"Shit, how did he survive?" Tisaina wondered as she paced outside her mentor's office.

Clearly, she had underestimated the human. She already thought she was taking him seriously when she had deliberately triggered a spacial explosion by manipulating the rift formations. She had even used some of her own, unique ability.

Normal assassination attempts probably wouldn't work on a mage who managed to get over the mountain range, so she had arranged for a blast strong enough to kill most people, even if they maintained constant defensive magic (which was already not common due to the required concentration and energy consumption).

He must've somehow noticed in advance and actively defended himself. The formations were well shielded and she had been precise with the inputs. What kind of senses did he even have?

Fortunately, she'd been subtle about getting Aria to take him into the tunnel. She hadn't voiced the proposal herself, but mentioned similar things in a conversation with one of Aria's friends, who'd then brought the idea up in Aria's group later. There was a significant risk that they wouldn't end up biting. She didn't lose much if they didn't. Fortunately, the best case scenario had occurred and the friend had convinced Aria's group while believing that they'd come up with the idea themselves.

All she'd had to do was confirm they were headed to the tunnel and then have an experiment go wrong. Nobody would be able to prove anything. Sure, the timing was suspicious, but nobody was supposed to go into the blast tunnels except during scheduled maintenance for this very reason.

By the letter of the law, the police were required to investigate, but they disliked humans as much as the rest of elven society. They wouldn't exactly be working their hardest to find the killer of a piece of shit human; they might even tacitly help her. Certainly, she was confident they wouldn't gather enough evidence to prove her guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

At most, she thought she'd be suspended for failing to log her intended lab usage. In her opinion, that was a small price to pay for getting away with murder.

The fact that there had been an elf in the tunnel who would also have gotten killed had completely slipped her mind.

Tisaina had only had a few hours to prepare so it had been somewhat sloppy. When she found out that a filthy human had blackmailed his way into studying with her precious master, she couldn't hold herself back.

Well, although it would be a bit risky, she had another way.

It was one of her special talents.

I typically wake up at 5am and spend the next hour running.

You could argue that it would be more productive to do other exercises on some days instead, but I make time to do those later in the day.

Running lightly helps me clear my head and solve problems I was stuck on.

If I'm bored, I increase the intensity until I taste blood. That is good as well.

On my homeworld, that was all I did, but here, I could also practice coordinating the movement of my body and the flow of mana within me as I ran.

I hadn't had the opportunity to run at all for the journey into the Elven Kingdom, as the way was full of traps and certain paths must be followed precisely. Carelessly running would have been too much of a risk.

There were safe routes for exercise within the kingdom itself, so that evening, after I left my meeting with the mage, I didn't use mana and ran until I felt like I would drop from exhaustion.

Back on my home planet, I was an engineer.

It wasn't for some stupid reason like "I wanted to chose an inconspicuous job to hide my 'true' ability."

(Although I did deliberately set out to live a life that most humans consider ideal, but that's a matter for another time, if at all.)

I deeply enjoy the process of creating systems based on understood principles.

If I'd had a different life, I think I would still have ended up as an engineer in the end.

This inclination is what made me so suited to magic. Spells themselves are a sort of engineering problem.

They are built of smaller units, like logic gates in computers. No human could track billions of repetitive structures, so for more advanced spells, we mages need to organize the structures into chunks that we can automatically replicate as templates. The process of replication is more organic, similar to cell division, but the design is tightly controlled.

It requires creativity, focus, and a deep understanding of the way energy flows and transforms.

I ran and thought of elven magic until I collapsed into bed and fell asleep almost instantly.

That night, I woke up from an unpleasant dream. My head was covered in tiny, translucent-white sacks of fat, like strange hybrids between liquid-filled vitamin pills and pregnant chigoe fleas. Each sack was the size of several grains of rice. When I tried to scratch them off, I dug holes deep into my skin. The holes were bloody in their depths, their surfaces covered in thick, gelatinous tape, and I found myself apologizing to Johan for making such a mess of my face. We sat on a sterile staircase and he tried to comb my hair. Every place he parted it revealed itself to be stiff with giant earwig-like invertebrates that tried to crawl away from the frozen light.

