The tale that follows is not from the time line we know—but it might have been, had the dice fallen differently...
Two Full Hendersons Ver0.1
2.0 Hendersons
The main story is irreparably busted. The campaign ends.
There once was a mansion in which pitiful victims were turned into wax dolls, fated to cry out for mercy every torturous night—perhaps I’d read it in a poem a lifetime ago. I found myself in a similar position to the keeper of such an estate: perhaps I had become the cryptic old man tasked with luring in sorry young ladies.
A breeze rolled in from the open window and turned a page in my book; only then did I realize that I’d dozed off. I raised my nodding head to see that the elements had stolen quite a number of pages from me, suggesting that I’d been out for some time.
Alas, resisting the realm of dreams is so difficult in old age.
Shaking off my lingering drowsiness, I decided to make sure my workplace was all in order. I set down my book and stood up to a view of countless works of art. Paintings covered the walls, depicting young boys and girls in fantastic outfits and immortalizing their smiling faces. Statues of stone and bronze stood unchanging, as packed full of timeless youth as the day they’d been made.
Every piece in this room had been handcrafted by an expert artisan. Each portrait and carving was so perfect that one might confuse this hall for a vault in the Empire’s Central Museum of Fine Arts. Some had been painted by young artists who would go on to become historic masters, while others had been chiseled by the same hand that now shaped the Emperor’s official busts; in terms of sheer pricelessness, the collection certainly rivaled the imperial stockpile.
Yet all this had been created to serve the interests of a single person—and what eccentric interests she had. Upon closer inspection, one could easily discern the tastes of this room’s owner: after all, the only throughline connecting all these art pieces was the beautiful children.
Newborns snoozed in baby clothes and adolescents celebrated their coming of age in full formal wear, but not a single one remained past the age of fifteen. Some had been physically no different from adults, but their stills had been carefully composed to draw out their lingering innocence.
The owner of this room loved children—in more ways than one. She loved doting on cute kids, dressing them up in clothes of her design, and having her favorites meet and play with one another. That alone made her sound like a wonderful philanthropist with a penchant for spoiling the young, but one look at the gorgeous figures dancing in these oilworks was enough to refute the thought.
This space belonged to an abnormal soul whose love only reached children of impeccable beauty.
I could find no better descriptor than irredeemable for her hobbies; an impartial observer was liable to furrow their brow, no doubt. Still, I supposed she compared favorably against some of the actual villains that roamed the world, seeing as she never once laid a finger on the objects of her affection—again, in more ways than one.
“Ah... How nostalgic.”
I patrolled about, inspecting the gossamer layers of enchantment protecting each piece from dust and sunlight, until my eyes stopped on a portrait. Newer paintings hung farther back in the room, and I’d traversed at least two full generations’ worth of them to return here.
The oil painting was two arm spans across and showed a brother and sister smiling. The girl clad in heaping snow-white frills could be no more than ten; she sat gracefully in a chair, forming the focal point of the piece. The boy laid a hand on her shoulder as he stood beside, dressed in a plain yet classy suit of full black.
I cared little about the boy, but the girl was adorable. The brushstrokes of her hair looked as though they could come alive at any moment, yet still they paled in comparison to the heavenly gold of her true form. Her round, amber eyes were much the same, as the real things shone more brilliantly than gemstones.
Of all those on display, I maintained that she was the cutest. I’d said this for as long as I could remember, and the half century that had passed since this portrait’s creation had done nothing to change my mind.
I, however, had changed. The golden hair my sister had once praised now bleached white, and my well-trained body had withered into a shriveled mass of wilting branches. In the end, I never managed to grow a beard, and all that hung off my sorry chin was a flap of pitiful loose skin.
I looked away with a sigh, only to catch my reflection in a glass box guarding a work of art. My gloved fingers ran across the mirrored image of an old, decaying man: my hair was tied up behind my back and a pair of glasses imported from the East adorned my weakening eyes.
