Magicapita

Miss Morspen's aged eyes swept back and forth between Serulia and Cæ as a hint of realization dawned on her. The relationship between her client and the prime witness was more intimate than she realized; she would need to alter the way she treated him, lest she potentially offend either of them.

"That's… a start," Miss Morspen reassured Serulia. "Now, let us get more detailed with the sequence of events, starting with the victory of your team. Let us try to plot it on this timeline before us."

Cæ stiffened, trying to appear as calm as he possibly could. It was hard to maintain his composure, however, when Serulia began describing each event, motion by motion, something Cæ had been dreading this entire time.

"…and the next moment I saw the attacks converging on me and then…" she frowned, wincing.

She put her hand to her head with an expression of pain.

"You don't have to push yourself, Serulia," Cæ gently assured her out of both self-interest and some concern. "It won't do you good to force yourself to remember things that bring you pain."

"No… I can remember." Her tone was one of resolve.

She knew that this was important to getting her justice. She was unwilling to be treated like a fragile damsel in distress who needed to be treated like a precious vase.

"I… I saw something impossible."

Cæ felt his heart stop beating.

Blood drained from his face as he grew paler. On the outside, he tried his best to appear as calm and composed as possible, as if this were just a mundane process that he would much rather avoid.

But on the inside, he had broken into a cold sweat.

"Something impossible…?" Miss Morspen frowned, clearly not the most pleased by that description. "What was impossible, precisely?"

"Ngh…" Her expression grew pained.

"Young miss, My Lord has instructed me to ensure that you don't take the recovery process too hastily." The butler standing behind her leaned forward, lightly reminding her.

"I am not recovering," Serulia retorted with a hint of irritation in her voice. "I know what I saw. It is at the very tip of my tongue. I know I saw something that is supposed to be impossible!"

Her fingers pressed against the side of her head as she closed her eyes, trying to replay the memory.

"I saw… I saw…" she murmured. "What did I see…?"

Cæ held his breath as he watched Serulia hold his very fate and destiny in her hand.

"…I can't." Her voice quivered with frustration. "I know I remember it. It is a memory just within reach. I just… I just…!"

"Alright. Alright." Miss Morspen intervened, raising her hands to try to calm Serulia down. "There's nothing wrong with that. We can work with this. Just… don't mention the 'impossible thing' part until you can remember precise details. The fact that you don't have precise memories of what happened can be used against you in a court of law. Opposing counsel will use it to prove that your memories of the event are not reliable—"

"That is bullshit," Serulia's tone was one of irritation. "My memories of the event are completely reliable."

"I know…" Miss Morspen assured her with a gentle, disarming tone. "I'm just saying that it is a vulnerability that does not need to be included. The goal is to get justice for Miranda, is it not? Does this 'impossible event' have to be litigated in court for justice to be meted out?"

"…No, it is not relevant to Miranda's crime," she admitted.

"Exactly, if it is not relevant, then we don't bring it up. Brevity. Relevance. Clarity. These are the most important traits that our presentation needs to have. Irrelevant information has no place in our case."

Cæ tried to hide the sheer relief that emerged within him. However, he knew that he was hardly out of the hot waters yet. He had just managed to get past one avenue of exposure. From everything that he had seen of Miss Morspen, of the way she took notes and converted them into points on a map in a timeline of ten seconds each, labeled with a person or event, with their own notes attached to them, Cæ could tell that this woman was highly meticulous.

She would not miss even the slightest discrepancy between testimony, and that was Cæ's biggest problem. He could already predict some of the ways that this went wrong. Once she began asking the other witnesses about Cæ's actions, and all of them reported that they were, for whatever reasons, unable to confirm Cæ's magic circles, then she would realize that Cæ's testimony was the only thing supporting his set of events.

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Of course, that didn't mean that she would jump to the conclusion that he was a legendary pure mage. Obviously not. It would be an absurd conclusion with such scant evidence when there were only three known pure mages in the entire world.

However, it would represent an area of weakness that the Nelnmont Family could target. And that was certainly not something that Miss Morspen was willing to let go of.

She would likely grill Cæ about the fact that nobody else saw his magic circles. Cæ needed to offer testimony that was plausible under the evidence that she collected.

'Insisting that I used magic is likely the best way to go. Any other explanation doesn't make sense.'

Incantation wasn't even a logical choice under the circumstances, while there was no way he could have body-cast such a complex spell when a well-known limitation of body-casting was the complexity of eidos.

