Mother of Learning

27. Cast Adrift

Zorian’s eyes abruptly shot open as a sharp pain erupted from his stomach. His whole body convulsed, buckling against the object that fell on him, and suddenly he was wide awake, not a trace of drowsiness in his mind.

"Good morning, brother!" an annoyingly cheerful voice sounded right on top of him. "Morning, morning, MORNING!"

Relief immediately flooded his mind, closely followed by despair. He did it – he kept his soul safe from the third time traveler and survived the encounter entirely unscathed. But his allies…

"Zorian? Are you alright?"

Zorian stared at his sister for several long seconds, a million thoughts racing through his mind. She looked uncomfortable with his blank stare and silence, but Zorian couldn’t really bring himself to care at the moment. His mind was still stuck on his desperate escape from Red Robe. On the fact that he almost got captured by a mass murdering psychotic necromancer with an untold amount of time looping experience. On the fact that said necromancer now knew there were other human time travelers running around and could be coming after him this very moment.

On the fact that the aranea were dead. Dead and never coming back.

He absent-mindedly pushed Kirielle off of him, put on his glasses and started pacing around the room.

Killing a soul was impossible. They could not be destroyed, only modified. Everyone said so – the teachers, all the books he had read discussing the topic, Kael the amateur necromancer… hell, even the goddamn lich had said so in one of his offhand comments back when Zorian was first brought into the time loop. How, then, did Red Robe manage to kill the souls of the aranea?

He supposed the simplest explanation would be that Red Robe simply found out something that normal mages hadn’t. He was a necromancer with a huge amount of time and an easy way to avoid the usual consequences of various grisly experiments. Perhaps he succeeded where other necromancers had failed. Zorian didn’t think this was likely – the lich seemed to be a better mage than anyone he had met thus far, Red Robe included, and he certainly considered a soul-killing spell impossible – but that just might all be wishful thinking on his part. He didn’t want the aranea to be gone for good. Dammit, he had grown to like the stupid spiders! Sure they’d had their disagreements, but he had really never wished them ill and he didn’t think they had wished him ill either. Novelty certainly hadn’t, and she couldn’t lie to save her life. If… if he was being perfectly honest with himself, he had practically thought of Novelty as a second little sister. But now she was gone, just like the rest of the aranea beneath Cyoria.

And the worst thing? He let it happen. He had spent the whole evening gathering the matriarch’s last message, oblivious and uncaring to what was really happening, while Red Robe was hunting down the aranea across the city. He had known he was dealing with another time traveler and he had never once considered that the man might have developed countermeasures against others of their kind. Gods, he felt so stupid now.

Although it was strange… First of all, if Red Robe could permanently get rid of anyone who bothered him with a spell like that, why hadn’t he used it more often? Surely the invasion would be a lot easier if he got rid of a couple of key stumbling blocks. Yet Zorian never heard of any notable people waking up dead at the start of each restart, and he had access to the extensive information network maintained by the aranea. There was an obvious answer to that, of course: there could be a significant cost associated with the spell which Red Robe was unwilling to pay. But the fact that he had gone out of the way to remove every single aranea in Cyoria made Zorian doubt that. If there was a serious cost associated with it, he would have made sure to investigate more thoroughly and soulkill only those he had to.

Secondly, the aranea weren’t actually time travelers, so the spell shouldn’t have worked! Zorian was quite sure that the time loop didn’t pull every soul back in time – if that was the case, every mage would feel the difference after a dozen or so restarts as their shaping skills miraculously increased overnight. Plus, there are normal necromantic killing spells that forcibly banish the soul from the body to kill people and Zorian had occasionally seen them in use during the invasion. If every person whose soul was banished from their body ended up dead at the start of the time loop, the number of inexplicable corpses showing up at the start of the time loop would have started to pile up quickly and everyone would have realized something was very wrong by the time Zorian was brought in. So all in all, clearly the souls of regular people who were not time travelers weren’t affected by anything that happened to them in previous time loops. The fact that Red Robe’s spell affected normal people in future time loops was strange, to say the least.

Zorian stopped pacing and frowned, idly noting that Kirielle had left the room at some point. He was getting the feeling that Red Robe was exploiting the very nature of the time loop to somehow get the desired effect. Zorian himself had no idea how the time loop really functioned, but presumably Red Robe did. Without that knowledge, he was probably never going to figure it out. Like always, he needed more information.

…except his main source of information – the aranea – had been utterly wiped out by the enemy, leaving him with nothing except a cryptic, incomplete dying message.

Damn it.

Over the next few hours, Zorian simply went through the motions, trying to hide the frustration, shame and panic he was feeling and to appear as normal as possible. He had failed to keep his inner turmoil strictly to himself, if mother’s worried questions were any indication, but in the end she accepted his explanation of being slightly shaken from a recent nightmare and stopped bothering him so he took that as a win.

And what a nightmare it was! Aside from losing the aranea, there was a non-negligible chance that Red Robe managed to figure out his identity and was going to assault the house at any moment now. True, he had managed to hide his face behind a scarf and had never spoken, but there were ways nonetheless…

He didn’t even think about trying to immediately leave the house in panic, though. The first and main reason for that was that if Red Robe had identified him and was coming to Cirin, then his family was in danger of being permanently killed, just like the aranea, and he wasn’t willing to let that happen. Kiri had grown on him over the course of the time loop and while he didn’t like his mother very much he wouldn’t let some psycho murder her. No, it was bad enough that the aranea had paid the ultimate price for his mistakes - he’d be damned if he’d leave his family to save his own hide.

The second reason was that, while it was certainly possible that his identity had been compromised, it was just that – a possibility, not a certainty. Yes, it would be easy to track him down by noting which students from Zach’s class were missing and then checking them out one by one, but it was entirely possible that Red Robe wouldn’t think of it. After all, as far as Red Robe was concerned, the mysterious human time traveler was associated with the aranea, not Zach. There was no reason to search for him among Zach’s classmates. And while Zach probably knew that Zorian was a time traveler by now, Zorian strongly suspected he would be out of Cyoria when Red Robe came knocking. If Zach had even a smidgen of common sense (not a certainty, admittedly), he would skip town first thing in the morning upon starting a new restart. Considering Red Robe thoroughly trounced Zach during the invasion by bringing the lich as his backup, and that Zach actually remembered it happening this time, Zorian felt that even Zach wouldn’t be crazy enough to stay where the clearly superior enemy could find him.

That was a lot of assumptions to rely on, but what else did he have left? He was backed into a corner. All he could do was wait and hope Red Robe wasn’t a master detective on top of being a scarily good necromancer and gods know what else.

In any case, his plan was quite simple at the moment - go board the train as normal, then promptly disembark upon leaving Cirin. He had no intention of going back to Cyoria in the near future. Red Robe was bound to pay attention to Cyoria for a while, trying to catch any time travelers the aranea may have brought in, so going there so soon would be just begging for trouble. Any minor misstep could blow his cover, and he didn’t trust himself to be able to lay low for multiple restarts at a time. No, best if he avoided the city for a while. He would have to return there at some point, of course, but he had to be a lot stronger and a lot better informed before he could show himself in the city again.

Aside from his determination to avoid Cyoria at all costs, his plans were virtually nonexistent. He was feeling rather lost at the moment. All emotional attachment aside, the aranea were also his best allies in this messed up event, and losing them effectively pulled the rug from under his feet. What the hell was he supposed to do now?

The conclusion he settled on was that he needed some time to calm down and come to terms with what happened. Think up a new way forward. He would probably end up just wandering around the country for a restart or two. Or maybe a dozen restarts. Yes, now that he thought about it some, the time loop was the perfect time for him to go on a country-wide, maybe even a continent-wide tour. Just… exploring and sight-seeing. Very relaxing. Admittedly, the matriarch’s last message mentioned something about the time loop gradually decaying, but she named no concrete deadlines in the fragments he had managed to piece together and he believed she would have put greater emphasis on that part if the timetable was particularly tight. No, that statement was there just to let him know he did not have an infinite amount of time to work with – he had some fairly large, but very much finite number to look forward to, and time was steadily ticking.

At least he hoped. He was quite doomed otherwise. Large but finite he could work with, but if he had only a handful of restarts left? It didn’t bear thinking about.

"Mister Kazinski?" Ilsa said, breaking him out of his thoughts. Just as well, his thoughts had taken a dark turn again, and he was tired of feeling depressed. "Are you listening to me?"

"I’m listening," Zorian lied. He wasn’t really listening, of course, but that was because he’d had this conversation with Ilsa a million times by now.

"Right," Ilsa said dubiously. "As I was saying, you can pick up your badge when you finish school since it’s so expensive and-"

"What if I want to pick it up now?" Zorian interrupted. His savings should be enough to fund a month of aimless wandering so he probably didn’t need the badge for work, but he didn’t like the idea of keeping his spellcasting abilities a secret lest some overzealous policeman report him to the guild and ultimately bring the academy in. Having a badge to prove his certification and membership would allow him to do as he pleased for the most part.

"You can pick one up at any of the mage guild offices scattered around Eldemar," Ilsa said. "Most large cities and regional centers have one."

Oh good. He had feared he could only pick one up at the Academy or something.

Eventually, Ilsa left, her parting words being that she looked forward to seeing him in class. Huh, that was new. Did she suspect he intended to blow off school to do his own thing? Well whatever, even if she did, it did not matter much – the academy always had a rather anemic response to students who didn’t show up for class. They would send a letter to his parents informing them that he wasn’t attending his classes, and that was it. And fortunately for Zorian, no one would be at home to read the mail by the time the letter arrived, since his parents were going to Koth to visit their precious Daimen.

Satisfied that his course had been set for the moment, he picked up his things and set off towards the train station.

As the train departed from Cirin and started its journey towards Cyoria, Zorian began to relax somewhat. Part of that was that train rides always made him kind of sleepy and therefore sapped the tension straight out of his body and mind, but a great deal of it came from the fact that Red Robe was nowhere to be seen. Hours had passed – enough time to prepare and mount an attack on the Kazinski household several times over for someone of Red Robe’s abilities – and no hostile force had struck against him or his family, so chances were that Red Robe wasn’t coming at all. That meant his identity was probably safe for now, which was a major relief. If he hadn’t discovered Zorian’s identity in the previous restart, he probably wouldn’t discover it at all – a month was ample time to track him down if Red Robe knew where to look. He wouldn’t really relax fully until several restarts passed as peacefully as this one, but this was an encouraging sign.

He just had to make sure he didn’t make any more stupid mistakes in the future.

The train stopped for a moment and then continued onward towards Cyoria. Zorian opted to stay on the train for now, despite his initial intention of getting off the train on the very first station after Cirin. The first stop after Cirin was an even smaller village that gravitated towards Cirin and had nothing notable to recommend it to anyone. Him disembarking there would be noted and remarked upon by the inhabitants and there was a chance that someone might recognize him and report him to his family before they could leave for Koth. And that was the kind of drama he really didn’t need at the moment. And besides, what the hell would he do in a tiny unfamiliar village like that? No, it was far better to wait until Nigelvar and then travel on foot to Teshingrad. Nigelvar was also a small town of little note, but it was an important enough transport junction that no one would find a traveler who disembarked there on the way particularly strange. Teshingrad was a regional capital. It couldn’t hold a candle to Eldemar, Korsa or Cyoria, but it was big and influential enough that newcomers were normal.

Teshingrad also had a mage guild office, so he could pick up his badge there.

He disembarked at Nigelvar without complications and immediately set out towards Teshingrad. Unfortunately for him, the storm that invariably hit Cyoria on the first day of every restart was apparently a more wide-scale phenomenon than he first thought, because he found himself in the middle of a raging rainstorm halfway there. His rain shield thankfully held out long enough for him to reach one of the roadside inns and take shelter there. He ended up spending the night there, slightly annoyed at the delay despite not having any concrete plans for the restart. It did not help that the food was terrible and the people kept giving him funny looks. It was probably his clothes – the ones his mother made him wear were clearly a bit fancy and out of the price range of most commoners, and he didn’t have the chance to change before entering the inn. He made sure to put a basic warding scheme on his room to deter would be thieves and attackers, but thankfully no one tried anything while he slept.

Having survived the night at the inn without incident, Zorian departed the place early in the morning and reached Teshingrad a few hours later… only to get unpleasantly surprised when he tried to pick up his badge. As it turned out, Ilsa had not been exaggerating when she said the badge was expensive. It would cost him half of his savings to have one of those made! It was a highway robbery in Zorian’s opinion, but the man he spoke with in the mage guild office wouldn’t hear anything about lowering the price. Instead he pointed Zorian at a nearby wall where a job panel stood. It was similar to the job panel posted at the academy in Cyoria, only the jobs were much more reasonably priced, since the town did not have the same glut of amateur mages that Cyoria did. It would take two days for Zorian’s badge to be ready for pickup, so he figured he may as well earn some money while he waited to replenish his money stash. It wasn’t like he had something better to do.

The job list was… rather more eclectic than he hoped. He was sure that 2 chickens and a bag of flour was a fair price for fixing up a broken wall, but it was of no use to him personally. And the couple of job postings that did not define any concrete payment sounded very suspicious to him. Even so, he still found plenty of things to occupy his time with. Thus, for the next three days, Zorian helped with a bunch of repairs, tracked down a missing goat, carried a stack of stone blocks from one end of the town to the other on one of his floating discs, helped the local alchemist harvest her herbs, and eradicated a particularly nasty rat infestation in one of the private granaries on the edge of town. None of it was particularly difficult, but Zorian would be lying if he said he didn’t learn anything in the process. It was a lot different knowing a spell academically and trying to use it to solve concrete problems.

"Well, there you go," the man behind the counter said, handing Zorian his badge. It was quite unexceptional in appearance, though Zorian could feel a complex spell formula embedded in it when his fingers touched the surface. He would have to take one of these things apart someday to see what that was about. "You can apply to any job you want with that, not just unofficial ones like the ones on the job board. Nice work, by the way. It’s been a while since someone went through the town and helped out the townsfolk like that."

"I didn’t really do it out of charity," Zorian grumbled.

"Oh, I know," the man said. "But there are a lot of mages who would consider such petty jobs to be beneath them and refuse to do them out of principle."

"A lot of them look like something the civilians could do on their own," Zorian admitted. "And no offense, but why don’t you help if it’s something that so desperately needs doing? I kind of doubt the guild would place a non-mage as their representative for the area."

"Ha!" the man laughed, not at all insulted by the accusation. "I do in fact help… when I find the time. This position is a lot busier than it appears, trust me on that. And while those jobs are admittedly not very desperate, most of them would take great efforts and a lot of time to accomplish without magic, whereas even a baby mage like yourself can solve them in less than an hour with a handful of spells. So yeah, maybe you didn’t save the world in the past few days or whatever, but the people you helped are certainly glad you made their lives a little easier. The townsfolk saved some time, you got some easy cash to spend, and I got rid of some of my more annoying obligations. Everyone’s a winner, no?"

"Hmm," said Zorian noncommittally.

"So… do you have a specific job already waiting for you or are you in search of one?" the man asked.

"Nothing specific," Zorian said. "I was going to wander around for a while and see what catches my eye."

"Ah, I see. Well, I can recommend a few neighboring sites if you’re interested in checking them out."

"Sure," shrugged Zorian. "It can’t hurt to check things out, I guess."

"Alternatively, if you’re looking for a better paying version of the sort of one-off jobs you’ve been doing for the past few days, I recommend you go north, towards the Sarokian Highlands. Always plenty of work at the frontier, whether it’s in infrastructure building or hunting monsters and whatnot. Much more dangerous than hunting overgrown rats, of course, but also a lot more profitable."

"An interesting idea," Zorian said. The only problem was that Cyoria was the main springboard for the expansion efforts into the Highlands. From what Zorian could figure out from the maps, it was very hard to bypass Cyoria when going that far north, and he didn’t want to be anywhere near the city for the foreseeable future. "You know, I can’t help but notice that the mage guild is pushing the settlement of the Sarokian Highlands pretty aggressively. What’s up with that?"

"Ah, well, it’s the whole thing with the Splintering, you see? Successor States are always looking to one-up each other and searching for advantages that could let them overcome their enemies. Eldemar has a nice big access to untamed wilderness to the north, so it would be a bit silly not to take advantage of it. It’s a place rich in natural resources, I hear, both magical and mundane."

Zorian spent an hour with the man, discussing the region and his options. He didn’t really want to settle down in any place in this particular restart, but he supposed he might want to try out some of the options presented by the man in the future, and in that case it might be convenient to have visited the location already and thus be capable of teleporting there directly.

So for the next two weeks, Zorian walked around the region, visiting various workshops, libraries, alchemists, herbalists and so on. Or just plain sight-seeing and doing odd jobs for the villagers and townsfolk he encountered along the way. He did not stop his magical training, but in the absence of any sort of clear goal or a convenient repository of spells like the academy library had been, he defaulted to the most basic of advancement methods – shaping exercises. It helped that most of the rural mages he met on his journey had some private shaping exercise they were willing to show him… and unlike Xvim, who simply told him the end result he wanted and refused to elaborate, they actually had detailed instructions about what to do and in what order.

By the end of the time loop, Zorian had learned how to peel the surface of a marble away, layer by layer; how to do the same to an apple and other fruit; how to cut paper by dragging his finger along the cutting line; how to induce a gentle ripple in a pool of water without touching it; how to levitate a blob of water and shape it into a perfect sphere; then freeze that sphere; and finally, how to telekinetically draw geometric shapes in the dust. None of those were really mastered in the Xvim sense of the word, but luckily Xvim wasn’t anywhere near him this time so he could simply move on to the next exercise when he felt he had absorbed it to his liking. Shaping exercises were a lot less annoying when he didn’t have to keep doing them until they could be done flawlessly, he found.

He also continued practicing his mind powers. They were extremely important, he felt – if it weren’t for them, he would have never survived his altercation with Red Robe intact. At some point he planned to seek out other aranean colonies and execute his exploit the time loop to slowly leech aranean magic from them plan, but right now he couldn’t do it. It was too soon, his memories of aranea and their demise (and the role his obliviousness and carelessness played in it) too fresh in his mind. So instead he simply used his empathy on every person he spoke to and practiced connecting to the minds of various animals. He particularly liked walking near streams and ponds and taking control of the dragonflies flitting about in order to make them perform dizzying acrobatics around him. Insects had such rudimentary minds that taking total control over them was exceedingly easy, though figuring out how to puppeteer them effectively took some doing and he still couldn’t keep control over more than 3 dragonflies at the same time.

Time passed. For the most part he managed to keep himself busy enough that he didn’t have enough time to be depressed, but all his worries and feelings of powerlessness returned in full force every evening as he prepared himself for sleep. Every plan he tried to make seemed hollow, doomed to failure. He wasn’t powerful enough. He didn’t know enough. Red Robe had years and years of experience over him, and that was never going to change.

As the end of the restart approached, his mood only turned darker. He had avoided another confrontation in this restart, but what about the next? Would he wake up next time to eerie silence, only to find out that Red Robe got to his family after he had left and left them lifeless, soulless husks for him to find?

On the last night of the restart, Zorian didn’t sleep at all, simply watching the night sky from a small, isolated hill he had found in his travels, idly using his mind powers to deflect mosquitos away from him as he stood consumed in his own thoughts.

Zorian’s eyes abruptly shot open as a sharp pain erupted from his stomach. His whole body convulsed, buckling against the object that fell on him, and suddenly he was wide awake, not a trace of drowsiness in his mind.

"Good mor- Hey!" Kirielle yelped as Zorian enveloped her into a strong hug. "What the hell, Zorian!? Let me go, you brute!"

"Still the same Kirielle as ever," Zorian sighed dramatically, a weak smile on his face. "Now get off of me before I hug you some more."

His family was alright and, just like in the previous restart, Red Robe was nowhere to be seen. Thus, a much happier Zorian once again boarded the train and disembarked at Nigelvar. He didn’t bother picking up his badge this time, though – it really was very expensive, and no one had actually asked to see it anyway. Instead he simply teleported himself to the last place he’d been at in the previous restart and continued his wanderings.

Being a mage out there in the periphery was a lot different than being a mage in Cyoria, Zorian mused. Without the massive quantities of ambient mana gushing out of the Hole, conserving mana was actually a noticeable issue – even shaping exercises tended to deplete his reserves after a couple of hours, whereas back in Cyoria his main limitation had been his patience and existing obligations eating into his free time. That was another reason why Zorian focused on shaping exercises in preference to any actual spellcasting while traveling.

He was also starting to miss the academy library. He had thought its reputation was way overblown for a while now, but now that he could no longer hit its vast shelves every time he ran into some issue he realized just how damn convenient it really was. It had a lot of holes where really exotic topics were concerned, but its selection of basic spells and books on common topics was second to none. Out here in the periphery, finding a spellbook that had the exact spell you needed was damn hard. They existed, but they had only the most basic of things and if you wanted anything exotic you were directed to some other settlement or private collection or what not.

He also found out that magic detection spells were a lot more useful than he had first realized. Outside of Cyoria, magical items and creatures actually stood out when exposed to such scrutiny. Back in Cyoria, most general magic detection spells just returned false positives all the time – you had to narrow your divination criteria down to something specific to get results.

All in all, he was starting to understand why mages tended to flock towards Cyoria and other cities situated on top of mana wells. Those kinds of places provided a whole lot of resources that were hard to acquire elsewhere in one convenient location.

But Zorian’s journey continued. He was determined to visit every large city in the country, if nothing else then so he could teleport to any of them as he pleased, and he was seriously considering a journey around the continent as well. The only thing stopping him was that international travel was bound to be a hassle, and he was doing all this traveling to relax, not argue with border officials about authorization.

When another restart passed and Red Robe still failed to show up, Zorian finally allowed himself to more fully relax. It had been three restarts, and Red Robe still hadn’t tracked Zorian down – he was pretty sure that meant he never would, then. Not a master detective then, that was good to know. Buoyed by the knowledge that he dodged the bullet this time, Zorian seriously considered what to do next.

He needed to contact Zach, but it wasn’t a priority. Zach likely didn’t have any crucial information that would help Zorian figure out how the time loop functioned, and Zorian didn’t know how to find the other time traveler anyway. They were bound to meet again at some point, and Zorian wasn’t going to play dumb again when they finally encountered one another, but he saw no need to waste his time on looking for a boy who probably didn’t want to be found right now. It wasn’t like he didn’t have anything to do in the meantime. He absolutely needed to master a number of skills before he considered going back to Cyoria and looking for Zach: he needed to find out more about soul magic, he needed to hone his mind magic into a proper tool and weapon like the aranea had done, and he needed to raise his combat skills to a level where he could meaningfully counter Red Robe in open combat.

The first priority was pretty obvious: he needed to know how to at least counter soul magic if he wasn’t going to get blindsided again when dealing with Red Robe. Preferably he also wanted to figure out what Red Robe really did to the aranea and – if possible – reverse it. He still had Kael’s list of people who could help him in that regard, and all of them were conveniently outside of Cyoria.

The second was just as crucial. Whatever knowledge about the time loop the matriarch gained behind his back, she almost certainly did it by ripping it out of someone’s mind. Someone who wasn’t Red Robe - probably a handful of normal people not aware of the time loop but still holding a small part of the puzzle. If he could identify these key people and read their minds he could find out what the big secret was. In other words, he needed to develop his mind magic, ethics be damned. He didn’t think he could do this on his own, so he would have to seek out other aranea webs for this.

Lastly, he was embarrassingly powerless against Red Robe in their last encounter, and if the other mage hadn’t made some big mistakes when handling him he would have lost utterly. He needed better traps and ambush tactics, better combat skills in order to not be utterly doomed when said ambushes fail, and better movement magic to retreat and escape when said combat skills prove insufficient. As far as he could tell, the only effective way to improve here was simple practice – in other words, going around and looking for trouble. The only problem with this was that this went against pretty much every instinct he had.

It would have to be done, though. He figured that delving into the Dungeon and taking a few restarts to visit the untamed wilderness to the north should do for a start, and he would figure out later where to go from there.

In line with those goals, he decided that his third post-aranea restart was going to be a bit more systematic than his previous wanderings. After marking down the locations of Kael’s associates on a map, he chose a medium-sized town called Knyazov Dveri as his next destination. The town was close to the northern wilderness and had a notable dungeon access, so there should be plenty of opportunities to practice his combat skills; it was situated on top of a Rank 2 mana well, which was fairly anemic as far as mana wells went but was nonetheless better than nothing; and finally, it was roughly in the center of a diffuse cloud of Kael’s associates scattered throughout the region, so he would have easy access to the rest of them should the one in the city prove to be a dead end. It was, as far as Zorian could tell, an ideal place to start at.

The next day he teleported to the nearest town he could reach with his teleport spell and set off towards his target.

28. Cauldron

Life takes you to all sorts of unexpected places, Zorian mused, once again taking the knife to the winter wolf’s corpse. If someone had told me, back in my first year at the academy, that I would need to know what the best way to skin a winter wolf was, I would not have believed them.

Then again, he technically didn’t need to skin the animal – he just felt it would be a horrid waste not to, since winter wolf pelts fetched a pretty high price back in Knyazov Dveri. If he was going to venture into the wilderness, looking for monsters and dangerous animals to fight, he might as well earn some money doing it.

Finally, the bloody work was done. He was sure a real hunter could have done it in a quarter of the time and hassle, but he didn’t care – a success was a success. He placed the pelt in his bag and went off in the direction of the stream he had encountered earlier, intent on washing the blood and grime off his hands and clothes. At some point he intended to use spells to do these sorts of things, but since harvesting spells were based on animation they were sort of useless to him right now. Animation spells worked by embedding a portion of the caster’s mind into the spell, so until Zorian knew how to properly skin an animal the old-fashioned way, he couldn’t hand it off to an animation spell.

As he walked towards the stream, he kept an eye out for the reason he was in this particular section of the forest in the first place – a small cottage of an old witch called Silverlake, who was one of the possible sources Kael had named in his list. So far, Kael’s prediction that he wouldn’t be able to find the place on his own and that he would have to loiter around the area until she approached him herself had been entirely correct – no divination could track the cottage down, and he hadn’t stumbled onto it by simply wandering around the place. If he didn’t have Kael’s assurance that someone lived here he would have given up long ago. The only reason he even managed to pin point the area as well as he had was because the old witch had a habit of harvesting all of the alchemically-useful plants and mushrooms in the area and Kael warned him to be on the lookout for suspiciously picked-clean areas like this one.

With a sigh, he plunged his hands into the stream. The recent rains had caused it to swell into a small muddy river, but the water was good enough for washing his hands in and cooling off. That done, he crouched next to the water and idly studied his reflection. He looked like a mess. He felt like a mess too. While he wasn’t entirely out of shape, and this wasn’t the first time he ventured into a forest, there was a difference between taking a two-hour stroll through the semi-tame forest near his town and spending most of the week in the great northern wilderness, hunting winter wolves and dodging snakes and other dangerous wildlife. Thank the gods he had the foresight to put that anti-vermin ward on himself or else he would have been covered in ticks and leeches by the end of day one… and that was assuming the mosquitos hadn’t driven him mad before that.

And the worst thing about it all? He would never get used to it, because any muscle growth and body adaptation would be wiped out when this restart ended. He made a note to himself to look into the possibility of getting enhancement potions or rituals to improve strength and stamina, because spending the first week of every restart with every inch of his body tense and hurting wasn’t a fun prospect at all. Or at least a potion to ease the- wait, was the bottom of the stream moving?

He managed to throw himself back just in time to avoid the huge brown shape that jumped out of the muddy water and tried to envelop his head with its massive jaws. He quickly backpedaled as the huge lizard-like creature tried to haul itself onto the shore and sent a small missile swarm consisting of three piercers straight at its head. Thankfully, the lizard thing was actually pretty slow, its surprise attack notwithstanding, so all three missiles found their mark. The creature’s skull promptly exploded from the impact, showering bits of tissue everywhere, and it immediately slumped dead where it stood, its lower half still submerged in the stream.

Zorian immediately turned on his mind sense and scanned the creek for the possible presence of more such monsters and then, having discovered none, slowly approached the corpse to inspect it.

It was a salamander. A huge brown salamander with a massive triangular head and beady black eyes that probably couldn’t actually see anything. It was a miracle that something that big could actually hide in a stream this shallow, but the muddy water provided it with just what it needed to surprise him. Damn, that would have been humiliating – killed less than a week in by a giant salamander. Then again, he nearly fell into a ravine on his first day here, and there was that assassin vine that tried to choke him yesterday…

"Is there anything here in this forest that isn’t going to try and kill me the moment I take my eyes off of it?" Zorian asked out loud.

He didn’t expect anyone to answer, since he was alone and all, but he did receive an answer. Sort of.

"What do you think you’re doing, feeling all sorry for yourself?" a harsh female voice answered him.

There was no one present as far as Zorian could see, and his mind sense detected only animals, but he still managed to detect fairly quickly where the voice was coming from – the source of the speech was the raven perched on a nearby branch.

"Well don’t just stand there and stare at my familiar, boy," the voice said, cutting in through the silence. "Quickly, haul it out of the creek before the stream washes it away! Do you have any idea how valuable giant salamanders of that size are? This is the find of a century!"

Zorian was tempted to point out that this find of a century nearly killed him, but decided not to. If this was who he suspected, he needed to stay on her good side. According to Kael, asking the old witch for help was a bit of a long shot, but likely to achieve very good results if he could convince her to seriously try and help him. Silverlake was very powerful and skilled, but also very annoying to deal with. She wouldn’t kill him or do anything overtly hostile to him without provocation, but she was capricious and prone to wasting people’s time. Zorian figured it was at least worth a try to approach her for help.

"You would be Miss Silverlake, I presume?" guessed Zorian.

The raven answered him with a burst of laughter. It was really strange to see a bird laugh like that.

"'Miss, am I? Well aren’t you a polite one… don’t get too many of those, these days. Why, maybe I’ll even listen to whatever silly request you came here for!" the bird finally said. "Now why are you just standing around? Didn’t I give you a task to accomplish?"

With a sigh, Zorian turned away from the bird and started casting a levitation spell to haul the giant amphibian out of the water.

Silverlake (no last name, and he shouldn’t ask about how she ended up without one – Kael was very firm on that part) was not like Zorian had expected her. She was old, yes, but for a woman of 90 years she was incredibly lively and spry. In fact, Zorian had a feeling she had an easier time moving through the forest than he did. She wasn’t particularly unkempt, either, despite living in the middle of the wilderness – her pitch-black hair was devoid of a single white strand (she probably dyed it regularly), and the simple brown dress she was wearing was unremarkable but immaculate. If it weren’t for the wrinkles, he would have pegged her as less than half her age. Was this a consequence of some sort of potion regimen or was she just lucky that way?

Well, no matter. Zorian followed her back to her cottage, the giant salamander floating behind him on a disc of force, where she promptly started to butcher the beast with practiced ease. Her hands didn’t tremble at all as she handled the various knives and heavy jars at her place, and Zorian became even more certain she put herself through some kind of enhancement regimen to ward off the effect of aging.

She was a potion master according to Kael, and alchemy had always been one of the best ways to prolong your life and keep yourself healthy.

"Don’t think I didn’t notice you faffing around the area for the past few days," she suddenly said, never taking her eyes off the salamander corpse. "Rather annoying, that. Also worrying. Means that someone told you where to find me. I don’t suppose you could shed some light on that, could you?"

"Kael told me where to find you," Zorian readily admitted. It wasn’t a secret, really.

"Kael?" she asked, before frowning. "No, wait, don’t tell me. I’m sure I heard that name som- oh! Now I remember – he’s the little rascal that knocked up Fria’s granddaughter! But I heard he ended up marrying her afterwards, so I guess that’s not so bad. Actually, I recall that Fria had been quite happy about that. She had been afraid the girl would never find herself a husband."

"Why?" asked Zorian curiously. Silverlake shot him a judging look, her brown eyes boring into his own, before returning to her work. "I mean, if it isn’t impertinent to ask. You don’t have to-"

"Relax, boy," Silverlake snorted derisively. "I am a lot of things, but I was never very tactful. If I’m bothered by something you say, I will tell you. If you ask something impertinent, I will tell you to go screw yourself. I’m just thinking. Let’s see… as you probably suspect by now, Fria, Kael’s mother-in-law, is a witch like me. There are some nasty rumors circulating about witches and their daughters – about how they sacrifice male children, have orgies with summoned demons, poison their husbands for inheritance, how they’re too lazy to work around the house and other ridiculous bilge. It makes a lot of men reluctant to marry the daughter of a witch."

"I see," said Zorian. He had never heard about that particular issue, but it sounded plausible enough – witches had a really bad reputation for dabbling in various unethical and forbidden magics.

"It’s been years since I last seen Kael and his wife," Silverlake said. "Or Fria, for that matter. I guess I should have been a little less harsh the last time they visited, but… well, what’s done is done. It’s strange the morlock saw fit to send you here when he himself dares not show his face to me."

Zorian frowned. "I… think you’re misinterpreting the situation somewhat. I don’t know what happened between you and them, but the reason they haven’t visited you is because they’re dead. Fria and Kael’s wife both contracted the Weeping and died. As for Kael, he had been too busy grieving and taking care of his daughter to go on a trip like this. You are rather isolated."

For the first time since he met her, Silverlake seemed taken aback by his answer.

"Dead? Fria is… and all this time I thought…" she mumbled, before halting and giving him a considering look. "Wait. You said Kael and his daughter. I see… hmm…"

Silverlake spent the next few minutes considering something. Zorian took the time to observe and study the cottage next to them. It looked rather flimsy and old, but it shone like a lighthouse to his senses when he discreetly cast a magic detection spell on it. How the hell hadn’t he noticed the thing earlier when he was searching for it? Those must be some powerful divination wards she placed on it. He couldn’t figure out how she was powering them, though – wards that strong needed a powerful source of magic, and this place wasn’t a mana well. There was no way Silverlake could be powerful enough to provide enough mana for the entire edifice, could she? Kael did mention that she was extremely strong and skilled in magic of both Ikosian and witch origin, and that he should never underestimate her, but this was still beyond what he was expecting.

Aside from the impossibly complex and powerful warding scheme, though, the cottage looked unremarkable. There were several racks next to it where various herbs and mushrooms were drying in the sun, but it wasn’t unknown for hunters and lumberjacks to have a side business of gathering herbs to sell in the nearby city so hardly something that would raise warning flags all by itself.

Silverlake snapped her fingers in front of his face, spraying droplets of salamander blood and other bodily fluids all over his glasses and breaking him out of his inspection. Despite his resolve to be polite to her, Zorian couldn’t help but glare at her in response. She just grinned at him, showing him two rows of gleaming white teeth. Apparently in all of her 90 years of life she hadn’t lost a single tooth.

Yes, definitely magic.

"If you’re done gawking at my home, we can continue our discussion," she said. "I have a request for you. You have a way to get in contact with Kael, yes?"

"Of course," said Zorian. "We’re friends, he and I." Or they would be, once he returned to Cyoria in one of the future restarts.

"Then I would like you to deliver a message to him," she said. "It’s nothing urgent, but I want him to know… that I regret how our last meeting ended and that I would very much like it if he came to visit me with his daughter sometime in the future. Oh, and that I want to teach his daughter the secrets of my magic. She is a descendant of a proud line of witches stretching back to time immemorial, and it is her birthright to continue it… should she want to. Got all that?"

"Sounds simple enough to remember," Zorian said. "And… could I now trouble you with the reason I came here for?"

"No," she snorted. "What, you think that just because you know a couple of people close to me and agreed to help me with a simple request like this that I’ll jump into whatever crazy problem you need help with?"

"You don’t even know why I’m here," Zorian pointed out.

"Nobody ever comes to me for help with the little things," she said with a grin. "If Kael sent you to me, that means he’s truly stumped for a solution."

"I… suppose I can’t argue with that," Zorian admitted. "You see, I-"

"I don’t want to hear it," Silverlake said, pointing her bloody palm towards him to shut him up. "Until you make it worth my time, I don’t want to listen to your sob story. If you want my help, you’re going to have to earn it."

"How do I even know you can help me at all, then?" asked Zorian. "I could end up paying you for nothing in the end."

"You could," Silverlake grinned. "You will have to risk it."

Damn witch. She was probably just wasting his time, but…

"Fine," he sighed. "What do you want from me?"

If anything, her grin just got wider.

Space blurred around Zorian, and then he was back in Knyazov Dveri, in one of the less traversed streets where he was fairly sure no one would see him teleporting in and out. It wouldn’t be a huge problem if it got out that he could teleport, but at the same time it would be notable and would attract attention to him. Few mages would be willing to teach the spell to a 15-year-old, and even fewer 15 year olds would be capable of learning it. It would be best if he were discreet about it for now.

Seeing how his arrival appeared to have gone unnoticed, he promptly exited the street and went towards the town square to grab something to eat, only to get distracted by the newspaper boy’s shouting.

"Shocking news!" the boy yelled. "A Cyoria mercenary company found dead to a man in their homes! Monsters stalk the streets of the city! Coincidence or conspiracy, read all about it in today’s edition! Shocking news, shocking news!"

Well… that sounded interesting. Zorian wordlessly shifted his course towards the boy and bought the newspaper in question. He then found a quiet corner to lean on and started to read.

Like he suspected, the mercenary company that was found dead was the one he and the aranea hired to participate in the ambush – there was a picture of the man who led the group next to the article and Zorian would recognize the man anywhere thanks to the distinctive scar he had above his right eye. Apparently they were all found dead at the start of the restart, with little clue as to who killed them and why. Naturally, that immediately produced a lot of interest from anyone, since it clearly wasn’t natural. The obvious conclusion – that someone managed to off an entire group of experienced battlemages in the span of a single night, not all of which were asleep at the time of death and some of whom were under heavy wards – was highly disturbing, but there were very few alternatives.

Another complication was that immediately after that discovery, there had been a stream of incidents involving various monsters moving out of the Dungeon and into the sewers… and sometimes then even emerging into the streets of the city. The experts were baffled as to why this was happening now, and the city leadership was hastily organizing an operation to descend into the Dungeon in order to bring the situation under control before the summer festival.

Well, that certainly put a damper on the invader’s plans. Zorian wondered how they would deal with that. In retrospect, it wasn’t hard to explain why monsters were invading the sewers and the streets of the city – the invaders were putting pressure on them from below, so they went upwards as a response. In the past restarts, the aranea were there to act as an unwilling anvil to the invaders' hammer, preventing the inhabitants of the Dungeon from breaking into the upper levels. But the aranea were dead now, and with them gone a whole layer of Cyoria’s defense that most people hadn’t even known about had collapsed.

Zorian couldn’t suppress a nasty grin at the thought that maybe Red Robe ended up shooting himself in the foot when he enacted his soul killing tantrum.

Interestingly, the mysterious murders and the monster attacks seemed to have had an effect on the academy too. There was a short sub-article next to the main one about the families who withdrew their children from schools in Cyoria, including his own academy. Jade, one of his classmates, had been pulled by her parents from the academy. She was listed among the names of notable students who opted to leave the city for their own safety – her father was a high-ranking member of House Witelsin – while the other notable names included… him?

Yes, there was no mistaking it – Zorian Kazinski, younger brother of Daimen Kazinski, was listed in the article as one of the students pulled from school by his parents. He wondered what that was based on – he was certain no one had managed to contact his parents before they left for Koth, so either the academy or the newspaper had decided to interpret his absence in light of current events and trends.

Zorian shook his head and closed the newspaper before continuing on his way.

After spending a week in Knyazov Dveri, Zorian had decided he kind of liked the town. It was a busy, lively pace where the arrival of a newly-minted mage like him was unremarkable and raised no eyebrows, yet not so large and prosperous that people like him were common and underappreciated. Thanks to the town’s position as a regional center and the presence of both a notable mana well and a dungeon access attractive to dungeon delvers, the town was full of shops catering to mages or requiring mage employees, and thus offered plenty of employment opportunities for a young mage… enough so that people sometimes offered him employment without him even asking about it.

He didn’t accept any offers, since a regular job would eat up a lot of time and would just distract him from his real quest, but it was something to keep in mind if he ever got out of the time loop.

"Why hello there. Mind if I join you for a bit?"

Zorian peered up from the map of the surrounding region he was studying and took a good look at the man who interrupted him. He was middle-aged, had a prominent mustache and a pot belly, and had a wide smile plastered on his face. Despite the fact that Zorian took several seconds to study him in silence, the man’s smile never faltered. Judging by the clothes he was wearing, he seemed to be one of the more well-off residents – a small time merchant, perhaps, or one of the craftsman-mages that had stores in the town.

He was probably going to get another job offer, then.

"Sure," Zorian said, gesturing towards the empty chair on the other end of the table. "Help yourself."

He thought for a moment whether he should get rid of the map while he talked to the man, but then decided not to bother. There was nothing incriminating on it anyway – a couple of marked down locations that would mean nothing to the man without some kind of context and some equally unhelpful notes scribbled on the margins. Silverlake had given him a task of gathering rare magical plants all over the damn forest, but gave him only the vaguest clues about where they could be found, so he was reduced to deciphering her statements and consulting the local herbalists for more information. And the local herbalists weren’t terribly cooperative. He had a feeling this was only the start of her demands, so he was trying to finish it quickly.

"Don’t mind if I do, don’t mind if I do," the man said happily, plopping down onto the offered spot. "These old bones just aren’t what they once were, I’m afraid. Standing around does terrible things to my knees. I guess the years caught up to me, eh?"

The pot belly probably doesn’t help, Zorian thought inside his head, though outwardly he remained silent, waiting for the man to tell him what he wanted of him.

"I have to say, this looks like a nice place to relax in," the man said, idly looking at the sheet of paper that listed the prices of some of the meals and beverages. "A little pricy, but quiet and out of the way. Private. Anyway, you don’t mind if I order us a drink, do you?"

"I don’t drink alcohol," said Zorian with a shake of his head. And he didn’t trust any of the non-alcoholic beverages in a place like this, either – it wasn’t that upscale of an establishment, regardless of what the man said. "I’m going to have to decline."

"Now that’s just unfair," the man said. "Oh well, I guess I’ll have to drink alone then. Forgive the impoliteness but I’m rather parched and it just feels wrong, having a conversation in a tavern without a mug of beer to sip on occasionally."

A few minutes later, the man took a swig from his mug and got to the point.

"Ah, that hits the spot," he said. "With that out of the way, allow me to introduce myself: I am Gurey Cwili, of Cwili and Rofoltin Equipment. Though I’m sad to say old Rofoltin passed away two years ago, so I’m the only owner now. I kept the name as it is, though. Tradition."

Zorian resisted the urge to tell him to get on with it.

"Anyway, I see you’re a busy man so I’ll get straight to the point – I’ve heard you’ve been going out into the forest to gather alchemical ingredients and hunting winter wolves. And also that you’ve been selling magic items on the side, too."

"Yes, what of it?" asked Zorian. Nothing he did was in any way illegal. The winter wolves had sizeable bounties for every pelt brought to the nearest guild station for the express purpose of encouraging people to hunt them, as they tended to prey on the livestock, children, and lone travelers, and selling magic items and alchemical ingredients was hardly a crime. Some places had arcane restrictions about what could and could not be sold and by whom, but those were usually the consequence of regional monopolies granted to someone and Knyazov Dveri was under no one’s monopoly. He’d checked. "I’m a certified mage, if that’s what’s bothering you."

He even had a badge to prove it. It was pricy, but he interacted too often with mages in the town to risk getting caught doing business without a license. Especially since he had gotten an impression that a couple of shop owners resented the competition he represented and would love to report him to the guild if they could find an excuse.

"To put it bluntly, I want you to sell your alchemical ingredients and magic items to me instead of my competitors," the man said. "Don’t think this is some kind of threat or blackmail, though – I’m willing to pay you extra for the privilege."

Zorian blinked. He didn’t expect that.

An hour later, the man had hashed out some sort of agreement with Zorian. The extra money didn’t mean all that much to Zorian, but the man did have something he wanted – a fully-equipped alchemical workshop that he wasn’t using all the time. In exchange for the right to use said workshop from time to time and the right to consult the man’s private library for botanical books, Zorian agreed to offer all his products to the man before he did to anyone else. The man seemed pretty pleased with himself at having closed such a deal. Honestly, so was Zorian – the local library had a miserable selection of books on plants and herbs, but Gurey claimed his own private library was not nearly so limited. Having access to a proper alchemical workshop was also convenient, and not something he could easily get elsewhere, unless he was willing to teleport to Korsa every time he wanted to make something. And he really didn’t have that much mana to burn.

"How come there is such a demand for potions and magic items here, anyway?" asked Zorian. "This city seems a little too small for the amount of magic shops. I understand the workshops since they can always export their products elsewhere, but how do shops like yours achieve such volume on the local market?"

"Oh, that’s easy," Gurey said. "Travelers. Or more accurately, settlers and adventurers. You see, this city is one of the last stops for settlers going further north as part of the Great Northern Push, as the government likes to call it. As one of the last centers of real civilization on their journey, we get a lot of demand for critical supplies of all sorts."

"Great Northern Push?" asked Zorian.

"Not a regular reader of the newspapers, I take it? It’s the whole thing with colonizing the Sarokian Highlands that the government has been pushing so hard lately. You must have noticed the posters around advertising free land and tax exemptions and what not. It’s part of Eldemar’s current strategy for achieving supremacy over Sulamnon and Falkrinea. The idea is that by taming the northern wilderness the country will get a major population and resource boost. All countries that have a border with the wilderness do this to a greater or lesser degree, but Eldemar has really invested a lot into this endeavor. Not sure whether it will be really worth it in the end, but I sure don’t mind the traffic it gives me!"

Hmm, now that he thought about it, there were traces of that even back at the academy – it was nothing horribly blatant, but textbooks and class assignments often worked in mentions of the Sarokian Highlands far more than one would expect, considering their low population and current importance.

In any case, the man soon left and Zorian returned to staring at his map. Goddamn witch.

"I don’t suppose that now that I have brought you the plants you asked for-"

"Don’t be silly, boy," Silverlake said, snatching the bundle of plants from his hands. "You don’t really think a silly little fetch quest like this is all it takes to get my help? Think of this as an… elimination round. You were horribly slow, anyway."

"Slow…" Zorian repeated incredulously. "It took me only 3 days. The only reason I could get them all so quickly at all was that I could teleport from place to place. Not to mention the danger involved – you never even told me those redbell mushrooms of yours exploded into clouds of paralyzing dust if handled improperly."

"Well that’s just common knowledge," she said, waving her hand dismissively. "Everyone knows that. Here, grind these snail shells for me, please."

Zorian looked at the small leather bag full of colorful red-and-blue snail shells and frowned. He knew that species of snail. They were used in production of certain drugs, and were very much illegal to harvest. More important than that, their ground up shells were a powerful hallucinogen and inhaling even a handful of dust would leave him delirious and incapacitated. He threw the annoying old woman a brief glare before simply casting a dust shield spell on himself – the same one he used to protect himself against the paralyzing mushrooms – before grabbing a mortar and pestle and getting down to work.

After he was done with that, the old witch promptly handed him the very bundle of plants he had spent three days gathering, rattled off a series of brief instructions and pointed him towards an old cauldron leaning on the wall of her cottage. Wonderful – apparently he was going to be making a potion the old way. He had been tutored by another witch as a child, so he wasn’t totally lost here, but the potion she wanted him to make now was unfamiliar to him. Not to mention that there was a reason why traditional potion making was considered obsolete compared to modern alchemy – it was harder, less safe, and usually gave worse results to boot.

Hopefully the potion she was having him make wasn’t the sort to explode in his face or poison him with fumes if he didn’t get it right. Oh, who was he kidding, of course it was. Frankly, if it weren’t for the time loop and the resulting immunity to simple death, he would be leaving at this point.

As he suspected, he botched that potion. Thankfully, every time he was about to make a particularly disastrous misstep, Silverlake stopped him. He just wished she found a better way to warn him he was about to make a mistake than hitting him with a willow branch. She could have poked his eye out with that thing!

He never thought he would say this, but he was starting to miss Xvim and his marbles. His old mentor was a saint compared to this crazy old woman.

"Well that’s no good," said Silverlake, peering into the cauldron and idly stirring the foul-smelling purple gunk that Zorian ended up producing (it was supposed to be a viscous, sweet-smelling, totally transparent liquid). She gave him a bright smile. "I guess you’ll have to go gather a whole new batch of ingredients before you can try again, won’t you?"

Zorian stared blankly at the grinning woman, feeling her anticipation through his empathy. She fully expected him to explode at this and was looking forward to it! Sadistic bitch. Unfortunately for her, she was about to get disappointed. He wordlessly reached into his backpack and withdrew a fresh bundle of ingredients.

Her smile never faltered, but Zorian could feel her disappointment regardless. It made him smile inside, though he maintained his poker face.

"You gathered extra, huh?" she asked rhetorically.

"I have plenty of experience with abrasive teachers," Zorian said simply. "I have another bundle besides this one, too."

"Good. You’ll need it," Silverlake said, knocking on the rim of the cauldron. "This was terrible. I don’t think two attempts will be enough. Hell, I’m skeptical you can get it in three! Go empty this crap you’ve made in the neutralization pit over there and start over."

Zorian sighed and levitated the cauldron onto a disc of force before marching off into the direction of the neutralization pit. It was really just an open pit that had been lined with stones and painted over with alchemical resin so that alchemical compounds poured into it didn’t seep into the ground or nearby water supply. His alchemy teacher back at the academy would have been horrified at the mishandling of alchemical waste, but if the great Silverlake thinks an open pit is sufficient for disposal of alchemical sludge then who was Zorian to disagree?

That done, he placed the cauldron back over by the fireplace and started over. Silverlake was probably right that he wouldn’t get it right in the next two times either, though – the potion clearly required fairly delicate temperature management, but that was a very hard variable to control when using wood burning and a regular fireplace. An old witch with lots of experience like Silverlake probably knew by instinct how to control the fire, but Zorian didn’t have the faintest idea of how to do it.

That was generally the main problem of traditional alchemy, as it was sometimes called. It relied heavily on the ability of the practitioner to adjust their methods on the fly to produce a usable product. Unlike modern alchemy, which relied on standardized equipment and exact measurements, traditional alchemy was all about eyeballing it and improvisation. Expressions like a handful of leaves, a slow fire and a moderate amount of time were extremely common in traditional alchemical recipes. Zorian knew because he once broke into his grandmother’s recipe cabinet to see if he could learn something from them. A pinch of salt apparently meant very different things to him and his grandmother, if the results of his secret potion attempts were any indication.

A further problem for him was that he was only really proficient in producing potions one by one, and the cauldron method was designed for producing batches of potions. There were some very important differences between production methods for single potions and for batches, but hell if Zorian could remember what they were at the moment.

"Who taught you?" Silverlake asked suddenly.

"Huh?" Zorian mumbled. "What do you mean? You want to know my alchemy teacher?"

"I want to know your potions teacher," she corrected. "You’re still pretty terrible, but you’re not nearly as clueless around the cauldron as I thought you would be. Who taught you?"

"Err, that would be my grandmother, I guess," Zorian said.

"A witch or just a housewife that picked up a few recipes?" Silverlake asked.

"A witch," said Zorian. "Though not a particularly dedicated one, I think. She gave me some lessons when I was a kid, but it didn’t last very long. My mother didn’t really like her teaching me."

Actually, Zorian was pretty sure his mother didn’t like his grandmother, period. Mother and daughter did not get along, in their case. Zorian always found it kind of hypocritical that mother spent so much time preaching to him about the value of family when she herself couldn’t stand her own mother if her life depended on it.

"Huh. Interesting. Don’t expect to get any fuzzy feelings out of me just because of that, though," Silverlake said.

"Wouldn’t dream of it," Zorian said lightly.

"Good. You’ll be happy to know I’ve decided on the price of my help for you."

"Oh?" said Zorian, suddenly perking up.

"Yes. You see, a little birdy told me you’ve been wandering around the forest, picking fights with the wildlife. So this should be something right up your alley. Tell me… have you heard of a something called the grey hunter?

29. The Hunter and the Hunted

Considering the reputation the Great Northern Forest had among people living in more southern, civilized territories, one would expect the place to be a giant death trap, with every animal and a good portion of the plants trying to kill you at every turn. The truth, Zorian had found, was a little more complex. While yes, the forest was full of dangerous creatures – even the deer were kind of aggressive and had tried to gore him a couple of times instead of fleeing from his approach – it was entirely possible to spend an entire day without endangering your life if you knew what you were doing. Granted, Zorian had a somewhat unfair advantage in the form of his mind sense, which let him sense a lot of the dangers before they had the chance to detect him in turn. Furthermore, the region he was frequenting was a border area – thus a little friendlier to humans than the deep, untouched wilderness in the far north. Still, he was confident that even a skilled civilian could move through the forest unmolested, much less a mage. Hell, he was doing just fine at the moment, despite having less than a month of experience.

Usually, Zorian wouldn’t have wanted to move through the forest undetected. The whole point of going here was to get combat experience, so avoiding danger was kind of missing the point. This time, however, sneaking around was more or less mandatory. He really didn’t want to get distracted around a threat on the level of a grey hunter, and he definitely didn’t want to alert the monster that he was coming by engaging in a loud, flashy fight right next to its lair. He slowly circled the area around the grey hunter’s lair, checking it for threats and hostile terrain that might inhibit him should he choose to retreat in any particular direction. In several places he carved clusters of explosive glyphs into the trees and exposed rocks – he doubted they were powerful enough to seriously hurt a grey hunter, but they might buy him a few seconds he needed to teleport away to safety.

He almost succeeded in reaching the lair without a fight. Thankfully the trio of fly-mosquito-whatever things that tried to ambush him were very easy to dispatch (they burned beautifully) and the fight didn’t raise enough ruckus to attract the monstrous spider’s attention. Zorian picked out a rather tall tree close (but not too close) to the grey hunter’s lair and levitated himself to the upper branches, where he promptly took out the binoculars he enchanted earlier for the purpose and started studying his target.

The location was actually kind of picturesque – a small rocky gully surrounded by forest, with some pretty sediment lines crisscrossing the stone and a few strategically placed clumps of grass growing between the cracks. On one of the walls stood a perfectly circular hole that served as the entrance to the cave. It was pitch black and surprisingly unremarkable and unthreatening – if Silverlake hadn’t told him it was there, it was entirely possible that Zorian would have missed it entirely if he had ever stumbled into the place in one of the restarts.

It would have been the last mistake he ever made, at least in that hypothetical restart – grey hunters were crazy good jumpers and possessed downright surreal speed. Zorian would bet anything that the one inside that cave could jump straight from the cave entrance to the other side of the gully in a single leap and close in before Zorian could so much as realize what was happening.

The grey hunter was fundamentally a very simple monster. It was a grey, furry spider the size of an adult man… and it also happened to be incredibly fast, strong, durable and spell resistant. It could run faster than a hasted mage, jump incredible distances, shrug off regular firearms and lower-level attack spells like a duck shrugging off water, outright ignore most direct-effect spells and bite through steel. Oh, and it had a very nasty poison that, instead of destroying tissue or wrecking the nervous system like most poisons, utterly disrupted a mage’s ability to shape and control their mana instead. Once bitten, you wouldn’t be casting anything for a while, and it would take weeks for the poison to fully flush out of your system. Apparently it was a type of poison adapted specifically to bring down magical beings that were the grey hunter’s typical prey, but it was just as effective against human mages. Basically, if you were fighting against a grey hunter alone and got bitten, you were done for.

These things were known for chewing through entire groups of battlemages sent specifically to get rid of them. Quite a feat for what is ostensibly an animal-level creature – most non-sapient monsters, no matter how impressive, were too easy to lure into traps to pose such a huge danger to a prepared hunting group. Naturally, Silverlake wanted him to tangle with said mage-killing super-spider as her price for her help. The good news was that she hadn’t asked him to kill the thing, something that Zorian suspected might be beyond him at the moment. The bad news was that her request was only a smidgen easier than that. She wanted him to confront the female grey hunter who laired in the cave he was currently observing and steal some of her eggs.

The lifecycle of grey hunters was a total mystery, as they were considered too dangerous to study through anything other than post-battle reports and vivisection, but Zorian was willing to bet that grey hunter mothers were fiercely protective of their spawn. Getting even a single egg was likely to be quite a challenge. In all likelihood, the mother would be reluctant to go far from her egg sack for any reason, so waiting for the chance to simply swipe some may be impractical, or even futile. For all he knew the female sat on her egg sack all day long and lived off her fat reserves until the young hatched.

Zorian placed the binoculars back into his bag and started jotting down notes in one of the notebooks he brought with him. The question of how to acquire the eggs without getting horribly murdered in the process was ultimately a question for another time – he was currently here just to scout out the situation and see if the task was even possible. As much as he wanted to prove the shriveled old witch wrong by completing her impossible quest, dying here would be incredibly stupid. He was on a time limit. A long time limit, but repeatedly dying because he decided to take on opponents way over his level would be an unforgivable waste. Every restart cut short was a restart he wasn’t using to its full potential. If he couldn’t think of a way to get the eggs that he was absolutely sure would work, he wouldn’t do it. And even if he could think of a way, he would only try it out near the end of the restart, when the most he would lose was a couple of days.

"Alright," he mumbled, snapping the notebook shut. "Let’s see what I’m dealing with."

The first thing he did was try to locate the grey hunter female to make sure she wasn’t outside her lair at the moment. He had no way of tracking down grey hunters specifically through divination, as he had never seen one before and lacked any grey hunter body parts, but a simple locator spell searching for a giant spider pointed him straight at the cave. Since the other two giant spider varieties that lived in the region – giant tree spider and giant trapdoor spider respectively – didn’t live in caves, the conclusion was obvious. He then tried to scry the spider, which immediately failed. Well, the spell technically worked… but the cave was totally dark. There were no glowing crystals or ember moss that occasionally lit natural caverns – just an ordinary cave full of impenetrable darkness that hid everything.

Damn, he hadn’t thought of that. Wracking his brains for a spell combination that would allow him to scout out the lair without having to go back into the city and hit the books, he decided to combine two different spells. First he cast the arcane eye spell, creating a floating ectoplasmic eyeball through which he could see remotely. He then created a floating ball of light, functionally identical to the simple floating lantern spell, except he altered the spell parameters so it would follow the ectoplasmic eye around instead of himself. He then sent the eye into the cave, closing his real eyes and connecting his sight to his remote sensor. There was a chance that the light would aggravate the grey hunter mother, but he doubted she would run out to confront him just for that, or that she could track him down on his tree for that matter.

As it happened, the grey hunter was either very, very bothered by his floating lantern or perhaps saw it as prey, because the eye had barely advanced into the cave, floating lantern in tow, when a grey blur slammed into it and Zorian’s awareness was violently wrenched back into his body. Blinking in surprise at his sudden perspective shift, Zorian was then treated to the sight of the grey hunter leaping out of the cave and skittering around the area in search of something.

After 10 seconds or so of looking at the spider, Zorian noticed two things. First, the grey hunter female didn’t have to sit on her egg sack all day long, because she was freaking carrying it on the underside of her abdomen! That was so freaking unfair. He withdrew everything he said about Silverlake’s task being easier than killing the thing – this was actually way harder, since he was only getting the eggs by taking them from the grey hunter’s cooling corpse but had to be careful when killing her not to damage the (likely much frailer) egg sack.

The second thing he noticed was that the spider was steadily getting closer to his location.

It wasn’t immediately noticeable. Rather than immediately making a beeline towards him, the spider shot off in a random direction for a second; stopped for a moment, as if reorienting herself; and then shot off in a seemingly random direction again. It repeated the same stop-and-skitter routine second after second, and though the movements seemed random at first, Zorian noted with dread that it was steadily getting closer to his tree as time passed.

So the murder-spider also had hypersensitive senses, now? This was such bullshit. How the hell had it noticed him anyway? He’d even taken the time to set up some camouflage spells and silencing wards around himself just to prevent stuff like this from happening. True, they were fairly weak, in order to conserve mana, but that shouldn’t have-

He frowned. That was it, wasn’t it? The grey hunter was tracking him through the wards. Its natural prey was said to be other magical creatures. It had a poison specifically designed to counter magic. It probably had some kind of innate magic sense that let it sense its prey over great distances. Rather than shielding him from the grey hunter, the wards he set up were revealing his location to it. The fact they were so weak was probably the only reason it hadn’t divined his location instantly and was instead reduced to stumbling all over the place in an attempt to locate him.

If so, he was in trouble. He couldn’t do nothing, as the monster would eventually sniff him out. On the other hand, the moment he tried to teleport away, his location would almost certainly be completely blown.

10 seconds later, with the spider getting ever closer and no solution in sight, Zorian decided he would just have to work fast and pray for the best. Taking a deep breath to calm himself down, he started casting the teleport spell as fast as he could.

As he feared, the grey hunter reacted instantly. The moment the first word of the chant left his mouth, the spider surged towards him, abandoning its previous jerky, uncertain advance. As it sprinted towards him, it angled away from the explosive glyph cluster Zorian placed on one of the rocks in its path, somehow aware of its existence and function, and launched itself sideways into the air. It landed vertically on the trunk of a nearby tree and immediately launched itself sideways again, bouncing from tree to tree and gaining altitude with each jump, until at last it was both close and high enough to reach Zorian’s location.

Zorian finished the teleport spell and was whisked away in the nick of time. The terrifying vision of a giant spider sailing through the air towards him, front legs extended and huge black fangs poised for a strike, would haunt his nightmares for days to come.

Following his almost-lethal encounter with the grey hunter, Zorian decided to put Silverlake’s quest on indefinite hold. There were plenty of other people that Kael listed as possible help, after all, and maybe if he talked to her in some other restart and tried again she’d send him on a less suicidal quest.

It was very frustrating, though. The thought of how thoroughly he had been outclassed by what was fundamentally a dumb beast brought to mind the memory of that final restart in Cyoria when he clashed with Red Robe in the ruins of the aranean settlement. The fact that the grey hunter was a giant spider, just like the aranea, further brought to mind uncomfortable parallels. Despite the fact that he knew intellectually that there was no shame in losing to a creature that even famous mages would balk at facing, and that he should in fact be happy to be even alive, he found himself very bothered at his ineffectiveness.

He spent the next day by tracking down giant trapdoor spiders, which were of similar size to grey hunters but brown-colored and a hell of a lot less dangerous, before smoking them out of their holes and then killing them in a variety of painful fashions. Their eyes and venom glands sold a lot better than winter wolf pelts, too. He should do that more often.

Still somewhat in a foul mood, he set out to see if any of Kael’s other contacts were able and willing to help him. When he arrived in the village where his first candidate lived and was informed by the locals that the man hadn’t been seen in the past two months, he was unconcerned. The man was a retired mage fascinated with familiars – he had six of them as well as a great number of more mundane pets, and was always looking to add another exotic creature to his menagerie. An absence of two months was a bit unusual, but not something to immediately raise an alarm about.

But then other disappearances started piling up. The old herbalist lady that also sometimes removed curses was simply gone, and her neighbors had no idea where she went. The two brothers that lived in a tower they built away from civilization and secretly studied soul magic were not present at their home, the gate to their tower broken and the insides stripped bare of anything worthwhile. The priest in the nearby town dedicated to studying the undead and ways to fight them had been found dead in his home 4 days ago, cause of death unknown. He was young and had no known medical problems or addictions, so foul play was suspected. An alchemist specializing in transformation magic was torn apart outside his village by a pack of unusually aggressive boars. And so on. Only the priest and the alchemist were actually confirmed dead, the others having gone on sudden business trips or just plain gone missing one day, and the disappearances were in a sufficiently large area that no one seemed to have connected them in a single pattern, but Zorian knew this was not accidental.

Someone was deliberately targeting anyone who had some sort of knowledge on soul magic. The only question was whether the missing people were dead or just kidnapped for some purpose.

Thankfully, he finally managed to locate one of the people Kael mentioned to him. Unfortunately, the man in question didn’t actually know any soul magic. Vani was just a scholar, and according to Kael could probably point him towards someone who does. Probably. The only trick was that Vani liked to talk, meandering from topic to topic as he pleased, and he would refuse to help anyone who was in any way impolite with him. Thus, anyone seeking him out for advice had to be very patient and ready for frequent digressions.

Zorian could do patient. He knocked on the door to the man’s home and was promptly ushered inside by Vani, a cheerful older man with a receding hairline who was not at all surprised that someone sought him out for advice.

The inside was… packed. That was the only word that fit, really. Almost every inch of the house was filled with boxes, shelves and pedestals that held books, statues big and small, plants and animals preserved in bottles, glass cases that held tiny models or buildings and other such things. Where the walls were visible, they were usually filled with paintings and drawings. As Vani led them both into his study, Zorian’s view fell on a particularly large and lifelike statue of a naked woman with some rather… bountiful… assets and he quirked an amused eyebrow at the man.

"It’s a, err, goddess of fertility sort of thing," the man hastened to explain. "Just a temporary thing, a friend of mine sent it to me for safekeeping and you know how it goes. Fascinating stuff. Anyway! Don’t think I don’t know who you are, young man – you’re the one who has been killing all the winter wolves in the region lately!"

"Err, is that a problem?" Zorian asked.

"Problem?" the man laughed. "Just the opposite! Finally someone did something to cull those awful beasts a little. They’re not too bad right now, but come winter they get aggressive and start assaulting travelers and outlying communities. There’s been a number of child disappearances the last few winters, and everyone knows it’s probably the winter wolves at fault. Damn things get bolder with every passing year…"

"How come nobody organized a hunting party yet, then?" asked Zorian. The mage guild was pretty much founded to respond to situations like this, after all.

"It snows pretty heavily here in winter, and whole towns can sometimes get cut off from the rest of the world for days, so it’s hard to marshal a response in time. Most of the time no one even finds out there was a crisis until days afterwards, when nothing can be done," Vani tapped the table with his fingers contemplatively, as if considering something. "Or at least, that’s what the hunters and the authorities like to say. Personally, I just think they’re afraid of the Silver One."

"Silver One?" asked Zorian curiously.

"It’s a rumor. A few years back, when the winter wolves first started acting up, there was an attempt to organize a wide scale cull and a large hunting party was organized. It ended… poorly. According to stories, several winter wolf packs worked together to lure the hunters into traps, separating them into smaller groups that were then defeated in detail. They acted more like an army than a group of wild animals, and survivors claimed they were led by a huge winter wolf with a shiny silver pelt. The Silver One – an alpha of alphas, as smart as any man and with the power to direct his lesser brothers against humans. There was an official attempt by the Eldemar’s mage guild to locate and eliminate this winter wolf, but they found nothing – neither the silver wolf nor any evidence of multiple packs working together. A lot of the locals are still convinced he exists, though – they say that anyone who goes after the wolves ends up getting confronted by it sooner or later."

"I see," frowned Zorian. "And what do you think?"

"It’s possible, I suppose," admitted Vani. "We live in a crazy world, and you can never really say that something is impossible. It could be a runaway experiment made by some crazy mage in the forest. It could be a new species originating from the Heart of Winter. It could even be a polymorphed mage on some deranged crusade to protect the bloodthirsty monsters from those terrible humans. All I know is that I’m glad someone is not getting intimidated by all the scaremongering floating around…"

It took another 15 minutes till Vani decided to even ask what Zorian came to him for.

"Kael sent me," Zorian said. "Or rather, he listed your name as a possible source of advice."

"Kael!" Vani said happily. "Oh, I remember him… shame about what happened to his wife and mother-in-law. The Weeping took so many great people from us. He still has his daughter, though, doesn’t he?" Zorian nodded. "Good. Children are the greatest treasure. Tell him I said that. He helped me write a book, you know? Did he tell you that?"

"He did," Zorian confirmed. Kael had warned him that Vani was a little vain and loved discussing his books, and that it might be a good idea to read one or two. Zorian took this advice and read two of them. The first one, the one that Kael had helped the man write by gathering the accounts of various people in the region, was about the recent history of the region and was mostly a collection of anecdotes, some interesting and amusing and some of them mind-numbingly boring. If it weren’t for Kael’s advice, he never would have gone past the first chapter. "I even read it, as well as one other book."

"Oh?"

"It was titled History of Pre-Ikosian Altazia," Zorian said, considering whether to tell the man the truth or to simply flatter him. He decided to go with the truth for now. "I… it was kind of interesting, but I don’t really agree with the lot of it. My principal complaint is that you keep talking about pre-Ikosian tribes living on Altazia as if they had lived in total vacuum, when the reality was that the entire southern coast of Altazia was dotted with Ikosian colonies and forts stretching back for at least a thousand years. Ikosians were hardly the total aliens to Altazia that you portray them as in your work."

"Ah, but the historical evidence clearly shows that the cultural influence of those coastal states didn’t extend very far inland," pointed out Vani triumphantly.

"That may be strictly true, but Ikosians were vastly more technologically advanced than Altazian tribes in most areas, and I think you’re greatly underestimating the effect of simple technological diffusion on people’s culture…"

Yeah. This was probably going to take a while.

"Ah, thank you for that," Vani said. They had been talking for several hours at that point, and Vani seemed surprisingly pleased to have met someone who disagreed with his conclusions and was willing to talk about it. Zorian also found out that the man was incredibly well read and seemed to have memorized half a dozen encyclopedias, because he was a font of various trivia. Whatever he thought about the man’s conclusions, he clearly hadn’t arrived on them on a whim. "It’s been a while since I had this kind of discussion with someone. Usually the kind of people willing to talk to me don’t know enough to challenge me, and the ones that do know enough aren’t interested in talking."

"You flatter me. I don’t really think my opinions have the same weight as yours. I certainly haven’t done even a hundredth of the research you did," Zorian said. Never hurt to butter people up a little. "But I really shouldn’t waste your time for much longer. I came to you because I wanted your advice on how to find an expert in soul magic."

"Soul magic?" the man asked with a frown.

"It’s a personal issue that I’d rather not talk about," Zorian said. "Suffice to say I have been hit by a soul magic spell of unknown effects and want to talk to someone about finding out what exactly has been done to me and how to protect myself against any further such events."

"Hmm," Vani hummed. "And Kael sent you to me?"

"You were on the list of people he said could help me. However, you were the only one I could actually locate. The others were… well, it’s very disturbing. Let me tell you about my last couple of days…"

Vani listened to Zorian’s description of disappearances with growing unease, writing down the names and facts that Zorian uncovered on a piece of paper.

"That is indeed very disturbing," Vani agreed when Zorian was finished. "To think that such a thing could happen without everyone realizing it for so long… I will bring this matter to the attention of proper authorities, have no worry about that. It does make me wonder who I can recommend to you when so many of the obvious choices have become, err, unavailable. Let me think about this a little."

Five minutes later, Vani managed to think up a solution.

"Tell me," he asked. "What do you know about shifters?"

"That they’re people who have the ability to turn into animals?" Zorian tried.

"Shifters are people with two souls," Vani said. "Long in the past, the ancestors of the shifters enacted rituals that fused their souls with the souls of their chosen animals, allowing them to take the forms of the animals in question and even access some of the abilities of said animals in their human form. It is a very old form of magic that predates the Ikosian invasion of Altazia, and I’m sad to say that most shifter tribes have lost the knowledge of the original rituals they used to create their kind. These days, they grow in numbers purely through mundane reproduction, with children of shifters inheriting their parent’s dual soul. There exist, however, tribes that retain the knowledge of ritual magic and soul mechanics necessary to perform the ritual in the modern age. While the purpose of such expertise is to turn regular humans into new members of the tribe, it may very well be general enough to help you with your issue."

"I see. And where can I find these shifters?" Zorian asked.

"That," Vani said, spreading his arms in a helpless gesture, "I do not know. Shifter tribes have a checkered history with the, shall we say, civilized communities. They rarely want to be found. But! I do know that there is a fairly powerful wolf shifter tribe living in this region – a tribe that definitely has the expertise you seek. I do not know who you need to talk to in order to meet with their leadership, but I do know that the leader of the tribe sent his daughter to Cyoria to get an education in more modern forms of magic. Raynie is her name, I think. A redhead. Quite the looker, I’m told. Perhaps you can start there?"

Zorian blinked. Raynie is a wolf shifter? That… wow. Yeah, now that he thought about it, there were some things that could point that way.

"Well," said Zorian rising from his seat. "You gave me a lot to think about. Thank you for your time."

"Think nothing of it," Vani smiled. "Go kill a few more winter wolves for me, is all I ask for."

"Wouldn’t a tribe of wolf shifters kind of dislike me for killing so many wolves?" Zorian asked.

"They’re wolf shifters, not winter wolf shifters," Vani said. "I’m pretty sure they don’t like each other much. Winter wolves have a habit of killing their more mundane relatives and invading their territory."

Zorian left after that, unsure how to proceed further in the restart.

"Back already?" Silverlake asked him, not bothering to look up from her bundle of herbs while addressing him. "I’m not seeing any egg sack on you, though."

"That’s because spider-mommy is carrying her eggs on her underbelly," he said. "The task is impossible. Why would you even send me on such a fool’s errand? Kael said you were eccentric, but ultimately harmless. This isn’t harmless. I almost died."

"If I thought you were the sort to rush in half-cocked and get your fool ass killed by something like that, I never would have sent you on that errand," Silverlake scoffed. "And anyway, isn’t it a bit premature to declare failure after less than a week? I’m patient. I waited for years, I sure as hell can wait for a few months more till you think of something. You’re a smart boy, I’m sure you’ll figure out a way."

Zorian opened his mouth and then closed it. Suddenly, her logic sounded a lot more reasonable to him. She didn’t know he was on a month-long time limit, after all. As far as she was concerned, giving him a task that would take several months to complete was perfectly logical. Where was the hurry? As for the suicidal nature of the task she gave him… apparently she had more faith in his skills than he himself did. Did he really give up too soon?

"A few months is too late," he said. "Anything that happens after the summer festival might as well not exist for me."

Silverlake finally stopped fiddling with the herb pile and gave him a hard look, her eyes glowing brightly for a moment.

"You’re not dying," she stated. "Not out of sickness, anyway? Someone hunting for you?"

Zorian hesitated, the image of Red Robe dancing before his eyes and opened his mouth to say yes. Silverlake cut him off, though.

"No, not really," she stated, going back to her herbs. "You have an enemy, but then again who doesn’t?"

Zorian exhaled in irritation and rose up, deciding to leave before he lost his cool and attacked her. He’d probably get stomped into the ground, anyway. Just before he teleported away, though, a thought struck him.

To hell with it, he thought. Why not?

"Hypothetically speaking," he said. "If you were visited by a time traveler who claimed to know your future self, what would you ask of him as proof?"

" Hypothetically speaking," she said, her mouth stretching into a cruel grin, "I would have asked him to retrieve a grey hunter egg sack for me."

Throwing his hands in the air in defeat, Zorian teleported back to his inn in Knyazov Dveri, the cackling of a sadistic old woman echoing behind him.

In the safety of the room he rented at the inn, Zorian was sitting on the bed, dismantling a rifle he had bought earlier. It was kind of amusing how easy it was to procure a firearm compared to high-level combat magic aids, despite them being just as lethal, but there you had it. They were especially easy to procure here in Knyazov Dveri, which was so close to the wilderness and its dangers. In any case, he was trying to see how the things worked and, more importantly, how they could be enchanted.

Firearms were notoriously tricky to enhance with magic. Like all ranged weapons, they had the problem that you could only enchant the device to be more accurate and durable, and if you wanted the projectile to have any sort of magical effect upon striking the target you had to enchant the projectile itself. Bullets were unfortunately very hard to enchant, being much smaller than arrows and crossbow bolts and usually made from some very magically unsuitable materials. You also couldn’t touch the bullet to channel mana into it once it was already in the gun… though maybe if he installed some crystal mana channels into the gun via alteration…

While he studied the device in front of him, Zorian idly considered ways to off the grey hunter from earlier. He had no intention of actually trying any of them, as they were each more implausible than the last, but there was no harm in coming up with scenarios.

Grey hunters had known weaknesses. First of all, they were purely melee opponents – if you could keep them at a distance, there was nothing they could do to you. The trouble was that they were really, really good at closing in on their target. Secondly, they were ultimately just magical animals so they could be lured into prepared traps and kill zones fairly easily. The problem here was that they were fast and tough enough to probably survive such a blunder. The magic sense the grey hunter demonstrated in Zorian’s first encounter with it probably also helped it avoid the most blatant of such traps.

He could think of a several ways to trap it, but most of them required knowledge of spells that he didn’t have. If he knew how to make a simulacrum and open portals, he could simply send in his simulacrum as bait and then open a portal leading to wherever he set the trap up. Hell, simply knowing how to make a simulacrum would make things a million times easier since he could test his ideas without endangering himself. If he knew large terrain alteration spells he could simply seal it off in its lair and wait for it to suffocate. If he knew the spells to manipulate large amounts of water he might be able to drown it. And so on, and so on…

He also considered poisoning the thing or putting it to sleep or otherwise using some kind of alchemical concoction that would cripple or kill it… but anything potent enough to kill such a beast was heavily restricted, made out of super-rare ingredients and expensive as all hell. He didn’t know how to make anything like that, and couldn’t get his hands on something that valuable and forbidden through trade.

He could try for brute force and build a golem to take the spider down. Since they were machines animated by magic, they were immune to poison and could be extremely strong – strong enough to crush the stupid spider in a head-to-head fight. Unfortunately, he didn’t know how to build a golem. Any golem at all, let alone one good enough to go toe-to-toe with a grey hunter. The art of golem making was complicated enough that several Houses were dedicated to mastering it, and not something to dabble in for a week or two. Or even a month or two.

Furthermore, even if he knew how to build it, the process of building would take at least a week and probably more, require a specialized workshop and consume a lot of expensive materials. He would likely bankrupt himself before he was even halfway finished.

Which brought him to firearms. The revolver worked well enough against Red Robe when his spells had failed him, after all. No regular firearm would do against the grey hunter, though – he needed something stronger than that. Unfortunately, higher calibers were usually reserved for the military and he would need to raid a military base and steal one if he wanted to go down that route. That could end very badly – who knew what kind of defenses a military base had, and being captured and interrogated by military investigators while drugged out of his mind on various truth serums was almost as bad as being discovered by a hostile mind mage or a necromancer. Plus, he was pretty sure they had a couple of mind mages and necromancers on the payroll anyway.

Oh, and even if he did find something suitable under a lax enough security, there was the matter that it would almost certainly still have to be enchanted and he couldn’t even figure out how to effectively enchant a simple rifle at the moment. Probably wouldn’t by the end of the restart, either.

A knock on his door woke him up from his musings and he quickly put the rifle into its box and hid it under the bed. Him owning the rifle wasn’t illegal, but he’d still rather not let whomever was looking for him see him tinkering with it. He made sure his shielding bracelet was on, just in case, and then opened the door.

It was Gurey, which did not surprise Zorian all that much. The man had been dutifully buying off any of the various alchemical ingredients and assorted body parts Zorian had gathered in the forest and allowed Zorian to use his workshop when he needed to make some of the trickier potions and magic items. The man had already commissioned a couple of magic items from Zorian, so he expected Gurey’s arrival to be about another commission.

As it turned out, Gurey had another kind of deal in mind. Once the pleasantries were exchanged, he skipped straight to the point.

"I want you to help me rob my rival."

30. A Game of Shops

"I want you to help me rob my rival."

Zorian blinked in surprise before giving the man an incredulous look. What?

"And… why the hell would I do that?" he asked the man curiously.

Gurey grinned triumphantly. "I knew I was right about you," he said. "You didn’t even pretend to be outraged at the question."

Zorian frowned. "I’m just not a very excitable person, that’s all. It doesn’t mean I’m going to actually help you rob someone," he shot back crankily. "In fact, I can scarcely imagine a situation where I would agree to such a thing. I was just curious what possessed you to broach the topic at all. This isn’t some kind of attempt at blackmail, is it?"

"Oh no, I’d have to be pretty stupid to try and blackmail a man who hunts winter wolves and giant trapdoor spiders for a living," Gurey assured him quickly. "Not that I have anything worthwhile to blackmail you with, anyway. No, I just felt I had an interesting deal for you and that I had nothing to lose by making an offer. You don’t seem like the sort that would get all high and mighty on me just because I employ a few shady business practices. I figure the worst you’d do is say no."

Zorian was silent for a moment. He supposed that Gurey had him there – even if Zorian actually cared to turn Gurey in, it would still be his word against Gurey’s. Proving the man’s guilt would be a hassle, Gurey would likely get a mere slap on the wrist even if convicted, and it would lead to far greater scrutiny of Zorian’s activities by nearby powers than he was comfortable with. All in all, it would mean an entire restart wasted on a pointless crusade that had no meaning inside the time loop and would quite possibly attract the attention of the academy authorities – previous restarts had made it clear they were very quick to involve themselves when one of their students had a brush with the law or the police, and he was still technically enrolled there. And if the academy found out about his whereabouts and activities, it was entirely possible Red Robe would also find out about it through cranium rats or his other spies…

No, even if Gurey was planning to murder someone, Zorian would not intervene. A simple theft… well, he wasn’t sure he would actually care all that much even if he wasn’t stuck in the time loop and he certainly didn’t care at all now.

"Well, the answer is definitely no," said Zorian finally. "I know that wanderers like me have a reputation of being opportunistic, but I’m afraid my ethics aren’t quite as flexible as that. I’m not going to stoop to banditry or burglary or whatever it is that you have in mind for this… deal of yours."

"Ah, I don’t think you quite understand what I’m talking about here," Gurey said. "You think I want you to steal something physical and that I’m offering you money in exchange, yes?"

Zorian raised an eyebrow at him.

"Nothing could be further from the truth," Gurey shook his head. "I know better than anyone that you’re raking in too much money at the moment to be tempted by petty burglary. Ethics aside, that’s too much risk for too little gain. No, if this operation goes off without a hitch – and I think you’re capable enough to pull it off – there will be nothing missing and no indication that a crime has occurred at all." He leaned towards Zorian conspiratorially and whispered the next part. " You see, what I’m trying to steal is not material wealth, but secrets."

Oh. Oh! Well that changed things considerably. He still didn’t want to have anything to do with Gurey’s deal, but he at least understood why the man felt comfortable discussing such an offer with him. Spying on other mages was technically illegal, but everyone knew it was a common and universal practice. Hell, according to some stories every Noble House worth its name had its own division dedicated just to that. You just had to make sure that you weren’t caught. Even the academy, which generally tried to give students a very rose-tinted version of mage culture, admitted that such professional espionage occurred all the time. Some of it was entirely legal, such as analyzing a rival’s products and spellwork with divination spells, or poring over publically available documents to see if they’d let something sensitive slip by without noticing… but such legal methods were usually very limited and mages often resorted to shadier methods. Bribing assistants and apprentices into selling out their master’s secrets, hiring burglars to raid archives and research notes, dedicated scrying campaigns, seduction plots… the possibilities were endless, and new ones were devised every day. As well as countermeasures for such.

Zorian recalled a particular fable that spoke of two mages that spent years devising ways to steal each other’s secrets and thwarting the other’s attempts to do the same to them. Eventually, after a decade of back-and-forth, they both succeeded in reaching each other’s inner sanctum at the same time… only to find out that neither had any secrets worth stealing. They had spent so much time and effort trying to one-up each other that they’d never gotten any actual work done.

Well, that was an obvious exaggeration, but it honestly wouldn’t surprise Zorian to find out that every magical business (and probably quite a few non-magical ones) in Knyazov Dveri did do at least a little bit of illegal espionage as a matter of course. The world of business was a cutthroat environment. Zorian knew from his parents' stories that even seemingly simple and honest farmers were willing to renege on their contracts if they thought they could get away with it. To someone like Gurey, this sort of thing was probably just business as usual.

But it wasn’t business as usual for Zorian. And frankly, Gurey was completely right when he said that the whole thing was a huge risk for little gain. He opened his mouth to give Gurey a firm (but polite) refusal, but was interrupted when Gurey pushed a brown, leather-bound book in his hands.

Zorian looked at the book in surprise for a second, idly wondering why it had no title, before giving Gurey a searching look. The man motioned him to open it.

Zorian did, and promptly found himself leafing through pages of hand-written notes and complicated diagrams. It was a journal of some sort. That’s why the book had no title or markings. A research journal of some mage, if he had to guess.

"What is this?" he asked, giving Gurey a suspicious look.

"A sample," Gurey said with a grin. "As I said, I know it would be foolish of you to do something like this for money – well, for the sums I am able to pay you, at least – so I came up with something that will hopefully be more attractive to you. Feel free to peruse that thing at your leisure and then come see me in my store tomorrow to give me an answer. Just remember, there is more where that came from!"

Gurey then immediately left, leaving Zorian alone with the mysterious journal/thing. Curious, he opened the book at the beginning so he could see if it perhaps had a title written on the first page. The first few pages were blank, but he did reach the title page in the end.

Breaking and bypassing wards and other magical defenses, it said. By Aldwin Rofoltin.

Rofoltin? That would be Gurey’s deceased business partner, wouldn’t it? Intrigued, Zorian sat down on the edge of his bed and began to read.

Having read through Rofoltin’s book, Zorian had to admit he was feeling a little… underwhelmed? It wasn’t a bad book by any means, but by the way Gurey had presented it, he’d expected more. As it was, the most useful thing he found inside was the step-by-step instruction of how to build your very own magic-analysis goggles, complete with a spell formula blueprint. That was convenient, as he had been meaning to build one of those for a while now and there were no publically available creation manuals on the topic that he could find – the spell formula blueprint alone probably saved him a restart-worth of work.

Other than that, there was little of real use in there… but perhaps that was what Gurey had been aiming for. It was a sample, as he said, meant to entice Zorian into cooperation by alluding to the possibility of granting Zorian access to the rest of Rofoltin’s books. If Gurey’s old partner had 5 other books like that, and each one had just one useful thing like the goggle thing, that was a couple of months of saved time right there. And if Gurey was keeping the good stuff for the end like Zorian suspected… tempting. Far more tempting than he’d thought this would be.

Shaking his head at his own greed, he locked his room behind him and set off in the direction of Gurey’s shop. He would have to check with the man what exactly he expected of him, but… chances were he was going to say yes. In truth, this sort of thing wasn’t that far off from what he had been planning to do on his own at some point. Chances were that he was going to have to learn how to break into people’s homes and spy on mages sooner or later – gathering information about the time loop, Red Robe and soul magic was bound to require it at some point. At least this way he would get some guidance from someone who’d done it before, get a chance to practice his skills on what was probably a far less difficult target, and get paid for it to boot.

Realizing he was in no hurry to actually confront Gurey, Zorian eventually slowed down and decided to take the scenic route to the place. He idly observed the people and buildings as he wandered the town, suddenly aware that he knew very little about the place, despite living in it for a while now. He had been so busy with other things that actually exploring Knyazov Dveri sort of slipped his mind. He didn’t even peruse the town’s Dungeon access, though that one was intentional – he had decided to hold back on doing that until he had a chance to judge how much of his time and attention his other tasks in this restart would take, and ultimately decided to leave that for some other restart. The Dungeon wasn’t going anywhere. In any case, now that he had taken the time to explore the town a little, he could say with some certainty that he hadn’t missed much. He had already visited most of the shops to determine what the best price for the ingredients he was gathering was, and aside from that the town was fairly average. It was similar to Cyoria in the sense that it was clearly a city that had experienced rapid growth in recent times – the old core of the city was easily recognizable by the single-story buildings painted in the traditional yellow color that usually signified Eldemar’s native architecture, while subsequent layers radiating from it had newer, multi-story buildings. Other than that, he hadn’t noticed anything particularly noteworthy, though he would have to set aside some days for exploration just to be certain.

Finally, he reached the building that proudly proclaimed it housed a business establishment known as Cwili and Rofoltin Equipment and walked inside. The little bell attached to the door rang out as Zorian entered, notifying Gurey of his arrival – a solution surprisingly devoid of magic, for a magic store – and the portly man soon poked his head from the back room he was currently in to see what he was dealing with. His eyes lit up immediately when he recognized Zorian.

"I’ll be with you in a second!" the man yelled before getting back to whatever he was working on in the back. Zorian took the chance to study the shop a bit while he waited.

Just like the first time he had been here, he was once again struck by how diverse the products sold by Gurey’s store were: he offered everything from wilderness-appropriate attire to the various magic items, potions, survival guides, dried herbs and other magical materials used by alchemists and artificers, and so on. And actually, it was even more impressive than it first appeared – Zorian knew from his previous talks with the man that Gurey actually offered a great deal more than what was displayed at the shelves of his store, so long as the customer seeking them was properly vouched for or knew how to ask the right questions.

Gurey once told a story about a customer who tried to buy the decorative potted plants he strategically placed around the shop to liven up the place, and while Zorian understood Gurey’s mirth at the incident, he also understood how someone might have decided they were for sale. With all the other things Gurey was selling, it really wouldn’t have surprised Zorian to find out that he dealt in potted plants as well.

"Ah, Zorian, my friend…" said Gurey, walking out from the back and approaching him. "Did you read it? An interesting book, isn’t it?" he prodded.

"It was… somewhat useful," said Zorian noncommittally. "Not much on its own, but if there really are a couple more where that came from, it might actually be worthwhile for me to work with you on your… problem."

Gurey frowned, apparently expecting him to be more impressed with his partner’s work. He opened his mouth to speak, but Zorian interrupted him.

"Before we discuss this any further, I’d prefer if we move to somewhere more private. Do you have a room I could set up some basic privacy wards in?"

"I have better," Gurey said smugly, quickly shaking off his previous disappointment. "I have a room with privacy wards already present… and not just the basic ones, either. Follow me."

He led Zorian to a small, inconspicuous room with a single desk and two chairs… a room whose walls, floor and ceiling were full of magical glyphs and geometric shapes made out of crystalized mana. Gurey placed his hand on one of the circles and the whole complicated spell formula pulsed twice in bright blue light before becoming seemingly inert. Zorian wasn’t fooled though – those pulses signified the more mana-intensive portions of the ward scheme becoming active. Much like many powerful warding schemes, the one he was looking at had two modes – the normal, mana-conserving one that could be powered indefinitely from its mana source and the advanced, super-charged one that burned through mana faster than the ambient mana levels could provide it with but was far more effective for the time it was active.

The sound of Gurey clearing his throat jolted him out of his thoughts and he realized he had been studying the wards for quite a while now. Oops.

"Is this one also somewhat useful?" asked Gurey with a smirk when he realized he had Zorian’s attention again.

"No, this is quite impressive," Zorian admitted. "Is this also made by your former partner?"

"Yes," Gurey nodded. "He was quite good at this. Setting up wards, I mean. Also breaking and bypassing them, but I understand those two are related. Learn how to make a ward and you’re 90% there to figuring out how to defeat it."

"That’s the conventional wisdom, yes," agreed Zorian. He decided not to dance around the issue any longer. "So… I’m guessing your former partner was your go-to person for these kinds of deals in the past, and now that he’s dead, you need to find someone else to do your dirty work."

"My, you’re direct," Gurey laughed nervously. "But you’ve hit the nail on the head, more or less. You see… magic was never my thing, as strange as that may sound from an owner of a magic shop. That was always Aldwin’s thing – he was the one that worried about the spellcasting part of the business while I was always more comfortable on the more mundane, civilian side of things. Making contacts, closing deals, finding new business partners, that kind of thing. I’m a really terrible mage when it comes down to it. I can barely cast anything at all."

Zorian gave him a curious look. "I’m pretty sure I saw you manipulate mana plenty of times, and activating the greater privacy mode of this room couldn’t have possibly been a matter of just channeling mana into that circle."

"Oh, I was always very good at using magic items," Gurey said. "You don’t need to be a proper mage to do that. Lots of practice and some specialized shaping exercises and you’re set. If you’re fairly wealthy like me and live on a mana well, you can even commission items that draw power from the ambient mana instead of from my own miniscule reserves… but we both know there are severe drawbacks to such items, and this sort of job really needs a proper spellcaster."

Zorian nodded. He had been considering the possibility of using self-casting magic items to make up for his below-average mana reserves for a while now, but there were a lot of problems with it. The core, inescapable issue was that souls of spellcasters were pretty damn good at spellcasting, while even the best-made magic items… weren’t. Making an item that allowed the caster to skip some of the steps during spellcasting was simple enough, but creating something that was capable of casting a spell entirely on its own upon command? Hard. Possibly very hard, or even impossible, depending on what spell you were trying to imprint into the item. Warding schemes and one-use magic items like his suicide explosive cubes got around the issue by having the maker cast the spell during creation, after which the spell formula simply stabilized it and kept it from degrading, but that workaround wasn’t very useful for the majority of spells.

And then there was the issue of powering said items. Not every place had much in the way of ambient mana, and even places that did often couldn’t provide the amount necessary for the spell at once. That meant that most self-casting items needed an internal mana battery, which brought a whole host of problems of its own. No battery was totally efficient and reliable – they all leaked mana in varying amounts, and could easily blow up if overcharged or poorly constructed. And that was without even getting into the number of actual combat spells that were specifically designed to make mana batteries blow up from internal pressure.

All in all, the creation of self-casting items was something that Zorian put squarely into the probably not worth it category. He wasn’t nearly good enough with spell formula currently to pull it off, and even if he were, it was still a very difficult sub-field of magic item creation that gave very dubious gains. Though he did eventually intend to track down a blueprint for a blasting rod – probably the simplest of self-casting items that blasted whatever it was pointed at with a torrent of barely-constrained energy, usually fire. A fittingly named item, and one of the few self-casting items that was known to be reliable and effective in actual combat, at least at close range. It was not a priority, however – such an item would be more of a last resort, side-arm sort of weapon than something to build his skills around.

"I’m not as useless at this sort of cloak-and-dagger stuff as you might think, though," Gurey said. "As I said, Aldwin was the spellcaster, but I was the one who identified the targets. You can’t spy on a threat unless you know they are a threat, after all. And I was always very good at spotting who our competition was and keeping an eye on their activities. People underestimate how much information you can get simply by being well connected and giving a few expensive gifts to people."

"You mean bribes," said Zorian.

"Zorian, my friend, you have much to learn," Gurey said, shaking his head. "Bribes are illegal. There is no law against generosity. Giving that bottle of expensive wine to your drinking buddy or inviting someone to that fancy annual dance that they’ve always wanted to attend is just being nice and no one can prove otherwise."

"Right," Zorian sighed. "I guess I shouldn’t talk, since I’m willing to go along with your plans. And speaking of which, why don’t we get back to the reason we’re here in the first place. What exactly do you want from me and what are you offering?"

"Very well. I presume you know about Vazen’s General Store?"

"The biggest magic-related shop in town?" asked Zorian.

"That one, yes. Cwili and Rofoltin Equipment was once bigger and able to compete with them on a more equal footing, but since the death of my partner two years ago those days have passed. Recently they have closed a deal with another company from Cyoria, but they have been silent about the contents of the deal. Everyone knows they have bought a bunch of spell formula schematics, alchemical recipes and production licenses, so it’s obvious they intend to seriously branch out into the production side of the business, but the exact details have been successfully kept secret. That is a problem. Depending on what Vazen intends to produce, some things are going to decline sharply in value, while the price of the raw materials used to make them goes up to a similar degree."

"I see. You need to see what your rival will release so that you can prepare for the impact it will have on the market," mused Zorian.

"Well, that and so that I can see if it is possible to counter his move in some fashion," Gurey said.

"I suppose you know where I can find that information?" Zorian asked. "Not in the shop itself, I hope. That place is bound to be heavily warded."

"It’s not nearly as warded as you might think – some basic counters to stop teleportation and divination, and that’s about it. But the place is always manned, even during the night, so you’re right that they’re not something you’d want to tangle with. Fortunately, you don’t have to. In the end, Vazen’s own paranoia is his undoing – I have found out that instead of keeping the documents in his heavily guarded shop, he has brought them into his much less protected home. Apparently he doesn’t even trust his own employees."

"How protected is his home?" asked Zorian.

"Well, my information might be a little outdated since I got it two and a half years ago, from my then-living partner who scouted the entire building, but I doubt much has changed. It has an anti-divination ward and all the doors and windows have intruder alarms and that’s it. The documents themselves are kept in a safe, though, and that is bound to have much more serious defenses."

"Not too bad of a setup, to be honest," Zorian said after thinking about it for a minute. "The divination ward stops casual espionage and makes it impossible to just scry-and-teleport inside, while the alarms on entrances make it impossible to simply sneak inside without magic."

Covering only the entrances with the wards was a common mana-conserving measure. True, it made the wards useless if the attackers could phase through walls or were willing to make their own entrance by blowing a hole in the building, but thieves capable of phasing through solid matter had bigger fish to fry than robbing small-time shop owners and blasting holes in the walls would kind of defeat the point of trying to acquire the information undetected.

"You can teleport, though, right?" asked Gurey. "I mean, I’m sure you can – the speed of movement over large distances that you’ve demonstrated pretty much requires it – but how good are you at it?"

"I can teleport," Zorian said hesitantly. He didn’t think he was making it that obvious, though he supposed he couldn’t keep leaving in the morning and coming back before the sun set with things only found deep in the forest without someone questioning just how he was doing it. "I’m getting pretty good at it, in my opinion. It takes me a while to shape the spell, but I can consistently pull it off."

"Excellent. The intruder alarms shouldn’t be much of a problem, then," Gurey said with a grin. "Aldwin had this neat trick where he could turn an item into a teleport beacon of sorts, and then simply teleport himself to its location without having to have been there in the past. I’m sure I can get some innocuous-seeming thing through the door, you just have to cast the spell on it. I don’t know how to cast the spell myself, but Aldwin did write it down in one of his journals…"

"Spell, you say? No spell formula involved?" asked Zorian curiously.

"No. Spell of recall, I think it’s called. It’s a two-part spell – you first cast a personal teleport beacon on an item, and it immediately forges a connection between you and it. You can then cast the second spell at any time, causing yourself to be recalled at the location of the item. According to Aldwin, it was meant to be used for rapid escape – you cast the first spell on a retreat point and then use the second spell to teleport there if you end up in a bind."

"Why not use a regular teleport for that?" frowned Zorian. "Sounds like a lot of trouble when a normal teleport will suffice. After all, you’ve already been to the location you’re teleporting to if you’re setting it up as a retreat point."

"I really don’t know. You will have to find that out yourself if you’re interested," Gurey said.

"Hm. So assuming this spell works as advertised and you can smuggle something in like you said you would, I just have to defeat the protection on the safe to get to the documents."

"Yes. That part will be all you, since I have no idea where it is or what protections it has," confirmed Gurey.

Zorian stared at the man for a while before taking a deep breath.

"Lovely. Unfortunately for you, I am not the professional ward breaker you seem to think I am," he told Gurey. "When you said you wanted my help with this, I had thought I would just play support or something. Something like this is, to put it bluntly, out of my league. I’m sorry, but unless there is something you’re not telling me, there is no way I’d be able to pull this off."

Gurey leaned forward and gave him a conspiratorial grin. "Even if I gave you Aldwin’s spellbook and his notes on how the spells are meant to be used?"

Zorian blinked. "What?"

Two hours later, Zorian left Gurey’s shop with three new books under his arm. They had agreed to make the attempt at the documents three days before the summer festival, ostensibly to give Zorian the time he needed to practice the spells in Aldwin’s spellbook but also because that way, should the whole thing go pear-shaped, Zorian would only lose three days of the restart.

Zorian hummed to himself in satisfaction as he walked back to the inn. It was nice to catch a windfall from time to time. After the whole annoyance with Silverlake and the mysterious disappearance of soul magic practitioners, he had begun to think that this whole restart had been a giant waste of time. Now… well, at least he’d gotten some shiny new spells out of it, ones of the sort that he could never have acquired through any legal avenue.

Things were looking up.

After his talk with Gurey, time passed quickly. It was difficult to practice the spells found in Aldwin’s spellbook, as most of them only interacted with wards and required an actual warding scheme as a target. Thankfully, Zorian had managed to find a warded house whose owner had left on a trip, allowing Zorian to practice on it to his heart’s content, provided he kept out of sight of the main road. He also occasionally warded objects himself for practice purposes, usually when practicing the more destructive spells, but that just wasn’t the same as interacting with an unknown ward.

Surprisingly, Gurey was also willing to have Zorian practice the spells on his shop’s warding scheme, so long as he didn’t do anything permanent. Zorian wondered about that. All things considered, Gurey was being far too accommodating to him. He suspected that the portly man thought of him as an investment and hoped to turn him into a more long-term asset, and as such was rather more generous to Zorian than he otherwise would have been, but he had no way to be sure. There did not seem to be anything malicious about it, so he mostly ignored it and tried to be simply grateful for his good fortune.

There were essentially three ways of dealing with wards. The first one was to starve the ward out, depriving it of mana until it simply fell apart. The second was to identify a way to disrupt its structure, causing it to fail on the spot. And finally, the third one was to trick it into not activating in the first place. Siphoning, breaking and bypassing were the terms used in literature for the three methods. Each one had its advantages and disadvantages, but for the task Gurey entrusted him, he would have to rely on bypassing the wards on the safe.

Siphoning had the advantage that it always worked – every ward could be siphoned to death with enough time and effort, it was just a question if the attacker was willing to devote the necessary resources for the task. Some wards could last for months after being isolated from their power sources, even when actively drained of mana during the isolation. Unfortunately, it required that the attacker have complete control of the area around the ward, as siphoning operations were difficult to set up and maintain – anything less than total control made it too easy for the defender to wreck the setup. It was mostly used for sieges and bringing down legacy wards that had outlived their usefulness.

Breaking was the fastest method of neutralizing wards – just disrupt the structure of the ward and let it collapse on itself. Unfortunately, many wards collapsed explosively or had other unpleasant side effects if simply broken, often resulting in the destruction of the warded thing and sometimes the one doing the breaking as well. A lot of wards were also simply too powerful to be broken by a single mage, or even a group of mages, unless the attacker had identified a particularly glaring weakness. So all in all, breaking a ward was often not possible, and, even more often, not desirable even if the possibility existed. Still, if one wanted to get rid of a ward quickly and had power to spare, breaking the ward was the way to go.

Finally, there was bypassing the wards – the preferred way of dealing with them, if at all possible. If the attacker knew how the ward functioned, either because he had been given access to the schematics of the warding scheme or because he had analyzed its structure via divination spells, they could take care not to activate any of the triggers that made the ward recognize there was a problem to be countered. Depending on how the ward functioned, it might even be possible to put additional layers on top of it to neutralize it completely. If an attacker wanted to keep their intrusion secret, bypassing the wards was a must, as it was the only method that left the wards intact after they were done.

Since the idea was to leave no trace of his home invasion, he obviously couldn’t break or siphon the wards on the safe – he had to trick his way past them and leave them intact. There were lots of ways to do that in the books Gurey had given him, since Aldwin was primarily interested in that sort of solution to the wards himself, but until Zorian took an actual look at the safe he couldn’t tell which ones he should use. So he settled on simply practicing all of them.

As the date of the summer festival approached, Zorian decided to visit Vani one more time to see if the man had any news on the missing soul mages. He didn’t, though he admitted he hadn’t tried to find out anything about that very hard. It was a matter for law enforcement, Vani had claimed, and getting involved would just paint them as suspects. He was probably right, and Zorian knew there was no point in snooping around now that the case was being investigated by the police, but he definitely intended to launch a personal investigation in future restarts to see what was going on there.

Vani had asked him whether he had found the shifter tribe, but Zorian admitted that he sort of gave up on that. He couldn’t go to Raynie, as she was in Cyoria, and nobody else could direct him where to go. Or maybe they could, but didn’t want to – the result was the same in either case. Besides, he was skeptical in regard to how much they could actually help with his issue.

Finally, the day had come. Gurey had managed to get a small plaque inside Vazen’s house by stuffing it inside an envelope and mailing it to the man along with some ridiculous advertisement. Zorian couldn’t believe that had actually worked, but it had, and now they just had to wait for the man to go to work before he could teleport inside and search for the safe. Vazen was a 40-year-old bachelor, so there was supposed to be no one in the house with him gone, but Zorian had prepared a set of concealing clothes for himself anyway (that he intended to throw away immediately after the operation) and was willing to teleport out at the first sign of trouble.

After an hour of waiting, Vazen left the house and Zorian teleported inside. Gurey remained outside under an invisibility field, acting as a lookout – if he spotted Vazen coming back, he would press a button on the stopwatch Zorian had given him, which would cause a ring on Zorian’s hand to heat up.

The house was, thankfully, completely empty… but also completely lacking in safes, warded or otherwise. Even after he’d added an additional layer to the wards in order to exclude the inside of the house from the anti-divination ward, his spells still gave no results… probably because the safe was itself warded against divinations. Frustrating. It was obviously hidden behind something, but Zorian couldn’t figure out where. There were no hollow walls, secret hatches beneath the carpet, places where the floor was scraped due to constant movement of furniture, and so on. Just as Zorian was about to give up and hit the books for an exotic divination spell that could work despite the ward, he finally found it. It was in the fireplace, of all things – if he hadn’t noticed how relatively clean it was (and reminisced about how much he hated cleaning the one back home in Cirin), it would have never occurred to him to look there.

The fireplace was not built for convenient access, so interacting with it was rather annoying – the safe was positioned to the left, making it impossible to actually see the lock without the use of a mirror. Still, that was just an inconvenience, not a real obstacle. He began casting analysis spells at the ward that protected the safe, trying to find a way past them.

He had just enough time to register that there was a very weak, localized ward present in the fireplace before he was forced to jump back and erect a shield in front of him. A deafening explosion erupted from the fireplace, enveloping the whole room in blinding, choking ash as the ward triggered the explosive trap in response to detecting his analysis spell. His shield protected him from the blast, but the ash cloud was hell on his lungs.

He teleported out, grabbed Gurey and then teleported again – this time away from Vazen’s house. The operation was a bust.

In the aftermath of the botched operation, the whole idea had been scrapped. Security was bound to go up now that Vazen knew there was someone after the documents, and Zorian didn’t fancy going against the new and improved defenses when even the old ones nearly killed him. Gurey was, if anything, even more shaken about the whole thing than Zorian was. He apologized profusely for the whole episode and ranted about how such lethal traps were illegal and how he couldn’t believe Vazen would employ such a thing, which Zorian found more than a little amusing. It helped explain why Vazen seemingly didn’t bother to report the break-in to the police, though.

Personally, Zorian was feeling pretty annoyed with himself. Despite what Gurey seemed to think, this was all on him. He really should have checked the fireplace for traps. Hell, he should have checked the whole house for those! Just because Gurey had said there were no other defenses didn’t mean he should have taken it for granted. The man had even said his information was outdated…

Well, no matter – he got some nifty spells out of the whole thing and he knew what to watch out for in subsequent restarts.

He thought about confronting the grey hunter at the end of the restart, but then decided against it. He would have just died messily, and he’d had enough brushes with death in this particular restart.

He went to sleep and woke up with his sister wishing him a good morning.

31. Marked

Zorian stared at the grinning face of his opponent, his own face a blank, expressionless mask. This was it. This last round would decide who the victor was, no question about it. His opponent thought he had Zorian backed into a corner, but Zorian had a secret weapon – he had already peered into the man’s thoughts and knew that he had already won.

The rules of the card game were pretty clear, after all.

"Twelve of pumpkins," Zorian said, placing his last card on the table. The man’s face instantly lost its grin. Zorian tried to keep a cool façade, but he probably smiled at least a little.

"Motherf- How are you this lucky!?" the man cursed, slapping down his own card on top of the stack – a measly seven of oaks, not nearly enough to win – and taking a swig from the glass of hard liquor next to him. He drank way too much in Zorian’s opinion, his thoughts steadily growing more and more muddied to Zorian’s mental probes as time went by… and while that did make him harder to read via psychic powers, it also made him progressively worse at playing the game. He probably didn’t even need to cheat to win the last two games, but cheating was kind of the whole point – he joined the card game to practice his mind reading skills in a real environment, not to win money off hapless victims.

"Well, this is it for me," Zorian said, standing up. "It was fun and all, but I really have to get going now."

"Hey, you can’t just leave now," the man protested, frowning at him. "That’s not how it’s done! You have to give me a chance to win my money back!"

"Orinus, you’re drunk," one of the other men at the table said. The two of them dropped out three games ago, but they still stuck around to talk, drink, and act as judges and money holders. "You didn’t lose anything. It’s the kid who just got back the money he lost to you in the previous game. Nobody has to pay anyone anything."

"Yeah, the last five games have basically been for nothing," the other man piped in.

Zorian nodded. Even with mind reading on his side, some hands were just unwinnable. Besides, he purposely threw a couple of games so as to not arouse suspicions of cheating in his partners. "We’re both even at this point, and I really have to get going, so it’s a perfect place to stop," he said. "Still, if you’re that desperate for a rematch, I can always relieve you of your money some other day. I’ll be staying in the town for a whole month anyway."

"You relieve me of my money, ha! The only reason you haven’t ended up in your underwear is that you’re immune to my secret technique!" Orinus half-shouted.

The other man snorted in amusement. "Getting the newbie drunk is a secret technique, now?"

"Hey man, don’t reveal all my tricks to outsiders… what kind of friend are you?" Orinus protested.

After a few more minutes of bickering and refused offers of alcoholic beverages, Zorian finally managed to excuse himself. Ignoring Orinus’s muttered questioning of Zorian’s masculinity due to his refusal to drink anything remotely alcoholic, he left the inn and started searching the streets of Knyazov Dveri for an out-of-the-way corner he could teleport from without being seen. The game had been both unexpectedly fun and useful for his mind magic training, but he hadn’t been lying when he had said he had to get going. Timing was crucial for what he intended to do.

In the previous restart he learned that most of the soul mages on Kael’s list had disappeared or died recently. That was, of course, highly suspicious – there was a good chance the whole thing was somehow connected to the time loop, which meant he had to know more about it. Sadly, during the last restart he had made the mistake of telling Vani about the disappearances, and he had raised enough of an alarm to have the police crawling everywhere around potential clue-sites. Consequently, Zorian had been forced to set the issue aside and wait for the next restart to conduct his own investigation.

Which is exactly what he did, the moment he woke up in Cirin and could leave without making Mother and Kirielle throw a fit. As he suspected, virtually all of the soul mages had been already gone, even on that very first day. Whatever had happened to them had been going on for far longer than the time loop existed, it seemed. There were only two exceptions: the two mages that were confirmed dead in the previous restart were alive and well at the start of the new one. The first one, a priest named Alanic Zosk specializing in fighting undead, had simply been found dead with no obvious cause a few days into the restart. The second one was Lukav Teklo, an alchemist specializing in transformation magic. He had been killed by boars not far from his home, on the evening of the second day of the restart.

Naturally, Zorian intended to talk with both of them, which necessitated saving their lives. The alchemist was a priority, as he died sooner and the cause of death was known and easily preventable. Thus his hurry to leave the game – if he timed things correctly, he would arrive at the man’s home an hour or two before his fateful stroll outside the village. If he mistimed things or his actions somehow caused the alchemist to accelerate his schedule… well, there were always future restarts. It’s not like the man would die for good.

He could have contacted the man sooner to warn him, he supposed, but how would he explain his knowledge of the attack? He’d just make himself look suspicious. And besides, he actually wanted the attack to happen. He doubted those were regular boars that attacked him, so he wanted to examine them up close… and also, the man was bound to be a lot more helpful if he met Zorian as a savior who protected him from a vicious pack of boars than if he just showed up at the man’s door with no warning.

After teleporting just outside the man’s house and making sure the alchemist was still in his house, Zorian settled in for a wait, making sure to keep out of sight of any windows. If there was anything that tiny villages like this one never had a shortage of, it was nosy old people who had nothing better to do except watch the streets for anything out of the ordinary. Honestly, some of the old women back in Cirin spent practically every waking moment glued to their window sills, making note of everyone that passed through their domain… he lost count of the number of times they got him into trouble with his parents when he had foolishly forgotten to account for their presence.

He didn’t have to wait long. Barely half an hour after he had settled in to wait, the alchemist left his house. It was a good thing he had come early, then. Zorian promptly cast an invisibility spell on himself and then started following after the man some distance away. Hopefully he remained far enough that the man would not find it suspicious when Zorian burst onto the scene at the first sign of trouble, but that couldn’t be helped. He didn’t feel comfortable putting even more distance between the two of them, lest the man be killed before he could come to his aid. Depending on how oblivious and combat capable the man was, he could get overwhelmed in seconds.

And the attack itself was bound to happen any moment now. The report he saw in the last restart said the man was killed just outside the village, and Lukav had immediately made a beeline towards the main road leading to the next settlement. Cautiously, Zorian drew his spell rod and strained his mind sense to the limit in order to find the attackers before they could strike.

He found nothing out of the ordinary, and was thus just as shocked as the alchemist when a bunch of boars burst out of the tree line and charged the man. They both froze for a second, and before either could react the boars had already closed half of the distance to the alchemist.

Embarrassingly enough, the alchemist reacted first. With a practiced movement, he threw a bottle of some sort into the path of the approaching horde and immediately dropped on the ground. Lacking the alchemist’s reflexes and thinking himself too far to be affected by the bomb, Zorian opted to simply drop invisibility and erect a shield in front of him as a precaution. That turned out to be a mistake, as the deafening explosion of light and sound left him dazed and blinking spots out of his vision for the next few seconds.

When he did recover, he saw that the bomb’s effect on the boars themselves had been underwhelming – they had been thrown about by the blast (as had the alchemist himself, having misjudged the distance somewhat in his panic), and the leading boar that had been caught in the center of the blast had been blown to bits, but the others were already up on their feet and converging on their target. Even the one with a broken leg was stubbornly stumbling towards the dazed, bleeding alchemist, undeterred by what should have been excruciating pain.

They made no sounds, they were unafraid of loud sounds and bright light, and completely ignored severe injuries like they were nothing. So much for the idea that they were ordinary animals. Oh well, he kind of suspected it was something like this. Acting quickly to stop them from killing the other man, he cast a swarm of 5 magic missiles at the boars closest to the downed alchemist. Smashers instead of piercers; if he was right about what these things really were, holes in their bodies wouldn’t even slow them down. The missiles were there just to knock them away from their target and give Zorian time to cast another, more unorthodox spell that he didn’t put in his spell rod. Oh, and possibly shift their attention towards him instead, though he didn’t think anything could make them switch targets. They were clearly sent to kill a specific man.

The smashers hit the boars in their flanks, sending them tumbling. As he suspected, they immediately scrambled to get up as if nothing happened, and the other four kept running towards the alchemist. He had finished his spell before they could reach him, however, causing a large shining disc of force to materialize between his hands.

The severing disc was a powerful cutting spell that was surprisingly mana efficient and allowed the caster to pilot the disc, changing its flight path at will. Taiven had not thought much of it, as it was not a fire-and-forget sort of combat spell, requiring constant concentration from the mage to keep existing. And it moved pretty slowly for a magical projectile, too. According to Taiven, competent mages would dispel the disc before it could reach them or otherwise evade it, and the caster is something of a sitting duck while directing the disc.

But the boars couldn’t dispel it, and had no ranged attacks to take advantage of his lack of shields. At Zorian’s direction, the disc shot forward, flying close to the ground – at the height that Zorian judged to be around knee-height for the boars.

Zorian’s fears that he had overestimated the power of the disc and that it would not be able to cut through the bones of tough animals like the boars proved completely unfounded – the disc encountered the legs of the first boar and simply passed through with no visible resistance. In its wake, the boar fell apart, its legs separated from its torso. Directed by Zorian the disc continued towards the rest of them.

