matchup was for him.
The Delicate Empress turned her body to mist, rocketed across space, and gulped down blood to heal her wounds and tap into strength unimaginable. She took every single strength that caused the other races to fear their ilk as bloodsuckers and proudly announced that this was what it meant to be vampiric; her strategy was unbeatable precisely because it was so simple.
Broken and battered, the duke was damned to a cycle of death and rebirth without any hope of casting a spell. All he could do was match his aunt’s look of disdain with a hateful glare, just as he had on that boat all those years ago. For her part, the woman apathetically shrugged off his silver rays of loathing and turned her attention to her great-niece, who’d sat down by the unconscious mensch boy’s side.
“Fix thine eyes upon my honey-hearted darling. How she doth remind me of mine youth; oh, how I pined for Sir Richard as a maiden,” Theresea said with a sultry sigh.
The vampiric nun knelt over the fading mensch life and wound her hands over her holy icon. Spurred on by the rich smell of blood, her fangs instinctively slipped out; their pointed tips tickled her tongue as if they were whispering right into her soul. For a moment, the addictive taste crept back from her memory to her mouth, triggering gluttony that spoke in hushed tones from the back of her brain.
Here lies a feast, it said. The God of Cycles has played a trick of fate to supply you with the greatest meal you could ever ask for.
“...O Goddess.”
Yet the priestess held firm, clinging to an invocation of the Goddess’s name as she bit deep into her tongue. She was not Constance Cecilia Valeria Katrine von Erstreich, the weak-willed vampire; she was Sister Cecilia, the humble priestess of Night that would save this boy’s life.
“O merciful Goddess of Night, Ye who watch over us from the heavens.”
She let the bead of blood that spilt forth from her lips roll down her chin unimpeded, instead moving her tongue to speak the words that needed to be spoken. Every syllable contained meaning—latent power that her faith granted her, yet that she had not once called upon until now.
“I am she who prays to give, she who refuses to merely receive. Loving Mother, I beseech Ye to relieve this soul of suffering.”
The gravitas of her incantation was met with a gentle glow of unknown origin that dispelled the eerie lighting of the room. True moonlight shone: the Mother’s guiding gaze cut through the dark to guide Her lost lambs.
“Take me to dust, and save Your beloved child from agony, for such is the path Ye have laid out.”
Cecilia’s solemn prayer was answered by heavenly power meant to distort reality to be as it always was meant to. Miracles were just that—miracles; their effects could bring about change that not even the most sublime magic could replicate. When the nun placed a torn limb back into place, it fused with the greater body as if it had never left. Leaving no scars nor even a mark of its destruction, the flesh combined with a lustrous new coat of healthy skin.
This was infeasible by normal means. What few or none could accomplish with thaumaturgy became perfectly possible with miracles. The powers that be used the limited omnipotence vested within Their bounds to dutifully bring about the wishes of the faithful.
But the gods did not coddle. They were guardians to be sure, but keepers of the world: to give and give alone was unthinkable for a miracle of sizable scope. Allow that, and men would cease to be men—they would fall to become mere servants of heaven.
“Urgh...agh! Aurgh! Hgraaah!”
The nun’s limbs began to rip apart with a distressing clamor. Muscles, tendons, bones—everything tore to announce that this was the price paid for a feat that defied reason.

Tprg4.23

[Tips] Triskeles are arcane life-forms and the canine of choice for the Empire’s military affairs. They are highly intelligent, with those trained by expert handlers capable of comprehending human speech and following complicated orders. Though most serve alongside city policemen, some find work supporting more specialized recon units.
As artificial organisms forged purely from thaumaturgic science, a male and female triskele still cannot breed without the assistance of a magus; one could consider them the descendants of animal familiars.

Is man stronger than beast? I think there are convincing arguments for either side. But one thing is for sure: there aren’t a lot of creatures mensch can beat in a fair fight.
“Eep!”
Two rows of razored teeth clamped down on open air, barely missing my foot. Not only were their fangs finer than pointed blades, but their massive jaws packed just as much power as they seemed to; they could tear through my leg as casually as I could snack on a pretzel.
The triskele that had leapt at me from a low crouch—hereby referred to as Dog A for my own convenience—led with its middle head, but then its left head tried to chomp at my midsection a beat later. I kicked this second snout both to divert the attack and to leap upward to make some space.
Despite its menacing appearance, the hound whimpered like a puppy when I kicked off it; was it trying to guilt-trip me? Too bad it wouldn’t work when its partner—aka Dog B—cleverly jumped up to catch me midarc.
I tried to summon an Unseen Hand to act as a platform so I could sneak in a slash while slipping past Dog B...
“Whoa?!”
...but my Hand was nowhere to be found, and the weight I’d committed to my step sent me tumbling in midair. As I spiraled to earth, I spied the masked noble muttering to himself and gesticulating with his cane; the bastard erased my spell!
“Man, that was close!”
I kicked Dog B’s left mouth shut to counter its perfectly timed attack, landing hands-down on top of Dog A as it tried to turn for another strike. Quickly bouncing right off, I curled up and swung its way as a parting gift...but only grazed it.
The Craving Blade’s unusually perfect edge let me cut right through the hardy coat of fur and score the dog’s flesh; a normal sword would have had trouble snipping off more than a few stray strands. Unfortunately, I wasn’t a manga protagonist, and a slash made without any solid footing lacked the force needed for a deep cut. Although it seemed like I’d rent a good chunk of flesh, I hadn’t so much as scraped the organs beneath.
Put another way, I’d cleared my saving throw and got a bit of chip damage in to boot—that wasn’t anything to scoff at. It was just that this world failed to provide me with the numerical hit points or damage numbers that would make these sorts of glancing blows feel rewarding.
Truth be told, the first triskele’s oozing red blood did nothing to stymie its feral rage, and the wound was already closing up. There was no doubt in my mind that they had some kind of spell woven into their cells to accelerate their regenerative properties.
They were the ultimate vanguards: strong, fast, and good at protecting their back line. Adding insult to injury was that they were composed of four distinct parts—three heads and a torso—making them difficult to take out in one go. Lopping off one head wouldn’t be enough for a kill; I couldn’t afford to keep playing fair forever.
I wanted to regain my footing upon landing a short distance away, but the hounds weren’t kind enough to let me. Dogs A and B twirled around with celerity unthinkable for animals of their size and bolted toward me with uncanny agility. Whereas I was sneaking in hits on reaction rolls, these two had specced their builds to take initiative every round—it was downright unethical.
Well, I guess that makes two of us!
Dog A charged straight at me, forgoing any wily tricks to simply crush me with its weight. Right behind, Dog B jumped high to attack from the air.
Are these things really animals?! Their synergy puts most adventuring parties to shame!
The flanking heads let them cover a great deal of lateral space, and their rushing legs were built to follow a sudden lunge to either side. Stepping back would only put me one pace away from the inevitable, and the massive frame barreling down from above gave me almost nowhere to run.
Fighting the urge to cry, I slid down the only escape route left: the wide space between the massive triskele’s legs. The thin layer of water coating the floor flared up in a tremendous splash as I dove, and I boosted myself with an Unseen Hand to clear the danger zone.
The mage’s jamming caused my Hands to dissipate immediately after construction, but the momentum they imparted upon me was here to stay. Though a force field may be magic, its physical effects on the world are not.
I considered sneaking in another hit as I slid by, but thought better of it. While it was tempting to strike at a distance where I could pierce the hound’s exposed belly to rupture its heart or rip out its organs, it would cost me a lot of speed; the remaining dog would pile on its friend’s corpse to crush me alive.
So instead, I left them a little present.
After completing my shiver-inducing ride under the great archway of the triskele’s legs, I sprinted toward the puppeteer behind it all. The Hands I used to push myself back onto my feet disappeared in an instant, but they were cheap enough to produce en masse. It was like I was a spendthrift filling up on bottomless hush puppies at a tacky American restaurant, dishing out more magic boosters every second to force myself forward.
All things considered, I was glad the noble was taking the time to annoy me by erasing every spell. I was a fragile little mensch, already wounded; if he’d started harassing me with attack magic that pierced my flimsy barriers, I would have been done for.
Plus, the triskeles were giving me enough trouble, so I did not want to have a ranged opponent to dodge. I hate to admit this, but I wasn’t strong enough to solo bosses, okay?!
“My word. You’ve gotten past them both! Alas, before you can close the distance...”
...Your hounds will chew me up, right? Don’t you worry about that: I’ve laid the groundwork. Before the masked man could say another word, an eruption of radiance lit up the world behind me.
“What?!”
Even with my back turned and the triskeles blocking the view, the flash was blinding; the dogs ate the same brilliance at point-blank range. The screeching blast that accompanied it put every canal in the ear through the wringer and dismantled any semblance of balance. As a finishing touch, I’d fitted my well-loved arcane flash-bang concoction with a modified trigger spell that had a few seconds of delay.
I didn’t know how long this would disable a triskele for. They seemed hardier than mensch, so there was a chance they’d recover more quickly. Worse still, the beasts were intelligent; the trick might not work a second time.
Still, I’d decided that this was the time to play my card. If I could disable the masked noble, his dogs would pose less of a threat. You know what they say: it’s always a good day to die—not that I planned to, of course.
I sprinted ahead, holding the Craving Blade to one side. I had to close the distance while the hounds were out of commission and the sorcerer was flinching from the residual flash.
The quality of my spirited yell was something difficult to put into words, even as the one making it; all I could say was that its energy was at least on par with the intensity of my hulking sword as I shifted my forward momentum into a sideways swing. Collisions fed back from the edge to the handle, letting me know I’d hit more than a few obstructions as thin as they were hard...but this time, my blade swung true.
I didn’t know whether his counterspells or the need to command the triskeles were to blame, but the nobleman’s barriers had lessened from his original seven to five. Perhaps he’d thought the last two superfluous to block a simple attack—unfortunately for him, a strike made on solid ground was sharper than anything I could do in midair!
His head flew. I would have liked nothing more than to mercilessly lay down another slash, but I could feel danger stirring behind me and had to retreat. Shit, they’re already up?! Not even tabletop wyverns recover this fast!
Both hounds jumped in for a tackle; I intercepted their front paws with the Craving Blade and pushed off, turning the force of impact into an accelerant to buy myself some space.
This time, neither Dog A nor B followed through with another offensive. Instead, they posted up next to the aristocrat’s body in a defensive stance, growling at me the whole time. I couldn’t help but feel that their worry was unfounded when the thing was standing upright, all peachy without its head.
Look, see?
The decapitated body sauntered off in the direction of its head, hoisted it into the air with a flick of its staff, and caught it in its left hand. The long wand activated, Cleaning the sewage off the smirk hidden behind a perfectly repaired mask.
I was up against the truest form of undeath: he wouldn’t die even if I killed him. Judging from how he shrugged off lethal damage, his talent in sorcery, and the fact that he was anything but physically inept, my best guess was that he was a vampire. That would prove a problem. Without a silver weapon—the metal triggered a visceral allergic response—laying around or a priest to invoke the word of a god, I had no way of putting him down for good.
Of course, that wasn’t to say that undying beings could restore themselves indefinitely. Regenerating after a fatal blow took a lot of resources, and enough repetitions would eventually cause his resurrections to slow down to a snail’s pace. The only problem was that I had no way of telling how many more deaths it would take.
Much to my dismay, I didn’t have so much as a spare second to scour through my character sheet for new skills—not that I could’ve brought myself to subject a deity to such blatant circumstantial worship. Seeing as They already had to deal with workplace power harassment, I could only imagine how painful it would be to have Their followers draw on Their power out of convenience alone. Besides, Faith-based skills were literally based on devotion, as the name suggested, and I doubted I could pray sincerely in my current state; any miracle I could conjure up would certainly be too weak to make a real difference.
“My goodness, how surprising. To think you’d not only incapacitate my little darlings—albeit for a fleeting second—but lead your blade to my person not once, but twice! It has been over a quarter of a century since I was properly bisected, and my most recent memory of losing my head is over a century since past. You have me feeling rather refreshed, young man.”
The man merrily twirled his staff in a way that skipped straight past nonchalance into open mockery of mortals. His mannerisms were so derisive that, had I not been surrounded by silver tongues that let loose frequent sarcastic jabs in my daily life, I would have lost my temper and cussed him out like a sailor.
“Swordplay is wholly removed from my realm of expertise, but it is apparent that yours is remarkable. The way you couple it with magic is likewise splendid. Much like your grade in formula assembly, I shall grant your practical applications an A. Though, I must say, while swiftly replacing every spell I erase is technically a solution, it fails to stimulate my love of beauty. What I’d desired from you was the ingenuity to rewrite the formula on the spot to prevent any further interference.”
Thanks for the rapid-fire analysis. Maybe I could’ve done that if your two dogs weren’t nipping at my heels!
“Yet I must admit, that last spell was splendid. Regrettably, its construction remained hidden to me behind the silhouettes of my darlings here—would you mind showing me again? I shall save my evaluation for after I have had a proper look.”
Oh, wait. I should just tweak my spells while he’s killing time taunting me. I’d gone out of my way to invest in multithreaded consciousness, so it would be a waste not to dedicate a portion of my mind to shoring up my weaknesses. I came up with a few new permutations which I would cycle through at random, making my Hands a bit harder to erase...I think. Man, I hope this works. Maybe I should pray.“Well then,” he concluded, “lecture resumes. Do your best to keep up in the third period, young man.”
The click of his cane striking the floor rang out once more, followed by a vibration that tickled my eardrums. Though it began as a low drone, the buzzing grew louder and louder, causing my skin to crawl; at last, the light tickle became a violent scratch that made me shudder as my ears cried out against the unpleasant wave of noise.
This was the sound of insect flight in full murmuration. The cacophony of beating wings crept closer from the back of the room in the form of a single unified mass; each bug fluttered in such peculiar consonance with those around it that the whole flock looked to be a single organism that triggered a hard-coded mammal revulsion.
Faced with a white lump of insects folding in on themselves, I reflexively gave the noble what he wanted: I shoved an Unseen Hand into my pocket and grabbed every remaining ounce of catalyst, throwing it at the swarm. Instead of clumping it up, I scattered it to cover my whole field of view in an attempt to blot out the cloud of bugs.
Intense radiance followed as the dolomite powder exploded into light and sound. Seventy-five thousand candelas flashed across 150 decibels of raw noise to burn and shock the insects’ sensory receptors until the critters could no longer fly. The wall of vermin that had been steadily approaching now crashed into the earth like a wave.
Upon closer inspection, I found they were white moths.
“Eugh!”
As the moths rained down onto their fallen comrades, they began to crush those at the bottom, releasing a pungent odor that stung my nostrils. Whatever fluids ran through their bodies were anything but kosher; they were probably familiars that had had been designed from the outset with self-destruction in mind.
Some time ago, I’d thumbed through some tomes on familiars after seeing how helpful and cool Floki had been. Can you blame me? Just imagine a mystic swordsman with a raven perched on his shoulder and try to tell me that isn’t cool. Alas, beastly companions were both inconvenient and inflexible. Their most glaring flaw was expense, in that rearing a proper familiar took vast reserves of time and money. I frankly did not have the patience to spend generations acclimating animals to arcane contact just to get the base to start making adjustments on. Mika had been gifted a thoroughbred from her master and was fortunate enough to tame it straight away; that wasn’t going to happen for me.
Modern magia dismissed the art as a hobby for the affluent, and there was no chance that Lady Agrippina had connections with anyone in the scene. After all, my employer and the perverted wraith she called a master belonged to the School of Daybreak—the foremost critics of familiar breeding.
Setting my bygone dreams aside, I hurried away from the stinging poison while conjuring the Insulating Barrier I’d picked up on a cold winter day, complete with the Selective Screening add-on. Though I primarily employed it to keep me warm or dry in my daily life, a quick shift in perspective made it a protective suit against harmful substances.
“Ahh, how clever of you, young man. Hm, perhaps a reevaluation is in order: consider your grade in spell structure bumped up to a B. Your formulae are multifaceted—truly quite delightful. Simple and versatile, I suspect this dandy trick would temporarily impede persons of any make. Not bad at all. I’d love to purchase the rights when we’re finished, so begin thinking of your price now, will you?”
Can you please stop breaking down everything I do after a single glance?! I didn’t spend all this experience just for you to see right through me!
Despite shaving away the frontmost layer of moths, the swarm continued on unimpeded; as I backed off, I could feel the rage getting to my head. I knew perfectly well—oh, believe me, I knew—that the masked noble was stronger than me...but having him underestimate me to this degree ground my gears.
It was already too late to run. The only path left was to fell the goliath.
The time had come to unveil one of my trump cards. Having nearly died at the hands of undead once, it wouldn’t have made sense for me to walk around without some kind of counter, now would it?
You see, on that day many moons ago when Lady Agrippina had laughed at me until I curled up into a miserable ball for ruining one of the firing ranges at the College...that hadn’t been the only spell I’d planned to test.
Sprinting away from the cloud of moths at full tilt, I thrust a Hand into my bag to pull out my ace in the hole—or maybe it would be more apt to say I tore off the seal on Pandora’s box. I’d hidden it away partly because I’d wanted to save it for when the time was ripe, but the main reason was that I’d known a facility that couldn’t handle molten thermite definitely couldn’t withstand this. When I’d packed it back at the atelier, I’d thought to myself, I bet I won’t use a single one of these—in fact, I’d laugh if I ended up in a predicament where I had to.
I tossed the catalyst. Although it looked like a scrap of junk wrapped in a few layers of cloth, this was the product of my mind firing on all cylinders to create the world’s most unethical board-clearer.
As the package disappeared into the veil of moths, I could feel the tactile sensation of my Hand being crushed by the overwhelming torrent of insects, crushing the packet into dust. Oh. I guess self-destructing isn’t their only trick...
Regardless, their efforts simply saved me a step in activating the spell. The outer safety layer was supposed to be activated by crushing it in a Hand, so its destruction posed no issue.
The safety carapace doubled as a trigger, and its destruction automatically activated the cantrip surrounding the catalyst within. A bit of simple migration and mutation was all it took to convert the contents, and an Insulating Barrier much like the one around me surrounded point zero to limit the blast zone’s radius before it warped the laws of reality to its whim.
And the final step lay with me.
Once the alchemical reaction completed and the final layer of cloth was gone, the aerosolized particles of the mixture flooded the isolated space in fractions of a second...
“Petals of the Daisy, hear me and scatter!”
...at which point I used one of the “overblown” chants the magia disliked so much—I found them a tad embarrassing too—to set it off.
The world erupted in an instant.
Despite being quarantined in space by a mystic barrier, the detonation was so powerful that the gale that leaked through knocked me away. I wouldn’t have shamefully tumbled off had I controlled the explosion from start to finish with true magic, but I’d opted for a cantrip in order to skirt by with the bare minimum mana usage.
Searing waves of air stirred within the bubble, carrying the force of the blast like an invisible iron hammer that rammed into everything it encountered. The liquid oxygen I’d scattered had instantaneously dispersed and subsequently exploded; to say the air itself had blown up was no exaggeration.
A tiny spark had been all it took. The insignificant outset began a chain reaction of ignitions in the oxygenated air that produced nearly two thousand degrees of heat with which it battered the space inside the barrier.
I’d heard that the destructive range of an explosive was far less than what it seemed. So much so that one could survive the scorching flames of an impressive blast—injuries notwithstanding—so long as they avoided the impact at the center. This was why every modern Earth explosive from grenades to flechettes utilized the initial burst as a means to deliver more damaging metal projectiles.
This had led to a realization that straddled the baffling line between brilliant and barbaric: since shock waves lost their force as they diffused over long distances, if one distributed combustibles across the whole area intended for destruction, then everything would blow up without losing the initial blast to natural dispersal! I’d just happened to borrow what these scientists had dubbed fuel-air explosives.
I hadn’t been able to synthesize the complicated fuels used in cutting-edge thermobaric weapons. Mulling over an alchemy station for hours and even getting a bit of help from the madam had only been enough to produce an early version that relied on liquid oxygen, and even then, I’d broken my fair share of equipment trying to keep the fluid below the boiling point. Had the smirking Lady Agrippina not offered a word or two of advice, I would have spent a truckload of experience points trying to develop this card up my sleeve.
And, well, this one should have stayed up my sleeve; whether I was happy or sad about finally seeing it in action was a complicated question.
But what mattered now was that it was strong enough. Everything in a ten-meter radius from its origin had been sectioned off in a barrier that trapped what should have been a momentary blast for seconds. The violent winds were paired with a vacuum that contorted lungs already emptied by the shock of impact; to top it all off, the reaction filled the air with carbon monoxide. Everything melded together to become an unsurvivable nightmare for anything that breathed...
...or at least, it would have by Earth’s standards.

[Tips] Formula revision is perhaps the highest form of spell jamming, in which one tweaks another’s spell to dissipate or otherwise backfire. To do so is to read someone else’s mind in order to rewrite their mystic formulae, and is a considerable display of arcane mastery.
It is similar to inserting erroneous variables or numbers into a mathematical equation. Say, for example, that a merchant wishes to tally a total sum via multiplication: if the price of the items or their quantity changes, or if the foundational idea of multiplication turns to division, the output loses all meaning. In fact, at times, the final result may cause direct harm to the solver.

The life-form thought.
The life-form always thought.
Such was the purpose that led to its creation; such was the desire that led to its acceptance; and such thought was how it had won its love.
Equipped with enormous capacity for thought that enabled quick and accurate arithmetic, it understood that a great many of its selves had been destroyed in a single breath. Eighty-five percent of the battle-ready units that it had split off and carefully cultivated had been blown apart in a terrific, never-before-seen explosion that burned and blew for far longer than anticipated.
The unknown spell demolished the swarm so thoroughly that no individual unit caught in the blast could be recycled for further use. Every call to its many selves went unanswered. Furthermore, the toxic fluids it had secreted were burned away; the pragmatic mind assessed that it was in no position to fulfill its duty.
At the same time, its master was incapable of movement. While he would have been fine if the burns were only surface level, the damage to his body was so salient that it was harder to pinpoint what sections were undamaged. The incessant turbulence of the prolonged explosion had churned his organs like a meat pie, and his bones had shattered under the extreme pressure. Unblocked heat had melted his skin into a frightful goo that dribbled onto his charred clothes, producing a sorry figure.
A normal person from nearly any other walk of life would be unequivocally deceased; yet the life-form knew from its unwavering link that its master was still alive. To be refused death even when reduced to this painful state of outright physical destruction begged the question: could this truly be called a blessing?
Vampires were hardy creatures. They could lose their heads or spill their guts and continue about their lives. There were only three things that could kill one of their kind in the truest sense of the word. However, what seemed an inexhaustible font of life could be drained by seriously maiming them.
Though the life-form’s master accepted that he was a vampire, the man personally rejected a life of vampirism. He scarcely ever partook in blood, and on the rare occasion he did, he far undercut his contemporaries. The raw power he had inherited meant living in a constant state of fast did not spell doom for him, but his diet remained insufficient for robust growth.
Eternity was a prison without something to cling to; if not warm nectar, then, what did he choose? Uncontent with the thought of surrendering himself to the circumstances of his birth, the man found meaning in the product of his own diligence, something that none could ever deprive him of: his own wit. He learned how to manipulate his mana by branding the lessons of magecraft onto his brain, actualizing a flood of creative ideas to imprint himself onto the world.
He was not a mere Erstreich, born to a fate of privilege. No, he was an individual: he was Professor Martin von Erstreich, member of the College’s factionless School of Midheaven—and he had polished himself to suit his own ideals through the merit of his own intellect.
The history of his studies threatened to numb the mind. Making full use of his immortality, the magus had spent day in and day out steeped in nothing but thaumaturgical research. As a result, he had climbed the sublime peak of strength; even a bloodsucker who had bolstered their own might via sin was no better than a pile of ashes in his wake.
Yet this also meant that he was incomplete as a vampire. His ability to heal was significantly inferior to a comparably powerful member of his ilk.
Today, he had already suffered two fatal blows—at the hand of a child he could annihilate at first sight, no less. The cost of frolic was steep. Although he carried himself as if nothing concerned him, a crumbling vampire in his position would have long since been reduced to dust; having endured two attacks that would ordinarily necessitate a prolonged holiday to heal from left the life-form worried.
Worse still, the life-form considered the act of taking a third attack head-on because it “seemed unique” to be utter insanity. Despite having seen the immortal prioritize curiosity over well-being all its life, it could not accept this as a decision made by a sound mind.
His resurrection was slower now. A vampire of his age who had nourished themselves with ample nectar would have easily brushed off the damage, but it knew its master’s injuries were deep enough to prevent him from moving for a short while. Given a few dozen seconds, he would be back to good health. His wounds would close, his clothes would neatly mend themselves, and he would once more resume his bombastic praise in his usual taunting—though he himself did not intend it in the slightest—tone.
But the life-form thought even this was too long.
The unsightly child had failed to rein in his own spell and flew off into a faraway pillar, but the will to fight burned on within him. While he’d unhanded his weapon upon being knocked away, his body remained full of life.
The life-form felt strongly that it could not let the child approach its master before he was fully healed.
It did not have time to recall the many selves posted far away. The stockpile of units it had left amounted to no more than a twentieth of its full arsenal.
Yet for it, that was not reason enough to forgo trying. The life-form scrounged up its dwindling selves to create a weapon that came pitifully short of its true power. Still, that would do: it just needed to buy a transient moment. In less than a minute’s time, its master would wake and clean up this elementary problem.
The life-form had no hope of comprehending his true intentions, but that was fine. His thought process mattered little to it. All that mattered was that he had loved it; as a tool, it was its duty to repay him.
So the life-form did not hesitate: leaving only the bare minimum needed to ensure its continued ego, it crawled out of hiding.

[Tips] The excellence of a vampire is decided on two key points. The first is the strength of their lineage: a vampire born as the result of a mighty mother and father will invariably inherit their strength. The second is the quantity of blood consumed: the liquid residue of foreign souls ennobles them.
However, this rule only expresses an individual’s merit as a vampire, and is an inadequate measure of overall power.

After letting loose my secret weapon—in the sense that I would’ve liked it to have remained a secret—the explosion sent me tumbling straight into a pillar.
Since I’d had no chance to practice, I hadn’t been sure how much of the impact would escape the barrier. I’d been wholly unprepared to steady my footing or to incrementally bleed off the momentum like I’d done with the masked man’s opening attack.
Still, it seemed like my combat rolls weren’t too shabby today. Luckily enough, I’d flown off at an angle that avoided collision for a few dozen meters, letting me roll for a decent while before slamming into a pillar. In the worst case, I could have flown right into one and splattered like a pomegranate.
“Augh! Blegh, ack!” ...But I ended up sustaining a deep wound that I couldn’t shrug off. “Hrgh... Ugh... I think I broke a rib...”
Every breath caused my stomach to spasm in pain at the sensation of something digging into my gut. I wasn’t shrewd enough to diagnose how many ribs I’d broken, nor was I slick enough to laugh it off as a flesh wound. When every breath felt like I was drowning, the best I could do was forcibly shut my wailing body up with my mind.
Okay, calm down—I gotta calm down. I didn’t have the time to writhe around in pain. While it was tempting to jot down the lessons that the output produced might be overdone and that I needed to work on the mystic barrier containing it, I knew I still hadn’t finished the job.
A mensch like me would need to be maxed out with special traits—enough to march across the line of humanity with their own two feet—in order to avoid being pulverized into dust; that much was clear to see from the two gargantuan triskeles laying on their backs, twitching and frothing at the mouth.
But I wasn’t brainless enough to expect raw destructive force to put an undead down for good, especially when I was up against the most physically resistant race of them all. Besides, blowing a giant fuse only to face the billowing smoke with a “Did we get him?!” or a “He couldn’t have survived that!” was just asking for him to get up again.
Although some considered methuselah “undead,” they were perfectly reasonable organisms that died when you lopped off their heads or tore out their innards. Of course, the question of how someone like Lady Agrippina might ever lose her head was a conundrum too ambitious to waste time on now.
No, the problem lay with those that never truly died unless a specific condition or conditions were met—vampires were the worst of the lot. The most effective means of permanently finishing one off was to either keep them in direct sunlight or impale their heart with a divine stake blessed to prevent further regeneration, but neither of these were clear-cut one-hit kills. If left alone, they would resurrect after years and years of healing; their ludicrous persistence was comical.
Other options were limited. Bitter that His wife granted them Her protection despite His having been fooled by them, the Sun God imbued his devotees with intense powers of purgation. On the other hand, the Night Goddess had recognized vampires to be too individually powerful and shackled them with a mortal weakness to silver. Without one of these methods, a vampire was sure to put themselves back together time and time again.
“Marvelous.”
See? He’s still kicking. As the lingering aftershock mellowed, I could make out a silhouette in the settling dust. I figured he’d still be alive, but why the hell is he still person-shaped?
Still, his recovery was incomplete and he seemed unfit to move. Inaction would let my short-lived moment of opportunity pass in the blink of an eye, so I had to hurry.
Clutching at the pain with a few Hands—I figured a makeshift corset would be better than nothing—I called the Craving Blade back to my side. It nestled itself into my outstretched hand like a lovable puppy, but its mad desire to hack and slash was anything but adorable.
Propping myself up with my uncute sword, my psyche gave my flesh the brutal order to start running. Every step caused tears to well, but I sucked it up—pain would quickly cease to be an issue if I dared stop.
I was going to kill him, right here and right now. As I started to weave my Unseen Hands with an iron will...it appeared.
“Ngh?!”
Permanent Battlefield triggered as a jolt of unease that zipped across my body; a moment later, I sensed a dull and strangely artificial bloodlust coming my way. Acting in slow motion on Lightning Reflexes, I managed to sling the Craving Blade around my back to block the attack aiming to pierce my heart from behind—that I pulled this off was a miracle no better than happenstance.
I’d positioned myself in a desperate bid to preserve my life, and the heavy blow easily knocked me off my dubious balance.
It barely took any time to regain my poise. I’d known from the start that I couldn’t block properly with my impromptu stance, so I’d managed to leap away in a direction of my choosing. Rolling off the momentum of a hit for the umpteenth time today, I funneled the recoil into my arm to swing my “emptied” right hand.
Having rerouted nearly all my kinetic energy into this motion, my arm whipped at breakneck velocity; the Craving Blade once again answered my call just as quickly. The sword had been blown away when I’d blocked, but it was already perfectly set in my hand as I swung to intercept the mystery assailant’s follow-up and sliced straight through their right forearm.
“Wha— Who the fuck?!”
My inner thoughts leapt out into the dimension of spoken word; the enemy pulling away from me was bleeding purple blood.

Tprg4.22

[Tips] The interior of the aeroship has the essentials as a matter of course, but also is fitted for epicurean lifestyles. An internal reservoir distributes water to every corner of the vessel through a plumbing system, even supplying a public bath. As if that isn’t enough to confound a regular sailor, the water is purified by a small slime, split off from the College’s Berylinian sewer keepers.

Landing in water means certain life; I knew of a TRPG that included this as a mechanic, so there wasn’t any room for debate. I recalled that the generous system gave free points for good character acting, and it had been fun enough for me to turn a blind eye to the glaring holes in its gameplay rules. Though its lack of safeguards and liberal charity had turned every playthrough into a munchkin-fest, I had thoroughly enjoyed playing.
“Blegh, ach! Glargh!”
That said, hacking up filthy sewage as I dragged myself out of the water was the pinnacle of the unseen struggle that lay behind the scenes of a PC’s heroic revival. I was most certainly not having any fun.
Look, I couldn’t help it: mensch just weren’t built to swim in armor. And we were especially incapable when an arrow was sticking out of one of our arms.
“All, ugh, according to plan...”
Along with the filthy water, I coughed up a cheeky one-liner on absent ears. Unseen Hands yanked my waterlogged body over to the wall, and I leaned on it in exhaustion. Had I not used a spell to pull myself along, my soaking armor and draining blood would have seen me making friends with the stones at the bottom of some river by now.
Honestly, when the chase had first begun, I had considered throwing off my pursuers by diving into one of the aboveground aqueducts that ran through the city. If I pretended to get hit, I could fall in and trick the guards into thinking I was dead; the search for a corpse in the sewers the waterways fed was sure to pull off the heat.
Afterward, I could casually vanish into the underground and calmly wait for Miss Celia and Mika’s safe return at the atelier...or so went my optimistic plan.
Everything had gone swimmingly until the part where I pretended to get hit: actually sustaining damage had not been part of my calculations. Had the arrow’s trajectory been the slightest bit off, I could have become a lavish feast for the fish and bugs of the city.
“Shit. I was so close to triple digits too.”
I swore under my breath to dilute the pain and began stripping off my armor to get a better look at the wound. The wooden rod lodged in my upper left arm was of magnificent quality, and the stinging pain that refused to go away proved that the metal tip buried within was equally superior.
After another handful of police encirclements and brawls to escape them, this critical arrow had sailed right into me. I hadn’t so much as seen the sniper and their presence had barely been noticeable—my focus in combat was at the precipice of mastery, and I’d still only noticed when the projectile was too close to dodge. I’d been trying to watch out for open avenues of fire, but to no avail.
I bet it was the same sniper that shot the first arrow I dodged.
I just had a feeling that it was them: I’d probably made them get serious by avoiding their first shot. If I’d been any later to react, it would’ve landed straight in my shoulder, tearing my ligaments and totally incapacitating me.
My gods, the jagers are terrifying. No one ought to have been so skilled; what was the Trialist Empire thinking, employing people this inhuman? I was unfortunately aware that the nation had no scruples about gathering individuals of every disposition, but this was just absurd.
My childhood companion Margit had been a frightening huntsman in her own right, but she hadn’t been able to land a shot from outside my range of observation. To think I was up against an archer that potentially outclassed her once again highlighted my dearth of luck.
“Hrrgh...”
For all my complaints about fate, an attempt to grip my left hand produced pain and a balled fist; fortunately, my nerves and muscles had been spared. Seeing it in my arm had scared me, but the arrow was a slim one designed to get through chain mail, and its smaller nature worked to my benefit. Not to say the silver lining didn’t come with a whole cloud, of course.
Anyway, I needed to figure out my next move. I looked up at the peculiarly clean pipe ceiling and expelled all the air from my lungs in a massive sigh.
I think it was safe to say that I’d succeeded in drawing the guards’ attention to some degree. The skies were dark by the time the chaotic manhunt had come to an end by the aqueduct; I’d bought a few hours of time. While I would have liked to fade into the veil of night for another few, or perhaps even till daylight...well, this would do. I didn’t want to overstep my bounds and lose everything for my troubles.
In any case, my first matter of business would need to be the rude guest making itself at home in my arm. I wasn’t in the most hygienic of places; the risk of infection worried me.
I gripped the shaft to see if I could pull it out, but my muscles tensed up and wouldn’t let it go. The agonizing pain that accompanied this attempt told me that the arrowhead was probably barbed.
“Oh man... I really don’t wanna. Ugh...”
Tugging on it would only worsen the wound. It evidently hadn’t hit any important veins or arteries, meaning I had an out, but whether it would kill me and whether it would hurt were two wholly separate issues. Not even I was far gone enough to push an arrow through my own flesh without hesitation.
“...Fuck it!”
I took a few seconds to steady my breathing, bit down on the edge of my clothes—I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t bite down on my tongue in pain, but needed something soft so I could grit my teeth without grinding them—and shoved the arrow with a Hand.
If only I could summon an Unseen Hand inside my body, I wouldn’t have had to brute force it through. I swore that I’d invest in an add-on like that or some kind of medical skill in the future. Or maybe I’d make friends with someone well versed in healing. Either way, my oath was solemn.
“Mmmgh?!”
The world flashed white with searing pain. The clump of metal fashioned to cause maximum damage mercilessly tore through my flesh and pierced my skin from within to poke out on the other side. Too besotted with agony, I couldn’t keep the spell active.
“Hah... Hagh... Augh...”
The dreadful pain was so harrowing that my breathing fell into disarray. If I could travel back in time to when I’d considered picking up Pain Resistance and a handful of similar traits, I’d punch the words “Mm, I should probably save up,” right out of my gods-damned mouth.
Maybe I should go find a time machine.
“Urgh... Hrrrgh...”
Sure, I’d experienced my fair share of suffering in the ichor maze, but this tear-inducing misery was a different flavor to the mind-bending migraines of mana depletion. My crying came with a stuffy nose and a pitiful moaning that couldn’t be held back. For all the injuries I’d overcome in my many years as a farmer’s brat, nothing had been this bad.
I haphazardly snapped the shaft and endured the sickening sensation of a foreign body sliding through a cavity in my flesh, bawling the whole time. Finally done removing the accursed arrow that had ignored my armor in favor of hit points, I tossed it into the sewer to allay my rage.
“Dammit,” I groaned. “I can see why all those NPCs gave up on this line of work.”
It fucking hurt. It hurt so bad that my vocabulary went right to shit.
Just imagining someone trying to fight without removing an arrow made me question their sanity. Pure tank builds were expected to soak more than a couple for their rear guard, and they now retroactively had the whole of my respect. The warriors standing up front to shield their squishy companions had truly been the greatest of men.
I reached into the bag around my waist and pulled out a flask of spirits to begin treating the wound. Buying time away from the guards had cost me a lot of effort, and I wasn’t going to squander it by sniveling forever; tears wouldn’t give me my arm back if I lost it to an infection. With my wallet, I couldn’t afford the luxurious iatrurgy I’d received following the zombies’ labyrinth.
I wondered how long it’d be until the airship set sail. Once it was off, I’d be able to breathe a sigh of relief: the only things left to do would be to find Mika and bring her back to hide in Lady Agrippina’s laboratory until Miss Celia’s aunt came to fix everything with her authority.
Sadly, the newly unveiled aeroship was probably not in any hurry to depart. I suspected it would load up some influential nobles and fly around the capital for some time in a showy pleasure cruise.
I really did underestimate how hard this would be...
As I internally griped, something white fluttered past: a moth. It floated by on gentle wings that were so devoid of hue that they stood out in the unlit darkness of the underground.
Tormented by fatigue and pain, my muddled mind wrote it off as just another critter that called the sewers home...but I should have been more wary. Especially when I was in the middle of a counterspell war, as basic as it was.
Bugs were toys to magia, customizable for any and every purpose. Having seen Mika’s raven—Floki was on standby at home so he wouldn’t get hurt or give away his master’s identity—and all he could do, I should have known...

[Tips] In Rhine, familiars refer to domesticated creatures that have been artificially enhanced through the use of magic. They are mainly employed in correspondence and search, and their usage in the region predates the Empire’s founding.
The unpredictability of sentient life has brought the art under critical spotlights in modern times and chipped away at its image among magia. Still, the creations of the expert biologists of yore boast tremendous utility to this day.

I awoke to the impact of my head hitting the floor.
Oh, crap. The relief of being done with my makeshift surgery loosened my guard so much that I’d gone out like a light. I may have been a fan of the heroes who shrugged injuries off as flesh wounds with nihilistic smirks, but I was in a bit too much pain to model myself in their image. I think I could be forgiven for going out cold for a moment.
Besides, I was alone. Propping myself up on badassery meant nothing without anyone to impress.
“Aw man... I don’t wanna get up. I just wanna take a nap right here...”
I only voiced my unrealistic hopes to remind myself of how hopelessly futile they were. Obviously, I knew I couldn’t stop now, and resting here would just worsen my chances of getting an infection.
Slow and steady, I told myself as I peeled my rear off the floor it so desperately wanted to cling to. Every step sent a stinging jolt into my arm, but I continued trudging along the sewers to complete my escape. I lit the way with the faintest mystic light I could muster and looked for the filthiest path available.
My goal was to get away without leaving a trace: a dirty pipe was likely to be cleaned by the sleepless slimes, and their presence amounted to a roadblock that not even jagers could surmount.
Still, they were jagers... I had literally just been on the receiving end of a faraway sharpshooter’s undetectable pinpoint shot, so maybe my idea was wasted effort. Who knew? Perhaps they’d just walk upside down on the ceiling and skip straight past the jiggly blockades.
“Whoa,” I groaned. “Another one.”
I tried to turn into a minor pipe only to be met with a wriggling body of gelatin hard at work. This unit had split itself up to plug the waterway and clean the grime that had accumulated on the walls, as well as any other miscellaneous foulness it found.
Spying a rat squirming helplessly in one of the translucent blobs caused my stomach to drop. As it melted away in the powerful base, I was reminded that one wrong step could see me sharing the same fate—not exactly a boon to my mental health.
Sure, danger was perfectly avoidable, but why was the crown’s infrastructure deadly, anyway? I wanted to leave this place in the dust as soon as possible.
“Man, this sucks...”
Unfortunately, this blockage in particular posed a real problem: my only two options were to turn back or head deeper into the earth. I’d selected this route as a shortcut, but luck hadn’t been on my side. This throughway had just been cleaned when I’d come to take care of the slimes a week ago, so I’d been convinced that it would be clear now too.
Irritably scratching at my head, I begrudgingly descended into the detour, knowing it was the only path forward. I could have attempted to cleave open a path with a full fleet of Hands, but putting the risk of failure on a scale with the reward of a few minutes saved simply didn’t balance out. I wasn’t in the business of teaming up with clowns to fight against millionaires in costume.
“Hrm?”
After a few more turns, doubt began to creep into my heart. It seemed like every path I wanted to take was clogged by sewer keepers.
Am I being led somewhere? By who? More importantly, why and how?
If their goal was to arrest me, then this process seemed rather over-the-top. They clearly knew my position, so it would be easiest to sic the jagers on me.
Turning on my heel for a tactical retreat, I heard a disquieting echo off in the distance. The sound was a plain warning: that of a viscous liquid not flowing, but writhing. A particularly hulking slime could be heard squeezing through the pipes, scrubbing everything from floor to ceiling as it did.
Nope, not happening.
I’d listened to plenty of verbal descriptions depicting despair-inducing enemies in my time, but not even the most theatrical GM could instill the same sense of dread as this distant noise. To hear it was to immediately imagine the walloping mass that produced it, accompanied by a mental siren flashing “DANGER” in runes that the mind couldn’t process. I could practically hear the words, “I repeat—do not fight this thing. Seriously. Are we clear?”
Admittedly, I’d giddily jumped into combat against such beasts once or twice. Or thrice. Maybe more. After all, I had been a player seeking fun, and it had seemed like doing so would produce the most entertaining outcome.
But to do so now was impossible; that thing could not be survived. The slime was the type of instant game over that would make a forlorn GM fold up their screen if they couldn’t manage to convince their players to be reasonable people.
With no room for contemplation, I advanced down the path, which was really beginning to feel like a trap.
Eventually, I emerged into a vast chamber. I had no idea what it was for—I later learned that it was an emergency storage tank for floodwater—but it was spacious enough to require rows and rows of pillars. For reasons unknown, the facility had even been equipped with mystic lanterns; the lights glowed eerily at regular intervals.
My most carefully placed steps still rang to the ends of the room and back; while I was sure they served some purpose, the bluish-purple lanterns flooded the scene with a ghastly aura. I was hard-pressed to keep walking in this skin-crawling atmosphere, but with my retreat blocked off, I had no choice but to continue.
I kept track of how many pillars I’d passed in order to prevent my sense of distance from getting skewed; my count reached thirty. Considering each one was placed roughly five meters from the last, I had traveled a sizable distance when a figure stepped out from behind one a ways in front of me.
The man’s appearance was sudden, yet altogether graceful. With every step, his spotless boots produced a satisfying click that reverberated through the hall like the fanciful beats of a song.
Slender and sleek, the man’s presence transformed the macabre hues of blue and purple into an elegant spotlight. Enveloped in a black silk ballroom suit of impeccable craftsmanship, the patrician’s looks were without flaw—nay, he went past that. His outward image was so sublime that it shocked the viewer into believing there were none who could rival his class.
However, the ostentatious mask covering his slender face betrayed that he was undeniably deranged. I’m pretty sure I’d seen his ilk in Saturday morning cartoons.
This oddball nobleman was a crank of high rank, so to speak; it was a shame he was wearing that mask, because otherwise his dashing bow would have been the height of showmanship. Upon completing his highborn greeting, he snapped his fingers.
Would you look at that? His empty hands cradled in soft silk gloves were suddenly holding a long staff. It wasn’t the kind of walking cane aristocrats were liable to carry for fashion, mind you. The rod was punctuated with a shining ruby whose crimson glint trended on sinister; how could I ever mistake it for anything but a sorcerer’s tool? And what was more, it was the kind wielded by the professors of the College—those perverts with as much authority as money—to facilitate ultra-high-level spells.
Instinct and experience collided to sound every alarm bell in my brain. Spare contemplation would just have me thinking in circles; I abandoned thought entirely and dove behind a pillar.
In the very same instant—or at most, a split second later—the space I’d been standing in exploded. Shock waves flung me off my course midair and violently thrust me past my initial landing point.
What the hell was that?! I didn’t feel any heat—that wasn’t a normal explosion! That felt like the air itself collapsed in on itself! What the fuck?!
My inability to decode what had happened left me in disarray, but I got a hold of myself by shifting my line of thought: I’d just failed a stat check for arcane knowledge. Rolling off the force of impact, I rebounded high while summoning my Unseen Hands.
First, I used a few to bounce myself like a beanbag; this let me redirect away from a collision with the pillar while chipping away at my velocity over the course of several repetitions. I didn’t want to dizzy myself by stopping all at once, and that would surely have crushed my internals in a horrifying way.
For perspective, the blast hadn’t just blown off my hood—it had caused the band tying my hair together to explode. If I decelerated too quickly, I’d cough up my organs like an unfinished kidney pie.
Once I’d slowed down to a manageable speed, I used a Giant’s Palm to cushion my landing and then shifted to advancing on invisible platforms without missing a beat. I kicked off each Hand with enough force to break them, closing the five pillars of distance in a single breath.
“My word,” he marveled.
I ignored him and swung down with both hands. I wasn’t in range to use the fey karambit, and I was sure he had some kind of ever-present barrier despite his nonchalance...so I spoke its name: that of the accursed blade that haunted me.
“—!”
Its wail sounded like the end of sound itself, but the nuance hidden within was that of euphoric rapture. It wept a song akin to grinding metals, and I could feel it weigh down my hands; singing the same ode to love that it cried at my bedside every night, the Craving Blade leapt through space to heed my call.
Painfully present in my grasp, the sword churned the air with its sickening moans of passion—no doubt a cheer of joy at having its long-unanswered wish to be used for its true purpose fulfilled. Loving adoration and thanks banged around my skull to the point of nausea, but I couldn’t complain; I pressed on, knowing I needed its unrivaled power.
The zombified adventurer had seemed to tie some of his self-esteem to this devilish zweihander and its constant yearning, but I was genuinely curious as to what kind of man he had been. Reading through his diary, he seemed to have had healthy relations with a set party of equally skilled friends, and his writing hadn’t set off any red flags about his character.
Whatever the case, I may not have been as eager to sate the blade, but the thing still let me go from unarmed to full swing in exactly zero time. I’m sure any TRPG enthusiast could instantly recognize how incredible it was to equip a main-hand weapon without having to use up an action.
By summoning a sword from thin air to turn my weaponless stroke into a full-blown overhead slice, I managed to pull off a frontal surprise attack—I bet he hadn’t seen that coming. The only reaction the noble had time for was to open his eyes wide behind his mask.
As its edge sundered the air, the sword converted the whistling gust into screams of mad delight. One might think leaping forward and bringing my weapon straight down was a thoughtless display of brute force, but I’d carefully coordinated every movement to transfer every joule of energy into the tip of the blade. Combined with the gravitational acceleration dragging me back down to earth, the strike was a masterclass of swordplay.
For most, a person’s body was simultaneously too hard and yet too soft to cleanly split in two—but the feedback I felt upon collision told me that this was one of the few exceptions. Yet for all its rarity and virtuosity, my attack began to spark while still en route to its target.
“Hrgh?!”
I shattered one, two, three, four adamantine bodies before coming to a midair halt on the fifth. The Craving Blade and my muscles propelling it had reached an equilibrium with the invisible screens impeding us.
“Hm. To think you would destroy half of my sevenfold barrier.”
With a dazzling voice better suited to an opera house than this dank dungeon, the man casually dropped an astonishing number—not that I had time to dwell. I’d eat a counterhit if I stopped pressing the attack for even a second.
I activated my spell once more: simple, efficient, and all too familiar, my Unseen Hands weren’t limited to just movement and defense.
“Oh?!”
All six Hands gathered together as fists to hammer my strike forward.
See, I wasn’t delusional. The strength of each Hand was based on my base Strength, which was only barely better than that of the average mensch. I knew that no amount of add-ons could turn six punches into a threat, especially against a barrier that had stopped a maximum-force attack made with a weapon that defied reason.
So I didn’t hit the man or his barrier; instead, I hit the back edge of the Craving Blade.
The logic was quite simple: it was akin to leaning into a carving knife stuck in the side of a pumpkin. I simply substituted the body weight with six fists that could beat a grown man into submission, and the carving knife with a double-edged mystic sword.
The man tried to dodge in a panic, but it was too late. All he’d done was shift the angle of entry from his crown to his collarbone. And as sorry as I was to say, I wasn’t grown-up enough to hold back against a psychotic bastard who introduced himself with a one-shot-kill attack!
I didn’t care if that meant I would once more have blood on my hands. It was this pervert’s own damn fault for toying with me when I was out here fighting for my life. Traditional wisdom dictated that decapitation wasn’t enough to feel safe around a mage. As a swordsman prone to disarmament at the mere loss of my thumbs, I couldn’t judge him by my own standards.
Forgive me: my life did not belong to me alone. I still had to watch over Elisa; I had a promise with Margit to fulfill; I had places I wanted to see with Mika. But above all else, to die here and now would be to cast a shadow on Miss Celia’s heart forever. If this lunatic wanted to curse anyone for his fate, it ought to have been himself for picking this fight for shits and giggles.
The sensation of metal shredding muscle and swimming through the meaty gaps between bones raised every hair on my body. Entering through the shoulder, the Craving Blade fluidly completed its arc by exiting between his legs. An attack this flawless felt like rolling two extra dice; the cut was so clean that making sure the blade wouldn’t smack the ground proved challenging.
Backstepping after a committed offense was practically second nature at this point, and it saved my hide: the man swung his staff up at me immediately after. Leaving a lingering heat on my nose and singing a few strands of hair, the gem flew by with enough force to make my gonads shrivel. I would’ve been reduced to a diet of porridge and soups had it landed.
“Mm, not bad. Not bad at all.”
Moreover, the masked aristocrat was standing on his remaining leg, wholly unfazed. His severed left half collapsed without the staff to hold it up, but it didn’t bother him in the slightest.
...Yeah, I figured. An enemy killable by normal means would never have been waiting in this carefully tuned stage meant for his theatrical entrance.
The mistress of fate was a cruel and sadistic GM. Would it kill her to provide an encounter with trash mobs I could mop up without lasting consequence at least once?!
“A great departure from my expectations to be sure, but laudable nonetheless. The methodology behind your efficiently assembled spells is breathtaking. For this I shall give you an A. However, the formulae are a tad bland for my tastes. I understand that they’ve been designed to produce maximum effect at minimum cost—no, truly, I do. But they are lacking in playful grace and especially in redundancy. At this rate, young man, your foes will easily be able to interfere with their construction. Were we in class, I could do no better than a C on this front.”
Out of nowhere, the loon began to assess my skills like some kind of tutor. Why in all the gods’ names did everyone around me have to be this way? I had enough incorrigible deviants and/or unkillable monsters in my life as it stood, thank you very much. Could they please stop multiplying?
His mutilated half deftly propped itself up on an arm and leg to push itself back onto his main body; as soon as it made contact, the man’s flesh infuriatingly stuck itself back together as if to say it were only natural.
Undead again. Great.
To add insult to injury, even his clothesmended themselves, driving home how much of a farce this was. I had to painstakingly stitch mine together or pay for someone to do the same whenever I landed myself in trouble.
“Let us resume our lecture. The second period begins.”
The noble struck the floor with the gem of his staff, and before I could wonder what he’d done, two shadows stirred from behind the pillars at his wings; I hadn’t noticed their presence whatsoever.
Glossy fur shimmered in the mystic light, covering explosive muscles itching for action below. Ferocious though they were, their lithe frames betrayed an agility that outstripped any mensch’s. And of course, the defining feature that completed their alarmingly perfect physiques was the three heads staring at me with the intelligence of a thoroughly trained hound.
I had seen triskeles like them around the city many times, but none had boasted the anatomy of these two. Where others had been comparable to large dogs, these eclipsed them with bodies the size of a lion.
With these unorthodox beasts under his command, the gentleman once again bowed with gracious civility.
“These are my little darlings. Take a gander at their magnificent coats. And the neighbors just love how friendly they are.”
They couldn’t quite swallow me whole, but they were certainly large enough to bite off a limb in one gulp. To have them introduced to me like they were adorable puppies was...well, no, fuck off. What kind of paragons of bravery lived in this guy’s neighborhood?
“The one on your right is Gauner. He’s a lively bundle of energy who loves to play with balls. On your left is Schufti. She’s a spoiled little princess who always sleeps cuddling her favorite dolls. They run through their favorite toys rather quickly, but they’re very sweet.”
I said fuck off, my guy. Don’t just keep running with the proud owner schtick. From my perspective, these were organic killing machines bigger than an oversized motorcycle; if that comment about their toys was supposed to come off as some kind of cutesy charm point, he needed to revise his script.
Who was this guy, anyway? I had so little idea of what he was here for that the mystery threatened to drive me insane. I could outright deny that he was here to apprehend me: his spells were too deadly. His casual attempts at murder and commitment to dramatic flair made it unlikely he had anything to do with the forthright city guard. Unpredictable to his core, the way he made his decisions based on entertainment value alone made him closer to one of my kind.
Could you quit prioritizing your fun and pull your head out of your ass for one second to explain yourself in a way that I can understand?!
“Look alive, young man.”
Gods dammit! Don’t just move on after your shitty melodrama like we’re all on the same page! Argh, I feel like I’m stuck at the table with a pretentious GM!
All this activity had my fresh wound throbbing, but I didn’t have time to stop now. With my Independent Processing firing on all cylinders, I steeled myself to face the charging hounds.

Tprg4.21

Bumping and thumping on a lump of clothes, Cecilia could not rein in her pounding heartbeat. Temporarily throwing her oath of virtue to the Night Goddess to the wayside, she’d tucked herself into a suitcase belonging to her church’s liaison to the aeroship—the Head Abbess of the Great Chapel herself.
On paper, this was no different from when she had still been a naughty little child of twenty, playing hide-and-seek with the other children at the Goddess’s almshouses. Reenacting a game that she’d partaken in with five-year-olds at the age of forty-three was terribly embarrassing, but her heart was banging for an entirely different reason.
So emphatic was every beat that she worried that those outside might hear it. The basket she now cradled herself in had originally been packed tight with spare clothes—she’d removed almost all of them to make space for herself—and she wondered with great fear and excitement how her plan had gone so smoothly.
How could she not, when the swaggering motion rocking her along was that of shipmates carrying her aboard?
Although the luggage belonged to someone of great authority, the sailors still did precautionary checks to make sure the contents were what the owner said they were, and that it didn’t contain anything suspicious. Whether it was the property of an aristocrat or not, every bag checked in was heavily scrutinized.
His Majesty the Emperor was to board tonight. As the most important individual in the whole nation, his order superseded the rights of the highest nobles—even the great dukes of the other imperial families. His loyal retainers would never let someone smuggle a dangerous item onto the ship no matter how important they were, even if they truly meant no harm.
However, the boy’s invisible “helpers” reduced all this security to naught. Though the trunk was too heavy for a basket of clothes, it mysteriously felt light to carry; when the guards opened the top, they curiously saw nothing but a stack of neatly folded clothes. At last, Cecilia found herself set down in the ship’s hold.
“It worked,” she marveled. Despite having set the plan in motion, the girl had been skeptical. Truth be told—though she had no means of knowing this—her scheme to stow away in someone’s luggage would have had her discovered instantly. This was no estimation or conjecture; she would have been found.
Unbeknownst to the vampire, every parcel carried onto the top secret aeroship had been scanned over not only by eyes, but by magia with search magic. The magia employed astounding spells that tracked thought itself to uncover any living creatures trying to slink aboard, going so far as to probe their minds for hostility. Yet not even the prestigious academics of the College were a match for the alfar: so in tune with the concept over which they presided, the fairies were nigh invincible in their element. Though they led many a child astray, at times fey guidance pointed to safety.
Cecilia’s lack of ill will and the Night Goddess’s protection also aided in her infiltration. While many revered the moon for bathing the mortal realm in gentle light, there were tales of how its rays sowed rot in the minds of mortals. Interwoven with the idea of lunacy, lunar deities provided their followers with divine barriers to guard the mind, and the Mother Goddess of Rhine was no exception. Sample Her light too frequently, and one was sure to lose their mind. After splitting goodness with the Sun God, She had come to lead the stars on the darkened ballroom of the heavens above; yet one must not forget she’d once been the arbiter of all that was evil.
With a little luck and a lot of brute force, the priestess had managed to smuggle herself in, but now cocked her head, wondering what to do next.
The cargo hold she’d been toted to was massive and provided plenty of room to hide. It would be all too easy for her invisible helpers to keep her hidden until she reached Lipzi. Much like the boarding process, a solo attempt would have her caught immediately—the vessel was outfitted with mystic sensors that sounded alarms when unauthorized personnel walked by them—but with fey assistance, the patrolling guards posed little to no threat.
Furthermore, she was a vampire: she did not have to take anything in nor let anything out. All she had to do was sit perfectly still for a day; deep prayer would suffice to pass the time. Upon reaching her destination, she could unveil her identity and they would surely bring her to where she wished to go.
Yet one thought gnawed at the back of her mind: What has happened to those kindhearted heroes?
If all had gone well and they’d gotten away, then the two of them would be home with Elisa by now, celebrating with a toast of freshly made tea—but Cecilia was not so naive as to presume this. As any good ehrengarde player does, she constantly kept the worst possibilities in mind.
Admittedly, a part of herself had faith that, of all people, Erich and Mika—the pair who had delivered her from the depths of despair—would handily escape their captors and make their ways home. However, they were unlike her: they were mortal. Broken bones took months to heal, severed necks could never be rejoined, and ruptured organs would cause them to fall where they stood, squirming like insects on the ground in their last moments.
The raw ability required to outdo the entire city guard for an entire day was something held by only the most exceptional individuals in all the land. The pair may have been savvy, but they were not so broken, as it were.
Countless avenues to tragedy raced by Cecilia’s mind: their hanged bodies, their deaths at the hands of a swarm of guards, or a lonely demise in a desolate corner of nowhere, caused by lingering wounds after managing to slink away. But it was when she imagined their heads lined up on boxes that her fear evolved into a fit of shivers.
Any of these situations were perfectly plausible. Clutching her trembling body, the priestess had only one thought: They need no ill fortune for this to be their future...but I cannot let it be.
Could she let them help her so earnestly without anything in return? Would she be able to hold her head high and face her Goddess if she did?
The answer was plain to see.
No one would ever know of her sin, and even if they did, tossing away two commoners as pawns would hardly be reason to vilify her. But Cecilia would never be able to forgive herself. How could she dare to speak of faith—to claim to revere the merciful Mother above—while carrying such misdeeds in her heart?
Her friends had set out to help her with their fragile lives on the line. To cast them away and hide away in her monastery without a shred of dignity was unthinkable; she would rather cast off the imperfect immortality that sustained her and return to the earth. Tearing off her cloak at daybreak without protective miracles to return her life to the gods was a far, far better fate—nay, it was the proper fate, as a believer and person both.
In fact, to do so would be her only hope of returning to the Goddess’s side without shame.
Cecilia was not fueled by romanticism or an immature longing for tragic catharsis. Hers was an oath founded in honed theology: If those two—even one of them—is to meet an untimely end, so too shall I lay myself before the sun.
This was the product of neither obligation nor responsibility; contemplating how she ought to be was simply another part of her theistic journey. Anchored around a hallowed selflessness, the vampire’s line of thought twisted to produce a rather self-centered conclusion: a life that she could not proudly offer to the Goddess was a life not worth living.
Spurred on by this thought, Cecilia began groaning in deep contemplation. How could she possibly help Erich and Mika? Her options were limited, and she only got as far as considering exposing herself to demand their safe return when an epiphany struck.
Cecilia knew only a few things about magic, but one included a means to contact faraway persons...and on a ship of this size, so prized by the crown, the device had to be installed on board.
“Will you please help me?”
The priestess spoke with the same solemn reverence she committed to the Goddess, and the fluttering lights danced around her in response.
“Those who give, heed well: give all that you have. Those who receive, heed well: receive only but once.”
Clasping her hands tight around her medallion, Cecilia recited the maxim nearest to her heart. It served as reminder, as confirmation, as resolution: she was not to freely take all that life gave her. In a world full of people interacting with people, the priestess believed this to be cardinal among the Goddess’s teachings, and it imbued her with the strength to leave the box of simple robes behind.
Leaping out, she felt sorry for those who would run out of clothes due to her actions, but this was a matter of faith. A day or two of wearing the same threads wouldn’t be the end of the world, and a boat this large was sure to have casters kind enough to Clean them if asked politely.
Cecilia placed the lid back on the basket with an unspoken apology to the Head Abbess and stepped out into the expansive interior of the vessel.
The aeroship was currently anchored just outside of the capital in order to facilitate the boarding of its guests, chief among them the Emperor. Though the location amounted to an empty field at present, if this preliminary test flight went well—of course, the truth was that anything resembling a real test had been concluded long before His Majesty could set foot on the aircraft—then a giant skyport would surely be constructed there in the future. The busy ruler was always in need of a quick means of transport, after all.
Naturally, a ship intended for the bluest blood in the nation had been outfitted with every bell and whistle: arcane lamps dotted the interior halls.
“I don’t see anyone.” Sticking her head out to peek left and right, Cecilia found the unbelievably well-lit hallway empty. She surmised that the crew had finished hauling in the luggage. “To think it could be so bright at this hour of night. How indulgent...”

Just like the streetlights of the capital, these lanterns were powered by stones full of mana. Their warm glow was counter to the stark exterior of the ship, illuminating the wooden floorboards and tidily set wallpaper in a calming ambience. One might confuse the place for a well-kept mansion, were it not for the portholes in place of proper windows.
“More importantly,” Cecilia mused, “wherever could I be?”
Unfortunately, the girl had no nautical sense, and she was not so spatially adept as to keep track of direction and distance traveled while being ferried around in a sealed box. The best she could do was peer out—moving past the decadence of a glass window—and speculate that she was near the lower levels because the ground seemed relatively close.
Now, the aeroship may have looked utterly alien from the outside, but it had been created to conform to traditional maritime design on the inside. The bottom of the ship was reserved for relatively nonessential goods—that is, freight that could be destroyed without endangering human life—while the upper levels were dedicated to inhabitable rooms that rose in quality as one ascended. One could see that the designers had fought for every edge in survivability to guard against a system breakdown that would send the ship tumbling to earth.
Given the tangle of spells responsible for flight, there were various facilities and instruments to operate the goings-on of the vessel, and they were primarily clustered up near the stern. Numerous arcane furnaces burned away in the lower floors, and the rear command tower poked up right above deck.
On the other end, the bow tapered off into a fine point, leaving little space for rooms or cargo holds. Instead, the whole of the ship’s head was taken up by the front command tower—though this one was not actually a tower—fitted with apparatuses to keep an eye on the ground, the path to be traveled, and the ship’s underbelly.
In practice, the piloting crew were centralized in the rear command tower, with those posted up front being tasked with feeding the captains the information necessary to make the right calls.
“Just as I’d feared... The most important points are unlisted.”
Cecilia had realized that a ship this gargantuan would certainly have its fair share of wayward guests, and as such would include public maps somewhere in its halls. Her guess had been correct, but alas, the chart had been designed for the guests and their staff and only detailed the locations of living quarters and luggage holds. Every critical point had been blotted out in gray ink and was simply labeled “No Entry.”
“I suppose I must consider myself fortunate to at least know where I am.”
If nothing else, this made her own location clear. Whoever drew the map had been thoughtful enough to clearly mark the viewer’s current location with a red dot.
Cecilia was on the first level of the lower layer—it seemed the demarcation between lower, middle, and upper had been decided by simply splitting the ship with horizontal lines—near the luggage bay for noble passengers. If she ascended one floor, she would find herself in the middle layer with a dining room and banquet hall; keep going and she could enter the first level of the upper layer, where the passenger rooms began. Three more layers would land her at the very top in the zenith suites, but despite being listed on the map, these were also grayed out.
“Hmm... If it’s anything akin to the monastery, I doubt they would place the working rooms in sight of the passenger rooms—particularly the honored suite.”
According to imperial taste, day-to-day affairs were best kept out of the eyes of one’s guests, and this idealized elegance pervaded even religious values. The kitchen and laundry room that the priestesses worked in were hidden in the back, away from pilgrims and regular churchgoers; similarly, though the Head Abbess’s office was located on the upper floors, it was placed on the back side of the Great Chapel.
Deduction told that Cecilia’s destination was not near the guests’ quarters or luggage. It had to be somewhere reserved for mariners: the stern or the bow.
As the young lady’s finger swayed back and forth indecisively, a memory suddenly grabbed her attention. When Erich had been scattering her dolls to throw off search magic, he had asked the alfar for help; perhaps these fairies had the power to look around without attracting any attention.
“Excuse me, Miss Alfar. Do you know which way I should go?”
Her question caused the two tones of light to blink. In more mortal terms, they were looking at one another in contemplation.
At last, the green orb excitedly flickered and circled around Cecilia before vanishing into thin air.
“I...take it you’re helping me?”
The vampire tilted her head in confusion and decided to wait. The thought of someone coming to check in a forgotten bag or to rifle through their belongings sent cold beads of sweat down her back, but eventually, the green glow returned from the hallway leading to the front of the ship.
It blinked a few more times to get the girl to follow; then it turned right back around the way it had come.
“You’ve found it?! My! Thank you so much!”
After a short while hurriedly chasing the fairy, Cecilia came upon a large stairwell that ran from the vessel’s top to its bottom. Wide enough to fit five or six bellboys carrying luggage in parallel, the staircase was vast and open.
And wouldn’t you know it: perhaps on break, a handful of sailors were sitting on the steps and drinking water.
The vampire rushed back into the hall she’d come from in a panic. Considering how empty the area was, it wouldn’t be easy to sneak by them and follow the green fairy, who seemed to disregard her plight entirely and had flown straight past the stairs.
However, Cecilia was no alf: her body was corporeal, and she couldn’t simply choose to not appear. There weren’t any convenient potted plants or unpacked cargo blocking their view—such things would be a safety hazard for an aerial vehicle—giving her no means of evading their lines of sight.
Oh no, she thought, plodding her feet in place, won’t you please go somewhere else?
Now it was the black light’s turn to grab her attention. It flew up and blinked right in front of her eyes before gliding over to a poorly lit spot in between the mystic lamps. This way, it seemed to beckon.
Cecilia hesitated. True, the path the fairy suggested was dark. However, it was only dark in comparison to the artificially lit hall around it; it hardly counted as shadow. Any shelter it offered still failed to hide her in any real way.
However, if the alf was telling her to come, then Cecilia was ready to believe. Steeling herself, she took a step into the open.
Miraculously, the men didn’t notice her as she passed by mere feet away. Her attire was clearly not that of a lost passenger or of a shipmate, so it wasn’t a matter of her not seeming out of place. In fact, not only did the sailors fail to notice her, but they didn’t so much as glance her way.
“...Huh? How?” Cecilia was so baffled by how easily she’d managed to slip by them that she turned around and muttered in disbelief.
She had no way of knowing this, of course, but the black dot guiding her belonged to a svartalf with the power to conceal her. Night was Ursula’s domain; her power was at its peak. Turning a wispy shadow into the impermeable veil of midnight was an easy task if it meant sheltering a child. Cecilia’s ludicrously careless remark had been swept away by the winds of the green light and the sylphid who shone it. The same held true for the vampire’s loud, artless footsteps and the sound of rubbing cloth that came from her unfamiliar robes.
Under the alfar’s guidance, the priestess managed to complete her perilous journey without being noticed: not by the sailors she encountered, nor the patrolmen on watch, nor even the wayward magus who crossed her path.
The only point where she had gotten a tad stuck was the magic door—made to automatically lock upon closing—that led into the unmarked section of the map. Thankfully, a sailor happened to come out and let the door swing wide, allowing her to squeeze in before it shut; the man had found it strange how long it had taken to close, but anything was possible when the thing could lock itself.
“Oh, it really is this way!”
The working sector of the ship was different in every way from the lavish midsection geared toward nobility. Uncovered metal plates lined the walls, devoid of warmth and aesthetic appeal.
Fire was the greatest fear on any ship, and doubly so when there was no sea to escape to. Out in the open skies, there were precious few ways to stop flames once they erupted; flammable materials had been elided to every degree possible during construction. Though the designers had been forced to concede on the usage of magical flame-retardant wood for the areas that housed guests, the halls seen only by the crew were built out of unembellished alchemical alloys.
On one such metallic wall hung a map made for the sailors’ convenience. Furthermore, there were written signs everywhere to keep the shipmates oriented in emergencies without forcing them to stop and read a chart to get their bearings.
In Cecilia’s case, though, the map told her exactly where she needed to go: the communications room equipped with thaumagrams and shortwave mystic speakers.
The monastery on Fullbright Hill was the Night Goddess’s foremost temple and was surrounded by towns of faithful in the valleys below. That said, it was also located in a region so physically remote that to dub it the middle of nowhere would be no understatement. The hill’s gentle slope paired with its impressive elevation to create an excessively protracted road just to get to the nearest blip of civilization at its foot.
The resulting difficulty in making emergency correspondence meant the righteous clergy swallowed their pride and employed what was debatably supreme amongst all of the proud Imperial College’s inventions: the thaumagram. The technology was so revolutionary that the devout priests who ordinarily spat on magic as affronts to the gods had no choice but to accept its utility.
The device worked by linking two separate units to ensure that the state of each perfectly mirrored the other; that is to say, if someone were to write on a paper slotted into Device A, the same writing would be produced on the paper slotted into Device B.
True, there had been advancements before it that served to send messages at a distance in the past. Yet none could claim to be as momentous as the thaumagram: the contraption could be easily operated by non-mages, and it allowed the transfer of unprecedented quantities of information at once.
Above all else, the invention included a feature to reroute its own link by swapping out a mana stone: a single device could connect to countless cities. By sizing up to two units and converting one to a read-only state, one could remain constantly available for an emergency message from any location. Not even the churches could deny its convenience, and the gods themselves had begrudgingly decreed, “If it helps my worshippers, I guess...”
And Cecilia knew how to use the machine.
Despite recognizing its utility, most belonging to the pulpit still regarded magecraft as a transgression on the realm of divinity. Though the technology had been adopted, few wished to be the one in charge of actually engaging with it; even the charitable, self-sacrificing pastorate of the Night loathed the thought of offering themselves as tribute.
However, Cecilia was different. When the previous operator retired due to old age, she willingly pitched herself as the replacement. Her heritage and the trouble it caused hung heavy above her head, and she had nothing but gratitude for her peers who treated her like any other nun. If everyone else was so staunchly opposed to it, she’d thought, then the least she could do to return their goodwill was learn how to use the mystic contrivance.
She had never imagined a day would come when this skill seemed so useful to her. The world truly was ever unpredictable, and devotion thought forgotten had come back to bless her.
Once more borrowing fey strength, Cecilia managed to reach the communications room without being spotted. But just as she reached for the doorknob, she pulled back—there were voices on the other side.
Of course there were. A communications room, by its very nature, was a place prone to urgent gatherings. An emergency message arriving at an unmanned facility, and leaving the admiral bereft of critical information was no laughing matter.
“Wh-Whatever shall I do?”
After all she’d done, Cecilia feared that she’d reached an impasse. Vampiric though she was, the girl had cast her lot with the ascetic believers of the Circle Immaculate. The Immaculate got by on little, and the most devout went so far as to unhand one of their own freedoms in the Goddess’s name; in her Rite of Prohibition, Cecilia had given up the right to wield violence by design.
Obviously, a vampire could muster strength far beyond what a mensch could resist. Otherwise, the young lady would never have managed the feat of rooftop parkour that had been the backdrop of her chance meeting with the piecemaker.
It was unlikely that the people stationed inside a communications room were well versed in combat, so Cecilia could theoretically let her ancestral might do the talking and forcefully take control.
But the priestess had a pledge: a grave, weighty promise with the Goddess. To break it would bring about penance greater than the favor that She had shown her. Rites of Prohibition were not mere goals set to better oneself, but verifiable pacts with a deity.
“Oh... But...”
Yet still, Cecilia wavered. The faith that she shouldered was a priceless treasure she wouldn’t give up for the world, but her friends’ lives weighed just as heavy—and they were out there, right now, risking death on her behalf. Could she bring herself to spare herself alone and abandon them?
An oath to the heavens is absolute: there can be no grounds for pardon.
But would She forgive her for forsaking those dear to her for her own preservation?
Nay, that was not the issue—Cecilia would never be able to forgive herself. They had called her their friend and treated her likewise, marching into danger for her sake alone; that she had allowed this in the first place infuriated her to no end.
What had she said only moments ago? If abandoning them was her only ticket to the safety of Lipzi, then she would rather let the Sun reclaim His gift of eternal life.
“Erich! Mika!” Cecilia exclaimed. “Wait for me!”
The priestess—the good Sister Cecilia—forcefully grabbed the knob and twisted with all her might. The explosive sound that followed was the result of her vampiric strength snapping straight through the metal lock; the deadbolt may as well have been paper in the face of a girl who’d ripped apart the bolted gratings of the underground.
Cecilia tackled the door open with everything she had, jumping in to find three men...knocked out in their chairs.
“Huwgh?”
Flabbergasted, a shameful sound that she’d never made before escaped her lips. After battling with her faith and resolving herself to sully a divine contract, she entered only to find that the situation had already been ironed out.
“What a helpless little girl.”
The charming voice of a young girl snapped the priestess out of her stupor; meanwhile, the door she’d busted open slowly closed itself to hide her from the outside.
“That voice...” As soon as she spoke, the black light floated into view. Though it took Cecilia a moment to process the situation, her question as to who had helped her was definitively answered. “Miss Alfar!”
It had been the fairies: unable to bear seeing the girl’s afflicting inner struggle, Ursula had asked Lottie to stop casually drifting around and to incapacitate the men inside instead. With authority over winds and the air that made it up, the sylphid had simply told the breathable bits to go away for a bit until the operators inside were out cold.
Truth be told, the alfar did not care about the girl. In fact, they might even say they disliked her: vampires were godly creatures from their inception, and their mode of life harshly conflicted with their fey values.
Still, Erich had taken a shine to her. Had they abandoned her, she would have suffered a terrible wound that would bring the boy just as much pain. While Ursula loved to tease and toy, she was not the type to enjoy true tears shed from sadness. Lottie, on the other hand, was an innocent soul who simply wished for her favorite children to live out their days with constant smiles.
Unbeknownst to the world, the three’s unique interests narrowly aligned, causing the alfar to help Cecilia beyond the conditions of Erich’s original request. But the svartalf couldn’t help but slide in one sarcastic comment—the remark forced its way up from the bottom of her heart.
“Thank you so very much, Miss Alfar. You have my sincerest gratitude for all your help. Thanks to you, I will be able to fulfill my duty to my dear friends without relinquishing my faith. I’m not sure if I can ever repay you, but I swear to try!”
Once she was finished expressing how grateful she was, Cecilia hurried over to the thaumagram—a state-of-the-art model fine-tuned by College engineers but identical in basic function. The only practical difference was that the mana stone determining the recipient could be removed at the press of a button, making it orders of magnitude easier to handle than the older versions.
“Umm, first I take an unregistered stone, and then, if I recall, the code for her Lipzi estate should be...”
Thaumograms could only communicate if both were set up for a connection, but a read-only machine could be outfitted with an empty stone to allow anyone with the right identification number to send it a message. This betterment was the result of many great minds’ blood, sweat, and tears—though most users in the present day tended to take their century-old contributions as a given—and their effort had evidently been well spent, as the contraption worked exactly how it was meant to.
Long ago, Cecilia had been given this number to write to if she was ever in need; how thankful she was at having committed it to memory. Ready to pen her letter, the girl dipped a quill into ink.

Tprg4.20

[Tips] His Majesty’s hexenkrieger are a subunit of the imperial guard. Composed wholly of mages, the group deals solely in matters of imperial thaumaturgical security. They are further divided by specialty into squads that specialize in maintaining barriers around the Emperor’s quarters, those who preemptively search for danger in His Majesty’s daily life, those who proactively attack threats to national security, etc.

Clock towers to keep the time and imposing spires of artistic make dotted the capital’s skyline, with the smokestacks of the manufacturing district reaching up to catch them. On one such skyscraper, a marksman and her spotter had taken their perch.
The massive arachne gracefully wrapped his great legs around the tower and served as a scaffold for the tiny floresiensis sniper he carried. Though fully grown, the woman looked like a baby on his shoulder, and her bow was bizarrely large for her build.
“No way,” the man muttered. “He dodged that?”
Clad in a custom uniform made to fit his goliath frame, the birdeater arachne nearly dropped the telescope in his spare hand. His partner had practiced archery until her soft hands developed callouses of steel, and he had only witnessed a handful of missed shots in all their years together.
“The perp must have eyes in the back of his head,” he sighed.
A few years prior, a so-called compound bow machined with pulleys had begun circulating the Trialist Empire. Ever since his partner had finally gotten hold of one—nonstandard gear had to be purchased out of one’s own pocket—and mastered it, she had become utterly terrifying in her bowmanship.
The woman relied neither on the gods nor the arcane; everything rode on the skill she cultivated with her own two hands. Despite the limited strength and stamina a floresiensis could possess, she had won the title of jager; there was hardly any need to say more regarding her skill.
Yet this virtuoso whose passion for long-range fire often flirted with psychotic obsession had missed.
The arachne glanced over: though she was approaching thirty, the woman’s exuberant charm was as radiant as ever—an opinion filtered through arachne tastes in physical appearance, mind you—save for the fact that she was trembling with a bitten lip.
Her reaction betrayed that she hadn’t missed due to some unforeseeable misfortune. Rather, she was well aware that the finicky machinery in her hands could at times be less cooperative than the heaviest greatbows; had it been caused by some intricate mechanical error, she would have already fired off a second shot, compensating for the issue.
No, the woman had been confident her shot was true. Everything about her technique had been flawless, and the arrow had still missed—nay, it had been dodged. Their opponent was clearly no ordinary suspect.
Home to more kinds of people than any other nation, underestimating someone of small stature was among the most dangerous mistakes one could make in the Empire. Some fully matured while maintaining a childlike facade like jumping spider arachne; many others, like the woman herself, simply did not grow in size beyond a certain point. Clearly, reports that the escapee “looked like a child” were best forgotten.
“Tch,” the arachne clicked. “He’s a stubborn one, all right. Already ducked into cover.”
Their mark fluidly regained his footing, instantly turning on his heel; he had calculated their line of shot from a single arrow and fled into a different alley. This vantage point would no longer offer them any opportunities.
“...Chase him.”
“Huh?”
Being as high up as they were, the floresiensis’s mumbling was unintelligible amidst the howling winds. Still, the man had literally heard her voice more times than his own parents’, and he could tell her tone was not that of the stark and mature woman he usually knew.
“Chase him! Right now!”
It was that of a little girl throwing a temper tantrum.
Oh man, he thought, bonking the palm of his telescope hand on his forehead. She was a lost cause: no amount of explaining the time it’d take for him to reposition to a decent angle would assuage her now.
Succinctly put, the sniper was a sore loser. Everything she had, including her prestigious title, was the result of her pride and abnormal persistence; naturally, she was confident in her skills to the point of hubris. That applied to the mature and sophisticated speech she’d trained up over the years as well, which had flown out the window when she’d missed her perfect shot.
“Yes, yes,” the arachne said. “As you wish.”
He knew better than to put up any resistance. Not wanting her to kick and flail and potentially run off on her own, he began descending. Boasting the largest frames of all arachne, his kind were known for a low stamina that hindered their bursts of agility; still, he endeavored to climb down as fast as he could. All the while, his partner silently glared daggers into him, as if to say, What are you going to do if someone else gets him first?!
After carefully clambering to the roofs below—tarantula arachne were much frailer than their massive bodies let on, causing many of them to be prudent sorts—he used the target’s speed and direction to infer the path of escape and swiftly began moving to the most apt spot for his partner’s line of sight.
As soon as he clambered up the chimney in question, the woman let an arrow loose without giving him a chance to spot her mark.
“No!”
The floresiensis’s cry shocked the arachne once more. She had been hell-bent on landing true, especially since she’d already let the suspect go once—for the deadeye to miss a second critical shot was unbelievable.
“What happened?!” he asked. Though these situations occurred rarely nowadays, his partner was prone to sobbing like a baby whenever she failed to perform; comforting her all night long was another part of his duties.
Two giant beads of water filled up the woman’s large eyes as she sniffled, “He fell...”
“What?”
“I hit him, but...he fell in the water.”
As her sad whimper vanished into the wind, the man cradled his head in his arms, partner still in hand. This was worse than just missing.
Ugh, he groaned internally. The squads looking for the body won’t ever let us hear the end of this...

[Tips] There are hardly any similarities between the arachne who draw heritage from jumping spiders, tarantulas, and orb-weavers other than the count of their legs. It is far from uncommon to see various tribes classified under the same name lacking common characteristics.

Tprg4.19

“That’s huge.”
I knew we needed to keep a low profile, but the words fell right out of my mouth. But I wasn’t alone: everyone in the city with a view of the skies was sure to be reacting the same way.
Exquisitely slender—that is, relative to its length—the tip seemed as sharp as the pointed end of a diamond, and it grew fatter near the rear, assuming I was looking at it head-on. Its point was as acute as a spear and flew through the air with equal aerodynamic grace. Two three-wing clusters stretched out from each flank...fueled by spells so intense that I could see the formulae.
Hold on a second. Just how massive is this thing? Perspective told me it was at a considerable altitude, but it was so big that my sense of scale was sputtering out. It couldn’t cover the whole of Berylin or anything, but it was definitely as big as one of its major districts.
I knew it was amazing, but...this was not it. I’d been looking forward to something straight out of the realm of fantasia. What the hell was this?! It was practically a weapon of mass destruction—the thing was knocking on the door to sci-fi.
This isn’t what I expected! Where’s the GM?!
After gaping in shock for a moment, revelation struck: everyone’s attention was turned toward the sky. I looked over at the spire and found that the siren had jumped to their feet, staring at the heavens in perplexity; the other guards were much the same.
They were possibly—nay, almost assuredly—just as shocked as me. While they’d certainly been given prior notice of the vessel’s arrival, no normal person would think to expect that from the description of “a ship that sails through the sky.”
...Isn’t this a perfect chance to slip away?
The guards had their eyes fixed skyward, and everyone was too bewildered for a passing noise to catch their attention. As the behemoth sailed on, I shook the awestruck lady beside me by the shoulder to snap her out of its hypnotic shock; it was time to go.

[Tips] Mystic circles are one of many auxiliary avenues for mages to supplement their spellcasting, and are generally written with ink on flooring or with arcane strands of visible light. Magia of the Trialist Empire consider them as showy and unstylish as chants, but those who prefer function over form may even tattoo themselves with hexes of their most commonly used spells.

