Rather than going into detail, it was far easier to gloss over why we were separated from our ‘other squad’. Honestly, that was the least of our concerns with Riala. I was more worried about what she had already figured out. Though that was also half the reason that Malaliel and the others would be joining us.
Along with Inasyah’s cover name of Edel, Malaleil was going with Ragna. If angels existed in this world and had similar naming conventions, we really didn’t want those particular names. The rest of the Extra agents went with their real names… or at least what I had been introduced to them as. They were, uh… well, I knew Evija. It wasn’t really my job to order people around individually anyway.
With Malaliel around, she would be in charge of the overarching battle strategy, if necessary. Fighting against familiar foes, we would already know what to do… but it was seriously unlikely there were only a few varieties of monsters in the entirety of Aidura.
Midnight was taking care of Disguise for the second squad. I was in charge of my regular group. As much as possible, we were trying to handle that away from Riala. She might have proper mana sensing capabilities.
Riala was dangerous. And yet… that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. I was dangerous. Malaliel and Inasyah were dangerous. With no offense to our Extra agents, their weapons were dangerous even if they weren’t. Midnight had dangerous Celmothian tech.
Dangerous wasn’t inherently bad, it just depended on the context. The danger was only a problem based on the risk of violence against us instead of for us. Had Riala almost killed Evija? Yes. But it was important to note that Evija hadn’t survived because Riala was unable to kill her, but because her violent incapacitation methods were nonetheless nonlethal. Now that we knew her, there was little chance she would randomly attack us while being uninformed, so it should be safer.
Unless she found out we were mostly humans and decided to eliminate us. Having an orc and some angels and such wouldn’t really tip things much, since only Those of the Many-Colored Skin lived here. Except for some captives of war.
So yes, Riala was dangerous but the actual risk of traveling with her was deemed low enough compared to the relevant necessities. Specifically, her offer of letting us observe the rest of The Six and their Heroic Curses. It was also too late to pretend we weren’t interested anyway.
Midnight and I did have an emergency plan. Assistive Familiar Casting and Multicasting combined between the two of us would allow us to use Teleport on far more people. It would take nearly 40 mana, but we could just go. If there was sufficient risk, we’d implement Celmothian Tactical Retreat- called that because of the language we would be using to call it out and because they did a lot of teleporting. Obviously if I meowed loudly whatever was causing us trouble would know something was weird, but hopefully they couldn’t do too much before we were gone.
For all that we had various plans, including Malaliel clearly thinking about whether or not she could cut off Riala’s head before she noticed, the journey was fairly relaxing. The greatest discomfort I suffered was not being able to use Shelter. I had no idea how to properly do something like that according to the local magic system, and I wanted to pretend as much as possible. I had no idea how much Riala suspected.
During the day we traveled, and during the evening we generally did a lot of studying. My main opinion was that quills sucked. I was properly inscribing my notes on lightning magic for Yalith, as promised. I couldn’t exactly pull out electronics with Riala around, so I had to actually start the final draft.
There was also magic practice. The disguises for the teens still looked young, because hiding their youth would be nearly impossible. Everyone treated them differently. We also didn’t neglect practicing magic, and we had plenty of books for them. It was probably weird to have them as part of a mercenary group, but we did have the good excuse that they had advanced talents. And we could honestly say it was impossible for them to go back to their families for the moment.
Malaliel and Inasyah both agreed about one thing. If you had to deceive someone, starting with the truth was the most reliable method. Obviously they split somewhat from there, with Malaliel being in the ‘but you should try to avoid deceiving people’ camp. Inasyah thought it was perfectly fine for enemies, but Malaliel was quite reluctant. I thought it might even be painful for her to be disguised, but she never complained about it.
Riala was social, which wasn’t that surprising but did make things harder. If she had avoided interacting with us, our journey might have been smoother. As it was, I was mainly confused why she was apparently traveling alone. There were multiple reasons that was weird, including that she was clearly important. There was no way someone as powerful as her wasn’t some sort of high ranking individual in a situation where the Six Countries were seemingly constantly at war with their central neighbor. The others had also known her, if not personally at least by image. Which meant she was famous enough for people to at least have heard an accurate description. It wasn’t the pink skin, either. I’d seen some others around.
“What are you studying?” Riala peeked over my shoulder.
I held up Dimensional Smuggling, letting her see the cover. “The thieves took the original of this,” I commented. What I held was a copy that Yalith made with magic. The tome didn’t have the right number of pages, and was too big overall. Being unsure how the copy spell worked, I’d preferred to overcompensate. Apparently, it could reshuffle text to and shrink images as necessary… but I hadn’t known that. So all the copies I got had extra pages, and some had weirdly large font. “I’m interested in dimensional magic, so Yalith got me a copy as part of her promised reward.”