On top of that, he hadn't even learned enough body-casting to possibly justify that as an excuse.

Magic circles were the only explanation. If she confronted him with why nobody else could confirm that, then he would simply have to shrug and say that they somehow missed it.

It wasn't even particularly suspicious, because the alternative was that he was a pure mage, which was obviously absurd.

"Alright, Mr. Cæ, your turn." She shifted her attention to him, drawing his. "Let us have you give me a moment-by-moment breakdown of what unfolded from your perspective. Be sure to be highly detailed about every event, no matter how small or insignificant it might seem.

'Here we go.' Cæ nodded with a calm expression, as if he had nothing to hide. "At the time that Head Coach Sorwel announced the victory of our team, I was about twenty meters or so away from Serulia, who was at our flag. By that point, I had already prepared the spell that I would go on to use to save her. I was on the very verge of dispelling the magic circle because of our victory, but then I noticed Miranda's bloodlust by pure chance and realized what was about to happen right about one second into your timeline here."

Miss Morspen nodded as she noted down his testimony on a laptop. "Go on."

"When I noticed Miranda's bloodlust, I… had a bad feeling about what she was going to do. I was even certain about what she was going to do in the pits of my gut, and out of instinct, I leaped to protect Serulia…"

Serulia's cheeks flushed red as she grew more bashful, averting her gaze with a hint of embarrassment on her face.

"I poured more mana into my flight spell at the same time," Cæ continued with a serious tone, "while maintaining the magic circle for the shield spell that I had prepared for her. I sped towards her at high speeds, barely managing to make it to her, at about three seconds after the declaration of victory, before her attack reached Serulia, and then cast my shielding spell at the very final moment before the attack reached Serulia, at about four seconds in."

She nodded with an appreciative expression at Cæ's unprompted elaborations of the timestamps, jotting down all of his testimony.

He continued describing the fiction he created with a completely composed demeanor and body language. He made sure to ensure that his breathing was calm, while his hands remained relatively still, his eye contact remained normal, and anything else that he could think of.

"…And then Miranda fainted too, presumably from the trauma and the stress," Cæ replied. "And that was the end of that."

She nodded. "Very good. This will be indisputable testimony based on my initial impression. You not only saw her attack but cast a magic spell that repelled her attack; thus, you are the only person who can confirm just how intense the spell was. It should be indisputable to any jury or judge."

"…Which one will this be?" Cæ raised an eyebrow. "I did hear some mention a jury, while others mention a judge."

"It depends entirely on the defendants, of course," she replied. "They have a right to opt for either. I suspect that they will try to opt for a judge, however."

"Why do you say that, Miss Morspen?" Serulia raised an eyebrow with curiosity.

The elder woman smiled. "Because any sane set of people will see that it is indisputable that Miranda attempted to murder you. It is much easier to try to bribe a judge than a jury. There are powerful protocols for jury protection that we would ensure are enforced, as would your family. But the Nelnmonts are, unfortunately, the most powerful group in law in this city. I say this grudgingly, of course, and with an optimism that it won't remain this way in the future. But they have a tremendous amount of influence over law enforcement, investigation, and judicial offices. They do not lose, regardless of the merit of the case. There are some exceptions, of course…"

She directed a pointed gaze at Cæ, who heaved a deep sigh.

The defeat they suffered at the hands of Headmistress Lenolia had been a blow to their reputations, but their foundations were still rock solid. Cæ assumed that they must have regained some of their lost footing if Miss Morspen spoke this highly of them.

He also realized that this must have been another reason why Miss Morspen, another powerhouse in Colohen City's legal sector, would know of him. He was a significant part of that case, and there was no doubt that she would have looked into him.

"The Nelnmonts…" Cæ murmured as his eyes lit up.

Now that he thought of it, he had dirt on the Nelnmonts. He could threaten to expose them for their child abuse of Melia and get them to drop the case.

'I don't have proof, though, I'll have to ask Headmistress Lenolia for the copies she had made of Melia being beaten by her father.'

He wanted to face-palm for not considering it sooner. In fact, he wondered why the Nelnmonts were bold enough to take this case when they knew that he was a key witness.

'Ah, right…' He remembered. 'They don't know that I know their secret. I only passed on that plan to Headmistress Lenolia and then remained uninvolved.'

It would explain why they had so confidently taken this case, thinking it had nothing to do with Headmistress Lenolia. Cæ couldn't even wait to see what kind of expression they would have on their face when they realized that this dirt would keep coming back to bite them.