Mage Among Superheroes

The situation was now a bit different than we had understood previously, but it didn’t really change our role. We still needed to continue our investigations into the source of the lasers, but now maybe there were people from a third world involved. Though with the core emitter of the weapons being recognizable as Bunvorixian in origin, it seemed unlikely that our recently met magical girl’s world was responsible for them.

“Are there any Bunvorixians on your Earth?” I asked.

“Not that I am aware of,” Eglantine replied. “Just the Scouring and ourselves, I believe.”

I frowned. “So do you not have a lot of magic and powers and stuff?”

Eglantine shook her head. “That would depend on what you mean. There are thousands of magical girls just in Japan. A relatively small portion of the population, but not all that rare either.”

I pondered for a few moments. “Having only one sort of powers in a world sounds boring.”

Strife- or in her non-magical form, Momo, tilted her head. “Do you have more than one…?”

“This world has one sort of overarching style that people get. My Earth has… a great number of them,” I said. “But they can’t get here right now because the borders of planes are weird. Speaking of which, what are our plans for these portals?”

Momo nodded. “Once I finish resting, I will try to lead you back towards the one I came through.”

“Cool. We might be able to close it up if it’s still hanging around,” I said. “It will be more difficult if there’s some sort of lasting physical component though. Were there any weird machines on your side of things?”

Momo shook her head. “It was simply in an alleyway. I do hope that nobody else has wandered through.” She turned to Eglantine. “The others were informed about our passage weren’t they, Lady Eglantine?”

“That is correct,” the porcupine confirmed. “Our citizens should at least remain safe from anyone passing through.”

“Good,” Momo sounded quite relieved at that. “Then… we just have to make it back through and… get it closed? You can do that?”

I grinned widely. “I’ve learned to alter portals. Which… has mostly been for closing them. Again, as long as there isn’t anything inputting additional power to hold it open it should be fine.”

“What if…” Momo frowned. “Nevermind.”

If I knew her slightly better, I might have pushed for an answer there. But I didn’t. Such were the perils of learning social niceties.

-----

Aside from reaching that one portal, our plans were generally flexible. Try to spot any enemy encampments, avoiding conflicts if possible. Because we’d be going deeper into enemy territory, and it was better not to risk being overrun. We were already pushing things by fighting people who outleveled many of us. Strife’s addition would only help so much in that regard.

We used different tunnel entrances to save ourselves some time, and soon several of us were sniffing out our previous path. There were no immediate signs of others crossing our trail, though apparently there were older scents. We moved further in under Strife’s guidance- she was transformed because we expected combat. Apparently, it wasn’t that draining to maintain if she wasn’t actually fighting, and shifting back and forth was riskier. In normal circumstances, she would usually be in safe territory which meant spending most of her time untransformed.

Ultimately, she brought us to a chamber with a large pool of water. Then she stopped.

After a few moments, when she didn’t seem to be doing anything, I looked over at Eglantine. The porcupine shook her head. I… wasn’t sure what that meant in context. “... Did we get lost?”

Strife twitched, her extremely long hair shaking. “No. This is… this is it. Where the portal was. But it’s gone.”

“Great,” I said. “We don’t have to close it, and your home should be safe.”

For some reason, she didn’t look happy. “Yes. But… now I can’t… I can’t return.”

“Oooooh. You don’t have those sorts of powers. I get it. It’s kind of expensive, but I should be able to send you back from here.”

Her head whipped around. “You can?”

“I told you I can make portals. It’s way easier to temporarily recreate one that previously existed. And you’re connected to the dimension so it should be… about as manageable as it gets,” I said. I almost said easy, but I was reminded the dimensional borders were weird here. It might be a bit tougher. “You’re not from that Earth but instead some other planet in that dimension, right Eglantine?”

“Correct,” the porcupine confirmed.

“I won’t focus on you then. Strife’s connection should be good enough. If the rest of you could watch the entrance?”

The Portal Squad nodded, heading out with the rest.

“How long will this take?” Strife asked nervously.

“Not too long,” I said. “Midnight, if you’d split the cost with me?” I didn’t have enough mana that I felt comfortable casting Gate alone, especially not if we might run into other trouble soon.

“Of course,” Midnight said. “Even?”

“Exactly,” I confirmed. I reached out for the faint traces of a portal, finding them like faded chalk lines on the road. As I gathered mana, I focused on Strife and her connection to that world. I had said it wouldn’t take long, but it only took a few seconds- I simply hadn’t wanted to worry her if something went wrong.

Space rippled open, revealing a perfectly normal alleyway. Well, a normal Earth alleyway. I’d battled people in plenty of them, and they were quite familiar. Was it the right Earth? It had better be.

“That’s it!” Strife said excitedly. She seemed to have momentarily broken her gloomy demeanor. “Thank you so much.” She scooped up Eglantine. She looked at the portal ahead.

“You just walk through,” I said. “You only have about a minute, so… don’t hesitate too much.”

We’d just met, so I wasn’t expecting long rounds of goodbyes or anything. And it was just dimensional travel, so it was best to get it over with.

“I-” Strife stepped back. “If we proceed, we will never be able to repay you for your assistance. Nor can I be fully resolved to know my dimension is safe from this one, without knowing more.” She turned, bowing. “I apologize for your wasted effort, but I cannot go through right now. I will pay you back for that, too.”

“Sure,” I said. “That’s like… an hour or two of effort for Midnight and myself.”

“... An hour?” Strife looked confused.

“A little more than three hours total. That’s just how mana regeneration works,” I said.

“But you… opened a rift between realms.”

