Mother of Learning

55. Threshold

For nearly half a minute, the endless void they floated in was silent. Neither Zach nor Zorian knew what to say, and the Guardian of the Threshold seemed content to placidly wait for further questions. Zorian would have liked to say he was considering the implications of this new knowledge at the time, but the truth is that he spent most of it being surprised at how well Zach was taking all this. He kind of expected the other boy to freak out and start swearing and shouting by now. But no, Zach was surprisingly calm and quiet about the situation. The only evidence he was in any way upset was a slight frown on his face.

"So," Zach eventually said, his voice cutting through the unnerving silence that sprung up around them. "What now?"

"I honestly don’t know," Zorian admitted. "I really didn’t think Red Robe had already left the time loop. It makes so much sense, though, now that I look back on things…"

"Yeah, he really screwed us over, didn’t he?" Zach sighed.

"Well, I wouldn’t exactly put it like that," Zorian smiled. "I’m pretty sure this is not what he had been planning. We were meant to disappear. The time loop was supposed to collapse when the controller of the time loop left this place, permanently removing us as a threat. But we’re still here, and if the time loop is this out of its normal parameters, it might actually be possible to get out of this place."

"Heh," Zach chuckled. "Now that you mention it, yeah. And also, this means I can stop holding back. You too, for that matter. We’ve both been doing our best to keep a low profile to stop Red Robe from noticing our activities. Now that we know he is no longer here…"

"Yes," Zorian agreed. "The way I see it, we have three main priorities. Number one, we need to find out how long we have until the time loop collapses. Number two, we need to find a way to get out. And number three, we have to try and find out who the hell Red Robe really is so that we can take care of him quickly if… when we exit this place."

Zorian turned to the side to look at the Guardian of the Threshold, who had been quietly floating in place not far from them while they talked. It didn’t appear bothered by them ignoring it.

"We should question the Guardian about everything we can think of," Zorian noted. "Who knows what kind of critical secrets it knows, and it doesn’t appear as if it cares to share anything on its own initiative. Though that could take a while – we should probably return to our bodies for a while to make sure we aren’t interrupted."

"Do we even have to worry about that?" Zach asked, pulling on his jacket in order to demonstrate the way their clothes seemed an integral part of their body. "The cube seems to have ripped our souls out of our bodies to bring us here. Does it even matter if our bodies get killed out there?"

"We could be just projected here," Zorian shook his head. "It sounds like the simplest way to achieve this, to be honest. Then again, that would leave the loop controller awfully vulnerable while messing around with controls. Hmm… Guardian?"

"You are merely projected into this place, but your stay will not be cut short by events in the outside world," the Guardian explained. It was apparently smart enough to interpret what his question was likely going to be based on his and Zach’s conversation. Interesting. "If your physical forms suffer critical damage, or if soul tampering is detected, I will draw in your souls inside the Gate for safekeeping. Your time here will remain uninhibited, though you will have to start a new iteration of the loop in order to leave the place, as I cannot re-anchor your souls back to your bodies if they are not sufficiently intact."

"Well. Good to know, I guess," Zorian mumbled. He looked at Zach, and found that the other boy was already staring at him. "Do you have anything you want to ask the Guardian or…?"

"You go first," Zach told him, shaking his head.

"Alright. First of all, is there a time limit as to how long we can remain here?" Zorian asked.

"When this iteration of the loop ends, so will your current visit to this place," the Guardian responded. "Other than that, no."

So when the time loop restarts, they will be flung back to their bodies at the beginning of the month, but other than that, they could stay here as long as possible.

They had plenty of time, then.

"What are the criteria for each iteration’s end?" Zorian asked curiously. "Is mere passage of time sufficient, or is there more to it?"

"Passage of time is sufficient," the Guardian confirmed. "No iteration is allowed to last for more than a month at the time. Beyond that, there is a multitude of contingencies that will cause the iteration to terminate prematurely."

"Can you list those contingencies?" Zorian asked.

"No," the Guardian stated emotionlessly. "You aren’t authorized for that information."

Zorian blinked in surprise. Though he had suspected the Guardian wouldn’t be able to answer all of their questions, he thought it would have to do more with it being just a dumb animation spell in the end, not that it would literally refuse to help them like that.

"What? But I thought we’re the Controller," Zach piped in suddenly. "How can we not be authorized to know?"

"The Controller doesn’t have unrestricted authorization," the Guardian explained. "Only the Maker and his agents have access to information about the workings of the Gate."

"Maker?" Zach repeated incredulously. "Maker of what?"

"Of the Gate, of course," the Guardian said. Zorian could almost imagine the Guardian rolling his eyes at the question, even though its eyes didn’t work like that and its voice never changed in tone.

"So the Controller isn’t the ultimate authority when it comes to the Gate or the time loop?" Zorian asked. The Guardian immediately confirmed this. "What can you tell us about this Maker, then?"

"You aren’t authorized to know the identity of the Maker," the Guardian informed him.

Of course it was going to be something like that…

"Ugh. This thing is so damn annoying!" Zach complained.

Ten more fruitless minutes were spent on trying to question the Guardian about the Maker, its agents, whether it was a god (like Zorian suspected) or not, how long it had been since the Maker had last interacted with the Gate, and so on. The Guardian’s response was the same for each of them: they weren’t allowed to know.

Zorian wished he could just invade the thing’s mind and be done with it, but their inability to perform magic in this place extended to his psychic abilities. They had no way to force the entity into cooperation, and eventually decided to move on to other topics.

"You said no iteration is allowed to last for more than a month," Zorian reminded the Guardian. "Can you tell us why?"

"When an iteration is over, everything in it is destroyed," the Guardian began. Well, good to have that confirmed… Zorian had assumed it was so for a while now, but having the Guardian verify it was nice. "Under certain philosophical outlooks, this could be viewed as mass murder…"

"But not under all of them, huh?" Zorian mumbled distastefully.

"Others do not view destruction of copies as a problem, so long as they do not diverge excessively from the original," the Guardian continued, ignoring Zorian’s interjection. "The time loop is set up under such an assumption. Thus, it is imperative that entities copied by the time loop are not given enough time to meaningfully diverge from the originals, as their destruction would then become unethical. A month was determined to be a good cut-off point."

"What if one of the copies managed to achieve awareness of the time loop and found a way to maintain continuity across different iterations?" Zorian asked. "Hypothetically speaking."

"That would be very unfortunate for the copy," the Guardian noted. "Only the Controller can actually leave the time loop, after all."

"See, this is the part I don’t get," Zach suddenly interjected. "Why was such a rule put into place? I mean, there is only one Controller to begin with, so why put that sort of limitation in place?"

"To stop the Controller from trying to smuggle some of the copies out of the time loop," the Guardian said matter-of-factly, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

There was a short pause as both Zach and Zorian processed this.

"Why… why is that important?" Zorian asked shakily.

"Because only the Controller has their real soul pulled into the time loop," the Guardian said. "Everyone else is a copy. For a Controller of the loop to leave, I only have to re-anchor their soul back to their original body. For one of the copies to enter the real world, I would have to switch their soul with the soul of the original. This would effectively kill the original."

There was another, longer pause following this explanation.

Zorian wasn’t terribly surprised at the fact that him leaving the loop would require he switch his soul with his original. It was one of the first ideas he came up with himself, after all. What surprised him was that Zach was apparently not a copy. Being the Controller had more to it than just having a marker stamped on your soul, it seemed.

"So the Controller has their original soul drawn into the time loop when it is first made," Zorian said. "They aren’t a copy, so there is no problem with them leaving. But everyone else would have to kill someone to get out, and that’s unacceptable. Is that correct?"

"Yes," the Guardian agreed.

"But you could do that?" Zach suddenly spoke up. "If one of the copies wanted to leave this place, you could switch their soul with that of the original?"

"Theoretically," the Guardian admitted, "but that goes against what I was made to do. I am the Guardian of the Threshold. One of the main tasks the Maker gave me was to ensure things inside the time loop could not menace the source of the template. If a diverged copy tried to kill the original by switching their souls with it, I would do my best to stop them."

"What about a normal, un-diverged copy?" asked Zorian. "Surely there is no harm in replacing the original with a normal copy. They’re practically the same thing! It’s what makes it okay to destroy millions of souls every month or so, isn’t it?"

The Guardian hesitated. A short, tense silence descended on the scene as it considered the scenario.

"So long as the copies do not diverge too much from the original, such a switch would be theoretically acceptable," the Guardian eventually admitted. "But it is my purpose to keep the time loop from spilling out in the real world as much as possible, so I would still refuse to perform such a switch. Only the controller, with the knowledge and secrets they gathered inside the time loop, is allowed to leave and make their mark on the world outside, since they are technically of that world to begin with."

"Alright," Zorian nodded, signaling Zach with his hand to drop the issue. Though still very placid, the Guardian seemed almost agitated by their current line of questioning. Zorian was afraid that if they pushed it too much it might realize one of them was a copy somehow and do something to correct this. Best to leave the topic alone for now. "Let’s move on to something else. Guardian, you said the Gate is barred because the Controller has already left the time loop."

"Yes," the entity confirmed.

"Can you tell me how many iterations that was ago?" Zorian asked.

"The Controller is still inside the time loop, Controller," the Guardian said unhelpfully.

Some more variations of that question confirmed that the Guardian had no idea when Red Robe left. The Controller left, but didn’t actually leave, and the Guardian was hopelessly confused about the whole thing.

Asking the Guardian for Red Robe’s description or other identifying information didn’t work either – the Guardian didn’t seem to perceive the world in the same way they did, despite its fairly human-like appearance and the lifelike avatars he and Zach were inhabiting. It seemed to ignore just about everything in terms of identifying characteristics when it come to the Controller. Other than the marker, of course.

"So the Controller that left has the marker, then?" Zorian asked.

"Of course," the Guardian confirmed. "How could he have left, otherwise?"

"How does the Controller get the marker in the first place?" Zorian asked. "Is it hereditary, assigned by the Gate itself according to some criteria or what?"

"The Controller is marked by the Key, by the Maker, or by its agents," the Guardian said. "I am not aware of what criteria were used in choosing any particular Controller. It is ultimately irrelevant to my purpose to know such things."

"But the Key is lost," Zach said, frowning. "Scattered across vast distances. And if the Maker is a god like you suspect he is, well… the gods have been silent for centuries. That only leaves his agents. Who would that be?"

"Impossible to say for now," Zorian shrugged. "But apparently you were purposely chosen by someone to go in here."

"Or maybe Red Robe was," Zach said gloomily. "I know you think I’m the original looper, but the fact that Red Robe was capable of leaving just like… it could be that he’s the one who’s the real deal. You saw how the Guardian reacted to the possibility of switching souls between the copy and the original. How did Red Robe leave if he’s just a copy?"

"I don’t know," Zorian sighed. "It’s too bad the Guardian gets all stupid whenever anything involving Red Robe leaving is brought up."

"If it didn’t get all stupid about it, we would have probably been erased out of existence when Red Robe left," Zach told him. "So that’s probably a blessing in disguise. Anyway, Guardian? This marker I have on me is unique, yes? There is no way for there to be multiple Controller markers?"

"None," the Guardian confirmed. "Before the time loop is activated, marking a new person will invalidate the old marker. Inside the time loop, the Controller marker cannot be invoked, and only lesser markers can be placed."

"Lesser markers? What the hell are those now?" Zach protested.

"The Controller can temporarily add people to the time loop by placing a lesser marker on them," the Guardian explained.

"What?" Zach squawked. "There is a way to include someone in the time loop and you’re only mentioning this now!? And what do you mean temporary?"

"Though I’m happy to answer any question you may have to the best of my ability, I am ultimately not designed to teach the Controller how to operate the time loop," the Guardian said. "That is the job of whoever placed the marker on you. And by temporary, I mean that the target of the lesser marker will retain their memories and abilities for up to six iterations before the marker dissolves."

"Why would this lesser marker be temporary like that?" Zach asked, baffled. "Is there a way to make it permanent?"

"It is temporary to keep divergence from the original to a manageable level and discourage the Controller from getting excessively emotionally attached to copies marked in such a fashion," the Guardian explained. "There is no way to make it permanent, as that would be needlessly cruel. They cannot leave the time loop, after all."

"But if copies that retain awareness for more than a month count as people and killing them is wrong, doesn’t that mean that using these lesser markers is effectively murder?"

"Yes," the Guardian readily agreed. "But it is not the Gate that does it, so it is acceptable. It is up to the Controller to decide when and if they feel comfortable using such an ability."

"So…" Zorian began after a short pause.

"I would never have used such a spell," Zach immediately said, correctly guessing what Zorian was about to ask. "Never. Why would I torture myself by bringing people into the loop, knowing that they would suddenly go back to their old, ignorant self in just six restarts?"

"Fair enough," Zorian said, guessing he had touched upon a sensitive topic. "Guardian, what about the ability to expel people from the time loop? Make them start each iteration soulless and dead? Does this ability exist?"

"The Controller has such an ability as well," the Guardian confirmed.

By now, Zorian knew better than to ask whether such an ability had been used in the past. The Guardian had very limited awareness about what happened in the time loop itself, caring for little except the Controller itself.

"How about the ability to restore people erased in such a manner back?" he asked instead. He was still angry at the matriarch for planning to betray him, but he wanted her back anyway.

"No," the Guardian said. "The ability instructs the Gate to make changes to the base template that is used to construct each iteration. There is no undoing them without direct intervention from the Maker. The Controller is advised to use this ability with wisdom and restraint."

For the next twenty minutes, Zach and Zorian tried to question the Guardian about the manner in which these abilities could be performed by the Controller or about any other abilities they may have at their disposal. Sadly, neither of those inquiries achieved results. The Guardian did not know how any of these abilities might be accomplished, and it refused to list all the abilities the Controller had, saying they were not authorized to know that information.

"This makes no sense," Zach complained. "It’s happy to tell us about specific abilities if we ask, but a simple list of all options is forbidden?"

"Well, it sort of makes sense if the Maker didn’t want every Controller to know about all the features at their disposal," mused Zorian. "If some or all of the Controllers are given limited information, you don’t want to let the Guardian tell them all about it anyway…"

Another fruitless question and answer session occurred, where Zorian tried to ask the Guardian about the history of the time loop and its purpose. The Guardian claimed not to have any knowledge of previous time loops, though, beyond simply knowing they existed. Apparently it did not retain its memories between different time loops. As for the purpose of the time loop…

"The purpose of the time loop is between the Controller and the one who marked them," the Guardian concluded. "Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say it is whatever the Controller wants it to be. There is little to stop them from doing whatever they want while inside the time loop, after all."

"Alright, next question, then," Zorian sighed. "Can you tell me how long will it be before the time loop runs out of whatever is powering it and shuts down? That is to say, how long do we have to leave this place?"

"Yes, of course. The time loop has enough power for 52 more iterations before it must shut down," the Guardian said. "Assuming maximum utilization of each iteration, that is equivalent to little more than four years of operation."

Four years… maybe he was just greedy, but that seemed very short to him. He asked the Guardian about that just to see what it would say. He expected it to refuse to answer, bringing up their lack of sufficient authorization or whatever, but the Guardian actually had an answer for them this time.

"The time loop is normally supposed to be initiated at the peak of planetary alignment," the Guardian explained. "Unfortunately, something seems to have gone wrong and the time loop has been activated one month prior to it. This made everything more costly, causing the time loop to degrade far more rapidly than it is supposed to."

"Do you know how long the time loop had been in existence thus far?" Zorian asked.

"967 iterations," the Guardian answered. "Approximately 30 years in linear time."

Wait, those numbers were kind of strange… how could almost a thousand iterations equal 30 measly years?

"Wait," frowned Zorian. "So the time loop spends power per iteration, not according to how much time passes?"

"Yes," the Guardian confirmed.

"But I cut a lot of restarts short by dying to some stupid shit in the first few days," Zach protested. "Are you telling me I’ve been burning through our allotted time every time I did that?"

"Yes," the Guardian confirmed again blandly. "It is the Controller’s right to do such a thing, however. Presumably you felt the gains were worth the sacrifice of additional time."

"Hell no, I didn’t!" Zach protested. "I just didn’t know any better! If I knew all this, I would have been a lot more cautious about this shit!"

"Unfortunate," the Guardian said. It did not sound very sorry or compassionate, however, using the same pleasantly bland voice it always did. "It seems you were poorly prepared for this undertaking. You should complain to whoever gave you the marker once you get outside."

"Yeah, I’ll get right on that. Just as soon as I manage to find the bastard," Zach said gloomily, "So anyway, let’s just get this finally out of the way… Guardian, how can we unbar the gate?"

"You would have to present me with the Key by bringing it before the Gate," the Guardian said simply. "If you present all five pieces, you will gain sufficient authorization to reopen the gate."

"I don’t suppose you could tell us where to find those things, then?" Zach tried.

"No," the Guardian immediately answered. Of course. "But finding them should not be too difficult for you. Your marker can sense their presence."

Not for the first time, Zorian wished the damn marker stamped on his soul came with an instruction manual or something.

Though they continued to question the Guardian for two more hours, very little new information came out of it. When they finally decided to leave, the Guardian informed them that they would have to start a new iteration of the time loop because their bodies had been excessively damaged while they talked to the Guardian and the dumb thing didn’t find it important to mention that until they were ready to leave.

After about five minutes, when Zorian realized Zach was not going to stop ranting at the Guardian any time soon, he just reached into his soul and flipped the marker restart switch.

Everything went mercifully dark and silent.

Like always, Zorian’s awakening was done via Kirielle jumping on top of him. The events immediately following the awakening were also fairly typical, with him having his talk with Ilsa and dodging Mother’s attempts at conversation while having breakfast. He even ended up inviting Kirielle to come with him to Cyoria, despite initially planning to leave her behind. Partially, this was because he realized his vague plans of rushing to gather the Key as soon as possible and find a way to fool the Guardian into letting him out were rather premature and he should really take some time to calm down and digest things a little. But an equally important reason for it was that he realized he needed a break. The previous restart had been very exhausting, what with all the non-stop aranea hunting and the various revelations at the end, and he didn’t feel like jumping into another long-term mission right away. Taking a restart or two to relax a little and think things through wasn’t going to kill them. The time limit they had was uncomfortably short for his tastes, but not that short.

He was just wondering how to explain all this to Zach when they next meet each other when he was interrupted by the knock on the door.

What? That… that doesn’t usually happen…

He went to open the door, reaching out with his mind sense towards the unknown visitor, only to find Zach on the doorstep. Apparently his fellow time traveler wasn’t content to wait for him on Cyoria’s train station.

Zorian was kind of shocked, and not just by the fact Zach decided to come to his home…

He could actually sense Zach’s mind now. It was still shielded, but the boy wasn’t under the effect of mind blank anymore. Zorian was kind of touched at the show of trust this represented.

"Hello, Zach," Zorian said. "Fancy seeing you here."

"Yeah, well, our last meeting’s ending was a little abrupt," Zach told him with a little glare. "So I thought I should drop by and finish our conversation."

"Sorry," Zorian winced. "I know ending things so suddenly was a jerk move, but I was already kind of depressed from what the Guardian was saying and you getting into a one-sided shouting match with the thing was…"

"It’s fine," Zach said, waving him away. "I lost my nerves too. It’s probably for the best you shut me down before I did something stupid. That thing seemed pretty uncaring, but if anyone can manage to piss off a non-sapient spell construct, it’s me."

"Zorian, who is that?" Mother suddenly said, walking up to them. Turning around, Zorian could also see Kirielle peering from behind the kitchen door as well, watching the situation unfold.

"It’s just Zach," Zorian said. "He’s one of my classmates from Cyoria."

"Oh my, Zorian finally has friends visiting him at home," Mother noted in exaggerated mirth. "I never thought I’d see the day. Could I get an introduction?"

"Sure," Zorian agreed. It was only polite. "Mother, this is Zach Noveda, a friend and a classmate. Zach, this is Cikan Kazinski, my mother. The little girl peering from behind the door is my little sister, Kirielle."

Mother gave Kirielle an annoyed glare and gestured her to come over and introduce herself properly. Huffing slightly at the order, Kirielle approached and shook hands with Zach as proper manners dictated.

"What, no Fortov?" Zach asked with a whisper.

Mother always had good hearing, though, so she ended up hearing anyway.

"He’s at his friend’s place right now. He’ll meet us at the train station, so you can see him there. I assume you intend to take a train to Cyoria along with Zorian, yes?"

"Yes. The train. Of course," Zach fumbled, giving Zorian a questioning glance. He had probably expected them to just excuse themselves and teleport to Cyoria.

"I decided to take Kirielle with me to Cyoria this time," Zorian said. "I hope you don’t mind her travelling with us."

Kirielle gave Zach the hardest look she could muster, daring him to disagree with her coming along.

"Err, right. Of course I’m okay with that," said Zach.

What followed was about twenty minutes of Mother trying to talk Zach into accepting something to drink and fishing for information about him. Zach decided not to mention he was the last living heir of a Noble House, possibly because he still remembered what Zorian had told him about his mother, and simply described himself as a wealthy orphan from Cyoria. Based on the looks Mother gave him, however, Zorian was pretty sure she suspected the truth. She was quite perceptive about these sorts of things.

Eventually, the four of them packed up and left towards Cirin’s train station.

"How come Zach doesn’t have any luggage to carry along?" Kirielle protested, glaring at the bag of her own things that Mother had forced her to carry herself.

"Well, I’m from Cyoria to begin with," Zach said with a grin. "My luggage is already there."

"Unfair…" she mumbled.

"Oh, you’ll see unfair when we get to Cyoria," Zorian told her. "There’s an hour walk from the train station to where we’ll be staying, and I heard it’s going to rain too…"

When they finally reached the train station, they found Fortov already there, talking to his friends. Mother insisted on introducing Zach to him, which annoyed Zorian far more than it probably should have.

"No offense, Zorian, but your family seems pretty nice to me thus far," Zach told him later, when he finally managed to excuse himself from Fortov’s group. "Maybe I’m a little biased, since my family all died and I wish I actually had a family… but I honestly can’t figure out your animosity for them."

"It’s personal," Zorian told him in a clipped tone. "There’s a lot of history that you aren’t aware of. Just drop it."

"Fine, whatever," Zach sighed. "I don’t want to start a fight. I actually want to apologize."

Zorian gave him a strange look.

"Apologize?" Zorian asked curiously. "What for?"

"Well, you mentioned last time how I keep up a mind blank around you at all times and how it means I don’t trust you…"

"You don’t have to apologize for that," Zorian told him, shaking his head. "I also told you I would have done the same in your place, remember?"

"No offense, but I don’t want to be like you, Zorian," Zach said, shaking his head. Well screw you too, Zach! The feeling was mutual! "The point is, you were right. We don’t trust each other, and we’re not going to get anywhere if we have that constantly hanging over our heads. We need to work together if we want to have any chance of getting out of here."

Well, that wasn’t quite what he said, but since Zorian actually agreed with the sentiment, he didn’t interrupt.

"So anyway, I think you already noticed I’m not under the effect of mind blank…" Zach said.

"Of course," Zorian nodded. "I do notice your mind is still shielded, though."

"Well yeah," Zach said, rolling his eyes. "Trust your neighbors but lock your door, you know?"

"I wasn’t complaining," Zorian said. "I was just going to notice the shield doesn’t feel like a spell. That’s a non-structured mental defense, yes?"

"Of course you already tested it," Zach sighed. "Goddamn mind-readers. But yes, it’s non-structured. I got it a long time ago, back in the first decade of my looping."

"It’s… kind of rough for something you’ve been practicing for decades," Zorian admitted. "I mean, I know it’s hard to practice non-structured mind magic when you aren’t psychic like me, but I’ve seen other regular mages with similar defenses and theirs were a lot better than this."

"I never really refined it much since… well, I never needed it for anything more complex than resisting casual mind reading and the like," Zach said. "This isn’t just me being lazy, mind you. This is pretty much conventional wisdom about non-structured mental defenses among mages. Or at least that’s what the various magic instructors I learned from told me. Get just enough skill in the ability to foil casual attacks and deal with anything more severe with proper defensive wards and the like. If you don’t have time to set up those, locate the source of the mental attack and go on the offensive. Or just outright flee from the scene. Most mages agree that fancy non-structured mental defenses are more trouble than they’re worth."

"Well, I’m kind of biased, but I don’t agree," Zorian said.

"Yes, I feel a bit stupid now for just accepting conventional wisdom when it comes to that," Zach admitted. "I’ve been stuck in a time loop for decades, it’s not like I didn’t have the time. I’ve honed far more useless skills to perfection just for bragging rights, so I really shouldn’t have skimped out on something like this. But enough of that. I have a request for you."

"Go ahead," Zorian nodded, motioning him to continue.

"Don’t mess with my mind without my express permission," Zach said. "Even if you catch me without any mental protection or something."

"Well, okay," Zorian agreed. "I can respect that. What if I suspect you to be under the influence of another mind mage already, though?"

"I… have to think about that," Zach fumbled. "For now, no. Don’t mess with my mind even then. Just knock me out and wait for the effect to wear off."

Zorian wanted to point out that some mind effects didn’t wear off, but he could see that Zach was still very uncomfortable around mind magic and decided to postpone this talk for some other time.

"Alright. I’ll leave your mind alone. I will only use my mind sense and empathy on you, since they require no mental invasion to use and it’s almost impossible for me to not use them on someone. Anything else?"

"Yeah," Zach said. "The fact you can sense and manipulate the marker placed on us and I can’t really burns, you know? I can accept you’re a better mind mage than I’ll ever be since it’s your special ability and all, but this personal soul sense of yours is something I could have easily acquired myself if I knew about it. Do you think you can teach me how to do that?"

"I think I’ll have to set you up with one of my teachers to do that," Zorian frowned. "Alanic has access to potions I have never even encountered elsewhere and knowledge of how to help if something goes horribly wrong. I don’t think it’s going to be too much of a problem, though – he’s a pretty helpful person, despite initial appearances."

Eventually the train arrived and they were forced to cut their conversation a little short. Since they were going to share a compartment with Kirielle for the rest of the ride, any sensitive conversations would have to wait for a while.

Even if they had wanted to talk about something arcane, though, Kirielle wouldn’t have let them. Any apprehension she felt towards Zach melted away during the first twenty minutes of the train ride and the resulting boredom. She started asking Zach questions about Cyoria and the academy. Later on, Zach would remark how surprised he was at the way Kirielle treated him, as Kirielle had been rather more unfriendly towards him in the previous restart. But, as Zorian explained to him, that Kirielle was one who had a far worse impression of Zach… and that bad first impression of Zach had never really left her for the rest of the restart. The way Kirielle was treating him now was actually far closer to her true personality than what he experienced before.

"Kind of strange that you don’t like most of your family, but you’re so close to your little sister," Zach remarked. "Was it always like that, or…?"

"I always did like her best out of all of them," Zorian said. "But no, I did not have this good of a relationship with her before the time loop. There was a reason why I had never brought her along before I started retaining my awareness across restarts."

"Ah. I figured it was something like that," Zach said. "So do we have a plan for this restart or what?"

"I was hoping we could take a break for a restart or two," Zorian sighed. "I need to think about things and come to terms with all of this. It’s a lot to take in."

"Hmm… fine," Zach said eventually. "I guess we should spend some time getting to know each other anyway. You can still introduce me to that Alanic fellow that teaches personal soul sensing, right?"

"Absolutely," Zorian confirmed. "You can work on your soul sense while we decide what to do. It’s not like I intend to literally do nothing myself, you know."

"Oh? What do you have in mind for yourself?" Zach asked.

"I’ve been pursuing lessons from my mentor, Xvim, but I could never really properly focus on them thus far. Now that I don’t have the decaying memory packet in my head demanding most of my attention, I figure I should finally be able to give him all my attention and see what the results are. I’m still not sure how much to really tell him about the time loop and how it functions, though. I mean, I’m freaked out by how it works, and I’m actually aware of the restarts… I’m not sure it’s a good idea to explain to Xvim what’s really going on."

"I can’t help you there," Zach shook his head. "I never had much luck in convincing people about the time loop, and that was before I knew all this crazy stuff about it that I do now. I have no idea how you even convinced Xvim to take you seriously about time travel, considering he never believed me when I tried to do the same."

"You went to Xvim to try and tell him about the time loop?" Zorian asked. "I guess you really meant it when you said you went to just about everyone with the story."

"Yeah…" Zach agreed. "Do you think it might help you convince him you’re telling the truth if I came with you? I can do some pretty crazy magic on demand, by now…"

"I don’t know," Zorian said. "I didn’t mention you when I talked to him previously, but that was mostly to minimize any links between the two of us in case Red Robe somehow caught wind of Xvim’s investigation in the time loop. Now that we know Red Robe is gone, it might be a good idea to include you into the story."

Zorian considered things for a few seconds.

"I’ll go alone on Monday," Zorian decided. "But I’ll tell him you’re also a time traveler and see if he wants to meet you."

Of course Xvim wanted to meet him. Frankly, if Zorian was in Xvim’s place and a student came to him with a story about being a time traveler and then another student was also a time traveler, he’d react the same way too. Thus, the very next day after Zorian’s talk with Xvim, he returned to the man’s office with Zach in tow.

"So, Mister Noveda," Xvim began. "Mister Kazinski here claims you and he are stuck in a… time loop, and have lived through this month many times before. You’ve lived longer than him, apparently. I’ve already heard Mister Kazinski’s story and saw the evidence he had for it, and now I’m curious to hear your side of it. But before we get to that, I admit I’m curious about your level of skill. Do you mind if we take an hour or two to test your magical abilities?"

"Sure," Zach shrugged. "I guess we’re going to have to leave the office for that, though…"

"That won’t be necessary, mister Noveda," Xvim told him. "The test will consist of simple shaping exercises."

"Shaping exercises?" Zach asked, surprised. "Err, kind of underwhelming, but okay. Ready when you are."

Oh dear. Should Zorian warn him?

No. No, it would be more amusing this way.

"Levitate this pen, please," Xvim told Zach, handing him one of the many pens strewn along his desk. "And then make it spin in the air."

Zach smiled, doing just that with total ease…

…at which point a marble nailed him straight in his forehead, causing him to lose concentration and stop levitating the pen, nevermind spinning it.

"…what?" Zach asked incredulously.

"You failed," Xvim informed him, finger tapping against the table impatiently.

"But… you threw a marble at me!" Zach protested.

"And you immediately lost concentration," Xvim said with a long sigh. "Shameful. And you’re supposed to be someone who trained magic for literally decades? What could you have possibly been doing all this time? Zorian here would have never let some little thing like that distract him, and he has only been stuck in the time loop for a few years."

There was a long pause as Zach looked incredulously between Xvim and Zorian, as if unable to believe what he was hearing.

Zorian was struggling not to laugh. He could kind of understand why Xvim had done this – it was an asshole move, and completely inappropriate for a teacher, but damn if it wasn’t amusing.

"Well, I suppose it’s to be expected," Xvim said. "Decades of shoddy instruction is nonetheless shoddy instruction. One more promising student failed by the poor state of our magical education. Let’s try that again, only properly this time. Start over…"

"I hate this guy," Zach told him as they left Xvim’s office. "I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to strangle someone more in my entire life."

"Yeah, Xvim has that kind of effect on people," Zorian agreed.

"I mean, I knew he was an asshole, but I never quite realized he was that… that much of an asshole. You know?"

Yes, he knew. Oh, how Zorian knew…

"If he’s always like that, then why the hell did you keep coming back to him restart after restart?" Zach asked incredulously.

"I wanted to prove him wrong," Zorian shrugged. "He was an ass, but he was demanding excellence in something I’d always felt I was good at, and so I just couldn’t let it go. Besides, he’s not utterly terrible, once you get to know him a little."

"Not utterly terrible," Zach repeated, rolling his eyes. "I really hope this is the end of it and I never have to talk to the guy again."

"You know, Xvim is pretty good at non-structured mental defenses," Zorian said innocently.

"No," Zach said immediately.

"What?" Zorian grinned. "I was just going to suggest you ask him for help in mastering the ability. I’m sure he’d be happy to help you train."

"No. Absolutely not," Zach shook his head. "And don’t think I didn’t notice how much you were enjoying yourself while I suffered in there. I’ll find a way to pay you back somehow, you’ll see."

Rather than be intimidated by the threat, Zorian finally laughed.

56. Obscure

Despite how much the experience had annoyed Zach, Zorian judged their meeting with Xvim to have been a full success. Sure, Xvim had been openly dismissive of Zach’s skills, but that was just Xvim being Xvim. The man had been impressed in his own way, else he would not have kept pushing Zach towards ever more demanding shaping exercises as their meeting progressed. Not that this outcome was surprising – there was a lot to be impressed about when it came to Zach’s shaping, especially if one knew how big his mana reserves were. His fellow time traveler had not honed his shaping skills to the same ridiculous standard that Zorian had achieved under Xvim’s tutelage, but he was clearly far better than he had any right to be. Zorian was confident that the skills Zach displayed in that office would be taken as a point in their favor.

The next day, Zorian decided to introduce Zach to Alanic as well and see if the priest was open to the idea of teaching Zach some of his soul defenses. Accordingly, they went to the priest first thing in the morning, effectively skipping an entire day of classes. Not that skipping classes was much of a problem for either of them at this point.

The start of the meeting went about as Zorian expected it would. Zach talked, Alanic listened, and Zorian mostly stayed quiet. The priest already knew the nature of their request, since Zorian had already explained things to him while arranging the meeting, but he wanted to hear Zach’s version of the story as well before he agreed to anything. Thankfully, Zach successfully kept to the script and didn’t blurt out anything he wasn’t supposed to.

Their story was, in essence, very simple: the two of them had ended up on the receiving end of a soul magic attack and now had some kind of marker stamped on their soul. Zach, being shaken by the experience, now wanted to learn how to defend himself from similar attacks.

"There is one thing that is bothering me about this," Alanic told them when Zach finished his tale, shifting his attention from Zach to Zorian. "If both of you suffered from this attack, how come only Zach is interested in learning how to defend his soul? Does the experience you went through not worry you as well?"

"Ah, well, I already know how to perceive and defend my soul," Zorian admitted.

"Really?" Alanic said curiously, raising his eyebrows in a silent question.

"Why would I lie?" asked Zorian with a shrug.

Alanic stared at him for a second before reaching across the table they were gathered around and grasping his shoulder tightly in his hand. Zorian was about to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing when suddenly all of his senses went haywire.

He swayed in his chair for a moment, the world around him spinning and melting like a bad illusion and his body feeling like it was being twisted into some unnatural form. Then he realized what was happening and used his magic to violently shove Alanic’s attack away from his soul. It worked, and the world immediately returned to normal, but Zorian had an uncomfortable feeling that had more to do with Alanic backing off at the first sign of resistance than him being all that good.

He gave the man a nasty glare, and Alanic removed his hand from Zorian’s shoulder.

"Shoddy defenses," Alanic said. "Serviceable, but shoddy. You should reconsider you decision, mister Kazinski. You could use my instruction as much as mister Noveda here."

"I know that!" Zorian snapped. "I just thought…"

…that Alanic would refuse to teach him, since he didn’t want to do so in previous restarts. Well, not without receiving explanations that Zorian had been unwilling to give the man at that time.

Hmm.

"You know what? Nevermind that," Zorian sighed. "Does that mean you’re willing to teach us, then? Both of us?"

"I suppose I am," Alanic said, tapping his fingers against the table for a few seconds. "You are hiding things from me, but I don’t think it’s something sinister. Who taught you how to feel your soul, if I may ask?"

"A friendly shifter," said Zorian.

Partially true, even if Alanic had done the lion’s share of the work.

"A shifter, huh?" Alanic said, giving him another long look. "Very well. Come with me so I can check up on this marker you two received from your attacker."

"Err, we don’t want it removed," Zach hurriedly said.

"Yes, you already said that," Alanic said. "I just want to have a look. Don’t worry, I’m not doing anything to you without your consent."

"You mean like launching a surprise soul attack to test our claims of already having a soul defense?" asked Zorian snidely.

"Don’t be so whiny," Alanic told him unsympathetically. "That was just a light tap, spiritually speaking."

"That light tap almost caused me to vomit all over your table," Zorian told him.

"Hmph," Alanic scoffed. "Your defenses are even shoddier than I thought, then."

Sighing, Zorian decided to drop the issue.

"What is it with you and annoying teachers?" Zach whispered to him as they followed Alanic deeper into the temple that served as his house. "Is this going to be a recurring thing with you? I don’t think I can handle a repeat of the Xvim episode this soon."

Zorian was tempted to bring Zach to Silverlake after this, just to show him the true meaning of annoying. At least Alanic and Xvim were each helpful in their own way in addition to being hard to deal with. He wondered if Zach was good enough to deal with the grey hunter… he probably could kill the beast, but could he do it in a way that keeps the eggs intact?

Though now that he thought about it, Silverlake probably doesn’t count as a teacher. She had taught him precisely nothing so far.

"Mr Zosk is way less annoying than Xvim," he whispered back to Zach, putting his musings aside for the moment. "He can be pretty harsh at times, but he’s always fair. He doesn’t insult people without good reason. The truth is my soul defenses really are shoddy at the moment. Give him a chance."

"I’m happy you have so much faith in me, mister Kazinski," Alanic said, butting into their conversation. Oops, guess they weren’t quiet enough. Or maybe Alanic’s hearing was just that good. "This Xvim fellow you keep talking about sounds fascinating. I hope you can introduce us sometime."

Zorian made a sour face. Bringing Xvim and Alanic together into the same room? Yeah, no way in hell was he letting that happen…

Alanic seemed to have noticed Zorian’s distaste for the idea because he actually laughed at him.

"I was just joking, mister Kazinski," the priest said, his voice still tinged with amusement. "If I really wanted to meet this Xvim, I would have sought him out on my own. With a name like that, I doubt he’d be hard to find."

"I suppose you’re right," Zorian admitted. Xvim was a fairly exotic name, and he had a feeling that his mentor was rather famous within certain circles as well. Everyone who worked in a prestigious institution like Cyoria’s Royal Magical Academy was at least somewhat famous. All in all, Xvim probably wasn’t very hard to find for someone like Alanic, who clearly had connections to one or more spy organizations.

Not for the first time, Zorian found himself wondering what exactly would happen if he told Alanic about the time loop. Not in this restart, obviously, but as an idea for the future… well, he could use the battle-priest’s help and advice.

Then again, he wasn’t working alone any more, was he? He would have to see what Zach would say about that.

Oh well. Hopefully Alanic would leave a better impression on Zach than Xvim had.

"Ugh," Zach said as they departed from Alanic’s home. "That psychedelic potion is pure hell. And I’m apparently going to have to go through several restarts worth of that stuff?"

"You didn’t have to take it," Zorian pointed out. "Its only purpose is to speed things up. You could have taken the slow, painless way and meditated your way to soul perception."

"No, I know my limits," Zach said, shaking his head. "Even you opted for the fast route, and I’m even more impatient than you are. How you managed to pretend to be unaware of the time loop all this time I’ll never fathom… What did he have you do while I was off hallucinating, anyway?"

"That light touch stuff he tried on me earlier," grimaced Zorian. "He kept using weak soul attacks on me while having me fight him off. It’s helpful, I guess. At the very least it gives me some experience in fending off soul manipulation. I usually rely on actual defensive wards to counter hostile soul magic, but this sort of stuff is useful if I’m ever caught off-guard with some casual soul spell. It’s strange, though. Why is Alanic willing to help me refine my soul defenses now that I’ve brought you along? Why does your presence make him less suspicious of me?"

"I guess I just look like a more honest person than you do," Zach said with a grin. Zorian rolled his eyes at him. "Anyway, what now?"

"Now? Well, you either go home and do whatever you want, or you go with me to Knyazov Dveri while I visit the local dungeon," Zorian told him. "I was going to go there while you had your lessons with Alanic, but that idea obviously had to be scrapped, so I guess I’ll do it now."

"You were going to go have fun in the dungeon while I suffered back there?" Zach frowned.

"Depends how you define fun," Zorian said. "I’m just going to load up on crystalized mana before getting back to the surface."

"I’m not sure I understand," Zach said. "Why would you need so much crystalized mana?"

"Money, of course," Zorian said. "I use some of it for my magic items and golems, but most of it is sold for some quick cash. I memorized where the crystal clumps are over the restarts, so it doesn’t take long to pick up a lot of them. It’s almost like collecting money."

Zach was quiet for a while.

"Well crap," said Zach after a while. "That’s clever. Why didn’t I think of that? I could have used that trick a decade or so ago…"

"What, you had cash problems?" Zorian asked curiously. "Aren’t you obscenely rich?"

"I don’t have nearly as much money as people think," Zach shook his head. Oh, right, his guardian kind of robbed him. "Hell, I don’t have nearly as much money as I thought I did, thanks to my slimy caretaker. But the real problem is that most of my money is unavailable to me. It’s all either banked into long-term accounts or stored away in ways that make it really hard for me to get to it on short notice. And even if I could get to it easily, I would still have to justify my expenses to my caretaker and get his permission in order to spend any significant sum. Which means that when I really wanted to spend a lot of money during the restarts, I basically had to get the money from scratch somehow…"

"Hmm. And how did you solve that?"

"Well, these days I just kill some rare magical creature and sell the corpse," Zach shrugged. "You can earn huge amounts of cash if you know who to sell it to. I really like your solution, though. It’s a lot safer, and not even that much more time consuming. Doesn’t dumping a huge amount of crystalized mana on the market collapse the price, though?"

Zorian shook his head. "In the grand scheme of things, the amounts of crystalized mana I can gather in a few days are a drop in the bucket. Even if I focused on doing nothing else for the entire restart, I’d only produce a fraction of what dedicated mines produce on a daily basis. Though trying to sell too much to individual shops does tend to bring unwanted attention."

"Alright," Zach nodded. "So how are we doing this?"

Later that day, when they finally returned to Cyoria, Zorian was lugging no less than five luggage boxes full of crystalized mana – a lot more than his excursions into the dungeons beneath Knyazov Dveri usually got him. They probably went a little overboard with their crystal collection, but that was fine. One could never have too much money.

Zorian usually stuck to the safer areas of the dungeon he had mapped and explored a long time ago when embarking on his crystal gathering expeditions, but Zach had insisted they explore the dungeon a little deeper than usual this time. Since the other time traveler was so powerful, Zorian had agreed. He was actually somewhat curious if they could find something interesting. In the end, though, they didn’t discover anything too amazing – just several new crystal clumps and some strange cave plants that Zorian couldn’t identify and decided to bring along with him. He could then show them to Kael when the boy finally showed up again. They didn’t stumble upon anything particularly dangerous, which pleased Zorian (who didn’t want to end the restart short because they died to some stupid monster in the dungeon depths) and disappointed Zach (who had been hoping for a good fight to blow off some steam).

Just as they were about to separate and go each to their own homes, Zach suddenly spoke up.

"That was kind of fun," he said. "We should go deeper next time."

"That’s a bad idea," Zorian said. "We already went past the depth where I met this floating mass of eyes that killed me just by looking at me. It’s only luck we didn’t meet anything like that today. Do you really want to cut one of our restarts short by dying to some stupid monster?"

"Ugh. You’re no fun," Zach complained.

"We can always go hunting all the monsters that are terrorizing the city now that aranea are gone," Zorian pointed out. "I already did that with Taiven in previous restarts, but… well, I can never really set myself loose when I’m around her. She knows me too well to accept my growth in skill at face value."

"Taiven. I remember her," Zach said. "She was your date for the evening that time when I invited all the students to my home for the summer festival. Are you close to her?"

"Not in the way you’re probably thinking of. We’re just friends," Zorian said.

"Friends that go on dates together?" Zach said with a grin.

Ugh.

"I’m pretty sure I told you something like this back then, but Taiven isn’t interested in guys like me. I’m not her type," Zorian responded, hoping this was the end of it.

Yeah, fat chance of that.

"Ah, so she shot you down then," Zach nodded sagely. "Well, don’t let it get to you. You can’t get to them all, even with the time loop and its multiple retries. I never managed to talk either Raynie or Akoja to go out on a date with me, for example, no matter what I tried…"

Zorian was sorely tempted to ask Zach about his attempts to woo Akoja, since that was bound to have been amusing, in a train-wreck sort of way. In the end, however, he decided that he really didn’t want to know.

"I hope you realize that I’ve been in this time loop for only a handful of years and that most of that time has been spent while under threat and under pressure from various emergencies," Zorian told him.

"Yes, so?" Zach asked, not understanding his point.

"Aside from picking a girl for the date at the end of the restart, I never went out on any dates," Zorian told him. Did his meetings with Raynie count as dates? No, probably not. "I certainly didn’t go after every single girl in the class like you seem to have done."

Zach stared at him in silence for a few seconds, apparently struck speechless at Zorian’s statement.

"Seriously?!" he eventually asked, his voice incredulous.

"Seriously," Zorian confirmed.

"You’re crazy," Zach told him. "Mark my words, you’ll regret this once we’re out of this time loop. You’ll never get a chance like this in your life!"

"You sound like an old man," Zorian said.

"Well, I am several decades older than you," Zach pointed out. "Listen to your elders, young man, I know what I’m talking about…"

Ten minutes and a lot of pointless banter later, they finally called it a day and separated. Strangely enough, despite the fact he spent the entire day either having his soul slapped around, crawling through dark, monster-infested tunnels or being teased by his fellow time traveler, Zorian found himself happy with how it turned out.

Though he really could have gone without that last conversation – now he couldn’t stop thinking about the various girls in his life.

And he was certain that if Zach knew about it, he would be laughing at his predicament.

The jerk.

Two days after their meeting with Xvim, the man called Zorian in his office to tell him that he had tentatively accepted his story as plausible and to talk about what they should do next. That was… surprisingly fast. It was interesting to experience just how big of an effect Zach’s presence had on people he talked to. Both Xvim and Alanic seemed to be taking him more seriously this time around, just because there was a second person backing his story up. Was it just that multiple people were convincing in a way that a single person wasn’t, or was there more to it?

He was tempted to ask Xvim about the topic directly, but it was unlikely he could offer much insight into the thought processes of his previous incarnations and would force him to admit he was purposely restricting Xvim’s access to relevant information about the time loop.

Regardless, he currently found himself standing in front of Xvim on one of the Academy’s many training grounds, waiting for the lessons to start.

"So," Xvim said. "I see you are here alone. I take it your fellow time traveler declined my offer, then?"

"I’m afraid you didn’t leave the best impression on him the last time you met, sir," Zorian told him respectfully.

"A pity. He could have used my help. But enough about the easily discouraged – we’re here to help you. You say you’ve already worked with me to hone your dimensionalism? Show me, then."

Zorian didn’t have to ask what Xvim was talking about. He took out a large, oval rock from his jacket pocket and outstretched his hand in front of him so Xvim could see the stone.

And then he generated a flawless dimensional boundary around the stone. Visually, nothing happened… but Zorian knew Xvim could tell the difference somehow. He supposed that his ability to sense magic was just that good.

"Passable," Xvim said, passing his judgement. "Keep working on it in your free time, but I suppose I can work with this."

Zorian nodded, and quietly pocketed the stone, his long experience with Xvim allowing him to shrug off his mentor’s ridiculous perfectionism without really getting upset. His dimensional boundary was more than just passable and they both knew it. Zorian had already started to work on forming a dimensional boundary over complex objects like small statues and planned to move on to live, moving insects soon.

"You seem to have rather good grasp on the basic teleport spell, and even know a great many variants," Xvim said. "So today I will show you how to defend against teleportation instead."

"I already know how to ward places against teleportation," pointed out Zorian.

"Truly?" Xvim said. "Let’s test that."

He waved his hands, conjuring four glowing orbs of light that quickly assumed a square formation over a large section of the training ground.

"Ward that area against teleportation, and then I’ll do my best to teleport in," Xvim told him.

Shrugging, Zorian went and did just that. He was quite good at warding, in his humble opinion, but he had no illusions that his wards would actually hold against Xvim’s attempts to sidestep it. Who knows what kind of sophisticated teleportation spells his mentor had at his disposal?

There. Not his best work, perhaps, as he was slightly rushed for time and didn’t have any fancy materials to work with, but that should at least force him to spend some time to-

Without saying a word, Xvim unceremoniously dispelled his teleportation ward with a wide-area dispel and teleported into the previously warded area.

Though he knew it wouldn’t help, Zorian just couldn’t help himself. He just had to say it.

"That’s cheating," he said. "You told me you were going to try teleport in, not that you’d just dispel the ward."

"And an actual attacker would play by the rules, hmm?" Xvim asked him. "You don’t think they would just teleport to the edge of the ward and get rid of it?"

"If you gave me time to prepare, the ward would be anchored to something and be nigh impossible to dispel like that," Zorian said.

"And if you gave me time to prepare I’d bring a couple of mana siphons to starve the ward into collapse," Xvim said pitilessly.

"Ugh. Fine. Can I have another try?" Zorian asked.

"Of course," Xvim nodded. "You can have as many tries as you want."

Two hours later and 5 ward refinements later, Zorian had a warding scheme that Xvim couldn’t just casually dispel whenever he wished. He had to extend the ward far outside the limits of the area indicated by Xvim’s glowing orbs, but apparently that wasn’t cheating either. The man even praised him for finally thinking outside the box.

And then, when he finally couldn’t dispel the ward, Xvim promptly teleported into the area as if the ward had never existed. Zorian wouldn’t have been so upset about that, except that Xvim didn’t appear to have used anything more complex than a basic teleport to do so.

"What happened?" he asked the man. "How did you teleport in with just the regular teleport? There are three stages of the basic teleport, and I made sure to suppress each and every one of them."

"I made a microscopic dimensional gate and used it to extend a ward-suppressing bubble in the middle of the area," Xvim said. "Then I simply teleported into a patch of effectively unprotected land. It is a standard way of getting into heavily-warded areas, though most people use magic items thrown into the area instead of creating a microscopic gate like I did."

"I presume this is because they can’t create a gate like that, even a tiny one," Zorian said.

"Yes," Xvim confirmed. "But I’m hardly unique in this capacity, so it would be best to know how to deal with the tactic."

"Fine," Zorian said wearily. "I admit defeat, master. I don’t know how to ward against teleportation effectively, so please teach me how. And if possible, I’d also like to know how to make the micro-gate thing, too."

"I suspect that level of skill is still beyond you, my student," Xvim told him with a small smile. "But we’ll see. Now listen closely…"

Days passed. Aside from getting lessons from both Alanic and Xvim, Zorian spent his time playing games with Kirielle and creating experimental spell formula blueprints. He sought out Nora Boole’s help for the latter task, discussing his designs with the enthusiastic woman that helped him start on his current path so long ago. She was surprisingly helpful, even after all this time… though it did bring him a bit more attention that he would have liked, since Nora couldn’t shut up about this amazing spell formula talent she had found among the students. With Red Robe out of the picture, however, he didn’t care as much about attracting attention.

He and Zach also went to hunt monsters that kept spilling into Cyoria a couple of times. Zorian already knew where a lot of them made their nests and which paths they took to the surface, and since he didn’t have to feign ignorance around Zach, they thinned out monster populations considerably during those couple of visits to Cyoria’s underground. At Zorian’s request, Zach mostly let Zorian tackle the monsters on his own, only getting himself involved when he had to. Which was embarrassingly often, to Zorian’s annoyance – his combat skills were steadily growing, but he still wasn’t a one man army like Zach was.

Eventually Kael arrived at Imaya’s place, and Zorian brought both him and Taiven into the time loop. Kael was very easy to convince, like usual, but Taiven was still rather incredulous about the idea. Then again, she always was rather hard to convince that he was telling the truth…

Currently he and Zach were just lazing around in an empty meadow, far from any settlement. Well, any inhabited settlement. There was a small village nearby, but it had been completely depopulated during the Weeping, and now the locals considered the entire area cursed and refused to move back in. Zorian didn’t expect that to last for long, but for now the village remained empty and the fields overgrown with grass.

Though the background of the place was rather morbid, it was a very beautiful location otherwise. Zach had really found some nice sites in his decades of wandering the continent.

"So what was Kael being so excited about the other day?" Zach asked him. "I don’t remember him being so excited about the time loop in the previous restart."

"Well, since I no longer have to worry about keeping my head down to stay below Red Robe’s radar, Kael decided he can conscript some of the local alchemists for that research he keeps transferring across restarts," Zorian said.

"That sounds very expensive," Zach said, frowning.

"It probably will be," Zorian said, nodding. "I’d be annoyed at him throwing my money around like that, but in truth I really don’t have much use for most of it. Besides, I can always dip into other sources of cash if I ever run out."

"Other sources?" Zach asked.

"I know the locations of several secret stashes of the Ibasans and the cultists scattered around Cyoria," Zorian said. "And I can always rob their houses too, since I know where a lot of them live and all."

"But that’s stealing," Zach protested.

"Yes?" Zorian confirmed, mystified at Zach’s response. "Why wouldn’t I steal from them? They’re a bunch of murderous invaders."

"Well… I guess it makes sense," Zach admitted. "But it just feels wrong to me, you know?"

"But you didn’t feel uncomfortable helping me violently break into aranean settlements so we could violate their minds for practice and skill theft?" Zorian asked curiously.

Zach winced. "I, uh… didn’t think of it that way. Besides, they’re giant spiders. It’s easier to justify that sort of thing when I can’t read their body cues and they don’t bother to talk to me about it."

"That’s because you had a mind blank on," Zorian noted. "They literally couldn’t talk to you. They did talk to me, though. They asked, even begged us to stop plenty of times."

"Uh, wow," said Zach awkwardly. "That’s… pretty messed up. I always did wonder why you were so reluctant to do attack more than one colony each day…"

Zorian nodded silently. He wasn’t exactly dying of guilt over what they did, but that was one restart he never intended to reenact in the future. There was no way he could keep doing that without becoming a monster.

After a short silence, Zach spoke up again.

"You know, Zorian," he said. "After watching you fight against the aranea in that restart and against other monsters in this one, I couldn’t help but notice your combat magic is a little… basic."

"I guess," Zorian said slowly, wondering what the other boy was getting at.

"It’s not bad!" Zach hastened to add. "It’s pretty good, all things considered. But, well… I don’t think it’s good enough for what we need to do."

"Fair enough," Zorian agreed. "I am working on it, though. I suppose you think I’m not doing enough?"

"Actually, I was going to offer to teach you some more spells," Zach grinned. "I’m not much of a teacher, but I don’t have to be one in order to increase your arsenal of combat spells."

There was no reason to say no – Zorian was always happy to learn more spells, especially restricted ones like most combat spells. Of course, learning spells was not the same as being able to use them effectively in combat, which was why Zorian still relied primarily on classics like magic missile, shield, fireball and the like.

It quickly became obvious that many of Zach’s favorite tricks wouldn’t work well for Zorian. For instance, Zach loved the shield variations that created multiple layers of force instead of a single shielding plane – while extremely effective, they had extreme mana costs associated with them as well. He also loved using spells in large swarms to overwhelm enemy defenses, which was likewise an impractical tactic for Zorian.

Still…

"Okay then, this is one of those fancy hexagon shields you sometimes see in illustrations," said Zach, casting the spell deliberately slowly so Zorian could memorize the movements and chants. A ghostly sphere made of interlocking hexagons sprung out around Zach. "I personally find it too much of a chore, but it sounds like it can work well for someone like you. The main advantage is that if an attack punches through, it will only destroy one hexagon instead of collapsing the entire shield. Though this does make the shield as a whole somewhat weaker than a layered aegis I showed you earlier. Hence me not using it much."

"That does sound more suited to me," Zorian admitted.

"We should probably stop for today," Zach said, dismissing the shield. It promptly dissolved into glittering motes of lights instead of simply winking out of existence like a regular shield did. Pretty.

"Yes," Zorian agreed. "It’s best I spend some time experimenting with stuff you’ve already shown me before I bother learning more new stuff."

"Don’t be afraid to ask for help," Zach said. "Hell, maybe one day you’ll even teach me something."

Zorian cocked his eyebrow at him.

"Who says I can’t teach you something now?" he asked the boy.

"Eh, I meant something related to combat magic," Zach clarified, waving his hand through the air dismissively.

"So did I," Zorian immediately countered.

"Zorian, please," Zach snorted derisively. "Combat magic is my thing. I’ve been working on it for decades now. Even if you know some obscure spell I’ve never encountered, I probably already have something better in my arsenal. Any feat of combat magic you can do, I can either duplicate or exceed."

"Hmm," Zorian hummed thoughtfully. "That calls for a little test, I think. Do you think you’re up to it?"

"Sure," Zach shrugged. "What do you have in mind?"

"See that rock over there?" Zorian said, pointing at a large stone some distance away from them. Zach motioned for Zorian to continue. "Keep an eye on it while I cast my spell."

"Alright," Zach said, retreating to a healthy distance and positioning himself so he could easily see both Zorian and the stone at the same time.

Slowly and carefully, Zorian went through the motions of the spell. Zach looked torn between confusion and amusement, since the spell was clearly just a magic missile, but said nothing and opted to just watch instead.

Zorian finished the spell. For a second, nothing seemed to happen.

Then the rock Zorian designated as his target exploded into a shower of stone fragments, causing Zach to flinch in surprise at the sudden, unexpected detonation.

"What?" he asked uncomprehendingly. He gave Zorian a suspicious glance. "Did you put an explosive glyph on that stone beforehand or something?"

"Nope," Zorian said, grinning widely. "I cast an invisible magic missile at it."

"Invisible magic missile?" Zach asked slowly.

"Didn’t you know?" Zorian asked innocently. "A flawlessly cast force spell is perfectly transparent, making it effectively invisible. It took me quite a while to achieve this, but I’m sure a master combat mage like yourself has mastered this years ago."

Zach stared at him for a second before shifting his gaze to the shattered rock the magic missile had demolished.

"So," Zorian began, smiling brightly. "How long do you think it will take you to duplicate that?"

Three days later, Zorian was kind of regretting one-upping Zach like he did. Ever since then, his fellow time traveler seemed obsessed with duplicating Zorian’s feat, refusing to understand that this wasn’t something you could achieve by working on it really hard for a couple of days.

"I’m not even sure why you’re so upset about this," Zorian finally told him. "It’s just a neat trick that people like you have no need for anyway."

"It’s the principle of the thing," Zach said, casting another magic missile at the tree in front of him. Zorian didn’t think the poor plant would last long if this continued for long. "I’m the combat guy. It’s my thing, and I’ve been at this for decades longer than you! I can’t let you outdo me in this area."

Zorian sighed at the explanation. He was getting uncomfortable flashbacks to Taiven’s little episode when she figured out how good of a combat mage he is. Was this a general combat mage thing?

Well, at least Zach was not crying over it like Taiven had… that would have been really awkward.

"At least let me show you how to do it properly," Zorian said. "You’ll never succeed by going at it in your current fashion."

Zach stopped for a second, considering it, before shaking his head.

"Maybe if I still can’t figure it out in a few days," he said. "I like to figure these sorts of things on my own."

Oh well, he tried. With a helpless shrug, Zorian left Zach to his pointless attempts at brute-forcing a problem that required finesse to solve.

Eventually Zach either ran out of mana or got sick of casting magic missile – probably just got sick of it, considering his monstrous mana reserves – and decided to sit down next to Zorian for a while.

"Do you mind if I ask you a little about what you remember about the start of the time loop?" Zorian asked after a while.

"Feel free," Zach shrugged. "But keep in mind that the beginning of the time loop is very fuzzy in my mind and I keep having trouble remembering specific things about it."

"Yeah, you mentioned that," Zorian nodded. "But I’ve been thinking about what you’ve said, both recently and back when you still thought I was unaware of the time loop…"

"That was an asshole thing for you to do," said Zach, interrupting him. "I know I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating."

"You’re never going to shut up about it, are you?" Zorian complained.

"Nope," Zach confirmed.

"Anyway," Zorian said, deciding there was no point in continuing that topic, "I remember you mentioning how you kept trying to convince everyone who would listen about the existence of the time loop. What was your logic behind that?"

"I found myself in some crazy time loop and there was an invasion of the city at the end of every month," Zach said. "Of course I wanted some help."

"So just to confirm…" Zorian tried. "Your earliest memories are of being confused by the situation you found yourself in, yes? The time loop was strange and novel to you, not something that felt natural?"

Zach frowned, lost in thought for a while.

"Yeah," Zach nodded. "Sounds about right. It doesn’t feel like the time loop was something I was informed of in advance or specifically groomed for, if that’s what you’re asking. I guess that’s a point in favor of Red Robe being the true Controller, huh?"

"Him being the original Controller still makes no sense to me," Zorian said. "Why would he tolerate you all this time if you weren’t somehow critical for the loop? Do you remember ever experiencing a time loop being cut short for no apparent reason?"

"No," Zach said. "I would have remembered something that abnormal. I did experience a few unexpected restarts while sleeping, but I’m pretty sure those were due to assassinations."

"Hmm. I doubt Red Robe never died prematurely, so that means the time loop only resets when you die. That’s a pretty obvious indicator it considers you more important than the two of us."

They continued discussing the issue for another ten minutes of so, with no solid conclusions by the end. Eventually they shifted to the topic of how to convince people around them they really were in a time loop and Zach started sharing some of his more amusing failures in his initial quest for allies…

"You told Benisek that you’re a time traveler?" Zorian asked incredulously. "I can’t believe you thought it was a good idea."

"Shut up," Zach said. "Aren’t you friends with the guy?"

"Eh, sort of," Zorian admitted. "But I’m afraid our friendship didn’t quite survive the time loop and its influence on me. I kind of feel bad, since it’s not his fault he can’t learn and grow like I do, but…"

"You don’t have to explain that to me," Zach said. "I used to be casual friends with a lot of our classmates, but I feel completely alienated from most of them by now."

"Right," said Zorian. Best not to dwell on such a depressing topic. "So what exactly happened when you told Benisek about the time loop?"

"I thought he took it quite well at first," Zach said. "Then I came to school the day after and found that he told half the school I’ve gone completely nuts. Though funnily, everyone seemed to have a different idea of what kind of crazy thing I believed in…"

"Yeah, that sounds like Benisek," Zorian nodded. "So when you said you tried to convince everyone, you really meant everyone, huh?"

"Well, obviously I couldn’t try to convince literally everyone in Cyoria," Zach said. "But it was a lot of people. Students, teachers, city authorities, you name it."

Zorian tapped his fingers against the ground around him, trying to think of some person from their class whose reaction to the time loop would have been amusing. Oh!

"How about Veyers?" he asked Zach. "Did you ever tell him about the time loop?"

"Who?" Zach asked, looking confused.

"Veyers Boranova," Zorian said. "You know, the guy who punched you in the face during class in our second year? He got expelled from the academy before the time loop began, but he had technically been our classmate, so I thought…"

He stopped when he noticed Zach was giving him a strange look.

"What is it?" he asked.

"Zorian… who the hell are you talking about?" Zach asked him slowly.

Zorian stared at Zach for a while, before he began to explain things in more detail.

"I’m talking about Veyers Boranova," he said. "Member of Noble House Boranova and our classmate during the first two years of our education. Tall, blond, and with vivid orange eyes that had a slitted iris and made him look sort of like a snake. You two hated each other… well, just about everyone hated the asshole, and he seemed to hate everyone around him, so I guess that doesn’t say much but… Anyway, the point is that there is no way you could have forgotten the guy!"

Zach shifted in place uncomfortably.

"I have no idea who you’re talking about," he finally admitted.

Wow. Now that… that was very, very interesting.

57. Unwanted

Zorian stared intently at the two sheets of paper in front of him, methodically going through every single line of text and marking down the matches and differences between the two documents. Zach sat beside him, watching him work with a thoughtful frown, not saying anything.

Despite the oppressive silence and serious mood, the two papers were simple lists of names. Classmates, teachers, public officials… each of them had listed anyone they considered even remotely important on their own sheet of paper, with no input from the other whatsoever. It was Zorian’s hope that by comparing the two lists with each other, they could see if there were any other obvious holes in Zach’s memory. Or Zorian’s memory, for that matter – it was unlikely, but Zorian didn’t entirely discount the idea that his own mind had been tampered with too.

"Is this really necessary?" Zach asked him. "Maybe I just forgot the guy?"

Zorian looked up from the two papers to give Zach an incredulous look.

"Hey, I’m just saying!" Zach protested. "I mean, it has been a pretty long time since I’ve been stuck in this time loop, and he was expelled before the time loop even began. I’d have to specifically seek him out, and what reason did I have to do that? We apparently didn’t even like each other, if I understood you correctly."

"Please," Zorian scoffed. There was no doubt in Zorian’s mind that Zach’s curious inability to remember anything about Veyers Boranova was artificial in nature. "I can understand you putting the jerk completely out of your mind. Hell, I pretty much did that myself. But to completely forget that he existed at all and everything about him?"

Yet that was precisely what happened, if Zach was to be believed. Zorian could only conclude someone had scrubbed Zach’s mind clean of everything related to the Boranova heir.

He wasn’t sure why Zach was so unwilling to accept that conclusion, though he did have his suspicions…

Zorian returned to his task of matching names for a while, eventually stumbling onto a name on Zach’s list that he was unfamiliar with. That was not very surprising, though – Zach’s list was way longer than Zorian’s, as the other boy was far more social than he was.

"Who is this Ilinim Kam guy?" he asked Zach.

"He’s was a student in one of the other groups during our first two years in the academy," Zach said. "We used to hang out together sometimes. You weren’t very friendly back then, so that’s probably why you don’t remember him. I don’t think you ever mingled with the other groups, did you?"

"No," Zorian admitted. "I was always very busy back then. I barely interacted with my own classmates, nevermind people I had no reason to talk to. Still, I did take a brief look at the other groups, back when I was investigating our classmates for potential Red Robe candidates. I don’t remember ever seeing any Ilinim Kam."

"Well, I did say he was a student," Zach pointed out. "He failed the certification exam and dropped out of the academy."

Well, that would explain it. He had completely ignored people who failed to advance into the third year, thinking them irrelevant. That’s how he’d missed Veyers too, actually.

"We’re going to have to make a list of people like that and see if it holds any more surprises for us," Zorian noted. Scanning the names below Ilinim, he noticed quite a few names from other student groups. "That said, I can’t help but notice that you know quite a few students outside our class…"

"I know what you’re getting at," Zach interrupted him. "You’re going to point out how I can list half of our year mates on demand but can’t remember a guy that went to our class."

"And?" Zorian prodded. "Your response to that?"

"You’re right. There is definitely something abnormal about me forgetting this Veyers guy like that. You happy now?" Zach said resignedly.

"Yes," Zorian nodded. "Now tell me who this Anixa Pravoski girl is…"

For the next hour and a half, they slowly went through the two lists of names, searching for any peculiarities. The good news was that Zach didn’t have any other glaring holes in his memories, as far as Zorian could tell. Only Veyers seemed to be a total blank.

"So… do you think Veyers is Red Robe?" Zach asked cautiously.

"That’s the question, isn’t it?" Zorian said, taking off his glasses and inspecting them for dirt. It was mostly a way to waste some time while he thought about what he wanted to say.

"Yes it is," said Zach slowly, as if talking to an idiot. "So why don’t you try answering it."

Ugh. So impatient.

"It’s possible," Zorian said. "But I don’t know. I’m kind of bothered by some things about this."

"Like what?" Zach asked curiously.

"Like the fact Veyers apparently wiped only himself out of your memory," Zorian said. "That is so… amateurish. I would expect more from Red Robe. I mean, if it was me doing something like this, I would have blanked out your recollection of another four or five random students to muddy the trail a bit."

Zach gave him an unamused look.

"You know, Zorian, sometimes I can’t help but wonder if you’re actually Red Robe," he said.

"You saw both of us in the same room, though," Zorian pointed out, completely unconcerned by Zach’s words.

"I already know Red Robe can make simulacrums, so that proves nothing," Zach said, folding his hands over his chest.

Zorian made a mental note to ask Zach to teach him how to cast the simulacrum spell, since it was unlikely that Zach had never learned the spell in all the decades he had spent in the time loop and Zorian really wanted the spell. They had more pressing issues at the moment, however, so he reluctantly set the idea aside for the moment.

"The second thing that bothers me is that it’s hard to swallow that someone like Veyers could be the relatively discreet and patient Red Robe," Zorian said, dragging the conversation back to the topic of Veyers. "I mean, he lost his temper at a disciplinary hearing, for gods' sake! He is even more impulsive than you are!"

"Hey…" Zach protested.

"Then again, neither of us are very similar to the person we used to be before the time loop, are we?" admitted Zorian.

"There are plenty of similarities," Zach said, shaking his head in disagreement. "But I do think that him having a short fuse before the time loop proves little. You were also rather unpleasant to interact with before the time loop, and look at you now…"

This was probably payback for Zorian’s earlier comment about Zach’s impulsiveness. He supposed he did kind of deserve that…

"I had reasons for behaving like I did," Zorian noted.

"Who says Veyers didn’t?" Zach asked. "I’m sure he felt his behavior was totally justified, too."

That was true, Zorian conceded. In fact, it could be that the nature of the time loop removed most of Veyers' problems and allowed him to calm down. Much like it did for Zorian himself.

"I suppose you’re right," said Zorian after a pause. He shook his head to clear his thoughts a little. "I think that, in the end, it doesn’t really matter whether Veyers is Red Robe or not. The fact you have no memory of him means he’s someone Red Robe didn’t want you to interact with, which makes him automatically important. We have to check him out."

"Oh, no argument about that," Zach nodded. "Though this makes me wonder… if Veyers really is Red Robe, what will we find when we track him down?"

"Depending on what method Red Robe used to leave the time loop, we would expect his counterpart in this world to be either a soulless corpse like the aranea or an unaware person no different from the rest of the people around us," Zorian said.

"Why a soulless corpse?" Zach asked, baffled.

"Well, I’ve been thinking of the ways Red Robe could have tricked the Guardian into letting him out of the time loop reality, and I realized he might have just asked for his soul to be shoved into his real world body," explained Zorian. "For a necromancer like him, it might be fairly trivial to just eject his old soul out of the body and continue as normal from there."

"Would the Guardian agree to do that, though?" Zach asked. " Can it even do that? It did claim it would have to switch souls if the body in the real world already has one."

"I can’t give you an answer to any of that, obviously," Zorian huffed. "I don’t know enough about either necromancy or the Guardian’s capabilities to say if it’s possible. It’s just an idea I’ve been considering, that’s all."

For a while, they kept throwing various possibilities at each other. It was all just wild speculation, however, so they gave up on that discussion as pointless soon enough. They would have to wait until they found Veyers before they could properly consider the issue.

A brief silence descended between them, each of them lost in their own thoughts.

"Are you sure you don’t want me to take a look at your mind?" asked Zorian after a while.

"What?" Zach asked with incomprehension, jolted out of his musings by Zorian’s question. A second later, when he finally processed the question, his face contorted into an annoyed glare. "No. Absolutely not. I’m sorry, but I already had my brain scrambled by one mind mage and I don’t want to be at the mercy of another. Besides, what would be the point? I may not be an expert on mind magic like you, but even I know there is no way to restore magically erased memories. I’d be letting you rummage through my mind for nothing."

"Well, it’s true that a properly blanked out memory is irrecoverable," Zorian admitted easily. "But why assume Red Robe executed the mind wipe flawlessly? I saw his mind magic in action at one point, when he tried to use it against me, and he wasn’t all that good with it. There is a good chance he missed something."

"You have a very skewed image what constitutes as good when it comes to mind magic," Zach told him. "It’s not Red Robe that’s bad, it’s you who is terrifyingly good at it. And the answer is still no."

"What if I tell you that you could still be under the magic’s influence?" Zorian asked.

Zach gave him a surprised look.

"What the hell do you mean by that!?" Zach asked him with a raised voice.

"It’s hard to believe you never encountered anyone mentioning Veyers in one of the previous restarts," Zorian pointed out with a sigh. "He’s not often mentioned, but people do talk about him on occasion. At some point over the decades, you really should have noticed there was a guy everyone in our class knew of, yet you have no memories of."

"Well… I was only rarely in class after some point…" Zach tried.

"Zach, you’ve been strangely evasive about Veyers this entire time," Zorian told him bluntly. "Hell, not long ago you again floated the idea you may have just forgotten the guy. As if it hadn’t been abundantly obvious by then that the guy had been purposely deleted out of your memories. I would have expected you to be excited about discovering something so important, but instead you seemed really keen to dismiss the whole thing."

"Zorian, you’re overcomplicating things again," Zach complained. "Please speak plainly."

"Fine. You’re probably under some kind of compulsion not to focus on the topic of Veyers," Zorian said. "And possibly forget about it after a while, if it was ever forcibly pointed out to you. We’ll have to see if you still remember this conversation tomorrow."

"Don’t even joke about that last part, Zorian," Zach warned him.

"It’s what I’d have done in Red Robe’s place," Zorian said, shrugging. "But I have a feeling you don’t have to worry about that. If Red Robe didn’t bother masking his memory wipe better, it’s likely that he didn’t bother with something so relatively sophisticated. The compulsion to dismiss the topic itself might have been enough, anyway. I mean, if it hadn’t been for me being so pushy and insistent about the hole in your memory when it comes to Veyers, you’d have likely dismissed it and eventually put it out of your mind."

Zach hissed something under his breath that Zorian didn’t quite catch but which he was pretty sure were insults and swear words directed at Red Robe. Something about his canine ancestry and fondness for male genitals. Regardless, Zach spent the next several minutes pacing around the area and muttering to himself.

He looked dangerously unstable, if Zorian was to be perfectly honest. And it wasn’t the first time Zach had done something like that, either. It occurred to Zorian that all those decades Zach spent in the time loop, with only limited ability to interact with other people, must have been harder on his fellow time traveler than he had supposed.

How much worse, then, would he have ended up if the time loop worked as intended and he stayed inside for hundreds of years or however long it was supposed to last? Maybe the Ghost Serpent was onto something…

Finally, Zach stopped his pacing, ran his hand through his hair in a frustrated manner, and turned to Zorian.

"I can’t believe I’m doing this," he said. "I really can’t, but I don’t seem to have a choice. Zorian?"

"Yes?" Zorian asked, curiously. Was Zach finally going to let him take a look at his mind? Probably, he couldn’t imagine what else-

"I want you to bring me to Xvim again," Zach said, a sour expression on his face. "I’m going to need those mind magic lessons after all."

"Oh," Zorian said, blinking in surprise. He didn’t expect that. "Yeah. Sure."

He wasn’t sure whether to be amused or annoyed by this outcome. It wasn’t what he had been trying to do by broaching the topic, but at least it was bound to bring plenty of amusement to him in the days to come.

The next three days proved to be rather frustrating. On the bright side, Zach did not forget about Veyers after a while, so any compulsion he might be laboring under did not extend that far. Unfortunately, that’s where the good news ended. Their search for Veyers had gone nowhere. They knew the boy’s name, what he looked like and where his home was, but they still couldn’t find him. In the end Zach and Zorian blanketed the entire city with divinations, and they still couldn’t track him down. Either Veyers was under some heavy anti-divination wards, or he was not anywhere near the city of Cyoria.

To make matters worse, nobody seemed to know anything about the guy, not even the various authorities. Zorian knew from questioning academy officials (and reading their minds when they refused to give him an answer) that Veyers had never interacted with the academy again after his expulsion, even though he was supposed to come and sign some documents to finalize things. The academy sent a message to Veyers' House to complain about that, but received no response whatsoever. The police, for their part, received no report that the boy was dead or missing, despite the fact Veyers hadn’t been seen in weeks.

They even tried contacting Noble House Boranova directly to see if they could arrange for a meeting. Sadly, their representatives told them to get lost. Not in those words, admittedly, they were actually rather polite, but they had still made it clear they didn’t want to talk to them.

All in all, investigating Veyers was proving to be a lot harder than Zorian initially thought it would be. At this point in time, however, Zorian didn’t find that either surprising or particularly disappointing. When was anything about this time loop simple?

Though it was a long-shot, Zorian decided to ask their classmates about Veyers to see if they knew something. At the very least, Benisek was bound to have heard some rumors about the disgraced Boranova heir, even if there was no telling how accurate any of them were.

"You’re on time for once, I see," Akoja told him as he approached the classroom. She marked his arrival on the attendance sheet she was holding in her hands. "A positive sign. What’s the occasion?"

Zorian thought about pointing out he was actually incredibly early, but decided not to. Let her have it her way this once.

"I actually wanted to talk to you," he said.

"Me!?" she asked incredulously, giving him a wide-eyed look. "Err, I mean, sure… what did you want to talk about?"

"Veyers Boranova," Zorian said.

"Him?" she asked in distaste. He felt a twinge of disappointment coming off her. "You really know how to pick a topic, Zorian."

"Sorry," he said, genuinely a little remorseful. He probably gave her a bit of false hope he would ask her out or something, if the feelings he got from her were of any indication. Not what he had intended. "I just thought you might know something about him, since you’re the class representative and all."

"To be honest, I did my best to put him out of my mind," she said. "I can’t tell you how glad I was when I heard he got expelled."

"Well, about that… do you know what exactly he did on that hearing to get expelled?" Zorian asked.

"No. Nobody does," Akoja said, shaking her head. "I heard people saying he attacked one of the judges, but that’s probably rubbish. That’s a little too much, even for Veyers."

As much as Zorian didn’t like the guy, he had to admit there was truth to that. Veyers usually had some restraint around teachers and other people that had power over him, so he probably wouldn’t have done something stupid like attacking a judge deciding his own fate.

But he wouldn’t put it past him, either.

"So you’ve never seen him lately?" Zorian asked. "Never heard about anything about what he did afterwards?"

"No and no," she answered, giving him a suspicious look. "Why the sudden interest in Veyers?"

"Zach wants to talk to him about something, but can’t find him," Zorian said. "I agreed to help so I’m asking people if they know something."

He sensed a twinge of annoyance from her when Zach’s name came up. Him being suddenly friendly with Zach didn’t sit well with her, he could tell, but to her credit she didn’t say anything about it. One of these days he really had to ask her why she disliked the boy so much.

"Maybe his House placed him under private arrest when he got expelled?" Akoja offered. "It was quite a scandal for them, so they probably don’t want him walking around in public for a while. At least until things died down a little. Knowing Veyers, he probably couldn’t handle people talking behind his back and mocking him. He’d lose his temper and make things worse than they already were."

"Maybe," Zorian agreed. It was also possible that Veyers was currently a soulless corpse and his House didn’t want that to get out for whatever reason. He and Zach were definitely breaking into the Boranova estate at some point if they failed to find any other clues to Veyers' location. "It would make sense, but his House didn’t seem to care about his outbursts before, so…"

"Yes," Akoja agreed, nodding. "It’s shameful how much they let him get away with. I can’t even imagine what my parents would do to me if I tried to behave like that. Getting myself expelled? I would probably be sent away to one of our rural relatives as punishment. I bet Veyers would have learned how to rein in his temper real quick if he had to work at a farm every time he did something stupid."

Wow. Akoja’s parents were pretty strict apparently. No wonder she turned out the way she did.

"How do you think your parents would react if you got expelled?" Akoja asked curiously.

"I… honestly don’t know," Zorian admitted. "Truthfully, I think I’d be too afraid to find out. They already don’t like me much, and academic success is the only thing I really have going for me in their eyes. If that happened, I’d just gather all my savings and portable belongings and leave the country or something. I wouldn’t even bother coming back home."

Akoja stared at him in surprise for a moment, at loss how to respond.

"Ah…" she finally said, a little uncomfortably. "I see…"

"Don’t worry about it," said Zorian. "It’s all highly theoretical, since there is no way I’m getting expelled like Veyers. One last question. This may sound strange, but do you know what Veyers was capable of?"

Akoja still stared at him thoughtfully for a moment, probably still focused on his previous admission. He was tempted to take a quick peek at her thoughts to see what she was considering, but managed to restrain himself. If he started looking at people’s surface thoughts for no reason, where would it all end? Besides, looking at the thoughts of a girl that had a crush on him was probably a bad idea to begin with.

"I assume you mean magically speaking," she said finally. Zorian nodded. "Well, his atrocious behavior aside, I do know he was actually doing well in terms of academics. I’m guessing his House hired some private instructor to teach him, or maybe even did the teaching themselves. I also know he could make fire without chants and gestures, and really easily too, but that is probably not unusual for a Boranova."

Zorian nodded. Noble House Boranova was famous for their mastery of fire magic. The orange, slitted eyes that all core members of the House shared hinted that this was a result of some bloodline or enhancement ritual, rather than secret training method, but there was no publically available information on the specifics of it. Houses were notoriously secretive about such things.

Thanking Akoja for her time and patience, Zorian continued on into the classroom. There were still a couple of people he wanted to try his luck with.

"Hello, Benisek," Zorian said, sitting down next to the boy. "Do you mind if I ask you about something?"

"Ah! So the great Zorian finally deigns to come back to his old friend!" Benisek said. "And here I thought you had replaced me with Zach!"

If Benisek hadn’t been smiling widely when he said that, Zorian might have been actually worried that the boy felt slighted. As it was, he just thanked his luck that Benisek was a very laid back person who didn’t take things personally.

It also helped that they weren’t terribly close friends, in all honesty. Though that was Zorian’s fault more than Benisek’s.

"Don’t be so melodramatic," Zorian told him. "You can have more than one friend, you know?"

"True, true," Benisek agreed readily. "And you look way happier this year than you usually are, too. Got a girlfriend too, perhaps?"

He wiggled his eyebrows at Zorian suggestively, causing Zorian to roll his eyes at him.

"Fine, don’t tell me," Benisek scoffed. "You know I’ll find out on my own soon enough, right?"

"Do you know anything about Veyers?" Zorian asked him, ignoring the question.

"Veyers?" Benisek asked. "Ah, I guess you only now found out why he’s not with us this year. I keep forgetting you live in the middle of nowhere and don’t really talk to people. Anyway, yeah, he lost his temper on his disciplinary hearing and got expelled. I guess even Noble Houses have only so much political capital to burn on people like him."

"Do you know what he actually did?" Zorian asked.

Benisek didn’t. He knew all sorts of speculation about it, such as the one that he set fire to one of the written witness testimonies or the one where he slept with the daughter of some high-ranking academy official and bragged about it during the hearing. They were all heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend sort of story, though, and Zorian didn’t put much stock to them.

Unsurprisingly, Benisek had no idea where Veyers could be at the moment. That’s not to say he didn’t have anything useful to offer in regards to the topic, though.

"You know, you’re not the only person asking for him," Benisek said. "I heard there are people discreetly asking people about his whereabouts for a while now. They’re offering money to anyone who can prove they’ve seen him."

Huh.

"Do you know who they are?" Zorian asked.

"I’d already have mentioned it if I did," Benisek said, shrugging. "But looking at the most likely suspects… I think it’s his House that hired them. If it’s not them, it’s unlikely they would let someone basically offer a bounty on one of their own."

"Maybe they don’t know?" offered Zorian.

"If I know, there is no way they missed it," Benisek said, shaking his head. "I’m just a curious amateur. Noble Houses all have actual professionals on their payroll."

So Veyers' House was looking for him too? Curious. Strange that they could not find him – if Noble House Boranova had its own intelligence network like Benisek claimed, they really should have tracked him down by now. Especially since they were his kin, and thus presumably knew him far better than Zorian ever could.

He thanked Benisek for the information and moved on.

"No, I don’t know what Veyers did to get expelled," Tinami said. "It didn’t have to be anything particularly heinous, though. If the academy actually puts you through a disciplinary hearing, they are already thoroughly sick of you. He probably shouted at the judge or something similarly minor, and they decided it was as good an excuse as any. It’s really a shame he couldn’t control himself more, the last thing his House needs is something like this."

"Why?" Zorian asked curiously. "What’s wrong with his House?"

"Noble House Boranova is a military house," Tinami said. "They suffered a lot in the Splinter Wars."

"Oh, is this something like what happened to House Noveda?" Zorian asked. "Were they too robbed of their assets?"

"Ah, you know about that…" she said. "No, it’s not like that. They weathered the Weeping without losing too many people, unlike the Noveda. But they still suffered crippling losses in the dissolution of the Old Alliance, and they’re a long way from recovering. Having the designated heir of the House behave like that… that’s not going to help the other Houses take them seriously again."

Hmm… so House Boranova was weakened, but not so much that people could loot them the way they did the Novedas. It probably wasn’t in their interest for Cyoria to be destroyed, so why would Veyers support the invasion?

"Perhaps he just doesn’t care about his House?" Zorian mused out loud.

"I’d normally scoff at the idea of a Noble House heir that doesn’t care about the House they had spent their entire life being groomed to take over at some point, but there is clearly something funny going on with Veyers," Tinami said. "So I don’t know. It’s possible."

While her explanations were interesting, Tinami ultimately couldn’t tell Zorian where to find Veyers. And since Tinami was the last of his classmates he had planned to ask about the quarrelsome boy, this was the end of his current investigation. It had been… surprisingly helpful.

He left the class to go find Zach and report his findings. The other time traveler had decided to talk to Xvim about getting mind magic lessons instead of accompanying Zorian to class, but he should be long done by now.

Surprisingly, when Zorian actually reached Xvim’s office he found that Zach was still inside. That could be either very good or very bad.

He didn’t have to wait long, thankfully. About fifteen minutes after he arrived, the door opened and Zach stepped out of the office.

"So, how did it go?" Zorian asked.

"Surprisingly bearable," Zach said. "He was still kind of insulting, but he didn’t outright provoke me this time."

"Yeah, that’s pretty much his real personality as far as I can tell," Zorian said. "So did he agree to teach you?"

"Yes," Zach confirmed. "It was easy. We hashed out an agreement about that in the first fifteen minutes or so."

"So what have you been doing all this time?" Zorian asked curiously. "Did he decide to hold your first lesson right then and there?"

"No. Yes," Zach said. Zorian gave him an unamused look. "What I mean is, he did give me a brief lesson there at the end, but that’s not why it took so long. We spent most of the time arguing about your theory I have a compulsion placed on me. He thought it was stupid of me not to have someone check up on me right away to see if there is any truth in that."

"Well, he’s right," Zorian bluntly told him. "Even if you don’t trust me to do it, you should at least go pay one of the certified mind mages in the employ of the Mage Guild to examine you. They’re quite reliable. I used their services myself at one point."

"I actually trust you more than I do experts like those," Zach said. "It’s just… I don’t want anyone using mind magic on me. Having someone looking through my thoughts is a last resort as far as I’m concerned. This compulsion, if it even exists, clearly isn’t a pressing issue. It’s pretty much rendered irrelevant at this point. I’d rather take the time to learn how to deal with this myself."

"If you say so," Zorian said. They had this argument before. There was no need for another rehash. "In other news, I’ve been asking around our class about Veyers…"

He told Zach about the scarce few things he found out from questioning their classmates. The most important fact, of course, was that Noble House Boranova appeared to be searching for Veyers as well.

"Damn," Zach said. "I guess there is no point in breaking into their estate, now, is there?"

"If we still can’t track down Veyers by the end of the restart, we should still probably do it. Just to make sure, you know? But if they really are looking for him, then he obviously isn’t there."

"I don’t understand," Zach said. "A person like him is too distinctive to just disappear. His eyes alone ensure most people would note his passage wherever he goes. Yet it’s like the earth swallowed him. Maybe he physically walked out of the loop?"

Zorian frowned. Theoretically? It could happen. The copies of people inside the time loop were every bit as real as their counterparts in the real world. Barring Guardian intervention, it should be possible for a copy to simply step out of the time loop reality and into the real world.

"I guess it’s possible, but we shouldn’t jump to conclusions," Zorian said. "Let’s try to locate him first and see what happens."

"I don’t see what we can try that we haven’t done already," Zach shrugged. "Aside from breaking into the Boranova estate, that is, and we already know that’s probably a dead end."

"The restart is still young," Zorian said, though he largely agreed with Zach. "We’ll wait and see if he turns up somewhere. Perhaps his House, with their greater manpower and resources, can track him down for us."

It wasn’t like they didn’t have anything to do in the meantime.

Over the next week, both Zorian and Zach slowly advanced their lessons with Xvim and Alanic and kept an eye for Veyers. Sadly, the Boranova heir never turned up anywhere and their attempts to find him went nowhere. They even visited many of the nearby settlements near Cyoria in their search, only to come back empty handed.

Zach floated the idea that maybe Veyers purposely went somewhere far, far away instead of sticking to the city and its surroundings. In that case, they may have more luck in tracking him down at the beginning of the restart, before he had time to get too far from familiar ground. It was as good idea as any they had, but it was of no help to them at the moment. And it also didn’t explain why Veyers would want to do something like that.

Despite their issues with finding Veyers, Zorian was happy. They finally had a real clue about Red Robe’s identity, Alanic agreed to teach him more about soul magic and his personal projects were going along nicely. He had even managed to convince Taiven to accept him and Zach as time travelers, despite being very suspicious initially.

Initially, the point of making Taiven aware of the time loop was so that they could continue with their project of making a perfect training plan for Taiven. However, once Taiven was actually convinced he was telling the truth, she decided she could also help him by finding him someone of his own skill level to spar with – she claimed it was the best way to really practice combat magic, and that he was going to start stagnating if he only kept fighting training dummies and dungeon monsters. To that end, she first pitted him against her two teammates and then against some of her former student peers that she managed to convince to spar with him.

He won about half of the fights. He could have won them all, of course, but using his mental powers or various magic items was against the spirit of the spars.

"I’m tempted to ask you for a spar," Taiven told him one day. "But a real one, not these ones where you limit yourself to invocations. But I have a feeling I’d get my butt kicked and I don’t think my pride can take that."

"Yeah, if I took you on with no holding back I’d just batter down your mental barriers and blast your mind into unconsciousness," Zorian said. "You don’t have the power to take me down before I dismantle your mental defenses. You did once, but not anymore."

"Yeah, I figured it was like that," she nodded. "And don’t even get me started on all those bombs you’re carrying. I’ve seen the tests you and Kael did with all those experimental potion grenades. You could probably beat me just by saturating the entire area with those, considering how many of them you made. Are they as expensive as they look?"

"Worse," scowled Zorian. "The grenades themselves aren’t that bad, but the experimentation needed to refine their recipe into something that effective is murder on my money stash. I’m actually running out of cash these days. Looks like I’ll have to start robbing the invaders after all."

Taiven shook her head ruefully.

"You say that so casually," she said. "I think this time loop thing is having a bad influence on you."

"Funny, most people think the time loop improved my behavior," said Zorian with a smile. "But yes, I guess in some ways I really am getting worse."

After a brief discussion about the morality of the time loop and permissible behavior for people aware of the restarts, the two of them said their goodbyes to each other and went to their respective homes.

The next morning Zorian and Zach entered Xvim’s office, thinking they would be having yet another routine lesson from the man. But they were wrong, because once they arrived, they found the office already occupied by someone.

It was Alanic. He and Xvim were casually chatting with each other when Zach and Zorian arrived, sipping tea and generally behaving like long lost friends that were finally reunited.

"Ah, mister Kazinski and mister Noveda," Xvim said. "Just the people we were looking for. Go ahead and sit down. Mister Zosk and I were just exchanging some very interesting stories…"

58. Questions and Answers

Xvim’s office was fairly typical as far as teacher offices went – a small room dominated by a large table and several bookcases, with much of the free space taken up by mysterious stacks of paper that every teacher piled up in their offices for some reason. It was relatively cramped even in normal circumstances; with four people inside, it crossed solidly into uncomfortable territory. There weren’t even enough chairs for everyone! Though that was admittedly something easily solved with basic conjuration spells.

Of course, much of Zorian’s current discomfort stemmed from the nature of the meeting he and Zach had stumbled upon, rather than the lack of elbow room. Interaction between Xvim and Alanic could make the rest of this restart very uncomfortable, or even force a premature end to it. Still, the suddenness of this development, as well as the cramped nature of their current environment, greatly amplified the threatening undertones of the meeting and Zorian couldn’t help but wonder how much of it was deliberate. Did Xvim and Alanic purposely arrange for this meeting to happen here and now in order to exert additional psychological pressure on them? Bit of a risky move, if they did. Some people reacted really badly to being cornered. Zorian would not have pulled such a stunt, were he in their place.

But no matter. It could be that he was reading too much into it and they just didn’t consider things that way. Besides, it wasn’t like they were really cornered. Zorian could start a new iteration at any time, after all.

After exchanging an uncertain look between themselves, Zach and Zorian greeted their two teachers back, moved into the room and made themselves as comfortable as possible under the circumstances.

As they settled into the room, Zorian found himself wondering what kind of information the two men had exchanged. Alanic had probably told Xvim everything he knew about them, but that honestly wasn’t much and mostly just proved that Zach and Zorian were keeping some things secret from Xvim. Xvim, on the other hand, had a far more complete picture of what was going on than Alanic… but would he really tell the warrior priest about the time loop? And would the other man believe Xvim, even if he would?

Considering the way the two teachers were watching him, he reckoned he would find out the answers to those questions in very short order.

"Surprised to see me here?" Alanic asked them challengingly.

"Yes," Zorian freely admitted. "It’s very… interesting to see you here. I didn’t think you and Xvim knew each other."

"We don’t," Alanic shrugged. "I grew concerned about some things about you two and knew you would never tell me the truth. So I tracked him down to see if he knew something that could help me."

"And you just happened to visit him at the time we have a session scheduled with him?" Zorian asked, raising his eyebrow at the man. "That’s some curiously lucky timing."

"Luck has nothing to do with it. This is actually my third meeting with your mentor, mister Kazinski," Alanic admitted readily. "I came here today specifically to meet with you two."

"Ah," Zorian nodded.

"Alright, let’s stop dancing around each other and get to the point," Zach said, apparently not in the mood for verbal sparring. He turned towards Xvim. "How much did you tell him?"

"Given the nature of the situation, we felt it would be foolish to try and trick one another," Xvim said. "I told mister Zosk everything I know about the time loop… a courtesy I wish the two of you had extended to me as well. It is quite obvious at this point that you know far more about it than you’ve chosen to tell me. A rather poor way of repaying my cooperation and generosity, if I may say."

Ouch. Zorian supposed he could add delivering guilt trips to the list of Xvim’s many talents.

"People react very badly if you try to tell them everything," Zach said, completely unapologetic. Unlike Zorian, his experience with Xvim and Alanic was both recent and relatively short. He didn’t care much for Xvim’s appeal to emotions. "I know because I tried it. Give too many details and people either freak out on you or dismiss you as a lunatic. And this was back when I didn’t know half the stuff I do today. It’s hard enough to convince people the time loop is real."

"I feel I have been fairly open-minded about this," Xvim noted.

"It took Zorian several years of mind-numbing shaping exercises for you to take him seriously," Zach said, rolling his eyes. "And even then, you tend to stall for weeks if he mucks up his timing or says the wrong thing. And that’s Zorian – when I tried to convince you, you didn’t entertain my story for a second."

Xvim frowned deeply, but said nothing.

"Okay, this is getting a little too heated," Zorian said, trying to stave off an argument. "First things first. Mister Chao, mister Zosk… I apologize for keeping you in the dark. Keeping some of the story secret from you made perfect sense from our perspective, but I can understand why you would feel a little betrayed by our behavior."

Alanic snorted derisively. Zorian suddenly remembered something.

"Actually, do you mind if I ask you something?" Zorian said, looking at Alanic. "What did Xvim say that convinced you the time loop is real?"

"So you know how to convince me yourselves in the future?" Alanic guessed. Zach and Zorian immediately confirmed his supposition. "To be honest, I’m still not convinced this is not nonsense."

"Oh," said Zorian, visibly deflating. Damn.

"So why the hell are you giving us grief over this if you don’t even believe what we’re saying?" Zach demanded, folding his arms over his chest defensively.

"Because I can tell you believe what you’re saying," Alanic said. "So at worst you’re delusional, rather than just a bunch of liars. I am somewhat hurt that Xvim here got to hear this tale from you, but you apparently don’t think I’m worth convincing. It’s not like I would have cut all ties with you if I didn’t believe you, you know? I would have just thought you were a little crazy."

Zorian gave Alanic an unamused look.

"You say that, but if I came to you with soul defenses that you yourself had taught me and used time travel as my explanation when you confronted me about it, it would matter a lot whether you believed my story or not," Zorian told him.

"Ah, so they are my techniques," Alanic said, nodding to himself. "I admit that had been bothering me for a while now. It’s one of the things that caused me to seek out Xvim. It was just so unlikely that a shifter knew how to teach you some of those things…"

"I did learn some of my soul awareness from a shifter," Zorian said. "But the majority of it comes from you."

"Right. I can see how that could be a bit of a problem," Alanic mused. "While a time loop would explain things, there are simpler explanations than time travel for something like that. You could be a powerful mind mage, for example…"

"I am," Zorian admitted.

Three surprised looks were immediately directed his way. Even Zach was caught off guard, probably because he expected him to keep this little factoid a secret at all costs.

"Hey, they wanted the whole truth. Let them have a taste of it," Zorian shrugged. "Yes, I am a powerful mind mage. It’s one of the things I had focused on over the restarts."

"An excellent choice for someone in your situation," Xvim nodded approvingly. "Endlessly useful and it would be quite dangerous to train outside the time loop."

Alanic gave Xvim a mildly scandalized look.

"So, anyway… I come to your place and demonstrate the soul defenses you taught me," Zorian told Alanic, looking him straight in the eye. "You ask me how this is possible and I say time travel. You don’t believe me and check me for mind magic. As it turns out, I am a mind mage. What now?"

"Things get complicated," Alanic admitted.

There was a short pause as everyone considered things in the privacy of their own minds.

"Well, this didn’t go as planned," said Xvim, giving Alanic an annoyed glance. The scarred battle priest shrugged at him unrepentantly. "Let us put hypotheticals aside for the moment. I will concede that simply telling us everything may not be as simple as it first appears. Nonetheless. I will have to insist that you try just this once. If you don’t… then both of us will withhold our lessons from you for the duration of this restart."

"Additionally," Alanic quickly added. "If you honestly tell us everything, I will tell you what you need to do to stop me from getting suspicious at you in future restarts."

Zorian hummed thoughtfully. The carrot and the stick. Truthfully, the threat didn’t worry Zorian much – losing their lessons for the two weeks or so left in the restart would be kind of annoying, nothing more.

He shared a look with Zach, who shrugged uncaringly.

"I’m fine with this," Zach said. "We already planned on doing something like this in the future, didn’t we? Worst case, we get an example of what not to do when we try for real."

Thinking about it some more, Zorian had to agree with this. This wasn’t nearly as planned and controlled as he wanted the eventual reveal to be, but what else was new? Few things went entirely according to plan, even in the time loop. He may as well tell them everything and see how they react. He opened his mouth to speak, only to be interrupted by Xvim.

"We would prefer if Zach were to tell the story, if you will," Xvim said.

"Me?" Zach asked in a surprised tone, pointing a finger at his own chest. "Why? Zorian would explain it way better than I could. Not only did he figure most of this stuff out before me, he knows you two far better than I do."

"Perhaps," Alanic conceded. "But it is far easier for me to gauge your honesty than it would be to judge Zorian’s."

Zach shot him an uncertain look.

"They’re not using mind magic on you," Zorian said, shaking his head. "I’d be able to tell. But between this and some of Alanic’s past comments, it seems likely that he has some supernatural way of checking people’s honesty."

He then frowned. Something was bothering him. A memory that danced at the edge of his awareness, trying to make itself known. Suddenly, he realized what this reminded him of – Kylae, the priestess that predicted the future, had also claimed she had some way of telling if he was being honest with her.

"You know, you are not the first priest that claimed he could tell if people are lying to them," Zorian told Alanic. "Is this some kind of ability priests possess that I’m not aware of?"

"It’s an ability connected to soul magic," Alanic said. "But higher ranking priests are quite often trained in soul magic, so you’re not far from the truth. The outer portion of the soul – the aura – reacts to its host’s thoughts and emotions to some extent, and those with soul sight can learn how to read and interpret its movements. Since most people have no awareness of their own soul, and thus no control over it, a soul mage can often get far stronger and reliable tells about people than you would get by relying on body language and intonation alone."

"But I can sense my own soul, so it’s not a reliable indicator where I’m concerned," Zorian surmised.

Alanic nodded.

"But I can’t actually detect and manipulate my aura to such an extent," Zorian noted. "All you’ve taught me is how to harden it to resist spiritual attacks."

"And I only have your word for it," Alanic shrugged.

"Alright, alright, I’ll do the explanation," Zach said, interrupting their exchange. He waved his hands in front of him, conjuring an illusion of the planet above Xvim’s table.

"This is the world," Zach said, pointing at the gently spinning green-and-blue sphere. He then shifted his hand to point at green blob that looked vaguely like Altazia. "And this place here is roughly where Cyoria is. Beneath the city there is a time magic research facility studying a powerful ancient artifact, likely of divine origin. The researchers think it’s an advanced time dilation chamber, and in a way they are right. When activated, it takes a detailed record of everything in existence… and copies it."

Zach waved his hands again, and the ghostly planet forked into two identical spheres – one floating to the left of the original, and the other to the right. The difference was that the left copy was no longer spinning, standing still as if frozen in time, while the right one was rotating madly like a spinning top.

"The copy of the world exists in its own pocket dimension that is under tremendous time dilation. From the point of the copy-people living in this copy-world, the original world is frozen between moments. A hundred years passes in a fraction of a second. Not that they know this. The only tell that the world is a copy bound to its own pocket dimension is that the spiritual planes have been cut off from the material world."

From the corner of his eye, Zorian saw Alanic suddenly stiffen.

"Time does not flow normally within the copy world," Zach continued. He adjusted the illusion again, altering the right planet slightly. It still spun, but there was a subtle, stuttering quality to it now, since every couple of rotations it reverted to its initial position before fully completing the spin. "Instead of always going forward in time, the world is periodically reverted to its original state. Everything is utterly undone, the land and its people constantly recreated from that initial record of the real world that was used to make the copy-world in the first place. Time repeats itself over and over, month after month after month. From the perspective of someone living in such a world, it would be like they are trapped in a time loop."

Zach leaned back in his conjured chair and gave Xvim and Alanic a dramatic stare. Zorian had a feeling Zach was kind of enjoying this, despite his earlier complaints.

"As a matter of fact, there is someone like that," Zach announced. "Three of them, in fact."

"Three?" Alanic asked, raising his eyebrow.

"Three," Zach nodded. "There was supposed to be only one – a single person aware of the repetition, a mysterious marker stamped onto his soul to make sure he retains his memories through the restarts. Zorian thinks that is me. If so, I do not remember being this chosen one. A second person found a way to retain awareness across restarts and messed with my mind, deleting many of my memories. Much later on, I decided to take on an ancient lich head on in battle and he tried to blend my soul with Zorian’s as punishment."

That got him a curious look from both Xvim and Alanic, but Zach didn’t try to elaborate on that, choosing to instead finish his story.

"We survived, but the experience granted Zorian a functional version of my marker, granting him awareness of the time loop," Zach said. "Unfortunately, it also eventually motivated the second time traveler to leave the copy world. For reasons I won’t go into right now, this means nobody else can leave without cheating the system somehow. And the fake world is running out of power and will collapse in little more than four years."

"And there you have it," Zach finally concluded, erasing the two illusionary planets with a wave of his hand and directing a bright smile at the two teachers. "We are all copies of the real thing, living in a looping, hyper-accelerated copy of the real world. A copy that will soon disappear, taking us all with it. Nothing you do really matters, and unless we can figure out a way to break the system, nothing we do will matter in the end, either. Zorian, did I miss anything?"

Zorian suppressed the urge to roll his eyes. Just a million details, that’s all. And did he really have to phrase things so provocatively? It would have already been hard to convince them, there was no need to make the job harder. But fine, he would play Zach’s game.

"An Ibasan invasion force is going to invade Cyoria at the day of the summer festival. The Cult of the Dragon Below intends to release a primordial in the center of the city while the defenders are distracted. The mayor of Knyazov Dveri is a necromancer and intends to harvest all of the souls killed in the conflict in some mad scheme to resurrect his dead wife as a lich and legalize necromancy," Zorian enumerated blandly.

"Eh, that isn’t strictly time loop related, so I was going to bring it up afterwards," Zach said dismissively.

A long, uncomfortable silence descended upon the room. Both Xvim and Alanic seemed at loss for words, simply staring at the two of them in indecision and occasionally sharing strange looks between each other.

Zorian imagined that was how he and Zach had looked when they first stumbled into their meeting, so this was kind of poetic punishment in his eyes.

"So," Zach said, clapping his hands. "Any questions?"

Several hours and many, many questions later, Xvim and Alanic decided they had had enough and stopped the meeting. They didn’t get everything in the end, not even close, but at the very least they knew the major details surrounding the time loop mechanism and invasion of Cyoria.

"Damn, that was exhausting," Zach told him afterwards as they wandered the city. "So much for your nice, relaxing restart to calm down and plan, huh? Between this and the Veyers thing, this is turning into a pretty exhausting month."

"I’ve had worse ones," Zorian said. "But yes, this was not quite what I had in mind when I told you I wanted a restart or two to unwind a bit."

"Do you think it will be worth it in the end, at least?" Zach asked. "They looked rather incredulous towards the end there."

"It’s the invasion stuff," Zorian said. "If I hadn’t lived through it, I’d have trouble believing it too. It sounds almost as far-fetched as the time loop itself. I’m not worried about that, to be honest. Unlike the time loop, the stuff about Ibasans, Cult of the Dragon Below and Sudomir is pretty easy to confirm. I just hope they won’t panic and do something stupid when they confirm that part of the story."

In the end, they had to meet with Xvim and Alanic two more times in the next four days, giving further explanations and details to their two increasingly nervous teachers. Like Zorian feared, they fixated more on the invasion of the City and Sudomir’s plots than on the time loop. He understood, but was kind of annoyed anyway.

Another thing that was annoying was that Alanic, despite his earlier promise, didn’t tell them how to stop his future iterations from getting suspicious at them. His explanation that he wanted to check things first was kind of understandable at the beginning, but now Zorian was starting to feel a little cheated.

He was therefore pleasantly surprised when Alanic came to him on the fifth day of their first talk to give him the promised information.

"So we just have to claim we’re junior members of this shady church organization of yours and that’s it?" Zorian asked the man incredulously. "You would have just accepted a claim like that?"

"The Mesalian Order is not shady," Alanic told him with a small glare. Sure, Alanic, sure. "It’s just not well known. And of course I would not just accept it. But neither would I drop everything to confirm your identity, especially if you forge a legitimate-looking letter of recommendation and give me something else to focus on. Like Sudomir, for example."

"If I tell you about the mansion, everything blows up soon afterwards," Zorian said, shaking his head. "I’m pretty sure I already told you that."

"So don’t tell my future self about the mansion, then," Alanic shrugged. "Use some other piece of information. There is no shortage of crimes that man is guilty of. I’m sure we can work something out in the coming days."

"Fair enough," Zorian nodded. He took a long look at Alanic, and noticed how tired and disheveled he looked. It didn’t look like he was getting a lot of sleep these days. "So. Does this mean you believe us about the time loop?"

Alanic released a long-suffering sigh.

"I don’t know what to believe anymore," he said. "But I figure there is no harm is helping you with this. If there is no time loop, the trick will be useless to you. If there is a time loop… well, you and Zach seem to be our only hope for a decent ending to all this."

At this point Imaya found them talking and gave Zorian an earful about being a poor host (he hadn’t offered Alanic anything to eat or drink). Rather surprisingly, she then managed to talk Alanic into joining them for dinner. He didn’t expect that. After prodding him a bit, Alanic admitted that he was so busy checking up on things he and Zach told him that he didn’t have a proper meal since yesterday.

Imaya was terribly smug about the whole thing.

"What was that you said?" She asked with a smirk on her face. It was a rhetorical question, of course. They both knew what he had said. "Something about how he was obviously not interested and how it was a pointless courtesy? Seems that old people like me do know a thing or two about being a proper host, eh?"

Zorian let her have her little victory. She did turn out to be correct in this case, after all. In any case, Alanic was back the next day, though he didn’t want to eat this time (Zorian had offered; Imaya couldn’t say anything now) and instead wanted the two of them to visit Lukav about something.

"Are you sure we shouldn’t have taken Zach with us as well?" Zorian asked as they put some distance from Imaya’s house.

"I want to discuss shifters and the primordial," Alanic said. "From what I understood of your story, Zach has nothing to contribute there that he didn’t hear from you first. I can’t see a reason to bring him along. Unless you think he’ll be insulted he’s left out of the talks?"

Zorian considered it. If they were doing something exciting, like fighting monsters and the like, then maybe. As it was, Zach was already getting annoyed by their talks with Xvim and Alanic, complaining how much time they take and how boring they were. He probably won’t care much that Zorian did this without him.

"No, probably not," he said, shaking his head. "I’ll just fill him in later about what we talked about."

"Good. Let’s hurry to the edge of the city so we can teleport to Lukav’s place," Alanic said.

"There is no need," Zorian said with a self-satisfied smile. "Let’s just find a deserted alley and I’ll teleport us out straight out of the city. The teleport beacon hasn’t been able to stop me for quite some time now."

If Alanic was surprised by his claim, he did not show it. Zorian supposed it was a minor thing after the revelations in the past few days. They found a sufficiently isolated place and soon arrived not far from Lukav’s house, just outside the village he lived in.

He spoke with Alanic while they walked, the warrior priest telling him about some of the theories he had thought up over the past few days. Most of them centered on the release of the primordial from its prison dimension.

"So you think this whole time loop was created to stop the release of this thing?" Zorian said. "I can see where you’re coming from. On one hand, both the time loop and the primordial release ceremony are clearly reliant on the planetary alignment to work. It’s not a coincidence that those two are happening at roughly the same time. On the other hand, the time loop did start a month earlier than it was supposed to, for some reason. Each restart just happens to end at the time of the primordial’s release. And on top of it all, the one time the primordial was released prematurely, the time loop immediately reset itself on its own."

"Seems like an open and shut case to me," Alanic pointed out.

"Nothing is open and shut about this time loop business," Zorian sighed.

"If you say so," Alanic said. "We’re almost there. Let me do the talking in the beginning."

As it turned out, this was not the first time Alanic talked to Lukav about the topic. He had already told his friend about some of the things he found out from Zorian – specifically, the part where a group was trying to sacrifice shifter children in order to set a primordial loose into the world – and asked for his advice on tracking down the sacrifices before the ritual takes place. Lukav asked a lot of questions, and eventually Alanic grew annoyed and decided to just bring Zorian along on his next visit to clarify things.

Not that Zorian could truly help Lukav understand the issue, since he didn’t truly understand it himself. Primordial essence was almost as big of a mystery to him as it was to Lukav.

"I don’t understand why they’re killing all these children," Lukav complained. "If the primordial essence is just a key to access the prison dimension, you’d think they needed only a drop of essence to work the magic. They could just… I don’t know, bleed them a little?"

"A bridge, not a key," Zorian said. Not that he truly understood what the difference was, but Sudomir had phrased it like that so it was probably important. "Apparently that means they need as much primordial essence as possible for the ritual to work, so they’re draining the victims of everything they have. Partial extraction of life force just doesn’t cut it."

"Even if it wasn’t necessary, they would have likely killed them in the end," Alanic said. "You don’t set up a ritual like that and then leave witnesses afterwards."

In the end, Alanic didn’t get what he wanted out of the meeting. He was trying to find a way to track down the sacrifices before the ritual began, as well as a way to locate the exact position of the anchor point of the primordial prison (something more accurate than Zorian’s inside the Hole, somewhere). Unfortunately, the only advice Lukav could give him in the end was to try and contact the local shifter tribes for help.

Alanic then left his friend’s house, but Zorian stayed behind. He wanted to talk to Lukav about his idea to accelerate his training with the help of transformation potions. The idea was to transform into magical beings with useful special abilities and then use the experiences gained in that form to upgrade his own abilities. He was especially interested in creatures that possessed a form of advanced magic perception, since he was unhappy with his rate of growth there. Xvim claimed he was advancing along adequately there, but Zorian didn’t really have time to be merely adequate.

Lukav gave him both the good news and bad news. The good news was that his idea was solid. It was a known training aid, just one that was sparingly used due to extreme expense of such transformation potions. Not an issue for him and Zach. The bad news was that transformation potions like the ones he wanted couldn’t be found on open market. This was the sort of thing you needed good connections and various licenses to obtain. Especially in the sort of quantity he would need.

Fortunately, Lukav was perfectly capable of making potions like that and willing to help Zorian out. All Zorian had to do was bring Lukav an appropriate magical creature in good enough condition and pay a moderate fee, and the man was willing to make a transformation potion or two out of it. Any leftovers not used to make Zorian’s potions would belong to Lukav.

Zorian had a feeling he was being thoroughly cheated there, but at the end of the day it was just money and he should probably be glad that Lukav was willing to essentially break the law for his sake. He still had an urge to learn how to make transformation potions on his own so he wouldn’t have to rely on the man.

Something to think about, at least. He made a note in the list of ideas he was making in his free time and moved on.

The next couple of days were surprisingly peaceful. Alanic and Xvim agreed to continue teaching them, cutting down on their usual questioning of them whenever they saw them. They were still clearly keeping in contact with each other, discussing the time loop and the invaders, but for now they kept their conclusions to themselves and plotted something in the background. Zorian was a bit concerned about that, but not enough to lose sleep over it. Their minds were sufficiently open for his empathy to work on them, and they didn’t feel like they had any malicious intentions towards him and Zach.

Zorian wasn’t doing anything substantive during this time, his motivation suffering due to his recent dealings with Xvim and Alanic. He tried his hand at drawing again to pass the time, messed around with theoretical spell formula and learned some new spells from Zach.

He also let Taiven talk him into several rounds of physical combat. Normally he would never agree to something like that, no matter how bored, but recently his golem-making skills had progressed enough that his lack of fighting skills was becoming an issue. He couldn’t make golems fight any better so long as he only knew only the crudest basics of normal fighting. After talking to Edwin, his fellow golem enthusiast in the class, he had found out that Edwin was (rather reluctantly) taking martial arts lessons to pre-empt this very problem. That was how he met Naim, actually. And no, there was no solution except to learn how to fight the hard way.

Taiven absolutely demolished him, of course. She was superior to him in strength, technique and practical experience. It was not nearly as bad as he feared, though – she actually toned down the violence to something manageable and gave him some solid advice about what he was doing wrong.

She still kind of sucked as a teacher. Zorian was pretty sure the student wasn’t supposed to end the lessons covered in bruises. He should look into hiring a proper fighting instructor someday. Maybe Naim knew a good one.

Another thing to add to his list.

It was another quiet day. Most of Imaya’s household, plus Zach and Taiven, were gathered around the kitchen table, playing a game of cards. Since there was only so many players that could join a game at once, and since they were horrible players on their own, Kana and Kirielle were each attached to another person. Kirielle was attached to Zorian, of course, since he was her brother. She gave terrible advice and complained loudly when he didn’t listen to her, giving clues to other players as to what his hand looked like. Kana, on the other hand, was sitting in Imaya’s lap – Kael was away currently, negotiating some kind of deal with one of the alchemists in the city, so Imaya decided to take her under her wing while she played. The little girl mostly just watched the game, but occasionally Imaya prompted her for advice and she dutifully suggested a card by silently pointing at it with her finger.

Imaya always played the suggested card, no matter how terrible the suggestion. And she was still doing better than Zorian and Kirielle.

He wondered if it would be okay if he started glancing at people’s thoughts from time to time. It was cheating, but he had Kirielle dragging him down and they didn’t, so it kind of evened out, didn’t it?

He studied his opponents a little. Right now, Zach was solidly winning the game. He was kind of suspicious about that, but if his fellow time traveler was cheating somehow, Zorian couldn’t figure it out. Imaya was second, despite the occasional help she solicited from Kana. Taiven was in third place, but she had a solid three point lead on him. Considering his current cards and the confidence all three of them radiated, he doubted that was going to change in this game.

"Play this!" Kirielle demanded, pointing at a card. Another poor choice on her part.

He played it anyway. Let her see the consequences of her folly, for once.

Suddenly, there was a knock on the door. Seeing how this was shaping up to be another loss for him, he immediately handed the cards to Kirielle and volunteered to check up on it.

As it turned out, the visitor was Xvim. Apparently his mini-vacation was over.

"Greetings, mister Kazinski," Xvim said. "Am I interrupting anything?"

"No, not really," Zorian said. "Well, sort of. But it’s nothing really important so don’t worry about it. Please come in."

Surprisingly, Xvim didn’t want to jump straight to business like Zorian thought he would. Instead, he accepted Imaya’s offer of something to drink (tea) and took the time to talk to everyone in the house (except for Kana, who didn’t talk). He got especially interested in Taiven, since he realized halfway through their talk that Zorian had told her about the time loop.

Zorian almost had a panic attack when he realized this – he was virtually certain that he was on the verge of another crisis, and would spend the next few days running damage control. He never actually told Taiven and Kael the whole truth about the time loop, after all. Thankfully, Xvim seemed more interested in the training regimen he was devising for Taiven and his help with Kael’s alchemy research, rather than her opinion on time loop mechanics.

Eventually he managed to get Xvim alone for a while and explained to him that she and Kael only know a part of the truth, and that he would appreciate if things stayed that way. Xvim didn’t seem to approve, but promised to respect his wishes.

Xvim also used this opportunity to ask why he was never informed about Kael and Taiven during their talks, and Zorian admitted he totally forgot to tell Xvim and Alanic about those two. It wasn’t really relevant to the whole truth in his mind. Xvim accepted this explanation without complaint, but still wanted to talk to them about their perspective on things.

In the end he, Zach and Xvim barricaded themselves in Kael’s alchemy lab to have a proper talk in peace.

"So. More questions, huh?" Zach said with distaste.

"Yes. But not the kind you are thinking of," Xvim told them. "I actually came here to talk to you about your plans for the future."

"Well, they are still in the process of being made," Zorian admitted. "You have to understand, it has only been a single restart since we found out we’re trapped in this world. The lead-up to that was very stressful, and this restart was supposed to be something of a short vacation. I have been slowly assembling some kind of plan in my head, but it’s still very rough."

Currently, Zorian’s plan for moving forward was very simple. Use time loop cheats to amass a lot of funds. Recruit various experts across the city (and perhaps the country and beyond) as their researchers, investigators and teachers. Take over the aranean criminal contacts and see if they could be harnessed for something useful. Trade with aranean settlements for their mind magic secrets. Raid mage guild records and various magical libraries (including the academy library) for information and forbidden magic.

"I think you should use your mind magic more," Xvim told him.

"What?" Zorian frowned. That wasn’t advice he heard very often. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that you should attack mages and steal their secrets with your mind magic," Xvim told him bluntly. "Not only spells and training methods, but also things you could use to convince them to cooperate with you."

"Are… are you sure you should be giving out that kind of advice?" Zach asked him incredulously.

"You have very little time to catch up to Red Robe and find a way to reach the real world," Xvim said. "Even for me, the enormity of the task in front of you would be rather daunting. You should use the tools you are given."

Wordlessly, Xvim reached into his jacket and handed Zorian a thick notebook. Opening it, Zorian found it full of names, addresses and accompanying short notes.

"There are people that should be able to help you, whether to increase your skills or track down some crucial piece of information or material component. Not all of them will be willing to help you out, however, and sometimes the things you need most out of them, they will not be willing to part with. In such cases… I suggest you employ more aggressive, even illegal persuasion methods."

By the end of Xvim’s explanation, the notebook felt incredibly heavy in Zorian’s hands. It was just a trick of the mind, he knew, but it didn’t help him feel better about it.

"You have no idea what you are asking of me," Zorian told him bitterly, fighting the urge to throw the notebook at Xvim.

"Probably not, no," Xvim agreed. "I was never in your kind of situation in my entire life, and I have serious doubts I would have risen to the challenge if I was. Especially at your age."

"You’re asking me to attack people who have done nothing wrong, just because they have something I want," Zorian said. "That kind of stuff changes you. I couldn’t even do that to giant spiders without feeling terrible afterwards. And really, I don’t want to be the sort of person who became used to stuff like that."

"Then feel free to ignore my advice," Xvim said. "I’m only giving you advice; I have no power over you. If you feel you can do without reaching for methods like these, or that going along with it would cost you something you cannot afford to lose… then don’t do it. It’s as simple as that."

There was a short silence where Xvim and Zorian stared at each other, Zorian clutching the notebook so tightly in his hand his fingers went white. Zach seemed to be at loss what to do, watching them both uneasily as if waiting for a fight to break out.

Eventually, Xvim broke the standstill by reaching out and pushing Zorian’s hand, still clutching the notebook, towards Zorian’s chest.

"Keep the notebook, whatever your decision," Xvim said. "It will be useful regardless."

Following that, Xvim politely excused himself and left. After he was gone, Zorian looked at the notebook one last time before slamming it loudly on top of Kael’s alchemy table in frustration.

"Worst vacation ever," he announced bitterly.

Zach said nothing.

59. One Step Forward

Not too long after Xvim had left the house, Zorian did as well. He had no particular destination in mind, he just wanted to get out of the house for a while. As far as he could tell, it was the only way for him to get some time alone. The rest of the house’s inhabitants could tell something had happened between him and Xvim that had greatly upset him and kept prodding him for answers. He knew they meant well, but gods were they annoying.

Their questions were especially inconvenient because he couldn’t actually answer any of them. Not without explaining the true nature of the time loop and multiple other things he had been keeping secret from them.

Maybe he had no right to be annoyed. Considering the magnitude of the secrets he was keeping from them, their nosiness was well justified. But he was not in a good mood at the moment and it was hard to be understanding and rational. Best to get away from everyone until he had a chance to cool off.

Zach didn’t try to follow after him, thankfully. Zorian made a mental note to thank him for his consideration later.

For a while he simply walked aimlessly through Cyoria’s streets, checking out storefronts and watching the people around him. Eventually, though, he grew bored with that and decided to visit some of the more significant places from his past. He checked out his old, academy-provided apartment that he had lived in during the initial restarts (it was now occupied by someone else, as it turned out) and spent some time on the roof of the building, just watching the city and feeling the wind blow over him. He then descended into the dungeon beneath Cyoria and walked through the lifeless corridors of the aranean settlement hidden within it. Finally, he walked over to Hole and spent some time peering into its fathomless depths, idly wondering whether the primordial’s prison was placed here because of the Hole or if the Hole was the product of the prison being placed here.

As he departed from the immediate vicinity of the massive mana well, he encountered a small group of cranium rats hiding in the shadows of a nearby building. With him no longer trying to mess up the invasion and with so many things happening in a short period of time, he almost forgot about them. He was pretty sure his mind magic had long since surpassed the swarm’s ability to hurt him, so they didn’t frighten him the way they once had. Hmm…

On a whim, he extended a telepathic probe into one of the rats, trying to start a conversation with the collective mind of the swarm. Maybe he could bribe or blackmail it into switching sides? Or at least get it to gather information for him as well as for the invaders – it would hardly be the first time a spy worked for multiple sides…

Connecting to the collective was easy. Trivial, even. Due to the way the swarm mind worked, it couldn’t really use mental shields the way he was using them. Instead, it relied on redundancy of individual rat minds and the sheer psychic might of its combined self when faced with hostile mind mages.

Talking to the collective, on the other hand, was proving to be as difficult as he had feared it would be. The swarm treated his every contact as an attack, striking back at him whenever he established a telepathic link and cutting off individual rats from the greater whole when they realized their counterattack was getting them nowhere.

In the end, when Zorian refused to stop his contact attempts and gradually ramped up the aggressiveness of his telepathic probes, the swarm mind just plain wrote off the entire group he had cornered and disconnected them all from the collective rather than continue dealing with him.

Only mildly disappointed by the outcome, Zorian continued on, not even bothering to kill the frightened, suddenly isolated cranium rats. What would be the point, really? The idea of making the cranium rats work for him stuck with him, though. What should he do to get the swarm to hear him out, though? Just keep pestering it like he just did until the swarm grew sufficiently annoyed with him to actually start talking back? If Zorian was in their shoes, he’d break the silence after a while to tell the jerk to knock it off. Just in case it actually worked.

Still, maybe he was assigning excessively human thinking to what was a composite mind made out of rats. If he wanted to talk to the swarm mind, he might have to actually capture one of the rats and bind it harder to the collective. Make it impossible for them to cut the connection and abandon it.

Sitting on a nearby bench and taking out a notebook, Zorian started to sketch a spell formula setup that would lock a cranium rat to its collective. A metal cage with three overlapping wards that should… no, wait, that wouldn’t work. Maybe he should just make his own connection instead of trying to strengthen the existing one… if he placed a small marker on five to six rats, it should create a resonance that…

A while later he had to reluctantly put his plotting aside, because it was getting dark and it was time to start going back home. It would take a couple of days to finalize the design anyway. And he was feeling a lot better now too, so there was no need to stay away from Imaya’s house any longer.

He found it curious that making designs for contacting cranium rats had been satisfying. What did he like so much about that? After thinking about it for a while, he figured it was because that was a problem he actually knew how to solve. He wasn’t sure which one of his ideas was the best solution, but it wasn’t like his time loop problems, which seemed completely intractable. He had no idea how to track down the five Keys, and even if he did they wouldn’t automatically tell him how to enter the real world along with Zach. He had no idea how to track down a kid that couldn’t be found by his own Noble House. Not only did he not have the skills necessary to accomplish these feats, he didn’t even know which skills he even needed for that.

With that in mind, was the sort of thing Xvim advocated even necessary? He had flipped through the notebook Xvim had given him as he wandered around. Some of the people Xvim had recommended were experts at divination and mind magic, which might potentially help him gather information. But most of them were more oriented towards magic in general.

What he had was largely an information problem. Would being a better mage help with that?

It might. What were the chances that the Keys, once found, could be acquired without using a lot of magical skill and effort? Miniscule, knowing his luck. And the way out of the fake world, whatever it ended up being, would surely demand far greater skills than he could currently marshal.

And that’s without considering the issue of Red Robe and the fact they would have to deal with him somehow when (if) they got out of the time loop.

It was dark when he finally returned, and when he entered the house, he found Imaya still awake and waiting for him.

Honestly, he just didn’t understand that woman.

"You know you didn’t have to wait for me, don’t you?" Zorian asked her, exasperated. "I do have a key of my own."

Even if he had forgotten it, it would have been childishly easy to unlock the door with magic. He could have even relocked it the same way after he went inside.

"I know," she nodded, unbothered by his tone. "But I wanted to wait for you anyway. Do you feel better now?"

"I do," Zorian admitted. He didn’t really accomplish anything, but he felt calmer anyway.

"Where did you go? Just wandering around?" Imaya asked knowingly.

"Pretty much," Zorian said with a shrug. "I bought Kirielle a hairclip, climbed to the top of a building, visited a graveyard, stared into a hole and tried to talk to rats."

"You bought your sister a gift?" she asked, curious. "What’s the occasion?"

Zorian gave her a strange look. Out of all the things he said, that was what she chose to focus on?

"It was cheap and I felt like it," he said. He sat down opposite to his landlord, not really in the mood for going to sleep yet. He wasn’t tired. "Why did you wait for me? Aren’t I just a tenant to you?"

"I’m not sure. I have heard about these tenants. They are supposed to be these terrible creatures that come home drunk and late, destroy your walls and furniture and never pay rent on time," said Imaya, voice tinged with amusement.

"Slander," Zorian said blandly.

"In all seriousness, I guess you’re right that I care too much," she said, sighing lightly. "It’s Kana’s and Kirielle’s fault, I think. They make me think of children I always wish I had."

Zorian gave her a mildly surprised look. Not because her wanting to have children was so unbelievable, but because in all the restarts he had known her, she rarely talked about herself like that. He almost asked her why she was still single if she wanted kids, before he remembered Ilsa’s warning not to discuss marriage or husbands with her.

"Don’t look at me like that," she said. "It’s natural to want kids, you know? I know young people like you don’t want to think about it, but that will change as you age."

"I didn’t say anything," Zorian said, shaking his head. "Though… I apologize in advance for being so brazen, but if you want children so much, why don’t you just have them. Sure, some people would judge you for being a single mother, but-"

He was interrupted by Imaya bursting into laughter.

"Oh, that is kind of funny," she said. "I guess Ilsa told you not to mention my husband and you jumped to conclusions, hmm? But no, being single isn’t the problem. It’s the fact I’m infertile."

Oh.

"My husband left me when we found that out," Imaya said. "He wanted kids too, and I couldn’t give him any. So there – now you know about that too. It’s not that big of a secret, and I’m mostly over it, so don’t worry about avoiding any mention of it. I’m not as delicate as Ilsa thinks I am."

She seemed to consider things for a moment.

"Though don’t mention it on a whim, either," she added. "It’s a depressing topic."

"I understand," Zorian nodded. Why would he keep bringing it up for no reason, anyway? "Just one question. You being infertile… is this a problem of not being able to afford the cure, or it being literally incurable?"

