Gabriel awoke, his head pulsing and throbbing. He felt awful, unlike anything he could remember. Which was very little right now, his thoughts all jumbled up. He could barely think, let alone remember anything. HE let out a little whimper. What had happened?

"Oh, hey Bruce, the brat is waking up." A voice practically exploded from somewhere in front of him, causing him to let out another whimper.

"Shut up, yah nut. He shouldn't wake up for hours now; I'm trying to read." Came back an equally loud, much deeper voiced response.

"Dumbass, you can't read."

"Can too."

"Just because you stole that stupid book doesn't mean you suddenly know how to read it."

"Does so!"

"Oh yeah? What's it about then?"

"... Politics."

"Oh, not this shit again!" There was a rapid stomping of feet and a door slam, and suddenly the two shouting voices were much quieter. Gabriel took the sudden quiet as an opportunity to crack his eyes open and look around. He was in a small, bare room with strange walls composed of metal and wood, blended together in a way he had never seen before. There was nothing else in the room but him and a small cage. A cage holding Skylar.

Gabriel tried to jerk to his feet at the sight of his glowing familiar, only to immediately realize he was bound hand and foot. Is… Is this a test? It wouldn't be the most extreme thing Gabriel had heard of from his family. After all, they had set his sister, Currana, on fire to train her pyrokinesis.

Quest: Escape your kidnappers

Reward: One Called Skill

One Called Skill Advancement

That answered that.

Gabriel returned to his bindings. He wasn't going to be escaping with them on. Thinking for a few minutes, Gabriel idly listened to the two men outside his tiny room arguing. It was an almost constant drone at this point. Finally, he settled on what felt like his only option. Gabriel summoned a Worker. It wasn't like he could do much else with Skylar knocked out. He then mentally commanded the invisible spirit to untie him. The bindings on his hands glowed, and he was free. The ones on his feet followed in seconds.

With a mental thank you, Gabriel rushed over to the cage. It was a simple metal thing, Gabriel couldn't sense any mana from it, but it was locked, with a large padlock. He didn't feel confident about breaking the thing without making a lot of noise. Hoping for a repeat, Gabriel told his Worker to open the cage. The padlock glowed, opened itself, and floated out of the way of the cage door. That is just… incredibly useful. Gabriel thought as he gently pulled Skylar out.

Focusing on his familiar and the bond between them, Gabriel tried to find any injuries or other abnormalities. A visual inspection ended up a bit pointless, since the fairies' constantly shifting appearance meant that he wasn't sure what he was looking at. Turning his attention solely to the bond, Gabriel felt nothing wrong. Honestly, it felt like Skylar was in a normal sleep. With that in mind, he gently poked them in the abdomen. This was not Gabriel's first time waking the sleepy fairy.

After a few moments, they rolled around on his hand, their arms stretched out, and a ringing little yawn came from them. Gabriel smiled, reminded of their first meeting. Skylar's sunshine wings popped out, and they flew out of his hands while still yawning. When they finally opened their eyes, the fairy did a double-take before looking at Gabriel questioningly.

"I'm glad to see you're ok," He whispered. "We got kidnapped."

Skylar nearly fell out of the air, and Gabriel felt immense panic and fear from them.

"Woah, Woah. Calm down," He gestured soothingly.

He felt a large heaping of indignation along with the panic.

"Yes, I realize it's perfectly reasonable to panic when kidnapped."

Skylar flew up to his face and gave him an accusing look.

"No, really. We are kidnapped, honest. I even have a quest to escape." He tried to push all the honesty he could through the bond.

Now his familiar was looking at him like he was crazy.

"Why am I not panicking?"

A sharp nod.

"Ahh, I don't know." Gabriel thought about it. "I guess this just feels sort of normal? I mean, all my brothers and sisters tell me about all the things they went through in training. This isn't that bad. Plus, it kinda feels like one of those summoning tactics scenarios Bazelphios has had me doing. In fact, he had one where I was kidnapped, didn't he? So yeah, no big deal."

Skylar crossed their arms and stared at him.

"I know I lost that one!" He raised his hands. "I'll do better this time, I promise. Plus, I have you helping me, and I have actual summons now. We just need a plan."

Skylar stared at him hard, before slowly nodding.

"Great, so this is what I was thinking."

{}

Gabriel was standing next to the door. He had been standing here for what felt like hours but was probably a lot less. He was starting to think his captors had forgotten about him. The arguing he could hear had stopped before he had finished his planning session with Skylar. It had been a while since then, and nothing had happened. He didn't want to leave the room without having at least taken out one of his kidnappers. He had only heard two, but he had no way of knowing how many there were. The one thing he had learned from Bazelphios's tactical training was that going on the offensive without any knowledge was a great way to get blindsided. Plus, in here, he had the element of surprise. They were probably expecting him to still be bound on the floor after all.

