New Life As A Max Level Archmage
12 – Peace Day Celebrations

Saffra froze at Vivi’s name. Daisy, ten-year-old girl she was, continued obliviously.

“She cast a divination spell. Locate Creature? She said it didn’t work. Do you know her?”

Saffra lowered her teacup onto her plate and set both gently on the table.

“She did, did she?” she asked slowly.

Daisy bobbed her head with total innocence, even as Vivi withered and died inside.

Why would Daisy think they knew each other? Sure, the timing made for a mild coincidence, but only that. With the hefty reward Daisy’s family had posted for such a simple task, the household had probably been receiving constant visitors. Why bring her up?

Everything had almost gone perfectly. Only children could bulldoze through good intentions like this.

“The spell was really cool! I don’t get to see magic often, and hers seemed really strong,” the enthusiastic Daisy chirped, happily petting the exhausted-but-relieved Monocle. “I thought it would work,” she said, slumping inward at the memory. She perked up a second later. “But you found him! So you two don’t know each other?”

“I’ve seen her at the Guild,” Saffra said, her face blank. “But no, not really.”

“Oh. She seemed…nice, at least.”

The delay lasted much too long, and even Saffra seemed amused by it.

“I think she is nice,” Saffra said. “But…I found him hiding behind some steps. She couldn’t have…I don’t see how…” She shook her head. “Divination magic is unreliable, no matter who you are. It was just a coincidence.” She nodded to herself, seeming to make up her mind. “I guess she read the poster I gave her, and came to try to help.”

“You’ve been passing those out?” Daisy exclaimed. Her face scrunched up, and she burst into tears again, hugging Saffra fiercely, which Saffra seemed to be half-embarrassed and half-secretly-pleased by.

The maid watched the exchange fondly, though interjected at the next opportunity with another desperate request to get the filthy cat cleaned up.

After watching the interaction a little longer, Vivi realized it was kind of creepy magically spying in on other people. Now that her involvement in the situation had concluded, she departed.

Overall, the mission was a success. She wasn’t sure how suspicious Saffra was, and would have preferred Daisy never brought her up, but Saffra hadn’t seemed to assume the truth. Thankfully Vivi had a solid alibi: maybe she really had stopped by just because of the poster. It wasn’t like Saffra’s first thought would be to think Vivi had orchestrated a rescue-mission-by-proxy.

The only loose thread was that Saffra knew Vivi was a powerful mage, and a [Locate Creature] spell failing might be suspect. But, as Saffra herself had said, divination magic was the least reliable of all branches, and mages had specialties. It was far from a stretch that even a powerful mage might fail a divination.

A clock tower chimed in the distance, and Vivi’s eyes turned its way. Five o’clock. Evening had arrived and the festivities below were ramping up, the streets packed as nearly every citizen started to mingle throughout the city.

From high in the sky, she could see where the bulk of activity clustered. The market and the town square were busiest, with preparations underway in the park—they were building a stage of some sort. Probably for later in the celebrations? The centennial Peace Day festival would last for seven days rather than the usual single, which meant a whole list of events.

Surprisingly, it had only been six hours since she’d arrived. It felt longer. A lot had happened.

She hadn’t intended to get involved with Prismarche. She had wanted to look around and get her bearings before heading for Meridian. Now, she had terrorized a bank teller, dragged two prominent criminals into custody, and drawn the attention of the Guard Captain and the Guildmaster.

So much for keeping her head down. At least her true identity remained hidden. Only the bank teller had any idea she was Vivisari, and he had been thoroughly convinced to keep quiet on that fact.

There was one more task she needed to handle before she could set down in the streets and walk through the city as a normal person again. A short errand later, she confirmed the train schedule, and that tickets could be bought as needed; she didn’t need to book in advance. Her only real goal was getting to Meridian, so she was pleased she had made real progress toward that, no matter how minor. She would board in the morning, after she collected the bounty and reinforced the cell enchantments.

Somehow, she knew staying in Prismarche would only further entangle her in local events. She had found trouble even when she’d been anonymous. Now that the Guard Captain and Guildmaster knew her face and had marked her as a person of interest, further debacles would ensue. She needed to flee. Get to Meridian and check on her house and guild. Helping Saffra and Allen had been worth her time, obviously, but she had goals to work toward.

Prismarche’s Peace Day celebrations were apparently something to behold, though, and they were going all out for the one-hundred-year anniversary. Vivi didn’t consider herself a ‘party girl’, but she wondered what lay in store. The next train didn’t board until noon tomorrow anyway. She wasn’t frivolously wasting time, besides in how she could maybe [Blink] her way to Meridian if she absolutely needed to—but she didn’t.

She wanted to experience this world and what it offered. There was no rush.

The festival really started to pick up when the sun edged over the horizon and the world washed orange. With the last of their daily duties completed, the citizens of Prismarche flooded the streets and shed all shreds of restraint. People loved to celebrate, and there was no better opportunity than this: the day that marked a hundred years freed from the Cataclysms that had once ravaged the world.

Not that the newer generation understood firsthand what monstrosities used to crawl these lands. The Rampant Genesis of the Flesh-Weaver, the Crimson Blight brought by the Reaper of the Lost Harvest, the Great Conflagrations called down by the Ashen Hierophant to scour entire cities.