Riala nodded. “I see you have a few tomes on lighting magic as well. As expected, really. I found your mastery quite impressive.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Think you could teach me that one where the lightning zapped around behind me?” she asked.
“Ah, well, that’s a trade secret you see.” I did my best to put on a pleasant grin instead of a nervous one. Maybe Disguise would help, maybe it would make it worse. I didn’t quite know how my other face worked.
“Hmph. You’d better not be a magic hoarder.” Riala clearly wasn’t concerned about personal space, as she leaned in quite close. “I don’t think the fort mage would have been so open with you if you were the type, though.” She turned her head oddly as she pulled away. “But I’m not going to ask you to give up your secret techniques already.” She stepped back and stretched. “I’ll just steal it in a duel in the future.”
Did she mean we’d be betting techniques on a duel or that she’d just learn it by watching? I couldn’t ask, because maybe I was supposed to know which one was normal. Well, ‘normal’ could have only been the former. I had the feeling Riala meant the latter and didn’t expect me to think it was normal.
“I don’t know enough about Telekinetic magic to benefit from the reverse,” I lamented. I was pretty good at Mage’s Reach, but tactile telekinesis was quite different. As for Telekinetic Hand from this world, it was a simpler and lower tier spell. That wasn’t bad, but I really didn’t have the expertise.
-----
“She meowed at me,” Midnight complained. “I have no idea if she has some sort of Translation active, so it’s a pain to respond…”
I nodded slowly. The Translation built into our summoned hero buddies was hard to detect. It was more innate than an enchantment. Presumably other people could do that too. Also, Riala had a lot more magic active at all times compared to… everyone else.
Yalith had a few things lingering on her, mostly to help around the library. I was pretty sure there was a defensive ward among them. I was less certain that it was specialized for papercuts, but I’d gotten hints of that. I hadn’t studied her long enough to be certain of that speculation, though.
We didn’t know how much Riala knew. Our angels were looking for malicious intent from her. If they found any? We absolutely wouldn’t be entering the capital with her. Riala was dangerous. Riala and the forces of a major city? Plus the king? Absolutely not.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Especially if he was her dad or whatever. That was speculation, though, because we hadn’t been willing to ask about Riala. If her identity was secret she was bad at keeping it that way, but if it really wasn’t secret it was too weird not to know.
A lack of information was really making things difficult. If it weren’t for the teens not being able to leave this world, I could be more bold in my investigations. Sadly, that wasn’t the case.
Riala’s own boldness might soon make other things irrelevant, though.
-----
“So what made you interested in The Curse?” Riala asked. I was studying the new information we had about that. Unfortunately, only myself and Midnight could do that easily- Midnight because he could pull it up on a personal display. I was the primary person studying them because I had the most experience with practiced magic. The angels were inherently magical, but it wasn’t the same. “Why now?’
“Well…” I tried to give myself some time to think. I’d prepared answers before, but clearly she wanted something more in depth than Xarrin and the others. “This is my first time really paying attention to the hero summoning thing. I’ve been an active mercenary for a couple years, so this is the first time The Six have summoned any heroes during my career.” I wasn’t sure quite how often this happened, but I did know the previous cycle of heroes had started more than a handful of years ago. “The matter was brought to our attention when we came across some knights on the border.”
“Yes, from Zuresh, right?” Riala smiled. “We haven’t been attacked by their heroes yet.”
“That’s right. Do they usually travel in whole groups or…?”
I realized we had one piece of unexpected cover. There were far too many of us to be a group of heroes.
“Sometimes they form parties of six,” Riala said. “Sometimes twos and threes. Stupid ones go solo. They usually get captured a couple days into their foolishness, if monsters don’t get them.”
Speaking of monsters, we hadn’t had much trouble on our journey so far. It had only been a couple days, but the roads had been clear. Then again, we had also encountered a couple patrols, passing in either direction. Obviously they would want to keep the way safe for supplies to reach the border.
“How would we stop this hero summoning long term?” I asked.
“Capture all the heroes. Obviously.” Riala said that as if the reason there were bounties was public instead of… secret. “They can’t get replaced if they’re still alive.”
“That’s… actually pretty efficient,” I admitted. “What’s stopping it from working?”
Riala shook her head. “We never catch them all. It’s also quite difficult to prevent suicides. Their health tends to fade pretty quickly in captivity.”
I couldn’t help but continue the conversation. “How do you treat the prisoners? Do you feed them enough? Nutrition is important.” It shouldn't be a problem to advocate for proper treatment of prisoners.
“We do our best, but some fade anyway. It might be curse related. Our healing magic doesn’t always work, and they’re often injured when they arrive. It’s also not healthy to be bound at all times but…” she shrugged. “What else can we do? We can’t exactly let assassins roam around the castle.”
