Aísē: My Five Supernatural Wives-Chapter 133: Old Friends, New Arrival

A Few Moments Ago…

"Huff Huff hahh—"

Victor huffed with ragged breaths as he barely dodged another blow from the monster clad in a Knight's Armour.

The thing moved like a nightmare given form — slow enough that you thought you had time, fast enough that by the time that thought finished, its gauntlet had already carved a trench through the cobblestones where your head used to be.

'Level 4 spells aren't touching it. Level 5 is going to drain me completely dry — and even then, I'm not sure it would do anything more than annoy it.'

Victor grimaced, weaving between the debris of what appeared to be a perfectly respectable abandoned English street, now rapidly becoming less of a street and more of a crater.

"Mariabell—" he grunted, rolling under a sweeping arm that would have separated his head from his shoulders, "—are you truly sure this is the place those two wandered off to?!"

Mariabell, to her considerable credit, was already constructing a containment array from behind a half-collapsed stone wall, her fingers tracing runes in the air with the practiced precision of someone who had survived one too many of Victor's plans.

"The tracking sigil led here," she called back, not looking up from her work. "The residual magical signature is unmistakable — Succubus-class, layered over something I've never encountered before. Something old."

Victor narrowly avoided losing a leg.

"Old." He repeated flatly. "You mean like— ancient, terrifying, and apparently owns a guard dog the size of a small cathedral kind of old?"

"...Potentially, yes."

'Fantastic.'

The Dark Knight — because that is what it clearly was, no amount of optimism was going to reclassify it as something more manageable — turned its hollow visor toward Victor with the slow, grinding deliberateness of something that didn't need to hurry. It had never needed to hurry. Nothing had ever outrun it.

Victor could feel it in his bones. The thing wasn't angry. It wasn't hunting. It was simply correcting. As if their presence here was an equation it was patiently solving, and the answer it kept arriving at was: remove.

He drew a long breath and called up every scrap of mana he had left.

'Alright. New plan. We don't beat it. We just need to get—'

The Dark Knight's armoured fist came down.

The world went white.

Then dark.

Then the rather unpleasant sensation of landing face-first on something that shattered under the impact.

Victor blinked, staring at what appeared to be the ruins of a very fine china tea set.

"...Ow."

"Ow is an understatement," Mariabell agreed from somewhere to his left, her voice muffled by what turned out to be a tablecloth.

The room erupted.

Chairs scraped back. Someone was on their feet. Victor's battle-worn instincts fired before his brain could properly catch up — he shoved himself upright, biting back the groan that tried to crawl out of his chest, scanning for threats—

And found Valerian.

Standing at the head of a ruined dining table, looking at him like he'd just seen a ghost.

Victor stared.

Valerian stared back.

The silence stretched for exactly three seconds before Victor's brain finally, mercifully, caught up.

"...Valerian?" His voice came out embarrassingly hoarse. "Is that— is that really you?"

"It's me." Valerian's expression cracked into something between relief and disbelief. "You're safe. We're all— we're friends here."

Victor let out a breath that felt like it had been building for weeks. He let his stance drop, the last of the combat-adrenaline finally bleeding out of him — and that was when the rest of the room registered.

A silver? Blue-haired woman with violet eyes—

He blinked.

'...Isabella?'

No. No, the hair was wrong, the eyes were wrong, the entire presence was wrong — Isabella didn't make the air feel like it had weight to it, Isabella didn't look at a room like she was the oldest thing in it by several centuries—

And then it clicked.

'...Mephistopheles.'

He'd only ever seen her at night. In poor light. He'd never had reason to look closely enough to notice — but now, standing here in the cold morning, it was undeniable. The face. The bone structure. Every feature.

'Why does she look exactly like Isabella?'

The question opened a door in his mind that led somewhere deeply unsettling, and he immediately decided he wasn't walking through it yet. He had a finite amount of cognitive capacity left after being thrown through a building, and he was going to allocate it carefully.

"Victor." Mariabell's quiet voice cut through the spiral. She was sitting up now, one hand pressed to her temple, staring at the

silver Blue-haired woman with an expression Victor had never seen on her face before.

Carefully blank. Professionally still.

"Liliana," Mariabell said.

"Mariabell," she replied. "You look terrible."

"Your guardian threw us through a ceiling."

"Technically," the silver-haired woman interjected from her position at the head of the table, completely unruffled, "it threw you through a roof. The ceiling was an interior detail you passed through on the way down." She paused. "And I didn't know you were coming."

Victor turned to look at her fully for the first time.

The weight of her gaze hit him the way certain Duke-level presences did — not with aggression, but with age. Something in his instincts went very quiet and very still.

"You," he said slowly. "You're the one who owns the thing outside."

"Guilty."

"And you didn't, perhaps, turn it off when two humans came stumbling into your territory?"

"I said," she repeated, her violet eyes sliding sideways toward Valerian with an expression that somehow managed to be both unbothered and slightly guilty, "I didn't know you were coming."

