Stealth, as a high ranked adventurer, was always a very tricky thing. Casimir prided himself at being very good at sensing magic, to the point where even notoriously stealthy monsters were able to be detected before they could go on the attack. This allowed Casimir to stay further away than most people would need to be in order to gain useful intelligence.

The other half of the equation was the hiding part. The key to stealth was not in being completely undetected, but in being below the threshold of attention. This was best achieved in one of two ways: By sneaking when your enemies are not alert for threats, and by creating a distraction, diverting their attention from looking for you. All processes that exist could be explained by a magical equation, after all. The layman could be forgiven for thinking that mana only existed as what could be used in magic, but that was because you could only use mana of a certain purity in magic. The impure mana that composed what could be perceived with the physical senses still worked by more or less the same processes a wizard bent to their will, and understanding the mana interactions of living creatures was vital to understanding the latest innovations in curse magic.

In the case of stealth, it can be explained that a mind could only use so much impure mind mana in order to sense things. As a rule, this is used up by evaluating the most obvious things in the area, a loud noise will use up that attention before a more quiet one, and that rule is extended to all possible senses.

In other words, Casimir didn’t need to be invisible, just less visible and quieter, both physically and magically, than the group of novice wizards that were stomping down the derelict guerilla tunnels. He adjusted the web of mental curses he had cast on himself, ignoring and dampening unneeded things, such as blocking out his students from his magical senses, and calming his emotions to improve his focus on the job. The adjustments narrowed his senses, allowing him to better detect things ahead of them while relying on the handful of alarms he placed as the group advanced to alert him to anything behind the group.

Sure, he could just use more and more mind mana to instead just allow him to process more and more information, allowing him to detect everything important at once, but not only is that incredibly wasteful in situations as controllable as this, it was loud, magically. While it was largely grandstanding and sorcerous pretension that caused people to make statements along the lines of all mana types being unique and unlike all others, for mind mana it pretty much held true. Among other things, mind mana tended to broadcast itself, without any prompting. It was how Mind Reading worked, by picking up on the impure emissions people output just by thinking and purifying them into something the caster could understand, although it was supposedly incredibly difficult to get anything as complex as words with the spell. So using heavy amounts of mind mana to look around might as well be shouting from the rooftops that you were looking for something, to things with mana senses. Frequently worth it, but not now.

These curses, the ones with tradeoffs that could be partially camouflaged as normal thought, were much more subtle, and easily hidden from magical senses through concealing enchantments, like the one on Casimir’s choker.

So as such, when his students fell for the most basic trap in the book, a door with an enchantment keyed to activate whenever someone tried to force the door open when locked, Casimir got to fully experience Peter’s swearing as Hanna healed his burned fingers. In their defense, the enchantment was gilded into the other side of the door, and heated up the metal door handle just through conduction, so it wasn’t poorly hidden, but their magic senses were better than that, right?

“If they didn’t know we were here when that went off…” Faron observed. “They certainly do now, idiot.”

“Shut up.” Peter said petulantly, before resorting to the adventurer’s usual lockpick: brute force. He used Resist Fire on himself, before grabbing the locking mechanism and using Metal Warp to literally tear it out of the door, opening the damaged door with a grunt. Casimir made a mental note to move up the lockpicking lessons, in the event that they survived their own hubris in wanting to participate. “There, it’s open.”

“Functional.” Illivere commented, cutting short any further argument.

“...Let’s go.” Faron said, swallowing what he was going to say. After they passed the door, Casimir ducked down and collected the tiny amount of purified copper that composed the trap, adding it to the small ball of the stuff that he kept in his trap-making kit. Gilded enchantments had many advantages over carved and inked ones, as long as you had the magically conductive metal to make them work. Gold was the preferred medium for such enchantments, due to how soft it was, but copper was cheaper, better for traps that he didn’t count on being able to recover later.

