Mal's breath hitched. He couldn't even respond to Lusia's question. Instead, he was simply staring at her blankly like some kind of madman.
He pushed down the feelings and took a few deep breaths. The sleeve of his formal suit chafed against this skin from the swaying of the carriage, his dark-brown hair flopping at the side of his vision.
Lusia was still staring at him, the world was green and good, and he no longer had that endless stench of blood that continued to haunt him at every step in his old castle.
But while this was incredible, he still needed to figure out what had happened.
"Lusia, where am I?" he asked.
The briefest flicker in her eyes indicated surprise.
"We are on the road in the northwestern part of the kingdom of Chama."
"And why are we on the road?"
"You don't remember, master?"
His breath hitched.
"Yes, I forgot," he said.
She cast a doubtful look at him, then it disappeared as fast as it had appeared. "We are going to the entrance exam for Exodi Academy, master."
The Exodi Academy for Magic?
But that . . . that was six years ago. Just after I turned eighteen.
Malfrasius reached up and rubbed his head. "I think I'm dreaming."
Lusia turned her attention back to her lap, where a tray, a cup, and a kettle were sitting along with a strainer. Based off the smell wafting from the kettle, she was making tea.
That smells… peculiarly strong, Mal thought.
She opened the kettle top and took a sniff. "I am fairly certain that you are not dreaming, master."
Mal stifled a laugh. It wouldn't do for him to become attached to her if this was some kind of trick or deception.
He stared at her, trying to both soak in her living appearance and determine if she was a trap.
Lusia was a cute girl, by most measures. Her black hair was short and curly while her amber eyes reminded Mal almost of hot coals. Her facial features were small and delicate like that of a cat's, and her body was slender and thin. She was wearing the outfit of a maid—a simple high-necked, long-sleeved black dress with a white apron on top.
The main "issue" was her default expression. There was something cold about her face to most people, the lack of a smile or frown unnerving.
Mal probably wouldn't have cared back in his first life. He'd grown up with her and found her about as interesting as a doorknob.
Right now, she was the most fascinating thing in the world to Mal.
She frowned and looked at him with squinted eyes.
"Master, is there any reason you're staring at me?"
Mal felt heat rush up his neck. "Sorry. I thought I saw… nothing. Sorry."
"If you're thinking of propositioning me." Her eyes turned icy. "I will remind you that your father has told you that such relationships aren't allowed with the staff."
Ah. Mal had forgotten how awful of a person he'd been in the past.
"Nothing like that," he said.
Her gaze was doubtful. He ignored her and pinched himself on the arm. Hard.
Nothing. Not even a flicker.
That crossed out dream theory. So perhaps it was an illusion?
Mal wasn't an expert in illusions. Certainly, if he were cornered by a powerful illusion, he could imagine himself falling prey to it quite easily.
But even so, he knew enough to identify what an illusion looked like. Illusion magic tended to fall apart once you pointed out the contradictions. If it was a physical illusion, one using mana constructs, then what Mal would need to do was analyze the area around him to ensure that these objects were truly real. If it was his mind, then he would need to take note of the imperfections created from the interface between his head and the magic. Either way, the contradictions would prove their falseness.
"What do you think of me, Lusia?" he asked.
"I don't know how to answer that question."
Hm. Why not?
"What do you mean?" Mal asked.
"I require further context. What is it specifically that you wish to know? Do you wish to know my thoughts of your character? Your physical appearance? Your abilities?"
. . . Yeah, that was definitely the real Lusia.
"Nevermind," Mal said.
Lusia took another look at him, the faintest narrowing of her eyes appearing before she turned back to her tea. she poured the kettle into one of the cups and the smell of the strong herbs wafted to his nose. He couldn't help but smile. If this was an illusion, it was one of the most well-crafted, well-formed ones he'd ever seen in his entire life. And he'd met archmages who specialized in the subject.
But if it wasn't an illusion, and it wasn't a dream, then what could it be?
Mal thought back to what had happened before he died.
Just prior to the heroine stabbing him, his mana core had flexed and attempted to cast the spell, but it wasn't able to. Then, when he'd been stabbed…
On the verge of dying, he'd managed to finish the time spell.
No, he cast it as he died. He'd performed a spell in that split-second window when his soul was about to pass to the afterlife—or simply disappear, depending on one's beliefs.
Was it beyond the realm of possibility to say that something might've happened at that moment? Time could be manipulated. He knew that. Even so, there were limitations. The reversal of time was one of those limitations. It was impossible. No one had ever done it. Every attempt to do so had ended in failure.
Yet here he was, six years in the past.
The opportunity of a lifetime.
The impossible made possible.
Lusia held out the tea cup toward Mal and he blinked in surprise.
"A cup of tea, master?"
Mal gingerly took the tea cup from her hands.
"You want to have my tea? You've never..." Her eyebrows furrowed by the slightest of margins. "Wait, don't—"
He took a sip.