"The second, I think. The healers at regular hospitals certainly don’t know of any cure that would help. If it exists, it’s something that would take a budget of a small state to track down and buy," Imaya said.

Zorian filed that away in the back of his head and moved on to other topics. Imaya’s problem, while tragic, was not very high on his list of concerns. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to look for any miracle cures when he conducted his investigation of the Keys and the like. He was pretty sure Kael would appreciate something like that too, and powerful medicines might not be useless to him and Zach either.

He spent the next half an hour talking to Imaya, mostly about Kirielle and what she had been doing all these days while Zorian was away. He was relieved to hear she was surprisingly well-behaved – he had been absent more often in this restart in comparison to others, and he was afraid she would act out because of it. The only issue was that she had apparently broken a couple of plates a few days ago and never bothered to tell him about it. It was annoying - if she had told him immediately, he could have probably fixed them up with magic. As it was, the pieces were dumped into the trash and were long gone now, so he would have to pay Imaya back for the plates with money.

Not that he couldn’t afford it, but still. He was so giving the little brat an earful tomorrow.

The next day found Zorian sitting in his room, surrounded by a veritable mountain of books. Some of the books were mundane, borrowed from the library or bought from the stores. Others were brought over from the book cache held in the aranean treasury, or stolen from the private collections of the cultists working with the invaders.

He was looking for something, anything, that might allow him to grow fast enough without resorting to Xvim’s idea of advancement.

Unfortunately, he had found little so far. As expected, really – if there was an obvious way to gather magical skills and power faster than normal, it would already be in widespread use.

He was actually rather glad when the door opened and Zach walked inside, since it gave him the excuse to take a break from his self-appointed task. He was kind of amused to see Zach flipping through a book of his own, though. It wasn’t often that Zach decided to read a book, especially one as thick as what he was currently holding.

"Something interesting?" Zorian asked him curiously.

"Not really, no," Zach replied. "It’s a medical textbook. Kael gave it to me. He has been bothering me for a couple of days now, saying that the time loop is absolutely perfect for medical research and begging me to invest more of my time in practicing my medical magic. Apparently someone told him that I am good at medical magic."

He gave Zorian a small glare while saying the last part. It had no effect on Zorian. He had no reason to keep that a secret from Kael, and he was pretty sure Zach could have made Kael back off easily enough if he really tried.

Instead he decided to change the subject and get to the probable point of this visit.

"What do you think about Xvim’s idea?" Zorian asked.

Zach visibly scowled, throwing his book on top of a nearby book stack before replying.

"It makes me uncomfortable," he said. "Extremely uncomfortable. That’s the kind of stuff Red Robe did to me, didn’t he? But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. I’m pretty biased here, but I can see Xvim’s reasoning. If you feel you have to do this, I won’t try and stop you."

"Did you ever do something like that when you were first gathering strength?" Zorian asked.

"Not like this," Zach said, shaking his head. "I didn’t like mind magic much, even back then. But I did attack people and looked through their private libraries and spell collections. I usually had a good reason to attack these people, though. Maybe you can do the same? Limit yourself to people you can justify attacking?"

"That’s kind of what I’m already doing," Zorian said. "Maybe not as aggressively as I could be, but only because I lack the time to truly dedicate myself to it. Xvim’s whole point is that this wasn’t going to be enough. That I need to take what I need, regardless of how justified the target is."

Zach hummed thoughtfully, thinking about that for a couple of seconds. Zorian waited patiently, curious about what his response would be.

"You know, most of my magic doesn’t come from raiding other people’s secrets," Zach finally said. "The majority of it I accumulated by simply paying, begging and annoying various experts into teaching me. Granted, some of it is only possible because I’m the last of the Novedas. Before its fall, my House had a habit of financing talented mages from poorer backgrounds while they were still beginning their careers, and quite a few such people still live and feel they owe Noveda a debt because of it. Me being the last of them also tugs at people’s heartstrings in some cases, as does the fact my guardian practically dismantled the House and robbed me of their legacy. Plus, some of them wish for fame that comes from teaching the last Noveda, or hope to profit from ingratiating themselves to me, gambling on me restoring the House to glory and paying them back afterwards. Between my money, family legacy and fame, it usually isn’t too difficult to talk people into teaching me. Maybe we can leverage that to get some of these people to cooperate willingly?"

"That is an interesting idea," Zorian said after a short pause. "I’m not sure how effective it would really be, but it’s worth a try. In fact, it kind of reminds me of the fact I do have some small amount of reflected fame myself, courtesy of my older brother. It might be a good idea to see if I can get something with that. That didn’t work too well for me in the past, but back then I clearly wasn’t a magical prodigy like Daimen. Now, I can effectively pass myself off as a second coming of Daimen by demonstrating some of the magical proficiency I picked up in the time loop."

Zach gave him a surprised look.

"Yeah, I know," Zorian said unhappily. "It kind of rankles to rely on Daimen like that, but desperate times call for desperate measures."

Zach just shook his head in amusement, not saying anything.

"What about black rooms?" Zach asked after a while. "Couldn’t we get extra time using them?"

"Actually, yes," Zorian agreed. "I’ve been checking them out and I think we can definitely trick the operators beneath Cyoria into letting us use the room once per restart."

"Just once?" Zach frowned.

"Black rooms are really mana intensive," Zorian said. "The facility beneath Cyoria can activate their black rooms twice a month, but the first activation is really inconveniently timed for our purposes. It happens right at the beginning of the restart. There is no way we can make use of it then, unless we stage an all-out assault on the facility as the very first thing in the restart. And even if that succeeds, that would surely cause the facility to shut down and postpone the second planned activation, so it wouldn’t actually gain us anything."

"Ugh," Zach mumbled unhappily. "But that still means we can essentially double our time, doesn’t it? A single activation gives as an entire month for the cost of a day."

"In a way, that’s true," said Zorian. "But it’s a month during which we cannot access any experts or books we didn’t think to bring with us in advance. It’s useful to be sure, and we should abuse it for all it’s worth, but it’s not nearly as useful as another actual restart would be."

"Maybe we can find some more black rooms elsewhere and commandeer them too?" Zach offered.

"It doesn’t hurt to look for them," Zorian agreed. "In any case, we won’t be able to use the chamber beneath Cyoria in this restart. We already missed the activation day, unfortunately. But starting in the next restart, we should plan to take advantage of it every single time to maximize training time."

"Yeah," Zach agreed. "Though I can’t help but think those will be some very boring months spent in there…"

"Probably," Zorian agreed. Especially for Zach, since he didn’t look like the sort of person who handled being cooped in a small room for weeks very well. "We’ll see how it goes in the next restart and adjust the plan from there. If it doesn’t work, we’ll scrap the idea."

"I know what you’re thinking. I’m not that impatient," Zach huffed. "I’m not going to throw away a golden opportunity like that just because I’m a little bored."

After a quick discussion about what to bring to the black rooms to pass the time (Zach insisted the best answer to that is girlfriends, but reluctantly gave up on the idea when Zorian started enumerating problems with that idea), they lapsed into a short silence. Zach looked around the room, taking in the books Zorian surrounded himself with and even casually flipping through some of them.

"So is there anything else?" Zach asked. "Did you find something worthwhile in this little book fort you made?"

"Not really," Zorian admitted. "Enhancement rituals seem interesting, if we can find the right one. Unfortunately, mages are very secretive about those. A lot of enhancement rituals require a lot of dead test subjects before one can fine-tune them to usability, so mages are leery of admitting they use them or know how to perform them. I think someone high up in the Cult of the Dragon Below is very good at those, though, so we might have something there if we can track that person down."

"Don’t enhancement rituals require you permanently tie up some of your mana reserves into maintaining them?" Zach asked. "Sounds like a bad deal for you. No offense, but you don’t really have that much mana reserve to burn."

"That’s why I specified we need to find the right one," said Zorian. "And besides, nobody said it has to be me who makes use of them. You’re good now, but it never hurts to get better and your reserves are more than big enough for an enhancement or two."

Zach considered it for a while, before shaking his head.

"I’m leery of messing with my magic like that," he said. "I’m not vetoing the idea, but it would have to be some pretty amazing enhancement to get me interested."

"Fair enough," Zorian shrugged. Indeed, enhancement rituals could be quite dangerous and some may even have effects that linger across restarts, so Zach’s hesitance was quite reasonable. "Oh! I been meaning to ask you this, but I keep forgetting. Could you teach me how to cast the simulacrum spell?"

"Uh, no," Zach said. "I did find the spell once, but I couldn’t cast it. The scroll said the spell requires the caster to have awareness of their own soul, which I couldn’t figure out at the time. I suppose this is what Alanic is teaching me how to do right now, but at the time I couldn’t figure it out and eventually gave up on learning it."

"Hmm," Zorian hummed thoughtfully. "Well, I can sense my own soul, so I should be able to do it. I don’t suppose this scroll is somewhere easy to get to, at least?"

"I don’t even remember where I found it," Zach said. He seemed lost in thought for a moment, before shaking his head sadly. "Sorry, but it was a long time ago. I think it was in the sanctum of that lich in Taraman, but it could have easily been in the treasury of that demon-worshipping cult in Tetra or in that secret vault I found under Marbolkano or in a hundred other places."

"Damn," said Zorian. "Well, try to remember. I can’t find a detailed description of the spell, but depending on how it works it could greatly improve our efforts."

"Will do," Zach nodded. Before he could say anything else, though, Kirielle barged into the room. Posing dramatically for no real reason, she announced that he had another visitor.

Yesterday it was Xvim, and it was Alanic’s turn to come and talk to him.

After a short round of greetings, Zorian ushered Alanic into his room, where Zach had been waiting for them, and retook his position on the bed, surrounded by his books. Alanic flipped through some of them, frowning at the dodgier works he stole from the cultists but saying nothing.

"Xvim visited me yesterday," Zorian said when Alanic didn’t seem like he would start talking any time soon.

"I know," Alanic said. There was no emotion in his voice, and Zorian couldn’t feel anything from his mind.

"I hope this isn’t an attempt to pressure me to take his advice," he warned.

"Heavens forbid," Alanic told him seriously, giving him a grave look. "I didn’t agree with his decision to begin with, so why would I pressure you to go along with him?"

"You don’t approve?" Zach asked, surprised.

"I’m a priest," Alanic said. "Why would I approve of attacking innocent people for magical power?"

"Forgive me for saying this, but you haven’t exactly been a shining beacon of morality in the previous restarts I’ve known you," Zorian said, frowning.

"Towards my enemies, perhaps," Alanic shrugged. "But these are not the kind of tactics one should use on allies and those who haven’t done anything wrong."

For a few seconds, there was a silence in the room as everyone digested this statement. After those couple of moments passed, however, Alanic seemed to deflate and closed his eyes in defeat.

"That said," he began. "I have to say what you’ve told me is both terrifying and depressing. Without your intervention, both Lukav and me end up dead at the start of the month. Even if the invasion of Cyoria fails, it will still take thousands of lives, most of which will have their souls captured and fed to Sudomir’s necromantic device. The aftermath could easily spawn another round of splinter wars, and I don’t even want to think what this Red Robe of yours would do if allowed to run unchecked."

"What’s your point?" Zach frowned. "We know damn well the stakes are high."

"I’m getting to it," Alanic said, giving Zach an unamused look. Zach just rolled his eyes at him. Rather than argue further with Zach, Alanic turned back towards Zorian. "From what I understand, a crucial part of you getting out of this fake world we’re trapped in is finding these five Keys, yes? And the marker on your soul is supposed to be able to sense them, but you don’t know how."

"Correct," Zorian confirmed.

"In that case, it is imperative that you learn how to sense your soul better. If we’re lucky, this will allow you to understand your marker better and unlock this critical ability," Alanic said.

"But I’m already doing that," Zorian pointed out. "You’re already teaching me how to sense my soul better, are you not?"

"I’m teaching you using the safest method I know of," Alanic said. "The kind I would naturally use when a teenager comes to me for help in learning how to defend himself against soul magic. It is not the fastest one, however. Not by a long shot. The method I have in mind is absolutely lethal if done even slightly wrong and leaves a permanent mark on the user’s body, and I would have never suggested it to anyone under normal circumstances. But these are not normal circumstances, and if you’re telling the truth about the time loop then the downsides are minimal. The only danger for you is that you might cut your restart short if you get it wrong."

Not exactly a small downside in Zorian’s opinion. Still, he was willing to risk it at least once to gauge how viable it was.

"How much faster is this new method?" Zorian asked.

"A lot faster," Alanic said, insisting on being frustratingly vague. "Additionally, there is a level of personal soul awareness you would have never been able to reach using the safe method I’m currently teaching you. Only by utilizing some of the more extreme methods, like the one I’m suggesting, could you truly master your skill at sensing your own soul."

"Well," Zorian said after a short pause. "I’m definitely interested, then."

"Yeah, not really much of a choice, isn’t it?" Zach said. "If it’s like that, of course we’re going to go for it."

Alanic gave Zach a strange look.

"I’m afraid this offer is only for Zorian for now," Alanic said, shaking his head. "As you are now, you would have never survived the ritual. You need a certain amount of existing soul awareness to undergo this training successfully."

"What?" Zach protested. "No accelerated learning for me? That’s not fair! I’m perfectly fine with risking my life, you know!"

"No, Zorian is the one risking his life," Alanic said. "You would just be throwing it away for no gain. You can’t afford to be so wasteful with your life. None of us can."

One giant argument (and some shouting) later, Zach grudgingly accepted that Alanic wasn’t going to let him go through the life-threatening training along with Zorian. Zach would still accompany them to the training site, but he would simply continue on with his current lessons rather than what Zorian was getting.

Strangely, Zorian found himself actually enthusiastic at the prospect of this life-threatening training. In all honesty, soul awareness training was some of the most boring magic training he had the displeasure to experience and he would gladly take the chance Alanic was offering. He could understand Zach’s frustration perfectly.

He just hoped Alanic’s faith in his ability wasn’t misplaced. At the very least, he was sure Zach would never let him forget it if he actually ended up dying because of a measly training exercise.

Two days later, Alanic led two of them to a completely new place, even to Zorian. It wasn’t inside the temple Alanic lived in, or any other place he had brought Zorian over to in the previous restarts. It was a literal hole in the ground in the middle of nowhere (well, in the middle of the poorly-visited forest in any case), which opened to a dark, dusty staircase. Light-suppressing wards were etched into the walls of the staircase, making both magical and mundane illumination impossible. They had to use their mana to sense their environment, slowly descending down the rough, uneven stairs while cursing whomever built the place. Probably Alanic, if the surety with which he moved inside was of any indication. If he didn’t build the place, he was certainly very familiar with it.

In any case, once they finally reached the bottom, they arrived inside a spacious, perfectly square room. This one wasn’t magically darkened, but Alanic forbade them from casting any lighting spells, insisting they use torches instead, so it ended up being pretty damn dark anyway.

"It’s a ritual room," Alanic said. "And the ritual I’m about to do is disastrous if done wrong. Any magic not related to the ritual could warp it in undesirable ways. Magical lighting should be safe, but it’s best not to risk it."

"This whole setup is sinister as hell," Zach complained. "If Zorian didn’t vouch for you, I’d probably be attacking you by now."

Alanic said nothing, instead focusing on lighting all the torches around the room with smooth, practiced motions. As the dim light of the scattered torches filled the room, it became obvious that there was a complex spell formula etched into the floor, arranged into several concentric circles.

"So can you explain now what this ritual is all about?" Zorian asked, staring at the spell formula in an attempt to understand what it did. The outermost circle was simply a classical mana barrier that sought to isolate the inside of the circle from ambient mana – a common addition to ritual setups in order to minimize the interference of outside forces upon the magic being done. The innermost circle, on the other hand, seemed to be some kind of anchor, preventing the contents from going… uh, what?

"The point of the exercise is for you to die for a time," Alanic said, turning towards him. All the torches had been lit by this point.

Zorian looked at the inner circle again. That was supposed to anchor his soul, wasn’t it? Prevent it from simply moving on…

"More specifically," Alanic continued, "I will eject your soul from your body while allowing you to retain awareness of yourself. By becoming a pure soul with no body to distract you, you gain unparalleled awareness of your soul and how it works. Partially because there is no body to distract you from concentrating on your soul, and partially because pulling a soul out of the body makes its structure and quirks less muddled and easier to study."

"See, what did I tell you?" Zach whispered to him. "He is trying to kill you. Pay up."

"We never put any stakes on the bet," Zorian whispered back. "And you’re right only on a technicality – the point of the exercise is for me to return back to life in the end. I think."

"If you won’t take this with utmost seriousness, I’m stopping this right now!" Alanic said angrily.

Zach quickly mimicked shutting up and Zorian schooled his features into a properly severe expression.

Alanic stared at them for a few seconds to make sure they were properly contrite and then continued on.

"The longer you remain outside the body, the more time you have to hone your skills and the clearer your soul will become to you," Alanic said. "But the longer you stay outside the body, the more tenuous the link that tethers your soul to your body will become. It is a fine balancing act, and the price of being incautious and guessing it wrong is death."

Alanic paused for a second.

"There is still time for you to back out," he finally said.

What, seriously? Like he would back out now.

"I’m willing to risk it," Zorian said, shaking his head. "What do I need to do?"

"Go sit in the center of the ritual diagram," Alanic instructed. "Before we do this, we must make preparations. Several spells have to be cast on you. One is a spell that will tether your soul to your body, but not pull you back in unless you will it. Another is a spell that will make a sort of magical brain for your soul to think with, allowing you to retain awareness as a soul without a body. If any of them is done wrong, you will just die…"

For the next fifteen minutes, Alanic kept explaining the mechanics of the ritual to Zorian, and even quizzed him several times to make sure he was paying attention. It was a bit tiresome, but he supposed that for something this dangerous it paid to be overcautious. Alanic felt that he should be able to handle the ritual, but stressed that there were no certainties when it came to things like this. A procedure like this was never really safe.

One thing was interesting, though. Zorian couldn’t help but notice how much of the setup clearly relied upon the leader of the ritual having soul sight and being able to cast soul magic on the trainee. This was not something an expert in soul defense could set up – it was full-blown necromancy. Another clue that Alanic might have a bit of a dark past…

"Oh, and one last thing before we start," Alanic said. "As you may be aware, bodies of living beings are not designed to work without a soul. Having your soul absent from your body does terrible things to it. The damage done by a person’s life force running wild throughout one’s body is insidious and hard to recover from. Many people have permanently ruined their health through abusing this method of honing their soul awareness. Due to the way the time loop resets your body, you should be immune to this long-term damage. However, this will do nothing to shield you from immediate aftermath of separating your soul from your body for a while. Even if everything goes flawlessly, you will wake up feeling incredibly sick and in terrible pain."

"I see," said Zorian.

"I’m telling you this so you don’t freak out and hurt yourself," Alanic continued. "It would be best if you don’t try to talk or move after waking up. Just endure the pain and the sickness for a while and wait for your body to re-establish equilibrium."

Zorian nodded, already dreading the experience.

"Ready?"

No.

"Yes," he said, sounding more certain than he actually felt.

There was no warning. With a sudden movement, Alanic clasped his hand around the top of Zorian’s head and pulled.

Only once had Zorian felt such pain, and that was when Quatach-Ichl had tried to fuse his soul to Zach’s. He tried to scream and found that he had no control over his body anymore.

His vision grew dark around the edges, his body felt numb and unfeeling, and all the sound in the room gradually disappeared. His awareness quickly shrank into a single point, until there was nothing left.

And then there was something. His soul blazed into his awareness, bright and clear in a way it never had been before. He panicked at first, struggling to understand what had happened to him and instinctively flailing around for some leverage with nonexistent limbs and finding nothing. After a moment, though, he remembered what was happening and what Alanic’s instruction said – the very first thing he had to do was find the link that tethered his soul to his body. He must never let it out of his sight, lest he stay this way for too long without realizing.

He was alone – alone in a way that was difficult to put into words. He could sense his soul, but everything outside the outer boundary of his soul was an empty, silent, featureless void. It was absolutely terrifying, and he felt a powerful urge to return to his body immediately.

But he didn’t. Gradually he calmed down and got to work.

He didn’t know how long he stayed as an aware soul, tracing the structure of his soul and the way it interacted with the marker woven into it. It was hard to tell the passage of time in his current form. It didn’t really matter if it was just moments, though, because this one visit told him so many things… everything was so much clearer and more obvious in this form, and he could already see-

The tether! It was weakening!

After fumbling in panic for a moment, Zorian activated the tether and his tether and soul rushed down to reunite with his body.

After going through Alanic’s new soul awareness training a couple of times, Zorian could finally say with certainty that coming back to life was worse than dying. Having Alanic rip his soul out of his body hurt like hell, but only for a moment. The pain and the sick feeling from returning to life lasted for hours, only slowly fading away.

He had to give Alanic some credit, though – it was effective. Very effective. After the fourth session, Zorian finally managed to locate the part of the marker that was in charge of detecting the Keys. It turns out the reason it was so hard to puzzle out was that it didn’t work over unlimited distances – it could only detect a marker when it was relatively close. That meant that, unfortunately, they couldn’t just follow the path laid out by their marker in tracking them down. But at least they would know now if they got close to one of them.

None of the Keys were around Cyoria. He had checked just to be sure, since he would have felt like an idiot if it turned out there was a Key just under his nose and he had never bothered to check.

Aside from that, he also identified a marker function that would tell him exactly how many restarts they had left until the collapse. They already knew that by now, courtesy of the Guardian, but it was nice to have a way to check that information at a whim.

In other news, Zach was kind of jealous about Zorian’s increased soul awareness and corresponding marker control. He was working extra hard on his basic training and was not at all discouraged from following in Zorian’s footsteps once Alanic pronounced him as ready, despite Zorian describing to him in loving detail how horrible the procedure felt.

Zorian refrained from noting that Zach had only just started his basic training in soul awareness, and that it would take multiple restarts before he reached the level Alanic wanted him to be at.

In any case, the restart was nearing its end, so preparations had to be made. Kael once again brought him his research notebooks to be carried over into the next restart, and Zorian also updated his own notes, as well as the outcome of Kirielle’s and Taiven’s training regimen for the restart.

And this time, there were new additions to his collection – both Xvim and Alanic brought him their own notebooks to transfer into the next restart. Well, Xvim actually brought more than one…

"I must admit you’ve outmatched me with your ingenuity in this regard," Xvim told him. "I would have never thought to just bring over entire notebooks by storing them in my mind. I trust there is no issue with giving me the same deal that you gave your friend, yes?"

"It’s fine," Zorian said. Since he no longer carried the matriarch’s memory packet, he had plenty of free space for more notebooks. He looked at Alanic standing beside his mentor. "What about you? Are you sure you only want to transfer this one little notebook?

"It’s all I need," Alanic said, shaking his head. "Unlike Xvim and Kael, I don’t intend to use the time loop to conduct some kind of research. I just need facts and names, so that I waste less of your time the next time you tell me about the time loop."

"I guess we shouldn’t give this to you if we don’t plan to tell you about the time loop in that restart, then," Zorian mused.

"Obviously," Alanic agreed. "But if you want to undergo the same training you just did, you’re going to have to tell me about it or else I’d never agree to it."

"I already guessed that," Zorian said. "Well, if that’s all, then this is it. This is probably the last time we will speak to each other before time resets itself."

Xvim and Alanic shared an uneasy look between each other.

"Actually, there is something else," Alanic said. "Me and Xvim plan to lead a combat group into the Hole during the invasion in order to disrupt the so-called summoning."

"Well, I’m not going to stop you," Zorian said, confused at where this was going.

"I know," Alanic said, giving him a look implying that he was being stupid. "I want you to come with us. If we can fight our way through to the ritual site, we can identify the mages in charge of the summoning and you can then interrogate them in future restarts. There is also a high chance that leaders of the local Cult of the Dragon Below will be there too. All in all, this is definitely information you should be interested in."

"I am," Zorian confirmed. "And yes, what you say makes sense. I guess I just wasn’t thinking of the implications of what you were planning. I guess I’m just so used to failing against the invaders when trying to fight them directly that I just unconsciously discounted the chance you might succeed. You know you’re going to have to fight Quatach-Ichl if you want to reach the ritual site, right?"

"We know," Xvim said. "He might be old and mighty, but he’s still just one mage."

"Well, one mage commanding a whole army of monsters and underlings," Zorian noted. "But fine, we’ll give it a shot."

"Good," Alanic said. "Do you think Zach will also come?"

"Are you kidding me? He’d never forgive us if we excluded him out of a good fight like that," Zorian said. "Just tell me where the meeting point is and we’ll be there."

When Alanic told him he and Xvim would come at the head of a combat group, Zorian had assumed they meant twenty or so mages as the main combat force and maybe twice that many riflemen to serve as support. Instead, when he and Zach came to the meeting point they found almost a hundred men, all of them mages. Some of them were indeed carrying rifles, but Alanic explained that they were just mages carrying firearms rather than regular soldiers.

Xvim and Alanic clearly took their warnings about the invaders and Quatach-Ichl very seriously, which was a good sign.

In any case, Alanic (who was the overall commander of the group, with Xvim being content to follow the man’s lead) decided not to waste their strength by fighting through the city to reach the Hole. Instead, the entire group hid themselves near their destination and waited for the invasion to begin.

"The point of this operation is to catch the leaders of the attack red-handed," Alanic explained when one of the mages asked why they weren’t attacking the summoners immediately. "We must wait for the attack to begin and gather steam, or else they might decide not to stick around the ritual site."

Xvim and Alanic had clearly been talking to the defenders of the city, making preparations, because when the fighting started, it immediately turned fierce around the Hole. Defenders focused much of their efforts into fighting the invaders there, and the invaders reacted to this by concentrating their forces around the Hole even more.

"We’ll wait for the city defenders to soften the invaders up a little before making our move," Alanic announced, dispassionately watching the carnage.

Zorian was watching it too, scanning the crowd from any sign of Quatach-Ichl. The ancient lich was prone to teleporting often when he fought for real, which made it a chore to keep tabs on him, even from this distance.

"Every time I lose sight of him I keep expecting him to suddenly appear behind me and blast me in the back," Zorian admitted to Zach quietly.

"Yeah, I know how you feel," Zach replied back equally quietly. "I’ve fought against other liches and won, but I could never really beat that son of a bitch. And he does have a tendency to pull crap like that on you when you least expect it."

Idly, Zorian began to do the same thing he often did these days to calm his nerves – he checked up on the Key detection mechanism in his marker. He never got a valid response from it, of course, but it reminded him that he had actually succeeded in something recently, and that usually helped his mood.

Except he actually did feel something now. Excited, he focused on what the marker was telling him and-

"Fuck," Zorian hissed, suddenly stiffening.

"What?" Zach asked worriedly.

"I found Quatach-Ichl," Zorian said bitterly, pointing at a spot to the left of them. The lich was just standing next to a building, placidly watching the battle unfold without bothering to intervene.

"Oh," Zach said, quickly noticing the lich now that he knew where to look. "What the hell is he doing just standing by the sidelines like that?"

"I don’t know," Zorian said. "I don’t really care at the moment to be honest. I found one of the Keys."

"Oh?" Zach said, his mood rising.

"You know that crown Quatach-Ichl is always wearing?" Zorian asked.

Zach looked at him blankly for a moment before his face twisted in a grimace.

"Oh you’ve got to be kidding me," Zach complained.

But unfortunately, Zorian wasn’t kidding. According to his marker, Quatach-Ichl was wearing the crown of the Ikosian emperors, one of the five Keys they needed to assemble to leave the time loop.

"This restart just keeps getting better and better," Zorian sighed.

60. Into the Abyss

Zorian didn’t have time to ponder Quatach-Ichl and his crown for long. Right after his brief conversation with Zach, a trio of artillery spells impacted the enemy lines in front of them, kicking up plumes of dust into the air and throwing the battlefield into chaos. Evidently that was meant to provide a smokescreen for their group, because Alanic announced they would begin their advance towards the Hole immediately after.

The entire battlegroup surged forward like a coiled spring, eager to take advantage of the distraction. Zorian found himself struggling to keep up – most of the mages in the battlegroup were physically fit adults, and Zorian was physically unimpressive even by the standard of his own peers. It took everything out of him to match their speed and not fall behind. Even then, he would have never lasted more than a handful of seconds if he hadn’t drunk a stamina potion before the battle.

Zorian had always known that being physically fit was an important requirement for a battlemage, if only because that’s what the academy named as the reason behind forcing first-year and second-year students to take physical education classes. Before the time loop, however, he had never really understood why it was important. It wasn’t about the ability to take hits or having backup when someone managed to force you into close-quarter combat, though these concerns weren’t wholly irrelevant either – it was about mobility. A physically fit person could move faster around the battlefield while carrying more and tiring less.

It was only in moments such as these that Zorian realized how important that was and how much his weak, scrawny body limited him. He really had to figure out some kind of workaround for that, but a simple stamina potion would do for now. At least he wasn’t the only one who had neglected his body – Xvim also had to take the aforementioned potion to keep up with the group, which made Zorian feel a little better about himself.

As they ran, Zorian noticed that Quatach-Ichl was gone from his spot. A quick consultation with his marker determined that the ancient lich had teleported himself a fair distance from the battle site, roughly in the direction from which the artillery spells came.

Well. That was… really unfortunate for those artillery mages. Looks like they would get no more support from them. However, since every second of Quatach-Ichl’s absence was good for Zorian and his group, it was probably better this way. Was he callous for thinking that way? Probably. However, maybe it was because the end of the restart was so close or because it was hard to feel sorry for people he never met, but he couldn’t help but take a strictly pragmatic stance about this. He directed a silent thanks to the mages for their sacrifice and then put them out of his mind.

Their approach was noticed very quickly, despite the distraction, and a portion of the enemy force broke off to confront them. The enemy organization was still in disarray from the artillery magic attack, so the response force was less numerous than it could have been. Even so, they were pitted against about one hundred or so mages, twenty war trolls, a regiment of skeleton soldiers and a small iron beak flock.

Easily manageable, in Zorian’s estimation. Though Alanic’s entire battlegroup had a little less than one hundred people, they were better equipped and probably more skilled than the average invader mage. Plus, they had Zach and Zorian on their side. The question was less whether or not they could sweep the enemy forces aside, but whether they could do so before Quatach-Ichl came back.

Soon, spells started flying on both sides. The enemy mages struck first, hurling wave after wave of magical projectiles at the approaching battlegroup. Fire bolts, beams of electricity and javelins of force were concentrated upon specific parts of the battlegroup and timed together so they would arrive at their targets simultaneously in an attempt to overwhelm individual defenses with impossible force. In response, the battlegroup stopped advancing at maximum speed and shifted into a staggered advance, the front half of the group halting in place to better shield the whole and counterattack while the back half surged forward. Once the back half of the group overtook the defending half, they switched roles, the previously defending half suddenly advancing towards the enemy while the other half covered them and responded to attacks.

Though such tactics greatly slowed down their advance, they were very effective. Despite repeated attacks, the battlegroup didn’t lose a single person as it edged closer and closer to the assembled enemy forces. The incoming projectiles were dispelled, shielded against and intercepted by floating chunks of stone ripped from surrounding roadway. All the while, the battlegroup kept sending out their own waves of attack spells at the invaders, scattering the attacks across the entire enemy group at first and then focusing the majority of their efforts on the weak links among the enemy mages that they identified with this probing barrage. With every exchange, several invaders ended up dead or dying with very little to show for it.

At this point, the enemy mages panicked. They ordered their war trolls, iron beaks and skeleton warriors to charge the battlegroup and stopped pacing themselves, burning through their mana reserves like crazy to throw out as much firepower as they could in the shortest possible time. Caught off-guard by the desperate gambit, three of the mages that made up the battlegroup ended up dead in the initial rush. Afterwards, however, the battlegroup quickly reorganized itself to counter the attack, stopping their advance in favor of a purely defensive posture.

Alanic, Xvim and Zach became more active at this point. Alanic took a few seconds to conjure a huge, animated bird made out of brilliant orange flame and sent the resulting firebird at the approaching flock of iron beaks. It proceeded to easily annihilate the flock, simply by flying through them, and then swooped down towards a cluster of enemy mages to continue its rampage. One of the mages managed to hit it with a dispelling wave before it could connect with the group, but rather than collapse upon itself like most magical constructs did when dispelled, the firebird detonated into a massive firestorm that swallowed both the group targeted by the firebird and the groups adjacent to it.

At that point, however, Alanic was no longer paying attention to the firebird. The moment he had finished casting it and sent it on its way, he had shifted his attention to the charging war trolls and skeleton warriors. He pointed his staff at the war trolls and fired five tiny orange bullets at them in quick succession. The small orange bullets shone very brightly, like miniature stars, and were incredibly fast. In the blink of an eye, they reached the war trolls and detonated into massive conflagrations, far bigger and hotter than any mundane fireball could manage.

Most of the war trolls were incinerated on the spot, but five of them were that strange sort of hyper-resilient trolls that Zorian sometimes encountered among invading forces – the sort that were extremely well warded against fire and other forms of damage. These war trolls survived Alanic’s spell bombardment, but were still singed and dazed by it, so Alanic shifted his attention to the rapidly approaching horde of skeleton warriors instead.

The undead horde had been thinned somewhat by a continuous barrage of attacks coming from the rest of the battlegroup, but there were several hundred skeleton warriors and these ones proved to be resilient against most forms of magic. Powerful wards seemed to have been etched into their bones, protecting them against common attack spells. It seemed inevitable that at least a quarter of the skeleton warriors would survive to close into melee with the battlegroup, which would be disastrous. The moment the horde got close, however, Alanic made a sharp, grasping motion towards it with his free hand.

There was no visible spell emanating from Alanic, but the pinpricks of sinister light burning inside the empty eye sockets of every skeleton warrior were instantly snuffed out. The entire horde of skeletons silently collapsed to the ground, like puppets with their strings cut.

Meanwhile, Xvim mostly concentrated his energies on countering the enemy mages. Whenever the invaders attempted to concentrate their fire somewhere, he conjured translucent purple clouds in front of the area, and at least half of the spells that had entered the cloud would end up being dispelled by the time they passed through it. Sometimes, when the enemy mages tried to employ some especially powerful spell, he would fire fast moving, milky white globes of ectoplasm that unerringly homed in and collided with the enemy projectiles, activating them prematurely. Very rarely, when there was nothing major to be countered, Xvim fired bright blue bullets at enemy shields – whenever one of those bullets connected with a barrier, it instantly collapsed and went away, regardless of how strong it seemed.

Strangely enough, Zach didn’t join in the rest of the battlegroup in peppering the enemy with spells. Instead, he spent most of his time ripping large chunks of the pavement out of the ground and hurling them at the enemy like a living catapult. It was crude, but surprisingly effective – stone and gravel could not be dispelled, and stopping all that mass was anything but easy. For the most part, the only defense against Zach’s catapult impersonation was to move out of the way – which was not always an option, and, more often than not, exposed the target to equally lethal threats. The five war trolls that survived Alanic’s fire stars, for instance, were too dazed to move out of the way in time, and were promptly crushed to death by several tons of falling rocks.

For a moment Zorian wondered why more people don’t try and do what Zach was doing, but then realized that most people weren’t nearly accurate enough to pull that off. Unlike normal offensive spells, Zach’s rocks did not home in on the target. It probably took literal decades of practice for Zach to be so unerringly accurate with his improvised projectiles.

As for Zorian himself, he didn’t bother joining in on the spell exchange. He knew that spending his limited mana reserves on these spell exchanges wasn’t the wisest course of action for him. Instead, he roamed through the enemy ranks with his telepathy, hunting for easy targets. Many of the enemy mages had at least some form of mental defense, but the quality varied greatly. Some of them were only weakly defended, and quite a few had no mental defenses at all. Zorian viciously punished such carelessness whenever he found it, driving telepathic knives into their thoughts and puppeteering their bodies into attacking their comrades. He was fairly sure he was doing way more damage by doing that than he ever could by casting mundane combat spells.

He also used his mind sense and his marker to keep an eye for ambushes and Quatach-Ichl’s return. Because of that, he managed to catch a trio of enemy mages trying to circle the battlegroup and attack them from behind. Although their invisibility spell was good, they were slow to react when Zorian suddenly attacked them with a severing beam, and all three ended up being cut in half by it.

Suddenly, Zorian’s mind sense detected a mind below their feet, rapidly ascending to the surface. It wasn’t the first time he experienced something like this, so he knew what he was dealing with.

"Rock worm!" he shouted, shining a harmless beam of light at the spot the creature was about to emerge from.

Without a word, the mages scattered from the emergence point and set up a kill zone around it. The rock worm attempted to compensate, somehow detecting the shifting positions of its targets through the ground, but Zorian immediately adjusted the beam of light to warn others of its movements. Too stubborn to break off the attack, the rock worm emerged to the surface anyway, erupting out of the ground in a spray of gravel. It lasted less than five seconds before it was sliced apart into several pieces by surrounding mages that were waiting for it.

And then it happened. The moment Zorian had been dreading and was diligently on the lookout for – Quatach-Ichl was back. His return came in the form of teleporting right behind the battlegroup, and then trying to catch them off-guard with a surprise attack from behind. It would have worked like a charm, too, except that Zorian by now somewhat understood how the ancient lich thought and had deliberately chosen to linger in the back of the battlegroup in anticipation of this.

With blinding speed, the ancient lich pointed its bony finger at the thickest concentration of mages in his sight. Zorian didn’t bother shouting a warning – it would never reach Quatach-Ichl’s targets in time – he just reached into his pocket and flung a pitch black metal cube at the lich.

A jagged red beam of disintegration magic erupted from the lich’s finger, seeking to slice apart its unfortunate victims. The cube Zorian threw at the lich was much slower, and would never reach the lich before the disintegration beam did its grisly work. However, it did not need to – instead of traveling in the direction the lich was pointing, the red beam curved through the air towards the black cube, hitting it instead. The cube seemed to drink in the light, absorbing it utterly instead of disintegrating. It then continued forward unimpeded, but it never actually reached the ancient lich – a quick gesture from Quatach-Ichl send it careening to the side, where is impacted uselessly against the pavement.

While this was happening, Zorian raised his hand into the air and created a loud boom to draw people’s attention to what was happening in the back of the battlegroup.

"The lich is here!" he shouted.

However, rather than continue attacking the back lines, Quatach-Ichl teleported again. The distance was very short, however, simply getting him to the right of the battlegroup. There he fired the disintegration beam again, and this time Zorian was in no position to counter him with another cube. Zach was there, but he was caught off guard and all he could do was raise a quick shield in front of himself. Other people managed to shield themselves too, but not everyone reacted in time. The jagged red beam cut a swath of destruction straight into the heart of the battlegroup, killing and wounding at least 15 mages.

Rather than wait for a response, Quatach-Ichl teleported again, this time to the left of the battlegroup. However, this was where Xvim was stationed and he was quicker to react than Zach. Another jagged red beam shot out of Quatach-Ichl’s hand, impacting the dark green shield Xvim erected between himself and the ancient lich. Quatach-Ichl swept his hand sideways, trying to repeat his recent move and simply maneuver the beam through the whole group until he encountered a weak link or two, but found that the beam refused to obey his commands. It remained stubbornly stuck to Xvim’s shield, twisting and warping in order to stay connected to it.

Quatach-Ichl dropped the disintegration beam then, but before he could do anything else, Xvim thrusted his hand forward and the dark green shield surged forward like a battering ram, crashing into the ancient lich. Quatach-Ichl was forced to take a step back, but was otherwise unharmed. On the other hand, this momentary distraction allowed an entire barrage of offensive spells from the rest of the battlegroup to reach him.

Quatach-Ichl suddenly sped up, his movement becoming a blur, and cast shield after shield. Every spell was blocked, sidestepped or even reflected back to the caster. He then stomped his foot against the ground, causing a massive sheet of rock and gravel to rise from the pavement and fly towards the battlegroup. A combined wave of force from numerous mages managed to blow most of the sheet away before it could flatten everybody, but by then Quatach-Ichl had teleported away again.

At least four people ended up dead in the exchange, partially as a result of reflected spells and partially because one large chunk of gravel managed to get through the force wave.

As if completing the circuit, Quatach-Ichl teleported next to the front of the battlegroup. Not only was this where Alanic had been waiting for him, however – this time both Xvim and Zach had followed him by teleporting to the front as well. Zorian remained at the back of the group, knowing he was too weak in direct combat to do more than get in the way against Quatach-Ichl. That didn’t mean he couldn’t help in his own way, though…

Alanic fired some kind of golden orb at Quatach-Ichl the moment he had appeared, which produced an almost panicked reaction from the ancient lich. He immediately erected a fancy-looking triple-layered shield in front of himself, which was probably a good idea since the golden orb passed through the first two layers as if they weren’t there and was only stopped by the third one. Quatach-Ichl was then immediately attacked by Zach and Xvim, who struck against him simultaneously from opposite sides. Zach launched six black, flying blades at the lich while Xvim fired some kind of layered white orb at him.

The lich suddenly sped up again. Zorian was entirely sure at this point that these bursts of speed represented the lich hasting itself with some pretty powerful temporal acceleration. Regardless of the truth of the matter, the extra speed allowed the lich to dodge the black blades and dispel the layered orb.

Well, try to dispel the layered orb. When the dispelling wave hit it, it only shaved off the surface layer of the orb, but most of the projectile continued on unimpeded.

At this point, the lich tried to teleport again. However, it was too late. Zorian had finished hastily carving the spell formula into the ground beneath him and proceeded to pour most of his mana reserves into the ward he was casting, anchoring it to the spell formula beneath his feet. A powerful anti-teleportation field immediately snapped into place around the entire area and the lich’s teleportation spell fizzled out.

The layered orb impacted straight into Quatach-Ichl’s chest. With a high-pitched grinding sound, it drilled straight through the lich’s armor and detonated inside his rib cage. The ancient lich’s entire skeleton was suddenly illuminated in arcing white light that seemed to lock down Quatach-Ichl’s movements. At the same time, Zach’s flying blades that Quatach-Ichl had previously managed to dodge suddenly reversed direction and slashed at the lich again. Their pitch black surface sank deep into the ancient lich’s bones, effortlessly slicing through the nigh-indestructible material. In less than a second, both of the lich’s arms were severed at the shoulder and the blades pressed on. Alanic started to make his move again…

Suddenly, a massive wave of dark red force erupted from Quatach-Ichl’s form in all directions, flinging Zach, Alanic and Xvim away from the ancient lich. The wave then continued on, slamming into the rest of the battlegroup and flinging them about. The physical part of the wave had been blocked before it reached Zorian, but there seemed to be a soul magic aspect to the wave that went through normal magical barriers as if they weren’t there. Zorian’s soul, strongly shielded as it was by now, weathered the assault without issue, but many of the mages around him staggered or even fainted under the spiritual pressure of the wave crashing into them.

Less than a second after the wave passed, Alanic was back on his feet again, having apparently weathered the sudden attack with little consequences. Xvim and Zach, however, were a lot less fortunate. They remained on the ground, still alive and moving but in no position to counter Quatach-Ichl at the moment. Zach looked particularly affected, rolling around on the ground as if in great pain.

"Crap," Zorian hissed. He poked the mage near him that seemed least affected by the wave and pointed to the spell formula at his feet. "Guard this so the lich can’t teleport away, okay?"

He didn’t wait for the man’s answer. He simply sped off towards Zach, hoping he was not too late. If Quatach-Ichl hit Zach with some heavy soul magic while he was incapacitated, it would be a total disaster. Damn it, he shouldn’t have agreed to this…

Thankfully, the lich didn’t prioritize finishing off the two downed opponents, partially because it was too busy re-attaching its arms (apparently it just needed to levitate them back to his shoulders and they fused back on their own; such bullshit) and partially because Alanic had launched a savage attack on it almost immediately. The warrior priest launched golden orb after golden orb at the lich, forcing it to frantically shield and dodge, but it was obvious he couldn’t keep it up and was only succeeding in keeping the lich busy.

Zorian finally succeeded in reaching Zach and started dragging him away from the battle. Thankfully, despite taking a soul attack at pretty much point blank, he seemed to be largely unharmed.

"Fuck, that hurt," Zach complained. "I hate soul magic."

He had the presence of mind to whine about things. That was a good sign. He couldn’t have been hurt that badly, then.

At this point Xvim also started to stagger back to his feet, apparently quicker to recover than Zach. Unfortunately, Alanic’s attack also started flagging a bit by then, and Quatach-Ichl decided that there was time to put down his two mostly-disabled opponents for good before they could recover. Like the previous two times, he suddenly sped up and launched two dark red orbs – one towards Zach and one towards Xvim.

Zorian immediately threw another absorption cube at the path of the orb, knowing it was probably a waste of time to try and shield against it. The orb was thankfully drawn into the cube and sucked into it, just like the disintegration beam earlier, so that was one crisis averted. However, he was in no position to save Xvim. Poor Xvim, there was no way he could-

Almost contemptuously, Xvim backhanded the incoming dark red orb with his left hand, as if striking an errant child’s ball instead of a magical construct. Against all common logic, the spell didn’t detonate against his hand like a proper magical projectile, and was instead deflected to the side. It impacted the ground to the left of Xvim, blowing up a chunk of the road but doing little else of note.

Uh…

Perhaps it was Zorian’s imagination, but even Quatach-Ichl seemed a little shocked at the sight.

Then the moment passed and the battles began again. Alanic and Xvim began exchanging spell fire with Quatach-Ichl in earnest again, and Zorian took advantage of that to drag Zach away into the relative safety of the battlegroup. By now, the battlegroup itself was starting to recover from Quatach-Ichl’s weird soul wave attack and joined in on the battle with Quatach-Ichl, taking off some of the pressure from Xvim and Alanic. Unfortunately, most of them couldn’t deal with the lich’s counterattacks nearly as well as Xvim and Alanic could, so they tended to die a lot. In less than a minute, more than 20 of them ended up dead, though this didn’t dissuade the rest of the battlegroup from trying to help.

At this point, Quatach-Ichl seemed to have decided he had bitten off more than he could chew and tried to unravel the anti-teleportation ward Zorian erected. A powerful dispelling wave swept through the area, seeking to undo Zorian’s work… and failed. If Zorian had simply covered the area with a free-floating ward, Quatach-Ichl’s ploy would have probably succeeded. However, Zorian had taken the time and effort to anchor the ward to a spell formula, making it far too stable to be destroyed on a whim.

Unfortunately for Zorian, Quatach-Ichl seemed to realize this as well… and the spell seemed to have provided him with some kind of feedback information about the ward, because he immediately went after the ward anchor. In a brief pause between the attacks, he suddenly crouched and jumped, soaring through the air as if gravity held no power over him. He flew over most of the battlegroup and landed squarely next to the ward anchor. The mage Zorian had tasked with the anchor’s defense stood his ground against the lich, along with a dozen others, but they were all swept aside with a casual wave of Quatach-Ichl’s hand.

The moment the defending mages were sent flying, Quatach-Ichl sped up again and surged forward, slamming his hand into the center of the crudely-etched spell formula. The surrounding ground immediately shattered, destroying the anchor, and before Zorian could so much as blink, the lich was gone. Teleported away.

A quick consultation of his marker told him that this time, the lich was nowhere near.

The battlegroup took several minutes to recover, regroup and count their dead, and then continued onward towards the Hole. Out of almost a hundred of them at the start of the battle, only 42 survived until the end, and 5 of those were too wounded to continue on with them.

Zorian felt they had been pretty lucky, all things considered.

The closer they got to the Hole, the fiercer, more numerous and more capable their enemies became. Despite this, they only lost a handful of their remaining mages in these conflicts – as intense as these battles were, they were something the battlemages knew how to deal with. Additionally, they were just one group of Cyorian soldiers pushing towards the Hole – there were other, bigger groups that were assaulting the place from different directions. The invaders couldn’t spare to send too much of their forces against a relatively minor incursion like theirs.

Quatach-Ichl left them alone for quite a while after his departure. As far as Zorian could puzzle out from the lich’s movements and random thoughts he had lifted from the minds of enemy mages, this was because their clash with the ancient lich kept him away from other, more critical battlefields, which led to a partial collapse of invader defenses around the Hole. Thus, he was too busy propping his forces back up and putting out fires to properly deal with them.

He did not entirely leave them alone, however. He occasionally teleported near them and attempted to catch them off guard in various ways. One such attempt consisted of the lich teleporting high into the air above them and trying to bombard them while flying. Another involved him teleporting a pair of thunder lizards right next to the group. A third one involved Quatach-Ichl teleporting a fair distance from the group and then conjuring a miniature horde of animated creatures to attack them. These attacks never really accomplished much, in large part because Zorian could track him through his crown and thus always knew when he was coming. In any case, Quatach-Ichl never lingered long, teleporting away the moment his latest scheme failed.

Zorian was especially fond of the two thunder lizards the lich brought him – since Quatach-Ichl had taken them away from their controllers, there was no one to contest Zorian’s control once he tried to subvert their minds. Instead of the thunder lizards rampaging through the battlegroup, Zorian ended up taking control of them and gleefully used them against every subsequent enemy group they encountered. They were so effective in Zorian’s hands that Quatach-Ichl eventually showed up just to get rid of them again.

Too bad the ancient lich didn’t linger long enough for Zorian to thank him for his gift.

Unfortunately, there were limits to everything. Once they started getting dangerously close to their destination, Quatach-Ichl decided that enough was enough. He teleported into the area around the battlegroup once again, and this time he brought 15 more mages with him. It was obvious this wasn’t going to be just another probing strike this time – the ancient lich was ready for round two.

And his very first move upon teleporting in was to thrust his skeletal hand straight at Zorian, launching a shining green javelin directly towards his chest.

Why? Hell if Zorian knew. Maybe he noticed that Zorian had some way of tracking his movements and detecting his presence. Maybe the way he had trapped the lich in an anti-teleportation ward and subverted his thunder lizards had left a particularly big impression on him. Ultimately, the only thing that matter was that Quatach-Ichl evidently wanted to see Zorian dead as soon as possible.

Zorian didn’t try to use one of his absorption cubes this time – by now, Quatach-Ichl knew damn well that Zorian had those, so he wouldn’t have bothered targeting him if he thought they could stop the spell. The way the green javelin effortlessly punched through the multi-layered shields the rest of the battlegroup erected in front of Zorian also led credence to this assumption. Instead, Zorian simply reached into his marker and prepared to end the restart – he had no idea if the green javelin had some kind of soul aspect to it, but better safe than sorry.

Before Zorian could end the restart, however, Xvim made his move. He thrust one hand towards the area in the path of the javelin and the other towards Quatach-Ichl and his group, causing two small spatial distortions to pop into existence. The green javelin had shattered all barriers in its way with effortless ease without visibly weakening in the slightest, but when it encountered the spatial distortion in its way, it simply disappeared…

…only to reappear in front of Xvim, shooting out of the second spatial distortion and hitting one of the mages next to Quatach-Ichl, whose hastily erected shield failed to stop it.

It was a miniature gate, Zorian realized, not a pair of spatial distortions. By placing one end of the gate in front of the green javelin’s flight path and the other in front of the enemy mage, Xvim had redirected Quatach-Ichl’s own attack against the enemy. For a moment Zorian wondered why Xvim didn’t redirect it back at the lich instead, but then realized this was a far more useful outcome. Targeting Quatach-Ichl with his own spell would have been satisfying, but it was unlikely that the ancient lich would have been felled by the javelin, whereas this way they had one less mage they had to fight.

Then the battle began in earnest. The mages Quatach-Ichl had brought with him must have been some sort of elite, because they were far more capable and powerful than the typical invader. Thankfully, despite the losses they had suffered along the way, the battlegroup still had more than twice the number of men that Quatach-Ichl’s group had – and the mages that comprised it weren’t much weaker than those Quatach-Ichl had brought along with him.

However, it became obvious very quickly that Quatach-Ichl really wanted Zorian dead for some reason. While he didn’t drop everything to concentrate on killing him, he and his subordinates targeted Zorian whenever they had the chance to do so. It got so bad after a while that Xvim had to drop everything else and dedicate all of his time to keeping him alive.

It was chaos. Swarms of burning stars flew through the air, colliding with defensive barriers and each other. A massive black beam that seemed to drink in the light around it scythed through the battlegroup, forcing Zorian to take a page out of Quatach-Ichl’s book and teleport away to evade it. A trio of bright red beams zig-zagged through the defensive ranks, closely hugging the ground in an attempt to get past the shields. A massive animated tiger made of blue flame savaged a pair of mages before pouncing towards Xvim and Zorian, only to hit the thin, barely visible defensive screen Xvim erected around them. The tiger of blue flame passed through the screen without resistance, but something crucial seemed to have been disrupted inside the construct by the passage, because it unraveled a split second afterwards. One of the enemy mages smashed a clay pot on the ground in front of him, and a dozen or so incorporeal wraiths flew out of the shattered remains, only to get quickly destroyed by Alanic. A dozen or so disgusting, mutated, giant rats tried to ambush the battlegroup under the cover of some very potent invisibility, only to be massacred by Zorian whose mind sense saw through the illusion with trivial ease. Another group of mages tried to reinforce Quatach-Ichl’s group, only to die instantly upon arrival as Zach turned the ground beneath their feet into a set of giant jaws that crushed them to death.

"This isn’t working," Zach complained to Xvim and Zorian, having retreated to their position. "It’s too slow. We’ll be here forever at this rate."

"Yes, I’m pretty sure that’s what the invaders are aiming for," Zorian said. "They just have to keep us busy until the ritual is finished, not kill us all."

"You know, you and Xvim are pretty much no use in this fight, except as damage magnets," Zach said. A pink, flower-shaped projectile streaked across the sky in a parabolic arc, heading straight towards Zorian, but Zach ripped a chunk of stone from the roadway beneath them and hurled it into the air to intercept it. The improvised projectile not only dispersed the funny-shaped (but probably not-so-funny in effect) projectile, but continued onward towards Quatach-Ichl’s forces, forcing them to defend against it. "And I reckon Alanic and his men could hold their ground without me."

"What are you saying?" Zorian said, scanning the battlefield for threats with senses both mundane and supernatural.

"It’s only us who really have to reach the ritual site. So let’s leave Alanic with the task of keeping Quatach-Ichl busy and continue on without him," said Zach.

Yeah, that sounded pretty logical. Zorian doubted Alanic would have anything against the idea.

"Okay, but how do we do that?" Zorian asked.

"Leave it to me," Zach said, cracking his knuckles. "Xvim, come closer so I can minimize the affected area. The spell is stronger that way."

"What do you intend to do?" Xvim asked curiously.

But Zach didn’t reply. The moment Xvim got closer he executed a long and complicated chant and a white, translucent sphere flickered into existence around all three of them. A moment later, it shot into the air like a cannon ball, taking them with it.

After they had reached an impressive altitude, bringing them beyond the range of most spells, the sphere instantly changed directions and flew off towards the hole at incredible speeds. Quatach-Ichl and his army attempted to shoot them down, but the sphere weaved through the attacks like a hummingbird on a sugar high, swerving, altering speed and reversing direction with unbelievable rapidity. What few spells managed to hit the sphere only managed to induce weak ripples on its surface, like pebbles thrown in a still pond.

Despite its great speed of movement and the rapid direction shifts it was executing, Zach, Zorian and Xvim remained safely suspended inside the sphere’s center, unaffected by the maneuvering. Zorian was pretty sure the effect of inertia alone should have killed them by now, but they remained perfectly alive and healthy. Well, the sight of some of the dodging maneuvers Zach was executing was making him feel slightly sick, but that was not the fault of the spell itself.

Very quickly, they reached the Hole and unceremoniously plunged into its depths.

Now all they had to do was find where the ritual was taking place.

The Hole was a big place. Zorian knew the ritual had to be done somewhere around it, and Alanic seemed certain that it had to happen below ground too. However, that still left lots of places to look for. Zorian had expected they would have to spend a fair amount of time divining its exact location and otherwise tracking it down.

In reality, the ritual location was absurdly easy to spot. The moment their flying sphere descended a little deeper into the Hole, they encountered a huge stone platform floating in the middle of the empty space.

"I have a feeling this is it," Xvim said unnecessarily.

Almost as soon as they spotted the platform, the people stationed on it spotted them too. Once again, the sphere was forced to dodge and weave between attacks, but it continued its rapid descend towards their target. Zorian mentally prepared himself for touchdown, but it seemed Zach had a better idea than simply depositing them in the middle of a hostile throng of mages. The sphere was just about the collide with the surface of the platform when it rapidly changed directions and slammed into the gathered defenders, trying to fling them off the edge of the platform.

Loud, panicked screaming erupted from their targets, many of which were too slow to realize what was happening and found themselves stepping into thin air and plunging into abyssal darkness of the Hole.

The sphere quickly circled the entire platform, flinging more people into the dark abyss surrounding the platform. Even more were simply knocked down by the movements of the sphere or dazed and wounded when it impacted them at high speeds. Finally, the sphere ground to a halt and flickered away, depositing Zach, Xvim and Zorian near the center of the platform.

"That spell really takes a lot from me," Zach said, stumbling slightly. "Take care of me while I recover a bit, okay?"

There was no time to answer – though caught off guard by their sudden arrival and the unconventional attack of the sphere, the defenders quickly started throwing themselves against Xvim and Zorian.

Zorian surveyed the situation as they fought. At the very center of the platform was a large stone cube covered in dense, complicated spell formulas. A larger, circular spell formula covered the ground around the cube, centered around it. Above the cube, a large red sphere floated in the air, occasionally rippling and warping under the magical forces it was subjected to. After a few seconds, Zorian realized it was blood. Standing next to cube was one of the mages, presumably the leader of the ritual. Another six mages stood on the edge of the spell formula circle. All seven were chanting and gesturing wildly, completely ignoring the commotion currently happening on the platform.

Though Zorian would have liked to interrupt the ritual by attacking these seven, he couldn’t. Though it was not readily apparent, the center of the platform was protected by a powerful hemispherical shield – he knew because Zach had tried to bowl through their little gathering by ramming his sphere through the platform’s center, but ended up bouncing off the invisible barrier defending them. Zorian tried to walk through it, just in case it only blocked magic and not people, but found the barrier as solid as stone.

Zorian also couldn’t help but take note of the clothes the seven mages in the center were wearing. They were wearing scarlet red robes that hid their faces behind a veil of supernatural darkness. How very familiar. This was exactly the same type of robe that Red Robe had been wearing. Well, the leader of the ritual standing in the center also had a stylized golden dragon embroidered on his robe, so he was a little different, but the other six wore pretty much identical stuff as Red Robe.

Aside from the core of the ritual taking place at the center, there were only two other interesting features at the platform.

One was a rectangular stone slab reminiscent of an altar. Several grooves had been cut into the otherwise featureless rectangle, draining into several stone bowls attached to its sides. The rectangle was completely spotless for the most part, but numerous red splotches could be seen on the floor around it.

Right next to the rectangle was a haphazard pile of dead children. There were four of them in total, and they were completely naked, their skin pale and bloodless and their chests brutally sliced open.

The second place was a collection of seven cages, four of them empty and open, and another three occupied by three more living children. They had already been stripped naked by the cultists, wearing nothing except thick brown collars around their necks. The skin surrounding the collars was red and raw, and in one case outright bloody, suggesting that the children had been desperately trying to take them off at some point. Zorian assumed the collars were what was stopping them from transforming.

The three children consisted of two boys and a girl. The two boys were total strangers to him, but he soon realized that he knew the girl. It was Nochka, the little cat shifter his little sister was friends with in some restarts. The three of them looked subdued and traumatized when Zach, Zorian and Xvim arrived on the platform, but once they realized what was happening and that there was a chance they could be saved, they started screaming for help and shaking their cages without stopping.

Though Zorian felt terrible for it, he ignored them. They were in no immediate danger, as every invader on the platform was either too busy with the main ritual or trying to kill the new arrivals. He simply dived into the heads of two unknown boys and memorized their names, homes and general identity, as well as when and how they were kidnapped by the invaders.

Gradually, the number of enemy mages on the platform fell lower and lower. The pace with which their enemies were dying especially increased once Zach had a chance to recover a bit and join them in wiping them out. Even so, they had been fighting for quite a while at this point, and exhaustion was starting to set in. Additionally, the enemy clearly saw the situation was becoming hopeless and was starting to become desperate.

Without warning, one of the mages pointed both of his hands at Zorian, launching a huge bolt of shining force at him. Zorian shielded, but some part of the spell’s effect managed to bypass through the shield and slammed into him, sending him tumbling backwards. He almost fell over the edge of the platform, but managed to glue his hands to the stone floor with unstructured magic in the last moment, leaving him dangling over the dark abyss.

He heaved himself back to the platform, only to find a sickly yellow beam heading straight for him before he could shield himself and dodge.

Just before the beam would hit him, Xvim stepped into its path. His mentor had probably run out of mana by this point, because rather than shield against the spell or reflect it, he simply shielded Zorian with his body.

The yellow ray hit Xvim straight into the chest, dealing no visible damage. Despite this, his mentor immediately slumped to the floor in a boneless manner and did not move again.

With a harsh movement, Zorian blew the attacker’s skull with a concentrated beam of force and then quickly moved to check up on Xvim. Sadly, it was as he feared – despite receiving no obvious damage from the spell, Xvim was already dead.

Zorian didn’t linger. Nothing good would come from mourning his mentor’s death, and the man would be fine in the next restart. The best way Zorian could honor Xvim’s sacrifice now was to make sure this entire risky trip had not been in vain.

By this point, most of the enemy mages at the platform had been dealt with, and the ones that were still alive were being steadily picked off by Zach. After a moment’s thought, Zorian decided that Zach didn’t need his help so he instead approached the center of the platform again.

The seven mages in red robes were still diligently chanting and gesturing, as if nothing outside their little bubble was of concern to them. Zorian did not know if this was because they had so much confidence in the barrier sealing them off from the outside world or if they literally couldn’t stop their motions without something going terribly wrong, and he didn’t really care. Since he had no way to break through the invisible defensive bubble, he reached out to the seven mages with his mind.

The barrier, strong as it may be, did nothing to halt Zorian’s psychic abilities. That was the good news. The bad news was that all seven of them had shielded their mind incredibly well. Zorian had never seen mental defenses that strong and sophisticated in a non-psychic individual. They had wrapped their minds in layers upon layers of different barriers, conjured decoy minds to mislead any attackers and even placed some reactive defenses that automatically counterattacked against any mental incursions.

And that was for the six outer mages. The ritual leader had flat out placed his mind under the effect of mind blank, and Zorian couldn’t tamper with him at all.

Undeterred, Zorian picked one of the six outer mages at random and began his telepathic offensive.

The mage in question flinched when Zorian started his attack, but said nothing and continued his chanting and waving. Probably couldn’t afford to stop then. Zorian completely ignored the decoy mind the mage had set up and set about systematically dismantling his mental defenses.

As seconds passed and Zorian started peeling back layer and layer of man’s mental defenses, the mage in question started to become increasingly frantic. He tried to dedicate some of his attention to fighting off Zorian, but he wasn’t psychic and there was only so much he could do to support his mental defenses without resorting to structured magic. Finally, the mage could not stand it anymore and abandoned the ritual in favor of repeatedly recasting his mental defense spells.

Sadly for him, he was far too late for this to work. Perhaps if he had dropped the ritual immediately he could have successfully stalled Zorian’s assault, but at this point Zorian had too much momentum and was too familiar with the flaws and peculiarities of his defenses. Barrier after barrier continued to fall.

Meanwhile, the rest of the red robed mages had been growing frantic as well. It seemed that they really needed all six outer mages to maintain control of the ritual they were performing, and the sudden absence of one of them had thrown everything into disarray. The sphere of blood floating above the central cube writhed and wobbled dangerously, and the leading mage kept chanting louder and louder in an attempt to maintain control over it.

Zorian ignored their plight, focusing on the mage he was targeting. At last, the final barrier fell and he dived straight into the man’s mind.

"Damnit, get out of my head!" the mage screamed, clutching his head in pain.

Zorian didn’t listen to him, of course. He plunged roughly into the man’s thoughts and memories, sweeping aside all resistance and seeking out names, goals, passwords, meeting places, addresses…

"No!" the lead ritual mage suddenly shouted. "No, no, NO! We were so close! This can’t be happening!"

The orb of blood seethed and boiled, strange shapes akin to mouths and eyes occasionally dancing on its surface, before it suddenly stilled.

For one single second, the sphere of blood hung motionless in the air, perfectly calm and spherical.

Then everything was illuminated in bright red light and darkness consumed Zorian’s world.

61. Anthills

When Zorian woke up, he was back in Cirin, being subjected to Kirielle’s usual morning antics. That was a relief. When the red light illuminated everything at the end of the previous restart, he had been afraid there would be lasting consequences. There was a primordial involved, after all, and he felt they were not something that should be taken lightly. There was a precedent about them being able to affect souls, considering the role of primordial essence in the creation of shifters.

After chasing Kirielle out of his room, he sat down and performed a quick checkup of his mind and soul for any non-obvious damage they might have received. Only once his self-diagnosis came up empty did he relax.

He wondered what the red light signified. The cultists had obviously lost control over the ritual and it failed in a lethal manner, killing everyone in the area… but he wondered what the nature of that failure was and how extensive the damage had been. It might be that stopping the ritual mid-way was almost as dangerous for the city as letting it run its course.

Well, no matter – they would just have to find a way to foil it before it even started.

As a bonus, stopping the ritual early meant that Nochka and the other shifter children wouldn’t get horrifically murdered to power up the ritual. Previously, Zorian had been running on adrenaline, and had more pressing concerns to worry about, such as hostile mages trying to kill him… as such, he had been able to push the emotional impact of those sights aside and not think too deeply about them. Now, however, there were no such distractions present… and Zorian had a very vivid memory, especially after going through all those aranean memory magic training methods.

Damn it. Those memories would bother him for months to come, he just knew it. Especially the part about Nochka. It wasn’t like the suffering of the rest of the children left him cold or anything, but they were essentially strangers. He saw all kinds of awful things happen to strangers during the invasion, and was somewhat numb to it by now. But Nochka… he knew her. Even before he had gotten pulled into the time loop and she became his little sister’s friend, he had known her – albeit only as that girl whose bicycle he pulled out of the river. It made it hard for him to just shove the memories aside in favor of focusing on something else.

Thankfully, he didn’t have to look far for a suitable distraction. Zach showed up at the door to his home again, just like he had in the previous restart, giving him someone to talk to. Soon, the two of them found themselves sitting alone in a train compartment, departing from Cirin.

"No Kirielle this time, huh?" Zach said, humming thoughtfully. "I guess this isn’t going to be another vacation restart, then?"

"Another?" Zorian scoffed. "Some vacation the previous restart turned out to be."

"Frankly, a lot of that is your own fault," Zach told him. "If you really wanted to relax, you shouldn’t have poked around serious matters so damn much. Hell, if you ask me, a proper vacation would involve leaving Cyoria entirely. We can still do that now, if you want. I know this really gorgeous beach in Tetra, way down in the south of the continent…"

"No, I don’t think that’s a good idea," Zorian said, waving him off. "Don’t get me wrong, I do need a small vacation… but I won’t be able to relax with all this bothering me in the background. Let’s take a couple of restarts to investigate all this new information and then we can relax."

"Oh?" Zach perked up, leaning forward on his seat. "So you found out something from that mage you memory probed?"

"Lots of things," Zorian nodded happily. The attack on the hole had been a very risky maneuver, even for a pair of time travelers like them, but the payoff was just as great as Zorian hoped it would be. It seemed that even inside the time loop, the old adage about big gain only coming with big risks was true. "Do you want everything or just the highlights?"

"Give me the highlights for now," Zach said. "We can go into details later."

"Alright," Zorian nodded. He expected as much. "First of all, did you notice what those mages behind the shield were wearing?"

"Red robes," Zach nodded. "Kind of like the one the third time traveler was wearing."

"They’re not like the one Red Robe was wearing, they’re completely identical," Zorian said. "I’m sure of it. And that is interesting, since those robes are not something you can buy on the open market. They are made specifically for the inner circle members of the Esoteric Order of the Celestial Dragon. No one except them should have one."

"Red Robe could have simply stolen it," Zach pointed out. "Though admittedly, I don’t have any idea why he would go out of his way to steal that robe specifically."

"Those robes are supposed to be a marvel of magical engineering," Zorian said. "They are made from very rare and impressive materials – specifically, scarletite threads and crimson sea silk – and densely embedded with powerful defensive magics and privacy wards. If they are as impressive as the mage I memory probed thought they were, I’m not surprised that Red Robe would want one. I want one too, now. We’re definitely stealing one in this restart so I can take it apart."

"Hell, if they’re that good, we’re stealing them all," Zach said. "If they’re made from crimson sea silk, we can sell them for huge amounts of money based on materials alone. It’s a bit unfortunate, though, since now we can’t know if Red Robe is just being practical by wearing those robes or if he really is a cultist."

"I think there is a good chance he might be a cultist," Zorian said. "He showed up pretty early in the restart when he went after us, and he was wearing the robes when he did. That implies he has one within easy reach of himself. The time he tried to kill you when you were barely out of bed is especially telling – it sounds like he came rushing at you as fast as he could, with minimal preparations, yet he still had it on."

"That’s a good point," Zach said, frowning. "Well, if that’s true, then he should be easy to find. Just how many members of the inner circle does the cult have, anyway?"

"Fifteen," Zorian said.

"You got them all from that mage?" Zach asked in surprise.

"Not all, no," Zorian shook his head. "I only managed to find the identities of five of them before the restart ended. But I know how many of them in total exist, and it shouldn’t be hard to track down the rest with the information I do have. Especially since I know the identity of the person leading the cult."

"Man, I’m really starting to get jealous of your mind magic," Zach said. "Whenever I tried to investigate the cult, I never really went anywhere with it. Forget about tracking down the leader, I couldn’t even identify high-ranking members. Not even truth potions helped."

"Probably because all members of the inner circle, as well as anyone else in important positions, swore a geas to keep the names and identities of their fellow inner circle members a secret," said Zorian. "Mind magic does not care about any of that, of course."

"Yeah, yeah, rub it in," Zach grumbled for a second. "Well, what are you waiting for? Are you going to tell me who the head crazy is, or what?"

"Vatimah Tinc, the head of the local branch of the Mage Guild," Zorian told him.

There was a brief pause as Zach digested this.

"Well shit," Zach finally said. "No wonder the invaders could set up bases beneath Cyoria and operate there unchallenged for more than a month. The man is in perfect position to block and sabotage any kind of investigation around Cyoria he doesn’t like."

Zorian nodded wordlessly. Although Eldemar had several institutions dedicated to countering criminal activity and investigating suspicious incidents, the Mage Guild was the first line of defense in that regard. With them subverted, nothing else would work correctly.

"Talk about the fox running the henhouse," Zach said. "I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, since it was obvious for years that someone pretty high up was helping the invasion… but this kind of thing still catches me off guard. What the hell does someone like that hope to gain by helping the invaders, anyway?"

"Oh, that’s an excellent question. Thanks for reminding me," Zorian said. "You see, I found out more about what the inner circle of the cult is planning with their ritual, and I can tell you it’s not what their regular members and their Ibasan allies are thinking."

"They’re not trying to let a primordial run amok through the city in an attempt to appease their world dragon god that hates all humanity?" Zach asked curiously.

"No," Zorian shook his head. "That’s what the regular members of the cult think. The inner circle know that while the ritual involved releasing the primordial into the world, the goal is not to let it do whatever it wants. The goal is to enslave it and get their very own living superweapon and bound wish genie. The imprisoned primordial is supposed to be Panaxeth, He Of The Flowing Flesh, and the inner circle of the cult thinks he can grant them everlasting youth and remake their bodies into something… better."

"Better?" Zach asked, arching his eyebrow. "Is this the kind of better where you end up faster and stronger but covered in eyeballs and tentacles?"

"Well, in the case of that mage I memory probed, it mostly involves him being 21 and healthy again," Zorian said. "And having a bigger penis."

Zach snorted in amusement.

"Panaxeth is supposed to be a fleshwarper, rather than a shapeshifter in modern sense," Zorian continued. "In theory, it should be possible for it to cure diseases, regress people’s age and remake their bodies into some superior form. It’s just a question of whether they can control it well enough."

"Can they?" Zach asked curiously. "Control it, I mean."

"No way to know, really," Zorian admitted. "But I doubt it. The idea is to restrain Panaxeth with a binding spell keyed-in to his essence and then subjugate his mind. Even the cultists admit that Panaxeth’s ever-changing nature means the binding spell won’t stay effective for long. Meaning they have to enslave it within fifteen minutes or less."

"You don’t think they can work that fast," Zach surmised.

"I think it might be impossible even if they had all the time in the world to work their magic," Zorian said. "Let me put it this way. When I invaded the mind of that mage at the end, I encountered powerful and sophisticated mental defenses on him. Better than I had ever seen before on a human mage. It took me mere minutes to dismantle them and start rooting through his memories. At the time, I thought the protections were there to compensate for the known weakness of the shield that protected the ritual ground. But that was just a secondary concern – their real purpose was to ward off any mental counterattack from the primordial while they tried to bend it to their will."

"Ah, I get it," Zach said. "You’re thinking that if you can get through the shields in a few minutes, the primordial could as well."

"Yeah," Zorian admitted. "It’s possible, I suppose, that I’m overselling Panaxeth and that he has no way to strike back at the minds of cultists trying to enslave him. But primordials are supposed to be these ancient beings that gave even gods pause, and Panaxeth’s powers revolve around manipulating living flesh, including the nervous system. At the very least, I expect Panaxeth to have incredible mental defenses at his disposal. I bet he could weather mental attacks from anything other than a master telepath with effortless ease."

Zach and Zorian continued talking for another half an hour, discussing the various facts and secrets Zorian had discovered with his memory probe at the end of the previous restart. Eventually, though, the conversation started to wind down.

"Huh," said Zach thoughtfully. "And here I thought the reason Quatach-Ichl didn’t follow us was because Alanic kept him too busy to do so."

"In a way, that’s true," Zorian said. "If Quatach-Ichl had left the battle to follow after us, his soldiers would have surely perished without his support… and I have a feeling he cares far more about Ibasan mages than he does for Cyorian cultists. In that way, Alanic and the rest of the mages that came with us did keep him busy. Still, if Quatach-Ichl thought there was a good chance the ritual would collapse without his support, he probably would have went after us anyway. Fortunately for us, the cooperation between him and the cult’s leadership isn’t exactly rosy. The leaders of the cult never told him they would be practically defenseless once the ritual starts, which gave him a skewed image of what kind of forces they had arrayed against us. He had no idea that the seven most powerful mages on that platform had no way to contribute to its defense."

"They were afraid Quatach-Ichl would take advantage of their weakness to off them," Zach surmised.

"Yes, exactly," Zorian nodded. "Especially since they weren’t completely sure whether or not Quatach-Ichl was aware of what the true goal of the ritual is. He shouldn’t have been, but old, powerful archmages like him are hard to fool and keep in the dark about things. And if he knew they were trying to take control of the primordial, it wouldn’t be particularly strange for him to try and sabotage them once they release it from its prison."

For about a minute, both of them were silent. Zorian because he no longer had anything notable to say, and Zach because he seemed to be considering something.

"You know, I’ve been thinking," Zach said, looking around their compartment. "Why are we still on this train? You didn’t bring Kirielle along with you and we’re well away from Cirin at this point. Can’t we just teleport directly to Cyoria already?"

"Well, yes," Zorian said. "I just figured the train compartment is as good a place to talk as any, you know? Although I’d like to make a detour before we go to Cyoria, if that’s okay with you."

"Sure," Zach shrugged. "Where are we going?"

"Eldemar."

"The capital city?" Zach asked. Zorian nodded. "Why?"

"To see if we can find another Key there," Zorian answered. "I’ve been thinking about the Keys, and how they’re apparently treasures of the first Ikosian emperor, and I think there is a chance the royal treasury has one or more of them. I mean, the crown of Eldemar has been trying to acquire the legacy of Ikosian Emperors pretty aggressively. Even if the treasury doesn’t contain a piece of the Key, it would be a good idea to break into their archives. They might know where the keys could be, even if they don’t actually have them. At the very least, their records and secret documents would be a good place to start in regards to our search for the Keys."

"You… want to break into the royal treasury?" Zach asked. After a second of silence, he shook his head and laughed lightly. "Actually, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. We should check out the treasuries of Sulamnon and a couple of other large Splinter Nations too – Eldemar isn’t the only country trying to collect imperial artefacts, you know."

"I know, but Eldemar is the closest and I’m guessing they already know about similar initiatives of other nations and how successful they are," Zorian said.

"The only problem is that breaking into the royal treasury is no simple matter," Zach told him seriously. "There is no way we can do it this morning, with no preparations whatsoever. And even with all our skills, I doubt we can do it without being discovered in the process. You wouldn’t believe how upset the royals get when an intruder successfully gets into the palace. It’s like kicking over an anthill – they would be after us for an entire month, and they’re actually pretty capable. It might be best to delay that kind of excursion till the end of the restart."

"Fine," Zorian said. It wasn’t like he expected he could just walk into the royal treasury and check thing up at his leisure. "But I still want to check out the defenses so I know what I’m dealing with. I assume from your words that you have already broken in there, so you can tell me the details from your perspective as we walk."

"I never actually managed to break into the treasury," Zach said. "Admittedly, I didn’t try very hard. I did it for a laugh, really, to see if I could do it. Well, it turned out to be harder than I thought. From the way the Ibasans managed to assemble their secret invasion, you might think the royals and their forces are incompetent… but you’d be wrong. They guard their treasures very, very well. If only they valued their loyal subjects as much as they do their possessions…"

The last part was mumbled under his breath, but Zorian heard it anyway.

"I knew this could bring a lot of unwelcome attention to us," Zorian said. "That’s why I didn’t bring Kirielle with me this time. One of the big reasons why I decided not to tangle with House Boranova too much in the previous restart is because that had the potential to get everyone around us in trouble. I guess in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t really matter if Kirielle, Imaya and the others suffer due to our actions, since everything will be wiped clean at the end of the month anyway, but I just can’t let myself think in such a way."

"No worries," Zach said, waving his hand dismissively. "I actually appreciate that kind of attitude. I was kind of worried before that you’d try to make me do some awful stuff in the name of practicality, but you’re an okay guy."

Zorian found it a bit amusing how trying to rob Eldemar’s royal family doesn’t qualify as awful stuff in Zach’s eyes. It wasn’t unexpected, of course, considering how the royal family stood back and watched as House Noveda was looted by Zach’s caretaker.

"Anyway, we’ll be annoying all sorts of powerful people in this restart," Zorian said. "The royal family, House Boranova and plenty more besides. I intend to go after the cult’s inner circle members, and they’re probably all very influential people."

"So we’re just going to go around stirring up one hornet’s nest after another?" asked Zach rhetorically. "Nice. I’ve done that in a couple of restarts. Fun times."

Zorian gave Zach a blank look. Sometimes, he really envied his fellow time traveler for having had literal decades of restarts to fool around and experiment in.

In the end, their visit to Eldemar transpired without complications, albeit this was largely because Zorian had Zach telling him what ideas would never work and warning him when something had the potential to alert the palace guards that they were being spied upon. Some of the countermeasures Zach described to him would definitely have tripped him up if he had been performing the attempt alone. The palace wards were so extensive they could even detect when someone was staring at the building for too long. Zorian still had no idea how something like that could even work, but he decided to trust Zach that he wasn’t playing a prank on him or something.

Somewhat intimidated by the defenses arrayed in front of him, Zorian decided to limit himself to a simple visual inspection, using captured pigeons as his remote-controlled eyes. The palace wards could detect spy animals, but they only reached so high into the air and pigeons had excellent eyesight.

As far as Zorian could tell, his actions were not detected. Even if they were, though, Zach and Zorian had already left the city before making the attempt, and Zorian was controlling the pigeons through a chain of telepathic relays.

The next day they went to Xvim and Alanic to try and convince them that time loop was real and that they needed help. There was a bit of an argument between Zach and Zorian about how to go about it – Zorian argued that they should take their time convincing them, while Zach insisted they should just dump everything in their lap right away and see what would happen. In the end, they decided to go along with Zach’s plan – if it worked, it would save a lot of time; if it failed, they simply lost a restart worth of their help, which wasn’t too debilitating.

Predictably, neither Xvim nor Alanic reacted well when faced with Zach and Zorian’s collected claims, but they both accepted the notes they had entrusted to Zorian in the previous restart and agreed to at least consider their story. It was more than Zorian had hoped to get out of them, to be honest.

Veyers still couldn’t be found. Zach confirmed that this was also the case at the very start of the restart as well – he had sought the boy out before coming to meet with Zorian, and Veyers was nowhere in Cyoria even then. As such, on the third day of the restart, Zach and Zorian decided to launch a more intense investigation into Veyers' whereabouts.

Specifically, they decided to break into Boranova mansion and interrogate Andoril Boranova – the man who served as the boy’s caretaker ever since his parents had died in the Weeping.

By necessity, their break-in couldn’t be very subtle. Although they had fallen on hard times, the Boranova were still an old Noble House, and their manor had very good wards protecting it. Neither Zach nor Zorian were in the mood for spending several restarts gradually mapping their warding scheme in order to subvert it peacefully. As such, they decided to just barge in, make sure Veyers was not hiding somewhere in the house under heavy wards, kidnap Andoril and then teleport to a pre-arranged place so they could interrogate the man in peace.

The initial attack on the manor occurred in the middle of the night (since the city authorities would be more sluggish at that time, what with most people being asleep and all) and consisted of Zorian casting a number of ward analysis divinations of the mansion’s wards in order to locate the wardstone powering them. His probing of the building’s wards was instantly detected, of course, but it took time for actual people inside the building to organize, understand what was happening, and muster a response – before they could do anything, Zorian had already found the information he’d been looking for.

"Over there," Zorian said, pointing his finger in the direction of the ward stone.

"Got it," Zach said, quickly starting to perform a long chain of gestures. "I’ll clear a way for us."

Soon, a devastating piece of artillery magic hit the wall in front of them, opening a brand new entrance to the mansion in question. They rushed inside, disabling the dazed mansion defenders they encountered before making a beeline towards the wardstone.

Zorian was shocked by how easy the operation turned out to be. No one could stop them – the mansion’s inhabitants were caught completely off guard by the suddenness and ferocity of their attack, and most of them tried to fearfully get out of their way instead of organizing some kind of hasty defense against them. In little more than a minute, Zach and Zorian had reached the ward room. The door was made out of thick, alchemically strengthened steel, and was virtually indestructible in the short amount of time they had to do this… but unfortunately for House Boranova, the walls were not similarly durable, and Zach unceremoniously blew the door off its hinges and strolled inside. After that, shattering the golden sphere that served as the anchor for the mansion’s wards proved trivially easy.

When the mansion’s wardstone fell, all of the wards defending the mansion followed. Sometimes, wealthy families like this one had backup systems in case treachery or accidents resulted in the failure of the primary wardstone, but apparently House Boranova didn’t bother with such contingencies. With no divination wards to get in their way, they quickly scried the entire mansion for Veyers, only to turn up empty.

No matter – they expected as much. They immediately set off towards Andoril, who was actually trying to organize some kind of defense after notifying the authorities about a break-in. The group he gathered around him actually provided the only worthwhile piece of resistance during the whole operation, but a lack of mental shields meant they suffered devastating losses before they realized what was happening and could counter Zorian’s abilities.

Andoril Boranova was knocked out and captured, and the two of them quickly teleported away from the mansion along with their prisoner. They made several teleportation jumps in quick succession, all of them using different teleportation spells and directions of travel, before finally arriving to a small underground box with no physical exits that they had prepared in advance for the interrogation.

Strangely enough, when they finally woke up Andoril and started asking him about Veyers, the man laughed.

It was a very bitter laugh, but a laugh nonetheless.

"Veyers, Veyers, Veyers! It’s always that kid, isn’t it?" Andoril sighed. "Alright, what did he do now?"

"It doesn’t matter," Zorian said, his voice resonant and magically distorted. Both he and Zach were hidden behind several layers of clothing and privacy spells, and the man should be incapable of casting anything, thanks to a magic-disrupting poison Zorian had fed him while he was unconscious. Hopefully the measures they had taken would be enough to keep their identities safe from various investigators, since they intended to let the man go after they were done questioning him. "Where is Veyers now?"

"I don’t know," the man grunted, sounding annoyed. Zorian could read his thoughts easily enough, and knew he was telling the truth.

"Aren’t you his guardian?" Zach asked. "How can you not know?"

"As if that boy ever listened to me!" Andoril snapped. "They made me the boy’s guardian, but never gave me the authority to discipline him. He comes and goes as he pleases. I haven’t seen him for an entire week, ever since he got expelled from the Academy."

"Why was he expelled from the Academy?" Zach asked.

"He lost his temper and erupted into a fireball centered around himself. No fatalities, but some of the people around him were burned, including a teacher that had tried to restrain him," Andoril said. "The Academy said it was an attack. He says he just lost control over his magic, and that if the Academy’s education was worth a damn, he wouldn’t have such shoddy control over his abilities."

"And what do you think?" Zach asked.

"I think Veyers did simply lose control over his magic and that the Academy knows it. They were just looking for a solid excuse to get rid of him," Andoril said with a derisive snort. "I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t want him if I was in their place either. Damn it, Veyers, why do you always do this sort of thing…"

"You’re being surprisingly cooperative," Zorian pointed out.

"I’m tired of taking the blame for everything that boy does," Andoril said. "I didn’t see the boy for an entire week and the first news I heard of him comes in the form of being kidnapped by a couple of madmen looking for him. Madmen that are willing to launch a frontal assault on a Noble House’s headquarters situated inside a major city… and are powerful enough to succeed. I’m not dying for that kid."

There was a brief pause as Zach and Zorian processed this. From reading the man’s thoughts, Zorian could tell that the way they masked their identity put the man somewhat at ease – if they had openly showed him their faces, he would have assumed they intended to kill him at the end, and would have been much less cooperative. As it was, he felt there was a good chance they would let him go if he told them what they wanted to know.

The fact that they were asking about Veyers rather than some other, more serious House secrets was also a factor.

The following hour-long interrogation shed some light on the quarrelsome boy that they had once shared a class with, partially through honest question-and-answer sessions with Andoril and partially through strategic use of thought reading, memory probes and short-term memory erasure. It turned out that House Boranova did have a bloodline, but most of their members never awakened it to its full potential. In its dormant state, the bloodline simply gave a person exceptional affinity to fire magic. Only the main line of the family knew how to ignite the bloodline into its active state, giving the user more impressive abilities.

Although House Boranova hadn’t gone extinct during the Splinter Wars and the Weeping, they’d lost most of the core members of the family. Of the main line of the family, only Veyers had survived the tribulations, and his father had died without igniting the boy’s bloodline or passing on to him (or anyone else, really) the specifics of the process.

The consequence of this was that some of the more influential members of House Boranova started to question Veyers’s right of succession. He was too young, they said, and didn’t even have his bloodline ignited. What kind of heir of House Boranova didn’t have an ignited bloodline? What made him actually qualified to lead the House? Wouldn’t it be better to put someone more proven in charge during these trying times? Someone like… one of them?

The conflict threatened to tear the House apart, until the Veyers faction created a brand new ignition ritual by piecing together fragmented historical sources and a healthy amount of speculation. Pressed for time and reluctant to give someone else the legitimacy of an ignited bloodline, they decided to use the ritual on Veyers right away.

At first, it seemed to work. Veyers developed non-structured fire magic, just like his ignited predecessors, and he could open magical locks that could only be opened by ignited members of the house and access the family’s secret areas. The pretenders dropped their claims, and all was well for a while.

Unfortunately, it soon became clear that either the new ignition ritual was faulty or that some kind of specialized training regimen was required to stabilize the ignited state, because Veyers started losing control over his emotions and magic. He became prone to rapid mood swings, laughing uproariously in one second, only to be reduced to near-suicidal depression in the next, and then erupting into murderous rage when confronted. His non-structured fire magic started manifesting itself based on his subconscious desires, frequently spinning out of his control entirely, almost as if it had a mind of its own.

House Boranova hastily found various experts and magical exercises that allowed Veyers to regain some measure of control over himself. None of it was perfect, however, and the complaints about Veyers’s leadership returned in full force. Enraged, Veyers tried to have his challengers executed, but House Boranova was in too dire a position to start killing its own members… essentially, even trying to do so would likely result in internal war.

Gradually, Veyers sank into a pit of anger and bitterness at the perceived betrayal of his own family members, and started to lash out at everyone around him. And when he started going to the Academy, this anger was extended to the Academy and everyone in it, since their attempts to help him control his unstable magical abilities didn’t work fast enough for his liking. Just like his family, the Academy had failed him.

Unfortunately, since Veyers and Andoril didn’t get along very well, the man had no idea if Veyers had any friends or associates outside the House they could talk to. It was unlikely that anyone else in his family would know more, either – Veyers had burned his bridges with most of House Boranova, even the people who had supported him in the beginning, blaming them for the consequences of his failed ignition. At this point, he was pretty much an heir in name only. The only reason he hadn’t been stripped of his position already was that there were multiple valid candidates to replace him, and the Council of Elders was afraid they would tear House Boranova apart if they selected a replacement immediately.

They knocked Andoril unconscious and then left him lying in a field near Cyoria, set to wake up after a few minutes. After another half an hour to mask their trail, they both returned to Noveda Mansion. Zorian was technically living in his old dorm building again, but he and Zach agreed it would be better if he moved in with Zach for the duration of this restart. That way they would always be close enough to coordinate with each other to either flee or fight off attackers.

They made a lot of people furious tonight, after all, and they were only going to anger more of them in the near future. If their hunters ended up tracking them down, it was best if they didn’t let themselves be picked off one by one.

The furor created by their attack on Boranova mansion was a sight to see. Zorian had originally intended to attack the Cult’s inner members immediately afterwards, but decided to postpone that when he saw the scale of the manhunt launched against them. Cyoria’s authorities really didn’t like something like that happening right under their noses – between the attack on House Boranova and the frequent monster attacks that had been taking place in the past couple of days, Cyoria didn’t exactly look like a safe, civilized city.

Zach and Zorian ended up spending most of the next three days outside of Cyoria, visiting various sites that Zach had found in the past in search of the elusive simulacrum spell. There was probably a more efficient way to find the spell itself, but Zorian was a bit sick of information gathering and this way had the benefit of putting Zorian’s combat skills to a practical test against the various creatures and hostile mages that Zach knew about. Zach seemed to find this more fun as well.

They fought through an entire tribe of invisible mountain yeti in order to raid the makeshift treasury they had made from the remains of unfortunate travelers that had fallen to their ambushes. They eradicated a massive jewel wasp infestation from an ancient temple so they could access the secret vault around which their main hive was built. They successfully caught a massive man-eater catfish that was terrorizing the villages of Woga river and extracted a metal scroll case from its stomach, the spells it contained safely protected inside even after years of exposure to stomach acids of the giant catfish. They stormed the tower of a minor necromancer and raided a demon cult.

They didn’t find the simulacrum spell, but the restart was only beginning and Zorian didn’t feel like they were wasting time. Not only was he gaining valuable combat experience, he was also finding all sorts of interesting magics among their spoils. Although Zach had already sifted through these in search of magic for his own use, he had a different focus from Zorian, and many things he didn’t have any interest in were good enough to catch Zorian’s attention. Zach had very little interest in spell formula, for instance, whereas Zorian zealously studied every magic item they found in their wanderings, trying to divine their secrets in hopes of deepening his expertise.

Aside from searching for the simulacrum spell and sorting through loot, Zorian also delivered a number of interesting magical creatures to Lukav so the man could turn them into transformation potions. Initial results were interesting, though Zorian couldn’t tell yet whether to pronounce the initiative a success or not.

He also visited several of the experts that Xvim had named in his notebook of targets he should aim for. He opted not to attack and memory probe them yet, and simply tried to talk to them to see what he could gain from them peacefully. Sadly, it was like Xvim said – their best tricks they weren’t willing to share for any price. On the bright side, even the stuff they were willing to share was useful to Zorian – the female mage that specialized in magic sensing techniques was especially useful, allowing him to identify several dead-ends among his ideas and helping him narrow down which creatures had the most useful magical senses to try and obtain. Apparently an Eye Beast – the floating purple blob covered with eyes that had killed him in one of the restarts – was one of the best choices for this.

Sadly, when Zach and Zorian tried to search the cave system beneath Knyazov Dveri for the creature, they could not find it. Even when they checked out the place where Zorian had ended up getting killed by it so many restarts ago.

Five days after they were informed of the time loop, Alanic and Xvim finally summoned them for a discussion. Faced with their own words and secret codes contained in the notebooks Zorian recreated, they tentatively accepted the truth of the time loop. Xvim more so than Alanic, who still seemed to be having trouble accepting something as bizarre as time travel. On the other hand, Xvim seemed to be very ill at ease about the invasion and the plot to release a primordial inside Cyoria, whereas Alanic took that part in stride.

Together, the four of them slowly went through that final battle (which obviously wasn’t in the notes Zorian gave them), noting what tactics Quatach-Ichl used, what spells were used and how they fared, as well as the various information Zorian had ripped out of the mind of that cultist mage at the end. Many ideas and suggestions were thrown around, and many more would no doubt be handed out after Alanic and Xvim had the chance to pore over the information for a few days.

Alanic seemed to be especially outraged when he found out about the specifics of the child sacrifice involved in the ritual to release the primordial, and wanted to know the names of the children so he could have someone guard them. Zorian had no complaints about that – it was actually rather relieving to hear, and took some weight off Zorian’s conscience for not focusing on them too much.

After that, Zach and Zorian started going after the cult’s inner circle. These raids were far more subdued and sophisticated than their direct assault on Boranova mansion, but they were hardly undetected. For one thing, the inner circle of the cult consisted of powerful mages, many of which had influential positions in various organizations – they were rarely alone, and their homes were well protected. For another, Zach and Zorian were after their possessions as well as their secrets. Whenever they gained access to their target’s homes, they took anything that looked valuable, interesting or incriminating.

Just as the furor over the attack on House Boranova started to die down and the attacks of the monsters crawling out of Cyoria’s underworld began to subside, a new round of scandals erupted in the city as several prominent mages were attacked in their homes and robbed of their possessions. The outrage got so bad that the Crown of Eldemar announced they intend to send a group of royal investigators to inspect the city and its institutions.

It was a bad time to be a Cyoria city official.

With a dull thud, the only door connecting the Black Room beneath Cyoria to the time magic research facility closed shut. From the point of view of the outside world, it would open on the very next day. From the point of view of Zach and Zorian inside, they had just secured themselves an extra month of time in the restart.

"We did it," Zach said happily. "I really thought we messed things up there for a second, but we did it."

"We did mess things up," Zorian said, inspecting the silky red robe in his lap. It was the fabled red robe worn by the inner members of the cult, one of the four that Zach and Zorian had acquired in their raids against the cultists. "Our forgery of the royal seal was incomplete and the guy inspecting our documents saw through it. I had to edit his memories."

"Ah," said Zach, deflating a little before his enthusiasm returned in full force. "Oh well, all is well that ends well. We didn’t forget anything, did we?"

Zorian glanced at the large pile of wooden crates they’d brought with them into the Black Room. There was a little bit of everything there – food, water, books to sift through, magical spells and exercises to test, piles upon piles of crystalized mana to make up for the lack of ambient mana in the Black Room, some interesting magic items for Zorian to study, board games to pass the time with and so on. He couldn’t see through solid objects, obviously, but they didn’t lose any of the crates in transit so it should all be there.

"I don’t think we forgot anything, no," Zorian said, shaking his head. He put the red robe aside for the moment and gave Zach a tired look. "How come you are so excited about this, anyway? You realize you’re going to spend the next month cooped up with me in this tiny space, sifting through written records and going through repetitive exercises?"

"Don’t be a killjoy, Zorian," Zach said. "This is the first time I’ve been in a time dilation chamber. This thing could do so much good for us. It’s exciting."

Zorian chuckled knowingly. He would see how long this mood would last.

62. Improperly Used

Inside the Black Room beneath Cyoria, Zorian sat cross-legged on the floor, eyes closed in concentration. Floating in front of him was a large sphere of water, its surface calm and smooth, without even the slightest ripple disturbing its surface. Around the sphere orbited numerous smaller spheres, each following a different orbit yet somehow managing not to crash into each other.

Without warning, a chunk of crystalized mana sailed through the air and punched straight through one of the smaller spheres in order to slam into the central sphere. The entire system of watery spheres trembled and wobbled for a moment, threatening to fall apart.

But it didn’t. After a few seconds, Zorian succeeded in regaining control. Soon, the only evidence of the impact was the chunk of crystalized mana currently floating in the center of the watery sphere and the fact that two of the smaller spheres ended up crashing into one another, forcing Zorian to absorb them into the central mass.

Zorian opened his eyes and glared at Zach.

"It’s so booooring…" Zach sighed, idly chucking another lump of crystalized mana at the sphere. Zorian temporarily shifted a portion of his concentration at the incoming crystal, seizing control of it telepathically and hurling it back at Zach. It did nothing, though, since Zach just lazily raised his hand and caught it in his palm.

Zorian shook his head in a mixture of amusement and exasperation. They had only been inside the Black Room for ten days at this point and Zach was already starting to get stir crazy.

For a moment he refocused on the water in front of him, causing all of the spheres to merge together into a thin stream and drain away into the miniature cistern which it had come from. Ten seconds later it was all gone, leaving behind only a wet chunk of crystalized mana. Zorian let it fall and caught it in his palm, before turning his attention to Zach again.

Truthfully, even Zorian found the situation hard to bear. They were trapped inside the equivalent of a tiny apartment, they had virtually no privacy and the lack of a clear day and night cycle was messing with their sleeping habits. He felt he could understand that one group that ended up butchering each other a lot better now.

Even so, this was something that had to be done, and they both knew it. The situation was hard to bear, but they were accomplishing things. Zach spent most of his time slowly honing his personal soul awareness and mental barriers, occasionally testing the latter against casual telepathic attacks by Zorian. When he was not doing that, he was either thinking up some way to distract himself or helping Zorian go through the numerous books and documents they brought with them to the Black Room. These gathered texts were either stolen from the stashes of high ranking cultists, looted from the various sites they attacked in their (thus far futile) search for the simulacrum spell, picked up from the aranean treasury beneath Cyoria or simply bought from the stores with their vast wealth. Zach wasn’t much of a researcher, but Zorian appreciated his help all the same.

As for Zorian himself, he spent most of his time going through the aforementioned books, practicing shaping exercises and working on his spell formula blueprints. He could not properly test the latter within the confines of the Black Room, both because of insufficient materials and because of the danger of his experiments backfiring in a small confined space, but a lot of spell formula work was theoretical in nature.

"If you’re so bored, why don’t you finish reading through those scrolls I gave you earlier?" Zorian asked, slowly drawing out mana from the crystal in his palm to replenish his reserves. Since the Black Room was completely cut off from the outside world, all of the ambient mana had been used up by now, forcing them both to use their supply of crystalized mana instead.

"Ugh. Did I ever tell you that I don’t really like reading?" Zach asked.

"Yes," Zorian deadpanned. "Many times."

"Well I’m saying it again," Zach huffed. "I don’t like to read. I especially don’t like to read longwinded cryptic rantings written by demon-worshipping cultists."

"Primordials aren’t demons," Zorian pointed out.

"Whatever," Zach said, throwing his chunk of crystalized mana at Zorian again. Zorian tried to catch the incoming crystal with his remaining free palm, but was a lot less dexterous than Zach and would have likely failed to catch it… if he hadn’t cheated by subtly altering the crystal’s trajectory to hit his palm. He threw the other crystal at Zach, deliberately aiming it over his head rather than straight at him, but Zach still caught it without problems. Was Zach always so accurate, or was this simply a product of endless practice over more than three decades of restarts? "I’m starting to question if those cultist texts are even worth anything. I don’t remember us finding anything useful in them thus far."

"Well, if nothing else, they have the most comprehensive explanation of blood magic, including actual guidebooks and casting instructions," said Zorian, picking up a non-descript book bound in brown leather from the stack beside him. The book appeared completely blank at first sight, but if one channeled mana into it in a very specific pattern, words would reveal themselves. "Who knows how long it would have taken us to gather this kind of illegal expertise otherwise."

Zach gave him a silent stare.

"What?" Zorian asked.

"Mind magic, soul magic, and now blood magic," Zach said. "It’s like you’re trying to become as sinister as possible…"

"What makes you think I want to learn blood magic?" Zorian asked, raising his eyebrow at him. "I mean, you’re kind of right, but what gave me away?"

"The fact you’ve gone through those books three times already is kind of a dead giveaway," Zach said. "Since you’re so interested in the idea, I’m guessing there is more to it than stabbing and bleeding people for power, right?"

"Yes," Zorian nodded. "There are basically three distinct ways to use blood magic. The first one is to simply use it as a power boost to enhance your spells in a critical moment. Needless to say, this is not very healthy for the mage in question. Life force is critical to our health in a way that our mana reserves aren’t. Even a slight expenditure of life force will leave you tired and weakened, and since life force recovers far slower than mana reserves the effects may linger for days or weeks."

"Huh," said Zach thoughtfully. "That sounds kind of like drawing upon raw ambient mana to get out of a bad situation, only better because you’re only risking your health instead of both your health and sanity."

"Pretty much, yes," Zorian nodded. "As far as I can see, drawing upon one’s life force is superior in virtually every way to drawing upon raw ambient mana."

"But not every way?" Zach asked.

"Well, it is admittedly somewhat easier to kill yourself by overdrawing on your life force than it is by drawing upon raw ambient mana," Zorian admitted. "Still, the risks are quite manageable in my opinion. Especially for us, what with our ability to undo any lasting damage caused by training or abusing it."

" Can we simply undo such lasting damage?" Zach frowned. "How are you so sure this won’t be a problem?"

"That special soul awareness training Alanic is putting me through is essentially inflicting a form of life force damage on me," said Zorian. "Most of the really big symptoms go away after a few hours of any particular session, but smaller ones linger for days afterwards. I tire more easily, lose most of my appetite, suffer from random cramps and pains and so on."

Zach seemed taken aback at his admission.

"You never mentioned that," he said.

"I didn’t want to whine," Zorian said, shaking his head. "It’s a small price to pay for what I’m getting. Anyway, Alanic pushed me pretty hard in the previous restart, so these things never really had time to die down. Instead, they just kept getting gradually worse as the restart progressed. They were never crippling, but it was noticeable. When the restart ended, however, so did all the health issues I had accumulated in the previous restart."

"And now?" Zach asked, frowning. "Are you getting sicker all the time in this restart too?"

"No, I’m pacing myself better this time," Zorian said.

"Good," Zach said. "Even if you can get your health back, it can’t possibly be good for your mind to spend an entire restart increasingly tired and in pain."

Zorian hummed thoughtfully. That… was a good point.

"So what are the other two ways of using blood magic?" Zach asked after a while, breaking Zorian out of his thoughts.

"Right. The other two methods," Zorian said. "Well, the second one is probably the most famous one. Or should I say in famous? It’s basically ritually killing people to extract their life force, which is then used to cast spells. Usually demon summoning."

"What?" Zach asked, giving him a strange look. "Why demon summoning?"

"Casting spells with someone else’s personal mana is hard," said Zorian. "It’s not toxic like raw ambient mana, but other people’s mana is extremely hard to shape and control. This is especially true when that mana was taken forcibly from the target. Using other people’s life force has the same problem, only worse, since life force is so much more potent than regular mana. If you want to do anything fancy with your stolen life force, you need to set up long and demanding rituals. It’s much easier to just summon demons with your own mana and use stolen life force as payment for their cooperation."

"I thought demons asked for souls as payment," Zach said.

"They accept both, and more besides," Zorian shrugged. "It depends on the demon, really."

"Well, whatever," Zach said, clearly not terribly interested in the discussion about demons. "Since the first method is kind of neat, but situational, and the second method sounds exactly as awful as I feared, I’m guessing it was the third method that got you so interested in this stuff?"

"Right. The third method of using blood magic is related to enhancement rituals," Zorian said, a bit of excitement suddenly shining in his eyes.

Zorian launched into a quick explanation of the matter. Enhancement rituals were complex magical rituals that granted permanent magical enhancements to the target. Superhuman strength, fast healing, flight, fire-breathing, inherent ability to see mana… these were just some of the many possibilities that a caster could acquire by investing in the field.

There was a price, of course, or else they would already be in widespread use. First of all, there was no such thing as a safe and easy enhancement ritual – they were all very dangerous and difficult, with the slightest mistake having the potential to kill, cripple or render insane. Secondly, enhancement rituals effectively turned the target into a magical creature… and magical creatures needed mana to live.

Every magical creature needed a certain amount of ambient mana just to stay alive and fuel their magical abilities. The more powerful they were, the higher the ambient mana levels had to be to support them. Stepping into an area too thin in ambient mana to support them wouldn’t immediately kill them, but they would find themselves quickly weakening and wasting away. This was the main reason why powerful monsters from the deeper levels of the Dungeon didn’t overrun everything – they would effectively starve to death outside their home areas.

A human, regardless of the manner in which they acquired their magical abilities, also had to pay the price to maintain their existence. A portion of their mana reserves was effectively lost, permanently tied down in the maintenance of the magical enhancement. Their mana reserves' maximum would be permanently lowered.

It was a heavy price to pay, especially for a mage already suffering from below average mana reserves, such as Zorian. Mages interested in magical enhancements had to think very carefully about whether a particular enhancement was worth the price they would pay for it.

That said, while the price had to be paid… the size of the price was not set in stone. Depending on the sophistication of the enhancement ritual, the quality of the materials used in the procedure and the skill of the mage conducting it, the enhancement could either cost you half of your maximum mana reserves or a mere tenth of it.

Blood magic, by virtue of interacting with a person’s very life force, could allow one to integrate a magical ability extremely well into the target. So well, in fact, that the ability could become inheritable – a true bloodline. In fact, quite a few bloodlines began in this very manner.

Employing blood magic to integrate an enhancement ritual made an already dangerous undertaking even more risky… but the price for an enhancement so well integrated into the target was greatly reduced.

There was still a price. Even with blood magic use, Zorian would still have to give up some of his precious mana reserves to acquire permanent magical enhancements. However, the price was reduced enough that Zorian was no longer willing to ignore the possibility outright.

"It’s not a priority, of course," Zorian finished. "But I definitely intend to experiment with the field in the future."

Zach clacked his tongue in dissatisfaction.

"I have to say I’m not too fond of the idea," he said. "Every time I think of blood magic, the image of those shifter children from the previous restart pops into my mind."

Zorian flinched a little at the reminder.

"But I trust you not to descend to that level of depravity," Zach hurriedly added. "Just… stay away from the whole sacrifice people to summon demons part of the field, yeah?"

"Yeah," Zorian nodded, a little more subdued.

He had originally wanted to point out that Zach could benefit from enhancement rituals even more than Zorian would, but decided this wasn’t the best time to raise that issue.

Zorian leafed through one of the books on more exotic shaping exercises, searching for something that seemed challenging, but not frustratingly so. Most of the exercises in it were pretty crazy stuff, though, even by his standards. He tried to remember where they had found the book while he leafed through its pages.

After a few seconds, he remembered. It was one of the books they had taken from the aranean treasury. They had also tried to break into that secret room on the ceiling where the Cyorian web presumably kept their real treasures, but failed. Despite Zorian’s growing skill at disarming magical security systems, all they had succeeded in doing was triggering the safeguards and ruining everything.

No matter. He would figure out how to get inside eventually. The setup was quite good, but it was no longer as arcane to him as it once was. He was pretty sure he could figure out how to dismantle the security spells in another five or six attempts.

"Why do you keep bothering with shaping exercises?" Zach asked him, not bothering to actually look at him. He was too busy juggling a dizzying number of crystalized mana chunks to devote too much attention to Zorian.

Showoff.

"Because I still haven’t reached the limit of my shaping ability," Zorian said, sounding as if that was the most obvious thing in the world.

"Zorian, you’re already starting to get better than me in terms of shaping skills," Zach sighed. "And my shaping skills are good enough to cast just about every type of magic out there. Including really demanding ones like medical magic. What the hell do you even intend to do with crazy shaping skills like that?"

"You can never have too much shaping skills," Zorian told him.

"You spent too much time around Xvim," Zach said. "The guy’s brainwashed you."

"Every improvement of my shaping skills, no matter how minor, means I spend less mana on my spells," Zorian said. "For a low-mana guy like me, every drop of mana is precious. We can’t all be inexhaustible mana monsters like you, Zach."

"Hell yeah! I’m the only one awesome like that!" Zach said, puffing his chest in an exaggerated fashion. Unfortunately for him, the action caused him to lose control over the chunks of crystalized mana he was juggling. They clattered to the floor, some of them breaking up into smaller pieces upon hitting the ground. "Oops?"

Zorian snorted in amusement.

"Did you ever find any clues about your mana reserves?" Zorian asked curiously. "There has to be a reason why you deviate so much from everyone else when it comes to your mana reserves."

"Sadly, no," Zach said, stepping over the fallen crystals in order to sit down next to Zorian. "No one I consulted about it has any idea how that is possible. Most people think it’s some kind of undocumented bloodline of the Noveda. Although if so, it’s one that shows up rarely and irregularly, otherwise the enemies of our House would have noticed it and noted it in the past."

"I suppose there is no chance of you just being very, very lucky?" Zorian asked.

"It’s rather unlikely," Zach said. "I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that my shaping skills aren’t that much worse than yours, despite the massive disparity between us in terms of mana reserves."

"Of course," Zorian nodded. "I assumed that’s just decades of practice adding up."

"Ha. Well, it’s not just that," Zach said. "The fact I was able to keep up with the academy curriculum at all, even before the time loop, pretty much shuts down the theory I’m just lucky. I’m magnitude 50 in terms of mana reserves, but I can shape my mana as if I was magnitude 25 at most. That’s too… convenient to be natural."

"Hmm, yeah," Zorian said thoughtfully. "Still, magnitude 25 isn’t small at all. I’m surprised you managed to get your shaping skills as high as you did with that as your starting point."

"I did have a lot of time to get it right," Zach pointed out. "Considering you managed to catch up to me in a measly five years or so, I don’t think it’s really that impressive. Especially since my shaping skills are as high as they will ever be while yours just keep growing better and better."

"I’m sure Xvim would be able to find you something to work on if you asked him for help with your shaping," Zorian teased.

Zach scowled at him, but then suddenly gained a thoughtful look on his face. He kept staring at Zorian for a few seconds, making him increasingly uncomfortable.

"What?" Zorian asked impatiently.

"You know, if you’re really so determined about pushing your shaping skills to the best they could be, you should invest some time in learning medical magic. Or at least, the diagnostic half of it. Many of those diagnostic spells analyze the state of your magic, not just your body. You can use them to map the flow of energies inside of you and get a better picture of your own limits."

That did make sense, sort of. Zorian already had a decent feel for his own mana, thanks to Xvim’s training, but this still sounded like an improvement in that regard.

"Maybe some other time," Zorian said, shaking his head. "It sounds interesting, especially if I intend to seriously mess around with blood magic, but it does not fit into my current plan."

"We have a plan?" Zach asked with mock surprise.

"Okay, so it’s a very loose plan," Zorian admitted. "But it does exist. What, do you want us to make a step-by-step schedule or something?"

They decided to take a few hours to just relax and unwind. They played cards and board games, exchanged stories and even had a drawing competition. Sadly, they couldn’t agree if it was Zach’s portrait of Zorian or Zorian’s portrait of Zach that was better, so the contest was reluctantly pronounced a draw.

They still had ten days to go. Zorian didn’t regret coming here in the slightest, but damn would he be glad to be out of this place.

"Finally!" Zach said, spinning around with his arms stretched out to take in the forest around them. "Finally, after years of imprisonment-"

"Only 30 days, actually," Zorian corrected.

"It felt like years," Zach continued stubbornly. "Damn, I’d never imagined seeing a bunch of trees would make me so happy. Look, Zorian – trees! Trees!"

Zorian smiled, saying nothing. He too was glad to be out, but he wouldn’t dignify Zach’s overdramatic antics with a verbal response. As if seeking to spite him, Zach walked up to one of the trees and hugged it.

Zorian stopped walking and stared at the spectacle in amusement, wondering how long Zach would keep this up. Especially since Zorian could see a large amount of ants travelling up and down the tree in question, and they didn’t seem happy at Zach for disturbing them…

Suddenly, Zach flinched away from the tree with a muttered curse and started shaking the furiously attacking ants off of him. Zorian couldn’t help it – he laughed loudly at Zach’s misfortune, and then dodged backwards when Zach tried to shake off the ants in Zorian’s direction.

"Jerk," Zach sniffed disdainfully.

"Come on," Zorian said, motioning Zach to follow him. "We’re not far from Alanic’s place. Once we give him the report we prepared for him in the Black Room, we can go and do a glad we’re out celebration or something."

During their month in the Black Room, Zach and Zorian had taken the time to compile all the important information they had gleaned from the looted cultist texts. Zorian intended to follow up on that information himself, of course, but it wouldn’t hurt to give that information to Alanic as well. Maybe coming at the problem from two different directions would result in something.

"That does sound nice," Zach said, trailing after him. "But I’m the one picking the place. No offense, Zorian, but you have no idea how to have fun."

"I have a feeling I’m going to regret this, but fine," said Zorian.

"It’s not true fun unless you regret it immediately afterwards," Zach said sagely.

Alanic was surprised to see them on his doorstep, but his surprise quickly turned pleasant when he realized what they’d brought to him.

"Thank you for this," he said. "I must say, I was a bit disturbed at how lightly you were taking this invasion, time loop or no time loop. It’s comforting to realize you really are putting some work into dealing with it."

"It’s hard to stay outraged at something for years and years, especially when things get reset once a month," Zach said. "But we aren’t ignoring it."

"Just remember to compile a similar report with your findings by the end of the restart," Zorian added.

"Of course," Alanic said. "What do you intend to do now?"

"For the rest of the day? Get drunk," said Zach. Ugh, was that what he was planning? "Afterwards, well… I guess me and Zorian will continue our search for the simulacrum spell. I’m sure I encountered it somewhere in the past, but I just can’t seem to find it. Why is a spell like that so rare anyway?"

Zach probably didn’t actually expect Alanic to answer that, but the warrior priest gave him an answer all the same.

"It’s because the simulacrum is one of the major stepping stones towards becoming a lich," Alanic said. "If you can cast that, you’re halfway there already. Not to mention the spell itself being a complete nightmare for criminal investigators. So anyone who is known to have it is watched more intently by the Mage Guild, unless they are very closely aligned with them."

"So… don’t tell anyone we can cast simulacrum, is what you’re saying?" Zach asked, largely rhetorically. Alanic gave him a blank stare. "Yeah, I figured. But wait, doesn’t that mean I should be looking for the spell primarily among groups of necromancers and liches?"

"Yes?" Alanic said, then frowned. "Hold on. You know the locations of necromancer groups and lich sanctums? Just… how many of these locations are we talking about?"

Fifteen minutes later, it had been determined that Alanic would join them on their simulacrum search. And also that Zach would sit down and write down a list of all necromancers, liches, demon worshippers, slaver compounds and other criminal sites he knew of… or at least the ones that he still remembered the exact location of, since he had forgotten quite a few of them by now. Unlike Zorian, he had never acquired some method of guaranteed perfect memory, and had never been all that good at remembering details anyway.

Zorian had a feeling that Alanic’s notes at the end of this restart would no longer be as small and sparse as they’d been at the end of the previous one.

"This is bullshit," Zach complained, his voice slurring slightly. He downed another glass of hard liquor and narrowed his eyes at Zorian. "There is no way you’re so good at holding your liquor. You’re cheating somehow. You cheater."

Well, he was certainly right about that. As a point of fact, Zorian was using the trick taught to him by Haslush, so long ago, and stealthily transmuting his alcohol into sugar. But why would he ever admit that?

He just downed his glass of sugar water and gave Zach a bright, self-satisfied grin.

In the Ishekatara Sea – the southern sea enclosed by the two prongs of the Altazian continent – there was a pirate ship. Well, there were quite a few of them actually, but this one was important because its crew was mostly composed out of skeletons. The only living crew were a trio of brothers, each of whom was a necromancer of some skill.

The Skeleton Pirates, as they were commonly called by their victims, had been living a pretty good life until now. The trade companies in charge of most merchant ships were notoriously cheap, staffing their cargo ships with the smallest crew they could get away with. Meanwhile, skeletons required no food or pay, and could be packed like sardines into the pirate ship’s cargo hold without ever complaining about inhuman conditions or getting sick. As such, when a metaphorical skeleton crew of a merchant ship met the literal skeleton crew of the pirate ship, the result was rarely in doubt. The living sailors were severely outnumbered, and probably reliant on guns for defense, which didn’t work very well against skeletons.

The only issue was closing in on their victims before they could get away, but the pirate ship the three brothers used was special. Most of their victims wouldn’t even know they were coming until it was too late, and quite a few surrendered their cargo immediately when they realized what they were up against. After that, the skeleton pirates looted everything, throwing some of the skeletons overboard to make space for their new loot – the skeletons were easily replaceable, after all – and went off to sell their ill-gotten gains.

Sadly for them, their comfortable existence had come to an end. The ship’s sails were burning, there were several gaping holes blown in the hull, and the sounds of magical combat emanated from its interior. This time, it was the skeleton pirates who were getting boarded.

Inside the ship in question, Zorian was fighting a horde of skeletons.

"This is so stupid," he complained, creating a shining beam of severing force to cut the approaching horde at the knees. He learned the hard way that destroying their heads did very little and that he needed to cut off their limbs if he wanted to take them out of the fight. "Why am I the one fighting mindless skeletons instead of going after living mages vulnerable to mind magic? Zach and Alanic better have a good explanation for-"

The ship shook from another explosion, but Zorian telekinetically glued his legs to the floor beneath him and thus managed to stay on his feet. The skeletons were not so lucky, and most ended up falling to the ground, providing an excellent opportunity to Zorian for finishing some of them off and maneuvering himself into a better position.

He had to hand it to the three pirate brothers running this ship – they’d put some pretty good wards on the vessel, or else it would have long since turned into a pile of sawdust from the intensity of the fight currently taking place. Though now that he thought of it, the pirates were probably powering such strong wards with the souls of their fallen enemies, so maybe it wasn’t as impressive as it first looked.

Or maybe the skeletons doubled as mana generators for the wards in addition to being the disposable crew of the ship? There was a certain amount of beauty in making skeletons pull double duty like that. Hmm…

Before the skeleton horde could fully recover and swarm him again, Zorian conjured an animated mass of ectoplasmic threads beside him and started herding all of the skeletons into it. Soon, the entire group was restrained and compacted together into a giant skeletal ball. Zorian then dragged said ball to the nearest hole in the hull and threw it out of the ship.

He then repeated the move with the other skeleton group in the ship. Now, if he was right about his theory the whole warding setup should-

Oh, there we go – the wards were already failing. Wow, they didn’t put even the slightest amount of mana storage somewhere as a precaution against a ploy like this? Or at least set things up so they would gradually fade away instead of suddenly crashing down like this? He retracted his earlier praise, this was very amateurish ward making.

He set off towards the heart of the ship, where Zach and Alanic were fighting the actual masters of the skeleton pirates, but when he finally got there the fighting was already over.

"For a group you claimed were such easy targets, it sure took you a long time to finally bring them down," Zorian commented while walking over to them.

"I assume you’re behind the ship’s wards failing?" Alanic asked, tapping a nearby chest with his battle staff in order to trigger an electrical trap placed on it. Zorian nodded. "Thank you for that. They were very annoying. It has been a while since I fought in an area that suppresses fire magic so firmly."

"I’m sorry, it’s been a long time since I fought them and I totally forgot they had these fancy wards covering their ship," said Zach, knocking on his head with a nervous laugh. "After a while, I just sank their entire ship instead of trying to fight the crew, so my perspective on how easy they were to fight was a little skewed."

Hearing that, Zorian didn’t have much hope that the ship’s treasure stash held the simulacrum spell. Still, in the interest of being thorough, he joined Zach and Alanic in disarming all the traps defending the treasure stash and searching through the contents. Even if simulacrum wasn’t here, there could be something else of note inside. But eventually…

"Found it!" Zach shouted, triumphantly holding a pitch black scroll case above his head.

"What, the pirates actually had the simulacrum spell in their stash?" Zorian asked, surprised.

"Yup, this is it. I remember it very well because the scroll case kept destroying the contents whenever I tried to open it, and it was so infuriating. Then I finally managed to get to the scroll inside and it turned out it was just a simulacrum spell. Man, I was so angry about that…"

Zorian stared at the black scroll case for a moment before motioning for Zach to open it. To his surprise, Zach didn’t bother unraveling the defensive trap on the scroll case or using a proper unlocking method – instead he sent some kind of magical pulse into the scroll case, causing it to fall apart into hundreds of jagged little pieces, as if it was suddenly sliced apart by hundreds of invisible blades.

Well… he supposed that was one way to defeat the trap…

"May I?" Alanic asked, extending his hand towards the piece of rolled-up leather that had been in the destroyed scroll case. Zach shared a look with Zorian, who shrugged noncommittally. The scroll was promptly handed to Alanic, who unfurled it and scanned the contents.

"It’s legitimate," Alanic eventually announced. "Some of the simulacrum versions are incomplete or even malicious versions meant as traps for the unwary, but this seems like the real deal to me."

Huh. Zorian had to admit he hadn’t even considered that possibility. He knew that some of the spells out there were fake or traps, but it was rarely a problem, especially if one was careful about their spell sources. He supposed that for illegal or highly restricted spells like this, the percentage of fake spells was much higher than average. Especially if they came on a mysterious scroll like this instead of a published book or something.

Alanic handed the leather scroll to Zorian, who slowly read through it.

Simulacrum, as Zorian already knew, created an ectoplasmic copy of the caster. The copy was fully autonomous, could think and act on its own judgement, and even cast its own spells. However, it had no soul and no mana reserves of its own. Instead, both of these were shared with the caster who made it. That meant that aside from the initial cost of creation for the simulacrum, as well as the running cost of maintaining its existence, the caster also had to pay for every single spell the simulacrum decided to cast.

He explained as much to Zach, who had read the description of the spell once but had since forgotten most of the details about it.

"It’s still useful," Zorian noted. "Having another copy of me to help me with purely mental tasks would be infinitely useful. But it’s not quite as convenient as I thought it would be."

"Yeah, it’s kind of disappointing," Zach said. "It’s good as bait and an additional worker to boss around, but I don’t think you’ll be using it too much in battle."

"I wouldn’t be too sure about that," Zorian said. "Sure, I won’t be spamming double fireballs with my simulacrum or anything, but my telepathic abilities are quite cheap in terms of mana costs. And they are more useful as a devastating opener than as a long-term tool in battle, so it would be pretty useful if I could make twice as many telepathic attacks whenever I make my move. Double the Zorian, double the mind magic."

"As if your mind magic wasn’t terrifying enough as it is," Zach grumbled good-naturedly.

"There are two things you should keep in mind," Alanic said suddenly. "One is that no simulacrum is an entirely flawless copy of yourself. Especially in the beginning, the copies are bound to be greatly degraded version of you, lacking the full extent of your abilities. As your proficiency with the spell grows, you will be able to get increasingly better replicas… but in the end, the simulacrum is just a reflection of you, rather than a flawless copy. This is especially obvious if you keep the spell going for long periods of time. I strongly recommend that you don’t keep your simulacrum active for more than a day, or else they will start developing their own personalities and goals that may run counter to your own. People have been killed by their own simulacrums in the past. Considering your simulacrum will be a master mind mage like you yourself apparently are…"

"Yeah, I get the picture," said Zorian, wincing slightly. "Don’t leave the simulacrum running for too long, or it may decide to overwrite my mind with its own or something similar."

"Yes," Alanic nodded. "The second thing you should keep in mind is that, while a simulacrum isn’t identical to you in every way, it is a replica of you in most ways. For instance, some people react really badly to the knowledge that they are a copy of a person, which causes their simulacrums to break down or go berserk immediately after being created. I don’t think you and Zach will have that kind of problem, considering the supposed nature of the time loop, but it’s something to keep in mind if you ever decide to share the spell with someone else. Similarly, if you don’t like doing something, your simulacrum won’t like doing it either… so it’s a bad idea to foist things you hate upon your simulacrums. This also means that if you can’t bring yourself to sacrifice your life for another, chances are your simulacrum won’t want to sacrifice itself for your sake either."

In other words, the simulacrum wasn’t his personal slave and would only obey orders that he himself would be willing to obey. Fair enough.

After a few more warnings and clarification from Alanic, the three of them left the burning ship and returned to Eldemar. The skeleton pirates would trouble people no longer.

Zach and Zorian spent the rest of the restart attacking the Cyorian cultists and occasionally going off on further raids on locations Zach remembered from his past. Since they had already found the simulacrum spell, these excursions were technically unnecessary, but they both decided to keep on doing them anyway. Zorian because he wanted the combat experience and had interest in some of the loot that Zach had never cared about, and Zach because he found fighting fun. Alanic joined them often as well, though as the restart gradually approached its end, he became more and more busy with his investigation into the invaders. Xvim was also offered a spot in these raids, but declined to go, saying he was too old for that now.

Four days after Zach and Zorian had left the time research facility beneath Cyoria, the place went into an uproar. It took them four days, but eventually they did realize that something was wrong with the way Zach and Zorian had used the Black Room. Of course, by this time Zach and Zorian were long gone and there was nothing they could do about it, but still. Zorian investigated the issue to see what they had done wrong, and was amused to find that what had really outed them in the end was the fact that they had never submitted a follow-up report to the proper government department. Apparently each group that used the Black Room had to submit a report, in triplicate, explaining in detail how they had used the Black Room and what their gains were. Since Zach and Zorian had never bothered to do so, the administrative assistant in charge of preserving the reports complained to the research staff, eventually triggering the investigation. If they had just sent the stupid piece of paper to the government office, chances were that no one would have said a thing. Zorian doubted anyone even read those things.

Three days before the end of the restart, Zach and Zorian finally executed a plan that had been in the works since the very beginning of the restart – they broke into the Royal Palace of Eldemar, quietly infiltrating the place at first, and then just blasting their way inside when they were discovered half-way through.

They only got about two-thirds of the way in before the palace defenses began to overwhelm them and they were forced to flee, but even this failed foray into the place told them two very important things.

First of all, the royal treasury actually did hold one piece of the Key within its depths. The dagger, if Zorian was interpreting what his marker was telling him correctly. They would have to figure out a way to break into the royal treasury if they wanted to assemble all five pieces.

Secondly, trying to break into the Eldemar Royal Palace caused an unbelievable amount of outrage. The palace guards had followed them for hours after their failed intrusion, only giving up when Zach and Zorian had descended into the deep reaches of the Dungeon to lose them. And even then, that had just given them a few hours of peace, during which Eldemar’s royals had apparently been organizing a state-wide manhunt for them.

It had been three days since, and the manhunt had never ended. All the newspapers and town gossips were talking about the failed break-in at the Royal Palace, and there was apparently a huge bounty placed on their heads. The bounty was a bit of a joke, since the Crown clearly didn’t know much about them – as evidenced by the lack of pictures or any clear descriptions in the bounty posters plastered everywhere. Thank the gods that both of them were experts in anti-divination spells and that they had the fancy red robes they’d stolen from the cultists.

Still, while the Eldemar forces didn’t know their identities, they clearly had some method of tracking down those two people who tried to break into the palace, because they unerringly kept coming after them every once in a while. The two of them were constantly on the run, with the longest period of time they had to sit down and relax being about six hours. It was frustrating, especially since neither Zach nor Zorian could figure out how their pursuers kept tracking them down.

"See, I was totally right in saying we should wait for the end of the restart before trying this!" Zach said as they ran towards the small forest nearby, the red robe he was wearing distorting his voice in unnerving ways.

"So what? I never disputed that!" Zorian responded, his voice similarly distorted.

Before they could say anything else, an ear-piercing screech sounded above them, quickly followed by another. Zorian didn’t even have to look at the source of the screeches to know it was those two giant crowned eagles coming after them, each with a pair of battlemages riding them. That thrice-damned group was incredibly annoying, always responding first to their every move, cutting off their retreat routes and disrupting their spells until the rest of the pursuers could catch up to them. Unfortunately, the eagles were fast and agile flyers, and the battlemages riding them incredibly good, so getting rid of them before their allies showed up was virtually impossible. By now, Zach and Zorian no longer tried to engage them – that just wasted time that could be used for running away.

"I don’t think we can keep this up for long!" Zach told him as he deflected some kind of multicolored lightning bolt into the nearby bush, which immediately exploded from the force of the spell. "How long?"