So he was relieved when he finally heard some footsteps coming from the other side of the door, filled by what sounded like keys jingling.

Well, alright then. This could be tough. Focus. Gabriel took a deep breath. His heart was racing. This would be his first real combat against an opponent that he knew basically nothing about.

The door opened.

"Hey, kid, you better be awake cause I got grub. Wait, that the-"

Gabriel fired off his spell, covering his eyes with his arm as a bright light bloomed right where he had been bound.

"Arg, fu- gahh!"

As the man jerked in surprise from the blinding light, partially blinded, Gabriel had immediately uncovered his eyes the instant the light was gone and summoned a Warrior right behind his captor.

What appeared was something like a cross between a mannequin and a statue. It had no musculature that Gabriel could see, just smooth marble white skin, completely featureless across the whole of its body. However, it had no joints like a mannequin would have, and moved with a smooth grace and power.

Gabriel sent it a command to hit the man as hard as it could the second he felt the summoning bond. The Warrior slammed its fist into the man's back and sent the already stunned kidnapper sprawling, the tray of food he had held flying across the room and spilling its contents. Focusing on the mana he could feel, Gabriel tried to assess his opponent as fast as possible. His senses told him the man was somewhere in the upper range of Low rank, so stronger than him by a decent margin. More than that, he was middle-aged, so he had decades of experience and training on the young summoner.

Not taking any risks, Gabriel summoned as many Warriors as he could. After he got up to nine, he suddenly felt like the skill hit a wall; he knew he could summon another one. He could feel it. Something was getting in the way.

Thinking fast, Gabriel unsummoned the Worker from earlier. Just like that, the wall dropped away, and he could summon his tenth Warrior. With all of them in the small room, it was pretty crowded.

"Get him!" Gabriel yelled. The Warriors all circled their target as he tried to lever himself up from the floor, still partially blind from the Flash spell Gabriel had fired off using his Elemental Light magic.

What followed was a completely one-sided beating. The target lay on the floor as the Warriors beat him into the wooden boards. This… was a lot easier than I thought it was going to be. Gabriel thought as he watched his summons beat the snot out of one of the people who had apparently kidnapped him, all the adrenaline draining out of him.

"Stop, don't kill him." The Warriors all turned to look at him. Gabriel got a distinct impression they disapproved. It made him notice the difference in the bond he shared with them compared to what he felt with Skylar, and even the one he had shared with the Worker earlier. Skylar's bond was a living thing, full of emotion and sensation. The Worker bond was very one-sided, with Gabriel sending commands, devoid of any kind of feedback.

He would say the Warrior bond was somewhere between the two. It felt more businesslike, but he could still get a general sense of how his summons were feeling. Right now, they very much thought he was making a mistake by not killing his kidnapper. Gabriel got the impression that they knew more about the situation than he had expected. These Warriors were clearly intelligent. They weren't just mindless puppets.

He was distracted from the sensations of one bond by another. Skylar was signaling to him that they had found the exit. The instant the door had been opened, Skylar had zipped out invisibly to find the fastest way out of here. Hopefully, without any conflict. Apparently, they had found exactly that.

Sending back that he understood, Gabriel focused back on his Warriors. He felt like he needed to give them an explanation. "I don't need to kill him, so I won't. The goal is to get out of here, not kill people." He stared at them. He was supposed to be a Hero. Going around killing people just because he could wasn't very heroic.

He felt a general sense of grudging acknowledgment from the group. That was another difference in the bond. Unlike the one he shared with his familiar, his bond with the Warrior's was to them as a group, not each individual. He could vaguely tell that they were all distinct individuals, but the bond blended it all together unless he focused.

"We're leaving as soon as Skylar gets here. They found the exit." That got a nod. So they all knew who Skylar was. Interesting.

As if saying it had summoned them, Skylar popped into view, waving at him. Nodding, Gabriel started walking into the hallway, only for one of the Warriors to catch up to him and grab his arm with its smooth, mannequin hand. Gabriel was surprised, both that the Warrior had stopped him and that hand on his arm felt like flesh. He hadn't known what he was expecting, but it wasn't that.

He looked at the Warrior. It gestured to itself, and then ahead of him.

"Oh, yeah. I guess that does make more sense. Go ahead." Gabriel replied to the unspoken question, embarrassed. Literally the first rule of being a summoner, and he forgot it the second he was in a real fight.

