Of the three people who knew what they were doing, I really shouldn’t have been the one in a leadership position. It seemed that Inasyah- going by the fake name Edel- was not planning to reveal anything about her status just yet. Revealing Midnight’s status as something other than a clever cat could lose us a big advantage against this crossdimensional kidnapping kingdom, so that was a good reason for him to remain silent.

  And thus, I was the one responsible for things. As long as Inasyah was doing some angel plotting, I supposed I could manage my position.

  “I’m not going to lie,” I said. “Things look dangerous.” For the teens. Not for the rest of us. As long as I didn’t worry about property damage, I could take out anyone I had seen so far. Unless they were very good at hiding things. “However, I do believe Zay’s promise that we would be trained. Likely for something dangerous, but we shouldn’t be pulled away immediately.”

  The teens looked confused. “Zay?” asked the alchemist. Was it Lana? She looked like a Lana. “Who is that?”

  “The princess.”

  “I thought she was… called something else.”

  “Could be. Probably best to try to remember when speaking to her. She’s bound to get annoyed if you get it wrong.” I had to consider whether I cared… and whether I could put in enough effort to remember the name of someone like that.

  “I feel like that would be a problem,” Ayat said. “Since we don’t have any support here. They might just get rid of us and get more heroes.”

  I nodded. The future swashbuckler seemed like she had her head on straight, but maybe that was just because she was properly cynical. “I imagine they can’t easily do that, for various reasons. For example, that magic halfwit running things seemed disappointed at advanced talents but they were still willing to keep us around. I wasn’t sure what they were expecting, but we must still be of some value.”

  I didn’t want to stay up all night talking to them. Or all day, since it should barely be afternoon for us locally. However, if we wanted to sleep before the local morning, we kind of had to force it. At least a short nap before dawn. Thus, I did my best to assuage their worries- they still needed us right now. We should comply with anything that wasn’t morally repugnant. Training new supernatural abilities shouldn’t be a problem for anyone, as long as the training methods weren’t completely insane. Indeed, some people looked quite excited.

  After that, it was time for the real meeting.

  -----

  With Inasyah and myself taking the same room, the two of us and Midnight were able to have a privateish meeting. As long as nobody came to listen at the door, but they all creaked. I didn’t sense any magical spying stuff.

  “Before we begin,” Midnight said. “I managed to record some of their initial exchange.” He gestured towards himself and his suit that was revealing itself. “The princess and the mage. Our Translation wasn’t used to the local language at the time, but it should work now.”

  “Great idea,” I said.

  The snippet was short- after all, they’d done their own version of Translation early on.

  “Princess,” the robed mage turned to the woman next to him. “We have successfully accomplished the summoning.”

  “Good. We are the last of the six… but I would hate to think our quality will not match.”

  That was it. Just a couple sentences, but important info.

  “Six, huh. Six by six, even,” I pointed out.

  “Six what?” Inasyah asked. “Countries? Individual princesses within this country?”

  “Sounds like a job for you,” I commented. I could ask about the world, but my questions would be far too blunt. “Midnight can’t ask directly, so he’d have to stumble across it.”

  “It might be some sort of competition?” Midnight said. “I don’t know why you’d need sets of heroes, for that.”

  “Also imprisoned or dead ones,” I pointed out. We’d seen some of that, but before we really had a way to do anything about it. “So?” I asked. “Should I just open a Gate and send these kids back home?”

  Inasyah shook her head. “As long as we don’t have any indication of current danger, it’s better to continue to investigate. Once they plan to separate us or bring us away from the castle, that might change. We’ll be using my discretion as an agent of Extra in that regard. And… we need to be certain we can get back when we make the attempt.”

  “I don’t think they have any wards of the sort,” I said. “But… maybe they’re just good. In theory, I’ll get spatial magic training tommorrow… however that works. I doubt I can pick up the local power system, but I should be able to fake it to some extent.”

  “I should be able to investigate some things,” Midnight said. “As long as they don’t object to a cat running around.”

  “So about you…” I asked Inasyah. “Do you really have dark magic affinity?”

  “No. I tricked the device.”

  “That could be a problem,” I said.

  “I should also be able to fake it. Hopefully,” she said. “I have some illusory abilities.”

  “You’re a weird kind of angel,” I said.

