Nostredame

Nostredame is the celebrated royal headmaster and archmage whose authority links academic knowledge, magical power, and the political response to Vainqueur Knightsbane. Known privately to Kia as Kevin, he is a powerful Claimed who adopted a fantasy-sounding name after arriving in Outremonde, yet retained enough intimacy with Kia to enter her room unceremoniously and scold her. His public identity is that of Professor Nostredame, a renowned master whose expertise helps interpret the Class System and manage dangers that conventional institutions cannot easily contain.

Identity and Reputation

Nostredame is introduced through the achievements of his apprentice, Lucie Lavere, whose academic success is presented as especially striking because she studied under him. Lucie had published research on the effects of the Red Death plague on base stats and on synergies between spellcasting classes, making her a brilliant young scholar rather than merely a court magician’s assistant. Her apprenticeship to the famous royal headmaster establishes Nostredame as an intellectual authority whose influence extends into the study of classes, statistics, and magical specialization.

His expertise is not confined to theory. When Henry Bright examines Lucie Lavere’s class with his Class Specialist Perk, her displayed profile reads Scholar 15 and Unknown Spellcaster Classes 22. The scene places Nostredame behind the development of a scholar capable of operating at the frontier of knowledge, while also showing the classificatory language that governs the world’s understanding of power. Nostredame’s significance therefore rests on both magical prowess and institutional command: he represents the person most likely to recognize what an unprecedented class or ability means.

Scholarship and the Vainqueur Problem

The emergence of Vainqueur Knightsbane as an intelligent dragon who gained levels becomes a direct challenge to established scholarship. Henry Bright describes the case as the first known instance of a dragon gaining a class of his own, distinguishing Vainqueur Knightsbane even from the fabled Jade Dragon of the East. Henry wishes to study him further, but reports that the Shining Crusade intends to send knights to kill him as soon as possible.

Lucie Lavere treats the proposed crusade with skepticism after hearing about Vainqueur Knightsbane’s demand for a lava bath. Her response suggests that Nostredame’s scholarly circle can see the absurdity and danger in applying a conventional monster-killing response to a creature who has become a historical and systemic anomaly. Although Nostredame is not present in that conversation, his mentorship frames Lucie’s intellectual openness: the school he leads produces inquiry into Vainqueur Knightsbane rather than reducing him to a target.

The same crisis later reaches Nostredame directly through Kia. When he gives her the letter concerning Emperor Vainqueur Knightsbane and the V&V adventurer company, she struggles to reconcile the dragon’s legendary reputation with his political and commercial ambitions. The letter explains that Vainqueur Knightsbane wants lands and gold in payment for destroying one of Maure’s generals, the lich Furibon. Nostredame’s role in conveying the matter shows him functioning as an interpreter between the old image of the dragon as catastrophe and the new reality of a leveled, negotiable, institutionally visible adventurer.

Kevin, Kia, and the Public Persona

Kia’s private treatment of Nostredame sharply contrasts with his official stature. He enters her room after kicking the door open, finds her drunk in the afternoon, opens the window with telekinesis, and watches her cure her hangover with the spell Cure. When she greets him casually as Kevin, he reprimands her for failing to use his hero name, Nostredame. The exchange exposes a long-standing friendship in which familiarity survives beneath ceremonial identities and chosen names.

The scene also reveals that Nostredame is one of the Claimed who adopted a new, fantasy-sounding identity upon arriving in Outremonde. Kia knows him well enough to disregard the distinction, and their closeness permits her to tease him even while wearing only white lingerie. Their relationship is therefore neither a formal teacher-student bond nor a purely political alliance. It is an intimate, irreverent connection between old teammates who understand the difference between the man Kevin and the public figure Professor Nostredame.

His intervention nevertheless has practical force. Nostredame explains that Vainqueur Knightsbane is regarded in the southern lands as the archetypal dragon and was once considered the greatest calamity of the age, having earned the Knightsbane nickname by killing every hero who challenged him. He then presents Kia with the problem of Vainqueur Knightsbane’s human partner, the emperor’s title, and the V&V company. By asking her to read rather than offering a simple verbal explanation, he makes the strange political reality itself the object of her examination.