Forcibly quieting the stubborn voice crying, Why? in the back of her mind, Agrippina du Stahl handily cleared a sociability check to put on a graceful smile. Her long, silver hair wove into a braid that embellished her crown far better than any artisanal coronet. Wearing a thin red gown that exposed much of the shoulders and arms was a bold statement only those endowed with natural comeliness could pull off; she needed no action to bolster her allure, which proudly proclaimed to the world that such threads were fit for her and her alone.
With a wine glass in one hand and a pretty smile tinged with melancholy, the methuselah was the shimmering flower at the center of the party. Marriageable men of every kind found themselves instantly besotted with the lovely blossom that rarely bloomed at these sorts of events—knowing not the poison at the roots—and flocked around her like bees seeking nectar.
Agrippina hated social gatherings, but not because she lacked the skill in etiquette or insight to navigate them smoothly. As a Seinian noble, the century or so she’d spent meeting other socialites with her father had been enough to perfect the craft, and another half century away was hardly enough for her to have lost her touch.
No, the methuselah simply found the roundabout conversations to be a fucking chore, and being invited to pleasure cruises or garden walks that she had no interest in made her want to hurl. She’d spent all her days keeping to the bare minimum of contact with others she could get away with, and the sole purpose of this godforsaken place was for her to make new connections with others whom she would otherwise have avoided. Frankly, she wanted to burn the terrace down and be done with it.
Only the surviving shreds of her pragmatic mind kept her base urges in check—that a failure to do so could spell the end of the world was just a part of the methuselah condition.
Painting over her gloomy soul with a perfectly set smile, the scoundrel participated in nauseating conversations and gingerly kicked aside any invitation to dance while filling her internal monologue with the sort of hateful speech that cannot be reproduced in text. The object of her venom was none other than Duke Martin, who had dragged her here saying, “There is something I simply must show you before writing your referral to professorship!”
To think, Agrippina had been so elated when he had disappointedly opened his retainer’s letter while grumbling about the time. At long last, she’d thought, the torturous nightmare would end. The cascading problems that had arisen as a result of their discussion remained very real, but she was happy enough to have a chance to rest her fatigued consciousness for the first time in months.
Yet by the time she’d gotten her bearings, the methuselah found herself dolled up and planted in a balcony banquet. As a final kick in the gut, the source of all her suffering, who had so excitedly dragged her out to show her something he considered interesting, had vanished on account of a “sudden emergency.” Had only the duke been at her side, she could have used him as an umbrella to stymie the torrential rain of idiotic suitors.
Agrippina wanted to throw a fit.
Why? Why was she out on the northern terrace of the imperial palace—so impressively famed as the Astral Garden—participating in a social gathering with the Emperor present?
Sick and tired of it all, Agrippina still continued to throw the names of every man coming her way into some corner of her brain, next to the tiresome topics she’d solved in her childhood that they merrily discussed. An outing of this sort would last hours at most; was there any reason a woman who’d lived as long as she couldn’t tough out a few more hours?
No. Absolutely not.
In the throes of despair, she gulped down the extravagant wines provided by the crown and wasted yet more time with conversations that carried no stimulation—not even negative. As the setting sun seared the skies for one last hurrah before deep navy reclaimed the heavens, those gazing toward the invisible stars began to stir.
Following their eyes, Agrippina looked up—only for her mystic eye to burn in pain. Overburdened by the task of witnessing too many magic formulae at once, her retinas were screaming to be relieved.
“Hngh...”
The vessel splitting the crimson sky in two was, in no uncertain terms, a mass of pure thaumaturgy. Mystic circles were plastered over every inch at every which angle, assaulting her eye with the glimmer of innumerable spells.
Too gargantuan for physical stability, the craft was held together by binding spells that covered the entirety of the surface; hardening magic had been layered on top as if to fully conceal the first arcane coating. The ship had been built to be so unrealistically large that to forgo such overdone measures would lead to its immediate destruction.
The mystic circles had been etched in so densely that six layers were plainly exposed. Each of the spells in use was a paragon of virtuosity: antigravity magic, physical repulsion barriers, and a convoluted system to funnel small amounts of air through gaps in its force fields to turn drag into propulsion. Built on a ludicrous jury-rigging of the most advanced magical tech one could imagine, the airship’s engraved spells could be seen as a blurry glow to even the most mystically illiterate—that was how great a violation it was of the laws of the universe.
I see, Agrippina thought. I can see why this might deserve the praise of the neophilic, magecraft-obsessed duke.
Glancing at the rabble, Agrippina saw that most had either frozen in dumbfounded wonder or spat the wine right out of their mouths. A few even dropped their cups, mumbling in fear about how the end had arrived—likely the product of some foreign pantheon’s prophecies.
Come to think of it, the methuselah realized a good number of foreign diplomats were in attendance; this showy display had clearly served its purpose. Judging from the sorry state of those around her, the airship was responsible for so much shock that those writing to their motherlands would probably be doubted for their outlandish exaggerations.
“My word. They certainly have equipped it with quite the arsenal.”
Having regained her composure, Agrippina plucked a wine glass off the tray of a waiter who’d frozen in astonishment, only to see dragon knights drop out from the bottom of the hull and take to the air. Truly, how many surprises did the Empire intend on delivering before it was satisfied?
Calmer now, Agrippina agreed that this was an impressive showpiece. It was conspicuous beyond belief, and entertained the eyes for as long as one cared to watch. The dragon knights pouring out had begun to fly in theatrical formation while leaving trails of smoke behind them, only adding to the artistic flair.
However, the appearance of something so wonderful begged the question: where had the duke who’d been so enthused about it gone?

[Tips] The imperial palace is home to three minor dance halls and one major. There are seven banquet halls, six smaller dining rooms, and twenty-five total meeting places—the palace is a castle designed in every way with social events in mind. The four balconies facing each cardinal direction are primarily used for parties held in the late evening. They are specially kept with magic to retain a comfortable temperature throughout the year, and the scenic overlook of the capital makes them popular with domestic and foreign politicians alike.

Although the mammoth ship’s ripping tailwind howled well into the heart of the capital, the keen siren staring up at it did not let the distraction dull his senses: the faint sound of a creaking window hinge rang clearly in his ears.
At His Majesty’s personal request, the Church of the Night Goddess had subjected itself to martial law. Anyone trying to get in or out could only do so under the supervision of the city guards posted inside, and the priests had been given strict orders to report to them if they so much as wished to let in some fresh air.
Ordinarily, the highly independent religious associations of Rhine would never accept such humiliation. The fanatics were willing to face even the crown with swords and horseshoes in hand if it meant their faith and agency were on the line. In particular, the Head Abbess of the Night led what may have been the most rabid of the countless radical sects that made up the Empire’s pantheon: those of the Circle Immaculate were complete lunatics only rivaled by the Circle Austere of Her husband’s flock.
Chaste to the point of insanity, they welcomed daily hardship as a blessing akin to laying on of hands; they were freaks, even by clerical standards. For an organization such as theirs to resign themselves to indignation at the hand of a secular crown was nigh unthinkable under usual circumstances.
Unfortunately, they had carried the burden of responsibility and now faced the consequences of failing to fulfill it. Though the custody of their charge had been a titular affair, her disappearance demanded retribution despite their lack of involvement with the escape—such was the woe of society.
To swallow terms normally vehemently opposed was the plainest sort of remorse. Truth be told, the Abbess had counted her blessings: a scandal of this sort could be grounds for ordained bishops—to say nothing of lower priests—to lose their heads. Cooperation with the state was a meager price to avoid that fate, though she had admittedly gritted her teeth and dug her nails into her palm as she spat in indignation, “Can our good Sister not go one year without incident?”
As such, the interior of the temple was under lockdown. The creaking sound, then, was almost certainly the result of outside interference.
The multicultural capital was home to countless peoples who could climb into buildings. Reptilians could stick to vertical surfaces, and insectoids like arachne could scale walls with ease. There was no end to the troubled citizens who flippantly ignored doors for convenience’s sake alone, and one being shouted down by a city guard was a common sight.
The man took flight: one powerful flap of his wing-arms ignited a magical reaction that shook off the jealous chains of gravity. Deftly making the most of his mensch-like frame, he curled up to turn on a dime as he jumped off the spire, turning to rocket down the roof mere inches from the tower. To write his movements off as mere acrobatics would be a disservice; yet those who partook in the dizzying life-or-death dance of aerial combat considered this mastery of motion no more than a necessity for survival.
Nearly grazing his magnificent beak across the shingles as he descended, the imperial jager spotted a lone intruder trying to break in and shouted.
“You there! What are you doing?! Freeze and take off your hood!”
Judging from the suspect’s build, it was a young male mensch. For a siren like himself, mensch were the easiest race to handle; for reasons unknown, every last one of the fools mistakenly believed raptors were as blind in the dark as domesticated fowl. So prevalent was the misconception that the poets had immortalized it in a limerick: Let your handicap be light for light gives sirens no handicap.

[Tips] Many popular preconceptions about other races arise from the Empire’s large swaths of differing groups: merfolk must soak in water half of each day or die, vampires melt under sunlight, stuarts eat nuts only to file their teeth, sirens cannot see in the dark, etc.
Despite their pervasiveness, the common mensch are no exception. Understood by others for their rugged adaptability, they often get puzzled looks when they complain about being hot or cold.

No matter what stat is being checked, every tabletop game has situations where the players are asked to make a dice roll that doesn’t really matter. Sometimes this is because failure is practically impossible, and other times it’s just that the official rules necessitate it as a formality, but every player has haphazardly thrown a compulsory die or two not caring what the result may be...
And it was at times like these that I encountered catastrophic displays of fortune.
In all likelihood, I’d succeeded on the action itself. Miss Celia and I had climbed an invisible staircase of Unseen Hands to a second-story window of the monastery (though secretly, I’d been hoping she would sprout bat wings and flutter in on her own), and she’d just managed to tumble inside. But as soon as I tried to follow after her...
“You there! What are you doing?! Freeze and take off your hood!”
For a moment, I couldn’t process the man’s order. Not because I was stunned by my own idiocy at being caught or anything, but simply because the speaker’s vocal cords were that unfit for human speech; his voice was more shrill than rubbing glass.
I’d broken stealth and failed my reaction to boot. Had he forgone the courtesy of clearly announcing my discovery and just gone for the kill, I doubted I would’ve had time to fit in another response.
Guards were principally bound to declare their presence before acting; they always called out to suspects before resorting to physical means. Whether they were an everyday patrolman or His Majesty’s secret service, the policy remained the same.
After all, they could afford it. A few seconds of preparation wasn’t enough for the average criminal to avoid being pounded into the dirt, so it was better by far to give the warning and dodge the ire of the populace. However, in spite of the guard’s orders to identify myself, he was already moving in for an attack.
Naturally, anyone stupid enough to sneak into a building under jager supervision was up to no good. Now that he’d done his formal duty, slapping me around was the next thing on his to-do list. I couldn’t tell whether that made him sloppy or deliberate, but whatever the case, he was barreling down at me with his legs primed for a kick—his hawkish outline made it clear to see.
Imperial culture dictated that people were to wear shoes regardless of what claws and nails were present on one’s feet, but the siren’s sandal-boot hybrid left his talons perilously exposed. Those razors were sharp enough to slice me like a rare steak, and perhaps even score me to my bone.
Basically, it boiled down to a counter-or-die situation. The last vestiges of sunlight gleamed off his imposing talons in a way that made it clear a clean hit would skip past applying concussion and land me in a death saving throw.
At once, I dismissed the Hand that I’d been using to support my torso while trying to get in the window and went into a relaxed free fall; by keeping my foothold present for another beat, I fell in an unnatural way that would duck under the attack. My thanks were split between the honorable jager for his warning and my Lightning Reflexes for letting me capitalize on the split second it offered.
The tips of his claws whizzed by my nose and— My gods, that’s scary! I’d been using another Hand to keep my hood over my face, but he tore up the mystic force field as he passed; I would have lost my nose had he so much as gotten a scratch!
Narrowly avoiding a promising future as mincemeat, I curled up like a cat and caught my fall with my hands. Cushioning the impact by bending my arms, I rolled onto my left shoulder to finish the landing; what momentum remained dissipated after a few somersaults. Those impulse buys I’d made after losing at foxes-and-geese weren’t anything to scoff at—rolling off the damage was orders of magnitude less taxing than breaking my fall with magic.
I didn’t have any time to spare, so I used inertia to propel me to my feet and into an alleyway. Everything would come crashing down if they caught me for questioning; considering the context, they might even resort to psychosorcery.
“Wha— Hey! Hold it, punk! Argh, dammit!”
The realm of flight was one we mensch would never surpass a siren in, but the reverse was true on the ground. While there were a few oddball tribes who were faster on foot than in the air, the jager’s wingspan gave him a hard time flying in the cramped backstreets. Now that I’d dodged his first strike, I was in a good spot to get away.
“Oh, you’re nimble aren’t you, you damn earth-crawler?!” he shouted, blowing into a whistle.
...Yeah, I figured. He was on lookout, so he was obviously equipped with some way to alert his fellow patrolmen, though I admit I was puzzled at how he’d blown the thing with his beak.
There were already patrolmen posted in the alley I’d ducked into, and the piercing hiss of the whistle snapped them out of the airship’s spell.
“Whoa there, who are—”
“Excuse me!” I shouted, tackling a young mensch man with my shoulder. As he slammed into the wall, I took the liberty of relieving him of his baton; this region had low rates of crime, and the local guards didn’t carry bladed spears if they were armed at all.
“Argh?!”
Squished between me and the wall, his grunt sounded thoroughly painful, but I left him to it. Snatching his staff—which was nearly as long as I was tall—I twirled it around to fasten it in my armpit.
Okay, next up is...huh. What is my next move?
I’d left Miss Celia with a final token of aid before making my getaway, so she would need to clear the rest of the path forward on her own; as capricious as this may be coming from the guy who got himself caught, committing two of my most valuable assets to her should have been enough to say I did my due diligence—or at least, I hoped it was. Honestly, I should and would have seen her journey through to the end, but that was a vain hope at this point.
Worrying about Miss Celia’s future was well and good, but my future was the more pressing matter. I wonder what they’ll do if they catch me...
With how out of hand this whole debacle had gotten, I doubted I could get away with the old, “Spare this poor street urchin for trying to steal a loaf of bread!” routine. They weren’t going to just call up my guardian—I supposed Lady Agrippina counted—to have her scold me and call it a day like some child who got in trouble at school.
Whoa, two ahead! The whistle had put them on high alert; with sneak attacks out the window, I had no choice but to face them head-on.
Although the guards of Berylin carefully selected elites who diligently trained even after taking up their daily duties, they didn’t exactly make for difficult opponents for me. Still far from the pinnacle of swordplay as I was, I’d trained up to the cusp of Divine Favor.
But above all else, the capital was simply too peaceful.
“Grah?!”
I bolted forward without readying my baton, just begging them to swing at my unprotected head; the first guard bravely and dutifully obliged. Nothing was easier to manipulate than an attack baited out, and his swing had clearly been made of my volition. I pivoted to my left side, dodging the overhead strike and whipping him with my own staff in the same motion. By levering the long rod at my armpit, I swung right up into his jaw and knocked him out cold.
“What the hell?!”
Baffled at his fallen comrade, the second guard panicked—that wouldn’t do. A guard from one of the bloodier cities in the Empire would have pushed his friend’s limp body to the wayside and thrown himself at me by now. Capital guards may have been famed as the cream of the crop, handpicked from every reach in the land, but as a swordsman trained in dirty rural tactics and the no-holds-barred setting of real combat, I found them much too naive.
Their skill, of course, was respectable. I’d heard that the selection exams included a one-on-one spar with an instructor on equal terms, so I had no doubt they were competent with swords, spears, and anything in between. Yet their posts as city guards in Berylin left them wanting for experience.
The capital was a hub of foreign exchange, and the soldiers guarding it were selected accordingly: they required brawn and brains to get the job. But by and large, they lacked the dogged determination to pry victory out of the jaws of defeat no matter the cost. While they were proud of their sublime mission to protect the peace and would do everything in their power to perform it at full capacity, they lacked the desperation of a canton watchman who knew that his death would be the death of his family.
For protectors of rural towns, defeat spelled the end of everything they knew. As unpolished as their technique was, they would sooner eat a clean stab to the gut in order to deprive an enemy of their weapon than see a bandit swing at their loved ones. Frankly, the fair-and-square strength of the capital’s guards was far easier to deal with.
My personal grading was that these men were skilled but ultimately lacking; I would liken them to a whiskey not yet aged.
To top things off, they seemed unaccustomed to wielding weapons in close quarters. The second guard wound up for a swing and bumped his staff into the walls of the alley, causing his attack to stray off its intended course; a minor tilt of my neck was all it took to avoid it. Such was the result of practicing many-on-one chases where the culprit never dared to advance toward them.
As my baton bounced off the first man’s jaw, I let recoil bring it downward unabated, simply redirecting it slightly. The second guard had preoccupied himself with not stepping on his tumbling ally, leaving his legs wide open for a sweep.
“Whoa— Augh?!”
Thinking it would be a waste of kinetic energy to simply let him fall normally, I placed the tip of my baton right where his head would land, and then kicked it into his chin. Call me savage if you must, but it did the job of concussing him.
...Whew, they’re alive. They wouldn’t be eating solids anytime soon, but it looked like I’d even managed to avoid breaking their teeth. All right, how many more of these do I have to get through?
“I heard voices this way!”
“Cage ’em in! Make sure to circle wide!”
“Remember, backup’s on the way! Top priority is to get the suspect’s location!”
It was time to roll up my sleeves for a round of foxes-and-geese. I’d be fine: surely it couldn’t be as hard as trying to outmaneuver Margit, and my life was on the line in either scenario. Stepping across the comatose duo, my earring jingled, wishing me the best of luck.

[Tips] The main work of guards in the capital is to stop and search for crime, which manifests itself as marching around town in armor. Officially considered reserve forces in the army, they boast great martial prowess; tested on all sorts of intellectual metrics, they make for bright seekers during searches.
Alas, the long drought of instability in modern years meant the most violent criminal an average patrolman faced was a drunkard at a pub. Only aging veterans decades into their careers and immortals too accustomed to the job to quit have anything that can be considered significant experience.

Thrust through an open window, Cecilia planted her noble bottom on the floor for nearly a whole minute in a daze. Outside, shouting voices and loud crashes mingled with a chorus of police whistles. Her large eyes blinked in confusion; she tried to chew on the situation but found it harder than a rock, and it developed without pause as she tried to digest it all. By the time she realized that Erich had been found, the whistles were sounding from far away.
“No!” Cecilia tried to scream. She opened her mouth, moved her tongue, and huffed out a puff of air, but the gift of language she regularly employed without thought refused to produce any noise.
Quizzically looking around, she found a pair of flickering lights fluttering around her: the same ones that belonged to the “helpers” that were present when Erich had been making magical decoys.
As a Goddess-fearing believer, Cecilia had never tried to use the mystic eyes she’d inherited from her father. Though she could catch faint glimpses of the arcane, her natural talents were only enough to see their true forms if they chose to appear before her; if they chose to remain hidden, she had no hope of spotting them.
The glows of differing hues danced about her midair. When speaking to these lights, the boy had seemed equal parts weary and affectionate, and the vampire had then asked what they were. He’d stated simply that they were alfar. He hadn’t given their names—those were a secret for him alone.
Seeing the flittering phosphorescent bodies urge her to her feet, Cecilia realized that the fairies were here. Despite being backed into a corner himself, the boy had left the alfar with her.
The priestess wanted to tear the window open and announce her presence, to shout out that he was not to be hurt. No matter how sheltered she was, she knew his capture would be anything but amicable. While he would likely not be killed to facilitate further questioning, they would beat him into submission; perhaps they might even break his bones and cut his tendons.
Yet the fact that he had left these alfar with her was proof that he hadn’t given up...and that he believed in her. It was a statement: “I swear I’ll escape, so make it to Lipzi safe and sound.”
Cecilia held herself for a moment, trembling. Finally steeling herself, she wound her fists tight and shook the dust off her borrowed robes as she rose to her feet. Even knowing that her voice would not ring out, she looked at the green and black bulbs orbiting her and spoke.
“Will you please help me?”
Not in a million years had the alfar expected her to speak to them. They stopped revolving around her as if they were mortals taking in a surprise.
Eventually, the hidden fairies resumed their dance, spiraling in a helix toward the door. The message was as clear as it was silent: Follow us, and we’ll show you the way.
Despite the clamorous whistles tugging at the corner of Cecilia’s mind, she chose to interpret the continued noise as proof of the boy’s continued safety.
Now it was her turn to play a game she’d enjoyed in her childhood. Even the sheltered princess had a memory or two of getting into trouble, and sneaking into someone’s luggage during a game of hide-and-go-seek happened to be one of them.

[Tips] Most people cannot see alfar, as fey perceptibility is dictated by their own whims and desires. As such, the parents of children whisked away to their twilit hill cannot so much as find the culprit. Only those graced with powers of mystic observation greater than an alf’s ability to hide can dig out a hidden fairy.

In battles between the few and the many, it is routinely the latter that has the edge; such is the reason we tell and retell the rare tales that document the former’s victory. The ultimate result is that legends of people beating the odds stick fast to our memories, and what was meant to be miraculous becomes merely commonplace, finally descending into the realm of hackneyed tropes. And no matter how grueling the true battle is, the poets always paint the scenes with simple and concise language to accentuate how powerful the hero is.
Basically, what I’m trying to get at is that the one-line victories seen in sagas were horribly callous.
“Gods, why can’t I hit him?!”
As I squatted down, a dazzling ray of light blasted just above my head. Dissipating just before it reached the wall behind me, the attack was, in simple terms, a laser beam. Instantly singing the part of my hood that made contact, the magical version of concentrated high-power light was alarmingly destructive.
This was a real head-scratcher. How in the world had I found myself facing yet another man in jet-black uniform—a member of His Majesty’s imperial mage corps? Seriously, when I’d first spotted him mixed into the crowd of city guards with personal bodyguards in tow, my heart nearly stopped altogether.
The hexenkrieger were not quite magia, but they were the resident experts who protected the Emperor in all things mystic. Less scholarly than those I’d encountered in the College, they couldn’t fine-tune complex spells with perfect precision, however, their intuitive understanding of practical sorcery was nothing to scoff at.
Much like how jagers were traditionally selected from our nation’s huntsmen, the hexenkrieger were composed of talented spellcasters who’d made their name in the private sector, or College students who’d abandoned the path of academia. Waiting at His Majesty’s side, they were combat-oriented specialists who prioritized practical defenses against hexes and attack magic, and sometimes even dipped into counterspells for poisons or traps.
For some ungodly reason—probably one as stupid as close proximity, knowing my luck—a monster like him had shown up out of nowhere to blast me with a barrage of spells. This was ridiculous; today was an awful day, even by my standards. Though this world lacked the morning news horoscopes that young girls enjoyed in my past life, I could safely say that mine would have been rock bottom.
Juking around beams of pure energy that would melt through steel given a few seconds—which, by the way, literally traveled at the speed of light—I jabbed my baton into a nearby guard’s gut, swinging the tip to launch him into one of his compatriots. Fighting while sidestepping suppressing fire was tough, but any pause to catch my breath would make me a sitting duck; difficulty was no excuse to give up.
I doubt this needs to be said, but my Agility—or rather, anyone’s Agility—was not enough to avoid a laser after it was let loose. My Lightning Reflexes were fast, but they abided by the laws of physics.
My method of dodging was one commonly seen in shonen manga: I paid close attention to the caster’s eyes and movements to read his next move, positioning myself away from his probable lines of fire.
Spellcasting invariably required mental processing; there were a few seconds of lag before mana could turn into reality-defying effect. While absolute freaks like Lady Agrippina ignored such restraints with sheer hardware, the power balance that held this world together would crumble at light speed if monstrosities of her make could be found on every corner. Not even I was unlucky enough for that.
What that meant for me was that I simply had to do my best to fake him out while abusing his kindness: he wouldn’t want to hit an innocent guard, would he? My brain was working at full throttle—I may have been no more than a musclehead, but I’d be damned if the organ between my ears wasn’t swole.
After all, I couldn’t afford to rely on magic unless I absolutely needed it to survive. Any lingering mana could give my identity away, so I could only use it as a last resort. That’s why this wasn’t me sandbagging, per se. I was just deathly serious about following the restrictions on this level.
“Shit! Open up a line for me! I can’t hit him like this!”
“Can’t you tweak your spell or something?! He’ll tear straight through us if we break formation!”
“Do I look like a god to you?! This beam has the power to pierce dragon scales—it’s hard enough to handle as is! You know light travels in a straight line, right?!”
Sorry, I must be hearing things. It can pierce what? Hold on. When did I become wanted, dead or alive? What happened to bringing me in for questioning?!
As cold sweat dampened my entire back, I shifted my focus to dealing with the imperial guard first. There was a marked difference between being able to dodge and actually managing to keep it up; if worse came to worst, he could give up and hit me with an unavoidable area-of-effect.
“You’re coming with me!” I shouted.
“Wait, sto— Hrgh?!”
After slamming the two city guards with my battlestaff, I unhanded the weapon and grabbed them both by the lapels, taking off in a sprint with their heavy bodies on my back.
My destination? The imperial mage and his two bodyguards, of course.
“What?!” he cried. “You—you coward!”
“Appreciate the compliment!” My words of thanks landed simultaneously with the guards I’d thrown, toppling everyone in the collision.
Imperial guardsmen were still human, it seemed. Had he fired with no regard for the men I’d used as meat shields, I would have been down and out.
Looking back, I supposed the mage’s kindness had been visible from the very start: he’d chosen to employ light from the visible spectrum so the front line could see his shots. A serious magus in his shoes would never have taken the onus of others’ safety on themselves; they’d use a superheated infrared death ray to plow through me, their allies, and the wall while they were at it. Wasting mana on precautionary measures like ending the beam early to preserve the architecture proved that this man was a saint.
Hmm... My patterns of thought were beginning to take after the depraved scoundrels of the College. I’d need to set aside some time to reorient my values to be closer to those of common people or I’d run into problems later down the line.
But the matter at hand left me with no time for these silly thoughts, so I ran up to the fallen mage and put in a solid kick to the jaw to knock him out. His bodyguards tried to untangle themselves and rise to their feet, but I put them to sleep before they could.
“You... You’ve gotta be kidding me...”
I didn’t know who uttered these words, but let it be known that that was my line. Not only had I been jumped by nearly twenty city guards, but they’d brought along a mage more competent in arcane combat than I was—a very comical joke indeed.
Having tossed my weapon to pull this trick off, I kicked a baton rolling around at my feet into the air and caught it to rearm myself. As an aside, this made for the sixth weapon I’d picked up today.
I scanned the remaining crowd. Although some were clearly shaken, not a single one dared besmirch their post by turning tail. Their loyalty was heartwarming; I only hoped that they would continue their service going forward for purposes other than apprehending me.
Tired of running, I raised my left hand and signaled them to bring it on. With a hearty cry meant more to rally themselves than to intimidate me, they pressed in.
“Ugh... Haah... Gods,” I heaved. “That totals...twenty-two? You’ve gotta be fucking with me...”
Yet in the realm of storytelling, the author does a disservice to us both: both their valorous charge and my courageous defense amounted to less than a single line of prose. All that remained was an endless torrent of sweat that spilled forth without reserve no matter how many times I wiped my brow. By the time I caught my breath, I was surrounded by a mountain of wounded soldiers.
They had truly been exemplary. They’d fanned out to cast a wide net, with each group of two to four buying time as they blew their whistles. Once the trap had been successfully laid, they moved in at once to overwhelm me with their numbers. Their tactics had been so methodical that I’d felt like the meat of a dumpling, smothered in dough with no hope of escape. Foolishly letting them stall had netted me the ridiculous odds of a one-versus-twenty-two melee.
These wardens of the capital had polished their craft to become the masters of urban roundup, and I had nothing but praise for their patriotic dedication. Had I not exploited the Bodhisattva’s blessing to its fullest, I would have been collared and chained at the nearest police outpost ages ago.
Unfortunately, the baton had cracked from excessive use, so I tossed it for a hand spear I found abandoned nearby. While Hybrid Sword Arts allowed me to use polearms with some competence, I would have preferred to find a longsword to make full use of my add-ons.
That said, swords were difficult to hold back with unless the blade was deliberately blunted. Once they went home, these hardworking guards were good sons and daughters, or mothers and fathers; I didn’t want to leave any lasting injuries, let alone kill them.
If only this had been a comic book where I could blast through them with a kapow! and kerblam!, subduing them into a starry-eyed state: had they been as invincible as the delinquents who shrugged off certain death with no more than a few sketched-on scratches, I could have saved a ton of energy by going all out. Whoever had built this world had made it so inconvenient.
I checked my grip on my newest partner and swung the spear to make sure I had a handle on its weight. Nice and straight. I’ll be borrowing this—can’t make any promises about returning it, though.
“Hurry up! I can’t hear them anymore!”
“Did our men lose?! That can’t be possible!”
Apparently, they wouldn’t even give me a moment to rest. The shouts and whistles in the narrowing distance got me moving. Their raised voices both helped them communicate and robbed me of any reprieve; they really knew what they were doing.
I hooked the butt of my spear onto one of the fallen men’s canteens as I began running down the alley. After a single sip, I splashed the rest over my covered head to cool off my overheating body.
The streets were beginning to look like a lost cause...but the rooftops offered only another graveyard. Glancing upward, the final moments of sunset had dyed the heavens a dark violet, and I caught a glimpse of a shadow cutting across the sky at terrific speeds. Irritably zipping to and fro in the sky beyond narrow cracks between buildings, the siren jager that had begun this whole chase continued to tail me. He remained relentless despite the darkened skies, and he’d shadowed me this entire time. Worse still, he swooped down to ground level any time I chose a path that even remotely looked like he could fit into, constantly keeping me on my toes.
With his mobility, the rooftops were clearly his domain. Any attempt at climbing for vantage would make me an easier mark, and I didn’t even want to think about what would happen if more sirens appeared. No matter how much the altitude facilitated my escape, it meant nothing if it benefited my enemies more. Plus, it wasn’t like this was a stealth game where I could knock out the guards of this area to conveniently lower the alert levels in the whole city.
I was sort of repeating myself, but the life of a have-not was full of sorrow. A normal person in my shoes would have been completely hopeless: I couldn’t kill them, I couldn’t debilitate them beyond repair, I couldn’t give away my identity, and worst of all, I couldn’t so much as sit still and hide because I needed to be the one drawing attention away from Miss Celia.
Might be a bit late to say this, but wow, is this bad.
I wanted to spit out a curse and a loogie to dispel my foul mood, but a terrible premonition sent shivers along my back; all my hairs stood on end as if someone had pressed ice against my neck. And despite running at full speed, the pink seashell jingled clearly in my ear.
I’d grown all too used to this sensation as of late: someone was going for the kill.
Ceding full control to my instincts, I leapt, knowing that attempting to block with an unfamiliar spear was ill advised. Though my somersault was highly committal, it was better to guarantee the dodge than to greedily position for more actionability.
Immediately afterward, an arrow sank into the cobblestone where my right foot had been—one that the College’s oikodomurges had enchanted with protective magic, mind you. As I crumpled up and rolled forward, I saw that it had lodged itself nearly a third of the way into the masoned pavement without so much as cracking the stone. The power was stupefying and the accuracy was monstrous; the shot was so unbelievable that I could feel my gonads shrivel in fear.
Had I eaten the hit, it would have torn my ankle straight off. Wait a second. Why the hell don’t I sense any mana on this thing?!
I’d had quite enough of the GM’s pranks. Upon completing my roll, I steeled myself for both aerial attacks and snipers with tears welling in my eyes.

tprg4.18

Elisa begrudgingly accepted her post to wait for the three others’ return. Naturally, her heart overflowed with discontent when her brother left, but she kept it neatly bottled up inside.

Elisa knew. She knew that her brother would struggle more if she tagged along than if he set off alone with that terrifying moonlit woman. She knew that he would spend a lot of precious time calming her down.

As growing competence fleshed out her repertoire, as she began to want to learn, Elisa was naturally beginning to realize what it was she ought to do. That is to say, she now understood what would make her brother happiest, what would bring him the least hardship, and most importantly, what would make him like her the best. The Elisa of old would have kicked and screamed to keep him home. Her young mind had known no option but to cry and cry and cry until he listened to her pleas to stop doing the things she didn’t want him to.

However, education had nourished her fledgling intellect past the depths of ignorance. She now understood that there was reason behind her brother’s heading into danger; she saw why he chose of his own free will to walk into the pits of hell.

He was kind—too kind. So kind that he could not bear to see others suffer in his presence. It didn’t matter if their hardship didn’t affect him, nor did it matter if their bond amounted to little more than bumping elbows on a walk down the street.

Worst of all, Elisa’s brother was so gifted that he could maybe make it all work out if he worked himself to the brink of death. If this had been a situation in which turning himself upside down and wringing every drop of strength out of his body wouldn’t resolve a thing, he would have grumbled in frustration and given up on her.

No matter how reckless her brother was, he always had his own logical plan for how to see his quests through safely. He would never willingly throw himself into a trial where the odds of death far outstripped any chance of success...or at least, Elisa hoped not.

Besides, including the time where he’d saved Elisa herself, this made for the fifth time he had turned his back to her to march into danger. By this point, it was clear that she couldn’t stop him; this was just who he was.

As a matter of fact, this current predicament was the result of having stopped him once—at this point she had no choice but to accept it. His will was such that Elisa, of all people, had internalized the futility of holding him back.

You know what that means, her maturing psyche whispered. If she couldn’t stop her dear, beloved brother from running off into harm’s way no matter how hard she tried, then the only thing left was to make his journey less dangerous by any means she could. Elisa made up her mind: for all that still confused her, for all the dizzying emotions that made up Mika’s soul, she would trust her with everything she had. No matter how intricate the tivisco’s prismatic desires were, her endearment was genuine, as was her resolution to brave the dangers to come.

And, leaving everything else aside, Mika had been kind to Elisa. She never lied, and her feelings toward the changeling came purely from love. There was no reason at all for Elisa to distance herself from the friendly mage. In fact, their goals aligned quite nicely: the thought of her sneering master detailing Erich’s need for protection flashed back in her mind.

Shields were better in numbers. Though Elisa wished to be the foremost bulwark, she needed time. Until then, she was willing to employ the help of others, and would continue to accept them as comrades once she came into her own; having one of those shields be someone she was fond of offered even more peace of mind.

However, the vampiric Cecilia was just impossible for Elisa to accept. Her eyes were like the uncaring cold of moonlight. Altogether different from the warm, sunny, soothing love that her brother showered her with, the changeling felt no happiness from the lunar glimmer in Cecilia’s eye. Cecilia’s was a bad light. It might very well protect her brother...but something told her that it would snatch him up and take him somewhere far, far away.

On a personal level, Elisa didn’t particularly hate Cecilia. The hues of her soul were pretty and clear; it was rare to find someone so untainted. Her purity was no untrodden snow—not the sort of delicate innocence that would blur into a gray mess as soon as it was trampled underfoot.

No, Elisa thought Cecilia’s soul was more like the diamond that occasionally graced her master’s neck: colorless though they both were, they gleamed with pristine beauty. When Elisa had begged to see the pretty stone up close, the magus had casually handed it off with an accompanying lesson in history.

The diamond’s namesake was rooted in the word for “indomitable” in the Orisons—the Blessed Kingdom’s antique tongue—and it conferred similar durability upon the wearer. Before the time of these ancients, its unyielding hardness had meant no amount of time and effort could polish the gem into attractive shapes; those still in the rough hardly even shone. For the longest time, the diamond had been worthless when compared to the historically adored ruby or emerald.

However, traditional and thaumaturgical advancements made in the past few centuries had brought an uptick in its popularity. By employing specialized techniques, one could buff the stone to shine as bright as sunlight itself; now it stood as the king of all precious jewels.

Apparently, Agrippina’s ancestor had bought a river in western Seine on a whim long ago, which had recently—not that Elisa trusted the methuselah’s definition of recency—produced a fist-sized chunk of ore. It had then been fashioned into a necklace for her master to celebrate her debut in high society.

To Elisa’s fey eyes, the infallible, cloudless beauty of its sparkle seemed something wholly incorruptible—and the same color shone within Cecilia. Pure and uncontaminated, she could only be shaped by another as strong as herself. Her character was not the product of a cloistered life, but rather a preordained outcome that would have come about no matter her surroundings.

Elisa liked this: the priestess did not embody some flimsy virtue that hinged on good fortune, fated to be violated at its first encounter with wickedness. Yet the vampire’s strength was itself the issue; she could become the stone that ground.

Only a diamond could chisel a diamond, and the best were treasured by jewelers and jewel collectors alike. Elisa had seen phantom visions of the blinding light swallowing her dear brother whole. The thought that the icy moonlight might sap the warm glow of the sun into a radiance devoid of heat terrified her to the point of shunning Cecilia.

But now Elisa knew: if her brother had accepted the vampire, then Elisa’s rejection couldn’t change his mind now. So her only choice left was to do everything in her power to make sure the moon didn’t infect the sun’s warmth.

“Be safe, Dear Brother. Please, come home to me.”

With a whisper as heavy as it was soft, the changeling clasped her hands together. She had only ever copied her parents at their local church until now, but today she prayed with her whole heart to the Goddess that that priestess served, with the hope that she would not whisk the boy away.

[Tips] On account of their difficult manufacturing process and scarcity within imperial borders, diamonds have been dubbed the King of Gemstones within Rhine. Though they come in several colors, the achromatic stones are prized most highly by both wearers and mages. Their refusal to bend until they shatter whole makes them a peerless catalyst in defensive barriers.

Mika pulled her hood as low as it would go and walked through the twilit city, carefully eyeing the state of town. Even as the sun careened into the horizon, the streets of Berylin were bustling. Workers walked home after a long day’s labor, nocturnal races rubbed the sleep from their eyes on their ways to graveyard shifts, and young drunkards linked at the shoulders jaunted around, rewarding themselves with booze for the hard work of living.

On the surface, the capital was the picture of peace. It was a bustling hodgepodge of every class of people in the Empire, and the perfect backdrop to blend into. There were countless other hooded figures hiding away from the sun or the noise.

Waves of people that would swallow an inexperienced country bumpkin whole flowed past Mika as she deftly cut through the crowd and made her way to the South Gate. At midday, this city entrance was teeming with merchants and their steeds, but with no more than a few minutes until closing, the traffic was sparse. The roads were well paved and the surroundings were relatively safe, but few wished to brave a trip beyond the walls after sundown.

The packed streets that Mika had used to conceal herself thus far could no longer protect her. On her walk here, a handful of guards had seen the “priestess’s” attire from behind and tried to call out to her, but none had been able to keep up with her fleet footwork through the crowds—but no longer.

I’m on my own from here on out, the tivisco thought, a chill running down her spine. The lump in her throat felt terribly hard to swallow.

“But I talked so much talk to my old pal,” she muttered into her robes. “It’s time to walk the walk.”

Mika casually stepped into the short line leading to the outgoing traffic inspection point. The guards carefully scrutinized every passport and face, going so far as to employ some sort of mystic tool—probably one that removed any magical disguise—which caused the line to move at a snail’s pace. The others waiting in line could be heard grumbling; this had been the norm at every gate for the past few days, and intercity travel had become massively tedious.

Mika kept her hands busy by toying with the wooden passport Cecilia had given her. Surely they won’t let me walk on by, will they?

She couldn’t afford to be found on purpose. Her discovery had to be natural; it had to be the product of some inevitable accident. That was why she’d lined up like everyone else—like someone trying to quietly slip away without causing a scene.

Her turn was coming up. With only a few people left ahead, the guard at the gate proper spotted Mika and put a hand to his chin. He nonchalantly pulled out a written description from his breast pocket, but looked up in alarm after reading it.

Now! The second he caught on, Mika bolted out of the line.

“Hey, wait! Stop right there!”

“What’s wrong?!”

“That girl that just ran off matches the description! Hey, hold it!”

A shrill whistle echoed through the streets, letting everyone in earshot know that a person of interest had been found. The guards leapt into action without much thought in order to not lose their opportunity to catch the fleeing suspect. If only they had spent a moment in contemplation, they would have realized that a person consciously avoiding a search would never appear before the gates looking so similar to how they had when they first fled.

But for now, that was well and good. Instinct that clung to the depths of their hearts rang the alarm on anyone who fled; the cascading chorus of whistles would bring their compatriots to the scene in no time at all.

Mika flew into an alleyway, casting a spell on a set of boxes that some stranger had carefully stacked up: a handful crumbled into pieces and clogged up the passage.

“Whoa?!”

“What the hell?! That was close!”

“Dammit, we can’t follow her from here! Circle around and call for backup!”

As guilty as she felt for destroying someone’s property, Mika asked that they put up with it to save an innocent girl, as little as that meant to the victim. Sprinting through the low quarter, she traversed the path she’d planned out on her way to the gate without so much as slowing down for a second.

The roads she’d chosen were narrow and branching, offering escape routes even if a path or two was blockaded. Among these, she’d carefully selected for walkways covered in eaves or halls between buildings to block off any view from above, using the breakable terrain that filled these passages all the while.

Those chasing her must have found it peculiar: the girl was meant to be a noble’s daughter who probably had never lifted a finger, so how had she smashed all these sturdy boxes?

“Hah, hagh,” Mika panted. “This way’s blocked; it’s time to reroute.”

While the escapee’s knowledge of the city was great, the pursuants were no slouches either. Their job was to protect the peace of the capital, and they knew the streets they served like the backs of their hands. If a native Beryliner wanted to join the guard, they had to be able to orally guide their examiner through every district without so much as a map; naturally, they read the tivisco’s trajectory in an attempt to encircle her.

As the sound of whistles grew in number, Mika realized that they were gaining ground. She’d expected as much: the city guard could very well number over a thousand, and even if the majority stayed put to hold their positions, those that could mobilize to chase her were in the triple digits. No matter how hard she tried, they’d catch her eventually unless she suddenly gained the ability to slip through walls.

“Whoa, they’re over here too!”

The mage tried to pass through a major street in order to hide away in another district, but she could hear the raucous clap of hooves barreling down the road right past the mouth of the alley. Horses could advance no faster than a walk in the capital; unless someone’s steed had gone on a rampage, that was surely the sound of a state-sponsored cavalry unit.

The gravity of the city guard letting their riders loose struck fear in Mika’s heart, but she was thankful all the same. Every troop and horse gathered around her was one that wouldn’t bother her old pal and new friend slipping out of the College around now.

“Boy, I sure am glad I started exercising! Phew! Okay, bear with me for a little while longer!”

Using her lay of the land and her precise, highly annoying magic, Mika continued to evade the dizzying number of patrolmen and imperial guards—though the latter were sure to arrest her instantly in a fair fight. With a runner’s high kicking in, her lips curled into a marvelous grin.

Erich’s penchant for adventures and horseback riding had spurred her on to fight off drowsiness every morning and jog around Berylin; the basic training was finally paying off. In high spirits, Mika swore to herself that she wouldn’t let anyone catch her, even knowing that the dead end was coming up.

[Tips] There are three ways to join the Berylin city guard: veteran guards from other urban centers can be handpicked or recommended for the position, and natives can enlist via a different program. The most influential nobles of the Empire are all gathered in one location during the social season and the Emperor resides in the city for most of the year, so much emphasis is placed on their skill and physique.

Fueled by the desire to cap bribery and corruption, their pay is far greater than that of other guards or watchmen, rivaling the salaries of regional knights. As a result, there is an endless stream of applicants for the position, most of whom inevitably are turned away. Passing through the selection process and passing through the eye of a needle are all but the same task.

His Majesty’s jager unit of the imperial army shared a crib with the Empire itself. The Founding Emperor Richard adamantly insisted that the outcome of war revolved around the accuracy of intelligence on the enemy army. As a matter of course, he began to construct an organized assembly of spies and messengers.

The Emperor of Creation asked for one thing and one thing alone: not loyalty nor justice, but rather the will to return home alive. If the situation called for it, he wanted those with toned bodies of steel and cold hearts of ice who would abandon morals and companions alike to bring him the information he required.

It was said that he had looked out at his people and saw that huntsmen were experts in stealth, equipped with the wit needed to prioritize their lives above all else. From then on, he began recruiting woodsmen and hunters, transforming them into scouts to lead his army.

This was still before Richard was the Emperor of Creation, before even his days as the Little Conqueror, when he was nothing more than a boy seeking his independence. He roamed his territory, making do with what little fortune he had to muster a force fifteen huntsmen strong. They were his eyes and ears, bringing home the reports he needed without fail, and played a large role in his ascent to the world’s first imperial throne.

As such, in modern times, the Trialist Empire continued to honor its exemplary scouts with the title of jager; should duty call, they even marched onto the front lines to navigate precarious battlefronts, unbound by traditional tactics of honor.

Now, a keen observer may then remark that none of the tasks mentioned particularly required hunting expertise. The modern consensus amongst Rhinian historians was that Richard had scrambled for any and every spare troop he could find, and had promised a gang of bandits pardons in exchange for military service; naming them “hunters” had been a front to preserve legal airs.

Whatever the truth, this was history five hundred years buried. The jagers of today were glorified as the most adept reconnaissance personnel in all the Empire... Not that their prestige did anything for them down in the depths of the sewers.

“Gods, the humidity is getting to my nose...”

“Seriously. I can’t get over this smell. How do humanfolk stand this?”

Jagers worked, at a minimum, in pairs. The werewolf and hyenid gnoll duo snorted out the damp air dulling their keen snouts; this incomprehensible mission to rustle up some vampire drew out much complaining.

Of all races, werewolves and gnolls made for some of the best scouts. Not only were they gifted with impressive physiques, but their capacity to safely eat raw flesh made them self-sufficient on long wilderness expeditions, and their body structures allowed them to travel low to the ground at blistering speeds for extended periods of time.

Above all else, their sensitive noses allowed them to pick up on olfactory clues in ways a mensch couldn’t dream of. Their ability to differentiate between scents and commit them to memory rivaled that of magia—suffice it to say, their kind made up a third of all the imperial guard.

“Argh, sending us down here has to be a cruel joke. No noble’s daughter is ever gonna waltz into the damn sewers.”

“Shut your trap. Have you forgotten how many times they barked our ears off in screening about how you can’t ever rule anything out for sure?”

“Okay, fine—sure. But c’mon, why the hell are we out here for a one-in-a-million chance? It’s been three whole days. I bet she’s long gone by now.”

The gnoll scrunched up his nose and griped; his werewolf companion scolded him, though he was truthfully doing no better himself. The duo followed the faint traces of human odor and continued wandering the sewers.

Since their efforts topside had produced no results, they couldn’t eliminate the possibility of an underground escape. The odds were astronomically low, but the higher-ups had had to send somebody, and these two were part of the unlucky crew.

They’d crawled around these filthy pipes and waded through the disgusting odors that permeated them for three whole days, but had yet to find anything. Every now and again, they would catch a whiff of people, but it invariably turned out to be adventurers—rare as they were in the capital—participating in the search, or College students working part-time to maintain the facilities.

Exactly one of the other units had accomplished something: apparently, they’d apprehended a band of criminals who’d been hiding in the sewers. Otherwise, none of the jagers had yet to find any trace of movement or residence in the area—not that this was a livable location.

The humidity was unbearable enough to wet a hydrophobic coat of fur, and the awful smell went without saying; the real issue, though, was that the Imperial College kept a bunch of evil living blobs as pets. The blasted things crept around the pipes searching for filth to clean at all hours of the day.

Running into the tiny ones might only cause a minor scald, but falling into the grasp of the biggest spelled certain doom. Even if one managed to free themselves before burning alive, they were sure to be unfit for public appearance for as long as they lived; an early retirement to a disabled soldiers’ asylum was guaranteed.

The pair had suffered the smell assaulting their delicate noses while avoiding the obnoxious slimes for days, and they had absolutely nothing to show for it. Even the most loyal and resolute soldiers were bound to let a complaint slip when things were this bad.

But someone whose skill was swayed by something as flimsy as personal preference would never have become a jager at all. Though they passed their gripes back and forth, the honed veterans were at their best no matter the situation.

Suddenly, both of their ears twitched, homing in on a sound too faint for a mensch to hear: two sets of footsteps bouncing around the pipes. For these expert stalkers, the volume spoke to the walkers’ weights, and the interval between steps betrayed their strides; combined, it was trivial for them to come up with a mental image of who they were.

They were both bipedal, and working backward from their weight and stride painted the picture of a pair of young humanfolk. A light metallic clinking was indicative of some sort of armor, and one of them had the steady, barely detectable gait of someone with martial training; the other was less precise and seemed wholly ignorant of how to hide his presence. The rhythm and timbre of contact between foot and ground pointed to two males.

The imperial scouts glanced at one another and immediately broke out into a sprint. No matter how much they complained about their lustrous manes being bogged down into sad mops, they were the Emperor’s proud huntsmen. The odds were slim, but even the unlikeliest chance was worth investigating without any semblance of negligence. Accelerating to top speeds, they were like arrows let loose—unable to stop until they found their mark.

They tore through cramped corridors, zoomed uphill, and then leapt over a descending slope in one fell swoop to find the source of the sounds. They hopped right over the flowing waters, and where there were no walkways, their claws sank into walls to keep them moving at full mast. Though an average person would struggle to keep track of them with their eyes, this wasn’t a point of pride for them; it was a given. This alone was hardly enough to call oneself a jager instead of a scout.

Despite the foul smell, the scent of mensch clearly popped out; they were as terrible at concealing their odor as they were their footsteps. In fact, their kind often went out of their way to play with strong aromas, much to the confusion and chagrin of keen-nosed demihumans.

However, as the smell drew nearer, the pair cocked their heads: both of the scents belonged to mensch boys. With hearts full of doubt, they jumped out into the corridor to be safe and checked on the two people occupying it.

The first was a young boy with blond hair too long for imperial style, neatly braided to not get caught up in his leather armor. He looked perhaps like a beginner adventurer, and though he wasn’t armed—naturally, as they were within city limits—they could tell from his footwork and stance that he specialized in swordplay.

Nestled behind him was another boy clad in the style of robes worn by magia: he was a student by every measure. He carried a bagful of test tubes with strange liquids in them over his shoulder and had a map of the tunnels in one hand. This was hardly the first time they’d encountered a poor College attendee just like him tasked with unenviable sewer chores.

Having a pair of jagers kick off a wall onto the walkway in front of them spooked the boys; the armored one jumped to shield his companion, but promptly stood down when he saw the men’s uniform.

Fitted with short collars, their pure sable coats and loosely tailored slacks of like color were immediately recognizable, even without the mantle that bore their insignia. No citizen of Berylin would need to look twice. Theirs was a black of loyalty, impossible to dilute by any dye, and the refined needlework that gave life to an otherwise drab uniform proved they bore the rank of imperial guard; they were the heroes of any young boy who called the capital home.

“The imperial guard?! Why are you here?!”

The men were used to receiving these sorts of twinkly gazes from young lads. While the mage’s mind had yet to catch up to him, the little swordsman was clearly a big fan.

Wrong again, they sighed internally. Still, this was all part of the job; the jagers put on their friendliest smiles and asked the boys for a moment of their time.

[Tips] Draftees make up the bulk of the imperial army, and the Empire sets no strict dress code for its general troops. They are expected to make use of cloth or leather equipment as they become available, and the wealthier among them purchase chain mail or helmets while fastening a signifying badge on their upper halves.

Naturally, the Emperor’s personal men and the guards of some cities also serve ostentatious roles that require a proper uniform. Since the dawn of time, man has sentimentalized coordination under command. As such, the imperial guards don their special regalia and act out the part of perfectly ordered troops; to this end, they are shields perhaps most fit to defend the capital of vanity.

Many like me had clearly run around and left traces of their aesthetic hang-ups all over this world. I knew better than to point out that military garb with stand-up collars had only gained traction in the eighteenth century on Earth, or to wonder why they were wearing double-breasted variants of schoolboy uniforms.

There was only one right response: They’re so cool!

While their features tended bestial, both the werewolf and gnoll were plainly handsome; combined with the killer outfits, the two were a sight for sore eyes. The werewolf had a sleek snout that left an impression of shrewd wit, whereas the hyenid fellow’s thicker neck covered in a ruffled mane oozed virility.

Pretty ladies may soothe the soul, but suave gentlemen in dapper clothes set the heart pounding. Although this wasn’t yet possible, one day I was sure their divine looks would heal insanity and dim eyes alike.

I looked up at them like any other boy would upon seeing the imperial guard and cooperated with their random—though in this case, they’d been spot-on—questioning by showing them my identity plaque. After looking it over, they returned it without any further interrogation.

And why wouldn’t they? These two gentlemen were hard at work looking for a vampiric noblewoman with black hair and red eyes; arresting a College student and his friend who’d tagged along to help wasn’t going to get them anywhere.

“Oh, but just for good measure,” the gnoll said, “would you mind taking off that hood for us, buddy?”

“Sorry about this,” the werewolf added. “I know it’s annoying to have the smell cling to your hair, but work is work.”

“Huh? Oh, yes, of course.”

With both the jagers behind the request, my companion naturally complied; as the hood came off, the sight of a short head of chestnut hair and garnet eyes was all it unveiled. His shoulders and chest betrayed a male physique, and those keener than I in the realm of smell would be particularly sure of his mensch odor.

“Thanks,” the gnoll said. I suspected he was just a detail-oriented type, as his disappointed frown showed no signs of surprise.

“Sorry again for stopping you. Feel free to go on your way, and make sure to holler if you come across anybody suspicious. We’ll be there in no time flat.”

The werewolf jabbed an elbow into his partner’s side while flashing us a dependable smile; that said, his lupine grin bore fangs too terrifying for my mensch sensibilities.

“No problem at all,” I said. “Um, did something happen?”

“Nothing big. We’re just on patrol to make sure no troublemakers hole up down here.”

“‘The grains in the field are yet more finite than the count of the wicked,’ and all.”

The gnoll gripped his ribs with a wincing grimace and the werewolf followed up with a line from one of my favorite poets; neither of the jagers seemed to suspect us as anything more than a pair of boys on an errand. Not to blame them, of course: I doubted anyone would have been able to peg my companion as Miss Celia without mystic eyes or some ludicrous mind reading technique.

“It must be terribly difficult to be part of the imperial guard. I wish you the best of luck.”

Despite covering her lips with a modest hand as she spoke, she was a “mensch boy,” through and through. It wouldn’t have meant much if Mika were the only one dressing up, after all. Miss Celia’s hair and eyes were the product of her Sunscreening miracle, and Elisa’s aroma pouch took care of her scent. Everything else had been up to me.

And boy, had I gone all out. I’d used my Handicrafts skill to fashion spare rags into proper shoulder pads to give her a masculine body line, going so far as to wrap up her midsection to downplay her yet-undeveloped feminine curves. Her gentle jawline was also too girlish, so I’d given her cotton to keep in her mouth.

To top it all off, I’d gone to my wardrobe and pulled out a set of robes worth more than I cared to ponder, courtesy of Lady Leizniz. While the memory attached to them was less than palatable—her exact words when presenting them had been, “If only you were my student,” if I recall correctly—the threads were perfectly suited to putting on the airs of a magus.

Then, at the very end, Miss Celia had excitedly proclaimed that she ought to have her hair cut if she was to pass off as a boy. Considering how long mine was, I’d attempted to dissuade her, but she insisted on it, citing that it would return to its usual length once the miracle wore off anyway; as much as it pained me to say, she then grabbed it and haphazardly lopped off a giant chunk.

That wasn’t what I’d been trying to say. Temporary as it was, seeing her carelessly sacrifice what was traditionally a woman’s pride was agonizing, no matter how happy to do so she seemed.

Furthermore, her unplanned haircut had come out to something egregious; trying to shape it up into something halfway presentable had been an ordeal. I was just thankful that I could brute force it into something decent with pure Dexterity and a pair of scissors.

It seemed my hard work had paid off, seeing as these jagers couldn’t distinguish her. I know I’d been the one to put on the finishing touches, but I doubted even I could recognize her like this if we were to spend a few years apart.

Just as I prepared to bid the men goodbye with a placid smile, the secret servicemen whipped their necks in unison in the exact same direction with frightening speed.

“That way.”

“It’s far. Running topside will be faster.”

“Agreed. Closest exit’s two pipes back.”

To us, their conversation seemed to materialize out of thin air. They must have heard something too faint for our ears to pick up...like, say, the silent echo of a faraway whistle calling for backup.

“If you’ll excuse us, we’ve got to be going. Be careful down here, lads.”

“Thanks again for the help! Make sure not to slip and fall!”

The jagers bolted off as swiftly as they’d arrived; not even I could outrun them at top speeds. I waved them off and kept my affable poker face frozen until they were well out of sight. Their footsteps came echoing down the pipes for some time afterward, but that too eventually disappeared.

“Are...” Miss Celia peeked her head into the tunnel they’d run into. “Are they gone?”

“Shh, they’re not that far away.” I pulled her back by the shoulder and put a hand to her mouth. Taking the safe route, we were still a long way from our destination.

“Is it Mika?”

“I can’t imagine it’s anyone else. Looks like she’s really running them around.”

I internally marveled at Mika’s strategy. Realizing that the overwhelming guardsmen would eventually cage her in on the streets, she must have hopped into the sewers for a locational advantage. Knowing how cunning she was, I bet she’d strung them along above ground until the brink of capture, and then ducked into a major pipe where she could use the flowing water to cover a ton of ground in seconds.

My blessing may have imparted me with the ability to tweak my mental faculties, but the head on Mika’s shoulders was better than anything I could’ve hoped for. I pitied the poor guards forced to traverse the unfamiliar sewers in pursuit; at the very least, I hoped that none of them would find themselves face-to-face with a giant slime.

Come to think of it, Mika had excitedly bragged about a new spell recently: she could turn a small catalyst into a one-man raft. By now, she was sure to be zooming downstream away from those chasing her.

My old chum was putting herself on the line to save our new friend. Now it was my turn to deliver Miss Celia to safety with everything I had.

The two of us walked along in search of our exit; once we’d covered a respectable amount of ground, Miss Celia opened her mouth again. As short as our time together had been, I was well aware by now that she couldn’t handle silence alone with another person. I’d humor her so long as she didn’t choose any dangerous topics.

“You know,” she began, “there have been so many patrolmen today. I wonder if something has happened.”

Her recognition that we were surrounded by keener ears than we could imagine led to rather roundabout turns of phrase—something I was incredibly grateful for. Cloistered life or not, her familiarity with these sorts of subtleties spoke to aristocratic heritage.

“Indeed,” I responded. “To think we’d run into the imperial guard three times—today must be our lucky day.”

Why yes, that was sarcasm.

Okay, I’ll admit it: I’d underestimated them. Miss Celia’s disguise had been a mere safety precaution; internally, I had figured the underground would be totally clear after three whole days of hiding. Yet we descended only to find the place crawling with stalkers pulling out all the stops.

That pair of jagers had not been the first: no, that honor went to a goblin and floresiensis. After them came an orb-weaving arachne—probably what most would consider the archetypal arachne—and a gecko-like reptilian. Each time, we’d shown them our identities and the real job request I’d swiped from the College’s bulletin to get them off our backs.

Can you blame me for letting my guard down after three days? Most normal people would suspect her to be long gone from the city by now and begin focusing their efforts beyond the walls.

This called for the utmost haste. I selected paths that were usually blocked off by slimes and forced my way past them with Unseen Hands. If we missed our chance now, we were going to spend the rest of our lives hiding in the atelier.

Plus, we’d given them a bit too much time. If they brought out a magus as broken as Lady Leizniz or a high-ranking priest with full command of miracles, then that would spell out an unwinnable checkmate...

[Tips] The holy district is located in north Berylin, next to the noble quarter. Every god in the Rhinian pantheon has temples there, but even the divine understand the political city for what it is: almost none of the chapels serve as the premier location of authority for their corresponding religion, though one would be forgiven for assuming as much from their impressive architecture.

Temples are not restricted to the holy district, and there are smaller parishes strewn across the city for layworshippers to visit. The monasteries of the holy district are primarily used for apologetics and to house clergymen; the day-to-day services provided to the public are hosted closer to the low quarters in which they reside.

Two thoughts etched themselves into the young student’s heart: This is going great! and, but I’m going to soak in the bath for a whole day once I’m done.

Having spent more than half an hour running this way and that, the girl finally found herself cornered. As the guards closed in, she could have accepted her fate with good grace and surrendered to not suffer any rough treatment upon arrest...but didn’t. Instead, she tore open a manhole meant only to be accessed by specialized personnel, and jumped in.

Those sewer covers were specially designed to prevent curious children and random citizens from using them on a whim: they could only be opened by twisting them into a specific position and pulling at an angle. Naturally, the only people who were taught this information were those that had business with the city’s waterworks, and they were all contractually bound to not share the secret with others.

All the pursuants stopped in muddled confusion. Not only had their target taken a path she had no business knowing, but it fed into a dirty slide that would make a common man balk: the gutter led to a pipe full of rainwater that ran off the streets. So long as one could stomach the terrible pain in their buttocks on the way there—or otherwise prepare a plank of wood to ride like Mika had done—the twisting pipe could make a handy escape route to the lower levels of the underground.

A handful of guards leapt after her on reflex alone, but most planted their feet with heaving shoulders; the absurd display caused them to reexamine the situation. No normal lady would choose the sewers, regardless of how desperate she was to escape. For that matter, what kind of noble girl had the stamina to outrun city guards for such an extended period of time?

Alas, pity the men: servants to the public, the members of the garrison were balled and chained by an oath of loyalty. Here was a suspicious person doing suspicious things; that she’d vanished into a dark, dank, eerie sewer was no excuse for inaction.

Manly battle cries—though some were markedly unmanly—echoed out in chorus behind Mika as she deftly steered her sled downward. A long while back, she had joked about sliding down the pipes to save on time despite knowing the filth would keep her from ever trying it; that mundane daydream was now her reality.

Unable to keep up with her calculated twists and turns, most of the men chasing her vanished into different forking paths. At last, Mika arrived at her destination: a wide pipe full of flowing water. Not giving up her trusty ride, the mage repurposed the wooden sled with a midair spell, landing on the underground river with a newly fashioned raft.

“Wow, this is terrifying!”

The planks stretched themselves out, with one contorting into an oar for steering. Mika bit her wand to free her hands—there wasn’t any rule against wielding a wand in one’s mouth—and desperately steadied herself, using a spell to calm the bobbing watercraft.

So long as she didn’t capsize, the rest of her plan was sure to go off without a hitch. Surrendering herself to the rushing current, she floated downstream several times faster than anyone could run after her.

While this was peachy for the escapee, it was nothing short of a travesty for those chasing her. They’d tumbled down a long, bumpy slide only to be spat out into head-high water. The capital’s garrison had training programs that revolved around the exterior moat, so the armored men weren’t at risk of drowning, but that didn’t mean they could move around with full agility.

Bluntly put, this was the worst place they could have found themselves in. None of the guards had dressed for an amphibious mission: they had heavy breastplates on, or soaking leather that clung to their bodies or the ground, or both. Drenched, their boots invariably sploshed with every step, dragging them down.

Worse still, those not blessed with innate night vision could see practically nothing. Natural light was foreign to the place, and they’d rushed down too quickly to prepare any real lighting. Captains were equipped with radiant arcane torches that shone through rain and sleet alike with just the twist of a cap, but the commanding officers had all remained topside to coordinate their men. Considering how they sold for drachmae when on sale, not even the Empire could afford to equip their rank and file with such marvelous equipment.

“Gods dammit! Don’t jump in without thinking or you won’t be able to get out! Everyone without night vision stand back!”

“Argh! I can’t smell jack! Hey, who’s got the lanterns?!”

“Forget it, they’re useless! I can’t even get my tinderbox to light!”

On the other hand, Mika was paddling downstream with an arcane light to guide her. She’d learned her lesson about visible light from her last encounter in the sewers; over the past three days, she’d developed a new spell that would only shine for herself with her master’s help. He hadn’t seemed all too thrilled that his disciple was suddenly studying formulae unrelated to oikodomurgy, but he’d helped all the same on the principle that eureka moments often came from the most unassuming ideas.

“How is she sailing in this darkness?! Damn... Can we buy any more time for the nocturnal guys to get here?!”

“Anyone that can see needs to lead the way! Top priority is to make sure we don’t crash and drown!”

“Blow the whistle first! We gotta call for the sewer patrols!”

The staggering difference in sight meant the disoriented guards were reduced to small dots in the scenery in the blink of an eye.

“Um,” Mika murmured to herself, “I turn here, then watch for the right, and then...”

Still, the mage knew her advantage was fleeting. The city guard had numerous merfolk units, on account of Berylin’s vast moat. No matter how unappealing it was to swim in these filthy pipes, those aquatic specialists would dive in right away if she gave them the chance.

“Okay, here goes nothing!”

Mika may have been well acquainted with the underground, but she couldn’t outsmart the whole city guard once they got serious. Eventually, she would run into the same fate she’d encountered on the surface—that is, if she didn’t put her plan into action.

As she approached a fork, the mage pulled out a vial from her satchel and threw it at the wall. The fragile glass shattered, spilling its contents into the water behind her; suddenly, a mystic reaction turned all the runoff it came across into oily perfume.

This, too, had been a gift from her master. Its intended use was to turn a standard bath into an aromatic skin treatment that a patrician woman might fancy. Squandering such a lovely product in literal sewage was a terrible waste, especially when only a few drops would suffice for a normal tub; yet committing the whole vial lived up to Mika’s expectations.

Off in the distance, a frightful rumbling shook the pipes. Only a few days prior, this sound of thick ooze sloshing through water had caused her blood to freeze solid; now, the keeper of the sewers was hers to summon. A gargantuan slime had noticed the dramatic level of pollution her magic drug had caused.

“Oh—oh gods! But it worked! Okay, okay, next!”

Mika hadn’t forgotten the bandits’ yelps as they’d abandoned their battle: they’d cried, “There’s too much blood!” Working backward, the studious mage realized that they’d been manipulating the slimes by dirtying the water with a potent contaminant.

She used the knowledge that had fueled a smuggling enterprise like no other to help the very same princess that the criminals had been trying to kidnap. The irony had Mika chuckling as she tossed yet another vial to close off a path.

It didn’t matter how skilled her pursuers were; no one could get past a slime if it occupied an entire tunnel. While a mage would be able to push it with a barrier, these were simply too massive to continue past without a detour. Furthermore, the faithful keepers were loyal workers; they wouldn’t run off to a new spot until their work was done, no matter how much filth accumulated elsewhere.

Mika knew she wouldn’t stand a chance in a square fight, but they were as good as scarecrows if there wasn’t a path to reach her. In fact, she’d touted herself a genius when she first came up with this scheme.

The trick went as swimmingly as the budding mage had hoped, and she was finally approaching the end of the line. Several pipes joined together, giving way to a massive tunnel. Ahead lay a pitch-black mouth, swallowing the raging rapids whole.

Mika fell—she sailed straight off the edge of a waterfall.

Of course, it wasn’t as if she’d plummeted without any countermeasure in mind. She’d recently studied up on physical barriers, and covered herself in a thin layer of protection from head to toe that doubled as a pocket of air. While it would only last her a few minutes at most, the rushing torrents meant she wouldn’t need more than that.

The real issue lay ahead. Mika squinted her eyes and carefully looked out into the muddy waters.

“There it is!”

Giant metal bars came into view. With all the water flowing down to this point, there had to be something to filter out physical debris, and there were three layers to the grating. The first was tremendous in size, meant to catch driftwood, and could easily be passed through by a regular person; the second was a softer but more tightly woven net, with openings only navigable by a small child; the last was a fiber wall meant to sift out the finest articles of trash.

With how strong the current was, a direct collision with the metal bars spelled certain death. Mika kept her cool, analyzing the current, and positioned herself as best she could. But for the final moment, she simply closed her eyes and prayed.

Her gamble paid off. She slipped through a gap without eating the fatal blow; in her place, the raft that had carried her here splintered and remained stuck to the metal partition.

Having avoided a double beating from water and metal, Mika found herself caught in the soft second layer. This net was meant to impede miscellaneous trash, like the corpses of small animals; the tivisco found herself nestled in a bundle of foulness. Even with the barrier in place, she could feel her skin crawl.

This drove home the message that the marvelous bioengineering that had produced the sewers’ keepers was not infallible. Seeing as they couldn’t be everywhere all at once, this net was akin to a feeding ground that they cleared out on occasion when there was little else to do. Unwilling to waste her precious air exploring the slimes’ cafeteria, Mika frantically pushed through the garbage to get to the other side.

At last, she pushed herself free and practically jettisoned herself through a hole in the netting. The blockade of junk ate the brunt of the water’s momentum, and the mage let this gentler current carry her for a short while.

Eventually, she came across a massive brown wall. This was yet another of the College’s inventions: a fibrous mesh as colossal as it was thin, designed as the last step to purify water of grit and mud. Clever as she was, Mika couldn’t get through gaps this tiny. Instead, she activated a spell that tore a hole in the fabric. Destroying public infrastructure hurt her oikodomurge’s heart, but the filter had been designed to repair itself over time; she passed through the newly made opening with a silent apology to the original creators.

Upon forcing herself to the other side, she drifted a bit longer and was finally released. Out she went: the water purified in these sewers eventually ended up flushing out to a river that ran alongside the city.

There was a sizable drop from the mouth of the final pipe to the water’s surface, and Mika hurtled out like a falling stone. Dunking into the river with a great splash, she panicked for a moment until her best friend’s voice suddenly flashed across her mind.

“Well, Mika, if you ever lose your bearings underwater, the best thing you can do is stop moving for a bit. Whether you sink or float depends on a bunch of factors, but that way, you’ll be able to figure out which way is up.”

If her memory served, they’d been discussing a scene in a saga wherein the main character fell off a waterfall and disappeared. When she’d jokingly commented that she would be in a real pinch if the same happened to her, this had been the boy’s response. To tell the truth, the answer she’d been expecting was more along the lines of, “Don’t worry. I’ll be sure to save you.”

Regardless, the handiest tidbits of advice often came from the most unexpected sources. Mika curled up in the fetal position and relaxed her muscles, letting the flow of the river sweep her along. Her personal bubble was out of oxygen, but the air that remained trapped within slowly dragged her toward the surface.

At long last, Mika crested the surface. Laying on her back, she floated gently downstream to face the sparkling night sky. The moon cruised along without a care in the world—not full, the half body was on its way to slimming down further.

Too bad. A full moon would’ve been nice.

Still, its gentle rays of brilliance beamed down as if to honor her for all she did for her friend—for that devout follower of the Night.

“Boy... I’m spent.”

Out of energy, Mika let the river dictate her course. As she drifted, her flowing hair shrank down to its usual length and began soaking up moisture to produce a mellow wave. The last of the magical disguises wore off, returning her eyes to their usual hue; it was as if even the potions were saying that her role was finished.

“...All right, it’s time for a bath. I’m heading back as soon as my clothes are dry!”

Flipping onto her stomach, Mika began swimming to the riverbank with an oath in her heart. While she couldn’t quell the anxiety over her friends’ fates, it wasn’t as if she could contact them any time soon.

For now, the best she could do was to wash off the rainwater, sewage, and sweat that were bogging her down, and patiently wait for their return.

I’m sure they’ll be fine, Mika thought, looking up at the heavens. How can they not be with a moon this beautiful?

[Tips] The waxing and waning of the moon is sacrosanct for those who glorify the Night Goddess, and there are poetic meanings for each phase. This does not necessarily mean a new moon bodes ill, however: it is a day of respite for Her followers, as She is thought to be paying a visit to the Sun God’s chambers.

The holy district was in the northern part of the capital—the north-northwest area, to be precise. Every building in sight was either a place of worship or a residence for the monks who ran them; most agreed that a pilgrimage here was second only in importance to the head temple of one’s respective religion, even for the less spiritually inclined.

Muted shades of burnt bricks, marble, granite, and limestone painted the scene with dignity without coming off as too imposing. It was a subdued location: the steeples did not tower high out of consideration for the imperial palace, and ornaments of simple make caught the eye in the absence of grandiose statues or gilded icons. Even the gaudy lovers of ostentation found in the Circle Brilliant kept their glitter confined to the inner rooms they controlled, allowing the Sun God’s temple to retain modesty in its majesty.

Still, our Father God’s monastery was probably the largest of these reserved buildings. Though the Empire did not write legislation codifying the size of divine shrines, the religious authorities had long since decided on their pecking order; one look was enough to get the gist of who was in charge. My quick glance sufficed to pick out a solar insignia, so my initial guess had indeed been correct.

It seemed natural to assume the second-largest temple next to His would be that of His wife, but the brighter colors suggested it belonged to the Harvest Goddess instead. The pantheon’s Mother and Father were customarily housed in locations a ways apart, and their temples could most often be found on opposite sides of major streets or districts. While I couldn’t make out my own goddess’s emblem of bundled wheat on the building, it was nigh unthinkable that the cultural tradition would be broken in the capital, of all places.

I’d only looked around to get a lay of the land, but my quick survey ended up soothing my weary soul. The simple and refined architecture spoke to a high-minded integrity that made the whole sector feel blessed. I was absolutely smitten with the talent on display: here was a place fit to receive the gods, designed to evoke the heavens themselves on earth.

In the Information Era, this place would be swarming with pilgrims snapping photos left and right with their phones—not that I could look down on them. Had I the time, I would have loved to stroll the streets and enjoy the sights. My daily chores kept me too busy to walk out to a corner of the city I had little business in.

Setting my personal observations aside, it was already evening. I’d remained within the manhole, only cracking it open to peek out, and found the area unaccosted by the hustle and bustle that was so common in the rest of the capital. No matter how many people roamed these hallowed walkways, the subdued beauty of these idiosyncratic places of worship commanded its viewers into silent awe.

For good and for bad, the Mage’s Corridor was a lively and developed place. Even in matters of ambience, magecraft and religion remained antithetical.

“We’re finally here,” I said, pulling Miss Celia up. After Cleaning the sewer stink off of us, we finally had a moment of repose...or we would have. “But this is a bit worse than I expected.”

There were more guards marching along the holy district than I had thought possible. Fully equipped city guards with swords at their hilts mingled together with the usual rank and file wearing breastplates and helmets I saw on the daily. On top of that, no one had told me I’d need to watch out for more secret servicemen after running into them three times in one day.

Okay, okay—logically speaking, it made sense. Guarding an escapee’s asylum was standard practice, and a sheltered girl couldn’t pull off three days on the lam against a force like this alone; clearly, they suspected she had some help on the inside.

My old chum had made the path here painless, but the most suspicious suspect alive wouldn’t convince them to abandon their posts here to give chase. Why did these guards have to be so damn sensible? It was nice when they were protecting me, but as someone trying to slip by them, their competence was infuriating. That’s it. I’m never fighting the authorities again.

Trying to suss out my options, I figured we could take refuge in an alleyway while we planned our next move...only to find the backstreets crawling with guards too. The way they eagerly packed themselves into every nook and cranny made this feel like a targeted attempt at bullying me in particular. Even a hooded parkour assassin would struggle to poke holes in this net, but we managed to catch a fleeting opportunity and sneaked into an alley. My brain was churning at full throttle, but the first thought that came to mind was, Why are these jerks such tryhards?

And yes, of course, the answer was because this was reality. Yet again, I was reminded that my predicament was wholly unlike stealth games designed to be cleared; it was incredible how I’d managed to delude myself after being on the receiving end of full-blown bloodlust at both the lakeside manor and ichor maze.

Although my inability to learn had me upset with myself, stray thoughts would do us no good; I decided to voice my concerns to bounce ideas off Miss Celia.

“I don’t think we’ll be able to get through this many guards...”

“Indeed,” she said. “The chapel is over there...see? Do you see the one with the spire?”

I followed her pointer finger to find a tall belltower and a shadow squatting on top: dyed in the scarlet of setting sun, the massive wings of a siren stretched out, its owner perched atop the steeple.

Sirens were a peculiar race that remained unclassified between demihumans and demonfolk. Despite all belonging to one unified people, their anatomies varied wildly, and not only based on what type of avian ancestry they had: some were covered in feathers, gave up human arms for wings, and had pronounced birdlike facial features; very rarely, sirens were indistinguishable from mensch save for a pair of wings sprouting from their backs. The variance was so wild that sirens native to different regions practically looked unrelated.

Some author or another of Earth had once written that a human being with wings on their back wouldn’t be able to fly. They’d posited that a person’s weight outstripped any lift generated by the flapping of wings, so any reasonably sized pair would struggle to even allow the user to glide.

Sirens had not received this memo: they flew. The smallest among them could take off from perfect stillness, and even the heavier ones could lift themselves into the sky with a short running start.

There had been a few siren households in Konigstuhl. All of the ones I’d known were pretty clumsy with their hands, but made great use of their aerial talents for the good of the canton. Most also held property in Innenstadt, and earned their keep by flying from the city to rural cantons with mail in hand. Having known nothing of thaumaturgy at that point, my reaction had been a casual, Wow! Cool! I wish I had that! Now equipped with knowledge, however, I recognized that something in their biology allowed them to intuitively employ magic. In some ways, they were like the fairies and spirits, though those creatures’ entire existences hinged on the arcane.

The benefits of natural flight hardly needed to be stated. When magia struggled to replicate their innate abilities, the strengths were readily apparent; though the physical toll the incredible spells enacted on their bodies made them frail, the pros easily overshadowed the cons.

Still, sirens had historically been seen as deficient beings in many ways, and theirs was a tale rife with persecution. Most notably, they were one of a kind: despite their instinctive mastery of ornithurgy, they lacked an internal conduit for mana. For a people flying off into unknown horizons in search of a place to call home, their arrival in the Empire was a matter of course—or destiny, if you’d like to be poetic.

Whatever their technical abilities or history may be, what it really boiled down to for us was that sirens could fly. That alone put them near the top of the rankings for scouting activities, and judging from the perched one’s uniform...

“Jagers again?”

The world was throwing its highest-level enemies—the best of the best—right our way.

I could only see their back, but judging from the wings and the shape of their head, their bloodline was drawn from birds of prey; their capacity for searching truly was best in class. I’d once heard eagles could pick out and accurately dive on prey from a kilometer away, so avoiding being seen was going to be next to impossible.

Considering how all of my run-ins today had gone this way, my dice had to be loaded. If life had a random encounter table, this was me hitting every bad outcome with a defeated sigh.

“It might be a bit of a struggle to ask your friend for help,” I said with a grimace.

They’d defended the most vulnerable part of their position with all their major pieces. At this point, I wasn’t sure if Miss Celia could get to her ally even if she managed to sneak into the church. She didn’t even need to be spotted by a guard: if someone loyal to her family recognized her inside, it was all over.

“Oh, whatever shall we do? I fear it would be too dangerous to try and masquerade as members of the crew.”

“I doubt that’d be possible anyway. Neither you nor I can pass for a burly seaman, and the crown wouldn’t just hire any old sailor for this to begin with.”

Anchoring in Berylin indicated that the airship was going to take the opportunity to refuel or restock, but dressing up as a shipmate would not suffice. A state-sponsored project intended to promote national interests was not the kind of place a day laborer could hope to find work. I suspected the lowest-ranking crewmen aboard were direct servants to knights.

“How many people is the Night Goddess sending?”

That left one route remaining: the tried-and-true luggage stowaway. If the church was sending people as envoys, it was sure to be a suitably sized party with a good deal of luggage. While they wouldn’t casually saunter up with a truckload of personal articles fit to move into a palace—they weren’t the corrupt bishops of Earth’s Middle Ages—the high-ranking priests most likely to be selected required fitting treatment, and I imagined there had to be some spot Miss Celia could hide in.

“Huh? I believe our boarding party has three members. The Head Abbess will have two priests accompanying her, and as they are all Immaculate believers, none have elected to employ a helper.”

Oh? In my mind, the Night Goddess’s involvement would have been as minimal as possible, but She still got three representatives. That meant the more populous churches would bring more than that; the religious affiliates alone summed to an impressive total.

Perhaps this airship was far bigger than what I’d been imagining. I’d conjured up an image of a humble galleass sailing through the sky, but accommodating my rough passenger estimation would require something far larger. With nobles, College professors, and high-ranking clergy in attendance, their sleeping arrangements were certainly not going to be shabby cots. Not only did they have to provide countless bedrooms fit for aristocrats, but their servants needed quarters and kitchens. Factoring all that in would take a leviathan of a vessel. More and more, it seemed that my fantasy of a classic ship floating on the clouds had been off the mark. I was markedly less enthused to see some luxury liner pop into the heavens ready to treat its passengers to a joyride around the world.

Whatever my personal thoughts on the matter, this new information necessitated a change in plans.

“Do you know where in the chapel the departing party is making their preparations?”

Miss Celia put a hand to her chin in contemplation. After a long moment, she answered with a dubious, “Probably.”

The task at hand was going to take a lot of nerves, but at least the sun had almost set; the watchful raptor’s eyes would lose their terrifying edge. Sirens’ vision was closer to that of birds than mensch, and they were particularly susceptible to loss of light.

For now, our best course of action was to wait out for nightfall before making— Wait. What the heck is that?

I’d been trying to keep an eye on the siren when a hovering dot appeared in the northern sky. Set against the backdrop of the crimson heavens, the garish white blemish grew larger and larger with every passing second. What had been a tiny stain ballooned into a ginormous shadow whose shape stood out clearly to the naked eye. Despite floating gods knew how high above the earth, it seemed gargantuan—larger than my brain could possibly fathom.

The tremendous, chalk-white boat slid across a sky dyed scarlet by the setting sun. Though it was long and sleek, the thing threatened to engulf the entire district whole as it sliced through the atmosphere with a shining snow-white bow.

Tprg4.17

[Tips] On Earth, religious divisions refer to groups who worship the same god in different ways, or who draw differing interpretations of holy texts. God may have given humanity commandments and scripture, but the details of worship have been left up to interpretation with the faith. As such, worship of the form a person truly considers most hallowed will produce the most pious results.