In the end, it was a close thing. On one hand, the boars didn’t even try to dodge, charging in straight lines that made them easy to intercept with the disc. On the other hand, Zorian had not practiced the spell in question particularly heavily, so he missed two boars on his first pass. Thankfully, the alchemist had recovered by this point and helpfully dealt with the two stragglers by causing an arc of spear-like spikes to erupt from the ground in front of him with some kind of alteration spell. The boars were so insistent on getting to him as fast as possible that they impaled themselves on the makeshift rampart and got stuck.

Zorian let the disc dissipate with a sigh. That was a win, yes, but he wasn’t satisfied with his performance. He’d frozen at the start, and his mastery of the severing disc spell left much to be desired. But what was done was done, and at least he achieved what he came here to do. Time to face the music. He set off towards the alchemist, who was kneeling on the ground and alternating between staring at approaching Zorian and at the still twitching, legless boars not far from him.

He frowned at them as he approached. They had no minds, he realized. That was why he didn’t detect them until they attacked – as far as his mind sense was concerned, they didn’t exist. Coupled with the fact they were still alive with their limbs cut off and that their wounds didn’t bleed at all, the conclusion was obvious.

His hunch had been right: they were definitely undead. As far as he knew, the only beings that counted as mindless for the purposes of mind magic were oozes, golems, creatures under the Mind Blank spell, and the so-called mindless undead. The boars were clearly neither golems or oozes, and he doubted Mind Blank was involved. It would also explain why they seemed to have no blood and felt no pain or hesitation.

"Are you alright there? You kind of took the worst of that blast," said Zorian, shifting his attention towards the man he came here to save. Now that he was close to the man, he could see that Lukav Teklo was a fairly handsome middle-aged man, sporting long black hair, a carefully sculpted beard and rather muscular physique. Zorian was a little surprised by this, as he had expected someone… wilder. After all, his fellow villagers had told him that the man disdained human contact and preferred to spend his time in the wilderness.

"Yeah. Yeah, I’m alright," the man said, rising to his feet before swaying dangerously. Zorian quickly caught him and helped him regain his balance. "Dammit. Hoisted on my own petard, literally. Didn’t even accomplish anything with it. Totally ignored my patented animal repellent. That’s some compulsion they were under…"

"I’m pretty sure they’re undead," Zorian said.

"What, really?" Lukav said, squinting at the closest boar. "My vision is a little blurry right now. Is it… is it really trying to wriggle towards me still?"

"I think so, yeah," Zorian confirmed.

Lukav barked out a stream of words in some Khusky language that Zorian didn’t recognize. He was pretty sure they were swear words, though, so maybe it was better that way.

"I’m sorry," the man said after a few calming breaths. "I don’t mean to be rude. I want to thank you, young man. I was lucky you happened upon me when you did. I surely would have died otherwise."

"Well, it wasn’t entirely luck," Zorian said, causing the man to give him a hard look. "You are Lukav Teklo, yes?" The man nodded. "I have been looking for you based on the recommendation you received from one of my friends, one Kael Tverinov."

"Ah, Kael!" Lukav immediately brightened. "Great kid, shame he stopped coming when he got engaged to that witch girl. I was hoping to recruit him as an apprentice, but I’m afraid Fria got to him first and unlike her, I didn’t have a cute daughter of my own to tempt him away with. Talented alchemist, that boy. I’d ask you how he’s doing, but we can do that in my house, when I calm down a little."

"That would be fine," Zorian said. "Though I want to take a look at these undead boars that attacked you, first. I’m pretty sure someone just tried to murder you. I don’t think undead boars arise on their own."

"Oh no, definitely not," Lukav agreed. "Minor undead like that are basically flesh golems, only with an enslaved soul or spirit placed inside instead of an automation core. The only naturally arising undead are ghosts and other soul entities. Alanic was always very clear on that. Not sure who would try to kill me, of all people, but apparently I pissed off a necromancer somewhere. Just my luck. I’ll report this to the guild and have them deal with this, but feel free to examine these things as much as you want in the meantime. I’m kind of curious myself, but divinations were never my thing so…"

Zorian nodded and got to work, using an alteration spell to bind the legless torso of the nearest boar so it wouldn’t thrash and move around before moving to analyze it.

As he feared, he didn’t find out anything particularly useful and was forced to leave the scene to the guild investigators. At Lukav’s advice he re-summoned the severing disk and chopped all of the downed boars except one into smaller pieces that no longer moved. Lukav claimed that one undead boar was enough for the guild investigators and he didn’t want to risk the attacker picking them up, sewing the legs back on and sending them after him again.

The last intact boar was buried deep into the soil via another alteration spell from Lukav, there to wait for guild investigators to arrive.

"Zombies, skeletons and other undead are not nearly as easy to make as stories make them out to be," Lukav explained as they made way towards his house. "Easier and cheaper to make than golems, sure, but still a significant expenditure of alchemical ingredients and time. Losing a dozen zombies like that has got to be a major loss for whoever is targeting me. No sense in letting them recuperate losses by leaving the zombie boars in fixable condition. Alanic told me to always destroy any disabled undead after the battle, just in case their maker is around to fix them back up. I didn’t think I’d ever be in a position where that advice would be useful but there you go."

"Forgive me, but is the Alanic you’re talking about Alanic Zosk?" Zorian asked.

"Why yes," Lukav confirmed. "I suppose Kael recommended him too?"

"Yes. He actually gave me a pretty long list of soul mages – you were just the first name on the list." He wasn’t really, but it hardly mattered. The man motioned him to continue. "I need your help with a piece of soul magic I got hit with. I don’t feel comfortable talking about it here in the open. I hope you’ll hear me out when we get to your home."

"Fair enough. But unless you got hit by a transformation curse, I don’t think there is much I can do for you. Alanic is actually a better bet – he’s no curse-breaking specialist, but he knows the basics of the field at least. Of course, it would have been even better to seek the help of the guild, but I’m guessing you have a good reason for not wanting to get them involved."

"I do," confirmed Zorian. "And while I realize that the chance of you being able to help me is slim-"

"Hey now, those are fighting words," Lukav warned.

"-I still hope you will hear me out and try to help me. It’s entirely possible that you hold a crucial key to solving my problem, even if you are unable to give me a total solution. My problem is not a curse, exactly. It is exotic enough that Kael recommended Silverlake as a possible solution if all else fails."

"Say what?" Lukav asked incredulously. "He recommended that crazy old witch as a solution for something?"

"I know," Zorian sighed. "I heard from a reputable source that she asked for a grey hunter egg sack from the last guy who asked her for help."

"Now that’s just ridiculous," Lukav snorted derisively. "Someone is pulling your leg. Not even Silverlake would do that. Anyway, I’ll see what I can do. It’s the least I can do for someone who saved my life."

After they had reached Lukav’s house, the man penned a quick report to the nearest Mage Guild representative and paid one of the village boys to deliver it to Knyazov Dveri while they talked. Apparently the kid was a very good runner and had done such things for Lukav in the past. Regardless, it took a full hour for Lukav to tackle Zorian’s problem, during which Zorian explained Kael’s rather tragic situation to the man and Lukav gradually calmed down and waited for the potion he ingested to take care of his concussion.

"Horrible. I thought that hearing about Kael would cheer me up after this whole ordeal, but it only makes me feel even more depressed," Lukav said. Zorian stayed silent, content to wait for Lukav to continue. After a few seconds of being lost in his thoughts, the man shook his head with a sigh. "Well, I think the potion did its work by now, since staring into the lamp no longer hurts my eyes and my head no longer feels like it’s been stuffed with wool. Do you think you could tell me more about your problem now? The house has some basic wards to shut down scrying but it’s not professional work, just something I had a friend make for me. The village doesn’t have enough ambient mana to support anything substantial in terms of permanent wards, anyway. I guess we could go to Knyazov Dveri and hire a private room in one of the more expensive inns, but that would cost a pretty penny and I’m kind of averse to spending money like that."

"It’s fine," said Zorian. He had already analyzed the man’s warding scheme as practice and found it adequate. Slightly worse than Zorian could manage with a full day’s work or so, but far better than a hastily erected privacy scheme that had been his original plan.

After a few seconds to collect his thoughts, he began to talk. Telling the man about the time loop was absolutely out of the question, of course, but that didn’t mean he had to be totally vague about his situation. He told him how he stumbled upon a fight between a lich and an unknown mage, and was caught in the crossfire, getting hit by an unknown soul magic spell in the process. The other mage dispelled it, but the damage had already been done. After spending several weeks sick, he seemingly recovered, only to find out later that the spell had left its mark on him after all. Here Zorian went a little vague, refusing to state what the consequences he noticed were, simply insisting that the issue was private.

"Difficult," Lukav said unhappily when Zorian was finished. "Knowing what the consequences were is a pretty crucial clue as to what the spell actually was, you know? You are sure it has nothing to do with transformation?"

"Absolutely," Zorian confirmed.

"Not even partial transformations?" The man asked. "Remember, not all transformations are total or involve obvious physical changes. The vast majority of magical enhancements are actually transformation, even if they only do things like increase your strength and agility – they all call upon attributes of some other creature to do their thing, transforming the user in some non-obvious way."

"I didn’t know that," Zorian admitted. "But no, it’s still not a transformation effect. It’s actually more of an out-of-body experience, with my soul periodically leaving the body and then snapping back to it. So magical augmentations are generally transformation magic? Is that why they always seem to ask for animal parts and the like?"

"Astral projection?" Lukav asked. "Hmm, makes sense. Some soul magic spells definitely weaken the links between the soul and the body if used incorrectly, and you said the spell the lich cast on you had been botched. Not that letting the spell run its course had been a good idea, mind you, but some of the necromantic arts are just as dangerous if dismissed incorrectly as they are in their raw form. You’re definitely right to seek help over this. And yes, the parts of animals and magical creatures are there to provide an example of what you want to the transformation spell. Eagle Eye spell literally gives you the eyes of an eagle, for instance. Transformation magic is very useful for such augmentation because it is very easy to reverse."

"It is? I thought transformation was dangerous," said Zorian. That was what they were taught in the academy.

"Well… maybe a little," the man admitted. "But compared to the alternatives, it is incredibly safe. You see, when you cast a regular transformation spell on yourself you are essentially putting clothes on your soul. Don’t look at me like that, it’s what it is. Yes, the official term is transformation shell, but they’re basically like soul clothes. You can put them on, see, and you can take them off. Even if you mess up the spell and can’t turn back or you get locked into an alternate form by a malicious opponent, you are still just a dispel or a curse-breaking session away from returning to normal. Your soul is still intact and unchanged beneath the transformation shell, and once the spell is gone you revert to your base form. The problem is that sometimes people overreach and end up transforming too far, so you end up with a mage, say, transforming into a troll in both mind and body and killing his entire family before the spell runs out of mana and he reverts back to normal. Or they attach the transformation shell too firmly to their soul and can’t change back, and are then stuck in the form of a sparrow or something and can’t talk to people or meaningfully interact with their environment. That’s why a lot of people don’t do transformation via invocations and rituals any more, and just buy transformation potions from people like me who know what they’re doing – no chance of messing up, just drink a potion made by an expert and you’re golden."

"Ah."

"On the other hand, when you’re literally messing with your body chemistry and using alteration on your flesh, you’re usually doing something totally irreversible," Lukav continued. "The human body is a complex thing, and I don’t think anyone really understands enough about it to meaningfully improve it. Most potions that aim to enhance the real body with some exotic concoction are basically stimulant drugs with addictive properties or cause hard-to-cure damage if used often. And alteration spells that aim to alter the flesh directly have heavy drawbacks that make them hardly worth the effort and are often a total bitch to undo. I should know, I got called in often to help out with the fallout created by such magic. But we’re getting off track. Come with me and I’ll see if I can do something about your problem."

Lukav led him into his basement, past several locked doors, until they reached a spacious underground chamber. The huge spell formula on the floor in the form of two circles, one large one and one small one, each of which was ringed by lots and lots of magical glyphs, was a dead giveaway that this was some kind of ritual room. The fact that the room was perfectly cubical, with identical dimensions in all directions, was a further confirmation – flawless geometric shapes were always better for holding magic than anything remotely irregular, which was why Ikosian artifice featured a lot of circles, triangles, cubes, pyramids, cylinders, domes and so on.

Other than the ritual circle on the floor, the room was empty and featureless – likely to minimize magical interference from anything else. Zorian hoped he would not have to get naked for this – he had heard some of the more delicate magical scans were actually bothered by clothes and the like, and wasn’t at all enthusiastic about that possibility.

Thankfully, Lukav’s instructions didn’t turn out to be that bad.

"Alright, leave any magical items on your person outside the room and then step into the center of the big circle, right into that big empty space," he told Zorian.

Zorian was more than a little apprehensive about leaving his magic items behind, since that would leave him totally defenseless. Especially the three innocuous-looking steel rings he had hanging on a necklace tucked into his shirt. Those rings were the latest iteration of his explosive suicide device that he had been steadily refining throughout the restarts. Anyone could make an explosive device with a bit of spell formula knowledge, of course, but making them stable enough not to go off by themselves yet capable of going off on a moment’s notice whenever he gives a signal? Shrouding the explosive mana core with enough divination blockers to make the bombs invisible to wards designed to detect those very kinds of devices, thus allowing him to take those things literally everywhere he went, including the tightly warded academy facilities? Making them small and convenient enough that they weren’t a chore to carry around? Not everyone could do that, he was sure.

In the end he decided to remove everything except the necklace. Getting killed by betrayal would suck but ultimately just be an annoyance, whereas getting stuck in some kind of soul mutilation ritual without means of suicide would be irreparably catastrophic. He just didn’t trust Lukav that much, even if his empathy was telling him the man was honest enough and harbored no hostile feelings towards him.

He quickly put his spell rod, shielding bracelet, bag of small explosive cubes (kept for offensive purposes) and the experimental automation core he had been fiddling with in his spare time into a small pile next to the door and walked inside. Lukav was already sitting inside the smaller circle, which also had an empty space in the center of it that could accommodate him easily. Zorian copied the man and promptly sat down on the stone floor inside the larger circle. He had a feeling this could take a while.

Apparently Lukav’s magic couldn’t detect the necklace, because he said nothing about it.

"You don’t have any kind of soul shell on top of your soul," Lukav decreed after 15 minutes of examination. "I kind of expected that. The sickness you said followed the spell that hit you strongly hints that part of your actual soul was affected. Let’s see if I can detect any foreign bits in your soul then…"

Now this was the part that Zorian definitely cared about. He had been wondering for quite some time how big of a chunk of Zach’s soul did he end up with and whether it was having some kind of effect on him that he was unaware of. Hopefully Lukav would be able to shed some light on that issue.

After more than half an hour of spellcasting and lots of frowning, Lukav was finally ready to give his report.

"Weird. You definitely have something woven into your soul, but it’s not like anything I’ve ever seen. Actually, you have two somethings. One is some kind of complicated bit of spellwork woven incredibly tightly into your soul, definitely not soul-stuff but not something I recognize either. Very weird that something so complex could result from a botched spell. Not calling you a liar but it doesn’t make sense to me. The other something… well, it’s definitely a piece of foreign soul stuff fused into your own soul, but I don’t think you have to worry about that much. It’s not a spirit or some soul parasite, and it seems to have all but dissolved into your own soul. In a year or two it will be gone entirely, completely assimilated."

"What kind of consequences will that have?" Zorian asked worriedly.

"None, I think. Your soul appears to be converting it into just another piece of itself rather than trying to keep it distinct. So there shouldn’t be any major personality shifts and you probably won’t get any nifty abilities from whomever or whatever it was that donated a part of their soul to you. Though, I guess it is possible that the fragment had affected your personality to an extent when you first got it, before your soul had the chance to assimilate it sufficiently, and such influences may linger still. Do you think and act radically different ever since the incident?"

Zorian frowned. "To be perfectly honest, yes, I am quite different from how I used to be. But I’m not sure how much significance to attach to that. The incident was very traumatic, and so much has happened ever since then…"

"I understand," Lukav nodded sympathetically. "Your life has taken a completely different course after your fateful encounter with the darker side of magic. You would have changed anyway, and any changes caused by the soul fragment would have been lost in the noise. If you want my advice, you should not worry about it. You are who you are right now, and the fragment is all but gone. If shifters can claim to be the same person after stapling an animal soul to their own, then I’m not sure why a little nudge from a soul fragment should worry you."

"It’s in my nature to worry," Zorian said. "Though admittedly the fact the fragment will be gone soon does make me feel better."

"Well," said Lukav, rising to his feet with an audible pop of his joints. "I’m glad to have allayed at least some of your fears, but this is as much as I can personally help you, I’m afraid. For the strange spellwork in your soul, you will have to talk to Alanic. He tends to be very suspicious of strangers and unannounced visitors, but I’ll accompany you to smooth things over since you did save my life and all. Is there anything else you wanted my help with?"

"Well, not really," said Zorian. "But if I can trouble you some more, what can you tell me about shifters? You mentioned them several times while we talked today. Are you in contact with the local wolf shifter tribe by any chance?"

"No, not really," said Lukav, shaking his head. "I mean, I could locate them if I had a week or so, but I’d really rather not. Talking to them is annoying, and they don’t like me very much ever since I tried to buy the shifter ritual off of them that one time."

"Ah," said Zorian with some disappointment. "It’s just that I also talked to Vani, the local scholar in Knyazov Dveri, and he recommended I try to contact the local wolf shifters for help. Do you think the idea has any merit?"

"In terms of whether their soul magic expertise could have helped you? Maybe, though I wouldn’t bet on it," said Lukav. "But I really, really doubt they would agree to help you. The shifter tribe he speaks of, the Red Fang tribe, is fiercely protective of their special magic and suspicious of anyone who takes an interest in it. Hell, they don’t even talk to other shifter tribes about it! Having nigh-exclusive access to shifter magic is very prestigious for them, and they don’t want to share it with anyone."

"Then why did you offer to buy it off of them?" asked Zorian curiously.

"Well I didn’t know that then, did I? How the hell was I supposed to know these things when they barely talk to anyone in the mage community?" groused Lukav. "Okay, yeah, I may have been a little too insistent, but they could have explained things to me politely instead of making such a big deal out of it."

"I see," said Zorian carefully. Lukav probably wasn’t the best person to help him contact the shifters, it seemed. Just as well, since he had a much likelier lead right now in the form of Alanic.

He agreed he would drop by tomorrow in the evening to pick up Lukav, and that they would then go meet Alanic together. The two men were old friends according to Lukav, and Alanic would be easier to deal with if he was there to vouch for Zorian’s character and honesty.

Zorian hoped that the priest would be as useful as Lukav claimed he would be.

The next day Zorian spent an entire morning practicing the severing disc to make sure he could actually control it properly the next time he used it, switching to various levitation exercises when he got bored or ran low on mana. As evening approached, Zorian teleported to Lukav’s village and spent an hour or so in idle chitchat with the man. Zorian wasn’t sure, but it seemed to him that the man had hinted at the possibility of teaching Zorian some of his secrets. Of course, there would probably be an apprenticeship contract involved if he wanted to take Lukav upon that offer, but with the time loop in place, such entanglements wouldn’t be permanent in nature. Perhaps he should set aside a future restart or two to see what the man had to offer, but transformation magic simply wasn’t a priority right now. He needed information and defenses against soul magic before anything else.

Eventually, they both got on their way. Lukav had wanted to walk to Alanic’s residence, but Zorian had vetoed the idea arguing that would be a waste of time when he could just teleport them next to the man’s house instead. Admittedly his only experience in teleporting others had been when he had retreated from Vazen’s house with Gurey in tow, but he was confident he could replicate that success. And as it turned out, he was right about that.

"I’m surprised someone as young as you can teleport," Lukav said conversationally, looking at their new surroundings to determine where exactly they ended up at. They were not far from the temple that Alanic worked at and which also served as his home, but Zorian opted not to teleport too close, as Lukav indicated that the man could be somewhat trigger happy about such things. "You’re, what, 16? I guess I finally met one of those kid geniuses people talk about. You’re not that Kazinski, are you?"

"No, I just happen to have the same last name as Daimen," Zorian lied.

"Figures," the man said. "You must get that question a lot."

"You have no idea," Zorian sighed. Thankfully, Kazinski wasn’t that rare of a last name and no one had accused him of lying when he denied any connections.

Whatever Lukav had been trying to say next was promptly drowned out by the unmistakable sounds of explosions coming from the house in front of them, immediately followed by angry shouting in an unknown language and sounds of gunshots.

Zorian quickly drew his spell rod and scowled. He had been afraid of this. Whoever was behind the disappearance of the soul mages had noticed their assassination of Lukav had failed and decided to throw subtlety out of the window and move fast to eliminate their remaining target. They no doubt knew that Lukav and Alanic were friends and that Alanic would soon know all about the assassination attempt.

He cautiously advanced forward, Lukav trailing after him.

There were no undead this time, probably because the target was a well-known undead-hunter and was thus bound to be good against them. Instead, the attackers consisted of 15 men armed with rifles – probably non-magical mercenaries – and 2 mages acting like spell support. They were hesitant to simply storm Alanic’s house for some reason, and instead waited outside for something to happen. Unwilling to charge into a group of riflemen like idiots, both Zorian and Lukav settled in behind some trees to observe the group.

"They’re trying to bring down the wards before they move in," Zorian realized after a few seconds. "The mage on the right is trying to collapse the entire warding scheme, the one on the left is protecting him from all reprisals while he’s busy and the riflemen are periodically shooting at the windows to keep Alanic from raining down offensive spells on them at will."

A ray of fire punctuated his whispered statement by erupting from one of the second story windows, aiming for the mage who was dismantling the wards. The other mage immediately shielded his companion from the attack, and the riflemen responded with a withering barrage of bullets at the offending opening.

"We have to help him," Lukav said firmly.

"The only option I see is waiting for a good opening," Zorian said. "I don’t see a way to get involved right now that wouldn’t immediately get us both killed."

"Can you deal with the two mages if I take care of the gun-toting idiots?" Lukav asked.

Zorian gave him a curious look. How did he intend to do that? Was he one of those idiots that still underestimated the effectiveness of guns even after the huge death toll they racked up against combat mages in the Splinter Wars?

"Well?" Lukav asked, a little more harshly.

Deciding to take some risk, Zorian skimmed the man’s surface thoughts for a moment. He promptly realized that the man beside him cared deeply about Alanic and couldn’t bear to see him killed if he could do something, anything about it. He was ready to move in with or without Zorian, but he honestly thought he could prevail against the riflemen. He was far less sure whether he could survive against them if he had to deal with the mage support as well, though.

"I can deal with them, yeah," said Zorian. "Wait for two minutes before you charge in."

He then promptly cast invisibility on himself and walked off in the direction of the two mages.

He wasn’t walking for the sake of being dramatic – the invisibility spell he was using was a very delicate optical illusion that required his conscious attention to maintain. Any sort of distracting activity, such as fighting or casting spells, immediately unraveled it. He couldn’t even run without turning into a shimmering humanoid outline that was far more attention grabbing than simply walking up to the mages with no cloaking attempts.

But a fast walk turned out to be sufficient. He was practically on top of the two mages when Lukav finally grew sick of waiting and charged into the fray with a battle cry.

At least he thought the creature that came charging in was Lukav. The huge bull covered in dark green, fishlike scales, its eyes glowing with malevolent red light, seemed like something a transformation expert would use and it sure as hell wasn’t aligned with the attackers. The beast let loose a loud bellow that was laced with some kind of magical fear effect. Zorian ignored the mental attack easily enough, but three of the riflemen weren’t as fearless and immediately fled screaming. The rest were shaken enough by the fear effect that they gave the bull a few crucial moments to close in before they started firing.

As Zorian expected, those scales weren’t just for show, and the bullets didn’t do much. The two hostile mages beside him seemed to realize their forces weren’t going to fare well against this new threat because the defender suddenly started to cast a spell and the ward breaker sped up his work. Deciding that the defender was the bigger threat, Zorian decided to forgo any fancy spellwork and simply pulled out a knife from his belt and rammed it harshly into the man’s neck, dropping his own invisibility in the process.

The other mage didn’t react fast enough, too shocked at Zorian’s sudden appearance, and received a swift kick in the groin a moment later. He immediately collapsed on the ground with a keening wail. After checking to see if any of the riflemen were gunning for him (they weren’t, as they were too busy being trampled by the bull beast that Lukav had transformed into) Zorian reached into the mage’s mind and blasted it with a crude telepathic assault. The man went unconscious like Zorian had been hoping he would, out of the fight.

Before Zorian could decide whether he should get involved in the fight against the riflemen (it seemed unnecessary, and he wasn’t largely immune to gunfire like Lukav was), a trio of flaming projectiles rained down from the second floor and incinerated three of the riflemen that had been trying to rally the others. The bull-beast let loose another fear-laced bellow at this, and the survivors promptly fled.

Zorian watched them go, ready to erect a shield around himself if one of them decided to let loose a few parting shots. None of them did.

The bull beast let out a derisive snort and kicked the ground a few times before suddenly… folding upon itself, for the lack of a better word, and becoming a man. Specifically, Lukav.

Man, transformation was more useful than he had figured it was. He understood why Lukav had been reluctant to engage the attackers without someone to take out the mages though – without hands, the alchemist could not cast any defensive spells himself, and was very vulnerable to hostile magic.

Any conversation was postponed when a short, bald, muscular man literally dropped out of the sky in front of them. It took Zorian almost a second to realize that this was probably Alanic Zosk and that he had jumped down from the freaking two story window!

He looked unaffected by the fall, but still!

"Al, you idiot, I told you not to do that shit!" Lukav yelled. "I almost firebombed you before I realized it was you!"

"You, boy," Alanic said to Zorian, completely ignoring Lukav’s anger. "Why did you let those men go? You could have picked them off as they fled."

"I… didn’t think it was okay to kill fleeing opponents?" Zorian said, surprised at being put on the spot like that. "I don’t know, it just seemed too bloodthirsty to just shoot them in the back while they ran."

A short silence ensued as Alanic gave him a blank look. His mind, though unshielded, was incredibly disciplined and gave Zorian no insight to the man’s personality and mood. He idly noted that one of the man’s eyes was blue, while the other one was brown. There was a horrid vertical scar over his blue eye, which really looked like it should have destroyed it as well when it was made.

"I see," he said finally. "You’re young."

"What has that got to do with anything?" Zorian protested, annoyed at the man’s attitude. They just saved the man’s life, for god’s sake!

"You haven’t been fighting for long," he simply said. "You’re inexperienced."

Yeah, well, you’re an asshole, thought Zorian. But outwardly he just frowned instead.

Yeah, Zorian could already see Alanic would be one of those people. He really had the damnedest luck.

Alanic Zosk turned out to be pretty calm about the full blown assault on his temple by two dozen gun-wielding mercenaries, refusing Lukav’s demand that they go and report the thing to the nearest Guild station right away with a dismissive statement that it was too soon to involve them. He even had the unconscious mage that Zorian had disabled transferred to the dungeon in the temple’s basement (why exactly did a temple have a dungeon, Zorian wondered but was afraid to ask), openly admitting he intended to have the man interrogated later.

In the meantime, he wanted to know what Zorian and Lukav came to him for. No, he didn’t need time to calm down, why do you ask?

Zorian had to admit he admired the man’s composure, even if he was a rude ass.

"Interesting," Alanic said after Zorian repeated the story he told Lukav. "Very well, I will see what has been done to you. Lukav, please leave the room while I examine mister Kazinski here."

Just like that? Apparently yes. Unlike Lukav, Alanic didn’t use any fancy ritual rooms, and the examination took all of five minutes before the man had pronounced his verdict.

"You have a marker stamped into your soul," Alanic told him bluntly.

"A what?" Zorian asked.

"A marker is a combination of a beacon and an identification tag. It allows certain spells to find the marker very easily across great distances and unambiguously identifies whatever is tagged by the marker. They are often used by shopkeepers in fancier shops to track stolen wares, by high-security prisons and spies to track movements of marked individuals and in construction of certain wards that allow people to be keyed in and therefore free of some or all of the restrictions that all other visitors labor under. Among other things. They are usually placed on items, as placing permanent markers on people is iffy and requires tattoos and such. Yours though, is stamped directly into your soul."

Zorian remained quiet, his thoughts churning. A marker. That was why he ended up caught in the time loop along with Zach, wasn’t it? The spell wasn’t keyed in to the originator’s soul or some such, since those things were ambiguous and could fail – the original looper could end up with his soul damaged or slightly altered, much like what happened to him and Zach in the end, and then the spell could glitch and fail to loop them back like it’s supposed to. No, the makers of the loop instead stamped Zach’s soul with something unchangeable and unmistakable.

And then Red Robe and Zorian inherited it, because the makers of the loop were a little too smart for their own good…

"Removing the marker-" Alanic began, oblivious or uncaring about Zorian’s obvious state of deep thought.

"I don’t want it removed!" Zorian immediately protested, broken out of his thoughts.

Alanic gave him a considering look.

"I suppose you are fortunate then, because I do not think I could remove it even if I wanted to," Alanic said. "It is unlike anything I have ever seen. The marker is woven incredibly tightly into your soul, suffusing every corner of it. It is as if a chunk of your soul was replaced with it and it then grew to fill every nook and cranny it could find to root itself in as firmly as possible."

Oh hell…

He rose from his seat in agitation, pacing around the room. Alanic watched him impassively, silent and expressionless, until Zorian calmed down a little and sat back down.

"I need more information," he said. "And I need a way to protect myself from things like this in the future. Can you help me?"

Alanic nodded.

"But tomorrow," he added. "For now I have a prisoner to interrogate."

32. Alternatives

Despite Alanic’s proclamation that he was going to interrogate the prisoner, he did not immediately descend into the temple dungeon. Instead he started rummaging through a nearby cabinet full of potion bottles while Zorian slowly absorbed today’s newest revelations, opting to remain in the room for the moment. He was not in the mood for answering questions that Lukav would have for him once he got outside, and Alanic seemed like the sort of person who would warn him if he was being bothersome. Since Alanic said nothing about his continued presence, Zorian felt he had tacit permission to stay.

He had a piece of propagating, self-repairing magic lodged in his soul. Part of him marveled at the magical expertise of the person or thing that created the time loop system, but the greater part of him couldn’t help but wonder what exactly was crammed into said wonder of magical spell design. Alanic’s description, as well as Lukav’s inability to identify the spell despite his advanced-looking ritual, painted a picture of something far too complex and lifelike to be a mere identification tag.

This was important, he could feel it – he needed to know how the marker functioned as soon as possible. For one thing, if there was some kind of hostile contingency woven inside it, ready to screw him over once he tripped over some esoteric activation condition, he wanted to know about it. Not to mention that this particular piece of magic could very well be a key clue to understanding the time loop. What kind of secrets were locked inside of it? Kael had speculated that whatever spell had been placed on Zach to initiate the time loop had all sorts of safeguards and contingencies woven into it, and while the marker clearly wasn’t the source of the looping magic itself, it sounded like the perfect place to put those safeguards in. Maybe it had the time loop instructions manual encoded somewhere in its structure? Well, probably nothing so convenient, but still.

There was one thing that still bothered him greatly – if he had a marker in his soul that uniquely identified him as a time looper, why the hell hadn’t Red Robe tracked him down by now? His enemy was a proficient soul mage, after all. Zorian found it difficult to believe he was ignorant of the marker mechanism. With that in mind, he should have had little trouble locating every single time looper, Zorian included. But he didn’t. Why was that?

"Mister Zosk?" Zorian spoke up. "Could you spare a moment, please?"

"Call me Alanic," the priest said, stopping his inspection of the cabinet with an annoyed huff. Zorian got the impression the annoyance was directed more at the cabinet than at Zorian, though. "What is it?"

"I know you said we’d speak tomorrow, but I’d just like to know how difficult it is to locate a marker like mine. How hard would it be for you to track me down with the best magic at your disposal?"

"By tracking your marker? Almost impossible," Alanic immediately stated. "I’d need the original keystone from the maker of the spell to define the search criteria properly. That thing is far too complex for anything else."

Zorian frowned. "Wouldn’t having my own copy of the marker sidestep that?" he asked.

"Well yes, but that would require you to be right beside me and serve as a willing focus of the spell. A tracking spell that requires you to be right next to the target is functionally useless, wouldn’t you think?" He suddenly gave Zorian a shrewd look. "But what you’re really wondering about is not you tracking down the person whose soul fragment gave you the marker, but them tracking you, aren’t you, Mister Kazinski?"

"Call me Zorian," he said. If the man wanted Zorian to be casual with him, he should show the same courtesy. "And yes, that is basically what I’m worried about. How easy would it be for another holder of the marker to track me down?"

Alanic quickly walked over to a nearby bookshelf, plucked a plain brown book from its shelf and handed it to Zorian.

"The spell you want is on page 43," Alanic told him.

Zorian quickly leafed through the book until he reached the indicated page. The spell in question was not an invocation, but rather a 10-minute ritual. It allowed the caster to locate a specified marker based on the copy of the marker in the caster’s possession, and it had a downright jaw-dropping range. If Zorian was reading this correctly, it could locate any and all copies of the marker over a circular area that extended well beyond Eldemar’s borders!

Yeah, it was not cheap in terms of mana use – it required enough mana that Zorian wouldn’t have been able to cast it at all before the time loop, and even now, after 3 years of restarts, it would take a sizeable chunk of his reserves. But still, for a nation-wide search spell it was shockingly accessible. He supposed its very narrow search focus allowed it to be hyper-efficient about mana use. Really, the only possible deal breaker was that the spell assumed the caster had a keystone imprinted with the copy of the marker, and would have to be slightly modified to switch the reference target of the spell from a stone held in the caster’s hand to a marker stamped on their soul.

Zorian sincerely doubted Red Robe was incapable of making such minor alterations to spells, though.

"I could be tracked from one end of the country to another," Zorian mumbled disbelievingly to himself.

"Yes," Alanic agreed. "Possibly even further. I don’t claim to have comprehensive knowledge of tracking spells so there may be a version with even greater range. Your insistence that the marker must stay on was quite surprising. I hope you have a good reason for leaving a giant target painted on your soul."

"Ugh. I’m not happy about the situation, but I do. I really, really do. I’d also like to cast this tracking spell myself to see how many other people turn up in results, but we can deal with that tomorrow. I’ve already kept you from your interrogation long enough."

"Unfortunately, I seem to have run out of truth potions," the priest said unhappily, throwing a glare at his potion cabinet. "Annoying. You can’t buy those on the open market and it takes days for Lukav to make a batch. It seems I won’t be interrogating anyone today…"

Oh. He agreed with Alanic, that really was annoying – he wanted to know who the guy was working for just as much as the priest did. He thought about offering his services as a mind reader to the priest but quickly shelved that idea. Aside from the very likely possibility he would make Alanic too suspicious of Zorian to help him with his soul magic problems, there was the fact that he wasn’t sure how much help he would be anyway. His mind reading skills were still very unreliable at this point. He’d feel pretty stupid if he outed himself as a mind mage and then failed to achieve anything of note – better try that in some later restart, after he gave his telepathic abilities some polish.

"No matter. I will figure something out. I’m afraid I’ll have to postpone our meeting for a day or two because of this, though. I’ll send a message through Lukav once I have sorted my business in order. Agreeable?"

"Sure," Zorian shrugged. "Just don’t die before we meet again. Whoever wants you and Lukav dead can clearly throw a lot of resources at the problem so they’re unlikely to stop now."

"The same goes for you, young man," Alanic scoffed. "You seem to have an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time. Suspicious, that. If I were in the attacker’s place, I would definitely make sure to get rid of you before trying again. And no offense, but you look like a much softer target than me."

Not having much to say to that, Zorian simply bid the man goodbye, had a brief conversation with Lukav outside the room to inform him of everything and then went back to his room at the inn. He would sleep on things before making any decisions.

With the next several days freed up for his own activities, Zorian decided to go visit Silverlake and see if the capricious old witch was in a better mood to help this time. The trouble was, he could no longer find her cottage. His memory was extremely good, and he remembered exactly where it was in relation to surrounding natural landmarks, but when he physically got to the location there was nothing there. No cottage, no witch, no nothing. As far as Zorian could tell, it wasn’t an illusion and there was no ward in place messing with his mind to stop him from noticing it – he detected no mental tampering, his area-wide dispels revealed no optical flickering, and he physically passed through the area that the cottage stood on in the previous restart and met no resistance whatsoever.

How the hell did she do that? Dimensional shenanigans, maybe? Like a pocket dimension that can intersect with reality under some circumstance or something?

Whatever the exact mechanics, he clearly wasn’t going to reach Silverlake’s place without her inviting him first. Considering that last time it took him several days of wandering around and almost dying to get her attention, he decided to not bother with that and find something else to do.

Namely, investigating the rest of the disappeared soul mages. While it was true that Alanic seemed to be his best clue at the moment, it wouldn’t hurt to check the other locations as well. Thus, while waiting for Alanic to contact him again, Zorian proceeded to break into the homes of each of his targets before combing through them with every divination spell in his arsenal. The knowledge he picked up from Gurey’s little escapade was quite useful here, as a number of those homes were warded against entry and divinations, and that would have given him quite a bit of trouble in the past.

What he found out wasn’t much, but it did put at least one question to rest – the attackers had indeed been active long before the time loop started. Two of the houses showed signs of a struggle, and forensic spells dated those signs about a month to a month and a half before the start of the time loop. In addition, the house of the old curse-breaking herbalist lady looked pristine on first glance, but Zorian easily detected evidence of repair magic used on furniture and sloppily erased blood splatter on the walls – both dated 3 days before the start of the loop.

Zorian silently thanked Haslush for his divination instructions – without them, he would have never been able to tell such things with any degree of certainty.

He also made sure to search the houses for anything personally interesting while he was at it, and here he had greater success. The herbalist lady had intact notes about her curse-breaking side-business – Zorian pocketed those, even if he wasn’t able to make use of them at the moment. She also had a pretty extensive journal that listed where to find rare plants in the nearby forest as well as detailed some of her rare recipes. Zorian left that alone for now, but made a mental note to show it to Kael at some point and see if it was worth something. The ransacked tower turned out to have been imperfectly ransacked, and Zorian managed to find two different secret compartments that the attackers missed. One held a trio of high-quality combat staffs and a stack of blasting rods. The other held a bunch of spellbooks containing combat spells – specifically, the sort of combat spells you couldn’t buy legally anywhere because they were far too effective and lethal for the Mage Guild’s tastes. Naturally, Zorian swiped all of it for his personal use. He found more interesting stuff in other houses, but nothing he felt like taking at the moment. The familiar-obsessed guy, for instance, had mountains and mountains of books and journals dedicated to soul bonds, magical creatures, and familiar-related magics. It was interesting, but not something he needed at the moment.

In the end it was five days before Alanic finally contacted Zorian again. If Lukav didn’t insist that his friend was alive and well, just unusually occupied with something, Zorian would have feared the attackers got him.

Regardless, Zorian soon found himself seated in front of Alanic, ready to finally discuss things.

"I apologize for the wait," Alanic said. "I’m afraid that the confessions I managed to force out of the prisoner had far more far-reaching consequences that I had initially suspected."

"Oh? I don’t suppose you could tell me what those are?" asked Zorian.

"I’m afraid not. It’s not something you should concern yourself with," Alanic said, leveling him a mild glare.

"Fine, fine, I get it," Zorian said, raising his hands in a placating gesture. Truthfully, it did not matter much because he already knew what Alanic had found out. While the priest seemed to have some sort of natural mental defense, his friend Lukav didn’t. Zorian had simply pestered the transformation expert about the prisoner and read the man’s thoughts wherever he refused to answer.

Basically, the mage Zorian incapacitated was hired by none other than Vazen – the man who Gurey wanted him to rob (well, spy on) in the previous restart. Worse, the man appeared to be just an underling himself, with the real ringleader being someone more highly placed in the local hierarchy. Someone capable of interfering with the police and guild investigations.

It was certainly an interesting piece of information, and Zorian had some suspicions of his own about Vazen now. The man had concluded some kind of deal with a company in Cyoria, so it was entirely possible he was connected to the invaders somehow. He had intended to have another go at those documents anyway, but now they acquired a whole new importance.

"Good," Alanic nodded. "What did you want to start with?"

"Well, first of all I’d like to know if you could help me defend myself against soul magic in the future," said Zorian.

"Why wouldn’t I be able to help you with that?" asked Alanic curiously, cocking his head to the side slightly.

"I was told that spellcasters without some measure of soul perception can only cast the most rudimentary of soul magic," said Zorian. And from his attempts to duplicate Kael’s spells, he knew that to be largely true – the only spell he managed to learn from Kael was the one that cloaked him from the soul perception of other necromancers, and Kael claimed that was baby stuff.

"Ah. You’ve been talking to a necromancer, I see," Alanic said.

Zorian winced. "It… seemed like a logical course of action. I had a soul magic problem, and he was a soul mage."

"Hmph. Necromancers," began Alanic, taking pains to stress the word, "have a habit of targeting others with their spells, so of course they consider soul perception to be absolutely essential for their craft. If you just want to cloak your soul in some protective effect, it is hardly necessary to go to such lengths."

Oh, is that why he could cast Kael’s soul sight invisibility spell but not the rest of his arsenal?

"Even for other things, it is possible to use lengthy rituals to get around that requirement. I believe you’ve already experienced an example of such a ritual when Lukav tried to determine what is wrong with you. Don’t be fooled by his lack of skill – Lukav is but a dabbler in this branch of magic, and if you dedicate yourself to the discipline you could end up much more impressive than he is."

"But I’m never going to progress beyond unwieldy ritual setups without soul sight, am I?" guessed Zorian.

Alanic sighed. "Yes. But soul sight is too much of a temptation. It makes soul magic too easy. For the sake of your immortal soul, I implore you to turn away from that path. It is not necessary to go that far just to protect yourself."

"I see," said Zorian. "Out of curiosity, do you have soul perception?"

For the first time since Zorian met him, Alanic looked uncomfortable. "Yes. But that’s… different."

Of course it is, Zorian thought. Do as I say, not as I do, just like it always was.

But he didn’t say that. Instead he asked Alanic what exactly he was willing to teach him.

"There are two ways I can see this going," said Alanic, quickly regaining his composure. "Option one is that I teach you how to perform a plethora of protective rituals to foil hostile soul magic. They are, as you say, cumbersome – casting times can be up to 2 hours long in some cases, and setting up a ritual isn’t easy. They last a long time, though. Weeks if you perform them correctly. The advantage of this path is that you get a way to defend yourself right away – I’m fairly certain you could do the beginning rituals as you are now. Also, some of the rituals will allow you to affect souls other than yours, though none of the rituals I’m willing to teach you can be used on an unwilling target."

"And the disadvantage is that if I’m ever caught unaware by the enemy, I’m screwed because there’s no way to shield myself on a moment’s notice," finished Zorian.

"Exactly. That’s where option number two comes in. With the help of some meditation exercises and special potions, I can teach you how to feel your own soul. If you hone the skill to a required level, this skill will allow you to cast any soul magic that has you as its target. You’ll be able to shield and analyze your soul with invocation spells, and it might even allow you to passively notice when someone is messing with your soul in some fashion."

"I like that option," Zorian said.

"I figured you might," Alanic scoffed. "The problem is that this option isn’t some quick power up. It will take you months to reach useable levels in this skill, and that’s assuming you have the patience and willpower required to perform the exercises every single day for months on end."

"I do," said Zorian curtly.

"We’ll see. I should also mention that until you master the skill of sensing your own soul, this option will leave you just as helpless to soul magic as you are currently."

"Yeah, that’s a little dangerous," Zorian admitted. Still, the second option sounded way more useful and functional than the first one. Maybe if he wasn’t stuck in the time loop he would blanch at the idea of spending months of his life like that, but right now it was looking like a bargain. "I suppose there is a reason why I can’t learn both at the same time?"

"They’re both demanding skills in their own way, and I don’t trust you to be capable of juggling them both effectively," Alanic said, his tone brooking no disagreement.

"Fair enough," Zorian said. He was going to visit the man in future restarts anyway, so he could potentially just pick different options on different restarts. "How about this: you teach me the very basics of the soul rituals, the things I can pick up well enough as I am now, and then we immediately switch to the personal soul awareness project."

"I suppose I can live with that. You should note that the basics of soul rituals won’t do much for you," Alanic noted.

"That’s fine. I’m mostly interested in option number two anyway. The reason I want the basics of soul rituals is because I still want to cast that marker tracking ritual you showed me, and modifying it to work with the thing attached to my soul is probably going to require some working knowledge of soul magic."

"Probably," Alanic agreed.

"Well. Now we come to the make it or break it question," Zorian sighed, fixing a weary gaze at Alanic. "What exactly are you asking of me in exchange for all this?"

Alanic rolled his eyes. "Don’t be so dramatic, boy. Teaching people how to defend themselves against necromancers and hostile spirits is a part of my calling, as far as I’m concerned. I’d take a whole class to teach if people were actually interested. Unfortunately, such threats are considered something of a minor issue in the aftermath of the Necromancer’s War. So while yes, I do intend to send you on an errand or two, it isn’t going to be anything too onerous. Lukav tells me you can teleport?"

"I can, yes."

"Excellent. I was thinking of sending you out as a courier from time to time to some of my more distant contacts. Nothing difficult or dangerous – just delivering some letters and packages for free."

Half an hour later, Zorian had managed to hammer out some kind of agreement with Alanic.

Overall, Zorian felt the priest had been quite generous in his terms – his principal demand was that Zorian had to show dedication, or else Alanic would unceremoniously terminate the lessons and kick him out. Specifically, he had to show up at the temple every evening like clockwork, and show diligence and enthusiasm for the lessons. Right. Oh, and there was the whole business with him being a courier from the priest on occasion, which was of little concern to Zorian – he thought of it as teleportation practice more than anything.

"Well then," Alanic said, leaning back in his chair. "Now that this is all done, we can begin with our first lesson."

"What, now?" Zorian asked in surprise.

"Is there a reason to postpone things?"

"No, no, I’m just surprised. Most of my previous teachers have been… well, no matter. What are we starting with?"

Over the next two weeks Zorian continued studying the other disappearances while attending Alanic’s lessons. He absorbed the basics of soul protection rituals in a few days and then moved onto the meditation exercises needed for personal soul sight, only to find out two things. First, the meditation exercises were incredibly, mind-numbingly boring. No wonder the man was worried about Zorian’s dedication, he could easily imagine someone dropping that after only a few days. But no, Zorian was stronger than that… and besides, he really needed that skill.

Secondly, those special potions Alanic mentioned? What the priest hadn’t clarified at the time – and indeed, hadn’t explained before Zorian actually drank one – was that they were extremely powerful hallucinogens. Almost immediately after downing one, Zorian was assaulted with a cacophony of strange, incomprehensible sights and smells, sounds become distorted and unrecognizable, and his thoughts degenerated into a chaotic mess. It was a profoundly unpleasant experience, and once Zorian finally came to his senses and stopped drooling all over the floor of the temple (the jerk could have at least put a pillow under him!) he felt a powerful desire to punch Alanic in the face. The man had effectively drugged him helpless and was completely unrepentant about it too, claiming that without the help of those potions the entire process could take years. He would have to drink one of those once a week, apparently.

Which was all well and good, but it still didn’t explain why the man hadn’t warned him what would happen when he drank that potion. Personally, Zorian suspected schadenfreude.

Aside from the whole potion incident thing, there was one tiny little detail he had failed to consider when he decided to accept Alanic as his newest personal tutor.

Alanic was a priest. Priests were, generally speaking, very religious people. It stood to reason, then, that they’d be very bothered by people who don’t care much about their own religion or have some gaping holes in their understanding of religious dogma. And with Zorian spending every evening in the temple, it really was too much to expect that Alanic wouldn’t notice just how… lacking… Zorian’s religious credentials were.

The good news was that Alanic wasn’t going to get rid of him because of this. The bad news was that he took it upon himself to correct this glaring deficiency. Thus, not only did Zorian have to suffer through boring meditation sessions every evening, they were now interspersed with longwinded lectures about the gods, angels, spirits, and man’s place in the natural order.

Heaven help him. Or not, he supposed. He doubted the angels would have a lot of compassion for someone in his position.

"…and thus, with the evidence that the gods have fallen silent no longer possible to ignore, and the unescapable fact that no more miracles would be forthcoming, the Holy Triumvirate decided to loosen the limitations on soul magic – a decision that did much to soften the blow of the Silence, but one that would have far-reaching negative consequences. But I can see that you are starting to lose focus so we will continue this tomorrow."

Thank the gods. Zorian quickly vacated the temple before the man could have a chance to change his mind.

He was barely out of the temple gates when he realized he was walking into an ambush.

It was a crow that tipped him off. It looked normal enough, though it was curiously brave in not fleeing at his approach. He had, however, gotten into a habit of automatically scanning the minds of every animal he saw as telepathic practice, and the crow in question didn’t have any. That immediately raised an alarm in his head and he stopped, expanding his mind sense to maximum range.

In the next second he threw himself to the side, narrowly avoiding a hail of bullets that ripped through his previous location. Almost reflexively, he fired two force missiles in quick succession: one at the undead crow that had taken flight while he dodged – he didn’t need that thing pecking his eyes out while he was busy elsewhere – and another one straight into the air, seemingly at nothing. That one was what Taiven called a screamer – a missile that produced a loud, shrill scream as it flew through the air. Zorian hoped that the noise would give pause to the ambushers, at least for a moment, but the real purpose of it was to attract Alanic’s attention and tell him there was a fight going on outside of his temple.

You know, just in case the gunshots weren’t clear enough on that.

The first bolt collided with the crow, causing it to erupt into a shower of feathers and fleshy bits (but no blood), but the second one didn’t have much effect on the attackers. Zorian was forced to immediately erect a shield in front of himself to tank a powerful beam of shining force, and was then pinned in place by a withering hail of bullets. He had to pour half of his mana reserves into strengthening the shield, but it thankfully held.

Also thankfully, the attackers had a piss poor sense of tactics – apparently the entire force wasted their ammo on the initial barrage, and thus couldn’t provide any further fire to keep him pinned in place while they reloaded. Zorian promptly took advantage of this to take cover behind a nearby tree, become invisible and then vacate the area as fast as he could without breaking the optical cloak.

It was a good thing he did, because the tree he had been hiding behind soon became a target of a massive fireball that reduced it to charcoal and did horrible things to everything around it.

These people really didn’t pull any punches, did they?

Tracking his attackers' movements with his mind sense, Zorian could tell they weren’t fooled with his maneuver. They knew he wasn’t dead, and they were coming after him. Whelp, time to exercise the better part of valor and teleport away to safety!

A few seconds later, he sighed in resignation. Of course they erected a teleport ward around the area. Well, if that’s how they wanted to play then so be it! Closing his eyes, he located the nearest gunman with his mind sense, connected with his mind and then hit him with the best telepathic attack he could manage.

He felt the target stop immediately, but apparently he’d failed to knock the man out. No matter. He disconnected from the man’s mind and moved on the next one and repeated the procedure. He grinned nastily when he felt the man’s mind shut down from the strain, the gunman falling unconscious.

Then he moved onto the rest of the ambushing force, attacking their minds one by one. Two thirds of them were strong enough to weather the attack, though they would likely be dazed for a while and suffer a nasty headache for the rest of the day, but a full third found Zorian’s telepathic attack too much for them. Sadly, the mage that supported them figured out what was happening and shielded his own mind against the tactic. Still, even if he didn’t get them all, he succeeded in taking away their momentum and slowing them down.

It cost him, though. His telepathic powers, exotic as they may be, were still magic… and like all magic, they used mana to power themselves. His empathy and mind sense didn’t seem to cost him anything that he could detect, and establishing a telepathic link with another was trivial in terms of mana expenditure – even for him, it was so minute as to be unnoticeable. But these telepathic attacks he had been doing? They were incredibly cheap, especially considering their effectiveness, but he had performed a lot of them in quick succession. He was almost spent.

He sure hoped Alanic got off his ass sometime soon, preferably before the mage could rally his forces and come after him again.

Suddenly, just as Zorian was about to start booby-trapping the place like crazy, another group of people teleported in and his heart sank. Well that just wasn’t f- wait, they were fighting the first group. Huh. It seemed Alanic had called for the cavalry.

The sound of gunshots and flashes of spellfire filled the air again, but this time Zorian wasn’t the target. Zorian wisely decided to sit this one out, being mostly out of mana and not wanting for one of the newcomers to confuse him for an enemy and put a bullet in his head before he had a chance to explain.

Ten minutes later, the noise quieted down and Zorian made his way back to the temple. There he found Alanic talking with a mixed group composed of a four-man group of Guild battlemages and a small contingent of Eldemar soldiers. He was questioned on his role in the battle, but the fact that Alanic vouched for him kept the man in charge of the group from dragging him back to the Guild station for questioning. Apparently Alanic had quite a lot of pull with the Mage Guild.

He was worried the attackers would blab about Zorian’s telepathic abilities, but apparently they were under the impression Zorian cast some kind of area-wide knockout spell rather than assaulting their minds directly. The leader of the Guild force even commended him on his restraint when faced with deadly force. Alanic gave him a severe look though. Zorian wasn’t sure if he did that because he figured out there was something fishy about the whole story or because he disapproved of Zorian’s soft approach. He knew from previous conversations with the man that Alanic firmly believed in tough justice and striking back at threats as effectively as possible, so he might just be annoyed that Zorian had not used something more lethal.

Eventually he was given permission to leave (though warned not to leave his current accommodations in Knyazov Dveri for the foreseeable future) and beat a hasty retreat back to his room.

When Zorian reached his room, he felt totally drained and wanted to do nothing more than to crawl into his bed and sleep until tomorrow. That had been… intense. He thought he’d have gotten used to having his life targeted and being in life-and-death situations, but he apparently wasn’t anywhere near that mindset yet. The questioning that followed wasn’t really pleasant either, and he suspected he had overextended his mind a bit with his last stunt because his thoughts felt slightly more sluggish and fuzzy than they should, even taking his tiredness into account.

But no, he couldn’t go to sleep yet. Today was significant in that he had finally finished modifying the marker tracking spell with Alanic’s help, and he wanted to test it right away. His mana reserves had recovered by now, so he was good for a try. He quickly fished out one of the wakefulness potions he had made over the last week and downed it in one go. His head cleared out almost immediately, and so he promptly started creating the ritual circle with the handful of salt and powdered quartz.

After the circle was made and triple-checked for faults, he slowly went through the ritual, mindful not to mess it up since it would take a large chunk of his mana reserves whether it succeeded or failed.

The moment he spoke the last line of the ritual, Zorian was suddenly given a sense of the location and distance of all markers within the range of the spell.

All two of them. One was in the very center of the search area – that was him, obviously – and the other was far to the south, somewhere along Eldemar’s southern border.

Zorian freely admitted he had not expected that. He had expected the ritual to locate either three markers or just one (himself). How can there be just two? Was one of the other time travelers out of range? Did he misunderstand something?

He would have to repeat the ritual at different intervals to see if another marker popped up at some point. On the very beginning of the next restart, certainly. But if the number of markers remained stubbornly at two, then that would mean that at least one of the time travelers didn’t have the marker. Probably Red Robe, because Zorian was sure that Zach had one. It would explain why Red Robe didn’t just make a beeline for Zorian when he realized he existed, and why he felt the need to ask Zorian how many other time travelers there were and who they were.

But that would mean that Red Robe became a time looper through some other mechanism than Zorian did, wouldn’t it?

"Nothing can ever be simple about this, can it?" he sighed, rubbing his eyes.

No matter. His immediate goals remained unchanged by this new complication – learn how to protect his soul, become a better fighter, and polish his mind magic into something usable and reliable. His mind drifted to the battle he was caught in today and he nodded to himself. His performance wasn’t flawless, but he got out of it alive and the growth of his skills was undeniable.

Despite all the issues he encountered, he seemed well on his way to achieving his goals.

33. Gateways

Standing still in the empty living room inside Vazen’s house, Zorian stared unhappily at the splatter of green gunk in front of him that was currently eating through the floor with an audible sizzle. One could hardly tell that, not too long ago, the acid slime in front of him used to be a stack of important documents stored in Vazen’s safe. The merchant really didn’t want anyone to take a look at these, it seemed.

The operation started well. Everything started well. Not seeing the point of reinventing the wheel, Zorian used his past method of entering Vazen’s home, then began dismantling the protections on the safe. Aside from the already familiar explosion trap, he also found a sleep trap which aimed to knock any prospective thieves unconscious the moment they touched the safe. He disabled both traps and, having found no further spellwork protecting the safe, immediately tried to remove the documents.

He promptly triggered a mechanical mechanism that dumped some kind of powerful acidic mixture on top of the safe’s contents. The good news was that he managed to avoid getting any of the gunk on his hands – considering what the stuff was doing to the floor at the moment, it would have probably eaten right through his bones before he managed to get it off of him. The bad news was that he failed to salvage any of the safe’s contents before the gunk ruined it. He managed to levitate the contents out of the safe, yes, but the gunk was almost like glue in the way it clung to the papers. He was unable to separate it from the surviving documents before it ate through them all and then happily continued to dissolve the floor beneath them.

He shuddered. He was really, really glad he managed to yank his hands away in time to avoid getting any of that stuff on them.

Once again, Zorian was forced to leave Vazen’s place empty-handed. He was sorely tempted to rig the entire place to explode in Vazen’s face the moment he came back home as revenge, but that would be petty and stupid. A murder of such an influential man would attract a lot of attention, plus Alanic was probably paying very close attention to the man. And he had tried to rob the man after all, so he had no right to be particularly outraged anyway.

Still… Zorian was now absolutely certain that Vazen was involved in some very shady things, and he wasn’t talking about tax fraud or industrial espionage. There was no way that Vazen would rig his safe to destroy things like business contracts and production blueprints in the event of discovery – the sheer amount of money he’d lost doing that must have been exorbitant. There had to be something more in there among those papers. Something incredibly illegal and incriminating, to the point where Vazen would rather lose everything than be discovered possessing it.

He was definitely coming back in the next restart. Maybe the man’s misdeeds were unconnected to the Ibasan invaders gunning after Cyoria or the group targeting soul mages around Knyazov Dveri, but somehow Zorian doubted it. It cost him nothing to check, in any case.

Well, unless Vazen had even more horrifying surprises waiting for him should he overcome the second layer of his defenses. Next time he was bringing a 10-foot pole with him, because there was no way he was putting his hands into that safe anymore.

The day after he had survived the failed ambush just outside Alanic’s temple, Zorian arrived at his next meditation session feeling more than a little bit apprehensive. And not just about the possibility of another ambush – he did not like the looks Alanic had been giving him when he was giving his statement and Zorian was worried about what that meant for him. However, the lesson that day had been wholly unremarkable – there had been no second ambush, and Alanic gave no indication he was upset or suspicious of him. Thus, he put it out of his mind and decided to follow Alanic’s example by carrying on as if nothing happened.

Now, three days later, Zorian could safely say that had been a mistake. Being dragged into the temple courtyard for a test of his combat skills sounded suspiciously like punishment to his ears.

As an aside, why did a temple have a battle arena in its courtyard instead of a nice, peaceful garden or something? Between that and the dungeons in the basement he was starting to get really dubious about this building’s spiritual credentials.

"Err, not that I don’t appreciate your help in shoring up my modest combat capabilities, but we really should be focusing on getting my inner soul sight functioning," said Zorian, shuffling uncomfortably in place. "You told me yourself that this skill requires total focus from me to master correctly."

Alanic simply continued staring at him, silent and impassive, from his corner of the arena.

And then he gestured with his staff at Zorian and threw a fireball at him.

Zorian was not surprised at the attack. He had been expecting something like that, to be honest. What did throw him for a loop was that he chose that particular spell to open combat with. Fireball wasn’t something you threw at a junior mage to test them – it was far too lethal for that! Even a stunted one was capable of killing a human on a direct hit, and a regular shield spell could not protect against it. No matter how powerful, it was still just a disc of force in front of the caster – the expanding sphere of fiery energy would just flow around it and envelop the caster behind it.

The shock lasted for but a moment, however, and then he immediately erected a dome of force around himself – not just a shield, but a full-blown aegis that protected him from all sides at once. The fireball hit the dome not long after, and Zorian’s view was momentarily blanked out by a blanket of fire.

When the fire cleared, he found himself standing in front of Alanic again, the priest as silent and unmoving as he had ever been. His apprehension at the situation dropped slightly. The fireball had been a very weak one. He knew because one of the retired mages he’d helped in his aimless wanderings prior to his arrival in Knyazov Dveri had taught him how to get feedback from his defensive spells, and his aegis had held strong against a spell that should have taxed it to its limit. Zorian was sure the man in front of him could have done much better than that if he had wanted to. The fact he hadn’t immediately followed up on his fireball with something to finish him off enforced the idea that this really was some kind of test.

A very messed up, dangerous test, but he was kind of used to such things at this point.

He sent a single magic missile towards Alanic. He could see the man scoff as he lazily raised his arm to block the puny attack, and suppressed a smile. Though it looked like a magic missile spell, the projectile was anything but – it didn’t so much smash into things as erupt into a spherical wave of force, much like a fireball that used force instead of fire. A forceball, if you will. Alanic will almost certainly use a regular shield instead of a full aegis against a puny magic missile, and then the forceball will-

The space in front of Alanic suddenly warped and shimmered, and Zorian’s forceball promptly winked out of existence. A dispelling wave of some sort, if he guessed correctly. Dammit. Then Alanic decided it was his turn again, and Zorian was too busy dodging bolts of fire and incineration rays to focus on internal cursing.

Zorian quickly learned that Alanic loved fire spells. Even after Zorian switched from all-purpose shields to variants specifically designed to tank fire magic at the expense of performance against other damage types, he persisted in using them. After his initial barrage of weak, fast-casting, numerous fire projectiles failed to overwhelm Zorian, he switched to trying to steamroll him with gigantic, slow-moving spheres of fire that didn’t explode and instead simply tried to envelop him in their flames. After Zorian managed to dispel them, he responded with more fireballs – and this time he wasn’t holding back.

Zorian tried to counter-attack whenever he spotted an opening, but all of his attacks were neutralized with contemptuous ease. Trying to kick up dust and other visibility obstacles failed because Alanic could somehow cause a gust of wind to disperse such attacks away from him without making a single gesture or visibly exerting himself. Items were useless because he could telekinetically hurl all projectiles away from him with a simple sweeping gesture, and any magical projectiles were blocked, intercepted or dispelled. Even after Zorian started launching projectiles in complicated parabolic, zigzagging or spiral trajectories, the priest seemed to have no problems tracking them and responding.

Finally, Zorian was nearly out of mana and decided to go out with a bang. He put most of his remaining mana into a ray of force that he promptly fired at Alanic’s face. The attack would have killed the priest had it really connected, though Zorian knew it would never connect. Sure enough, the man simply side-stepped it and Zorian collapsed on the ground in exhaustion, his arms raised in surrender.

"I give up," he panted. "Whatever point you wanted to make to me, you’ve done it. Though if this was all for the sake of showing me I’m not the biggest fish in the pond, you needn’t have bothered – I’m well aware how screwed I’d be in a face-off against a veteran battle mage."

"The point was seeing how long it would take before you started resorting to lethal moves," Alanic said, walking up to him and offering him a hand. Zorian internally debated the merits of casting the shocking grasp spell and electrocuting the jerk, but in the end decided to be a bigger man and simply accepted his help in getting up. It probably wouldn’t have worked, anyway. "I’m rather disappointed it took until you were on your last legs to go for the killing blow."

"Oh screw you, Alanic!" snapped Zorian. "What kind of nutjob tries to kill their opponent in a freaking spar!?"

"You?" Alanic tried, a smirk dancing on his lips. "You did try to kill me at the end, didn’t you?"

"That’s… I knew it had no chance of actually succeeding."

"Yes, and I’m certain you realized that a minute or two into the test. You should have stopped holding back at that point, or at least followed my lead in what is an acceptable level of force."

"Actually, let’s refocus on that issue instead," Zorian said. "What if you had ended up killing me? Some of those spells you tried to hit me with would have put me into a hospital for months if I hadn’t tanked them. Possibly kill me outright! The skills I used to survive your test aren’t something you had any right to expect of me!"

"I can control what my fires burn," Alanic said matter-of-factly. Zorian was honestly stumped at that. That kind of thing was possible? "I also have a divine artifact that can heal any burns so long as the victim is still alive. Regardless of how things looked to you, you were in very little danger. Still, you clearly thought I was being excessively aggressive and you still held back against me. That kind of hesitation will get you killed some day. As it almost did a few days ago."

"I knew this was about those riflemen I disabled," Zorian mumbled.

"Yes. Disabled. They tried to kill you, with an ambush, no less, and you went out of the way to simply knock them out. There is being merciful and there is being stupid."

"Are you sure you’re a priest?" grumbled Zorian.

"A warrior-priest," Alanic clarified. "Not every religious order is about peace and forgiveness. And even those that are usually make exceptions for self-defense, in practice if not in theory."

"Fine, fair enough," Zorian conceded. "But why do you care? Why is this so upsetting to you?"

"That’s a stupid question. I don’t want you to die, that’s why."

"Um," Zorian paused, momentarily stumped for a response. What the hell was that supposed to mean? He really wished Alanic wasn’t so utterly unreadable to his empathy. "Look, I’ll be honest with you – I wasn’t really being merciful. You’re misreading the whole thing. I simply attacked them in the best manner I had available."

"Please," Alanic scoffed. "I know very well how difficult it would be to take down a group that large non-lethally. Do you really expect me to believe that was the method of attack least dangerous for yourself that you had available?"

"Well, yes," Zorian said. "I guess it would help to know that I’m a natural mind mage. I sense all minds around me, regardless of physical obstacles or line of sight, and I can launch a crude mental assault on them if I so wish. Using that, I could knock them out outside of their shooting range, before they could pin-point my position. Actually killing them would have entailed entering their attack range so I could cast something more deadly at them. Which I felt was rather suicidal at the time."

Alanic gave him a curious look. "An interesting ability. I note that not all of the attackers had been disabled by the time the Guild taskforce had arrived. Did you simply not have time to go through them all or…?"

"It’s a weak attack," said Zorian. "It’s not hard to resist."

Alanic nodded. Zorian hoped the priest would not question him on the exact mechanics of his ability, as he was not sure he could deceive the man convincingly. Thankfully, it did not seem he would push the issue at the moment.

"What would you have done if no reinforcements had arrived?" Alanic asked.

"Tried to lure them into a mine field," Zorian shrugged. "So yeah. I was fully prepared to blow them up into tiny pieces if they continued to go after me. There’s a lot you can accuse me of, but being suicidally merciful isn’t one of them. You don’t have to worry about me."

"I’m not so sure about that," Alanic grouched. "But it does seem I have misjudged you somewhat. Walk with me."

Alanic walked back into the temple proper and Zorian followed him. He soon found himself sitting in a small kitchen that he had never seen before, though that wasn’t saying much. He had never really explored the site, fearful of drawing Alanic’s ire if he stepped foot in some private sanctum that non-clergy were supposed to never witness. Most temples had at least a couple of those as far as Zorian knew.

"Misunderstandings aside, the test was quite real," said Alanic once they were seated. "I really did want to see what you were capable of combat-wise."

"And?" asked Zorian curiously.

"You are better than I thought you’d be," said Alanic. Zorian preened at the praise. Alanic didn’t seem like the sort of hand it out lightly. "But it’s clear to me you’re no legend in the making. I estimate that your natural mana reserves are average at best, perhaps even below-average, and your spells have the feel of a mage who has practiced a lot rather than those of a talented beginner."

Zorian scowled, his earlier pride forgotten.

"A mage as young as you should not have experience in fighting that extensive," continued Alanic. Uh oh. "I had suspected it for a while now and now I am certain – you are not some recent graduate going for a round of wandering before settling down. Or a traveling mage who stumbled onto something way over his head. You are someone who actively looks for trouble. Had been looking for trouble for a while now…"

Zorian said nothing. He was about to claim that it was trouble that looked for him, not the other way around… but when he really thought about it, that wasn’t really true at the moment. He really was looking for trouble right now. It was one of his core goals in Knyazov Dveri. He had a good reason for it, but still.

"I’m not going to ask you to tell me who you are. People who start fighting as young as you must have started to get as good as you are aren’t usually the trusting sort. You’d never tell me, and truthfully I have no reason to push you in that regard. No, what I want to know is what your immediate goal is here. I don’t believe that you really stumbled upon Lukav’s encounter with the boars accidentally, or that the soul marker stamped on your soul is really unconnected to the enemies after our heads. Considering how helpful both me and Lukav have been to you in this past several weeks, I believe we both deserve a little more honesty from you. What is really going on here, Zorian?"

"Regardless of what you may think, my reasons for coming here were exactly as I told them to you," Zorian said. "I really did get caught in the aftermath of a soul magic spell. I really did come to Lukav, and by extension you, because I wanted to understand what had happened to me. None of those were fabrications. But…"

"Yes?" Alanic prompted.

"I had done some research on the people behind my attack – the original attack that resulted in the marker on my soul, I mean – and uncovered some pretty heavy stuff. They are connected to Cyoria’s leadership somehow, and have links to the local branch of the Cult of Dragon. As far as I can see, they are Ibasan in origin. One of the reasons I had for coming here, aside from seeking out your help, was that I wanted to get out of their territory."

"And you think our attackers belong to that group?" surmised Alanic.

"Considering how large and organized the Ibasan group was, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had some kind of organization branch here. And the fact both groups make use of undead and soul magic is kind of indicative to my eyes. But I don’t actually have any proof, and I’m far from certain."

Zorian wasn’t comfortable about sharing everything with Alanic. For instance, telling him about the invasion or the primordial summoning plot was out of the question, as Alanic would no doubt insist on notifying the Cyoria authorities about those and that could alert Red Robe about Zorian’s whereabouts. He did, however, tell him about a lot of other things… like the other disappearances in the area. His own investigation into them had pretty much stalled for the moment, so he had little to lose by telling him about them at this point.

After several exhausting hours of back and forth, Alanic all but threw him out of the temple, claiming he had to think about things. Zorian was glad for that, as he was thoroughly sick of the entire conversation by that point… even if there was a good chance Alanic would want to have nothing to do with him by tomorrow.

Oh well, even if the man refused to see him after this, there was always the next restart. There wasn’t that much time left in this restart anyway.

Zorian was in the process of affixing a left arm to the wooden golem he was building when a human mind suddenly appeared in his room. He would like to say that he reacted immediately and decisively, but the truth was that he was momentarily paralyzed by surprise and fear, spent several moments fumbling for a response, and then realized that his mysterious attacker was actually Alanic.

He glared at the priest that had just teleported into his room without warning, trying to set him on fire with his eyes. Sadly, that ability wasn’t one of the things in his repertoire, and Alanic was completely unfazed at his glare.

Note to self: find a spell that lets you set whatever you’re looking at on fire.

"What the hell do you think you’re doing, Alanic?" Zorian snapped. "I could have shot you if I hadn’t realized who you were in time."

Alanic glanced at the half-disassembled rifle on Zorian’s bed and raised an eyebrow at him.

"Well not with that, obviously," Zorian groused.

"You didn’t turn up for your evening lesson," Alanic said with disapproval. "I felt it prudent to check up on you."

"I kind of thought I should give you some time," Zorian said defensively. "You seemed pretty annoyed yesterday."

"I was disturbed, not angry," Alanic said. "I needed some time to think. If I wanted you to skip on your lesson I would have said so." He looked at the half-finished golem and raised his eyebrow at Zorian. "A curious choice of materials for a golem."

"It’s a prototype," Zorian said. "I don’t expect much from my first golem, so I wanted to make it out of something cheap and easy to work with."

Alanic shook his head. "It doesn’t matter, really. I suppose I can give you a day off from lessons for one day. Tell me, though – is there anything else you forgot to mention to me yesterday?"

"Not really, no," said Zorian. Nothing except things he had purposely kept to himself, anyway. "Although I’d like to ask you a question, if I may. As a soul magic expert, do you think it’s possible to kill a soul?"

"No," Alanic said immediately. "What kind of question is that? Do I need to read you passages from the Book of Zikiel again?"

"No!" Zorian protested. "No, that will not be necessary. Yes, I know that’s what the books say, but… the necromancer I told you about, the one who killed my informants?"

Alanic nodded, indicating he knew what Zorian was talking about. In truth he didn’t know the half of it. For one thing, Zorian had never explained to the priest that those informants had been giant talking spiders. Still, Zorian had told enough of the story for Alanic to follow along.

"He claimed to have done more than just kill them. He said he killed their very souls to ensure they were never coming back."

"An empty boast. He was just trying to demoralize you," Alanic scoffed. "Souls are unkillable. Corruptible certainly, but you can’t destroy them."

"Even if he had effectively unlimited time to figure something out?" Zorian pressed. "He did mention he spent decades within a time dilation field while he was ranting at me."

"Necromancers have been trying to destroy a soul for a millennium without much luck," Alanic said. "Finding a way to crack open the indestructible core of the soul to see what makes them tick and if it can be manipulated and duplicated has been the goal of many a necromancer over the ages. And many of those necromancers spent centuries pursuing their grisly work with little regards to morality or pity for the people they experimented upon. I sincerely doubt this one mage can do what a thousand years of necromantic tradition has failed at just because he spent a couple of months in a time dilation chamber. Provided he made use of such facilities at all, that is. Personally, I find it much more likely he’s making things up."

"What if it’s more than just months, though?" Zorian pressed. "Years, even decades?"

"You mean like that old drivel about Black Rooms that various organizations supposedly have?" asked Alanic. "Those rumors are almost certainly false. They are not impossible in theory, but much harder than they sound in practice. The logistics of time dilation chambers is very complex and requires more than just capability to speed up the passage of time in an area. And that’s especially true for things like necromantic experiments, which require a constant stream of victims to serve as experiment subjects. Unless your boasting necromancer has access to something like the Sovereign Gate, his claims are laughable."

"Sovereign Gate?" asked Zorian.

"Never heard of that story?" Alanic asked. Zorian shook his head in negative. "Well, do you at least know who Shutur-Tarana Ihilkush was?"

"How could I not?" Zorian scowled. "My history teacher made us all memorize the first three chapters of The 13 Cities of Salaw by heart. That would be the last king of Ikos, yes? The man who conquered all of the city states around the Umani-Re river and created the Ikosian Empire. What does he have to do with anything?"

"The Sovereign Gate is an artifact supposedly dating back from his time," Alanic said. "Like many great rulers, Shutur-Tarana has a great many fanciful stories and grandiose claims associated with him, and this particular one claims he either made or found a doorway into another world. Having found he did not age at all while on the other side, he spent 11 lifetimes there, learning their secrets and honing his skills. Eventually, he grew homesick and decided to go back home. Once he was back in his own world, however, he found the doors forever barred to him. He stored the Sovereign Gate in his royal vault, there to wait for a worthy successor who would repeat his feat and usher the empire into a new age with the wisdom gained from the other side. Or, well, resurrect it… since it is thoroughly dead at this point."

"An interesting story," Zorian said.

"But probably just that – a story," said Alanic. "It would have probably remained half-forgotten in some decaying tome as one of the many obscure tales surrounding the first emperor, but Eldemar’s royal family is very fond of it, since they claim to have the Sovereign Gate in their possession."

"Oh?"

"Yes, though in all honesty I’m not the best person to ask about that topic. Personally, I think the whole thing is fabricated drivel which Eldemar royals thought up to give themselves some additional legitimacy. They never mentioned the Gate or any of the other Ikosian artifacts they apparently had until they had their ambitions and reputation dashed in the Splinter Wars. They probably just swiped one of the Bakora gates from somewhere and are trying to pass it off as a genuine Ikosian artifact with fanciful stories. You should probably find an actual historian for a proper discussion on the subject."

"Fair enough," said Zorian. "I was just curious. What are Bakora gates, though?"

"Also something you should ask a historian about," said Alanic. "To put it simply, they are some kind of ancient teleportation network that predates Ikosian civilization by a fair margin. No one knows much about the Bakora, since they only left their gate network and a handful of other artifacts behind, but their reach was vast – the gates can be found all over Miasina, Altazia and even Blantyrre. Sadly, the art of actually activating the gates has been lost to the sands of time… or maybe their magic simply broke down a long time ago and they no longer work. Regardless of the truth, they are mostly just historical curiosities now – modern mages have their own teleportation network up and functioning, so most of the interest in the Bakora gates has dried up, at least on the mage side."

After reminding Zorian not to skip the lesson tomorrow as well, Alanic decided to leave in the same manner he arrived – by teleporting out. Zorian shook his head to clear it of fanciful tales of ancient artifacts and continued working on his golem prototype. He would go ask Vani about the Sovereign Gate and the Bakora gate network tomorrow, though he didn’t expect that to go anywhere. While the story about the first emperor of Ikosia could be sort of interpreted as an account of the time loop, it made no sense that an artifact that was supposedly stored in the capital would cause an effect centered around Zach and Cyoria. Oh well, it hurt him nothing to ask.

It was only half an hour later that Zorian realized that Alanic had teleported inside his room despite the fact he had warded it against teleportation.

Frowning, Zorian wrote down a reminder for himself to tear down his current ward scheme in the coming days and put up something stronger. And a second reminder to ask Alanic how the hell he had done that.

Zorian had been worried that Vani might not welcome him into his home the way he had the last time they’d spoken in the previous restart. After all, he hadn’t spent the month visibly culling the winter wolf population like he had last time, and that seemed to have had great influence on him.

As it turned out, he need not have worried. The man was as friendly and helpful as ever, though also just as talkative and prone to digressions.

"Ah, Ulquaan Ibasa, the isle of the exiles," said Vani. "A fascinating place and a fascinating topic. I wrote a book on the Necromancer’s War, you know? Not an easy topic to write about in an objective manner, since so many are ready to dismiss them as monsters and criminals out of hand…"

Zorian made a sound that could be possibly interpreted as agreement, though really, his opinion of Ibasans couldn’t possibly be lower. Perhaps if he hadn’t repeatedly witnessed all the killings and destruction in Cyoria he might have felt some pity for them, but as it was? They really were dangerous scum in his eyes.

Unaware of Zorian’s inner musings, Vani launched into a protracted explanation of the causes behind the Necromancer’s War. He spoke of succession disputes in several prominent Houses and royal families that developed when their leaders turned themselves into liches and vampires and their heirs realized they would never inherit their birthright because their parents would never die of age alone. He spoke of the common people, who hated necromancers with a passion, and resented being ruled by the undead. And finally, he spoke of Eldemar’s desire for supremacy, and how they were all too happy to prove their authority over all of Altazia by getting involved in every dispute they could find in order to place people more sympathetic to them in leadership positions.

Finally, it all came to a head when the kingdom of Sulamnon, back then in a personal union with Eldemar, rose in rebellion against their king, supported by Reya and Namassar. When they lost said rebellion, they were forced to issue a blanket ban on necromancy by the king of Eldemar, or else forfeit their lands to the crown. The ban, if enacted, would gut the entire military of Sulamnon, which made great use of undead in their army at the time, as well as force a number of prominent aristocrats to hand over their titles to their children and go into exile.

The necromancers in Sulamnon refused to accept the treaty and raised an army of their own, bolstered by the part of the Sulamnonian military that still felt they had a chance to win if they continued fighting. Soon, they were joined by other forces that resented Eldemar’s growing power – the remaining Khusky tribes that still retained some military might, the remains of witch covens, the undead aristocracy of other countries that saw the way wind was blowing and wanted to overrule the precedent that would see them similarly disposed of, as well as a number of opportunistic actors that felt they had more to gain by siding with the necromancers than with the king of Eldemar. The Necromancer’s War had begun.

The necromancers soon showed themselves to be cruel and merciless opponents, and the atrocities they committed against captured villages and defeated soldiers shocked the continent. Any sympathies or support they had from neutral parties that wanted to see Eldemar humbled quickly evaporated. Instead of serving as a rallying force against Eldemar domination, they handed the growing kingdom exactly the sort of war they needed to cement their authority and legitimacy. When Eldemar’s general Fert Oroklo defeated the necromancer’s army led by Quatach-Ichl, thereby destroying them as a coherent force, the continent sighed in relief. The kingdom of Eldemar rewrote the map in their favor, and were seen as heroes for it instead of tyrannical aggressors, and the surviving parts of the necromancer’s army fled to the frozen island in the north that would be henceforth known as the isle of the exiles - Ulquaan Ibasa.

The king of Eldemar graciously agreed not to pursue them to their new home. No doubt that was because of his great mercy, rather than unwillingness to send soldiers to some worthless ice-swept land in order to pursue a broken enemy.

Then again, considering it took more than a hundred years before the exiles started making trouble again, Zorian supposed he couldn’t blame him for his reasoning. Hell, he still wasn’t certain what the Ibasans hoped to gain with their destruction of Cyoria. He supposed if their leadership was composed out of immortal undead they might have personally participated in the Necromancer’s War and were still bitter about it.

"Well, I hate to interrupt such a fascinating story, but I was really hoping to ask you about some historical artifacts," Zorian said when he finally spotted a lull in Vani’s discussion.

"Oh?" Vani said, perking up.

"Yes, I’d like to know if you have some sources about the Bakora gates and the Sovereign Gate."

"The Sovereign Gate is nothing," Vani said dismissively. "The royals won’t even let anyone see it, much less examine it. I have doubts whether it exists at all. The Bakora gates, though…"

Vani promptly started digging through his stacks of books, and continued to do so for another fifteen minutes or so. Finally, he found what he was looking for in some forgotten corner. He leafed through the book until he found the correct page and then shoved it into Zorian’s hands while pointing at the illustration stamped on it.

The Bakora gates did not look anything like Zorian had imagined. When Alanic had described them to Zorian, he figured they were something like stone arches or rings or something like that. Instead, they looked like hollow icosahedrons assembled out of some kind of black bars. Not very gate-like in Zorian’s opinion.

"It’s hard to study the gates, since no one has witnessed one in actual operation for quite some time, but from the writings found inscribed into their pedestals and preserved written records, we know they function similarly to a teleport platform," Vani said, waving his finger over the illustration for… some reason. "Only they open a dimensional hole that connects one gate to another instead of teleporting people standing inside. It is probably not a good idea to stand inside the gate while it activates."

Zorian gave the man an incredulous look.

"Well, I mean, it could have some kind of safety feature to abort the activation procedure if someone is standing inside," Vani defended himself. "Anyway, the bars are likely stabilizers, making sure the rift stays open long enough for people to step through."

"Hmm. They sound really powerful and exotic. I’m surprised there’s so little interest in them," said Zorian.

"Most people think they were not nearly as efficient as modern teleport platforms are, and they are bound to be exorbitantly expensive and difficult to make. The gate spell is almost certainly reverse-engineered from Bakora gates, back when people still knew how to activate them, and it is pretty much the pinnacle of dimensional magic that very few mages can cast safely. Teleportation magic, on the other hand, is relatively accessible and cheap. In the end, it all comes down to the fact they are currently inert and nobody knows how to use them. If, indeed, they can be used at all in modern times. They are the oldest magical artifacts that we are aware of – it is possible they broke down a long time ago."

"How many of them are there?" Zorian asked.

"Hundreds are known," Vani said. "Only gods know how many more remain undiscovered in some distant jungle or mountain peak. The Bakora really loved placing those gates all over the place, it seems. Hmm… I actually think I have a map of all the recorded gates in Altazia."

It took more than half an hour for Vani to find the map in the mess that was his house, but he did produce it in the end. Zorian studied it curiously, immediately noting one particular location.

"Cyoria has a Bakora gate?" he asked incredulously. "How? Where? I’ve never heard anything about that."

"Oh, that." Vani snorted. "I almost forgot about that. That gate is deep within the lower levels of the Dungeon beneath Cyoria, very far into the dangerous levels. It would be suicide to go there for most mages, so nobody studies that one to my knowledge. Researchers interested in the gates have safer locations to set up camp at."

After studying the map for a while and failing to find anything really notable, Zorian thanked Vani for his time and left. The Bakora gates were kind of interesting, but he didn’t see how they could be connected with the time loop.

Another dead end as far as he was concerned, but at least he didn’t waste too much time on this one.

Zorian’s eyes abruptly shot open as a sharp pain erupted from his stomach. His whole body convulsed, buckling against the object that fell on him, and suddenly he was wide awake, not a trace of drowsiness in his mind.

"Good morning, brother!" an annoyingly cheerful voice sounded right on top of him. "Morning, morning, MORNING!"

Zorian gave Kirielle an incredulous look. What? Why was he here? The summer festival was still days away, and the last thing he remembered was peacefully falling to sleep. Did Zach die prematurely again or was he killed in his sleep without even realizing it?

He was broken out of his thoughts when Kirielle kicked him, apparently unhappy that he was ignoring her. He expertly stabbed his finger into her flank, causing her to lose her grip on him with a squeal of indignation, and then took advantage of her moment of weakness to throw her off and rise to his feet.

"I need to cast a spell," he said, looking at her. "Please give me some time alone."

"Can I watch?" she asked.

Zorian raised his eyebrow at her. "Do you think you can keep quiet for ten minutes?"

She placed her palm over her mouth, mimicking the sign of silence.

"Right. Go lock the door then so mother won’t be disturbing us," he ordered. "I need utmost concentration for this."

Also, mother would go berserk if she found him pouring salt and quartz dust on the floor, so it was best if she were kept out until he was done. Thankfully, he had both materials available in sufficient quantities, so he would be able to perform the marker tracking spell without delay.

Ten minutes later, Zorian was once again given a sense of where all the marked individuals were in relation to himself. Two of them again – one representing him, and the other one in the direction of Cyoria. Less than a minute later, the other marker abruptly shifted positions to the southeast of where it had originally been, and then shifted south again not long afterwards. Teleportation. The owner of the marker seemed to be in quite a hurry to get away from Cyoria.

There was no third marker.

The other marker was almost certainly Zach, Zorian felt – his classmate definitely began restarts in Cyoria, and it made sense for him to have the marker since Zorian had to have got it from somewhere. That left Red Robe, then – either he did not start the time loop in the vicinity of Cirin, managed to teleport outside Zorian’s detection radius in the 15 minutes or so it took him to set up the tracking ritual… or he flat out didn’t have a marker.

He would repeat the detection ritual every couple of days and see if the third marker ever popped up.

"That spell is lame," Kirielle complained, poking him in the flank and disrupting his concentration. Apparently this was as far as her patience went. "There is nothing to see at all!"

"Here, have a swarm of butterflies," sighed Zorian, conjuring a tiny swarm of glittery, colorful butterflies. It was actually a pretty hard spell to pull off, despite the totally useless effect – it took a lot of skill and practice to make that many animated, solid illusions and make them half-way convincing. Still, the spell’s ability to distract and fascinate Kirielle was every bit as great as he had hoped it would be – it took her a full minute to realize he had slipped out of the room.

Worth every minute he had spent on learning it.

"All right," mumbled Zorian to himself, taking a deep breath to steady himself. "I have temporarily shut down the house’s warding scheme, neutralized both the explosion trap and the sleep one, blocked the acid mechanism and destroyed the alarm beacon disguised as the document seal. This is it. Third time’s the charm."

And with that, Zorian commanded the small wooden golem in front of him to go fetch the papers for him. No way was he going near that safe personally.

The wood golem, version two, slowly stepped forward. Its movements were awkward and jerky, but it did not stumble or sway drunkenly, which was a vast improvement over the wood golem version one. It would be useless in battle, but this task was something he felt his creation might actually pull off. If not, he had a collapsible 10-foot pole in reserve.

Amazingly, the whole thing went off without a hitch – the golem reached into the safe and pulled out a stack of documents without some horrid trap mangling it in the process and then walked up to him and presented him with his prize.

It was only when he tried to take the documents from the golem’s hands that disaster struck – he foolishly assumed that the golem would automatically let go of the paper stack when Zorian tried to yank them out of his hands, but of course the wooden doll had no such instincts. It was too slow to release its grip, and ended unbalanced when Zorian unwittingly yanked it forward. Before Zorian knew it, the entire stack of papers was sent tumbling through the air and ended up strewn all across the floor of Vazen’s living room.

Zorian half-expected the papers to suddenly burst into flames out of sheer spite, but they thankfully remained intact. Just… completely scrambled out of order, probably requiring him to spend hours sorting them out.

"Ah, screw it." Zorian said, quickly scooping up papers into an unruly pile and stuffing it into his bag. "I’ll just take the whole thing with me and sort it later."

His picked up his klutz of a golem and teleported out of the house. Minor annoyances aside, the mission was a success and he could finally find out what was so important about these documents.

34. Unreasonable Things

He didn’t bring the papers to his room, of course. He was confident that there was no tracking spell on anything in the stack, but he was also confident that Vazen would try to divine the location of the papers the hard way once he noticed the theft. He might even succeed, in which case Zorian didn’t want them to be near anything that would automatically implicate him in the theft. No sense in taking that risk when he could simply store the papers elsewhere.

Elsewhere, in this case, meant outside Knyazov Dveri – that way the papers would be out of range of virtually every divination spell cast from inside the city. Thus, after teleporting around randomly a couple of times to confuse any theoretical trackers, Zorian’s last jump took him deep into the forested wilderness to the north of the city, to a location that had a small, convenient cave nearby. He had found the place in an earlier restart, while he had been tracking down ingredients for Silverlake, and he had felt even then that it would be a nice place to set up camp at. It just needed some touch-ups here and there to make it suitable for his purposes.

He conjured a glowing lantern to light his way in the gloom of the cave and got to work. After a quick casting of an area-wide spook animals spell to drive away all the bats and vermin that had taken residence in the cave, he set about using alteration magic to clean the place up and make some shelves and reading surfaces out of the rock. A while later, after he tested things for comfort and stability, he decided that stone chairs perhaps weren’t the best idea and instead constructed some basic furniture out of the fallen branches he found in the surrounding forest. There – good enough for his purposes.

"Now comes the hard part," he spoke to himself.

It was time to start constructing the warding scheme for the place.

Three hours later, Zorian had layered every single divination ward that he felt could be useful and a few that he didn’t, and had rechecked the whole thing twice to make sure everything was stable and worked correctly. Truthfully… he wasn’t satisfied. He had an insufficient collection of different anti-divination spells to set up a proper, iron-tight warding scheme, and too little experience to properly judge what was crucial and what was not. In addition, if it took him this long to set up even this mediocre thing, how long would something more complex take? He really needed to get better at warding…

He shook his head to clear his thoughts. He needed to get better at a lot of things, but he had to prioritize. Defense against soul magic, then combat skills, then aranean mind arts. Those three things were urgent and couldn’t be put off. Everything else was secondary for now, even the mystery surrounding Vazen and the documents. If stealing the documents resulted in his early death, despite the many precautions he took… well, he would just have to set the whole thing aside until he was done with his current main goal, wouldn’t he?

No, his current defenses would have to be enough for now. He placed the papers he stole from Vazen on the nearby stone table he’d made from the cavern floor, sat down on a chair he’d fabricated from wooden detritus he’d dragged into the cave and began to read…

Hours later, when he was finally done reading and organizing the whole thing, he seriously contemplated burning the whole stack down and scattering the ashes in the wind. Safer that way, and probably more than a little cathartic. He had expected to find something heavily incriminating, but this was something else entirely. Why did the man keep all of his incriminating correspondence in one convenient place, anyway? If it had been Zorian in his shoes, he would have destroyed all the letters once he read them so they couldn’t be used against him. Was Vazen keeping them as possible blackmail material or something? If so, that was kind of ballsy of him, considering what kind of person the man was dealing with.

Said person being Sudomir Kandrei, the mayor of Knyazov Dveri. Because of course it was the goddamn mayor that was behind everything. No wonder that telling the police about the disappearances never went anywhere – even if somebody had seriously looked into it, they would have been told pretty quickly to drop the case by their superiors. Local governors in peripheral areas such as these were basically tiny tyrants that could do as they pleased, so long as they made sure not to piss off the wrong person or stir up trouble.

Not that knowing who was responsible for the disappearances shed any light on the man’s motives. When all was said and done, Vazen was merely the guy supplying Sudomir with various illegal materials and occasionally hiring shady people in Sudomir’s place so the mayor couldn’t be implicated in the deal. The merchant didn’t even know about most of the disappearances as far as Zorian could see. In fact, Vazen’s shady dealings with the mayor seemed to have been much more benign until about three months ago, when the man suddenly upped the game and started demanding much riskier merchandise, in far greater quantities, as well as started arranging full-blown assassinations like the ones directed against him and Alanic. One could tell from the letters that Vazen was getting progressively more disturbed and annoyed at his customer for escalating things like that, especially since Sudomir refused to elaborate on what had caused this sudden change. The deal that Vazen made with a company in Cyoria, the one that Gurey was so interested in, was basically a bribe that Sudomir had arranged for Vazen to calm him down and keep him cooperative.

The blueprints and recipes contained in the documents looked kind of interesting, but there was nothing there that Zorian found really notable or sinister. The names of the three businesses that provided the documentation were something he recognized, however – they were run by people that the aranea had identified as members of the Cult of the Dragon.

So. The mayor of Knyazov Dveri had some kind of connection to the Cult of the Dragon Below. Significant enough that he could arrange for them to hand over extremely valuable documentation to one of his agents for a mere pittance.

Well, the idea that this whole thing was connected to Ibasan invaders just got a lot more credible with this, though it was not Vazen that had links to them like he originally suspected. Still, the question of why he was after the soul mages around Knyazov Dveri remained. Why bother? What did the Ibasans get by doing that? Some of these people could only loosely be described as soul mages to begin with, and most of them weren’t a serious threat to the Ibasan force… or anyone really.

He sighed. Like always, every answer he found seemed to bring up two more questions in its wake. He placed the papers on a nearby shelf carved into the walls of the cave, opting not to destroy them just yet, and then went back to his room to get some sleep.

After he had gotten some sleep and had a chance to think about things, he decided to put off the investigation of Sudomir’s activities for some other time. No sense in stirring up the hornet’s nest further when he could just wait for some future restart in which he never stole Vazen’s documents and nobody knew they were even being threatened by someone.

However, as days passed without incident and nobody ever tracked down the documents to his little forest hideout, he began to relax. He didn’t restart the investigation or change any of his plans, but he figured this would be a nice, relaxing restart where nothing of real note happened. He slowly absorbed Alanic’s lessons in personal soul sight, fiddled with his wood golem (version three) in his free time, and made sure to cast the marker detection spell at least once per day (no change; the spell never showed anything except two markers).

And then, two weeks into the restart, he woke up in the middle of the night to see a black-clad figure with an obscured face and a knife in their hand standing over his bed.

Later on, he would wonder what had tipped him off that he was in danger, but in that moment he simply reacted. Without bothering to structure the magic into any real spell, he reached out to the blanket covering him and flung it at the assassin in a crude burst of telekinetic force. The man (probably; the build suggested a man) stumbled back as the blanket collided with him, not really hurt but surprised at the maneuver and disoriented by the sudden blindness.

Zorian scrambled to his feet, barely managing to get upright before the assassin succeeded in throwing the flimsy fabric off of him and lunged towards him. Three knife swipes later and Zorian was sporting a deep gash on his arm and a bleeding scratch on his cheek and knew for a fact that he had no chance against the man in a physical confrontation. He frantically searched the room with his eyes, trying to spot something to help himself with, and admitted to himself that sound-proofing the room may have been a slight mistake. Only slight, though, because even if he could scream for help he doubted anyone would be able to reach him before the assassin was done with him. No, the bigger mistake was that he opted to sleep with his rod of magic missiles and shielding bracelets in his desk drawer instead of taking them with him to sleep.

It was official: after this battle, regardless of outcome, he was going to cast magic missile non-stop whenever he had free time and mana to make it fully reflexive. He couldn’t afford to be this defenseless when deprived of his tools.

"If I die I will blow us both up!" Zorian yelled, and meant it. The suicide necklace, at least, was always with him. Maybe he should put something other than explosives there for situations like this.

The man hesitated for a second at the proclamation, but then moved to attack again. That second was enough, though – suddenly given a moment to concentrate, Zorian blasted the man’s mind with telepathic noise. The assassin flinched, aborting his attack, but he didn’t go down.

Not yet, anyway. When Zorian took advantage of his momentary dizziness to smash a nearby paperweight into his face, though, he went down in a spray of blood and didn’t get up again.

A minute later, after he had calmed down a little (and confirmed that the assassin, while still alive, wasn’t going to get up any time soon) he decided he couldn’t go to the police with this. They were effectively the mayor’s underlings, and Sudomir was likely the one who ordered the man bleeding on the floor of his room to kill him. Or had someone else arrange it for him, more likely, considering his behavior from Vazen’s letters. The fact that the assassin apparently had a key to his room, which was how he had bypassed Zorian’s intruder alarm, didn’t help his paranoia any. Regardless, he only really knew one person he could go to with this.

Already wincing at the lecture he was going to get, Zorian picked up the assassin’s unconscious body and teleported to Alanic’s temple.

Like Zorian hoped, Alanic readily accepted his explanation that the bleeding man he was carrying was an assassin sent to kill him and agreed to take him off his hands. He even gave Zorian a fast-acting healing potion to deal with the cuts and gashes the man inflicted upon him in their brief life-and-death struggle, and those weren’t exactly cheap.

Unfortunately, he also decided that Zorian was now going to move permanently into the temple with him. According to Alanic, he had been expecting something like this to happen ever since Zorian stopped his and Lukav’s killings earlier in the month and this was all the proof he needed that Zorian wasn’t safe out there. Who’s to say the attackers won’t try again and succeed? No, as far as the warrior priest was concerned, Zorian had to be under constant guard until the situation was resolved.

Zorian really hated that idea, as it meant being effectively under house arrest for the remainder of the restart, but Alanic made it clear there was no way to blow him off without also losing his help in mastering personal soul perception. So that was that.

Despite his misgivings, however, it turned out to be something of a blessing in disguise. Since there was not much to do in a small, boring temple, Zorian found himself spending most of his time endlessly casting magic missile in an effort to make it faster and more reflexive. He did make a promise to himself, after all. In any case, those efforts attracted Alanic’s attention, and he agreed to give Zorian advice on how to improve his combat magic. Admittedly, Alanic couldn’t help him much in his self-imposed goal of making magic missile reflexive – that was just a matter of sufficient repetition. Instead, most of his help centered around squeezing the most out of fire spells, which appeared to be his specialty.

Thus, whenever Zorian got sick of repeatedly casting magic missile, he worked on mastering the plethora of minor fire spells whose mastery Alanic claimed would increase his ability to wield fire in combat. One made a thin ring of fire around the caster, making the prospect of melee difficult for enemies unless they were willing to get burned; Alanic claimed a skilled caster could increase and decrease the radius of the ring from moment to moment, cause it to split into several weaker rings for better coverage, as well as move the center of the ring’s alignment up and down along the caster’s body. The second conjured a small flock of fully autonomous, sparrow-sized birds made out of fire to harass the enemy; that one was supposed to be practice for weaving animation magic into fire spells, as the usefulness of the spell depended entirely on how well animated the birds were. And so on, and on, and on. Alanic knew a lot of minor fire spells.

"Only twenty?" Alanic asked. "Come on, kid, I know you can do better…"

Zorian ignored him, patiently herding the twenty marble-sized fire orbs into gentle orbits around himself. Casting the spell itself was super-easy. Controlling the 20 conjured fire orbs simultaneously was not.

"I don’t want to tire myself out too quickly," Zorian said, testing his control over the orbs by having a couple of them fly out of formation. He had already given himself a nasty burn the last time he used the spell by accidentally slamming one of the fire orbs into the back of his hand and was not looking forward to a repeat performance. The ability to direct the orbs as you wish was an interesting advantage, but that also meant there was little in the way of safety features inherent in the spell. "I’ll run out of mana too quickly if I start summoning 50 fire orbs all at once."

"You shouldn’t be casting the spell a lot anyway," Alanic said. "Sustaining the orbs is by far cheaper than constantly recreating them. The point is to take control of them, and recasting the spell doesn’t help you with that. You’re just letting your fear of getting burnt control you."

"Well yeah, I don’t want to accidentally burn my eyes off or something," protested Zorian.

Alanic sighed and shook his head. "You’re too tense for this. Take a break and we’ll continue this tomorrow."

Zorian immediately dropped the spell in relief. No matter what Alanic said, he did not like that spell. Still, Alanic was the fire magic expert here.

"Can I ask you something?" asked Zorian. Alanic casually waved his hand, telling him to get on with it. "Is it true you can selectively burn targets with your spells? That is, flat out exclude people from being damaged by your fireballs and the like?"

"Ah. I suppose Lukav told you about that," Alanic mused. Yeah, sure, let’s go with that. "Yes, that is something I can do. More than that, actually. It is nothing you would care to learn, however – it is a difficult skill that requires a lot of specialized training. Years of it. Unless you intend to specialize in fire magic – and you strike me as a generalist mage, to be frank – I would not recommend worrying about it." He smiled. "Besides, by the time you mastered something like that, the pocket meteors spell you are currently struggling with would be a joke to you, so it’s hardly a shortcut to not getting hurt with that."

"Figures," Zorian said. "But you know, a simple fire ward would make that spell a lot safer to practice. Why can’t I use it on myself before casting the spell again?"

"Danger sharpens the spirit," Alanic said airily. "You’ll learn faster and take things more seriously with the threat of horrific burns hanging over your head. But mostly I just wanted to see how long it would take you to remember you can do that."

"Ugh," Zorian grunted. "You’re evil."

There were no further attacks for the rest of the restart, and this particular one ended right on schedule instead of being cut short like the previous one was.

The marker detection spell never displayed a third marker in its detection radius, despite Zorian casting it several times a day towards the end.

For the next three restarts, Zorian deliberately avoided making any ripples and focused on growing his skills. Not a very exciting time, but by the end of it he was finally able to cast magic missile quickly and easily without any external aid. He had also mastered personal soul sensing well enough that Alanic started teaching him his arsenal of protective soul magic. In addition to that, he learned a plethora of new fire spells, made some improvements to the wooden golem design he was exploring, and practiced the rest of his combat arsenal on the monstrous wildlife living in the wilderness.

Unfortunately, Alanic had been becoming ever more suspicious of Zorian as his skills rose with each restart – no doubt the fact that he recognized quite a few of those skills as his own had a big hand in it – and had almost refused to teach Zorian at all in the latest restart. Zorian had eventually managed to talk the man into helping him by promising to tell him everything after the summer festival, but he suspected that pretty soon even that was not going to fly. By his estimation, he had at most two more restarts before Alanic refused to teach him anything without a damn good explanation, which he would be unable to provide.

But that was fine – by the time that happened, Zorian would no longer be defenseless in the face of hostile soul magic so the first of his goals would be achieved. He never really expected Alanic to teach him everything, anyway.

In the next restart, Zorian decided to lift his self-imposed ban of snooping around Sudomir and his activities. As cautiously as possible, he tried to find out more about the man. Sudomir being a well-known and public person, it wasn’t hard to get people to talk about him… but most of the information he got was either useless or highly suspect. The most interesting piece of information he found was that the man was often absent from Knyazov Dveri on various official errands, and that those errands had become especially frequent in the last few months. This was in line with Vazen’s letters, which also claimed the man had changed his patterns radically in the last few months.

When simple questioning failed to produce any new results, Zorian decided to be a little bolder and investigate the link between Vazen and the mayor. He didn’t want to deal with Vazen himself, but fortunately there was no need to. Vazen wasn’t a one-man operation like Gurey – he had other employees, and those other employees didn’t have the same paranoia and level of security that Vazen did. They brought stuff home from work to look over later, left their keys cunningly hidden behind nearby flowerpots, and rarely had any sort of magical defenses. One of them even kept a detailed daily journal with all sorts of interesting tidbits and remarks. Probably the most interesting thing he found out from Vazen’s employees was that he regularly sent mysterious packages to a place called Iasku Mansion – a place that his employees were pretty sure didn’t actually exist. The place the packages were delivered to didn’t exist on the maps, save as a random section of the uninhabited forest far to the north of the city. Further into the wilderness than Zorian ever got, in any case.

After consulting some maps, Zorian realized that he had no idea how long it would take him to reach the spot in question. Weeks? Months? Damn, those two really picked an out-of-the-way spot for their exchanges, didn’t they? This was going to be such a chore…

He went to Lukav for help. The transformation specialist was noted to be an outdoorsman type, so he should have some advice on reaching out-of-the-way places like that one. Maybe there was some kind of enhancement potion that could help?

"No, I don’t think enhancement potions would be of much help in this," Lukav told him while staring at the map Zorian provided. "They don’t last long enough, and it would take you at least two weeks to reach the place on foot. Tricky. Maybe it’s just my bias showing, but have you considered simply shapeshifting into a bird and flying there?"

"I haven’t," said Zorian, surprised. "The idea never occurred to me. How complicated would that be?"

"Not complicated at all, but perhaps a bit pricy," Lukav admitted. "You would probably need to waste a potion or two to grow accustomed to flying and moving in your new form. Maybe more, depending on how fast of a learner you are. Birds are very different from humans."

He handed Zorian his price chart, and quickly pointed out the bird section.

"I recommend the eagle, personally," Lukav said. "Good flier, excellent eyesight, and big enough that few things will dare attack you. Plus, it’s an eagle, what’s not to like? Not like you need to be inconspicuous where you’re going."

Zorian looked at the price tag attached to the eagle transformation potion. It was… doable. He could buy three of those if he had to, though he hated using up most of his savings like that. Even though he knew they would be back at the beginning of his next restart, it just felt wrong to fritter them away. He spent years saving that money, dammit! Besides, what if he needed those savings later in the restart for some reason?

"I guess I could try that," Zorian said. "Incidentally, do you pay money for some rare animal that can be found deep in the forest?"

"Ha, no. If it can be found in forests around here, I’m more than capable of getting it myself," Lukav said. "Sorry. Though if you are willing to risk your life in the local dungeon, there are a few things I would be interested in paying good money for…"

Gliding upward on an updraft of warm air, Zorian surveyed the landscape around him with impossibly sharp eyes. The experience was impossible to describe – everything was full of color and detail, like a veil he didn’t know he labored under had been lifted off his eyes. It reminded him of the time his parents had brought him to the doctor for an eye checkup and he was told he had to wear glasses. His father had been so disappointed about that, but the moment Zorian had donned the little pieces of glass on his face he knew he never wanted to take them off. This was just like that time, only even more extreme. If he tried, he could discern individual leaves on a tree from a mile away. The houses in the distance that would have been nothing but blurry blocks to his human self were instead rendered with perfect clarity, right down to that old tomcat hiding in the shadow of a chimney on that one house.

Being an eagle, Zorian decided, was awesome. Weird, but awesome.

He flapped his wings a couple of times to change directions, wobbling dangerously for a moment. He still wasn’t much of a flier, truth be told, and the less told about his landings the better. Thankfully, big birds like eagles spent most of their time in the air gliding and catching air currents, so he could get by. He fixed his eyes forward, in the direction of where Iasku Mansion was supposed to be, and set off into the wilderness.

Flying over trees got boring pretty fast, though, even with ridiculously enhanced eyesight – the leafy canopy of the forest obscured the surface from scrutiny pretty effectively, so there was nothing to see for the most part. He could see snow-capped mountains in the distance – the infamous Winter Mountains that dominated the landscape of central Altazia, which were said to be the source of all ice and snow by some – an icy, merciless heart of winter that woke up once a year to cover the land in frost until it was inevitably beaten back by the forces of summer, winter giving way to spring.

Zorian would like to call that superstition, but for all he knew there could actually be a kernel of truth in that, like an insanely-powerful ice elemental living there or something. There was very little known about the mountains, largely because of how dangerous they were – exploring them was about as safe as trying to map lower reaches of the Dungeon, and not nearly as rewarding.

Finally, Zorian approached his destination. He had been worried he would miss the spot, since he didn’t have a map and everything sort of looked the same to him from his vantage point, but he needn’t have worried. Iasku Mansion was very obvious and easy to spot. It wasn’t, like he suspected, some inconspicuous clearing or standing stone that Vazen and Sudomir used as a drop-off point. It was, in fact, an actual mansion.

Zorian circled around the building a few times, trying to comprehend what he was seeing. The mansion gleamed white in a sea of green, somewhat worn down by the ravages of age and nature but clearly livable and cared for. Aside from the mansion, there was also a small warehouse attached. The warehouse appeared to be of much more recent construction, however – it had no moss on the roof, there were no cracks on the walls that his enhanced eyes could see, and it was far blockier and utilitarian in construction.

Zorian had no idea why somebody would build this thing here. If it was a fort or an observation tower, he could understand… but who would want to build a luxury dwelling this isolated and exposed to the dangers of the north? Sadly, his contemplation was interrupted when the crows that dotted the trees around the mansion took exception to his presence and a hundred angry caws filled the air.

Zorian focused on them momentarily. Though the birds were small and distant, the eyes he currently possessed had no problem in discerning their features. They weren’t crows. They were larger, and their pitch black feathers had small red decorations and an almost metallic sheen to them.

Iron beaks. The hell-birds of the north. Zorian didn’t fancy his chances against one of those in this form, much less against the huge flock stationed around the mansion. Though now that he thought about it, he could probably cast magic missile in this form now, couldn’t he? He might be able to bring down a couple of them before the rest tore him apart, then. That wouldn’t get him anything, though, so he stopped circling around the mansion and put some distance between himself and the iron beaks until they finally stopped making noise and threatening gestures.

He wondered what he had done to upset them so much. He supposed they just didn’t like a large predator circling menacingly around them.

Well no matter. Landing right next to the mansion would have been a poor idea anyway. Very exposed, and probably warded too.

He searched the surrounding area for an open space he could land at without breaking his neck (transfer of injuries between real and shapeshifted forms was weird and inconsistent, but Lukav assured him that being killed in one form means you’re definitely dead in the other as well) and finally found a clearing some distance to the west of the mansion. A little bit farther than he had hoped for, but beggars can’t be choosers.

After a frankly embarrassing landing that saw him face-plant into the grass, Zorian transformed back into human form and spent several minutes memorizing the place so he could use it as an arrival point for future teleports.

That done, he set off towards the mansion, hoping to get a closer look. He already missed the eagle’s awesome eyesight, but some things were better done from the ground and this way he would actually be able to teleport away from danger and make himself invisible. As far as he knew, iron beaks had no magical senses, so an optical cloak should be enough to evade their attention.

He was right – the iron beaks took no notice of him while he inched closer to the mansion, cloaked in an optical cloak and an aura of silence. Before actually scouting the place, however, a pack of winter wolves burst into the scene, led by a particularly huge specimen. Unlike the rest of the pack, the alpha didn’t have a white pelt. His was silver and shiny, and his mind felt different from the rest. Stronger, deeper, more complex. Sapient.

Zorian stood frozen, watching the group with dread. Twenty-two winter wolves led by an unknown super-special sapient variant. Fuck, he just had to push his luck, didn’t he? No way would they be fooled by his spells, considering how sensitive canine noses were…

Except… they kind of were fooled. At one point the Silver One suddenly stopped and started scanning the tree line, and Zorian’s heart skipped when its eyes briefly passed over Zorian’s location, but then the moment was gone and the pack moved on and disappeared somewhere on the other side of the mansion.

A minute later, when he was sure they were gone, Zorian slowly retreated into the surrounding forest and teleported away.

Zorian decided to leave the Iasku Mansion alone for the moment. He was virtually certain they were connected to the Ibasan invaders now, and definitely intended to get to the bottom of that place at some point. However, he had a feeling that investigating the mansion as he was now would probably involve a lot of dying. Plus, he had a hunch that the mayor was a necromancer, and definitely had one under employ even if he wasn’t, so losing a battle there might have more serious consequences than a premature restart. No, if he wanted to go there he had to finish Alanic’s lessons first and greatly increase his combat skills, at minimum.

Instead, now that his time with Alanic was coming to an end, he had to step up his effort to improve his combat magic so he could go talk to the other aranea tribes and learn the secrets of their mind arts. There were a lot of reasons why that was important, but the one that drove him the most was the possibility of unlocking the matriarch’s memory packet that still remained in his mind.

The memory packet wouldn’t last forever, Zorian knew. It was stable for now, the matriarch having pulled out all the stops to make it as resilient and durable as possible, but it would unravel and fail in time, and all the memories locked within would be gone. If Zorian wanted to fill in the blanks left in the matriarch’s last message and understand what made her reach the decisions she did, he had to gain access to that knowledge.

He had no delusions it was going to be easy. For one thing the other aranean tribes were in no way guaranteed to be friendly, and even if they were, there was no reason for them to actually teach a random human their secrets. And even if he could secure their cooperation, the memories of something as alien as the aranea were bound to be a chore to interpret. And even if he could master that, he still only had one shot at unravelling the memory packet without ruining the content or triggering whatever defenses the matriarch installed to prevent him from doing just that.

But that was a matter for the future – right now he didn’t feel very confident walking into a possibly unfriendly aranean hive. Since he didn’t feel like testing his mind magic against the masters of the craft, his current plan for dealing with hostile or treacherous aranea basically boiled down to quick-casting mind shield and burning everything in sight via more conventional magic. Better combat skills were a must for that plan to work, though.

As it happened, he had something that should advance his combat skills, as well as make up for the money he lost to Lukav when he bought those two eagle transformation potions – dungeon delving! He had basically ignored the dungeon entrance at Knyazov Dveri due to being sidetracked by the disappearance of local soul mages and Alanic’s lessons, but there was no reason to continue to do so anymore. Most of the wildlife around Knyazov Dveri had ceased to be a challenge at this point, anyway.

Thus, two days after his hasty retreat from the Iasku Mansion, Zorian walked over to the official entrance to the dungeons beneath Knyazov Dveri and requested a permit to descend into its depths. It didn’t cost any money, thankfully, and it was really nothing more than a formality to make sure you understood what you were getting into.

"Just remember, this part of the dungeon has never been pacified properly," the man behind the counter told him, handing him a permit card that he had to show to the guards to be let through. "It means there are greater riches to be found down there, but also that things are much more dangerous. People disappear down there all the time. Nobody is going to look for you unless you join one of the local delver guilds. Which I personally recommend to young mages such as you."

Zorian gave the man a non-committal hum and left, descending below on a long spiral staircase until he reached a small natural cavern that housed a small town. The inhabitants of the city above called it Delver Village, though officially it was just an extension of Knyazov Dveri. Not many people actually lived here – the buildings consisted mostly of guildhouses and businesses catering to dungeon delvers.

He had no intention of joining any of the guilds. Last time he checked they didn’t let new members like him out in the field for at least several months after they joined, which made them pretty much useless to someone in his situation. He did understand the logic of it – you didn’t want your new, inexperienced members to get horribly murdered out in the tunnels, and very few mages were particularly capable at his age – but that didn’t make them any less useless to him. He also didn’t have any money to buy anything from the shops, so he didn’t remain in the settlement for long. The people there were jerks anyway, asking for money just to answer basic questions or demanding that he join their guild before they would divulge any secrets. Thank the gods he could just read the answers out of their mind anyway.

Zorian stared at the patch of glowing mushrooms at the corner of a largish cave he encountered in his wanderings through the cave system under Knyazov Dveri. It appeared to be a normal patch of giant glowing mushrooms, little different from the ones he encountered elsewhere around here, but he knew better. He wasn’t fooled. His mind sense clearly told him there was an animal mind behind that mushroom… no wait, the mushroom itself had a mind? An illusion? Or some weird intelligent mushroom?