After a few more twists and turns, which sorely tested Casimir’s ability to keep track of the various unexplored tunnels and if something was leaving them, Peter stopped at another door, which was also trapped. “He went in here.” He said, but holding back on opening it.

Hanna hummed as she analyzed the door. “I think it’s trapped. With… I can’t tell if it’s fire or water mana. Both?” It was ice mana, actually. It has parts in common with both other kinds, so it was a pretty understandable rookie mistake.

“Let me see.” Illivere said, scanning it herself. “It’s a freezing enchantment. One moment…” With a precise burst of fire mana, she was able to break the gilding of the enchantment, which caused frost to coat the handle, but as the trap couldn’t reset itself after the damage, Peter was able to repeat his previous feat to bypass the door.

Past the door was a room that made Casimir immediately think ‘safehouse’. It had a cot, a desk, and some cabinets, and while he couldn’t see them yet, it probably had a few hidden exits.

It was, however, empty, so whoever they were tracking, had left somehow. Casimir slipped in while his students were searching the cabinets, speaking up after going right behind them. “Find anything?”

Casimir’s students immediately jumped up in surprise, Faron swinging his arm while coating it with some force armor. Casimir bent forward to avoid the attack with a whole inch to spare, rolling his eyes at the poor reflexes of the other students. “At least one of you is alert.” He said, causing Peter and Hanna to flinch in shame. “Again, did you find anything?” Casimir repeated.

Illivere brought out some papers. “It’s in code.” She explained while frowning.

Casimir frowned. Codes and languages were more Hana’s thing… He’s picked up a little, though. Casimir applied an mind acceleration curse on himself to help him process things. “Let me see.” Hrm, the letters were Elven, which didn’t help that much, given how 90% of languages Casimir knew of used either Elven or Dwarven characters. After looking through a few more pages… “It’s in seatongue, ferrian, or potealish, from the letters.” Or something more obscure that also used that particular distinctive accent mark on some of the letters. “Assuming the code uses a single language, at least. My bet is seatongue.” Given the use of pirates in the previous attack, it seemed the most likely.

Still, if there was evidence like this… Casimir checked the cabinets himself, opening a sealed compartment that his students missed that contained… a code wheel! Also a few other cryptography tools, but with this, it would be a lot easier to crack the contents of the letters.

Peter rubbed his temples as he looked around the room. “I can’t tell where he left from, he’s been everywhere here.” Well, Casimir supposed he should consider himself lucky Peter managed to follow the trail this far, tracking using Attune Senses was far from easy.

“What’s this for?” Hanna asked as she examined a metal bowl with ashes within.

“Burning things.” Casimir replied. “Like the papers he used to translate these documents.” They must not have gotten around to decrypt these ones, if they still had them instead of burning. “Or the ones he received before this.” He put the documents away into his bag. “It’ll take hours to work through this. I’ll handle it later. Anyone find anything else notable?”

Illivere spoke up first. “I have located a mysterious lever.”

“Perfect.” Casimir said, checking out the mechanism himself. Safehouses weren’t usually decorated, so the light sconce, with a fresh reservoir of pnuma oil, being in the center of a carved mural depicting one of the founders raising Anima from the sea was pretty suspicious. The lever wasn’t the sconce itself, but instead it was a sea monster’s single horn that concealed a hinge that allowed the section to be pulled from the wall. “Let me check it for traps.”

Focusing, Casimir couldn’t see any enchantments beyond the normal ones that were in literally all of the walls here, protecting the area from monster formation. Still, it meant that pulsing a bit of metal aspected mana to examine the mechanism wasn’t going to explode anything.