Here stood a man once known as Erich from Konigstuhl; then as the honorary student of the leader of the School of Daybreak, Lady Leizniz herself; then by the humiliating name of The Moonlit One upon attaining the title of magus. But all that I saw in the glass now was the seventy-year-old husk that remained in his wake.
I wasn’t bemoaning my opportunity to live out my final years in peace. I could no longer keep up with the hour-to-hour bedlam that had plagued me in my youth, and my lust for adventure was simmering down—not that my love of it had disappeared, mind you. Simply put, I’d realized that it wasn’t a line of work meant for an old codger like me and put the world of adventure behind me.
How could it be otherwise? I’d taken plenty of traits to resist my decline, but I could never muster the will to fight aging itself. This body of mine was showing more signs of wear with each passing moment.
My knees ached every night, the number of midnight trips to the restroom only ever increased, and three days prior, I’d even lost a tooth. I had managed to keep my entire set until the age of sixty, but had lost three teeth in the past decade alone; I couldn’t deny my physical deterioration.
Where I had once wielded Schutzwolfe like my own arm, she now felt heavy in the hand; I hadn’t touched her for more than maintenance or simple exercise in gods knew how long. I had been at my prime as a polemurge just past thirty; I had been able to swing her for two days straight and have energy to spare.
The years take such a toll.
I wondered what my youthful self would have thought seeing me now—especially the boy who had sworn to take his childhood friend on a journey around the world.
Looking back now, it was a strange fate: my employer had sold me off for ten years of liberty without a moment’s hesitation, and I had begrudgingly acquiesced when the wraith dangled the carrot of Elisa’s tuition before my eyes. What had followed was a dazzling display of depravity. I was thrown into more clothes than I could wrap my mind around, taught everything there was to learn, and pushed into bizarre situations with my fellow “favorites” to pose for incomprehensible paintings.
Frankly, my surprise at being promoted from a servant to a magus-hopeful evaporated in the blink of an eye. The moment I became her disciple in both name and fact—as opposed to being her disciple’s servant on loan—the woman threw all semblance of reservation out the window.
I had been utterly terrified by the fact that my personal room in her laboratory was chock-full of extravagant costumes that increased in number with every passing day. I could understand wanting to dress up the cutest girl—now the most beautiful woman—in the world, but I hadn’t been able to comprehend why she’d wanted to do the same to me.
In fact, I still couldn’t understand.
“Erich, are you here?” The door opened without a sound, as was proper etiquette. Although she could have easily slipped right through, physically moving the door was her form of consideration for whoever might be within.
“Ah,” I said, “good day to you, Master. Here to soothe your soul?”
Nothing about her had changed: her long, black hair; the motherly twinkle in her drooping eyes; her plump lips; the alluring moles under her eye and mouth; and her voluptuous figure were all precisely the same as the day we’d met over fifty years ago.
Here was my master: Magdalena von Leizniz. The strange vitality-glorifier had made her overbearing affection for me plain at first sight, but continued to keep me by her side in my unseemly old age—all while never changing herself. The wraith was as youthful as the day her fervor had resurrected her from an early death.
“That is one reason,” my master answered, “but I also recall asking you to come by my atelier if you happened to be free.”
“Oh dear... Did you truly?”
I cocked my head quizzically and pushed up my glasses, but she simply folded her arms and bore her discontent. This was unbefitting behavior for a woman of her standing; I could no longer remember how long ago it had been when she’d abandoned all reservations around me.
“Goodness, you always play senile at times like these,” she sighed. “You were taking another nap, weren’t you?”
“Please, Master, I would never. To dishonor my own teacher’s treasure trove by dozing off is unthinkable. I was hard at work, inspecting the preservation spells on your priceless paintings.”
For my part, I had long since gotten used to lying through my teeth without a shred of guilt. At first, I’d practiced to not embarrass my master in aristocratic settings, but my long tenure as a noble in my own right was mostly to blame. High society was a world wherein even a lowly magus unambitious for further bureaucratic sway needed the ability to mix poison into cordiality to survive.
