382. Escaping the Capital
There were a few other mages out at night, but no one looked twice at Rhys. Why would they? He’d been defeated and permanently locked away. There was no reason for Yulin or Fifteenth to share his face or put him on wanted posters, because they had him. He wasn’t a suspect anymore, but a prisoner.
Getting locked up might be one of my best tactical moves yet.
Of course, that’d change the second someone in the know realized he was gone, which was why he had to get out of the capital asap. It would be super embarrassing if he got caught because he ran into maintenance man #72 and the guy had a wait a minute moment. It was better to keep moving and get his bearings out on the outskirts, then eventually wander back to the capital once he knew what he was doing. It was classic imposter syndrome behavior; go somewhere to play it cool where no one would know if he knew what he was doing or not, then head back to the place he’d be tested once he was confident he had enough of a handle on things to blend in. Imposter syndrome was trashy syndrome, one of those pseudo-psychological fad diagnoses that everyone suddenly had, and then everyone forgot about and no one had, so why not? He’d already gotten a pretty big boost from the whole sealed-hero trope, so why not keep going?
Not that he was discounting imposter syndrome. It was totally real and all that. He’d been there, felt that, got the t-shirt. The trashy part was the “fad diagnosis that everyone suddenly had” part. They came around every few years, everyone got them, and then no one had them just as suddenly. It was like ‘being OCD,’ except ‘being OCD’ was somehow evergreen and not a fad.
Not quite as crazy as the fad diagnosis of hysteria. “Yes, that’s right, women, you’re not supposed to feel horny, so let me treat you with this electronic vibrating rod.” Man, doctors in the 1920s were crazy.
Then again, that was the era of “sea air” and hacksaw amputations, so maybe he wasn’t that shocked. Same era as using radium to treat things like acne and general malaise, too, which was absolutely nutty. It was half a step above leeches and quicksilver, but not that big of a step. Medicine back then was wild. They were just trying any old thing. Crazy how far we’ve come.
“We” was a strong word in several ways, since he wasn’t in his home world and he certainly wasn’t a part of the “we” that was progressing medicine even when he was, but it felt right. He represented his whole home world, one single white man. It wasn’t possible that there were other perspectives that were not white and male and didn’t live in their mother’s basement and accomplish nothing with their lives. That just didn’t happen.
Gods, I hate that people actually think that. On the other hand, it was textbook trash behavior to be egocentric and believe there was no world beyond what one personally experienced. He hadn’t figured out the way it would benefit him yet, but he had lots of time to figure it out. At this point, he was willing to do anything that qualified as trashy, pretty much. It’d worked out for him so many times that he was almost just legitimately a trashy person.
Wait, hold on. I am legitimately a trashy person. Always have been. Where did I get off thinking I wasn’t for a minute? He shook his head at himself. A few decades or so in a crystal box did things to a man.
The edge of the city loomed. Rhys went to take off, then paused, looking around. The last time he’d been here, people had flown around at all hours of the day, freely leaving the city at any time and from any point. Aside from initial entry to the city, too, people were more-or-less free to enter the city wherever and whenever they liked; the official entrance was for first-timers and those who hadn’t yet obtained free-flight permission. Now, though, no one flew around. The skies were empty around the city. No one even queued up by the front door; it was a total wasteland.
Hmm. Rhys glanced around, then fished in his pockets for a hoop. Using a bit of sticky unknown goo, he attached it to a random streetside pebble and tossed it off the edge of the city. The pebble tumbled down, dropping out of the sky.
As it fell, he finally caught sight of the city’s enforcers. A uniformed mage in a shockingly modern-looking suit zoomed by on a sleek broom. And modern it was: a sharp-edged gray uniform jacket with exaggerated lapels and a fitted body matched with gray uniform pants with a slightly darker stripe down the outer leg. Beneath, the mage wore shiny black leather shoes. The outfit was finished with a gray pillbox cap that had to be held on by mana, because there was no way it stayed on top of his head otherwise. The tiny cap made the entire imposing uniform look a little silly, but Rhys wasn’t going to tell him that. The man looked dead serious, his eyes locked dead ahead. He still wore long hair, though it was pulled into a strict bun that didn’t touch the collar of his shirt.
As the pebble dropped, his eyes darted to it, then to Rhys. Rhys gave him a smile and a wave and pointed at his foot, oops, I kicked it style. Quietly, he stirred his impurities, preparing for battle. If the man recognized him, he’d have no option but to stand and fight, and hopefully take this one guard out before word spread.
The guard, unaware of the threat to his life, rolled his eyes and shook his head at Rhys. He flew on, continuing to circle the city.