Deciding that it didn’t matter, Zorian leveled the combat staff he’d made for himself and fired an incineration ray at the mushroom. If he had learned anything in the two weeks he had spent down here, it was that absolutely everything wanted to kill and eat him – and not necessarily in that order. The rock mites, for instance, wanted to paralyze you and lay their eggs into your still-living body so their larvae could eat you alive from the inside out. Anyway, the point was that striking first was common sense with these things, and he had no intention of getting closer to the mushroom impersonator.

Sure enough, the moment it was hit by the ray of fire, the mushroom immediately unraveled into a large tentacled form of the tunnel octopus. Figures. The ability of those things to mimic both the color and texture of their surroundings was as impressive as it was annoying to deal with. This one was out of luck, though. Caught off guard by the devastating fire attack, it flailed its tentacles about briefly in panic before collapsing dead on the floor of the cave.

Zorian threw a rock at it to make sure it was not faking it, and then relaxed. He would have probably died to one of those by now if he didn’t have his mind sense – it was, without a doubt, his main advantage compared to the other dungeon delvers. Thanks to it, he was able to evade the javelin worm ambush sites, tunnel octopuses and other hidden dangers to reach the richer, less exploited lower areas like this one. No wonder Taiven had been so excited about having someone with that ability in her team, back when she had first found out about it.

He instructed the floating spheres of light around him to scatter around the cavern and slowly inspected the walls for any sign of crystal and strange minerals. In general, crystalized mana seemed to be a much better money-maker than hunting creatures for parts, at least if you could access virgin areas like this one. Crystallized mana also had the benefit of being, well, static. If he found some in a particular place on this restart, it stood to reason that it should also be there for every subsequent one as well. That meant that, if he could map out where they were over several restarts, he should be able to blitz through a bunch of known sites in just a few hours and get an enormous cash infusion at the beginning of every new restart. Especially if he learned how to filter through Dungeon interference and became able to teleport while inside it.

Sadly, his inspection found nothing in this cavern. Looking at the charred tunnel octopus corpse, Zorian considered the possibility of just harvesting its brain and beak (the most valuable parts of it by far) and returning to the surface. He had already found two large lumps of crystalized mana and several small ones, so this trip was already a smashing success, and continuing further would mean going deeper into the dungeon, with all the danger that implied.

He continued on – not like he was ever really in danger thus far so even if the danger jumped up a notch he should… be…

Zorian rounded a corner and came face-to-face, so to speak, with some kind of floating pink ooze covered with eyes. It glowed, threads of light dancing throughout its smoky, translucent bulk, and its form writhed and shifted chaotically, ripples and pseudopods growing and retracting from moment to moment. For a moment it appeared to have not noticed him, its countless eyes – each its own color and shade – blinking and swiveling in their sockets with no rhyme or reason. But that moment passed quickly and its many eyes turned towards him, some of them extending on pseudopods so the creature could focus them on Zorian properly…

Zorian’s eyes abruptly shot open as a sharp pain erupted from his stomach. His whole body convulsed, buckling against the object that fell on him, and suddenly he was wide awake, not a trace of drowsiness in his mind.

"Good morning, brother!" an annoyingly cheerful voice sounded right on top of him. "Morning, morning, MORNING!"

Zorian looked at his grinning little sister incredulously. What? But he was just-

"Oh come on!" Zorian groaned, burying his face in his hands. "That’s it!? It just looked at me and I died? What kind of absurd ability is that!?"

"Umm…" Kirielle said.

"Forget I said anything," Zorian said, giving Kirielle a brief hug before rising to his feet. Kirielle refused to let go, clinging to him like a barnacle, so he just carried her around as he walked to his bookshelf and retrieved his Compendium of Dungeon Denizens, volume four, and began leafing through it. "I was just having a dream, that’s all."

"What kind of dream?" Kirielle asked curiously.

"I was going to be rich, and then I got killed by an… eyebeast?" Zorian said, as he looked at the description in the book. Even the name was stupid. Ugh.

"Oh," Kirielle said. "A nice dream that ends in a nightmare. I hate those."

"Me too, Kirielle. Me too," Zorian said, snapping the book shut and placing it back on the shelf. The description in the book told him nothing useful about the damn thing. Beware its deadly eyes indeed.

He thought about casting the marker detection spell again, but what would be the point? It never detected more than two markers in existence. Or less for that matter. At this point it was obvious that this was all it was ever going to show. Whatever way Red Robe used to get into the time loop obviously wasn’t identical to the one used by Zach and Zorian.

As for Zach, his movements indicated that he always opened the time loop by hightailing out of Cyoria. The direction was not consistent, though, and he seemed to wander around randomly around Eldemar during each time loop. He wondered what that was about. Clearly the boy was avoiding Cyoria, just like Zorian was, but beyond that he could not figure out what Zach’s goal was – Zorian had tried placing the locations Zach visited on a map and found no pattern he could see in it.

Whatever. Zach will be Zach. He had his own, more pressing problems to worry about at the moment.

"Right. Kiri, could you perhaps let go of me now?"

35. Mistakes Have Been Made

The beginning of the restart is always the most annoying part of the time loop, Zorian mused quietly, standing on one of the arrival platforms in Cirin’s train station. He pulled a watch out of his pocket and inspected it for a minute before putting it back with a sigh. The train was late. The train was always late, because this was less than a day into the restart and there hadn’t really been time for anything important to diverge yet.

It was in times like these that he wondered why he even bothered going through this charade in every restart when he could just teleport out of his room at the start of every new loop and be done with it. It would save him hours of frustration and he knew from a couple of previous restarts that nobody threw a manhunt after him if he did that. He’d basically get an extra half a day each restart – that would add up to something significant pretty quickly, wouldn’t it?

But, just as they always did when he considered that option, his thoughts turned to what the reaction of his mother and Kirielle would be at such a move. He never eavesdropped on them during those restarts where he hightailed out of the house at the earliest opportunity, but he couldn’t imagine either of them taking it well. He didn’t get along with mother all that well, but he knew she cared for him in her own infuriating way and Kirielle…

He looked at Kirielle, standing sullenly some distance from him. The downside of his increasing empathy skills was that he knew just how devastated Kirielle was at not getting to come with him to Cyoria. If that was so upsetting, he couldn’t even imagine how she would react if he did his disappearing trick immediately after he chased her out of his room. There was no way he could do that to her, no matter how much sense it made. He was feeling guilty enough about her as it was.

He walked up to her and ruffled her hair, which caused her to snap out of her funk temporarily in order to slap his hand away and give him a fierce glare. Or at least what she thought was a fierce glare, anyway.

"Don’t be so gloomy, Kiri," he said. She said nothing, but the spike of anger and resentment he detected in his empathy was answer enough.

Damn it…

"Look," he told her. "I’ll bring you with me the next time I go to Cyoria, okay?"

She gave him a startled look as her mind processed what he just said and then looked away with a pout. For a moment he thought she wouldn’t say anything, but then her mind stopped cycling between different emotions and settled on faint, suppressed hope.

"You promise?" she finally mumbled after a few seconds.

"Yes," he said seriously. "I promise."

In the back of his mind, Zorian realized he really meant it, too. When he finally decided to go back to Cyoria, he was bringing Kirielle with him. It wasn’t sensible in the least – it would cost him considerable time and attention to keep an eye on her and she would be in far greater danger than if he left her behind – but he was going to do it anyway. Not just for Kirielle’s sake, either. He kind of missed living at Imaya’s place with Kirielle, Kael and Kana…

He had to take a step back to regain his balance when Kirielle rammed into him, wrapping him in a hug and burying her face in his stomach.

"You better not lie," she said, looking up at him with suspicious, narrowed eyes. "I’ll never forgive you!"

"Yeah, yeah," Zorian scoffed, pulling at her nose until she let go of him. A loud whistle pierced the air, signifying that the train had finally arrived at the station. "I have to go now. We’ll talk about this when I come back."

Fifteen minutes later Zorian watched a much happier Kirielle waving enthusiastically at him as the train departed from the station. Zorian responded with a much more restrained wave of his own and smiled. Maybe it hadn’t been the smartest decision to make, but it was the right one nonetheless.

Zorian spent the entirety of the short train ride to Teshingrad trying to perform a headcount of his fellow passengers using his mind sense – a surprisingly difficult endeavor due to the anti-shaping ward placed on the train. While not remotely able to actually stop him from sensing minds, the minor magical static produced by the ward compounded quickly with distance, effectively cutting his range in half. It was uncannily reminiscent of the similar magical static that suffused the dungeon, which had much the same effect.

Hmm… now that he thought about it, that was probably what had inspired the ward in the first place. Did that mean that practicing magic inside a ward like this one would help him learn how to filter out the Dungeon static? Something to think about, in any case. Making a series of progressively stronger disruption wards to practice on sounded like a lot better idea than his original plan (which mostly consisted of trying to brute force things by practicing teleportation in the Dungeon until he got it right).

Once he disembarked from the train, Zorian teleported to Knyazov Dveri and immediately descended into the local Dungeon, where he proceeded to pick up every single piece of crystallized mana he had discovered in the previous restart before his unfortunate encounter with the eyebeast. When he tried to cash them in at the Delver Village shop he used for the purpose, however, he ran into… problems.

Apparently, there was a huge difference between going into the dungeon a couple of times and returning with a handful of crystals each time (what he did in the previous restart) and going in there once and returning with an entire bag of crystalized mana after a few hours. Not only did the shop not have enough money on hand to buy the whole batch off of him, the fact he had brought back such wealth after a single foray into the Dungeon caused far more of a stir than Zorian would have ever guessed. After all, you just don’t do that kind of stuff unless you have some kind of secret method that is better than everyone else’s or you were lucky enough to hit some kind of motherlode. Either possibility automatically made him a person of interest to every dungeon delver in Knyazov Dveri, as well as quite a few other people as well.

Any sort of plan he had for the restart immediately crashed and burned. There was just too much attention focused on him, which made it impossible to pursue tasks discreetly or talk to people as a relative unknown. His divination wards got an extensive field test due to the incessant magical spying he had been subjected to ever since, and while Zorian thought they held up admirably in the face of foreign assault, he couldn’t actually be sure they were never bypassed. One enterprising spy actually painted spell formula onto living moths and turned them into semi-autonomous voice recorders – if Zorian hadn’t tried to chase them off with telepathy and found it curious they kept getting back towards him regardless he probably would have never noticed. How many others had done similar things without him figuring out what they’d done?

Of course, not everyone went with the cloak and dagger stuff. A lot of people simply wanted to talk to him about their amazing offer and what not, and few of them took his no thanks quietly. At least one group outright attacked him when he told them to get lost, though thankfully they weren’t all that good at actual fighting and were sent running easily enough. There was also at least one attempt to break into his room, which ended with a would-be thief electrocuted for his trouble and earned Zorian a stern talking-to by the law enforcement regarding excessively lethal security measures.

Finally, after a week of dodging aggressive recruitment efforts and repelling the myriad magical probes directed at him, Zorian decided to admit defeat and leave Knyazov Dveri. He failed to save Lukav and Alanic anyway, due to all the scrutiny he was under, so there was little reason to stay in the town and every reason to leave. He simply picked up all of his belongings, including a handful of bigger mana crystals he’d never managed to sell, and teleported as far south as he could manage.

Live and learn, he supposed. The next time he tried to pull off that trick, he should sell it outside of Knyazov Dveri and probably not all at once in the same shop. It was probably smartest to go to Korsa and Eldemar, since they were big cities that probably saw far more traffic in mana crystals and had plenty of shops to sell to. Though Cyoria would probably be even better in that regard, once he was ready to go back there – it was not only big, but also the magical center of the whole continent.

But no matter, the restart was still salvageable – there were plenty of things to do outside of Knyazov Dveri. For instance, finding the aranean webs to trade with. He knew they existed all over the continent, but other than the destroyed one under Cyoria, he didn’t really know the exact location of any of them. Even if he wasn’t ready to actually deal with them properly yet, it wouldn’t hurt to spend a restart or two just locating every single web he could find and see just how friendly and receptive to trade each of them was. If Spear of Resolve was to be believed, they were unlikely to attack him outright just for contacting them. Modern aranea were descendants of aranea who grew in power after trading with humans, after all, so most of them should be at least mildly receptive to the idea of doing it again.

New goal set, Zorian teleported to Eldemar, the kingdom’s capital, to visit the Cartographer’s Society library. As far as map collections went, theirs was without equal, and it was largely free for perusal as well – so long as you never destroyed anything, you only had to pay for maps you wanted the library to copy for you. Zorian had spent a few days there the last time he had visited the capital, just browsing the shelves for any map that caught his fancy, and swore he would visit again when he had the time. This seemed as good an excuse as any.

"I dearly hope that’s not one of our maps you are writing on, young sir," the voice behind Zorian’s shoulder said. "As far as the library is concerned, that would undisputedly be destruction of our property."

Zorian jumped in surprise at the voice, too absorbed in his research to notice the librarian sneaking up at him. He looked at the map in front of him, heavily annotated and fighting for desk space with several stacks of map cases, travel journals and atlases and then shifted his attention to the old, bearded librarian behind him.

"It’s not," he told the man. "It’s the cheapest map of Eldemar I could find in a store I found on the way."

"Hmm. Would you object if I ask you what you are working on? It is rare to see such a young man here, especially one who is so absorbed in his research."

"I’m trying to find an aranean colony," said Zorian, not seeing the need to lie.

"And those are?"

"Magical talking spiders."

"Ah. Sounds like an intriguing project," said the old librarian. "I’ll leave you to it. As friendly advice, I will note that it would have probably been cheaper to just have the library make a few copies of the maps you were interested in. The Cartographer’s Society is not a profit-seeking organization and we try to keep the prices down as much as possible."

"I’ll keep that in mind," said Zorian. "Say, since we’re on the subject of copies… do you think I could learn how to copy documents like that from someone? Or is it some big secret of yours?"

"It is no secret," the librarian said. "The official policy of the Society is that maps should be as widely disseminated as possible, and we do not have a monopoly on that type of magic."

"Oh good," said Zorian. He knew a few ways to magically copy documents, but they relied on animating writing instruments to transcribe the contents. That didn’t work all that well on non-textual content, and was slow even for written works. The spell used by the Cartographer’s Society made perfect duplicates of any given map, down to every detail and shade, with only a single spell. "So does that mean you’re open to teaching me how to cast the spell?"

"I’m afraid that isn’t one of the services offered by this library. However, if you visit the main offices of the Cartographer’s Society, you can sign up for some basic classes in map-related magic, map making, map handling, and map-related research like you’re doing right now," the librarian said. "The prices are very affordable and it would probably help you in your quest to find these aranea as well."

Zorian hummed speculatively.

"I guess I’ll check it out," he said. He certainly had no shortage of money, thanks to his ill-considered stunt at the start of the restart, and he was going to have to spend a few days in Eldemar one way or the other.

The librarian soon left Zorian to his own devices again, and he considered the map in front of him. He didn’t have anything concrete yet, but he had several likely places to look for an aranean web. Korsa, Jatnik, Gozd and Padina were all large cities that had dungeon access and would be easy to reach from Cyoria, the source of the aranean expansion wave. One of them was bound to have the aranea living close by, and they might be willing to give him the location of nearby webs if he asked nicely (or bribed them sufficiently). Korsa was especially suspicious, since the city had an extensive textile industry, including one dealing in special clothes made out of spider silk. They got most of their raw material from Cyoria – unsurprising, as it produced the lion’s share of the stuff – but at least some of it was gathered locally… from a mostly harmless breed of giant spiders native to the region.

Yeah. Totally not an aranean colony.

Zorian made a small note in his notebook to track down every settlement that produced spider silk in any significant amount and decided to end the search for the day.

Zorian spent five days in Eldemar, though in all honesty he got everything he could about possible aranean sites on day three. The other two days were mostly so he could relax a bit and mentally prepare himself for what was to come. The idea of an impending meeting with another group of aranea left him in a depressed mood, since it reminded him of what happened to the previous group of aranea that had gotten involved with him, and that wasn’t exactly the best mindset with which to go and meet a bunch of telepaths. He did his best to distract himself by sight-seeing around the capital and browsing various magical stores he encountered.

He only browsed, though, never actually bought anything - Eldemar was a terribly expensive place to live in, he’d found. Everything, from room and board to already expensive magical reagents had higher prices in the capital than anywhere else Zorian had stayed at. Higher quality demands higher payments, the merchants assured him. What a load of crap. He suspected the average citizen in Eldemar was simply richer than those in the rest of the country and could thus pay more. The large number of theaters, art houses and music halls present in the city certainly indicated that the inhabitants had plenty of money to burn.

That aside, the city was nice. Orderly. The royal quarter was walled in and off-limits to uninvited commoners like him, but that didn’t mean that the government left the rest of the city outside their little bubble to rot. There were no obvious slums that Zorian could find – all of the buildings were well cared for and the streets free of trash and decay. Police patrolled everywhere, and were even joined by a group of well-armed soldiers at one point.

Asking around, he found that security was always tight. Eldemar had been a favorite target for saboteurs during the Splinter Wars, at least one of which managed to set the entire city ablaze. The fire consumed many important buildings, including both of Eldemar’s magical academies and its central library. By the time the city had recovered and rebuilt, most of the mages and their attendant facilities had already moved to Cyoria, cementing its rise as a magical nexus of the continent. Eldemar’s citizens still seemed bitter about that, harboring a fair amount of resentment over the fact. In any case, security was upgraded immensely in the aftermath of the fire, and never really went away. Even their underworld was thoroughly purged and resculpted into something more manageable. Dungeon delving was forbidden within city limits – instead, the royal family sent the army into the depths several times a year to get rid of anything remotely dangerous they could find.

Basically, he could cross Eldemar from the list of possible candidates to have an aranean colony. If it ever existed, it was almost certainly wiped out or chased away at this point. It also helped explain why the invaders targeted Cyoria instead of Eldemar, even though Eldemar contained the royal palace, treasury and most of the government buildings - much juicier targets if one intended to collapse a country and destabilize the continent. The city was too well guarded for such a large-scale attack to take them by surprise.

He ended up taking the classes offered by the Cartographer’s Society. More accurately, he paid extra to have an instructor assigned to him for individual lessons, so he could save some time. Zorian was pleasantly surprised by the mage they sent him in response – the young man assigned to him was polite and straightforward in his teaching methods. A welcome reprieve from Zorian’s usual luck with teachers. He only attended three sessions with the man, but that was enough to give him a plethora of mapping spells, not all of which dealt with classical paper maps. Zorian’s personal favorite in that bunch was a spell that created a miniature illusionary replica of the caster’s surroundings above their palm – that had been fun to play with.

It was tempting to just spend the rest of the restart goofing around with maps and visiting various curiosities in the capital, but he didn’t. He had a task to do, and an invisible time limit counting in the background. At the end of the fifth day, he gathered up his things and set off for Korsa to find the aranea.

Korsa was a big city – the third biggest city in the kingdom, to be precise, right after Cyoria and Eldemar. Even though Zorian was certain the aranea were in there somewhere, he knew it would take him ages to find them if he searched for them by exploring the local Dungeon. So he didn’t even try. Instead he approached the textile manufacturer that produced spider silk products and flat out asked him to introduce him to the aranea.

The man refused, claiming he had no idea what Zorian was talking about before throwing him out of his store with a warning to never come back again. Harsh. Still, Zorian never actually expected his request to be granted. He just wanted the man to inform his aranea trading partners that there was this strange kid going around town asking people about them. If the local aranea were anything like those in Cyoria, that would get their attention in a flash. He wouldn’t have to look for them because they would be looking for him.

It took less than two days for the aranea to track him down.

It was late in the evening of his second day in Korsa when Zorian felt an aranean signature enter his radius. Considering he was currently sitting on a small hill on the outskirts of Korsa, surrounded with a lot of grass and fields and nothing of any importance whatsoever, he felt confident that it was here for him.

[Greetings,] Zorian sent telepathically. [I am Zorian Kazinski. I have come to trade.]

Aranean minds were still too strange for him to recognize their emotions easily, but he felt sure the aranea was thoroughly shocked when he spoke to her.

[You are Open?] the aranea asked after a few seconds.

[Yes,] Zorian confirmed. He decided not to mention the Cyorian aranea and his connection to them for now – for all he knew they might have been mortal enemies or something. [May I know who I am talking to?]

[I am Seeker of the Eight Universal Paths, of the Sword Divers Web,] the aranea sent. [You can simply call me Seeker.]

[Seeker then. I would like to start by apologizing for the way I attracted your attention, but I didn’t know how else to contact you. I hope I haven’t caused too much of a stir,] Zorian said. [I hope we can work with each other despite this somewhat rough start.]

[I’m afraid I am not qualified to negotiate on behalf of my web, so I cannot make any firm promises. My task was only to find you and report my findings to the web,] Seeker responded. Translation: she was supposed to trawl through Zorian’s memories to see what his deal was, but him being psychic kind of made that impractical. [That said, I’m sure a small incident like this one can be easily smoothed over if you refrain from scaring us like this in the future. Just so I know what to report to the matriarch, what kind of trade are you proposing?]

[I want to trade for knowledge and training,] said Zorian. [Specifically, I want your help in learning how to wield my psychic abilities.]

[You already seem fairly proficient in them, though,] Seeker pointed out. She sent a weak psychic probe to worm its way through Zorian’s defenses but promptly retracted it when Zorian harshly slapped it down. [Not many humans can use telepathy so smoothly, and even fewer would have noticed that probe.]

[You flatter me, but we both know I am but a rank beginner when it comes to mind arts,] Zorian said. [I wish to move beyond bare basics in the field. At the very least I want to get a better grasp on telepathic combat and develop memory manipulation abilities.]

Seeker produced a burst of uncertainty and surprise over the link that Zorian didn’t quite know how to interpret. Some kind of aranean curse, maybe?

[You are certainly ambitious, young human,] Seeker said. [I hope you realize that this is not really a small thing you are asking for. I don’t believe the leadership will be happy with that idea. What exactly do you offer in return?]

[I have a number of magical items that I believe would be very useful to aranea, including one that allows telepathic communication over vast distances. Since I am the inventor and maker of such devices, I am open to requests in regard to their modification to suit your needs better. Since I am also a capable mage in general, I can help you out in any task that would benefit from human-style magic. And finally, I have access to important news that I would rather not discuss at this time, and which I suspect would greatly interest you.]

There was a short pause as the aranea absorbed this, after which it responded with a note of tentative acceptance.

[I see,] said Seeker. [As I said, I am not in a position to agree to any deals, but I shall present your case to the matriarch and we’ll see the result. Is there anything else you wish for me to note?]

[Not really, no. I would like to know how I can contact you properly in the future, if you don’t mind.]

Seeker was silent for a few moments before sending him a mental map of Korsa’s lower sewers with three distinct locations marked with a tiny blue sun.

[You can contact us by going to any one of these three places, but please don’t be impatient. It will probably take a couple of days before we’re prepared to talk to you again and impatience isn’t going to endear you to us.]

[Fair enough,] Zorian said. He had no intention of staying inside Korsa for days while they deliberated on whether to give him the time of the day or not, but fortunately he didn’t have to. He could kill two birds with one stone by giving them means of contacting him wherever he may be, while also providing a tangible example of what he was offering to them.

He removed a large wooden disc out of his jacket and placed it on the ground before him.

[This is a telepathic relay,] Zorian told Seeker. [Anyone touching it will be able to get ahold of the person holding the matching pair, regardless of distance. In this particular case, that someone is me. I’m not going to be in Korsa for long so use this to contact me when you’ve reached your decision.]

[I’m not bringing a possible bomb into the settlement,] Seeker said. [But I guess there is no harm in dragging it off to some forgotten corner where no one will stumble upon it until we come back for it again. Farewell, Zorian Kazinski. Events permitting, we shall meet again in a few days.]

Zorian wasn’t idle while the Sword Divers deliberated whether to accept his offer or not – he left Korsa to continue searching for more aranean colonies. Sadly, none of the other colonies were as easy to find as theirs, despite living beneath much smaller settlements. By the time the Sword Divers contacted him again eight days later, he only found one more colony. Illustrious Gem Collectors lived under a small village near Ticlin and, although perfectly friendly and polite, immediately informed him that they had an exclusive contract with the leaders of the village to only engage in trade with them and none else. Unfortunate. That said, they were perfectly willing to tell Zorian the locations of five other webs in their vicinity that might be more open to the idea, so that was still a win in his book.

Before Zorian had the chance to check out any of them, however, he finally received a call from the Sword Divers that they were ready to make a deal. At this point the restart only had a week and a half left in it, so Zorian doubted he would get much out of the agreement, but he went to meet with them regardless.

When he reached the designated meeting place, however, he found only two aranea waiting for him, which was very suspicious. His experience with the aranea, limited as it may be, told him there should have been a minimum of three – one negotiator and two guards. More realistically, it should have been even more of them. The Cyorian matriarch had been fond of carting at least four honor guards along with her, and that was when meeting with little old him that she knew for a fact was no threat to her. Illustrious Gem Collectors sent a total of eight aranea in their greeting party.

His suspicions were confirmed when the two aranea revealed they were just guides, meant to take him where the real meeting was to take place. Zorian was instantly alarmed, and his paranoia was not assuaged in the least when the two aranea proceeded to lead him deep, deep into the Dungeon beneath Korsa. Too deep for his liking.

"Okay, we’re stopping here. This is as far as I’m willing to go," said Zorian out loud, purposely not bothering to communicate with his guides telepathically. His voice resonated unnervingly in the large cavern they were in, and the two aranea flinched at the harsh sound of his voice.

[Please, be patient,] one of them said nervously. [We’re not far from the meeting place. It will only take a little while to reach it.]

"Well, then it shouldn’t be too big of a problem for you to go fetch them and tell them to come here," Zorian said. "The exact place shouldn’t matter much unless you are trying to lead me into an ambush."

The sudden stiffening of their bodies told Zorian everything he needed to know. He had just enough time to channel mana into the mind shield spell inscribed on the medallion he wore under his shirt for the occasion before two mental attacks slammed into his newly-erected barrier like a pair of sledgehammers. He immediately fired an overpowered magic missile at one of the aranea in front of them, crushing her like a grape. Her mind instantly winked out and disappeared from his mind sense.

The other aranea, realizing it would never batter down his mental shield fast enough, jumped straight at him, fangs bared. It bounced back harmlessly off the shield he erected in front of himself. Zorian drew his spell rod out of his belt and pointed it at her.

"Why do this?" Zorian asked her. "Tell me and maybe I won’t just incinerate you on the spot?" Zorian asked her.

She didn’t answer. After a second, Zorian realized with some embarrassment she couldn’t, seeing how his mind was totally shielded from her at the moment. He dismissed the shield for the moment, but kept the spell rod trained at her.

[Please, I don’t know anything!] she mentally whined. Zorian kept alert for any surprises she might send at him over the telepathic link, but she didn’t even try. She seemed completely overcome with terror. [I was just supposed to lead you there, nobody told me the reasons! Please don’t kill me, I don’t want to die!]

Zorian growled before shoving the suddenly glowing spell rod at her. Her fear spiked for a moment and she let a terrified screech, curling upon itself in preparation for her demise… and then suddenly stopped when all that happened was a bubble of force springing into existence around her.

Just then Zorian felt two additional aranean signatures speeding towards him from the direction his two guides had been leading him to. Then another, and another…

Shit. The two must have sent a warning to the main ambush force. He gave the surviving guide a brief glare, causing her to curl up inside her force cage, and then started running towards the surface. He knew for a fact that humans were way faster than aranea so it should be possible to simply outrun the pursuers and-

There were eight more aranean minds in front of him, blocking off his path of retreat.

Zorian cursed his rotten luck and he skidded to a halt, trying to think of a way out of this. His mind shield wasn’t going to last long against… 16 araneas!? No, 18, two were just slow runners apparently.

Six telepathic attacks slammed into his mind shield, failing to break it but causing him to stagger drunkenly as his vision swam and his balance went haywire. He wondered for a moment why only six of them had attacked his mind when so many more of them were in range before he remembered his talks with Novelty about telepathic combat. Battering down mental shields like this one too vigorously could easily destroy the mind underneath.

Seven attacks this time. His mind shield still held, but only just barely, and he collapsed on his knees in response regardless.

They weren’t trying to kill him. Of course not – what would have been the point of that? No, they were aiming to capture…

Zorian almost lost consciousness as nine attacks slammed into his mental shield, crushed it like an egg and then ripped straight into his unprotected mind. The pain was excruciating, blanking out all thought and making it impossible to concentrate on anything. There was something he needed to do, he was sure, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember what exactly it was…

He felt his muscles lock up as an alien mind seized his motor control away from him and started rooting in his head for facts and memories. He had to do… something… had to…

Suddenly an image flashed before him, of two necklaces hanging from his neck, one of them inscribed with the defensive spell that ultimately failed him and the other that contained…

His mind suddenly snapped back into place, his course of action clear. Activate the suicide rings, that’s what he had to do. He felt the alien mind panic as it realized what he was going to do, and felt three more attacks rip through his thoughts. They were far weaker than the ones that broke through his shield, but his mind was unprotected now and they felt like hot knives driven into his brain. He held onto the thought, though, the idea that he had to activate those rings no matter what. He forgot what the rings really did when the mental knives hit, forgot why they mattered or where he was and what he was doing, but he still knew what he had to do. Had to… had to…

A weak, gentle pulse of mana poured into the rings around his neck and the world suddenly became awash in light and heat.

Then there was only darkness.

Like many times before, Zorian woke up in his room back in Cirin. However, there was no Kirielle jumping on him to wake him up this time, and it was late in the evening instead of early in the morning.

Also, he had a blinding headache. Can’t forget about that part.

Suddenly the door cracked open and a familiar head peaked inside tentatively, as if afraid what it would find inside. Zorian squinted, his vision blurry without his glasses, and gave Kirielle a searching look.

Her eyes immediately widened in surprise for some reason. He reached out to her mind in order to understand what was going on and-

"Ow," he croaked painfully. Okay, apparently he wasn’t supposed to do that.

"Mother! He’s awake! He woke up! He woke up!" Kirielle shouted, thundering down the stairs. Zorian winced at the sound and tried to remember what happened. How the hell did he mess himself up this badly so early in the restart? The last thing he remembered was…

Suddenly his memories came rushing back in, along with a fresh wave of pain, and he remembered everything. Well, not literally everything – his memories of everything after he confronted the guides were fuzzy and jumbled out of order – but enough of it to understand what happened to him.

Those treacherous, motherfucking slimes!

"Zorian?"

Zorian jerked in surprise at his mother’s voice, broken out of his recollection.

"Uh… I’m… sort of fine?" Zorian mumbled. "My head is killing me, but I don’t think it’s anything serious. Can you hand me my glasses?"

His vision cleared immensely with his glasses on, allowing him to see just how worried mother looked as she stared at him. He winced internally. He was pretty sure he knew what the problem was, but better feign ignorance…

"What happened to me?" he asked.

"You wouldn’t wake up," Mother said. "You scared Kirielle like you wouldn’t believe – she came running down this morning, bawling her eyes out, saying she killed you. Well, you obviously weren’t dead but nothing we did could shock you awake either. We summoned a doctor, but he couldn’t find anything wrong with you. As far as he could tell, you just suddenly fell into a coma for no reason."

He nodded slowly. That sounded about right. The Sword Divers really did a number on h- wait, what was that first part?

"Killed me?" he asked incredulously.

"I didn’t say that!" Kirielle protested, suddenly entering the room and carrying a bowl of soup in her hands. "Mother is just making things up! It’s just that I… um…"

"Relax, Kiri," Zorian sighed. "There is no way you jumping on top of me could have caused this."

The silence that followed clued him in that he’d made some sort of mistake. What did he…?

Oh. Oh damn.

"How’d you know I did that?" asked Kirielle.

"Because… that’s what you always do?" Zorian tried, his mind still a little fuzzy and unresponsive. Probably why he made that kind of stupid mistake in the first place. "Hey, how about that soup, huh? Is that for me?"

"Not always," Kirielle huffed sullenly, thrusting the bowl at him. Whew, one bullet dodged. Mother was still giving him suspicious looks, though…

Zorian considered things as he practically inhaled the bowl of soup in front of him (the aranea may have scoured his mind, but there was nothing wrong with his stomach and he had not eaten for an entire day). This whole restart was probably a bust. The headache was bound to stay with him for weeks, only gradually going away, and he would be pretty useless while it lasted. On top of that, he wasn’t sure if mother would even let him go to the Academy after an episode like that, so it might be impossible to leave the house without flat out running away. It might be best to just spend the entire month recovering and making sure his attackers didn’t saddle him with any nasty surprises or permanent consequences.

He glanced at mother and Kirielle, who were both still giving him concerned looks, as if expecting him to fall apart at any particular moment, and then the empty soup bowl in his hand.

"So," he said. "You wouldn’t happen to have more of this stuff, would you?"

Like he expected, mother didn’t want to even hear about him going back to the academy so soon after his inexplicable coma and insisted he remain at home to recover. However, she and father had arranged for their trip to Koth in three days' time, and she was clearly loath to delay it. Since the last thing Zorian wanted was to spend any more time around his parents than necessary (even though mother had been surprisingly nice to him at the moment, he knew the effect would wear off after a few days), he was fully on board with her going through with their original plans and leaving him alone at home to recover.

In the end, mother and father did not need too much convincing to leave for their extended visit to Daimen. Zorian just had to promise to stay home for at least a month before heading back to the academy, with neighbors occasionally checking up on him to make sure he was keeping to his end of the bargain. Oh, and take Kirielle off their hands, but he no longer considered that such a chore as he once did.

Interestingly, this was the first time since he got stuck in the time loop that he had spoken to his father again. It only took a single snide comment about his weak, fainting son for him to remember why. If he was lucky, this would be the last restart he had to interact with the man.

The month passed in quiet recovery. Kirielle was initially enthusiastic about nursing him back to health, but it took her all of two days before she got bored of playing nurse and dumped all of the cooking and household chores in his lap. He was fine with it, really – she meant well, but he wasn’t a big fan of burned steak and half-cooked eggs, which was just about the only thing she knew how to make. That seemed to signify to her that he was okay, though, because she began pestering him for magic lessons soon after. Not having anything better to do with his time, he agreed. She showed much more patience for that than she did for cooking, at least.

As the restart gradually dragged to its close, Zorian breathed a sigh of relief. The attack had no lasting consequences he could detect. The headaches were annoying, but thankfully subsided quickly. By the end of the third week, they were completely gone. He had no problems using his powers after the second week or so, and he noticed no holes in his memory – even the memories of the final attack had gradually un-jumbled themselves into a proper timeline by the end of the first week, although the very end was hard to interpret due to his less than coherent state at the time. The matriarch’s memory package was thankfully still whole and intact, waiting for the day he was good enough to open it properly.

He had been lucky. That could have gone far worse for him than it had in the end. Far, far worse. If he hadn’t managed to activate his suicide rings in time…

But no matter – live and learn. He would just have to make sure he came better prepared when he visited the other aranea communities in the next restart. He had five other candidates from the Illustrious Gem Collectors, and they can’t all be treacherous jackasses like the Sword Divers, right? Still, he had every intention of taking better precautions in the future to make sure something like the previous restart could never happen again.

If another group of aranea tried to betray him in the future, he would be ready to show them just how big of a mistake they made in attacking him.

36. A Battle of Minds

Eventually, the month-long recuperation period came to an end. Zorian spent the last few hours of that restart with Kirielle, attending Cirin’s own celebration of the summer festival. Kirielle was very happy with him, because apparently she was never allowed to wander around or stay up so late during the previous festivals. He didn’t really reciprocate her excitement, to he honest – Cirin’s summer festival was the same as it was every year: incredibly dull. He found himself almost wishing for Ibasan invaders to make an appearance, just to liven the place up a bit.

Okay, no. No, he didn’t. The whole thing was still very boring – that’s what he meant.

Regardless, with the beginning of the new restart (initiated by the familiar feeling of Kirielle jumping on top of him to wake him up), he was ready to once again tackle the problem of contacting the aranea and getting them to teach him mind magic. It didn’t work all too well last time, but he had a whole month to consider what went wrong and how to fix it and he was willing to give it another go. Though not immediately, of course – teleporting to the nearest aranean web right from the start would be stupid. He had no intention of getting anywhere near one until he had already tested some tactics and equipped himself accordingly. Consequently, he started the restart in the same way he had started most of the previous ones: by going to Knyazov Dveri.

He did two things before anything else after entering the town. First, he descended into the local dungeon to pick up all the mana crystals he knew the location of… though he didn’t sell a single one in the Delver Village, or even the town above, so hopefully there would be no uproar and spying attempts on him this time around. Secondly, he saved both Alanic and Lukav from the assassins - even though he had no intention of pursuing lessons from Alanic in this restart. One of his reasons was purely emotional – both men had helped him a lot, and it felt wrong to let them die when he was already there, capable of preventing their deaths, even if it was meaningless in the long term – but the other reason was that saving them gave him some relatively non-threatening combat practice. He knew he could defeat the undead boars trying to ambush Lukav and the attack party assaulting Alanic’s temple without dying, but they were still life-and-death battles that he had to take seriously.

One of these days, when he finally got some mind magic expertise from the aranea, he was going to capture the two mages involved in the assault on Alanic’s temple and trawl through their memories to see if they knew anything important. Maybe some of the gunmen too…

But he was getting ahead of himself. No counting his chickens before they hatch – better worry about actually learning said mind magic before thinking about what he would do once he had it.

The first and most obvious problem he had to tackle was what to do if things went wrong again. No matter what precautions he decided to take, there was always a possibility he would bite off more than he could chew or end up caught off-guard. Technically, he had his suicide rings for that, but there was one thing that struck him about his altercation with the Sword Divers – how slow he had been about activating them. He should have blown himself up the moment it became obvious that the situation had become hopeless, instead of waiting for the last possible moment like he had. He could think up a lot of excuses for himself, but at the end it all came down to one simple fact: he didn’t want to die. He had a powerful survival instinct, and it was not easy for him to consciously kill himself… even if he knew, on an intellectual level, that it wouldn’t be permanent. Thus, he had waited until he was absolutely sure he wasn’t getting out of that situation alive and intact, and it had almost cost him everything.

All things considered, Zorian didn’t want to become jaded, accustomed to dying and suicide – that seemed a bad attitude to have, especially once he left the time loop. That left two main ways he could see to deal with the problem. One was to set up a bunch of contingencies into his suicide rings, allowing them to activate automatically in certain cases. Another was to have more options to choose from when faced with disaster – something other than fight to the death or kill yourself. A retreat option.

Contingencies sounded like a good idea, and Zorian even had some experience making them thanks to his studying of warding – a discipline that made heavy use of contingencies to determine when it should activate particular defenses. Unfortunately, most warding schemes used relatively easy-to-define triggers such as a human touches the object or 'a living being not keyed into the wards enters the area'… defining a trigger for a contingency that would kill him should his mind be tampered with but wouldn’t activate the moment he engaged in telepathic communication of any sort or hit his head or became dizzy or a million other things which were beyond him at the moment. Even if he could make such a thing, he would still have to exhaustively test it to make sure it was reliable… by working with a friendly aranea. Which, uh, kind of made it useless for his current needs.

So he cheated. Instead of creating a nuanced, sophisticated contingency, he made the metaphorical equivalent of a sledgehammer. Specifically, he made a contingency that would kill him the moment he lost consciousness or suffered a sufficiently strong headache… but only if he turned it on. It would normally stay dormant, to cut down on unwanted activations, but he could activate it on a moment’s notice if he found himself in a dangerous situation. He wasn’t terribly happy with that solution, but it would do for now. He just had to remember to turn it off once the danger had passed, lest he explode the next time he went to sleep. That would be so very embarrassing…

That being done, he turned his attention to the retreat option. He had considered everything from talking to Lukav about transforming into a rock worm or some other tunneling creature, alteration spells that would allow him to create his own paths and sanctuaries underground, phasing magic, haste spells, and more. But ultimately, his mind kept going back to teleportation. It was the ultimate form of mobility magic, and everything else was just a poor substitute. If he could somehow bypass Dungeon interference to teleport away, he could simply avoid ambushes like the ones the Sword Divers had used against him instead of resorting to suicide in order to evade capture.

Fortunately, during the month-long recuperation, Zorian had come up with an idea of how he could side-step his current limitation as far as teleportation was concerned. Which was why, before descending into the dungeon, he turned one of the large stones he found on the outskirts of Knyazov Dveri into a recall anchor.

The recall spell was outright made specifically for quick retreats, and the link forged between the caster and the anchor ensured they could teleport out even from areas warded against teleportation. Well, so long as the wards were basic ones, since those protections simply disrupted the targeting part of the teleport rather than inhibiting dimensional warping as such. Consequently, Zorian had a feeling the spell would work to yank him back to the anchor, even through the Dungeon interference.

He was right… sort of. He had found that past a certain depth, the strain on the link became too much and it snapped. Before that happened, however, the spell worked flawlessly, allowing Zorian to quickly teleport away to the surface. The depth past which it ceased to work was too shallow for his liking, but he was confident he could strengthen the link. Over the next couple of days, he worked to combine several marking spells and his knowledge of spell formula in order to create a stronger anchor for the recall spell – one that would allow it to power through any amount of rock and Dungeon interference. He was largely successful in this, though the anchor object had to be pretty large to contain the final spell formula he designed. No matter, there was no need to make the anchor particularly portable for what he had in mind.

Satisfied that both of his projects bore fruit, Zorian spent the rest of the week creating various portable traps and magic items… including a more combat-worthy version of his wooden golem. Golems, having no minds, were almost entirely immune to aranean mind magic, and Zorian intended to bring one with him under the explanation that it was his helper and luggage carrier. Partially true, since the golem he’d made wasn’t exactly the mobile wardstone and murder statue that professional war golems were… but in the end it was still a painfully obvious bodyguard construct and Zorian fully expected the aranea to recognize it as such. Having such a guardian trailing behind him was bound to make even the most opportunistic aranea think twice about going after him.

Or at least he hoped so. He also hoped they wouldn’t feel too threatened by the construct, since they might simply refuse to talk to him at all if it made them too nervous around him…

Well, no matter. He would risk it. Gathering all of his equipment, he teleported himself and his golem to the one aranean colony that had been friendly to him the last time around. It was time to pay the Illustrious Gem Collectors a visit.

The last time Zorian had visited the aranean web that called itself Illustrious Gem Collectors, he found a colony that specialized in harvesting various precious stones that were abundant in their local underworld and traded them to the nearby human village in exchange for various human-produced goods. They were miners, essentially. They informed him straight away that they had agreed not to trade with any humans except the ones at the village, but gave him the locations of five other webs that might be more willing to help him. Since his main goal had been to locate as many aranean webs as possible and sound them out, Zorian had accepted this explanation at face value and moved on. However, after thinking about it for a while, he realized he had been kind of stupid. Just because they couldn’t trade with him didn’t mean they couldn’t receive gifts. He should have given them one – aside from the fact they may have been even more helpful if he had done so, there was also a chance they immediately alerted the webs they sent him to about his coming. In which case he definitely wanted them to put in a good word for him, which would be far more likely if he were handing out gifts to every group he visited.

Hell, he even had a perfect gift for them. Although he cashed in on a lot of the crystallized mana he found in Knyazov Dveri’s local underworld, he left a fair amount for his own tinkering and for situations like this. He was pretty sure the Illustrious Gem Collectors would have no problems accepting a gift of crystallized mana, since they traded similar items to the village all the time and it would not be in the least bit suspicious of them to have a couple of mana crystals in their possession.

Zorian entered the tunnels that held the Gem Collectors' colony and contacted the nearest sentry in the manner shown to him by the web’s matriarch during his last visit. If the web found it in any way unusual that a human knew how to properly greet them and ask for audience, they never mentioned it. Instead he was soon presented with the web’s matriarch, She Who Eats Fire and Sees Gold, and her escort of 10 other aranea. Huh, two more guards than the last time… apparently having his golem trail after him did have an effect. Still, while the matriarch was noticeably more nervous around him this time, she did not act outraged at his addition and she gave him essentially the same speech she had the last time around. They were honored by the visit, but they had prior commitments and agreements and couldn’t deal with him so here’s a bunch of other webs he could pester for help instead. Only this time they gave him eight names instead of five. Aside from the Rose Labyrinth Dwellers, Yellow Cavern Guardians, Filigree Sages, River Navigators and Luminous Advocates that he’d already known about, she also gave him the location of the Talisman Bearers, Ghost Serpent Acolytes and Silent Doorway Adepts. Strange. Why the extra information this time around?

[Is there something special about those last three webs?] he asked.

[Ah, so you have heard of them then?] the matriarch said, making her own conclusions about his question. [Yes, they are a bit… shady in their dealings with others, human and aranea alike. I wouldn’t normally send a young mage like you to webs like theirs, but you seem like someone who can take care of himself.]

She gave his golem a significant look.

[He’s just my luggage carrier,] Zorian said.

[Of course he is,] the matriarch said, a touch of amusement embedded in her telepathic message. [I’m sure those glyphs on its surface are purely aesthetic too. Leaving that aside, is there anything else we could do for you?]

[You have done more than I could have possibly hoped for, honored matriarch,] Zorian answered honestly.

He beckoned the golem to come closer and pulled out a box from the backpack it was carrying, pointedly ignoring the wave of tension that rippled throughout the assembled aranea at the action. He then opened the box, revealing several pieces of crystalized mana and placed it in front of the matriarch.

[Please,] he said. [Take this as a small token of my appreciation for your help.]

The matriarch stared at the box without a word for several seconds before becoming agitated. No, wait, she was just trying to mimic shaking her head with her entire body.

[I cannot accept this,] she protested.

Zorian frowned. [Surely the village leadership isn’t so insistent about your trade agreement as to keep you from accepting gifts?]

[It is not that! Your gift – it is simply too generous,] the matriarch said. [It’s too much.]

[I respectfully disagree,] said Zorian firmly. [You were amicable and honest with me, and you told me where to go even if you could not help me yourself. You’ve most likely saved me months of searching by telling me where I can find more webs. I feel this is the least I can do for wasting your time with this meeting.]

The matriarch remained silent after that. After a while, Zorian figured she was not going to say anything and that this was effectively the end of their meeting.

[In any case, I suppose it’s time for me to leave,] Zorian said. [Until we meet a-]

[Wait,] the matriarch said, interrupting his farewell. [One of the webs I told you about. The Luminous Advocates.]

[Yes?] asked Zorian curiously.

[They are a web dedicated to honing our psychic abilities as much as possible, even by aranean standards. Among other things, that means they are intensely interested in studying rare cases, such as aranea with unique talents… or human psychics. They will want to work with you every bit as much as you want to work with them. Always keep that in mind, because they’re liable to pretend otherwise when you deal with them.]

[I… see,] Zorian responded. [That is a very useful thing to know about. I thank you for your advice, wise matriarch.]

[Oh, there is no need to flatter me,] She said. [I’m just helping a good, generous soul get forward in life. Besides, the Luminous Advocates are snotty and arrogant, always looking down on us as mere miners and thinking their mastery of the mind arts makes them so much better than everyone else… in my opinion, they deserve to be taken down a bit. But never mind that, I’ve just realized I’ve been a terrible host. If you would be willing to follow me deeper into the tunnels, I would love to give you a brief tour of our humble home. We can talk some more while we walk.]

Zorian agreed, but quietly turned on the suicide contingencies before following after her.

Just in case.

Despite Zorian’s concerns, the brief tour of the place offered by the matriarch turned out to be just that. There was no sudden ambush or sinister reveals, just a stroll through the tunnels with some running commentary. Zorian could tell he was only being shown the less interesting, outer parts of the settlement… but the tour was really more of an excuse to have a conversation and exchange some information, so he didn’t mention it.

The matriarch gave him a little more information about the other webs. The Rose Labyrinth Dwellers were somewhat unique in the sense that they never visited the surface. Most aranea webs lived underground but were heavily dependent on the surface for their survival. Not so for the Rose Labyrinth Dwellers – they were only active underground, and were rather mysterious even to other aranea. The matriarch didn’t know how they would feel about teaching him, but she seemed sure they wouldn’t attack. The Yellow Cavern Guardians had apparently found one of the rare underground fungal forests and made it their home – they were fiercely protective of their home, knowing just how tempting a target it was for just about anyone, but the matriarch felt they were worth the visit. The Filigree Sages specialized in webcraft, which was basically the aranea equivalent of spell formulas – instead of carving glyphs onto items, they anchored their spells into web constructs for some reason. Zorian didn’t understand why they would do that, since web constructs were bound to be far more fragile than glyphs carved into stone and metals, but it seemed to be a thing among the aranea. It was probably a convenience thing – aranean limbs weren’t exactly made for carving and chiseling things, so they probably had to use alteration magic any time they wanted to do such things. Easier to just spin some webs. The River Navigators made their homes on the banks of an underground river, and had mastered the skill of making boats and using them to travel down its length and back. This allowed them to range a lot further than most aranea could manage, and thus gather more resources. They were very active in trading with humans, but mostly for material possessions rather than psychic instruction. Finally, there were the Luminous Advocates. Their territory had little in the way of natural resources, so they mostly traded their mind magic expertise to other aranean webs instead of dealing with humans much, but that was due to lack of means rather than wants. The matriarch insisted that the Luminous Advocates were clearly jealous of the Illustrious Gem Collectors' wealth, and otherwise made some snide comments about their character and even sexual potency. She did admit, albeit grudgingly, that they were his best bet if approached correctly.

Zorian was somewhat surprised how relatively advanced the aranea in the local region were with regards to their crafting abilities. The Cyorian web mostly traded with the surface for all their crafting needs and didn’t produce anything except silk and processed monster parts. It reminded him of Novelty and her desire to learn 'human construction magic'… and thinking of Novelty promptly made him feel guilty and angry, so he dropped that trail of thought soon enough.

Of the last three webs, the matriarch knew little beyond generalities. The Talisman Bearers were apparently heavily magic-focused, most of them carrying large metal discs full of spell formulas strapped to their bodies. The Ghost Serpent Acolytes had abandoned the aranean Great Web belief in order to worship some kind of native spirit they found. The Silent Doorway Adepts had either some kind of stealth magic or great teleportation skills, or maybe both, because they had a reputation for getting into inaccessible places and disappearing from them just as easily. All three had a bit of a shady reputation. The Talisman Bearers were known to be very greedy for magic they could use, especially magic items, which could be either very good or very bad for Zorian. The Ghost Serpent Acolytes slavishly followed the guidance of their guardian spirit, and the Ghost Serpent was known to be a little… erratic at times. The Silent Doorway Adepts were thieves, or at least had a reputation for such.

Zorian decided to put all three of them firmly at the bottom of his list of aranean webs to visit.

For his part, Zorian told a little bit about himself to the matriarch - how he was studying magic in Cyoria, and how he had met the aranea there. How they had helped him make sense of his abilities and learn how to control them. How they are all dead now, wiped out in totality.

[So Cyoria changes hands once again, does it?] the matriarch asked rhetorically. [I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Do you happen to know which web took over?]

[None at the moment,] Zorian said. [It wasn’t a rival web that destroyed them. It was… something else. Most likely some monster rising from the deeper section of the dungeon. Cyoria has had a bit of a problem with that recently.]

[I have heard something about that from the night runners,] the matriarch said. [But I didn’t know it was that bad. Still, expect a new web to move in soon enough. Cyoria is a tempting prize. Not for us, mind you, the Illustrious Gem Collectors are happy enough with their lot, but plenty of ambitious webs would jump at the chance to claim the place for themselves.]

[Night runners?] asked Zorian.

[A name for aranea that go between different webs to bring news and conduct trade. Don’t go looking for them. Night runners generally don’t like humans. Their whole existence revolves around crossing over vast stretches of human-controlled land. Many die to mages and guns in the process. They wouldn’t appreciate some random human tracking them down, regardless of the reason. The whole point of being a night runner is evading humans, after all, and especially mages.]

[Got it. Don’t bother the night runners unless I want a fight,] said Zorian.

[Have you ever gotten in an actual fight with an aranea?] the matriarch asked curiously.

[Um. Sort of,] said Zorian. [It didn’t end all that well for me. While we are on that topic, have you ever heard of the Sword Divers web?]

[Can’t say that I have. Where are they from?]

[They live under Korsa,] Zorian answered.

[Oh, no wonder, then! Korsa is really far from us. I’m afraid that aranean webs have very little contact with webs outside of our immediate vicinity. Other than the news we get from the night runners and the occasional aranean explorer, we know little of what happens in distant webs. It may be strange to hear this, but we actually have a better picture of what humans are doing at any given point than our own kind. What did you want to know about the Sword Divers anyway?]

[They arranged for a meeting with me and then tried to ambush me when I got there,] Zorian said.

[Ah,] the matriarch said quietly. [I am sorry to hear that. Treacherous webs like that bring a bad name to our kind.]

[So you can’t tell me why they did that?] Zorian asked.

[It could be any number of things,] the matriarch said, adding a mental equivalent of a shrug. [Aranea are not nearly as homogenous as humans in term of culture-] Zorian silently boggled at the notion of humans being culturally homogenous. [-since the relative isolation of each web quickly causes webs to develop their own… peculiarities. Perhaps you insulted them somehow. Perhaps it was how they test anyone wanting to meet with their leaders. Perhaps they were simply greedy and decided you would be an easy target. I’d personally assume the latter, but who could possibly tell?]

Soon after that, the conversation died down and he parted ways with the Illustrious Gem Collectors. The matriarch told him to drop by for another chat when he was done scouting out the other webs to tell her how it went, which Zorian interpreted as come back again soon with some more expensive gifts, but agreed to anyway. He meant it too – this visit had turned out to be far more productive than he had been hoping, and who knew what else he might learn from the matriarch if he could get her talking again. Stopping by before the restart ended shouldn’t be too much of a hassle.

The next day he set off towards the Rose Labyrinth Dwellers to begin his task in earnest.

Despite having detailed instructions about where they live, it took Zorian an entire day of searching before he encountered any of their sentries. And an entire day of wandering the lightless tunnels, constantly doubling back after taking wrong turns and fighting the denizens of the Dungeon. That black, fire-breathing beetle whose carapace shrugged off both kinetic force and fire really gave him a scare, but thankfully it was rather slow and freezing it solid finally allowed him to kill it.

The Rose Labyrinth Dwellers really lived up to the Labyrinth part of their name.

[Zorian Kazinski of Cyoria,] the aranean spokesperson began. The local matriarch declined going out to meet him, sending a small greeting party of four aranea instead. They had taken their sweet time considering his offer, silently communicating between themselves for nearly two hours, but it seemed they have finally reached their decision. [We have discussed your request and reached a decision. We agree to teach you in the ways of our Gift, but only if you accept our terms.]

[Those being?] asked Zorian.

[You will live with us for the duration of your lessons. You will eat and sleep in our settlement, hunt with our hunters, patrol our territory with our scouts and otherwise act as a member of our web.]

Zorian balked at the terms. How the hell did they expect him to agree to that!? He knew for a fact that the aranean idea of food was vastly different from the human one, for one thing. But frankly, even ignoring the sheer logistical problems of that idea, it required him to trust them far more than he did. He’d be at their complete mercy all day, every day…

…which, now that he thought about it, was probably what they were going for. That, or they were trying to get rid of him via unreasonable terms.

[There is no negotiating these terms?] asked Zorian.

[No,] the spokesperson responded. [If you are not willing to commit yourself, how can you expect the same of us?]

[…I will have to think about it,] Zorian said. It was a dirty lie, of course, since he had already thought about it and rejected the idea with extreme prejudice. But there was no sense in being impolite. For all he knew, they thought they were being extremely reasonable.

[Take your time,] the spokesperson said. [It is not something to decide on quickly. You know where to find us if you’re interested.]

[I am sorry, but we are going to have to refuse your request,] the aranea said. [Perhaps if you are still interested in a couple of months from now we might be able to help you, but we are currently busy with… the renovation of our settlement and cannot help you. I hope you understand.]

Zorian stared the two aranea in front of him. That the matriarch of the Yellow Cavern Guardians came to greet him with only one guard was already pretty strange, but her nervous, twitchy behaviors did nothing to still his paranoia. Thankfully, it didn’t seem she was planning on doing anything to him, she just seemed generally stressed and frightened. In fact, her guard was just as nervous, and so was the sentry he initially contacted. The entire web seemed to be on edge for some reason.

The matriarch returned his stare with one of her own, her body shifting from time to time to switch focus between him and his golem, trying to divine something about them through intense scrutiny.

[I am sorry if I am making you nervous,] Zorian said. [I assure you that the golem is-]

[We are not threatened by your stupid toy!] She snapped. [We have far more pressing-]

She suddenly cut herself off and remained silent for a second before reestablishing telepathic communication.

[I am sorry. I let my temper get the better of me. Please, just leave. It is dangerous for you to remain here.]

[You are being threatened by someone,] Zorian guessed. A spike of emotion and images came from the link, hard to interpret but not totally incomprehensible. [Correction, some thing. A monster. A thing from the depths?]

[This talk is over,] the matriarch said icily. [If you don’t go away, I will attack you.]

[Perhaps I could help?] Zorian tried.

[No, you cannot,] she said. [You are unwanted here. Leave. Now.]

What else could he do? He left.

[Yes.]

[Yes?] Zorian repeated in surprise. [Just like that?]

Bridge of Moonlight Connecting Ten Thousand Shores, the matriarch of the River Navigators, gave him a searching look. [Was I not supposed to agree? You gave a convincing offer. I could really use those telepathic relays to connect all our outposts together. I’ve been trying to buy some of those from the Filigree Sages for ages now, but the greedy bastards keep increasing the price.]

Honestly, considering how his previous visits had gone, he’d half-expected the River Navigators to consult the river currents about whether or not they should teach him and then inform him that the river said no. That was just about how his luck worked, apparently. But no, they just patiently listened to his offer and promptly agreed. It was almost anticlimactic, but Zorian wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

[The Filigree Sages have telepathic relays? And here I thought I was being original when I made them…] he complained. Though it kind of did make sense that some of the aranea would try to make something like that. It was probably more unusual that no one else had them…

[If it makes you feel any better, they are the only web I know of that have them, and they refuse to share them with the rest of us,] Bridge of Moonlight said. [They won’t even sell the finished product to us, lest we figure out how to make them from live examples.]

Ah, of course - the tendency of spellcasters everywhere to jealously hoard their knowledge and share bare scraps with others. A major part of why Ikosian magical tradition was so successful was that it had mechanisms for overcoming that – widely-accessible schools to teach everyone proper basics, state-sponsored libraries to preserve spellbooks and make them available to aspiring mages, legal frameworks for apprenticeships and magical monopolies, and so on. Even with that, there were a lot of cases of mages taking priceless magical knowledge with them to their graves because they had never entrusted anyone with their secrets.

Zorian decided that if he ever managed to escape from the time loop alive, he was going to write a book about psychic powers to make sure people like him don’t have to jump through the same hoops he had to in order to master their abilities. He wasn’t sure how much of his knowledge would be transmissible through a simple written medium, but he would try.

Three days later, when Zorian provided the first shipment of telepathic relays and proved they worked as advertised (plus warded one of their storage caves against various vermin), they introduced him to Mind Like Fire, his new mind magic teacher.

[Your name is surprisingly short by aranean standards,] he told her.

[The names you hear are simply approximations of their original meaning in aranean mind-speak,] she said. [Our names are all of similar length, but since our languages are so different, it is often hard to translate certain concepts without ending up rather verbose. Though in my opinion, many aranea also enjoy making the translation as grandiose-sounding as possible. Are you ready for your lesson?]

[Yes.]

[Excellent. First, let me tell you what I mean to teach you. Feel free to stop me if you already know something I included in my lesson plan or have any objections.]

Zorian nodded, settling down on the small chair provided for him and glancing at his surroundings. The room they were in was pretty well done for something built and furnished deep in the dungeon by a bunch of giant telepathic spiders – it had a proper table and some chairs, a pair of decorative cabinets (they were completely empty; Zorian got curious and checked when he was left alone at one point), and even a couple of landscape paintings hanging of the walls. Only the lack of any windows and an expensive, clearly magical lamp perched on the table indicated that he was not in some medium-grade hotel on the surface.

He found it interesting that the River Navigators had a room in their settlements that was clearly intended for humans – it meant they received human visitors often enough they felt the need to make a guest room for them. He should probably ask them about that later.

[The first thing I intend to teach you is how to encase your mind in a defensive mental shell. It is one of the simplest and most expensive means of mental defense, but also one of the most effective ones. The name is indicative; much like your exoskeleton protects your soft, squishy insides-] Lady, I don’t think you understand how human anatomy works… [-so too does this technique create a form of mental exoskeleton to protect your vulnerable thoughts.]

[So, basically, it is the psychic equivalent of a mind shield spell?] asked Zorian.

[Show me,] she demanded.

Zorian complied. He channeled mana through the amulet hanging around his neck and his mind was instantly encased in a protective magical shell that repelled all mental intrusion.

For a full minute, his teacher remained silent and still, unable to establish telepathic communication with him but also not giving any indication that he should drop the spell. He decided to keep it up until she signaled him somehow, but that moment never arrived. Instead, after about two minutes of nothing happening, her telepathic voice rang in his head again.

Despite the fact the mind shield was still on.

[As I thought,] she said smugly. [The spell is neat in its simplicity, but it ultimately suffers from the same drawbacks common to nearly all human mind magic. Namely, it gives you no feedback whatsoever when attacks start interacting with your defenses. You didn’t even feel it when I slipped past it, did you?]

[I do feel it when sufficiently powerful attacks interact with it,] Zorian protested.

[That’s not feedback, that’s damage leaking through without totally collapsing the whole thing,] she scoffed. [No, while this thing may have served you in the past, it is thoroughly inadequate for my purposes. A real mind shell, the sort I will teach you to produce, will be far better than this. It will be many times stronger than what your spell can manage, and infinitely more adaptive and responsive. You will be able to sense probing attacks, too subtle to actually damage your defenses but indicative of what your opponent is planning. You will be able to repair and reinforce your defenses without tearing the whole thing down and starting from scratch. You will be able to strike back without dropping your whole mental shield to do so…]

[Sounds wonderful,] Zorian said. He collapsed the spell, since it clearly wasn’t doing anything at the moment. [Though if I may be so rude, I do think there is one thing where human magics generally beat your psychic powers.]

[Oh?]

[They generally require no attention from the caster to keep affecting the target, and they expose the caster to far less risk of mental retaliation by their victims. From what I can tell, that is not true for psychic powers.]

[True,] she acknowledged. [But I think the inflexible nature of those spells is too much of a weakness to make up for those advantages. But we’ve digressed enough – after you learn how to defend your mind a bit we will move onto attack and retaliation…]

It did not take long for Zorian to realize that Mind Like Fire was very serious about her job. Far from teaching him only the bare minimum and meeting him once a week or so like he had assumed she would, she scheduled lessons with him every single day and demanded every shred of effort and patience he could spare. The lessons basically consisted of him lovingly constructing a mental shell around his mind before Mind Like Fire mercilessly took it apart, only backing off when his defenses collapsed from the strain. It was a good thing he had decided not to turn on his suicide contingencies before going into her lessons, because they would have gone off at the end of the very first day due to all the headaches he had suffered in the process.

Still, Zorian couldn’t complain. This was basically what he was searching for all this time, wasn’t it? True, it was a lot more painful than he had imagined, leaving him bedridden for hours after the lessons ended, but it was also a lot more effective than he had thought it would be. His ability to shield his mind was improving fast, and after the first week Mind Like Fire started bringing guest teachers to give him experience with attacks different from her own.

Not that everything was perfect. For one thing, Mind Like Fire had a Xvim-like obsession with getting the basics right and refused to teach him anything else until he mastered the mind shell technique to her liking, and she had some pretty high standards. For another, the River Navigators spontaneously raised the price of their cooperation twice, first demanding of him another ten relays if he wanted to continue the lessons, and then urging him to help them kill some kind of giant mole monster that was threatening one of their outposts. The mole-thing didn’t look particularly dangerous to Zorian, but apparently it was resistant to mind magic and too tough to bring down with their meager magical skills. Though annoyed at the sudden and completely unwarranted demands, Zorian decided to play things their way, easily producing another ten relays and luring the giant mole into a minefield he had set up for it. As tempted as he was to break the whole arrangement on principle, the fact was that Mind Like Fire was simply too good of a teacher to lose.

Before the restart ended, Zorian had once again visited the Illustrious Gem Collectors, gifted them some more crystalized mana (to the matriarch’s continued protests that he was being too generous) and told them a little about his experiences. They had nothing new to tell him, however, so his visit was largely pointless in the end.

Upon the start of the next restart he once again teleported to Knyazov Dveri to perform his preparations and then promptly contacted the River Navigators with the offer, deciding not to contact the Illustrious Gem Collectors this time. The River Navigators were just as quick to accept his offer as they had been in the previous restart, and they once again assigned Mind Like Fire as his teacher.

Not particularly surprising, as he soon found out. Now that he showed some pre-existing skill, she actually allowed him to have some breaks during the lessons where she would tell him a little about herself and her web. She was literally their mind magic teacher, and was thus the most logical person for the job. Although she usually taught aranean children, rather than adults…

Maybe Zorian was a little too prideful, but the fact that they had sent their elementary school teacher to conduct his lessons kind of burned.

[Prepare yourself,] Mind Like Fire suddenly stated, and Zorian knew the break was over.

He quickly erected the shell around his mind, a simple blast of telepathic noise washing over it harmlessly. Mind blasts like that one were the simplest form of telepathic attack, one that even Zorian could produce, and they had no chance in hell of punching through a solid defense like he was currently sporting. It was the fastest attack most telepaths could manage, though, and Mind Like Fire always started a battle with one of those to see if she could catch him unprepared with it. That used to actually happen, back when he was still starting and was struggling to call up the mental shell on a moment’s notice, but even after it stopped working on him she persisted in doing that at the start of every battle.

Immediately after the blast subsided, he felt pinpricks skittering across his shell, looking for flaws and weaknesses. He had tried to be clever in the past by deliberately creating weak spots and then quickly shoring them up when she committed to an attack, but he quickly learned that was a risky tactic to employ at his level of skill so these days he was more passive and reactive.

Soon enough, once she was convinced there were no obvious flaws in his defense, she tried to create some. Sudden, concentrated mental bursts slammed into his mental shell, seeking to crack it by concentrating all their energy against a specific portion of the shell. He recognized that attack as the one that the Sword Divers had used to smash his mind shield spell and ravage his mind. Not surprising they had used that, he was informed, since that type of attack was specifically designed to punch through mental barriers. Mind spike, the aranea called it. Unlike the last time he was faced with this attack mode, however, he had a shiny new mental defense and was facing only one attacker. He felt the spikes hit his shield but it held, and he quickly repaired all the damage and reinforced that part of the shell to withstand future attacks.

Mind Like Fire promptly switched targets, bombarding another, different portion of his mental shell. And when that didn’t work, she moved on to the next, and the next, steadily speeding up her attacks until Zorian was straining to hold his mental shell intact. She began mixing in low-powered probing attacks between mind spikes, masking the tiny pinpricks among the sheer intensity of her barrage and looking for any cracks created by her assault. Zorian frantically worked to patch up damage and reinforce the shell in places where he detected her probes, and somehow held on until her attack attenuated.

Success. His shell usually cracked during that last phase. Maybe now she would-

A massive vise of telepathic pressure closed around his mind from all sides, crushing and grinding without mercy or end. The attack, the unimaginatively but appropriately named mind crush, closed around his mental shell like an armored fist around a soap bubble. And, weakened as it was from the previous barrage, the shell promptly broke like one too. Zorian experienced a brief flash of blinding pain in his head before Mind Like Fire realized she’d won and let the attack dissipate.

"Motherfucker," Zorian swore loudly, massaging his temples and not even bothering with telepathy to express his displeasure. "Did you really have to finish things off with that attack?"

[Yes,] Mind Like Fire said simply.

"Ugh," Zorian groaned.

[I’ll give you five minutes before we go for round two,] she said.

"I take back everything nice I’ve ever thought about you," Zorian told her. "You’re pure evil."

[My other students agree with you. There is a reason why I was named Mind Like Fire, you see,] she said. [Four more minutes left.]

Damn it.

37. Slow Burn

As the weeks went by, Zorian became increasingly bored with Mind Like Fire’s lessons. While they continued to pay results in terms of his increasing mental combat proficiency, they were also very repetitive and had increasingly marginal results. It didn’t help that his mental defenses were by now too good to be casually collapsed by his teacher, which meant that he no longer ended the lessons with a raging headache and an urge to lay down for a few hours. The lessons mostly just taxed his patience now, leaving him a bit tired and frustrated but otherwise ready to do something else.

He decided to do just that. He had never really finished sounding out the rest of the aranea, wanting to get some basics of mental combat from the River Navigators first, but he was becoming increasingly certain that Mind Like Fire was stalling him with her demands at mastery in order to avoid teaching him anything more advanced. His mental defenses were already good enough, in his opinion, so there was no harm in giving the other webs a visit to see what their offer was.

The Luminous Advocates were his first destination. They were, after all, supposed to be very interested in teaching someone like him, as well as hungry for resources he could provide. Unfortunately, that didn’t quite work out. Their initial offer was utterly ridiculous, calling for Zorian to pay a simply staggering amount of money and magical artifacts. He didn’t agree to that, of course – couldn’t, actually, even if he wanted to, since the whole thing would cost twice as much as he had on his person. Even if he gathered all of his savings and sold every single mana crystal he’d found under Knyazov Dveri, it still wouldn’t be enough. It took more than 3 weeks to talk them into a more reasonable price, since they seemed to finally realize he was in a hurry. By that time, the restart was already near its end. Undeterred, he tried to approach them again over the next four restarts, varying his approach, but in the end only managed to reduce the negotiation period by a couple of days.

Admittedly, the few lessons he actually managed to finagle out of them really were top-notch. Not only did they give him some crucial advice in regards to strengthening his mental shell that really sped up his progress in Mind Like Fire’s lessons, they also helped him hone other aspects of his psychic abilities. For instance, he was now capable of forming two-way telepathic links that allowed non-psychics to talk back to him mentally, as well as form links with multiple people at once. They even taught him how to better handle the information from divination spells which dumped their results directly into the mind of the caster. Some useful information, that. Nonetheless, Zorian decided to give up on seeking their help after the fourth restart. While their help was useful, the sheer amount of time and nerves he lost arranging for said help to actually materialize made the whole thing a poor deal in his mind. It didn’t help that they categorically refused to teach him memory manipulation unless he subjected himself to a total memory probe, courtesy of their elders, which made their web a bit of a dead end as far as he was concerned. Because that was basically never going to happen.

Since negotiation with the Luminous Advocates involved a whole lot of waiting for the web to respond to his offers, Zorian had time to approach the Filigree Sages at the same time. They too took a lot of time to convince, although in their case it was because they were a suspicious bunch and also more than a little bit unhappy about him selling telepathic relays to the River Navigators. Thankfully, the first time he managed to convince them to teach him, he immediately found a shortcut that allowed him to drastically cut down on the negotiation time necessary to convince them. All he had to do was demonstrate his proficiency with spell formulas and promise to help them adapt human techniques to their own webcraft. They cared about that a lot more than about any material trade goods, and so long as he did so it only took a week of negotiation before they agreed to teach him.

Zorian was more than a little shocked when he was first shown an example of the Filigree Sage’s webcraft. He had expected something relatively simple and crude, like a piece of spider silk cloth with familiar Ikosian symbology embedded into it, or perhaps even individual threads woven into the glyphs. Instead, the Filigree Sage crafter he was to work with led him to a rectangular formation of stone pillars, in the middle of which was suspended a complex, multi-layered sphere made out of spider silk. The sphere glowed with pale white light in the darkness of the room, points of brighter lights constantly racing along this or that thread in a complicated dance that Zorian couldn’t decipher. Every inch of its surface (as well as every inch of the inner layers too, he would later find out) was covered in glyphs. Unfamiliar, non-Ikosian glyphs. And his guide claimed this was just one of the lesser practice spheres, since they weren’t going to bring a potentially-untrustworthy outsider anywhere near the real thing.

He had realized at that point that he had bitten off far more than he could chew. Helping the Filigree Sages refine their webcraft basically required becoming adept in a whole different tradition of making spell formulas. A tradition that descended from the Ikosian one, thus making the job much easier, but still. This was a task that could take years . Not something that you could do on the side while focusing on something else.

He still gave it an honest try (mostly by completely giving up on rest and free time for several restarts) and the Filigree Sages seemed pleased by his work, but in the end he decided that he simply couldn’t justify the spent effort to himself. While the topic itself was extremely interesting – indeed, many researchers would have quite literally killed to be in his place, studying an otherwise unknown magical tradition – it was ultimately a distraction he, at the moment, didn’t need. And really, the actual mind magic instruction he was getting in exchange for his work was little different from what the River Navigators were offering. He did admittedly get to experience a slightly different style of mental combat from the one practiced by River Navigators and most other aranean webs, since the Filigree Sages used methods that revolved around group combat. Not very useful to him, since he didn’t have a fellow telepath to use it with, but he did learn some tricks to deal with multiple attackers.

Originally, the Filigree Sages were completely unwilling to teach Zorian any form of memory manipulation. However, after two restarts of studying their webcraft, it became impossible to pretend he was starting from scratch. The next time around, he used an excuse that he’d learned the bare basics from the Cyorian web. He was promptly taken to their matriarch (who had mostly ignored him up until then, preferring to have her underlings interact with him), who seemed very keen on sending an expedition to Cyoria with Zorian’s help in order to establish some kind of contact with the Cyorian web. Not even finding out they had all been killed dampened her enthusiasm for the idea of an expedition to Cyoria – it just meant the focus of the expedition shifted from establishing contact to looting the place down to bedrock. Lovely. Regardless, in exchange for transporting the expedition to Cyoria, protecting them from any threats and transporting them back, Zorian was promised… just about anything, really. Even memory manipulation was on the table.

Aside from the fact that agreeing to such a thing would require Zorian to go back to Cyoria, and the fact that he would be helping a group of aranea loot the remains of his friends, there was the little matter of him not being actually sure that the Cyorian web actually used any webcraft. He suspected they did, and many of the things the matriarch had mentioned in her stories and off-hand comments seemed to indicate so in retrospect, but he wasn’t actually certain. It was just an excuse he made up to explain his otherwise inexplicable knowledge.

He should definitely go down into the ruins of Cyoria’s web and check to see what’s in there before agreeing to any such expeditions.

With the Luminous Advocates and the Filigree Sages essentially eliminated from the list of options, at least for the time being, Zorian was left with only three options to serve as an alternative to the River Navigators. The three shady webs that the Illustrious Gem Collectors had warned him about. Zorian was about to start approaching them when Mind Like Fire finally decided to move on from basic telepathic combat drills.

When Mind Like Fire declared that Zorian’s mental defenses were passable and that they would be switching over to honing his offensive arsenal, he was cautiously optimistic but didn’t expect much. Practice would probably become less painful, since Mind Like Fire would be on the receiving end of attacks this time, but he didn’t really think his attacks would be very effective. Her mental defenses were bound to be excellent.

But then Mind Like Fire told him to hit her with his best shot and simply stood there, content to passively weather the attack and Zorian decided to oblige her. He dumped a positively huge amount of mana into his next attack, the most he could manage without the entire thing losing cohesion, and slammed it straight into her mental shell.

The results were beyond all of his expectations. Rather than simply bouncing off her mental shell like he had expected, the attack effortlessly blew her defenses away and slammed into her unprotected mind like a battering ram. She screeched in pain, spasming and flailing with her whole body, and, for a brief while, there was pandemonium as other nearby aranea burst into the room to see what the fuss was about. Zorian tried to explain what had happened without the whole thing devolving into a fight. For a moment he was sure he would have to flee and was already clutching the recall rod in his hand to teleport away, but Mind Like Fire recovered in time to defuse the situation.

She also insisted on continuing the lessons as if nothing notable had happened, and proceeded to shoo away all the other aranea that had come to her defense.

[Damnation,] Mind Like Fire grumbled once they were alone again. [Not only did I get taken down by a human rookie, but everyone saw it too. I won’t live this one down for a long while.]

[Uh, sorry?] tried Zorian. He wasn’t sure what to even tell her, in all honesty.

[Don’t be,] she said. [It’s my fault, really – your inexperience has automatically put me in the mind of one of our young and I foolishly assumed your attack would be like one of theirs. But while your skills at mental combat leave much to be desired, you are still a qualified mage with plenty of mana to burn and considerable experience in managing it. I should have let you face my best defenses and then lowered the strength afterwards. I should have waited to see what your strongest attack was like instead of making assumptions about how strong my shield needed to be. Let that be a lesson to you as well, should you ever teach someone – it is always unwise to be arrogant and carelessly presumptuous, lest you get taken down by some precocious hatchling.]

He was not a freaking hatchling! He was only a year away from being legally recognized as an adult, and was already one if the time spent in the time loop was factored in!

[I didn’t do anything permanent, did I?] Zorian asked instead.

[No, of course not. Why do you think- Ah. I see that in my haste to bring your practical skills to a workable level, I have neglected some crucial bits of theory. Like what happens when an attacker manages to break through the defender’s defenses.]

[Bad things?] tried Zorian.

[Yes, but perhaps not quite as bad as you’d think,] she countered. [To grossly simplify things, there are four main things one can do to an unshielded target. The first is to simply assault their mind telepathically, seeking to damage it. This is, in almost every case, simply a way to incapacitate the target for a while. It is very difficult to actually kill people through purely mental attacks – usually such attacks simply cause a lot of pain and make the target lose consciousness for a while. Maybe quite a while, and they may suffer from headaches, confusion and amnesia for a time, but even then they are almost guaranteed to eventually recover.]

[Oh. I didn’t know that,] Zorian admitted. He honestly thought that getting hit by a sufficiently powerful telepathic barrage could cripple you permanently. Then again, for a while could perhaps mean months or years, so still not something to take lightly. And he was pretty sure a pain-inducing attack could be easily adapted to an instrument of torture. [So you were never in any permanent danger, then, but you’ll probably be hurting for a while.]

[Yes, that is the short of it.]

[And the other three things the attacker could do to the target?] Zorian asked.

[Well, the second possibility is that the attacker extracts information out of the target, either by reading their thoughts or probing their memories. Reading thoughts is the easiest option, of course, but often ineffective. Aranea, mages, and quite a few human civilians as well, have learned to maintain certain discipline over their surface thoughts, making it hard to pluck information out of their minds that way. That leaves deep memory reading, and this is not nearly as easy as it sounds, as most people have quite a lot of memories to sift through and can sense when someone is rooting through their heads and resist. Even non-psychics can resist deep memory scans, if they’re strong-willed and the psychic isn’t very practiced in the skill…]

Zorian remained silent. He had raised the possibility of being taught memory manipulation plenty of times in the past, and she had always told him he wasn’t ready yet. He couldn’t imagine her answer would be any different now. At least it wasn’t a flat out no, he supposed.

[The third and fourth options are what we aranea call deep and surface manipulations. Surface manipulations consist of temporary manipulations, such as fooling the senses or amplifying a particular emotion in the victim to produce a desired reaction. Deep manipulations, on the other hand, are more… permanent. They consist of things such as modifying someone’s memories, blanking out entire sections of their life, instilling lasting compulsions or turning them into unaware sleeper agents. Deep techniques are what a lot of humans associate mind magic with, but they are actually rarely used. Such lasting mental alterations require the attacker to dive deep into the victim’s mind and spend a lot of time tweaking things, making them hard and time-consuming to use. This is not something you use in a fight – this is something you do to a foe that has been decisively defeated and cannot strike back at you at all. Even among us aranea it is considered something of a dark art. Few of us are proficient in its use.]

Zorian sighed. "This is all leading up to an explanation about why you don’t want to teach me any memory manipulation, isn’t it?" he said out loud.

[Yes and no,] Mind Like Fire said carefully.

"So a no couched in flowery language," said Zorian derisively. "Man, that’s the third refusal in a row. I’m going to have to find more webs to investigate…"

[Oh, have you gone to other webs with this?] she asked, not in the least bothered by his little outburst. [Sounds like quite a story, you’ll have to tell me about it later. But don’t write us off yet. While it’s true that we are not ready to let you root through our minds, even as practice, that doesn’t mean we can’t help prepare you for when you do eventually find an aranea brave enough to let you read her memories.]

"And you’re going to do that by…?"

[The main problem you are facing when trying to read aranean minds is that our ways of perceiving the world are very different from yours. Our many eyes allow us to see the world in three different ways, only one of which – the one provided by our pair of big, forward-facing eyes – is in any way analogous to human vision. We can also sense vibrations through our legs, and our sense of touch is much more sophisticated than yours. It’s how we can navigate through the tunnels so easily with no light to see by.]

"You can’t see in the dark?" asked Zorian. Most Dungeon-dwellers could.

[No, we need at least a little light to see,] she said. [We do have excellent low-light vision though. But we’re getting off track. What I’m trying to say is that even if you received access to an aranean memory, you probably would not be able to parse it. If you want to be able to read aranean memories, you first need to learn how to process the way we perceive the world. And that is where I can help you. I can let you tap into my senses and let you adjust to them. I can even package some of my more inconsequential memories into little packets and send them to you over the telepathic link to help you understand how to deal with memory packages.]

"Oh," Zorian said lamely. Yeah, that did sound useful. Somewhat mollified by her response, he switched back to telepathic communication. [So can we perhaps switch to that right now? I must admit I am getting thoroughly sick of combat drills. I know it’s important to practice my mental shields, believe me, but I’m going to go crazy if this continues for much longer.]

[As a matter of fact, yes. I had wanted to wait with such instruction until you could actually break through my mental shields before starting you on that path, but you did succeed with that. Not in a way I had expected or planned for, but fair is fair. We shall start with surface manipulations, since you will need some proficiency with them before you can tap into someone’s senses. How much did your other aranean teachers tell you about them?]

[Very little, other than the fact that they exist,] Zorian said. [But surface manipulations are basically mind control, yes? We covered those back in my mage academy. Only theoretically, with an emphasis on identifying the type of mind control and how to fight it, but still.]

[Summarize those lessons for me, please,] Mind Like Fire ordered. [I’d like to see what I’m working with.]

With a wave of his hands, Zorian created a glowing geometric diagram that was informally known as the mind control rectangle among the students and whose official name escaped Zorian at the moment. It was something far too loquacious and complicated for what were basically four words arranged into a simple two-by-two grid – a rectangle divided into four smaller ones, each of the four major methods of manipulating people through mind magic assigned its own corner.

Domination, Suggestion

Puppeteering, Illusion

[Pretty,] Mind Like Fire deadpanned. [But I must confess I have never learned how to read human script, so you’ll have to explain to me what that means.]

Ah. Right. He sometimes forgot that for all that aranea interacted with humans, they were still alien beings with a completely different culture. Ikosians had possessed an almost religious reverence for the written word, and had spread literacy to every place that had fallen under their domination, so literacy was near universal in places they’d once ruled over. Universal literacy most likely made it much easier to train as many people as possible into mages as well, thus providing tangible benefits for the policy. The aranea, on the other hand, had no such tradition, and probably couldn’t use human-style writing effectively anyway. He knew that the Cyorian web had a number of aranea that could read and write, but most aranea probably had no need to master such skills.

[Domination and suggestion represent spells that enforce the caster’s will upon the target,] said Zorian, pointing at the upper row of the rectangle. [Domination spells involve the caster outright ordering the target to do something and compelling them to do so against their will. Suggestion attempts to present the order as something the target wants on their own. They are will and situation based; depending on the sort of person you cast such spells at and the circumstances they are in, it might be completely impossible to affect them with this sort of mind magic. Most people will resist orders to kill themselves or their loved ones, for instance, and it is next to impossible to convince a patrolling soldier that you are not the person they are looking for if they had been given your picture or someone singled you out to them.] He pointed at the lower row of the rectangle. [Puppeteering and illusions, on the other hand, are not directly affected by the target’s personality and circumstances. Puppeteering flat out usurps the target’s control over their body and pilots it like a… well, puppet. Illusions manipulate the target’s senses in some fashion. Neither can be resisted as such, although puppeteering has to overcome the target’s magic resistance first and illusions can be detected and dispelled.]

Zorian waved his hands again and the illusion split in half, separating the rectangle into left and right halves – domination and puppeteering on the left side, suggestion and illusion on the right side.

[Domination and puppeteering are forceful methods,] he said. [The target knows they are being targeted by a spell, and will usually be furious at the caster when it ends. As such, they are usually used in combat situations, against people who are clear enemies to you. Suggestion and illusion are subtle methods. The target doesn’t automatically become aware they have been affected, and in fact the goal is for them to remain unaware as long as possible. They are generally used for criminal and espionage purposes.]

Compulsion spells on the top, hijacking spells on the bottom, forceful spells on the left and subtle spells on the right. Yup, he’d covered everything. He let the illusion evaporate into smoke and settled down to wait for Mind Like Fire’s response.

[An interesting breakdown,] she said. [It has a sort of simplistic beauty to it. I’ll have to remember that one. The reality is far more complex and less sharply defined… but we’ll get to that later, when it’s actually relevant. I was never very big on spending time on theory, truth be told. We’ve wasted enough time on it today and I’d like to get started on something productive.]

The resulting lesson was exceptionally painful, reminding Zorian of his initial lessons with her, several restarts in the past ago… and despite her insistence she was being no harder on him than she was on any of her other students, Zorian knew the sudden ferocity of her lessons was her revenge for catching her off guard.

On the bright side, she calmed down after a week of that. On the less bright side, he would have to piss her off like that on every subsequent restart as well, so he was looking at a week of painful headaches at the start of every restart.

Sometimes you just couldn’t win.

As it turned out, Mind Like Fire’s statement about him being unable to understand aranean senses turned out to be not just correct, but a vast understatement. Even after a full month of practice, he couldn’t make heads or tails of aranean senses. Even trying to limit his sensory tap into their vision alone left him dizzy and confused, and the less said of their sense of touch, the better. They had a rudimentary sense of taste on their leg hairs! They tasted the ground they walked on! Why for the love of all that was holy would a species need to have an ability like that!?

It also put Novelty’s habit of touching everything, him included, in an entirely new and unsettling light…

Not that he’d learned nothing during the entire month. Mind Like Fire did manage to teach him how to affect the minds of others in minor ways. Some of these, like the ability to induce spasms and limb failure, he already knew how to produce - but not very consistently before he’d been lectured on the proper way of hijacking other people’s nervous systems. Others, like inducing full body paralysis, lightly dampening or amplifying their emotions, subtly redirecting their attention away from things or inducing failure of one or more of their senses were wholly new to him. But while these things were all unquestionably useful, the total lack of progress on the one thing that he really had to master hit him hard.

In the end, he reluctantly decided to consult the Luminous Advocates for help. As much as they annoyed him, they probably had an answer to his problem. He managed to short-circuit the negotiations with them only two weeks into the restart by simply paying their ridiculous price. It required spending day after day on exploration of the lower levels of Knyazov Dveri’s dungeon and selling everything of worth he had found there, but he did manage to talk them down to something halfway reasonable and then just pay them off.

According to the Luminous Advocates, his main problem was that he was basically trying to take on too big of a challenge at once. For one thing, he was trying to tap into the senses of another while still retaining his own, forcing his mind to process different perspectives at once. And no, sitting still with his eyes closed was not nearly enough to get around that. In order to deal with that issue, the Luminous Advocates taught him how to turn his mental abilities inwards and shut off one or more of his senses, leaving only the foreign sensory stream for his mind to process.

Their second suggestion was that he had to practice sensory tap on something easier first. Preferably his fellow humans, as their senses were closest to his own, but some of the more similar animals might also suffice. Only once he’d mastered the art of tapping into the senses of his fellow humans should he bother trying to tap into something as alien as an aranea.

When Zorian tried to do just that by tapping into the senses of a random passerby in a nearby town, he realized they were completely correct. He nearly collapsed from disorientation, even though he was only tapping into familiar human senses this time. It would be a long time before he could move on to something more exotic than a human, it seemed.

Which presented him with something of a problem. While Zorian’s mental abilities were currently good enough that he didn’t fear discovery every time he used them on some random civilian, he could hardly guarantee that he would never mess up and reveal to his target that he was messing with their heads. And frankly, you could never really be sure that your target really was a random civilian – it was all too possible to step into the mind of some high-ranking mage good at blending in with the crowd, or to encounter a civilian trained to detect such intrusions. And the response of the mage guild to rogue mind mages was harsh. He didn’t want a guild hunter team after him, even if the time loop would probably shield him from the worst of the consequences.

And that was without even considering the moral dimension of the whole thing. Picking on innocent people for the sake of personal training was not the road he wanted to go on, and dismissing their plight as irrelevant due to the time loop struck him as an unhealthy attitude to have. He might have justified the whole thing to himself if it was just a matter of tapping into their senses, since that was mostly harmless, but the Luminous Advocates made it clear this wasn’t the only skill he would have to practice on his fellow humans to get right. He would encounter the exact same issues when he tried to master memory manipulation – even after accounting for their different senses, aranean minds were sufficiently different that he would need to practice on something more similar to himself before he tried to interpret their memories. And practicing memory probes was neither safe, harmless nor inconspicuous.

He needed an acceptable target.

Zorian walked carefully through the streets of Cyoria, scanning the crowds for any signs of hostility with every sense he had available. He had a feeling his tension and nervousness was very obvious to people around him, but then again he was hardly the only person who was nervous. The random monsters welling up from the dungeon had spooked many a native, and there was a sense of tension in the city that hadn’t been there the last time he’d been in the city.

This was his second recent visit to Cyoria, and it was just as uneventful as his first. He had even deliberately walked into some back alleys and more isolated parts of the city to see if Red Robe or one of his agents would confront him once he was out of the public eye, but no such things happened. He wasn’t even confronted by a band of rough-looking men trying to steal his belongings, like it usually happened in the trashy adventure novels he read from time to time. Sighing, he twisted the top of the recall rod hanging off his belt and was promptly teleported to the outskirts of the city. The location was totally unremarkable – it wasn’t lived in, and had been trapped to hell and back over the course of several weeks – Zorian could come and go as he pleased, but if the ward surrounding the area detected anyone other than him appearing inside, it would unleash a plethora of traps on the interloper – the nastiest and most lethal of traps that he had the capacity to make and install.

He repeated the action three times in quick succession, recalling himself to three additional, similar spots, walked off in a random direction for an hour or so and then finally teleported himself to his real destination.

Two days later, when no one tried to track him down to a small, remote village he’d chosen for his current base (mostly because it was in the middle of nowhere with nothing but fields of wheat for miles in any direction), he finally breathed a sigh of relief… and promptly started planning his next foray into the city. Next time he was checking out the aranea ruins to see if Red Robe had put any tripwires there to alert him of intruders coming there.

When Zorian first got the idea of going back to Cyoria, he had immediately dismissed it as madness. He wasn’t ready, and acting prematurely could potentially ruin everything. However, the more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea. Red Robe clearly wasn’t trying to locate him anymore – if he had been doing so, Zorian wouldn’t have lasted nearly as long as he had, he was quite sure of that. Why Red Robe felt no need to locate him, when he clearly wanted to get rid of any rival time travelers, Zorian did not know. He’d feared that the other time traveler had maybe placed tripwires in Cyoria to alert him when he came back, but even that seemed increasingly unlikely at this point – Zorian had been all over Cyoria during his two brief forays into the city, even in parts of the Academy, and nothing of note happened.

That was important, partly because Zorian felt like he was going a little crazy and desperately wanted to see some familiar faces, at least for a short while, but also because Cyoria held some perfect targets for him to practice his growing mind magic skills on. The matriarch solved at least a part of the time loop’s mystery by ferreting out information out of the heads of Ibasan invaders and their supporters. Why couldn’t Zorian do the same? He would not only be advancing his abilities in preparations of opening the matriarch’s memory package, he would also be tackling the mystery of the time loop from another direction. Two birds with one stone.

He wasn’t going to move back into the city yet. He would continue testing the place for a while still. Try to spend a whole week in there, show up for a class or two. But if Red Robe’s response turned out to be as non-existent as this?

His long exile from the city was about to end.

Zorian spent the next three restarts alternating between Mind Like Fire’s lessons and making forays into Cyoria. He was never attacked while in Cyoria, not even when he combed through the aranean corpse-filled settlement in one of the restarts. A part of him felt that was highly suspicious, but ultimately it didn’t keep him away from the place.

Especially since he was starting to reach the limits of what Mind Like Fire was willing to teach him. His mental defenses were top-notch, and his ability to strike back at hostile minds was nothing to scoff at either – even Mind Like Fire admitted she actually had to take him seriously these days. She had taught him all of the simple tricks and basic techniques she dared give him access to, and he was even getting the hang of tapping into aranean senses – the Luminous Advocates were right, it went a whole lot easier after he had mastered the art of tapping into purely human senses first. If he wanted to get any benefit from her teachings, he would have to spend a few restarts practicing deep memory scans on humans first.

Of course, that would require finding an aranea that was willing to teach him even the basics of such memory scans. Mind Like Fire’s reaction to that was a firm refusal, since that would involve lowering all of her defenses and letting Zorian dive deep into her private memories. Even among themselves, the aranea considered such an act to be one of great trust and significance. It didn’t help that when Mind Like Fire challenged Zorian to provide similar access to his own memories to her, he had little choice but to say no.

He did know that the Filigree Sages were willing to play along if he let them loot the Cyoria settlement, but Zorian had been unable to find much in the way of webcraft when he searched the settlement in one of his brief forays, so he wasn’t sure whether that would actually work out at all.

Then, near the end of the last restart, something interesting happened. Zorian had gotten permission from Bridge of Moonlight to stay in the River Navigators' main settlement for a while after he helped them dig up a brand new cavern with alteration spells, and was present in the matriarch’s chamber when a messenger from the Yellow Cavern Guardians arrived to plead with the River Navigators' matriarch for help.

The Yellow Cavern Guardians, he had found, were on the verge of extinction. A few days before the start of the time loop, the caverns from which they got their name – and which their survival and prosperity depended on – had been taken over by some huge monster from the deeper levels of the dungeon. The creature was too magic-resistant to be affected with mind magic, extremely tough, and also regenerated. Roughly a week and a half into the restart, the Yellow Cavern Guardians were starting to get desperate. In an attempt to retake their cavern, they had decided to launch an all-out attack, seeking to drive the monster off. It was an utter disaster, and the Yellow Cavern Guardians lost both their matriarch and her two successors/assistants/somethings. Now leaderless as well as desperate, the Yellow Cavern Guardians went into a panic (well, they claimed they deliberated things, but Zorian knew how to read between the lines) before begging for help from anyone they thought would listen.

Sadly for them, the River Navigators had no intention of messing around with a creature capable of taking on an entire aranean web and winning. Fortunately for them, Zorian was not nearly so intimidated.

The last time he’d offered aid, he’d been rudely refused. But last time, he’d asked at the start of the restart, when their leadership had still been alive and believed they could handle things. They had probably been more worried about him taking advantage of their momentary weakness and had not felt they needed all the help they could get. Now that their leadership was dead, however, they were not in a position to be nearly as picky.

He didn’t even have to ask – the messenger approached him with a plea for help on her own, after Bridge of Moonlight blew the messenger off and she’d realized that Zorian was there.

After hammering out some basic agreement (which could be summarized as we’ll agree to anything, just give us back our cavern!) Zorian recalled himself and the messenger to the recall stone he had left on the surface and then immediately teleported them to where he knew the Yellow Cavern Guardians were. The messenger seemed shocked he knew where to find them without her guidance, and a bit disoriented from the rapid succession of teleporting, but she recovered quickly and led him to what passed as leadership of their web for the moment.

Several hours later, he found himself at the entrance to a vast cave overgrown with a fungal forest, a pair of Yellow Cavern Guardians guards watching him from deeper into the access tunnel. Supposedly they were ready to intervene if he ran into trouble at any point, but he was pretty sure they were just going to stay on their asses if he got attacked and then, if he lost, mournfully report he had tragically ended up as monster chow before they could do anything. They seemed terrified even to be there.

Zorian created a floating eye out of ectoplasm and sent it deeper into the cave to get some basic sense of its contents and layout. His recent practice with tapping into other people’s senses made processing what the eye was sending him child’s play, and he no longer had to close his eyes to use it.

He had to admit one thing - the cavern was simply breathtaking. It was huge, and almost entirely covered with a dizzying variety of giant mushrooms. The more familiar umbrella-mushrooms existed between ones that resembled leafless trees and long, fleshy spikes and berries. Looking over them, Zorian even spotted several that appeared to be whitish plants rather than mushrooms, complete with small flowers and atrophied leaves. The largest of them glowed with a faint blue light that suffused the entire cavern with weak, shadowy light.

Underground forests like this one were treasure troves of information and interesting alchemical ingredients, and were highly sought after by both humans and dungeon denizens. And this one was both huge and largely unspoiled. No wonder the Yellow Cavern Guardians were so protective of it.

His appreciation of the view was quickly interrupted, however – the monster wasn’t hard to find.

It was right in the center of the cave, sitting like a king in a small, shallow lake situated there. Well, shallow in a relative sense. Zorian could have submerged himself easily in its center, but it was barely a puddle for the monster who towered over the waters. It looked like a giant frog, albeit one whose mother had mated with a troll and which was then raised solely on muscle-growth potions from the day it was born. Knobby, dark green skin covered a creature that was at least five meters tall, even while crouching, and its limbs were thick and practically bursting at the seams from the sheer muscles it was sporting. Oh, and they ended in huge, sharp claws rather than suction cups.

One of the frog-thing’s eyes swiveled in its socket to focus on Zorian’s ectoplasmic eye, noticing the intruder, but the creature remained motionless and eventually returned to its silent vigil, ignoring the sensor. The monster had knocked down all the fungus surrounding the lake, probably to give itself a better view of its new domain, and was now just standing in the lake in the center, periodically shifting in place so it could stare at the different parts of the cavern.

Zorian dismissed the sensor and turned to the two guards behind him.

"I’m going to need a few days to prepare," he said.

Three days before the end of the restart, Zorian was ready to try and kill the giant frog monster that had driven the Yellow Cavern Guardians out of their home. His plan was simple: fire.

Lots and lots of fire.

When he finally arrived at the cavern entrance, he first made sure the frog-thing was still where he had last left it (it was) and then carefully lowered an ignition stone into the crate full of highly flammable alchemical bricks he had been levitating behind him. Once that was done, he created an illusion around the crate to make it look like an aranea and sent it floating along the ground towards the monster. He trailed after the crate under the guise of invisibility, a huge, solid steel golem trailing beside him. The golem was fully visible, and mostly served as a big, visible target for the creature’s ire if this whole thing went south.

Zorian had considered a number of methods to trick the monster into eating the decoy, but none of them turned out to be necessary. It seemed that the claims of the Yellow Cavern Guardians about how the creature loved eating aranea were spot on, because the creature barely even looked at the disguised crate before attacking. A long, ropy, blood red tongue lashed out at the crate with dizzying speed, reeling it into its wide open maw in the blink of an eye.

The moment the frog thing’s mouth snapped shut, Zorian sent a mana burst at the ignition stone in the crate, causing the whole thing to blow up in its mouth.

The resulting scream was quite possibly the most disturbing sound he’d ever heard in his entire life. It wasn’t a croak or anything even remotely froglike. It sounded like a whole herd of pigs being slaughtered messily, over and over and over again. The frog thing vomited a stream of fire, blood and bile, trying to expel the offending substance to no avail – Zorian had specifically chosen an alchemical product whose fire clung to the surface like glue, and no matter how hard it tried, it could not remove the burning gunk that covered its insides. Truthfully, its attempt to vomit out the compound was only making things worse. It would have had more luck by keeping its mouth shut and trying to starve the fire of oxygen.

Sadly, after a few more futile attempts, the monster suddenly stopped struggling, noticed Zorian and his golem, and immediately charged towards them.

Zorian silently motioned for his golem to meet the creature’s charge with one of its own, not even questioning how the creature knew he was there. Dungeon denizens had all kinds of ridiculous abilities and senses, especially powerful ones like these. He sent a wave of force at the creature’s feet, managing to trip it up a bit and allowing his golem to slam its metal fist straight into its face. Though much bigger than his creation, the creature seemed momentarily stunned at the hit and didn’t have enough time to dodge when Zorian hit it with a massive fireball.

Annoyingly, it still wasn’t dead. It screamed again, scorched from both inside and outside, its eyes reduced to ruined husks by the fireball. But it still found enough strength to tear apart his golem (which he had spent ages crafting and reinforcing) in a flurry of violence. It ripped both of its arms out of their sockets, snapped the main body in half, and flung the pieces into the distance. The armless remains of the upper torso impacted the ground not far from Zorian, but he remained silent and still, hoping to avoid notice.

It would have been nice to say that what followed next was some epic battle where he bravely strode forth to finish the monster once and for all, but in truth, he simply evaded the creature’s notice and waited as it rampaged throughout the forest for a while, looking for more targets. The loss of its vision seemed to really hurt it, and it never even came close to detecting his location. At some point it simply stopped and keeled over, finally dead after having succumbed to its many wounds.

Still - a victory was a victory, wasn’t it?

His "guards" had fled from their posts at some point in the battle, so Zorian slowly made his way towards the Yellow Cavern Guardians' temporary camp to give them the good news.

The two Yellow Cavern Guardians that came to check up if he was telling the truth stared silently at the charred corpse of the frog-thing that had nearly ruined them. Zorian tried to be respectful and wait for them come to terms with the fact that he had actually succeeded in killing it, but after five minutes he was really starting to get impatient. And annoyed – it wasn’t that unbelievable that he’d succeeded at this, surely?

He cleared his throat, finally getting their attention.

"About my payment…" he began.

Zorian’s eyes abruptly shot open as a sharp pain erupted from his stomach. His whole body convulsed, buckling against the object that fell on him, and suddenly he was wide awake, not a trace of drowsiness in his mind.

"Good morning, brother!" an annoyingly cheerful voice sounded right on top of him. "Morning, morning, MORNING!"

Zorian sighed. He really wished that not all of his restarts began this way.

"Good morning to you too, Kiri," he said politely. "Mind getting off me?"

"Hmm…" she pretended to think about it. "Nope! I think I’ll stay like this for a while."

"That’s unfortunate," he said blandly.

"You know you’re going back to academy today, right?" she asked him.

"How could I forget?" he responded. "The real question is, do you want to come with me?"

Kirielle’s eyes expanded comically, like those of a particularly startled cat. "Really!?"

"I wouldn’t have asked if I wasn’t certain," Zorian said.

Five minutes later, Zorian managed to distract an ecstatic Kirielle with an illusionary bird and get her to stop babbling and start packing her luggage.

He, on the other hand, was ready. He had learned the basics of deep mental scanning from the Yellow Cavern Guardians last restart, he was certain that simply being in Cyoria wasn’t dangerous in itself, and he had a rough plan of where to go from now on.

It was time to visit his old Academy again.

38. Return to Cyoria

Zorian’s previous experiences with riding the train to Cyoria alongside Kirielle hadn’t been very encouraging. She always started excited and curious, staring intently at the passing landscape and commenting on anything that caught her interest, but that didn’t last very long. There just wasn’t all that much to see on the route to Cyoria, so she quickly got bored of looking through the compartment window and turned to the only other source of entertainment left to her – him. And he was hard-pressed to entertain her throughout the entire ride.

That was back when he had been unwilling to use his rising shaping skills to do magic on the train, though. This time he decided he simply didn’t care about the risk of discovery. He could find no detection ward on the compartment they were in, and even if they did catch him in the act somehow, they would probably just slap him with a small fine and a lecture. It would be annoying, but better than listening to Kirielle whine about being bored for several hours. Plus, this way he got to practice his spellcasting while inhibited by a shaping disruption ward – something he had already been planning to try.

That was how Zorian found himself levitating a sphere of water in front of him, a ring of pens and erasers orbiting around it in a diffuse, slowly revolving ring. It was hard, despite the seeming triviality of it all. This wasn’t just him stacking a bunch of easy beginner spells to get a neat effect – he was performing an act of unstructured magic, treating the whole thing like a very complicated shaping exercise. Between the complexity of the floating construct and the disruption ward throwing off his shaping skills, he was really struggling to maintain control over the sphere and its satellites. He was pretty sure this was his absolute limit in terms of mana shaping skills so he should probably-

"Make a frog!" Kirielle challenged.

Zorian gave Kirielle an annoyed look. She grinned at him, confident that she had won their little game. That she had finally found his limit. He did not deliberately set out to make the complex thing floating in front of him, after all – it had started out as a much smaller sphere with a mere two pens circling around it, and Zorian had fully intended for it to stay that way until Kirielle started challenging him to make it more difficult. After he emptied the entire contents of his water bottle and used up all of the pens and erasers they both had in their possessions, he was certain she would have had to concede his victory…

He broke eye contact with her and focused on the floating construct in front of him. Trying to shape the floating water into anything other than the sphere it was now would be insanely hard. Telekinetically controlling water was far, far harder than doing the same with solid objects, and he would be hard pressed to sculpt it into complex shapes even if he was outside of a disruption ward and had no ring of small objects to serve as an additional distraction.

But he’d be damned if he was just going to roll over and admit defeat to his little sister just because of that. Over the next fifteen minutes, he slowly shaped the blob of water into a sculpture of a frog, as detailed and convincing as he could manage it… in other words, not very. He did have a burst of inspiration half-way through, though, and decided to depict the frog monster he saved the Yellow Cavern Guardians from in the previous restart instead of a normal one. Unfortunately, Kirielle didn’t think much of his efforts.

"That’s a pretty weird frog," she declared.

"It’s a yellow cavern devil frog," said Zorian, shamelessly making things up. He had no idea how that monster was called, or if it even had an official name to begin with. "Huge, vicious things with a penchant for eating little girls."

"That’s stupid. You’re just making things up," she accused. "Just admit you lost."

"Bah, you asked for a frog and I made one. It’s not my fault you are not knowledgeable enough in the diverse and fascinating world of magical amphibians. Let me put this away and then I’ll tell you about Sumrak the mage and the story of how he saved a secret society of mages from one of the aforementioned devil frogs…"

Before Kirielle could complain too much, Zorian hurriedly set about dismantling the construct in front of him before his rapidly degrading control unraveled completely, letting the pens and erasers float down on the empty seat beside him and pouring the water back into its bottle. That done, he launched into a somewhat modified account of his battle against the frog monster.

Well okay, heavily modified. In Zorian’s story, the Yellow Cavern Guardians were a group of reclusive human mages that lived in the far north, practicing spider magic, and the adventurer Sumrak confronted the frog monster head on with his awesome magical might instead of resorting to traps and subterfuge. It made for a more impressive story that way. Kirielle seemed skeptical of the story at first, but when Zorian started using detailed illusions to demonstrate the events he was talking about, her suspiciousness melted away and she paid rapt attention to the story.

Zorian didn’t know whether to be amused or outraged that she was so entranced by the illusions. They were… well, not quite easy, but nothing special either. The floating ball of water and school supplies he had made earlier on her prompting had taken much more skill and effort to create. He was tempted to chalk it up to her ignorance of what a true display of magical expertise looked like, but he suspected that even if she knew how to judge the difficulty properly, she still likely wouldn’t have cared. He had noticed during previous restarts that she loved illusionism the most out of the magical disciplines he had shown her. Maybe it appealed to her inner artist?

The train announcer declared that they were arriving to Korsa, forcing Zorian to cut the story short just before Sumrak succeeded in fighting his way through the devil frog’s innumerable spawn and confronted the monster in the cavernous home to which it had cravenly fled when it lost its last bout with the adventuring mage…

…and of course Kirielle was having none of that. She was fine with waiting while people were streaming into the train and looking into compartments to find a seat, but with everyone now settled down and the train moving again, she demanded he continue with the story. The problem was that Ibery had decided to join them in the compartment in the meantime, and Zorian felt just a tiny bit apprehensive about showcasing his abilities in front of her. An apprehension that Kirielle didn’t empathize with in the slightest.

"You can’t stop now, not when the story is so near the ending," she complained.

"Well, so long as I refrain from using my, err, visual aids …" tried Zorian.

"Nooo!" Kirielle pleaded. "That was the best part of the story!"

Zorian threw a significant glance towards Ibery, hoping that Kirielle would take the message. She did, sort of, though she didn’t react to the information the way he hoped she would.

"Oh come on, the nice lady won’t snitch on you for doing magic in the train," Kirielle declared out loud. She then turned towards the startled Ibery and gave her the most soulful puppy-eyes look she could muster. "You wouldn’t do that, would you?"

"Umm…" Ibery mumbled, fidgeting uncomfortably in her seat. "What? I though the train had countermeasures to stop spellcasting?"

"It does?" asked Kirielle, surprised.

"It does," Zorian confirmed. No point in playing dumb now. "They just disrupt spellcasting though, not make it impossible. You can work around it if you’re good enough."

"And… you’re that good?" Ibery asked uncertainly.

Zorian shrugged, offering no other response. To Kirielle’s delight, he then proceeded to finish the story he had been telling, pretty illusions included. He noticed that Ibery had set aside her book to listen as well.

She also tried to discreetly cast a few simple spells when she thought he wasn’t looking, and then frowned when she failed to overcome the disruption ward. She was probably just curious about the level of skill needed to overcome the ward. He thought about scanning her surface thoughts to find out what she was thinking, but decided not to after giving it some thought. The risk of getting caught in the act was minimal, since Mind Like Fire had taught him how to stealthily test for presence of mental defenses, but getting into the habit of casually invading the minds of everyone around him struck him as a bad idea. He left Ibery to her experiment and focused back to Kirielle and the story he was telling.

Once he was done with the story, Ibery promptly struck up a conversation with the two of them. She admitted that she didn’t care much about the story itself, especially since she only caught the tail end of it, but she was very impressed by his ability to overcome the train’s wards. Especially once she learned he was only starting his third year at the academy.

Eventually they arrived to Cyoria, however, and went their separate ways. Before they said their goodbyes, however, Ibery nervously told him to drop by the library sometime in the next week in order to discuss… something. Well, whatever – he had intended to raid the library for more spells in this restart anyway, he might as well see what she wanted from him while he was at it.

"I think she likes you," Kirielle said when they were alone.

"Nah, she’s head over heels for Fortov," said Zorian.

"What?" Kirielle asked, baffled. "Her and Fortov? No way!"

"Well I didn’t say they’re together," Zorian clarified. "Just that she has a crush on him."

"How do you know that?" Kirielle asked suspiciously.

"Ancient magical secrets?" tried Zorian. Kirielle gave him a deadpan look. "Fine, fine… I’ll tell you later, when we arrive at our new lodgings. It’s not something we should discuss out in the open."

Even as he conversed with his little sister, Zorian paid attention to what his mind sense was telling him while they moved through the crowds. Even if he was being targeted by someone shielded from mental detection, the absence of a mind in someone would be a huge red flag on its own. He detected no hostile intentions directed at either of them, though, and none of the suspicious people he encountered were invisible to his mind sense. After ten minutes, he breathed a sigh of relief – his fears of walking into a trap with his little sister in tow appeared to have been unfounded.

Hmm, he knew it would rain later on, but he could ward against the rain easily enough… perhaps a little sightseeing around the city to quench Kirielle’s curiosity a little?

"Hey," Zorian said, attracting Kirielle’s attention. "Do you want to visit the main plaza of the city? They have a pretty nice fountain there that I like to watch sometimes…"

She said yes, of course. He needn’t have even asked.

It had been more than four years since Zorian had started looping, and a lot of things had happened in that period. Keeping track of it all was a major challenge, despite his mage training and his own excellent memory. Being absent from Cyoria for nearly a year and a half in order to escape Red Robe’s scrutiny certainly didn’t help in this regard, and many of the minor details and specifics of how a normal restart was supposed to go had faded from his mind during his long absence.

It should not be very surprising, then, that he’d totally forgotten what happened the last time he tried to reach the fountain at the beginning of a restart – after all, he hadn’t tried it since that very first, fateful restart that got him included into the time loop.

Thus, when the two of them finally stumbled upon the swarm of cranium rats blocking their path, Zorian was caught just as off-guard by it as he was the previous time. He wasn’t as defenseless as he was back then, though, and he nearly burned them all to a crisp before he stopped himself. He was pretty sure that him killing the swarm would put him on the invaders' radar, and therefore on Red Robe’s radar as well, so the smartest move would be to simply retreat like he did back in his first restart.

He felt the swarm testing his mental defenses and responded by strengthening his defenses and striking back. The attacks stopped, but his counterattack did very little to the collective mind of the swarm – the group mind was thoroughly unshielded, probably because any mental shell would interfere with its internal telepathic network, but his counterattack merely knocked out a couple of individual rats instead of doing any significant damage. He wondered-

He felt a spike of terror from Kirielle as she finally realized what she was looking at, and realized he really shouldn’t be playing around with these things – he was probably immune to anything they may dish out but she wasn’t. He fired off a weak flamethrower at the closest part of the swarm to make them back off a little and then immediately turned around, grabbed Kirielle and fled. The rats didn’t follow, much like how they didn’t follow him the first time he encountered them. They probably didn’t want to attract attention any more than he did, though that did raise the question of what the hell they were doing blocking off one of Cyoria’s major roads in broad daylight. Something to look into eventually…

While they ran, he idly marveled about how fortunate it was that he’d never replicated that first meeting with the cranium rats before he had met the aranea – they would have undoubtedly read his mind, and there was a good chance they would have found out about the time loop from his thoughts. Even if they dismissed the time travel stuff as delusion, they would have definitely been interested in him knowing about the invasion…

"Um, can we still go see the fountain?" Kirielle asked once they had retreated sufficiently and she’d had a chance to catch her breath and calm down.

"Yeah, I know an alternative route," said Zorian, pointing towards a nearby park.

Wait, hadn’t he tried that in the first restart and encountered some kind of problem? He was pretty sure he had. What kind of- oh! The bicycle girl. He had totally forgotten about her. Oh well, that wasn’t really a problem – he would just get her bicycle out of the water really quickly and they would be on their way.

Kirielle got unusually quiet when they encountered the little crying girl and hung back while he talked to her. He got the girl’s bike out of the creek with trivial ease, simply placing his hand over the bridge and wiling the bike to rise into his grasp – it took more time to calm the girl down a little and get her to tell him what she was upset about than it did to actually retrieve it. He used a couple of spells to dry the bike off and clean all the grime that had accumulated on it, simply because he could and saw no reason not to. He suspected the bike was cleaner now than it was before it had fallen into the creek.

"There," said Zorian proudly. "Your bike is clean, intact and out of the creek. You can stop crying now, okay?"

"Okay," she sniffed, rubbing her eyes. "Um. Thank you."

"Don’t mention it," Zorian said. "Well, we should get going now, so take care. I think it’s going to rain soon, so you should probably head home as well."

"Come on brother, don’t be mean. We can’t just leave her here," protested Kirielle suddenly. "We should get her home ourselves, just to be sure."

"He’s not mean," the other little girl protested, suddenly snapping out of her daze. "And I can find my way home just fine. I’m not stupid."

Oh, he liked this kid. It wasn’t often that someone defended him in preference to Kirielle.

"Well. I’m glad that someone is not automatically assuming the worst of me," said Zorian, giving a sideways glance towards Kirielle. She rolled her eyes at him. "I am sure that Kirielle didn’t mean anything like that, though – she was just worried for you, since you still looked pretty upset."

"I was just… I only got the bike yesterday and mother told me to be careful with it because they couldn’t afford a new one and I…"

"Hey, hey, it’s alright," said Zorian quickly, interrupting her story. She looked like she was going to cry again. "You got it back. All’s well that ends well. But maybe we really should accompany you home, at least until you calm down a little."