Zorian glanced at the city of Cyoria looming nearby. Though it might appear to their pursuers that they were just randomly fleeing around, the two of them had actually been deliberately luring them here. The end of the restart was fast approaching, and the invasion was about to begin…

"I think it will start right-"

Before Zorian could finish the statement, numerous artillery magic flares rose into the air from the hills surrounding Cyoria. The invasion of the city had officially begun.

Zorian grumbled discontentedly. Damn reality always ruined his dramatic timing.

"Nevermind, it’s starting!" he said out loud.

"Yeah, thanks a lot. I would have never known if you hadn’t told me," Zach said sarcastically.

Zorian said nothing, simply stepping closer to his fellow time traveler. Immediately after, Zach finished his spell and they were both enveloped into a semi-transparent white sphere, which then shot into the air with dizzying speed.

Giant crowned eagles were apparently fast and agile enough to follow after the sphere, which surprised Zorian more than it probably should have. Still, the two of them had an entire army of surprised invaders to serve as their unwilling meat walls – the sphere unerringly homed in on the largest flock of iron beaks they could find and flew straight through it, splattering numerous birds to death and pissing the entire flock off.

Sadly for the pursuing eagles and their riders, furious iron beaks aren’t very discriminating about their choice of targets. Especially when one target was clearly more vulnerable than the other and was clearly trailing after it, suggesting that they were working together.

The two of them didn’t stick around after that – Zach directed the sphere into a nearby building, where it smashed into the wall and crashed inside. This largely got them outside of the iron beak line of fire, since the inside of a building didn’t let them concentrate their forces much and they had a much more attractive target outside anyway. Thus, once they had killed the handful of brave birds coming after them, they just left the area by teleporting to different sections of the city.

Truthfully, Zorian expected him and Zach to spend the entire night leading their pursuers into a series of conflicts with the invaders. Not because they hoped to get something by doing that, but rather because they felt their pursuers were just that stubborn. However, it would seem they had been uncharitable to their opponents, because after the third time Zach and Zorian led the entire pursuit group into an Ibasan army group, they seemed to realize the scale of what was happening and gave up on going after them in favor of helping the beleaguered Cyorian defenders.

Encountering Quatach-Ichl during that third confrontation and losing both of their giant eagles in the process may have had something to do with that.

Currently, Zach and Zorian were sitting on the roof of the Academy’s highest building and observing the fighting.

"Wow," Zach said. "You know, those mage hunters are kind of impressive when they’re fighting someone else."

"Yeah," Zorian agreed.

"So what are we going to do now?" Zach asked. "Just sit down and watch the world burn for a few hours until the loop resets?"

"No," Zorian answered, shaking his head. "I have a better idea. Let’s rob the academy library."

Zach looked at him funny, raising an eyebrow at him.

"I’m serious," Zorian said. "I know there is probably nothing really that important in there, but I have always wondered what kind of spells are kept behind those higher level sections that I was never allowed to go to."

"That… is a good point," Zach said. "I can’t believe I never tried that myself. If nothing else, just so I can say I did it."

And thus, for the next few hours, Zach and Zorian rampaged across the Academy library. While the invaders and the city defenders fought bitter battles across Cyoria, the two of them were peacefully searching through restricted texts, unbothered by the librarians and other security, who had long since fled the building in light of the invasion.

When the restart finally ended and everything went black, Zorian’s only thought was that he hadn’t finished the book he was holding…

…and that they were definitely going to do this again.

63. The March of Days

To the north of Knyazov Dveri, deep inside the northern wilderness, there was a small, inconspicuous gully with an equally unremarkable cave carved into one of its walls. It was unlikely that anyone who stumbled upon the area would think much of it, though if they were very perceptive or experienced in the ways of the forest, they might have noted that the place felt surprisingly… peaceful.

Yet, it was anything but. The inhabitant of the cave was vicious and powerful, and many creatures had paid with their lives for trespassing into its area. The peaceful atmosphere was simply the result of the beast killing anything edible or threatening in its immediate domain, which caused the larger and more intelligent creatures to avoid the area.

Despite knowing all of this, someone was about to barge into the place and provoke the grey hunter mother lurking inside the cave. Floating high in the air above the area was a wooden platform densely covered in crystalline glyphs, and standing upon it was a teenager that looked like Zorian but arguably wasn’t.

He was Zorian’s simulacrum, and he had been sent here to die.

From his safe location high in the sky, the simulacrum stared at the pitch black entrance to the grey hunter’s lair, nervously fiddling with the watch-like device in his pocket that controlled the platform he was standing on. It would be lying to say he wasn’t apprehensive about what he was expected to do. True, this had been his own idea, back when he and the original were still one and the same, but… well, it was one thing to decide to create a copy of yourself to serve as bait for a giant man-eating spider and quite another to come into existence and realize you are to be that bait.

He was made in his creator’s image… and Zorian? He had a very strong survival instinct. He couldn’t remember ever being suicidal, and even after being trapped inside a time loop he shied away from risking his life without a good reason.

He was scared. There, he said it. He was not just apprehensive, he was flat-out scared! How could he not be? He was going to be torn apart by a giant spider and he was supposed to just stand there and let it happen. It was…

He shook his head, doing his best to calm his thoughts. He chose this. He remembered making this plan, remembered all the arguments for why it had to be this way, and it was all just as valid now as it was then. It was only his own cowardice that was making him hesitate now. And while Zorian had never been, nor was likely to ever be some kind of paragon of bravery… he was better than this.

Still. Less than an hour ago, he had been willing to sacrifice his copy for this. He distinctly remembered this. It felt like his own decision, even though he technically didn’t even exist back then. What did it say about him that he had been so cavalier about the decision back then, but now that he was to be said sacrifice, he found himself having doubts?

One of the rings hanging around his neck suddenly vibrated for a moment. The original was trying to contact him. He sent a telepathic probe into the ring in question, which was actually a miniature telepathic relay, and formed a connection with the mind of true Zorian. He briefly wondered if it was possible to use their soul as a telepathic conduit in lieu of their artificial relays, since they shared one and all. However, he knew too little about soul magic to judge how difficult such an idea would be, so he put the thought aside.

[Ready?] the original Zorian asked.

The simulacrum hesitated, just for a moment. The original seemed… confident. The fear and anxiety that plagued the simulacrum were entirely absent from his progenitor’s thoughts. Instead, the original seemed expectant, even excited. What vast differences in thinking, and they had diverged so recently from one another…

Well, no matter. Strangely enough, he didn’t blame the original for his attitude. What sense would that make? In the past several restarts since Zorian had acquired the simulacrum spell, he had relentlessly practiced it. By now, any copy he produced was a pretty good rendition of the original. The simulacrum was confident that he was cut from the same cloth as the original Zorian, so chances are that he would have behaved the same if their positions were reversed somehow.

If he cursed Zorian, he cursed himself.

[I’m ready,] the simulacrum sent back.

After a moment’s hesitation, he also enclosed his thoughts on using their soul as a telepathic conduit inside a memory packet and sent them over the link to the original. Just in case the original Zorian didn’t have the same idea for some reason.

There was a short pause as the original seemed to consider things. When he finally responded a few seconds later, it was with but a single word.

[Go.]

The simulacrum didn’t argue or stall for time – he immediately pressed a button on the watch-like device in his pocket, causing the wooden platform to plunge downward with dizzying speed. Somehow, now that the moment of truth had finally come, he was able to discard all his worry and hesitation and act decisively. He was still scared, but there was also determination there… or maybe it was just resignation? Either way, as he watched the ground rapidly get closer and closer, he knew that he could do it. He could play the role he was meant to play.

Though he was currently standing on a piece of wood hurtling towards the cold, unforgiving ground, the simulacrum wasn’t worried about crashing into the ground and dying. The platform wasn’t actually falling in the classical sense, as evidenced by the fact it stayed aligned horizontally with the ground instead of flipping around randomly through the air. It was a magical travel device executing a controlled descent, and the simulacrum had full faith in its construction. He remembered making it, after all.

No, all of his worry and attention was being directed at the unassuming cave entrance in the gully. He had come to terms with being torn apart by a giant murder-spider in the near future (well, mostly ), but whether or not his death would achieve anything was still an open question. The plan wasn’t complicated – he just had to lure the grey hunter mother into stepping onto the very wooden platform beneath his feet, which would cause the multitude of traps and restrictive wards anchored to it to activate, sealing the spider’s fate. The problem was that the grey hunter was quite canny about recognizing traps. Thus his current method of entry. In theory, suddenly dropping out of the sky right into the middle of the grey hunter’s territory should catch the spider off-guard and enrage it enough for it to rush out and attack him without making sure it wasn’t blundering into a trap.

In theory. In practice, the grey hunter was annoyingly unpredictable. This wasn’t the first time Zach and Zorian were fighting the thing, and their previous clashes with it were… well, they managed to eke out a win in the end. For a certain definition of win. The grey hunter was dead in the end, yes, but in one restart Zach ended up being bitten and couldn’t cast anything for the rest of the restart, and in the other Zorian had both of his legs shattered so thoroughly it took him an entire week to heal, even with the best medical care money can buy. Gods that was painful. Thankfully, he was just a copy mind inhabiting an ectoplasmic shell, so he wouldn’t be suffering through a repeat of that experience – he had no bones to break, after all.

Hopefully the trap would work. It would be nice to get the spider’s egg sack intact (something they hadn’t managed to accomplish up until now), if only so he could rub the achievement into Silverlake’s face. But barring that, Zorian would settle for a proper victory instead of a pyrrhic win that left them in recovery for the rest of the restart.

The simulacrum frowned. You know what? He wasn’t taking chances with this. If he had to die, he at least wanted his death to be meaningful and achieve something. Thus, just before he hit the ground, he dipped into the mana reserves he shared with the original and cast a hasting spell on himself. He immediately felt the world slow down around him, the spell accelerating his personal time flow by about two and a half times. This was not part of the plan – in fact, the original was probably cursing him right now to hell and back for wasting a good chunk of his precious mana reserves – but the haste effect might let him react fast enough to the grey hunter’s moves to actually achieve his mission, so the original would just have to deal with it.

The platform hit the ground with surprising gentleness, the powerful wards emanating from it blunting the force of the impact until it could barely be felt. But the simulacrum still felt it and stumbled in place for a second. He recovered almost immediately, but by then the grey hunter was already making its move.

What a fast response. It would seem they had underestimated the murder-spider once again, because less than a second since the platform touched the ground, the grey hunter was already jumping out of the cave entrance. It must have detected the intrusion while the simulacrum was still in the air and was already on the move by the time the wooden platform hit the ground.

With his accelerated perceptions, the simulacrum could see the furry, many-legged body of the grey hunter sailing through the air in all of its terrible detail. The huge glossy fangs, the soulless black eyes, the quill-like fur covering its entire body…

The simulacrum was not ashamed to admit he froze in place for a moment. He regained his wits quickly though, just in time to see the grey hunter slam into the ground next to the gully, kicking up dust and gravel as it immediately launched itself back into the air again. He watched the beast intently, trying to think of the best way to keep it contained on the platform long enough for the traps to fully activate. But something was wrong – the grey hunter was going too high and too fast. At that speed and at that angle of ascent, the spider was…

Damn it, it was going to overshoot his location entirely! It wasn’t taking the bait. Maybe it could understand that the platform was a trap, or maybe it knew that the simulacrum was just an ectoplasmic construct and thus didn’t find him threatening enough – whatever it was, the grey hunter decided to completely ignore Zorian’s simulacrum and the platform he was standing on.

At that moment, the simulacrum was torn between feeling amused and being annoyed. On one hand, having the murder-spider ignore him entirely after all that inner turmoil he went through was kind of funny… but the fact that the spider was clearly going after the original instead was bad and objectively the worst way this mission could have ended. A simulacrum like him was a lot more expendable than the original was.

He thought about trying to telekinetically snare the grey hunter and draw it into the trap, or get its attention by using mind magic… but his memories told him that could never work. The grey hunter had insanely high magic resistance, and trying to affect it with magic directly was like trying to hold a live eel… an exercise in frustration. Instead, he tried something else. As the grey hunter was passing overhead, the simulacrum created a thick rope of magical force and tried to use it to entangle the grey hunter and reel it in onto the platform. Unfortunately, the spider twisted its body in mid-air, avoiding the rope by a centimeter or so. It then managed to right itself fast enough to land solidly on its feet, landing a good distance behind the platform.

Frustrated at the way he was failing his mission, the simulacrum tried to get the grey hunter’s attention by firing a ball of entangling ectoplasmic threads at its back. He knew from experience that the grey hunter was strong enough to break through the spell, but, humiliatingly enough, the spell didn’t even hit it properly. The spider reacted instantly, rolling to the side to avoid the bulk of the spell. A few threads did manage to snag it, wrapping themselves tightly around its legs, but the grey hunter just accelerated forward, gouging out clumps of grass from the forest floor as its legs sought greater traction, and the threads that tried to restrain it snapped like they were made of straw. It then sped off into the distance, zigzagging a few times to avoid the handful of overpowered magic missiles the simulacrum had sent after it as a parting gift. Despite being overpowered and cast in haste, the missiles were only faintly visible, existing only as a slight discoloration in the air – a testament to Zorian’s mastery of the spell. Despite this, not only could the grey hunter evidently perceive them without even turning around, it moved with sufficient speed and agility to defeat their homing function and dodge them anyway. That shouldn’t even be possible, damn it!

The simulacrum stared at the dust trail left behind by the grey hunter, taking a deep breath to calm himself (even though he was just an ectoplasmic construct and didn’t really need to breathe). The damn spider didn’t even have the decency to turn around and pay attention to him upon being attacked, never mind being tempted to step on the platform. It treated the simulacrum like it was just a particularly aggressive rock or something, instead of an actual threat!

Well. His mission was certainly a failure, but maybe he could help the original in some other way. He started running after the monster and sent a message to the original through the relay hanging around his neck, asking for directions. The original had been observing the event through his senses, so he didn’t have to explain much. He was immediately told to observe only and stop wasting mana for now. Wow, what a jerk. He supposed he had been a little wasteful with their shared mana reserves, but come on! He was just trying to salvage the situation somehow.

When he finally caught up to the grey hunter, he came upon the sight of a battlefield. Zach and Zorian were both engaging the grey hunter, along with a group of golems (two big and slow ones for defense and ten smaller and faster ones to act as distractions). The grey hunter hurled itself at Zorian – the original one – only to crash into a thick multicolored plate of force and bounce off. Zach tried to take advantage of this and impale it, sending a trio of black javelins at it, but the spider reoriented itself in an instant, dancing around the projectiles like a leaf in the wind and hurled itself back towards Zorian again the moment its legs touched the ground. It zigzagged across the ground, kicking up dust and gravel and unerringly dodging every trap that had been hidden in the area beforehand, including some purely non-magical ones like hidden pits and iron bear traps. Zach did his best to hit it with a multitude of projectile spells, and Zorian directed his golems to block it and try to push it into one of said projectiles or the traps it was avoiding. It was all for naught. The grey hunter’s agility and speed was unreal, and the few times it ended up boxed in by the attacks and the traps, it unfailingly identified which attack it could tank without getting hurt.

Zach launched a dense sphere of rock at the back of the boxed-in spider, only for it to kick back with its rear legs like a horse and shatter the sphere of magically hardened rock like it was just loosely packed earth. Zorian managed to hit it with a powerful incinerating ray, but all that did was burn off some of the dense fur covering its body and didn’t seem to do any lasting damage. Zach trapped it in a cage of dense, layered force, but the grey hunter mother shattered each one like it was made of paper and burst free before Zach and Zorian could strengthen the prison enough to hold her. One of the smaller golems managed to latch onto the grey hunter’s back; without hesitation, the spider rammed itself backwards into a tree, causing the golem to let go.

The simulacrum watched all this, observing the battle and waiting for the right moment to act. He knew that, despite Zach and Zorian’s apparent lack of success at damaging the grey hunter, the situation was under control at the moment. The two of them had fought the beast twice already, and though they suffered a heavy price each time, they also learned how to keep it at bay and put pressure at it. The only reason why the grey hunter hadn’t fallen yet was that neither Zach nor Zorian were trying their hardest to kill it yet. They were still hoping to get its eggs relatively intact, so they couldn’t use area of effect spells as indiscriminately as they should against an opponent like this.

Sure enough, while the battle failed to kill the grey hunter, it was steadily getting pushed back towards the wooden platform as the minutes ticked by. The spider seemed to realize it was getting herded into a trap, however, and stubbornly refused to get pushed onto it.

Finally, after both Zach and Zorian were starting to run out of mana and get physically exhausted, and all but two of the smaller golems had been reduced to scrap, the two finally managed to trick the grey hunter into a trap. Zorian deliberately left himself somewhat open, casting his defensive plane of force relatively high, and the grey hunter took the bait and tried to slide under it to get to Zorian. Perhaps it was getting tired itself and decided to take the chance? Regardless, Zorian had been ready for it and promptly materialized a dimensional gate in front of himself… a gate whose exit point led straight onto the wooden platform. The spider tried to twist itself in mid-air to dodge it, but Zach used a powerful gust of wind to push it in anyway.

And then, just as it was going to slam into the wooden platform and get snared, the grey hunter revealed its final trump card – it shot a strand of silk out of its back end and used it as a lifeline to reel itself to the side of the platform, avoiding it entirely.

"Okay, that does it," Zach growled. "We’re taking it down, damn the eggs."

"Fine," Zorian agreed unhappily.

The simulacrum could understand the original’s frustration. They were so close to total victory…

One of the remaining golems tried to push the grey hunter onto the platform again, only for the spider to do a backflip – there is no other way to describe it – and land right on top of the golem. It then pushed itself off, using the golem’s head as leverage to propel itself away from the risk zone, and shoved the golem straight into the platform in the process.

…and yet so far away.

A giant firestorm suddenly consumed the entire area, courtesy of Zach, and for the first time in the battle, the grey hunter screamed. It was fast and tough, but it couldn’t dodge a spell that affected such a wide area and a fire so intense was beyond it to fully shrug off. It was not dead, but large patches of its fur were gone and two of its eyes had burst from the heat.

Its egg sack was reduced to ash in its entirety.

The grey hunter mother let loose an ear-splitting screech of rage for her destroyed eggs and went completely berserk. No longer caring to avoid damage, the spider rushed at Zach, who it correctly identified as the source of the firestorm, at even greater speeds than before. It charged straight through the hail of projectiles launched at it by both Zach and Zorian, losing a leg and another eye in the process, and kept going. It almost succeeded at sinking its fangs into Zach’s chest but Zorian managed to recall the boy away before the strike could connect.

A berserk grey hunter was dangerous. They became less cautious and more willing to tank damage in order to inflict some of their own in turn. In their previous clashes with the grey hunter mother, they had been caught off-guard by the change in tactics, which was how Zorian had gotten both of his legs broken. This time, though, they were ready for it… and for someone who knew what was coming, a berserk grey hunter was actually easier to fight than a calm one.

An area-wide freezing spell from Zach, a ball of shredding force from Zorian, and a collective sacrifice from the remaining golems dog-piling it and self-destructing themselves, and the grey hunter was finally dead. Its mangled corpse looked like a living warzone, but as far as the simulacrum was concerned, the fact it still remained in one piece after everything it went through is already amazing.

"It’s a shame," the original said, approaching the corpse to inspect it. "I really thought we had a chance of getting its eggs this time."

"I’m just glad I didn’t get bitten again," Zach said, rubbing his chest as if trying to ward off phantom pain. "Thanks for the save back there. Anyway, you shouldn’t be too greedy. This thing is a pain to fight, even when we’re going all-out, never mind trying to capture it. We still have its corpse in reasonably good condition, which means we can make those awesome magic perception potions again. That’s reward enough if you ask me."

The simulacrum smiled, remembering how shocked Lukav had been when they had brought a Grey Hunter corpse to him in one of the restarts and asked him to turn it into an enhancement potion. Unfortunately, grey hunters were so rare and dangerous to hunt that there was no publicly available potion recipes involving them, nevermind a specific one that granted the imbiber its senses. Lukav couldn’t do it. It was beyond his pay-grade, he said. All he could do was give them a list of better alchemists that could be able to help them, though he warned them that even they would probably have to invent a new potion from scratch in order to fulfill their request. Zach and Zorian had to spend two weeks visiting various potion makers recommended by Lukav till they found one that was capable of working with the corpse in their hands, and even then it took the woman more than a single restart to create the potion. They had to give her the research notes she had made herself in the previous restart and make something up to explain how they had them.

In the end they did get a recipe of turning dead grey hunters into powerful potions of mana perception, but the issues involved had finally convinced Zorian to start learning how to make transformation potions himself. He was still a rank beginner in the field, but even the little he knew was useful. Eagle-eye potions were surprisingly easy to make, and the visual acuity they gave was amazing.

"Yes, exactly," the simulacrum said, approaching the group and startling Zach.

"You’re still here?" Zach asked. "Oh, right, Zorian did say the spider ignored you entirely."

"Yeah, the grey hunter had absolutely no interest in me whatsoever. I guess it could tell I’m a simulacrum. Its senses are really something."

"It’s something alright," Zach said. "Zorian, are you sure that thing isn’t intelligent?"

"Yes," Zorian said. "I can’t affect its mind, but my mind sense works on it just fine and I can judge its sapience. It’s dumber than a troll."

"But it’s still about as smart as a crow or a boar," the simulacrum protested against his creator. "It’s got animal cunning. Do you remember how Zach dragged us into that bar in Knyazov Dveri and then started a drunken conversation with that group of hunters?"

"Ugh, how could I forget?" Zorian said.

"You know, Zorian, watching you talk to yourself like that is pretty damn surreal," Zach pointed out.

Neither the simulacrum nor the original acknowledged him in any way.

"Anyway," continued the simulacrum. "At one point the hunters spoke about being hired to stop wild boars from destroying the crops around the city and complained about how quickly the wild boars learned to recognize and avoid traps. They said the boars even learned how to spot magical setups, despite not having any magic perception as far as anyone knew."

"Yes, but those are learned skills," Zorian said, frowning. "The boars have to be constantly exposed to traps to learn how to deal with them. The grey hunter didn’t have any chance to learn like that."

"How do you know that?" the simulacrum countered. "It’s Silverlake who sent us to this place, remember? Logically, this means she tried to retrieve the eggs herself and failed. I rather doubt she tried to fight the grey hunter head on, so…"

"She used traps," Zorian said, finally reaching the same conclusion the simulacrum had. "She used all sorts of traps, and all she did was teach it how to recognize and avoid them."

Zorian looked absolutely outraged at the fact Silverlake had basically trained the grey hunter on how to respond to human attackers and never even bothered to tell them about it, but Zach just laughed lightly.

"Deceptive mission givers, how nostalgic," he said. "I remember the first time I got screwed over by one, I was even more incensed than Zorian here. That aside, Zorian, I’m amused that your simulacrum figured it out before you yourself did. How does that work?"

"Differing perspectives," the simulacrum said with a light shrug.

"We diverged a few measly hours ago," Zorian said dismissively. "Just how different could our perspectives be?"

The simulacrum frowned, a little annoyed at the response. He didn’t answer with words. Instead he forced a connection to Zorian’s mind and blasted him with a few choice memories. The nerve-wracking wait before the platform’s descent. The terrifying sight of the grey hunter jumping out of the cave and seemingly towards him. The feeling of frustration and powerlessness as he watched the battle without being able to meaningfully contribute anything. Zorian gasped and took a step back, caught off-guard by this sudden pseudo-attack, and gave him a shocked look.

"Very different," the simulacrum said, and then deliberately collapsed his own ectoplasmic body and dissolved into smoke.

His job was done, anyway.

It was a beautiful sunny day, and Zorian was standing on an abandoned field, far from anything dangerous or important. He wasn’t alone. Standing around him was a group of familiar people: Zach, Taiven, Imaya, Kirielle, Kana and Kael. They were all gathered around a stone table that Zorian had created out of the nearby ground, watching the potion bottles lined up in the center of it. Each had a slightly different reaction.

Zach looked mildly interested but otherwise calm and collected. Taiven had a distant, thoughtful expression, seemingly consumed in her own thoughts and barely even conscious of her surroundings. Imaya seemed torn between quiet excitement and apprehension, occasionally glancing at Kirielle and Kana with a small frown. She probably thought they were too young to be here. Considering the unhappy, sour look that Kael was giving Zorian, he probably agreed with that conclusion. Zorian was unrepentant, though – if Kael didn’t want Kana here, he could have just refused to bring her along. It wasn’t Zorian’s fault that Kael was too weak-willed to resist his daughter’s whining and relented to her requests in the end.

As for Kirielle, well… she was practically vibrating on her feet from excitement, staring at the potion bottle like she wanted to swallow it with her eyes. A bit comical, but Zorian could understand.

It wasn’t every day that you got a chance to turn into a bird and fly.

"Alright," Zorian finally said. "I’m giving you all one last chance to back out."

Besides Kirielle’s loud no, he received no response. He assumed that meant none of them were stepping out at the last moment, but just to be sure he gave Kael a curious look, since he seemed to be the one most against this.

Kana, whom Kael was currently holding in one hand, noticed the look and gave her father a quiet whine, as if warning him to not even think about sending her away. Kael responded with an amused snort and a casual tap against her forehead.

"I’m going to go through with it, against my better judgement," Kael said, looking Zorian straight in the eye. "I guess I should congratulate you – it’s been a while since Kana so obviously wanted something. Now hurry up and explain things before I change my mind."

"Fine," Zorian shrugged. "I’ll keep it brief. There are six transformation potions here, all identical. Drink it and you will be transformed into a peregrine falcon."

"And then we can fly?" Kirielle asked excitedly.

"Of course," Zorian said. "What would be the point of transforming into a bird if you can’t fly? Though it might take a while before you can control your new body correctly, so don’t be surprised if your initial attempts turn poorly."

"What if someone falls from the sky for some reason?" Imaya asked. "Or if something tries to eat us?"

"That’s why there are six potions instead of seven," Zach noted. "I’ll remain untransformed and step in if someone messes up. As for something trying to eat you… well, it shouldn’t happen. But if it does, Zorian will be flying beside you and give them hell. There is nothing in the area that can survive against him."

Mostly because of his psychic powers. For normal mages, transforming into a non-humanoid form was quite risky, as they would lose access to all structured spells. Zorian’s mental powers were just as usable as a falcon as they were when he was human, so he was not nearly as defenseless.

"Okay. It’s comforting to know you’ve put some thought into this and that it isn’t something you’re doing on a whim," Imaya said. "But isn’t this horribly expensive? Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to try being a falcon as much as the others, but… it just seems so wasteful to spend all these potions for what is essentially playing around."

Ah, yes – Imaya was the only adult here that hadn’t been informed about the time loop. One of these days he was going to tell her the truth just to see how she reacted.

He spent a few seconds trying to put together a convincing response in his head, but before he could vocalize it Taiven already butted in to explain instead.

"Don’t worry about that," Taiven sighed. "It’s secret so I can’t tell you the details, but the cost of these potions is so small for these two as to be functionally irrelevant."

A few more clarifications later and the potions were distributed to everyone present except Zach. Originally Zorian intended to drink his potion first to reassure the others that it worked correctly, but apparently Kirielle didn’t need convincing and immediately drank hers when Zorian handed a bottle to her. She transformed without any issues and the rest of them were treated to a sight of a brand new female falcon flailing around on the grass for a good minute or so. She had attempted to take flight immediately and found that it was not nearly as easy as one might think.

After that the rest of them drank the potion and transformed as well.

The next several hours were kind of a mixed bag. On one hand, nobody ended up getting hurt. On the other hand, it turned out that Zorian had vastly underestimated how difficult it was to control a completely alien body for most people. He had thought that his initial attempts at being a bird were bad, but he was like a born genius compared to what his current pupils displayed. After some thoughts, he came to the conclusion that this was probably another thing that benefited from him being Open, as aranea would call it. The entire point of his psychic ability was that it gave him greater awareness of his own mind and allowed him to process mental information from completely foreign sources – that was why he was able to contact and read other people’s minds so easily, why divinations that dumped information straight into the mind of the caster worked better for him, and probably why he could handle being transformed into a completely foreign body far better than, say, Imaya or Kael.

He suddenly understood a lot better why transformation magic was so relatively niche, and why shifters were still envied by those who wished to take on the forms of other creatures. Learning how to control a different body than the one you are used to was hard for Zorian, and it was apparently even harder for other people. Anyone who wanted to benefit from transformation magic couldn’t do it on a whim – they had to practice with their new form a lot before they could use it in any serious manner.

Still, by the time the potion wore off, everyone had managed to take flight at least once. This was mostly because Zorian was present, though – he used his telepathy to directly show people how a falcon is supposed to move, sometimes even puppeteering their movements for a few seconds to demonstrate what they were doing wrong. If they had been trying this alone, chances are they would have required at least three or four sessions to get it right. And it was entirely possible they would have ended up hurting themselves in the process.

The common consensus at the end was that being a falcon and flying through the air under their own power was amazing and that maybe they should do it again some time. Kirielle also excitedly floated the idea of turning into a dragon next time.

He probably spooked Imaya and Kael something fierce when he didn’t immediately veto the idea.

"What are you doing?"

Zorian stopped drawing the bowl of fruit in front of him to give Kirielle a strange look.

"Isn’t it obvious?" Zorian asked. "I’m drawing things."

Zorian didn’t really know why he was doing it, to be honest. He didn’t think himself an artist, but he felt like trying a new hobby since his old one of reading fiction was starting to get a little stale. There were only so many good stories out there and he had read just about everything that interested him at least twice by now.

He would probably get bored of drawing eventually, but he had only been doing this for the past three restarts and for now he found it kind of relaxing.

"Since when do you draw?" she asked, nosily sticking her head over him to study his work. "Is this related to that mysterious artist of yours?"

For a moment, he was confused what she was talking about before he remembered that was how he had explained those old drawings of hers he had given her at the beginning of the restart. He had been steadily compiling her work over the past several restarts, giving her the updated collection in every restart. Since she disliked drawing things that already existed among the drawings given to her by Zorian, this forced her to continually pick new things to draw every time.

Much like his decision to start drawing, this effort was motivated purely on the ground that he found the result kind of amusing.

It was a bit wasteful in terms of mental space, but that was no longer the issue it once was. Ever since he opened the Matriarch’s memory packet, he had plenty of space for things like this. In addition, he had recently developed a better, more efficient method of storing notebooks than his original improvised setup. He no longer recorded the entire structure of a notebook, opting to just memorize the text and the diagrams inscribed within. A seemingly simple idea, but one that had taken him months of tinkering to get right.

"Yeah, I guess it is," said Zorian. After all, it was unlikely it would occur to him to start drawing if it were not for Kirielle.

"Is she a girl?" Kirielle asked conspiratorially.

Zorian’s mouth twitched in amusement.

"Yes," he said with a bashful cough. "As a matter of fact, she is."

Kirielle grinned impishly, looking very pleased with herself for figuring it out.

"I knew it!" she crowed. "What’s her name? Do I know her? When can I meet her? Oh and what about…"

It took Zorian at least a half an hour to get her to leave him alone, and somehow he had managed not to laugh at her face throughout the whole thing. Sometimes he really surprised himself.

Zorian turned the solid iron sphere in his hands, staring at it thoughtfully. He would undoubtedly look weird and maybe kind of crazy to any passerby that might be looking at him, since the sphere was totally invisible to the naked eye. Fortunately for him, the only other person inside the room was the very person who had given him that sphere so he could focus on the object of his study without being distracted by the mutterings of random strangers.

The sphere in his hands was a complex, multi-layered thing surrounded by a dense cloud of different wards stacked upon each other. The jigsaw-like arrangement of metal plates that made up its physical structure was liberally peppered with both mechanical triggers and glyph clusters that would destroy the fragile core buried in the heart of the sphere if he tried to open it incorrectly. He was supposed to retrieve said core whole and intact, so that was obviously an unacceptable outcome. He had to navigate the virtual maze of stacked wards and then carefully dismantle the sphere to retrieve the core hidden within… and he had to do it without being able to see what he was working with, since the invisibility field was tied to the very core he was supposed to retrieve and couldn’t be deactivated until he got access to it.

Oh well, time to get to work.

The sphere’s invisibility was a pain, but it didn’t leave Zorian stumped. His magic perception had been steadily advancing ever since Xvim had introduced him to the skill, and recently he had undergone several giant leaps forwards in that regard. Partially this was due to the augmentation potions made from the grey hunter’s corpse, and partially it was because he and Zach had been throwing obscene amounts of money at various experts so they would teach them their skills.

He focused his senses on the sphere, trying to make sense of it. After about ten minutes of passive observation he was confident enough to move on to more active methods. He carefully analyzed the contraption with a multitude of divinations, some general and some incredibly focused and specific. Slowly he bypassed or neutralized the outer wards so he could start dismantling the physical structure of the sphere…

It took him more than two hours of challenging work, but he was successful in the end. He held a bright red crystal in his hand and handed it to the middle-aged bearded man that had been watching him as he worked.

"Excellent! Excellent!" the man said happily. "That was truly impressive. You’re even better than your brother was at your age."

Zorian smiled at the compliment, not saying anything. His outrage at being constantly compared to Daimen had cooled down considerably over the years, but he didn’t trust himself not to sound bitter if he tried to respond with words. He would just nod and quietly take advantage of the fact that this man had taught his brother and looked at him favorably because of it.

"I couldn’t help but notice that you didn’t use a divination compass while you worked," the man said, leaning back in his chair. "Do you not need it?"

"No," Zorian said honestly. "I just dump all the information the spells give me directly into my head. I’m innately talented at interpreting that, so there is no need to bother with a divination compass. Besides, I find that most physical tools discard a lot of important information given by the divination, simply because they have no way of displaying it."

"Ha! Of course they do, that’s why ward breakers like us pay huge sums for ever more sophisticated divination compasses. In my estimation, you are already at the level where generic, store-bought crap can’t satisfy your needs. You’d have to contact a mana forge and buy a custom built one. Of course, if you’re really capable of comprehending the spells in your mind, maybe that’s just pointless cost for you, I don’t know."

Zorian hummed thoughtfully. He was honest about not needing a divination compass, but he supposed it wouldn’t hurt to check out the fancier, custom-built ones. Who knows, maybe there was something he was missing with his current methods. It cost him nothing to buy a box of them and then dismantle them to see how they worked.

A few hours later he left, carrying a list of divination compass makers and a letter of recommendation without which those high-level experts wouldn’t even deign to speak with him. He soon arrived at the local park where Zach was already waiting for him, sitting on the bench and feeding the pigeons with bread like some old pensioner.

"Already done?" Zorian asked, mildly surprised. Zach was supposed to check out the combat magic instructors in the city, which should have taken him a lot longer than this.

"None of them are worth our time," Zach said, shaking his head and throwing another chunk of bread at the small throng of pigeons in front of him. "Larsa is Falkrinea’s biggest and most important city. You’d think they’d have a respectable selection of combat instructors but they’re nothing special. I guess it’s true what they say about Falkrinea being the weakest of the Big Three in terms of military might."

Zorian nodded, accepting his judgement. Zach had spent decades in the time loop pursuing combat magic excellence, so he knew what he was talking about. Even though Zorian required a completely different selection of spells to be an effective combat mage than Zach did, he had faith that Zach was keeping that fact in mind when checking these people out.

He plopped down on the bench next to Zach, marveling at the way the pigeons failed to react to his sudden movement. If these pigeons ever landed in Cirin, they would be all caught before nightfall and barbecued. Say what you want about Falkrinea’s lack of military might, they really were a prosperous nation.

"What do you think about your newest instructor?" Zach asked. "Is he any good?"

"He’s good," Zorian nodded slowly.

"But?" Zach asked, sensing there was more to it.

"He’s not teaching me everything he’s got," Zorian sighed. "And I don’t think there is a way to convince him to do so. He’s very impressed with me, but…"

"But he’ll only teach his best secrets to a formal apprentice, and even then you’d have to stay with him for a year or more before he would consider it," guessed Zach.

"Something like that," Zorian nodded.

"That’s pretty much what Xvim said would happen," Zach noted. "You never did go around mind probing people on that list, did you?"

"No, I had been contacting them and trying to get them to teach me their skills the proper way. I had been hoping it won’t be necessary," Zorian said, frowning. "And in a way it really hadn’t been, if only because up until now I had plenty of worthwhile things to learn even without resorting to that. But now… I don’t know. If we want to get at the dagger in the royal treasury, we’re going to need to become a lot better at ward breaking and the like. And these are not skills that people are willing to trust a stranger with, especially not one they’ve met less than a month ago. These are highly restricted, sometimes outright illegal skills. Most of the experts I’ve been talking to won’t even admit they have them, much less agree to teach them to us."

He hadn’t been met with total failure. Two of the experts on Xvim’s list actually proved willing to teach him to the best of their ability – one because he happened to be in debt and was desperate for large sums of money, and one because he was a mind mage who found Zorian’s innate mental abilities endlessly fascinating. It was kind of interesting to compare structured mind magic to his own abilities and see how they fare against each other, and though he was unlikely to ever use structured mind magic himself, it did inspire him to take his mental abilities in new directions. However, just two experts out of the large list Xvim had given him was…

Well, frustrating. Especially since it wasn’t just a moral issue – it was so much more useful to learn from people when they were honestly trying to teach you something. Because of the need to know which are the right questions to ask and a lack of back and forth between the teacher and the student, mind magic interrogations were far inferior to having a willing teacher. If Zorian had to memory probe Xvim every time he wanted something from him, for instance, the benefits would be but a fraction of what he got out of the man through his current methods. Well, unless Xvim was secretly hiding something of crucial importance from him, but Zorian kind of doubted that.

"What about targeting criminals?" Zach asked. "You’ve established links with Cyoria’s criminal underground through the contact lists the aranea left behind, haven’t you?"

Yes, he certainly had. Interestingly, most of these were not cloaked, shady men in dark alleys but rather otherwise respected merchants and (somewhat less respected) mercenaries. He had used his mind magic on these people a lot more freely than he had when interacting with legitimate experts and instructors, but truthfully? There was a reason why most of these people used their abilities for crime instead of opening a legitimate business. They just weren’t good enough. Most of them had a neat trick or two, and Zorian copied those from them when he could, but in general they had nothing that couldn’t be acquired easier elsewhere. Probably the most useful thing he obtained from these people was a channel for acquiring illegal materials and the knowledge of how to hire unscrupulous mercenaries without getting ripped off or ending up in jail. Useful things to be sure, but that wasn’t what Zach was asking about.

"It wouldn’t work," Zorian said simply, shaking his head. "They don’t have what we need."

"Alright," Zach said, not pressing the issue. "To be perfectly honest, I think we’re doing just fine as it is. You shouldn’t feel pressured to do this if you don’t want to. We’ll manage somehow."

Zorian said nothing to that, not really sure himself what the correct answer was. There was a part of him that said he was being stupid by refusing to employ his mental abilities to their maximum extent, but he suspected that once he started to casually assault people for no reason other than them having things he wanted, it would be hard to take a step back. You are what you do. If he started going down that path, it would change him, and not for the better. Sure, having those skills would greatly increase the chances of him successfully escaping the time loop, but was there any point to that if what came out at the end was a monster?

Zorian rose from his spot and walked away. Zach followed him, throwing the entire remains of his bread to the pigeon throng as he left the bench. They left the park and its dangerously fearless pigeons and continued their conversation on foot.

"Underwhelming results aside, this is a nice city," Zach said. "Was there anything else you wanted to do here?"

"Yes, actually," Zorian said. "There is a famous golem maker here and a couple of spell formula crafters for hire."

"You really are determined to spend all of our money, aren’t you?" Zach asked rhetorically.

"Of course. It’s completely useless to leave it sitting there without use. It’s not like we can transfer it between restarts," Zorian said.

He actually wasn’t going to seek instructions from these people – he was going to hire them to do work for him. He had been doing that for several restarts now, paying various spell formula experts to design or improve blueprints for him. Then he took the finished designs and gave them to the same people in the next restart in order to further refine them. Sometimes he also gave them to different people, just to see what different takes they have on the problem.

He did the same with warding experts, golem makers and alchemists. All of those fields took a lot of thinking and testing, but the finished designs were fairly compact and could be used by anyone, making them really convenient to advance in this fashion. At some point he was probably going to hit a point of diminishing returns with this, but that point was a long way off at the moment. Besides, when that happened, he might be able to take the collected knowledge he gained this way and trade it to people for their professional secrets. Magical knowledge and techniques could tempt some people in a way that money never could.

The snide part of Zorian informed him that he was robbing these people just as surely as a memory probe would have, only using more roundabout methods. Zorian told it to shut up and that it just wasn’t the same.

Simulacrum number two was bored and the cause was easy to understand – he was attending academy classes like a normal student. Zorian hadn’t been regularly attending classes for quite a while now, even when trying to stay on the teachers' good side, since doing that was a huge time sink and provided him with no benefits at this point. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a choice in the matter. The original had gotten it into his head that he should check how obvious a simulacrum’s disguise was by having them interact with a bunch of people on a regular basis… which somehow meant being sent back to school.

Okay, okay, so he actually knew what the logic behind that was. He had all of the original’s memories, after all. The idea was that the academy was full of mages of all sorts, and his classmates were at least passingly familiar with him, so if anyone could notice there was something wrong with him, it would be them.

They didn’t notice anything wrong, of course. The simulacrum actually broke off from the script entirely – he was supposed to stay inconspicuous but he decided to show off his future knowledge as much as possible instead – and nobody raised a fuss. Unlike Zach, he was known to be a good, diligent student. They probably thought he had studied ahead or something.

In any case, the mission was less one of nerve-wracking infiltration and more of an exercise in resisting soul-crushing boredom. The only good thing about the situation was that he would only have to tolerate this for one day – the original had been very zealous about dismissing his simulacrums at the end of each day, so he wouldn’t have to be here tomorrow too.

Why couldn’t he have been like the simulacrum number one, who was mapping the local underworld, or simulacrum number three, who was arranging a trade deal with one of the aranean webs near Knyazov Dveri?

Well, the current class had finally ended during his internal whining, so he could-

"Wow, Zorian, you got every question on that unannounced test correctly! How did you do that? I checked and some of those questions aren’t even in our textbook."

Zorian turned around in his seat, looking at the girl speaking with him. It was Neolu. When he had arrived to the academy, he had quickly realized that she considered him to be something of a friend, even though he had no memory of ever really interacting with her before the time loop. How was that possible? Well… he wasn’t the first simulacrum that was sent on this mission. And apparently one of the previous simulacrums was similarly bored out of his skull here and decided to go off the script and befriend her. And then never bothered to inform the original about it.

Simulacrum number two didn’t intend to inform the original either. The whole thing was harmless and imagining the original’s reaction when he finally found out was kind of amusing.

He leaned forward a little in a conspiratorial manner and motioned for Neolu to come closer. She did, and from the corner of his eyes he also saw Akoja leaned in a little so she could eavesdrop on them better.

"I have a time machine," he whispered to her solemnly. "And I’m using it to cheat at school."

He heard Akoja snort softly in the background. Neolu, though, gave him a weird, considering look.

"Really?" she asked suspiciously, like he had just told her something unlikely but still entirely possible.

That… was not the response the simulacrum had expected. He stared at her face for a second, at a loss about how to answer that. Hmm… now that he thought about it, Neolu was a bit cute. She had a pretty face and her naiveté could be kind of endearing, in small doses. He had looked down on her in the past, thinking she was kind of dim and flighty, so he had never really thought about it much. But seeing how he was going to live less than a day now, he found himself a lot more forgiving than he would usually be.

"No, I was just joking with you. I don’t really have a time machine," Zorian explained patiently.

"Pity. Having a time machine would be grand," Neolu said, smiling. "Sometimes I really wish I could go back in time and fix things before I mess up."

"Don’t we all," Zorian shrugged. Too bad the time loop didn’t work like that. After a bit of thought he tore off a sheet of paper from his notebook and wrote down the questions for tomorrow’s spell formula test and handed it to Neolu.

The moment she realized what she was looking at, her eyes widened comically.

"Is this–" she began, only for Zorian to cut her off.

"Hush. I never handed you anything, okay? See you tomorrow, I guess."

Akoja gave him a very disapproving look afterwards. Apparently she figured out the general nature of what he did from the clues in front of her and she didn’t like it. Her disapproval died down considerably when he handed her a copy of the questions as well, though she did mumble something about cheating being wrong.

The simulacrum rolled his eyes at the statement and went back to Imaya’s place to report to the original.

Somehow, he didn’t think that would actually stop her from making use of the information tomorrow.

Eight restarts had passed since the time Zach and Zorian had first tried to break into Eldemar’s royal treasury. Their priorities during this time consisted of investigating the invasion forces, looking for possible signs of Red Robe, trying to track down the rest of the missing Key pieces and figuring out some way to leave the time loop. Of course, since actually retrieving even the known pieces of the Key was impossible with their current skills, and they had no idea what kind of abilities they would need to retrieve the rest, a large portion of their efforts was dedicated to elevating their magical expertise in various ways.

Zach did his best to focus on strengthening his personal soul awareness and mental defenses, but both of those skills were very tedious to improve and Zach was pretty impatient by nature. He often spent a lot of time trying to figure out some way to improve his combat magic, even though he was already very good at that and any improvements tended to be very marginal.

As for Zorian, he did a little bit of everything, from pursuing more mind magic lessons from the aranea (though he had picked all low-hanging fruit in that regard and was starting to hit the point of diminishing returns) to working on his golems and magic skill. However, the bulk of his effort centered around mastering dimensionalism and time magic as much as possible, in the hopes that doing so would give him some clue as to how they could escape the time loop. Thus far, he didn’t have any solid leads in regards to such an escape route, but he did learn how to open dimensional gates and haste himself, so at least he accomplished something.

Currently, Zach and Zorian were inside a Black Room – but not the same Black Room as the one in Cyoria. This was the result of a considerable effort to find other Black Rooms across Altazia, since making use of the one in Cyoria twice remained as impractical as ever. So far they had managed to find two more – one in Sulamnon and the other in Cwenjar, a small Splinter State on the border of Eldemar. Unfortunately, these were a lot less impressive than the one Eldemar had built. The Sulamnese one could only be activated for twelve days, while the Cwenjari one could only last for five. But still, 17 days was 17 days, and Zach and Zorian had been dutifully making use of them anyway.

It might actually be a good thing that these Black Rooms were less effective than the Cyorian one, since suffering through three months of isolation in every restart would probably be really unhealthy for their psyche.

Especially considering Zach was already going crazy, even though they were currently in the Cwenjari Black Room and there was only one day left before they could leave.

"Damn it!" Zach swore, the complicated geometric shape above his hand winking out as he lost control of it. Lately he had been trying out some very exotic shaping exercises in another bid for improving his combat magic, but evidently it wasn’t going as well as he hoped. "Okay, I’ve had enough of this! Done! I’m done!"

He shouted this overdramatically to the sky (well, to the ceiling, since they were in-doors) while keeping his hands raised in the air. Somehow, Zorian was getting the idea that there was more to this than his momentary failure to figure out a random shaping exercise.

"You’re still angry about what happened with Alanic and his soul awareness training, aren’t you?" he surmised.

Zach responded by swearing up a storm, which Zorian took as confirmation that he was correct.

It happened in the previous restart. Alanic had finally judged Zach to have reached a point in his soul awareness where he could move on to the more dangerous version of soul training that Zorian had undergone. Zach was very excited and confident, but the moment Alanic touched Zach and tried to separate his soul from his body, Zorian’s marker activated and the restart immediately ended.

The marker woven through their souls was a curious thing. It was hard to figure out for the same reason that memory probes were hard – you had to pretty much already know what you were looking for before you could find it. You couldn’t just browse through it for interesting information like you would a book and the like. You had to know which was the right question to ask.

Now armed with the knowledge of what was possible, courtesy of what he had seen his own marker do in that terminated restart, Zorian had no problems leveraging his hard-won soul awareness into figuring out what happened.

The marker, as it turned out, had a contingency that terminated the current restart if significant tampering of the controller’s mind or soul is detected. It was unclear what exactly would qualify as significant tampering, but apparently even wrenching a soul out of the Controller’s body was enough to trigger it.

In Zorian’s marker, this function was non-functional, which was why he could go through Alanic’s soul training without any issues. Zach’s marker, however, was not defective in this manner. It detected Alanic’s training as an attack upon the Controller and reacted accordingly.

This information helped answer a few questions that Zorian had been wondering about for quite some time. Such as why Red Robe had done such relatively minor damage to Zach’s memories – he probably couldn’t have done more than he did. In fact, the real surprise was that he had managed to do as much as he had without triggering the restart. If Zorian was reading his own defective marker correctly, the contingency in question was quite trigger happy – whoever made it was a big believer in the better safe than sorry school of philosophy when it came to the safety of the Controller. Red Robe must have spent multiple restarts figuring out a way to get past it to the extent that he did.

This would also explain why Zach had been so relatively unconcerned in the past about having his soul or mind targeted. He had probably been hit by spells like that plenty of times, but that just ended his current restart prematurely. With that in mind, his attitude might not have been as foolish as Zorian had thought it was.

Of course, no defense was unbeatable in the end. Liches, for instance, commonly possessed a very similar contingency that wrenched their soul back to their phylactery when exposed to things like hostile soul magic. Which was how Quatach-Ichl, as someone who had probably fought quite a few rival liches, instantly knew how to bypass it when Zach foolishly told him he would survive bodily destruction. As for how Red Robe bypassed its protection to mess with Zach’s mind, Zorian wasn’t quite sure…

…but he had a suspicion it was related to Red Robe’s use of non-structured mind magic. He distinctly remembered that Red Robe had been using non-structured mind magic on both him and Zach, despite being fairly bad at it. Which was kind of foolish of him at the face of it, since structured mind magic would have probably served a non-psychic like him a lot better in most regards. However, if the marker’s contingency was aimed primarily at countering structured magic, and non-structured magic bypassed it to some extent, his choice of attack mode made perfect sense.

At first, the idea that the marker’s maker didn’t take non-structured magic fully into account when designing the contingencies sounded like an unbelievable oversight to Zorian. However, the more he thought about it, the more sense it made. Non-structured magic was a lot rarer in the past, both due to the more primitive shaping instruction at that time and because magical bloodlines used to be smaller and less sophisticated. The marker, and even the time loop itself, may have been built with a set of assumptions that were simply not valid today as they once had been. And whoever had activated the Sovereign Gate either couldn’t or wouldn’t update it to take modern circumstances into account.

"…all that time I wasted on those exercises!" Zach shouted, his rant finally dying down as his anger ran out of steam.

"It’s not that bad," Zorian assured him. "Yes, you lost out a fair bit by not being able to go through the same training I did, but you still managed to achieve some elementary soul awareness, and that’s not nothing. It will allow you to cast defensive spells on your soul, at the very least. Which is a must if we ever want to fight Quatach-Ichl and take his crown. So you didn’t waste anything. The only real loss is that we lost an entire restart to that."

Zach winced. "Yeah, in retrospect, we really shouldn’t have tried that at the very beginning of the restart."

"Hindsight is always perfect," Zorian shrugged. "It’s just one restart and we learned very valuable information from it. We’ll manage."

Zach sighed and plopped down on the floor again with a heavy grunt. He was quiet for a moment.

"It just seems like we haven’t accomplished all that much in these past seven months or so, you know?" he finally said. "I mean, we investigated all the high ranking members of the cult and none of them are obviously Red Robe. We also can’t locate Veyers at all – it’s like he just vanished into thin air. We have yet to successfully extract the damn dagger from the royal treasury and we can’t even find the rest of the Key pieces …"

"Okay, that last one isn’t really true," Zorian said, interrupting him. "We may not know their exact location, but we do know where to look for them."

Their search for the missing pieces of the key had been long and expensive. Such a project would have been impossible to finish in any reasonable amount of time by just two of them working alone. So they didn’t even try. They outsourced their work to numerous information brokers, both legal and criminal, paying huge sums to have them and their agents check up on rumors and stories of Ikosian inheritance floating around. They hired museums and historians to comb through historical records in search of any scrap of information related to the objects. As for themselves, they made themselves useful by breaking into government records of Eldemar, Sulamnon, Falkrinea and other Splinter States. The buildings that held those records were not nearly as well defended as the royal treasury, and the Splinter States had made their own attempts to locate these important historical objects.

Thankfully, those efforts were not without results.

"Knowing that one of the pieces is in the deepest part of the Xlotic desert, that another had been lost gods know where in the jungles of Koth and that the last one was stolen by some asshole who took it with him to Blantyrre is not very helpful," Zach grouched. "All it tells us is that searching for the rest of the Key on Altazia is probably pointless. And how are we supposed to get to these places to search for the missing pieces, anyway? Just getting to Koth would take us almost an entire restart, nevermind actually searching for it. If that information is true, we’re kind of screwed, Zorian."

"Maybe," Zorian agreed. "But you see, I have a plan…"

64. Distance

Eldemar and Koth were very far from one another. The exact distance was hard to pin down, since the name Koth covered a pretty big area on the southern continent, but Zorian estimated it to be around 7000 kilometers minimum. Worse, this was a straight line distance, so the actual journey would be even longer. It was not impossible to make that journey in the span of a month, but just reaching the place was not enough for Zach and Zorian – they needed to reach it with plenty of time to spare, or else they would have no time to search for the piece of the Key that was supposedly lost there. Additionally, if they spent most of their time in transit to Koth, they could not make use of the Black Rooms scattered across Altazia. Thus, by committing themselves to such a journey, they effectively lost more than a single month of time.

There were two main methods of traveling from Eldemar to Koth. The simplest, as well as the cheapest method was to board a ship at the city of Luja and make your way to Koth by sea. Even the cheaper ships would get you there within a month, and the pricier vessel may make the journey in as little as 20 days! Well, assuming the ship didn’t get sunk by a tiger-striped nautilus or something along the way. But he heard those were pretty much exterminated along major shipping routes, along with sea hydras, razor sharks and flying barracudas, so probably not. In any case, this was the method Zorian’s parents were using to get to Koth, as they were not in that much of a hurry and didn’t want to spend more money than they needed to.

The second main method was utilizing the existing network of teleport platforms that connected most major settlements on Altazia and Miasina. It was pricier that ship travel, but that was not an issue for Zach and Zorian. A bigger problem was that while this method was faster than ship travel… it actually wasn’t that much faster. Using publically available information, Zorian calculated that it would take them 15 days to reach Koth by using the teleport platform network, and that was under ideal conditions. The issue was that the teleport platform network worked on a strict schedule that couldn’t be sped up – the network spanned over numerous different countries, after all, and none of them were willing to let mass teleport traffic go in and out of country with no control or supervision. Each platform had security checks and border control that travelers had to go through, and that took time. A lot of time, according to Zach – he had already tried to use the platforms as a method of reaching Koth once, purely on a whim, and it actually took him most of the month to reach his destination. Would Zorian be able to do better? Doubtful. Even if Zorian offered to pay extra, the teleport operators would refuse to make an off-schedule platform activation just for his sake – who would cause an international incident just for some extra cash? And even if Zorian went wild with his mind magic and convinced them to make an exception for him and Zach, the destination platform security would not be inclined to play along. Depending on the destination, they might even shoot him on sight – there had been cases where teleport platforms were used for raids and surprise attacks, and some places were very trigger happy about un-announced teleports.

All in all, Zorian didn’t think he could optimize the teleport platform to any significant extent. They were a very fast and convenient method if one was traveling to a destination that was a couple of jumps away, but they just weren’t designed to get people over vast distances as fast as they were willing to pay. If anything, the speed of transit was deliberately throttled to more manageable levels, so that the local authorities could exercise some measure of control over it.

Unfortunately, there were no other routine methods for crossing such large distances. Not many absurdly rich people needed to get from Eldemar to Koth as fast as humanly possible in any given year, so no widespread service provided it.

That left unconventional methods. Zorian had considered some wild ones, such as stealing one of the few existing airships to make the journey or transforming into a migratory bird and flying there, but ultimately dismissed them as too fanciful to really work. Besides, methods like that didn’t solve the problem of losing access to Altazia’s Black Rooms, and would require them to dedicate at least several restarts in pursuit of exotic skills that were unlikely to be useful for anything else. Being able to pilot an airship was good for bragging rights and not much else, unless you were actually an airship pilot by trade.

Eventually, his thoughts turned to the gate spell and his recent practice of making heavy use of simulacrums. Probably because that was what he had been working on recently. By themselves, neither of the two spells was the solution to his problem… but combined together, they could be.

The simulacrum had no range limit as far as Zorian was aware – it had to be created next to the caster, but it could then roam as far away from the original as it wanted. The gate spell, on the other hand, was largely limited by its rather miserable range… unless there were people on both ends of the gate working in tandem to stabilize it. If there were people casting the spell on both ends of the gate, then it also didn’t have a known range limit. In practice, the gate spell was rarely utilized in this way, both because people capable of casting the gate spell were as rare as hen’s teeth and because actually coordinating two such people to synchronize their casting over large distances was hard. It was often quicker and more practical to simply chain teleports from place to place than to go through such a hassle.

With the simulacrum spell, Zorian didn’t have to worry about finding another person capable of casting the spell. He could effectively be two or more people at the same time. And while coordinating the spell over continental distances was a bit of an issue, it was not insurmountable. In the worst case, he could simply instruct his simulacrum to leave a trail of telepathic relays along its path and maintain contact that way.

One nice thing about the idea was that while his simulacrum was traveling to Koth, he would be able to stay in Eldemar and wouldn’t lose access to the Black Rooms in that particular restart. One not so nice thing was that this would permanently tie down one of his simulacrums, leaving one less for him to boss around. He could only maintain three simulacrums at most without his mana regeneration going negative, so that was not an entirely irrelevant cost.

Additionally, that would require him to discard his previous rule about only allowing simulacrums to exist for 24 hours. However, he didn’t really foresee much problems with that – his simulacrums had been really well behaved, all things considered. His current simulacrums could be kind of cranky and weird sometimes, but they were clearly him and had his best interests at heart. Still, maybe he should start considering some kind of countermeasure in case one of his simulacrums went rogue and tried to take over? But any countermeasure he designed his simulacrum would know about. Argh…

In any case, that still left the question of how the simulacrum was going to reach Koth in a reasonable amount of time. It was nice that Zorian wasn’t going to have to dedicate half a restart to such a journey and lose access to the black rooms, but the fact remained they would only have 15 or so days in each restart left to conduct a search for the Key. He needed something better than that.

That was why he decided to talk to the Silent Doorway Adepts. It could turn out to be a massive waste of time, but if they really knew something about the operation of Bakora gates, that could be precisely the solution he needed.

After all, why bother setting up a brand new gate network if one already existed, and was largely unsupervised to boot?

Thus, Zach and Zorian were currently standing in front of the Silent Doorway Adept representative, Refuge in Void. She was a skittish little thing, twitching and shuffling in place all the time, acting way too nervous for a professional negotiator. Then again, how many humans interacted with aranea so heavily they learned how to read their body cues? Maybe it was Zorian who was weird.

Surrounding them were eight other aranea, serving as guards. There were originally four of them, but the Silent Doorway Adepts brought in another four once they realized what Zach and Zorian were after.

The negotiations weren’t going too well.

"I am sorry, honored guests, but we really cannot help you with this," the Silent Doorway Adept representative said, using a vocalization spell to speak out loud instead of resorting to their usual telepathy. She was either not very proficient in the spell or was trying to unnerve them with amateurish psychological warfare, because her voice was weirdly resonant and distorted. "The Bakora Gate in our possession is simply a treasured historical artifact. It has great sentimental value to us, but we know of no method to actually make it work."

Her middle legs twitched slightly, an obvious nervous tic that plagued her since the very beginning of these talks.

"But please," she added, trying her best to sound sincere, "if you find anything regarding the activation of Bakora gates, contact us immediately. We are as interested in this matter as you are."

"I’m sure you are," said Zorian, clacking his tongue unhappily.

They had tried just about everything they could think of to secure the web’s cooperation on this – they had offered confidential information on surrounding polities, offered rare materials and money, offered knowledge of secret aranean techniques they had gotten from the other webs in various restarts and they had offered an utterly ridiculous amount of crystalized mana for it. It was all for naught – the Silent Doorway Adepts remained obstinate in feigning ignorance on the matter.

He exchanged a long look with Zach, who just shrugged in response. This meeting was largely Zorian’s idea. Zach came to the meeting while under the effects of the mind blank spell and mostly remained silent – a fact that surely wasn’t helping the Silent Doorway Adepts relax around them. Still, that was the whole point – Zorian deliberately instructed Zach to do that, as an unspoken intimidation attempt. He knew from his past dealings with the Silent Doorway Adepts that merely being polite and generous wasn’t going to accomplish anything, so he brought Zach along to show them he wasn’t someone they could dismiss out of hand. In a way, it worked – Zorian was sure the web would have chased him off by now if he had come alone, but since there was a mind-blanked mage standing next to him, looking all grim and imposing, they remained polite and treated him far nicer than they did in the past.

It was true, what they say – negotiations tended to go better if you brought both gifts and an armed entourage, as opposed to just gifts.

Unfortunately, their hosts seemed to be running out of patience, as Zorian spotted some of the guards shifting their positions, as if preparing themselves for a surprise attack.

"Please don’t do that," he said with a sigh. "You have no chance against us in an actual fight. I’m sure you’ve noticed that my friend here is under a mind blank, and I assure you he’s as good as you’d think. I am not that bad at fighting myself, if you’ll permit me to be a little immodest, so don’t discount me as a threat either. You would only be walking into your death if you attack us. Don’t do this to yourself."

"If you are so confident in your combat prowess, why not just attack us and take what you want by force?" Refuge in Void said. Perhaps it was just Zorian, but she sounded a little bitter to him. "Why negotiate with us at all?"

"Because it’s the right thing to do," Zorian told her matter-of-factly. "We’re not brigands."

"I see. So your friend here…?" she asked, leaning slightly towards Zach, who raised his eyebrow at her curiously.

"It’s just a precaution," Zorian said. "Unless you attack me, this meeting will not degenerate into violence."

Also, he was not at all sure he could figure out their secrets from reading their minds. The sort of knowledge about the gate he wanted was likely held by a small selection of their experts and maybe leaders, and they were liable to have protected it well. In the past, when Zach and Zorian raided aranean webs, their elders had the annoying tendency to erase their own memories in regards to important secrets, rather than let them fall into their hands. Since the two of them hadn’t been after their closest secrets back then, this had been a minor matter back then. Now, though, it would be a giant show stopper.

"In that case, I will be frank with you – we are not willing to divulge our secrets to you," Refuge in Void said. "You’re just wasting both of our time here."

"At any price?" Zorian frowned.

"I’m afraid so. I honestly can’t think of anything you could offer us that would make us reveal our closest mysteries to you."

Well. This was… not unexpected. It was time to bring out his secret weapon, then.

"Let’s test this with one last offer, then," Zorian said.

"Sure," Refuge in Void said, projecting a mixture of relief and disinterest, as if she was just pleased this was about to end.

"Me and Zach here are time travelers," Zorian said. "And we can help you send messages from your current selves to the Silent Doorway Adepts in the past."

There was a short pause as the aranean representative froze for a second and then shook her forward legs in a strange gesture.

"Well," she said. "I have to say, this… this is the first time anyone has tried that argument. I find myself curious… do you have any kind of proof for that statement?"

"Three days from now, you are going to send a team of three aranea to an old contact in Tozen to pick up another shipment of crystalized mana," said Zorian, causing the representative to freeze again. "However, it will be a trap and two of them will never return."

"That doesn’t-" Refuge in Void started saying.

"Two days after that," continued Zorian in a louder voice, cutting her off, "you will finally track down the Red Scrolls of Tmilicen, but your previous buyer will say he is no longer interested in them. He will instead point you to Padina’s Magical Museum as a possible buyer. At the same time, you will come into possession of a box of emberheart crystals…"

After Zorian made another ten or so predictions, Refuge in Void finally broke down and went to speak with her elders. An hour later, he was handed over to someone higher in the chain of command – specifically, Glittering River of Stars, who was some kind of vice-elder as far as he could figure out. She was a lot less obstructive than Refuge in Void had been, but still not willing to talk to him about Bakora gates.

"We will need some time to confirm these… predictions of yours. I’m sure you understand," Glittering River said apologetically. She really sounded apologetic, too! She was a much better actor than Refuge in Void had been.

"I understand," Zorian said, nodding slowly. "It’s fine. We didn’t really expect to get your cooperation after one attempt, anyway."

"But that’s okay," Zach said with a sunny smile. "We have as many attempts to get this right as we want to."

To her credit, Glittering River did not shift or twitch uncomfortably, as Refuge in Void had been prone to, but Zorian could tell she was uncomfortable anyway. They had explained to her the general nature of the time loop they were in, but neglected to mention some important details – such as that they were on a time limit or just how crucial Bakora gate information might be to them. Zorian wasn’t sure how much the Silent Doorway Adepts really believed about their story, but they were clearly spooked enough by the implications to humor him for a bit.

"Incidentally, if there is a way for me to prove my claims easier to your web in future restarts, I’d love to hear it," Zorian said.

"We will have to discuss things before I get back to you on that," Glittering River said diplomatically.

After that, they were basically ejected out of the colony and told to come back in a week. Considering that Zorian had been afraid they would laugh them straight out of the room the moment they mentioned time travel, he considered this already a victory. So long as they didn’t reject the idea out of hand, he was sure they could prove to them that the time loop was real. They may not have literally infinite retries like they had implied to Glittering River, but what they did have should be more than enough.

"We seem to have frightened them pretty badly there," Zach commented on the way back to Cyoria. "Especially when you started mentioning the deals you’ve made with other webs and how you intend to repay them after you get out of the time loop. You’d think they’d be happy about their fellow webs being rewarded, but apparently not."

"The last time one of the aranean webs got massively superior to others, they swept over the entire continent, conquering or supplanting every rival colony in the way," Zorian pointed out. "They’ve got every right to be worried."

"Huh, I hadn’t thought of it that way," Zach said thoughtfully. "I mean, you’ve already told me that, but I just hadn’t considered how that would affect their attitudes. It’s good I left the negotiations mostly to you, then. You really understand aranean psychology way better than I do."

There was a short silence before Zach spoke again.

"So… do you really intend to just hand down knowledge to other webs like that?" he asked curiously.

"Of course," Zorian nodded. "Not to every single web I interacted with, admittedly, but every web that has been especially helpful to me is bound to get something for their trouble."

"What about help of the human variety?" Zach asked. "Do they get any repayment?"

"That’s a bit more dangerous, since they are far more likely to track me down through my gifts than the aranea. I want to pay people back for their help, but I don’t want to suffer just because I have a sense of honor," said Zorian.

"Yeah, some people are really shameless," Zach agreed. "Give them a finger and they’ll try to bite off the whole arm. And some might just be too curious for their own good."

"Yeah," Zorian nodded. "I intend to try and repay people anyway, but I’ll have to be a lot more careful and selective about it."

"Makes me feel a little guilty," Zach admitted. "I don’t think I’ve ever seriously considered paying people back for things I got from them over the restarts. Invite me when you start finalizing those plans, okay? I think I have a few people I should really reward somehow for all the good they’ve done to me."

"Sure," Zorian nodded.

"So," Zach continued. "The Silent Doorway Adepts. Do you think their leadership will believe us in the end?"

"Maybe. But even if they do, it’s no guarantee that they’ll agree to a trade," Zorian said, shaking his head sadly. "If they’re paranoid enough, any deal with us might seem like shooting themselves in the foot. They have no way to make sure we’re actually going to keep our end of the bargain once we’re outside the time loop. Who’s to say we won’t just pump them for every secret they have and then unceremoniously discard them? You know, like the Ghost Serpent thought we would do to it?"

Zach made a sour face. He didn’t like to be reminded of the snake spirit – he had been severely insulted by its accusations, taking them much more personally than Zorian himself did.

"In any case," Zorian continued, "Even if these negotiations fail, it’s not the end of the world. There is at least one other group that seems to have insight into how Bakora gates work – there is a fully functional gate mechanism beneath Cyoria, courtesy of the invaders, and it’s supposed to be heavily inspired by Bakora gates."

"None of the Ibasans know how that thing works," pointed out Zach. "I bet only Quatach-Ichl really does. So that doesn’t really help us much."

"Yeah, probably," Zorian agreed. He had delved into the minds of enough high-ranking invaders to realize that the gates probably weren’t made by any of them. Either Quatach-Ichl was the only one who knew the secrets of their construction or the other builders weren’t allowed to be part of the invasion force. It would make sense if it were so – the gates were one huge advantage for the Ibasans, and they definitely didn’t want that secret to fall into the hands of Eldemar’s mages. "But I wasn’t thinking of finding someone to memory probe for the information. I was thinking of simply taking over the gate site and analyzing the gate scaffolding itself."

Zach raised an eyebrow at him.

"I though you said that would take months," he asked curiously. "Maybe years. What changed?"

"I realized I was being kind of an idiot," Zorian said. "Sure, it would take a long time if I tried to figure it out all alone… but why do that? Why not bring a small army of experts down there and have us all tackle it together?"

Zach hummed thoughtfully.

"It would have to be done very, very carefully, unless we want Quatach-Ichl to come crashing to the party," he said. "But then again, that’s true for anything involving the invasion, isn’t it? Yeah, it’s worth a try. Let’s do it."

"We’ll wait for the day of the invasion," Zorian said hurriedly. He could see Zach was getting fired up and he would rather not go get himself killed in the middle of the restart due to his impatience. "The security of the gate is laughable if you time things right."

"Oh, right, you did mention that," Zach said, deflating a little. "Man, I feel so angry at myself for never figuring that out before you told me. I never did manage to step through the gate myself, you know? Even when I was fast enough in carving my way through the defenders to avoid Quatach-Ichl showing up to get rid of me, the defenders always collapsed the gate before I reached it."

"I still can’t believe you just made a direct, frontal assault on the Ibasan base instead of trying to infiltrate it," Zorian said. "Why the hell did you think that would work?"

"I’m not good at infiltration," Zach said with an unrepentant shrug. "Besides, it almost did work. It’s not stupid if it works, right?"

They spent the rest of the journey home arguing about whether or not there is any difference between almost worked and ultimately failed.

"What do you mean, I have a date with Akoja?" Zorian asked his simulacrum incredulously.

"Just what I said," the simulacrum said, unconcerned with his agitation. "She asked me to meet her in that little tea house two blocks from the academy and I accepted."

Zorian felt the urge to throw a lightning bolt at his damn simulacrum, but he knew that wouldn’t actually help him feel any better. If anything, it would just complicate things further by denying him much needed answers as to how could this happen!?

"You can’t just decide things like this on your own!" Zorian hissed to his simulacrum in frustration.

The simulacrum arched his eyebrow at him.

"Well it’s true," Zorian insisted. "I know you’re my simulacrum and I told you to do whatever, but you should have contacted me for opinion before agreeing to something like this."

"Are you saying that if you had been in my place, you would have blown her off when she asked to meet?" his simulacrum asked with a knowing smile.

Zorian frowned. If this were before the time loop? Yeah, definitely. Now? No, not a chance. He wasn’t interested in dating Akoja – he didn’t think their personalities meshed well – but he’d give her a chance at least.

He hated that gods-damned smirk that was on his simulacrum’s face right now, but he was right that Zorian would have likely made the same decision in his place.

"This is just-" Zorian started, before stopping himself with a sigh. "When?"

"Two days from now," the simulacrum said.

"How the hell did this happen?" Zorian asked. "I knew Akoja was kind of crushing on me, but she never tried anything until now. What changed? What did you do?"

"Actually she did set up a meeting with you once, remember?" his simulacrum said. "Only she chickened out at the end and nothing came of it. But I doubt it’s going to be like that this time, since she set up an actual date for it and all. Anyway, I didn’t do anything, it’s your previous simulacrums that did."

"What do you mean?" Zorian frowned. He’d been doing a lot of frowning ever since this conversation started.

"Apparently they’ve been pretty active among our classmates without telling you. They’re hanging out with all sorts of people and then leaving out that detail when making their final reports. In particular, they’ve been interacting with Akoja heavily enough that she apparently felt confident enough to ask me out."

Before dismissing a simulacrum, Zorian always made sure to ask it for a memory packet of everything important that had occurred to it during its short life. This was usually accompanied by a verbal report, since Zorian found it useful to chat with his simulacrums from time to time to see how they’re faring. This did mean he had to rely on the simulacrums being able to effectively summarize their existence for him, but there was no real alternative. If he asked the simulacrums for memories of their entire existence, he would never be able to digest the memory packets in any reasonable amount of time. Interpreting 24 hours of memories, no matter how mundane, would take him at least a couple of hours… and he usually had more than one simulacrum active at the time. He could only rely on his simulacrums to pick what they felt was important and pass it on.

"Why would they do that?" Zorian asked.

"No idea. But if I were to guess… because it’s kind of funny to imagine your reaction when you finally find out," his simulacrum said, grinning. "I’m certainly amused at your predicament."

"My predicament, huh?" Zorian said slowly, giving the simulacrum a nasty look. "Actually, I have a better idea. You are going to do it."

"But I’m going to go away at the end of the day," the simulacrum said, confused.

"Not anymore," Zorian said. "I’ve been thinking of relaxing the 24-hour rule, and you’re going to be the first test subject. Congratulations – you’re going to remain active for more than a day, just so you can take responsibility for what you’ve done."

"Hey, hey," the simulacrum protested. "Wait just a minute here! Don’t you think it’s kind of an asshole move to send a simulacrum on a date instead of you?"

"Why?" Zorian asked with a malicious smile. "You’re the one she spoke to, so it’s only fair that you be the one to do it."

"Yes, well… I’m still just made of ectoplasm and we’re meeting in a tea house," the simulacrum said. "I’ll probably be expected to drink something, and I kind of can’t. I’m totally solid and homogenous from the neck down."

Huh, he didn’t know that. He knew that simulacrums had to sleep just as well as he did, because he tried to leave one to work over night once and found it snoring on the floor in the morning. As for things like food and water, he’d never really thought about it – the spell description on the scroll said a simulacrum didn’t need any sustenance besides magic so he didn’t think there was anything there to worry about.

"You know what?" Zorian sighed. "You’re right. I should be the one going, if only for Akoja’s sake."

"Right. I’m glad you can see reason," the simulacrum said, clearly relieved.

"However," Zorian added with louder voice. "That doesn’t mean you’re completely off the hook. You remember what I said earlier?"

"No?" the simulacrum said slowly.

"I said I was thinking of relaxing the 24-hour rule," Zorian patiently reminded him. "That still applies, and you’re still going to be a test rat for that."

He quickly gathered all the maps, brochures and partially filled out information tables and unceremoniously thrusted them at the simulacrum.

"Congratulations," Zorian said blandly. "You just earned yourself a one-way ticket to Koth. Your job, which you have no option but to accept, is to find a way to cross more than 7000 kilometers in less than a week. Good luck."

"Oh, come on!" the simulacrum protested. "That’s impossible and you know it! Hey! Hey, come back here!"

But Zorian wasn’t listening. He had less than two days to figure out what kind of nonsense his previous simulacrums had set up for him.

Beside the current situation with Akoja, that is.

The small, out of the way tea house Zorian and Akoja were currently in had a bit of a reputation among students. Not all of them – before the time loop, Zorian had no idea it even existed – but among the more relationship-focused students of the academy, this place was famous as a good place for a romantic meet-up. As such, there was no doubt in Zorian’s mind what Akoja was trying to say when she asked him if he wanted to meet with her here – the fact she picked this place in particular made it pretty clear she was expressing romantic interest in him.

The… date … had gone well in Zorian’s opinion. Neither Zorian nor Akoja were very talkative people, so most of the time passed in awkward silence. Still, they did chat a little and he didn’t make Akoja run off in tears or storm off angrily out of the tea house – considering how his previous evening with Akoja had gone, this was a massive success!

He gulped down the last dregs of his tea, which had gone thoroughly cold by now, and took a good look at Akoja. She looked away shyly, projecting a mixture of discomfort and excitement in response to his attention. She was a thin girl, with short brown hair and expensive-looking glasses. The clothes she wore were fancier than she usually had on her, but still very conservative and modest – all muted colors and not a bit of extra skin visible anywhere.

She wasn’t a classical beauty, but he’d still describe her as kind of attractive. Especially when she was blushing and being shy, like she was right now.

She was so hard to figure out. Yes, she was kind of crushing on him, but he was pretty sure there was more to it than that. Out of concern for her privacy, he had refrained from peeking at her surface thoughts and limited himself to what his passive empathy was telling him. The more the date progressed, the more certain he became that she wanted to bring some topic up to his attention, but somehow she always back down before she went through it. What was that about? He thought about calling her on it, but was reluctant to do so – things were going pretty well thus far, so why risk ruining things?

Besides, if this thing was actually important to her, she would surely summon the courage to bring it up eventually…

"Thank you for agreeing to see me," Akoja suddenly said, straightening herself a little. "I, um… can I ask you something?"

"Yes, go ahead," Zorian nodded.

"I know… that you don’t get along all that well with your family," she said, before stopping to study his reaction.

Oh boy. No wonder she was so reluctant to bring this up, whatever it was. If she were to start a conversation like that with the pre-time loop Zorian, it would be threading on very dangerous waters. Now though… well, Zorian liked to believe he had progressed a little since those days, so he just motioned her to continue.

"A-Anyway," she continued hurriedly, "you kind of indicated that you want to become independent because of that. Find a high-paying job somewhere, get yourself a home and such…"

Zorian gave her a curious look.

"I was wondering if you could give me advice in that regard," she finally asked.

"How to achieve your own independence?" Zorian asked.

"Yes," she confirmed quickly.

"Why?" he asked curiously. "I thought you got along great with your family."

"I do," she said. "We’re pretty close to each other and I have no problems with them. I’m fortunate that way. It’s just… I don’t really have a good relationship with anyone else."

Zorian was about to say something before she cut him off.

"Except for the teachers, I know," she added, giving him a warning look. "But they don’t really care about the students half as much as they pretend to. Especially not students of average talents like mine, who come from a non-magical background and only have their work ethics to lean on."

Zorian hummed thoughtfully, not really understanding what she was getting at. As for Akoja herself, she remained silent and thoughtful for a few seconds, and Zorian got the impression she was thinking of how to explain things further. Thus, he simply waited and refrained from interrupting her.

"Did you ever get the impression that the academy was just milking us for cash?" she finally asked.

Zorian reeled back a little, caught off guard by the question. Did he think that? Well, there were plenty of things he felt they were doing wrong, but…

"No, not really," he admitted. "Sorry. Why do you think so?"

"Well, until the Splinter Wars and Weeping thinned out the number of Noble Houses and other respectable sources of students, the Cyoria’s Royal Academy of Magical Arts didn’t even think of allowing people like us, with no prominent ancestry, into its halls. I’m pretty sure we’re only here because the academy was faced with a choice of either cutting costs or accepting riff-raff in for money. And picked money in the end, of course."

"Ah," Zorian said. "Yes, you’re probably right there. But I wouldn’t describe that as milking us for money personally."

"Maybe I’m just getting paranoid," Akoja sighed. "I’m getting a bit disappointed in academy staff these days. Anyway, the point is that I’m not sure how useful the academy diploma is going to be for me. My family paid a lot of money for me to be here, and they expect great things from me in the future. When I had just come here, I thought that if I just tried my best in class and excelled, that it would all work out. Now I’m not so sure. And I don’t want to go back to my family and beg for help. They’d help me, I know… but I don’t want to disappoint them. I don’t want to be a burden."

"So you’re hoping I can give you some advice in how to find a well-paying job, affordable housing and so on," Zorian finished.

Before the time loop, it was unlikely that Zorian would have been able to advise her much. At the end of the day, his idea was quite similar to her own – excel in your studies and everything would hopefully work itself out in the end. They just had a slightly different definition of what constitutes excelling. Now, though, he actually could recommend a few places to her. He had checked out the employment opportunities a couple of times, though by that point he had been severely overqualified for most of them and had abandoned the project in disappointment. Still, he felt that it was actually smarter of her to forget about that for now and focus on excelling in her magic studies… though perhaps in a slightly more focused manner.

"Just pick one field of magic and focus the bulk of your effort there," he said. "I’d normally suggest spell formula, since being good at those is very well paid… but I noticed you don’t like math much, so maybe not. How do you feel about alteration?"

"It’s fine, I guess," she shrugged.

"Try focusing on that, then," he suggested. "It’s one of the better paying fields. Plus, Ilsa is a master of that type of magic and she seems to like you, so you might be able to get some help out of her with that as your focus."

"I see," she said, looking thoughtful.

"Also, I’m pretty good at alteration," he noted. "I might be able to give you a bit of help if you get stuck with it."

Actually, he would be able to help her with just about any field of magic. But it would sound stupidly boastful to say that, so best to be a little modest about his self-praise.

There as a long pause as Akoja digested all this and fiddled nervously with her teacup.

"So," Zorian said, ending the silence. "Was this all?"

"Hm?" she mumbled, broken out of her reverie. She looked panicked for a moment. "Oh. Well, I… yes. I guess."

"I see," Zorian said. "That’s a bit of a shame. When you asked us to meet here, I thought you were actually asking me out on a date."

"I, w-well, it’s not… it was part of the whole, I-" she stammered.

"Relax, I’m just joking with you," he said with a light laugh.

"Jerk," she huffed. "But, um… I kind of do like you…"

"I have to be honest here – I’m not really interested in relationships right now," he told her bluntly. So long as he was stuck in the time loop, he had no intention of pursuing a relationship with anyone. "I know this sounds a little heartless, but…"

"I understand," she sighed, sagging a little. A surprisingly level-headed reaction to a rejection. "Since you’re being so honest, tell me straight – do I have any chance at all with you?"

"I don’t know," Zorian admitted. "We’re so different from each other…"

"How so?" she asked, sounding more curious than insulted. "We seem quite similar from where I’m standing."

"Well, you’re far more concerned about rules and reputation than I am, for one thing…" Zorian said.

She gave him an exasperated look.

"I’d have to be blind to not notice that you don’t care about propriety to the same extent I do," she said. "Yet I still like you. Surely that means I’m willing to work with you on it, right?"

Work with me or work on trying to change me? Zorian wanted to ask. He could be wrong, but he got the impression that Akoja saw him less as his own person and more as raw material to turn into something more to her liking. But no, that would be too confrontational and the date would only go downward from there. So he just glossed over her question and moved on.

Despite him refusing to become an item with her, the date ended pretty amiably from there. Perhaps because he didn’t categorically refuse her and she still thought she might have a chance with him? Whatever the case, they agreed to meet again next week in a more neutral location, ostensibly so Zorian could give her the material he gathered about potential places of employment, costs of living in different cities and so on.

He didn’t know what to think of the whole thing in the end. When he heard his simulacrums had set him up on a date with Akoja, he thought this could only end badly. In his opinion, he and Akoja were very incompatible with one another. After today’s meeting, though, he could almost see it working out in the end.

He so didn’t need this right now…

Well. Could be worse, he supposed – his simulacrums could have set him up with Neolu instead. He had found out that she was also someone they had befriended over the course of the current restart, for whatever reason, and a sneak peek at her thoughts told him she wasn’t exactly opposed to getting involved with him. If he had ended up on a date with her, everyone in the academy would have known about it by the end of the day. At least Akoja had some sense of discretion. Thankfully, Neolu was kind of traditional in mindset, and would never ask someone out the way Akoja did – she would expect a guy to make the first move.

He was going to have to supervise simulacrums he sent on boring tasks like going to class a lot closer in the future.

"You have got to be kidding me," simulacrum number 2 said incredulously. "500 silver coins just for a teleport to Zixia? Do you think I grow money on trees or something?"

The man he was talking to, a bald, heavily-tattooed man in his forties, simply scowled at him in response.

"No like, can get lost," he told Zorian in broken Ikosian.

The simulacrum sighed in frustration and walked away. The original might be swimming in cash right now, but he wasn’t. There was only so much money he could take with him when he left Eldemar, so he couldn’t afford to be too profligate with his funds. This was especially true because every country had its own currency, so he couldn’t just bring stacks of paper money to pay people with – Eldemar’s paper bills weren’t worth much outside Altazia. Hell, they weren’t worth much in some places in Altazia, either. One of the tiny statelets he visited hated Eldemar so much he had nearly gotten attacked when he tried to pay a mage with their money.

No, if he wanted to complete his journey, he needed to carry things that had more universal value – gold, silver and gems. And since those things were both heavy and fairly bulky, he could only bring so much with him.

Simulacrum number 2 grumbled to himself discontentedly. When he had started his journey, he was so sure he had thought of a genius solution. If the teleport platform network was too slow and inconvenient, he thought, why not just find teleport-capable mages and pay them to teleport him personally? Combined with an occasional teleport of his own when he couldn’t find anyone willing to provide this service, and he felt the idea of getting to Koth in less than a week might not be so crazy after all!

Well… it was a little harder than that. First of all, he had a somewhat skewed image of how common teleport capable mages were. Especially mages that could teleport over large distances and could bring other people with them. These kind of people were very rare, and could only be reliably found in large cities and other places where mages naturally congregate. In addition, not every such mage was a heavy traveler, and often had an extremely limited selection of places they could teleport to. Finally, on top of all that, accepting Zorian’s deal was technically illegal dodging of border checks – some mages wouldn’t do it at all because of it, or charged very steep prices for their services.

But still, despite all these issues, the plan had been working fairly well so long as he was still traveling through Altazia. Once he entered the Shivan Archipelago and the Xlotic states, though, another problem with the idea made itself known.

He didn’t speak the local language.

Zorian knew three languages – the common Ikosian that was spoken throughout Altazia in various dialects, the local Khusky tongue that peasantry around Cirin used in their daily lives and the High Ikosian that was used in scholarly works and international trade.

Even among mages, fluency in High Ikosian was not common. Thus, if Zorian wanted to question people for information and negotiate, he often had to resort to common Ikosian. The worked out pretty well in Altazia, but quickly became a big headache outside of it. It was true that both the Shivan Archipelago and the Xlotic states were once part of the Ikosian empire, but while these places spoke common Ikosian, this was such an alien dialect of Ikosian, at least to Zorian’s ears, that he could barely understand them. Additionally, many of these places were like Zorian’s own home region, in that many of the regular inhabitants spoke mainly in their own native tongue and only knew the smattering of common Ikosian for use in trade and such. The Ikosian Empire may have conquered these places and forced the Ikosian language to be used by the administration, but local languages were still there beneath it all.

This was especially true in Shivan Archipelago, where every damn island seemed to have its own local language and dialect.

He thought that was bad, but as he traveled ever southward along the coast of Miasina, he realized this problem was only going to get worse. Koth had never been successfully conquered by Ikosia, due to being separated from northern Miasina by a giant desert (much smaller in those times, but still present) and an imposing mountain range that cut the continent nearly in half. As a consequence, they spoke completely alien tongues that Zorian couldn’t understand in the slightest.

On top of that, the further south he went, the darker the people’s skin tone became, and the more exotic their facial features got in comparison to his own. People recognized him as a weird stranger on sight, and were intensely suspicious of him the moment he approached them.

The area he was currently in was especially bad, because it was very sparsely populated and the settlement he was in was the only congregation of mages for several hundred kilometers around… and the people inside it knew it. Which was why they were trying to bleed him dry whenever he tried to purchase their services.

Oh well. It could be worse.

He could still be attending classes at the academy, for one. Now that would have been a real nightmare.

He did wonder how the original’s date with Akoja went, though. He would have to pester the original for details again when he contacted him for his daily report.

65. Dangerous Ground

Far to the north of Cyoria, square in the middle of a heavily forested mountain range, there was a secluded valley devoid of any vegetation. Instead, it was covered in sharp, broken rocks of all shapes and sizes. There was no obvious reason for the place to be so lifeless and desolate, especially considering how verdant the surrounding mountains were. As he stood on a cliff overlooking the valley, Zorian wondered about that. Was the valley so rocky and desolate because of what made its home here, or was it the other way around and the valley’s inhabitants had picked it precisely because it was so suitable for themselves? Probably the former, but one could never quite know… there could be some subtle geomantic magic surrounding the place.

"Zorian," Zach said, interrupting his thoughts. "The view is… nice, I guess. If you like rocks or something. But why the hell are we here, exactly?"

"You have no appreciation for nature’s wonders," Zorian sighed. Assuming this was actually a natural wonder, that is, and not something the earth elementals had done to make their home more comfy for themselves, anyway. "You were with me when we talked to that hunter community a few hours ago, weren’t you?"

"Yes," Zach nodded. "You told them we’re searching for elementals and they sent us here. Which is fine and all, but why are we searching for elementals all of the sudden? You should know by now that I really hate the whole mysterious act. If you don’t start explaining things right now, I’m starting a wrestling match with you right here on the edge of this cliff."

Zorian gave him an incredulous look, before pointing at the sharp, spike-like rocks at the bottom of the cliff.

"Don’t think for a second I won’t," Zach warned. "One restart cut short is a small price to pay if it will teach you not to do this crap anymore."

"It wasn’t anything sinister," Zorian sighed. "It’s just that it’s a pretty crazy idea and I didn’t want to bother you with it. I did say you could sit this one out, didn’t I?"

"You forget who you’re talking to," Zach smiled widely. "I’m the guy who fought the most infamous dragon of our time just to see if I could do it, descended as deep into the Dungeon as I could before dying and took on the entire Ibasan invasion force all by myself. I’m no stranger to crazy ideas."

"True," Zorian said.

"Besides," Zach said, sounding more serious this time. "We’re in this together. Stop trying to do things alone, it’s getting seriously annoying."

"Fine, fine, I get it," said Zorian, raising his hands up in defeat. "Look… the point of all this is to try and find where the other primordials are imprisoned."

"What?" Zach asked incredulously. "We’re having so many problems with this Panaxeth thing, and you want to find more?"

"Yes," Zorian nodded. "Well, maybe. As I said, it’s a pretty crazy idea. It’s just… I was thinking I might need to set loose a primordial into the world, and I realized that doing that with Panaxeth wouldn’t be a good idea. Panaxeth’s prison is in the middle of Cyoria, and too much attention is already on it. So I thought, why don’t I find my own primordial, then? One that is in some isolated place where nobody is going to disturb us while we work?"

Zach looked at him like he just declared he was secretly a shapeshifted dragon and started sprouting horns.

"You did this on purpose, didn’t you?" he asked.

"What, described the idea in the most disturbing possible way?" Zorian asked back with a smirk. "Yeah." He shook his head. "It’s true, though – that’s essentially what I was thinking about."

"Why, though?" Zach asked. "Is this about finding a way for you to leave the time loop?"

Zorian looked at his fellow time traveler in surprise.

"Don’t be so surprised," Zach scoffed. "You already told me how space itself seemed to collapse when Panaxeth tried to leave his prison. It’s natural to wonder if that kind of spatial hole could be used to fashion some kind of passage out of this place. I’ve thought of it too. Admittedly, I have no idea how you could actually go about doing that…"

"Neither do I," Zorian admitted. "But it’s the only thing I could think of."

Zach hummed thoughtfully. "I thought you said the restart immediately collapsed when Panaxeth got out of his prison, though?" he said. "Last I spoke to you, you thought Panaxeth getting out of his box was one of the conditions for terminating the time loop. Did you change your mind about that or do you have a way around that?"

"It’s obvious the time loop can be fooled in many ways," Zorian said. "As such, I thought that maybe if we enclose the area in a pocket dimension and then release the primordial, the time loop might not detect that as a breach."

"Why do you… oh!" Zach said, eyes widening as he realized what Zorian was getting at. "Because the primordial is still technically imprisoned! It would have to breach the pocket dimension we created before the time loop would consider it free."

"That’s the idea," Zorian said with a nod.

"Would the primordial have any trouble doing that, though?" Zach asked with a frown. "I doubt we could make a prison anywhere near as strong as these divinely crafted prisons that are currently holding them."

"We could always layer multiple pocket dimensions around ourselves," said Zorian. "At least I hope. I don’t know how pocket dimensions work, but they can obviously be stacked on top of each other to some extent. Otherwise, the time loop wouldn’t be able to recreate the various pocket dimensions scattered around the world."

"You know, this raises an important question," Zach said. "Where are we going to find someone to teach us how to make pocket dimensions? I mean, that’s one of the rarest magical disciplines out there. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a mage that can create one. I admit I haven’t been looking for those secrets very hard, but still. What’s worse, you’re talking about pocket dimension creation of incredible scale and sophistication – we need someone who is incredibly good at this obscure magical skill, not someone who can barely do it. Finding such a person… I think this could be even harder than gathering all of the pieces of the Key."

Zorian patiently listened to Zach’s concerns, nodding slightly from time to time. It was all so very true. And yet…

"I’m pretty sure I already know a mage that is very good at creating and manipulating pocket dimensions," Zorian said.

"What? Who?" Zach demanded.

"Silverlake," Zorian said, sighing heavily. He really didn’t want to admit he needed her, but…

"The crazy witch lady that sent you to kill the grey hunter?" Zach asked incredulously.

"The same," Zorian confirmed. "Think about it. Why else can’t we locate her damn hut? I refuse to believe her wards are good enough to resist a systematic sweep of the whole area from both of us. It’s just not possible. And she isn’t editing our memories, either – unless she is a godlike mind mage that makes even aranea elders look like children in comparison, I would at least be able to tell my mind had been tampered with after the fact."

"You think she hides her hut inside a pocket dimension?" Zach asked.

"I don’t see what else it could be," Zorian said.

"Huh. Well, I guess we better find a way to get those stupid eggs soon, then," Zach said with a careless shrug.

As if that would be the end of it. Zorian had a suspicion that even if they brought Silverlake the eggs, this would just be the start of their headaches with her.

Regardless, this was the end of that topic for a while. After a short discussion of the best route to take through the rocky labyrinth, they used a flight spell to float down the cliff and onto one of the bigger rocky outcroppings jutting from the valley. From there, they decided to conserve mana by trying to advance on foot. Also, the hunters claimed that the earth elementals did not appreciate people flying over their home and would hurl rocks at people who offended them in such a way.

An hour later, they realized they had taken the place too lightly. The landscape held no predators trying to ambush them, but it was exceptionally hard and dangerous to traverse on foot. The ground was rough and uneven, with a labyrinthine arrangement of ridges and rocky outcroppings, and it was often far less solid than it appeared to be at first glance. A careless step could easily result in it crumbling away beneath one’s foot, with disastrous consequences – the stones of the valley were very angular and sharp, and sometimes even shaped like knives and caltrops, so any falls or imbalanced flailing easily led to serious injury.

Neither Zorian nor Zach ended up injured, but it did make their progress terribly slow and miserable.

"Ugh," Zach said, casually firing a weak disintegration wave at the nearby rock in order to smooth it out a bit. Once all the edges and spikes were gone, he sat down on the stone and gave Zorian a long look. "I must say, those hunters we talked to have quite a penchant for understatements. When they said the elementals were a bit tricky to reach, I expected something easier than this."

"Well, they’ve been living in these mountains for months," Zorian said. "Maybe for them, this is just tricky rather than a hard slog. But yeah, this is getting a little ridiculous. At this rate, it will take us a whole day to reach the center."

"So… do we just fly there or what?" Zach offered.

"The hunters said the elementals fire on people flying over their home," Zorian said, shaking his head. "I know we could probably survive their barrage, but we’re here to ask for their advice. We don’t want to piss them off before the talks even begin. Let me try something."

Having said that, Zorian quickly fished out a brilliant red potion out of his backpack and downed it.

Grey hunters had amazing senses. The most prominent of these, of course, was their ability to sense magic, but that was actually just the tip of the iceberg in regards to a grey hunter’s ability to perceive the environment. By now, Zach and Zorian had figured out that grey hunters also had an incredibly acute ability to sense air currents and the vibrations in the ground. Together with their amazing magic perception and other, more mundane senses, it gave grey hunters an almost omniscient awareness of everything in their immediate vicinity. The potions of grey hunter perception that Zach and Zorian had been creating in recent restarts mostly ignored all of these in favor of focusing on the grey hunter’s magic perception. This was both because they were treading new ground and had to prioritize, but also because even if they could condense the totality of grey hunter’s perception inside a single potion, it was doubtful that either of them could process the information without blacking out.

Recently, though, Zorian had decided to experiment a little with the tremor sense part of the grey hunter’s perception and commissioned a potion that would grant this ability from the alchemist they were working with. That was the potion he had just drunk, and this was going to be its first real field test.

About 10 seconds after he drank the potion, Zorian felt his skin tingle before his awareness… expanded. It was muted at first, but that changed quickly the moment Zorian took a step forward. He felt his foot hit the ground in a way he never had before, and the alien sensation almost brought him to the ground right then and there. A strong, vivid pulse emanated from his foot, spreading itself through the rocky labyrinth around him before being reflected back at him. In less than a second, he had a three dimensional map of his surroundings impressed into his mind.

"Give me a few minutes to get used to this," he told Zach.

After fifteen minutes of pacing back and forth and jumping in place, Zorian was reasonably sure he could crudely interpret what his new sense was telling him. However, even this, which was probably just a shadow of what the real grey hunter was capable of, should allow him to effortlessly navigate through the valley. He motioned for Zach to follow him and they restarted their journey towards the elementals' home.

Travel was very fast this time. Every step that Zach and Zorian took sent vivid pulses through the ground around them, mapping their surroundings in Zorian’s mind and allowing him to identify which ground was too unstable to support their weight. Zorian felt this was probably how the grey hunter always managed to detect buried traps that Zorian had tried to snare it with, even if they were totally non-magical. Every time it performed one of its damn jumps, the shockwaves generated by its landing would pulse through the ground around it, informing it of not just the layout of the ground around it, but also of its contents.

But that was a thought for another time, because it wasn’t long before they had finally reached the place they had been looking for.

They knew they had reached it because the rocks around them crumbled to pieces and six earth elementals stepped out of them to block their path.

They were a diverse bunch. One was a huge boulder with four stubby legs and a pair of massive rocky arms that could probably crush both of them to paste with a single hand swipe. The other was a six-legged cat-lizard-something carved out of shiny stone, its knife-like scales bristling at their intrusion. The third was a giant elongated human head, soundlessly bobbing up and down through the ground, which rippled and flowed like water in its presence. The fourth was an incredibly lifelike obsidian centipede, looking more like an actual monster than an elemental spirit.

The fifth and six earth elementals, though, were clearly the leaders of the bunch. Both of them were around three and a half meters tall, fairly humanoid in appearance and armed with actual metal weaponry that looked human-made rather than formed out of stone and the like. One of them had a muscular-looking figure and four faces arranged around its head, and carried in its hands a massive sword. The other looked like an old man, with a beard made out of knife-like stones and a long, whip-like tail trailing behind him. This one carried a huge mace in his hands, waving it in the air menacingly.

After a few tense seconds, the four-faced elemental stepped forward towards them.

"Forbidden," he told them simply. Zorian kind of expected the elemental’s voice to be all booming and gravely, considering its size and composition, but it was actually very crisp and spoken at normal volume.

"We bring gifts," Zorian countered, bringing out a box out of his jacket pocket and showing the contents to the giant elemental in front of him. Zach proceeded to do the same.

The boxes held a pair of fist-sized red stones, glowing with inner light. The so called dragonheart stones were highly coveted by some magical creatures, including earth elementals. These stones were hard to acquire, as they could only be found deep within the Dungeon as a rule, and humans had no real use for them aside from making expensive jewelry and trading them to creatures that coveted them. Thankfully, Zach had encountered an entire cave full of them at one point, so it was simple enough to acquire some.

The moment the earth elementals saw the stones, they quickly changed their tune. The lesser elementals around them tried to scuttle over to have a closer look but the two leaders quickly caused them to stay back with a few menacing movements. After that, the four-faced elemental spoke again, again limiting himself to a single word.

"Come," he said simply.

The four lesser elementals stayed behind, while the two humanoid giants led them to one of the large rock formations that turned out to be hollow. Inside, they found an interior that wouldn’t look terribly out of place in a human dwelling – there were tables, chairs, shelves, cabinets and even some potted plants. Items of obviously human making were scattered throughout the area, some of them hopelessly broken. Zorian assumed they were battle trophies to warn and awe human visitors against treachery, but it was hard to be sure – spirits were notorious for having very alien sense of aesthetics, so maybe the elementals just found the arrangement pleasing to the eye somehow.

In the back of the chamber, opposite of the entrance, stood the elemental they came here to see. Stonechild, the elder elemental.

Zorian didn’t know what he had expected to see. A massive stone monolith with a giant face carved in it? A miniature mountain? A larger version of the humanoid elementals that escorted them to this place?

What he definitely didn’t expect was to find himself facing what appeared to be a ten-year-old boy. And not one that was crudely carved out of stone, either – Stonechild’s form was incredibly lifelike and realistic, and he looked like nothing more than a real human child, if one whose skin was bit browner than was common this far to the north.

There was only one thing hinting at Stonechild’s elemental nature – his eyes were solid black, devoid of any internal structure a real human eye should have. It was as if someone set out to make a flawless human replica but then ran out of patience in the end and decided to just socket a pair of polished black gems into the eye sockets and call it a day.

"Welcome," Stonechild said, his voice steady and very natural sounding. He smiled reassuringly at them. "We don’t get many visitors here, so my manners are a little rusty and I have little to offer you with. I apologize in advance for my poor hospitality. Would you like a glass of water?"

Zach and Zorian glanced at each other uncertainly. This… was not quite how they had imagined the great elder elemental would behave towards them.

"I could go for a glass of water, yeah," Zach said with a shrug.

Stonechild nodded to himself in satisfaction and walked over to a nearby shelf, which held several ceramic jugs and a collection of glass containers of various sorts. Stonechild picked up what was clearly a pickle jar at first, but then hesitated for a moment before putting it back on the shelf. He then picked up a proper drinking glass instead.

Zorian watched as the elder elemental went about pouring Zach a glass of water, shifting in place nervously. Strange as it may sound, Stonechild worried him a lot more than the two hulking elemental guards that stood vigilantly by the entrance of this place. He didn’t look as imposing as them, but his appearance was a dangerous sign all on its own. It was well known that when it came to spirits, the more humanlike they were, the more wary one had to be around them. Not necessarily because that made them more powerful, but because it meant they understood humans well enough to pretend to be one. This understanding, in turn, meant they could counter, fight and manipulate humans in a way their more ignorant fellows could not.

Stonechild’s understanding of human mentality and culture made him a lot more dangerous than he would be if he was just a bit more powerful than your average earth elemental.

It was interesting to see this kind of an elemental here in total wilderness, though. Elementals were some of the most ancient spirits known to man, but also one of the most alien and incomprehensible. The vast majority of them couldn’t even speak in a human-comprehensible manner, nevermind understand human logic and attitudes. This inability of human and elementals to understand one another, coupled with the fact that elementals often occupied land that humans coveted and that elementals typically reacted to provocations by attacking any human within reach (most elementals had trouble telling human individuals apart from one another), led to many bitter conflicts between the two groups in the past. Elementals that understood humanity to the level that Stonechild did were vanishingly rare and usually involved the elemental in question allying itself to a human community for several generations. Most of them served as protector spirits of various Houses or brokered some kind of trade deal with the local authorities in exchange for being left alone.

For Stonechild to live in this kind of isolated location, away from any significant human community, yet still know so much about them… it was weird. Zorian suspected he might have originally lived somewhere in the south, but was driven away from his previous home by something.

"I hear you bring gifts for me," Stonechild eventually said.

"We sure do," Zach grinned. The two of them handed their dragonheart stones to the elemental, who accepted them without any apparent excitement or comment. He rotated the stones in his palms for a few moments before setting them aside on the nearby table.

"It is a good gift," Stonechild said. "But is it really a gift? I would never claim to be an expert on humanity, but in my experience your kind is rarely this generous for no reason."

"It’s a gift," Zach said. "We do want something from you, but we’re willing to pay for it. Those stones are yours no matter what you do."

"Even if I throw you two out right now?" Stonechild asked curiously.

"Even then," Zorian confirmed.

"Hmm. I think I like you two," Stonechild said. "So what is it that you want from me? I warn you in advance that I dislike fighting. Me and my kind will not be your mercenaries, no matter how much you offer to pay."

"We’re only after knowledge," Zorian said.

"Only knowledge?" Stonechild repeated, his black eyes narrowing slightly. "And yet you’re willing to pay such a heavy price, just for a chance to petition me for it. It is surely not just knowledge, then. What kind of forbidden secrets are you after?"

"We want to know where the primordials were imprisoned," Zach said.

Thus far, Stonechild had been very serene and self-assured in his mannerisms. It was somewhat at odds with his child-like appearance, to be honest. However, when Zach mentioned what they were after, Stonechild actually flinched a little.

"Why would you seek the ancient blood?" Stonechild asked, leaning forward towards them. "No matter what your reasons are, you’re only inviting disaster upon yourself. There is no gain to be had there."

"You say that, but I heard there are people who gained great powers by binding the blood of primordials to themselves," Zorian said. It wasn’t something he intended to do, but he still wanted to hear what Stonechild had to say about it.

"Artifacts of forgotten wars at the beginning of time," Stonechild said, waving his hand dismissively in the air. "Should you find one of these out there in the vast world, unclaimed by anyone, that is obviously a great boon for you. But to tamper with the cages that hold back those of the ancient blood is utter foolishness. Since the time of their imprisonment, no one has ever received gift from their kind."

"Are you saying they’re actively malicious?" Zach asked curiously.

"Do you hate the bugs eating your crops? Do you torture mosquitos for drinking your blood?" Stonechild asked. "We are all nothing to them – elemental and human both."

"Right, right, we’re not people to them so they can do whatever they want to us," Zach said. "It’s fine, though – we don’t really want anything from the primordials themselves. What we’re really interested is those fancy pocket dimensions that hold them."

"Pocket what?" Stonechild asked, cocking his head to the side in confusion. Apparently he never encountered that particular term and couldn’t figure out the meaning from the context provided.

"Their cages," Zach clarified. "The thing that holds them outside our reality."

"Ah," Stonechild nodded. "That is… less disturbing. But I caution you to forget the idea anyway. Cracking the prisons is probably beyond you… thankfully… but you might end up accidentally contacting the prisoner or attract unwanted attention. Few such prisons are truly unguarded."

"We’d really want to take a look at one, anyway. Do you think we could come to some kind of agreement?" said Zorian, motioning towards the dragonheart stones with his head. "There are more stones like that where those came from. And we might have more gifts for you besides."

"Even if I was willing to help you with this, I honestly do not know where the ancient blood was buried," Stonechild said. "I cannot help you."

The elder elemental disguised as a child glanced towards the stones for a second before shifting his attention back to them.

"However…" he said. "I might know a couple of other elementals that would be able to help you."

"Ah, that’s fine too, I guess," Zorian said. "I suppose you’d be willing to give this information to us?"

Stonechild smiled widely.

"For a price," he said.

"Yes," Glittering River of Stars said, sagging a little. "We will agree to let you observe us use the Bakora Gate in exchange for… I can’t believe I’m saying this… time travel related favors."

"Finally. It was about freaking time," Zach muttered under his breath.

It turned out he hadn’t been quiet enough, because River of Stars bristled slightly at his words and immediately turned to him.

"What would you know? This was a difficult decision for us! Even if you’re telling the truth about time travel, we have no way of enforcing this deal! You can renege on it easily enough, and we won’t even know an agreement existed in the first place!"

"Yeah, and that’s why your elders refused to accept a mere promise alone," Zach shot back. "We paid you an absurd amount of crystalized mana and other valuables for this favor. Plus we destroyed that nest of serpent-bearded toads for you as a sign of good faith."

"And if you’re telling the truth about the time loop, none of that will matter in the long run, will it?" River of Stars asked rhetorically.

Zorian thought about getting involved, but ultimately decided that any words would just be throwing oil into the fire. Truthfully, he understood the doubts and hesitation of the Silent Doorway Adepts all too well. He would feel the same in their position. He actually hadn’t expected this negotiation to succeed at all in this restart – he expected it would take at least two or three times before he learned how to approach them correctly. However, saying that out loud would be the equivalent of shooting himself in the foot. The aranea probably wouldn’t appreciate it much, and Zach would feel betrayed. His fellow time traveler had been getting steadily more annoyed with the colony as they dragged their many feet and the end of the restart inexorably approached, so he probably wouldn’t appreciate Zorian taking their side – even as a diplomatic tactic.

Thankfully, after staring at each other really hard, Zach and River of Stars decided to mutually back down.

"Whatever," River of Stars said. "The elders have reached their decision, so there is no point in arguing this. Is there anything else?"

"Yes," Zorian spoke up. "Do you have something that would help us convince your web we’re telling the truth in future restarts?"

"Ah, yes," River of Stars said. "There was some discussion about that. We have… something. We have no idea how useful it will be to you, since we’ve never actually made any contingencies in case of time travel being real, but you of all people can afford to do some trial and error on this. Hold on."

She was still and silent for about ten seconds, probably engaging in telepathic communication with the rest of her web.

"Prepare for a memory packet transfer," she told him, before sending a telepathic probe at his mental shields.

Zorian allowed her to establish contact, and she immediately shoved a small memory packet at him. He quickly perused the contents, noticing it mostly held meaningless strings of numbers (well, meaningless to him at least) as well as some kind of detailed map of the region surrounding their web. He unraveled the memory packet and repackaged the information into a memory packet of his own – that way he wouldn’t have to worry about it decaying on him the way the matriarch’s memory packet did – and then gently pushed at the connection with River of Stars, signaling to her to end the connection.

She did as he asked, but she couldn’t help but take a quick peek at his memories as she withdrew. Zorian didn’t even try to stop her – instead, he simply pushed a memory of him being stabbed to death in one of the earliest restarts at her memory probe, causing her to flinch a little and hastily break contact.

"It’s rare to see a human so well versed in telepathic conflict," she said, a little awkwardly.

"Thank you," Zorian said. "Can we see the gate now?"

"Yes," she confirmed, a little more respectfully. Apparently his little show of telepathic sophistication had humbled her a bit. Huh. He made a mental note to challenge one of their elders to a telepathic duel in future restarts, just to establish his telepathic credentials. Maybe they’d look down on them less if he did that. "I’ll lead the way."

River of Stars led them down the twisting tunnels of the aranean settlement, far deeper into the colony than they’d ever been allowed to go before. There, in a large underground chamber, stood a circular stone platform that held a familiar black icosahedron that was the Bakora gate. Well, it was familiar to Zorian at least.

"You’ve never seen a Bakora gate before?" Zorian asked Zach, who was currently slowly circling the construct and inspecting it curiously. "In all those countless restarts, it never crossed your mind to seek one out?"

"No, why would it?" Zach asked, poking the black bars experimentally with his finger. "They don’t work and nobody knows how to activate them. I’m no researcher – if countless scholars couldn’t get anything out of them, what could I do? It’s really similar to the Ibasan one, though… you can clearly tell they were inspired by one of these things when they made theirs."

"The fact that there is another gate-using group operating around is disturbing," a nearby aranea commented. "You should have mentioned that information earlier when you spoke with us."

"Sorry," Zorian shrugged. "I didn’t think it was important. So how will this work exactly? Considering you gathered no less than fifteen araneas here, I’m guessing the activation requires some kind of group ritual?"

"It is a ritual, yes," the aranea confirmed. Her name was Marvelous Geode, if he remembered correctly. Well, her name was quite a bit longer than that actually, but that was what it shortened to anyway. "It’s not the correct way to activate the gate, but it’s the only way we know."

"What does the ritual involve, exactly?"

"Well…" she hesitated. "First of all, we need to establish contact with the spirit of the gate…"

"Wait, the gate has a spirit?" Zorian asked incredulously. He focused his mind sense on the gate for the moment. "I don’t sense a mind within it."

"Of course you can’t," she said. "The spirit is completely disconnected from the Great Web. Its mind is permanently dark, much like your friend’s mind is under that spell he keeps constantly active around us. Yet, the spirit is very much real."

Marvelous Geode stood a little straighter, giving him a challenging look, as if daring him to contradict her. He didn’t. While the idea of the Bakora gate having a spirit was a bit weird, he would trust the Silent Doorway Adepts on this. They did get the gate to work, after all, unlike everybody else.

"So how did you find out about this spirit, then? Do you have someone with soul perception or something?"

"The spirit cannot be detected through the soul, either. Its soul is shrouded somehow, and does not show up on casual inspection, even if one is a necromancer. One has to contact the spirit in a very specific way before it will deign to reveal itself," Marvelous Geode explained.

That… well, it certainly explained why this gate spirit had remained an unknown thus far. However…

"How did you even find out about this, then?" Zorian asked curiously. "Did you just tinker with the gate and end up contacting the spirit by accident or…?"

"Well, there was admittedly a whole lot of tinkering involved. The founder of our web was obsessed with the gate and invested a lot of her time and energies on it. That said, we were rather certain that there was a spirit in there so our tinkering was directed at establishing contact with the spirit right from the start," Marvelous Geode said. "After all, Bakora gates were said to be able to open up dimensional passages to each other, entirely on their own. That goes against everything we know about magic items. I’m told you’re quite an artificer, so you no doubt know that magic items never really cast anything – they can only ever maintain a spell that is anchored to them, and anything else is an illusion achieved by shifting the spell in question into different modes. For the Bakora gates to be able to open and close dimensional passages to any gate in the network, they had to be some kind of spellcaster. And spellcasting requires a soul."

Zorian hummed thoughtfully. Pretty solid logic there, he had to admit. By now, Zach had long got bored of staring at the gate and walked over to stand beside him. As for the rest of the aranea that weren’t explaining things to Zorian, they were busy carting large quantities of crystalized mana to the vicinity of the gate.

"The local area has insufficient quantity of ambient mana to power the opening of the gate," Marvelous Geode explained. "Once the spirit is contacted and starts opening the dimensional passage, we have to evaporate a large amount of crystalized mana and funnel it into the gate or the process will fail."

"Why not just move the gate deeper into the Dungeon?" Zach asked.

"They can’t," Zorian said. "It’s well known that Bakora gates cannot be moved from their spots or they literally fall apart. Most experts are guessing that the icosahedron bars are only the tip of the iceberg and that part of the gate is embedded into the surrounding rocks and the like."

"Yes," Marvelous Geode said. "We have heard about that, which was why it was never attempted. There was some talk about drilling a hole to the deeper layers near the gate in order to create an artificial mana well… but nobody really knows just how much damage to their surroundings Bakora gates can take before they break down, so that idea never went anywhere. The gate is too precious to risk like that, even if it would save us a lot of money."

With all preparations done, Marvelous Geode excused herself and joined the rest of her fellows in setting up the ritual to contact the gate spirit. After some frantic running and pushing, the araneas entered into a circular formation around the icosahedron, forming three concentric lines around the object. Then they all started casting.

Twenty minutes later, they were still going at it with no visible change.

Eventually Zach couldn’t take it anymore and leaned in towards him.

"Zorian, do you understand anything that is going on here?" Zach whispered to him. "I’m not an expert on aranean magic, but they seemed to be just repeating the same movements over and over again…"

"Yeah," Zorian agreed, studying the ritual with a frown.

It was… strange. He could vaguely recognize the spell they were casting as some kind of soul magic ritual, similar to the protection rituals that Alanic had taught him. Things that even a person like him with no soul perception could use. These kind of rituals were lengthy and crude – the magical equivalent of groping in the dark – but sometimes it was enough. Lukav had used something similar when he had analyzed his soul in the past for damage and the like.

However, the ritual Silent Doorway Adepts were performing didn’t look like any ritual spell he knew of. Not that Zorian had witnessed all that many group rituals, but this was still…

He suddenly realized what was bothering him – the movements of the aranea weren’t nearly as synchronized as they should be.

"It’s not really a group ritual," Zorian whispered back to Zach. "They are all performing the same ritual spell independently of one another. And then, when they’re done, they just start over and do it again and again."

Zach stared at the fifteen araneas surrounding the gate for a few seconds, before leaning towards Zorian again.

"Are you saying," Zach asked him incredulously, "that they’re basically annoying the gate spirit into revealing itself?"

"Uh, no. That’s not what I was getting at," Zorian replied. "I think the ritual they use is flawed, and only works when everything aligns just right… but since they don’t really know how the gate functions internally, they can’t aim for those circumstances specifically. They can just repeat it over and over and hope that it eventually works."

"Why have fifteen of them doing it at once, though?" Zach asked. "It the circumstances aren’t right for one of them, why would it work for the other fourteen?"

"If you look at them closely, you will see they’re not casting the ritual in unison – that’s what tipped me off as to what they’re doing, actually. They’ve staggered their casting so that they all finish the spell one after another. I think that, in practice, getting the ritual to work is just a matter of very specific timing. By constantly bombarding the gate with contact requests, they make it more likely that one will actually connect."

"Ah, I see… so the ritual could conceivably be done by one person alone, but they would likely miss many windows of opportunity and take way longer than a group like this," Zach said. "Well… this will be very annoying if we want to use this ourselves."

"Yeah," Zorian agreed unhappily.

Not only was the ritual an aranean creation, meaning Zorian would have to convert it to human-style spellcasting before he could make use of it, but it was also a very inelegant solution that would be a pain to set up for someone other than Silent Doorway Adepts. Even if he hired enough mages for this kind of setup to work, he would still have to teach them the spell itself and then train them to stagger their casting correctly. Even then, they would never be as good at it as the aranea, since they didn’t have years of practice with the setup like they did. And the aranea were already at it for half an hour and still going, so he shuddered to think how long it would take under less than ideal circumstances. Just how long would this-

A flash of bright light in the center of the icosahedron marked the opening of a dimensional gate instead. The aranea immediately stopped their repetition and scrambled throughout the chamber in a sort of organized chaos, evaporating the chunks of crystalized mana and feeding it to the gate mechanism. The spatial doorway steadily grew, eventually stabilizing into a circular hole in the air that led… elsewhere.

Zorian glanced at his pocket watch. It took the aranea about 40 minutes to open the gate, most of which was spent on contacting the gate spirit.

Marvelous Geode scuttled over to them, looking very pleased with herself.

"The passage is open," she said.

"Does it always take this long to open?" Zach asked.

"Oh no… this was quite fast by past standards. Sometimes it takes as much as two hours before the gate spirit will deign to respond. This is an auspicious omen for this cooperation."

Zach and Zorian looked at each other unhappily. Two hours…

"You can try going through it if you wish," Marvelous Geode said.

"Where does it lead, anyway?" Zorian asked.

"Sulamnon, not far from the port city of Hitamtep," she said. "Eldemar and Sulamnon have been engaged in a trade war for a while now, so trading there is quite profitable."

"You’d probably get a better return by going to more distant lands, though," Zorian noted. "Are there distance limitations on Bakora gate use?"

"In theory, no. In practice, getting to very distant lands is impossible for us. In order to connect with another Bakora gate, we need to first travel to said gate through some other means and contact its own gate spirit. Only after we receive a… sort of mental key from the gate spirit, can we use our own gate to reach it."

"So each gate has its own secret password and you need to get it before you can travel there?" Zach summarized.

"It’s not very secret – the gate spirit will freely give you its key if you can contact it. But yes, that is essentially correct," the aranea confirmed.

"Sounds like you could use someone that can freely travel over human territory and access distant Bakora gates," Zorian noted.

"Well, yes. That is the primary thing that our elders hope to gain from this deal," Marvelous Geode said carefully. "If you could help us acquire keys to distant gates, this could easily catapult our webs to unbelievable prosperity. Especially if you can secure us a connection to Miasina. There are no aranea there, as far as we can tell, so it’s pretty much virgin ground for us to settle… an entire continent worth of it."

In the end, the two of them did step through the gate and explored the other site a bit. The Silent Doorway Adepts were, as it turned out, a territorially discontinuous web, with semi-autonomous colonies established around each of the gates they traveled to on a regular basis. The colony back in Eldemar was clearly the main one, though, and that probably wouldn’t change any time soon since the sub-colonies were denied the knowledge of the gate activation ritual.

They didn’t venture forth from the aranean colony too much. Two people with an obvious Eldemarian accent were unlikely to be viewed favorably by Sulamnese inhabitants – the two countries hated each other, after all.

The moment Zorian returned to Cyoria, he sat down on his work desk, called up a memory of the ritual, vividly preserved in his mind, and set about understanding it and taking it apart. He respected the aranean achievement and dedication, but there just had to be a better way of doing this.

"I see," mumbled Zorian to himself, turning the telepathic relay in his hand. The innocuous-looking metal plate was connected to the long, long chain of telepathic relays that his simulacrum left behind him, like breadcrumbs, as it traveled ever further south. He occasionally received reports and memory packets from the simulacrum, detailing the issues his copy had encountered on the journey.

"Something good?" Zach asked.

"My simulacrum has finally reached Koth," Zorian said. "Or at least the port town of Jasuka, which is generally considered to be the entry port to the region."

"Man, finally," Zach said. "The restart is going to end in less than two days. I was starting to wonder what was taking him so long."

"It’s not that simple…" Zorian protested, feeling compelled to defend his copy. It was a hard and frustrating journey and Zorian was honestly grateful to his simulacrum for actually attempting his task seriously instead of doing a half-assed job or giving up half-way through.

"I know, I know," Zach said, waving his hands in a placating gesture. "There is no need to get all protective of your precious copy. I’m certainly not going to complain about not having to do anything but wait while your simulacrums do all the work. And the traveling speed is bound to improve as your simulacrums figure out better traveling routes in the future. But you have to admit this is kind of disappointing."

"Yes," Zorian admitted. "Especially since all of my simulacrums get dismissed when we enter Black Rooms and get cut off from the outside world. We really need to figure out how the Ibasans stabilize their gates, or else I’ll need to send a simulacrum to Koth at least twice per restart."

"We could always find a Bakora Gate in Koth, send your simulacrum there to open our own gate and then bring a bunch of Silent Doorway Adepts through it to ask the gate spirit for the password," mused Zach. "Then we can just go and use the aranean gate in future restarts."

"It’s a nice idea, but who knows how long it would take to set up?" Zorian asked rhetorically. "I don’t know if you noticed, but the Silent Doorway Adepts are a rather suspicious bunch. I don’t know how quickly we can convince them to cooperate in the future, but…"

"Yeah, now that you mention it, I don’t really like the idea," Zach agreed. "How is your analysis of their contact ritual going?"

Zorian’s face twisted into a grimace.

"That bad, huh?" Zach asked with a grin.

"I’ll say this: there is a reason why they’re still using that stupid method instead of switching to something better. I don’t think I’ll figure out something better any time soon," Zorian explained unhappily.

"You might want to work with them instead of away from them in the future," Zach noted. "They’re annoying jerks, but I’m sure they’re as interested in making the contact ritual better as we are, and they have way more experience with it than you do."

"I guess you’re right," Zorian agreed. "I think-"

He stopped talking when he noticed his simulacrum was trying to contact him again. Huh. That was fast. Wonder what that was about…

"Uh, Zach?" he eventually asked.

"Yeah?" Zach asked curiously.

"Do you have anything you should be doing in the near future?"

"I’m bored out of my skull and you know it," he said. "Why?"

"The simulacrum says he’s in the jungle to the west of Jasuka and that he’s found a perfect spot for the gate. He’s asking if we want to try opening one right now," explained Zorian.

Zach thought about it for a few seconds. Or maybe just pretended to think about it – Zach had a flair for dramatics like that.

"Why not?" he finally said, jumping to his feet. "Let’s go see Koth."

Gate was an amazing spell in Zorian’s opinion. Teleport was arguably a more useful piece of magic, despite the range limitations that forced mages to chain teleports if they wanted to cross any appreciable distance, but it just didn’t have the same emotional impact that a dimensional gate did. There was just something emotionally satisfying about crossing continental distances in a single step.

For example, Zorian had just followed Zach through the dimensional passage he and his simulacrum had opened, and suddenly went from a hastily secured underground room in Eldemar to a steaming, verdant jungle in Koth.

It was… louder than he thought it would be. The sheer cacophony of different sounds was impressive, but he imagined that would get tiresome very fast.

"You have no idea," his simulacrum grumbled, having read his thoughts. "I especially hate that one bird that keeps making sounds reminiscent of a dying man’s scream. I really wish that bird would shut up already. I even thought of tracking it down so I could kill it, but I can’t seem to find it in all the foliage. You’d think something that loud would be trivial to track down, but…"

"Anything special we should keep in mind here?" Zorian said, cutting the simulacrum off before he could get going. He knew himself – once he started complaining, there would be no end of it.

"Yeah, the wildlife is absolutely terrifying," the simulacrum said. "At one point I saw ants the size of my thumb dismembering some kind of jungle cat, and some of the snakes can fly. No wings or anything, they just kind of silently float through the air like they were swimming through water. And that was in the first hour or so."

"Yeah, I heard the southern jungles make the Great Northern Wilderness look like a playground," Zach said, picking up a dried branch off the jungle floor and taking a few experimental swings with it. "Not sure how much of that is true and how much of it is just southerners trying to make themselves look tough, but there is probably some truth to it. If nothing else these jungles should be more unpredictable than our forests, since the wildlife is more diverse here."

"I was also told by the natives that foreigners often get sick not long after coming here," the simulacrum said. "It’s not a single disease either – there is a whole bunch of things you could contract here. Most of them aren’t lethal, but they can leave you bedridden for weeks. Not a problem for a simulacrum like me, but you’re going to have to stock up on cures before you start wandering around the region."

"Great," Zorian clacked his tongue unhappily. "Another thing to worry about."

"Hey," Zach said suddenly. "Don’t get mad at me, but… didn’t you say your eldest brother is active around here?"

"Yes?" Zorian said, drawing the word out unnecessarily. "What’s that got to do with anything?"

"Well," Zach began carefully, "I know you don’t like him, but we’re kind of total strangers here. We don’t know the language, we don’t know the culture, and we don’t know how to navigate the local authorities. Your brother, on the other hand, probably does. And he probably has existing contacts all over the place that he could refer us to…"

Zorian made a really sour face at that. Yeah, he could see the logic in that. Especially since they were on a treasure hunt and his brother was… well, a treasure hunter. He probably could help. And, as much as Zorian hated to admit it, probably would be willing to help.

But he so, so, didn’t want to ask Daimen for help…

"We don’t have time for that right now," Zorian said curtly. "The restart is ending soon."

Zach chuckled in amusement.

"But you agree that we should see him?" Zach asked, face full of mirth. "I say, I didn’t think it would be that easy."

"It’s a matter of survival," Zorian’s simulacrum grumbled. "We can’t let our personal grudges get in the way of that. In the grand scheme of things, this is nothing."

Well put, simulacrum number 2. Well put.

"That’s good," Zach said. "You know, I’m really looking forward to meeting the guy. Maybe punch him in the face if he’s as bad as you obviously think he is…"

Zorian and his simulacrum shared an exasperated look between themselves. Still, he couldn’t deny that a part of him was interested in seeing how a meeting between Zach and Daimen would go. He hoped that Daimen still had that competitive streak and challenged Zach to a sparring match or something – watching Zach wipe the floor with him would be pretty damn satisfying. Not as satisfying as Zorian doing so himself, of course, but pretty close. Plus, he would be lying if he said he wasn’t interested in what exactly his brother had been doing down here in the south that occupied him so. And why were his parents coming here to meet with him, anyway?

Hmm…

Perhaps, before he sought out Daimen here in Koth, he should have a chat with mother at the start of the next restart.

If nothing else, that way he wouldn’t have to search for him all over Koth.

The people guarding the Ibasan gate beneath Cyoria were a cranky and unhappy bunch. In theory, their task was one of great importance – they were guarding the Ibasan route of retreat, making sure no Eldemarian battle force could close the gate, or even pass to the other side to wreak havoc on the base of Sudomir, their ally. In practice, this was seen as punishment duty. Having been stationed here, they were denied a piece of the action happening above, and thus the glory and looting opportunities that came with it. Besides, what were the chances that the beleaguered Cyorian defenders could not only afford to send some of their battle mages down here, but that they also knew exactly where to go in order to find the Ibasan gate site? No, the idea was absolutely ri-

"Hook goblins!" someone shouted. "We have hook goblins incoming!"

No one was worried at first. Hook goblins were ferocious and very deadly if one allowed them to get close, but they weren’t particularly tough and went down easily before concentrated spellfire. Indeed, the first wave was nothing special, lulling the Ibasan defenders into a false sense of safety. But as they killed one wave of hook goblins, then two, and then another, they realized this swarm of them was a bit larger than they were used to. Then a couple of mages got a strange headache at the most inconvenient of times and failed their spells, and some of the hook goblins managed to close into melee range…

The defenders dissolved into chaos. The troops manning the defenses may have thought the attitude unfair, but there was a reason why the Ibasan leadership considered most of them to be the dregs of their invasion force.

The commanders of the force delayed asking for help as long as possible, afraid of what their superiors would say if they proved unable to contain even a simple hook goblin incursion. What a humiliation that would be!