Had anyone else been present, they would have shouted, “What are you, a child?!” before doubling back and realizing that the vampire was, in fact, a child. However, the three actually present were shocked into dumbfounded silence. Cecilia had hidden her planned mode of transport with adventure in her heart, but none had expected it to be one and the same as the airship making the rounds as hushed whispers in the capital.
Those unrelated to its construction knew it only as a ship that could soar through the skies, but the rumors were true: this “aeroship” was the crown’s cutting-edge weapon to cut a path through the portless boundaries of the Empire. For all its land, the nation had failed to secure even a single hold in warm waters. The three-headed dragon could bear no more burden: the Empire couldn’t afford to take on more territory in the name of open seas.
Of course, the northern regions ended in coastline, but their sheer bluffs and icy winters made them hostile to navigate, if the frigid oceans permitted voyages at all. All the harbors up north were smaller towns dedicated to fishing.
There was one passage in the northwest: the Howaldtswerke Peninsula was a tumorous growth on the continent, and the port of Schleswig on its tip could launch ships into international waters. Yet the belt of islands blocking the path to the north and west meant an imperial vessel would need to make a massive detour to access the temperate and prosperous waters beyond. Clearly lacking in the eyes of the throne, the Empire did not see it as a worthwhile investment.
Long ago, they’d even considered constructing a canal westward to connect their own sea to the greater ocean, but the raging waves of the North hid drakes and sea serpents that would make for an arduous process. Imperial estimates of the day had predicted it would take more than seven generations to complete, and so the project died on the vine; now it only served as a tantalizing what-if that burrowed in emperors’ minds.
For the time being, the Empire made do by giving its southern satellites trade privileges and the power to impose duties in order to use their ports as if they were imperial property. It wasn’t as if Rhine lacked the means to trade overseas, but it was plausible that unforeseen happenstance could deprive them of access at any moment; thus, those in power were always eager to find alternative routes.
This had led the nation to consider all sorts of impractical ideas: the once-dreamt-of Great Northern Canal, a plan to extend their namesake river into a channel for seaworthy craft, and the innovative push for aeronautical travel that was nearing its completion.
Being a work of technology that would decide the fate of a power such as Rhine, the project involved countless people, and the gargantuan vessel wasn’t exactly easy to hide; word passing into the realm of rumor was a matter of course. While the Empire would have preferred to keep everything tightly undercover leading up to their bombastic reveal, the lips of man ever defied sealing; tidbits here and there had leaked from every angle.
Deflated at having her surprise swept out from beneath her, Cecilia explained the details with crestfallen lethargy. Little Elisa only understood that she was speaking of something incredible, but the other two had frozen with pursed lips.
“Tonight,” Cecilia went on, “the aeroship is to arrive in Berylin and anchor on the outskirts of the city...where His Imperial Majesty will board. Then, those involved will tour every state in the Empire on the craft.”
“And you want to sneak on? Onto this aeroship?”
“What a grandiose scheme...”
Both boy and girl shivered at the thought of pulling off such a daring feat, staring at the priestess in disbelief. This was a national project backed by the crown, and tonight was going to be its maiden voyage. Hitching a ride on His Majesty’s personal vessel was not just a step past bold: it was leaping with both feet into the realm of hubris.
To begin with, this was the sort of secret to be preceded by the word “top,” and the security around it was sure to be intense. With the Emperor in attendance, the state would obviously pull out all the stops and assign a detail of imperial guardsmen to secure the premises. Forget not letting a kitten through unquestioned—they wouldn’t so much as let the fleas on its back sneak by.
“But of course, I do not intend to force my way on board like a common bandit. I have an in.” The priestess wavered for a moment, taking in the unfamiliar experience of unveiling a scheme. “The truth is, the church has also been involved in the aeroship’s construction.”
Up until now, the technical design and construction of airships had been led solely by members of the Imperial College. This iteration was no different in that magia had drafted the specifications and seen the building to completion, but going into the third attempt, religious authorities had finally taken on some of the load.
What that actually meant was that they’d spent the first two iterations’ worth of time debating the inconseque... They’d debated the irrelev... At long last, a profound discussion involving the gods themselves—translated through vague prophecies, as was expected—over which deities were involved in aeronautical flight had concluded.
Indeed, the imperial aeroship piqued divine interests as well.
At first, the God of Wind and Clouds had made much hubbub that anything soaring through the skies was His domain; then the Tidal Goddess objected, singing that a vessel with “ship” in its name was Hers to claim; only for the Artisan God to butt in and say the craftsmanship involved could only be done under His name. In the blink of an eye, every deity with an argument for involvement had announced the project as Their own jurisdiction.
While an impartial observer would want to tell them to get along like they might to schoolchildren arguing during a classroom assembly, this was a matter of life and death to those who resided above. Divinity was a condition wherein one’s power drew from faith; take one look at how the Harvest Goddess had managed to become one of the five mainstays of the pantheon, and it was obvious why They were all so zealous. Much like social media, Their reach extended with every follower.
As such, the gods watched as closely as mortals. Whoever managed to claim authority over this turning point in history was sure to earn Olympian acclaim from the peoples below. Unlike those who could count on their believers so long as mortals walked the earth, lesser deities whose popularity waxed and waned with generations were especially desperate.
This theological debate amounted to a classroom assembly without a teacher—yes, there had been plenty of fistfights involved—and had gone on for a few decades before finally coming to a conclusion.
The conclusion caused more chaos. The compromise reached had been that the airship was to include a blessed temple within...but they had failed to decide on whose.
During construction, the Artisan God had granted it His protection; when it was due to depart, the Tidal Goddess offered a blessing for navigational fortune and shipments dutifully delivered; once it was in the air, the Wind God was to look after it in His skies. The arrangement was utterly impossible to wrap one’s mind around. Sure, there was a similar separation of powers for maritime vessels, but the Tidal Goddess ultimately had the final say in that case. The situation here was far more flawed: after all, no one knew who was responsible for the damn thing.
An esteemed physicist had once said that everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler, and how right he was. Not only were the mad scientists of the College wringing their brains for everything they had, but the churches and their gods now quibbled over every detail. The airship truly was the culmination of all imperial culture—for better and for worse.
“Um, and as the ship plans to partake in night voyages...”
“The Night Goddess got involved.”
“Well...yes.”
After laying out the complicated context, Cecilia explained that the Night Goddess affiliate that was to board was a personal friend of hers. She had apparently been a fellow pupil at the Fullbright Church, and would never callously turn away a person in need; so long as the vampire could explain her situation, she could count on her support.
“I am sure she’ll bring me as her attaché should I ask. The Goddess is not so heavily involved with the ship itself, meaning our envoys will be limited in number. If I can manage to get aboard, I doubt the guards will pay us much heed.”
“I see. So if we can just get you to the church...”
“Yes. From there, I will be able to stow away, and subsequently sneak out on the first stop of the voyage. Once in Lipzi, I shall be under my aunt’s protection.”
Overall, the plan was a classic stowaway story; it was a bit rough around the edges, but it was still the best plan available. Pushing to reach an effective safe spot that would allow her to ride out the rest of the journey in relative peace certainly offered better odds than trekking the poorly kept backwaters of the Empire for hundreds of kilometers. It was also a much more cerebral plan than busting through security to attempt the world’s first airborne hijacking.
“Understood. In that case, let us make for the holy quarter.” Erich paused in thought and mumbled, “But how?”
Many problems still remained, but one was supreme: the innumerable pursuers still littered throughout the capital. They hadn’t put up wanted posters of her description, but that might have actually been easier to deal with.
Throughout the day, the boy had kept a close eye on the guards around town, and he’d spied something dreadful. The policemen in standard garb equipped with no more than batons had not been alone: they’d been accompanied by men in menacing, pitch-black military uniform.
Escaping the watchful eyes of the city guard was one thing; playing a game of foxes-and-geese with the professional hunters that made up His Majesty’s jagers was a challenge like no other.

[Tips] The imperial jager unit is a military reconnaissance group composed of the best scouts and huntsmen in the nation. These maestros of the shadows scope out favorable sites for decisive battles, spy on enemy logistics, and snuff out espionage in imperial territory. Having played a major role in wars that changed the fate of the Empire on many occasions, they are one of the most esteemed groups in the nation.
Though poets sing no sagas in their name and craftsmen build them no statues, to them, that is an honor of the highest degree.

Avoiding a coordinated search is so hard.
We had a magic swordsman (with an emphasis on swordsman), a sorcerer and scholar specialized in supportive spells, and a noncombatant priestess. Can you see the issue? That’s right: we were missing the single most important class for a city adventure—we didn’t have a scout!
Thinking it over, we had a laughable composition. The only scenarios where this would be acceptable were minor escort quests where full-scale combat wasn’t a given, or when the GM planned ahead to supply a scout NPC on account of the party’s small size; anywhere else and someone would have been shouted at to dip into the class, even at the cost of a level in their main job.
Scouts secured the route ahead and kept an eye on the party’s rear to watch for being tailed; spelunking around a metropolis without one was true hardship, whether we were on the run or in pursuit. It was like accelerating into a full sprint with a blindfold on.
The silver lining was that I’d invested in high-tier traits like Permanent Battlefield and had spells like Farsight to look around beyond my own line of sight. I could probably avoid being totally ambushed, but our enemies wore plain clothes to blend into the city and hid with all the expertise of lifelong scouts: I could only unearth them after their first strike. This meant I couldn’t use the sublime strategy of avoiding every encounter but the boss fight—and even that, with any luck.
Oh, how I pined for my childhood companion, my shining pearl; I wondered what Margit was doing in our beloved hometown. If only she were here to guard me and light our way as she’d done in Konigstuhl, I would have known no fear. We’d taken an oath to set out on a journey together, and now she was the missing piece to make our unwieldy party whole. Without her, my back felt hideously exposed; I shivered like I’d been left out in the elements.
“...Oh, I almost forgot.”
Leaving me to soak in loneliness, Mika smacked her fist into her palm and got up, saying she’d be back in a bit. We waited curiously for a while, and she returned out of breath: apparently, she’d gone back to the low quarter to haul over a large bag whose contents she dumped out onto the table.
“I bet we could use these.”
“...Potions?”
Mika had brought a ton of tiny vials containing arcane drugs. Each of the perfectly shaped glass bottles was capped off with a mystic seal. According to her, she’d gotten these high-quality products from her master.
“My master gets a lot of gifts and samples from other magia whenever he goes to the salon, and he gave me a bunch of stuff when I first shifted female. He said that now that my cycles have started, I should learn a thing or two about makeup.”
“Oh, so these are makeup potions?” I asked. “I can’t believe they hand out things this fancy as free samples.”
“Every time it hooks in a customer, it covers the cost of a freebie dozens of times over, so I don’t think it’s that crazy. Besides, the market is big. Even men will take them for their wives or lovers, and then they’ll buy more as gifts if their lady takes a fancy to them.”
This was news to me. But come to think of it, magia were all rich—barring those whose research really did not make any money—and professors straight-up received stipends outside their grants as a part of being noble. Meeting a fellow magus at a tea party embodied both social and business opportunity.
It was times like these where having a sedentary master who refused to socialize posed a problem. How was I supposed to learn these basic concepts that others took for granted?
Oh, actually...I supposed these sample potions were sort of like the clothes Lady Leizniz forced upon me.
“Uhhh, nope. Not this one. Not that one... Aha!” After sifting through the labels on all the glassware, Mika finally held up three vials with a smile. “Boy, I’m glad I kept all of these. I don’t really care about this sort of stuff, so I was thinking about selling them or keeping them for Elisa once she got a bit older. Who knew they’d come this much in handy?”
“What do these concoctions do?”
Miss Celia leaned in, peering into the vials with great interest; Mika obliged, carefully explaining each one.
The first was a drug that could temporarily elongate a person’s hair. This was an intermediary that had come about from research into reviving lost hair roots—evidently, balding struck fear in the hearts of men no matter the world. While it failed to serve its original purpose in any way, it had hit the market as a nice change of pace for the well-to-do ladies around town.
The second also had to do with hair: it weakened any natural curls to produce straighter locks. This, too, was the product of failure. Its initial concept had been to straighten hair for up to a year with one dose, but only lasted for a few hours at most. In this case, the prototype was to demonstrate the creator’s progress and lure in investors to fund the rest of the research.
That said, I doubted we would ever see the drug have permanent effects: continuous sales drove up profits, after all. I bet that creating a formula for temporary change like this was actually harder than one that didn’t revert; it seemed pharmacists were shady no matter which world I was in. I dubiously eyed the bottle for the telltale alternating red and white corporate logo.
The third potion was one that would temporarily change the colors of one’s eyes. Again, we had something made to spice up a noblewoman’s appearance—or at least, I suspected that had been how the creator pitched it to their investors. In reality, it had probably been designed with deception in mind from the start; unlike the brown-dominated landscape of Earth, the rainbow of irises in Rhine made eye color the most distinguishing characteristic for mensch-like peoples outside of hair and skin. Fashion was secondary to its utility in stealth, including less savory activities like marital infidelity.
“Um, one drop makes this much hair, so I should take...about this much?” Mika measured out a dose of the first drug. “Blegh! Why’s it taste so bad?!”
“It’s growing!” Miss Celia exclaimed. “Mika, it’s growing!”
“Wow!” Elisa cried. “Me next! Me next!”
I’d been left to brood over the dark intentions lurking on the other side of these potions on my own, and meanwhile the girls merrily sated their curiosity for the arcane makeup.
Mika’s hair grew with every passing moment, and her head of wavy black was the gorgeous night sea personified. The growth looked perfectly natural; if she remained fixed in her feminine form and grew out her hair, this was precisely how she would look. Though the product had failed to deliver on its initial goals, the magus who’d designed it was no amateur.
“Whoa, so this is what I’d look like with long hair... Man, it’s curly. I can’t even tie it like this! That’s it, I’m keeping it short. If it’s this bad when I’m a girl, then I can’t imagine how unbearable it’ll be when I’m a boy.”
“Does your hair change when you’re a boy?” Miss Celia asked.
“Yes, it gets much curlier. I think I take after my father when in male form, and he had quite the unruly head of hair.”
“Huh? Why isn’t it growing?”
As the other two engaged in a bit of ladies’ talk by the mirror, Elisa sat off to the side, confused as to why the potion hadn’t worked on her. Despite her mensch body, my sister had the soul of an alf; I surmised that she had too much inherent resistance to magic for a small dose to affect her.
“Next up is the straightening potion...and this one’s bad too! Ugh, my tongue’s on fire! Did they cut corners on the flavor because they haven’t gone public yet or something?!”
“But Mika!” Miss Celia said. “Look, the effects have already begun! How spectacular!”
A small sip of the second brew quelled the rolling ocean into a serene lake that reflected the lights of the room like the glowing midnight moon. Mika’s hair was always soft and smooth, so seeing it stretched out in this enchanting way tickled my desire to run a hand through it.
“Ugh,” she said. “My neck feels so hot and heavy... Is this what you always deal with, Erich?”
“Glad you finally understand,” I responded. “Enjoying the novel sensation?”
“Sure. Don’t think I’ll ever do it again, though. How about you? You’re the one who’s seeing it—enjoying the novelty?”
Mika jutted out her hip to strike a pose and flipped her hair with striking glamour. The fact that my heart skipped a beat seeing my familiar friend’s unfamiliar appearance was a secret I would keep to the grave.
“Yeah, you look lovely.”
That said, I’d honed the art of the poker face in my time working under the madam. My cheeks remained unblushed as I voiced my earnest opinion, to which she answered by whirling around at terrific speeds.
“I... I see. Thanks.”
...But I still had an unobstructed view of her face in the mirror. She was looking pretty red, so it seemed my compliment had embarrassed her. Come to think of it, I doled out praise at every turn when Mika was male or agender, but I often felt too shy to do so when she was a girl. This sort of flattery wasn’t typically part of our exchanges.
For now, the situation was that a female friend was attempting to hide her embarrassment; peeking just because I could would be uncouth. I tilted my chair away just slightly and decided to console Elisa, who was huffing and puffing about how the potions hadn’t worked.
“Are you all right, Mika?” Miss Celia asked. “I pray that you aren’t feeling ill from some unknown side effect.”
“N-No need to worry, Celia. I’m perfectly fine. Uh, um...oh, right, the next one!”
I turned a blind eye to her cracking voice and continued calming my sister down. After a short while, Mika called us back over; her preparations were complete.
We turned to see two girls—not twins by any make, but similar enough in appearance. They looked close in age, height, and color and length of hair. While Mika’s eyes weren’t quite a vivid scarlet, they were a reddish shade of brown that might pass off as the vampire’s bloodred at the right angle. Anyone looking for these descriptors was sure to stop her for questioning. To tie everything together, Mika had gotten changed when going to retrieve her bag: she wore a dark, hooded robe not dissimilar in shape to a nun’s garb.
“What do you think, Erich? Her spitting image, huh?”
That’s why I’d realized her plan the moment she’d returned—why I’d known exactly what the mystic drugs were going to be used for.
“I’m going to go out ahead of time and run around as bait. I’ll let the guard find me around one of the major city gates and drag out a bunch of them.”
Mika puffed up her chest with confidence. Only now that she’d laid her plan bare did Miss Celia catch on; her white complexion drained the last of its color as she grabbed Mika by the shoulders.
“You can’t! That’s too dangerous!”
“Worry not, Celia. The people looking for you consider you a VIP. They aren’t going to get rough to try and catch me.”
“Still! What if you do get caught?!”
“I’m a Berylinian veteran, through and through. I swear I won’t let them catch me.”
Although Mika’s words felt propped up on thin confidence, I decided to trust her. She pushed herself hard, but always spoke up when she felt she was out of her depth; I knew she wouldn’t turn herself into a needless sacrifice.
Every single day, the oikodomurge hopeful roamed the streets of the capital to study the imperial architecture and city planning of the Empire’s crowning urban achievement. She knew every hidden alley and nearly every linking path in the sewers. If she said she could buy us time, then I had no doubt she was telling the truth.
“Got it,” I said. “We’re counting on you, Mika.”
“Of course. Leave it to me, old pal.” Turning to the vampire, she said, “And Celia, won’t you bless me with good fortune instead of fretting over my safety? How sad it would be to head into battle without so much as a maiden’s prayer.”
Miss Celia still seemed distraught, but this request was too much to deny. Though we had come to her aid without demanding any recompense, she had graced us with thanks; we were all in the same boat now. She stared Mika dead in the eye in absolute silence, until finally coming to terms with my old chum’s decision; for the first time, she slipped off her hallowed medallion.
“Please,” she prayed, “I beg of you to not endanger yourself. Should you fall into their hands, I promise I will protect you no matter what it costs me. Until then, may my Goddess grant you Her protection.”
The priestess pressed her lips into the silver icon and solemnly tied it around the mage’s neck.
“Thank you, Celia. See that, Erich? With this wonder-working gift, our success is all but in hand.”
“I’m only jealous it wasn’t me,” I said with a smile. “Our victory is a forgone conclusion.”
I extended a hand and Mika gave it a firm shake. Then, we bent our elbows upward, pulling each other into a one-armed hug with our hands still clasped. No matter which gender she embodied, this embrace of friendship and well wishes was one that we shared without reserve.
“Stay safe.”
“You too.”
Our cheeks slid past each other’s as we pulled away, and she made for the door with a goodbye...until she was stopped by a shout.
It was Elisa.
The three of us turned to her in surprise. She closed her eyes, took a few deep breaths, and got up from her chair; we waited as she steeled herself for something unknown. Then, despite her continued disregard for Miss Celia, she walked up to our guest and pinched her skirt in a proper noblewoman’s curtsy.
“I sincerely apologize for my discourteous attitude. I shall accept any recourse you deem fit for my abuse, but may I humbly ask you for a strand of your hair?”
Elisa’s most well-spoken sentence to date shocked all of us into silence. Miss Celia was dumbfounded to receive an apology from a girl who seemed to hate her; Mika was surprised to see someone she considered a child speak so maturely; and I was frozen by some unknown fear that swelled in my heart.
My chest grew so tight that I clutched it in hand, and Helga’s memory glimmered there in the corner of my eye.
“I require no compensation, Elisa. In fact, you need not apologize at all—I was never angry with you. If a hair is what you need, then please feel free.”
The merciful priestess accepted Elisa’s apology without reserve; Mika was moved, thinking she was doing something clever for the sake of her dear brother. I alone was trapped in my memories: the memory of my sin at the lakeside manor, and what I had learned from it.
Alfar changed to suit their desires. Whether that entailed growth or insanity mattered not; if the fey soul within deemed it necessary, the mensch shell of a changeling would bend to match.
What was Elisa trying to become? What was she doing?
I didn’t know, and it scared me; my heart hurt. This wasn’t the first time, and I’d been so innocently happy to see her mature in the past. But now, for reasons I couldn’t explain, I was deathly afraid of seeing my sister try to grow up.
“Thank you very much.”
Elisa took the strand of hair and walked to her desk drawer, where she pulled out a small pouch. She put the hair inside and filled the whole thing with mana.
Many moons ago, Lady Agrippina had taught her this magical trick—it didn’t even amount to a proper spell—so that she could regularly dispel the arcane energy that accumulated in her body. The madam had once expressed amazement that she dutifully continued the exercise to this day.
Truth be told, this was nothing more than a gamified way of helping toddlers with their first mystic steps. It was supposed to be a fun way of keeping a child’s attention while teaching them mana-circulation habits that would increase their overall capacity with time.
For girls, the most popular variant was to take an undried herb, place it in a pouch, and artificially create a potpourri. This game familiarized the child with catalyst production and taught them the names of various grasses and flowers, so it was well used as a stone that killed three birds.
But Elisa had put in a hair. As I wondered what she could be doing, she finished enchanting the bag and handed it to Mika.
“This will overwrite your natural odor and produce something similar to Lady Cecilia’s. I believe it will trick even those with the keenest noses.”
“Oh, of course!” Mika exclaimed. “I’d completely forgotten that they might have canine demihumans and the like that might know Celia’s scent!”
Mika pulled Elisa into a hug and sang her praises. My tiny little sister smiled as innocuously as ever and said, “Mika, I can’t breathe,” with a tone that betrayed her joy.
And then she looked over at me, with those big, pleading eyes.
Suddenly, I snapped back to reality. Elisa was the same as usual. The baseless anxiety that had gripped me dissipated as though I’d never felt it at all. Glancing down, Helga’s memory had already regained its usual level of luster.
What was I so scared of—no, wait. What was I even thinking about again?
“You’re amazing, Elisa! A genius like you will make professor in no time!”
I shook off the intangible haze clouding my mind and joined Mika in a group hug to extol my brilliant baby sister’s efforts. Afterward, the future-world-renowned genius used one of her own hairs to help mask Miss Celia’s scent as well.
Now we had nothing left to fear; what more could we worry about now?
“All right, I’m off,” Mika said. “Give me about half an hour before you set out.”
“Gotcha,” I replied. “Best of luck.”
“Please,” Miss Celia prayed, “may the loving Mother’s grace from on high shine favorably upon you.”
“Be careful!” Elisa said. “I’ll be good at home and wait!”
It was finally time: the adventure of a lifetime was about to commence.

Tprg4.16

[Tips] Unlike man-to-man disagreements, spats between nations carry the paradox of absolutely necessitating some sort of compromise while not having an easy means of negotiation. As the scope of states balloons, communication technology has failed to keep up, making far-reaching conglomerations not yet a reality; instead, major powers elect to send embassies and politically protected ambassadors to fill them.

Cecilia was as sheltered as they come, and she had spent most of her life holed up in a monastery. She spent her days revering the Goddess of Night, praying in Her tranquil sanctuary, and emulating Her grace by serving the people of the land. As serene as this lifestyle was, it was rather devoid of surprise.
The hymns she sang were the same that she’d sung hundreds upon thousands of times before. Her days studying proverbs and giving alms to the faithful and needy were eternal repetitions of a set schedule.
Yet life at the church, surely boredom epitomized to some, was not so bad for Cecilia. In South Rhine, far from the imperial capital and regional capital alike, on Fullbright Hill—though it seemed dubious whether the twenty-four-hundred-meter summit constituted a hill—she found herself leading a life she’d chosen to live.
Yes, she had arrived there on order of her parents, but over time, her own desires had shifted to align. A life of earnest prayer and wholehearted faith in the Goddess proved a good one. Words could not describe the soothing fulfillment that engulfed her in those moments when she truly felt the Mother’s tenderhearted embrace.
This sensation was something unknowable to all but pure-blooded vampires—a satisfaction and repose limited to those born with inherited sin, those who were denied the fate of death. At times, the reaper was liberty; he was forgiveness. Alas, no explanation could suffice for mortal comprehension, just as the immortals could never understand the lesser races’ frantic fear of aging.
By no means could she consider a life so rich with the peace absent in worldly cities a bad one. Though others pitied her fall from epicurean luxury to simple clothes and meals, Cecilia valued this placid state more highly than any pile of gold coins.
That said, her life after having come to the capital and been called to her father’s side had been an unbroken string of surprises rife with excitement.
It wasn’t that she thought one was better than the other. But in the three meager days since she’d overheard the maids’ whispers and fled her house, her two friends had given her more wonder and drama than all her years in the church.
She’d run on the rooftops to escape her pursuers; she’d sneaked into the sewers, only to witness her first life-or-death battle; she’d dressed up in disguise and hidden herself away in the Mage’s Corridor, and even made her way to the Imperial College—a place she’d only heard of secondhand. Positively everything was new to her, and the flood of unfiltered information reignited a long-dormant sense of curiosity.
Even now, she wanted to get up and explore any place her feet could carry her to. The only reason she hadn’t was the plea of the young piecemaker who’d saved her to stay put, handing her a book of ehrengarde puzzles and seating her in his sister’s room with tears in his eyes.
And of course, how could we forget the boy? Were it not for him, Cecilia would have been dragged back to the manor ages ago. She would have fallen into that alleyway burnt orange by the setting sun, and her head would have burst like an overripe fig. Decapitation spelled no doom for vampires, but both Sun and Moon had vied for control of the heavens in that hour; her regeneration would have been long. Even a purebred like herself would have been apprehended before regaining consciousness.
Cecilia had been on the verge of dying for the first time in an unknown city, of meeting her end alongside the end.
Yet it was not so. Catching her in gentle arms, the two of them appeared.
It was the piecemaker boy whom she’d dueled over the board many a time. Despite his pretty hair and kitten-like eyes, he had been a fiendish rapscallion in their games, and she’d frequented his stall determined to get the better of him.
The boy was incredibly kind. He was a gentleman unthinkable from his play, going so far as to protect her without any connection between them—all without a second thought of the fate that could await a commoner butting into noble politics to right the wrong of an unwanted marriage. Far from stopping there, he even shouldered the danger of sheltering her in his master’s abode without a hint of hesitation.
With him came the raven-haired mage by his side. Hailing from a people as peculiar as Cecilia’s, they had accepted her as a friend. Not only had their magic shielded her, they’d created a path to safety when it seemed there was nowhere left to go.
Surely, hers could not have been a good first impression. Without Cecilia, Mika and Erich both would have happily ended their days after comfortably soaking in a bathhouse. If they had so chosen, they could have even stopped their friend from taking the path of danger; she’d realized right away that the duo’s bond was something unshakable by a girl who’d literally fallen out of the sky.
Yet they had not. Raven black did not reject the actions of shimmering gold; it instead chose to protect the pitch-dark shade of night.
Though the pair lacked the armor and horses of the knights in fables, as they dragged her forward by the hand, Cecilia thought they must be the heroes the poets sung of. To cast everything aside for someone in need—for a lone girl in trouble—was precisely the stuff of sagas.
Selfless and compassionate, they volunteered themselves to see her predicament through. They refused to abandon her after learning of her origins; they stayed even though hers was a race that only grew easier to hate the more one learned.
Cecilia was a vampire, the progeny of a mensch whose tale lived on in an infamous fable, The Man Who Swindled the Sun. After tricking the Sun God into giving him immortality, the original vampire incurred the divine Father’s wrath, earning a curse to burn and blister his people in His light forevermore. Without the protection of shade, His curse would melt flesh and bone, and eventually reduce even their souls to ash.
Truthfully, this curse was tolerable. As a matter of fact, the Night Goddess Cecilia worshiped admonished her other half, stating that He who was tricked was at fault as well. When She appeared in the skies, the curse weakened; when the Sun God relinquished His daily reign, the vampires fully regained their undying nature.
The other curse was excruciating.
The patron god’s punishment spake thusly: drink directly from the warm fonts of bloody nectar which He hath created, or suffer eternal thirst.
Some may initially consider this to be a mistake; why not make it the other way around and deny them access to His creations? However, for all the Sun God’s impulsive tendencies, He was no fool; He knew that by tying their only reprieve from drought to conflict, He could curb the accursed people’s power to dominate. This restriction was the ultimate reason vampires had failed to ascend to hegemonic dominion, constrained to a fate of reasonable rule as statesmen of peaceful nations.
Without populous peoples to feed on, they were doomed to die out with their prey. If they succumbed to their basest urges, the clump of sheer mana next to their beating hearts would muddy their souls and reduce them to beasts; do that, and they would become the enemies of all men, reduced from people to monsters that needed to be driven into the sun.
The curse clung to a vampire’s instincts, bending their tastes and lust for vice in ways no other being could experience. The thirst was horrific—they couldn’tdie. No matter how parched or how starved they got, the Sun God refused to reclaim his gift of immortality; after all, they suffered more this way.
How long it took before any given vampire began to hunger varied, and Cecilia’s devotion to the Mother Goddess was rewarded with a particularly long period of repose. Where others had to feed once per month, she could easily go half a year; if she put her mind to fasting, she could endure several years without losing her mind.
Sadly, that was not the case now. It had been quite a while since she’d last accepted a churchgoer’s charity, and she’d been slated to feast at a banquet hosted at her father’s villa. Running away had thrown away her chance to attend, and her recent overexertion meant her craving had been ramping up by the time she was hidden away.
It was torture. While all peoples were born understanding the pain of starvation, that of mensch was incomparable to the horror of vampiric thirst. A mensch could starve to the brink of death, deranged enough to sink teeth into their own newborn, and still they would not understand the pain. Such was the root of the vampires’ demonic classification; all their lunacy hinged on sustenance.
For all Cecilia’s attempts to stay strong, the discerning boy had found her out instantly. He was well versed in the unique predicaments of the world’s many kiths, perhaps because of his proximity to the College, and must have pieced together what was going on after looking at her struggle.
When she awoke next, she rose from the couch she was borrowing to find a wine glass filled with fresh blood. She wasted no time on such foolish questions as whose it was. There were only two warm fonts of nectar present, and even their short time together was enough to know the blindly doting brother would never spill his own sister’s blood.
The fact that he had said nothing and feigned ignorance spoke wordless volumes to his character and that of those who had raised him. He knew imperial vampires considered the act of sucking or drinking blood highly indecent: only during dinners with close friends and family or in the comfort of a secluded room did they dare partake, hiding in unseen shadows. The culinary culture of imperial vampires was a thoroughly cheerless affair.
Of course, they could also eat standard foods, and they could allow the cradle of drunkenness to rock them to sleep. Yet the only thing that could sate the truest of hungers was the crimson that floated in this cup.
Knowing the burden of her kind, the boy chose to take a step beyond merely saving Cecilia’s future: he bestowed upon her the benevolence of his own lifeblood.
To a mage, blood was priceless. It served as the circulator of internal mana and a catalyst for spells; few would consider giving it away under any circumstance. The more magecraft one studied, the more they were sure to realize the cost and dangers of entrusting it to another.
Yet here she was, holding a full cup of the stuff—no small amount by any metric. She had not even asked for it, and it was here with no mention of an expected thank-you.
The blood was heavy and delicious. Often telling of what went into a person’s body, whether that be food, drink, or the very air they breathed, the liquid conduit of mana revealed more than the family registry at a church.
Cecilia’s tongue went numb and she jumped and twitched in delight. It was young, healthy, and chock-full of magical power; it offered a stimulation unlike any other she’d experienced. The flavor was both gentle and explosive, dancing on her tongue in a way only mensch blood could. As it slid down her throat, it left behind a rich and brightening aftertaste.
When one considered that the contents of the glass had come from a young boy’s body, it seemed far too much, and yet she had finished it in the blink of an eye. Forgoing the modesty and virtuous poverty the Night Goddess endorsed, she greedily lapped at the droplets sticking to the cup with fangs brazenly exposed.

Cecilia would never live this down. To lose herself to such an extent that she would put gluttony over manners was not a matter of priesthood or nobility; she could hardly call herself a vampire. Longingly gazing at the perfectly clean wine glass after the fact was a disgrace like no other. At this rate, she would deserve the derogatory title used abroad: she was practically a bloodsucker.
She threw herself into a particularly complicated ehrengarde puzzle and straightened herself out. Pushing away the drained glass she’d been unable to let go of, she steeled herself to welcome him back as a proper priestess.
The boy would be home from shopping at any minute. Cecilia was going to have to explain how she intended to escape, so she needed to clear her mind, carry herself with poise, and make sure no shameful thoughts—
“We’re back! Man, it sure is getting hotter.”
The empress in her hands fell to the table, knocking away the loyal retainer and knight waiting on her below and toppling a sturdy castle in the process. The calamity of the board reflected her state of distress perfectly.
With the end of spring came warm weather; with warm weather came an open collar; and with an open collar came the boy’s neck, tantalizingly bare.

[Tips] In the Trialist Empire, using one’s fangs to feed straight from one’s prey is considered gauche; vampires instead feed by drinking from a glass. This tradition arose as a means of easing early imperial fears of their predatory nature.
However, there is an exception made for a “lover”—a special partner who allows the vampire to sink their fangs into flesh unimpeded.

Mika and I returned to the atelier to find our vampiric lady in something of a panic. It was still a tad early for her to be up, but perhaps the unfamiliar environment meant she was having a hard time sleeping too. She looked to have been busying herself with the book of intermediate ehrengarde puzzles I’d brought as a time-killer, and dropped the piece in her hand as soon as she looked at me.
Huh? Do I look funny?
I’d made sure to do a cursory wipedown so as not to appear in front of a blue-blooded lady drenched in sweat, and I’d Cleaned my clothes to make sure I wouldn’t smell. Maybe it was time to start taking some add-ons for this spell to imbue myself with a pleasant perfume after the fact.
“Um,” I said cautiously, “is something the matter?”
“N-No! Not at all! Welcome back!”
I’d figured it would be best to probe into my mistakes for posterity’s sake; Miss Cecilia responded by whipping the puzzle book to her face so quickly that it left an afterimage.
Fair enough, I supposed: pointing out someone’s flaws was pretty awkward.
“As long as it isn’t anything important...” I knew it definitely was, but I moved on and began unpacking our luggage. When I turned around, I could feel an intense gaze drilling into my head and upper back.
Concerned, I groped around with an Unseen Hand...but didn’t find anything weird clinging to me. For a second there, I’d thought I’d fallen for the timeless “kick me” sign. Though I supposed Mika would have noticed a prank like that—assuming she wasn’t the culprit, that is.
In which case, I had no clue why Miss Celia was staring at me like this. I dwelt on the issue while flapping the hot air out of my shirt, when I suddenly sensed a presence behind me.
I know you’re trying to hide and all, but you’re not catching me off guard that easily. How many years do you think I spent dodging Margit?
“Welcome home, Dear Brother!”
But of course, I wasn’t going to dodge my adorable baby sister. Elisa phased through the door of a wardrobe and leapt at me; I intentionally let her get the jump. I caught her weightless body as she wrapped her arms around my neck and slotted her chin over my shoulder. Living up to my sister’s expectations was all part of a good big brother’s job.
“Wow, you scared me!” I said. “Come on, Elisa, that’s dangerous. What if you fell?”
“But I knew you’d catch me for sure, Dear Brother!”
Once upon a time, Margit had told me that leaping on another person took a great deal of courage: they might reflexively swat you away, or they might lose their balance and send both of you tumbling. Clinging to someone’s collar and burying one’s face in their chest or back could only be done with someone truly dependable.
Elisa’s joyful, innocent smile proved that she had absolute faith in me. No matter what she did, she was sure I would be there to catch and forgive her. I felt like I was using up all my good karma; our family’s little girl was an angel after all. I’d have to watch out for any gods trying to snatch her up as their bride.
“That doesn’t mean it’s good to jump on someone without notice, Elisa.”
“Oh, welcome to you as well, Mika!”
I was too much of a doter to scold her properly, but thankfully, Mika put in a gentle warning in my stead. Much to my delight, having spent so much time locked in together had made both of them comfortable with one another’s names.
“Besides, Elisa,” Mika continued, “you’re a well-to-do young lady. You can’t be hiding in the dresser like that. How long were you in there?”
“Umm, since my dear brother left.”
“Buwha?” A bizarre noise escaped my mouth. I’d stopped to do several errands on my way to meeting Mika, so I’d been out for a few hours; had she been in there this whole time? I asked her why she’d do something like that, and my sister pouted and turned away.
Ugh, so that’s it. She still wasn’t comfortable around Miss Celia.
I scolded her for being a bad girl and poked the air out of her puffed cheeks, but this just got her to giggle and squeeze me tighter. While I knew that the best thing to do for her as a person would be to seriously reprimand her, I just couldn’t bring myself to be hard on her when she was acting spoiled.
“You shouldn’t just ignore our guest, okay, Elisa?” Mika joined me in gently poking her cheek. “She prepared a lot of stories to tell you, you know.”
Mika then pointed at the small table next to Miss Cecilia’s temporary bed—which was a couch, by the way. She had staunchly refused to use the bed on the principle of not intruding on the sleeping grounds of the room’s master; I begrudgingly let her sleep on the couch, knowing that any mattress I could get my hands on would be several times less comfortable.
At any rate, the desk was stacked with books relating to the Night Goddess that Mika had borrowed from the College library. There were holy texts, hymns, and even picture books made for children, but they showed no signs of having been opened; Elisa really had hidden away the whole time.
Considering how Miss Celia was devout enough to employ miracles, I had no doubt she knew the scripture of her faith by heart. I felt guilty: she’d gone out of her way to ask for these all for Elisa, and never got the chance to use them.
“All is well, Mika,” the priestess said. “Children of her age are prone to such feelings. Matters of compatibility are often unamendable.”
Not even my old chum’s admonishment could get Elisa to face the vampire, but the victim of her neglect spoke up in her defense.
Miss Celia was right to say that this attitude was common in children. Whether a child took a liking to someone or not could be swayed by the most superficial things, and failing to adhere to social standards was a part of growing up. Whether the underlying cause was shyness or a bad first impression, it was often too much for an immature soul to explain in words; most simply let bygones be bygones and waited for time and growth to solve the issue.
The charitable priestess had claimed she was good with children, and here was the proof: not only did she understand them logically, but she had the benevolent mercy to forgive their childishness.
“You’re too soft, Celia...”
“I’m sorry, Mika. But really, I don’t mind.”
The vampire gracefully smiled on the couch and the tivisco crossed her arms with a troubled frown; I sat by the wayside appreciating the two black-haired beauties’ amicable exchange with the world’s cutest girl around my neck. What a blessed place to be. I felt so bad about being a guy stinking up the place that I wanted to turn into the potted plant in the corner.
“Wait, Dear Brother! What’s this?!”
“Huh? Oh, right, that’s a present. Look, ice candy!”
“Yay!”
However, our family’s little princess noticed our gift for her, so it was best to let her dig in quickly. It was preserved with the heat-retention spell I’d designed for my mystic thermite, so I wasn’t worried about it melting; I just didn’t want to make my twinkly-eyed sister wait longer than she had to.
“Well then.” I put on my brightest smile in the hopes that we might all be able to enjoy a cordial atmosphere. “Shall we partake in some tea?”

[Tips] Owing to its multicultural population, smell is a large part of imperial aesthetics. Excessive body odor and perfume alike are considered transgressions against races with keen noses. However, the art of selecting scents is a delicate one: while there are many wrong answers, there is hardly ever one that is universally correct.
The safest choice is usually to employ a lightly aromatic soap or flower to mask one’s sweat, with smoky smells following closely behind as a contender for least offensive. Citrus is harder to fit in for day-to-day use, as groups with canine or feline ancestry often find the tart odor much too strong.

The commandments bestowed from gods to man in the Trialist Empire of Rhine were not so heavy when compared to those of the deities of other lands. The flock—barring that of the Sun God who led them—predominantly upheld the virtues of austerity and chastity, but none expected the common person to rigidly adhere to every rule. Even the dedicated priests of Their cults were not held to a particularly strict standard.
Unchecked gluttony, adultery, or rampant lust were reasons for reproof whether the judge was divine or earthly; the Rhinian pantheon’s leniency was plain to see from how its priests were allowed to partake in matrimony, pursue flesh, or suckle the sweet nectar of drink so long as it was in moderation.
However, there was one exception: those who took after the loving Mother of the Night lived by a precept of self-discipline. The merciful matron goddess upheld that true compassion was not the product of abundance; benevolence was not a tool for the wealthy to trade wide margins for contentment with themselves.
At times, love was heavy; it was painful; it was excruciating. Empathy was rooted in the idea of sacrificing a part of oneself in the name of another.
Now, this was not exclusive to the Night Goddess, but Her church comprised several different factions. This differed from the religious delineations of Earth: those sometimes had entirely different rituals or even worshiped different entities, all due to discordant interpretations of the same holy scripture. Here in the Empire, circles of the same sect still pledged their devotions to the same deity, read their gospel in the same way, and were, strictly speaking, part of the same group.
Yet the faithful were ever liable to grope for more ways to demonstrate their devotion. Theological meditations on which aspect of their god of choice was holiest, or what would be most representative of their will, had been the beginnings for these religious diversions.
The gods may lovingly watch Their peoples, but those who ruled Rhine from Their heavenly perches had an unwritten rule to not interfere with the spiritual journeys of their flocks. Divine punishment and oracle alike were employed sparingly so long as an interpretation was not a self-serving desecration of Their names. As a direct result, the peoples below founded various circles in order to polish the cognitive sport of prayer into something more.
Upon first learning this, a certain blond boy had thought to himself that They were like authors who took no action against those who trod upon their canon, happy about the fact that people bothered to engage with their work so deeply—a rather pointless analogy, perhaps.
At any rate, the point at hand was that worship came in many forms. For example, take the Father that sat at the top of His pantheon. The Circle Brilliant chose to empty their wallets in His name, lavishly decorating their temples and rituals. On the other hand, those from the Circle Vivacious gratefully accepted His light and used it to earnestly raise the crops he gave life to. Some even subjected themselves to penance that would make followers of the War God balk, like those of the Circle Austere. Although they stood under the same banner, their displays of faith varied wildly.
In the Night Goddess’s case, there were two major branches within Her flock: the Magnanimous and the Immaculate. Cecilia had cast her lot with the latter.
While the Magnanimous threw themselves into charity in order to help the needy as their merciful Goddess might, those of the Circle Immaculate prized honorable poverty, helping others not with the whole of one’s fortunes, but what little they had left to spare after divesting themselves of worldly objects. One might say this group was unsuited for a vampiric noble, and there was little that could be said in return; still, the philosophy paired with Cecilia’s character well.
This adherence to prudence was oft spoken of as an unflinching asceticism. Even committing themselves to tortuous fasts, the Immaculate and their radical zeal instilled awe in even the devout priests of other factions.
As evidenced by her use of miracles, Cecilia had not been excepted from this harsh discipline. She had endured fasts wherein she could not so much as swallow back her spit before the Moon rose from Her slumber; she had forgone sleep to recite and transcribe sutras. The priestess had made do with little to nothing, and had spent so long in a destitute lifestyle that would drive others mad that she saw it as nothing more than the standard for life.
Yet that same girl now found herself unable to process her own emotions.
Mind you, this was not the result of Elisa’s presence hiding away the gorgeous contour of Erich’s neck, painted in by the captivating shade of uncovered skin; this caused her no disappointment.
By no means would she ever find herself dismayed that she could no longer see the tightly wound muscles packed under a wrapping of skin that remained fair despite enduring the sun’s light. It was no shame that his collarbone—which had teasingly peeked out from its home in his shirt collar earlier—was now out of sight.
Of course, a sudden rush of saliva threatened to puff up her cheeks with drool, but that was absolutely, positively, not all there was to it.
Whether it was intentional or not, Cecilia was perplexed by the girl who had hidden that neck away—by Elisa herself. For the past three days, she’d tried to open up to the changeling on several occasions, to no avail. Every attempt to start a conversation hit a wall of silence; any invitation to a round of ehrengarde was curtly refused on the grounds of not knowing the rules; her inquiries as to what she was doing were met with, “Homework from my master,” giving her no room to expand.
Cecilia simply could not understand Elisa.
The vampire did not consider herself bad with children—in fact, she was quite fond of them. Her sanctuary had often taken in orphans without homes, and she’d spent many a day traveling to nearby towns or cantons to serve the children in almshouses there.
Cecilia’s confidence in childcare was no hubris; children had indeed taken to her well over the years. She was kind, energetic, and had a wealth of knowledge to share. In fact, she had been so popular that it had been difficult to keep up with all the boys and girls wanting to play with her.
However, some youths had lived through harsh times, or gotten stuck in understandably childish cycles of thought that made them dislike her. She was not so arrogant as to believe that all children were meant to show her affection or anything of the sort. Whether wanting for experience or equipped with egos yet immature, Cecilia believed that every person was to be respected as an individual; at most, she prayed that one day, they might come to be friends.
But Elisa was not the same. Sometimes, when the girl stared at her, Cecilia felt something utterly alien in those big brown eyes; those were not the eyes of a child in her first decade of life. The priestess couldn’t quite put it to words, but for lack of a better term, she felt that the gaze was something that should only have been possible for someone more “adult.”
Having lived in a monastery for so long, Cecilia was not well acquainted with the look and could not pinpoint what it signified. Digging through her memories, she found the hue of her gaze similar to the people she’d met at one of her family’s estates, introduced to her as “friends of her father’s” or “the good lady of so-and-so house.” Whatever the case, she was sure that those eyes, readily changing with the light from brown to amber to gold, hid something extraordinary.
Look, Cecilia thought. Even now, as we chat over tea, I feel it across the table...
The priestess took a sip of fragrant tea and a bite of sweet ice to dispel the uncanny discomfort from her consciousness, clearing her throat in preparation to move to the serious matter at hand. It was finally time for her to unveil her trump card—to reveal how she planned on avoiding the treacherous roads and get to Lipzi.
“By the way, Elisa, Mika told me an interesting rumor today.”
“A rumor?”
Entrenched in the childish notion that she ought to wait until the conversation died down for maximum surprise, Cecilia waited for the siblings to finish their cute family moment. The sister had installed herself on her brother’s lap as a matter of course and happily waited to be spoon-fed. What was more, she was enjoying a sumptuous two flavors, just as Mika had. Cecilia had been treated to two flavors of ice candy as well, but Mika knew that Erich had almost assuredly only used the guise of equal treatment to pamper his sister, despite having only eaten a single ice pop himself.
“Come on, tell her, Mika.”
“Hm? Oh, all right, all right. Listen well, Elisa, because today, a ship that can fly through the air is coming to the capital!”
“Whaaat?!”
Two voices cried out in surprise. Cecilia screamed in sorrow at having her big surprise nipped in the bud.
The other three shrunk back in shock as the vampire shot up. How could they not? Here was a genteel saint who minded her manners and covered her lips for the faintest smile, leaping to her feet with a terrible cry.
“Um... Is something the matter?”
Erich’s gingerly muttered question was met with a response that produced yet another wave of dizzying astonishment: “How did you find out?!”

Tprg4.15

[Tips] Successfully casting a spell does not always mean successfully activating the effects of said spell. Lighting a basic flame underwater will obviously lead to immediate extinguishment. A spell may as well not be cast if its target resists its effects; the same is true if the activation itself is jammed.

I had a passing memory of chaff and flares being included in modern military aircrafts as a countermeasure against missiles. Chaff threw off radio-guided missiles by scattering a bunch of electromagnetically visible decoys, while flares created large amounts of heat to distract heat-seeking missiles away from the plane.
In that sense, I supposed the teachings of great mages long gone could effectively be boiled down to this: mystic chaff and flares make for great counterspells.
“My... How marvelous!”
“You’re so cool, Dear Brother!”
Two children stared intently at my hand; I was using a fleet of Unseen Hands to whittle down a block of wood. Seeing the lifeless chunk of raw matter change shape with every passing moment, only to receive a delicate coat of metal and paint must have been an enchanting scene.
With the equivalent of two grade-schoolers on a field trip gawking at my work, I finished up one in a series of many decoys. I’d done quite an impressive job, if I do say so myself: I used my piece-making supplies to produce something reminiscent of ⅛ scale hobbyist figures.
Well, technically, they weren’t reminiscent—they literally were figurines made at a one-to-eight scale...of Miss Celia.
My Dexterity was knocking on the door of Divine Favor, and I’d left my Whittling skill at Scale VI. Combined with my impulse purchase of the Keen Eye trait, I could reproduce my model with startling accuracy. My heated bouts of ehrengarde with Miss Celia had earned me a nice chunk of experience, so I had no qualms about spending some of it on her.
Furthermore, much like how Insight heightened my sense of sight in battle, Keen Eye would do the same during everyday life. It allowed me to take in fine details without error, and also made me more perceptive of things that were out of place—I suspected Margit already had this trait, since the examples included a twig clearly snapped by someone’s weight, or a footprint left in dust—so I was sure it would remain useful going forward.
Bolstered by my investment, my wooden statuettes threatened to drown me in narcissistic glee with how well they came out. The little Miss Celia closing her eyes and clasping her hands together in prayer, complete with her holy robes, was her spitting image; I was sure anyone who knew her would be able to name her at first glance.
From there, Mika added on a coat of foil to make it sturdier, and then colored her in. The final product was market-worthy.
“You’re such a perfectionist,” Mika sighed. “You know you don’t have to make it this good, right?”
“Don’t be like that, old chum. You’re not one to talk anyway. Look at how much detail you put into the blush of her skin.”
“That’s only because you were so picky back when I was coloring the ehrengarde pieces. ‘No,’ you said, ‘the thighs need a more flirtatious shade of—’”
“All right, Mika! It’s time to shut up! Besides, you’re just as guilty as me! That was the most excited I’ve ever seen you to touch something up with paint!”
I used one of my actual hands to cover my friend’s mouth before they could make any more slights against my character, taking the finished product they were handing me and hiding it behind my back.
Now is a good time to clarify that this one-to-eight-scale Cecilia had not come about because Miss Celia’s beauty suddenly struck my fancy; we had a proper goal in mind. On its own, it was just a well-made figurine that would retail for around 29,800 JPY in a hobbyist store, so I’d worked in a way to include some mystic meaning.
Each doll had a compartment to carry a slip of paper that Miss Celia had written her name on in blood. The effect was that each carving looked like her, had the name Cecilia, and carried a small part of her body inside of it. This transformed these wooden knickknacks into magic objects that might be her. An arcane algorithm seeking her position would wonder, Is this her? It kinda feels like her...It didn’t matter that an actual person could tell they were fakes at first glance. Much like a high-quality flare misleading a missile’s seeker pod, the important part was that the substitutes could fool a spell devoid of sentience.
“Here,” I whispered. “I’m counting on you.”
Summoning a Hand, I carried the figurine I all but snatched out of Mika’s hands around a corner. I was pretending as though I was hiding them using my own magic, but the truth was that I was putting in a request with my invisible neighbors using a Voice Transfer.
“Yes, yes, very well. A request from our Beloved One is a request well worth honoring, and I suppose it’s only right to finish what I’ve started. Run us around all you please.”
“Okie dokie! Ummm, where oh where should Lottie put the next one...”
The fey duo accepted the piece and vanished to who-knows-where. Decoys meant nothing if they were clustered around in one area. If they got a read on our general location, the people chasing us could use their authority to order searches of every house in our district. On the flip side, if they were strewn across every part of the city without any rhyme or reason, their discoveries wouldn’t divulge our actual position.
Scattering the woodcrafts by hand was more than just a hassle, so the task of lugging them to ridiculous places—and some to more believable locations, of course—went to the alfar that had blessed me with mystic lips.
Ursula’s expression made it clear she was less than enthused to work overtime after exiting the sewers, but Lottie seemed to be enjoying the job as a bit of fey mischief; either way, their efforts were incredibly helpful. I was sure they were sneaking the things into all sorts of places that would confuse a magus right about now.
That said, I didn’t want them to take it too far. The figurines’ striking resemblance meant they could be used for curses if they fell into the wrong hands—though a lack of any personal connection to Miss Celia meant this wasn’t a huge issue—so we had to make sure to retrieve them later. I’d explicitly stated that they needed to remember where they hid them all, but Ursula aside, I was worried if Lottie had taken my warning to heart.
I supposed at worst, I could offer them candies and a few minutes playing with my hair to have them seek out any missing statuettes. Still, I couldn’t get over the fear of scattering something more personal than personal information all over the city. I prayed that no pervert would come across one and take it home with them.
“Magic is so wondrous,” Miss Celia said. “To think you can create wooden sculptures like this is astounding.”
“The strength of magic is that it can do anything so long as the caster has the wherewithal to find out how.”
The priestess cheerfully watched my knife and chisel dance, while my sister stared off into empty space—she was paying more attention to the construction of the spell itself. I’d complained before about attracting too much attention, but purehearted praise was a different matter entirely.
With this, we were safe from any magus trying to locate us...though I unfortunately had to add the qualifier, “for now.”
We had three more days of this; I could only hope that whatever Miss Celia’s plan entailed, it was worth all this effort.
“It’s time to go,” I said.
“Go?” the vampire repeated. “Are you heading out someplace?”
I’d been at this for several hours, and had produced more than ten Miss Celia action figures; this was probably enough. Any more would produce diminishing returns. While we still ran the risk of their effectiveness waning as our pursuers collected them, I could always make more in the future.
Now that we’d weakened the effect of enemy search magic, it was time to leave my lodging in the low quarter behind for a place no one dared to intrude on: off we went to Krahenschanze.
“We may be safe against magic,” I explained, “but we won’t have anywhere to hide if the authorities come knocking. They won’t hesitate for a second to bust down the door to a mere servant’s home.”
What was more, I’d sensed the Ashen Fraulein throwing a fit upstairs a few moments prior. Our presence made the house a target for search spells, which tickled the silkie’s fury. As the keeper of this dwelling, uninvited guests were sure to upset her. Personally, I considered myself a tenant solely thanks to her benevolence; it was best to ride out this episode anywhere but here. Plus, a silkie guarding her home was nigh invincible. Alfar wielded utterly overwhelming power when dealing in their place of power, and I would hate for some poor, unknowing mage to eat the brunt of her wrath for accidentally trespassing.
“I know of a place that no one would dare set foot uninvited.”
“Wait,” Mika cut in. “Are you sure about this, Erich?”
“It’ll be fine. She won’t have any complaints about me merely inviting a guest.”
Besides, I thought, I have an excuse or two up my sleeve.

[Tips] A counterspell war is a battle between mages waged via magic. While some are simple exchanges of destructive spells, many occur entirely in the realm of espionage or intrigue. Much like how traditional wars are fought on and off the battlefield, counterspell wars span a wide range of potential settings.
Also, the term is often used even when one side utilizes divine miracles as opposed to magic.

Why had the Trialist Empire stood for five centuries despite being surrounded by enemies on all fronts, championing a culture and mode of society unseen in any other nation? Why did it stand tall as a great power whose influence permeated the greater part of the central continent’s western reach?
The answers were many: a favorable geopolitical location; a lack of racial persecution that allowed full use of its multicultural populace; an efficient and bureaucratic—and ruthless, as those who lived through it would add—selection process for nobility that occurred early on in the nation’s history.
Ask for an explanation, and one would be showered with innumerable theories from countless historians, all insisting that they alone knew the true reason. Yet if we were to ask what qualities allowed Rhinians to build their sprawling Empire, one would surely find itself on every list: their staunch belief that achievement be rewarded amply.
A woman sat exhausted, the deep bags under her eyes and a terrible complexion hidden under a layer of powder and rouge. Messy from days without washing, her hair could only be kept in place with a liberal dose of perfumed oil. As she stared at the trinkets lined up on her desk, she felt as though all strength was fighting to leave her body.
“I found these scattered about the city, so I elected to bring them to you. I’ve made a handful of attempts to eliminate decoys to bolster my spell’s efficacy, but my efforts only led me to these.”
A half-written letter, a mountain of unopened reports, and enough formal grievances to spill off the table and onto the floor packed Mechthild’s office tight. Though she’d hired a civil servant to handle her paperwork, there were so many issues that ultimately required her oversight as the commander of the search that she hadn’t been able to keep up at all.
The magus she’d met three days earlier had gone out of his way to pay her a visit, and used what precious little desk space remained to show her something that shocked her to her core.
One glance had been enough for the servant to recognize that the three dolls depicted her master. They’d been meticulously crafted, as if someone had shrunk down her lady to an eighth of her size; for reasons unclear, each depicted her in a different pose to further please the eye with a masterwork of artistry.
The first showed her standing upright, praying with her eyes closed; the second saw her on her knees, facing the earth, surely singing a hallowed hymn; the last depicted her dancing with both arms outstretched, her hair fluttering about her. Each piece was unique and detailed, and had this been a normal day, the woman would have reached for her wallet and politely asked to purchase them.
But the price mattered not in their current state of affairs. More importantly, these were the decoys the magus had explained on their first meeting.
Mechthild did not understand. Surely, these had been crafted in order to throw her and her men off her lady’s trail, but did they really need to be this well-made?
“I inspected these for the sake of my report and found them to be decoys of exceedingly superior make. They contained a charm inside with a signature written in blood. Paired with the impeccable attention to detail, it is nearly impossible to tell these apart from the real lady using magic. I am absolutely certain that whoever created these is a pervert—no sane person would go this far.”
“I suspected as much... Even I can tell.”
What was the craftsman thinking as he worked? Looking at these, it seemed less likely that a lovestruck mage decided to help the girl escape, and more that a crazed man enchanted by her beauty decided to kidnap her. The commander of the search concurred with the magus’s absolute confidence in the creator’s perversion.
“There were a handful of safeguards in place to prevent their use as targets in a curse, but I have brought them here to be prudent. What would you like me to do? I can dispose of them in a safe manner if you’d like, but I imagine that you may wish to handle this within the family, seeing as they depict the young lady of the house.”
“Yes, well... Please leave them here. We shall handle it.”
Despite agreeing to take responsibility for them, the woman began to pity her future self: discarding something that bore such a close resemblance to her lady would weigh on her. As difficult as it would be to throw them away, showing them to her liege when all was said and done would surely be met with a troubled smile and both of them sharing the burden.
Handing them to her employer—the distinction between whom she served and who paid her was a common one—was no better. He was an eccentric who allowed his hobbies to absorb him to such an extent that she was sometimes baffled at his continued leadership of the clan, but he was also a father who loved his daughter; keeping these away from him was better than inciting a crazed response.
But she felt that to destroy them as the magus suggested would be a waste of these perfect recreations. She truly was at an impasse: she couldn’t bring herself to be rid of them, but putting them on display in her room would surely cause a scene somewhere down the line. This was giving her a massive headache.
“Also, I bear correspondence from my master.”
Opening the letter with a hand on her temple, the woman instantaneously had to fight the urge to tear the paper to shreds. The letter read thusly: “Sorry about my inexperienced student. I’ll give you a refund for the work he did. I’d love to come help and all, but my research is getting good, so give me a bit, okay?”
Naturally, the author was a prestigious magus who bore the rank of professor, and the actual contents of the letter did not read so frivolously. The grammar, style, and verbiage all abided by the rules of etiquette as a shining example of imperial aristocratic penmanship. Its sole flaw was that, for all its mannerly airs, even the most favorable interpretation amounted to the same message as the casual hypothetical.
You may think, Surely he can’t get away with that. Alas.
Character aside, the man in question was a professor at the Imperial College who had earned his status through diligence, not blood. The stark meritocracy that laid the foundations of the Empire meant people like him were afforded some leeway in the realm of social misconduct.
In fact, a slothful methuselah once abused such lenience to spend years camping in the College’s library, and there was an infamous wraith who unabashedly and openly pursued her personal interests for similar reasons. The only way of winning over someone in power was to face them with greater authority; the woman was but a steward, and as you may expect, she did not carry all the might of her employer.
There were two ways to convince a professor to abandon their research and bend to her will: she either needed the power of someone who could force them to or a topic that would compel them into voluntary assistance. Sadly, she had neither.
Though she acted as proxy for the head of the house, she was ultimately no more than a lackey doing chores. The professor likely expected her employer to come out himself if the task was actually important.
And what a compelling argument that is, Mechthild thought, pushing down the stinging pain suddenly manifesting in her gut.
“...I am so very sorry,” the magus said. “My master has a conference soon, you see...”
The man bowed apologetically. From his perspective, he’d hoped his master would cover for his mistake and help him save face. Unfortunately, whatever pet project the professor was working on took priority over his disciple’s dignity.
“No, it isn’t a problem. Not at all... Would you please just let him know that I would appreciate a message should he find himself with time to spare?”
“Of course. I shall also continue to work within my bounds. With that, I shall take my leave.”
“I wish you a safe journey home.”
You’re all worthless. Rage and bloodlust boiled up from the depths of her heart, but the woman wrung out all her self-control and managed to see the man off with a flat expression.
All of this was her employer’s fault. He’d been so beside himself as he prepared to welcome his daughter that he’d let what should have been a tightly kept secret slip to one of the maids. While she was sure the maid was enduring a steep punishment by now, Mechthild believed the blame lay with the lord of the house for being careless enough that a mere maid could catch on.
Furthermore, she simply could not comprehend the thought process behind holing up in a conference room in the middle of this important procedure just because he’d found someone who piqued his interest. Had he been around—not even that! Had he at least assigned an influential member of the main house to help, all this could have been resolved much sooner. This was the same man who still refused to let go of his professorship. Surely he must have had an underclassman or two whom he could task with a favor.
The woman’s rage was so rabid that she legitimately feared fainting from a burst blood vessel in her brain, but a series of cautious knocks at the door quickly extinguished the flames of fury. She reordered the scattered documents and letters before permitting the visitor entrance.
“U-Um, Lady Mechthild?”
One of her subordinates clad in holy garments walked through the door. She, like their master, could most often be found praying in a secluded church. The nun was something of an adjutant, who was tasked with accompanying the young lady places where the bodyguard was barred from entry.
The nun carried in a tray with a hot bowl of food; the steam rising up was her concern over her overworked superior given physical form.
Unfortunately, Mechthild was not looking forward to a nice meal: she had sent the girl off with a letter hoping for her to return with any kind of response from the man in charge. The nun’s sorry smile and the tray carrying nothing but a gentle pot of porridge—those close to the woman all knew about her chronic gastritis—and a wine glass were evidence that her expectations had been betrayed.
“Not yet, I take it?”
“Um, well... Yes, not yet.”
If sighs had mass, then hers would have plummeted through the floor and sunk into the pits of hell. Massaging the bridge of her nose, she waved the girl inside.
Mechthild resented her employer—the root of this whole ordeal—with every fiber of her being. Not only was he the instigator of the overarching nightmare she found herself in, but he was directly at fault for the theatrical runaway she’d been dealing with for three days now. The only reason an unworldly nun with no one to turn to was now evading detection was because of him.
If only he’d been more careful in wording his letters. If only he’d paid more attention to his daughter’s growth. If only he’d realized in how many ways the apple failed to fall far from the tree. Had a single one of these been true, the woman would not have had to run her frail mensch body into the ground for three days and nights, fueled only by short naps and arcane drugs.
“It would seem that, well, um, his current conversation is proving quite...engaging, and there doesn’t seem to be any sign that he, er...”
“Enough,” Mechthild said, waving her hand.
Her history with their lord was long, and she knew well just what kind of creature he was. Oh, indeed, she knew all too well—down to the familiar pain in her bowels.
Her employer was, in most cases, a talented man. Where lesser lords would abscond in a fit of tears within days of inheriting the litany of arduous duties that came with his position, he handled them all as a mere side venture for his hobbies. He was the kind of verifiable genius who did more than avoid catastrophic failure; he actively bettered the situations he dealt in.
But once his curiosity was piqued, the jig was up.
Usually, a letter or thought sent his way was enough to pull his attention away from academic merrymaking, but nothing worked at his most engrossed. Even if the Emperor himself summoned him to the palace—a claim backed up by multiple documented accounts—he would continue indulging himself in whatever so gripped him.
The man had personally handed Mechthild a magical device that would deliver her thoughts to him, but it was no better than a brick if he disabled his end of the communication; letters were met with no reply. Crises concerning his own estate or the fate of the Empire meant nothing in the face of his interests.
She was painfully aware that he led a life incomprehensible to mensch; though they shared similar forms, the beast within was totally different. Reaching true understanding was no small feat.
Mechthild let out a long sigh and asked, “And the reports from the highways?”
“We’ve mobilized the city garrison, but no luck so far. The director of the imperial guard has kindly tasked his infantry with checking within the capital’s borders, but...”
“No luck, I take it.”
Berylin’s garrison was full of talented soldiers. It was composed entirely of veterans who had several years of experience serving as guards in other imperial cities, and they were selected for discipline and appearance—the capital was the hub of foreign diplomacy, after all.
Skill varied between individuals, of course, but they outstripped the watchmen killing time in smaller cities in every metric of pen and sword. The sense of duty that came with promotion to a post in the capital meant they invariably took pride in their work, and one could hardly find a better fit for the slow and steady job of inspecting traffic.
Meanwhile, the Emperor’s jager unit was composed entirely of huntsmen and scouts who’d been recommended for the position; searching for a mark was their specialty. True, a more precise definition would peg their main activities as the reconnaissance and pursuit that bookended a wartime battle, but they were still more than capable of seeking out a target in the city.
The woman and her flock had called in every favor they could to amass a force like no other. Calling upon the city guard alone was ordinarily beyond the scope of a single family’s power, and the authority required to order around the secret service went without saying. This was only possible thanks to the cooperation of her employer’s secretaries and clansmen, and the magnanimous collaborators from the church, who were all surely dying of overwork in the palace right about now.
Yet despite having assembled this utter dream team, they still had not found the lone girl. Here stood a collection of talent that could apprehend a world-class spy; how in the name of all that was good could they let a sheltered priestess who did nothing but pray roam free for three days?
The woman simply could not fathom how this could be, and those taking part in the investigation were beginning to cock their heads; were they really being sent after an ignorant young lady? It would be easier still to believe that they were chasing a spirit that could hide its presence at will.
“Please have them continue their searches. I will head to the palace and speak to the secretaries about any adjustments that need to be made.”
“Understood. But the landing is scheduled for—”
“I know,” the woman muttered. Truth be told, she had planned to drown in work pertaining to a completely separate issue until the heiress decided to head for the hills. The task must have fallen to someone else, judging from how the event seemed to be going as planned.
More importantly, this was sure to draw the attention of her employer away from his long, long chat. Her interrogation as to why a “simple question” turned into a month-long conversation could wait for another time.
“In that case, I shall ask for the details after discussing with the secretaries.”
“Huh? No, please, someone else can handle that. Lady Mechthild, you need to rest.”
“I have many things that must be reported in person, so I shall go myself.”
Pushing the enticing pot of porridge out of her line of sight in a feat of sheer willpower, the dutiful attendant pulled her cloak off the coat rack in the name of servitude. Her mantle was a thick, dark pelisse which left her right arm unhindered; the crest of a wine glass split down the center was embroidered on it in silver thread.
Donning the crest of shattered antiquated evils, of value drawn from strength and not history, of the venerated House Erstreich, the woman steeled herself for a marriage with her stomachache and left her seat.
She was to meet with the pitiable vampiric secretaries who shared her unenviable position, and would then pay her employer a visit with a morsel of news in hand: the airship was arriving at the capital.

[Tips] House Erstreich’s crest is a wine glass split in half. The original Erstreich belonged to a branch of a branch of an ancient vampire predating the Empire. After emerging victorious in the founding war, he is said to have broken the old patriarch’s emblem—that is, a wine glass—and announced that, in the end, power spoke louder than heritage.

Walking around town as of late was terrifying; it was like living in the wake of a terrorist attack. City guards patrolled every corner at least twice as often as usual, there were casual inspection points in every district, and customs harshly scrutinized anyone passing through the gates despite the ongoing busyness of spring traffic.
Furthermore, the patrols searched through every non-noble house they came across—with the homeowner’s “permission,” of course—in what amounted to warrantless raids. While I’d have expected the other precautions if, say, Tokyo or Osaka was hosting a global summit, this last point was a startling first for me.
Finally, dragon knights whom I could only assume were partnered with the police circled the skies above; for the first time, I even spotted a few avian races employing their gifts of flight to join them in patrol.
If I didn’t know what was going on, I would have thought we were going to war...but what scared me most was that the denizens of the capital shrugged it off with a casual, “Again?”
“Yeah, this happens a lot here.”
Mika gave me some insight as a veteran Beryliner while picking out an apple from a street stall. It was a breed sourced from the archipelago in the polar north that had been cultivated here in the Empire; being a brighter red than native apples made it highly popular around these parts.
“It’s always like this when a foreign big shot comes over, so I doubt it’s all about our friend.”
But you know, the changing season had brought a fresh wardrobe with it, and even the most common of fruits felt poignant when in my well-dressed friend’s hand.
“Hello? Erich? Something wrong?”
“No, it’s just... That apple suits you.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Mika giggled; the beautiful maiden’s laugh was brighter than the red apple in her hand.
That’s right: much to my bemusement, Mika’s shift had come. Today was the first day of her cycle, and I’d been caught terribly off guard when we’d met up. This was already the third time I’d seen her female form, and yet I wasn’t even close to getting used to her charms.
She pulled out her wallet with cheerful laughter, handed the merchant a copper, and walked on ahead.
“Mm,” Mika said. “This one’s juicy and sweet!”
Seeing her plump, scarlet lips pressed against the red skin of the apple ought to have been so very mundane, but curiously, I found it seductive enough to make me dizzy. My gaze was dragged toward the point of contact, and my eyes continued to follow her tongue as it chased a bead of juice rolling down her cheek.
My fascination was partly fueled by fatigue, but only partly; her actions made for a dreamlike scene. If it did pop up in my dreams, though, a certain brilliant philosopher’s psychoanalytic interpretations would probably lead me to the conclusion that I was just pent-up.
“You tired?” she asked, tossing the half-eaten fruit my way. “Here, have a bite and chin up.”
Something about the whole situation made me feel like her giving me the apple would be plastered front and center on the marketing material had this been a dating sim. Naturally, it would have been backed up with the game’s most moving soundtrack and the highest-quality animation to match.
“...Yum.”
I bit into it with a satisfying crunch, letting the harmony of sweet and sour fill my mouth, and felt a little better, just as Mika had said. We regularly shared food regardless of her gender, so I wasn’t about to start blushing over an indirect kiss...but my complexion was suspect: apparently, I was incredibly pale.
“You don’t look too good,” Mika said. “Have you been sleeping well?”
“Not really... What we’ve done has started to sink in, and the anxiety’s been keeping me up. Plus, even after I cleaned everything up, having the city guard knock on my door in the middle of the night freaked me out.”
Also, my expenditures were starting to mount, though they weren’t necessarily related to my wallet. That said, Mika seemed pretty tired herself, so I wasn’t alone.
“Can you tell?” she asked. “I mean, we’ve gotten ourselves into something pretty big, so I can’t help but be nervous. Whatever do you think will happen should our fair lady’s ploy fail?”
“I wonder...”
While that was a moot point so long as we succeeded, the thought of what would happen otherwise sent a chill down my spine. Even if we pleaded that we’d had no choice but to obey her noble command, the wrath of her family would ultimately dictate our sentence for helping her escape.
Strict commitment to the law was one of the Trialist Empire’s charms, but the powers of discretion unfortunately lay with the aristocracy. Who knew what would happen if they were in a bad mood? They wouldn’t hang us and our whole families or anything—imperial law didn’t even have punishments of association that severe—but we were best off steeling ourselves against the possibility of imprisonment or hard labor.
I didn’t regret our actions one bit, but we really were doing something insane. Having connections in power that would at least be willing to hear our side meant we weren’t totally lost, but we would have had to be utterly demented to try this without any backing. The biggest thing keeping my peace of mind together was that I could bow down and promise a blank check of modeling favors to Lady Leizniz to insure our lives; otherwise, I wouldn’t have managed for three days on only light insomnia.
Now, you may ask what I’d been doing for three whole days. The answer was incredibly simple. In fact, I could wrap it up in one sentence: Miss Celia, Elisa, and I had cooped up in the madam’s atelier.
This was calculated, mind you. First, our pursuers were connected to the church, which made it doubtful they’d have close ties within the College. Even if they did, a researcher’s personal laboratory could only be intruded on if they were under suspicion of treason or another equally severe crime, so we didn’t have to worry about police raids.
Second, that living icon of indolence loved to peek in on others, but was demonstrably less enthused about having her own privacy invaded. Despite having studied under her, I couldn’t make heads or tails of the overdone barriers she’d set up all around the atelier, meaning we would be safe against the spells of all but the best professors.
Last, I could come up with any number of reasonable excuses as to why I was holing up there. Magia and their students locked themselves indoors as frequently as salarymen made their morning commutes; if I explained that my live-in sister had fallen ill, having a servant spend several nights was just as normal. I could even bring in any guest I wanted under the pretext of their helping me nurse my patient. It wasn’t as if they had ID cards to log every entry and exit; no one would notice that one person had gone in but hadn’t come out so long as we played it cool.
I mean, considering the building, I imagined there were quite a few cases wherein someone had gone in without ever coming back out. In fact, I’d heard rumors of someone coming back out multiple times in a row, so...
All things considered, it was hardest to see what was under one’s own nose, and I supposed the bluebird of happiness was closer than I’d first thought.
We walked around the marketplace in the low quarter, nibbling on the apple as we bought up groceries. Lady Agrippina’s continued subscription to delivered meals meant we didn’t have to worry about cooking, but I was giving my portion to Miss Celia, so I needed to get my own food elsewhere.
I couldn’t afford to go back to my lodging much. For reasons unknown, Elisa’s sour mood had yet to resolve itself, and I didn’t want to leave Miss Celia all alone to deal with it. I’d spent the first night at home to see how things would play out, which was when the city guard had decided to inspect my residence—whether that was a stroke of good luck or bad was up for debate.
They would have broken down the door to perform their search if need be. It went without saying that the Ashen Fraulein would have been livid beyond belief, so I was fortunate in the sense that I’d prevented extra trouble. Still, inviting them inside and watching them comb through everything had been taxing on my sanity: I’d been sweating over the fear that they’d find a hair that wasn’t mine or something, even though there wasn’t any rational reason for them to interrogate me for that.
Regardless, my heart-racing and stomach-churning three days were coming to an end. Come evening, Miss Celia would awake and rub the drowsiness out of her eyes, and we’d finally hear how she intended on getting to her aunt in Lipzi in one day.
“Hey, Erich, wanna take a quick break?”
I looked up from confirming the contents of my paper bag—the lack of refrigerators made the daily need to purchase perishables such a chore—to find Mika tugging at my sleeve. It wasn’t fair that the simplest mannerisms felt rounder and cuter when she was a girl; when the good ladies and gentlemen of the world caught on to my old chum’s charms, I had a feeling that the tastes of society as a whole were in for a rude awakening.
Setting my offhand thoughts aside, I followed Mika’s pointed finger to find a familiar kind of stall, one that always popped up around this time of year.
“Ice candy, huh? Sounds good.”
“Right? It’s been warming up, so let’s take a seat and enjoy ourselves. I bet the other two will be really happy if we bring them some too.”
The parasol-shaded pushcart was the kind of quaint summer-treat trafficker that one might see in the countryside of modern Japan. Unlike those that accompanied larger caravans into rural cantons, these fellows were retailers—not mages. The ones I’d seen back in Konigstuhl had been private entrepreneurs, producing ice with simple cantrips and selling their snacks on the spot from the back of their wagons like preindustrial food trucks. Here in the city, the candies were mass-produced by some absentee spellcaster or another who then hired middlemen to peddle their wares on the streets.
It was hard to say which made the tastier treat, but the businesses here in Berylin generally dealt in higher-quality confections, making it harder to find duds. The brains behind each operation could usually be traced back to a municipal ice-keeper who produced extra product on the side, or a full-fledged magus with noble connections trying to earn some extra coin—or avoid their taxes. Basically, the market was full of talent from the ground up.
However, they were also markedly more expensive: a caravan mage might charge twenty-five assarii a pop, whereas urban peddlers doubled that price at the very minimum. Fancier ones casually cleared a libra each, even when marketed toward common folk, so indulging oneself required a serious discussion with one’s wallet.
“Seventy-five assarii per,” I read aloud. “Well, it is important to treat ourselves every now and again.”
“And we can always make more pieces if we need the coin.”
This shop’s price clocked in at three quarters—no small number for a servant and student strapped for cash—but we thankfully had received an ample allowance from Sir Feige, and our purses were plump from our ehrengarde business.
Figuring that this could offer some much-needed relief for our souls, we walked over side by side, ready to swallow the price. But you know, Mika, I can’t help but think we shouldn’t be locking arms if you’re as hot as you say.“Oh,” I said, “they have ice pops. I think I’ll go with that.”
I was cognizant of my role as bug repellent, though, so I didn’t bother putting up any resistance. After looking through the shop’s selection, I decided on a textbook ice pop: it was a white, crisp, frozen rod of flavored water on a stick.
“Hmm, then I’ll go with...huh. This is hard. Do you think milk or lemon would be better? I want something sweet, but I want to feel nice and fresh after too.”
On the other hand, the large array of different flavors had made Mika indecisive. She was planning on getting a hard pastry bowl with the frozen treat placed inside—probably the standard when it came to imperial ice candy. Unable to keep watching her struggle, I handed the shopkeeper a coin and asked him to put on a scoop of each.
“Huh?! No, Erich, I couldn’t!”
“Come on, don’t sweat it, old chum. I know I’m asking a lot of you, so just think of it as an apology gift.”
“But it’s so expensive...”
Mika’s persistence caused the man running the stand to boom with laughter. The callistian’s ursine coat seemed like it would make the coming season a struggle, but a slight misunderstanding had put him in merry spirits.
“Missie, your boyfriend’s trying his best to show off, and part of being a good girlfriend’s letting him do it. Boys are funny creatures that’ll throw around their muscles and wallets to try and prove they’re dependable, see?”
“B-Boyfriend?!”
Mika was still totally flustered when the large man deftly scooped up some flavored ice with a twirl of his spoon and pushed the bowl onto her. Then, he handed me a quarter back from the change I’d given him.
“Just this once, okay?” he said.
“...Thank you kindly,” I responded. “I’ll be sure to support your business if our paths ever cross.”
“Attaboy,” he chuckled.
I’d planned on going somewhere else for Elisa and Miss Celia’s shares if these didn’t turn out to be exceptionally delicious, but now I had no choice but to stop by again. I pulled my blushing friend over to a bench and we sat down; I began working away at my ice pop before it could start melting.
Oh, that’s good! The milky flavor was sweet, but not too pronounced.
“Um, thanks, Erich.”
“Hm? Don’t worry about it. It’s nothing compared to what you’re doing for me. But you better hurry—the top’s already melting.”
“Ah!”
I held back a snicker as I watched her panic and dig in with a small wooden spoon. We enjoyed the sweet ice for a while; it took about half my ice pop to cool me off enough to regain control of my mental faculties, and Mika suddenly piped up as if she’d remembered something.
“By the way, have you ever heard of a ship that can sail through the air?”
A ship in the air? While I hadn’t heard of anything of the sort, the topic was proper fantasy and I was all for finding out more. Airships were a well-worn trope in ancient mythologies and stories, but that was because they tickled some romantic notion that pervaded every human culture.
Modern Earth dwellers flew often, but only in the context of a sterilized aerial cruise. One couldn’t feel the breeze, nor gaze out at the never-ending panoramic skies below; all that one felt in the airtight box of an airplane was the sway of turbulence or ear-popping barometric shifts in pressure.
The airships that sailed into an unknown, endless frontier in fantasy settings were different. Rushing winds whipped those standing on deck, and one could dangle their legs off the side to enjoy a sea of clouds to their heart’s content. What boy could ever hope to contain their excitement over airships?!
“I happened to overhear a little something during lecture,” Mika continued. “Apparently, a ship that sails through the sky is coming today.”
“Whoa,” I marveled. “What else—what else?”
Unfortunately, in all the time I’d spent in this world, I had yet to hear a peep about the outlandish vehicles that I expected of fairy-tale settings—until now.
“Well, I don’t know that many details, since this is all secondhand...”
Mika looked to be enjoying herself tremendously as she unveiled her big rumor. Just as I was steeped in the boyish delusion of flying boats, she seemed entrenched in the maidenly romance of flight itself. Oh, how blessed I was to have a friend with whom I could share these dreams.
“But apparently, it’s a newly invented vessel backed by the Emperor himself! It’s supposed to change the future of the whole Empire, and all sorts of people are working on it. And they’re bringing it to Berylin so they can show off the crown’s power.”
“Wow! But it’s kind of strange that there hasn’t been any news about it.”
“Come on, Erich. Obviously, the best way to grab people’s attention is to stay quiet, and then...bam! Out of nowhere! If they build up too much anticipation beforehand, the surprise of it coming won’t hit as hard.”
True enough. Groundbreaking technologies of this kind were most astonishing when they appeared out of the blue without any forewarning. If a flying ship soared over the capital unannounced, every citizen in the capital would remember it for as long as they lived.
“What’s more, my master got called to the imperial palace today for a massive terrace banquet. I know it’s nearly summer, but don’t you think the capital is still a bit cold at night?”
“And they’re hosting it outside anyway...which means the people there...”
“Right! I think they’re inviting foreign diplomats and ambassadors there.”
Berylin was home to embassies belonging to all its political partners. These sorts of institutions were a natural byproduct of the need for smooth and speedy international relations, but could also be said to have arisen after the stubborn nations involved realized that they benefited from having a means to end their repetitive wars in some peaceable fashion.
Despite the arcane technologies that allowed for thought transfer and mystic voice receivers, the world was still without telephones or even telegrams; starting and ending wars proved to be a royal logistical pain. Unlike the period of warring states that had preceded Rhine’s founding, no single country had the power to plow through another and occupy its territory.
War was a costly endeavor: a nation couldn’t just annihilate the opposing military forces, declare that it now owned the lands they occupied, and call it a day. Routing a mobilized army still left an inevitable siege, and even after felling a city, it cost a lot of time, effort, and oh lord did it cost money to stamp out remaining dissent.
Winning a war didn’t mean one could claim the losers as faithful taxpayers; no one was going to roll over and pony up. Purging the local leadership and replacing them with new rulers was also a massive undertaking; the budget and manpower needed to keep a newly conquered territory until discord was quelled could outstrip whatever spoils were to be gained from the land, especially once the cost of the preceding battle was factored in.
This economic burden was one that grew exponentially as societies advanced, and the list of nations that could bear it shrunk with every passing year. Small countries could still potentially swallow another of their size whole in one fell swoop, but two rival players on the world stage could hope at best to file off a handful of metroplexes over the course of decades. If enough influential lords sniffed out a turning tide and defected one way in droves, there was a slim chance a major nation could collapse all at once—but that was a big if.
As such, the main mode of conflict between powerhouses had evolved into a game of pokes: snatching up suzerainty of nearby satellites, trading sovereignty of city-states, and exchanging economic demands shaped the battlefield. Everyone knew that the outbreak of war would lead to years of deadlock involving siege after siege until one side ran out of resources and had to sue for peace before they fizzled out entirely.
Not to mention that participating in conquest was as exhausting as fending it off. Taking victory when it showed itself was important, but an advancement made without any consideration for the manpower and resources spent in its achievement could threaten to weaken the victorious state. War truly was a difficult endeavor.
As a direct consequence of jeopardizing their existences on more than a few occasions throughout history, these nations had come to place embassies within one another’s borders—or so it went.
I couldn’t imagine the shock of seeing a seacraft fly through the air at what was meant to be a formal banquet like any other. I would have loved to see how much wine would be spat out mid-sip in person. Looking at the First World War of Earth was proof enough of how important the advent of flight was. I was sure the diplomats in attendance would make up all sorts of excuses to leave the event early and dispatch messengers to their motherlands posthaste. I felt bad for the poor couriers, forced to run out in the dead of the night.
“There have been rumors about the development of flying ships for decades now, but I hear that this is the first time ever one’s going to be unveiled. The feast is supposed to start in the evening, and I already can’t wait.”
“I guess we’ll have to stare at the clouds on our way home.”
My heart had been dancing at the wondrous marvels of this world for the past decade straight, but the only other thing that had gotten me this giddy was my first encounter with magic. The sky was such a fantastic thing: my childhood dreams of standing on the deck of an airship with the wind blowing through my hair came back to life; my imagination drifted to the freedom of soaring on drakeback; my heart pounded at the thought of a personal airplane with a tiny engine taking off.
Open skies were just so incredibly wonderful—as if to say this is fantasy, this is what boyhood is about! I wished to ride on board myself; I wondered how long it would be before they were open to the public. New state-sponsored tech wasn’t going to be easily mass-producible.
“I’m so jealous,” I said. “I want to try riding one too.”
“Same here. Spells of flight are really hard and I’m not a good fit for them, so I’d given up hope. But thinking that I might get to fly one day makes the world of tomorrow seem so dazzling.”
Mika’s penchant for dramatic turns of phrase paired well with our conversation as we went back and forth while staring into the heavens. I felt so conflicted: the dream of flight alone was tempting me to join the imperial army.
As strange as it may be to say as someone dipping my toes into space-bending magic, flying spells were invariably difficult and expensive to acquire. Magia that could freely move in three dimensions were a rarity, and people could build whole careers off that skill alone. In fact, achieving flight alone was enough to go from the already-prestigious title of magus to that of an ornithurge. They were as uncommon abroad as they were in the Empire, and every country prized them alongside their dragon knights as being one of the few forces capable of aerial combat.
Thinking about it for any length of time was enough to see why. From a tabletop perspective, taking to the air was up there with long-range teleportation in its ability to nip a campaign in the bud. Whether the heroes were to sneak into an enemy base or get past a blockade, the ability to fly nullified all the awful traps the GM stayed up at night designing with a devilish grin.
It was downright unethical. The day I designed a booby-trapped hallway only to hear, “Er, I float five centimeters off the ground and go through, and I’m gonna tie a rope up high on the other side for everyone to climb on,” would never leave me...
“I wonder what kind of boat it is,” Mika said. “I’ve only ever seen rivercraft, but it might be one of those giant sea vessels you see in paintings.”
“I bet it’ll be a gargantuan sailboat—one that’ll puff up dozens of giant sails against the backdrop of the blue sky, slowly floating with the wind.”
“That’s awesome...”
“I know...”
Moving past my otherworldly trauma, Mika and I finished off our chilled snacks with our eyes still skybound. Still stuck in the land of dreams, we purchased more for the pair awaiting our return...but I think that we were fatigued beyond help.
After all, here was a high-speed mode of transport all but made to order, and somehow, we didn’t manage to connect the dots to Miss Celia’s “ride.” Had we been in our usual states of mind, we would have spotted the link immediately and had time to prepare ourselves for the shock. Instead, the two of us walked back to the College, blissfully ignorant of whatever our friend’s plan might be.