"Yeah!" Kirielle piped in. "We can talk on the way and get to know each other. I just moved in here and it would be nice to have a friend my age. What’s your name anyway? I’m Kirielle and this guy here that got your bike out of the river is my brother Zorian."

"Nochka," she said. "But, um, I don’t want to make you late."

"We were just going to see the fountain, nothing really important," Kirielle waved her off. "We can do that any time. Come on, show us where you live."

The walk to Nochka’s house was a short one – she lived pretty close to the park, which was the reason her parents had let her go there all alone. Still pretty strange for parents to be so hands off about their child’s whereabouts, but Zorian’s parents were the same with him so he didn’t pry. He didn’t say much of anything really, but that was okay because Kirielle talked plenty enough for both of them. Nochka herself was shy and nervous, constantly watching her surroundings and jumping at every unusual sound, but she did warm up to Kirielle by the time they had reached her house. She was eight, a year younger than Kirielle, and was also fairly new to Cyoria. Her family had arrived into the city a couple of months ago, and she didn’t have any friends her age either. Great. He was pretty sure he knew where this was going…

Zorian once again tried to disengage from the whole situation once they got Nochka to her destination, but failed – Nochka’s mother saw them arriving and insisted they come inside, and he didn’t want to be impolite. He figured the woman had every right to be curious about a couple of strangers walking around with her daughter in tow, so they should at least allay her fears a little before leaving. Nochka hurriedly gave her an account of the situation the moment they were inside; though in her story the bike didn’t end up in the creek, but was instead stuck in a rope trap that happened to be in the park for… some reason. Nochka kind of glossed over that part and moved onto Zorian helping her get it down from the tree.

Yeah, Nochka was a terrible liar. Based on the way her mother was looking at her when she finished her story, Zorian was betting that she would be getting the real story out of Nochka the moment Zorian and Kirielle left the house.

Nochka’s mother, who Zorian learned was named Rea, was honestly a little scary to Zorian. She didn’t look frightening – she had the same jet black hair and dark brown eyes that Nochka did, and the stature and dress of an average housewife – but it took only five minutes for Zorian to decide there was more to her. Her movements were all fluid and precise, she never stuttered or wavered when she spoke, her gaze was frighteningly intense, and she gave off an air of absolute confidence and composure. Frankly, if he had been alone he would have left the place in a hurry, but Kirielle didn’t seem nearly as intimidated by the woman and insisted on telling her new friend stories. Such as the one of how they stumbled upon her in the first place.

"Ah yes, the strange brain rats," Rea said when Kirielle told them about their encounter with the cranium rats. "I’ve seen a few hanging around the house, but never in such numbers. Disgusting things."

Zorian frowned. Why were the cranium rats hanging around their house?

"You should be careful," he told her. "They’re called cranium rats and they can read your mind, possibly even memories if left unmolested long enough."

"Hmm… good thing I kill them when I find them, then," Rea said.

"Yes, but don’t think that makes you totally safe," Zorian said. "They’re a telepathic hive mind, so killing one rat will not erase the information it has gathered on you. What one cranium rat knows, they all know. I really think you should report this to the city authorities and have them hunt the swarm down, but it’s your choice in the end."

"I see," Rea said after staring at him for a few seconds. "I’ll talk to my husband about your advice and we’ll see what we can do. I must say, you are surprisingly well informed for a fifteen-year-old, mister Kazinski."

"Brother is really smart," said Kirielle.

Oh hush, you flatterer.

"Right - thank you for your hospitality, Mrs. Sashal, but our landlord is expecting us and we really should get going," Zorian said, rising from his seat and motioning for Kirielle to do the same. From what Rea had said earlier, her husband was going to come home from work soon, and he’d rather not get stuck in another round of explanations.

"The rain is rather heavy, though," Rea said, glancing through the window next to her. "You should at least wait for the weather to get better before you go."

"Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem like it’ll happen for quite some time," said Zorian. "But that’s okay, because I can just teleport myself and Kirielle close to our destination and shield us from the rain for the short while we’ll be caught in it."

"Can Kirielle come over to play with me some time?" asked Nochka.

"Uh, yeah. Sure," said Zorian. Yes, he was pretty sure Kirielle would be angry if he said no. Though he really didn’t want Kirielle in an area infested with cranium rats…

Zorian and Kirielle said their goodbyes and left in the direction of Imaya’s house.

The next day, Zorian woke up early and told Imaya he was going to the library, though in truth he did no such thing. Instead, he teleported himself to Knyazov Dveri, where he proceeded to gather crystalized mana. By now he had mapped large portions of the local underworld, and as such couldn’t actually pick up every piece of crystalized mana within a single day. He would need another two or three days to clean the place up properly. Oh, and he was also hitting the limits of his memory, it seemed – he had outright forgotten about some of the minor resource locations, and it took him a while to track down others. Annoying.

He wondered what his previous self would say if he knew that in the future he would have so much wealth within reach that he would literally forget about some of it. Probably something rude.

He had only been back at Imaya’s place for half an hour or so before Taiven came to speak with him.

"Let me guess, you want me to go into the sewers with you to recover a watch from a bunch of giant spiders," Zorian guessed.

"What? No, I decided not to bother with that job since more lucrative ones have popped up lately," said Taiven. She gave him a strange look. "How the hell do you know about that, anyway? I told maybe two people I was even interested in that job."

Uh, right. The circumstances in Cyoria had changed greatly since the last time he’d been in the city – the mercenaries he hired to confront Red Robe had been soul-killed along with the aranea, and monsters were starting to well up from the Dungeon with no aranea to keep them in check. Nothing could nor should be taken for granted – he had to keep that in mind.

Rather than try to trick her with some poor excuse, he decided to simply ignore her question and ask his own.

"If you’re not here for that, why are you here, Taiven? You don’t exactly have a habit of visiting me for the hell of it…"

Taiven protested that she totally did visit him for the hell of it, and vehemently denied that she had come to ask him for a favor. It was an opportunity, she insisted – an opportunity to earn big money and fame, if only he would cooperate with her.

Well. If nothing else, her new scheme was a lot more tempting than her old one.

Long story short, the monster incursions he read about in the newspapers had started way earlier than Zorian had expected they would. There were a couple of bad ones on the very first day of the restart – a young couple had been heavily injured when a huge abyssal centipede crawled out of the sewers in the middle of a crowded street and a restaurant had to be evacuated when a huge yellow ooze broke into the wine cellar and started consuming everything in sight. Things got worse overnight, and there were a number of fatalities while Zorian had been busy picking up crystalized mana in Knyazov Dveri, causing the city to enact some emergency measures. One of these was issuing large bounties on confirmed monster kills and encouraging various dungeon delvers and mercenary groups to go as deep into Cyoria’s dungeon as they dared, and cull the monster population before they could reach the surface.

As far as Taiven was concerned, this was exactly what she had been waiting for. Already frustrated with the lack of chances to prove her worth, she was eager to take advantage of this new development to make a name for herself by aggressively pursuing bounties and putting down as many dungeon denizens as she could find.

The problem was that her group was too small for her ambitions. Three people do not make a proper hunting party.

"I’m surprised you came to me with this," said Zorian. "This sounds like it requires decent combat skills, and I am only a third year. Surely some of your peers would have been better for this?"

"Well, the thing is, I’m not the only one recruiting… and many of the other recruiters are a lot more prestigious and well-known than little old me. It should get easier once I start getting results, but that could be too late and I can’t afford to be too picky right now."

"Can’t afford to be picky, huh?" said Zorian flatly. Before the time loop, that phrase right there would have caused him to refuse her offer out of spite. He hated being thought of as second best, never mind a last resort. But years in the time loop had tempered his ego, and he could admit to himself that Taiven’s judgement was spot on – considering the information she had on him.

"Okay, bad choice of words," admitted Taiven. "But as you said yourself, you’re only a third year. How good are you at combat magic? Do you think you could pull your own weight in a team as you are now?"

Hmm, how much should he reveal here? Taiven could be shockingly oblivious about some things, but she would definitely not ignore him being way stronger than he had any right being. And she was one of the few people who knew his pre-time loop self well enough to make such a judgement call with a fair amount of certainty.

And for that matter, did he even want to join Taiven’s group? It sounded like a huge time sink, and he had so many other things vying for his attention… maybe it would be better if he were to pretend he was too weak and inexperienced to help her?

Oh to hell with it – he’d give it a chance this time. If nothing else, it would give him a ready-made excuse for a lot of things he intended to do in this restart.

"Absolutely. I have been in the Dungeon before," he admitted. "I have a decent repertoire of combat spells and I’m confident that I won’t freeze on the first sign of danger. The biggest problem is my mana reserves – at maximum, I can only cast about 20 magic missiles in a row. And that’s after I increased my reserves through constant use – I’m pretty average in terms of mana reserves magnitude."

Taiven stared at him for a few seconds, incredulous. "You’ve been in the Dungeon before?" she finally asked. "I’m surprised you got permission for that. The Academy sure didn’t want to give me one before I was well into my fourth year."

"I didn’t say anything about asking permission," said Zorian.

"Zorian…"

"What, like you’ve never done anything like that?" challenged Zorian.

"Well, maybe once or twice," Taiven admitted. "But it doesn’t sound like this was an occasional occurrence for you. Getting your mana reserves that high must have involved some pretty intense practice, considering where you started from. That sounds pretty dangerous."

"Sometimes a man has to take chances," Zorian quoted in Taiven’s voice. "I do believe you’re the one who told me that, Taiven."

"I was talking about romance and you know it," she protested. "Why couldn’t you take my advice about that instead?"

I did take your advice, thought Zorian sourly to himself. I got laughed in my face for my trouble.

"Why are you lecturing me about this? You should be overjoyed your desperate ploy had worked," he said instead. "Do you want me in your damn team or not?"

"I do, I do!" Taiven quickly assured him. She pulled out a sheet of paper from her bag and set it down on the table in front of him. "I guess you’re right, this isn’t really important right now. Why don’t you just fill out this membership form and I’ll give you a rundown of what I had planned for tomorrow…"

Over the next couple of days Zorian went on regular forays into Cyoria’s underworld with Taiven, Urik and Oran. He quickly realized that his combat skills weren’t really the most valuable thing he brought to the whole operation – the combined might of Taiven and her two old teammates was usually enough to destroy any threat they encountered, with Zorian only called to fight when one of those three ended up low on mana and needed to rest for a while. No, the biggest benefits he brought to the table were a detailed map of a huge chunk of Cyoria’s underworld (courtesy of the matriarch’s last message) and a decent proficiency in divination that allowed him to scout the areas in front of them and track down any specific target they were pursuing. Without him there to direct the rest of the group, they would have probably spent most of their time wandering aimlessly in search of something to fight. Those three were dangerously overspecialized for direct combat in Zorian’s opinion.

While down in the Dungeon, he took the opportunity to scout the invaders' underground bases that he was aware of, trying to see how they were dealing with this kind of increased activity and scrutiny of Cyoria’s underworld. Taiven’s group was far from the only one that had tried to cash in on the bounties the city was offering, and more groups were expected to get involved soon. What he found was that the invaders had retreated somewhat, abandoning several of their more exposed bases completely and leaving only token forces in many others. That was bound to have a very negative impact on the execution of the invasion…

When he wasn’t hunting down dungeon denizens with Taiven, he was tending to the multitude of his other plans and obligations. He finished harvesting crystalized mana under Knyazov Dveri and had started to slowly sell his huge stockpile off to various stores, both in Cyoria and outside. He took Kirielle to see Nochka and stayed around to watch out for any cranium rats in the area (but thankfully didn’t detect any). He ended up meeting Nochka’s father this time – a tall, jovial, bearded, muscular fellow named Sauh who loved to laugh and talk and was completely unlike his wife, yet still terrifying in his own way. Zorian was half-convinced that the workshop Sauh insisted on showing him, the one full of hammers and other heavy, dangerous-looking tools, was the man’s way of threatening him bodily harm should he hurt his daughter in any way. He also visited the library to see what Ibery wanted from him. To his surprise, he found out that Ibery was interested in getting magical instruction from him. She had been looking to hire someone for additional tutoring outside of the academy, but found most tutors out of her price range, and was hoping a third year like him might be amenable to a spell exchange or something else of that nature. Though the offer was kind of interesting, he had too many things on his plate as it was – so he told her he’d get back to her after the summer festival, if she was still interested. Perhaps in some future restart where he refused Taiven’s recruitment pitch.

And, of course, he still had to attend classes. That was a chore, though not quite as big of a one as he had been expecting. His long absence from Cyoria had made him forget many of the details of how classes were supposed to go, and caused him to view others in a completely new perspective. The constant monster incursions into the city had also had an effect on the academy. Jade was gone from the class, pulled out of the academy by her family for safety concerns. Zach was gone too, of course, and since nobody (except Zorian) knew the real reason for his absence, most people assumed he had been similarly pulled out for safety reasons and sent out of Cyoria. Kyron announced during their first lessons that he was running additional combat practice lessons during evenings and Ilsa openly encouraged anyone with significant combat ability to join one of the groups culling the monsters, offering special benefits and exceptions to anyone who did so and achieved results. She pointed out Zorian, Briam, Tinami, Naim and Estin as examples of people in the class who had already done that, thoroughly surprising Zorian – he never would have guessed so many people in his class had decided they’re good enough to get themselves involved in that. Two days later, Kopriva would join that list, while Maya and Iroro were ordered home by their parents until the situation calmed down.

With such large changes in class composition and teacher behavior, Zorian’s school experience was relatively novel compared to what he remembered of his pre-exile Cyoria days. He was sure it would all get boring and repetitive again after another restart or two, but for now it was bearable.

A few more days passed. The number and severity of monster excursions gradually dropped off, and the city stopped behaving like a kicked over anthill and settled into some semblance of normality. There was still a lot of tension in the air, forays into the Dungeon went on still, but things were finally calming down. As such, Zorian started investigating various invaders, cultists and other people related to the invasion that he still remembered from his time with the Cyorian aranea, tracking their movements and activities but launching no attacks for the moment. The furor over the dead mercenaries and monster incursions caused so many changes to the preparations of the invasion that his memories were of limited use, and he didn’t want to move until he was reasonably sure he knew when and where to strike.

It was peculiar, though… even accounting for massive divergences due to Red Robe’s removal of aranea, the invaders were still strangely ineffective. Less informed. Before, they seemed to know how to bypass certain wards or evade notice of Cyoria’s law enforcement – knowledge that they largely lacked in the current restart. He was starting to suspect that Red Robe had a habit of handing over a lot of crucial information to the invaders in previous restarts, even ones where he didn’t appear to pay much attention to them afterwards… but that in this one restart he’d chosen not to bother with that at all.

Strange.

The arrival of Kael at Imaya’s place reminded Zorian of their deal to help Kael develop his alchemy in exchange for help with soul magic and other stuff. Unfortunately, there was a problem: Zorian had largely forgotten what the contents of Kael’s notebook were over the many, many restarts he had been absent from Cyoria. Somehow Kael managed to figure out a few things from the disjointed parts of his notes that Zorian still remembered, which helped convince him that Zorian was telling the truth, but he was essentially starting from scratch.

Zorian knew he had to find a solution to the forgetting problem if that deal was ever going to work. Without constant reinforcement in every restart, he would forget again, and the amount of information he had to memorize was only going to increase with each restart, making the task harder. And that wasn’t just the issue with Kael’s potion recipes, either – he had been having trouble remembering the layout of Knyazov Dveri resource deposits, some of the minor details of previous restarts (such as his meeting with Nochka) had completely slipped from his memory, and he had a feeling that remembering the vast amount of information about invaders in Cyoria he was currently gathering was going to be a major issue in the future.

He needed a better way to remember things, and he needed it soon. He would have to set aside the upcoming weekend to see if he could figure something out.

He knocked on Xvim’s door and dutifully waited for the man to invite him in.

"Come in," Xvim called out from inside, and Zorian quickly entered the man’s office and sat down when instructed to do so.

"Show me your basic three," Xvim ordered.

Zorian did so – silently, efficiently and without complaint. He had decided before coming here that he would try and see how long it would take for Xvim to get unnerved by him meeting all of his demands without any issue or complaint. It was a long term project, of course – he didn’t really think he could baffle the infuriating man in this particular restart – but he was determined to see it through. He would practice whatever stupid exercise Xvim threw at him every single day, restart after restart, until he got them right. Until he got them all right, if he was forced to. The man had to run out of shaping exercises at some point, right?

Xvim threw a marble at him. Zorian moved his head lightly to the left, moving out of the marble’s flight path without ever meeting the man’s eyes. Another two marbles flew at him, but the result was exactly the same.

"Close your eyes," Xvim ordered.

Zorian did. He still dodged every marble Xvim threw at him, a cloud of diffuse mana scattered around him as a detection field. Xvim did not react, unfazed by his improbable skill, but neither did Zorian.

"You can open your eyes again. Here’s a box of marbles," said Xvim, reaching beneath his desk to pick up a large bowl full of hated spheres of glass. They came in a wide variety of sizes, and Zorian was silently thankful that Xvim only ever threw the small ones at him – some of the big ones looked like they could knock a man unconscious if they connected. "Levitate as many as you can. Hurry up, we haven’t got all day!"

Zorian levitated every single marble in the bowl, but alas – he was too slow. Or at least Xvim thought so, anyway. He made Zorian lift and lower the entire mass of marbles over and over again, wasting an entire hour. Zorian said nothing though, doing his best to meet Xvim’s unreasonable demands.

"Levitating them like that in a giant disorganized lump is unsightly. Make it a proper sphere. A ring now. A pyramid. That doesn’t look like a pyramid to me – do you need to have your glasses checked, mister Kazinski? Yes, better. But slow – you must be faster. Much faster. Start over from the sphere again. Again. Again."

Zorian made the mass of marbles flow from one shape to another as fast as he could, but eventually a disaster struck – he lost control of the exercise and the entire mass went crashing down onto the table. Zorian winced as the marbles bounced off the table, making a huge racket and scattering all over Xvim’s office, his mask of cool detachment breaking for a moment.

Damn it.

Several seconds passed in the aftermath as Zorian and Xvim stared at each other impassively.

"Well?" asked Xvim curiously. "What are you waiting for, mister Kazinski? Hurry up and gather the marbles into the bowl so we can continue where we left off."

"Yes, sir," said Zorian, unable to keep a note of sourness out of his voice. "I’ll be right on it."

It was official: he really hated marbles.

39. Suspicious Coincidences

Zorian stared at his tormentor in silence, as relaxed and impassive as one could be when faced with such a pitiless, unreasonable man. Xvim stared back at him, his face a picture of unshakable, effortless composure that made Zorian’s best efforts at stoicism appear laughable in comparison. Still, he wouldn’t break. He didn’t break. He had (eventually) met every ridiculous demand Xvim had given him and had never blown up at the man even once. Of course, that hadn’t impressed the man any, even when he’d demonstrated insanely good shaping skills for a third year student, but he’d expected as much.

They continued staring at each other in silence for several seconds.

"That," Xvim finally decided, "was terrible. You are inflexible, slow, yet paradoxically impatient. I see in you a tendency to overreach, mister Kazinski, moving on to advanced fields of study without a healthy foundation to back it up. A common problem with many of your fellow mages, true, but everyone else is doing it was never a valid excuse for anything. We will have to work on that before we tackle anything more substantial."

"Of course, sir," Zorian said calmly. "I’ll be sure to practice everything you’ve shown me back at home."

"Good. I expect a better performance on our second session," said Xvim, leaning back in his chair before making a shooing motion with his hand. "You are dismissed."

Zorian made a solemn nod, slowly rose from his chair and then fled the office as fast as he could without making it obvious he was in a hurry to leave. Only when he shut the door and put some distance from the room did he let himself relax.

That could have ended up badly. Very, very badly. He knew he’d be taking a risk when he tried to read Xvim’s mind, but the man had aggravated him so much that he couldn’t help himself. Besides, what were the chances of Xvim deciding to shield his mind for a meeting with one of his students? Pretty good, apparently, because Zorian encountered a powerful mental shield when he tried to read his thoughts. He withdrew immediately, terrified that his telepathic probe had been noticed by the man, but whatever defenses Xvim had apparently gave the man too little feedback to notice Zorian’s relatively delicate attack. Well, that or he did notice but decided not to say anything, but that seemed very unlikely – if that were the case, he would have at least made a snide comment or two about how sloppy Zorian’s attempt was, even if he wasn’t at all bothered by the attempt itself.

It was very interesting that Xvim had bothered shielding his mind for their meeting, though. Was Xvim one of those mages who kept their mind shielded at all times, or did he somehow know about Zorian’s talents? There were a lot of possibilities. Zorian made a mental note to barge into the man’s office unannounced at some point in the next week, just to see if Xvim had his mind shielded even when not expecting Zorian to arrive…

His thoughts were still preoccupied with Xvim when he arrived back home, at which point the realization that he could sense the minds of Nochka and her mother in the house pushed the topic of his so-called mentor out of his mind. That was unexpected – there had been no plans for them to visit, as far as he knew. He entered the house and made a beeline towards the kitchen, where he could sense Imaya and Rea were currently situated, and found them seated around the kitchen table, gossiping over some cookies and… plum brandy?

Well, whatever. After exchanging greetings, he tried to ask Rea about her reasons for coming unannounced without sounding rude and accusing. He didn’t quite succeed if the dirty look Imaya shot him was any indication, but Rea herself didn’t seem to mind.

"Nochka was being impatient about your next visit so I decided to take her to Kirielle instead," she explained. "Besides, it is not fair to make you spend your time on bringing your sister over to my home. You are a student of magic, with many additional obligations aside, I’m told, and I am but a simple housewife with plenty of free time."

Simple housewife, right. If she really was what she claimed to be, he would… well, he wouldn’t do anything crazy, but he’d be shocked. It was possible, but she was too confident and emotionally composed to be some ordinary housewife.

"For myself, I have no complaint about Nochka coming here from time to time," Imaya piped in. "So you need not worry about any complaint from me."

"I see," Zorian said slowly. He looked at Rea, and found her unflinchingly meeting his gaze. Though his empathy detected no hostile intent and she didn’t do anything overtly threatening, he found her vaguely unsettling. It was her body language, he realized – though her posture was relaxed, she did not fidget or move at all.

Making a snap decision, Zorian decided to take a risk for the second time in a day and dived into her surface thoughts. He didn’t want to get too comfortable with violating the mental sanctity of people around him, but if a person looked like a threat, he felt it was justified. And Rea definitely looked suspicious to him right now.

Rea’s mind was not shielded, and she gave no indication that she detected his intrusion. That said, he didn’t get anything worthwhile out of it. She was not feeling very introspective at the moment, nor thinking any incriminating thoughts. Mostly, she seemed to be studying him, even as he was doing the same to her. Much like Zorian could tell she was not a normal housewife, she too seemed aware that he was anything but a normal student.

He decided to get her talking about her background and current situation, hopefully guiding her thoughts down the path that would reveal what her deal was. Besides, Imaya seemed to be getting more and more uncomfortable with their silent stare-down so if nothing else he should break the silence to calm her down a little.

"You know, I just realized I never did ask you why you and your family moved into Cyoria," said Zorian. "I bet it’s a fascinating story…"

Over the next half an hour, Zorian spoke with Rea about her life and recent history, with Imaya occasionally jumping in with her opinion. Despite his efforts, Zorian failed to uncover any deep secret from Rea’s thoughts. Her mind was too focused on what she was saying, with little in the way of internal musings or stray thoughts. The only thing Zorian could tell with certainty was that she hadn’t lied even once while talking to him. Her story about her family moving from a small rural town to Cyoria out of simple desire for a better life in the big city was something she honestly believed in, rather than some clichéd cover story. Her husband wanted a better paying job he could not get in their old home, Rea wanted to get away from their rather unpleasant neighbors who were spreading nasty rumors about her whenever they could get away with it, and they were both unhappy with the poor state of the local school and wanted better for Nochka. So they moved. Simple as that. Currently they were still in the process of setting up in Cyoria, and were thus having some money problems, but Rea seemed unconcerned about that, claiming it to be a temporary issue.

His mind reading did pick up on two interesting things. First, Rea had ridiculously good hearing. Throughout the entire conversation, she was somehow picking up on the conversation Kirielle and Nochka were having in another part of the house, separated from the kitchen by a corridor and two closed doors. Zorian himself could not hear a thing from the two girls, no matter how hard he strained his ears. Secondly, while Rea did not know he was reading her mind, she was pretty good at figuring out people’s moods and motives the old fashioned way – she realized pretty quickly he was suspicious of her and trying to interrogate her.

And she found it amusing. Very, very amusing.

Eventually, Zorian was forced to admit defeat, withdrawing from Rea’s mind and excusing himself so he could leave. At the very least he was mollified that Rea did not seem to have any sinister plan for him and Kirielle, which was really all he cared about in regards to her. She could keep her secrets, so long as they didn’t come back to haunt him later.

"Oh yes, I nearly forgot," Imaya said as he turned to leave. "Kael said he wanted to talk to you when you get back. He’s in the basement right now, tinkering with his alchemical equipment again."

Thanking her for the information, Zorian descended into the basement to see what Kael wanted from him. It could be any number of things, really – he had dropped a multitude of bizarre problems on the morlock boy since they’d met in this restart, and he counted himself lucky that Kael was so reasonable and level-headed about what he had learned. He had to admit, with no small amount of embarrassment, that he himself probably wouldn’t have taken it half as well in his place.

Then again, he had the feeling that Kael’s willingness to accept his explanation about the time loop came from greed. He was sure that Kael saw the time loop less as a terrifying anomaly and more as a fantastic opportunity that could catapult his skills and knowledge immensely if he played his cards right, and that doubtlessly influenced how inclined he was to accept Zorian’s story as truthful. Case in point…

"Ah, you’re here," Kael greeted him. "Did you get the ingredients I asked of you?"

"Yup," said Zorian, reaching into his bag and withdrawing a wooden box full of alchemical ingredients.

"There were no problems?" Kael asked, accepting the box and promptly opening it to examine the contents. He pulled out one of the bottles from the box, the one full of inky black liquid, and brought it towards the light to check something.

"No. The shopkeeper looked at me strangely for buying so many expensive ingredients, but said nothing in the end. It would still probably be smart to buy the next batch from some other shop, though."

"Probably," agreed Kael, putting the bottle back and snapping the box shut.

There was no offer of reimbursing Zorian for his expenses. One of the first demands Kael had of Zorian once he decided the time loop thing had something to it was for Zorian to finance his experiments to the best of his ability. He understood Kael’s demand for what it was – not just a way for the boy to secure more funding, but also a challenge for Zorian to prove he believed what he was saying. After all, if he really believed in his own time loop story, he wouldn’t care at all about spending his money like that, would he?

Kael placed the box on the work table next to him, depositing it among the many other boxes, ceramic bowls, glass bottles and other alchemical instruments that cluttered Kael’s workspace. He seemed to be lost in thought for a moment, his bright blue eyes rapidly scanning the rest of the basement, before he focused back to his conversation with Zorian.

"How often do you think you’ll be able to buy more?" he asked.

"Well… I hesitate to say as often as you need me to, since I’m sure you can burn through any amount of money I have if you go wild, but I’m pretty loaded right now. Thanks to the time loop I found a very time-efficient way to extract a great deal of crystalized mana from Knyazov Dveri’s underworld, and selling that has given me a huge amount of money to spend," Zorian explained. "So… two or three boxes like that a day if I had to? Maybe more, but I really think that would be a bad idea, since I don’t think I’d be able to avoid unwelcome attention if I started buying so much expensive stuff."

"I… see…" Kael said slowly, clearly more than a little surprised at the information. "That’s a lot of money. Out of curiosity, why did you go to the trouble to get so much? Funds for your own experiments?"

"Partially," said Zorian. "It certainly makes things a lot easier when you can throw around money like it’s nothing. Saves time. And yes, I know it’s strange for that to be a concern when you’re stuck in an ever-repeating time loop."

"And the other part?"

"Greed, I guess," Zorian admitted. "When I finally break out of the time loop I kind of want to have all my monetary concerns taken care of. Probably not the best use of my time but-"

"Don’t worry, I understand you completely," said Kael, smiling slightly. "I probably wouldn’t have been able to resist doing so myself. In fact, I probably would have done it much sooner, even with the threat of other time travelers and the presence of more pressing problems you’re dealing with. So many problems in my life would have disappeared if I had a million pieces or so…"

"Well, you are an alchemist," Zorian said. "Your profession has always been very expensive to practice, unless you were one of those alchemists who were willing to limit themselves to components they could grow and personally harvest in the wilderness. It makes perfect sense that you’d want to get rich if given a chance."

"Perhaps. I don’t think I’d be anywhere near as efficient about it as you are, though. Well, not without resorting to theft. The thought of looking for crystalized mana would have never occurred to me. What’s so valuable about it that people are willing to pay so much?"

Zorian gave Kael a curious look. "It’s a bit strange to hear an alchemist ask that. I’m pretty sure that powdered crystalized mana is an important potion ingredient."

"Not in the kind of potions I’m making," Kael said, shaking his head.

"Ah. Well, crystalized mana is basically ambient mana in solid form. Harder to make use of than ambient mana, since it first has to be broken down into the more familiar, ethereal form before you can use it to power anything, but it is very convenient as a mana battery. Most mana batteries, such as the ones made with spell formulas, lose all stored mana in a couple of days to a week. Crystalized mana, on the other hand, is completely stable in normal circumstances. That’s very useful if you want to, say, support a powerful magical item or warding scheme independently of ambient mana levels," explained Zorian.

"Ah, so these are the crystals the new trains use for fuel," said Kael.

"Yes," Zorian confirmed. "I heard that use of crystalized mana as train fuel is really driving the prices of it upwards lately, got a bunch of people worried. Very convenient for me, though."

"Shame it’s only useful for powering items," Kael said. "Having some kind of personal mana battery would have been a nice way of side stepping your limited mana reserves. Have you looked into making such a thing? Even if it only lasted a few weeks, that should be enough to be useful in your circumstances."

"Of course I’ve looked into it," Zorian scoffed. "It’s impossible. Personal mana loses its affinity with its maker rapidly once expended, becoming indistinguishable from ambient mana in a matter of minutes."

"Ah."

"Indeed. What about alchemical solutions? Is there a potion that increases your mana regeneration, gives you a momentary mana boost or something like that?"

"I doubt it. I think we would have all heard about such a potion if it was at all available. But it’s possible, I suppose, especially if it has some serious drawbacks that curtails its use. You should probably ask Lukav about that – if anyone knows how to answer that question definitively, it’s him," Kael said. He squirmed uncomfortably. "And since we’re on the topic of Lukav, I have a bit of a… personal request."

"I’m listening," Zorian said curiously.

"Okay…" Kael began. "When I gave you that list of people to consult with in regards to soul magic, I did not exactly give you a list of strangers. We weren’t best friends, but I knew these people. We had history between us, we met sometimes to exchange news and the like… to find out that someone had been going around, kidnapping and killing them, was very upsetting to me."

Zorian winced. Now that it was pointed out to him, he had been really rather callous when he told Kael of the disappearances in Knyazov Dveri, hadn’t he? This wasn’t just another disquieting mystery to Kael, but an outright attack on him and his acquaintances.

"I’m not angry at you," Kael hurriedly added. "I realize you already have a lot on your plate, and that staying alive and figuring out what is behind the time loop takes precedence over everything else. However, I would really appreciate it if you looked into these killers and figured out a way to stop them for good."

"Of course," Zorian immediately agreed. "I had fully intended to do so anyway. I simply delayed that investigation until I had taken care of more pressing problems and gotten somewhat better at magical combat."

Besides, he had figured that investigating the invasion forces here in Cyoria would automatically bring him closer to solving that particular mystery. The two were clearly connected somehow, perhaps even two different fronts of the exact same operation.

"I see. That takes a load off my chest," Kael said, exhaling heavily. "If there is anything I can do to help you with this, just let me know. I’m still in the process of asking around, but I think I can get my hands on a couple of truth potion recipes."

"I already have my own interrogation magic, but I suppose having more options to choose from never hurts," Zorian said. Truthfully, truth potions might actually be more effective than what he had in mind, at least at the current stage of the investigation, but he really needed to develop his ability to sift through people’s memories so he was reluctant to use them. "Keep in mind that Lukav already knows how to make a truth potion, so if your talks fall through I can just teleport you to his village so you can have a friendly chat with him. Perhaps he is willing to share."

"He knows how to do that? Sneaky bastard was holding out on me," Kael grumbled. "Still, that does remind me that Lukav is far from being a helpless victim and neither is his priest friend. It might be a good idea to involve them in the investigation – they might be perfectly capable of taking the killers down on their own if you provide him with sufficient information."

Now there was an idea. It would be hard to secure Alanic’s cooperation without coming clean about absolutely everything, but the benefits could be immense. He would have to seriously consider it when he started to seriously tackle the problem of Iasku Manor and disappearances around Knyazov Dveri.

"Well," said Kael after a few seconds of silence, unlocking one of the drawers attached to his work desk and withdrawing a cheap, featureless notebook out of it. "With that out of the way, I’d like to discuss another unpleasant topic with you: your soul marker."

Zorian straightened his back a little, suddenly alert. Truthfully, when he had told Kael about the soul marker and allowed the morlock boy to perform a scan of his soul, he had not expected much. Kael may have been a necromancer, but he was very much an amateur one. Still, he figured it wouldn’t hurt to put some trust in the other boy – both Lukav and Alanic were rather narrowly specialized when it came to their soul magic expertise, and it was entirely possible that they had missed something that a full-blown necromancer, even a novice one, would find obvious. It seemed that was indeed the case.

"What is it?" he asked with barely hidden excitement.

Kael sighed and pressed the notebook into Zorian’s hand. Leafing through it, however, Zorian realized he didn’t understand anything in it. It was full of unfamiliar diagrams and alien jargon, interspersed with brief paragraphs that meant nothing to one who lacked sufficient context to understand them. He shot Kael an annoyed look.

"I’ll be blunt," said Kael, ignoring his glare. "Your marker shouldn’t work." Seeing Zorian’s confused expression, he moved to explain. "I was immediately suspicious when you described how tightly the marker’s entwined with your soul – why would someone make such a deeply embedded marker and then make it a simple unchanging identification stamp like you assumed it was? The desire to make the marker resilient to damage and harder to remove could explain some of it, but it was still excessive – there are less invasive means that would have only failed if the soul was so mangled that the person was effectively dead. Those methods do have a noticeable flaw, though – they are a lot easier to copy than what you have rooted in your soul. That, I felt, was key. The marker was designed to foil attempts at copying it to other people. And in order to do that-"

"It needed to check up on the host’s soul to see whether it has been transplanted to another person," Zorian interrupted.

"Yes," Kael said. He took the notebook out of Zorian’s hands, flipped it to one of the later pages and handed it back to him.

Looking at it again, Zorian could tell that the diagram was supposed to be a crude outline of a human’s body, several circles, tringles and straight lines drawn over it. Below it was a short paragraph talking about essence channels, feedback nodes and transition barriers. It still didn’t mean much to Zorian, but he could tell this time that it was supposed to represent Zorian’s soul, the marker attached to it and their interaction to one another.

"I do not claim to completely understand the marker," Kael said. "Or even most of it – it’s an awe-inspiring thing, clearly made by a master soul mage. I especially like how it makes itself inconspicuous to casual soul scans – I’m not surprised I never detected it before being informed it was there. Still, there are some things about its functions that are obvious to me, and one of them is that the marker is designed to consult the soul of its host – the core, unchanging part of it, anyway – and alter its identification tag according to what it detects. Transplanting the marker to another person should result in a totally different identification value."

"But that’s clearly not how it works," Zorian protested. "Zach and I have the same damn marker! The tracking spell wouldn’t have worked otherwise!"

"It’s broken," Kael said calmly. "Your marker, that is. There are parts of it that are totally inert, either because they do not acknowledge you as its rightful host or because they are missing some critical piece that got lost in the transfer. I’m guessing that at least one of those is supposed to send a signal to the looping mechanism when you die, terminating the loop prematurely – that would neatly explain why you get sent back when Zach dies but he doesn’t experience the same when you end up dead. He has the intact version of the marker, whereas you don’t."

"But the main part of the thing works?"

"In a sense. It does everything it is supposed to, consulting the core of your soul, but for some reason it is still stuck on the same value it had while it was still inside Zach. It’s broken, but it’s broken in your favor."

"Huh," said Zorian lamely. What was he supposed to say to that? "Honestly? This isn’t such a huge surprise. I always suspected that the marker was in some way defective. After all, I highly doubt that its makers intended for someone like me to enter the time loop the way I did. Does this really change anything?"

"Depends how you look at it," Kael said. "You are in no danger of being suddenly dropped out of the loop, so I suppose from a personal perspective this doesn’t change much. But look at it from a wider perspective. If I’m right, then whatever convergence of circumstances aligned to pull you into the time loop along with Zach was a fluke. A fortunate fluke, but a fluke all the same. It is not consistently reproducible."

Zorian frowned. What was he…

Then it hit him.

"Wait. How did Red Robe end up time looping, then?"

"Yes, that is the question, isn’t it?" Kael said, his fingers drumming on his work table impatiently. "I’m afraid I don’t know how to answer that question. But he clearly didn’t use the same method you did."

"Yeah," Zorian agreed. "I had strongly suspected that, but I couldn’t be sure. Him having some other method of joining the time loop would explain why he never used his own marker to track me down the way I did Zach. He doesn’t have the same marker as me and Zach, if he indeed has one at all, so he would have to capture Zach and use him as a key to locate me that way."

"And if he’s indeed a master soul mage like you seem to think, he probably knows you could not possibly have an identical marker as Zach, so there is no reason for him to try that in the first place," Kael said.

They bounced theories and ideas off one another for the next half an hour, but it was all just hollow speculation at the moment. They had no way to confirm or discard any of the possibilities. Kael thought that Red Robe was in some way piggy backing on Zach, either by leaving portions of his mind in Zach the way the Cyorian matriarch did with Zorian, or by having some kind of soul link with Zach. Zorian discarded the possibility of a mind package immediately. The logistics of that kind of setup didn’t add up – Red Robe was active within hours of the start of the loop, if his quick arrival to the ruins of the aranea colony in that one restart were any indication, and processing a large amount of memories took more than a day. Not to mention that Zach didn’t start every restart by going to the same location, so it was questionable how Red Robe would have even gotten a memory package in every restart. No, Red Robe definitely wasn’t using memory packages. And really, Zorian didn’t think he was linked to Zach’s soul either – if he was, he would have checked Zach’s soul for additional connections when he’d read his mind and found out there were additional time travelers running around. Instead, he immediately ran off to confront the aranea. The thought of someone being connected to Zach’s soul didn’t seem to occur to him.

Personally, Zorian thought Red Robe did have a marker of some sort. It was entirely possible, he felt, that there was a way for people who knew what they were doing to enter the time loop properly – to get their own marker and all. Though that did raise a question about why he didn’t just off Zach and go on with his life free of interference.

What was so special about Zach?

"Right. I don’t think we’re getting anywhere with this," Zorian said. "Anything else I should keep in mind?"

"Nothing that Lukav and his priest friend didn’t already warn you about – avoid any magic that could alter your soul substantially. We don’t know what caused the marker to get stuck on its current identification value, and there is no telling what will push it off the edge so take care," said Kael.

"I was afraid to do that even before now, and for that exact reason too," Zorian said, leaning back on making a deliberately dramatic sigh. "Pity, though. I guess my dream of turning that stupid grey hunter Silverlake sent me to deal with into my very own familiar or becoming a grey hunter shifter is doomed to remain just a dream…"

"Didn’t you know? There is a reason why most shifters are made from normal animals," Kael warned him. "Being a shifter means you get instincts from the other part of the soul, and magical creatures always have very strong souls… the more magical the creature, the stronger. And they tend to be extremely violent and territorial. With regards to grey hunters, I’m fairly certain they don’t tolerate even their own kind, much less anything else. Such an attitude would bleed over to you if you became a grey hunter shifter. And there is also the matter of inheritance to consider - even if you are able to master a grey hunter’s soul and not let its urges rule you, there is no guarantee that your children will be similarly strong-willed, especially since they’ll have those urges from the day they are born. I’d strongly recommend against that course of action. As for making it your familiar, keep in mind that it takes a long time for the soul link to mature and that you need to be close to it the whole time. There is no guarantee that the creature won’t kill you during the process. And if you do manage to slave it to your will, it could still be dangerous to everyone around you who is not protected by the soul bond."

"There was no need for a lecture. I was just joking," said Zorian flatly.

"Good."

"Even if its abilities would have been so very useful…" Zorian said wistfully. "Extreme toughness, speed and magical resistance? Yes, please!"

"Just kill it, chop it up for parts and make an enhancement potion out of them," suggested Kael. "You can ask Lukav to help you do it, I’m sure he’d jump at the chance. Not many people are crazy enough to go after one of those monsters, after all, so I’m pretty sure he never had a chance to work with grey hunter parts."

"You know, that actually sounds like an interesting idea…"

"Glad I could help," Kael said, peering into a slowly bubbling metal pot on the table in front of him and scowling. "Well, my current experiment is not going too well. And I thought I had it this time, too. Time to try batch number four." He gave Zorian a speculative look. "Say, do you think you can help me out here? Some of the steps are pretty simple, and observing my work will ensure you don’t forget what I talked about as easily as you did last time."

"Yeah, I’ll help, and holy gods will you stop reminding me of that!?" Zorian whined. "It was more than a year, and I had a lot on my mind, it was natural I would forget a lot of things. Besides, I’m already working on side-stepping my faulty memory somehow."

"Hmm, I wish you luck about that," Kael said. "Nonetheless, we both know you’ll remember my work a lot better if you understand what I’m doing instead of just blindly memorizing recipes and dry instructions. Think of this as free alchemical lessons."

Well. He did use a fair amount of alchemy in solving the problems he encountered, so getting some advice in the field might actually be useful.

"Alright. Where do you want me to start?"

The next day, Zorian decided to make good on his own internal promise to find some solution to the forgetting things problem. Well, he had to organize another one of Kirielle’s magic lessons first, but there were no issues with that. Her progress was much faster than it had been in the previous restarts he had tried teaching her, since he had already been through this several times and was therefore getting better at motivating her and explaining the subject matter in a way she intuitively understood. His obligations done for the day, he quickly excused himself and went out for a walk, lest Kael or Imaya find some other job to dump in his lap.

In the long run, Zorian knew he already had a perfectly good solution for remembering things with perfect clarity – he could just make memory packets like those of the Cyorian matriarch, storing them in his mind for future recall. The map of Cyoria’s underworld that the matriarch had left him was still as crystal clear in his mind as it had been the day he had assembled it from the scattered remnants left in the minds of the male survivors of the colony. It served as a shining example of what was possible for one who could master the procedure of creating such things. And it wasn’t like learning how to do that would be an additional time sink, either – learning how to handle memory packets was something he was already working on. It was his current priority, in fact.

The problem was, it would be a while before his effort there bore any fruit. Could be a couple of months, could be a couple of years… well, hopefully not years, since the matriarch’s memory package could decay into uselessness by then, but the point remained: it was not a quick solution to his immediate problem. Fortunately, human mages were quite good at making quick solutions to immediate problems, and surely some of them had at one point needed to memorize a map down to the very last detail, or recite a book word for word? Zorian would be shocked if the spell to do such a thing didn’t already exist somewhere out there, it was just a question of whether he could find it.

He decided to try at the academy library first. A bit unimaginative, but it was the best place to start his research and it had been a while since he’d spent some time browsing its shelves. He kind of missed that during his long absence from Cyoria.

Three hours later, he was torn between smiling in satisfaction and the urge to find something flammable to take his frustration out on. The bright side was: he found what he was looking for. There were no less than five different spells that could do what he wanted, mostly by allowing the caster to record what they see and hear for a brief period of time and storing that record in their minds. They differed in details, such as whether it was possible to pause the recording or not, but the core was the same. One even claimed it could form a clear memory retroactively, allowing the caster to remember what they had forgotten.

The bad news was that these spells were only available in the restricted section of the library.

Specifically, the mind magic section of it.

Zorian leaned back in his chair, precariously balancing it on its back two legs and taking his glasses off to massage his eyes. To say that the academy was reluctant to give permission to random students with regards to doing mind magic would be a severe understatement. He needed a better library pass if he wanted to get what he wanted, and there was no way he was going to get it through legal means.

He narrowed his eyes while staring at the library ceiling. There was no helping it. He would just have to steal one.

"What has gotten my best student so gloomy on this fine day?"

Zorian jumped in his seat, startled, the poorly balanced chair almost giving up on him and pulling him to the floor. After finally stabilizing himself enough, he turned around to give Ilsa an unamused look.

"Sorry," she said, but her smile and the emotions he felt off of her told Zorian she was not sorry at all. "I didn’t think you would react so… explosively."

"You just surprised me a bit," Zorian said. He had detected a person passing by him with his mind sense, but that wasn’t exactly something unusual in this place. It wasn’t like the library was empty, after all. "What can I help you with, Miss Zileti?"

"Nothing, really – I am already done with what I came here for. You didn’t notice it because you were so absorbed into your reading, but I had passed through this section twice before now. I just didn’t want to interrupt you then, since you looked quite busy. I was just leaving now when I noticed you trying to burn a hole in the ceiling with your eyes, so I wondered if I can help you with whatever is troubling you."

"I appreciate the offer, Miss Zileti," Zorian said. "I really do. But I don’t think you can help me with this."

Helpful though she may be, Zorian was pretty sure that asking her to help him with committing a crime was a terrible idea. Amusing, but terrible.

"What are you working on, anyway?" she asked, peering at the open book in front of him. "Memory preservation spells? Why would you need that?"

"I need a way to quickly and flawlessly memorize a notebook or two," Zorian said truthfully.

Ilsa gave him a searching look.

"If this is about class work…"

"No, I think I’m doing quite well in my classes," Zorian said, shaking his head. If anything, he thought he was doing too well – he was at the top of his class in terms of grades, despite his efforts to avoid standing out. "It’s personal. All I can say is that I’ll be going on a trip soon, and I won’t be able to bring anything with me. Anything but my memories, that is. And while my memory is quite good, it is not good enough to memorize, say, a word-for-word transcription of a book of potion recipes."

"Sounds ominous and suspicious," Ilsa noted.

"I’m not planning anything illegal," Zorian assured.

"I’m sure," Ilsa deadpanned. "That’s why you’re looking up spells that I know you’re not authorized to learn."

"Hence me being gloomy when you approached me," Zorian countered. "I’d thought I had found a solution to my problem, but it turns out it’s beyond my reach at the moment."

"I see," she said. "Out of curiosity, how important is it that you be able to access the information in the book while it is stored inside your mind?"

"I’m not sure I understand," Zorian frowned. "What would be the point of holding a book in your head if you couldn’t read it?"

"To create a copy of it, of course," Ilsa smiled. "It’s a trick that some alteration experts use if they want to be able to create complex objects without carrying the originals with them. They use a spell to record the blueprint of an object, storing it inside their heads, then simply use that blueprint to create copies of the object whenever it strikes their fancy. Well, provided they have the correct raw materials. In your case, that would be a blank book of similar dimensions to what you’re trying to copy and a bottle of ink."

"And… you know how to do this?" asked Zorian hopefully.

Ilsa hummed. "Well, I am an alteration expert… but even if I was willing to teach you, this is not exactly an easy spell combination. It requires a great deal of alteration expertise and great shaping control. It would take-"

Zorian concentrated for a second and pulled at the heavy, metal lined book on the shelf next to him with his magic, not bothering to make a single gesture or hand motion. The book smoothly slid out of its shelf and floated in front of Ilsa, startling her. Before she could say anything, the book opened itself and started turning its pages, slowly at first but then speeding up until the last half of it passed in a blur and the book slammed itself shut. His point made, Zorian smoothly slotted the book back to its previous place on the shelf.

"I can’t think of a proper way to prove my alteration expertise right now," said Zorian in the resulting silence, "but I’m perfectly capable of restructuring a metal pan into a fully functional metal watch. How much harder would this be compared to that?"

"Not exactly harder," Ilsa admitted, still staring at the book on the shelf with a frown. "But certainly different. You’d have to practice for a few days before you can get it right." She shook her head and tore her eyes away from the book to stare Zorian in the eyes. "We’re going to have a talk about this on Monday, mister Kazinski."

"Does that mean you agree to teach it to me?" he asked.

"Not yet. I’ll need to run some tests on you to see whether you can handle the spells safely."

Ilsa soon left, leaving Zorian alone to his own thoughts. He closed the book in front of him, setting it aside. Ilsa’s spell combination wasn’t exactly what he had been looking for when he searched for a quick and dirty solution, but it could work. In fact, it was even better than his original idea in some regards. Much less annoying to use, for instance. Plus, he wouldn’t need to painstakingly transcribe the information from his head every time he wanted to add or change something. He would give Ilsa’s method a chance.

But he was going to steal a better library pass anyway.

Two weeks passed in a blur of activity. Most of it was routine, like him accompanying Taiven and her team to the Dungeon, teaching Kirielle or helping Kael with his alchemy (and having his soul occasionally scanned by the other boy, with little results thus far). It helped that Kirielle actually had a friend her age this time so she monopolized his time a lot less. Whatever dark secret her mother harbored, Zorian had to admit Nochka’s presence made Kirielle a lot more manageable than she usually was, so he was definitely going to visit that bridge in future restarts as well.

Two main things stood out from the rest. The first one was that he had managed to learn the spells Ilsa had talked about, and they worked just as she said they would. He was happy that he could finally keep written notes on what happened in the time loop, since he now had a method of effectively transferring his notebooks into the next restart. Kael was happy too, since he could now be much more liberal about the amount of information he was sending over to his future self – he promptly gave Zorian four fully filled-out notebooks to store the blueprints of, with a promise of one more by the end of the restart. Zorian really hoped Kael wouldn’t accumulate notebooks so rapidly in future restarts, because Zorian could only hold about 15 blueprints in his mind. The matriarch’s memory packet didn’t leave much room for anything else, really.

The second interesting thing was that he had all but confirmed that Xvim had his mind shielded at all times. He had barged into the man’s office three different times, and the shield had always been active. Sadly, his unannounced visits seemed to have finally provoked the unflappable man somewhat, so now Zorian had 5 different shaping books on his reading list for their next session. Depending on which book Xvim decided to focus on, their next lesson would consist of Zorian making detailed shapes out of sand, telekinetically dismantling a watch without breaking any of its parts, playing around with candles and matches, trying to apply paint on canvas without using any brushes or carving glyphs into stones with his fingers. Or maybe all five if Xvim was feeling particularly vindictive.

But that was all background activity – the real focus of his efforts was tracking the Ibasans and the Cult of the Dragon Below, mapping the structure of their organization. Originally he wanted to be cautious, spending most of the restart just observing everything, identifying their members and locations they met and did business in, but… well, he saw his chance and he took it. While the Ibasans were mostly full blown mages and lived deep underground in heavily warded bases crawling with guards, only periodically visiting the surface, most of their allies in the city were far more modestly protected. Zorian followed around cultists and simple mercenaries that worked with the Ibasans, tracking them down to their homes and reading their thoughts as they skulked around. The wards on their houses, if they even had them, were hilariously easy to avoid or break, allowing Zorian to root through their stuff for additional clues and connections with other members of their conspiracy.

He had found out some interesting things. For instance, not all of the Ibasan agents in the city were aware of what they were getting themselves into. The various merchants that smuggled food and other supplies to the invaders seemed entirely ignorant of whom they were really supporting. It was just business to them. Apparently there were numerous secret bases and operations happening in deep reaches of Cyoria’s Dungeon, and most of them were fairly inoffensive – illegal harvesting operations for dangerous substances, secret research facilities by various trading groups, even a government black site of some sort. The merchants thought they were simply supplying one of these many shadowy factions and never pried much into the identity of their customers. A couple of mercenaries knew that the invaders planned to do some kind of terrorist strike during the summer festival, but didn’t care about the details so long as they got paid – they didn’t seem to be aware of the true scale of the invasion.

Then there was the Cult of the Dragon Below, who honestly baffled him. The cult had a very complex, confusing structure, with lots of different ranks and categories of membership, and every rank seemed to have been fed a different story. On top of that, some members seemed to be in it purely for the benefits and had never bought into the Cult’s belief system in the first place. They were in it for the money – apparently, being a member of the Cult of Dragon could be pretty profitable if you played your cards right. They knew that the cult planned to release a primordial at the summer festival to ravage the city and everything around it, of course, but didn’t believe the primordial in question even existed, so no harm in going along with it, right?

Right.

There was still no evidence that Red Robe was in any way operating among the invasion forces, nor that he had shared even a speck of knowledge with them before running off to do something else, so Zorian decided to be a little more aggressive and start actually practicing his memory reading on acceptable targets. To that end, he identified a small cultist gathering – organized by a trio of magic-wielding members who appeared to be of a slightly higher rank than the usual dregs Zorian encountered thus far – and prepared to subdue them for questioning.

Eight armed cultists, three of whom were magic wielders. His old self would have called him crazy for trying to tackle them all on his lonesome, even from ambush, but they never really stood a chance – he trapped the house they were to meet in before they even got there, having found out about their chosen meeting place several days in advance, and took them down one by one as they came. Mostly by telepathically compelling them into falling asleep, much like the aranea had tried to do to him such a long time ago when he’d first encountered them. The last arrival was a mage who had a mind shield spell formula on a ring and fought his attempt off. Zorian was forced to deal with him via slamming him into a wall a couple of times with some judicious application of the force blast spell.

Once they were all down and tied up, Zorian took a deep breath and concentrated on diving into the memories of his first victim.

Before he got instruction from the Yellow Cavern Guardians, Zorian sort of expected that probing someone’s memories would be like one sometimes sees in adventure novels and the like – a walk through some psychedelic mindscape, where the intruder has to navigate deeply symbolical mazes and fight mental representations of the victim’s psyche and what not. The reality was nothing like that. Or at least the way aranea did it was nothing like that, and the Yellow Cavern Guardians had seemed more than a little amused when Zorian had described the idea to them. Instead, memory probes simply consisted of a powerful telepathic probe that punched through the surface layers of the victim’s mind and then started branching throughout their inner self in search of whatever the psychic was after.

It was by its very nature a dangerous procedure – unlike lighter, surface manipulations, deep scans like the one he was about to do could permanently ruin a mind. An amateur like Zorian was all but guaranteed to cause irreparable damage on his first try, unless they had spent years doing careful exercises which Zorian had no time for. Thus, he was not terribly surprised when that first man ended up as a mindless husk five minutes later. The convulsions and foaming at the mouth that preceded it were very disturbing, however, and almost made him give up on the whole thing right then and there. He didn’t even manage to read anything out of his memories, so his death had been for nothing.

A few minutes later, after he’d had some time to calm down and drown out the little voice in his head telling him he was a monster for killing a defenseless man like that, he continued with victim number two. He decided not to stay so long inside the minds of the rest of them.

Number two, three, four, five and six survived his probes. They could even wake up some day. Well, they could have, if the time loop wasn’t so close to its end. The sixth attempt actually yielded some results, too – he didn’t find much in the man’s memories before he had to withdraw, but he did add a few more names to his list to investigate, so at least some good came out of it. The last two suffered only light damage due to his probe. They knew nothing useful that could help him.

Zorian left the house feeling hollow, wondering whether he was really justified in doing this.

He came home to find Kirielle in tears and the entire household in an uproar. Rea and Sauh Sashal had been found dead in their home, brutally murdered by what appeared to be a monster missed by the many extermination squads operating in the city by now.

Of their daughter, there was no trace.

40. Shifting Tracks

Zorian woke up very early in the morning, roused from his slumber by the faint, incoherent mumbling of Kirielle sleeping beside him. For a moment he wondered why Kirielle was sleeping in his bed instead of being in her own room, but then he snapped out of the confused half-dream state he was in and memories of the previous evening came rushing in to him.

Rea and her husband were dead, their daughter missing. An event that had completely blindsided Zorian, who had never heard of anything like that happening in the previous restarts. Was this something that usually happened and he just never heard of it, or did the many changes in the wake of the aranean destruction somehow cause this? That fact that Rea and Sauh had been killed by a wandering monster seemed to suggest the latter, but Zorian had a hunch there was nothing random about that monster attack. The cranium rats had been monitoring the Sashal household for a reason, after all, and the invaders were ever so fond of slaving dungeon denizens to their will and using them as their attack dogs.

Kirielle, of course, neither knew nor cared about Zorian’s musings on the matter. Unlike him, who was not terribly close to the Sashal family and for whom their deaths would in no way be permanent, Kirielle had gotten very close to Nochka and was devastated to hear about the attack. Not even pointing out that she may still be alive could get her to stop crying. After all, the police said her parents were killed by a dungeon denizen, and those weren’t exactly known for kidnapping people and keeping them alive for ransom.

In the end, Kirielle only calmed down and went to sleep when Imaya gave her some homemade calming tea that kicked in suspiciously quickly. Probably a mild opiate. He should have asked for a cup of that himself, in all likelihood – he had already been rather unnerved by his experience of reading the cultists' memories, and was thus ill-equipped to deal with this brand new crisis.

Moving slowly, Zorian carefully extricated himself out of his bed and vacated the room, trying not to wake up Kirielle. He was pretty sure he failed in that regard, as her mental signature abruptly got more active about halfway through his retreat from the room, but since she never said anything and kept her eyes closed, he figured she didn’t want to talk to him yet. Or maybe she just wanted to go back to sleep. It was pretty early…

He found everyone else already awake and seated around the table when he entered the kitchen – Imaya, Kael and even Kana.

"Couldn’t sleep either, huh?" Kael asked rhetorically.

"Kirielle snuck into my bed in the middle of the night," said Zorian with a sigh. "She’s hard to bunk with even in normal circumstances, and considering the recent events…"

"Poor thing," Imaya said. "She was hit the hardest by this, I think. It’s a disgrace that something like that could happen in the middle of the city, and after it was already known that monsters were getting unusually aggressive too!"

Imaya spent the next ten minutes or so blaming the city for poor handling of the monster crisis – a subject that she never showed all that much of an interest in before now. It didn’t take an empath to figure out that Kirielle wasn’t the only one greatly affected by the killings. She had probably formed a friendship with Rea during the many times she had brought Nochka to meet with Kirielle.

Kael and Kana, on the other hand, seemed far less affected. Kael had virtually no interaction with either Nochka or Rea, and had never even met Sauh, so that was understandable. Kana had sometimes joined Nochka and Kirielle in their games, but had been nowhere near as close to Nochka as Kirielle had. She was also very young and probably didn’t quite understand what was happening.

Eventually Imaya ran out of steam and fell silent, though Zorian could still feel a lot of frustration coming off her. An uneasy atmosphere descended on the table.

"Oh yes," Imaya said suddenly. "I forgot to tell you yesterday, but the police want to talk to you about… Rea and her family."

"Me?" asked Zorian in surprise. "What would I know about that?"

"You did speak to Rea and her husband relatively recently," pointed out Kael. "They probably want to see if they told you something of importance. Most likely they want to talk to everyone who knew the victim."

"I see," Zorian said, idly drumming his fingers on the table. "Are they going to drop by at some point or should I go visit the police station?"

"Detective Ikzeteri said he was going to be at the Sashal residence at noon today, and that you should meet him there if possible," Imaya said.

Zorian frowned. Ikzeteri? That sounded familiar, where did he… oh, his old divination teacher had that last name too, didn’t he? And he was a detective, too…

"This detective Ikzeteri… he wouldn’t be named Haslush, would he?" asked Zorian.

"I think that was his name, yes," Imaya said, frowning. "I have to say I don’t really remember his introduction all that well. I was too shocked to really pay attention. Why, do you know him?"

"I’ve heard of him," said Zorian. "It’s not really important, I was just curious. I’ll go give him a visit later."

At that point Kirielle trudged into the kitchen, apparently having decided not to go back to sleep after all, and they all wordlessly decided to shelve the topic of the Sashal family for the moment.

The Sashal family home didn’t look like a scene of death. That was the first thing Zorian noticed when he approached the house. He had expected to see some kind of damage on the building – broken windows, the door torn off its hinges, maybe a damaged wall section – but the house looked entirely intact. If it weren’t for the trio of policemen hanging around the entrance and giving him severe looks as he approached, he would have never guessed the occupants had been killed.

Didn’t look much like a monster attack to him. The chance of this being an actual random event kept getting lower and lower.

"I’m here to speak to detective Ikzeteri," he said to the tall, mustachioed, stern-looking policeman that looked like he was the leader of the group in front of him. "He told me I should look for him here. Is he present?"

"He’s inside," the man nodded. "But I’m afraid I can’t let you go look for him yourself. If you are willing to wait a little, I will notify him you’re here."

"I’m fine with that," said Zorian, though internally he wasn’t happy. He had wanted to take a look inside the place to see if he could spot any clues. He doubted the police would be willing to tell him any details about the killings, after all.

Inconvenient. He could just wait until they left the place alone and sneak in then, but that might take several days – most of the clues would have gone cold by then, assuming they hadn’t been confiscated by the police as evidence. Besides, there wasn’t all that much time left before the end of the restart, so his window of opportunity to conduct an investigation was very small.

Damn it, he so didn’t need this right now…

"Wait here, then," the mustachioed policeman said. "What is your name, boy?"

Zorian gave him his name, and the man promptly disappeared through the door to fetch Haslush. After five minutes of waiting in uncomfortable silence while the other two policemen gave him suspicious looks, however, he could tell it would take a while for the man to return.

Zorian shuffled in place uncomfortably, probably looking mightily suspicious to the two policeman scrutinizing his every move. He knew it wasn’t entirely rational, but he was profoundly unnerved about being so close to law enforcement. Logically speaking, they had no reason to suspect him of anything and this entire talk was likely just a formality. He’d had bad dealings with the police back in Cirin, though, and he was also dealing with Haslush – his old teacher could be scarily perceptive at times. Zorian wouldn’t put it past the man to notice something strange about him and bring him in for more detailed questioning, which would be a gigantic waste of time at best, and at worst would necessitate an early end to the restart via suicide.

He’d prefer to avoid the latter possibility at all costs. Kirielle was already devastated about losing a friend, so having her brother suddenly blow himself up in the police station all of a sudden would be terrible. True, Zorian wouldn’t be there to see her anguish, and the restart would end a few days later, but just imagining the possibility made him ill.

Maybe he should read Haslush’s mind? Haslush was probably trained in detecting and resisting mental intrusion, being a mage working for law enforcement and all, but Zorian’s particular brand of mind magic was very non-standard. He didn’t use any obvious chants and gestures, so maybe he could get away with it. It would probably answer a lot of questions and would allow him to avoid any obvious blunders while talking to him…

…but no, that was too much of a risk. Besides, he had a much better target for something like that standing just beside him – he doubted those mundane policemen were trained in dealing with mind magic, beyond maybe being given a few pointers. A secret is only as strong as its weakest links.

He proceeded to worm his way into the two policeman’s thoughts. He found out that they were really not as interested in him as he had been imagining, but they also weren’t thinking about the Sashal family either – one of them was hungry and thinking of the dinner his wife was making him back home, and the other was fantasizing about some female administrative employee back in the station. Well, that was okay – he would talk to them and lead their thoughts back to the situation at hand.

"So, I don’t want to get you gentlemen in trouble or anything, but is there anything you can tell me about what happened here? Sauh and Rea had been friends of mine and I was shocked to hear what happened to them… is there anything you can tell me about all this?"

Zorian didn’t really expect them to say much – he fully expected them to give him the silent treatment until Haslush got outside, but simply mentioning the topic was usually enough to get a person to start thinking about it. He didn’t expect to be hit by a veritable wave of distrust and derisiveness coming from his link to one of the policemen, though.

[And he looked like such a normal-looking kid, too,] the man thought to himself. [I’d never have guessed he was hanging around a bunch of thieving cat shifters. Just shows you can never trust outward appearances when it comes to magic bullshit…]

Rea was a cat shifter? Huh. That made a lot of sense, actually – explained some things. What he didn’t understand at all was that the policeman seemed to think this made Rea and her family bad people – so much so that Zorian was apparently bad just for associating with them.

Apparently he had physically reacted to this revelation, because the other policeman noticed it and spoke up to forestall any possible unpleasantness. He didn’t seem to see Zorian’s reaction as any evidence of mind reading, chalking up his reaction to him being able to sense the change in his partner’s bearing and facial expression.

"We’re just here to look tough and discourage curious neighbors from snooping around, kid," the other policeman said. "We don’t know anything more about this than you do, in all likelihood – some sort of dungeon creature made its way into the house and killed the couple inside. For anything more you’ll have to wait for officer Kalan to come back with the detective."

The first policeman lightly shook his head before catching himself and stopping. [The creature that killed them simply sauntered in through an unlocked door instead of breaking in and attacked absolutely no one else in this entire crowded neighborhood. If that was an actual monster incursion, I will eat my own shoes,] the man thought to himself. [The kitties probably stuck their noses in some shady business, like usual, and got offed for it when someone took offense. Gods know they got their paws on everything these days…]

Zorian frowned. "What about Nochka? Their daughter? I was told her body was never recovered and that she might still be alive?"

The two policemen suddenly became very uncomfortable. Even the first one, who clearly didn’t like cat shifters as a whole, felt bad about the little girl who reminded him of his own daughter. Neither of them thought there was much chance of Nochka ever being found again, but they were unsurprisingly unwilling to tell this to Zorian and instead tried to think of a suitable non-answer they could give him.

They both breathed a sigh of relief when their exchange was interrupted by the arrival of their mustachioed friend who exited the house with Haslush in tow. Haslush, for his part, decided to lead Zorian on a walk away from the house, ruining his plan to keep mind reading the mundane policemen while they talked for additional clues.

It might be for the better, actually – paying attention to two different thought streams at the same time had already been rather hard. Trying to have a conversation with Haslush while doing the same would have probably been impossible.

"So, Zorian… I can call you Zorian, right?" Haslush asked. Zorian nodded, aware that the man had a massive dislike for formality. "Right. I’m guessing Miss Kuroshka has told you what happened back there, but just so we’re clear: Rea and Sauh Sashal have been found dead in their home yesterday morning, along with the mangled corpses of two giant centipedes. Their daughter was nowhere to be found, and nobody has heard anything about her since. Any of that news to you?"

"Mister Tverinov and Miss Kuroshka already told me most of that, but not the part about the mangled centipedes," said Zorian.

"Yes, well, your younger sibling reacted so badly to the news that I censored myself a little. Called it a monster attack rather than dwelling on the details," Haslush shrugged. "I apologize for upsetting her so much. I’m told I can be a little tactless at times, but it’s a hard trait to lose. This line of work tends to make you more than a little bit morbid, and I sometimes forget most people aren’t exposed to death and crime every waking moment of their lives."

Zorian thought about assuaging the man’s worry and assuring him he didn’t hold a grudge about that, but then figured the man would be more willing to share information with him if he appeared guilty, so he remained silent. Instead, he shifted the topic back to the killings.

"So they were killed by giant centipedes?" asked Zorian. "I didn’t see any damage outside the house. How did they get in?"

"Through the door. Apparently the occupants had left it unlocked."

Zorian gave Haslush an incredulous look.

"I’m just telling you what we found," Haslush said defensively. "I know this case is strange, it’s why we haven’t pronounced it closed and moved on. And on that note, is there anything you could tell me about the Sashal family that would explain what happened to them?"

Of course he did – but nothing he could tell the man without getting himself in trouble. He told Haslush everything he had figured out about the apparent cat shifters though his interactions with them, but this was very sketchy information, and based on Haslush’s unhappy expression probably wasn’t anything new to the detective. Not that surprising – Imaya alone had probably told him everything Zorian just did and then some.

"This wasn’t really a monster attack, was it?" Zorian asked.

Haslush gave Zorian a piercing look, which Zorian met unflinchingly. After a few seconds, Haslush withdrew a hip flask from his jacket, took a long, deep sip from it and then put it back into his jacket pocket.

"No, probably not," he admitted.

"Why were they targeted and by whom, if you don’t mind me asking?" Zorian said, trying his luck. Hey, who knows? Maybe the man would even answer.

"Well now. If I knew that, I wouldn’t be speaking to you now, would I?" Haslush pointed out.

"So you have no leads," Zorian concluded.

"I have too many leads," Haslush corrected. "The Sashals… well, how much do you really know about them?"

"I presume you’re talking about them being cat shifters?" Zorian guessed.

"Ah, so you do know about that. I’ve been wondering about that – the rest of your housemates didn’t seem aware of that fact, but Imaya said you were unreasonably suspicious of Rea right from the start. Well, if you know what they are, then you surely know why this could be any number of things…"

"I don’t, actually," said Zorian shaking his head in denial. "I was suspicious about Rea because she looked suspicious and I am a paranoid person. Them being cat shifters never factored into it, and to be frank I know virtually nothing about them. What’s the deal with cat shifters anyway?"

"Bluntly put, most cat shifters are heavily involved with crime," Haslush said. "Theft, smuggling and spying, usually, but occasionally even assassination. Their alternate forms are tailor-made for such shady activities, after all. Cats are small, stealthy animals whose presence is hardly ever notable in and of itself. How many new, never-seen-them-before cats do you see in a week?"

"A lot."

"Right. In a big city like this, unfamiliar cats are ubiquitous. Few things threaten them aside from humans, and most humans don’t hurt cats without reason. And on top of that, shifters get the ability to access traits of their animal form even while they’re human, meaning cat shifters get things like night vision, a sense of smell powerful enough to put most dogs to shame, superior balance and agility, and a whole bunch of other benefits."

"I’m still a bit surprised this lets them be so active in crime," said Zorian. "You’d think the sheer flexibility of classical mages employed by the various police forces would allow them to shut down a shifter group operating like that, regardless of their special abilities."

"Ah, but you’re assuming cat shifters work alone, which is not the case at all. They are hands down the most firmly assimilated shifter type of them all. They live in cities and towns among ordinary people, and are virtually indistinguishable from a normal human on casual inspection. Everything a regular citizen could do, cat shifters can as well – in particular, this means they have no problems in getting classical magic of their own. Hell, their links to crime mean they can get their hands on many things an average mage can’t, like permanent enhancement rituals or illegal spells for evading notice and influencing people…."

"Do you have any evidence that Rea and her family were that type of cat shifter though?" Zorian frowned. "Maybe I’m naïve, but they didn’t look like that to me. Surely there are non-criminal cat shifters?"

"There are," Haslush nodded. "And every single cat shifter would have you believe they’re one of them. Considering what happened, I don’t think I’m willing to put much stock in the Sashal family being such counter-examples."

Half an hour later, Haslush decided he’d gotten everything he needed out of Zorian and sent him on his way. Instead of going home, however, Zorian hung back. Once he had confirmed that Haslush was not going back to the scene of the crime, Zorian stealthily went back there in order to do some more fact-finding. There were guards posted in front of the house, but none were inside. Perfect. Zorian didn’t dare enter the house himself, afraid that there was some kind of alarm on the house to notify the police of break-ins, but conjuring an ectoplasmic eyeball and sending it inside didn’t seem to trip any wards so he closed his eyes and had his eyeball spy look around the house.

The bodies of Rea and Sauh were long gone by this time, but it was not hard to figure out where each had died due to all the blood stains. Tragically, Rea seemed to have been killed in front of her daughter’s room, trying to keep the attackers away from Nochka. She didn’t go down without a fight – the bodies of the two giant centipedes, which the police decided to leave in the house for some reason, littered the entire area. They had been quite literally torn to pieces, their bodies sliced into sections by some powerful severing attack. In the end, though, it hadn’t been enough. The door to Nochka’s room was smashed open – the only door in the house to have been dealt with so destructively – her bed flipped over, and Nochka herself nowhere to be found.

Zorian had been harboring a hope that maybe Nochka had turned into a cat when the attack had come and then escaped into the night, but that didn’t seem likely anymore. It was beyond obvious now that Nochka had been taken by the attackers for some reason.

Half an hour later, not having found anything similarly notable, he was ready to call it a day and go home. That’s when he searched the place where Rea had died again, and noticed something interesting on the severed head of one of the centipedes – faintly carved into the chitin of one of the forward sections of the centipede was a very familiar symbol – a circle with an archaic Ikosian pictogram for heart inside of it. It wasn’t the official symbol used by the Esoteric Order of the Celestial Dragon, but it was one of the several secret signs that their lower order cultists used to signal other members of their membership.

After inspecting the rest of the centipede parts and failing to find anything else significant, Zorian let the eye dissolve and walked away. So his initial suspicion was right – this wasn’t some shady deal coming back to haunt Rea and her family, it was connected to the invasion somehow. Admittedly, Zorian had no idea how, but he knew where he could find that out.

The Cult of the Dragon Below was going to get a lot more visits from Zorian in the coming days.

After that day, Zorian’s daily schedule changed completely. Kirielle lost all interest in magic and no longer attended the lessons he had organized for her, and he decided to free some more time by dropping his membership in Taiven’s group and skipping most of his classes. He spent most of this extra time planning and executing attacks on known members of the Cult of the Dragon Below, trying to find out what they did with Nochka. He attacked them incessantly, hitting two or more locations a day, and ruthlessly memory-probed every cultist he disabled in those excursions.

He learned some interesting things doing that. For instance, while Sudomir Kandrei, the mayor of Knyazov Dveri, was indeed a member of the cult, he was a very independent-minded one… to the point that the cult was very annoyed with him. They seemed to have no idea he was killing soul mages around his town, nor did he have any links to the Ibasans as far as they knew – the man promised to give his flocks of iron beaks and hordes of winter wolves to the Cult of the Dragon Below, not to the invaders as a whole. Zorian supposed he might be in contact with the Ibasans on his own initiative, but it was equally possible that his soul mage killing practices were his own thing. What he hoped to accomplish with that, Zorian could only guess.

He also found some emergency resource caches that the Cult scattered around the city, its underworld, and surrounding villages. They looked very… steal-able. He made himself a note – a real written note, seeing as how he could now effectively take a notebook with him to the next restart – to search through those in some future restart for anything interesting or easy to sell for some quick cash.

When it came to locating Nochka, however, his successes had been underwhelming. He managed to track down the group that kidnapped her, but they had simply been following orders and had long since handed her off to another group. He then tracked down that group too, but they no longer had her either and also didn’t know who had her now. He had dived deeply and aggressively into their memories, shattering their minds beyond repair, but to no avail – the man they handed Nochka to was a total unknown to them, other than being a high ranking member of the cult, and they had absolutely no idea where she might have ended up in.

Truthfully, Zorian had already suspected that kidnapping Nochka had been the whole point of the attack on the Sashal family, so his findings weren’t a huge surprise. The fact that the order had come from the very top of the cult indicated they considered it to be of critical importance. They also told both groups that Nochka had to be delivered alive and unharmed to the transfer point, forbidding abuse under the pain of death, which was also fairly strange. Why? Why did they want Nochka so badly, and why was her continued health so important?

He suspected the answer was something in line with she’s their sacrifice to the primordial to wake him up. Demon summoning often involved ritual killings, so it wouldn’t surprise him much if unbinding a primordial required the same. Still, why Nochka in particular? Because she was a shifter? The cultists did refer to the primordial as – among other names – He of the Flowing Flesh, which could indicate an ability to change its physical form. There were other shifters in the city, though. Other cat shifters, even.

He didn’t think he could get to the bottom of this by the end of the restart. If he had another week, maybe, but the restart was near its end and the Cult of the Dragon Below was getting more paranoid in the face of his constant assaults on them – they’d already tried to set up an ambush for him the last time he tried to attack a location, and only his ability to read people’s surface thoughts kept him from stumbling into it and getting himself killed. He wasn’t going to get much from them in the two days he had left before the summer festival.

Although, as horrible as Nochka’s kidnapping was, it could prove to actually be a huge opportunity for him, so long as it happened predictably in every restart. If he could place some kind of tracker on Nochka, she could lead him to the highest echelons of the Cult of Dragon, those who had stayed well hidden from him up until now. Also, if she really was intended as a sacrifice like he suspected, she could lead him to the place where the cult intended to perform their unbinding ritual, which could be a key to a lot of mysteries surrounding the Cult’s actions - perhaps even the time loop itself.

He would have to wait and see how events would play out in the next restart.

"Can we talk?"

Zorian looked away from the novel he was reading and glanced towards Kirielle, who was currently standing on the doorway, nervously gripping one of the support beams. Strange. Kirielle had been very subdued and asocial ever since Nochka had disappeared, rarely ever bothering him anymore, so her approaching him like this was quite unexpected.

"Sure," he agreed easily. He wasn’t doing anything important at the moment, anyway. He was supposed to be organizing his notebooks so he could store the latest blueprints in his mind, but he just didn’t feel like doing that at the moment and was instead procrastinating with some light reading. He could spare some time for his little sister. "What is it?"

She ran up to him and, before he could tell her to stop, hurled herself on top of him. As he was currently lying on his bed, she ended up basically re-enacting what had long become a very familiar scene to Zorian.

Damn it, Kiri, I get enough of that crap at the beginning of each loop! thought Zorian, but refrained from actually saying it out loud. Kirielle was already shaken up, no need to snap at her when she finally decided to open up a little.

"Where are your shoes?" he asked instead. "Don’t tell me you’ve been walking around the house bare-footed again?"

Kirielle glanced at her feet and gave him a guilty look. "Don’t be like Mom, Zorian. It was only one time."

"You’re doing it right now, too," Zorian pointed out.

"Okay, two times," she said, pouting.

He put a bookmark into his novel, laid it aside, pushed her off of him and rose in a sitting position. She immediately mimicked him, sitting on the end of his bed beside him. They sat like that in silence for a while, Kirielle dangling her bare feet over the floor and staring at her toes like they were the most fascinating thing in the world.

"I’m sorry," she finally said.

"What are you sorry for?" asked Zorian, surprised.

"For being difficult."

"Difficult?" asked Zorian incredulously. He peered into her mind for a moment and found her thinking about Mother. Ugh. Yeah, that did kind of sound like something their mother would say. She never did like crying much. One of the few things she praised him for was that he rarely cried, even as a young child. "Kiri, you lost your friend. It’s okay to be sad about that. You weren’t being difficult at all."

"But you’ve been avoiding me all week," she mumbled.

"I wasn’t avoiding you," he protested, aghast that she would even think that. "I was just… giving you some space to grieve in peace. You know? And besides, I was…"

She gave him a curious look when he didn’t continue. "You were what?"

Should he tell her?

"I was trying to find Nochka," he finally admitted.

Her eyes widened at this. "You were… Is that… you should have told me!"

"I didn’t want to get your hopes up," Zorian said.

"I was hoping anyway," she said, gripping the sheets tightly in her little fists.

He put an arm around her shoulder and pulled her into an embrace. She was still tense, but gradually relaxed after a while and returned his hug.

"I didn’t find her," he admitted after a while.

"Well, obviously," she said, as if it was the most self-evident thing ever. "But you tried. You knew you probably weren’t going to find her, and you still went out and searched for her. You didn’t cry and mope around the house all day like I did."

"Kiri, you’re nine," Zorian sighed. "What else could you have done? You’re being way too hard on yourself."

She didn’t say anything to that. Eventually he decided to just spend some time playing cards with her and praising her drawings. Which did cheer her up in the end, so he chalked that up as one of his better ideas. One of these days, once he mastered the alteration spell he was using to transfer notes into subsequent restarts sufficiently, he should gather some of her artwork into an art book of some sort and copy it into the next restart. Showing her the drawings she herself had made in previous restarts was bound to produce some amusing reactions.

Later that evening, Zorian decided he had given Kael enough time to wrap up his last minute experiments and went down into the basement to retrieve the last of the morlock’s promised notebooks. The door was unlocked, so Zorian simply walked in and closed them behind him.

As the door clicked shut, Zorian felt the sounds of the house above them disappear, the privacy portion of the wards placed on the basement engaging and sound-proofing the room. Among many other things. The privacy measures were apparently a standard part of the warding package the academy used to secure their workshops, and thus got added automatically to Imaya’s basement when Kael had requested they turn it into a proper alchemical workshop… something that was very convenient in moments like these, since it meant that Zorian didn’t have to spend hours securing the room every time he wanted to talk to Kael about some sensitive subject.

"You done yet?" Zorian asked the other boy. Kael ignored him for a moment, staring at some passage in the book in front of him, but then shook his head and pushed it away from him, massaging his eyes.

"Yes, I’m done," he said. He pointed at the notebook placed on top of a large stack of books. "The notebook is there. Everything is ready on your end?"

"Mostly," Zorian said. "I still have to write down some stuff I found out today."

Kael raised an eyebrow at him. "I thought you said you were taking a break from the cult today?"

"I did," Zorian said. "Doesn’t mean I did absolutely nothing, though."

"Oh?"

"Basically, I was thinking about warding, and how the upper level cultists all lived in warded houses that were a pain to break into and was thinking of how to speed the process up. And then I remembered that there is not only already a type of tool to do that present on the black market, I actually know where to find one for free. The aranea had stolen a ward scanner from one of the invaders a while before the start of the time loop, and the device was surely still in the destroyed colony."

"You said you don’t like going there," Kael noted.

"I don’t," Zorian sighed. "The place is… it has too many bad memories. And the corpses of the aranea are literally scattered all over the place, so it’s hard to go there and not be reminded of that whole fiasco that saw them destroyed."

"I still think they were somehow ejected from the time loop rather than soul-killed," Kael said. "I agree with what other people told you – souls are indestructible. There has got to be a trick there."

"Yes, well, time travel is supposed to be impossible too," Zorian pointed out. "Though I’ll admit that I’m hoping you’re right. Never mind that for the moment, the point is that I went there to find the ward scanner… and I couldn’t find it."

"So?" Kael asked.

"So, that means that either somebody already took it or that there is some secret part of the aranean complex that I’m unaware of. And frankly, I think it’s the latter. I mean, once I thought about it a little, the sheer emptiness of the aranean settlement was very suspicious… The Cyorian web was very wealthy and surely had a sizeable treasury. The matriarch often implied they have some kind of storage full of trade items and such. But I never saw anything like that when I checked the settlement out earlier, probably because I was very uncomfortable there and in a hurry to leave."

"You think there is something important there?"

"Time loop related? No, probably not," Zorian admitted. "But I need every advantage over Red Robe I can get, and there could be a lot of useful stuff there. Who knows what the aranea have squirrelled away over the years?"

"True," Kael agreed, rising from his seat and popping his spine. "Well, I’m tired. I think I’ll go to sleep now. Is there anything else we need to talk about?"

"There’s nothing pressing I can think of," Zorian said, shaking his head.

"I see. Just so you know, I’ll be taking Kana with me on a trip to a nearby village on the day of the summer festival. I don’t really want to be in Cyoria when the invasion comes, and I’m even less enthused about Kana being caught up in the invasion."

"I understand."

"I’m glad. If you want, I can take Kirielle with me," said Kael. "I know you’ve been agonizing about what to do with her for a while now."

"Yeah," agreed Zorian. "I don’t want to leave her alone for the invasion, but at the same time I need to be able to move freely if I am to investigate what’s happening with the invasion after all these changes. You think she’ll agree to go with you?"

"I don’t know, that’s up to you," Kael shrugged. "All I can do is make an offer."

"Fine, fine, I’ll talk to her," Zorian sighed. "That’ll be a lovely talk, I can already tell."

"Notify me what you decided by tomorrow evening," said Kael.

And just like that, the restart was already almost done. Tomorrow he would see how the invasion of the city proceeded this time around.

Zorian looked over his things, trying to remember if he had forgotten something crucial in his rush to finish the preparations in time. He couldn’t think of anything, but it would be just like him to forget something blindingly obvious while worrying about the irrelevant minutiae.

He still had several hours to burn until the start of the invasion, however, so he left the preparations alone for a now and left his room to find some quick diversion. Remembering that Imaya kept a whole miniature library of exotic works in her house, he set off to browse its shelves in search of a good time waster. He found Imaya already there, though, staring at her collection with a faraway look.

"Miss Kuroshka?" he asked worriedly. He was getting some worrying feelings from her with his empathy. "Are you alright?"

"Hm?" she mumbled, before her brain rebooted again and she truly focused on his presence. "Oh, Zorian. How long have you been standing there?"

"I only just came here. Been looking for a book to pass the time with, but you looked…"

"Don’t worry," she sighed. "I’m just disturbed by the sudden quiet in the house. It looks so… lonely."

"Huh. I thought you’d be glad to have some peace and quiet for a change," Zorian said.

She snorted. "I think you’re projecting your own attitude here a little," she said.

"Probably," admitted Zorian. He always did like to have some space from everybody else, and would have probably welcomed a situation like this in her place. "But Kael and the girls are only gone for one day, so it’s hardly a big deal. You could have gone with them, you know?"

"I know. But if there really is rioting during the festival, like you said there might be, I don’t want to leave my house to the looters. It’s… it’s the only thing I have left."

"Oh…"

"Sorry, getting a little personal there," she smiled. "Is there any particular book you were looking f-"

There was a loud knock on the front door. Imaya and Zorian both raised their eyebrows at each other – apparently neither of the two knew who might be coming for a visit in this time of day. Most people were getting ready to attend the summer festival somewhere, either at some friend’s house or some other venue. Imaya hurried towards the door to see who it was.

There was a brief pause where Imaya had a brief exchange with whoever was at the door, after which Imaya called out at Zorian to join them.

"Zorian, your date is here!" she yelled.

"My date?" he asked incredulously, more to himself than to anyone else. How could he have a date when he didn’t-

She didn’t.

But she totally did. As he came to the front door to see what Imaya was talking about, the frowning face of Akoja greeted him from the doorframe.

"Hello, Ako," Zorian said blandly. "What a surprise to see you here. I suppose Ilsa had something to do with this?"

"I, yes," she fumbled, her composure breaking for a bit. "Miss Zileti told me to accompany you to the dance, since we are both without a partner."

Now wasn’t that interesting. How the hell had Ilsa known that? True, Zorian had no date for the dance, and in fact had no intention of attending the academy dance at all, but she shouldn’t have been aware of that! Zorian had never told her anything to that effect, nor did he hint at that to anyone except… Imaya. Damn.

He gave his landlord a dirty look before refocusing back on Akoja. This was not part of the plan. He was supposed to roam around the city, observing the invaders in action and noting the changes to their tactics as a result of the various changes arising from the destruction of the aranea and that unfortunate mercenary band he’d hired to participate in the ambush.

Sometimes he hated his empathy. Without it, he would never have known just how much this meant for Akoja and how hard blowing her off to do his own thing would hit her.

"We still have several hours before we have to be at the dance hall. Come inside and wait with Imaya for a bit while I run some urgent errands in the city," he said.

"What?" she stammered, confused, as Zorian squeezed past her through the door and began walking into the city. "Wait, you can’t just-"

Zorian quickly cast the teleport spell and let the city’s teleport beacon draw him into Cyoria’s teleport access point. He had lots of work to do and only so much time to execute it.

"What were you in such a hurry for, earlier?" Akoja asked as they slowly made their way towards the academy. She was surprisingly calm and polite, all things considered. Zorian had thought she’d be more annoyed at him because of his emergency exit earlier.

"I had something already arranged before you arrived. I had to take care of some things when you came knocking at Imaya’s door," Zorian said. "Cancel some things and adjust others."

Specifically, he was placing marker stones in various parts of the city to make scrying easier. Watching the invasion forces move through the city was not quite the same as ambushing isolated battlegroups and rooting through their minds, but at least it was something.

Maybe it was better this way. His original plan was kind of ambitious. Possibly too ambitious…

As they talked, Akoja told him a little about how the rest of his classmates handled the changes to the restart. It was mostly just idle chat, though it did remind him that he hadn’t paid much attention to his class in this restart. There was just so much to do in this particular restart that interaction with his classmates sort of fell by the wayside. Considering that one of his motivations for coming back to Cyoria had been to see and talk to them again, that was something that should probably be remedied in the near future.

The night proceeded far more smoothly than the last one where he’d had Akoja as his date – she seemed to have far more respect and concern for his wishes this time around, though Zorian couldn’t for the life of him figure out why. In some ways he had actually been a bigger jerk now than he had back then. Regardless, once the flares started hitting the city, he snuck away from her and started scrying the city for information.

The initial barrage of artillery spells was different this time around. While the old artillery barrage used by the invaders specifically targeted critical buildings whose destruction was calculated to send the city into chaos and cripple its ability to organize a defense, the new barrage was… uninspired. Oh, they still targeted the central police station, the city hall, and other obvious targets, but things like backup government buildings and armories were left intact. In fact, a lot of the flares seem to have been aimed completely at random, demolishing unremarkable clusters of houses and civilian apartments – something that would admittedly greatly increase the number of deaths in the invasion, but was of questionable strategic benefit. Bizarrely, every single temple in the city was the target of at least one flare – Zorian had no idea what the invaders were trying to accomplish there, and it definitely wasn’t something they did in their previous invasion plan.

The fights around the city were far fiercer than they had been in Zorian’s previous restarts. Partly it was due to the defenders being in a lot better shape this time around, courtesy of the invasion’s poor choice of targets for their initial strike, but there was more to it than that. The invasion forces seemed a lot less coordinated than he remembered them being. They moved a lot less purposefully through the city and often blew off their apparent goals to rampage through the undefended civilian neighborhoods. That happened sometimes in the past as well, but never in such high numbers.

As far as the initial attack on the academy went, the invaders chose their actions there just as poorly as they did elsewhere. The new barrage targeted the academy building directly instead of aiming for the less well defended dormitories and support buildings like the old barrage did. Consequently, the flares simply splashed harmlessly off the heavy wards protecting the main complex, doing minimal damage. With no need to render aid and run damage control in the peripheral part of the academy, the teachers were free to keep their forces concentrated and organize the evacuation of the student body and other non-combatant employees much more competently than they had before.

Funny, he originally thought the academy was massively incompetent for leading the students into massive underground death traps, especially since that involved going over vast swathes of open ground where they would be completely exposed. They didn’t look so dumb right now. The evacuation went off without a single problem, and no one attacked them when they were shoved inside the shelters.

Zorian was pretty sure at this point that he was looking at what the invasion was really like – what it would look like had Red Robe never given them any help. When he really thought about it, most of their mistakes could be chalked up to being far less well informed and lacking the ability to bypass every ward and defense they encounter because they’ve been either keyed into them or knew how to counter it quickly.

It would appear that Red Robe really did abandon the invaders in this restart, right down to the very end. Was this a one-time thing or did Red Robe suddenly decide not to meddle in the invasion anymore?

His musings were interrupted by Ilsa coming to the shelter and demanding that every combat-capable student come with her to defend the academy. Thanks to him participating in monster hunts with Taiven’s group, that included him as well, so he got up from his spot on the floor and joined the group of students following her outside. There, he saw what had gotten Ilsa so concerned that she was recruiting students as defenders – the invaders were massing just outside the academy wards, preparing for an all-out assault. Entire regiments of war trolls, winter wolves and skeletons were present there, supported by their mage handlers and thick flocks of razor beaks. More unusually, there were a couple of flying drakes mixed in among the deadly corvids, and two bulky, elephant-sized lizards stalked in front of the miniature army.

"Thunder lizards," Ilsa said distastefully from beside him. "Immensely tough and very destructive. They can breathe arcs of electricity in a straight line in front of them, so try not to fight them from the front if you are forced to engage them at all."

Lovely. He never saw those in any previous restarts. Maybe this was something they never felt like committing to the battlefield because they never felt they needed them?

But the time for considering such things was over. Although clearly not fully assembled for attack, the commander of the monstrous horde urged his forces to charge ahead. Maybe he felt that waiting for the rest of the forces would be a bad move since the academy defenders were busily fortifying their positions, or maybe he was just impatient. Either way, they surged ahead, thunder lizards leading the charge.

Zorian knew he could offer very little by simply pouring some more offensive spells into the attacking horde along with the rest of the defenders, but he had a better idea anyway. Focusing on the two thunder lizards, he felt their simplistic minds and was overjoyed to find out that they were far less magically resistant than he had feared. He suspected that might be the case – the invaders were probably controlling those things with mind magic to begin with, so it would only make sense that they were not all that resistant to it. Regardless, this meant he could manipulate them. Not to the extent of directing them like puppets, but enough to negate their attacks.

Sure enough, when the lizards started approaching the makeshift barricades that the teachers had made out of the ground via alteration spells, the two lizards opened their toothy mouths and tried to blow up the barricades with their thunder attack. Zorian quickly seized control of their movements and made them angle their heads towards one another, their thunder attacks colliding with each other’s bodies. A surge of anger flooded the minds of the two thunder lizards, and they halted their charge in favor of roaring at each other, too dumb to realize their actions were caused by outside influence. Zorian seized on this opportunity, amplifying their wrath and urging them to fight each other, and the two of them promptly collided with each other and began fighting to the death.

To their credit, the rest of the invading forces simply flowed around the two battling behemoths, unconcerned with their failure. The battle was joined.

Zorian stared at the battle site full of corpses, more than a little bit dazed. He had been in a fair amount of battles ever since he’d gotten pulled into the time loop, but nothing quite like this. The fight had quickly turned chaotic once the two forces seriously started engaging one another, and even now that it was over Zorian still wasn’t sure what exactly happened there.

They won in the end, repulsing the attackers – the mages decided to flee when enough of their monster minions got killed – but they lost far more people in the attack than Zorian had thought they would. Zorian himself was surrounded by a pack of winter wolves at one point and only survived thanks to no less than five blasting rods he had smuggled into the dance hall with him. Well, that and Kyron’s timely arrival with reinforcements to drive the attackers back.

He jumped in fright when someone’s heavy hand clasped his shoulder suddenly, almost blowing their head off with a reflexive piercer before he realized it was just Kyron.

"You’re the one that was messing with the heavy-hitter monsters during the whole fight, aren’t you?" his combat teacher asked.

"Yeah," Zorian shrugged. No need to keep it a secret this close to the end. "I felt that was the most effective way of contributing to the battle that I was capable of."

"Well, that flying drake would have roasted poor Nora alive if you hadn’t made it plow into the ground suddenly, so thanks for that. Though we’re really going to have to talk about how you learned how to do that and what exactly your limits are…"

"Ha," Zorian snorted. "It’s far too late for that, I’m afraid."

"Oh?" Kyron asked, a mixture of warning and curiosity in his voice.

"Yes," Zorian confirmed. He consulted his watch to see what time it was. It was 2 hours and 39 minutes after midnight. "I’m afraid this loop is just about to end."

Kyron stared at him blankly for a few seconds before opening his mouth to say something. Before he could utter a single word, though, everything went black and Zorian woke up back in Cirin, ready to start this month anew.

41. Myriad Clashing Motives

The start of the newest loop differed little from the previous one – he got on the train to Cyoria with Kirielle in tow, entertained her with feats of magic as well as disguised (and more than a little embellished) accounts of his own adventures to stave off boredom, and even talked with Ibery for a bit. Just for a bit, though – she wasn’t terribly interested in him this time, since he’d finished telling stories to Kirielle by the time they stopped at Korsa, and didn’t demonstrate any amazing spellcasting skills while she was in the compartment.

"Here we are," said Zorian, stepping off the train and helping Kirielle finagle her luggage through the train wagon door. It was kind of cute how she insisted she would carry her luggage on her own, but he knew from previous restarts that this resolution wouldn’t last very long. Well, whatever, he’d let her live in denial for now. "Welcome to Cyoria, dearest sister."

"I’m your only sister," she shot back, curious eyes looking around the massive train station she found herself in.

"You know I’m telling the truth, then," Zorian said blandly.

Kirielle ignored him in favor of studying the colorful storefronts, the huge clock hanging from the train station ceiling, and the flowing masses of people milling around the place. Truth be told, she handled the sight a lot better than Zorian had when he disembarked in Cyoria for the first time ever.

"Big," she concluded eventually.

"Cyoria is a big city and an important transport hub," said Zorian simply. "They get lots of traffic."

"Do you mind if we look around for a bit?" Kirielle asked.

"You mean browse some stores for interesting trinkets?" Zorian guessed. She pouted at him. "Sure, we can do that. I’m only buying you one souvenir, though, and nothing too ridiculous."

"What qualifies as too ridiculous?" she asked, eyeing the storefronts speculatively.

"Use your common sense," Zorian deadpanned. Like hell was he getting into a definition game with her.

"And if I’m not sure about something?" she prompted.

"Ask," he immediately fired back.

He could probably buy anything she set her eyes on, especially considering he was about to get a massive cash infusion in a few days, but he didn’t think it a good idea to encourage her excesses like that. Kirielle had never been very keen on restraint to begin with and he shuddered to think what would happen if he decided to pander to her whims too much.

For the next hour and a half, Zorian simply followed Kirielle around as she flitted from one store to another like a drunken butterfly, following no pattern he could discern. Then again, he didn’t really invest much thought into figuring it out – he mostly spent his time practicing his mind sense, trying to process the information he was getting about the crowds around them. Large, closely-packed crowds like the ones at Cyoria’s main train station still tended to ruin his mind sense, reducing the feedback into an incomprehensible, blurry blob of emotions and strange signals. He was getting better at picking specific minds out of that background fog, though. He practiced the procedure by constantly keeping track of Kirielle’s mind, turning her into a sort of a telepathic anchor, and then trying to pick out the minds of random people from the crowd to get a better feel for them. It was slow, annoying work, but he was getting sick of having his empathy and mind sense effectively shut down every time he encountered a crowd.

She picked a snow globe in the end. Admittedly, it was a very nice snow globe – the little house and the trees inside it were incredibly detailed and well done, almost as if someone had literally shrunk a house and its immediate environs and placed them in a glass sphere. Clearly some fairly sophisticated magic had been used to produce the thing, even if the end product was completely non-magical to his senses, and the globe was priced accordingly… but it was better than Zorian had feared so he bought it without complaint. Idly, he wondered if his alteration skills were good enough to produce a globe like that…

With Kirielle’s trinket-hunting done, they set off towards the main plaza and its fountain, just like they had in the previous restart. Unlike the previous restart, Zorian took them through the park right from the start – there was really no need for them to meet the cranium rat swarm. Quite the contrary, it was an unnecessary and unacceptable risk, as Kirielle’s mind was completely unshielded and there was always a possibility that the rats could figure something important or attention-grabbing from Kirielle’s stray thoughts.

As it turned out, that had been a pretty important change. Having never seen the cranium rats, Kirielle obviously couldn’t tell Rea about them, so the topic simply never came up. And apparently he greatly underestimated how much he’d disturbed Rea in their previous first meeting, because keeping quiet about the terrifying mind-reading powers of the rats made Rea a lot less on guard around him this time around… as well as much more insistent about them staying for a while. Hmph.

He let Rea and Kirielle convince him to delay their departure. As far as he could tell, this was the best moment to find something out from Rea’s mind, before she had time to grow suspicious of him, and he had every intention of using it to the hilt.

"A student of Cyoria’s Royal Academy? Pretty prestigious place to study at for a boy hailing from a small rural town, if you don’t mind me saying," Rea remarked. "Not that there is anything wrong with being from a small rural town – we’re from one ourselves, after all – but doesn’t Cyoria’s Royal Academy accept only the, ah…"

"Only the very talented or the very well-connected?" guessed Zorian. It was what most people who weren’t personally involved with the institution thought, after all. Seeing Rea nod in agreement, he continued. "Not really. The admission process is a combination of how well you do on the entrance exams, whether you receive a recommendation from a member of the academy staff or someone else suitably famous, and whether denying you admission would offend someone particularly powerful and influential. Basically, so long as you can pay the admission fee and do well enough in the entrance exams, you are guaranteed to get in."

"Is that how you got in?" Rea asked curiously.

"I was in the top 50 based on exam results," said Zorian proudly. He was 48th, but he wasn’t going to mention that.

"Brother is plenty talented," Kirielle said suddenly. "But, um, they probably also accepted him because of our brother Daimen. At least that’s what mother said happened."

"What?" asked Zorian flatly.

"Umm…" Kirielle stammered. "Please don’t be mad because mother told me not to tell you this because you would get mad at me but mother said you and Fortov were only accepted so easily because Daimen got so big and successful…"

"Daimen had nothing to do with it," Zorian said, grinding his teeth in annoyance. "I achieved good enough results that my admission had never been in question! Mother is, like usual, ascribing everything good in the world to Daimen and lumping me with that lout Fortov in order to-"

"I believe you, mister Kazinski," Rea interrupted him. "Calm down. There is no reason to jump down your little sister’s throat like that."

"Right, sorry," Zorian said, with a little bit more bitterness than he intended.

There was a short, awkward silence for a few seconds. Great. Real smooth there, Zorian.

Damn it, why did he let this get under his skin like that?

"So, I’m assuming your brother is that Daimen Kazinski?" Rea asked finally. "The famous one?"

"Yes," Zorian sighed. "The famous one."

"Wait, your other brother is famous?" Nochka asked Kirielle innocently. "What for?"

"Things," Kirielle shrugged uncomfortably, saying nothing else on the topic. Probably trying not to upset him further by continuing the discussion.

"Daimen is an adventuring archeologist," Zorian said, doing his best to suppress his annoyance with the whole thing. "He leads expeditions to dangerous areas in search of lost artifacts and ruins. Or even rare plants and magical creatures, even though that should technically be outside the purview of archeology. He has been very successful in this, so he gets a lot of attention from people."

There. It was an incomplete explanation, yes, but not really misleading or anything. Hopefully it would suffice.

"I haven’t heard anything about him for more than a year now," Rea remarked.

"He’s in Koth," Zorian said. "Apparently he found something very important in the jungle, but he’s been very secretive about it. I’m sure you’ll hear all about it when he finally deigns to unveil it to the world."

Thankfully, the topic of conversation shifted away from Daimen at that point. Zorian decided to take advantage of the somewhat personal nature of Rea’s questions to ask about their personal details. Her story was functionally identical to what she told him in the previous restart, but her surface thoughts were far easier to read this time, what with her not being primed to defend her secrets from a swarm of thought-sharing, mind-reading rats.

Her surface thoughts told him an interesting story. For one thing, Sauh was not a cat shifter. Only Rea and Nochka were. Rea had been a criminal, but then she met Sauh and decided to leave that life behind to be with him. How… romantic. Except that neither Rea’s former associates not the rest of the townsfolk were willing to let Rea forget what her past was, so the family packed up their things and left to somewhere where nobody knew who they were and where they could start anew. Where Nochka could grow up without her mother’s past sabotaging her at every turn.

Damn, he was really starting to get mad about what the Cult of Dragon Below had in store for them… he didn’t think he could just coldly watch as Nochka’s parents are murdered and she herself kidnapped. Though, thinking about it now, it wasn’t such a problem in this particular restart – his memory reading was nowhere near good enough yet to get much out of high-ranking cultists, even if he could track them down by following Nochka’s movements. And who said he was even capable of preventing her kidnapping in the first place? It wasn’t like he had a fool-proof plan to stop it, after all – if the kidnapping proceeded under some different schedule than the one in the previous restart, he’d basically have to monitor the Sashal family day and night to intercept it.

He decided to put his original plan on hold for now and see how things developed. Who knows, maybe the last restart was a fluke and kidnapping Nochka wasn’t something the cultists routinely did in every loop. He would have to put some kind of tracker on her just in case, though…

By the time they were done talking, the rain had already started falling outside. Rea tried to argue that they should wait for a while until it lessened, but Zorian knew that wasn’t happening for quite a while and refused. He enveloped himself and Kirielle in a weather shield to block the rain and bid the Sashal family goodbye.

He considered it a proof of his growing skill and mana reserves that his shield held strong for the entire length of their journey, letting them arrive at Imaya’s place completely dry and unwinded.

The next few days were fairly routine – he went to Knyazov Dveri to get himself plenty of crystalized mana, sold said crystals in various stores in Cyoria for large amounts of cash, accepted Taiven’s offer of joining her team in running monster-killing missions and tested whether his stored notebooks had survived the restart (they had).

With the start of classes on Monday, however, Zorian decided to go out of his comfort zone a little and initiate contact with one of his classmates. Specifically, Raynie. He was currently investigating shifters, after all, and she was supposed to be a wolf shifter herself. Maybe she knew some crucial information? It didn’t hurt to ask.

There was one big, obvious problem with his idea, however – Raynie got a lot of love confessions and date invitations from her many love-stricken fans, and would probably assume his attempt to talk to her was just more of the same. And she was not interested in love and dating, she made that very clear over the years. How could he ensure his attempt to talk to her wouldn’t be misunderstood?

He agonized for an entire day over which method of approach he should use, before deciding he was being stupid. So what if she got the wrong idea when he asked to talk to her? Though she categorically rejected every man who tried to court her, her rejections had always been polite and non-violent to his knowledge… except for that one time she punched a guy in the face, but everyone who was there agreed that guy got a little grabbier than was proper. Bottom line was, he could just approach her directly before class and ask for a talk, and the worst that could happen was that she could tell him to get lost without hearing him out. Hardly the end of the world, and with the time loop in place he would have a chance to try again in the next restart with a different approach.

The worst didn’t happen, though. When Zorian asked to talk to her after class, Raynie simply gave a little sigh and spared a lingering glance at the ceiling, as if asking the gods what she had done to deserve this, before agreeing to his request.

The class came and went, and the classroom gradually emptied of people until only Zorian, Raynie and Kiana were left. Why was Kiana there? Hell if Zorian knew, but her presence was clearly not unintended by Raynie so he opted not to say anything. Did Kiana know about her friend being a shifter? If not, then broaching the topic in front of her was probably not something Raynie would appreciate.

How annoying.

"Sorry about this," Raynie said. "I know you probably wanted this to be private, but Kiana insisted on staying behind too, and, well…"

She shrugged helplessly. She sounded honestly apologetic about it, and if he were incapable of sensing people’s emotions, he would have probably believed her too. He gave Kiana a glance, and she quickly straightened her posture and fixed a small scowl on her face. Probably trying to look intimidating or something. Her real emotions were a mix of boredom and impatience, though – she probably considered the entire thing a massive chore.

Zorian almost cracked a smile at the whole setup. The funny thing was that if he was going to ask anyone out, it would probably be Kiana, not Raynie. He’d kind of had his eyes on her before he’d gotten stuck in this whole time loop business, in an idle, daydreaming sort of way. If he remembered correctly, Zach caught him staring at her once, in that fateful first restart. A part of him wanted to ask Kiana out right now, just to see how the two of them would react to such a development.

But no, that would only be amusing for a short while and he would have to live with all the created drama for the rest of the month. Besides, his reasons for liking Kiana were extremely shallow and based entirely around her looks – he felt she was just as beautiful as Raynie, and preferred her black hair to Raynie’s red. That was it, really. For all he knew, her personality could be absolutely atrocious.

"If you’re okay with her presence, then so am I," Zorian said. "That said, do you mind if I erect a privacy bubble around us? Neolu and company are hanging by the door, trying to eavesdrop, and I think we’d all be happier if they did not hear this."

"Ugh," Raynie grunted, rising from her seat and marching off towards the door. "There is no need for that. I’ll be back in a moment."

Through his mind sense, Zorian could feel the four mental signatures of their eavesdroppers flee before Raynie’s approach. They were already halfway down the corridor by the time she opened the door, and in less than a minute Raynie was back in her seat.

"Well then," she began, "now that the spy brigade is gone, we can finally get this over with. What did you want to talk to me about, Mister Kazinski?"

"Does Kiana know about shifters?" Zorian asked.

Evidently she did, if her shocked reaction was any indication.

"What?" Raynie stammered. "How do you know about that?"

"I asked a scholar named Vani to tell me about shifters and-"

"Vani from Knyazov Dveri?" Raynie asked, interrupting him. "Aren’t you supposed to be from Cirin?"

"I am," Zorian confirmed. "That doesn’t mean I am forbidden from visiting Knyazov Dveri on occasion. I have friends there."

"Of course you have," Raynie sighed. "Look… Zorian. I kept this a secret for a reason."

Zorian nodded in agreement. "That’s why I asked whether Kiana knows."

"I know," Kiana piped in, crossing her arms in front of her. "And I’ll be charitable and assume you’ll keep it a secret, just as I have, despite being friends with that blabbermouth Benisek. So what exactly do you want from Raynie anyway?"

"I made acquaintances with a couple of cat shifters, and I wanted to hear an opinion of another shifter about some things related to that," said Zorian. "I figured I’d ask Raynie first and see if she was willing to answer some questions."

There was a brief silence as both girls digested this.

"I… uh… this is way too heavy of a topic for a free period," Raynie decided. "Our next class is about to start soon."

"Well, yes," agreed Zorian. "It doesn’t have to be now. I just want to know if you’re even willing to help me out."

"I might as well," Raynie said dismissively. "My main concern about shifter-talk had always been about not wanting people to know I was one to begin with, and the cat is apparently already out of the bag. Besides, if you’re hanging out with the likes of cat shifters, you’re going to need some advice. No offense to your new acquaintances, but cat shifters tend to be unsavory characters."

"I did hear some rumors about that," Zorian admitted. "So how is this going to work, then?"

"I don’t know," Raynie admitted. "I’m going to have to think about it. You’ve ambushed me out of nowhere with this. I’ll get back to you when I figure out a time and place."

"Don’t contact us, we’ll contact you," Kiana summarized.

And then they were out of time and ended the meeting in favor of rushing to the next class. Over all, Zorian was pleased with the outcome… even if the looks and whispers of his classmates signified they had noticed the interaction and that the resulting fallout had yet to be determined.

Raynie didn’t seem to be in a hurry to organize a meeting with him after their talk, but Zorian didn’t hold it against her. It was nothing urgent, and he had plenty of things to busy himself with in the meantime.

Currently, that meant combing the aranea settlement for any hints regarding where they kept their treasury. He wasn’t having much luck yet, but then again he didn’t expect to be lucky so soon – it would be a pretty terrible secret treasury if all it took was a single day of dedicated searching to track it down.

Zorian wandered the tunnels of the settlement, his mind sense straining in an attempt to detect some surviving aranea hiding somewhere. He didn’t find any. The aranean settlement was a silent tomb, unmoving corpses of giant spiders scattered throughout its expanse and undisturbed by scavengers due to the wards the aranea had placed on it. Occasionally his mind sense detected a mental signature, but it inevitably turned out to be some dungeon denizen trying to sneak past the wards of the settlement or one of the few surviving male aranea.

Not that the latter were wholly useless – though sub-sapient, they were still representative of what the aranea were like, and didn’t have the mental defenses that female aranea did. Zorian made sure to capture each one he encountered so he could read their minds for information about the location of the treasury – more out of desire to practice his memory reading on something related to aranea than out of any real hope that they knew something.

Though he had to say the males were a lot smarter than Zorian had thought they would be, considering what he’d been told by the female aranea – they were actually closer to animals such as ravens and pigs than something dumb like a horse or a dog. Three of them even worked together in order to ambush him, and Zorian only narrowly avoided getting bitten by the one of them.

The aranea were only weakly venomous, according to what he’d been told by them, but he would still rather not tempt fate like that.

"Damn," Zorian swore. Nothing, not even a clue as to where he should look next. "That’s it, I’m done with this for today. Kael, you done with your examination yet?"

Kael shifted his attention from the curled, motionless corpse of some unfortunate aranea towards him, his mind slowly switching gears from his focused work state into something capable of holding a conversation.

"Hmm? Oh, that," Kael mumbled. "Yes, I checked them over for soul magic ages ago. I can find no traces of any soul magic being performed on them. None whatsoever, and it’s honestly freaking me out. If you hadn’t told me what really happened, I’d have assumed these bodies to be very sophisticated meat puppets devoid of souls to begin with, not sapient creatures whose souls have somehow been removed. I’ve just finished a more comprehensive medical scan, however, and there is no way these bodies are meat puppets. I’m baffled. This doesn’t look like the aftermath of any soul spell I know of."

Damn. He had really been hoping Kael would be able to find something.

"You really can’t tell me anything else?" Zorian urged. "Anything?"

"No. Well, maybe," Kael said, hesitating. Zorian urged him to continue. "While my medical scans show these spiders indeed died on the first day of the restart, they died somewhere after two in the morning."

"Ah, I see where you’re going with that," Zorian said after a brief pause. "That implies that the time loop starts almost six hours before I wake up."

"Yes," Kael agreed. "I’m not sure how useful that is to you, but it’s interesting."

"Very," Zorian agreed. "Especially if I can somehow force myself to wake up at the start of the time loop as opposed to when I usually do."

Kael nodded and before suddenly checking on his pocket watch. "Ah, I didn’t even realize so much time has passed. I promised Kana I would take her to the park today, do you think we could-"

"Yes," Zorian preemptively agreed. "That’s why I interrupted you in the first place. I’ve had enough of this place for one day. Just gather your things and I’ll recall us back to the basement."

Five minutes later Kael and Zorian were teleported back to Imaya’s basement – or rather, the large stone that served as an anchor for Zorian’s recall spell. The recall spell was quickly becoming one of Zorian’s favorites, due to its ability to cut through many forms of magical interference and anti-teleportation wards. It would be even better if maintaining a recall link with each anchor stone didn’t incur a running mana cost, but you can’t have everything, he supposed. He bid goodbye to Kael, who had his own duties to attend to, and went out to seek out Kirielle.

He found her in the kitchen, telling stories to Imaya and playing with the miniature golem he’d made for her. Amusingly, no one in the house seemed to realize just how much money and skill it took to create that thing – it was just a fancy magical doll to them, and they barely gave it a second’s thought. To Zorian, though, that little golem was very special for one simple reason: he had created the blueprint for it in the previous restart.

Although Zorian had spent a lot of time in the restarts messing with spell formula and magic item creation, the truth was that he had been somewhat reluctant to truly sink a lot of his time into the field because he had to effectively recreate his designs purely from memory with every restart. While that was good in a sense, as it forced him to re-evaluate and refine his designs each time instead of relying on tried-and-true designs, the fact of the matter was that it slowed things down to a crawl whenever he was forced to recreate everything from scratch over and over again. He had effectively been limited to fairly simple projects, but now that he could actually transfer notebooks across restarts, he was freed of these limitations and could truly start advancing in the field.

He greeted Imaya, announcing his return, and then turned to his little sister.

"Hello, Kiri," he greeted. "Are you ready for your magic lesson?"

"Yes!" she agreed enthusiastically.

"So does that mean you read the first three chapters of that book I gave you?" Zorian asked.

"Err, yeah," she agreed, much less enthusiastically than before. "I, uh, may have skipped a few parts."

Zorian gave her a knowing look. He had a feeling that if he quizzed her on what she read, he would find she skipped far more than a few parts.

"Alright," he said, putting a small black cube on the table in front of them. "This here is the mana absorption cube. Its function is very simple – it will absorb any mana you let out, after which the carved lines you see on its surface will begin to glow. It sounds useless, but beginner mages like yourself have trouble sensing their own mana flow, and thus cannot really determine whether their efforts are achieving any results. This will help keep you on target. Later, when you start extruding mana out of your body reliably, we can move onto purposely feeding mana into the cube in order to build greater control…"

Kirielle took the cube carefully into her hands, as if afraid it was going to bite her, and started tracing the lines carved into its surface with her fingers.

"Did you also learn using one of those things?" she asked. "I thought that was done using those one of those glass balls you brought home after your second year?"

"I did, but I discovered those things aren’t really the best tool for the job," Zorian said. "They’re mass produced, with an eye for price instead of maximum effectiveness. That cube you’re holding in your hand is a bit better than that."

"Oh," she said, giving him a surprised look. "Was it… expensive?"