It is fortunate that I don't have any ill-feelings towards insects. I suspect it would have been significantly more unpleasant otherwise. Still, they filled me with a nameless sense of dread and I woke up to find myself in a place that was not where I fell asleep. After taking a moment to assess my surroundings, I created a light source. It was an empty room: white walls and no door.

I examined the space and found it to be of peculiar quality. More accurately, it had little quality whatsoever. It felt separated from the normal spacial continuity. A pocket dimension?

It seemed that I had been caught in some sort of trap.

It was one of admirable construction. The space was so thoroughly detached that I could not find where it was relative to anywhere I knew of. If I tried to teleport out without more information than what was then was available to me, the odds of ending up somewhere in a void were astronomically high.

Perhaps if I stretched my senses to the limit and waited for long enough, paid attention closely enough, there would eventually be some echo or hint that would allow me to extrapolate my location. In all likelihood, I would run out of mana and die long before then. Attempting to sense such faint fluctuations would consume additional energy.

I decided to save my strength instead. Whoever put me in here would likely eventually attempt to observe me, at the very least to gloat or check if I was dead. Such activities would yield more information, give me more to work with. Hopefully, it would let me find a more efficient way out.

Once I extinguished my light magic, I was plunged into absolute darkness. I lay down and began to knit my remaining mana into a stable structure that would reduce long-term leakage to a minimum. I would not be able to use magic readily, but I would be able to delay the onset of hunger and thirst.

It was a waiting game from here on out.

Movement cost energy; I kept it to a minimum. Not wanting to deal with pressure sores, I shifted my body at regular intervals. It also helped keep me sane. I'd occasionally make noise or pinch myself so that I would not forget my senses; the additional expenditure was worth it.

When I felt like it, I counted seconds. Other times, I simply let my thoughts wander into memories.

There was a girl with eyes as close to golden as I've ever seen. We were eating at her favourite restaurant. She cut away a piece of her meal and offered it to me, smiling. I took it and gave her some of mine.

I was walking through an art gallery, looking at the statues chiselled from marble. It was my brother's exhibit. Finally free, he had become an artist. The figures were beautifully muscled and draped in smooth marble cloth. It shouldn't have been possible to make stone look so soft. I still don't understand how his large, rough hands were able to carve such delicate details. I admired him for it.

Fields of hay stretched before me. I rode through them, feeling the sun on my skin. It was warm and the air was fresh. The horse was sleek and well-trained. I was still the property of the facility, but on that day, even our instructors seemed a bit more relaxed.

I called these and many other experiences up, in a sort of extended meditation. My primary goal was to retain sanity.

Finally, the moment I was waiting for arrived.

I felt something enter the room.

Safira manifested herself. It was time to check on the prisoner. Time flowed faster in the pocket dimension, so he should have been for several weeks without water or food. Even a competent mage would be starving and dehydrated by now, running low on mana.

He would be weaker now, more malleable.

Tisaina had originally wanted to kill him. She had planned to leave him there to starve.

However, Tisaina hadn't expected the police to actually send a serious task force to locate him after he went missing. Due to the nature of his disappearance from a heavily warded room, Tisaina was on the list of suspects. If this went on, she would be brought in for interrogation.

If she were found to have killed the human mage, it had been made clear that the consequences would be dire. Therefore, it no longer made sense to try to kill him.

So Tisaina had called on Safira.

The prisoner hadn't seen Tisaina's face and the dimensional magic didn't have a strong signature. Although it was a rare magic, theoretically there was no easily obtainable proof that she had done it.

Safira just had to get the prisoner to agree to not pursue the matter and to leave the elven kingdom. It shouldn't have been difficult given his situation. He would be desperate for any means of escape.

But when Safira finally laid eyes on him, she began to have second thoughts.

She didn't know it was possible for an elf to be so well-constructed, let alone a human.

Surely, this mage was worthy of serving her master. But first, he would need to be trained.

It would be easy to shatter his weak human will. By the time she was done, he'd be eager to clean her feet with his tongue.

He'd probably even enjoy it. Safira was a familiar who hadn't yet come into her full power, so she looked like a slender young girl with large eyes. To a man like him, she'd be both adorable and deliciously forbidden.

Safira licked her lips at the thought and loudly called him to wake up. He didn't respond. She realized that he was barely breathing and that his mana was far too weak.

This was a great opportunity for her to gain his trust.