That changed when an entire regiment of steel golems came running into the gate chamber, following behind the last hook goblins. Each of them carried a rifle and a belt full of spell bombs, and they were far more resilient than mere hook goblins.

More importantly, they signified a clear Eldemarian attack on the gate chamber. This was no longer just an unlucky incursion of Dungeon denizens but an organized assault. In fact, most of the Ibasans suddenly realized that the hook goblins were probably just a setup to soften them up before the real assault force arrived!

At this point the Ibasan defenders abandoned their pride and tried to contact the small elite Quatach-Ichl had left by the dimensional gate itself. If this was an Eldemarian attack, then there was no shame in summoning Quatach-Ichl to save them…

Unfortunately, Zach had already taken care of the gate battlegroup by then, freezing the war trolls into icy statues and disabling the mages. No one would be coming to save them. The final nail in the coffin was when Zach and Zorian stopped hiding and joined the golems and hook goblins in finishing off the Ibasans.

The force arrayed before the Ibasan defenders was so overwhelming that many of them surrendered rather than keep fighting till the bitter end. This was a bit of an unforeseen problem, as neither Zach nor Zorian had the heart to just massacre people who surrendered in cold blood, but they also didn’t trust them not to start something while they were distracted. After some heated discussion, they ended up solving that by using sleeping gas bombs on them until they were all knocked unconscious.

They were just finished with that when a small metal plate hanging off Zorian’s hip suddenly shook and Alanic’s voice emanated from it, faint but crisp and perfectly audible.

"This is Alanic, code Tharo eight seven four. You should be done by now. Is the chamber clear?"

"This is Zorian, code Raha one one eight," said Zorian back into the plate. He personally thought it was kind of unnecessary, but Alanic insisted that these codes were used every time they made contact with one another through the communication plate. "Everything is clear on my end. You can bring everyone into the gate chamber."

Five minutes later, a seemingly endless stream of people poured into the former Ibasan base, led by Xvim and Alanic. Some of them were soldiers and battle mages, here to ensure the safety of the gathered people from the Dungeon denizens, but most of them were various artificers, scholars, dimensionalism experts, spell crafters, and so forth. They were all led into the center of the chamber and presented with the Ibasan gate.

They all gathered around the gate, scrutinizing it intently… some with obvious enthusiasm and some with professional stoicism.

"Alright everyone," Xvim told them. "We have only a few hours to figure this thing out as much as possible, so do your best. Mister Kazinski and mister Noveda here are the leaders of this project, so please report all your findings to them. Don’t be fooled by their young age, they very much have the confidence of the authorities in this matter."

And thus, almost a hundred respected experts gathered from all over Eldemar set about studying the Ibasan gate and how it could be recreated.

66. Marred Perfection

For nearly six years now, Zorian had been living in this endlessly repeating month. It felt longer, to be honest. So many things had happened, and his worldview had undergone such radical changes, that he felt it would only be right if the whole thing had taken place over a decade or more. It made him wonder how the original Zach would compare to the boy he had come to know – they seemed vaguely similar at first glance, but those were no doubt just surface similarities. There was no way that Zach had stayed the same over several decades, Zorian just hadn’t known the boy all that well before the time loop and thus couldn’t spot the differences.

Nevertheless, Zorian had spent a bit over half a decade in the time loop, and in all that time he had never really sat down with his mother to have a chat about things. Some people would have been very ashamed about this, but not Zorian. Indeed, he felt that one of the really nice things about the time loop was that he could virtually eliminate his interaction with his parents.

Now, for the first time in years, he was going to strike up a conversation with Mother… and it would be about Daimen.

He hadn’t thought he’d ever want his parents to talk more about his older brother, but life was funny like that sometimes.

"Actually, this reminds me of something," Mother said. "Your father and I are going to Koth to visit Daimen."

Oh good. He’d been waiting for her to mention their trip to Koth. Thankfully, this wasn’t something he had to steer the conversation to – despite her choice of words, the topic was clearly at the forefront of her mind. She found a way to bring it up in every single restart.

"Well that’s a little sudden," Zorian commented lightly. "What brought this up?"

If his mother was surprised by him showing actual interest in family matters, she didn’t show it.

"It’s only proper for us to visit Daimen from time to time," she said in a lecturing tone. "It has been nearly a year since we’ve last seen each other. Family ties are important."

"Uh huh," Zorian said in a patronizing tone. "Wouldn’t it make more sense for Daimen to visit you instead? Seems that would be way easier than you travelling all the way to Koth."

"Well," she said, pausing a little. "You’re probably right about that. But you know how driven Daimen is. He’s been really fired up about whatever he’s been looking for. There is no way he’d take a break right now, not even to visit his family."

"I see," said Zorian. The old, bitter part of him knew that they would never have been so understanding if he had tried to do the same. No, had he ignored his family for nearly a year, missing all the family dinners and such, he would have never heard the end of it. But that wasn’t helpful right now, so he pushed such thoughts away and focused on something else. "Since he won’t come to you, you’ll come to him. Fair enough. Although, if this is a family meeting, how come you aren’t making the rest of us take the trip with you? It’s not much of a family reunion if more than half of it isn’t even there."

"How do you know we aren’t making you come with us?" she asked curiously.

Zorian paused for a moment. Crap… she hadn’t actually mentioned that part yet, did she? Oh well, this was pretty easy to salvage…

"What, you’re going to stop me from going to the academy at the very last moment?" Zorian asked her with a raised eyebrow. "Or Fortov? Or drag Kirielle around a completely alien country where she is liable to pick up ten different exotic diseases in a matter of days?"

"Actually, it’s good that you’ve reminded me about Kirielle-" she began, only for him to cut her off almost immediately.

"I’ll do it," he said.

She blinked in surprise, momentarily stunned into silence.

"I beg your pardon?" she asked.

"You wanted to ask me if I would take Kirielle with me to Cyoria, right?" Zorian guessed. "I imagine this was why you even brought this topic up in the first place. I’ll do it. I’ll take her with me to Cyoria."

"Yesss!" Kirielle yelled, cunningly hidden just out of sight so she could eavesdrop on their conversation.

Zorian rolled his eyes at her outburst and even Mother felt the need to direct an exasperated look in Kirielle’s direction. Not that the little imp saw it – she was still hiding and pretending she wasn’t spying on them.

"That was surprisingly easy," Mother commented, shifting her attention back to him. "I know Kirielle has been a little difficult lately. I’m glad you can see beyond that."

"Yes, well, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, we can go back to discussing your actual reasons for rushing to Koth so suddenly," Zorian said.

Mother gave him an appraising look.

"Why do you care about this so much?" she asked. "Not that I’m complaining about you taking interest in family matters. In fact, I think it’s a positive thing. However, you can’t deny that this is somewhat unlike you."

"And you can’t deny this trip is somewhat unusual," Zorian immediately shot back. "You’re leaving Kirielle in my hands for at least two months and probably more, which you probably don’t like at all…"

"I’m sure you’ll do fine," she interjected.

"…and you’re leaving your company without proper leadership in the middle of the summer, which I’m sure is driving father more than a little crazy," finished Zorian, ignoring her comment.

It wasn’t that their business couldn’t survive without them for a few months. The company his parents had built was long past the phase where they needed to get personally involved in every little detail or business deal – so long as no crisis popped up, they could easily leave the whole thing to their subordinates for a couple of months. But what if there was a crisis? There was no way his parents were not thinking about this and worrying. Especially father, who seemed to think most of his workers were either lazy or incompetent. That is, if Zorian had interpreted his father’s random grumbling correctly over the years.

"Your father has indeed been a little hesitant to leave the company to its own devices for so long," Mother admitted. "But it’s…"

She hesitated, visibly considering whether to tell him the truth or not. Not for the first time, Zorian wondered if he should just use his mental powers and read her thoughts. He really didn’t want to. Even though they didn’t get along very well, there was just something very amoral about intruding on his mother’s thoughts like that.

"It’s what?" he asked slowly.

"You’re very pushy today," she remarked, an unhappy frown on her face.

"You keep criticizing me for not thinking about the family and our reputation," Zorian said, not able to keep a flash of annoyance out of his voice. "Yet now that you clearly have some kind of family emergency on your hands, you are keeping me in the dark about it. I think I have the right to be a little rude."

"It’s not a family emergency," she said, rubbing her forehead in frustration. "Not like you’re thinking, anyway. It’s just…"

She sighed, deeply and heavily, like she was carrying some kind of great weight on her shoulders.

"Can you cast some of those privacy wards that prevent sound from leaving the area? This is not something that I want Kirielle to hear."

Zorian nodded and promptly erected a two-layer barrier – one to block out sound from leaving the room and the other to prevent anyone from stepping foot in it without exerting a considerable amount of physical force. Just in case Kirielle decided to be a bit bolder than usual.

"It’s done," Zorian told Mother. "Now what’s this about?"

"Daimen is getting married," she finally admitted.

Zorian stared at her for a second, trying to process that. What? That was the big secret?

Okay, so he could understand why his parents would consider this to be big news. However, he expected them to be… well, happier about it. The way mother behaved, he would have thought that somebody had died, not that a wedding had been announced.

"I don’t understand," Zorian admitted after a few seconds. "Why is this such a bad thing? If I remember correctly, you even made some pointed noises to him that he wasn’t that young anymore and that he should think about settling down. Is there something wrong with the fiancée?"

"The girl is fine," Mother sighed. "She’s from a powerful family of mages that are movers and shakers in their state. She’s basically local nobility."

"So he’s marrying into nobility, then?" Zorian asked. "Funny, I would have expected you to be ecstatic about that."

Mother gave him a rather unamused look.

"No? You don’t like the fact that he’s marrying into nobility?" Zorian asked, baffled. He honestly didn’t understand why Mother disapproved of this so much. This sounded like something she’d be thrilled about.

"It isn’t a good thing that she’s local nobility. That only makes things worse," Mother explained. "Bad enough that he wants to marry some distant foreigner when there are so many perfectly good local girls he could go for. Daughters of influential families that would be happy to forge ties with us in exchange for getting a genius mage of his caliber into their fold. But nevermind that. I could stomach this if this was just random girl he picked up in Koth and brought home. But this girl… she’s practically a princess. There is absolutely no way she would agree to move here to Altazia with Daimen. Instead, it will be him staying in Koth with her."

"Ahh…" Zorian said, finally understanding what the issue was. If Daimen married this girl and remained permanently in Koth, his parents would gain nothing from this. Even though he would be marrying into nobility, it would be very distant, foreign nobility. That would only give his parents some mild bragging rights, but none of the practical benefits that marrying some influential family in Eldemar (or at least in a country on the same continent) would.

Plus, if Daimen remained in Koth, his parents would only ever see their favorite son (and his new family) once in a blue moon. The distance between Koth and Eldemar was not something casually crossed.

"So," Zorian said. "I’m guessing you’ve already tried to talk him out of this through your letters?"

"Yes," Mother said. "We wrote to him at length as to why this is a poor idea. No matter how amazing he thinks this girl is, he could do so much better here in Eldemar."

"But Daimen didn’t listen to you?" Zorian surmised, not without some schadenfreude at their predicament.

"He said he loves her," she said, shaking her head sadly. "He won’t budge an inch on the matter. He won’t even delay the marriage, much less cancel it. Keeps insisting she’s perfect and that he can’t let the opportunity slip away. It’s too sudden! Why won’t he listen to me!?"

Zorian clacked his tongue. He didn’t know why she was so surprised. Love always made people unreasonable, and Daimen had had his parents doting on him for as long as Zorian could remember. Why would he give up what was apparently the love of his life just because his parents didn’t approve?

That said – and Zorian couldn’t believe he was thinking this – he actually agreed with Daimen here. What right did their parents have to get in between him and his new fiancée? It was ultimately his decision to make.

Though admittedly, it was also his parents' right to drop everything and go all the way to Koth to try and convince him otherwise in person.

"I suppose you think that going there and trying to convince him face-to-face will be more effective than letters," Zorian surmised.

"You can never be as convincing in a letter as you can when being physically there in front of someone," Mother said. "But I don’t know whether that will be enough, that’s all. We still have to try. I know he’s young and in love, but he’s making a big mistake and he needs to know that."

"Hmm," Zorian hummed. "Alright. I’m not going to get involved with this and I’m sure you don’t expect me to. Thank you for explaining things, at least."

"Don’t spread this around," she warned. "I’m telling you this because I know you can keep a secret. There is still a chance we can set this right."

"Alright," agreed Zorian easily. "Quick question, then. Do you know what Daimen has been working on in Koth and where he is right now?"

"No, he was always very secretive about that. He was worried someone would intercept his letters and beat him to his prize. The world of treasure hunters is very competitive, from what I hear. We agreed he would come and pick us up in Jasuka once we arrived there."

Zorian nodded. About what he expected, really. It made sense for his parents to arrive in Jasuka, since the city was the main entrance port for ships entering the Koth region from the north, and it made sense for Daimen to go and meet them there. Sadly, this meeting was too late for Zorian’s purposes, so he needed some clue with which he could track his eldest brother down.

Like, say, the identity of this fiancée of his.

"Do you know the name of this girl he wants to marry?" Zorian asked. "Or maybe the name of this noble family of theirs and which country it is from? I’m curious."

"Her name is Orissa Siqi Taramatula, of the Taramatula family," Mother said. "They are from the state of Haramao, wherever that is. Supposedly they’re very distinctive, because their family magic is based around these… magical bees that they cultivate."

"Bees?" Zorian asked curiously.

"Yes. They breed several species of magical bees and use their secret family magic to control and direct them. They’re supposedly very versatile," Mother explained. "They produce some sort of extremely valuable honey, they can be deadly in battle and they’re very good at tracking things down. It’s this last thing that led Daimen to contact them. He hired their best trackers for his mission, and the daughter of the family head came along with the group. One thing led to another and, well… now we have this situation on our hands. Hopefully her family is as unenthusiastic about this as we are and we can get their help with this."

Ha. It would seem that Daimen was finally going to learn how unpleasant their parents could really be when they disapproved of their children’s choices.

In any case, this was probably already enough information to track down Daimen – this Taramatula family sounded like they would be trivially easy to locate, and they probably knew where Daimen was. Still, it might not hurt to see if he could get anything else out of mother – maybe Daimen let something important slip through in his letters.

He opened his mouth to ask another question, only to get interrupted by a knock at the door.

Oh right. Ilsa was here to talk to him.

Mother motioned for him to go open the door, and Zorian obliged her. Continuing the conversation would have to wait until he dealt with the academy representative.

Xvim’s home was currently host to a very unusual group. Zorian, Zach, Xvim, Alanic, Kael and Taiven were all gathered in Xvim’s living room, poring over the various documents Zach and Zorian had collected over the restarts. Everyone who was aware of the time loop was there. Zorian would have normally left Kael and Taiven out of this meeting – Kael because he had told him to keep secrets from him in subsequent restarts and Taiven because she never fully believed in the time loop anyway – but Xvim and Alanic insisted that they should be involved with things this time. This wasn’t something Xvim and Alanic usually did, but Zorian had come to expect these kinds of sudden requests from them lately. Ever since they had started leaving messages and research notes to their future selves via Zorian, their actions tended to vary a lot from restart to restart.

Zorian saw no reason to refuse the request, so Kael and Taiven got to join them this time.

Unlike everyone else, Zorian didn’t bother reading any of the documents. There was no need to. He was, after all, the one who had taken all the various notes and records and turned them into the relatively concise reports they were currently reading. Well, he and his simulacrums, anyway – he tended to delegate this kind of work to his copies these days. He just had to remember to read through their finished work at least once or else they would try to sneak things in as a form of silent protest against being given boring chores to do. But really, what did he have them for if not so he could delegate the boring, time-consuming stuff to them?

"Well, that is good news, about the Ibasan gate," Zach said, leafing through the information they gathered on the structure in the previous restart. "I was all but sure that Quatach-Ichl had stuck a human soul somewhere in there to make the gate. I mean, even the Bakora gates require some sort of spirit to function like they do."

"Bakora gates open portals all on their own, though," Zorian said. "The Ibasan gates don’t. They just keep a portal someone else created open indefinitely."

"Yes, it’s hard to see what a soul in there would do, except maybe provide a power source," Alanic spoke up. "It’s not like sticking any random soul in there would allow it to open dimensional passages on its own. I guess if you added a soul of a willing mage in there, like Sudomir did with his wife-"

Kael made a very sour face at the reminder about that. He didn’t have a very high opinion of Sudomir’s act of love and flat out said so earlier. It didn’t help that Sudomir had pretty much hunted down all of Kael’s friends and would have likely done the same to the boy if he hadn’t been scouted out by the academy by then.

"-then maybe you could improve the efficiency of the structure or something," Alanic finished. "Otherwise, there would be little point to it."

"Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining," Zach said. "I mean, if the Ibasan gate is just a spell stabilization frame made out of exotic materials and spell formula, that means we can copy their design easily enough, right? Zorian?"

"I’m not sure something this intricate and advanced deserves to be called just anything," Zorian remarked. "As for recreating it… well, if it were just you and me working on this, I’d say it would take us years to figure out how to reproduce it. But since we’ll be using the whole army of experts approach we used in the previous restart… it will still take at least a year, but probably not more than one."

"Still a year?" Zach whined, visibly disappointed. "Why?"

"The short time during which we have access to the gate is really hampering us," Zorian explained, clacking his tongue unhappily. "We may have an army of experts, but they only have a couple of hours before the end of the restart to examine the gate. There is only so much they can do in such a short time."

"Why not just attack the base before the end of the restart?" Taiven asked. "Is this Quatach-Ichl really that unbeatable?"

"Yes," Zach and Zorian answered in unison.

"Okay, okay, no need to pile up on me," she grumbled. "And is there no time during which he’s absent from Cyoria or something?"

Zorian was just about to explain why that wouldn’t work when he remembered something. He reached for a nearby stack of papers and started quickly leafing through a timeline of the invasion he and Zach had painstakingly made. A definitive timeline was, of course, completely impossible – things changed often, depending on what Zach and Zorian did in any particular restart. However, certain things seemed very resistant to change, and virtually always happened on schedule if they didn’t specifically try to disrupt them. He was sure he remembered something about… ah!

"Here," Zorian said triumphantly, pointing at one of the paragraphs. "At the beginning of the third week of the restart, Quatach-Ichl has a tendency to return to Ulquaan Ibasa and stay there for three whole days. So long as we don’t disrupt the invasion too badly until then, he’s likely to do just that in this restart too. Then, if we managed to seize the Ibasan base at the very start of this period, we will have three whole days to study the gate without interruption."

"That’s a big if," Zach pointed out. "You’re talking about attacking the base while it’s fully staffed and defended. Trust me, that’s very different than taking out those bunch of incompetents that loiter around the base during the invasion itself. And you’re talking about doing it without giving them enough time to raise the alarm and summon Quatach-Ichl back. Or get reinforcements from Sudomir’s mansion, for that matter."

"Yeah," said Zorian thoughtfully. "Alanic’s soldiers alone aren’t going to cut it this time. We’re going to need to hire aranean mercenaries if this is ever going to work. I’m pretty sure I can find a web that would be interested if we offer enough payment."

"And Sudomir?" Alanic asked.

"Oh, that one is easy," Zorian said. "He’s still a mayor of Knyazov Dveri. We just create a big enough disturbance in the town and wait for him to show up, as he surely must. Then we kill his bodyguards and kidnap him in broad daylight."

There was a brief silence as everyone gave him strange looks.

"What?" Zorian said defensively. "You’ve got a better idea?"

"You’ve become a scary person, Zorian," Taiven remarked.

"Why kidnap?" Alanic asked. "Why not just assassinate him?"

"He cryptically hinted that he was very hard to kill when I spoke to him," Zorian said. "I don’t know what magic he used for that, but it’s possible that just killing him wouldn’t work. So I figured it was safer to just put him to sleep and keep him that way for as long as necessary."

"Well, I at least approve of this course of action," Alanic said. "If nothing else, this will give me a chance to interrogate Sudomir once he has been captured. I note we’ve never really done that properly in any of the past restarts."

"Yeah, it was never really a priority, and the man’s plans were all pretty crazy anyway," Zorian shrugged.

"Crazy or not, he clearly had plenty of talent in magic," Kael said. "You shouldn’t just limit yourself to questioning him about his crimes and links to Ulquaan Ibasa. You should interrogate him for everything he knows about necromancy and other magic as well."

Unsurprisingly, this made him the new target of everyone’s strange looks, much like Zorian had been earlier.

"Look," Kael said, trying to sound calm. "I probably hate this monster more than anyone in this room. Chances are that a portion of his knowledge comes from the very people I knew. People he killed and, in all probability, whose souls he interrogated for secrets. Magical and otherwise. But that’s precisely why you should do the same to him! It’s…"

He struggled for a moment to find the right word.

"Just," Alanic offered quietly.

"Appropriate," Kael corrected. "It’s appropriate for him to suffer a similar fate. Fitting."

It took another two hours for them to create a basic outline for a plan of attack on the Ibasan base. The biggest surprise to Zorian was that Taiven wanted to participate in the fighting. Specifically, she wanted to join the soldiers and battle mages that Alanic would be mustering for the operation. Alanic provisionally agreed to this, though he told her he would throw her out of the battlegroup immediately if she proved incapable of following the chain of command.

The tiny flinch she did after hearing that told Zorian that she’d likely had problems with that in the past… but she agreed with his condition anyway.

In the end, the meeting was dismissed and everyone went their own way… except for Zorian, who stayed behind to talk to Xvim about something.

"So," Xvim began. "We’re alone, Mister Kazinski. What is it that you wanted to talk to me about that you didn’t want the others to overhear?"

"First," Zorian said, taking out a notebook out of his jacket pocket, "take a look at this."

The notebook was, of course, the very list of people to interrogate for secrets that Xvim had given him in one of the previous restarts. The one that had caused him so much self-doubt and worrying. Xvim carefully started leafing through it, his frown deepening ever further as time went by. Zorian patiently waited for him to finish, not saying a word.

"I suppose I’m the one who gave you this," Xvim said, giving Zorian a questioning look. Zorian nodded. "I see. Then… should I assume you’re here because you’ve already gone through the entire list and now need more names?"

" No," Zorian said, a little more forcefully than he intended. "No, I’ve done no such thing. I… I managed to get a couple of people there to willingly teach me what they knew, despite your assurances that they wouldn’t do that under any circumstances. I tried to convince the others to do the same, but when they refused… I just moved on to other things. I haven’t invaded the mind of anyone on that list. Well, aside from an occasional surface scan…"

Xvim stared first at Zorian, and then at the notebook in his hands, staying silent for a while. Finally, he wordlessly handed the notebook back to Zorian.

"That," Xvim decided, "is relieving to hear."

Zorian blinked in surprise at the statement.

"I don’t know whether my past self would agree with me. Probably not, if he gave you that list," Xvim continued. "And I can definitely see the logic in giving you that list, even though I don’t like it. All that said, I don’t understand what the purpose of this talk is. If you don’t need more names, why did you show me that book?"

"I have decided I won’t be going after these people," Zorian said. And what a load off his chest that was, too. "Not the way you… not the way your past iteration had urged me to do."

"Hm. I’m not sure whether to praise you for your ethics or berate you for being too soft to do what has to be done," Xvim grumbled, shaking his head slightly. "Then again, the way you phrased that makes me think you still have some sort of designs for the list. I’m guessing that’s where I come in, yes?"

"See, the idea is this – I want you to talk to these people and try to get their secrets yourself," Zorian told him bluntly. He paused for a moment. "And then share these secrets with me, of course."

Xvim looked at him like he was stupid for a moment then let out a brief chuckle of amusement.

"Mister Kazinski," Xvim told him, "if I could get these people to share their secrets with me like that, don’t you think I would have already done so?"

"Not for all of them," Zorian pointed out. "Some of them are clearly on the list because you thought I might be interested in what they had to offer, but you probably don’t care for their specialties. I doubt you even tried to trade for they have to offer."

"That much is true," Xvim admitted.

"As for the rest… how much did you really offer them for their life’s work?" Zorian asked.

"I’m always fair in my dealings, mister Kazinski," Xvim said with a frown.

"Yes, but what if you gave them an outrageous offer?" Zorian smiled. "The collected secrets of dozens of mages. More money than they’d ever seen in their life. Rare materials that cannot be obtained on the open market. A chance to hire a group of archmages for a task. That sort of thing."

Xvim raised an eyebrow at him. "If you can offer all that, why do you need me?"

"See?" Zorian said, pointing straight at his face. "That reaction there. Disbelief and amusement. You know I’m a time traveler, and you still can’t take me seriously when I say what I offer. How do you think other people would react? Those kind of claims, when they come from me or Zach, really are outrageous to people. And not in a good way. We’re just teenagers with no known accomplishments. We only have borrowed fame from our families to fall back on, and that can only take you so far. You, on the other hand, are a highly respected archmage. They know you. You’re friends and acquaintances with some of them. It won’t be so ridiculous if you offer these things."

"It will still sound rather ridiculous," Xvim pointed out. "People will think I’ve gone mad. Well, more than they already do, anyway."

"Don’t worry, your reputation will be restored at the end of every restart," Zorian told him.

"How very comforting," Xvim deadpanned.

They were both silent for a while as Xvim considered the idea.

"There is some merit to it," Xvim eventually admitted. "Some of these people… I don’t think there is anything I could offer them to share their findings with me. Most, though, probably have their price, if one were willing to go high enough, and the offer looked credible. And on that note, are you sure you can really deliver what you offer? Take money, for example – I’m not sure you understand what kind of sums are exchanged between high-level mages on deals like these. What sounds like an outrageous sum to you might look like pocket change to them."

Zorian didn’t try to explain. He simply reached into his pocket and handed Xvim a bank check he had made for the occasion. Xvim glanced at it and immediately raised his eyebrows at the sum written on the piece of paper.

"That’s a lot of zeroes," Xvim said after a short pause.

"No, mister Chao," Zorian said with a toothy smile. " That is just pocket change."

The coming week was a relatively busy one, with many things happening. An invasion of the Ibasan base beneath Cyoria was being organized, the Silent Doorway Adepts were being convinced that time travel was real and that they should give them access to their Bakora gate and associated experts again, some changes were being planned for their tour of Altazia’s various Black Rooms and the plot to convince various experts to part with their closely-guarded secrets was slowly going forward. Thankfully, it was no longer just Zorian working alone on all these things, as it once was, so this kind of workload was easy enough to maintain.

That said, all of this was mostly irrelevant to simulacrum number two, whose job was simply to go to school and then disappear at the end of the day. Strangely enough, number two didn’t mind his task. He knew that his predecessors had been rather unenthusiastic about their task, but he personally found it just to his liking. Maybe it was because the original had created him right after he had finished another negotiation session with the Silent Doorway Adepts, but he felt this sort of relaxing task was just what he needed.

Still, actually paying attention to classes was out of the question, so he picked up a couple of advanced books to read during lectures and breaks.

It was during one of the breaks that he found Neolu watching over his shoulder curiously.

"What?" he asked. He was rather surprised, really – this wasn’t like in the previous restart, where the earlier simulacrums ended up secretly befriending her during their short lives. He was sure of it. So why exactly was she taking interest in him and his reading choices?

"Why are you reading dictionaries of Xlotic languages?" she asked curiously.

Oh. Right. Of course she would be interested in that. She was from Xlotic herself, after all.

He had found out a fair amount about Neolu in the previous restart, partially because Neolu herself felt the need to tell him about herself and partially because he had needed to reconstruct what his simulacrums had done by subtly questioning people and reading their thoughts. Neoluma-Manu Iljatir (Neolu for short) was a daughter of a regular, but very wealthy house from Kontemar – one of the bigger Ikosian successor states on the Xlotic coast. The darker, bronze-colored skin of hers hinted at it, but that kind of complexion was also common in southern Altazia and the Shivan archipelago, and thus not a dead giveaway. The blue, tattoo-like markings on her cheeks and forehead were the signature trait of her house, and nobody knew if they were merely cosmetic or held some kind of secret Iljatir family magic.

For Neolu to travel all the way from Xlotic to Eldemar in order to study magic was rather unusual, to say the least. It wasn’t like Xlotic didn’t have plenty of prestigious academies of its own. It was once the heartland of the Ikosian empire after all, and though the Cataclysm hurt the region badly, that still counted for something. Nonetheless, Neolu’s father decided to send her all the way to Eldemar for her magical education. Officially it was because Cyoria’s academy was the world’s most renowned magical academy and he wanted nothing but the very best for his daughter, but rumor had it she had been involved in some kind of scandal back home and he wanted her out of people’s sight for a while. Sending her to a distant but prestigious magical academy was probably a good solution in his book.

That was just a rumor, though, and even if Neolu was here in unofficial exile, one certainly couldn’t tell that by her behavior. She seemed quite happy to be in Cyoria, and never gave the slightest amount of indication that she was bitter about her family or home. It was possible that the rumors were just rubbish in this case and that she had just really wanted to go to a foreign country for her education and her father couldn’t bear to refuse her request.

Well, no matter. Not his business anyway. As for him reading Xlotic dictionaries, well… he was actually trying to make himself somewhat useful by helping simulacrum number one, who was steadily making his way to Koth right now. He had been in mental contact with his fellow simulacrum for a while now, and while the dictionaries he was reading were kind of outdated, it was better than nothing.

Of course, he couldn’t really tell that to Neolu.

"I was thinking of visiting Xlotic once I graduate from the academy," he told her instead.

"Really!?" she gasped. "Oh, that’s wonderful! Trust me, it’s a beautiful place. You should visit my place when you do – I can give you a tour of the city and tell you where to go if you want to see something interesting."

Hmm. Now that was an interesting idea. Didn’t Zach say that it was easy to convince Neolu that time travel was real? Maybe they should recruit her as a guide when they went looking for the piece of the key that was supposedly lost in Xlotic. She probably wouldn’t be able to help them too much, but she could at least make sure they didn’t make any major social blunders and act as a translator for them while they gathered their bearings. And maybe put in a good word for them to her House, so they could hopefully tap into their contacts throughout the region.

"I’ll keep that in mind," Zorian said. "Say, do you think you could help me translate a few things? I have this list of phrases that I got from my friend who has been to Xlotic, but I can’t seem to find them in the books…"

Once Zorian’s simulacrum had finally reached Koth again, actually tracking down Daimen proved to be quite easy. Admittedly, this was only because he had managed to get the identity of his fiancée out of Mother. Turns out, Daimen was not quite as driven as Mother imagined him to be – instead of ceaselessly pursuing whatever goal he came to Koth for, he was taking a bit of a break to spend time with his girl at the Taramatula family estate. Well, considering he had been doing that for several weeks now, a bit was probably an understatement. Anyway. All Zorian had to do was talk to a high-ranking member of the House, ask him where Daimen was, lift the information straight from his mind when he claimed he didn’t know anything regarding the matter, and then make his way to the place with Zach in tow.

Thus it was that the two of them found themselves waiting in front of the entrance to the Taramatula estate, stubbornly insisting that they wanted to talk to Daimen and ignoring the guards who were equally stubborn in claiming they’d never seen the man in their life.

In all honestly, Zorian was kind of amazed they hadn’t tried to violently get rid of them yet. He knew that Houses back in Eldemar tended to be a bit trigger happy when faced with visitors who couldn’t take the hint. Though if they did, Zach and Zorian were entirely capable and willing to take them down and then keep doing the same to any reinforcements the House sent their way. Maybe they could sense that somehow?

Eventually, a rather severe-looking middle aged woman in white-and-orange clothing arrived to see what the disturbance was. She said her name was Ulanna, but she made no mention of what her position in the House was and what sort of authority she was wielding.

"You say you are Daimen’s younger brother?" she asked with an arched eyebrow. Ulanna actually spoke grammatically perfect Ikosian, unlike most people they found in Koth, though her accent was pretty thick.

"Yes, Zorian Kazinski. You can show him this as proof," said Zorian, handing her a rolled up painting that he had shamelessly stolen from Daimen’s room back in Cirin. The painting depicted three female students from Daimen’s year at the academy, scantily dressed and posing suggestively. He had supposedly gotten that painting as a gift from the girls in question, and always kept it displayed prominently in his room, ignoring Mother’s objection that it was obscene.

The woman slowly and dramatically unfurled the painting, stoically scrutinized the contents with a raised eyebrow, and then gave him a mildly amused look.

"I see," she said. "If nothing else, you seem to have a similar sense of humor as he does. I’ll be sure to show this to him. I’m sure there is an interesting story behind it."

"Oh absolutely," Zorian said with a sunny grin. "I’m sure he’d love to tell you all about it."

About fifteen minutes later, Ulanna returned with Daimen in tow.

It had been a while since Zorian had last seen his brother, but he hadn’t changed much in the meantime. He was still the same tall, handsome guy with a muscular, athletic build and a confident swagger. Zorian would recognize him just about anywhere.

Zorian had changed a lot since their last meeting, however. He had become good enough at magic to notice that Daimen had discreetly cast a divination spell at him to confirm he really was Zorian and not a disguised imposter. He had gotten good enough at his mental powers to immediately tell when he was in the presence of another psychic individual.

He closed his eyes momentarily. Daimen was psychic. Of course. The one thing that Zorian was somewhat special at, and Daimen had to have it too. To tell the truth, though, he had somewhat been expecting it. It would certainly explain where that incredible social sense and persuasiveness of his had come from – even as a child, Daimen could wade through social situations that even adult men would struggle at. How good was Daimen at controlling his gift, though? Zorian felt an urge to send a telepathic probe at him to check, but restrained himself. Maybe later. The situation was still a little tense right now, no sense in making himself even more suspicious.

Also, if Daimen was Open and had some measure of control over it, then he should have very much noticed that Zorian was like him. Why hadn’t he said anything to him or his parents?

Yeah, he definitely needed to confront him about this at some point.

"Zorian?" Daimen said. "Is that really you?"

"Who else could I be?" Zorian shot back. "I know we haven’t seen each other in a while, but have you really forgotten what your little brother looked like already?"

Daimen laughed awkwardly. "No, of course not. It’s just that this is very unexpected. Shouldn’t you be in school or something?"

"I should," Zorian admitted. "But I decided to take a trip to Koth instead. Then I remembered you’re already here and thought it would only be polite to drop by and say hi."

"Uh huh," Daimen said. He gave him a measuring look. "Tell me honestly – are you here on our parents' behalf?"

"No," Zorian said, shaking his head.

"So you’re not going to try and get in between me and Orissa?" he asked.

"No, why would I?" said Zorian. "I’m happy for you. You’re on your own when it comes to dealing with Mother and Father, though."

"You little brat," Daimen growled. "Then why the hell did you pick that of all things as your proof of identity, hmm?"

"It was a lovely painting," Ulanna commented stoically beside him. "You must have been very popular in your school days, mister Kazinski."

Daimen ignored her comment in favor of focusing on Zorian.

"It sure seems like you’re trying to get me in trouble here, is what I’m saying," he told Zorian.

"All I know about how to properly treat a brother I learned from you, brother dearest," Zorian said with a sickly smile.

"Oh?" Ulanna asked. "It sounds like you have some fascinating stories."

"Yeah, there are some nice ones," Zorian said. "My personal favorite is when he thought it would be funny to constantly lock his little brother out of the house for hours on end."

"Actually I just wanted the house all for myself, and you didn’t want to go out and play outside like a normal kid," Daimen pointed out. "Besides, I actually paid a price for that one."

"Yes, that’s why I said it was my personal favorite," Zorian said.

"What exactly happened?" Zach asked, causing Daimen and Ulanna to truly focus on him for the first time since the conversation started. He had been uncharacteristically quiet up until this moment, just observing the interaction from the sidelines and not saying anything.

"Zorian learned how to pick locks just so he could enter the house again, that’s what," Daimen explained with annoyance. "I mean, what kind of kid does that? And then some stupid police officer that had no idea he was trying to break into his own house sees him and arrests him for burglary. Man, was Mother pissed about that when she found out. At both of us, really, but especially me since I was older and was supposed to be watching him instead of chasing him out of the house to do my own thing."

"Perfectly understandable," Ulanna commented.

"Yeah, yeah, I was a bit of a brat as a kid," Daimen said dismissively. "Who wasn’t? Anyway, come inside, you two. I must say, it’s pretty impressive that you were able to travel all the way here from Eldemar…"

"Pretty irresponsible too," Ulanna added from beside him.

"Well yeah, but I’m the last person who can lecture people about that," Daimen said. "Man, compared to some of the stuff I did when I was their age, this is nothing!"

Ulanna raised an eyebrow at him.

"Err," fumbled Daimen, before rounding back at Zach and Zorian. "And what the hell are you two waiting for? A written invitation? Get inside already before I dig myself an even deeper hole! I swear, this just isn’t my day…"

With that, Daimen turned towards the actual building of the estate and marched towards it, trusting them to follow after him. With a careless shrug and a smile at a job well done, Zorian followed after him.

67. Convergence

Zorian had to admit he was somewhat surprised at the way the Taramatula family treated him and Zach. They clearly knew about Daimen’s family not approving of his relationship with Orissa, and the two of them made a spectacle of themselves upon arrival too. Zorian fully expected them to be wary of them, even unfriendly. Instead, the moment Daimen had confirmed Zorian was really who he said he was, they treated them both like honored guests. They summoned what must have been half of the whole extended family to greet them, introduced them to many of these people personally, gave them a brief tour of the place and offered to get Zorian something to drink at least three times before they accepted that he wasn’t thirsty.

That kind of reception made Zorian more than a little uncomfortable. He knew they were just being polite, and that all these smiles and pleasantries weren’t very genuine, but he simply wasn’t used to that kind of treatment. It didn’t help that very few of the Taramatula spoke Ikosian, which made it hard for Zorian to make himself understood. He only knew a few words in the local language, most of which were colorful local curses that his simulacrum had felt the need to include in his report for some reason, but people around him insisted on trying to talk to him anyway.

Normally, this would be Zorian’s clue to start peering into people’s surface thoughts in order to decipher what they wanted from him. This wouldn’t totally solve the problem of differing languages, since people’s thoughts were in no way completely divorced from the language they spoke, but it would help. However, being too liberal with mind magic in a gathering of mages was a recipe for disaster. The risk of discovery was too high. This was especially true because the Taramatula were bee controllers, which probably meant they specialized in some form of mind magic to begin with.

Someone in the Taramatula family didn’t feel the same way about him, though, because he just felt a telepathic probe smashing against his defenses.

Zorian, who was just in the middle of answering one of Ulanna’s questions, immediately stopped talking and turned towards the source of the probe. The mind magic had been crude and unsubtle, allowing Zorian to zero in on the person responsible almost immediately. It was a young teenage girl, who was currently doing her best to look innocent and doing a terrible job of it.

"Is something wrong?" Ulanna asked with a frown, following Zorian’s gaze and scrutinizing the girl with interest.

"No, nothing," said Zorian, shaking his head and turning back towards her. "I must have imagined things."

He didn’t want to raise a fuss over this. It would be his word against hers, and it would probably be seen as petty and oversensitive to make a big deal over the whole thing, even if they believed him. Besides, the probe had been more amusing than threatening. The girl was terrible. He could fight off that level of attack in his sleep.

He did kind of wonder if this was something the Taramatula leadership instructed the girl to do, or if it was something she decided on her own initiative. On one hand, Zorian found it hard to believe that the Taramatula would entrust a task like this to someone this unqualified. On the other hand, this way they could escape consequences if they were caught much more easily. They could always claim it’s just a kid being stupid and ask for leniency in light of that fact.

After a moment of consideration, he casually sent a telepathic probe of his own at the girl, wormed his way past her flimsy mental defenses and hit her with a weak mental shock as a friendly warning not to try that stuff again in the future. It was just a tiny little jolt, probably didn’t even hurt, but she reeled back as if slapped and quickly found a way to excuse herself from the meeting.

Zorian sniffed disdainfully. What a baby.

Ulanna frowned at the scene but didn’t say anything. He was pretty sure that she, at the very least, was ignorant of what the girl had tried to pull on him.

Eventually they were introduced to Orissa as well, the woman that Daimen was apparently so in love with. She was a tall, shapely woman, confident in her posture and movement. Very dark skinned, as was typical of all people of Koth. Beautiful, but so were all women that Daimen went for. She was one of the more reserved Taramatula they were introduced to, though Zorian couldn’t tell if that was because she was usually like this or if she was simply leery about them in particular.

Overall, Zorian couldn’t really see anything special about her. Nothing that would explain, at first glance, how she managed to capture Daimen’s heart so firmly. Skill, maybe? According to Ulanna (who was, as it turned out, Orissa’s aunt), Orissa was one of the more capable Taramatula members.

"Your brother has good taste," Zach whispered to him, tracing a vague hourglass figure in the air.

"You know nothing about her except that she’s good looking and that she can behave herself in public," Zorian pointed out. "How is that good taste?"

"With those looks, what more do you want?" Zach asked him, grinning.

"I can’t believe I’m defending Daimen here, but I’m sure it’s not that shallow," Zorian said. "Daimen had plenty of beautiful girls throwing themselves at him in the past and he never thought to marry them. I’m sure there is more to her than just looks."

"I’m sure the looks helped," Zach said.

"Oh, definitely," Zorian agreed to that. "I don’t think I’ve ever seen Daimen go for a girl that wasn’t beautiful. It’s just that I don’t think she could have won him over by beauty alone."

As if sensing that the two of them were talking about him, Daimen soon extricated himself from the main mass of people and sought them out.

"What are you two doing, whispering to each other on the sidelines?" he asked, approaching them. "Don’t you know that’s rude, especially when you’re the guests of honor for the occasion?"

"We don’t even speak their language," Zorian pointed out. "Kind of makes it hard to mingle."

"Well you certainly won’t learn if you don’t interact with people," Daimen said.

Zorian frowned, a flash of annoyance rippling through him.

"Did you come here just to lecture me?" Zorian asked him, an edge of warning in his voice.

"Still so prickly," Daimen sighed. "Look, since you’re not really interacting with anyone, why don’t we go somewhere private and have a nice friendly chat."

He looked at Zach with a speculative look. In response, Zach smiled broadly at him and gave him a stupid little wave, like this was the first time they saw each other.

"Right," Daimen said, looking mildly amused. "I guess you want your friend to join us, then?"

"That’s right," Zorian said. "He followed me all the way to Koth, it would be a jerk move of me to simply sideline him now that I’m here."

"Sure, I guess," Daimen said with a shrug, motioning for them to follow him. "He’s not your boyfriend, is he?"

Zorian scowled, resisting an urge to fire a lightning bolt at him.

Zach, on the other hand, was a little less restrained and launched a kick in Daimen’s direction. A kick which Daimen easily dodged, Zorian was sad to note.

"Oh don’t be so touchy, you two, it was just a little joke," Daimen said, waving his hands placatingly in front of him. "You two should know all about little jokes, what with the stupid prank you pulled on me when you arrived. Right?"

Zorian clacked his tongue unhappily. Okay, so he kind of got them there.

Daimen led them across the estate towards the little guest house near the northern edge of the complex, taking care to make a big arc around the building where Taramatula bee hives were housed.

"You don’t want to go near there," Daimen warned. "The Taramatula keep multiple types of bees, and the combat ones tend to be pretty aggressive around strangers. Your scent is new, so you getting too close would probably send them into a frenzy. The keepers would calm them down, but still. Very scary, seeing a huge cloud of magical killer bees descending towards you."

"Speaking from experience, I take it?" Zach asked.

"Yeah, they didn’t like me either, at first," Daimen confirmed. "I have no idea why the Taramatula didn’t tell me to watch out for that when I first moved in, but I suspect it was some sort of hazing thing. They wanted to see how I would react to being put in that situation, I guess."

"Are you sure they weren’t just bitter their daughter chose to marry some foreign commoner and wanted to scare you off?" Zorian asked curiously.

"Nah, I’m pretty sure they’re pleased with her choice," Daimen said, sounding completely unconcerned. "The local politics still makes my head spin every time I try to understand it, but the Taramatula have thoroughly solidified their position in the local scene. What they want most right now is powerful mages on their side, and… well, I don’t want to brag too much, but I’m kind of amazing."

"The only amazing thing about you is your ego," Zorian muttered under his breath.

Daimen either didn’t hear him or chose to ignore the comment.

"Well, I’ll be honest with you and admit they would have preferred if I married one of their… less prominent family members," Daimen said. "Someone who wasn’t so close to the main branch of the family. But I made it clear to them right away that this wasn’t going to happen. I wasn’t after Orissa’s hand because I coveted their status and influence, I was after her because I loved her. It was either Orissa or nothing."

Zorian considered asking Daimen what exactly was so amazing about Orissa, but decided he didn’t actually care about the answer that much and stayed silent.

Eventually, they reached their destination – a humble little building that looked like somewhat disrespectful accommodations for a person who was soon to marry into the Taramatula family. However, Zorian knew from talking to Ulanna that this wasn’t the actual housing the Taramatula assigned to Daimen. He had a spacious room in the central building, one much more fitting for someone like him, it was just that he mostly chose not to use it. He spent most of his time here, in this out-of-the-way guest building, which had been assigned to him as his own private workshop after he complained that his assigned room wasn’t secure enough to do his work in.

Daimen ushered them inside the building, which was overflowing with maps, strange devices and what appeared to be old artifacts recovered from gods know where.

"Don’t touch anything," Daimen warned them. "I’ll kill you if you break anything."

Zorian knew it was just a stupid expression, but he couldn’t help but imagine Daimen actually trying to kill the two of them and eventually realizing what he had gotten himself into. It put a sunny smile on his face. Oh how glorious that would be…

"I don’t like that smile," Daimen noted. "Seriously Zorian, don’t touch anything. This is work related."

"I’m just messing with you," Zorian said, shaking his head. "We’ll leave your things alone, no need to worry. How is your expedition faring, anyway?"

Daimen collapsed on his chair with a long suffering sigh, snatching a clay figurine of a bearded man off the table and staring at it for a few seconds.

"It’s… going," he said, eventually. Very informative. "I’m close to finding it, I know I am, but I just can’t seem to zero in on the actual location. I don’t understand. We combed through the whole region – and I know it’s the correct region – but everything is just…"

He shook his head and returned the figurine back to the table.

"Anyway, I’m taking a bit of a break right now," Daimen said. "I figured it might clear my head a bit. Let me see things with a fresh perspective and all. But enough about me, let’s talk about you. I’ve been wondering… how did the two of you get here so fast? I don’t know about you Zach, but Zorian couldn’t have possibly just disappeared from home until after our parents went on their own journey to Koth. That leaves… not a lot of time to actually get here."

Zach and Zorian shared a look between each other. The two of them had debated what to tell Daimen about their goals and situation for a while, and the general conclusion was that they had no real option besides flat out telling him the truth. Zorian didn’t have a very high opinion of his brother, but Daimen was anything but stupid, and he knew Zorian personally. Not very well, but still. There was little doubt in Zorian’s mind that Daimen would immediately see through any stupid story they might concoct about their visit. And in Zorian’s experience, Daimen wasn’t the type to quietly accept that sort of thing.

They needed his full support and the only way to impress the gravity of the situation upon him was to tell him about the time loop and their need for the Key. Hopefully Daimen would be less aggravating to convince than, say, Silent Doorway Adepts.

"We opened a Gate and stepped through it," Zorian eventually said.

Daimen gave him a weird look.

"A Gate? As in, a dimensional passage?" he asked.

"Yes," Zorian confirmed. "We created a portal straight from Eldemar to here in Koth."

"You’re saying nonsense, but you look completely serious," Daimen noted. "Either your acting has really gotten good or you’re taking me for an idiot. Zorian, if you’re going to lie to me, at least check things beforehand to make things at least slightly plausible. Do you have any idea how hard it is to cast the Gate spell?"

"Oh yes," Zorian nodded seriously. "Took me a while to get the hang of it."

"I’m sure," Daimen rolled his eyes. "I mean, you mastered the spell so well you can apparently open the doorway all the way from Altazia to Southern Miasina. How does that even work, by the way?"

"Well, first I made a simulacrum and sent it to Koth…" Zorian began.

"Oh, so you can make simulacrums too? Way to go brother, you sure are a prodigy," Daimen praised mockingly.

"Then, when my copy arrived here, we coordinated with each other to open the passage between our two locations," Zorian continued, ignoring his jab. "With two casters working on the spell at both ends of the passage, distance was not an issue."

"That’s…" started Daimen, and then stopped and hummed thoughtfully to himself for a few seconds. "Okay, I think that could actually work. Congratulations, I guess. At least one part of your story holds water. It’s still silly though, because you cannot possibly cast either of those two spells. Hell, I can’t cast either of them, so how could you?"

Zorian was just about to respond, but Zach was faster.

"What if we prove it to you?" he asked.

"Prove it to me?" Daimen asked incredulously. "And how do you propose to do that? Opening another Gate to Eldemar?"

"Of course," Zorian nodded. "Seeing is believing. Nothing we could say would be as convincing as just showing you the truth. Fortunately, I left another simulacrum back home, so we can open a portal there whenever I want."

"Zorian, there is taking a joke too far, you know…" Daimen sighed.

"It costs you nothing to humor us for a bit," Zach pointed out. "At worst you get to watch Zorian make a fool out of himself for a bit."

Daimen considered this for a second and then chuckled for a moment.

"Yeah, you have a point there," Daimen said, grinning.

Jerks, the both of them.

"So should I open a portal right here, then?" Zorian asked innocently. "Since I obviously can’t do it, it shouldn’t be a problem, right?"

"No way," Daimen told him. "I’m not risking my workshop just so you could prove your point."

Zorian grinned at him.

"Annoying brat," Daimen grumbled. "Alright, whatever. I have no idea of what you two are up to, but I’ll play along for now. In return, though, I want your promise that you’ll tell me why you’re here afterwards. Why you’re really here, that is, not another bullshit story."

"Deal," Zorian said, agreeing to the request with ease. He was going to do that anyway, so it cost him nothing to promise such. "When do you have the time?"

"I’m not doing anything right now," Daimen said, shaking his head and rising to his feet. "Let’s go. The sooner we get this over with, the sooner I can get back to my work and Orissa."

Zorian almost felt bad for his older brother. The demonstration Zorian planned to give was just a beginning. There would be no peaceful routine for Daimen in this restart, at least if Zorian was successful in convincing him he was telling the truth.

Almost. But not quite.

"I thought you said you were taking a break from work," Zorian pointed out.

"Shut up," Daimen responded. "You know what I mean."

"He’s working with his fiancée," said Zach with a lecherous smile on his face. "I’m sure it’s hard, physical labor."

Daimen muttered something about teenagers but otherwise didn’t comment on Zach’s assertion.

"Do we need to leave the Taramatula estate for this?" Daimen asked. "If you end up causing another scene by triggering the defensive wards or something, I’ll be pretty cross with you."

Zorian hummed thoughtfully.

Most wards were not made with detecting gate creation in mind, but one could never know for sure what an unknown warding scheme would react to. Not without launching into an extensive analysis of the wards themselves, which could itself trigger something and raise the alarm. Without knowing how the local wards were laid out and what their sensitivity thresholds were, Zorian could only advocate caution. As such, the group left the estate, leaving a message with the guards that they’d be back in a bit.

Unsurprisingly, that would turn out to be a huge understatement. It was probably fine, though – Zorian had seen the look the Taramatula guards gave Daimen when he said he’d be back before they know it, and he had a feeling this wasn’t the first time Daimen pulled this sort of thing.

Maybe asking himself what Daimen saw in Orissa was the wrong thing to ask. A better question was, what the hell did she see in him?

Zorian sat on one of the hills overlooking Cyoria, observing the city. Or at least pretending to do so – in reality, most of his attention was on Daimen, who was standing beside him and staring at the city in utter silence. Zach was lying on the grass next to them, whistling some annoyingly catchy tune and tracing outlines in the clouds with his finger, not even pretending that the city interested him. The whole situation was a strange sight to Zorian’s eyes, and not really how he had expected the situation to develop once they brought Daimen back to Eldemar.

When the group had been back in Koth, and Zorian proceeded to cast the Gate spell successfully, he had expected Daimen to… well, do something. Be shocked, or at least surprised. Maybe even become aggressive towards them, demanding an explanation or doubting their identity again. At the very least, he expected his brother to be visibly incredulous at the feat and have trouble deciding how to respond. Instead, Daimen just got very quiet and serious, not saying much and observing everything around him with uncommon intensity. He cast a number of spells that looked fairly exotic to Zorian’s eyes, but which he suspected were meant to tell him whether or not he was stuck in an illusion, detect if his mind was being tampered with, and reveal any hidden presences lurking around them. That done, he cast the Mind Blank spell on himself, followed by three different privacy wards, and then threw some kind of metal sphere through the dimensional passage. Some kind of remote magical sensor, obviously. Only once the sphere told him there was no obvious trap around the Eldemar side of the gate did he agree to cross over.

Seeing Zorian’s simulacrum upon arrival made him frown, but he did not comment upon it. In fact, he did not comment much on anything that happened since then, opting to just silently scrutinize everything. Zach and Zorian teleported him around Eldemar for a bit, just to drive home the point that yes, they really did open a passage straight back home, and then brought Daimen here to this hill when they realized the man was just passively following after them and not reacting to things.

Frankly, Zorian was getting a little concerned there. They had been on this hill for half an hour now, and Daimen was just standing there like a statue, staring at the city with this weird glassy expression. Did they… break Daimen or something?

"Talk to us," Zorian finally said, not able to restrain himself any longer. Zach stopped whistling for a moment and inclined his head towards them, waiting to see whether Daimen would react.

He did. As if woken from a dream by Zorian’s statement, he took a deep breath and slowly turned in place until he faced Zorian.

"Who are you really?" Daimen asked curiously. His voice was calm and unhurried, but Zorian could detect an undercurrent of frustration and anger lurking there. He may have mind blanked himself, but Zorian had years of experience of reading people’s emotions and matching them to their facial expressions and mannerisms.

"I’m Zorian, of course," he told Daimen, equally calm and unhurried. He had expected this might happen. If a person you know suddenly got impossible good at something or developed mastery in brand new fields out of the blue, it was reasonable to decide they could be possessed or an impersonator.

"No, you’re not," Daimen said lightly, shaking his head. "Zorian is… too young to be capable of all this. My brother works hard and is almost as smart as me, but he just didn’t have enough time to get this good. So you can’t be him. Who are you and why did you go to the trouble of setting this up?"

Zorian had half a mind to dispute this assertion that he was almost as smart as Daimen… but he had to be honest and admit that Daimen was, if anything, being overly generous there. Things never came to Zorian as naturally as they did to Daimen.

"Why are you so calm if you think I’m someone other than your brother?" Zorian asked curiously. "If I thought Kirielle was replaced with an imposter while I wasn’t looking, I sure as hell wouldn’t be calm about it."

Daimen frowned at his mention of Kirielle. Maybe he didn’t know that Zorian was supposed to watch over her while their parents went to Koth? It was rather unexpected of him to agree to that, so maybe Mother never notified him of that little fact.

"I’m calm because raging at you would solve nothing," Daimen said. "I need answers, and I doubt I could force them out of either of you two. You are a mage capable of creating simulacrums, teleporting across the country at whim and opening Gates to another continent. Your friend here has been more low-key, but his relaxed manner makes me think he’s actually the more dangerous of the two of you."

"Indeed," Zorian commented.

"I don’t know, Zorian, I think a lot of people would be way more terrified of you than they would be me," said Zach, still lying around of the grass, completely ignoring the tense situation developing beside him.

"So I can do little except try and see what you want and hope that Zorian is still alive," Daimen concluded, ignoring the comment.

"I see," Zorian sighed. "I suppose it’s not too surprising for you to reach this conclusion from where you’re standing. However, you are wrong. I am Zorian. Your logic makes sense, but only if you make certain assumptions about the passage of time involved."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" Daimen said, frowning. "Stop trying to sound mysterious and explain yourself."

"Very well," Zorian said. "The truth is that it has been a while since we last saw each other, brother. It might seem like I’m implausibly capable, but it took me almost six years, instruction from experts that most people don’t have access to, and enough money to finance a small country for a year to get this good. I’m six years older than I should be, but I’m still Zorian."

"That’s… ridiculous," Daimen said. But there was a sliver of doubt in his voice. Or was it hope? He probably didn’t want to believe Zorian had been replaced by someone.

"So was our claim that we made a dimensional doorway across continental distances," pointed out Zach. "And yet we’re here, aren’t we?"

"That’s different," Daimen protested. "At least that’s theoretically possible. This… I can’t think of a way this could work. You can’t just add an extra six years of life to a person without anyone noticing anything. Not even the best time dilation chambers could give him that. Besides, he implied he was interacting with the world at large while he lived out those six years, so time dilation couldn’t be what he’s talking about. Where does that leave us?"

"It leaves us with a world in which time repeats itself," Zorian told him. "On the eve of the Summer Festival, everything is reverted to the start of the month. All that you did in the previous month is undone, and you forget. Everyone forgets. You lived through this exact same month so many times, making the same motions, same decisions, oblivious to this… time loop that the world is bound in."

Well, at least Zorian assumed so. Any changes in a given restart could be somehow traced to actions of either him or Zach, and surely none of their actions thus far were big enough to propagate all the way to Koth, right?

"We remember, though," Zorian continued. "We can advance our skills across restarts and learn from our mistakes. Which is how I got as good as I did in such a seemingly short amount of time."

"You’re telling me I’ve been essentially doing nothing for the past six years?" Daimen asked him incredulously.

"Try several decades," Zach said. "Six years ago is when Zorian ended up gaining the ability to retain skills and memories across restarts. The time loop has been going on for decades before that, though."

Daimen looked like he was going to say something but then started pacing around the grassy hill instead, mumbling something unintelligible to himself.

Seeing how they were back to waiting for Daimen to snap out of it again, Zorian just shrugged and went back to tracking the shapes in the clouds again.

After about five minutes, Daimen suddenly stopped and approached Zorian again.

"I’m not saying I believe you…" he began hesitantly. "Because I don’t. It’s crazy. But I’m willing to hear you out in more detail."

"Fair enough," Zorian nodded solemnly. He cupped his hands in front of him and created an illusionary image of a slowly-spinning planet in front of him. Above the planet was a simple drawing of an upturned triangle connected to a single horizontal tine through its tip. "In the beginning, there was just the world we all lived on and an ancient artifact called the Sovereign Gate…"

The pretty illusions and the detailed story did not convince Daimen that their story was true. Not fully, anyway. He was forced to admit that Zorian probably was who he said he was, if only because he knew too many random details about their childhood days, but he found the time loop to be quite a crazy idea. There were not a whole lot of other answers that would explain things, though, so Zorian was hoping it wouldn’t be long before he fully accepted things. It helped that he had introduced Daimen to Xvim and Alanic, who were somehow more convincing to Daimen than his own brother. If Zorian was interpreting things correctly, Daimen found him pretty unnerving now, which was both kind of annoying and kind of flattering.

But no matter; while Daimen was busy coming to terms with the truth of the world, other preparations and operations continued unimpeded. The Silent Doorway adepts were finally convinced to give them a chance in this restart too, and Zorian threw himself into the task of helping the aranea understand their Bakora Gate better. There was also the vague plan of transporting some of their mages to distant Bakora gates in order to obtain their gate keys for future restarts, but that was still in the beginning stages.

The time to take advantage of the Black Room beneath Cyoria also came and went, and this time Zach and Zorian were no longer the only people inside. Kael and Xvim also joined them. Kael couldn’t exactly practice his alchemy inside the Black Room, but he wanted time to rewrite and reorganize his research notes a little, since their size and the haphazard manner in which they were written were making the whole thing gradually unmanageable. He claimed it took him most of the restart thus far just to figure out what he did in the past and how to build up upon it. As for Xvim, he was switching his time between prodding Zach and Zorian whenever he felt they were slacking off and experimenting with various shaping regimens. Like Kael, he also had a mountain of notes, but he claimed there was no need for him to rewrite and organize anything. Perhaps it was because he was older and more experienced with note-taking, or maybe he just read fast and had an absurdly good memory, but he had no problem with quickly absorbing the notes that Zorian gave him at the start of each restart.

Alanic and Taiven declined to participate. Alanic claimed there was no point in him being there, while Taiven said she didn’t want to be stuck in a tiny little room with four men for a month. Which was… fair enough. He really should have thought of that before he even brought the idea up for her consideration.

Zach commented, with a suggestive grin, that he wouldn’t mind giving up his spot in one of the future restarts so Zorian and Taiven could have the Black Room all to themselves to experiment. Thankfully, Taiven took it in good humor and just rolled her eyes at him.

It was not long after they returned from the Black Room that Zorian finally succeeded at something that had been bothering him for quite a while now.

"I did it!" he exclaimed, barging into Zach’s room one day. "I finally succeeded!"

He was greeted with the sight of Zach sitting on the floor in front of one of the aranea that the Silent Doorway Adepts had sent to Cyoria to act as their representative. Zorian had placed telepathic relays between Cyoria and their main colony, making such an arrangement less problematic than it would otherwise be. Normally, finding Zach talking to one of the aranea without Zorian being present would be quite an unusual sight. The aranea didn’t have much respect for a non-psychic like Zach, and Zach didn’t tolerate their condescension well. However, Zorian could identify the aranea in question at a glance, thanks to one of her main eyes being covered with a milky white membrane, having been ruined in some magical accident in her youth. Frozen Thoughts Spanning Across Bottomless Chasms was somewhat deviant by aranean standards, and held a deep fascination for non-psychic beings and how they perceive the world. Zorian suspected it had something to do with her sight being crippled at a relatively young age, and the wider aranean philosophy of considering non-psychic beings as fundamentally crippled. Regardless, Frozen Thoughts was one of the rare aranea Zorian met over the restarts who actively preferred interacting with Zach over him, and it wasn’t unusual to see her seek him out, even when she had no official business to bring up.

Zorian wasn’t entirely sure why Zach was so willing to indulge Frozen Thoughts' curiosity, when he clearly didn’t think much of aranea in general. Perhaps he just found the situation novel enough to be interesting, or maybe he was just too polite to tell her off, but he treated Frozen Thoughts with a surprising amount of understanding and patience.

"Well," Zach said. "Congratulations, I guess. What exactly did you succeed at?"

"I found a way to open the secret research facility hidden in the ceiling of the Cyorian web," Zorian said. "Without destroying any of the contents, I mean."

"Oh?" Zach said, sitting up a little straighter. "Anything interesting?"

"I’m still going through it all, but at first glance most of it seems to revolve around their efforts to translate human magics into forms more compatible with the aranea," Zorian said.

"Makes sense," Frozen Thoughts said. "Isn’t that the whole point of living beneath Cyoria? At least for us aranea."

"Right," Zorian said. "Well, that means that little of it will be useful to me directly… but I may have struck gold here regardless. I think the other aranean webs are going to be very interested in this. With the kind of knowledge in my arsenal, I might be able to arrange for heavier concessions from the aranean webs we meet. Maybe I can even talk them into teaching me some of their really good stuff, and then use that to get more really good stuff out of other webs and so on…"

"I’m amused that you feel comfortable discussing a plot like that right in front of me," Frozen Thoughts said. "But I can’t really blame you. My web would have probably been even more ruthless about taking advantage of that kind of opportunity if they were in your situation."

"That’s interesting to hear," Zach said speculatively. "Perhaps we might delegate some of our skill gathering to your web, then? Zorian is understandably a little skittish of going full raider on your people, but if we were to supply you with a bunch of secret aranean techniques and equipment and left it up to you how you use them to acquire more… well, I’m sure that Zorian wouldn’t inquire too deeply about the methods you used in your dealings."

"I’m right here, Zach," Zorian complained.

"So was Frozen Thoughts when you explained your master plan, but that didn’t stop you," Zach grinned. "Besides, I feel most of the araneas we met think a little too highly of themselves and could do with a little humbling."

"I’m… going to put this topic off for now," Zorian said. "Anyway, I did find one thing in the research facility that could be interesting. The web actually had a whole project dedicated to trying to adapt some of their mental techniques to human psychics. The idea, as far as I can tell, was to create a limited skillset for a sort of… human vassal. They didn’t call them that, of course, but that’s kind of what it amounts to. The psychic would get instruction from them, the sort they cannot really get anywhere else, and in return they would serve as the aranean spokesperson and, in their own words, a problem solver. There would be no coercion or mind bending involved here – the documents were quite clear on that, as the web leadership wanted everything to be completely aboveboard if one of the psychics was subjected to mental examination and other scrutiny. The psychics would be kept in line through a simple threat of withdrawing support and teaching assistance to anyone who doesn’t cooperate. And possibly legal persecution, since they intended to implement this only after they worked out some kind of formal deal with the Cyorian administration."

"So almost exactly like those mages and families that swear fealty to established Houses," Zach noted.

"Yes, that is probably where they got the idea," Zorian confirmed. "That’s why I called them vassals. Anyway, most of these skills are too rudimentary for someone like me. I’m already too good at telepathy, mind reading, mental combat and the like to benefit from the bulk of the program. However, the web was also experimenting with providing the most loyal of these vassals mental techniques like those used by aranean elders to enhance their thinking. I’m still poring over the information, but the research notes seem pretty complete. The Cyorian web seems to have documented a lot of the obvious dangers and pitfalls involved in adapting these kinds of inner techniques to human minds. With access to this, I might actually be able to start tinkering in this field without doing something irreversible to myself."

"They must have left quite a trail of insanity behind them with such experimentation," Frozen Thoughts speculated. "Tinkering with that kind of thing produces a lot of complications even in our own communities. Trying to adapt these techniques to human minds probably involved a lot of dramatic failures."

"The documents never say what happened to the humans involved with the experimentation, but I suspect you are right," Zorian nodded.

"If you want my advice, I suggest you start dabbling in this field by going to the Perfect Phantasm Crafters," Frozen Thoughts told him.

"Them?" Zorian asked, surprised. "I didn’t know they were experts on these kind of techniques."

"They aren’t," Frozen Thoughts said. "But pretty much all aranean webs have some measure of expertise in these, and the Perfect Phantasm Crafters are one of the webs with better understanding of the differences between human and aranean minds. Additionally, their brand of inner techniques is relatively safe and inoffensive. They focus on the so-called self-illusions. Techniques that leave most of your thoughts untouched, merely altering how you perceive the world – highlighting some things in your vision, blocking out sounds, and so on. On the face of it, the idea of deliberately deceiving yourself may seem kind of dubious, but it can be very useful and it’s easily undone. If you want to get started on this without risking insanity, the Perfect Phantasm Crafters are probably your best bet."

After some more questions about the matter, Zorian left Zach and Frozen Thoughts to whatever discussion they had been having before he had barged in and left. He had too many things to worry about in the current restart to start an extensive new project like this, but it was something to think about in the future.

"So what do you think of the Taramatula?" Daimen asked.

Zorian glanced at his brother, trying to decipher why he had suddenly asked him that question. Like usual, Daimen always had a mind blank on when he knew Zorian was around – in the beginning he had dropped that thing once he had realized he was really his brother and not some imposter, but when he later found out that Zorian was a master mind mage he started zealously applying it on himself whenever they met.

Since Daimen was clearly so paranoid about mind magic, Zorian had held off on confronting him about his own psychic nature and how much he really knew about it. Besides, Daimen was still reeling from the realization that he was just a copy in an endlessly repeating pocket universe, so he felt it would be a little bit mean to dump too many things on him at once. He had time. That particular question wasn’t very time critical.

Currently the two of them were taking a slow walk across the outer boundaries of the Taramatula estate, ostensibly to just enjoy the view but actually so they could have a conversation without fearing someone would eavesdrop on them. Zach was not present at the moment, since Daimen requested this to be a private meeting between the two of them. Instead, he stayed behind in the central building of the estate, exchanging stories with the tutor that the Taramatula had provided to both of them free of charge – after the relatively embarrassing showing he and Zach had during their initial reception, the Taramatula decided they really needed a lesson in the local language and customs. Especially since it soon became obvious that the two of them would be visiting their place quite often in the near future, due to their frequent meetings with Daimen.

The estate itself was quite large, with a massive central building ringed by a multitude of smaller ones. At least a quarter of the smaller buildings housed bees instead of people. All of the structures were sparkling white, not because they were painted such and kept clean, but because they were built using some kind of pearly white stone that didn’t seem to get dirty. The central building had more color, though, being obviously intended as more ostentatious and eye-catching. Colorful, complicated braids and geometric shapes framed all of the doors and windows, and zig-zagged across open walls. They weren’t painted on either, and instead seemed to be made out of semi-precious stones and magical crystals embedded straight into the structure of the walls. Zorian wasn’t sure, but they may have doubled as reinforcement for the building’s warding scheme, so there was a possibility they weren’t just ornamental.

Taramatula were also very fond of statues, most of them depicting stern-looking people that were presumably prominent ancestors of the family, but there were also a fair number of ones depicting various magical creatures. And giant bees, of course. What would a bee-focused family of mages do without statues of giant bees? All of the statues were carved and painted to be as lifelike as possible. The people of Koth were very fond of realism in art, and Taramatula were no exception.

"They’re surprisingly hospitable and friendly," said Zorian. "I expected them to be more arrogant and conceited, considering their status."

"This is actually pretty typical of how most minor nobles behave," Daimen told him. "I interacted with a lot of them over the years, and they’re rarely overtly unpleasant. Even if they think you’re beneath them, they will rarely let that show unless you go out of the way to annoy them in some fashion."

"I concede to your expertise in the matter, then," Zorian shrugged. "Anyway, I kind of like them."

"I’m glad," Daimen said. "I guess you’d have no issue with taking my side when Mother and Father come, then?"

Zorian gave him an incredulous look.

"What?" Daimen asked defensively.

"You think my opinion actually matters to them?" Zorian asked, raising his eyebrow at him. For that matter, he was surprised that Daimen cared about his opinion either. "But sure, throw my support of you right into their face if they ask. Not like their opinion of me could get much lower."

"Zorian, that’s… a little too harsh towards your parents, don’t you think?" Daimen tried.

"Nope," Zorian answered unrepentantly. "I never mattered to them. Not until you made it clear you have no intention of settling down and taking over their family business and Fortov showed them what a failure he really is. Then they expected me to drop all of my dreams and plans and remake myself into what they needed me to be."

Daimen was quiet for a while.

"I see," he eventually said. "You were so reasonable and calm during our meetings that I almost forgot what a perpetual ball of anger and resentment you tend to be."

"Screw you too, Daimen," Zorian told him simply. "What exactly did you bring me here for, anyway?"

"Well, first of all I wanted to say I’m very impressed with what you’ve achieved so far," Daimen began.

Zorian gave him a strange look. Daimen was praising him? What the hell was going on here?

"Don’t look at me like that," Daimen protested. "I really am. Six years is not that long in the grand scheme of things. You’re still effectively a year younger than me, yet you’ve accomplished so much. I think that most people, even if they were handed the same opportunity as you, wouldn’t have gotten as far in such a short period of time."

Zorian stayed silent for a few seconds, unsure how to respond to that.

"Thanks, I guess," he finally said. "Does that mean you accept the time loop as real now, then?"

"Yes," Daimen nodded. "I guess I do."

"In that case, I’m going to be frank with you," said Zorian. "We originally sought you out because we need your help with something."

"Of course you do," Daimen said matter-of-factly. "A treasure hunt of some sort, I’m guessing?"

"Yes," Zorian confirmed. "Remember what I told you about the third time traveler and how he stranded us all here? Well, there is potentially a way for us to unlock the exit. However, to do that we need to gather five pieces of the Key that holds dominion over the Sovereign Gate. And one of these pieces in supposed to be lost here in Koth."

Daimen listened to his explanation very calmly at first, nodding slightly here and there to indicate agreement and that he was paying attention, but then he suddenly flinched and straightened his back, as if struck by some realization.

"Wait… the Sovereign Gate is an ancient imperial artifact!" Daimen exclaimed.

Zorian looked at him like he had gone mad.

"Well, yes," he said slowly.

"Which means these Keys you’re looking for are probably also ancient imperial artifacts," Daimen concluded.

"Yes," Zorian confirmed, still not understanding why Daimen seemed so animated about this. "The ring, the crown, the dagger, the orb and the staff of the First Emperor of Ikosia. Supposedly, the orb has been lost here in Koth. One of the emperors personally led an invasion force into the region to conquer it, but the army was scattered and driven deep into the jungles, where most of them perished. Including the emperor, whose body and possessions were never found. And he was reportedly carrying the orb with him at the time, so…"

Zorian stopped talking because Daimen began to laugh, first quietly and then progressing into a full-blown maniacal cackling. Seriously, what was wrong with him?

"Daimen?" he asked uncertainly.

"Of course. Of course!" Daimen said. As if that explained anything. "It all comes back to this in the end, doesn’t it?"

"I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me why this is so funny to you?" Zorian asked him, voice laced with annoyance.

"Because, my dear little brother," Daimen told him, "that orb is what I’m after, too."

68. Green Hell

Historically, Koth had been a frequent target for Ikosian expansionism. The jungles that covered the region were dangerous to traverse and hard to clear, but they held valuable resources that couldn’t be found anywhere else. This made Kothic societies developed and wealthy enough that nobody would scoff at conquering them, yet left the region as a whole politically disunited and fragmented. Thus, Ikosian rulers often tried to bring the region under their thumb, reasoning that a bunch of bickering city-states and small kingdoms could not possibly unite together in time to repulse them.

But such initiatives were never successful. Koth was very far from Ikosian heartland, over rather inhospitable terrain, and fielding significant armies there was very hard. Additionally, the states of Koth proved quite willing to temporarily set aside their differences in order to resist Ikosian incursions into the region.

One of these unsuccessful campaigns, one that failed particularly dramatically, was the one launched by Awan-Temti Khumbastir. He was one of the more successful Ikosian emperors, but his success was built upon many small successes and the gradual prosperity of the empire under his reign. He had no grand feats to his name, and he feared his rule would be forgotten as soon as his corpse cooled. Thus, he set his sights on the one thing he felt would immortalize his rule for all time. By conquering Koth – something that his predecessors had repeatedly failed at – he would acquire the glory he craved and prove himself an emperor worth remembering.

It helped that Koth was being increasingly united by the rapidly growing League of Sawosi at the time, fueling fears that Koth might coalesce into a real competitor to the Empire if allowed to develop unchecked.

The campaign was a failure. Sure, the Ikosian armies had their successes in the beginning, and most historians agree that the war was a close one until the very end. But what does that matter when the last battle had been such a spectacular loss for the Ikosians? Frustrated by the slow progress of the campaign and by the very real possibility he would be returning home in failure, Awan-Temti assumed personal command of the army and led it straight into a trap the League of Sawosi had set up for him. The resulting battle was a total rout for the Ikosian army, which was then forced to retreat deep into the dangerous jungles that made up the interior of the continent. Most of the force perished there, picked off by diseases, wildlife or environmental hazards. This included Awan-Temti himself, who would vanish without a trace somewhere in the trackless jungles. His corpse and belongings were never found, and the uncertainty of whether he was really dead or just missing would cripple attempts of his successor to assume the throne for quite a few years, leading to a period of great instability and turmoil for the empire. In a strange way, Awan-Temti had actually achieved the fame he had sought when he went to Koth – the campaign of conquest would become a popular cautionary tale against arrogance and glory-seeking, his name never to be forgotten.

As for the League of Sawosi, they only had a short while to celebrate their victory. In order to fuel their war machine, they had taxed and arm-twisted their vassals and member states to such a massive extent that they revolted against the League the moment the Ikosians had left. Its armies devastated by the war and its treasury empty, the League was unable to respond to this challenge against its authority, and quickly fell apart. No other power would ever come as close to unifying Koth as the League of Sawosi had come before the war.

Zorian was getting a little off-track in his musings, though – the important thing was that Awan-Temti had been carrying quite a few imperial treasures on him when he disappeared, and this possibly included the imperial orb. This was not actually stated anywhere in official Ikosian history, which was very quiet about the fate of the orb, but several historians had noted that imperial chroniclers mysteriously stopped mentioning the orb in the aftermath of the campaign. It was likely that Awan-Temti’s successors had been unwilling to admit that one of the artifacts of the first emperor had been lost in that campaign and had done their best to quietly sweep the issue under the rug by ignoring the orb’s existence from that moment onward. In any case, attempts to locate Awan-Temti’s final resting place were not exactly a rare occurrence. The orb aside, the rest of the treasures he had been carrying were a tempting prize on their own. None of these attempts were successful, but Zorian was armed with something none of the previous treasure hunters had had in their possession – an infallible way to detect the presence of the orb when at a considerable distance from himself, regardless of any wards or other obstacles that may be foiling mundane divination.

"You have an in-built artifact detector," Daimen summarized, giving him a jealous glare.

"Only in regards to a certain type of artifact, but yes," confirmed Zorian smugly. "I still need someone to point me in the right direction, of course. I was originally going to ask you for help in that regard. I mean, you’re supposed to be this famous treasure hunter and all…"

"I am a famous treasure hunter," Daimen pointed out.

"Right," Zorian nodded. "So I figured that you might be able to help me narrow down the search region faster. Give me a few tips, connect me to the right people, maybe even get personally involved. If you’re already searching for the orb yourself, though, then everything just got a lot easier."

Zorian was also reassured that someone had independently come to the same conclusion he and Zach had regarding the orb’s location. It meant they probably weren’t pursuing a fake lead.

Daimen gave him an indecipherable look, staring at him in silence for a moment. Finally, he slowly shook his head and spoke.

"I don’t know whether I love you or hate you right now," he told Zorian. "On one hand, I have been stuck with this thing for months now, and it’s driving me crazy. My own team had begun to lose faith in me and had started complaining about wasting time on this. You swooping in with a solution in hand is exciting, but a part of me is incensed that somebody else is going to hand me a solution to this search. It feels like you’ve just stolen some of my thunder, you know?"

Oh, Zorian knew that feeling very, very well. But no matter, the really interesting thing was that Daimen’s own team was starting to mutiny. That explained a lot about what was happening, honestly. Such as why Daimen was currently inside the Taramatula estate instead of out there in the field, trying to find the orb as soon as he could.

"Is that why you decided to take a break from everything for a while?" Zorian asked. "To give your team a chance to calm down a little?"

"Ugh," Daimen said, grimacing. "Sometimes you’re too perceptive for your own good, Zorian. Yeah, I wanted to keep going but they were being a big bunch of babies and complaining about sleeping in the jungle for several weeks and whatnot. Eventually we got into a bit of an argument and things got too heated for my liking, so I decided to give everyone some rest until I could rethink my approach."

Hmm. From what Daimen had told him and Zach earlier, Daimen had had his team focus on one specific area of the jungle for a while now, since he was sure he’d had the right spot identified. Meaning that he was probably telling them to comb through the exact same area over and over again with no results. Zorian wasn’t surprised that they’d eventually lost their patience.

"Anyway," continued Daimen, "give me a few days to gear up and organize everyone again, and we can go see if that detector of yours is as good as you say."

"Wait, you’re taking your entire team with you?" Zorian said, frowning. "Why? Can’t we just pop over there quickly and check things out?"

"No, because it’s a huge area covered in dense, monster-infested jungle," Daimen told him. "I can only teleport us to a few places there in a safe and reliable manner. The rest of the way we’ll have to walk, and I don’t feel safe doing that with only three people. I’m good, and I’m guessing you and Zach are too, but that’s not enough. Even the best mage is vulnerable to surprise attacks, and there is plenty of opportunity for that here."

"I thought you said you had it narrowed down to one spot," Zorian pointed out curiously.

"Well, relative to the huge swathes of jungle that cover the entire region? Yeah, I did," Daimen said, a little defensively. "It’s still a lot of ground to cover, though. Why do you think I’ve been stuck on this for this long?"

Zorian was about to try and argue that everything would still be so much faster if it was just the three of them, but Daimen cut him off with a warning stare.

"Look," Daimen said, "I know you’re on a time limit here, but be reasonable. It’s a dangerous land full of chameleon drakes, devourer mantises, howlers, thorn swallow flocks and gods know what else. Stumbling about in haste will see us all killed in a matter of hours. Besides… Orissa is going to kill me if I try to do this without her, and my team will be waiting for their turn right behind her. They were a part of this from the start. I would end up looking like a petty glory hound if I cut them out of the endeavor just before we claim the prize. I’m not wrecking my reputation like that. I’m sure you can spare a day or two on this."

And that was how Zach and Zorian found themselves searching for the orb of the first emperor with Daimen, Orissa and 15 other people.

When Zorian had conceded to Daimen’s request to organize a full-fledged expedition for the orb, he’d known the whole endeavor was bound to turn into something of a spectacle. He had been absolutely right about that, but he had also completely misjudged what would cause it. He had thought the situation would gradually develop as he and Zach were forced to reveal their capabilities, piece by piece, during the course of the expedition. What actually happened was that Daimen outright told people that his little brother was secretly a master mage that rivaled him in skill, that Zach was similarly talented, and that the two of them had found some kind of imperial seal that let them detect other imperial artifacts nearby.

This wasn’t really what Zorian had had in mind when Daimen had told him that he would handle explanations and that Zorian needn’t worry about thinking up an excuse for his powers. He was tempted to ask Daimen why he didn’t tell them all about the time loop too, but he was afraid that the madman might actually go for it. How the hell did Daimen think this was a good solution to the problem?

Daimen also decided, without even bothering to consult with Zorian, that field deployment would happen via gate usage. Daimen would teleport to the target area on his own and then coordinate with Zorian to open a dimensional passage between the Taramatula estate (where the rest of the team would be waiting) and their destination. This would admittedly speed things up considerably, since not everyone in the group could teleport and there were a lot of supplies to transport as well… but it meant revealing to the whole group that Zorian could open gates. Daimen saying that Zorian was a master mage is one thing, and might be passed off as Daimen being biased in favor of his family, but a mage that could open gates at Zorian’s age naturally raised a lot of eyebrows.

Annoyingly, everyone seemed to quietly accept that Daimen could cast the gate spell, even though the only reason he had that capability was because Zorian had taken the time to teach it to him in this restart. He normally wouldn’t have bothered with that, but entering a Black Room had severed him from his simulacrums outside of it, dispersing them in very short order. This meant that he would have to keep sending simulacrums on a multi-day journey to Koth every time he emerged from one, which was annoying and quite impractical. As such, he decided to try and teach the gate spell to Daimen so he could open the gate to Koth with his help.

Fair is fair, though – it took only two days for Daimen to learn the spell, which was kind of amazing. He was already extremely good at dimensionalism, it turned out, having done the relevant shaping exercises and practiced with various types of teleportation. He had simply never found anyone willing to teach him the actual spell. Experts that could cast the gate spell were very rare and they didn’t share that kind of magic with others lightly. Not even if the person was a famous treasure hunter like Daimen.

In any case, Zorian was more than a little annoyed at how Daimen had handled the expedition preparations and thus decided to vent a little by showing off more than he had initially planned. He took four of his combat golems, which he had been mass producing in preparation for the assault on the Ibasan gate beneath Cyoria, and brought them with him to the expedition as his bodyguards. He probably didn’t need them, but the look on Daimen’s face when he stomped into the Taramatula estate with four golems in tow was priceless. It would also serve as a useful test of how his golems handled unfamiliar environments, he supposed.

Finally, the gate was opened and 19 people (plus four golems) entered the area that supposedly held the orb – a dense, shadowy patch of jungle known to the locals simply as Dai Hurna. Green Hell.

"A simple, but apt description," one of Daimen’s team members told him. He was an older, weathered-looking man that served as the group’s main ward expert. Both in making and breaking them. "I’ve been in more dangerous places, but this one is near the top of the list. Try to stay near the center of the group. You and your buddy may be good, but some things can only be acquired with age."

Zorian had been rather dismissive of the man’s words at the time, since the weathered old mage obviously did not know the full story about him and Zach, but he would soon learn there was some wisdom to be found in the old man’s words. The vegetation alone was a huge obstacle to exploring the area – there were no jungle trails crisscrossing the place, and the lack of sunlight made the area shadowy and dim, making it hard to spot dangers and navigate through the foliage. Zorian’s mind sense helped there, allowing him to sense the minds of predatory animals with relative ease, but not every danger had a thinking mind behind it. Some of the vegetation was mobile and predatory, for instance, but not especially intelligent. Zorian found that out the hard way when a tangle of jungle vines wrapped themselves around him and tried to drag him off into a pit when he got a little careless. Thankfully, his golem bodyguards managed to fight them off long enough for Zorian to clear his head and ignite the air around himself, forcing them to back off.

"You are lucky," the weathered mage told him afterwards. "That fisher vine was a young one. Older ones grow razor-sharp thorns along their length. I’m sure you can imagine what would have happened to you if one of those got ahold of you. Though admittedly, older fisher plants are easier to spot than young ones…"

How embarrassing. Still, at least he knew that he had made the bodyguard golems correctly – they had reacted quickly and precisely to the crisis and managed to keep the plant from dragging him off without breaking his bones in the process. Making golems that knew how to hold back their full strength like that was pretty hard, Zorian had found.

Zorian conceded the man’s point after that and did not stray from the main group too much. Zach, on the other hand, did not let that incident scare him off. He wandered around the area freely, unconcerned with the various dangers crawling about the place. Zorian supposed that Zach had a good reason to be so fearless, considering he had literal decades of experience at adventuring in dangerous environments, unlike Zorian.

"Stop!" Zorian called out to the group. They all obeyed him. He knew that some of the people gathered here looked down on him because of his age and perceived nepotism, but nobody doubted his ability to detect danger anymore. He pointed at the area slightly to the right of the group. "Two chameleon drakes up ahead. Big ones."

Chameleon drakes were the primary danger of the area. They were tough, agile, fast, could change the color of their hide so rapidly they were virtually invisible to the human eye, and routinely reached about 3.5 meters in length. They also sometimes hunted in groups, and had no compunctions about preying on humans. Green Hell was absolutely crawling with them for some reason.

Fortunately for the group, they had Zorian and his mind sense. Chameleon drakes might be a huge danger to most travelers, but to Zorian, their highly developed minds stood out like glittering stars in the night sky. The chameleon drakes were equipped with more than just speed, size and virtual invisibility; they were also quite intelligent by animal standards. On the verge of sapience, in Zorian’s estimation. Maybe even there, to an extent. This was no doubt a boon against most opponents, and did much to explain how they could give seasoned mages so much trouble, but it made their ambushes painfully obvious to a psychic of Zorian’s level.

Upon hearing Zorian’s warning, three people changed their stances and focused their attention on the area he indicated. One was Orissa, another was a young woman in bright blue clothes named Kirma and the third was a burly bearded man named Torun. These three were the scouts of the group, scanning their surroundings for dangers, obstacles and even the orb itself. A bit pointless, that last one, but being told that Zorian can simply detect the presence of the orb from a considerable distance seemed to have awoken some kind of competitive spirit in the three.

Each of the three had their own methods of gathering information. Orissa’s was through her bees, which she had scattered throughout the jungle around them. She carried on her back a huge backpack-looking thing that was actually a portable beehive. A constant stream of bees was constantly leaving the backpack under Orissa’s direction or returning to it to report their findings. It looked pretty heavy, but Orissa was carrying it with practiced ease. Zorian was unsure whether that was because Orissa was stronger than she looked, or if the hive was lightened in some way.

Orissa’s bees looked fairly mundane to Zorian’s amateur eyes. They didn’t have any special mental signature either – Zorian had initially thought that maybe they were unified into some kind of collective, like the cranium rats, but he found no evidence of that. He asked Orissa about them, and she admitted that the Taramatula couldn’t actually access the senses of their bees directly – instead they had some method of talking to the bees and getting usable information in the process.

Zorian could tell that whatever method the Taramatula used to direct and talk to their bees, it wasn’t a structured spell. Orissa never did any chanting or gesturing, nor did she use any obvious spell aids. The process seemed to be almost like breathing to her, as evidenced by the fact she could direct her bees and talk to Zorian at the same time without any visible strain.

Kirma, the blue-clothed woman, was probably the most mundane of the three scouting mages. She was clearly using classical scrying and other divinations for her work. What was noteworthy about her was the divination compass she was using. It was a large, heavy looking, multi-layered contraption of brass and silver, its shape vaguely reminiscent of a lotus flower. The petals were densely inscribed with mysterious glyphs and shapes that Zorian found hard to puzzle out through casual inspection.

The lotus device seemed to be highly effective, because Kirma was cycling through some rather complicated divinations with a speed that even Zorian would struggle to match.

Finally, there was Torun. Torun was constantly surrounded by a swarm of eyes that floated around him, twitching to-and-fro as something caught their attention. Each one was different, differing in size and internal structure of the eye from the others, and they looked very lifelike. To be precise, they looked like they had been extracted from corpses of various magical beings famous for their visual powers and then preserved in some fashion. Which was probably exactly what happened.

Zorian was about 90 percent sure that Torun couldn’t actually see through all of his eyes. In fact, he suspected that the man was limited to rapidly cycling between them instead of being able to process visual information from multiple eyes at once. There also seemed to be some severe distance limitations involved, because he never sent them too far into the jungle to scout things.

"You are once again correct," Orissa remarked after a while. "If I may ask, how are you detecting the drakes from such a distance? Is this also the work of this mysterious imperial inheritance you stumbled upon?"

"No, it’s just mind magic," Zorian said. He could tell most people suspected as much by now, so there was no need to be all secretive. A bunch of them had already cast some kind of mental defense spell on themselves when they thought Zorian wasn’t looking. "It’s something of a specialty of mine."

"I see," Orissa said, nodding. "I did suspect this was the case."

"Hey, little Kazinski," Torun called out to him. Zorian gave him an annoyed glare. That seemed to be the newest name Daimen’s group had given him, and he hated it. "How good is that mind magic of yours? Do you think you could snare one of those drakes and bring him over?"

Hmm. An interesting question. Chameleon drakes had considerable magic resistance, but it was nothing absurd. He just might be able to subvert one and puppeteer it for a while. However, after he did some subtle probing of their minds…

"No," he said, shaking his head. "Not these ones, at least. They’re a bonded pair, and would never abandon one another. I could dominate one of them perhaps, but the other would follow after them and defend them."

"Unnecessary fights will only slow us down," Daimen stated. "Leave the drakes alone, Zorian. Torun has enough eyes to play with, anyway."

"You can never have enough eyes," Torun said. "But actually, I was after the beast itself this time. Chameleon drakes, much like their more mundane cousins, have the curious ability to move each of their eyes independently of one another and thus focus on multiple things at once. And they have four of them. I suspect I could learn… interesting things from them."

"There is no shortage of chameleon drakes around here," the withered old mage from earlier said. "The kid can get you one later. Preferably a young one, so it does less damage when it inevitably breaks out of its bindings and rampages throughout the camp."

"Don’t even joke about that," Daimen told him. "Anyway, we’ll just go around them, I g-"

"No need," said Zorian. "They’re leaving. They’ve noticed that we’ve stopped walking for too long and found it suspicious, so they’ve called off the ambush."

"Even better," Daimen said, pleased. "Onward we go, then."

After a few minutes, Zach stopped his wandering and approached him.

"I’ve thought of something," he said. "What if you shapeshifted into a bird and simply flew around for a bit? I bet you could cover ground pretty fast that way."

"I’d be dead in a matter of minutes," Zorian said, shaking his head. He’d thought of that idea already and discarded it immediately afterwards. "The trees are pretty high here, and full of things that prey on birds. If I fly high enough to be safe, the ground would be beyond the marker’s detection radius. If I fly low, I probably get eaten by something."

"Ah," Zach winced. "Yeah, I didn’t think of that. And now that I think of it, the orb could easily end up being underground. Probably the best place to get some safety in a place like this."

"That’s it!" Daimen shouted, hitting himself in the forehead. He had evidently been eavesdropping on their conversation, the jerk. "That’s what I’ve been missing all this time. Underground! We should have been looking for the damn orb underground instead of simply searching through the foliage! I’m such an idiot…"

After that, Daimen called for everyone to stop and make a base camp so they could discuss things for a while. With this done, the group quickly came up with a plan to perform some kind of geomantic ritual spell that would map out the basic shape of the underworld and narrow down their search on that basis. Honestly, Zorian was feeling a bit lost there – he had studied many things over the course of the time loop, but ritual spells involving more than one caster were not one of them. He mostly kept to himself while the rest of the group was setting up the ritual. He thought about striking up a conversation with his fellow time traveler, but Zach seemed to be trying to hit on Kirma, so Zorian left him alone for now.

Eventually, his solitude was broken when Daimen pulled him to the edge of the camp, where Orissa was already waiting, so that the three of them could have a conversation about something. Zorian already had a pretty good idea what this was about.

"You’re interested in my mind magic, aren’t you?" Zorian asked Orissa, giving her a shrewd look.

"Ah, well…" Orissa fumbled slightly. "Was I that obvious? Yes, I must admit the topic intrigues me."

"It’s a personal secret," Zorian told her bluntly.

"Zorian!" Daimen protested, jumping to his fiancée’s aid.

"But I might be willing to share some of it if Daimen agrees to honestly answer a few questions for me," Zorian said, turning towards Daimen with a cheery smile.

"What kind of questions?" Daimen asked hesitantly.

"Questions about your own mind magic," Zorian told him, his smile turning into a frown. "Questions like why you never told me I was a natural mind mage when I was a child. You had to have known, as a fellow natural mind mage, but you never said anything and left me to suffer alone."

"W-What?" Daimen said, erupting into a burst of outraged laughter. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"I know you’re like me, Daimen," Zorian told him. "I can sense it. And you can sense me as well."

"No, I can’t," Daimen protested, shaking his head vigorously. "Maybe I have a potential for the sort of mental bullshit you’re capable of, but I was never taught how to do that. They told me I was an empath and taught me how to turn the ability on and off, and that’s it, okay? I don’t know what you’re talking about."

"You’re saying you never noticed anything unusual about me?" Zorian asked, frowning.

"Well…" Daimen laughed nervously. "I noticed you were very easy to read… but hell, that could have meant anything!"

"You suspected the truth," Zorian accused.

"Okay, so I did!" Daimen admitted. "But I couldn’t be sure, and why out myself for a mere suspicion? Especially to a brother that hated me and constantly got me into trouble! And really, what if it was true? What of it? If you really were an empath like me, that only made your actions more baffling and annoying."

"What good is empathy like that with no control?" Zorian snapped at him. "I couldn’t even walk into a crowd without consequences! If you had taken a bit of time to teach me how to turn it off, or at least told me what to watch out for, I wouldn’t have been nearly as baffling and annoying as you thought I was!"

The discussion then degenerated into several moments of incoherent shouting and accusations before Orissa decided to act and stopped the argument by interposing herself in between them.

"Why don’t we all take a break for a moment and calm down," Orissa said. Her bees synchronized their buzzing into an ominous hum. "You two are just talking past each other at this point. You’re making assumptions about each other that clearly aren’t true."

Zorian scoffed, and almost snapped at her as well for trying to use such petty intimidation tactics on him. As if he were afraid of a bunch of bees. Still, she kind of had a point that he and Daimen would probably be better served to sit down and have a more… sedate discussion about the issue.

Daimen backed down even sooner, too smitten with Orissa to really stand up to her on the issue.

Having successfully defused the situation, Orissa then excused herself, claiming this was something they had to work out on their own and that she didn’t want to intrude. Daimen tried to protest and keep her there, but Zorian was grateful for her action and gave her a small nod as she left.

After a while, they started talking. As it turns out, Daimen had been empathic for as long as he could remember. His empathy was nothing like Zorian’s, however. Daimen’s empathy was weaker than Zorian’s had been, but far more controllable. He never suffered any headaches in crowds, and he could focus it on specific people at will. He realized early on that this ability was something unique to him, and that he could get far more out of it if nobody knew he had it. Thus, he kept it a secret from everyone. During his time in the academy, he had realized that he was an empath and secured himself instruction from an older empath who had taught him how to turn his ability on and off and some minor tricks to improve its sensitivity and selectiveness.

Daimen had never developed a proper mind sense, and couldn’t identify other Open people on sight like Zorian could. Even his empathy was crude and unsophisticated by Zorian’s standards.

"I suspected you might be like me," Daimen said. "But then again, your actions were kind of strange for someone who could sense people’s emotions like I could, and that gave me pause. It never even occurred to me that your empathy might not work exactly the same as mine did. I still don’t understand what went wrong in your case when my empathy was such a boon to me. Why didn’t you say anything?"

"I did," Zorian said. "Mother and Father said they would throw me in a madhouse if I didn’t shut up about that topic."

"Ah ha ha…" Daimen laughed nervously. "I’m sure they were just joking around. You are way too sensitive about these things, Zorian."

Zorian did not attempt to argue with him. Since their parents had always fawned on Daimen so much, he had a very skewed image of them. There was probably no helping that.

"Look on the bright side, though," Daimen continued, trying to change the topic. "Since you had no preconceptions about your ability being empathy and thus limited to sensing emotions, you developed it into something far more amazing. I’m really jealous of that, to be honest. I didn’t know there was more to my ability until I met Orissa and the Taramatula."

Hmm. If the Taramatula knew about Daimen’s innate mind magic talent, it was no wonder they were so understanding about Orissa wanting to marry him. He was famous, good looking, a mage prodigy and a natural mind mage? Truthfully, if Zorian was in Daimen’s place, he would be wondering if Orissa ever actually loved him or was simply going after him out of sheer opportunism.

"What did Orissa want to talk to me about, anyway?" Zorian asked.

"Oh. Well, I think you kind of already gave her an answer to that," Daimen said. "She wanted to see if the mental ability you were using is the same one I have."

"Ah, I see," Zorian nodded. "The Taramatula are hoping it’s inheritable, I’m guessing."

"Is it?" Daimen asked.

"Probably," Zorian shrugged. "I’ve heard that abilities like that never just spring out of nowhere in a child, and it’s a bit of a stretch that the two of us have the same ability through luck alone. There is clearly some kind of inheritance thing going on, but it’s hard to say whether your children would be guaranteed to inherit it."

"A lot of bloodlines aren’t guaranteed for children to inherit in their raw state," Daimen said. "There are often artificial methods of ensuring inheritance involved, such as specialized potions and rituals. I doubt the Taramatula will care much."

Any further discussion was interrupted when one of Daimen’s teammates came up to them to notify them the ritual was ready, and that they were only waiting for Daimen.

"Alright, we’ll continue with this topic some other time," Daimen said. "For now, let’s focus on finally tracking down that damn orb."

Like many places, Green Hell had an extensive network of underground tunnels running beneath it. Indeed, the local underworld was unusually complex, which helped explain why the area was so rich in ambient mana and why it was so abundant in dangerous wildlife. Even if one limited themselves to surface layers of the Dungeon, reasoning that Awan-Temti wouldn’t have wanted to descend too far, that was a lot of tunnels to cover. Thus, when Daimen’s team presented them all with a three-dimensional illusion of the local underground, Zorian could only stare at it in confusion. How the hell does this information help them narrow down their search? They would still have to walk through most of the area to cover all the tunnels reasonably close to the surface.

However, Daimen seemed to see something important in the floating image, because he soon pointed his finger at five places on the map.

"Here, here, here, here and here," he said, poking the illusion in five different places, causing it to waver for a second before correcting itself. The spots looked completely random to Zorian. "We should focus on these areas to start with."

"I don’t understand," Zorian complained to Zach. "On what basis is he picking those five places?"

He had been hoping that Zach, having decades of experience in adventuring, would see something in Daimen’s choices that he missed. His hopes turned out to have been misplaced, however.

"No idea," Zach told him. "That map is a total mess to me. He’s probably just bullshitting to make himself look more knowledgeable and experienced. I used to do that a lot when I ended up in charge of something. Never let your peons know you actually have no idea what you’re doing."

"I can hear you two just fine, you know," Daimen told them in an annoyed tone.

"I wasn’t trying to be quiet," Zach pointed out.

Daimen didn’t reply. Instead he simply pointed them towards the nearest of the five places and motioned for everyone to start moving.

They were only halfway to the first spot when Zorian suddenly stopped. He had been spamming Key detection requests to his marker on a regular basis as they walked and now it actually reacted to something.

He found the orb.

"It’s here," Zorian said excitedly.

"What? What’s here?" Daimen asked in confusion.

"The orb, of course," Zorian said. Was he intentionally being stupid? "It’s here, I can sense it."

"Do you mean it’s right below us, or…?" asked Zach, speculatively looking at the ground beneath his feet. Probably considering how best to excavate the huge amount of dirt between them and the nearest tunnel.

"No, but close," Zorian said, pointing towards the north-east.

The group stared in the indicated direction for a while, as if that was going to help them see the orb through all the dirt and vegetation that was in the way.

"Is there anything notable in that direction?" Daimen asked Kirma. She was the one who kept detailed maps of the region, stored in her lotus device.

She quickly consulted her device for an answer.

"Actually… yes, there is," she said hesitantly. "There is a chameleon drake nesting ground over in that direction. Because the place is so relatively prominent, it was one of the first places we checked."

"I remember now," Daimen said. "Chassanah insisted we check it out. Said that of course the orb is in the most dangerous place in the area, how could it be anywhere else?"

He pointed at the weathered old man who had advised Zorian caution earlier.

"And I was right, see?" Chassanah said. "We should have looked harder."

"But I don’t understand," Kirma protested. "We searched that place. There is nothing there."

"We never actually set foot in the place, though," Torun pointed out. "We just checked it out remotely."

"We were thorough," Kirma insisted. "There was nothing there. Awan-Temti was traveling with his entire entourage when he disappeared and was carrying a hefty supply train. We saw no evidence that a group of that size perished there."

"It’s been a long time since Awan-Temti walked the earth," Torun said, shrugging. "And it’s possible the fool got separated from his entourage and perished there alone. Maybe the orb is buried under some rock in one of the caves, and is protected against divinations."

"I… suppose," Kirma reluctantly conceded. She seemed unwilling to admit she may have missed the orb in her earlier search. She probably saw it as a blow against her personal pride.

A decision was made to make another attempt at searching the place. The group approached the nesting ground as close as possible without provoking the chameleon drakes into swarming them and then systematically scried the place.

The place was actually not that big. Neither the cenote itself nor the caves dug into its walls were connected to the Dungeon, so there was only so much ground that their spells had to cover. Despite that, no amount of divinations, remote scouts and other information gathering methods could find the orb. There was no evidence of any kind of treasure there.

"It’s definitely there," Zorian insisted stubbornly. He knew what his marker was telling him. "It’s right there in that biggest cave near the bottom of the cenote – the one that looks natural instead of being artificially dug up by the chameleon drakes."

"We already searched that one a million times with everything we could think of," Kirma said, sounding very annoyed with him. "Torun even risked sending one of his rarer eyes in there, the one that can see through solid objects. There is nothing there, okay!? Your legacy is malfunctioning."

Zorian sighed. There was no point in arguing about this, anymore.

"I need to get physical access to that cave," he told Zach. "I’m sure I can find it, but I need to be actually there, not watching things through a divination screen or a remote sensor."

"Got it," Zach said, rising to his feet and dusting himself off. "I’ll deal with the lizards, you just stay behind me and keep them from flanking me or something."

"Not so fast, you two," Daimen told them. "Do you honestly think we would just stay on the sidelines and watch you either get horribly killed or claim the orb for yourselves? That’s a lose-lose proposition. We came here together, and we’ll execute this assault together as well."

"This is stupid," Kirma complained.

"We’re doing it anyway," Daimen said. "If Zorian says the orb is there, it’s there. However, let’s not charge into the cenote like idiots. I’d rather induce them to swarm out and blunder into a trap. Here’s what we’re going to do…"

In the depths of the Kothic jungle, a fierce battle was raging. On one side there were nearly a hundred chameleon drakes charging in defense of their homes and young, and on the other side was a group of 19 people that had brazenly thrown irritating gas into the cenote to flush them out. Though the chameleon drakes looked brutish, they were not dumb. They knew they were being provoked, but they also knew they had to answer this challenge. This wasn’t the first time someone had tried to take their cenote habitat away from them, and it wouldn’t be the last.

Daimen’s group had set up a minefield between themselves and the cenote when they had provoked the chameleon drakes, but they had underestimated their opponents. Rather than launch a frontal charge at Daimen’s group, the chameleon drakes split their group into two halves and charged at them in two wide arcs, aiming to hit their flanks from both directions.

One might think the drakes had spotted the trap and reacted accordingly, but Zorian could peer into their minds and knew they hadn’t. Cold, hard experience had taught this particular group not to face their enemies head on if they could avoid it, especially if they were human.

The two groups crashed into each other and the chameleon drakes came out for the worse in the process. They were impressive beasts, fast and strong, but their strengths were most pronounced when attacking from an ambush. Their virtual invisibility did not work well if they were constantly on the move and the lightning-fast tongue attack they liked to use as an opening strike was less effective on a creature that expected it.

It didn’t help that Daimen’s group had several powerful mages, including Zach.

With a practiced movement, Zorian fired a glittering orange star at the chameleon drake in front of him. The large reptile reacted with impressive agility, throwing itself to the side to avoid the projectile and folding its front claws over its face to protect its eyes from the imminent explosion. And the explosion did come, just like the chameleon drake predicted, singeing its scales but not doing any truly critical damage.

It landed right on its feet with the nimbleness of a housecat, its four conical eyes whirring around, each in its own direction, in an attempt to reorient itself. Finally, it fixed its front two eyes on Zorian, the other two eyes twitching about for any hint of an attack from behind and it opened its large, toothy mouth wide open.

It was the mistake that Zorian had been waiting for. He launched a force lance at the chameleon drake and then immediately followed it with a double-layered shield around himself, casting them so quickly that it almost appeared as if he cast two spells simultaneously. The chameleon drake shot its spear-like tongue at Zorian, punching through one layer of his shield but failing to penetrate the second. Before it could retract its tongue for another go, however, the force lance hit it straight in the throat through its open mouth, bypassing the tough scales that protected its body.

The drake dropped on the ground immediately, kicking and thrashing about like it was having a seizure, kicking up plumes of dust in its death throes. Zorian spent a second to make sure it was down for good and then turned his attention to the rest of the targets.

He was just in time to see Chassanah stumble over an ill-placed rock and fall to the ground some distance away from him. His opponent, one of the slightly smaller chameleon drakes that only barely reached 3 meters in length, immediately took advantage of this to try and pounce at him.

Fortunately, Zorian had his golems scattered through the entire group, and one was nearby. The golem, devoid of self-preservation and acting under Zorian’s telepathic orders, launched itself at the chameleon drake with a full-body tackle. It crashed into the chameleon drake’s flank, causing it to veer off-course and giving Chassanah enough time to recover and get back to his feet.

"You okay, old man?" Zorian asked him, running up to him to make sure he didn’t hit his head in the fall or something. The chameleon drake seemed to be busy slamming his golem repeatedly into the ground, outraged that its interference had costed it its kill.

"I’m fine," he said, shaking his head. "How embarrassing. Here I am, lecturing the younger generation about the need for modesty and caution and whatnot, and then I make a stupid mistake like this. Bah! It’s true as they say, you learn things all your life and still die a fool."

Looking around the battlefield, Zorian realized that the chameleon drakes were getting beaten back at every front. On one side, Orissa was using her bees to attack the sensitive eyes of the drakes, making them flail around in panic as they attempted to dislodge such tiny opponents from themselves. Daimen and other members of his team then finished off the blinded drakes by focusing their fire on them one at a time. On the other, Zach disdained any sort of fancy tactics and simply used a pair of floating black swords to slice any chameleon drake that came close to pieces. The swords seemed to pass through the beasts' tough hide without resistance, killing them instantly. The drakes eventually grew fearful to even approach him, choosing instead to pursue other targets.

Soon, the chameleon drakes seemed to collectively realize that the confrontation wasn’t going well for them and started to retreat. Amusingly, some of them chose to retreat directly through the minefield that they had missed in the initial charge, which resulted in another couple of fatalities among their number without Daimen’s group needing to do anything to make it happen. Only a few died before the rest learned to stay clear of that area, however.

Taking stock of the situation after the battle, Zorian noted that no one in Daimen’s group died in the fighting, so this could be safely described as a resounding victory. Even though things could have gone a lot smoother than this, in his opinion.

However, there was a problem. While the chameleon drakes retreated, they did not flee entirely. They simply withdrew towards the cenote and then stopped. They seemed unwilling to give up their home, even if they knew they were beaten.

They started hissing loudly in their direction, puffing themselves up to look bigger and making threatening movement towards them.

"Are… are they trying to intimidate us or something?" Daimen asked incredulously.

"I think so, yeah," Zorian said.

"They lost a fight and now they’re resorting to threats instead? That’s amusingly outrageous," Torun said. "I guess there is no harm in trying, from their perspective. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, eh… it was worth a try."

The threatening display didn’t dissuade them from advancing, of course. The orb was down there, so getting access to the cenote was a must. However, when they started moving towards the cenote again, the chameleon drakes changed their behavior. They stopped trying to intimidate them and instead threw their heads into the air and started to… wail.

Zorian did not know how to describe it. It wasn’t really a wail in the human sense, but the sound was loud, repetitive and pitiful. And all the chameleon drakes were doing it in unison. It was like the entire group in front of them was cursing the heavens for abandoning them.

"Damn, these things are actually making me feel sorry for them a little," Daimen complained. "I kind of feel like a villain here."

"They’re not crying," Zorian said, a terrible realization growing in the back of his head. "They’re calling for help. Summoning assistance."

"They’re what?" Daimen frowned. "Kirma, can you check–"

The entire group stumbled as a tremor shook the earth beneath them, centered on the cenote.

"What the hell was that!?" Daimen demanded. It wasn’t clear who he was talking to, but it was Kirma who eventually answered, after consulting her lotus device.

"The water in the cenote," she said. "It’s churning…"

Then Zorian felt it. Before, the cenote felt mostly dead to his senses, and even scrying from the group failed to locate anything of interest. Now, however, Zorian could feel a mind dwelling there. Something big, mean…

…and hungry.

"Okay, tactical retreat, tactical retreat," Zorian said gesturing everyone to start retreating from the cenote. He noticed that the chameleon drakes had stopped wailing and instead looked rather expectant and… almost gleeful. "We have something seriously big and hostile coming up from there. I think–"

He didn’t have time to think. Something huge and dark blue unfolded itself out of the cenote. At first Zorian thought he was looking at some kind of animated tree or a giant sea anemone, but then the branches stilled for a second and it became obvious what he was looking at.

It was a hydra. A really, really big one. Eight draconic-looking heads observed the world around it with interest, eventually zeroing in on the group of humans in the distance. Its eight mouths opened up slightly, exposing rows and rows of dagger-like teeth, and began to salivate.

"Oh," said Zach happily in the resulting silence, his eyes shining with a fire that Zorian rarely saw in him. "Looks like I might have some actual fun here after all!"

As if reacting to his statement, the hydra opened all eight of its mouths and let loose a deafening roar.

69. Ruin

Zorian could tell right away that the hydra in front of them was not normal. First of all, it was too big. He was no expert on hydras, but he knew that even the largest ones didn’t grow more than 10 meters in length. This one seemed to be at least twice that size, if the size of its heads was of any indication. Then there was the matter of how suddenly it had appeared on his senses. There was no way he could miss something like that with even casual inspection, nevermind the detailed sweep he had done on the cenote. The mind he was currently sensing was one of the most distinctive things he had ever witnessed through his mind sense, and it should have drawn his attention immediately. The hydra seemed to have nine minds – one for each head, and a ninth one that served as a kind of… overmind, for the lack of a better term. The individual heads seemed to be somehow suborned to the main mind of the hydra, which was probably in charge of coordinating the heads towards an overarching goal. It was kind of fascinating.

Then the hydra pointed all eight of its heads at them and roared. If they were dealing with a normal hydra, this would just be a cheap intimidation tactic. Instead, the roar was infused with potent wind magic, battering the whole group with a powerful gust of wind. Zach and Zorian simply glued their feet to the ground with non-structured magic, and Daimen protected most of his team with an impressively quick force wall spell. Sadly, that still left four people at the mercy of the incoming wind attack. Of those four, one was Chassanah, who simply stabbed his staff into the ground and held on to it with pure physical strength. Zorian was impressed – the old man looked kind of gaunt, but there seemed to be surprising strength hidden under his wiry frame. As for the other three, they were not as quick on their feet and merely released a chorus of short cries and screams as they were blown off their feet and sent tumbling into the distance. They didn’t die, but they wouldn’t be getting up any time soon.

Zach was the one who handled the surprise attack the best. While everyone else, even Zorian, was scrambling to withstand the roar somehow, Zach was already casting some kind of complex spell in retaliation. He transformed the entire area in front of him into a field of roughly-hewn stone blades before the windstorm even had time to die down, all of them wreathed in ominous red light. Then he slammed both of his hands into the earth before him, sending them all hurtling towards the hydra.

The monster took one look at the approaching cloud of stony death, its many eyes widening in surprise and fear, then immediately cut its roar short and withdrew all of its heads back into the cenote. The chameleon drakes, still arranged around the cenote, were not as quick. The rain of blades slammed into the area around the cenote, burying themselves deep into the jungle soil and impaling through any chameleon drakes that were unfortunate enough to be in the way. The lucky ones were slain on the spot by the stone shards. The less fortunate ones wailed like wounded pigs as the red light that infused the blades spread throughout their bodies and started liquefying their insides.

The surviving chameleon drakes lost any semblance of group cohesion and simply scattered in all directions, abandoning their former home, the pained cries of their dying brethren motivating them to keep going until they had left the range of Zorian’s mind sense entirely.

Zach wasn’t really paying attention to the chameleon drakes, though. They were just collateral damage. The moment he had launched the rain of flesh-dissolving blades at the hydra, before he had even known whether it would hit its target or not, he was already casting another spell. Thus, the moment the hydra withdrew back into the cenote, Zach sent a pair of pale blue balls of magical energy after it.

Zorian would later find out that the projectiles were meant to freeze the water at the bottom of the cenote, hopefully imprisoning the hydra in a block of ice. Unfortunately for that idea, the hydra didn’t retreat back into the water. It simply ducked out of the path of Zach’s attack and then decided to jump out of the cenote and charge at the group.

Seeing the giant hydra jump out of the cenote with the same ease a housecat jumps onto the kitchen table really drove in the point that they were dealing with something entirely out of the ordinary. Normal hydras were just highly venomous and capable of impressive tissue regeneration, especially in regards to their heads. They were not known to be especially fast or agile out of the water.

The charge of the hydra was unstoppable. Daimen and his team launched a constant stream of different attack spells at the hydra, all in vain. Every projectile they launched was intercepted by the hydra’s many heads before it could hit its main body, inflicting damage that was soon undone by the hydra’s natural regeneration ability. A hydra’s regeneration was most potent in regards to its heads, even capable of overcoming fire damage and other things that usually foiled regenerators, but its main body was a lot more vulnerable. Daimen’s group clearly knew this, and thus aimed for the main body with every attack they made, but the hydra was too quick and canny for this to work.

Zorian refrained from joining in on the attack. If Daimen’s whole group couldn’t break through, his addition would likely be a meaningless waste of mana. He simply focused on figuring out how its mind works, conserved his mana and repositioned his golems so he could respond in time upon spotting an appropriate opening. Fortunately, the hydra seemed focused primarily on Zach, having identified him as its biggest threat.

Well, perhaps it was a bit callous of Zorian to say that… but in his defense, Zach looked quite happy at the fact that he had attracted the hydra’s ire with his earlier spell. Seemingly ignoring the massive hydra thundering towards him, Zach cast two lengthy spells. The first created a large ball of soft white light that just hung there above his head, seemingly doing nothing at all. The other produced no visible effects, but Zorian’s magic perception was pretty good by now and he could sense eight magical constructs suddenly springing into existence around Zach.

Soon, the hydra was close enough to Zach to attack. At that moment, all eight heads struck, surging towards Zach like coiled springs. Somewhere behind him, Zorian could hear some member of Daimen’s team scream out a warning to Zach, as if that was going to do him any good now. At the same time, though, the eight concealed spell constructs surrounding Zach also sprang into motion, surging forward to meet the hydra’s heads. Eight spectral shark jaws faded into existence, already in the process of biting down towards the attacking heads. The hydra, suddenly realizing it had blundered into a trap, tried to abort its attack.

It was too late. It was too big and had too much momentum. Whatever magic gave it such abnormal speed and agility had its limits. The spectral jaws slammed shut, slicing through hydra scale and muscle alike with ridiculous ease. Panicked, the hydra seemed to dip into some secret reserves of strength that allowed it to quickly extricate most of its heads before they were bitten off.

Most, but not all. One of the spectral jaws caught its target particularly well and then kept biting down. With a loud crunch, the jaws bit right through the hydra head’s spine, separating it from the main body.

The hydra’s remaining seven heads roared in pain and anger, the headless neck of its eighth head flailing around madly and spraying blood everywhere around it. This wasn’t a wound its regeneration could fix – the head wasn’t damaged, it was just plain gone. It would regrow in time, but this process would happen too slowly to have any influence on the outcome of this battle.

Zorian expected that Zach would now use the mysterious ball of white light floating above his head, but the spell remained inert. Instead, he once again created a field of stone blades in front of him. Before he could launch it at the hydra, however, it suddenly retracted its heads closer to its main body and wrapped itself into something resembling a scaly, fleshy sphere. Then it disappeared into thin air.

When it appeared again, it was suddenly next to Daimen and his group.

"Of course it can teleport as well," Zorian mumbled to himself.

It should have been more surprising. Teleportation magic was usually very impractical for large creatures, because the costs increased explosively with the volume of the thing being teleported. Instead, it almost seemed appropriate. Zorian by now strongly suspected that they were dealing with some kind of ancient guardian from Awan-Temti’s time, back when gods still meddled in mortal affairs and granted potent powers to those that caught their fancy. It was to be expected that something like this would be equipped with strange and potent abilities.

He pointed at the air in front of him and a large, semi-transparent disc of force materialized in the air before him. Zorian hopped onto it and flew off in the direction of the hydra. He was fine with letting Zach face the hydra on his own, but Daimen and the people around him would probably need his help to stay alive.

Chassanah, who was still near Zorian by this point, copied his trick and followed after him on a force disc of his own.

The sudden teleportation, while very impressive from a creature that big, seemed to take a lot out of the hydra. Instead of striking immediately, it took a few seconds to uncoil and catch its breath before attacking again. This blunted some of the shock among Daimen’s group and allowed them to organize themselves somewhat before it struck.

When it did strike, however, it was devastating. A layer of shields was erected in front of the group, but it was smashed into rapidly fading smoke and motes of light in under a second. Desperate to keep the hydra away from himself and his men, Daimen conjured a giant ectoplasmic version of himself, which then physically tackled the hydra. The giant ghostly Daimen snatched two of the hydra’s heads with its ghostly hands and tried to wrestle it to the ground. This didn’t quite work, but it did keep three of the hydra’s heads too busy to attack anyone else and stopped it from moving freely on the battlefield, so it wasn’t really a failure either.

Kirma fired a swarm of drill-like projectiles at the hydra, each of them unerringly homing in on the hydra’s sensitive points – eyes, mouth, ears, nostrils. This was rather remarkable, as most homing spells were not nearly that precise in their aiming. Especially since the miniature drills were moving with incredible speeds, which would further complicate homing functions of most spells. Zorian could only imagine the lotus machine she carried was somehow responsible for that feat.

Zorian would have thought Orissa would be entirely useless in this kind of fight, since the hydra was unlikely to even notice bee stings. However, she surprised him. Her bees suddenly became encased in an orange aura that caused the air around them to ripple from the intense heat emanating off them. From that point on, they flew faster and burned all that they touched, like a thousand tiny flying furnaces. Occasionally she would make a quick gesture, causing some of the bees to detonate, creating tiny but intense explosions that charred the hydra’s tough, scaly skin wherever they touched it. And because the bees were so tiny, they could simply fly past the more durable, regenerating heads and strike at the hydra’s main body.

Zorian also added some pressure on the hydra himself, launching a force lance, an incinerating beam and two severing discs at the hydra as he flew towards the battle site. He didn’t really think he would inflict real damage with that, but every second the hydra spent on dealing with those attacks was a second it couldn’t spare on dealing with Daimen and the others.

Despite all of these efforts, the hydra still had seven heads left, and it was hard to keep them all constantly busy. Zorian had to sacrifice one of his golems to save Orissa from having her head bitten off when the hydra finally figured out where the annoying burning, exploding bees were coming from. Torun also sacrificed one of his larger eyes to survive an attack, causing the eye in question to burst into a copious amount of translucent slime that formed a thin, rubbery dome around him. The head that was targeting him bit down on the dome and, despite its apparent flimsiness, failed to punch through. The dome bent and stretched, but did not break.

Unfortunately, not everyone targeted by the hydra had such a life-saving method prepared. One of the mages was bitten nearly in half before anyone could do anything about it, dying on the spot. The other had his arm pumped full of venom when the hydra grazed it with its jaws. Daimen immediately cut off the limb in question and then directed one of the mages to teleport him and all the other wounded away from the battlefield.

Additionally, one of the men tried to circle the hydra and attack it from behind, only to have his legs shattered in response when the hydra revealed that its tail was also a potent weapon, able to strike at things with great force and speed. Zorian didn’t begrudge the man his agonized screaming – he still remembered how much it had hurt when the grey hunter had done the same to him.

Finally, Daimen found a good moment to spring his trap. The hydra managed to get through some of the defensive spells and sent one of its heads towards Daimen, who threw a mundane-looking red projectile at it. Sensing no great danger, the hydra simply bit down on the projectile to make it go away… shattering the potion bottle hidden inside the projectile right inside its mouth.

The hydra as a whole flinched back as it sensed the alchemical mixture pour down its throat, stopping all of its attacks. The affected head released an agonizing scream as it rapidly began to transform into glittering white crystal. Its natural regeneration was unable to halt the process and it seemed inevitable that the entire hydra would rapidly crystalize and turn into a lifeless, glittering statue.

Without hesitation, one of the hydra’s other heads bit down on the neck of the rapidly crystalizing head and tore it off in a shower of blood and gore. Now down to six heads, but safe from the crystallization poison, the hydra gave Daimen a murderous look and prepared for another charge.

Unfortunately for the hydra, this was when Zach, Zorian and Chassanah reached the battlefield and the tide shifted. Chassanah circled the battlefield, casting barrier after barrier and preventing anyone else from being killed or seriously wounded by the hydra’s multitude of attacks. Zorian had figured out enough of its mind to start messing with its aim and timing, and occasionally launched combat spells at it as well when he spotted a good opening.

Then there was Zach. Unlike Zorian and Chassanah, he didn’t bother with a force disc – when the hydra teleported away from him, he simply jumped into the air and flew off towards the new battlefield like it was the most normal thing in the world, his eight spectral jaws in tow. The mysterious white orb was still floating over his head, too. As he traveled, another three identical orbs joined the one he made earlier, equally passive for now. When he finally reached the hydra, the spectral jaws that trailed behind him surged forward, biting towards it, and it was instantly put on the defensive.

Naturally, this was when the hydra pulled another one of its surprise abilities. It roared again, breathing clouds of bright green gas in every direction. Everyone was forced to temporarily retreat from what was likely some kind of poison mist, giving the hydra some much needed respite.

The battle continued. The hydra lost another head, then two. The hydra managed to rob Zach of all of his spectral jaws and wounded another one of Daimen’s men. Zorian managed to hit the hydra’s main body with a shredder sphere, inflicting a lasting wound on it. All of his golems ended up being reduced to scrap, however. Daimen’s ectoplasmic giant was dispersed, but Daimen managed to slice off its tail in response. At first glance, it seemed like they were winning and that victory was only a matter of time… but the truth was that they were steadily running out of mana. The hydra might be on the verge of collapse, but so were they. Even Zach’s seemingly inexhaustible mana reserves were starting to run out.

They didn’t want to retreat. At least one person was dead, many had suffered serious injuries, and they had used a lot of expensive resources during the course of the battle. On top of that, while the hydra was grievously wounded, it would recover quickly if it was left alone. Far faster than their group would. If they fled and came back later, it would probably be back in top health, with all of its heads back.

The hydra didn’t want to retreat either. It had only three of its heads left, but it knew it could recover from this setback very quickly. Its enemies were visibly weakening, it just had to keep going and outlast them. Besides, turning its back to such dangerous enemies was lunacy – all of its instincts were telling it that doing so would be a mistake. Better to risk fighting to the bitter end than be cut down from the back as it fled.

In the end, though, they had all underestimated Zach again. Sometime during the fighting, Zach had created another white ball to join the four he had prepared earlier. He then spent the rest of the battle arranging the five balls around the battlefield and trying to maneuver the hydra into the center of their formation. Although no one except Zach knew what they were supposed to do, his performance was impressive enough that everyone did their best to help him with this. The hydra was wary of the balls in the beginning, but as time passed and they remained little more than glowing ornaments, it began to mostly ignore them.

Eventually, Daimen instructed his men to feign a panicked rout and the hydra recklessly followed after them, stepping right in the middle of the resulting formation. In that very moment, Zach made a strange hand sign and the balls activated. A web of brightly shining threads unfolded out of them, reaching across empty space to intertwine with each other and trap the hydra under a dome of delicate-looking threads.

The hydra experimentally brushed against the dome of threads and hissed in pain as they lacerated its flesh like a thousand interlocking razors.

And then the dome began to shrink.

Everyone watched, exhausted, as the giant hydra futilely fought to break out of the dome of razor threads closing in on it. It bellowed in rage again and again, defiant to the very end. Finally, with its entire body mangled and only one head left intact, it once again curled into a ball and teleported out of the sphere.

Unlike the first teleport, this one did not take it very far. In fact, the hydra appeared right next to the rapidly shrinking sphere, having transported itself just far enough to escape immediate death. It swayed on its feet as it unrolled, looking as if was going to keel over dead at any moment. However, before that could happen, it lifted its head one last time and gave Daimen a bitter, murderous look. Though it was actually Zach that was responsible for its current predicament, it had been chasing after Daimen and his men when it blundered into the trap, and it viewed him as the primary culprit of its current predicament.

Through his magic perception, Zorian suddenly detected a massive buildup of magic in the hydra. In fact, virtually everyone seemed to have detected it, considering how they flinched in surprise. Before anyone could do anything, the hydra opened its last remaining mouth and fired a beam of pitch black energy straight at Daimen.

Eyes widening, Daimen reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, unassuming mirror, thrusting it in front of himself as some kind of shield.

The beam hit. The mirror shattered as if hit by a bomb, the sound of its destruction reverberating throughout the surroundings with unnatural loudness. Daimen himself was blown back like a rag doll, the arm that held the mirror clearly broken. The black beam was gone, however, as if it had never existed in the first place.

For a full second, the hydra seemed to stare at the scene. Then, it shuddered for a moment and collapsed to the side, dead.

The battle was over.

The immediate aftermath of the fight was, in many ways, more nerve-wracking for Zorian than the actual fight had been. After checking up on everyone, it turned out that only one person had actually died in the fighting – Goliri Ardat, the guy that got bitten in half by the hydra near the start of the fighting. However, Goliri was best friends with one of the other men in the group, Alachi Gotrum. Alachi was devastated and furious that his friend had died, and he felt the primary person responsible for his death was Zorian. It had been Zorian who had insisted that they had to gain access to the deepest cave in the cenote, after all. The man had kept hurling insults at Zorian for over five minutes, and even tried to attack him physically before Zach intervened.

Unfortunately, that’s when two more members of Daimen’s team spoke up in support of Alachi. The guy who had lost his arm due to the hydra’s poison and the man who’d had his legs shattered by its tail were also very unhappy. They were essentially crippled, and they likewise blamed Zorian for it. Likely Zach as well, but they were too intimidated by his combat prowess to piss him off. Zorian, on the other hand, looked like an easier target.

During all of that, Daimen tried to play peacemaker and calm his men down, but he never expressed any support for Zorian. This pissed off Zorian more than it probably should have. He knew that this was his team and that he couldn’t just categorically side with Zorian just because he was his brother, but it left a bitter taste in his mouth that Daimen hadn’t said so much as a single word in his defense. Instead, it was Chassanah who eventually sided with him. The old man seemed to have taken a liking to Zorian.

This started another round of accusations concerning Zorian’s obvious proficiency in mind magic, with Alachi claiming Zorian was clearly mind controlling people and that police should get involved.

The moment police involvement was mentioned, Daimen seemed to shift tracks in his methods of resolving the conflict. He stopped the discussion, dragged Alachi to the side and erected a privacy ward around the two of them. Zorian had no idea what was said between them, but Alachi no longer bothered him after this.

As for the two crippled mages, Daimen told them that their wounds weren’t necessarily unrecoverable with the right treatments and promised to pay as much as he had to in order to get them back in top shape. This seemed to mellow them out a lot, and they no longer made any fuss either.

With that particular crisis somewhat resolved, they could finally inspect their gains. They dropped off most of the wounded at the nearest hospital (Daimen decided to just put his broken arm in a cast and return to the field) and gated back to the site of the battle.