Well, technically Zorian had produced that cube on his own, but the materials he used weren’t exactly cheap…

"Yes, but don’t worry about it," he said dismissively. "I don’t mind spending money on this, so long as you actually take your lessons seriously. And Kirielle?"

"Yeah?" she asked curiously.

"You really need to actually read those three chapters for our next lesson, and I’d appreciate if you didn’t lie to me like that in the future," he said.

At least she had the decency to blush in response.

The first week of the restart was a pretty big success in Zorian’s eyes. True, he never did manage to find the aranean treasury, but everything else was going along nicely.

Red Robe had once again neglected to give any information to the invaders, so they were stumbling around just as badly as they had in the previous restart. This was the second time in a row that he had done that, and that was taking into account just the restarts that Zorian knew about – it had probably started way earlier than this. Did Red Robe completely give up on supporting the invasion after their confrontation? That was more than a little strange, considering how dedicated he’d been about helping them out before. Maybe he supported the invasion primarily as a way to keep Zach busy with something and mask the aftershocks of his own actions? If so, the fact that he revealed himself to Zach would kind of make such trickery pointless…

Regardless of the reason, Red Robe’s absence made things very convenient for Zorian. The moment he realized Red Robe was once again ignoring the invaders, he immediately launched a series of raids on the known invaders and their cultist allies. He found nothing new yet, but every memory dive he did made him one step closer to opening the matriarch’s memory packet so he considered himself successful there regardless. He also scouted a couple of the emergency resource caches that he’d found in the last restart, and even looted a particularly badly defended one. That particular cache held nothing except a large quantity of unlabeled potion bottles, which was slightly disappointing. He handed them off to Kael to see if he could figure out what they were and find a use for them. He’d feel bad about taking advantage of the morlock boy so much, except that Kael actually seemed enthusiastic about all the work Zorian was sending his way, so Zorian figured it was okay.

His monster hunts with Taiven were more successful this time around as well, since he had knowledge of where the monster nests and main migration routes were from his previous restarts. Taiven was ecstatic at their results, though Zorian had noticed her giving him some strange looks when she thought he wasn’t paying attention. Did she somehow realize how improbable his claim of divining the locations of the monsters was? Well, no matter – since she never actually confronted him about it, he decided to continue using his foreknowledge to improve results of the hunts and deal with the fallout when (and if) it came.

His quest for getting himself a better library pass was also going along nicely, even though it was still in the beginning stages. The method he chose was extremely simple: he hung around the library entrance during its busiest hours and covertly scanned the minds of everyone who entered and left, looking for people with higher passes who weren’t regular visitors of the library. After all, while the academy was stingy about giving higher authorizations to its students, actual holders of higher authorizations weren’t exactly rare. Plenty of mages had them, and few of them were using them with any degree of regularity. If he chose his target correctly, they would never even realize their library pass had gone missing. And hopefully, the library would also never realize the holder of the card was not the same person whose name was printed on it.

The crowning achievement of this week, however, was the session with Xvim he was currently attending. Xvim was usually extremely punctual about their sessions, ending them at exactly their mandated time – no more, no less. Today, however, Zorian had been so good about meeting his ridiculous demands that Xvim decided to quietly extend their session beyond their allotted time. Zorian said nothing, simply continuing his endless repetition of the tasks Xvim gave him, but internally he was smiling. Even if Xvim retained his stony facade, the fact he decided to break off from his usual routine told Zorian that he was definitely making progress in unnerving his annoying mentor.

Unfortunately, as much as he’d like to see how long Xvim intended to keep him here if he did not complain, Zorian had other obligations to fulfill today.

"A training session with someone else, you say," Xvim asked curiously. "And what, pray tell, is this training session about, to trump the meeting with your mentor in importance?"

"It’s something Professor Zileti arranged for me," Zorian said, invoking the authority of another teacher. "I’m meeting another student so we can practice our mind magic together."

Xvim stared at him for a second. If Zorian had expected some kind of shock at his admission, or a request at confirmation that, yes, he indeed meant 'mind magic'… he was disappointed. Xvim just stared at him for a bit, tapped his finger on the table once, and then reached some kind of decision.

"Why have you not notified me of this sooner?" he asked.

"I meant no offense, sir," Zorian assured him smoothly. "It’s just that this was our first meeting, and you immediately had me start with shaping exercises when I entered the room. I felt it would be imprudent to interrupt your lesson for such an ultimately irrelevant detail."

"Hmph. And you say you’re practicing with another student? The blind teaching the blind…" Xvim said, shaking his head in disapproval. He then made a dismissive gesture with his hand, shooing him away. "Well, then. Go. I’m not going to keep you from your duties."

"Thank you, sir," Zorian said, rising from his seat. "I am to see you on next Friday, then?"

"No, come see me on Monday after classes," Xvim said. "I need to see this mind magic of yours in action before I can plan for our next session."

Huh. Now this he did not expect. Was Xvim implying he could help him develop his mind magic somehow? He did have a very good mental shield, admittedly, but Zorian was still skeptical that the man could help him in that regard. And he was also more than a little baffled that Xvim was even willing to help with that, even if it did turn out that he was some kind of mind magic expert… he thought the man was all about the shaping exercises and other basics?

Deciding he was going to have to wait till Monday to see what Xvim had in mind, Zorian left the man’s office and went off to meet Tinami for their mind magic practice.

Well, he technically did not know he was meeting Tinami in particular, but considering that the setup was largely the same as it was the last time around (he told Ilsa about his mind magic and requested a practice partner), he didn’t think the identity of the other student was that much of a mystery. And indeed, when he arrived at the assigned classroom, he found Tinami already there, waiting for him.

"You are the other mind mage?" Tinami asked incredulously.

[Yes,] he answered telepathically, causing her to flinch in shock. She narrowed her eyes at him in response.

"You’re late," she complained.

"Sorry," he apologized. "Xvim unexpectedly decided to extend our tutoring session beyond bounds. I only managed to get out of it a few minutes ago."

"You chose Xvim as your mentor?" Tinami asked. "Why?"

"I live in Cirin," Zorian explained. "That’s pretty far from Cyoria. By the time Ilsa managed to get to me, all the other mentors had filled their quotas and Xvim was the only one left."

"Is he as bad as they say?" she asked.

"He had me do shaping exercises for two hours straight today."

"Ouch. Okay, I guess that justifies being a few minutes late," she admitted. "We should probably reschedule our future meetings, just in case this keeps happening."

"Probably," Zorian agreed. Not even he knew what Xvim would choose to do next, and he had lived through this month many, many times by now. "Anything important I should know before we start?"

Just like the last time they did this, Tinami was largely interested in practicing her telepathy and ability to read surface thoughts. She was rather bad at it by Zorian’s standards, but she improved rapidly under his direction. As for himself, he mostly practiced tapping into other people’s senses with her. He could access the senses of other humans quite easily at this point, but trying to actually function while getting two sets of sensory inputs was a massive challenge. Especially if he and Tinami were looking in completely different directions and such.

Truthfully, there was very little that practicing with Tinami could offer him that he could not also do with Kirielle, Kael or some random stranger… but this way he got to talk to one of his classmates, which was one of his resolutions for this restart. It didn’t hurt that cooperating with Tinami could be potentially quite useful, considering who her family was. Also quite dangerous, since they were known to dabble in mind magic and necromancy, but he was willing to take that chance. It was too bad he was essentially starting from scratch with her, though – the last time he’d done this with Tinami, he had introduced her to the aranea and they’d overshadowed him in her eyes by quite a margin. Because of that, they’d interacted very little outside their practice sessions. Then again, considering he had simply viewed her as a mind magic practice dummy back then and never even tried to get to know her, he had no right to complain. Now, though, there was no convenient nearby aranea to introduce her to, even if he wanted to… he would have to catch her attention in some other way.

"Okay, I’ve just got to ask – where on earth did you learn how to perform mind magic so well?" Tinami asked. "I’ve been learning these things for years, under some very good tutors, and you’re just effortlessly one-upping me in every application of it I can think of. How come?"

"It’s a secret," Zorian said bluntly. "Ask me later when we get to know each other better."

She quirked her eyebrow at him. "When, huh?"

"When, if, whatever suits your fancy. The point is that we don’t know each other well enough for me to reveal something that personal to you."

"That’s fair enough," she sighed, leaning back in her chair. "It’s really annoying, though. I know I’m not exactly a genius in the field but-"

There was a knock on the door. Zorian and Tinami both looked at each other and shrugged, mystified about who could be knocking on an empty classroom door at this time of day.

"I’ll go check," Zorian said, rising from his seat. Chances were that it was someone looking for one of them, and knowing his luck that meant they were looking for him.

He opened the door, only to find Kiana standing behind it.

"Um, hi?" Zorian said uncertainly.

"Hi," Kiana said, sticking her head inside the classroom quickly in order to see if they were alone. She did a double-take when she saw Tinami and gave him an incredulous look.

"It’s private," Zorian said crankily, preempting any sort of question. He stepped out of the classroom and closed the door behind him so they could have some semblance of privacy while they talked.

"I didn’t say anything," she said, raising her hands in front of her defensively. "I just came to tell you that Raynie has finally decided to meet with you again. It’s at ten in the morning tomorrow, at this address." She pushed a folded piece of paper into his hands. "I shouldn’t have to tell you this, but don’t spread this around, okay?"

"Like I’d feed the rumor mill like that," Zorian scoffed, rolling his eyes. "Will you be there too, standing guard again?"

"No, but the owner of that restaurant is a friend of Raynie so don’t get any funny ideas," she said. "Oh, that reminds me – Raynie wants you to know that this is definitely not a date. Even though it’s a private meeting in a restaurant between two teenagers…"

She smiled mischievously at him.

"Hey, aren’t you supposed to be on your friend’s side?" he complained.

"I was just joking," she sighed. "Gods, you’re just as humorless as she is. Heavens help us if you two really do end up getting together in the end… see you around, Zorian."

And then she just turned and left without even waiting for his response. She… wasn’t really how he’d imagined her to be. Shaking his head, he stuffed the paper with the address in his pocket and went back to the classroom.

"Sorry for the interruption," he told Tinami. "It was a small personal matter I had to- why are you looking at me like that?"

"No way," she mumbled. "I heard you were going after Raynie, but to think you got her to agree to it… how ever did you do that? I thought that was impossible!"

"I don’t have a date with Raynie, Tinami," Zorian calmly assured her. "You are jumping to conclusions."

"Unless… of course!" she exclaimed. "Of course a mind reader could figure out her weak spot!"

"Hey!" he protested. "Now that’s just insulting. I would never violate the privacy of her thoughts like that!"

"Why not?" Tinami asked curiously. "I would, in your place."

"Are… are you sure you want to admit so readily to something like that?" Zorian asked incredulously.

"Please. I don’t believe for one second you are being perfectly moral and responsible with your mind magic," Tinami accused. "You’re far too good at it to have developed your powers the legal way."

"This topic is over as far as I’m concerned," Zorian stated. "Why don’t we go back to practicing mind magic? You know, the thing we’re supposed to be doing?"

"I have to ask though, what is it that you people see in that girl?" Tinami asked, completely ignoring him. "What does she have that I don’t? Is it the red hair? It’s the red hair, isn’t it?"

Zorian let his face fall into his hands. And it had been shaping up to be such a nice day, too.

42. Sum of Its Parts

Not far from the restaurant where he was supposed to meet Raynie, Zorian sat on a bench and waited. There was no sign of her yet, but that was in no way unusual – he had misjudged the amount of time it would take him to find the place, and was thus a little early. He didn’t let it bother him, choosing instead to pass the time by experimenting with his mind sense on the passing crowds, tapping into the eyes of pigeons flying overhead and practicing his shaping skills on the handful of pebbles he had taken to carrying around on his person at all times.

Honestly, shaping exercises were kind of relaxing when he didn’t have Xvim breathing down his neck and being a jerk. He should try finding one that was actually challenging – really challenging, but not Xvim’s patented you-haven’t- really -mastered-this bullshit – and setting aside some time to… hm?

He drew the pebbles currently floating in front of him back to his palm and pocketed them, before leaning over a nearby ornamental bush where his mind senses had detected an extremely faint mental signature. Despite knowing exactly where to look, it took him two whole seconds to spot the mantis camouflaged against the leaves. He stared at the bug for a while, before an idea occurred to him…

He pointed his palm towards the insect and concentrated, trying to telekinetically draw it towards him without crushing it like a… well, bug. Something that was greatly complicated by the mantis holding on for dear life to the twig it was standing on. He had hoped to surprise it with this sudden maneuver, but its reactions were surprisingly fast for something that had been moving so slowly and ponderously just a second ago. Nonetheless, Zorian wasn’t so easily deterred. Five minutes later, he had finally managed to detach the mantis from the twig without hurting it and was levitating it in front of him. The mantis twisted and flailed around in the air, clearly unhappy with its predicament, but Zorian had established too firm a hold on it for his telekinetic control to lapse just from that.

At least until the mantis decided it was finished with this annoyance, then suddenly unfurled its wings and flew off. Oh, right – mantises can fly if they need to… He totally forgot about that. Shrugging, he focused on his mind sense for a moment, checking if Raynie had arrived yet.

She had. She was still hidden by the nearby building from where he was standing, but her mental signature was unmistakable. He set off in the direction of the restaurant, and was soon back at the entrance, trying not to stare at the street corner he knew she was going to emerge from. When she did finally round the corner, however, she stopped in her tracks and just sort of stared at him in apprehension instead of coming over to meet him. Honestly, what was up with that? He already agreed with her that it wasn’t a date, so what was she apprehensive about? He accidentally turned in her direction, pretended he’d just noticed her and gave her a little wave.

She stopped stalling and came over to greet him properly.

"Sorry if I’m cutting it a little close," she said. "With most people I know, it’s a miracle if they’re only ten minutes late, so I’ve learned not to be too early to this sort of stuff. You didn’t wait long, did you?"

"It was a bit of a wait," admitted Zorian. "But to be fair, I was rather early. Don’t worry about it, I found things to amuse myself with."

"Oh?" she asked. "And what would that be, if you’re willing to share?"

"Nothing too interesting. I was just doing some shaping exercises," said Zorian, retrieving the pebbles from his pocket and making them float in a rotating ring above his palm. "Silly, I know, but it passes the time."

Raynie stared at the rotating ring of pebbles for a second before shaking her head, mumbling something unintelligible and motioning for him to follow her into the restaurant. He returned the pebbles to his pocket and hurried after her.

The moment he stepped inside the dining hall of the restaurant, he understood the reason behind the restaurant’s somewhat unusual name – Fearsome Catfish indeed. Hanging from the ceiling of the dining room was a preserved body of a massive catfish, big enough to swallow a grown man whole. An… interesting choice of ornamentation for a restaurant. Raynie seemed both amused and pleased that the taxidermically preserved trophy gave him pause for a moment, although he only knew that because of his empathy – she neither reacted nor said anything to him as she led him to a nearby table where they took their seats.

He half-expected Raynie to order a plate full of meat, what with her being a wolf shifter and all… but she actually ordered a grilled trout and a plate of vegetables. Huh. He supposed he shouldn’t be so quick to assume… though speaking of assuming things, was he expected to pay for them both? His cynical side was saying yes, since her choice of meal was on the pricier side of things… but then again she was the daughter of a tribal chief. Maybe she had plenty of money and this was perfectly normal for her. Maybe she’d be offended that he’s trying to pay for her share of the food and think he’s trying to court her after all…

"It will take some time for the chefs to prepare the food," Raynie said. "Why don’t you tell me about these cat shifters of yours while we wait?"

Zorian scanned the other tables in the dining hall for any eavesdroppers. They were by no means the only people in the restaurant, and Zorian kind of thought this was way too public of a location to be having this sort of conversation… but it was mostly Raynie’s secrets that were at stake here, so if she felt this was fine, then it was. None of the other diners were paying any attention to them, so at least there was that.

He told her as much as he could without bringing up the invasion or information about Rea’s background that he obviously shouldn’t know about. Even so, he sincerely hoped that Raynie wouldn’t want to speak with Rea after their talk, because he would almost certainly find himself in a bit of a hairy situation if that were to happen – he could scarcely explain how he came by some of his information without admitting he had spied upon the Sashal family in some fashion.

"I don’t think they intend to harm you in any way," Raynie said once he was done. "They wouldn’t be willing to leave you alone with their daughter like that if they did, nor would they let her get attached to your little sister if they meant to make you into a target. Most cat shifters are dishonorable, but they don’t target their own neighbors, friends, contacts and the like. They never make trouble in their own territory."

Well. Zorian had already known that the various shifter groups are by no means united, but it seemed they weren’t even on particularly good terms either. Or at least Raynie’s group didn’t seem to like cat shifters much.

"I’m guessing the cat and wolf shifters don’t get along, then?" surmised Zorian.

"We hardly ever interact with each other. Our relations are not bad because they’re mostly non-existent," said Raynie. "I personally think they give the rest of the shifters a bad name, and I know I’m not the only one in my tribe with that opinion. You should watch yourself around your new friends. I know I just said earlier that they are not plotting against you, but that doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous. Cat shifters are rarely just cat shifters – they are the shifter group that has embraced Ikosian magical traditions the most. They especially like to dabble in illusionism, mind magic, scrying and… other shady disciplines. I wouldn’t put it past them to spy on you in some fashion."

"I’ll keep that in mind," Zorian nodded. "I’m curious, though – is that a general thing? Do different shifter groups usually avoid each other?"

"No, not at all," Raynie said, shaking her head. "We try to maintain contact with other shifter groups, it’s just that cat shifters are… well, it’s a long story, and I can smell our meals coming. We’ll talk more after we’ve eaten."

She was right – the food was indeed brought over to their table not long after that. And Raynie was either very hungry or an extremely fast eater, because she scarfed down her meal in half an hour flat and then kept giving Zorian impatient looks while he ate his own food at a much more sedate pace. Rude. He refused to hurry up just because of her.

"Alright," said Zorian eventually, setting his plate aside to signal that he was done eating. "We were talking about shifter relations."

"Yeah," Raynie agreed. "Well, the first thing you need to keep in mind is that the current image of shifters as some sort of weird mages living on the fringes of normal society is something very… modern. Before the flood of Ikosian refugees came to the continent and conquered everything, shifters didn’t live on the fringes of anything – partly because the rest of the natives hated us and would have never allowed us to live near them, but also because we didn’t have to. We had our own tribes and territories to live in."

"The other natives hated you so much?" Zorian asked.

"Oh yes," Raynie confirmed. "Even today, the scattered remains of the original tribes that lived in the region – the people you collectively call Khusky – can’t stand the sight of us. Thankfully for us, they have managed to thoroughly marginalize themselves over the years and no longer have any say in how shifters are treated. That’s the good thing that came with the Ikosian conquest - the Ikosians didn’t find shifters nearly as threatening or inhuman as the Altazian natives did. As far as they were concerned, we were just your typical group of overspecialized native mages that they hoped to absorb into their society."

"But?" Zorian prompted.

"But their attempts to absorb us never quite succeeded properly," Raynie shrugged. "We speak Ikosian and follow the laws of the land, but most shifter groups have stubbornly clung onto every shred of autonomy and independence that we could. Wolf shifters were the most vocal and successful in that regard."

"Ah, I see," said Zorian, understanding. "And since the cat shifters decided to discard their autonomy in favor of assimilating more closely into the rest of the population, you don’t get along with each other."

"Yes," she sighed. "We’re not enemies, but they have completely rejected our politics and went their own separate ways. Both sides agree that they’ve got nothing to say to each other and avoid contact."

Zorian hummed noncommittally. Somehow he doubted that the wolf shifters really didn’t consider cat shifters enemies. He’d buy the idea that the cat shifters really were apathetic over the issue, but the wolf shifters must be pretty bitter over the other side breaking ranks like that. They were just powerless to do anything about it.

"So how successful are cat shifters, then?" Zorian asked curiously.

"Very successful," Raynie admitted. "Eldemar’s government loves to point them out to shifter tribes worried about what would happen to them if they gave up on their traditional rights. It’s why they are so reluctant to seriously crack down on them, despite their shady behavior. If the biggest success story of the shifter integration program comes under fire, it would likely cause all those other shifter tribes considering going down that path to back off and dig in harder."

Right, totally not enemies.

"So if cat shifters were so very successful, doesn’t it make sense to copy them to some degree?" Zorian asked. "I mean, I can understand not wanting to be criminals, but what stops you getting yourself some classical mages among your ranks? I’d be willing to bet their decision to acquire Ikosian-style spellcasting had a lot to do with their success."

"What do you think I’m here for?" Raynie asked him with a smile.

"Ah, well…" Zorian fumbled. "While you’re clearly training to be a classical mage, you are a rare exception from what I’m hearing, not the rule. Why is your tribe only sending someone to learn this now? Why not earlier?"

"There is a reason why the shifter group most successful in adopting Ikosian-style magic is also the group that cares the least for our traditional rights," she said. "While the idea sounds simple in principle, in practice it amounts to opening a backdoor for the central government to influence the tribe. Members trained as mages have a tendency to make power-plays and bring the mage guild, and through them the central government into internal tribal disputes when they don’t get their way."

"Ah," nodded Zorian in understanding. "And the central government is all about abolishing autonomous groups like yours when given a chance."

"Yes," she agreed. "Plus, the tribal elders are very traditional and often react badly if the new mage shows too many outside influences upon return. Many times the mage simply walked out of the tribe in disgust after a few years of clashing with them."

"So what changed to make you come here?" asked Zorian. A flash of indecipherable, but decidedly negative emotion welled up in the girl in front of him. "Or is that too personal a question?"

"It’s… not really, no," she said, scowling for a moment before schooling her features. She was annoyed at something, but she didn’t seem to blame him for it. "I guess there are two main reasons. Ever since the splintering of the Old Alliance, the centralization policies that characterized its twilight years have been somewhat discredited, lessening the pressure on shifter tribes to assimilate. This makes outsider-trained members less threatening to many in the tribe. On top of that, the recent colonization drive to the Sarokian Highlands has many shifter tribes wary, since their lands are directly in the path of settlers. If a group of mages decides to settle inside of our borders, it is not at all certain we could get them to leave without asking the central government for help."

"Help for which they would demand concessions," Zorian guessed.

"Well, they are actually obliged to help us in that regard for free," Raynie said. "It’s their duty. But every time we fail to resolve problems ourselves, we weaken our authority and credibility. If we do it too much, our supposed autonomy will end up being only on paper. So it would be best if we had some of our own mages to handle things. Anyway, those two come together into a situation where the tribal leadership felt we had to acquire some mages of our own, and could afford the risk that comes with such attempts."

Zorian nodded and spoke no more of the topic, even though he could tell there was more to it. It wasn’t as though Raynie had lied to him – he detected no intent to deceive from his empathy – but there was clearly some factor she didn’t want to discuss there. Something personal, he guessed. Something that made her angry and bitter at her tribe, which she otherwise spoke about with pride and reverence.

He had a feeling that her coming to Cyoria was something of an exile.

He asked her to give him a rundown of other shifter groups and she jumped at the chance to change the topic to something else.

Shifter politics were surprisingly complex. Aside from cat shifters, the raven and owl shifters had also fully abandoned their tribal roots in favor of assimilation into regular society – they were not quite as successful as cat shifters, but both were doing decently for themselves. The viper shifters had also tried to pursue that path, but theirs was not a successful story – they failed to integrate and were nearly wiped out when they launched a short-lived rebellion during the Splinter Wars. The wolf, deer and boar shifters provided the core of the autonomist faction, which sought to preserve their traditional tribal structure and their special privileges. The bear and fox shifters were aligned with the autonomists, but had been slowly wavering in their support over the years and had powerful assimilationist factions working inside of them.

Finally, there were three more shifter groups that stood out from the rest for a couple of reasons. First, there were the eagle shifters, who couldn’t accept being ruled by anyone, autonomy or not. They simply transformed and flew off in the direction of the Winter Mountains, where they somehow survived till modern times. How they dealt with such hostile, monster-infested environment nobody was quite sure, and they wanted nothing to do with the rest of humanity. Not even the other shifters. The second one were seal shifters, who got on the wrong side of Eldemar during the Necromancer’s War and were mostly killed off as a result. The survivors left for Ulquaan Ibasa along with other losing groups, and were never heard from again. Raynie suspected they wouldn’t want to talk to other shifters, even if they still survived in their new home. Finally, there were the pigeon shifters, who were never a tribe to begin with – they were a product of an eccentric mage that managed to get ahold of a shifter transformation ritual and was dedicated enough to create his own shifter clan with it. They were mocked and looked down upon by the other shifters, but Raynie admitted (after some prodding) that they were actually doing quite well for themselves. Being able to turn into a flying animal at will had its uses.

"I’m surprised there aren’t more attempts like that, to be honest," Zorian said.

"There are," Raynie said. "They just tend not to go anywhere. They start well, but then run into problems when the first generation shifters start having children. If not handled properly, shifter children tend to grow up somewhat… dysfunctional. Established shifter groups have centuries of tradition to draw on in this regard – new, experimental shifters are stuck with no guidance and must tread with utmost care for the first few generations. Something that a lot of new shifters have no patience for."

The conversation drifted away from the topic of shifters after that, shifting to a discussion of the recent monster invasion of the city and how it affected them. Zorian largely deflected Raynie’s questions about what exactly he did in his team whenever they went hunting, as he suspected Raynie would be a lot less willing to just accept Zorian’s implausibly high skills than Taiven was, and she didn’t push the issue too much. He was rather surprised how big of an effect the monster invasion had on her, though.

"Honestly, this whole monster crisis is making me very self-conscious," Raynie revealed. "I was sent here to learn magic and become an asset to the tribe, and I thought I was doing fine in that regard… but now I know that many of my classmates are good enough to go after real dangers already and I’m… not. I thought I was among the top of the class, but it seems that’s true only academically. I don’t like it. I should have been among those of you going out there to fight those things."

He had no idea how to respond to that, so he just kept silent. The conversation died down after that, and they went their separate ways. There was no mention of a second meeting, but she did mention he was welcome to ask her more questions if he thought of anything else. That was more of an approval than he’d expected to get, really.

And yes, she did indeed expect him to pay for both of them.

Zorian turned his new library pass in his hands, idly studying the identification glyphs etched on its surface. The name on the pass was not his, of course, since he’d brazenly broken into someone’s house and stolen it… but the chances he would get confronted over that were, surprisingly enough, negligible. As he quickly learned when he tried to use his new pass, the higher passes weren’t just a slip of inert paper like his old one was – they were small wooden panels imprinted with a magical identification array of glyphs. To use them, one just had to walk up to the doors leading to the restricted section of the library, and then insert the panel into the depression next to the door. If the pass authorization was high enough to access that particular section, the door would unlock and the visitor could walk inside. No interaction with the librarians was necessary, and nobody asked to see his pass when he tested it, even after he’d spent several hours in the mind magic section.

Honestly, he was feeling rather foolish at the moment. He expected the restricted sections to be guarded by some fiendish bit of security and identity checks around every corner, and instead he found a security system a child could break. If he knew it was this easy, he would have done this far earlier. As far as he could see, the only danger was that the man he’d stolen from might realize he’d been robbed… and Zorian really wasn’t worried about that. He had picked his target carefully, took nothing except the library pass from the house he’d broken into, and had done his best to leave no evidence of his entry. Even if the man suddenly started caring about the library pass he hadn’t used for months and noticed it was missing, Zorian really doubted he would conclude somebody stole it. Who the hell breaks into people’s houses in order to swipe their library passes?

All that said, Zorian suspected that if he tried the same trick to access some really deeply restricted section, he would be stopped cold by firmer security. He would have to acquire a top level pass at some point and test it out near the end of a restart.

Right now, though, he had to see just what Xvim had in store for him. He pocketed the library pass and approached… the door…

He frowned. What the hell was happening? This was where Xvim’s office was located, he was sure of it – had been here countless of times, and everything else was exactly where it should be. He just…

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, letting the mental shield snap shut over his thoughts. The compulsion to ignore the door to Xvim’s office melted away, and his eyes finally stopped skimming over it like it didn’t exist. No, now that he thought about it, it was more like he had dismissed it as irrelevant. As obviously not what he was looking for. If he’d been less sure of himself, who knows how long he would have looked for the door before figuring it out.

Opening his eyes and forcing down his annoyance at Xvim’s antics, he knocked on the door and then immediately entered without waiting for permission to do so. He found Xvim calmly staring at him, fingers steepled together.

"Pitiful," Xvim declared. "That such a crude trap managed to snare you, even for a minute, shows how woefully unprepared you are for the dangers of mind magic."

"Yes, sir," agreed Zorian easily. He was too inured to Xvim’s attitude to really get worked up by it anymore. "That is why I professed a desire for a training partner to Miss Zileti."

Xvim waved his hand through the air once, as if warding away a particularly annoying fly, wordlessly letting him know how little he thought of that idea.

"I understand, from talking to Ilsa, that you are a natural mind mage, yes?" Xvim asked. It was apparently a rhetorical question, because he didn’t wait for Zorian’s response before continuing. "It is commendable that you are trying to correct your deficiencies on your own initiative. Too many mages with such natural talents mistake their inborn advantage for actual mastery, wasting their potential and putting everyone around them at risk. Even themselves. Especially themselves."

Wow, was that actual praise from Xvim?

"Sadly," Xvim continued, "your attempt, much like the shaping skills you displayed at our session last Friday, falls embarrassingly short of achieving actually worthwhile results. It is up to me, as your mentor, to mould you into something resembling a competent and responsible spellcaster."

Ugh. Never mind.

"I see," he said, somewhat sourly. "Please forgive my impertinence, but I was not aware that you were an expert in mind magic. I thought you taught advanced shaping exercises for fourth-year students."

"I also do private lessons for particularly talented first and second years," Xvim said, a ghost of a grimace flickering over his face for a moment before he smoothed it into his usual impassiveness. Xvim probably didn’t think much of their talent. "And, more relevantly, I teach a fourth year elective dealing with defense against hostile magic. Obviously, this includes mind magic as well."

"Ah," said Zorian. That did a lot to explain Xvim’s constant mind shield. Still… "I feel I should point out that my innate ability grants me a very powerful and flexible mental shield."

"Oh? How interesting," Xvim said speculatively. "Tell me, is your ability purely defensive or can you reach out and touch other people’s minds too?"

"The second one," Zorian admitted. "That’s why I asked Miss Zileti for help – I needed a willing target that would let me practice telepathy and mind reading on them."

"In that case, you probably already know about the mental barrier I’m currently sporting," Xvim stated.

"Well yes, but not because I tried to access your mind or anything," Zorian lied. "It’s just that the base form of my talent is a passive form of empathy that tells me what other people are feeling, and I cannot sense anything from you. As far as I can tell, that only happens when they are shielding their mind somehow."

"I am certain that is the only reason why you know of it, and that you have never even entertained the thought of getting revenge on your insufferable mentor by taking a quick peek at his mind," Xvim said indulgently. "As it happens, though, I want you to try and invade my mind. Please do your best to get past my mental barrier and tell me how it compares to your own."

Oh, this was absolutely perfect. A chance to attack Xvim and get away with it? How could he refuse? Still, as annoying as his mentor was, he didn’t really want to hospitalize the man, so he didn’t immediately launch the strongest mind spike he could form into his unprepared defenses. No, instead he first ran some light probing attacks to see if he could find any obvious imperfections (he couldn’t) and then launched a quick succession of weak attacks to gauge the strength of Xvim’s shield.

It was a very solid thing, comparable in strength to what Zorian and the aranea could create, which surprised him a great deal. On the other hand, that meant he didn’t really have to hold back. He powered up his strongest, most focused mind spike and slammed it directly into the mental barrier.

Though outwardly calm and composed, inwardly Zorian grinned in savage glee as he felt Xvim’s mental shield crack and buckle under his sudden onslaught…

…and then the moment passed, and Xvim’s mental barrier immediately snapped back into place, as perfect and unyielding as it was at the start.

Zorian’s eyes involuntarily widened in shock. N-No way… he repaired it!? How? He wasn’t a psychic, he was sure of it, and no spell he knew of could repair itself. Certainly not that quickly. Zorian couldn’t fix his mind shield that quickly. Hell, the aranea he practiced with couldn’t make their defenses snap back to an intact state that quickly.

He launched three more powerful attacks in quick succession with the exact same result: the attacks did damage to Xvim’s mental barrier, but it was repaired so quickly and thoroughly that a lesser attacker could have been fooled into thinking it had never been damaged at all.

He narrowed his eyes. No. No, he was not going to be foiled in this. Brute force wasn’t working, but he hadn’t been trained by the aranea for nothing – he had far more than that at his disposal. He started executing basic attack patterns taught to him by Mind Like Fire, treating Xvim like a fellow psychic instead of a mage using a structured spell, and slowly the limits of Xvim’s defenses revealed themselves to him. For one thing, Xvim did not seem to feel his probing attacks – anything not strong enough to crack his mental barrier was effectively undetectable to him. Secondly, his barrier was completely uniform – he never reinforced a spot he was attacking, even if he repeatedly targeted the same place over and over again.

When he next attacked, he did not use a powerful but momentary mind spike – he picked one part of Xvim’s mental shield and started crushing it. He didn’t let up, and slowly it began to crack under his mental pressure. No repair was possible – his attack was overwhelming the shield’s regeneration, widening the cracks and bringing it closer and closer to total collapse. He diverted a few tendrils of power from the main attack into the widening holes in Xvim’s defenses, causing the man to visibly flinch as telepathic forces seared his surface thoughts…

"Stop!" Xvim ordered, raising his hand into the air in a halting gesture.

Zorian immediately withdrew, letting Xvim recreate his mental defenses and regain his composure.

"Well," his mentor said, massaging his sinuses. "An afternoon headache, just what I needed today. I suppose that will teach me to tempt my students. Nonetheless, it was a fascinating experience. Less classical mind magic, and more akin to something a memory moss, an azure sea hermit crab or a cranium rat swarm would employ."

"That wasn’t a spell you were using to shield your mind, was it?" Zorian asked.

"No, it was not," Xvim confirmed. "It was unstructured magic, much like your own abilities."

"But how?" Zorian asked. "I can tell that you aren’t… well, a natural mind mage like me."

"Mind magic shaping exercises," Xvim said simply, as if that explained anything.

"There are shaping exercises for mind magic?" asked Zorian, surprised.

"There are shaping exercises for every field of magic," Xvim said. "They are essential for building a proper foundation around which you can base your spells."

Right, stupid question. What he should be asking was how doing shaping exercises allowed Xvim to do a reasonable impression of a full-blown psychic. He was a bit of a one-trick pony, but to be fair, it was a very nice trick.

"I was not aware that doing shaping exercises can give you unstructured magical abilities," Zorian remarked.

"Really?" Xvim asked him curiously. "What did you think shaping exercises were, if not unstructured magical abilities? Do enough of related ones over the years, and they’re bound to build up to something greater than the sum of its parts. In the case of mind magic, the ability to defend against it is so universally coveted that countless training regimens for gaining mental defenses have been devised over the centuries. What I displayed is not a common skill by any means, but is not particularly rare either."

Zorian frowned. Come to think of it, a fair number of people he’d encountered in the past had some form of mental defense that didn’t really feel like a structured spell. Alanic for instance, as well as Rea. Zach also had some sort of mental shield, according to Spear of Resolve – one she did not feel comfortable tampering with. He really should have suspected something like this earlier.

"Can you also use telepathy and mind reading in an unstructured manner, too?" he asked Xvim, acting on a hunch.

"Me, personally? No. I’ve never had an interest in anything other than defending myself," Xvim said. "But if you’re asking whether it’s possible, the answer is yes… with caveats. It requires great dedication for rudimentary results – such an aspirant would never be able to duplicate the attack you just casually did, for instance, even after a lifetime of honing their skills."

He knew it – it was just like soul sight. Getting a reduced version of the ability that affects only yourself was doable with a lot of work, but reaching out and applying it to someone else was all but impossible.

"So?" Xvim said impatiently, breaking his contemplation. "The comparison?"

"Err, right. Your shield seems to give you far less feedback than mine does, it’s too uniform in composition and your response to attack is very predictable and exploitable for someone who knows what they’re doing," said Zorian, relishing the chance to make Xvim on the receiving end of criticism for a change. Xvim simply nodded, giving no indication that his pride was wounded by the barrage. "On the other hand, your shield has far fewer imperfections and you can repair it a lot faster than me."

"Well then," Xvim said, leaning back on his chair. "I guess we know what you’ll be practicing today, then, don’t we?"

"Alright," said Zorian. He was fine with the idea, really. Improving his mental defenses was always welcome in his mind. "How is that going to work, though? I don’t think any classical mind spell can do much to me, barring surprise attacks like that trap you put on the door."

"Surprises come in many forms, mister Kazinski," Xvim said, reaching into his drawers and retrieving a spell rod, which he promptly pointed at Zorian’s face. "Allow me to demonstrate."

Zorian hurriedly strengthened his mind shield, determined to weather the incoming mental attack Xvim was launching at him, but what hit him wasn’t a mind magic spell. It was some sort of dispelling wave, and his mental shield evaporated upon contact with it like a raindrop hitting a burning oven.

Then the knockout spell hit him.

He resisted. He may have been stripped of his mental shield and caught off-guard, but he was still an experienced mage and he went through Kyron’s resistance training too – the relatively minor spell Xvim used could not subdue him. But the point was made, regardless.

"A proper mind mage," Xvim said, "would have reconstructed his shield before the second spell had been even cast."

Zorian sighed. Of course they would have.

"Start over?" he guessed.

"Start over," Xvim confirmed.

In a scene that Zorian would rapidly begin to hate with every fiber of his being, Xvim once again pointed the spell rod at his face and blasted his mental shield into oblivion.

Following their Monday session, Xvim largely replaced their regular sessions with mind magic related ones, constantly pushing his defenses and giving him long lists of mind magic shaping exercises to try. Most of these exercises were absurdly easy for Zorian, teaching things he already had an instinctive grasp of, but searching the restricted section of the library with his brand new pass yielded some less intuitive ones that actually taught him something new.

He didn’t intend to duplicate the circumstances that led to Xvim’s new attitude in future restarts. While he’d definitely learned some stuff from Xvim when it came to mental combat, Xvim was ultimately an annoying teacher to learn from and nothing he wanted to teach Zorian absolutely required his help to work.

Besides, his meetings with Tinami weren’t really getting anywhere. He wasn’t really getting much from them himself, and Tinami basically turned his every attempt at interaction into an interrogation attempt, trying to figure out who had taught him to be as good as he was currently.

She also seemed to have blabbed about his meeting with Raynie, since everyone in class seemed to know about it when he came to the academy on Monday. Probably as revenge for refusing to answer her questions. In any case, that pretty much killed any sort of good will he may have had with Raynie – she accepted that he was not at fault when they talked later in the day, but she still didn’t want to be seen anywhere near him after that. It was probably Benisek loudly congratulating him in front of the whole class that really screwed him over when it came to that.

Why did he ever think that hanging around that guy was a good idea?

Oh well, live and learn. Seeing how his social endeavors were in tatters for the rest of the restart, he focused his energies on finding the aranean treasury, his personal experiments, and tracking down and interrogating the invaders. The latter two were doing just fine, but his quest for the aranean treasury stubbornly yielded no results. He resolved to take the Filigree Sages up on their offer to take them to the Cyorian settlement in exchange for their help with memory manipulation – maybe aranean explorers would be more successful than him, and more help with his memory reading skills was always welcome. He should also save the Yellow Cavern Guardians from their invader again, just in case they had something new to tell him now that he had some actual experience with mind reading under his belt.

His invasion-related activities steadily continued as weeks passed, yielding no revolutionary results or critical revelations, but his memory reading skills were getting pretty good and he had found some interesting targets that might actually know something interesting. Unfortunately, his constant attacks had made the invaders cautious and paranoid, and everyone important was always armed and under tight security – Zorian didn’t feel confident going after them under such conditions. He would go after them in a future restart, when they hadn’t had the forewarning that he was coming for them.

As the end of the restart approached, Zorian laid off the Cultists a little, limiting himself to raiding their caches and monitoring their activities. The caches held no crucial clue or amazing treasure, but one of them did have a whole lot of cash (which Zorian intended to put to good use in future restarts) and the potion collection he stole at the start of the restart looked promising. Kael claimed he would need another restart to finish going through them, but some of them were clearly advanced combat potions that produced clouds of acidic vapor upon breaking, doused everything in unquenchable fire and similar effects. That sounded quite compatible with Zorian’s fighting style, in all honesty.

And then, several days before the summer festival, his spying effort finally gave him the alert he had been waiting for: the leadership of the Cult of the Dragon Below issued an order to one of their low-ranking groups to kidnap Nochka. It wasn’t the same team as it was the last time, nor was the kidnapping scheduled to occur on the same date it had in the previous restart, but his efforts had caught the order anyway.

He ambushed them halfway to the Sashal family house, when they were still herding their giant centipedes through the sewers. His initial idea was to seize control of the centipedes and make them turn on their masters, making it look like they lost control of the beasts. Unfortunately, the mage controlling them knew what he was doing – the moment Zorian attempted to influence the minds of the monsters he clamped down on his control over the centipedes and shouted a warning to the rest of the group that they were under attack.

So Zorian used his backup plan and chucked one of the combat potions he recovered from their cache into their midst. The centipede controller, as well as three of his centipede minions, died on the spot, frozen solid when the bottle broke and the glittering blue liquid made contact with the air. Alas, that revealed his hiding spot, forcing him to shield himself from a barrage of offensive spells the three surviving cultists had started peppering him with.

Fortunately, with no more controller mage to contest his control, the last centipede was child’s play to commandeer. Before his three attackers had realized what was happening, the centipede’s poisonous pincers bit down on the leg of one of them, and they had to defend themselves from a danger in their own midst.

They never stood a chance from that point on, though they had managed to kill the centipede before Zorian finished them off. His task done, he left the scene, wondering what the Cult of the Dragon Below was going to do now that its plans had been foiled. Were they going to come after Nochka again, with more resources this time? Just how important was she to them, anyway?

He supposed he would find out soon.

To Zorian’s surprise, Nochka was never attacked after that. Instead, the cultists attacked another family the day after that – this time a rather prominent officer serving in Eldemar’s military who happened to be one of those pigeon shifters that Raynie didn’t think much of. The man and his wife were unharmed, but their eight-year-old son was kidnapped by their unknown assailants and no ransom demand had been issued.

Unlike the cultists' attack on the Sashal family, this one garnered a great deal of attention from the newspapers and the authorities. After all, their new target wasn’t just some random nobody, but a member of Eldemar’s military… and they didn’t bother with some flimsy monster attack setup this time, choosing instead to just barge in and kidnap a kid during the night. Quite a bit more attention grabbing.

So. Clearly the cultists needed a shifter, probably a shifter child, for some purpose. Primordial summoning, most likely. They needed one so badly they were willing to kick over an anthill just before the invasion, exposing it to a huge risk of discovery.

But it didn’t have to be Nochka, apparently.

"Hey, Zorian," Kirielle called out, distracting him from his musings.

He looked towards her and found her trying to paint a face on the next generation wooden golem he had made for her. It had a whole bunch of minor improvements over the old one, but Zorian suspected Kirielle only really cared about one of them – the new version had long, brown hair attached to its head, based on her request. Apparently she decided that it wasn’t lifelike enough for her.

"What?" he asked.

"Who are you taking out to the dance tomorrow?" she asked.

"It’s none of your business," said Zorian. Ugh, he would have to make sure to be out of the house by tomorrow evening, just in case Ilsa sent someone after him again.

"Are you going out with the red-headed girl you’re dating?" she asked.

"N- Wait a minute, how do you even know about that!?" Zorian protested.

"Kael told me," she said, biting the wooden end of her paintbrush for a minute before adding some fine touches on the golem’s new eyebrows.

Stupid Kael… he probably thought this was all so terribly amusing.

"I think you could use a girlfriend," Kirielle said, before turning towards her new golem. "Don’t you agree, Kosjenka?"

Just as it had been made to do when presented with something that sounded like a question, the golem nodded its head gravely.

"See, even Kosjenka agre-"

"Kiri," Zorian cut her off.

"Yes?"

"Shut up."

43. Overwhelmed

Perhaps it was because she knew that Zorian already had a date, much like everyone else seemed to believe, or perhaps it was simply a matter of Zorian being more circumspect with his intentions this time around, but Ilsa didn’t send any girl after him in the end. Not that Zorian had stayed at Imaya’s place long enough to see that in person, of course – that could have easily left him stuck with an unplanned date for the evening again – but he had left a scrying beacon in the house so he could check up on it periodically.

A part of him was annoyed he even cared about that. In the grand scheme of things, such petty drama did not matter in the slightest… there wasn’t enough time left in the restart for the consequences of ignoring it to really catch up to him. And besides, he could hardly be blamed for not showing up on a date he had never arranged to begin with! But, well, he was curious… and it wasn’t like checking up on the house from time to time was some huge commitment on his part.

No, most of his time was spent on hovering on the edges of the invasion proper, trying to spot breakaway groups small enough to ambush. Well, that and repeatedly telling himself that he didn’t have to interfere every time he saw the invaders kill helpless civilians, since they were going to be just fine when the loop restarted. The first thing was complicated by the variety of monsters that accompanied the mages, who all had very good senses and came in great numbers. The second was complicated by the sheer brutality the invaders displayed to everyone in their path. For heaven’s sake, some of them were breaking into random houses and murdering entire families inside! Not even looting anything, just committing mindless slaughter of non-combatants for no real reason. Madness.

He knew stuff like that happened during the invasion, of course, but it was never this… personal for him. He was there this time, witnessing the behavior in detail and cold-bloodedly deciding where to engage the invaders and where to move on. And he wasn’t talking about avoiding groups that were straight-up too big for him to handle – those were easy to ignore, since he had never felt compelled to help others if doing so would cost him his own life in return. No, he was talking about groups that were entirely manageable with his current skills… except that he couldn’t figure out a way to deal with them without killing everything. And what would be the point of that? He needed Ibasan mages alive so he could read their minds – that was what this was all about. An ambush that did not result in subdued mages to interrogate was a waste of time and mana, as well as liable to summon Quatach-Ichl to dispatch him. The ancient lich always personally intervened when someone got too successful against the invading forces.

And that was without even considering the possibility that Red Robe was secretly lurking somewhere out there in the city, waiting for a big enough disturbance to clue him in that a time traveler was back in Cyoria. He didn’t think that option was very likely, what with Red Robe completely abandoning his support of the invasion lately, but it was not an option he felt completely safe discounting. No, sticking to his original plan and avoiding unnecessary engagements was definitely the right choice to make.

Maybe it was a good thing his mind kept going back to the stupid date drama – if nothing else, it gave him something to distract himself with.

Fortunately for his deteriorating mood, he soon found a duo of Ibasan mages that had strayed too far from their main group and were only lightly defended. Well, relatively speaking. They had two war trolls and twelve skeletons as bodyguards, with another six war trolls vandalizing shopfronts not too far from where they were standing, but he was confident he could deal with that if he could surprise them.

He made his way towards the group, mentally nudging the iron beak whose senses he was tapping into to fly closer to his targets so he could examine them more closely. There was something deliciously ironic about using the invaders' own scouts against them like that, but the real reason he was using the iron beaks instead of simply scrying on the invaders was that iron beaks had much better vision than he did and could also see in the dark. Very useful, that. He had also tried to employ the same trick on the war trolls that hung around the invaders, but found their senses very hard to process. Trolls had terrible eyesight, and were color blind to boot – their main sense was their ridiculously good sense of smell and, to a lesser extent, their hearing. Not to mention they were far less mobile than the iron beaks, and the Ibasans kept a much tighter leash on the brutes than they did on their iron beak flocks. Hmm… he wondered…

Acting on a hunch, Zorian focused on the nearest iron beak flock and tried to dominate the one flying on the tail’s end of the flock. It was surprisingly willful for an animal, but his attempt was not contested by anyone and the iron beak soon broke off from its group and made its way towards Zorian. Huh, that worked. Nobody seemed to be reacting to his actions, either. Convenient. Apparently the iron beaks were a bigger weak link of the invasion than he’d thought!

He removed a potion vial from his pocket and handed it to the dominated iron beak that had landed next to him. It took some time, but eventually he managed to telepathically convey to the magical corvid that it shouldn’t clutch the vial too tightly in its claws unless it wanted bad things to happen to it. That done, he directed it to dive bomb the Ibasan duo with the vial.

He would not have been surprised at all if his ploy had ended up as a failure. A lot of it depended on the iron beak executing everything flawlessly, since Zorian was only dominating the iron beak, not puppeteering it – a dominated creature executes orders to the best of its own ability, not the controller’s. That was nice, in the sense that there was no way Zorian could have puppeteered the bird precisely enough to pull off something this complicated. It did mean he was a bit of a helpless observer as a result, though. Oh well, even if the ploy failed it should at least act as a proper distraction for his own attack…

The iron beak exceeded his expectations. Not only did it approach the two mages from behind, entirely on its own initiative, it dropped the vial at the exact spot Zorian told it to aim at. The exact spot. That had got to be some innate magic ability at work – they were uncannily accurate with their feather attack too, come to think of it. In any case, once the vial hit the ground it exploded into a cloud of yellow gas that knocked out the two Ibasans in a matter of moments. Their bodyguards weren’t affected – the war trolls because their magically-enhanced metabolisms kept the knockout gas from working, and the skeletons because they had no metabolism to affect – but once their controllers went unconscious, it became ridiculously easy to goad the war trolls into attacking the skeletons. It took less than a minute before every skeleton was reduced into dust and splinters.

He directed his iron beak to make a few passes at the two trolls, and the bird interpreted that as 'send a couple of feather volleys straight at their eyes (ouch), after which the two former bodyguards ran off to chase the bird in blind anger, leaving Zorian free to approach the two knocked-out mages unopposed.

This was the fifth group he ambushed tonight, and the first one where everything had gone so smoothly. He didn’t even have to personally fight in the end! He really should use iron beaks more extensively in the future.

After dragging the two unconscious bodies to some less exposed place, he took a deep breath and dived into their memories.

Memory reading, more than any other branch of mind magic, deeply resembled divination in the way it functioned. You had to decide what you wanted to look for, and if you were asking the wrong question, your answer would be worthless or misleading. In Zorian’s case, there were four main things he looked for whenever he read the minds of Ibasan mages: whether they knew about any mage in a garish red robe, where the primordial summoning ritual was supposed to take place, what they knew about the goals of the invasion and, last but certainly not least, whether they knew anything about the time loop or time travel in general. The same thing he probed the minds of cultists about, really. He was lucky this time, in that one of the two mages lying before him was a higher ranking mage that should hopefully know more than the common grunts he had been dealing with thus far.

None of the Ibasans knew anything about a mage wearing red robes, and the two men he currently had at his mercy were no exception. Follow up questions regarding missing members which had left the group around the start of the time loop revealed that despite their inability to maintain discipline during the actual invasion, the Ibasans ran a pretty tight ship during the lead-up to it. Anyone who stepped out of line was severely punished by the Ibasan leadership, and the handful of cases where someone tried to abandon the invasion resulted in Quatach-Ichl hunting them down like dogs as an example to everyone else. Consequently, all such attempts had stopped long before the time loop had begun.

As far as Zorian was concerned, that pretty much killed the possibility of Red Robe being an Ibasan invader. He had suspected as much, considering how Quatach-Ichl treated Red Robe during that evening, but it was nice to have more confirmation. It was still possible he was connected to the Cult of Dragon Below, which didn’t (and couldn’t) exercise anywhere near the same control over its members.

As far as the location where the primordial ritual was concerned, none of the Ibasans officially knew anything about it… but it was apparently a sort of public secret among group commanders (such as the one whose mind Zorian was currently reading) that the summoning was supposed to take place on top of the Hole, or at least as close to it as humanly possible.

Zorian felt pretty stupid when he found that out. Of course. Of course it was the Hole, the city’s biggest and most obvious landmark. He had even known that the Cult assigned special significance to the damn place, he just never… damn it. He shook his head. In his defense, the lower-ranking cultists were convinced that the ritual was going to take place in some super-secret place that nobody knows about.

As for the goals of the invasion, that was something Zorian found very easy to extract from the minds of his victims, as they knew very few actual facts about that. Only the very top of the Ibasan leadership seemed to know what they were really trying to accomplish here, and the common grunts were going along with the whole thing almost entirely because Quatach-Ichl was going along with it too. The ancient lich was held in very high regard by the Ibasans. As a thousand-year old lich, he was an almost impossibly ancient mage, and had power and skill to match his age. He was alive back when the gods still spoke to humanity, and was rumored to have been blessed by several of them. On top of all that, he had a reputation for being harsh but fair, as opposed to a lot of other Ibasan leaders who simply had a reputation for being harsh. He was something of a saint to these people, as strange as that looked to Zorian. The mindset was that if Quatach-Ichl said this was possible and worthwhile to pull off, then it was. It was just that simple.

Also, there was a general feeling among the Ibasans that Altazians were all a bunch of degenerate weaklings that would surely fall like wheat before the mighty men and women of Ulquaan Ibasa. Then again, that particular brand of rhetoric was common in Eldemar too, so he didn’t think it all that notable in the grand scheme of things.

As for time travel, his current victim knew nothing of it, just like everyone else he- wait! There was something. It wasn’t about the time loop, or time travel, but apparently Eldemar had a secret research facility deep, deep within the Dungeon, dedicated to researching time magic. Time dilation, to be more precise. The facility was heavily defended, with insanely good security measures – as they had to be, considering the sheer depth the facility was located at – so the invaders had decided to leave it alone. Some of the Ibasan leaders, notably Quatach-Ichl, were known to be unhappy about that. They felt something important had to be there, if Eldemar was willing to maintain a research facility in such a dangerous environment, and wanted to have it. Unfortunately for them, the rest of the leadership felt the number of troops and effort required to crack their defenses could not be justified with such speculative gains.

That was… interesting. Although the Ibasan mage he was memory-reading did not know the exact location of the facility, Zorian was pretty sure he did. The map left to him by the matriarch had a number of locations marked on it, two of which he had never been able to reach to check out. One was surrounded by Ibasan forward bases and patrolled too heavily for him to ever approach it successfully – Zorian presumed this was their main base. The other was ridiculously deep, and he never even tried reaching it – he did not think he could survive a journey into such depths. Frankly, he was kind of amazed the aranea managed to map the Dungeon that deep, considering even powerful mages would think twice about descending to that depth.

He had no proof, but he strongly suspected this was the time magic research facility discovered by the Ibasans. And considering the matriarch had marked it down as important, it almost certainly had some relevance to his situation.

He dived deeper into the man’s mind, looking for more information. He felt his victim’s mind quake under the severity of the probe but persisted anyway – any compunction about hurting these people had evaporated after watching them rampage around the city for several hours.

The path outlined by the matriarch wasn’t the only one, apparently, or even the main one. The government did not supply the facility through a perilous journey down the winding tunnels of the Dungeon proper – they did it by descending down through the Hole until they reached the desired depth, where they had drilled an artificial tunnel into the wall in order to connect the facility with the outside world. Of course, while that path avoided most of the dangers associated with such extreme depths, it was still insanely dangerous for anyone without authorization to be there, so that did not help him much. Maybe if he-

Oops. He pushed it too hard – overwhelmed by his (still rather crude and unsophisticated) memory probe, the man’s mind collapsed into a chaotic, undecipherable mess. He would be getting nothing more out of him. Damn it.

He fired two piercers at the unconscious mages, killing them both, and turned to leave, only to find an iron beak watching him closely from a nearby window sill. It was non-hostile, simply scrutinizing him. Zorian checked the feel of its mind, and found that it was indeed the very same iron beak he had dominated earlier, just like he suspected. His influence over it had dissolved a while ago, though, so that couldn’t be the reason why it was so docile towards him. Huh.

If nothing else, he’d expected it to resent him for overriding its will. He sensed no animosity from the bird, however – just satisfaction and schadenfreude at seeing the Ibasan mages dead. Either the iron beaks didn’t like the Ibasans much, or this particular iron beak was not a fan.

"So," Zorian said. "How do you feel about helping me kill more of these?"

The iron beak cocked its head to the side, uncomprehending. Right, still only an animal, if a very clever and willful one. He sent the bird a telepathic impression of two of them killing more invaders.

The iron beak answered with a shrill screech and a burst of bloodlust so strong Zorian found himself taking a step back from the animal.

Hate. Grudge. Kill.

"Right," he mumbled to himself. "I’ll take that as agreement."

He didn’t bother to dominate the bird this time – he just instructed it to find another small group of invaders and started looking for more iron beaks to possibly subvert.

Zorian subdued two more groups after that, neither of which had anything new to teach him, before Quatach-Ichl suddenly teleported in front of him and blasted him in the face with one of those jagged red disintegration beams he loved so much. He died instantly, unable to raise any defenses in time.

Oh well, the night had been coming to a close anyway. At least he’d managed to experiment a little with the iron beaks flying around. Sadly, he had discovered that only a tiny minority of them were receptive to his control, and contacting the wrong ones invariably caused the entire flock to descend upon him like a murderous mob. The previously subverted birds also immediately switched sides back to their brethren when this happened, which he really should have expected but somehow was still taken entirely off-guard the first time it happened. In any case, the iron beaks definitely hated the invaders for some reason, but turning them against their masters was very difficult. Something kept them loyal, and the few mages whose minds he had questioned for an answer didn’t know what it was – they thought of iron beaks as dumb animals and paid no heed to their thoughts and motives.

He began the restart in the same general way he had started the last two - by scouting the state of the invasion, getting his mana crystals, helping Taiven clean up the Dungeon of monsters, and so on. Except, of course, that he was far more effective at all of those this time around. He also stole a better library card for himself immediately and recreated Kosjenka for Kirielle, among other minor additions.

The newest restart, much like the two that preceded it, showed no sign of future knowledge by the invaders. This was the third consecutive restart where Red Robe unceremoniously ditched them, and Zorian was starting to suspect this was now a normal situation rather than just a momentary whim. Most likely, Red Robe had completely lost interest in the invasion after their confrontation.

The question was - why? Why do that after he had spent all those restarts stubbornly handing out knowledge to them?

Well, perhaps a better question would be, why had he been doing that in the first place? What did helping the invaders do for him? Was it just a way to keep Zach focused on some highly visible, but ultimately irrelevant quest so he wouldn’t question things? Or perhaps a way to muddy the waters, so to speak, and hide the aftershocks of his own actions by regularly inducing a big splash at the start of every restart? Maybe. But the sheer amount of information he provided to the invaders made him think there was more to it than that. It was incredibly optimized to do as much damage to the city as possible – Red Robe must have sunk an enormous amount of time and effort to produce something like that. The outcome of the invasion mattered to him in some personal way. So why stop? What changed?

Zorian tried to think of it with a properly paranoid mindset. Red Robe thought that the aranea had brought an unknown, but large number of people into the time loop. These people were organized and also crafty enough to evade his notice for years. Not something that would be easy to hunt down and purge. Zorian had also displayed mind magic in their battle, so the one encounter Red Robe had had with these people involved one of the few types of magic that could permanently deal with him. All of this meant that the time loop got infinitely more dangerous for Red Robe all of a sudden. There was a legion of enemies plotting against him and lurking around every corner.

If Zorian was in Red Robe’s place, would he immediately begin to plot against this group, laying down traps and ambushes and trying to track them down? No, definitely not. He would get away as soon as possible, not just out of Cyoria but out of the entire wider region around the city. If he began the restart somewhere in the city, he would get the hell away at the start of the restart, much like Zach seemed to be doing. He wasn’t sure how long he would stay away, but Zach had yet to stop leaving the city at the start of every restart, and he was the reckless one out of the three of them.

Maybe it wasn’t so strange that Red Robe was staying away from the city at the moment. In hindsight, that bit of misdirection by Spear of Resolve had been far shrewder than Zorian had given her credit for at the time. But how long would it be before Red Robe realized that the legions of enemy time travelers simply didn’t exist?

There was another option. If Red Robe was helping the invasion in an attempt to optimize it, so that it could be as effective as possible once the time loop ends, and if the aranea were only ejected from the time loop instead of soulkilled, as Red Robe claimed… then any further optimization attempts would be a total waste of time. Once the time loop ended, the aranea would be alive and well again, and any plan developed in their absence would give worse results than the one Red Robe had previously developed. Admittedly, Zorian mostly liked this option because it meant that the aranea were recoverable, but it would also explain a lot of things. Such as Red Robe’s reluctance to use his soulkill spell more liberally. If soulkilled persons were only gone for the duration of the time loop, that would neatly explain why he didn’t use it on non-loopers – that would be entirely counterproductive, since he would still have to deal with them eventually, except that he wouldn’t have the option to try out different tactics against them in the time loop, and couldn’t find out what worked best.

Zorian could only hope that investigating the invaders would bring some answers to his questions. Though if everything else failed, he supposed he could always behave like Zach and simply launch an endless stream of suicidal missions aimed at breaking into the time magic research facility, since that was clearly relevant to the time loop somehow. He was bound to succeed eventually, right? If Zach was able to kill Oganj with that method then surely he could break into one measly facility.

Hmm, maybe he was thinking about this wrong – he should outright recruit Zach into the attempt. He was still a bit leery of contacting the other boy, both because that would mean revealing himself to Red Robe if he was monitoring Zach and because he was not at all sure Zach would be of any actual help to him at this point, but if he was reduced to metaphorically banging his head on the wall then he might as well involve someone who has spent gods know how many years in the time loop honing the skill at doing exactly that.

Something to keep in mind when the time comes, anyway.

With the start of classes, Zorian decided to approach Raynie again while skipping on the mind magic training with Tinami. He still hoped to get to know the Aope heir better, but it was clear that trying to get close to both Raynie and Tinami at the same time was unfeasible, and Raynie seemed the easier one to handle. He did not recreate his initial request as closely as he had intended, but Raynie agreed to set up a meeting between them nonetheless.

Benisek had a spontaneous attack of clumsiness when he had tried to loudly congratulate Zorian and ended up sprawling on the floor of the classroom after tripping over his own two feet. It was a funny and mysterious thing, and Zorian hadn’t had absolutely anything to do with it, but it sure was nice that he’d only made a scene out of himself instead of himself and Zorian, wasn’t it?

Still, while he had high hopes that his attempt to get to know Raynie better would go better this time around, the fact was that interacting with her involved a lot of waiting time – he might as well try to get to know another one of his classmates in the meantime. And since female classmates had a high chance of producing the same kind of problems that Tinami had in the previous restart (because that was just how his luck worked, damn it), that someone should probably be a guy. Hmm, which one of his fellow male students looked interesting… oh! Edwin was really interested in golems, wasn’t he? He had both of his parents in the golem-making business and couldn’t shut up about them the last time Zorian had asked a mildly-topical question about the subject. Well… he might as well show Edwin his own golem designs and ask him what he thought. It would be interesting to see how his designs compared to ones made by someone hyper-focused on the field.

He waited until classes were over and then walked over to where Edwin and Naim were talking. Like always when he saw them together, he found it interesting how different the two of them were, both physically and in terms of personality. Edwin was a short boy, with pitch black hair and slightly darker skin tone that hinted his ancestors were relatively recent arrivals from the south, or perhaps even from Miasina. Naim was a relatively unassuming brown-haired boy of average height, distinguished only by the fact he was rather athletic and fit for your average student. Edwin was talkative and expressive, getting excited easily and often gesticulating heavily when he spoke. Naim was calm and restrained, like some sort of serene monk who had achieved enlightenment and could thus no longer be fazed by anything anymore. They were like the sun and the moon, yet somehow they’d ended up as inseparable.

He had to admit, he felt just a little bit intimidated by the prospect of approaching them. He was worried they would be suspicious of him, suddenly approaching them out of the blue like that. Zorian’s previous relationship with the two was polite, but very, very distant. They had hardly known each other. Then again, that was an accurate description of his relationship with most of his classmates bar Benisek.

But he need not have worried. Edwin was naturally a friendly sort, and only got friendlier when he found out why Zorian was talking to him. And while he did sense some exasperation from Naim, that was solely because of the topic of the conversation rather than Zorian’s presence as such. He was not as crazy about the topic as Edwin.

"That’s a nice stabilizer for the kind of small doll this is intended for," Edwin said, tracing the relevant glyph sequences with his finger. "I don’t think it would work for something larger and heavier, like a proper, man-sized golem made out of solid steel, but it’s downright inspired for this. I’ll have to remember this. I don’t understand why you put these in, though," he said, jabbing his finger at the trio of compressed nodes he used to fine-tune the design. "They’re inelegant and just plain unnecessary. The design works perfectly without them, and they don’t seem to do anything except randomly tweak things with no rhyme or reason."

"Actually, the design doesn’t work without those," Zorian said. "All of the prototypes were breaking down on me until I got sick of trying to make it work like it was supposed to and just forcibly tweaked things in the manner you’re looking at. It works fine now, but it makes altering the design a real pain. I’m hoping you can help me find the underlying issue that’s tripping me up."

Edwin gave him an incredulous look. "Wait… so this is, like, an actual design. Not just theory work? You’ve built one of these?"

"Well, yeah," Zorian said. "What would be the point, otherwise?"

"But isn’t that super expensive?" Edwin asked curiously.

"No, it’s just moderately expensive," said Zorian. Though in all honesty, his sense of what was expensive and what wasn’t had probably gotten utterly skewed while he was in the time loop. "But I’m funding it out of my own pocket and no one can really stop me from spending my money on whatever I find appropriate."

"Oh no, I’m not criticizing you," Edwin grinned. "Hell, I wish I could do the same! You sure you don’t need an assistant or anything?"

"It’s… a possibility," Zorian said hesitantly. He could see that Edwin was very serious about his suggestion, and it surprised him. He had thought he would have to make an effort to get him to cooperate on specific projects, and here he was proposing partnership. "How much time can you dedicate to this?"

Naim gave a short, amused laugh. He was largely content to quietly sit on the sidelines thus far, but apparently he couldn’t resist reacting to this.

"That sort of thing is all he does in his free time," Naim said with a light smile. "The real question is just how long your patience will last before you tell him to knock it off already and go home."

"Oh shut up, you," Edwin complained. "Like you are any better, mister training. You have your martial arts, and I have my golems."

"I have a lot on my plate lately, so I’m not exactly sure how much time I can dedicate to this. But I think I can spare a couple of hours every two or three days if you’re up for it."

"I’m up for it," said Edwin. "For a chance to see how my designs work in practice, I’d even be willing to wake up before noon during the weekend. What’s keeping you so busy anyway? The classes are only starting."

"Ah, well, I do a lot of independent studies," said Zorian. "The golem experiments you already know about, but I also do a lot of studying into spell formula in general, as well as alchemy, general purpose utility magic and so on. I do advanced shaping exercises and practice combat magic whenever I find the time."

"Sounds a bit unfocused," Edwin said. "Impressive that you manage to fit all of that into your schedule, though."

"Yes, and you still found time to join in the monster hunts," Naim noticed.

"I think of that as combat magic practice," Zorian said.

Naim gave Edwin an amused look. Edwin scowled back at him.

"What?" Zorian asked.

"When I told Edwin I wanted to join a hunter group to practice my combat skills in real situations, he called me an idiot. He said no one else would be dumb enough to risk their lives for training," Naim said, patting Zorian on the shoulder like an old pal. "Well, it seems there are two of us. Welcome to the idiot club, Zorian."

"Right," Zorian mumbled. "But wait, what other reason would a student like us have to join a monster hunter group?"

Naim shrugged. "Money. Fame. Duty."

Oh right, some people get paid to do that stuff. And aren’t stuck in a time loop that made stuff like fame and duty utterly unattainable.

Before he could actually say anything, another one of their classmates suddenly decided to enter the conversation.

"Forgive me for butting in like this," said Estin Grier, suddenly speaking up from behind Zorian. "But I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation. Do you mind if I comment a bit?"

There was a brief pause, as the three of them stared at the newcomer. In the end, it was Edwin that broke the awkward pause.

"We’re just talking, man," Edwin huffed. "It’s not a private club or anything. Go ahead and say whatever you want to say."

Zorian glanced at Estin, studying him for a bit. The boy was one of the students he once suspected might be Red Robe – well, just the third time traveler back then, since he hadn’t met the guy yet – since his family emigrated to Eldemar from Ulquaan Ibasa. If he was being truthful to himself, the boy’s appearance had contributed to those suspicions – Estin was a tall, severe-looking fellow, with sharp facial features, dour expression, thick eyebrows, black hair and eyes of such dark brown they looked almost black too. Him being very withdrawn and rarely speaking unless prompted by someone or something did nothing to dispel the rather sinister impression he got from the boy.

But as far as Zorian was able to piece out, Estin was really just a normal, albeit extremely intimidating student. He had no links to the invaders and didn’t really behave like someone aware of the time loop.

"Very well," Estin nodded seriously. "I was going to note that while most of the students didn’t join the monster hunts solely in order to test and hone ourselves in the crucible of battle, they surely considered that an additional point in favor of participating. One can have multiple goals for deciding something."

"So… you also like combat magic practice?" Naim surmised.

"Yes," Estin agreed. "That is one way to interpret that. And with that, we can see that there are three of us who wish to test our combat skills and grow. Perhaps we could help each other. Have a meeting so we can trade news and personal styles, spar, and other such things."

For someone who stayed quiet most of the time, Estin sure was very verbose once he got going. Still, he was all for Estin’s idea, since he’d been curious about their level of combat skills ever since he’d heard they participated in monster hunts. Naim was also interested, so after discussing it for a while, the three of them decided to ask Ilsa to let them borrow a training hall sometimes in the future. One with actual ground, because apparently Estin’s magic didn’t work well with indoor environments, whatever that meant.

Estin also asked about Edwin joining them, but he wasn’t interested. Edwin didn’t like to fight, and had no interest in honing his combat skills. Zorian assured the golem enthusiast that he still intended to work with him on their golem designs.

He just had to figure out a way to fit these two new obligations into his already overloaded schedule.

Finding a training hall suited to their needs turned out to have been largely a non-issue – the academy had lots of training halls, and most of them were free to use by any student. Not all of them were billed as combat magic training grounds, but they all had basic safety wards in place and could be unofficially used as such. According to Ilsa, such misuse of academy resources had been rampant for quite some time already, and was accepted as normal even by the teachers these days. As such, she recommended they just commandeer whatever place they needed for a few hours instead of waiting a week for the academy to give them an official time slot that may or may not suit them, at a training hall that may or may not be what they needed. They just had to make sure they weren’t interrupting a sanctioned study group or some such.

Armed with that knowledge, they toured some of the available options until they found a training hall that was really just a walled-off and warded section of academy grounds, and thus had plenty of soil and rocks that Estin apparently needed to really show off.

Estin, as it turned out, was one of those people with an innate magical ability. Specifically, he could manipulate earth, rocks and similar materials in an unstructured manner, much like how Zorian could work his mind magic. Estin was rather cagey about the specifics of how his ability worked, since it was apparently his family bloodline and they were trying to keep it semi-secret, but it apparently wasn’t immediately usable in its untrained form and Estin’s current abilities were a result of considerable talent and a lot of work. In the handful of mock-fights they did to familiarize themselves with each other’s skills, Estin used the ability exclusively to levitate large clumps of earth and rocks around himself, interposing them between himself and incoming spells with unerring accuracy. Well, if he could see the attack coming anyway – he didn’t fare so well when Zorian made his magic missile loop back and come at him from behind his back. It also took some time for him to form a sphere, and he didn’t seem capable of controlling more than four at any particular time, because when Zorian launched an eight-missile swarm at him he simply surrendered and asked him to tone it down in the future.

Still, it was a pretty useful trick he had there. Blocking with the spheres didn’t seem to take any attention from Estin, allowing him to focus purely on peppering his opponent with offensive spells while his spheres defended him. If he had something more dangerous than magic missile in his arsenal, or if he could actually weave a homing function into those magic missiles, he might have actually posed a problem for Zorian.

Well, a problem for him so long as he held back so very badly. He decided in advance that the only spells he was going to display was his mastery of magic missile and basic shield spells, and that appeared to have been a good choice because he was beating both of them pretty decisively even with that. Especially Naim. As a first generation mage with no special magic or familial history to draw on, he was limited to the same magic missile and shield combination that Zorian claimed to be limited to, but without the years in the time loop to hone his skills at those two spells to near-perfection.

If he were fighting against pre-time loop Zorian, Naim would have wiped the floor with him. He had more than twice the mana reserves that old Zorian had, and had clearly known how to cast those two spells years ago and had been slowly honing them all that time. On top of that, he was highly fit and agile, and in his fight against Estin he simply dodged every projectile that the other boy sent his way. The old Zorian couldn’t weave a homing function into his magic missiles, and would thus not be any more successful than Estin in that regard.

But sadly for Naim, he wasn’t fighting Zorian’s past self, and thus ended up overmatched in his own game. Zorian’s shield was impenetrable to anything the other boy could dish out, and dodging didn’t work against Zorian’s attacks.

After this, Naim and Estin decided to move on to hand-to-hand combat, probably specifically to spite and one-up Zorian. Knowing he was useless in a fist fight and would just embarrass himself, Zorian immediately bowed out of that, conceding he had no chance against either of them. They were both very smug about that.

Well whatever, let them have their consolation prize. Better than being bitter at Zorian for besting them, that’s for sure. In any case, the two of them had no less than five rounds of that, and it became obvious by the end that Naim was just plain better at that than Estin was, despite Estin’s greater size and bulk. He would later find out that this was what Edwin had been talking about when he implied that Naim was just as obsessed with martial arts as he was with golems. He practiced martial arts religiously every single day, and was good enough to get invited to national contests in the field.

After that, they decided to share training methods and other advice – something that ended up surprisingly useful to Zorian, since both of them had found some neat little shaping exercises that Zorian never thought to look for, but which ultimately ended up with Zorian doing most of the talking and demonstrating. He expected as much to happen, though – he was the most experienced person among them, after all.

He left the meeting pleased with how it turned out. Considering that both Naim and Estin wanted to have another meeting like that, Zorian supposed they were pleased with it too, even though Estin was throwing him some sour looks when he thought Zorian wasn’t looking. When they did organize another meeting, though, it wasn’t just the three of them that showed up.

Briam, Kopriva and Raynie also showed up, wondering if they could join. Naim and Estin immediately dumped the decision on him, spontaneously designating him as the group’s leader. Lovely. He accepted, of course. If nothing else, he was pretty sure that sending Raynie away would not reflect too well on him and his plans to get closer to her.

The problem was that all three of them were very raw and untrained when it came to actual combat magic. Briam was admittedly already a member of the hunting group, but that was solely because he had his fire drake familiar – his spells were almost entirely centered around supporting that living flame thrower. Kopriva was in the process of becoming a member in a hunting group, but also not due to combat magic as such – she got in on the basis of providing her team with alchemical bombs and potions, and was heavily reliant on them herself. Raynie probably had some of her shifter magic to fall back on if really pressed, but she was keeping that part of her a secret and her mastery of classical combat spells was nothing to write home about.

Somehow, they still managed to make the meeting work, but it involved a lot more work and responsibility than Zorian was comfortable with. Since he was the leader, it mostly fell upon him to help the newcomers out.

At the end of the meeting he was sought out by Raynie, who handed him an envelope with the time and place for their meeting. It was the same restaurant she had used last time, which he supposed made sense if the owner was a personal friend of hers like Kiana claimed.

While this was happening, Zorian was in the process of finalizing his agreement with the Filigree Sages. In exchange for transporting them to Cyoria, guarding their salvager crews, and transporting their finds back to their home, Zorian had secured three different mind magic teachers, one of which was supposed to be an expert in memory reading and manipulation. Said memory reading expert also agreed to probe the minds of up to five prisoners that Zorian brought to her and share the findings with him. Finally, and a lot less critically, Zorian was entitled to a portion of the things the aranean salvager crews found in the settlement – only important because it gave him the excuse to closely monitor their activities, ostensibly so they wouldn’t cheat him out of his due, but really just so he knew how to properly salvage the place in future restarts.

Embarrassingly, it took less than two days for the Filigree Sages to do what Zorian couldn’t manage in an entire restart. Apparently the solution to finding the Cyorian web’s treasury was to descend down the deep vertical shaft which the Cyorian aranea used as garbage disposal, except that halfway to the bottom was a hole in the wall that led to their treasury. The hole was big enough for an aranea to comfortably pass while lugging cargo, but Zorian would have to crawl to pass through the opening and into the main chamber. The shaft actually had numerous such tunnels of various sizes branching off of it, all but one of which were dead ends, but it wasn’t that hard to narrow it down once you knew what the trick was.

According to the Filigree Sages, shafts like these were the secret to the ease with which the aranea could penetrate even very deep layers of the dungeon without getting slaughtered in the process. While a shaft like that did allow for some of the horrid things from lower layers to reach you easier, they were very defensible and could always be collapsed on invaders if incursions got too frequent. In cases where such shafts didn’t exist, aranea were liable to create them via application of stone shaping spells.

The actual treasury was… huge. A lot of space was taken up by huge spools of spider silk thread which were presumably the web’s primary source of income. But there was also a lot of raw currency there, both in the form of paper notes as well as precious metals and gems. A fair number of alchemical explosives and potions was also there, including heaps of different healing potions that the salvage crews claimed were optimized for aranean biology. They were very excited about those, and wanted Zorian’s help in contacting whoever made those – they seemed very dismissive about the possibility that the Cyorian aranea produced those themselves. There were quite a few spellbooks, alchemical recipe books, or spell formula blueprint compilations - many of them highly restricted, rare or very expensive. The Filigree Sages intended to cart all of them off back home for research purposes, but they agreed to let Zorian peruse them and copy a few choice bits for his own use. That would be enough to keep him busy until the end of the restart, so he was perfectly happy with that.

Finally, the vault held a lot of stuff that was really only of interest to aranea. Leather pouches and straps that aranea used for carting things around, nutrient blocks that were the aranea equivalent of dry rations, things like that. The Filigree Sages, at least, seemed very intrigued by those, marveling at the Cyorian web’s technological sophistication and ingenuity. It all looked very underwhelming to Zorian, but he supposed it wasn’t easy establishing a technological society when you have no hands.

Amazingly, the treasury was only the tip of the iceberg. There was another secret part of the settlement he had never found - a secret magic research room, which could only be accessed by selectively disabling a few choice bits of the warding scheme in one of the rooms, and then passing through the newly-opened hole in the ceiling. Sadly, there was a further layer of defenses even beyond that, and neither the Filigree Sages nor Zorian had been able to crack the wards on the second door thus far. The leader of the salvagers was starting to toy with the idea of simply smashing the door, but worried that there was some kind of self-destruct mechanism inside that would destroy the contents if the entrance was forced open. That was how Filigree Sages secured their own magic research rooms, apparently.

Finally, there was a room for storing records, which Zorian hadn’t noticed simply because it had never occurred to him to try and connect his mind to the one particularly lumpy wall in the back of the settlement. Apparently the bumps were memory stones – magic items that could record thoughts and memories, and which were apparently the aranea’s equivalent of written records. Personally, Zorian didn’t think this method was nearly as convenient as written records, but the Filigree Sages claimed this was a much more natural and convenient method for them, so what did he know? The important thing was that the records room held information about most of the dealings and operations the Cyorian web had had with the humans on the surface, barring top secret ones, and that Zorian could possibly coopt some of their organization for his own purposes. The Filigree Sages had no interest in that, seeing as how they intended to simply cart off anything that wasn’t nailed down rather than establish some kind of long-term presence, so they simply pointed the room to him and told him to do whatever he wanted with it.

Embarrassingly, Zorian remembered noticing the wall the first time he searched the place and thinking its unique texture might be significant… so he dug it up with alteration spells and was disappointed when he found nothing but solid rock behind it.

It was after one of these meetings with the Filigree Sages that Zorian came back to Imaya’s place and found Taiven waiting for him. Curious. They didn’t have another monster hunt scheduled until tomorrow. Maybe she wanted to talk about upping their tempo? They were extremely successful this time around, thanks to Zorian making full use of his future knowledge, so maybe she wanted to strike while the iron was hot. If so, he would have to disappoint her – he had too many things on his plate to devote more time to that.

The moment he got closer and she noticed him, however, he immediately realized she wasn’t here about something like that. She was upset. She asked to speak to him in private so he led her to his room and locked the door. He had heavily warded it at the start of the restart with a permanent warding scheme, so there was no need to waste time on privacy spells.

"What’s wrong?" he asked.

"What’s wrong, he asks," she mumbled.

Crap, she was upset at him. He didn’t remember doing anything to make her upset, though.

She took out a light blue crystal and slammed it at the desk of drawers next to his bed.

"What’s that?" she demanded.

"That’s a rhetorical question, surely?" Zorian asked, baffled. "It’s a piece of crystalized mana, of course."

"Yes, but why do you have an entire crate of that under your bed?" she demanded.

Zorian frowned. "You’ve been rooting through my stuff without my permission?"

"No, your little sister was," she said. "She and Nochka were playing princesses and making crowns out of crystalized mana for the two of them, Kana and Kosjenka. I walked in on them and asked them where they got those pretty stones they were using."

Damn it, Kiri!

"Okay," said Zorian, taking a big breath to calm himself down. "Putting that aside for the moment, why has this gotten you so upset? Why does it matter if I’ve got a crate of crystalized mana under my bed?"

She balled up her hands into fists, seething in her own frustration and… self-loathing? What?

"Because everything!" she finally shouted, slamming her fist into the nearby wall and causing him to flinch back in shock. "Everything! Everything, everything, everything!"

"Taiven, please!" shouted Zorian, frantically trying to calm her down. "Just calm down, you’re not making any sense!"

Was she… crying?

"How can you be so good at everything!?" she half-shouted at him, pushing him away. "You’re good enough at alchemy that Kael praises you. You create golems in your free time. You’re so good at divinations that adult professionals accused me of lying when I told them how good at finding monster nests you are. And you’re apparently good enough at combat magic that they’re letting you teach your own group!"

"That’s not-" Zorian tried to explain.

"Don’t try to lie to me!" she snapped at him. "I know you’re a better combat mage than me. You try to hide it, but I can tell. I’m not stupid! "

"I never claimed you are," Zorian assured her.

She ignored him.

"I worked on this for years," she cried. "I’m two years older than you and I worked so hard! Every day, every weekend, every moment I could spare. I made sure to focus; not spread myself too thin. I live for this. And then I find out that not only are you better than me in the one thing I focused on, you also have time for all these other things too! How!? How are you so much better than me? What am I doing wrong!? "

"Nothing!" Zorian hastily assured her. "You’re honestly pretty damn awesome, Taiven, and the only reason I got even close to your level is because I’m a dirty cheater who cheats."

"Then show me how to cheat, too, damn it!" she shouted.

Before he could say anything in response to that, she… wrapped him into a hug and started sobbing into his shoulder. He awkwardly returned her hug after a few seconds, desperately trying to think of a way to handle this situation.

He couldn’t think of anything at the moment. In light of that, perhaps it was a blessing in disguise that Taiven didn’t look like she would stop crying any time soon.

44. A Show of Trust

The idea that someone might connect all the dots and realize his abilities were way too developed for his age was not a foreign idea for Zorian. He tried to make sure that the abilities he showed to any one person or group were firmly within the realm of possible, but he always knew that a sufficiently curious and dedicated individual could track down enough clues to realize something didn’t quite add up. There was no solution to this, as far as he could tell – not unless he wanted to spend most of his time performing an incredibly elaborate and boring act. Something which he wasn’t sure he was capable of, and which probably wouldn’t be too good for his sanity. Ultimately, he decided that the whole thing was largely a non-issue. As long as he wasn’t caught doing something illegal, he could simply tell such amateur detectives to get lost. Well, he’d probably be more formal and courteous about it than that, but that was what it all boiled down to in the end.

He was even aware that it might be Taiven who caught on to him. In many ways, she was in an ideal position to do so. She was probably the only person who actually had a solid idea of what was normal for him and what wasn’t, and was thus far more likely to realize just how abnormal and sudden his current skill growth was. He had been interacting with her pretty heavily lately, giving her lots of material to work with. And lastly, they’d known each other from before. They were… friends. She would feel entitled to an explanation of some sort, and would be a lot less hesitant about confronting him than someone else might be.

And yet, despite all of that, Taiven still managed to completely blindside him in the end. He expected her reaction to be a lot of things, but never did he imagine she would break down into tears. It was just so unlike her. Yes, she was a very emotional girl, but she was also the sort to keep going forward and never let anything get to her.

He glanced to the left, where she was sitting on the bed beside him. She was a mess. She had stopped crying for a while now, but after-effects were still very visible – red face, runny nose, the standard stuff. Still, her emotions had leveled off in the past few minutes, so maybe she was ready to talk now?

"Feeling better?" he asked.

She lightly punched him in the shoulder as a response.

Yes, definitely feeling better.

"This sucks," she complained. "I came here all fired up, ready to get some answers, and in the end we didn’t even have a proper fight. I just made a fool of myself. Why couldn’t you have been more angry and defensive and… Zorian-like?"

"Err, sorry?" he said, mildly confused. He was tempted to ask just how she defined Zorian-like but decided it would be best if that remained a mystery for now. "To be fair, you weren’t behaving very Taiven-like either."

"I guess," she conceded. "Tell me something. Have you always been this talented? Have you been lying to me this whole time?"

"No," he answered simply.

She scrutinized him for a moment, watching for any sign of uncertainty and shiftiness in his eyes and posture, before sighing heavily.

"Figures," she said. "I thought as much. You’d have to be very dedicated to keep up the act for so long, and I can’t think of a reason why you’d bother. Still nice to hear it from your own mouth, though. Except… that only leaves one option on the table. That you overtook me in everything, including my specialty, in the few short months since we last saw each other. That…"

"You’re wrong," Zorian said, shaking his head. "I did not overtake you. I am confident that if we fought, you’d be victorious nine times out of ten. You’re still better than me."

If he didn’t just use mind magic to incapacitate her right from the start. Or ambush her. Or cover the battlefield in enough explosives to level a building. But he was pretty sure Taiven wouldn’t count those as real victories anyway, and aside from that, his point still stood.

"It doesn’t matter," she huffed. "With the kind of ridiculous growth you’re displaying, you’ll close that gap in a handful of weeks and then leave me in the dust. And you’ll have all that other stuff you’re tinkering with too. Am I wrong?"

"Sort of," he said. She gave him an annoyed look so he immediately clarified. "It’s complex. There is no way I’ll be able to close the gap between us in a handful of weeks, as you said. But time flows differently for me than it does for you, so I’ll get a lot more than that."

"What? What the hell are you saying?" she asked, giving him an incredulous look.

"We’ll come back to that later. Before I say more on the topic, I want to know what got you so upset about this," he said calmly.

"Say what? Zorian, you can’t say something like that and just go but we’ll talk about that later. This… this demands immediate clarification! This will be bugging me in the back of my head until I get an answer!" she complained.

"I know," Zorian said, smiling widely. "That’s why I’m not explaining anything until you tell me what’s going on."

She glared at him. He only smiled wider.

"You’re evil," she told him, looking away. "Besides, I already told you what’s bothering me and I’m pretty sure you heard me just fine. Everything I’ve done, all the skills I’ve spent my life honing… if you can surpass it all so easily, then what the hell have I been doing all my life? I don’t know what kind of cheat you used, and it honestly doesn’t matter because it shouldn’t have been enough! I’m good at this and I live for this, you can’t just decide one day to pursue the same field as me and then catch up to me in less than three months… while not even focusing on it properly! The only way that could be possible is… is if I were never really that good to begin with…"

"Oh come on," Zorian protested, quickly wrapping Taiven into another hug to forestall a second round of crying he could feel welling up inside of her. "That’s so totally ridiculous. Why would you doubt yourself like that? How does me being better erase your own accomplishments?"

"Accomplishments?" she asked incredulously, pushing him away. "What accomplishments? I work as a freaking teacher’s assistant, Zorian. For a non-magical class no less! Do you honestly think that’s what I hoped for when I graduated?"

He winced. So Taiven wasn’t as sanguine about that temporary setback as she pretended to be… In retrospect, he shouldn’t be so surprised by that – while failing to secure herself a mentor immediately after graduation was by no means the end of the world, it was bound to be a severe blow to her confidence. Still…

"Taiven, aren’t your parents both battlemages?" Zorian asked. "How come they haven’t pulled some of their connections to find you a mentor, or even just a better job?"

"Oh, my parents would love to find me a mentor," Taiven scoffed. "In fact, they already have someone in mind! He’s one of their old friends who’s long left the exciting parts of the business behind him when he lost his leg to a rock worm. He’s all about being cautious and minimizing risks, and he never does anything more challenging than routine pest extermination. Of course, that’s precisely why my parents want me to learn from him. If they had it their way, I’d be hunting mutated rats until I was thirty or something."

"Ah…" said Zorian awkwardly. He seemed to have walked straight into a touchy subject there.

"Yeah," Taiven said. "I love my parents, and I know they just want to keep me safe, but we just don’t see eye to eye there."

"Okay, sorry to bring that up then. But really, if the reason you’re so upset is that you think you’re some kind of failure, well… you can rest easy. You’re an awesome combat mage. As awesome as you ever were, and nothing I do can change that."

"I’m… not sure I really believe that," Taiven sighed. "I couldn’t find a mentor. The team I made wasn’t going anywhere until I recruited you in it. Meanwhile, my parents keep insisting I’m not ready and that it’s a good thing I’ve had such a slow start of my career. It’s nice to hear some encouragement, but it rings a little hollow considering… you know."

"Taiven, I’m not so good because you’re secretly bad and nobody bothered to clue you in until now," Zorian said. "I’m so good because I had more than four years to hone my skills since we last saw each other."

Taiven looked at him like he had grown a second head.

"That’s right – I’m actually older than you now," Zorian said. "With that in mind, it is actually pretty amazing that I am still not capable of casually sweeping you aside in a fight. Sure, I could kill you instantly from an ambush, but if we clashed head to head in a battle of pure spellwork, I would have to use every trick at my disposal and still wouldn’t be guaranteed a win. That is why I keep insisting you’re awesome."

"I don’t understand," she said. "You don’t sound like you’re joking, but that’s what this looks like to me. How can you be older than me? That’s not how age works, Zorian."

"Ah, did you already forget what I told you earlier?" Zorian asked, amused. "About how time flows differently for me than it does for you? I seem to remember you said it would keep bugging you until you get an answer…"

"Look, you know I’m not one for riddles and intellectual maneuvering," Taiven said crankily. "Why don’t you just tell me what’s happening here, okay?"

Sure, why not.

"I’ve lived through this month before," he said. "Many, many times. Every time I die, or on the night of the summer festival if I don’t, my soul gets wrenched back in time to the start of the month. It’s an endless loop that sees me getting stronger and more capable with each passing restart. Since you don’t retain your memories across restarts, my growth appears abrupt and inexplicable to you, but it’s really nothing more than your typical gradual improvement. Believe it or not, you’re the one that taught me a fair deal of that combat magic you’re so jealous of."

"Shut up. I’m not jealous!" she protested.

He quirked an eyebrow at her. "Out of all of that, that’s what you chose to focus on?"

"Yeah, well, at least that one has an easy response," she said. "What the hell am I supposed to say about the rest? Sure, it would explain your skills perfectly, but it’s just so…"

"Crazy?" Zorian offered.

"Yes," she agreed. "And also terrifying. You’re basically saying I’ll get killed in a few weeks and replaced with a one-month younger version of me. And that this isn’t the first time this happened, it’s just that I don’t remember any of it. That’s like something out of a horror story!"

"I prefer to think of it as just memory loss rather than death," Zorian said. "You’re still you, you just lose a couple of weeks of your life."

"Repeatedly," she added.

"Repeatedly," Zorian confirmed. "I’m not saying it isn’t terrifying, just that I don’t think it’s equivalent to death. Admittedly, I’m a little biased here – if I thought that the time loop murdered millions of people at the end of every restart, I’d have probably gone insane from stress a long time ago."

"Ah," she winced. "Sorry, I guess I’m still thinking of this as some kind of hypothetical scenario instead of something that’s actually happening. Still, assuming you’re not just pulling my leg here – and I swear to heavens, Zorian, if you are pulling my leg I’ll glue your mouth shut with that really nasty gunk they use on dangerous prisoners – that’s still pretty messed up. And also very unfair. Why are you the only person to remember anything?"

"I’m not," he said. "There are at least two other people looping with me, possibly more. One of them wants to destroy Cyoria."

She stared at him for a second before getting up from her position. For a moment he thought he had gone into too much detail too fast, and that she was going to walk through the door, but instead she started looking through his drawers, searching for something. He thought about telling her off for rooting through his stuff like that, but decided to wait and see what she was up to.

She eventually found an empty notebook and a working pen in one of the drawers, appropriated one of the larger and thicker books in his room and then reclaimed her seat on the bed.

She opened the notebook on her lap, the heavy book she took serving as an improvised table, and quickly scribbled something down on top of the page.

Huh, he’d never thought of Taiven as someone to take notes like that.

"There, I’m ready," she said. "Why don’t you start from the beginning this time…"

In the end, he wasn’t sure whether he had convinced her what he was saying was true or not. She took a lot of notes, asked even more questions, and then just left after telling him she had to think about things.

A far better outcome than he had expected to get, honestly. He really hoped she would overcome her disbelief and accept his story. It would be nice to have someone other than Kael to talk to about time loop related things. Not that there was anything wrong with the morlock boy, far from it, but sometimes he really wished he could get a second opinion about stuff.

Of course, it would hardly be him if that little bit of hope that came his way wasn’t soon balanced out by something or someone popping up to complicate things. In this case, that someone was Xvim. When he arrived at his office the next day for their weekly mentoring session, he was informed that his training group had been noticed and that Xvim was not happy at all that such an amateur had delusions about being fit for a teacher. In order to make him fit for a teacher, Xvim decided to step up their schedule – they now met three days a week instead of the usual one.

He really hated that man.

His talk with Raynie was going well, in his opinion. If nothing else, she was a lot more relaxed than she had been in the previous restart – she’d even ordered a glass of wine to go with her meal. Of course, he wasn’t actually learning anything new from her, since she was telling him the same things she had told him the last time they’d done this, but that was to be expected. He couldn’t exactly continue on where they last left off without explaining where he got that information, and he didn’t feel like making something up. The week had been stressful enough, he was fine with just going with the flow like this.

"You know," Raynie said, taking a small sip from her glass, "I’m getting the feeling that you already know most of what I’m telling you."

Oops. It seemed Raynie was a bit more perceptive than he gave her credit for. He didn’t think he was being particularly careless, so maybe she was just that good. Probably for the best that he’d never tried to lie to her, then.

"Sort of," he admitted.

"Why did you ask me something you already know the answer to, then?" she asked.

"So I can compare it with what I already know and see whether you were feeding me a bunch of lies or not," he said.

She snorted derisively. "I think you’ve confused me with one of your cat shifter friends. Don’t you think it’s kind of rude to assume the worst of people like that?"

"So you’re saying your visit to our training group the other day wasn’t about you testing me to see what I would do?" he asked with a smile.

"Ugh. It was so obvious, huh?" Raynie sighed. "Well, it wasn’t just that… but yes, I wanted to see how you would treat me."

"And?" he asked curiously. "What’s the verdict?"

"It’s good," she said. "You didn’t lash out at me for being so clearly underpowered compared to you and your buddies, but you also didn’t drop everything to spend the entire meeting hovering around me, trying to help. A fair treatment. I respect that. I don’t want special privileges."

"So you intend to keep coming, then?"

"Yes. As I said, seeing your reaction was just a part of it. I wasn’t lying when I said I wanted to get better."

There was a brief silence as Raynie seemed to considering something.

"So, Zorian? I’m curious about something," she eventually said. "What is it that drives you to try so hard? I mean, you’re near the top of the class at every subject, and you seem to be good enough for a fourth-year when it comes to combat magic. That had to have taken quite a lot of work. What are you trying to accomplish?"

Hum. What an interesting question. His reason for pushing himself at so many magical skills was, of course, that he very much needed them to survive… but that wasn’t true for all of them. Some of them he pursued for personal reasons, because he had an interest in the field. The funny thing was, he no longer had any idea what he wanted to actually do with his life once he was out of the time loop. Most of the career paths he had been eyeing before he got stuck in the time loop no longer appealed to him. They were too modest and routine for someone of his current skills, and he would only get more capable as time passed.

He could do better than that. But better how?

"Independence," he eventually answered. Raynie gave him a curious look so he hurried to clarify. "My family and I don’t really get along. I want to get away from them as soon as possible. Buy my own place, get a source of steady income to support myself, things like that."

All true, except that he already had the skills to achieve all of that easily. But it was the best answer he could come up with on such short notice.

"I see," she said. "I apologize if I’m overstepping my boundaries, but why aren’t you getting along with your family?"

"It’s a bit personal," Zorian sighed. "And also a long story. But the short version of it is that my parents have never cared much for me. I am the third son and a disappointment."

"A disappointment?" Raynie asked curiously. "Do I want to know?"

"You probably already know this, but I have a really famous older brother," Zorian said.

"Yes, Daimen," she nodded. "What about it?"

"I’m not him," Zorian said simply.

"Ah," she said, drawing the word out. "It’s that kind of disappointment. But shouldn’t your other brother have the same problem, then?"

"He does, but he’s more charming and social than me," Zorian shrugged. "He’ll never measure up to Daimen, but he’s ultimately alright in their book."

Also, Fortov was a selfish asshole and could go straight to hell for all that Zorian cared.

"Interesting," she said. "Let me present you with a hypothetical situation. Imagine it was not Daimen who came first. Imagine it was you, and your parents treated you as their chosen son. But then Daimen came about, and they promptly switched their favors to this new wonder child. Your time in the spotlight is over, and your parents fully expect you to move aside for their new darling. Do you think you would still have the same attitude you do now?"

Oh boy. He had a feeling this wasn’t really a hypothetical situation at all.

"Well…" he said, swallowing heavily. "Truthfully, I don’t think it’s possible for me to know what this hypothetical me might think and feel. So much would change in my life that I wouldn’t be the same person sitting here today. However, assuming someone magically switched me with this alternate version of me… yes, I would have the same attitude."

"You wouldn’t try to fight for your birthright as the firstborn?" she asked.

"No," he said, shaking his head. "The alternate version of me, having experienced my parents' favor, might see some value in trying to get it back. I would still seek to strike out on my own as soon as possible. The scenario doesn’t change anything for me."

"I see," she said, lost in thought.

Not long afterwards, they finished their talk and went their separate ways. As he walked back to Imaya’s place, he wondered whether he’d answered her hypothetical situation correctly.

She agreed to meet with him next week, so perhaps she would eventually explain what that was about.

He spent the rest of his Saturday working on the next golem with Edwin. This one was going to be a little more ambitious, being made out of steel and much bigger than Kosjenka – though not nearly as big as he had originally wanted, since Edwin had informed him that construction of golems taller than a meter in height was prohibited unless one had a special license. He had already broken that law in a previous restart, and he was definitely going to break it again in future ones, but there was no need to do so right now. He didn’t think Edwin would report him, but he probably wouldn’t want to help him break the regulations so brazenly. Them being arrested would be but a brief inconvenience for Zorian, but Edwin wouldn’t think of it that way.

The next day he immediately left the house in the morning and descended into the tunnels below Cyoria. One way or the other, the magic research room was getting opened – if he could not bypass the wards on the entrance, the Filigree Sages would break down the door to get in, consequences be damned.

He didn’t really agree with this decision. It had been less than a week since the Filigree Sages had started their salvaging operations, so he didn’t see why they were in such a rush to get it open. Well okay, they did explain why they were in such a hurry – the Cyorian underground was highly coveted territory among the aranea, being a center of their magical and technological revolution and all, and they were worried that the neighboring webs would swoop in and muscle them out any day now. Of course, Zorian knew from previous restarts that the neighboring webs weren’t going to come any time soon, but he couldn’t exactly tell the Filigree Sages that he had seen the future and that their fears were unfounded.

But no matter, even if they ended up destroying the contents, it wasn’t some great harm, at least from his perspective. He could always try again in future restarts.

He approached the dead settlement and he reached out telepathically to the guards posted by the Filigree Sages, announcing his arrival. Circle of Fortune and Golden Dust, the overseer of the Filigree Sages' expedition, moved to greet him.

[Welcome back, Zorian Kazinski,] the aranea greeted. He had told her previously to just call him by his name, but she hadn’t taken him up on that. [Any news from the surface?]

[Nothing too important,] he said. [The monster incursions are beginning to peter out so the number of monster hunters stalking the Dungeon should see a sharp drop soon.]

[Good,] she said. [This place is outside their usual patrol routes but I still worried some of them would stumble upon it. Are you ready for the attempt?]

[I guess. I still think you’re rushing, though.]

[We are,] she admitted. [I am not casting aspersions on your combat skills, but you’re still just one mage. If nothing else, you cannot be in more than one place at the same time. We have to work quickly.]

They soon arrived at the room that held the research room. Six more aranea were already inside, two of them analyzing the wards while the other four waited for a command to break down the door. After conversing with the two aranean ward breakers for a few minutes, Zorian created a floating disc of force to stand on and lifted himself towards the hole in the ceiling where the entrance stood.

He took out the ward analysis device from his jacket – the pocket watch that Taiven had been hired to retrieve so long ago, and whose absence clued him in to the existence of the treasury. He had located it inside the treasury uncovered by the Filigree Sages and, while he fully intended to dismantle it to see what made it tick, for now it was more useful to him intact, serving its intended purpose. He channeled a divination spell through the device and got to work.

From what he and the aranean ward breakers had been able to tell thus far, there were three main layers of defenses on the entrance. The first one would electrocute anyone touching the walls of the entrance. The second one would superheat the air inside it to lethal temperatures. The third one would bring down the entire ceiling on top of wannabe looters. All three had complicated and hidden trigger conditions, tied to a detection layer that neither he nor the aranean ward breakers could figure out.

Obviously, the third defense was the priority to disable, but it also appeared to be the defense most sensitive to attempted tampering. The Filigree Sages had worked out a way to neutralize it, but doing so would no doubt trigger all other defenses – both the two they were aware of, and any further ones they had yet to detect.

The ward analysis device really showed its usefulness, though – the detection layer, so byzantine and obscured from scrutiny in the past, simply unraveled under its power. It was… not as bad as he feared. He could do this. He contacted Circle of Fortune and told her he thought he could disable the defenses. The aranea in the room exploded into a flurry of activity, mostly vacating the room in case he overreached and brought the whole room down. Circle of Fortune and the two ward breakers, however, remained. The ward breakers would help him in the attempt, while Circle of Fortune simply announced that she had to be there. He didn’t argue with her, too absorbed by the task in front of him.

Over the course of the next hour and a half, he and the two aranean ward breakers slowly and carefully neutralized the detection layer and then moved onto unlocking the door itself. The door itself had some additional defenses, relatively minor in nature but strong enough to really ruin their day if they triggered any of them – it was to his immense relief, then, that they managed to get it open without setting off a single one.

Unfortunately, that’s when the defenses inside the room itself, completely separated from the main ward scheme and therefore undetectable from the outside, activated. If Zorian hadn’t reacted immediately by erecting a shield in front of them while simultaneously directing the force platform they were standing on downwards at maximum speed, the incoming explosion would surely have killed them on the spot. Even with that, they ended up crashing painfully on the floor of the cave, dazing them for a couple of crucial seconds.

There was no time to sit down and recover, though, because the ruined entrance to the research room was starting to pump sickly yellow gas into the room and Zorian had no intention of seeing what effect it had when breathed in. He held his breath and quickly sealed the entrance with a bubble of force, stopping more gas from pouring in, before casting a spell he’d seen Kyron cast once during the invasion. He raised his hand into the air and concentrated on the gas, causing it to surge towards his outstretched palm, where it flowed into a small, compact ball.

Moments later, once he was sure he’d gotten all of the gas, he restructured the churning ball of poison gas into harmless, inert dust and took stock of the situation with Circle of Fortune, who was lucky enough to escape the incident without consequences. The two ward breakers were not so lucky – they weren’t dead, but it was close. It turned out that aranea could not hold their breath like humans, so they ended up breathing in some of the poison gas in the room before he neutralized it. They would recover, but not any time soon, so Circle of Fortune asked him to drop them off back at the main Filigree Sages' settlement and pick up a new pair of ward breakers as replacements.

He later sent some ectoplasmic eyes and other remote sensors into the room to check it out, and found it completely wrecked by the explosion and coated in some dangerous looking green slime. Circle of Fortune just mentally shrugged, pronounced the entire thing a bust and ordered the entrance to the room walled off with alteration spells to prevent any further surprises coming from there.

[Don’t beat yourself up over this failure,] Circle of Fortune told him. [If we had gone through with our original plan, those defenses would have still gone off, probably killing the entire assault team assigned to breaking down the door. Plus, we’d also have had to deal with other traps you ended up disabling before you ran afoul of that last set. This is a much better outcome.]

Well, that was one way of looking at it. He left Circle of Fortune to deal with the final cleanup of the situation and went off to find his mind magic teachers among the aranea.

It didn’t take long for him to track them down to one of the isolated corners of the dead settlements, where the three of them were huddled together and engaged in telepathic conversation.

Before this restart, such intra-aranean conversations were completely opaque to him – telepathy was not language-independent, so unless the aranea spoke in a manner he could understand, he was out of luck. Now, however, one of those teachers had begun to teach him how to understand and use the aranean telepathic language, so he could actually understand a few snippets. He was still a rank beginner at it, of course, but it was enough to understand the general topic of the conversation. They were discussing the three strongest neighboring webs – Burning Apex, Red Brand Bearers and Deep Blue – and the threat they would pose to the expedition if they decided to send a war party to Cyoria. Sadly, that was about as much as he could figure out from the conversation. The details totally escaped him.

He made a mental note to see if he could find something about the neighboring webs in the records room. It might be a good idea to visit them sometime and see what they had to offer.

[Greetings,] he sent to all three of them. [Am I interrupting something important?]

[We’re just killing time,] Voice of Peace answered for them. She was the teacher that was supposed to help him learn how to interpret aranean senses, thoughts and memories. She’d decided on her own initiative that this included teaching him the aranean language, claiming he would never be really capable of making sense of the aranean mind without being fluent in it. She was also the most enthusiastic of his three teachers, often willing to work with him beyond their officially allotted time or go beyond the strict boundaries of what she was assigned to help him with. [Are you here for your daily lesson?]

[Yes,] he confirmed. [I know I’m a little early, but the project to open up the magic research room was a bit of a disaster.]

[We’ve heard,] said the aranea known simply as Hammerer – an rather apt name, considering the aranea in question specialized in telepathic combat and favored powerful, unrelenting assault. [Circle of Fortune was always the reckless sort. At least you made sure nobody died. I must admit I didn’t expect much from you when I heard you were supposed to guard us, but it seems you are actually useful from time to time.]

[Hammerer!] Voice of Peace protested.

[I just say it how it is,] Hammerer responded, not in the least bit contrite.

[Let’s not bicker in front of our student. It sets a bad example,] said Memory of Sublime Glories, the last of his three teachers. Zorian got the notion that she resented him somewhat and considered the job of teaching a lowly human to be beneath her. Or maybe teaching in general, he wasn’t really sure. Either way, she was too professional to let that get in the way of her job, so he had no cause to complain. [Are we following the same program we did the last time?]

[I don’t see why not,] Zorian said.

[In that case, we will continue where we left off yesterday. As an aside, I will not be able to help you further unless you acquire someone to serve as a, ah, practice subject for our next session. You indicated this would not be a problem?]

[No,] Zorian stated. [It won’t be.]

It should be trivial to ambush one of the cultists and drag him down here for interrogation and memory magic practice. The only thing he was unsure of was whether to go for a low-ranking member who probably didn’t know anything but whose disappearance would go largely unnoticed or if he should aim higher. He would have to think about it some more.

[Before we start though, I’d like your opinion about something,] Zorian said.

[Oh? What about?] Memory of Sublime Glories asked. [Is this about that massive memory packet lodged inside your mind, perhaps?]

Ugh. This was a problem with learning memory manipulation from the aranea – he had no choice but to let Memory of Sublime Glories inside his head somewhat. He was pretty sure he would detect any serious breach of trust on her part, but it was hard to prevent her from taking a sneak peek at his thoughts every now and then.

[I thought you said you’d refrain from doing that?] he asked her, annoyed.

[I barely looked,] she protested. [An aranean memory packet inside a human mind, especially one of that size, is just very noticeable. Besides, you were just thinking about letting me examine it in more detail, so why are you complaining about that? I’m about to get a much closer look at it anyway.]

Zorian sighed in defeat. He hated it when the aranea responded to his thoughts before he actually put them into words. It was just rude. Still, she was essentially correct – he needed her to take a look at the matriarch’s memory packet and tell him what she saw, because to his own amateur mental senses it seemed to be degrading already.

If that was true, then he needed to know how much time he had.

After a bit more back and forth he reluctantly opened his mind to her and agreed to let her take a closer look at his mind so she could figure out what was happening with the memory packet. Thankfully, she seemed to behave herself, so the explosives around his neck remained inert and undetonated.

Eventually she withdrew from his mind and gave him the verdict.

[I’m afraid you’re correct,] she said. [The boundaries of the memory packet have indeed begun to fall apart.]

His heart sank. That was precisely what he was afraid of. He wasn’t ready. If he opened the package now, he doubted he would get anything out of it. But if he waited…

[How long do I have?] he asked.

[Hard to say. I’ve never seen a memory packet that big, so it’s hard to judge how the decay will progress. It can stay stable for another three months, I think. Maybe four. If you really want to be certain, though, you’ll have to open it within the next two months.]

[Isn’t there anything that can be done to stop, or at least slow the decay?] Zorian asked desperately.

[Repairing memory packets is fairly easy if you’re the one who made them,] Memory of Sublime Glories said. [Far less so if somebody else did. I don’t think I could repair something that elaborate, and you would never trust me to tinker that deeply with your mind, anyway. I will teach you the basics of the skill, if you wish, but to get good enough to repair that thing you will have to secure a better teacher.]

[Any idea where I could find one?] Zorian asked.

[The Luminous Advocates probably have what you need,] she said. [I heard they can be hard to deal with, though. They drive a hard bargain.]

Ugh, those guys. Well, desperate times called for desperate measures. If nothing else, getting enough money to pay for their outrageous prices should be fairly trivial at this point.

[In that case, I’d like to postpone our current lesson plan for a bit and concentrate on memory packets and how to repair them,] he told her.

[Of course,] she agreed easily. [Here is what you do…]

He returned home later in the evening, tired and depressed. He had hoped to do some more work after his visit to the Filigree Sages, but between the failure to secure the contents of the magic research room intact and the confirmation that the matriarch’s memory packet had begun to unravel, he didn’t feel like doing anything.

"Oh, you’re back!" Imaya exclaimed when he entered the house. "Your friend has been waiting for you for a while now. She’s in the basement with Kael right now. Do you want me to call her or are you going to get her yourself?"

His friend? Her?

"Taiven?" he guessed. Imaya nodded. Huh, that was a lot earlier than he had expected to hear from her. This could be either very good or very bad. "I’ll go see what she wants."

"You know, the last time your friend visited you, she left the house looking like she had been crying," Imaya said casually.

"Is there a reason why you’re pronouncing friend like that?" Zorian asked her suspiciously.

"You’re not breaking young girls' hearts, are you, mister Kazinski?"

"Ugh. There is nothing like that between me and Taiven, okay? And besides, if anyone is the heartbreaker here, it’s definitely Taiven," he protested.

She gave him a curious look.

"I’d prefer not to talk about it," he said, shaking his head.

Thankfully, she didn’t press the issue, so he went to the basement to talk to Taiven and see what she decided. He found her talking with Kael about the time loop, comparing notes and discussing time travel mechanics.

"So does this mean you believe me?" he asked her hopefully.

"I suppose," she said. "This is still all very fantastical and unreal to me, but everything you told me seems to check out. Or at least the parts I can actually check do. And Kael here seems convinced you’re telling the truth, too. So yeah, I guess I kind of believe you."

"Is there anything you can tell me that would help me convince you in future restarts?" Zorian asked.

"Kael and I talked about that for a while," she said. "I don’t know. Any personal information I could give you would just creep me out if you started spouting it off all of a sudden – I’d sooner decide that you’ve been spying on me or that you’re reading my mind than that you are a time traveler. If you just tracked me down at the start of the restart and started showing off everything you’ve learned inside the time loop, I’d definitely accept that something strange is going on, but I’d probably think you’re a shapeshifter in disguise or possessed. It’s only because I interacted with you pretty heavily for a whole week that I never doubted that you’re… well, you."

"How about this then: I start the next restart the same way I did this one, joining your group and all, wait for a few days for you to get annoyed with my growth spike, and then confront you about it on my own initiative before you have a chance to get really fed up with it," Zorian tried.

Tension that he never even noticed until that moment seemed to drain from her shoulders and she sagged in relief.

"What?" he said, frowning.

"I… was afraid you’d just keep duplicating the circumstances that led me here over and over again," she admitted. "Even if I don’t retain memories of it, I don’t want to be repeatedly reduced to tears. It was humiliating once, thank you very much."

"Truth be told, I wasn’t okay with the idea of repeatedly making you cry, either," he told her. "So that option was definitely off the table, even if you were okay with it."

She looked away, embarrassed.

Kael cleared his throat to get their attention.

"I hate to break up the moment, but we have much to talk about," he said.

"Yes," Taiven agreed, relishing the chance to change the topic. "First of all – Zorian, why haven’t you contacted Zach yet? This Red Robe of yours is a threat to you both, and you said yourself that you think he’s at the center of all this. It only makes sense to work together. I don’t understand your reluctance to talk to him."

"First of all, there is a possibility that Red Robe is monitoring Zach and tracking his movements. If so, then contacting him would mean revealing myself to Red Robe," Zorian said. "Secondly, I suspect that the moment I contact Zach, my whole schedule is getting thrown into the trash can. I have some fairly urgent things I need to do in the near future, I can’t drop everything to hang out with Zach. Even assuming he is fairly understanding of my goals, he’ll still probably insist on taking part in my activities. Since the things I’m doing require subtlety, which he entirely lacks, that’s a problem. All in all, I just don’t think it’s a good idea to involve myself with him at this moment."

"So, what, you intend to avoid a potential ally just like that?" Taiven asked.

"Only until I’m done investigating the invaders and I can get the matriarch’s memory packet open," Zorian said. "After that, I will probably go out and meet with him to see what he has been doing and whether we can help each other."

"Huh. Alright," she said, somewhat mollified. "That makes more sense. To be honest, I thought you’d be a lot more stubborn about this than that. Kael said you had some sort of grudge against the guy, and I know how you are with your grudges."

"Well, Kael is wrong. I don’t have a grudge against Zach," he said, giving the white-haired boy an annoyed look. "But whatever. One problem solved. What else do we need to talk about?"

Kael ripped out a page out of his notebook and offered it to Zorian.

"We made a list," Kael said with a smile. "Taiven had a lot of suggestions."

Zorian accepted the piece of paper with a sigh and began to read. She really knew how to pick a day to drop this on his head, didn’t she?

When it rains, it pours.

45. Fine Structures

Zorian was starting to realize he didn’t understand Taiven nearly as well as he thought he did. And it wasn’t just the surprising amount of insecurity that lurked behind her seemingly endless optimism and confidence that made him think that – it was also the amount of thought and consideration she put into his time loop situation. When he told her about his situation, she actually listened to him without interruption, and even took notes, and then later came back with a list of questions and ideas. This was very atypical behavior for her. Taiven was pretty much a prime example of the less thinking, more action philosophy, and she even admitted that she still wasn’t entirely convinced about the whole time loop thing, so he was rather baffled about her motives and thought processes.