Tprg4.14

While I would have loved to say that aloud and dive into bed so I could flee to the land of dreams, our long day had yet to end. We still had business to settle, so I got everyone back on track and sat them all down at the living-room table. Mika and Miss Celia took positions on the couch, I sat across from them on the floor, and Elisa planted herself in my lap.
The Ashen Fraulein was kind enough to read the room and prepare a pot of tea so that we could enjoy a sip as we discussed. Miss Celia was terribly surprised to see a ready-to-serve tea set appear without warning, but I was too tired to explain. I just said, “It’s magic,” and left it at that; I didn’t specify whose, but I wasn’t strictly lying.
I took a mouthful of tea—of all the things she could have brought out, the Ashen Fraulein decided to serve blue mallow tea with a hint of lemon in what I could only imagine was a bout of mischief—and patted my sister on the head to try and get her to stop staring into the table.
“Allow me to formally introduce you, Miss Celia. This is my sister Elisa, firstborn daughter to Johannes of Konigstuhl canton. At present, she is studying under a magus so that she might enter the Imperial College of Magic as a full-fledged student.”
“My,” Miss Celia marveled. “The College? Hello there, little one. I am Cecilia. I am a member of the Church of the Night Goddess; I serve the merciful goddess of the moon from my lowly, unranked position at the bottom of the Circle Immaculate. I pray we may get along.”
Unranked? As surprised as I was, the more pressing matter was that Elisa was turning her cheek and refusing to answer.
I wonder what’s wrong? I’d thought she’d gotten more used to this sort of thing thanks to her time with Mika, but maybe she was still afraid of strangers.
“What’s the matter, Elisa?” I cooed. “Come on, say hello.”
“Mm... Mmgh...”
I peeked over to see my sister’s face; she was trembling and biting her lip. She seemed scared of something, but I had no idea what. Knowing that it was poor manners to display this sort of attitude to a noble, I tried rocking her shoulder, but Miss Celia raised a gentle hand to stop me.
“That’s enough, Erich. She doesn’t need to speak to me if she doesn’t wish to. Children of her age rarely do. The Night Goddess’s sanctuaries often double as almshouses, so I am well accustomed to dealing with young ones.”
“But...”
“Please, that’s enough. Don’t you agree, little Elisa?”
She smiled with all the compassion of the Mother Goddess above, but my sister turned around and buried her face in my chest. After looking at her sadly for a moment, Miss Celia raised her hands ever so slightly to signal she was done with the topic.
I looked over at Mika, but they shook their head; they were just as lost as me. Elisa’s manners had been really impressive at the parade, but it looked like I’d need to talk to her about it later in private.
Moving on from my sister’s sudden shift from merrily playing with my hair to outright sulking, we had important matters to discuss...
“The two of you have helped me more than I could ever have asked.”
...but our good dame managed to take hold of the conversation before I could.
“I cannot allow you to be swept up any further in the trouble that is to come. Despite having given me even the very clothes on my back, I have nothing to compensate you with. But mark my word, I shall repay this debt.”
Whoa there, she’s going off in the wrong direction. Still patting Elisa’s back, I glanced over at Mika; they knew where this was heading too, and answered my look with a small nod. In turn, they tried to confirm my intentions with an inquisitive blink; this time it was my turn to nod.
As short as our time together had been, we were both certain that Miss Celia wasn’t a bad person. On top of that, she’d saved my life. What reason was there to hesitate now? How could I call myself a man—nay, how could I call myself human if I cast her out out of suspicion like she was going to ask me to?
I thought it was too late for such things in the first place. We had a common saying in the Empire that an assarius and drachma were equal in the pot, similar to the Earth idiom that posited one might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. Er, well, that came off a bit gruesome—I probably should have likened it to “in for a penny, in for a pound” instead.
At any rate, the point was that we’d gotten involved out of our own free will. Whether she brought more trouble or not, we had a duty to see through what we’d started.
Talk of responsibility aside, our own feelings on the matter were even more important. I would never be able to sleep soundly at night after chasing her out after only helping her with half the job.
“Miss Celia,” I said, “I pray that you won’t ask something as merciless of us as to abandon you now.”
“My old pal speaks the truth, Celia. I’d thought that having your permission to use a nickname made us friends. Was I wrong?”
“Of course not!” she blurted out. In another moment, she would realize her mistake and cover her mouth. Alas, it was too late: she’d given her word.
“Then I see no need for secrets among friends,” I said. “We’ve accompanied you thus far, so if delivering you to safety is within our means, we would be happy to oblige.”
“Besides,” Mika added, “our parents didn’t raise us to be so heartless as to throw a young lady onto the streets with nothing more than a meager set of clothes. Please, won’t you let us face our families again with our heads held high?”
Our usual tomfoolery managed to creep into our pleas, but the sentiment itself was genuine. Not helping her here was sure to leave something terrible lingering in our hearts for years to come.
But, hey, ignoring her absence as of late, I had an absolute behemoth of a connection covering my back; our odds of success weren’t astronomically small by any means. I wasn’t sure what she’d make me do in exchange, but knowing that villain, she was sure to cook up some tremendous ordeal for me. Still, she’d probably honor my request for help: lending a hand every now and again to her ticket to Berylin was sure to be in her interests.
Mika and I stared at her with passion in our gazes, waiting for a response. After a brief pause, a single tear bubbled up from those glistening ruby reds of hers, and she wound her hands together with downcast eyes.
“Thank you so much, Erich, Mika. I... Well...” Despite the hesitation still present in her tone, Miss Celia finally unveiled the reason for her escape. “You see, I am running away from a marriage. Yes, a marriage I have no desire to partake in.”
I knew it!
The ancients themselves had decided long ago that a dainty girl on the run was sure to be running from the altar. I’d seen the tale of a young maiden fleeing the clutches of a slimy old man or a calculating schemer who only wanted her for her family’s fortune countless times, in every possible medium.
This trope extended to the Empire’s tales as well. Twenty people counting on their fingers and toes still wouldn’t amount to the number of times I’d heard sagas of wandering knights and adventurers rescuing noble girls from their perilous engagements. Surely the little boys of our nation dreamed of committing such heroics themselves, whether in bed or wide awake.
That said, arranged marriages were absolutely everywhere, to the point where it was the default.
“As you can see, I have cast my lot with the Church, but this was originally my family’s intention. While I serve the Night Goddess of my own volition now, it was my father who first sent me away.”
Whether noble or common, marriage in this day and age was not something to be decided by personal feelings: it was a familial affair. The folly of a union between patrician and plebeian needed no explanation, but even the son of a wealthy, land-owning farmer would face serious repercussions for trying to pursue romance with the cute daughter of a poor family who borrowed the land on which they worked.
Questions of romance could only begin to be asked when society advanced enough to prioritize the interests of the individual; in an era where industry and the economy built on it were weak, such things skipped straight past futility into the realm of the downright harmful.
“Yet now, he demands that I return to secular life... I had thought his summons was simply to see me, as I hardly ever have an opportunity to descend from Fullbright Hill. Never in my wildest imaginations had I thought that he would sully my faith, of all things...”
Parental authority over wedding their children was more than a matter of preserving the interests of a clan: it was seen as serving social order. Trying to butt in was incredibly uncouth. Even under the lax standards of Earth, meddling in another’s marriage was considered inconsiderate at best. Done here, it would be the same as picking a fight—or in the worst case, starting a war.
“I caught wind of this plan, and made my escape just as I was being taken to his estate to be sealed away.”
The three of us could cause mayhem and destruction, getting away in a daring chase with the blocky words “THE END” preceding the end credits, but we still had the rest of our lives to live. Factoring in our futures, the problem was anything but trivial. Were we characters in a cheap novel, we could just sock Miss Celia’s father in the face and lecture him until he changed his tune, but alas.
Despite all my pessimistic grumbling, I had a feeling that we’d be able to figure something out within the bounds of the law.
We would have had no choice but to pack it up if we were dealing with a stupid girl trying to elope with a commoner: the only ways out then would be to tear down every barrier on her way to the remote edges of the frontier, or to punch her dad with a heartfelt prayer that everything would work out.
However, I could vouch that Miss Celia was not the type to let her own partiality dictate her actions without thought. While she was admittedly reminiscent of an elementary schooler excited on their first trip to a faraway land, succumbing to pangs of curiosity was different from thoughtless indiscretion. She had to have known her father would send people to chase her, and I doubted she would have tried running at all without some chance of victory.
“Thankfully, I suspect not all of my family will take kindly to this engagement. I have a gregh—ahem. I have an aunt whom I owe much, and I am certain she would convince my father to stop.”
“Now that’s reassuring!”
While I was a bit curious about her cough, having a dependable ally within her family sped things along tremendously. I knew she’d have something up her sleeve.
“With my aunt’s help, I will be able to reach the Church, whom I’m sure will also take my side. I hate to be presumptuous, but I believe myself to be regarded well amongst my peers, and the Head Abbess of the Great Chapel is a personal friend of mine. So, as long as I can evade capture...”
With religious authorities on our side, we had a real shot at pulling this off. Er, more importantly, the Head Abbess of the Great Chapel was the top authority that oversaw all of the Night Goddess’s following. What kind of acquaintance is that?!
Perhaps it was one of those stories that played off immortality. Miss Celia was a vampire who looked to be our age, which put her at least past fifty; if she’d taken care of children in her youth, it was perfectly reasonable that one might grow up to climb the ranks of the church. As curious as I was, it wasn’t exactly a pressing matter, so I decided to shelve it and maybe ask again when we had more time to spare.
The big news here was that we had Miss Celia’s aunt on our side. Since time immemorial, little brothers had been fated to bow down to their big sisters—I would know. Although her name had grown difficult to recall, the painful episodes I’d endured at the hand of my sister a lifetime ago were as fresh as ever. How could I ever forget? My birthday and Christmas had been the only chances to beg my parents for a new game, and she’d bullied me into choosing something that she’d wanted.
Maybe equating my frivolous trauma with the inner workings of a noble house wasn’t quite right, but I maintained that people were ever people, no matter the world. Besides, it was clear who wore the pants, given Miss Celia’s conviction that her aunt would make things right.
“In that case,” Mika said, “all we need to do is contact your aunt.”
“Victory is finally in sight, old chum!”
Now that we had our mark, there were plenty of ways to stick the landing. If she was nearby, we could sneak out of the capital and head straight there. If she was far away, we could hope to reach her by mail. At the very worst, we could run around Berylin and wait for her to back us up, so long as we could get in contact with her.
We had a clearly defined goal; now was the time to act. After all, we were up against nobles. They had limitless angles of attack on account of outstripping us by a gigantic margin in terms of wealth and manpower. Perfection could wait—haste was the name of the game. As the ones on the lam, our position was only going to worsen the more time we gave our pursuers to prepare.
Judging from how well-dressed the first batch was, I surmised that Miss Celia’s father was anything but underprivileged. It was best to assume he’d put his money where his mouth was and hire hundreds to search for us with a fine-toothed comb. The worst-case scenario could even entail him enlisting the guard, making the whole city a danger zone.
Gods damn the bourgeois...
“By the by, Miss Celia,” I said, “wherever might your aunt reside? Does she have an estate here in the capital? Or is her main residence close by any chance?”
I swallowed back a mysterious desire to go find a flag dyed scarlet and looked over at the vampire. Suddenly, she clammed up and averted her eyes, twiddling her fingers in silence.
“She is in...um...Lipzi.”
“What?”
Lipzi was the capital of the administrative state—formally a Regierungsbezirk—that made up the eastern reach of the Empire, and the headquarters of one of the three imperial families, House Erstreich.
But most importantly of all, the direct distance from the capital to Lipzi was one hundred and forty kilometers.

[Tips] The capital of an administrative state is the center of regional political and executive affairs, and is thus most often found in the territory of influential families. The imperials, electorate, and other members of the highest order maintain estates at each and every one, sending stipends to lesser, local nobles under their wing in a bid to maintain their influence. They then reconvene during the months where the nation’s oligarchs engage in politics from their separate estates in the imperial capital.

I was so shocked by the distance that I stood dazed for a moment. Even Mika, who was less familiar with the geography around here, was furrowing their brow.
My acquaintance with the lay of the land could be traced back to my three-month-long journey with Lady Agrippina. Thinking that it would be helpful for the future, I’d memorized a national atlas—a rough sketch that included every territory in the Empire—which gave me a decent idea of relative distance. That understanding was exactly why I was in such despair.
One hundred and forty kilometers sounds simple enough; it was about the distance from Osaka to Nagoya. Modern sensibilities would reduce the journey to roughly one meal and a really hard ice pop on a bullet train, or a two-to-three-hour road trip involving a picnic at a highway rest stop...but it was a massive distance for us.
It was too far a march on our own two feet, not even to mention that one hundred and forty kilometers only covered the distance between the two points on a map. Traveling there would require us to traverse several times that.
In case it wasn’t already obvious, the Empire was home to mountains, rivers, and rolling hills, just to name a few topographical complications. The state wasn’t some half-baked player in a city-sim game who could conjure up direct roads between key locations on a whim.
Between Berylin and Lipzi lay a sheer mountain range known as the Southern Sword. While not as harsh to navigate as the Frost Spirit’s Peaks the giants called home, normal travel gear would still leave a traveler freezing or slipping to their deaths in half a day. Obviously, no road went through them; while a path straight south would be an all-around good investment that would save time and money, oikodomurges weren’t exactly omnipotent.
Ideally they’d plow a tunnel through the mountains to make a direct path, but that remained an ideal for now. That would surely only come in the far future, when advancements in architectural technology would grant the crown the heavy machinery and sturdy materials needed for such an endeavor.
The Trialist Empire was still miles ahead of any other country, and the crowning jewel of its great transportation network was the linchpin highway, a series of stone-paved roads that connected all its most important regional capitals. However, this system did not prioritize creating optimal paths; not only did it snake around to avoid obstacles, but it also took efficiency of construction into account, meaning the intersections were structured to connect three or four different roads at once. There wasn’t any way to shrink that down to match the direct distance.
Not that we were lucky enough to even use the roads.
The Empire’s esteemed highway system laid its foundations in bedrock, complete with drainage systems and enough ruts for several lanes of traffic to run in parallel, and foliage was cleared on each side to prevent highwaymen from having a place to set up ambushes. Oikodomurges had polished what was effectively a medieval autobahn more finely than a shining mirror. Smaller roads branched off the nation’s central artery like capillaries, connecting towns and cantons to the greater Empire.
This was all in the name of national security and economic prosperity. Over five centuries of history, the Empire had laid and maintained new roads with a zeal that bordered on mania. Unlike in the Middle Ages with which I was familiar, the crown did not scoff at major highways as a path for enemies to take to our key holds; rather, they were seen as a means of rapidly deploying our own troops to any location on the front lines as the situation called.
Inversely, it followed that minor roads were not well kept. A country’s budget and manpower were finite, and the towering five-hundred-year-old behemoth was no exception. Local lords often maintained streets within their sphere of influence, but only insofar as it suited their own interests; they weren’t serving a public demand for free travel.
Even the furthest frontiers in my past life had been neatly tailored to bend to the whims of automobiles, but the same could not be said here. Common sense said that an attempt to travel without using the main roads was one’s own decision, and it was thus up to the individual to figure something out.
For us, that was incredibly unfortunate. Naturally, the first places anyone would check would be easy avenues of movement; cutting off any high-speed escape routes was the first step of catching a fugitive in a wide search radius. Much like how the police of Earth set up freeway checkpoints, enacted searches at hub train stations, and shut down airport boarding gates, our pursuers were sure to keep an eye on every road out of Berylin. There would be guards at every gate checking our bags, they’d forbid face coverings, and the inspection to get into the city would be far less lax than it had been. I had no doubt that they’d cast a net so tight that they wouldn’t let so much as a kitten get by without questioning.
We needed to dodge the authorities and our pursuers and hike through a couple hundred kilometers of uncharted mountains with a young lady in tow... That’s death.
If we had access to proper roads, I could have made it work. I could make around thirty kilometers of progress per day on foot—even with my stubby child legs—while stopping at the inns that dotted the land, and I could easily double that if I rode Castor or Polydeukes. Despite having an inexperienced and sheltered girl with us, I swear that I could manage similar numbers if I could get ahold of a stagecoach; there were plenty of caravans that regularly traveled between the imperial and regional capitals, so finding one that would allow us to join them would be a cinch.
But the net ensnaring us would only grow wider, and eventually, ducking under the watchful eyes of patrolmen would become impossible. I doubted they were idiots, so they were sure to close the path to Lipzi as soon as possible to prevent us from seeking help.
Uh... Are we screwed?
Had it just been Mika and I, we could have braved the perilous journey with a private letter to Miss Celia’s aunt in hand. However, in that case, we needed to worry about what to do with the damsel in question while we were gone. With the master of the house absent, we could stick her in Lady Agrippina’s atelier, but I couldn’t just leave her alone with Elisa when the madam could come back at any moment.
Though Lady Agrippina wasn’t totally heartless, she had exactly zero tolerance for anything she deemed a bother. Should she return home to find that I’d brought in a walking nuisance that she had no obligation to attend to, she would throw Miss Celia out in an instant. Worse still, I would be thoughtlessly dragging her into something that could affect her standing in high society; I would certainly be at her mercy after she cleaned up the situation as she saw fit.
And how could I complain when this really was a decision made solely on my account? That would be like leaving something out in a shared common space and getting upset when someone else threw it away.
I wanted nothing more than to have already perfected space-bending magic. If only I’d mastered that, I would have snapped my fingers and solved Miss Celia’s problems with all the ease of a fairy godmother summoning a pumpkin carriage and glass slippers.
I supposed the fact that teleportation invalidated so many scenarios like this one was exactly why it was locked behind such steep experience costs. Had I possessed the madam’s skills, this whole conundrum would have taken fewer than five days to mop up: not only could I have cut out the entirety of our sewer disaster by sending Miss Celia straight to my lodging, but I could have teleported to some random point I’d visited on our three-month journey to the capital and gotten a massive head start to Lipzi. From there, I’d just run straight to my destination and complete the mission!
Hm... This was the sort of anticlimactic story that would make a player chew out their GM for not planning against their antics, and one that’d cause the GM to shout that they should have held back.
“Um, but there isn’t any need to worry! I have a ride! I’m well aware that it’s too far to reach on foot!”
“A ride?”
Miss Celia must have caught on to our uncertainty, because she began speaking in a rush. Apparently, she had some means of getting from Berylin to Lipzi without being caught by the police.
“I cannot spare the details yet,” she went on. “But it shall arrive in three days’ time. If all goes well, I will be in Lipzi only a day after that.”
“One day?! That’s unbelievable...”
“Even dragon knights would take longer than that. Are you sure it’ll only take a day?”
My sheer surprise was joined by Mika tilting their head in tempered curiosity. Under normal circumstances, a fast horse would need a few days, and a messenger on foot would need two to three weeks; making the trek in a single day was absurd. Drakes could soar through the skies in a straight line, but they could only be handled by experienced jockeys—if one could manage to steal one of these living weapons from underneath the crown’s nose, that is.
“Yes, one day! You will have to wait and see, but from what I hear, it will surely only take a day.”
Miss Celia puffed up her chest with confidence, but her refusal to explain further worried me. More than anything else, her twinkling eyes spelled danger: whatever means of escaping the city she had, it was something that this curious lady considered fun. That same fun was why she merrily told us to wait and see; while knowing she only did so hoping to entertain us as friends left me with no room to complain, it really did not feel like she understood the gravity of our situation.
Ah well. It beats risking the hike.
“Very well,” I said. “Then we simply need to buy three days, correct?”
“Yes,” she replied. “But I suspect hiding away here...”
“Will only net us around one.”
Having a concrete goal in mind made victory seem within reach, but things were not as easy as they seemed. It sounded like we could evade detection for three days if we holed up, but that wasn’t an option when there was a very convenient and very magical way to search for persons of interest.
Ladies Leizniz and Agrippina sent their origami birds and butterflies my way without the messages getting lost using the same tracking system found in search magic. The fact that Miss Celia’s location hadn’t been exposed yet could be entirely chalked up to her pursuers not employing a mage. I suspected they still believed her to be a sheltered princess wandering aimlessly about the capital, and they hadn’t gotten serious yet as a result; she’d been on the cusp of capture when we crossed paths, so I doubted they wanted to escalate their efforts any more than they already had.
If a moderately trained mage—say, the apprentice of an ordained magus—began searching in earnest, we’d be caught sooner rather than later. We would have been cornered in the sewers long before getting to sip tea at this table had one been present from the start.
“An experienced magus can pick out their target amongst the tens of thousands of people in this city in no time at all,” I explained. “A strand of hair or a chipped nail will be more than enough for them to mark you for their spells.”
Search magic scoured the fabric of reality for traces matching whatever query was made. These were essentially wrinkles or stains left on the warp and weft of existence, and hiding in the deepest, darkest corner one could find would do nothing to eliminate such evidence. Secret rooms designed to shelter persecuted priests and catacombs built in the depths of the earth could not stop a procedure that dealt in metaphysical realms.
Yet it also had its drawbacks. Searching was only accurate when provided with an item that had some connection to the target.
I didn’t know for sure how much time we had before they dipped their toes into the arcane, but factoring in the requisite preparations, we had a day at best; if they’d already begun setting up, they would begin sometime tonight...and magia fit to serve noble houses were a stone’s throw away in the capital. It went without saying that I wouldn’t have been worried about three days on the run if we’d been up against the kind of beggarly house that didn’t have any connection to the College.
Which means we don’t have time to take it easy.
“Fear not,” I said. “I’d like to believe that I know a thing or two about dealing with magia.”
I was a servant, not a magus—but I was still a number-crunching munchkin to my core. I knew better than anyone that the tactics I didn’t want to run up against were also the tactics that would frustrate my opponents the most; I always kept contingencies to counter things that I found troubling.
After all, doing what one wanted while disallowing one’s enemies from doing the same was among the strongest strategies in any game, whether that be ehrengarde, a TRPG, or the sprawling game of life that used people as its pieces.

[Tips] Search magic refers to a mix of true and hedge magic that traces mystic footprints left behind by a mark, and exists in a variety of differing implementations. The simplest cantrips merely highlight particles of matching scent, but most either seek out a predetermined mark or use a catalyst to find the catalyst’s “owner.”
The masters of search magic, however, reverse engineer a target’s location by starting with evidence that the target physically existed to begin with. From there, they make semantic connections to approach their destination with certainty that no normal method can match.

Sleepless as the city may have been, the majority of the imperial capital’s denizens were tucked away as the Mother Goddess sailed on her gentle arc through the sky. In a dim, dreary room, a man heaved a heavy sigh. He was dressed in a thick, hooded robe of equally dark colors, plainly telling the world he was a magus.
“...Did it fail?” The woman facing him was the same one who had been chasing Cecilia on the rooftop. She’d changed into skinny pants and a white top, with a pelisse draped over her left shoulder so as not to offend any nobles with whom she might have an audience. Her hair, cut too short for the tastes of most, was neatly slicked back with a bit of oil.
“I’m afraid so.” On the table in front of the man lay the most up-to-date, comprehensive map of Berylin available. It spared no detail, not even the most vulnerable of military secrets; no normal person could hope to get their hands on something of this quality.
A pendulum dangled above the map, its bob a triangular pyramid cut from blue topaz. The name of the gem meant “that which is sought” in the southern tongues spoken near the sea, and the mystic formulae etched into the sides bolstered its inherent properties.
The magus had attempted to locate the girl via dowsing, a form of divination initially used to search for water and ores buried underground. In recent times, the thought of trespassing in the domain of deities who presided over the earth had put a pause on its original use—not even magia were willing to seriously anger the gods—but it was still commonly employed to find missing objects or persons.
“Was the catalyst I brought too weak?” the woman asked. “I should’ve known a single lock wouldn’t be enough...”
“No, it should have sufficed. Ordinarily, I require no catalyst at all to find somebody. For example...would you happen to know of anyone in the capital whose current location you can pinpoint?”
The knight pondered the magus’s question for a moment and then offered three names belonging to the men who’d joined her during the day. She had given them the night to rest on account of their strenuous search, so they could all be found in the servants’ quarters of her master’s estate.
“Mr. Karl is here, as is Mr. Lars...”
The man lifted his pendulum over the map, and it bent in gravity-defying ways to point at the very building the woman had envisioned her subordinates sleeping in.
“Ah, but it seems Mr. Luitpold is down in the low quarter...near the pubs, if I recall. I, too, paid these cheap dens of alcohol visits in my youth.”
That moron, the woman thought, holding back a click of her tongue.
A sudden shift in the pendulum’s angle directed their attention to the low-class bars the magus had mentioned, complete with a nearby red-light district.
The man’s skill was obvious. Of course, someone who knew whose house she served could have made an educated guess at the manor—her employer was just that famous. Anyone who hadn’t heard of him was sure to be a hick who spent their lives under a rock.
However, she knew her talented yet foolhardy subordinate well, and he was an ardent lover of liquor and women. It was easy to picture him ignoring her orders to get some rest; he had once coerced a young boy from a branch family into sneaking out to the red-light district with him so he could save on paying from his own pocket. Seeing an idiot like him sneak a drink to soothe his aching body was as sure as the roosters’ cry in the morning.
Engraving a mental note that she’d make him write up a report and do fifty laps around Berylin when they next met, the woman’s attention moved on to the wavering pendulum.
“But this,” the magus said, “is the young lady in question.”
“What in the world?”
Until now, the thread had been taut, pointing straight at a single location; now it began aimlessly tugging every which way. Every few seconds, it would stop in place for a moment before zipping away to a new spot. The places it pointed to had no rhyme or reason to them: it ventured outside the city walls on several occasions, and once it even came to rest directly on the imperial palace.
“Ordinarily, even a failed attempt won’t produce such erratic results. With my skills, I would say...at worst, the marker would restrict itself to a single district. Considering I have her hair, I was confident I’d be able to pinpoint the very building she is in.”
“Then what is this?”
“At the risk of repeating myself, may I ask if the young lady is versed in the magical arts?”
“That’s preposterous.”
The woman was in such disbelief that she let a minor faux pas slip under her breath, but the magus did not react in any way. Instead, he continued his questioning by asking if the Night Goddess provided any miracles that could impede his spell.
This time, she could not be so sure. Every member of the family she served paid tribute to the Mother Goddess—though the degree of their faith varied by person—and their retainers had all converted as a matter of course. Yet she personally knew little about miracles: they were gifts from divine to devout meant to protect the faithful, and the clergy of each religious order guarded their unparalleled rewards from the public eye. Modern churches placed great emphasis on written record, but the secrecy surrounding miracles meant that they alone were passed down via oral tradition.
Those unconnected to a church thus had no means of learning about its miracles. While most had a general idea of which gods had power over which domains, the technical details remained a blur. The woman didn’t know whether the religious leaders of old had wanted to avoid being used by statesmen for their powers or their gods had explicitly sworn them to confidence, but regardless, she was merely a lay churchgoer with no means of finding out.
The Night Goddess was said to lend Her strength primarily in the name of healing, protection, and guardianship; it was difficult to tell if hiding oneself fell under those categories. While the veil of night certainly helped conceal those in the shadows, Her true nature was the moonlight that offered solace within that darkness.
At an impasse, the woman had no choice but to answer that she didn’t know; the magus then stated that it was unlikely anyway.
“In which case,” he went on, “would you happen to know of any powerful connections she may have in the capital? Specifically, a magus or someone adjacent?”
“That also seems unlikely. My lady spends nearly all of her time praying atop Fullbright Hill, and her only friends within the city should be a handful of religious officials.”
Fullbright Hill was located in the southern reach of the Empire, near the mystic Frost Spirit’s Peaks. “Hill” was a misnomer: it was a mountain. Its name came from its gentle slope that stretched out for miles and miles, but its peak was the highest of all the holy mountains in the nation.
Legend had it that moonlight shone more brightly at the summit than any other place in the country, which was why followers of the Night Goddess had planted their head temple there. Peoples seeking protection from Her or Her believers then began gathering at the base of the mountain, giving rise to the churches and towns in the surrounding area.
Limited were the opportunities for a dedicated priest to leave such a location. Evangelist missions weren’t unheard of, but the girl they were searching for would never have been chosen to go on one. Barring her fellow believers, there was no way for her to have an acquaintance in the capital, let alone a friend.
The woman asked the aim of the magus’s questions. Catching the swinging pendulum, he answered that this result was anything but natural.
“Say, for example, that I cast this spell to search in a completely mistaken area, or to try and find something that doesn’t exist. The pendulum would not budge. On the other hand, even when tasked with searching for someone I haven’t met, whose name I only know by hearsay, and whose face is unimaginable to me, the marker will point somewhere, with enough mana and skill.”
“But that isn’t what happened. Which means?”
“We’ve been challenged to a counterspell war.” Confused by the unfamiliar turn of phrase, the woman asked the magus to explain, so he added, “We magia tend to fight magic with magic of our own.”
In essence, he was saying the girl had a mage or magus assisting her getaway.
“That’s absurd! My lady shouldn’t know anyone of the sort! She had no more than the clothes on her back—not even a coin purse—when she escaped!”
“Which makes it unlikely that she hired a mage... Pardon me asking, but is the young lady...well, how shall I put this? Is she blessed in manners of appearance?”
“I... Well, my bias as her loyal attendant aside, I believe her to be exceedingly attractive.”
“Then I suspect some troubled lad has fallen for her at first sight. Every boy has dreamed of saving a pretty damsel in distress at some point in their lives, you see.”
The magus slipped off the ring linked to the pendulum with a sigh and rolled up the map. Sifting through a drawer at his desk, he pulled out something that glimmered in the candlelight.
“The current reaction is that of the young lady’s presence being scattered all throughout town.”
As soon as she heard the word “scattered,” the girl’s servant lost all color in her expression. The only thought that had come to mind was her charge being cut into pieces and hidden away all around the city.
For reasons undisclosed, her lady was resilient to death, but she could still be physically destroyed, and her natural powers of regeneration could be delayed. The most brutal and horrific means of doing so would be to dismember her and carry off each piece to a different place.
“Rest assured, I do not mean that in a physical sense. Rather, the spell would have given no feedback at all had she been killed.”
“Th-That...is good to hear. If anything were to happen to her, my blood would skip past running cold and freeze solid.”
As he beckoned his pale-faced companion to relax, the magus took the lid off the shining silver thurible he’d fetched from the drawer. All the while, his mind cynically drifted to wonder whether the woman’s reaction was one of loyalty or self-preservation.
“If one were to put mystic pursuance into simple terms, it would be the art of scanning through the skein we call reality in search of a stubborn stain—that is, a person. Our ‘eyes’ are driven toward the most notable of blemishes, but a smattering of smudges made in a similar hue will cause our attention to wander.”
“What do you mean? Are you saying that a dense gathering of closely related family members might make the process more difficult?”
“That is one possibility. But more commonly, search spells catch traces left by the person themselves: fallen hairs or well-worn articles and the like.”
“Then what point is there to using magic?!”
“Of course, this is an issue encountered only by novices. As little as it may mean, I consider myself a specialist in the field, and my formulae reject the noise that lesser spells may snag on. However, the accuracy of my means is sure to drop when encountering decoys of stellar make.”
“Decoys?”
In response to her question, the magus raised his hand and began counting down examples: something soaked in blood, the most powerful mystic trail of all; a prized trinket that one carried around at all hours; a loose tooth, or any body part greater in importance than a single hair; or a body double specifically made to stand in for the person in question.
“A body double?” the woman repeated in awe.
“They’re employed by more nobles than one might expect. Having one’s location known can often lead to trouble, after all.”
The magus reached back into his desk to produce a mortar and pestle. He pinched a bit of ash from the thurible and placed it into the bowl, and then opened a tiny box, throwing in the bundle of hair found inside as well.
The warrior had procured that from her lady’s bed and comb. Though the girl inherently produced little waste on account of her people’s efficient metabolic processes, no amount of careful cleaning could eliminate her footprint entirely. While the woman considered her actions a terrible transgression, she’d rushed to collect as much as she could when the magus had informed her of its utility.
“‘Body doubles’ are simple charms,” the magus explained. “Take a slip of paper with an arcane formula, have the person write their name on it, and wet it with a few drops of blood. That will suffice to draw a great deal of mystic attention away from the target. Not only are they trivial to produce, but they are easy to carry around. I suspect a great many people have elected to employ them—not that they impede someone of my skill, of course.”
The man ground the hair and ash together. Though hair wasn’t usually something that could easily be broken up, the clump immediately crumbled into dust, combining with the ash to create a fine black powder.
“Paper substitutes are then often delivered to body doubles of the traditional kind to lend their disguises credence. They’re beyond common in this line of work, but there is an alternative that outstrips its deceptive capabilities.”
Tapping the bowl to accumulate all the powder in one spot, the magus placed it down and pulled a pipe out of his inner pocket. He gracefully opened the tobacco box on his desk and plucked out a few leaves from the countless varieties stuffed inside. After packing them in, he took a drag and they glowed red without a flame in sight.
“...Which would be?” the woman asked.
“A doll.”
He exhaled a cloud of smoke with no regard for the woman’s scrunching nose, and dumped the leaves into the thurible after finishing his first puff. The embers slowly spread into a fire that filled the chamber, producing a smoke with a curious scent. Finally, he poured the black powder from his mortar into the thurible, causing a massive pillar of flame to shoot straight up.
Not expecting the sudden flash, the woman covered her face and instinctively reached for her dagger; in the next moment, she realized the heat was gone. She looked up to see the fire pillar had been replaced with a dark smoke cloud hovering in one place. The cloud began to swirl above the thurible, eventually stretching itself into a new shape: that of a raven.
The bird fluttered its massive, smoky wings and landed on the desk; unbelievably, it began to preen itself.
“Be off.”
At its master’s order, the raven flew away in peculiarly lifelike fashion. Though it disappeared upon slamming headfirst into the door, it did not dissipate; instead, it slipped through the cracks in the frame.
“With this, we shall find her in a few moments’ time. Would you care for any tea while we wait?”
Placing down his pipe, the magus walked over to a cabinet in the corner of his room, pulled out a set of cups, and leisurely began preparing tea. Still dazed by the fantastical display, the woman had to pull herself together to politely accept his offer.
Instead of the usual red tea, he handed her an herbal blend made up of soaked dried leaves. The soothing fragrance helped the woman unwind after a long day of running around; his attention to detail even in softer matters heightened her opinion of him—it had been worth sending away his apprentice in search of a true professional.
After getting halfway through her cup, the woman looked up to ask the magus how long the process would take. Yet her eyes rose to see him frozen, teacup in hand, with a profoundly grave expression.
The man’s breathing was shallow, and he coughed violently as if some terrible pain had possessed him. The woman could not bring herself to call out to him, but the abnormality of his demeanor dragged her back out of the relaxation she’d finally attained.
Just as she regained enough wit to hurry to his side, he yelped in pain and threw his cup onto the floor. The teaware was clearly expensive and well used, and his carpet was equally as luxurious, but he didn’t care at all—he couldn’t. The magus was too busy clutching his chest in a desperate bid for air.
“Sir! Are you all right?! What’s happened?!”
“Agh! Aurgh! Hrgh...gah!”
She rushed to hold him as he writhed in agony, but his frantic dance was so violent that he pushed the trained warrior off and flung her back into her chair. He stumbled about, shattering his teacup underfoot and kicking the shards in every direction. Yet all his squirming did nothing to ease the pain, and he began frothing at the mouth...when an earsplitting noise erupted from within his desk.
“Grah?! Hah... Hah...”
The sound signaled the man’s emancipation from his torturous pain; he collapsed onto his knees with labored breath. His right hand continued to hold his breast tight, while his left clung to the table for purchase.
“Are you okay?! What in the world happened?!”
“Ugh... Is this...recoil?”
With the woman patting his back, the magus stumbled to his desk, fighting a coughing fit the whole way. He opened a drawer to pull out a clump of wood from its depths: a clump that had once been a doll made in his likeness.
“Recoil? Recoil from what?!”
“Within defensive...magic,” he heaved, “there exists...a subset of curses... Ugh... That attack anyone...trying to peer into a location...”
The doll had been a stand-in for the magus. It had been modeled closely after him and engraved with his name, and he’d carried it around with him for a considerable length of time to ensure it would make a compelling mystic substitute. In fact, it bore such a connotational resemblance to him that it posed a risk of its own: damage dealt to it could feed back to hurt him. But a long career spent ferreting out the lost and that which does not want to be found had convinced him the dangers were worth it.
Tonight, that assessment saved his life. Had this doll not exploded in his stead, his body would have taken the whole of the fatal attack.
He surmised that his seeking spell had snagged somewhere, earning the ire of whoever resided at the location. They then responded with a curse so lethal that it would not serve as a warning—its sole intent was to kill. The hex was close to the upper bound of human capability to withstand. This was a matter for the best of the best, grounds only meant to be trodden by those who had one foot out the door of mortality: the professors of the College.
“I apologize. It brings me great frustration and even greater shame to admit this...but your request is more than I am able to bear.”
“I... I see,” the woman said. “And are you sure you’ll be okay?”
“Worry not. I won’t die from this...but I humbly request to be relieved for the night.”
Although her mission was of the utmost urgency, she couldn’t whip the magus into working after seeing his condition; he was trying his best to seem healthy, but one glimpse at his complexion made it clear he was inches from death.
“O-Of course,” she said. “Please get some rest and take care of yourself.”
“Thank you very much for your benevolence... Forgive me, for I shall pen my master tomorrow morning.”
After being seen out of the wobbly-legged magus’s atelier, the woman entered the College elevator and began ruffling her hair in frustration. He’d been the best magus she personally knew. Finding someone that outstripped him would mean going through an intermediary within the clan, but the most influential were all at their personal estates preparing for the upcoming harvest in fall. It was too far removed from the political season for anyone notable to remain in the capital.
Those that remained were hardly any better than herself, and absolutely none had as much expertise as the collapsed magus. Of course, that didn’t include her employer, who would have been the most dependable help she could have asked for...if he weren’t in the midst of partaking in his favorite hobby. No matter how many messengers she sent to retrieve him, the man refused to respond.
Oh, how unimaginably blissful it would be for her to throw up her hands, exclaim, I tried my best! and collapse backward onto a fluffy bed. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be. While she was displeased to see her lady forced into an undesired position, she couldn’t ignore the plans of the main family. Few could survive without ties of kinship in this day and age.
No matter how exhausted she was, the retainer could not give in. More than anything else, she simply couldn’t stand the thought of her master wandering unknown lands alone; the appearance of an unknown mage only worsened her fear and confusion.
“My lady,” she whispered, “your Mechthild is coming. I beg of you, please be safe.”
Up, right, left, and down; the elevator’s wild swings in unthinkable directions made Mechthild dizzy, but she remained cool as she reached into her breast pocket for a small vial. She tore off the seal—including the warning label that stated only one was to be administered per day.
One sip of the mysterious drug sufficed to banish drowsiness, but she downed the entire bottle in one gulp. This was her third vial of the day, and she had two left; they would no doubt be gone by sunrise too, but insomnia, minor paralysis, and complaints from the mage who’d written the prescription were a price she’d gladly pay for her charge’s safe return.
The instant the elevator dinged, Mechthild squeezed herself past the slowly opening gate and bolted out. At the same time, the elevator beside hers began to move.
Though it was odd for someone to be around at this hour, she ignored it and tore through the empty Krahenschanze halls to burst through the front gates, ordering the night watchman to prepare her a horse.
Her first order of business would be to return to the palace and hear the imperial guard’s report. From there, she’d need to visit the head of the city guard; then she’d return to the manor to organize her own men, and...the list kept going on.
Steeling herself for a long night, the woman looked up at the heavens. Her master’s object of worship had sailed over half Her nightly course, and she offered the moon a silent prayer.
May my brave lady be safe.
Whether the Goddess above knew the praying servant or the runaway master mattered not; Her heavenly form remained silent, bathing the lands below in the clear glow of night.

Tprg4.13

Knowing that Miss Celia was a vampire did little to improve our journey home.
You see, no amount of reassurance that she wouldn’t die or that she was fine with being injured could convince me to let a young lady go off and hurt herself. This wasn’t even something society expected of me: I couldn’t call myself a man if I did. That, and I wasn’t keen on seeing her resurrect for a second time.
Laugh at me for being old-fashioned if you’d like, but I fit in quite well with the times here in the Empire. Besides, as fragile as we mensch were, I still had my pride as a trained warrior.
Now, I’ll admit that had she been a PC whose player I could talk to, I would have happily sent her along as a low-tech mine detector to ensure the party’s safety. Even the cruelest orders could bait out a laugh at the table, and I’d enjoyed acting out plenty of equally crazed scenarios in the past; barbarism was the spice that gave our humor kick, and lunacy was our palate cleanser in between meals.
However, I was not at my old table laughing at crimes against humanity and crunching numbers to the point of absurdity: having lived so long as Erich that I could no longer internalize any other identity, I couldn’t overlook danger for efficiency’s sake alone.
Of course, I was still willing to shoulder risks myself and had less than zero qualms about letting someone as overpowered and morally bankrupt as Lady Agrippina throw herself into danger, but Miss Celia was off the table. Shriveled up as it was, my heart wouldn’t let me laugh at a kind and sheltered lady running headfirst into death.
My old tablemates were sure to smirk at how soft I’d gotten if they were to see me, but I didn’t care. This was my life, and I was going to play my role as I saw fit.
After a lot of huffing and puffing about how she wanted to lead the way, we managed to convince her to stay in the middle. I was the vanguard and Mika was tasked with keeping an eye out from the back, just like how we’d started.
To reiterate, the tunnels beneath the Mage’s Corridor were precarious to navigate. Now that we knew criminals could be lurking around any corner, we needed to be extra vigilant. This was different from my peaceful quests from the College in every way; the worst part of feeding slimes was just the humidity.
“I won’t die no matter what kind of foulness crosses our path, you know...”
“Please,” I begged. “We’ll be okay, so please just stay behind me.”
“We just don’t want to see our friend start vomiting rainbows, Celia.”
“F-Friend,” she echoed.
Leaving her to her moment, I threw all carelessness to the wayside and decided to call for fey support once more. Owing Ursula anything terrified me, but it was better than being attacked for having visible light out. I borrowed the same wondrous night vision she’d lent me in Helga’s manor and marveled again at how convenient it was. These tunnels usually required a torch to see more than a step or two away, but now it felt as if I were walking around outside at high noon.
It would have been nice to call for Lottie too, but I couldn’t reach her; a different alf ruled the stale air down here. Despite presiding over a concept as nebulous as wind, I supposed it was only fair that she couldn’t meddle in a place where air only circulated at open exits. It would be like asking an open-ocean sailor to navigate a muddy stream on an unfamiliar rivercraft. I wasn’t about to be the sort of idiot that said, “They’re both boats, aren’t they?”
With my vision accounted for, I picked up a random rat scurrying around with an Unseen Hand. The vermin that survived in spite of the sewer keepers’ constant patrol were fat and vicious; I suspected the city’s high population meant they had a lot to eat.
We didn’t have to worry about dog-sized rats coming after our lives or anything, since those had been exterminated years and years ago—which, in a horrific twist, meant that they’d actually existed at some point—but smaller rats could still break skin with a bite and carried all manner of pestilence. They were a legitimate danger to our safety.
So why capture one, you might ask. The answer was that I needed a canary: by constantly having an outstretched Hand carrying a rodent in front of me, I could detect any clouds of death ahead of time.
I refused to breathe in any aerosolized versions of the illicit substances imprudent mages flushed down here. Paying a visit to the iatrurge because I’d come down with the prismatic flux, like Mika had said, was not on my itinerary.
I grabbed the rat’s snout to shut up its annoying squeaking and got walking. After a decent while of gingerly tiptoeing and looking out for any reject homunculi that might await, we managed to find a familiar accessway to the surface.
Apparently, there weren’t any morons who’d decided to zap the ethics out of their brains and let it dribble out of their noses today. What a thing to be thankful for; honestly, I’d been steeling myself for an encounter with a giant white alligator or something with how my day had gone.
“Is this our destination?” Miss Celia asked.
“It is,” I answered. “My lodging is on the street just above us.”
I let the rat go as thanks for its honorable service and waved over the other two, who had been following at a distance. As curious as ever, I had to stop Miss Celia from reaching for the ladder. Please just let me lead the way...
“Good gods,” Mika said, “I never thought this dingy ladder would look so dazzling... Man, I want a bath.”
“I completely agree,” I sighed. “Too bad the bathhouses are all closed at this hour. We’ll have to make do with a bucket of water.”
“It’ll do. I just want to get rid of this awful feeling of filth that spells can’t solve.”
I heard my friend groan as I began climbing. The Clean spell was amazing to be sure, but it didn’t induce the feeling of cleanliness. Having been dunked into water from head to toe, I really wanted a bath. Spring was coming to a close, but tonight’s episode had left me chilled to my core.
“Hrrgh... Got it.”
But after sliding the heavy manhole out of the way, my house was right there. A towel and a warm tub of water would go a long way, and I could cozy up afterward with a cup of red tea.
“...Dear Brother?”
“Wha— Elisa?!”
I poked my head above ground, only to find my beloved baby sister sitting at my doorstep, dressed up in her finest clothes...

[Tips] The slime-feeding request regularly posted on the College’s job bulletin only entails work in relatively safe portions of the sewers. The Mage’s Corridor is handled by specialist magia who have means of defending themselves, and most never travel to the area; Erich is only familiar with the area because it serves as a shortcut to his destinations.

Elisa had been in a good mood lately. Her master had vanished just as suddenly as she’d appeared, which meant she could spend more time with her beloved brother. Of course, she still felt lonely without her Mama and Papa, her brothers and new sister, and all the friends she’d left behind back home. But so long as her dear brother Erich was with her, Elisa could put up with it. When he patted her head with his rough, warm hand, she felt as cozy as when she used to take naps under the midday sun.
That very same brother had been giving her even more attention than usual ever since her master disappeared. When she tried on the clothes that the disgus— scary see-through lady gave her, he clapped until his hands were sore. He even rewarded her by taking her outside to play, and that was a lot of fun.
Elisa could remember the day they’d gone to see the knights marching in sparkly armor like it was yesterday. Until then, she had never understood why her master forced her to keep a diary for tradition’s sake; now she finally had memories she wanted to preserve in written words.
After all, it was the first day Elisa met someone new since coming to the capital. The black-haired boy—her brother explained later that he wasn’t always a boy—that Erich introduced her to was a bit scary at first, but she warmed up to him as they played.
While he was more reserved than her other brothers back home had been, he was very nice. After spending more time with him, Elisa could tell that he wasn’t an enemy—to her and her precious Erich both.
To tell the whole truth, Elisa had difficulty understanding him at first. Fey conceptions of life differ wildly from those of every other living thing. Even the eternal methuselah and vampires are remarkably mortal compared with creatures whose intuitive control over magic leaves them just shy of embodying incomprehensible concepts.
Having the soul of a living phenomenon, Elisa commanded an ability she’d never told anyone about: she could see a person’s inner self.
That was why she was so attached to her family; they had shown her nothing but affection. They had given her the love and serenity that the alf she had once been had craved to the point of throwing her self away.
Yet she had trouble understanding Mika. Tivisco were newcomers to the Empire, and she had never encountered one, even before she’d been reborn. Their emotions were a complicated blur: she saw the hues of a boy, the pigments of a girl, and the dizzying mix that resulted when they joined. They were all sincerely a part of them, but each was hidden away—a paint swirled into water that refused to settle into a flat color, instead creating a rainbow whirlpool.
The young changeling’s ego was not yet ready to wrap itself around a mind that refused to conform to monochromatic harmony. Although she was positive that Mika’s sentiments were affectionate, their contour was more difficult to navigate than the involutions of an unbroken geode.
Friendship, love, envy, attachment, joy, and...craving? Whatever they were, Mika’s threefold self defied Elisa’s understanding. It was too confusing that only one seemed to surface at any given time, despite the underlying soul remaining the same ineffable, iridescent anchor.
Even knowing that Mika was an honest ally of her brother’s, Elisa didn’t know how to get along with them. She had no reservations against a friendship like the ones she’d read about in books. They were already friends with her brother, and she had become quite fond of them during the parade.
The children in Konigstuhl had scared Elisa. Hesitation was foreign to them, as was deep thought; they took it for granted that everyone could do what they could, and that everyone thought as they thought. No matter how normal that may be for children yet to learn to think beyond themselves, it had terrified the frail girl.
Mika was a different story. They were thoughtful and always paid attention to the people they were with; Elisa didn’t need to peek into their soul to see that.
So, on a personal level, she didn’t mind being friends with them. Going outside to play together sounded fun, and she suspected she’d enjoy sharing a cup of tea at home as well. Though she had only ever been dressed up by others until now, she’d read in stories that girls would buy clothes in each other’s company as a pastime—perhaps they could try that together if their schedules aligned.
But one thing held Elisa back: Mika’s intricate emotions concerning Erich. What was it that they wanted from him? No amount of pondering could produce an answer, even with her profound fey intuition.
The alfish merkwelt diverged from mensch’s as a matter of course, but also from those of all sentient life. Time’s passage was inscrutable to them, but the most private feelings were clear and concrete. Indeed, those like Ursula who appreciated the awkward and roundabout expressions of sentiment that mensch employed were few and far between.
For most fairies, affection spanned the range of love, attachment, possessiveness, and sensuality. Whereas humanity had created rigid boundaries to preserve peace and order, the alfar chose not to—nay, they could not. Such urges were why they snatched away their favorite children to join them in a merry dance lit by a never-setting twilight, hoping to eventually turn them into one of their own.
These heinous “pranks” were not the product of mortal malice. Anyone with the slightest semblance of common sense knew the unhappiness of a child being torn away from their home—even the aloof methuselah could at least reason it out logically—but alfar were wholly ignorant. Rather, they kidnapped children to show them their version of happiness.
For all the poets who had sung of the complexities of love, their words only rang truer when considering the love of alfar. Theirs was impossible to organize—if there was any need at all. How could we ever put to words the passions of beings who existed wholly for their own sweet sakes, drifting through life on no more than a whim?
Humanity was unfit to study what the alfar intuited as love, and not even a changeling making her calculations through a mensch brain could hope to crack the code.
Though a mensch’s mind and an alf’s ego had melded to create Elisa, the process was too imperfect for her to fully reflect. In fact, her relatively long life had let her experience human love and mortal values that only deepened her confusion. She had gone out of her way to mix two mutually exclusive essences.
The discrepancy between fey soul and mortal shell was not the only reason changelings were considered unnatural. The inner struggle between human ethics and alfish instinct caused a breakdown so great that it ruined the body and soul, generally cutting their lives short.
Yet despite living in a constant mental state of utter chaos, Elisa found Mika’s condition more perplexing. Really, what did they want out of their relationship with Erich?
Margit had been easy. Her romantic affections had been so overt that even a five-year-old Elisa had been able to envision the arachne’s hope for the future: she wanted to marry, start a family together, and live belonging to each other until the day they died. The huntress dreamed of a tried-and-true ending, passed down since the dawn of time. Some might even consider her desires morally righteous (setting aside the issue of whether the average married couple lived up to this ideal).
Elisa hated Margit—hated her because the arachne wanted to steal away her dear brother’s number one spot. Even if Margit failed, the mensch part of Elisa’s heart knew that the child they produced would certainly succeed. Erich loved to ramble on about how his sister was the cutest girl in the whole wide world; Elisa had no intentions of giving up the title.
Agrippina was also easy. That thing was plenty evil, even by Elisa’s sensibilities, and their current give-and-take relationship changed nothing about her opinion. However, the methuselah was also clearly uninterested in disrupting the siblings’ relationship in a way that Elisa feared.
Put simply, her master’s heart was so full of ill will that she was ironically pure. Her passions ran so deeply green they were nearly black, only ever concerned with how to maximize her own pleasure. While it was impossible to guess what she was thinking, knowing her overarching goals made her easy to handle.
Elisa was anything but fond of the danger she exposed Erich to as his teacher and employer, but so long as she didn’t threaten her position, the changeling figured that there were ways to deal with her.
But what about Mika?
When male, Mika had, for the most part, exhibited trust and camaraderie. His bond with Erich had proved unshakable by an outside force; Elisa wasn’t sure, but she thought it was probably the feeling epitomized in the term “brothers-in-arms.” If that had been the whole of it, Elisa would have been happy to heed Erich’s advice: it would have taken some time, but she could eventually come to treat him like yet another brother.
The problem was the other two genders wrapped up inside of Mika. Had each gender assumed a separate personality that only appeared with the corresponding sex, Elisa would have been content to treat each as a different person. But a tivisco was only ever themselves, and they were not three identities sharing the same body.
The soul that lay beneath was a single, unified individual, and the differing genders were akin to clothes that they put on to show the world. Garments did not make the person, but each article of clothing came with a valence, a significance that played off all the other parts in the ensemble.
On this point, Erich gave the matter little thought and internalized Mika’s condition as an underlying personality that swapped between three distinct phases. Elisa saw something more. They were like an art piece composed of three different paints. Although the carefully placed pigments seemed discrete at first glance, the colors were bound to blend at the edges so long as they touched in any way. This delicate mixture was the root of her confusion.
When all was said and done, what did Mika want? Elisa was too incomplete as an alf and too inexperienced as a mensch; the fragmented girl could find no answer. Indeed, the thought that Mika did not know the answer themselves would take yet more time and experience for her to consider.
Still, Elisa had no qualms saying that Mika was kind. Just once, they’d even helped her study. Following that tutoring session in the College library, Erich had begun accompanying Elisa when she studied—something she was very grateful for.
The pile of books her master had assigned was full of boring and hard palatial writing, but Erich brought stories that were much easier. Those books were funny and weird—her brother had said the word she was looking for was “emotional”—and they took turns reading; when she did a good job, he would praise her.
One accomplishment and he’d smile; two and he’d pat her head; three and he’d hug her. For the first time, Elisa thought to herself that it might be nice to get better at things. The thought of what he’d do after four, or five, or six threatened to send her beating heart right out of her chest.
These days were so blissful that she didn’t even care about the meandering thoughts clouding her relationship with Mika. She woke up every day with her dear brother at her side, they enjoyed breakfast together without her master getting in the way, and then they studied together after they were done. He still had to leave a lot to do errands, but they spent much, much more time together than before.
Elisa wished her master would never come back. She would probably do something terrible with her usual pristine smile if she found out, but the young girl couldn’t help it.
And today was another peaceful day without her.
After Elisa finished her morning studies, her brother let her ride the horsies for a little bit. The black horsie named Polydeukes was much bigger than Holter was at home, but he was just as nice; he walked around really slowly so that she could have fun. The beautiful world around her was shimmering so vividly that just getting a higher view atop the saddle made it seem like the whole world had changed.
At noon, Elisa’s dear brother had to go to work, but it was okay because he was going to come back in the evening. So, she waited eagerly.
She waited very, very eagerly.
But then the sun started going down and her brother wasn’t back yet and then it sank all the way and he still wasn’t back and she was so so so sad...
So Elisa decided to go find him. Because her brother was always doing something dangerous. He was always using dangerous tools, and learning dangerous magic, and running into danger with a smile. That’s why Elisa had to go find him.
Elisa knew where her dear brother lived. He’d brought her there a few times, and she was friends with the nice gray lady that took care of him. The gray lady told her a lot of stories about him and was really nice, so she liked her. She was way better than the silver moth meanie that just came to brag all the time.
Her dear brother would be so lost without her, she thought. She put on the clothes he’d praised her for the most—she’d gotten this snow-white blouse and black corset skirt on her first day in Berylin—and decided to go to his house and find him.
Elisa packed a lot of gifts: a can of tea leaves that her lazy master stashed in her room, a small pouch of pastries, and even some grown-up things, like a bottle of wine and a wedge of cheese that made her nose scrunch up.
It was going to be okay: her master just bought things at random and stashed them away, so she would never notice a bottle or two missing. Elisa couldn’t read the name on the wine label, but it was bright red and very pretty, so she was sure her dear brother would love it. And there was no doubt in her mind that he’d mix a little bit with plenty of honey and water so that she could try some too.
Elisa asked her floating friends to help her braid her hair and then set out with the basket full of goodies in one hand, but her brother wasn’t home. She had waded through a dizzying crowd of people and fought the wooziness that came with the noise around town, but he wasn’t home.
She was so sad that she almost cried. The friends that had come with her cheered her up and the nice gray lady came out to check on her, so she didn’t. But she was still very sad.
What would she do if he never came home? She hadn’t become a mage that could protect him yet...
Elisa was so, so, so anxious. But just when she felt like she couldn’t hold back her tears any longer, her dear brother came back to her. For some reason, he came out of a hole in the street in front of his home, and was looking at her mysteriously.
“Did you come all this way alone?!”
Her dear brother jumped out of the hole in a worried panic and scooped Elisa into his arms. She was so happy that she didn’t even ask why he wasn’t wearing a shirt; the urge to cry vanished and she felt like the sun had come up even though it was midnight. He was warm and gentle. If joy had a color, it would be his pretty hair; if fun had a color, it would be his twinkly eyes...
And he himself was happiness.
“Um... May I come out?”
Someone else peeked their head out from the hole. She had wet black hair and was wearing the shirt her dear brother always wore. Elisa didn’t know what the jewelry dangling from her neck was, but she had a terrible feeling about it.
This woman, too, was gold...but not the golden joy that her brother brought. No, she was the glow of the half-moon floating high in the sky—just like the image clearly etched into her gleaming medallion.
They were similar, but different. She was not joy; she was not fun; she was certainly not happiness. Hers was a colder hue.
The color scared Elisa. Her chest squeezed up as tightly as the night she found out they were tearing her away from home. It was as if someone had gripped her heart and was trying to squish it so it would never beat again.
All Elisa could do was cling tight to her brother as she stared at the frightening girl soaked in lunar glow.

[Tips] Imperial climate is best suited to producing sweet white wines, but heavier reds are preferred to the Empire’s west. The bottles produced in royal wineries are known as “highborn blood” in Seinian, and just one can cost as much as an entire mansion.
You know, when it comes down to it, I was a single-tasker at heart. This might ring hollow coming from someone with fancy Independent Processing, but I believed that casting multiple spells and solving multiple problems were fundamentally different beasts.
What I’m trying to say is that there wasn’t the slightest chance that I could handle a double-booking of my sister’s moodiness and a damsel in distress. For the love of all that’s good, GM, don’t just toss them into the same session out of laziness.
Clearing the nasty smirks of the powers that be out of my head, we slipped into my home and decided to start by fixing up our attire. I couldn’t loiter about half naked forever, and that was doubly true for Miss Celia’s coquettish legs peeking out for the world to see.
“I’m sorry, Elisa. Be good and sit still for a minute. We’ll all catch colds if we stay in these clothes.”
“...Yes, Dear Brother. But whatever were you doing?”
“It’s a long story... A long, long story.”
I fled up to the second floor to break free from Elisa’s accusatory stare. Ever since our big discussion—the “why do you do scary things” one—she’d begun acting overprotective. Thank goodness I hadn’t suffered any visible injuries during my scuffle with the underground bandits; if she’d clung to me in tears again, I would have had to grovel on the floor for mercy.
Internally thanking Miss Celia for ensuring a woundless battle, I pulled out three sets of normal clothes from my drawer. As an aside, the luxurious and oh-so-unique threads given to me by a certain pervert were stashed away at the madam’s laboratory. There were no convenient bug repellants in this day and age, so I didn’t want to store fabrics that fine in a wardrobe that didn’t so much as have a mystic seal. The Ashen Fraulein could maybe handle it, but I didn’t want to add more to her plate.
Not that I would have lent Mika and Miss Celia those costumes had they been here, of course—though I couldn’t deny that I often thought they’d suit my old chum more than me during my fitting-room escapades.
...Wait a second. Properly laundered as they were, I realized it might be uncouth of me to loan out my boxers. While Mika almost certainly wouldn’t care—they generally chose to wear masculine clothes when agender anyway—offering them to Miss Celia could constitute sexual harassment.
However, the culture of undergarments was remarkably advanced in the Empire, and many women’s underwear were similar to what I’d seen on modern Earth. Having her wear clothes without any would be poor form.
But, again, my gut morals told me it was probably wrong to give her my own underpants. Ah, but without anything, the pants would chafe, and...
Thunk. I turned around to see a pail of steaming water atop my writing desk. Slightly on the hotter side, the water carried the aroma of a floating herb bundle throughout the room as it waited to be used.
What was more, a set of unfamiliar clothes lay folded beside it: women’s underwear. The traditional set of a nightgown and shorts looked like they were woven with a mystery textile that was softer than silk. Obviously, these didn’t originate from my room; I wouldn’t own something like this, and I didn’t have any women in my life who’d forget them after an overnight stay.
“Ashen Fraulein?” I called.
No response. I had yet to ever hear the silkie of few words speak, but today’s silence seemed a bit different. She was being as helpful as ever, but I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d done something to offend her; she usually never made a sound during her chores. Perhaps the noise was simply to notify me of the bucket’s appearance, but I had a feeling that I’d done something to get on her bad side.
Still, she wasn’t the type to throw a fit over my inviting a girl over, and Miss Celia was the pinnacle of good manners; I couldn’t imagine she’d broken the rules of etiquette horribly enough to upset my housekeeper in this short time. Miss Celia was the sort of upstanding lady to honor me as the lord of the house and politely ask me for permission to take a seat, despite my low birth.
Regardless, I didn’t have the time to dwell over my speechless housemate’s mood, so I said my thanks and headed downstairs. My apology to the Ashen Fraulein would have to wait until I could swipe some top-grade cream from Lady Agrippina’s atelier.
“Miss Celia,” I called. “A change of clothes is waiting for you upstairs. Please help yourself.”
“Truly? Oh, but Erich, I couldn’t sully your clothes like that.”
“No need to worry. There’s also a bucket of water to wipe yourself with.”
“My!” she exclaimed, gently pressing her hands together. As someone whose only contacts were country bumpkins and total scoundrels, her genteel mannerisms were new and refreshing.
Miss Celia skipped up the stairs on light feet, and her excitement at the thought of being able to clean up was apparent in the ring of her steps; she had felt just as icky as we had. Much like how my hopeless employer still had to sweat, immortality did nothing to wick away cloying humidity.
“Let’s get changed too, Mika. We’re total messes.”
“Honestly. By the way...I got scared when this bucket showed up out of nowhere. Is this her doing?”
They pointed at the dining table—by the way, I’d painstakingly repaired the legs to return it to its former glory—where a large tub was seated. Round slices of dried citrus floated in place of the herbs found upstairs, giving it a pleasantly sour odor. Citrus was a perfectly fine fragrance for men to wear; it could be a bit risqué when dealing with demihuman races with sensitive noses, but this much would be fine wherever we went.
The tub came with towels to dry ourselves with afterward, and even a comb. I was beyond thankful; my dip into rainwater had left my hair strewn with tiny particles of grit. It was itchy and painful, but I couldn’t scratch at it without damaging my hair; I’d been in quite a bind.
Elisa kindly turned to face the wall, so we stripped down without any reservations. Having grown up in small, rural households, we didn’t even mind undressing in front of members of the opposite sex; it wasn’t like anyone had cared when we took steam baths or played in the river.
We made sure to cast Clean on ourselves first, and then began wiping our bodies down with wet cloths to get rid of the discomfort. It wasn’t anywhere close to a real bath, but the deliverance from the dank hell we’d suffered made it every bit as enjoyable.
Magic had dispelled most of the sand from my head as well, but the densely packed nature of my hair made it impossible to get everything in one cast. As I contemplated my options, Mika pulled out a chair and waved me over.
“Allow me to rinse your hair, old pal. I didn’t swim and my hair isn’t that long, so I feel fine, but I’m sure the same can’t be said for you.”
“Are you sure?”
“If only you’ll grant me the honor of brushing against your dazzling locks.”
My old chum’s Prince Charming line painted my cheeks red. Man, good looks are so unfair. After all, the only thing Mika had to do to turn our pretentious game of theatrics into a real heartthrob moment was fix their posture a tiny bit.
“I wanna—oh! Um... I would like to as well! Please, Dear Brother?”
And so, my enthusiastic little sister joined in and the two of them began washing my head. I untied my hair and sat down, leaning back over the edge of the pail. While it was similar to what one might see at a beauty salon, the chair in use unfortunately did not have a backrest; I had to carry most of my body weight with my abs alone. My daily training meant I could manage, but this was shaping up to be a good workout.
Mika and Elisa splashed on warm water, running their fingers through my hair to clean out the dirt. I did the same thing every time I bathed, but having twenty foreign digits do it in my stead was indescribably relaxing. I’d been getting sick of my long locks, but the two of them massaged my scalp like they were handling delicate glassware.
“You two don’t have to be so gentle, you know. A man’s hair is tough.”
“Don’t say that,” Mika said. “We can’t just carelessly yank on something as magnificently kept as this, now can we?”
“That’s right,” Elisa agreed. “Your hair is nicer to touch than Lady Leizniz’s clothes, Dear Brother. I’ll be extra careful while I’m washing it!”
The pair huffed in unison, and I gave up and left them to it. They were doing this out of goodwill; I wasn’t going to rudely demand they do it my way.
I hadn’t gotten a haircut since I left Konigstuhl. What had started as a means of getting on the alfar’s good side now left me with hair past my shoulders and down to the small of my back; it was getting to the point where I wanted to trim it down. The problem was that everyone I knew save for Lady Agrippina was sure to throw all manner of fuss my way if I did.
But it’s so annoying... It’s hot and heavy, and as you can see, it’s a pain to clean.
“All righty,” Mika said. “Nice and clean. Sit up so we can dry you off.”
“No, I’m fine. I’ll just use a spell to—”
“Dear Brother, you can’t! You always do the same for Master! I thought you said drying it by hand makes it prettier!”
“Well, yeah, she’s a noblewoman and I’m her servant.”
Alas, my logic did not get through to them, and the duo went through a stack of towels to dry my hair.
I wondered why Mika seemed so much more forceful than usual, but figured that they were probably throwing themselves into this boring everyday task in order to quell the jumpiness of our recent battle. It made sense, since this marked only the second time they’d experienced life-or-death combat. Coping like this was leagues better than mechanically seeking out sex or alcohol, so I was content to let them do as they pleased.
Rather, I was the odd one out for being able to clap my hands and instantly put every fight behind me without a care in the world. I had a good explanation for it: my brain was primed to interpret the shift from combat to daily life as a scene transition, a side effect of my TRPG-inspired blessing. Still, I couldn’t deny that my behavior was strange.
Sir Lambert had once said that the ability to switch between a state of relaxation and emergency was a sign of budding talent, but I didn’t want to be too talented. While Mika never found it eerie on account of our strong friendship, anyone else would have expelled me from their party. I made a mental note to be careful going forward; I’d fake it if I had to.
That said, I was only at ease because I’d secured a win without having to kill anyone. There was a real chance that I’d only be able to keep up my cool demeanor as long as I could still ride out fights without trying.
“Phew. Thank you very much.”
My creaky staircase and the young lady walking down it pulled me out of my wandering thoughts. She’d tied her pitch-black hair into a braid that flowed nicely behind her, uncovering a smooth forehead in the front. The hairstyle would have paired well with a ballroom gown, but sadly her current attire was a men’s set of peasant clothing too big for her.
“It isn’t much,” I said. “Apologies for the meager clothes.”
“They aren’t meager at all. In the Circle Immaculate, our uniforms are often made of hemp or cotton. Besides, I’ve never cross-dressed before, so I’m finding this rather enjoyable.”
Miss Celia covered her lips to hide a befittingly upper-class smile, but her animated excitement was closer to that of a child. It seemed she meant every word.
“More pertinently,” she said, sitting in a nearby chair, “you all seem to be having fun.”
I cocked my head in confusion, and she pointed behind me with an elegant hand gesture.
“Hey, quit moving, Erich!”
“Um, M-Mika, please hold on to that part tight!”
I tried to turn around, but my hair pulled me back. I didn’t even have time to appreciate my sister adorably stammering over Mika’s name without honorifics.
“Wait... What are you two doing?”
“Well,” Mika said, “we went through the trouble of prettying up your hair, so we figured we may as well pretty you up even more with a nice braid.”
“It’ll get all out of shape if you move,” Elisa said. “It has to be symmetrical to be pretty!”
“What do you mean you ‘may as well’?!”
Why does every single person I know insist on toying with my head?!
Alas, I didn’t have it in me to interrupt my best friend and beloved sister’s fun. All I could do was sit and endure the awkwardness while Miss Celia watched and smiled from a distance.

Tprg4.12

Urgh, I can’t focus for long enough to churn out a spell! The lack of air was dulling my brain to the point where I couldn’t summon the Unseen Hands I’d casually thrown around like real appendages... No, I’ll make one through sheer grit, dammit!
If I didn’t get this guy off of me, the slime would catch us and melt us to the bone. I’d probably drown before then, but I refused to die like this. Wait a second. This asshole is trying to cut corners by pushing me down into the slime!
As if I’d let you! I racked my brain for the most painful place I could target... Here!
A transient moment of concentration let me scramble together a single Unseen Hand that cut through the water and plunged into the merman’s body. I jammed my arcane fingers into his gills before clamping down and twisting with all my might.
His grip loosened up. Knowing that this was my last chance, I frantically squirmed free as he put a hand up to his neck in pain. I fled from the slime now nipping at my toes and breached the surface.
The air was delicious—as sublime as the first gulp of water I’d taken after conquering the undead swordsman’s ichor maze.
“Erich, hurry!”
“Please make haste! It’s almost here!”
I didn’t even get a moment to savor the taste of air; I paddled toward them like mad. Grabbing on to the staircase, I dredged my heavy, breathless body out of the water. My soaked hair clinging to my face was an infuriating distraction.
I thanked the heavens that the water could only rise so high. Climbing stairs was exhausting, but it was better than having to climb up the pipes in a panic.
Just as I rose onto the final step, I heard another splash; this time, I was ready to react. The merman shot out of the water like a flying fish, aiming to land a hit right in my side. His eyes were bloodshot and the injury in his gill left him drooling red.
Why?! Why do you insist on trying to kill me?! You could’ve just waited for us to get to safety and sneaked out before the slime got here to survive!
Mika started preparing something with the walls around the same time I began weaving a Hand to intercept him...but there was someone else who’d started moving before us.
“No!”
Miss Cecilia threw herself from the alcove and sacked the merman out of the air on his path to me.
“What?!”
“No way!”
Tangled together, the two of them tumbled through the air and dove into the water. They did not instantly melt, but their shadows sank, pulled down by gravity, until they disappeared into the deeper layer that sat beneath. One last bubble floated to the surface and popped, leaving its originator behind.
“Why...”
Strength abandoned me, and I couldn’t so much as tell if I was actually standing on the stairs. I mechanically moved my numb legs and took a seat at the edge of the pipe, turning to face the water; Miss Cecilia was not there.
I thought it had to be some sort of mistake—an illusion. Mika and I could have handled it; surely, we would have.
Though, to tell the truth, my lack of breath had left my spellcasting shaky, and Mika’s sideways wall-pillar probably wouldn’t have caught the full-speed merman in time. I knew that, but... But this?
Mika collapsed onto their knees and punched the ground. They stared into the water with dilated pupils, unblinking, with drool dripping from their agape mouth. Their disbelief was as terrible as mine.
We had met her today; saved her on a whimsical conviction; and ran off with her without knowing a single detail. Yet the fact that we had failed to save her was unbelievable.
I was stupefied—there was no other word for it. I cradled my head and asked myself why, over and over again. We were at the end of the end—the final step of the final hurdle—so why? Why?! How did this...
A sloshing sound interrupted my thoughts. Someone had stepped on a stair.
Could it be? No, that’s preposterous.
I couldn’t so much as convince myself to look up, but then the second footstep, and the third, rang out in succession. I was not imagining the sounds.
Very slowly, I began to raise my head. First, I saw feet: they had been thoroughly charred, exposing raw bone to the air. My gaze continued to rise and I saw tattered cloth, more hole than not, barely clinging to whatever flesh was left. Her abdomen was all but gone, and I had a clear, painful view of her internal organs.
Her beautiful chestnut hair and deep burgundy eyes had melted away. She was too horrific to cast eyes upon, and I wouldn’t have even recognized her had the Night Goddess’s medallion not survived to hang from her neck.
“Ce...cilia...?”
In kind terms, her current state was an atrocity. I only managed to squeak out her name; Mika swallowed their breath and had collapsed once more from their knees onto their rear.
“Oh... Oh no... No, this is terrible. W-We need to find a healer...” Mika put their hands on the floor in an attempt to push themselves to their feet. I didn’t know whether it was the slick ground or a general state of shock, but they failed and crashed hard into the metal. They made another attempt, but their inability to process the reality we faced had robbed them of their motor functions.
“Ehh...righ...”
The meat of her neck had been torn away to the brink of severing, and the sounds leaking out from it were... I think it was my name. She was calling for help: pleading for me to save her—to not let her die.
Oh, what do I do? Lady Agrippina—where is Lady Agrippina? If anyone, maybe she can do something...
“Aghhm... Ohhh... Khay...”
She reached me before I could make a single mindful movement. Her fingers had been reduced to exposed bone with gooey flesh stubbornly clinging on, but she still raised her hand to run them across my cheek.
“Aghm... Aye... I’m...okay.”
The damage should have been fatal, but my desires must have conjured up a hallucination, because her indecipherable groaning was turning back into regular speech. The gluey bones brushing against my face gained definition and rediscovered their heat.
At last, I realized that I was not dreaming. Her disfigured flesh fell off before my eyes, and her crimson wounds bubbled with muscles that knit her body back together, packaged under a new layer of vivacious skin. She had already been so fair that I had wondered if she’d ever set foot in the sun, but now her complexion was paler still, bordering on a bluish-white that made me question whether she was alive at all.
Fresh eyeballs pushed out their crumbling predecessors; the brilliant red of pigeon blood stared right back at me.
As her skin reclaimed territory on her charmingly round face, a full head of hair sprouted: not chestnut, but rather the hue of the gentle darkness that surely coated the skies fathoms above us. Her locks had more luster than when they’d been brown, and they shimmered under our mystic lanterns like the starry night.
Yet for all her beauty, her most striking feature remained those unchanging lips—a more brilliant scarlet than any rouge. And peeking out from the gap in between them were a pair of long, pearly fangs.
“Erich, I’m okay. I’m so glad to see you’re safe.”
The priestess had returned from the void of death, and as she wiped away my tears with her thumb, she smiled.

[Tips] Miracle and curse are two sides of the same coin; both are assignments of the divine.

It was too gruesome to call a miracle.
I had seen her flesh melted in a slimy chemical base, plainly spelling out her demise. Bone jutted out from every limb and the inner membrane of her torso was exposed to the air, letting her precious vitals peek out from beneath a thin layer of red. The fair maiden’s smile had been charred to the cheekbone, her nose falling to earth. That lush head of almond hair was forever lost.
This walking sack of meat was only barely alive, like a candle guttering in its last moments. It cried my name, as if praying to me to save her from death.
She was not meant to be saved. She’d tackled the merman lunging for me and sunk into the depths, folded into the arms of the final executioner of all pollution. The inside of a slime was hell itself: no living being could survive the disintegration that awaited.
Yet she had brought about a painful miracle—or in other words, she had paid the price of her sin.
Melted muscle bubbled back into place before my eyes, and she shed the horrific patches of what skin remained as she once more assumed the luster of a beautiful girl. The process was anything but, flesh and blood painstakingly stretching itself back into place. This was no undoing: fresh cells heartlessly pushed out their dead companions. This was not the grace of god, but the brutal fate reserved for a certain race.
The broken body resculpted itself, not so much as blemished. A full head of hair sprouted in an instant: not a brown fit to glimmer under the sun, but a shimmering black cut straight out of the night sky. Her missing lips filled in redder than any lipstick, and long white fangs peeked out between them.
“Erich, I’m okay. I’m so glad to see you’re safe.”
Her mouth curved into a gentle smile. Blurry as my vision was, I could make out that her crumbling eyes had regrown in a single blink; where once they had glimmered like deep-brown garnets, I was now met with the vivid crimson of rubies. This was no albinism, where a lack of pigmentation allowed blood to paint in the irises, but a brilliant and natural eye color...
One nothing human, mensch or otherwise, could possess.
“I’m sorry to have surprised you. As you can see, I am perfectly fine. I...or should I say, we cannot die so easily.”
“Lady Cecilia,” I said. “You’re...”
“Indeed. I am...a vampire.”
I finally realized why she’d been happy to venture down sketchy paths, and why she’d offered to lead the way even knowing how dangerous the path forward was.
Miss Cecilia pulled the ragged remains of her robes close to hide her body—yet she seemed less like an unwed girl preserving her modesty and more like one ashamed of her heritage.
“...I’m sorry,” she said. “I must have scared you. But I truly didn’t mean to deceive you.”
Suddenly, my brain kicked into gear. What was I doing, letting a girl sit around like this?! I grabbed the hem of my shirt, pulled it off in one fluid motion, and Cleaned off my sweat and the sewer water.
“Eek!” Miss Cecilia cried. “E-Erich?!”
“Here! Please pardon my rudeness for staring!”
“No, but Erich, more importantly—”
“Please put this on first! Come on, Mika, turn around!”
She seemed to have more to say, but I forced my shirt onto her and climbed into a side pipe with my back to her. Mika may not have been a boy at the moment, but they jumped up like a spring-loaded toy when they realized what was going on. The two of us awkwardly listened to the echoing sounds of skin rubbing against cloth as we waited for her to finish.
Um, anyway...hopefully, a men’s shirt would be able to cover her down to at least the thighs. Giving up my pants would leave me stripped down to my skivvies, so that was a no-go, and I wasn’t about to tell Mika to give up theirs when they were agender, so this would have to do.
“Um,” Miss Cecilia said, very confused. “I’m done?”
We turned around, and while she was still sparsely clad, we could finally breathe a sigh of relief. The ways of the world dictated that this sort of transgression could be punished with death, making our accidental gawking far more than an issue of manners. The bare skin of an unwed noble girl could literally burn our eyes off—not from its beauty, of course, but at the hands of a jailer’s red-hot iron brand. My sopping wet hair hadn’t been the only thing sending chills down my spine.
Still, my shirt was far from the perfect solution. Although she was tugging it down in embarrassment, it exposed most of her thighs, and had she been a few years older—I suppose if she was a vampire, that would make it more apt to say a few decades—her soft curves would have been utterly enchanting. It was difficult to find a place to rest my gaze.
In an attempt to dispel the awkward atmosphere—and to wrest my eyes away—I bowed as deeply as I could. I’d mentioned before that greetings were important, and gratitude was much the same. The shock of her return to health and the panic of her naked form had knocked it out of my mind for a moment, but I hadn’t forgotten that she’d saved my life.
“First and foremost,” I said, “I’m glad to see—no, before that—thank you for saving me. I am deeply ashamed to have caused you such pain to protect me.”
“Not at all,” Miss Cecilia said, tilting her head with a gentle smile. “This is nothing to concern yourself over, especially when compared to the selflessness you two have shown me. Please don’t let it bother you.”
Despite her demeanor, I couldn’t believe that to be the case. Vampires were incapable of dying except under a handful of specific conditions, but they still felt pain all the same.
Admittedly, my knowledge came from books and what Lady Agrippina had told me, but I knew what kind of creatures vampires were: they were undead beings that, like methuselah, would never die unless killed by outside forces. Despite being hounded by sunlight, weak to miracles, and sensitive to silver, they outstripped mensch in every way, whether physical or magical.
They were the kings and queens of demonfolk. Powerful at night and forced to lurk in the shadows during the day, they bore a strong resemblance to the popular monsters that littered fiction in my previous world.
Unlike the folk traditions of Earth, my current world understands them to be a perfectly respectable type of “people,” as opposed to unnatural freaks. Though their internal mana stone classifies them as demonfolk, they are otherwise more or less the same as mensch.
Hence, their pain thresholds are comparable to those of mensch...and they aren’t exactly undying: they do die, but simply resurrect after the fact.
The title of undead was something we mortals had bestowed upon creatures with limitless capacity for regeneration, but a solid hit could still kill a vampire. Their souls simply refused to leave their bodies on death, and their flesh reassembled itself with time.
What I’m saying is that Miss Cecilia must have experienced horrendous pain. I literally could not imagine how tortuous it would be to have the flesh melted off my bones, let alone put it to words. Burning oneself with boiling water was already enough to keep most awake at night; I simply couldn’t believe that she hadn’t suffered when I’d had an unobstructed view of her insides.
“If you say so,” I responded, “then I won’t make any more fuss over the matter. Still, I beg you to take better care of yourself.”
I bowed once more to pay my respects to the girl who’d braved terrible agony without so much as a peep for my sake. Looking back now, the odds that either Mika or I would have been able to react in time were high. Even so, the true virtue lay in her wish to save me, and the fact that she had brought her wish to the realm of action. I would not dishonor her by asking if it had been necessary; I would offer nothing but gratitude that she’d chosen to bear life-ending misery for my sake.
“This life of mine is hardly anything to note,” she said. “More importantly, I’m so very—”
“By the way,” I said, “why do you look so different?”
Miss Cecilia had done nothing wrong, so I cut off her apology. Having concealed her identity to some degree meant nothing when I owed her my life. Instead, I tried to change the topic by asking about something that genuinely piqued my curiosity. I would hate for her to have lost a rare and important piece of equipment in her rescue attempt.
“Huh? Oh, well, um, I serve the merciful Night Goddess, whose love extends to even us vampires. As humble as they may be, She has graced me with miracles in Her name. Specifically, I employ the Miracle of Sunscreening, which allows me to don the figure of a mensch for a time.”
Ooh, so it was basically like a religious variant of disguise skills. Come to think of it, having races like vampires mimic standard humans was a tried-and-true staple. Skin whiter than a bloodless corpse, fangs whiter still, and brilliant red gemstones shining in both her sockets were sure to stand out otherwise.
“Her grace is what allows me to wander outside even during the day. The Sun God’s wrath toward our kind never wanes, after all.”
Miss Cecilia held her medallion close to her heart—I suspected another miracle had prevented its destruction—and smiled so charmingly that she at once seemed courageous and deserving of protection. You didn’t need to be a boy to appreciate how cute she was; I could sense Mika’s heart skip a beat too.
However, I found it a bit odd that she used divine power to avoid the sun: the Trialist Empire of Rhine did not discriminate against vampires, so she was employing a miracle strong enough to bend racial traits as nothing more than a parasol.
Is she a high-ranking member of the church or something?
Miracles were essentially heavenly favoritism from a god to Their most devout followers. Unlike those of the systemic religions of Earth, these gods could directly influence our world, and the power they lent directly correlated with a worshipper’s devotion—most often reflected in their status within their church.
Not to say that deities didn’t factor in monetary donations, but con men only interested in political power or greedy skeeves only interested in swiping alms couldn’t get anywhere in faithful pursuits. That did also imply that politicians and grifters both could receive divine favor so long as they were earnest in prayer, but that was a separate issue.
“But as a result, I ended up tricking both of you...”
Drat. I’d been too open-ended with how I steered the conversation, and ended up letting her feel guilty over the one thing I was trying to avoid.
“Lady Cecilia, please don’t blame yourself,” I said in a panic.
“That’s right, we helped you because you’re you,” Mika added to help.
“Mensch or not, you saved my life.”
“And bonds forged from entrusting our lives to one another are hard to break—too solid for something like race to sway.”
“Mika’s exactly right! So please don’t say that you’ve ‘tricked’ us.”
Despite all we’d said, she still mumbled, “But...”
Mika could take no more, and stopped her in her tracks with a shake of their head. “...I’m not all I seem to be either, you know.” They were planning on laying their story bare to put an end to Miss Cecilia’s negativity.
Maybe our time together had changed Mika too. They had spent their childhood biting their tongue as others kept their distance, and their innocent hope that things would go smoothly in the city had left a scar on their heart. But little by little, the good experiences had piled up, and they now wanted to share their differences with someone they trusted. As their friend, what more could I ask than to see them face a difficult yet necessary task of their own volition?
“I’m a tivisco,” Mika said. “We’re a rare sight around these parts, so you may not have heard of us.”
“Tivisco?”
“Yes. I’m sexless at the moment—I don’t have the physical traits of a man or woman, and...”
Mika’s heartfelt words sucked Miss Cecilia right in, and her tightly wound fingers had slipped from her medallion before I knew it. Though it had looked like she was praying, this was proof that her walls were coming down; holding one’s hands or arms in front of themselves was a classic bit of defensive body language.
“So,” Mika concluded, “I suppose you could say I’ve been tricking you all this time.”
“I would never!”
“In that case, let’s agree that neither of us has. No more sorries, okay?”
Mika flashed her a carefree grin and put a finger over their lips. Miss Cecilia stared blankly for a moment, but then smiled back, like a tiny flower peeking out through the cracks in its bud.
“Very well,” she said. “No more sorries.”
“Yup, we won’t need them. Besides, Erich is hiding plenty himself.”
“Huh?!” What was with the collateral damage?! I was exactly what was written on the tin! “Wait, what are you saying, Mika?! I’m a harmless and unassuming servant that you can find anywhere in the capital!”
“Harmless?”
“Unassuming?”
“What?! I’m right, aren’t I?!”
The two of them shared a dubious glance; I was moments away from crying out that it wasn’t fair how friendly they’d gotten in all of a few minutes. I wasn’t wrong, dammit!
As I prepared to present my defense, a high-pitched sound rang out again and again in the echoing tunnels: a sneeze. I glanced over at Miss Cecilia; both hands were covering her mouth, and her pale cheeks were red enough to catch fire. Nobles did not sneeze in public: if they felt the urge come on, they simply held it back. Apparently, she’d been a bit too relaxed and the shame had now set in.
The three of us looked at one another in silence...and then all burst into laughter. It was comically ridiculous that a sneeze of all things had been the trigger for us to regain our composure. After working together to all get out alive, we had one person naked from the waist up, one naked from the waist down, and one absolutely drenched; at the end of everything, each of us kept insisting we were in the wrong—it was too ludicrous not to laugh at.
“Ha ha,” I said, “we’re all going to catch colds at this rate.”
“You’re right,” Mika agreed. “Cleaning magic aside, I want to get changed.”
“Then let’s hurry out of here and get back up to the surface. We took a long detour, but the Mage’s Corridor shouldn’t be too far from here.”
“Hehe,” Miss Cecilia chuckled, “then let us be off.”
So long as we could get out of the storage tank network, our trip back home was bound to be easy. We’d only struggled because of all the interference to begin with; now that the slime had shooed off the mysterious thugs, we only had the usual magical waste to worry about.
“Your hand, please, Lady Cecilia,” I said. “The pipes are terribly slippery.”
“Here you are... Oh!” As I took her hand, I spied a cheery grin on her face. “If you would please, call me Celia. Those close to me always refer to me so.”
Mika and I exchanged glances and hesitated for a moment, but neither of us was boorish enough to refuse a friend’s request to call her as she liked. Context was everything, and nothing was stopping us from acting chummy with her now.
“Then don’t mind if we do, Miss Celia,” I said.
“Heh,” Mika chuckled awkwardly. “It’s a bit embarrassing, but...I’d be happy to, Celia.”
“Thank you!” she beamed. “Feel free to be as informal as you’d like!”
She closed the sentence with another sneeze. This time, Mika and I managed to maintain etiquette and turned away before she could let it out...but we all laughed anyway. Slowly but surely, the gaps between the three of us were shrinking into those of friends.