  “Where I’m from, angels like Malaliel are the weird ones,” she commented. Then she shuddered. “Imagine not being able to lie.”

  “It’s good for convincing people of your words.”

  “So is what I can do. Most of the time.”

  I did remember the brief feeling that the angels’ words were true. It was about that time Malaliel had first started chopping off heads, so obviously it wasn’t foolproof. Still, the appearance of truth could be useful. “Just make sure not to get yourself in too much trouble. I’m going to try to do some magical scouting tonight. With Arcane Eye.”

  “Good luck with that,” Inasyah commented.

  I wondered if she could grant good luck. It didn’t seem she was proactive about it, if so.

  Arcane Eye was something I hadn’t used much, really. It was mostly during testing to confirm I could do it. It was a scouting spell that made- wait for it- an invisible magical eye. But since I had Scrying first, it showed a lot of downsides. Like having to move from your physical location to wherever you wanted to see things. It could also be destroyed. There were different ways our teams generally had to scout ahead if we were already in an enemy lair, and we didn’t usually have the time to spare.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  But here? We were just sitting around. The downsides weren’t so big.

  Also there were huge gaps under the doors. Whoever made them should be ashamed of the workmanship. I expected better of a castle, but I technically hadn’t been in one before. No, I hadn’t even been inside the closest place I visited- the mage’s tower in Granbold. I just met people outside.

  Midnight and I sent our Arcane eyes out into the hall, and back towards parts of the castle we’d passed that seemed interesting.

  “I’ll go left here,” I commented when we approached a certain intersection. I didn’t actually see Midnight’s Arcane Eye, but we shouldn’t have diverged far yet.

  Most of what we saw was boring. Hallways. Barracks. Bedrooms of other sorts. I was glad we could both see in the dark, because otherwise we might have had some trouble.

  “Couple dozen soldiers, maybe,” I commented. “Unfortunately, I can’t feel how strong they are through this.” It might be possible to upgrade the Arcane Eye with other senses, but it would be much more mana cost. And maybe easier for others to sense. Not a good time to experiment. “I could take them all out at once, though.”

  No matter how strong they were, I was certain that they wouldn’t survive a Meteor Swarm. Not that I didn’t know people that couldn’t, but there was no way they had this many people of that strength and also bother to yoink people from another world. Unless advanced talent was actually a big deal. In that case, though, I had to once again wonder if I actually had talent, or if the orb was misreading things. I might be good at spatial stuff, or maybe this world made me good at it suddenly, or it tried to make me. Would power exclusivity apply to something like this? I really wished I could grab the checking thing for further analysis.

  “Some of these rooms are harder to get into,” Midnight commented. “Plush rugs going to the door. However, I can just manage to push through.”

  “That’s one way to prevent people from hearing you inside, I guess,” I shrugged.

  Inasyah was politely ignoring us. I wasn’t sure if she needed to sleep, but if she did it wasn’t really time yet. The teens would hopefully be making the attempt to sleep. I could manage for a day with a quick nap in the morning though.

  After an hour or so of exploration, we’d seen quite a bit. Even if we had to recast the spell every twenty minutes or so and start over from our rooms, we’d covered most of the castle. There were a few secure locations without gaps, though.

  And one other anomaly. Some locations we couldn’t see. It was like a blur filter.

  “Scrying wards, probably,” I commented. “But it doesn’t seem they can stop the eye from moving about. Either way, we know something important is there.”

  It could be private rooms of the royalty or important mages, or something else. We didn’t quite have the context to figure it out yet, though we hadn’t specifically spotted any of them sleeping. Maybe tomorrow evening we could follow them to their chambers, if we knew their locations.

  -----

  In the morning, we had bread and cheese for breakfast waiting on the table- I’d heard the servants bring it in. The teens complained when I woke them up, and then complained about the food. Personally, I thought it was fine. Not hero quality food, but clearly the people who brought us here didn’t care that much. Or they were dumb.

  It turned out to be a third thing, but that wasn’t exclusive with them being dumb. People could always have reasons and also just be dumb.

  The minordomo came to collect us just as we were finishing eating. We might not have gotten to eat at all if we hadn’t started right away. This seemed like a terrible way to raise people you expected to be strong.