Still, while the list she had made with Kael’s help was kind of surprising, it contained nothing particularly revolutionary, and all of the points could be boiled down to four basic questions. Why didn’t he get help from more people around him than her and Kael? Why didn’t he tell the government or academy authorities what was going on and get their cooperation? Why was he pursuing so many magical fields instead of properly focusing on them, one at a time? And lastly, why didn’t he try harder to develop his combat magic!?

Zorian found the last one especially amusing. It was only a few days ago, after all, that Taiven was breaking down into tears over his incredible combat skills, yet now she was saying he should have put more effort into them.

You just couldn’t satisfy some people.

Alas, Taiven didn’t find her complete turnaround of opinion nearly as amusing as he did. Zorian’s logic for putting combat magic practice squarely in the secondary goal pile – namely, that very few of his problems could be solved through direct violence and that he just wasn’t terribly suited for combat magic in the first place – had been summarily rejected by Taiven, who decreed that she would be helping to bring him up to snuff in that regard. Through sparring.

Constant, daily, dangerously serious sparring. He’d apparently had no idea what he was getting into when he’d decided to go along with her idea, because there was a huge difference between sparring with Taiven when she thought he was just a precocious amateur with a couple of tricks and sparring with her when she considered him a serious threat right from the start and wasn’t afraid of hurting him. She was vicious and merciless, and he was honestly afraid she would end up killing him if he didn’t give it his all, despite all the safety wards embedded into her family’s training hall. It was just a bit too intense for his liking.

Maybe she was still a little bitter about him improving so much in so short a time.

"Are you ready?" she asked him, twirling her combat staff playfully in her hands.

"No?" Zorian tried. He’d just finished another frustrating session with Xvim, and didn’t get to rest at all before coming over to Taiven’s place. The last thing he wanted to do right now was get smacked around in the name of training.

"Too bad," Taiven snorted derisively. "We’re starting. Go!"

Yeah, he didn’t think that would actually get him anywhere. He immediately threw himself to the side, dodging her opening shot. Which wasn’t a magic missile or anything reasonable like that – no, she opened the battle with a powerful beam of force. Force lance, as the spell was called, was her new favorite when fighting him. He knew better than to try to shield against it this time – the beam was practically designed for cracking simple force barriers, focusing an immense amount of penetrating force on a tiny patch of the shielding surface. Some of the stronger, more advanced shields could withstand the beam, but nothing in Zorian’s arsenal could truly stand up to it. He had learned that lesson very painfully in the first few spars he’d had with Taiven during the past few days, and he still had bruises all over his chest and arms to prove it. Even at their highest setting, the safety wards couldn’t blunt the power of the spear-like beam completely.

No, the only realistic defense he had against that spell was moving out of its way. The good news was that beam spells like those couldn’t home in on targets, so dodging them was an option. The bad news was that a beam traveled blindingly fast and was really hard to evade at the distances he and Taiven fought at. Plus, he kind of sucked at dodging.

The last few days had forced him to learn quickly, though, and in this particular case he was fast enough to move out of the beam’s path.

He responded immediately with a gust of wind, trying to knock her off-balance and possibly blind her. Sadly, this was not the first time he’d tried that and she simply countered it with a weather shield before throwing a fully-powered fireball at him. Gods, she really wasn’t playing around, was she? He fired off a dispelling wave to negate it, since the alternative would be to tank it with a much more expensive aegis. Besides, cost concerns aside, the spherical shield would leave him immobile while in place, and Taiven would be sure to capitalize on that.

A force lance that quickly followed the fireball told him that this was indeed her likely plan – if he had stood still and tried to tank the fireball, the force lance would have caught him flat-footed.

He threw a small swarm of magic missiles at her, all of them on a very direct trajectory towards her. They were just bait, really, intended to take advantage of a certain predictable maneuver Taiven liked to do, where she countered such attacks by firing a massive battering ram of force that not only swept the attack aside, but also acted as a counter attack at the same time. That’s why he immediately followed up his barrage with a ray of electricity, which would be completely unaffected by her blast of force.

He guessed her response well this time. She had tried to respond with a force battering ram, but then caught onto his plan half-way through and dodged the beam he’d sent at her. As for himself, he used the disturbance in her attack rhythm to initiate a short-distance teleport, transporting himself behind her back. She noticed him, of course – she was probably using that mana-sensing trick she’d taught him so long ago – but she could do little else but raise a hasty aegis to shield herself against the blast of force he’d sent at her. He followed this up with a force lance, intending to give her a taste of her own medicine, but she expertly dodged that and sent an eight missile swarm at him, forcing him to fire another dispelling wave to deal with them. He kind of wondered why she still kept bunching up her projectile swarms together like that when she already knew that allowed him to take them all out with a single counter-spell. Maybe she couldn’t? He knew he had better shaping skills than her, so maybe that kind of fine control over one’s projectiles was beyond her.

He teleported again to evade another battering ram of force and then sent his own missile swarm at her, each missile following its own exotic trajectory to make them hard to track and take out.

That battle raged like that for another couple of minutes, before Zorian was forced to concede defeat due to running out of mana. It was a good fight in his opinion, if nothing else because he didn’t get any new bruises this time around. Taiven complained, of course, lecturing him about pacing himself better, but the simple truth was that she was driving him way too hard for him to be conservative with his mana use. He would rather be too frivolous with his mana use and lose due to exhausting himself than end up on the receiving end of an offensive spell again.

"You know, running out of mana like that in a real battle basically means you die," Taiven said.

"And getting speared through the lung by a force lance doesn’t?" Zorian countered.

She stared at him. "Okay, yeah, you got me there."

She walked over to a nearby bench and motioned him to sit beside her.

"Have you thought about that list Kael gave you?" she asked.

Of course he had. He even discussed with her some of the points she’d brought up over the past few days, although he suspected she didn’t like his answers all that much. Interpreting her question as a demand for a more long-winded, comprehensive explanation, he started telling her about the reasoning behind his decisions.

His reasons for not getting help from more people, and especially official authorities of any sort, were simple to explain. The more people he told about the time loop, the greater the chance that they would let something slip to the wrong person and lead Red Robe back to him. Unless they had something he really needed, and which he simply couldn’t get by any other way, it was best to keep them ignorant of the time loop. Truthfully, even telling Taiven was probably a pointless risk. He told her about the time loop for the same reason he kept taking Kirielle with him to Cyoria, despite his little sister being nothing but a huge liability and time sink – he wanted someone familiar to talk and confide to.

He kept his mouth shut about that last detail in his explanation to Taiven, though – he doubted she would appreciate hearing that. Instead he focused on the fact that virtually no one would be willing to believe him about being a time traveler, and that convincing them would probably take weeks and could easily cause quite a stir. This was especially true in regards to her ideas about contacting the city government or academy authorities. Zach had already tried to notify them about the time loop and had never been taken seriously – there was no reason to think Zorian would be any more successful at it than Zach was.

"Didn’t you say Zach is kind of an idiot?" Taiven asked curiously.

"Sort of," said Zorian. "But in this case, I think he’s far more suited to the task than I am. There is no way I’d ever be as trustworthy to authority figures as Zach."

"Ah, yes, the natural mind magic thing," Taiven said.

"Well, that too, but I was actually thinking about how I’d probably never be as forthright and honest about things as Zach probably was," he admitted. "I’d hide things and people would notice and be wary of me as a result."

Taiven gave him a long, searching look. "You’re not even telling me everything, are you?"

"I’m telling you most things," he said. "Everything I think is relevant."

She stayed silent and gave him an annoyed look.

"Anyway," he said quickly, looking to change the subject, "even ignoring that, contacting Cyoria’s authorities is a particularly bad idea because there is obviously someone high in the administration that is cooperating with the invaders. I’m almost certain by now that whoever is leading the Cult of the Dragon Below also has a high position in the city government – it would explain why the members of the cult keep getting lucrative contracts from the city and exemptions from all sorts of normal regulations – and it would make sense for Ibasans to also have someone in their pocket."

"I keep forgetting that part," Taiven admitted. "Which is pretty bizarre, now that I think about it. Finding out that some crazy cult has thoroughly infiltrated our city government is honestly one of the scariest parts of your story, but the part where I’ll apparently get erased out of existence at the end of this month sort of drowns out everything else."

Ouch. She was still fixated on that. He did his best to move the conversation along, tackling her concerns about spreading himself thin next.

Her complaints that it would be better for him if he picked one or two things to really focus on held merit. Unfortunately, there was a reason why he was not doing that - he kept encountering various emergencies during his time in the time loop, which forced him to often drop topics or push them into the background to accommodate the newest priority that just sprung up on him. The second issue basically amounted to personal weakness – he could only focus on something for so long before he got thoroughly sick of it and had to do something else. Since he aimed to be a generalist mage anyway, he didn’t think of this as some huge issue he had to work on, but he understood why a tightly-focused spellcaster like Taiven would be annoyed with him for that.

"As for not trying harder at combat magic, well… we already discussed that topic enough, I think. You already know my opinion on the matter," he told her.

"Yet you keep coming to these spars anyway," she noted. "I know I was kind of pushy about it, but it’s not like I can really make you come if you decided to put your foot down."

"Well, I do want to get better at it," he shrugged. "No reason to refuse free practice. I just wish you would tone it down a little."

"Oh, come on. What are you afraid of?" Taiven scoffed. "Aren’t you a big, bad time traveler that can’t really die?"

"Treating death as a nuisance could easily become a habit that would kill me for real once I’m out of the time loop. Unless there is a pressing need for it, or some downright amazing opportunity, I’d like to avoid dying too much," Zorian said. "Also, you do realize that the time loop only resets when Zach dies, not when I do? If you end up killing me, you’ll have to live with the consequences 'till the end of the month."

The look she gave him told him that no, she did not realize that.

Yup, that was more like the Taiven he knew.

She mumbled something about sensitive little flowers and then leaned back on the cold wall behind them. Rather unhealthy, that.

"You know, you don’t have to rely on me to help you with combat magic," she said. "There are quite a few combat magic instructors in Cyoria. With the amount of money you have at your disposal and the ability to keep spending it over and over again, you could get instruction from all of them. Combat magic may not be a priority for you, but keep that in mind. This is a killer opportunity, and you will never get anything like it outside of your time loop."

Zorian frowned. "What do you mean?"

"A lot of mages simply won’t teach you if they know you’ve been taught by their rival or competitor," she told him. "As in, they’ll refuse out of principle. There is quite a bit of difference in teaching your personal tricks to some young mage who is just starting out and teaching them to this extremely talented guy who has absorbed the teachings of several veteran mages. Hell, some mages won’t want to have anything to do with you if you seem too competent, period. They don’t want to create a competitor that will overshadow them and steal lucrative opportunities from them in the future."

"No offense Taiven, but Daimen never had any trouble securing powerful teachers," Zorian said. "If anything, the number of people who wanted to mentor him increased as his talent became known to people."

"I don’t doubt it," she said. "But I guarantee that some doors also became closed to him at the same time. For you, that doesn’t have to be the case – not only will prospective teachers never know who else taught you in the past or how good you really are, you can also do things like sign apprenticeship contracts without them really binding you to anything. Hell, you could accept some really shitty deals if it meant getting some of the really deep secrets people have. Just… think about it, okay?"

"I am thinking about it. I’ve been thinking about that sort of thing since the start of the time loop. It’s just that more pressing issues keep cropping up and eating into my time," he said. "I’m surprised you’re bringing that up, though. Doesn’t that bother you? I mean, we’re basically talking about weaseling out the secrets that these people have spent their life gathering without compensating them in any way."

"Well, yes," she said. "But realistically speaking, I’d do it in a heartbeat if I was in your place. And frankly, so would nine tenths of those same experts you’re feeling sorry for. Are you seriously telling me you haven’t been doing something like that all this time?"

"Sometimes," Zorian said. Ilsa stood prominently in his mind, since he’d flat-out become her apprentice to get her to teach him some of her stuff. "But I have been keeping a mental list of people I owe in this way, and I was thinking of doing something for them once I get out of the time loop. It’s already quite a long list, though, and I don’t know whether I can even do anything for some of them…"

"Ugh," she grunted, looking away uncomfortably.

"What?" he asked.

"You’re a really weird guy, Zorian," she complained. "You can be such a selfish jerk at times, and then you say stuff like that and I realize I don’t understand you at all."

"The feeling is mutual, Taiven," he told her with a smile.

"What, that you think I’m a selfish jerk or that you don’t understand me either?" she asked.

"Both," he said. Man, she really walked into that one…

She made an outraged sound and gave him a light shove.

"You’re violent, too," he added.

"Whatever," she said, getting up from the bench. "I’ll bring Grunt and Mumble to our next spar so you can have some variety. I think I can also call in a few favors from my former classmates who also went for combat-related careers and have them fight you a few times as well. Your spellcasting is technically flawless but you need better combat reflexes."

Zorian gave her a curious look.

"Why are you being so proactive about this?" he asked her. "I know you hate me bringing it up, but it was only a few days ago that you hated the idea of me surpassing you in your own field. Why did you change your attitude so drastically? You don’t even fully believe in the time loop story, according to your own admission."

"Because your life is on the line," she told him seriously. "That’s the most important thing I got from your explanation. If it weren’t for that… well, I’d be hell of a lot more jealous and bitter about all this. But it’s not just an advantage, you have a heavy responsibility on your shoulders, and someone is trying to get you killed. In light of the chance that you might not make it out of this alive, all of my frustrations seem so… petty in comparison."

Huh… was that why she was so insistent he needed to work more on his combat skills?

"Don’t die, okay?" she said when he didn’t say anything for a while. "You’re the best friend I have."

Zorian fidgeted uncomfortably, unused to that kind of confession and mystified as to how he should respond to it. The snide, cynical part of him felt that was a pretty sad admission. He hadn’t exactly been a nice person in his pre-loop days, and he had nursed a grudge against her ever since she’d laughed at his love confession. If the invasion and the time loop had never happened, would he have gotten over that in time to salvage their friendship? Or would he have continued to push her away until she eventually gave up on him, completely unaware that she apparently considered him her best friend?

"I’ll try not to," he eventually told her. He couldn’t promise anything. Telling her that he would definitely live and that she had no cause for concern would be a lie and they’d both know it. "Say, Taiven, did you put some thought into how we can make this time loop work to your benefit? You know, like Kael did for his alchemy?"

"Well, no," she said, shaking her head sadly. "It’s useless, isn’t it? Practicing combat magic requires shaping skills and routines that cannot be transferred via written notes. What could either of us possibly do to help the other Taiven?"

"I could teach you various shaping exercises and note which ones work best for you, though," Zorian said. "I could show you the different combat spells I found over the restarts and note which ones you handle the best and what the most effective way of training you in them is. Kirielle’s magic lessons are at least two times more effective now than they were when I first tried to teach her, so it should be utterly trivial to create a training program that would let you grow twice as fast as you would without it."

"Just how much stuff do you think you can cram in one month?" Taiven asked skeptically.

"We won’t know 'till we try it, will we?" Zorian countered. "And besides, there is no reason why the final training plan has to be limited to a month. Does every single new thing you learn necessarily build atop things you already mastered?"

"No?"

"There you go. That means we can break down a training plan into month-long chunks and optimize them separately. We can get at least a year that way, especially if you branch out in some necessary support skills that you’ve been ignoring. Your lack of divination skills is really felt in any restart where I decide not to join you, for instance."

Taiven looked torn. She was clearly excited about the idea but at the same time she felt… guilty about it?

"I don’t know…" she said. "That sounds really time consuming, and you don’t really get anything out of it. You said yourself that you already have too many things vying for your attention."

She was right, of course. Still, he owed her something for all the help she’d given him in the past, and this seemed like a perfect way to pay her back. He would find the time if he could. Maybe not a lot of time, but still.

"I was going to look into combat magic-related shaping exercises anyway," he said. "It might actually be a better idea to go through those together with you than to study them alone. You would know which ones are more useful better than I would. And besides, who says I have to hover around you all the time – I’m sure you can do a lot of testing yourself and then write a notebook for me to transfer into the next restart like Kael is doing. Or just tell me what you found out face to face before the summer festival."

It didn’t take much convincing before Taiven was fully on board with the idea. In a way, this was what she had asked of him back when she lost her composure – to show her how to cheat, too. He promised to bring an initial batch of spells and shaping exercises tomorrow on their next spar and then left to take care of other obligations.

He wondered how long it would take for her to realize that she had agreed to spend day after day doing shaping exercises. He’d have to practice his Xvim impersonation for tomorrow.

In the ruins of the aranean settlement beneath Cyoria, Zorian patiently waited for Memory of Sublime Glories to finish memory probing the Ibasan mage he had captured and brought to her for interrogation. He had ventured deep into invader-held underground to retrieve this man, and was fortunate to stumble upon one of the middle-ranked leaders of the invasion force, so he had high hopes for the result of Sublime Glories' memory dive.

In the meantime, he kept floating above the cavern floor not far from the aranea and her victim, holding himself aloft with the personal levitation exercise. In his left hand he held one of several small stones, which he kept disintegrating into dust in similarly non-structured manner. He had mastered both shaping exercises a long time ago, but the mild disruption effects present this far underground made them mildly challenging and thus a nice way to pass the time.

He was starting to run out of rocks when the aranea finally withdrew from the invader’s mind and approached him.

Obviously, he had not told Memory of Sublime Glories anything about time travel, so he was not surprised that her report didn’t mention anything remotely related to that. Still, she found out plenty of things of interest.

[The Ibasans are scared of you,] Memory of Sublime Glories said. [Well, not you personally, but the human nations on this continent are a source of constant worry for them. The technological revolution you are undergoing has not taken root on their island, and they fear they will gradually become powerless and irrelevant as time goes by. Since your nations have recently gone through several rounds of self-destructive wars and a deadly epidemic, and are at their most disunited in a long while, a lot of Ibasans feel that the time to strike at you is now. There has been a lot of agitation to launch some kind of invasion, but apparently there is also an influential faction that thinks such an invasion would be utter suicide and advocates trying to reopen diplomatic links to the continent. In light of that, this attack seems to have two main goals. The first is to make this nation look weak to others, thereby making any potential invasion by Ulquaan Ibasa look more attractive to their less warlike kin back home. Such a perception of weakness could also possibly ignite another continental war that would weaken everyone on the continent further. The second goal is to destroy any chance of official peace between Ulquaan Ibasa and Eldemar, thereby making the position of the reconciliation faction untenable.]

[They’re not scared that Eldemar might respond to the attack by outright invading Ulquaan Ibasa?] Zorian asked.

[Ulquaan Ibasa is remote and inhospitable, and Eldemar has continental rivals to worry about,] Memory of Sublime Glories said. [They expect a response, but nothing substantial. A series of raids at most.]

Zorian wasn’t so sure about that. Eldemar had been prospering for some time now, and the government was quite proud and aggressive. He wouldn’t put it past the current royals and the Noble Council to launch a full scale invasion of Ulquaan Ibasa out of sheer principle, costs be damned. Especially since the Ibasans were diplomatically isolated and not part of the byzantine web of alliances that prevented the larger Splinter States from simply attacking the smaller ones and absorbing them through force of arms.

As the aranea continued with her findings, however, it became obvious that the Ibasans had not simply relied on empty hope to discourage such an invasion. Sometime near the beginning of the month, just before the start of the time loop, the Ibasans had managed to overrun Fort Oroklo without alerting Eldemar that it had changed hands.

Situated on a small island to the northeast of Eldemar and named after the general that had defeated Quatach-Ichl’s army at the conclusion of the Necromancer’s War, Fort Oroklo was a small but important installation that served the dual purpose of being a monitoring station for keeping an eye on Ulquaan Ibasa and a supply base for Eldemar naval patrols. The Ibasans apparently called it Fort Dagger, because they considered it a knife pointed straight at their throat. So long as Eldemar held Fort Oroklo, they had a perfect staging ground for any raid or invasion on Ulquaan Ibasa.

Before Eldemar could launch an attack on Ulquaan Ibasa, it first had to retake Fort Oroklo – a heavily-warded fortress situated on an excellent defensive position.

[Some of this doesn’t make any sense,] Zorian complained. [According to you, the Ibasans are transporting their forces straight from Ulquaan Ibasa to Fort Oroklo, then from Fort Oroklo to some unknown point in the Sarokian Highlands, and then from there to beneath Cyoria.]

[Yes, what of it?]

[That’s not enough stops for an effective teleportation chain,] Zorian said. [Only two stop points for a journey of such distance, with the final destination point being deep underground to boot? There is no way that’s really what’s happening. If they were sending letters or small packages maybe, but no way could you transport an army like that. Even if Quatach-Ichl is the best mass teleporter in the whole damn world, the mana costs for such long jumps would be completely impractical on that scale.]

Admittedly, such a small number of stops would do much to explain how they could transport such an army through Eldemar territory without being discovered by Eldemar, but…

[They’re not teleporting in the manner we’ve seen you do it,] Memory of Sublime Glories noted. [They are using some kind of stone construct to open a dimensional passage between two points. Like a door to another land.]

What?

[Can you describe that door in more detail, please?] Zorian asked, frowning.

Instead of answering with words, the aranea promptly projected an image of said door that she pilfered from the man’s mind straight into his mind.

It wasn’t a stone arch like he expected – instead, it was a collection of stone bars arranged into a form of a large, skeletal icosahedron. Suspended in the middle of this bizarre geometric construct, like a window cut into the very air itself, was the dimensional gate. It appeared circular at first glance, edges marked by a warped, blurry outline that looked as if someone had ran a finger through a wet painting and smudged all the colors together. As the aranea helpfully rotated the image, however, it became obvious that the gate looked circular no matter from which direction it was seen. It was spherical.

Well… he supposed that answered some things. The gate spell was pretty much the pinnacle of dimensional magic, requiring both a lot of mana and extreme shaping skills to pull off successfully, but the invaders did have an ancient lich on their side. If anyone could casually open a gate, it would be Quatach-Ichl.

But…

[They were inspired by ancient artifacts called Bakora gates,] the aranea added. [Though unable to actually figure out how the Bakora gates work or how to activate them, they realized that the icosahedron thing around them is meant to stabilize the dimensional passage and make it last indefinitely. Or at least as long as you keep supplying it with enough mana. So they made their own version of it.]

[Wait, you’re saying that thing down there is constantly active?] Zorian asked incredulously.

[According to our prisoner, yes,] the aranea said. [As far as he knows, the door is never shut down.]

Gods, a permanent dimensional passage like that… no wonder the invaders could bring such a huge force beneath the city and keep supplying it. He fired off a bunch of additional questions about how the knockoff Bakora gate was made, what its limitations were and so forth, but found that their captive had no idea of any of those things. Anyone except the leaders of the invasion was unlikely to know such things, and possibly no one except Quatach-Ichl, who seemed to be in charge of maintaining the gates.

Annoying. Still, the fact that the invasion was supplied by permanently active dimensional gates did provide certain opportunities. For instance, it meant that if he could capture the gates fast enough, he could get access straight into the heart of Ibasan operations, perhaps even Ulquaan Ibasa itself. Destroying the gate in their main base would no doubt utterly cripple the planned invasion, unless a new gate was easy to build, which he doubted. Finally, it opened the possibility of stealing the design from whoever made the thing – something he definitely wanted to do if it was at all possible.

Hopefully the design wasn’t exclusively held by Quatach-Ichl or ran on children’s souls or some such, because that was one amazing piece of magic.

[What about the research facility I’ve told you about?] Zorian asked.

[Nothing that you don’t already know,] Memory of Sublime Glories told him. [Frankly, I think you’re going about this the wrong way. You say the previous aranea found out something important about that facility? Well, I don’t think they did it by reading the minds of Ibasan invaders. Admittedly, I cannot tell that for certain without getting access to some of their leaders, but they seem to neither know nor care about what’s down there. Except for the lich, and as we both know, they’d never succeed in reading that thing’s mind.]

[Well they clearly got information about it from someone,] Zorian said.

[Yes, well, it is a government facility. It stands to reason that someone from the government knows what they do down there. Chances are that if you want to find out about the facility through the same methods that the previous web used, you are going to have to target whichever government official that facility is reporting to.]

That… was a good point. He had no doubt that Spear of Resolve would attack a city official without the slightest bit of hesitation if she felt he had answers to her questions and she felt she could get away with it. And she could definitely get away with it, since she knew she was stuck in a time loop and none of the consequences would matter beyond a certain point.

[A valid point, but let’s refrain from antagonizing the city government for now,] he said.

[More than fine with me,] the aranea responded.

Having exhausted all of the topics Zorian could think of, they bid each other goodbye and agreed to meet the next day for his usual mind magic lessons.

Weeks passed, and while he didn’t make any incredible breakthroughs, his various projects kept slowly advancing forward. He absorbed everything about memory packet creation and reinforcement that Memory of Sublime Glories could teach him, he dutifully practiced what the other two Filigree Sages had to teach him, he scoured the academy library for interesting shaping exercises for both himself and Taiven, he built no less than three different golems with Edwin, and he learned a large number of spells from the books he and the Filigree Sages had found in the aranean treasury.

The most interesting of these new spells were a couple of highly illegal teleport variations that could punch through weaker teleport wards. If he could master those, he would get a major mobility boost within the city. Admittedly, it was possible that the city authorities could detect when someone was bypassing the city’s teleport redirect in that fashion, but even if they could indeed do that, that would still make those spells incredibly useful during the actual invasion, when they’d be far too busy with other things to deal with him.

Oh, and he also met with Raynie a couple of times. He was given a lot of information about the current political climate among shifter tribes and their history, which was kind of interesting but probably not really important for anything. The meetings were a nice distraction, though, so he didn’t care that he wasn’t really learning anything.

"So there is something I’m kind of curious about when it comes to shifter magic," Zorian said. "I apologize in advance if I’m asking you to reveal some kind of tribal secret, but what exactly is the big advantage of being a shifter as opposed to just using a potion or a ritual to assume an animal form? I know that shifters can eschew material components that are otherwise needed to make a transformation shell and that you can do a partial transformation to access the senses and other traits from your alternate forms, but that seems a little underwhelming, all things considered…"

"Well, you have to remember that shifters originate from a different time, when other methods of transformation were far less developed and common than they are now," Raynie said. "But there are some things you’re missing. The shifter transformation is much faster and safer than anything you can cook up with your alchemy skills, and you automatically get instincts to go along with your new form. A normal mage that transforms into an animal will have big problems moving in their new body and even interpreting the animal’s senses if they’re too different from what humans are used to. A shifter can innately understand how their alternate form works, so it doesn’t take much for bird shifters to learn how to fly as easily as birds or for wolf shifters to actually understand what their enhanced noses are telling them."

"Ah," said Zorian in understanding, remembering how badly he flew while transformed into an eagle, even after spending several sessions practicing his flight. "Yeah, that does sound like a major improvement over a transformation potion."

"There is also a stealth factor to consider, as your cat shifter friends can attest," Raynie continued. "It’s much easier to use transformation magics covertly when you can transform at will, whenever you want, to what extent you want, with no strange movements and material aids required. And since we’re on the topic of your feline friends, let me ask you something that I’ve been kind of curious about. Did you know all this stuff about shifters before you met the cat shifters, or did you only research the topic because you started hanging out with them?"

"I’d known about shifters for a while by the time I met them," Zorian said. It was true, in a way. "I was searching for help with something and came to Vani for advice. He actually advised me to seek you out."

"Me!?" she asked incredulously. She frowned. "Or do you mean shifters in general?"

"Both. But he recommended you by name," Zorian said.

"Oh?" she leaned forward in her seat, curious. "And what exactly could I help you with?"

"It doesn’t matter," Zorian said, shaking his head. "I’ve already gotten help elsewhere, and I’ve been told by others that you couldn’t have helped me anyway."

"Oh come on," she huffed. "That’s just teasing. You can’t just say something like that and then say it doesn’t matter. Either you tell me or I send a letter to Vani, asking him what he sent you to me for."

Ugh. He didn’t think she was serious, but if she was that could easily lead to awkward questions about why Vani doesn’t remember ever talking to Zorian in the past. He really had to learn how to watch his tongue better; he was becoming as bad as Zach.

"It’s very personal so I’d appreciate if you leave the matter alone, okay?" Zorian sighed. "The short story is that I had the misfortune to end up on the receiving end of a necromantic spell and had a piece of foreign soul spliced with my own. I wanted answers as to what exactly happened to me, and Vani suggested I approach your tribe for help. But since he had no idea how to actually find them, he named you as a possible contact."

"Ah, that’s… more serious than I thought," she said. "I’m sorry I pried. Are you…"

"I’m fine," said Zorian, waving her off. "Don’t worry about it. I found a nice priest that helped me learn how to sense and protect my soul, so there should be no further incidents like that."

"I see. That’s good," she said. She stared to the side for a few seconds, considering something, before refocusing back on him. "So did you at least get any good abilities out of the whole thing?"

"I’m… not sure," Zorian said evasively. "I’m still not sure what exactly the newest addition to my soul is or what it does."

"Really?" she frowned. "But didn’t you say you learned how to sense your soul?"

"Yes, so?"

"So why don’t you just focus on the spliced part for a while and try to figure out what it is? That sounds important to know. I know you probably want to forget about whatever happened to you, but as a shifter I can tell you it’s very unhealthy to ignore parts of your soul because they won’t ignore you."

"Hold on, how would I sense a part of my soul?" Zorian frowned. "That wasn’t a part of the lesson I received from the priest."

Raynie opened her mouth to say something before quickly closing it. She stayed silent for a while, considering something.

"You know," she finally said, "I’m not sure whether anyone other than shifters would even want to sense specific parts of their soul. No need, probably. Unless they intend to modify it somehow, and that’s usually a bad idea. And also not something a priest would do, unless they’re a very heretical priest. So your teacher probably didn’t even know that it could be done."

"Oh," Zorian said lamely.

"Do you want me to teach you how to do it?" Raynie asked.

"What?" asked Zorian. "Really? Aren’t shifters very secretive about their magic?"

"No?" Raynie said uncertainly. "Not about stuff like this, anyway. This is simple stuff, every shifter learns how to do this as a child. They have to if they want to make use of their abilities properly. I can’t see any harm in teaching you how to do it if you’re willing, and I kind of feel like I owe you for all the help you’ve given me during the practice sessions you organized."

Huh, something good came out of that time sink? This restart was just full of surprises.

"Well, I’m willing," he shrugged. "Name the time and the place."

He didn’t have much hope that a technique designed to sense a part of your soul would give him anything particularly substantial about his soul marker, but it didn’t hurt to try and see if it led to something.

At the very least, Raynie implied it was a simple thing to learn, so it shouldn’t become another thing vying for his time.

As it turned out, the method for sensing parts of your soul turned out to be rather simple when someone actually pointed it out to you. Well, provided one had already gone through the trouble of developing a personal soul sense beforehand. The results he got when he used it to inspect his soul were… better than he hoped. He actually could sense his marker and the way it was woven into his soul, but unlike shifters, he didn’t get any instinctive understanding of its function and how to use it (if it could be actually used by the one it was stamped on). Which made sense, considering it was not actually a part of his soul in the way a shifter’s alternate form was.

Raynie herself seemed unfazed by the partial failure and told him to keep trying for a while. It usually took months for shifters to fully map out the way different parts of their soul interacted with one another, and while she doubted his case made him as complex as a shifter she felt it was too early to give up after a single day or two.

Fair enough. He supposed he could set aside an hour or two every weekend and see if it led anywhere.

In the meantime, the day of the summer festival approached and Zorian became consumed with preparations for the end of the restart. This time, he had something a bit more ambitious he wanted to try out.

He was going to try and infiltrate the Ibasan main base during the invasion and pass through the dimensional gate to see where it led. And then, hopefully, find someone new and more interesting to interrogate on the other side.

46. The Other Side

"I’m ready," Zorian said. "You can start casting whenever you want."

Estin, his current practice partner, gave him a solemn nod and started launching magic missiles at him in quick succession. Zorian calmly intercepted them all with his shield, dividing his attention between watching the way Estin was casting the spell so he could help him improve it afterwards and trying to work out the absolute minimum shield strength he could get away with to safely tank the attacks. A bad idea usually – if this had been a real spar, like the ones he had been having with Taiven recently, being as cheap as possible with his counters would be a recipe for disaster. But well, his practice group had pretty much given up on those when he was involved. He was too good and didn’t know how to hold back properly, so these days he mostly served as a living target and dispenser of advice.

Not that this made him useless to the group, far from it, but it did mean he had to get creative to get some personal benefit from attending these practice sessions.

After fourteen magic missiles, Estin stopped casting and they switched positions, with Estin defending himself and Zorian attacking. The former Ibasan was the only person in the training group who could really tank one of his magic missiles at maximum power, so there was no need for Zorian to hold back. The floating earth spheres Estin used as shields were far more resilient than he initially gave them credit for, soaking up his magic missiles with ease. No matter what he tried, he could not even shatter one, much less punch through them. It was an interesting challenge.

He had largely reached a plateau in terms of magic missile strength. Like all spells, magic missile had a limited amount of mana it could be supercharged with, and Zorian was at the point where he simply couldn’t cram in more mana without hopelessly destabilizing the spell boundary. That was a shame, as magic missile was his most energy-efficient combat spell, thanks to the amount of practice he put into it. In fact, the spell was so mana-efficient at this point that it was playing merry hell with his ability to judge how far his mana reserves had grown. He could cast about 35 of them in quick succession, which was more than four times the amount he could cast before the time loop – that shouldn’t be possible, especially since he was sure his mana reserves still hadn’t topped out yet, so the most logical conclusion was that his magic missiles required significantly less mana now than they had in the past. The magnitude system probably wasn’t designed with people like him in mind. He doubted a lot of people practiced magic missile as doggedly as he did.

And yet, for all the refinement his magic missile now had, he knew from Kyron that he still hadn’t reached the pinnacle of the spell. A properly executed magic missile would be totally invisible. Which his magic missiles weren’t.

He had an idea about that, though.

No one in the practice group other than Estin could reliably tank one of his magic missiles without their shields giving way. Even his normal missiles often proved too much for them, never mind if he really powered them up. As a consequence, he had been forced to learn how to adjust his attacks downwards to something they could deal with. He quickly found that trying to purposely weaken his missiles was pretty hard. Strategically sabotaging the spell boundary to make the spell less mana efficient was inelegant and offended his professional pride, but trying to make magic missile technically perfect yet functionally weaker was not as easy as it appeared at first glance. His reflexes, honed over the years spent in the time loop, and even the very construction of the spell itself naturally tended towards a certain optimum effect. Going against it was a constant struggle.

Still, he had gotten the hang of the ability to dial down the missile’s power after a few days, and had discovered that when he dialed the power low enough, he could get the shine and opacity to drop like a stone. At the very lowest point, he could produce missiles that were nothing but a faint warp in the air – and sadly, about as effective on anything they hit. Still, practicing the spell at these lower power levels made it easier to see the faults and imperfections he made in the spell boundary, and fixing those immediately led to a small but noticeable increase in his mana efficiency when casting his normal version of magic missile.

He had a feeling this was the secret to effectively developing proper invisible force spells – don’t start by making normal versions invisible, instead reduce the power and work on making a weaker version more technically perfect and mana efficient. Then steadily work your way up until you end up with a flawlessly executed, fully-powered version.

None of the books he’d found actually outlined this method as a possible training regimen, instead suggesting endless repetition of the spell as a method, but Zorian felt his idea had merit. He had little to lose by trying it, since the officially suggested training method consisted of mindlessly practicing the normal version for years and even decades at a time. Yes, he was stuck in a time loop, but there had to be a better method than that.

After he’d failed to get through Estin’s earth defense, he called for a brief pause to let everyone replenish their mana reserves. He personally didn’t need the break – he was purposely using only a small fraction of his reserves during these practice sessions, and he had already honed his ability to assimilate ambient mana as far as it could go, so it generally took him only a few minutes to go back to his top form. The others needed to catch their breath, however, and he had to be mindful of that.

If nothing else, he was learning the limitations of people around his age. He had honestly forgotten what it was like to be on their level, and had trouble judging what people his age found challenging or even downright impossible. Hopefully this experience would make him better equipped to pretend he was a normal student in the future, or at least more aware of what would attract people’s attention and to what extent.

The break was eventually interrupted when Edwin marched into the gathering, the latest golem they’d made following after him.

"Hey Edwin," Naim greeted. "What brings you here? Finally decided to join us?"

"Ha, no. No, I’m here because of this," he said, grasping the little golem by its shoulders and proudly pushing it forwards so the group could take a look at it.

The construct was pretty impressive, even if Zorian was a little biased in thinking that. Being little less than a meter tall, the golem did not look particularly intimidating, but he doubted anyone would mistake it for a harmless toy. Its slender, humanoid figure was made out of alchemically-treated steel and powered by a comparatively massive crystalized mana battery that supplied it with plenty of power. Its movements were smooth and natural, and despite Edwin’s rough handling, it never lost its balance like Zorian’s previous golems would have. The golem looked and moved like a credible little helper and last ditch defender/distraction.

They did a good job of making it, Zorian felt. Enlisting Edwin to help with his golem making had definitely been the right decision.

"Neat," Naim shrugged. "That’s what you and Zorian have been working on all this time, isn’t it? What about it?"

"Yes," Zorian agreed. The last time they met, he left the golem with Edwin so the other boy could run a bunch of tests to see if it worked properly. Did Edwin find some critical flaw in the construct or did he just come to brag about their success? "Is there something wrong with it?"

"It?" Edwin asked with faux outrage. "His name is Chelik, and he’s absolutely perfect! I mean, just look at him! Everyone, meet Chelik. Chelik, say hi to the nice folks gathered here."

The golem quietly gave a brief wave before letting its metallic hand unceremoniously drop again.

Yeah, apparently Edwin just wanted to brag. Zorian caught Estin and Kopriva rolling their eyes at the spectacle, while Briam and Raynie seemed honestly impressed by the little golem. Naim just continued smiling serenely, and Zorian couldn’t tell whether Naim was honestly happy for his friend or just humoring the guy.

"Unfortunately, there was one part of him that I just couldn’t test properly," Edwin said. "We warded this little beauty with every defensive ward we could manage. Well, Zorian did, I just kind of watched and took notes. But never mind that, the point is that Chelik here should be able to shrug off a lot of damage and disruptive spells and…"

"You want us to try and damage it," Estin surmised.

"Yes," Edwin agreed with a grin. "I’ll just move aside and then you can all just attack it together."

"All of us?" Raynie asked curiously.

"Yeah," Edwin nodded. "He’s really tough, so don’t worry about overkill. I don’t think any of you can really do anything to it individually."

Estin frowned, clearly taking that as a challenge, before putting one of his palms on the ground in front of him. For a second, nothing happened. And then, without any warning, the ground beneath Chelik opened up like a set of earthen jaws and pulled it into the resulting hole before snapping shut. The poor golem was left with most of its body trapped under the soil, with only its head sticking free.

Edwin stared at the buried golem for a second before glancing uncertainly towards Estin. The other boy inclined his head to the side, smiling faintly, clearly very pleased with himself.

"Okay. Claim disproven," Edwin chuckled awkwardly. "Could you please unbury him so we can move onto further testing?"

Eventually, they did try to bring down the little golem with a collective magic missile barrage and predictably failed. Even Zorian’s missiles did not damage Chelik in any way, though hitting the limbs and head could imbalance it and knock it to the ground. Estin tried to hammer it into scrap with one of his earth spheres, but only succeeded in knocking it to the ground and rendering it immobile so long as the sphere was pressing down on it. Kopriva chucked a vial of alchemical acid at it, but this didn’t work either. Finally, Briam went ahead and summoned his familiar and had the juvenile fire drake breathe fire at the golem for a while. That at least had some effect, in the sense that the golem ended up visibly heating up as a result. The fire wards weren’t able to deal with sustained fire magic, it seemed. Edwin terminated the testing at this point, not wanting to see Chelik actually destroyed.

A satisfactory result, all things considered. The vulnerability to being buried and otherwise restrained was a large and obvious weakness, though, and Zorian was already considering what he could do to overcome it when making golems in the future.

The end of Edwin’s golem test ultimately also signaled the end of the current practice session as well, and most people excused themselves and left afterwards. The day of the summer festival was only a few days away, so this was basically the last training session he would have with the practice group. That fact left him strangely sad – he had originally resented the loss of free time that came with the meetings, but the classmates he taught had ended up growing on him a little. It was nice to have someone actually respect his skills and achievements for a change, instead of constantly reminding him about how inadequate he was and how far he still had to go.

He turned towards Raynie, the last person to remain at the training round with him. She didn’t look like she intended to excuse herself, so he assumed she wanted to talk to him.

"Yes?" He asked.

"Did you find out anything about your extra soul bits?" she asked.

She was stalling for time, but whatever. No reason not to answer the question.

"Sort of," he said. "I found a few ways to interact with it, but I only know what one of them actually does. Or at least I think I do. I’ll try it out soon to make sure."

Yes, it was rather surprising, but apparently the marker actually was designed to be interacted with by its bearer. There were multiple… switches, for lack of a better word, that were clearly meant to do something once they were activated. A good number of them were utterly inert, and did not react at all to his probing, either because he did not know how to interact with them properly or because they were broken in the marker’s transfer from Zach to Zorian. A lot of them were perfectly functional, however, and readily responded to his probes, eager to be set off like exuberant little puppies. He shied away from actually experimenting with them, since they gave absolutely no indication what their function was.

All except one. There was one command switch that immediately gave him a vague impression of what it was meant to do when he tried mucking around with it. He planned to test that one at the conclusion of his portal infiltration attempt.

"Make sure to have someone watching over you when you do that," Raynie cautioned. "At the very least they can call for help if you collapse or something."

"I will," Zorian lied. "Now why don’t you tell me what’s really bothering you."

"It’s nothing you can really help me with," she sighed. "I just feel like complaining to someone, I guess. I have no one here to confide to, except for Kiana. My fault, really. I didn’t try very hard to make any other friends. I don’t want to bother Kiana about this again, so…"

"Well, feel free to complain," Zorian told her. "Is this about your family, perhaps?"

"Yes," she confirmed. "I sent them a letter last week. Asked them if I could come home for the summer festival. They said I wasn’t welcome. Well, not really in those words, but I can read between the lines."

Harsh. What did she do to deserve that kind of response? Well, Raynie did say she wanted to complain, so he would probably find out soon. He opted to stay quiet and let her talk.

After a moment of quiet while she collected her thoughts, she started her story.

"The leadership of my tribe is hereditary," she said. "The firstborn son of the current chief inherits the mantle of leadership from his father. Simple enough, but the problem was that my father didn’t have a son. My mother had a hard pregnancy when she bore me, and the tribe refused to bring outside healers to help. After I was born, she could conceive no further children. Or at least that’s what we all thought for a time. Regardless, it was decided that in the absence of a male heir, even a daughter would do. Nobody wanted a succession crisis."

Hmm, so the tribe accepted a female leader but wasn’t too happy with it. Considering the hypothetical scenario she’d asked him about earlier in the restart, he had a feeling he knew where this was going…

"As I grew up, I was constantly told I had to be strong for the tribe," Raynie said. "That I have to work hard and embody the ideals we represented, so that there could be no question as to whether I deserved my position. I never resented that. I was proud of my tribesmen and my parents, for putting so much faith in me. I did my best, and I was good at it. Good enough that, in time, even my staunchest critics had fallen silent. But then mother got pregnant again."

Zorian winced internally. It was a son, wasn’t it?

"Nine months later, mother gave birth to the baby boy that my father had always wanted," she said bitterly, confirming his suspicion. "I wasn’t sidelined immediately, of course. They had to make sure my brother was not defective in some way before doing something so rash. I had hope for a time that I might succeed in keeping the mantle through superior skill and effort, but of course he ended up being a blasted prodigy. It was clear that he would eventually eclipse me. I… did not take it very well. I did not step down from my position quietly, and some of the tribe members even supported me. Mostly because they felt I had proven myself capable while my brother was still a relative unknown, and the designated heir had never been stripped of their position like that, so the whole thing was a bit questionable. But ultimately, my worst enemy was my own father – I had thought he was proud of me, of all I had accomplished, but in the end he was the one arguing most vehemently that I should move aside so my brother can take the mantle. How could I have possibly won that battle when my own father stood against me?"

"So they don’t want you back because they think you’re a threat to your brother’s legitimacy and the tribe’s leader?" Zorian spoke out.

"I am a threat to his legitimacy," Raynie said. "Was. I don’t know. I’m not really sure about anything anymore. I feel like nothing I did mattered in the end. What do I even have to live for, now? All my life I was taught to live for the tribe, but I’m not sure I even want to go back there when they finally deign to let me return. What is there waiting for me? I don’t think I’ll ever be happy living back there."

Zorian studied her for a moment, wondering if he should try and comfort her. She seemed more angry than sad, though, and he had a feeling she wouldn’t appreciate such a gesture. Best not to risk it.

"So you being here is your exile, then?" he asked.

"Pretty much," she answered. "Me being here allows them to cement my brother’s position without my interference. Plus, me being educated by outsiders and taught outsider magic destroys whatever shreds of legitimacy I had left."

"I can’t understand why they won’t let you home for the summer festival, then," Zorian said. "Not that I understand why you’d even want to go back to your father and brother you clearly can’t stand, but that’s beside the point. The point is that if you’ve been outmaneuvered that thoroughly, surely there is no harm in letting you go back home for a few days. That seems very petty of them."

"I was a bit of a bitch to my brother the last time I was home," she admitted. "I guess the little shit went crying to our parents, because they’ve been keeping him away from me ever since. They seem to think there is a risk of me killing him. So insulting."

They kept talking for a while – well, Raynie kept talking, he mostly just listened – but eventually she ran out of steam and just fell quiet for a time before announcing it was late and that she should go. Before she left, however, she told him that she enjoyed their meetings and asked if they could continue meeting like that, even if his original purpose for approaching her had long been fulfilled at this point.

He agreed. Of course he did. And despite her stoic demeanor, he could tell she was very happy to hear that. But the summer festival was just around the corner and she would soon forget any of this ever happened. The next time they met, they would be virtual strangers to each other.

He decided not to befriend Raynie again in the future. Not while the time loop was still in effect, anyway. If he ever managed to get out, though, he told himself that he would try to befriend the red-headed shifter for real. She reminded him of his pre-time loop self too much to just ignore it. Her problem was, as she said, something he couldn’t really help her with… but maybe just having an extra friend would be enough.

He remained at the training ground for quite some time afterwards, lost in thought, before making his way back to Imaya’s place.

It was the day before the summer festival and everything was ready. He had stopped Nochka’s kidnapping again, crafted all of the equipment he would be using in his gate-crashing attempt, and evacuated the Filigree Sages back to their home. Now all that was left was to gather the findings Kael and Taiven had made with their personal research and store them inside his mind for future restarts.

Fortunately, he was currently meeting them both in Imaya’s basement for exactly that purpose.

"Here," Taiven said, handing him a small notebook. "I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m kind of glad the month is coming to a close. You have no idea how annoying it is to practice shaping exercises all day, every day."

"Taiven, I’ve had Xvim as my mentor for the past four years," Zorian pointed out.

"Yeah, yeah…" she waved dismissively.

"Show me what you’ve learned," he told her.

"What? But it’s all written down there," she protested, pointing at the notebook in his hands.

"Doesn’t matter, I want to see it personally," he insisted. "Some things really cannot be written down."

She had progressed nicely, he decided fifteen minutes later. Some things he considered trivial didn’t really work out, which meant he either wasn’t teaching them properly or Taiven was spectacularly unsuited for them, but there were also some exercises that came almost naturally to her. It was a good start, if nothing else.

"That was way too slow," he said. "And you fumbled a bit towards the end. Start o-"

"If you say start over one more time, Zorian…" Taiven warned him.

"Fine, fine, I’ll stop channeling my inner Xvim," he chuckled. "We’ll stop here. I got what I needed, I think. Kael, how about you? Are my eyes deceiving me or has the amount of notebooks you got for me actually shrunk from what it was initially?"

"You said you memorize how the whole book is made with that spell of yours, not just text, so I figured I would write as dense as possible and save space that way. A single book takes the same amount of space in your memory regardless of how much is written in it, if I understood you correctly," Kael said.

"That’s true, but the alteration pattern I store is never flawless, so some imperfections are bound to creep up in the reproduction. I hope you didn’t make the letters too small…"

Some quick testing proved that Kael’s condensed writing survived the memorization-reproduction process just fine, so Zorian went ahead and memorized the whole stack.

"Well, that’s it I guess," Taiven said awkwardly. "I guess we’ll see each other in the next restart. Not that I’ll remember any of it…"

"Actually, I’m going to skip going to Cyoria for a couple of restarts," Zorian admitted. "I need to find a way to halt, or at least delay the degradation of the Matriarch’s memory package. And also to advance my memory reading skills so I can get something out of it if I fail. I can’t waste time on classes before I solve this."

"Fair enough," Kael said. "I’ll note that I have pretty much exhausted all the low-lying fruits when it comes to my research. I’ll need to reach out to other experts and maybe acquire some restricted materials through less than legal channels the next time we do this. I know you’re justifiably leery of making too many waves, so you’ll have to discuss this with my other self."

Just as well that he was putting his routine in Cyoria on temporary hold, then. He didn’t need a distraction like that right now.

The group separated after a while, with Zorian leaving to find Kirielle. There was one last thing he wanted to do before the end.

"Kiri, do you think you could show me your drawings?" he asked.

She didn’t need much convincing. She ran out of the room and soon returned with a thick stack of papers that represented her artistic endeavor over the course of the past month. She drew anything that caught her fancy, it seemed – the sparrows that liked to gather on the street in front of Imaya’s house, the house they lived in and its inhabitants, the trees in the nearby park where she played with Nochka, and so on. He was especially impressed with the handful of images that depicted Cyoria’s main train station – not only did she remember what all the various storefronts they’d visited looked like, she even memorized many of the individual items that had been on sale. Zorian had forgotten most of that stuff roughly five minutes after they had left the train station, but Kirielle had remembered it well enough to draw a realistic picture of it an entire day afterwards.

If he ever found some time to kill, he should ask Kirielle to teach him how to draw. He doubted he would be any good at it, but the mental image of his little sister trying to teach him something was amusing.

"…and this one is Nochka’s kitty fo- err," Kirielle fumbled, barely catching herself in time. She threw him a panicked look and then tried to shove the drawing of the young black cat beneath some of the already inspected drawings.

Heh.

"Her kitty form, perhaps?" Zorian asked innocently.

"You knew!" Kirielle gasped.

"I knew," he confirmed. "So could you tell she’s a shifter on your own or is she simply as bad at keeping secrets as you are?"

"I’m not bad at keeping secrets!" she protested. "And, um, she kind of slipped that she can do magic and I bugged her until she showed me what she can do."

Ah yes, the eternal tendency of people to brag about their skills. Well, that and Kirielle’s incredible ability to keep bringing the subject up until the victim decides it’s easier to just give in and humor her. He didn’t blame Nochka for giving in, considering how often he ended up doing the same.

Nochka’s indiscretion aside, there were no further surprises waiting for him among Kirielle’s drawings. He then tried to cast the memorization spell to commit the entire stack to his memory, but found that Kirielle was intensely protective of her work and strangely suspicious of his actions. It took a while for Zorian to convince Kirielle that the spell he wanted to cast was totally non-destructive and that he wouldn’t even dream of burning her artwork or anything similar. Really, where did she even get the idea?

"Fortov once burned a bunch of my drawings when I asked him to show me some magic," she admitted. "Said it was a joke."

Zorian rolled his eyes. Yes, that sounded about right for Fortov. Knowing Kirielle, she was probably being extremely annoying and disruptive… but that was still a very shitty thing to do.

"I’m kind of insulted you’d compare me to Fortov, but whatever," Zorian said. He quickly memorized the stack and handed it back to her. "There. All done."

Kirielle quickly leafed through the papers to make sure he really hadn’t done any damage and then left to put the drawings back to her room.

She was back soon enough, though, looking worried.

"Zorian, why did you want to memorize my drawings?" she asked. "You could just ask me to show them to you whenever you wanted to take a look. Are you going somewhere?"

Zorian gave her a sideways glance, wondering what to tell her. He would be leaving her behind during the next few restarts, and he kind of felt guilty about it, but there was no helping it. It was why he was wasting some of his mental space on her drawings instead of filling it out with something more practical.

She was pretty observant to have come to that conclusion, though. She probably noticed some of his other preparations.

"Yes," he admitted. "I am. After the summer festival."

"Oh," she said. "But don’t you have to attend classes?"

"Well yes. But this is more important," he said. "Don’t worry, I won’t be gone long. You won’t even notice I’m gone."

Surprisingly, she accepted this explanation without complaints. Good. The last thing he needed was for her to freak out this close to the end.

"But," she decided, "you have to bring me a gift when you come back. Or I’m telling mom you left me alone with a bunch of strangers."

"Sure," said Zorian, rolling his eyes. He wondered if gifting her with the drawings she’d drawn herself in previous restarts counted as cheating.

Probably. But he was going to do it anyway, just to see how she reacted.

The dimensional gate beneath Cyoria was a difficult target to approach. One had to avoid numerous Ibasan patrol groups to even get near it, and then the prospective attacker had to deal with an entire defensive base built around the gate if they wanted to actually pass through. Storming such a place was a task for a battlegroup, not a single mage, and would give the defenders plenty of time to shut down the gate if they felt the base was about to fall. Not to mention that Quatach-Ichl could and probably would come to their aid if such a major assault was launched on the place. No, the only viable way of accessing the gate was to sneak in somehow. A rather unlikely endeavor, considering the place was teeming with mages and war trolls, and likely had plenty of detection wards layered on top of it too. But Zorian had a plan. A rather reckless plan that he’d never even think about trying outside of the time loop, but it was a plan regardless.

At its core, it rested on the assumption that the Ibasans would send almost everyone they had to participate in the invasion proper, leaving only a handful of defenders to guard the gate. Thus, the best time to make the attempt was when the invasion had already begun. If the Ibasans were smart and cautious, that wouldn’t be true and his plan would be over before it even began. If they were really smart and cautious, the gate would be shut down the moment the invasion began and all of his plotting would have been for nothing. But Zorian was willing to bet that the Ibasans needed all the manpower they could get for the fighting on the surface, and that the leadership needed the gate functioning so they could retreat safely to their island. There was a lot of sea between Eldemar and Ulquaan Ibasa. He was hoping they would just leave behind a skeleton crew at the base, with orders to summon Quatach-Ichl if they get into more trouble than they can handle.

Thus, when the day of the invasion had finally come, Zorian immediately descended deep into the tunnel system beneath Cyoria and started looking for some nasty critters to dominate. Something strong enough to cause a distraction, but weak enough that the defenders wouldn’t panic when it started throwing itself on the base defenses. Just a random monster attack that would distract everyone and give Zorian a chance to slip inside unnoticed.

It took him some time, but he eventually found a pack of hook goblins – small, flightless, bat-like humanoids whose front limbs sported huge, hook-like claws. Highly dangerous up close but easily killable. A threat but not that much of a threat. Perfect.

Then he waited. As time went by, his prediction of Ibasans withdrawing virtually everyone to participate in the invasion gradually came to pass – the Ibasans were indeed withdrawing nearly all patrol groups around their base, allowing Zorian to finally approach the place and lay his eyes on the center of Ibasan invasion. Well, he already knew its basic layout from the memories extracted from the captured Ibasans, but that wasn’t the same as seeing it first-hand.

The base was situated in a massive cavern, and was quite large. It was practically a small town, which was not very surprising considering the amount of forces the Ibasans normally kept here. In the center of the settlement stood a handful of stone buildings that were probably raised from the cavern floor via alteration. The gate was in the middle of this section, serving as the heart of the settlement. Surrounding the fancy stone buildings was a ramshackle collection of tents and pens where the peons and war trolls lived.

There were no walls around the settlement, but each of the tunnels connecting to the cavern had a checkpoint that served as a first line of defense.

Zorian waited for a while for the numbers to thin out further and when they remained static for a while, mentally pushed the hook goblins to attack one of the checkpoints, doing his best to boost their bloodthirstiness and suppress their fear. He didn’t have to do much, honestly – hook goblins seemed to be almost perpetually angry creatures, going utterly berserk at even the slightest provocation. They fell upon the checkpoint, screeching and clawing, and the base immediately went into an uproar.

Zorian’s original idea was to use the distraction to attack one of the other checkpoints while everyone else was distracted, but that turned out to be unnecessary – when he reached his chosen target, he found out that its guards were unprofessional enough to leave their posts to help out their buddies against the hook goblins. Or maybe the base was even more short on manpower than he originally suspected? No matter, he decided to simply take advantage of the situation and waltzed in.

He made it all the way to the gate without being stopped, or even confronted by anyone. At one point he crossed paths with a mage running towards the battle site but it only took a weak suggestion from Zorian that he was ' completely normal, nothing to see here' and the man promptly put him out of his mind and kept running. He honestly didn’t expect it to be that easy. Unfortunately, when he reached the dimensional gate itself he found that it had its own guards and that they refused to leave their posts, despite the commotion.

Four mages and two trolls. He could deal with them perhaps, but he didn’t think he could do it without raising a ruckus. Shame. He was just about to throw caution to the wind and start chucking around fireballs and explosive cubes everywhere, when one of the other defenders came running and started shouting at the mages around the gate. The hook goblins had broken through the checkpoint and the newcomer wanted them to signal Quatach-Ichl to come and save them.

Uh, oops? He honestly didn’t think his little minions would end up winning. It seemed that not only did the Ibasans leave a skeleton crew to hold the base, said skeleton crew was composed out of the dregs of their force. No wonder this infiltration was so easy.

Fortunately for Zorian, no summoning of Quatach-Ichl would take place. The mages guarding seemed horrified at the very idea. Their leader ranted for an entire minute about how the ancient lich would have them all flayed alive if they summoned him to deal with a bunch of stinking hook goblins, and eventually sent two of his fellow guards and both of the war trolls to contain the incursion.

Zorian could only watch incredulously as the gate was suddenly left with only two mages to guard it. Well. That certainly made things easier. He waited for a while for the other Ibasans to get some distance away from the gate and then chucked a vial of sleeping gas at the two remaining guards from his hiding place. One of them, the one that spoke to the panicked defender and seemed to be their leader, managed to stumble out of the cloud in a semi-lucid state and promptly received a piercer in the head for his troubles. The other collapsed into sleep, as intended, and Zorian blew the cloud away with a gust of wind before hurriedly approaching the dimensional gate they were guarding.

Zorian itched to examine the thing in greater detail, but no, this wasn’t the time for that… the current priority was to find out what was on the other side. Looking through the opening itself, he could see that the gate led to an empty, spacious room devoid of further guards. Which was rather weird – were the Ibasans really leaving one end of the gate undefended? He tried extending his mind sense through the dimensional opening and was pleased to note that the gate was no barrier to his mind sense. And even gladder that he could detect no hidden enemies.

Suspicious, but mindful of the limited amount of time he had, he took a deep breath and stepped through the gate.

He felt a tendril of magic brush against his soul protections the moment his foot touched the floor of the destination room, trying to identify him. It recoiled from his spiritual defense and Zorian immediately felt the atmosphere in the room change, becoming heavier and more foreboding. He had been detected by the wards and labeled as an intruder.

Behind him, the edges of the dimensional opening started crackling with lightning. The gate then began rapidly shrinking and soon winked out of existence entirely in a soft flash of light.

Though the closing of the portal had taken him off guard, Zorian was ultimately unconcerned about its disappearance. He was already through, after all, and at least this way the Ibasan forces on the other end of the gate wouldn’t be able to pursue him.

He quickly looked around and confirmed that the room was indeed empty, aside from the now-inactive stone icosahedron erected in the center of it. There was only one door in sight, and Zorian immediately blasted it to splinters rather than open it normally. No need to risk getting hit with some hostile ward effect because he was dumb enough to grasp the handle. Quickly leaving the gate room, he started exploring the place, trying to find out as much as he could before the Ibasan forces on this side of the gate, alerted by the wards, came running to deal with him.

Except that there were no Ibasan forces. And he wasn’t in some hastily erected base, either. He quickly found out that the gate had been situated in a basement of a pretty luxurious mansion. A very large, seemingly abandoned mansion. Zorian was confused at first – the first gate in the chain was supposed to lead to some isolated place in the Sarokian highlands after all, so he kind of expected a wilderness camp surrounded by trees.

Then the defenders of the place finally tracked him down, and he understood where he was. The undead boar that just tried to bite his leg off was exactly like the ones that assaulted Lukav every restart.

He was in the Sarokian Highlands. Specifically, he was in Iasku Mansion. And the place was apparently teeming with undead.

He frantically dodged a knife thrust by his assailant – a silent, knife-wielding man wrapped in concealing black clothes. Zorian had shot him through his head with a piercer earlier, but that didn’t seem to bother him too much. Another black-clad, knife wielding corpse advanced at him from the left, and the blasted boar looked like it was readying for another charge.

Zorian threw a glowing cylinder on the ground in front of him, causing a disruptive, dispelling pulse to wash over everything around him. The three corpses attacking him collapsed lifelessly to the ground, the pulse having destroyed the magic that kept their animating souls bound to their bodies.

Zorian sighed. That was the third dispeller grenade he had been forced to use since coming to this place. He’d only ever had five of them to start with, not having expected to fight hordes of undead today. Most of his other single-use items were gone as well. He knew this mission was likely to result in his violent death, but this was still kind of annoying.

And also more than a little dangerous. The presence of so much undead meant there were necromancers inside. It might actually be dangerous to die here.

He was just about to go back to the gate room and barricade himself there when a living person entered his mind sense, heading straight for him.

Well, crap. That was the necromancer, wasn’t it? Of course it was. That must be why the undead backed off after that last attack. He quickly scattered his remaining explosive cubes on the floor in front of him and retreated deeper into the corridor.

Then the door on the other end of the corridor opened and a tall, muscular man with a huge mustache stepped into the corridor. He took one look at Zorian and smiled jovially, like seeing an old friend who he hadn’t heard from in years.

"Welcome!" he said. "I am Sudomir Kandrei, the owner of this humble abode. May I ask why you have invaded my home?"

"I don’t know what you’re talking about," said Zorian, taking a step back. Step deeper into the corridor, step deeper into the corridor… "The door was quite open, all I had to do was step through the gate. If you didn’t want anyone coming through, surely you wouldn’t have left that thing so unprotected. Why, I bet a whole army could just waltz through this place if you weren’t careful…"

Zorian took another step back. Sudomir followed him, taking a step deeper into the corridor-

Now! Zorian sent a pulse of mana to the explosive cubes, triggering them and sending the entire corridor into a-

No, actually nothing happened at all. What the hell?

"Wards. Wonderful things, aren’t they?" Sudomir smiled. "I can’t have things exploding in my own home, you see. And besides, even if you did catch me in that trap, that wouldn’t have killed me. I assure you I am quite hard to kill."

Lovely. Zorian stared at the man in front of him for a second and then concentrated on his marker for a second.

"What are you doing?!" Sudomir asked harshly. He could probably see that he was doing something with his soul. Damn necromancers and their cheating soul sight.

Zorian ignored him and ordered one of the slots of the marker, the one that actually gave him an impression of what it was supposed to do, to activate. His vision immediately turned dark and then he woke up back in Cirin, Kirielle wishing him a good morning.

He sighed in relief, confusing Kirielle. Thank the gods that worked.

47. Politics

Sitting alone in the train’s compartment, Zorian stared through the window at the passing landscape, lost in thought and not really paying attention to what he was looking at. He was supposed to have disembarked already, but the events that had happened at the end of the previous restart were still at the forefront of his mind and he figured it was best to delay his plans for a few hours until he was less distracted. It wasn’t like he had some tight schedule to follow this early into the restart.

Closing his eyes for a second, he searched his soul for the marker switch he’d used to escape Sudomir and immersed himself in the impressions it gave him whenever he connected to it. The switch in question did not announce its purpose in words, but it made itself understood anyway – it was the abrupt end of everything, followed by a return to the beginning.

Revert to starting point. That was what the switch claimed its function was, and, as far as Zorian could tell, that is exactly what it had done when he’d used it at the end of the previous restart.

He had a way to end the current restart at whim. He could start over at any time without leaving behind a soul that could be interrogated and messed with. Hell, he wouldn’t be leaving behind anything – the world would end on his command. All it took was pressing a switch.

That changed everything. Necromancy, in many ways his worst enemy, was suddenly a lot less dangerous and frightening. The risk of having his suicide rings taken away or negated by fancy wards also became a lot less worrisome – the marker was virtually impossible to detect or take away from him. Many ideas he had previously dismissed on the grounds that they were too dangerous to attempt, such as exploring Iasku Mansion or pissing off Quatach-Ichl by aggressively going after Ibasan forces, were suddenly back on the table.

Getting killed or knocked out before he could react was still a danger, though, as was the possibility of being drugged into submission. He wondered if he could set up some sort of contingency to trigger the revert switch automatically upon his death… it would require delving deeper into soul magic, but that may be a smart thing to do anyway, and eliminating one of his major remaining weaknesses was no small feat.

A possible issue was that the revert switch might affect Zach and Red Robe as well, not just him. Was their restart cut short as a consequence of his action in the previous restart? Probably. It must have been, if the switch worked like he thought it did. There was a chance they’d failed to note the abrupt end, since he’d activated the revert switch very close to the time it usually ended at anyway… but since he intended to keep using the revert switch, that wasn’t going to last very long.

It didn’t really matter, though, even if they had noticed. Both Zach and Red Robe had already known there were at least two other time travelers in the time loop, so this told them nothing particularly important. Well, it might come as a bit of a shock to Zach, since he’d never had his restart cut short like that, but whatever. He could now experience what it was like for Zorian when the other boy went around fighting dragons and whatnot.

Opening his eyes, Zorian withdrew from the marker and refocused his attention on the passing landscape for a bit. It did not hold his attention for long before his mind drifted back to the events of the previous restart.

Truthfully, he hadn’t expected his gate exploration initiative to be as successful as it ended up being. He had expected to face better and more numerous defenses on the Cyorian side of the gate, and once he managed to step through it, he expected to emerge into another heavily guarded Ibasan base. He hadn’t expected to live long once on the other side. In fact, it honestly would not have surprised him if he had died before ever reaching the gate itself, nevermind actually accomplishing much on the other side. The first try had been primarily about testing the Ibasan defenses to see what he was dealing with.

Well, apparently he had been far too modest in his ambitions. He got everything he had been hoping for, and more. Now that he knew just how undermanned and unprofessional the defense of the gate was, and that there were no Ibasan reinforcements on the other side to come to their aid, he could afford to be a lot more direct in future attempts. Bringing a small army of golems and wiping out every defender so he could study the gate at his leisure actually seemed like a viable option. Granted, he would have to do it without giving the defenders a chance to summon Quatach-Ichl, but it seemed doable. As a bonus, said golems would be heaven-sent against the hordes of undead infesting Iasku Mansion. They were just as tireless as the living dead, and had no souls for the necromancer to mess with.

Of course, it was impossible to think about Iasku Mansion without automatically considering that final confrontation he’d had with Sudomir Kandrei at the end, and that soured Zorian’s feeling of success somewhat. He got out of the situation unscathed in the end, but the fact was, he got thoroughly outplayed and backed into a corner by a dangerous necromancer and had to rely on an untested ability to escape from his clutches. That wasn’t the way Zorian wanted his conflicts to go.

To be fair, though, the situation might not have been as bad as it looked. The restart was nearing its end by that point, so perhaps he could have stalled the man long enough to avoid any serious consequences. Failing that, he could have thrown a maximized fireball at his feet and hoped that reducing his body to fine ash interfered with Sudomir’s ability to snare his soul. It was hard to know how dangerous the situation truly had been without knowing more about Sudomir’s personality, or the limits of his necromancy skills.

Well, he was going to find out more about the man very soon. For one thing, Sudomir was the mayor of Knyazov Dveri, and therefore a public figure – there should be lots of information available about him, in both official and unofficial sources. For another, Zorian intended to keep attacking the gate beneath Cyoria and exploring Iasku Mansion at the end of every future restart. There was no reason to pass up on that, really – the defenses of the gate were sufficiently flimsy that it wouldn’t eat much into his schedule to organize an assault at the end of the month, and the revert switch made the idea of exploring a necromancer’s lair a lot less crazy than it was up until recently.

He definitely had to do something about the wards on the place, though. Sudomir seemed to have placed some very sophisticated stuff on Iasku Mansion, and Zorian didn’t feel comfortable just ignoring them. Who knows what kind of exotic, forbidden stuff a necromancer like Sudomir wove into his warding scheme?

Maybe he could avoid triggering the wards at all? If he could find some way to pass the initial authorization test upon stepping through the gate, the wards should stay dormant. There had to be a keystone or some such that let people pass through unmolested, there was no way Sudomir keyed in every individual Ibasan into the damn ward scheme.

After some thought, he decided that such a bypass would be useful, but would likely just delay the problem – if it was Zorian in Sudomir’s place, he would have definitely placed further tripwires around the mansion to foil such abuse. Considering how much Sudomir relied on his wards to deal with intruders, he was bound to have thought of that and more.

He was wrenched out of his musings by the voice of the station announcer, who informed him that the train was soon going to arrive to its next destination. Deciding he had delayed things a bit too much as it was, Zorian grabbed his luggage and went off in search of an exit.

It was time to visit the aranean colonies again.

The last time Zorian had tried to get instructions from the Luminous Advocates, the result was a frustrating negotiation process that had lasted for nearly three weeks and had consumed the entirety of his funds in exchange for useful, but decidedly non-critical knowledge. The one thing he had needed back then, they had been unwilling to teach him. Consequently, he had stopped bothering with them. Especially since he had since found other, much more reasonable webs to trade with.

The situation had changed, however. He was a lot better at mind magic now, so they should hopefully look down on him a lot less. He was also in a much better position to satisfy their assorted demands, thanks to the discovery of the aranean treasury back in Cyoria and the ability to steal money and resources from the Cult of Dragon Below by raiding their caches. Finally, after getting taught about aranean culture and customs from Voice of Peace, he had come to a conclusion that he had likely bungled his previous interaction with Luminous Advocates somewhat. He had come off as impatient and disrespectful, which probably had a lot to do with them dragging the negotiations out for several weeks – it was both the means of pressuring him into giving them greater concessions and a way of getting back at him for a perceived slight.

That was why, when Zorian went off to meet with the Luminous Advocates on the first day of the restart, he didn’t offer a trade proposal. Instead, he simply introduced himself and asked for a meeting sometime in the future. He was told to come back in two days. He did just that, at which point he presented the Luminous Advocates with a gift and spent several hours pretending he’d just dropped by to have a friendly chat with them instead of anything serious. Only then did he present his offer, starting with a very ambitious plan where he offered a lot and demanded just as much. They refused, of course, making a counteroffer that was ridiculously more in their favor, and so the negotiations began…

It took them an entire week and a half to agree on a deal in the end, which was slow and annoying, but still a lot better than before. The agreement, much like the one he’d had with the Filigree Sages in the previous restart, went beyond his primary goal of learning how to repair memory packets and also encompassed refinement of his basic telepathy skills, practice of mental combat techniques and further development of his ability to tap into and interpret aranean senses. The last one was not something the Luminous Advocates had any real experience with, by their own admission, but they were willing to lend him their considerable expertise on the topic. In fact, that was the part of the deal they seemed most excited about.

Of course, Zorian didn’t spend said week and a half idling around while the Luminous Advocates dragged their feet – he spent most of that time scouting out other aranean webs to see what they were able and willing to offer him. He visited the Talisman Bearers, Ghost Serpent Acolytes and Silent Doorway Adepts – the three shady webs that the Illustrious Gem Collectors had informed him about back when he’d first sought other aranean webs to learn from. Back then he didn’t feel safe dealing with them, but his skills at shielding his mind had grown considerably since then. He also toured the seven webs in the vicinity of Cyoria that he’d found out about from the Filigree Sages – the Burning Apex, Red Brand Bearers, Deep Blue, Crystal Torches, Indestructible Silver Order, Stone Revelation Chanters and Riddles of Opening. All of them were interesting in their own way, but none of them could really help him with his memory packet repairing problem better than the Luminous Advocates could.

The Talisman Bearers were a magic-focused web – the most heavily magic-focused one that Zorian had ever encountered – and were thus a bad choice to go to when dealing with a relatively exotic mind magic issue like his. Still, visiting them had not been a waste of time in the slightest. Out of curiosity, he had bought several of the metal discs they used for their spellcasting to see how they worked. The spell formula designs etched into the discs blew him away – subjected to size and scarcity restrictions largely foreign to human spellcasting communities, the Talisman Bearers focused on squeezing in as many spells as they possibly could onto their primary spellcasting tool. The design was complex and incredibly dense, but it worked smoothly and efficiently, without the destructive resonances and disruptions that usually plagued such highly compressed spell formula constructs.

The discs were useless to Zorian in their natural state – he wasn’t an aranea, and these tools were very much intended for aranean use. Still, they were sufficiently similar to human spell formula that he could learn a lot from studying them. Considering how much he relied on items, any advantage in that area was noteworthy.

The Ghost Serpent Acolytes refused to see him. Apparently their god/guardian spirit told them he was bad news and that they should tell him to get lost. He had no idea what that was about, but it automatically made the web a lot more interesting than he expected. What did the spirit know about Zorian that pissed it off so much? He left the Ghost Serpent Acolytes alone for now, but he made a mental note to visit the web again in the next restart, before doing anything else, to see if they reacted the same way.

The Silent Doorway Adepts were another surprise, because the doorway in their name came from the Bakora gate around which they built their settlement. That was very, very interesting. They got really uncomfortable when he started asking questions about it, too, blatantly trying to change the subject. They claimed the gate mystified them as much as it mystified humans, but Zorian wasn’t sure he believed that. There was definitely a story there, and their web was famous for having some kind of secret magic that allowed them to get into places. Still, it was obvious he wouldn’t be getting anything out of them on the topic, so he politely backed off and moved on to other topics.

Sadly, they had no interest in teaching him things. They pointed him back towards some of the webs he’d already known about, such as the Luminous Advocates, and that was that. That was not to say they were not interested in trade, though – they very much were. They showed passing interest in most of the stuff he offered, but what really caught their attention was crystalized mana. They really wanted crystalized mana for some reason – they were willing to take all of it off his hands, if he was willing, or as much as he could spare otherwise. In exchange, they offered a wide variety of magical items and tomes, all clearly of human origin… and many of them very much illegal. They also offered to put him in contact with some of their human trade partners, in case he wanted something they currently lacked. They also admitted, after some prodding, that they could provide him with information about other aranean webs – where they could be found, what they were famous for, and what their weaknesses were. They warned him, however, that they would cut all ties with him if he misused such information.

After some thought, Zorian asked them about alternatives to the Luminous Advocates when it came to mind magic specialists, agreeing to their price for such information. After a few hours, their representative returned with the information in question, giving him the names and locations for about eight more webs that were notable for their mind magic mastery. He thanked them for the information and left.

The seven webs around Cyoria all had some things in common. For one, they were all very friendly to humans and a lot easier to talk to than any of the other webs he had been interacting with recently. For another, they were all magic-focused webs – Cyoria was the epicenter of the aranean magical revolution, and all nearby webs had adapted to take advantage of that in some fashion. Finally, they were a lot more hostile to their neighbors than the other webs he had spoken with. The Burning Apex, Red Brand Bearers, Crystal Torches and Indestructible Silver Order all tried to hire him to attack their neighbors, and the Burning Apex outright stated that they intended to massacre the entire Riddles of Opening web whenever they got the chance, down to the last male and child. Oh, and all of them were very interested in any information about the Cyorian webs and any possible weaknesses they might have.

Zorian suddenly understood why Spear of Resolve had been so worried about her neighbors and wanted to get humans on her side.

Thankfully, none of the webs actually insisted that he had to help fight their battles, and were happy enough to engage in more peaceful forms of trade. Naturally, Zorian was primarily interested in mind magic instruction. The local groups, although primarily magic focused, did have decent grasp of their innate mind magic… especially when it came to telepathic combat. Most of them were fine in tutoring him in their abilities, although the Stone Revelation Chanters and Indestructible Silver Order required a higher level of commitment than he was able to spare in this particular restart. In addition, most of them also traded in exotic alchemical ingredients gathered in the deep dungeon, some of which were impossible to acquire on the open market.

Unfortunately, it was impossible to hide from a bunch of natural mind readers that he had contacted other aranea groups in the area while receiving tutoring in mind magic from them, so he could only get instruction from one of the local webs. Most of them didn’t care if he was also receiving instruction from the Luminous Advocates, though, except for the Crystal Torches, who refused to teach him anything if they weren’t the only ones teaching him.

He chose Deep Blue in the end, because they were one of the three major webs in the area and struck him as the most peaceful of the lot. Also, Deep Blue mind magic specialized in dominating and manipulating the various monstrous denizens of the Dungeon. Zorian figured their methods of dealing with creatures very different from themselves might also be useful in his quest to understand the aranean mind. And if not, well, being more effective at herding and neutralizing magical creatures was still a pretty useful skill to have.

Thus, he’d secured himself two tutorships from two different aranea groups for the restart. The Luminous Advocates complained, questioning the usefulness of a web like Deep Blue when he’d already secured the services of the best of the best, but Zorian couldn’t help but notice that they got rather more motivated in their teaching ever since he’d done that.

Trying to arrange for a third group of aranean teachers would definitely be a mistake, though. Best not be too greedy.

Not much happened until the very end of the restart. He dutifully kept learning mind magic from the Luminous Advocates and Deep Blue, and when he wasn’t doing that, he was advancing his studies in other magical disciplines and preparing things for the upcoming gate assault at the end of the restart. He was rapidly going through magical books he’d recovered from the aranean treasury in Cyoria, writing down any interesting spell he could find and outright memorizing ones that looked particularly useful. Ward analysis divinations, new combat spells, mind magic of the more structured kind… he’d learned so many new spells he had trouble remembering them all. He was also steadily trying out new shaping exercises, writing down which ones were easiest to work with, which ones had a trick to doing them right and which ones became much easier if he did some other exercises before them. He was surprised how lacking the various exercise manuals were in regards to crucial information like that.

By the time the restart was nearing its end, Zorian was ready for another attempt at the gate. He had adjusted his arsenal in light of what he had discovered about his opponents and thus had made six golems to bring along with him as support. He’d also captured several Ibasans during his trips to Cyoria, trying to discover a method of passing through the gate without triggering the wards on Iasku Mansion. Sadly, none of them knew the answer to that particular mystery. He could only hope that the actual gate guards were better informed.

Finally, he had tried to find out as much as he could about Sudomir Kandrei without attracting too much attention. Since the secret master of Iasku Mansion was also the mayor of Knyazov Dveri, he did that by teleporting to the town in question and started asking people questions and reading their minds while they talked. He found out that Sudomir had an excellent reputation among the people he governed – he was a capable administrator under whom the city grew a lot more rich and influential than it had previously been. He took full advantage of Eldemar’s northern colonization drive to catapult the city to prominence, and then generously spread the wealth gained from that among the locals. He was known to be a rather secretive and private person, but very friendly and talkative when actually interacting with others. He was a powerful and talented mage, with a specialty in wards. His wife had died during the Weeping, and he was hurt deeply by it, never bothering to remarry.

Interestingly, Iasku Mansion wasn’t as big of a secret as Zorian first imagined it to be. Quite a few people knew that Sudomir had some kind of secret hideout in the wilderness to the north, and that shady stuff happened there. However, most people thought that Sudomir’s brand of shadiness involved smuggling of restricted merchandise and organizing drug-fueled orgies and what not. Basically, they thought he was connected to organized crime groups, not that he was animating corpses and betraying the country.

On the day of the summer festival, Zorian went to Cyoria and descended into the dungeon below the city to wait for the invasion to start. He couldn’t find the group of hook goblins he’d used previously – him not being in Cyoria and killing monsters with Taiven had completely altered the distribution of monsters in the Dungeon compared to the previous restart – so in the end he settled for a female tentacle-tailed scorpion. Mostly because she had hundreds of young, and they followed her lead in everything. If he ordered her to attack the Ibasan base, they would do the same, with no need for specific directions coming from him.

Zorian slipped into the base while she and her brood distracted the defenders, much like he had last time. The golems, being much slower than him and very un-stealthy, were ordered to stay behind while he went off to subdue the more disciplined mages and war trolls stationed around the gate itself.

The war trolls were annoying. He needed the mages alive so he could interrogate them about the gate protections and the methods they used to summon Quatach-Ichl, but anything that would disable them would also fail to work against the war trolls. After some thought, he simply set up incineration traps a fair distance away from the gate and then started using a combination of guidance spells and gas bombs to bombard the area around the gate from a fair distance away. He turned the entire area into a thick cloud of sleeping gas, probably wasting more than half of the bombs needlessly, but whatever. The important thing was that the mages all ended up incapacitated and the war trolls came running after him, screaming their heads off.

They ran straight into the incineration traps, but rather than dying a horrible, fiery death, they survived the experience just fine. It took only a second for Zorian to realize what was happening. They weren’t regular war trolls – no, these were the same sort of hyper-resilient ones that he and Taiven had encountered in one of the previous restarts. The ones that shrugged off fire. He teleported away in time to avoid being crushed to a pulp by the huge iron maces the two trolls wielded, but it was a short-distance teleport and they were upon him again in a heartbeat.

The resulting battle, which consisted mostly of Zorian teleporting around and throwing things at increasingly angry and injured war trolls, resulted in expenditure of nearly all of his prepared explosives and the destruction of four of his golems when he was forced to summon them as distractions half-way throughout the battle. Damn it.

But at least he was alive and well, and the same could not be said of his opponents. The war trolls were eventually frozen solid by freezing rays, after which he shattered them into pieces just to be sure. Live and learn – next time he was using frost traps instead.

Checking up on the rest of the Ibasans, he found them losing against the tentacle-tailed scorpions. They managed to wound the mother, but that only made her spawn go berserk with rage and they surged forth with suicidal fury. The Ibasans scattered in front of them, and Zorian made sure to pick off anyone that looked like they were actually making a dent in the horde or trying to organize the defenders.

With most of the threats neutralized, he went back to the gate and banished the cloud of sleeping gas that clung to the place so he could reach the mages he’d incapacitated.

What he found from their minds was encouraging. First of all, the four he’d incapacitated were the only ones that knew how to contact Quatach-Ichl. That was why the other defenders came to beg them for help in the previous restart – they weren’t asking for permission to summon Quatach-Ichl, they literally didn’t know how to do it themselves. The method itself consisted of a simple sending spell, though one that required a particular keystone to actually reach the ancient lich.

He had seen the keystone in question before, he realized. It was the teardrop-shaped amulet of polished black stone that high-ranking Ibasans always wore. He thought it was a purely ornamental thing to mark their station to other Ibasans, since it gave off no magic and had nothing whatsoever etched into its surface, but apparently he was wrong. Even now he could not figure out how it was supposed to work as a keystone, and he didn’t dare analyze it too deeply, lest he trip some invisible tripwire and summon Quatach-Ichl to his location. He didn’t feel like receiving a disintegration beam to the face at the moment.

Also, the way to enter the gate properly consisted of letting a high-ranking Ibasan step through the gate first. This signaled to the wards in Iasku Mansion that everything was fine and everyone who entered after them is with them and thus also okay by association. Zorian did not know whether these specific Ibasans were keyed into the wards themselves or if the wards were detecting the presence of the keystone they all had on their person, and he didn’t care. He simply pushed one of the unconscious Ibasans through the gate, amulet included, and stepped through afterwards. Just to be safe, he instructed his two surviving golems to immediately follow after him.

He breathed a sigh of relief when the wards failed to react to his presence and the gate didn’t close. Success.

"Let’s see what I can find before Sudomir realizes he has an intruder in his home," Zorian mumbled to himself, stepping over the unconscious body of the Ibasan he pushed through the gate.

He motioned his two golem bodyguards to follow after him and then moved deeper into Iasku Mansion.

Considering it was one of the invasion points used to attack Cyoria, Iasku Mansion was surprisingly empty. Now that he didn’t have to dodge undead attackers all the time, Zorian had time to explore the interior and was baffled by how seemingly ordinary it was. It was an empty, but otherwise unexceptional mansion.

He encountered neither traps nor undead until he tried to move towards the very center of the mansion, where he suspected Sudomir was located. At that point he crossed some invisible threshold and he felt the wards try to probe his soul and fail. A heavy feeling promptly settled down around him as the wards concentrated their energies around him.

Knowing that the hordes of undead inside the place were making their way towards him and no longer caring about stealth, Zorian started testing the wards to see what exactly they did. He began by throwing one of his last remaining explosives in front of him and activating it to see if it would work. It did, but that didn’t necessarily mean the adjustments he’d made since last time were actually working. In the previous restart, his explosives had worked just fine at first, only to suddenly fail when he faced off against Sudomir. In all likelihood, the warding scheme only turned on its heaviest defenses when Sudomir commanded it to do so, and left them dormant otherwise to conserve mana.

Trying to scry on the dimensional gate to see if it had closed when the wards turned on him failed – nothing inside the house could be targeted by any of the divination spells he was aware of. Teleporting out didn’t work, and connecting a recall tether to a stone cylinder and launching it through the window as far as it could go didn’t allow him to recall himself out of the place either. The wards were also filling the entire mansion with a low-powered shaping disruption field – not enough to stop him from casting things, but definitely making his spellcasting take longer and require more concentration.

He considered simply escaping outside through the windows – a surprisingly viable option, since they were very large and could be opened easily from the inside – but decided not to. Sudomir seemed pretty talkative in the previous restart, and now that Zorian knew he had a guaranteed way out, he wanted to see what would happen if he talked to the man. Maybe Sudomir was the sort of person who liked to gloat? It was stupid, but there were people like that.

Over the next half an hour, Zorian fought against an endless stream of undead. Unlike last time, he was able to conserve his dispeller grenades and other items by relying on his golems to keep some of the animated corpses busy while he tackled the rest. He was sufficiently effective at whittling down the army of undead, in fact, that Sudomir eventually decided to withdraw his remaining forces rather than see them all destroyed. Or at least that’s what Zorian assumed, since all of the undead boars and black-clad corpses turned and fled at some point.

Huh. He did not expect that. He wondered whether Sudomir would even show up without Zorian being completely exhausted by his minions. Sudomir was clearly watching him, either through divinations or via some spying function embedded into the wards, so he surely knew Zorian was still dangerous to approach.

Shrugging, Zorian started analyzing the wards with the help of the ward analysis device he took from the aranean treasury. If Sudomir decided to stay away, that just meant he could deconstruct his warding scheme at his leisure, and that was still a win in his book.

Like he suspected, the wards did not like him trying to figure them out. If he hadn’t already outed himself as an intruder, he was certain that his current attempt at analysis would have branded him as such immediately. Zorian expected as much – that was why he hadn’t tried that the moment he stepped through the dimensional gate. What he didn’t expect was for the wards to actively fight back against his analysis. The shifting of the local ward fields around him and the repeated disrupting pulses directed his way were disturbingly adaptive, too intelligently used to come from a mindless spell construct. Was Sudomir somehow adjusting the warding scheme on the fly or were the wards themselves somehow intelligent?

The air in front of him shimmered in a vaguely humanoid shape, and Zorian immediately fired a force lance at the spot. The shimmer was unaffected, though, and soon solidified into a ghostly image of a familiar man. A tall, older, muscular man, dressed in an expensive brown suit. He had a huge mustache and a smiling, sunny expression on his face.

Zorian wasn’t fooled, though. While Sudomir’s illusionary projection tried to give off an air of happy indifference, his smile was noticeably more strained compared to how it was the last time he had seen him.

"Hi there!" Sudomir greeted him through his projection. "I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but this is a private residence. You can’t just come in here and start tearing the place apart! What did I ever do to you, anyway?"

"I’m surprised you’re willing to show your face so openly, Sudomir Kandrei," Zorian stated, scanning his surroundings to make sure Sudomir was not trying to distract him with his projection while setting up a surprise attack.

"Ha! A mage of your caliber doesn’t stumble into a place like this accidentally," Sudomir scoffed. "Your skills, your equipment… you already knew who and what was here, I’m sure. The interesting question is, who are you? It’s only polite to introduce yourself to people, don’t you know?"

"Why did you help the Ibasans organize their attack on Cyoria?" Zorian asked, not interested in giving any personal information to Sudomir and not really finding the man’s antics amusing. "The death toll is in the thousands, and will only grow larger by the end. What did those people ever do to you, Sudomir?"

"Ah. It’s nothing personal, really," Sudomir shrugged, his smile dimming somewhat. "They’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Politics can be brutal like that."

"Politics?" asked Zorian incredulously. "They’re trying to release a primordial to rampage around the continent and you think that’s somehow in your political interest!? I can understand how the Ibasans think this is a good thing for them, but what about you? Why would you want that to happen?"

Sudomir stared at him for a second with a judging look on his face.

"So you know about that too, huh?" he said, clacking his tongue in distaste. "Well, I don’t think I feel comfortable discussing my goals with you, my dear home invader. However, just between you and me, I’d wager the Ibasans are too optimistic about this primordial’s supposed danger level. It’s going to do a lot of damage, I’m sure, but to imagine it running around the continent, destroying things at whim? Not a chance. I give it at best a week before Eldemar gathers enough troops to kill it. And that’s assuming it’s not just a dumb animal that will wander into the first trap they set for it."

"That’s a very reckless attitude to have about the scenario," Zorian frowned. "What if you’re wrong?"

"Nothing in life comes without risk," Sudomir said in a lecturing voice.

Ugh. He was going nowhere with this conversation, and the man was blatantly stalling for time. He dispelled the projection with a wave of his hand and started walking towards the center of the mansion again, his two golem bodyguards walking in front of him. There was no point in trying to analyze the wards again, since he couldn’t get through the weirdly intelligent safeguards Sudomir had put in place to prevent such things.

Another ghostly projection shimmered into existence in front of him, but he dispelled it before it had a chance to speak.

"Now that’s just rude!" a disembodied voice echoed all around him. No more projection this time – just sound that followed him around wherever he went. "We were having a conversation!"

There was a locked door in his way, so Zorian chucked one of his three remaining explosive cubes at it. It failed to work when he gave it a signal to explode.

"Sorry, but no explosions in my house," Sudomir’s disembodied voice declared.

Zorian frowned. Just like in the previous restart. And he had adjusted his explosive to try and counter the effect too. Worrying. By themselves, anti-explosion wards were nothing new. Every important building had them. Most of the time, though, they were just basic things that could not stand up to Zorian’s craftsmanship. Sudomir’s wards could not only counter his basic explosives, but also his specialized work that was expressly designed to work inside a heavily warded area.

His hand instinctively grasped one of the explosive rings he carried around his neck. His old suicide method, which he opted to still carry around just in case. He quickly took off one of the rings and threw it at the door, wanting to see if they would work. The suicide rings were his most sophisticated work, after all, designed to work no matter what the circumstances.

The ring failed to blow up. Hmm. Maybe the wards worked on some exotic principle that totally shut down all spell formula-based explosives?

To test that theory, he threw a bottle of liquid explosive, alchemically made and devoid of any fancy spellwork, at the door in question. The bottle exploded as intended, sending dust and wooden splinters everywhere.

So alchemy-based explosives still work. Good to know.

"Just how many expendables did you bring with you?" Sudomir asked him through his voice spell. "It must have cost a fortune! I’m flattered that you spent all that money on little old me, but is that really the best use of your resources?"

After that, the remaining undead in the mansion started attacking him again, trying to ambush him from nearby rooms as he tried to navigate the confusing inner layout of the mansion. They failed to actually hurt him, but they slowed his advance to a crawl and ended up being enough in the end.

He literally ran out of time – the restart ended before he could track down Sudomir and confront him.

Oh well, there was always next time.

The next restart was largely similar to the previous one. He still contacted Deep Blue and the Luminous Advocates for mind magic instructions and largely spent the entire restart working on his mind magic. He did make a minor deviation at the start of the restart in order to visit the the Ghost Serpent Acolytes, though.

They told him the exact same thing they had in the previous restart: the Ghost Serpent says he’s bad news and that he should go away. Trying to find out why he was bad news yielded no results – the spirit the web in question worshipped refused to say what about him was bad news. The very knowledge of what sort of bad news he was, was in itself bad news. He was the worst news.

Bizarre. Well, disliking someone for no reason was no crime and, short of attacking the Ghost Serpent Acolytes, there was nothing Zorian could do about the situation. And if he attacked them, then he was kind of vindicating the asshole spirit in a way, wasn’t he?

His lessons with the Luminous Advocates progressed at a rapid pace. By the end of the restart, he was ready to attempt to repair the matriarch’s memory packet. It worked… sort of. The packet wasn’t exactly fixed, but he’d halted the degradation and bought himself another two months before it would start to decay again. That, the Luminous Advocates informed him, was the only thing that could really be done about a decaying foreign memory packet – you mentally stitch it together and it would hold for a time, but that process was in itself destructive to the packet, so there were only so many times one could repair it. Based on the size and condition of the matriarch’s memory packet, the Luminous Advocates thought it could only be repaired one more time without risking its destruction.

He had two more months to get better at memory packet repairs, after which he would get one more chance to buy some time. That meant that, depending on how good the second round of repairs went, he had about four or five more restarts at most to get good enough at interpreting aranean memories to read the memories stored in the packet.

He decided he had to get some experience with reading aranean memories. Actually reading aranean memories, not doing simplified exercises with aranean tutors. Of course, neither the Luminous Advocates nor Deep Blue would agree to work with him on that, and he would bet that no other web could be talked into it either. No, that sort of thing was virtually always a hostile act – something you do to your enemies.

So the solution was simple. He had to find some aranean enemies.

His first idea was to go after the Sword Divers. After all, they did try to ambush him once, and he still held a grudge about that, even if they didn’t remember any of it. It even worked for a time – he managed to ambush several Sword Diver patrols and captured them for memory reading.

His first two attempts to read the aranean mind ended up about as well as his first attempt at reading human minds. That is, not well at all. He improved quickly, however, and soon found out some interesting things about Sword Divers. They had a habit of attacking vulnerable mages, it turned out – they limited themselves to mages that tried to explore the Dungeon beneath Korsa, and they were very careful about whom they targeted, but they were definitely willing to attack anyone they saw as an easy target. They also lived very deep in the Dungeon, and any time they made the wrong person disappear, they just retreated from the surface layers until the searches and outrage died down.

And that is what the Sword Divers did when they realized someone was targeting them – they flat out abandoned the Dungeon beneath Korsa, retreating into the depths. Having read their minds, Zorian knew it would be weeks, perhaps months before they deigned to return, and he didn’t dare follow after them.

So he just looted their surface money stashes (more out of spite than because he really needed the cash) and went searching for more targets.

He asked both Deep Blue and the Luminous Advocates if they knew an aranean web they wouldn’t mind targeted. Surprisingly, it was the Luminous Advocates that were more interested – he expected Deep Blue to jump to the chance, considering their neighborhood, but they were actually pretty content with their current situation. They did offer him a job, however… one that they claimed would buy him pretty much anything he wanted out of them. Basically, they wanted him to get rid of the crystal ooze that was harassing their resource gathering expeditions into the deeper parts of the Dungeon.

Crystal oozes were virtually immune to physical damage, quite fast, absorbed most forms of magical energy, could shoot arrow-like shards of crystal at things that annoyed them, and even a tiny prickle from one of their crystal blades and shards would rapidly turn a living being into a crystal statue. They were sometimes called crystal basilisks, and they were one of those nightmare monsters that nobody actually wanted to fight unless there was no choice.

Deep Blue didn’t seem very surprised when he declined their offer.

As for the Luminous Advocates, they were apparently under constant threat from a web they called The Demon Skin Web or the Howling Ones. Those weren’t their real names, but since that particular web refused to talk to any of the other ones and simply did the telepathic equivalent of screaming whenever someone tried to talk to them, the Luminous Advocates didn’t know what to call them. The Luminous Advocates indicated they wouldn’t mind to see them gone, or at least thinned out a bit.

Well, by the end of the restart, Zorian had found out a lot of things about them. Such as that they called themselves Challengers of the Unspeakable, and were the so-called old aranea – the magicless, original webs that got conquered, assimilated or exterminated by the newer, magic-using webs originating from underneath Cyoria. They had watched all their old neighbors fall before the tide of magic-using newcomers, either through violent conquest or through magic-using immigrants, until they were the only ones left. As far as they were concerned, it was the Luminous Advocates who were The Demon Skin Web.

Tragic, but Challengers of the Unspeakable were also violent killers that actively raided their neighbors, and even nearby human communities when they could get away with it. Zorian had no qualms about raiding them back.

Finally, as the end of the restart approached, he started finalizing his preparations for another gate assault. This time his golem brigade would hopefully survive long enough to actually step into Iasku Mansion along with him, giving him solid superiority over Sudomir’s undead guards.

As they say, third time’s the charm.

48. Well of Souls

Far away from any established path or settlement, in a small artificial cave that Zorian had made to serve as his workshop and base of operations, there was a large wooden table. A mass of papers was strewn over it, and Zorian was staring at it with a small frown. The collection of scribbled notes and crude diagrams in front of him would no doubt look like a haphazard mess to the casual observer, but there was a pattern to the chaos. Zorian had spent a fair amount of time assembling the entire thing, and each piece of paper was exactly where he wanted it to be.

Absentmindedly tapping his pencil on the table, Zorian considered the information laid out in front of him. Everything he knew about Sudomir and Iasku Mansion was there on the table, along with any other information he thought might be relevant for the upcoming gate assault. Truthfully, he already had a plan for the event… but it never hurt to double-check things, just in case he had forgotten something crucial. There were only three more days left until the summer festival, so if he wanted to make any significant changes to the plan, this was pretty much his last chance to do so.

After his conversation with Sudomir in the previous restart, Zorian was now fairly sure that the man had his own goals he wanted to accomplish, and was effectively a third faction of the invasion force. He was not just being a loyal member of the Cult of the Dragon Below or sympathetic to the Ibasans – he was hoping to gain something out of this endeavor, and it wasn’t the same thing that the other two factions were fighting for.

Sadly, he had been unable to figure out what Sudomir had been alluding to when he said he supported the invasion because of politics. That could mean anything, really – there was no shortage of reasons why someone might want Cyoria gone or taken down a peg. Sudomir might be trying to alter the internal balance of power within Eldemar to advance his pet cause or trying to destroy Cyoria’s regional importance to boost the power of his own town and domain. He might be trying to weaken Eldemar as a whole on behalf of foreign interests or he might simply want to distract the central government by destroying a major loyalist stronghold and giving them an external enemy to focus on. The possibilities were endless and he had no way to narrow things down.

Well, no way besides repeatedly invading Iasku Mansion or attacking Sudomir directly. The former he was already doing, and the latter was hard to pull off. It was too easy for Sudomir to teleport away if Zorian decided to attack him on the job, and Zorian didn’t know where the man went when not attending to his duties. Certainly not to his home in Knyazov Dveri, which was virtually abandoned most of the time. Knowing Zorian’s luck, Sudomir was probably spending most of his time safely ensconced in Iasku Mansion, which was essentially unassailable before the day of the invasion.

No, his current way of going about things was definitely the correct one. Sudomir was never as vulnerable as he was on the day of the invasion, and not just because he foolishly sent virtually all of his forces to join the invasion and then left the obvious hole in his defenses completely unguarded. Iasku Mansion was obviously more than just a secret base for Sudomir, otherwise he would have been far more willing to cut his losses and run in the previous restart. There was something there – something he was unwilling to abandon, even after being metaphorically caught with his pants down and steadily backed into a corner. Zorian had a feeling that if he could find this mysterious something, he would solve the mystery of what Sudomir’s real goals were easily enough.

He spent several more minutes poring over the papers in front of him, considering and discarding various possibilities, before his eyes fell on the small cluster of notes dealing with Iasku Mansion’s warding scheme. His frown immediately deepened. Those wards worried him. His research told him there were several methods that Sudomir could have used to achieve the sort of reaction Zorian had experienced when he had tried to analyze the wards, but in all honesty? The most likely answer was that Sudomir had bound souls into the mansion’s warding scheme. It seemed fairly obvious, considering Sudomir was clearly very necromancy-focused, and it would explain the weird ominous feelings he kept getting whenever the wards recognized him as an enemy. Most wards weren’t so obvious about targeting someone.

Another point in favor of such a theory was that Iasku Mansion wasn’t situated on a mana well, as far as Zorian could tell. He had spent several days wandering around the area where Iasku Mansion was located, mapping the local geomantic web and dodging winter wolf patrols, and he had found no evidence of a convenient underground ley line that could be tapped into. In other words, Iasku Mansion couldn’t possibly support a warding scheme of any appreciable power. Not with conventional methods, anyway. Souls though… souls continued producing mana, even after death. It was what made them so valuable to spiritual entities like demons and was one of the reasons why undead were so much more convenient to use than golems. It would take a lot of souls to power the sort of wards that Iasku Mansion sported, but it could be done. And Sudomir clearly had no problems getting souls, considering how many undead guards he had at his disposal.

Unfortunately, the illegal nature of soul magic made it difficult to gather solid information on its limitations and peculiarities. Even if he really was dealing with a creepy soul-powered house, Zorian had no idea what that meant for Sudomir’s capabilities or how to exploit it. Coupled with the fact that Sudomir no doubt had some kind of last resort defense set up at the heart of his domain, and Zorian was feeling just a little bit uneasy about blithely walking in there without knowing more about what he was dealing with.

Fortunately, he was a mage. He had a way of eating his cake and having it too.

The basic idea came from seeing Sudomir’s projection. Zorian couldn’t really project himself through the mansion like that, since the wards would stop him, but he could pilot his golem army remotely. That would be very impractical for most mages, but he was a telepath, and a pretty damn good one at this point. All he had to was do install a bunch of telepathic relays into each golem, along with some moderately complex spell formula work to make them understand his telepathic commands.

It worked well. No, it worked better than well. Maybe it was because he had animated the golems himself, and they thus had affinity to his own thoughts, but ordering them around telepathically was very fast and smooth – almost like controlling additional bodies. He could never achieve that sort of precision and coordination with verbal commands, and Zorian was wondering if there was any point in even bothering with conventional control methods in the future. Unless he was designing golems for someone else’s use, verbal commands were only useful as a backup method for times when his telepathy was being disrupted.

Unfortunately, there were some problems with his idea of simply throwing his golems at Sudomir and orchestrating things from relative safety. For one thing, the fact that he wasn’t there personally meant he would be unable to use any magic to help them out. There was no way to cast spells remotely through his puppets – even his mind magic didn’t extend beyond the golems themselves. He also wouldn’t be able to activate his dispeller grenades and other spell items with mana pulses, which had necessitated a complete redesign of his arsenal into something cruder and less versatile. Finally, there was a fairly major issue of Sudomir seeing through his setup and disrupting his control over the golems. According to the books, that was the major reason why remote control schemes weren’t more popular among mages – they were too easy to disrupt if the opponent knew what he was doing. Hopefully his solution to that problem would work. Come to think of it, he should probably check up on that now…

Dropping his pen on the table with a small sigh, Zorian left the planning room (as he had dubbed it) and went to the crafting chamber where he assembled his golems and other equipment. Most of the golems were already done at this point, silently standing at the far end of the room where they wouldn’t be in the way, awaiting orders. Six golems – two of them big and bulky to soak up damage, and four smaller and faster ones to serve as a backbone of his little force. He extended his mind to them momentarily, testing their responsiveness to see if the control interface had degraded since their last test. It hadn’t. Good. The first dozen or so versions had been very unstable, but it seemed he had ironed out all the flaws in the latest batch. He turned his attention to the reason he came here – his last, currently unfinished creation.

It didn’t look like much, in all honesty. Thin, almost skeletal, and yet smaller than even his four agility-focused combat golems. The animation core that powered it was likewise underwhelming – the golem in question couldn’t do anything without constant, detailed instruction. It would be useless for just about any purpose… except, hopefully, for the one that Zorian designed it for.

Namely, for being his body double. The golem was specifically designed to mimic his size and proportions, with an animation core meant to synchronize with his telepathic orders as smoothly as possible. Magical sensors allowed Zorian to see and hear through it as through his own senses, and while he couldn’t achieve the same amount of hand-eye coordination while using it as he could with his own body, it should be enough to throw around grenades and walk around well enough to pass as a human being.

He glanced at the nearby alchemical container, where a syrupy pink liquid bubbled softly upon a carefully regulated fire. The artificial skin solution looked pretty much done to his eyes, but the recipe he had bought claimed the whole thing needed to simmer for at least another fifteen minutes so he left it alone for the moment, putting the golems through another round of tests to pass the time.

Finally, once the fifteen minutes had passed, he dumped the artificial skin solution over the golem and quickly started molding it into something resembling himself before it solidified and became unmodifiable.

Half an hour later, he stood back to inspect his handiwork. It… was kind of bad. The golem didn’t really look like him much, or even entirely human, despite his best efforts. Either he sucked even more as a sculptor than he’d thought he did or he should have taken the solution off the fire sooner, recipe be damned. But it was adequate, really – some strategic goggles, heavy clothing and maybe a large hat should be enough to hide the imperfections. It should look human enough to fool Sudomir, at least until he could face off with the necromancer in person, at which point the man’s soul sight would allow him to see through any amount of disguise anyway. Hard to hide that the golem has no soul, after all.

Oh well, even if the idea turned out to have been stupid and unnecessary in the end, he regretted nothing. He’d always wanted to make a body double of himself to offload some of his more annoying duties onto, and this seemed like a step in the right direction. Animation spells could get scarily intelligent at the highest levels of sophistication, so it should be possible to design a lookalike golem that could pass casual inspection and pose as him.

Looking at the misshapen thing in front of him, though, Zorian knew he was quite far from being able to create something like that.

He’d never be able to skip family gatherings with this!

By now, the gate assault had become something of a routine for Zorian. He dealt with the Ibasan defenders virtually flawlessly, the only complication being that the pair of cave drakes he’d used as a distraction had fallen a little too quickly for Zorian’s liking. They were big and tough, but apparently hordes of weaker opponents were a better choice for keeping the defenders busy until he could secure the gate. Still, all of his golems had survived the attack on the Ibasan base, and most of his spell item stockpile was still unspent, so Zorian considered the first phase of the attack a success. With the gate secure, the real operation could begin. He pushed the unconscious body of one of the Ibasans through the gate to fool the mansion’s wards into thinking the incursion was authorized and then stepped through, his golem battlegroup trailing behind him.

The plan was simple: Zorian would remain in the gate room, guarded by one of the big golems, while the rest of his force would be sent deeper into the mansion to confront Sudomir. Zorian would be essentially projecting himself through the smallest, most human-looking golem, occasionally giving the rest of the golems superfluous verbal commands to complete the illusion. Hopefully this would fool Sudomir into thinking he was dealing with two human invaders, one of whom was just guarding the gate while the other one led a force of golems deeper into his domain, rather than just one human that was directing the golems remotely. Not only should it keep Sudomir from trying to disrupt Zorian’s remote control, it should also keep Sudomir’s attention firmly on the advancing golems and reduce the chance of him sending his forces around to strike at real Zorian.

The first surprise came when his golems had reached the spot where the wards had turned on him in the previous restart. This time they didn’t activate. Strange. After thinking about it for a while, Zorian decided it was probably because none of the golems had souls. The detection wards were probably soul-based, just like everything else in this house.

Sadly, that only delayed the problem, as he soon encountered a locked door he had to go through to keep advancing. The golem Zorian was puppeteering didn’t have anything to pick the lock with, and even if it had, it lacked the manual dexterity to perform something as finicky as lock-picking, so he just ordered the big golem to smash the door aside.

Unsurprisingly, that proved too much for the wards to ignore, and they immediately turned hostile. Zorian ordered the golem group forward, trying to get them as close to the mansion’s center as possible before Sudomir scrambled his undead forces and tried to intercept them.

Curiously, the dimensional gate stayed open, despite the activation of the wards. Zorian could feel the wards' agitation as they realized he was a threat and intensified around him, but even though he triggered the wards in such a brazen manner, even though he was right there in the gate room, the dimensional opening refused to close shut. Obviously triggering the wards outside the actual gate room sidestepped the automatic shutdown contingency, but that sounded like such a silly oversight that Zorian couldn’t help but think Sudomir wanted things to work like that. Surely a warding expert like Sudomir wouldn’t make that sort of mistake? And even if he did, he almost certainly had a way to shut down the gate on his own initiative, independent of any automatic shutdown.

What was he missing here? Why would Sudomir want the gate to remain open, even if he had intruders inside his mansion?

Well, whatever. Only one way to find out. The golems pressed onwards, even as the first waves of undead began to crash into them. Zorian had plenty of spell items to burn this time, so he used them quite liberally on the attackers to great effect. His advance was steady and unstoppable, and the attacks on his golem group became increasingly frantic and disorganized as time went by. Sudomir hadn’t even tried to contact him, in person or via projection.

There were far less traps than Zorian expected there would be, though in retrospect it made a lot of sense that Sudomir wouldn’t seed his corridors with explosives and other destructive effects. Nobody wanted their possessions trashed by their own defenses, and the mansion was usually filled to the brim with guards anyway. When Zorian did finally encounter a real trap, it came in the form of a gas trap that rapidly filled an entire hallway with thick, yellow smoke. Considering that the gas had no effect on his golems and that the activation of the trap was soon followed by one last attack by the mansion’s undead defenders, Zorian guessed that the gas was poisonous. It was a pretty good way to debilitate unprepared living foes while leaving the undead boars and warriors unaffected. The smoke also reduced visibility for anyone relying on regular sight, while the undead didn’t seem affected by the resulting visibility issues.

Sudomir had clearly put in his all into this one last attack, even sending a pair of flesh golems to reinforce the more familiar boars and black-clad human corpses. The flesh golems managed to destroy two of his smaller golems before being torn apart, but the result was never really in doubt. The undead were destroyed and Zorian broke through the last door standing between him and his destination. The golem he was puppeteering stepped into the heart of Iasku Mansion, and the sight honestly left Zorian speechless.

The room was large and cylindrical, with every inch of the walls covered with spell formula glyphs. Rather than being simply etched or painted on, however, the glyphs were made out of a shiny, silvery metal embedded into the walls. The really eye-catching thing, though, was the massive crystalline cylinder placed into the exact center of the room. It stretched from floor to ceiling, affixed to them via stone bases and thick metal bands, and emanated a soft blue glow that dimmed and brightened in a slow, regular pattern. Like a gigantic, glowing, cylindrical heart.

Zorian stared at the glowing pillar and the glyph-covered wall in silence, wondering what the hell he’d stepped into. He had expected to find something interesting here, yes, but the sheer scale of the thing in front of him was rather intimidating.

"Beautiful, isn’t it?" Sudomir said, stepping from behind the pillar. "It took me years to build all of this. It’s a work of love, and I’d really hate to see it damaged. So be a little careful with those explosives you are toting around here, okay?"

Zorian frowned at the man in front of him. Sudomir was just standing there, smiling at him cockily. It was as if he was daring Zorian to attack him. For a moment, he debated simply ordering his golems to surge forwards and crush Sudomir into paste, but he decided to hold back for the moment. He wanted to see if he could get something out of the man first.

"The cylinder is a soul storage device, isn’t it?" Zorian spoke through the golem. "That’s how you’re powering the wards in this place. There must be hundreds of souls trapped there…"

"A soul storage device!?" Sudomir repeated, sounding quite outraged. His left hand twitched uncontrollably for a second before Sudomir used his other hand to still its movements. "You think all of this is just…"

He burst into laughter, like he’d just heard a very amusing joke.

Was it just Zorian or did Sudomir sound just a little bit unhinged this time?

"My dear, foolish, uninvited guest… you have no idea what you have stumbled upon here, do you? Look around you!" said Sudomir, making a sweeping gesture with his hands to indicate at the room they were standing in. "Do you really think this place is just a simple soul storage device? No, no, my friend – what you are looking at is a veritable well of souls containing thousands of spiritual essences, and with enough room for a million more!"

"A million souls?" Zorian asked incredulously. "Come on now, Sudomir… how would you even gather that many souls in a timely manner?"

"Cyoria has almost half a million people," Sudomir said, shrugging lightly. "If the attack on Cyoria goes as planned, most of them are going to die tonight. They will then go here to join the ones I’ve already gathered."

He knocked on the crystal pillar lightly for emphasis.

"What?" asked Zorian, a horrifying realization dawning on him.

"Oh yes… This place?" began Sudomir, spinning in place with his hands outstretched. "This is the equivalent of an antlion pit for souls. Everyone who dies in the vicinity of Iasku Mansion has their soul drawn here and trapped in the well. Normally, that doesn’t mean much, since we’re in the middle of nowhere. But now…"

"The gate," Zorian said. "It allows you to extend your soul trap over the city while the Ibasans go about killing people. That’s why you haven’t closed the gate, even after you realized you were under attack."

"Every moment that the gate spends closed is a moment during which souls are not flowing into the well," Sudomir said. "And, you see, there were no more attackers pouring in by the time I noticed the intrusion. Only you two… or perhaps just one? I can’t see a soul on you. You didn’t react at all when I flooded the corridor with breath-stealer gas, either. Not to mention how suspiciously passive the mage next to the gate is. You’re some kind of fancy projection, aren’t you?"

Before Zorian could say anything, Sudomir started laughing again, loudly and hysterically, his hands twitching and clenching in a disturbing manner. Zorian was pretty sure at this point that there was something very wrong with Sudomir. He had triggered some pretty radical change in the necromancer with his successful invasion. The laughter, the twitching, the unusual candidness of his responses… Sudomir looked almost drugged. Did he panic in the face of the crisis and take some ill-advised enhancement potion? Or maybe perform some spell with severe side-effects? Whatever the answer, Sudomir was steadily becoming more unstable as the conversation progressed and Zorian didn’t think he would get much more out of him.

"Why? Why!?" Sudomir screamed suddenly, instantly transitioning from laughter to overdramatic despair. His skin writhed like snakes were swimming through his flesh and his eyes began to shine with a soft blue glow. Yup, he’d definitely panicked and done something stupid. "Why did you come here!? Everything was going so well, so perfectly! All those years of planning, all the sacrifices I made… I won’t let you take it all away from me! I won’t, I won’t, I won’t, I won’t!"

Zorian ordered his golems to attack the man, but he had made his move far too late. Before the golems could reach him, Sudomir’s body rapidly expanded and twisted, transforming into a huge humanoid monster. It was green, vaguely reptilian and had small, vestigial wings growing out of its back – like a cross between a troll and dragon.

The golems he’d ordered to attack Sudomir kept charging at their target, undaunted by the transformation, but the creature was stronger and more agile than Zorian’s creations. It probably was part-troll, too, because it definitely regenerated like one when wounded. It did not take long for the smaller golems to be reduced to scrap, and the big golem wasn’t doing so well either.

Zorian was just about to hit it with every spell item he had left when he found out that the troll-dragon thing could breathe fire too. The poor golem he was following didn’t last a second under the heat before failing.

The big golem disappeared from his control less than a minute later. Knowing that he had no chance against this transformed, berserk version of Sudomir, Zorian stepped back into the Ibasan base on the other side of the dimensional gate and then tried to analyze the gate to see how it worked.

