Frey's Ascension
100 more years pass, and Warden Prella is getting closer to retirement now. Despite everything remaining quiet all these years, the warden still has nightmares about the time she met the demon of the pit. His Aura traumatized her soul – leaving a scar that still hasn't gone away.
Because of her paranoia, she adds another anti-Haalfrin security feature in her pit every couple decades, as soon as she can spare the budget to buy it…
… And after the Demon has lain dormant for 600 years, the Warden finally ends up causing trouble for Haalfrin, though she doesn't know it.
Because Prella KNOWS that Haalfrin gains power by absorbing Aura, she took some extra steps and installed some VERY advanced enchantments which were imported all the way from one of the Otherworldly tribes.
With these new enchantments, all Aura of any kind are passively absorbed from the world around it, then stored in spirit stones Prella keeps locked away in her tower. With no Death Aura left in the hallways now, a part of her mind is put at ease.
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"COMMANDER!!!" one of the Will scouts flies up to Haalfrin and screams in agitation. "I don't know what the enemy general did, but all the Death Aura's gone! Even the Aura you're sending up is being absorbed and lost!"
"SH##!" Haalfrin curses. "How bad is the loss?"
"A couple months' worth of collecting, sir," the soldier responds.
"Hmm…," Haalfrin wonders, "Did the prison masters discover what we were doing? What now?"
With no way to collect Aura anymore, the death gods won't be able to visit them anymore. After a few more years, they're going to starve to death!
Haalfrin looks through the wall, where he knows his fellow inmates are living. By now, there's only 5 of them left (compared to there being 7 100 years ago).
(Of the 5 left, 2 of them are women, and 3 are men. The two women's names are Dee and Nella, while the 3 men's names are Garr, Talfon, and Vic.)
'If I tell them the bad news, even more of them might commit suicide.' Of course, Haalfrin doesn't know that, but it does seem likely.
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Since Haalfrin can only talk to his Wills through their common link with Frey, she hears the entire conversation, and her breathing freezes up. 'No more food? Are we going to die?' she thinks I'm a panic.
Thinking of the fun times and the late "nights" spent reading books, she panics. 'No! I don't want that to end! That's why I never told him I could've helped him escape a long time ago!'
…Indeed, her Yiir Name has an ability she could never bring herself to tell Haalfrin.
Not only is she able to FEEL Death Aura as if it were a piece of her own flesh… she's able to use it to travel. Everywhere that the Aura is, so is she.
With this power, she could've easily travelled up the floors using Haalfrin's pillar of Aura.
…However, if Haalfrin had known she had this ability… 'I didn't want to help him escape,' Frey thinks, 'I wanted him to stay here with me, forever.'
Then, she looks down, and a tear falls from her eyes. 'But… If I use my Yiir Name, then I'll help Sir Demon escape... If he's gone, then these times down here will end. Either we all die, or Sir Demon leaves.'
Frey sits down against the wall and rests her head in her knees. Her heart is heavy with sadness, for she knows that whatever choice she makes, her life will change, and she'll lose something.
After several minutes thinking about the future, her heart gradually builds up the courage.
She already knows what she needs to do; she just didn't know if she had the courage to do it.
So, when she stands up and looks upward resolutely, she feels something stir in her soul. "Haalfrin," Frey calls out. "Extend your Aura upward."
"What's going on?" he asks.
"Just do it."
Haalfrin rarely hears Frey talk seriously, but when she does, he thinks it's worth listening to. So, he reaches out with his Aura and extends it up. "How high do you want it?"
"As high as you can get it."
The moment Frey says this, she feels her vision black out again, and her mind falls back into her Soul Realm to receive her 6th Name.
"Heh…," Frey mutters one last thing before she loses consciousness completely. 'I'm younger than Sir Demon, but I already have more Names than him. He'll be so angry. Heh heh…'
And with that, she's gone completely limp, and her mind has left to her Soul Realm..
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Interactions with Names happen instantly, so the reason people usually take a bit to wake up from their soul realm is that they dilly-dally inside most of the time.