[Tips] Religious rank is determined by the church one serves. Although different organizations may employ slightly different systems, most vary little from a standardized progression.
By and large, the qualifications for each rank are determined by the god of the religion themselves: divine favor can be measured by way of miracle, after all.

“Dammit, we got our asses handed to us...”
Deep in the bowels of Berylin’s underground, lamenting moans bounced around an unremarkable room. The men who uttered them had cut faces, broken limbs, and missing fingers.
The initial swear, on the other hand, came from a man holding up his prized possession—a magical lantern that only shone for the user and those marked as allies ahead of time—to see all his men writhing about on the floor.
He was the captain of the red squadron, but that meant little when each squad was named without pattern. His background mattered little, so the details will be spared in writing; at most, it sufficed to say he spent most of his days seamlessly blending into the crowd of well-behaved citizens to become the background.
“Fuck... My teeth...”
He spat out the blood pooling in his mouth with another curse, and he felt something strange on his tongue. Reaching in with a finger, he found that two of his molars were hanging onto his gums by a thread after the terrible beating they’d received.
A wall had come alive to sock him in the face. As the man giving orders, he’d been far enough back to avoid the golden dagger as it darted about, but the mage’s masonry was another story. He’d been knocked out cold against the wall until just before they’d fled.
He yanked the loose teeth from their meager connection and threw them at the wall in a fit of rage. Trying to figure out how he’d eat the next day only further stoked his fury.
“I can’t believe this. Who the hell were those brats? ...Gods dammit, what am I supposed to report?!”
Alas, taking out his anger on a lost part of himself solved nothing. Not only did he have to clean up after his decimated unit—upon closer inspection, he’d lost a great many men either to the slime or to sheer confusion—but he had no idea what he could say to the commander who’d given him this job.
Known as Hydra by outsiders, their organization had no intentions of coming up with an internal name and just as little interest in combat. Their mastery of the sewer system, and the secrecy, efficiency, and unparalleled confidentiality it provided, were their biggest selling points. Assassination and kidnapping were bonuses that they dipped their toes into for no other reason than because they could; they never advertised those kinds of services themselves.
Still, each and every member was experienced enough to handily wipe the floor with a common street thug; in what world could he tell his bosses with a straight face that a pair of clearly underage brats had whooped them into submission?
Had it been the authorities, one of their few rival gangs, or a nigh unheard-of Berylinian adventurer, he would have had plenty of room for excuses. Even the lowly sentries of the capital’s guard were as well trained as an ordained soldier, and the criminal organizations that opposed them included professionals in violence.
As far as adventurers went, the only ones that could make a living around here were the best of the best that catered to the capital’s aristocrats. If they’d run into a monster like that, they wouldn’t have been stupid enough to even try fighting. But they’d underestimated their marks as mere children, and look where they were now.
To tell the truth, the men had failed to grasp what had happened. The blond kid had shot toward them at dizzying speeds and torn through their ranks like a tornado; for whatever reason, most of them hadn’t even been able to see halfway through.
Those who’d faced the barrage of stones and rumbling punches of the wall had not fared any better. They couldn’t even attempt the mental gymnastics required to see the tight corridors they made their clandestine living in as an enemy that could sucker punch them in close quarters.
The man didn’t have any excuses: he’d lost too much to the worst opponents possible.
“Dammit...dammit! Don’t just sit there and cry, you bastards! What are you, toddlers?! If you can move, then go fucking tend to the wounded!”
Regardless, he couldn’t mope forever. He had a responsibility to pick up his groaning subordinates and bark some life back into them. They needed to patch themselves up as best they could and climb back up topside, or it would affect future business. Those with major injuries would need some clever dressing up, and they’d need to clean the blood from this room to make it seem like they’d never been here at all; the slightest lapse in care could garner the attention of the authorities.
After all that, the man would have to face his superiors. Imagining their grim expressions and the punishment he’d receive spawned a knot in his stomach that hurt even more than his swollen face.
Their syndicate wasn’t primitive enough to execute its members for every mistake, but they prized leadership and secrecy above all else; he would need to take responsibility for his failures.
First and foremost, he would need to pay a fine for his shortcomings; he’d also have to manage the replacements for the men lost; and finally, he would need to come up with a bandage fix for the active projects his injured subordinates were sure to stall. The expenses weren’t in the realm of a drachma or two; he might even need to dip into his secret stash in order to stay afloat.
As he despaired over how he was hemorrhaging more money than blood, a small noise caught his ear: the tiny splash of a droplet of water. Although the snaking pipes made it reverberate far from its origin, this was anything but rare in a sewer filled with water and beset with dew. However, the man’s long years of unlawful conduct had imbued in him an unconscious intuition that tipped him off to this innocuous sound.
Unfortunately for him, his face slammed into the wall the very next instant and he could no longer move. The force of impact jostled his brain around in his skull, and his shattered nose flooded his windpipe with blood. The pain of his fractured skull, the disorientation of his rattling brain, and the panic of gasping for air left him immobilized.
He tried to warn his men—to no avail. Choking on his newly broken front teeth, all he could do was wail. Even if he had succeeded, they had already met similar fates, reduced to a trail of faces and guts beaten concave by an adamantine fist. Their wounds and the swiftness of their maker betrayed a primordial strength tempered with martial prowess. Light a cigarette; take a drag; watch the cloud of smoke vanish in the open air; the subjugation took half that time.
The captain finally recalled how to breathe and looked up through the tears blurring his vision to see something unfathomable. Of his remaining men, there had still been over a dozen battle-ready souls; the attackers who’d brought them down numbered a paltry two.
“Pft. Them’s it?” A totally unarmed and unequipped mensch looked around, patently bored. The young man spoke with a thick South Rhine accent, and his spiky black hair had been slicked back like a one-way pincushion.
“What more did you expect from thugs creeping about beneath our feet like worms?” The man responding was a demihuman—perhaps a saurian or heqatos, depending on whether the features the dark obscured trended squamate or batrachian. He spoke in perfect palatial dialect and with an unnaturally blank affect, though the captain could still make out a smile at the end of his speech.
The only similarity in the two men’s appearance was their clothing: black military garb. Their high-collar double-breasted uniforms were not those of an average soldier; only those who displayed unwavering loyalty, razor-sharp minds, and peerless skill in battle could don the regalia of the secret service.
Also known as the imperial guard, these soldiers reported directly to the highest authority in Rhine. Trained to protect His Imperial Majesty to the last no matter who dared threaten the throne, they represented the sublime peak of strength—each was worth a whole unit of regular troops.
The man wondered why a group of monsters in mortal skin would gather in a place like this, and then it clicked. Only those with connections to the imperial families could command the imperial guard, and only when the fate of the Emperor or Empire was at stake.
He finally understood: their mark was just that important. His informant had described the girl in the nun’s costume as “a VIP’s kid,” but he had not once considered the possibility that she was imperial.
Berylin was full of nobles, and kidnappings of their children were plotted or carried out every day of the year. Despite their glamorous veneer, those born with blue blood played dirtier than the filthiest waters running in this sewer. When one needed an especially ill-gotten edge, Hydra was often the first to call.
The man was a career scoundrel, but never in his entire life had he dreamt it would lead him toward the most untouchable bloodlines there were.
“But ’ey, why’s them ’ere playing in puddles, anyhoo?”
“Who knows? Whatever their reasons, we have a good number that ought to still be able to talk. I’m sure they must know something of value.”
If the standing army was the sword in His Majesty’s right hand, then guardsmen made up the gentleman’s carry hidden in his left—and only those fit to call themselves the sharpest inch of its edge could don these jet-black uniforms. Originally a group of scouts handpicked by the Emperor of Creation to ensure his successor’s safety abroad, their one and only oath of fealty belonged to the crown.
There was no way out. Had the crooks been at full strength, then perhaps they could have used the tunnels to throw them off; now that they were in their clutches, they couldn’t even hope to take their own lives.
What awaited them was merciless interrogation that would only end with an eternal darkness. After a lifetime each of acting out a normal life well seasoned with vice, they were faced with a final humiliation that filled their hearts to the brim: I shouldn’t have given in to greed; I should have lived an honest life.
The men knew nothing. They had nothing to confess. Coughing up the truth in hopes of a painless end wasn’t even an option for them; yet from the interrogator’s point of view, any claim of ignorance was but another potential lie that had to be checked over the course of their questioning. Their pleas would only be answered when the imperial guard was satisfied—satisfaction that was sure to only come when they were inches away from death.
Unbeknownst to the world, a handful of villains disappeared into the capital’s labyrinthine underground, never to be seen again. The commander in charge of the red squadron accepted the news quietly, carefully cleaning up every trace of the event. When all was said and done, they straightened out the surviving members and then cut ties.
In the Far East of Earth, there goes a saying that gods unbothered smite no mortals; a world away in the polytheistic Empire, the unwritten rule of avoiding the wrath of those on high was no less true. In fact, the only difference was that the saying applied to mortals as well, so long as their authority rivaled the heavens.
Many mock karmic retribution as nothing more than a theatrical invention; if so, then tonight was the rare exception to the rule.

[Tips] The imperial guard’s official name is the Guardsmen of the Three Imperial Families, and it is also known as the secret service. They are the protectors of Rhine’s imperial bloodlines, commanded by the sitting emperor. Selected for skill and integrity, they enjoy one of the few permanently employed occupations that deal entirely in combat.
They number less than a thousand. The Emperor of Creation made his selection without any consideration for social standing; ever since, employment in the imperial guard has required a meritocratic test of skill that few can pass.

tprg4.11

“I, ugh, augh...” I wheezed and tried to catch my breath. “I told...you...not to run off without...”

“Um, I’m very sorry.” Miss Cecilia said. “It’s all just so intriguing.”

This was the most tired I’d been in quite some time. I wrung out breaths like my throat was an empty tube of toothpaste as I held back my desire to shout. Every word oozing from my lips tasted like iron.

Unfazed by the slime incident, the priestess had continued her grade-schooler act on several more occasions, necessitating a rescue each time. I had no idea how long it had taken us to get this far. She wandered down every wayward path with a curious “What’s this?” and all I wanted was for her to stop. Did she even understand that we were on the run?

Imagining this multiplied by thirty, the struggle of educators in my past life sprang to mind. I could never.

“Please,” I heaved, “I’m serious... Please stop, ugh, running off on your own... It’s...dangerous...”

“I’m sorry, Erich,” she said. “But if it’s so dangerous, I really must be the one to—”

“I’m begging you... Just stay behind us... Just follow...me...”

“Blegh,” Mika coughed. “Wait. Erich, wait... Water... I need water...”

Apparently, my old chum was even more exhausted than me, so we decided to take a short break. Unfortunately, we had been on the way home from a normal day at the bazaar, so we didn’t have our usual travel gear. Food and drink hadn’t been more than an arm’s length away at the open-air market, so we hadn’t thought to pack any; after stashing our shopkeeping goods at the storehouse, we were practically empty-handed.

Forget a waterskin—we didn’t even have a cup. This was the pinnacle of inconvenience, but we couldn’t have expected to stumble into an incident this suddenly. I could have avoided this had I been the type of adventurer to always carry my gear on me, but I was just a normal local going about my life.

Left with no alternatives, I summoned an Unseen Hand to catch the water we pulled out of the air.

“Goodness, the water is floating! Is this also magic?”

To a non-mage, the liquid appeared to be suspended midair; Miss Cecilia was too engrossed with poking at it to drink any for herself. Her finger only came into contact with the hand-shaped force field holding it up, but she seemed amused enough by how the sway she introduced caused the water to ripple with every touch.

She was a priestess: a devotee to the gods who invoked miracles with Their power would not know anything of magic. Mysteriously, her reaction was a far cry from the outright hostility most faithful showed. Magecraft was the art of twisting the heavens’ finest creation, and it followed that most clergymen didn’t take kindly to it.

“Magic is so very versatile,” she mumbled. “I suppose I can see why he is so preoccupied with it...”

For a moment, I wondered, Who’s “he”? but thought better of asking and shelved the thought. I’d already decided not to pry, and now wasn’t the time to question her. Judging from how she hadn’t said anything of substance on the long walk here, she wasn’t ready to share, and any undue meddling would just sour her mood. Instead, I chose to focus on the positives: she trusted us enough to let a secret slip in our presence.

“We’re close to the Mage’s Corridor,” Mika said. “What’s the plan?”

“Let’s lay low at my place for the time being, since we’ll be able to duck under any search spells there. My housekeeper is as terrifying as she is kind, after all.”

The dear Ashen Fraulein watching over my lodging was an utter powerhouse that had run out countless tenants who had, in all likelihood, been trained mages. If a spell came flying our way to locate Miss Cecilia, the silkie would refuse such an ill-mannered entity so much as a foot in the door.

Alfar earned their title of living phenomena by manipulating complicated magic with intuitive ease. Few could match them in mystic pursuits, making my house in the low quarter our most realistic safehouse.

“Then we’ll need to stay on our toes,” Mika said.

“Yeah... Maybe one of us should hold her hand.”

The issue was that, in order to approach our safe haven, we needed to traverse the perilous subways of the Mage’s Corridor. This area was legitimately dangerous, so I was ready to tie Miss Cecilia up if that was what it took to keep her still. No matter how many warnings they received, the boneheads of this ward never stopped flushing their failed experiments down the drain.

Our nation’s leaders had sunk massive sums into the construction and upkeep of this facility, and it went without saying that they weren’t going to just forget to place restrictions on what could be disposed of here. Laws proscribed the dumping of certain substances with the threat of severe penalties. But the slothful were ever abundant, and tracing the origins of a contaminant required massive effort; those that couldn’t be bothered to care about their actions’ consequences constantly poured their trash into the sewers.

The location was just too convenient: one could throw away anything without worrying about witnesses, anything left for long enough would be eaten up by slimes, and there were even convenient idiots who’d cover their tracks for them.

You see, cleanup crews hired to dispose of trash were not above breaking the law. Among the contractors tasked with getting rid of dangerous items, every so often a stingy worker would shirk their responsibilities and just come to the sewers to abandon their charges. I’d once stumbled upon a small box stuffed with unglazed earthenware vials full of suspicious chemicals, no doubt left behind to save on disposal costs.

As a result, the subterranean maze around the Mage’s Corridor posed a serious threat to our safety. There was more than just toxic sludge: every so often, an alchemical solution caused any slimes that ingested it to turn rabid and die, so the slightest lapse in alertness in this hellhole could trigger a saving throw.

Just as I was preparing to summon a Hand to keep a permanent hold on Miss Cecilia’s sleeve, I sensed something was off. Realizing that it was a Listening check, I pressed a finger to my lips and turned all my attention to my ears. I extinguished my mystic lantern and Mika dutifully followed suit. Too accustomed to the light, my eyes could see nothing in a world lit only by the fickle shafts of sunset that bounced in from the gutters; I closed them to acclimate them more quickly and shut out distractions.

The constant noise of running water was joined by the faint echo of something else: careful footsteps. They were clearly aware that sound carried well in these tunnels, and each step sounded more like someone was wiping down a stone tile... They have cloth wrapped around their shoes.

While my abilities weren’t enough to accurately discern their numbers, I could tell there were more than one. I knew that the saying warned not to speak of the devil, but wasn’t this a bit soon?

Only lawless rapscallions would ever bother to sneak around a place like this. Whether they were a disposal crew or black-market peddlers, no criminal fancied the idea of giving away their position for free; a good citizen on decent business wouldn’t need to hide their presence like this.

The footsteps were getting closer. Unfortunately, all we could do was retreat to a secluded alleyway and wait for them to pass. I doubted they’d pounce on us just for running into them, but nothing good could come of an unnecessary encounter.

“Excuse me,” Miss Cecilia said, “is something the matter? Why have you turned off the lights?”

The fuck?! Why would she start speaking now, of all—oh, of course! She’d been too busy looking around to notice me putting my finger to my lips!

The footsteps were picking up speed as they closed in on us. What?! Why would you come toward us?!

Before I could find any time to think, I locked eyes with a man rounding the corner.

“Augh!” As he came around, an intense light blinded me. He had a lantern painted black on three sides to serve as a spotlight; I suspected it had been tweaked to bounce around the light and strengthen its beam, because it had managed to rob me of my vision from a considerable distance.

Dammit! My attempt at adjusting to the dark had just left me more vulnerable to the radiance!

“The hell?! Is that nun the brat we’re after?!”

“Why’s she here?!”

“Who gives a damn?! Nab her!”

The three resounding voices threatened to disorient me aurally as well. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I heard two sets of footsteps bolt our way. My mind was a mess and I had no idea what was happening, but my body was moving on its own terms. I’d trained my martial responses to the point of second nature, and I leapt into action on sheer reflex.

This must have been the power of one of the traits I’d purchased with my ichor maze payday: Permanent Battlefield. I’d been able to switch gears on the fly before, but this trait brought my constant readiness to new heights. The motions I’d practiced tens of thousands of times now transcended the need for conscious thought, taking the form of an involuntary response to danger. It was an incredible boon: in tabletop terms, I could now roll reactions on unreactable events, and received a bonus when dealing with ambushes.

Blindness wasn’t insurmountable so long as I had a general idea of where they were. Unseen Hands were simple enough to make that I could launch six invisible fists in parallel to mow down the entire space in front of me.

“Grgh?!”

“Agh!”

“Hey! What’s wrong?!”

Four of my virtual fists slammed into something hard, but the other two landed against something duller. It seemed as though I’d only hit two of them; the last was probably waiting behind with the lantern in hand.

I suspected the rigid feedback had come from some kind of armor. I hadn’t gotten a good look before being blinded, but they must have been wearing breastplates or chain mail underneath their clothes.

On the other hand, the dull thumps were the unfamiliar sensation of fist on flesh—probably near a bone. I’d learned a bit of fisticuffs under the umbrella of Hybrid Sword Arts, but truth be told, I hadn’t ever put it into practice. Mostly because I hadn’t needed to, but also because I didn’t want to risk injuring my own body. I couldn’t say this was all that pleasant of a sensation, even as a nicety.

The grunting was followed by the sound of one of the men collapsing. I hadn’t been able to pinpoint where I’d hit them from the tactile feedback alone, but evidently one of my punches had landed in a critical spot. Just as I was feeling confident that things were looking up, a series of painfully shrill noises sliced into my eardrums: they were blowing a whistle.

Dammit, we’ve been had!

I hurriedly set up a Farsight to secure some sort of vision—while its main purpose was to peer into the distance, it could serve as a replacement for my real eyes in a time of need. Seeing myself from a head higher than my usual eye level was awfully disorienting, but I could manage so long as I thought of it as a third-person perspective game. I called up my Hands once more to finish what I’d started.

Now that I could see, I didn’t need to rely on closed fists: I grabbed onto the collars of their filthy clothes—rags, really—and pulled them tight. With six appendages, I could dedicate two to each enemy; the one on the ground was down but not out, so I had to make sure he wouldn’t get up. I choked each out with a judo-style lapel stranglehold. Unseen Hands could approach from any direction, making it trivial for me to get an angle on their collars that would make them dig into their carotids.

“Grbl... Ghgh...”

“Wha... Brlgh...”

A sufficiently powerful enemy could pry them off, since my force fields had a physical presence, but I could make that nigh impossible by using a technique that pitted their own garments against them. As their brains ran out of oxygenated blood, their struggling slowly came to a halt. I held the position for a little while for good measure, and regained my sight by the time they were all out cold.

“Are you all right, Mika?”

“Yeah, other than the stars I’m still seeing. What about Lady Cecilia?”

“M-My eyes have yet to return. Oh, my head...”

I was battle ready again, but that wasn’t enough to let my guard down. That thug had shouted, “Nab her!” when he’d seen Miss Cecilia; they hadn’t come our way to eliminate witnesses to a crime, but specifically to find her.

Whether this was just bad luck or we’d somehow been seen entering the sewers, this was bad news. The sound of a whistle would travel a considerable distance in these tunnels, and the pattern the goon had used had sounded like some sort of code.

Look, see? I heard more footsteps. As it turned out, those crooks hadn’t been the only ones scurrying around the sewers.

Oh, give me a break! This isn’t in the realm of “bad luck” anymore! You drop a campaign in my lap out of nowhere and don’t even give me my armor for a full-on encounter?! What’s wrong with you, GM?!

Had I been fully armed and without a helpless princess to protect, I would have gladly leapt into battle to beat them all down...but I couldn’t let anything happen to Miss Cecilia, and I didn’t know anything about how strong or numerous our enemies were.

“Gods dammit,” I groaned. “I can’t believe they’re already here. Mika, we need to run! Lead the way!”

“Huh?! Agh, wait, where are they coming from?! Uh, let’s double back for now! If we take a wide loop around, we should be able to get home from another path!”

This was our best bet for avoiding a confrontation. Unfortunately, my Listening skill wasn’t enough to echolocate with all this reverb, so the best we could do was run around and hope to throw them off our trail.

Not that I expected it to be easy. We were used to the sewers, but those chasing us were probably even more so. The difference in our familiarity was going to be night and day, especially since they were probably no strangers to the filthy paths we avoided to keep clean, as evidenced by their tattered clothing. Their clean clothes were kept safe in bags and only changed into when surfacing; being equipped to shift between underground dealings and daily life showed that these thugs were well trained.

“Tsk, they’re close,” I said. “Let’s get going.”

The footsteps were fast approaching; their shoes were padded, so they were likely to be even closer than I imagined. I’d wanted to check the unconscious ones for a weapon, but we couldn’t spare the time.

“Th-This is enough!”

“Huh?”

However, the damsel fueling the chase planted her feet just as we were about to run. I whirled around to see her ready to explain herself, but...

“Pardon my rudeness!”

“I cannot allow you two to put yourselves in—eek!”

We didn’t have time to listen to nor convince her. I understood that she felt guilty and wanted us to leave her behind, but it was too late for that now. Besides, if we were going to abandon her at the first sight of conflict, we would have been floating in a bath with an extra few coins in hand by now.

My obsession with adventure needed no repetition, but Mika’s love of heroic sagas was remarkable too. Had they been the type to flee in the face of danger, they would have cut ties with me after our life-threatening journey to Wustrow. For all the minutiae that differentiated us, we were two peas in a pod.

I lifted Miss Cecilia up without waiting—I wanted to keep one hand open, so she would have to live with being hoisted onto my shoulder—and booked it. As soon as I began running away from the footsteps, she stopped talking; maybe she was afraid of biting her tongue.

Ah, how rude of me: I knew from our games that she was an intelligent person. She must have caught on that arguing wasn’t going to change anything.

We ran down the most secluded paths we could find, but the uninterrupted patter of footsteps and the occasional whistle remained persistently within earshot. Even though we couldn’t tell how many of them there were, it should have been impossible for them to have enough men to totally surround us. Why did it feel so impossible to escape?

I swept away our tracks every now and then with a Hand, but I couldn’t find the time to put together a full Clean spell, let alone do anything about our scent. That said, it felt less like the enemy had a talented scout and more like they were reading our next move based on our starting location.

The underground was a sprawling network of pipes, but not all of them were perennially suitable for human travel. Runoff from a storm several days removed could flood certain paths, and others were totally blocked off in service of large-scale repairs.

“Whoa, crap! Turn around, Erich, turn around! There’s a slime!”

“What?! Another one?!”

And, like the one my friend hurriedly abandoned, some paths were occupied by the keepers of the sewers. Still, there shouldn’t have been this many of them: we’d run into three slimes already. Their presence blocked the flow of water, so multiple units weren’t normally meant to be active in the same area at any given time. The piping was designed to be redundant, so that one or two points of blockage wouldn’t escalate into a bigger issue, but this was clearly not right.

Do these thugs have some way of manipulating the slimes?

“I see light! They’re over here!”

“They’re close! Box ’em in!”

Footsteps did not precede these voices; instead, I heard the sound of paddling water. Dammit, do these guys have kayaks or something?! No wonder we can’t get a lead!

I had no longsword, no zweihander, no catalysts, and no projectiles. Mika’s presence kept the situation from being totally hopeless, but this was all but the worst way to fight on the enemy’s home turf.

Schutzwolfe. If only I had Schutzwolfe, I could cut down twenty—no, thirty goons without a problem!

A voice pricked at the corner of my mind: the formless emotion it represented was that of anticipation.

No, simmer down. I don’t plan on using you. I wasn’t about to let a bloodthirsty killer have its way. What was I going to do if the mafia tried to hunt me down as revenge for killing their grunts?

“Damn,” I said with a click of my tongue. “Mika, we need to speed up. Are you good?”

“Just fine,” they answered, “if you ignore how badly I want to hop in a bath right now.”

Hah, I thought. Then let’s get this over with and find a tub.

[Tips] Some sections of the imperial water-transfer network are sealed off for construction for years at a time.

Where there is man, there is sin.

The imperial capital was no exception to this truth, and found itself home to what one might call organized crime. They were, without exception, smaller than their counterparts found in other urban centers; still, these elite gangsters continued to eke out a dishonest living amidst the devoted knights, steadfast guards, and obedient populace that made up Berylin. Wading into a sea of model citizens, they blended into the waters of good intent as their minds spun devising ways to stay afloat.

Among the various groups that made up the capital’s criminal world, one was known to its competitors as Hydra.

Their main business was smuggling: whether one needed help crossing city lines or simply wanted to get their hands on contraband, their services were always in high demand, and at high prices. However, that didn’t mean they shied away from using the secluded nature of their underground home to dip their toes into the felonious realm of kidnapping and torture. These experts of the labyrinthine sewers were head and shoulders above other two-bit smugglers, said to be capable of sneaking a lesser drake into the capital undetected.

They had no true name with which to announce themselves. A label was the first step to discovery, which could herald a catastrophic chain reaction; they relinquished the most basic representation of unity on principle.

The organization was comprised of small cells, led by captains who were in turn led by commanders who steered their nameless gang via council. Their years of experience had morphed into mastery of the imperial waterways, affording them unparalleled mobility in their field.

And so, when a wretched fellow came by with a request fueled by his pathetic greed, they fanned out below the streets as one of many search parties. What reason did they have to refuse? Snatching up a witless noble girl was easy—especially one in eye-catching holy garb.

Their chance discovery in the sewers was a blessing like no other. Over the course of their long history, they had developed an intuition for municipal maintenance schedules—alas, not even they had been able to grease palms within the government—and learned the behavior of slimes. Catching her here was sure to be much, much easier than the aboveground chase they’d braced themselves for.

The only hiccup was the two extras by her side, and their inexplicable understanding of the subway system. Three men were concussed in the blink of an eye, and they continued to run around while avoiding all the dead ends; clearly, these weren’t just everyday brats.

Regardless, the gangsters did not panic. On top of their positional advantage, they also had a secret weapon that would guarantee their success.

The arcane life-forms the College had created to roam the waterways had many behavioral quirks—one of which was their tendency to immediately attempt to purify any substantial filth that piled up in the clean water pipes. Unbeknownst to the average person, there was a special slime that spread itself thin across the entire network to carefully monitor the water quality.

The criminals had discovered this through sheer coincidence. Generations prior, one of the group’s members had done his business in the tunnels and noticed that a slime had been dispatched to a location that hadn’t aligned with any known patrol paths. He’d repeated his experiments on a whim, and his confirmed findings eventually evolved into the strategy they used now.

Slimes filled up the areas they inhabited, so by throwing feces or rotting animal carcasses into clean water, they could block off entire passageways. This was primarily meant to split up the authorities if their allies were being chased, but nothing stopped them from using it to cut off escape routes when they were on the hunt.

While they couldn’t afford to go on the offensive against the city guard—long ago, they’d pushed their luck so hard that the guard had been one step away from establishing a permanent post in the sewers—the tactic was dominant against anyone they were truly willing to fight.

These men were anything but negligent; they had begun plugging up pathways as soon as they’d realized their mark was underground. Their motivation wasn’t in buttering up a meaningless small fry, nor was it for his paltry reward.

The Empire’s pockets were unfathomably deep. With the right intermediary, the crown would pay out no matter who found the girl. A seasoned criminal syndicate could think of anything a shortsighted crooked cop could, and more—including a way to cut him out of the picture for a bigger payday.

Earning the animosity of a nobody meant nothing to them. They kept contact to a bare minimum: a single messenger disguised and under alias had been the only liaison for all their communication, whether that was a briefing or a payout. As soon as they cut the bridge, the corrupt officer would be lost chasing an organization whose name he didn’t know.

Thus, the world dubbed them Hydra, after the infamous dragon who could only be felled by severing all its heads at once.

Their speedy encirclement was nearing its end. Open hallways had been converted to dead ends without their prey’s knowledge, and their remaining path left led straight to their burial chamber: a tiny room meant to store rainwater. The only pipe out that a person could fit through was too high up for a person to reach.

Everything was going according to plan...except for one critical misconception. The beast they hunted was no mere rat; they had cornered a terrible monster with enormous fangs.

[Tips] Hydra is a criminal organization that derives its title from a dragon species of the same name. Though the government has made several forays into the world under the table to stamp them out, they remain active to this day.

Life is full of dead ends: at some point in every person’s journey, they will come across a predicament that can’t be resolved no matter what price they’re willing to pay.

The first time I experienced this myself had been when our family was forced to send Elisa to the capital. Who could have predicted that I would drag myself all this way to join her, only to land hip-deep in the same despair?

“...Damn.”

“They sure got us...”

My curse was met with my friend’s resignation. We’d run and run and run until the final beams of sunlight vanished from the gutters above, and our dramatic escape had reached its pitiful conclusion.

After wading through a terrible path full of knee-high water, we were at a dead end. We’d desperately pressed through countless unnatural blockades, just to end up stuck in a dank tomb: we’d run into a storage unit that distributed clean water to the surface.

They really did get us.

“This is the worst,” I groaned. “Oh, this is just the worst.”

“You said it,” Mika agreed. “I thought we knew this place like the back of my hand, but I guess they one-upped us.”

The loud sloshing of legs trudging through water rang out from the tunnel beyond. They were no longer showing any restraint, and instead used the noise of their impending arrival to kill our morale. At this point, it was a waste of time to try counting their numbers; they easily cleared single digits. With reinforcements sure to come, our position looked pretty grim.

“May I be let down?”

I’d hauled Miss Cecilia around for at least an hour, and she’d held her tongue until now for our sakes. She wriggled in my arm like she really meant it, so I obliged by slowly setting her onto the ground. Without an ounce of hesitation, she sullied her pristine robes and, for some reason, pulled us both into a hug.

“Erich, Mika,” she said, “thank you both so very much. I’m grateful beyond words that you would go so far—that you would do all this just for me...but this is enough. At this rate, I’m sure that you two will find yourselves in terrible danger. You may even lose your lives.”

Moderately shorter than us, Miss Cecilia’s face was buried in between our shoulders. I didn’t need to see her expression to know how she was feeling though: the damp heat soaking into my arm was enough.

“But please, no more. Thank you—thank you so much. The kindness you’ve shown me today is all I could ever ask.”

Her voice was trembling and she squeezed us so tightly that I was shocked her frail frame could produce such force. I didn’t know why she was so overcome with emotion, but one thing was clear: she had given up.

“Miss Cecilia,” I said, “I think you’re misunderstanding something.”

“That’s right,” Mika echoed. “And what a terrible misunderstanding it is.”

One didn’t need to be well versed in stories to know what she was going to say. She was about to pull an “I’ll surrender myself so you two can escape unharmed.”

However, that was a naive way of thinking. We were up against a criminal syndicate—and one in the capital, no less. Berylin was a living hell for lawbreakers, and their success here put them in a different league from the part-time ne’er-do-wells in rural cantons. I suspected plugging any information leaks would be their top priority, meaning our lives were already forfeit; why would they bother letting someone run off with even a tiny sliver of knowledge about their business?

We had tried to run because we didn’t want to deal with that. If we could just get away, we could ask Lady Agrippina—sure, she wasn’t around, but the thugs wouldn’t be able to reach us at the College—or Mika’s master to help us mop up these lowly gangsters. That would have been the simplest solution with the lowest chance of blowing up in our faces later; so, we’d run.

Alas, the worst had come to pass: we could no longer run. But while we’d complained about how awful the situation was, no one had said anything about it being hopeless.

“We merely didn’t want to work up any more sweat,” Mika said.

“But they’re the ones who picked this fight,” I jumped in. “Why don’t we give them what they came for?”

We still had one way out. I hadn’t wanted to resort to this, but it was all we had left. Our final means of resolution was that which sat in every adventurer’s back pocket: with a lucky physical “persuasion” check, we could have everything go our way.

“All right, then. Mika, will you join me in this battle?”

“You don’t even need to ask. Compared to the zombies we saw in the ichor maze...they’re nothing.”

“Hah! Likewise, comrade.”

In some ways, this was the perfect location. There was only one entryway, and the room was cramped and relatively short; they wouldn’t be able to fit enough archers to barrage us with projectiles, and we were too close for high-angle fire. My greatest fear had been a stray arrow hitting Miss Cecilia, but now that seemed unlikely. The narrow opening also meant that we wouldn’t need to worry about fighting two-versus-many so long as we controlled the entrance. While the water inhibited movement, that was practically a nonissue for me and my old chum.

“This place is just right.”

I pulled out the fey karambit I always kept on me as my gentleman’s carry and double-checked my grip. Mika had their wand in hand and pressed it to the wall with an indecipherable murmur.

“Please,” they said, “right this way.”

A section of the wall jutted itself out and curved in to make a semispherical hideaway.

“Wow, Mika! I thought you said the bricks down here were hard to manipulate.”

“They’re imbued with conservatory magic that makes them hard to alter, but I’m not the same old me. Besides, I’ll need to learn how to work with other people’s spells without breaking the enchantment if I ever want to do any conservation work.”

“A-Are you two planning to fight?! Stop! Please, I beg of you, don’t risk your lives for me!”

Mika and I gave her a light push on each shoulder and led her into the makeshift cubby. It remained partially open so she wouldn’t suffocate, but it was only just big enough for her to crawl into. With this, we wouldn’t have to worry about her taking collateral damage.

“All right then,” I said. “Let’s do this. Ready?”

“As ever. Let’s give them a show.”

We were fully prepared and our spirits were high. The men grouping up by the entrance were loitering around, no doubt planning to slowly wear us down with demands to yield. But I couldn’t keep them waiting, could I?

“I’m off.”

“Yep. Leave your back to me.”

Mika was the most reassuring support I could ask for as I took my first step. I kicked off the submerged flooring and leapt out of the heavy water, hanging high in the air. My soaking-wet boot landed not on the water’s surface, but on the Unseen Hand laying directly atop it. By summoning pairs of invisible platforms over and over again, I had a dry walkway all to myself.

Freed from my hydraulic yoke, I sprinted forward with full agility, jumping into enemy lines in a single breath. There were more of them than I’d expected, but their gear wasn’t anything notable. Maybe they hadn’t accounted for the possibility that we’d bring the fight to them, but that carelessness made them sitting ducks.

I swiped up my fey knife in a backhand grip and sliced through the closest man’s face. My blade’s intricate arc entered through his chin, cut through his nose, and then crossed up to exit through his forehead. For an instant, the world stood still as the white line of my attack ran its course; not a moment later, a fountain of blood gushed forth.

“Graaah?!”

One down. He could still move, but the sharp pain and torrent of blood blocking his vision would keep him from contributing to the fight. I’d gone deep enough to score bone; he’d need something stronger than superglue to put his face back together.

“Hey there,” I said. “Good evening.”

Greetings are important. Surprise attacks were fair play, but it would be rude of me not to offer a salutation once it was over. Upon landing, I stayed crouched to kick another of the criminals and sent him flying; in the same motion, I pushed myself to my feet and used the upward momentum to elbow another.

The elbow was a staple weapon on the battlefield during hectic scuffles; I was far more familiar with using it than my fists. However, modern martial arts associations on Earth had banned its use for its deadly nature, which was the same reason I didn’t exactly find many opportunities to strike with it. The man I’d just hit stumbled backward from the force of impact and the back of his head slammed against the wall; he probably wasn’t going to be able to eat anything anytime soon.

“You little shit!”

“C’mere, brat, I’ll kill ya!”

“Oh, you’ve done it now!”

It took them a few seconds—time worth its weight in gold in my hands—and three fallen comrades to process what had happened, but they now raised their weapons and swung.

Their reactions were so slow that a Konigstuhl watchman performing at their level could expect Sir Lambert to blow a gasket and put them on a sleepless training schedule for their disgraceful conduct. Equipped with sacks of rocks and heavy sticks just unhazardous enough to not attract the attention of the guard, they attacked without paying any heed to the limited space we had. I hopped back, and they ended up hitting their own allies after failing to rein in their inertia.

Hmm, the first three weren’t that impressive either. Maybe violence isn’t their felony of choice.

At best, they were slightly better than an average person for not balking at the thought of hurting another living being. Their middling skill and my ability to move fast despite the flooded room had led to a good deal of friendly fire.

That’s good! Keep it coming! I was more than happy to chip away at their forces without doing any work.

They tried to regroup for another offensive, but their next attack was taking a while. Ah, of course, I realized. The guys I’d knocked down were blocking the only path toward me, and they were having trouble getting them out of the way. Two adults were enough to pack the corridor tight, and the pipe that lay beyond was barely any wider. This was a textbook example of over-assigning troops.

I’d steeled myself to face the gates of hell, but our situation turned out to be less dire than I’d thought. This gang was so clinical with their wily tricks that they never encountered combat. What a sad bunch; violence was king in this line of work, after all.

“Erich, keep your head down!”

I processed Mika’s command with an internal Sure? and stayed low after landing from my backstep. A split second later, the second wave’s vanguard—they’d finally sorted out their traffic jam—went flying backward.

“...That might have been too strong. Do you think he’s alive?”

The perpetrator in this case was obvious: Mika had woven a spell near the exit to catapult a clump of brick with tremendous force. Shooting a stone was a classic offensive spell, every bit as recognizable as fire or lightning, but fit their oikodomurgy to a tee.

Their cantrip had shot a fist-sized rock at speeds so blistering that it still appeared blurry with my Lightning Reflexes at full drive. Judging from its stability in the air, they’d tweaked the projectile to be conical or otherwise aerodynamic. Mika’s newfound ability to directly contribute as opposed to playing a pure support role had probably been why they’d been so confident; I would go so far as to say they’d been waiting for a chance to show the spell off.

“Glragh! Blerrr, gfhgh...”

“Holy fuck, that’s bad! Get a grip, man! Come on!”

I could hear the victim’s disgusting glossolalia from the other side of the doorway amidst the panicked screams of whoever had fished him up. The water came up just below my knees, so he was at risk of dying if left alone; thankfully, our enemies were ready to clean up after us.

“Mika,” I called. “Good news! He’s not dead!”

“That’s nice to hear,” they responded. “I tried it out on test targets, but I was still a bit worried. I made sure to set it to shatter on impact so it wouldn’t be completely overpowering, but this is the first time I’ve used it on a real person.”

“Don’t fuck with us, you brats! You better get your asses over here, or I’ll kill your parents, your brothers, your sisters, and your whole family tree!”

“‘Good news,’ my ass! We’re gonna rip out your guts and feed ’em to the slimes when we’re through with you!”

Whoa there, I didn’t realize you still had the will to bark. Unfortunately for them, our hometowns were too far to reach, and making good on their word to our ties in the capital would prove physically impossible. If these crooks were willing to take a stab at Lady Agrippina, I’d like to see them try.

But even so...they’d chosen the worst possible threat to make.

“Ursula.”

“Right here.”

I whispered under my breath so Mika wouldn’t hear, and the svartalf appeared with a singsong greeting. Her true power shone when the Sun God finished his daily reign, and the darkness of night was not limited to the surface. The lightless underground unseen to the moon was but another part of her domain.

“Would you kindly teach them what a precious thing light is? No need to hold back.”

“Oh my,” she hummed, “how frightful you are, Beloved One. But how could I possibly refuse a request from you?”

Ursula left her perch behind my ear and fluttered out of sight. She made off with the last vestiges of perceivable radiance with all haste, as evidenced by the chorus of panicked wails echoing down the pipe; the men’s vision had been pilfered by the dreadful fairy of the night.

They’d threatened my family: my brothers and parents back home, and Elisa here. I was rapidly losing any reservations about going all out. Don’t get too attached to those faces of yours, punks.

“Mika!” I shouted. “I’m pushing up! Cover me!”

“What?! Wait! Why are you leaving our safe zone?!”

I no longer had any reason to tread lightly. As numerous as they were, a blind opponent was hardly a threat, and I doubted any of them were strong enough to refuse alfish bewitchment. If I laid back and waited around now, it would take us years to get our well-deserved bath.

Throwing yourself into the fray without any chance of victory is reckless; lunging in to exploit a momentary weakness is bravery. I ran out of our room into the tunnel and swiftly checked both sides. There were more thugs grouped up on the left, so I instantly turned my invisible footholds their way, twirling in a mad dance to cut them down.

I sliced through eyes to guarantee blindness, chopped off fingers to disarm them, and grabbed a loose bludgeon out of midair to knock one out cold. A few of them had resisted Ursula’s invitation into the dark to some degree, but none could claim full command of their sight; combined with their companions plugging up space, their haphazard swings amounted to nothing worth mentioning.

“Jeez!” Mika shouted. “Don’t push yourself!”

I heard a series of low thuds on the right side. Using the angular momentum of an uppercut, I took a peek behind me and saw countless protrusions in the wall reach out to punch our foes with astounding power. The sideways pillars were too skinny to knock a grown adult out with a single strike, and stronger races or highly armored opponents could probably eat a handful without falling. However, the lightly armored rogues were mostly mensch, and even those that weren’t were still writhing in pain despite their continued consciousness. Teeth flew everywhere, landing in water bloodied by crushed noses—Mika’s side looked like it had caused more pain than mine.

“Whoa!” My persistent alertness allowed me to just barely react to the dull, heavy bloodlust I sensed beneath the water. A short spear shot sideways toward my midsection; I twisted clear and sandwiched the shaft between my arm and chest. Employing all my extra Hands, I yanked up the weapon to come face-to-face with a strange hybrid between mensch and fish.

He was a merfolk. These amphibious demihumans had both lungs and gills, switching between the two breathing apparatuses with a specialized muscle. This fellow in particular closely resembled a catfish, and his ancestral ability to survive in muddy bogs meant he was perfectly capable of swimming in the sewers. As amazing as his talents were, I couldn’t bring myself to marvel when he was putting them to use in crime.

Both of us held on to the spear and vied for position as we waged a battle to win superiority in balance. Although our bout only lasted an instant, it was plenty to discern his wealth of experience as a fighter.

Unwilling to unhand his weapon for free, he held on viciously. Fixating on a tool to the point of missing an opportunity was perhaps the most cardinal of battlefield sins, but in this specific scenario, the game of tug-of-war was a reasonable gamble to net him my head.

The merman was too strong for me to overpower with my childish build, and he knew his way around a spear well enough to grasp the nuance of how to combat me after I caught his weapon: he wanted to turn the situation around by toppling my center of gravity and drowning me.

I took him to be a savvy warrior—at worst, he was still the strongest of all the men I’d fought today. I couldn’t understand why a man of his talents had cast his lot with a gang. With skills this refined, he could easily have made a living under the sun.

My mensch sensibilities made reading his fishlike expressions impossible, but a chill ran up my spine as he opened his mouth ajar. I immediately tilted my head to one side and an invisible something whizzed by the spot my eyes had just been in.

The merman had spat a needle at me. One wouldn’t spot them on an open battlefield, but needles were a sidearm—generally categorized as such because they were ill fit for warfare outside of ambushes—that were as effective as they were heinous. They were especially potent in swordlocked states or tugs-of-war as a means of creating an exploitable opening—perhaps even more so than standard magic.

My thanks went out to Sir Lambert for having taught me about these underhanded tactics. Without the proper knowledge, my ill omen would have stayed a funny feeling, and I wouldn’t have been able to take the proper course of action to counter it. Had it not been for those lessons, I would probably be squirming around for air with a hand on a bloodied eye by now.

Not wanting to stay in this position all day, I decided to join my opponent in thinking outside of the box. At this point I’m sure it sounds done to death, but I used my full fleet of Hands to pull him at maximum power.

Each of my six Unseen Hands was stronger than I was. No matter how well-built or beefy the enemy, they wouldn’t be able to fight this. I used my brute force to lift him up and flung him at the wall.

For his part, he realized my intention and tried to let go, but it was too late. I’d grabbed onto more than just his spear: I had a grip on both of his hands and an armpit. I knew a seasoned fighter would notice the extra Hands despite their invisibility; I’d accounted for that from the start.

The merman’s body struck the wall with an awful squelching sound before slowly sliding into the water. At times, the environment made for the perfect blunt weapon: his face was crushed, and crimson oozed from his nose—I’d forgotten that fish also had red blood—at an alarming rate. He wasn’t getting up anytime soon, but thanks to his gills, I could leave him be without worrying about him drowning on me.

Not only had I cleaned up the enemies’ champion, but I’d picked up his weapon to boot. I’d been eyeing his spear, since it was well suited to the narrow passageway we found ourselves in.

I jabbed enemy after enemy with the stone tip of my spear from outside their meager weapons’ ranges. This one-sided beatdown meant my victory rate was finally ramping up, and I was closing in on twenty crooks subdued...when it came.

Dozens of people were sloshing around in the water in a frenzy, but a deep rumbling echoed into the pipe from a distance.

“AAAHHH!!!”

That was when I heard the screams on the other end of the tunnel.

“Oh, gods, it’s a slime!”

“Fuck! There’s too much blood!”

“Make a break for it! We still have a chance! Run!”

All the gangsters abandoned the battle. They picked up any wounded near them and all ran off.

Uh, wait. What did they just say?

The noise of viscous fluid rubbing against the walls of the chamber gradually grew louder. It was only as I watched the gangsters toss away their pride in a mad dash to escape did it click: it was coming. The harbinger of purgation that saw no good or evil on its path to purification was on its way.

“Oh, oh—oh no! Mika, we need to run!”

“R-Run?! But where?!”

“Wherever it is, we need to grab Miss Cecilia!”

That thing was bad news—we couldn’t do anything to fight it. It was an enormous mass of pure superheated monstrosity that we couldn’t do anything to. Even if I were fully armored and had all my catalysts, I doubted I’d get through more than a hundredth of its mass before it melted me in its bubbling bulk.

The slimes were akin to a stage gimmick that wasn’t designed to be fought. Any attempt to interact with it would force the GM to try and intervene, and a party foolhardy enough to do it anyway would be met with a sigh and a folded up master screen.

Our only recourse was to flee like headless chickens. We sprinted on my Hands in utter hysterics, and by the time we got back to the rainwater storage room, we could no longer hear the splashing footsteps of the fleeing crooks. Miss Cecilia was poking her head out of the cubby, probably because the silence had her worried; while we normally would have been obliged to scold her, the matter at hand made her proactive approach worthy of the highest praise.

“Come out, please! We need to run!”

“U-Um! What happened?! What in the world is happening?!”

“We, uh, don’t have time to explain! Please, just hurry—” As I pulled her out by the hand, we heard a tremendous mass slam into the wall behind us.

Oh gods. It’s already here.

“Oh, oh, n-not good!” Mika yelled. “E-Erich, what do we do?! Should I try making a full pocket in the wall to shield us?! These bricks are impervious to them!”

“I don’t think we’ll have enough air to survive until it passes! Can you block off the entrance instead?!”

“No way! I can’t fill a gap like that all at once, and the slime will probably tear straight through a thin wall!”

Crap, we’re running out of time! I could practically see the sadistic smirk of the GM as he turned over an hourglass. Wait, no, what do we do?! Are we done for?! Come on, there has to be something—maybe I can lift us up with Unseen Hands and keep us airborne until it... No, even the wall pocket is better than that!

Ursula couldn’t save us now, and Lottie’s wind shield meant nothing if I couldn’t summon her. While I could have called for her earlier and brought her down with us, speaking her name did nothing when we were cut off from the outside air.

Uh... Um...

“Excuse me!”

Mika and I were panicking over the few cards we had left in play when a piercing cry stopped us in our tracks. I whirled around, surprised by Miss Cecilia raising her voice for the first time, and saw her pointing to the ceiling. She was gesturing into pitch darkness.

“There! I spy an opening on the upper wall!”

“Huh? I don’t see—”

“No, she’s right! Look, Erich!” Mika flashed a mystic ray of light toward the heavens to reveal a hole: it was a pipe meant to redirect rainwater from above!

“Woo!” I yelped. “That’s incredible! Miss Cecilia, you’re a saint—a bona fide messenger of the Goddess!”

“O-Okay,” Mika said, “I should be able to make stairs leading up to it! We’re going to make it!”

My old chum poured all of their mana into their wand and smacked the floor, summoning a single pillar that towered upward, with steps jutting out from the core at regular intervals. Its threadbare nature made it feel a bit sketchy to traverse, but it was a proper spiral staircase that reached the ceiling.

“Yeaaah! You did it, Mika! I love you!”

“L-Love?! Uh, um, er, I’m glad to hear that, but let’s hurry, Erich!”

Y-Yeah, probably not the time. We had Miss Cecilia go up first—having the slowest lead the way would cause the least confusion—with Mika following and me taking the rear. Climbing these steps without a handrail in the dark was stressful beyond belief, but I could always catch someone with a Hand if the worst came to pass.

“Wh-Whoa!” Mika exclaimed. “The water’s rising!”

“Huh?! Oh, um, shall I run?!”

“Slowly! Please walk up slowly!”

Slimes were far more dense than water, and the keeper of the sewers naturally pushed water along with it as it moved. The excess was rapidly filling up this storage tank, but I made sure to calm Miss Cecilia down and have her ascend at a sensible pace.

We were fine: the water was rising, but now that I was looking closely, I saw other barred outlets meant to let it escape to lower areas of the underground dotting the walls. These had probably been fitted specifically to counteract flooding in the case of a slime pushing along too much water.

“Oh... There are metal rods here.”

Miss Cecilia managed to complete her precarious climb, and now realized that our escape pipe was blocked by a set of bars. The water was closing in and had grown darker to herald the slime’s arrival, but we had nothing to fear. Mika could remove the barrier and get us to safety in the blink of—

“I-I shall remove them! Hrng...ah!”

The terrifying sound of metal being warped out of shape was followed by a short silence and then the resounding splash of something heavy sinking into the water.

Huh? Hold on... What?

“Did... Did you just pry the bars off?!”

“Hurry!” she replied. “Do you think the water will reach us here?!”

“Uh... Well... I don’t think it’ll rise past a certain point to prevent backflooding in the streets...”

Mika and I looked at one another in bewilderment. I silently questioned whether the barrier was something a skinny girl could brute-force, and they violently shook their head.

I’d figured as much. These things were built to withstand the literal tons of water that flowed in after a big storm, and I doubted they were flimsy enough for a normal human being to lift, let alone bend. I don’t think I could so much as make them creak with all six of my Unseen Hands.

“Wah?!” Just as Mika tried to join Miss Cecilia in the pipe, they totally lost their footing. They’d left one leg on the last step of the stairs, and it had crumbled underfoot.

As they had said earlier, these bricks mystically defied change; perhaps a tiny slipup in casting had been all it took to lose stability after supporting the weight of two people. More likely, however, was that its use as a foothold in the monstrous task of bending steel had been too much strain for the thin slab of rock to bear. For all my grumbling about my share of bad luck, Mika was right there with me.

“Gotcha!”

At any rate, I wasn’t going to just let my pal fall; I had to help Miss Cecilia too, since she’d tipped herself over in a knee-jerk attempt to save Mika. I allotted three Hands each to prevent their falls. Mika got one as a foothold and two to prop them up; Miss Cecilia was about to fall face-first because she’d jumped forward despite knowing she wouldn’t make it, so I gently pushed her back by the shoulders and stomach.

Phew, that should be enough...

Our moment of peril had subsided, and frankly, I was being negligent: it took me an extra beat to notice the wet footsteps blending into the echoing sounds of water.

I whirled around as Permanent Battlefield combined with my usual alertness sounded the alarm, but all that did was turn my fatal lag into critical lag. My whole field of view was taken up by the face of a catfish: the merman’s lidless eyes were opened wide in unconcealed spite as he pounced from the water and tackled me.

Why are you here, you bastard?!

“Argh!”

“Erich!”

My reaction was late, my footing unstable, and I’d been in the middle of shifting my balance from the staircase to the pipe. All together, these factors left me with no means of resistance as the merman dragged me into the water with him. The only saving grace was that I managed to take a massive breath, knowing that I was going under.

“Mmrgh...”

Once again, these dice of mine had failed me with their accursed numbers at the end of the line. I still didn’t understand why he was here. Had his friends forgotten to save him because he was underwater? Left behind in a hopeless situation, had he let the flowing tides wash him here? What kind of bullshit was this?! I couldn’t even tell if this was my misfortune or the GM’s corrupt personality at this point!

I clawed at him to peel off his stranglehold, but his moisturizing outer coating of mucus kept me from getting a grip. His wrists were structured differently from a mensch’s, so I couldn’t even tell where to grab him to inflict the most pain. Worse still, his neck was too girthy to choke him out in return.

tprg4.10

[Tips] As the Empire’s showpiece to foreign ambassadors, buildings in the capital of vanity are tightly restricted so that all the roofs in any given district will be of equal height. This means that an average mensch confident in their leg muscles can use the rooftops as a convenient walkway. But beware: the crime of disrupting townscape upkeep is punished with a hefty fine of twenty-five librae or a month of unpaid labor.

“We’re in...” Mika summoned a dim orb of light. “...A warehouse?”

Indeed, our makeshift hideout was one of the many storehouses dotted throughout the city. Although the capital’s main purpose was to act as a hub of diplomacy, the large walls showed that it was prepared for a siege in dire times. The palace was a bastion for our executive government: it had a moat the size of a lake and four whole castles guarding it, not to mention the metropolis an invader would have to wade through to reach it.

Naturally, the crown needed to maintain supplies if they wanted to withstand a siege; there were imperial storage units all over the town. I suspected that either this alleyway entrance was only meant for when goods needed to be hauled out, or the dual deadbolts were spell-locked, only accessible by a mage.

I’d complained about my luck, but it seemed fortune hadn’t totally abandoned us. A deserted spot that no one would ordinarily be able to enter was perfect for laying low. Had we barged into someone’s home, the resident’s scream would have done us in.

“So, Erich,” Mika said with a furrowed brow and their hands on their hips. “Want to explain yourself?”

Noticing our tension, the priestess worriedly shifted her gaze between the two of us.

Yet I didn’t exactly have a good explanation. There was a girl, and a bunch of people were chasing said girl. The classics were classics for a reason, and the royal road dictates that she who is chased is innocent. Sure, sometimes the runaway damsel ends up being a thief or someone whose purpose is to drag the party into all kinds of tribulations, but that was a fun twist too, so I was all for it.

Jokes aside, I knew her. How could I cast her away without finding out what had happened? I explained to Mika and they put a hand to their face.

“Ah, so she’s the ehrengarde player... Fair game. Leaving her out to dry here would be too cruel.”

“Right? Besides, tons of sagas start with the protagonists sheltering a girl on the run.”

“I always knew you had it in you to be a hero, but this is grander than I expected.”

Mika’s exasperated but affable laugh let me know they were on board; we could start moving the discussion forward.

“Um,” the priestess interjected. “I’m very thankful for your help, but...why?”

“Like I explained to my old chum here,” I said, “I think it’s only natural to lend a hand to someone I know so well.”

Surprise was written all over her face, visible even through her concealing hood. She’d been clutching her medallion tight to fight her growing unease; now she was white-knuckling it.

“You saved me for that alone? Me, a stranger whose name you do not know?”

She couldn’t bring herself to believe me without reservation. True, common sense dictated that my reason for saving her was absurd: who would risk their own life for someone being chased by five people on a rooftop, especially when the pursuers were clearly being led by someone of considerable standing?

I wouldn’t—that is, if she truly were a stranger.

“We’ve enjoyed many a deep conversation,” I said. “I believe your decisions over the board speak volumes to your character.”

As hackneyed as it was, I considered this the truth. The realm of play was far more expressive than most gave it credit for, and I couldn’t count the number of times I’d thought to myself that a move was very like the person making it. Drawing from my experience, I’d decided this priestess was worthy of my trust—at least, enough for me to save her once and ask why she was being chased.

She froze in astonishment for a moment, but soon covered her lips to giggle in a very genteel way. “Then I suppose you are quite the untrustworthy gentleman.”

“Ha ha! She’s got you there, Erich.”

“...That’s fair. Looks like I’ll have to tally another loss for me.”

Ouch, I didn’t think she’d go there. I employed a lot of diversions, decoys, and baits to take major pieces; I couldn’t refute her. She preferred honest offensives using her emperor; I was the antithesis of her fair playstyle.

“But as devious as you are,” she added, “I know well that a friend is more valuable than small change.”

We laughed for a spell, and then I showed her the silver piece the woman had given me outside. The priestess bit her tongue as if there was something she wanted to say but couldn’t bring herself to.

Hm? If I remembered correctly, this coin had been minted to celebrate someone named Archbishop Lampel. Lampel the Hairless had been some big shot theologian who earned a place on our currency with a particularly noteworthy dissertation, and these usually went for twenty percent more than a libra on account of their good make.

Why had the priestess’s expression clouded up upon seeing the silver piece? While I would have loved to roll for perception, the answer didn’t seem too hard to find: whoever was after her was almost guaranteed to be someone she knew well, like a member of her immediate family. Coupling the noble bodyguard I’d spoken with earlier with her refined mannerisms let me see the big picture on my own. The priestess was probably heartbroken that they’d stoop to such low tactics in order to hunt her down.

Had she been the type of mademoiselle to throw a tantrum saying, “How dare she buy my whereabouts with this cheap coinage!” then I could have ignored her without a slight on my conscience, but alas.

“So,” I asked, “why are you being chased?”

“Huh? Oh, um...”

Not having expected me to get right into the real issue at hand, the girl reeled and her eyes darted between me and the floor.

Whoops, I shouldn’t have been that hasty. We’re barely acquainted, so nothing good will come from rushing her. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t wish to. I only asked in the hopes of helping a good friend and rival.”

Choosing whether to press or withdraw based on another person’s reaction to a question was difficult, and one wrong move could immediately end the conversation. She seemed hesitant to divulge—and not in the way where she might ostensibly be inviting me to pry—so I figured it was best not to overstep my bounds.

“Still,” I said, “may I ask for a name, at least? I am Erich of Konigstuhl, a piddling servant to a magus.”

“And I am Mika, but one humble student sullying the seats of the College, studying with the Hannawald cadre within the School of First Light.”

As the two of us bowed together, the priestess pondered for a moment, still holding her holy icon close. At last, she made up her mind: her hand reached up and she removed her hood.

“I am Cecilia. I am a lowly priestess who offers prayer to the Night Goddess with the Circle Immaculate from a church on Fullbright Hill.”

Her unveiled visage was that of the moon on a foggy night, freshly revealed by a crisp breeze: her image was vivid as it was enchanting. Her skin was profoundly fair, but retained a vibrant vivacity all the same; the unblemished palette of white was accented by lips pinker than the most brilliant cherry blossom. My assumptions of her stature were reinforced by the dignified garnets gleaming deep brown in her long-slit eyes, accentuated by the lighter chestnut of her long, straight hair coming down sharply to decorate the bridge of her nose.

Childlike roundness lingered in her beautiful features, but the glimmering will that shone through her windows to the soul did away with such immaturity in favor of raw captivation. It was almost difficult to believe that a person could be born so empyreal in appearance.

At once, my doubts disappeared: she was noble. Her unfathomable elegance, poise, and command of upper-tier palatial speech betrayed the tale of a young lady running away from home. I could see why she might want to conceal her backstory. I had no doubt she’d found herself here after making a daring escape in order to elude some terrible injustice.

Once again, Mika and I didn’t need any outward cue to exchange glances. And again, we nodded in unison with the same thought in mind: let’s help her.

“In that case,” I said, “we won’t delve any deeper into your personal affairs, Miss Cecilia.”

“Agreed,” they echoed. “We should try and leave the area quickly, so if you don’t wish to answer, I will not ask. Any friend of my old pal is a friend of mine, after all.”

Mika’s closing statement left me beaming. I raised a fist their way and they knocked their own against it without missing a beat.

“But wherever to?” Miss Cecilia asked. “There are already lookouts on the rooftops, and they’ll occupy the streets soon enough...”

She was clearly unable to keep up with the rapid developments, and surely would have had steam wafting off her thick robes had this been a manga. Although she was quick to move in ehrengarde, the unpredictable events had overheated her brain.

And, I mean, I couldn’t blame her. I was some kid she barely knew who ran a board game piece shop; not only had I pulled out some wily tricks to save her, but I was now offering to see this through for nothing in return.

Who wouldn’t hesitate in a situation like this? If I’d been in her shoes, I would’ve been convinced this “Erich” character was going to betray me at the most critical point of the story. It was unthinkable for a chance meeting to be this perfectly arranged...but that was true from my perspective too.

“The blossoming capital’s artistry isn’t exclusive to the surface.” With a mischievous grin, I pointed toward a trapdoor hidden in the darkness of the room.

Let the urban adventure begin.

[Tips] Cityscapes are one of many different settings a TRPG can take place in. They are a far cry from dungeons, abandoned castles, and open plains, often requiring the party to interact with all sorts of characters to solve a mystery in the heart of a metropolis.

The pursuers had not been unleashed on a whim. The girl had escaped the estate with the help of sympathetic maids a little over two hours prior, so they had certainly been caught off guard; still, they made their moves with proper foresight.

Not only had the woman commanding the pursuit rounded up her most elite to give chase, but she’d sent messengers bearing the news of the girl’s escape to every corner of the city. Knowing that the target of her mission was important like no other—the girl drew from one of the most sublime bloodlines in the country and had even been raised in hiding until now—she’d already planned ahead for the slim possibility that her team would lose sight of their mark.

The captain of the search party had never expected to resolve the issue on her lonesome; the world was too imperfect for that. Impeccable planning and the best security money could buy still allowed some to slip through the cracks, and she was willing to endanger her reputation if it meant patching up even one more point of failure.

Accolades were only worth so much. The city guard scoffed at her, jeering about how overblown this was for a single girl on the run; the imperial guardsmen dug at her, asking if this was really worth their time. Even so, she did not waver: all the distinction in the world meant no more than a roadside pebble when weighed against the lord she venerated.

However, in other respects, one could even say that she was overly optimistic. Sincere diligence was of paramount importance in imperial high society, but that was not necessarily a universally held opinion. Some preferred to use the mistakes of others to line their own pockets.

Among the many officers tasked with deploying men in search of this missing person of interest, one had come up with a dastardly idea: if he were to find the child before anyone else and turn her in directly to her family without reporting to his superiors, the prize for his efforts was sure to be exorbitant.

These sorts of lowlives could be found wherever one went. So obsessed with their own well-being were they that a jingling sack of change was enough to buy any loyalty they had to goodness; this held true no matter how strict the moral code or how severe the penalty.

Just as the captain of the search went about life with an unwavering faith in the infallible nature of someone above, there existed scum who could imagine nothing more sacrosanct than their own greed. Such was the duality of the world.

As a matter of course, a conniving cur could only employ conniving tricks. He took one look at his available pieces, and after sending his subordinates off on the job, he turned to his source of alternative income.

The shadows of the sprawling city were home to unscrupulous folk willing to toe the line of legality, if not boldly step into the realm of the illicit. These criminals called the sewers of Berylin their home. While certain circumstances prevented them from setting up a permanent headquarters, they were much in their element when moving around beneath the earth—a fact that coincided to a predestined degree with the capital’s subterranean infrastructure.

Their position primed them for unlawful activity, and the shameless officer thought they would make the perfect pawns. Crooks were ever at the ready so long as one had the cash to buy them, and soon they would gather their men, tap into their streams of intelligence, and get feet on the ground to find the girl.

Most of the gangsters fanned out through the city’s underground passageways, expecting to surface at different points around town to continue their investigation there. The unseen network of tunnels was only ever home to them and the occasional state official there to maintain the system; no normal person would ever be found there, let alone the young lady they were hunting.

Indeed, one could consider it no less than a bizarre twist of fate that destiny had prepared for them a violent surprise.

[Tips] The imperial underground waterways—or the sewers for short—are a hybrid aqueduct and sewage-treatment system that span the underground levels of the capital. Countless pipes sprawl in every which direction, and many walkable passageways have been constructed alongside them for upkeep purposes.

Only maintenance personnel and College affiliates are allowed to enter, but the expansive network of tunnels is impossible to police effectively, even for the crown jewel of the Rhinian state.

“To think all this was just underfoot,” Miss Cecilia said in awe.

The Trialist Empire’s infrastructure was far beyond that of the Middle Ages I’d read about in history books; it bore a closer resemblance to the marvels of engineering seen in Classical Rome. Of all the great masterworks in Rhine, though, the gargantuan array of pipes that made up the Berylinian water system was the greatest.

“We’ll struggle to reunite if we end up separated, so please make sure to stay close.”

My chosen escape route had been a trapdoor leading from a storehouse to the sewers. We hadn’t stumbled into a commercial storage unit, but rather one belonging to the crown—explaining why the alleyway entrance had been secured with only deadbolts—and these sorts of buildings always came with passages leading to the facilities below.

The crown couldn’t exactly allow random houses to have access to the underground, nor could inspectors reasonably come and go through private property. These accessways supplemented the manholes dotting various streets throughout town, and spoke to the Empire’s willingness to support systems even after they were already established. This level of commitment drove home just how intelligent the architects of this city were, and reinforced my amazement that Mika was aiming to join their ranks.

“All right, Mika,” I said. “Where are we?”

“Uhh, give me a second. I didn’t bring my map today, so... We shouldn’t be too far from the main eastern passage, so if we can find a sign somewhere, I should be able to figure out where we are.”

The three of us stuck close to one another as we carefully trod down the narrow path. Grooves meant to let rainwater pass lined the floor, and I could hear a trickling sound ring up from below. It hadn’t looked like it was going to rain, so this was probably waste from some home or another.

Mika led the formation, with Miss Cecilia in the middle, and me covering the rear. With two of us lighting the way with magic, we could make out enough to advance without fear of losing our footing.

After walking for a short while, we came upon a wide tunnel. The long, long cylinder had walkways on either side of the deep yet gentle stream in its center. With the brick walls and masoned flooring, it was more a testament to human ingenuity than a creepy hallway—at least, so long as it was well lit.

“Is this...a sewer?” Miss Cecilia asked. “I find it rather peculiar...”

“That it doesn’t smell?” I said.

“Yes, and that the water seems very clean. I haven’t spotted any insects either.”

The priestess leaned over the water without fear and went around carefully inspecting the brick and stone that made up the passage. To a trained eye, this was the solemn manifestation of many a talented architect, but most would shrink away or at least show some distaste for a location as unpalatable as the sewers.

Much to my surprise, she did not show any such aversion; in fact, she seemed delighted to find herself in a place she had never visited before.

“What pretty ornamentation on the walls. Oh, and what’s this? There’s something written here. My, this writing is rather archaic. It says... ‘The superintendent can eat a fat one,’ and, ‘Give us a raise’?”

Seeing her stick her nose into everything she found novel was...well, she reminded me of an elementary schooler on a field trip. She seemed like she was around my age—my physical age, that is—but acted more naively, perhaps on account of her sheltered upbringing.

“Oh, I know where we are. Remember, Erich? We came here around the middle of last month.”

Not to spoil her fun, but the patterns on the wall were for more than entertaining well-to-do ladies. These were unique codes that made different areas of the system distinguishable from one another to the few people who could decipher their meanings. I had a general understanding of them as well, since Mika had taught me the basics on a previous trip.

“This area connects to the tap water system of the city,” I explained to our guest. “The water here only flows to one more cleaning tank before going back up to the surface, so it’s already been treated several times by this point. That’s why it’s so clean.”

“Is that so? I’d once heard compulsory sewer labor to be a punishment for criminal offenses, so I had imagined these tunnels would be quite the fearsome place.”

Had these been the drains of industrial Britain, we would be in a fearsome location indeed. However, this world had the curious phenomenon of magic, and this city was the capital of vanity in such a world. No matter how beautifully manholes were adorned, a terrible odor would instantly undermine any attempt to put on airs. The Empire’s insistence on polishing its infrastructure to perfection bordered on downright petty.

All this to say, the sewers weren’t anything to worry about so long as one knew how to carry themselves—but that was a big if.

“Rats and the like do pop up from time to time,” I continued, “meaning one might be at risk of catching something foul down here. But the capital’s waterways are well maintained, so there’s no need to worry.”

“My, you’re very knowledgeable on the matter. Oh, what is this pattern here?”

Whoa there, you really do have a childlike sense of wonder. That won’t get you killed, per se, but... “Excuse me.”

“Eek!”

Miss Cecilia had been one pace away from letting her curiosity direct her to a large opening with a carving of a relief valve and water droplet at the top before I yanked her back by the arm. Her subsequent shriek was not a product of my haphazard tugging, mind you: the instant she stepped forward, a translucent body had jumped out from the opening onto our walkway.

Yes, yes, run along now. I used a Hand to scoot the soft, jiggly mass back into its den. I’d grown used to this slimy sensation over the course of many a bulletin board quest.

“Wh-What was that?”

“A keeper of the sewers,” I said. “They feed on our waste to produce clean water; you could even consider them the rulers of this domain.”

It was a slime: the College had crafted an artificial life-form that metabolized waste and filtered out impurities to create clear water. Kept in sewers across the Empire, these innocuous fellows were diligent workers whose sole purposes were to clean filth and eat up plague-ridden pests. Their invention was one of the greatest feats known to alchemy.

I ask that the “well-versed” among you remain seated: these slimes did not have any of those functionalities. They couldn’t selectively melt away clothes or armor, nor did they have any reproductive need to assault the living; they simply ate whatever scraps fell their way.

R-rated services notwithstanding, these slimes did a terrific job of bolstering the Empire’s waterworks to astounding levels. Any other system of this scale would have sludge, mud, and dust everywhere, but these little creatures ate it all and even preyed on disease carriers like rats and bugs. While we were still in the posttreatment side of the facility, the water wouldn’t be this clean without them.

Abroad, foreigners joked about the well-known fact that imperial water could be ingested without even boiling it—only true in major cities, obviously—and the industrious workers who made that a reality were trudging about today as they always did.

“The College is in charge of overseeing these slimes,” I explained. “I come down here to give them special feed every so often, so I know a bit about the area.”

My familiarity with the sewers had begun with the remarkable unpopularity of the slime maintenance quest on the College’s job bulletin. Slimes mainly subsisted on random filth that they fermented and broke down into calories, but their metabolic process required magic to function. Feeding them rocks full of mana did wonders to keep them trucking along, so requests to do so showed up on the quest board a few times a month.

Naturally, crawling around the sewers for half a day to earn a single libra wasn’t exactly enticing, and even the poorest students preferred to avoid the creepy underground if possible. As a vulture who could only pick off forgotten requests, it was one of the few tasks I could take without reserve, and I had grown well acquainted with these tunnels as a result.

Mika’s navigational knowledge came in part from accompanying me, but mainly from their classes: oikodomurge hopefuls had to come down here as part of their practical lectures.

Seen in a different light, this dearth of foot traffic made this the perfect hidden route to throw off trackers, especially since I doubted a noble would even think to check here. We mostly knew where we were going, so the only other issue was the uncomfortable humidity that would cling to our hair and clothes; otherwise, this was an ideal route to get anywhere in the city without being stopped.

We just needed to be a teensy bit careful with where we stepped. The original alchemical inventors had been geniuses to be sure, but even they hadn’t found a way to teach these primal organisms how to differentiate between what was and was not meant to be eaten.

Thanks to the slimes’ hard work, though, the ground was clean enough that we didn’t have to worry about slipping. As long as we kept track of where we were, the trip home was bound to be easy...

Or at least, it had been bound to be easy.

tprg4.9

[Tips] “No pawn mates” is a popular rule in southern Rhine, in large part because the Emperor of Creation was born in the region. While checks are allowed, checkmates are considered distasteful. Imperial political scientists often cite this as an example of the Empire’s strong national zeitgeist: love for the Emperor permeates even the recreational pastimes of the lower castes.

The rift between mortal and immortal is impossible to bridge. Of all their differences in value, the deepest divide is that of what life is. This is not merely to say that the undying are more patient or that they are prone to more complacence; their attitudes regarding economies of time are mutually exclusive.

Although mensch sometimes forgo proper sustenance and sleep in favor of their favorite activities, they cannot avoid consumption or excretion as a whole, and some degree of rest is required for them to enjoy their pastimes to their fullest. Carried to the logical extreme, they live for life’s sake, and every other activity is accessory to that goal; after all, no superfluous pursuit can make headway if the bare minimum requirements needed to stave off death are not met.

However, the same cannot be said of immortals.

Methuselah do not have to eat or drink, and vampires can power through the pangs of hunger to relinquish their sole source of nutrition—blood—without keeling over. Furthermore, their natural talents most often converge on some fixation or other: in the end, life becomes accessory to whatever mode of recreation they choose.

Perhaps the most well-known example would be that of ehrengarde connoisseurs. Once obsessed with an art, undying beings will dedicate the whole of their eternal existence to it. The better part of undertakings cannot be completed alone: even the solitary crafts of painting or poetry require editors or trusted critics to polish the work before it enters the public eye.

Thus, one must ask, what would an immortal hobbyist do when stumbling upon a person that can help hone their craft or with whom they can share their passions? They try to drag them into it, of course—to make them squander any and all free time chasing the same dragon.

It is here that the gulf between life lived for life’s sake and life lived as an afterthought becomes abundantly clear. Immortals gleefully take in their favorite lesser beings in an attempt to share their interests with the poor souls. Ehrengarde lovers are infamous for latching on to choice players and never letting go: they pay exorbitant sums in order to ensure that the masters of their hobby can devote every drop of attention to furthering their own skill.

It ends ever in tragedy. Fleeting life-forms dabble in the arts as a way of giving their existences greater luster; scarce few individuals truly dedicate everything to a calling. They marry, have children, and give birth to things more important than mere vocations before they inevitably pass away.

Immortals cannot fathom this so-called “normalcy.” The two walks of life are simply that different in every way, shape, and form.

“And so, madam, as we know it possible to open a space between two locations through which objects can be transferred, I see no reason as to why we should be unable to filter what may pass through. The formulae required to restrict teleportation to biological matter may be all but alien to modern magic, but we know they exist. If we therefore form a barrier of tubular shape...”

Faced with a handsome man in the absolute best of spirits, a methuselah scoundrel wondered to herself how many days it had been; yet even in spite of losing track of time, her razor-sharp mind continued to whiz at full speed. Living with frail mortals that could die if she so much as glanced away had caused her to begin using day-night cycles as valuable measurements of time as of late. Had she been the same old Agrippina of yore, this conversation would be fated to never end.

“You mean to suggest that we construct a space-bending rift on one end that specifically filters away air, I presume?”

“Yes! You’re a bright one, madam! That’s exactly it! And by employing anti-gravity magic to ‘drop’ the ship sideways, we ought to achieve forward movement without need for propulsion, all free from air resistance. Am I not a genius?! Should we set a regular route with this technology, the airship will be the fastest mode of transport in all of history!”

“A wonderful idea indeed, Duke. The only hiccup would be that one thousand magia of our caliber would still lack the mana to power such an endeavor.”

How long had she discussed these pointlessly unattainable theories detailing pointlessly advanced engineering in pointlessly precise detail in service of a pointlessly high-minded ideal with this pointlessly energetic man?

Methuselah were a people who, in theory, did not need the concept of time to structure their lives. But to relinquish food and sleep in favor of endless debate and mystic experimentation screwed with even Agrippina’s internal rhythm.

While she couldn’t write off the conversation as boring by any metric, her time here was undeniably taking its toll. Sitting face-to-face with a man that could easily kill her in the societal sense and could probably do the same in a physical one did not rub her the right way.

Worse still, the former emperor constantly barraged her with topics that prodded at her interests in a crafty attempt to draw more comments out of her. Agrippina hated the man’s silver tongue, but couldn’t afford the rudeness of silence with a person of his standing—which was also the reason she had yet to cut him off and ask when they were going to get to the real meat of the conversation.

After debating several magical theories for long enough to wither anyone’s perception of time, the vampire slapped his thigh and beamed at her with a vivacious smile.

“My goodness,” he said, “this has truly been a fruitful discussion. You see, I simply cannot help myself when an unsolved problem is left dangling before me.”

Flaws with the current airship design had dominated a large part of their discussion. The original theoretical proofs had been published fifty years prior, and the Jadwiga had taken to the open skies only to crash after being attacked by fledgling drakes a piddling thirty years ago. The second ship, the Kriemhild, had been run aground during a stable low-altitude test by a flock of drakes and griffons. This recent disaster lingered in the memory as a testimony to the difficulty inherent in even the slightest defiance of gravity.

The Empire required a reliable means of flight. An airship needed the ability to protect itself from exterior threats and complete its voyage without outside support; a vessel was only worth anything if it could make it there and back again in one piece.

Alas, this proved a difficult objective. People had been made to toddle around on the dirt, and to forsake their initial design was to take on challenges greater than one ought to bear. In response, the good duke had initially considered the possibility of employing a barrier of space-bending magic or some sort of short-range physical separator.

Agrippina had been introduced to him as an expert on the subject, so he’d brought up his ideas with no more intent than to get a second opinion before touching on more serious matters. He’d planned to quickly—by immortal metrics—move on, but lost himself in the exciting conversation and totally forgot about his original reason for being here. This was in spite of his retainer begging him to come out already from beyond the door—the poor servant had been reduced to waiting for his master rather than on him.

“Yes, well...” Agrippina paused, savoring her relief that the end was in sight. “I suppose these treatises penned with my meager wits have served some use if they were enough to entertain you, Professor.”

“Please, there’s no need for modesty, madam. Truly, I find it peculiar that you and your exceptional talents have been buried beneath the rabble all this time.”

As if to smother Agrippina’s returning tranquility, the duke gathered the scattered essays and ran his fingers across the covers. His beauty was intoxicating as he lovingly gazed at the works.

“An analysis of the foundational correlation between heat dispersion and magical augmentation. A critique of the Fifth Axiom for its inconsistencies with space-bending magic, and a subsequent proposal of nonaxiomatic theory. A proof to allow both space-time degradation and dilation to theoretically coexist... Each and every one touches on a topic that a scholar could spend a lifetime researching. For these wonderful subjects to be confined to short-form essays is a shame like no other.”

The vampire sighed with such passion that it transcended the realm of lust to attain new heights of sensuality. Noticing his shift in demeanor, the scoundrel realized, Oh. Not good, and instinctively began weaving a teleportation spell.

Unfortunately, Agrippina was a few moments too late.

“This must be fate,” Martin said. “Worry not, for I shall endorse your rise to professorship using my name! I have no doubt you suffered many an injustice as the daughter of a foreign house, but those days are over! You have the Erstreich Dukedom at your back now—this boorish title will see some good use yet!”

The morally bankrupt methuselah felt as though she could hear something very important shatter into a million pieces.

To begin with, she had remained a researcher thus far of her own volition: she was free from the tedious responsibilities of professorship, and her subordination to Leizniz had meant none would approach her in the hopes of stirring up a new cadre. On the flip side, she enjoyed privileges beyond those of a student, which she used to further what research piqued her interests and read forbidden tomes in the library. She had no need for funds thanks to her family, so being a researcher offered her the most freedom to advance her research.

Agrippina did not need prestige; she already had money; glory was a laughable motivator. This incorrigible nature of hers had been the very reason a woman of her marvelous talents had lazily played second fiddle to a vitality-loving wraith.

“No, in fact, it would be a waste to shelve a brilliant mind like yours away in the realm of academia. You would make for a wonderful advisor to my daughter... Shall I create a new position in the palace?”

Agrippina could hardly even imagine how many rules and customs he would need to trample over to get his way, but for a brief moment, a voice in the back of her mind whispered that it knew how she could get hers: if I kill this fool and run, maybe it will all be swept under the rug...

...It probably won’t, Agrippina’s waning sanity grumbled back. No, it definitely won’t.

As she resigned herself to her fate, she could hear that sickly wraith’s scornful laugh echo in the depths of her heart.

[Tips] Researchers at the College all dream of writing a masterwork essay that will gain the attention of all their peers and send the world of academia into a mad frenzy—which is practically the only hope of receiving a letter of recommendation for promotion. This also means that a person who goes out of their way to hide their accomplishments should, by all accounts, never receive an opportunity to climb the ladder.

I liked many things about the Trialist Empire, but one of my absolute top picks would have to be the lack of an obnoxious rainy season. With the delightfully dry summer right around the corner, I had completely given up on worrying about my employer.

Lady Agrippina still kept in touch. Her instructions to Elisa about homework never ceased, and she made sure to leave any necessary money on her desk for us to take, so she was verifiably alive and well—er, she was still alive.