His face screwed up and he nearly expelled the drink out his nose.
It tasted like grass!
Mal gave a wavy smile. "It tastes great."
She looked at him, then at the kettle. She poured another cup and took a sip. A faint dash of red ran across her cheeks.
"It tastes like grass," she said.
***
The carriage rumbled along, neither of the two inhabitants inside speaking to one another. Mal was too caught up in his own thoughts, while Lusia… had put the tea set to the side and was now mending a shirt. Mal must've ripped a shirt at some point during the carriage ride, he supposed.
Mal had become a dark lord for a reason. He delved into dark magic for a reason. He'd slaughtered the innocent for a reason.
It was in his second year of magic school that he'd received a vision, a glimpse of the future. He'd wanted to practice divination, desperate for something, anything that he could be good at.
Then, a miracle: a vision.
What he saw shook him to his core.
The world would end in four years, just after graduation on the sixth year.
The vision of fire, of his skin being boiled off his bones, of his eyes melting into his skull, had haunted him every night afterward. He knew in his heart of hearts that what he'd seen was the truth. The question was what he was going to do about it.
With his weak F-grade core, there was no acceptable way to gain the power needed to stop such an event. He'd ended up turning to dark magic, spending more and more time in the forbidden section of the library—though, now, in retrospect, he could see that the security for the forbidden library was laughably weak. He literally just wandered in, and there were about five or six other students who'd say hi on the regular.
Obviously, this plan hadn't worked very well. It turned out that sacrificing people in order to obtain power—even if they were criminals and the general scum of society—put all the wrong attention on Mal.
He had the chance to turn back multiple times, but after the death of his father and Lusia, he'd become locked on his path.
Before long, it was essentially him against the world. This all culminated in the final battle where his chest had become acquainted with the feeling of metal.
His hand absentmindedly went up to his solar plexus. Even now, he still felt a ghostlike pain from where it pierced him.
It didn't matter.
As long as he played his cards right, he would never again come in contact with that damned heroine. Hell, maybe he'd be able to preemptively eliminate her.
The world was his oyster. He had future knowledge, a mastery of spellcraft, and magic theory. The only thing he lacked was resources, but he would be able to solve that, given enough time. And yeah, there was a demon off to kill one of the professors, but he had a full year to figure out the way to deal with that bastard. Plenty of time to come up with countermeasures.
The biggest issue, the destruction of the world? That wouldn't be for six years, until after graduation.
The problem was…
He glanced over at Lusia. She wasn't looking at him, engrossed in her work.
Mal held out his hand and summoned the most basic spell he knew. The first one he'd learned at Exodi. Mana came from outside his body and flooded his smooth, unused core. On the surface of his core, it arranged itself into a basic rune, barely more than a circle.
Arcane Sphere.
A fully sixty seconds ticked by before an absolutely miniscule ball of mana appeared on the surface of his hand.
Useless.
He crushed his hand into a fist and the ball vanished.
He had to strengthen his core or find a different method of gaining strength. But what to choose?
Malfrasius internally crossed out the dark magic route in his mind.
Although dark magic did give him the power that he so craved, the sacrifices were immense. Even discounting what it had done to his reputation, there was also what it had done to his body and mind. The reason for his paleness in the original timeline wasn't because he stayed inside all day. It was because all of his modifications to his core and all the spirit pacts he had made. They had slowly worn away at his vitality like water against a stone.
Even if he had beaten the heroine, he probably only had four years of life left. Everything else had been sacrificed on the altar of power.
It affected his mind, as well. If he'd thought rationally, he would've known how to avoid pitting everyone against him. He would've hidden his rituals better. He would've hidden his pacts. Instead, by the time he was aware of what was happening, it was too late. The world knew, and there was no turning back.
He did manage to purge the foreign influences from his mind, but that had come at a major cost. His reflexes were never quite the same after that, and his long-term memory had become blurry.
Problematic, given that the details of his past would matter for something as high stakes as this.
"Lusia, how far away are we from the city?" he asked.
Lusia looked over at him. "You're referring to Exodi, master?"
"Yes. Do you know how far away we are?"
"I am not certain, but I believe us to be in the range of five and a half minutes to seven minutes. Of course, we're not heading to the city proper, but rather to the academy, which is in the interior and is fifteen minutes away."
Mal snorted. "Very specific."
"I try to be exact, master."
There was no snark or change in her expression. She was being completely honest when she said that.
Which made it all the more amusing.
His thoughts wandered back to his past. And how Lusia had—inadvertently, and not by her own fault—locked him on the path that he went down.
Her death was the final seal for his fate. At that point, whatever vestiges of his sanity remained completely dissipated. He was a monster. What was the point in pretending otherwise?
But now…
Now she was here, alive, and looking at him with that blank expression of hers.
