Within a thinly-lit stone-bricked room sat the old headmaster behind his grandiose desk scrawling away at the mound of pasty sheets of paperwork. This part of his job was his least favorite, and he gained no satisfaction from doing it. However, his duty was to follow through with it, a commitment of his own device.

As this was his office, he had taken the liberty of decorating it in accordance with his liking. He only spent two weeks of the year in this tower, but he had come to consider it a homely environment to him, and as personalization was befitting of a home, so too would his office befit décor in his taste. After all, though he was not unlikened to a guest, or the devil, in the eyes of Logos scribes inhabiting the tower, they both ultimately answered to one power: The King himself. And he, The King, granted his legendary companion, the headmaster, complete and total rule over the duration of his two-week stay, an annual occurrence.

The headmaster deemed it a necessary recess from the scribes’ preferred work of maintaining records and manuscripts, a matter which the headmaster had convinced the king thoroughly of had little to no importance now.

The information collected in the documents and manuscripts that the scribes worked so tirelessly to preserve over the span of many generations was now mostly obsolete because of the headmaster himself. Because of that, the scribes felt a burning hatred mixed with jealousy toward the headmaster, as one usually would when everything they built their identity around turned out to be bad and wrong.

However, many younger scribes had come to revere him, and so he tended to keep in closer contact with those younger scribes while letting the older ones not participate in his operations were they so inclined. He knew the Logos scribes to be a stubborn breed, stuck in their ways. It was better to just let them be.

Adorning one of the walls in the headmaster’s room were ever-nearing one-hundred of what looked like paintings. However, these paintings didn’t share the same qualities as the oil kind found all throughout the art world. Instead, they had an air of uncertainty to them, like they were made with one part, artistic intent, and the other, chance. It was a burgeoning art form known to the art world as watercolor.

However, to those who cared not for such trivialities, the painting still held a mystique that seemed alien and unknown. The splotchy patterns of shade and color depicted structures that a person could recognize as being of this world but with a design that could not. Some depicted boxy towers seemingly being supported up to such great heights by walls made of thin glass panes. Other pieces displayed what one might think of as rows of foreign-looking carriages being pulled without horses, their glossy finish illustrating wealthy stature, but the sheer quantity of them would make the viewer think twice about the notion.

The headmaster was an artist, but not just any artist; he was in a class of his own. No other living artist could match his skill. When he wanted to make his work more surreal, it would come out looking like colorful water droplets had hit the canvas at just the right rate and frequency that nature itself guided the colors into the form of a spectacularly divine landscape. When he strived to make a picture realistic, it was nearly one-to-one with life; it was like a photo; it was photo-realistic.

His techniques and skill were unseen before in this world. In the prime of his career, some of his paintings were so realistic that the shock of seeing them was enough to stop the hearts of a few unfortunate older viewers. From there, he was launched into the depths of nobility and eventually to where he was now.

He wasn’t simply an artist but also an ingenious inventor that helped bring about a new age of technology. He was a master in the art of bureaucracy and the creation of working governmental bodies. He was a cultural innovator that changed people’s views and understanding of hygiene, biology, ethics, mercantilism, theology, philosophy, astronomy, law, justice, physics, chemistry, and even the art of war.

He was born into the world an unparalleled artist at birth, and over many campaigns, he rose from a foot soldier to an invaluable general. His otherworldly and outlandish stratagems threw away such notions as war being a game of numbers replacing it with the doctrine of superior firepower and adaptive guerilla tactics that were so effective that it wasn’t uncommon for him to win with as few as two or three casualties per battle. The weapons of war he devised and employed made his enemies willfully surrender out of sheer terror of being completely annihilated.

The time he held the reins to the military was the most successful warring period in known history and certainly at least within the 5th Era. Under his demand, the tiny duchy-state—that was once known as Azuria after the color of the water it was pressed tightly against—engulfed the surrounding petty kingdoms. And soon after that, in the nearby empire of Leone—which had become so infatuated by this one man—the nobility executed a bloodless coup against their own emperor without Azurian involvement whatsoever.

Hearing the news that the Leonian nobility had given themselves away of their own accord somehow changed him, changed his aspirations ever-so-slightly. After discovering that it was, in fact, not a coordinated ambush and that the coup was indeed genuine, he marched into the capital with a portion of his army and, upon taking control of the castle, sent word back to the king.

Watching his majesty sit upon the Leonian throne, he made only but two requests. First, he asked that his liege rename the kingdom to Azurellione in honor of those who had joined alongside them in a willful union, and secondly, that the king move the capital to Leone, renaming it Leonna after the then-current capital of Vienna back in their homelands of Azuria.

Soon after, he retired from his life as a general and took charge of other aspects of governance. Through sheer diplomacy and national appeal, he managed to vassalize and integrate nearly every surrounding duchy, city-state, clan, and tribe until all left were empires and kingdoms. His cult of personality was so great that almost thirty separate cultures put aside their differences and came together to form a collective under one banner.

