32 - Caught

Vivi looked around at the pulverized yard, the toppled trees, the gouges in the ground, and the general state of ruin she’d brought to her home—to Winston’s White Glove Academy.

She’d…definitely gotten carried away.

Hearing Winston’s voice ring across the yard should have inspired happiness. And it did, sort of. But not like it should, thanks to how incriminating her circumstances were.

Guilt, and embarrassment. That was what rushed through her as she realized what she’d done. This was the first impression she would leave on Winston after a century of separation? Coming in and tearing up the grounds he’d painstakingly, loyally maintained, and far worse, attacking his pupils?

Technically, they had attacked first, but she knew that was a flimsy excuse. Considering the absurd gap in their strength, she could have ended the fight before it began. Or at any point in the ensuing battle. With little effort, much less violence.

She would at least own up to her mistake. The truth was, she hadn’t been able to help herself. Getting to fight a Titled-rank combat maid had targeted that vital flaw of hers.

Taking a breath, she braced herself for the well-deserved scolding. She dispelled the [Illusion] concealing her face and turned to Winston.

He had aged. In the game, he had been a refined man in his thirties: tall, broad-shouldered, neatly trimmed beard, and with a mane of combed-back black hair. That black hair was gray now, though the years seemed to have done more good than harm—and he hadn’t been unattractive to begin with. He’d turned into a bit of a silver fox.

That said, a century had certainly left its mark. She wouldn’t call him old, but his wrinkles were plentiful and marked him as decidedly not a spring chicken. Time had worked at a quarter of the speed it should have, she estimated, so he looked to be in his late fifties—two and a half decades added on.

On Vivi turning to him, his green eyes widened, and though she got the sense he was a hard man to surprise, he took a step backward in pure shock.

Vivi felt like she needed to explain herself. She cleared her throat and said, “They weren’t in danger. I just…wanted to test their capabilities.”

It was the most generous spin she could put on her behavior without outright lying. She hoped Winston wouldn’t be too upset, but it would be more than deserved.

With Vivi having peeled back the [Illusion] covering her robes and face, the Gloves surrounding her reacted with similar displays of astonishment, finally understanding who their opponent was. Which was to say, with widened eyes, a full-body twitch, and other muted reactions. These weren’t men and women who would go dropping their jaws at even the most unbelievable developments. Which, to be fair, the appearance of Vivisari Vexaria, the long-lost hero of legend, surely counted as.

After a long moment of stunned silence, Winston’s expression morphed into something Vivi hadn’t expected. His posture stiffened, his mouth pressed into a line, and his eyes took on a flinty look.

“If you wear her face as some ploy,” the man said tightly, “I warn you, miss, that you will have gone too far.”

Vivi considered him. It wasn’t unreasonable, she supposed, that someone might try to steal her identity as part of a plot. Winston didn’t seem to believe that was the case, but neither was he discounting the possibility.

He wanted proof. And did, indeed, hope she could provide it.

If there was one thing Vivi was good at, it was undeniable proofs of identity.

Fixing the utter destruction she’d brought to Winston’s Academy would help make amends, anyway. So she could kill two birds with one stone.

She raised her staff. The men and women surrounding her tensed, but didn’t move to stop her. They didn’t know if she was an impostor, but even if so, she deserved wariness.

“[Mass Greater Restoration].”

A wave of green energy pulsed out, and when the burst of restorative magic passed over the arranged maids and butlers, their bruises disappeared, their cuts sealed, and a second wind seemed to seize and lift their weary postures up.

Far from being assuaged, the White Gloves eyed her with more caution.

She turned her attention to the grounds. Spells like [Reconstruct] repaired manmade creations: devices or furniture or buildings, or, as previously used, Convoys. Certain druidic spells could regrow or rejuvenate trees, but that wouldn’t suffice either. A fight between so many Titled-strength combatants had done more than tear up the lawn or toss branches around. It was a battlefield, filled with toppled trees, huge cuts in the ground, and smoking craters.

At least the manor had survived. Both she and her opponents had taken care to avoid dragging the fight to it. Not for the building’s sake, but the students inside.

There was one way to fix everything, though even for Vivisari, it would be mana intensive. But down to every misplaced pebble, shattered tile, and blade of grass, she would put the Academy grounds back how she had found it.