Political Counsel and Diplomatic Power

Nostredame’s political judgment appears most clearly in the debate over whether Kia should investigate Vainqueur Knightsbane. King Roland Gardemagne has frozen the bounty on the dragon because Duchess De Sade declined to press charges over her sister’s death and because Vainqueur Knightsbane destroyed Furibon. Roland’s policy is to allow the dragon to play at being a noble so long as he follows Adventurer Guild procedures and limits aggression to Gardemagne’s enemies.

Kia is more suspicious, warning that dragons are egomaniacs and that power may go to Vainqueur Knightsbane’s head. She says that Lucie Lavere has already proposed moving to Murmurin to check on the dragon and his associates, while the supposed guild representative would in practice be a long-term royal spy. Nostredame’s connection to this plan places him within a network that combines research with surveillance. The kingdom wants to understand the unprecedented dragon, but it also wants the knowledge gained from that observation to support political control.

At the later meeting between King Roland Gardemagne and Vainqueur Knightsbane, Nostredame stands beside the king as his archmage. When Roland requests a map of the continent and a pen, Nostredame conjures both tools with a snap of his fingers. His magic enables the treaty discussion to become concrete: Roland draws the Albain Mountains as the frontier between Gardemagne and Vainqueur Knightsbane’s dominion. Vainqueur Knightsbane immediately insists that the mountains are his as well, claiming the titles of Emperor of Murmurin, Ishfania, and the Albain Mountains.

Nostredame is also tasked with a dangerous rescue. King Roland asks whether he can free the king’s niece from her prison. Nostredame answers that the caster’s level exceeds his own, but that his artifacts and optimized Perks will make the task trivial. The statement combines an acknowledgment of inferiority with confidence in preparation and equipment: power is not presented as a single fixed quantity, but as something that can be supplemented through artifacts, specialized abilities, and strategic optimization.

The Class System and the Limits of Authority

Nostredame becomes an explicit defender of the Class System when Icefang challenges Vainqueur Knightsbane’s account of it. Vainqueur Knightsbane claims to have uncovered an ancient dragon system that grants power and money and allows him to protect the dragon way of life from those who would reduce dragons to lead. Icefang dismisses the claim and demands proof, while Vainqueur Knightsbane challenges the system to appear before him.

Nostredame panics and explains the first-level requirements: awareness of the system and the stat criteria for beginner classes. His unfinished explanation indicates that the other dragons have not accessed it because they lacked awareness, met the wrong conditions, or both. The moment is important because Nostredame’s knowledge does not give him complete command of the discovery. He understands the mechanism well enough to identify its entry requirements, yet he cannot prevent the system from becoming a public revelation once Icefang calls for it.

This episode makes Nostredame an intermediary between hidden rules and visible consequences. His expertise translates the Class System into intelligible criteria, but Vainqueur Knightsbane’s discovery destabilizes the authority of established experts, royal institutions, and dragon tradition alike. Nostredame can explain the threshold; he cannot monopolize what lies beyond it.

Narrative Role and Significance

Nostredame’s recurring function is to make the unfamiliar legible. He mentors the scholar best positioned to investigate class theory, informs Kia about the unprecedented dragon whose identity has become political, equips King Roland Gardemagne’s diplomacy with instantaneous magic, offers a solution to a prison guarded by a stronger caster, and explains the conditions governing the Class System. Each appearance places him at a boundary where an old category fails: scholarship meets a leveling dragon, royal policy meets an adventurer empire, and magical hierarchy meets optimization.

Yet the character is not merely an impersonal sage. The name Kevin, the scolding of Kia, and his panic during the public demonstration of the system preserve a comic and human scale beneath the titles of royal headmaster and archmage. His authority is substantial but not absolute; he remains dependent on evidence, alliances, artifacts, and institutions while trying to interpret forces that are changing faster than official knowledge can absorb. In that contrast lies his narrative importance: Nostredame embodies the attempt to govern a world in which discovery, friendship, and political danger continually outrun the categories designed to contain them.