Take Me Away, Dark Lord!

The terrified maids, who had been cowering just a moment ago, spun around. They gasped in absolute, horrified shock.

The Count was thrashing wildly in the two-foot-deep water. But the true horror, the absolute social devastation, was fully visible to the entire foyer.

Because his trousers were tangled around his ankles, the Count’s lower half was entirely exposed.

And the pompous, arrogant, highly critical nobleman was currently wearing a pair of tight, bright pink undergarments covered in a pattern of tiny, cheerful yellow ducks.

The silence in the foyer was deafening.

And then, one of the younger maids let out a sharp, choked snort.

She immediately clamped both hands over her mouth, her face turning bright red, her shoulders shaking violently.

Standing on the stairs above the thrashing, sputtering Count, Caspian and Elara froze.

Caspian stared at the bright pink, duck-patterned underwear.

The stoic, sorrowful aura he usually projected shattered.

He suddenly spun around, facing the wall, pressing his forehead against the marble pillar, his chest heaving with silent, suppressed laughter.

Elara immediately whipped out a delicate lace fan, snapping it open to cover the lower half of her face, though her emerald eyes were crinkling with delight.

”MY PANTS! THE FISH ARE IN MY TROUSERS!” the Count shrieked, thrashing in the water, desperately trying to pull his soaking wet silk pants up over his brightly colored undergarments, looking like a drowning, furious walrus.

Out in the courtyard, two hundred feet away, Seraphina swallowed her star-peach and smiled a deeply, satisfied smile.

’Checkmate, you moldy old toad,’ Seraphina thought, licking the sticky peach juice from her fingers.

She had the perfect alibi.

She was surrounded by three Vanguard knights who could testify that she had been sitting on a bench, eating fruit, nowhere near the staircase. It was simply an unfortunate wardrobe malfunction.

As the muffled sounds of the Count’s shrieking and the maids’ suppressed giggling drifted through the open windows, Seraphina hopped off the bench.

She had studies to attend to. And more importantly, she had a corporate merger to negotiate.

***

Seraphina’s daily schedule in the Capital Estate was incredibly rigorous.

Between maintaining the D.S.S. surveillance network, preventing Kaelus from murdering politicians, and successfully navigating her toddler-camouflage, she was essentially working a highly stressful, 80-hour-a-week corporate espionage job.

Her afternoon sessions with Professor Roan were her only true intellectual outlet.

She walked into the secondary study, carrying a rolled-up piece of thick, standard-issue parchment under her arm.

Roan Charte, the Supreme Archmage of the East, was sitting behind the heavy oak desk.

He was in his full, devastatingly handsome tutor persona, wearing a charcoal suit, silver-wire glasses, black hair slicked back with perfect precision. He was currently grading a highly complex spatial geometry exam she had taken the day before.

He looked up as she waddled in, his pitch-black eyes immediately zeroing in on the parchment under her arm.

”Ah, the Sovereign returns,” Roan drawled smoothly, setting his red quill down.

He leaned back in his chair, lacing his long fingers together. ”Did you manage to successfully avoid the Archduke’s wrath regarding your refusal to eat steamed carrots this morning?”

”I fed them to the pink dog,” Seraphina replied, marching up to the desk. ”Ignis likes crunchy things. And Papa Duke was too busy glaring at his reflection in the mirror because he wasn’t wearing his armor to notice.”

Roan let out a soft, amused chuckle. ”The Vanguard’s sudden pivot toward casual menswear has certainly sent ripples through the estate. Alistair looks as though he is actively composing his own obituary.”

Seraphina didn’t laugh.

She stopped in front of the desk, looking up at the incredibly powerful trickster disguised as a handsome scholar.

”Mr. Balcony Ghost,” Seraphina said, her voice dropping the childish inflection entirely, shifting into the cold, calculated tone of a CEO preparing to make a pitch. ”We need to talk business.”

Roan raised a single, elegant eyebrow.

The playful demeanor vanished, instantly replaced by a sharp, intense, highly engaged curiosity.

He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desk.

”Business?” Roan murmured, his voice a low, silky hum. ”I was under the impression our business consisted of magical theory and historical dates. Are you intending to renegotiate my salary in macarons?”

”Macarons are for compliance. This is about expansion,” Seraphina corrected.

She unrolled the thick parchment and slammed it down onto the center of his desk, smoothing the edges flat with her small hands.

”Look at this,” she commanded.

Roan adjusted his silver-wire glasses, looking down at the parchment. He expected to see a child’s drawing.

Perhaps a highly detailed map of the estate’s cookie stashes, or a crude crayon drawing of a duck.

What he saw completely short-circuited his unparalleled magical intellect.

It was a schematic.

A flawlessly drafted, mathematically perfect, hyper-complex arcane blueprint.

Seraphina had drawn a series of overlapping, three-dimensional runic arrays.

But these weren’t standard Imperial runes. They were a bizarre, incredibly innovative fusion of ancient spatial theory and something entirely alien.

She had mapped out a physical device, a small, handheld slate of polished obsidian embedded with specific, highly pressurized mana-crystals.

Roan’s pitch-black eyes widened.

He traced the lines of the schematic with his finger, his brain rapidly processing the theoretical applications of the runes.

”By the stars...” Roan whispered, his voice completely stripped of its usual sarcasm. He looked up at her, genuine, shock written across his handsome face. ”Seraphina... what is this?”

”It’s a localized, mana-resonant communication array,” Seraphina explained casually, tapping the center of the diagram. ”Current Imperial communication relies on courier birds, which can be shot down, or high-tier telepathic mages, which are expensive and prone to headaches. This blueprint uses entangled mana-crystals. If you pair two crystals using the spatial folding sequence I’ve outlined here, you can transmit audio frequencies instantaneously over a distance of up to fifty miles. No lag. No intercept.”

Roan stared at her.

He was the Supreme Archmage.

He had spent twenty years studying the deepest mysteries of the universe.