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Carlos closed his eyes and took a deep breath to calm his nerves. It was dramatically easier than it felt like it should be, given that he'd just escaped from almost certain death and was still in grave danger. He'd barely even begun to inhale when his hands stopped shaking, his heartbeat slowed, and his mind snapped with crystal clarity onto the urgent task of solving the disaster they faced. His 23 years of life as a nerd, student, and software engineer had not prepared him this well for calmly handling life-and-death crisis decisions, and the few months of experience in this new world since his arrival weren't nearly enough to have changed that naturally. His mind-augmenting soul structures were showing their worth yet again.
A memory sprang to mind, one from the world he'd grown up in. Using Google Maps to navigate while driving, he'd noticed that it only ever said just "turn right" when the turn was immediate. Otherwise, it always led with how far away the turn was — for example, "In half a mile, turn right." For imminent action, the first thing you needed to know wasn't what to do, but when to do it. He could actually consider both points concurrently, but that was what having extra minds was for.
"Princess Lornera, how long do we have before your father tracks us to here?"
"Wha…?" The princess blinked and looked around slowly, confused and disoriented. The mana of her soul's surface, dense and heavy, roiled with turbulence. "I– I…" She shook her head and closed her mouth, then slowly collapsed and huddled in on herself, wrapping her arms around her bent knees and muttering to herself as her face whitened. Her toned muscles shook. "How did… How could I…" She shivered and fell silent, staring blankly ahead.
Carlos mentally stumbled at the sight, his train of thought momentarily derailed. Lornera had been so decisive in their defense just moments ago. Why had her confidence and certainty disappeared so suddenly and completely?
Colonel Lorvan cleared his throat. He and Major Ordens stood ramrod-straight right behind Lornera, their steel full plate armor gleaming resplendently in the midday light. "If he calls for immediate pursuit, we have a few minutes at most."
Carlos raised an eyebrow. "Even through three sequential teleports? My spell took a couple random detours on the way to make extra work for any tracker."
Lorvan paused for a moment. "That might buy you a few more minutes, if you structured the spell with enough separation to avoid leaving the wrong traces."
"Alright." Carlos nodded and looked around. Lorvan and Ordens, as royal guards literally compelled to absolute loyalty to the Crown, were taking this situation strangely well, but he didn't have time to dig into that right now. The sun shone bright from high in the sky, warming the large forest clearing they were in. The great tree at the mana wellspring's center stood tall, its branches all channeling great streams of dense high-level aether into the air like a magical fountain. Each stream smoothly integrated into the orderly arrangement of Purple's dungeon domain. A few simple and undecorated stone buildings stood, scattered around the tree in all directions with a good 30 feet of clearance from it. The surrounding forest, or perhaps calling it a jungle might be more accurate, showed no movement. The place seemed calm, almost idyllic, in sharp contrast to the urgency he felt.
People were scattered among the buildings, but he could sense every last one of his employees somewhere within the large clearing. Lornera was already drawing several people's attention, the dark orange hue of her orichalcum-colored shirt and leggings sticking out like a sore thumb — and that was for the people who couldn't sense the unmistakable solidity of her royal-tier soul.
He raised his voice and simultaneously called for attention through Purple's telepathic bonds, just to make certain that everyone noticed. "Everyone! The reward ceremony was a pretense to trap us. King Elston declared that Amber and I's strength is a threat to his supremacy, and he tried to kill us. Princess Lornera defended us and tried to convince him to value us as allies instead, but he refused, and we just barely escaped." He paused briefly to let that settle in. "I will not try to command anyone to stand with us against him. We can teleport you back to Dramos if you want, or you can choose to come with us. Or stay here, I suppose. Regardless, you must choose NOW, before the king finds us here!"
One voice rose sternly to cut through the babble of murmurs that erupted in response. "The young lord and I will take that offer to return at once. His father wants no part of any conflict with the Crown."
Carlos had almost forgotten that Kindar's supervisor existed; the man had kept quiet and out of the way so completely, quelling Kindar's increasingly-rare protests with little more than a stern look and declining all other interaction, that he'd faded invisibly to the background. Now, he faced Carlos squarely and held one hand firmly on Kindar's shoulder. Kindar opened his mouth and seemed about to protest, but the unnamed supervisor squeezed Kindar's shoulder and shook his head, and Kindar subsided.
Carlos nodded. "Very well. Amber, would you like to handle it?"
"Sure." His partner-in-treason, apparently, strode forward and extended her right hand toward the pair. Kindar looked back and forth uncertainly between her and the man at his shoulder, but the man confidently raised his other hand to grasp Amber's.
Carlos let his gaze linger on her for a moment. She was thin and lanky, with far too minor curves for mainstream beauty standards. Her hair, a lighter brown than his own, was nothing special, and she kept it cropped short. Her clothes were plain, slightly loose, and covered her completely from neck to lower thighs. She showed little grace in her movements. And yet, when King Elston had asked about alliance by marriage, her face had come to mind, smiling infectiously in his head. She was his kindred spirit, as passionate about magecraft as he was, and similarly sharp-minded. All that had held her back before was a lack of knowledge, and they had grown close in the course of rectifying that lack. He liked her, he trusted her, he enjoyed her company, and he knew that she felt the same about him. Was it love? Only time would tell. It was, at the least, a good foundation for whatever might develop.
The moment passed, and Amber cast her spell. Threads of solid essence formed into a complex arrangement of pipes, and liquid mana poured through them to power the effect. An ethereal mesh of evenly-spaced nodes and connecting lines enveloped her, Kindar, and the supervisor, and the three of them vanished.
