Back in the days when Real Men used Real Computers and did everything with command lines on text-based terminals instead of new-fangled GUIs, it would have been more obvious what’s really happening behind the scenes. 
Which is that the process of moving files from one directory to another on the same logical drive (including popping files up one directory level as per the OP’s request) is actually a “rename” function. No files are actually moved, all that happens is that file pointers get changed, so that files automagically appear in the desired new folder. The same way that a rename can change a file’s name, a rename can also change its pointers and hence its parent directory.
This becomes a bit more obfuscated when using a GUI, but Windows is smart enough to know that a cut-and-paste from one folder to another in the same partition is actually just a rename, which is why it’s virtually instantaneous no matter how big the file(s). So the way to pop files up into the higher-level directory is a cut-and-paste, either explicitly or via drag-and-drop if you prefer, and then delete the empty directory. I always do an explicit cut-and-paste just out of habit.