“And I can only do that a few times per day,” I confirmed. “Is this… difficult to understand?”

“Are you some sort of archmage?” Eglantine asked.

“I’m like… mid level,” I said. “I’m pretty good at Gate, though. Lots of practice. You would not believe how many portals this one guy throws around. And how many people have to be rescued from the other side. Or by going through and leaving behind a secret base.”

“... Sounds like fiction,” Strife commented.

“Same with magical girls!” Iron Hawk shouted from outside the chamber.

“Yeah, what she said,” I agreed. “Though there isn’t a lot that’s easy to confirm as fiction in this world here. Anyway, you have like ten seconds. Either go through or help us track down other portals.”

“I must remain to assist you,” Strife said.

“Cool. We can always use more stabbing. Anything else you can help us with?”

She held her hand up to her eyepatch. “In the most dire of situations… I can, yes. Should we find ourselves vastly outnumbered.”

Was it rude to ask her to not be mysterious about that? Or maybe she was physically incapable of not being mysterious. Eh, whatever. I’m sure she knew how to use her stuff.

I wonder if I could get a cursed eye somewhere. I bet they were useful.

-----

Apparently, Flower had picked up the trail of more dark elves. It turned out Flower was an excellent scout… which wasn’t that surprising. That was why Lyklor brought her, after all. I looked between him and Flower. Then Zeb, Miss Flutter, and Fluffy. I had just one question for him.

“Why do all beastmaster companion names begin with F?” Okay, I had two. “And is there some reason you couldn’t bring Fang along?”

Lyklor looked at me. “My alphabet doesn’t even really have an f,” he pointed out. “And I don’t know if hers does either,” he said, looking at Zeb.

“We sure don’t! I can’t even go fffff,” she said. “You need lips and stuff. Or magic.”

“Regardless, there’s no limitation on me bringing Fang here specifically. But it’s not her kind of place, so I didn’t.”

“Too bad you don’t have a cave bear,” I shrugged. “Though it’s not like you can just have a million different companions. Probably.”

We kept conversation to a minimum as we found ourselves approaching what we thought was probably enemy territory. Then I sensed some sort of ward. I motioned for everyone to stop. “There’s something magical up ahead. Flower must have already flown through it.”

“How unfortunate,” Lyklor said. “But if it were a hazard, she would most likely have avoided it. It could be a detection ward of some sort.”

“So they’ll know we’re here?” I asked.

“They will know a bat came here,” Lylklor pointed out. “Whether or not that alerts them is a different matter. Can it be avoided?”

“We can try that turn back there. But it kind of covers the whole area ahead.”

He nodded. “We should pause here. She will return soon enough, and we can redirect ourselves.”

Flower indeed came back, and reported spotting enemies. And some sort of buildings, even. Meanwhile, Miss Flutter looked disappointed that she was not part of the scouting efforts.

We continued to make our way, with my ability to sense magical things being our primary guiding factor. We found several other tunnels heading the same way all with wards.

“Oh,” I shook my head. “I don’t actually have to guess what those wards do. There’s a reason I learned Arcane Sight.”

There usually wasn’t enough magic or magic adjacent things for me to need it, so I’d sort of forgotten. But when I was wondering if I could figure out what the consequences would be… I realized I had the solution.

It wasn’t cheap enough to have on constantly, as it only lasted ten minutes or so, but that was sufficient to pick out one or two.

Once I took a proper look, I realized things were quite simple. “These are life wards,” I explained. “They’ll detect any living thing passing through.”

“Including Flower?” Lyklor asked. “Because they might take note of a bat passing back and forth multiple times.”

I nodded slowly. “There’s something you need to understand about mages. We really don’t like being interrupted.” I took a second and third look just to confirm. “Yep, there it is. An exception for small animals. Including insects, of course. Can you imagine if alarms were constantly going off?”

Sir Kalman stepped forward slightly. “So they don’t know we’re here yet.”

“But we also can’t get to them without setting off alarms. I don’t know if rushing would help, since they seem to have fortifications in that cavern ahead.”

There was a screech behind us. A quite loud one.

“Oh!” Zeb bounced excitedly. Which meant… very little. “Miss Flutter found something!”

There was no reason to not go check it out, so we followed her down a little side path we thought was a dead end. And it was… except for a small opening in the ceiling. Miss Flutter was about person sized, but she was used to wiggling through gaps like that. The dire bat screeched again. Hopefully, it sounded like natural cave sounds. Well, I’d heard a few bats of different sizes so probably.

“She says she can see them! It opens up to that cavern!”

“Can she explain more clearly?” I asked.

“She cannot!” Zeb said without even consulting the dire bat. But she said it enthusiastically, as expected.

Ultimately, Flower flew up to verify her information… and we learned that there was a quite large opening. I couldn’t sense any magical wards, either. Seems they missed a spot.

The first person we hoisted up was Malaliel. She didn’t look like she was having great fun squeezing through the opening with her wings and all, but she was probably one of the better people to scout out what we could see.

Next was me, not because I was more likely to fit and certainly not because I was light, but because I could sense magic. And Midnight didn’t want to go that high if it could be helped.

“It’s alright, Midnight,” I reached down. “It’s like a balcony here.”

He leaped from Sir Kalman’s head onto my outstretched arm. Fortunately for him, he was very familiar with how his claws held onto my outfit.

There was no magic ahead, and I double checked with Arcane Sight. But… there were signs of magic behind some areas I couldn’t quite see. Not actual glowing light, but instead magical traces slipping around the fortifications they had.

Well, good. We found something. Now we had to figure out what to do with it.