I still had no idea what had actually happened to her, but seeing Lady Leizniz going about her business as jubilation personified was proof enough that whatever fate had befallen the madam was unspeakably horrific.

I was running bets in my mind on what sort of mess Lady Agrippina had gotten herself into, complete with winning odds:

i. A powerful authority had captured her and was putting her through the wringer for her disregard for every rule in the book. One-point-one-two odds.

ii. Relatives from her motherland had come to visit with all sorts of family drama (like an arranged marriage). One-point-seven-five odds.

iii. The Empire was employing her as an expert for a secret project and had confined her for the duration of her service. Three-point-six odds.

iv. Some gentleman or another was chasing her around out of love. Twelve-point-four odds.

There wasn’t much to it, but personally, I was gunning for either ii or iv. I would enjoy nothing more than to see that loathsome creature chained by the collar of marriage. Think about it: the sight of that woman scowling in bridal uniform would make for the perfect blackmail, and double as an unforgettable moment to look back upon whenever I needed a hearty laugh.

Of course, that required the unlikely event that there was a man somewhere on this planet that could rein in that utter beast, but still. Putting my tasteless mockery aside, I’d taken some time off from running my street stall to replenish my wares, and I finally had a solid-enough stockpile to warrant opening up again.

“Boy, the weather’s perfect for business today.”

“You’ve got that right, Mika.”

The only difference was that today, I had my old chum sitting beside me.

While I’d been working on my products, he’d complained about having trouble with sculpting fine metal ornaments. Aesthetics were an integral part of architecture: one could get away with boring and pragmatic designs in times of need, but a proper building was meant to please the eye. Symbolic patterns and stone statues to serve as watchmen were indispensable for a complete work.

As an oikodomurge hopeful, he’d been told to practice until he could make something of respectable make; as it turned out, that was easier said than done.

Mika certainly had artistic talent, especially when drawing buildings or blueprints. Having seen some of the sketches he made on used scrap sheets, I was sure he could run a small business as a street artist if he got his hands on some real paper.

However, he discovered that his talents in rendering architecture on paper did not translate to proficiency with three-dimensional bodies. When he tried to sculpt a gargoyle meant to decorate the corner of a roof as a gutter, his attempt had amounted to a mushy facsimile of the original model.

When he showed me, the palm-sized lump of clay had been...well, it wasn’t an idol of an evil god or anything, but it reminded me of a kid’s toy that might come attached to a magazine subscription. I could still see the vision, but the shaping was a bit off at every corner, and he clearly hadn’t been sure where to add definition and where to smooth things out; it had all the detail of a felt doll.

My idea to help my struggling friend was to show him my homemade ehrengarde pieces. I figured it would be easier to take note of his own mistakes if he had the original on hand to compare his work to, and if we bought some used scrap metals, he could wrap the foils around the figures to get a more intuitive understanding of their composition.

This plan worked wonders. It had been a long road, seeing as how Mika had churned out a few dozen more failures—we had to turn them back into malleable clay with magic every time—but by the end, he’d been creating proper eye candy.

As we practiced, I’d thought to myself that all this time, effort, and mana would go to waste if we didn’t earn a bit of profit on the way. And so, Mika plus Erich had birthed a set of metal ehrengarde pieces. They weren’t solid metal, but rather plated versions of my wooden statuettes. They were also all fully painted, so my new lineup was far more stylish than the old woodworks I’d been selling.

I’d thought to peddle these on Mika’s behalf to help my buddy pay their College fees, but they insisted on not letting me do all the work of running the stall, so here they were. As a result, the two of us were both getting ready for a day of selling board game pieces.

Mika was a strong enough player to hold their own against me, so this meant we could hustle twice as many customers as before. According to them, there were oodles of master players in the North on account of everyone being snowed in all winter, every winter. As a child, they’d played with their parents and siblings until the pieces began to wear. I could see why they’d said, “I’m pretty familiar with the game”—big words for someone who was always so humble.

As we lined up our two tables next to each other—selling as a pair also meant we had to rent a pair of permits—Mika began to mumble anxiously.

“I’m kinda worried they won’t sell... We jacked up the prices a lot.”

“Don’t worry about it, old chum. Look how glorious these are.”

I picked up a piece and felt the cool metal on my fingertips. Playing with it to show its silvery gloss, it looked like a real knight had been shrunk down to the size of my palm. Not only was he clad in plate armor, but even his trusty steed was fully equipped; with a piece this heavily clad, no pawn would ever take him down—the rules be damned. They were expensive to produce and we were selling them for five librae a pop, but I was sure we’d clean house.

Lovers of ehrengarde were mostly also lovers of collection. Lining up their favorite troops and telling the stories of where they got them was a frequent diversion during postgame analyses.

“They’ll sell,” I assured them. “Personally, I’d want a whole set of pieces like these.”

I placed my lips on the realization of our craftsmanship and flashed Mika a smile to try and calm their nerves, but for whatever reason, all I got in return was a dubious stare.

Wh-What? Did I do something? Maybe I tried a bit too hard to be cool...

“It’s just...you’re not that convincing when you have something that’ll definitely sell out on the table next to mine...”

With a sulking tone, Mika’s gaze drifted over to the items I’d created on my own time: the Smokeshow Army series.

“No, uh, this isn’t—hey, wait! Don’t act like you weren’t on board with this!”

“Yeah, when I was a boy! But now that I have my wits about me, this is scandalous! Look at how much leg she’s showing!”

Back when I’d fulfilled my promise to the ogre to carve up a purdy ogre warrior, a handful of other customers who’d seen the piece asked me to make them something similar. Men lusted no matter the day or age, it seemed, and my realization that figures of stimulating women were quick to sell had soon gotten the better of me.

I’d made a knight whose garments only covered her chest and hips, leaving the underside of her breasts, her stomach, and her limbs at the mercy of the elements; a dragon knight who playfully coiled her legs around a massive drake’s neck; a messenger who ferried her correspondence in an absolutely monumental bosom.

I had given form to every fleshly idea I could come up with, and before shifting back to agender, Mika had been all for it. In fact, he’d given me suggestions for new boneheaded motifs; talking shop as one of the boys again for the first time in a long while had gotten to my head, and I’d mass-produced a whole series of the things.

I’d made a pawn wearing armor too big for her, exposing her legs; an empress in sensationally thin silk, crossing her legs atop her throne with ostentatious flair; an archer who—oh, what was I even thinking with this one—let her bow dig into her chest to accentuate her body lines. One glance at any of them was enough to uncover the proclivities of their creator, and here lay an entire army of them...

My subsequent attempts to win back my friend’s respect failed spectacularly, and I began the workday with a cloud over my head. Dammit... You’re an accomplice! Why do you get a free pass just because your sex changed?!

Mood aside, however, our business went swimmingly. The metal pieces were selling at a good pace, and we found our demographic with show-offs who were looking to splurge.

Admittedly, Mika had been right: the Smokeshow Army sold out almost instantly, and I had a mountain of requests for new designs to build. All the disgusted stares from the good women of town did hurt a tiny bit—oh, say, just as much as stepping straight on top of a D4.

But other than my mental damage and the litany of failed social conduct saving throws, business was booming. Mika’s tight schedule and budget wouldn’t allow us to do this every day, but by my estimate, we could make around fifty librae a month like this; skill truly was man’s greatest ally in his time of need. I was once again reminded how my father from a lifetime ago had told me to study, his constant refrain that, if nothing else, an education would never be a detriment.

We continued making sales in between grinding challengers to dust, and I could feel my brain tiring out by evening. I stretched, loosening up my tightened muscles as I stalled closing up for the day. The girl more interested in games than pieces had failed to show up. It wasn’t as if we had a spoken friendship, and I’d taken some time off, so it was only natural for her not to be around.

Still, I couldn’t deny that I’d been looking forward to playing that worthy rival of mine; Mika had been curious to see how they’d stack up against her too. For all the profit we made—the Smokeshow Army raked in almost five librae on its own—it was a disappointing end to the day.

No matter how populous the capital was, most of its citizens were day dwellers. As the sun careened toward the horizon, our fellow merchants packed up one after another until we followed suit. All we had left was a plain set of tables and chairs and one set worth of ehrengarde pieces, so the cleanup was easy.

We needed to stop by my house to stash away our earnings and tools, but after that, I thought it might be nice to grab Elisa and go to the public bath with the three of us. Our payday meant we could afford a nicer bathhouse for the night.

My sister was more used to Lady Agrippina’s personal tub complete with scented oils than a public space, but I was sure she’d still have fun. She was still little enough to take into the men’s side with us, so we wouldn’t have to worry about her getting lost.

“A bath sounds nice,” Mika agreed.

“Right? Which one should we go to? I’m thinking that we can afford to splurge.”

“I’d rather keep the bath simple and eat a nice meal, personally.”

The heft of my purse put me in a cheery mood, and we happily gabbed about our plans as we turned into an alleyway that served as a shortcut home. Suddenly, a peculiar sound caught our attention. Foot traffic had abandoned this back alley, so it was coming from somewhere else...from above.

A high-pitched clattering interspersed with the sound of something breaking: somebody was running across the shingles on the rooftop.

It went without saying that it was out of the ordinary for someone to walk on top of the roofs in the capital. Every now and again, a light-footed stuart or someone naturally capable of mystic flight like a siren would do so out of laziness, but the risk of property damage meant that the city guard was quick to shout them down.

I won’t lie: the clusters of tall buildings did make it enticing to jump from rooftop to rooftop like a hooded assassin, but it really did cause trouble, so the good boys and girls at home would do well to not try for themselves. Shingles were surprisingly expensive to manufacture, and repairing something that high up cost an exorbitant fee; anyone who broke them could kiss their wallet goodbye.

What all of this meant was that anyone who rushed across rooftops was sure to be a walking problem magnet to be avoided at all costs. Whether it was a turf war between thugs or a frantic chase between secret agents, the situation was certainly not something I would benefit from sticking my head into.

Thankfully, the sound was a block or so away. All we had to do was shut up and wait for it to pass. As if on cue, Mika and I looked at one another and nodded in unison without a word. After slogging through the ichor maze together, we’d learned an unforgettable lesson that loomed over our collective consciousness: stay as far from danger as humanly possible.

In perfect sync, we hid in the shadows of a stack of wooden crates by the side of the walkway and waited for the footsteps to pass. Just in case, we poked our heads up to keep an eye out...

Huh. The sound is getting closer. This is unlucky, even for me...

I prayed that they wouldn’t come toward us, and my prayer was sort of answered: the footsteps were approaching from the top of the building opposite us. At this rate, they’d most likely jump clear over our alleyway and onto the rooftop behind us.

Yes, keep going! I don’t know what your deal is, but so long as you don’t stop now...

The next instant, the catastrophic sound of a shattering shingle filled my ears. Municipal services paid for the upkeep of the capital’s architecture to keep up appearances, but the finite budget couldn’t cover every forgotten roof that faced a desolate alleyway. Years of neglect had left several unseen spots in Berylin weak and rotting.

Whoever this mystery person was, their luck was even worse than mine. The final, most important step before leaping across the gap had been the one to snap a derelict shingle. As it exploded underfoot, the shards scattered and revealed the silhouette of a person falling with the blazing sunset at their back.

Oh, they’re going to die.

The person was falling upside down—a mensch’s center of gravity was toward the head, so it took technique to fall upright. I wove together my Unseen Hands out of pure reflex. They were some thirty meters away: well within reach. My fleet of appendages grabbed onto shoulders, thighs, and hips, slowly decelerating them to land without injury.

My artificial sense of touch brought back a bewitching softness; I had to fight off my instinctive desire to let my fingers sink in for more.

Give me a break, okay?! I was stuck in the body of a middle schooler!

No, forget it. More importantly, what the hell was I doing? Sure, seeing someone fall to their death would sour the mood after a good day of work, but getting involved with someone this clearly troublesome couldn’t have been the right answer. I knew from the last adventure that everything I touched turned to disaster.

“Huh? How did...”

The shadowy figure grasped at her body in disbelief; I, too, shared her amazement. Her familiar voice, outfit, and shimmering lunar pendant spoke to an unbelievable truth: the Night Goddess priestess had fallen from the sky.

“Wh-What are you doing here?” I stammered.

“Uh, Erich?” Mika tugged at my sleeve, but I’d already stepped out of cover in pure bewilderment.

“You’re...the piecemaker?” she asked. “How have you found yourself here?”

“That’s my line,” I retorted. “Why were you on the roof? You were moments away from falling to your death.”

“Well... Um, more importantly, thank you for...” The priestess looked me over. “You are the one who helped me, are you not?”

From appearances alone, I didn’t have any means of catching someone’s fall. I looked like any other commoner in my linen shirt and pants, and nothing on my person suggested I could use magic.

Had Mika walked out with me, she surely would have looked to them instead. They had on their usual robes and had their wand on hand.

“Oh, man oh man, why is this happening?”

Speaking of which, my old chum was cradling their head and mumbling in the corner, and I was feeling much the same. In what universe was I supposed to expect to reunite with an acquaintance from my side venture in such exasperating circumstances? The chances had to be astronomically small.

But for now, we didn’t have time to be worrying about things like that. Another set of footsteps could be heard growing nearer from above. Whoever was chasing her was closing in on us, and I had three options for how I could handle this.

First, I could pretend I hadn’t seen anything, grab Mika by the hand, and run away as fast as possible. I would probably never see the priestess again, and Mika might lose some respect for me, but this would be the path of least resistance.

Second, I could turn the girl in for some kind of monetary reward. I would definitely never see her again, and Mika would be genuinely upset with me, but this was about as safe as the first option. The only way this could go wrong would be if the pursuants weren’t the type to let witnesses live.

Third... Oh, come on! This was the only real choice! The quixotic dream crap aside, what kind of man doesn’t save a girl in need?!

“Wha—hey!”

I grabbed her by the hand and pulled her to a nearby door, summoning a Hand on the other side. Among all the add-ons I’d taken for the spell, Third Hand and the tactile feedback it offered was so universally broken that I thought it ought to be listed in an errata sheet for future editions of this setting: after all, it let me grope around and unlatch a deadbolt I couldn’t even see.

“Get in, quick,” I ordered. “Take care of her, Mika.”

“Wh-What?”

“Jeez,” Mika sighed. “Never a dull moment with you around, Erich. Come with me, miss—and not a peep from here on out, all right?”

The priest was stupefied by how the door had opened, by the strangely cooperative piecemaker whom she’d explained nothing to, by the mage going along with it all with a weary smile, and by the still-unexplained mystery of how she’d landed safely. Yet for all her confusion, she sneaked into the quiet room, and I took my post just outside to keep an eye on the people chasing her.

The approaching footsteps were far lighter than hers, and their minimal sound profile spoke to a great deal of experience. Not to say they were an expert traceur, but rather that they’d trained to run on uneven ground.

“There’s a broken shingle this way!”

“I don’t see her! She might’ve dropped into the alleyways! Comb the gutters!”

“Fan out, dammit! We need to surround her!”

There were multiple people after her: with a little focus I could make out five sets of footsteps. What on earth had she done to get five skilled trackers on her tail? Or perhaps she hadn’t done anything; it was just as possible that she simply had something that they desired.

I could hear one of them break away from the crowd toward us, and she deftly made her way down into the alley. She used nearby eaves, decorations, and uneven segments of the wall to climb down without making any real noise.

The woman was tall and clad in simple yet well-made armor; her sheath had a dagger in it, despite being within city limits. Every aspect of her appearance spoke to her stature: she was a noble’s personal steward, and a high-level one entrusted as both a secretary and bodyguard.

I caught a whiff of a classy perfume carefully tuned to not be overstated as she approached me. I was pretending to loiter about by the door, and I looked up to see a chestnut-haired mensch. Her razor-sharp features were made even more menacing by her stern expression; a child more easily scared than me would have started bawling.

“You there,” she said. “Do you have a moment?”

“Um...yeah?”

I played the part of a passerby utterly dumbfounded by some woman who’d rained down from the sky perfectly. I couldn’t claim that it was the product of my role-playing experience, though, as I literally was exactly that. All I had to do was let my palatial speech slip, and I no longer had a need to act. I was confident that the GM would give me a bonus here even if I elected to roll for Persuasion and not Bluff.

“Did anyone come through here? I’d be grateful for any useful information.”

This was a typical way of striking deals with the lower class, and from how she flashed a silver coin, this was far from her first negotiation. People were the most sincere when incentivized by a reward that suited their wallets: too little and they’d lose interest, but too much and they’d overshare in a panic. A libra was perfect to get the info she needed in as little time as possible.

“I saw someone jump across the buildings just like you, miss. Boy, that spooked me. I was on my way home from selling stuff at the market when a shingle whizzed by me! I thought I was gonna die!”

I kept my lies and truths equally mixed. I still had a folding table, chair, and ehrengarde box on me, so I really looked the part of a random bystander. Of course, I happened to be a random bystander who had a soft spot for scenes where floating girls were caught after they rained down from, say, a castle in the sky, but she didn’t know that.

“Thank you, that helps. Treat yourself to a nice dinner tonight.”

The woman placed the coin on the box of figurines I was cradling, and climbed back up the way she came with the same finesse as her descent.

...Holy moly. I couldn’t pick up any trace of mana, so she’d scaled the wall with physical prowess alone. I wonder if I can learn to do that. I’m sure it’d come in handy during an urban campaign.

Ah, but I couldn’t let my TRPG-addled brain get the better of me. If I ever tried to scramble around up there without the backing of some powerful noble, I was sure to be arrested by the city guard.

I waited to confirm that the pursuers were all out of the vicinity and slipped into the building with the other two. The only source of light was a tiny window, but I could make out enough with my Cat Eyes to tell we were in a storage room. Surrounded by heaps of filled sacks, the priest in hiding stood with a worried expression.

“What happened to my pursuants?” she asked.

“They left. I hinted that you jumped into a different alleyway, so we should be safe for the time being.”

Now it was time to hear her story. No normal priestess would have a noble’s subordinates chasing her down, but for all the trouble she represented, there was a rule older than tabletop games themselves: thou shalt help a maiden on the run.

tprg4.8

What was this weight that rested in my palm? Was it steel? Wood? My sword? Was it someone’s life, my family’s future, or was it plainly me?

Sinking into deep thought when faced with a difficult question was a quirk of mine. I had originally been the type to conquer a GM’s unjust challenges with pure physics—not the scientific kind—or a wily trick to weasel my way out. I had spent so much time trying to find the most efficient means of success or to otherwise make my GM groan and pull out a rulebook that contemplation had become an unbreakable habit.

Yet for all my pondering, I no longer knew whether throwing myself into the fray of adventure was good or evil.

Elisa had asked why—why did I actively advance into danger? I had not been able to answer—to explain that I danced with death to chase a dream that had taken hold a lifetime ago. I didn’t see how I could. How was I meant to look my sister in the eye when she was earnestly trying to find a way for me to live safely, and tell her that I threw myself into the thick of the fight for my own gratification?

The issue was unsolvable. Elisa wasn’t wrong: while I wanted to win her a life free from discrimination, I didn’t have to risk my life for that future. On the other hand, I could affirm the validity of my admiration in a heartbeat. It was a childish passion that had admittedly silly origins, but my desire to set off on the same path my avatars had once taken came from the bottom of my heart.

No matter how long and hard I thought, these two ideals could not gel in my brain. Peaceful days and a life of adventure were harder to mix than oil and water; no person on the planet could solve this conundrum. I didn’t need anyone to give me answers to know that there were only two choices: to prioritize Elisa’s wish, or to prioritize mine.

That being said, no matter how much Elisa pleaded, I believed having some amount of strength was mandatory. Setting the talk of adventure aside, casting my lot with Lady Agrippina was like letting the cruel mistress of Fate slip a twisted wedding ring onto my finger.

My recent errand had quickly devolved from a simple task to an overtuned quest; I was sure there was more where that came from. Narrowly escaping the reaper’s embrace thrice on three separate battlefields, all before coming of age, had made me certain of one thing: I could not live a harmonious life no matter how hard I tried.

This went beyond the future Buddha’s blessing; at this point, I was convinced that the stars had aligned at my birth. I hadn’t prayed to the heavens for a life of hardship, of course, but there was little to do if They had chosen me. Put in Rhinian terms, the God of Trials had fallen for me at first sight.

I’d learned from my time in the ichor maze that this world’s GM was infuriatingly unbiased. Not only would my enemies unabashedly take time to set up on me, but sometimes the task at hand would clearly not be balanced with my victory in mind. Unlike a proper game master, this universe did not expect me to surmount all its challenges; I wanted to chip away at the possibility of dying facedown in the mud after being trampled by a streak of bad luck as much as humanly possible.

What was worse, my master was the Agrippina du Stahl. Although she was laying low and avoiding any public affairs for now, living in the capital meant that she was highly likely to drag me into some kind of disaster sooner or later. I didn’t know if she’d scheme something up of her own accord or if someone would realize her utility and try to profit off her talents, but I knew it was coming. So far I’d only seen the splendiferous exterior and the well-oiled machinery of Berylin, but I knew the political center of a massive nation couldn’t be all roses at its core.

The question of whether I would choose my dream or Elisa’s would have to wait until I sorted out the immediate danger.

As a brother, I naturally wanted to let my precious baby sister have her way, but this was no longer just a question of me, as evidenced by the jingling pink earring’s whispers: “Don’t let this be a decision to regret.”

What an impossible paradox. I wondered why any form of life had been trusted with even a scrap of organic tissue with the capacity to contemplate these unsolvable issues. As a great thinker whose name lamentably escapes me once said, when all was said and done, the depths of hell resided under a thin shell of bone.

It was a riddle worthy of a deity. Not just any old god either: it would need to be one so omnipotent that They’d trample all over the contradictory word games we mortals played with. They would have to lift an unliftable boulder without violating the rock’s unliftable properties; only a god who could bend logic from the inside out would be capable of— Whoa.

A sudden chill ran down my spine. This tingle had none of Margit’s playfulness; it was the feeling of something wholly foreign, like some unknowable thing had been peering at me all along, and I’d happened to meet its gaze. The terrible feeling of rolling dice seized me...

And then it was gone a moment later. With it went my mental baggage, and I’d managed to ride out my temporary distress without spilling a drop of pride or water—cause enough for me to marvel at my own skill.

Now a Master of Hybrid Sword Arts and with Ideal Dexterity, I’d brought my two mainstays to the realm of Scale VIII. Combined with Enchanting Artistry, I could now balance a mug of water on the tip of my blade while my mind wandered elsewhere.

I slowly exhaled the warming morning air and flicked Schutzwolfe upward; the half-filled cup took flight, and I caught it near the end of its arc, downing the water to quench my thirst.

I’d had an inkling that I’d be able to pull it off, but actually catching a cup with the blunt of my blade was really something else. Sifting through hazy memories, I recalled scoffing at comic characters doing the same, but here I was.

Facing two conflicting ideals and choosing one to cut down was an onerous task, but slicing through physical objects was a breeze; it followed that if slashing them was easy, not slashing them was just as doable. Getting into the nitty-gritty of how a sword fulfilled its purpose would be needlessly long-winded, but suffice it to say that the wielder could dull its stopping power through technique. In an extreme case, one could smack something with the edge without leaving any incision.

In other words, I am become the blade...or something.

The thin layer of snow that had so obnoxiously stuck around was finally out the door as the Harvest Goddess and her bounty brought in the warmth of spring. Farmers in rural cantons all across the Empire would be running to and fro to begin the agricultural cycle anew, and wandering merchants would be peddling wares like their lives depended on it; the joyous atmosphere of the spring festival was second only to that of autumn, after all.

Which meant that it had already been a year since Elisa and I left our beloved Konigstuhl behind. Oh, how time flies.

Yet the glee of springtime did nothing for my dilemma. Laugh at me for my irresolute temper if you must, but the pain of choice was not so evident until one came upon a crossroads like mine.

If only I could bring myself to throw it all to the wind.

Elisa had asked why, oh why, did I choose to do scary things. She questioned my reasons for arming myself, and begged me to stay safe by her side. After spending all winter lost in thought, I had only been able to answer one of the doubts she’d spawned with her roundabout pleas for me to quit chasing adventure: no matter what, I could not give up on combat skills.

Looking back, it was clear that none of the enemies I’d faced thus far were willing to entertain a speech check. Had I not been a skilled swordsman, I would’ve been buried long before I was afforded the privilege of worrying over this sort of thing.

Personal safety as a basic right was alien to this era, and the morality of harming others often boiled down to a loose “Don’t do it unless nobody is looking.” While the tangible presence of the gods helped to some degree, a Wild West outlook on life was impossible to rein in entirely.

To gingerly and tactically plagiarize a certain association, the only thing that stops a bad guy in armor is a good guy in armor; in this day and age, this sort of logic was plain truth. It was terrible to see from a twenty-first-century perspective, but the logic of the naked blade underpinned every band of adventurers to brave a dungeon-bashing tabletop setting.

Elisa was innocent—for better or for worse. She didn’t know what malintent truly was because we, her whole family, had shielded her from it her whole life. It was only natural for a baby of nine: no child her age ought to live in fear of military power and senseless violence. The conclusions she’d come to were perfectly reasonable for a young girl.

So, if we were to assume man to be a redeemable creature, Elisa had completely bested me with her dialectic. And as an adult—under imperial standards, I was close in the physical sense too—I simply had to hold on to my beliefs and wait for her. One day, she would grow up to realize the awful implications of the disparate soul, and what it truly meant to protect another from the evils of the world.

Until then, I was to be a loving shield. I’d taken an eternity to mull my decision over, but ultimately chose the strength needed to live up to this role; my payday from the ichor maze had gone into leveling Hybrid Sword Arts and Dexterity by one each.

Please, please, there wasn’t anything to worry about. People weren’t so far gone that we needed bombastic drama just to grow. I hadn’t ever experienced a fight in my past life, but I’d still known that the only immediate solution to someone throwing punches was to throw one back. If I had truly needed to experience that sort of life-changing event to learn that lesson, all of humanity would have gone extinct ages ago.

That’s why I was sure it would work out; I truly believed that even though I didn’t have it yet, I would one day find an answer that we could both be happy with.

I wiped the sweat from my brow as I finished up my early morning training. Somewhere in the corner of my meandering consciousness, I thought, Wait. Did I just jinx myself again?

Suddenly, a wave of mana washed over me. I glanced over to see a tear in space—the same old spell I’d seen the madam use many times—from which a fluttering paper butterfly emerged. I found this odd: I had a short-range talisman that would let her thoughts reach me so long as I didn’t leave the city. Why had she gone through the trouble of penning a letter?

“‘No work today,’” I read aloud. “‘Stay away from the College’?”

The short note had been scratched out quickly, and the ink had yet to dry. Her penmanship was anything but pretty; she’d clearly been in a rush to get this out.

“Seriously? Isn’t it a bit early for a callback?”

Perhaps I really had foreshadowed a terrible event. I mean, I knew I’d just been grumbling over the trouble Lady Agrippina was liable to cause, but come on...

[Tips] Jinxes (sometimes called “flags”) are statements and events that conjure up future events at disproportionately high frequencies. He who sets out to battle after seeing a child born or before marrying his beloved is almost guaranteed to die to a stray arrow; when a player rolls with the words, “Please give it to me! I just need an expected value to live!” a 2D6 will cap out around five or six.

In her 150 years of life, Agrippina du Stahl had rarely faced true hardship. Born to a politically invincible baron who commanded countless territories and had an incalculable treasury, she was an unaging methuselah with nearly unlimited mana—not to mention her eye, extraordinary even among her kind. One could only assume that she had received some sort of divine favor, and she unapologetically used her gifts to multiply her fortunes in the service of a more comfortable life.

Methuselah were of a rare temperament, in that they took no pride in their age. Although they employed it as a metric at times, never did they gloat about their long lives. They focused instead on experiences, and only brought out years lived as a bargaining chip with mortals.

After all, their glory days never waned...and they never truly grew past that point. The talented were talented from youth, and though they were all enormously powerful in the grand scheme of life, the average were doomed to be average within their kind. Experience was important, but in the end, a life-or-death battle between methuselah was almost always decided by the speed of their mental faculties.

Not even the best, most veteran driver can outrace a sports car with a minivan. Those who were truly bright simply made up for their dearth of experience with faster calculations. As such, Agrippina had never brought up her century and a half of life as a point of pride—save for when she bullied her mortal servant—and could only recall a handful of incidents in that time where she had genuinely stood on the back foot.

Perhaps her only blunder had been when she’d legitimately angered Lady Leizniz into handing her an ultimatum: fieldwork or serious combat. On that day, the sharp-witted Agrippina had hesitated until the very last moment.

No amount of cleverness could eliminate the monotony of indefinite fieldwork, especially when it also entailed leaving her treasure trove of books behind. Furthermore, if research became her only pastime, it would counterintuitively never see progress.

However, to fight the dean would be an absolutely abysmal plan: win or lose, she gained nothing in the process. If Agrippina lost, she would be at the mercy of one Magdalena von Leizniz—who, judging from her fury, was sure to be utterly ruthless. Yet if she won, the disdainful stares within her cadre would evolve into all-out hostility; not even she had the capacity to deal with that. Even with her father’s support, a noble in a foreign land could only exert so much influence.

Knowing that she had no hope of escaping to another cadre, Agrippina had contemplated the two terrible options that sat at the bottom of the barrel. In the end, she’d chosen the path that left her with the possibility of a future renaissance.

Now, the dreadful punishment had passed, and her lovely indolence was once more in hand. One year was a mere blink in a methuselah’s life, but this past cycle of seasons had shone brighter than the finest gem when placed against the backdrop of her twenty-year ordeal.

Agrippina had soared from rock bottom to dizzying heights, and she had no intentions of slipping up now. There would be nothing worse than to let a prized jewel slip from her fingers out of carelessness. With how well she’d done well for herself thus far, she was surely set to continue sailing smoothly now that she’d tasted failure and abandoned negligence.

Alas, a life lived on her lonesome had shaped Agrippina du Stahl’s mental framework to revolve around how her actions affected herself...but she was no longer alone. She now kept an emotionally volatile apprentice and a servant so altogether chaotic that she couldn’t predict what he’d do if she left him alone. Up until now, she had tossed all sorts of things their way in the simple name of entertainment.

Finally, it had come time for her to pay the interest owed for her merriment. The world had caught up to her, declaring that none were to enjoy more luxuries than they were due.

“Ah, it is good to meet you. Please, no need to be so stiff. I am but an independent professor without any cadre to my name.”

Agrippina eyed the behemoth sitting before her and pointlessly wondered how this had happened for the umpteenth time today—not that such knowledge would do her any good now.

The enormity of the man in front of her was impossible to know. This vampire had dabbled in the chessboard of politics while simultaneously embodying the game of imperial economics. The self-described professor was one and the same as the Bloodless Emperor of old; of all the things Agrippina had accounted for, a meeting with Duke Martin Werner von Erstreich was not one of them.

“Come, be seated,” he said. “I may have been the one to call upon you, but the College is your domain, is it not? With your position as researcher, it would only be right for me to offer my hospitality.”

“Yes, well... May I inquire as to why I was invited?”

“Please, take a seat first, madam. Wine, perhaps? I’ve procured a wonderful bottle from my estate. Will a red Mauser suit your palate?”

“Uh, yes.” Agrippina was stiffer than any of her usual contacts could believe possible as she planted herself on the epicurean sofa. Not only was it supremely soft, but the cushioning had been balanced to ensure the sitter’s comfort by an artisan of manic focus; yet the methuselah felt about as relaxed as she would in a torture chair lined with steel rivets.

Agrippina found herself with one of the untouchables of the College. Here was a walking landmine so dangerous that the Emperor himself had begged him, “Dealing with the different cadres is taxing enough. Please, if nothing else, keep your political sway out of College dealings.” Why has it come to this? she thought.

Duke Erstreich was known for passionately churning out treatises; he was equally famous for his patronage of scholarship, endowing those who caught his critical eye with grants and other charity. He distanced himself from the factional warfare of the College, instead proving his ardent love of knowledge by focusing on his studies.

Agrippina had awoken in the morning to another wonderful day... So why was she stuck here with this peerless eccentric? For all the times she’d forced her will onto others, this marked perhaps the first occasion on which she had no choice but to play along with the unreasonable whims of another.

“Well, let us chat for a spell before diving into the main topic,” the vampire said. “I’ve read a handful of your essays since coming across your name, and each and every one has impressed me. It must be some kind of joke that these wondrous treatises gained no traction among our peers. I at once doubted my memory, thinking that perhaps I’d simply forgotten the attention your theses received.”

“Ah, yes, well...” Of course you haven’t seen them.

Agrippina had written all of those papers to meet the bare minimum of her obligation, and refused to proactively generate interest by attending debates or asking for opinions. Her real research was safely hidden away, and she only intended to reveal it when she felt the time was right; everything she’d published up to this point had been carefully tweaked to be of respectable make, but no more than that.

As a result, this encounter completely blindsided her. She hadn’t accounted for the possibility that someone might whiff out her true talents from the way she wrote such safe and boring essays—or at least, she’d assumed anyone with enough eye to do so would write her off as unassuming.

The College was a nest of talented magia, and making real advances in magecraft often required unshakable beliefs and the will to prove it; most of her peers were full of themselves. Agrippina had penned every sentence thinking that the most gifted among them would disavow her work as sarcastic humility.

Not even with all her brilliant wits about her could she have expected that someone would appreciate these treatises. While she’d prepared contingencies in the event that someone tried to antagonize and expel her, coming up with a plan of action for the opposite on the fly proved difficult.

“To begin, I’d like to look at this one...”

Agrippina took the transcription, and with one look she braced herself for a war of attrition. When an immortal wished to quibble over their own area of expertise, they would throw food, sleep, and all of their duties to the wayside—she, of all people, would know. Born into an absolute monarchy, the refined lady could not muster the courage to refute a man who had once borne the title of Emperor of Rhine.

[Tips] Professors who do not swear allegiance to a cadre—or otherwise lead one themselves—are exceedingly rare, but do exist. Some are best suited to solo research, others are too socially undesirable to gain allies, and others still are simply so grumpy that nobody wishes to work with them. In the rarest of cases, an individual can be so unique that the act of joining a cadre could threaten to tip the delicate balance of power, requiring them to abstain from such actions.

They say there are oddballs in this world who spend their free time actively searching for ways to make more work for themselves.

“Check.”

“Argh!”

Well, if you can call this work, it holds for sure.

I pushed my pawn forward and knocked away the final guardsman blocking my path to the enemy emperor. Guardsmen couldn’t be felled so long as they remained exactly one space in front of the emperor, but this fool had greedily leapt forward, attempting to snuff out a major piece.

“Err, wait! I didn’t mean to do that!”

The old dvergar across the board—or maybe he was young? It was hard for a mensch to tell with how luscious all their beards were—twirled strands of his lengthy mane with his fingers as he groaned.

“No take-backs,” I said. “Unless...”

I tapped the wooden sign on top of the table, and the man visibly hesitated for a moment before pulling out a copper quarter.

“Thanks for the business,” I said, bowing politely. His frustrated groans were music to my ears as I returned the guardsman to his place and undid the work of the pawn.

Now then...how had it come to this?

Upon being set free from all my duties beyond caring for Elisa, I’d decided to use my new leisure to engage in some business. Carving ehrengarde pieces remained a good way to earn bits of experience here and there, so I’d kept the hobby alive for years; now, I was just selling all that I’d made. Slapping a coat of cheap paint on simple wooden figurines was a far more peaceful way of earning pocket change than anything else I’d tried thus far. Saving up morsels of experience in this way had long since become a part of my daily routine, and I was finally cashing out on all the random statuettes I had lying around taking up space.

The imperial capital was a good place to sell. The low quarter had an entire section within the artisan’s district dedicated to an open-air market where one could rent table space for twenty-five assarii a day. I didn’t have to get permission from the local magistrate like back home, nor did I have to pay a cut to a local union or guild. While it looked like we’d manage on the tuition front, I wasn’t about to say no to padding out my living expenses.

I was here, under the open sky, selling board game pieces for anything from fifteen assarii to a whole libra. The pawn was like a shogi pawn in that it could only go forward, and its only peculiarity was that three of them lined up horizontally could block leaping pieces from advancing over them; naturally, it sold for very little. However, the carefully crafted knights—pieces that couldn’t be taken from the front except under very specific circumstances—were more expensive, to say nothing of the emperor and prince that were literally required to play the game. All in all, my pricing model was tried-and-true.

Still, I couldn’t help myself from throwing in a fun twist: beat the shopkeeper, and you could take any one piece of your choosing. Sure, I was basically doing the same thing as that stuart that had cheated me with “five gold coins,” but I was letting the challenger choose their own prize, fair and square. Aren’t I magnanimous?

That said, the price of a challenge was two pieces, and any take-backs would cost another piece. The old gentleman currently at the board had bought up enough units to start his own army, making him the perfect sucker—ahem, customer.

I took a moment to mull over my options and pushed forward my messenger—a piece that couldn’t capture others but that would bring down any opposing piece that captured it—that was collecting dust in my formation. I figured it’d be best to play reactively and bait out more enemy mistakes.

Not to brag, but I considered myself quite the ehrengarde player. Few people had been stronger than me back home. Before leaving, I’d even beaten a local landowner who tooted his own horn about being a powerhouse in his day, with four-piece odds (meaning I had employed four fewer pieces) at that.

My Ehrengarde Knowledge was at Scale V, and I’d always been a fan of board games, so I was confident that my skill was genuinely impressive. The important thing to note was that I’d invested in knowledge about ehrengarde as opposed to the Ehrengarde skill. Leaving it all to my blessing in the realm of play would be no fun, now would it?

Board games are wonderful. They’re a different kind of interaction from TRPGs, and differing playstyles truly express the personalities of the players who partake: when every move oozes with expression, these deep mental sports let us truly understand our opponents across the board.

Hobbies shade in the picture of life; like the tabletop adventures I’d once relished in, my journey with ehrengarde was something I couldn’t let go of. Plus, if this pastime was going to give me experience and cash, there was nothing more that needed to be said.

After the man racked his brain and took back another move, I toppled my own emperor to concede. I had spied three separate occasions on which I could’ve turned the tables on him, but had taken pity instead; pushing for a win here would be childish.

Besides, the man’s insistence on brute force had made it clear he was a sore loser. Not only was winning too much bad for business, but if he got angry and demanded a rematch on the spot—I had no rules against repeat challengers—that would cause a scene. I couldn’t keep the next in line waiting, and it would be bad if he spread rumors that I was running a scam. He was such a suck—benevolent patron that I could hand him a free major piece and still profit, so I saw no harm in a little customer service.

“Hrm... Well, I guess I’ll call it there for today.”

“Thank you for the business. Have you decided which piece you’d like to take with you?”

The dvergar didn’t seem wholly pleased with how things had turned out, but he ended up taking a knight that I’d spent a lot of time crafting. He hopped down from his seat—it was a normal chair, but his kind sat in them like full-height stools—and went home.

Judging from the direction he left in, I surmised that he was an artisan of some kind, here on a break from work. He could end up being a faithful regular, so I decided to go easier on him if he came back again.

“Awright, I’m next.”

“Hello,” I said. “Which two pieces will you be purchasing?”

The next challenger was an ogre with rolled-up sleeves. His coppery skin and red-gold hair pointed to his belonging to a tribe much farther south than the local region. A dagger sheath dangled from his waist—no dagger, of course, considering we were in the capital—so he was probably a lower-rung bravo.

“Mm,” he said, “this empress is real purdy. She’s a pricey one, but I’ll take her and that dragon knight over there. Hey, boss, make me an ogre warrior and yeoman, won’t you? I’ll be here for another four days, so get it done by then, yeah?”

Some people came by and bought into the challenge with their favorite two pieces, regardless of price; to them, the potential prize was just a bonus. As the sculptor, it was gratifying to get requests for new designs from folks who weren’t just in it for the biggest bargain.

“Then I’ll have it ready in two days from now.” Not like I have anything else to do these days, I internally muttered as I lined the board.

This match didn’t have any special rules, so we each took turns placing one piece each until our formations were complete. Some variations required the use of prearranged compositions, but the classic style of play included more thought, making it more fun.

“We’ll decide who goes first with these dice,” I said.

“Sure. Ooh, that’s a good one!”

He tossed a pair of six-sided dice and they both landed six-side up. I followed suit as a formality to get a two and three... Hey, my expected value!

“Ha ha,” I chuckled. “The first move is yours.”

“Aw yeah, let’s do this! But man, d’you make all these yourself, boss? I like collecting the cool ones, but having a whole set styled the same is real nice too.”

Like shogi, ehrengarde could not escape the fate of giving an edge to the player who moved first; it wasn’t absolute enough to say the second player was at a marked disadvantage, though, so I didn’t mind. The power of tempo only helped to shape one’s own formation to match their game plan, making it slightly easier to mount potent attacks. The rest was determined by skill, which was why I enjoyed the game so much.

Our pieces clicked and clacked without much pause; each move in a street game was only allowed ten seconds, after all.

On another note, I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to Lady Agrippina. I was taking care of Elisa, but not even she had seen our master as of late: my sister had been sentenced to indefinite self-study, and told me, “Master hasn’t been home even once.” I couldn’t even imagine what would cause the embodiment of sloth to forsake her den for this long.

I will admit that I was taking full advantage of the opportunity to set up this street stall and show Elisa around the city, and the like...but after three days, I was starting to get worried, even knowing how utterly busted that methuselah was. No matter how strong the PC, no matter how psychotically broken the enemy, people died when their time was up.

But for now, I was relishing a win. Despite starting with a solid position, the ogre played impulsively, and quickly toppled his own emperor without a single take-back. He cheerily took the empress—whose bust was seventy percent larger than the statue I’d based it off, I might add—and reminded me that he was looking forward to a purdy warrior before going off on his merry way.

I’d known that sex would sell no matter the era. Maybe if I made a few nude statues with “artistically poignant” expressions, I could...

No, no, no. This world was no stranger to beating down overt displays of sexuality, so I needed to keep myself in line. Not only that, but I would probably lose my mind if I began obsessing over how to conjure the impression of thin fabrics from solid material; I’d gotten by thus far mostly on Dexterity, but that wouldn’t suffice to reach the pinnacle of artistry. This was supposed to be an easy side venture to top off my experience points, so dedicating too many add-ons to the task would be putting the cart before the horse.

I leisurely continued playing ehrengarde and selling pieces until evening sneaked up on me: the setting sun had nearly hidden itself away behind the city’s spires. As I started cleaning up, I made plans to take a quick bath and bring Elisa out with me for dinner. She was getting accustomed to her luxurious life, but it seemed that a lowborn soul would always be more at home when eating the street foods of the common people.

I cracked my neck and was just about to close up for the day when another customer walked up to my table.

“Excuse me. Would you happen to be done for the day?” Cool and steady, the voice cut through the clamor of evening with a tone that reminded me of those sudden summer breezes that whisked away a sweltering day.

I eyed the source of the polite interruption—a priestess, her face hidden by her hood. Her robes were black—an unembellished flax—and a silver medallion hung from her neck, marking her as a follower of the Night Goddess.

The lunar mother presided over serenity, solace, and caution. She healed the weary souls who slumbered at night, promising them tranquil respite; for those who used Her veil for wicked means, She swore to mend their ways.

While not as commonly revered as the Harvest Goddess, the Night Goddess had a strong following in the Trialist Empire. Her adherents primarily included soldiers and night watchmen, but She was also fairly popular with knights, nocturnal races, and graveyard shift workers. I didn’t know anyone particularly devout to Her cause, but Captain Lambert of the Konigstuhl Watch had always considered her his patron goddess.

The people of the canton had quizzically joked, “That terrifying bastard worships the Mother Goddess?” but we were far removed from the days of honorable formations in war. When nighttime raids and assaults at dawn were common practice—both on the giving and receiving ends—mercenaries were sure to love Her tender embrace on the same level as the God of Trials.

I glanced up at the sun; it was high enough to warrant one more game. The sheer number of pieces meant that a long session of ehrengarde could last a whole day, but it was typical for a quick match to end within half an hour. She’d gone through the trouble of coming, so I thought it fair to call her my last patron of the day.

“I still have time,” I said. “Would you like to buy a piece? Or perhaps you’re here for a game.”

Her face was unnaturally shadowy, even with the setting sun—her clothes were likely blessed with some kind of divine protection, and I couldn’t tell what face she might’ve made at me. She took a seat without saying a word. Then, pulling out a silver piece, she picked up a watchman and flag bearer like she’d been eyeing them all along.

The watchman was a terribly eccentric piece that was invincible so long as it did not move from its starting square; I’d modeled the one she’d taken after an old man sitting in a chair, keeping a lookout at night with a spear in hand. The flag bearer had the unique ability to allow the pieces to its left and right to advance forward alongside it once per game; it, too, was incredibly idiosyncratic, and could make or break a match depending on how it was used.

This priestess had a rather acquired taste. Both of her selections were difficult enough to use that they were considered litmus tests of a player’s skill. Back in my early days of playing, I’d struggled to make them work, and they’d caused me many a headache when on the other side of the board. I couldn’t even count how many times my final push had been stopped dead in its tracks by an impenetrable watchman or a flag bearer’s charge plowing through my defense. We didn’t have many ways to pass time in the countryside, so there had been plenty of master tacticians offering to play at the local plaza.

We pieced together our starting lineups, keeping one eye on each other’s selections, and it was impossible to tell who was better off by the time we were done. Personally, I preferred to keep my openings malleable and tailor them to my opponent; apparently, she was much the same.

However, I’d split my emperor and prince to afford myself more defensive opportunities (as I could take the emperor off the board on my own turn to promote the prince). My opponent had elected to place her emperor on the front lines with an empress (who gave the emperor the movement of a knight) in order to rush me down, with her prince tucked away for safekeeping.

Hmm... How do I put this? It sort of felt like a battle between sixteenth-century and eighth-century strategies. It was like seeing an undying hero lead his army into battle with nothing more than his own personal might to back his confidence.

We rolled the dice to determine turn order, and my luck wasn’t as good this time: snake eyes. Without a moment’s delay, she pushed a pawn forward. What a fast player.

Click, clack, click, clack. The steady tempo of pieces thumping onto the board continued under the reddening sky. Merchants who’d closed up shop, passersby who were drawn in by the pleasing sound, and lovers of the game who’d happened upon our bout by chance all gathered around, forming a small crowd around our board.

From the very first move, she’d placed her pieces without a shred of hesitation, only taking a handful of seconds for each maneuver. Even with my Independent Processing running at full throttle, keeping up with her was a serious challenge.

This wasn’t a blitz game or anything, so I didn’t have to match her pace. I was speeding up for my pride’s sake alone.

I mean, there were almost ten people watching our match; there was nothing lamer than to back down here. The fear that I might blunder at any moment kept me anxious beyond belief, but I was determined to see this through.

From what I could tell, she wasn’t a natural-born multitasker. I’d played with the madam when the game tickled her fancy every so often, and the priestess was nowhere near that level. While she wasn’t making any outright mistakes, I noticed a handful of moves that could carry negative implications for her in a few moves’ time.

A real methuselah would be in a different league. I’d once played Lady Agrippina with eight-class odds—that is, she’d been down eight classes of pieces—and still suffered a total defeat. If I were up against a monster like that, I wouldn’t last more than five minutes at this pace before my whole board crumbled.

This priestess was simply the type to play her best at rapid speeds. I’d run into a fair share of these sorts: deep calculations just got their wires crossed, so they left the decision-making to their guts. They were usually on the weaker end, but every so often, a player could pose a real threat with sheer instinct.

Now on her final push, she used her flag bearer with a knight and emperor at its wings to charge past my wall of pawns in a glorious assault. She blew past my fortress of pieces; only a guardsman remained to protect my emperor. It seemed the end was near...but alas, she hadn’t been able to outrun the consequences of her berserk pace.

Before she could deliver the finishing blow, I let my emperor cede, promoting my prince on the other side of the field. My guardsman quickly fell without its liege, but it didn’t matter; her advancing emperor still had to get through a messenger to reach my new monarch, and the rules prevent any emperor from killing a messenger.

That one turn’s delay was all I needed. My prince still had an escape route, and she had no choice but to give chase if she wanted any hope of victory: her emperor abandoned the knight that had escorted it into my territory. I just needed to encircle her leader and the game would be set.

“Oh,” she said, voicing her surprise coolly.

She must have spotted the castle I’d prepared a few squares away. An emperor or promoted prince adjacent to a castle could swap places with it, and my prince was going to arrive at safety sooner rather than later. It had been a point of interest in the early game when tucked in next to the emperor, but I suspected keeping an eye on it as the tides of war changed had proved challenging.

This kept my monarch alive for an extra round of play, giving my other pieces a chance to abuse the cracks in her formation. Not willing to let her emperor fall, she had no choice but to put an end to her offensive. Naturally, this play alone wouldn’t lead to a direct checkmate, but...

“...It seems that would be the game,” she said.

And so it was. While she could still abdicate with her emperor, her previous overextension left too many vulnerable points in her position; regrouping would take a lot of effort, and I wasn’t going to sit around and let her take it easy. If she tried to go all-in on the attack and press for my prince, her other pieces were too far removed to support the emperor, and she was sure to come up just short.

The existence of a prince in addition to the emperor may seem like a flaw that would drag out games, but ceding the throne in a losing board state was almost always the same as admitting defeat anyway. Funnily enough, it was as if the game itself warned its participants to not let a successor’s existence be cause for one to rest on their laurels.

“A fine game.” The priestess’s dainty fingertips pushed the emperor off its balance. Both the emperor behind enemy lines and the prince cornered with nowhere to go fell to the board alongside their clever schemes. Alas, such was often the fate of would-be heroes and legends.

As the curtains closed on our bout, the onlookers applauded and immediately began a postmortem, as hobbyists are wont to do. Someone reached in from the side and recreated the exact board state from seventeen turns ago, and the audience began to argue amongst themselves over such things as, “This must be where victory was sealed,” or “No, no, you could certainly see it a few steps prior.”

“Are you here always?” The priestess seemed uninterested in the spectators and rose from her seat, plucking the two pieces she’d purchased off of the board. She was totally unfazed, even when the crowd complained that they needed those pieces to continue their analysis.

“Well,” I answered, pulling out extra pieces to appease the others, “whenever I have time. I can’t promise that I’ll be here tomorrow, but I plan to be around for the near future.”

“I see. In that case, I pray we might enjoy another bout sometime.”

I motioned for the others to open a path, and she quickly exited the scene.

...Boy, I’m tired. Spending fewer than five seconds per move really strained my mental faculties. At least Lady Agrippina had always woven in long spells of deep thought at times—not to say that I ever survived a well-planned move from the woman, but still. To think I’d be more tired now than when playing a methuselah.

Hey, wait a second. I summoned up my character sheet and checked my stats. Wow, that’s a lot of experience. I could get a minor trait with that.

Pleased with the multifaceted payday, I watched the excited mob chatter on and on about our game. I wonder when they’re going to be done...

[Tips] Anyone can play ehrengarde, so long as a few basic pieces are available, making it a well-loved game in an entertainment-impoverished age. The majority of imperial citizens know how to play, and the low up-front cost of a simple set combined with the lack of upkeep makes it a mainstay in the realm of recreation.

On the other end of the spectrum, some immortals dedicate their eternities to learning the intricacies of the art, and will even offer rewards for strong players to share experiences with them over the board. The top contenders can go around hunting these bounties to make a living as true professionals, and the best of the best even receive salaried sponsorships to stay at their estates as personal practice partners.

I was employed by a woman who I obviously didn’t want dying on me, but who was sure to throw all manner of commotion my way if she remained alive. To not know whether to wish for her safe return was my eternal struggle.

Much to my surprise, Lady Agrippina was nowhere to be seen after half a month. Elisa received instructions on what to read, write, or recite by way of origami butterfly; she was still alive, but she hadn’t returned to her atelier this entire time.

Curiously enough, no amount of head-scratching allowed either me or Elisa to make any form of contact with her. We didn’t have an address to which we could send letters, and the madam had left the receiver for my Voice Transfers in the lab.

To top it all off, we’d visited the seamstresses’ yesterday and mustered the courage to ask Lady Leizniz about the situation. Her response had been, “I suspect she is taking a dose of medicine long overdue,” complete with singsong timbre and a perfectly set smile.

I’d instantly realized the dean had been behind it all, and the thought was frightening like no other. Lady Leizniz’s beaming smile had surely been the product of more than our cosplay session. I refuse to dwell on the other details of the occasion any further. That maniac had tried to get me to cross-dress—and not just in any old dress either. Any fool could have clocked me at first glance! I knew that souls were twisted by hatred as part of a wraith’s rebirth, but I couldn’t help but feel as if her personality had been perverted in a different way.

I’d refused, to be clear. My stores of pride were close to bottoming out, but I refused to give up my last shred of integrity, no matter how fruitful the trade turned out to be. If I’d caved there, the only thing left to sell would be my actual ass.

Leaving the substance of decades of therapy sessions sure to come aside, I was once again posted up at the open-air market. Even after the rental fees, I pocketed an average of four or five silver pieces a day; unfortunately, my stock of figurines was disappearing as quickly as my pride.

Come night, I used all my Hands in parallel to mill out four separate carvings at once to churn out experience, but the most labor-intensive pieces still took two hours to finish. Polishing up a figure and painting it took another hour. My production process couldn’t keep up with demand.

As I pondered whether I ought to shelve the shop for a while to focus on building up my stock, she appeared again. Draped in the same hooded robe as at our first meeting, the priestess always showed up as the sun and moon shared a fleeting moment in the heavens.

“You’re here today,” she said. “Shall we play?”

“Yes, of course.”

And, as was a matter of course by now, we began moving our pieces at a brisk pace. I presently held the lead with four wins and two losses, but every single victory had been hard-fought. This game got harder and harder as your opponent learned your habits, and I suspected our head-to-head would trend closer to even the more games we played.

The clicks and clacks went back and forth with musical rhythm, and the falling pieces changed the board with every beat. Deciding what to sacrifice, save, and take in mere seconds was a daunting task; yet for all the consequence a single mistake could carry, the stress of playing was of a very pleasing sort.

I wondered what sort of person this priest was. I’d heard many a clergyman partook in the game in between their pious duties, but I found it odd that she always arrived at this hour. Most activities venerating the Night Goddess began around this time, yet she came to visit nearly every day. Considering she also checked in on days I wasn’t present, she wasn’t an average grunt in charge of handling busywork...

Whatever the case, our relationship began and ended with the conversations of make-believe war that we shared over the board. Prying into her personal history would be uncouth; it wasn’t as if blue blood was going to let her pawns beat my knights, anyhow.

Oh, the placement of that nun—a piece that couldn’t make captures but could sacrifice itself to shield an adjacent ally—is obscene. Wanting to go on the offensive today, I’d marched my emperor into enemy lines; she was making full use of her defensive arsenal to stifle my momentum. I could trade the guardsman accompanying my emperor for her nun, but that exchange would lose me material...and my other pieces weren’t quite in range to help.

If only this adventurer were one space farther forward... In exchange for pawn-level mobility that made them dead pieces in attacks, adventurers could be replaced on my own side of the board after being taken. Had it been in position, I would have gladly sacrificed it.

Argh! The magus waiting in her back ranks now pushed into an infuriating space. Magia could forgo movement to take pieces one tile removed, and now that it had posted up, my army’s movements were severely restricted. My attack...

Nipped in the bud, my offensive ultimately came up one step short, and I had no choice but to concede. Thinking about how I’d committed too many major pieces to pick off her prince in the midgame made me groan. If I’d still had a knight, or better yet, a dragon knight—a one-of that everyone used that could move in any direction for any length and leap over a single defender—left over, I could have promoted my prince and had some hope of resetting the board for a win.

“Am I mistaken, or did you hold back?” With her prize of a vampiric empress in hand, the priestess seemed uncharacteristically displeased as we opened up our postmortem.

“You didn’t give me any room to go easy,” I answered.

Hearing my response, she deftly rearranged the board to its positions some fifty turns prior, and made a few hypothetical moves to show a future that we had not encountered.

“Would your pawn not have reached my emperor if you had pushed it here?”

“Yes, but, well... Taking an emperor with a pawn is...”

The southern regions of the Empire abided by an unwritten rule that letting a pawn cut down an emperor was simply too crass to be allowed. Putting the ruler in check with a pawn was fine, but we held on to the desire for our monarchs to meet a beautiful end at the blade of a worthy opponent. For mate to be delivered by a foot soldier’s hand was considered hideously base.

That evidently was not the case here, but I couldn’t shake off the customs of my hometown. The tabletop munchkin in my heart whispered with bloodshot eyes that I ought to just pull the trigger, but my romantic side implored me to uphold beauty and honor; when it came to ehrengarde, the latter won out.

“I suppose if that is how you play, then there is nothing to be done...” Her tone suggested she wasn’t as understanding of my decision as she let on, and she rose from her chair with these rather unholy words. “But the distinction of rank means nothing in the face of death.”

Er, actually, maybe her statement was the epitome of piety? Regardless, her no-holds-barred philosophy clashed with her refined speech and mannerisms in a frightening way. I knew a dagger was ever a dagger no matter if its wielder was lay or noble, and that one good stab could bring most living creatures to their end. But as a peon like any other, I couldn’t help but wish for the emperor who reigned up high to keep his chest puffed all the way to the grave. How could we ever want the person who decided on the future of our nation to die a piddling death?

“I bid you good day...and make sure not to count this in our score.”

I had just been mentally tallying a four-to-three total history when she made her demand and left. Getting away when I had a clear path to victory had really gotten to her. Personally, I didn’t see the problem with chalking one up on her side to my own player error, but...

Actually, no, what surprised me the most was that she’d been keeping track at all. For all the games we’d played, she’d never once shown any concern over the outcome of a match. Despite her class, she had a bit of a childish side to her; I rudely smiled at her cute attitude as she receded from view.

Tprg4.7

With the harsh winter of the capital behind us, the gentle onset of spring made its presence known with the first instance of uncovered greenery in months—much to the joy of my horses. There was only so much they could do in the winter. Even normal horses felt stressed after being cooped up inside all season, so I could hardly imagine how stuffy it must have been for two warhorses bred to run at all hours of the day.
“Giddyup!”
I kicked Castor’s sides and he stretched out his neck with a huff, galloping forward with long strides. Although he accelerated slowly, he could maintain top speed for a long while once he got there; I had to lift up my rear and clamp onto the saddle with my thighs just to keep balance.
Tightly wound muscles ebbed and flowed underneath his onyx mane, and a torrent of sweat poured out to make his excitement plain. From the other side of the reins, I could feel his intense desire to sustain this speed for as long as I could let him.
While I felt sorry for the poor steeds marched into war zones at the whim of their riders and those burdened with great loads, it was clear that the running in and of itself was of great pleasure to them. And at times, they were happy to carry the weight of one extra mensch on top.
How wonderful it must be to just run to your heart’s content without any goal in sight.
I bounced my hips with every step to steady my upper body and let Castor have his way. As I rode, another set of clattering hooves approached from behind: I peered over my shoulder to find Mika and Polydeukes catching up.
“Ahhh! Fast—too fast! Agh! W-W-W-Wait, wait, no, hold on! Polydeukes!”
My old chum was desperately clinging to the younger of the Dioscuri. He may have been shrieking like a little girl, but his taller height, broader shoulders, and wavier hair were the results of his male shift.
Now a few months past the start of winter, this made for the second time I’d seen his masculine form. As I’d suspected, those blessed with good looks remained handsome regardless of gender—proof of the unflinching unfairness of life. Still, seeing him all panicked reduced his charms to mere childish cuteness.
“Mika! Don’t cling to him like that! It’ll just make you bounce harder!”
I shouted through a Voice Transfer so he’d hear me over the hoofbeats, and I heard him scream in the distance that he would if he could. I’d thought him used to jockeying by now, but judging by the tears welling up as he clung to Polydeukes for dear life, he wasn’t ready for a full-on sprint.
“I-I’m s-scared!” Mika squealed. “This is—oh, this is too fast! I’m scared! Save me! Save meee!”
“Don’t be a wuss! I’ll catch you with a Hand if you fall, so sit up! Riding like that is harder and more dangerous!”
“No, no, no way! S-Stop, please! Come on, I’m pulling the reins! Polydeukes, please!”
“Quit pulling back and let him dictate the pace! If you sour his mood, he might throw you off!”
“Whaaat?!”
Seeing his brother let loose had made Polydeukes give chase, and evidently, it was still too early to bring Mika along for the race when he’d only just gotten comfortable with long rides.
“You’re awful... You’re terrible, Erich... Why didn’t you slow down?”
By the time we finally stopped at the edge of the forest, my friend had been reduced to a pancake who could only glare at me from atop the saddle. All that extra resistance had kept Polydeukes ten lengths behind, and he made his discontentment known with a snort.
“I told you not to push yourself,” I sighed. “Not even I can stop Castor once he gets that excited. Horses are tough to keep in line.”
With the snow gone, I’d planned on letting them let off some steam. Mika and I were due to visit our usual foraging grounds for a quest, so I’d wanted them to at least get one good sprint in each.
I had told Mika he could take it easy and catch up later, but he had been the one to refuse me. “Hey now, who do you take me for, old pal?” he’d said with a smug grin. “I’m pretty sure I know my way around these two by now.”
Of course, I’d warned him that a full-speed gallop was worlds apart from what he’d seen thus far—especially when he was on his own and couldn’t just cling to me—but alas.
“Ugh...”
“Come on,” I said, “that’s enough moping about. You were the one that said I didn’t have to hold back when you’re a boy, remember?”
For all his big talk of being able to keep up with more roughhousing, Mika was quick to tire out. I jeered at him to get down like I would to one of my brothers, and he shot me a sidelong set of puppy-dog eyes. As of late, he’d really begun to make use of his good looks, the clever rascal.
I gave in and lent him a hand: I pulled him off the saddle and carried him sideways into the forest. This did wonders to mend his terrible mood, and he ended up being even more motivated than usual for our herb gathering.
“That should do it.”
“This list always looks like it’s coming from a brewery,” said Mika. “Are we really helping someone with arcane research?”
We clapped the dirt off our hands and double-checked our knapsacks to finish off our task. Foraging for herbs here was routine at this point, and we knew all the most fertile spots and how long it took for new buds to pop up. Despite all the other students we ran into here, the abundance of resources let us avoid any troublesome quarrels.
Mika and I washed our hands to make sure the residual herb dust wouldn’t harm our skin and found a big tree to sit down by. The warming weather meant we’d worked up a mild sweat, so the shade and cool breeze felt wonderful.
Exercise was a wonderful thing: I couldn’t dwell on my problems so long as my body was moving.
“Ooh, a pie for lunch?” Mika asked. “Feeling luxurious, are we?”
“Hm? Oh, yeah. My housekeeper made it for me when I told her I’d be going for a trip at noon.”
“Wait... Don’t you live in the low quarter?”
“Don’t sweat the small stuff,” I said, slicing into the Ashen Fraulein’s pie. I’d brought it along in a wickerwork basket stuffed into Castor’s saddlebag, but two layers of Unseen Hands had been enough to keep it looking pristine.
I scooped up the slice with my everyday knife and carefully brought it up to eye level to find it had been stuffed with meat. The silkie was partial to making dishes from the islands in the far north, so this was probably an intestinal pie.
“Thanks,” Mika said, taking the piece. “Looks like we’re in for a solid meal.”
“Right? I kept it warm with magic, so the crust should still be nice and crisp.”
He eyed the food for a while before taking a large bite out of it, and his eyes instantly shot open. I worriedly asked if it didn’t suit his tastes, but he instead explained that he’d eaten this sort of thing back in his hometown. Come to think of it, the polar archipelago was a hotbed of rotating lords and kings, so many people native to the region sought refuge in the northern reaches of the Empire.
“Mmph, yum!” he beamed. “It barely has any stink to it. If you ever eat one of these made by an amateur, the stench that leaks out as soon as you cut it open makes it completely inedible.”
“This sure is good,” I agreed. “There’s no covering up the smell of innards, but this gamey flavor actually makes it better. I bet she spent a long time preparing the meat.”
“That reminds me—my mom used to try all sorts of things, like burying rosemary in the filling instead of just rubbing it on, or waking up in the middle of the night just to replace the saltwater bath the meat stewed in... Good times.”
Mika chewed on the pie and the emotions it uncorked as we reminisced, and the hefty lunch was safe in our stomachs before we knew it. Pressing the leftover crumbs against our fingers and pecking at them was hideously bad manners, but forgive us: we were two growing teenagers who needed all the food we could get.
“Phew,” Mika sighed. “Allow me to repay you the wonderful meal with a morsel of intriguing news.”
I was in the middle of greedily licking the oil from my hands when he suddenly shifted the conversation with flourish. I eyed him curiously, and he pulled out a crumpled slip from his inner pocket. The shoddy plant-based paper paradoxically bore the overblown words Imperial Order: His Imperial Majesty’s Berylinian Parade.
“A Berylinian Parade?” I read aloud.
“Every few years,” Mika explained, “the military holds this parade as the winter season of high society ends to see off the nobles returning home and give everyone an excuse to de-stress. They start from the northern castle of Weiss Morgana and march around the capital’s four biggest roads to get back to Blutschloss in the west. Seeing a bunch of knights and nobles strutting through town all dressed up for half a day is a real spectacle.”
The chalk fortress in the north was the judicial center of Rhine. It officially went by a different name; Weiss Morgana was, to my knowledge, a nickname coined by locals that had stuck. The Empire’s official name was likely more stiff and respectable.
The gentle redbrick structure to the west was the headquarters for military affairs, and they also were unfond of their nickname. In fact, we College affiliates were the odd ones out for referring to our nest so playfully as Krahenschanze; those who referred to the blue castle of culture to the east as Schwulst Palaste—literally “showy palace”—were sure to do so with animosity in their hearts. Not even the people of Berylin were that pretentious.
I found it all very clever that the army was to march from the house of law to the house of arms: it spoke to the Rhinian axiom that might meant nothing without order, and that order without might was an unattainable daydream. I had no doubt that the planners behind the march arranged this path to appeal to those canny enough to spot the metaphorical gesture.
“All three of the imperial houses are coming this year, so it should be a grand old time. There’ll be a bunch of street stalls too. How about it? Wanna go together?”
“So it’s kinda like a festival,” I said. “Sounds fun.”
Far from a farming community, Berylin was devoid of festivities unless the government went out of its way to set something up. On Foundation Day and the Emperor’s birthday and the like, the common people were treated to wine, bread, and access to select castles and estates—the upcoming parade would be no different.
Furthermore, it gave us lay people something to gawk at, gave the attention-seeking gentry a chance to show off, and even served to shock and awe any foreign diplomats visiting the city. One could plainly see how stringent the Empire was: if it was going to use its precious funds, it was going to get more than one or two uses out of every dime.
And you know what? If the state was going to offer me its hospitality, I was more than happy to oblige.
“Hey, Mika,” I said. “There’s one thing I want to ask about first.”
“Hm? What is it?”
“Would you mind if I brought along my sister?”
This would make a great change of pace for Elisa with all the studying she was doing lately, and it was the perfect excuse to introduce her to my new friend. To be blunt, my sister was unsociable—or at least, super shy. Mika’s past trauma made him similarly put off by the idea of expanding his social circle: when people talked to him, he usually sidestepped them and avoided making deeper ties.
I’d wanted the two to meet for some time now. Not only were they both students—I blatantly ignored their differing schools and cadres—but I also simply wanted to show off my wonderful friend to my family.
“Your sister, huh? She ended up here with a lot of strings attached, if I recall.”
“Yep. Plus, she’s really shy, so I don’t even think she’s made an acquaintance since moving to the capital. I want to help her make some connections early on. I mean, she’s not an official student yet, but...”
“But she’ll need it in the future, right?” Mika leaned back against the bark and slowly slid down to the ground. His cloudy expression betrayed his lingering apprehension at getting to know more people.
The College was a serious place of study, wholly different from the playground of moratorium I knew university to be. Whether their goal was to peer into the depths of magic or win a position as a bureaucrat, every student was earnest in their efforts to better themselves and succeed. I knew as much from my time with Mika: not once had he ever uttered a half-baked complaint about attendance rules or report deadlines.
But my experience did tell me one thing: Elisa was going to need friends. At times she would need the help of others to sort through research papers or to perform multi-man experiments, and making companions out of her fellow classmates would probably become a necessity. Call me cold and calculating, but I stood by the idea that there wasn’t anything wrong with trying to smooth out my sister’s thorny path.
As far as Mika went... Well, I didn’t intend to overstep my bounds. I wasn’t some out-of-touch teacher, and I wasn’t going to force him to step out of his comfort zone if he didn’t want to. Still, I couldn’t deny the small hope that this could be his opportunity to overcome his past traumas.
From all the time we spent together, I was sure that Mika wasn’t antisocial. In fact, I’d go so far as to say he was inherently sociable and was at his happiest when spending time with others. While he probably favored making a few treasured connections to casting his net wide, it didn’t seem like he was against the idea of having more friends.
He had simply been hurt by the invisible walls in his hometown and the insensitivity of his classmates—again, I couldn’t blame them, since they were also just kids—and naturally cooped himself up in his own bubble. I had an inkling that deep down, he wanted to try talking to new people. That said, I had no plans of abusing my position to butt in and “fix” his internal struggles. I hadn’t understood this in my youth, but after crossing the threshold of adulthood once, I knew well: picking off another’s scab never ends well.
Only the injured can feel how a wound is healing. To know whether a dried clot of blood is filled with pus or simply needs more time to heal is a delicate issue, and oftentimes confuses even the very person it affects. To tear off that seal can only end one way—it would be less surprising than a match lighting ablaze when thrown into a fire.
If I tried to reopen his old wounds, it could worsen his pain or leave a throbbing scar that would linger with him forever. I didn’t want to be the sort of “friend” who would force him into something he wasn’t ready for.
Still, if nothing else, I wanted to help steer him onto a path where he would one day forget about his trauma entirely, until the dried scab fell off on its own accord. Mika truly thought of me as a friend; I hoped that perhaps meeting my own flesh and blood would be a bit easier for him. If all went well, that could become the stone for him to take another step forward on, and then another, until his injured heart was fully healed.
My suggestion did not receive a ready reply. Mika silently stared up at the heavens, his irises swaying alongside the branches dancing in the wind. Lost in thought, his eyes were following their movements on autopilot.
I didn’t rush him; instead, I placed the bag of strawberries we’d picked for dessert on his stomach. Mika’s hand rummaged around robotically and plucked a fat, red fruit, carrying the snack to his lips, just as red. He reached for a second, then a third, and in place of a fourth, he at last spoke.
“...Yeah.” Swiping away a dribbling bead of strawberry juice with his thumb, Mika sat up and swiveled around to face me. “I’ve actually been curious, since you always talk about her. I’d be more than happy to finally meet the famed cutest girl in the world.”
Mika’s dashing features were warped into a markedly clumsy smile, half-excited and half-afraid; but to me, what shone through the brightest was his unwavering courage.

[Tips] Parades see knights, officials, and their servants marching through the city in a display of military might. Those who march take pride in their beautiful garb and the cheers of the people; those who watch rest easy at night knowing the great might of those who protect them.

In the words of Lady Agrippina, these were vain castles in the capital of vanity; yet, at times, that gilded veneer was what swayed men’s hearts.
“Wow,” I said. “Look at that, Elisa.”
“Pretty! Pretty, Dear Brother!”
I’d loaded Elisa up on my shoulders to make sure she wouldn’t get lost amidst her excitement. I knew the crown had mandated festive decorations, but the sights of the town were really something to behold.
The mystic streetlights that stood at every corner each served as the pole to a flag embroidered with the national emblem of a three-headed drake (representing the three imperial houses). Houses on major streets were covered in all sorts of fantastical banners, making a mere walk candy for the eyes.
Soldiers had obviously cleared out the route to be marched, but just an alley away from the projected path, one could find all manner of street stalls being run by the city’s populous merchant class. I couldn’t even count the number of shops selling food and water, not to mention the foreign textiles, clothes, lifestyle goods, knickknacks, and even weapons on display.
“Ice candies!” Elisa exclaimed. “Dear Brother, there’s ice candies!”
“There really are,” I agreed. “Let’s get some later, okay?”
All her enthusiasm had caused Elisa’s speech to devolve a bit, and she began to kick her legs as soon as she spotted her favorite frozen treat. There there, calm down, I prayed. I’ll buy you some later. I don’t know what I’ll do if you get this fancy outfit dirty, so calm down, please.
Elisa’s clothing had been, alas, handpicked by Lady Leizniz before leaving the College. Her gothic evening wear utilized enough silk and velvet for one to buy a house with the raw materials, and was arranged in a way that made me question whether the design had arrived a few decades too early for my baby sister to wear. The deep maroon trimmed with black and scarlet puffed up her shoulders and fit snugly near the waist to make for an unnecessarily mature contour for a girl her age.
On the lower half, she had a shorter skirt that only went down to her knees, which the wraith had gone so far as to puff up with a metal wireframe. Her thin black tights had intricate embroidery all across them; this wasn’t very standard for gothic styles, but probably arose from Lady Leizniz’s penchant for making her unique tastes known.
That woman was so bizarrely fixated on forcing long gloves and patterned tights onto little girls. The moment wherein she’d called for a seamstress crying, “I must see the shape of her knees!” would sit in a special part of my heart for as long as I lived—the part labeled emotional trauma, of course.
Despite wearing what amounted to a Player 2 alternate color of Alice’s dress in Wonderland, my sister once again earned her spot as the cutest girl ever by pulling it off. Lady Leizniz had given it to her, since it was a day to celebrate—for whomever did she mean, I wondered—and it had thankfully done away with the minor tantrum she’d been throwing before we left.
Elisa was a sweet little girl, but...man, was it hard to make her happy once her mood soured.
Me, you ask? I was keeping it simple. I’d told Lady Leizniz I might need to move around, so she let me off with a silk shirt, skinny pants, and a double-button vest—just barely enough to look classy. The all-black base and embroidered silver thread made me feel like I was playing right into her tastes, but...I was just glad to not look like the mangaesque princess knight again.
Even so, we blended right into the crowd. Nobody wanted to miss out on one of the few festivities the capital offered, and everyone around us had wrung out their meager wallets to doll up for the event.
I found this impressive on more than just an aesthetic level. Fashion was expensive, and especially so for something that did little to improve one’s daily life, so it usually ended up at the bottom of anyone’s priority list.
Our hometown was a pretty regular place where nobody truly struggled to get by, but chasing trends had been a completely foreign idea. People were happy to put in some clever effort to look nicer—herbal makeup had been pretty popular—but spending money for the privilege of fretting over dirt and grime was something we’d all put off until absolutely necessary.
Fancy clothes only came out at weddings and coming-of-age ceremonies; even then, they were sewn up right before the event and younger brothers were expected to reuse the eldest’s threads. That was how expensive clothing was in this day and age.
But you wouldn’t know it looking at this. While no one wore anything that overstepped the bounds of their social caste, it was a marvel to see everyone clad in colorfully dyed fabrics. Some were clearly giving it their all: a commoner needed to pinch a lot of pennies to afford the silk veils I saw on some women passing by.
Truly a befitting scene for a festival in the capital of vanity.
Sarcasm aside, the gorgeous scene was likely only possible because of all the aristocrats living in Berylin. Tastes of the upper class ebbed and flowed, and it followed that poorer nobles shopped secondhand for things out of fashion; as the cycle repeated and certain styles became unwearable for a self-respecting member of high society, they naturally fell to stores patronized by common people.
These tailors then broke down old clothes into their fancy raw parts, rearranging them into something usable by wealthy lay folk; from there the cycle continued among the populace until eventually, a nobleman’s trash turned into a commoner’s treasure. This, too, was probably an attempt at intimidating foreign diplomats. They sure have thought of everything.I waded through the bustling sea of pretty costumes toward our meeting spot. As a lover of flair, Mika had thrown all pretense of convenience to the wayside and suggested for us to meet up at a plaza a ways from the College—the festive air had gotten to him too.
Originally built as a buffer against the spread of potential fire, the clearing was ordinarily only used to wash small objects, but today it was swarming with people. Usually only home to a lonely fountain—another fire-prevention measure—and a few benches, the place was packed with street stalls and citizens sizing up wares as they waited for the marching to begin.
We were fated to drown in people no matter where we went, it seemed. People from nearby cities and cantons must have made the trip over for a spot this secluded to be this packed; impressive, considering how little marketing there had been for the event.
I thought it might be difficult to pick Mika out from all the other people in the crowd...but I was wrong. Resting on the edge of the fountain, my friend was very much standing out.
Glossier than the wings of a wet raven, he’d clearly bathed or rubbed in some oils, because a shining halo of light gleamed off his hair, to say nothing of how his snowy northern skin beamed under the sun. His build was sturdier as a boy, and he nicely filled out a deep navy robe—the classiest color a lowborn kid could get away with wearing.
Carrying his well-worn wand under his arm was the cherry on top. His troubled expression was sure to draw the eyes of ladies passing by—or rather, it had.
Three young women surrounded Mika, eagerly chatting away to vie for his attention. Judging from their mannerisms and overt attempts at dressing up with clothes of middling make, they were all commoners; still, they were middle class with access to proper education, so I surmised that they were part of the merchant class that made up the majority of Berylin’s population. Not only that, but they were clearly the daughters or apprentices of large companies that frequently dealt with the upper crust.
“Him, Dear Brother?” Elisa had caught my gaze and pointed at Mika.
“That’s right. See, isn’t he handsome?”
“Mmm...mm?”
Much to my surprise, Elisa’s response was more confused than affirmative. I figured she was probably still too young to understand what it was like to find someone attractive.
Anyway, seeing my buddy flounder through the ladies’ flirting was novel and entertaining, but I couldn’t just sit and watch forever.
“Mika!” I said, raising my hand.
“Oh, old pal!”
Mika happily waved back to show his gratitude at being saved, but when I briskly made my way over, he shut up, looking at the girl on my shoulders with a confused set of blinks.
“Ladies,” I said, “I beg your pardon, but would you pray withdraw for the day? As you can see, we have made plans to see the sights of the parade as a party of three, and today marks an important opportunity to acquaint my sister and friend.”
I deliberately employed the most refined palatial speech I could to hint that I had ties to aristocracy, and the women retreated in disappointment. Truth be told, two of them had eyed Mika and I as a set and attempted to continue the conversation, but the third thankfully tugged at their sleeves.
As they all turned away, I read the woman’s lips: “Those clothes come from a famous noble brand. We shouldn’t push our luck.”
Apparently, she’d connected some dots based on my clothes. As cramped and humiliating as my outfit was, I had to admit that Lady Leizniz’s favor had been helpful, just this once.
“You really saved me there, Erich,” Mika said. “But boy, I never thought you’d bring a real fairy with you.”
Being stared at by a stranger scared Elisa, and she squeezed her legs tight with fear. I knew it was tough for her to overcome her shyness, but I really wished she wouldn’t choke me out for it; I tapped on her thighs to tell her to loosen up, and while she softened her grip, she still wasn’t fully relaxed.
“Oh, where are my manners?” Mika asked. “That was awfully rude of me to call out to a proper lady without a family member’s permission. Will you do me the pleasure of introducing me to this wonderful sister of yours, Erich?”
“Of course,” I said. “Come on, Elisa. Let’s get down, okay?”
“Mmkay... Oh! I mean, yes, Dear Brother.”
I let Elisa down and had her stand straight up. I waited for her to fix her dress and posture, just like she did in her lessons, and gave her a little push to have her step toward Mika.
“O friend from the north, it is an honor unmatched to acquaint thee with mine own flesh and blood. Here stands Elisa of Konigstuhl canton, eldest daughter to Johannes.”
My introduction was bombastic enough to stay in line with our usual games of wordplay, but it wasn’t technically out of place. No one actually announced themselves in this old-timey way anymore, but I decided to follow tradition to herald the coming of my beloved baby sister, and Mika was ready to match.
“O friend from the south, no word of thanks can express my gratitudes at meeting thy kin on this blessed day. Allow me to name myself: I am Mika, a mage who hath ridden the northern gales to this land. My allegiance lies with the Hannawald cadre within the School of First Light. O lovely maiden, wouldst thou do me the highest honor of a formal introduction?”
Mika put his left hand across his chest, opened his right palm at belt level, and stepped back with his right foot—the typical greeting magia offered to those that outranked them. Most switched right and left here, but the magia deliberately broke norms in order to announce their background at first impression.
There were alternative theories for why this came about. Some said that by showing a wandless right hand, one showed respect and lack of hostility. Others said that placing the left hand—associated with herbs and medicine—near the heart was a sign of reverence. With how fluidly the rules of etiquette changed, I didn’t know the truth, but it was probably similar to how someone had first decided that napkins were to be picked up from the right side.
“I...” Elisa paused for a moment. “I am Elisa of Konigstuhl, direct disciple to Lady Agrippina du Stahl, Leizniz cadre, School of Daybreak. Mr. Mika, I am delighted to make your acquaintance, and it is a great pleasure to meet you.”
A massive wave of applause swept through my heart. After a minor hiccup at the start, Elisa managed to get through her entire greeting perfectly. If I could’ve gotten away with it, I would have summoned a whole gang of Unseen Hands to give her the praise she deserved.
Good job, Elisa! I’m so proud of you! She didn’t even say “um” a single time! Our little princess is a genius!
“Thank you kindly for the graceful introduction,” Mika said. “I hope ours is a wonderful relationship, Miss Elisa.”

This was far from necessary between commoners, but my friend lifted his robe and bent his knee. I instantly summoned a Hand to keep his garments from getting dirty, and he flashed me a thin smile. While we weren’t always totally in sync, I suspected he’d knelt down knowing I’d cover for him.
Elisa caught on quickly and extended her right hand. Mika took it into his own and placed a kiss atop her glove—a formality that represented respect from man to woman and intimacy the other way around.
I was no Lady Leizniz, but seeing my adorable sister and my handsome friend like this was picturesque. If their overwhelming beauty was enough to wow me, then it was all the more imperative that I never let that one-of-a-kind eccentric lay eyes on them together.
No, wait a second. There was a chance that the blinding wholesomeness of their presence could cleanse the wraith’s soul and send her to heaven...but I supposed the risks involved were too steep. I would just have to do my best to keep my sworn pal away from the viper’s fangs.
“That was quite the shock,” Mika said. “Erich has talked my ear off about how charming you are, but when I first laid eyes on you, I truly thought he’d gone off and brought an alf.”
“My dear brother said that?”
“That he did. Whenever we go shopping, he’s always on about what you might like or what might suit you. I’m always a second priority even when I’m right there!”
Mika shook his head with a joking chuckle...and Elisa giggled too!
“But my dear brother speaks about you often as well, Mr. Mika. When he helps me with my homework, he’ll teach me with methods he says he learned from you.”
By using me as a conversational bridge, the two of them managed to overcome the first hurdle of apprehension and began opening up to each other. Mika readily asked Elisa to forgo any honorifics, and my sister followed suit soon after.
I won’t deny that it was incredibly awkward to be the topic over which they bonded, but, well...I supposed it was fine so long as they were having fun.

[Tips] When meeting someone for the first time, it is best practice to wait to be introduced by a mutually known third party.