For the first time since arriving in this world, she began to cast real magic.

Mana gushed out from her in waves, in such enormous quantities that the air seemed to physically thicken. All five White Gloves staggered, faces paling as they felt the sheer power being poured into the working. Using no less than sixty simultaneous streams of mana, she painted glowing runes into a spell circle that engulfed a third of the expansive estate—dwarfing a regular circle by an order of magnitude. Hundreds of arcane symbols took shape, flowing into each other, bleeding power as they took coherence into a diagram of such complexity that even she struggled to keep it fully in her head.

It was a spell diagram that, if not solely Vivisari Vexaria could form, then surely less than five individuals in the world.

There were a number of magics considered taboo. Some for moral reasons: usurping the mind or soul, to name the prominent offenders. Some for the sheer danger they represented; anyone would frown at a mage sticking their hands into the bloody guts of reality. It was simple logic that one should not, for example, toy with the mechanisms of Fate or breach the dimensional boundary.

Nor should they—and this was the magic she wrought above her estate now—violate that fundamental flow, that mechanism which ushered one minute into the next, the sun across the sky, winter into spring.

Time.

Like necromancy, there was nothing inherently evil about temporal magic, or any arcane working. Nor was it inherently dangerous, so long as one didn’t try to involve sapient creatures—intelligent minds fundamentally couldn’t survive such a violation, nor, indeed, could the fabric of reality. It had been those transgressions that had shaped the Shattered Oracle’s madness and brought his Cataclysms to the world.

But Vivi’s spell was simpler, and she didn’t overstep. She targeted only the grounds and surrounding areas subjected to their duel.

With the last of two thousand and sixty-three runes forming to complete a grand tapestry that would make even an Institute archmage bleed from his eyes and ears to gaze upon, the spell completed.

With a long, keening noise that came from nowhere and everywhere, Vivi reached forward and grabbed something that should never be grabbed.

She borrowed the words of a madman.

“[The Clockwork Unwinds].”

The machinery that held reality together came to a screeching halt. And, with agonizing slowness, began to tick in reverse.

Clumps of soil and pulverized stone leapt from their surroundings and slammed into ragged gouges. Pulverized turf knitted together. Toppled trees shuddered and wrenched upright, splintered trunks patching as thousands of shards slotted together. In several short moments, through a display that left even Vivi speechless, the manor’s grounds restored to their former glory. The battle’s collateral damage playing in reverse for everyone present.

The spell ended. She lowered her staff, link severing and gushing mana conduits closing. Her legs wobbled. Even Vivisari had her limits, and violating one of the fundamental rules of the universe had approached them.

Or, at least, had cost enough she could feel it for the first time. She was a long way from manaburn, but that certainly hadn’t been magic she could cast dismissively.

As she came back to awareness, she found an audience staring at her. And in a way wholly unlike before. Not just astonishment. But awe, in the biblical sense. Equal part horror.

To be fair, she felt the same.

Winston alone wore a different expression. He was smiling. A reserved, mild quirk of his lips, as befitting a butler’s composure.

He bowed.

“Welcome home, Mistress Vivisari. I’ve managed the estate in your absence—I hope you find everything to your satisfaction.”

The resulting silence was deafening. The five White Gloves stood mute for obvious reasons. Vivi’s lack of response, though, was different.

Winston wasn’t upset? She had torn up the grounds and assaulted his pupils. Even if she’d fixed most of the damage, surely he was angry.

If not, she almost felt worse.

“Of course,” Vivi finally said. “Yes. Thank you. Like I said, sorry for the…commotion. We have a lot to talk about, Winston.”

“Indeed we do, Mistress.”

Vivi scanned the dumbfounded maids and butlers who held their weapons halfway at the ready, with confusion, knowing the fight had ended but not willing to lower their only means of defense against the terrifying monster—however impotent they knew resistance would be.

Her eyes fell on her first and primary victim. “Thank you for the spar. Winston trained you well. You’re not hurt?”

A complicated series of expressions flashed across her face, predominant among them incredulity and bewilderment. Getting control of herself, she dispelled her weapon, enormous battle axe melting into silver smoke. She curtsied stiffly and said, “My deepest apologies, Mistress Vivisari. I should have appraised the situation more carefully. My actions today were unforgivable.”