Valerian's eyebrow twitched with the particular patient suffering of a man who had gotten used to this.

"Mephistopheles."

"Don't use that tone with me. I can't disable a sentinel-class guardian in real time, Valerian, they don't have an off switch, that's the entire point—"

"You could have given the town a ward of passage."

"I could have done many things. I did not anticipate that your friends would apparate directly into an active—" she stopped. Exhaled. "Fine. I apologise. Marginally."

Victor decided to table the questions about what precisely a 'Mephistopheles' was and why Valerian was apparently comfortable enough with it to argue about sentinel?-class guardians over a destroyed breakfast table.

He had bigger problems.

"How bad is it?" Mariabell murmured from beside him, quiet enough that it didn't carry. Her eyes were moving around the room in the same way his were — cataloguing, assessing.

"Manageable," he said, at the same volume.

She gave him a look that said she had a somewhat different definition of manageable.

Aisha finished sealing the last of Mariabell's cuts and sat back, her expression carefully neutral in the way it always went when she was processing too many things at once. "Victor — how did you find this place? We've been off the grid for weeks."

"I tracked Valerian's residual mana signature." He paused. "Mariabell did, technically. I just provided moral support and got thrown through a building."

"Tracking Valerian's signature at this range," Liliana said, tilting her head with something that looked like genuine assessment, "means you're either extraordinarily talented or extraordinarily stubborn."

"She's both," Victor said.

Mariabell didn't look up. "I'm a Mage of the third faculty. Tracking is—"

"Third faculty?" Mephistopheles' voice shifted. Subtle. The idle amusement thinning just slightly at the edges, like a curtain moving to reveal something sharper behind it.

She turned to look at Mariabell properly.

Mariabell met her gaze without flinching, which, Victor thought, said everything about her character.

"The Astor family," Mephistopheles said slowly, the words not quite a question. "You've encountered them before."

Not a question. A deduction.

The table went quiet.

Mariabell's hands stilled in her lap.

"...Yes," she said, after a beat. "My family had dealings with them. Before." Her jaw tightened. "Before Austin."

Valerian straightened. Liliana's smirk was gone. Even Mephistopheles' expression settled into something quieter — the stillness of someone suddenly very interested in continuing a conversation.

"Then you may know things about his methods," Valerian said. "About his circuits. His weaknesses."

"Possibly." Mariabell looked at him steadily. "What are you planning?"

Victor cut in before anyone could answer.

"Whatever it is," he said flatly, "I'm helping."

"Victor—" Valerian started.

"No." His voice came out harder than intended, and he didn't pull it back. "I don't know what's happening here yet. I don't know who half these people are or how you ended up in an abandoned English town with a demonic guardian and a dining table plan to kill a Duke. But I'm not sitting on the sidelines while you—"

He stopped.

Valerian was looking at him. Not arguing. Just— looking.

The same expression he'd had since Victor had landed on the table. Something careful in it. Something that had been through too much, recently, to pretend at lightness.

Victor exhaled.

"...Just tell me the plan," he said, quieter. "All of it."

Valerian opened his mouth.

And Mephistopheles went still.

Not the studied stillness of someone pausing. The absolute, physical stillness of something ancient suddenly snapping to attention — the way a predator goes motionless when it hears something in the dark.

Every head turned toward her.

Her violet eyes weren't focused on the room anymore. They were focused on something none of them could see. Something beyond the walls, beyond the abandoned streets, somewhere out on the cold English horizon.

The candles on the table didn't flicker.

The room just felt, inexplicably, colder.

"Mephistopheles," Liliana said. Carefully.

Mephistopheles raised one hand. Silence.

Several seconds passed.

Then, very quietly, she set both palms flat on the ruined table. Her expression had changed — the dry wit was gone, the marginal apology was gone, all of it stripped back to something that had lived long enough to recognize the specific texture of certain kinds of danger.

"We have a problem," she said.

"Another one?" Victor said.

"A different one." Her eyes came back to the room. They swept across all of them, landing finally on Valerian. "The Austin operation isn't our only timeline issue anymore."

A pause.

"There's a Mana pressure building on the eastern approach. Military discipline. Coordinated suppression — they're trying to hide it, and they're doing it well." Her voice was controlled. Factual. The kind of calm you learn when panic is an indulgence you stopped being able to afford centuries ago.

"That is not Austin's signature."

Valerian's expression shifted. Something knowing and cold moving through his eyes.

"How far?" he asked.

"An hour." She met his gaze. "Perhaps less."

As I pondered Mephistopheles's words a familiar feeling came to me as I sensed a presence next my connection with Liliana....

"Is she?".

The name didn't need to be said. Victor watched Valerian absorb it, watched the set of his shoulders change — not with fear, but with the particular weight of a man who had been waiting for something to catch up to him and had never quite believed he'd have enough time.

Victor looked between them.

"Someone," he said, "start talking. Now."

....