Fanfare of fife and drum announced the official start of the parade...but that only meant they had begun marching from the northern castle. That area was reserved for VIPs, meaning we couldn’t even get close.
Parties of well-to-do patrons each enjoyed the privacy of an open-air booth so that high-ranking officials could bring their spouses and young children to enjoy the show on an uncluttered street. Invitations were only sent to those of a certain pedigree, so I wouldn’t have been able to relax enough to enjoy it even if I could’ve sneaked in.
That was why, when Lady Leizniz had invited us to join her, I’d put it in her ear that all the traffic there might make my shy baby sister cry. Hearing that, she had begrudgingly—and oh, do I mean begrudgingly—sent us along, biting her lip. I want to reiterate that we had made it out on a hair’s breadth, and one wrong move could have seen us stuck in a box with all the woman’s other favorites; the thought alone struck terror in my heart.
Thankfully, we instead found ourselves on a relatively uncramped corner west of the northern road. We were still in the gentrified part of town, where poorly put-together vermin were liable to be shooed away, but we were all dressed to the nines today.
Speaking of which, Mika’s new robe was apparently a hand-me-down from his master. The professor had figured his old clothes would fit Mika when he was a boy, and my friend had personally retailored it a bit to not sag.
I could understand how his master felt; it was only natural to want to send one’s protégé wearing something better than usual on a day of celebration. The thought of attending the festivities hadn’t crossed Lady Agrippina’s mind, let alone dressing up for the event; Mika’s teacher was a shining example of normalcy to compare her against.
In all fairness, the madam’s shallow understanding of holidays was less of a personal problem and more one that affected any flint-hearted methuselah, so I couldn’t pin it on her specifically. Frankly, she was probably one of the better ones for having given Elisa a silver piece when we told her we’d be heading out.
“Look, here they come.”
I’d hoisted Elisa back onto my shoulders to give her a better angle, and two rows of soldiers finally came into view. They were the vanguard whose job was to announce the prestigious folks that would follow: commoners couldn’t identify people by armor and banner alone, and even noble children in the middle of their schooling would have a hard time without someone introducing everybody. That would reduce the whole affair to a showcase of fancy armor, which wouldn’t be all that fun for anyone.
As an aside, heraldry was an art that could be even more complicated than magic, so I’d elected to forgo it despite how useful it seemed. When attaining a III: Apprentice level cost as much as seven tiers of Hybrid Sword Arts, there was clearly something wrong.
Not that I could call foul, I supposed. The noble houses that made up His Majesty’s loyal shield numbered in the hundreds, and there were all sorts of different branches for each. Mixing in the countless knight lineages and fallen houses made for an awe-inducing final total. There was more to memorize than in a long-running trading card game, so it was fair enough for the experience costs of mastery to skyrocket.
“Here comes the first of the Five Generals! Second only to the moon-eating wolves of House Graufrock, the Grauberg clan is led today by its rightful heir and successor, Sir Adalbert at the helm! Following them is...”
By my estimate, the one leading the parade was from some knighthood or other. He had a mystical contraption coiled around his neck to amplify his voice, and I could hear him clearly announce the titles and prestige of all who marched by through the hum of the crowd. They must have gathered up a lot of people to find someone with his voice and looks.
“They’re coming out the gate strong,” Mika said.
“Yep. A branch family of one of the imperials. Do you get it, Elisa?”
“Yes, Dear Brother. The name came up in Master’s lectures.”
Elisa went on to name the other Five Generals, houses that sat at the top of imperial military affairs, but all I could think about was the operatic struggles that had no doubt gone down behind the scenes to decide on this order in the parade. I was convinced that blood and gold had been spilt on the dimly lit stage of backdoor politics over which clan was to follow which other, or even who was to march at the head of each.
How refreshing it was to be in the spectator’s seat, free from such strife. Truly, to stay a commoner was life’s greatest blessing.
A few minutes after the vanguard had passed, a troop of warriors clad in enchanted armor—some magical, some divine—could be seen slowly making their way toward us on a flock of impressive warhorses. Their leader was a young werewolf who’d removed his helmet and held it in his armpit.
His lush mane of gray fur had been carefully groomed such that the shortened patch took the shape of an immaculate crescent moon. As a fighter myself, seeing him clad in such magnificent plate armor drove a spike of pure envy into my heart.
And he wasn’t alone! More just like him followed one after another, and my high spirits finally reached their tipping point: I lost myself to the festive atmosphere, hooting and hollering like any other child. Mika tapped into the same boyish amazement, and though the unfamiliar feelings gave him pause, he joined me soon after.
On the other hand, Elisa couldn’t quite wrap her mind around what made armor so cool to us, and instead pelted me with an endless barrage of questions—you know, the sort that curious young children often ask. Things like, “What are those pointy spikes on their boots?” or, “Why are their spears so long?”
“Hark, good citizens of the capital! Next we have holy knights hailing from the Unified Pantheon of Berylin, here at the personal request of His Imperial Majesty! At the helm we see a devout follower of the God of Trials, Father Diedrich! As a member of the Great Boniface Sect, he leads...”
The infinite line of marching soldiers continued with holy knights, which included some radicals who professed their faith with swings of their swords. While religious entities usually didn’t involve themselves directly with imperial politics, they could be counted on at times to declare holy wars against heretical enemies of the state.
Their inclusion was probably aimed at diplomats who hailed from lands where rivaling religions had taken hold, or missionaries that had been granted special permission to enter the country. While the Rhinian pantheon was generally rather quiet, it could completely uproot the divinity of any who opposed it; our gods of war and battle weren’t known as the Barbarian Gods abroad for nothing.
“Now then, pay heed! He who shall pass now sits atop the imperial throne, leads the venerable House Baden, and rules all the Empire with infallible authority! Here comes His Imperial Majesty, the keeper of peace in the eastern land of savages, and restorer of stolen imperial glories! Here comes August IV!”
A deafening wave of cheers washed over the crowd from front to back. Who could blame them? The crown jewel of today’s event—our one and only Emperor—had descended to greet us.
“Wow,” I gasped. “Hey, Mika, look! That’s incredible!”
“Whoa!” he shouted. “Real dragon knights! I’ve never seen them fly so low!”
Long hair swirled about and a few people lost their hats to the tailwind as they soared past, but not a single soul complained. Everyone on the scene simply raised their fists toward the whistling skies.
They were real dragon knights. The lesser drakes they rode were highly intelligent and receptive to people. We made use of their group hunting skills in battle, and they’d been considered the peak military steed for generations now. Their red carapaces showed that they came from a mountainous population comfortable with a furnace’s blaze: they intuitively employed magic to fly and breathe metal-melting flames. The most terrifying thing about their breath was that it used a biological oil as a catalyst, and it still shot forward when they were traveling close to the speed of sound.
If a fleet of them cut off a formation of enemy soldiers from the skies, all their tactics and stratagems would melt away faster than a candy drop. So great was their influence that military advisors of the past had once considered a nation’s might to be directly proportional to their arsenal of drakes; as someone under their protection, nothing could inspire more confidence.
Nowadays, of course, advances in polemurgy and siege weaponry made their influence less absolute, but they remained a key part of turning the tides of battle. A single dragon knight was said to do the work of a whole squad of cavalry, and the Empire had one, two, three... Three squads of six?!
As I lost myself in the drakes gliding leisurely above, a thundering footstep that shook me to my core brought my attention back to the ground. I looked to see dragon knights walking down the street.
The leader of the pack was a massive plateau drake. It had a bluish carapace and much larger wings than its mountain-dwelling cousins. While it couldn’t spit fire, it could summon razored gales that could score the face of a mountain. Witnessing it march on its hind legs and balance itself with the tips of its wings was equal parts terrifying and heartening.
And the man who sat atop that magnificent specimen was our Emperor: August IV, the Dragon Rider. Clad in shining white armor, he exuded too much raw virility for me to believe the man was over fifty. He stared ahead with a gaze devoid of even the faintest ounce of softness.
However, the charming old lady riding with him was quite the opposite in every way. His Majesty’s unyielding vigor made him look even taller than he already was, and the Empress Consort almost looked like a floresiensis by comparison. She gratified the citizenry in place of her stark husband, and the white-haired grande dame made sure to wave to both sides of onlookers evenly.
It took a long while for anyone to follow, but eventually a young man who shared many of the reigning monarch’s features appeared—probably the crown prince. I’d been too giddy about the flying drakes to pay attention to the herald.
“Weird...” Mika cocked his head as soon as the prince came into view.
“What’s up, old chum?”
“I don’t know. How do I put this? I’ve seen His Highness once, when I helped carry my master’s things into the palace. But he seems so...different. Like he’s less rugged, maybe? Or more at peace, or something...”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m not really sure, myself. It’s just...he wore a grimmer expression when I last saw him. His brow was just as furrowed as his father’s.”
I looked over at His Highness at Mika’s request, but all I saw was him and his werewolf princess waving to the people with bright smiles—I couldn’t even begin to imagine the scene my friend was describing. He looked like a good, amicable man that didn’t have a single care in the world.
“Hrm...” Mika groaned. “I mean...I guess?”
Although he didn’t seem convinced even as he spoke, all his puzzlement quickly faded away as the next part of the parade approached.
The three of us stayed to watch the parade until it ended in the evening, and went out for supper together. The two of them had gotten nice and chummy over the course of the festival, and by the end of the day, Elisa was holding my hand in her right and Mika’s in her left. It had been a good day: Elisa had taken her first step into society, as small as it was, and I had a feeling Mika was a tiny bit closer to putting the past behind him.
Ah, if only my problems were any closer to resolution.
A small thorn still pricked at my heart, but the joyful weariness of a day well spent helped soothe my soul as the day turned to night.

[Tips] The crown prince’s official duties only entail taking command when the emperor is unable to do so. However, in reality, there are examples of princes gradually being given more and more responsibilities until the reigning monarch simply abdicates to them; for someone who abhors the thought of coronation, the position is a terrible punishment.

Tprg4.6

[Tips] The Adventurer’s Association once conducted a survey to see why their members chose the career that they did. The third-most-cited reason was the love of heroic sagas, shared by one-fifth of the participants. In second place, one-fourth answered that this was the only path they had. At thirty-eight percent, the most popular response was fame and fortune.
Such is life. Work is usually allotted with no more ado than rolling a set of dice, and at times, the lives of men are lighter in the pocket than a coin minted with silver.

To the methuselah, the other races—that is to say, mortals—seemed to rush through maturation. For a creature that could live without food or drink in a shelter no better than a roof and walls, the urgency required to worry about matters of today and tomorrow seemed awfully antsy.
Agrippina was one such methuselah, who had begun to accustom herself to this foreign pace of life as of late. She chuckled internally, thinking, How convenient it is to have a spur nearby.
“Master.”
“Yes?”
Making full use of her multithreaded capabilities, she’d been scribbling a luminous trail of elegant cursive in empty space, all while reading the book in her hands. Poetic euphemisms were rarely employed amongst magia, but the gentry of this land were so averse to clearly labeled promises that to teach her student the language of letters was unavoidable.
Finished with her necessary but tiresome work, the child placed down an eagle quill too large for her hands and stared at her master. The magus caught a glimpse of her disciple’s expression out of the corner of her eye and closed her book: whatever the girl wanted to say, it was clearly not a question about her homework.
As depraved and self-centered as Agrippina was, she commanded enough good sense to put in diligent effort for the sake of protecting her prized leisure. If her apprentice wished for serious advice, she concluded that putting this riveting story on pause to hear her out was for the best.
Elisa’s mental state had recently leapt forward again, ushering in a great deal of academic progress: her command of the written word was now beyond that of her brother. The methuselah had an inkling as to what had spurred on this breakthrough, and thus also had a solid read on what her disciple was going to say.
“When will I be able to begin learning magic?” Elisa asked.
A fine question. Not the question itself, mind you—Agrippina fancied the implication that lay behind it.
Study words to keep your brother close; learn magic to shoo alfar away; gain strength to protect him. Such were the wicked whispers the villain used to fan the flames of her student’s determination. Her ever-servile spur had been vital in inducing the girl’s belated mental development, and it seemed that another set of gears had clicked into place in her mind.
Agrippina knew not what her apprentice and servant spoke about behind closed doors; she wasn’t fond enough of gossip to consider eavesdropping worthy of her time. Still, she could guess what this spoiled sister would beg of the brother she so adored.
As Elisa’s mind caught up to her body, she had learned the behavior of thought. With this advancement came the loss of dependence—not in conduct, but rather in the invisible realm of the soul. On the surface, she remained the tiny baby clinging to her brother’s side...but her true colors were beginning to soak in: a shade of monomania, a tinge of fixation, and the unmistakable hue of an alf.
“Let me see,” Agrippina said. “I shall take you someplace nice in due time as a measure of your manners. If you manage to play the part of a proper young lady then, I will consider beginning lessons in magecraft.”
A changeling only eight years of age was still a changeling. The base psyche trapped in her brain was not that of a mensch, and once her alfish side roused from its slumber, she would quickly come into her true form. The evidence was palpable: to learn all that she had of writing and speech in a single summer would be grounds to dub any other child a genius.
Fairies were living phenomena; the flesh could pull as hard as it pleased, but these innate desires were too strong a magnet for the ego to resist.
Agrippina thought this very apt for a girl who had begun her studies to protect her brother from meddlesome alfar. She considered Elisa’s single-minded motivation adorably pathetic and wondered what her servant would think if he were ever to discover the truth.
“When will that be?” Elisa pressed.
“Well...I suppose if I were to make a reservation now, it would be sometime within the month.”
The methuselah inspected her disciple’s resolute expression and let out a quiet chuckle. But make no mistake: this was not the loving smile of a mature adult cheering on their mentee through the nervousness of a practical exam. No, it was the sick, twisted sneer of a woman gazing at a live bomb, imagining what kind of fantastical explosions waited at the end of the fuse.
Now then, Agrippina mused, I wonder what sort of alf this little changeling came from?
The magus had come up with a highly probable hypothesis with her wealth of knowledge, and it seemed that the opportunity to confirm her theory was not too far away—in the mensch sense of the phrase, even.
“But isn’t this a bit sudden?” Agrippina asked. “Are you that interested in the grand spell your brother developed?”
“No...” Elisa shook her head. “My dear brother told me that there are a lot of bad people in the world, and that’s why he must fight—to protect me. That’s why he pushes himself so hard.”
The evildoers she spoke of were hardly uncommon. The authorities’ capability to search their vast territories was simply unfit to catch them all; when one hopped border was all it took to turn a criminal back into a law-abiding citizen, violence was a profitable venture. Of course, local churches kept records of wanted fugitives in their family registries, but the inability to validate one’s identity only mattered for those seeking honest work.
Thus the state employed the cruelest of punishments to enforce order. Thieves were collared and chained, murderers were decapitated, and bandits were hanged up high. Yet no amount of severed heads could cull the seeds of evil.
Upon witnessing the execution of a bandit who’d attacked a tax caravan, the great prose poet Bernkastel once sang, “Count the grains of blooming wheat and you may numerate them yet, but these heads shall only end with the history they darken.”
Filled with more resignation than irony, the verse spoke to the infinite stupidity of sentient life. Man’s eternal quest for power was to defend against it, and it was for safety’s sake that the weak accepted rule by others.
“But if I get stronger—so strong that I can protect him from anything—then my dear brother won’t have to do anything dangerous again, will he?”
A will of tremendous gravity gleamed in Elisa’s amber eyes—no, perhaps this was a trick of the light, but they glowed the faint gold of moonlight. She tilted her head and gracefully covered her lips, just as Agrippina had taught her. To smile with childish charm was part of a young noble’s duties, but this was anything but cute.
“And when that happens,” the changeling continued, “I don’t even think he’ll need to leave the house. He’ll always be by my side, and we can play and have fun and be happy forever... Am I wrong, Master?”
The brother was mensch folly incarnate: he longed for fleeting moments of euphoric glory. Now the sister was following suit, dyeing herself in the folly of fey; how did she differ from the eternal dancers of the twilight hill?
She was still so young, but the ripening process had advanced beyond recall. Seeing her disciple this way, Agrippina had to suppress a roar of laughter to speak.
“No, you’re not wrong in the slightest. I think you’re perfectly sound, so long as you become stronger than everyone in the whole wide world, including your brother.”
Methuselah lived incomparably longer and thought incomparably faster than mensch, but they too lived and breathed in their own form of folly. Their irrationality was that of a grown woman smacking a sleeping child awake and rejoicing at the sight of their tears.
With Agrippina’s purse and skill set, leading these two siblings down a sensible path would be trivial. It would be all too easy to teach the girl values befitting a mensch and to shape the boy’s childish ambitions into a more robust ideology.
Alas, the utter scoundrel threw all pretense of integrity to the wayside as she shoved her chips into the most entertaining pot she could find. If the maxim of gods leaving no sin unpunished was true, then surely a divine bolt of lightning or an apostle would come to smite her at this very second.
“If that is what you desire,” Agrippina went on, “you must make haste. Win your professorship and become wholly invincible. Grow so strong that even Erich cannot raise a single finger against you, and he shall know your arms to be the safest place in the world—that to stay there will be his greatest gift to you.”
“Me?” Elisa asked. “Stronger?”
“But of course. Erich amasses strength because he is stronger than you. He endures the burden of danger, the exhaustion of training, and the responsibility of earning money all for the weak Baby Elisa, doesn’t he? Now, tell me. What would happen if the opposite were true?”
“I... I would be the one...”
As you can see, the heavens were silent. Agrippina gave a wicked grin, well aware that she was pouring gasoline on the bonfire of Elisa’s resolve; the changeling beamed as if she’d just uncovered a gift from the absent gods.
Two creatures altogether estranged from ethics each let their own heavy emotions sink deep into their cores, and then carried on with lecture. Elsewhere, the brother was stepping into a bath to recollect himself; he was no doubt accosted by a terrible shivering fit.
How could he not be? After all, his sister was earnestly concocting a plan to keep him safe...from everything the world had to offer.

[Tips] At the end of the day, changelings are merely alfar in mensch frames.

Let us speak of the nation they call the Empire.
The Trialist Empire of Rhine, as its official name went, was founded by Richard, the Emperor of Creation, with initial holdings in the eastern region of the western reach of the Central Continent; the ancient powerhouse was running 524 years strong.
There had been a tremendous state in the Central Continent in the final years of the Age of Gods, remembered by modern historians only by an informal moniker: the Blessed Kingdom. It met its demise with the era of divinity, and this great power’s dissolution threw the whole landmass into bloody disarray.
The power struggles of the western reach were especially grisly. Though a tad chilly, the temperate lands were arable and fit for livestock; freshwater abounded in the rivers that cut through hospitable flatlands. One could see why the region had earned the name Elysium in the heavenly tongue used in those days.
But bounty begot battle. Among all creatures, man alone could not contain his thirst for more: how could such a beast rest easy when every conquered territory came with the promise of luxury?
Just as countless countries rose, fell, and rose again, so too was the Empire’s tale stained in blood—and how could it not be, with the Founding Emperor’s circumstances?
The Empire’s namesake was the River Rhine, a massive waterway that flowed from south to north. In those days, the lovely maiden flowed beside countless tiny nations that were liable to disappear in a decade at best. This period of warring lesser states was a far cry from the Pax Imperia that would one day follow, but that future was far out of sight. For perspective, the Kingdom of Seine established its throne centuries before uncontested imperial hegemony.
Amidst the struggle, the lastborn son of a branch family of one of these minuscule nations thought to himself: “Should we continue to turn our fangs upon one another, we shall vanish as a snake swallowing its own tail might. This disordered smattering of selfish fools has been propped up solely by the fruits of the lands on which they perch. In the presence of true power, their disorganized squirming will make it all too easy to claim the greatest share.”
Fed up with the frustrating incompetence of his clan, the boy began to establish his own house. Any other lastborn son in such a position would have been washed away in the muddy stream of history, but not Richard of Stuttgard—he who would one day become the Emperor of Creation, Richard von Baden-Stuttgard.
His first order of business was to tame the populace. After removing cruel local magistrates behind curtains, he directly promised the common people lower taxes and less compulsory labor for their allegiance. Using the funds from his loyal citizens, he raised an army to eliminate every last despot of his clan’s main branch to seize House Baden as its rightful ruler. The political spectacle of revolt had been possible in great part due to three allies Richard had made.
First, he’d befriended the werewolf warriors the Badens kept collared and chained, promising them emancipation and equal rights if they fought by his side.
Second, he came to the doorstep of the vampiric household that reigned over their largest neighboring state. However, he did not engage with the ancient, two-thousand-year-old patriarch of the clan; he instead turned to a fledgling barely a century old and already tired of the elders’ overbearing ways, and took the young immortal under his banner.
Third and final, Richard partnered with three minor kings. Each of the monarchs had vied for dominance on a quest for Rhinian unification, but had been forced back into their own borders by competitors. Reduced to longingly gazing at a succulent fruit rotting on its own branch, their ambitions were easily rekindled.
With talent and opportunity in hand, Richard swept across the land. His army spread through the Maiden’s Bosom—the most fertile part of the Rhine River Valley—faster than wildfire. So meticulously calculated were his marks and so flawless was his execution that the great historians who followed considered his campaign devoid of intrigue.
Richard’s territory expanded to enclose the favored maiden of the gods that scarce few had ever ruled, earning him the epithet of “the Little Conqueror.” While the moniker was in part a sarcastic jab at his unimpressive origins, those who uttered it did so knowing that he was a tireless engine of demolition and plunder, his front lines advancing with every annexation.
At last his callous and wanton invasions came to a pause as he turned to more diplomatic means. His progress had been so rapid that the insignificant kings—dubbed so by history, not by personal choice—that were to oppose him found themselves without the time to coordinate their forces in coalition.
This was not, of course, a mere stroke of luck on Richard’s part: with every new acquisition, he loaned his newfound resources for cheap to countries he did not yet plan to topple.
These beneficiaries had no intention of repaying any favors, but to bite the hand that fed was too daunting a challenge; instead, they turned on their historical rivals to further their own interests. Even the mightiest of contenders on the world stage could not spare time to strategize against Richard with a swarm of principalities nipping at their heels. Invariably, the Little Conqueror swooped in at the end as if to say, “Your time has come.”
The man had an eye for people and opportunity. Although he never worked against his own interests, he was acutely sensitive to the power-hungry fools that he employed as pawns in his bloody grand design. Meanwhile, he plucked capable vassals from within his borders to establish loyal clans—many who enjoyed continued prestige in Modern Rhine, like the Five Generals or Thirteen Knights—who brought prosperity to the budding nation.
Richard’s talents brought abundance, which became the foundation of a country too sturdy to easily upturn. That, in turn, bought him time. Eighteen years had passed since he had begun his revolt, but the man was still healthy and spirited. At the age of thirty-two, Richard founded the Trialist Empire of Rhine and declared himself Emperor.
Truth be told, Richard had only won the position of a high king. However, his sapling state had been born atop a pile of corpses, and he knew he needed more; haphazardly inheriting the titles of old would only amount to a gilded facade of prosperity sure to rot from within soon after.
Bloodshed had unified Rhine, and without stable footing, bloodshed would destroy it. Worse still, the death of a single great king could shatter the land back into pieces. Richard dreamed of a sturdy, towering tree that would not fall as soon as the gods recalled him to their lap: to this end, he relinquished the priceless commodity of time.
So began the Trialist Empire of Rhine.
The emperor came from one of the three great houses that had founded the Empire to begin with, and the three minor kings were rewarded for their loyal service with the awesome privilege of the vote. Not only did this prevent excessive consolidation of power, but it also helped quell discontent, as the ruler required the consent of the ruled.
Furthermore, if the emperor only commanded authority granted by electors, any attempt at revolution would amount to little more than the assassination of a figurehead. One would need to provide substantial cause to sway the wielders of power to join a militaristic coup.
Richard broke free from existing modes of rule and kicked aside the title of High King to crown himself the first-ever emperor. For those that coveted the title, the only rightful path to the throne was littered with his rules. He created more than a position: here he proclaimed the birth of a new world order.
A coronation unknown to the law crowned no true Emperor; a nation serving an illegitimate ruler was no true Empire. Richard had amassed much in a single generation, and this code would remain steadfast for all those who would come to inherit his treasures: he became the immaculate model of all the virtues Elysium expected of its master.
And so, the Empire found its footing.
With the bulwark of his noble houses by his side, Richard brought the scattered churches of the land into one pantheon with the promise of protection and independence, standardized systems of measurements and weights, and ironed out the legal system that underpinned Rhinian affairs. It had cost him fifteen years, but by the time he approached middle age, the Empire had become an unstoppable behemoth.
All that remained was the harvest: minor nations that had played for neutrality now eagerly entered the imperial umbrella, and cornered giants bent the knee to prolong their existences. By the time Richard was canonized as the Emperor of Creation, not a single lesser state lay on the maiden’s banks.
The one emperor and three imperial houses had gained four electors for a total of seven, all from the 227 noble lineages that formed the backbone of the Empire. The hydra had swallowed the region whole to morph into a bizarre oligarchic monarchy that respected the rights and privileges of its lesser lords as if it were a federation.
The oddity of the system was the result of cumulative compromise. A single bloodline was too frail to bear the burden of the crown, but parliaments and oligarchies had failed before, and to leave power in the hands of the populace was a dream within a dream. With how liable it was to collapse, the castle was less built atop a pile of sand and more built out of sand.
Yet the process of coming to terms on common ground repeated ad nauseum had stacked up enough begrudging compliance for the Empire to continue expanding its borders for five centuries—few could claim the political experiment to be a failure. Its flaws were many and its domestic history was rife with violent purges, but throughout it all, the Trialist Empire remained standing to the modern day.
It was here in this ancient nation that an old man sat alone, surrounded by magnificent ornaments, lavish furniture, and trophies of war ranging from swords to crowns. The walls of the expansive room were tastefully subdued, but they were not mere stone: a layer of elaborately patterned wallpaper covered the masonwork. The flooring was just as exquisite; a shag carpet covered every square inch of ground to seal away the cold earth below.
Light flickered on the shelves by the wall, and the glimmering treasures on display would surely cause any historian’s eyes to fall out of their sockets. The royal crowns of fallen kingdoms, prized swords thought lost to time, and a fragment of the long-gone Blessed Kingdom’s throne lined the display cases. Each was a symbol of forgotten glory, as if to say this was the might of Rhine.
The centerpiece of the room was a stately throne that teetered on the edge of excess, sure to paint all but the most dignified as charlatans when used. Embodying centuries of history, the seat doubled as a test of worth for any who dared to sit.
Even so, the graying gentleman atop it did not shrink away from his ceremonious surroundings. He did not rely on majestic possessions to inflate his person, but rather imbued them with greater regality by his presence.
His head retained a handsome gloss in spite of the white hairs weaving into his raven mane, and what at first appeared a skinny frame was chiseled from pure muscle without an ounce of waste. He wore the finest threads dyed in the color reserved for the imperial: a resplendent purple-blue.
The man’s nose was sharp and high set, while his slender, ashen eyes gleamed with intimidating tenacity. Habit had sealed his lips tight and permanently furrowed his brow into an austere statesman’s glare, robbing him of the frailty that so often came with age.
Similarly eye-catching ornaments lay atop his desk, and his chair was lined with magnificent cushioning dyed in the same imperial colors as his attire. Despite the comfort such padding no doubt provided, his back remained ruler-straight. He was closer to a perfectly sharpened spear than a man, complete with a pointed head: the crystallization of imperial authority rested on his pate in the form of a golden crown.
Let it be known that August Julius Ludwig Heinkel von Baden-Stuttgart was the rightful heir to House Stuttgart, chief among the imperial Baden bloodlines that descended directly from the Emperor of Creation himself—here sat the reigning monarch, Emperor August IV. The gallant hero was infamous for climbing atop his drake and diving into the thick of the fight. He was so popular, in fact, that the number of sagas recounting his exploits rivaled the Black Flag Emperor, despite his still being alive.
The Emperor’s lips parted. His deep, somber voice was frequently likened to that of the draconic mount he commanded. Two personal guests of his sat in the imperial office reserved for the most serious matters of state, ready to bear witness to words that would shake the Empire.
“Hear,” he spoke. “I...grow weary of this.”
“Shut the fuck up. The least you could do after calling us all the way out here is thank us for coming, asshole.”
An aging werewolf snapped at the Emperor with words choice enough to knock a hypothetical onlooker flat on their rear. Beneath his stately mane, the manly lupine figure was scored with countless scars. His gray coat was wrapped in a fine purple-blue top, embroidered with his family crest of a great wolf. He and his flock were markedly different in appearance from the demonic cynocephali, and his demihuman kin would agree that he was an exceptionally strapping fellow—even as he grunted with a merciless glare.
“We get here and the first thing you do is grumble,” he barked. “Have some shame. I was in the middle of whooping my idiots out west back into place, so you better have a good reason for making me march all the way back to the capital.”
The werewolf was David McConnla von Graufrock, head of the Graufrock Duchy. As one-third of the imperial pie, his clan governed a large swath of land from the central north of the Empire to its western holdings. Once upon a time, his forefather had won his freedom by joining Richard against a tyrant; centuries later, the preeminent werewolf lineage still held the nation together with their military prowess.
The Graufrocks also boasted the right to rule, and David in particular had served as August IV’s spear for many a moon and year. Having leapt into battle at the age of seven, he’d been an early bloomer even by werewolf standards. Nowadays, he was well regarded for continuing his track record of loyal service without showing a hint of his old age, as the sitting emperor’s closest advisor.
How shocked the populace would be to hear him assault His Imperial Majesty with the filthy diction of a drunkard at the pub.
Alas, this was unavoidable: be they liege and vassal as they were, the true nature of their dynamic was better described as brothers in arms or partners in crime. David’s second wife was August’s younger sister—and the Founding Emperor’s second wife had similarly been the eldest sister of the first Graufrock—but their familial ties paled in comparison to their unyielding friendship.
“I’m going to sock you in your face if you recalled us just to complain. Oh, and I’m helping myself to a bottle or two from the vault while I’m at it.”
David’s remarks easily crossed the line, even for a candidate to the throne, but the Emperor showed no signs of caring. Had August’s retainers been present, they would have reached for their daggers, turning red in the face, but the man himself accepted the disrespect as a matter of course.
They had stood shoulder to shoulder, groveling in the same mud and eating from the same pot—they’d subsisted on “stew” that included anything edible they could get their hands on—on the front lines. What was there to hold back now?
The pair had made themselves busy with their fair share of mischief in their youth: they’d peeked up skirts, ventured into red-light districts, and gotten punched out of bars when they couldn’t pay their tab. David’s greeting could be considered on the civil side, considering their relationship.
“What wretched vassals I am burdened with,” August remarked. “Always swiping prized wines from my cellar for every little request... I shall never forget the day you pilfered my 244-year-old red Alsace over a tiny marriage interview.”
“Do you have any fucking clue how hard it was to rein in that wild beast for long enough to marry her off to your grandnephew? Plus, this time I had to stop my brats from running around and picking fights to make time to come.”
“I suspect the fault for that lies more with your genetics than with me... At any rate, I turned fifty-seven this past autumn. The gods will not punish you for treating me with more care.”
“Still early to bemoan one’s age, I’m sure you’ll agree.” A third voice entered the fray. In contrast to the booming vulgarities offered by the werewolf, this new speaker cut off the haggard August with sprightly vigor.
Not content to merely discount the Emperor’s cries, the man went so far as to plant his behind on the imperial desk. He fearlessly crossed his legs and casually began filing his fingernails—a show of flippancy that was grounds enough for him and his whole family to be beheaded and kept on pikes to decorate the castle gates for half a year.
The gentleman was frighteningly beautiful, like the hue of silver personified. He nestled a stylish silver wand beneath his arm, snuggled into his magus robes, and with his bangs neatly pulled back, Martin Werner von Erstreich openly displayed his particular silver eyes.
Martin, too, was one of three who could lay claim to the throne, as evidenced by his family crest: a wine glass split in two. He was the progeny of the crafty vampire who had helped Richard overthrow the two-millennia-old ancient bloodsucker, all while politically maneuvering around the terrible accusation of treachery.
“You’re in the middle of your second term, aren’t you? Ha, that leaves plenty of room to spare. I suffered three, you recall. With how brief a period it is, I’d prefer to hear a more spirited declaration that you have another term in you yet.”
Such was the silver gentleman’s excuse for sitting on the imperial desk so brazenly. He had endured three fifteen-year terms signing papers on this very table. It was impossible for him to summon any restraint when interacting with property that was all but his own.
Martin’s two aging companions grimaced at his immortal arrogance. For a mensch and especially a werewolf—who on average lived thirty years less than mensch—fifteen years was an eternity. To have the whole of preadulthood written off as “brief” was objectionable from a mortal perspective.
“Wow,” David scoffed, “the mindset of a four-century-old geezer sure is something else.”
“With how unlike our perceptions of time are,” August added, “might I suggest you take a fourth term upon yourself? You, if anyone, surely have plenty of room to spare, Duke Erstreich. I reckon you shall take an afternoon nap and awake to find your tenure complete.”
Faced with a snarling werewolf and a glaring emperor, the mighty vampire nonchalantly blew the dust from his fingertips. His silver eyes flickered with discontent as he pointed his sharpened nails at them both.
“You’re to call me Professor Martin or simply Professor—how many times must I tell you this, gentlemen? I’ve expressed my distaste for that unromantic title on more occasions than I can remember. Ah, but forgive me: perhaps you two imbeciles left the ability to learn back inside of your mothers’ wombs.” Having said these damning words with all possible grace and civility, he added, “And I’m not a geezer. I’m still quite young, thank you.”
In fairness, vampires in foreign lands regularly strolled about at five hundred, and there was even a princess who’d celebrated her first millennium as of late. Martin was, relatively speaking, still young.
At any rate, these three were the colossi at the heart of the Trialist Empire. All of them were shrewd bureaucrats and played the part of liege and vassal perfectly in the public eye; if anyone acquainted with them were to see this scene, they would come to the conclusion that this was a distasteful performance from three impeccable body doubles.
But of course, their conversation was raw, unfiltered reality.
“Y’know, Gustus,” David said, “you say you’re tired and all, but I heard from my craftsmen that you put in an order for a new set of drake gear. And not some fancy-ass ceremonial armor either. You’re buying a saddle with plenty of room to load up cargo.”
The werewolf casually dropped August’s nickname as he scrutinized the man’s claim of fatigue. Although his white hairs were certainly growing more numerous, the deep black that pervaded his branch of the Baden tree was still lush, and his gray eyes had just as much life in them as those of a man in his prime; those who lent him their hand when he climbed a flight of stairs did so as no more than a formality.
“It is a gift,” August answered. “I did not place the order to suit my personal interests. I recognize the gear may fit my lovely Durindana, but it is the product of coincidence, as I intend to bestow the equipment upon a drake of equal size.”
Lies spewed forth without a hint of hesitation: he didn’t so much as shift his gaze. The Dragon Rider’s moniker was no mere publicity stunt, and he’d grown up riding lesser drakes into battle. Even now, he pampered his trusty steed in the palace’s drake stables—evidence enough that he could not abandon his lifelong fixation on soaring through the open skies.
The Emperor’s military career had begun with the dream of flight. Determined to leave the earth beneath him, he had learned of a species of drake that man had narrowly managed to domesticate and enlist; to him, his appointment as the head of the clan and subsequent coronation were unsolicited byproducts of his success.
“Rumor has it that the third iteration of your aeronautical warship has been refitted again,” Martin remarked. “The, er, Alexandrine, was it? I’ve heard whispers of your stubborn insistence on equipping it with the capacity to launch draconic knights. ‘Weary’ indeed. Over at the College, not a day goes by without hearing a gripe about how ridiculous the final specifications have become.”
The vampiric professor glanced back to gauge the Emperor’s reaction to his provocation, but August was experienced. After navigating the world of politics—where foul intent sprouted faster than common weeds—for nearly three decades, this didn’t even faze him.
“That is a measure to better the survivability of the airship. Pray tell that you have yet to forget the tragedy of the Kriemhild.”
The Emperor’s retort was unwavering, his steadfast gaze more solid than steel. Who could believe that such a stalwart being had no scruples about using his salary and whatever imperial funds he could to fuel his personal hobbies?
On the note of the aeronautical warship, the Empire was in the midst of a project that combined its impressive advancements in magecraft and shipbuilding. The theoretical concept had been hashed out half a century prior, and the tests had advanced to the third prototype build at present. As the wings to a new dawn, the airship was meant to strike awe into Rhine’s neighbors while solving the state’s lack of a large port, heralding the next age of prosperity.
The Trialist Empire had been a continental nation since its inception, and lacked any notable holdings on the coast. Although it bordered a good deal of ocean to the north, the majority of its shoreline was covered with unusable sheer bluffs; the few cooperative banks they had became unnavigable for anything more than local fishing boats come wintertime. This is to say, the Rhinians had no warm water port from which to launch larger vessels.
The lovely maiden from which they derived their name flowed to a verdant inland sea in the south, but even then, many points on the Rhine were not traversable for massive crafts. Ships also differed in make between those specialized for river and ocean travel, so artificial enlargement was not a viable solution.
For the moment, the satellite states Rhine kept in orbit to its south included seaside city-states that provided access to the southern sea, settling the immediate issue. Yet the Empire knew that a day would come when its inability to command open waters would come to bite it. To expand its already-excessive borders could cause the nation’s already-strained central government undue tension, making conquest unappealing; still, the imperial leaders sought some means of oceanic access.
Their solution? Airships.
By constructing the vessel around an arcane engine and running quasi-mystic circuits imbued with anti-gravity and propulsion spells all throughout the build, the Empire would have access to the most endless sea of all: that which continued far into the heavens.
Or at least, it would once the many problems this plan came with were solved. Not only was the technology volatile, but it was incredibly difficult to recover from an error when hovering far above ground, and to top it all off, those who inhabited the skies interfered with progress to challenge imperial air supremacy.
The Empire’s little wings had to account for all of these problems at once. To that end, those in charge of designing it were constantly testing new solutions that had proven innovative at best and bizarre at worst.
“You know,” David butted in, “I’ve been thinking this for a while now, but why the hell’d you name the thing after your wife?”
“‘Forget the Kriemhild?’” Martin repeated mockingly. “No, I remember—I remember well how a flock of drakes ran the Kriemhild aground, and how you insisted on commencing work on a new vessel in the wake of the tragedy, you spendthrift.”
“The airship will revolutionize trade and warfare!” August shouted. “This investment is no waste or whim! And the ship was christened by means of public vote!”
“Come the fuck on, you’re the Emperor!” the werewolf shouted back. “Renaming the damn thing should’ve been child’s play! What the hell are you going to say if it sinks?!”
“Then at least keep the scale modest!” the vampire joined in. “Why couldn’t we begin large-scale construction after developing reliable flight?! You might as well ask a novice shipwright to hammer out the frame!”
“It won’t sink!” the Emperor boomed. “Anything graced with Alexandrine’s name is destined for greatness!”
“Oh, I fucking knew it, you stupid lovebird!”
“Why must you be so insistent in your baseless confidence, you fool?!”
Any one of these exchanges would cause a devoted patriot to cough up their guts and die on the spot, and the three greatest powers in the Empire continued their charade for another ten or twenty minutes. As a matter of course, the ceaseless fonts of indignity were only sealed when the Emperor—the impetus of all this, mind you—brought down his fist.
“Enough! I am at my limit! Let me resign!” August hurled the crown from his head—an act that would make some skip past fainting straight to sudden death—and jumped to his feet. “I tried to refuse this second term as well, only for you two to conspire to keep me on the throne! One of you—I don’t care who—switch with me!”
“You mustn’t ask for the impossible, Your Majesty!” David cried. “I am a withering thirty-two years of age, no less atrophied than a mensch such as yourself at fifty-seven. And oh, the horror! My old wounds rouse me without fail each night! How inconceivable it would be to punish—I mean, entrust such a pitiful soul with the great responsibility of sovereignty!”
“The post exceeds my capacity, Your Majesty!” Martin proclaimed. “Alas, my meager talents leave me unable to take on any more than my current mission of checking the power of the nation’s artisan unions to secure our financial interests. Should I abandon my office and allow internal trade wars to wage unabated, the citizenry you care for as your own sons and daughters will suffer horrors the likes of which have remained unseen since the foreign invasion prevented by the Black Flag! Please, reconsider! You must understand that our tenuous peace rests upon your shoulders!”
“Your Majesty this, Your Majesty that—only at times like these do you ingrates perform the part of loyal vassals! Fine, then consider this an imperial mandate! Switch with me!”
The dictionary contained no word severe enough to describe their ignobility as the men shouted themselves hoarse. Perhaps it was enough that they retained the bare minimum of good sense to keep their battle to the realm of repartee as opposed to that of fisticuffs.
Only after each had taken a glass of water did their tempers cool, allowing them all to remember that they were grown adults. They took a moment to wipe their sweat or Clean themselves in a belated attempt to don some guise of dignity. With renewed airs, they resumed discussion on a topic that could alter the fate of the Empire—but at its core, this remained the world’s most worthless game of musical chairs, wherein the goal was not to sit.
“Ahem... I have been sleeping poorly as of late, and I wake each morning to terrible coughing fits. Age has robbed me of my vigor to the extent that I can no longer hide the effects of my poor health on my work. No longer can I fulfill my duties as emperor.”
Properly crowned once more, Emperor August IV coughed with clear deliberation. True, it sounded genuinely painful; however, the magus at the table noted he’d cast some sort of physical manipulation magic. Employing remarkable skill to inane ends must have been some sort of cultural tradition in Rhine.
“This is coming from the guy who nearly worked his personal guards to death by doing his imperial tour on drakeback because it was faster...”
“How odd. I recall you’d been quite animated when coming to see our progress on the Alexandrine... I must be misremembering.”
The Emperor gracefully ignored his grumbling dukes and glanced over at the werewolf. “When the winds carry the scent of war, the valiant House Graufrock is best at the helm. Say, have you heard the rumors of the giants stirring in the Frost Spirit’s Peaks?”
“As if. It’s too late for them to come out now. But seriously, I really can’t handle it. I don’t think I’ll last another fifteen years in good health. The court physician doesn’t look too pleased with my condition, and my brat still doesn’t have the experience to lead...”
August could say nothing to this excuse. The two of them had been together through thick and thin—including the baffling incident when David, the patriarch of one of the imperial houses, had helped him escape the castle and earned himself a temporary ban from the palace for his troubles—and he knew his old friend was on his last legs.
The average werewolf lived to fifty, and even the healthiest barely ever made it past seventy. At thirty-two, David was well within range of planning his retirement.
With that in mind, August’s gaze shifted to the vampire. He’d dealt with plenty of crafty career politicians during his reign, and continuing the conversation as if he hadn’t literally just nominated Duke Graufrock for the throne was hardly a challenge.
“To match our mighty rivals, an unflinching foundation will be paramount for our nation. I believe duty calls for you, Duke Erstreich.”
“Professor,” the immortal vampire mumbled, averting his eyes.
August’s nomination had compelling grounds: unaging beings did indeed tend to benefit from their disposition when on the throne. They were less likely to lose sight of a set plan, and they did not overexert themselves to rush out a project like their short-lived counterparts did when the reaper was in sight, making them perfect for carrying out long-term schemes.
In fact, for the greater part of the Trialist Empire’s peacetime—or at least, that of cold wars disguised as peace—House Erstreich had been the ones to steer the country toward economic prosperity. Their indifference to life made them less suitable for battle, but none could match their patience on a long-term investment. The macroeconomics of a state could only truly show change in long increments of five years or so, after all.
“True,” David chimed in. “It’ll be peaceful for a while. The two of us cleaned up all the big wars.”
“The eastern conquest was an ordeal,” August added. “Both you and I lived on the front lines for two whole years.”
“Excuse me?!” Martin exclaimed. “I think you’re forgetting about someone who toiled to secure supply lines and restructure the army!”
Having already been denied once, the Emperor completely ignored Martin; the werewolf was content to do the same so long as the hot potato was not in his hands. Together, the pair made for a mighty coalition: the Baden and Graufrock clans had close ties to four of the electorate houses—over half. Though August’s family would not be enthused about letting their representative abdicate, they were more likely to bide their time until their next emperor than to put up any real resistance.
This was indicative of the major peculiarity of imperial politics, the greatest flaw in the system: for all its apparent fluidity, the top families of high society were distinct in name only.
Relations between the imperial houses needed no introduction. The Founding Emperor had taken an Erstreich princess as his legal wife, and his son had wed a Graufrock. The first Duke Erstreich—also known as the second emperor—had doted on Richard’s younger sister as his favorite mistress, and his son had also wed a Graufrock. House Graufrock, in turn, drew blood from both other duchies. For the lords of these houses, they were sure to have a relative in power no matter who wore the crown.
Little changed for the electorate houses. While most monarchies disallowed marquises like them from marrying into royalty, the Empire’s restrictions were far more lax. Brides and grooms could be welcomed into the innermost court of the palace, and imperial princes and princesses commonly relinquished status to wed into these lesser houses. Again, they were all effectively related.
If an elector ever dreamed of seeing their kin crowned, they were sure to take the diplomatic path of marriage. Such games of statecraft could only be played against a backdrop of relative peace and prosperity, thus discouraging rash actions. This collusion allowed the Empire to dodge the violent struggles of succession and subsequent fragmentation that plagued other nations; as wonderful as this was, it also meant everyone involved had to close their eyes and pretend not to see the blatant put-up job on display.
That said, being emperor came with far more weight than any soul could imagine. If a sorry wretch intoxicated with lust for power found himself in a position to claim the title, he would be crushed underneath the endless work, overwhelming responsibility, and the nigh unrealizable expectations set by his retainers and in-laws—a fact that helped to keep the machine running after hundreds of years.
“Why not cede to the crown prince?” Martin asked. “I would be happy to back his ascension.”
Although the Trialist Empire was not a hereditary monarchy, the crown prince could assume power in times of emergency. In some edge cases, previous emperors had handed over the reins to particularly trustworthy princes, so the precedent was there; unfortunately, Martin’s desperate suggestion only drew a deep, deep sigh from August.
“I don’t know what got into that thankless urchin, but he threatened to remarry his wife into her family abroad if I tried... Do you truly think I would fail to consider easier options before summoning the two of you?”
“Whoa there,” David said. “You know how much of a hassle it’ll be if another dukedom pops up? If he throws our satellites into chaos over this bullshit, I swear...”
“Is that even possible?” Martin questioned. “Surely not, yes? The gods and their churches will never allow him to remarry his own wife to enter her family.”
“That buffoon has connections on that end,” August muttered, his voice downcast. “The pious brat.”
As the heaviness of the Emperor’s heart dragged down the atmosphere, silence set in upon the room. The vampire’s eyes darted back and forth as he contemplated amidst the quiet tension.
Hook, line, and sinker, the other two thought at once. But just as they began to start considering how to deliver the news to the electors, the ingenious magus struck epiphany. The vampire had earned his professorship without abusing his political position, and his intelligence was not just for show.
“I know! I shall yield my estate to my daughter!”
Martin decided to offer his beloved daughter of forty years as a human sacri— Ahem, he decided to unveil his newfound ambition to place his child in the venerated seat of the Emperor, all with a refreshed smile on his face.

[Tips] The three imperial houses are the most powerful families in the Rhinian Empire. The leaders of the two clans not currently sitting are considered dukes, and serve the Emperor as trusted counsel—on the surface. In actuality, they are a web of relatives who treat one another as such.

Tprg4.5

[Tips] The College’s testing areas have been built even deeper into the bedrock than its underground workshops. The shallowest rooms are small and unimpressive, but the largest spaces extend to the ends of the horizon.
They are segregated into their own worlds by conceptual barriers of peerless make; many generations ago, the sitting emperor had invested over half of the imperial treasury and just as much of his own dignity to bring these safeguards into existence. This implied, of course, that until then, College magia had whimsically conducted their practical research wherever they pleased.
The most confidential, top secret testing center lies at an abyssal depth equal to the most highly restricted parts of the College library. Despite its top-tier security, the records show that unfathomably powerful attack magicks broke all restraints from the inside out on three separate occasions; each left its mark on history as a disaster of cataclysmic proportions.

The sight before my eyes was so irrepressibly familiar to me that an institution absent in this universe floated to the forefront of my mind—a phenomenon that I found most peculiar.
The records of memory rotted far more quickly than those inscribed in parchment or stone. Even the most vivid episodes were sure to fade from someone’s mind after a century, and most mental matters eroded in far less time; how could I ever hope to cling to perfect recollections of a world no longer my own? Introduced to time’s whetstone, my memory was slowly becoming a speckled mess of accounts drained of their color. My closest friends and even my family were fizzling away, their names and faces reduced to shapeless ideas in my mind. Coworkers that I hadn’t been particularly close to were even worse, despite having seen them every day of my life.
The sights and layout of the city I lived in—and of my own room—could only be dragged up in vague terms. On my worst days, it took me serious effort just to remember my own name. That was how immersed I’d become in a world that only knew me as Erich of Konigstuhl canton. Yet there remained an inexplicable through line: the fantastic delusions I’d seen unfold at the game table clung to the core of my being. For the most unique, memorable tales, I could name every single PC by heart—though I could only remember the people who’d played them by nebulous physical attributes and playstyle at best—and retell the whole story to this day.
For example, one of my favorites was the time our PCs had proposed to the dragon we’d been tasked to slay, forcing our befuddled GM to retrofit the story into a Princess Kaguya-esque tale. Where we’d planned for a lengthy session complete with a time trial gimmick to use the lingering vestiges of the dragon’s seal against her, a critical round of negotiation (better known as flirting) got us past the ancient beast’s cryptic riddle and caused the whole aim of the story to shift: our new goal became to prop up the unpopular PC as a man’s man. Who could have seen that coming?
After a great deal of fuss, we finally convinced our heroic buffoon to smooth-talk the dragon, and his dice successfully pierced the final boss’s heart. Preoccupied with the sweet and the sour of newly married life, the dragon gave up on her plans to ruin all of humanity; we’d saved the day.
At some point, the GM had gotten so into the whole thing that he converted her into a klutzy draconic babe who wielded unfathomable power but was super weak to chutzpah; watching our friend lose himself hard enough to boldly lay his fetishes bare left us all crumpled on the floor, clutching at our aching sides for minutes on end.
To make a short story of a long one, memories tied to powerful, deep-seated emotion had yet to fade in thirteen years of physical life and eight years of mental life. But there was another type of memory that lingered just as long: impersonal, technical concepts, like the one I felt upon seeing this testing facility. Fitting, considering how my reason for being at what I could only describe as a firing range had been purely technical to begin with.
The space was partitioned off into innumerable narrow segments. The skinny rectangular boxes were designed to test spells and arcane tools that fired in straight lines and at a distance, with a target at the far end and the controls for said target near the entrance. Each hallway was isolated by walls on every side, and the doors leading in prevented outsiders from peeking. The design served the dual purpose of containing dangerous spells and keeping secrets from slipping out.
All one could glean from the outside was whether or not the room was in use based on the plaque on the door. I expected no less from this den of radical invention: when even lowly students could be rewarded with immediate promotion for progressive breakthroughs, deterring plagiarism was a top priority.
Though I couldn’t see or hear the experiments being held, the overwhelming number of filled booths spoke to an ardor that permeated the air. At this very moment, countless students were putting their ingenuity and doctrine to the test.
Specifically, the fervor here was fueled by the approaching technical showcase. Basically, College affiliates unveiled their latest and greatest to put on a show every new year; anything that caught a professor’s eye could expect to see backing, so ambitious students were desperate to stand out from the crowd. Or at least, that was what Mika had told me.
You may then ask if he, too, was funneling his blood, sweat, and tears into creating something worthy of the competition, but the answer was no, not really. He was still busy dying on the mountain of projects and essays he’d missed during our trip, to the point where I’d barely seen him at all these past few days. In any case, he already had a direct mentor, so he didn’t need to puff himself up for random professors and researchers. He didn’t have a particular pet project to fund either, so there was no reason to push himself.
Enrolling as a College student was precarious business. One didn’t need a master to attend, per se, but it was plain to see that learning directly from a celebrated scholar was a much shorter path to achieving one’s goals. I’d heard that some managed to rise to the rank of researcher without a supervising mentor, but these stubborn geniuses were rare exceptions to the rule.
Thus, many were the students in search of a capable advisor. Even those who already had their own masters saw this as an opportunity to attract more renowned professors, and the most driven honed their research with frantic vigor. Like salmon climbing rapid falls, the school flocked to fertile grounds.
To that end, I was incredibly blessed to have two academically outstanding—I refused to give thought to their nonacademic qualities—magia taking time out of their days to teach me. Though of course, anyone feeling envious was free to take my place.
I risked being seen as a spy scoping out the competition if I stood here any longer, so I decided to hurry along to my booth. All these hard workers were most certainly on edge at the thought of someone stealing their glory, making this hall more dangerous than a back alley in a run-down city.
...Hm? That gentleman doesn’t look like he belongs.
I spotted a dashing fellow leaning against the wall before I ducked into the reserved room. His looks were enough to make the finest flower blush, more handsome than the moon itself. Somewhere on the younger end of his midtwenties, the man seemed high-strung but noble in quality; his platinum hair was parted a little over two-thirds of the way to his right, and the pragmatic wit he exuded bordered on coldheartedness. Combined with his pallor, the man could have defined a generation of films as a movie star specializing in villainous roles. While his bluish-violet robe immediately announced his authority, his tall, well-built silhouette would have done well in the carbon-black spy suits of secret agent flicks.
Yet in spite of all his outward beauty, there was one element that drew attention like no other: the silver gleam that sat in the back of his deep-seated eyes.
Walking around the melting pot that was Berylin, one could expect to see a whole rainbow of irises, but this was the first time I’d ever seen silver. The finest smith in all the land could spend a lifetime polishing an ingot, and the man’s gems would still outshine its luster; if he told me they were truly made of pure metal, I would believe him without hesitation. They were so stunning that to gaze into them directly would surely stop one’s heart for seconds at a time.
Man... I sure have run into a lot of inhumanly gorgeous people since coming to the College.
I would have liked to continue appreciating his good looks, but I wasn’t about to let myself get in trouble for ogling someone so obviously aristocratic, so I slipped into my lane. He was probably here to scout for new talent: a student’s accomplishments reflected well on their master, so it was no wonder a gentleman interested in taking on apprentices would be here to observe.
...Wait a second. He couldn’t see anything from the hallway, so that didn’t make any sense. I wonder what he’s here for, then?
As fun as it was to speculate, my time here was limited. The baseless supposition could wait for later.
The interior was totally isolated by walls, matching up with what I’d seen from the outside. I knew from the plaques that both neighboring rooms were in use right now, but I couldn’t feel a thing. If I focused all my efforts on sensing the flow of mana, I could only barely make out that something was happening on the other side of the wall—that was how private these booths were.
Oh, of course. No matter how many physical and magical barriers were set up, the most skilled magia would pick up on the faint traces of mana left behind. The gentleman in the hall could easily wait around for a whiff of something interesting and catch a glimpse of the caster whenever they left their room.
Still, at my level, it was practically impossible to sniff out what was happening behind closed doors...which meant I was free to let loose!
I pulled out the goods and got to setting everything up right away. I had a few pipes that resembled pointed throwing clubs or maybe oversized darts that I’d gotten from one of Lady Agrippina’s acquaintances at the capital’s artisan union.
These were obviously thrown weapons, but as one might suspect, my scheming didn’t end there. I wasn’t going to pay this overdone testing range a visit just because I discovered throwables. These iron tubes were actually catalysts, and their hollow insides could be stuffed with arcane reagents.
Just to be safe, I took everything apart and checked for issues before conducting my trial. I unscrewed the cap and pulled out a single cartridge of the substances I’d expected to see.
“Nice,” I mumbled to no one in particular, resealing the lid.
The casing was the same as what I used to produce flash-bangs, but the dolomite inside had been swapped out for a pinch of flame retardant I’d tweaked with magic. And while something that resisted fire might sound difficult to come by, I’d been able to purchase it for no more than a piece of candy at a nearby hardware store.
The initial steps in this multi-spell process had already been completed. Using the alchemy set Lady Agrippina had retrieved from the lakeside manor, I’d extracted and purified a certain compound from the flame retardant with mutative sorcery and increased its volume with a touch of manifestation.
On the inside of the tube, I’d lined the walls with rituals written in my own blood. My ability to wiggle into spaces no real appendage could enter and deftly scribble with all the precision of a rice artist showed the true might of my dexterous Hands.
I had an iron pipe and a chemical hidden inside; all I had to do now was change the makeup of both at the same time. Like I’d mentioned, this was the exact same process as my magical flash-bang. But make no mistake: I had good reason for dishing out the cash for a mold to cast my own pipes from.
Moving my Hands was nearly second nature by this point, and I extended my invisible arm as fast as I could after picking up the throwing stick. I’d invested a lot of points in a new Feather Fingers add-on which let my hands stretch out at speeds never before seen.
The metal rod zoomed forth faster than a flying arrow and jammed into the target hanging at the end of the hall; in an instant, the mana contained within triggered all of the prearranged spells. What little compound was in the cartridge magically migrated into the iron, forming a chemical reaction that would ordinarily necessitate a large-scale industrial plant. Meanwhile, the rod itself had plucked oxygen from the air, instantaneously rusting from its self-inflicted oxidization.
My mensch brain couldn’t register the individual steps in real time, but each dutifully ran its course. As the two components became one, the final formula awakened from its slumber: a tiny, tiny spark. The minuscule ember fizzled away before it could escape the confines of its metallic prison, but its heat quickly spread through the interior, and—
“Whoa?!”
It exploded so violently that I reflexively covered my face. The flash had been blinding; I may have been a split second late with my barrier, but the scorching waves of heat were unbearable even with it up. The metal target hanging from the ceiling had melted away within fractions of the first second.
“Holy...”
Faced with awesome destruction that surpassed my every calculation, a whimper escaped my lips. I could hear my neighbors muttering in the wake of my burst of light and heat, but that wasn’t my fault, was it? This was what this place was for, right?
Fine, I confess: I’d made thermite.
The alum used to fireproof stuff had aluminum in it—though not even close to as much as one could mine from bauxite—which I’d separated out. I combined my pure extract with extra waste metal, alchemically converting the whole thing to aluminum and increasing my supply. Mixed with iron oxide and excited with a spark, the reduction produced four thousand degrees of heat in an instant.
Four thousand degrees. The melting point of pretty much every substance in this world was well below that. Very few things could withstand that kind of heat, and on Earth, the reaction had been used for welding metals together—when it didn’t see use as an incendiary bomb.
Magic could be used to totally liquefy metals, so melting them wasn’t anything new, but such techniques could only be performed by an experienced magus confident in both their capacity and output. If I wanted to do something like that, it would take me a depressing amount of training. However, I’d already developed a batch of cantrips that could be used to disable my foes. I’d figured that if I put my brain to task and made good use of alchemical ingredients, I could mimic the feats of legendary magia without all the strain; seeing my new combo in action, I’d been right.
A substance theoretically hot enough to melt most metals was likely to chew through mystic barriers too, to say nothing of common heat-resistance magic. Furthermore, unlike normal fires, this exothermic reduction didn’t stop for lack of oxygen and could continue when submerged in water. The only counterplay that remained was to use magic to locally cancel the phenomenon of burning itself. Even more obnoxiously, the oxidized aluminum would retain its heat for a while after the reaction completed, continuously scalding any enemy unlucky enough to have the molten metal stick. I’d tweaked the bomb’s directionality to fire forward from within the dart, so if it pierced someone’s skin, this unethical addition would burn them from the inside out.
The world was full of stalwart beings, but I had yet to hear of an organism whose innards were as impervious as outer armor. Although many races boasted lightning-fast regenerative powers, I doubted they could heal themselves while boiling metal braised their organs.
It was simple, cheap, powerful, and hard to counter. When first coming up with the idea, I’d done a little dance of excitement at the thought of having a way to deal with unkillable monsters, but...
“Holy shit, this is horrifying.”
A target probably made from some fancy alloy designed to endure the abuse of constant attack magic had melted in an instant. The molten remains joined the thermite as it dripped to the ground, not forming a puddle, but a hole as it chewed through the floor.
Forget people, this was absolutely not okay to use on any living being—they’d dissolve without a trace. That, and the side effects of sweltering heat and the ultraviolet flash that hit me all the way back here needed to go. Letting this blow in close quarters would cook me and my allies just as much as any enemy.
I mean, polemurgy as a whole had a lot of violent stuff—burning, freezing, shocking, and the like—but I felt like this was a bit...much. Borrowing the advancements of twentieth-century scientists looking for better ways of generating heat on Earth and applying literal magic to bend the rules of physics had left me with unhinged destructive power.
I wonder what’ll happen if I scale everything up...
As I steeped in the awe of my results’ depravity, I finally realized something: the floor was bubbling.
Oh shit! I’d completely forgotten about the Heat Retention spell—originally meant to keep food warm—I’d added in to extend the effects! I didn’t know if there was a floor below me, but I was not about to get in trouble for making a hole in someone’s ceiling. I sat there wondering what to do when neither water nor smothering would do me any good. At my wits’ end, I ended up banishing it to the realm of elsewhere with space-bending magic; I averted the crisis, but earned myself a headache for the rest of the day doing so.

[Tips] While often referred to as a collective, the Imperial College’s testing facilities are categorized into different grades based on their intended use and intended users. The entire bloc is sectioned off with the most powerful barriers available, but to use such technology to separate smaller sectors would necessitate an infinite budget.
There are departments for students, who are unlikely to cause any real damage; researchers and professors, who engage in risky undertakings; and total containment cells to prevent whatever happens inside from getting out at all costs, to name a few. Each is equipped with appropriate security measures, and as long as the users perform tasks within the anticipated bounds, the rooms are the pinnacle of experimental safety.

What I would give to hold that shimmering silver.
Such were the thoughts of those who gazed upon the monochrome gentleman, who himself watched a blond-haired, blue-faced boy flee a testing room. The man approached the door, secured with a cryptographic spell that would only respond to the formula scrawled on its corresponding reservation sheet, and effortlessly turned the knob—the lock had forgotten its purpose the instant he made contact.
“My,” he marveled.
What remained was the aftermath of an ignition much too strong to be the work of a novice mage: waves of hot air rushed to escape through the opened doorway, suggesting that the initial blast had been powerful enough to generate an atmospheric current.
The man neatly tucked his hair back after the gust settled and stepped inside to the overpowering stink of burning metal. He pinched his high-set nose and advanced to the source of the heat without hesitation.
“A cantrip.”
Oppressive heat had melted the masoned flooring: the stone showed signs of having boiled. Though the origin of the scorching blast hot enough to make midsummer winds resemble wintry gales had vanished, the deep hole remained feverish. To leave all this heat behind after the source had disappeared pointed to hedge magic; true magic unimaginatively used to heighten destructive power would not amount to this.
“Fueled by more than mere mana, I take it.”
The Imperial College had already worked out that while the absence of heat could be absolute, the reverse was untrue. They had done many experiments to work out statistical correlations between mana expenditure and heat production for both true and hedge magic: the results showed that the cost of melting metal was immense.
Yet the sturdy metal target imbued with shock-repellant magic had liquefied beyond recognition. So thorough was its destruction that he could only presume this to be the work of an entirely new cantrip. Even so, it had verifiably not been a spell of epic proportions: the trace mana was too meager. Only a handful of minor magic had been employed here. While the lack of evidence would be understandable if someone had mystically concealed their work, he found it difficult to believe the panicking boy from earlier would have done so. The rest of the scene could hardly be called a cover-up.
“And not a drop of oil to be seen.”
The gentleman’s nose twitched as if to sniff out the origin of this destructive mystery. His brow jumped at the pungent odor, but it helped confirm the absence of traditional catalysts. Fats and oils were widely employed for heat-based spells by mages to the point of tedium, and magia made efforts to avoid them and their traceable nature. No matter how severe a burn oil could produce, it was too recognizable: chief among its obnoxious quirks was how the air around the caster invariably grew thick with loathsome grease.
One could mask its use through careful manipulation and eliminate all but the desired effect, but the idiosyncrasies of oily catalysts could not evade detection. In the absence of any scattered flecks of oil or any hint of its scent, the silver gentleman eliminated the possibility of its use.
The searing heat would drive any other away, but he walked up to the smoking edge of the hole and peered in. All the moisture evaporated from his eyes, but he continued to stare in search of clues.
“These marks point to slow dissolution as opposed to instantaneous explosion. The heat remained constant, but gradually sank downward.”
Despite having nothing more than the shape of a cavity to work off of, the man’s intellect and deep knowledge of sorcery let him explore countless possibilities. He surmised that some viscous liquid akin to molten iron had been used to trap an exorbitant amount of heat. If so, the lack of oil and the frightening speeds at which it had destroyed the flooring could easily be explained.
The only remaining point of mystery was that producing enough heat to melt metal and manipulating it once liquefied was a task too arduous for the young students that rented these smaller testing lanes. With his curiosity at its peak, the man took a moment to ponder, and then touched the scalding hot hole without a shred of hesitation.
“Hm.”
His skin burnt off in an instant; the heat vaporized his blood and cooked his flesh. The man showed no more discomfort than when he’d raised his brow at the scent of burning iron. He was purely analytical, gazing at his own mangled hand like it was an exotic insect preserved under pins and glass.

Where anyone else would have lamented the irreparable damage done to their one and only mortal shell, the gentleman let out an awestruck sigh. The searing pain of his melting flesh and the inconsolable sadness of losing part of himself failed to bother him; rather, he hadn’t felt either in the first place.
“This heat rivals that of Great Work polemurgy.”
If he were to feel anything, it would be the elation of discovering magic yet unknown to him, or the nostalgia of experiencing a similar effect to a spell he’d endured before. Although whatever he’d found had stopped quickly after chewing through his fingers, the heat it produced was similar to the hellfire the Empire employed when wiping entire battlefields clean. That purging flame required several polemurges working in tandem, and could only be deployed with the approval of the Emperor himself.
“Interesting. Its power surpasses that which the destruction suggests, and the melted stone flattens itself at the bottom of each crater in an act of concealment. The combination of atypical features points to an entirely new spell... Most interesting.”
Turning on his heel, the man reached into his breast pocket. His hand reemerged, pinching a fresh glove for his pristine, uninjured digits.
“Shall I investigate? Ah, but how boorish that would be... Anyone coming here is nigh guaranteed to be polishing their work for the showcase.”
The odds were good that someone going out of their way to borrow a practice room in this season was putting the finishing touches on their exhibition for the New Year’s gala. Every year, some budding prodigy or another brought something that truly wowed the gentleman, and he looked forward to untying his purse in support of these inventive minds more than anybody else.
This year’s event was sure to be spectacular. Better not to go poking about for the culprit’s name and face, the silver magus reasoned, if he wanted to avoid spoiling his excitement. The privacy afforded to those using these rooms meant nothing in the face of his authority, but such privileges were to go unused today.
Surprises were always best untainted. No matter how long life dragged on, a reveal could only ever come once.
“Every visit to Berylin is so rife with bother, but I suppose good things do happen. Ah, the vigor of youth is such a wonderful thing to behold.”
With a slight bounce in his step, the gentleman decided to clean up the work he had been so unenthused to do only a moment ago: on he went to the imperial palace.

[Tips] Great Work sorcery—also known as ceremonial magic or grand magecraft—requires multiple mages, a massive arcane circle, countless catalysts, or an incredibly drawn-out incantation. The process arose from the mind-boggling difficulty of casting an unfathomably powerful spell at a ludicrous distance.
However, the necessity of exhaustive preparations, fine mystic control, and perfectly synchronized teamwork makes the craft accessible only to the most skilled magia, and even then only to those that have dedicated years of single-minded practice to the art.

I learned the painful lesson that a normal scolding is far less painful than sardonic mockery.
Kneeling on the floor as the scum of the earth merrily strolled around me for thirty odd minutes, singing, “Are you even aware of where it is you stand?” had me on the brink of sobbing. But if she was willing to pay the repair fees and cover my ass on the bureaucratic end in exchange, I would take that deal every time: pride was cheap—especially mine.
I was this close to snapping back that it was the facility’s fault for breaking under the stress of a half-baked mage’s inexperienced attempt at ingenuity, but I couldn’t bring myself to do so when I thought back to how smug I’d been when I’d left. Now that I knew an offhand comment could lead to me holding back tears, I swore to watch my mouth in the future.
But considering how Elisa came to my rescue and said, “I’ll get really mad if you keep bullying my dear brother!” I think the overall experience was a net positive. Seeing her step between us and glare back at her own master was like having an angel protect me in the flesh. The way her hair began to float from her overflowing mana was a teensy bit terrifying, but she was an angel all the same.
Faced with her darling disciple’s emotional and magical growth, I’m sure the tenderhearted master had no choice but to cede her incessant barrage of ridicule. But at the end of all of her derision, her final comment was, “Dear me, what a nifty little thing you’ve created.” I couldn’t bring myself to completely hate the madam when she offered morsels of fist-pump-worthy praise like this.
Freed, I began to clean up Elisa’s room. I worked every Hand in parallel to put away scattered notes and half-read books—I always reminded her to keep everything in order, but sadly it seemed she was taking after her mentor—and was in the middle of Cleaning every nook and cranny when Elisa called out to me. I looked back at the canopy bed to see her wearing a new set of pajamas I hadn’t ever seen before.
Again, you pervert?
Several layers of thin silk had been laminated into a piece of nightwear that could buy Heinz and Miss Mina’s cottage—obviously the work of the wraith toeing the tightrope of criminality. I could just barely hold back my disgust, since it wasn’t at all transparent, but I seriously wondered what kind of horrific death one would need to experience in order to revive with inclinations this dire. Cute clothes were one thing, but to squeal over a girl’s pajamas was positively ill. And what was with her fixation on gloves and socks, anyway?!
“Dear Brother?”
“Hm? What is it, Elisa?”
Yet our little girl was so incredibly charming that she could pull off the most deranged gifts from an utter creep. She had a giant tome full of homework cradled in both arms and rocked her legs back and forth with a puzzled expression.
“Dear Brother, why did you make such scary magic?”
Her tilted head and pure gaze were adorable enough to shatter my heart. I knew our family had an angel on our hands. Unfortunately, the cherub’s question also made my chest tighten up in a completely different way.
“I’m curious,” she said. “Why, oh why, do you choose to do scary things, Dear Brother?”
Innocent naivete slid into my ear in the shape of refined palatial speech, permeating my psyche. I’d begun developing new weapons solely for the abstract goal of adventure, and the tiny droplet of doubt she introduced now threatened to melt away the supposed righteousness of my goal.
Elisa’s question was genuine, and her heartfelt concern made it all the more difficult for me to answer. In a different light, I had set out on this path for no other reason than simple admiration that had taken hold of me a lifetime ago. I didn’t have a serious duty to fulfill, nor had the gods entrusted me with a prophecy to bring about.
The future Buddha had blessed me with the power to indulge in all that I willed, and that very will had been the starting point of my journey.
This path was one of merciless bloodshed, devoid of neat delineations between good and evil. I was no fairy-tale hero, predestined to bring justice to the world: my enemies were not restricted to irredeemable villains whom I could slay with a Happily Ever After.
Such lessons had long been carved into my soul. Every day, the icy shimmer on my left hand reminded me of she whom I had failed to save. To choose violence was to choose a path with fewer smiles and more pain. It was to actively distance myself from the merry ends of heroic fables.
Countless quests took murder to be a given, and many were so corrupt that accepting the job was a sin in and of itself. The tried-and-true act of hunting down bandits kept someone, somewhere, sometime in the future safe, but still required blood to be spilled in the present. Boiled down, defending a village besieged by raiders and sifting for treasure in a labyrinth were the same: they ultimately came down to transactions of life and death.
I scoured every reach of my mind to find a logical explanation to why I’d willingly subject myself to a career wherein the reaper was my closest companion...but my sluggish brain could not squeeze out a valid response.
“I know you’re very strong, Dear Brother. I know you protected me from bad people...” Elisa stared at me. “But I can’t help but think you’re actively seeking out danger.”
Her words were a mallet slamming into my skull; I nearly lost my balance from sheer dizziness.
“At the mansion in the woods, I think Master would have done something if you hadn’t stepped forward. Master is very strong and very wealthy. I’m sure she could have done something.” I could say nothing as she continued, “And this past winter, I don’t think you had to force yourself on such a terrible journey. If you hadn’t, wouldn’t Master have just purchased the book and tidied everything up?”
Elisa’s logic was airtight. I may have had good reason for internally referring to Lady Agrippina as a scoundrel—she was willing to toy with the lives of others for her own amusement, going so far as to laugh off a lifelong grudge so long as it proved entertaining—but even so, the madam was not the type to force me into something so long as I refused with all my might.
She loaned me to Lady Leizniz, but had gone no further on account of my personal refusal. Had she truly wanted to milk me for everything I was worth, she could have let go of the reins and handed me off to the wraith as an honorary student. I would have been a massive bargaining chip, and with Elisa trapped by her side, she could’ve tapped into me as a never-ending faucet of intel on the dean. As far as bargains went, this would’ve been grazing the upper bound for what one could buy with the life of one forgettable farm boy.
Lady Agrippina had elected not to take this deal. She put in a cruel word at every turn, mocked me for my shortcomings to my face, and threw unreasonable tasks my way, but not once had she forced something onto me that she knew I wouldn’t accept, despite it being clear that her bank and clout made imposing her will a trivial task.
In which case, there was clearly only one reason left for me to dive headfirst into the battlefield: my own will. I couldn’t deny that Lady Agrippina could and would have solved every issue in my stead. Looking back, there had to have been a better way to pacify Helga; at the very least, the madam would not have let her run off like I had. The ichor maze incident wouldn’t have even come up had I not tried to get clever, but if I’d refused Sir Feige’s proposal on grounds of undue danger, he most definitely would have acquiesced—as disappointed as I’m sure he would have been.
My happiness was the product of hindsight. I happened to have been fortunate enough to trade Helga’s life to preserve my own; Mika and I had just been lucky to get home without dying. This streak of serendipity was the product of my own skill, but the perils I’d so narrowly avoided were not, strictly speaking, necessary.
The great rewards they heralded were not in vain, of course: though it pained me too much to think of Helga’s memory as “loot,” the treasures that accompanied my dungeon-delving adventure reduced the total time I would spend in servitude. To me, that was a wonderful bounty.
However, the same could not be said for Elisa. If I had made a single error—no, even if I hadn’t—in any of these encounters, the dice could have told the tale of a boy who fell in battle. My sister was asking me if all the prizes I’d won were worth this risk.
The only fight thus far that had been truly unavoidable had been the one against Elisa’s kidnappers—and even then, there had been the possibility of Lady Agrippina’s stopping by on a whim if she’d sensed something peculiar afoot. On the most fundamental level, everything else had been my own doing.
If I’d asked the madam for help like a normal child during her afternoon meal, I wouldn’t have been sent off to the lakeside manor. If I hadn’t tried to squeeze out a bonus reward from living up to Sir Feige’s expectations, I wouldn’t have been comatose in bed until wintertime.
“Why didn’t you choose to stay and learn with me in the capital?” Elisa asked. “I know it’s expensive, but I’ll do my best too! I’ll hurry up and become a student, and then a researcher—I’ll make enough to pay for your classes too. Besides, you can still make money here in Berylin...just like you’ve been doing.”
I had nothing to say in response. She was completely right: I’d spent my spare time cleaning requests off the College’s bulletin board, and the pay was significantly better than anything I could make as a lowly worker in the city. Lady Agrippina was also far from difficult to part from her coins, and my current wage for household chores had boggled my mind when I’d first seen it.
Not to mention the most important part: the madam had not included any mention of interest or deadlines for Elisa’s student loans. This was an unprecedented act of altruism on her part. No matter how little interest she showed in monetary affairs, anyone else would have included some form of interest, if only to keep up appearances. In a setting without commercial regulation and fixed rates, she could have used her patrician powers to force us into a contract of twenty or thirty percent accruing daily.
Yet she’d elected to forgo any such usury. She saw us solely as a means to prop up her preferred mode of living, and had loaned us capital in service of that goal.
In fact, I could totally see her handing Elisa a casual “graduation gift” on the day she became a researcher that matched whatever debt remained. It seemed much more like her to avoid the bothersome calculations of what had been paid and what was yet owed as soon as she was past the need to adhere to official College rules.
Still, we had no need to cling to Lady Agrippina’s benevolence: a fixed sum that never grew could always be repaid through honest work. Once Elisa won her rights back as a magus and began receiving stipends from the government, the debt would settle itself without her actively trying—her future salary was going to make us look like fools for crying over a measly ten drachmae here or a year’s worth of tuition there.
“So, Dear Brother...won’t you stop? Please?”
At this point, my justifications felt paper-thin. She had done more than blow them away; she’d made them vanish without a trace. For better or for worse, my call to adventure had been a tenuous affair. I was no better than the Lv1 Fighter setting out from his hometown in the boonies after listening to one too many heroic sagas...but the true nature of battle was not so flimsy.
Now I faced questions that shook my very core: Why did my magic have to be scary? Why did I have to fight?
The fervor that had gripped me when the ichor maze had dissipated burned as brightly as ever, and the world of tabletop games shined with the same vivid colors it always had. My earring jingled in the windless room; I didn’t need its reminder to relive the oath I’d made on that twilit hill. All these questions represented was a splash of darkness accentuating the picturesque depiction of adventure in my mind.
“I’ll do my very best,” Elisa pleaded, “so won’t you stay here with me forever?”
Yet the pigment of those shadowy streaks was rich enough to sow the seeds of doubt. Do you have enough reason to abandon a peaceful life? it asked. Can you cut off your worrying sister to dive into the lion’s jaws? Is that what you call morality?
“...But you know, Elisa,” I said, “the world is full of bad people. That’s why we need a little bit of scary magic: just so that they can’t hurt us. I think I’d die of sadness if anything happened to you.”
I could do no better than evade these interrogations. I didn’t want to break my own pledge and abandon my dreams, but I couldn’t deny my sister’s compelling argument, especially knowing she was saying this for my own sake. When two antithetical ideas are both right, finding the correct answer becomes a Herculean task.
Oh, I realized, maybe there is no correct answer.
I had literally fought to untangle exactly this sort of knotty existential question to the grave as the cancer ate away at me, so I think I was fit to say this with confidence: no amount of contemplation would ever produce a satisfactory answer. The only thing that awaited me was the spiritual pain of mental fatigue. At the end of much deliberation, I’d chosen to see my ceaseless pain through with a peaceful finale. Yet as the curtains closed, I shuddered in bed and wondered to myself: I know I can’t win—the numbers show it. But if I had fought on...how much longer would I have lived?That was why I had turned to meditation. It had been my only escape from the pain that overrode my mind.
“Hrm... To stop bad people...”
Elisa mumbled to herself with the inquisitive glimmer of a fledgling magus. I reflexively shook my head. I couldn’t understand why she was pondering this so deeply, like a cartoon hero trying to overcome the antagonist’s psychological tricks—this topic wasn’t going to make anyone any happier.
“So,” she asked, “is it all for me?”
“...That’s right,” I said. “For you. If I die, I won’t be able to protect you until you’re all grown up. The world has more bad people than you think, Elisa. That’s why I want to be stronger than all of them.”
Not to make excuses, but bloody conflict was shockingly easy to stumble upon in this world. An honest merchant could meet their end when a marauder plundered their house, and kidnapping was obviously a threat, considering how Elisa had already been targeted twice.
The world needed combatants, no matter how shallow their cause.
Shaking off the uncertainty in my heart, I finished cleaning the room and laid my sister in bed, her brow still as furrowed as ever.

Tprg4.4

Bonds with Connections
Some games include systems of rapport to clearly define player interactions with friendly NPCs. Ranges are defined for professional partnerships at arm’s length, friendships built on mutual ties, and even undying romantic love. But beware: the actions taken over the course of a session are sure to affect one’s social ties.
“Mm... So cold...”
While I couldn’t handle the bitterest of frosts, I appreciated the brisk air of winter. The crisp morning stung my nostrils as I inhaled, but I could feel the deep breath rinse my lungs clean as I blew out the lingering cold. It was a sure way to rouse me, even as my warm sheets tried to pull me back in.
Even with the Ashen Fraulein’s thoughtful care, the low streets of the imperial capital abounded with the chill of a dark morning. Winter saw little sunlight, and I needed Cat Eyes just to make things out, even though I hadn’t awoken any earlier than usual.
“It sure is colder here than back home...”
The silkie had been kind enough to prepare me a warm pail of water. Raw well water at this time of year was so cold that I often felt like just touching it would peel my skin off. The capital’s wells weren’t connected to natural groundwater: they pumped from a system of aqueducts spanning both below and above ground, making the temperature fluctuate with the seasons.
“But they say it snows here every year,” I mumbled to myself. “I guess it’s bound to be different.”
Berylin was situated in Rhine’s northern reach, and I’d never experienced weather this frigid back home in Konigstuhl. I’d spent many a year without snow there; maybe comparing its climate to that of a land with frequent sleet was a fallacious idea to begin with.
Still, there was always a bigger fish, and the capital was far from the coldest place in the Empire. The further north one went, the more ruthlessly the elements pierced one’s protective layers; slightly to our south, the great spirit of hoarfrost presided over the southeastern mountain range. I didn’t freeze to death the instant the fire went out, so I had it good by comparison.
Still convincing myself of my relative fortune as I wiped down my face, when I opened my eyes, a small vial that hadn’t been there before entered my view. Smelling faintly of milk and olives, the salve inside was a moisturizer to fend off the dry air. These sorts of things were much too costly for commoners to regularly purchase. I had no idea where she’d gotten her hands on it.
“A word of thanks for the Fraulein’s goodwill.”
Regardless, questioning its origins would do me no favors, so I offered my gratitude and decided to help myself. I sat down in front of the foggy mirror a tenant from yesteryear had left behind, and peeled off the bandages covering the remaining wounds from my...
“Huh?”
I peered into the mirror to find that my face was absolutely flawless. Er, not to say that I’d taken a skill or trait to attain unparalleled beauty; I mean to say that the scabs dotting my profile had given way to silky-smooth skin. Not only that, but the scars I’d been secretly looking forward to were nowhere to be found!
I ran my fingers across my mug in disbelief, but the only tactile feedback I found was that of a baby’s bottom. I could have sworn I’d heard the iatrurge sigh about how my injuries were going to leave a mark.
What? How? Where’d they go?! And here I’d been so excited to finally start looking like a man: after all, facial scars told the badass story of a personal history rife with conflict. Having vanquished a foe so mighty, I’d been ready to bear a physical memento of our fierce battle. In the far future, young adventurers would look up to me and ask, “Where’d you get that scar?” and I’d tell the tale with a knowing smirk plastered on my face...
Or at least, I would have, if the things hadn’t up and vanished with my fleeting fantasies. Losing the scabs was nice and all, but how had they disappeared without leaving so much as a dent?
What’s more, I’d begun sprouting the first signs of a mustache by this point in my first life. Looking back, I remembered my brother Heinz bragging about his facial hair when he’d been my age.
The Trialist Empire of Rhine—and most nations in the West—saw the beard as a marker of adulthood. Growing one might have been easy, but keeping it neatly trimmed was a far greater challenge. Maintaining stately facial hair was evidence of time and manpower spent, and some races went so far as to decorate their dignified scruff with ribbons or golden bands. Of course, the trouble it took to remain totally clean shaven also spoke to one’s stature, but most preferred the majesty of a bountiful beard.
Like the scars, I secretly longed to grow my own one day. I hadn’t ever been sent overseas—to say, the Middle East, where hairless men were sometimes looked down upon even in the modern day—during my time in Japan, giving me no excuse to cultivate my facial hair. But all the handsome actors in my favorite fantasy films graced the screens with grand manes lining their chins.
My father in Konigstuhl kept a neat beard, and my oldest brother’s had nearly fully grown in by the time he came of age. I clearly did not want for genetics, and I’d spent countless days in my youth daydreaming of how I would style my own when the time came.
Yet in spite of it all, my face was positively velvety. I rubbed myself over with inhuman Dexterity, but my sensitive fingertips picked up so little resistance that the whole affair began to feel fishy.
“...Ursula.”
“Did you call, O Beloved One? How busy you must be to be up before the moon hides away.”
I called up the svartalf to confirm my suspicions, and she appeared in the darkness like she’d been there all along. Dawn had yet to break, and with the False Moon nearly full, I caught a full-sized night fairy’s reflection in the corner of the mirror. Although I wasn’t exactly keen on letting her lounge on my bed like she owned the place, I decided to look past her poor manners for hospitality’s sake.
“My wounds are gone and I can’t grow a beard. What do you know?”
Recognizing that it was hopeless to win a verbal exchange—why did every woman around me have a tongue of silver?—I kept my question blunt. She raised her head from my pillow and answered without a care in the world.
“Hmm, I wouldn’t know anything about wounds or facial hair. Personally, I’m quite particular to boys with scars. Lunacy shines brightest under moonlight, and I find those blemishes reminiscing over the mad heat of battle poetic and beautiful.”
Aha, so you don’t know anything “personally,” huh?
“Lottie.”
“Hiya! Need something?”
My second suspect responded as soon as I called for her, gently floating down onto my head. The waxing Hollow Moon did nothing for the sylphid’s height, and her appearance was as fittingly fey as ever as she tucked herself into my hair.
“Did you do something about my wounds and beard?”
“Huh?! Uh... Um...”
“Never mind. Don’t bother answering.”
Between Ursula’s roundabout testimony and Charlotte’s obvious stammering, the culprit was readily apparent. I lurched forward and buried my head in my arms; the sylphid hovered away before she could fall, coming up to my face with puppy-dog eyes.
“Um... I’m sorry. Lottie just thought you’d be sad if you got cuts and stuff that stayed. Peoples worry about ouchies on their faces, right? And, and my friends too! All my friends say it’s not cute to have ouchies there...”
I see. So the alfar had done something to prevent my wounds from leaving scars once they healed. You lot sure do have a lot of tricks up your sleeves.
“No,” I said, “you know what? Don’t worry about it. Really, it’s fine. I’m not that upset about it anyway.”
Seeing her hang her head in shame made me feel like I was in the wrong, however untrue I knew that was. That said, I genuinely wasn’t that mad, so I was happy to forgive her knowing that she had my best interests at heart.
I was still going to dock a candy drop from snack time, though.
The Empire traded for sugar with its satellite states bordering the southern sea at favorable rates, so it wasn’t particularly expensive to get ahold of...but it also wasn’t particularly cheap.
Hm? What’s that? I’m a cheapskate? Forgive me; I couldn’t help the lightness of my purse. The ten drachmae I’d gotten from Sir Feige had mostly gone to extending Elisa’s scholarship, and the rest had gone home to my parents and the newborn nephew I hadn’t been able to celebrate.
Charlotte’s jaw dropped to the floor and she began to sulk. However, one thing bothered me about her confession: for all that she’d said about scars, she hadn’t touched on the matter of facial hair.
“Which means the beard was the work of...”
As I voiced my doubts, I heard the sound of ceramics clinking together as if the one holding them had jerked in surprise. I glanced behind me in the mirror and saw that the bucket at my bedside had been replaced with a steaming cup of chicory red tea. Never before had I heard dining ware clatter in this house when receiving my morning brew; for the rule to be broken now pointed to a conclusion I hardly needed to restate.
“...Ashen Fraulein.”
“‘I can’t help it,’ she says. ‘Beards aren’t cute.’” Ursula spoke for the tight-lipped housekeeper.
...Oh, fine. Have it your way—do whatever you want. I couldn’t help but be surprised that my reserved and responsible caretaker would play such tricks on me, but then again, silkies had a reputation for their penchant for mischief. I would have preferred a less noticeable prank, but I supposed I had to live with it.
As I stroked my featureless chin, awash with melancholy, realization struck. The alfar liked children with blond hair and blue eyes. The two latter points were what had drawn them to me in the first place, but who was to say that youthful innocence wasn’t just as important to them?
Furthermore, Ursula had stated that she wouldn’t know anything about “wounds or facial hair,” but she had conveniently left out her relation to anything else.
“Hey, Ursula.”
“Mm? Is there more, Beloved One? I’m getting sleepy, you know...”
“Looking at the rest of my family, I’m going to grow pretty tall.”
In fact, I’d already allocated enough points to get me past the 180-centimeter mark when fully grown. Imperial mensch were blessed with sizable physiques, so this wasn’t enough for someone to consider me especially tall...unless they were obsessed with childish cuteness.
“Wh-Why do you bring that up?”
I had never—and I mean never—heard Ursula stumble over her words. Her shifting eyes were the nail in the coffin.