The first gain was actually the dead hydra. Daimen and his team were quite excited about its potential worth. The sums involved weren’t much to Zorian, but that was just the time loop messing with his sense of proportion when it came to money. If they could really find an appropriate buyer for this thing, the hydra could get Daimen and his team enough money to turn a lot of heads.

The dead chameleon drakes would also be gathered and sold, although their value was far less than that of a hydra. Especially since Zach’s spells had really made a mess out of a lot of them, making many of the corpses borderline useless.

As they walked around, inspecting chameleon drake corpses, Zorian heard Daimen complaining to Orissa about his broken mirror. Apparently it was a divine artifact that Daimen had found on one of his expeditions and decided to keep. It was supposed to be utterly indestructible, and had saved Daimen’s life many times in the past, and now it was gone. He was thoroughly heartbroken over that, and Orissa pointing out that at least he was alive thanks to its sacrifice didn’t seem to cheer him up much.

"Ready, little Kazinski?" Torun said, slapping Zorian on the back a little harder than was necessary. "Let’s go get that orb that you’re so sure is down there, eh?"

Zorian said nothing. Before descending into the depths of the cenote, the group carefully checked the place again in order to see if there were any more giant magical hydras or worse things lurking nearby. They found no evidence of such, but they also failed to figure out how they had missed the hydra in the first place, which was worrying. The water at the bottom was frozen as a result of the two projectiles that Zach had sent down here at the start of the fight, but there was no evidence of any kind of underwater cave the hydra could have hidden itself in. It was like the hydra simply popped into existence out of nowhere when the chameleon drakes called for it.

When they finally entered the cave Zorian had pointed out, the orb was nowhere to be found. Zorian expected as much, though, and wasn’t really worried.

"Can you still sense it?" Daimen asked anxiously. He was probably a bit desperate to get some tangible results from gaining access to this place, so that he could justify the losses he suffered to get here… both to himself and to others.

"I can," Zorian confirmed. He walked towards the far end of the cave and jabbed his finger at the empty air in front of him. "It’s here. It’s at this exact spot, even."

He waved his hand through the air where he sensed the orb and it passed through it without resistance.

"Yet I can’t actually see it, or even touch it," Zorian added. "How curious."

Everyone who had even the slightest amount of expertise in divinations, or detection magic in general, immediately gathered around the spot, poking, staring and casting magic at it. After ten minutes of that, Daimen finally got a result.

"I can’t believe this," Daimen said, running his hand through his hair in annoyance.

"You have something?" Kirma asked hopefully.

"It’s a hidden world," Daimen said.

"A what?" Zorian asked, having never encountered that term before.

"A pocket dimension, like the one you think Silverlake is hiding in," Zach told him. "They are normally almost impossible to find unless you know exactly what to look for. Thus, some people call them hidden worlds."

"So this spot that little Kazinski has pointed out…?" Torun asked hesitantly.

"An entrance to the… pocket dimension where the orb resides," Daimen said, giving Zorian a complex look. "Damnit. All of Awan-Temti’s other belongings are probably there too. No wonder we hadn’t found any trace of his group in all this time. We would have never found this without Zorian, even if we had spent years combing this place."

"But we did have him, and thus the expedition is saved," Torun said with a careless shrug. "What are you being so gloomy about?"

"What indeed," Daimen mumbled.

"Anyway, now we just have to figure out how to break through this invisible door thing and we’ll be free to loot Awan-Temti’s tomb to our hearts' content, yes?" Torun asked.

"Yes, but I’d like to point out that this is probably where the giant magical hydra had come from," Chassanah butted in. "What if there are more of them inside? What if there are worse things waiting for us there? We shouldn’t be reckless."

"Yes, Chassanah is right," Daimen nodded. "We lost too much here as it is. I want to hire more fighters before we try to set foot there."

"I’d like to stay here for a while and study the entrance point for a bit," Zorian said, frowning. "Something doesn’t feel right about this."

"Fine," Daimen sighed. "But don’t do anything before consulting me! Look, but don’t touch."

Zorian nodded. Over the next two hours he scrutinized the pocket dimension entrance point while paying attention to the way his marker reacted to it. He also asked Daimen to teach him whatever spells he had used to confirm the presence of a pocket dimension. Daimen mumbled something about how he would normally charge an arm and a leg for a confidential magic like that, but taught him the spells anyway.

After two hours had passed, he was finally certain of his conclusions. He called Daimen over and asked him for permission to do something.

"Something?" Daimen said warily.

"Something," Zorian nodded.

"And if I refuse, you and Zach are going to come back here when my back is turned and do it anyway," he surmised.

"Well…" Zorian hesitated.

"Absolutely, yeah," Zach immediately confirmed.

Zorian gave him an annoyed glance. Not that he disagreed with his fellow time traveler, far from it, but he could have been more diplomatic about it.

Daimen cupped his face in his hand for a moment. Perhaps he was imagining things, but Zorian thought he heard a brief prayer for patience directed to one of the silent divinities.

"Just tell me what you want to do, okay?" Daimen finally said.

"I want to think we’ve misread the situation," Zorian said. "It’s not that the orb of the first emperor is hidden away in a pocket dimension. The pocket dimension is the orb of the first emperor."

Daimen gave him a blank look. Zorian took this as an indication he should keep going.

"I agree with you that we’re dealing with a pocket dimension," Zorian said. "But my marker is quite insistent that the dimensional anchor we’re looking at is not just an entrance to a pocket dimension. It is the very orb we’re looking for. This may sound a little crazy but–"

"You think the orb is a portable hidden realm," Daimen surmised.

"Yes," Zorian nodded. "I think this entrance we’re looking at is simply how the orb looks when it is… deployed."

"I see," Daimen said speculatively. "And you think you can collapse it back into an actual orb?"

"I’m willing to try, at least," Zorian said. "Though you should probably get yourself and your team out of the cenote before I make the attempt. Just in case."

After a few seconds, Daimen turned towards his team, who had been silently listening to the conversation, and told them to establish a defensive perimeter around the pocket dimension entrance and a fallback point outside the cave. It seemed he had no intention of letting him and Zach try this on their own.

Zorian clacked his tongue unhappily. If things went south again, he had no doubt that most of these people would blame him for everything again. Well to hell with them, he was still doing this.

The moment Daimen announced that everything was prepared and that he could begin, he cupped his hand below the invisible dimensional anchor and tried to connect to the orb with his marker. It took some tries, but he eventually succeeded – the surrounding space rippled like hot summer air for a moment after which something resembling a glass globe materialized in the air and plopped down onto Zorian’s waiting palm.

Orb of the first emperors: obtained.

After a second of shocked silence, everyone rushed forward, uncomfortably crowding Zorian’s personal space in order to take a look at the artifact.

The orb in Zorian’s hand looked… interesting. The orb was a perfect sphere of crystal-clear glass, completely unmarred by the passage of time. Running his fingers over it, Zorian could not feel even the slightest scratch on its surface. Seemingly encased inside the glass was a ruined palace, partially destroyed and overgrown with trees, vines and other vegetation. The palace and the trees were extremely detailed and lifelike, to the point that Zorian could count the individual leaves on the trees if he focused on them long enough. It reminded Zorian of one of those novelty snow globes that Cyorian merchants liked to sell, the ones that had high-qualify models of famous buildings encased in the glass.

Eventually Zorian handed the orb to Zach, if only so people would crowd around him instead of Zorian in order to get a good look at the orb.

"That palace… it’s not just a model, is it?" Zach said, sounding fascinated. "It’s a real thing, contained inside the orb."

"Obviously," Orissa said. "Why would it be a ruin otherwise?"

"So Shutur-Tarana made himself a portable palace to carry around with him at all times?" Zach asked rhetorically. "I like it."

"Yes, now imagine just how much stuff there could be stored there," Torun said happily. "Ah, little Kazinski, I forgive you for everything. You’re the best thing to have happened to this team."

Although Zorian was dying to study the orb in more detail, he had reluctantly decided to leave the orb in Daimen’s hands for now. Trying to take it away would probably spark another fight and it wasn’t like he had enough time to truly devote himself to its study right now. The attack on the Ibasan base beneath Cyoria was fast approaching, which meant that both Zach and Zorian would be forced to devote the majority of their energies into that for the next couple of days.

"I have to say this whole thing makes me feel very conflicted," Zach said as they left the group.

"Why?" Zorian asked curiously.

"Well, on one hand, we only found the orb so quickly because Daimen pointed us at the right spot to start at," Zach said. "So if we ever get out of the time loop, the right thing to do would probably be tell him how to get it as a thanks for his help."

"But?" Zorian prompted.

"I really like the idea of having my own portable palace," Zach said with a dreamy grin.

Zorian snorted derisively. "You shouldn’t get excited just yet. For all we know the ruins really are full of slumbering giant hydras or something."

"That just makes me more excited," Zach said. "That thing was a great opponent. Clearing a whole nest of them would be amazing."

Oh, right. For a moment he had forgotten who he was talking with.

They spent the rest of the way home arguing about what the best setup for a modern portable palace would look like. The main point of contention was that Zach wanted to make an arena full of actual monsters to fight with, whereas Zorian argued that sophisticated training dummies were better because they were less likely to break out of their containment and rampage throughout the entire place.

"It’s just not the same," Zach complained, shaking his head sadly.

In the end they had to agree to disagree on the issue.

All the preparations were complete. Soldiers were recruited, human mercenaries and aranea hired, golems made, wild monsters dominated into serving as combat support, additional equipment bought and several limited combat exercises performed. The scale of the operation was sufficiently big that the authorities had sent a team to investigate what was happening, requiring some quick mind magic and forged documents to avert disaster. It helped that many Houses had small (or not so small, in some cases) private armies to protect their interests, and that many of these Houses had estates in or around Cyoria, which made their group stand out a lot less than it might otherwise.

All that was left to do now was to wait for Quatach-Ichl to leave for Ulquaan Ibasa so they could make their move. There was some worry about that, as Quatach-Ichl didn’t seem to be getting ready to leave. Xvim had raised the issue that they might have tipped Quatach-Ichl off somehow, and a fierce discussion sprung up about whether to go ahead with the assault anyway if that was the case. Thankfully, the question turned out to be irrelevant in the end – Quatach-Ichl still left on schedule, and the mission could proceed.

The first task was simple: kidnap Sudomir, hopefully neutralizing the entire Iasku Mansion in the process. In order to do that, though, they had to lure the man out of his nigh-unassailable home.

Thus, Zach and Zorian stole a pair of fancy red robes from the Cult of the Dragon Below and teleported to Knyazov Dveri, where they proceeded to smash up store fronts, set several warehouses on fire and used alteration to call out Sudomir as a traitor to the Esoteric Order of the Celestial Dragon. Zorian also used his mind magic to guide a herd of wild boars directly into the town square, after which he released his control over them and let them run amok as they pleased.

The city guard tried to stop them, of course. They were actually pretty brutal about it, going so far as to have snipers try to pick them off from the rooftops, despite the fact that Zach and Zorian clearly avoided killing anyone themselves. Still, they were barely a challenge. Zach and Zorian simply knocked them out or otherwise incapacitated them, and then continued with their extended provocation.

After a while they stopped with the attack and left. This was partially because they were afraid Sudomir might opt not to show up if he thought the danger had not yet passed, but it was also because there was a chance the city authorities would call in Eldemar’s military if things went on long enough.

It took nearly five hours for Sudomir to show up in the city, upon which he was greeted by irate shop owners and city officials, demanding an explanation and some kind of compensation. Not even the twelve dangerous-looking, grim-faced body guards that followed after him everywhere could make them pause.

Zach and Zorian observed for a while and then struck like a lightning bolt. Sudomir himself got incapacitated early in the fight and the twelve bodyguards he had brought with him turned out to be decidedly average and unable to deal with them. Especially since they weren’t trying not to kill anyone this time.

"I’m glad the kidnapping went off without a problem," Alanic told them when they dragged Sudomir back to their base, "but did you really have to cut off his arms?"

"Don’t look at me," Zach protested. "It was Zorian’s idea."

"He’s a dangerous necromancer," Zorian defended himself. "I couldn’t risk him hitting us with some nasty piece of soul magic in the middle of the battle and this was the quickest way I knew of stopping that from happening. He said he was hard to kill so I figured that he wouldn’t die from blood loss."

"I can’t believe my previous selves thought you weren’t brutal enough," Alanic mumbled under his breath. "And why is he not unconscious? I thought we agreed you’d knock him out before bringing him here?"

"We couldn’t knock him out," Zach admitted. "We tried five different drugs on him, and none of them worked."

"Though he did pretend to be unconscious after we hit him with the fifth one," Zorian pointed out. "Zach wanted to try knocking him out the old fashioned way by hitting him in the head with a rock, but I vetoed that. So we just glued his mouth shut, tied his legs together, put a bag over his head and brought him over."

"I see," Alanic said, looking in the direction of Sudomir’s brand new prison cell with a frown. "I wonder what he did to himself to get such resilience."

"Well, you’ll have plenty of time to find out," Zach shrugged. "Later, though. We should be starting the assault on the gate now, yes?"

"Not yet, no," Alanic said, shaking his head. "Let’s ask Sudomir a few questions concerning the Ibasan base. He might know some crucial detail about its defenses or some such."

Both Zach and Zorian were anxious to launch the assault as soon as possible, both because that would give the researchers more time to study the gate if they succeeded and because the longer they waited, the bigger the chance the Ibasans would realize what was coming and raise the alarm. However, Alanic’s suggestion made a lot of sense and he knew more about these sort of mass engagements than they did. If he thought a few more hours spent interrogating Sudomir wouldn’t doom the operation, he was probably right.

The interrogation turned out to be fairly mundane and unexciting. Sudomir was surprisingly calm and polite for someone who had been brutally attacked in broad daylight, de-armed and then carried off for mind magic assisted interrogation. It didn’t even take all that much mind magic to make him tell the truth. However, he also did not seem to know anything terribly useful about the layout and defenses of the Ibasan base. Sudomir and the Ibasans may have been cooperating closely with each other, but neither side fully trusted the other, and a lot of things were kept secret between them.

Eventually the three of them ran out of questions to ask, much sooner than they expected they would. Well, they ran out of questions related to the Ibasan base, anyway. Rather than stop, Alanic simply decided to expand the scope of the questioning beyond that topic. This wasn’t exactly what they agreed on, but Zorian said nothing for now. He could sense that Alanic’s questions were all building up to something. Some question that Alanic desperately wanted answered.

"Why are you gathering so many souls in your mansion?" Alanic eventually asked Sudomir. "What on earth do you need half a million souls for?"

Ah, so that was what was bothering him…

"W-What?" asked Sudomir, sounding shocked for the first time since the questioning began. "How do you know that?"

Alanic gestured towards Zorian, who immediately launched a mental assault on Sudomir’s mind, forcing him to answer the question.

"Ghhhk!" Sudomir grunted, grinding his teeth as he fought against the compulsion. "Damn it, that’s not… It’s… I need it…"

"For what?" Alanic pushed.

"For the wraith bombs," Sudomir ground out eventually.

"Wraith bombs?" Zach asked curiously. "As in, you pack a wraith into a bomb and throw it at people?"

"Ha ha, yes! Yes!" Sudomir said, suddenly breaking into hysterical laughter. He was no longer fighting against Zorian’s mental compulsion for some reason, as if he realized there was no way he could win there and decided to just give them exactly what they want. "Not just one wraith though! Hundreds! Thousands even! And you don’t throw them at people. No, no… you throw them at cities."

"What?" Zach asked, frowning.

"Wraiths can multiply," Alanic said quietly. "Give a wraith some time and lots of victims, and it will make another wraith out of every human whose soul it consumes."

"Yes, exactly!" Sudomir said, nodding furiously. "Just think of what would happen if you dumped thousands of these things in the middle of a major city. Unless the outbreak is contained immediately, the whole city would be overwhelmed in a matter of hours! Only the Triumvirate Church has enough experts in ghost fighting to counter a wraith outbreak after it gathers some steam, and they were decimated in the Weeping. If I had enough wraith bombs in my possession, Eldemar would have to appease me. They’d have to…"

There was a brief silence during which Sudomir seemed to get lost in his own world and everyone else was processing what he just said.

"You’d have to use this wraith bomb of yours on at least one city before anyone took your threat seriously," Zorian eventually pointed out.

"Yes, of course," Sudomir said, giving him a patient look, as if he was asked something obvious by a small child. "That goes without saying. I was thinking of targeting Sulamnon first. That would immediately spark another round of Splinter Wars. Sulamnon wouldn’t care about any excuses from Eldemar’s government. Not if it was obvious that the wraith bomb came from Eldemar. With another continental conflict under way, Eldemar would have no forces to spare on suppressing me. In fact, they would surely be tempted to make use of my… assets to help them win the war. I…"

For a moment, Sudomir looked like he was about to continue with his explanation, but then he suddenly froze up and some of the mania that had taken over him seemed to drain out of him.

Only for a moment, though. Almost immediately, the spark of madness returned to his eyes once again, except this time it was slightly different. There was violence and aggression lurking there now, and his face twisted into an outraged snarl.

Sudomir’s flesh suddenly turned green and his body started to swell in size. He grew a tail and horns, his eyes became slitted and his teeth sharpened to dagger-like points. Zorian, who had actually seen Sudomir transformed into a giant monster once before, realized what he was looking at and started to shout out a warning to Zach and Alanic.

Alanic was already reacting, though. The moment Sudomir started to transform, he rushed up to him and slammed his palm against his chest. A multitude of yellow ribbons covered in some sort of religious writing sprang into existence around Sudomir. They circled around the captured necromancer once before sinking into his flesh, causing the transformation to stop and Sudomir to be instantly wrenched back to his human form.

Sudomir stared at Alanic in shock for a full second, at a loss for words.

"Oh…" he finally said. "Well. That didn’t work out as well as I hoped."

Alanic made a slashing motion with his left hand and then lightly poked Sudomir on the forehead with his index finger. This caused Sudomir to suddenly become wreathed in dark red light and then collapse into unconsciousness.

"Let’s go," Alanic said, motioned for Zach and Zorian to follow him out of the cell. "We’ll continue this interrogation later. For now, we have an Ibasan base to capture."

70. Carried Away

Deep beneath Cyoria, in a recently excavated cavern separated from the main tunnel network, an army was being assembled. It consisted of about 200 people, about 120 of which had been gathered by Alanic through various means while the rest were mercenaries Zorian had hired for considerable amounts of money. Of course, this number did not include the many non-combat experts that would be responsible for figuring out how the Ibasan gate functioned. Nor did it take into account the many golems that Zorian had made for the occasion, about 80 of which were scattered through the area, or the 40 aranean mercenaries that were hired from the three different webs recommended by the Silent Doorway Adepts.

As far as armies went, this wasn’t much. But it was still a sizeable group, and getting it past Ibasan patrols without them noticing their passage was… difficult.

For ordinary mages, that is. Zorian could just send his simulacrum to sneak past these patrols and then just open a Gate to let the assembled forces through unmolested and unnoticed.

There was something very amusing about using dimensional gates to bypass Ibasan patrols, establishing a temporary staging ground deep in their territory, and then launching a surprise attack at their base.

Zorian was just in the process of attaching small metal cylinders to his belt, each one filled with potent alchemical mixtures, when he sensed Zach approaching him.

"You look worried," Zach told him.

Zorian frowned. He didn’t notice it before Zach pointed it out, but yeah. He kind of was.

"A little," Zorian admitted, continuing his preparations. "I mean, we’re risking another confrontation with Quatach-Ichl here. He’s one of the few people who has the ability to do us lasting harm. Every time we tangle with him, we’re taking a big risk."

"Eh, it’ll be fine," Zach said dismissively, giving him a strong pat on the back that had Zorian swaying in place for a second. He gave Zach a glare for that, but his fellow time traveler just grinned at him in response. "Besides, the annoying pile of bones isn’t nearly as dangerous as you think. I’ve fought him plenty of times, and I’m still standing. He doesn’t like to use necromancy in battle for some reason."

Alanic, who was staring at the map of the Ibasan base along with Xvim, decided this merited a response from him.

"Most necromantic spells aren’t well suited for battle," Alanic said, not taking his eyes off the map. "They take too much concentration and they need to overcome the target’s magic resistance to work. It’s faster and cheaper to just burn people to a crisp or cut them to pieces. The terrible necromantic spells that are sometimes bandied about in textbooks are torture spells meant to be inflicted on a subdued victim, not something you use in an even fight."

There was a long pause as Zach and Zorian digested this. One of these days, Zorian decided, he really had to ask Alanic about his past. The old battle priest would likely refuse to talk about it at first, but maybe if he picked a right moment and was really persistent?

Well, whatever. It was a thought for some other time. He considered pointing out that a fight between them and Quatach-Ichl wasn’t exactly an even one, since the difference in power and skill between the ancient lich and any one of them was still a yawning chasm rather than anything resembling a close match-up, but he figured that would be missing the point. Alanic’s point was that Quatach-Ichl likely didn’t go for necromantic magic in a fight because it was suboptimal, and that was probably true – getting into a habit of toying with your opponents was quite stupid, and the ancient lich had been shrewd enough to survive for more than a thousand years now.

Truth be told, Zorian found those jagged disintegration beams that Quatach-Ichl liked to use to be plenty terrifying in their own way.

"You know," Zorian suddenly said. "My past self would be horrified if he saw me right now."

"Why?" Zach asked, arching his eyebrow in askance.

"This attack is pretty… audacious," said Zorian. "There is no way my past self would ever consider this a reasonable risk to take. A part of me scoffs at this, dismissing it as simple cowardice, but there is another part of me that can’t help but wonder whether the time loop had eroded away my ability to recognize what is and is not appropriately cautious behavior. What if we manage to leave the time loop and deal with Red Robe, only to die two months later because we did something completely stupid out of sheer habit?"

To Zorian’s surprise, Zach actually seemed to give the question some serious thought. Zorian expected him to either dismiss his concerns or question how Zorian could possibly know what his past self would have thought of their current situation. Instead, Zach seemed to consider the issue in his head for well over a minute before responding.

"I doubt that’s going to happen," he eventually said, his tone and mannerisms somewhat subdued. "I have… things I need to do after we get out. Social things. It will be at least a year or two before I can start picking fights with dragons or whatnot, and I don’t think you’ll start looking for trouble without me prodding you. A couple of years should be enough to let us adjust to a world without restarts, right?"

Zorian simply gave Zach a non-committal hum in response. Zach had a pretty rosy picture of Zorian in his head if he thought there was no way he could get himself into trouble on his own. Zorian still wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life if… when they got out of the time loop, but he would probably need a lot of money and rare resources. He could easily imagine getting into trouble in the process of acquiring these, or once he amassed enough that people start to take notice or once he told people what he was actually doing with all these acquisitions.

Zach’s inordinate fondness for picking fights with giant monsters was definitely dangerous, but Zorian suspected his personal ambitions could be even more dangerous than that. A mage of Zach’s caliber can usually flee from giant monsters if they find themselves overmatched against it. Make a human organization interested enough in you, though, and they will hound you till the day you die.

He shook his head and steeled himself. Now was not the time to contemplate those topics too deeply. The opening moves of this attack were about to begin and Zorian had a crucial role to play in them. If they wanted to stop Quatach-Ichl from being alerted and summoned back to the base, someone had to sneak into the base and either assassinate or disable as many Ibasan leaders as possible before the main force of the attack hit. That someone was, of course, Zorian. Him and the aranean mercenaries he had hired for the occasion, that is.

Cloaking one’s presence thoroughly enough to avoid dedicated scrutiny was quite hard. In a contest between two equally skilled mages, one of which was trying to hide and one of which was seeking for the hidden one, the seeker would almost always come out on top. If your opponent could manipulate your very mind, however, dictating what you see, hear and remember… then even the most sophisticated detection spell could not help you find them.

Well, that was the theory, at least. Zorian was quite sure the Ibasans would catch on to their presence relatively soon. Mind magic was not exactly unknown among mages, even if few of them could manifest it as stealthily and flexibly as Zorian and his new aranean minions could. Still. They didn’t have to stay undetected forever – just long enough to track down and remove anyone who knew how to contact Quatach-Ichl.

"I’m going," Zorian said out loud, speaking to himself as much as he was to the people around him.

"Leave a simulacrum with us," warned Alanic.

Zorian hesitated for a moment. He had dismissed all his simulacrums before the operation began so that they wouldn’t be a drain on his mana reserves. It was annoying, because it meant he would have to rely on Daimen again to re-establish a link with Koth, but he felt this operation deserved his full focus. That said, Zorian shouldn’t be doing anything too mana intensive during the initial infiltration, so maybe leaving a simulacrum behind in the command room wouldn’t be a bad idea.

He executed a complex series of chants and gestures and then cupped his hands in front of him, causing a milky white sphere of ectoplasm to materialize in front of him. He felt the spell reach towards his soul, connecting it to the ball of ectoplasm in front of him. The moment he felt the connection snap into place, he plunged his right arm straight into the ball of ectoplasm and imposed upon it an image of himself, causing it to squirm and writhe like a living thing.

"That always looks so freaky," Zach commented off to the side.

Zorian ignored him. This was the most sensitive part of the spell, since the caster had to keep their image firmly in mind as they manipulated the ectoplasm. If they faltered even for a second, the spell would either fail or produce a hopelessly false copy. This was because, although the spell was tapping into the caster’s soul to create the copy, it was tapping into something that described a creature of flesh and blood and trying to translate it into a form made out of magical fields and ectoplasm. A multitude of little and not-so-little sacrifices and compromises had to be made during this process, and a non-sapient spell couldn’t be trusted to prioritize things properly. The first time Zorian succeeded in producing a simulacrum, for example, he got a nearly-mindless wreck that nonetheless contained a vividly detailed internal bone structure. The spell sacrificed nearly everything else to get that one thing just right.

Of course, Zorian was now too well versed with the spell to fail like that, even with Zach distracting him with inane comments. The writhing sphere swelled in size and erupted into thin, rope-like pseudopods that formed a rough outline of a human being…

Two minutes later, a flawless-looking replica of Zorian opened its eyes and looked around. One would think that simulacrums would come into existence already aware of everything and ready to spring into action on a moment’s notice, but in practice they always seemed a little confused after being created and took about 30 seconds to gather their bearings and calm down.

"There," Zorian said. "Anything else?"

"No," Alanic said, shaking his head. "Go. Try not to get yourself killed, I guess."

"I guess?" Zorian mumbled under his breath. "Thank you, Alanic, you really know how to make a motivational speech."

And then he left. The attack on the Ibasan base beneath Cyoria had begun.

The initial stages of the infiltration went very well. Zorian used a combination of a floating invisibility sphere and clouding the minds of the Ibasan guards to smuggle himself and the aranea into the base, after which they split up into small groups to cover more ground in as little time as possible.

There were some complications. For one thing, there were some pretty insidious and powerful wards scattered around the base, arranged in no pattern that Zorian could decipher. These hadn’t been there when Zorian invaded the base in the previous restarts, which implied that Ibasans normally took those down before executing the invasion of Cyoria. Zorian was kind of baffled as to why they would tear down their own wards like that, though, even if they did intend to abandon the base after the invasion. For a moment he actually worried that they had been betrayed by some of their mercenaries, despite their precautions, and that the base security had been upgraded in response. However, the wards in question were arranged so haphazardly, the entire warding layout so full of holes, that Zorian eventually ruled out that idea. If the Ibasans had been expecting them, they would have done a better job of warding the place than this. As it was, the warding setup looked almost like a collection of individual wards, each of which had been erected by a different person without bothering to consult anyone else about what they were doing. In at least two places the wards clashed with each other so severely that they created dead zones in the areas where they overlapped, canceling each other out.

Zorian had a rather silly urge to write a letter to Quatach-Ichl, criticizing him for not teaching his minions how to make a proper warding scheme. This sort of thing reflected badly on him too, you know, he ought to think of his reputation…

Anyway. Another problem was the Ibasans had these brown dogs that could smell the aranea coming, no matter how well cloaked, and wouldn’t stop barking. And they were either naturally mind blanked or had been made so artificially, because Zorian couldn’t detect or connect to their minds at all. He had been forced to kill and replace them with motionless ectoplasmic replicas, which took an annoying amount of time and mana on his part.

After that, everything went perfectly for a while. Numerous Ibasan leaders were eliminated, and though the base was starting to wake up to the fact something funny was going on in their base, they were still not aware of the extent of the problem on their hands. However, there was something that Zorian had not taken into account…

The Ibasans had fought against aranea before. Before the time loop – and even during the time loop, before Red Robe erased them from the time loop – the Cyorian web had been a huge obstacle to their operations. As such, they had a multitude of countermeasures and defenses aimed specifically against the aranea. Many of these were abandoned when the local aranea mysteriously disappeared, experts in charge of manning them re-assigned to other, more productive duties… but some of them remained intact. Just in case.

When the aranea moved near the center of the base they seemed to cross some invisible line that immediately triggered a base-wide alarm. It was loud, shrill, and everyone in the base seemed to immediately realize what it meant because they immediately started layering mental protection spells on themselves and grabbing their weapons.

[Oops?] the aranea closest to Zorian said hesitantly.

[I don’t even understand what got us,] another complained. [Human magic is such bullshit…]

Zorian snorted derisively. Well, it wasn’t like this was completely unexpected. He reached out with his mind, connecting himself with the network of telepathic relays that had been densely distributed across this entire section of the underworld, and ordered the miniature monster horde he had gathered to attack the base from all directions.

From one of the tunnels, a huge red centipede surged forwards, hordes of hook goblins and cave drakes following after it. The Ibasans concentrated their fire at the centipede first, trying to bring down the biggest threat, only to see most of their spells fizzle out due to the many wards Zorian had attached to it. From another tunnel, a swarm of floating, jellyfish-like monsters came pouring in. They looked slow and weak, but when Ibasans tried to bring them down they discovered that the jellyfish had an innate shielding magic that blocked their projectiles. Worse, the jellyfish could somehow interface with one another and merge their shields into a stronger, unified barrier. From the third tunnel, a horde of phalanx toads came rushing into the base. The Ibasans killed many of them, but there were five more for each they killed and they acted with unusual organization and discipline, spontaneously forming into coherent groups and sweeping everything before them with their spear-like tongues.

Finally, the fourth group of monsters didn’t bother moving through any of the existing tunnels – the rock worms Zorian subverted simply burst into the base from down below, having dug out their own entrance into the base.

The whole plan had a high chance of falling apart at this moment, Zorian knew. Although he and the aranea had gutted a lot of their leadership, they hadn’t gotten everyone that could summon Quatach-Ichl. If the Ibasans wanted to call the ancient lich for help, they could. However, Zorian had noticed in the past that Ibasans were generally reluctant to call upon their leader. Quatach-Ichl hated getting called to deal with trivial things. He didn’t usually kill people for disappointing him in such a manner, but he was rather prone of relieving them of their positions or reducing their salary – which were horrifying enough consequences for most people.

Zorian was hoping that the Ibasans, faced with what appeared to be an aranean attack, would decide to try and tackle things on their own, rather than immediately call Quatach-Ichl to help them.

Well, he seemed to have been right about that. The Ibasans chose to fight the monster invasion on their own. The trouble is, they were winning. The centipede was intercepted by trolls and bludgeoned to death with sheer force of numbers, the jellyfish shield was visibly weakening and the phalanx toads were being pushed back with a liberal application of fire. As for the rock worms, well… the Ibasans had rock worms of their own. Zorian had counted on the monster horde getting defeated, but not this fast. He wasn’t done killing the leadership yet, dammit!

He suddenly got a message from his simulacrum that Zach wanted to help out with the assassination.

Well. The plan was already failing, so he supposed there was no harm in letting Zach wreck things for a bit before they abort the whole thing.

As quickly as possible, he synchronized with his simulacrum and opened a gate between the command room and the Ibasan base, letting Zach pass through.

Zach took a rather long look at them battlefield, taking in how the battles were progressing first-hand, and then turned to Zorian.

"Do you know where those leaders are at the moment?"

"Err, sort of?" Zorian said. "I mostly had the aranea pinpointing their location for me, but they’re kind of busy directing the monster horde at the moment."

"But you know the general area they’re in, right?" Zach prodded.

"Oh yeah," Zorian nodded. He pointed at a big, solidly-constructed building not far from them. "Most of the surviving ones are in that building over there. The wards are pretty tricky so it will take me some time to–"

Before Zorian could finish speaking, Zach had already fired some kind of projectile at the building. It was seemingly tiny, more of a faint red pinprick of light than a proper-looking offensive spell, but its flight path was followed with a piercing scream so loud it made Zorian’s ears hurt.

The projectile slammed into the wall of the building and then burst into crescent spatial distortions that sliced through everything in the vicinity with no visible resistance. The whole heavily warded building fell apart like an apple thrown into an industrial blender machine, burying everyone in it under several tons of rubble.

"One problem solved," said Zach, lowering his hand. "What about the others?"

"Well," said Zorian, a little sourly. Only a little, though – truthfully, he had been expecting something like this when he agreed to involve Zach into this. "If the Ibasans didn’t already know they’re under attack by more than just aranea, they certainly do now. Let’s see if we can kill them before they realize just how disgustingly powerful you are and call Quatach-Ichl in panic."

"Let’s," Zach agreed.

Deciding there was no point in pretending this attack was just a minor aranean offensive anymore, Zorian sent a telepathic message to Xvim and Alanic to start the assault in earnest.

He received a confirmation almost immediately. It seemed Zach wasn’t the only one who was spoiling for a fight.

Zorian understood. They had all spent so much time and resources into organizing this attack, it would be almost a crime to call it off now.

It was time for Ibasans to see what it’s like to be suddenly invaded.

Beneath the city of Cyoria, a vicious battle was underway. The small army that Alanic had assembled, bolstered by the various mercenaries, Zorian’s golems and what was left of the dominated monster horde, advanced deep into the disorganized Ibasan ranks. However, the Ibasans weren’t just passive victims. Despite having their entire high-ranking leadership gutted by Zach and Zorian, despite the huge losses they suffered in the initial attack from the monster horde, despite the shock they must have felt at the appearance of another human army, the Ibasans still resisted the attack with considerable might. Their top leadership may have fallen, but local commanders quickly assumed control of the remaining forces and did their best to link up and coordinate their movements. Huge war golems charged into rapidly-forming defense groups, aiming to break them up, only to be met with screaming hordes of war trolls barring their way. The aranea led the remaining monsters into suicidal offensives, only to be countered with equally suicidal delaying actions from the Ibasans' own war beasts. Zach and Zorian converged on any local commander that seemed to be especially good at their job, aided by a couple of Alanic’s men that seemed to be really accurate with a rifle and fond of head-shots, but there was always someone wiling and capable of replacing them once they moved on to other targets.

Currently, Zorian’s simulacrum was standing in the vicinity of the dimensional gate at the center of the Ibasan settlement, where Xvim and Alanic had moved shortly after the attack began. Unfortunately, the gate had been shut down by the Ibasans when they realized they were going to lose it – another thing that didn’t go according to plan. Even if they managed to win this, a powered down gate stabilization frame was much less useful as an object of study than a working dimensional gate.

"We should have brought more monsters," Alanic said suddenly, standing not far from the simulacrum and observing the battlefield. "We should have brought more everything, really, but I don’t think we could have realistically recruited more people. We’re doing very well compared to the numbers arrayed against us, but it’s not enough. There are simply too few of us compared to the number of Ibasans gathered here."

"We were afraid that if we sent too many monsters, it would spook them into calling Quatach-Ichl immediately," the simulacrum pointed out. "Though considering how successful they were against the horde, I agree we were probably too conservative with them."

"Speaking of which, did Zach and Zorian manage to eliminate the Ibasan leaders before they contacted Quatach-Ichl for help or not?" Xvim asked.

The simulacrum quickly contacted the original and asked him that same question. Ten seconds later he turned back to Xvim.

"It’s doubtful," he said, shaking his head. "They had trouble locating the last two leaders. They’re dead now, but they had plenty of time to realize how dire the situation is and call for help."

Xvim said nothing for a second, looking thoughtfully at the powered-down gate next to them.

"We shouldn’t have taken the gate from them so quickly," Xvim said. "We should have left it in their hands for a while to give them an avenue of retreat. I think they would have tried to fall back into that undead mansion instead of fighting a lost battle if they had a choice."

"Or they might have found a way to commandeer some of Sudomir’s undead minions if given enough time, making our current issue even worse," the simulacrum said with a shrug.

"We’ll analyze what we did wrong later," said Alanic firmly. "What we need now is solutions. How do we salvage this situation?"

"Shouldn’t we just retreat?" asked Xvim curiously. "Even if we take the base in the end, it will take us many hours to do so and cost many lives. On top of that, there is a high chance that Quatach-Ichl will come back before we are done and tip the balance in Ibasan favor."

Alanic said nothing for a few seconds, clearly discontent with that idea.

"I have an idea," the simulacrum eventually said. "Why don’t we just rip the gate stabilization frame out of the ground, pedestal and all, and carry it off to the surface for study. I mean, the original reason why we wanted to secure the base and do our research here was because moving an active dimensional gate was impossible. But we don’t have an active gate. We have an inert stabilization frame, so what stops us from simply carrying it off somewhere else before trying to figure it out?"

Xvim and Alanic gave him surprised looks.

"What?" the simulacrum asked defensively. "The idea has merit!"

"It does," Alanic agreed. "I was just surprised to see you make such a suggestion. Sometimes I forget simulacrums like you are more than just extensions of Zorian and can have ideas of your own."

"Same," Xvim agreed.

The simulacrum scowled. Stupid flesh-and-blood people and their prejudices.

Soon, Xvim and Alanic ordered their forces to fall back a little and threw themselves into the task of cutting the gate stabilization frame free of the ground without damaging something crucial. The pedestal the frame was affixed to had some kind of root-like structure that extended into the rock beneath it, meaning that a surprisingly large chunk of the ground had to be taken along with the gate itself.

None of the problems were in any way insurmountable, though, and the whole thing was soon floated into the air and slowly pushed towards one of the base exits.

The movement did not go unnoticed, however, and when the Ibasans saw what they were doing they went completely berserk. Apparently they really hated the idea of the gate stabilization frame being carried away like that. From that moment on, the whole battle shifted in tone – instead of trying to minimize their losses and stalling for time, the Ibasans suddenly surged forward and tried to recover the stolen gate at all costs. Alanic’s forces shifted from trying to put pressure on the Ibasans to a strictly defensive posture, trying to keep the Ibasans away from the retreating gate with equal zeal.

The situation only grew more dire soon after that, as Ibasans realized that recovering the gate is a lost cause and started trying to destroy it instead.

"Why are they so upset about us taking the gate!?" Zach shouted while creating a thick prismatic wall in between the floating gate stabilization frame and the approaching Ibasan war party.

He was just in time. The moment the barrier snapped into place, three different projectiles slammed into it – a thin blue javelin of force that crackled with some kind of magical energy, an animated serpent made out of green fire and a large white sphere that had smaller red spheres orbiting around it. The wall flickered, cycling through different colors, and for a moment it seemed it would hold… but then the three projectiles combined together to release some kind of combined pulse that disrupted the barrier and it fell apart into multi-colored smoke.

The fire serpent, the only survivor of this clash of spells, surged madly towards the floating gate, seeking to detonate itself against its surface. It never reached it. A milky white sphere soon hit it in the flank, courtesy of Zorian, causing it to fall apart into rapidly fading clusters of green fire.

"They’re afraid of what Quatach-Ichl will do to them when he finds out they let someone acquire a sample of his work," Zorian said. The simulacrum suspected the original had taken said information straight from the minds of nearby Ibasans. "He doesn’t even let his allies examine it. How do you think he would feel about this?"

The battle raged on. The simulacrum watched, rather discontent, as people fought all around him to either destroy or preserve the floating gate. He couldn’t do much himself, as any significant mana use would cripple the original’s ability to fight, so he was reduced to a role of observer for the most part. He watched the battle carefully, scrutinizing every detail in hopes of spotting something that required his attention.

The Ibasans charged forward again and again, supported by long-range spells from their allies in the back ranks, only to be repulsed. Zorian’s golems slowly dwindled in number, the volume of spell fire too much even for their heavy wards to handle. When they grew too damaged to be of much use, Zorian strapped alchemical bombs all over them and sent them into suicide charges to halt particularly troublesome offensives. Zach’s spells reaped a bloody toll on Ibasan forces, but not even his mana reserves were endless and the time he spent in recovery gradually increased as the battle grew more heated. One of the Ibasan mages decided to sacrifice his life for the cause – as he finished casting his last spell, he removed a ritual dagger from his belt and slit his own throat, using some blood magic to pour every shred of his life-force into it. The resulting spell produced an incandescent meteor that punched through every single obstacle in front of it, and would have no doubt reduced the floating gate into molten rubble if Xvim hadn’t used a series of dimensional gates to redirect it back at the Ibasans.

Finally, the simulacrum noticed something he felt merited his attention. On the edges of the main battlefield, a small group of friendly soldiers was being overwhelmed. Of the original fifteen, most were already dead. Only six still lived, and only three of those six could walk and fight properly. The simulacrum telepathically alerted the original to the situation, but was told everyone was currently busy and that sacrifices have to be made in situations like these.

The simulacrum then pointed out to him that one of the survivors was Taiven. The original immediately changed his mind and told the simulacrum to go and help them.

The simulacrum wouldn’t have actually obeyed an order to leave Taiven to her fate, but it was nice that he and the original were still on the same page in this regard. He teleported next to the group and immediately intercepted an incoming fireball with a well-placed dispelling wave. Taiven’s shocked face was kind of priceless.

"What are you waiting for?" the simulacrum asked the group. One of the Ibasans tried to sneak up on them by kicking up a cloud of dust with a misaimed spell and using it as a cover for his approach. He received a force lance to the face for his trouble. "This position is lost. Why haven’t you regrouped elsewhere?"

"We can’t leave them!" Taiven protested, pointing at the three wounded soldiers next to her.

"I told you to leave us here," one of the wounded soldiers said. "Just go. We’ll stall them to buy you some time."

"We’re not leaving anyone behind!" Taiven insisted.

The other two healthy soldiers said nothing, but the simulacrum could see on their faces that they didn’t want to leave the wounded soldiers behind either. They were probably friends.

"How about this – you go and take these people to safety, and I’ll hold the Ibasans at bay?" the simulacrum offered.

"Zorian…" Taiven started, sounding both a little annoyed and a little worried.

The simulacrum wasn’t listening to her anymore, though. He could feel the Ibasans moving towards the group again so he conjured two large severing discs above his palms and launched them forward in front of him. The first wave of Ibasans literally fell apart before the discs, screaming horribly as they were effortlessly sliced apart by the two buzzing spell constructs. The commander of the Ibasan group tried to restore order to his unit, shouting orders and threats so loudly the entire base must have heard him. He fell silent when his own bodyguard slammed a knife in his eye socket, killing him instantly. The apparent betrayal (which was actually the result of Zorian puppeteering the man’s body, not genuine betrayal) further sowed chaos in the Ibasan group, stalling the attack.

The simulacrum then shifted his attention back to Taiven and her group, only to find the soldiers gone but Taiven still present.

"Let me guess," the simulacrum sighed. "You sent the rest of them to safety but decided to stay behind with me?"

"I told you," she said. "We’re not leaving anyone behind."

In retrospect, he really should have made it clear he was a simulacrum right from the start.

"Listen," he started. "I’m actually–"

[Stupid simulacrum!] the original’s voice thundered in his mind. [What the hell are you doing down there!? The rest of the soldiers are back but you and Taiven aren’t? Stop fooling around and spending all our mana, dammit! I need that to defend the gate!]

The simulacrum winced at the angry tirade in his head. The interruption left him confused for a second, unable to remember what he was doing right before the original contacted him.

He was further distracted when another volley of spells erupted towards the two of them, roughly half of it directed at him and the other half at Taiven. Taiven blocked her share of projectiles easily enough, and the simulacrum was just about to do the same for himself when he felt his mana reserves rapidly drain away. Apparently the original had decided to blow his entire mana reserves on something, leaving them both defenseless for a while.

"Damn it, original," the simulacrum quietly grumbled.

Then the spell volley hit him, tearing straight into him and blowing his ectoplasmic form into rapidly fading pieces.

As his tattered remains started to unravel, he spared one last look at Taiven, who was looking at him with an absolutely horrified look on her face.

Only then did he remember what he had been trying to tell her before the original contacted him.

His last fading thought was that he really, really should have made it clear that he was just a simulacrum right from the start…

In the end, they managed to extract the gate stabilization frame out of the Ibasan base safe and intact. The frenzied attempts of the Ibasan forces to stop them had petered out after a while, the surviving soldiers retreating back to their base and allowing them to withdraw in peace. The forces assembled by Alanic and Zorian had paid a heavy price for this success, however, being cut nearly in half by the end.

Only time would tell if the researchers Xvim gathered would find out anything useful about the recovered gate stabilization frame.

As they suspected, Quatach-Ichl showed up not long after they finished their retreat, having received a call for help at some point in the fight. Zach and Zorian had been on edge for a few days after this, expecting the Ibasans to launch a premature invasion of Cyoria, much like they had in that one restart where Zorian prodded Eldemar into attacking Iasku Mansion… but what happened instead is that the remaining Ibasans started to withdraw from Cyoria entirely.

The invasion, it seemed, was being canceled.

71. Shadows of the Past

After the attack on the Ibasan base had been concluded and it became obvious that no immediate invasion would result from it, Zorian proceeded to re-establish his link to Koth. Since he had dismissed his simulacrum in Koth before the attack, he had to rely on Daimen’s help for the second time in the restart. Although it kind of bothered him that he was forced to rely on Daimen so much, he had to admit his help made things a lot easier than they would have otherwise been.

He didn’t expect any problems to crop up and, in a way, there really hadn’t been any. The dimensional gate opened just fine, after all. The problem was that it opened directly inside the Taramatula estate. Instead of finding some out-of-the-way location in the jungle, like they had agreed on beforehand, Daimen had decided to simply open the gate inside a heavily warded room meant for receiving teleporting visitors. While a dozen or so Taramatula family members stood around the edges of the room and watched.

Zorian, who had stepped through the gate first, was so shocked at the sight that he immediately halted in his tracks. This caused Zach, who was coming right behind him, to crash into him. Thankfully, they managed to keep their balance instead of falling to the floor in a tangle of limbs. That would have been awkward.

"Hey, why did you sto– Oh. That’s a lot bigger reception that I was expecting," Zach said, looking around.

Zorian didn’t bother responding to Zach’s feeble attempt at humor. Instead, he zeroed in on his older brother and gave him an outraged glare. "Daimen, what the hell were you thinking!?"

To his credit, Daimen actually winced at the question, looking properly guilty.

"I’m sorry," he said, waving his hands in front of him in a placating gesture. "I didn’t have a choice, okay? I can’t leave the Taramatula estate anymore and I couldn’t just open a dimensional gate in their home without their knowledge or consent. It was either this or aborting the whole thing entirely."

Zach and Zorian were quiet for a second, processing that statement.

"Why can’t you leave the Taramatula estate?" Zach finally asked. "Are you a prisoner or something?"

"It’s complicated," Daimen said with a heavy sigh. "Let’s go find somewhere quiet to talk."

Before either Zach or Zorian could say anything, one of the gathered Taramatula decided to cut in and make a suggestion. It was Ulanna, the woman who had greeted them the first time they had visited the estate.

"I know just the place," Ulanna said. "For a family of our stature, not having an appropriate meeting room for occasions such as these would be quite an embarrassment. Please wait a minute while I make some arrangements and then we can go."

Zorian gave Ulanna a thoughtful look. Though her words made it seem she was just trying to be a good host, he could understand the underlying message easily enough: the Taramatula were an involved party in all this, and they wanted to be present during the talk.

Ulanna raised an eyebrow at his look, as if daring him to object. He didn’t.

"That’s quite all right," he simply said. "Me and Zach will go collapse the gate while you deal with things on your end."

Zorian had no idea what Daimen had told the Taramatula about the gate. Hopefully he hadn’t been foolish enough to reveal that he and Zorian were opening passages between two different continents, in which case it was imperative that they close the gate quickly, before they could puzzle out the truth for themselves.

As he and Zach worked to collapse the gate, he could hear Ulanna conversing with some of the other Taramatula in the room. His grasp on the local language was still very poor, so the only thing he understood was that she ordered food and drink to be made and brought to them. Zorian was in no mood for either, but he figured out it would be impolite to try and stop her.

A little while later, they were all ushered into a relatively small but luxurious room. There were five of them present: Ulanna, Daimen, Orissa, Zach and Zorian. Despite the presence of Ulanna and Orissa, though, it was Daimen that provided most of the explanation for what was happening. Apparently, one or more members of Daimen’s team had talked to outsiders about the orb they had found, and the story had blown up very quickly. Within hours, everyone and their mother wanted to speak to Daimen to find out what he intended to do with the orb and to try and influence him to sell it to whatever group they represented.

Caught off guard by the sudden flood of interested buyers and aware that not everyone was willing to take their refusal to sell the orb in good grace, Daimen and his team retreated to the Taramatula estate and barricaded themselves there until further notice.

"The people after us can’t afford to be too brazen with the Taramatula, so we’re safe while we remain inside the estate," Daimen concluded. "But the moment we step out we’ll be ambushed by dozens of different groups. They know we’re in here. They have the estate heavily monitored. Everyone and everything going in or out of the estate is closely tracked. I couldn’t possibly leave the estate to open the gate elsewhere."

"Maybe I’m just stupid, but why don’t the Taramatula simply tell all these people to back off? They’re supposed to be the main political force here, no?" Zach asked.

"I’m afraid it’s not that simple," Ulanna said. "There are too many powerful groups making their moves here, quite a few of them from outside our sphere of influence. Though they cannot afford to take us lightly, the same is true for us as well. This is a sensitive situation and we have to move carefully. Rest assured, though, that we are taking note of every slight against us for when the time is right."

"Another issue is that some elements of the local government are discussing the possibility of simply confiscating the orb from us by force," Daimen said. "The Taramatula have to spend a lot of their influence on making sure that the initiative doesn’t get anywhere. Damn it, I knew it was important to keep this find a secret but I had no idea it would inspire this sort of greed…"

"It’s a portable pocket dimension of massive size," Orissa pointed out. "On top of that, it contains ruins from the Age of Gods, and probably the remains of Awan-Temti’s wealth. There could be divine artifacts in there, plants and animals that have gone extinct in the rest of the world, anything. Of course it inspires so much greed. You’re fortunate you have the Taramatula family to shield you from all this while we figure out what to do."

"Yes, yes, I get it," Daimen said patiently. "I’m lucky to have you, dear."

"Have you made any trips to the pocket dimension yet?" Zach asked curiously.

"We haven’t even discovered how to deploy the orb," Daimen said, shaking his head. "We don’t have a command marker like Zorian does, so we have to do things the hard way."

"Meaning?" Zach prodded for details.

"We have to reverse-engineer the control spells that are used for operating the orb," Daimen said. "A generational treasure like this one would definitely have a method of controlling the orb without a command marker, as a safety measure if nothing else. We just have to find it. Unfortunately, that could take a while."

Daimen gave Zorian a meaningful look. Though Zorian didn’t know for sure what he was trying to tell him, he could guess. While finding a way to operate the orb without a marker was not a priority for him and Zach, it would mean a lot for Daimen. He was probably well aware that Zorian had no intention whatsoever of revealing his abilities to Daimen outside the time loop, which would make those control spells absolutely crucial to his mission. Without them, even removing the orb from its resting place would be impossible, greatly complicating everything.

"Even if we had the means of operating the orb, we would still refrain from sending an expedition to its interior at this time," Orissa noted. "The possibility of further guardian beasts, like that god-touched hydra, is too high. Months of preparation would be required to mount a proper expedition, and the current political situation makes such preparations impossible."

"Yes, exactly," Daimen quickly agreed. He turned to Zach and Zorian. "And because I’m stuck here all the time, I can’t really hire the experts I need to figure out how to operate the orb, either. The truth is that I have very little to do here. I was thinking it might be a good idea for me to disappear for a few days. Get the orb away from covetous eyes and talk to some old friends about my options."

"This again," Orissa said with an unhappy frown.

This sparked a brief argument between Orissa and Daimen, since Daimen didn’t want to explain what exactly he was up to and Orissa insisted that she had every right to know the details. In all honesty, Zorian thought Orissa’s position was quite reasonable and empathized with her frustration at Daimen’s evasiveness. However, he also couldn’t fault Daimen for this, since it wasn’t like he could just openly say that–

"If you want us to take you back to Cyoria with us when we reopen the gate, you should just say so," Zach said.

Everyone sent him a shocked look. Well, everyone except Zorian – he just buried his face in his hands and tried to take deep breaths.

"Damn it, Zach…" he mumbled into his hands.

"What?" Zach protested, giving Zorian an exasperated look. "Any story you and Daimen cook up wouldn’t last a day and you know it. They’re not stupid. They’d figure it out soon enough."

"Thank you, mister Noveda," Ulanna told him. "I’m glad that at least one man here respects our reasoning skills."

Zach gave her a thumbs-up and a sunny grin.

"You’re saying you opened a dimensional passage here all the way from Eldemar?" Orissa asked, sounding just a little bit incredulous.

"We do a lot of crazy stuff," Zach said with careless shrug.

It turned out that neither Ulanna nor Orissa were very familiar with the details of how the gate spell works. This wasn’t very surprising, as the spell was extremely rare, but somehow Zorian kept forgetting little details like that.

After Zorian gave them a brief explanation of how the gate spell functioned, Orissa gave him a strange look.

"What?" Zorian asked, feeling somewhat self-conscious.

"This method you use to ignore distance limitations requires another person helping you on the other side, yes?" she asked. Zorian nodded wordlessly. "Then how can you open a gate back to Eldemar? Can the third Kazinski brother cast the gate spell, too?"

"What, Fortov? Please," Zorian scoffed. "He’ll be lucky not to flunk out of the academy."

"Zorian!" Daimen protested. He never liked it when Zorian badmouthed the rest of the family.

"No, we’ll be using the simulacrum I left back in Cyoria," Zorian said, completely ignoring Daimen’s outburst. "Since I can cast the gate spell, my simulacrum can obviously do the same."

"Oh, so you can create a simulacrum too?" Ulanna asked casually, not sounding particularly surprised. Zorian had to hand it to her, she was very good at projecting an aura of serene confidence. Orissa seemed to be trying to mimic that attitude, but she was nowhere near good enough to pull it off. One could see that these kind of reveals bothered her and put her somewhat off-balance.

"We do a lot of crazy stuff," Zorian said. He thought about mimicking Zach completely and giving her a thumbs-up and a cheeky smile, but quickly dropped the idea. That sort of thing was something only Zach could pull off without looking like a total idiot.

In the end, they managed to hammer out an agreement. Daimen would return to Cyoria with Zach and Zorian and would take the orb of the first emperor along with him. Zorian would leave a simulacrum in the Taramatula estate so that they could return via gate spell in exactly four days.

Zorian thought this would be the end of it, but his hopes were ruthlessly squashed when Daimen told him he still had to explain to his team that he would be away for a while.

For a moment, Zorian felt the urge to make an overdramatic gesture to the uncaring heavens. And here he’d thought this would just be a short visit to Koth, consisting of little more than replacing his lost simulacrum and asking Daimen if he had found out anything new about the orb.

Sometimes he just couldn’t win.

It was a massive relief to Zorian when the three of them finally stepped through the gate and returned to Cyoria. Both the Taramatula and Daimen’s team were on edge right now, and thus rather exasperating to deal with. He kind of felt bad for his simulacrum, who would be stuck with them for the next several days. Oh well, at least he had Kirma and Torun to talk to – those two were fairly interesting and he suspected he might be able to broker some kind of trade with at least one of them.

Regardless, he was back and could devote other matters. Xvim’s efforts to convince various experts to trade their secrets with him had been reasonably successful, Sudomir had to be properly interrogated, the efforts of the researchers to understand the Ibasan gate stabilization frame were starting to bear fruit and the Silent Doorway Adepts were hinting that they were willing to send a group over to Koth to acquire a gate key. Sadly, recent events concerning Daimen and the orb had probably made that last idea a dead end in this restart. His simulacrum couldn’t possible leave the Taramatula estate without a hundred pairs of eyes following his every move. Unfortunate. He could really use an alternate entrance to Koth that didn’t rely on Daimen right now. He would have to assign a high priority to this idea in future restarts.

Daimen had agreed to hand over the orb to him and Zach while he was in Cyoria. Partially because he figured they could find out far more about it than he could, due to possessing a marker that could actually operate it, and partially because he wasn’t entirely sure the orb would be safe in his possession. News traveled faster than people. By all rights, his little trip to Cyoria should have gone undetected by his pursuers, but he couldn’t be completely sure. Thus, he felt it was for the best if he didn’t have the orb on him unless absolutely necessary.

Zorian expected that he would be the only one that could tinker with the orb to discover its secrets, since Zach didn’t have the necessary personal soul awareness to control his marker. He was very much wrong. Apparently, Zach didn’t need to have conscious control over his marker to take command of the orb. After an hour or so of tinkering with the orb, Zach managed to connect to it instinctively.

And after that one success, he no longer needed an hour of tinkering to connect to again. Simply touching the orb would be enough to re-establish contact. Zach didn’t even have to concentrate on it to pull it off – a touch and a stray thought were enough.

Zorian was a little sour about that. The orb certainly never reacted that way to him, no matter how many hours he spent interacting with it. No, he had to spend months going thought that hellish soul awareness training and then more time painstakingly studying the way marker worked to get as far as he did. This sort of stuff really made it obvious that his marker was some kind of inferior version of the one on Zach.

It had been only a day since they were back in Cyoria when Daimen surprised him again. He wanted to talk to Kirielle and Fortov.

This was a bit of a problem. Both of their siblings knew for a fact that Daimen shouldn’t be in Cyoria. Mother and Father had gone to Koth to meet with him. How on earth did he intend to explain his presence here? But Daimen insisted that he needed to do this, and Zorian didn’t feel like arguing with him. There was probably no great harm in it, and he was pretty sure that Daimen would go and have those conversations behind his back if he was too stubborn.

Amusingly, Daimen wanted to talk to Kirielle and Fortov alone, without anyone else being present. Zorian was almost certain that meant he wanted to ask them specifically about Zorian. Hah! Fortov didn’t know anything about Zorian, and Kirielle was a little tattletale and would no doubt tell Zorian everything that she and Daimen talked about. But he told Daimen none of that and simply wished him luck before sending him on his way.

The next day, Daimen came back to talk to him, looking lost and confused.

"They didn’t even want to talk to me…" he complained, sounding quite dejected. It actually made Zorian feel bad for him somewhat.

"Come on, it’s not that bad," Zorian comforted him. "I don’t know about Fortov, but I’m pretty sure Kirielle wouldn’t have snubbed you like that. Imaya tells me you spent an entire hour with her."

"Yeah, but that’s all I did with her," Daimen complained. "She spent the entire hour fidgeting and looking uncomfortable. She barely spoke, and only when I specifically prodded her. I’m not entirely sure, but I think she was actually scared of me a little. That’s…"

Damien waved his hands in the air, as if trying to convey some kind of unpronounceable concept through silent gesticulation.

"Sad?" Zorian offered.

"Sure, let’s go with that," Daimen said. "Also worrying. And upsetting. And a whole host of other things. Especially when coupled with what happened with Fortov. Do you know what happened when I knocked on his door?"

"Not really, no," Zorian told him. He had actually known about Daimen’s talk with Kirielle, since she had told him all about it when he had come to Imaya’s place in the evening, but he honestly had no idea how Daimen’s talk with Fortov had gone. Not well, obviously, but it would be interesting to hear why. "What did he do?"

"He was just really abrasive to me right from the start," Daimen said. "He refused to even let me in, eventually started shouting at me and then slammed the door in my face and ignored me."

Huh. Interesting.

Daimen looked at Zorian, silently asking him for an explanation. Zorian said nothing, though, and Daimen grew visibly frustrated as seconds ticked by. He ran both of his hands through his hair and clutched it tightly in his fists, as if wanting to tear it off.

"You’re going to go prematurely bald if you keep doing that," Zorian commented lightly.

Daimen gave him an unamused glare.

But he did remove his hands from his head.

"I don’t understand!" Daimen protested loudly. "Am I… Am I such a horrible older brother? I knew you didn’t like me, but even Fortov? Even little Kirielle?! Why?! What did I do?!"

Zorian clacked his tongue and considered things for a second. On one hand, he felt that Daimen was getting exactly what he deserved. On the other hand, the fact that Daimen was so upset over this meant that his mental image of him was little… unfair. He decided to be a little nice to his older brother for a change.

"In regards to Kirielle, the answer is simple, my dear eldest brother," Zorian told him. "You’re practically a stranger to her. By the time she was old enough to interact with people, you were practically never at home. When was the last time you talked with her? Disregarding yesterday’s meeting, of course."

"Uhh…" Daimen fumbled.

"You can’t even remember," Zorian stated, shaking his head. "Anyway, all she had of you were stories she heard of you. Most of which came either from Mother… or from me. After all, I’m one of the people who interacted with her the most over the years."

"Oh, heavens help me," Daimen lamented. "What exactly did you tell her about me?"

"The truth," Zorian shrugged.

"You mean your truth," Daimen accused.

"Of course," Zorian responded, completely unmoved by the accusation. "But don’t worry, I kept quiet about your worst excesses. Truth be told, I never liked talking about you to anyone, and that included Kirielle. And besides, Mother never failed to take your side in everything. If it were just the matter of stories, Kirielle would be more ambivalent to you. The thing is, she needs help… and she knows she’ll never get it from you. She just might get it from me, though, which is why she doesn’t want to sabotage her relations with me by getting cozy with you. She knows you kind of piss me off."

"What do you mean she needs help?" Daimen frowned. "And why are you so sure she’d never get it from me?"

"Because it would require standing up to Mother," Zorian said.

Over the next hour or so, Zorian tried to familiarize Daimen with Kirielle’s situation. The arranged marriage their parents had prepared for her. Her desire to learn magic like the rest of them. He tried to keep the explanations brief, worried that telling this to Daimen constituted some kind of betrayal towards Kirielle, who had told him these things in confidence. He said enough for Daimen to form a rudimentary picture of what was happening with Kirielle behind the scenes, though.

"I can’t believe I never heard of this," Daimen said, his eyes somewhat unfocused as he seemed to recall something in his head. "I speak to Mother and Father often and they never mentioned this."

"Did you ever actually ask them about Kirielle?" Zorian asked.

Daimen was quiet for a few moments.

"…no," he eventually admitted.

"Well, there you go," Zorian shrugged.

Daimen exhaled heavily and then corrected his posture, sitting a little straighter in his chair.

"Okay, I admit I haven’t been very fair to our little sister. I guess I kind of deserved such a chilly reception from her," Daimen said. "What about Fortov, then? What’s his deal?"

"How would I know?" Zorian protested. "Do you honestly think I speak to Fortov about you?"

Daimen gave him an annoyed huff. "Yes, I get it, I get it – you never talk about me to anyone if you can help it. But surely you have some inkling about how Fortov thinks and what bothers him. You’ve been interacting with him for six years now."

Zorian made a weird face, momentarily struck speechless by this statement.

"What?" Zorian laughed. "Whatever gave you that idea? Why would I be interacting with Fortov?"

"Are… Are you serious?" Daimen asked incredulously. Zorian stared at him. "He’s your brother. You live in the same city. You can visit him anytime you want."

"So?" Zorian asked, inclining his head uncomprehendingly.

"Are you honestly tell me that in all these years, you haven’t seriously talked to our brother even once?" Daimen asked. His tone was pleading, as if begging Zorian to tell him he’s wrong.

"That’s what I’m saying, yes," Zorian nodded. Why would Daimen expect anything else from him?

"Doesn’t the restart end in a massive invasion?" Daimen frowned. Zorian nodded again. "What does Fortov do during the invasion?"

"Presumably he reaches the academy shelters and spends the night there, along with the other students," Zorian shrugged.

Admittedly, the shelters hadn’t been very safe during the one occasion he had actually experienced them, but that was when Red Robe had actively been helping the invaders by feeding them information. Without his help, the shelters were actually pretty safe.

"Presumably? You never checked?" Daimen asked. Zorian shook his head in denial. "Zorian, for heaven’s sake…"

"I don’t see why you’re so surprised by this," Zorian told him honestly. "Fortov is my second least-favorite person in the whole family, right after Father. Of course I never bothered to check up on him."

Daimen opened his mouth, as if he wanted to continue that argument, but then just shook his head and gave up.

"Nevermind," Daimen sighed. "Did you have any interactions with him during all these time?"

"Actually, yes," Zorian said. "He pushes this one girl into a purple creeper patch near the end of every restart and then comes to me to beg for a healing salve. I used to just avoid being home whenever he comes, but these days it’s not even necessary. He never comes to find me if I stay at Imaya’s place."

"He pushes this girl into a purple creeper patch regardless of what you change in a restart?" Daimen said, frowning.

"As far as I can tell, yes," Zorian confirmed. "The girl has a huge crush on him, if that means anything to you."

Daimen made a thoughtful hum. "It’s better than nothing, I guess. But really Zorian, must you be so petty and callous? I know you and Fortov didn’t get along as kids, bit this sort of attitude is a little too much. You nurse your grudges way too deeply."

"It’s easy for you to call for peace and understanding," Zorian said, folding his arms over his chest defiantly. "It’s not you who had to deal with Fortov’s crappy attitude over the years."

"All I’m saying is that maybe you should give him a chance," Daimen said. "Like you did with Kirielle when you decided to take her with you to Cyoria. If you were wrong about her, who’s to say you weren’t wrong about Fortov as well?"

"But I wasn’t really wrong about her," Zorian pointed out. "I didn’t want her around because I felt she was a selfish little blabbermouth that would distract me from my studies and tattle on me when she returns to Mother. That’s all still true, it’s just that I no longer care about that. Provided I actually manage to find a way out of this time loop, my future is set. I can afford a distraction or two, and Kirielle running off and revealing my plans and activities to Mother is irrelevant because our parents can’t stop me anymore. I’m so skilled and powerful that I can do whatever I want, Mother and Father be damned."

Somewhat surprisingly, Daimen didn’t grow even frustrated at this response, like Zorian thought he would. Instead he just gave him a sad smile and shook his head ruefully.

"Mother and Father are so concerned about me making a mistake that they’re rushing over to Koth even as we speak to talk me out of my marriage to Orissa, but they fail to notice a crisis developing right in front of them," he said. "We really are one messed up family, aren’t we? And the terrifying thing in all this is that I will forget all about this very soon, won’t I? After the summer festival, it will be as if none of this ever happened. That’s so unfair. How the hell can I fix a problem if I have no memory of its existence?"

"I don’t think you could fix our family, even if you had all the time in the world," Zorian told him. "But yes, the reality of the time loop is rather soul crushing if one really thinks about it. You’re dealing with this pretty well, all things considered."

"It’s mostly because I have avoided thinking about it too deeply, I think," Daimen said. "Now that we’re getting closer to the time limit, I find my thoughts wandering towards it more and more. Especially since I’ve done so much in these last few weeks. I’ve realized so many things. Important things. It’s frightening and infuriating to realize I must lose it all."

"Well, I’m sure you’ve heard about the notebooks I’m transferring between restarts for various people," Zorian noted. "If it’s really so important, you can just write it down and hand it to me for safekeeping."

"Oh?" Daimen smiled. "So I actually qualify for that prestigious service? I must say, the way you’ve been talking about our family, I was starting to get a little worried. What if you intended to just forget about me in all future restarts? You already know how to find the orb, after all, and I know you aren’t exactly a big fan of me…"

Zorian gave him a mildly uncomfortable look. He had been thinking of something like that. Though his eldest brother would surely be useful in tracking down and recovering the rest of the pieces of the Key, it bothered Zorian a great deal to rely on Daimen for anything. It just… felt wrong. It convincing Daimen to help them was a time consuming task, too, so was it really worth the time to include him in their efforts?

In the end he realized he was just looking for excuses. They needed the help that Daimen could provide. If nothing else, it wasn’t very fair to Zach to sabotage their chances of getting out of the time loop just because he had a problem with Daimen.

Plus, the truth was…

"I was wrong about you, okay?" Zorian said with a heavy sigh. "I still think you’re very annoying, but… you’re not as bad as the Daimen that lived inside my head."

It hurt him to say it, but it was the truth. Maybe Daimen had changed after he had moved out of the house and stopped interacting with Zorian or maybe Zorian’s image of him had never been all that reliable to begin with. Whatever the truth, this Daimen was more helpful and reasonable than the dark giant that had loomed over him in the past.

"I’m not sure if I’d call it wrong, exactly. Regardless of their reasons, the other two siblings don’t like me much either. I’m clearly an abject failure as an older brother. It’s a sobering realization," Daimen mused. After a second of silence, he shook his head as if to clear it up. "But enough of depressing topics like that. You mentioned the notebooks you’re carrying across restarts for Xvim and the others. As it happens, I’ve taken the time to talk with Xvim yesterday. He told me about the trade deals you two are trying to set up with various experts."

"Yes, it’s honestly one of my better ideas," Zorian nodded. "It’s already showing results and there is every indication we can do even better in future restarts. I don’t think every single one of those experts will agree to a trade in the end, but quite a few are clearly open to the idea if approached by someone they actually respect. Are you thinking of helping Xvim convince people?"

"No," Daimen shook his head. "I’ll be pleased to help if Xvim asks for it, but my involvement could easily turn the initiative into an unmitigated disaster. You probably think of my fame as purely beneficial, but the truth is it causes many mages to view me as a threat. A lot of them would never trade anything with me. Why do you think I never learned how to cast the Gate spell before you came along?"

"I see," Zorian said thoughtfully. "If not that, though, why did you mention Xvim’s efforts?"

"Well…" began Daimen. "Gathering secret knowledge from Altazia’s many experts is a commendable initiative, but it is hard work and it will likely only provide incremental improvement to your capabilities."

"True," Zorian said. "But what’s the alternative? All the low-hanging fruit has already been plucked."

"Not necessarily," Daimen said with a grin. "What is and is not low-hanging fruit depends on a person’s abilities, and you have something that few other people do – an ability to traverse between continents with ease."

Zorian thought about it for a second and then motioned for Daimen to continue. He didn’t quite see what he was getting at.

"What I’m saying is that Koth would be a good place to extend your magic gathering initiative," Daimen continued. "Unlike Xlotic, which is relatively well-connected to Altazia due to the existence of the teleport network, Koth is quite remote. Despite that, they use the same basic magic system that we do, unlike Hsan. This makes them a great place to find unexpected spell combinations and novel alchemy. Who knows what kind of… low-hanging fruit can be obtained by combining our magical traditions with those of Koth?"

Zorian raised his eyebrow at his eldest brother. Daimen looked quite animated as he spoke of the idea.

"And I suppose you’re volunteering to run this sort of initiative?" Zorian asked.

"Ha ha…" Daimen laughed nervously. "To be perfectly honest, doing this was one of my objectives in coming to Koth. I was in the process of laying the groundwork for it even before the time loop started."

"Well… that’s great then," Zorian told him honestly. "I don’t see an issue with the idea, then."

"Great!" Daimen said, giving him a sunny smile reminiscent of Zach. "It’s just that this time loop came too soon and not all of the preparations were complete. I may need a tiny, tiny loan for my dearest brother to start things up…"

A few days later, Daimen was returned to Koth. The orb was left in Cyoria, since Daimen figured it was safer that way and because Zach had really taken a liking to it. Busy as he was with other things, Zorian decided to delegate all orb-related tinkering to Zach. Considering how much more strongly the orb reacted to him, Zach may be in a better position to uncover its secrets anyway.

Today, though, Zorian had received a somewhat unusual request: Taiven wanted to talk to him. In private.

Normally such a request wouldn’t be particularly notable, but Zorian had actually not seen or heard from Taiven at all ever since their attack on the Ibasan base. If it were not for Alanic’s assurances that she had survived the battle in perfect health, Zorian would have been honestly worried for her. As it was, it was obvious she had been avoiding him for some reason. He had actually thought about tracking her down to ask what was happening, but the end of the restart was approaching and so many things were vying for his time and attention…

No matter. Since she’d reached out to him all of a sudden, he would presumably find out what was bothering her quite soon.

When they met he offered to teleport them to some empty, quiet place, but she would have none of that. Apparently when she said she wanted to talk in private, she meant she would bring him to her family training hall – the same one where they sometimes sparred against one another in previous restarts. She seemed to find the place calming and reassuring.

"So what’s this about?" he asked her.

"I’m worried," she said. She sounded worried, too.

Zorian waited for a few seconds for a clarification of what exactly she was worried about, but Taiven seemed to have trouble finding the words. She paced around the training hall like a caged tiger, scowling and shaking her head.

"No, seriously, what is this about?" Zorian asked.

She still didn’t say anything.

"Is it time loop related?" he added after a bit of thought.

"Of course it’s time loop related!" she burst out at him. She looked like she was going to snap at him but quickly managed to reign herself in. She shook her head sadly. "And, in a way, it isn’t. I don’t even know why I called you here. It’s stupid. I should just–"

"Don’t even dare try to send me away now," Zorian warned her.

"I won’t, I won’t," she assured him. "I’m just… I just realized I probably lost you as a friend."

Zorian gave her an incredulous look.

"And why would you think that?" Zorian asked her curiously.

"Because this time loop has changed you," she told him. "You already feel like a stranger to me. You’re so hard to read these days, and so very capable. Everything I can do, you can do better. And that’s only going to get worse as you spend time in here. By the time you get out, why would you need me anymore? By the time this is all resolved, I will probably no longer have a friend."

"Eh, you’re being overdramatic," Zorian told her. He knew he was probably sounding a little dismissive, but he honestly didn’t know what else to tell her. "I know you don’t remember this, but I spend a lot of time interacting with you in various restarts. There is zero chance that I’m just going to forget you."

"Well yes, I’m sure that you won’t just forget me," she huffed. "But any concern you have for me will be of the… well, patronizing kind. You’ll be so above me it isn’t even funny. We won’t be equals, you know? It’ll be you, a secret archmage, keeping an eye on his old friend for old-time’s sake. It’s very depressing."

"Ah," said Zorian slowly.

There was a lot of truth in what she was saying. There was really no way their friendship would be the same as it had been before the time loop. However, that was not necessarily a bad thing. His past self was… somewhat bitter with Taiven. He had not considered them to be close friends, something that Taiven seemed rather oblivious to. Much like she was oblivious to his past crush on her, really.

So yes, their relationship would never be the same. But was that a bad thing? While Taiven might lament the loss of their earlier friendship, Zorian couldn’t help but wonder whether there would have even been a friendship if he hadn’t got stuck in this time loop. Would he have eventually overcome the hurt of having his love confession laughed at and reestablished close bonds with her? Probably. But it would have taken quite some time and he wasn’t sure Taiven would have stuck around him for long enough to see that happen.

"Why did you ever decide to become friends with me, anyway?" Zorian asked her curiously. "This will sound a little self-deprecating, but I don’t think I was that good of a friend."

"Ha ha!" she laughed, her mood brightening a little. "Well, it’s good that you’re so honest. That’s the one change I like about the new you."

She picked up a practice doll from a nearby bench and started making minute corrections to it. Zorian couldn’t see what they were meant to do, so he assumed she was just stalling for time and giving herself something to do.

"Since you were willing to be a little self-deprecating, I will follow your example," Taiven eventually said. "I wasn’t a very good friend either. Either to you or to anyone else. I’m too blunt and impulsive and I can’t judge the situation and people very well. Most people actually find me pretty insulting and aggravating."

Zorian was going to say something to cheer her up, but then he remembered that her nickname for him was Roach. He still remembered the argument he’d had with her when she had tried to convince him that being compared to cockroaches was a compliment because they were amazing animals, famed for their adaptability and resilience. Eventually he caved in and (reluctantly) let her call him that, but he could see why some people would be deathly insulted if she were to pull that kind of stunt on them.

"I actually have very few friends aside from you," she continued. "Aside from you, only my two teammates seem to like me. But Urik and Oran… they’re old friends. I’ll never be anything other than the third wheel if I hang out around them."

"But I didn’t have any other friends," Zorian surmised.

"Yeah," Taiven told him. "You annoyed me, I annoyed you, but we got along with each other anyway. Maybe you weren’t a good friend, but I wasn’t much better, so it didn’t matter. But now you’re getting better, and I… I can’t."

She hugged the practice doll like a little girl trying to comfort herself with a favorite toy. It was a somewhat weird sight, since the practice doll was the size of an adult human and creepily featureless.

Zorian stared at her, wondering how to handle this. He didn’t see how he could convince Taiven that the nature of their friendship wouldn’t change once he got out of the time loop. It would be an obvious lie. Of course, Zorian did not consider this change to be a bad thing, but to explain why he felt that way he would have to…

…eh, why not. If he was really honest with himself, he always had wanted to do this. He just hadn’t had the courage to go through with it.

"I had a crush on you once," he told her.

"Eh!?" she exclaimed, jerking in surprise and dropping the practice doll. It clattered to the floor, leaving deafening silence in its wake. For a moment, anyway. "What do you mean, you had a crush on me!? When!? How!?"

"Do you remember that time I asked you out on a date?" he asked her.

"What? Are we… are we talking about that time…" she fumbled. Zorian nodded anyway. He had only ever asked her to a date once in the time they knew each other, so she couldn’t be thinking of anything else. "But, uh, isn’t that when I… laughed at you?"

Zorian gave her a long-suffering look.

"Yes," he confirmed. "Yes, it is. It wasn’t a joke, Taiven. I was dead serious about it."

"Ah ha ha…" she laughed nervously. "Wow, that’s… really something."

She buried her face into her hands for a moment.

"Gods above, I’m so stupid sometimes," she mumbled into her hands.

Then she punched him in the shoulder.

"Hey!" he protested in mild outrage. He’d normally be more bothered about the sudden physical violence, but eh. It was Taiven. He expected that sort of thing from her. "What the hell!?"

"And you’re stupid too!" she told him. "Why the hell would you just accept me laughing at you like that if you were being serious!?"

"Well what the hell was I supposed to do!?" Zorian protested.

"Tell me I was wrong! Ask me out again! Get angry before storming off!" Taiven shouted. "Anything! Not just pretend everything was fine and retreat with a tail between your legs like a wounded puppy. I mean… I kept joking about that long afterwards and you still didn’t say anything. At least if I knew I wouldn’t have been rubbing salt into your wounds like that!"

"It doesn’t matter," Zorian grunted. "In the end I still got an answer to my question. You clearly weren’t interested in me that way. You found the very idea laughable, even."

"Oh come on!" she whined. "That’s not fair. I wasn’t laughing because the idea of me dating you was so ridiculous. I was laughing because I gave you love advice urging you to ask people out and you followed it by immediately asking me out. It just… seemed to me like you were making a joke. In retrospect, I was being stupid, but… You should have said something, damn it!"

There was a long, uncomfortable silence as two of them refused to look at each other and sat there in silence.

"We’re going out on a date," Taiven suddenly declared.

Zorian gave her a weird look.

"But I’m over you," he pointed out. "That’s why I said I had a crush on you. It’s all in the past for me."

"Yeah, I figured," she said. "It doesn’t matter. We’re still having a date."

"Don’t I get any say in this?" Zorian asked, an amused smile on his face.

"What are you talking about," Taiven sniffed disdainfully. "You’re the one who asked me to a date. I’m just accepting your invitation… with a bit of a delay."

Zorian laughed at the uniquely Taiven logic.

"A bit of a delay, she says… You really are something," he said, shaking his head. "Fine. Have it your way."

"Good," she said simply, then looked away, as if too shy to meet his eyes.

Zorian smiled. He had been telling the truth, and he really didn’t have a crush for her any longer. Any romantic feeling he’d had for her had petered out during his long stay in the time loop.

But he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t kind of glad about this.

72. Crossroads

He never really realized how beautiful Cyoria could be in the evening.

That was Zorian’s thought as he and Taiven wandered around Cyoria, checking up street stands and discussing casual topics. Most settlements grew dark and quiet as evening approached, giving off a dangerous and sinister atmosphere, but Cyoria was a major metropolis and this was the week before the summer festival. The streets were lively and well-illuminated, with lots of people wandering around and lots of street vendors setting up stands and trying to convince these people to part with their money for sweets, trinkets and so on.

Zorian would never have guessed that he would enjoy this kind of atmosphere. In the past, he had found occasions like this to be rather aggravating and avoided them whenever possible. Of course, in the past, Zorian would get headaches just from being in a crowd and he didn’t have a pretty girl to keep him company.

He gave a sideways glance to Taiven, who was walking beside him. Even though this was just a friendly date and not anything romantic, he couldn’t help but treat it fairly seriously. He had chosen to wear a fairly formal outfit for the evening, took her to an expensive restaurant and even invited her for a round of dance. He was initially worried he was taking things too far, but considering Taiven came to the date wearing a very expensive-looking dress and had kept her usual cheery disposition throughout the entire evening, he seemed to have made a good choice.

"I’ve got to say, this went a lot better than I thought it would," Taiven suddenly said. Zorian raised an eyebrow at her. "Wait, that came out kind of wrong. What I mean is… considering how bad both of us are at the social side of things… umm…"

Zorian gave her a faint smile and decided to save her from further awkwardness.

"It’s fine," he said. "I get your point. I’m also pleasantly surprised at how well this turned out. I guess we’re better at this than we thought."

"Well, in my case it’s mostly trial and error, so I can’t feel too proud about myself," Taiven laughed lightly. "I went to quite a few dates in the past. Plenty of guys get attracted to me for my looks and don’t quite comprehend what they’re getting into until they experience it firsthand. Trust me, my first date was a real disaster."

"Oh? You’ll have to tell me that story sometime," Zorian teased.

"No way," she said, giving him a playful shove and causing him to stumble to the side a little. He nearly crashed into an elderly couple walking past them, but managed to correct himself in time. "The less people know that story, the better. Hell, sometimes I wish I could forget that memory myself. But then I’d probably make the same mistakes all over again, so I guess it’s a good thing I can’t forget."

She frowned suddenly, staring at the night sky for a moment before giving him a curious look.

"What?" he prodded.

"What about you? Do you do this often?" she asked him.

"Do what often? Go on a date with you?" Zorian asked, amused.

"Well not with me," she said, rolling her eyes. "I mean in general. You’ve been in this time loop for years. Surely you’ve gone on a few dates in all that time."

"A few," Zorian admitted.

"Ha!" she said, pointing her finger at him triumphantly. "I knew it!"

Zorian opened his mouth to respond but Taiven immediately stopped him.

"Don’t you try and bewitch me with your honeyed words," she said in mock outrage. "I bet you tell them to every girl you pursue."

"But I haven’t even said anything yet," Zorian pointed out. "Really, I have no intention of justifying myself to you. Based on what you just told me about your dating experiences, you went to a lot more dates than I have. You heartbreaker."

They kept talking and meandering through the streets for a while longer, until eventually the conversation wound down and they both seemed to reach an unspoken agreement that it was getting late and that it was time for the date to end. Zorian couldn’t help but get progressively quieter and more contemplative as the date grew to a close.

They had been walking in silence for several minutes when Taiven decided to speak up again.

"What’s wrong?" Taiven asked. "Why did you get so depressed all of a sudden? Was it something I said?"

"Hm?" Zorian said, broken out of his reverie. "No, no. It’s not you. I’m just thinking. It’s… well, it’s probably for the best if I don’t tell you."

"Zorian, don’t make me hit you," she said warningly.

"Fine, if you insist…" Zorian said, giving her an awkward chuckle. "I was just thinking how utterly depressing it is that you will not remember anything that happened tonight in future restarts. We cleared the air between us, enjoyed a wonderful evening… and none of that will matter when the loop resets again. You will revert to the same suspicious, borderline hostile Taiven that I get at the start of every restart. It takes half of each restart just to convince you the time loop is real and that I haven’t been lying to you since I met you or been replaced by an imposter, nevermind anything else."

Taiven winced, looking away guiltily.

"No, don’t feel guilty," Zorian told her, shaking his head. "It’s a perfectly reasonable reaction. It’s one thing for old, experienced mages like Xvim, Alanic and Daimen to believe in the time loop. They’ve dealt with many complicated situations in their life and experienced plenty of strange magic. People like you and me? Well… did you know I spent the first six restarts going to classes like everything was just fine, hoping everything would return to normal if I just kept my head down and behaved like usual?"

Taiven gave him a surprised look.

"Yes, I know," Zorian nodded. "It’s kind of stupid, but that’s what I did. Your reaction is pretty good, all things considered. It’s just that I really like how this turned out, and yet… I realize this will probably forever remain an empty memory in my head. I can’t replicate the chain of events that led to this in the real world. I’m not even sure I can replicate it in future restarts. So I guess I’m just trying to figure out what I should do about this in the future."

A short, awkward silence descended on the scene, causing Zorian to wince a little inside at his own poor timing. Why did he insist on telling her this now? He just couldn’t let things end on a positive note, could he?

"Sorry," he said quietly.

He suddenly felt like he could understand some of Zach’s attitude towards people around them. Was this why Zach no longer bothered to actively befriend any of their classmates or friendly strangers, even though he clearly used to do so extensively in the past? The way Zorian was feeling this evening… perhaps this was how Zach felt all the time during his earlier years? Making friends and experiencing life changing moments with them over and over again, only for the other party to forget all about it in the next restart…

"Don’t be sorry," Taiven said. "What are friends for if they can’t even listen to you whine from time to time? Besides, it was a fun evening. One moment of depressing seriousness isn’t going to ruin it."

Eventually they reached a crossroads where their paths separated and stopped. Zorian wracked his head for a moment, trying to figure out what was the appropriate way to end the date. They weren’t actually romantically involved, after all.

"So… I guess this is it," he eventually said lamely.

"I guess it is," Taiven agreed, equally lamely.

After a second of hesitation, with neither of them making a move to leave, Taiven spoke up again.

"Hey," she suddenly said. "So, I know you said you were totally over me… and I totally respect that! But just in case you ever change your mind about that, you should really work on your body a little."

"What?" Zorian asked, surprised.

"You know. Start running and exercising. Pick up some kind of physically intensive outdoor hobby. Put on some muscle," she said. "I’m not saying you stand no chance otherwise, but…"

Zorian huffed at her, torn between amusement and exasperation. "But it would do wonders to make you see me as relationship material, right?" he surmised. Taiven nodded. "Fair enough. I’ll keep that in mind."

Well. Taiven’s preferences in men aside, he had been rather annoyed with his lack of endurance lately. It made things more difficult than they needed to be and forced him to constantly drink potions just to keep up with Zach and others. It wasn’t a huge issue in the time loop, but such an extensive use of potions was inadvisable in the long term. Once he was out of the time loop, he’d probably end up working on his physique on his own initiative, just so he could maintain the sort of pace he was used to by now…

In any case, this was the end of their evening together. After saying their goodbyes, both of them went their separate ways.

Zorian deliberately took the scenic route back to Imaya’s place, consumed in his own thoughts and in no hurry to get back to sleep.

Simulacrum number two, stationed in Koth, was pretty pleased with how things were going.

Being stationed in Koth was usually a rather boring task, since it meant being stranded in an alien land whose language and writing he did not understand. He couldn’t read any of the local books, he couldn’t engage in casual conversations with people and he couldn’t cast any spells without good reason.

This time, however, he was living in the Taramatula estate. The Taramatula knew very well he was just a simulacrum, but this didn’t seem to bother them much. They treated him just as well as they did the real Zorian – they gave him a room to sleep in, a teacher to help him master the local language, and access to things like paper and building materials for his research.

Plus, there was Torun and Kirma, Daimen’s two teammates who were currently trapped in the Taramatula estate. Perhaps because they currently had nothing better to do and were bored out of their minds, or maybe because the original really left an impression on them, but both of them proved very receptive to the simulacrum’s offer of magic exchange.

Kirma was the more conventional of the two. Although Zorian had never seen divinations being used in such a way before he’d met her, she claimed she was using pretty standard magic that could be acquired from practically anywhere. Even her flower-shaped divination aid was simply something she had commissioned from a professional artificer, not something she had made herself. Thus, she didn’t feel much need to keep her methods secret. In exchange for the many rare and exotic spells that Zorian had acquired in the time loop, she was entirely willing to show him some tricks of her trade and give him guidance on how best to develop his divination skills.

In addition, she gave him a list of people to talk to in case he wanted to pursue a career in the field, completely unprompted by the simulacrum. He suspected she had some kind of deal with these people to send young talents their way, but he decided to give them a visit in one of the future restarts anyway.

As for Torun, he was pursuing a very rare and exotic field of magic that involved extracting and preserving organs of magical creatures and then using specialized control spells to turn them into something of an extension of the caster. It was not a popular field of study, both due to having been created relatively recently and because it existed in something of a legal limbo in most places, so Torun was actually ecstatic when the simulacrum showed an interest in it. Most people considered his magic to be somewhat creepy and off-putting.

The simulacrum very much doubted the original would dive particularly deeply into the field. It would take a lot of time to get anywhere with it and it didn’t provide anything they desperately needed. However, some of the spells and techniques Torun used to control and make use of his eyes could potentially be used to improve coordination between Zorian and his golems, or even Zorian and his simulacrums.

Of course, such developments were too general to be the cause of the simulacrum’s current happiness with his situation. The truth was, he had recently dodged a huge bullet!

Mother and Father were coming to Koth, and someone had to pick them up and smuggle them into the Taramatula estate. That someone was, of course, Daimen… but Daimen also insisted that Zorian accompany him in this task. He wouldn’t budge on this in the slightest, stubbornly insisting it was Zorian’s family duty to accompany him to pick up their parents.

Sometimes it was good to be just a simulacrum. While the original had to explain to Mother and Father what he was doing in Koth, he was told instead to stay hidden from them at all times in order to minimize the amount of necessary explanations. An order he was only too happy to obey.

He was currently safely sequestered in the corner of the Taramatula library (of course the estate had its own library), humming a discordant tune to himself and reading a children’s book in an attempt to hone his ability to read the local writing. Sadly, language skills were one of those things that were almost impossible for him to transfer to the original in any meaningful manner, so this was something done more for his own amusement than any long-term gain.

As some point Orissa had also entered the room, but he paid little heed to that, giving her a short greeting and then getting back to his book. He had monopolized one of the three tables in the room, stacking it full of books that he judged to be relatively easy to understand, but that still left plenty of space for her to work with. He didn’t react even when she looked over his shoulder to see what he was reading. He wasn’t ashamed of his choice of reading in the slightest.

Everybody had to start somewhere. Plus, the book had pretty pictures.

However, Orissa didn’t just pick up a book from the library and leave, like the simulacrum expected her to. Instead she fetched a chair from a nearby empty table and sat down next to him.

"Yes?" he asked, curious. It was unusual for Orissa to deliberately seek him out like this, to say the least. Aside from that one time when she invited the original for a discussion via Daimen, she had been quite reserved.

"I’m worried," she said simply. "Daimen and your… other self should be back in a few hours."

"Ah," the simulacrum said, suddenly understanding what this was about. "You’re worried about Mother and Father coming here."

"Yes," she confirmed. "I know I’m being rude here, but I was wondering if you could tell me a little about your parents."

"Me?" the simulacrum asked incredulously.

"I was told simulacrums retain most of the memory of the original," Orissa said blandly.

"You know that wasn’t my point," the simulacrum complained. Orissa smiled faintly at him. "I mean, the original doesn’t exactly have the best relationship with the rest of his family. What could I possibly tell you that Daimen hadn’t already?"

"Daimen got really evasive about his parents once it became obvious they don’t approve of our marriage," Orissa said, shaking her head. "He says I shouldn’t worry, that he’ll handle it, but how can I possibly not worry? He clearly thinks the world of them and here they are, coming all the way to another continent to talk him out of marrying me."

"This will probably sound a little flippant, but there’s probably no need for you to worry so much over this," the simulacrum told her. "He’s their darling genius son. Whatever he wants, he’s going to get it. It’s been that way since forever."

"It would still mean a lot to me if you could tell me a little about them before they arrive," Orissa insisted.

Simulacrum number two gave her a contemplative look. Truthfully, he wasn’t sure if telling her about Mother and Father would be a good idea. His depiction of them would no doubt be really negative, and might end up worsening tensions between his parents and Orissa as a result. That probably wasn’t in anyone’s interest, least of all Orissa’s.

"You’re basically asking me to stick my hand into the fire, here," the simulacrum said.

"I guess I am," she admitted.

"Then let me ask you something first," the simulacrum said. "Are you interested in Daimen only because of his mind magic bloodline thingy?"

He expected Orissa to be either shocked at the question or explode with outrage. He did not expect her to laugh at him.

"What, are you worried I’m taking advantage of your big brother?" she asked with a grin.

"Just a little," the simulacrum admitted. "He’s an empath, so he should be hard to fool… but you’re a talented mind mage from a family specializing in mind magic. Anything is possible."

"And here Daimen thinks you hate him," Orissa said with a sigh. "To answer your question… it’s definitely not irrelevant. I love him, but if he didn’t have this innate mind magic affinity of his, I probably would not choose to marry him. I love my family too, and I need to keep their interests in mind. However, do you honestly think your brother is marrying me purely for love?"

The simulacrum gave her a surprised look.

"By marrying me, he is marrying into nobility and wealth. It’s not his only concern, but it’s hardly irrelevant. If I was a poor orphan, or even just a well-to-do middle-class girl, he would have never agreed to marry me. So no, I don’t think I’m taking advantage of him. We both have our ambitions. It’s just fortunate that we can fulfil them with someone we actually like."

"Huh," the simulacrum said thoughtfully.

After a few seconds of silence, Orissa spoke up again.

"So can I get an answer to my question, then?" she asked.

"Sure," the simulacrum shrugged. "So, the first thing you should know about our parents is that they’re very driven and ambitious people. Our father, Andir Kazinski, was the fourth son of a wealthy farmer. Our mother, Cikan Kazinski, was the only daughter of one of the few remaining witches, who raised her alone after her husband left her. Father knew that as a fourth son, he would never inherit anything. Thus, when he was 15 years old, he managed to procure a small loan from his father and left home to open his own business. He married our mother less than a year later. Over the years, they had turned that small initial business into a local power that has made them quite wealthy and respected. Well, not by your standards, but…"

"It’s impressive," Orissa nodded. "They reached surprising heights from such humble roots. That must have taken a lot of work."

"They did work very hard to get where they are," the simulacrum agreed. He had his disagreements with Mother and Father, but they had very much earned their wealth and status. Of course, their success involved just as much scheming as it did hard work, but he was pretty sure Orissa understood that part without him having to spell it out. "But while such attitude brought them success, it does have some consequences. Bluntly put, they view almost everything through the prism of how it will reflect on the family reputation and finances. This marriage between you and Daimen… even if Mother and Father thought this was a good thing for Daimen–"

"That’s it! That’s what I’ve been missing all this time! They don’t see the benefit for the family as a whole!" Orissa exclaimed suddenly. "Of course. After putting so much money and effort into Daimen, they naturally expect to see some kind of return for their trouble. Ah… we’ll continue this later, okay? I need to make some arrangements."

The simulacrum watched, surprised and amused, as Orissa hurriedly left the library. He wasn’t entirely sure what happened there, but it would seem that Orissa didn’t actually perceive his parents' attitude as wrong. Considering the sort of background she comes from and her explanation about how her marriage with Daimen came to be… he probably shouldn’t be surprised.

"Well, at least now I know why Daimen likes her so much," simulacrum mused quietly to himself. "She’s like a younger version of Mother! Sometimes life really is a comedy."

In normal circumstances, picking up Mother and Father from Jasuka harbor and bringing them to the Taramatula estate would have been a simple matter. Now that Daimen was under such intense scrutiny, however, this became a huge, complicated endeavor. The Taramatula mobilized a large portion of their manpower to disrupt and distract surveillance operations that kept an eye on Daimen’s movements. When Daimen and Zorian finally left the estate, five other decoy teams, shapeshifted in their likeness, also left at the same time to muddy the water further. Then, all six teams started teleporting around randomly for a while, before each of them made their way to a completely different city.

Despite all these preparations, the whole plan would have surely failed if Daimen had really gone to pick up Mother and Father during this trip. In reality, the whole operation was simply a giant distraction. Its main purpose was to mask the fact that Zorian had created a third simulacrum while they were teleporting around randomly through Koth and then sent it away to hide while they drew everyone’s attention. When Daimen and Zorian returned to the Taramatula estate, Zorian’s brand new simulacrum slowly made his way to Jasuka and then opened a hidden gate between the city and the estate, allowing Daimen to enter and leave the city too quickly for anyone to really intercept him.

Naturally, this meant that Zorian’s involvement was absolutely crucial for the operation’s success. If it weren’t for that, Zorian would have never agreed to take part in it, no matter how much Daimen begged and threatened. How the hell was he supposed to explain his presence in Koth to Mother and Father? No matter how poor their knowledge of magic was, they would surely recognize dimensional gates and simulacrums as high-level magic that should be way beyond him.

"Even if you hadn’t come with me, they would have still realized you were in Koth," Daimen told him. "You are too well known among the Taramatula by now. Someone would have surely let them know about you, whether intentionally or accidentally."

"Maybe, but that wouldn’t have been my problem," Zorian countered. "I’d be back in Cyoria, and it would be your job to figure out an explanation that made sense and deal with their attitude."

Daimen scowled at him, saying nothing.

In any case, the initial meeting was much calmer and more subdued than Zorian expected. The steam ship that carried their parents languidly entered Jasuka harbor and then disgorged an endless stream of passengers and cargo, temporarily creating a miniature pandemonium as the throng of disembarking people and dockworkers shouted and pushed at one another. By the time Daimen and Zorian had found Mother and Father, they already looked absolutely exhausted and were in no mood to start a fight. They were surprised to see Zorian in Koth, of course, but mostly they were glad to have an extra person help out with the luggage and whatnot.

"Aren’t you supposed to watch Kirielle?" Mother asked him, frowning.

"I am," Zorian said. "I’m just here to pick you up. I’ll be back in Cyoria before nightfall."

"How?" Father asked. "I thought no one could teleport over such distances. And teleportation is supposed to be advanced magic, anyway."

"It’s a secret," Zorian simply said.

Father made an indecipherable hum and said nothing further.

"Whatever it is, I hope you can use the same method to send us home when the time comes," Mother said, sounding worn and tired. "Ship travel doesn’t agree with me. I think I lost a whole year of my life getting here. It would be great if we could avoid boarding a ship for the return trip."

And that was it. Nothing more was spoken about Zorian’s presence. Especially since, when the group had finally stepped through the dimensional gate and entered the Taramatula estate, they were greeted by Orissa and the rest of the Taramatula delegation. At that point, the mystery of Zorian’s presence on another continent was the furthest thing from their minds.

Naturally, Mother and Father were full of smiles and compliments. The tiredness they displayed before Daimen and Zorian seemed to instantly disappear and they busied themselves with handing out very expensive gifts and endlessly praising the thoughtfulness and generosity of their hosts. If Zorian hadn’t known in advance what their purpose for coming here was, he would have never guessed they disapproved of the marriage.

Two days passed. Mother and Father slowly settled into the Taramatula estate. Zorian tried to stay away from the place as much as possible, not wanting to get tangled into Daimen’s mess too much, and the simulacrum he had left in the estate did the same. As such, he didn’t really know how their attempts to talk Daimen out of the marriage were progressing. He had his own things to worry about. Now that he had a simulacrum outside the Taramatula estate, he hurriedly arranged for a group of Silent Doorway Adepts to be transported to Koth, next to one of the local Bakora Gates.

Happily, the operation to acquire the gate key was a full success. Both Zorian and the Silent Doorway Adepts were ecstatic about this. For the aranea, this gate key represented access to a virgin territory awash with opportunities. For Zorian, it was a way to ensuring easy access to Koth without having to rely on Daimen. Plus, he suspected that having this key would make it much, much easier to convince the Silent Doorway Adepts to cooperate with him in future restarts.

Now, however, Zorian was back in the Taramatula estate. His parents had specifically called for him to come see them. In all honesty, Zorian had totally expected this to happen. They had taken his presence in Koth in stride when they had first come, but now that they had time to rest, talk with people and think about things, they no doubt realized there was something very much off about him. The only thing he hadn’t been certain of was whether the restart would have come to an end before this happened.

He was currently standing in one of Taramatula meeting rooms, Father and Mother standing in front of him. Originally, Daimen had wanted to be present for the talk as well, but they had shooed him away, insisting this was a private talk. That had been kind of amusing. It was not often that they treated their favorite son in such fashion. Apparently, whatever arrangements Orissa did were insufficient, and they still opposed the marriage. And since Daimen stubbornly refused to give up on the idea, they were currently not terribly fond of him.

"We spoke with Daimen about you," Mother said suddenly.

She had a complex, worried look on her face, as if she was having trouble deciding how to handle this. Father, on the other hand, stayed silent and stony-faced, his emotions indecipherable.

"Yes?" Zorian responded blandly.

"He tells us you’re incredibly powerful and competent. Far more than you let on," she said.

"True," Zorian admitted. He didn’t see the point of hiding it. They already knew he could move across continents in a quick, reliable manner.

"But why would you keep something like that hidden from us?" Mother asked imploringly. "Having another genius in the family is a joyous thing. Surely you don’t think we would have stood in your way?"

"Ah, you mean… like you’re not standing in the way of Daimen’s marriage?" Zorian asked innocently.

"That’s something completely different!" Mother said, scowling at him. She quickly reined herself in, however. "And besides, we’re not standing in Daimen’s way. We’re simply… trying to pull him back for taking a wrong turn. If he stubbornly refuses to heed our advice, we will reluctantly accept it, not sabotage his life in revenge."

"What she’s saying," Father suddenly spoke up, "is that we already disagree with what you’re doing with your life, so what’s one disagreement more? You can just throw one of your juvenile hissy fits, just like you always do, and we’ll grit our teeth and bear it because at the end of the day you’re still our son. Just like we always do."

Zorian stretched his mouth into a thin line and gave Father a narrowed stare, but said nothing. Father simply stared back at him, as if daring him to say anything.

"Andir, honey, I thought we agreed I would be the one to talk," Mother sighed.

Father raised both of his hands in a gesture of surrender. He also gave her an exasperated look, but she had already turned back towards Zorian, ignoring him.

"What are you planning, Zorian?" Mother asked him bluntly.

"Nothing much," Zorian said. "I’m going to move out of the house immediately after I graduate. Maybe sooner. Open my own business, buy myself a house, things like that."

"You think running a business is easy?" Father challenged. Well, that didn’t take long.

"I’m an amazing mage," Zorian said immodestly. "Even if I had the worst business sense in the world, I’d still be able to make enough for a living."

"But the family business–" Mother began.

"Not for all the money in the world," Zorian said, cutting her off.

A brief silence descended upon the scene as Mother and Father shared a long look between them.

"Oh!" Zorian said, suddenly remembering something. "I’ll also take care of Kirielle."

This statement naturally caused both of them to give Zorian a look of surprise.

"What do you mean you’ll take care of Kirielle?" Mother asked slowly. "Why would she need someone to take care of her?"

"Well, someone needs to teach her magic and nullify that stupid arranged marriage you prepared for her," Zorian said casually.

A look of intense, shocked outrage appeared on Mother’s face. For a moment she seemed unable to process what she just heard, but then she outright exploded at him.

"You little brat!" she snapped at him agitatedly. "You have no idea what you’re talking about!"

Weirdly, Father just laughed at the scene, shaking his head at nobody in particular. Zorian was mystified by this reaction, but decided to ignore it for now.

"The situation seems simple enough to my eyes," Zorian countered, unperturbed by her outrage.

"In regards to living your life, we can humor you, but you have no right, no right at all to tell me how to raise my daughter!" Mother shouted angrily at him, stomping threateningly straight into his personal space. "You are way out of line! Andir, you tell him!"

"What, me?" Father said with a look of exaggerated surprise. "I thought we agreed you would be the one to talk to him?"

Mother gave him an angry, venomous look that promised later retribution, but didn’t press him further.

"You have no idea what’s in Kirielle’s best interest, Zorian," Mother told him warningly. "Don’t stick your nose where it does not belong!"

"I’m afraid that, if I don’t get an actual explanation, I’m still going to go through with my idea," Zorian told her.

"You can’t take a child from her parents, even if you’re her brother," Mother told him angrily. "We can call the police!"

"But would you actually do so?" Zorian challenged. She shrank back a little. They both knew she wouldn’t. "Besides, I bet that marriage is of questionable legality to begin with."

"The marriage is… negotiable," Mother said, pacing around the room in agitation. "You’re making a mountain out of a molehill. It’s just an informal agreement, not a legally binding document. It’s not like we’d force Kirielle to go through it at all costs. But magic is absolutely off the table! She can never, under any circumstances be taught magic!"

"Why?" Zorian frowned.

"I’m trying to do her a favor!" Mother shouted, turning to face his again. "Don’t you know what her roots are? What my mother was?"

Zorian gave her an uncomprehending look. Her mother? What did her mother have to do with anything? He knew they didn’t get along well, but he never really heard anything too shocking about her. Besides, she had been dead for a while now.

"Wait," he said. "Are you talking about–"

"She was a witch!" Mother said, preempting his conclusion. "She was a witch and she was so damned proud of that fact. She never let anyone forget it! Once, she even threatened she was going to poison the town well when a bunch of customer tried to get out of paying her for the potions she made them. You know, just like the witches of old were said to do when someone wronged them!"

Zorian winced.

"You have no idea what it’s like to be the daughter of a witch," Mother continued. "A son is fine. Witches didn’t care about male children. Everyone knows this. They firmly believed that magic was transferred to the child through the womb, so only a daughter can continue the lineage."

Zorian raised an eyebrow at her. Why would they–

"I don’t know why they believed what they did!" Mother said, as if reading his mind. "I never cared to know. I just wished she would shut up about witches and let me live some semblance of a normal life. But she never did, so everyone around me saw me as a soul-stealing, mind-ensnaring, poison-wielding witch-in-waiting. And if Kirielle learns magic, she’ll suffer the same fate."

"Mother…" Zorian sighed.

"I was really lucky to marry your father," Mother said.

"Well, you were a pretty fine catch yourself," Father said, grinning. He had been silent while Mother ranted about her childhood frustrations, but apparently he now felt it was safe to throw in a comment or two.

Mother ignored him, though. She was probably still angry about his earlier quip about her being the designated speaker.

"My daughter won’t have to fear for her future and rely on luck to find a good husband. She won’t have people cross to the other side of the road when they see her or spreading vile slander about her completely unprovoked," Mother continued. "Unlike my mother, I’ve done everything I can to distance myself from our family legacy. So long as she takes my example and stays well away from anything magic related, anyone that tries to start something will end up looking petty and paranoid. But if she starts learning magic, then everything will be ruined!"

"You don’t know that," Zorian pointed out.

"Why take the risk?" Mother challenged. "Maybe if she married early, to a wealthy and respected husband… but you already said you are opposed to that, didn’t you? So where does that leave us?"

Zorian stared at her. This was the side of Mother that he had never really known before. Was this why she was so obsessed with family reputation and social position?

He looked at Father, but the man was uncharacteristically skittish. He just looked away, refusing to meet his eyes.

Though he didn’t actually say anything, Zorian understood the message: he was on his own here. Kirielle was Mother’s project, and he wasn’t going to stick his nose in it unless he had to.

"What if Kirielle doesn’t want to go along with your plan?" Zorian asked slowly.

"She’s nine," Mother said. "She doesn’t know what she wants."

"She’s not always going to be nine, though," Zorian pointed out.

"Yes, well, we can continue this conversation when she gets older," she told him firmly. "You didn’t start learning magic when you were nine, either."

She had a point there. In all honesty, he wasn’t willing to push this matter further than this. He mostly just raised the issue to gauge her reaction to it. He hadn’t expected this sort of response. On top of that, while Kirielle said she wanted to learn magic, she was also rather impatient and flighty. Who knew whether she was even capable of the discipline required to become a mage.

Besides, the most important thing was that the arranged marriage was apparently just an informal thing and not something his parents would push for at all costs. He couldn’t claim with certainty that it would be a good idea to teach Kirielle magic, but he knew for a fact that she hated the arranged marriage thing.

"Right," Zorian said finally. "I’m not informed enough to make a decision here, so I’ll withdraw for now."

"You’re damn right you’re going to withdraw!" she told him. She still sounded outraged but the anger was visibly draining out of her now that he was no longer challenging her. "What the hell made you think you have the right to give me parenting advice? Not even your father dares to tell me how to raise my daughter and you, an immature brat that has never even been with a woman, think you can tell me what to do. Why don’t you make a daughter of your own if you think–"

This was going to take quite a while, wasn’t it?

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Father staring at the scene and smiling faintly in schadenfreude.

Zorian sighed. Yes, this would definitely take a while.

"So, I discovered a new function of the orb," Zach said.

Zorian stopped working on the metal, flower-shaped construct on his bench and gave Zach a curious look.

"What do you mean you found a new function?" Zorian asked.

"I mean, one completely unrelated to its role as a mobile palace," Zach said, waving the orb in front of him. "Look. Take the orb and try this…"

It took a while for Zach to convey to Zorian what he had to do to activate this new function he discovered. After all, the way Zorian interacted with the orb was completely different from the way Zach did. Zach’s way was more instinctive, almost automatic, whereas Zorian had to take the initiative and actively grope around for a way to interface with it.

Eventually, though, he succeeded. He connected with the orb in the new manner that Zach found and immediately found himself connected to… something. Some kind of empty space, maybe?

"Weird," Zorian eventually said.

"Yeah," Zach said. "I have no idea what this does, though."

"Neither do I," said Zorian after some tinkering. He handed the orb back to Zach. "Keep tinkering with it. You’ll probably have more luck with it than I would."

Besides, Zach had far more free time to tinker with the orb than Zorian did. The restart was nearing its end and there were so many things that needed to be done…

The restart was almost over. Overall, Zorian would have described it as a highly productive one.

The study of the gate stabilization frame they had stolen from the Ibasan base yielded a lot more results than Zorian expected. He now knew that some very unconventional methods had been used while making the gate – instead of carving the spell formula necessary for the operation of the frame, the Ibasans had embedded them directly into the frame in the form of numerous magic threads. The frame literally had to be peeled away, layer by layer, in order for researchers to record the layout of the threads and attempt to decipher it. Sadly, though they had invited many capable researchers on the project, they had failed to make sense of how the frame worked. Perhaps if the gate frame was still actively maintaining a dimensional passage, but as it was? Not a chance…

Still, it was a start. A lot of important groundwork had been done, and future analysis of the gate should go much faster. It was probably good that they didn’t manage to take an active gate in this restart – if they did, they would no doubt shy away from simply taking it apart like they ended up doing here, and several crucial insights would never have been made.

The interrogation of Sudomir was also a success. Granted, the man knew so many important things that he and Alanic had already agreed to keep kidnapping him in future restarts as well, but even his current gains were considerable. For instance, Zorian had finally found out what the deal was behind his strange transformations.

While Sudomir was an extremely talented warder and soul mage, and dabbled in lots of other magics as well, he was not terribly impressive as a fighter. Sudomir was well aware of this, and thus decided to close that vulnerability by becoming a shifter.

But he was overconfident and reached far beyond his grasp. Rather than picking one specific magical creature to fuse his soul with, he decided to splice up several magical creatures into some kind of unholy abomination that theoretically combined the best features of all of them… and then fused with that.

According to Alanic, it was incredible that the ritual didn’t end up turning him utterly insane or a quivering mass of unstable flesh right from the get go. As it was, the shifter ritual he designed was only a partial failure – the transformation was almost uncontrollable, forcing him to keep it suppressed at all times. But whenever he was under a lot of stress or in emotionally charged situations, his control inevitably started to slip, warping his mind…

Still, while the shifter ritual was a failure in many ways, it did give him his signature resilience. One of the creatures he used in crafting his initial abomination was a troll, and the other a dragon. The other three were similarly hard to kill. Zorian shuddered to think what would happen if he were allowed to completely transform into his composite form.

Another thing they found out from Sudomir was that there were some people related to the Cult of the Dragon Below that they had missed thus far when investigating the invaders. This was because they technically weren’t cultists. In fact, they were purposely kept separated from known cultists as much as possible, so they would look as clean as possible in case somebody investigated them. This included a fair number of lawyers, low-level politicians and even a respected judge. There was no time left to really check these people out, and Zorian suspected they weren’t too important for understanding the invasion, but he made a mental note to investigate them anyway. Just for the sake of being thorough.

Eventually the day of the summer festival came… and no attack occurred. The Ibasans continued evacuating, the Cult of the Dragon Below never made a move, and the primordial trapped in the Hole was never released.

But the restart ended right on schedule anyway, and Zorian woke up in Cirin, with Kirielle wishing him a good morning…

73. Plodding Ahead

Deep in the jungles of Koth, there was a large, circular hole in the ground that led to a narrow vertical shaft and a pool of greenish water at the bottom. Although the place was quite beautiful, very few people could come here to admire it. It was, after all, absolutely teeming with chameleon drakes.

Naturally, this was the cenote where they had recovered the orb of first emperors in the previous restart. Zach and Zorian stood on the edge of the cenote, observing the chameleon drakes milling around the place and discussing how to go about recovering the orb this time around. Occasionally a group of chameleon drakes wandered past them or scrutinized their location, but between their cloaking spells and Zorian’s ability to reach into their minds and edit their senses and memories, there was little chance of them being discovered.

"So how are we doing this?" Zach asked. "Do you think you can sneak us in?"

Zorian stared at the cenote for a second before shaking his head. The drakes inside the cenote tended to clump together in groups of five or more, and the orb cave seemed to be the place that held the largest group.

"It’s hard enough to keep the drakes from noticing us when it’s just one or two," Zorian said sadly. "Those four independently moving eyes make their senses quite unlike humans. Figuring out how to fool their senses from moment to moment is too tiresome for me to do it on large groups."

Zach didn’t seem surprised by this. He seemed to be getting more familiar with the limitations of Zorian’s mind magic. "Then we should just go in, spells blazing, then?" he offered. "I mean, why complicate things? We can take them, I’m sure of it."

"I’d rather not fight a swarm of chameleon drakes today," Zorian said. "How about this? You move back from the cenote a little and attack them. If their previous reaction is any indication, they should all swarm out to deal with you. When they do, I will teleport into the orb cave, claim it, then teleport out. Even if they leave behind a few guards, these will be no match for me."

"And what if your attempts to claim the orb cause the hydra to appear?" Zach said with a frown. "I don’t want to be mean, but your fighting skills…"

"I’m no match for that thing, I know," Zorian said, nodding. "I don’t have to actually fight it, though. I can always just flee if it appears. I’m good enough to survive its assault for the few seconds it takes to cast the teleport spell. Besides, I suspect the hydra can’t actually exit the pocket dimension inside the orb cave itself. It’s just too big. The last time it emerged from the lake at the bottom of the cenote, and I suspect this time it will be no different."

"But if you snatch the orb and leave the cave, won’t the hydra have plenty of space near you to teleport itself in?" Zach asked.

Uhh… damn. He hadn’t thought of that.

"And even if the hydra doesn’t react immediately, simply having it inside makes the orb into a massive time bomb. The monster can clearly exit the orb whenever it wishes. What if we bring the orb to Cyoria and the hydra decides to enter the city while we’re sleeping or otherwise distracted? Imagine the damage it could do. If it decides not to react when we claim the orb, it might be a good idea to deliberately lure it out before we bring the orb to a populated area."

They decided to try Zorian’s idea anyway. The execution turned out to be a little more complicated than Zorian had thought it would be. Apparently Zach alone was not threatening enough to whip the entire group of chameleon drakes into a frenzy and make them leave their lair. After all, he was just one man. He might have been ungodly powerful, but that wasn’t something that could be gleaned at first sight. Thus, the drakes initially simply sent a group of five young drakes at him to deal with him. Of course, when Zach effortlessly slaughtered those five, the entire cenote grew more agitated… but not agitated enough to rush out and swarm him. They felt pretty safe in their cenote base, so they just massed themselves together and decided to wait and see if Zach would actually dare attack them in their home. Inconveniently for Zorian, they picked the orb cave as their rallying point.

Thankfully, when Zach started to launch artillery spells at the cenote, they decided they couldn’t afford to turtle up like that. They rushed out to try and stop him, leaving only a handful of guards behind. Zorian quickly teleported in, claimed the orb and teleported out.

Mission accomplished. As for the hydra, it never showed up. Not when Zorian claimed the orb and not when Zach and Zorian waited for several hours in the middle of the jungle to see if it would eventually decide to emerge. Zorian didn’t know what to think about that. On one hand, this meant they didn’t have to fight a giant, teleporting, godtouched hydra. On the other hand, it was just like Zach said earlier – this meant that said hydra could pop out of the orb when they least expected it and ruin the entire restart.

"We really need to figure out how to actually enter the damn orb," Zach said unhappily, turning the orb idly in his hands.

"We need to consider the possibility that the orb simply doesn’t have that kind of ability built into it," Zorian told him, staring at the orb in Zach’s hands in a speculative manner. "Teleportation magic is tricky to make into magic items. There are recall rods that can teleport a person to a pre-determined point and teleport platforms that can allow teleportation between fixed points, but anything more sophisticated requires a living caster. It might be that the previous owners of the orb used some kind of specialized spell to enter and leave the orb dimension."

"Lovely," Zach said, throwing the orb into the air and triggering its deployment mechanism. The orb distorted and then collapsed inward with a soft whooshing sound. In a flash it was gone, no visible trace of its presence anywhere. "That means either searching for an obscure teleportation spell or creating one from scratch. That could take forever. As if we didn’t have enough time sinks already…"

He reclaimed the orb, causing it to pop back to existence again, and then deployed it again immediately afterwards.

"If you are right, though, then this is really poor design," Zach continued. "Why the hell would you not include a way in when making something like this? It shouldn’t be that hard to place a teleport platform, recall stone or something similar inside. Then, when the owner of the orb commands it to, it pulls the person inside and deposits them there. That’s a viable method, no?"

He reclaimed and then deployed the orb again.

"It is," Zorian agreed. "And maybe there really was such a place inside the orb, once. But teleport platforms and recall stones don’t last all that long without regular maintenance. Not for centuries, at least. And there is a chance that something inside actively broke the mechanism. Say, a giant rampaging hydra…"

"I didn’t think of that," Zach scowled, reclaiming the orb again. "We just don’t–"

When Zach deployed the orb the fourth time, there was a much louder whooshing sound than usual and the two of them suddenly found themselves standing next to a gigantic pissed-off hydra. It immediately pounced on them with an unearthly roar.

Needless to say, the next few minutes were… somewhat hectic.

Defeating the hydra took longer than it had the last time they fought, but the fact they didn’t have to worry about Daimen and his men dying actually made the battle easier. Things were a little hairy in the beginning, when the hydra had caught them off-guard, but after that they just kept themselves out of the hydra’s reach and kept hammering away at it until it decided the situation was hopeless and fled into the jungle. That took hours to do, though, because Zach had already reclaimed the orb by that point and the hydra really didn’t like that. It didn’t help that Zorian was interested in how its multi-part mind worked and thus spent most of the battle studying it instead of fighting it for real.

They didn’t chase after it to finish it off. Having it out of the orb was enough for them. They did spend a lot of time discussing what happened, though, and came to a conclusion that it was no accident that the hydra had only emerged after Zach had deployed the orb. It was likely that the hydra couldn’t exit the orb while it was in its portable form and had to wait for Zach to deploy the orb before it could make the attempt. That, in turn, suggested that perhaps entering the orb without deploying it was similarly impossible… which would make their previous method of studying the orb while holding it in their hands a somewhat wrong-headed method of finding the entrance.

Regardless, after claiming the orb and chasing off the hydra that emerged from it, Zach and Zorian returned to their current base in Koth – the small aranean base that the Silent Doorway Adepts had established around the local Bakora gate.

Zorian’s previous suspicion that the Silent Doorway Adepts would get friendlier and more open to his arguments if he brought them a functional gate address to Koth turned out to be true beyond his wildest dreams. The aranea went absolutely crazy once they tried it out and confirmed it worked. It took little more than four days for him to convince them that the time loop was real and that they should work with him, which was less than half of what it was before. He still sent a simulacrum on a slow journey to Koth, though, both because he didn’t want to put all his eggs in one basket and because he needed it to establish a telepathic relay link to Koth by physically placing relay stones along the way.

Still, he was extremely pleased that he managed to get this deal with the Silent Doorway Adepts working. It wasn’t absolutely crucial for reaching Koth, but it would be absolutely necessary when they decided to retrieve the piece of the key that was lost in Blantyrre. Blantyrre didn’t have any notable human civilizations, meaning that ships traveling there were extremely rare. There was no convenient archipelago to serve as a bridge between continents and allow island hopping, so teleporting there was out of the question. The seas and coasts were wild and untamed, full of dangerous monsters and natural danger zones. Zorian had spoken to Daimen about it, and the conclusion was that it was theoretically possible for them to reach Blantyrre within the span of a month… but only just. They would have to fully dedicate an entire restart for the task, and they would be left with a measly handful of days to explore Blantyrre before the restart ended.

Thankfully, Blantyrre was seeded full of Bakora Gates. In fact, they were seeded much more densely there, as if whatever power that had made the gates originated from that continent. This was curious because, as far as anyone knew, humanity had never really lived there in the past. Scholars often quarreled about what this meant, but Zorian didn’t really care about those arguments – all he cared about was that the Bakora gate network was pretty much the only viable method he had of reaching Blantyrre in a timely manner. The fact that one of the imperial artifacts was lost in Blantyrre was one of the major worries he had about their chances to collect the entire Key. Now that he knew he could potentially reach the continent in as little as four days if he acquired the correct gate address, it was like a giant rock was lifted off his shoulders. Maybe they really had a chance of doing this…

"What about your brother?" Zach suddenly asked. "Didn’t you hand him a notebook full of descriptions from our previous restart? Surely he left himself information about where the orb is."

"He did, but I already told him we would be claiming it for ourselves," Zorian said.

"Ha. He must have loved that," Zach said, smiling at Zorian slightly.

"Yeah, he wasn’t happy about that," Zorian nodded. "He wasn’t too bitter, though. He knows he can’t handle the hydra without our help. He’d need more than a month just to find, vet and organize the extra mercenaries he’d have to hire to successfully retrieve the orb. He did make me promise I would let him have the orb once we were out of the time loop, though."

"I guess that’s fair," Zach shrugged. "I mean, I’ve really taken a liking to this thing, but he does sort of have a legitimate claim on it, and he’s your brother to boot. You owe me, though."

"I owe you?" Zorian said, raising his eyebrow at him. "Owe you what?"

"Another portable palace like this, of course," said Zach, waving the orb in front of Zorian’s face. "You’ll be trying to get crazy good at pocket dimensions soon, no? Surely, a measly little pocket dimension like this is no big deal."

Measly, he says. Information about pocket dimension creation was scarce, but what Zorian had found suggested that this orb was near the top end of what was possible to achieve. There were examples of bigger hidden worlds, but not many.

"Correction," Zorian said blandly. " We’ll be trying to get crazy good at pocket dimensions soon. Are you seriously telling me you’ll pass by the opportunity to learn how to create one?"

"I’d never pass up the opportunity to learn something so useful," Zach said with a grin. "But you’re the one who’s good at creating things, while I am more the kind of guy that breaks them. Plus, we’ve already established that you owe me. I’ve magnanimously decided to let your brother claim the orb outside the time loop as a favor to you. As recompense, you need to make another portable palace for me when we finally get out."

"We’ll talk about that later, when we find out how feasible the idea actually is," Zorian told him lightly. "However, I can tell you right now that you’re never getting an actual palace."

"Whaaat?" Zach whined. "Why not?"

"Because pocket dimensions don’t create matter," Zorian told him. He pointed at the orb in Zach’s hands. "If you want them to contain a piece of land like that one does, you basically have to steal it by enclosing an actual place into it during the creation process. So if you want a portable palace… well, you first need to build the palace in question. Putting aside the actual costs of such a project, which are bound to be astronomical, I just don’t have the necessary skills to design and build a palace."

"Oh," Zach said. "Yeah, that makes sense, I guess."

"Now, if you want a tastefully hollowed out rock or a nice wooden cottage… that I can definitely help you with," Zorian told him. "Hell, I might even be able to fit in some actual glass windows if you want me to be extravagant!"

That triggered a lengthy argument about what kind of building would be possible for a single mage to build on his own, using only natural materials. The argument eventually culminated into a building competition where both Zach and Zorian did their best to construct the most luxurious residence they could with the materials they had on hand.

If any jungle explorer were to stumble upon the site several hours later, they would probably be baffled by the series of towers, ziggurats and blocky houses scattered throughout the entire region. Alas, this part of the jungle was very remote and no such explorer would ever come before the restart ended.

The bats and other animals that moved into the buildings after a few days definitely appreciated their new accommodations, though.

Zach and Zorian floated in the black void. The black sky that surrounded them was omnidirectional and featureless, containing only one point of interest – a roughly humanoid entity with softly glowing eyes. The Guardian of the Threshold.

It had been a while since they visited this place. They tried not to interact with the Guardian too much, lest they accidentally trigger some kind of safeguard and it realized there were two Controllers inside the time loop and that it should do something about that. However, now that they’d gotten their hands on a piece of the Key, it only made sense for them to come and visit the Sovereign Gate to see how it would react.

"Welcome, Controller," the Guardian said, its voice just as soft and devoid of emotion as Zorian remembered it to be. The entity gave no indication it remembered their last visit to this place.

"We have questions for you," Zach told the Guardian bluntly.

"I will do my best to answer them," the Guardian agreed placidly.

They didn’t ask it about the orb immediately. Instead, they first confirmed the number of restarts they had until the time loop collapsed, just in case. They had 42 left, exactly as it should be. After that Zorian summoned a list of questions the two of them had prepared for the Guardian over the previous restarts, concerning Red Robe, the mechanics of the time loop and so on.

They didn’t get anywhere with that, of course. The Guardian either didn’t know how to help them or flat out refused to do so when they asked things they weren’t authorized to know. They had expected that, but it was still frustrating to be foiled so thoroughly. In any case, once they had exhausted their prepared list of questions, they finally moved onto to the main purpose of this visit.

"Guardian, can you tell us more about the Key now?" Zorian asked.

"To find out about the Key, please bring me the Key for inspection," the Guardian told him.

"Yes, yes… in order to find out about the Key, we must first have the Key. A perfectly logical requirement," Zach said, rolling his eyes. "But we’re not here for that. Our question is this: if we bring you a single piece of the Key, does that count for something? Do we get to ask you questions about it?"

"Having only one piece of the Key will result in information about that part only," the Guardian noted.

"That’s fine," Zach said dismissively. "We brought you one of the pieces, so why don’t you take a look?"

"I do not see it," the Guardian told him immediately. "Are you sure you have connected it to the control room properly?"

"Wait, we have to do what?" Zach asked incredulously.

As it turned out, simply having the pieces of the Key on them when they connected to the Sovereign Gate wasn’t enough. The Guardian neither knew nor cared what they had on their person when they entered this void it inhabited. Instead, it was up to Zach and Zorian to connect the orb to the Sovereign Gate so the Guardian could inspect it and confirm its authenticity.

How were they supposed to do that? The Guardian was naturally of no help whatsoever. It took them two hours of frustrated tinkering before they realized they had to use their marker as a sort of bridge, simultaneously connecting it to both the Sovereign Gate and the orb. Only then did the Guardian recognize it.

"This is indeed a legitimate piece of the Key," the Guardian decided.

"Finally," Zach huffed. "So what does this get us?"

"Nothing on its own," the Guardian responded. "You need the entire key to unlock higher authorization than you have now. However, you can now ask me for information about it like you wanted earlier. Keep in mind that I have no knowledge of the object’s mundane functions. I can only give you information about it as it relates to the time loop."

"So if we asked you about the pocket dimension contained in the orb…" began Zorian.

"I couldn’t help you," the Guardian said. "I didn’t even know there was a pocket dimension encapsulated within the Key piece until you told me."

There was a second of silence as both Zach and Zorian frowned at the information. This was not completely unexpected. It had been very obvious during their previous visit that the Guardian did not perceive the world in the same way humans did and often just plain disregarded things not related to its job. Still, this was disappointing to hear.

"Alright," said Zach eventually. "So what can you tell us about the orb, then? What are its capabilities as it relates to the time loop?"

"It contains a memory bank that the Controller can use to store and organize their important memories across restarts," the Guardian said.

Wait, what? Zach and Zorian shared a shocked glance, not having expected this at all.

"A memory bank…" Zorian repeated slowly.