I’ve got to change my face ASAP. It was all well and good to be on the run, but being on the run with his own face was nothing but a throw. As someone whose streaming career had amounted to casually streaming whatever game he felt like playing to four viewers on a good night, Rhys wasn’t in the business of throwing for content, so he needed to get on that. Right now, he was still in the state where the wrong person could visually identify him and totally fuck up his grand plan of “get the hell outta dodge.” He needed to at least eliminate it to people who recognized his aura, and then, ideally, suppress his aura enough that no one could sense that either.
It got easier to suppress his aura the higher his tier grew. He hadn’t expected that. Honestly, he’d thought it was going to get harder. He had more aura, so naturally, it was harder to hide it. It wasn’t like he was auramaxxing or anything, and no one had ever accused him of having rizz, but he unquestioningly had more aura now. Buckets and buckets of the stuff. It was just that more aura, it turned out, came with more aura control, and the two didn’t grow at the same pace. Aura control outpaced the growth of aura, or maybe it was more like the more aura he had, the easier it was to control it. It was like the difference between threading a needle and slotting a rope through a metal bearing. The rope was bigger, but anyone would tell you it was harder to thread a needle than to feed a large rope through a big, obvious bearing. Even with his somewhat rusty self unused to suppressing his aura from his time in the coffin, he was still able to quash it with ease such that the passing officer would never have sensed it.
That was suspicious, but not overly so; plenty of people hid their auras, for every reason from convenience to getting the jump on other mages to hiding their strength to their own personal amusement. Running into a high-tier expert who didn’t hide their aura might have honestly been more suspicious to the officer. Of course, it wasn’t as if he could hide his aura in battle; if he was going all out, he was going all out, and aura control be damned. It was the first extraneous thing to get tossed aside in the heat of the moment, like kicking off your shoes as you stumbled in the door, madly making out with your girlfriend (which movies had taught him happened all the time to other people). But in every day life, it was now shockingly easy to squash his aura down to the point that only those who knew him very well or got very close to him would sense it at all.
All that to say that he wasn’t shocked that the officer kept going. The poor guy would have the worst job on earth if he had to swoop down and punish every pebble-kicker. Then again, there’s power-hungry assholes who would love nothing more than a chance to exert their authority. I guess I just got lucky that I rolled a reasonable lazy person, and not a power-tripping tyrant. But the next one wouldn’t necessarily be so reasonable, so instead of standing there and waiting for his pebble to land, he wandered along, pretending to be out on a night stroll.
Things have definitely changed around here. The only question is, how much?
To tell the truth, he could teleport to the pebble at any moment; he didn’t need to wait for it to come to a stop. Still, he assumed the city was covered by a barrier. If they were going to go to the effort to put forth a patrol of flying officers, it would be madness if it didn’t have a barrier. The barrier was what he was trying to break through with his pebble, so there was no point teleporting to the dropping pebble. It was only worth activating the hoop once it was past the barrier, and there was almost no chance the barrier extended to the ground, so he might as well wait.
As for the barrier stopping the pebble, well, both pebble and hoop were just inert garbage until he activated them. If the barrier stopped the pebble, then there’d be a pile of trash flying around under the city. After all, at the end of the day, it was a city occupied by people, and people generated trash, litter, dirt, and dust. Even if the mages were scrupulous and clean to a fault, there’d still be things like dead skin flakes, the red dust of the mortal world, and so on and so forth piling up beneath them. Since that wasn’t the case (sadly), it would probably fall through without interference.
He wanted to activate the hoop and peek, but doing so would make his entire inert trash play null and void, so he held back and simply wandered down the street, moving with just enough confidence to make sure no one questioned him. No one was out on the streets but him, so clearly it wasn’t really a thing to just wander at night anymore, but as long as he moved with confidence, he’d probably be left alone. That was just how things worked. It’d be even better with a hard hat and a clipboard, but he had to make do with what he had, which was pretty much nothing.
That’s not true. I still have my trash black hole. He did, but its reserves of usable trash were much diminished. He’d spent a lot of his impurities overcoming the natural resistances of the high-tier materials of the mega death portal, and in the end, he’d had to burn all but the most essential good trash in order to keep his star alive and accomplish his goal. It was worth it, because now he had a high tier mega death portal under his power and he’d undermined the boss’s entire endgame at the same time, but it had cost him a lot. And just like destroying the final four with a full team of max-level legendaries in a certain animal catching game, it would be big funny, but it was also going to take so long to be funny that it was going to feel not worth it for not only most of the game, but also for most of the post-game grinding.
He crossed his arms. He needed more trash. He needed more filth. And there wasn’t enough trash in the city, which meant it was time to get back out into the world. Also, he needed to figure out how long it had been as subtly as possible, and also he needed to figure out what had changed. In summary: he needed to get out there.
It had been long enough. Making a small gesture with his hand, mostly because he could and he thought it looked cool, he summoned another trash hoop from his trash black hole and activated the hoop he’d left on the pebble. It blinked open, showing him the forest floor and a few trees. Good to go. With a little grin, he stepped through, leaving the city behind.