Foxtails and Fairytales: Facades and Fables of the Phantom Prince

[Arc 6] Ch. 10 Harem Protagonist(s)

Sebas

What am I saying! I couldn't take my eyes off of her as I nearly confessed my undying love but caught myself when I felt everyone's eyes on me.

"Forget it!" Abandon ship! "I'm out of here." I threw away Juile's hand and stormed away to have Sable stand in front of me.

"Hold up drama-king. You can't leave until the job is done." Sable stared me down with her empty and hollow cloudy eyes.

I slipped on both of my gloves. "Then get out of my way." I punched my fists and unleashed a wave of magic and released three dozen duplicates that finished the task in under five minutes as I walked past her. When I was done, I turned back to her and with a shrug and a nod from Sable I disappeared into the crowd.

*

After such a racket I use one of my escape techniques. I slip into a clothing store and into one of their changing rooms. Once inside I use one of my premade teleport scrolls. They are not a new magic just a rare one. They require lots of magic power to fuel. I don't have time to explain it, but I have a sliver of Etherite wedged inside the small rolled up scroll. When it breaks it releases a large amount of magical power which makes it a convenient instant power source for spell scrolls.

The scroll is about the sized of a ball point pen and is three sheets thick. I think of my destination and with a concentration of force I snap the sliver between two fingers and my thumb. The explosion of magic is sucked up by the first scroll and passed into the second with enough to teleport me away. In a blur, my world shifts around me as I pull a second teleporting scroll out.

Suddenly, I am in free falling over the ocean. Since teleports can be tracked it's a redundancy thing. They do take time to track in the best of circumstance so teleporting several times in inconvenient locations, such as the middle of the air, are good ways to cover my magical tracks. Before I can fall too far, I activate then second scroll with a crack and roll into a cave carved into the mountain north of Hearthroam.

My body is used to the feeling of the teleport. But I'm still shaking from making such a display in public. The feeling of so many eyes on me skipped past all the good memories of it and straight to the days where I was openly mocked like I was some kind of public freak show.

Some part of me knows that I've been running from the attention, running from the stares, running from every worst-case scenario my imagination could come up with over the years. But that doesn't change the trauma. Just being in public is hard enough sometimes, but I made a scene and said some embarrassing things. Which threw me into a frenzy mentally.

The cave became smaller and it became harder to breath. My heart thundered and the memories of the taunting freshly rang in my ears like it were happening right now.

Fell over from the vertigo of my tremoring emotions and somehow managed to scoot over to the wall. I took a few deep breaths and allow my five tails to manifest and wrapped them around me. The warmth of the tails quickly offset the chill of the mountain air. I reached into the air and activated a magic circle that opened my personal space storage magic. I didn't have to invent this magic even though I tried. There was a tome at Alexandria that held it and so I eagerly mastered it. It had a fair amount of storage space... which is stocked full of my emergency supplies.

The shortcoming of this convenient magic is that it's terribly limited without an anchoring item like a ring, bag, or crest. No unlimited storage cheat, figures.

I pulled out my lifeline. A worn miniaturized adventurer's journal the size of a pack of playing cards. On the front was the crest of the Reynis family. My adopted father and idol gave this to me, and I chanted the mantra that's gotten me through more hard times than I care to count.