To The Surface (1/2)

As the guard is holding Frey's hand and patiently walking her down the hall, the man looks down at her and remarks, "Still... what did you do to get so filthy, anyways? Got into something you're not supposed to? Hmm?!"

Frey grimaces hearing the man's lecturing tone. Somehow, he's way more annoying that Sir Master Mage when he talks like that.

Not wanting to give an answer, Frey looks up and opens her eyes really wide at him and blinks slowly.

She'd heard from Sir Demon that humans are creatures who are psychologically wired to have more natural protective instincts towards things with small hands and big eyes. It's why some animals with small, beady eyes are usually un-cute, while others with large, googly eyes are loved almost universally.

This is because humans have instincts to protect babies, and their babies have small hands and bigger proportional eyes.

Knowing this, Frey opens her eyes wide, hoping the guard will find her cute and stop the inconvenient line of questioning.

…Instead of getting incoherently wrapped in her charms, the guard thinks she's too scared to answer. Her acting is just that bad. "Oi! I asked you a question!"

Rather than bothering any more about this man, Frey keeps thinking about escape. 'Are there any places without surveillance mirrors?' she wonders. 'What about the storage room? …AH!' she nearly screams out, 'There WERE surveillance mirrors there! They already saw me use magic and attack someone!'

Realizing she has even less time than she thought, Frey's mind works extra hard, and she comes up with an idea. She then starts thinking a spell in her mind while she gathers her mana.

After she finishes molding the mana in her soul, she releases the energy.

There are no flashy magic circles or explosions. Instead, the guard suddenly feels an absence next to him. He looks down and shouts, "Where did she go!?" Her vanishing was so abrupt that he had a hard time comprehending.

Frey had thought about a teleportation spell, but those things take a lot longer, and they're more complicated; she didn't want to risk it. Instead, she used the simplest and most reliable form of invisibility.

You see, there are two schools of thought when talking about invisibility. There are people who want to bend light around your body to make themselves impossible to see. This is a little tricky, since controlling that much light so precisely may make you disappear, but it'll leave behind a shimmering effect in the air. Nobody has magic control great enough to make you completely unnoticeable this way.

The other school of thought is to simply use illusion magic to make people unable to notice you by directly manipulating your mind.

The latter method is certainly more reliable, though its only downside is that this illusion magic targets individual minds; the illusion is harder to hold the stronger the minds of the targets, and the more targets there are.

This means that invisibility via illusion looks a lot better, but it works on fewer people at once, and there's a chance that the target's mental resistance would cancel out the spell anyway.

In Frey's mind, she can make herself disappear from this one man's vision while not disappearing in the eyes of the surveillance mirrors. What a perfect plan!

And so Frey briskly walks down the hall undeterred. With her spiritual eyes, she can see people's spirits through walls. With this, she can see people before they can see her. When this happens, she shifts the illusion spell over to them. Then, when they actually run into each other, none of them look at her.

"Eh heh, perfect," she mutters.

As she walks around the hall seemingly aimlessly, she starts to get really confused. "Where's the teleportation circle to get to a higher floor?" she mutters. 'Whatever. I'll find it eventually. I didn't know it was this easy.'

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"Warden," comes a voice from a Far-Speak medallion hanging on the wall, "There was a disturbance on Floor 9."

"What happened?" comes Prella's older and more irate tone.

"There was a scuffle in the storage room of that floor. A lot of the food was knocked over. We also saw 2 unconscious maids laying on the floor."

"Do you know who did it?" the warden asks.

"Yeah. It was a young-looking mage. She wasn't in uniform, though."

"A prisoner, then?"

"Maybe…," the officer replies, unsure.

"Tell me where she is now," the warden commands.

Once she gets the officer's answer, she speaks a password in her surveillance mirror, and two images pull up on her wall. On one mirror, she sees a girl hunched in a corner, desperately stuffing as much cake as she can in her mouth, and on the other, she sees the girl currently walking down the hallway.

'Huh,' the Prella guesses, 'If she's that desperate to eat cake, then she's definitely a prisoner.' She pulls up another far-speak medallion and speaks into it, "Sir Rian."

"Yes ma'am!"

"There's an escaped prisoner on Floor 9. I'll send you the location. I want you to check her background and find out what a mage prisoner is doing on Floor 9!"