After assessing it, Casimir pulled at the monster horn, careful not to pull it too hard, and tugged it to the side before it was fully extended. “This is a much more complex mechanism than I expected to find.” It actually looked like the kind of complexity you’d see in some of the older kobold warrens, the ones that manage to fester for long enough to spawn the strongest kobold subtypes. “It’s a lot newer than everything else here.” Was the monster that contracted this a Kobold Prince? They’re clever enough for such matters, but the very idea that kobolds could exist long enough to spawn one, in Anima, was ludicrous. But if there was such a being outside of Anima that was transported inside… that had potential for an idea. Or it could be some foreign country with the mechanical skill to pull something like this off, but not the magical… speculation was useless right now.

Nevertheless, after the sixth click of the gears, Casimir moved the lever back to the vertical track and pulled it all the way down, which finally allowed the facade the mural was carved on to swing open. “Here we are. Peter, has he passed through here?”

“Oh!” Peter startled at being directly addressed, before walking into the tunnel past the door. “Hrm… Yes, I think he did.” He turned to the other students. “Come on! We’ve almost got him!”

Casimir set up another alarm on the broken door, and again on the now open secret door, before following the bait once more.

Dealing with people as your enemies instead of monsters was so annoying…

----------------

After a few dozen meters past the secret door, Casimir noticed the man struggling with another mechanism ahead. It seemed to be of equal complexity to the last one, which meant that it was annoying to go through even if you did know how. From the man’s cursing, which Peter could probably hear by now, he had screwed it up and was going through the process of resetting it so he could try again.

As expected, Peter rushed forward once he heard his quarry, and the other students followed. After a brief struggle, Casimir approached the man from behind, examining him for more suicide enchantments. Ah, there. “This is some clever work.” Casimir said idly as he brought out his disarming tools. The mental curse that was restraining the man’s thoughts flexed in strain, as he desperately avoided thinking of anything that would set off his suicide enchantment. “Talk about a hair trigger on this choker, needing Taboo to prevent you from accidentally setting it off. Naturally, it’s nearly impossible to disarm.” The man relaxed, then groaned as his Taboo probably gave him a headache as it siphoned mind mana from his system. “Guess you figured out that you were etched to burn after your buddies didn’t come back, eh?” The curse flexed again. “Don’t worry, you’re going to walk away from this.” Casimir lied, and the man groaned again as his headache redoubled from his Taboo saved his life again.

Casimir pulled out his focus spikes one at a time, tuning the mana appropriately for the points he needed to affix. He’ll need… six points, so six spikes. The enchantments were well-designed, but Casimir got the impression they were… simplified. Something that the enchanter cut some corners on so it didn’t take too long to make each one, or so they could give it to some less skilled mages for production. Casimir expected something like this to attempt to hide its structure through needless complexity, but it didn’t. It certainly wasn’t made by the same hand that created those crappy booby traps. After each spike was tuned appropriately, he floated the lot and had three of them hit the first set of points, and after the mana pulse made the enchantment shift, the other three struck the collar on three different points, venting the mana in the enchantment out as hot air, Faron letting the man go and getting some distance.

After the collar was successfully disarmed, Casimir removed the Taboo curse with even less effort, maximizing the mana efficiency by placing his fingers on the four points on the man’s skull that corresponded with the matrix’s vulnerable points before forming a negative mind void on the relevant fingers, destabilizing the matrix. “There.” He spent one more moment to ensure that the free-floating mana was also removed, ensuring his headache remained. “Now, our questions.”

Illivere made the first one. “What were your orders?”

Peter asked the next one without waiting for the man to answer. “Who’s your boss?”

Faron, not to be left out, threw in a question of his own. “What are their plans?”

Despite usually being pretty happy to stay quiet, Hanna had one too. “Where were you going?”

The man groaned, his head presumably swimming at the various questions combined with his head’s freshly-squeezed status. Just where Casimir wants him to be. “Stop… loud…”

Casimir turned the man around, so that he was looking only at Casimir instead of his students. “Now, I can fix your headache. Something so simple is nothing compared to that suicide choker you had.” The miserable look on the thug’s face brightened a bit. “Problem is, I’m a bit lost.” Casimir lied. “So if I do that, you’re going to need to help me out. How am I supposed to get through that door, and what’s on the other side?” This wasn’t something Casimir actually needed to know, but it was important to start things off with something verifiable.