He remembered it used to irritate him back when he'd been a young man. Now the sense of nostalgia was almost overwhelming.
"Master, you're staring again. Is there something on my face?" she asked.
Mal's grin turned sly. "Your eyes, for one."
Her nose crinkled up.
"Of course my eyes are on my face. I am unsure as to why you are calling attention to that."
Mal covered his mouth with his left hand and let out a few short laughs.
"It's nothing, Lusia. Sorry."
Her face reset to that blank expression of neutrality, and she looked back at the shirt she was mending.
Mal continued to watch her. Her fingers moved the needle with ease. She had done this many times, he could immediately tell. Of course she had. That was part of her duty as a maid of his father's household. The mending of clothes, the cleaning, the cooking—she hadn't done all these things on her own, but the point was that she was well acquainted with the domestic side of things.
…huh, were there supposed to be that many holes in between the stitches? And why was the thread colored white? The shirt was black—
He ignored the discrepencies. It didn't matter.
Even at his absolute worst, she refused to leave. It wasn't out of affection for him, he was aware. He was fairly certain that Lusia didn't even know what affection looked like. Love and friendship were foreign things to her—as they were to him in his early life.
His father's household didn't allow for such things, after all.
He wasn't sure why she'd stayed by him. Perhaps it was loyalty? Loyalty to him, to his father, or perhaps simply to her duty? Her contract expired when she turned 20, but she'd renewed it for some reason that he'd never understood.
He didn't know. Either way, in this life, he would ensure that she was duly rewarded. He would turn her into a queen if that was what she desired. All the riches of the planet, all the glory she could desire—hell, he would even find her a prince for a husband if that's what she wanted.
Either way, this time he would make things right.
"Lusia, if there was one thing in life that you desired above all else, what would you ask for?" he said.
Her hand stopped, the needle halfway through Mal's shirt.
For several long seconds, Malfrasius could hear nothing but the clip-clop of the horses in the front. Her eyes were honed in on the stitch she had just made as if it were personally responsible for murdering her dog.
Huh, she'd switched the thread from white to yellow at some point.
"I suppose," she said slowly, deliberately, "I could use new supplies. I'm almost out of thread."
The words registered in Mal's mind, and he opened his mouth and shut it multiple times.
"Right, um… I'll get right on that."
Her eyes darted up from her stitch when he said that.
"Do not. You are not supposed to trouble yourself with my concerns. I am the servant, you are the master."
Mal raised a single eyebrow. "I can't reward my ever-faithful servant?"
"No, you cannot."
Mal was taken aback by how firm her tone seemed to be. He didn't remember her placing such an emphasis on not giving her gifts or helping her… Then again, in his past life, he'd been so much of a prick that he probably never did that in the first place.
Perhaps she thought it was some sort of trick? Or maybe she just genuinely believed that it was improper for him to do such a thing?
"Think of it as a bonus. Surely my father has given you bonuses before, right?"
"No. He has not." She shook her head. "If this is some kind of trick, I won't fall for it."
Malfrasius shut his mouth. It was clear that she didn't want him doing anything. That was fair. If it was a matter of trust, then he would have to earn that. It would take time, but Malfrasius was nothing if not persistent.
Due to the silence, his thoughts went back to overall planning. So the dark lord route was out. What other options were available to him?
He supposed that he could simply go up to the headmaster or the king and show off his future knowledge. If he was feeling particularly clever, he could pass it off as an extreme form of divination.
Although it would help him gather resources, Malfrasius was hesitant. What if he ended up becoming limited in what he was able to do because of all the eyes watching him? A resource like him, someone capable of such perfect future-telling, would become an invaluable asset to the king or to whoever he told. If he didn't play his cards right, he could end up in a golden birdcage. Beautiful, a perfectly lovely place to live—but ultimately, a prison.
Lusia was still trying to mend the shirt, but at some point it had ripped even further than when she'd started. She took out the thread and started again, her fingers tense.
He thought back to his school years. He knew all the major players. He knew all the classes. It would be extremely easy to blend in with that kind of knowledge. Not only that, but the academy was extremely well-connected. The city hosted hundreds of alumni who worked in extremely high positions in the kingdom. The academy itself had extremely prestigious faculty—the headmaster, chief among them.
If he could build his connections here, gather resources, gather allies—would that be enough to turn the tide against the end of the world?
A noise caught his attention.
Hooves?
The carriage jerked forward. The shirt flew out of Lusia's hands and into the tea tray, a sleeve falling straight into one of the cups full of liquid. The combination of liquid with dye combined and somehow, the entire sleeve turned a bright, garish pink.
The skin tightened around Lusia's eye while the rest of her body froze completely.
"That's… unfortunate," she said, voice deadpan.
The sound of horses galooping came closer.
"Stop the carriage!" a grizzled voice yelled. "Or else you're going to taste steel!"
Mal frowned.
It seems we've encountered trouble.