01.24 - The Vision of Escapism

“The holy inquisition?" I staggered.

“We have to hurry,” Kentaro said. “We got to bail those three out before they start with the interrogation… and torture.”

“Just a moment,” I said. “Do they know about me? Did anyone follow you?”

“I don’t think so…” Kentaro said.

“You don’t think so?” I asked with barely disguised rage.

“Hey, get a grip,” Tia said as he shook her head. “You know Kentaro is reliable. Usually.”

“I am pretty sure,” Kentaro said after a moment of pause. “I dealt with those that came to our house. Reiko is at a smuggler's place. An old acquaintance. He can get us all off world. I’ll fill you in on the location later. We have to hurry.”

“I have no idea what you did,” Alfred said. “But if you’ve made enemies of the church, we need to make sure the young lady will be safe too.”

“Let’s not waste time,” Tia said. “I will fill in Alfred on the details while the two of us fetch Dawn. We’ll alert Isabella and Geber too. In the meantime, do what you have to.”

—

We had almost reached the center of the Lichthafen, when Kentaro managed to lure a small group of pursuers into a side alley, where we took down the holy knights and interrogated the inquisitor who led them.

I say interrogate, but all the information we got out of him came from insults toward us, our co-conspiritors, and the fate awaiting us.

We knocked him out cold. No need to tally more bodies than absolutely necessary.

The three courtesans were held somewhere in the dungeons below the grounds of the great cathedral.

That was about all we knew.

I used ‘Transform’ to assume the appearance of the inquisitor from before, and had a shackled Kentaro follow me into the lion's den.

Suffice to say that the punny shackles of theirs were insufficient to fully constrict a melee combatant adventurer of Silver rank.

Anyway, the plan was as follows:

Get them to think they had achieved their goal of capturing their target.

At the same time, claim that his allies were still at large, pursued by the holy knights we had taken down before, and fleeing beyond the west gates in the direction of the mountains.

Not the complete opposite of our real position, to not give away our plans in the case of someone with more than two brain cells putting two and two together later on.

We had them lead us to the dungeons, without having to break into a place we had no clue about.

That part of the plan began to fail three quarters of the way into the basement below when one of the guards started to ask questions. I only managed to dodge them for two iterations, before we had to knock him and his buddies out too.

We stuffed them into a storage room, which gave us a bit of time, but not as much as I had hoped.

We continued our little charade through the corridors.

This time, my ‘Tracking’ Skill from the ‘Forager’ Class came in handy.

Not in a forest, or anywhere outdoors, mind you.

Whoever designed those Skills sure loved to cut corners and overlook edge chases.

Maybe it was the same System that missed the busted blessing combination of mine by its oversight?

I also didn’t know if this church and their inquisition served the same gods who had sent me here. I assumed not. They had probably just monetized the cope and over time filled enough support roles to make the public dependent on them, like most other organized religions back on earth.

After maybe half an hour of stumbling around, we finally found the three women we were looking for.

Akane, Koharu, and Loreley seemed more or less okay. They had already suffered through some basic interrogations, were dehydrated and hungry, but were still mostly unharmed.

The real problem would be our escape.

Or it would have been, if I gave one iota of a damn about the church or what they considered holy.

Trapped? Underground?

No such thing for a ‘Geomancer’.

I applied my earth magic to parts of the dungeon.

The resulting cave-in doubled to bury our tracks.

By the time they would dig out half their dungeon, we’d be gone for weeks.

My newly created tunnel ended up connecting right with the sewage system.

Not a pretty sight, or smell, but way better than just crawling out of a hole next to the cathedral.

After following the underground waterways for three branches, we finally crawled out of the servers and made our way to Kentaro’s smuggler friend, where we met up with Tia.

Suffice to say that, despite Alfred's best attempts, Dawn was less than happy about dropping out of the Magic Academy in such a way.

Isabella and Geber were in a similar boat. They had risked life and limb for their workshop, only to lose it now anyway.

As for Reiko, she had made peace with our plans.

My ‘mother’ was probably still somewhere in town, oblivious to all that’s been going on. But I honestly didn’t care anymore at this point.

Alfred, Dawn, and Tia seemed to agree with my assessment.

Isabella and Geber had no alternative.

The same was true for Akane, Koharu, and Loreley. Akane struggled to depart without the chance to say a last goodbye to her long since grown up siblings, but that would have risked involving them too. At least the other two had no family to speak of.

Reiko’s only remaining relative was Kentaro, and he didn’t have any choice after slaying multiple holy knights.

As for me, I was the source of the sacrileges that had ultimately led to this.

We could not fully leave the Elden Lords territory, due to restrictions brought about by the still ongoing war against Seth and his allies, but there were some safe worlds on the outskirts.

As the sun rose in the east, the eleven of us departed on a spaceship made of wood, steel, and linen, that was, for all that I could tell, only held together by fate, miracles, and magic.

Our ultimate goal was an agricultural enclave, ruled by a secular governor, still part of the Elden Lord’s domain, but not under the yoke of the particular church that was out for our blood, all for the sin of saving lives without their approval.

So we sailed towards the star of morning, aiming for a faraway world.