In the back of his mind, Carlos idly wondered how the structure of essence formed by the spell determined its effect. He knew by now what shapes did what, but why did each shape do its specific thing and not something else? Magic done by mystics, rather than through the rigid incantations of the system that mages used, seemed to operate almost entirely by the intent and desires of the wielder. Was there anything truly fundamental to the shapes of spells at all, or was it an arbitrary encoding of the intent of the incantation system's long-gone designers? Was it based on the written form of the designers' conversational language, perhaps, in the same manner that many programming languages on Earth use certain English words as key syntax elements for structures that would be described using those words?
Carlos reflexively started up an extra mind for that line of thought as it formed, keeping one mind focused on the reactions of the other people still present. The four adventurers who had joined his service were conferring with each other fiercely in a huddle. A young man outside their group didn't wait for them to finish.
"Oh wow, boss, congratulations! You beat my record for how much trouble you've gotten yourself into!" Trinlen, the new graduate they'd recruited from the Royal Mage Academy as their magic teacher, whistled appreciatively.
Carlos couldn't help but smirk in amusement at Trinlen's casual disregard for how serious the situation was. He took in the young mage's relaxed posture, standing there in t-shirt and shorts and sporting a large grin, and shook his head. "You know, a normal person would take that as a warning to get the hell out. Something tells me that's not how you see it."
Trinlen interlaced his fingers, turned his palms outward, and flexed his hands, bending his fingers back. His knuckles cracked audibly. "Of course not! I signed up for exciting adventures, and you're delivering even better than I'd hoped for. I'm with you all the way. I, uh, don't think I could actually help in a fight against the Crown, but I'm along for the trip, wherever it goes."
Carlos shrugged and nodded graciously. "Sure. Welcome aboard. Just remember that this was your decision."
The adventuring party from Dramos broke their huddle and sprang into coordinated motion. Sconter sprinted to the portable stove and grill, his large frame somehow not making even the slightest sound, nor disturbing so much as a single leaf or blade of grass, and he rapidly dismantled it. Noralt ran to one of the buildings and burst inside, breaking the door open with the sheer force and weight of her thick muscles rather than spending even an instant on using the doorknob. Esmorana physically stood in place, holding elegant poise in a flowing dress, but her mana poured forth and commanded the air to retrieve various things.
Haftel, meanwhile, turned to face Carlos and nodded at him. Amber reappeared at Carlos's side right at that moment, and Carlos drew her into a sideways one-armed hug. She quickly relaxed into his grip and hugged him back. Her mental voice spoke to another of his minds through their telepathic bond. [He said that if we somehow patch things up with the Crown within a year, Darmelkon will have the rest of our payment waiting for us, but he can't risk the Crown's wrath. Oh, and I gave Mayor Stelras a quick heads up. He thinks he'll be okay, mainly because he never officially joined our house.] Carlos silently noted the information internally.
Haftel nodded again at the pair of them and idly flipped a dagger in his right hand repeatedly. "Right. So. My lords, we're not happy about it, but we figure we don't really have a choice. We're in too deep. We swore service to your house, and the Crown knows it. If the…" He looked at Princess Lornera for a moment. "If the king has decided to wipe out your house, he won't take any chances with any servants who might secretly still harbor loyalty to you, no matter how fervently we disavow you. Our only real hope is if he's right about you being a threat to him, and you beat him."
The final person present chose that moment to add her own piece. "King Elston Kalor would not say such a thing lightly, and having felt the true potency of your souls myself, as well as Elston's daughter's soul for comparison, I believe his concern is well-founded." Ressara smiled and pushed a strand of her long black hair behind her ear. She ignored, or didn't notice, the short appreciative glance that Haftel gave her curvy buxom figure. "I hoped to chronicle the rise of the next Sandaras. Now, it seems that you may become far greater than he ever even aspired to be. Whatever end this comes to, I will gladly see it through."
Carlos quickly swept his gaze across them all. Sconter had the stove stowed already. Noralt was back with a few packs and had somehow put on her heaviest armor in the brief time the conversation had taken. Esmorana had a pile of things hovering next to her. Haftel grabbed a pack from Noralt and settled in place. Trinlen had grabbed his pack with a quick Telekinesis spell, and Ressara's pack as well, which she nodded to him in thanks for.
"Alrighty then, I guess everyone's going. Gather close." Carlos mentally nudged Purple, and the wall of a nearby building opened up to expose the dungeon core. He cast Telekinesis to gently float Purple to the group. Once tiny, the glowing purple prism had grown to more than a foot tall, and half that wide. Purple had been a priceless wildcard for him multiple times before, and he hoped the same would prove true again this time.
He built a unique variation of a Teleport spell and held it at the ready, wrapped around everyone but not yet activating. He had designed this one to combine input from both himself and Purple to determine the destination, and he had one more wrinkle to really try to mess with any tracing attempts. He waited while Purple carefully pushed and pulled at precise points in the spell's structure, forcefully twisting its destination specification in ways outside the spell's own mechanisms. If this worked the way he hoped it would, a mage analyzing the spell's mana traces would find the destination that the undistorted spell would have gone to, while they would actually end up somewhere else.
Carlos looked at the royal guards and the princess, who was still huddled on the ground and shaking. "Are you three ready to come? Princess Lornera?"
She did not respond.
Carlos thought back to what he'd said when he urged her to come here a few minutes ago. He had worded his exhortation with the revelation in mind that she had a soul structure specifically to enforce loyalty to the Crown. "Stay alive and free for the Crown's sake, right? Ready to come with us again?"
Lornera blinked, stopped shaking, and looked up at him. "Hmm? Oh. Yes."
Carlos activated his spell, and their surroundings abruptly changed. "Now, did that actually break the trail, or are we still in danger?"
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And we're back! All the protagonist's compatriots are together, and some of them need to be informed about recent events. How convenient for a quick recap scene.