“Oh, you... And here I thought today’s fitting would be the perfect occasion to tailor you a new set of clothes.”
“Again? What I have now is more than enough for an old sack of bones with not long left to live.”
“It’s always ‘not long left’ this and ‘withering husk’ that with you. I’ll have you know that I’m not the least bit worried. With your vigor, I’m sure you’ll live another hundred years.”
“Have you forgotten, Master? I am but a mensch; a full century would be a marvel to achieve.”
That same span could be considered chump change in this world full of immortals, especially when Lady Leizniz herself was nearing three hundred. While I understood that her undying existence had spanned more than ten times the length of her life as a mensch, her hazy perception of mortality did not apply to me.
Although her statement was similar to the sorts of light jokes one might make to humor a dying man, this woman seemed to believe her own words to some extent. Unfortunately for her, I was free from regrets at this point; I couldn’t imagine throwing myself into a desperate struggle to cling to this mortal realm.
Elisa had come into her own: Elisa the Ambrosial was renowned as a leading professor by all her peers. In fact, she was the central figure of a subfaction within the Leizniz cadre. While I, of course, would have loved to continue watching over her, her refusal to grace me with any nieces or nephews left me ready for her to move on from clinging to me.
I was content. In my long life, I’d seen off many I held dear. My unchanging connections like Ladies Agrippina and Leizniz were the minority; my case was far more normal. When all was said and done, I was enjoying my twilight years.
“Eternity is too great a burden for me,” I said. “This is just enough.”
“Hrmph,” Lady Leizniz grunted. “Then who will watch over my treasure room for me?”
“Worry not. I’ve brought up many students who can fill my role without issue. Have you forgotten, Master? It was you who brought all manner of talented children to my doorstep, demanding I tutor them.”
I’d probed a weak point of hers, and she had no recourse but to bite her tongue. After a short moment of silence, she folded her arms once more and turned away with a pout.
“Well! How blessed I am to have such a capable apprentice!”
“You are too kind to me, Master. Come now, you must be going soon. I tailored your schedule today around the morning fitting, so your afternoon appointment with Count and Countess Wenders is fast approaching.”
“I knew you hadn’t forgotten! Oh, I can’t believe you! You must come next time—am I understood?! I won’t forget this!”
After her immature outburst, the wraith twirled away and vanished using the ghastly means of teleportation she reserved for when she was out of the public eye.
My goodness, I thought, what a curious life I’ve come to live.
[Tips] No mensch has ever attained unaging immortality without abandoning their mensch form.
As one of the Five Great Pillars, the Leizniz cadre was an absolute behemoth, but it couldn’t quite be considered a singular entity. Like every other faction of its size, it spawned numerous smaller sects like children and grandchildren.
However, not all entered vassalage out of good faith: some swore fealty only to bide their time, knowing it was too difficult to overtake the remarkable individuals at the top. As a result, every so often, a scheme to turn the tides popped up. Under-the-table political conspiracy was the most reasonable of the plots one might encounter; others went straight for blackmail, many resorting to fabricated claims to topple the giants above. But the most extreme cases were those that caused physical harm.
Of course, this didn’t entail outright combat with a cadre dean. Setting the optics of violence aside, imperial law allowed for duels. If one filed the paperwork fair and square, challenging an esteemed professor could even be seen as an act of honor. No, the physical harm in question referred to that of assassination and kidnapping.
Though the College turned away the unintelligent, that wasn’t to say it didn’t have its share of idiots. At times, people were born with as much academic talent as they lacked good sense, and such folk were prone to taking matters into their own hands when they got impatient.
And to these knaves, Lady Leizniz’s darling children made for the perfect target. After all, she was a per...fect altruist like no other, and she tossed boundaries of school and faction aside to care for any prodigal gem she came across, even if they chose not to join her cadre. Seeing as how they were chosen for their app...arent talent for magic, her flock was not limited to the heirs of powerful houses.