Predictably, the gate soon detected his tampering and shut itself down. Of course. He kind of figured that would happen. Well, at least that way Sudomir couldn’t get to him, and he’d also located one of the traps Quatach-Ichl had placed on the gate to prevent tampering with it. It would take a fair number of restarts, but he felt he could locate and dismantle the protection on the gate with a bit of trial and error.

He didn’t have much time to consider things, though, because Quatach-Ichl showed up soon after the gate closed to see what was happening. Zorian activated his restart switch rather than confront him.

At the start of the next restart, once he had a chance to calm down and think about things, Zorian decided that Sudomir had to be dealt with somehow. Originally he’d gone after the man because he had seemed like an easier target than the Ibasan leaders and probably knew a lot of their sensitive secrets, but the revelation about his soul gathering operation really disturbed Zorian. He had no idea what one would need hundreds of thousands of souls for, but it couldn’t possibly be good. Politics, he’d said. Hmph.

Still, this soul trap of his… it should be very obvious to someone who knew what to look for. Large-scale magic like that couldn’t be hidden easily. Was that why Sudomir had gotten rid of every soul mage in the region? So they couldn’t stumble upon his twisted masterpiece and report him to the government? If so, then dealing with Sudomir might simply be a matter of reporting the man to central authorities and having them deal with everything.

He didn’t need this kind of distraction at the moment, though – the matriarch’s memory package was steadily degrading and he was running out of time. Thus, for the next two restarts he continued doing what he had been doing thus far: visiting aranean webs in order to learn more about memory packets and the aranean mind. He still made two gate assaults at the end of each restart, but he no longer tried to access the soul well in the center of the mansion. He didn’t see the point – he completely lacked the expertise to make sense of that thing, so he doubted he would learn anything from studying it. Instead, he simply explored the rest of the mansion, building a map of the place and trying to see if there was anything else interesting about it. He didn’t find much, though. Certainly nothing that could compare with the soul trap in the central room.

He also tried to make sense of the teardrop pendants the Ibasans wore around their necks, also without much luck. Analyzing them did not bring down Quatach-Ichl’s wrath on him like he had feared, but there was nothing there to indicate he was holding a functional keystone. The only thing he could think of was that the material itself was perhaps the key. Zorian couldn’t identify it, and it was totally indestructible to casual efforts. It kind of reminded him of Quatach-Ichl’s skeleton, which was also black in color and incredibly resistant to damage.

Although the Luminous Advocates remained his primary aranean teachers in these two restarts, he also checked out the eight webs he was referred to by the Silent Doorway Adepts. Sadly, only three of those were in any way useful to him: The Mind Temple, Perfect Phantasm Crafters and Adherents of Contemplation. Zorian chose to learn from the Mind Temple in the first restart and the Perfect Phantasm Crafters in the second one. The Adherents of Contemplation were too fond of riddles and non-answers for his taste.

The Mind Temple were all about memory, though more focused on honing and organizing their own memories than reading and modifying other people’s ones. Still, they had quite a lot of expertise when it came to memory packets, even if what they taught him was centered more about him making his own memory packets than repairing foreign ones. His skills at making memory packets were good enough by now that he would never really forget anything he specifically tried to remember. If nothing else, that should drastically reduce the number of notebooks he had to write and store at the end of each restart – the alteration method was still useful for transferring other people’s notes across the restart, such as Kael’s research, but most of his own needs were now better served by directly organizing his memories with mind magic.

The Perfect Phantasm Crafters had a very indicative name. They specialized in making illusions – ones made out of real sound and light, as well as simple tricks of the mind. They couldn’t really help him with his memory package problem, but Zorian would also have to actually interpret the information inside the package once he opened it, and Perfect Phantasm Crafters knew a lot about the difference between human and aranean minds. They had to, if they wanted their illusions to work on humans.

However, as helpful as the Perfect Phantasm Crafters were in that regard, there was ultimately only one thing that consistently helped him to understand aranean thoughts – beating up aranea unconscious and forcibly rooting through their minds. Even getting Lukav to make him an aranea transformation potion and assuming their shape for a few hours hadn’t helped him as much.

At the end of the second restart, he tried repairing the matriarch’s memory package again. It was the last time he would be able to extend the deadline, and he was hoping to get four or five extra months before he had to open it.

Instead, he got three.

Damn it.

Though he had only three more months until he had to open the matriarch’s memory packet, Zorian decided to stop seeking lessons from the aranea and simply go back to Cyoria, taking Kirielle with him as usual. There was no point in seeking the lessons at the moment, since he could no longer repair the packet and the only thing that could really improve his ability to understand it was attacking aranea and reading their minds. He didn’t need to set aside an entire restart to do that. Besides, he wanted to ask Kael about his opinion of Sudomir and his operations, since the morlock was the only friendly necromancer that Zorian knew.

He didn’t tell Kael about Sudomir and his soul trap immediately, though – that was bound to be rather upsetting to the boy, considering that a lot of Kael’s friends and acquaintances were killed by Sudomir and probably ended up in that soul well of his. Not really the best topic to broach just after you told someone all about the time loop and the Ibasan invasion that was going to hit the city in less than a month. He would let Kael browse through his notebooks in peace for now and broach the subject later.

Unfortunately, coming back to Cyoria meant that he had to suffer through Xvim’s stupid exercise sessions again. Levitate these marbles, make them glow different colors, assemble them into different shapes… so boring. Wait, fuse two marbles together? What? Xvim usually didn’t give him any alteration-based shaping exercises during these sessions. But no matter, he had already tried that shaping exercise on his own, so it was still trivial to perform it.

Xvim frowned at him. Should he be worried or celebrate that he induced that kind of reaction out in the usually imperturbable man?

Worried, it turned out. Xvim’s demands immediately became atypical following that. Zorian was told to levitate water, to freeze it solid, to make a perfect cube out of ice and then quickly cut it in half without shattering it, to reshape a coin, to burn images into wooden panels, to make a coin spin, to shape candlewax, to hold his hand over a candle flame without getting burnt, to make dice fall on one specific side Xvim called out, to repair a damaged watch, to wilt a flower, to teleport a snail…

Quite a few exercises were utterly beyond Zorian, especially the latter ones. Others he could do, but not with the surety that he knew Xvim demanded of his charges. And yet, Xvim did not triumphantly stop once he’d found something that Zorian was incapable of and then tell him to practice that until he got it right. Instead he just moved on to something else, apparently just testing him to see where his limits were.

"Tell me honestly," Xvim said. "Are you truly Zorian Kazinski?"

"Yes?" Zorian said, baffled. "Why would you ask that?"

"You are too good," Xvim told him bluntly.

What? Now he decided he was too good at this? Bizarre. What did he do to perturb Xvim so much? He couldn’t really remember doing anything more impressive than usual.

"I’ll take that as a compliment," Zorian said. "I am definitely Zorian Kazinski, though, no doubt about it."

"Then how do you explain your shaping skills?" Xvim asked. "They are completely implausible for your age and known background. No matter how talented you may be, your shaping skills are just too… thorough … to be anything but a product of years of practice."

"I started early," Zorian tried.

Xvim gave him an unamused look.

"I’m going to be perfectly honest with you, mister Kazinski," Xvim said with a sigh. "I know it was me who taught you those shaping skills you are currently displaying. Not all of them, but definitely the ones that you have learned properly. Not only do you display some tells that I don’t think anyone other than me would have taught you, but you also seem to know me well enough to anticipate my requests before I even speak them."

Oops. He hadn’t even realized he’d been doing that.

"The thing is, mister Kazinski," said Xvim, leaning forward and fixing him with a small glare, "I don’t remember ever teaching you. And I assure you that I have a very good memory. I would like an explanation, if you don’t mind."

Zorian was silent for nearly a minute, thinking of how to answer that. He could just play dumb, but he had a feeling that Xvim wouldn’t let this go and the most likely explanation for the confusion was that Zorian had used mind magic on Xvim in the past. Considering that he was, in fact, a highly capable mind mage, and that this would be hard to hide under determined scrutiny, it was in his best interest not to let things degenerate into actual legal investigation.

He could just hit the restart switch and start over, but… that felt a little excessive at this point. He could always do that later if the situation continued to deteriorate. Plus, activating the switch so early in the restart might bring unwanted attention from Zach and Red Robe.

Would it be so bad if he told Xvim the truth? The man knew how to protect his mind, and probably wouldn’t go around telling everyone who would listen that his student claimed he was a time traveler. As much as Xvim annoyed him, he was a capable adult mage that clearly knew a lot about limitations of magic and how to go about developing it. He could be quite useful if he could convince him he was telling the truth.

"I’m waiting, mister Kazinski," Xvim said.

"Alright," Zorian relented. "The truth is that we’re all trapped in a time loop of sorts. The whole month leading up to the summer festival repeats itself endlessly, but most people forget everything that happened when time resets itself. But some people remember, and I am one of them…"

Xvim listened to Zorian’s story in silence, neither asking questions nor professing disbelief. Zorian didn’t tell the man everything, of course – he said nothing about the invasion that happened at the end of the restart, for instance, and he kept information about himself and his abilities to a minimum. Definitely not telling the man who suspected him of messing with his mind that he was more than capable of doing just that!

Eventually, Zorian’s explanation wound down and silence descended upon the room. Xvim seemed to be lost in thought for the moment and Zorian was content to wait for the man’s reaction.

"So," Xvim said eventually. "You are saying that we have been having these practice sessions for several years now, except that I forget all about them every few weeks."

"Yes," Zorian confirmed.

"That must have been a miserable experience for you, then," Xvim observed candidly.

"Err…" Zorian fumbled, unsure how to respond to that.

"I am still not sure whether to believe you about all this," Xvim said. "It seems quite unbelievable. However, assuming you are indeed telling the truth, I feel compelled to apologize for the actions of my… previous selves. You see, I make it a point to be very demanding with my charges for the first month or two of our mentorship."

What?

"What?" Zorian asked incredulously, scarcely believing what he was hearing.

"It builds character and weeds out the unfit," said Xvim, giving him an unrepentant shrug. "Moreover, most of the students being sent my way need to be humbled somewhat, for their own good. Unfortunately, a time loop does not play well with such ploys. I wouldn’t have put you through several years of that kind of treatment if I had any control over the situation."

Zorian was torn between wanting to laugh and slugging the man in the face. He subjected every student to several months of being an utter jerk as a test of character? That was so stupid! How could he possibly think that was a reasonable thing to do?

"I cannot possibly put into words how much I want to hit you right now," he told Xvim seriously.

"We’ll talk about expanding your vocabulary later," Xvim told him dismissively, before depositing a pen and a piece of paper in front of him. "For now, please list a few things I can check to confirm your story."

Shooting Xvim one last glare, Zorian picked up the pen and started writing. This was going to be one long restart, he could already tell.

49. Substitution

Time travel was a hard thing to prove. It was known to be impossible among mages, and proof to the contrary usually boiled down to possession of impossible knowledge and skills. Unfortunately, that often simply wasn’t convincing enough. There existed a nigh-infinite number of ways to gather information with magic, none of which required time travel, and impossible skills could just as easily mean you were not who you claimed you were. There was little that Zorian could tell Xvim that couldn’t be explained with something more mundane than time travel.

Still. While Zorian had no idea whether Xvim was actually going to accept his story, he was confident that the information he’d written down on the sheet of paper in front of him would at least give the man some pause. The restarts varied greatly in how they developed, but some things always remained the same, which meant that Zorian could give Xvim a multitude of small predictions about the upcoming days. Things like what was going to be written in the newspapers, what magical stores would announce special sales in preparation for the summer festival and what students would end up leaving the academy because of the monster incursions. It helped that it had been less than a week since the restart had begun, so events didn’t have the time to diverge too much yet.

Individually, each of the things he’d written were easy to explain. When taken as a whole? He would have to be the best damn spy in the whole city to acquire that kind of information, and it still wouldn’t explain how he’d known about some of the more sudden events on the list.

He handed the list to Xvim, who quickly scanned it and then pocketed it with a silent nod. He told Zorian that he would try to verify his claims over the weekend and that Zorian should visit him again on Monday.

And that was that. A decent outcome, all things considered. Zorian halfway expected Xvim to criticize his penmanship and tell him to start over and write properly this time around. He bid Xvim goodbye and left.

He was in the process of walking back home, idly trying to think of a good way to broach the topic of Sudomir’s soul well to Kael, when he spotted a green-haired girl waving at him in the distance. Surprised and distracted as he was, it took him several seconds to realize who he was looking at, even though green hair was pretty damn rare and therefore a huge giveaway. It was Kopriva Reid, one of his classmates.

He waved back uncertainly, wondering what that was about. It was common courtesy to greet your classmates when you meet them outside the academy, of course, but this wasn’t the first time Zorian had encountered Kopriva outside the academy and she had never reacted like this in the past. She’d give him a nod if they passed each other by or say hello if he did it first, but never try to attract his attention like she just had. Which made sense, really. She was almost a total stranger to him, just like most of his classmates. So why was she…

Oh. Nevermind, he was going to find out what she wanted soon enough. She was crossing the street and making a beeline towards him.

Zorian studied her as she approached, trying to see if he was in some kind of trouble. He felt no hostility or apprehension emanating from her, so probably not, but Kopriva always kind of intimidated him. Less so since he got stuck in the time loop – before he used to actively avoid her whenever possible – but even in his current situation he’d rather not tangle with someone from House Reid. He was still vulnerable to being drugged senseless, and that was kind of their specialty.

He clearly wasn’t the only one who found her intimidating, either. She was a tall, shapely girl – something Zorian could attest to at the moment, what with her getting ever closer to his position – but very few people had tried to court her over the years. Even Benisek refrained from making a pass on her, which was pretty damn amazing. Zorian was pretty sure that Akoja was the only other girl in their class who Benisek had never tried to flirt with.

"Zorian, you can’t believe how glad I am to see you here," she said once she’d finally gotten close enough. He raised his eyebrows at the statement. "You live together with Kael, right?"

"Yes," he confirmed, curious what that had to do with anything.

"Good. I agreed to meet with him about a business deal today and he gave me the directions to this Imaya’s place where you two live, but… I seem to be misremembering something because I can’t find it," she said. "Could you give me some directions here?"

"I can do better. I’m on my way there myself, so if you don’t mind I can just walk you there," he said.

"Great! I was hoping you would say that," she grinned at him. "Lead the way, then. And don’t mention to anyone that I got lost, okay? That was pretty freaking embarrassing, I don’t know how I messed up so badly. If Kael asks, we just… met on the way by accident. Kind of true, anyway."

Zorian nodded in acceptance and they both set off towards Imaya’s place. He couldn’t help but frown at Kopriva slightly, though. Business deal? Was this what he thought it was?

Unfortunately, Kopriva noticed the look and misconstrued its meaning.

"What’s that look for?" she asked defensively. "You don’t approve of me coming to your place or something?"

"It’s not like that," Zorian assured her hurriedly. Man, she was prickly. "It’s just that when Kael told me he was going to find someone to buy those rare alchemical ingredients from, I didn’t expect this to be the result. I thought he would go to someone… well, older."

When Kael had told Zorian that he had to get ahold of a fair amount of normally restricted alchemical ingredients to continue with his research, Zorian had thought the morlock would go to some shady shop or something, not try to broker a deal with one of their classmates. Then again, Zorian had to admit that that the idea wasn’t stupid as such. House Reid, of which Kopriva was a member, specialized in growing magical plants and processing them into alchemical ingredients. It was also a public secret that they were heavily involved in the sale of drugs and illegal alchemy products in general, and through that maintained deep links with organized crime groups. There was a highly publicized trial against the House a few years back, since several smuggling rings were found to be led by exiled members of the House, but nothing came out of it in the end. House Reid was responsible for a sizeable proportion of Eldemar’s herb fields, greenhouses and forest preserves, some of which nobody except House Reid knew how to tend to, so the government wasn’t willing to antagonize them too much.

So yes, there was some logic to Kael approaching Kopriva to acquire the needed ingredients, though Zorian was still very surprised it had worked. He would have expected Kopriva to act outraged at the implication that she was engaged in criminal activities, fearing some kind of trick. That’s what Zorian would have done in her place. He would have to ask Kael how he had done it later, just in case there was some secret to it that he should know about – he did intend to make use of criminal networks himself in the near future, after all.

"Wait, you’re in on that?" she asked, surprised.

"Yeah. We’re in a partnership of sorts," Zorian said.

"Huh," she said, giving him a speculative look. "I would have never guessed you were involved in something like this. You just seem so straight-laced, you know? Then again, you’re a pretty driven guy, and my grandfather always said that nobody ever got powerful by following the law."

Such sage wisdom from the older generation.

"To tell the truth, I would have never guessed you’d be involved in something like this, either," Zorian said. "I mean, weren’t you annoyed when Kael approached you about this? Doesn’t it bother you that one of your fellow students automatically assumed you were involved in your family’s other business simply because you’re part of House Reid?"

She snorted derisively.

"Everyone assumes that anyway," she said. "They’re just too polite to say it out loud. At least most of the time. Besides, I made some uncharitable assumptions about him as well. I wouldn’t have acknowledged any random offer, you know? If you had been the one to approach me, I would have told you to go to hell. And possibly punched you, if you didn’t back off after that. But since Kael is a morlock, I assumed his offer is actually genuine. Morlocks have a reputation of their own, you know…"

Ah. So that’s why it had worked so easily.

Kopriva then tried to talk him into telling her what he and Kael needed so much restricted material for and how they had gotten the money to pay for it. Zorian actually answered the first, saying it was for benign medical research (totally true, unless Kael was misleading him) but refused to answer questions about the money. He took the chance to ask her if she was planning on reporting them to someone, reading her surface thoughts to make sure she was telling the truth. She denied that – truthfully, as far as he could tell – and seemed more amused than insulted by the accusation. She didn’t really believe they wanted the materials for medical research, though. Zorian didn’t bother convincing her he was telling the truth.

After that, the conversation shifted to other, more casual topics. Mostly academy-related, as that was a relatively inoffensive subject, but Kopriva sometimes pried into his private life when she saw a convenient opportunity to do so. It was interesting, as she hadn’t been this talkative in the previous restarts when she’d joined his combat magic group.

Eventually they reached their destination, at which point Kopriva met Imaya. His landlord had either never heard of House Reid or had an even better poker face than Zorian had thought, because she looked positively overjoyed about Kopriva’s visit. She insisted that Zorian was rude not to offer Kopriva something to eat and drink before dragging her away to hash out a deal.

"Food before work," Imaya said in a lecturing voice. "That’s the rule."

Since Kopriva seemed actually excited at the prospect of eating some homemade cookies, Zorian went along with it. He wasn’t in that much of a hurry.

He really shouldn’t have been surprised when Kopriva asked Imaya for a glass of beer, or when Imaya gave them both a glass in response. He covertly transmuted the liquid into something non-alcoholic while they weren’t looking, but that just made the stuff taste even viler than it usually did, so he may have shot himself in the foot there.

In the end, while the deal was successfully concluded, what was supposed to be a relatively short visit ended up taking most of the afternoon. Kopriva even ended up meeting Kirielle, with whom she got along surprisingly well – he would have to talk to his sister later about what was acceptable for conversation around the green-haired girl, since Kopriva said she would drop by again next week to deliver the materials. He should probably have a talk with Imaya as well, just in case the older woman really had no idea who she was dealing with.

Ultimately, though, Zorian did not worry about the whole thing too much. The deal was largely arranged by Kael, for Kael, with Zorian’s role being mainly to pay for it all. As such, he felt it was only proper to let the morlock boy take care of it while Zorian focused on something else.

Gods knew he had too many things vying for his time as it was.

Zorian’s plan for the weekend consisted of two solid days of aranea fighting and accompanying memory reading to practice for the eventual opening of the matriarch’s memory packet. Sadly, the plan didn’t survive collision with reality. His first target – the Burning Apex web in the vicinity of Cyoria – turned out to be a rather poor choice for aggression.

They were a martially-inclined web, proficient in both magic and mental combat, and had spent most of their existence in fierce competition with the neighboring webs. The patrol he ambushed seemed like easy targets to him, but they ended up being anything but. They worked together flawlessly, had some sort of mental attack that could partially pass through his mental barriers and had prepared the battlefield beforehand. They ended up maneuvering him into a pre-existing explosion trap and detonated a boulder right next to him. He managed to shield himself against the bulk of the blast, but he still ended up with a severely wounded arm and a multitude of minor scrapes. Plus he had a raging headache from when he failed to shield against their telepathic attacks properly.

He activated his recall stone and fled.

The damage was nothing really serious, he later found out, but it would take several days before he was completely healed, even with the healing potions that Kael was supplying him. Since embarking on further campaigns against the aranea while in less than top form struck him as a terrible idea, his plans would have to be delayed. Damn it.

At least Kael was happy. Ever since he had found out that Zorian could teleport all over the country as he pleased, he had been trying to talk Zorian into taking him to the northern wilderness so he could gather herbs, mushrooms and other materials for his research. Zorian had been decidedly against it, considering it to be a waste of time… but since his plan was already shot to hell and he couldn’t do much at the moment, he figured he would grant Kael’s wish just this once.

Accordingly, Sunday found Zorian wandering around the forest with Kael. Zorian had expected his role would be to simply teleport Kael around and protect him from anything that sought to kill them, but Kael was feeling talkative that day and insisted on explaining everything he was doing to Zorian. Every time they encountered one of the plants Kael was looking for, the morlock boy told him why the plant could be found in that particular place, what it was useful for, and how to harvest the plant correctly. All of which was very important information that was not easy to get ahold of – one could not find this sort of thing in most books, as people were reluctant to share this sort of information. It was all too easy to overharvest specific magical plants if too many people were doing it, so there was a tendency among herbalists to guard their secrets tightly and only pass them on to their apprentices. Even so, quite a few magical plants went totally extinct over the centuries due to unchecked exploitation, making potions they were used for impossible to make in modern times.

So yes, it was a good thing to know all this. And yet…

"I still don’t see why you wanted to do this so badly," Zorian complained as he used a knife to harvest some sort of river grass. The thing was tricky to harvest correctly, since one had to cut it quickly and in exactly the right place or its alchemical properties would be completely ruined. Not an easy thing to do with one wounded hand. "We could have just bought all of this in a store and saved ourselves so much time. Yes, I know it would have been rather expensive, but I could afford it. Easily. Money is less of a problem for me than time."

"I’m afraid you are wrong," Kael said, shaking his head. The morlock boy was crouching not too far from Zorian, staring at a large boulder like it was the most interesting thing in the world. Zorian felt the urge to ask Kael what the hell was so interesting about that rock, but eventually decided he didn’t want to know. "The things we are gathering are very hard to find in a store. They tend to be snapped up by wealthy, influential alchemists who buy them straight from the people who gather them in the wild. They never reach the shelves."

"Really?" Zorian asked, surprised. "Strange. You’d think someone would just start cultivating them if they’re in such high demand. You know, like House Reid and so many others are already doing for other useful magical plants."

"Not every plant can be grown in controlled conditions," Kael told him. "Many of them cannot survive outside their natural environment for whatever reason, and that environment is either impossible or uneconomical to mimic artificially. Others will grow just fine, but will lose whatever essence makes them useful if not taken care of in just the right way or exposed to very specific conditions. Some of them can be transplanted into gardens and survive, but will never grow or reproduce afterwards. Some of them grow so slowly that nobody can be actually bothered to wait for them to grow to maturity."

"Okay, I get it," Zorian said, interrupting his lecture. "Magical plants are very hard to domesticate. I actually knew that already but the ones we’re gathering just don’t seem all that special to me, you know? But if you say otherwise, I will take your word for it. I’m not a botanical expert by any means."

"Neither am I, but I do know a few things about the topic. My adoptive mother insisted I had to know these things if I wanted to be a real alchemist," Kael said, rising to his feet and discarding the clump of moss he had been scrutinizing up until a moment ago. "Are you done with those? Do you need some help?"

"Here," Zorian said, handing Kael the river grass he harvested. "I think I got all of them correctly but you should probably check to make sure."

Kael glanced at the small bundle in Zorian’s hands and immediately discarded three of the stalks that Zorian had apparently ruined without realizing it. How Kael could recognize that on first sight, Zorian had no idea.

"We’re done here, I think," Kael said, looking around for a second. "I don’t think we’ll find anything else here without a lot of walking around. Do you think you can teleport us to the next section of the forest now?"

"Sure. My mana reserves were replenished a while ago," Zorian said.

"Let’s go then. Deeper into the wilderness this time around. We haven’t been attacked by anything truly dangerous the entire day and I want to see if I can find some ghost ivy or moonflowers," Kael said, gesturing northward.

Zorian nodded, unperturbed by the somewhat increased danger. While there were quite a few creatures that could kill them that deep in the forest, he should be able to notice them in time and teleport them to safety. A minute later they popped over to their new destination and Kael started looking around to assess their surroundings.

"Teleporting is so very convenient," the white-haired boy commented. "I can’t wait to learn how to do that. How long do you think it would take me to learn how to teleport like that?"

"I don’t know. A year or two?" Zorian speculated. "If you work hard on your shaping skills, that is. As little as a couple of months if you work with me to create a training regimen for you like I’m doing for Taiven."

"Ha. I might take you up on that at some point," he said. "I’m wasting a lot of your time and nerves as it is, though, and I don’t want to be greedy."

"You’ve been a lot of help over the restarts," Zorian assured him. "You’ve earned some consideration from me, as far as I’m concerned."

"I see," Kael said speculatively. "In that case, I’d like to pester you a little about those disappearances happening around Knyazov Dveri. Many of these people had been my friends and acquaintances, and their fate rests rather heavily on my mind. I know you have been busy in these past few restarts, but did you perhaps look into the matter at some point?"

Well. He hadn’t planned on having this talk during this particular outing, but he supposed this was as good a moment as any to tell Kael about Sudomir’s soul trap thingy.

"Actually, about that…"

Zorian had fully expected Kael to freak out when he heard what Sudomir was doing in his isolated forest mansion, and he was not disappointed in that regard. If anything, Zorian greatly underestimated how furious the morlock boy would be by the end of the story. Kael, in a rather stunning display of recklessness, wanted them to go visit Iasku Mansion immediately so he could inspect Sudomir’s soul trap. It took almost an hour for Zorian to convince the other boy that this was a spectacularly bad idea – Zorian was still wounded, Kael was not thinking straight, and neither of them had done any preparations for such an expedition.

"You realize what this means, right?" Kael asked him. It was apparently a rhetorical question because Kael immediately answered it himself. "Every one of those times you died during the invasion, your soul was likely sucked into that thing along with everyone else’s."

"Yeah, so?" asked Zorian. "The time loop mechanism clearly doesn’t care about that. It just plucks my soul out of the pillar and goes on to do its thing like usual."

Though now that Zorian thought about it, that in itself might be a clue as to how the time loop really functioned. It could be that the time loop mechanism was just so powerful that it could casually extract his soul out of a giant soul prison that probably had a million safeguards against someone doing that very thing… but it could also be that the way it all worked just sort of sidestepped the problem. If the time loop really destroyed everything whenever it rolled back time, it might not really matter where his soul ended up in the end, so long as it’s still intact.

"Yes, and the collection process is apparently sufficiently benign that you have suffered no soul damage from being exposed to it multiple times," Kael said. "That’s good to know, at least. It definitely puts some of my fears to rest. But Zorian, I… I’m honestly not sure how much I can help you with this. When you really get down to it, I’m really just a dabbler in soul magic, and Sudomir is clearly an expert at the field. He has also delved deep into areas of soul magic that I wouldn’t have even touched, so even if I were an expert I might not have been of any help. I’ll see what I can find out in the next couple of days, but in all likelihood you’re going to have to find someone else to help you deal with Sudomir."

"I don’t suppose you have any recommendations?" Zorian tried.

"I already gave you a list of people I know who dabbled in soul magic and, well, Sudomir already got most of them," Kael shook his head sadly. "Sorry. Maybe try that warrior priest that Lukav is friends with? He clearly has considerable experience with soul magic and he sounds like he could help. In fact, the priesthood in general might be your best bet. They regularly go after people like Sudomir, and have both the qualified experts and the experience necessary for something like this. I’m pretty sure they won’t just dismiss your claims out of hand. They take reports of necromancy very seriously, and your accusations should be easy to prove – just teleport someone in the vicinity of Iasku Mansion and let them see the evidence themselves."

"That’s an interesting idea. I might actually try that in the next restart, if you really end up being unable to help me in any way," Zorian said. "Though I’m worried about that escalating into something huge and attracting Red Robe’s attention. Sudomir is connected to the invasion pretty tightly, I don’t think the Ibasans would stay secret for long if Iasku Mansion came under attack like that."

"Honestly, that might actually be a good thing," Kael speculated. "Red Robe thinks you are part of an army of time travelers out to get him, right? If so, it might actually be suspicious if you don’t periodically do something big like that."

"Well, maybe," Zorian said. "But it’s still a huge hint to Red Robe, telling him where to look to find out more about his opposition. I feel it’s too dangerous to expose myself to danger like that."

After a while, they ran out of ideas to bounce back between each other and uncomfortable silence descended between them. Kael’s inability to help much against Sudomir clearly kept eating away at him, gradually worsening his mood, and Zorian didn’t know what to say to cheer him up. He doubted Kael even wanted to be cheered up. Eventually, Kael decided to simply cut their expedition short and asked Zorian to teleport them back home.

The gathering trip was over.

Monday came, and with it his meeting with Xvim. Xvim had never told Zorian when exactly he should drop by for their talk, so Zorian decided to come see him once his classes were over and he had no other obligations. Xvim, as it turned out, had other ideas. The man ended up causing a small stir by barging into Zorian’s first class of the day to pick him up, evidently impatient to talk to him. He had no idea whether this was a good or bad thing, and Xvim refused to discuss anything until they were safely seated inside his office.

"So," Zorian asked. "What’s your final verdict?"

Instead of answering, Xvim took a palm-sized stone orb out of his drawer and handed it to Zorian.

"Channel some mana into this orb," Xvim told him.

The moment Zorian did so, the stone sphere lit up in a soft yellow glow. That was very familiar to Zorian. It reminded him of those basic training orbs they were given during their first year at the academy – the ones that helped students learn how to reliably channel their mana into the target. What was the point of making him do something like that again?

Wait…

"Is this thing testing my mana signature?" Zorian asked curiously.

"Yes," Xvim confirmed. "Everyone’s personal mana is unique. You can hide or change your mana signature, but you cannot mimic someone else’s to the best of my knowledge. The most you could do is trick the orb into giving a false positive, but I’d be able to tell if you were tampering with it in that fashion. It seems you really are who you claim you are, mister Kazinski. I expected as much, but it would be sloppy not to check."

"First it was a lock keyed in to my mana signature, and now this. How exactly did the academy acquire my mana signature? I don’t remember giving it at any point," said Zorian, handing the orb back to Xvim.

"Every time you used one of these training orbs during your first year," said Xvim, waving the stone orb in front of Zorian’s face, "you were effectively giving the academy your mana signature. It was just a matter of locking the orb down to preserve it for future use."

"And that’s legal?" Zorian frowned.

Xvim nodded. "Required by law, even. The government likes to have everyone’s mana signatures on hand for investigations. It greatly simplifies a lot of identity disputes and the like."

"Right," Zorian sighed. "So now that we’ve established I’m indeed Zorian Kazinski…"

"Yes, the time loop problem," Xvim said, putting the orb back into his drawer. "I assume you are aware of the prevalent opinion regarding time travel?"

Zorian nodded.

"They say it’s impossible," he said. "I know. But that’s theory-"

"And a lot of failed experiments," Xvim interjected.

"-and my personal experiences say otherwise," continued Zorian, ignoring Xvim’s interjection. "Whatever prevalent opinion says, I can clearly see that time travel is possible. It’s just a question of whether I’ve convinced you I’m telling the truth or not."

"You’ve convinced me there is something to your story, at least," Xvim said. "But I’m afraid I’m going to need more convincing before I actually accept the idea of a time loop. Do you think you could clarify some things for me?"

The next hour and a half consisted of Xvim questioning Zorian about the rules that governed the time loop and the events surrounding it. The questioning was detailed enough that Xvim probably realized Zorian was hiding some things from him, but the man never called him out on this. He also never wrote anything down, simply staring at Zorian and listening to his explanations in silence. It was honestly all a little unnerving.

"The material world has been cut off from the spiritual realms?" Xvim asked, raising an eyebrow at him. "And you didn’t feel this merited an inclusion in that list of things you gave me at the end of our Friday meeting?"

"Well, what would that prove?" Zorian defended himself. "Nothing about that says specifically time travel."

"No, but it helps ameliorate one of the major issues that has been bothering me about this scenario," Xvim said, staring at him. "Namely, the incredible scale of the event you’re describing. You’ve described the time loop as a cosmic phenomenon – it doesn’t just wrench your soul into the past, it literally rolls back time for everything except you and your fellow time travelers. That’s an implausible claim. The universe is very big and magic as we understand it has sharp limitations. But if the time loop had to cut off the material realm from the spiritual sphere to do its work, then that means it is somehow limited in scope, and that makes the whole thing a lot more believable to me. Did you speak to an astronomer to see if there were any irregularities in the stars and planetary orbits?"

"No," Zorian frowned. "Why do you think there would be irregularities?"

"Because any responsible spell designer tries to minimize the costs of the spell, regardless of how much mana he has at his disposal," Xvim told him. "If I was in charge of building a spell that does what you describe, I wouldn’t have bothered extending the effect beyond what I absolutely had to. Why burn resources unnecessarily? No one has ever set foot on the other planets, much less the distant stars. You could simply replace the heavens with an illusionary screen and be done with it. Most people would never know the difference."

"But astronomers might," Zorian guessed.

"Yes. Especially if the spell originates from the time of the first Ikosian emperor like you said it might. There were no telescopes back then, and even professional starwatchers relied on their eyes to note the changes in the heavens. An illusion good enough to fool them might not be enough to do the same today," Xvim said.

"I guess it’s worth a try," Zorian said dubiously. "Though I’m honestly kind of skeptical that will go anywhere. I’m pretty sure you can’t just isolate our planet from the rest of the celestial bodies without breaking everything horribly and killing us all in the process."

"There has to be a limit somewhere," Xvim said. "I’ll talk to the couple of astronomers I know and see what they tell me. In the meantime, make a note somewhere to include the spirit world severance factoid in your list the next time you try to convince me that the time loop is real. It should do wonders for your credibility. Also, make sure to sign the list with this."

Xvim took out a slip of paper from his pocket and handed it to him. Written on it in neat, perfect writing was a long string of letters and numbers. The whole thing was completely random and nonsensical as far as Zorian could tell.

"Some kind of coded message?" Zorian mused out loud.

"Something similar. I’ve made a lot of contingencies over the years, including ones for when I expect to have my memories edited against my will and want to send messages to my future self," Xvim said, surprising Zorian. That was… quite paranoid. And also a good idea – he should probably make his own version of that. "You will have to memorize the whole thing perfectly for this to work – if even a single number or letter is out of place, the whole thing is ruined."

Zorian took several seconds to commit the code to his memory and then immediately created a memory packet around it, permanently preserving it for flawless recall in the future.

"Done," he said, handing the slip of paper back to Xvim. "What now?"

Based on the various adventure novels Zorian had read as a child, he kind of expected Xvim to promptly burn the paper slip in his hand to prevent it from coming into the wrong hands. But no, Xvim just put it back into his pocket and gave Zorian a searching look. Disappointing.

"That, mister Kazinski, is something that I should be asking you," Xvim said. "I was originally worried that you might be an imposter and that you might have been editing my memories. Regardless of whether or not you really are a time traveler, you have effectively put those fears to rest. Truthfully, I have no right to demand anything more from you. What now, indeed."

"Well, you are technically my mentor and you’re supposed to advise me about how to develop my magic," Zorian tried, hoping that Xvim would actually do his job properly for once. He was curious how Xvim’s teaching looked when he was not putting his charges through some messed up dedication test.

"Unfortunately, this is probably not the best time for that. I would need to thoroughly test your skills to see how I can best help you, and I’ve kept you away from your morning classes for too long as it is," said Xvim. "I should have something ready for you when we meet again on Friday."

"Not another batch of shaping exercises, I hope?" Zorian couldn’t help but asking.

"No," Xvim said, smiling slightly at the question. "While I definitely intend to correct any obvious deficiencies in your magic base and raise your shaping skills to acceptable levels, I’m actually thinking of advancing your dimensionalism studies as far as they can go. That is, after all, the magical field that deals with things like time manipulation, which makes it uniquely relevant to your situation. It is a hard and demanding field of study, but if you could endure several years of my trials and keep coming, you doubtlessly have the required patience to succeed at it."

Huh. That actually sounded kind of nice. The first part sounded a little ominous, but he would reserve judgment until he actually saw what that entailed in practice. He didn’t actually mind the idea of being taught some shaping exercises, so long as Xvim didn’t resort to the same frustrating grind that he had employed in the past, and actually explained to Zorian how he was supposed to go about performing the exercise.

In any case, the meeting was very much finished at this point, so Zorian said his goodbyes and left Xvim’s office.

It was probably the first time he had ever left that place feeling better than he had when he entered it.

Over the next few days, the aftereffect of Zorian’s failed campaign against the Burning Apex web gradually faded away, leaving him completely healed. Kael was still poring over his necromancy books and tinkering with some kind of spell item he was building, and refused to talk to Zorian about Sudomir. He claimed he was pursuing a lead and that he would discuss things with him when he was ready. Zorian had a feeling that Kael was a little annoyed with him over his handling of the soul trap reveal, but he really couldn’t think of what he could have done so much better. Maybe Kael didn’t like that Zorian had waited so long to break the news to him? On the other hand, Taiven had reacted much better when he had told her about the time loop this time. She was a lot more receptive to the idea if he didn’t wait for her to have a breakdown before telling her.

All in all, the recovery period was a bit boring and Zorian found himself searching for something to pass the time with. Just for fun, he recreated Kirielle’s drawings that he had stored in his mind and showed them to her. She frowned a lot while inspecting them, especially at the ones that clearly depicted the interior of Imaya’s house and its inhabitants, but she did not seem willing to claim them as her own work. Instead, she criticized the technique of whoever drew them and suggested improvement, which amused him. She then asked him where he got them, and was annoyed at him when he insisted that he conjured them fully formed out of his head, which was also amusing.

Somehow, the resulting argument led to Kirielle giving him an impromptu drawing lesson and Zorian was bored enough at the time to go along with it. According to Kirielle, he was actually decent at drawing, which surprised him. She even claimed he could get as good as she was if he was willing to work on it. Considering how swamped with everything he always was, he doubted he would ever find the time for something like that. Then again, perhaps he could use an actual hobby…

It was during one of those slow days that Zorian went to the academy library in search of a book that talked about Eldemar’s internal politics. Partly because he couldn’t shake off the feeling that Sudomir’s offhand comment about how he was working with the invaders because of politics wasn’t completely false, and partly because his recent musings about House Reid made him realize just how rudimentary his knowledge about Eldemar’s power structures really was. He doubted he would really find an answer as to what Sudomir was referring to, but it probably wouldn’t hurt to educate himself a little on the issue.

In theory, Eldemar’s internal situation was relatively simple. The country was a monarchy, with the power of the Crown kept in check by a Council of Elders – a gathering of nobles that were ostensibly supposed to advise the monarch and help them govern the country efficiently. The seats were hereditary, each held by a different Noble House. That was why they were Noble – they had a seat on the Council of Elders, and were thus involved in the direct governing of the country. A regular House, while usually afforded a fair amount of special privileges and autonomy, did not have a say in how the country as a whole was run.

Of course, reality was far more convoluted than that. The Crown and the Council of Elders clashed all the time, the Houses routinely overstepped their bounds if they thought they could get away with it, organizations like the Mage Guild and the Holy Triumvirate Church wielded considerable influence of their own and powerful independent actors tried to play all sides for their own benefit. And that was not even getting into the issue of semi-autonomous entities like the shifter tribes or the Free Port of Luja.

Basically, the matter was complicated and Zorian’s initiative didn’t accomplish all that much. He was just about to give up and go home when he stumbled upon Tinami. Or rather, she stumbled upon him – he was stationary, with his back turned to her, and the only reason he knew she was there was that he could recognize her mind through long exposure to her during previous restarts. He was content to ignore her at first, pretending he didn’t know she was there… but since she was sufficiently curious to look over his shoulder to see what he was reading, he decided to say hello in the end.

"Hello, Tinami," he said, not bothering to turn around. She immediately jerked back in surprise at the words. Ha. Surprise successful. Taking care to wipe the smile off his face, Zorian turned around to face the girl. It was only polite to look at someone when you were talking to them, after all. "Is there something I can help you with?"

"N-no, sorry," she said, stumbling for a moment but recovering her composure quickly. "I was just curious about what you were reading. And I just have to ask: Splinter of Splinters? Really, Zorian? That’s kind of…"

She paused for a moment, clearly searching for a polite term to use.

"Why would you ever read such trash?" she finished eventually.

Zorian looked at the book in his hands. He hadn’t noticed anything too bad in the book thus far, though admittedly he wouldn’t call it good, either. Frankly, the only reason he was idly reading through it was because one of the other books he had already read and liked listed it among its sources.

"I’m trying to find out an answer to a political question, but I know very little about politics," Zorian answered honestly. "So I’m mostly just reading things at random, leafing through whatever book catches my attention."

He placed Splinter of Splinters back on the shelf. The book was boring as hell anyway.

"What kind of topic are you looking for?" Tinami asked him.

"I’m trying to find out a political reason why someone would want to burn Cyoria to the ground," Zorian told her bluntly. "Hypothetically speaking, of course."

"Are we talking about external or internal forces?" Tinami asked, completely unperturbed by his admission.

"Internal," Zorian clarified. "I’m pretty sure the number of external enemies that want the same is numberless."

"Not really, no," Tinami said. "Cyoria supplies critical products to the entire continent. I think only Sulamnon and a handful of others would be glad to see it completely gone."

"What about Ulquaan Ibasa?" asked Zorian curiously.

"Them?" Tinami scoffed. "Who cares what they want? They can’t do anything to us except raid our shipping. And as long as Eldemar controls Fort Oroklo, even that is just a minor nuisance."

Zorian hummed non-committedly. He couldn’t really fault Tinami for that logic, since he would have likely said something similar before he had experienced the invasion and found out who was behind it.

"Fair enough," he said. "So what I’m getting from all of this is that you know a thing or two about politics, yes?"

"I am an heir of one of the Noble Houses," Tinami shrugged. "I’m required to know this sort of stuff. So yes, I suppose I do."

"Excellent. Then, do you think you can recommend me a book about Eldemar’s internal politics that isn’t… trash, as you say?" he asked her.

He expected her to either say no or give him a title or two to look for. What he did not expect was for her to drag him across the library for over fifteen minutes in search of something that met his exact criteria. By the time Tinami was done suggesting things to him, he’d ended up with three different books, one of which was a huge scary tome that made Zorian sleepy just looking at it. He was starting to think he had made just a tiny bit of a mistake when he had asked her for help in this matter.

"Sorry, I went a little overboard," Tinami apologized, sounding honestly apologetic.

"It’s fine," Zorian sighed. "Though I’ll be honest with you – I really doubt I’m going to read all of this."

He shook the stack of books in his hands for emphasis.

"If you must pick one of the three to read, read Time of Tribulations," Tinami told him. Oh good, that wasn’t the big one. "That’s the important one. The Splinter Wars and the Weeping completely rearranged the political landscape everywhere in Altazia, but especially in Eldemar. Without understanding what aftershocks they caused and how countries dealt with them, you will never really understand Eldemar’s politics."

"I see," Zorian said quietly. That did make a lot of sense – the Splinter Wars essentially created Eldemar in its current form, and the Weeping actually originated from Eldemar. Nobody at the time realized just how dangerous it was, in the early days of its spread, so it had significant effects on the country. It would be surprising if those two events hadn’t changed things greatly. "I guess it has something to do with the significant death toll of mages those two caused?"

"Sort of," Tinami said. "It has to do with replacing them. Before the Splinter Wars, far more mages belonged to an established House or had at least one mage parent. First generation mages like yourself were… well, not rare exactly, but far less common than they are now. After the Splinter Wars and the Weeping, though, a lot of those Houses and families went extinct or bankrupt, unable to deal with the chaos of the times or the loss of critical members. The last thing Eldemar wanted to do was downscale their operations due to lack of mages, so somebody had to replace the dead. The result was a lot of first-generation mages flooding the magical market in previously unseen numbers."

"So?" Zorian asked. "I guess I’m a little biased, being a civilian-born student myself… but why is that a problem?"

"Not a problem as such, no," Tinami said carefully. "But it definitely changed the politics of the country beyond recognition. First generation mages are educated and supported by the Mage Guild, and by extension the Crown of Eldemar. When Houses and other autonomous groups clash with the Crown, first-generation mages overwhelmingly side with the Crown. The influx of civilian-born mages helped Eldemar bounce back from the Splinter Wars and Weeping incredibly quickly, but it also strengthened royal power and made the Mage Guild far more important than it used to be, and that scares a lot of factions."

"Interesting," Zorian hummed thoughtfully. "How does that relate to Cyoria and people who want to see it burn, though?"

"Well, Cyoria is absolutely critical for first generation mages who want to make it big," Tinami said. "Most other mana wells have sharp limits on the amount of mana they produce, and thus have tight regulations about who can perform what magical business in the area. They’re usually controlled by some established group or even a House, and aren’t very friendly to newcomers unless they’re willing to become someone’s underlings. The Hole, on the other hand, spews incomprehensibly vast amounts of mana into the air every single second. Far more than anyone could really use up. There is never a shortage of ambient mana in Cyoria, so nobody cares about how many mana forges, research facilities and various other facilities are built in the city. Unsurprisingly, the city is absolutely flooded with first-generation mages, which makes it a major loyalist stronghold. It’s so important to the central government, politically speaking, that some people call it the second national capital. Anyone who has an axe to grind against either the Crown or the Mage Guild might want to see it gone. Though I rather suspect that anyone expressing the desire to see it literally burned to the ground is just being overdramatic. Our external political situation is sufficiently dangerous that no one really wants to weaken the nation too much, and Cyoria is both a major population center and a magical powerhouse."

"So, what I’m getting from your explanation is that people who most want to see Cyoria gone probably come from various Houses that dislike their historical importance being eroded," Zorian said. Sadly, that didn’t explain Sudomir’s remark as far as Zorian could tell – he had no idea whether Sudomir was a first-generation mage, but he definitely wasn’t a part of a House. "But the thing is, there are plenty of Houses, even Noble Houses who have their headquarters stationed here. Yours, for example. Or House Noveda."

"Not every House likes every other," Tinami shrugged. "There are plenty of them that would hold a celebration if every Aope spontaneously died in their sleep."

Ouch.

"But it’s funny you would mention the Novedas. You know what happened to them, right?"

"They all died except Zach," Zorian said immediately.

"Yes, and then the Crown placed Tesen Zveri as Zach’s caretaker, and he sold off nearly everything they owned to his friends and associates for pocket change while paying himself a huge caretaker fee. Few people will outright say so, but the man basically looted the entire House of everything they had. And the Noveda were very, very wealthy," Tinami explained. "If Zach wasn’t such an idiot, I’d imagine he’d be extremely bitter about the city authorities that were complicit in the deed. I could totally imagine myself wishing for Cyoria to burn down to ashes, if I were in his place. At least on an emotional level."

Huh.

"You know," Zorian said. "I think I want to hear more about that story…"

50. Containment

The idea that Tesen Zveri had been stealing from Zach was not entirely surprising to Zorian. For one thing, he’d known for quite a while that Zach and Tesen did not get along, what with Zach occasionally thrashing the man at the beginning of the restart for no apparent reason. For another, Zach had explicitly told Zorian in one of the restarts that he did not approve of how Tesen had been managing his properties. It did not take some great genius to see that this was more than just a simple difference in opinion. Theft was one of several explanations that Zorian had considered as a possible explanation, but he could never quite figure out why Tesen would risk his reputation for what was surely just pocket change to someone of his stature.

As it turned out, Zorian had been thinking too small. Tesen wasn’t siphoning some money off the Novedas' accounts here and there – he just plain went after everything they had. Surprisingly brazen. What kind of forces stood behind Tesen that would allow him to be so shameless about abusing the trust he was given? What kind of machinations and political maneuvering had compelled the royal family to assign such a hostile caretaker to the last surviving member of a House that had been so loyal to them in the past?

All in all, when Zorian had asked Tinami to tell him more about Zach’s caretaker and his looting of House Noveda’s properties, he’d expected quite a story. Something lengthy, complex and dramatic. What he got instead was a rather underwhelming tale of simple greed and corruption.

The appointment of Tesen Zveri to the position of Zach’s caretaker was completely devoid of controversy at the time the decision was made. Tesen Zveri was the patriarch of Noble House Zveri, who had been close allies of House Noveda, and his reputation had been quite good at the time. Thus, when Tesen nominated himself for the position of Zach’s caretaker, few people had any objections. He was a high-ranking nobleman, a powerful mage and an ally of the House that he was supposed to care for – who could really contest his appointment?

Unfortunately, Tesen’s greed turned out to be stronger than his sense of obligation or respect for his deceased allies. From the moment he had acquired the rights to manage the Novedas' property, Tesen wasted no time in abusing them as much as possible. Most of their property ended up being sold to members of House Zveri at laughably low prices, and the profits made from those sales largely went to Tesen himself in the form of exorbitant caretaker fees that he paid himself for doing such a fine job at managing things.

"And nobody protested about that?" Zorian asked incredulously. "The Crown? I heard House Noveda were big allies of the royal family. Or one of the Novedas' many vassal families and contractors, they must have had some power and they surely couldn’t have liked what Tesen was doing. Or hell, other Noble Houses – at least some of them must have felt sympathetic to Zach’s cause."

"House Noveda was indeed a close ally of the Crown," Tinami confirmed. "But so is House Zveri. And unlike Noble House Noveda, Noble House Zveri survived the upheavals largely intact. For the Crown to go after Tesen would have meant alienating one of their major remaining allies at a time where they could ill afford to do so. I suspect the Crown was unpleasantly surprised by Tesen’s behavior, but decided to look the other way out of practicality."

She paused for a second, frowning slightly as she considered things.

"Plus, I hear Tesen generously donated some of the artifacts and funds from the Novedas' treasury to the Crown," she eventually continued. "Actually, he was rather generous about spreading the Novedas' wealth around in general. I imagine that’s how he quieted most of the criticism."

"I see," Zorian hummed thoughtfully. "They have their slice of the pie, so now they’re no longer inclined to protest too much. Still, if Tesen had been as blatant about things as you said, you’d think that somebody would have tried to do something. Some people just don’t care about money. Or at least not enough to let something like this go unchallenged."

"Ah, well, I make it sound really obvious but it’s really not," Tinami said. "The truth is that Tesen was always going to end up selling off a lot of Noveda properties and halting many of their activities, even if he had been acting in good faith… the problem was more about who he sold things to and at what prices. He was supposed to slim down Noble House Noveda to a strong, manageable core. Instead, he used virtually all of their wealth to enrich his family and further his political career, leaving only a tiny sliver to Zach. But that’s not something that is immediately obvious to casual inspection. You would have to launch an investigation into the matter to prove anything, and that would give Tesen plenty of time to mobilize his connections and shut you down before you get anywhere…"

Well, if it actually took some digging to realize what Tesen had done, then that would certainly help explain some things. Such as why none of their other classmates seemed to know about Zach’s situation. Most of them were terrible gossips, so if Zach’s situation was widely known, Zorian would have known about it too by now.

Though really, considering how readily Tinami was telling him all this, he wondered how it was possible that she’d never told this to the rest of their class.

He decided to just ask her about it.

"Well, if we were having this talk a year ago or so, I wouldn’t have told you all this," Tinami told him. "Back then we had Zach in our class, and I wouldn’t have wanted to say anything before talking to Zach about it. But now Zach is no longer in our class, so it doesn’t matter anymore."

Ah, yes – since Zach fled Cyoria at the beginning of the restart, just like he always did in recent restarts, it made sense to assume he had given up on the academy. His poor showing during their first two years of education probably made the theory even more plausible than it would otherwise be…

He wondered whether Zach had known what Tesen had done to his inheritance before the time loop. He had a hunch the answer was no, since nothing about Zach’s pre-loop attitude indicated that he was in any way concerned about his future or angry at his guardian, but he could be wrong. Maybe Zach was a very good actor.

"How much do you think Zach knows about all of this?" Zorian asked Tinami.

"I don’t know," she said. "I only tried to sound him out once, and… uh, I guess I was too oblique because he thought I was hitting on him."

Zorian couldn’t help it. He laughed.

"It’s not funny!" she protested.

After several more minutes of questions and answers, Zorian found out that Tinami couldn’t really give him any details about Zach’s situation. She knew about the situation in general terms, but the specifics were understandably hard to come by. The conversation did, however, give Zorian an idea – what if Zach wasn’t the only one that had happened to?

"Oh yes, that sort of thing is not exactly a rare occurrence," Tinami said when he shared the notion with her. "A lot of weakened Houses and smaller families ended up being dismembered like that in the aftermath of the Splinter Wars and the Weeping. Most countries had too many things on their plate to go after every shady thing that was happening, especially if the people doing the dismembering were closely aligned with the government or some other powerful faction. In fact, compared to the fates of some other heirs, Zach is fairly lucky. Some of them were quite literally looted of everything they had. Once their caretakers were done with their properties, they were basically thrown out on the streets with nothing but the clothes on their backs. The Novedas are still a Noble House though, so Tesen couldn’t really go that far. He needed to have some smokescreen in case someone started throwing accusations. So Zach still has his mansion and can live off a healthy trust fund, and Tesen can point to that if somebody tries to charge him with anything."

Interesting. Zorian highly doubted that Zach wanted to see Cyoria burned to the ground just because the city’s leadership was complicit in the looting of his House – the other boy seemed too good natured for that – but he could totally imagine some of the other, less fortunate and thus less forgiving individuals wanting to strike back at the people who had profited at their expense. No matter who’d get caught in the crossfire. Could Red Robe be one of the people in that position? That would help explain why the other time traveler seemed to want Cyoria destroyed so badly…

Well, he had no way to confirm that, so that would remain just an idle thought for now. Though, once he opened the matriarch’s memory packet, he should probably try to track down those kinds of people living in Cyoria and check up on them. Just in case.

His talk with Tinami did not last long after that. They both had things they needed to be doing, and he was getting the impression that Tinami was starting to get a little suspicious of Zorian’s fixation on the topic. Surprisingly, she wanted to meet with him again… or maybe not so surprisingly, since she implied she wanted to ask a favor of him. After agreeing to another meeting, Zorian said goodbye to the girl and went back home.

The moment he arrived back at the house, he realized he had stepped into pandemonium.

After coming back to Imaya’s place, he found that Kopriva had dropped by and brought the alchemical ingredients Kael had asked for. Normally that would be excellent news, but it turned out that her timing had been somewhat… unfortunate.

She wasn’t the only person to have dropped by at Imaya’s house that day. Rea and Nochka had also decided to come over, Nochka so she could play with Kirielle, and Rea so she could have a drink and chat with Imaya. Then, Taiven arrived as well, wanting to discuss something with Kael. Thus, when Kopriva had come over to deliver the package, Kael was locked in his basement with Taiven and Imaya was busy talking to Rea. The job of letting Kopriva into the house fell to the three remaining inhabitants of the house – Kirielle, Nochka and Kana.

Kopriva had already met Kirielle, but not Kana. Kael didn’t want their classmates to know he had a daughter, so he had kept her out of sight the last time Kopriva had come over. But Kael wasn’t there, and Kirielle couldn’t keep a secret if her life depended on it, so when Kopriva asked Kirielle to introduce her friends, she thought nothing of revealing Kana’s true identity.

At that point the rest of the household got involved, with Kael freaking out and trying to convince Kopriva to keep Kana’s existence a secret, Kirielle repeatedly trying to apologize to Kael, Kopriva being visibly amused, and Imaya trying to run damage control. Amusingly, it turned out that Taiven hadn’t known Kana was Kael’s daughter either – she just sort of assumed she was Imaya’s daughter, despite her having the same sort of vivid blue eyes that her father had, and never sought confirmation about it from anyone.

Sadly, everyone was too caught up in the drama to pay attention to the packet of alchemical ingredients that Kopriva had brought over… well, everyone except Nochka. She decided that this mysterious packet was very interesting and worthy of examination. Unfortunately, either Kopriva had failed to secure the ingredients properly or Nochka had examined the package too enthusiastically, because she managed to breathe in a bit of hallucinogenic dust from the package and started losing control over her form. Her eyes became slitted like a cat, she grew a tail and claws and started hissing at people who tried to examine her to see what was wrong.

That started the second round of drama, with Rea being upset that her daughter was basically outed as a shifter and that Kopriva had left dangerous substances within reach of children, Kopriva trying to defend herself, Kirielle assuring Rea that it’s okay because she already knew her friend can turn into a kitty, Rea being angry at Nochka for being so indiscreet, and poor Imaya playing peacemaker for the second time that day.

At this point Zorian had come back from his talk with Tinami and was told what happened in his absence.

"I was only gone for a couple of hours," Zorian complained. "Damn, you people work fast."

He was immediately faced with a plethora of unamused looks.

"Okay, look," he said placatingly. "I think you’re all making mountains out of molehills here. First of all, I’m pretty sure Kopriva has no intentions of spreading rumors about Kana amongst the student body…" Mostly because he’d read her mind to make sure. "…and I don’t think anybody here really minds Rea and Nochka being shifters, either."

"What makes you think I’m a shifter as well? She could have inherited it from her father for all you know," Rea protested, folding her hands over her chest.

Zorian ignored her remark.

"Really, the only semi-serious issue was that Nochka ended up drugged," said Zorian.

"I swear I secured the package properly," Kopriva mumbled.

"Nochka probably punctured something with her claws," Rea admitted with a sigh. "She likes to use her claws to remove wrappings and such."

"Nevertheless, the package was here because of me… and Kael, but that’s beside the point. The point is, I feel somewhat responsible for what happened. What do you think would be an appropriate compensation for this?"

"Oh, there is no need-" began Rea, only to get cut off by her own daughter.

"I want a doll," Nochka slurred. The effects of the alchemical dust she breathed had faded, but were still far from gone. "Like the one Kiri has. She said you made it."

"I made a doll for Kiri?" Zorian asked, before he realized what Nochka was referring to. "Oh wait, you mean Kosjenka. That’s technically not a doll, but whatever. Assuming your mother agrees, I don’t see the problem with that."

"Is this doll going to explode if treated roughly?" Rea asked suspiciously.

Not an unreasonable fear. Some magical items held a substantial amount of mana inside of them and could thus easily detonate if handled roughly. In this particular case, though, that would never happen. He didn’t trust Kirielle around explosives any more than Rea trusted Nochka around the same.

"No, it will just stop being animated," Zorian said. "The golem is powered by ambient mana and made mostly out of wood, so there is nothing in there that could explode if it breaks."

"Then no, I have no objections," Rea shrugged. "Though really, this is quite unnecessary. Nochka is just milking this for all it’s worth and I wouldn’t blame you at all for simply telling her off."

"Mom!" Nochka whined. "You’re supposed to be on my side!"

Zorian was distracted from the spectacle by a burst of emotion coming from Kana. The little girl was fidgeting like crazy in Kael’s lap, clearly waging some internal war with herself. Though she was as silent as ever, Zorian could feel through his empathy that her attention was squarely on him. She wanted to… tell him something?

"Let me guess, you want a doll too?" Zorian said, taking a wild guess at what was bothering her.

Kana nodded so fast her head looked like it was going to fall off.

A round of laughter from everyone present followed that exchange.

"Alright, alright," Zorian sighed. "I get it. Two new golem-dolls coming up. I’ll be busy in the near future, but they should be done over the weekend."

Now that he thought about it a little bit, this sort of development wasn’t that surprising. Kirielle had been making both girls jealous of her new toys for a whole week now, so it made sense that they’d want one of their own if they thought they could get away with it. They were probably just too polite to ask for one in previous restarts, or simply couldn’t think of a good way to ask.

"Damn it, now I’m getting a little jealous," Kopriva groused. "Why don’t I get a doll too?"

"You’re too old to play with dolls," Zorian told her, rolling his eyes.

"You can play with Kosjenka when you visit," Kirielle offered.

"Aww," Kopriva grinned, ruffling Kirielle’s hair. "You’re a sweet kid. It’s hard to believe you’re related to someone like Zorian."

Hey…

"Brother is really great," Kirielle protested, pushing Kopriva’s hand away from her hair so she could straighten it back into place. "He’s like a hedgehog. He gets nice once you get past his prickliness."

Ugh. And they were just getting started, too. After completely defusing a tense situation and promising to make expensive toys for a couple of little girls? Truly no good deed goes unpunished.

Friday came, and with it Zorian’s next meeting with Xvim. This time, however, Xvim didn’t want to hold their session inside his office – instead, he led Zorian to a restricted training ground he had reserved for the day. They would be doing serious magic, Xvim claimed, so his office was no longer sufficient for their purposes.

"I have talked to some astronomers since we last met," Xvim began, unlocking the door of the training ground and shooing him inside. "I have nothing conclusive yet, but the results thus far are not encouraging. There have been no significant deviations among the celestial bodies. Additionally, the planets in particular are being closely watched because of the upcoming planetary alignment. It is unlikely they are illusionary – the affected area likely includes the entire solar system."

"Provided it is, in fact, limited by area," Zorian pointed out.

"Yes," Xvim agreed easily. "That is true. However, while my forays into astronomy have met with rather disappointing results, I’ve found something interesting while researching time magic. Tell me, have you ever heard of Black Rooms?"

"What, the ones that let you spend several years inside while only a day passes outside? Those actually exist?" Zorian asked incredulously.

"No, those ones are definitely fake," Xvim said, shaking his head. "But ones that can stretch a day into a month do. And the interesting thing is how they achieve that kind of extreme time dilation effect. Time magic has sharp limits in how effective it can get – even the most powerful hasting effects can only speed up time four to five times before they hit a wall. At that point, no matter how powerful and skillful the mage is, the boundary between two temporal flows starts to unravel."

"So how can Black Rooms speed up time by a factor of thirty, then?" Zorian frowned.

"By isolating them from the rest of the world," Xvim said. "That’s why they’re called Black Rooms. They have to completely enclose the area and seal it off. This greatly lessens the stress of the temporal boundary, but it also makes it impossible to interact with people outside while the Black Room is working. Once the time dilation is engaged, nothing goes in or out until the effect is broken. Material supplies, magical communication… nothing goes through. Even contact with the spiritual planes is blocked."

Zorian frowned. "I see. So there is precedence for powerful time magic to require an enclosed area to function properly. But from what I understand, the principles behind the Black Rooms would require the affected area to be literally enclosed in a physical box."

"The time loop is clearly a more advanced piece of magic than the Black Rooms, so it’s likely it uses a more subtle method of sealing off the area of effect," Xvim responded.

"I suppose," Zorian said, acknowledging the possibility. "I’m curious, though – how come Black Rooms are such a mystery? I only knew of them as rumors up until this point. Surely Eldemar would not hesitate to use them openly if they’re so effective?"

"In addition to needing tremendous amounts of mana, Black Rooms are very difficult to use properly," Xvim said. "Due to the way they’re cut off from the outside, one has to plan each use very carefully – if the organizers failed to account for something critical, the whole operation is essentially ruined, and a lot of time and mana has been wasted. Black Rooms cannot be turned off and on at will, and the mana cost of an operation has to be paid in full at the start. I understand there is a lot of controversy surrounding the Black Rooms, with many people disputing their actual usefulness and claiming they’re a huge waste of money. Some of the more spectacular failures associated with them do not help their reputation."

"Oh?" Zorian asked, intrigued.

"Initially, Black Rooms could not prematurely terminate the time dilation field once it was turned on," said Xvim. "Once the Black Room was on, whoever was inside was stuck until the spell wore off."

Zorian winced. Yeah, that had been bound to end poorly.

"At least one group died of thirst after an administrative mix-up caused the organizers to stockpile too little water into the area before activation. Another group almost died of starvation after some form of insect snuck into the food supply and managed to ruin most of it before the infestation was detected. Even if everything was done properly, you are still essentially imprisoning several people in a small, cramped space where they have no privacy and little to entertain themselves with. Fights were common, with several experiments culminating in a bloodbath. In one memorable case, the entire group managed to mutually kill each other off – there were literally no survivors once the Black Room finally opened."

"What about sending individuals?" Zorian asked.

"Most people can’t handle total isolation for long," Xvim shook his head. "Besides, it costs exactly the same to run a Black Room for one person as it does for several of them, and the more people you send in, the more work can get done."

After that, Xvim asked Zorian to demonstrate some of his flashier magic – mostly combat magic and landscape alterations, but also teleportation, which actually worked unimpeded within the training ground, unlike in most of Cyoria. It made sense, considering Xvim had told him during their last meeting that he intended to teach him dimensionalism.

After a while, his mentor decided he’d seen enough and motioned him to stop.

"You seem to have no specialty that I can see," Xvim said.

"Well, I guess my specialty are spell formulas," said Zorian. "But that is not exactly something I can demonstrate quickly and at whim."

"Just as well," Xvim said. "I know comparatively little about spell formulas and would be ill-equipped to evaluate your skill in the field."

Wait, Xvim actually didn’t have expertise in something related to magic? Some of Zorian’s amusement and surprise at the notion must have shown on his face because Xvim actually decided to provide an explanation.

"I understand why so many mages are fascinated with spell formula, but I always found them to be somewhat distasteful myself," Xvim said. "They are a crutch, most of the time. With a proper mastery of a spell, you wouldn’t need them."

"Right," Zorian scowled. He understood why someone obsessed with perfection in mana shaping would have low regard for magical aids that sidestepped the need for that, but there was more to spell formula than making spell rods and such…

"I’m not criticizing you, mister Kazinski," Xvim said. "Just explaining my lack of interest in the discipline. You can go far if you really master your specialty. But enough of that – when I said you don’t seem to have any specialty, I meant in regards to mana shaping fields. You seem to be a generalist when it comes to those, yes?"

"I seek out whatever magic is relevant to me at the moment," said Zorian. "But yes, in general I try to master a little bit of everything. As far as I can tell, the main reason people specialize is time constraints. I’m not quite immune to that, but I’m pretty sure I can get good at several fields instead of just one."

"The path of an archmage," Xvim nodded. "I approve. For someone in your situation, aiming for anything less would have been a waste. I’m glad I don’t have to convince you of that, at least."

Huh. Did Xvim just praise him for something? In any case, this reminded him of something he had been wondering for quite a while…

"Are you an archmage?" Zorian asked Xvim.

"An archmage is not an official rank that someone assigns to a person," Xvim said. "It is simply a term for a mage who has mastered several fields of magic to such an extent that they could outdo a typical specialist mage when it comes to those fields. I suppose the term could be applied to me, but it would be shockingly arrogant of me to claim it on my own. One is only ever a real archmage when other people start referring to you as such, and not many people use that term to describe me. Then again, not many people know about me in the first place, and I prefer it that way…"

So that would be a yes, basically. Surprising that a person like that would be willing to work as a teacher at the academy – people like Xvim were incredibly rare and in high demand. Then again, Xvim did say he liked being an unknown, so perhaps a relatively quiet job like this one was just what he wanted.

"Do you have a specialty?" Zorian asked. He figured that since Xvim was in a relatively good mood at the moment, he might as well milk it for all it’s worth and try to find out more about the man.

"Defense against magical attacks of all sorts," Xvim said. "I actually teach an advanced class on the topic in your fourth year of education. Of course, if one aims to defend against something, they must first get to know it. And thus, I have become familiar with many a type of magic. But let’s get back to you, shall we? I have to say, for one aiming to become an archmage, your way of going about it is somewhat… suboptimal."

"How so?" Zorian frowned.

"For instance, your way of choosing which mana shaping exercises to practice," Xvim said. "While practicing a wide selection of different exercises like you’ve been doing is certainly useful, it is not really the best avenue of approach for a generalist mage. You would have been better served by focusing on raw mana manipulation and sensing. Such basic shaping exercises are time consuming and give no short-term benefits, but the cumulative effect of their mastery decreases the learning time of every spell and improves spellcasting in general."

"I haven’t really heard about such shaping exercises," Zorian said, feeling a little lost.

"It’s not something a specialist mage would care much for," Xvim said. "And most people who write books are specialists. Your age works against you here – most people don’t start dabbling in those exercises until they’re much older, no matter how talented they are, so the people you spoke to probably didn’t think you’d be interested in those. Young mages like you have plenty of low-hanging fruit with much faster payoff to amuse themselves with."

"Right. So what are we talking here exactly?" Zorian asked. "I’m drawing a blank as to what sort of raw mana manipulation I could be doing as an exercise."

"Well, one major deficiency I noticed in your skills is that you don’t seem to perceive mana around you to any appreciable extent," Xvim said. "And I’m guessing your ability to perceive your personal mana flow is hardly any better than that of the rest of your classmates. For someone of biological age, that would be entirely adequate, if rather disappointing. In your case, it really is inexcusable."

Zorian was tempted to ask whether it was inexcusable by Xvim’s standards or the more sane standards of the rest of the world. But he didn’t. This was absolutely fascinating and he had largely gone numb to Xvim’s barbs by now.

"From everything I’ve read, mana sensing is a rather advanced skill that even long-time mages struggle with."

"Yes, but you seem to be rather bad at it, even accounting for that," Xvim noted. "I’m guessing this is a consequence of spending so many years in Cyoria, which is awash in ambient mana. It’s good for training, certainly, but it instills a certain amount of… wastefulness in young mages."

Zorian didn’t need empathy to notice the distaste on Xvim’s face when he said that.

"On top of that, it is very difficult to practice perception exercises in a place like this," Xvim continued. "The ambient mana suffuses everything, dulling your senses. It would be far better to practice mana sensing somewhere outside the city to start with. This training ground is specially warded to keep the majority of the ambient mana out of it – did you notice that?"

"No," Zorian admitted with a frown. Though now that Xvim mentioned it…

"This is what I meant when I said your ability to sense mana is deficient," Xvim said. "You should have noticed it right away, the moment you stepped into the training ground. But no matter, that’s why I’m here – to help you overcome your many flaws and become the best you can be. In any case, while the exercises I’m about to teach you would be normally rather hard to practice outside of this training ground, you are capable of teleportation. I suggest you simply teleport into the countryside outside of the city when you want to work on your ability to sense mana. Now pay close attention to what I’m about to do…"

At the end of the session, Zorian was honestly feeling a little overwhelmed by Xvim’s program. While the man was less of an asshole in this restart, he was still a very demanding teacher who pulled no punches when he seriously taught people. He had ended up showing Zorian more than twenty exercises aimed at improving his ability to sense mana, both inside and outside of him, and he expected Zorian to work on them for several hours every single day. On top of that, Xvim also showed him several exotic teleportation variants that Zorian was also expected to learn by their next meeting and gave him a deceptively simple shaping exercise related to dimensionalism.

The exercise involved taking a random rock and trying to form a so-called dimensional boundary around it. Apparently, the formation of such a boundary was the first step in just about every piece of magic dealing with time and space – the teleportation spells he loved using so much formed a boundary like that around him every time he used them, and would fail instantly if something prevented the spell from creating it. Like a ward, for instance. Getting better at shaping the boundary could easily improve just about every dimensionalism spell he cared to cast in the future.

The problem was that the dimensional boundary was completely invisible to normal senses, making the exercise really hard to practice. How do you create and shape something you can’t see and can only vaguely feel via crude feedback your personal mana gives you? He didn’t think he could get the hang of that exercise any time soon.

Of course, if his ability to sense mana – especially his personal mana – was on a higher level, the exercise would have instantly gotten a lot easier. Zorian was pretty sure Xvim had only given him that exercise to drive the point home how important mana sensing was and how much his lack of skill there was holding him back. Ugh.

Days went by quickly. Kael was still working on the Sudomir problem, but Zorian had plenty of things to hold his time, so he left his morlock friend in peace. His attacks on aranea webs were restarted, though this time he was less ambitious and picked a bunch of minor webs instead of a relative juggernaut like the Burning Apex. Accordingly, his attacks went a lot better and his aranea memory reading skills got lots and lots of practice. Since he was already rooting through the memories of defeated araneas, he decided to kill two birds with one stone by searching their minds for interesting mind magic skills. He found nothing really revolutionary, but every minor trick and variation of a known technique he learned from his fallen foes added up to something in the end.

He met with Tinami again, like he agreed to. Like she hinted at in their last meeting, she wanted to ask him for a favor – specifically, she wanted him to give her his family tree. A weird request, but apparently she was collecting that information from all of her classmates for a personal project. His cynical side insisted that this was a code name for secret Aope information gathering operation, but who knew really. Maybe she was just really interested in people’s lineages in addition to spiders. In any case, Zorian saw no reason not to humor her and promptly cobbled up something for her in his notebook. The execution was a bit lacking, unfortunately, since his knowledge of his family tree was a bit sketchy. Especially on his mother’s side, since she hated talking about her witch mother and anything related to her.

Tinami didn’t care about how sketchy it was, though. If anything, she seemed to be even more excited about it when she found out Zorian had a witch among his ancestors. Considering the origin of Noble House Aope, he probably shouldn’t be surprised about that.

Despite the incident with Kopriva’s alchemical supplies, Rea kept coming to Imaya’s home and bringing Nochka along with her. If anything, Rea’s friendship with Imaya seemed to have only become firmer in the wake of revelations about her shifter nature. Meanwhile, Nochka and Kana were proud owners of their own toy golems – Nochka had asked for her golem to be given a feminine form like Kosjenka’s, and named it Rutvica, while Kana was a bit of a surprise in that she wanted her toy golem to look male. And have white hair. Zorian had no idea what she called it, but Kirielle and Nochka seemed to have decided its name was Jaglenac amongst each other.

In other news, Kana seemed to have realized that Zorian had some method of understanding her thoughts, because these days, whenever she wanted to have her desires known, she simply dragged him off from whatever he was doing so he could interpret for her.

And here he’d thought she was a little angel. Turns out he just hadn’t had anything she’d wanted up until now.

Finally, as the end of the restart began to approach, Kael finally decided he’d run out of options. He asked Zorian to teleport him in the vicinity of Iasku Mansion so he could try to analyze the soul trap. He didn’t think that would accomplish much, but there was little else he could think of.

Zorian agreed, and decided to take Taiven along with them. Mostly because he intended to try to analyze the soul trap himself, from the perspective of a spell formula specialist rather than a soul mage, and he needed someone to defend them against the iron beaks and winter wolves patrolling the wilderness around the place. Taiven had no objections, and even relished the chance to fight something, so they were off.

They only stayed a short while, and Zorian had to break off his analysis to help Taiven defeat the flock of iron beaks that had started to harass them, but it was enough for Kael to decide the whole thing was beyond him.

Kael was very quiet and subdued after that.

The next day he’d made an excuse to drag Zorian out of the house and asked him to teleport them to the north of Knyazov Dveri so he could visit his wife’s grave.

"We’re here," said Kael, pointing at the small abandoned cottage just ahead of them.

"Finally," Zorian mumbled, breathing heavily. He felt sorry for Kael, he really did, but when Kael said the place was not far from the main road, he didn’t quite think the morlock boy meant this. An hour-long trek, uphill, along a bumpy, narrow forest path was not what Zorian would describe as not far. Also, how the hell was Kael not affected in the slightest by the journey? The boy didn’t look all that fit to him…

Once they reached the cottage, Zorian took a minute to catch some breath and looked around. Kael immediately went to the back of the building to tend to the two simple, earthen graves that stood there.

"Pretty isolated place," Zorian noted, wandering over to help Kael get rid of the grass and weeds that had completely overrun the place. "No offense, but why did you end up burying your wife here, of all places?"

"I didn’t have much choice back then," Kael said. "There was only one village in the vicinity, and they’re very backwards, superstitious folk. They’d never let a witch and her daughter get buried in their cemetery along with their own dead. And even if I could make them accept it somehow, they’d just vandalize it the moment I wasn’t looking."

"Disgusting," Zorian frowned.

"It’s fine," Kael said, shaking his head sadly. "This was their home. It somehow feels appropriate for them to be buried here."

"So this other grave…?" began Zorian.

"Fria," said Kael. "My mother-in-law, and also my teacher. She died just before Namira did."

Namira, Zorian learned, was the name of Kael’s deceased wife. The crude gravestones (that Kael had presumably made for them) said their last name was Tverinov. Apparently Kael had assumed their family name when he married Namira. That was pretty interesting – it was not unheard of for a husband to take on his wife’s name, but it did not happen very often. Usually only civilians who somehow managed to marry into one of the Houses did that.

Then again, maybe it was a witch thing. He knew that one of the reasons his mother and grandmother did not get along was that mother decided to take father’s family name instead of the other way around. Considering that mother’s choice seemed very conventional in the grand scheme of things, his grandmother’s objections had always seemed strange to him.

They both stood there in silence for a while, not saying anything. Finally, after several minutes of comfortable silence, Kael spoke.

"I’m sorry," Kael said suddenly.

"For what?" Zorian asked curiously.

"I wasted your time," Kael sighed.

"What?" Zorian asked incredulously. "You just wanted to visit your wife’s grave, there is nothing wrong with that."

"No, I’m talking about Sudomir and his soul trap," Kael said. "I kept stalling for over two weeks and I have nothing to show for it. I should have given up long ago, but…"

"Ah," said Zorian. He’d kind of figured out that wasn’t going anywhere after the first week or so. "That. It’s fine, really. Are you sure there is nothing new you can tell me?"

"Nothing," Kael said, shaking his head. He then reached out into the inner pocket of his jacket and pulled out a small notebook. He handed it to Zorian. "Here. I wrote down everything relevant I could think of into that notebook. Keep in mind that this is literally just me making wild speculations, though – I have no way to know if anything I wrote there has any basis in reality. "

"Right," said Zorian pocketing it for the moment. There would be time to read it later. "Still, even if it’s just speculation, it’s clearly not nothing."

"I guess," Kael said. "But I still feel pretty useless."

"Why?" Zorian asked curiously. He had known for a while that Kael was frustrated by his inability to offer help against Sudomir, but he never really understood why Kael felt so deeply about that.

"I don’t know," admitted Kael. "Maybe it reminds me of how Fria and Namira contracted the Weeping, and I could do nothing except helplessly watch as they wasted away. Or maybe I’m overthinking things. I heard it’s a bad idea to psychoanalyze oneself."

Zorian couldn’t help but wince visibly. Kael didn’t often refer to his personal tragedy, so sometimes it was hard for Zorian to keep in mind how traumatic these deaths must have been for his morlock friend. He had never lost anyone he personally cared about to the Weeping, but he’d heard that those who fell to the disease suffered horribly before the end.

It was at times like this that Zorian really understood how the specter of that epidemic still hung over many people’s lives. It had only been a handful of years since the Weeping, after all, and many people were still mourning their dead.

"I hope you don’t think less of me for asking this," said Zorian. "But how did you end up as a married father at thirteen, anyway?"

Kael burst into laughter.

"What?" he asked, greatly amused. "All these restarts and you never thought to ask me this before?"

"Well, I never seem to find a good opening to-" Zorian fumbled, caught off guard by the rapid change in Kael’s demeanor.

"Sometimes, Zorian, you’re just too considerate," Kael said, shaking his head with a final chuckle. "I’d have asked by the end of the third restart for sure if I was in your place. And by the way, you’re off by two years. I was actually fifteen when I got Kana."

Zorian gave him a strange look.

"I’m older than I look," Kael explained. "I’m two years older than the rest of our class, but Ilsa said that doesn’t really matter."

Huh. He’d never have guessed Kael was two years older than him.

"Anyway," Kael said. "There is not much to say. My mother died in childbirth and my father resorted to alcoholism soon afterwards, so I learned to stay away from the house most of the time. The village children didn’t want to associate with a morlock, so I ended up wandering the wilderness a lot, looking for things to sell for extra cash. One day I stumbled upon Namira in the forest and she led me to this place to meet her mother. Eventually Fria found out about my situation and offered to take me in. I agreed, of course."

"What, you weren’t scared away by rumors of witches making potions out of children’s blood?" Zorian asked jokingly.

"Well, the rumors also said morlocks like me ate people, so I didn’t put much stock in them," Kael said. "Anyway, I soon found out that Fria’s motives weren’t entirely motivated by compassion. She wanted an heir, and Namira did not have much talent for magic."

"I thought witch magic was heavy on the potions and very light on anything that would require actual shaping skills?" asked Zorian.

"It is," confirmed Kael. "And Namira was still horrid for it. She didn’t have the instincts or the mentality for it. Since Fria really didn’t want her secrets to die with her, she needed to teach her magic to someone from outside the family. And she chose me, because… well…"

"Namira fancied you?" Zorian guessed.

"Yes," Kael sighed. "She actually made it an official condition for teaching – if I wanted her magic, I had to marry her daughter. But really, I’d have agreed to marry Namira even if she didn’t provide any incentive for me to do so."

Kael spend the next half an hour telling Zorian small, inconsequential stories about his life in the cottage next to them. It seemed to help his mood immensely. Finally, he took a deep breath and signaled to Zorian that they should go back to Imaya’s place before the inhabitants got worried.

"I have made no mention of Sudomir’s soul trap in my research journals," Kael said suddenly, just as they were about to leave. "If I ever ask you about him or the disappearing soul mages in the area, just lie to me. Say you have no idea what is happening or something. It’s not like I can do anything about it and it makes it completely impossible for me to focus on my work. I felt horrible these past few weeks, and I failed to get anything done on the alchemical side of things."

Zorian stared at him for a second before nodding in agreement.

"Consider it done."

51. Out of Control

The new restart began in the same manner as all of his previous restarts – with Kirielle mercilessly jumping on top of him to wake him up.

"Good morning, brother!" Kirielle yelled on top of him. "Morning, m- Hey!"

With a simple act of will, Zorian seized Kirielle telekinetically and levitated her into the air. She stopped her customary morning greeting with a startled yelp, her hands grasping around her in a panicky attempt to find some sort of purchase and stop her ascent. She struggled in vain. Perhaps if she had been expecting Zorian to levitate her off of him, she could have grabbed onto something in time, but she had been caught completely by surprise and was entirely at his mercy. After a few moments of wild flailing, she seemed to realize this and pouted at him.

"That’s not fair," she complained, looking down on him from her vantage point above him. "Since when can you even do that?"

Zorian ignored the question, instead studying the magic he was using to levitate her with his mana perception. He was still a long way from mastering even the most basic forms of mana perception, but an entire month of Xvim’s tutelage was definitely showing its results. Even a rudimentary ability to sense his own mana flow helped immensely when performing unstructured magic like he was currently doing, allowing him to notice and correct minute flaws in his technique that would have otherwise destabilized the whole undertaking. It was somewhat embarrassing that he had neglected such a potent skill all this time, but maybe it was fortunate he had done so. It was Xvim’s guidance, as much as the shaping exercises themselves, that was responsible for his rapid growth in the skill, and he would have wasted a huge amount of time if he had tried to piece things together on his own.

Taking advantage of his momentary distraction, Kirielle suddenly started struggling again, swiping at him with her hands in an attempt to reel herself back down. Zorian promptly floated her further up in the air, causing her to miss his covers by a few hairs.

"Oh, come on!" she whined. "Zorian, don’t be such a jerk! Put me down!"

Zorian gave her an evil smile and started to float her sideways, away from the bed…

"Slowly!" Kirielle quickly clarified, catching on to what he intended to do. "Put me down slowly!"

He thought about letting her fall and then telekinetically catching her in the last moment before she hit the floor, but quickly discarded the idea. He wasn’t that confident in his unstructured levitation skills… or his timing, for that matter. He gently floated Kirielle down to the floor and got out of bed.

Unfortunately, Kirielle was rather fascinated by her brief experience with magical levitation, and was instantly upon him, bombarding him with an endless stream of questions. Well. That kind of backfired on him. He just couldn’t get her to calm down…

"How long can you keep doing that?" Kirielle asked.

"I don’t know," Zorian said. And he really didn’t, but he was hoping that if he answered some of her more inconsequential questions, she would eventually give the matter a rest. As such, he tried to give her a more detailed answer. "It would depend heavily on how docile you were being and whether I had something else disrupting my concentration. At least an hour, assuming I had your cooperation."

"Great!" Kirielle said happily. "In that case, I have an idea!"

Zorian slowly descended down the stairs, trying not to make too much noise. The idea, after all, was to surprise Mother, and he couldn’t exactly do that if-

"Zorian, get down here already!" his mother shouted, the sound of her footsteps making it clear she was rapidly approaching the bottom of the stairs. "Your breakfast is getting… cold…"

She entered the main hallway where the stairway was located and then stopped to stare at the spectacle. Zorian himself was fairly unremarkable, but Kirielle was floating in the air beside him instead of using the stairs.

There was a brief moment of silence as the two sides stared at each other, one in surprise and the other in expectation of an eventual reaction. In the end, though, it was Kirielle who eventually broke the standoff. The little imp just didn’t have the patience to stick to the plan.

"Mom, I’m flying!" Kirielle announced loudly, waving her hands up and down in mimicry of flapping wings.

Mother opened her mouth for a second to say something but then thought better of it. She silently rolled her eyes and turned her back on them, mumbling something uncharitable about mages and children.

"When you’re done playing around, come and eat," she told Zorian, before disappearing into the kitchen again.

Zorian and Kirielle shared a glance. Conveniently enough, with Kirielle floating beside him as she was, they were actually at the same eye-level.

"It was totally worth it," Kirielle opined.

Yeah. Yeah, it was.

"Thus it so happened that Sumrak’s quest for restoring his lost memories took him to Korsa, where he descended into the tunnels beneath the city in search of the mythical Scorpion Swordsmen, and the even more mythical Orb of Memory which they guarded," Zorian spoke dramatically. "Little did he know, however, that the Scorpion Swordsmen were not nearly as honorable as the myths had made them out to be, and that his journey into the depths beneath Korsa would be his most dangerous adventure yet…"

Zorian swept his hand through the air with a flourish, and the illusion that was there promptly dissolved into ectoplasmic smoke, only to reform into a completely different illusionary scene.

Kirielle sat on the edge of her seat, listening in rapt attention. Over the various restarts, Zorian had more or less worked out what sort of things Kirielle found impressive and interesting, so it wasn’t very difficult to keep her attention these days. Which was good, because it made the long train ride at the start of the restart a lot more bearable, for both of them, than it would have otherwise been.

Only half of his attention was on the story he was telling, though – he was also considering what to do in this new restart. More specifically, he was considering whether to have another relatively quiet restart like the previous one had been, or if he should notify the Triumvirate Church about Sudomir’s soul trap. The first option seemed more sensible – he had only two more restarts (including this one) to raise his skill at interpreting aranean memories to levels necessary to open the matriarch’s memory packet, and he couldn’t afford to get distracted too much. Aside from that, the second option was very attention grabbing and had the potential of leading Red Robe straight towards him if he did it even slightly wrong.

The choice seemed obvious, but Zorian was getting concerned. Red Robe was being too quiet. Sure, the third time traveler may be laboring under the delusion that there’s a whole army of other time travelers out to get him, but Zorian would have still expected Red Robe to make some kind of move by now, even if strictly through proxies. That Zorian could detect no trace of Red Robe’s actions was slowly making him more and more paranoid. It didn’t help his peace of mind that both Taiven and Kael were even more certain than Zorian that Red Robe was planning something big rather than simply laying low. Stirring the hornet’s nest a little by exposing Sudomir to the authorities just might create enough waves to reveal what Red Robe was planning…

In addition to that, pointing the authorities towards Sudomir was bound to do wonders for his investigation into the invasion and their leadership. There was no way that an investigation into Sudomir would not point them towards the Cult of the Dragon Below and the Ibasans. That was almost certainly going to save Zorian months of work, if only because he could watch carefully who they’d arrest and then investigate those people on his own in future restarts. And if he could actually gain access to written records and the investigators' memories? Absolutely priceless.

His main problem with trying to map out the organization of the invasion was that he was just one person and had to conduct his investigation under utmost secrecy. An official investigation would not labor under similar limitations. In fact, Zorian suspected that no matter how skilled and experienced he became over the restarts, he would never really be able to match the investigative power of the entirety of Eldemar and its counter-intelligence agencies. People who worked there had dedicated their whole lives to this sort of thing, and he knew for a fact that Eldemar had mind mages of their own under their employ. They could discover things that Zorian wouldn’t even think of looking for, because he didn’t possess the necessary background to know which questions to ask.

The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea. He would have to be very, very careful, but this could be just what he needed to connect everything together.

Yes, he was definitely approaching the Church when they arrived in Cyoria…

"Hey, don’t space out now!" Kirielle protested. "You haven’t finished the story. We just got to the good part!"

"Sorry, sorry!" Zorian apologized hurriedly. He found it kind of amusing that what Kirielle considered good parts usually involved fighting of some sort. Well, that or usage of some kind of epic magic. "As I was saying, the Scorpion Swordsmen had just led Sumrak to the supposed secret area where the Orb of Memory rested on a pedestal, beneath the Holy Stalactite, when suddenly his guides turned on him…"

Though Zorian had resolved to approach the Triumvirate Church about Sudomir, his first action upon settling a little in Cyoria was not to go to the nearest temple – it was to track down Xvim and tell him about the time loop. He saw no point in wasting time by waiting until Friday to confront him, as the sooner Zorian told him about the time loop, the sooner Xvim would accept it as true and start working with him again. In fact, Zorian had hoped that Xvim would be even easier to convince this time, since he was in possession of the password thingy that Xvim had given him in the previous restart.

Unfortunately, easier didn’t mean effortless. Despite the password (that Zorian was certain he had memorized correctly), Xvim was highly suspicious of him. It took several hours' worth of questions before he was willing to accept Zorian’s story even provisionally, and he didn’t seem terribly convinced even then. He told Zorian they would talk more on Friday and then basically kicked him out of his house.

Maybe he should have waited until Monday and spoken to Xvim in his office instead of visiting him at his home…

No matter. Depending on how things went with the Church, he might actually need a free week to set things up properly.

The next day, he went to a temple. Specifically, he went to a temple he had already visited in the previous restarts – the one with the nice green-haired priest and the future-divining high priestess. There was no particular reason to pick that temple over the others other than familiarity, but he didn’t think it would matter. Whatever temple he went to, they would still report to the same parent organization.

Batak was as polite and welcoming as always – he immediately greeted Zorian upon his arrival at the temple and ushered him inside. After serving them both some tea and engaging in some small talk, he probed Zorian for his reason of coming.

"It’s unusual to see a young man like you visit our temple," Batak remarked. "Do you do this often?"

"Well, no," Zorian admitted. "To be honest, I tend to avoid temples. I’ve had some bad experiences with them in the past. But I wanted to report something and ask for some advice, so here I am."

"Oh? What kind of bad experiences?" Batak asked curiously.

Of course he wanted to know about that. Zorian would have thought that something to report would have aroused Batak’s curiosity more, but apparently not.

"It’s a bit of a long story," Zorian sighed. "The first thing you have to keep in mind is that I am an empath."

"As in, you can sense other people’s emotions?" asked Batak. "A useful gift."

"When trained," Zorian nodded. "But as a child, I had no control over it. I didn’t even know I’m an empath. All I knew was that being around large groups of people made me sick and dizzy. And back in my home town of Cirin, the temple was usually packed full of people. The few times my parents brought me there, I ended up fainting and causing a bit of a stir…"

"That’s unfortunate," Batak said sympathetically.

"Not as unfortunate as the old priest’s reaction was," Zorian said, shaking his head. "He really took my reaction personally. He decided that I have some kind of bad blood that was repelled by the holiness of the temple."

"Bad blood?" Batak asked incredulously.

"My mother was of witch lineage," Zorian clarified.

"Ah," Batak said in understanding. "That makes more sense. While I don’t condone the man’s reaction, it was not entirely unreasonable to believe you have some witch-descended bloodline issue going on with you. Lineages were very important to witches, and they loved inheritable magic abilities. Many of their influential families had some kind of bloodline power to draw on."

"Wait," Zorian frowned. "Then my empathy…"

"It is entirely possible," Batak nodded.

Damn. So it was possible that the bigoted old priest could have actually been right about him, at least in a way? Because if his empathy really was something he had inherited through his witch lineage, then bad blood really did have a hand in his fainting episodes…

He didn’t know whether to be amused or bitter about that.

"I thought empathy was fairly generic, as far as special powers go," Zorian said. "Lots of people have it, relatively speaking."

"Special powers don’t pop out of nowhere," Batak said. "Most are a product of potions, rituals, spiritual possession and the like. But sometimes these powers can get transferred to a person’s descendants while staying dormant for a generation or two before resurfacing. It’s a bit of a public secret, but when a child is born with a magic power out of nowhere, that almost always means the child has some interesting things hidden in their family tree. In regards to empathy being relatively common, well… I’m guessing that there are more people with, shall we say, interesting backgrounds than most people would be willing to admit."

That was very interesting, because witches were endemic to Altazia, but empaths could be found all over the three continents inhabited by humans. Zorian didn’t think all those empaths in Miasina and Hsan drew their roots from some witch born in Altazia. Assuming that Batak was indeed right and random empaths originated from an ancestor that deliberately made themselves psychic, that would mean that lots of people managed to turn themselves psychic over the course of history.

In other words, there was some kind of reliable method of turning normal people into psychics circulating around. It couldn’t be too easy, since empaths were still rather rare, but clearly it wasn’t impossibly hard either.

There was also the matter of his family. If his psychic nature was indeed some kind of pseudo-bloodline thing, then his mother and siblings were bound to have it as well, if only in a dormant fashion. He knew that most of them were not full-blown psychics, since he would have felt it if they were, but maybe Daimen was. His oldest brother did have an uncanny ability to understand people…

Well, there was no way to confirm it one way or the other. Daimen was in Koth, and Zorian didn’t think he could reach him even if he dedicated an entire restart just to get there. Unless he found a way to instantly reach another continent or something, they would never meet while the time loop lasted.

In any case, even if the rest of his family weren’t fully psychic, there may yet be a way to awaken their dormant mind magic talent. It was surely easier to unlock a dormant magic ability than to create it out of nowhere, so he couldn’t help but wonder if it was possible to, say, make Kirielle psychic in a relatively easy and painless fashion. Not that he would do that, as the idea of a psychic Kirielle absolutely terrified him, but maybe once she was older and able to handle the power responsibly…

"Anyway," Batak continued after a short pause, "I believe you said something about wanting to make a report and needing advice?"

"Yes," Zorian said. He then withdrew a blank, sealed envelope from his pocket and handed it to Batak, who frowned at him.

"An anonymous report?" Batak mumbled to himself.

Personally, Zorian didn’t feel this was very anonymous. Anonymous would have meant sending the letter through normal mail, without ever having to meet face to face with anyone. Unfortunately, as much as Zorian liked that idea, that would have gotten him nowhere. Such a report would not be taken seriously at all, and would likely be thrown into the trash before it ever reached someone important. If he wanted the Church to actually do something, he had to talk to an actual priest and have them vouch from him that his report had been made in good faith.

"I have to ask, is this absolutely necessary?" Batak said, concerned.

"The information contained in the letter concerns the crimes of a highly influential person with plenty of subordinates," Zorian said blandly. "If my name is known, I would fear for my safety."

"I see," Batak sighed. "Very well, I will forward your report to my superiors as it is. I must warn you, however, that they are not terribly fond of anonymous reports. They are seen as unreliable. Rest assured that your concerns will be looked into, but it may take some time before the Church investigators get around to it."

"How long is some time?" Zorian frowned.

"A few weeks. Possibly months, if something more urgent comes up," Batak said.

Damn. So much for that idea. It seemed he would have to go with his plan B – talking to Alanic Zosk. He had wanted to avoid doing that, since he kind of doubted that the old warrior priest would just leave him be without any questions afterwards, but it seemed he had no choice. If he absolutely had to make a face-to-face report to someone, Alanic was probably his best shot. The man was almost certain to believe him and probably cared enough about Zorian to keep his identity secret.

He could always just end the restart prematurely if things got too out of hand.

"Well, with that out of the way, what can I advise you about?" Batak asked, pushing the letter to the side of the table.

"Souls and necromancy," Zorian told him bluntly.

"Oh," Batak said, suddenly sitting a little straighter. "That is… quite an unusual topic to ask about. Young man, the only advice about necromancy I can give you is: don’t use it."

"I wasn’t planning to," Zorian shook his head. "What I want to know is why somebody else might do so. And also why they would feel the need to gather thousands of souls and keep them imprisoned in a giant crystal pillar."

Batak gave him a blank look, glanced to the side of the table where Zorian’s sealed letter was innocently resting, then gave Zorian another blank look. Then he placed the letter in front of him again and wrote URGENT on top of the envelope in big, blocky letters before setting it aside again.

Well. Zorian still intended to go talk to Alanic, since he had no idea how much influence Batak’s little remark would have on his superiors, but he was still touched by the gesture.

"You probably know this, but souls are very mysterious things," Batak said seriously. "They have many functions, most of which we can’t even understand, much less influence. But their most important function is not, as many mages believe, that they allow one to produce and shape mana. It is the fact they serve as a living, breathing record of everything a particular entity is."

Zorian raised his eyebrows in incomprehension.

"The gods originally gave souls to living beings in order to record their thoughts and forms, so that their lives may be preserved after death and their deeds properly judged in the afterlife," Batak said. "For that reason, the gods, who had intimate knowledge of how souls worked, were capable of many miraculous things. So long as they had access to a person’s soul, they could bring them back to life, even if their bodies had been reduced to ash and scattered into the winds. They could peer into their soul to examine their entire life from the moment they were born. They could restore a person’s youth by regressing their forms to the state they once possessed. According to some stories, they could even create an identical copy of a person, indistinguishable from the original in every way."

"Copies of people?" Zorian frowned.

"It is not that strange," Batak said, waving his hand dismissively. "The simulacrum spell does something very similar. While simulacrums are in no way flawless, they are sufficiently real that some people have argued the use of the spell is inherently unethical. They believe that every time a simulacrum disperses, a person dies.

"Do you?" Zorian asked.

"No," Batak shook his head. "Naturally, I follow my Church’s dogma, and it states that only things with souls are considered people. Simulacrums do not have them. But this is a digression, and I am not an expert on such magic. What is important is that soul magic has the potential of giving earthly mages godlike powers over their fellow man. It is little wonder, then, that many people have coveted such power over the years. Their efforts have been mostly in vain, but that doesn’t stop necromancers from committing atrocity after atrocity in an effort to unlock mysteries of the soul."

Zorian considered this information for a few moments. The idea of souls as divine recording devices was totally plausible to him, since he could clearly see that simply sending his soul back in time could keep his memories intact. Which was rather curious, now that he thought about it – it was common knowledge that human minds were stored inside the brain. Was his soul overwriting his brain cells upon the start of every restart or was something yet more exotic going on there?

Though there was something about that story about gods making copies of people that was nagging him in the back of his head. He felt like he was missing something important.

"So why is soul damage so catastrophic to the body?" Zorian asked curiously. "Clearly the connection between the body and soul is not just one-way."

"Clearly," Batak agreed. "But nobody really understands the nature of that connection and the way it works. It is known that souls cannot think or feel when not embodied in something. The soul needs a body, even if it’s just an ectoplasmic shell… but the body equally needs a soul. It’s likely that such a catastrophic reaction to soul damage has a lot to do with a person’s life force, however."

Zorian wracked his brains for a moment, trying to remember what life force had to do with anything. If he remembered correctly, life force was simply a special type of personal mana that wasn’t part of a mage’s mana pool and was used exclusively by the body to keep itself living and resist foreign magics. Since the amount of life force rarely varied much between humans, and couldn’t be used to power spells, the academy instructors hadn’t spoken much about it.

Wait. That was it, wasn’t it? Life force was something every living being had and depended on to stay alive. And it was basically just an exotic form of mana. And the outer portion of the soul – the part that can get warped and mutilated – was the one in charge of regulating a person’s mana flow. If a person’s soul was damaged, that would cause their very life-giving energies to spin out of control…

"I understand now," Zorian nodded. "Though, if I could trouble you for a few more questions…"

Two hours later, Zorian wrapped up his conversation with Batak and left the temple. Strangely, the green-haired priest actually expressed a wish for Zorian to drop by some time for another chat. Strange. Zorian would have expected the man to be rather leery of him after discussing such a topic. He gave Batak a non-committal response, unsure whether he should take the man’s offer, and left for home.

The next day, Zorian went to Knyazov Dveri to talk to Alanic. Since he had saved Lukav from Sudomir’s schemes and helped Alanic drive off his own attackers, he figured that the man would be well disposed towards him and inclined to listen to what he had to say. Just to be sure, however, Zorian had made a little detour before talking to the warrior priest – he went to the house of Vazen, the merchant that did Sudomir’s dirty work, and stole all the incriminating evidence from his safe.

In the end, though, Alanic didn’t even look at all those papers Zorian had brought him. The moment Zorian started talking to him about a mansion full of undead and the soul trap surrounding it, he demanded that Zorian teleport him to the place immediately. Not tomorrow or in an hour or when he was done looking through all the gathered evidence – immediately.

So Zorian did just that, internally grumbling about all the effort he had wasted into preparing his case. Wasn’t Alanic in the least bit afraid that Zorian would teleport him into some sort of pre-arranged trap? No, apparently he wasn’t.

Once Zorian teleported them to the edge of Iasku Mansion’s ward, Alanic just stood still and stared in the direction of Iasku Mansion in total silence. This continued for quite a long time.

"Uh, are you okay?" Zorian finally said, unable to restrain himself any longer. "Shouldn’t you be casting spells to confirm my story?"

"There is no need," Alanic said calmly. "I can feel the spiritual sinkhole tugging at my soul easily enough."

Zorian looked at Alanic in alarm.

"We’re in no danger," Alanic assured him. "The effect is weak and the souls of living beings are tethered to their bodies too strongly to succumb to it. It’s only because my awareness of my own soul is so high that I can easily spot it. You have some measure of soul awareness too, I see, but too little to notice such things."

So a sufficiently good soul mage could tell that the soul trap existed just by entering its area of effect? No wonder Sudomir considered everyone with a hint of aptitude in the field a threat to his plans. Even if most of the people he killed and kidnapped weren’t on the level of skill that Alanic displayed, it only took one to blow his conspiracy wide open.

Suddenly, Zorian noticed a group of dark dots flying towards him and swore internally. Damn iron beaks.

"I hate to interrupt you, but some of the mansion’s guards are already coming towards us," Zorian told Alanic. "If we don’t leave, we’ll soon be flooded with winter wolves, undead boars and the like. I speak from experience."

"Oh, so you’ve done some sneaking around the place already?" Alanic asked curiously.

"Had you read all the information I brought you, you would have known that," Zorian grumbled.

"Worry not, we’ll get back to the information later, when we start organizing an assault on this place with the army."

Zorian gave Alanic a surprised look, startled.

"What?" Alanic laughed. "Did you think we were going to infiltrate this place? No, we’re bringing soldiers, artillery and several mage combat groups and sieging the place into submission. And you’re going to help me investigate the rubble."

"What, I don’t get any say in this?" Zorian asked, unable to keep a bit of challenge from creeping into his voice. Damnit, this was exactly what he was afraid of…

"Don’t complain," Alanic told him. "I know what you’re going to say: you don’t want to be involved. You want to go home and pretend this has nothing to do with you, right?"

"Well, yeah," Zorian admitted. "I gave you all the information I know, what more do you want from me?"

"I truly doubt you’ve really told me everything you know. And the army will be doubtful as well," Alanic sighed. "They will want to find you, and they would eventually succeed at doing so. If, on the other hand, you are clearly working for me, they will be leery of going after you. Strange as it may sound to you, you are far safer beside me than you are on your own."

As if to punctuate his claim, Alanic pointed his hand at the approaching iron beak flock and snapped his fingers. A dazzling beam of electricity erupted from his palm and struck the leading bird. In the blink of an eye, the beam arced from one bird to another, jumping from target to target.

In but a moment, a twenty-strong flock had been reduced to a rain of charred corpses and blown-off feathers that descended on the forest canopy.

Okay, he had to admit, that was very impressive. Especially since he knew that Alanic was a fire specialist. It would seem his specialization wasn’t as narrow as Zorian had thought.

Still…

"How would the army even know I exist unless you tell them about it?" Zorian argued.

"I’ll have to tell them about it," Alanic said, shaking his head. "I’m not much of a liar, and they can be rather shrewd and persistent. It wouldn’t take them long to figure out that I’m working with someone else, and they will naturally want to know who that person is."

Ugh. How annoying. Should he just dismiss this restart as a failure and start over?

…No, not yet. Maybe he could get this to work.

"I need to stay anonymous," Zorian eventually said.

"We will work something out," Alanic said dismissively.

And that was that. From that moment onward, Alanic considered him his subordinate.

Zorian had to admit, it was kind of amazing how quickly Eldemar could mobilize its forces once it identified a serious threat. It took only four days for them to organize the assault on Iasku Mansion and mobilize the necessary troops. The Triumvirate Church was involved too, sending two groups of twelve warrior priests each to support the several hundred soldiers and nearly fifty mages that Eldemar itself threw at the problem. Four huge war golems and thirteen magic-enhanced cannons served as heavy support.

Zorian himself was not involved much in the preparations. He mostly just silently followed Alanic around, clad in a face-concealing robe that the warrior priest had given him. The few times he had to speak, he did so exclusively through a magic orb that could translate his thoughts to speech. He had made it himself, surprising Alanic somewhat. Apparently Zorian’s standards were a little skewed again, and what he thought was a mildly-useful trinket was actually something that was worth quite a bit of money in stores and took some practice to learn how to use.

From what Alanic had told him, the rest of the force thought he was some kind of elite investigator in the employ of the Triumvirate Church and were more than a little intimidated by him. Alanic seemed endlessly amused by that. In any case, very few questions had been asked about his presence, but the restart was still young and Zorian didn’t dare hope that could last. At least for now, though, his identity was secure.

He really felt out of his depth in all of this, though. This wasn’t what he’d had in mind at all when he had decided to make the Church aware of Sudomir’s schemes. Hell, Sudomir himself was probably long gone now – there was no way he hadn’t noticed all the preparations going on around him.

He told Alanic as much one day, but the warrior priest didn’t share his opinion.

"Sudomir has invested a lot of time and money into that place," he said. "There’s no way he’s going to abandon it without a fight. Four days is not enough for him to evacuate his possessions from that place, and he probably had less than that. I doubt he noticed the preparations straight away."

"If you had moved more carefully in the start, you could have probably arrested him before he realized what was happening," Zorian said.

"Not at all. You can’t just suddenly arrest a popular and influential mayor like Sudomir like that," Alanic said. "You need solid evidence, or else people will cry foul. What you gathered is a good start, but nowhere near enough. Attacking a mansion full of undead is a lot easier to justify, and I’m sure we will find plenty of evidence to convict him inside."

Zorian shook his head, not really convinced, but he didn’t argue the point further. He would just have to wait for the assault to see how things went. Alanic and the army might be right, after all.

Considering the amount of forces the army planned to bring to bear on Iasku Mansion, there was no way to really launch a surprise attack on the place. Even with the use of teleportation, it would take quite a while to bring everyone over to their destination and assume proper positions. As such, the initial phase of the plan called for three groups of mages to arrive first and erect a large-scale teleport ward over the entire region – hopefully preventing Sudomir from simply teleporting out when he realized the sheer scale of the assault heading his way.

Well, that part of the plan went off without a hitch. Unfortunately, erecting the anti-teleportation had been like kicking over the hornet’s nest – almost as soon as the wards solidified, endless streams of undead started pouring out of the mansion, as well as from the storage facility next to it. Skeletons, undead boars, flesh golems, massive abominations of stitched human flesh (Zorian didn’t even know Sudomir had those; then again they were just up-scaled versions of a normal flesh golem) – the amount of reanimated soldiers Sudomir had at his disposal was mind-boggling. Zorian could only presume that he hadn’t faced such hordes in his own incursions on Iasku Mansion because by that point most of these joined the invaders in their attack on Cyoria.

Caught off-guard by the ferocious counter-attack, the army struggled to organize its forces. Fortunately, these were all disciplined and experienced soldiers, and they came here fully expecting to fight against undead hordes. It would take a lot more than this to demoralize them.

Cannons fired again and again into the approaching horde, thinning the ranks considerably. The four solid-steel war golems, although far inferior in numbers to the giant flesh-stitched monstrosities mixed into the undead ranks, proved to be far superior to them in strength and durability. The giant flesh golems failed to make a breakthrough, being thrown back again and again until they fell apart. Nonetheless, the chaos of that initial exchange meant that a lot of mages and ordinary soldiers fell to the horde. Ten mages and more than 50 normal soldiers became casualties in the first ten minutes of the battle.

After that, however, the army had had enough time to get a grip on the situation. As had the mages. After some initial difficulty, they finished some kind of multi-mage spell and a pair of giant fire vortexes suddenly sprang into existence in front of the approaching horde.

Almost like living beings, the two vortexes wove through the undead ranks, sucking up reanimated bodies into their center, where they were burnt to a crisp. The strange thing was that instead of growing weaker with time, the vortexes only seemed to be getting stronger with every undead body they consumed.

The few reanimated corpses and flesh golems that survived the artillery, war golems, and fire vortexes were met with a hail of grenades and high-caliber bullets wielded by normal soldiers and none of them survived to make contact with the assault force.

And then the top of Iasku Mansion exploded upwards. For a moment Zorian thought that Sudomir had perhaps once again panicked in the face of a determined attack and did something to screw himself over, just like he had during their last encounter, but then something inside the resulting dust cloud roared.

Something huge. The roar reverberated through the area, creating a shockwave of force that blew away all dust and debris shielding the top of Iasku Mansion from sight. As such, Zorian was treated to a sight of a massive metal platform that was almost entirely taken up by an equally massive skeletal dragon. Its gleaming white bones glowed with countless lines of yellow light that signified a staggering amount of spell formula etched onto the long-dead bones, and instead of being hollow, its ribcage seemed to be crammed full of some kind of metal machinery and likewise looked rather sophisticated in nature.

What.

What!?

Why did Sudomir have that thing!? Why hadn’t he ever given any indication he had something like that in the past!?

The skeletal dragon didn’t care about Zorian’s internal incredulity and muttered curses. Its entire surface lit up with a pale yellow light, creating some sort of ghostly mimicry of a membrane over its wing bones, and then it lazily took fight.

It set off straight towards where Zorian and Alanic were standing.

The battle for Iasku Mansion had begun.

52. Things Fall Apart

Zorian was caught thoroughly off-guard by the appearance of the skeletal dragon. After all, he had already explored Iasku Mansion during the previous restarts, and thus thought he knew what kind of forces Sudomir had at his disposal. He could hardly believe he’d managed to miss something so big and dramatic. On top of that, the way in which the skeletal dragon revealed itself was very loud and dramatic, and it clearly knew where to find Zorian, since it immediately set off towards him…

Well, probably not towards him specifically – in all likelihood, it just went after the assault force leadership, trying to perform a decapitation strike. Not a bad idea, since most of said leadership was concentrated in one command area. Granted, such an attack needed a proper strike force – one that could somehow bypass the frontlines to reach the command area in the back, and one that was strong enough to overcome the defenses protecting it – but the skeletal dragon coming after them probably qualified. It could fly pretty fast, after all, and it was clearly infused with very potent magic.

Unfortunately, the leadership of the strike force included Alanic, from whom Zorian never strayed much due to the role he’d assumed in front of the rest of the assault force. So now he had a huge dragon skeleton coming straight at him.

"Safest place in the entire battlefield, my ass," Zorian mumbled gloomily, just loud enough for Alanic to hear him.

The stern priest said nothing, instead focusing on casting a spell of some sort. An anti-scrying measure, if Zorian interpreted his chants and gestures correctly. Zorian supposed that Alanic was disturbed at the ease with which Sudomir had managed to pinpoint their command area, and was trying to prevent further surveillance.

Glancing around him, Zorian noticed that the other mages in the command area were also hurriedly casting spells. The command area became a hurricane of activity in a flash – well, even more so than it already had been during the opening clashes of the assault. Despite this, Zorian remained still, aware that any contribution of his would likely cause more harm than good. He could barely understand what was going on around him, so how could he make sure he wasn’t getting in the way? Unless one of the mages asked for his assistance, he would refrain from doing anything.

The dragon had barely started its flight towards the command area when a thick black cloud rose into the sky from the forest around the mansion. Iron beaks. Their numbers blackened the sky and filled the air with ominous cawing that could easily be heard all the way to where Zorian was standing. Sudomir probably intended them to serve as a distraction for the skeleton dragon.

The swarm of magical corvids quickly separated itself into five smaller flocks and descended upon the assault force, sending a rain of knife-like feathers at the Eldemarian soldiers. In response, one Eldemarian war golem pointed its metal palms at the approaching iron beaks and a series of explosions erupted in the midst of the flock, killing hundreds of birds with each detonation. The regular soldiers were not defenseless either, and soon brought out some kind of grenade launcher devices and started firing potion canisters into the air. They detonated into flashes of light and electricity, effortlessly scything through the attacking birds. Despite this, the iron beaks kept coming, their numbers seemingly endless. If anything, the death of so many of their kin only made them fiercer and angrier, if the increased volume of cawing and feather attacks was any indication.

Zorian frowned and shifted in his place uneasily. He had been uneasy with the trajectory of the whole restart for a while now, feeling he had completely lost control over events a while ago. Seeing the scene in front of him, that unease only grew stronger. The Eldemarian forces might even lose at this rate. Should he end the current restart and start over?

No… no, not yet. He was taking a bit of a risk, since dying here meant getting sucked into that soul-gathering pillar that Sudomir had in his mansion, but he wanted to see how things would develop. At the very least, he wanted to see how the battle would end. Maybe Sudomir had more surprises in store for them, not just the undead dragon currently flying towards him.

And speaking of the skeletal dragon, Zorian had expected it to swoop in and try to tear them apart in melee combat. Most skeletons could not manage much beside that. Evidently, though, the spell formula and machinery used in this skeletal dragon’s construction were not there just for show. Still on its way towards them, the dragon skeleton opened its maw and fired a thin yellow spell beam at them from within the depths of its skull. The beam was faint and translucent, but Zorian knew better than to assume this made it weak. It crossed the distance between the dragon and the command area in an instant, losing little of its coherence in the process.

Thankfully, the mages in charge of the defense had good reflexes – in the brief moment between when the skeletal dragon opened its maw and the beam flew out, they managed to erect a barrier to tank the blow. Unlike the barriers that Zorian was familiar with, this one wasn’t a thin layer of force – it was a thick, gelatinous wall of ectoplasm that distorted everything seen through it.

The undead dragon’s beam impacted the wall and blew a huge crater in its surface, easily digging through more than half of its thickness. However, the nearby material in the rest of the wall quickly flowed into the hole, filling it up in a matter of seconds. Soon, the whole thing looked as if it had never been damaged in the first place.

The dragon fired the beam two more times, trying to overwhelm the defense by targeting the same spot on the wall through continuous fire. It failed. It simply could not deal enough damage to counteract the wall’s regenerative abilities.

Undaunted by the failure, the skeletal dragon continued flying towards the command area. The two fire vortexes that were created to deal with the initial undead horde, still going strong, moved to intercept the creature. The dragon actually swerved from its trajectory to confront one of the vortexes, breathing some kind of massive dispelling wave at it. Although the flame of the vortex grew noticeably dimmer in the wave’s passage, it resisted dispersal. At the same time, volley after volley of spell projectiles started homing in towards the undead dragon as it entered the range of defending mages. The spells hurled at it were very diverse – just about every one of them was different from the rest in some fashion. After a while Zorian realized that they were testing the dragon’s wards to see if there were any obvious weaknesses in its defenses.