Huh, I see. So that’s how you want to play it.
I whirled around, summoning an Unseen Hand to uncoil my trusty loop of rope and propelled it toward the bed. I wasn’t using it as a whip or anything: my invisible fingers pinched the tip, leading it into position to apprehend the guilty fey.
No sooner had I thrust forth the rope than Ursula disappeared with a short yelp, leaving only my blankets within the lasso. I heard the Ashen Fraulein drop something in a panic as soon as she sensed our scrap; an errant spring breeze whizzed out of the window I’d opened for fresh air.
“All of you?! Hey! This isn’t funny, dammit! You better not have done anything! Come back here! Show yourselves!”
This was the first time I’d ever lost my temper enough to shout at my ephemeral company, but not even the threat of fey retribution could stymie my rage. Height was more than a matter of personal preference: I needed that to do my job as a swordsman!
Every inch lost affected my arms as well, shortening the reach of my swings by proxy. Those who would laugh this off as an acceptable margin of error were fools; whether a wound proved fatal oftentimes came down to mere millimeters.
Furthermore, weight was king in close-quarters combat, and the total load of muscle a body could bear directly scaled with height. Losing that dimension put me at an inherent disadvantage. The drama of a David felling a Goliath was electrifying, but the feat itself was daunting. At the very minimum, if I were to face a large man with parity in skill—magic notwithstanding—the odds would be insurmountably in his favor. Why else would the boxing associations of Earth have placed such stringent restrictions on their weight classes?
My fury at having my life toyed with flooded out in the form of angry yelling. Alas, all my shouting faded unanswered into the quiet of early morning.

[Tips] Blessings and protections require the will of the conferrer, but not always the conferred. Otherwise, shades of gold and blue would not so commonly arise among the young souls departing for heaven or those who never return from the deepest woods.

Last night’s snowfall had painted the town in a layer of white, and the virgin snow crackled under my feet with every step. The burnt vermilion of brick peeked out from beneath the bleached landscape, and the faint blue finish of mystic street lamps made for a dreamlike scene.
As I swallowed the chilly air like a tall glass of ice water, I felt like I’d taken in the slowly brightening sky of the fading night with it. If the night sky were ever bottled up as a wine, surely it would taste like this: crisp and sweet, its flavor only lingering in the nose for a brief moment.
I let out a long, slow, deep breath; my anger was finally fading. At this rate, neither Ursula nor Lottie would respond to me for a while, and the Ashen Fraulein never showed herself to begin with. It seemed their plan of action was to wait out what seemed like a childish tantrum, but they would do well to realize that I wouldn’t forget this so easily.
Showing up to my morning duties in such a foul mood would be improper of me, so I’d come out on a walk to enjoy the sights of an awakening town. Although I hadn’t left the Empire’s borders, my first winter in the capital felt like I was in a foreign land, and this peculiar feeling improved my mood even more than I’d hoped.
That said, not wanting to let myself loosen up too much before work, I couldn’t bask in wintry sentiment forever. I wasn’t going to let myself freeze up no matter how romantic the nipping air was. I activated an Insulating Barrier with the Selective Screening add-on to push away the cold air and apply a hydrophobic coating to my boots.
This had been one of my purchases with the ichor maze payday. Combat may be the meat and potatoes of TRPGs, but I’d always wished to have access to the convenient lifestyle skills that popped up during role-playing segments; these were a key element to the craft in their own right.
Stuffing myself fat with cotton or weighing myself down with a heavy leather coat proved a massive bother, and I figured relying on half-baked space-bending magic as my sole means of true defense wasn’t ideal. My answer had been to pick up a mystic barrier at a III: Apprentice level. All the quintessential barrier did was impede physical and magical contact: conceptually, it was a boring, paper-thin layer that denied entry to unwanted phenomena.
However, its simplicity lent itself to resource efficiency, and up at Scale V, the activation would become startlingly quick, making it usable as a twitch reaction to deflect arrows and middling swords. I could also weave them at an angle to divert attacks to get some extra value, and a little ingenuity let me repel water, wind, and cold as an all-in-one weather shield.
Walking through the snow without worrying about my clothes and hair getting damp was a wonderful feeling. Never again would I have to scurry for a change of clothes upon tripping, and my eyes were safe from the tear-inducing pain of strong tempests wicking away their moisture.
Man, this was such a good find. The barrier was as useful in daily life as it was in the heat of battle. I could even wrap it around my hands when drawing water to prevent my skin from cracking. I’d swiped the idea from Lady Agrippina’s thaumaturgic gloves, thinking that I might hold some experiments of my own; clearly, I’d made the right call.
I arrived at the College very pleased with my new toy, and headed to the stables as I did every morning. No matter how much frigid snow piled up on the land, the stablehands showed up without fail to care for their dependents, and I was much the same.
“Hey, whoa. Good morning to you guys too.”
I pacified the crowd of horses that came up wanting to play—I made an excessively long detour to avoid that stupid unicorn—and finally arrived at my stable to find that Castor and Polydeukes were as full of life as ever, despite the gelid dawn. Once more, I was made to marvel at how hardy these creatures were. They were inherently warm, sometimes even producing the kind of heat that would knock out a mensch. The steam they could generate after a good workout proved that they didn’t need magic or overcoats to withstand the elements, unlike us.
“Hey, hey, quit biting me... What? Are you bored?”
Polydeukes nuzzled up against my back as I cleaned his waste and replaced his bedding. He nibbled on my clothes with a snort, begging me to take him out; only a few days ago, he’d gotten to run to his heart’s content. A horse had to run to fully exercise its purpose—especially these two warhorses. Every generation of their ancestors had been handpicked for their exemplary physiques, and I was well aware that they were itching to get some exercise.
“I’ll ask them to let you run a lot today, okay? And I’ll take you two out for a long ride sometime before the snow piles up, I promise.”
I stroked his long face and let him lick me in mine. I stared into his eyes and his solemn violet irises stared back. Though they lacked the tool of language, the twinkle in his eyes felt to me a testament that these trusty beasts of burden rivaled our own intelligence. With his gaze alone, he asked me, “Do you swear it?”
“I wouldn’t lie to you,” I said with a pat. “I’ll invite Mika so all four of us can go.”
Finally satisfied, the first half of the Dioscuri stopped gnawing on my garb. Communicating with them like this made horses feel so very human. They resisted bad treatment as a matter of course, and forcing a saddle on one was far from enough to tame it. These proud animals were the types to shake off an unwanted jockey or die trying.
Perhaps that was why they responded so kindly to my sincerity. Of course, I couldn’t take it easy now: spoiling one brother was sure to upset the other if I didn’t give him equal treatment, so I made my way over to Castor. Here, too, I had a similar exchange that ended with my face covered in drool—I couldn’t bring myself to just deny them with a barrier—so I cast Clean on myself as I did for the line of fellow horse keepers waiting with copper pieces in hand. I’m happy to report that nowadays, many of these folks were kind enough to wave to me in town whenever our paths crossed.
“Excuse me,” I said. “If it’s not too much trouble...”
“Don’t worry, I know the drill. I’ll let them run all they want.”
Among the many stablehands to whom I offered my services, I asked the one in charge of the steeds’ physical activity for a favor. Horses had the emotional capacity to feel depressed if the stress of staying locked indoors piled up, so the management here scheduled time for them to run. In place of a tip, I thanked the exercise director with a free Clean and made my way inside Krahenschanze.
“Huh,” I said to myself, “what’s with all the people?”
Winter’s grip let off the moment I stepped through the front door. Visually temperate like an ancient banking institution, the main hall had also been carefully tuned to disallow the interior from deviating more than a few degrees off of the most agreeable of temperatures.
In the wee hours of the morning, I expected only to see students picking at requests on the bulletin board, the clerks at the front desk, and those who had to partake in an early lecture...but not today.
It didn’t take a master detective to realize some well-to-do members of the gentry were paying the College a visit. Silk and golden thread were accentuated with sparkling gems for buttons, and I spied mantles imbued with personal climate control, to say nothing of the fancy wands that prioritized form over function.
Those waiting at the wings wore lavish outfits deliberately tweaked to remain slightly out of fashion; only the richest and most influential could afford to dress their attendants as proper nobles. Beside them, even the bodyguards were equipped with stylish swords, though their attire remained simple to prioritize ease of movement.
In total, there were two or three separate groups within the crowd. They chatted with one another with perfectly set smiles. I didn’t know whether they were waiting for more company or killing time while the clerks filed away paperwork, but I found it curious that they had business at the College.
Researchers and professors were bureaucrats in their own rights, and many orbited court politicians to offer their counsel, but the magia were generally the ones paying the visits, not the patrons.
Those returning to their Berylin estates from across the land for the many social events held in winter generally held property near the palace. It was a straight, short shot north from here, but I wondered what would bring these haughty patricians here on their own two feet. I would have expected them to send a messenger bearing an invitation to a tea party held elsewhere.
Whoops, I thought, turning away. My inquisitive nature had gotten the better of me, and the sharp bodyguards caught me staring. I decided to make a tactical retreat before they could scold me for my poor manners. This was all worlds apart from me anyway. Nothing good could come from a lowly commoner like me trying to get involved...a lesson which my own master, Lady Agrippina, taught me with every fiber of her being.
“My, you’re here already? Time certainly flies.”
I entered the madam’s mystic greenhouse, bathed in gentle sunlight wholly inappropriate considering the season. Of all the things I’d expected to see, her buck naked frame was not one of them.
Her usual chignon had been reduced to a wet mass of free-flowing hair, clinging tightly to the white curvature of her body. Her limbs had an unbelievably normal amount of muscle despite her refusal to exercise, and they drew the eye from her core with aesthetic appeal that rivaled the nude marbles of the Renaissance.
“I have many things to say,” I sighed, “but first and foremost, I implore you not to wander about before drying your hair.”
Although my liege never failed to laze about in thin garments, this was the first time she’d so brazenly abandoned clothing altogether. Occasionally, her pajamas would slip to reveal a single tit—and no, of course she didn’t care—but this was almost enough to make me question whether she was a real noblewoman at all. Yet no matter how impeccably polished this breathing still life was, I didn’t even need to roll the dice to succeed in resisting her charm.
“I had a sudden fancy for a bath, you see,” she explained, “but the book I brought to pass the time proved a tad too gripping. I’m airing myself out to avoid sweating in my clothes.”
“Yes, yes, that’s all very well,” I replied. “I’d like to set your hair, so would you be so kind as to take a seat?”
Lady Agrippina sat down as if she were the one accommodating me, but let the records show that all the concessions made were mine. Not wanting to let her drip all over the carpet and make more work for me later, I dispelled the water on her body. I carefully began combing her locks and drying them with a towel; I could have handled this with a quick Cleaning as well, but that invariably led to a lesser final result.
“Ahh,” she sighed. “How relaxing. Give me a scalp massage while you’re at it, will you?”
“I fear the day isn’t long enough for that, madam.”
It was remarkable just how insistent she was on marching only to the beat of her own drum. I painstakingly wrung the towel out after every stroke as I patted down her long silver strands. The comb proved exceptionally superfluous with how few knots I encountered, and I felt as though I’d wasted my time caring for an already-superb product as I finished setting her usual hairdo.
“Mm, well done... Now hand me the comb.”
“As you will.”
My stark-naked employer had oh-so-elegantly pulled out a book with which to busy herself, but now she waited with her hand outstretched. As soon as the comb left my grasp, a blaze of fire ran across its surface. Methuselah bodies were machines efficient enough to produce almost zero waste, but their hair was one of the few exceptions.
Hair could be used as an arcane ingredient, especially when concocting spells to find or target a specific individual. My liege was well aware of her penchant for earning grudges, and thus was very fussy about plugging any leaks—so much so that she refused to lower her guard around her one and only servant, even though she held my life in her hands.
Still, her concerns were valid; one carelessly done errand could turn lethal in an instant. High society was a toxic sea of knavery where crooked souls donned the guise of morality; staying afloat required a constant state of alertness.
“Hmm,” Lady Agrippina mused, “shall I partake in breakfast today or no?”
“Madam, I beseech you to dress yourself first.”
“But it isn’t as if anyone is looking.”
Ignoring her sociopathic comment, I forced the madam to change classes from an irredeemable streaker to a beauty rivaling Helen of Troy—in the sense that she too could bring a nation to its knees, albeit physically. I knew that asking her to choose an outfit would only prompt a half-hearted answer, so I brought her a robe that I’d seen her wear often enough.
The madam grumbled to herself as she made herself decent, and it sank in that this woman had truly forgone food, sleep, and drink to read when she’d been on her own. She was a wealthy, hedonistic, silver-haired, mystic-eyed elf (sort of) with a distaste for clothing and an inclination toward remorseless villainy—did she really need all of these quirks?
I muttered under my breath that we’d all be better off if she could pawn away some of her character traits as I went to prepare breakfast. Living up to the needs of its finicky clientele, the room service always delivered on time, and I went to wake Elisa after I finished setting the table.
Elisa’s room was the most cramped in the entire workshop, but I use “cramped” here in the monied sense of the word. Two or three normal people could comfortably live in this space: it was around twenty-six square meters in total.
Every visit saw the room more cluttered than the last: the place was buried in gifts fueled by Lady Leizniz’s favor. I failed to comprehend how that deranged vitality freak had ended up the way she did, but it was evident that she derived no greater joy than from presenting the objects of her affection with lavish gifts that she personally picked out. In my opinion, it seemed like her long life at the top of the world had eroded her ability to see things from a more normal perspective...but I supposed she was free from the expenses of the living. I guess I couldn’t be too hard on her.
“Wow, this sure is...something.”
Still, her most recent offering may have been the grandest yet: my darling sister—the cutest girl alive—was snoozing away in a bed literally fit for a princess. Three full-grown mensch could complete a yoga routine on the mattress alone, and obviously, there were fine silk curtains hanging from the canopy. Elisa was sleeping in conditions far better than the casual hammock her master employed.
On a similar note, the writing desk that had been installed at some point was a first-rate piece of arcane furniture that gained height proportional to its user, and the wardrobe that gobbled up the never-ending stream of new outfits had been magically enhanced into a multi-room walk-in closet.
If these unhinged feature lists weren’t enough, the desk had been graced with paper and pens extravagant enough to line a working aristocrat’s table. With their thin layer of dust, they spoke to a nauseating wish to receive a letter penned in my sister’s big, round, cutesy-wootsy lettering.
I mean, I could see why someone might dote on our family’s little girl—she was the cutest, after all—but this was just sickening. The plethora of long gloves and folding fans unfit for a child under ten spoke to the sender’s repulsive proclivities. But this sea of excess warmed my heart even more when I saw Elisa clinging to the product of my sorry finances. Most of the dolls cluttering the room had been tossed to the wayside without so much as being unwrapped, but the one in her arms was starting to fray from being squeezed tight every night.
I had used every ounce of Dexterity at my disposal to make her a stuffed bear so she wouldn’t feel lonely at bedtime while I was away from the capital. It didn’t quite live up to the teddy bears I’d once held, but I was proud of my work all the same; seeing my baby sister cradle the patchwork of cloth and cotton so dearly filled my heart with joy.
“Elisa,” I cooed, “it’s morning.”
“Mmgh... Mr. Brother?”
I knew she would one day grow out of such toys, but it was enough that she appreciated it now. I just prayed that I could be her number one until the day that some dashing gentleman swept away her heart as a fine lady in her own right.
“Morning Mr. Brother...”
“Mhm, good morning, Elisa. I’m here, so let’s go get some breakfast.”
Although the palatial tongue was nearly second nature to her now, Elisa’s speech always crumbled when she was half-asleep. I gently rocked her shoulder, and she looped her hands around my neck. I scooped her up out of bed and helped her get ready for the day.
...Come to think of it, I wondered who had taken care of her while I’d been away. It couldn’t have been Lady Agrippina, could it?
Elisa was slowly learning how to do things for herself, but I had yet to teach her how to set tables. I didn’t notice any food stains upon returning, so it had all evidently gone smoothly, but trying to imagine the one and only Lady Agrippina of all people taking care of another... Brr. The thought sent chills down my spine.
I managed to peel off my sister-sized prickly burr and sat her down for breakfast. This was where I would have once been dismissed for a period of free activity, but my schedule had changed ever since I’d come back: Elisa was acting spoiled again.
How was a brother supposed to say no when his little sister’s eyes welled with tears and she sniffed, “You won’t get hurt again, will you?” I was sure the only reason I’d been permitted to sit in on her morning lectures was because the madam had grown weary of dealing with her outbursts. Lady Agrippina knew that leaving Elisa’s mental care to me was the path of least resistance.
So I stuck around until noon and watched over two lectures, on the palatial tongue and etiquette respectively. These turned out to be much more thorough than I’d imagined: the material was considerably more advanced than the speeches the local children had given to thank the magistrate at the end of their schooling back home. Elisa was learning poetry: she wove together rhymes, pulled from historical motifs, and counted the strokes of her brush as she delved into linguistic territory that I had never trodden. I’d read my fair share of poems, to be sure, but like the one Sir Feige and I had discussed, those had all been ametrical pieces aimed at the unlearned. I didn’t know anything about composition.
Lady Agrippina was a ceaseless font of critique, but wasn’t our little girl incredible for composing her own poems? I’m sure you’ll agree that she was at least a genius like no other.
Her palatial dialect was also distinct from the lower-class pronunciations I used; she was studying an accent meant for the members of the upper strata. The intonation was difficult to get right, especially when it came to the nasal sounds that didn’t appear anywhere else, so I was floored when I heard her form fluid sentences.
Even more amazingly, our master said that she was only a few perfected topics away from being ready to attend College lectures as a registered student. Elisa had grown up so much in the time I’d been away.
This jubilation carried me into midday, where the biggest meal of the day awaited. Lamb stew was a rarity as the main dish, but the copious use of spices drove home the point that this was fit to grace an affluent table; it even came with dessert that was sure to improve Elisa’s spirits. Thinking about how much the full course cost never failed to frighten me out of my wits.
“You may have some too, Dear Brother!”
“Thank you, Elisa. But make sure to clean your own plate first, okay?”
My little sister had no idea that my smile was just a front to hide cold sweat as my mind raced to put a price to the Western Krantz Cake on her plate. Lady Agrippina was kind enough to foot the bill on account of the food being ordered to suit her tastes, but my working-class mind couldn’t help but wander to the thought of paying for it myself, even though I knew for a fact that my employer didn’t care enough about money to pinch me for pennies.
No matter how much of a tantrum she threw, neither Elisa nor I could eat with her on my lap, so I pecked her on the forehead and coaxed her to hop off. Pushing away my teary-eyed sister was akin to mincing my soul with a Blade Cuisinart...but I knew that there was more to love than spoon-feeding her like a hapless kitten, and told myself as much over and over in hopes of reconditioning myself.
“Ah,” Lady Agrippina said with a wave, “I’d nearly forgotten.”
I made the rounds to clean up some more chores, and the madam stopped me when I passed by her hammock. I didn’t quite comprehend the need to pass me her note as an origami butterfly when I was within arm’s reach, but I supposed that was just her style.
“That’s the reservation you asked for. It’s under my name, so if anyone asks, you’re there carrying out an experimental errand.”
“Does ‘experimental errand’ even mean anything?”
The paper in my hands was a ticket into the College’s testing facilities. For an institution committed to plumbing the depths of theory, the magia here were not satisfied with achievements bound to hypotheticals; naturally, there were several different testing grounds to observe the effects of new research. Sorcery and danger were two peas in a pod, and environmental factors could drastically alter a spell’s effect and throughput. An attempt to grope for the ideal circumstances for newly developed magic necessitated more than an average personal workshop.
These containment rooms had been the College’s solution to this issue. Some were simple spaces made preposterously large to keep all effects localized; others were equipped with specialized apparatus to replicate precise conditions over multiple trials; and others still were built sturdy enough to withstand the sorts of brash trials that would endanger a researcher in their own atelier.
Considering how these personal laboratories were already isolated from society, it went without saying that the potentially weapons-grade experiments held in the larger installations posed a serious risk. No one wanted to leave this liability in the backyard of the imperial palace, here at the heart of Rhinian affairs. That said, the government couldn’t exactly let magia wipe away random swaths of countryside every time they screwed up, especially when some of the more extreme cases involved straight-up biohazards. In the end, the crown had been predestined to pay a premium for enough boxes on a sufficient scale to contain nearly any threat.
Naturally, my purpose in going to such a location was to try out a new combo that I’d been mulling over. I’d figured it might be a bit irresponsible to test my theory in the woods or something, so I’d asked Mika for some advice, at which point he’d told me about the facilities. It went without saying that a mere servant couldn’t reserve a room, so I’d asked Lady Agrippina to do so in my stead.
With how strictly I assumed the College guarded its private grounds, it must have been a serious challenge to get this permission in the short handful of days the madam had taken. Her reputation with those from other factions was terrible, let alone among the Leizniz loyalists, so I was always amazed at how she managed to throw around her political weight. Not that I wanted to know her secrets, of course. I knew not to poke my head in where there was trouble, and I was willing to shake hands without any questions so long as things were smooth sailing.
“Just tell the elevator where to go, as per usual,” the madam explained. “Keep in mind that I could only manage to find a shared suite geared toward students, with how packed the testing facilities are at this time of year. Make sure not to do anything too grand.”
Who did this witch think I was? I knew how to keep myself in line. Besides, my spell wasn’t so mind-bogglingly powerful that I’d need to hold back just because I had a few neighbors. It was just an extension of the flash-bang magic I’d come up with: cheap, efficient, and modest, but impactful.
“Worry not, madam. I am well aware of my place.”
“Really?”
I totally ignored her drawn-out remark and broke free from Elisa’s pleading stares to put the Stahl laboratory behind me.

Tprg4.3

I maintained that min-maxed martial abilities offered a beautiful path to uncontested power in a vacuum. As a fully specced swordsman, I could cleave through armor like hot butter and dig my razored edge into the most formless of geists and souls, culminating in the apex of skill: a god-felling cut.
However, I’d split my resources into swordplay and magic, and between the two, arcane arts progressed more quickly.
At present, I was confident in saying I would be hard-pressed to lose a one-on-one fight. Hybrid Sword Arts was at VII: Virtuoso, where only Scales VIII and IX lay above; my traits had all been carefully selected to reinforce my strengths.
On the magical end, I had the Independent Processing to simultaneously command a fleet of Unseen Hands, and my mutant homebrew magic let me disable living enemies in a burst of light and sound. If worse came to worst, I had an absolute defense in my space-bending barrier. Looking at my character sheet caused me to marvel at just how much of a royal pain I was to kill.
Yet even with all that and an adept debuffer at my side, the two of us had been one step—no, half a step—from dying. Further, I was still light-years away from being as unfathomably broken as the lowlife in front of me.
The bottleneck for both of these issues was my lack of radical new ideas and my overreliance on physical attacks. Making a sword go beyond the bounds of physical reality took far too many experience points. Even now, knocking on IX: Divine territory came with a nausea-inducing price tag, and the ability to cut down shapeless concepts lay even beyond that.
Magic offered a slightly cheaper path. Although messing with souls and phenomena and the like remained a feat for true masters, I wouldn’t have to ever relive my struggles against the undead. Readying an arsenal of new options for such foes would be relatively inexpensive in comparison.
I could develop auxiliary equipment that directly added to my firepower, shore up weaknesses with mutative spells to lengthen my reach, or even pivot away from my arcane swordsman build to focus on creating a thaumaturgic I-Win button.
...Of course, this was all predicated on the assumption that the little guy upstairs had what it took to be a researcher at all.
In this genre, so to speak, the classics saw main characters walk into magical academies and show off raw power they didn’t quite understand with flash and flourish to win the approval of others. Whether the display happened at an entrance exam or during a quick spar was irrelevant; by blowing away an opponent with ease, they were instantly transformed into objects of worship and respect, placed at the top of the social—if not systemic—pecking order.
Alas, the Imperial College was an institute of learning, and “Dunno how, but I did a thing!” did not fly. Despite its fantasy facade, this world was curiously modern in its outlook—no doubt thanks to the wanton contributions of my predecessors and the absence of religious hegemony. If I wanted to become a top-tier magus, I would need to distill my own abilities into the realm of theory, capturing the essence of my ideas in essay form for others to scrutinize. I’d thought that the eccentric notes Mika always took seemed like a lot of work, but she had merely been doing the bare minimum to claw her way to the beginning of a magus’s journey.
Studying and writing treatises while preparing to set off on an adventure would need a truly unimaginable amount of time and resources. The nonnegotiable detours I would need to take—at minimum, I’d need to upgrade my palatial speech before I got anywhere near a lectern—did little to solve my overarching problems.
Lady Agrippina had said she would make me her student; she had not said anything about paying for me.
Honestly, what was wrong with this woman? This whole venture seemed like it would cost several times my theoretical tuition, and she was willing to dish out the former but would leave me to dry on the latter. What kind of meager existence did she want me to live? Was I to be some Classical Chinese peasant, farming scraps of food to eat by day and studying for the civil service exam by night? She’d probably relish in my financial distress with a wine glass in hand, the witch.
“I understand... May I put Elisa to bed?”
“Feel free,” Lady Agrippina said. “Tuck her in before she breaks that neck of yours.”
Whether I was to pay or be paid, I decided to put off my money troubles for another time. Trying to decide on anything when my brain was all mushy was a sure ticket to disaster. Besides, Elisa had cried herself to sleep, and leaving her like this was just as bad for her as it was for my neck.
Fighting the urge to go to bed myself, I laid my sister onto her soft covers and wished her good night.

[Tips] Like many universities on Earth, ranks beyond that of student at the Imperial College are gatekept by the standing professoriat. Some prodigies rise to research positions after two years; others lose all hope when they see children generations younger than them attain professorship. The College is more than a garden for mad scientists: it is a melting pot of people from all across the spectrum of talent.

“Now then,” Lady Agrippina said joyfully. “It’s finally time.”
By the time I returned, she’d brought in a short work desk from gods-know-where and slammed down the treasure box on top—and by treasure, I mean none other than the Compendium of Forgotten Divine Rites I’d handed her moments ago.
“Is there any need for me to accompany you as you open it?” I asked.
“What?” she scoffed. “Surely you must be curious to see what your prize for overcoming an extraordinary challenge amounts to.”
Pen and paper had been readied alongside it, perhaps for the madam to jot down notes on what she was to read. Both her hands were enveloped in a lattice of glowing mystic circles—as per usual, her magic was too adroit for me to comprehend—that safeguarded the skin like a pair of gloves. The innumerable strands of light weaving in and out looked like she’d covered her fingers in earthworms. It was—and I am being as generous as I can when I say this—patently vile.
“Madam, I would advise you to consider why the tome was so thoroughly sealed when it passed into my hands in the first place.”
“I’m sure it won’t be an issue so long as we don’t peek in with our bare eyes. Does it truly not pique your interest? I’m shocked that you managed to refrain from opening it before arriving.”
“Madam, I would advise you to consider the full-strength barriers shrouding both your hands. Would you not mock any other magus for their lack of cool had you seen them cast this spell?”
“Oh, please. This is but a safeguard for the book itself. I wouldn’t want to sully such a rare find with the dirt of my fingers, you know?”
A normal barrier would do just fine for that, you bald-faced liar...
Regardless of my true thoughts, a servant such as I could not voice them, nor could I escape the situation after my liege had so kindly readied a seat for me. Perhaps I could have slinked off had she only prepared a chair, but the table had a steaming cup of tea on it that hadn’t been there when I’d left.
“Hm?” I mumbled. A small box had been left beside the teacup. The wool-covered parcel with carefully rounded corners was of considerable quality, but it lacked a logo. The quiet rejection of ostentation packed in this masterwork was proof enough that it had come from a high-end store somewhere in Berylin.
“Take it,” Lady Agrippina said. “Consider it a gift for an engrossing story well told. Put it on, will you?”
“Uh...” I opened the container to find a monocle. It was the same make as the madam’s: just a bit of glass rimmed with metal meant to sit in one’s eye socket.
“Used as it may be, it hasn’t a speck of dust on it. It ought to still be more than functional.”
“Are you sure? This must have been costly...”
“What more worth will it have than a stone in an alleyway if it sits around unused?”
No matter her logic, I was a regular person who considered silver quarters just as far out of reach as gold coins; I felt like I was dealing with something more than I was due. Also, my eyes didn’t sit very deep on account of my Mother’s Son trait; I was worried it might slip off.
Yet as soon as I brought the monocle up to my eye, it snapped into place. I shook my head back and forth, but it clung tightly to my skin and didn’t even get close to budging; in fact, I couldn’t even feel the coolness of the metal itself.
However, when I tried to remove it, it fell into my hand without any resistance. I accidentally brushed against the lens, owing to my unfamiliarity with eyewear, but that too failed to leave any marks.
...How much cutting-edge technology is loaded in this tiny thing?
“Come, we’re about to begin,” Lady Agrippina said. “Forget the details and put it on already.”
I did as she commanded and the madam began to rub her hands together—a mannerism I found particularly occidental—as if she were about to dig into a gourmet dish. She inserted the key with awesome gravity and opened the latch.

Its breathtaking presence was the same as always.
However, I wasn’t taken by the same revulsion as when I’d first laid eyes on it. I could see an evil something akin to black miasma or an infinite bundle of formless appendages wrap around the book. I saw things that I’d never seen before. Upon squinting, the wriggling worms around Lady Agrippina’s hands slowly gained definition: most of it was composed of magical formulae, but...was that scripture sandwiched in between?
“I see,” she hummed. “My hopes had been high, but this truly is the real deal. Even with great alterations to the text, even in a language unknown to the original...to think it would be this impressive.”
Encased in the oxymoron of holy magic, the madam’s fingers ran across the book’s cover. As she did, strands of her protective layer frayed and scattered. An equal or perhaps greater number of the same came to replace their lost comrades, but seeing my fears substantiated did little to ease my anxiety.
I knew this thing would curse me just by touching it. Locked up as it had been, I patted myself on the back for having lugged this thing back in my knapsack.
Although Lady Agrippina stood the tome upright to spare me from facing its text, pure dread began flooding out as soon as she cracked it open, leaving me little time to appreciate her consideration.
There was nothing behind me. I knew there wasn’t, but I could feel something creeping up. The tingling hallucination of that same something brushing against my skin caused me to grab myself in reflex, but all I felt were the goosebumps forming underneath my clothes.
Faint sounds tickled my senses—or perhaps they weren’t sounds at all. All at once, like a whispering voice and a swarm of buzzing insects, the slimy noise rushed through a packed crowd to crawl into my ear.
As the whispering encroached farther into my inner ear, they gained vigor, and with it, meaning. My mind began to curl around notions not meant to be thought...until a frightful, world-shattering howl shocked me back to reality. The shriek heralded ruin: it was like broken glass being rubbed together beside an oilless machine running itself into the ground. This violation of mind was accompanied by a short burst of will that I’d grown used to in the past few days.
Getting a hold of my thoughts, I realized that my hands were no longer cradling myself, but a sword: unhindered by any sheath, the black steel of the Craving Blade appeared in my arms.
It shouted messages laden with warnings and threats at the tome, whittling away at the miasma it had spilt. At once, Lady Agrippina took note of the new arrival of malicious energy and looked up from the text with a raised eyebrow.
“Huh,” she said.
That was it.
My employer immediately returned her attention to the book and sat quietly for some time. Her immersed gaze stared holes into the first page, but she herself didn’t move a muscle.
How long had this gone on? The steaming red tea had long since gone cold, and even the pot it had been poured from was devoid of warmth by the time she finished pondering the contents of the first page.
Satisfied with her understanding, Lady Agrippina slowly reached for her monocle. For the first time, I saw the light jade of her heterochromous eye unobstructed by anything. Behind glass, it had appeared like the leaves of a willow filtering a gentle sun; now I witnessed the true hue that crept below.
The green was not the product of an excess in pigment, but of some precipitate ceaselessly churning around and around in the rippling surface of her iris. A disturbingly alien glimmer squirmed in her eye as it made off with the meaning concealed in the words it read. Where I expected the gentle arc of an eyeball, I found a lake choked with algae, tides surging from the corrosive gasses shooting up from the muddy bed. Eventually, the sublime horror of watching her outstripped that which I felt from the tome itself, and I turned away.
“I’d done a bit of digging when I noticed that presence around you, and I knew you’d bring me something fascinating,” Lady Agrippina said. “Well, we shall save that for another time.”
She closed the book with a thump, followed by a creaking hinge and the click of a lock. Then I heard a quiet clack of metal, likely from reequipping her eyepiece. She ordered me to look up, and I did so to see her taking a drag from the pipe she ordinarily summoned.
The madam rested one arm on the couch’s armrest and wearily puffed a cloud of smoke. It seemed that the tome had been enough to drain even her.
“A compelling read, that one. I’ll need to make a legitimate effort to study the text... Anyhow, the preamble was—”
“I’m fine, thank you!” I thrust out my hands to cut her off both verbally and physically.
For whatever reason, Lady Agrippina was wide eyed with surprise. After another puff or two from her pipe, she quietly said, “And here I had thought you’d ask to know after it was all done.”
“I’ve learned when to fold my hand,” I said.
Sure, I’d brought countless tales of adventure to life in my time, but I’d walked in the shoes of just as many unarmed—not to say that arms would help—investigators snooping around foreign lands overrun with fear. I knew. Some things were meant to stay unknown. The perverse corners of my heart whispered to me that that knowledge would open new avenues of strength—that it would give me access to pages my current blessing wouldn’t even let me look at.
All my training as an investigator cried out with the hammer of experience in hand: get a grip! it shouted, driving nails into my unrestrained curiosity.
My cacodaemoniacal inner voice likely wasn’t wrong, but as was often the case with these sorts of systems, the tradeoff was sure to be greater than the reward. If nothing else, the mythical and magical in these tales had always made me stop and ask, “Do we really need this?”
I had Elisa, Margit, and now Mika counting on me; I couldn’t afford to lose this character sheet, for their sakes. I wasn’t about to let myself lose all that made me me on the inside while retaining this fleshy shell.
“Oh,” Lady Agrippina mumbled, “what a shame.”
I internally flipped her remorseless villainy the bird and used my finest manners to put in a request for a short leave.

[Tips] The sanity of those who achieve great things constantly comes under question, and perhaps nothing demonstrates this principle more than the various traits and skills that cannot be imagined—let alone acquired—without delving into madness.
This is a clear warning from the gods to their mortal subjects that they are better off without such knowledge.

Setting out on a journey is hard, but getting back is just as bad. Aside from unpacking, long trips come with laundry to clean—instantaneously with magic, but still—and a giant backlog of chores that accumulate while you’re away. Any souvenirs need to be distributed to those who treat you well in daily life, and letters of gratitude are in order for those who treated you well during the vacation.
In my case, my souvenirs didn’t amount to much. Being placed in between the imperial capital and the true North, the “local” foods of the region hadn’t been all that different from Berylinian cuisine. I’d brought back baked goods made from acorn flour, but any noble would think twice if offered food this shabby.
I handed my large bag of pastries to the Krahenschanze clerks I’d befriended, and they accepted my meager gift with smiles on their faces. Sitting here at the front desk meant they had to be of considerable stature, but they were bighearted folks who recognized that I’d strained my scant wallet in a show of thanks.
They didn’t voice a single complaint; in fact, they gave me a small bag of hard candies in return, blurring the lines as to why I’d showed up in the first place. Well, whatever, the inclination to spoil children was but a facet of adulthood.
Speaking of, my visit to Lady Leizniz’s to report my safe return added another tally on the chalkboard of memories I’d do my best to erase from memory and writing. If nothing else, I would never come to understand the values of a ghastly spirit passionately screaming, “Being able to tell that you’re cross-dressing at a glance is its own form of perfection!”
After a day of running around the capital, Elisa was finally beginning to calm down from the separation anxiety and shock of hearing that I’d been wounded. As I put her to bed, the first snow set in on the region, and with it came a summons from Lady Agrippina.
No matter the era and no matter the culture, unsavory talks were to begin only after the little ones were safe in the land of dreams.
“Now then...”
I returned from Elisa’s bedroom to find that my liege had changed out of her thin pajamas in the short time I’d been away and into a proper gown, complete with a monocle. However, the glassware adorning the greener eye was not the same as her usual eyepiece.
The madam’s standard monocle was unembellished, but this one had an intricate pattern—wait, were those letters?—of fine gold wire that gave off powerful waves of arcane energy.
On my first night back, something equally as ineffably fearsome as the cursed compendium had surfaced in her eye; as the keeper of that chromatic nightmare, I was sure the gold and glass had some sort of deeper meaning.
“Show me,” she commanded.
I didn’t need to waste time asking what she meant. For the umpteenth time since I’d returned, I let out a sad, tired sigh and said, “Come.”
My order spanned all of a single syllable, but the intent contained within was definite. Imbued with meaning, my voice soaked into the fabric of reality, completing the mission it had been entrusted with.
There was no dramatic production; like a coin knocked off the table subsequently clattering on the floor, the sword that had appeared in my hand had always been a mere inevitability. Despite its heft, the Craving Blade stuck to my being was sickeningly comfortable in the hand.
Just in case, I’d bet on one-in-a-million odds and had tried throwing it away a few times on the way home. Of course, it had shown back up beside me like a haunted doll every time. On top of that, last night it had popped up of its own volition and did the same when I uttered a single word; it was comical how unfunny the situation was.
“My... How grand. No bend in space-time, no distortion of matter, and it isn’t even physically parasitic, yet it responds to your voice all the same.”
Lady Agrippina showed no surprise at the Craving Blade’s manifestation. While there was no room to doubt her irredeemable character, seeing her leap straight to thinking aloud reminded me of her great academic genius. Rather, I supposed it was that same talent that had kept this laboratory—or more aptly, this lounge—untouched in the two decades she’d been gone.
“That was practically a miracle,” she said.
“A miracle?”
I wanted to point out that an unholy relic that pleaded at my pillowside for me to use it night in and night out didn’t deserve to be described in such splendid terms, but I knew that wasn’t what she meant. The madam was talking of miracles in the sense of those techniques listed in the Faith category—the sacred powers of gods.
Deities were keepers of the physical realm, responsible for revising and retouching the world. Tasked with the burden of preventing life and culture from backpedaling, they alone had the authority to skip stitches in the quilt of existence without breaking the rules. Despite having their own limitations and quarrels, none could refute that the sanctity of their strength was far out of our reach.
“...You’re telling me this abominable sword is using miracles?”
I couldn’t understand what she was trying to say. Perhaps she’d meant to say “curses” instead. Ow, hey, quit squeezing my brain with your complaints! Maybe it’s finally time to pick up a mental barrier...
“Yes, miracles. I sense no mystic discharge, no physical irregularities, and the world itself hasn’t bothered to punish it with the cost of breaking its rules. Leaping through space clearly defies common logic, so to avoid penalty for such feats is clear indication that the phenomenon is considered ‘natural’ in some way—thus, a miracle.”
The scum of the earth wore the cool expression of a real scientist as she explained. Her firm gaze and confident tone made it clear she was not toying with me as she so often did.
“Magic, no matter how expertly woven, is an affront to the natural order.”
She flicked her pointer finger up and a point of light emerged at the tip.
“A simple speck of illumination is hardly worthy of being dubbed magic, but even so, it is the product of forcefully bending the universe to my will. There are unavoidable points of incongruence, and there will remain evidence of my tampering once finished.”
The orb leapt forth, drawing a gentle arc with its trail. Suddenly, it stopped, and just as I thought it would turn around, it shot upward and exploded. Once it was gone, it left behind a spiky bubble like one might see in a comic book; clearly, Lady Agrippina had exaggerated its aftereffects to make her point.
Magecraft as a whole was the process of invoking articles from the lawbook of reality and reshaping them to suit one’s needs. Long ago, when she’d pushed me into taking my first sorcerous steps, this master of mine had likened it to skipping a stitch in the large, intricate work of knitting we lived in.
How ingenious a metaphor that had been.
As the crochet hook pierces the surface, the uneven spacing warps its neighboring thread, and the unoccupied space left behind will remain to catch a discerning eye. No matter how carefully a mage composes their spells, evidence of their work is sure to remain.
“With meticulous diligence our traceable prints may approach invisibility. Alas, to cross that bound is a futile hope, and even this pitiful example no better than a piece of flint will create a trail in its wake. Consider a glass of salt water: you may dilute its flavor to be undetectable, but that does nothing to remove the solute in any real sense.”
Apparently, the open seams caused by our meddling were impossible to cover up with more arcane trickery. It was much the same as how wiping down a foggy window with a dry cloth did little to clear all the droplets, and any attempt would simply leave more marks of where the cloth had been used.
No matter how neatly the strokes had been made, a gentle breath revealed all the marks on the glass. In the same vein, hiding evidence of magic with more magic was a difficult, fruitless task.
“On the other hand, miracles are corrections to the current state of things. The gods are allotted short windows in which to edit the original blueprints of reality, such that their desired outcomes are and have always been.”
While miracles also effectively bent reality to someone’s will, the heavens could reknit the chunk of space-time over which they presided from scratch to blend into the overall artistry. When the divine chose to engage in needlework, they had no need for dyes to change the color, nor shears to change the shape.
“This is one of the fundamental demarcations we magia use to discriminate between magic and miracle. Otherwise, I’m sure the unheavenly races would have simply classified the gods as users of some advanced form of magic, unworthy of being venerated as superior beings.”
Breezing by the fact that her seemingly respectful statement would likely drive clergymen to pull up their sleeves in preparation for a crusade, Lady Agrippina pointed her outstretched finger at the Craving Blade.
“In summary, that sword is using miracles by the strictest definition of the word.”
“I see...”
“Otherwise, I can only discern that it is immeasurably old...and that it likely lacks the capacity to feed on your soul or sanity or what-have-you.”
You’re a liar! I was on the cusp of shouting back at her, but the green twinkle gazing my way had a mysterious persuasiveness to it. I only realized this now that I could see mana a bit more clearly, but there was something unnerving about her left eye...
Still, I couldn’t rid myself of the instinctive disbelief in the back of my mind and ended up staring at the Craving Blade. Its fuligin sheen refused all the light flooding into the atelier, and the sight of it alone was enough to breed doubt in the words of a first-rate methuselah researcher.
Suddenly, I heard the sound of shifting cloth as Lady Agrippina reached for the handle. Her pointer finger barely brushed against it, and...
“That, and...I see that it is as loyal as I suspected.”
A small font of blood gushed. That tiny bit of contact had made her finger explode, stripping away enough flesh to expose the bone beneath.
“Wha— Hey?!”
“Ouch... My, it’s been some time since I last drew blood. Tearing through all my repellant fields—seriously, what’s wrong with this thing?”
Despite the severity of her injury, Lady Agrippina was sucking on her finger, making no more fuss than someone dealing with a hangnail.
No way in hell is that enough to heal you! Also, you sounded like you had a hunch this was going to happen, so why in the gods’ name did you try it?!
“What?” she asked. “Experimentation is important. Besides, I wouldn’t want to bottle up my curiosity and let it cloud my mind later on.”
I felt like I finally grasped why the methuselah population was so small relative to their capabilities. I definitely recognized the trope of a group who valued their inquisitive nature over life itself. Their fertility rates were low too, so it was no wonder they couldn’t multiply when all their brightest minds were busy doing stuff like this.
“Anyhow,” the madam went on, “it seems convenient, so why not take advantage of it? You won’t have to lug it around, and you can exploit its recall properties to use it as an infinite projectile.”
“Actually, madam,” I said, “I experimented with the same idea, but the blade complained. Said that was no way to use a sword.”
“What? How obnoxious.”
For once, I had to agree with her.
Lady Agrippina pulled her finger out of her mouth, and the bleeding had already stopped. That said, I was caught a bit off guard: I’d thought it would have been completely healed by the time she was done.
“I can more or less tell what you’re thinking, but I’m not as well versed in bodily magicks as you might think. Ah, but I did spend a spell delving into neurological magecraft when I had little else to do.”
The baffling thought process needed to fiddle with the mind out of boredom really highlighted how aloof never-ending life-forms could be. Knowing the brain to be the control tower of thought and applying external stimuli to see the reactions like there was no other logical progression was something I would be out of my depth to comment on.
“Come to think of it,” she added, “couldn’t you inflict awful injuries if you tricked your enemies into taking this sword in hand? Perhaps it is as outstanding a trap as it is a weapon.”
If it was already throwing fits about being thrown, I couldn’t help but have a sinking feeling about what would happen to me if I tried something like that.
Loyalty may have made for a better blade, but I would need to test the limits of its devotion at some point. If I ever lost grip of it in the heat of battle, I wouldn’t want an ally to have their hands detonate because they were trying to do me a solid; there was only so much one could laugh off over a pint at the pub.
That said, if it had pierced the madam’s defensive means—what amounted to the world’s most overkill rubber gloves—then the Craving Blade might have had some kind of power to dispel magic. If it could repel or disperse spells that targeted it, then I could rely on it to shield me as a last resort.
Er, wait. Looking back, it hadn’t been able to nullify Mika’s final tactic of converting spiderwebs into wires. Relying on it so wholly probably wasn’t a good idea.
The difficulty of setting up proper tests was part of what made cursed items such a hassle to deal with. It whined for me to carry it with me wherever I went, but carrying the damned thing presented risk in and of itself. Plus, if it really did employ miracles, handing it over to a church was going to do nothing to impede it.
“Mm, this hurts more than I anticipated. I’m off to the iatrurge’s, so you’re free for the night.”
Lady Agrippina had been staring down her wound and had toughed it out for a while, but at last she grew weary of it and got up to leave the atelier. She walked out on her own two legs, making it clear that she wasn’t bluffing about the pain; complex magic like teleportation was easy to bungle if one wasn’t superbly focused.
Evidently, that monster in a human frame wasn’t totally invincible. Her relatively inadequate defenses were the silver lining in a hopeless situation.
You may question why I immediately began analyzing her strengths under the assumption of combat, but I had archived her in my mind as an enemy as opposed to a connection ages ago. I hadn’t forgotten my original oath to make this villain cry uncle; so far I’d made few promises more grave.
I propped up the Craving Blade against the couch and stretched out on it without reserve—the boss lady wasn’t here, after all. Her taste for luxury lived up to my expectations, and the pillowy cushioning was softer than my own bedding back home. Mm, so bourgeois...
The madam’s introduction of yet another difficult decision wove more chaotic knots into the tangled skein of my future. I’d received my blessing to do as I willed, but the diverging stairways leading up to my goals turned choosing a path into a serious challenge—a struggle stemming from privilege to be sure, but rejecting all but one future was arduous.
“Not to mention I have this to worry about...”
I activated my blessing and opened up my skill tree. No matter how user-friendly the interface was, the labyrinthine web was too elaborate to navigate in battle; I hadn’t found the time to explore when we’d been deep inside the ichor maze.
I glanced at my stock of experience points. This too only added fuel to my burning befuddlement.
While not quite outstripping whatever first blood bonus had accompanied my first major quest, I had earned nearly as much as I had at the daemonic mansion.
This didn’t surprise me: I’d plowed through encounter after encounter, culminating in a major boss fight to clear out a proper dungeon. I’d expected as much for my accomplishments, and my inflated treasury was enough to draft up more than a few dubiously balanced ideas.
Unfortunately...I couldn’t make any decision lightly with the road ahead so uncertain.
For example, if I were to change course to become a magus, I would need more than a few scholarly skills to get by. Curiously, I didn’t need to explicitly invest in skills to feel comfortable with things I’d been familiar with in my past life, but the rigorous study of wizardry wasn’t quite the same as the bachelor’s in liberal arts I’d finished at a middling university.
Hiking up my proficiency in the palatial tongue would be a given, and the specialized field would necessitate even more add-ons as expensive as they were niche. Fixing my lowborn accent to not offend social superiors was a must, and I’d need to be able to pen cryptograms like the one Sir Feige had written at a moment’s notice.
The cost of acquiring both sides of literary ability would pile up quickly, and I doubted I’d be able to resist the urge to pick up extras like Intuitive Reading or Speed Reading. Rough estimates for the basics put my total at over half my current reserve.
You may wonder what the big deal was over a bunch of dumb letters, but writing was and had been akin to magic—it had been a privilege of the haves since time immemorial. The nobility of Earth had enjoyed power specifically because of their literacy, and the monks endowed with the gift of writing were the freest to interpret their sacrosanct texts.
Words on paper allowed one to skip rungs on the social ladder; something so impactful had to have a complementary price. Rather, the systems wherein guns and maces ruled the land had offered written language at too much of a bargain.
Furthermore, I’d want a better Memory to make my studies and social endeavors smoother, and a higher Mana Capacity was a requirement for both experiments and practical demonstrations.
But with that said...it was pretty cheap, all things considered. Normal people had to spend years of their lives to amass these kinds of skills and traits. I could do the same at the press of a button; that was markedly unfair, even if I did have to risk my life to do so. Seeing countless sleepless nights of study boiled down to the same value as a few seconds of life-or-death combat really put into perspective how callous the world was.
I’d felt this gut-wrenching feeling before, but where? Oh, of course: this was the same emotion that arose when one came home with an annual bonus only to be met with end-of-year expenses like health insurance waiting a little ways ahead—the same as looking at a juicy balance in one’s bank account knowing that none of it was free to actually use.
Argh, this is so frustrating! I could feel my intestines tying themselves into a knot. I couldn’t deny being at least somewhat enamored by the idea of being a magus. I mean, I’d be a magus for crying out loud! I wouldn’t be some nobody chanting spells, but a recognized scholar! There wasn’t a person alive who didn’t want to hear the words, “Excuse me, Professor.”
Uh...maybe that was a bit off the mark, but whatever.
Regardless, I had amassed enough to bring one of Dexterity or Hybrid Sword Arts to Scale IX and have a bit of pocket change left over. Part of the goal I’d set for myself when planning out my final build was now within reach, and the ambition that realization sparked was difficult to contain. I know I’d talked about recognizing the limits of a lone blade, but my long commitment to the craft had left me fixated on the idea.
Crap. As soon as I began thinking about swords, the troublemaker at my feet started spewing toxic waves, begging to be used. No one said anything about swinging you around this very instant. Besides, my add-ons are all for one-handed swords, so I’m really not equipped to handle a zweihander.
As I shook the thoughts out of my brain, my earring jingled. The crisp, dainty chime evoked the same feeling as a certain someone’s whispers; with it came a phantom scent that tickled my nostalgic sentiment. A familiar tingle lapped at my tailbone, slowly traveling up my spine to caress my brain.
“Yeah...I know.”
I had left my hometown behind with a promise that I would end my servitude within five years, all to play out the role of a cool brother protecting his baby sister. My initial impetus was all the purpose I needed. Besides, the burning passion for the adventures I’d spent a lifetime drowning in had yet to flicker away in this new world. Not even the most painful, agonizing moments of facing my own end could curb my yearning for more.
I had thrown myself into the jaws of death to save Elisa from kidnappers, fended off a daemonic surprise attack while I was resting, and walked on a knife’s edge to take down the powerful ogre in the dilapidated manor. I had shouldered a duty to carry Helga’s memory in the deepest corners of my heart; I had fought tooth and nail to drag myself out of an ichor maze with a sworn friend by my side. Every single episode had been traumatic in its own right, and I’d internally vowed to renounce mortal combat forever after each.
Yet my mind wandered to when I’d rescued Charlotte and won a fey knife that shone brightest when I was at my most desperate; to her last remnant which twinkled back at me to this day; to how Mika and I had cheered when we’d heard the bounty for the bandits we’d rounded up. The moment of fulfillment as I felled an insurmountable foe to conquer an ichor maze was blindingly bright in my memory. Every single one of these cherished events had come with unparalleled joy.
The emotion was the same as, and yet altogether different from, the pen-and-paper adventures I’d shared with my dear colleagues a world away. This new-made joy reeked of blood and iron, but it was just as unforgettable as what we had shared through scribbled notes, clattering dice, and fits of hysterical laughter.
I wasn’t wishing for something as moronic as cheap thrills, nor was I stupid enough to deny the value in a quiet life. My parents now and my parents then had taught me how precious a thing peaceful days could be.
“But...I just can’t give up on it.”
When all was said and done, my adventures had been fun—even if death grazed the bridge of my nose, even if despair nipped at my ankles on my path through hell. I’d only done this twice, and both times had been short enough to fit in a single session, but as idiotic as it was, I looked back on those experiences with deep adoration.
Sharing supper at a happy dinner table, hooting and hollering at a bar, and leaning against another’s shoulder for a muted chat were all occasions to treasure; yet the heat of quixotic life had already permeated my being. It was incredible how excited I became after the fact when, while searching for an exit to the ichor maze, I’d cussed out the brain-dead GM for their godsawful balance, swearing to never engage with their work again.
At first, this longing felt like something I’d left behind somewhere in the deep past, but it sat so very right in my soul. Like a weight dropping straight into my heart, I caught the feeling and accepted it without resistance. Chewing on it, I found it to contain the same flavor as the walk to the train station after a completed session, full of friendly chatter.
It’s over, but there’s always next time; there’ll be a next time because it’s over.
I think I was just a fool, fated to spend the rest of my life griping about life-threatening perils and fondly reminiscing as soon as the danger had passed. I knew that the felt-lined table of adventure required a steep buy-in: I was betting my own life. But even then, I knew I’d push all my chips to the center as soon as the next session began.
“Hah,” I chuckled in realization. “I’m the same as them.”
Sixty flat drachmae wasn’t enough to retire for life, but anyone else would have taken it to improve their quality of life and treat themselves to a small splurge. Yet here I was, with my sister’s future and my own wanderlust the only things on my mind—it was plain as day that I wasn’t in a position to be judging Lady Agrippina or Lady Leizniz.
And in that case, I would see this through to the end.
Besides, if I really ended up wanting the prestige, I could always come back after I was done having fun. Lady Leizniz had once grumbled about the geezers she had to teach, so the College probably didn’t have an age limit.
There was only one thing left to do. I peered into the sheets of data and dove into my own world.
“I wonder what I should take next...”

Tprg4.2

[Tips] The wealth disparity in these times is incomparably massive relative to that of modern Earth. Each of Feige’s transcriptions costs tens if not hundreds of drachmae; Agrippina’s yearly expenditure on leisure reading easily enters the triple digits; Leizniz has already squandered two hundred to clothe the siblings from Konigstuhl.
“Ah, it is good to see you well, my young swordsman.”
The iatrurge had given me permission to get up for some light exercise by the time Sir Feige came to visit us, and he’d brought a gift wrapped in cloth and the early cold of a northern winter. Three days prior he’d sent us forewarning of his arrival as aristocrats are wont to do; the theatrics of slipping a dried, magical leaf in through a closed window to herald his arrival was a clear vestige of his time winning bread in the harsh markets of the imperial capital.
“What an honor it is to have you, Sir Feige,” I said, kneeling down and bowing my head. “I am delighted to make your acquaintance once more, and offer my sincerest thanks for your magnanimous hospitality.”
We commoners had an ordained process for welcoming a visit from a member of the upper crust. Mika and I had both lived in the capital long enough to know that these rules were absolute, even if we knew the noble in question was laid-back enough to forgive casual conversation. Until he went through the hoops of explicitly allowing us to ease up, we had to stay sharp.
“Now, now, no need to be so formal.” With a benevolent wave of his hand, the treant beckoned us to rise. “Honorifics are little more than ornaments in this region anyhow. More importantly, would you introduce me to this charming mage by your side?”
Surprisingly enough, Sir Feige was dressed to the nines. His dark navy doublet and leggings went well with his barky skin and the silvery accent of his foliage. While the design was careful to emphasize the man’s casual demeanor, it retained the traditional elements of attire Rhinian aristocrats so highly prized—fashionistas notwithstanding. In fact, his family crest was even sewn onto his overcoat, making his attire fit for a meeting with fellow nobles.
This was clearly overkill for a visit with two lowborn children, making the weight of his respect all the heavier on my shoulders. I could barely keep myself from shrinking away.
“This is my dear friend,” I said. “She’s the mage I spoke of when I first reported to you.”
“It is an honor to meet you, Sir Feige,” Mika followed. “I am Mika, a student of the Imperial College of Magic, School of First Light. I offer you my deepest gratitudes for your considerate care in nursing my dear friend and me to good health. I swear to one day repay this debt to you.”
“Please,” Sir Feige said, “don’t be so stiff, my little heroes. I too was once a lay sapling, and am no more than a single branch of an old tree. Come, let’s sit. I’ve brought you pastries from a baker in the city.”
At his invitation, I led him to the tea table and pulled out a chair. Whether lady or gentleman, the person of lower standing was always expected to do so for those above them.
The furniture belonged to the doctor, who’d readied everything upon receiving word of Sir Feige’s arrival. Grand enough to suit a magus’s tastes, it was horribly out of place next to the sickbeds; still, it paired well with the treant’s dignified appearance. As I showed the gentleman to his seat, Mika brought over the teapot she’d prepared in advance. In another display of wealth, we’d been given a set of ivory-white porcelain to entertain our guest. Lady Agrippina’s china was more than a few cuts above this, but even so, the teaware was well out of our price range.
I’d found it curious that a magus skilled enough to master iatrurgy would live out on the brink of nowhere, but I felt like I knew why now. The hospital itself was stately yet simple, and it was evident that Sir Feige appreciated the doctor’s choices in decor. Much like the master scrivener, the doctor must have grown sick of Berylin and washed up here.
After taking our seats, we partook in a relaxing tea break. Mika had brewed the red tea perfectly, and it seemed Sir Feige was fond of whatever root she’d used. With how dry the early months of winter get, the old treant was perennially keen to rehydrate.
We unpackaged the pastries he’d brought us, and these were equally delectable. Not too sweet, the snacks drew out the tea’s aromatic flavor with a delicate touch of molasses and just enough chew to satisfy the jaw.
Our conversation went from introductions to personal history to old memories—all fun topics to share. Alas, the peaceful atmosphere lasted only until we finished talking about the joys and struggles of working in Berylin.
“I see,” Sir Feige said. “With all that experience, it’s hardly any wonder how you two managed such an impressive feat. Indeed, you’re more than worthy of my trust with this.”
Satisfied with our qualifications, he reached into his inner pocket and produced a wooden box. It was clearly too large to fit in his doublet: more specifically, it was just big enough to perfectly enclose that infernal tome he’d shown me in his office.
“Urp,” I grunted, the memories flooding back to my mind.
“What in the world?” Mika’s eyes went wide as she stared at the intricate patterns of sealing text etched into the wood.
These engravings were no mere embellishments; rather, the chaotic array of intersecting lines was the furthest thing from the aesthetic symmetry that dominated imperial taste. Too misshapen to be magic and too blasphemous to be the work of gods, the repulsive design could only be a lock meant to contain something even more hideous. Only from a distance could I see that the lawless strokes actually arranged into a congeries of bubbles.
“I present to you the reward for your labors: the Compendium of Forgotten Divine Rites.”
“Thank—” I swallowed back the lump in my throat as I took the box. “Thank you very much.”
The corrupted tome’s presence was overwhelming, despite its seal. I didn’t have any difficulty imagining what horrors would await me if I tried to hold it with my bare hands.
“The book has been fastened with four layers of divine protection, eight layers of magic, and a physical lock. Fear not, little one. That case will not open by mere accident; you can leave it unattended in an unused drawer until the end of the universe, if you so choose.”
Frankly, I was beginning to get the feeling that doing so would be for the best: I wanted to bury the thing so deep underground that no one would ever be able to reach it again. I hadn’t thought about it much when receiving my orders, but what the hell did the madam want this paper brick of pure evil for? I’d known she was a voracious and indiscriminate reader from the lists of texts she had me fetch from her bookshelves and the College library, but I couldn’t fathom why she’d want to read this.
“I pray that your master will make use of their good sense when dealing with this,” Sir Feige said. “For safe measure, I suggest you carry the case and key separately.”
“...We shall heed your prudent advice. Mika, will you hang on to this?”
As I picked up the weighty brass, a sudden thought bubbled up in my mind: why not push it into the lock? I knew the key itself was free of any curse, so this had to be the same appel du vide that had implored me to read the thing during my first encounter.
Mika swallowed her breath. After looking back and forth between me and the box, she finally mustered up enough courage to stick out her hand with a nod. I dropped the key into her palm, and her trembling fingers squeezed tight on the metal. She quickly stashed it in her inner pocket to dispel the lingering gloom.
For my part, I picked up the box and thrust it deep into the knapsack laying by my bed. I dug out everything I’d packed, including the extra clothes I had yet to touch, just to bury the tome at the very bottom. I swore not to let my hand wander in until I was all the way home.
“Hrm,” Sir Feige groaned. “I’m sorry to have soured our pleasant chat. Unfortunately, I couldn’t just leave this matter unsettled.”
“It had to happen eventually,” I said. “There’s no need for undue consideration, sir.”
With the manifestation of villainy out of sight, my woozy mind finally regained its edge. Now that I knew how unbearable it could be when locked up, I was even more grateful that I’d been spared the fate of hauling it around raw.
“But what was that thing?” Mika asked, clutching the key in her pocket. “What is a forgotten god?”
Although she spoke more to herself than to Sir Feige, I had been too scared to do even that when I’d first seen the tome.
The old treant grunted and stroked his chin. The white leaves of his beard were like morning fog made solid, and his twinkling scarab eyes shone through the haze; he was trying to assess how much he could tell us.
“Divine strength comes from faith,” he began. “The gods’ might is born from the love of lesser life-forms. However, there is no guarantee that their power will tread a righteous path.”
“Do you mean the difference between good and evil gods?” I asked.
“No, little one, those are mere rifts in doctrine or personal values. How should I put this? Goodwill is not always welcome in our world, you see. For example...”
Sir Feige began to speak of an ancient deity in a land far to our east. It no longer had any followers, but in its heyday had spread its name with the dogma that “death is freedom.” The god had declared this ephemeral realm to be devoid of respite; the suffering of mortals was so prevalent because that was all their world contained. I could see the argument. Maitreya, the future Buddha that had brought me to this world—at least, as far as I could gather—and his predecessor Gautama had come to the same conclusion in the Heart Sutra.
The principle that knowledge of the suffering that fleeting reality entailed was prerequisite to understanding the weight of emancipation from it grasped at the fundamental roots of Buddhism; yet for whatever reason, the god Sir Feige spoke of had decided to declare suicide and homicide the highest forms of charity, teaching its followers that killing was the purest goodwill.
Neighboring pantheons denounced the blasphemous deity and eliminated it and its faithful alike. Nowadays, it was just another villain in the long annals of history, with but a handful of scriptures to its name.
“Countless atrocities arise from good intentions,” Sir Feige said. “Even in the Empire, we have lords who implement disastrous reforms, cantons that crumble due to misplaced kindness, and towns that go up in flames when well-meaning actions go south... The list goes on.”
Similarly, he explained that while many a god had been brought to heel on account of the consequences of their misguided altruism, none had ever lost their names.
“Whether their intentions be good or ill, gods are only forgotten when their existence itself is considered a scourge on this planet. To be, to be known, and to be spoken of are their greatest sins; they are so supremely heretical that the heavens let mere mortals engage in the insolence of god-slaying. You’d be better off not thinking about them too deeply.”
“Just knowing about them can bring us harm?”
“That’s right. Some forgotten gods will curse your soul forever if you so much as utter their name, and others will begin their schemes as soon as your mind acknowledges them. Thus, we bury them along with their monikers, forever entombed in a land without remembrance. The manuscript I worked off of was a copy of a copy of the original, each filtered through the barriers of language, and I still could have been in danger had I not been a treant.”
Holy crap. The tome was a nested translation four generations deep, and it still gave off concentrated ill omen. Sir Feige had to be truly outstanding to have powered through his work in conditions like that.
“Hrm... I’ve spoiled the mood again with my tiresome chatter. Come now, let’s move on to something else.” The treant downed his remaining tea and cut through the heavy silence with a loud clap, putting on his biggest smile. In place of forgotten gods, he asked us to tell him a tale: “What exactly went on in the ichor maze?”
Of course, I’d given him a general rundown of the events upon returning to Wustrow, but I’d skipped most of the details in order to speed along the process of finding an iatrurge. What he was asking for now was a proper retelling.
I glanced at Mika. She was staring at me as if to ask for permission to speak...so I caved and nodded. Refusing an aristocrat’s request was a difficult proposition, and we didn’t really have anything to hide.
Now, I know this isn’t something to state with such certainty, but I verifiably lack literary talent. I studied palatial writing under Lady Agrippina as part of my duties, and her great acclaim of my skills had come in the form of doubting whether I’d ever be able to break into high society.
The incomprehensible practice of littering letters with poetry—okay, maybe I could come to terms with the letters, but I refused to acknowledge their need in official records—had quickly exposed my wanting abilities. Honestly, I couldn’t bring myself to waste my experience points on such things, so I’d readily accepted that I simply wasn’t suited to storytelling.
Naturally, I’d need to bite the bullet if I wanted to become a diplomat or magus, but as an adventurer-hopeful I had no need for linguistic mastery.
However, the same could not be said of Mika: she’d landed at the College gates with the lofty dream of bettering her homeland as a full-fledged magus, and had diligently studied all the accessory fields on the road to professorship. When we tossed lyrical lines back and forth, mine were always quotes from sagas that had stuck with me; in contrast, she was creative enough to sometimes ad-lib new material.
So listening to her passionately depict our adventure with more fervor than any minstrel left me staring blankly into the distance, thinking, Wowee, this Erich fellow sure is something. It was just that, well, her narration was so laden with splendiferous rhetoric that I couldn’t help but wonder what alien species she’d seen to come up with such magnificence.
Hearing her say my “twinkling eyes put the glimmering veil of the night sky to shame,” or that my “sweet golden locks were the envy of the Harvest Goddess Herself,” didn’t even give me time to blush; I skipped straight to tapping her shoulder to calm her down.
By far the worst aspect of her oration was that it managed to light a fire in Sir Feige’s soul. He’d whipped out a notepad and had begun writing down everything.
I was intensely curious about his handwriting now that I could see it in person: although the inky letters only gave off a faint trace of mana, whatever spells or cantrips he used were efficiency epitomized when it came to turning a mad scribble into a perfectly typeset font. Alas, I couldn’t focus on his technique with Mika going on about this strange hero, whom I found equal parts familiar and exotic.
Every now and again, I interrupted her romanticized account to clarify that my intentions hadn’t been so grand, but each time, she simply stated, “Don’t be so humble,” and went on without skipping a beat. Sir Feige and his note-taking were much the same.
“Incredible,” the treant said. “What a fine story. I’d wished to have this tale packaged into a proper song when the little swordsman first told it to me, but that desire now burns stronger than ever. Would you two mind if I asked a friend of mine to put your exploits to meter?”
“W-Wait!” I shouted. “Please, reconsi—”
“Really?!” Mika exclaimed. “Are you listening, Erich?! We’re going to have a poem! We’ll be part of a real saga!”
My friend grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me with more zeal and vigor than I’d ever seen her display. Her cheeks were rosy from excitement and she panted with every breath; had the circumstances been any different, I would have mistaken her for a cat in heat.
“Stop!” I pleaded. “Calm down, Mika! I’m not as cool as you make me out to be! No one wants to hear about a pair of heroes dragging themselves home with blood, sweat, and indescribables dribbling from every pore!”
“Don’t be stupid, old pal!” Mika retorted. “That’s exactly what makes our story good!”
“That’s right, little one,” Sir Feige chimed in. “I may love the heroic epics wherein a conundrum knottier than a seaman’s hitch is cleared with the faint flick of a sword, but those that end with the protagonist exhausting all their strength to rip victory from the jaws of defeat are just as splendid. Fret not about the money; I’ll be sure to give you your share.”
“No, that’s not what I meant!”
Please, old chum, have mercy. Not only had Mika heavily dramatized our feats, but she was also apparently wearing a thick pair of rose-tinted glasses when looking at me.
Ours had not been such an impressive victory. We’d been on the brink of defeat, and awoke covered in dust, mud, and the blood seeping from our countless wounds. We’d summoned up the dregs of our mana, shamelessly clinging to any and every means to extend our fleeting lives. If nothing else, the tale was unfit to be immortalized by a poet that spoke to Sir Feige’s tastes for rhapsodic heroism.
It easily took me over two hours to curb the nobleman’s mischief and straighten out the loose screws in my friend’s brain. While I wouldn’t deny that this made for a great change of pace after losing my sanity to the damned tome, I didn’t appreciate the mental fatigue that came with this public humiliation.
In the end, I managed to convince Sir Feige not to publish the saga, but he remained adamant on having it written for personal use. He said he knew of the perfect poet, one whom he regularly patronized, but I really, really did not appreciate it.
He also said he’d send us each a copy whenever the saga was completed, but I knew by this point that I’d seal it away somewhere without so much as opening the cover. This wasn’t just for my soundness of mind: can you imagine what would happen if Lady Agrippina were to see it? Just thinking about it made me shudder.
As the tea party came to a close, I was left wondering whether the accursed book or my company had caused me more grief for the day.

[Tips] Divine seals are a form of containment that rely on heavenly miracles to produce. Though they come with several restrictions, once met, the seals rob their mark of power and weaken its influence on its surroundings.

The cold night nipped at my skin. I’ll need to start stuffing my clothes with cotton, I thought.
A few days had passed since Sir Feige’s appointment. This morning, the iatrurge had given me the all clear for more strenuous activity, so I’d made sure my traveling buddy was asleep and sneaked out after dark.
The hospital was one of the finest buildings in Wustrow, with a large fence enveloping both it and the doctor’s residence-slash-office across the yard.
All sorts of herbs grew in the open garden, and there was even a greenhouse in the corner to sustain less cooperative plants. The lot was of respectable size, making it the perfect place to get my body moving.
“All right...”
I held Schutzwolfe’s sheath in my left hand and placed my right on her handle. Everything but the blade itself had been tailor-made for me, and the way my fingers sank into the grip was always euphoric—especially now that I had forgone physical activity for so long.
I whipped my arms forward and stretched my hips to unsheathe her in one fell swoop.
Although European blades were not as known as their Japanese counterparts were for striking from a sheathed position, it would be wrong to assume such tactics were impossible. By maneuvering the upper and lower halves in sync instead of relying on one’s hands alone, a sword could rapidly be freed from its shackles.
My surging blade sliced through the night air with a whistle. A flurry of sideways strikes followed, and as I warmed up, I twirled Schutzwolfe into a backhanded stance to bring her down from above.
Every limb, every digit, was one. The movement of one muscle rippled through joints to affect all its peers, and congruent harmony created a system more than the sum of its parts.
I kicked off the soil, landing in a way to send the force of impact to my chest. With a turn of my shoulder and a delicate flick of my wrists, I slashed horizontally, vertically, and diagonally, both up and down. Every attack cut through the imaginary shadows of necks, armpits, and wrists exposed through cracks in armor.
“Urgh...”
Yet my form was far from satisfactory. My breathing fell into disarray within a hundred swings, and my arms and thighs felt heavy. With every strike, the splitting sound of the air grew louder to inform me of my wasted movements. Allowing the edge of my blade to tilt by even the slightest degree increased drag and displaced more and more air. An impeccable attack—one worthy of being dubbed critical—compelled the atmosphere to stay silent. Yet my unsightly movements were a far cry from cutting down the formless air around me.
I had rusted in every way: my flesh, my bones, and most importantly, my senses.
Taking weeks to rest was far too much to allow me to retain my desired level of skill. I hadn’t decayed to the point of frailty, but I knew that if my past self were to appear before me, I wouldn’t last more than five exchanges before losing my head. The question now was how long it would take to regain what I’d lost.
Come to think of it, I’d seen an interesting trait a while back when I’d been pondering my build. Quick Healer shortened the total time needed to make a full recovery, and there were a few others that made it harder to lose muscle memory once attained.
Up until now, I’d been tunneling on jacking up my maximum damage throughput, but maybe it was time to start taking long-term traits and skills that would help me over the course of a campaign. The future Buddha’s blessing allowed me to build myself up like a tabletop character, but did nothing to shape the world into that of a TRPG; I couldn’t expect a full heal to fall into my hands at the end of every session.
Cliched as it is to say, he who has no health has nothing. I couldn’t deny that taking care of my body was one of my most important tasks as an adventurer. In fact, killing this much time whenever I got injured was sure to cut into my ability to do what I needed to do.
“Ugh, augh... Blegh... Ahh...”
As soon as I eased up, the terrible cramps in my wrists, knees, and all the other joints I had abused wielding a sword set in. I panted more than ever before, and my whole mouth tasted like iron.
I was embarrassingly sluggish. I’d need to draft up a proper schedule to get myself back on track. I pulled over my waterskin with an Unseen Hand and took a long gulp. With a sad sigh, I returned Schutzwolfe to her sheath; I was definitely going to be sore in the morning. Still, I had more to do: I hadn’t chosen to come out at nighttime on a whim. With the doctor’s approval out of the way, I could have easily done this when the sun was up. Mika wasn’t the overprotective type, anyway.
But I couldn’t exactly test this in broad daylight.
“Come.”
I imbued my voice with will and a sword instantly appeared in my outstretched hand. Reality neither warped nor tore; the sword simply materialized between my fingers like it had always been there.
Howling cheers assaulted my mind. The unpalatable brainquakes were packed with its ecstasy at the thought of being swung. I’d figured that it was best to test the sword, seeing how I couldn’t rid myself of it and all. But I wasn’t just testing how it measured up as a weapon; I needed to see how much of a threat it posed.
Darker than the lightless night, its blade gleamed under the moon. Near the hilt, the engravings blinked on and off with a haunting glow. Although it was monstrously large in my childlike hands, it wasn’t too heavy to wield. Despite its age, the handle was absolutely perfect—irritatingly, even more so than Schutzwolfe’s, which had been specifically made for me. The center of mass was perfectly placed. I wouldn’t grow tired using this sword for hours at a time, yet it still allocated enough weight near the tip that the sharpest part of its edge had significant heft.
I swung it around a few times and could tell that my base mastery in Hybrid Sword Arts without any two-handed-weapon add-ons was enough to create a devastating attack. Even with my tattered arms, I could command it with enough force to split the cold night with no more than a faint whistle.
The sword was magnificent...but oddly enough, that was it.
This was undeniably a mystic blade, and not of the Excalibur or Durandal varieties. No hero would carry an arm of this make; it was the sort of weapon you’d find in the hands of a cursed prince or stumble upon in the family feuds of the Poetic Edda.
Yet holding it now, I felt nothing. It was simply an impeccable sword, and while I found its mind-grating screams tiresome, there was nothing more to it.
It did not urge me to harvest blood and souls for my dark lord, nor did it magically improve my swordsmanship. I didn’t have any problems letting go after taking it into hand either.
“I can’t believe it’s actually safe...”
I was not a blithering enough idiot to pick up an obviously evil nightmare without any thought. I’d made sure to consult Ursula beforehand, since she seemed to understand the thing to some degree. When I’d asked her about the dangers, she’d replied that the sword would be content if I loved it as a sword, and swore that its only quirk was its chatty nature.
I’d remained skeptical. Can you blame me? Sure, it looked cool, but its aesthetic appeal was not that of a shining white knight; it paired better with an unholy villain in full black armor, trimmed with bloody red to boot. One testimony from a friendly alf wasn’t quite enough to assure me.
After finishing my trial run, I wiped the sweat from my brow and stuck the Craving Blade in the ground, only to be met with pleading. It felt like a dog begging to turn off the path home in order to extend its walk. But when I placed my hand on the pommel and expressed my exhaustion, it sent me one last disappointed thought before giving way to silence.
...Huh. I guess it’s willing to listen to me.
Quenching my thirst, I looked up at the moon. I would have to think about my relationship with this thing on my way home. Naturally, I planned to reserve judgment until I could ask the madam for her opinion in Berylin...but even so, the Craving Blade was my reward for this little adventure.

[Tips] Cursed mystic blades are more than tall tales—they exist, and the College keeps several corrupted specimens locked away in the depths of its great library.

Having been born in the temperate lands of South Rhine, the swift and frigid approach of the northern winter was merciless beyond belief.
“It’s already snowing...”
When Mika and I had finished our preparations to return to Berylin, we looked much bulkier from all the stuffing in our clothes. We had busted out the winter gear we’d packed just in case our stay in Wustrow dragged on, and the extra padding was a token of Sir Feige’s compassion. Judging from how fluffy it was, the cotton he’d given us was a high-quality import from the east. Thanks to his present, we managed to avoid spreading what we had on hand too thinly.
“We never even used cotton this nice back home,” Mika said.
“What? You guys use cotton in the north?”
I looked over in surprise. The extra layers rounded out her silhouette, heightening her childish cuteness, but her eyes were anything but: she was glaring at me like I was some sort of moron.
“We might be used to putting up with the cold, but we’re still humanfolk. The werewolves and selchies still barely wear anything in the wintertime, but regular mensch and tivisco have to bundle up. In fact, I’m pretty sure most of what we earn goes into heating our homes.”
“Oh... I didn’t know. I’ve just heard that joke about how ‘it’ll be a cold year when the northerners put on sleeved shirts’ and all.”
“That’s an exaggerated stereotype.” It was rare for her to find a joke so unamusing. She puffed her nose and finished packing the last of our souvenirs and foodstuffs onto Castor’s back.
Speaking of which, Castor and Polydeukes were dressed just as nicely as we were. Again, the blankets keeping them warm were a gift from Sir Feige, seeing as the medical treatment had been the cause for our delayed departure.
Horses are truly a hardy lot. Despite originating in warm climates, workhorses held strong in the snowy farmlands of the north. The stalwart creatures could push through snow even when the temperature was below freezing, and those not born in polar regions could grow accustomed to the cold over time.
However, while they remained lively on days where we mensch would freeze, the cold impacted their caloric efficiency. Their resistance to the elements apparently stemmed from the heat they produced in their intestines while digesting—I’d been blindsided by the awfully modern science behind this knowledge—so they required more and more food as the temperature dropped.
Thus, Sir Feige had granted the Dioscuri these quilts, so that we wouldn’t be totally hopeless on the off chance we failed to find an inn.
The “little adventure” he’d sent us on may have turned out to be an unliving nightmare, but I almost felt guilty for how well he’d accommodated us. I made a mental note to write a proper thank-you letter as soon as I returned home.
“All right,” I said. “We’ve made a lot of memories here, but I think it’s time to go.”
“Yup,” Mika said. “The clouds look like light, powdery snow, but who knows what’ll happen tomorrow? I doubt the roads will get blocked off, but we’d better hurry back south.”
Spoken like a true northerner. Mika felt something that I didn’t as she stared up at the gray skies. Maybe those eyes were looking somewhere else—somewhere far north of Wustrow.
I, too, wanted to visit her homeland one day. Living at the Imperial College made it difficult to leave the capital. Without trains or cars, long-distance travel took heaps of money and time. She would likely never get a chance to return home until she achieved the grand ambitions that had led her to Berylin to begin with.
My situation was not far from hers...but I had Elisa. I couldn’t imagine how difficult it must have been to leave home at such a young age to live in a faraway land with foreign etiquette and foreign foods, all without a single person by her side.
“...You don’t have to worry about me, Erich.”
“Huh?”
“How long do you think we’ve been together? I can guess what you’re thinking from the look on your face.”
Mika put her foot on Castor’s stirrup and nimbly leapt on; the clumsiness she’d shown months ago was nowhere to be found. She pulled down her scarf and flashed me a sunny smile.
“I miss my hometown a lot—so much that I want to head there this very instant.” She offered me her hand and continued, “But I’ll be fine. I have a friend now, don’t I?”
“...Yeah. You’re right. Let’s go home, old chum.”
“Let’s, old pal.”
I voiced my concerns that riding double from the outset might tire out Castor, but Mika’s hand remained outstretched. Unable to outlast her enthusiasm, I took it and climbed on behind her.
“I’ll lead for once. I can’t cling to your back forever, can I?”
Mika’s smile was beaming with pride, so I silently put my hands around her waist. The sensation in my hands was different from the countless rides we’d shared in the past: softer and rounder, her body was markedly more feminine. Yet even so, my heart was almost comically calm.
Mika is here. My friend may look different on the outside, but nothing has changed at all. That thought alone was a comfort like no other.
Our steed’s hooves advanced down the road with the characteristic clopping of horseback travel. Once the layered drone of footsteps began, it refused to cease; more and more, the scenery behind us disappeared with every passing second.
In that moment, I had an epiphany: this must be the meaning of adventure.
And with this realization came another: no matter how ordinary my life in the capital had become, the dream branded onto my soul would never fade. Surely I would set out, time and time again, to see this scenery just one more time. I would chase this indescribable melancholy and fulfillment that awaited after a job well done.
“Hey, Mika?”
“What’s up, old pal?”
“I know this was a rough trip...but will you come with me again?”
She didn’t turn back, but pretended to think with a loud “Hrm” to tease me.
Don’t be so mean. I tightened my hold around her waist and put my chin on her shoulder, causing her to let out a ticklish laugh.