Five of the Warriors filed past him into what looked to be a very narrow hallway that turned sharply after only a few feet. The next Warrior gestured, and Gabriel followed his summons out, with five behind him. They went through several sharp turns and passed more doors exactly like the ones for his cell. Gabriel insisted on checking them for more prisoners, which his summons didn't approve of, but all of them were empty. Shortly, they entered a much larger room through a door made of pure metal instead of the odd mash of wood and metal that the rest of this place was composed of. This room had several doors, but Skylar just went to the one directly across from the one they exited.

Then it was only a short stretch of hall to a split, through the left door, and into another room. The whole time, Gabriel was stuck in the middle of the group. Despite all the scenarios Bazelphios had run with him being essentially the same as this, being treated like precious cargo was uncomfortable. Fortunately, they made their way out of his captors… base? Hideout? Whatever it was, within a few minutes, all told.

Quest Complete!

Choose your reward

Unfortunately, the only reason Gabriel knew he was out of the hideout, was because of the quest reward. The door they had just exited was another of the weird wood-metal hybrid doors, and the place it led to just looked like a larger halfway with more doors. Unlike the previous ones that had been barely three feet wide, this one was several yards across.

"Great. I have no idea where we are." Gabriel sighed.

{}

Halis was sitting in his office, working through some paperwork that had been handed down to him. The new mobilization orders had led to a lot of residual work in the aftermath of deployment, and he had to do his part. He was interrupted by a knock on his door.

"Enter."

In came a young Squire, with a sheet of paper. "Paladin Halis, I have the document you requested."

"Which one?" Halis had several document requests pending since he was currently doing inventory. Consolidating all that information was time-consuming.

“The profile on one Bazelphios Adalmantous.”

"Ahh, excellent. I'll take that. You're dismissed." The Squire handed him the document and left with a simple solute and not another word.

"She's quite good," Halis muttered to himself. It was rare he had a Squire assisting him that could fulfill his request without bugging him with incessant questions. "I should give her a commendation."

Halis appreciated people who knew how to get a job done on their own.

He began to read the documentation about his brother's teacher. It would help him find the best way to have the man disappear.

Only to nearly bite off his tongue.

"He's a WHAT?!"

{}

Bazelphios Adalmantious, space mage, one of only five god-like entities to arise since the War of loss, and one of the oldest living mortals on Atay, was sitting in a recliner, sipping hard liquor and eating popcorn. The recliner itself was situated in the middle of the pagoda where he had been training Gabriel over the last week. He watched said student through a portal floating in front of him while laughing as his student curb-stomped a grown man in under ten seconds.

"That's my boy, give 'em hell!" He let out a massive, wet belch. "Oh, felt that one."

From behind him, a concerned voice called out, "Bazel, have you seen- Is that Gabriel?!"

Jacob, head butler of Light's Aegis and one of Bazelphios's only living friends, rapidly approached the recliner, staring at the viewing portal. "Where is he? How are you maintaining this spell? I thought-"

"Shh, shh. Calm down, Jakey. You're losing that whole 'composed butler' vibe. I found a way to limit the symptoms." Bazelphios made calming gestures.

"What?"

"Alcohol!" Bazelphios exclaimed, waving his gourd emphatically. 'The stronger, the better. You really make some good shit."

"That's lovely, but where. Is. Gabriel," Jacob grated out, his earlier confusion and concern rapidly swinging toward anger.

"It's fine; he's fine."

"Where?"

Bazelphios knew that tone. And he didn't want to lose alcohol privileges. "...The negative floors."

"The negative floors!? How!?"

"...He got kidnapped."

Jacob let out a weary sigh. "Bring him back."

“...Weeeell.”

“Bazel I swear to Grim-”

"Just hear me out!" Bazelphios pleaded, hands clasped.

"...Fine."

"I have been taking his training seriously; I'll have you know. He's not helpless anymore. Plus, he already got a quest and cleared it in a few hours."

"Really? What kind of quest?" Despite his own reluctance, Jacob felt himself becoming intrigued.

"The kind that gives him a Called skill and a Called skill advancement in one shot," Bazelphios said smugly.

"... You'll pull him the second it goes bad?"

"Yup. I actually like the kid, but he needs some practical experience. This'll be good for him in several ways."

"...Fine. He can stay, but not for too long. I don't want to see what happens if Balthazar looks into this."

"Ehh, I'll handle that windbag if it comes to it."

"No, you won't."

"I could try."

Jacob sighed. "Yes, I suppose you could."

{}

Through his Clairvoyance skill, Mahun watched as his son escaped his captors and into the maze that was the negative floors.

"He's doing better than expected. Perhaps I should alert my lord."