“Okay, okay.” The thug said, clutching his head. “You’ve got a deal.” Normal hangovers were, surprisingly, really complex to fix instead of prevent, but this was much easier, as it was caused by magic. Really, any mind curse built to wear off by just letting the soul dissolve it, the simplest kind of curse, will do the job. But if it was to be done quickly… The man groaned in pleasure as his headache abated from the calmness curse. “Okay, that door leads to another one of the safehouses that got built between the tunnels. The latch is supposed to go if you bend the lever halfway, pull it down two thirds of the way, pull right and hold for two clicks, then left and back up again, hold for three clicks, and then all the way down…” Casimir stared at the man, not because he suspected he was lying, but to test him. “I got the clicks mixed up…” He admitted, explaining how he was held up. “You reset it by bending it out all the way and pushing it in, pulling it out when the clicks stop.”

Casimir subtly pulsed the metal detecting spell once more after checking for a magical trap, and confirmed that the mechanisms worked like the man said they did. Fantastic. He reset the mechanism and followed the man’s instructions, noting that a magical trap suddenly primed after the first set of clicks, but after reviewing the mechanism again, finished the instructions and the latch opened up without setting off the trap. “Alright, let’s settle in.”

As promised, the other side was another safehouse, much like the first one. “Now that we’re all here peaceably, and you no longer have death hanging over you, “ for now, “-it’s time to have a conversation.” The man nodded smoothly, the artificial calm numbing him to fear. Strong emotional stressors fought against calming magic, but that only applied to immediately obvious ones. Knives pointed in your face? It would take a more complex and powerful curse to keep one rational in the face of that. When it came to more abstract dangers, like the knowledge that the person in front of you could kill you in an instant, calming curses were substantially more effective. “Now, who controls these tunnels? Who made these safehouses?”

Having already agreed to help, the calming curse made him resistant to changing from that course. So, he talked. “The tunnels are controlled by the boss.” Casimir raised his eyebrow at the simple explanation, but fortunately he continued. “No one knows who the boss is exactly, but he calls himself ‘The Herald of Malice’ like one of those arrogant adventurers do sometimes.” Has Casimir ever heard that title before?

After a moment of silence, Casimir decided that he probably wasn’t going to remember it if he hadn’t yet. “Okay, and why were you watching my students?” This was playing dumb, just a little bit, but at least he had managed to confirm that these were criminals and not the Archmagus’s idea of being protective.

The calming curse fluctuated a bit, but not enough to be noticeable to the target. Casimir reinforced his own calming curse to ensure that he can remain rational and present himself appropriately to manipulate the man. “Uh, I was just keeping tabs on the girl for the boss.” He said, taking a moment to choose his words carefully. Hm, he may be lying here. “I wasn’t told why.” While Casimir was sure that was true, his bullshit detector was going off.

“Speculate.” Casimir ordered, observing the painful flex of mana as the lazily constructed calming curse was tested.

“Ah! Ah, she’s rich, I noticed that, so my guess is her family has some kind of treasure that the boss wants.” Interesting that he didn’t immediately go to ‘money’. It’s quite telling as to how this Herald fellow operates.

Right, next question: “What kind of resources does this guy have? Who or what are your partners?”

Suddenly, the secret door, closed behind them, started clicking, as if it was being opened again. Casimir idly realized that he had neglected to alarm their path past the first secret door… As he realized this, the thug calmly explained: “Around here? That’d be the kobolds.”

Casimir expanded his senses again, finding, to his dismay, that they were surrounded. The secret door opened to reveal the lightly furred kobolds, basic warriors by the looks of them, pointing seven spears through the doorway as the other door to the room opened up, seven more spears poking out as well.

“...I see.” Casimir said. This could be tricky…