Frey, however, knows she's in a hurry; Haalfrin has already extended his Aura upwards, and he's about to be discovered by the warden. There's no time to waste. So, she finishes reading her new Name, then exits her soul realm without even giving herself time to experiment with her powers.
The moment she wakes up, Freyya tears the used-up mana stone from around her neck, then she grabs ahold of the thin strand of death Aura.
Once she touches it, her body dematerializes in an instant, and her spirit is absorbed in the strand. Right now, she looks just like the little Will wisps, except instead of being silver, she's golden-colored.
"Gotta hurry!" she mumbles as she shoots upward as fast as she can. She knows the warden has enchantments now that can absorb Death Aura, so she's afraid Haalfrin's strand of Aura will be consumed if she takes too long.
The floors zip by extremely quickly in her view, and as she passes by brightly lit corridors – some teeming with life – she gets a really strange feeling in her heart. 'Is that what other people look like?' she gasps, 'I didn't remember!'
Even if collecting Aura secretly takes a long time, Haalfrin's 600 years of hard work hadn't been for nothing. When he started the secret collection process, he had only been able to reach up to the 20th Basement Floor.
Now, Frey reaches the end of the Aura strand and (after counting the floors on the way up) learns that she's on the 9th Basement floor. "Higher… higher!" she starts shouting out desperately.
When she can't go any higher, she hops off the Aura strand and lets Haalfrin retract it again. 'Hopefully, he didn't lose too much through that endeavor.'
Truth be told, these Aura absorbing crystals sprinkled throughout the pit are designed to take in ambient Aura, so Haalfrin only lost a few more months – nothing compared to the centuries worth he has.
Once Haalfrin's Aura pulls back, Frey finds herself standing alone in a storage closet. She then looks up and wonders, 'What now? I have 9 more floors until I reach the surface… and the Warden's tower…'
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"Crap…," Frey curses out loud, "where am I on this floor, exactly?" It HAS been 600 years since she's seen anything but lifeless hallways. Sure, some of the death gods left furnishings for her, but that's not the point; the room she's in right now feels… lived in…, and that makes her uncomfortable.
Frey thinks about how to get to the surface, and her mind goes blank. "How do the security enchantments work again? Will anyone know I'm not an employee just by looking at me? Will anyone stop me?" She has no idea.
Another pressing problem for Frey is her rumbling hunger. She used up a lot of mana traveling through that much Aura. With her mana depleted, she needs to eat a lot to gain her power back.
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The girl looks around and notes the tall shelves full of boxes. 'Probably a supply room. Better check around in case there's any food.'
All the boxes are labeled, though she can't read the signs. She sniffs a few boxes and smells food in most of them. 'Don't mind if I do.' She sifts through some of the boxes almost mindlessly, until she finds something precious.
'MILK!' she nearly shouts out loud. 'Oh yes!' She uses her magic to chill it more than it already was, then she rips off the cork on the glass jug. When Haalfrin and the death gods found out she can't take dairy products without getting diarrhea (something about being unable to digest something called "lactose"), they stopped giving her milk.
A part of her spirit died that day.
With this in mind, Frey happily gulps down as much as her tiny stomach can fill. 'Ah. I'm alive again.'
Then, she turns her nose up and sniffs again. 'Is that… cake?' (Normally, the guards wouldn't have cake, but the Warden has a policy of celebrating every employee's birthday once per year in a single, collective party. That's the ONLY day they bring in cake.)
The girl gets really happy and starts digging through the colder section of the storage room, and she finds boxes and boxes of cake – all ready to be given to the servants and guards for the yearly celebration.
"It's a sign," Frey mutters when she finds the treasure.
'If there's cake, then the gods are telling me my mission will succeed, and that they approve of my choice to come here.'
Frey then wrinkles her nose and curses under her breath, "That crappy Mr. Demon. He always says that children shouldn't have too much sugar. He never lets me eat a lot of cake."
Knowing this makes these boxes of cake look much more attractive...