Young students without official masters who lodged in the capital’s low quarters with the pennies they received from their backers at home were all too easy a mark for experienced adults. Once every decade or two, some intelligent magus revealed how ill-versed they were in basic critical thinking.
“S-Sir Dalberg! Sir Dalberg, please help me!”
A barrage of knocks assaulted the door to my well-lived-in home—I couldn’t bring myself to move no matter how many times others insisted the place didn’t suit my stature—rousing me from my shallow slumber.
I’d nodded off in my armchair reading through the latest collection of arcane treatises. The sheaf of papers had moved from my lap to the table, complete with a bookmark; in its place, a warm blanket wrapped all the way around me despite my never having gotten up. Even as I wasted away, the Ashen Fraulein remained one of the few friends I had left by my side.
I wiped away a bead of drool from my lips and opened the door.
“Thank the gods you’re here, Sir Dalberg! I need your help! You have to help me!”
The boy paying me a visit was almost fully grown. He must have run here at full sprint, judging by his labored breathing and ruffled clothes.
“What has you so worked up at this hour of night? Come in and calm down. We can’t have you making all this noise where people can hear.”
“We don’t have time! They’re gone—everyone’s gone!”
My attempt to bring him indoors did little in the face of his hysteria. Out of options, I decided to employ a short hex.
“Listen well and relax. I won’t be able to help you if you don’t calm down and explain everything clearly. I will count; with every number, you will take a long, deep breath...”
I’d developed this spell in my early days as a teacher to keep my students level headed. Panicking made children and adults alike forget that a rational explanation was a quicker path to understanding than rushing to spit out words.
Mana woven into my voice bade the boy to breathe deeply as I slowly counted. Finally in command of his wits, he rapidly laid out what had occurred; this time, his speed was planned and economical, as opposed to an uncontrolled reaction.
This openhearted lad was one of Lady Leizniz’s current favorites, and his short hair was a rarity among her chosen. He was much like Mika—long ago, we’d run into Lady Leizniz where she practically never went, in a terrible twist of misfortune—in that they had both been swept up by my good master because they’d been caught with a friend she already fancied.
As one might guess from his appearance, he was a lowborn boy. Young and sociable, he made friends wherever he went at the College without paying much heed to factional allegiance or social standing. Naturally, he was close with many of our master’s other favorites, and frequently took them along when he went to play. On one such outing, he stepped away for a moment to buy the group water, only to find all of his friends gone when he returned; though they had all earned Lady Leizniz’s favor, none of those present had particularly strong backing otherwise.
There sure are some awful people out there. If they stopped to think for even a moment, they’d know what’s going to happen next.
I wondered what these fools wanted. Perhaps they hoped to extract information from Lady Leizniz’s students; maybe they were going to use the children as a bargaining chip. It was possible they meant to harm them to send the message that dealing with that terrible witch would only bring further harm.
Whatever their reasons, they were beyond salvation.
Still, they weren’t completely brainless. As inexperienced as the children were, they were still students of the Imperial College; snatching them up without letting the boy catch any glimpse before, during, or after required a good deal of skill. Furthermore, the kidnappers had executed their ploy when Lady Leizniz was away from the capital on business.
I personally attended to my master’s schedule to prevent any leaks, so they had either tailed her or had a source from a competing cadre that was attending the same event. It was a shame that all their wit had gone to the most unscrupulous ideas.
“Sir Dalberg, what do I do? Oh, I—I don’t know what to do...”
“Don’t worry. This old man will take care of everything.”
If only these fools would spare my aching bones all this hassle...
[Tips] Magical ability wanes with age similarly to muscles, but is far easier to keep up with diligent exercise.