Unfortunately, the attack spells hurled at the skeletal dragon were about as successful as the dragon’s long-range attack on the command area was – which was to say, they weren’t. Part of the problem was that the skeleton dragon was surprisingly agile, swooping through the air with incredible grace, and a part of it was that it had its own forcefield to protect itself. It was just a simple force aegis, nothing fancy, but there was a reason why the aegis series of spells was so popular among mages – they worked pretty well. A layer of force like that could stop anything that a physical obstacle could… and most spells couldn’t go through solid objects.

Still, the spell volleys continued to come, and the two fire vortexes did their damnedest to engulf the dragon and drag it into their fiery depths. Though the vortexes looked like energy constructs, they could evidently exert plenty of physical force, because they managed to completely halt the dragon’s advance. Their attempts to do actual damage nonetheless proved completely ineffectual. The skeletal dragon seemed to possess inexhaustible quantities of mana for the purposes of powering its defenses, and everything that connected with it was shrugged off. It was probably powered by captured souls, much like the mansion it was defending.

But the skeletal dragon’s advance had been halted, and no defense was truly perfect. One of the mages found a spell that was remarkably good at burning through the thing’s shield (some kind of disc made out of purple fire that glued itself to the surface of the shield and kept draining it) and eventually the first layer of the skeleton dragon’s defenses fell. Unfortunately, the undead dragon seemed to have realized it had found itself in an unenviable position and promptly intensified its struggles. It fired one attack after another at the fire vortexes, occasionally sending an attack or two at the other threats targeting it, causing both vortexes to disperse.

And then it fired its yellow beams again, but this time it didn’t aim them directly at the command area or the rest of the Eldemarian forces. Instead, it fired the beam at the ground in front of its targets, dragging the beams across the landscape. Huge amounts of dust and gravel were thrown into the air, reducing visibility and disrupting many the spell volleys coming after it. Many of the spell projectiles fared poorly when aimed through dust clouds, detonating prematurely or veering off course.

By now, Zorian was completely certain that he was not dealing with a mindless automaton like most of the undead were. The decisions made by the skeletal dragon clearly indicated there was a sapient mind driving its actions – either the construct itself was not as mindless as your average skeleton or Sudomir was personally piloting it through some remote link, much like Zorian had been piloting his golems the last time he’d invaded Iasku Mansion.

If the dragon was not a mindless undead, then that meant it was potentially vulnerable to mind magic. He tried to extend his mind sense far enough to check up on the idea, but the dragon was still too far away for that.

"Can you lure it closer?" Zorian asked Alanic. "I know it’s dangerous, but I might be able to disable it if I can get close to it."

"We’re already working on it," one of the mages close to them said suddenly, cutting into the conversation before Alanic could say anything. "We have a surprise of our own prepared for it once it gets close enough, but we can’t be too blatant about luring it here or it will realize something is wrong and keep its distance. What do you have in mind?"

"I want to try attacking its mind," Zorian admitted.

"Oh? A mind mage, huh?" the man asked him rhetorically, giving him a speculative look. "Could work, I guess. Tell me when you think the moment is right and we’ll try to give you an opening."

Zorian didn’t really understand what kind of opening they thought they could give him when it came to mind magic assault, but he nodded in assent anyway.

While most of the mages had been trying to deal with the undead dragon, the rest of Eldemar’s forces had been busy dealing with the iron beaks assailing them. At some point, isolated packs of winter wolves and war trolls had joined the iron beaks in their counter attack, but somehow Eldemar’s forces were still holding. After a few minutes, Zorian noticed that some of the mages were teleporting away and returning with extra forces and realized how – apparently Eldemar had been prepared for the possibility of the assault going wrong and prepared reinforcements to be brought in as needed. A small but steady stream of new mages and mundane soldiers constantly kept trickling into the area to strengthen the existing forces.

"It’s coming!" the mage that had previously spoken with Zorian shouted. And indeed, the undead dragon had clearly decided it was done playing around and made a beeline straight at the command area once more. The man turned to Zorian. "We’ll hit it with a dozen paralysis bolts the moment it comes close enough. It probably won’t do anything, but it should tie up some of its mental defenses. The moment I give you the signal, do your thing. You have one attempt, and then we’ll go with our plan."

Zorian concentrated at the approaching enemy, extending his mind sense as far as he could in the skeletal dragon’s direction. The dragon fired beam after beam at the barrier protecting the command area, and the damage done to the wall was noticeably growing more severe as it got closer. At point blank range, it could probably cut through the wall of ectoplasm and deal actual damage to the command area… provided it still had enough power to punch through the rest of the defensive wards that had been erected around the area when the place had been made. Still, even if the wards could hold out against the beams for a time, they surely would not last long. It was best to stop the thing as quickly as possible.

The skeleton dragon accelerated as it got closer, clearly intending to ram the wall with its entire mass, trusting its durability. The moment it had entered Zorian’s psychic range, however, he knew he had it. He could sense the mind behind the dragon clear as day. It was shielded, but Zorian could immediately tell it was not enough to stop him from breaking through. He didn’t have much time, though, the dragon was traveling pretty damn fast and-

Twelve bright blue bolts suddenly converged at the approaching skeletal dragon, cast by the mages around Zorian. This close, their target could not dodge, even with its amazing aerial acrobatics, and its force aegis had been exhausted long ago. The moment the bolts had struck the undead dragon, their combined force smashed the mental shield protecting its mind like a hammer striking an egg. For a fraction of a second, the dragon’s skeletal form even grew rigid, continuing to fly forward due to existing momentum but temporarily paralyzed by the combined effect of those twelve bolts. But although the paralysis itself had been shrugged off almost instantly, that was immaterial – the important thing was that its mental shield had been stripped away from it, leaving it completely unguarded.

Zorian immediately launched a barrage of psychic knives straight at the mind that controlled the dragon. The controller recoiled in pain and shock, caught by surprise by the brutal assault, and Zorian took advantage of its weakened influence on the undead dragon to seize control of it for a moment.

In an instant, the skeleton dragon changed the direction of its flight downward, plowing straight into the ground with all of its considerable speed. Mountains of dust and gravel erupted into the air as it dug a deep trench into the ground below, slamming into several trees (the trees came out worse in the collision) before gradually coming to a halt some distance from the command area.

For a moment, everyone around Zorian halted and turned towards him in silence.

"Holy hell," somebody said. "That actually worked."

"It’s still intact," Zorian said tersely. "And the controller is still fighting me for influence. All I can do is keep it still for the moment, and even that isn’t going to last long."

Indeed, while the undead dragon’s controller had been caught off guard by Zorian’s move, the fact was that trying to attack a controller through the puppet they were controlling was not an easy thing to do, even for him. It greatly lowered the speed and power of Zorian’s mental attacks, and the controller had already restored their mental defenses by now and was doing his damnedest to reassert control over the skeletal dragon. The blasted thing clearly had some kind of powerful control array built into it, because Zorian was quickly losing the battle for control over it.

"You’ve done more than enough," Alanic said, before turning to one of the army leaders around him. "Fire the living metal rounds."

Behind the command area, four hidden artillery emplacements opened fire, each one unerringly hitting the immobile skeletal dragon. Instead of exploding, the projectiles erupted into a tangled mess of silvery threads that wrapped themselves around the skeletal dragon, seeking to entangle it firmly.

"Originally we wanted to use this to force it down to the ground," Alanic told him. "But this is even better. Once the living metal roots itself into the ground, that thing will never set flight again. How long do you think-"

Zorian felt the mind behind the dragon finally wrench control of the body away from him, and the immobile form of the skeletal dragon suddenly began to struggle and thrash against the metal threads.

"Nevermind," Alanic sighed. "I guess we’ll have to do this the hard way."

Though the undead dragon struggled fiercely, the metal threads appeared unbreakable. They writhed and coiled like some kind of metallic worms, constantly seeking purchase on the long-dead bones. Far from freeing itself, the dragon’s struggle seemed to only leave it in direr straits, as the threads took advantage of its shifting and thrashing to bind it more firmly. It tried to render the threads inert by breathing a dispelling wave at them, cycled through four different magical fields (also doing nothing to the threads), before finally trying to fire its deadly yellow beam at the nearby command area. Unfortunately for it, the threads had restricted its movements too much by that point, and it could no longer point its head in the proper direction.

Frustrated, the dragon roared, much like it had when it had first revealed itself. This close, its roar was more than just an intimidation tool – the sound was loud enough to rupture one’s eardrums and the kinetic shockwave created by the roar itself could easily send an unprotected man flying. Fortunately, the command area was warded against such relatively minor damage and Zorian simply had to endure some painful ringing in his ears in the aftermath.

Eldemarian forces started to rain spells and artillery shells at the dragon, apparently unconcerned with the possibility of damaging the living metal threads that were keeping the undead dragon chained to the ground. For good reason, it turned out, as nothing seemed to do any damage to them. Or perhaps any damage dealt to them was immediately healed – the living metal thing they were made of seemed to be a very morphic, malleable material.

Sudomir didn’t seem to like the predicament his fancy undead superweapon found itself in, because not long after the attack barrage started, several massive magical projectiles were launched into the air from Iasku Mansion. They ascended high into the sky before descending down to the earth again, travelling across a parabolic trajectory and crossing immense distances in the process – far beyond what normal magic was capable of.

Zorian was reminded of that very first invasion (that he could actually remember), and the fake fireworks that served as a beginning of the invasion. It was the same thing. He could instantly tell he was dealing with artillery magic. Spells like those took a long time to cast and used incredible amounts of mana to power them, but they had both extreme range and extreme damage potential.

Zorian wasn’t the only one who had immediately figured it out. Almost immediately, the leadership of the assault force decided to abandon their current position – two of the projectiles were aimed at the command area, and nobody was sure whether the existing defenses would hold out against even one. Fortunately, artillery spells like these ones were very slow, making it easy to move away before they hit. Fundamentally, they were intended to be used against static targets, and were ineffective against things that could move out of the way. But Zorian suspected that Sudomir never intended for them to actually die – he just wanted to disrupt their attack on his pet undead dragon. A ploy that was quite successful, as Eldemarian forces scrambled to get out of the way of the descending artillery spells.

But Eldemarian mages didn’t just passively run away. Even as they shifted their forces to escape from the blast areas, they began to cast artillery spells of their own as retaliation. Soon, several new artillery spells rose in the air, targeting Iasku Mansion. Sudomir had still struck first, though, so by the time they were halfway to their target, the artillery spells that had been launched from Iasku Mansion reached their destination. One of them was, amazingly enough, targeting the skeletal dragon. It seemed Sudomir was gambling on the idea that his dragon was tougher than the living metal threads that kept it restrained.

The world erupted into fire, light and noise.

Almost immediately afterwards, the skeletal dragon flew out of the dust cloud created above its former prison. It was missing one of its legs, and some of its bones were cracked, the spell formula inscribed on them growing dim, but it still moved. Some of the living metal threads still clung to its bones, stubbornly refusing to let go, but there were too few of them now to do anything more than annoy it. It seemed that Sudomir had gambled correctly.

The world exploded again as Eldemarian artillery spells reached their destination as well. A shining golden dome of force intercepted the projectiles, shielding Iasku Mansion from devastation, but it was left dim and flickering in the aftermath.

The undead dragon immediately turned back, retreating towards Iasku Mansion. Its retreat seemed to signify a general retreat, because the surviving winter wolves and war trolls also fled back into the safety of their base.

As for the iron beaks, their numbers had been cut down to less than half, and the moment they saw the skeletal dragon fleeing from the assault force they scattered in every direction, flying away from Iasku Mansion at maximum speed. Scanning the minds of several frantic iron beaks flying above him, Zorian could tell they had no intention of ever returning to this place. Whatever force Sudomir had used to keep them on his side was apparently insufficient to make them ignore the massive losses they had suffered in this battle.

The first battle for Iasku Mansion was finished, but nobody was fooled into thinking the rest of the siege would be easy.

Over the course of the next several hours, Sudomir did his best to stall Eldemar’s forces as much as possible. His surviving forces launched constant raids on the assault force, doing little damage at this point but successfully breaking the army’s forward momentum. The skeletal dragon, in particular, was still a menace – it no longer made bold, frontal attacks like the one it had performed in the beginning, but it made sure to go after any perceived weakness or recklessness. In addition to that, the area immediately around the mansion was full of hastily erected traps, both magical and mundane, as well as ambush parties composed out of those familiar black-clad undead corpses that Zorian had met before in Iasku Mansion. Finally, the defensive wards on the mansion were running at maximum power, burning through whatever mana reserves they had stockpiled to resist the constant artillery bombardment that was being directed at it ever since Sudomir had launched his artillery spells at the assault force.

At first, Zorian felt that this kind of stalling action was a perfectly sensible decision on Sudomir’s part. He was probably buying himself enough time to evacuate his Ibasan buddies back to their other bases through the dimensional gate in his basement, and would probably escape through it himself at the end. But as hours went by, it became obvious that Sudomir really intended to fight the assault force to the bitter end for some reason. He could have surely escaped ages ago if he really wanted to.

Regardless of how determined Sudomir was to defend his mansion to the end, the outcome had already been decided at the end of that first battle. As hours passed, the noose kept tightening around Sudomir’s neck. The forest around the mansion was burned down to cinders to prevent further ambushes and traps, Sudomir’s stockpile of undead minions eventually started to run out and the mansion’s wards were clearly on the verge of breaking.

And then Sudomir did something that Zorian would have never expected him to.

He surrendered.

Even more amazingly, his surrender was not some kind of trap like Zorian suspected it was when he first heard about it. In the end, Sudomir really did open the gates of his mansion and powered down the defensive wards, letting himself be captured. That… just didn’t make sense to Zorian. He could have escaped easily enough – the Ibasans inside the mansion certainly hadn’t stayed – Eldemarian forces found plenty of evidence that a lot of people had been living inside the mansion until very recently, but no-one other than Sudomir himself was still present. Even if the Ibasans had shut the gate on him, Sudomir could have surely just ridden into the sunset on his fancy skeletal dragon.

Zorian waited for a while to give the Eldemarian investigators a chance to explore Iasku Mansion, and then went to confront Alanic about his concerns.

"What is there to be confused about?" Alanic asked him. "If Sudomir had persisted in his resistance, we would have collapsed his stronghold on top of him and he would have died. Nobody wants to die, least of all a necromancer."

"But the gate we found in his basement…" Zorian began.

"Yes, shocking stuff," Alanic frowned. "It does seem strange that he did not retreat through the gate along with his unknown allies, doesn’t it? But you have to remember, just because they cooperated doesn’t mean they were actually friendly to one another. It could be that he expects better treatment as an Eldemarian captive than as a long-term guest of his so-called allies."

"Even so, it shouldn’t have been too hard to flee from the battle if he was determined," Zorian insisted. "He could have flown out, for instance. Gods know we couldn’t have really stopped that pet undead dragon of his if it had simply flown off in a random direction."

"No, but we could have tracked it," Alanic said. "But yes, you are probably right. He could have fled. But that would have meant that we would have leveled this place to the ground. Sudomir seems to be very attached to this place. It seems this is his life’s work, and he is loath to see it gone."

He cares about his soul trap thing so much?

"Isn’t it destined for destruction anyway?" Zorian asked, frowning. "Surely Eldemar is not going to let a giant soul trap remain intact?"

Alanic stared at him for a few seconds before sighing heavily. "They’re definitely going to release the souls trapped within. Too many people know about them by now, and it would be a huge scandal if it became known they let so many innocent souls remain trapped in that thing. At the very least, I’m sure I can get the Triumvirate Church to apply pressure on Eldemar to do so. Unfortunately… I cannot guarantee that the device itself will be destroyed. Sudomir’s work is utterly repugnant, but also very impressive to some people. It’s entirely possible he can reach some kind of agreement with Eldemar’s government."

"Agreement?" Zorian asked incredulously. "How could that possibly work? I know that Eldemar has some secret necromancers under their employ, but Sudomir is…"

"I know," Alanic said, raising his hands in a placating gesture. "But it would be completely in line with Eldemar’s previous behavior to retool this place into a secret research facility and then place Sudomir under house arrest here. He would be forced to work for Eldemar, and all manner of restrictions would be imposed on him, some of them ethical in nature, but that is obviously a far lighter punishment than a monster like him deserves. I’m almost one hundred percent certain that this is what Sudomir is aiming for."

"I see," said Zorian unhappily. He knew that Eldemar was no image of perfection and goodness, but he was still unpleasantly surprised that they would be willing to work with someone like Sudomir.

Then again, they still didn’t know that Sudomir wasn’t just practicing illegal magic, but was also actively betraying the country to foreign enemies. Zorian suspected that Eldemar would be a lot less willing to make use of Sudomir once that little fact came out…

"Of course," Alanic continued, "if I were to find out something particularly damning about the man before Eldemar’s black divisions have a chance to sequester him to one of their compounds for questioning, then such an agreement might become politically unworkable. There is only so much that can be swept under the rug, after all."

Zorian gave Alanic a suspicious look.

"Meaning… what, exactly?" Zorian asked.

"Your ability to target Sudomir’s mind through his bone dragon puppet was very impressive," Alanic noted. Huh, so it was Sudomir who had been piloting that thing. Zorian had wondered about that. "Even if it was for but a moment, you must be a pretty good mind mage to have achieved that."

Wait, Alanic was offering him a chance to root through Sudomir’s mind for information? Why yes, Zorian was very much interested.

"Say no more," Zorian told Alanic, trying not to show his enthusiasm. "I’ll be happy to help you interrogate him."

"Come with me, then," Alanic said, turning around and motioning for Zorian to follow after him. "Mind you, we’ll only have an hour or so alone with him. This isn’t exactly an official interrogation and there is only so much I can bend the rules…"

Zorian didn’t really care. Frankly, he had a strong feeling he was going to have to terminate this restart prematurely sometime soon anyway, so getting into trouble like that was no big deal. He was just happy this opportunity had fallen so neatly into his lap. He thought he would actually have to try and scheme to get access to Sudomir. He followed after Alanic, mentally preparing a list of questions he wanted Sudomir to answer.

"How come you didn’t just pump him full of truth potions and interrogate him that way?" Zorian asked. He knew that Alanic had done that sort of thing in previous restarts, so it was a bit strange to see him hold back in that regard now.

"That leaves too many traces in the victim’s metabolism," Alanic said, shaking his head. "I did say I’m bending the rules here, didn’t I? I need to be able to play dumb when Sudomir accuses me of using magic to force answers out of him."

"Right," Zorian nodded. "Sorry for being dumb, but I have no experience in things like these, so you’ll have to be a little patient with me."

"An expert mind mage that has no experience in things like these," Alanic stated blandly, visibly rolling his eyes. "Right."

Zorian decided not to respond to that. There was no way he could explain how he had really gotten his mind reading skills, so it was best to stay silent and quietly appreciate the way Alanic was not questioning him about that. For now, anyway.

Sudomir looked surprisingly good for someone who had gotten captured by an Eldemarian assault force. He was wearing shaping-disrupting manacles on his wrists and an exploding collar around his neck, but other than that he appeared completely unharmed. He seemed jittery and impatient when they came in, giving Alanic a sour look but not saying anything. Reading his surface thoughts, Zorian found out that Alanic had already been here a couple of times to ask the man questions, and Sudomir was already sick of him. The man refused to discuss anything with Alanic, apparently aware that there was something fishy about him being sent in as an official Eldemarian interrogator.

Zorian shrugged and got to work. He didn’t try to be subtle – he immediately performed a powerful mental attack on Sudomir, ruthlessly crushing his mental defenses and sending feelers deep into his mind. Sudomir clutched his head in pain, powerless to resist. This close to Zorian, and with his ability to cast spells suppressed by the manacles he was wearing, Sudomir had little hope to expel Zorian from his mind. He couldn’t even scream or shout for help, since Zorian had prevented him from doing that.

The only difficult thing was making Sudomir speak his answers out loud for Alanic’s benefit. He didn’t want the warrior priest to know just how effortlessly he could root through someone’s memories, but forcing the man to do something was far harder than simply interpreting Sudomir’s thoughts and memories… and also, Sudomir was under compulsion not to speak about certain topics. It turned out he had gotten clever and placed a geas on himself before surrendering, placing restrictions on his ability to discuss some things. Stuff like his cooperation with the Ibasans and the planned invasion of Cyoria. This was, of course, completely unacceptable. A big part of reporting Iasku Mansion to Alanic was Zorian’s desire to blow the whole conspiracy thing wide open, so the geas definitely had to go.

Zorian was not really a soul mage, so simply removing the geas was out of the question. Fortunately, he didn’t have to do that to neutralize it. Mind magic was a known bane of the geas-type spells – a geas couldn’t prevent a mind mage like Zorian from lifting information straight from someone’s mind, and it could not compel one to follow an order they could not remember ever receiving. One of the reasons why geas were not more popular throughout history was that if the recipient of the geas was unwilling to play along, they could simply pay a mind mage to purge their memories of the restriction they labored under. The geas would still technically exist, but the compulsion to honor it would be gone.

The geas Sudomir had placed on himself was very fresh, less than a day old, and thus it took less than five minutes for Zorian to make Sudomir forget it ever existed. He didn’t even bother notifying Alanic of its existence.

In any case, once the full scale of Sudomir’s activities started to come to the surface, Alanic decided that he no longer cared about keeping the interrogation short and covert. The interrogation lasted for hours, and only ended because Zorian was afraid he might permanently cripple Sudomir’s mind if he kept rummaging through it incessantly. During those several hours, Zorian found out a wealth of information about the Ibasan invaders, Cult of the Dragon Below and Sudomir. Most of this information involved the identities of collaborators and places where evidence could be found to doom them all – this was the sort of information that Alanic was most interested in, and Zorian saw no reason not to give it to him. In fact, he intended to visit some of these people himself in some future restarts, but for now he would simply step aside and let Alanic go after them.

For Zorian, though, some of the more interesting pieces of information he got from Sudomir concerned the man’s reasons for doing what he did. The core of everything seemed to be the fact that his wife died. To be fair, Sudomir was an unscrupulous necromancer even before then, but it was only after his wife contracted the Weeping and passed away that he’d really lost it. Rather than accept her death and move on, he extracted her soul and tried to bring her back to life. He failed, naturally. Apparently it was not a simple thing to make a dead soul think again, to say nothing of actually restoring it to a semblance of life. Eventually he bound his wife’s soul to Iasku Mansion, restoring a measure of her mental faculties in the process. That was why the warding scheme of the place could intelligently respond to scans and attempts to bypass it, and also the reason why Sudomir had been utterly unwilling to see it destroyed. He would rather let himself be captured than abandon his wife’s soul to eventual destruction.

In fact, the biggest reason why Sudomir agreed to help the Ibasans was that Quatach-Ichl promised to give him the ritual needed to turn his wife’s soul into a lich. A normal lich creation ritual required a living person to work correctly, but Quatach-Ichl claimed he could modify it to work on the disembodied soul of Sudomir’s wife too. Whether Quatach-Ichl was lying about that was anyone’s guess.

The other reason for helping the Ibasans invade Cyoria, the politics part that Sudomir had mentioned in the past, was that Sudomir wanted to legalize necromancy. After all, his wife was soon to come back to life as a lich, and he certainly didn’t plan to die of old age if he could help it either, and it was impossible for him to hide things like that in the long term. Especially if he intended to keep his political position, which he definitely did. Thus, he wanted to make Eldemar drop some of the restrictions surrounding soul magic, or at least to make some special exceptions for him in particular. To that end, he felt he needed to make Eldemar weaker (so they would be desperate for his help) and himself stronger (so he could be the savior they were in desperate need of).

The actual details of Sudomir’s master plan eluded Zorian, as they were too complex and convoluted for him to figure out in a mere couple of hours. And frankly, Zorian didn’t care that much. He found the whole thing crazy to start with, and felt that it was all just an excuse anyway – Sudomir helped the Ibasans because he wanted his wife back. Everything else was just him lying to himself.

Zorian also encountered a couple of other interesting facts while searching Sudomir’s mind, such as the means Sudomir had used to control the iron beaks. Apparently it was a mixture of kidnapping their chicks to hold as hostages and dominating some of the more influential members of the flock. Iron beaks were fiercely protective of their young and intelligent enough to understand a hostage situation, and also didn’t seem to realize their leadership structure had been magically subverted, so this ploy worked surprisingly well. Zorian still wasn’t sure if it was possible to do anything with this information, but he filed it away for future musings.

Eventually, the topic of the interrogation drifted to the issue of primordial summoning (well, more like Zorian guided it there, but whatever) and Zorian decided to see if Sudomir knew the answer to a question that had been bothering Zorian for quite some time.

"Why does the Cult of Dragon Below need a shifter child to complete the ritual?" Zorian asked.

"Children. Plural," Sudomir said. He had mostly stopped struggling against Zorian’s mental probes by now, since it hurt a lot less that way. Currently he mostly focused on trying to shift the interrogation away from sensitive topics. Too bad for him that Zorian knew a great deal about what he and his allies had been doing in the past several months. "The ritual needs at least five shifter children to work. Ideally more."

Zorian frowned. Five children?

"What happens to them?" Alanic asked.

"Sacrificed, of course," Sudomir said, rolling his eyes. His thoughts told Zorian that he considered that a very stupid question. Ask an obvious question, get an obvious answer.

"Why so many?" Zorian asked. "And why children? Why shifter children?"

"There is only so much primordial essence one can extract from any particular shifter," Sudomir said. "And that essence gets progressively more integrated into the shifter’s body as they age, making it next to impossible to extract. Only very young shifters have any significant amount of free floating primordial essence in their bodies."

What?

"Explain," Alanic told him.

Sudomir sighed. "Simply splicing a foreign soul into your own won’t make you a shifter. At least, not the kind people are familiar with."

A stream of disjointed flashes flew across Sudomir’s mind and Zorian dived deeper into his memories to investigate. Sudomir knew this stuff because… he had been doing research into shifters for years now. He had captured dozens of shifters, experimenting on them in a brutal fashion to see what makes them tick. He even made several attempts to produce one, the most successful one being his production of the Silver One. Disturbingly, though, the Silver One wasn’t a human granted the ability to turn into a winter wolf, but the opposite – he had grafted a human soul onto a winter wolf, granting him increased intelligence and ability to turn human if he so wished. That… why would he do such a thing!?

Zorian took a deep breath and pushed the thought out of his mind. While horrible, Sudomir’s shifter experiments were basically a drop in the bucket as far as Sudomir’s crimes were concerned. Asking him about it would just waste the little time he had left with the man.

"In order to make the transformation so flexible and thorough, the ancestors of modern shifters had to use something more," Sudomir continued. "Specifically, they used a bit of primordial blood they had recovered from the creature imprisoned beneath Cyoria. That particular primordial was noted for its shapeshifting prowess, and thus served as a potent catalyst for their own rituals. It is one of the reasons why their shifter rituals are so hard to acquire for outsiders. Even if they can procure the instructions for the ritual, they still need the blood of an existing shifter to perform it, because they’re the only ones with primordial essence coursing through their blood."

"The cultists want to use that primordial essence as a key to open the prison," Zorian mused out loud.

"Yes," Sudomir confirmed. Zorian could feel that the man liked talking about this topic, as it shifted the interrogation away from his misdeeds onto someone he didn’t much care about. Although he was technically a member of the cult, Sudomir didn’t seem to have any emotional attachment to his fellow initiates. "In a way, that essence is still a part of the primordial, and can thus be used as a tool for bridging the gap between our world and the pocket dimension where the primordial has been imprisoned."

"Pocket dimension, huh?" Alanic said.

"That is why they call it a summoning ritual," Sudomir said. "Technically, the primordial isn’t on the same plane of existence as the rest of us. The gods made a special extra-dimensional prison to shove it into. Such pocket dimensions always have a place where they touch our reality, though, and the cult has long ago found where the anchor point for the prison is."

Zorian was forced to terminate the interrogation soon afterwards, but before he did so, he made sure to memory wipe Sudomir of his recent memories. As far as he was concerned, the interrogation had never taken place.

As they left, Alanic commented on the fact Zorian was not using any words or gestures to perform his mind magic. His tolerance for Zorian’s peculiarities was probably steadily approaching the breaking point, and he would soon demand some kind of explanation. Unfortunate, but the lack of gestures and chants was not something Zorian could fake – he was pretty sure an expert mage like Alanic would notice if he tried to make something up to mask his ability.

By the time he’d finally gone back to Cyoria, it was already evening and Kirielle was sound asleep. Imaya remained awake to wait for him, which Zorian found a little bizarre – he had already made up an excuse yesterday for the fact that he would be absent for an entire day, and told her not to wait for him. She cared a bit too much about her tenants for a landlord, in his opinion.

As he went to bed, he couldn’t help but wonder what kind of chaos was going to follow in the wake of the fall of Iasku Mansion. He supposed he would find out soon.

In the next couple of days, Alanic left him alone and refrained from getting him involved in further investigations. That didn’t mean that he and the rest of Eldemar’s authorities were idle, though – in the days that followed, Cyoria was rocked by one scandal after another as important people started getting arrested and brought in for questioning left and right. Zorian paid close attention to who was getting arrested, even though he actually already knew most of them due to his interrogation session with Sudomir.

Aside from paying attention to the arrests going around him and the reactions they were causing, Zorian also executed several attacks against various aranean webs to continue accumulating experience needed for interpreting the matriarch’s memory packet. He was good enough at picking his targets at this point that he had few issues with actually subduing aranean patrols, but he found the experience very draining in an emotional sense. He was basically attacking random aranea for no reason whatsoever, all because he needed a victim to practice his memory reading on, and it was hard not to feel like a villain. Some of the aranea begged him to stop or repeatedly tried to talk to him instead of fighting back. He simply withdrew whenever he encountered such individuals, seeking out more aggressive individuals that actually fought back against his unprovoked aggression, even though that was infinitely more dangerous and definitely not the most efficient strategy.

A few days more passed before Alanic had finally contacted him, using a letter, of all things. The message was short, basically telling him that some people were asking about him, but that he was successfully dodging their questions for now. The letter warned Zorian not to draw further attention if he wished to remain anonymous, since people were already interested in him. Fair enough. He had already decided he would terminate the restart in a few more days – he just wanted to wait for a little while longer to see if something interesting would happen, since he didn’t think the arrests had reached a critical point yet.

By this point Kael had moved into the house and Zorian had already told him about the time loop and given him his research notebooks, so he decided to tell him a little about Sudomir and the information he had learned from the man. He omitted any information about Kael’s friends and acquaintances, since the morlock had told him to keep that secret from him, but that still left a lot of stuff to talk about.

"Oh? Shifters have the essence of a primordial inside of their bodies?" Kael said, surprised.

"That’s what the man said, at least," Zorian nodded. "I can’t help but wonder how this extraction thing works. Do the cultists really have to kill those kids to get this primordial essence?"

"Almost certainly," Kael nodded. "It sounds like it’s part of their life force. It would make sense for something that is inherited from parent to child. Regardless of method, removing someone’s life force is never benign. Ritual sacrifice is simply the fastest way to perform blood magic on them, but even if the cultists used something fancier, the results would likely be the same."

"Blood magic?" asked Zorian curiously. "You know what that is?"

"Ah, right, you probably don’t know. The mage guild does tend to suppress that information, doesn’t it?" Kael mused. "Blood magic involves using people’s life force, usually to fuel various spells. Life force is really potent, much more so than regular mana, so the temptation is always there. Of course, not only are blood magic rituals incredibly dangerous, using your life force also has terrible effects on the body. Thus, most mages who dabble in it prefer to use other people’s life force instead of their own. You know all those stories about villains that ritually sacrifice people for power? They’re basically doing blood magic."

"Oh. So that’s blood magic? Kind of underwhelming," Zorian said. "I thought it would be something incredibly arcane and sinister, considering how obsessive the mage guild is about purging any mention of it from books."

"Blood magic is very easy to do, so long as you have a steady stream of sacrifices," Kael said. "And there is little variation in the amount of life force between different humans. Any random civilian will do as a sacrifice. It’s a very quick if bloody road to power, and the mage guild is afraid that if the information about blood magic was freely available, you would see blood mages popping up all over the place. I’ve also heard that blood magic can be used to steal other people’s bloodlines and special abilities, and you can imagine how all those super-special Noble Houses would feel about that. The mage guild cracks down on it very viciously, and blood magic produces too many victims for a practitioner to hide for long."

Before Zorian could continue the conversation, a series of explosions started to erupt across the city, causing them both to run outside to see what was happening. They found the rest of the inhabitants of the house to be unhurt but confused and frightened by the detonations, though Zorian already had a pretty good idea what was happening.

His suspicions were confirmed when he climbed to the roof of the house and took a look at the city around them, only to see vast swathes of it burning and many of the streets overrun with war trolls and hostile mages.

The Ibasans and the Cult of Dragon Below had decided to launch their invasion early.

The next several hours were a blur. Though the invaders didn’t have the support of iron beaks and the undead normally provided by Sudomir, and though Cyoria’s forces were far more prepared for foul play this time around, the invaders still had a lot of firepower and did their best to cause huge amounts of damage. Though he wanted to go out and explore this unusual invasion, Zorian couldn’t bring himself to abandon the rest of the household alone and undefended to the invaders. Instead he stayed at home, eliminating small groups of invaders that had decided to target this area of the city and occasionally using divination to spy on other parts of the city when things were relatively quiet.

Interestingly, despite him eradicating at least six battlegroups, Quatach-Ichl never showed up to deal with him. Presumably he was a lot busier this time around, and couldn’t afford to deal with a minor issue like him.

To be honest, he didn’t understand what the Ibasans were trying to accomplish by launching this premature attack. At least their original plan to attack during the summer festival had a chance to really do some lasting harm to the city, while this one was doomed to fail right from the start. Then again, maybe they didn’t have much choice. They surely knew by now that Eldemar’s investigators were onto them, so waiting for the summer festival was clearly stupid… but with Iasku Mansion shut down, perhaps retreating to Ulquaan Ibasa in a timely manner was impossible.

After a while, his scrying attempts noticed that fighting was especially fierce around the Hole. This was where most of the invading forces were concentrated, and Quatach-Ichl never seemed to move far from the place. Were the invaders gambling everything on the successful summoning of the primordial? It certainly seemed so. A part of him wondered if that meant Nochka had been kidnapped and was being ritually sacrificed as he watched, but he pushed that thought aside. He couldn’t do anything about it, even if she was, and she would be alive when the next restart begins.

It was interesting, though. If the cultists successfully released the primordial from its extra-dimensional prison, he would finally be able to see for himself how dangerous and destructive it was. The restart wasn’t even close to ending, after all, so the primordial would have plenty of time to show its might.

Hours ticked by and Zorian suddenly realized this was it. The fighting around the Hole had reached a fevered pitch, with Eldemar’s soldiers frantically trying to surge forward and overrun the invaders while Quatach-Ichl rained a dizzying variety of suppressive fire on the forces arrayed against him. At some point one of Cyoria’s mages actually managed to melt half of his skull off with some kind of golden fire, which was the first time Zorian had ever seen something do actual damage to the ancient lich, but that didn’t seem to hold him back much. Above the Hole, and presumably on the inside of it, space shuddered and writhed, distorting everything like hot summer air. Slowly, jagged black threads started rising into the air from the depths, zig-zagging through the air and occasionally forking offshoots.

They were cracks, Zorian realized. Reality was breaking.

Suddenly, a huge volume of space in the center of the cracks simply… caved in, creating a pitch black hole that hung in the air. Something huge and dark brown, like a hand studded with mouths and eyes, shot out of the rip in space, but Zorian didn’t have time to study it much. Without any prompting from him, the marker on his soul suddenly activated and everything went black.

He woke up in his bed in Cirin, with Kirielle wishing him a good morning.

With a sigh, Zorian helped Kirielle unload her luggage from the train, his mind still on the events of the previous restart. Why did the time loop restart when it did? Was it because Zach just happened to die at that point, or was it – like Zorian suspected – because the primordial was successfully released into the world?

What kind of relationship did the primordial have with the time loop? Was the whole point of the time loop to prevent its release? He wondered whether the time loop ended when it usually did because a month was how long a default restart lasted or because that’s when the primordial was usually released and he never bothered to stop the ritual until now. Hm.

"Welcome to Cyoria, Kiri," he told her. "Pretty impressive, isn’t it?"

He was cheating, of course. He knew that Kirielle found Cyoria’s central train station impressive. This time, though, something else seemed to have attracted her attention.

"Umm," she said, pointing behind him. "I think that guy wants to talk to you."

Zorian turned around, only to see a pissed-off looking Zach stomping towards him. Zorian was so shocked at the sight that he didn’t move at all until the boy was practically in his face.

He opened his mouth to give him an awkward hello, but before he could say anything, Zach’s fist shot forward in a blur and punched him in the face.

53. Phantoms

The moment Zorian realized that there was a fist flying towards him, he instinctively tried to take a step back to avoid it. Unfortunately, his and Kirielle’s luggage was right behind him and he was never really a hand-to-hand fighter to begin with. Surprised and imbalanced as he was, Zach’s punch not only connected with his face but also sent him sprawling to the ground, the back of his head slamming painfully against the unyielding concrete.

He didn’t black out, but the force of the impact still left him in a confused daze for some time. It couldn’t have been very long, just a couple of seconds, but when he regained the ability to process what his senses were telling him, he found that his surroundings had absolutely exploded in the brief period of time he was incapacitated. Kirielle was screaming for help at the top of her voice (and she could scream really, really loudly when she wanted to) while simultaneously kicking and clawing at Zach like a cornered lynx. Zach, for his part, looked very confused and panicked, awkwardly trying to fend off Kirielle’s attacks without hurting her while trying to explain himself. Sadly for him, his words were largely unintelligible due to Kirielle’s shrill and incessant shouting. The boy seemed to be at a total loss as to how he should deal with the situation he found himself in.

In other, less public circumstances, Zorian would have probably stayed on the ground for a little while longer, amused at Zach’s predicament and feeling the boy deserved his fate. Served him right for punching him out of nowhere like that. As it was, he scrambled to his feet as quickly as possible while looking around. As he thought, they were attracting a lot of attention from people around them – everyone in the vicinity was watching the situation, talking and whispering amongst themselves and pointing fingers at them. It was likely that the only reason why nobody intervened into the situation yet was that Zach was visibly losing against Kirielle, making the situation sufficiently comical to put them at ease. Still, that could change any moment now. He was pretty sure he saw a couple of policemen hurrying over in their direction, if nothing else. Best to stop this before it escalated.

He shouted for Kirielle to stop and calm down, and was a little surprised when she immediately stopped attacking and retreated behind him. Considering how fiercely she had defended him, he sort of expected her to be harder to restrain. But no, apparently now that he was back on his feet, it was his own responsibility to defend them both. Fair enough. Logically speaking, he was better qualified to stand up to Zach than a nine year old girl. Logic could be misleading, though – he doubted he could ever put Zach on the defensive as much as Kirielle had a few moments ago. It was a good thing that Zach didn’t look like he wanted to continue attacking him any time soon.

Kirielle poked her head from behind Zorian to give Zach one final glare, causing him to flinch slightly, before turning to Zorian and giving him a questioning look. No doubt she wanted to know why this total stranger just punched him in the face out of nowhere. It was a good question. Why did Zach just do that? Hell if Zorian knew. He had considered the possibility that Zach might be hostile to him when they finally met, yes, but this wasn’t really what he had in mind when he thought of a hostile Zach. Punching him in the face was hostile, yes, but physically attacking your target in a crowded train station was not a proper way to ambush a fellow time traveler. Even Zach should know this. So what was this about, really?

Sighing heavily, Zorian ran his hand through his hair in frustration and gave Zach a good hard look. Two things immediately jumped out to him. First of all, he couldn’t sense anything from Zach – as far as his empathy and mind sense were concerned, the boy in front of him did not exist. He had no thoughts or emotions at all. That meant that the Zach in front of him was either a very good illusion or under the effect of mind blank spell. Considering his punch felt quite real, he was going to assume it was the latter. Evidently Zach had come to this meeting a lot better prepared than he had been in the past. Secondly, he should probably get Kirielle’s nails clipped after they got to Imaya’s place, because they were evidently long enough to draw blood if she used them to scratch people. Zach had received a pretty nasty-looking wound on his forearm during his brief battle with her.

As he noted before, Zach didn’t seem interested in fighting with him anymore. The boy looked back at him with a strained smile and greeted him with a quick, awkward wave of his hand.

Ugh, Zorian thought to himself unhappily. This guy…

"This," Zorian announced out loud, "is all one giant misunderstanding."

"Yes!" Zach immediately agreed, nodding frantically. "Totally a misunderstanding."

Of course, it couldn’t really be that simple. Zach and Zorian spent the next fifteen minutes explaining to Kirielle that they were classmates who knew each other from before and that this was just Zach making good on his promise to punch Zorian in the face the next time he saw him for being a big jerk. Or so Zach claimed, anyway.

Zorian could hardly believe what he was hearing. That was serious? He had to admit he did vaguely remember Zach promising something along those lines in that awful soulkill restart when they had last seen each other, but he hadn’t thought much of it. People make proclamations like that all the time. Zorian had totally forgotten about it until Zach reminded him about it.

In any case, after they were done explaining things to Kirielle, they had to explain things again to the policemen that had come to check up on the disturbance. Since Zorian had stood up in Zach’s defense, they decided not to arrest him… so instead they issued a monetary fine to both of them for fighting in public. Zorian personally thought that was totally bullshit, but since Zach immediately promised he would pay both of their fines out of his own pocket, he decided not to protest too much.

Then it was time for a third round of explanation. Since Zach’s attack on Zorian took place so soon after their arrival in Cyoria, Fortov was still around and decided to check up on this disturbance happening nearby. It was pretty bizarre seeing Fortov actually concerned for his and Kirielle’s wellbeing for once in his life, but the concern did not last very long. Once Fortov realized they were both fine and that Zorian’s attacker was his friend, he quickly left them alone to go back to his friends.

Not that Zorian was complaining, of course – the less time he had to spend around Fortov, the better. Still, this was the first time since forever that Fortov had sought him without intending to get a favor. He even managed to restrain himself from insulting Zorian in the course of talking to him. It was novel, and therefore interesting.

"Well then," Zorian clapped his hands. "Now that that’s done, we should get going. Our new landlord is waiting for us, and I want to get somewhere where people aren’t staring at us and talking behind our backs."

"Is he going to come with us?" Kirielle asked, giving Zach a suspicious look.

"Yes," Zach confirmed. He had largely recovered from Kirielle’s attack by now, regaining most of his usual confidence. "I need to talk to your brother about some things."

"What kind of things?" Kirielle demanded.

"Serious things," Zach said.

She looked to Zorian for confirmation and harrumphed dismissively when he nodded in agreement to this.

"You’re both stupid," she pouted. "Acting like that in public… and I was actually scared we were under attack and everything…"

"Don’t be like that," Zorian told her, using one of his arms to draw her into a one-armed hug. "I was really touched by your defense of me, you know? I’m pretty sure this was the first time someone stood up for me like that since… well, ever."

"She’s too much," Zach said, studying the three bloody lines Kirielle had scratched into his forearm.

"So I’ll tell you what – if you show some patience with Zach today, I’ll answer any question you may have about the whole thing later in the evening before we go to sleep," Zorian told her, ignoring Zach’s whining.

"Really?" Kirielle asked, peering at him suspiciously.

"Really," Zorian confirmed. While Zorian didn’t usually tell Kirielle that he was a time traveler, he wasn’t violently opposed to the idea. Since it seemed he was going to interact with Zach pretty heavily in this restart, he didn’t see much harm in telling her what was really going on. He was pretty sure Red Robe would sooner track him down by monitoring Zach’s movements than by following a chain of distorted rumors back to Kirielle.

"Really?" Zach asked, looking at him curiously.

"Yes, really!" Zorian huffed. What’s with all this disbelief? It’s almost as if they didn’t expect him to tell the truth or something. "I already told her about the restarts before, and it wasn’t a problem."

"You did?" Kirielle frowned. "But I don’t remember you telling me anything about any restarts."

"Completely understandable," Zorian said, patting her on the head. "Don’t worry, all will become clear later."

He hoped. He glanced at Zach again, wondering why the boy tracked him down now, of all times, after spending so many restarts avoiding Cyoria.

He really did hope Zach’s arrival would make things clearer instead of just complicating things further.

Zorian had originally intended for this restart to be much like the previous ones, but with the sudden inclusion of Zach into his schedule, he decided that plan was untenable and would have to change. Accordingly, he did not bother meeting Nochka this time around, instead taking Kirielle and Zach straight to Imaya’s place. Kirielle had a tendency to blab just about anything to Nochka, who was not exactly very good at keeping secrets herself, and that didn’t mesh too well with his intention to tell Kirielle about the time loop in this restart.

The first half of the journey was uncomfortably subdued. Well, Zorian himself didn’t mind the peace and quiet all that much, but he knew that neither Kirielle nor Zach were predisposed to be that silent for long periods of time. The two did not know how they should act in the presence of the other and thus kept to themselves. That lasted up until it started raining. At that point Kirielle decided she wanted to play around with the rain barrier Zorian set up around them, just like she usually did at the start of the restart, Zach’s presence be damned. That turned out to have been the ice breaker, and they both got more talkative all of a sudden. Both towards Zorian and to each other.

Of course, he and Zach could not really discuss the time loop out in the open with Kirielle around, so their conversation mostly took place in the form of discussing their magical skills and occasionally demonstrating a spell or two to Kirielle and each other. Aside from being a useful conversational tool, it also allowed the two of them to compare their abilities against one another to see where they stood in regards to magical ability. Well, somewhat – obviously Zorian wasn’t laying bare his entire skillset to Zach’s scrutiny, and he doubted the other time traveler was being perfectly forthright either, but still. Just because the comparison wasn’t complete did not mean it was worthless.

What Zorian discovered was humbling. While Zach was very combat magic focused, just like the boy had admitted to him in the past, he had made good use of the time loop to turn himself into a well-rounded mage. He was the sort of archmage that made other archmages envious – he had expertise in just about every type of magic, including the notoriously difficult and specialized medical spells. He actually healed the scratch marks Kirielle gave him as a proof of that claim. Even in regards to crafting-oriented magics like alchemy and spell formula, which Zach admitted were his least favorite fields and which Zorian specialized in, the last Noveda still possessed sufficient expertise to debate Zorian in a non-vacuous manner.

Finally, the little demonstrations they did for Kirielle clearly showed that Zach’s shaping skills weren’t any worse than Zorian’s. Despite having huge mana reserves, Zach had excellent shaping skills.

Whatever Zorian could say about Zach’s choices in the time loop, he clearly hadn’t been standing idle this whole time – he had been steadily working on his skills for decades, and it showed. In retrospect, it was horribly arrogant of Zorian to even think he could have caught up to the guy in little more than 5 years.

"You know, I can’t help but notice that your older brother left pretty quickly and didn’t even try to talk to me," Zach said. "Not that I’m complaining, since it works out better for me that way, but you’d think he’d be more interested in someone attacking his little brother in public."

"He knows that neither of us can stand him, so he keeps away," Kirielle said casually, doing her best to snatch the little animated water drakes flying around her out of the air. Zorian and Zach had competed earlier to see who can create more realistic-looking drakes out of the surrounding rainwater, so the entire shield bubble was still full of them. Zorian was pretty sure he won, but Kirielle was the judge and she claimed she couldn’t tell the difference. The little traitor.

"I don’t think he’s that considerate," Zorian scowled. "He just didn’t feel like spending time on us. He had better things to do than waste time on his younger siblings."

"No, I’m pretty sure he knows you hate him," Kirielle said, shaking her head. "He even said so when we were alone once. It’s why he tries to avoid you if he can help it. He thinks he’s doing you a favor."

Zorian frowned. He supposed he hadn’t been terribly subtle about his opinion about Fortov, so he wasn’t really surprised that Fortov knew. He did find it hard to accept that Fortov’s behavior was motivated by anything other than his selfishness, though. If he wanted to do Zorian a favor, why was it that he still came to Zorian from time to time to ask for favors? That was the worst reason possible for approaching him – the whole reason why he hated Fortov was because he always had to make up for Fortov’s failures to do his job in addition to his own duties.

"So you think I’m being too harsh with him?" Zorian asked curiously. Before he had gotten stuck in the time loop, the mere insinuation that this was the case would have been the equivalent of throwing a lit match in a bowl of lamp fuel. Now he found himself honestly curious about what Kirielle thought about the topic.

"No. Yes. Maybe," Kirielle said. "I mean, he’s still a jerk and I don’t like him either. So I know how you feel. But maybe us being mean to him back isn’t the correct thing to do. Maybe he’d be better if we were more patient with him. I’m not. I try being nice to him sometimes, but he makes it very hard."

"Yeah, I’ll bet," Zorian snorted derisively.

"You know, I’m getting the idea that your family is a little messed up," Zach said.

"You have no idea," Zorian said. "And that’s probably a good idea. Let’s end the subject here, okay?"

"Fine, fine," Zach acquiesced. "So, is this the place?"

Zorian looked at the house Zach was pointing out and nodded.

"That’s Imaya’s house, yes. Let me just arrange for everything with the landlord and unpack a little and then we can talk. Do you have a place already lined up?"

"I… didn’t think that far," Zach admitted.

Zorian sighed. Figures. "Then we’ll go to the ruins of the aranean colony in the tunnels below us. There is already a pretty good warding scheme protecting the place."

"Oh, so you know where that is?" Zach said, perking up. "Did any of the spiders survive?"

"Spiders?" Kirielle mumbled, brows furrowed in thought. Zorian could tell she had been analyzing their every word during the entire walk, trying to figure out what they were hiding. It was both commendable and amusing.

"No, none," Zorian shook his head. Zach immediately deflated.

"So it’s just the two of us, or…?" he asked hopefully.

Though his empathy could pick nothing from him, Zach wasn’t a terribly hard person to read. Zorian realized that Zach really wanted to talk to fellow time travelers. The more of them there were, the better. He must have been very lonely and bored all these years he spent in the time loop.

"Just… let me drop off Kirielle at the house and then we’ll talk," Zorian said.

"You better not forget your promise," Kirielle warned, jabbing him in the ribs with her bony little index finger. Yeah, she was definitely getting her nails clipped when he got back.

"Fine," said Zach. "I’ll wait for you to-"

"Oh no," Zorian said, cutting him of. "Do you know what Imaya would do to me if she heard I left a person out here in the rain instead of inviting them inside? And she’d definitely hear, because Kirielle is too much of a tattletale to keep her mouth shut."

"Hey!" said tattletale protested.

"She won’t care that you’re a mage and can easily protect yourself against the rain. I’d be hearing lectures and snide comments for days," Zorian said. "You’re coming inside and introducing yourself to Imaya."

And so, with Kirielle and Zach in tow, Zorian walked up to Imaya’s door and knocked…

After an hour or so, once everything had been arranged, Zorian led Zach into the depths of Cyoria’s underworld. Along the way, Zorian explained the truth behind what happened to Zach. There had been no large number of time travelers – just him and the araneas piggy-backing on him using memory packets. And in the aftermath of their confrontation with Red Robe, the aranea were all dead – soulkilled, according to Red Robe. While Zorian had some doubts about that, it was undeniable that the aranea started every loop dead from that point on.

Once they had reached the dead aranean settlements and Zach had had the chance to study the place for a while, they sat down and began to talk.

"I tried to find this place immediately after that restart," Zach noted, staring at the nearby aranean corpse. He was surprisingly shaken by the dead settlement, considering aranea were rather inhuman and he had known them for a very short time anyway. "All I found were some isolated aranean corpses like this one."

"Those were basically guard posts," explained Zorian.

"Yeah, I guess. Maybe I’d have tracked it down eventually, but then this… Red Robe tried to ambush me."

Zorian perked up. This was the first clue he had about Red Robe’s activities in the wake of Zorian’s confrontation with him.

"He attacked you?" Zorian asked, leaning forward with interest.

"Attacked me and lost," Zach grinned proudly. "He’s not that hard to beat without Quatach-Ichl to support him."

So Zach was good enough to defeat Red Robe in a straight one-on-one fight. That was good to know.

"I guess he was counting on the advantage of surprise, but I saw his ambush from a mile away," Zach continued. "I knew he was probably stalking me so I was already on guard. Still. He managed to escape in the end, and I didn’t really feel safe wandering around these tunnels with someone like that hunting me. I basically left Cyoria and hid for the rest of the restart."

"Did he ever come after you again?" Zorian asked.

"Yes. Once," Zach said. "In the very next restart, he tried to attack me at its very beginning. He teleported straight through the wards on my home and tried to kill me while I was still in the bedroom, getting dressed."

"And he once again fled when you defeated him?" Zorian asked.

"Well, I’m actually the one that fled there," Zach said, coughing uncomfortably. "I was still half-asleep and in my underwear, okay? I didn’t expect him to come after me so early. Anyway, from that point on I have been leaving Cyoria at the start of every restart to prevent further surprises like that. Even if Red Robe never came after me again after that one surprise attack."

"Hmm," Zorian hummed thoughtfully. He doubted that Red Robe spent all this time trying to track down Zach, so this still did not explain why he had been quiet all this time… but it was interesting information nonetheless. What did Red Robe want from Zach so badly?

"So… why did you stop hiding now, of all times? And did you really have to punch me in the face like that?" Zorian asked sourly. "My teeth still hurt from that."

"Do you even have to ask?" Zach scoffed. "You have been stuck in this time loop along with me for gods know how long, and you never came to me about it. No, worse than that – when I came to talk to you, you played dumb and did things on your own behind my back. You deserved a good punch in the face just for that."

Zorian fiddled with his glasses awkwardly. Okay, it did sound kind of bad when he said it like that. But he had good reason for behaving like he did! He really did!

"But you know, I understand," Zach continued. "I got played like a drum by that red robed fucker that’s looping along with us. He messed with my mind and was probably monitoring me somehow–"

"You’re sure he’s not doing it right now, right?" Zorian cut in with a question.

"I know how to shield myself from tracking magic, Zorian," Zach said frostily. "Better than you, I imagine. It’s just that I usually didn’t bother with it, since I thought I was the only person aware of the time loop, so why bother? Ever since that night, though, I’ve been layering non-detection spells on myself constantly. The asshole hasn’t managed to track me down once in all this time. I doubt anyone can."

"I can," Zorian noted. "But then again, I seem to have an advantage that Red Robe does not seem to possess. I’ll trust that you know how to protect yourself."

Zach gave him an unreadable look. Almost without thinking, he tried to focus his empathy on the boy to get a better feel for his emotions, only to suddenly remember that Zach was under the effect of mind blank when he felt nothing at all from the boy.

Yes, Zach could definitely protect himself if he wanted to.

"You’ll tell me about that later," Zach said, shaking his head. "Anyway, sorry for snapping at you. I’m still kind of angry at myself for getting screwed over by Red Robe. I get a little testy about the subject. But anyway… I understand. It was dangerous to just talk to me directly with Red Robe lurking in the background. I still think you should have talked to me, but I can see why you’d think otherwise. I can even understand why you left that night without bothering to explain anything to me, considering what ended up happening."

Zach gestured towards a nearby aranean corpse for emphasis.

"So I decided to leave you alone for a while. Even once it became obvious that Red Robe was no longer after me, and had essentially disappeared into thin air as far as I could tell, I stayed away so as to not attract attention to you. Just in case Red Robe was somehow watching, despite all my precautions. I figured you knew what you’re doing, and once you were ready, you’d come to me so we could tackle the time loop and this Red Robe guy together."

How did he expect Zorian to track him down if he purposely made himself as untraceable as possible? Nevermind, he’d ask that question some other time. Best not to interrupt the boy now.

"And then you pull that crap in the last restart," said Zach, anger leaking into his voice. "You’re finally making a move, and in a big way too, triggering the invasion several weeks early, but you made no attempt to involve me in any way. How can I not be angry? How can I not want to punch you in the face? Do you think so little of me? Just because you saw me brought down by two incredibly powerful opponents, one of which is a thousand-year-old lich, you think you can-"

"Zach, Zach, listen, that… that wasn’t intentional,"

Zorian said hurriedly, trying to stop Zach from getting too angry. He had a feeling he was going to get another punch in the face if he let the boy get going too much. "I never intended that restart to blow up like that. The whole thing was a mistake, it escalated way beyond what I was comfortable with, but I was curious and–"

"Did you even intend to contact me? Ever?" Zach asked him bluntly.

"Yes. Absolutely," Zorian confirmed. "Probably after this very restart."

Zach leaned back in surprise, giving him a surprised look.

"Oh," he said, anger draining right out of him. "Well, if that’s so, then it’s probably good I came to you when I did, isn’t it?"

"I’m kind of in the middle of something important," Zorian sighed. "I really should be focusing on that. Hell, I should have been focusing on it in the previous restart too, instead of messing around with Iasku Mansion and the invaders, but I can get really stupid sometimes. That’s why I only wanted to contact you after this restart."

"If it’s so important, why not let me help?" Zach asked curiously.

"It’s not something you can help me with," said Zorian. "Remember those memory packets the aranea used to retain awareness between restarts? Well here’s the thing…"

He then launched into an explanation about the matriarch’s memory packet and how he had been trying to hone his aranea memory interpreting skills to a high enough level to understand its contents. This also led to a discussion about Zorian’s mind magic abilities. Zach was clearly uncomfortable with mind magic, which made sense considering how it was used against him. After some internal debate, Zorian offered to have a look inside Zach’s mind to see what exactly Red Robe had done to him… but Zach predictably refused. He admitted that he didn’t really trust Zorian that far yet, and maybe never would. Zorian was just glad the other boy didn’t take offense at his offer.

"So if I understand you correctly, you’re attacking isolated aranean patrols in order to practice memory reading skills on subdued aranea," Zach said.

"Yes," Zorian confirmed.

"And you think I can’t help you there?" Zach asked incredulously. "Zorian, you’re a total idiot."

"Err," Zorian fumbled, not sure how to respond to that.

"Zorian, with my help you would not need to waste time stalking isolated patrols. We could just walk up to the main aranean settlement and take them all head on," Zach told him. "I’ve done that before. I didn’t just spend all these past months just keeping out of Red Robe’s sight – I’ve also been investigating things on my own, such as searching for other aranean webs around the continent to see if they can help me. Except that I’m not psychic like you and they can be incredibly dismissive and rude to flickerminds like myself. I’ve been attacked plenty of times, and I know exactly how to fight them. They’re no match for me at all. The power disparity is so big I can actually focus on incapacitating them instead of aiming to kill – even when they attack in groups. With my help, you could have had hundreds of aranean practice dummies every week, maybe every day. It largely depends on how fast we can find new webs to target."

Zorian stared at Zach for a few seconds before swallowing heavily. That… that was a good point. He hadn’t even considered that.

"Well, what’s done is done," Zach shrugged. "But I’m here now, so you have no excuse to keep being stupid. When do we start?"

In the end, Zorian decided there was no reason to delay things – they would be going after their first web the very next day. In the meantime, he went back to Imaya’s place and talked to Kirielle. She claimed to believe him when he said he was a time traveler, but Zorian could sense she wasn’t entirely convinced yet. Even after he recreated a stack of her drawings from his mental storage and showed them to her.

Though that part did seem to make his story a lot more plausible to her.

"I’m relieved," She told him before going to bed for the night. "You were so nice to me, it was really scary. I was afraid you were replaced by some kind of shape changer."

"Go to sleep, Kiri," Zorian sighed.

The next day Zorian located one of the smaller webs in the vicinity of Cyoria and took Zach there. He wasn’t entirely convinced the operation would go as smoothly as Zach had promised, but Zach soon made all his fears groundless: the aranean web in front of them was subdued with terrifying ease.

There were no fancy tactics involved. Zach simply walked up to the settlement’s main entrance tunnel and started raining down spells on the ill-prepared defenders. Waves of translucent blue force battered them against the walls, animated serpents made out of lightning electrocuted them and grasping ectoplasmic threads entangled them and stopped them from simply fleeing. When they realized that Zach was immune to mind magic, the aranea turned to traps, ambushes and mass attacks – but Zach simply punched through them, barely slowed at all. Magical traps were dispelled, non-magical traps disabled with alteration spells, the mass attacks and ambushes Zach simply tackled head on and won anyway.

In less than half an hour, every aranea that did not flee was incapacitated or dead. Aside from actually locating the web, Zorian hadn’t done much and had just stood back and watched the carnage.

Zach was absolutely terrifying.

"Do you think this will be enough for you to work with?" Zach asked, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet and giving him an expectant look.

Zorian gave him an annoyed look. He could sense at least fifty aranean minds around them. The asshole knew well enough that this was more than Zorian could have subdued in an entire week of non-stop attacks on aranean patrols. This was just him taking a subtle swipe at him.

Then again, considering the level of skill Zach had just displayed, maybe he deserved to be a little arrogant.

"Yeah," he said. "It’s plenty."

After talking about things for a while and exchanging information, both Zach and Zorian agreed that neither of them knew all that much about the time loop. Like Zorian had long suspected, Zach spent most of his time trying to think up a way to counter the invasion and had not put much thought into what the time loop actually was. According to him, he always thought he had to find a way to counter the invasion in order to end the time loop. He could not explain why he thought so, since his memories were full of unexplained holes, but he felt very sure about that.

That could be a confirmation of Zorian’s earlier theory that the release of the primordial was what triggered the restart, but it could also be a compulsion that Red Robe had put on Zach to screw him over. After all, the release of the primordial in the previous restart involved very visible cracks in space heralding its coming… something that Zorian had never witnessed before. And it wasn’t like he had never observed the area around the Hole during the last moments of previous restarts. Why had the release of the primordial never caused such dramatic symptoms in the past?

Regardless, they both agreed that opening the matriarch’s memory packet was their best bet for getting some solid answers. Accordingly, over the course of the next week, most of their time was spent on tracking down and attacking various aranean webs. They attacked a new one every single day, and the amount of experience in reading aranean minds that Zorian had accumulated was incredible. Zorian probably read more aranean minds in that one week alone than he had in the entire two previous restarts combined.

The especially important part was that Zorian was no longer just reading the minds of random guards and patrol aranea, but also the minds of their leaders and even matriarchs. Not only were these higher-ranking aranea especially hard to read (and thus gave the most useful experience), their thoughts were also an entire order of magnitude harder to interpret. There seemed to be a method among aranea to turn their mental powers inward onto their own minds, and most higher-ranking aranea had at least some expertise in it. Zorian wasn’t exactly sure what those techniques were designed to accomplish, but they altered the thoughts and perceptions of the user immensely.

As a matriarch of a powerful web, Spear of Resolve was doubtlessly a user of these techniques as well. If Zorian had tried to interpret her memories without having taken this into account, he would have likely been in for a nasty surprise.

On Monday, when classes began, Zorian visited Xvim’s office to try and bring him into awareness of the time loop again. In the previous restart, Xvim had been very suspicious of him and his overtures hadn’t gone anywhere. It was difficult to know how much that had to do with his approach and how much of it was a product of all the arrests in Cyoria at the time, but Zorian was not taking any chances this time. He suspected he had tried to move a little too fast in the previous restarts, so this time he was more conservative.

He waited until Xvim was in his office before visiting him, tried to reduce his arguments to bare essentials and then finally handed him the code the man made him memorize. Xvim still told him to come back on Friday in the end, but Zorian had a feeling things would end up working better this way.

He was right. On Friday, Xvim tentatively accepted his story and once again decided to help Zorian grow by honing his dimensional magic and shaping skills. For now he just tested Zorian’s abilities to see where he stood, but he promised to have something more substantial for him next week.

Considering how busy this restart promised to be, Zorian was perfectly fine with that kind of pace.

The first week also reminded him how much more Kirielle focused on him when there was no Nochka around to distract her. Without a friend of similar age to spend most of her time with, Kirielle focused most of her attention on trying to monopolize Zorian’s time as much as possible. He had almost forgotten how clingy and annoying she could be, and now resorted to building all kinds of magical toys for her to amuse herself with and leave him alone for a few minutes. Thankfully, she liked puzzles, and there were a lot of magical puzzles described in old spell formula books – mages loved inventing them for some reason.

Later in the week, when Kael and Kana moved into the house, some of that attention shifted onto Kana. In the restarts where Zorian introduced Kirielle to Nochka, Kana inevitably ended up as something of a third wheel to the two of them. They played with her, sure, but in any group of three people, someone was going to get pushed to the side… and Kana was much younger than Kirielle and Nochka, and silent to boot. He kind of suspected that Kana was happier with just Kirielle around.

Since Kael was always informed of the time loop the moment he arrived at Imaya’s house, and since Zach often visited the place to speak with Zorian, the two of them finally had the opportunity to meet and talk with one another. Although they did discuss the time loop a little, Kael had yet to fully absorb the content of his notebooks yet (that was getting harder and harder as the number of past restarts and the number of notes in them increased), so that didn’t really get anywhere. Instead, they mostly talked about alchemy. And the Weeping. Zorian would have thought they’d shy away from the topic, but apparently they were perfectly fine with bonding over their shared tragedies.

Currently, both Zach and Zorian were sitting beneath a tree in the middle of nowhere – a small copse of trees surrounded by farmland in the vicinity of Jatnik, not really a notable area in any way. Zach was currently trying to make an unbroken crown of daisies (and failing hilariously) while Zorian stared at the map of Eldemar that had every web they had located marked on it. Thanks to the memories of various matriarchs and aranean diplomats that Zorian had recently viewed, he now knew the locations of hundreds upon hundreds of new webs. Deciding where next to attack was actually quite a problem at this point.

"Hey, Zorian," Zach suddenly said, discarding the daisy crown he was building in a huff after accidentally tearing it apart again. "I know you’re on a time limit, but do you think we could take a few days to find a specific aranean web?"

Zorian gave him a curious look. Truthfully, he found their current pace very demanding and stressful, and would have probably begged for a break soon enough anyway.

"I could, yes," he nodded, pointing at the map in front of him. "I won’t say the map we have is really comprehensive or anything, but even if the web you’re looking for isn’t on it, it can probably point us in the right direction."

"Yeah, that’s why I’m bringing it up," Zach said. "I originally wanted to wait until you opened the matriarch’s package before mentioning this, but the more I think about it, the more I think we should check this out now. Maybe it will be crucial in understanding what the matriarch was thinking."

"What is it?" Zorian asked.

"Spear of Resolve told me back then that if anything should happen to her, I should go talk to the Ghost Serpent Acolytes web," said Zach. "She refused to say where they are or how to reach them, though. That’s why I have been visiting the aranea webs ever since then."

Zorian frowned. Ghost Serpent Acolytes? The web that refused to speak to him because their spirit told them he was bad news? Could it be that they or their spirit knew something about the time loop?

Well, the time loop did sever the link between the material plane and the spiritual ones, and the Ghost Serpent Acolytes worshipped some kind of snake spirit. Even if it was a native spirit, and thus lived in the material world, maybe it still had some kind of connection to the spirit planes and knew something important.

"I know where they are," Zorian said. "There is no need to search for them. I can just tell you where they are."

"Oh," Zach said. "Wow, and I spent so much time looking for them… I can’t believe I could have just popped over to you and asked you where they live. We really should have met sooner than this, it seems."

"Yeah," Zorian agreed. "Anyway, it’s probably best if I just point you in the right direction and don’t come with you. Every time I tried to talk to them in the past they said their spirit doesn’t like me and that I should go away. It says I’m bad news."

"That’s weird," Zach frowned. "What did you do to piss it off?"

"Nothing," Zorian said, shaking his head. "I even tried visiting them soon after the restart began, before I ever interacted with any aranea. They react exactly the same way. I don’t know what’s up with that, but it’s best if you go there alone and don’t give them any indication we know each other."

After listening to Zorian’s directions, Zach immediately teleported away to meet with the Ghost Serpent Acolytes and Zorian himself returned home to wait for him and get some much-needed rest. However, it was only several hours later that Zach returned to Cyoria as well and came over to Imaya’s place to talk to him. He walked up to the table Zorian was sitting at and sat down next to him, an unreadable expression on his face.

"They wouldn’t see me," Zach said. "Their spirit says I’m bad news."

"Really? So we’re both bad news," Zorian hummed, tapping his fingers against the table. "Did they say why you’re bad news?"

"No," Zach shook his head.

"Do you think we should just attack them and read their memories?" Zorian asked. He was all for being considerate, but it was obvious at this point that Ghost Serpent Acolytes held some important piece of the puzzle in regards to the time loop.

"No," Zach said quickly. "If they know we’re time travelers, perhaps they have some method of perceiving the restarts. Attacking them might forever sour their opinions of us. Maybe we try going there at the same time and refuse to leave until they agree to speak with us?"

Zorian arched an eyebrow at Zach.

"What?" Zach defended himself. "It’s worth a try! Don’t underestimate the effectiveness of being annoying for extended periods of time."

In the end, Zorian agreed to go along with Zach’s plan of annoying the Ghost Serpent Acolytes into talking with them. He notified Kirielle and Imaya that he’d be gone from the house for a while and then left with Zach to visit the suspiciously judgmental web.

The moment they approached the aranean settlement, they were immediately ushered inside. Zach and Zorian gave each other an incredulous look and tried to ask their aranean guides why they were admitted so readily when Zach was turned down earlier in the day as bad news. They were simply told that the Ghost Serpent wanted to see them and that they neither knew what was happening nor cared. They just did as they were told.

Eventually they were led into a large circular cavern filled with water. There was a large rocky outcropping jutting from the center of this miniature underground lake, and a stone bridge connected the entrance to the cave to this rock. The ceiling of the cave was covered in small clumps of glowing white crystals, giving it an appearance reminiscent of the night sky full of stars, and the waters of the lake were dark and still.

All in all, the cave gave off a very eerie feel to Zorian.

Floating in the middle of this underground lake, just above the rocky outcropping, was a giant, milky-white, translucent snake. The only spot of color present on the ghostly serpent were its eyes, which had a soft pink glow. Spirit names were often very fanciful and poetic, but it seemed that the Ghost Serpent was exactly what it advertised itself as.

The moment he and Zach entered the cavern, the Ghost Serpent focused its large slitted eyes on them. A wave of pink light rippled across its ghostly scales, travelling out from its eyes and down to the very tip of its tail, and then it spoke.

"Leave us, leave us, leave us," it said, its voice soft and melodious, not a trace of a hiss in the pronunciation. Why it felt the need to repeat the order three times was anyone’s guess, since the aranea immediately began leaving the chamber after it had instructed them to leave.

The Ghost Serpent waited for the aranea to leave and seal the entrance before it began to speak again.

"How?" It demanded. "How can there be two of you? I know the rules well enough – only one can enter and only one can leave."

"We don’t know what you’re talking about," Zach protested, folding his hands across his chest. "Why don’t you start from the beginning, okay?"

"You cannot order me, Branded One!" The Ghost Serpent snapped, coiling through the air angrily before fixing its glowing pink eyes at Zach again. "I hate you, hate you, hate you! Thief and murderer! Liar and egg smasher!"

"Hey, that’s slander!" Zach protested. "We don’t even know each other! This is the first time we’ve met!"

"Is it? Is it really, really, really?" the Ghost Serpent asked with narrowed eyes, once again employing the unnecessary repetition in its words. "I wouldn’t know, even if it is, would I? I know how this works. You both bear the Brand." It glanced at Zorian for a second. "That is the only reason I’m talking to you. I know the Brand and I know what it means. Most have forgotten it, dormant as it has been in the past few Cycles, but I am older than the mountains and rivers, and I remember. I remember the crimes they did – the way they made me fall. And if they behaved as they did at the End, who dares even imagine what they did in the In-Between? But the Branded Ones are one and there are two of you. This makes no sense, sense, sense!"

"Ghost Serpent, you must believe us when we say that we understand very little about what is happening," Zorian said. "I have gathered from your words that you know about the time loop, yes?"

"The time loop?" Ghost Serpent repeated slowly, as if tasting the words. "An interesting choice of words. But nobody remembers the In-Between. Only the Branded One. This is something that has happened again and again in the past. It is not difficult to understand."

"Then please shower us with your wisdom and explain it to us dumb people," Zach said, rolling his eyes.

"You’re saying there have been more time loops in the past?" Zorian asked hurriedly, before Zach had the chance to piss off the Ghost Serpent for good. Fortunately, it seemed that while the Ghost Serpent knew about the time loop, it did not actually retain the memories between restarts. It just knew that it was stuck in the time loop and could recognize them as time travelers due to their marker… which meant that this situation was possibly reproducible, and even if they bungled things up, it should still be possible to retry this conversation again.

"They were regular like the progression between night and day," Ghost Serpent replied. "Every four hundred years, whenever the planets aligned. But the Gate has been lost for some time now, or perhaps the Key. Alas, it seems someone has finally enacted this wretched thing again. May he burn in the molten heart of the world forever, ever, ever!"

The Ghost Serpent writhed in the air for a moment, seemingly overcome with anger and outrage at the person responsible for the time loop. Then it focused on them both once again and spoke.

"I remember. Do you not?" It asked. "Do not answer, I can see it on your faces. I do not understand how the Brand can be shared, but clearly it has happened. I do not wish to talk to you anymore."

"Please, oh great spirit of this cavern," Zorian knelt, hoping that flattery and some humility may buy them some time. "I can see you have been wronged grievously by the Branded Ones in the past. We do not dispute your grudge. But we have been thrust into the time loop unknowingly and without any say on our behalf."

"Flattery is good, but useless here," the Ghost Serpent said. "I know how this works, works, works… you will come here again and again, sucking me dry of any knowledge and wisdom, learning of my fears and weaknesses, and you will take, take, take until there is nothing else. The only thing to do is not to engage you at all. What can you do to me, after all? Today I die, and tomorrow I live once more."

"We just want to know how this time loop works," Zorian said.

"Yes!" Zach agreed. "Just tell us what is happening here! If we are really the evil masterminds you imagine us being, then you’d be telling us something we already know anyway."

Ghost Serpent hovered in the air silently for a while, considering the request.

"Very well," it said eventually. "But after that, you must leave. And if you have any honor at all, you will never visit me again. Even after I have forgotten."

"We promise," Zach said easily. Zorian couldn’t help but wonder if the boy really meant it. After all, the Ghost Serpent could be such a useful source of information…

"Promises are but wind, but they are better than nothing at all," Ghost Serpent said. "Watch closely."

The spirit shifted its gaze to the still waters around them, and a large sphere of water floated up in the air from the surface. After a few moments, the sphere flew over to where Zach and Zorian were standing and started writhing like it was about to burst.

Instead it unfolded into a crude diagram – a single horizontal line with an upturned triangle balanced on top of it by the tip.

"The bottom link is the Beginning and the End," the Ghost Serpent said. "It is the world you were born in, and the world you will die in. The triangle is the world of In-Between. It exists between the moments, constantly destroyed and recreated anew. A lifetime condensed in a moment. We are all trapped in this place, phantoms created for the Branded Ones like you to learn from and test themselves against. When the fires that fuel the world of In-Between run out, we will all fade away into the void… except for the Branded One, who will go to the End, to live through this month one last time, time, time…"

"Wait, are you saying this is all fake?" Zach asked incredulously. "That we’re all some kind of illusion!?"

"A reproduction, not an illusion," Ghost Serpent replied. "If you could mimic a painting in every stroke and shade, would it not be as real as the original from which it sprang?"

"But that’s-" Zach began to protest.

"Enough!" Ghost Serpent snapped. "I have given you what you asked for. Honor your end of the bargain and leave, leave, leave! Guards! Escort them out, out, out!"

And then, before either Zorian or Zach could protest further, the Ghost Serpent dived into the waters of the lake and disappeared from view. Despite its ghostly appearance, its dive caused a huge splash, forcing Zorian and Zach to quickly shield themselves or be thoroughly drenched.

Okay, that was just rude.

Regardless, the aranea soon came and politely, but firmly threw them out of the settlement. They both stood outside in silence for a while, lost in their own thoughts.

"So…" Zach said. "What do you think?"

"I think that I need to open that memory packet as soon as possible," Zorian replied.

The Ghost Serpent’s story had given Zorian a horrible suspicion about what Red Robe had been doing all this time…

54. The Gate Is Barred

In the wake of their talk with the Ghost Serpent and their subsequent ejection from the aranean settlement, Zach and Zorian teleported away to a sufficiently distant and remote location and sat down to discuss what to do next. And that’s when the arguments began.

Zorian really wanted for them to separate for a few hours. He needed some alone time to think about what they’d heard. To make sure his logic was solid. He had his suspicions already – terrible, terrible suspicions – but they weren’t the sort of thing he’d want to blurt out lightly. In fact, he wasn’t sure he wanted to confide them at all… to anyone. Even Zach.

Another reason why he wanted a short break from his fellow time traveler.

Zach didn’t want to play along, though.

"We should talk about this now," Zach argued. "While the memory is still fresh in both our minds."

"I have a really good memory," Zorian argued. Indeed, he had specifically memorized the entire meeting with the help of mind magic, and would never forget any of it. He could review the memory in vivid detail as many times as he wished. "It would be better if I had a chance to think about the spirit’s words for a while."

"Well, that’s fine," Zach said, giving him a dismissive shrug. "You can do that. Who’s stopping you? But there’s no reason why you can’t do that here with me. I can be patient. I’ll just… quietly sit here by the side and wait until you’re ready to talk. It will be like I’m not even here."

Zorian gave him an annoyed look. He had serious doubts about Zach’s ability to sit quietly like that for extended periods of time, and even if he could… it wasn’t the same. There was no way Zach didn’t know that.

"Look," Zach said, matching his annoyed look with his own. "I know how this goes. If I let you get away now, you’ll use that time to think up some stupid story to throw me off with. You know something."

"I don’t know anything for certain," Zorian protested, shaking his head. "And frankly, if I wanted to keep my suspicions to myself, I wouldn’t have bothered to invent some kind of elaborate lie to deceive you. I would have simply refused to tell you anything."

Zach shifted uneasily for a moment.

"Okay," he said. "I guess I was being a little unfair there. Sorry. But still, you aren’t seriously considering just leaving me in the dark, are you? After I informed you of that stupid snake and helped out with your mind magic training? Surely you realize how fast that would kill any sort of trust between us?"

Zorian looked away. Of course he realized that! But it wasn’t that simple! If what he was suspecting was correct, then how could there ever really be trust between them?

"There can only ever be one winner in this game", Spear of Resolve had said in her fragmented message.

"Only one can enter, and only one can leave", said the Ghost Serpent.

If only one time traveler could keep the gains made in the time loop and the rest get dissolved into the void, like they had never existed at all, then how could they ever truly cooperate with one another? Any alliance would just be a temporary convenience, inevitably ending in betrayal.

And when all was said and done, Zorian was pretty sure that Zach was in a much better position to screw him over than Zorian was to do the same. The time loop seemed to recognize Zach as more legitimate, if nothing else.

Still, while a big part of him screamed at him to keep quiet about his theories at all costs, there was a small but equally insistent part of him that argued against keeping Zach in the dark. This situation seemed strangely familiar to him…

After a while, Zorian realized what was bothering him. The idea of him hiding this sort of knowledge until he could be sure and Zach being bitter at him for doing so… it reminded him so very much of his arguments with Spear of Resolve before she was soulkilled. And for good reason – he was pretty sure his current suspicions were exactly what she had tried to keep secret from him. He was thinking of treating Zach the same way he had been treated in the past. And he knew how much he had hated the matriarch’s secretiveness back then…

Did he really want to basically re-enact the matriarch’s secretive scheme, despite the catastrophic way it ended up resolving? Wouldn’t it be better to treat Zach the same way he wanted to be treated?

The trust had to start somewhere.

"Fine," Zorian sighed, turning back to face Zach again. "I’ll tell you."

"Finally," Zach shouted in exasperation, raising his hands in the air. "I thought I’d have to hit you to make you come to your senses."

Note to self: talk to Zach about his unfortunate tendency to resort to physical violence to solve personal disputes. Right now they had more pressing topics to discuss.

"I should note that this has the potential to really destroy any chance of us trusting each other," Zorian sighed. "I mean, we already don’t trust each other. You keep that mind blank spell up at all times when you’re around me, for instance. That spell is harmful for your mind if you keep it up non-stop. I don’t believe for a second that you don’t know this. So you apply it up specifically for our meetings because you’re afraid I’ll mess you up with my mind powers if I get the chance."

Zach flinched, his face morphing into a comical expression of surprise. It reminded Zorian of that time he had caught Kirielle raiding the kitchen pantry for sweets a few years ago.

"You don’t have to feel guilty," Zorian interrupted his response, shaking his head sadly. "It’s smart. I would have done the same in your place. But it helps illustrate my point – we already don’t trust one another. How much more, then, would we be paranoid around each other if we knew only one of us could exit the time loop with their mind and magic intact?"

"What?" Zach asked incredulously. "How? Why?"

"The Ghost Serpent pretty much stated it outright – only one time traveler gets to leave the time loop," Zorian said. "The rest… disappear forever, I suppose. It makes sense, really – I don’t think there was ever supposed to be more than one time traveler. Or Branded One, as the Ghost Serpent calls us. A reference to the marker, most likely. Anyway, if our situation is as unprecedented as the spirit suggested, and the time loop mechanism was only ever designed under the assumption-"

"Zorian," Zach interrupted him. "Don’t take this the wrong way, but… your explanations suck. I have no idea what you’re talking about. Well, okay, I kind of do, but still. Start from the beginning, please."

"Fine," Zorian sighed, trying to squash his annoyance. "The beginning. First of all, no time travel is technically happening here."

"No?" Zach asked, frowning. "How is that? The illusion world thing?"

"There is no illusion," Zorian said, shaking his head. "It’s all real. We’re real. Flesh and blood and soul and everything else. We’re not living in a spell construct or some fancy dream."

"That’s good," Zach said, breathing deeply. "It would just kill me inside if it turned out that everything I’ve learned in here is fake and that I’ll be the same old Zach I once was once I wake up in the real world. So what is this, then – an actual copy of the real world?"

"Why not?" Zorian asked. "The gods have been known to copy people completely, duplicating them down to their souls and all. Plus, it seems that even mortal mages once knew how to conjure actual matter from nothing. Here, let me show you something…"

Zorian took out a piece of paper and some alteration tools out of his backpack and created a copy of one of Kirielle’s drawings in front of Zach, explaining how the spell functioned to the other time traveler.

"That’s a damn useful spell combination," Zach said. "I can’t believe I never learned about it in all this time. This would have made so many things easier…"

"Yes, well… I can teach you how to cast the spells later," Zorian said. "Anyway, this is what I believe the time loop is essentially doing, albeit on a much greater scale. Whatever is behind this took a blueprint of the world, much in the same way I did with Kael’s notebooks and my little sister’s drawings. A mind-bogglingly detailed image of a single moment in time across the entire planet. Possibly beyond. And it is repeatedly producing a replica of the world based on that blueprint, allowing it to run for a month before destroying it and starting over."

Zach stared at the drawing Zorian recreated, lost in thought. This particular one depicted two sparrows in the middle of fighting one another. It was pretty impressive how perfectly Kirielle managed to capture this one moment of their battle in a static image. If only she was as dedicated in her magic studies as she was in her art…

"That’s crazy," Zach eventually stated.

"And time travel isn’t?" Zorian asked, raising his eyebrow.

"I don’t know, it somehow sounds more plausible to me than this," Zach said, sighing. He handed the drawing back to Zorian. "I guess it does make a lot of Ghost Serpent’s ramblings make sense, though. But here is what doesn’t make sense - if our original world is real, and this copy we’re living in is also real… where are we exactly? An entire world takes up a lot of space, after all."

"In a pocket dimension, I’m guessing," Zorian answered. "I have no proof, but hear me out. It is clear that, in order for this whole setup to work, we have to be under an insane amount of temporal acceleration right now. Otherwise, how could only a moment pass in the real world while we spend decades or even centuries in this… looping world?"

"Ah, I get it," Zach said. "It’s not that the time doesn’t pass in the real world while we’re here – it’s just that time flows so fast here that barely any time has passed in the real world."

"Exactly," Zorian said. "But this sort of temporal acceleration is on a whole other level than even the best temporal acceleration facilities currently in existence."

"Yes, so?" Zach shrugged. "Compared to copying the whole world, that seems pretty underwhelming."

"I guess," Zorian agreed. "But I suspect there is more to it than just the creator of this thing being ridiculously powerful. Time acceleration rooms have to be isolated from the outside world in order to work with any sort of efficiency. But this isolation is still done through magical wards and physical obstacles like walls, which means there is only so much you can separate them from the rest of existence. A pocket dimension, on the other hand, only touches our reality in one particular spot – its anchor point. You can’t get more isolated than that, and I bet the possible temporal acceleration is much bigger if you enclose the target area in its own pocket dimension."

"So, you think the time loop is actually a physical copy of the world, enclosed in its very own, temporally accelerated pocket dimension," summarized Zach. "The time loop has a ridiculously detailed image of the real world as it was at the start of this month, and it periodically recreates the whole world based on that."

"Yes," Zorian confirmed. "I’m only guessing all this, but it fits with what I found out so far."

"And here I thought this thing couldn’t possibly be any crazier," Zach complained, burying his face in his hands. After a second or two he straightened up again and looked at Zorian. "So how does this affect us? How is this different from this actually being a time loop?"

"For one thing, it means that ensuring a perfect month is impossible," Zorian said. "You can’t live through one loop, decide you really like how it turned out and then end the time loop and continue on from there. If you want to do things for real, you have to leave the time loop. You will then be flung back at the beginning of the month to try everything one last time."

"Okay, that is an important difference," Zach admitted.

"Secondly, the Cyorian aranea will almost certainly be alive and well in the real world," continued Zorian. "If everything here is a copy, and the pocket dimension is deliberately isolated from the real world as much as possible in order to facilitate temporal acceleration, then it’s unlikely that anything done to people in the looping world affects their real life counterparts."

"He could always soulkill them again in the real world, though," Zach pointed out, frowning.

"I doubt he can," Zorian said. "I don’t think the spell actually kills souls. I think it simply marks them in some way, letting the time loop mechanism know it should not recreate them at the beginning of the new restart. If the time loop is, as the Ghost Serpent believes, some kind of training mechanism, then it makes sense to include a function like that into it. It allows the Branded One to get rid of impassable obstacles by removing them from the loop entirely."

"What? That’s so unfair," Zach complained. "Why does he get such an ability and I don’t?"

You might have had it at some point, Zorian thought to himself. It’s quite possible Red Robe got it from you and then wiped your memory of the spell…

"Do you think it might be possible to… unmark them somehow?" Zach asked. "It’s nice that the aranea aren’t permanently gone, but it would be nice to have their help within the time loop too."

"I don’t know," Zorian said. "It depends on what exactly has been done to them. There is still another issue."

"Yes?" Zach asked curiously.

"Considering what the time loop really is, I don’t think we can just passively wait for the mechanism to run out of power," Zorian said. "It seems likely to me that staying inside the looping world once it runs out of power equals permanent destruction. If we want to survive the collapse, we have to deliberately leave this place before it’s too late. Which is a problem, since neither of us knows where the exit is or how to access it."

Zach stared at him in shock. It seemed he hadn’t really considered this possibility.

"And on top of that, the Ghost Serpent said only one person can exit this place," Zorian sighed. "Meaning that the moment one of us leaves the looping world, all the other time travelers still inside are dead. Erased out of existence, really."

"We don’t know this," Zach protested. "How would the stupid snake know something like that anyway? You heard what it said – it has no memories of anything that happened during previous time loops. It could be making things up to divide us. It certainly hates the Branded Ones enough to try something like that."

"Still, what if the spirit is right?" Zorian asked. "What if only one of us can win this?"

"Then neither of us leaves until we figure something out," said Zach immediately, straightening his posture. He gave Zorian a direct and determined look. "We’ll figure out a way to get both of us out alive and well. There must be a way."

Though the boy was immune to Zorian’s empathy due to his mind blank spell, Zorian could still feel the passion behind his words. Zorian had to give it to him – Zach could be very inspiring when he wanted to be. Unfortunately, there was a very important detail he had forgotten…

"The thing is," Zorian noted quietly, "it’s not just the two of us who are here. Red Robe is in this world as well."

Zach paused for a moment, not saying anything.

"…shit," he finally concluded.

"Yes," Zorian agreed. "I think I know why we haven’t seen any sign of him in all this time."

"You think he’s trying to leave?" Zach asked, fear creeping into his voice.

"It’s what I’d do in his place," Zorian said. "He thinks there is an unknown amount of other time travelers plotting against him, at least one of whom is a better mind mage than he is, and you have effectively slipped from his grasp. Why take the risk of confronting all that when he can just leave the looping world and erase all his enemies out of existence in the process? He’s been in this place long enough that he’s probably gotten most of what he wanted out of it, anyway."

"Damnit," Zach swore, kicking a nearby rock in frustration and beginning to pace around the place. "Damnit! Why!? Why is it always like this!? I finally, finally get some answers about this shit and of course I’m three steps behind some asshole who is doing his best to screw me over! Zorian, please tell me you have some sort of idea where the exit is."

"This is just a wild guess, but I suspect it might be in the time magic research facility beneath Cyoria," Zorian said. "Spear of Resolve was very insistent on making sure I learned its exact location, putting multiple redundant copies of that section of the map. There must be something important there."

"That’s great!" Zach said, brightening up. "When can we go there?"

Zorian snorted derisively. "Not for a long, long time. The place is insanely well secured. Even Quatach-Ichl refused to attack the place without army support."

"Damnit," Zach swore. "Of course it couldn’t be that simple."

"I’m hoping that the matriarch’s memory packet contains some crucial information about the topic," Zorian noted. "At the very least, it should tell me what about that place is so important. That way we can at least know whether or not to waste our time on the place."

"Well that’s something at least," Zach sighed. "Hopefully we don’t find the exit, only to see Red Robe just about to leave when we get there."

"Don’t tempt fate," Zorian told him. "Anyway, I just have to ask. Suppose we find the exit and Red Robe isn’t there…"

"I already told you. No one is getting left behind," Zach said, correctly guessing Zorian’s question. "Once we confirm where the exit is, we’ll mess up Red Robe until he’s no longer a problem, and then we sit down and figure out a way to get both of us out. And if we can’t figure it out ourselves, we’ll find someone who can. It’s a big world out there, someone must know a way to help."

Zorian stared at his fellow time traveler, a bit humbled by his optimism and sense of ethics. He kind of wished he could sense emotions off the boy, though, because he couldn’t help but wonder if Zach was feeding him a bunch of idealistic rubbish while quietly planning to leave the time loop at the first opportunity. How much could he afford to trust the boy?

And in the back of his head, a small, treacherous part of his mind whispered: how much could Zach afford to trust him?

After that talk, Zach and Zorian threw themselves into aranea hunting with newfound fervor. Day after day, week after week… in all honesty, the different webs were already starting to blur together a little in Zorian’s mind.

But it was effective – his ability to interpret aranean memories was growing by leaps and bounds, and he had even identified what the high-ranking aranea were doing with their own minds.

They were manipulating their own thoughts, doing things like filtering distractions out of their senses, blunting inconvenient emotional highs and placing compulsions on their own behavior. It seemed to be a way to increase productivity and ensure better decision making.

It was also incredibly dangerous. Improperly done, this sort of mind magic could render one dead, catatonic, irreparably insane or worse… and it was a branch of magic that was easy to do incorrectly. Nobody truly understood their own mind, after all.

Despite the danger, Zorian found the idea fascinating. It wasn’t literally an intelligence boost, but it almost functioned like one. He would probably try to dabble in it at some point… but not now. He had his hands full at the moment. He just hoped that Spear of Resolve’s mental manipulations weren’t as radical and convoluted as some of the other aranean elders he had seen recently.

Zorian’s lessons with Xvim proceeded without incident. He decided not to tell the man about his latest findings about the nature of the time loop, as he still didn’t know what to think about that himself, and was worried about how Xvim would react to finding out he was just a copy. He was a remarkably calm and collected man, but that would be quite a revelation. He did, however, ask Xvim about pocket dimensions.

Unfortunately, Xvim knew virtually nothing about them. The secrets of their creation were rare and closely guarded – only the greatest of mages could make even a tiny one, and they did not share that knowledge lightly. Xvim had claimed he had never seen one in his entire life, despite talking to a lot of capable mages, which made Zorian a bit amused. Technically, Xvim was looking at a pocket dimension right now, he just didn’t recognize it as such.

Between his interaction with Zach, aranea hunting and lessons with Xvim, Zorian was constantly busy. It was tiring, and he opted not to do many of his usual routines from previous restarts. He never went to hunt monsters with Taiven, for instance, and never told her about the time loop either.

Finally, as the end of the restart began to approach, Zorian decided he had prepared as much as he could. He informed Zach he would try opening the matriarch’s memory packet soon and that he was taking a two day break from aranea hunting to get some rest before the attempt.

Kirielle, at least, was ecstatic about that. She could finally have him all to herself for two whole days… or at least that’s how she seemed to interpret his decision, anyway.

It was currently the second day of his self-imposed rest, and he was lying on his bed, reading a rather silly piece of fiction dealing with time travel. It was a book about a man who went three years back into the past to prevent a devastating war and save his lost love. The story was more amusing than Zorian thought it would be when he started reading it, but that was probably just him – the story was supposed to be a romance, not a comedy, it’s just that he personally couldn’t take it very seriously.

The time travel spell was powered by love, of all things – what kind of magic was that?

Kirielle interrupted his fun by jumping on top of his bed (and him) and elbowing herself in by his side, where she pretended to read the book with him for a while.

"Can I ask you something?" she suddenly asked after a while.

"Go ahead," Zorian said, turning the page. Kirielle quickly stopped him and turned the page back where it was. Huh, maybe she actually was reading along…

"Do you always bring me along when you go to Cyoria?" she asked.

Oh. That question again…

"No, not always," Zorian admitted.

"Why?" she asked immediately, outrage creeping into her voice. He could tell she kind of expected that answer, but definitely didn’t like it.

"Because it’s dangerous," Zorian admitted. "Zach isn’t the only time traveler beside me. There is a third person looping, and he is after us. Truthfully, the sensible thing would have been to never bring you along-"

"No!" Kirielle protested.

"-but I’m just too damn nice to do such a thing," Zorian finished.

"Mom says that praising yourself is in poor taste," Kirielle informed him.

Zorian gave her an annoyed look and promptly dropped the open book on her face. She sputtered indignantly for a moment before lifting the book and trying to use it as a bludgeon against him.

She gave up quickly when she realized it wasn’t very effective. And when she noticed Zorian was trying to distract her from her questions.

"Why don’t you call the mage guild on this guy if he’s so dangerous?" she asked.

"Because he’s a time traveler and they would be of no help," Zorian said, rolling his eyes. "I doubt I could even get them to believe me. And even if I could, it would just be a huge clue for the jerk as to where he can find me."

"That sucks," Kirielle declared.

"Yup," Zorian agreed.

She fidgeted nervously for a moment, setting the book down beside her on the bed.

"Am I of no help?" she asked.

"You help keep me sane," Zorian told her.

"That’s it? I totally defended you from Zach back at the train station," she pointed out huffily.

"Okay, you definitely have a point there," Zorian admitted. Even if he hadn’t been in any real danger, Kirielle’s actions were still glorious. "But really, what are you getting upset about? Are you afraid if I don’t bring you along every single restart, I’ll get bored of you or something?"

"Yes," she admitted. "Daimen and Fortov both went to the academy, got themselves new friends and forgot all about us. Then you went there as well, but couldn’t get any friends and I know it’s kind of mean, but I was glad for that because that meant you didn’t forget about me-"

"Kiri…" Zorian sighed.

She ignored him and continued with her explanation, quickly spilling out word after word and barely pausing for breath, as if it was all going to disappear if she stopped.

"-but you were still getting so distant and you were always, always annoyed at everything. And then you bring me along and you’re suddenly nice, but now you suddenly have this Zach who is a time traveler like you and he will remember and I won’t and-"

"Kiri, there is no way Zach can replace you," sighed Zorian, hugging her to stop her from getting herself even more upset, and rolling his eyes at her when she could no longer see him. She got worked up over the dumbest things sometimes. "The guy is almost as annoying as you are, and he doesn’t even have an excuse of being nine years old."

She proceeded to hit him in the back for that comment. Well, at least she wasn’t crying.

"I’ll forgive you for not bringing me with you sometimes," Kirielle eventually decided. Very generous of her. "But you’re not allowed to forget me!"

"Sure," he agreed easily. What kind of request was that anyway?

But the more he really thought about it, the more he realized he might not have a choice in the matter. If Red Robe decided to leave the time loop and collapse this entire world behind him, what would the future have in store for him and Kirielle? The real Zorian and Kirielle, that is, since the Kirielle he was looking at was just a copy, same as he was…

And that was another thing. He was just a copy of the real Zorian. If he found a way to return into the real world… what was going to happen to the original? Ugh… he was getting a headache just thinking about it. He’d kind of have preferred it if the time loop simply switched his soul with that of the original – that would mean he was killing the original Zorian by exiting the time loop, but this looping world had effectively killed hundreds of such Zorians already, so what difference would one more make?

Would the original Zorian agree with such assessment? Would he accept that it was okay for him to die so that a future version of him might live? In all honesty, probably not… but there was no way that would stop him from performing the switch if he had to.

Tomorrow he was going to finally open the matriarch’s memory packet. He really hoped it had the final pieces he needed to figure out this puzzle once and for all.

"Alright," said Kael, handing him a vial full of glowing yellow liquid. Inspecting it closely, Zorian could see that the glow was not uniform, but instead came from tiny glowing motes swimming inside the liquid. "This is the potion I was talking about. The potion of self-awareness. It’s meant to improve a person’s ability to block out distractions and focus inwards. It’s typically used to help train people’s ability to sense their mana reserves and souls, but I suspect it will help for this type of mind magic to work as well."

"How reliable is your information about this stuff?" asked Zorian suspiciously, swirling the liquid inside the container. "Did you test it somehow or…?"

"This is what my teacher used to help train my… abilities," Kael said. "It definitely works for its intended purpose. And while I’m not entirely sure it will help you in your task, it definitely won’t hurt to take it. Zach volunteered to test the potion a few times, so I know for a fact it doesn’t interfere with mind magic."

He pointed towards the boy in question and Zach promptly gave Zorian a thumbs up and a bright smile.

Ugh. The jerk refuses to drop his mind blank around him for any reason, but he blithely drinks a bunch of strange potions made by a junior necromancer he just met. Sometimes he just didn’t get that guy.

"Fine. Here goes," said Zorian, quickly downing the liquid.

Almost instantly, Zorian’s mind sharpened to an incredible degree while, paradoxically, the outside world began to feel distant and indistinct. It wasn’t that his senses suddenly grew worse, because they were as sharp as they ever were, but what they were telling him suddenly became a lot harder to focus on.

He stopped struggling against the effect and let his mind turn inward. He could sense his heart beat, his muscles shifting as he fidgeted in place, the blood coursing through his veins… he could sense his mana reserves and the way they reacted when he tugged at them… his personal soul sense, normally so faint and sluggish to respond, suddenly seemed much easier to understand…

Damn. Why hadn’t he asked Kael for something like this earlier? This would have been incredibly useful back when he was trying to develop a personal soul sense.

No, he couldn’t get distracted – he discarded these visions and instead dived into his own mind where the matriarch’s memory packet stood. He did not feel the same sense of increased clarity this time – probably because his mind magic was already too good for the potion to improve – but that was okay. He mentally grasped the decaying memory packet and began to carefully take it apart.

Not carefully enough, it turned out. The packet, already on the verge of falling apart completely when he began, couldn’t tolerate Zorian’s still somewhat inexperienced touch. It violently burst apart, momentarily dazing Zorian with a burst of confusing images (some kind of defense mechanism, maybe?), and the memories contained within began to rapidly fade away from his mind.

Swearing internally at his failure, Zorian scrambled to access some of the memories before they all faded away.

Previously, Zorian had been hoping that Spear of Resolve hadn’t delved as deeply into the mental self-manipulation as some of the other aranean elders had. Now he could safely say he was an optimistic fool. The memories currently floating in his mind spoke of an absolute master in the field that made all the other expert araneas look like total underachievers in comparison. Spear of Resolve seemed to have found a way to turn part of her mind into a magical calculator, could somehow temporarily separate her mind into multiple parallel threads of thought and could integrate perceptions of multiple araneas into a unified, coherent whole. And that was just the stuff he could figure out in the short time he had been given. Even if Zorian had been given several extra years to get better at reading aranean memories, he doubted it would have helped him interpret the memories locked inside the memory packet.

And yet, despite all of this, there was one particular memory that Zorian could easily understand… because it had been made understandable specifically for him.

[If you are reviewing this memory,] the matriarch’s memory echo said, [then in all likelihood, our plans were foiled and things went awry. It also means you have gotten good enough at mind magic to dive into the memory packet and read some of my memories. Well done. I hope you have had the courtesy of respecting my privacy and leaving the rest of my memories alone.]

Zorian could literally feel the smugness in her words. As in, she had made sure to attach that particular emotional impression to that particular section of the message. She knew damn well he had no hope of interpreting the rest of her memories.

Even in death, that spider was mocking him.

[I know you think I had it coming by rushing into this, but hear me out. I have sought out every clue about the time loop I could find. Most of what I’m about to tell you comes from the patron spirit of another aranean web – the Ghost Serpent Acolytes. Seek it out if you haven’t already, though be warned that the spirit might not be too happy to see you.]

What an understatement. Did the matriarch not realize the depth of the Ghost Serpent’s hatred of time travelers, or did she simply think her warning was sufficiently informative?

[Other sources include the researchers at the time magic research facility beneath Cyoria – you can find its location in the map I’ve attached inside this message – as well as some of the invaders that had the chance to interact with our mysterious time-traveling foe. It seems the invaders were quite curious about their new informant and have invested considerable time and effort into figuring him out.]

Damn. His investigation into invaders never seemed to produce any results as far as Red Robe was concerned. Then again, by the time Zorian was able to investigate them properly, Red Robe was no longer interacting with them at all.

[What I have gathered from all this is that this time loop is some kind of… fake, parallel world. We’re real, but we’re not. It’s hard to understand. Or maybe accept. The problem that arises from this is very simple: the time loop is degrading. I can’t tell how long it will be before it collapses entirely, but I do know that simply waiting for it to end would be disastrous. One has to deliberately leave this place. And everything I’ve gathered about our time-travelling foe from the invaders suggests he is completely unconcerned with finding the exit or leaving. I do not believe for a second that our foe is too stupid to see the importance of this or too complacent to make it his priority. The obvious conclusion is that he has already found the exit, and he can leave at any time. Thus, stopping him was of utmost importance. No matter what, he couldn’t be allowed to leave the time loop.]

Oh this was bad…

[And also, if I am honest with myself…] The ghostly memory of the matriarch hesitated, as if wondering whether to say the next part at all. [If I am honest with myself, I had been hoping that I could find out how our mutual foe joined the time loop. So I could join it as well… and then, eventually, leave it before anyone else could.]

Wait, what?

[I’m not heartless, mind you. I would have done everything in my power to help the alternate version of you on the other side. Zach too, for that matter. But I had essentially been planning to betray you. The amount of good I could do – for my web, for my species and yes, maybe even for myself… it’s so very irresistible. I hope if you ever get out of this place, you will not blame my other self for my own weaknesses, but I simply cannot see how I can make any other choice. It’s nothing personal, but there can only ever be one winner in this game. I am truly sorry.]

That… Zorian almost tore the entire message apart in anger after listening to that. All this time he had been feeling guilty about her dying, hoping that Red Robe was lying and there was some way to bring them back… and it turns out Spear of Resolve was planning to screw him over?

But no. No, he wouldn’t be destroying the message. It was important. Too important for him to throw it away.

He would listen to the message to the very end. He owed Spear of Resolve that much, at least. Even if she tried to betray him.

[I am unsure if this message is even necessary. But if the time loop can so casually create copies of us, it can surely destroy us just as easily. Our foe clearly has deep knowledge of how the time loop works. Thus, this message. I hope it won’t be necessary, but just in case, I put in a map to point you towards the invaders' bases and – more importantly – the time magic research facility deep beneath Cyoria. I am rather sure the time loop exit is located there – it is an ancient artifact called the Sovereign Gate. You can find its legend in various books easily enough, I’m sure. The security is high, but you will find a way to access the facility peacefully at the end of this message. The Gate did not react to me no matter what I did, but maybe it will to a proper time traveler like yourself. Otherwise, you may have to find The Key to get it to open. This is bad, since – if I have interpreted the Ghost Serpent’s ramblings correctly – the Key consists of the five imperial treasures of the first Ikosian emperor. The ring, the crown, the staff, the orb and the dagger. These items are all lost, likely scattered across Miasina. You’d have to conduct your search on a whole other continent. I didn’t think it was possible, even with the help of something like working Bakora gates, so I didn’t put too much effort into tracking down rumors surrounding them…]

After that was a map of Cyoria’s underworld, largely identical to the one he already had but with the various holes in his version filled out with relevant information. Finally, the matriarch gave him information on the government inspector that had the authorization to access the time magic research facility, to check up on their work and make sure they weren’t wasting government funding. According to the matriarch, the man was not even a mage, and was easy to impersonate… which was how she had gotten access to the place.

Aside from the pre-arranged message, he did not get anything else out of the memory packet. But truthfully, the message was already a little too much for him. The matriarch’s plans to betray him, the fact that Red Robe might have figured out a way to leave a long time ago, the stuff about the Key in the end…

Eventually the effects of the potion wore off and he found himself drawn to the world around him again. Both Zach and Kael were eager to see what he learned from the packet and Zorian did his best to tell them about his findings. All except for the way Spear of Resolve planned to betray him. That felt a little too personal at the moment.

The unanimous conclusion was that they had to access this time magic research facility as soon as possible. Accordingly, Zorian would raid the government inspector’s place the very next day to steal his identity badges and everything else they needed to gain access to the place.

Two days later, everything was ready. Since it would be a bit implausible for government inspectors to consist of two teenagers, Zach had bought them both a shapeshifting potion on the black market that turned them into nondescript, middle-aged men. Which was… weird. Regardless, with their appearances changed and with all the necessary documentation in their hands, they simply walked into the appropriate city office and demanded access to the facility.

Zorian had been worried that Spear of Resolve had been insanely lucky on her own try and that somebody was going to call their supposed superiors to confirm their orders and identity… but no such things happened. They weren’t even suspicious about the fact that there were two of them when there should have been just one.

Zach, being an idiot, actually asked them about this. Zorian was about to wipe their memories and shout at him, but it turned out they saw nothing wrong with his question.

Awful security.

"You must be new," the guy talking to them said. "That place gets inspected constantly. The royals are afraid someone is going to steal their precious Sovereign Gate, so they check up on it constantly. That’s why there’s so much security around the place. Honestly, I don’t understand why the researchers tolerate it. If I was in their shoes, I’d send the damn thing back to the royal treasury so I can work in peace. I bet it isn’t even the real thing…"

After that, they were directed to a fancy magical elevator on the edge of the Hole, which took them down to the facility in question. Along the way, they passed next to the various other, less secretive research facilities – one of the armed guards that rode along with them was talkative and wouldn’t shut up about them. Zach actually engaged the man in conversation, which was nice, because it allowed him to stay silent without looking too rude.

The other guard was as silent as Zorian. The two of them shared a friendly eye roll with each other in regards to the two gossips next to them and then ignored each other for the entire ride.

Finally they reached the place, passing through two more armed checkpoints that merely glanced at their papers before shooing them inside, and then they were finally inside.

They were greeted by a pair of researchers – one middle-aged, and one that couldn’t be more than 18 years old in Zorian’s estimation. They offered to give them both a tour of the place, and were quite surprised when they accepted the offer.

"We don’t often get inspectors that are actually interested in our work," the middle aged man commented. He had introduced himself as Krantin Keklos earlier. "Most just want to see the Sovereign Gate to see it’s still there and intact, and then leave as soon as possible."

"Oh, we definitely want to see the Sovereign Gate as well," Zach said, smiling. "We just thought it might be interesting to see what else you have got down here."

"Of course," Krantin said. "Rest assured that we have been taking good care of it. We’re grateful to the Crown for allowing us to study such an amazing artifact."

"You don’t believe it’s a fake like everyone else seems to," asked Zorian curiously.

"I’m not sure if it’s the Sovereign Gate of historical legend," Krantin admitted. "But it is surely a genuine artifact from the Age of Gods."

Over the next hour, Krantin and Aread (his younger assistant who mostly let Krantin take the lead) led Zach and Zorian through the facility to demonstrate their work. Zorian could tell that Krantin was absolutely ecstatic to give someone he considered influential a tour of the place, despite his subdued attitude. He wanted more funds and support from the Crown, and thought that pandering to them might help him get it.

There were three main portions of the facility. The first was a series of three Black Rooms – the first and smallest was reserved for experiments on plants and animals, while the two bigger ones saw human use. The second portion dealt with combining alchemy and temporal acceleration in various ways. Finally, the third and last part was based around a large black cube about four meters long on each side. There was a door-like depression on the side of the cube, but Krantin explained that they had never managed to get it open.

Carved into this door was a very familiar geometric diagram – a horizontal line with an upturned triangle balanced on top of it.

"There it is," Krantin said, sweeping his hand towards the black cube. "The Sovereign Gate. Despite the legend surrounding it, we believe it is some kind of powerful time acceleration room rather than a literal gate to another world. Sadly, we have never really managed to activate it. I had high hopes that the upcoming planetary alignment and the resulting amplification of dimensional magic might be the key to getting it to work, but no such luck. Shame."

"Amazing," Zach said staring at the cube with an unreadable expression on his face.

"Yes," Krantin agreed. "It’s hard to believe something like this had just been gathering dust in the Noveda family treasury for countless decades. If it weren’t for Mister Zveri’s generosity in donating some of Noveda’s unneeded artifacts to the Crown, who knows how long it would have languished there undiscovered!"

"Yes," Zach said frostily, grinding his teeth. "What a generous guy, that Tesen."

"Well," Krantin coughed, realizing he had struck some kind of nerve, "Although I’m happy to answer any questions you may have, this is about it for what we do here. If you would-"

Looking around, Zorian looked around to confirm they were alone in the area for the moment and then reached out to the two researchers' minds. Though both Krantin and Aread were highly-trained mages, they were specialists in time magic and had no real mental defenses. In just a few seconds, Zorian forced their minds into mindless stupor. They remained standing on their feet, and looked fine at first glance, but they were effectively unconscious.

Zach raised an eyebrow at their sudden silence.

"You got them?" he asked, turning to Zorian.

"Yes," Zorian confirmed. "So. Do you know how we can activate this thing? And is it even wise to do so? I mean-"

"We should try touching it," said Zach.

…yeah, okay. It wasn’t like Zorian had any better idea.

"We should do it together, though," Zorian remarked.

"Oh, right – that way we will hopefully both activate it at the same time. We both have the same marker thing, so it should work, right?"

"Right," Zorian agreed uneasily. He wasn’t so sure personally, but what else he could do? If the matriarch was right, Red Robe already knew about this place and could leave whenever he wished. The time loop still existed, though, so clearly he didn’t. Why not? Zorian would have in his place.

He needed the answers the thing held.

"On three," said Zorian. "One, two… three!"

The both pressed their palm against the diagram on the door in perfect synchronization with each other.

Two seconds passed.

"Nothing is happening," Zach complained. "Damn…"

"No," Zorian frowned. He could feel something reaching out from the cube in front of them, trying to access his marker. Asking for… confirmation? "I could feel something. I don’t know if you can feel your own marker yet-"

"Not really, no," Zach said.

"Well, anyway, I think if I just-"

He flipped one of the switches on his marker. The mysterious force reaching out from the cube immediately rushed into him. Everything went black.

Zorian half expected to wake up in Cirin again, with Kirielle jumping on top of him and wishing him a good morning.

But he didn’t. He was instead floating in a black, featureless void. And Zach was right beside him.

"Woah. What happened," Zach asked, looking around. "Where are we?"

"The cube wanted me to give it confirmation of some sort," said Zorian. "So I said yes. And here we are."

"If we’re permanently stuck in this void because of you, I’ll never forgive you," Zach warned him.

"You would have done the exact same thing in my place and you know it," Zorian said.

"Well yeah, but aren’t you supposed to be the paranoid, sensible one? Agreeing to unknown requests from a mysterious ancient artifact sounds pretty stupid to me."

Before Zorian could say anything, another person popped into existence in front of them.

No… not a person. The entity in front of them was vaguely humanlike, but that was clearly just a crude façade. It wore no clothes, but that was okay because it had no genitals, body hair or anything else other than smooth skin. Its face was blank and apathetic, and its eyes were glowing white voids devoid of iris or anything else except soft light spilling out of them.

"Welcome, Controller," the entity said, its voice soft and emotionless.

Zach reacted faster than him – he immediately reached for his spell rod, only to find it effectively glued to its holster. Checking himself, Zorian noticed his own spell rods suffered similar fates. In fact, his very clothes seemed to be glued onto his skin and though he could feel his mana reserves he didn’t seem able to manifest any of that mana at all.

"Who are you?" Zach demanded. "What is this place?"

"I am the Guardian of the Threshold," the entity said, as apathetic as its face. "And this is the control room."

"I don’t think this is a physical place," Zorian noted. "Notice how your clothes seem to be a part of your body."

"Hey, you’re right…" Zach said, frowning as he tried to roll up his sleeves and failed.

"We’re some kind of projections," Zorian said. "As is the entity in front of us."

They both stared at the entity in front of them. It seemed to interpret their attention as some kind of prompt.

"What is your request, Controller?" the Guardian asked.

"Can we leave this place?" Zorian asked.

"Of course," the Guardian agreed easily. "Do you want to do that now?"

"By leave, we mean go back to the bodies we’re being projected from," Zach clarified.

"The answer remains the same," the Guardian easily responded.

"What about leaving the time loop?" Zorian asked.

"Time loop?" the guardian mouthed uncomprehendingly. Its eyes flashed for a moment before it refocused on them again. "I’m sorry, but the gate is barred."

"What?" Zach protested. "What the hell do you mean the gate is barred?"

"The Controller has already left the time loop," the Guardian explained. "It’s not possible for anyone else to leave."

There was a brief silence as Zach and Zorian processed this claim.

"But I thought we were the Controller," Zach protested.

"You are the Controller," the Guardian agreed easily.

"But you just said the Controller has left the time loop," Zorian frowned.

"He has," the Guardian confirmed.

"Why is the time loop still in existence, then?" Zorian asked.

"The time loop cannot end while the Controller is still inside the time loop," the Guardian said.

"So the Controller has left the time loop, but you can’t end the time loop because the Controller is still in the time loop?" Zach asked incredulously. "Don’t you realize how stupid that sounds?"

"I don’t think we’re dealing with a sapient being," Zorian said. "It’s some kind of animated spell performing its function and getting confused that there are multiple Controllers when there is only ever supposed to exist one. Guardian, how many people are you talking with right now?"

"Only the Controller can access this place," the guardian placidly answered.

"So wait…" Zach said in a trembling voice. "You’re saying…"

"Red Robe has somehow tricked the control room into thinking he’s the Controller of the loop," Zorian sighed. "He has already left. And so no one else can leave."

"The gate is barred," the Guardian confirmed.

Well, fuck.

End of Arc 2