The name echoed in the unnaturally silent square. Lyno.
Lyno flinched as if he'd been struck. They knew who he was. This was bad. This was very, very bad. He was definitely getting the bill for this crater.
[There goes my tea money for the next decade. Maybe two decades. Can they garnish the wages of a part-time bookstore clerk? Oh gods, they probably can.]
While Lyno was spiraling into a panic about his personal finances, the Imperial Knights were slowly approaching the scene. Their steel boots crunched softly on the dust of the disintegrated golem.
The squad captain, a woman with a severe scar across her brow, knelt at the edge of the crater. She didn't touch it. Nobody was foolish enough to touch something humming with that much raw power.
HMMMMMMMM…
The sound was less an audible noise and more a vibration in the fillings of one's teeth.
"Captain Vorlag? Report?" one of the younger knights asked, his voice trembling.
Captain Vorlag pressed a hand to the side of her helmet, activating its Aetheric Scope. Her eyes widened, the monocle attachment glowing a frantic red.
"By the Unblinking Eye…" she breathed, her voice tight with disbelief. "The readings are… impossible."
"What is it, Captain?"
"Pure severance," she said, standing up slowly. "No heat residue. No kinetic fragmentation. The magical bonds, the physical structure, its very concept as an object—it was all… erased. Annihilated at a foundational level."
She took a deep breath, turning her hard gaze towards Lyno, who was currently trying to make himself as small as possible behind the cabbage cart again.
"This wasn't a spell," she declared, her voice carrying across the square. "Spells are crude. They burn, they shatter. This… this was a judgment."
The other knights stared, their professional training warring with the impossible truth before them. They were elite soldiers. They knew power. And this was something beyond their scale of comprehension. Their respect for the unassuming man who had unleashed this 'judgment' was instantly forged in a crucible of terror and awe.
Up on the rooftop, Valerius Zathra smiled. It was the smile of a man who had been vindicated.
Even these brutes can sense it, he thought. They see the afterglow of a miracle and mistake it for simple destruction. They see a single brushstroke and cannot fathom the artist behind it.
With a grace that defied his age, Valerius leaped from the rooftop.
WHOOSH!
He didn't fall. He descended, carried by unseen currents of aether, his dusty robes billowing around him. He landed on the cobblestones without a sound, a single, withered leaf detaching from his shoulder and turning to dust before it hit the ground.
Every eye in the square turned to him. Whispers erupted.
"It's him! The Mad Sage!"
"Valerius Zathra! I thought he was exiled!"
Valerius ignored them. His entire universe had contracted to a single point: the slight, terrified man pathetically failing to hide behind a cart of vegetables.
Lyno saw the old man land. He saw the intense, burning look in his eyes. He saw him start to walk forward with a purpose that screamed "You! You are in so much trouble."
[He's definitely the landlord! Or the Mayor! He has that look! The 'you-have-wronged-me-and-my-town-and-now-comes-the-reckoning' look!]
Lyno did the only thing his panic-addled brain could think of. He plastered a painfully servile smile on his face and prepared to beg for his life.
Valerius stopped five paces from him. The silence was absolute. He studied Lyno, his gaze sweeping over him from head to toe.
Fascinating. His vessel shows no outward signs of power. His mana ducts are dormant. His life force is stable, even calm. It is the perfect disguise. He contains an exploding cosmos within him and presents it as a placid pond. A lesson in humility! The greatest power is that which never needs to be shown!
"Master," Valerius said, his voice a low, reverent rasp.
Lyno blinked. Master? Was he talking to him? He glanced behind him. There was nobody there but a wall. A very cracked wall.
He pointed a shaky finger at his own chest. "Me?"
Valerius's eyes gleamed.
A test! He feigns ignorance to gauge my conviction! He asks if I can perceive the Master within the man. Brilliant!
"Yes," Valerius affirmed, his voice growing stronger. "You."
Lyno's blood ran cold. He had been identified. The bill was coming.
"I-I-I am so, so sorry!" Lyno stammered, bowing repeatedly. "It was an accident! I tripped! I just wanted some tea! I swear! I can pay for the damages! In installments! Very small installments! Over many, many years!"
The words tumbled out of his mouth in a pathetic torrent.
Captain Vorlag and her knights, watching from a distance, were floored.
"Did you hear that?" a knight whispered. "'It was an accident'… He is claiming such absolute power was an unintentional byproduct of his movement!"
"And 'I just wanted some tea'..." Captain Vorlag mused, her expression one of dawning horror. "Is that a code? Was the Golem interfering with his acquisition of some vital artifact, codenamed 'tea'?"
Valerius, however, saw the deepest truth. He saw past the surface-level meaning of the words.
'I tripped,' he interpreted internally, his soul trembling with the revelation. He calls the act of re-aligning causality itself a 'trip.' A single, casual misstep for him is a reality-shattering event for us mortals. The sheer, unfathomable scale of it!
'I just wanted some tea.' He did not act out of malice. He acted to restore balance, to remove a dissonant element that was disturbing his serenity. He did not seek to destroy the golem; its destruction was simply the most logical outcome of its audacity to exist in his presence! It wasn't a battle. It was... pest control!
Lyno's desperate offer to pay for damages was the final, devastating piece of the puzzle for Valerius.
He seeks to reimburse the world for the 'damage' his mere existence causes it. This is not a man. This is a walking, breathing primal law of the universe, and he is APOLOGIZING for it. The humility! The absolute, soul-crushing humility!
Valerius Zathra, the Mad Sage, the man who had debated archons and stared into the abyss without flinching, felt his knees weaken. This was a truth his soul had been seeking for centuries.
With a finality that shook the square, he dropped to one knee.
THUD.
He placed a fist over his heart and bowed his head low, his long white beard sweeping across the dusty cobblestones.
"My name is Valerius Zathra," he announced, his voice booming with the conviction of a newfound faith. "For a hundred years, I have searched for a truth beyond the grasp of empires and gods. Today, I have found it."
He looked up, his eyes burning with a fire that seemed to scorch Lyno's very soul.
"Your methods are beyond my comprehension. Your wisdom is an ocean in which I am but a drowning child. I am not worthy to even gaze upon you, but I beg."
Lyno stared, his jaw slack, a thin line of drool almost escaping his lips. What in the Nine Hells was happening?
Valerius's voice reached a crescendo, a declaration that sealed both his fate and Lyno's nightmare.
"Master Lyno! Please, allow this ignorant old man to serve you! Let me be the one who chronicles your works, who studies your footsteps, who shields you from the gnats and flies of this world so they do not disturb your contemplation!"
He slammed his other hand to the ground, a pact sealed in dust and madness.
"I swear my life, my soul, my very essence to your cause, whatever it may be!"
For the first time all day, Lyno's mind went completely and utterly blank. His internal monologue had crashed. All he could feel was a singular, terrifying thought bubbling up from the abyss of his confusion.
[My new butler… is a famous lunatic.]
And beyond that thought, another, even worse one began to form.
If this was just the beginning… how was he ever going to get a moment of peace to brew his tea?