"Yes," the Guardian confirmed. "You should be able to sense an empty space inside if you focus on the Key piece correctly. Simply focus on the memories you want to store in the bank and push them inside. Once inside, they will persist from restart to restart and be available for viewing at any time, unless you choose to delete them at some point. Keep in mind that this ability only exists inside the time loop – once you leave and this reality permanently collapses, all of the memories you stored inside the Key piece will be similarly destroyed. Make sure to refresh on anything important you placed there before you leave."

There was a brief silence as the two of them digested this information.

"I guess we now know what that mysterious empty space inside the orb was," Zorian finally said.

"Yeah," Zach said distractedly, lost in thought for a second. He then took a deep breath and turned to Zorian again. "It sounds very convenient."

"Yes," Zorian agreed. The ability was a little redundant to him, what with his ability to create memory packets, but he could imagine that an average Controller would find the ability absolutely invaluable. It was almost like having a notebook that carried over from restart to restart, only better. "Guardian, is there any limit on the amount of memories this bank can hold?"

"There are limits to everything," the Guardian told him. "But you are highly unlikely to ever reach these particular ones. Even if you found a way to store your entire memory and did so in every single restart, you would not come even close to filling the available space inside the memory bank."

Good to know. This gave him some very nice ideas… after all, if he could unload most of the notebooks had he kept in his head into the orb, he could really go wild in recruiting experts and having them continue their work across restarts.

"Do you think the other imperial artifacts have similar abilities?" Zorian asked Zach.

"Probably," agreed Zach. "Hey, Guardian! What about the other pieces? Do they all give us an ability related to the time loop?"

"To find out about the other pieces of the Key, please bring them to me for inspection," the Guardian answered.

Zorian snorted in amusement.

"Yeah, dumb question, I guess," Zach said, clacking his tongue. "But I think they probably do all give an ability. No reason for the orb to be the only one. Now I’m even more anxious to get my hands on these things…"

"No wonder we haven’t been able to find a way to place temporary markers or remove people from the time loop," said Zorian after some thought. "No doubt those two abilities are also tied to imperial artifacts. Probably the crown Quatach-Ichl is wearing and that dagger that is in Eldemar’s royal treasury."

Zach gave it some thought.

"You may be right," he eventually said. "Which do you think gives what?"

"Well, purely thematically speaking, I’d guess that the knife is what removes people from the time loop," said Zorian. "Which would leave the crown as the artifact that allows for the placement of temporary markers."

"Hm. It does make sense if you think of the temporary markers as subordinate to the main one," Zach mused. "The main marker is the ruler, and the ruler needs a crown."

The Guardian of the Threshold remained silent during this conversation, giving no indication it had heard anything. Pity. Zorian had hoped it might react a bit and therefore indicate how close they were hitting to the truth. He really wondered how that thing was made. It appeared to be a mindless automaton, but some of its responses were sufficiently lifelike that he had trouble treating it as a purely mindless thing.

"Guardian, will you remember that we’ve already brought you this piece the next time we visit or do we need to bring all five pieces simultaneously to get higher authorization?" Zorian asked.

"You must bring the entire Key if you want higher authorization," the Guardian said.

"Damn," Zach swore.

"We suspected it would be like this," Zorian sighed.

They spent another hour pestering the Guardian about the orb and the memory bank it contained. They didn’t find out anything terribly important though, so they eventually disconnected themselves from the Sovereign Gate.

Unlike the first time they had gone here, this time they’d made much more thorough, sophisticated preparations. As such, they didn’t find their bodies catastrophically damaged by the time they were ready to leave. Quite the contrary, the researchers left them well enough alone with no mind magic necessary. This was partially because they’d brought much more intimidating forgeries of their credentials and partially because they were trailed by two massive bodyguards that kept watch while they were communicating with the Guardian. The bodyguards were, of course, just particularly lifelike golems that Zorian had made for the occasion. They were actually pretty terrible as far as golems went, but they looked human enough to fool casual inspection and that was the only thing that mattered. Their only job was to follow them around in utter silence, looking all grim and intimidating.

They didn’t immediately leave the time magic research facility. They had come here not just to have a chat with the Guardian of the Threshold, but also because they wanted to make use of the Black Room for the restart.

However, they had made a mistake this time – they decided to bring the orb of the first emperor with them into the Black Room.

It was a tempting idea. If they could bring a portable palace with them into the temporal acceleration area, then it didn’t matter much that space was so limited – they could bring everything they needed, even people, inside the orb. The main limitation of the Black Room would be broken. Sure, they still didn’t know how to actually enter the pocket dimension contained in the orb, but neither of them thought the procedure would forever elude them. And besides, they didn’t need to be able to enter the orb to test the viability of the idea. All they had to do was bring the orb with them into the Black Room and see what would happen.

Well, what happened was that the Black Room shut itself down almost instantly after initiating temporal acceleration.

After an hour of analysis and heated discussion with nervous researchers, Zach and Zorian found out that the price of temporally accelerating an area of space was based on the volume of space being accelerated. By bringing a palace worth of space inside, even inside a pocket dimension, the two of them massively inflated the mana cost of the operation procedure. Not to mention that the facility itself was not designed to handle that kind of strain. As such, the Black Room ran out of mana in less than a second and immediately shut itself down. The researchers, though still somewhat intimidated by them, gave them a severe tongue-lashing for even trying the idea without consulting them about it beforehand.

Oh, and they were really interested in studying the orb. Zorian actually considered letting them do so, just to see what a group of dedicated researchers like this could tell them about the artifact, but refused their request for the moment. He had to set things up very carefully before giving them the orb, or else he would simply be handing it to the Eldemarian authorities and starting a manhunt for the two of them.

"I wonder if this is true for the time loop as well," Zach mused later, when they were out of the facility. "If we create our own pocket dimensions here, aren’t we also increasing the volume that needs to be temporally accelerated and thus creating a strain on the system?"

"Probably," Zorian said. "But the time loop reality is so huge that even if we increased its internal volume a bit by opening additional pocket dimensions, the added power drain should be pretty miniscule. The problem with the Black Room is that it’s pretty tiny. The space inside the orb is actually many times larger than the Black Room itself. As such, bringing the orb into the Black Room is like trying to transport an elephant inside a tiny, one-man boat. No matter what clever method you use to make it fit, it still weighs so much it would sink the whole setup. I fear this idea is dead in the water."

"Shame," said Zach. "The orb does a pretty good job of isolating the space inside from the rest of reality, though. That’s kind of what the Black Room is meant to accomplish, only better. What if, instead of trying to bring the orb inside the Black Room, we simply ditched the Black Room altogether and retooled the entire facility to apply its temporal acceleration effect on the orb itself? I know the space inside the orb is much more massive than the Black Room, but maybe the effects of a better dimensional boundary overshadow that? And really, even if it produces less drastic acceleration, I’d rather spend half a month inside a palace than a full month inside a tiny cramped room…"

"An interesting idea," Zorian admitted. "We’d need to get willing cooperation from the staff of the facility to pull something of that scale, though. No way could we pull this off ourselves, especially not on a super-secret research facility financed by the Eldemarian government."

Zorian still made a mental note to revisit the idea later. Perhaps it wasn’t very feasible at the moment, but they needed every advantage they could get.

On one unremarkable Sunday morning, Zorian woke up to find Imaya’s house under siege.

Well, not a literal siege, but the throng of people gathered around the entrance was impressively large and thoroughly blocked anyone’s ability to get in or out of the house. Zorian was quite mystified by this, since he couldn’t think of anything he had done that would cause such an occurrence.

Zorian joined the other inhabitants of the house, who had awoken far sooner than him, in staring warily through the window at the mass of people surrounding the house. They seemed to be quite a diverse bunch, ranging from simple curious neighbors that had gathered to see what was happening to groups of healers, mages, various guild recruiters and newspaper reporters.

"Dare I ask what this is about?" Zorian asked Imaya, who was nervously wringing her hands as she eyed the gathered crown with a wary eye.

"It’s my fault," Kael spoke up in an embarrassed voice. "I’m sorry."

"What do you mean it’s your fault?" Zorian asked curiously. "What did you do exactly?"

"Well, you know how I keep working on better medicines? And how I’ve been recruiting other alchemists and healers in my work? Well, the results of that effort are getting… kind of impressive. Impressive enough to cause a stir. Especially when they come from someone as young as me with no real backer," Kael explained. He shuffled in place uncomfortably and Kana squeezed herself closer to him, disturbed by the fearful, awkward atmosphere in the room. "I’m really sorry. I hadn’t considered this possibility at all."

Zorian shook his head, not really angry at the boy. Part of the blame rested on him too – he should have paid closer attention to what Kael was doing and what kind of attention it was garnering. Though in all honesty, this was just a mild inconvenience for him. He could teleport in and out of the house at will.

"They were initially much more aggressive about trying to get in," Imaya told him. "But those wards you placed on the house stopped them cold so they’ve been more restrained since then. The wards themselves drew some people here, though. I’m not sure, but I think some people from the Mage Guild are here to talk to you about that…"

It was only then that Zorian remembered that raising heavy wards around a residence required a special permit from the city’s mage guild. A permit that Zorian didn’t have. He had been warding places so often these days, with zero regard for local laws and customs, that he had almost forgotten that this sort of thing was regulated in most places.

Okay, maybe this was more than just a mild inconvenience…

In the mountains of southern Altazia, there was a fairly famous cave system that surrounded an ancient volcano. The volcano hadn’t been active in over a century, but the caves still held spacious caverns and winding corridors full of lava that never cooled. This was a magically powerful place heavily aligned with fire, and it was absolutely teeming with fire elementals.

And one of those elementals was Kilnfather, the elder fire elemental that Zach and Zorian were currently visiting.

Kilnfather wasn’t the oldest of the elder elementals living in this place, but he was the only one even remotely interested in talking with humans. The others lived deep in the lava fields of the volcano cavern system – simply reaching their strongholds would be a monumental task, considering the incredible heat and the omnipresent poisonous fumes of their home environment, and convincing a taciturn elemental to talk with you was a notoriously futile endeavor. So Kilnfather it was.

They met Kilnfather in a wide, spacious cavern of black basalt stone. Steam and poisonous fumes billowed up from the cracks in the floor and walls, but the air was entirely breathable with the aid of the right air filtering spells. As for the temperature, well… it was hot, but not unhealthily so. They could endure it for the few hours the talks would last.

The only thing Zach and Zorian really had to watch for was not to hurt any of the Kilnfather’s 'children'…

Kilnfather looked like a giant gecko made out of cooling lava. He was black, with cracked skin that pulsed with inner fire, dimming and brightening in a regular rhythm. His eyes were big, yellow, slitted and shining. Surrounding him was a small throng of smaller black geckos that looked like tiny copies of him. If one looked at the smaller geckos closely enough, however, they would notice they were not elementals like Kilnfather. They were actual living beings.

The black geckoes had been, as far as anyone could tell, just regular animals until Kilnfather had implanted some of his elemental spirit into them, causing them to swell in size and develop powerful fire-based magic. Kilnfather loved his creations with all his heart, to the point where he styled his entire appearance after them, and some people speculated he was trying to shape them into a legitimate sapient species as time went by. He did not tolerate any violence towards his beloved children and would immediately start hostilities with anyone who hurt so much as a scale on their back… and call the rest of the domain’s fire elementals for help if he thought he was outmatched.

The trouble was, sometimes these children started hostilities, forcing people to defend themselves… but the Kilnfather didn’t care. No matter the circumstances, his children were always in the right.

"Welcome, guests," Kilnfather said, his voice deep and resonant. "Come closer, come closer. Mind my children, please. They can sometimes get a little… overzealous in their welcome, but they always mean well."

"Kilnfather is as welcoming as stories say," Zorian said politely. "Hopefully these two guests will be found worthy of your hospitality. Please accept our gifts."

They directed the floating field of force that carried a small basalt chest towards Kilnfather, forcing it to stop at a respectful distance from the elemental. It opened on its own, revealing a plethora of rare stones and materials that were said to be attractive to fire elementals.

"Oh my, you shouldn’t have, you shouldn’t have," Kilnfather said, his large, bright yellow tongue darting out his mouth to lick his eyes one by one. "But it would be impolite of me to refuse a gift. What was it that you said you came here for?"

"Well…" began Zorian. "We were wondering if you ever heard of any of the locations where the primordials were imprisoned…"

House Letova was a fairly important House in Falkrinea. They were a new House, having achieved their status due to their knowledge of certain unique potions that nobody else could figure out how to make, but their future looked rather promising. Their potion business was booming, giving them plenty of money to throw around to make themselves heard and boost their political influence in Falkrinea and elsewhere.

Naturally, they guarded the secrets of their alchemy very, very closely. They invested a great deal of their newfound wealth into security, well aware that if their competitors managed to get their hands on their secrets their ascent to greatness would be greatly jeopardized.

Today, Zach and Zorian were trying to break into House Letova’s alchemy repository. They weren’t doing it because they honestly wanted to steal their alchemical secrets, though Zorian would take a look at their records if they succeeded, simply to satisfy his curiosity. No, they were doing it because they wanted to practice their ability to break into secure areas.

The problem was simple. They needed to get the imperial dagger that was stored in the Eldemarian royal palace. However, the palace was way out of their league at the moment. They just didn’t have enough experience in breaking into places like that. Thus, Zorian had hit upon the idea of targeting minor Houses, gradually tackling greater and greater challenges until they gathered enough expertise in infiltration to tackle their real goal.

They had already tried their hand at breaking into some wealthy estates, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. House Letova would be their biggest challenge yet.

"You know," Zach had told him before they launched the mission, "I am amused by the fact that you have qualms about stealing people’s secrets by rooting through their minds, but have no problems at all about physically rooting through their stuff."

"It’s not the same," Zorian protested.

"I know," Zach said. "And don’t get me wrong, it actually sets me at ease that you have some standards about your mind magic usage. I can’t help but find it a bit amusing, though."

"You don’t seem to have any problems going along with this," Zorian remarked.

"Nah, I’ve done things like this all the time when I was alone," Zach said dismissively. "Only with less sneaking in and more blasting the door off its hinges and powering through the wards. One of these days we’ll have to do these raids my way. It’s a rush. I bet you’d love it."

Zorian snorted. "I bet I wouldn’t," he countered. "Though maybe you’re on to something. Somehow I feel less conflicted about taking people’s notebooks, research documentation and the like than I do about taking their thoughts and memories. Mind magic is… something I can do on a whim. It’s easy, it’s convenient and I don’t think I’m a good enough person to resist the temptation to use it all the time if I get into the habit of using it lightly. But this kind of thing… it’s terrifying and stressful and takes effort to organize and pull off. I’ll probably never feel casual about it."

"Hmm," hummed Zach. "I wouldn’t be so sure. Almost anything gets pretty mundane if you do it long enough. But it is true that raids like this aren’t something you do on impulse alone. Anyway, we came here to steal alchemical recipes, not to talk philosophy. Are we doing this or not?"

"We’re doing it," responded Zorian. "Let’s go."

Nine restarts had passed since the restart in which Zach and Zorian had found where the orb of the first emperor was located. The two of them had worked on their skills, sought out experts and raided places for practice and critical secrets. They expanded their research initiatives massively, making use of the orb’s memory bank to store all the research notes that resulted from this, and then found new sources of money and materials to pay for all this. Sudomir was completely interrogated several times and his knowledge of the invasion and soul magic made full use of. They worked with Daimen to get in touch with his friends and colleagues, narrowing down the location for the piece of the Key that was lost in the Xlotic desert. They worked hard to understand and reverse-engineer the Ibasan gate and tried to figure out a faster, easier way to activate the Bakora Gates.

They managed to enter the orb near the end of this period. They had been forced to design a specialized teleportation spell to do so, which took multiple restarts due to the rarity of pocket dimension magic and the corresponding difficulty of finding the right experts and manuals. When they had finally managed to get in, they found that the pocket dimension did contain a teleport platform that served as an in-built entrance… but the platform had broken down a long time ago due to lack of maintenance. Once the platform was fixed, the spell was no longer necessary… but since they were in the time loop, this repair was undone at the end of every restart. Zach and Zorian eventually stopped bothering to repair the platform and just used the spell to enter and leave as they wish. The spell was the superior option anyway, since it allowed them to enter and leave the orb in any location they wished.

As for the contents of the orb… well, they hadn’t found any more giant hydras inside, much to Zach’s disappointment. They had found a lot of dangerous plants and animals, though, so it was hardly peaceful. They also found a great deal of potions, magical equipment, secret grimoires and valuable materials… virtually all of which had expired, rotted, broken down or were hopelessly outdated. They had high hopes that there was something good buried in all that trash and rubble, and were still stubbornly combing through it.

Mercifully, the general decay of the place also extended to palace defenses. It was clear the palace had once sported impressive wards and a frankly ridiculous number of traps (giant boulders rolling down the corridors… seriously?), but most of them had broken down over the centuries.

Currently, Zorian was sitting on the grass in the middle of an isolated meadow. Not far from him was a simulacrum absorbed in assembling a magical rifle, tirelessly pondering design improvements and occasionally testing out prototypes on a distant rock. Zorian didn’t want to disturb him, but made a mental note to himself to add better sound dampening wards on the final design – those magical rifles he had been building were painfully loud. Though considering how large some of the latest designs were getting, that was to be expected. He had told the simulacrum to design a better rifle, not a portable cannon, dammit!

In any case, Zorian himself was controlling a group of golems against a group consisting of Zach, Alanic, Xvim and Taiven. His four opponents were holding back a lot, or else the golems wouldn’t last very long, but that was okay. This wasn’t a test of his golem making skills – it was a combat exercise meant to test different tactics and figure out the most effective method of controlling and deploying his golems.

He took advantage of a short pause in the battle to quickly check up on his simulacrum in Koth. These days he no longer needed a long chain of telepathic relays to do so – the soul magic knowledge he got from Sudomir had allowed him to devise a method of establishing telepathic contact with his simulacrums through the soul they all shared. He found out that the simulacrum was busy arranging some kind of trade deal along with Daimen and left him to his devices.

Eventually the combat exercise ended and the other four joined Zorian in relaxing on the grass.

Well, they were relaxing until the simulacrum fired its prototype cannon again and startled them all with another devastating boom.

"Gods, Zorian," Taiven complained. "That thing your copy is building is like a miniature siege engine and you’re still not satisfied? What on earth do you need a gun like that for?"

Zorian smiled at her.

"We’re going to kill a giant spider," he told her. "And then we’re going to visit an annoying old woman with its remains…"

74. The Return

Simulacrum number four was worried. He really shouldn’t be, considering what he was and how many times the original had fought the grey hunter by now. If anything, he should be feeling excited – he had a good feeling about this attempt. Their skills had grown, they had become intimately familiar with the grey hunter’s capabilities and they had brought a number of surprises designed specifically to counter it. This could work. This could actually work, unlike so many previous attempts they’d made.

Maybe that was it. In their previous attempts, Zorian – and, by extension, simulacrum number four – had always felt the attempt was a long shot. Even if they failed, it was to be expected. This time he actually felt good about their chances, making him more emotionally invested in the outcome.

Then again, they actually had a pressing need for the grey hunter’s eggs this time. They could contact Silverlake without them, but talking to Silverlake was going to be much harder and much more annoying if they couldn’t bring her something she desperately wanted.

He unconsciously clutched the rifle closer to his chest, the sensation of it dispelling his current stream of thought. He remembered practicing with it over and over, but it still felt a bit alien to his mind… and so did the arms that held it. He was a brand new type of simulacrum that the original had thought up recently – instead of being embodied into an ectoplasmic shell like a regular simulacrum, he had been attached to a real matter golem body designed to mimic the original. This was a step up from the base spell in just about every regard, granting him vastly increased durability and halving his maintenance cost at the same time. It allowed Zorian to maintain twice the usual number of simulacrums and ensured that they wouldn’t be destroyed by relatively minor damage. The only downside was that making the golem bodies was very time consuming, and that the materials were expensive as hell. Or at least that was the idea, anyway. The simulacrum actually felt significantly stiffer and more restricted in his movements than he was used to, a clear sign that his joints weren’t working quite as well as the original had hoped they would. No doubt the original would find a way to fix or mitigate these issues as time went by, but that would make no difference for him personally. He really hoped he wouldn’t lock up or miss in the actual battle because of this.

Alas, the time for contemplation was over. A short message rippled out of his soul and into his consciousness, informing him (and the other three simulacrums gathered around the area) that the original was about to start the fight. He quickly checked up on his rifle one final time and then sent a confirmation that he was ready through the exact same method, using their shared soul as a conduit for communication. Very convenient, that. The original was already working on further upgrades, based on their studies of the hydra and the cranium rat collective, but that was still in the initial stages and nowhere near ready for field use. For now, normal soul conduit communication would have to suffice.

And then it began. The grey hunter leapt out of its cave and immediately moved to attack Zach and Zorian, completely ignoring the simulacrums scattered around the area. A swarm of projectiles answered its charge, Zach and Zorian doing their best to keep it pressured without wasting too much of their mana reserves. Zach launched powerful beams of force at it, forcing it to keep dodging and breaking up its momentum. Zorian, on the other hand, borrowed Kirma’s trick – holding a greyish metal cube as a spell focus, he launched swarms of smaller, cheaper projectiles that homed in unerringly on the grey hunter’s weak points. He timed his attack to coincide with Zach’s, forcing the grey hunter to take at least a few hits from every barrage. Although individually weak and unable to truly threaten the grey hunter, they were apparently doing something because the spider was clearly getting angrier and more agitated as seconds ticked by.

Simulacrum number four trailed the grey hunter with the scope of his rifle, but did not shoot. The grey hunter was currently ignoring the simulacrums because it did not perceive them as a threat, but that wouldn’t last very long if they started blindly firing into the battle zone. No, if he and his duplicate brethren wanted to help Zach and the original, they needed to pick their moment carefully.

The problem with using the gun on the grey hunter wasn’t in whether or not it could dodge the bullet. It couldn’t. To Zorian’s knowledge, nothing was fast enough to dodge a projectile that moved faster than sound itself. The problem was that the spider never sat still long enough to get a good shot on it. Bullets didn’t track their target and using magic to make them do so was incredibly difficult. The most Zorian could do was curve their trajectories slightly towards where he wanted them to hit. And the simulacrums didn’t just have to hit the grey hunter – they had to hit it in a way that left the egg sack unharmed.

Basically, they needed the grey hunter to stay still for a second. A tall order, but the simulacrum was confident that Zach and the original could pull it off.

The grey hunter lunged towards Zorian. Zach was a bigger threat, but Zorian was more annoying and probably looked more vulnerable to its senses. If it could get rid of the annoying weakling first, it could then focus its full attention on the true threat and its victory would be assured. But looks could be deceptive. The grey hunter smashed straight into Zorian’s shield at full force and was stopped cold. The thick barrier of force that surrounded Zorian was a marvel of spell engineering, a custom spell that Zorian had designed with the help of a dozen professional spell crafters to make maximum use of Zorian’s exceptional shaping skills. The softly glowing threads, woven through every inch of the thick sphere of force, lit up like blazing lamps, distributing the incoming force away from the impact points and into the shield as a whole, lessening the strain on any individual point in the shield.

The grey hunter attacked the shield again and again in quick succession, and it finally gave way… but rather than the whole shield shattering, three small hexagons of force broke down instead, leaving the main structure unharmed. Before the grey hunter could take advantage of that the entire shield shifted and automatically rearranged itself, nearby hexagons sliding into place to close the gap.

Suddenly aware that Zorian was no easy target to be brought down quickly, the grey hunter tried to back off, but it was too late. Zach had positioned himself carefully while the grey hunter had been trying to batter down Zorian’s shield, and now launched a barrage of three hyper-dense stone spheres at the spider. The grey hunter spun around like an acrobat, deflecting the spheres away from itself with measured kicks, but Zorian took advantage of its predicament to launch a pair of metal cylinders at it. The grey hunter, accustomed to weathering Zorian’s annoying but weak attacks and not seeing any great concentration of mana in the cylinders, chose to ignore them in favor of the much more threatening stone spheres.

Just before they were going to impact the grey hunter, the cylinders detonated into a cacophony of sound, bright light, magical disturbances and aromatic smoke – all of it specifically optimized for grey hunter senses.

Dazed and disoriented by the flashbang grenades, the grey hunter stumbled and stopped. Just for a moment.

Simulacrum number four pulled the trigger.

Another deafening blast sounded out, closely followed by two more. Simulacrum number two didn’t fire, as he was positioned very inconveniently and there was a danger he could hit the egg sack if he fired. Of the three bullets, one missed the grey hunter completely – simulacrum number one had apparently aimed his shot so poorly that not even the trajectory correcting magics the original placed on the bullet could help. It didn’t matter, though – both he and number three had hit the grey hunter straight into its cephalothorax, the bullets had successfully breaking through its carapace.

It was a testament to the grey hunter’s toughness that, mere moments following this, it shook off the stun effect and retreated at top speed, as if it hadn’t just been shot twice in the head with high-caliber armor-piercing bullets. But it didn’t matter. It was living on borrowed time – from the moment those bullets sank into its flesh, its fate was sealed. The bullets were filled with the distilled essence of the crystal ooze – a magical creature every bit as powerful as the grey hunter, whose touch turned all flesh into inert crystal. The crystallization bullets, as Zorian called them, were already turning the grey hunter’s organs into lifeless crystal, and there was nothing the spider could do about it.

They grey hunter seemed to realize it too. It went berserk, lunging at Zach and Zorian with even greater zeal, and then tried to flee. They couldn’t allow that, of course. If it escaped, it would doubtlessly retreat into the deep dungeon and hide before dying, and other denizens of the dungeon might eat the egg sack before they could track down its corpse. Thus, walls of stone and force sprang up to bar its path, ectoplasmic threads and tentacles sought to entangle it and dimensional gates barred the path to its lair.

Eventually, the internal crystallization process advanced too far for the grey hunter to keep functioning and it started to visibly slow and then stop. Simulacrum number four and his fellow duplicates were then sent in to hack it apart and claim the egg sack, because the original was too much of a coward to do it himself. Then again, the grey hunter did mangle one of the simulacrums beyond repair as its last act before dying, so maybe he shouldn’t judge.

But anyway… the grey hunter was dead… and the egg sack was still intact.

It was time to visit Silverlake again. After some thought, simulacrum number four wandered off from the grey hunter’s corpse and sought out the original to talk to him about visiting the old witch. He was so looking forward to seeing her reaction when she realized what they had done, and it wasn’t fair that he wouldn’t get to see it just because he was a simulacrum! He was the one that shot the grey hunter! Well, he and number three, but number three ended up being killed by the grey hunter’s last hurrah.

He totally earned this and was not taking no for an answer.

After securing the corpse of the grey hunter, Zorian and his simulacrums went about carefully removing the egg sack attached to its underbelly without damaging it – a task far harder than Zorian would initially have assumed it would be. Then again, the egg sack had stayed attached to the grey hunter while it was doing all sorts of sharp movements and acrobatics, so it was a bit silly of him to assume he could just peel it off the spider as he wished. Still, it was nothing that Zorian and his duplicates couldn’t solve with a bit of time and analysis. After an hour or so, they finally managed to separate the egg sack from the corpse without ruining it.

They immediately set off to see Silverlake. They had no idea what it took to keep the eggs alive in the long term, after all, so it was better to deliver them to Silverlake as soon as possible. They also kept the grey hunter’s corpse, stashing it in the orb of the first emperor. Much of its value was ruined when its insides crystallized, but there should still be enough of it for a potion or two.

After some reasoned and totally calm discussion, Zorian also decided to take simulacrum number four with him to see Silverlake. Being accompanied by a simulacrum might help him convince her that he wasn’t just a precocious teenage mage and that she should actually take him seriously.

In any case, tracking down Silverlake’s home wasn’t hard this time around. She may have hidden it in a pocket dimension, but Zorian knew the general area it was in and had specialized divinations that could find such things. They didn’t try to break into the pocket dimension, though. That would have been threatening and rude. Instead, they got her attention in a more civilized manner – by taking the grey hunter’s corpse out of the orb and parading it around the pocket dimension entrance while chanting her name.

It didn’t take long before she decided to come out to meet them. She gave the dead grey hunter a quick, intrigued look before seemingly ignoring it in favor of focusing on them instead. She remained standing next to the entrance to her pocket dimension, though, a long iron rod clutched tightly in her bony fingers.

"Hello," Zach said, giving her a sunny smile and a casual wave of his hand.

"What a curious bunch of visitors you are," Silverlake said, unmoved by his friendliness. "It’s not every day that two baby mages manage to track me down to this place… and is that a simulacrum attached to a golem frame? My, aren’t you a clever sort."

"Well, you’re a pretty clever sort yourself," Zorian noted. "You figured out what my simulacrum is without casting any obvious analysis spells."

He really meant that, too. Certainly he couldn’t pull off something like that. He’d have to spend several minutes casting analytical divinations before he could work out what he was dealing with. Granted, she may have done that before she stepped out of her pocket dimension, but it was still impressive.

"Well? Out with it," Silverlake demanded. "Why are you bothering this old woman in the middle of her afternoon nap, making all this racket?"

"We have come to trade!" Zach said in an equally cheery tone, undaunted by her wariness.

"We have killed the grey hunter and retrieved its eggs fully intact," Zorian said without preamble, waving his hand at the corpse of the giant spider on the ground next to them. His simulacrum, meanwhile, casually extracted the grey hunter’s eggs from the box he was carrying, letting Silverlake see them. Her eyes immediately lit up with greed and excitement. She hid it quite quickly, but it was there. "We thought you might be interested in them."

"Oh? And why did you think that?" Silverlake asked him, inclining her head to the side, like a bird that spotted something interesting.

"Because you told me so in the past," Zorian said blandly.

"Because I told you so in the past," Silverlake repeated slowly, looking at him like he was stupid. "What a curious thing to say. Old I may be, but my memory is still going strong… and I don’t remember ever talking to you."

Zach and Zorian had discussed extensively what to tell Silverlake before coming to this place. Telling her the truth about the time loop was dangerous, because she was likely proficient in both soul and mind magic. She was a highly capable witch, after all, and they were famous for dabbling in both of those fields. However, convincing her to help them through lies and manipulations would take a long time… and time was, amusingly enough, something they had a chronic shortage of. Thus, they had unanimously decided to just tell the annoying old witch the truth and see how she reacted. Even if she was hostile, they could probably handle it.

Probably.

"You don’t remember because the world we live in is constantly repeating itself. On the night of the summer festival, the world ends. Everything reverts to how it was the month before, and then carries on as if nothing was wrong. Like an endlessly repeating music box, you repeat your actions over and over in month-long intervals… constantly forgetting, constantly starting over," Zorian explained, being deliberately a little melodramatic and mysterious.

Silverlake listened to his explanation with an arched eyebrow, looking surprised and amused in equal measure.

"My word, you came all this way just to deliver this kind of tall tale to me?" Silverlake said, chuckling lightly. "I suppose I can understand where you’re coming from. I have been told, on occasion, that I am rather repetitive in my arguments."

"It’s not just you," Zorian said, shaking his head. "Everyone is reliving this month over and over. Only me and Zach here are immune."

"Oh, but of course!" Silverlake said, slapping herself in the forehead. "Of course it’s like that! No doubt I too can get this kind of immunity at very favorable prices, thus saving myself from this awful, awful fate of… repeating myself for all eternity? I must say, the scammers these days are getting really inventive."

"Actually, there is nothing we can do to help you retain awareness of previous restarts," Zach said, clacking his tongue unhappily. "Kind of depressing, but there you go. We’re not here for that. As I have noted earlier, we’re here to trade – the grey hunter’s eggs in exchange for magical help."

Silverlake stayed silent for a second.

"Ah, I see," she finally said. "This is just you answering my question. I asked how you knew I needed the grey hunter’s eggs and you gave me an answer. I supposed if I asked you for an actual explanation…?"

"This is an actual explanation," Zorian said. "It’s not my fault you don’t believe me."

"Hmph," Silverlake scoffed. "Out of curiosity, during this conversation that I have no memory of, did I ever actually tell you what I needed the grey hunter’s eggs for?"

"No, you did not," Zorian admitted. "To be honest, I was rather angry with you back then and didn’t inquire too deeply. I came to you for help with a pressing problem and you sent me on all sorts of tasks, all of which I did without complaint. But my only reward was to be told to go after the grey hunter for its eggs. I was a lot weaker back then, so that basically amounted to sending me on an impossible task in order to get rid of me."

"That does sound like something I would do," Silverlake nodded sagely. "Which brings me to my next point – why are you so certain that I actually desire these eggs? Maybe I just sent you on a fool’s errand to waste your time, and didn’t actually care about the outcome."

Well, the truth was that Zorian didn’t know this for certain. He was making an educated guess, based on things like her clearly having tried to acquire the eggs herself in the past. But she didn’t have to know that.

"I’m an empath," he told her. "So I am certain you do want these eggs very, very much."

Silverlake scowled at him.

"A mind mage," she spat out in disgust. "I have the most rotten luck, I swear. I only like mind magic when I’m the one using it on others! Fine, fine, I admit it, I do want the grey hunter’s eggs… but they’re not as valuable as you might hope!"

"Meaning?" Zorian asked calmly.

"I have an important project that requires them, but it’s only one of the two critical components that I lack. If you had brought both of them, I would really be desperate to make a deal with you. But it’s a shame, a shame, for without the other critical component, the eggs are merely… interesting."

Zach rolled his eyes at her.

"You’re just like Zorian described you," he said. "Every time one of your tasks is accomplished, you come up with another one."

"Well that’s not very fair," she said reasonably. "I don’t remember ever giving you a task, after all. But that aside, I never said I will not trade for the eggs. I just said you better not hope to swindle something actually good from me in exchange for something that minor."

Minor, she says. Right.

"Out of curiosity, what is this other critical component?" Zorian asked.

"Bones and certain organs of a giant brown salamander that has grown past a certain size," Silverlake said.

"That’s it?" Zach asked incredulously. "Those things are everywhere around here!"

"It’s not as simple as it sounds," Silverlake said. "Yes, there are plenty of them to be found in the rivers and creeks around us, but they simply aren’t big enough… not mature enough. Giant brown salamanders never die of old age, you see. They simply get bigger. But they are a fairly weak type of magical creature, and they grow really slowly past a certain point, so almost none of them reach the size I need them to be. I need a salamander that has survived for at least one hundred years, and that’s incredibly rare."

"They can’t be bred in captivity?" Zach asked.

Silverlake looked at him like he just asked the dumbest thing ever.

"Who would be willing to wait a hundred years for a creature to grow up?" she asked. "Nobody has that much time, boy. Besides, they’d probably all get sick and die before the hundred years are up. I have no idea how to go about raising giant salamanders."

Zorian couldn’t help but remember how his first meeting with Silverlake had gone. If he remembered correctly, he had just been attacked by a particularly large giant brown salamander and had killed it in self-defense. This was the catalyst that had caused Silverlake to finally reveal herself to him. Back then he had blithely given her the salamander corpse, not even realizing how valuable it was… and Silverlake, after receiving something so apparently valuable from him, still decided to send him on a bunch of fool’s errands without even hearing him out.

That withered old bitch!

"Let’s stop dancing around the issue for a moment," Zorian said, swallowing down his annoyance in favor of actually accomplishing something. "This is our offer: the grey hunter’s egg sack in exchange for a month’s worth of instruction in pocket dimension creation. What do you say?"

"Oh? Pocket dimension creation?" Silverlake said contemplatively, tapping her chin with her index finger. "So that’s what you’re after. That’s a pretty exotic and high-level skill. Are you sure you’re even capable of learning it?"

Oh, good – she didn’t deny she possessed the skill in question. Zorian had kind of been afraid that her hideout was just something she had found through luck and that she wasn’t actually capable of creating pocket dimensions herself. It would have been a pain trying to find someone else who had that kind of expertise.

In any case, Zorian didn’t try to convince Silverlake with words – instead, he simply opened a dimensional gateway straight to Koth right then and there. Silverlake was instantly on guard when he started casting a spell, but didn’t try to stop him. About half-way through, she seemed to realize what he was doing and relaxed. Instead, she got an intrigued look on her face, especially when the dimensional passage itself sprang into existence beside Zorian.

She circled the gate a few times, peering intently at it, before turning to Zorian again.

"Well, you are full of surprises. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a stable, well-crafted dimensional passage," Silverlake reluctantly admitted.

Zorian smiled. That was only natural. After all, Zorian’s gate creation skills were a fusion of more orthodox gate creation skills that Xvim had taught him, as well as the insights Zorian had made from studying the Ibasan permanent gates and seeing the Bakora Gates in action. He doubted many people had had the opportunity to study so many different gate creation methods.

"As you can see, I’m quite good at dimensionalism," Zorian said. "And so is my friend Zach, here. You don’t have to worry about us not being able to follow your instructions."

"Well that’s good," Silverlake said with a wide, happy grin. "Then that just leaves the question of payment. You see… I don’t think the grey hunter’s eggs will be enough to pay for this."

Zorian didn’t bat an eye at this. He’d fully expected Silverlake to discard their initial offer and reach out for more. Someone as greedy and insatiable as she was would never agree to a person’s first offer.

It was good then, that he had many more things to offer.

"I could dispute that, but I am feeling generous today," said Zorian. He motioned for Zach to take out the orb of the first emperor, which he promptly did. "What my friend is holding is a portable pocket dimension holding an ancient ruin. It’s a lost artifact from the Age of Gods, probably impossible to reproduce in modern times. If you agree to this deal, we will allow you to study the artifact for the duration of our lessons. I’m sure you can imagine how beneficial this could be for your own pocket dimension creation skills."

Silverlake clearly could imagine, because she stared at the orb with such intensity that Zorian was afraid she would attack them both on the spot and try to take it from them. But after a few seconds, she shook her head and tore her eyes away from the orb.

"Throw in that modified Gate spell of yours and we have a deal," Silverlake said.

"Ah, no, I can’t agree to that," said Zorian with fake sadness. "Still, that spell isn’t completely out of the question… if you agree to some additional concessions."

Silverlake scowled at him, but Zorian completely ignored her displeasure. If she could be greedy, so could he. He could tell she really wanted that Gate spell, so why not get everything he could out of it?

"I suppose you have something specific in mind?" she asked him.

"I want to acquire the ability of soul perception," Zorian said. "And unfortunately, the potion made out of dirge moth chrysalises is not an option."

"Yes, that potion doesn’t keep well at all," Silverlake confirmed. "It can last six months at most, and even that’s pushing it. But really, why are you bothering me with such a minor request? Just go kill some people. That’s how nearly all necromancers get that ability these days. Even if you have no talent whatsoever at soul magic, you should be able to get it after twenty or so sacrifices."

"That isn’t an option," Zorian said, glaring at her lightly. "At all. If I have to ritually murder people to get the ability, I’d rather give up on the idea."

"Bah," Silverlake spat. "What’s a touchy-feely, squeamish kid like you trying to get soul perception for, then? You’ll never achieve anything worth a damn in soul magic with that attitude."

"I may need it to save my life," Zorian told her. "It’s not something you need to worry about. The question is: can you do it? Can you make me a potion that can grant me soul perception in less than a month’s time?"

"Hmph," Silverlake scoffed. "Do you even know how difficult it is to acquire soul perception through a mere potion?"

"Yes," Zorian said decisively. "I really do. That’s why I came to you for help."

Truthfully, most of what Zorian knew about that came from Sudomir, who had been extensively interrogated for his knowledge in previous restarts. Alanic contributed some, but the scarred battle priest was cagey about his knowledge of necromancy and outright admitted to be inferior to Sudomir in that regard. Anyway… apparently, all souls had some measure of soul perception in them by default, but it was tightly locked and unavailable for use. Alanic’s explanation for this was that soul perception was something the gods intended to be only activated after death, to help guide the soul to its destination, and that its premature activation on the material plane was dangerously tempting. Thus, the gods sealed it away until death, lest it lead people to heresy and sin. Sudomir’s explanation was that this ability was something inherent to souls themselves, and that the gods had selfishly sealed it away because they were afraid of humanity’s power and ingenuity. Considering necromancers tended to be wildly immoral, Zorian was kind of leaning towards Alanic’s side of the argument.

It didn’t matter, though. Even Alanic admitted that soul perception wasn’t evil by itself. The Triumvirate Church urged people not to deliberately seek it out, but at the same time they encouraged its use among their priesthood. Every high-ranking priest and quite a few lower-ranking ones had some measure of soul perception. With the disappearance of the gods, the Triumvirate Church had to find a way to make up for their loss of divinely-granted powers… and granting soul perception abilities to their priesthood on a mass scale was one of the methods used. It was the Triumvirate Church who developed and perfected the dirge moth potion – the most affordable and reliable alchemical method of gaining soul perception to date. It was just that the recipe for the potion was so simple and distributed so widely that it eventually leaked outside the Church hierarchy and became wildly employed in necromantic circles.

Zorian once felt it was strange that a potion only available in 23-year intervals would be so attractive to people… but then he found a fragmentary recipe for an alternative potion in Sudomir’s memories and immediately realized why. The ingredients required absolutely couldn’t be acquired either in stores or on the black market. These were the sort of things one needed to personally seek out in the wild and dangerous corners of the world… and most of the ingredients came attached to creatures possessing some method of attacking the soul. Even for Zach and Zorian those things were a major danger. In order to make a potion outlined in Sudomir’s memories, one would have to possess top-notch connections or a great deal of time to track down all the ingredients, have enough power to claim them, and then find someone with enough alchemical skill to make a complicated potion they had probably never made in their life and succeed on their first try.

On top of that, all such potions were based on the same basic principle – they brought the imbiber on the very brink of death, only to pull them back at the very last moment. Very much like that special training Alanic had put him through, only even more extreme. Needless to say, if you made that kind of potion incorrectly, you were highly likely to die on the spot after drinking it. Dirge moths may only come every twenty-three years, but they were rather abundant when they did show up, thus allowing alchemists to actually practice with the ingredients.

Of course, there were other methods of getting soul perception. They just weren’t very useful for him.

For instance, one could simply be born with it. Some people had innate soul sight, called ghost eyes by the scholars, much like he had been born innately empathic and capable of instinctive mind magic. He obviously wasn’t one of these. Some people, after almost dying, unlocked the ability by accident. But this was something that couldn’t be counted on, since nobody knew how that really worked. Finally, there was a really simple, accessible method involving a sacrificial ritual. All one needed to do was forge a temporary soul bond with a person and then kill them. Slowly. While keeping them conscious, because of course it wouldn’t work otherwise. This was the method Sudomir used, and the method that most budding necromancers used, since it was cheap and easy to set up.

Having experienced what the procedure entailed from Sudomir’s memories, Zorian knew he didn’t have what it took to go through that. He was, as Silverlake said, way too squeamish to basically torture a dozen people to death.

"If you know how difficult those potions are, then surely you understand that making one of those in a month is nonsense, even for me. Just gathering the ingredients alone–"

"Whatever ingredients you need, we will procure for you," said Zach, cutting her off. "You only need to put them together into something that works."

"Hmm," Silverlake said, humming to herself thoughtfully. "You did kill the grey hunter while not damaging its egg sack in the slightest. That speaks well of your combat skills. Still, gathering ingredients for an old-fashioned soul perception potion will require you to have at least elementary soul defenses."

"We have those," Zach told her.

"You do?" she asked, sounding surprised. "Well fine then. So long as you take care of ingredient collection, I guess I can make you a potion of soul perception. But only that! I will not give you the recipe or allow you to watch the creation process itself."

"Acceptable," Zorian nodded. He waited for a few seconds, but it did not seem like she would say anything else. "So, do we have a deal then? In exchange for the grey hunter’s eggs, research access to the portable pocket dimension in our possession and my expertise with the Gate spell, you agree to teach us pocket dimension creation and make us a potion of soul perception."

Silverlake stood silently, mulling the deal in her head. She frowned and grimaced to herself, occasionally breaking into indecipherable muttering and strange gestures. Zorian watched her suspiciously, worried that she was trying to slip in some stealthy spellcasting in all that nonsense, but it all seemed to be completely innocuous. Well, as innocuous as that kind of unstable behavior could be, anyway.

"I have a question," she finally said. Zorian motioned her to continue. "Earlier, you told me that wild story about this month endlessly repeating itself and how I lose all memory of it while you don’t. Wouldn’t that mean that everything I gain in this deal is illusionary, while everything you gain from it will actually stay with you?"

"I thought you didn’t believe in that," Zorian remarked.

"Let’s pretend I do for a moment," Silverlake said without batting an eye. "Am I wrong?"

"You’re not wrong," Zorian shook his head. "In the grand scheme of things, this deal heavily favors us. Everything you gain will be gone at the end of this month, while the knowledge we gain and the unlocking of my soul perception will stay with us for future use."

"Then… don’t you think it’s stupid to tell me that?" Silverlake asked him curiously. She didn’t seem to be actually angry, merely interested in the logic he used to arrive to his decision. "I mean, I don’t actually believe that nonsense you’re spouting, but if I did, it would make me totally unwilling to accept this deal of yours."

"I’m thinking towards the future," Zorian told her calmly. "It’s not possible for me to absorb your pocket dimension creation skills in less than a month. We both know this. I will be coming over here with this same deal again and again, and I’ll need to continue from where we left off in the previous restart. I might be able to fool you at first with lies of having learned the basics from someone else, but that will quickly get untenable. At some point, I will have to explain how I know skills that are obviously yours… even though you don’t remember teaching me."

"Well, that’s all good but… how does this help you right now?" Silverlake asked expectantly.

"Right now would be a good time to discover something I can use to convince the future you I am telling the truth," Zorian said. "You might not believe me, exactly, but you’re clearly willing to entertain the idea for a time… as your current line of questioning amply proves."

She scowled at him, but he ignored her displeasure.

"Basically, I am hoping you will eventually tell me something that I can show off to your future self in order to convince her that the time loop is real and we really have met before… even if she has no memory of it."

Silverlake stared at him for a moment before breaking into cackling laughter.

Zorian sighed. He really didn’t see what was so funny about that.

"Boy, you are madder than I am!" She finally wheezed out, punching herself in the chest a couple of times to get her laughing under control. "Anyway, I accept your deal! And since I’m in a good mood right now, I’ll throw in a reward for you! You want a secret? I’ll give you a good one. The reason I need those grey hunter’s eggs and the body of a hundred-year-old giant salamander is because I’m working on a potion of youth."

"You’re trying to stave off death from old age?" Zach asked, surprised. "Wow. That’s an incredibly advanced skill. I heard from Zorian you were a master alchemist, but I didn’t know you were that good."

"Silly boy," Silverlake chuckled. "I’m not trying to stave off old age. I already have that."

They were both struck speechless at the admission. An immortal!?

"Ha ha!" Silverlake cackled. "Surprised, aren’t you? Yes, I could persist like this indefinitely. Don’t get fooled by my dashing good looks – I’m positively ancient."

"How ancient?" Zach asked cautiously.

"It’s impolite to inquire about a lady’s age," she said with mock bashfulness. "But it’s a three digit number, I can tell you that much. Anyway, I did a fine job of stopping time from ravaging my body, but this isn’t good enough for me. I want my youth back. And with those spider eggs you brought me, I’m only one step away from that goal."

A short silence descended on the scene, Zach and Zorian being at a loss what to say about that.

"Pretty good secret, isn’t it?" Silverlake said.

She told them all this just so she could brag about how amazing she was, didn’t she?

"Yes," Zorian coughed. "Yes, it is. Anyway, about this trade…"

"Come back here two days from now," Silverlake said dismissively. "You came here completely unannounced, so you’ve caught me completely unprepared. My house is a total mess right now, completely unsuitable for entertaining guests. I need to get some extra chairs out of the basement, dust off the furniture and maybe prepare some refreshments. I think I still have some of that mushroom cake I experimented with a few years back. I know that sounds a little dodgy, but it keeps really well and it gives you such wonderful dreams…"

"The eggs stay with us until we meet again, then," Zorian warned her, completely ignoring her banter.

"Hmph," Silverlake scoffed. "Fine, be that way. Paranoid brats. Make sure to stash them in a dry, dark place with plenty of ambient mana around or they’ll get ruined and the deal will be off!"

"I’ll keep that in mind," Zorian nodded. The eggs were a lot simpler to preserve than he feared, then. "Just to make sure, this thing is safe, right? The eggs won’t hatch in a few hours and release a bunch of tough little spider monsters everywhere, right?"

"No, no, no… well, they shouldn’t …" Silverlake said, hesitating slightly.

"We’re stashing them well away from any populated areas," Zach said decisively. "And when we go to retrieve it, we’re sending one of your simulacrums in first."

"Hey!" the simulacrum currently present protested.

"Stop that," Silverlake snapped at them. "It will be fine. Trust me."

All three of them gave Silverlake an unamused look, clearly telling her how they felt about her reliability and trustworthiness.

"Kids these days, no respect for their elders…" she muttered angrily. "Well, off with you then! Go away. This has been such a pleasant meeting thus far, it’s best to end things on a high note. Don’t forget to bring gifts the next time we meet! Honestly, I can’t believe you two came to visit someone and didn’t even bring them a bottle of brandy or something. Don’t you know that gift-giving is an important tradition? No, don’t answer that, I was just lecturing you, not actually asking you for your opinion. Go. Shoo!"

And thus their meeting with Silverlake ended – with her shooing them away like a bunch of naughty cats loitering around her backyard. Still, they’d largely achieved what they came for, so Zorian was happy.

He just hoped she was actually going to keep to her end of the bargain.

When Zach and Zorian came to visit Silverlake again, she was standing next to a humble cottage, messily butchering a pair of giant brown salamanders. These were smaller specimens, incomparable to the giant that had tried to eat Zorian so long ago, so Zorian assumed they were not the sort she needed to complete her potion of youth… but apparently she still had some use for even younger salamanders. In any case, she welcomed them with a wide smile and an immediate demand to hand over the spider eggs. They did so, patiently waiting as she ignored them entirely for over a minute in favor of inspecting the eggs for damage and whatever else she was looking for. She ushered them into her cottage, which proved to be less of an actual cottage and more of a disguise for the entrance to her pocket dimension.

Well, the inner layer of her pocket dimension. The cottage itself was also hidden in its own pocket dimension, which is why Zorian couldn’t find it by just wandering the forest. But the cottage dimension was just the outer layer of her hidden world, one that could be deployed (thereby becoming actually accessible to visitors) and compressed (seemingly disappearing from the world entirely) on a whim. Nested inside this cottage dimension was another, bigger pocket dimension, which served as Silverlake’s actual home and base of operations.

In Silverlake’s own words, the cottage was just a front to fool idiot visitors.

As for the contents of the inner layer, it consisted of three things: a nice, luxurious two-story house, an expansive herb garden full of rare magical plants and a heavily warded alchemical workshop where she did most of her work.

Yes, a powerful witch that was clearly very proud of her traditions and made distinctions between alchemy and potion making had a fully equipped alchemical workshop that would be familiar to any conventional alchemist out in the major cities. Zorian couldn’t help but find that a little amusing.

It had been five days since then, and thus far Silverlake was keeping to her side of the deal. Zorian was afraid she would try to shirk her duties as an instructor, giving them inscrutable training regimens that weren’t certain to work before disappearing into her workshop for the rest of the day, but this didn’t happen. Probably because they were deep inside her home base and there was a real danger that they could torch her home and herb garden if they felt cheated by her. Or maybe because she really wanted the Gate spell modifications and knew that the level of cooperation she could expect out of Zach and Zorian in regards to that would directly correlate to the level of dedication she showed when teaching them how to make pocket dimensions. Whatever her reasons, Silverlake actually gave them long, exhaustive explanations and even created a few fist-sized pocket spaces in front of them as a demonstration.

Creating a pocket dimension was deceptively simple. The basic idea was to stretch and fold a chosen volume of space into a miniature spatial bottle and sort of… cap it. This cap was called the anchor point and it prevented the folded space from snapping back into its natural form the moment it was no longer being forced into shape, as space was naturally wont to do. After that, the pocket dimension could be gradually inflated to the maximum size the anchor point could bear.

Obviously, the creation of an anchor point was the most important part of pocket dimension creation. It was the place where the dimension was connected to the main reality, and served as both an entrance and as a foundation upon which the stability of the dimension ultimately rested. Its size, power and sophistication determined how big and stable a pocket dimension could be. If it was ever destroyed, the dimension attached to it would quickly meet the same fate.

Neither Zach nor Zorian had yet managed to successfully create a stable anchor point, no matter how minor. The process was every bit as hard as learning how to cast the Gate spell, except it required even more mana and attention to detail. Zorian was somewhat annoyed to realize that Zach would probably get the grasp of the ability far sooner than he would, simply because he had far more mana to burn on training than Zorian did.

It didn’t help that Zorian had heavily stunted his ability to recover mana by maintaining six different simulacrums. Funny how he invented a brand new method of using simulacrums, halving the maintenance cost of each one… and then promptly doubled the amount of simulacrums he kept going at any particular time.

Currently, Zorian was sitting on the ground in the Silverlake’s pocket dimension, reviewing reports from his simulacrums while he waited for his mana reserves to recover. One of the simulacrums was in Koth, brainstorming how to get to the other pieces of the Key with Daimen. Another was raiding the academy library for restricted theory books on advanced dimensionalism. The third one was arranging a trade deal with one of the minor experts they were approaching for work. The fourth and fifth ones were working on upgrades to the simulacrum’s golem frames. Not quite something he’d invest so heavily in normally, but he had little choice – all simulacrums went on a strike until he agreed to permanently station two of the copies on that particular task.

Finally, the sixth and last simulacrum was working on something very delicate and possibly dangerous – mental enhancements.

It was pretty low-key for now. He didn’t want an insane copy of him rampaging around, or worse, going after him. Additionally, the simulacrums were still essentially him, which meant they were not at all okay with thoughtlessly risking their minds. Taking into account the possible risks to his own safety, and the disturbing possibility that his own simulacrums might mutiny if he pushed things too far in this direction, Zorian had ordered the last simulacrum to limit himself to self-inflicted illusions for now. Things like figuring out how to block out noise and other distractions, add highlights and reminders to his perception, and so on. It was a very orthodox, very safe sub-field of mental enhancements. Because it only modified the caster’s senses, not their thoughts and emotions, there was only so much one could mess up, and little of it was unfixable. Human mages had done quite a lot of work in this regard, mostly because they had been trying to make divinations that could display their output though illusions projected on the caster’s senses. Of course, Zorian also consulted the various aranean webs too. The Luminous Advocates and Perfect Phantasm Crafters were the two webs most helpful to this project, though he had also received notable help from several otherwise minor webs such as Band of Fog and Dreaming Refuge.

"Boy, I told you to keep an eye on that cauldron," Silverlake snapped at him, breaking him out of his thoughts. "It’s going to boil over if you keep daydreaming like that. Quit it. It’s unprofessional."

"Ugh," Zorian grunted unhappily, throwing a glance at the huge iron cauldron to his left. Silverlake did basically rope him into helping her with her alchemy – sorry, potion making – while he recovered. However it was only supposed to be for 10 minutes and she had only come back now to take over, after at least half an hour had passed.

"We never agreed I would be your personal assistant when we made the trade. I should start charging you for these things," Zorian muttered, just loud enough for her to hear him. She pretended he didn’t say anything. He raised his voice at her. "What is that cauldron even doing? If you’re going to recruit me in your projects, you should at least tell me what’s going on."

"It’s an experiment," Silverlake said distractedly, too busy cleaning some kind of carrot-like wild root to look him in the eye while speaking. "I’m sure you noticed me chopping up those runty salamanders in the last few days. I’m trying to artificially concentrate the salamander’s regenerative essence to see if I can create a workable substitute for the hundred-year-old salamander that I lack. Probably won’t work, but eh. It’s worth a try."

"Regenerative essence?" Zorian said, frowning. "Is that what the giant salamander is for?"

"Of course," Silverlake said. "They can regrow anything, repair any damage. If you carve them carefully enough, both halves will regrow into fully healthy, functional copies. Useful thing, that. Most healing magic simply enhances and accelerates the body’s natural healing abilities, so it doesn’t work well on some wounds. The salamander’s regenerative essence, if concentrated enough and combined with some other ingredients… why, it might even turn back the clock and undo the effect of old age!"

"Hmm," Zorian hummed thoughtfully. Okay, so this was slightly more interesting than he assumed. Still… "So why are you doing it like this, doing the procedure under the open sky, in a simple iron cauldron? You have an alchemy workshop that nearly every professional alchemist would be envious of. Why not use it?"

"Hmph. Shows what you know," Silverlake said. "I’m doing it this way because this is the superior option. It’s good enough for the job. Doing this with a complicated alchemical setup wouldn’t get stuff done any faster or give better results – it would just inflict wear and tear on delicate equipment and be a nightmare to clean up afterwards."

Zorian had nothing to say to that. Her argument did make a lot of sense, after all.

They both stayed silent for a while. Eventually Silverlake finally finished preparing the wild roots and unceremoniously dumped them into the boiling cauldron. She watched the liquid bubble for a few seconds, before nodding sagely to herself and adding a couple of wooden planks to the fire.

"Do you know what the difference between alchemy and potion making is, boy?" Silverlake asked suddenly, glancing at him with narrowed eyes.

Zorian was tempted to tell her that potion making was just a subset of alchemy, but he knew she would consider that a wrong answer.

She was asking about potion making in the sense that ancient witches understood it, not in the sense that was currently taught in schools.

"Potion making focuses on using a cauldron, and nothing else, to make their wares," Zorian said.

"Yes," Silverlake agreed. "Sounds very foolish, doesn’t it? A botched potion can release clouds of poisonous or mutagenic gas, explode in your face or splash all over you and melt your skin. Hell, a correctly made potion can be just as bad! Very often, old witches carried a mark of their minor failures in the form of scars, strange odors and skin diseases from the years of exposure to magical fumes and concoctions. Modern alchemy is so much safer, so much more precise. Why, then, do you think the old witches do things in the way they did?"

Zorian cocked his head to the side, trying to figure out what she was getting at. What’s that got to do with anything?

"Because it was… cheaper?" he tried.

"Ha. Close," Silverlake said. "It’s because alchemy, in its current form, requires an entire society built to enable it. Somebody has to build all the vials, containers, heaters, and other equipment. Somebody needs to grow, gather and track down the ingredients used in it. Somebody needs to transport and distribute it to those that need it… or have the right connections to use it. Somebody needs to guard the workshops full of valuable equipment from thieves and various miscreants. The old witches had access to none of that, so they had to make do with chucking things into a big iron cauldron and eyeballing things. It is, as you said, cheaper. Cheaper in terms of money and also cheaper in terms of social infrastructure needed to support it."

"I see," Zorian said after a while.

"These days there are virtually no witches that do not use alchemy in some form, in addition to their traditional cauldron-based skills," Silverlake continued. "The ancient covens would have considered us all heretics, I bet. But the ancient covens have all died out to my knowledge, and that’s hardly an accident. Times change. The covens didn’t and paid the price for it. Alchemy has its place… as does potion making. Don’t be so quick to look down on it."

"You made that entire long-winded speech just to deliver that little lecture at the end of it, didn’t you?" Zorian huffed in annoyance.

"You’re going to remember it better this way," Silverlake cackled. She prodded the bubbling liquid in the cauldron with an iron ladle she used to mix it. "Well, whatever, I think we can leave this be for a few hours. You recovered yet, boy? I say, you sure take your time with your rest – it’s a miracle you got this far with such an awful work ethic. Why, when I was your age, we…"

Zorian sighed and got up, doing his best to drown out her moralizing. He sent a quick message through his soul to the simulacrum working on implementing sensory filters, telling it to work quickly. He was going to need those skills as soon as possible.

75. Soul Stealer

The great wilderness that existed in the north of Altazia was a place that contained many rare and valuable things. Exotic natural resources, interesting locations, magical plants and animals extinct in the south… all of those and more could be located if one was willing to spend time searching for them and was strong enough to survive deep in the untamed mountains and forests. This wasn’t because the northern wilderness was particularly blessed in natural resources and magical hot-spots, of course, but simply because most of it had never been settled and systematically exploited by human societies. The southern areas had once had these kinds of things as well, but the spread of civilization and rising number of mages had caused many of them to disappear. Mines were depleted, forests chopped down and turned into farmlands, Dungeon openings sealed away or turned into carefully-regulated mana wells, delicate areas destroyed through war or short-term greed and dangerous plants and animals deliberately hunted to extinction. After all, nobody wanted to live next to a man-eating magical tiger or a walking tree that periodically planted itself in your field and ruined the crops, no matter how valuable they were to some mage in the neighboring country.

Such was the case with the plant that Zach and Zorian were currently after. The soulseizer chrysanthemum, as it was called, was one of the rare entities that ate souls. Since nobody wanted a soul-eating flower growing in their garden – or anywhere near them, really – the plant rapidly went extinct any time humans moved into an area. Thus, if Zach and Zorian wanted to find one, they had to go to the wild areas untouched by most of humanity.

Currently, the two of them were hiding under a globe of invisibility, warily watching a huge black bear amble past them. Though the bear wasn’t truly a life-threatening danger to them, they were in no mood to pick a fight with it. It was a resilient monster, and no part of its body was particularly valuable on the general market. Considering they had been trudging through the dense foliage of the Great Northern Forest for most of the day, they really just wanted to find where the soulseizer chrysanthemum was hiding and go home.

Thankfully, the bear did not appear to be hunting and paid little attention to its surroundings. It simply walked past them and soon disappeared from sight.

Zach dispelled the globe of invisibility that hid them from sight and then cautiously scanned the area for further dangers. Although not as dangerous as the deeper layers of the Dungeon and the like, Altazia’s northern forests were not a place for the unwary. This deep in the wilderness, there lurked threats that posed a danger even to Zach and Zorian working together, should they be caught by surprise.

"Gathering all these ingredients on Silverlake’s list is surprisingly hard," Zach said, relaxing slightly upon detecting nothing of note. "They’re rare, dangerous, or both, and Silverlake never gave us a single clue where we could find any of them… and yet, the task is still clearly doable, so we can’t really complain about being given a completely impossible task. The old witch really has a knack for this stuff."

"I’m half-convinced that most of these are not necessary for the potion at all," Zorian said, sighing lightly. He spent a few seconds reorienting himself and then set off in the northwestern direction. Zach followed him without complaint. "She probably added quite a few of these because she personally needs them for something, not because the potion we ordered demands it. The trouble is–"

"We have no idea which ingredients are essential and which are not," Zach finished for him. "She never lets us see the actual recipe. We can only speculate and try to call her bluff, but we’re more pressed for time than she is and she knows it. She wouldn’t relent, even if we guessed correctly, and might even up the price out of spite."

"Yes," Zorian nodded. "Whatever. It’s doable, that’s all that matters. Let her have her little victory if it pleases her."

"True," Zach agreed. "Say, are you really sure we’re in the right place? We’ve been looking for more than two hours and the flower doesn’t appear to be here. Maybe the yeti tribe we spoke to lied to us. Relations between them and humans are not exactly the best."

"The tribe’s shaman didn’t lie," Zorian said, shaking his head. "He thinks we’re cocky idiots that will get our souls eaten by the soulseizer chrysanthemum, so he told us the truth as he saw it. He gets the payment we promised him and two humans end up dead. It’s a win-win as far as he was concerned. It’s just that yetis don’t really have any concept of maps or precise coordinates, so all I have is a set of vague directions regarding the local landmarks. Just be a little patient."

"But this is so boring," Zach whined childishly.

"Tough luck," Zorian told him pitilessly.

Zach was quiet for a few seconds before he started talking again.

"You know, the idea of fighting a flower is kind of funny. And embarrassing," he said.

"I don’t know," Zorian said. "I think fighting those rabbits a few days back was way more embarrassing. Especially since both of us ended up getting bitten before we managed to bring them down."

"Ugh. Don’t remind me," Zach groused. "Those have got to be one of those fake ingredients Silverlake added to the list. I mean, how are a bunch of rabbits like that related to a potion of soul perception?"

"I think those red gems embedded in their foreheads were some kind of sensors," Zorian speculated. "They did see through our every attempt to sneak up on them."

The two of them spent the next half an hour discussing which of the ingredients were likely to be fake, only to realize that none of them were obvious imposters. They could all potentially be valid, which meant that either Zorian was too paranoid or Silverlake was very clever when picking her additions. Zorian was leaning towards the second option.

"I know we already talked about this before visiting Silverlake, but are you really sure this is even necessary?" Zach eventually asked. Seeing Zorian’s confused look, he moved to clarify. "Acquiring soul sight, I mean. Are you really sure you need it?"

"Of course I’m not sure," Zorian said, shaking his head. "Maybe once we get the whole key, everything will be neatly resolved, and me getting soul sight will end up being a pointless diversion. The thing is, even if the Guardian of the Threshold overlooks the fact there are two of us and places our souls back into our bodies, there is a problem…"

"Your original body still has its old soul," Zach said.

"Well, it would be more accurate to say that the body I hope to inhabit was never truly mine to begin with," Zorian said. "But yes, that’s the core issue. If I want out, I need to steal my real world body somehow. I guess this could be done by convincing the Guardian to switch my soul with that of the original, but… the Guardian has made it clear that this goes against the very nature of his job. I’m skeptical that acquiring the Key will let us ignore this."

"I get that," Zach said. "But maybe you don’t have to literally steal the body, you know? Maybe you can kind of, you know… coexist with your old self?"

"An interesting idea," Zorian said. "I don’t know enough about soul magic to say if that would be possible, but… that kind of thing would still require me to acquire soul perception first."

"Yeah, I guess," Zach sighed.

They walked through the forest in silence for a few seconds, Zorian keeping an eye out for that funny-shaped rock outcropping that the old yeti had told him about. It should be around here…

"What’s really on your mind?" Zorian eventually asked.

"You know I’m not really sure that I’m the real Controller of this time loop," Zach said. "And if I’m not… I could be facing the same choice you are."

"Ah," Zorian said, nodding. Personally, he felt Zach’s fears were unfounded, but he knew by now it was useless to tell him that. "I see."

"Do you think I should try to acquire soul perception too?" Zach asked. "I’m not nearly as comfortable as you are in killing my old self, but I have to admit… if I have to choose between myself and him…"

"It would be the safe thing to do," Zorian told him. Concerns about not being the true Controller aside, he didn’t see any particular downsides about Zach acquiring soul perception. "But best not to try that in this particular restart. We have no idea how the safety triggers on your marker are going to react to a potion like that. I mean, they did terminate the restart when you tried to undergo Alanic’s training, remember?"

"I remember," Zach scowled. "If it weren’t for that, I would have had simulacrums of my own by now."

"Right. They could easily trigger this time too, since the potion works on similar principles," Zorian remarked. "It’s best if we wait for a less interesting restart before testing this."

"Yeah, I’m in no hurry," Zach said. He glanced around the area they were traveling in. "How long do you think it will take you to find this soul-eating flower? Maybe we should stop for now and come back tomorrow?"

"Actually…" Zorian began, his eyes zeroing in on a bunch of seemingly unremarkable trees, "we’re here."

He pointed at the base of one of the trees, where a beautiful white flower proudly sprouted from the forest floor.

There was nothing overtly supernatural or sinister about the soulseizer chrysanthemum. It was a large plant, but not monstrously huge. Its leaves and stalk were the most mundane of green, easily blending into the rest of the nearby vegetation. A single white flower the size of Zorian’s head crowned the otherwise unremarkable plant, its numerous rows of petals folded inwards into a sort of flowery hemisphere.

This sort of peaceful, unremarkable appearance was merely a trap, though. Since the soulseizer chrysanthemum was immobile, most of the time it behaved as inconspicuously as possible to lure its victims near. The moment Zach or Zorian stepped close enough, the flower would reveal its true nature.

"You know how I said earlier that the idea of fighting a flower is kind of funny?" Zach asked.

"Yeah?" Zorian prompted.

"I take it back," Zach said. "There is nothing funny about a dangerous creature that hides itself so thoroughly. I looked straight at it and I still can’t see any sign of danger. If we hadn’t been clued in advance about its true nature and where exactly it can be found, we’d never have noticed it."

"Mm," Zorian hummed in agreement. "If you really think about it, this is one of the most dangerous enemies we could possibly face. Stuff like the grey hunter could kill us, but the time loop makes that just an inconvenience. But this flower? If we stumbled upon it by accident, without being mentally ready or applying some kind of soul ward beforehand, there is a good chance we’d really end up with our souls devoured by it."

"Well, you would," Zach pointed out cheekily. "The safeguards on my marker would probably kick in the moment my soul was torn away from my body. You, on the other hand, would be thoroughly doomed. You know what soul devouring entities do, right?"

"They flay the outer layers of the soul for nourishment and keep the indestructible core as a sort of mana battery," Zorian said. "Or in the case of wraiths, they use the core to make more of their kind. I don’t know how fast this process is, but even if it takes a while, I’d probably end up with my soul severely damaged by the time the restart ended. I would probably spend every single restart thereafter in a deep coma and stay that way until the time loop collapsed."

They both stared at the seemingly peaceful flower for about a minute, both of them lost in their own thoughts.

"Alright, enough dawdling," Zach suddenly said, clapping his hands loudly to wake up Zorian from his reverie. "Let’s get this thing uprooted and chopped up into ingredients!"

After discussing it for a few minutes, they decided it would be best if only one of them confronted the chrysanthemum. The other would stay back and be ready to extract them if something went wrong. This, however, led to the issue of who would be staying back and who should advance upon the dangerous plant.

The argument was surprisingly charged, with both of them arguing that they should be the ones attacking. Zorian argued that his soul defenses were better than Zach’s by far and that they couldn’t afford to get into the habit of triggering premature restarts. Zach, on the other hand, argued this was dumb and that he should definitely be the one making the attempt. Zorian might have much better soul defenses, but if they proved to be insufficient, he could wind up permanently dead in all future restarts. In light of that sort of risk, who cares about a single interrupted restart?

"This is beyond stupid," Zach told him. "You don’t even like fighting!"

"But I fight when I have to," Zorian countered. "Besides, I think you’re exaggerating the level of danger I would be in. If you see me slump dead, immediately kill yourself. That will trigger a restart and get my soul out of its stomach. I doubt the chrysanthemum can mutilate my soul in such a short time."

Zach scowled at him. "Any plan that involves me committing suicide is a bad plan. I swear, I still can’t believe you were wearing a bomb around your neck before getting control of your restart trigger…"

"Actually, I still carry a bomb around my neck," Zorian told him, showing Zach the plain-looking golden chain he usually kept tucked into his shirt. His spell formula skills had advanced to such an extent by now that the chain was no longer obviously a magic item – unless one specifically decided to inspect it with analytic spells, it would look just like a mundane accessory. "Having more contingencies is always useful, after all. Still, I guess you have a point… I don’t think I’d fail here, but the worst scenario is worrying. Tell you what – I will agree to back off here, but if you fail and end up cutting the restart short, I get to confront the chrysanthemum the next time around. Deal?"

"Deal," Zach nodded. "If I can’t do it now, I probably won’t be able to do it on the second or third attempts either. I guess it is kind of unreasonable of me to cut restart after restart short like that. I still feel an urge to hit myself when I think of all the restarts I frittered away by doing just that…"

Then Zach started walking towards the flower, and all their arguments were revealed to have been moot. The soulseizer chrysanthemum twisted itself to face them both, the flower stalk moving with the speed and fluidity alien to normal plants, and a barely perceptible ripple emanated from it, covering a spherical area easily large enough to cover them both.

They had been within its striking range all along. It just chose not to attack them immediately.

Fast and omnidirectional, the ethereal ripple released by the chrysanthemum was impossible to dodge. Zorian, caught off guard by the attack, could do nothing except take it head on. Zach, having expected some kind of response from the flower, had successfully erected a shield around himself before it hit. It didn’t matter, though – the ripple passed through the shield like it wasn’t there at all. It slammed into both of them at almost the same time, sending them reeling.

Zorian felt sick in a way he had never experienced before in his life. His vision swam, assailed by numberless fleeting illusions and flashing lights, and his ears felt like a bomb had gone off right next to him. His sense of balance went completely haywire, his skin stung all over and his stomach churned like something was trying to tear itself out of him. It took a monumental act of will not to vomit all over himself and collapse on the ground. It was some kind of stun attack, Zorian realized. An incredibly complex stun attack, weaving together physical, mental and spiritual aspects into one unified whole.

Zorian reached into his own mind and forcibly shattered the mental aspect of the stun. The whole structure of the attack immediately became unbalanced, allowing Zorian to stabilize his condition somewhat. His vision cleared up a bit, and he saw Zach collapse to his knees, hands shaking, and vomit all over the forest floor. That… wasn’t much of a surprise, to be honest. Zach was not as adept as Zorian in defending either his mind or his soul, and he was closer to the chrysanthemum when it attacked.

Before Zorian could do anything, the soulseizer chrysanthemum turned towards him. Perhaps because he had weathered its stun effect better than Zach, or because he was closer to the border of its attack radius and it worried he would flee, but the flower chose to deal with him first. Its multitude of petals erupted with ghostly blue flame and unfolded like a mouth full of teeth, revealing a pitch black area in the middle of the flower.

Zorian’s soul immediately started vibrating in his body, sending waves of pain throughout his very being. Normally, this level of soul attack would never be able to seriously threaten Zorian… but with the aftereffect of the stun still lingering, resisting the pull of the flower was proving difficult. And the effect wasn’t stopping. Instead, the suction only seemed to get stronger as time went by and the flower searched for a firmer grip on his soul.

Despite that, Zorian was not worried. Before it attacked, the flower felt just like any other plant in the forest. It had no discernible mind, and thus nothing that Zorian could target with his mind magic. Now, however, he could very much feel a thinking mind behind the chrysanthemum.

He gathered all of his concentration and then launched a massive telepathic attack at the plant’s mind. This time, it was the flower’s turn to reel back in shock. Its attack on Zorian’s soul immediately ceased as it silently shook and waved around, trying to stabilize itself.

Zorian wasn’t going to let it have the time. Even though he still hadn’t entirely recovered from the initial attack, he poured all of his energies into launching one mental attack after another. The flower resisted fiercely. It was clearly a complete amateur when it came to mental combat, but it possessed an instinctive ability to form mental barriers and was armed with a powerful magic resistance that made it difficult and mana expensive for Zorian to target it.

After a while, Zach recovered enough to make his own move. He summoned a massive ghostly blade and sent it chopping down at the stem of the plant. In all honestly, it looked like compete overkill and Zorian worried he was going to ruin the chrysanthemum’s value as an alchemical component. They needed it fairly intact, after all.

The flower was undaunted, though. Threatened by the incoming blade, it spat a stream of glittering stars out of the black hole in the center of the flower. The glittering motes of light immediately arranged themselves into a dome-like construct that stopped the blade cold with barely a flicker.

They were soul cores of creatures the chrysanthemum had devoured in the past, Zorian realized. Somehow, it could control them and shape them into defensive constructs.

Well, not just defensive constructs, it turned out. After Zach and Zorian kept hammering its defenses for a while, it realized that at the rate things were going, it was going to lose. Its shield was going to get battered down sooner or later, and Zorian’s strategically launched mental attacks were disrupting its attempts to launch further soul attacks at them. Upon realizing this, the chrysanthemum reshaped the soul cores into a series of long, hair-like whips and started flailing them around. Zorian at first thought the chrysanthemum intended to attack them with those, but it turned out he had once again underestimated the plant. It quickly wrapped the whips around the nearby branches and uprooted itself right out of the ground before turning to flee.

Zorian had to admit, seeing an uprooted flower swing about from branch to branch, like some kind of weird monkey, was a unique experience.

Sadly for the soulseizer chrysanthemum, such desperate measures would not save it. It launched another stunning pulse at them in an attempt to lose them, and this did slow them down quite a bit, but in the end it was chased down and killed.

"We have been outsmarted and nearly killed by a flower," Zach said, still keeping a wary distance from the chrysanthemum’s remains. "We are never speaking about this again."

Zorian readily agreed to this request.

The Esoteric Order of the Celestial Dragon, known to most people as the Cult of the Dragon Below, was more than just a weird religion. It was an entire support organization that helped its members advance forward in life. They vouched for their fellow members when skills and trustworthiness were questioned, they helped them get the jobs and mentorships they needed to advance in their careers, offered their members loans under favorable conditions, granted free access to spell libraries that would be too restricted or expensive for members to otherwise get and they provided legal aid if members got into trouble with the mage guild. The higher ranking one had in the Cult, the more pronounced these advantages got.

This was the main reason why the Cult got so powerful and widespread. The sort of large-scale, highly treasonous plot that the Cult was currently participating in was not really something that they usually did. It was actually very, very atypical. For the vast majority of their existence, they had simply been a mystery cult crossed with a mutual aid society – kind of shady and disreputable, but nothing that the authorities would go too crazy over. Their biggest enemy was the Triumvirate Church and their faithful, which considered the Cult’s beliefs to be a direct affront to their dogma.

In any case, an expansive organization like that had more than just direct members of their secret club to draw upon. They also had a multitude of outside associates and other experts that sporadically worked with them. Some of these were true faithful that deliberately maintained distance from the main organization so that outsiders could not easily puzzle out the connections between them, others were just mercenaries that sporadically took missions from the Cult and some simply didn’t know who exactly they were working with. Zorian had largely ignored these people during his investigation into the Cult’s activities, since tracking them all down was an incredibly time-consuming and difficult task. He had better things to do with his time.

Then Alanic interrogated Sudomir a bunch of times and they discovered that the crazy mayor of Knyazov Dveri had detailed knowledge of these people. Sudomir appeared to have gone out of his way to gather as much information about the Cult as possible, worried that they might move against him at some point. The relations between him and Cult leadership hadn’t been the best since they realized he intended to publically advocate for the legalization of necromancy, something they regarded as lunacy.

Zorian still wasn’t terribly interested in spending time to investigate all these people. He didn’t think that would result in anything substantial. But Alanic was, and he didn’t have too many other things vying for his time. Thus, he wholeheartedly threw himself into the investigation, making full use of the time loop to comb through every lead and scrap of evidence Zorian could wrench from Sudomir’s mind.

And today, that effort seemed to have borne some kind of fruit. Alanic had notified Zach and Zorian that he had uncovered something important and told them to meet him next to an unassuming house in one Cyoria’s richer neighborhoods.

When they arrived, they found the place cordoned off by the mage guild personnel, but they had been notified that the two of them were coming and let them through on Alanic’s orders. Once again Zorian wondered just what position Alanic occupied that he could command people like this, but Alanic stubbornly refused to answer such questions and Zorian respected the man’s help too much to go prying into his thoughts.

"You called, we came," Zach said, waving his hand at Alanic to get his attention. "What do you have for us?"

"I don’t claim to understand every detail of the… situation you have found yourselves in," Alanic said, choosing his words carefully due to the presence of other people in the room, "but I believe you’ve indicated the name Veyers Boranova is important to you, yes?"

Zorian looked at him in shock.

"What? What does Veyers have to do with this? Is he here?" Zach asked.

"In a matter of speaking," Alanic said evenly. He motioned them to follow him and led them down the stairs and into the basement beneath the house. "This is the house of one of the lawyers deeply associated with the Cult of the Dragon Below. He is not a member, but he has helped on a number of occasions and is known to be sympathetic to their organization. I managed to get authorization to conduct a search of his house and… well, this is what I found when I opened the icebox in his basement."

Alanic stopped next to one of the three iceboxes lined up next to the basement wall and unceremoniously lifted the lid up. Inside was a frozen body of a teenage male, a peaceful expression on his frosted face.

It was unmistakably Veyers Boranova.

Zach and Zorian stared at the body for nearly half a minute, not saying anything.

"He’s… dead?" Zach asked lamely.

"Indeed," Alanic said. "I hear neither of you really got along with him well, so I will not offer you condolences."

"So the owner of this house…" Zorian began uncertainly.

"Jornak Dokochin," Alanic told him.

"Yes, this Jornak… did he kill Veyers?" Zorian asked. "When did this happen?"

"He is adamant that he did not kill the boy," Alanic said. "He claims the boy died of unknown causes while sleeping. One day he was fine, if a little surly, and the next day Jornak went into his room to check up on him and found him dead in his bed. I’d normally scoff at that explanation, but the timing…"

"He died on the first day of the restart, didn’t he?" Zach guessed.

"Yes," Alanic nodded. "The frost damage and the sheer passage of time make it difficult to tell for certain, but I’m pretty sure this is the same situation like those aranea beneath Cyoria and the mercenaries that were found mysteriously dead in their homes."

"Doesn’t that mean Veyers was soulkilled?" Zach frowned. "He isn’t Red Robe?"

"We can’t say that just from this," Zorian said, shaking his head. "We have no idea how exactly he entered the time loop, or what would happen if he left it. For all we know this could be the natural result of his leaving the time loop."

"Ugh," Zach grumbled. "So we found Veyers and yet learned nothing of value. I hate things like this."

"Well, anyway… I guess Veyers being frozen in the basement of a heavily warded house does explain why we never managed to find him when we searched for him in the previous restarts. What was he doing here, anyway?"

"Jornak has been disinclined to cooperate with us in this regard," Alanic told them. "He refuses to discuss details with me. He is a lawyer so he is harder to shake up and interrogate than most people I deal with. That’s why I told you to come here immediately. If you want to get anything out of him, we need to talk to him now. I’m afraid House Boranova has already heard of the news and is going to descend here sooner or later."

Alanic then led them to the second floor of the house, where Jornak was currently under house arrest with a couple of guards posted next to him. When they arrived they found Jornak pacing around his room like a caged tiger, angry and agitated. He deliberately ignored their entrance, not giving them so much as a glance.

Zorian observed the man and the room itself. Jornak was younger than he thought he would be, probably in his mid-twenties and with a very handsome, boyish face. He was immaculately dressed in expensive but conservative clothes, and the room he was in seemed to be designed to maximize his image as a cultured, well-read intellectual. The walls were lined with filled-out book shelves and small works of art laid scattered around the place to give it a bit of artistic flair.

Zorian’s parents had a similar room back in Cirin. Much like them, Jornak had probably never even read most of the books lining the bookshelves.

"So mister Dokochin," Alanic began. "I’m back. Don’t mind my two helpers here, they’re just here as support. Now that you’ve had a chance to calm down a little, are you willing to discuss things like a civilized person?"

Zorian gave Alanic a mildly questioning glance. Was he deliberately pissing the guy off? Jornak did not look calm at all. Alanic did not react to his silent question though, so Zorian simply trusted him to know what he was doing. He supposed that with him here, it hardly mattered whether Jornak wanted to talk or not.

Jornak finally deigned to look at them, giving Zach and Zorian a brief, contemptuous glance before dismissing them as unimportant.

"Your church really likes them young, doesn’t it, priest?" Jornak said, grimacing at Alanic unhappily. "I know my rights, mister Zosk. I will not talk to anyone until Mage Guild representatives and my lawyer arrive. Until then, I will patiently wait here and I’d appreciate it if you stopped wasting my time."

"Curious that a lawyer would want someone else to defend them," Alanic said.

"A surgeon would be foolish to try to operate on himself, and a lawyer is ill advised to represent himself in court," Jornak said dismissively. "I would not expect a Church dog to understand these things. People like you always think you’re above the law, anyway."

"Hmm," Alanic hummed, completely unaffected by Jornak’s caustic comments. "I’ll be honest and say I expected as much. Zorian?"

Zorian did not ask Alanic what he wanted. He already knew. He reached out mentally towards Jornak. The young lawyer actually had rudimentary mental defenses, but this was not something that could stop Zorian. He punched through those defenses as if they were paper and pressed down on the man’s mind.

Jornak’s eyes widened like saucers as he realized what was happening.

"Answer the questions," Zorian commanded.

"N-no!" Jornak protested. "This… this is illegal! I’ll… damn it. Damn it!"

"Did you kill Veyers?" Zorian asked, just to be sure.

"I didn’t kill him! I didn’t kill anyone! I already said I just found him dead one day! It’s the truth!"

"What was he doing in your home?" Zorian asked.

"That’s… we were friends," Jornak said, gritting his teeth.

"A friendship between a 15-year-old-boy and a 25-year-old man like you?" Alanic commented lightly. "Who is it that likes them young, again?"

"You people…" Jornak hissed angrily at him. He took a deep breath and forcibly calmed himself down. "Look… I promise to tell you the whole story. Just… release me from your mental compulsion. It’s hard to think with this thing muddying my thoughts."

Zorian gave Alanic a questioning glance. Alanic nodded for him to do as Jornak said, apparently willing to give the man a chance. Fair enough. He supposed they could always repeat the procedure if Jornak became uncooperative later on.

"I’m still keeping an eye on your surface thoughts," Zorian told him as he released the compulsion to make him talk. "So don’t try to lie to us."

"I don’t have to lie!" Jornak snapped at him. "This whole thing is just… damn it, Veyers! Even when dead, he still makes trouble for me."

"Yeah, he has that effect on people," Zach said with a sagely nod.

Jornak ignored that comment, gathering his thoughts for a moment.

"Alright," Jornak said. "So, I met Veyers almost a year ago when he came to talk to me about his legal options in regards to his… situation… in his House. I empathized with him then. What happened to him reminded me a little of myself. I too have had my birthright stolen from me."

"Really?" Zach asked curiously.

"I don’t want to talk about it and I ask you to be merciful and not force me," Jornak said. "It has nothing to do with this, and you can find out most of it through public documents. It’s not like I’ve ever hid my grievances, after all."

"Just give us the short version," Alanic said.

Jornak gave him a hateful look, but after glancing at Zorian for a second he decided to humor the scarred battle-priest anyway.

"In short, I was a relative of a small House that went extinct some time ago. Although not a true member of the House, I was the closest thing to a descendant and I was supposed to inherit their wealth and properties… but then a new claimant suddenly appeared, completely out of nowhere, claiming even closer relations. His proof of his lineage was painfully fake and all the documents obvious forgeries, but he was better connected than me and in the end, courts assigned everything to him and left me with nothing."

"I see," Alanic said. "And so you saw young Veyers coming to you for help and felt touched by this young man that was seeing his legacy usurped from him by branch members of his House."

"Yes, precisely," Jornak said. "In truth, I couldn’t help him much. Formal Houses like his own are given a lot of leeway in how they govern themselves internally, and general law is only somewhat applicable to his situation. Still, the boy seemed to appreciate my advice, and the fact that I cared … which not many people around him did, if he was to be believed."

"And him coming to live inside your home…?" Zorian prompted.

"That… you know he was expelled from his school?" Jornak said, frowning. "Well, he didn’t want to go back to his family after that. After wandering all over the city to cool down, he came over to my house and begged me to house him for a few days. He said he needed a place to hide for a while and think about what to do about things. How could I refuse?"

"That’s very generous of you, and I mean that sincerely," Zorian said. "But how does that lead to his body being stuffed into your icebox?"

"That… I didn’t know what to do, okay!?" Jornak said, becoming agitated. "I just came into his guest room one morning to see why he missed breakfast and found him dead. I didn’t know what to do! Despite all his problems, he was still a noble and House Boranova would never take this lying down. He died in my home and the wards didn’t register any intruder at all. How would I possibly explain this? I empathize with the boy, but I don’t want to ruin my life for him! Haven’t I suffered enough!?"

Jornak gritted his teeth and started pulling at his hair in frustration. With a sharp turn, he started pacing around the room again, gesticulating to himself and muttering under his breath.

It wasn’t an act, as far as Zorian could tell. Jornak had never bothered to reform his mental barriers after Zorian destroyed them, leaving his thoughts completely unguarded. Everything he said was truth as he saw it, and he was honestly panicking and unsure what to do.

"So, this could be a dumb question, but why keep Veyers' body in the icebox in your basement?" Zach asked suddenly.

"I didn’t know what else to do," Jornak said, still pacing around the room. "If I took it out of the house to dump somewhere, the trackers hired by House Boranova would find me the moment I stepped out of my house’s privacy wards. As for destroying it… well, I’ve never destroyed a body before! I mean, obviously I didn’t! How would I know how to do that? So I put the body on ice while trying to think up a solution…"

They didn’t find out much from Jornak after that. Although Zorian personally found the man’s choices to be rather questionable, he was ultimately just a man who found a dead teenager in his guest room and panicked. If Jornak hadn’t knowingly helped the Cult of the Dragon Below so many times in the past, Zorian would have even felt sorry for the man.

About fifteen minutes after Zach and Zorian left Jornak’s room, another group of Mage Guild personnel arrived, accompanied by several representatives from Noble House Boranova, and took over the scene. Alanic informed Zach and Zorian that this marked the end of his involvement with the case… and thus the end of their ability to examine the house or question the man.

It was just as well, though. The restart was coming to a close, so there was not much time for a detailed examination. Additionally, it would have been better if they arrived in the man’s house at the start of the restart, before he had a chance to stuff Veyers' body in an icebox. And in the next restart, they would do just that.

Until then, Zach and Zorian agreed to keep speculation about what this meant about Red Robe to a minimum.

Despite numerous issues that had cropped up in their search, in the end Zach and Zorian managed to gather all the ingredients Silverlake needed (or at least claimed she needed) for a soul perception potion. It took them most of the remaining time to do so, however, and by then the end of the restart was looming close. Thus, they were somewhat anxious as they waited for Silverlake to finish making the potion.

"It should work," Silverlake told them. "I mean, I’ve never actually made that specific potion in my life and the old witch recipe that describes it is not nearly as clear and precise as the modern recipes you two are familiar with… but since it’s me making the attempt, it will probably work out fine."

"Yes, yes, we get it – you’re awesome," Zach said with a tired nod.

"And don’t you forget it," Silverlake said shamelessly. "It shouldn’t take long. Gathering the ingredients is the time-consuming part; the actual potion making could be done in as little as two hours. You two go play outside while I work. You can practice your pocket dimension creation skills or something."

"You have a real gift for finding exceptionally infuriating teachers, Zorian," Zach told him after they got out of Silverlake’s earshot.

"Yes, but they tend to be exceptionally capable ones, too," Zorian countered. He took out a small box from his jacket pocket and flipped it upside down, allowing a stream of marbles to pour out of the box and into his waiting palm. A moderately perceptive person would quickly realize that there was no way all these marbles could fit into such a small box.

"Only 28 marbles?" Zach smirked. "Amateur. I managed to cram 32 of them inside a box like that."

Zorian gave Zach a suspicious look, but it didn’t seem like his fellow time traveler was lying about that.

"Damn it," Zorian grumbled. "All those specialized shaping exercises and I still can’t advance faster in this field than you do."

"I have six times more mana than you do and you’re further hampered by the number of simulacrums you keep around you at all times," Zach said with a careless shrug. "It’s hard to make up for such a disadvantage."

He was right, of course. Truthfully, it was amazing he was able to keep up with Zach’s learning rate at all. It still made him feel a little annoyed that he lost their informal competition about who would advance faster in the field of pocket dimension creation.

Oh well – there was still time to catch up. They would be chipping away at the topic for quite a few restarts after this, and he was confident he had more patience than Zach did…

It ended up taking Silverlake nearly four hours to finish the potion, despite her claim that it could be done in as little as two hours. She claimed she had merely been waiting for the concoction to cool down to a comfortable drinking temperature before bringing it over, but Zorian suspected it had more to do with the process being harder than she’d thought it would be rather than anything considerate like that.

"You should drink the potion soon," Silverlake told him. "The instructions were a little fuzzy about its shelf life and there was a bit of unplanned excitement involved in making it, so I had to add in a little something to forcibly stabilize it. It should retain its potency for about a week, after which there is a small but non-trivial chance it might explode in your face. Best not to take that chance, hmm?"

"Unplanned excitement, you say," Zach dead-panned. "That doesn’t exactly inspire confidence."

"I’m 97.3% sure it will work as expected," Silverlake said firmly.

There was a small silence as Silverlake looked at them expectantly, no doubt hoping one of them would ask her why it was 97.3 instead of 99 or something like that. She would be sorely disappointed. They both knew better than to humor her like that.

"I’m 97.3% sure you pulled that number out of your ass," Zorian told her bluntly. "But it doesn’t matter. This month is approaching its end and time will soon reset itself. I’m going to drink this right away."

"Ah yes, the great time reset," Silverlake said. "You’re still going on about that, huh? Well, did I ever tell you about–"

But Zorian wasn’t listening anymore. He uncapped the potion bottle Silverlake handed to him and immediately drank the entire potion. The thick green liquid was bitter as hell, but otherwise unremarkable. For a few seconds, nothing happened…

…and then he experienced a sensation reminiscent of the soul-stealing move he had experienced when fighting the soulseizer chrysanthemum and his senses rapidly began to dim.

He lost consciousness.

When Zorian woke up, he found out two days had gone by. They had expected as much, though. According to what they knew, the process of gaining soul perception through this method always took at least a day, and could take as many as five. Some unfortunate souls, ignorant of this little detail, had been known to die of dehydration after drinking a potion like this in secret.

In regards to what had happened while he was unconscious, Zorian had only the fuzziest of recollections. He had periodically regained awareness throughout the process, but it was like trying to remember a dream. He remembered a series of senseless, disjoined images: a sea of suns connected by glowing threads, a massive volcano in the middle of an eruption, a carpet of smoke crawling across desolate lands…

Just like his usual dreams, in other words. He put it out of his mind, and focused on the important stuff… like whether he had successfully acquired soul sight or not.

The answer was that he had. It wasn’t as instinctive as Zorian’s mind magic, but Zorian had found a sufficient amount of instructions in Sudomir’s mind to figure out what he had to do. So long as he poured mana into his soul in very specific ways, he could see the souls of other people. It wasn’t really sight as such, so much as a whole new sense that gave him headaches when he tried to process what it was really telling him, but that would improve with time and practice.

Overall, Zorian considered the whole thing to be a massive success. The only problem with the whole thing was that he had forgotten to mention to Imaya and Kirielle that he would be absent from home for several days, so Zach had to take the brunt of their ire and convince them not to report his disappearance to the police. Now all three were kind of annoyed with him…

Currently, Zorian was sort of hiding from them in Silverlake’s pocket dimension. Of course, he did have a valid reason for being there, beside that – he was trying to find something that would convince her future self that the time loop is real. Silverlake did have a penchant for telling him little personal stories from time to time, but it was hard to discern which ones were fake and which ones real, so he doubted that would help him convince her in the future.

"Did you know I was considered a dangerous radical in my youth?" Silverlake asked him. Zorian didn’t and told her so. "Oh yes. When I was born, the covens had already been on their last legs – Ikosian magic had shown itself to be mostly superior to our own spellcasting traditions. After all, most of our spells are long rituals involving lots of chanting and standing still for hours on end, or relied upon invoking the spirits of the land – who are notoriously fickle things if you ask me, you can never rely on them to aid you when you need them the most. The one thing we had going for us – our potion making – the Ikosians simply copied and then improved upon. I saw all this, and I decided to commit a huge heresy – I decided to study Ikosian methods in addition to traditional education I received from my mother. My coven exiled me for it when they found out."

"Tragic," Zorian said. "But that wasn’t quite what I was looking for. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t really be surprised if I revealed I knew this little tidbit of your past."

"No, of course not," Silverlake said. "I’m sure you could find out that and more if you really decided to investigate my history. If you came to me and started narrating my past, I’d just think you did your homework before coming to see me."

"Right," Zorian nodded. "So I’d really prefer if you gave me something more substantial. Surely you have some kind of private password that you could easily tell me without truly inconveniencing yourself. You can change it immediately after you tell me, so it’s not like there is any danger I’ll abuse it."

"Not during this month, no," Silverlake scoffed. "But what if you’re right? I have no assurance you’ll only use such a secret to convince my future self of your crazy tale – you could use it just as easily to rob her blind!"

"But you don’t believe in the time loop?" Zorian tried.

"If I’m going to entertain a stupid hypothetical, I’m not going to do a half-assed job," Silverlake said, her tone brooking no argument. "But… hmm. I think I have it. Do you remember how you came in front of my home and made all that racket to draw my attention?"

"Of course," Zorian nodded. "It’s one of the best moments of this month."

Silverlake took a sudden swipe at him with her bony, withered hand, but Zorian successfully dodged her strike.

"Brat. I should refuse to say anything now, but I don’t want you pestering me about this further," Silverlake grumbled. "Anyway, at some point I actually considered the possibility of someone finding my abode and trying to catch my attention. I was thinking of what would be the proper, polite way of doing that, and I realized I would probably have to install some kind of doorbell or something. And that would be kind of incompatible with the whole hidden nature of this place, no?"

"Right," Zorian agreed. "So the doorbell would have to be hidden too, accessible only to people who have been told about it in advance."

"Exactly!" Silverlake said. "Now, in the end, I just scrapped the whole idea. I didn’t want people visiting the place too casually. However, I did implement part of the system before I gave up. There is a stone in this place that emits shrill whistles when a special keystone is activated right outside the entrance to this dimension. These keystones were never actually made, so the whistle stone just sits there, uselessly gathering dust. I guess there is no harm in showing you how to create a matching keystone…"

"And that would convince you there’s something funny going on?" Zorian asked.

"Well yes, I guess it would," Silverlake said. "I mean, I never actually made a single keystone, let alone distributed them to people. How could you possibly create one that matches perfectly with the whistle stone in my dimension? If you showed up holding one of those, that would catch my attention for sure."

Zorian grinned. He had a feeling their chances of convincing Silverlake in the future had just dramatically improved…

One of the more unexpected things about this restart was that Daimen had made a surprise decision to stay in Cyoria for the last few days of the restart. Zorian was not sure what exactly triggered this decision. Perhaps it was because Zorian had asked to borrow his divine artifice mirror for a little research or because his eldest brother had joined them in exploring the ruined palace inside the orb this time, but he suddenly decided he absolutely must see the invasion that occurs on the night of the summer festival.

Zorian thought nothing of it at first. Even when Daimen came to Cyoria a few days before the actual day of the invasion, making a mysterious claim that he had something he needed to do, Zorian just dismissed it as him wanting to talk with his old friends or whatever. Then Daimen came to him for help and Zorian realized he probably should have inquired deeper into what Daimen was doing while back home in Eldemar.

"No, Daimen," Zorian told him firmly. "I am not going to set up a meeting between you and Fortov."

"Come on, Zorian, this is our family at stake here," Daimen pleaded.

"Oh please," Zorian protested. "You and Fortov not getting along with each other is not a crisis. That’s par for the course in our family. Stop being so melodramatic."

"Crisis or no, this time loop is perfect for solving things like this, and it will take so little effort, too! Show some compassion for your big brother and do me a favor, eh?" Daimen insisted. "Haven’t I let you borrow my mirror when you asked, despite my better judgment? And let’s not forget about that secret room full of treasure that I found in the ruined palace – it would have taken you months to find that without me, if you ever did."

Zorian made a sour face. Yes, Daimen was rather more helpful in this restart than he usually was. That secret room in particular… they were still sorting through the contents, but it would seem there were some very nice things hidden there. One of the daggers appeared to be a genuine divine artifact! They had no idea what it did yet, but even if it turned out to be underwhelming, it would be extremely valuable as a research subject and priceless trade good.

"Look," Zorian said. "Using me as a lure so you can basically ambush Fortov out there in the open really doesn’t sit well with me. Don’t you think that’s kind of a jerk thing to do?"

"I thought you hated Fortov?" Daimen challenged, raising his eyebrow at him.

"I don’t like him, but this sort of manipulative maneuver doesn’t sit well with me," Zorian said. "Just go confront him directly, okay? I’m sure he’ll relent if you keep pestering him."

"No, he won’t," Daimen said slowly. "Do you think I’d suggest this if that worked? Besides, you’re looking at this the wrong way. You don’t have to trick him or anything. You said he always seeks you out at the end of the restart, so long as you don’t avoid him. Something about the cure for the purple creeper rash, yes?"

"Yes," Zorian reluctantly admitted. "So you want me to just go somewhere where he can easily reach and wait for him to show up on his own?"

"Yes," Daimen nodded. "Since you haven’t asked him to meet with you, he has no right to complain when it turns out I was in the vicinity."

"Well… alright," Zorian sighed. "Though if you have been pestering him these past few days, he might decide to deviate from his usual pattern. It’s amazing as it is that he always ends up pushing Ibery into that purple creeper patch. That has got to be a deliberate move on his part…"

"Mm," Daimen agreed. "I should ask about that too, I guess."

The final plan was very simple. Zorian would spend the evening walking around the city, occasionally casting divinations to see if Fortov was approaching. If he was, he would quickly seek shelter in one of the many coffee shops scattered around Cyoria, under the theory that Fortov was slightly less likely to start yelling at Daimen in the middle of a crowded coffee shop than in the middle of the street or whatever. Once Fortov sat down, Daimen would show up to crash the event.

Daimen’s little plot worked perfectly. Fortov did show up, looking for Zorian’s help in procuring an anti-rash potion. Zorian had already made the necessary salve before coming here, so he just handed the little jar full of salve to Fortov and sat back to finish the cup of tea he ordered.

Fortov looked down at the cure jar in his hand, fingering it awkwardly, and frowned at him.

"You just… happened to have that very specific cure lying around in your pocket?" Fortov asked Zorian incredulously. "What the hell, Zorian? Do you carry a whole apothecary with you at all times or something?"

Well, the way his pocket dimension creation skills were advancing, that might actually be a possibility in the future.

"I knew you’d be looking for that," Zorian said. "I spoke to Ibery, after all."

Fortov’s face twisted in surprise.

"She spoke to you!?" he asked, shocked. "Oh man… why me? Look, I… thank you for this, but–"

"You pushed her into that purple creeper patch deliberately, didn’t you," Zorian said, not really asking so much as making an observation.

"It’s not that simple, okay?" Fortov said defensively. "You don’t know what she’s like. I know she looks quiet and all, but she was being really aggressive and wouldn’t take no for an answer and she kept trying to kiss me and… I guess I went a little overboard."

"And a purple creeper patch just happened to be nearby?" Zorian asked. Fortov’s explanation was great and all, but how did that explain Ibery ending up in in that bush every single time?

"I deliberately took the purple creeper related task when they were distributing class assignments, because people usually avoid them like a plague. But that didn’t deter her this time. I guess in retrospect it would have been smarter to take something where lots of other people would be nearby. At least that would stop her from trying to get physical with me…"

Zorian was going to inquire more about this, but this was the moment that Daimen finally showed up to crash the meeting. Strange… he actually kind of wished Daimen had taken longer to arrive. The story was just getting interesting…

"You again!" Fortov hissed, giving Daimen an angry glare. "Why can’t you take the hint!? And how the hell are you even here? I thought you were supposed to be in Koth!"

"Please, I just wanted to talk, okay? Why are you being so…"

Zorian leaned back in his chair, taking another sip of his tea, and mentally toned down the volume of the shouting going around him. So much for the idea that Fortov would hold back because they were in a public location. But it didn’t matter because this was Daimen’s stage now and there was no need for him to get involved.

Well, there wasn’t any need for it until both of them decided to pull him into their argument just because he was there. And because his smug attitude pissed them off, apparently.

Sometimes he just couldn’t win.

76. Critical Blunder

The evening was a pleasant one, with cool winds blowing through the streets of Cyoria and the moon shining brightly in the sky. Zorian took it all in, feeling somewhat invigorated by the evening chill, and thought about life. It was interesting, Zorian mused, that even after all these years spent in the time loop, some simple experiences had eluded him until now.

Getting thrown out of a coffee shop for disturbing the other customers, for instance, was an entirely novel experience.

He glanced to the side, where Daimen and Fortov were currently having a tense face-off, staring at each other with serious expressions. He wasn’t even angry, in all honesty. Yes, being ejected out of the building was mildly embarrassing, but it didn’t bother him all that much. What did bother him was that even after causing such a commotion, they still failed to even establish what the problem was. Honestly, these two…

"Fortov, look…" Zorian began cautiously, "I understand you being mad at Daimen but you’re only shooting yourself in the foot here. The reason Daimen sought you out is because he wants to know why you’re angry with him. If you want to get rid of him, just tell him what your problem with him is and he’ll go away. Well, probably."

"Don’t you start," Fortov said, giving him a suspicious frown. "You helped him set this up, didn’t you?"

"I didn’t ask you to seek me out," Zorian pointed out calmly. "You decided that on your own. And nobody forced you to stay around and argue with Daimen, either. You already have the salve you came for, no? You could have just picked yourself up and left the moment Daimen showed up. That’s what I’d have done in your place. The fact that you stayed around means you do want Daimen to know why you’re angry after all."

For a second, Fortov just stared at him, a stony expression on his face. It was a somewhat alien look on the normally amiable Fortov.

"I so want to punch you in the face right now, you smug asshole," Fortov eventually said. "But I suppose there is something to that logic, so I’ll restrain myself."

"Finally," Daimen mumbled, just loud enough for both of them to hear him. "All this dancing around and refusing to say what’s bothering you, I almost thought you had turned into a woman while I wasn’t looking."

Fortov glared furiously at him, to which Daimen reacted only by rolling his eyes. Thankfully, the shouting didn’t start up again. It seemed that Fortov had gotten his anger out of his system a bit.

"Right, now, just before the nice waitress asked us to leave the premises, I believe you were saying something about your problems with the academy being Daimen’s fault?" Zorian prompted. It was in his best interest to help Daimen get his answer now, or else the man would no doubt make more annoying plots like this one in upcoming restarts.

"Which is ridiculous," Daimen butted in. "We barely even interacted with each other by the time Fortov started attending the Academy in Cyoria."

"Yes!" Fortov said, pointing his index finger at Daimen with a stabbing motion. Then he repeated the gesture for emphasis. "Yes, that’s exactly my problem! We barely interacted at all!"

"What?" Daimen asked uncomprehendingly.

"You don’t even know what I’m talking about," Fortov said, more as a statement of fact than a question. "I think that’s what pisses me off the most about this. You don’t even remember! You’ve completely forgotten all about your promise!"

"Wha- What promise?" Daimen fumbled.

"You were supposed to help me!" Fortov burst out, pointing at Daimen again and then hitting himself in the chest with a closed fist to indicate himself. "Remember? I came to you before enrolling here and asked you if I could count on you to support me when I run into troubles at the Academy, and you said yes … you said I could always come to you for help if I needed it and that it’s no issue, no issue at all…"

Daimen visibly winced at those words.

"Oh," he said weakly. " That."

"Yes, that," Fortov said sullenly. "I was such a fool to actually trust you on that. What good is a promise like that when you’re always busy with something, always unreachable and brushing me off when you’re not? You probably forgot about that promise the moment you made it… if you ever took it seriously at all."

"I made that promise in good faith," Daimen protested. "It’s just that I had some professional opportunities come up afterwards that were too good to let go. Don’t you think it’s kind of unreasonable of you to expect me to sabotage my career just to help you with schoolwork? I mean, you could have always just asked Zorian for help instead and…"

Both Fortov and Zorian gave him a glare for that. Daimen considered his words for a moment and then mumbled something that was either a quick prayer to the gods or a colorful curse before dropping the idea and moving on.

"Anyway, moving on," Daimen said, coughing into his fist. "I guess I kind of did fail you there. I do admit that. However, to say that makes me responsible for your academy problems, that’s still rubbish. Let’s be honest here Fortov… me helping you out every once in a while wouldn’t have made much of a difference in the grand scheme of things."

"It wasn’t supposed to be every once in a while, you jerk…" Fortov protested.

Zorian stood off to the side, shaking his head as the two continued to argue. As minutes ticked by, it became obvious that this promise thing meant completely different things to Fortov than it did to Daimen. Fortov, it turned out, had understood Daimen’s promise as a commitment to a much heavier form of support. Though Fortov did not phrase things that way, Zorian understood his middle brother’s explanations for what they were: an admission that he expected to be carried along throughout his entire education on Daimen’s coattails. Daimen, on the other hand, probably made that promise without much thought put into it, thinking it a mere formality. He evidently expected that Fortov would come seek him out once every few months to ask a question or two and talk about girls and life and stuff.

Amusingly enough, he ended up not even getting that in the end…

"Can’t you see you’re being completely unreasonable?" Daimen said, gesticulating wildly. "Do you even hear what you’re saying? You basically expected me to do half of your work for you. That’s completely ridiculous!"

"He’s right, it is," added Zorian, nodding sagely.

"I was just describing an ideal case, I would have been happy with even a fraction of it," Fortov shot back. "And it doesn’t matter because in the end I got nothing at all! You gave me a promise and then you forgot you’d ever made it. That’s a jerk thing to do, no matter how you try to spin it."

"He’s right, it is," added Zorian, nodding sagely.

"Shut up, Zorian!" they both said in perfect synchronization.

Zorian pretended to stagger back from the outburst and mimicked clamping his mouth shut.

As for Daimen and Fortov, the two of them shared an uncertain look between each other before quietly deciding to calm down a little and take a step back. Zorian would have liked to claim that this was his plan all along, but truthfully he was just messing with them for his own amusement.

"But seriously, you’re being kind of crazy here," Daimen said to Fortov again, a little more sedately this time. "I get that you’re having problems with your studies, but–"

"Man, you just don’t understand," Fortov complained, cutting him off. "This city, this academy… it’s out of my league. I know this. I’ve always known this. I know my limits. I’m not as smart as you and Zorian…"

"You’re plenty smart, Fortov," Zorian cut in. "You’re just lazy."

Fortov didn’t even try to refute him, but Daimen gave him a sidelong glance.

"I thought you were going to keep quiet?" Daimen asked.

"I lied," Zorian said with a careless shrug.

"Whatever," Fortov said, exhaling heavily. "I’m not as good as you two. Happy now?" Zorian made a circular motion with his hand, signaling him to keep going. "Anyway, my point was that I only agreed to enroll here because Daimen said he would support me. If I had known I would have to do this alone, I would have told Mother and Father to enroll me somewhere else. Somewhere less… prestigious. But they pushed hard for this, saying what an opportunity this is and I thought… well, at least I’ll have my genius older brother there to help me sort things out…"

Zorian didn’t say anything after that, quietly waiting by the side and letting the two of them talk. He didn’t feel much compassion for Fortov’s plight. Daimen may have a cause for feeling a little guilty about how things turned out, but all Zorian saw was the same old Fortov he’d known from his childhood – a lazy, shallow asshole constantly looking for ways to shift his own responsibilities onto people around him. He was darkly amused when the two of them eventually decided to just take a step back and have another meeting in a week or so… something that would never happen, and Daimen damn well knew so.

Oh well, it wasn’t really Zorian’s problem. That is, until Fortov left the scene and Daimen tried to make it his problem…

"No, Daimen, I am not going to delve into the hows and whys of Fortov’s failures and assemble a tutoring program for him," Zorian bluntly told him.

"Why not? You do for Kirielle and even that female friend of yours," Daimen said. "He’s your brother, Zorian."

"Sorry, but you can’t guilt-trip me into doing this. Mother’s antics have made me completely immune to guilt-trips," Zorian said dispassionately. "I am sick and tired of having to pick up after Fortov’s failures time and time again. How about you do it for once in your life? You’re the one who made a promise that you failed to keep, no? Don’t you think it’s in poor taste to try fobbing this off on me so quickly after your little heart-to-heart with Fortov?"

"The restart is just about to end, when else am I going to talk to you about this if not now?" Daimen protested. "And I don’t retain memories over the restarts like you do, that’s why I can’t do it."

"But you can leave yourself notes at the end of each restart and work on the problem that way," Zorian countered. "You are doing that very thing in order to figure out how to get Mother and Father to accept your marriage to Orissa, so I don’t see why you can’t apply it here too."

Daimen frowned, either because he did not like the idea or because he was reminded of how utterly he had failed in his task of convincing them thus far.

"He’s your brother, Daimen," Zorian said, flinging his words back at him.

"Ugh," Daimen grumbled. "You can be such a little shit sometimes… Fine, you win. I guess it has to be me. But I’ll need you to do me a small favor…"

One restart ended and a new one began. At the start of the new restart, Zach and Zorian immediately invaded Jornak’s home, knocking him out, kidnapping him and searching his home. They found Veyers dead in the guest room, just like Jornak’s story in the previous restart suggested they would. Using his brand new soul perception and a couple of soul magic forensic spells he had stolen from Sudomir’s mind (unsurprisingly, necromancers had a very developed tradition of analytic spells meant to be used on corpses), Zorian determined that Veyers was in a virtually identical situation as the soul-killed aranea beneath Cyoria.

Normally, when one’s soul was ripped out of their body, there would be subtle signs left etched into the flesh of the deceased, and these could be used to infer the method of extraction used. Neither the aranea nor Veyers showed such traces, though – it was as if they were merely flesh puppets that had never held any life to begin with.

They had expected such a result, but it was nice to have things confirmed so clearly.

After examining Veyers' body, they moved on to Jornak. Zorian had expected the young lawyer to be absolutely livid at them, but the way they just barged into his home and brutally subdued him must have clued him in to the fact they weren’t here on behalf of regular law enforcement. Or maybe it was their age – Zorian sometimes forgot to account for that little detail, as he felt pretty old these days, but he and Zach still looked like teenagers. Jornak was thus a lot more subdued this time around, too terrified about what they wanted to do with him to put up much of a resistance. Sadly, interrogating him with the aid of truth potions and mind magic yielded very little of note. Everything was mostly as Jornak had said in the previous restart, except that Veyers was also something of an informant for the young lawyer in addition to being a friend – he basically reported anything interesting that occurred in his House to Jornak, who then forwarded the information to the Cult of the Dragon Below. Thus, Veyers was something of an unwitting low-level spy for the Cult.

Finally, Zach and Zorian sat down one day to discuss their findings and what they meant regarding the identity of Red Robe.

"So," Zach began, "we’ve confirmed that Veyers is either Red Robe or connected to him in some fashion. His body is clearly just a meat puppet that never held a soul to begin with, just like the bodies of your aranean friends beneath the city. Either he was somehow connected to Red Robe and the man decided to use soulkill on him, or he is Red Robe and this is what happens to a controller’s body when they leave the time loop. Is that about right?"

"It is," Zorian confirmed. "Additionally, the fact Red Robe saw fit to delete your memories of Veyers reinforces his importance. We haven’t been able to find anyone else whose entire presence had been scoured from your mind, so whatever link he has to Red Robe isn’t small."

"He also has a reason to be bitter at the city and a link to the Invasion, however tenuous," Zach added. "Yeah, he could totally be Red Robe. Even his height and build matches what I remember of him when he attacked me at the start of that one restart…"

"Sadly, that is not real proof of anything," Zorian said, shaking his head. "At the level of skill we are working at, that sort of thing is trivially easy to fake. All it takes is a quick transformation spell and you could radically change your height and build."

"Well, he did attack me at the very start of the restart when he was undoubtedly in a hurry and didn’t have much time to make detailed preparations. Maybe it slipped his mind? You have a better memory than I do and you saw him up close… how does the Red Robe in your mind compare to Veyers?"

Zorian considered it carefully. After a while he decided that Zach was right – Veyers did have the appropriate height and build to be the Red Robe in his memories.

"It is as you say," Zorian said slowly. "He does kind of fit under that robe. But really, in order to get to the bottom of this, we need to find out what happens when a controller leaves the time loop. This should tell us whether Veyers is just a soulkilled victim or the very mastermind we are looking for."

"And how are we supposed to do that?" Zach complained. "That stupid Guardian of the Threshold thing refuses to entertain hypotheticals like that. We already asked it what happens in this scenario, remember? It simply insisted that no such thing could transpire. Besides, we still don’t know what method Red Robe used to leave. If he’s a later addition to the time loop like you assume he is, he couldn’t have used the normal method to do so. He would have run into the problem of his original already having a soul, which should have led to the Guardian refusing to cooperate. Depending on what method Red Robe used to leave the time loop, the answer to the question of what would happen to his body might radically change…"

"Not necessarily," Zorian said. "One thing that always stuck with me about Red Robe is that he honestly seemed concerned about the possibility of there being a large number of other time travelers involved in the time loop. That means that he knew of a very easy and reliable way of inducing people in the time loop and thought it was entirely plausible that someone was using it on a mass scale."

"He did seem quite certain that there were a lot of other time travelers lurking around," Zach said, frowning. "My memory of that time is not the best, but that did appear to be the main thing he sought answers about when he probed my mind that night…"

"Right," Zorian said. "And this method couldn’t have been the same as what I went through, because what happened to me is highly dangerous to the marker donor and probably doesn’t give consistent results. It also couldn’t have been something that is hard to set up, or else Red Robe wouldn’t have accepted it happening so readily and on such a large scale…"

"So what is it then?" Zach asked impatiently. "I’m guessing you have some sort of answer, or else you wouldn’t be mentioning it. Don’t try to re-enact those cheap detective novels with me, please. I always found the long reveals in those books to be really annoying…"

"Fine, I’ll be blunt," Zorian sighed. Killjoy. "I think Red Robe was simply using a modified temporary marker to persist in the time loop. Sure, they’re supposed to last only six months, but that’s probably just an extra restriction rather than something inherent in the marker itself. And my own marker demonstrates quite clearly that these markers can be damaged. Perhaps selectively damaged, allowing people to remove some of the functions."

"There have to be some protections against that," Zach frowned. "I doubt that the makers of the system would just allow people to tinker with their work like that."

"Possibly," Zorian conceded. "Not having seen any temporary marker yet, I can offer little except baseless speculation. But still, this seems to me like the most likely and straightforward way for Red Robe to enter the time loop."

Zach considered his words for a while before giving it a careless shrug and focusing his attention back to Zorian.

"Well… alright," Zach shrugged. "Let’s assume you’re right. So what? How does that relate to what we were talking about?"

"Well, the temporary markers are supposed to be temporary," Zorian said. "There is probably a clear course of action meant to be done when they run out and the person they were supporting… disappears. And this course of action will probably be performed even if the person disappears prematurely through some other method."

"Oh!" Zach said, slapping himself in the forehead. "Of course! So if Red Robe entered the time loop through a selectively damaged temporary marker, all we have to do to find out what would happen after he leaves… is place a temporary marker on someone and see what happens after it runs out."

"Exactly," Zorian nodded.

A brief silence descended on the scene.

"You know," Zach began after a while, "I’m pretty sure we already know the answer to that question. It probably just recreates a person from its usual template, as if they were never a temporary looper to begin with. I have no proof of this, but it intuitively makes sense to me."

"You are probably correct," Zorian nodded. "I also have no proof, but it is consistent with the intent of the time loop as the training simulation to set things up in that fashion."

"Which would mean that Veyers isn’t Red Robe," Zach continued with that line of thought. "Red Robe should have ended up as a normal person with no memory of his time looping self, not a soulless corpse."

"If he really did enter the time loop via a modified temporary marker, that is probably the case," Zorian nodded.

"Hmm," Zach hummed thoughtfully, tapping his fingers against his chin. "So let’s assume for a moment that Veyers is just a broken link. I still think he’s the most likely candidate for Red Robe, but whatever – your theory does sound rather plausible. Who is Veyers linked to? Jornak? Is he Red Robe?"

"He could be, I guess," Zorian said uncertainly. "I mean, I see no real evidence for that, and the man is not very impressive…"

"We weren’t very impressive before the time loop happened to us, either," Zach pointed out.

"True," Zorian said. "I’m not saying it’s impossible for Jornak to be Red Robe, just that I see no real evidence for the idea."

"Did Veyers have any other friends and associates other than Jornak?" Zach asked.

"I think he did, but Jornak did not know who these people were," Zorian said. "Veyers didn’t like to talk about his personal life and Jornak didn’t pry into it too much. The fact that Veyers chose to take shelter in Jornak’s place might be artificially skewing our perception of how close they were – they weren’t really that close. Jornak was actually quite surprised when Veyers came knocking on his door with a plea to let him stay for a while, and even contemplated refusing."

They discussed things for another hour or so before deciding to shelve the discussion for now. They would be interrogating Jornak in more detail in upcoming days, which would hopefully shed more light on the issue. They also intended to use pieces of Veyers' body as divination tools to try and track his movement while he was alive. They would have to do this very, very carefully though, lest they get tracked down themselves by the Boranova House investigators.

Eventually the two of them retired into one of the quieter, less frequented taverns on the outskirts of the city and sat down to have a drink and talk about less serious topics. The waitress gave Zorian a really weird look when he ordered fruit juice instead of anything alcoholic and Zach mocked him for it, but Zorian wasn’t really bothered about that. Instead he decided to make use of this opportunity to complain about the family drama that Daimen forced him to participate in near the end of the previous restart.

"Oh man, your family is such a train wreck," Zach laughed. "It’s not even funny, except it kind of is. Though I have to admit, I kind of get the urge to defend Fortov when you explain his situation like that. I mean, I understand why you feel the way you do, but us fuck-ups needs to look out for each other, you know?"

"What do you– Oh yeah, you were kind of doing badly in the Academy yourself, weren’t you?" Zorian suddenly realized. He winced. "Sorry. I wasn’t thinking."

"No, it’s fine," Zach said, shaking his head. "I’m not insulted. Much like Fortov, I too had excuses for my poor performance. But I understand now that they were just that: excuses. Perhaps Fortov will eventually learn his lesson as well, eh?"

"Perhaps," Zorian agreed diplomatically.

Zach responded by taking a deep sip out of his beer keg and then leaned back in his chair in contentment.

"You know, every time I think about what my future would have been like if I never got pulled into this time loop thing, I get both furious and horrified," Zach said, staring at the ceiling of the tavern with unfocused eyes. "It’s been so long but I remember what it was like so very vividly… How I lived in an empty, half-abandoned house, constantly hearing about how I was expected to rebuild my entire House from scratch and feeling utterly lost as to how I can accomplish it. How I eventually decided it was a hopeless task and began to coast by on the least amount of effort I could get away with and just tried to keep myself happy. But hey, it was fine! I had plenty of money! I mean, that was why Tesen fired all the servants and sold off all our properties, right? So it doesn’t matter if I don’t do too well at the academy and have no real professional skills. Everything will work out… just… fine!"

Zach suddenly finished off his beer keg and then slammed it violently onto the cheap wooden table. The tavern workers all turned towards them, and for a moment Zorian thought he would be thrown out of a building for the second time in two restarts, but in the end they just shook their heads slightly and went about their work. Evidently this was not a rare occurrence around here.

"I’m getting angry again," Zach explained unnecessarily. "I shouldn’t be talking about this while drinking."

Zorian scratched his cheek awkwardly, not sure how to respond to that. He was really regretting starting the topic about Fortov now…

"You know what the problem with teaming up with you is?" Zach asked him suddenly, staring intently into his eyes. He didn’t wait for his answer. "I can’t start a restart by beating Tesen into a bloody pulp anymore. I used to do that every once in a while to work out my frustrations."

Zorian remembered that. It used to occur quite frequently, leading up to a lot of speculation about Zach and his reasons for doing that…

"It’s probably for the best you stopped doing that," Zorian told him. "You might develop unhealthy habits and end up becoming a fugitive for no good reason once we’re out of the time loop. That would be a pretty sad way for all this to end, no?"

"I guess," Zach said. "But it was so satisfying…"

Zach eyed his keg for a couple of seconds, as if considering if he should get himself another, before sighing and pushing it to the side. Good. He’d rather not deal with a drunk Zach right now.

"What do you intend to do about Tesen, anyway?" Zorian asked. "When we get out of the time loop, I mean."

"What else? I’m going to sue him into oblivion," Zach said. "He may be powerful and well connected, but I still have some friends in high places and he was pretty brazen in his actions. He broke the law when he robbed me of my inheritance and I’ll do my best to make him pay for it through official channels. If that doesn’t work… well, I hope it doesn’t get to that."

"I see," Zorian said. "I didn’t see you do any research on the topic thus far…"

"I’ve already done all the preparations a long time ago," Zach said. "I have all the evidence I need, I know how to blindside him when putting things into motion and I can afford to hire the best damn lawyers in the country to represent me. There is nothing more that can be done within the confines of the restart. These kind of legal cases take years of legal wrangling, not weeks. Still, a strong start does count for a lot and all the lawyers I spoke with tell me I have a good chance of winning."

"That’s good," Zorian nodded slowly. "Though I have a suspicion Tesen and his faction won’t limit themselves to mere legal wrangling in their attempts to deal with you."

"I know," Zach grinned. "But you know me. I don’t shy away from danger. Let them come. It will just give me a stronger case when it turns up what they’ve been up to."

"Anything I can do to help?" Zorian asked.

"Probably not, actually," Zach said, shaking his head. "This is mostly a job for lawyers, not for the likes of us. Once I put things into motion, I just need to keep the money flowing and ward off any assassination attempts and the like. But we’ll see. Rest assured I will not be too shy to ask for help from my fellow time traveler."

The conversation wound down after that, and they each went their separate ways for the day. The upcoming days were going to be somewhat busy ones, involving a great deal of preparations and planning.

It was time to visit Silverlake again… and this time they planned to seriously try and convince her that the time loop is real.

When Zach and Zorian showed at Silverlake’s hidden base, they came carrying the grey hunter’s egg sack and the ancient giant salamander that Silverlake was looking for. The eggs were acquired in the exact same way they had been in the previous restart. As for the salamander, they just went to the same place Zorian had found it in the past and then started their search from there. Eventually, after two whole days of searching up and down the river and examining nearby hiding places, they found the giant salamander buried in the mud of one of the flooded caverns, almost undetectable if one didn’t know what to look for. Without an appropriate starting point, it would have taken them forever to track it down.

But no matter, the point was that they had both of the ingredients that Silverlake wanted so badly for her youth potion, and Zorian had created the keystone that Silverlake had shown him how to make in the previous restart. They also loaded up a bunch of combat golems into the portable palace orb, ready to be taken out at a moment’s notice, just in case Silverlake reacted badly to their approach… something that was entirely possible, but unavoidable. They didn’t have the time to take things slowly anymore.

"I’m ready," Zach said, twirling a combat staff in his fingers to pass the time. "Go ahead and ring the bell."

Zorian nodded and activated the keystone in his hands. Nothing visible happened, but Zorian was sure he had performed the action correctly. Now they could only wait.

They had to wait a surprisingly long time, longer than they had to the last time they had come here. Zorian suspected this was because Silverlake was studying them from inside before deciding to come out, and this time they had come more heavily armed and visibly dangerous. Eventually, however, she decided to greet them anyway. The fact that Zach had gotten bored at some point and started building a giant statue of himself via alteration spells right outside her home might have motivated her to hurry up.

"How the hell did you activate that old piece of junk?" She immediately demanded, squinting at each of them suspiciously. "I never gave anyone a matching keystone. Hell, I never even made any matching keystones. Suspicious. Very, very suspicious. Who are you two?"

"To answer your last question, I am Zach Noveda and this is Zorian Kazinski. We are but humble academy students coming here to pay our respects to a living legend," Zach flattered shamelessly. Silverlake snorted derisively at him, saying nothing. "And also to arrange for a trade, I guess. Or should I say… re-negotiate our existing one? After all, this is the second time we’re meeting like this."

"I don’t think so?" Silverlake said curiously. "I don’t remember you. I may be old, but I’m pretty sure I’d never forget a couple of brats as brazen as you two. I mean, I kind of like that kind of attitude, but only when it’s directed at other people…"

"That’s just because your memory of our meeting has been wiped clean from your mind," Zorian said in a carefree manner. "Nothing to worry about. Anyway, here is a gift."

Zorian reached into his backpack and withdrew a bottle of brandy and a box of sweets from it, which he then handed to a surprised Silverlake. She made no move to claim them, looking at both objects like they were poisonous vipers.

"A gift?" she asked emotionlessly.

"It is customary to bring gifts when visiting someone," Zorian said sagely. "It’s an important tradition."

Silverlake made a sour face at that explanation. She spent a few more seconds scrutinizing the two objects before finally deciding they were probably harmless. She took them both from his hands and immediately stuffed them into one of her jacket pockets. Even though the heavy bottle and the large box of sweets shouldn’t have possibly been able to fit into that tiny jacket pocket, they somehow did.

What a casual use of pocket dimension creation… Zorian couldn’t help but feel a little jealous. He wouldn’t be able to duplicate that feat, and in fact didn’t even know how to go about achieving it. He could only extend the space of rigid containers right now, and had no idea how to use something as flexible as a pocket as a base for a pocket dimension. He knew it was unreasonable to expect to be as good as Silverlake after only a month of instruction, but this was a pretty stark reminder of how far he had to go to match the old witch’s expertise in that regard.

Silverlake grinned at him in triumph, savoring this little victory for all it was worth.

"Let’s back up a bit, shall we?" she asked, a little more confident this time. "You said something about my memory being wiped?"

"Yes," Zach nodded. "You see, about a month ago we came to you with a certain offer…"

And Zach started giving Silverlake the summarized version of what happened in the previous restart, though they took pains to temporarily omit any mention of the time loop itself. They figured it would immediately make Silverlake disbelieve anything else they had to say if they started with that. Instead they just narrated the general terms of their deal and the way she had instructed them in the art of pocket dimension creation and occasionally sent them on random errands.

