The rest of Phoenia's reserves raid the tower and kill any left-breathing stragglers. Calina takes the immobilized mage to a small cellar under the castle along with Yanami and Iyuna.

—Clink Clink Clink

Faint metallic footsteps bounce off the walls of a spiraling stone staircase.

"P-Please… What do you want…." Calina's hostage situated on her shoulder eyes start to falter.

His left leg's gash starts to frost until it fully envelops the wound.

"Gaah…" He gives a relieved tone as the skin's blood starts to ice. The man looks toward Iyuna, who gives him a faint smile.

"We don't want you dying on us before you give us our answers."

They reach the end of the cellar and find a table with a lantern surrounded by three wooden seats. Calina hoists the mage off her shoulder and sits him in a seat facing towards her.

"I may be ruthless, but I'm no liar. I've only got four questions for you; If you answer them honestly, I'll let you live, hell, I'll even see if we can get that leg of yours healed."

The mage grasps his black robs with his head faced down.

Calina raises four fingers on her left hand before letting her index finger down. "What's your name and rank?"

"I'm a… Proud senior priest of the Vytorian Alliance, my name is Oppa."

"We're getting somewhere, Oppa. Thanks for the cooperation. Next, approximately how long does it take you to cast your spell?"

Iyuna's eyes shift toward Calina, then back toward the mage.

"When it comes to the water and stone spells… I suppose about seven to ten seconds?"

"Good, good. How many priests were with you today guarding the castle?"

"About… Six of us… You killed Hyum… The guy stationed next to me, and I'm sure that dragon-lady squashed the two others… I could hear the screams of the remaining two running from the castle walls covered in flames."

Calina encloses her pinky into her hand. "Last question… Have any beasts with black metallic bodies been attacking your country lately?"

Yanami's eyes widen with interest.

"Beasts with black bodies… N-No… We barely have anything like that around our borders, mostly just goblins, and small game monsters."

Calina bends down and touches the man's leg.

"Aula Freim."

The man's leg starts to heal back with rays of light, but in doing so, Calina's left arm starts to extrude blood from the inside of her armor. The man looked toward her in awe as he maneuvered his new leg to and fro.

"W-What type of sorcery is this?! That's amazing!"

Calina's eyes narrow as she looks towards the gate at the top of the stairs. "Yanami, could you please escort this man back to the outskirts of any nearby town?"

Yanami nodded her head while gesturing toward the mage. They walked up the spiral stairs until a clanking sound can be heard from the shutting door.

Iyuna looks away from the stairs and focuses on Calina.

"What was with those questions? Why didn't you just ask him the specifics, so we got clear answers?"

"You should know this better than anyone, Princess Iyuna, and that's that humans are satisfactory liars. Some are good, some are bad, but most lie in the middle when it comes to giving the truth. If you want to find what you're looking for, you're going to have to maneuver around the door to find a keyhole."

Iyuna crosses her hands while giving an impartial look. "Ok… So what did we learn?"

Calina sits down in the mage's seat and crosses one of her legs over the other.

"I needed to know what his alliance recognized him as. In Phoenia, we give our magic-wielders the titles of sorcerers, mages, and sages based on their magical prowess.

They probably have no clue about the other magic levels if they refer to him as a priest. If they were casting Level 2, it meant they skipped Level 1; to our knowledge, that's virtually improbable."

"I suppose you could be right, but we have no evidence that he was unaware of the other levels."

"Actually, we do. His roused expression when I healed his leg meant he'd never seen healing magic done anywhere else. I clenched his leg to feel his heartbeat to make sure that his reaction wasn't staged."

"Ok… What about the second question then?"

"The next question allowed me to figure out how much knowledge they had on spell casting. The correct answer for casting any Level-2 spell would be exactly four seconds.

It doesn't matter if your magic proficiency is high or low; Once you understand the basic elements, that's the set time—no more, no less.

Phoenia easily figured this out during its testing phase with magic, so this tells me that someone must've taught them manually, rather than them being born with magic proficiency like in Phoenia."

"B-But that's impossible. If that's the case, then the rule stating that a person's lineage grants them a greater magical priority is false?!"

"This is a game-changer since, according to our sources, a mage or sage is born with a specific amount of magic proficiency. Even if you train with a mage, it won't boost you very much. But this wasn't as interesting as my third question."

Iyuna looked towards the lamp, giving off a faint glow around the table. "Yes… Your third question was quite peculiar. Why would it matter how many mages they used? It was probably just the battle strategy they formed to protect this structure."

"Everyone in Euphoria knows the might of Phoenia on the battlefield. If they were serious about using mages as a countermeasure, they would've put them somewhere where they were hidden.

A mage can conjure a spell to any location and anyone as long as they have a sense of either one. All they have to do is imagine the person or space. The mages didn't need to be front and center like that.

This gives me the impression that they were testing their newfound abilities since their defense was so flawed. I mean, seriously, three people charge your front lines, and everyone stays behind closed gates? Sounds kind of bizarre when it comes to military tactics."

"That's also very strange — According to our ranks, we haven't uncovered anyone of high rank amongst the bodies. Meaning that they put a group of unskilled soldiers and mages in this shelter for some odd reason."

"I actually got the answer to that with my fourth question. The Vytorian Alliance covers a good bit of land around our borders. If they haven't seen any of the Evil King's beasts, that means that they're specifically targeting our land."

"I wouldn't understand why though…."

"And that's what made all of this fit together." Calina stands while walking towards the spiral staircase.

"I've come to believe that we have a new player in the game… Something or someone knows of our strengths and intends to do everything in their power to crush us. And to make things worse, I believe they're a lot closer than we think."