A handful of children lay gagged and bound in an exceedingly unremarkable warehouse. They’d been changed out of their clothes into sets of dingy rags to guarantee that none of them had access to a hidden catalyst. The attentiveness on display spoke to a single-mindedness that would blot out any possible distraction...but the perpetrators were in a state of frenzy.
“What do you mean this isn’t enough? I grabbed all the kids I found!”
“You imbecile! I told you, again and again, that there are supposed to be five of them—to get all five at once! Count them! Or maybe you can’t even handle basic arithmetic!”
“What did you just say?!”
As the argument would suggest, there were only four captured children laying on the floor. The whole plan had revolved around the idea that no one other than the kids themselves would bother causing a scene over a few people not returning to the low quarter. Combined with Leizniz’s absence from the capital, an opening like this came once in a lifetime; how could the man contain his fury when the plan had gone awry due to sheer incompetence?
Despite Leizniz’s absence, her cadre was full of powerful magia. True to Daybreak style, she had more active polemurges than one could count on both hands under her command. If the missing child made their way to the College, the operation was sure to be a bust.
“Dammit. I hate wasting an opportunity this good, but I suppose we’ll have to change course...”
“...Should we put them all down? It’ll still be a blow to that damned wraith, and we’ll have enough time to cover everything up if we start now.”
The silver lining of this situation was that the children did not overhear their conversation. They were all in a magically induced coma to prevent any unwanted breaches of information.
Originally, the men had planned to move the children once more to a safe house, where they would use them as hostages to threaten Leizniz. There, the children would be forced into writing letters and recording messages on arcane tools to chip at the dean’s psyche.
The kidnappers weren’t moronic enough to think that would be enough to topple the whole cadre, of course, but the effects would be undeniable. These factions were cults of personality, and any anxiety the charismatic individual at their centers carried was sure to weaken the whole structure. From there, they’d be able to concoct grander and grander schemes against her; these children were meant to be an investment for future conspiracies.
However, they didn’t want to take too many risks in the process. While this warehouse had been carefully prepared with several deceptive barriers to throw off any search spells, a skilled magus would locate them eventually. How much time they had depended solely on whom the runaway child decided to ask for help.
“...Let’s do it.”
“Are you sure? There’s no going back.”
“It’s better than taking undue risks. We’ll have to report that something went wrong, but we should—”
The man stopped midsentence, causing his partner to turn around in confusion. “Hey, what’s wrong?”
“Grbgh... Hrgh...”
“Hey!” Something was obviously wrong, and the second man rushed over to his companion to shake his shoulders. Up close, he saw blood gush past his friend’s fingers as he desperately gripped at his throat.
Without any fresh blood, the man’s mind could not so much as weave a final spell. As his brain rapidly ran out of fuel, the man’s thoughts ground to a halt until he eventually stopped moving in his friend’s arms.
“N-No... This can’t be!”
The survivor froze up in terror, letting the corpse roll to the floor. Who could blame him? The frightful scene before him ought to have been impossible.
It was unthinkable for anyone to have prior knowledge of this location. He’d cut out all middlemen when procuring the warehouse, and had prepared all manner of magic to conceal his presence: barriers that deflected search spells, bubbles to contain all sound, and an illusory image of an empty space that would deceive anyone using far-sight to peer inside. He’d snatched the children no more than half an hour ago, so there was no possible way for someone to have already arrived.
Furthermore, his late partner was a professor. While not quite a polemurge, he had always kept his self-defense a top priority; how on earth had he been slaughtered by a cut to the front of his throat?
The cascading impossibilities boiled the man’s brain, but he still tried to take the situation in stride. He slipped a well-worn bag of catalysts from his robe sleeve to his hand and began to charge his wand.
This was his ace in the hole. By imbuing a pouchful of scrap iron with his mana, he could fragment the metal into a storm of razors that would rend everything around him asunder. Whether his foe was invisible or too fast for the naked eye, his glittering cloud of iron dust would file everything down like a formless chisel. If the enemy was sturdy enough to resist, their first breath would shred them from the inside out.