And they used plenty of props in their explanation. When they spoke of how they offered the previous version of Silverlake grey hunter’s eggs, they took the eggs they obtained in this restart out of the portable palace orb and showed them to her. When they spoke of how Silverlake told them she also needed an ancient giant salamander to complete her youth potion, they took out the living salamander they captured and showed it off as well.

Silverlake’s eyes shone brightly when she saw the two alchemical ingredients she wanted the most laid out in front of her, but she remained silent and motionless as she listened to their story in a rapt manner.

When it came time to move the story into Silverlake’s home dimension, though, her expression fell and turned grave. This was because Zorian started using illusionary scenes from his memory to illustrate his points. Normally these kinds of illusory images weren’t worth much as a proof. After all, nothing stopped the illusionist from fabricating things, and people’s memories tended to be kind of fuzzy in even the best of cases. However, Zorian had the ability to remember a scene down to the tiniest detail and it wasn’t like one could randomly invent a detailed layout of Silverlake’s dimension and be correct. He could replicate the image of her favorite cauldron down to the tiniest scratch and replicate the exact number of dried onions and mushrooms hanging from the hooks on her wall. It was a pretty damning proof that he had at least been there at some point, even if he wasn’t telling the truth about anything else, and Silverlake clearly knew it.

"Stop, stop," she suddenly told him, waving her hand in a forceful manner. She looked honestly shaken at the sight of these images. "I… I need to check something."

Zach and Zorian stood by the side while Silverlake started casting one diagnostic spell after another on herself. Occasionally she would stop and mutter to herself in some alien Khusky tongue that neither Zach nor Zorian had ever encountered, before shaking her head and continuing with her self-diagnostics.

After that she started examining the entrance to her dimension before wordlessly disappearing inside. Zach and Zorian still waited patiently, not saying anything. She returned twenty minutes later, looking more disturbed than ever.

"It doesn’t make sense," she loudly proclaimed. " None of this makes sense. My memory is fine. It hasn’t been tampered with. I know it hasn’t, because there are always, always traces left when one does so and my mind doesn’t have any. But you’ve clearly been inside my home long enough to dig up that old stone and puzzle out a matching keystone for it, long enough to memorize every corner of it down to the smallest detail. Except there is no trace of illegal entry, not even the faintest whiff of it, and there is no way in all the hells and all the heavens I’d ever forget letting someone like you inside. And your story! What a bunch of rubbish! You say you sold me grey hunter’s eggs a whole month ago, yet I see no evidence I’ve ever processed them! And now you come here with a new sack of grey hunter’s eggs, as if those can be acquired just by going into your neighborhood store or something. Who are you people and what is happening here!?"

She punctuated her statement by making a sweeping hand gesture, causing two huge, hulking humanoids of earth to suddenly coalesce out of the soil around them.

Earth elementals, and not minor ones either. However…

"Should we…?" Zach mouthed.

Zorian quietly nodded and made a sweeping gesture of his own, though his one was mostly for show, not because he actually needed to make it. Then again, maybe it was the same for Silverlake. In any case, he made use of the time needed to make the gesture to reach out into the ever-useful orb, causing a bunch of equally huge and hulking war golems to pop into existence next to them.

"We don’t want to fight," Zorian said. "But if you really insist on it, I guarantee you it won’t end in your favor."

Rather than answer him, Silverlake stomped her foot on the ground, causing a set of heavy, potent wards to radiate out of the entrance to her pocket dimensions. The warding scheme quickly enclosed the entire area, shutting down their teleportation, filling the area with fog, inhibiting their shaping skills, disturbing their souls…

Even as Silverlake was making her move, though, Zorian was doing the same. He quickly reached into his backpack again and retrieved from it a truncated pyramid made out of glittering blue stone. He threw it in front of him, and it promptly righted itself in the air and began to hover there, golden lines and glyphs suddenly appearing on its surface. In a blink of an eye, it had enclosed Zach, Zorian and their war golems under a dome of yellow light.

Silverlake’s wards crashed into the dome… and were immediately halted in their tracks. The old witch was way better than Zorian in a number of fields, but her skill at setting up wards wasn’t one of them. Not to mention that wards were always more effective as a means of defense than they were as an offensive tool.

There was a tense silence as the two sides stared at each other from behind their respective barriers. After about a minute of this, Silverlake suddenly sighed and commanded the earth elementals to merge back into the earth and the wards to retreat back into her pocket dimension. After a second of hesitation, Zach and Zorian similarly put away their own defenses.

"Well…" Silverlake said, sounding surprisingly chirpy and relaxed. She chuckled at their wary postures and serious faces. "I really suffered a loss this time, didn’t I? I guess this is what I get for trying to escalate things into combat. I was never that much of a fighter, truth be told. I don’t suppose we could all forget this ever happened, hmm?"

"Sure, let’s," Zach said, giving her a friendly grin. "It’s probably for the best if this never happens again, though. I only ever give people two chances."

"Oh?" Silverlake said, cocking her head sideways like a curious bird. "Oh, I see. Everything I’ve been met with thus far is your friend’s work, but he isn’t actually the combat specialist. You are. And you never even made a move thus far…" She shook her head, speaking to herself self-depreciatingly. "Silly old girl, making such blunders at your age… it’s just as they say: you learn all your life and still die a fool. Though there should hopefully be no dying for me just yet…"

"In any case," said Zorian, coughing into his fist to attract her attention, "I believe I have an answer for the concerns you expressed just before this… unpleasantness. You were wondering how this was all possible, yes?"

"Yes," she bluntly confirmed. "I’m very curious as to how this could happen."

"It’s like this," said Zorian, creating another illusory scene, this one depicting the planet they lived on, spinning placidly in the air. "There is an artifact from the Age of Gods that can take our entire world, take a snapshot of every single thing in existence and create a flawless copy of it in a giant pocket dimension…"

Surprisingly, after Zorian had gotten about halfway into the story, Silverlake suddenly started to ask a series of rapid-fire questions about the Sovereign Gate, the Guardian of the Threshold, the exact mechanics of the time loop itself, and so on.

"Alright, you can stop now," she eventually said, tapping her leg with her bony fingers. "I think I know what’s going on now. Well, somewhat. And if I’m right, then there is a very easy way to check if you’re telling the truth or not."

Zach and Zorian perked up at her words.

"Oh?" Zach asked excitedly.

Silverlake grinned, obviously enjoying the fact that she knew something they didn’t. Or at least thought she did – Zorian wasn’t going to get excited before he heard what she actually had to say. For all he knew, she was just trying to patch up her wounded pride.

"Tell me," she said, "have you two ever heard about the primordials?"

77. Testing

Primordials were strange, enigmatic creatures. They were supposedly first-born children of the primordial dragon from which the world was fashioned, ancient and powerful. In life, their abilities had rivaled those of the gods themselves. In death, they had spawned a multitude of lesser primordials to continue their struggle. One would think that such fearsome beings and everything related to them would be vividly remembered by history, but this was not the case. In his search for primordial prisons outside Cyoria, Zorian had consulted many church documents, historical records and elementals, largely in vain. Primordials may have been powerful and frightening in their heyday, but they had been sealed away thousands of years ago. That was a lot of time for information to be forgotten, especially since the gods had actively tried to limit knowledge of them and their prisons while they had still been active in the world. Thus, finding any substantial information on them was quite hard.

Moreover, even when such information was found, it was hard to gauge how much of it was reliable and how much of it was pure fabrication. A lot of the stories that bothered going into the details of the nature of primordials were mutually contradictory, and there was no way to test any of them to see which one was closer to the truth than the others.

"In other words, you know virtually nothing about primordials except that they exist and that one of them is imprisoned in Cyoria," Silverlake concluded after hearing their explanation.

"Yeah, pretty much," Zach confirmed. Although they were searching for the locations of other primordial prisons in their free time, that hadn’t produced much in the way of actual results. "What does this have to do about confirming the truth of our story, though?"

"Patience, boy, patience," Silverlake urged smugly. "A house must be built from the foundation up. In order to answer that question, I must first show you the truth about primordials and the way they were imprisoned…"

Oh? She could actually answer those questions? Zorian was torn between excitement and a healthy dose of caution. On one hand, this was a powerful witch that has lived through more than a century – surely she wouldn’t be making claims like that without a good reason to be confident? On the other hand… well, it was Silverlake.

After some thought, he decided to voice his concerns to the old witch in front of him.

"Ignorant brat," she complained. "Do you think I’d be joking about something this serious!?"

Zach and Zorian shared a knowing look between each other.

"Well… yeah," Zach said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

"Now that you mention it, that does sound like something I would derive dark amusement from," Silverlake mused, rubbing her chin with her hand as she stared at the tree branches above her.

"Not exactly something you should be proud of," Zorian pointed out unhappily.

"Anyway, do you want to hear what I have to say or not?" Silverlake asked loudly, abandoning her musing pose in favor of folding her hands over her chest and looking at them both defiantly.

"Sure we do," Zorian said. As annoying as the old witch was, she had some very unique skills and insights that were almost impossible to find elsewhere. "Let’s hear it."

Silverlake stayed silent for a few seconds. Before either Zach or Zorian could say anything about that, the entrance to her secret hideout flared into life again and another Silverlake stepped out of it, carrying a large brown book in her hands.

Zorian raised an eyebrow at this. Silverlake having some kind of duplicate was not that surprising. There were lots of spells that duplicated the appearance of a caster in some way, after all. Even if it was an actual simulacrum, Zorian still wouldn’t find it unusual, since Silverlake was clearly proficient in soul magic. The really interesting question was which Silverlake was the real thing: the one they’ve been talking to all this time or the one that had just walked out of her dimensional hideout?

He activated his newly-acquired soul perception and took a look.

It was not easy for Zorian to use his soul perception. Training it had been slow and frustrating thus far, though he had been told by Alanic that he was doing just fine by normal standards. He’d had the ability for less than a month, so it was to be expected that his control over it was crude and that he had trouble interpreting what it was telling him. Zorian imagined this was how non-psychics felt when they tried to train their non-structured mind magic into something usable.

Still, identifying whether something in front of him had a soul or not was well within his modest capabilities. With that in mind, he focused his soul perception on Silverlake and immediately realized that she indeed had a soul. She wasn’t an illusion, a remote-controlled puppet or a simulacrum, then. So they had actually been talking to the real Silverlake up till now; that was nice to know. Just to be thorough, he shifted his soul perception to the approaching book-carrying Silverlake and…

She had a soul too. What?

Zorian shifted his attention between one Silverlake and the other repeatedly, trying to work out what was happening here. It was no use, though – his soul perception simply wasn’t sophisticated enough to unravel this mystery and he didn’t want to start casting analytical divinations at the old witch and her weird clone. Blatantly scanning someone without their explicit permission was widely considered to be rather rude and insulting behavior.

The other Silverlake soon reached the one Zach and Zorian had been talking to and gave her the book she was carrying. The first Silverlake glanced at the book, nodded slightly and then snapped her fingers.

The other Silverlake seemingly imploded, badly startling both Zach and Zorian, her form collapsing into a smoky black ball. The ball existed for only a moment before reforming itself into a large black bird, which promptly hopped onto Silverlake’s shoulder. It was a raven, Zorian realized.

Of course! Zorian thought, slapping himself in the forehead. Silverlake had a raven familiar! The link between a mage and their familiar allowed both of them to assume the form of one another really easily, provided that the mage knew the proper spells.

And Silverlake no doubt knew the proper spells, because familiar magic was one of the things that witches were known to be really fond of. Hell, she’d even found the way to shield the raven’s mind from scrutiny, preventing Zorian from easily identifying it as a shapeshifted animal.

Zorian opened his mouth to say something but was interrupted when Silverlake tried to blow away the layer of dust on the cover of the book and ended up sending herself into a coughing fit due to all the dust suddenly flying into her face.

The raven cawed indignantly at this, flapping his wings a couple of times for emphasis.

"Shut up," Silverlake said to the raven in between her coughing and wheezing. She glanced towards Zach and Zorian. "And why are you two just standing around like that!? Come closer and take this blasted thing away already! Who do you think I brought it for? Do you think I wanted to refresh my memory or something?"

Zorian stepped closer and Silverlake immediately pushed the large leather-bound tome into his hands. He grunted softly and took a step back, caught off-guard by her sudden movement and the book’s considerable weight. Damn, this thing was heavy…

"Read this and everything will become clear," Silverlake said, finally getting her breathing under control.

Zorian eyed the heavy leather book in his hands suspiciously. The cover was brown and non-descript, with a title that proclaimed, in plain white letters, that this was a collection of cookie recipes. Flipping the random pages of the book seemed to reinforce this claim.

He glanced at Silverlake and saw that both she and the raven perched on her shoulder were eying him closely, waiting for his reaction.

With a small sigh, Zorian swiped his hand across the book and cast an appropriate dispel, shredding the illusion covering the book into pieces. Following that, he was confronted with a lot less innocuous title: Unspeakable Cults, Volume Four.

"You just can’t resist pulling these kinds of tricks all the time, can you?" Zorian asked rhetorically.

"You made a lot of tall claims today," Silverlake shrugged. "It’s only natural for me to test them every now and then in small ways. If you two are really a bunch of old time travelers like you claim to be, a simple illusion wouldn’t have posed a problem for you. Besides, I can’t exactly leave a book like this out in the open without disguising it somehow…"

"What do you mean?" Zach frowned.

" Unspeakable Cults is one of the most widely banned series of books circulating around Altazia and Xlotic," Zorian explained, idly leafing through the book. All sorts of ghastly drawings and descriptions immediately assaulted his eyes. "It was written by an anonymous author that had a penchant for infiltrating secretive cults and mage organizations so he could observe their ceremonies and activities. No one is quite sure how he did it, but considering the furor the books created, it’s clear he didn’t make it all up. Anyway, after infiltrating all these cults and watching them for gods know how long, he wrote a series of eight books that go into great detail about what he had seen. Every debauchery he had seen, every messed up sacrifice or morally-bankrupt experiment is described in great detail, and he even illustrated some scenes with drawings and diagrams. Although the books contain no actual spells or ritual setups, they have been banned almost everywhere as blasphemous, degenerate filth."

He closed the book, eying it in great distaste. He really didn’t want to read this stuff…

"I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what page I should be looking at?" Zorian asked Silverlake, staring at her pleadingly.

Silverlake just grinned at him nastily. Damn witch…

Zorian glanced towards Zach speculatively, but the boy immediately shook his head at him before he could even open his mouth.

"No, no, no," Zach said quickly, extending his arms in front of him in a warding gesture. "Sorry Zorian, but this definitely sounds like a job for you. You have a lot higher tolerance for this kind of stuff than I do."

Ugh. As much as Zorian hated to admit this, his fellow time traveler kind of had a point. Reading the minds of high-ranking cultists, Sudomir, Ibasan invaders and others had shown him enough of the dark side of humanity that he had been numbed to the horror of it all to a large extent.

He still didn’t want to wade into a book like this one, though, so he decided to get a little creative. He started casting divination after divination spell at the book, trying to divine the section of the book that Silverlake wanted him to read. This was harder than it sounded, because the book was heavily warded against divinations and did not ever mention primordials by name, but Zorian was very good at divinations by now. Especially these kinds of divinations. He’d had his simulacrums in charge of researching mountains of documentation for obscure clues for quite a while now, so a task like this was pure routine by this point.

After five minutes or so he found the section that seemed right and flipped the book open. Both Silverlake and Zach peered over his shoulder to look at the page he had picked.

"You’re no fun, boy," Silverlake said, scowling at him.

Zorian took that as an admission that he had indeed found the right page to start at and began to read.

The chapter in question described a small cult of mages, somewhere in Xlotic, which worshipped an entity imprisoned behind some kind of dimensional veil. They did this by capturing unwary travelers, implanting some sort of magical worms into their brain and then forcibly establishing contact between their mind and the mind of the imprisoned entity. Normally, mental contact with the entity resulted in quick insanity as one’s mind was overwhelmed by the flood of incomprehensible thoughts and images, but the chemicals released by the worms as they fed on the victim’s brain tissue somehow allowed them to last longer under this assault. Drugged out of their minds to keep them talking and half-insane, the victims would then spend the next couple of hours screaming, pleading, cursing and babbling gibberish while the cultists diligently wrote down their feverish ravings for later study.

After repeating this process gods know how many times, the cultists eventually assembled a fair amount of information about this entity, which the cultists called the Golden-Feathered Worm. To Zorian’s eyes, it appeared clear that this Golden-Feathered Worm was actually an imprisoned primordial, even if the book never actually identified it as such.

Because of the relatively unpleasant nature of the text, the somewhat archaic language the book was written in and the unhinged nature of the insights obtained by the cultists, it was tempting to just dismiss all of their findings as delusional gibberish. However, after re-reading the chapter a handful of times and thinking of it in some detail, he felt there was some actual insight hidden amidst the insanity. The victim’s mutterings of eyes between spaces, time that moves in braids and spirals, bones that stretched inside and outside and other such nonsense all hinted at the idea that the Golden-Feathered Worm was a very dimensionally complex being.

The path of the Golden-Feathered Worm is the path of the self as the universe, the book said. Indeed, the rest of his kind is also as such: each one a world unto itself, their flesh but a thin, porous cloak to hide the depths beneath.

That was interesting, to say the least. The book was basically saying that primordials were not really creatures in the way Zorian commonly understood it, but more like living miniature universes. He… didn’t know what to think about that. It sounded crazy, and considering where it had come from, Zorian would normally dismiss the idea without a second thought.

He handed the book to Zach, who had given up on trying to read over his shoulder a while ago, but would probably still want to see what the book had to say. Zorian couldn’t wait to see his face when he got to the lovingly illustrated description of the worm implantation procedure.

"So?" Silverlake asked, not bothering to wait for Zach to read the book too. "What do you think?"

"I presume you’re referring to the idea of primordials being living universes masquerading as flesh-and-blood beings?" Zorian asked.

"Wait, really?" Zach asked incredulously, slowly leafing through the book. He was going through it too fast so Zorian assumed he was only skimming the text instead of meticulously poring over it like Zorian had done. "How does that work?"

"Read the book and you might get your answer," Silverlake said blandly. What a lie. Zorian had read that chapter several times over and he still had no idea how that could possibly work. "But yes, that is what I was getting at."

"Great," Zach said. "But what does that-"

"I think we are living inside a primordial," Silverlake said.

There was a brief pause as they both digested this statement.

"I think you’re going to have to explain that a little," Zach said slowly, letting the book hang by his side for the moment so he can focus on her better.

"Well, provided that what you are saying is at all reliable," Silverlake said. "You are saying that this Sovereign Gate thing can copy the entire world and create its very own miniature universe to house it all. Oh, and run the whole thing at absurd temporal dilation levels. That is not the level of power you get from a divine artifact. The gods may have been able to build such things, I don’t know, but I have never heard of them handing out something on this level of power. Surely such a device would require an absolutely titanic expenditure of divine energy to produce, no? Sounds like a lot of effort just to give a mortal a new toy to play with. On the other hand, if the Sovereign Gate is just a modified, mutilated primordial… well, suddenly the whole thing becomes a lot more plausible. Turning one of their ancient enemies into an item like that and handing it down to a measly mortal to use and abuse sounds exactly like something the gods of old would do. Especially if the primordial in question had irritated them particularly badly by primordial standards…"

A long silence descended upon the scene as Zach and Zorian considered the plausibility of the story. Silverlake waited calmly for their reaction, hands clasped behind her back. She appeared to be trying to project an air of serenity and unshakable confidence with her stance and expression, but the effect was ruined by the fact she couldn’t stop herself from nervously tapping her foot against the ground as she waited.

Silverlake could be onto something, Zorian decided. It had always seemed to him that the Sovereign Gate was ridiculously powerful, even for a divine artifact, and this was as good an explanation as any as to why this was the case. He suddenly remembered the Ikosian myth of how the entire world they lived on had been fashioned by the gods out of the body of a defeated primordial dragon. He’d never taken the old myth very seriously, but maybe there was something to that story…

"You said there might be a very easy way to check if we’re telling the truth or not," Zach said cautiously. "Is this related to that? Are you saying it’s somehow possible to check whether we are inside a primordial or not?"

"Well, perhaps," Silverlake said, humming softly to herself. "You see, I have known about the primordial sealed away in Cyoria for quite a while, and have been carefully, carefully studying its prison from time to time. It was never the focus of my studies, but I reckon I know it quite well. If my speculation is correct, I should be able to notice some kind of change in the prison when I study it again. I refuse to believe that being recreated in the body of another primordial will not have a noticeable effect on it. Well, truthfully, my first instinct is to say that such an item couldn’t possibly affect beings on the level of primordials, even if they are sealed away… but from what you say about Panaxeth, I am completely wrong there, so whatever. Anyway, let’s go check!"

"Now?" Zorian asked with a raised eyebrow.

"Is there any point in waiting?" Silverlake challenged.

"I guess not," Zorian admitted. "I’m just a little surprised at your… decisiveness."

"I’ve just found out I could be trapped inside a body of primordial god-like monster that probably hates all humanity," Silverlake said, looking like he was an idiot. "Of course I want to confirm or deny this as soon as I can! Don’t you?"

"A copy trapped inside a body of a primordial god-like monster," Zorian corrected her.

"And you were preceded by countless other copies that lived out their short lives in vain, all their thoughts and accomplishments undone at the end of the month," Zach added.

"A bunch of brats, both of you," Silverlake told them. "Let’s just take a look at that primordial prison in Cyoria for now. You two know how to teleport, right?"

"We do, but there is no need for that," Zorian said. "I have a much better way for us to get there quickly."

After the three of them returned to Cyoria (via Zorian’s dimensional gate spell, of course), they immediately proceeded towards the place the primordial was imprisoned in – the massive circular abyss around which the city of Cyoria was built, known simply as the Hole.

Fortunately, accessing the Hole was not terribly hard. Although the incomprehensible amounts of mana gushing out of it were the foundation upon which the city rested, the Hole itself was not monitored very closely. The biggest concern the city had about it was that it was rather popular for people to commit suicide by throwing themselves into its depths, which meant they had to put a token patrol here and there to try and curb this behavior. These patrols were not very good and only checked the most obvious approaches to the Hole. So long as they didn’t bring too many people and avoided making a spectacle out of themselves, they could linger inside as long as they wished.

As they descended into the Hole’s depths, Zach and Zorian questioned Silverlake about her interest in primordials. Silverlake claimed it was not something she had ever been overly concerned with, it was just that she had been alive for a long time and even casual study could build up to something substantial when you keep chipping at the problem over several decades. She also claimed that, like them, she did not know of any primordial prisons other than the one in Cyoria.

Zorian wasn’t sure he believed her, to be honest. She knew Panaxeth’s prison well enough to give her confidence that she could detect changes in its dimensional boundary, but she’d only studied it casually? Zach and Zorian could only faintly detect the presence of the prison and little else, and it wasn’t like their attainments in the field of dimensionalism and divination were low. Furthermore, while their search for other sites of primordial imprisonment had yet to bear fruit, they did have no less than three promising leads already… and that was with them casually directing some efforts at the problem, rather than dropping everything to pursue the issue. He was supposed to believe that Silverlake couldn’t manage to find even one additional prison after spending gods know how many decades of interest in the topic? He had a feeling Silverlake was seriously underselling both her level of interest in this and her attainments in it. He even suspected that her incredible level of skill in the field of pocket dimension creation might come from pursuing this line of research.

He did not voice his suspicions, though. He could tell that, although Silverlake was putting forth a confident façade in front of them, the things they had said had deeply disturbed her and made her uneasy. If he was too pushy she might feel backed into a corner and lash out. Frankly, she had never struck him as the most stable of individuals to begin with.

They didn’t have to descend far into the Hole to get access to Panaxeth’s prison. Unlike the palace orb and other pocket dimensions that Zorian was familiar with, primordial prisons seemed to have larger and more complex anchors to the main reality that extended over quite a large area. In fact, considering that Zorian had once witnessed Panaxeth breaking out of his prison in the sky above Cyoria, he suspected that the anchor extended well outside the Hole itself… it was just that those parts of the anchor were too subtle for Zach and Zorian to detect them. In any case, once they had reached sufficient depth, Silverlake asked them to shut up and let her examine the prison in peace. So they did just that, sitting down on a couple of nearby rocks in silence while Silverlake did her thing.

Zorian paid close attention to the spells Silverlake was casting. Though one couldn’t learn a spell just from watching someone cast it, they could get a pretty good idea of what the spell was supposed to do if they were experienced or familiar with the relevant theory. Zorian was both, so there was a lot he could tell by watching Silverlake analyze Panaxeth’s prison. She used dozens of individual spells in her investigation, each one of them a lengthy and complex thing that seemed narrowly specialized for one specific function. Such unoptimized, hyperspecialized spells were probably something she had made herself, specifically to tackle the problem of analyzing a primordial’s prison. Furthermore, she cast these rather unwieldy spells with practiced ease, making no mistakes whatsoever, strongly suggesting she had done them often enough for it to become rote.

Casual interest, sure…

As time went by, Silverlake’s face started to frown more often and her casting became more feverish, but she remained completely silent and focused on her task. She didn’t even mutter to herself, as she was often prone to do. Finally, after more than two hours of casting, pondering and intense staring at the empty patch of air in front of her (what was that even supposed to do?), Silverlake let her arms drop to her sides, sighed and then turned towards them.

"Alright," she said. "You win. I provisionally believe your crazy story."

"Provisionally?" Zach asked curiously.

"We’re clearly in a different world than we were up until a few months ago," said Silverlake. "It does not necessarily mean your specific version of events is what is happening, but I have no better explanation at the moment. So for now, I’m accepting your story as valid."

"Just to confirm, you actually detected a noticeable difference between Panaxeth’s prison as it was a few months back and as it is now?" Zorian asked.

"I suppose you could say that," Silverlake said, a note of discomfort creeping into her voice.

"Why the glum face?" Zach asked, picking up on her mood. "Didn’t you expect to find just that?"

"I expected to either find that the prison is some kind of poor man’s knockoff of a real primordial’s prison or that it was thoroughly unchanged from how it was before and that you were trying to feed me a pack of lies," Silverlake said.

"But?" Zorian prodded.

"But it’s the same prison as it has always been… just seen from a different perspective," Silverlake said, lost in thought for a second. She scowled when she refocused back on them and saw them looking blankly at her. She clacked her tongue. "Bah! I can’t believe I have to explain myself to a bunch of amateurs like you… Well, let’s try it like this: you know how a dimensional gate looks like it’s composed out of two discrete portals but is actually just one dimensional construct with two ends? The prison in front of us is like that. I can sense the changes in it, but a closer look reveals they are clearly superficial. It’s the exact same object, just seen through a different lens. Panaxeth’s prison exists simultaneously in both the real world and… whatever the hell this place really ends up being. This Sovereign Gate of yours couldn’t duplicate primordial prison grounds, but it could make them attach themselves to this world in addition to their original one… and it’s giving me a headache. I don’t know how this could possibly work and I don’t know why someone would bother with this. Why didn’t this divine toy just neglect the primordial prisons entirely instead of going to all this trouble to ensure access to them even in a recreation of a real world? Argh…!"

She pulled at her hair for a second (not very hard, mind you, she seemed to do this just for dramatic emphasis) and then turned back towards the gaping abyss in front of them, staring at it in deep thought.

After a few moments of silence Zach asked the obvious question that Zorian was pondering as well.

"If the primordial prisons are objects that exist both in the real world and the time loop reality, doesn’t that make them a sort of a… bridge, for the lack of a better term?" Zach asked Zorian quietly. "If so, it might be possible to use them as a sort of conduit for opening a passage between this world and the real one. Hell, releasing one of them from their prisons might not even be necessary!"

"I wouldn’t place my hopes too high on such an idea," Silverlake suddenly said. Apparently she wasn’t so deep in her thought that she couldn’t eavesdrop on their conversation. "Primordial prisons are hard to perceive, nevermind interact with. It would take vastly more skill to use them as a spell conduit than–"

She suddenly stopped and turned around to face them, an incredulous look on her face.

"Wait, what was that about releasing one of them?"

After convincing Silverlake that something funny was going on with the world at large and that their time loop explanation was at least a little bit plausible (and smoothing out some unfortunate misunderstandings), Silverlake reluctantly agreed to continue teaching them pocket dimension creation. In addition, Zorian had managed to talk her into selling them the analysis spells she used to study Panaxeth’s prison in exchange for both of the ingredients for her potion of youth. As much as she complained that such a trade was profoundly unfair due to the mechanics of the time loop, she just couldn’t resist getting her hands on both of the ingredients she needed to complete her potion of youth.

Unfortunately, convincing Silverlake that they were onto something had one major unfortunate side-effect: she was suddenly extremely interested in them. She wanted to know everything about them – where they came from, who their family was, where their allegiances lay, what their skillset was, how much money they had at their disposal, everything. And when they had refused to cooperate with that, she started to spy on them. And then mobilized some of her contacts (apparently she wasn’t as much of a total hermit as it appeared at first glance) to gather information on them when it turned out they were too good at evading and foiling scrying attempts and other magic-oriented methods of spying. This would be very annoying even at the best of times, but what made this especially problematic was that Zach and Zorian were already doing all sorts of eye-catching things, arranging all kinds of high-value trades and throwing around ridiculous amounts of cash. This worked just fine as long as nobody was focusing on them, but the moment a bunch of nosy people were told to specifically look into what Zach Noveda and Zorian Kazinski were doing… well, suddenly they had a lot bigger reasons to be interested than one witch’s curiosity. Even if Silverlake backtracked and told these people that she changed her mind and no longer cared for the information, they wouldn’t stop their investigation now.

Ugh.

Caught off guard by this change in their routine and forced to temporarily lay low, Zach and Zorian turned to other things to amuse themselves with. In Zorian’s case, that something was the study of divine artifacts.

Sitting around in a secret, warded house, Zorian stared at the small collection of items in front of him. There were seven of them in total: a small silver pyramid, a dark brown wooden staff, a golden bell, a pitch black disc covered in seemingly random scratches, a large green gem with several light motes trapped within, a large bronze compass and a plain-looking iron dagger. The dagger had been recovered from the ruins inside the portal palace orb, while the others had been shamelessly stolen from private collections and treasuries of small countries. Although it looked unremarkable, this pile of items would likely inspire greed in even the richest of individuals living on the continent.

"You know that it’s almost impossible to find something useful by studying divine artifacts, right?" Daimen said, staring intently at the gathered items. Zorian had reluctantly invited Daimen to join him in this task, seeing how he had much more experience with this sort of thing than he did. "Entire groups have dedicated their lives to studying one specific divine item and came out empty-handed in the end."

"Yes, I know," said Zorian, picking up the dagger they had found in the orb and flipping it in his hand. They still had no idea what it did, other than being supernaturally sharp. Divine artifacts were immune to divination magics so the only way to discover their uses was to either use trial and error or search through historical records to see if there are any descriptions of the item’s powers in ancient texts. "But I have something most of those groups don’t – a willingness to destructively study the item in question for any clues and have it come back intact at the end of each month."

Daimen made a sour face at him.

"This feels so wrong," he said uneasily. "These are priceless, irreplaceable relics. It’s sacrilege."

"Yet you agreed to come here and participate in it," Zorian noted lightly.

"Well… I can’t say I was never tempted to do something like this," Daimen sighed. "Are you sure they’ll be back to normal?"

"I’m sure," Zorian confirmed, pointing at the dagger in his hands. "I already dismantled this dagger in the previous restart and it’s back to normal now. However mysterious divine abilities are, the Sovereign Gate clearly has no issues in duplicating these items over and over again."

"That’s both reassuring and terrifying," Daimen noted.

Zorian wondered what his brother would say if he told him that they were currently stuck inside some kind of weird primordial thing that may or may not be alive and just waiting for a chance to devour them all. Alas, as funny as it was to fantasize about his reaction to that, it wasn’t worth the drama to actually go through with telling him about it.

"So, before we begin, I’m kind of curious…" Zorian began. "How did Fortov react to that illusion disc I made for you?"

The disc was something the Daimen of the previous restart had come up with. In order to help him convince Fortov to open up and talk to him, Daimen came up with the idea of a disc that would, when activated, project an illusionary scene of their talk in the previous restart. Zorian was skeptical of the idea; why would seeing such an illusion convince Fortov of anything? But Daimen insisted it would work so Zorian humored him. He tapped into his memory of the evening and constructed the most realistic illusion of the event he could before binding it to a disc that he left in Fortov’s mail. Strictly speaking, that was the end of his obligations in regards to the matter, but he kind of wanted to hear what the outcome of that stunt turned out to be.

"Well, you could say it sort of worked," Daimen said with a small grin.

"Oh?" Zorian asked with a raised eyebrow.

"He’s talking to me, at least," Daimen shrugged. "That’s all I really wanted out of that disc, so I have no reason to complain."

"How did you explain the contents of the disc?" Zorian asked curiously.

"I didn’t," Daimen grinned. "I used the mystery as an incentive to talk to me. I said I would explain everything in a month."

Zorian rolled his eyes at him.

"Anyway, I also have something to talk about before we dive into all this," Daimen said, sweeping his hands over the gathered divine artifacts. "I’m pretty sure I have narrowed down the location of the Key piece that was lost in Xlotic."

"You have?" Zorian asked, leaning forwards with anticipation. He had to say, his brother’s help was proving itself invaluable when it came to jobs like this one. If Zach and Zorian had to locate all the missing pieces of the Key all by themselves it would have taken them much, much longer than this. "Where is it? Is it the Tower of Hylos-Na? I hope it’s–"

"It’s the Ziggurat of the Sun," Daimen interrupted him.

Zorian leaned back into his chair with a groan. Out of all the possible options, the Ziggurat of the Sun was definitely the worst one. It was situated deep into the interior of northern Miasina, in an area that was once lush grassland, but was now located deep within the Xlotic desert. There were no major human settlements nearby, just an endless expanse of desert. Simply approaching the ziggurat required a lengthy, difficult trek through these parched, desolate lands.

And any expedition that reached the ziggurat itself would be faced with the tiny issue of the ziggurat’s current inhabitants: sulrothum, a species of giant sapient desert wasps that had taken over the structure when the deserts had claimed the whole area. Sulrothum were almost three meters long, possessed incredible strength and toughness and there were hundreds of them living within the ziggurat. As for their friendliness, well… sulrothum was a local human word roughly translating to devil wasp. Zorian kind of doubted they would allow them to peacefully search their base for ancient magical artifacts.

"Sorry," Daimen said. "I know how you feel, but I’m pretty sure I got it right. The imperial ring is there, provided the sulrothum haven’t already found it and taken it elsewhere."

"Which is a distinct possibility," Zorian noted.

"At least you have that in-built Key detector, so we’ll know if the ring is no longer there before we waste too much time on securing the place," Daimen shrugged.

"Of course the damn ring has to be in the most difficult location possible," Zorian grunted unhappily. "Just getting there will be an issue."

"Actually, I think I have a solution to both that and how to reach Blantyrre in a reasonable time frame," Daimen grinned before throwing a rolled up poster at him. "Have a look and tell me what you think."

Zorian caught the poster before it had time to hit his face, gave Daimen an unamused look because he was pretty sure his brother deliberately aimed the object at his head, and then unrolled it to take a look.

It was a propaganda poster, basically. It showed a pretty picture of a weird-looking wooden ship that was apparently commissioned by the king of Aranhal, one of the larger nations in Xlotic. It was an airship, Zorian realized.

An expensive, experimental airship designed by some of the best artificers in Aranhal as part of some kind of national vanity project. It was mostly done, the construction crew was just putting finishing touches on it currently and it was planned it would undergo a test flight in a few weeks.

"So?" Daimen said with a knowing smile on his face. "What do you think?"

Zorian stared at the poster for a second before looking Daimen straight in the eye.

"I think we have ourselves an airship to steal."

78. Grinding Stone

Airships were not held in very high regard among people who cared about such things. The idea of a flying vessel was something that had captivated mankind since time immemorial, of course, but every concrete design for such a vessel had been disappointing. After all, although magic could make a ship fly easily enough, doing so on a long-term basis was very expensive in terms of mana. Moreover, this cost increased massively if one wanted to not just fly, but fly fast and retain a healthy amount of maneuverability in the process, too. This was why very few mages employed magical flight without a pressing reason to do so, even though flight magic wasn’t that complicated and many mages were capable of it.

As a result of this fundamental issue, most airships couldn’t actually fly around as they pleased, but instead had to follow fixed paths that took them through mana-rich areas that could sustain them in the air. And even so, airship designers still had to ruthlessly keep the vessel’s weight down during construction. This made the resulting product relatively fragile and greatly limited the vessel’s usefulness. They also tended to be rather expensive to build and maintain, as the materials which went into them tended to be on the pricier side and the design of the vessel itself was something that required a whole team of skilled professionals. It also didn’t help that there was no standard airship design available to the public, meaning that most airship construction teams started their projects from scratch and were often the only ones who could truly fix or modify the vessel.

Finally, there was a tiny, yet very important issue of how incredibly lethal an airship crash was compared to, say, the sinking of a sea-going ship. If anything went wrong, it was all too easy for everyone on board to die. There had been a number of high-profile airship accidents over the years, including a rather spectacular one where the Tetran airship Gepid plunged straight into the sea not long after starting its maiden flight. And even if one ignored the possibility of a simple malfunction, there was still the matter of the many flying magical beasts that could easily crash the airship if encountered at an inopportune time.

In light of all that, it was not hard to see why airships weren’t in more widespread use. They were not economically viable for private interests and state militaries generally found flying magical creatures to be more effective as an aerial combat force. Despite that, people stubbornly kept trying to make them viable. There was something about a flying vessel that people found irresistibly captivating.

There were considerable differences between regions, however. The states of northern Miasina, for instance, were the leaders when it came to investment into airship research. Due to the vast stretches of desert that surrounded them, the nations of Xlotic saw more potential in airships than Altazian ones. Building roads and railways in the inhospitable interior of northern Miasina was exceptionally difficult, and there were few population centers big enough to justify an expensive teleport platform. A free-flying, economically-viable airship that could traverse the Xlotic desert would be a huge boon to whoever made it.

Pearl of Aranhal, the airship Zorian wanted to steal, definitely hadn’t been designed with economic viability in mind. No expenses have been spared in its construction. Although Zorian had not been able to find concrete numbers anywhere, the final price tag was rumored to be positively astronomical. The airship’s capabilities, however, were said to be appropriately impressive for something that had so much money sunk into it. It was fast, maneuverable and surprisingly robust for an airship. Most importantly for Zorian, though, it boasted an experimental power core that allowed it to operate independently of ambient mana for long periods of time.

After some discussion with Zach, they decided not to make a move on the airship in this particular restart, however. Half of the restart had already passed and they were already committed on many other fronts. Besides, due to Silverlake’s earlier inquiries, people were still paying close attention to them. Zorian still decided to look around a little to get a feel for what they were dealing with.

Unsurprisingly, the airship was under significant protection. Not so much against thieves, since the idea of someone outright stealing the airship was kind of ridiculous, but against spies and saboteurs. The defenses were tight enough to thwart Zorian’s casual probing, but he was confident he could get through them in time. It might take several restarts, but it would happen. The bigger problem, in his opinion, was that the Pearl of Aranhal required a crew of ten in order to take off and land, which made the idea of two people stealing it somewhat problematic. He would probably have to wait for Zach to be able to cast the simulacrum spell before they could make the attempt. Another problem, though a comparatively smaller one, was that some small but critical pieces of the airship hadn’t been installed, and possibly not even made yet. Zorian was confident he could manufacture and install these components himself, but he would need access to the relevant blueprints first…

Once upon a time, one of my ambitions was to examine a train to see how its engines work, Zorian thought to himself nostalgically. Now I’m casually planning how to steal and analyze an experimental airship in my free time. Even taking the time loop into account, it’s still amazing how far I’ve come since then. I wonder what my old self would have said to something like that…

That, of course, was something impossible to answer. He shook his head and focused on more immediate matters. Currently, he was going to meet someone he hadn’t spoken to for a very, very long time – Zenomir Olgai, the old language expert he had once sought out to help him figure out what happened to him. Back then, he had been murdered by the invaders not long after talking to him, so he had reflexively avoided the man ever since, suspecting him a spy. However, none of his investigations of Ibasan collaborators and cultists pointed to Zenomir being one of them. Thus, when Zenomir’s name popped up while seeking out a translator that could help him with some of the documents he had acquired in Aranhal, he decided to pay him a visit. He even intended to drop some hints about the invasion while he was there, just to see if someone would try to murder him again because of it. Who knew, maybe Zenomir was part of some super-secret section of the invaders that other members didn’t normally know about.

As he approached Zenomir’s office, though, he suddenly stopped when he felt a familiar presence.

A bunch of cranium rats were lingering in the area, hidden inside the walls. The swarm quickly withdrew their telepathic probe when they noticed his mind was well shielded, but Zorian was practiced enough at mental shielding that even the faintest of mental attacks could not escape his notice.

He frowned. If cranium rats had been loitering around Zenomir’s office back when he had visited the man, it was no wonder that Zorian had ended up being a target. That only raised another questions though: why were the cranium rats paying attention to Zenomir? The man was somewhat famous as an incredible polyglot and language expert, but that shouldn’t be of much interest to the invaders.

After some thought, he decided to leave the cranium rats alone for now. He knocked on Zenomir’s office door and waited.

He waited for nearly fifteen minutes. Apparently he had arrived at a somewhat bad time, since the old teacher was talking to someone already. Another student, Zorian eventually realized. He took a quick peek at the student’s mind to make sure he was not connected to the cranium rats and found out that he wasn’t. He was just a student that had picked Zenomir as his mentor and was now arguing with him over something. Zorian didn’t linger inside his mind long enough to find out what, as he disliked invading other people’s privacy with his mental powers unless it was truly necessary.

Eventually the meeting ended and Zenomir called him in. Zorian gracefully accepted the man’s offer to sit down and went right to business.

"I’m here because I was told you could help me translate a highly technical document written in Aranhal Ikosian," Zorian told him. "Or at least point me towards someone who is up to the task."

"Ah yes, Aranhal," Zenomir said sagely. "They do speak a particularly distinct form of our tongue, don’t they? Can you show me the sample of what you’re working with?"

Zorian took out a few pages of technical writing out of his school bag and handed them to the old language expert. He wasn’t worried about Zenomir recognizing them as illegally acquired. Unless he was inexplicably connected to Aranhal’s airship construction team in addition to his apparent link to invaders, the text should mean little to him.

Zenomir carefully put on a pair of reading glasses and glanced through the papers in silence.

"Lots of unknown technical jargon, I see. Airship construction materials? My, what an interesting topic…" Zenomir mused, before giving Zorian a good-natured smile. "I can see why you were referred my way, though it somewhat saddens me that a student of our fine academy did not think to seek me out right away. At the very least I’d give you my initial opinion free of charge, which is probably more than you got out of whoever sent you here."

Zorian could tell that the man wasn’t really angry with him for this oversight, merely giving him a friendly warning that he had failed to take advantage of his academy membership to its fullest extent. Sadly, while Zenomir was both friendly and polite, the events that transpired after Zorian had talked to him the last time around and the cranium rats lurking in the walls had made it impossible for Zorian to really trust him. So he just nodded sagely at Zenomir’s reminder and moved on.

"Let me ask you something first," Zenomir began. "Is this document that you want translated an isolated thing or are you planning on collaborating with someone from Aranhal on something?"

"The project I’m working on does involve a fair bit of interaction with Aranhal natives," Zorian reluctantly admitted.

Thankfully, Zenomir seemed to think nothing of Zorian’s admission that he was going to interact heavily with people on another continent. Zorian would think this sort of thing would raise some eyebrows, but apparently not.

They spent the next ten minutes discussing what the translation job would entail. Zenomir asked him a couple of questions about the exact nature of this project he was working on, but thankfully he backed off when Zorian told him it was confidential. He confirmed that this sort of translation job was well within his capabilities, though it would take a couple of days and wouldn’t be exactly cheap. None of this was a problem for Zorian, though, and he told the old teacher as much before the man raised another idea.

"I’m going to be a little bold here, but perhaps simply hiring a person to translate this document might not be the best course of action," Zenomir said. "I think you should invest some time in learning the language itself. You’d be amazed how many layers of communication you lose by relying on external translation and I guarantee your partners will respect you a lot more if you can communicate with them directly."

"I’m unlikely to interact with people from Aranhal after this project is done, though," Zorian said, frowning. Plus, he was pretty sure there wouldn’t be too many respectful exchanges between him and the Aranhal airship construction team, language barriers or no. "That’s a lot of wasted effort for one job."

"Learning a language is never a wasted effort, young man," Zenomir lectured him. "It develops your mind and expands your horizons! Besides, it’s not as if you’re starting completely from scratch. Aranhal Ikosian is different from standard Ikosian, but not unintelligible."

"That’s true," Zorian admitted. It was more like a heavily divergent dialect with a lot of words borrowed from the native language spoken by the people before Ikosian conquest. Much like many of the local versions of Ikosian on Altazia, really. "It would still be a lot of work for someone who isn’t naturally inclined towards languages like you are, though. No offense, Professor Olgai."

"Hmph. Wait here for a minute," Zenomir said, quickly springing up from his chair without waiting for his answer, and then entered a nearby side-room in his office and closed the door.

He stayed there for over ten minutes. Judging by the quiet sounds emanating from behind the closed door, the man was shifting around boxes and searching through stacks of paper and books in search of something. Zorian sighed. This was taking way longer than he thought it would…

Finally, the old teacher returned to his office, carrying a tall stack of books, folders and loose sheets of paper. He was carrying so much that he had to use his elbows to manipulate the door handle, which he did with the practiced grace of someone who does things like that all the time. He dumped the pile on the table in front of Zorian and pointed at it.

"Tell you what, young man," Zenomir said. "This here is a small selection of dictionaries, translation guides and random notes regarding Aranhal Ikosian that I had in my store room–"

"You just happened to have Aranhal-related stuff in your store room?" Zorian asked incredulously.

"Oh, I have all sorts of things gathering dust in there," said Zenomir dismissively. "Some of the teachers are rarely in their offices, but I pretty much do most of my work here. So it’s handy to have most of my resources close by. Anyway, why don’t you take this and see how much of that document of yours you can translate yourself using this as a guide. If you impress me with your work, I promise I’ll help you translate the rest of your project for free."

Zorian opened his mouth to point out that he’d rather just pay for translation but Zenomir wouldn’t hear it.

"Free!" Zenomir repeated. "Do you hate money, young man? Don’t be in such a hurry to part with it. I’m not very demanding, don’t worry. Just do your best and I’m sure you’ll do fine. Who knows, maybe you’ll even discover you have a previously undiscovered passion for languages, eh?"

Zorian seriously doubted that, but he could see there was no use in arguing with Zenomir about this. Besides, now that he thought about it a little, it might actually be useful to get some elementary proficiency in Aranhal Ikosian. He might need to interrogate the airship construction crew at some point, and that was going to be really difficult if their language was completely opaque to him. Not even mind reading helped in that case, since people’s thoughts were heavily shaped by the language they spoke.

"Very well, I’ll give it a try," Zorian relented.

"Excellent!" Zenomir said, beaming at him happily.

"Still, is it really okay for you to just give me all this?" Zorian pointed at the pile in front of him. "Some of this stuff looks… irreplaceable."

"It’s fine," said Zenomir, waving him off. "You look like a serious young man. I’m sure you’ll return it all in one piece."

Zorian didn’t say anything to that. He just stared at the pile of books and paper in front of him, lost in thought, for a few seconds.

"Well," Zenomir suddenly said, clapping his hands. "Is there anything else you wanted to ask? If not–"

"Actually, yes," Zorian said. "Are you a member of the Cult of the Dragon Below?"

Zenomir eyebrows shot up at the question.

"I’m sorry, what?" he asked.

"They officially call themselves the Esoteric Order of the Celestial Dragon," Zorian said. "They are one of the newer religious organizations, one dedicated to the worship of the entity that is commonly thought to reside in the center of the world. They have a rather large presence here in Cyoria. Are you a member of the Order?"

"Ah, I think I have heard something about them once," Zenomir mused, tapping his long white beard with his hand. "But no, I am not a member. Why do you ask?"

"Are you an agent of Ulquaan Ibasa?" Zorian asked, completely ignoring the old teacher’s question.

"Now wait just a minute here," Zenomir said, finally getting somewhat angry. "What kind of question is that!?"

Hmm. He was being completely honest. He was not knowingly associated with either the Ibasans of the Cult of the Dragon Below.

With a small sigh, Zorian reached deeper into Zenomir’s mind, casually brushing aside the old teacher’s rudimentary mental defenses, and modified his short-term memory to erase this conversation out of his mind. The whole process only lasted less than a minute, due to the relatively trivial nature of the memory edit, after which Zorian withdrew from Zenomir’s mind.

The old teacher blinked a few times, gradually shrugging off the mental daze that Zorian placed on him so he could work in peace, before giving Zorian a surprised look.

"What happened?" he asked.

"Uh, you kind of dozed off for several seconds there," Zorian said, pretending awkwardness.

"Ah. I guess old age is finally catching up to me," Zenomir said ruefully, shaking his head. "Where were we, again?"

"Actually, I think we’re kind of done here," Zorian said. "But first, let me ask you a somewhat strange question. Do you have any idea why someone would want to spy on you?"

"Spy on me?" Zenomir asked incredulously. "Why no, I have no idea why someone would want that. Frankly, I wish more people would be interested in my work. If someone wanted to know more about what I do, why, all they have to do is ask!"

"I’ll cut straight to the chase, then," Zorian said. "Due to some exotic inborn abilities that I have, I happen to know that there are rats lurking in the walls around your office. And not normal rats either."

"Ah, now that… is quite concerning," said Zenomir. He sat down in his chair and frowned. He tapped on his beard a few more times, deep in thought. "Hmm. Rats in the walls…"

After a minute or so, Zenomir slapped his palm against the table, scaring Zorian back into attention.

"Aha!" Zenomir said triumphantly. "I’ve got it, I think. I don’t think these rats, if they are indeed spies as you suspect, are here for me. As it happens, the headmaster’s office is very close to mine. The headmaster is rarely in it, but a lot of visitors and academy documentation passes through the place."

Zorian had to agree this did make a great deal of sense. As a place of such importance, the headmaster’s office was probably protected by heavier and more sophisticated wards and other defenses… but the corridors approaching it might have been overlooked due to cost-cutting and such. He would have to take a walk through the academy to see if there were other places that cranium rats linger as they did here.

"Of course, this will have to be reported," Zenomir’s shoulders suddenly sagged. "I can already sense a headache coming. So much paperwork…"

"I don’t suppose you could exclude me from the report?" Zorian asked. He would mindwipe him again if he had to, but he would rather avoid doing that.

"I might as well," Zenomir sighed. He apparently didn’t have a single suspicious bone in his body. "No reason for both of us to suffer. Though I have to ask you to keep quiet about this, or else the academy might go after you for ruining its reputation."

Zorian assured him that he had no intention of spreading this around, picked up the stack of books and papers the man had given him and then left. Instead of exiting the academy immediately, though, he took the extended route that saw him passing next to the headmaster’s office a couple of times.

It turned out that, yes, all approaches to the headmaster’s office had cranium rats lurking in the walls. It seemed that Zenomir’s theory was very much correct.

Well. That was one mystery solved! It had been a while since he had solved one of those without raising at least one new question in return.

Somehow, it made him feel like he was finally getting close to a solution for all this.

In an unremarkable, out-of-the-way cave system situated a healthy distance away from Cyoria, Zach, Zorian and two aranea were training their magical skills.

Zach was tinkering with a large wooden chest, practicing his pocket dimension creation. His ability in this area was slowly but surely overtaking Zorian, despite him dismissing some of his simulacrums and focusing more of his energies on the issue. As far as Zorian could tell, this was purely due to Zach’s massive mana reserves and the resulting ability to sustain the mana-intensive training longer than Zorian ever could. Zorian wasn’t any more talented or hard-working than Zach was, after all, and every advantage and training method he had was also something Zach had access to as well. It made perfect sense that Zach was pulling away from him in this regard, but that didn’t stop Zorian from feeling kind of jealous and annoyed with the situation. A petty part of him was tempted to start hiding some of the relevant shaping exercises and tricks he had found while combing through the various spellbooks and training manuals in order to close the gap somewhat, but he resisted the impulse. That would be stupid and self-defeating. Zach getting better was a good thing.

That aside, neither Zach nor Zorian had really progressed far in terms of pocket dimension expertise. The chest that Zach was fiddling with still functioned on essentially the same principles as the marble-storing boxes they had practiced with previously. It was the simplest form of pocket dimension, which involved expanding the available space inside a container. Essentially, it allowed a mage to produce an enclosed space that was larger on the inside than it was on the outside.

There were a lot of limitations involved with this procedure. The pocket dimension required mana to keep existing, so such an item could only be stored in areas where ambient mana was abundant enough to sustain them. Or be provided with an in-built power source of some sort. A complicated, fiddly spell formula had to be embedded into the walls of the container, or else the space expansion would expire after less than a day, just like any other spell. Finally, the weight of the object inside did not disappear, so a chest with several tons of rock inside would still weigh several tons, no matter how small it looked.

Of course, weight concerns aside, cramming too much stuff into your pocket dimension container isn’t a good idea to begin with. If the container is damaged, the pocket dimension anchored to its interior would immediately fall apart, forcing the contents back into mundane space. Typically, this meant the pocket dimension would explode, showering everything around it with high-speed shrapnel of its former contents. For this reason, it was also a good idea to make the container as sturdy and damage-resistant as possible. Zach and Zorian learned that very quickly after cramming too many marbles into a box whose bottom could not handle the weight, thus creating their very own marble-flinging cluster bomb.

The more time the two of them sank into studying pocket dimensions, the more Zorian realized how incredible the portable palace orb they recovered in Koth was. It had some kind of internal power source that could sustain it indefinitely and made it completely self-sufficient from its surroundings, it weighed no more than a regular glass orb of its size would and it contained an incredible amount of space and matter inside. Zorian was tempted to dismiss all of this as evidence of divine tampering, except that Silverlake stubbornly insisted that all of this was potentially achievable through familiar mortal magic. Yes, even the power source thing. Somehow.

Then again, she did maintain a rather large pocket dimension with some pretty potent defensive wards in an area that really shouldn’t be able to support such. How was she doing that, anyway?

Well, it wasn’t something that could be figured out by idle contemplation. He put the matter out of his mind for now and focused his attention to the two aranea next to him. Both of them had been sent here by the Silent Doorway Adepts at Zorian’s request. Ever since he had become capable of giving them a large list of novel gate addresses and a sizeable amount of strategic information about their local region, they became much more willing to cooperate with him and humor his requests. In this case they allowed him to recruit two of their best retrievers. Thieves, basically. Zorian called them Ghost and Veil, though these were only shortened versions of their real names.

Ghost and Veil were originally meant to show him how to use his mental powers to infiltrate guarded sites more easily, but he found them to be surprisingly friendly and curious for a pair of thieves and spies. They fulfilled their part of the bargain without any reservations, and were even willing to go beyond what was originally agreed upon… provided he traded some instruction and secrets of his own to them in return.

As such, they were currently gleefully practicing some of the magic he had given them on each other, steadily refining the somewhat clunky spells that had been converted from the human spellcasting system into an aranean one and thus suffered from a fair bit of inefficiencies. Zorian left them alone to their work for the most part, only involving himself if he saw them making an obvious mistake, but he made sure to survey the results of their work at the end of each day. When he finally found a way for him and Zach to leave this time loop, he intended to bundle up little improvements like this into one giant package and then gift them to the various aranean webs that had helped him over the years.

As for Zorian, he was tackling something that he had wanted to obtain for quite a while now. He was learning the aranean skill of going dark – the psychic equivalent of the mind blank spell.

The skill was pretty hard to obtain, since the aranea saw it as inherently shady, meaning that most of them weren’t even willing to admit they knew how to perform it, much less trade it to someone who could very well be hostile. It was only after a lot of prodding and some high-value trades that Ghost and Veil agreed to teach it to him. Even then, they made him promise in the strongest possible terms that he would use it sparingly.

They need not have worried. Zorian had heard enough horror stories about the mage equivalent of the skill to know he had to be careful about this. Mind blank was well known to be insanity-inducing if used on a long-term basis. Mages that left it active for too long became increasingly paranoid, becoming obsessed with imaginary plots and threats. They would inevitably begin to view everyone around them as a threat, alien and untrustworthy, and withdraw from society as much as possible to pursue their own inscrutable goals. There was a highly-publicized case a few years back where a very rich mage went down this path and eventually turned his isolated estate into a foreboding death-trap filled with layers upon layers of traps, golems, powerful wards and vicious guard beasts. His children were not very amused when they realized he had blown all of his wealth on that and that they wouldn’t be inheriting any of the money that they had been counting on.

This going dark was harder than he thought it would be, though. He knew that mind blank was a difficult, high-level spell, but he had naively thought that being psychic would negate that somehow. It was a mind-related thing, after all, so why wouldn’t his innate talent work on it? But no. If anything, that only made things harder. Even mundane mages felt a surge of wrongness upon cutting their minds off from the world, suffering from vertigo, illusionary static noise and headaches before fully mastering the spell. For psychics like Zorian, though, it was a little like plucking out your own eyeballs because you knew you could grow them back later. Even though one knew that no permanent loss would occur, the very idea just felt wrong on a deep-seated, visceral level. It wasn’t easy to make yourself do this to yourself.

He was stalling, he realized. He took a couple of deep breaths, trying to calm himself for another attempt. Okay. The 27th time was the charm…

He sank his awareness inward, carefully mapped out the borders of his consciousness and then sort of… folded his mind upon itself.

It was horrible. It can be scarcely described in words alone, but he felt like his whole world had gone dark and confined, pressing down on him. He almost dropped the attempt right there, just like he had so many times before, but he gritted his teeth and persisted.

As the borders of his consciousness contracted, getting smaller and smaller, he breathed deeper and deeper, a deep fear welling up from the depths of his soul and causing him to pause. He had an unreasonable, unexplainable feeling of being entombed alive, imprisoned in a cage made out of his own flesh and skin, and it took him an unknown amount of time to take that final step.

With one last, desperate push, his mind finally finished folding upon itself and stabilized. The sense of wrongness was still there, but muted and manageable.

Everything seemed so unnaturally quiet all of a sudden, even though nothing in his surroundings had really changed.

Well okay, that wasn’t entirely true. Ghost and Veil had stopped casting spells at each other and were looking at him with interest.

"You did it!" Veil said excitedly. She was using a vocalization spell instead of resorting to telepathy, since Zorian’s current status kind of prevented that. "Amazing! I thought it would take you at least another 30 tries!"

"It’s not that amazing," Ghost said dourly. "It’s a decidedly average progression for someone of his level of skill."

"He’s a human, though," Veil objected. "I don’t think it’s fair to judge him by our standards."

"You’re right. We should be even stricter," Ghost said. "After all, he’s not nearly as reliant on his mental powers as we are."

"I’m right here," Zorian complained.

"Don’t listen to this killjoy," Veil told him. "Just enjoy knowing that everything will be a lot easier from now on. The first time is always the hardest. Oh, and you should be extra careful about not shutting yourself from the Great Web for too long during these initial steps. The ability degrades the mind much faster if not done flawlessly, and your first handful of attempts probably won’t be that good."

"Just like mind blank, then," Zach noted from the side, not taking his eyes off the chest he was working on. "Until you’re sure you mastered the spell, it is recommended you keep it on for no more than half an hour maximum."

"Umm, sure. I’m not too familiar with human time measurements, but let’s go with your friend’s suggestion on that," Veil said.

Zorian nodded absent-mindedly. Frankly, he was tempted to end the effect immediately but he knew he had to acclimatize himself to it if he wanted to use it even remotely seriously. He was just about to ask the two aranea if there was anything else he had to watch out when Zach suddenly jumped up and started laughing triumphantly.

"It works!" Zach said, swinging his chest around and then raising it above his head. It was actually mildly impressive, because Zorian knew for a fact that the chest was quite heavy and not something he personally could swing around like that. "It’s finished and it totally works!"

"What were you working on, anyway?" Zorian asked. Clearly Zach hadn’t been working on just another expanded chest, or else he wouldn’t be so happy to succeed.

"This?" Zach asked rhetorically, shaking the chest held in his arms. "Why, it’s an icebox of beer holding, of course! Not only can it hold a large number of beer bottles, it also keeps them at a nice, cold temperature for perfect consumption!"

"An icebox of… wait, you made all this fuss about a simple expanded chest with a chilling field added on top?" Zorian asked unhappily.

"Oh hush, you know it’s a genius idea," Zach said. "Don’t be so cranky. I think the mind blank is already affecting you."

Ugh. Zorian doubted this was true, but he immediately dismissed the effect anyway. Better to be safe than sorry.

There was plenty of time to work on this later.

Eventually, after an annoyingly long time, Silverlake agreed to meet with them again. By then, the investigators she had sent after them had thoroughly disrupted their plans and a lot of the restart had already passed, so they were not as enthusiastic about the whole thing as they might have been. Zorian really hoped this could be avoided in future restarts, somehow, because there was no way they could tolerate these kinds of delays and disruptions on a persistent basis.

Surprisingly, she wanted to meet in some public space in Cyoria, not in her forest hideout. After some back-and-forth, they agreed to hold a meeting in one of Cyoria’s less visited parks. There would be some minor danger of being overheard, but it was likely that anyone that did hear them would dismiss them as speaking nonsense.

"You’ve put me in a very unfavorable position," Silverlake told them the moment they met. "I think I believe you about this month endlessly repeating itself, as crazy as that sounds, but that means that I basically have no leverage against you whatsoever. You can promise to pay me back in all sorts of ways, but I have no means to enforce any of that. Even if I feed you truth potions and decide you sincerely mean to honor your promises, who’s to say you won’t ever change your minds in the future? If you decide to renege on your side of the deal, I will never know."

"So what’s your decision, then?" Zorian asked. There was nothing he could say to make her feel better about that.

"What else?" she laughed. "I’ll work with you and hope you’re not planning to screw me over. What other choice do I have?"

"We were worried you’d ask to put us under a geas," Zach admitted.

It was a reasonable fear. Forced magical oaths were one of the things witches were infamous for using.

"Geas have limited usefulness these days," Silverlake said, shaking her head sadly. "They were feared once upon a time because mages were comparatively rare and often had a very limited selection of spells at their disposal. In those times, finding someone who could lift a geas placed on you was legitimately hard. These days you can just walk into your local mage guild branch and hire someone to get rid of it within a few days. Placing a geas on you would just create resentment. No, I’m afraid I’ll have to use the carrot and the poison strategy."

"Err, isn’t that supposed to be the carrot and the stick?" Zorian tried.

"We just established that I don’t have much of a stick when it comes to you two, no?" Silverlake said. "So I can’t really counter-attack, but I can make myself a poisonous pill to swallow. Incidentally, I would like to point out that I have made myself immune to all truth potions I know of and that my mind has been rigged to collapse should my mental defenses ever be violently shattered. This is something I did long before I met you two, so even attacking me first thing in the restart won’t negate it. Just an interesting tidbit, you know?"

"Yeah, we know," Zach said with exasperation. "Subduing you and trying to forcefully get your secrets out of your mind would be a total chore and take way too much time, so we better ask nicely."

"Exactly," Silverlake nodded happily.

"So what’s the carrot part of the deal?" Zach asked curiously.

"I am an alchemist of incredible skill and I have lived for a very long time. I know how to make many wondrous potions and know incredible secrets… none of which I can be persuaded to share with you in less than a month’s time. At the very least, I am confident that you’ll seek me out eventually for my secret of how to stop aging and restore your youth. I know, I know, you’re in the prime of your life now and old age seems distant… but when your body starts to fail and your mind dims, I am confident you’ll become interested to discover what I know about the topic." She paused dramatically for a moment. "Of course, if you were really smart, you would strike while the iron is hot and come to me while you’re still young and I haven’t worked out how to get these blasted eggs on my own. That way I won’t think you’re desperate for a solution and you’ll have lots of things that interest me. You’d be able to get a much better deal that way…"

"How do you know we won’t be able to figure out such a thing ourselves?" Zach asked.

"What, you think youth potions grow on trees or something?" she scoffed. "This is something that takes an absolute master of alchemy to accomplish. You may be decent enough in comparison to your average alchemist, but it takes a lot more than that to tackle this kind of problem. Besides, you seem to be paying other experts to do your alchemical research and complicated work for you. That says everything about your future alchemical expertise, really."

There was some truth in that. Zorian did have a healthy amount of interest in alchemy, but he liked spell formula better and it was impossible to focus on everything at once. Even in a time loop and with a small army of simulacrums running around.

"So I guess you’re not really interested in refining your eternal youth potion over multiple restarts with our help, then?" Zorian asked.

"Good heavens no, why would I want to do that?" she asked incredulously. "That would just remove what little leverage I have over you, and for what? I’m confident I’ll get it right eventually. I have time, even without the time loop. I’ve been working on this for a very long time, what’s a couple of years more?"

"I see," Zorian said. "Well, I am glad you are at least willing to work with us on this. Though I do hope your future selves will not sabotage our work with spying and delay the meeting for most of the month like you have."

"I don’t know about that," Silverlake said, not in the least bit apologetic. "Your story is very crazy and requires checking. It’s hard to speed that up."

"Ha, well… don’t be so sure about that," Zorian said, reaching into his backpack to retrieve a handful of Kael’s notebooks that the morlock boy had given him permission to share with others. "Let me tell you about the wonders of notebook transfers across restarts…"

With Silverlake’s cooperation secured, the restart ended uneventfully, the only notable difference being the larger number of notebooks that Zorian was transferring into the next restart. Considering that the orb’s memory bank was practically limitless in size, this was not a big deal.

The next several restarts were somewhat routine. They were learning pocket dimension expertise from Silverlake, looking deeper into Veyers' ties with the Cult of Dragon Below, figuring out the activation procedure of the Bakora Gates and the construction methods of the Ibasan ones, doing small preparations for the airship theft, experimenting with divine artifacts and sifting through the ruins inside the portable palace orb. Zorian was messing around with mental enhancements while Zach was steadily getting closer to being able to create his own simulacrums.

Their various other operations, such as hiring various experts to do research and development for them, also continued at a steady pace.

Just like that, another six restarts had gone by.

79. Crime and Evading Punishment

Although Aranhal widely advertised their new airship to their own populace and neighboring countries, actually seeing the Pearl of Aranhal took a bit of effort. It was located next to an important industrial town, but wasn’t actually in it. Instead, the construction site was placed outside the settlement itself, close enough to be supplied with relative ease but far enough to foil casual visitors.

The airship was currently grounded in an oval-shaped holding structure and surrounded by extensive scaffolding. Ringing that was a collection of storehouses, barracks, watchtowers and temporary housing for workers and overseers. Finally, the entire work camp was surrounded by a warded, alteration-made stone wall that stopped minor magical creatures or petty criminals from simply waltzing into the place. Neither this, nor any of the other, more subtle defenses could stop Zach and Zorian from infiltrating the place without being seen, of course. They were currently standing on one of the observation platforms attached to the ship, observing it.

Zorian had to say, the Pearl of Aranhal was a beautiful construct. Airships were often depicted as floating sea-going ships – an image that stemmed from the earliest known models, which really were simply modified sea-going ships. Ancient airship creators were working with a lower technological base and less developed economic infrastructure, forcing them to pick an already constructed vessel as a base for their project. Most modern airships, on the other hand, were built from the ground up as dedicated aerial vessels, so they rarely looked anything like a mundane ship. They tended to either have long cylindrical hulls covered in stabilizing fins or be some manner of a triangle. The Pearl of Aranhal bucked the trend there, in that it had a relatively flat, rhombus-like shape. It kind of gave Zorian an impression of a giant leaf. It certainly looked like it should be fast and maneuverable, but it made Zorian somewhat skeptical of the claim it was especially robust and durable by airship standards. Well, no matter. They wanted the ship because of its speed and flight endurance, not combat ability.

In any case, the airship’s name seemed particularly fitting in light of its current coloration. Its hull was painted in dazzling, pure white, with no overt markings or identifying patterns. This was meant to be only temporary, however. Aranhal intended to decorate the ship further before unveiling it to the waiting public, but they had yet to settle down on what kind of color scheme and decorations to put there. The question seemed quite trivial to Zorian, but was apparently an intensely divisive political question that caused many bitter arguments in Aranhal’s halls of power. The current overseer was continually kicking the can down the road in regards to the issue, fearful that whoever lost the dispute would try to cut the project’s budget out of spite.

"What do you say?" Zach suddenly said, rocking in place on his heels. He looked quite bored. "It’s about time, no?"

"Yeah, I guess," Zorian answered. He was a bit nervous, he realized, so he may have been stalling a little. "I’ll go tell my copies to set the monkeys loose."

He reached to his simulacrums through his soul, his ability to use his soul as a telepathic conduit as natural as breathing by now, and gave them a simple go signal. They already knew what to do.

Golden triclopses were monkey-like magic creatures native to the area. They had bright yellow fur, two small horns on top of their heads and an extra eye in the middle of their forehead. Their third eyes gave them the ability to perceive magic in some strange, hard to understand way, which made them quite interested in magic items. Of course, being only as smart as regular animals and somewhat aggressive, their interest tended to be unhealthy for the magic items in question and the humans that owned them. Zach and Zorian had captured several groups of these beasts earlier to set loose as a distraction. They were particularly good for this because the construction team had already had a number of smaller clashes with the local triclops communities, and thus having a bunch of them making trouble in the base wasn’t immediately suspicious. They had tried this already in the three previous restarts to test the waters, and they knew that the guards would first move to contain the situation before wondering if someone had sent this unusually large group of them here intentionally.

By then, of course, it would be too late.

After the golden triclopses were set loose upon the unsuspecting base, Zach and Zorian remained in their current spot for a while, waiting. It would take a while before the creatures were discovered, the severity of the problem became obvious, and before the majority of the base’s guards were mobilized to deal with them. Zorian monitored the situation through his simulacrums, whose senses he could tap into with ease. His studies of the cranium rat swarms and the god-touched hydra living in the portable palace orb had done much to improve his ability to coordinate with his simulacrums. They weren’t quite a single mind yet, but he probably didn’t want that to begin with.

Zach also had simulacrums present in the base. He had only managed to get them working recently, so they tended to have far more quirks and differences from the original than Zorian’s own did. However, they needed those simulacrums if they wanted to steal the ship and it was pretty unlikely any of them would go insane and try to kill them, so whatever.

"There," Zorian eventually said. "Everyone who was going to get pulled to deal with the monkeys is gone. It’s now or never."

"Finally," Zach said.

He didn’t say anything else, instead opting to jump down from the platform. Zorian followed after him with a sigh, giving the simulacrums the signal to drop whatever they were doing and converge on the ship. Even Zach’s simulacrums, since his fellow time traveler seemed to have forgotten about his copies in his hurry to get to the action. Or maybe he just expected Zorian to take care of that for him – it was actually easier for Zorian to coordinate Zach’s simulacrums than it was for Zach himself, due to his lack of easy telepathy. Though, since Zach and his simulacrums were largely identical in mind, it should be quite possible for him to use telepathy to communicate with his copies with ease, even if he wasn’t a natural mind mage like Zorian. He made a mental note to talk to Zach about that later…

Zach, Zorian and their simulacrums surged forward, pushing past the shocked technicians and civilian staff and disabling any armed resistance they encountered. Zach and his simulacrums broke down the scaffolding and the anchor beams that were holding the airship locked down while Zorian and his simulacrums went about installing the missing airship components and ejecting anyone that remained inside the ship.

It went… surprisingly well. Zorian was a little worried, since they were making this attempt only a few days into the restart and the preparations had been made in a considerable rush. He’d had to take a potion of vigilance and miss a night of sleep entirely in order to finish constructing everything in time, so he was technically doing this while staying awake for more than 24 hours.

They only had two significant complications. One was that some of the soldiers inside the ship had barricaded themselves inside a storage room and placed high-level mental wards on themselves after they figured out how Zorian was overrunning the crew so easily. Since Zach and Zorian couldn’t use anything too destructive for fear of damaging the ship, this made the resulting situation a bit of a chore to resolve in a timely manner. Thankfully, the golem bodies of Zorian’s simulacrums were capable of taking considerable abuse, so Zorian simply sent them in to swarm the soldiers with no regards to countering attacks. The result were two simulacrums with seriously damaged torsos and one that was missing both of his legs, but the problem was solved and the damaged simulacrums could still crew the ship just fine… though the legless one kept whining to Zorian about his predicament.

The other was that once every simulacrum and missing part was in its place and they tried to take off, the airship wouldn’t budge. It turned out that someone had installed an additional safeguard that none of the people Zorian had interrogated had been aware of, and Zorian was forced to frantically search for it while Zach repelled constant assaults on the ship from the reorganized Aranhali soldiers outside. Thankfully, Zorian eventually found the section the safeguard was in. Unfortunately, it was inside an engine regulation section, and integrated into it too deeply and too subtly for Zorian to remove it cleanly in the time they had left. Aranhali battlemages were no doubt going to start teleporting in any time soon, and then they’d be forced to abort the attempt. Thus, Zorian just torched the entire mechanism, allowing them to take off but permanently crippling some of the ship’s engines.

Now the airship was in the air, rapidly distancing itself from the construction site as it flew in the direction of the Xlotic interior. However, it was considerably slower than it should have been and there was another Aranhali airship chasing after them in pursuit. Zorian had no idea how that airship had gotten on the scene so quickly. Maybe it had just happened to be in the area when they made their attempt?

In any case, the two of them were currently in the main control room, trying to figure things out. While they had done their homework before coming here and had a rough idea of what operating the Pearl of Aranhal involved, it was one thing to have a theoretical knowledge of how something worked and quite another to actually put it into practice.

"You know, this thing is harder and less exciting to pilot than I thought it would be," Zach said idly, poking and prodding the various levers and buttons on the control panel in front of him.

"I do know," Zorian told him, a little grumpily. He was rapidly becoming aware of why Aranhali plans called for a dedicated navigator that would focus fully on charting a ship’s course. He was so fobbing off this job to a simulacrum the next time they did this… "Just focus on keeping the flight engines running and be glad you’re not in charge of navigation like I am."

"I’m not so sure your job is that much harder than mine, considering you wrecked half the ship in order to get us in the air," Zach remarked.

"It wasn’t half of the ship!" Zorian protested.

Zach laughed at him.

"So easy to rile up," Zach said mirthfully. "Anyway, whoever designed this stuff should have really been pulled aside and told to cut down a little on the mysterious dials and counters. He should have put in some kind of magic panel or an illusion projector that would give you information in a more understandable form. Would that really be so hard?"

"I think you have a skewed image of how easy that kind of thing is," Zorian remarked. "That kind of thing is neither cheap nor easy, and it would make it really inconvenient to fix things if something goes wrong. Dials and counters are simple to make and fix."

"I guess," Zach conceded. "It’s still annoying that we’re not even able to see the Aranhali airship pursuing us. One would think that an option to see a pursuing enemy would be one of the core features put into a control room. I should be able to say… I don’t know, something like on screen!, and have an image of the enemy projected on these windows in front of us."

He gestured towards the large, clear windows that offered a breathtaking view of the outside world. Currently they could see nothing except the clear sky and the distant horizon, which sounded a little useless but at least it assured them they were flying straight, weren’t going to ram into anything and that the weather was pleasant enough to fly in. Pretty much what these windows were intended for, Zorian was sure.

"That would be kind of useful, actually," Zorian agreed. "And while the airship itself isn’t nearly so convenient…"

He quickly performed three different divination spells, created a large illusionary screen in the air in front of them and then cast the final spell to integrate all of these into a semi-unified whole.

The illusionary screen rippled with prismatic colors for a second before settling into a three part screen. Two of them showed a scried image of the pursuing airship in different angles. The third one gave them a downward view from a vantage point high above the Pearl of Aranhal, allowing them to easily grasp the position of the enemy airship in relation to themselves.

"Nice," Zach praised.

The other Aranhal airship was larger and more heavily-built than them. It had a more typical cylinder shape, and had a handful of cannons sticking out of its hull. The Pearl of Aranhal, on the other hand, was entirely unarmed. Even if they did have cannons of their own, they couldn’t use them, as they lacked the qualified gunners to make use of them.

Zorian wasn’t feeling very threatened, though. Despite the damage to its flight engines, the Pearl of Aranhal was still slightly faster than the other airship. The design was really proving its worth there. Gradually, minute after minute, hour after hour, they were pulling away from the other airship. Additionally, Zorian had diverted one of his simulacrums to see if something could be done about the damage he had done to the ship’s flight engines, and it seemed the answer was yes. In another two hours or so, their speed would shoot up and their pursuers would be left in the dust.

"Uh, not sure if you noticed it yet, but there is another airship in front of us," Zach said, pointing at a distant dot that had yet to enter into the range of their scrying screen but could be seen through the mundane window of the control room. "Do you think they’re here by coincidence or…?"

Crap.

Some frantic divinations quickly revealed that the third airship was most certainly not there on accident. It was moving to intercept them, and both it and their old pursuer were making minor course adjustments in order to box them in better, apparently coordinating their moves. The strange thing was that the new airship wasn’t even owned by Aranhal – it belonged to the neighboring country of Mezner. The two countries didn’t exactly have the best relations with one another, so Zorian couldn’t help but privately wonder what Aranhal had promised to the other side in order to get them to help out. A lot, probably.

They really, really didn’t want to lose the Pearl of Aranhal, it seemed.

Previously, when Zach and Zorian were securing the Pearl of Aranhal and fleeing the scene with their ill-gotten gains, they had been trying to treat their enemies with as much mercy as possible. The Aranhal soldiers posted on the construction site were perfectly justified in being outraged at them, after all, so the two time travelers tried to disable their enemies non-lethally. To Zorian’s knowledge, nobody had actually died during the theft itself, though some people did get seriously injured and the golden triclopses might have killed someone after they had left. They even left the pursuing airship be, preferring to flee rather than destroying them, as they very well could have.

However, having been caught between two airships like this meant they could no longer afford to treat the situation with such velvet gloves.

Guided by Zach’s and Zorian’s hands, the Pearl of Aranhal promptly turned around to confront the Aranhali airship that had been pursuing them. If they had to fight, it was better to tackle their enemies one by one than wait for them to catch up to them together.

The Aranhali airship did not fear a confrontation. It knew that the Pearl of Aranhal was unarmed, and that Zach and Zorian were running it on a skeleton crew. Thus, it simply continued onward towards them, silently accepting the challenge.

It did not fire its cannons at them, though. Instead, six holes opened up in its hull and released a dozen or so giant eagle riders towards them. The eagles were overloaded with passengers, visibly straining under the weight of men they had to carry, but they flew fast nonetheless.

Simulacrum number two stood on the outer hull of the Pearl of Aranhal, studying the scene dispassionately. His legs were glued onto the surface of the airship to keep the wind from sweeping him away, and his golem body was unbothered by the cold. After sweeping through the incoming enemy forces once, he sent his memory over to the original for study and then put them out of his mind. They weren’t his problem. There were other simulacrums in charge of dealing with defense. His job was a bit more… proactive.

He flexed his hands and shook a little, just to make sure the previous battles hadn’t left some hidden injuries on him. The golem bodies that the original had made for them had been perfected to such a degree by now that they felt completely indistinguishable from their original form. However, the advantages of the golem bodies came with a hefty downside – if they were ever damaged, it was very hard to repair them, requiring a lengthy and expensive process. Poor simulacrum number four was still legless, for instance, though number two agreed with the original that his whining got really old after a while. If a normal simulacrum had had both of his legs blown off, he would have dispersed from the strain. The guy should be grateful he even still existed, not complaining about missing limbs.

His little checkup done, he calmed his mind and focused on the task at hand: counter-attacking the Aranhal airship.

They thought themselves safe because they thought their opponents had no weapons. But they were so very wrong…

Simulacrum number two teleported to the enemy ship. Teleporting from one moving target to another was tricky thing to pull off, and was beyond most teleporters… but it was entirely doable for Zorian, and therefore for his simulacrums as well. He couldn’t teleport directly into the enemy airship, but he didn’t have to – he teleported on top of the enemy airship’s hull, disintegrated a few panels to create an opening for himself and then stepped inside.

He didn’t even try to hide himself as he advanced through the corridors towards the airship’s flight engines. He didn’t have the time, and he had probably been discovered the moment he made a hole in the hull, anyway.

Three armed crewmembers quickly found him.

"Halt! Stand d-"

He was ready for them. A severing whip cut them to pieces before they could so much as fire a shot. He didn’t even slow down. He simply sped up, his divination spells having successfully mapped the interior, showing him where to go to reach his destination.

The severing whip trailed after him, attached to his arm, and when he came upon another group of people he used it to cut them down as well. It was a very efficient spell – the whip, once created, was pretty cheap to maintain – but one that was rarely used due to its short range and the possibility of the caster slicing their own limbs off if they didn’t have complete control over it. A bit brutal, admittedly, but the culmination of his task here involved crashing the entire airship – most of these people would end up dead in the end, no matter how you sliced it.

A hail of bullets impacted his chest but he simply ignored it, not even bothering to shield against them. His golem body was tough, able to shrug off minor attacks like those with ease. Spending mana to defend against things like that would be a waste.

When a dazzling, spinning bolt of fire swerved around the corner to slam into him, though… that he shielded against. The explosion was massive, blowing off all nearby walls and setting the air ablaze. If simulacrum number two had to breathe, this would have been a pretty devastating opener. Even as it was, it knocked him a little off-balance… and the mage that cast that spell soon rounded the corner to finish him off, before the aftershocks had the chance to die down.

The man moved incredibly quickly, using some strange telekinetic magic to skate across the floor at high speeds. He was big and muscular, sported an impressive mustache, and wielded a large saber in his hand. Not a weapon Zorian was used to facing, as most mages avoided close-quarter fighting if they could help it.

The enemy mage immediately charged at the simulacrum using that strange skating movement magic, silent and grim. He swung the saber in his hands towards the simulacrum, its edge lighting up with an ominous red glow that made it clear he wasn’t dealing with a simple steel blade.

Number two admitted he had been caught off guard a little… but only a little.

He performed a short-range teleport to get behind the man, avoiding his charge, and then fired a trio of attack spells at him. Instead of stopping and turning, however, the man skated along the walls and ceiling of the corridor, keeping all of his speed and momentum. He even used that strange saber of his to harmlessly dispel the first spell Zorian directed his way – a force lance that Zorian had sent at him in hopes of breaking his momentum by forcing him to shield. The simulacrum had to admit that was pretty impressive.

The second spell, however, was a soul magic attack – a short-range wave of ghostly force that minutely disturbed the connection of the soul with its body, causing a wave of nausea and vertigo in those affected. The spell was weak, and it could be greatly attenuated by just about any shield spell, but since the man trusted his saber over a classical defense spell he was hit by the wave at full blast. He stumbled for just a moment, but that moment of weakness was enough for Zorian to launch his third attack on him.

The severing whip struck like a viper, severing the man’s head from his shoulders in one fell swoop.

Simulacrum number two stared at the dead body for a few seconds in total silence, before taking the man’s saber for later examination and continuing on his way.

He still had an airship to crash.

The battle between the Pearl of Aranhal and the two opposing airships got increasingly heated as time went by. At first, the two attackers were aiming to recapture the ship mostly intact, and thus attempted to board them with soldiers and mages. However, when Zach and Zorian had sent their simulacrums to wreak havoc inside the enemy airships, trying to bring them down from the inside, and then repelled several boarding attempts despite their numerical disadvantage, that attitude began to change. They started firing their cannons at them, and then began lobbing increasingly deadly artillery spells their way, forcing Zach and Zorian to spend a lot of their mana on defense.

When it became obvious that Zorian’s simulacrum inside their airship could not be stopped, the Aranhali airship tried to ram them out of spite before going down… sadly, they made the Pearl of Aranhal too well, allowing Zach and Zorian to maneuver out of their way long enough for simulacrum number two to destroy the enemy airship’s flight cores and send it crashing into the ground below.

Finding itself alone against them, the Mezneri airship then chose to simply flee. Unlike their Aranhal allies, they had no reason to pursue this to the bitter end. Zach and Zorian let them run, and simply breathed a sigh of relief before continuing on their way. Keeping a massive vessel like the Pearl of Aranhal intact in the face of double aggression had strained even them, and the airship had not gotten out of battle unscathed. Thankfully, none of the damage was critical, and further pursuers wouldn’t be able to catch up to them.

Indeed, for the next few days, they had been blissfully free of any enemy going after them. The fact that they were flying over the desolate, trackless desert that covered the interior of northern Miasina probably had a lot to do with that. The only dangers were an occasional pair of desert drakes that got too curious for their own good and tried to fly closer to check them out. It gave them quite a scare, because they had initially mistaken them for dragons when they had spotted them in the distance, but they were easy to chase off otherwise.

A bigger problem turned out to be locating an accessible Bakora Gate. They wanted to find one before continuing towards the Ziggurat of the Sun, to make it easier to gain access to the ziggurat in future restarts. Unfortunately, the maps of known Bakora Gates in the area turned out to be really outdated and unreliable. This area had been hit hard by the Cataclysm, and almost no humans lived here anymore. Some of the gates were just gone, possibly destroyed in one of the many wars that had swept through the area as the desert spread northward. Or maybe they never existed, and the mapmakers had put them there based on faulty sources. Some were buried under the sand and gravel and thus unusable for their purposes. Some were there, but not quite in the area specified by the maps – the mapmakers had only known the general area where the gate was located and made an educated guess about the exact location instead of going there to actually check things.

Apparently mapmakers had been less concerned about quality control in the past. A lot less.

Still, they managed to find a suitable Bakora Gate after five days of flying around the desert. The time wasn’t entirely wasted, in any case – Zorian took advantage of his unrestricted access to the airship’s internals to inspect it in detail. He also took some of the equipment apart to see how it worked before putting it back together again, although he was forced to stop when Zach complained he would break things even worse than he already had.

In any case, once they had settled down on a Bakora Gate to use, they grounded the Pearl of Aranhal in the area before re-establishing contact with Eldemar. Zach had left one of his simulacrums there, so he could open a dimensional passage for them the same way Zorian used to do… except that he couldn’t contact his simulacrum telepathically through the soul, so they had to wait for a pre-arranged time of day instead of doing it on a whim.

There were a lot of things they had to do back in Eldemar. First of all, they had to secure the cooperation of the Silent Doorway Adepts in order to obtain the password of the Bakora Gate they had claimed. Their research into the method of operating the Bakora Gate had greatly improved the speed and reliability of the aranea opening ritual, but they still needed the web’s cooperation in order to make use of them. Thankfully, convincing the Silent Doorway Adepts to ally with them was a lot easier these days – the perfected opening ritual and the many new gate passwords they had obtained over the restarts made their words carry considerable weight. It usually took only a few days before the Silent Doorway Adepts were ready to work with them.

Secondly, they had to organize an expedition towards the Ziggurat of the Sun. Since the place was a Sulrothum stronghold, they couldn’t just fly in there as they pleased. They had a brand new airship, but Sulrothum could all fly. They had to scout the area, see if they could get Alanic on board, repair the Pearl of Aranhal and Zorian’s simulacrum-golems and then come up with a plan of approach after they had seen what they were working with.

Thus, Zach and Zorian reluctantly left their new airship out there in the desert, guarded only by a few simulacrums, while they went back to Eldemar to prepare things.

Hopefully nobody would try and take it while they were occupied elsewhere.

The room was packed. Everyone who was a part of their conspiracy, as Zach called it, was there: Kael, Taiven, Xvim, Alanic, Daimen… and Silverlake.

Silverlake had never taken part in these kinds of group meetings in the past. While they had managed to convince her the time loop was real and come to an agreement with her, she clearly didn’t trust them very much. She instructed them in pocket dimension creation and she worked with them to decipher the nature of the primordial prisons and the manner in which they were connected to the time loop reality and the real world… but she also kept trying to covertly spy on them and she was leaving coded messages to her future iterations inside her notes. Zorian couldn’t figure out what those coded messages were saying but he was sure they were there, even if Silverlake kept insisting he was just paranoid and making mountains out of molehills. She also stubbornly refused to make use of the time loop to work on her youth potion, but Zach and Zorian cared a lot less about that than she seemed to think.

In any case, the result of all this was that Zach and Zorian were both leery about trusting her too much and kept keeping her out of their greater plans and group meeting as such. However, that kind of thing couldn’t go on forever and it was becoming obvious that waiting for Silverlake to find something encouraging in the notes of her predecessors was an idle dream. They could only hope that if they extended a little more trust towards her (even though she sure hadn’t done anything to deserve that) she would eventually reciprocate.

Besides, their plans for the current restart were extensive and important enough that it didn’t feel right to exclude anyone out of the planning sessions.

It was interesting, though… Zorian had expected Silverlake to make a remark about Kael, since the morlock boy had indicated they had some kind of prior knowledge of each other when he had sent Zorian to talk to her, but Silverlake didn’t seem to notice him. It wasn’t that she was deliberately ignoring him as far as Zorian could tell; she just didn’t seem to perceive him as important or familiar. Perhaps she just didn’t connect the person with the face in front of her? Kael had no doubt been a child when they had last met, and he was a teenager now…

Regardless, while Silverlake did not recognize Kael, she definitely recognized someone else: Alanic. What was more, Alanic clearly recognized her as well. They faced off against each other for a full five seconds after they saw one another, just… staring at each other. Not saying anything. Then they looked away and pretended nothing happened. Since they didn’t say anything, Zorian pretended not to notice.

Currently, everyone was staring at Zach and Zorian with a complicated expression, momentarily struck speechless.

"That was you!?" Daimen exclaimed incredulously. "You’re the ones who did that airship theft that all the newspapers are talking about!?"

"That’s us, yup!" Zach said, nodding proudly. "We’re awesome."

"That’s…" Daimen said, grasping for words.

"Reckless," Xvim supplied.

"Stupid," Taiven offered.

"Your idea," Zorian said.

"Yeah, exact–" Daimen began, before registering what Zorian had said. "Wait, what?"

"Yup," Zorian nodded seriously. "Totally your idea."

"I assume you had a reason for doing that, then?" Alanic prompted.

"Of course," Zach laughed. "We had the best reason. Gather round, children, Grandpa Zach is going to tell you all a story…"

Over the next half an hour, Zach told everyone involved what the point behind the airship theft was. Zach being Zach, he focused more on describing the exciting parts of the airship battle than the strategic goal of the theft, or their reasoning, but he did eventually manage to get the point across. They needed the airship in order to locate all the Key pieces in time. Without the Pearl of Aranhal, travelling across the Xlotic desert to reach the Ziggurat of the Sun would probably require multiple restarts due to the hostile environment and a lack of human towns where they could hire teleporters at. Additionally, they eventually needed to reach Blantyrre to collect one of the pieces, and traversing the vast amount of ocean that separates Blantyrre from the nearest human landmass in less than a month would be nearly impossible through alternative methods.

"It’s more than that, though," Zach continued. "Not only is the airship we stole absolutely critical in getting us out of this time looping reality, it is also important practice for another theft that needs to happen."

"More thefts, mister Noveda?" Xvim asked him, raising an eyebrow inquisitively.

"Well, yes," Zach said. "After all, the dagger is held inside Eldemar’s royal treasury…"

"Oh heavens…" Taiven groaned, burying her face in her hands. "Zorian, are you seriously going to break into the royal vaults?"

Kael, who was sitting next to her, chuckled quietly.

"He kind of has to, doesn’t he?" he said, sounding a little amused.

"Since you’re mentioning this now, I’m guessing you intend to make the attempt at the royal treasury in this very restart, then?" Alanic asked.

"Yes," Zorian confirmed. "Additionally, we also intend to try and wrest the crown from Quatach-Ichl, the ancient lich fighting for the Ibasans. Potentially, we could gather all but one of the Key pieces in this very restart. I doubt we’ll succeed in getting them all this time – hell, I wouldn’t even be surprised if we fail to get any of them – but it’s good practice and it should at least tell us what areas we’re lacking in and what we need to work on to succeed next time."

"I see," Alanic sighed. "I will be frank – I am not very comfortable with condoning such an act of treason. Considering what is at stake here, I will not stand in your way… but you should not count on my help in this regard."

"Ha ha!" Silverlake suddenly cackled. "So righteous and serious! This is too funny! I still remember how you came to me back then, a budding little necromancer full of ambition and anger, asking for my help! It’s really hard to reconcile that memory with what you ended up becoming. A necromancer and a thief became a fervent priest and a patriot, now I’ve really seen everything in the world…"

Alanic stiffened slightly at her words and then gave her an angry glare. Silverlake just grinned cheekily at him. Taking a deep breath, Alanic rose from his seat and gave Zach and Zorian a frosty look.

"I think it would be best for everyone if I did not participate in this meeting anymore… or any other meeting where you planned how to best rob Eldemar’s royal family," Alanic said. "And while I realize more than anyone that desperation can make one do things they rather wouldn’t, I have to warn you that you’re making a mistake by working with this old ghoul. You’re playing with fire. She will stab you in the back in a heartbeat if she thought it would benefit her."

"Ah, I love you too, my little necromancer," Silverlake said sweetly.

Alanic did not bother to respond to her, or even look at her. He simply turned around and left the room. Not quite stormed off, but it wasn’t quite far from it.

Zorian resisted the urge to bury his face in his hands. It always had to be something, didn’t it?

A long, uncomfortable silence descended on the scene. Only Silverlake seemed entirely comfortable with the situation, humming happily to herself and idly examining one of the experimental potions Kael had made. The meeting was happening in one of the alchemical workshops Zorian had made for the white-haired boy, so there were quite a few of them lying around.

"So," Silverlake eventually began. "You were saying something about an ancient lich?"

80. Enemies

Although the Xlotic desert was usually depicted as an endless sea of sand, with only the occasionally broken up rocky outcroppings or secluded oases, its actual landscape was far more complex than that. There was plenty of sand, yes, but also vast fields of rock, barren hills and mountain ranges, remnants of dried-up lakes and riverbeds, and old Ikosian ruins scattered all over the place. And that was just the more mundane landmarks. Zorian had heard that there was a forest composed out of stony, seemingly fossilized trees in the deep desert, blooming with life and greenery during the rare times it rained in the area before reverting back to its seemingly lifeless appearance after a few weeks. Then there were the so-called water volcanos – massive geysers of boiling water that occasionally erupted from the Dungeon in some regions, flooding the area around them for a brief while.

The area around the Ziggurat of the Sun wasn’t as unusual as those two examples, but it was still an unusual place. First of all, this was once a famous temple complex of the Ikosian Empire, and a great many ruins were scattered around the area – ruins of temples, lesser ziggurats, military forts, private estates and so on. Many of these ruins had been claimed by the local sulrothum, but many more had been overrun by various desert-adapted monsters, which had moved into them and had dug themselves in too thoroughly for anyone to dislodge them. Secondly, there was a seasonal river passing through the area – although it only persisted for part of a year, it was enough to make the area relatively vibrant compared to its immediate surroundings. Finally, the local underworld was particularly extensive and featured a large underground lake that no doubt contributed to making the land far livelier than it realistically should have been this deep in the Xlotic interior.

Zach and Zorian were currently traveling through this land on foot, warily observing their surroundings. Their journey had been relatively free of dangers thus far, but that could change in a flash if they weren’t careful. The heat was also slowly starting to get to them. Their comfort spells had done a fine job of warding off sunstroke and the worst of the desert heat, but this sort of magic was not all-powerful and Xlotic was quite an extreme environment.

It made Zorian wish they had just arrived here in their pretty new airship. Unfortunately, that hadn’t been an option. They were coming here to try and negotiate with the sulrothum for the right of passage, and the devil wasps would no doubt react badly to the sight of an incoming airship. Most likely they would just attack the vessel immediately, ruining any chance of successful negotiations.

Well, if Zorian was being honest with himself, the negotiations were not very likely to be successful anyway. Although sulrothum were known to have peaceful interactions with humans on occasion, they had a reputation of being an extremely fierce and violent species, and there was a long history of bloody conflict between them and humanity. On top of that, sulrothum were incapable of producing the necessary sounds to mimic human speech, and humans could not speak sulrothum either, making communication between the two species difficult.

Even though the odds of a peaceful outcome were low, though, Zorian still felt they had to try. No doubt he and Zach could forcibly take the ziggurat from the sulrothum if they really applied themselves, but there were hundreds of these things living there and this was their home. This was where they kept their children, their food stockpiles and water reserves, their workshops and trade goods… they were not going to give the place up easily. They might even decide to fight to the death, which would force Zorian to deal with sulrothum children and non-combatants somehow. He’d rather avoid that headache if at all possible.

"This should be enough, no?" Zach suddenly said. He hopped onto a nearby rocky outcropping and quickly scanned their surroundings. "I think we’re far enough into their territory. Any further and they might attack us on principle. Though really, I still think we’re going about this the wrong way. Sulrothum are famed for their savagery, no? I bet smacking them around a bit until they’re ready to talk would produce better results than just approaching them peacefully. Show them we’re serious, you know?"

"You might yet get your wish," Zorian said, performing a brief sweep of the area with his mind sense, soul perception and his plain two eyes. There was some sort of snake hiding beneath a nearby patch of thorny bushes, but it was absolutely terrified of them and had no intention of attacking them, so Zorian ignored it. "If the wasps attack us immediately or refuse to even entertain our offer, we’ll go with your plan."

"Ha. Great," Zach grinned, before retrieving a water bottle from his backpack and emptying it on top of his head. He sighed in relief. "Ahh, I needed that…"

After some thought, Zorian decided to follow his example and did the same.

It did make him feel a lot better, he had to admit.

A minute or so of comfortable silence ensued.

"Shall we?" Zorian eventually asked.

"Yes," Zach nodded. "Fire away."

Zorian performed one of the many spells that produced a signal flare in some fashion – in this case, a brilliant red star that released a high-pitched scream as it flew through the air – and fired it straight into the sky above him, announcing their presence to everyone for miles around.

They didn’t have to wait long. Not even fifteen minutes after Zorian had fired the flare, a trio of black dots appeared on the horizon. Their features were kind of hard to discern because they were approaching them from a direction that let the sun illuminate their backs, but Zorian was pretty sure he was looking at an incoming sulrothum patrol.

Soon, this suspicion was proven correct.

They were louder than Zorian thought they would be. The drone of their wings, beating several times a second to keep their large bodies aloft, was audible from a considerable distance. It kind of made Zorian wonder why they even bothered to try and mask their approach when anyone who wasn’t deaf could hear them coming. Regardless, as the sulrothum patrol got closer, Zach and Zorian shifted their posture in preparation for a possible attack. They didn’t think the sulrothum would just attack them with no provocation – if nothing else, they’d have brought more tribe members if they were going to be hostile right off the bat – but it was best to be prepared for everything.

Their landing was anything but graceful. Instead of gradually slowing down, the sulrothum dropped to the ground with reckless speed, impacting the gravel-covered earth in front of Zach and Zorian with considerable force and kicking up dust and loose stones in every direction. The shockwave even reached the place where Zach and Zorian were standing, though the weather shields they had protecting them simply deflected these stray irritants to the side with no action required on their part.

Well. The meeting had barely even begun and already Zorian was starting to dislike the damn wasps.

In any case, with the sulrothum right in front of them, Zorian could finally take a good look at one. He had seen the descriptions and illustrations of them in the books, naturally, but that sort of thing really couldn’t compare to seeing something in person. They were big – smaller than the three meter long giants that the books described, but not that much smaller – but also very spindly and fragile-looking. That impression was misleading, he knew – sulrothum were said to be strong enough to tear a man limb from limb with their bare hands and tough as coffin nails. Black, glossy chitin covered their wasp-like forms, and their faces were very much insect-like – alien and inscrutable. Their eyes, as black as their bodies and multifaceted like those of most insects, gave away nothing of their inner thoughts. They had a pair of short antennae on top of their heads, though, and these twitched madly in their general direction, revealing their agitation. Zorian had trouble interpreting their thoughts and emotions, alien as they were to his sensibilities, but he could tell that the trio was feeling twitchy and paranoid, ready to either attack them or flee at the slightest sign of aggression.

All three of them carried spears. They were appropriately sized for a creature of sulrothum size and strength, which meant they were pretty gigantic by human standards. The size and weight alone made those spears a significant danger, even though they looked somewhat crudely made. In addition to these close-quarters weapons, each sulrothum also carried a handful of smaller spears strapped to their backs. These were the notorious heavy javelins that sulrothum used as their ranged attack method. Generally, every sulrothum raid opened with them hurling a storm of these javelins at their targets before closing in to clash with their foes face-to-face. Sulrothum bodies were strong and durable, and they did not fear close-quarters combat… but even so, they did not balk at softening up their targets a little before closing in.

Somehow, the spears and javelins made the sulrothum trio far more threatening than they should appear. Objectively speaking, the three devil wasps in front of them did not pose a significant threat to Zach and Zorian, but seeing them clutching those spears in their hands was a stark reminder that they were dealing with creatures that were not just sapient, but tool-users as well. As a rule, sapient monsters did not employ tools much – other than lizardmen and a few other species, most of them basically lived like animals. Their innate abilities were potent enough that technology largely seemed pointless to them. Why use a spear when your claws are sharper? Why build a house when the cold and the rain hardly hurt you? Sulrothum, though, went to the trouble of creating tools and homes that made use of their natural advantages and made them more potent than they would otherwise be. They shouldn’t take them too lightly.

"Hello," Zorian greeted with as much friendliness as he could manage, when standing in front of a trio of giant, sapient, aggressive wasps. "Do you understand me?"

He really hoped they did. Sulrothum tribes usually made sure they had at least a couple of members that could understand the local human language, but this tribe lived quite a distance away from any major human power so it was possible they felt no need to bother. If they were ignorant of any human tongue, or only understood a dialect that Zorian himself did not speak, they were in trouble. Telepathic communication between entities that did not speak a common language was a crude and often unpleasant thing, doubly so if the people involved were as different in their perception of the world as humans and sulrothum were.

The three sulrothum erupted into a storm of chattering, punctuated by an occasional buzz of their wings and mad flailing of their antennae. However, they did not bother to face each other to do so, their attention on Zach and Zorian never wavering and their spears pointed firmly in their direction. Finally, the sulrothum on the left stepped forth towards them before twirling his spear theatrically and stabbing into the ground. He thrust all four of his hands towards them, palms open, in a gesture that was probably supposed to prove that he really was unarmed.

Then he made a series of hand gestures before leaning back and expectantly waiting for a response.

Zorian frowned. Was this how the sulrothum usually communicated with humans? It would make sense, he supposed. Most mages weren’t as proficient in mind magic as Zorian, and Ikosian spellcasting language already employed a lot of hand gestures so this method of communication wouldn’t be totally alien for a lot of people. Plus, sulrothum hands were remarkably similar to human ones, despite being giant wasps.

"Well that’s a bit of a problem," Zach commented lightly.

Zorian ignored him.

"I do not understand that," Zorian said, speaking loudly and slowly. "Please think your responses at me in human language. I will pick it up from your thoughts."

The sulrothum froze for a moment before flattening his antennae over his forehead and hissing at him, sounding remarkably like an angry housecat.

"I think you got him a little angry," Zach supplied helpfully from the side.

Yeah, thanks Zach. Real helpful of you.

The sulrothum reached to his side and grasped one of the several items tied to his waist – a small bundle of herbs and bones, wrapped in snake leather. All three had a couple of trinkets like that hanging off their bodies, but until now Zorian had not put too much thought into that. In any case, the sulrothum proceeded to wave the bundle in front of him, as if trying to ward himself against Zorian’s magic. Sadly for him, the bundle didn’t really do anything as far as Zorian could tell.

Zorian was mystified at the action before it occurred to him that this might be the equivalent of one of those silly folk charms that old grannies and street sellers sometimes peddled to children, travelers and the like.

"I mean you no harm. I really don’t," Zorian said, as soothingly as he could manage. It didn’t seem to help. The sulrothum in front of him just waved his little charm harder and the other two sulrothum were starting to get more agitated as well. "And really, your thoughts are safe! I can only see what you think in human terms, nothing else!"

This was effectively true. While Zorian could indeed see into the sulrothum mind, even their emotions were a pain to puzzle out, much less their surface thought. If he wanted to be able to read their minds, he would have to invest months or years of work to do so, much like he did with aranea. They didn’t have time for that.

The sulrothum in front of him was silent for a few seconds. Then, seemingly realizing that his magic charm was not being effective, he stashed it back on his belt and shifted his posture into a more confident stance.

[Speak,] the sulrothum said in his mind.

"Fine," Zorian nodded. "First, let me introduce ourselves. I am Zorian and the person next to me is Zach. May I know who I’m talking to?"

[No,] the sulrothum replied.

Ugh.

[I will not give you my name, sorcerer,] the devil wasp clarified after a few seconds. [Everyone knows that names have power and that your kind can use them against us.]

What? This was news to Zorian…

Well, whatever. He would just think of the sulrothum in front of him as Buzzkill for now, then.

"We seek passage through your territory and wish to present gifts to your leaders," Zorian said. He didn’t mention anything about searching the ziggurat yet, since simply getting inside would give them useful information. At the very least they would find out if the Key piece was actually there if they could get in, due to the detection ability of their markers.

[Out of the question,] Buzzkill said resolutely. [You are not of the tribe.]

"Do you not accept guests in your home?" Zorian frowned. "I know we are different, but surely there is some kind of tradition of hospitality in your tribe?"

Buzzkill’s hands twitched into a beginning of a gesture, before he caught himself and laboriously started forming thought for Zorian to detect. The language he spoke was a strange dialect of Ikosian, possibly an archaic version of some local dialect, but Zorian had gotten relatively proficient in Xlotic dialects by now, and could puzzle out his meanings easily enough. It helped that they weren’t having some particularly high-minded discussion here.

[A wise one does not simply let strangers walk into his home,] Buzzkill stated. [We would need to make sure you are friends of the tribe. Signs would have to be consulted and proper rituals observed.]

"I… see," Zorian said uncertainly. "And how long would that last?"

[Many days,] Buzzkill said. Zorian could be wrong, but he thought he detected a note of schadenfreude in his thoughts.

Zorian was silent for a while, considering the situation. A few more questions to Buzzkill regarding this whole process of consulting the signs and whatnot did not yield anything except vague explanations and refusals to elaborate. It was all very secret and not to be spoken to with outsiders, apparently.

His questioning was eventually interrupted by an incoming telepathic message, however – one coming from Zach. He may not be psychic like Zorian was, but telepathy was not beyond the reach of normal mages – it was just rarely used because it required a great deal of training to use, even if one knew the relevant spells, and because of trust concerns. Now, thanks to the extensive training of his mental defenses over the last dozen or so restarts, Zach had lost some of his paranoia regarding mind magic, allowing them to silently exchange thoughts when the situation called for it.

Who knew, maybe one day Zach would actually let him perform a detailed examination of his mind to see if Red Robe had left any more surprises in there…

[I’m guessing things aren’t going too well?] Zach asked.

[Hard to say,] Zorian said. [Strictly speaking, he didn’t say no, just that it would require a lot of time and effort, and probably bribes, for us to be granted entry into their territory… but I don’t know.]

[Huh. Alright,] Zach said.

"Hey, big guy!" Zach suddenly spoke out loud, causing all three sulrothum to turn their heads towards him. "Be honest. You don’t really intend to let us meet your leaders, do you?

Buzzkill shook his wings a few times contemptuously, before laboriously forming words in his mind again.

[It is not my decision to decide that,] he said. [But I think not. We are wise to your ploys. Your kind is dangerous and scheming, and you forever lust after this place. It was once yours, and you have never come to terms with how it changed hands.]

Any further discussion was rendered obsolete when Zach and Zorian noticed a swarm of black dots on the horizon. There were at least 20 of them and they were coming straight towards them.

[I advise you to turn and leave this place,] Buzzkill said, sounding much more confident now. [You are not welcome here.]

Silently, Zach and Zorian seemed to have come to an agreement. They both immediately launched offensive spells at the sulrothum in front of them.

The three sulrothum reacted quickly, probably having expected hostilities to break out soon. Buzzkill wrenched his spear out of the ground and charged straight at them with a loud, screeching battle cry while the two sulrothum in the back reached towards the javelins strapped at their back. Neither of them accomplished their goal – a massive wave of telekinetic force and cutting wind erupted from Zach, smashing straight into them and sending them away like bowling pins. A human would have been reduced to bloody chunks if caught in that kind of attack head on, but the three sulrothum survived mostly intact.

Before they could reorganize, Zorian fired a pair of force javelins at them, each one carrying a different amount of damaging force in itself. The purpose of this battle wasn’t so much to kill the three sulrothum – they could have done that in the initial salvo if they so wished – but rather to puzzle out the limits of their protective abilities and intimidate the tribe somewhat so that they were more likely to negotiate when they come in force later. With that in mind, Zach and Zorian proceeded to throw the three sulrothum around like rag dolls, breaking their wings and limbs in the process and making sure that the incoming sulrothum forces could see the overwhelming power they represented.

Eventually the incoming sulrothum swarm finally arrived at the scene and it was time to leave. Zach and Zorian tanked one of the javelin salvos from the group, just to show they could, and then teleported away.

But they would be back, and they would bring an army with them next time.

"Alright, now that everyone is here, we can officially begin," Zorian said, giving everyone present a cursory look. "I know that some of you have certain… misgivings about some of the people present, but it means a lot to me and Zach that you were willing to come here regardless."

He gave Alanic and Silverlake a look while saying that, as they were pretty much the people this was directed at.

After Alanic had abruptly left the meeting last time, the meeting had been wrapped up soon afterwards. It felt wrong to just continue the discussion without someone as critical as Alanic being present, so they mostly spent the meeting bringing Silverlake up to speed in regards to their plans and activities.

"I don’t know what you’re talking about, brat. Personally, I though the last meeting was a fun little reunion," Silverlake said. "It’s not my fault Alanic decided to be a baby for no reason. Really, one would think a grown man like him would be at peace with his own past by now. Not to mention–"

"Silverlake, please," Zorian interrupted her with a long-suffering sigh. "We’re here to talk about Quatach-Ichl and how to tackle him, okay? Let’s leave these kinds of personal discussions for some other time."

Preferably never. He shot Alanic a grateful look for not rising to her bait and sparking another confrontation. Alanic did not visibly react, simply pretending as if Silverlake did not exist.

"Indeed," Xvim said, tapping his finger at the table speculatively. "I assume you have some sort of a plan, already?"

"Only a basic outline," Zorian said. "We definitely need to surprise him, and it should preferably be done near the very end of the restart. Quatach-Ichl’s movements become increasingly predictable as the date of the invasion approaches and most of the Ibasan resources are already committed somewhere by that point, meaning that Quatach-Ichl will have trouble marshaling most of his underlings to defend him or send them in pursuit of us if we can recover his crown. As for the actual execution of the ambush… well, we first wanted to try catching him with a soul-severing bullet, since that could end the fight immediately if it works."

"Soul-severing… that’s the coin trick you used to disable him in the past, yes?" Xvim asked.

"I still can’t believe that actually worked," Kael sighed. "I had to reread that part of your notes three times to make sure I caught that correctly. I don’t know what my previous self was thinking, sending you against an ancient lich armed with that. It shouldn’t have worked."

"It was a pretty lucky win," Zorian admitted. "It only worked because Quatach-Ichl did not see me as a threat and thus decided to catch an object thrown at him in his hand instead of simply deflecting it away or shielding against it. I doubt I could engineer such a situation artificially and there is no way a coin is getting through his defenses during combat circumstances."

"Yeah, no way," Zach agreed. "I’ve tried to nail him with items in the past. No chance of him overlooking something like that while you’re fighting him. He often actually sends thrown items right back at you with a casual gesture. He is quite proficient with unstructured telekinesis."

"I’m not sure I understand how this maneuver is possible," Xvim admitted. "Unusual circumstances aside, you employed an elementary piece of soul magic to shut down a lich. Liches are famous for being fiendishly hard to deal with, so why did a thousand-year-old one fall so easily?"

"Because it wasn’t Kael’s little spell that exiled the lich’s soul back to his phylactery," Silverlake said. "It was his own soul defenses that did that. You may think that being vulnerable to a cheap trick like this is a weakness, but imagine for a moment what would happen if that coin the brat used was a fancy soul jar or the like."

"His soul would get captured and his phylactery would be useless," Xvim said. "I see. So liches like him make their defenses incredibly sensitive, so that even the slightest soul disturbance causes their souls to snap back to their phylactery."

"Precisely," Alanic said. "Losing a body and everything you had on your person is a blow to be sure, but it pales to the possibility of having your soul captured."

"Most people don’t carry a one-of-a-kind divine artifact like the crown of the first emperor," Zach noted.

"I’m sure Quatach-Ichl feels he can recover the crown from whoever claimed it off his… err, corpse," Zorian said. "Considering his level of power, he’s not too far from the truth."

"Besides, what good are awesome magical items like that if you’re not allowed to make use of them for fear of losing them?" Silverlake said. "I’d wear a fancy magical crown too, if I had one. Always wanted to try playing a princess as a little girl…"

"Unsolicited childhood fantasies aside, I’d like to remind you two that all liches are automatically powerful soul mages, and can adjust their soul defenses quite easily and rapidly," said Alanic. "If you hope to banish Quatach-Ichl’s soul back to his phylactery, you only have one attempt per restart to do so. After that the lich will be expecting such a ploy and will likely take necessary precautions against it."

"What about going one step further and making an actual soul jar in order to capture Quatach-Ichl’s soul?" Kael asked. "I mean, the last time Zorian tried this, he only had me to help and I’m… kind of a beginner at this. With Alanic and Silverlake here… well, they’re clearly both very capable soul mages, so perhaps they could make something more potent than that?"

Alanic and Silverlake shared a long, complex look before they both refocused on Kael again.

"No," Alanic sighed, shaking his head sadly. "You are drastically overestimating our skills. Aside from having your phylactery destroyed, the biggest danger to a lich is having your soul captured. They spend a great deal of their energies making sure that can’t happen under any circumstances. An old, experienced lich like Quatach-Ichl…"

"The only realistic way of dealing with him is destroying his phylactery," Silverlake finished for him. "Nothing else would work."

"I see," Kael said in a subdued manner.

"There is a reason why so many mages aim for lich-hood," Silverlake noted. "As far as methods of immortality go, having your very own resurrection point is hard to beat."

"Being undead is no true immortality, merely a twisted reflection of one," Alanic stated.

Silverlake harrumphed at him, but said nothing. Instead, she turned towards Zach and Zorian and gave them a speculative look.

"What?" Zach asked.

"Did you two ever think about just… soulkilling Quatach-Ichl? You know, that trick the third time traveler used on the aranea and such? It would neatly solve this problem, not just in this restart, but in all subsequent ones as well."

"We did," Zach nodded slowly. "The conclusion was that we have to be very careful with that. The headaches we had with Veyers had taught us that a person behind heavy wards is essentially untraceable. If we soulkill Quatach-Ichl and it turns out he begins the restart behind some heavy wards or a place that nobody knows about, the crown might become completely unrecoverable."

"Hmm," Silverlake hummed. "You should really try to track down his movements and bases some of these days…"

"I’m going to have to agree with her on this," Alanic said. "I know you say you’re stretched enough as it is, but even a mere chance of ridding the world of such an ancient lich would be worth throwing some effort in that direction. This is probably the best chance of anyone tracking down his phylactery in the foreseeable future."

"That’s easier to say than to actually put into practice," Zach said, shaking his head.

A small silence descended at the scene, only broken up when Silverlake decided to clear her throat and attract everyone’s attention to herself.

"In any case, I’ve done some digging in my personal records after you’ve explained the situation to me… I think I have something that might help you take down Quatach-Ichl," she said, pulling out a weathered old scroll out of her bag.

"Oh?" Zach said eagerly. "Do tell."

"It’s a trap field that prevents souls from escaping out of the area," Silverlake said, throwing the scroll in his direction. Zach caught it, fumbling slightly with the catch due to not expecting the move. "For undead like Quatach-Ichl, it stops them from leaving until they shut down the ward. If you can lure him into the field, it should give him trouble for a time at the very least. I heard he moves a lot around the battlefield and loves to retreat to come back later. This ward is not nearly as obvious as an anti-teleportation field, but effectively has the same effect as one on undead."

Huh. That did sound very useful against Quatach-Ichl.

"Anyway, I would be of little use to you in the actual battle against a powerful lich like Quatach-Ichl, but I can help you set up the battlefield beforehand," Silverlake continued. "Aside from the spell I just gave you, I also have a few other surprises, though none are as effective as that one. And while Zorian is arguably a better warder than I am, he doesn’t have experience with these particular spells."

"I’m probably going to take you up on that offer," Zorian said. This restart was going to get pretty busy as their preparations approached completion, so any chance to offload some of his responsibilities on someone else was useful. "Every little bit of help is useful. As for Xvim and Alanic, I am hoping you two will help us battle Quatach-Ichl if the ambush fails."

"Which it probably will," Zach noted.

"Hush, child," Silverlake chided him. "Don’t you know you will curse this whole endeavor with such talk?"

"Just being realistic," Zach shrugged. "I tangled with Quatach-Ichl the most out of anyone here, so I feel I have the right to be a little pessimistic. Anyway, I actually have a suggestion of my own. I think I have an idea about something we can do to better prepare for the eventual battle against Quatach-Ichl."

"And what would that be, mister Noveda?" Xvim asked.

"A practice fight!" Zach said with a cheerful grin. "I’ll play the role of Quatach-Ichl and you will all cooperate and try to subdue me. Admittedly, I am not an ancient lich of unfathomable power and experience, but I did recently become capable of creating my own simulacrums, so there is no danger of me getting hurt in the fighting. You can think of me as a discount Quatach-Ichl, I guess."

Zorian flinched a little at his description. This was such a bad idea…

"Zach," he protested. "There is no warding scheme in existence that would be able to handle the level of destruction involved in such–"

"I think it’s a great idea," Alanic suddenly said. Zorian gave him an incredulous look. "I would like to also invite Silverlake to participate in these exercises. Even if she doesn’t intend to participate in the actual battle, these sort of mock fights would surely help her get a better perspective on what she is dealing with and help her fine-tune her preparations…"

Oh come on!

"What’s that supposed to mean?" Silverlake said, scowling at him.

This sparked a loud fight between them, the two of them slinging barbs and thinly-veiled insults at each other while Zorian’s mood steadily worsened.

[I hope you’re happy with yourself,] Zorian sent to Zach telepathically.

[It’s going to be great, you’ll see,] Zach sent him back, completely unapologetic.

Zorian looked at Alanic and Silverlake, who were still trying to out-talk each other, and then at Xvim, who looked like he wanted to attack both of them to make them shut up. Kael had decided to flat-out vacate the room at some point, which was probably smart of him. He was too weak to participate in the sort of practice fight Zach was suggesting and staying behind might mean he would get pulled into the argument between Alanic and Silverlake.

"Yeah," Zorian muttered to himself. "Great."

In the end, despite Zorian cautioning against it, the group decided to hold the battle practice that Zach suggested. Alanic obviously supported the idea, and he managed to goad Silverlake into supporting it too in the end. Xvim, though annoyed with the way Alanic and Silverlake were acting, felt it was a sensible idea… and was probably curious about the level of magical skill that Zach and Zorian truly had, anyway.

Thankfully, the practice fight was not going to happen for a few more days, leaving Zorian time to tangle with other issues. Mainly, this meant making preparations for the attack on the Ziggurat of the Sun. Golems had to be made, terrain scouted and information on sulrothum gathered. Thankfully, Alanic had agreed to help them out during the fighting, despite his disagreements with them over the inclusion of Silverlake into the time looping conspiracy. Fighting pagan monsters that had seized a religious monument of the faith, Alanic said, was a worthy task for a battle priest like him. Unfortunately, having him gather a small army and having them assist in the endeavor, like he had done in some of the previous restarts, was apparently not possible. Those people had been willing to participate in secret operations on Eldemarian soil, but bringing them to the deepest stretches of the Xlotic desert to fight the sulrothum was bound to backfire. They would demand explanations and refuse to cooperate.

No, if Zach and Zorian wanted to have real people assisting them in their attack on the ziggurat, they needed to hire mercenaries and factions in Xlotic itself – preferably in the region closest to the Ziggurat of the Sun. As a bonus, such locals likely had first-hand information about sulrothum and their battle tactics, having been fighting them for decades now.

At the moment, Zach and Zorian were sitting around an open air table in one of Cyoria’s fancier taverns and discussing the issue. Zorian was slowly sipping his fruit juice, while Zach had ordered the biggest keg of beer that Zorian had ever seen served in this kind of establishment. Zorian had initially thought that the keg was undrinkable in any sort of reasonable time-frame, but Zach was making a valiant effort to prove him wrong on that account.

The contrast between the two probably looked quite funny, because the other patrons occasionally gave them funny glances and shook their heads in amusement.

"Anyway," Zorian said, "the idea of consulting and hiring the locals for the fight against the sulrothum is good, but I’m running into issues of language again. I acquired a decent grasp of various Xlotic dialects by now, and Daimen and his connections help substantially, but this just isn’t enough when I’m trying to actually hire guides, scholars, mercenaries and whatnot. I think we may need to find an actual translator to help us out. I wonder if we can talk Zenomir into going on a trip to Xlotic with us…"

"Bah. Why bring an old man like that when we can bring a hot girl instead?" Zach asked. "Neolu is native to the region, and I bet she’d love to ditch school and go wander the world with us. Actually, I don’t have to wonder – I know she’d like that because I used to do that sometimes. Just… tell her I’m a time traveler and bring her along with me as I wandered the continent. Sometimes I’d bring others along too, but most people aren’t willing to accept the whole time traveler explanation as readily as she…"

"Ah, I remember her," Zorian said. "And you say she’s really easy to convince about time travel?"

"Yeah, definitely," Zach nodded. "She asks for proof, of course, but that’s easy to give. I already know more than enough to convince her to join us. Though admittedly she might be a little more reluctant to run off with two boys than just one. I, uh… used to phrase my offer more like a romantic getaway than a business transaction."

Zorian sighed in exasperation. Then again, if he had been stuck in a time loop like Zach had been, with no obvious danger pressing down on him, wouldn’t he do the same thing? He’d probably take advantage of the time loop to go after a girl or two…

"Why don’t we first try to talk to her about this before we take it for granted that she’d want to go along with this," Zorian told him.

"At the very least she probably won’t mind getting us in contact with her family," Zach said with a shrug. "Her family is rich and in a bit of a political crisis right now, so it should be possible to acquire their cooperation in exchange for helping them out with a problem or two. Finding us a translator or two is the least they could do for us."

"A bit of a political crisis?" Zorian asked slowly.

"It’s a long story," Zach said dismissively. He took a large gulp from his massive keg of beer and took a deep breath. He was going to get completely drunk again before this was all done, wasn’t he? "I’ll tell you later, if Neolu herself doesn’t tell you."

"Hello there. Do you mind if I join you for a few minutes?" a voice suddenly asked from the side.

Zach and Zorian were very surprised to hear this request. They had set up a privacy ward around their table, which was a clear sign to everyone that they did not want to be disturbed. They turned their attention to the source of the request, which turned out to be an older man in an expensive-looking suit. He wasn’t one of the tavern workers and neither Zach nor Zorian had ever seen him before, so it was unusual for him to approach them like this.

Despite this, Zorian did not think for a moment that the man was just a curious tavern patron.

After all, if the man was just your average person, he would be able to sense the man’s mind. And he couldn’t. The man was completely blank to his mind sense, as if he didn’t exist at all.

Mind blank was not an easy spell to cast, and being under its effects immediately placed the man in the upper tier selection of mages.

Zorian silently communicated this to Zach through telepathy, after which they shared an uneasy look between themselves.

"Sure," Zach eventually said. "Have a seat."

The man smiled at them confidently, as if he had always known they would have accepted his request. He took an empty chair from a nearby table and dragged it off to join them around theirs.

Zorian scrutinized him, trying to see if something in his features would jog his memory. He was a pretty striking person, though, so it was unlikely he would have forgotten him if he had dealt with him in the past. He had very proud posture, like someone who had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and his clothes and immaculate appearance reinforced it. His skin was darker than was common in this corner of Altazia, suggesting southern origins. Perhaps he was someone from Xlotic whose attention they somehow attracted? It wouldn’t be impossible for a powerful mage from Xlotic to eventually make their way to Eldemar.

"Thank you for your hospitality," the man said politely. "I guess I should introduce myself. I am Saruwata Merenptah and I’m afraid I’m here to discuss something a bit… unpleasant. You see, I have recently noticed that you have been gathering information about me and interfering with my activities, so I have decided to come here and see if there is any way we could discuss this in a civilized manner and maybe come to a peaceful solution. I do not consider myself an unreasonable man."

What an exotic name… it definitely sounded Xlotic, but he was pretty sure that kind of name was obscure even there. He definitely didn’t remember about interacting with any person named like that, and he had a pretty good memory thanks to his mental powers. The rest of his story, though… what the hell was he talking about? He gave Zach a questioning look, but his fellow time traveler shook his head in the negative. Zorian turned back to the man and gave him a serious look.

"I’m afraid you made some kind of mistake, mister Merenptah," Zorian said.

"No, I don’t think I have," Saruwata said confidently. "My name may be confusing you somewhat. I rarely use my old name when interacting with the public, so most people have forgotten it. Just the way I like it, to be honest."

Zorian frowned.

"How do you expect us to know who you are if you hide your identity like that?" Zach asked, his tone somewhat unfriendly.

Zorian didn’t blame him; perhaps it was because of the man’s unflinching confidence, appearing as if he was holding all the cards and the outcome of this meeting was already predetermined, or because of the mind blank he put on himself, but he was really starting to dislike this Saruwata Merenptah. He also noticed that the man’s soul was flawlessly stable, with not even the tiniest ripples marring its surface as they spoke, which meant he was a soul mage of the highest order. Not even Alanic could keep his soul so featureless.

"Ha ha!" the man abruptly laughed. His soul still remained completely calm, despite his obvious amusement. "So you’re saying you’re targeting so many people that telling you I’m one of your victims isn’t enough to narrow things down? Interesting, interesting…"

Zach scowled. "Mister Merenptah, I’m starting to think you’re asking for a beating."

"If I tell you I’ve been around for a while, will this help?" the man said, grinning from ear to ear.

Master mage. Incredibly proficient in soul magic. Xlotic in origin. Someone they were targeting. Very old… older than he looks? Fake appearance? Obscure name… possibly an archaic one? Old enough to go out of fashion?

Fuck…

Zorian swallowed heavily.

"Quatach-Ichl?" he asked.

The man’s grin never wavered. Instead, a flash of sickly green light passed over his face for a moment, revealing a familiar pitch-black skull of a millennia-old lich. Then the moment passed and his face was the same flesh-and-blood mask he had been wearing up until now.

"I’m so pleased to deal with intelligent people," Quatach-Ichl said, leaning back in his chair. "It makes things so much easier. So… do you think you’re ready to talk?"

81. A Civil Conversation

The tavern was a bright, lively place. Not very crowded, which was why Zach and Zorian had chosen it, but there were plenty of people talking, drinking, eating and walking around. Some of them gave their table a glance from time to time, but that was just idle curiosity and they went about minding their own business soon afterwards. Nobody really paid attention to them, nor to the new arrival that had joined them at their table.

They didn’t even realize they were in the presence of a millennia-old lich that was currently plotting to destroy the whole city.

Then again, that was to be expected. Quatach-Ichl’s disguise was practically flawless. Even Zach and Zorian had been fooled until he had revealed himself, so how could a bunch of random bystanders notice something was wrong? Even now, with the lich within a hand’s reach of Zorian, he was struggling to notice any obvious tells that the man in front of him was actually a walking skeleton instead of a real flesh-and-blood creature.

Seconds ticked by in total silence, the two sides silently staring at each other. Zorian would have liked to claim that he was furiously thinking about the implications of this sudden visit and devising the proper way to tackle it, but the truth was that he was thoroughly shocked and was having trouble formulating any kind of coherent train of thought at the moment. He could hardly believe that Quatach-Ichl had casually walked up to them in a busy tavern and started talking to them like there was nothing wrong. What the hell was he even thinking!? This was surprisingly impulsive behavior for someone who was supposed to be more than a thousand years old.

Fortunately, Zach was more adept at retaining his presence of mind in these kinds of unexpected situations. The benefit of greater experience granted to him by the literal decades he had spent in the time loop, Zorian supposed.

"You look better than I would have expected you to look," Zach commented.

"How so?" Quatach-Ichl asked curiously. He made a couple of gestures at the passing waiter, ordering a something for himself. Zorian wasn’t sure what, but the waiter seemed to have understood him and responded with a casual nod in return.

Why was a lich like Quatach-Ichl ordering drinks, even though he doesn’t need to drink? Probably for the sake of appearances, but still. Could he even drink? Was his disguise good enough to allow that?