  “Training begins this morning. I will bring you to the training fields.” He looked at Midnight. “The cat is not welcome.”

  I shrugged. “It’s fine. He can wander around elsewhere and catch rats. He’s well behaved, I promise.”

  The man turned up his nose, but didn’t refuse.

  Midnight was internally rolling his eyes. Good job not giving himself away in front of the kids.

  The rest of us were separated into different areas, but all within eyeshot of each other. That was important, because even if some of the kids weren’t that pleasant I didn’t want to leave them all on their own.

  Meter and I were together, as the space guys.

  We were out in a field for our training. It looked to be trampled quite frequently by whoever passed through, but it wasn’t quite bare dirt. I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be grassy or if the green patches were just weeds.

  Our teacher was a hunched old man. “I am High Mage Yahaya, and I will be instructing you on spatial magic.”

  Meter looked properly rapt, even if there were bags under his eyes. I was at least interested enough to pay attention, but Yamaha probably couldn’t hold a candle to Wrickle. But maybe I was judging him too early.

  “Spatial magic is mostly useful for carrying things,” he said.

  Oh, so he was just bad, then.

  “To that end, we’ll begin by creating a space for you to store things.”

  Dimensional creation? That was huge, if true.

  “You want to imagine a small box. About the size of your palm.”

  Oh. Lame. But I followed along anyway.

  I had to admit, Yamaha wasn’t a terrible teacher. I did my best to follow along, first mentally visualizing what I wanted. A space, more or less attached to my hip. I wasn’t sure why I would locate it physically relative to my body instead of using the ‘closest space’ doctrine, but I presumed they didn’t know about that. At the moment, I didn’t have any reason to share that.

  Then we got to chanting and hand gestures. I felt the flow of mana from the guy, and it didn’t make any sense at all. But Meter seemed to get what he was going for. It only took him a few tries to get the words pretty close. The hand gestures took longer, but it was the opposite for me.

  I bet the version of Translation magic they used was specifically set up to help with using their magic chants. I did wonder if they knew what the words meant, though.

  I did. Vaguely. So perhaps Yamaha had to know it, too. It was kind of like reciting a program. Power, size, duration. Parameters for the spell, though they seemed inexact. More like buckets to throw things in. Rather than choosing a specific thing, it was just that the spell had those things. Oh, and the word for ‘space’, which was definitely not the whole meaning behind that.

  The weirdest part was that my mana moved on its own when I was doing things according to his instructions. I wasn’t directing it along with the gestures, but the other way around.

  Wild.

  Also, I was sure glad that I could use the local magic system, to some extent. But even though I had years of experience on Meter, he still managed to complete the spell first. I felt a magical effect appear next to him. Yamaha had done the same several times, seemingly refreshing the effect every time he demonstrated.

  “Now take this,” Yamaha said, holding out a stone. “Set it inside your storage area.”

  It didn’t look like Meter was doing anything until he let go. Then the stone disappeared. It wasn’t like his hand was hidden by slipping into a far space. I wondered why it worked that way. Could it perhaps not do partial containment? Was it just the way he imagined? Yamaha didn’t seem surprised, at least.

  “I did it!” Meter celebrated as he jumped up. “This is amazing!” He reached his hand around, groping for something unseen before he finally managed to grab the rock and pull it out. Relatedly, it was in the same spot he’d put it. Not next to him, but where next to him had been.

  It didn’t move with him. That was a flaw… but one that at least Yamaha was aware of.

  He showed us how to lock the space to follow us around. How to grab multiple things. How to change the shape to fit oblong objects. It was all decent.

  But Wrickle had started by throwing an entire tea set onto a table. This guy probably didn’t have the ability, and he certainly didn’t have the style. Plus, he looked at me with disdain every time I was slightly behind Meter, even though I was more or less letting the teen win. I didn’t need to get the chanting right, probably.

  “Thank you for your instruction, High Mage Yahaya,” Meter said as our lessons finished. I noticed throughout the day that mana regeneration was good here… but using magic was still tiring.

  “Thank you for your instruction, High Mage,” I also said. I did appreciate his patience, at least. And he needed a lot of it when the kid skipped steps he thought weren’t important.

  The others all looked exhausted in various ways. Though I was pretty sure Inasyah was faking.