Once he activated the dastardly spell, he had absolute confidence that everything in range—that is, the entire warehouse—would be reduced to nothing. His conviction was, in fact, correct: any living being in the room would be sure to die. He’d tested it against the highest-quality barriers countless times, and nothing could impede its destructive power.
But that was only if he could activate it.
“Argh... Ugh?”
Just before he could pull the trigger, he felt a light shock on his back. It came with a dreadful cold that quickly became a burning pain that spread throughout his chest. He looked down and saw a shimmering blade sprouting from a bloody opening in his breastplate.
That was the last of him: his heart had split in two like a gourd under a knife, and he could no longer function. As he fell to earth, the sword abandoned him, and one could trace back the blade to a plain handle held by a wrinkled hand, blue veins peeking out from under the skin.
The wielder was clad in a black open-collared jacket and skinny pants that pushed up the contour of his legs. Beneath his outerwear, he wore a shirt of a slightly lighter shade embossed with an intricate pattern. As overwrought as his clothes were, anyone with an eye for magic would know at first glance that they were not for show: the old man’s garments had been carefully woven to ward off attacks, whether physical or magical.
“I’ve lost my touch.”
He flung the blood from his beloved sword and returned it to its sheath with a half-hearted smile. In his heyday, the man had severed heads and pierced hearts with such force that his blade remained unsullied by blood and oil; it was only recently that he had come to appreciate the hydrophobic enchantment of his clothes.
Most of all, the need to drive his foes to the cusp of death just to save a few hostages without injury told the tale of his age. Although he could still collect their heads and preserve their brains for long enough to analyze their memories at his lab, a younger version of him would have been able to keep the kidnappers alive and extract the information he wanted in a far simpler manner.
“The years take such a toll,” he sighed. Pushing up his hair, his eyes turned to the ceiling, still as blue as ever.
“My.” A figure appeared, soaking into reality from the darkness of the night. Her silver hair drifted in space, her mothlike wings fluttered, and she wrapped both arms around the man’s neck with a whisper. “I happen to think this to be quite the accomplishment.”
“Not even trying to hide your flattery, I see. You know better than anyone else how I was in my prime.”
“You’re certainly not the same as when you were young and strong. But I believe you to be most beautiful as you are now. Isn’t that so?”
“Yaaawn... You said it, Ursula.”
The response came from the man’s crown. His once-golden locks now shimmered a lunar silver, and they’d been braided into a tight nest—one inhabited by an alf who looked like a spring day decided to dress up in a green one-piece.
Ursula and Lottie had been friends with the old man since before he had grown old; unlike the other fairies who had lost interest in his maturing body, these two had remained by his side. Tonight, they had answered his call to help him save a group of children.
Alfar could only be warded off by charms or scents specifically designed to impede them, so the sylphid had traced her quarry’s scent on every breeze in town. Her svartalf companion had then pulled her champion into the night, blinding those who attempted to play in her domain. Their fey mischief was beyond the realm of man-made barriers and dodged the sense of sight mortals relied so heavily on.
Despite his success, the old man felt diminished by his reliance on his longtime friends. Perhaps he would have needed them as a naive teenager, but by the time he hit his twenties, he’d taken care of matters like this all on his own.
I’ve grown so pathetic.
Yet to hear from these lovers of permanence that he was most beautiful as he was now left the man feeling as though his seventy years had been anything but poorly spent. At the end of the day, he’d made it in time: if his exhaustion could buy these boys and girls a chance to enjoy their youths, that was a cheap price to pay.
[Tips] Brains continue to function for a few minutes after the heart stops.
Upon hearing what had happened while she’d been away, my master placed a hand to her cheek and sighed.
“Is something not to your liking, Master?”
“...Erich, I know I may have entrusted you with full discretion in my absence, but that doesn’t mean you have to solve every issue on your own. Aren’t you the one always saying not to push your aging body too hard?”
“Ah, but this is hardly anything worth noting.”