The young loved and revered him like a god, and when the old died out, and the young took their place, anything he said on matters of fact became gospel. When he claimed the clouds were filled with water from the ground, no farmer batted an eye. When he decreed that sickness was caused by tiny bugs, doctors through whatever they thought they understood out the window. When he said that merit trumped birthright, the pushback of nobility was quickly overshadowed by their subject’s approval of the notion, and what little resistance remained subsided under the king’s will.

From there, the nearing forty-year-old man devised a system where a legislative body of representatively elected nobles voted in by the common people collected and saw to the needs of the cultures they represented and a constitution to be upheld by a fair and equal branching court system with a strict meritocratic hierarchy of judges.

The system which he implemented was by no means perfect, but to him, it was as close as he thought he could get to instilling the system, which he remembered quite fondly. The trouble of that being those he had long since professed and in a way allusively promised to have rightful ownership of the land, they and supposedly he considered theirs.

After that, he created the concept of prison labor camps for all those convicted of high crimes under the new sets of laws. Then came a rudimentary form of unionization of lower-class jobs, a progressive tax system alongside anti-tax-evasion committees that had to take vows of poverty and reject gifts of any shape and form, fines for unhygienic behavior, and waste disposal, public bathhouses, sewers, and aqueducts. He showed the world that highly-effective drugs could be made from mushrooms and mold, bringing about a tidal wave of new discoveries in the field of medicine, which had been previously hyper-focused on the ever-decelerating development of magic-based medicine. He taught the world the importance of clean water, washing their hands, and brushing their teeth. He demonstrated his very rudimentary understanding of electricity and mechanics, as well as an outline of his masterful art techniques and so much more.

Finally, after all, was said and done, after many years and many breakthroughs, he knew his time in the spotlight was drawing to a close. In his last two acts, he created four academies: The Academy of Science & Math, The Academy of Architecture & Engineering, The Academy of Magic & Theology, and The Battlemage Academy. Once all four were off the ground and running, he set his sight on the Archaic system of the old Leonian Knights Academy. Revitalizing and reforming it, so that entrance into the academy was no longer restricted solely to male nobles, he instead put in place a standard that echoed his general views on meritocracy.

So it was, how it has been. Most of his latter days precluded him from focusing on anything but the five schools he maintained. His official justification made known to the public was that he was stepping aside so that the next generation could fill his place, but many were skeptical of such a notion. Who could fill the position of someone so unparalleled by anybody known to the world, someone so many put above their own god of worship, a man to whom many widely considered the human embodiment of a god, one tangible and definite, one that could be seen and spoken to?

The headmaster yawned with an unmistakable look of boredom. His reasons for focusing so extensively on the five academies only known to him, so far, had been a bust. It was, once again, shaping up to be a year with no interesting applicants.

“S-Sir,” A younger scribe shouted, barging through the door.

The headmaster sat his pen to the side as he looked at the scribe, asking, “Yes, son? What is it?”

“I’ve received word that one of the applicants have just defeated an expert.”

The grizzled man initially showed no interest. Until right when, after a few seconds had passed, the young scribe opened his mouth to speak when a sudden excitement overcame the headmaster.

With a smile, he demanded, “Well pull her up on the monitor.”

“Yes, sir,” the scribe reacted, not picking up on the fact that the headmaster somehow knew it was a girl without having been told.

A large projection beamed into existence in the center of the room, floating above a black obelisk that looked crystalline in nature. It was a device he helped develop alongside The Academy of Architecture & Engineering and has become the standard of long-distance communication ever since.

In the projection, a recorded video played of Monika’s fight from the very same angle above the fountain in the courtyard where the projection of him was seen earlier that day by Azriel and the crowd.

The headmaster watched the fight to its entirety. It had been four years since a person had managed to defeat an expert, and he feared that it was a sign that the youth were getting weaker. He was glad to see he was mistaken. Even were she an outlier, the simple fact that a commoner girl managed to use such coordinated movements reassured him from his growing doubts.

“Switch to the live feed.”

“Y-Yes, sir,” stuttered the scribe, pressing a button and flipping a switch.

The projection flickered, resonating static for no longer than a second before the picture became clear. The camera was trained on Monika sitting with her hands in her lap, an ear-to-ear grin on her face.

“What’s that?” the headmaster blurted at seemingly nothing.

The scribe stuttered, “W-What’s what, sir—?”

“Quickly turn the feed to the right,” he demanded.

“Yes, sir,” the scribe complied, unsure of what precisely the headmaster was looking to find. Slowly dialing one of the knobs on the contraption caused the feed to turn along with it with a slight input delay.

“Stop.” The headmaster commanded. The scribe keenly yanked his hands away from the controls and stepped back.

The live feed displayed Klaus’s fight with the master seconds before his victory. Then when it happened, everyone in the crowd shuffled to look in his direction, some even jumping or standing on tiptoes to look over others.

“Ah, so he has a friend, I see,” the headmaster commentated nearly five seconds before Azriel stepped up to Klaus, giving him a pat on the back.