Vivi blinked. What? She was clearly the one at fault. Maybe the maid had acted rashly too, but leaping to protect the Academy from an invader was far less unreasonable than Vivi’s own reasoning of ‘she had really wanted to fight the super cool combat maid’. She was going to be mortified about that for years to come.

“You were simply defending your home,” Vivi said, and her face would be burning red if not for her body’s built-in stoicism.

The woman held the curtsy, not raising her eyes to meet Vivi’s. The other four maids and butlers were doing the same, she noticed.

She felt, suddenly, extremely out of place. More than usual for being the center of attention.

What was she supposed to say?

Before the silence could linger, Winston said, “Constance, if you could restore order to the Academy? I will attend to Mistress Vivisari myself.”

The Glove of the First Class—Constance, apparently—rose. She nodded at Winston and, with another curtsy for Vivi, excused herself, hastily taking long, refined strides toward the manor’s open doors. The others did the same, their composure likewise restored. If forced. It was an undeniable retreat.

“I see you’ve changed little over the years, Mistress Vivisari,” Winston finally said when they were alone, a tinge of amusement coloring his voice.

She paused. What did that mean?

“How so?” she asked carefully.

Winston considered her, then gave another small smile. “Merely that you are as full of…vitality and whimsy as always.”

Vitality? Whimsy? She stared at him. Surely this man would be the only person in the world to refer to Vivisari in that way.

Or would he? She had assumed that Vivisari’s personality wasn’t the same as her own…but had she been wrong?

“Are you calling me impulsive, Winston?”

“Never, Mistress. That would be unbecoming of a servant to his superior.”

Vivi blinked.

He was sassing her!

Her mood rose, abruptly, all the way to the ceiling. Winston knew her. Or knew Vivisari—and Vivisari must be closer to her, Vivienne, in personality than she’d assumed. Because he was clearly aware of that ‘fatal flaw’ of hers.

Probably, she and Vivisari were the same person. Or alternate versions of each other? However that worked, their cores were the same.

She had wondered how this would work. Meeting people who had known her alternate self. Would they expect a stoic savior of the world, devoid of personality or full of wisdom, or something else entirely? Vivisari’s natural stoicism, the way she never blushed or faltered or jolted in surprise, had made Vivi think that they were different people.

But no. Winston’s first exposure to her after a century had been tolerant exasperation at the totally unnecessary debacle she’d created. He wasn’t surprised in the slightest. Had expected it of her, even.

…unfortunately, that meant she should really reflect on her impulsiveness.

“To be fair, I didn’t start it,” Vivi said. “I just didn’t discourage it, either.”

His lips twitched, and he dipped his head. “Yes, my daughter is also not one for considering her actions, despite my best efforts. I am unsurprised by how this event unfolded.”

“Your daughter?”

“Indeed. Constance is my eldest.”

Oh, no. Not only had Vivi attacked his academy and destroyed the estate he’d carefully managed, but she’d thrown spells of mass destruction at his family. With a blanket guarantee of safety, yes, and she’d restored the grounds. But still. It was the principle of the matter.

How was this man not upset with her?

Amused, and once more proving he knew her beyond a superficial manner, Winston predicted what she was thinking and said, "She has seen far more than her fair share of battle, Mistress Vivisari, and she left with no injuries, merely wounded pride. While perhaps shaken, all five of the men and women you instructed today will appreciate what transpired. There are few experiences so invaluable as a reminder of how far you have left to climb. Indeed, as a father, I thank you for providing her such a lesson. Being humbled in this manner may save her life in the years to come.”

There was wisdom in the words, certainly, but she couldn’t just agree. “That’s quite the spin you’ve put on things, Winston.”

“Such is the role of a diligent servant. In all matters, his lady’s image comes first. But rest assured. I mean what I said.”

She studied him, then relaxed. “I’m glad, then.”

A second passed, and in the lapse of conversation, her eyes idly flicked over his shoulder, into the manor’s interior.

He read the cue. “May I show you inside, Mistress Vivisari?”

“If you don’t mind. I’d like to see what you’ve done with the place.”