I kept a straight face as I spoke, but in truth, it had been backbreaking work. I’d lugged home two idiots while artificially keeping their brains from shutting down entirely and painstakingly extracted all their memories about the conspiracy and the mastermind behind it. Afterward, I’d used my own personal contacts to get in and completely uproot the group pulling the strings—this was hard work for someone turning seventy-one in the fall.
And yet I had managed. I would not let them hurt those children and drag this woman’s name through the mud. I was painfully aware of just how irredeemable a pervert Magdalena von Leizniz was, but I also owed this pervert more than I could ever repay. She had offered me a path to becoming a magus, handed me the secrets of psychosorcery, and introduced me to countless cherished friends.
But most of all, she had loved me. One might think it odd that she had chosen to keep me by her side past my coming of age and continued to shower me with gifts alongside her other favorites, but I knew why. Although her rebirth had undeniably warped her tastes beyond repair, she truly loved each and every one of us.
In all likelihood, I hadn’t brushed her heartstrings in any particular manner; she had simply kept me around because she’d worried for me. To a wraith with two centuries under her belt, a boy whose talents let him accomplish more or less anything he set his mind to so smitten with adventure had seemed to her a disaster waiting to happen.
Her vast wealth of experience was something I wouldn’t fully comprehend in this lifetime, and it had produced this conclusion: if she let me roam free, I would certainly face challenges that would push me to my very limit, and I would risk my life to overcome them.
Lady Leizniz was too kind. She couldn’t bear to let me run headfirst into danger, and instead fastened me here—if nothing else, she wanted for me to only set off when I was older, wiser, and less liable to let my cockiness lead me to ruin. In the end, here I remained. People I had considered more talented than me had died or retired left and right, but even at seventy, I stubbornly refused to return my professorship; even now, she kept me by her side.
This was more than I could ever ask. She continued to dote on her adult students long after she stopped tailoring their clothes, but I alone had the privilege of remaining here. For all my complaints, I too had grown up to the point of old age; had I truly been unhappy, I wouldn’t have stayed all these years.
I had no doubt she’d seen through my clumsy act long ago; why else would she accept me without comment?
“Very well,” she sighed. “I don’t want you to push yourself, but I won’t trample over your goodwill either. Thank you for all your efforts, Erich.”
“Shooing away the insolent fools who would snip at my master’s darling flowers is hardly worthy of thanks.”
“Allow me to offer you a reward. Is there anything you’d like?”
“Please. The greatest reward is serving you.”
I held back a snicker at how overblown my line was. I supposed it was worth saying, seeing as how my master laughed in my stead.
“I see. Then in its place, I shall punish you for putting yourself in danger without my knowing.”
Huh?!
“Wha—wait, Master, please!”
“You deserve it all the more for refusing my generous reward. And here I was, ready to let you sleep on my lap with a nice pat on the head.”
“I’m a seventy-year-old coot with great-grandchildren! What on earth are you going to do to me?!”
“No matter how old you get, you’re the same little boy I first met! You always ignore my warnings not to push yourself, and you still risk your life just because you think you can get away with it! You can be seventy or even one hundred for all I care—you’re the same bad boy as ever!”
What kind of ridiculous logic is that? I know I’ll never match you in age, but this is just absurd.
“As for your sentence... You have to come to the next fitting!”
“Master, have mercy!”
“Certainly not! I’ve already given Elisa the date, so you’ll be in a world of hurt if you don’t show up!”
“You have to be joking!”
Never mind, she was a pervert after all—an incorrigible pervert of the worst degree. I was sure to spend my days honoring and cursing this unchanging master of mine until the day I drew my last.
But until then, I was going to keep fighting the good fight. Maybe I can get out of this if I can sync up all my geriatrics on the same day...
[Tips] While the thought of applying the concept of a “life span” to beings that have already once died is peculiar, current consensus simply lists wraith life spans as “unconfirmed.”
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