Chapter Text
Monica had tried, really tried, to be reasonable.
She wasn’t overreacting.
She knew she wasn’t.
Three days ago, Louis had come home with a bandage around his ribs, brushing it off with a lazy, “Got caught off guard. Nothing serious.”
He said it like he hadn’t been one unlucky inch away from a punctured lung.
Two days ago, Nero had walked in with a split lip and bruised knuckles from breaking someone’s jaw. “They insulted you,” he’d said, as if that explained everything.
And yesterday?
They had both come home quiet.
Neither hurt, neither bleeding — just tired. Unusually tired. The kind of tired that spoke of too much blood on their hands, even if it wasn’t theirs.
They didn’t tell her what happened.
They didn’t ask for help.
And it started when Louis and Nero started protecting her with their complex assortment of wards and protections.
She understood why.
She had scared them.
She even scared herself sometimes.
But still—She was one of the Seven Sages.
She wasn’t just someone to be defended.
And that bothered her more than anything
So here she sat, cross-legged on her bed, brow furrowed, with chalk in hand and a dozen half-finished glyphs hovering in the air above her palm.
She wasn’t breaking any wards.
She wasn’t altering the existing ones.
She wasn’t removing safeguards.
She was simply… adding them.
Rule #3 warns them when I am in danger., but why shouldn't it warn me when they are too?
If either Louis or Nero are in danger — notify Monica and activate teleportation protocol.
She sealed the final glyph with a satisfied smile.
There, a ward to protect them, like they did for me. Now we're even.
The chalk glowed faintly, activating the new formula, her mana seeping into the amulet carefully placed in the center of her glyph.
She didn’t know — couldn’t have known — that the moment her magic branched into the system, it categorized her new ward under the existing ‘’Rule #3’’, interpreting her actions as an alteration of the existing rule, silently triggering a series of warnings.