'I feel like I'm falling a lot recently...? I didn't think I was all that clumsy.'
"Can you stop screaming?"
"...Sorry."
"Not you, Prince. Her!"
"MEEEEEOOOOOOOWW!"
The fall really was quite long. Nearing a minute, even. Linnie wondered if he would be squished once he reached the bottom. Yes, that was a serious concern. So, in an act of unbelievably quick thinking...
"Prince, get in my hat!"
"Wh-what!?"
Not wanting to explain any further, the boy simply swiped it over The Prince. Then, he shoved Lady inside. Lastly, as the ground was right beneath him, he dove inside of his hat.
Of course, he didn't lose the momentum, and ended up crashing down into the small room inside. Luckily, he had set up the entry point with a few dozen pillows that he may or may not have taken from the guest rooms in the manor, since the room had already left a few bruises on him from hitting the hard floor.
That didn't stop him from falling onto The Prince, though, who hadn't been thinking fast enough to roll out of the way.
"Ow! My arm! I think you broke my arm!" he wailed.
"Whose fault is that!?" Linnie shouted. "It looks fine, anyway."
"Meow!"
Linnie scrambled away from the pile, tripping and stumbling over the mound of pillows. He glanced warily at the mirror, then looked to the door.
"Come on, this is the way out."
Linnie guided The Prince into the void outside of the room, leaving him awestruck.
"This... is the inside of a wizard's hat? I've only read about it before."
"Uh, cool. Just reach above you and pull yourself out to exit."
"But there isn't anything to grab?"
"There will be. Even Lady can do it by herself, now."
"Okay..."
The Prince vanished from the space, and Linnie followed shortly after. Lady came out at last, though Linnie secretly wished she had just stayed inside.
The boy put his hat back on his head and looked around, stumped.
"Well, where the hell are we?"
****
Almost all of the masked men were dead or incapacitated. All but three, in fact—the two who had been speaking in the beginning, and the one who had snuck up on Alwyn twice.
They were a decent margin stronger than the rest, and were clearly in some sort of leadership positions. Well, that last part was obvious at first glance, since these three were the only ones with slightly different masks.
The one on the left had black lips, the one in the middle had black eyes, and the one on the right—the one that had snuck up on me—had a crack running down the false face.
"Do all of your groups have three leaders? Or was this just a meeting between three groups?"
"..."
"But you were so talkative before..." Alwyn said in a sad voice.
He was trying to seem nonchalant, but, the truth was—he was pretty damn nervous. He hadn't been able to effectively gauge how strong exactly these three were, and the fact that they outnumbered him was, obviously, not very good.
He only had one thing going for him... they knew as much about him as he did them. Nothing he hadn't shown in the past few minutes of fighting.
"None of you guys would happen to be wizards, would you?"
Alwyn was only met with silence. Then, an explosion of action. The three of them, at least at the physical level, were on par with high-tier squires. That meant that the three of them together had the potential to beat a knight...
A hand swiped for Alwyn's face, and he only narrowly dodged by leaning back a few inches. With utmost disrespect, he spit in the black-lipped man's face. Saliva wasn't what came out, though, and it was instead a torrent of flame.
Alwyn leapt back, but found himself colliding with the black-eared man. The man shoved Alwyn off of him and immediately went in for a powerful kick. The wizard spun around and caught the strike with both hands, forming a barrier around his fingers to reduce the impact.
A kick like that could've broken his arms.
The crack-faced man flew in with a drop-kick from the right, but was stopped mid-assault by an earthen coil made from the debris scattered around the ground. He struggled with the stone serpent while the black-eared man forced his foot away from Alwyn's grasp and went for a punch.
But it was a feint, and the black-lipped man struck Alwyn as he dodged.
'I'm gonna need a drink after this!'
Alwyn lightly tapped Power on the ground and blinked a short distance away from the three men, giving him a half-second at least to breathe. The men were soon upon Alwyn again, but he was instantaneously back where he was a moment ago.
He continued fighting and dodging and stepping, but each time his foot touched the ground he left a shimmering distortion in the shape of a spectral footprint.
'That should be enough?'
Alwyn then took his final step before finishing the fight. All of a sudden, every place that there had been a footprint, now stood a copy of the wizard. The three men were frozen for a second, but didn't let it stun them for too long.
Perhaps they should've. No, they should've run away as fast as they could right then.
All of the copies raised their staffs at the same time, and though the three men were attacking them one at a time, there were far too many to destroy. It would be too late if they found Alwyn's real body.
Working around his limited mana, Alwyn was forced to take advantage of the lingering mana in the air. Thanks to the barrier surrounding the building, there was at least triple the amount that was usually available.
The wizard cast a spell that, rather than exerting mana from his core, would use it to alter and configure the very air's latent mana surrounding them.
A web of glowing frosty mana formed, officially trapping the three men within the bounds of the spell. Before they knew what was happening, they had died, reduced to ice sculptures.
"...They all died from that? Seriously? Who am I supposed to interrogate, now?" Alwyn frowned.