The only kind of prisoners on Floor 9 are magicless folk. The teleport circles are also password-protected, so it's very odd how this dirty-looking girl got there in the first place.

As the Warden waits for results from her subordinates, she continues to study the girl in her mirrors. "I saw telekinesis and illusion magic. She has her Syl and Dra Names at least, so that means she's probably a 2nd gate mage."

Of course, Warden Prella ruled out that the girl is a 3rd gate mage; the warden has all the 3rd gate mage's names and faces memorized, and she doesn't recognize Frey. She also assumes the girl isn't a 4th gate mage… much less a 6th gate mage.

Only a minute passes before Sir Rian gets back to Prella. "Ma'am. I went through the roster of prisoners, and I couldn't find this girl. I think she's an intruder."

Hearing this, the warden sighs and says, "Enough. Just take her into custody." Assuming the intruder is a 2nd gate mage, this should be easy, right?

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Frey is walking down the hallway when she hears scuffling behind her. She turns around, and her spirit vision lets her see a crowd of spiritual auras coming from around the corners. With the way they're headed, they're about to trap her on both sides of the hall.

Due to Frey's long experience living exclusively around spiritual beings, her ability to read Auras is probably the best in the entire Brancotte Empire. Because of this, she knows just by looking at these auras that they're all mages, and they're all coming for her.

…After all, the relationship between spirits and wills is the same between physical matter and physical force. Spirit is a thing, and Will is the energy that moves the thing.

Frey being able to tell what these guards are intending (Willing) is as intuitive to her as looking at a falling rock and knowing how fast it's going and where it's going to land.

Maybe it's because of Frey's many experiences spent running away and hiding in play with Haalfrin, but she's very quick to react.

She turns to the side and tries running into a room. When the door is locked, she grips it hard and rips the handle out of its socket.

'Oops. Whatever.'

Frey darts into the room, slams the door shut, and prepares the short-range teleport spell Haalfrin taught her.

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"Captain," one of the guards hears the warden speak from his Far-speak medallion, "the intruder went into the door on the right."

The guard captain nods and then motions for the correct door. "She went in there! After her!"

They pour into the room, and one of the mages who know spatial magic sees a distortion in the air. "She teleported."

"Find where she went then!" the captain orders the man. The man nods and then starts working on spatial tracking.

…Unfortunately, of all of Frey's magic besides spirit magic, she's best at teleporting. In the end, even when they track her to her destination, she's already teleported 3 more times.

Eventually, as Frey gets further and further out of their reach, the guards eventually lose track of where she's at.

(An analogy for teleportation and spatial tracking is like this: When you teleport, it's like moving really fast through the water. When you do this, there'll be a current left behind you. A spatial tracker can read this "current" and be able to assume fairly accurately what direction you went and how far you traveled. However, the current soon calms down and disappears. Spatial trackers can't follow anymore if they take too long to get there.)

(This is why the guards were eventually unable to track Frey anymore; she's teleporting faster than they can track her.)

Because of the intruder's unpredictable pathing, the captain has his men spread out. Hopefully, with all this teleporting, she'll have run out of mana by the time they find her again!

…Unfortunately, none of the people here are aware that their target is a 6th Gate mage. There hasn't been a living 6th gate mage in thousands of years, so the truth is the last thing they'd think of.

Because the intruder still has plenty of mana whenever she runs into a patrol, the captain finds that he's able to contact fewer and fewer of his men during the search. "SH#T!"

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Frey frantically teleports all over Floor 9. She can't teleport far enough to reach a higher floor, but she can at least explore this place rapidly; she's already been discovered, so there's no point in hiding anyway.

Even still, the girl has the feeling the enemy always knows where she is… Yeah. It's the surveillance mirrors. "How annoying!" she curses as she starts ripping the mirrors out of the ceiling as she makes her way down the hallways.

With how reckless Frey is being with her mana, she quickly starts to run out of it. 'I don't know where I am or what I'm doing,' she panics, 'So I need a place to hide for a bit while I think.'

She thinks back to all the places she's seen during her teleporting spree, and she considers the best spot to go back to.

Once she makes up her mind, Frey snaps through space one last time and arrives in the middle of a prison cell stuffed full with a dozen prisoners.

They keep the prisoners separated by gender, and the cell Frey happened to appear in was completely full of adult men.