The game had never shied from displaying the Cataclysms in a gruesome light, the carnage left in their wake and how the world was affected. She shuddered to imagine how the inhabitants, translated into reality, remembered them. No wonder the populace revered the Party of Heroes even a century later. They had saved this world from incomprehensible terrors.

Vivi preferred huddling in a dark room with a blanket over her shoulders most nights, but she did enjoy slinking out on occasion, and being in this new body and this new world made her more comfortable with the unknown than usual. She outright enjoyed walking through the cheering crowds. Droplets of ale caught her cheek as men slammed tankards, cheering and singing as they clutched each other by the shoulder, already so drunk they struggled to stand. She only felt slightly claustrophobic by the press of bodies. Emotion was infectious, and the only emotion now was revelry thick as molasses.

Vivi could still get drunk, she discovered.

She didn’t go to parties often…or like, ever, in recent years…but the universal salve to awkwardness was alcohol, and she didn’t mind partaking when the opportunity called for it. It was hard to resist even if she wanted to when everyone in sight had a cup in hand and the obvious glow of intoxication about them.

She didn’t overindulge, though. Only had a few. She ate a lot of street food—the fried balls of batter with gooey insides as delicious as anything she’d ever tasted—and congealed into the masses. She didn’t linger anywhere long, or talk to anyone beyond frivolities, since she didn’t belong here, not on any level big or small. She was a ghostly spectator.

Around ten at night one of the truly extravagant displays organized in the town square: a parade. Floats trundled through as people cheered from behind guardrails. To her interest, amusement, and horror, it was a series representing the Cataclysms. In order, from start to finish as Vivi remembered clearing them.

Leading the procession was a hunched-over lich jerking forward on a withered black staff. Actors in masks, warriors and rogues and mages, fended his minions off. The Umbral Regent, bringer of the Cataclysm of Eternal Twilight. Though not realistic to the campaigns Vivi remembered, the representation was clear.

Then the second of the Cataclysms: The Crimson Blight wrought by the Reaper of the Lost Harvest. Plagues and starvation, led by a husk of a human in red robes. Also valiantly defeated.

The Cataclysm of the Hungry Deep. A kraken—the Maw of the Abyss—leading raiding parties of fish-like humanoids emerging in masses from the ocean. The beast had terrorized the coasts and isles of this world since time immemorial.

Rampant Genesis. The Flesh-Weaver and his grotesque creations, haunting the otherwise peaceful elven forests.

Sundered Earth. The Colossus, straightforward in raw destruction, but claiming more lives than any besides the final Cataclysm.

Fractured Time and the Shattered Oracle, a cautionary tale for peering too deeply into the most profound and esoteric magics. The least destructive, but the most horrifying in many ways, his victims trapped for millennia in alcoves of stuttering time—or equally terrible fates.

And lastly, The Ashen Hierophant, twelve-foot titan of black plate armor. He was the most accurately represented Monarch, maybe because Prismarche knew his presence intimately even after the years. His fires had cleansed more lives than disease, age, and famine combined. Entire expanses of the continent laid to waste, scars lingering a century later.

It was strange to watch such monsters cheered and jeered at, with such a lack of grimness, but it solidified the idea that the Cataclysms were relics of the past. Few to none of the people here had any clue what those monsters had been like, so there was no solemnness or genuine relief. That was a good thing, she supposed.

Eventually the parade wound down. The crowd drifted away to return to other festivities.

The next major event happened an hour later. Fireworks.

They were positioned right outside the city’s walls so everyone could see them. People seemed fascinated, pointing with wide eyes and grinning at the display, but Vivi found herself disappointed. She had expected more. The bursts of color were simply pitiful.

She guessed that while technology had improved, the people of this world were far behind her own. Fireworks were much more impressive after centuries of development, even if these people had magic on their side.

Looking back, it was probably her tipsiness at fault for her upcoming poor decision making. A whim guided her, and she didn’t think better of it. Caught up in the excited revelry, she wanted to give the city of Prismarche a real show. Fireworks as she knew them. And perhaps amplified a few times over to impress.

Part of it was also how she wanted to experiment with her magical abilities. Casting system-recognized spells, the ones logged in her ability list carried over from Seven Cataclysms, was fascinating, but she knew instinctively she could make her own too. Seeing the paltry display of explosions and lights made up her mind. She would give Prismarche a spectacle befitting the circumstances.

She extracted herself from the crowd and found a secluded alleyway then closed her eyes to delve into the memories of her new body.

Vivisari Vexaria was the world’s eminent power in sorcery. She was no god, but as far as magic went, she was the closest mortal to being so. And that wealth of knowledge lurked in Vivienne’s head now.

Creating a new spell wasn’t a simple task, even as an expert. But neither was it overly complicated, not for a mage of Vivisari’s caliber.

Bit by bit an arcane circle formed in her mind. Her [Grand Fireworks] spell utilized two branches of magic: elemental and illusory. Mostly fake, but a tad real. For the scale she wanted, if she used purely elemental magic, she might cause real harm.

As Prismarche’s display came to an end, she finalized her creation. She drew mana from herself, shaped it, and incanted her first self-created spell.

“[Grand Fireworks].”

A trail of red light flew from her staff as Prismarche’s fireworks ended, the so-called ‘grand finale’ settling into a dark sky. Vivi’s ember hung high above the center of the city for a long, suspended moment, all eyes drawn to its burning presence.

Then it exploded.