She wasn’t offended about the idea of treating the heroes humanely. That was good. Or rather, if she had been… it would have been one of the signs we had to kill her. Since Evija was willing to forgive her, I was kind of fond of her. Strong and honorable, and I couldn’t personally fault her for being a bit reckless. Though a little more warning would have been nice. Like any chance at all to actually explain.
Then again, if we were enemies, catching us off guard was the correct option. I’d done that to people I was certain were enemies many times. Usually they were wearing obvious markings though.
“You know the heroes are from another world?” Riala said suddenly. “Most of them want to go back. We’d prefer to not deal with them. But we can’t send them back.”
I nodded. “They’re tied to this world, right?” The tomes I’d already read on the curse had that information. I wasn’t giving away firsthand knowledge.
“Yeah. So we were thinking what if we faked it? If we only needed a certain count, we could just mark some of our people. Or random humans.”
Presumably they abducted those humans. Or they were prisoners of war, which was slightly different. It wasn’t yet clear whether getting rid of the heroes would just make it easier for these people to kill their foes, but at least they weren’t entirely cruel. Which would make it more difficult to handle if they did prefer to be at war for some reason.
“I assume that didn’t work,” I said. “Given there’s a new batch of heroes.”
“It really didn’t work,” Riala grumbled. “For one, replicating the curse isn’t something just anyone can do. Then there are the semi-mandatory components dragging it down. And… I should probably stop there. Until you officially get access to the rest.”
I nodded. What else could I do but agree? I was disappointed, though. It sounded like she was going to say something important.
“So do you have any experience with other curses?”
“Uh… not really.” Aspect of the Barbarian wasn’t actually a curse, even if I had called it a curse when I wasn’t happy with it. Aspects were innate. “It seems tougher to do than just zapping someone with lightning.”
“Same with tossing a spear through them,” Riala agreed.
-----
Evija still liked learning magic, and I still liked helping people develop their powers. She needed my help more now because Midnight couldn’t be seen talking to people and because there were limited books with the introductory magic. Again, except for digital copies we couldn’t access right now.
I was teaching her an extension of the most basic Lightning spell in the book. The first one had created something like static electricity. This one was a real damaging spell, and I could compare it to Shocking Grasp. Except it didn’t work via touch. Instead, the lightning was charged on one hand and released when one got near their target. It would then jump to them. It was called Lightning Claw because of how it tended to flow from the fingers.
“The insulation is a very important part of the spell,” I said. “Or you just zap yourself. But you have to release it to activate the spell.” Evija of course could understand the reason for such things. My goal was to make actually doing it easier. “You could create double layers, if half-dissolution is an issue.” I demonstrated, forming insulated layers on my palms and the rest of my hand- including through my wrist. “It’s more difficult in some ways, but only on the front end.”
I had enough experience to modify these basic spells all according to this world’s rules, so I wasn’t concerned about Riala overhearing. Which was good, because she was frequently listening. She didn’t have quite the same desire to learn everything about magic as Yalith, but she was clearly an expert.
The tomes had basic lightning wards I could use to help with training as well. Energy Ward would have worked, obviously, but I wanted to look as natural as possible. I hoped my hands weren’t too clumsy and my words too weak to appear experienced. At least Translation helped my vocal confidence.
Evija replicated the method a few times, before getting a look on her face. “Hmm, can I try something?”
“As long as you keep your levels low and only use lightning… I can prevent any major catastrophes," I said. “We don’t have a lot of spare potions, though.”
“I think this should work,” she said. “Technically, I’m not changing anything.”
“I’d like to know what you’re going to do first, if you can explain it.”
It was safer that way. But I also knew that it wasn’t always possible to explain. This time, though, it wasn’t that weird.
“Okay, so, I cast it twice,” she held up her hands- currently unmagicked. I could picture an invisible basketball held between her hands. “Then the lightning goes between these two.”
“Ah… I get what you mean. It might work but… I definitely wouldn't do it without a target.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Where do you think that electricity is going?”
“Between my hands.”
“And what’s protecting them?”
“Well, the insul- ah.”
“Yeah,” I nodded. “Best not to rely on the insulation you’re weakening.” Technically, we didn’t remove the protection, otherwise it would just harm the hand to begin with. However, the power weakened to let the lightning flow out. Intentionally releasing a charge towards the hand would be risky. And unlike my native system, magic here didn’t have automatic safety features. Instead, casters relied on proper spellcraft.
“It would be so cool to grab someone and zap them though,” Evija sighed.
“I think that’s just a higher tier spell,” I explained. “You’d have to create a special node to draw the current. But you could center it between your hands. It’s not a bad idea, even.”