"You look surprisingly… fleshy," Zach clarified, taking a sip from the massive keg of beer in front of him.

"Ah, that," Quatach-Ichl said. "Truthfully, this is how I usually look. The skeleton form is something I reserve for battles and intimidation purposes."

Having spied on the lich a few times in the previous restarts, Zorian knew this wasn’t quite true. Quatach-Ichl also habitually appeared as a skeleton when interacting with the Ibasan forces and other people involved in the invasion… though perhaps he counted that under intimidation.

"It’s pretty bold to just approach your enemies like this," Zach commented.

"Are you going to attack me in the middle of this tavern?" Quatach-Ichl countered.

"I’m seriously considering it," Zach said, his face twisted into a small frown.

"No, you’re not," Quatach-Ichl said, giving them a knowing smile. "Putting aside the morality of involving all these defenseless bystanders in our dispute, starting a fight here would be just as bad for you as it would be for me. The ruling powers of this country would be just as interested in your activities as they would be in my own – probably even more so, since you two would be easier to blackmail and take control of than me."

He was right, of course. The two of them had come here without disguises, in their real identities. If they were to fight the Ibasan lich here, the authorities would track them down within a matter of hours, and the level of skill they would be forced to show during the fight would intrigue and alarm just about everyone involved. Once they started to look into Zach and Zorian, all sort of interesting things would come out. Even if the two of them won the fight with Quatach-Ichl and somehow managed to avoid any dead bystanders or property damage along the way, the restart would be effectively over. At that point they could just as well end the restart and start over.

Well, the truth was that the smartest thing to do would probably be to just end the restart immediately. Having this conversation with Quatach-Ichl was equivalent to playing with fire. Not even the ability to end the restart on a whim could perfectly guarantee their safety. Sudomir could detect when Zorian started messing with his soul marker, so Quatach-Ichl could doubtlessly do it too. With him so close to them, and having come here prepared for anything, it was entirely possible they might not be able to activate the marker in time before he made his move. Plus, an unscrupulous, ancient mage like him would no doubt have a whole host of subtle tricks in his arsenal, and they would possibly not even realize they were being attacked until it was too late.

Despite that, Zorian had to admit he was curious. He wanted to take the risk and hear what Quatach-Ichl had to say. This was a potential disaster, but also a potential opportunity. It was the first time they’d had the chance to engage in any kind of meaningful conversation with Quatach-Ichl, and Zorian had a feeling this kind of thing was not an easy thing to replicate between restarts.

"What you say is true, but it seems to me that you’d still be the bigger loser if we fight," Zorian said. "If your actions become known to–"

"You could have easily made that happen by now," Quatach-Ichl said calmly, cutting him off. "I don’t know how much knowledge you have about what I’m trying to do, but I’m guessing quite a bit. You could have easily made your findings public by now, but you didn’t. Instead you limited yourselves to raiding our supply caches and striking at the more careless members of our little conspiracy."

Zorian frowned. He supposed this was what Quatach-Ichl had been referring to when he said they had been interfering with his activities. However, the fact of the matter was that Zach and Zorian habitually did that kind of thing in every single restart, more in order to acquire additional funding than anything else, and it had never caused them to run afoul of Quatach-Ichl as a result. Minor complications like that didn’t usually arouse his attention. So the true reason Quatach-Ichl had managed to find them must be located elsewhere, and Zorian could think of two main possibilities. For one thing, this was the first time they’d gone after Quatach-Ichl directly, and maybe the ancient lich could detect that somehow. The second possibility was that Silverlake had overestimated her ability again and tried to gather information on Quatach-Ichl herself, with predictable results.

He was leaning towards the second possibility.

"So you saw we moved against your group and noticed we could have probably done even more damage if we really tried and thought to yourself: man, I really need to have a friendly chat with those guys?" Zach asked.

"Why not?" Quatach-Ichl challenged. "We may be enemies, but so what? Enemies talk to each other all the time. Half of the world’s diplomats would be out of jobs otherwise. Well, all of them, if you’re a cynical old bastard like myself and see all international interactions as fundamentally hostile, but you know what I’m saying. The point is that you could have reported your findings to the authorities, but decided not to. And I could have easily gone after some of the people close to you in retaliation for the raids you’ve done on my allies, but chose to have this discussion with you instead."

Both Zach and Zorian glared at him lightly in response to that thinly-veiled threat at the end. Quatach-Ichl pretended not to notice the look.

"Anyway, what I’m saying is… we may be enemies, but we aren’t irreconcilable enemies," Quatach-Ichl concluded. "Surely we can reach some kind of agreement here?"

"I’m afraid I’m going to have to disagree with you there," Zach said. "You want to destroy Cyoria, gather the souls of everyone who dies and feed them all to wraiths, release a primordial to rampage around the region and trigger another round of Splinter Wars. Unless you’re willing to drop this whole invasion thing and go back to your island, we pretty much are irreconcilable enemies. Don’t mistake our current passivity for willingness to quietly watch by the sidelines while you execute your mad schemes."

"Aha. So I was right, you do know quite a lot…" Quatach-Ichl said slowly, neither alarmed nor angry at Zach’s statement. "However, if you’ll forgive me for being a little blunt… why do you care?"

Zach raised an eyebrow at him.

"I’ve looked into you a bit before coming here," the ancient lich continued. "Neither of you are all that closely connected to the city itself. You are a scion of a dead house that has been taken advantage of, and Zorian here is just a talented outsider attending school here. I’m really not sure why people of your caliber would waste time on basic magic classes like that, but there are all kinds of people in this world, I suppose. Personally, I’d have gone crazy in a matter of weeks if I had to impersonate a complete beginner at magic for several years but… eh, I’m getting a little off-track. The point is, each of you has only a handful of people here that you really care about. We could easily arrange for them to be outside on the day of the invasion. Do you really care that much, in your heart of hearts, about all the random people that are going to die?"

If Quatach-Ichl had asked Zorian that at the start of the time loop, before he had largely come to terms with his place in the world, got to know all the people around him and witnessed in excruciating detail just what the invasion of Cyoria actually looked like… maybe he really would have answered no in his head, like Quatach-Ichl clearly expected him to.

But now…

He remembered the image of Nochka and the other shifter children, naked and in cages, reaching out to him and screaming for help. It was closely followed by the memories of all the people who helped him in all these restarts, and who would likely die in the invasion if he did nothing to stop it, as well as all the different scenes of slaughter and looting he had witnessed over the restarts. He decided that yes, he very much did care. And he was pretty sure Zach did too.

"Don’t you?" Zorian challenged.

"Not really, no," Quatach-Ichl said seriously. "I come from an age where it was quite normal to round up all the mages and combat-capable men in a conquered town and mount their severed heads on pikes just outside the city walls as a warning to all who would dare defy you. I find modern sentimentality in regards to war casualties insincere, hypocritical and faintly disgusting."

"Ah," said Zorian with distaste. He supposed this only made sense. Quatach-Ichl was more than a millennium old, and came from a different, more bloodthirsty time. For all that he was considered tough but fair by his own soldiers, the army he once led against the Old Alliance was famed for their brutality towards the conquered populace. It was said to be one of the main reasons his side had lost the war against Eldemar.

"What’s with that look on your face?" Quatach-Ichl said, rolling his eyes at him. "Be honest, now… if you were really such a moral and upstanding citizen, why would you go to so much trouble to hide your true level of power and all the various projects you seem to be financing? Why would you move against me on your own instead of coordinating your actions with the law enforcement and the military? Whomever you are connected to, it clearly isn’t Eldemar’s government. So I ask again: why do you care so much about what happens to Cyoria?"

Huh. That was interesting. It was obvious that Quatach-Ichl had come to them mostly to fish for information rather than because he truly believed he could come to some sort of agreement with them, but up until now Zorian didn’t know what exactly he was after. Now, he was starting to suspect that Quatach-Ichl was mainly concerned with puzzling out the identity of the forces standing behind them.

In reality, Zach and Zorian were rogue agents, supported by no one… but there was no way Quatach-Ichl would think that. It would be virtually impossible for two teenagers like them to have reached the heights they did on their own, no matter how talented. Since Quatach-Ichl had failed to find their backers when he investigated them, he could only conclude that they were very well hidden.

The existence of a secret faction that he had not been aware of was doubtlessly bothering the old lich, making him hesitate to move against them until he knew more.

Zorian quickly sent a telepathic message to Zach, warning him not to let it slip that there was nobody backing them up. Quatach-Ichl would probably not believe them even if they openly admitted their lack of support, but it was best not to push their luck like that.

"We already told you, you just don’t want to listen: because of the many, many casualties that would result from your planned attack on the city," Zach said. "And that’s just the start of the suffering. The wars that would no doubt follow in the wake of the attack would–"

"Oh come on, you can’t blame me for that," Quatach-Ichl complained. "I mean, I can understand you blaming me for the destruction of the city, but another splinter war is inevitable. Surely you understand that? This peace we have right now? It’s just a short breather so the countries involved can recover from the damage the Weeping did to their command structure. Well, I personally think every peace is just preparation for war, but this peace especially so. Another round of wars is going to happen soon, regardless of whether Cyoria is attacked or not – I’m just trying to nudge the whole thing in a direction that best suits the interests of Ulquaan Ibasa. Same as your own country of Eldemar and everyone else involved, really."

"I’m not entirely convinced that another war is inevitable," Zorian remarked. Although there was obviously a lot of truth in that, since he had heard that sentiment expressed by various people he had interacted with over the restarts. "But even if that is true, there is a big difference between you and most of those countries. Their plans eventually end in something stable. You just want to keep everyone fighting forever so they cannot threaten your island."

"What? No, I don’t. Who told you that?" Quatach-Ichl protested, actually sounding mildly incredulous.

"You don’t?" Zorian asked curiously. Truthfully, he was being deliberately provocative. He had no idea what Quatach-Ichl really wanted, but what he said just now was one of the guesses discussed by his subordinates and various members of the Cult of the Dragon Below.

"It’s a stupid idea," Quatach-Ichl said, shaking his head in exasperation. "The leaders of your nations can be remarkably stupid sometimes, but they’re not that stupid. If we keep stirring shit up time and time again, sooner or later they will all decide to set aside their differences for long enough to wipe us out before getting back to killing each other."

"Huh. So your actual goal is…?" Zorian tried.

"Heh. I guess it’s not that big of a secret anyway," Quatach-Ichl said, smiling at him in a patronizing manner. "I want to mess up Eldemar and Sulamnon and make Falkrinea win the war."

What?

"What?" Zach protested. "Falkrinea? Why them?"

"Who else?" Quatach-Ichl asked, his tone making it clear it was a rhetorical question. "Eldemar and Sulamnon would never seriously entertain peace with us – anyone who thinks they would is either an idiot or a traitor. Falkrinea though… they are the weakest of the Big Three in terms of military, and their heartland is very far from Ulquaan Ibasa. If they win and subdue Eldemar and Sulamnon, they will doubtlessly be quite disinterested in some fool’s campaign to deal with Ulquaan Ibasa. Keeping their former enemies suppressed should take most of Falkrinea’s strength. They will have little power or inclination for other major undertakings."

Zorian was about to ask why he thought Sulamnon would fail to take advantage of Eldemar’s weakness instead when he remembered Sudomir’s plan with wraith bombs. He had intended to make an example of Sulamnon to prove he was serious about using his wraith bombs on defenseless towns, wasn’t he? Had Quatach-Ichl given him that idea? From the man’s memories, he knew that Sudomir himself did not think so, but Zorian wouldn’t put it past Quatach-Ichl to have subtly led the man onto the idea without him realizing it.

The conversation temporarily died down because the waiter had come to their table to deliver the drinks Quatach-Ichl had ordered. To Zorian’s surprise, the lich had ordered three kegs of beer to be brought to the table instead of just one – one for each of them. Zorian simply pushed his keg to the side and ignored it, but Zach calmly poured the contents of the new, smaller keg into the giant one already in front of him, which had been steadily getting emptier as they talked. This was no time to get drunk, Zach…

As for Quatach-Ichl, he simply left his own keg untouched on the table in front of him. He didn’t have so much as a sip out of it – Zorian suspected that despite looking like a flesh-and-blood person, he couldn’t really drink and eat food like one. It was probably an ectoplasmic body of some sort, similar to the ones employed by the simulacrum spell.

Since nobody wanted to discuss the invasion of Cyoria and similar topics in front of the waiter, a brief silence descended upon the table. Zorian made use of it to consider their interaction with Quatach-Ichl thus far. Sadly, the only conclusion he had was that it was all very strange. He really couldn’t see through the ancient lich’s plots.

Zorian had been watching their adversary like a hawk, but Quatach-Ichl never tried anything underhanded or gave any indication he wanted to drug them or target them with some subtle soul magic spell or whatever. He also never got visibly angry with them, even though this conversation probably wasn’t going the way he wanted it to, and even after Zorian subtly scanned the beer he had ordered to make sure it was safe.

No, their interaction with Quatach-Ichl had been entirely peaceful thus far. Aside from clearly fishing for information about them and throwing in a subtle threat or two in his statements, he seemed to really want to just talk.

Hmm…

"Well, I can see this is not going anywhere, so let’s put all that aside for now," Quatach-Ichl said after the waiter left and a couple of seconds passed. "Instead, let me raise another issue – you have been looking into me in these past few days."

"Big deal," Zach scoffed. "Clearly you have been looking into us, too."

"As a response to your own actions, yes," Quatach-Ichl said with a small smile. "But you misunderstand. I’m not being outraged at you trying to get to know your enemy – I’m just wondering if there is more to it than that. Sure, you could have been simply looking for a personal weakness or a more effective tactic of dealing with me, but maybe… you actually wanted something from me?"

"You think we were trying to establish contact with you?" Zorian asked incredulously.

"It happens all the time," Quatach-Ichl shrugged. "People regularly come to me for help."

"They come to a sinister bag of old bones like you, begging for help?" Zach asked incredulously.

"Of course," Quatach-Ichl said with a big grin, not the least bit insulted by Zach’s choice of words. "I’m a millennia old archmage. I have survived several world shaking events, and even participated in some of them. People seek me out for all kinds of reasons. Some want lost or restricted magics that are almost impossible to get otherwise, some want to borrow my strength and expertise, and some are simply curious historians trying to get first-hand accounts of bygone eras. I usually help the latter ones for free, being a man of culture and generosity that I am, but others have to make it worth my time. Don’t let that intimidate you, though – I don’t deal in souls or demand people’s firstborn sons or whatever you read about liches in all those slanderous books your government keeps shoving down your throats. I’m an honorable lich, only ruthless to my enemies, and I pride myself on my fair and honest dealing with others."

"I see," Zach said, tapping his finger on the table thoughtfully. He then leaned forward conspiratorially and said, "As a matter of fact, we do have something we want from you."

"Oh?" said Quatach-Ichl, leaning forward as well. "Do tell."

Zach opened his mouth and then paused for a second, no doubt purely for the sake of drama.

"We want the crown you’re wearing," he whispered in a low voice.

For the first time since the meeting had begun, Quatach-Ichl seemed genuinely surprised. Zorian didn’t blame him. He was pretty shocked Zach had decided to bring that up, too. He didn’t say anything, though. Hopefully his trust in his fellow time traveler wasn’t misplaced and Zach actually knew what he was doing instead of simply being a little tipsy and ignoring the possible consequences.

In any case, the surprise on Quatach-Ichl’s face didn’t last long. He soon began laughing instead, leaning back in his chair and shaking his head.

"Oh, you two… I knew it was a good idea to come here," the lich eventually said, having managed to compose himself again. "You’re not even joking, are you? I say, sometimes I wish I could go back to being as young and brash as this… do you even know what this crown is?"

"Of course," Zach said. "It’s one of the artifacts of the first Ikosian emperor."

"Good eye," Quatach-Ichl said, giving them a thoughtful look. "It’s been quite a while since someone had recognized it for what it is. Most people think I’m just a megalomaniac for wearing a fancy crown all the time and leave it at that. How did you know? I thought you had never actually seen me before today, but I guess your investigation of me has been a lot more thorough than I suspected…"

"In truth, we knew you were in the possession of one of the imperial artifacts before we had even started investigating you," Zach said.

"Oh?" Quatach-Ichl asked in interest.

"It’s because of this," said Zach, retrieving the portable palace orb from his jacket pocket.

He extended the orb towards Quatach-Ichl, letting him inspect it in detail.

The old lich stared at the orb for more than 20 seconds in total silence, gazing into it with a serious face.

"The imperial orb…" he finally said. "I thought it was lost."

"It was," Zach nodded, yanking the orb back and shoving it back into his pocket. "And now it has been found again."

"So it has," Quatach-Ichl agreed. "However, I don’t understand how it is related to the crown I’m wearing. Unless you’re saying the orb can detect the other imperial artifacts?"

"That’s precisely what I’m saying," Zach nodded. "Well, to be more precise, the owner of any of the imperial artifacts can detect all the others. If one can access their hidden functions, that is."

What an impressive pack of lies. Not that Zorian cared too much about Zach lying to the murderous old lich in front of them, but it was kind of impressive that Zach could think up something so misleading, yet technically true. After all, the Key pieces did have hidden functions, and if one could access them, then they clearly had a marker as well…

"Truly impressive," Quatach-Ichl praised. "I always knew there was more to the crown than I had managed to uncover, but the hidden abilities had always eluded me. I don’t suppose the orb is for sale?"

"Is your crown for sale?" Zach replied, countering a question with a question.

"Not for all the money in the world," Quatach-Ichl said.

"Well then," Zach shrugged. "You have your answer, then, don’t you?"

"And yet… I feel there is a reason you showed me that orb," Quatach-Ichl speculated.

"How about a trade?" Zach tried. "You tell us what your crown does and in return we tell you what the orb does. Very simple and innocuous, and we both get to satisfy our curiosity without having to part with our precious priceless artifacts. How about it?"

"Very simple and innocuous, indeed," Quatach-Ichl deadpanned. "But the thing is, I already know what the orb does. It’s just a particularly large pocket dimension, no?"

"No, no," Zach said, shaking his head. "It does more than that."

"It does? I see…" Quatach-Ichl said thoughtfully. "I think I’m still going to refuse that offer, though. I have a feeling that I would still end as the loser in that exchange. Give me something more to work with. Say… the location of one of the other artifacts you uncovered?"

"Sure," Zach said, agreeing with the suggestion immediately. Of course he did. At the end of the day, the very nature of the time loop made this kind of information exchange inherently biased in their favor. Everything they said to Quatach-Ichl today, he would forget when the time loop reset itself. "Shall we go first, or do you want the honor?"

"It might as well be me," Quatach-Ichl shrugged. He didn’t seem terribly concerned about revealing such an important personal secret. "It’s not such a big secret, anyway. I actually use it as a form of intimidation sometimes. You see… the crown is one massive mana battery."

There was a second a silence following that statement.

"What?" Zorian said incredulously. "That’s it? Just a mana battery?"

"Ha!" Quatach-Ichl grinned. "I knew you’d react like that! It never gets old. However, when I say it’s a mana battery, I don’t mean it stockpiles ambient mana like the mana batteries modern mages make. I mean it stockpiles the personal mana of the wearer… and the mana inside it never gets un-attuned. It effectively makes my maximum mana reserves ten times larger than they naturally are."

"T-Ten times!?" Zorian couldn’t help but blurt out. By the gods… and he thought Zach was a total mana monster.

Although Zach was more reserved, one could see on his face that he was also boggling at the utterly ridiculous amount of personal mana that Quatach-Ichl apparently had at his disposal.

The ancient lich seemed very pleased by their reaction.

"Of course, that is without considering the divine blessing I’ve received in the past, which doubled my already impressive mana reserves," Quatach-Ichl continued. "Measuring of one’s mana reserves was in a rather primitive state at the time I had begun my mage career, so I don’t really know what sort of magnitude I would have according to the standards of modern mages, but I think I was about… magnitude 25? Something along those lines, I believe. The divine blessing then doubled my maximum without hurting my shaping skills in the slightest, so my natural mana reserves were huge even before I got ahold of this lovely little crown. So when I said my mana reserves are effectively ten times their normal size due to the crown? It’s actually even more impressive than it sounds."

How… interesting. Zorian shared a long look with Zach. That explanation about the divine blessing that doubled his mana reserves… didn’t that sound rather familiar?

"So…" Quatach-Ichl eventually said with a grin. "Do you still think making an enemy out of me is a good idea?"

"This blessing you spoke about…" Zorian tried.

"Aha, no," Quatach-Ichl said, raising his finger to stop him. "I honored my side of the bargain. Now it’s time for you to honor yours."

"Fine, fine," Zach sighed. "Aside from being a massive portable pocket dimension, the imperial orb is also a nigh-infinite memory bank, capable of storing a massive amount of personal memories and mental blueprints inside it."

Quatach-Ichl considered it for a moment.

"Considering the scarcity of writing supplies in those times… yes, I can see how that kind of function would be invaluable. Not that impressive today, although the remaining records inside the orb, if any, would be incredibly valuable. To historians, if nothing else. How much did you find inside?"

"No comment," Zach immediately said. The memory bank was completely empty, of course, as it could only be used inside the time loop, but Quatach-Ichl didn’t need to know that.

"Fair enough," Quatach-Ichl conceded.

"As for the location of one of the other imperial artifacts…" Zach said. "Well, you can find the dagger inside Eldemar’s royal vault. You’re already attacking the country in question, so you should have no qualms about breaking into its royal vaults as well."

"They have one of the imperial artifacts and they’re letting it gather dust inside the treasury," Quatach-Ichl said, shaking his head sadly. "How typical."

There was a brief and uncomfortable silence as both Zach and Zorian waited for the lich to say something more, but he never did. Instead he simply observed them silently, saying nothing.

"So, this blessing you spoke about…" Zorian tried again.

"It’s going to cost you," Quatach-Ichl immediately warned.

"Well, what do you want?" Zorian asked him bluntly.

"Since you’re asking questions about the divines, I think it would only be appropriate if you offered something divine yourself," Quatach-Ichl smiled.

Zorian thought about it for a second before pulling out the mysterious dagger they had found in the imperial orb and handing it to Quatach-Ichl. Giving the ancient lich a divine artifact of unknown powers in exchange for this kind of information would be monumentally stupid in any other circumstances, but he really wanted the proper answer to his question and the dagger would be back in his hands in the next restart anyway.

Quatach-Ichl gingerly accepted the dagger and immediately started casting spells on it, scaring Zorian quite a bit. This was the first time Quatach-Ichl had performed any sort of magic after approaching them, and Zorian watched him like a hawk to make sure he didn’t slip in something unsavory between all those divination spells he was casting at the dagger.

"It’s a divine artifact," Quatach-Ichl eventually concluded.

"Yes," Zorian confirmed. "Divine for divine, no?"

"What does it do?" he asked.

Zorian was pleased that not even a millennia-old lich like him could just casually figure out divinely-bestowed powers.

"I don’t know," he admitted to the lich. "It’s just something we recovered from an old ruin."

"So it could be totally useless or amazingly powerful," Quatach-Ichl concluded, turning the dagger carefully in his hands and studying the lines and glyphs etched into its surface. Zorian knew he would find out nothing through that, though. They appeared to be purely decorative and said little about the dagger itself.

"No divine artifact is useless," Zorian insisted.

"You’re wrong," Quatach-Ichl said, shaking his head. "Gods were very impulsive, whimsical creatures. They made all sorts of pointless items purely as a joke back in their heyday, it’s just that most of them broke down or got thrown away as the years went by."

"Divine artifacts can break down?" Zach asked curiously.

"Of course," Quatach-Ichl nodded seriously. "Most of the surviving divine artifacts are not unbreakable because this is some inherent trait of a divine artifact – they are unbreakable because they wouldn’t have lasted for centuries if they weren’t."

"Still, based on what you just said, the very fact this dagger lasted up until this day means it’s probably at least a little bit useful," Zorian said.

"There is some truth to that," Quatach-Ichl acknowledged. He looked Zorian straight in the eye. "Are you sure you want to trade this, though? You could be losing a real treasure, you know?"

"I’m sure," Zorian said firmly. "Just make sure to give me an extra-detailed explanation if you’re so worried about taking advantage of me."

"Ha! Decisive. I like that," Quatach-Ichl said. "Well, since you’re not afraid to take a risk, I guess it would be pretty pathetic of me to shy away from it."

With a dramatic flourish, Quatach-Ichl twirled the dagger expertly in his hand, showing impressive manual dexterity, and then… pushed the dagger straight into his chest.

The dagger sank into him like he was made out of water, right through the clothes, and then it was gone like it never existed. Quatach-Ichl also looked completely unharmed by the action.

He folded his hands over his chest and smiled at them.

"What exactly did you want to know?" he asked.

"You said this divine blessing of yours doubled your maximum mana reserves," Zorian said. "Was that a typical size of increase for such blessings?"

"Hm?" Quatach-Ichl hummed, seemingly surprised at the question. "Well… that’s an interesting question, but I’m afraid I can’t answer that. People with divine blessings were rare, even in times when the gods still roamed the earth, and they tended not to advertise their identity and capabilities. If you think secrecy among top mages is bad today, you don’t want to know what the ancient archmages were like. So many legacies got lost because the old fools refused to let anyone see their work… but I digress. I suspect that the sort of blessing I received is relatively typical of its sort. Making someone’s mana reserves twice as big utterly dwarfs any sort of natural increase one can obtain through other means, thus firmly cementing the god as actually godly, but it isn’t completely over the top. Plus, doubling something is a nice, simple-to-understand change."

"Do you know how it actually works?" Zorian asked.

"In very general terms," the ancient lich said. "It’s a sort of stabilization frame made out of divine energy, encircling the soul. Somehow, this allows the target to store and regenerate more mana without hurting their shaping skills. Nearly undetectable through classical magic, just like all divine works, but the fact it interacts with one’s soul means that skilled necromancers can eventually learn how to perceive it through soul perception."

A stabilization frame? Was it perhaps… in the shape of an icosahedron? Did Quatach-Ichl design his gate stabilization frame based on the faint outline of the soul stabilization frame that encircled his soul? Zorian thought about hinting at it somehow and observing the lich’s reaction before deciding that was probably going too far.

"Is there any way to receive such a divine blessing other than getting it from a god?" Zach asked with a frown.

"Technically yes," Quatach-Ichl said. "The angels are said to be able to bestow such blessings to this very day. However, they are extremely stingy with them and are said to only bestow them upon their most pious and capable servants. I rather doubt they would be impressed with either of you two. So in reality, no, there really isn’t any way for you to receive such a blessing. It’s a privilege that only ancient monsters like me and a few fanatical dogs of the church can wield."

They asked a few more questions in regards to the soul stabilization frame and how it could be detected, probably rousing some of Quatach-Ichl’s interest in the process, but eventually the old lich decided he’d had enough of their questions and turned to leave.

"Well," he said, rising from his seat. "I enjoyed this talk and you’ve given me a lot to think about, but I think this is a good time to stop."

"Yes," Zorian agreed. It was getting tiresome constantly being on his guard around the ancient lich, making sure he didn’t say the wrong thing or miss some sinister plot unfolding in the background.

"If you want to talk more, feel free to contact me through this," Quatach-Ichl said, handing them a simple paper calling card, plain white and undecorated. The only thing on it was an address in Cyoria, typed in bold, black letters.

Zorian silently pocketed the calling card.

"I have a feeling we’ll see each other again, soon," the old lich said with a grin, before turning around and calmly walking out of the tavern.

A long silence followed in his wake, neither Zach nor Zorian saying anything for a full minute, just listening to background noise of the tavern and playing the entire encounter repeatedly in their heads.

"I guess the most pressing question now is: what do we do?" Zorian asked. "Do we do the smart thing and immediately end this ticking time bomb of a restart… or do we play with fire and try to take advantage of this somehow?"

"I don’t know," Zach sighed, pushing away his giant keg to the side. In the end he never did manage to completely finish it, though Zorian felt that was more due to the circumstances than a literal inability to do so. "It’s hard to think straight about this right now. I’ve got so many bad experiences with that damn bag of bones… I got trashed by him so many times, got so many of my plans ruined when he just swooped in and started wrecking the place… but if you forced me to give you an answer right now?"

Zorian sighed. He already knew what the answer was going to be.

"I always did like fire," Zach said with a grin.

82. Ancient Circles

Aranhal, the unfortunate nation that had lost its airship prototype to Zach and Zorian, had been affected deeply by the theft. It was a huge blow to their prestige to lose their prized creation in such a dramatic manner, possibly more so than a mere technical failure would have been. If the design itself was flawed or the builders had assembled the vessel incorrectly and it crashed during its maiden flight, that would have been kind of embarrassing… but mostly for the project itself and the factions that supported it. Having a bunch of thieves break into the construction site and steal it away, though? That reflected badly on the whole country. It didn’t help that Aranhal couldn’t suppress the information that they had engaged the thieves in an airship battle and lost. The airship they had lost in the ensuing battle couldn’t be simply swept under the rug, after all. Many people ended up losing their positions over this scandal, information gathering groups in the entire region were going crazy trying to figure out which group was responsible for the feat and rumors were flying that a massive audit of Aranhal’s government agencies and armed forces was in the works…

Zach and Zorian, the causes of the entire furor, were only dimly aware of all this. They kept an eye on the news and reports coming from the region, but it didn’t seem like Aranhal was getting any closer to tracking them down, so they gradually lost interest. Zorian did find it kind of interesting how many otherwise obscure groups and individuals were roused into action as a result of their theft, though. Perhaps it would be a good idea to stir up some similarly great outrage back in Altazia, just to see if something particularly interesting would show itself in its wake…

That was a thought for some other time, though. At the moment, Zach and Zorian were simply relaxing on their new airship as it flew over the empty, sun-scorched desert. They weren’t going anywhere in particular – they were just meandering from one random place to another, testing the ship’s flight systems and enjoying the view. As an added bonus, aimlessly flying around the Xlotic desert was a pretty good way of foiling any attempt to eavesdrop on them. No matter what kind of exotic methods of tracking them down and spying on them Quatach-Ichl had at his disposal, they probably couldn’t reach across continents and reach them here.

"Wow, the view from here is amazing! And look, those four tower-like rock formations over there? Those are Retam’s Fangs, where the prince of Ixam and the rebel queen Hanfa swore an alliance to unite their forces and repel the Ikosian forces encroaching upon their land. Even though they failed in the end, I always thought their story of forbidden lovers fighting a doomed battle against insurmountable odds was so romantic…"

Zorian glanced to his side, where Neolu was leaning over the airship railing and animatedly babbling about anything that caught her eye. Bringing her along with them when they boarded the airship kind of interfered with the idea of maximum security, but Quatach-Ichl already had plenty of people to choose from if he wanted to kidnap someone to question about Zach and Zorian, so whatever. He was more amazed that she was willing to go along with them, to be honest. A couple of acquaintances come up to you one day and tell you that they’re time travelers and want you to join them for a joyride in their stolen airship and you just… accept the offer?

"I’m hardly an expert on ancient Ikosian history, but wasn’t that alliance a matter of pure pragmatism? And didn’t the prince of Ixam have his father’s permission to broker a deal with the rebels?" Zorian asked curiously. "What exactly makes this a case of forbidden love?"

Neolu gave him an unamused look.

"Err, never mind," Zorian said quickly. He didn’t want to start an argument about a silly topic like that. "Forbidden love it is."

Neolu’s expression brightened immediately, and she clapped her hands happily.

"We should come down and look around!" she said enthusiastically. "I hear nobody has been here for nearly a decade, since it’s so deep in the desert now. I want to take a souvenir or two. Ooh, my sisters will be so jealous when I show them…"

Zorian really didn’t understand her. She readily accepted their claims about the existence of the time loop – although she was indeed more wary of the story when it was both Zach and Zorian talking to her about it rather than just Zach – but the way she spoke and behaved made Zorian wonder how much she really believed them. She didn’t seem to care at all about the impending end of the month that would rob her of everything she achieved here.

In any case, they had no reason to refuse her request. It wasn’t like they were pressed for time, or even going anywhere in particular, so stopping by for some sightseeing and to pick up some pretty rocks was okay. Besides, Zorian believed that once Neolu experienced the scorching heat of the desert outside the airship, she would quickly decide to cut their visit short.

Two hours later, he realized he may have underestimated Neolu somewhat. Being a Xlotic native, she seemed to possess a much higher comfort threshold for hot, dry climates than he or Zach did. She was also far more athletic than he had given her credit for, because she was jumping about and maneuvering herself across the rock landscape with far more grace than he would have expected from a teenage girl wearing a dress.

Maybe it was some kind of a bloodline? House Iljatir, like many magical Houses, was rather secretive about its family magic and special abilities, but they probably had them.

"Hey, Zach," Zorian called out. His fellow time traveler, who was just in the process of carving Zach was here into one of the stone formations, turned to him with a questioning look. "What is House Iljatir’s special thing?"

"I don’t know," said Zach. "Something divination-based. Neolu got all apologetic when I asked and said she wasn’t allowed to tell me and I didn’t push. I didn’t think it mattered."

"Something divination-based, huh?" Zorian mused thoughtfully. Hmm. Depending on what exactly that represented, maybe she had an actual reason for trusting them so easily…

"Yeah," confirmed Zach, either not realizing or not caring that Zorian was mostly talking to himself when he repeated his words. "Those three blue circles she has imprinted on her cheeks and forehead? They’re supposed to represent eyes."

"Oh. I was kind of wondering about that," Zorian said.

"You could have just asked her," Zach said, shaking his head and turning back to finish his inscription. "She’s a really easy person to talk to, you know? Even if you ask something she can’t tell you, she probably won’t get mad at you."

After mulling it over for a few seconds, Zorian decided to do just that. He approached the cheery girl that joined them on this trip and waved at her to get her attention. She seemed to be in the process of trying to capture one of the small blue lizards that made their home in this place, though, and was so focused on her task that she did not notice him. The little creatures were totally harmless, but very fast after soaking in the sun for hours on end and quite tricky to catch.

"Neolu?" he asked.

She jumped a little in surprise at his sudden interruption, before refocusing on him. Her eyes, blue like the markings on her cheeks and forehead, stared at him uncomprehendingly for a second before an idea seemed to occur to her.

"Catch one for me!" she commanded, pointing at one of the distant blue lizards with her finger. The lizard instantly reacted to her sudden move, darting so fast into a nearby crevice that it looked like it teleported.

Zorian raised his eyes at her, his mouth stretching into an amused smile.

"Err, please?" she added with a nervous smile of her own.

"Fine," Zorian sighed. After a second of consideration, he decided to go for the simplest option – he reached into the mind of the nearest lizard and manipulated it into coming over on its own. Once it approached close enough, he simply scooped it up and handed it to the girl next to him, who immediately started to coo and fawn over it. Didn’t girls usually find reptiles creepy and disgusting?

"Look at you, so gorgeously blue and gloriously spiky," Neolu said, turning the lizard over so she could see him from all sides. The lizard looked decidedly unamused with her manhandling, and would have started biting her fingers by now had Zorian not been constantly calming it down. Neolu gave him a curious look. "How did you do that?"

"Mind magic," he answered honestly. Using mind magic against animals was not illegal, and didn’t typically scare people.

"Oh. That’s kind of cheating," she frowned. She stared at the little lizard in her hand for a few seconds before sighing dramatically. "I kind of want to keep it, but… no, that would be wrong. I don’t have anywhere to keep it, I don’t know what it eats, and it would probably be lonely without its fellows."

She lowered the lizard back to the ground and Zorian released his mental hold on it. Surprisingly, the little lizard didn’t immediately run away after that. Instead, it opted to give them confused looks and it shuffled in place uncertainly.

"Go along little guy, you can go home now," Neolu said. "Don’t forget me, okay?"

The lizard blinked at her in confusion, probably wondering why the big creature didn’t eat it when it when it had the chance, before turning around and darting away into the distance.

"Sorry about that. I get a little weird sometimes," Neolu said, turning back towards him. "I guess you wanted to tell me something? Is it time to leave?"

"No, I was actually just going to ask you about something," Zorian said. "You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, but I’m kind of curious… how come you accepted our story so easily?"

"Shouldn’t you already know the answer for this?" she said curiously. "You’re the ancient time traveler who has seen it all, right?"

"I’m not that ancient, actually," Zorian said, shaking his head. "I spent about seven years in this time loop, not counting the time dilation rooms."

"Time dilation rooms?" Neolu asked curiously. "What are those?"

"It’s a long story. Ask me some other time, okay?" Zorian said. "The point is that I have not seen it all – not even close. Truthfully, this is the first time I’ve had any significant interaction with you."

"Boo! Am I so boring?" she pouted.

"Not at all," Zorian said hastily. "It’s just…"

"It’s fine, it’s fine…" said laughed. "I’m just teasing. Well, mostly. You say I accepted your story really easily, so that means you tried to convince many other people thus far. Depending on how far down the list I am, I might actually be offended…"

"It was mostly Zach who tried to convince all our classmates and anyone who would listen, so that statement is based mostly around what he told me of his experiences," Zorian said. "He said most people reacted really badly to his claim of being trapped in an ever-repeating month. Especially in the beginning, before he honed his skills to downright implausible levels and memorized which secret and prediction this or that person found convincing. You though… you always accepted his story very easily. Even in this restart, where you know we stole an airship and both of us approached you instead of just Zach–"

"Why would it matter that you both approached me about this?" Neolu asked with a frown.

"Err…" Zorian fumbled.

"Oh. Oh! I get it," Neolu giggled. "I guess I can see it, he can be kind of cute…" She suddenly stopped and gave Zorian a panicked look. "I mean, not that you’re not, but you’re a bit too quiet and passive for my taste and– gods, I should have just pretended to be scandalized about this, shouldn’t I? Okay, okay, shutting up now…"

"You know, you still haven’t answered my question," Zorian pointed out, amused.

"What? Oh, about me being easy to convince…" Neolu said, giving him a short, nervous laugh. "Right, I don’t really have an answer to that. I guess you’re expecting some big mystery here but there isn’t any. I’m just kind of foolish, I guess. We know each other, I could tell that you had no malicious intentions towards me and you provided all the proof I asked of you… even if you were delusional or lying, I probably wouldn’t have been in any harm."

Zorian gave her a speculative look. The way she phrased her statement gave the impression she trusted a mere hunch about their good character to keep her safe, but the surety in her voice made Zorian think there some something a lot more concrete involved there. Perhaps something… divination-based?

"And if I asked you how you were so sure we had no malicious intentions towards you?" he asked curiously.

"Woman’s intuition," she said cheerfully, her voice sounding like she had been just waiting for a chance to use that response.

"Well, regardless of the reason, I thank you for your trust," Zorian said.

"No problem!" Neolu said, giving him an appreciative look for not pushing her on the issue. "Was there anything else you wanted to ask?"

"Yes, actually," Zorian said. "This may be too personal, but why did a girl from Xlotic decide to go all the way to Cyoria to attend a magic academy? It’s a somewhat curious thing to do, you know?"

"Ah…" Neolu sighed, her good mood suddenly deflating somewhat. But only somewhat. "That. Well, my mother is actually from Eldemar. She used to tell me stories of her homeland when I was little, and I always wanted to visit the place. So I begged my father to let me come and he couldn’t say no to me. That’s the reason I usually tell people when they ask me that question. And, I mean, it’s kind of true! I really did want to visit. And Cyoria is really interesting and I’m not really sorry for being there…"

"But?" Zorian prompted.

"But if it was for that, I probably wouldn’t have gone so far as to sign up for school here," Neolu said. "I would have simply visited for a few months. The truth is my father has made some pretty serious enemies back in Nelentar, and there were concerns they would go after his family to get to him. Especially after me, because… um, father doesn’t really trust my judgment much."

How… very surprising. Then again, most people would say that Zorian’s parents were in the right and that Zorian was being unreasonable when he clashed with them, so maybe he should be more open-minded about Neolu’s reasons for acting the way she did.

"In the end, it was decided I would be sent to Eldemar," Neolu continued. "That way I would be out of danger, I get to fulfill my long-time wish to visit my mother’s homeland and the whole thing can be explained back home as my father spoiling his daughter a little too much. Three birds with one stone, no?"

"Indeed," Zorian agreed. Though he personally found it sad that Neolu’s father sent his daughter to Cyoria to keep her safe, only to have the city invaded by Ibasans in the end. That didn’t exactly go according to plan…

"Anyway! I actually think the whole thing turned out really well in the end, so I have no regrets. You don’t have to feel sorry about me," Neolu said. "Though to be honest, I’ll probably be glad when I’m done with the academy and can come back home. I… kind of miss my family. You probably don’t understand, being able to see yours any time you want and all."

"Err, yeah… you’re probably right about that," Zorian said slowly. He didn’t bother clarifying that it was not quite for the reasons she was thinking of.

They wandered the rocky landscape for a while after that, after which all three of them returned to the airship and continued their aimless wandering through the desert. Neolu somehow talked him into helping her take away a large green rock from the site, even though it was pretty much worthless as far as Zorian could tell, and he couldn’t possibly fathom what she intended to do with it, and she was inordinately happy about that. She spent about half an hour humming to herself and inspecting the rock in great detail before eventually seeking him out again.

"Zorian, can I ask you something?" she asked him, then immediately continued with her follow-up question without waiting for his answer. "This time loop of yours… it’s going to end someday, right?"

"Yes?" Zorian said, unsure what she was getting at.

"So one day, this month will run its course as it always does… and I will live on and remember instead of endlessly forgetting?" she prompted further. "And you will remember this day and act accordingly?"

"I… that’s the idea," Zorian said, faltering slightly. They never told her that there was a good chance they would be destroyed in the end, having failed to leave the time loop before it collapsed. He didn’t really want to tell her about that if he didn’t have to, either.

"What do you intend to do when that happens?" she asked, biting her lip. "About me, I mean."

"About you?" Zorian asked, caught a little off-guard by the direction this was going in. "Well, it depends on what you want us to do, I guess."

"I don’t know what I want," she admitted. "I just know I had fun today and I don’t want to forget it all."

Ah… and here he thought the realization she would lose everything at the end of the month hadn’t affected her in the slightest. Maybe the implications of the time loop just hadn’t hit her up until now? Unfortunately, there was very little he could do to comfort her in regards to that. Aside from lying, of course.

"But," she continued, "since that is not possible, I have a somewhat selfish request out of you and Zach: when we meet again at the end, don’t pretend this never happened. You don’t have to tell me about the time loop, but don’t be a stranger. I know I’m probably not the most exciting person you’ve met over the years, but you’re not allowed to forget me, okay?"

Zorian gave her a strange look.

"Well… okay," he said slowly.

"Yay! New friends!" she exclaimed, causing Zorian to sigh a little. She really reminded him of a little kid in some respects. Or Novelty.

He really missed that silly little spider sometimes…

"I hope you realize we won’t be stealing this airship in the final version of this month," Zorian said. "So this particular memory is… probably never going to be recreated."

Neolu seemed to give it a serious thought.

"That’s probably for the best," she eventually decided. "From what the papers are saying, you killed a lot of people when you destroyed that pursuing airship. That wasn’t very nice."

"I… really don’t understand you," Zorian admitted, shaking his head. "You know that, but you’re still here. And you want to be friends with us."

"All those people will be alive when time resets again, so it’s fine," Neolu said with small shrug. "But hey! Even without the airship, you can still open doors between continents, no? That’s how we reached your airship in the first place. So you can take me to see all these places anyway!"

Zorian opened his mouth to point out that revealing they could perform intercontinental travel spells was still a huge deal, but in the end he just shut his mouth and remained quiet. Considering Neolu’s peculiar personality, she was probably one of the few people who could handle such a revelation without totally freaking out.

"I guess you’re right," he eventually conceded.

Besides, what was incredible cosmic power for if not for taking a girl out on a casual vacation into uninhabited desert filled with crumbling ruins and bloodthirsty monsters?

Maybe Zach was becoming a bad influence on him…

In the end, it was not hard at all to talk Neolu into helping them find the translators and contacts they needed to operate more freely in the Xlotic region. Most of these were going to be in her home country of Nelentar, since that was where she could wield her family influence the most and where her knowledge of local knowledge and customs was most pronounced, but that was still plenty useful. With such a solid starting point, it wouldn’t be hard to extend their net wider throughout the region.

They ended up dropping her off in Nelentar with a pair of simulacrums while they returned back on the airship to discuss something else. Namely, the Quatach-Ichl situation.

"It’s been a few days now," Zorian said. "We’ve both had time to calm down and think about it. Do you still think we should take a risk and try to broker some kind of deal with Quatach-Ichl?"

"Well yeah," Zach said. "I mean, what’s not to like? It would be trivially simple to give him divine artifacts, or even pieces of the Key like the imperial orb, in exchange for rare magic and knowledge. Then we can do it again in the subsequent restart with him none the wiser. I feel a dark spark of joy at the very thought of such a scenario. If there is anyone that I don’t feel the slightest bit guilty doing that to, it’s him."

"I’m not sure how far we can take that, though," Zorian said nervously. "He’s bound to notice something is wrong at some point. Especially if we trade for magical instructions – if Xvim and Alanic could notice when we were displaying their own techniques, Quatach-Ichl can surely do the same. And I’m fairly sure he would react far more violently to the idea of someone stealing his secrets."

"It doesn’t matter," Zach said, shaking his head. "It just means we have to be smart about this. We ask him about pocket dimensions in one restart, then about soul magic in the next, then about dimensional gates and so forth. We try our best to get the most we can out of each interaction, and only when we have exhausted a full list of topics do we consider revisiting some of them. If we’re pursuing a different topic each time, he shouldn’t be able to notice anything is wrong."

"Yes, I’ve considered that idea too," Zorian mused. "But that rests on the idea that the lich is actually trustworthy."

"He did come to talk to us instead of simply trying to assassinate us or kidnapping people we hang around with to blackmail us," Zach pointed out.

"It’s hard to tell how much of that is his real attitude and how much he was simply afraid of rousing some kind of sleeping dragon, though," Zorian pointed out. "He clearly thinks there is some kind of secret force supporting us. If he knew we were on our own, I have a feeling he would have been much more domineering."

"Well, that problem has an obvious answer, at least," Zach laughed. "We just need to make sure he never finds out!"

Zorian supposed he was right about that. It didn’t make Zorian feel any better about the idea, though.

Reaching into his pocket, Zorian retrieved a piece of paper and unfolded it. It held a simple address in Cyoria, transcribed from the calling card that Quatach-Ichl had given them. He had thrown the original into a public trash can an age ago, of course. Even though it looked perfectly normal and he couldn’t actually find anything wrong with it, it was better to be safe than sorry.

"What are you thinking of?" Zach asked after a few seconds.

"I’m just wondering how much of Quatach-Ichl’s attitude that day was real and how much of it was a carefully crafted mask," Zorian said. "He did come there in what was effectively an ectoplasmic disguise and maintained perfect control over his soul throughout the entire meeting. For all we know, every word and expression could have been carefully calculated to leave a specific impression."

"Eh, I don’t think so," Zach immediately said, shaking his head. "I did have short interactions with him from time to time in various restarts, you know. None as extensive as the one that day, but it adds up. And the Quatach-Ichl we met that day was very much like what I remember of him in the past. He had that same uncaring, informal manner of speech that looks so out of place on a terrifying old-as-dirt lich and the casual way he threatened us, more like he was stating facts than trying to be menacing… it sounded very much like what I was used to. No doubt there was some level of deception and social manipulation going there, but I don’t think he was faking most of it. Like that move with the dagger near the end of the meeting – plunging an unknown divine artifact into his ectoplasmic form may have been intended to send us some kind of message, though I struggle to figure out what it was, but more likely than not it was just him having a bit of a theatrical streak."

"I did get the impression that he likes to brag, yeah," Zorian agreed thoughtfully. "He seemed to delight in drawing attention to his abilities, great age and other advantages. Like his insane mana reserves, for instance."

"Ugh, don’t remind me," Zach grumbled. "I guess now I know how people felt about me all this time. But yeah, I think he’s pretty much what he advertises himself as: an old, incredibly powerful lich with little concern about appearing humble or dignified. I think it’s partly because of his great age. I read once that, contrary to what most people think, ancient peoples tended to be a lot more rude and forthright than modern ones. A lot of immortals throughout history found it hard to keep up with changing social mores. For instance, not that long ago people had very little concept of privacy and thought nothing of having sex in the same room as their children. Public torture and executions were considered to be almost akin to a free entertainment show you could visit rather than something horrifying. And you heard yourself what Quatach-Ichl thought about the proper treatment of conquered populace. In all likelihood, the way Quatach-Ichl behaves is a sort of compromise between what he feels is reasonable based on the ancient environment he was raised in and what he thinks he can get away with in the modern era."

That was an interesting point. Zorian couldn’t help but remember that one time he decided to describe the process of butchering animals to some of his classmates in Cyoria who had never been outside the city. He was surprised and amused when he realized how horrified they were at his description of how the animals were killed and processed. It seemed so silly and hypocritical to him, since he was pretty sure they ate meat just fine and would continue to do so in the future.

And that was between people belonging to the same general age and culture. Quatach-Ichl probably experienced this sort of thing magnified a hundredfold. Perhaps when Zach and Zorian told him about how wrong it was to kill all these people in Cyoria, he thought of them the same way Zorian did about those squeamish kids that couldn’t handle how their meals were prepared behind the scenes.

"You know surprisingly much about the topic," Zorian pointed.

"Back when I didn’t know when this time loop was going to end, I looked around for any information I thought might be applicable to my situation," Zach shrugged. "I was kind of going crazy from the endless repetitions and I thought maybe the books about immortals and their ilk would be of help. Unfortunately, it turned out our situations weren’t very comparable. It turns out most ageless people think the world is changing too much and too fast for their tastes, not that everything is too cyclical or boring or whatever."

"I see," Zorian said, leaning back. "So, just so we’re clear: we’re really doing this?"

"I think we should," Zach confirmed. "It’s dangerous, yeah, but the gains would be so very sweet. Doubly so because we’re effectively stealing knowledge from that bag of old bones…"

"The situation in this restart is not very good for what we talked about, though," Zorian pointed out. "The restart is more than halfway done by this point. If we’re going to try and get the most out of any individual topic within the span of a single restart, we should wait for the next one to start."

"I don’t think it would be wise to just ignore Quatach-Ichl in this restart, though," Zach frowned. "He will probably decide to move against us if he thinks he cannot turn us to his side somehow."

"Yes, but I had another idea about that," Zorian said. "What if… we recruited his help in breaking into the Eldemar’s royal vault?"

Zach gave him a surprised look.

"That’s a pretty interesting idea, but how would we possibly divide the spoils?" Zach asked. "I mean, both sides will want to claim the dagger in the end…"

"Well, no doubt Quatach-Ichl will try to betray us in the end in order to claim the dagger for himself," Zorian said. "But…"

"But that’s fine, because we want to fight him in the end," Zach surmised.

"Yes," Zorian confirmed. "After all… how else can we get ahold of his crown?"

He just wondered how they were going to explain all this to Alanic. If he hated the idea of them raiding Eldemar’s royal vaults and working with Silverlake, he was going to be positively thrilled with their latest idea…

After a considerable amount of preparations, it was time for Zach and Zorian to assault the Ziggurat of the Sun and try to claim the imperial ring that was supposed to reside somewhere inside. Their forces for the task were relatively modest – aside from two of them and their simulacrums, they also had Alanic, about 20 mercenary mages from the Xlotic region and a small army of golems that Zorian had made specifically for the occasion.

They did not choose to arrive in the Pearl of Aranhal. The airship was ill suited to fight masses of flying opponents like sulrothum, and it would get immediately recognized for what it was by the mercenaries, which would cause all sort of issues down the line. They had enough trouble convincing these people to cooperate with them in this seemingly crazy operation as it was.

Instead, they brought the whole group to their destination – a sulrothum outpost not far from the ziggurat that Zorian’s simulacrum had secretly infiltrated and taken over a few hours earlier – through the usage of dimensional gates. The display of such high-level magic did much to quell the mercenaries' concerns, which was a nice side-effect that neither Zach nor Zorian had really counted on. They would have to remember in the future that implausible displays of magic did not just alarm people, but could sometimes actually set them at ease.

After organizing themselves a little, the entire group was split into two. The first one, composed out of all of the mercenaries, most of the golems and one simulacrum of Zach and Zorian each, was ordered to march out of the sulrothum outpost and launch an obvious, frontal assault on the structure. This was, of course, little more than a distraction… but a distraction that the sulrothum probably wouldn’t be able to ignore.

According to the military personnel and sulrothum experts Zach and Zorian had talked to in the past few days, humans usually dealt with sulrothum strongholds by bombarding them through artillery magic from extreme range. Unfortunately, neither Zach nor Zorian were all that proficient with artillery magic. It was a magical discipline designed for sieges and outright warfare, and typically involved titanic amounts of mana being shaped by multiple mages acting in concert with one another. Zach knew a bit about it, since his monstrous mana reserves allowed him to cast some simple ones all by himself if he really needed to, but Zorian only had a theoretical grasp of the field. Fortunately, the 20 mercenaries they hired were proficient with artillery spells and had experience in anti-sulrothum tactics to boot.

The devil wasps had no choice but to come out of their base and confront them. Even if they suspected the attack was a distraction, they had to assign at least some of their forces to disrupt the bombardment.

After a few minutes, three more pairs of simulacrums, each group holding a Zach and a Zorian, departed from outpost under magical cloak. Their job was to find their way into the ziggurat and find where the imperial ring was located.

Meanwhile, the original Zach and Zorian, Alanic and the two most powerful golems patiently waited for their moment…

Simulacrum number one nervously watched the cloud of giant black wasps on the horizon. It was his job – as well as the job of Zach’s simulacrum and the many golems the original made for this day – to defend the artillery mages from being harassed by the sulrothum so they could work in peace. In general, their whole group was supposed to make itself as threatening as possible so the sulrothum would have to send the majority of their forces out of the ziggurat, thus leaving it open easy for infiltration by the simulacrum teams. He was fine with that. However, how was he supposed to do that when the damn devil wasps refused to attack and just kept flying back and forth out of their attack range?

"What the hell are they doing?" the simulacrum asked the Zach-simulacrum beside him. "They can clearly see that we’re setting up an artillery magic position here. Do they think we’re bluffing or something?"

"No, I think they’re waiting for something," Zach-simulacrum said. "An order from their leaders, maybe? I think–"

A loud roar resounded in the distance and a huge serpentine form erupted out of the sand, directly beneath were the area the sulrothum swarm was flying in. No, not serpentine… worm-like. A huge brown sand worm raised its head towards the sky, its toothy maw unfolded like a hellish, fleshy flower. As for the devil wasps, they seemed to be… cheering?

"Damn it, they managed to tame a fully grown sandworm?" The leader of the mercenaries whined. "That’s going to be a nightmare to fight."

Simulacrum number one had to agree. Although he could easily detect incoming sandworm attacks due to his mind sense, it was hard to deal with attacks that came from underground. Especially since the sandworm was huge, meaning they had little chance of stopping its attacks and could only move out of the way whenever they detected it coming.

"I have an idea," Zach-simulacrum said, quickly performing an alteration spell that hardened the sand beneath them into a stone platform and then raising it high into the sky.

"There," Zach-simulacrum said, smiling. "It’s a bit expensive to maintain, but now the stupid thing can no longer reach us. For all their huge size, sandworms are useless against things that can fly."

He had barely finished speaking when the sandworm suddenly shook, almost like a dog trying to dry itself off, and a series of translucent, glowing, yellow wings grew out of its sides. They were long and paper-thin, reminiscent of dragonfly wings, and looked comically inappropriate for lifting a creature like that into the air… but as the creature’s many golden wings started slowly undulating like oars on a boat, the sandworm slowly lifted itself into the sky and then reoriented itself towards them.

Zach-simulacrum immediately deflated.

"Now this just isn’t fair," he complained.

Simulacrum number one looked at the flying sandworm, which was currently flying towards them while accompanied by a swarm of devil wasps and decided he couldn’t agree more.

Zorian stood in the ruins of the sulrothum outpost they arrived in, observing the state of the battle. In the distance, Zach’s simulacrum was desperately trying to keep the giant, flying sandworm busy while Zorian’s own simulacrum protected the mercenaries from the sulrothum swarm. Curiously, when the Zorian’s simulacrum tried to influence the sandworm’s mind, he found it completely impossible to infiltrate. Usually he could at least make some headway when making such an attempt, even if the creature was heavily magic resistant, but the sandworm’s consciousness seemed to be protected by a mental equivalent of a stone wall – incredibly solid and unyielding. That was probably worth checking out in more detail in future restarts.

In truth, he thought that part of the battle was going really well. Yes, the mercenary group failed to get off all but one artillery spell and was constantly getting pushed back, but it served its job as a distraction marvelously. The sulrothum even sent another swarm of warriors at them at one point, trying to take them out sooner, which caused simulacrum number one to rant expletives at him over their soul link for a full minute or so, but was pretty convenient for the plan as a whole.

No, the problem was that the simulacrum pairs sent to infiltrate the ziggurat weren’t doing so well. Somehow the sulrothum discovered all three of them the moment they got close enough to the main structure, which probably meant there was some kind of subtle alarm ward protecting it. One of the teams then died trying to charge the front entrance, the other sacrificed itself to provide the third one a chance to punch a new entrance through one of the outer walls of the ziggurat, and the third one managed to get inside but was currently blocked in one of the corridors and would likely get swarmed by the defenders soon.

On top of that, the sulrothum figured out where the original forces first appeared and decided to send a group of warriors to check it out. That was how the outpost ended up in its current, ruined state.

"Although we haven’t found the ring, yet, it’s now or never. I’m commanding the simulacrum that managed to get inside to open a gate for us. We’re going in."

"Understood," Alanic said solemnly.

"Finally," Zach said, cracking his knuckles.

Zorian took a deep breath and waited, tapping into the soul link he had with his simulacrums and paying close attention to his simulacrum inside the ziggurat. Opening a dimensional gate was a lengthy process requiring a lot of concentration, which meant it took some time and effort for the simulacrum to find himself in the position where he was able to do so. Finally, after using up all fifteen of his remaining grenades in one massive attack and having Zach’s simulacrum charge forward and sacrifice itself to get him some space, the simulacrum managed to successfully open a dimensional passage between itself and the original.

Zorian sent his two remaining golems through the dimensional gate to clear the way, and then he, Zach and Alanic all rushed inside.

There, they found a mangled artificial body of Zorian’s simulacrum that ended up sacrificing his fleeting life to finish the spell in time. Rather than interrupt the gate-opening spell and save himself, the simulacrum chose to ignore the incoming attack from one of the sulrothum warriors and kept casting the spell till the very end.

Curiously, now that the two battle golems Zorian sent as a vanguard had cleared the entire corridor, there were no more sulrothum coming. That final grenade attack and the arrival of a new batch of invaders seemed to have caused them to temporarily withdraw and regroup.

"Let’s go," Zorian said, pointing towards the corridor on the left.

"Any particular reason to go in that direction?" Zach asked. "I mean, that seems to be the place where most of the devil wasps are coming from…"

"Yeah, it is," Zorian admitted. "I don’t know where the ring is, but I’m operating under the idea that our luck is horrible and thus our target is obviously in the most dangerous part of the ziggurat."

"Oh," Zach said. "Yeah, that does make sense."

Zorian turned to Alanic walking next to them, who was ignoring their banter in favor of scanning the walls for some reason. Probably looking for some clues as to where they are – all of the walls still retained detailed carvings of various religious scenes. Most of them were from Ikosian era, but some of them had been crudely repurposed by the sulrothum, who did their best to modify the carvings into something that fitted better with their own religious beliefs. Alanic was very unamused by their efforts, if his deepening frown was of any indication.

"Alanic, we’re going to have to rely on you. Zach and I have been using our simulacrums to fight for a while now, and we need some time to recover our mana reserves a little," Zorian told him. "Do you think you can–"

Two sulrothum warriors suddenly charged out of the corner in front of them, both of them carrying spears and decorations that looked far fancier and better constructed than what they had encountered thus far. They were probably elite warriors of the colony, and they screeched out a challenge and charged at them the moment they saw them.

Alanic’s expression didn’t change in the slightest. He simply waved his battle staff lightly and two tiny, highly compressed balls of fire flew forwards at incredible speeds. They impacted the warriors' faces, burning a hole straight through them, and the two sulrothum died on the spot.

"Don’t worry," Alanic said. "Leave it all to me."

He had barely finished speaking when a literal horde of sulrothum converged all of a sudden.

The entire corridor erupted into burning flames.

After much bitter fighting and several temporary retreats, the group finally managed to achieve its goal. One of the battle golems was rendered inert, the other was missing one of its arms and had three spears sticking out of it and slowing it down, Alanic had received a nasty-looking wound across his chest and Zach was almost out of mana.

But they had found it. They had found the imperial ring.

Unfortunately, they found it because the person wearing it decided to come to them. Apparently they caused such a commotion that the sulrothum high priest decided to confront them personally, accompanied by his highly-trained, well-equipped honor guard. He was a particularly large sulrothum, equipped with menacing-looking bone armor and holding what was unmistakably a spell staff. He was clearly a mage, and if the low-level magical aura he was emanating was of any indication, probably a soul mage to boot.

He was also decorated with an absolutely ridiculous amount of little trinkets and various jewelry, one of which was the imperial ring that he had on one of his hands. If Zorian didn’t have the marker’s function to detect pieces of the Key, he would have never spotted it among all that junk the high priest was wearing.

They couldn’t fight him. Maybe when they were in their top form, but not now. However, Zorian just couldn’t bring himself to flee without at least trying to pull off one last thing…

He summoned most of his remaining mana and launched a massive mental attack on the high priest. Just for a moment, he smashed aside his mental defenses, suppressed his will and forced him to perform one simple action.

In one smooth movement, the high priest ripped the imperial ring off his finger and threw it at Zorian, who immediately caught it in his free hand.

Then the effect was broken and the sulrothum high priest looked dumbfounded at what he had just done.

"Zach, get us out of here now!" Zorian urged him.

Just before they teleported away, leaving their poor damaged battle golem behind as a distraction, they heard a shrill, outraged scream from the high priest at the unfairness of it all.

Zorian nodded sagely in his heart. Yes, sometimes the world really was extremely unfair.

83. Scorpion

Zach and Zorian were sitting in one of the many empty rooms in the Noveda mansion. This wasn’t something that often happened. Despite this being his home, Zach didn’t like to spend too much time in the place. Very few people lived there, relative to its size, which gave the mansion an empty, almost abandoned atmosphere that Zach found uncomfortable. Even before the time loop, he liked to spend most of his day outside, visiting friends and wasting time.

Zorian kind of wondered about these friends of Zach. He had never really seen Zach interact with any of them through the restarts. From what Zach told him, though, most of them were in the same situation as Benisek – kind of friendly with pre-time loop Zach, but not really that close to him and very ill-suited for dealing with the implications of an endlessly repeating month. Much like Zorian pretty much stopped interacting with Benisek, Zach seemed to have totally stopped bothering with these casual friends he had once had. It was a bit sad, though maybe Zach intended to continue interacting with them more heavily once he was out of the time loop…

Regardless, the reason for their uncharacteristic presence in the Noveda mansion was simple: the place still had a well-crafted, perfectly functional warding scheme and the two of them didn’t feel like traveling outside of Cyoria and creating a temporary base just to have this discussion. Thus, they simply retreated into one of the private study rooms that could be found in the estate and hoped this would be enough to foil any spying attempts by Quatach-Ichl or others.

The room was pretty nice. It was small but luxurious, with heavily decorated wooden furniture, several marble statues, magical lighting and temperature control and bookshelves lining every single wall. The center of the room contained a table and some chairs, and sitting in the center of that table was the object that Zach and Zorian had gathered to discuss.

The ring. One of the pieces of the Key that they had to bring to the Guardian of the Threshold in order to reopen the time loop exit and one of the artifacts associated with the first emperor of Ikosia. It was made out of solid silver and largely featureless, with no notable decorations or gems. A few faint lines and sigils covered its surface, only visible upon close scrutiny. It did not seem very imperial, unlike the crown that Quatach-Ichl was wearing or the palace orb.

If they had not possessed the tracking function of the marker on their side, it would have been very hard to pick it out as special from the rest of the small trinkets that the sulrothum high priest had been carrying. Just like the palace orb, it seemed completely immune to divinations of any sort.

They already knew what it did. Maybe it was because they already had plenty of experience with the palace orb, but figuring out how the ring functioned only took a visit to the Guardian of the Threshold and half a day of tinkering with it. It was just that the end result was… not as useful as they had hoped.

"Interesting thing, isn’t it?" Zach said, picking the ring up and making it spin on its edge like a top. "Heh. Of course, it’s more useful for me than it is for you… but that may be a good thing. At least we won’t have to struggle with the question of who to assign it to in the future, like we do with the palace orb!"

Zorian clacked his tongue at the analysis. The ring had an intriguing main function: it somehow granted the wearer an ability to use soul perception through it. As far as Zorian knew, there was no other item with a similar function, which made the ring quite interesting and unique… but also very useless for people like him who had already unlocked soul perception through other means.

Zach, of course, was another story. Due to the safeguards on his marker, unlocking his soul perception was anything but easy. Most methods to do so required one to be brought to the very edge of death and tampered deeply with the user’s soul to achieve their goal. The soul perception potion Silverlake made for Zorian did the same, which was why they had not bothered to have Zach try it out thus far. They just didn’t think it would work and didn’t want to cut a restart short for now. The soul perception ring basically negated any need for such dangerous unlocking, giving Zach a way to practice soul magic easily.

Frankly, Zorian suspected the ring was created specifically with the goal of solving this kind of issue. Since it was extremely difficult for a controller with an intact marker to unlock their soul perception through classical means, it made sense for Shutur-Tarana to prepare a workaround for his successor.

"It’s a bit inconvenient that the ring is so hard to get to, though," Zorian remarked. "The ring only grants you soul perception while you wear it. No ring, no soul perception. If you started each restart with the ring on you, like the controller was probably supposed to, then that would be a minor issue. As it is, it will take us a week at minimum to get ahold of it in each restart, and that’s after optimizing things…"

"Yes, that does suck," Zach agreed. "I definitely intend to try and figure out a way to gain soul perception the right way, so that I don’t need to depend on it, but this is still good. I doubt finding an alternative will be easy and we know from your example that simply unlocking soul perception is just the first step in the process and that a lot of training is needed to use it – with this, I can get started on that right away."

"I guess that’s true," Zorian nodded. A part of him was annoyed that Zach got to skip a large chunk of the work Zorian had to do to gain his soul perception ability, but he knew that was just his jealousy talking and that this was objectively a good thing. "It still feels to me like the ring is relatively underwhelming, at least compared to the other two examples we know about. Even its time loop related skill is not that exciting."

Like all Key pieces, the soul perception ring had an ability that could only be accessed inside the time loop by the current controller. Specifically, the ring could place a tracking marker on target souls, allowing the ring bearer to track their movements with ease. According to the Guardian of the Threshold, the markers persisted across restarts, allowing them to know exactly where people started their restarts and what their usual routines were.

Or at least that’s the effect they would have had if Zach and Zorian had started the restart with the ring. Since they hadn’t, the value of the tracking markers was greatly reduced.

In any case, Zach and Zorian had tested the ability on various animals and random bystanders and found that the marker placement was fast and stealthy, that the ring could keep track of marked entities across intercontinental distances, and that divination wards didn’t seem to hamper the effect in any way.

This sounded pretty amazing, and it was, but the markers had a serious flaw. Namely, anyone skilled in soul magic could detect when they were placed on them. This meant that Quatach-Ichl was effectively immune to it, as was Sudomir, Silverlake and a whole plethora of other potential targets.

"They can’t all be amazing," Zach shrugged. "And truthfully, I think the real issue is less with the usefulness of the ring and more with how late we got ahold of it. If I had the ring with me right from the very start, it would have been an absolutely priceless treasure. The tracking ability alone would have saved me a ton of work and some dying. Currently, we’re both so good at divinations, memory reading, stealth spells, various tracking magics and things like teleportation that the ring is no longer very impressive to us. But that’s just us being awesome, not the ring being underwhelming."

Zorian hummed thoughtfully. There was a lot of truth in that.

"Besides, it may be a good idea to place these tracking markers on all of the high ranking cultists and Ibasans to see if they’re doing something we don’t know about," Zach said.

"That would take quite a bit of effort, though," Zorian pointed out. "The ring just gives you the distance and direction of your target, and only one at a time as well. You’d have to constantly pay attention to the ring, cycling through all of the tracking markers and matching the information you receive to places on the map to see where they actually are in actually useful terms. Then you’d have to go out personally to check up on any interesting movements to see the details of what is going on, or send a simulacrum, and–"

"You’ve done more complicated projects before, Zorian," Zach said, waving him off.

Zorian raised an eyebrow at him.

"You… do realize it’s you who will be doing this, right?" he asked Zach. "After all, you’re the one who’s going to be wearing the ring. What with you needing its soul perception granting abilities…"

The look on Zach’s face when he realized he just dumped a huge amount of work in his own lap was truly priceless.

Although Zach and Zorian had successfully retrieved the imperial ring from the Ziggurat of the Sun and found out what it did, there was no time for celebration. Quatach-Ichl’s surprise visit had completely changed the dynamics of their current restart, and they had to prepare. One of these preparations was gathering everyone’s research notes and the like. Normally this would be done just before the very end of the restart, but since there was so much chance of things going wrong this time around, Zorian decided to speed things up a little.

At the moment, this meant visiting Kael in his basement alchemy lab to see how his projects were progressing. This would be normally rather mundane, but nothing seemed to be entirely mundane in this particular restart. Apparently Silverlake had figured out who Kael was at some point in the restart and had talked to him a few times already. Sadly for Silverlake, Kael had given her a chilly reception. Their previous interaction seemed to have left a bad impression on Kael, something that did not surprise Zorian in the very least, so he was not at all eager to reacquaint himself with her. The fact that she showed unhealthy interest in his daughter Kana, due to her witch roots, probably didn’t help. Sadly for Kael, though, that didn’t deter Silverlake in the slightest, and she decided to barge in on this meeting to give them both her personal opinion on what Kael had been doing all this time.

"It’s terrible," she stated without preamble.

Zorian had pretty much expected that. Kael probably did too, but he was too much personally invested into his project to just ignore the provocation.

"It’s not terrible," Kael said in a clipped tone, not even bothering to look at her. "There, now it’s your word against mine. What now?"

"Now I win, because I’m a wise, experienced witch and you aren’t," Silverlake said smugly. "Really, I don’t understand why you’re so angry with me. Are you really still so angry about the way I spoke to you back when we first met? Don’t be so petty! They’re just words. I guess I was a little harsh, but can you blame me? Fria totally broke the rules when she took you under her wing and taught you all these things. A harsh word or two is really nothing compared to what I could have done… bah, kids these days don’t know what’s good for them."

"It’s not terrible," Kael repeated, completely ignoring her attempts to pick on their shared past. "In fact, the potions and the research I have produced over the restarts are so good that they produce an uproar among Cyoria’s medical and alchemical community if I release them too carelessly."

"Well I’m not saying it’s worthless," Silverlake clarified. "But considering the amount of resources you had at your disposal and the sheer advantage given to you by the time loop… it’s underwhelming. It’s terrible. So many missed opportunities. So much lost potential."

Zorian did not try to inject himself into their bickering, but Silverlake’s statement made him frown. No doubt Kael’s methods could be better than they were, but what exactly was she talking about? In his personal opinion, Kael’s work was pretty incredible.

Back at the beginning, when Kael had told him he wanted to research things with the help of the time loop, Zorian had agreed to help, but didn’t really think Kael’s work would have any wider impact. He knew this would be a tremendous personal boon for Kael, of course, allowing him to figure out the best recipes and production methods for known potions. The sort of thing that established alchemists don’t share with anyone except their apprentices. But affecting the medical field as a whole? He knew that Kael was something of a young genius that had been specifically recruited by the academy because the folk healing remedies he had been producing to support himself and his daughter were good enough to get some influential people to take notice, but still. Alchemy was a very profitable occupation and many alchemy-based Houses and organizations had experienced, well-funded researchers on their payroll. What could one beginner alchemist, working in his basement, do that they could not?

Indeed, at first Kael focused primarily on improving his personal alchemical technique. He experimented with replacing expensive alchemical components with cheaper ones, with increasing potency of the standard cures, with cutting down the production time and skipping certain steps… small things, but they added up. They added up in ways that Zorian honestly hadn’t expected. It turned out this sort of production optimization was rarely done on such a small, personal scale by the big alchemical groups. They usually produced their potions in large batches, so figuring out the best recipes and production procedures by a single alchemist working on an individual potion or two was of very limited usefulness to them. Plus, if something could be done by a lone alchemist with a relatively cheap setup, it was much easier for it to be stolen by outsiders or leaked by angry former employees and so on. Thus, they rarely invested too much into that kind of research.

Granted, there were no doubt plenty of individual alchemists that worked exclusively with small scale setups, and they had done plenty of research on their own… but they rarely shared these insights with anyone who wasn’t family or a chosen successor, and many times ended up taking them to their grave. The fact that Kael had done years of research, funded by considerable resources and in cooperation with many individual alchemists and Healers that Zach and Zorian had helped him contact, and was entirely willing to release it to the public… it was a lot more important than Zorian realized.

This wasn’t all, of course. Thanks to the support Zorian had given him, Kael was eventually able to be much more ambitious in his projects. Though he still pursued simple refinement of the production process, he had already picked most of the low-lying fruit in that regard. Now he was going after things like trying to combine several medical potions into one, experimental self-diagnosis potions that allowed a person to feel the state of their body with great clarity, and attempted cures for diseases that didn’t have any accessible cures on the market. Of course, Zorian had a feeling this last one was what Kael really wanted to focus on. The death of his wife and mentor during the Weeping had clearly left a great mark on him, and seemed to serve as his primary motivation to try so hard in his alchemical pursuits. But these sort of ambitious projects were quite hard, and Kael was having very limited success there. Especially since, in every single restart, Kael had to re-familiarize himself with what he had been working on before he began building upon it.

"Missed opportunities, huh?" Kael said, leveling Silverlake with an unamused glare. "So what would you have done in my place, then?"

"For starters, I would have been far more liberal and unrestrained with human experimentation," Silverlake told him immediately.

Both Kael and Zorian flinched at this.

"Oh, look at you two babies!" Silverlake cackled. "You’re living in a time loop, are you not? When are you going to do human experimentation if not now? You are surrounded by perfect test subjects! Any damage you do will be conveniently wiped out at the end of the month and you have the unprecedented ability to test various versions of a medical potion on the exact same patient without your previous attempts affecting the later ones and muddying the waters in regards to which one is really better. Really, it’s practically criminal that you’re not taking advantage of this…"

"First of all, I don’t care that I’m trapped inside a time loop and people won’t really suffer and die – I did not go down this path to hurt people," Kael told her firmly. "Secondly, even if I didn’t balk at this on ethical grounds, it’s still a terrible idea. The other alchemists and healers aren’t stupid. Any potion developed through unchecked human experimentation will be obvious as such – people will surely realize that I couldn’t have possibly developed such a potion without going through an inordinate amount of test subjects and send the authorities to check up on me."

"At which point they will find absolutely nothing, because you did everything in the time loop, erasing all the evidence," Silverlake said. "They’re just accusations. Just keep insisting you’re a genius and you figured it all out in a dream or something equally absurd. You’re way too skittish. I think you’ll find that a lot of powerful people won’t care that you’ve done everything nicely and according to law. So long as you make too many waves they will want you under control or gone."

Kael was silent for a few seconds.

"You might be right," Kael conceded after a while. "But I don’t care. I already said my main problem is with the ethics of the whole thing, not whether or not I can get away with it in the end."

Silverlake glanced at Zorian.

"No way," Zorian said, shaking his head. He had seen just how messed up unrestrained human testing can get while trawling through Sudomir’s memories. While Silverlake probably had a lot tamer things in mind than that, he’d rather not risk it.

Silverlake ignored him, tapping her chin with her finger and muttering something that sounded suspiciously like if you want to do something right, you’ve got to do it yourself. This being Silverlake, though, Zorian had no idea if she was being serious or was just trying to piss him off.

"Well, never mind that, then," Silverlake shrugged. "Second idea, then. Did you two ever contemplate recruiting governments for help? They already have existing logistics and infrastructure, and the amount of resources even a minor statelet has at its disposal is vast."

"Yes, but we decided against it in the end," Zorian said. "Governments do things very slowly. Getting them to commit to anything worthwhile would take far more than a month, unless I was willing to use mind magic to speed things up. Which I’m not."

"Ah, but I wasn’t suggesting you try to negotiate a deal with them or beg for handouts," Silverlake said with a grin. "All you have to do is leak your potion formulas, research notes and other secrets to various governments and their research teams. Make it seem like they originate from their rivals and bitter enemies to light a fire under their ass and then simply stand back and watch what they do with it all. No need to convince them of anything – just dump things into their lap and swoop in at the end of the month to steal all their work."

That… might actually work.

"Huh," Zorian said. "You do raise a good point there."

"You shouldn’t have said that," Kael said. "She’ll be absolutely insufferable from now on."

Silverlake just cackled in obvious satisfaction.

"Well then," she said. "Do you want to hear the rest of my ideas?"

Once all of the preparations had been done, Zach and Zorian went to the address Quatach-Ichl had given them to contact him.

They had already discreetly checked the place out earlier and knew the place was actually a just a small, seemingly-innocuous corner store. The ancient lich had never given them any secret phrases or contact methods, so they were a little mystified as to what they were supposed to do when they arrived there. Just call for Quatach-Ichl by name? However, it turned out that they need not have worried. The man behind the counter seemed to immediately know who they were and what they were at the moment he saw them. He pointed them towards a door to the storage room, which wasn’t actually a storage room, where Quatach-Ichl had already been waiting for them. His black, metallic-looking skeleton just sat there on a chair in one corner of the room, tapping his fingers against his leg bone and observing them as they approached.

Well. That was kind of creepy. How the hell had the lich known they were coming? Surely he hadn’t spent the whole day here, just in case they decided to drop by…?

"Wow, you were waiting for us all this time?" Zach said loudly, bluntly drawing attention to the fact. "We must really mean a lot to you."

"I left a spare body in here and jumped in, so to speak, when I was informed you were coming over," Quatach-Ichl said, rising from his chair and making a few casual gestures in the air. A cloud of ectoplasm rapidly condensed around the black bones and then solidified into a familiar fleshy guise. He smiled at them lightly. "Still… I will admit I was rather looking forward to this. After speaking to you that day, I couldn’t help but check up on some things and I must say you’re even more unusual than I thought."

"Oh?" Zach prompted.

"For instance, there is no evidence that you are anything other than regular human teenagers," Quatach-Ichl said. "I thought, before seeing you up-close, that you may be shapeshifters or possessor entities wearing teenage bodies. Having seen how perfectly your souls slot into your forms, I can effectively rule that out. I have also managed to get a better glimpse at what you are doing and I have to say… you are even more capable than I thought you were. It is really curious that you have managed to amass so much magical skill, money and contacts while being so young… and even more importantly, while evading the notice of people who keep an eye out for such things."

"Well, those people clearly aren’t very good at their job because someone managed to organize an entire invasion right under their noses," Zach deadpanned. "In comparison to that, overlooking a couple of precocious teens is a minor matter, don’t you think?"

"Ha! There is a lot of truth in what you’re saying," Quatach-Ichl laughed. "The security around here is terrible. Still, the only reason we have been able to pull this off is that we have many of the local authorities infiltrated and that I secretly take care of… problematic elements. We are not completely undetected in the way you two appear to be. Furthermore, we are operating in impossible fashion, using magics that nobody is aware are possible, and we have only recently ramped up our activities to their present level."

"So have we," Zach pointed out. "If you’ve been observing our activities as closely as you claim to have, you’ve surely realized we only started to ramp up after seeing you do the same."

"That’s a curious way to put it," Quatach-Ichl said, cocking his head to the side in a questioning manner. "As far as I can tell, you didn’t just ramp up your activities… it’s more like you hardly even existed up until a few weeks ago. And many things you’re pursuing have no conceivable connection to stopping us."

There was a brief silence as both sides quietly studied each other and their reactions.

"Well," Zorian said eventually. "I hope you don’t expect an answer from us in that regard."

"Oh no, of course not," Quatach-Ichl said, shaking his head. "I’m just thinking out loud, that’s all. So. I presume you have an offer for me, yes?"

"Yes," Zach nodded. "We want you to help us break into Eldemar’s royal treasury and retrieve the imperial artifact stored there."

Quatach-Ichl gave them an incredulous look.

"Alright, you’ve got me there," he said after a second. "I honestly didn’t expect that at all."

What followed was an exhaustive, two hour long session of questions and answers where Zach and Zorian tried to prove to the ancient lich that they weren’t crazy for trying to pull this off. They showed Quatach-Ichl the various building plans and other information that they had gathered about the royal treasury in the past, pointing out that they already did most of the work and just needed his help with overcoming a few final hurdles.

They weren’t lying, either. They actually already knew how to bypass most of the defenses without being detected, it was just that the final stretch of defenses was extremely closely guarded and was basically impossible to breach in secret. As far as they could tell, any opening of the treasury was automatically a big deal and sent an alarm to people in charge of defending it. This was even true for when the royals were going in. It was just that the official openings were always announced well in advance, so the guards knew to ignore the alarm in those occasions. Thus, Zach and Zorian needed to fight their way in after a certain point, stay inside long enough to find and claim the dagger, and then escape without getting trapped inside. This was beyond them at the moment, but if they had help from someone on the level of Quatach-Ichl, it might be enough for them to succeed.

Quatach-Ichl initially thought the idea of assaulting the royal treasury was stupid and bound to fail. He even accused them of trying to get him to sabotage his own invasion plot by drawing attention to himself in this manner. However, greed was a powerful motivator and once Quatach-Ichl realized that the break in had a large chance of actually being successful, he started to seriously consider it.

There was a big problem with the negotiations, of course. Both sides wanted the imperial dagger. Sure, the royal treasury no doubt held all kind of valuable treasures and documents, but very few of them were priceless in the same way that the dagger was. Quatach-Ichl had lived for more than a thousand years, and had all the money and mundane wealth he could possibly wish for. Some of the other artifacts stored inside could potentially be interesting, but it wasn’t a sure thing and they wouldn’t have time to sift through them all to pick the cream of the crop. No matter what they offered, Quatach-Ichl wouldn’t budge in the slightest. As far as he was concerned, they could have anything else in the treasury, so long as he got the one thing he truly cared about – the imperial dagger itself.

Truthfully, this was all according to plan. Zach and Zorian always knew Quatach-Ichl wouldn’t agree on a deal that would involve him giving up an imperial artifact. In fact, Zorian strongly suspected that Quatach-Ichl would immediately attack them once they were outside to claim the imperial orb from them as well. However, so long as they managed to break into the royal treasury proper, they did not care much. Even if they failed to wrest the dagger and the crown away from the lich in the aftermath, the whole thing would still have been worth it. This was because getting into the inside of the treasury would give them a chance to analyze the main wardstone that protected the entire complex, hopefully letting them outright bypass the defenses in the future.

Thus, they eventually reluctantly agreed to let Quatach-Ichl claim the dagger in exchange for the first-claim right on everything else they encountered inside.

Quatach-Ichl gave them a strange look after that, not saying anything for a while, before suddenly turning more jovial and praising them for their sensible attitude. Half an hour later they hammered out a deal and agreed to meet in two days in Eldemar City…

Zach and Zorian were calmly walking through the treasury corridor, escorted by four stony-faced guards. They ignored the guards and employees they occasionally encountered along the way, behaving like their presence was completely natural. Three times they encountered invisible detection fields that would have announced their presence to ward supervisors deeper inside the treasury complex, and it took less than two minutes for Zorian to subvert each one into letting them pass without alerting anyone. After a while, they encountered an actual security checkpoint with a couple of mages and gun-wielding soldiers. Zach just casually greeted the group while Zorian flashed an access badge in front of their faces without saying anything. The guards gave them questioning, uncertain looks but didn’t bar their path. There was no official visit to the treasury scheduled, but the group was escorted by guards and had the symbol of royal authority. The group continued on.

Quatach-Ichl trailed after those two, observing everything curiously. After they put some distance between themselves and the security checkpoint, he decided to speak up.

"The mystery grows," he commented, glancing at the four guards marching beside them. "These guards you have dominated into helping us have very few giveaways that they are being manipulated into doing this. No jerky movements, no hesitation… other than being a little overly serious, there is no clue they are being controlled by another. I had no idea you were such a capable mind mage. If you had such abilities, wouldn’t it be easier to manipulate someone with legitimate access to this place into secretly retrieving the dagger for you?"

"Impractical," Zorian said simply. He didn’t want to explain that his ability to control people was really quite limited. He may be a powerful mind mage, but he never invested much effort into figuring out how to execute those kinds of long-term compulsions. Even the aranea considered that kind of deep mind editing to be sinister and repellent, to say nothing of himself. His specialty was telepathic combat and memory reading, not enslavement.

"You know, Ulquaan Ibasa has much more relaxed laws regarding mind magic than any country on the continent," Quatach-Ichl lightly commented.

"Are you seriously trying to recruit me at a time like this?" Zorian asked incredulously.

"I’m just pointing out you’d get a lot more appreciation for your skills if you emigrated there," Quatach-Ichl shrugged.

Zorian said nothing in response. They soon reached the point of no return – the doorway that could not be opened without throwing the entire treasury into high alert.

Even opening the door was not easy. It was incredibly sturdy, as were the walls it was attached to – they could not be battered down with raw force or blown off their hinges. Two keys were required in order to open it, neither of which could be safely acquired, and using them required the presence of the Chief Treasurer, who had to lower the local wards in order for the keys to work. Even if everything was done correctly, the treasury opening alarm would still sound, and defenders would swarm over to see what was going on if no opening had been scheduled for the day.

There were other entrances to the royal treasury, including a secret one that could be accessed through the dungeon, but all were defended just as heavily.

At the moment, the only solution Zach and Zorian had for this door was to outright attack the local wards until they shut down and then use the copies of the two keys they had produced earlier to open the door. Which kind of worked, but the local wards were no joke. Bringing them down was a very time consuming process for the two of them, leaving them low on mana and beset by every defender in the building.

"We’re going to need your help here, as discussed," Zorian told the ancient lich.

Quatach-Ichl simply nodded absent-mindedly, studying the door in front of him.

Then they began. All three of them started assaulting the warding scheme, subverting, negating and pushing back the defensive field. Zach and Zorian were both very good at defeating wards by now, but Quatach-Ichl completely blew them out of the competition there… and not just because of his monstrous mana reserves, either. His skill at dismantling magical defenses was incredible. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t that unusual. The lich had been alive for more than a thousand years. He probably had deep knowledge and sophistication about every form of magic there was.

The warding scheme did not take their aggression passively. It was the type of ward that actively struck back against attackers and it pushed back against them endlessly. Waves of telekinetic pressure and temperature extremes assaulted them, strange rainbow light tried to put them to sleep and nearby decorative wall tiles exploded into clouds of miniature razors. They were undaunted. Zach and Zorian had known those defenses were there before they had even started, and all three of them were capable of easily defending themselves from attacks on this level.

By now, the entire treasury was in high alert and the first defenders were starting to approach them at high speed. Zach was about to direct some of his energies into dealing with them when Quatach-Ichl casually swept his arm backwards and fired one of those jagged red beams he was so fond of using onto the ceiling behind them. He must have hit something critical because the entire section of the corridor immediately caved in, showering everything in a thick cloud of dust and gravel and cutting them off from the approaching first wave of defenders.

"Pointless distractions," Quatach-Ichl said curtly. "Just focus on the wards."

The wards didn’t last long after that. Once they were gone, Zach and Zorian inserted the keys into the door, which started to slowly open with a heavy grinding sound. There was no way to speed this up, but they didn’t have to wait for it to fully open. The moment a small crack was produced between the door and the wall, Quatach-Ichl used some strange dimensional spell to twisting the resulting opening into a man-sized portal. Zorian decided he really needed to learn that spell. Being able to effectively squeeze through even the tiniest opening was pretty neat.

Once they were through, they were faced with another problem. A pair of huge, hulking golems made out of some kind of glossy black material barred their path. They both held strange shotgun-like guns that fired metallic webs instead of bullets and they were incredibly resilient. They were clearly intended to keep intruders busy rather than actually kill them, so Zorian didn’t think it was a good idea to try and tangle with them.

He deployed the palace orb, retrieved a pair of huge golems out of it and sent them to keep the treasury golems busy while they continued on.

"Interesting golem design," Quatach-Ichl commented. "I don’t recognize the manufacturer."

After a second of thinking, Zorian decided he felt like bragging a little.

"I made them," he admitted.

"Oh? A man of many talents, I see," Quatach-Ichl said. "I must admit I always thought golem making was just a squeamish man’s necromancy, but recent advances in the field are pretty impressive. Perhaps I might commission some work from you in the future."

The actual treasury wasn’t just one giant room filled with gold coins and priceless magical artifacts, like Zorian had idly imagined. Instead it consisted of numerous individual vaults, each with its own reinforced door that had to be battered down to claim the contents inside. Nothing was clearly labeled, which meant that finding anything specific was a total chore unless you knew exactly where to go. Since Zach and Zorian had a marker that let them sense the dagger’s location, though, it wasn’t long before they managed to track it down. Quatach-Ichl claimed it immediately for himself, giving them a challenging look. The two of them had no intention of fighting the lich for the dagger, though. Or at least not in this place.

In any case, this dagger wasn’t the only thing they wanted out of this place. They also wanted to locate the main ward stone of this place and it wouldn’t hurt to also smash up a few more vaults to see if there was something particularly interesting inside. They both made a handful of simulacrums and sent them to scatter all over the place… but were caught a little off-guard when Quatach-Ichl proceeded to create enough simulacrums to accompany each one of theirs.

Apparently he did not trust them to have even their simulacrums out of sight. Or maybe he was just that curious about what they were up to. Either way, they decided not to make a big deal out of it and simply went about their work.

Eventually, they managed to find the main wardstone. It was hidden under the metal floor and shielded from most divinations, but Zorian managed to track it down anyway. He didn’t have enough time to study it in great detail, and it couldn’t be moved without destroying it, but even that brief examination gave him plenty of ideas for the future. The treasury wardstone was a real work of art, and Zorian definitely intended to come here again to take a few more looks at it.

As for the vaults, they held all sorts of wealth, rare materials and mysterious items… but it was really hard to figure out what was truly useful to them and what wasn’t in the short amount of time they had. They ended up piling everything they recovered into the palace orb for later study and just forgot about them for now.

"That orb is much bigger and more convenient than I thought it would be," Quatach-Ichl’s simulacrum mused idly beside. "I think I may have underestimated its usefulness just a little."

Quatach-Ichl actually had his own pocket dimension containers, but they were apparently a lot less expansive than their own, which meant he had to be much more selective about what to take from the place than they were.

Of course, the Eldemarian guards and military were anything but idle while they were doing that. It was less than five minutes before they managed to break through the collapsed corridor and four giant golems wrestling each other in the middle of a corridor, and then the fighting began.

In all honesty, they had probably stayed too long inside the treasury. Too many forces had rushed to the place, making it very hard for them to fight their way out and escape. They couldn’t simply open a gate to outside with the simulacrum trick, because apparently the treasury wards were thorough enough to shut that idea down. The ward stone was too tough to be destroyed in any reasonable amount of time. If it were just Zach and Zorian, this may very well have been the end of this particular restart.

However, they had Quatach-Ichl on their side, and he had apparently already prepared a contingency for this kind of situation.

The only warning Zach and Zorian received about what was about to happen was when the sounds of distant screams and detonations started resounding in the distance, as if the treasury defenders were fighting another enemy outside as well as them. Before they could ask Quatach-Ichl what was happening, a nearby wall collapsed as a huge sphere of black metallic bones slammed directly into it and crushed it under its weight.

The sphere quickly uncoiled into a large, crocodilian skeleton that swept through nearby space with its tail, sending treasury defenders flying away like wooden toys. Fireballs, force blades, disintegration beams and a wide variety of grenades rained down on it immediately afterwards. Some of them were even doing damage.

But it was too little, too late. Before their attacks could deal anything more than superficial scratches, it noticed Quatach-Ichl and immediately barreled towards him.

"Please tell me that’s a friend," Zach said.

"Ha! You can say it’s a pet of sorts," Quatach-Ichl laughed. "Jump on it when it gets close and make sure you hold on. If you let go, you’re on your own. There is no way I’m coming back for you."

If someone had told Zorian a few years earlier that he would be riding through the streets of Eldemar on the back of a giant skeletal crocodile-thing, after having robbed the royal treasury in the company of a thousand-year-old lich… well, he would have told them that they have an overactive imagination. Yet, that was exactly what had happened. Zach, Zorian and Quatach-Ichl managed to fight their way out of the treasury while riding the lich’s pet and simply kept rushing forward. By the end the poor crocodile thing ended up falling apart, having sacrificed itself to save them from one last coordinated spell barrage by the Eldemarian military, but by then they had already left the radius of the city wards and teleported away.

Now for the hardest part: dealing with Quatach-Ichl…

Zach, Zorian and Quatach-Ichl were hiding inside a small cave under a random field. It had been more than half a day since they had broken into the royal treasury, and they had the exact same problem that Zach and Zorian had had when they had made their attempt at the treasury in the past – somehow, the Eldemar forces were tracking them down everywhere they went.

[How annoying,] Zach commented to Zorian telepathically. [I was specifically paying attention for something like this and I never noticed any sort of tracking mark being placed on us or on any of our possessions.]

[I can’t detect anything being done to our souls, either,] Zorian replied. [It’s really frustrating. How exactly can they track us so unerringly? They clearly don’t know our actual identities, just like they hadn’t known in the previous restart we’ve done this, so it must be something like a tracking mark or magical tether. We’re both experienced with detecting those kind of things, so why can’t we find it?]

Quatach-Ichl, who was currently sitting on the floor of the cave in complete silence, looked like he was engaged in some kind of intense meditation. Zorian could tell through his soul perception, however, that Quatach-Ichl seemed to be doing some rather intense personal soul searching. He could tell because the lich’s soul was usually perfectly calm and controlled, but now it churned and pulsed as if caught in a storm. Presumably the lich thought the tracking method had been placed on their souls and was trying to locate it. Zorian had done the same with no results, so he didn’t get his hopes up that Quatach-Ichl would find anything this way, but it was worth a shot. At least he wasn’t flipping out and trying to kill them for dragging him into this mess.

Maybe if they–

"It’s a tether made out of divine energies," Quatach-Ichl suddenly said, rising from the floor of the cave and dusting himself off.

"Divine energies?" Zorian repeated incredulously.

"Like the ones that make up my soul stabilization frame and power divine artifacts," Quatach-Ichl said. "There must be an item somewhere in that building that automatically connects to the soul of any being that comes within a certain distance of it. How insidious. If I didn’t have so much experience sensing the piece of divine magic in my own soul, I would have never been able to detect it."

Damn it, divine magics were so unfair. No wonder they hadn’t been able find the way the Eldemar authorities were tracking them…

"Can you sever it?" Zach asked.

Quatach-Ichl shook his head. "Perceiving divine energies is one thing. Affecting them is another. I have no way to get rid of the tether, although I can tell it’s not permanent. It will eventually weaken and fade away."

"Eventually being…?" Zach tried.

"A couple of weeks at least," Quatach-Ichl said calmly.

"You are too calm," Zorian pointed out. "Clearly you have already found a solution."

"Yes," Quatach-Ichl said smugly. "The tether may be made out of divine energies, but it ultimately has the same weakness that all such magical tethers have – a maximum distance it can support before it snaps. If we go outside the range of the item we are tethered to, the magic will break and we’ll be free to enjoy our ill-gotten gains."

"Ah," Zach said. "Wow, this is easier than we thought, then!"

"Of course, being made by a divine artifact, the tether no doubt has a downright absurd maximum range it can support… and Eldemar’s authorities will probably take the anchor item out of the treasury to keep us in range of the effect if they notice us trying to break the tether this way. So not only do we have to travel extremely far away from here, we must do it so quickly that Eldemar’s authorities cannot keep up with us."

Zach and Zorian looked at each other before turning back to the grinning lich. He probably thought he had them – that they had no method of traversing vast distances quickly enough and that he would be able to squeeze some kind of concession out of them in exchange for helping them break the tethers on their own souls.

Well… he was wrong.

"I don’t see the issue here," Zorian shrugged.

"No?" Quatach-Ichl asked. "I’m not sure you understand… just teleporting around a little isn’t–"

"No, we get it," interjected Zach. "It’s just that, no matter how ridiculous the range of this tether is, going to Xlotic is probably enough to make it snap. And if not that, then we can just continue on to Koth instead."

Quatach-Ichl stared at them with an uncertain look on his face.

"Do you want to come with us?" Zorian asked innocently. "It probably isn’t so easy for you to put so much distance between yourself and Eldemar on such a short notice."

"Yeah, you’ve helped us a lot tonight, so it’s only right for us do something for you too," Zach nodded, playing along.

They didn’t actually expect Quatach-Ichl to agree to their suggestion. After all, going with them involved stepping through a dimensional portal without knowing where it really led. That wasn’t something you did unless you thoroughly trusted the other person, and Quatach-Ichl didn’t even trust them enough to leave their simulacrums wandering around unsupervised.

They opened a portal to Xlotic, and Quatach-Ichl followed after them, surprisingly calm. He did not comment at all on the fact they knew how to cast something as rare and difficult as a dimensional gate, or the fact they arranged for said gate to open to another continent on a moment’s notice. He simply observed everything around them, his eyes sweeping over the desert horizon with a thoughtful expression.

"Cities to rubble, fields to dust…" he murmured quietly. "What a depressing sight."

Hum. Zorian had never really thought about it before, but Quatach-Ichl was probably the only living person that had seen Xlotic as it had been before the Cataclysm.

In any case, Quatach-Ichl then closed his eyes and once more started sensing his soul for the tether. He opened his eyes ten minutes later and nodded to them.

"It’s gone now," he said. His voice was devoid of any trace of joy or satisfaction, though, which set off some alarms in Zorian’s mind. "Apparently Xlotic is far enough that the tether ended up breaking when we crossed over here through the gate. Or maybe once the gate closed behind us. Can the tether maintain connection through a dimensional gate, even if the people are far outside its range in terms of actual distance? Interesting stuff. Too bad this is hard to reproduce and study. And too bad none of this is real, no?"

Zorian couldn’t stop himself from flinching a little at that statement. Quatach-Ichl narrowed his eyes at the movement.

"I thought so," he said, voice serious. He started to slowly circle around them, eyes never breaking contact with them. Like a predator. Zach and Zorian assumed fighting stances, but did not make any aggressive moves. "I should have figured it out earlier. I really should have. The fact everyone got cut off from the spirit planes all of a sudden should have been a massive warning as to what was happening, but it sounded so incredulous that human beings could cause something so grand in scope and effect. When I found that the aranea beneath Cyoria had just suddenly dropped dead one day, I was just happy an obstacle had disappeared and did not think on it as hard as I should. It was only when I talked to you that things started to become clear… but I, in my arrogance, refused to see the truth."

"We have no idea what you’re talking about, bag of bones," Zach growled at him.

"It all clicked when you just casually opened a dimensional gate to another continent," Quatach-Ichl continued, ignoring his claim. "There had been something about your attitude that had bothered me right from the start, when I first talked to you in that tavern, but it is only now that it starts to make sense. You showed up out of nowhere, loaded with money and skills that make no sense in light of your past and age… like two adult mages badly pretending to be a couple of teenagers. You are fine with giving up divine artifacts in exchange for information and throw huge amounts of money on speculative research… as if material possessions don’t matter to you, only knowledge. You don’t like me killing people, but you have no problems butchering Eldemar treasury guards to get what you want… like those guards were never actually real to begin with."

Quatach-Ichl stopped his circling. Silence descended on the whole scene for several seconds, with nobody saying anything. Though everything was still and quiet, tension invisibly started to ratchet up.

"This whole thing… is some kind of giant illusion, isn’t it!?" Quatach-Ichl finally concluded. They said nothing, and the lich took their silence as a confirmation of his idea. "I should have seen it sooner, but I was too full of myself. How could I, mighty Quatach-Ichl, be snared into some kind of illusion like that? I instinctively rejected the truth until it was staring at me right in the face. But now… now I’m going to have some answers. Some real answers!"

He attacked, his organic guise melting away to reveal the black skeleton wreathed in green light that lurked beneath the skin.

They were ready for him.

Quatach-Ichl immediately went for soul magic this time, not even bothering with disintegrators and energy spells. Presumably because, while he wasn’t actually certain how this illusion he was caught in worked, he had already noticed Zach and Zorian did not seem to value physical things much and thus suspected these weren’t their real bodies. If he wanted to defeat them, he needed to aim for their souls.

Well… he was kind of right about that, but Zach and Zorian had come here prepared. Their souls were fortified with defensive wards and they were not as defenseless and terrified in the face of soul magic as they once were.

Pulses of ghostly light assaulted them, but they warded them off with some effort. They responded with more mundane attack spells like incineration rays, ground liquefaction spells, destructive black blades of spatial force and so on. Quatach-Ichl defended himself with haste, force fields and animated sand creatures, but responded solely with soul magic attacks.

After a few exchanges, Zach and Zorian decided to reveal the next layer of their preparations – the trap wards they had placed on the area beforehand. The truth was, Quatach-Ichl really was kind of stupid for following them here through an unknown portal, because this was one of the several places where Zach and Zorian had prepared a trap for him. Granted, they had thought they would have to force him here through the gate, but this way worked too.

However, Quatach-Ichl had evidently prepared himself too. Before the wards could fully activate, the ancient lich removed one of his decorative bracelets and crushed it.

Four cubical constructs made out of black bones materialized around Quatach-Ichl, as if emerging from some kind of hidden pocket dimension around him. Each of them had four skulls embedded into their sides, their eye sockets burning with a dim green flame. Through his soul perception, Zorian could detect that each skull held a trapped soul inside of it. Powerful ones too – they had probably been harvested from talented and experienced mages, not some random bystander.

The skull cubes pulsed, seemingly synchronizing with each other, and then started unfolding into their own warding scheme then began to overpower the ones Zorian and Silverlake prepared in this place.

Well. Time to go all-out, then. Zorian deployed the palace orb and summoned Alanic, Silverlake and Xvim, who had been patiently waiting there for just this moment.

The fight quickly heated up, spells flying left and right. Quatach-Ichl was forced to give up on using exclusively soul magic to attack them. Soul magic had never been especially suitable for actual fights, which was why Quatach-Ichl didn’t usually use soul magic as his first resort. Now, faced with five dangerous enemies, he could no longer afford to use such suboptimal tactics.

Zorian expected Quatach-Ichl to retreat at this point. He could no doubt tell he had no chance of winning this fight, and those skull cubes floating in the sky were effectively negating the trap wards that Zorian and Silverlake placed on the area to keep him from simply teleporting or flying away.

But Quatach-Ichl didn’t do that. He kept fighting like a man possessed, throwing vast amounts of mana into every single spell. Finally, after a particularly well-executed haste spell, Quatach-Ichl managed to produce a wind gust spell sufficiently powerful to lift them off their feet and scatter them. Normally they would have glued their feet to the ground to prevent that, but the sand of the Xlotic desert simply wasn’t hard enough to let them do that – something they hadn’t realized until it was too late.

Quatach-Ichl immediately followed it up with a huge pulse of soul magic that aimed to stop everyone in the vicinity. Zorian fortified his soul immediately before it hit… and then realized it was just a distraction.

Before anyone could recover from the wind blast, Quatach-Ichl hasted himself again and thrust his hand towards Xvim, hitting him with two spells in quick succession. The first was a powerful dispel which stripped the man of all his personal defense spells… including his mind blank. The second was some kind of mind magic spell.

Shit…

Zorian didn’t hesitate. He immediately used his telepathy to plunge into Xvim’s currently unprotected mind and started a mental tug of war with Quatach-Ichl, trying to eject the lich from his mentor’s mind.

The spell Quatach-Ichl had cast was some kind of memory probe, he quickly realized. Powerful, but very crude and destructive by Zorian’s standards. It probably hadn’t done any permanent damage to Xvim yet, but it probably would if this continued for long. Thankfully, although Quatach-Ichl appeared to be very good at mind magic, he was still using a structured spell and didn’t have that much experience in actual telepathic combat. Soon, the lich decided to retreat from Xvim’s mind on his own.

Alanic recovering and trying to melt him down with a massive fire spell probably had a lot to do with that. Not even Zorian could trawl through someone’s memories and pay attention to a fight at the same time.

In any case, Zorian suspected that Quatach-Ichl had gotten what he wanted out of Xvim’s mind in the end. His body appearance was hard to read, but he looked like he was a little… rattled.

"Wait!" Quatach-Ichl said. "Stop!"

They didn’t stop, of course. Not until he suddenly took his crown off his head and threw it on the ground in front of them. And then did the same with the imperial dagger they retrieved from the Eldemar’s royal treasury.

Huh. Zach and Zorian signaled the others to stop fighting for a moment.

"Take them," he said.

"You’re just going to give them to us?" Zach asked curiously.

"We both know they are meaningless to me," Quatach-Ichl said curtly.

"How much did you glean from those memories you stole?" Zorian asked curiously.

He glanced towards Xvim, but his mentor gave no indication that the experience had shaken him up to any significant extent.

"Enough to know how meaningless this all is. At least for people like me," Quatach-Ichl said, sounding a little defeated. He laughed hollowly. "Ha ha ha! You really got me good! I have to say, if you just–"

It only took a moment for them to be caught off-guard. They had unconsciously relaxed a little after Quatach-Ichl seemingly gave up and no longer made aggressive moves, and the lich immediately took advantage of it. He once again put himself under the effect of haste and then rushed straight at them, literally running up to them… and then he exploded.

Later, Zorian would wonder what exactly tipped him off and made him immediately activate his marker’s restart switch when he realized he Quatach-Ichl was rushing at them. Was it because he unconsciously sensed something through his soul perception? Because of some unexplainable hunch? All he knew was that, when Quatach-Ichl started detonating his own soul in that last suicide attack, Zorian had already initiated the restart ending protocol.

They still ended up being caught by part of the blast before the restart ended. Zorian’s soul was engulfed in a soul-corroding, excruciatingly painful blast of spiritual energies before everything went dark.

His last thought was that he hadn’t even known a soul could be detonated like that…

84. Powerless

Zorian slowly awoke in his bed in Cirin. His head was fuzzy, his body hurt all over and he had trouble remembering what he had been doing in the previous restart. Confused and in pain, he remained lying in bed for a time, fading in and out of consciousness.

Gradually, his mind began to clear up and he started to get concerned. Something was wrong. Yeah, he was feeling absolutely terrible, but it was more than that. Something was subtly off about this situation, and it was really starting to bother him.

Oh, right, it suddenly dawned on him. Kirielle didn’t wake me up by jumping on me. I woke up on my own with no one else in sight. That shouldn’t be possible unless something has gone very, very wrong…

The moment he realized this, it was as if something clicked inside his mind and it all came back to him. The sudden visit of Quatach-Ichl, the theft of the dagger from the royal vaults with his help, the final battle they had against the ancient lich and the insidious soul attack he used just before the restart ended… the memories flooded into his mind suddenly and without end. The process was forceful and alien, as if something was shoving these thoughts directly into his brain with little regard to his wellbeing. The waves of pain and nausea radiating from his damaged soul suddenly intensified, and he barely managed to roll himself out of bed before vomiting his guts out all over the floor of his room.

Dimly, he was aware that Kirielle rushed inside when he started making noise and then rushed back out screaming for mother to come and help, but he was in no position to react to that. It took all of his strength just to remain conscious and weather the pain. His soul felt like it was going to split apart, and he instinctively knew that it would be a terrible mistake for him to black out at the moment. He and Zach had long theorized that their soul synchronized somehow with their body at the start of every restart, interfacing with their life force and rearranging their brains to account for the memories they gathered over the restarts, and it looked as if this was true… except that in its current state, it was no longer capable of smoothly completing that process. Without Zorian’s conscious efforts to stabilize his soul, it would not only ravage his body and mind but possibly also injure itself further in its fumbling.

If he lost consciousness now, who knew when he was going to wake up next? A small, panicked part of his mind feared he had already spent the majority of their remaining restarts in a soul damage induced coma, but he shoved that thought aside for now. This wasn’t the time to worry about that. For now, all he could do was grit his teeth and deal with the problem at hand.

He didn’t know how much time he spent in that state, shivering on the floor of his room as he fought to stay awake, but eventually Mother and Kirielle rolled him over onto a blanket and carried him off to a guest room to recover in. Somehow, he managed to persist through it all until his soul finally calmed down. When he finally recovered enough to talk, he found out that it was still the first day of the restart. He had failed to react when Kirielle came to wake him up, and stayed that way for about two hours before waking up. Mother and Kirielle seemed shaken at the severity of his apparent illness, and refused to let him get up and walk around on his own in the aftermath. They also called for a local healer to come and check up on him, which was very annoying yet perfectly reasonable in light of what happened, so he could hardly object to it.

Predictably, the healer failed to find anything really wrong with him. He was not a mage, just a local who knew how to recognize common illnesses and hand out appropriate potions in response. He failed to find anything seriously wrong with Zorian, so he simply suggested that they watch him closely for a few days to make sure it didn’t happen again. Mother was rather unhappy with his uselessness, but she did seem more at ease after receiving the diagnosis.

When they finally left him alone for a while, he decided to chance things and reached into his marker, even though he knew the action would aggravate his soul damage somewhat. He had to know how many restarts they still had left.

The marker told him he still had 25 iterations left, which caused Zorian to breathe a sigh of relief. He didn’t lose any of the restarts, it seemed.

Unfortunately, this was where the good news ended. The damage Quatach-Ichl’s last attack did to his soul meant that he was currently completely incapable of casting anything – attempting to perform even the simplest of shaping exercises caused his soul to radiate waves of pain and nausea throughout his whole body in protest. Though this would go away in time, he estimated it would take at least three months before he was back in his top form. Perhaps as much as four or five months if circumstances forced him to push things and he kept aggravating his injuries.

Zorian suddenly realized that he relied on his magic for practically everything these days. He had already forgotten what it was like to be a weak, mundane teenager. Even coming up with a plan for going forward that didn’t involve the use of a teleport spell was hard…

Damn it. He doubted Zach was any better off than he was, considering he had yet to visit Zorian after so many hours into the restart, so this was pretty much a total disaster. Even though they hadn’t spent any of the restarts in a coma, the inability to use magic was going to sharply limit their options in the upcoming restarts. There was no way they would dare approach Silverlake or Quatach-Ichl with an obviously damaged soul like this, for instance. Additionally, the ancient lich may be able to recognize the soul damage as having been done by himself in some fashion – Zorian had no idea how one would go about doing that, as he found no traces of foreign soul fragments in his soul, but he wasn’t a millennia-old lich like Quatach-Ichl.

He sighed. He had really underestimated the ancient lich. He probably should have been raging internally at the amount of grief he caused them, but in all honesty? Zorian found himself kind of impressed by the decisiveness and ruthlessness Quatach-Ichl had displayed. It took mere moments for Quatach-Ichl to decide, after seeing Xvim’s memories, that the time loop was real and that he should sacrifice everything to hit them where it hurt the most. Most people would be doubtful at the information they received or too shocked to think clearly, but Quatach-Ichl didn’t hesitate at all to sacrifice his own soul in an attempt to take them down.

Zorian could see the logic. Without Zach and Zorian mucking things up, Quatach-Ichl was pretty much guaranteed to get what he wanted out of the invasion of Cyoria, and potentially cooperating with them had little appeal to him. Possibility of betrayal aside, he was a thousand-year-old lich – what use did he have for a measly decade or two? Still, knowing all of this intellectually, and being able to disregard self-preservation in order to pull off a suicide move… those were two entirely different things. Zorian had no idea that a person could detonate the outer layer of one’s soul in order to launch a massive suicide attack on the souls of everyone in the vicinity, but even if he did, he would not have expected Quatach-Ichl to use such a maneuver after less than a minute of consideration. Zorian knew that he would be unable to act so boldly if he had found himself in Quatach-Ichl’s shoes, and it boggled his mind that a lich – people that are typically obsessed with personal survival at all costs – was able to steel himself into pulling off a suicide move so easily.

Well. Putting that aside, he suddenly realized he had a tricky problem on his hands. Namely, he had to find a way to convince Mother to let him go to Cyoria so he could check up on Zach. From what he remembered, the last time he failed to wake up in time it was due to the Sword Diver attack in one of the restarts, and he had to remain in Cirin for the rest of the month to make Mother calm down and let him out of her sight. This time the situation looked much worse, and he needed to convince her to trust him far more than she had been willing to the last time around.

He could already feel his headache getting worse.

It took two whole days of constant nagging and arguments before Zorian was able to convince Mother to let him go. He thought about just boarding a train when she wasn’t looking, but the look in her eyes made him suspect she would drop everything and follow after him if he tried that. She could be remarkably stubborn that way. Strangely, it was Father who ended up helping him by arguing in his favor. He actually seemed impressed that Zorian was willing to push through his sickness and keep attending classes, and ended up helping him convince Mother to let him go to Cyoria. It was a very surreal experience to Zorian, since he couldn’t remember the last time his father took his side or approved of his choices. He didn’t know how to feel about that.

In any case, Mother eventually relented on the whole issue, though she did insist he take Kirielle with him. So she could keep an eye on him, supposedly. It was amusing to see her pause in surprise when he immediately agreed to her request.

The journey was a bit of an unpleasant shock to him. Robbed of his magic and still plagued with phantom pains and tremors, he struggled to carry their luggage and they both ended up getting caught in the rain for a while before they sought shelter in a nearby inn. He ended up renting a tiny, overpriced room for a single night, since the rain wouldn’t be stopping any time soon.

Kirielle wouldn’t stop complaining about getting wet for nearly an hour and screamed like a baby when she saw a particularly large cockroach crawling along the wall of their room.

Being unable to access his vast magic abilities was an unusual and very unpleasant experience.

The next day, he brought Kirielle to Imaya’s place. Thankfully, she did not make too much of an issue out of their arrival, even though Zorian had not arranged for anything with Ilsa in this particular restart.

Then he went searching for Zach.

He quickly realized this wouldn’t be as easy as he imagined. Zach was, he soon found out, officially missing. Tesen Zveri, Zach’s legal guardian, was organizing a search for him and called for anyone who had any information about his whereabouts to contact him immediately.

That was… very familiar. Almost nostalgic, really. It was pretty much the same situation that he had faced during the first few restarts after he got pulled into the time loop.

He wondered what that meant. Was this some kind of additional time loop safeguard that kept the controller gone until they recovered, or was this just Zach’s guardian freaking out about finding a comatose Zach and faking a disappearance? Personally, Zorian would bet on the latter. Quite a few people apparently knew how inappropriate Tesen’s handling of Noveda’s affairs was, so if Zach were to fall mysteriously unconscious all of a sudden, he would be one of the prime suspects. Zorian could totally see Tesen fearing that the coma would be blamed on him and faking a disappearance until he can decide what to do, much like Jornak did with Veyers.

In any case, it was relatively easy to prove which one of the options was correct. Zach and Zorian both had a marker with an identical key, and Zorian knew a tracking ritual that would let him locate his fellow time traveler with ease.

All he had to do now was find someone to help him cast it. Because he was currently incapable of doing it himself.

Gods, he hated this restart so much…

The room was silent. Zorian was supremely calm and collected, staring Xvim right in the eyes despite the look of annoyance present on his mentor’s face.

"So let me see if I got you correctly," Xvim said. "You are a time traveler, you fought a millennia-old lich with Zach in the previous version of this month that I can’t remember, your soul has been damaged so you conveniently can’t demonstrate any of this amazing magic you apparently know and now you want me to help you rescue Zach from the evil clutches of Tesen – his legal guardian who is secretly behind his recent disappearance, despite organizing a nation-wide search for the kid."

Zorian considered it for a second.

"Yes, that’s pretty much what I’m saying," he nodded.

"Get out of my office."

Ilsa carefully studied the stack of papers in front of her, one hand propping up her chin while using the other to slowly tap her finger against the desk in a steady rhythm.

Zorian patiently waited for her to finish reading. If this didn’t work, he would have to take a risk and seek magical assistance through black market channels. Dealing with criminals while being essentially powerless was taking quite a bit of a risk, but there was nothing he could do. He needed to know what was going on with Zach.

"So all I need to do is cast this spell on you and tell you what the results say?" Ilsa eventually asked, giving him a suspicious look.

"That’s right," Zorian nodded.

"It looks like a tracking spell," she noted.

"It is a tracking spell," Zorian confirmed.

Ilsa raised an eyebrow at him.

"Dare I ask what it’s supposed to track, then?" she asked.

"It’s kind of personal," Zorian said, doing his best to look depressed and desperate. "I’m afraid my friend has gone missing. Please, Miss Zileti. You know I’m not a troublemaker student and I don’t ask for much. It… it would mean a world to me if you did this for me!"

Ilsa snorted derisively at him.

"Hmph! You need to work on your acting skills, Mister Kazinski," she told him. "That aside… I had professor Chao tell me about a strange little visit from you recently."

Ugh. He was still kind of annoyed that Xvim was so unwilling to entertain his claims. Being implausibly good at magic was apparently really important for convincing the man there was something to his crazy time travelling claims. Well, convincing him quickly, in any case. He could probably wear down the man’s skepticism with a lot of time and effort, but he didn’t want to wait that long to tackle this problem.

"Is this friend of yours Zach Noveda, perhaps?" Ilsa tried after he didn’t say anything for a while.

"He could be," Zorian shrugged.

"Zorian…" Ilsa sighed, folding her fingers into a triangle in front of her. "Putting aside that I have never really heard of you interacting much with mister Noveda in the past… what if you’re right? What if Zach has really been kidnapped by his caretaker and taken somewhere? I cast the tracking spell and give you the location. What do you do with it? How can an academy student like you handle the guards and the security measures that this place would undoubtedly have and rescue Zach?"

Zorian internally debated the merits of explaining to her that his plan was to simply hire black market mercenaries to do the parts he himself could not, but eventually decided it was a bad idea. He had no real excuses in regards to where he got all the money needed to hire such people or why he thought he could judge their skills and character well enough to identify which of them are worth hiring and which aren’t.

"You don’t have to worry about it," he told her, giving her a reassuring smile. "I’m just trying to find a friend. I’m sure it won’t be all that difficult."

She gave him an unamused look. Yeah, he probably should have just gone to the black market right from the start instead of bothering with this…

Contrary to his expectations, though, she didn’t just throw him out of her office immediately after.

"Give me two days, okay?" she eventually told him. "I need to speak with the academy leadership about this."

"Huh?" Zorian said, surprised. "I’m not sure I understand. Why would you need to kick this up so high? It’s just a tracking spell…"

"And let you get in over your head and disappear as well? I don’t think so," Ilsa said. "If we’re going to do this, we may as well go all the way. Besides… mister Noveda is a student of our institution. It is well within our rights to try and locate him if he goes missing."

She pushed the stack of papers towards him and tapped it a couple of times for emphasis.

"Now…" she said, "explain to me how exactly this tracking spell works and why you think it can find mister Noveda when so many professional diviners have tried and failed to do the same."

It was fascinating to watch how quickly and effectively the academy could mobilize itself when it really cared about something. Perhaps it was because the House Noveda had some secret ally among the academy leadership or because the academy saw the whole situation as a chance to score some free reputation points, but they really did assemble a team to go check up on the location Zorian would provide them with.

He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t a little intimidated by the attention suddenly directed at him. For one thing, he wasn’t actually completely certain the tracking spell would work. While he personally didn’t think it very likely, it was still possible that Zach’s disappearance was really just some sort of time loop safeguard and that he was literally nowhere to be found. It would be quite awkward if that happened.

Thankfully, the tracking spell worked just fine. Zach was just outside of Cyoria, in one of the smaller private estates that technically wasn’t owned by Tesen but could be connected to his family if one looked deeper. The group assembled by the academy immediately stormed the place, presenting official-looking authorization documents when questioned about their motives and identity. There were guards in place, but they were apparently not paid enough to face off against a numerically superior force from a well-known institution and they quickly decided to stand down and give them free rein. The secret basement Zach was being held in was cunningly hidden, but since Zorian was there to serve as a living tracking device, it was simple enough to find it anyway.

Zach was in a soul-damage induced coma, just like Zorian expected him to be. Due to his inability to cast anything, including soul diagnosis spells, he couldn’t be sure why Zach had ended up in a worse state than he did, but he had his suspicions. Zach’s control over his own soul was much weaker and cruder than Zorian’s, as was his ability to retain mental discipline. If he woke up early on in the restart like Zorian did and had to fight to stay awake and prevent his soul from going berserk…

Well. Even Zorian found that struggle to be a challenging one.

In any case, Zorian was now presented with a new problem. Even though he had been crucial in tracking down Zach, he now couldn’t access his unconscious body at all! The discovery of his unconscious body had kicked up a media storm that didn’t look like it was going to die down any time soon and he had been transferred to an expensive hospital and placed under guard. Zorian was not a family member, nor did he have any other known links to the Noveda heir, and many people were suddenly questioning his involvement in all this. The academy was taking his side for now, but Ilsa told him things were a bit delicate at the moment. Tesen was trying to distance himself from the matter, bitterly denying he had anything to do with Zach’s coma or imprisonment outside of Cyoria, and his faction pushing hard for Zorian to be arrested so he could be vigorously questioned.

No matter. Even if Zorian could see Zach, what would he do with his unconscious body? Before he visited Zach in the hospital, he had to figure out how to accelerate his healing. Who knew how long it would take for Zach to wake up if he had to rely on his natural rate of recovery? Fortunately, this was something he could actually tackle with his current abilities.

Sudomir, just like many necromancers, often ended up damaging his soul in various ways while training and practicing his craft. As such, he had invested a lot of time in tracking down methods of accelerating his recovery, and Zorian had made sure to steal most of these out of his head during their interrogation sessions. A lot of these were purely personal soul magic exercises that were useful only to the soul mage using them, or complex ritual spells that he wasn’t capable of casting right now, but a few actually came in the form of potions that could be administered to others.

And alchemy did not require any mana shaping. His inability to do magic did not hold him back here in the slightest. So long as he could track down and buy the appropriate materials, he would be able to create the potions in question.

Getting materials for such a relatively exotic potion was anything but easy, of course. Many of them were not sold on the open market, and even if they were Zorian did not have enough money on him to buy them. He thought about robbing invader caches again, but his lack of magic made that a far riskier proposition than it usually was. Additionally, he had attracted quite a bit of attention to himself lately, so going out for a little midnight stealing was probably unwise. Thus, he ended up amassing the necessary funds the hard way – he bought a bunch of raw materials with his available money, made a handful of rare, hard-to-make potions with them, sold them for money, used that money to buy even more raw materials, and so on. It took him a week of that to get enough money to buy what he actually wanted, and then another four days before he had managed to track it all down and finished the potions.

The end result was three different bottles, one holding a milky white liquid, another a blood red syrup that looked as if it was constantly boiling and the last one a glossy, pitch black pill that floated in the center of the bottle as if weightless.

He took all three of them and departed in the direction of the hospital that held Zach. He was still not allowed to visit him, but who cared about that? Through a strategic use of sleep bombs and other disabling potions, he managed to gain access to Zach’s room, after which he proceeded to force-feed the three soul cures to his unconscious body, one after another.

He immediately left afterwards. It would take a while for the potions to actually take effect, and it would be best if he were far away from the scene of the crime when people found the trail of unconscious bodies he had left in his wake.

The news of the second attack on Zach while he was in the hospital kicked up another round of controversy and several dramatic vows by the hospital staff and city authorities that the perpetrator was going to be caught any day now. Considering that not even Zorian’s worst detractors seemed to suspect him as the perpetrator made him rather doubtful of that claim, though. One amusing detail was that the hospital claimed they had caught the attacker in the act and heroically fought him off, which was why Zach supposedly hadn’t been hurt more as a result of the break-in.

While he waited to see what the result of his intervention would turn out to be, Zorian looked into what had happened to Alanic, since the battle priest was one of the few competent and reliable soul mages he knew of. Sadly, with Zorian being unable to teleport and busy with the whole Zach situation, he never did intervene to save Alanic from Sudomir’s assassin, so by the time he checked up on him the man was already dead. Frustrating. It did make him kind of curious how those assassins were even capable of killing someone of Alanic’s caliber. Investigating the case a little revealed he was essentially ambushed while sleeping, allowing his attackers to kill him before he even realized what was going on. That… kind of made sense, yeah. If Zorian saved Lukav, Sudomir panicked and acted prematurely, trying to kill Alanic through sheer force before Lukav could contact him and tell him someone was killing people like them. If the assassination of Lukav went through without issues, Sudomir would act with due caution and planning and kill Alanic in his sleep.

In any case, the treatment worked far better than he had hoped – four days after he fed Zach those potions, his fellow time traveler woke up from the coma. Not long after that, he demanded to see Zorian, which pretty much shut down any further attempts to keep Zorian from visiting the hospital.

"How are you feeling?" Zorian asked his fellow time traveler.

"Like crap," Zach grumbled. He gave Zorian a suspicious look. "I heard you’re the one who tracked me down after my asshole caretaker just stuffed my unconscious body down in some basement. I guess I should thank you for that, but… how are you so much better off than me? Did you not get caught in the blast or something?"

"You know our conversation is probably being eavesdropped, right?" Zorian asked him.

"So? Just put up a privacy ward on the room and be done with it," Zach told him.

"I can’t," Zorian sighed. "I can’t really cast anything right now."

Zach was quiet for a few seconds.

"Ah," he said finally. "I guess you didn’t get off as lightly as it appears. You probably don’t want to hear this, but that kind of makes me glad. I kind of prefer it when you have to suffer through this crap with me."

"Jerk," Zorian said, though there was no real heat in it.

"Yeah, yeah… but seriously, why are you already walking around while I can’t even stand up without vomiting all over myself?"

"I’m not sure, but… do you perhaps remember waking up in your own room for a moment before losing consciousness again?" Zorian asked him.

Zach frowned.

"It’s hard to remember," he said after a few seconds. "Maybe?"

"Hm. Well, we’re going to have to continue this particular topic when you get out of the hospital," Zorian told him. "Can you estimate how long it will be before you’re back in top form?"

Zach frowned. "I don’t know. Four, five months? Something like that."

Zorian breathed a sigh of relief. Although Zach’s condition was worse than his own, it would seem it still wasn’t too bad…

"Is there something urgent you need right now?" Zorian asked him. "As you can imagine, my ability to acquire things is a bit limited at the moment, but I’ll do my best."

"All I want right now is to be out of this damn hospital," Zach grumbled. "But I don’t think that’s going to happen before the end of the month, considering what I’ve overheard, and neither of us has the ability to force the issue right now."

It was as Zach said. He spent the rest of the restart trapped in the hospital while Zorian had to dodge increasingly insistent questions about his involvement in the Zach affair and his personal activities.

Thankfully, before those things could really get anywhere, the summer festival had arrived and the restart came to an end.

The next five restarts were relatively relaxed. With their souls so heavily damaged and their spellcasting impaired, Zach and Zorian couldn’t really do anything particularly dangerous or strenuous, lest their recovery be prolonged even further or their soul damage become permanent.

Whether it was Zach or Zorian, they had no choice but to patiently wait for their soul to heal, so they gave up on doing anything serious and decided to just have fun and work on some of their easier skills. A part of Zorian was aghast at taking a break with their time steadily running out as it was, but forcing themselves would gain them little while risking a lot so he did his best to suppress it.

Unexpectedly, having his soul damaged actually ended up being quite a boon to Zorian’s skill with soul perception and soul magic in general. It allowed him to map out his soul in far greater detail and enhanced his understanding how souls generally functioned. There were some things that were very hard to notice when things were going smoothly, and some pieces of the soul were far easier to comprehend when one compared intact and damaged versions of the soul to one another. He knew from reading Sudomir’s mind that necromancers often deliberately mutilated other people’s souls for that exact reason, destructively studying the anatomy of the soul to enhance their own skills, but one could never really perceive foreign souls on the same level of detail as one could perceive their own. As far as Zorian knew, no soul mage was crazy enough to deliberately damage their own soul as heavily as Zach and Zorian had gotten theirs damaged just to enhance their knowledge of soul mechanics, so their current opportunity was somewhat unique.

Although Zach started from a lower level, his skill in regards to personal soul perception also grew by leaps and bounds in this period, since he invested a huge amount of effort into it – much more than Zorian himself. The fact that he had ended up worse in the wake of Quatach-Ichl’s soul attack seemed to have affected him greatly.

Aside from soul magic, the two of them also worked on their basic shaping skills and tinkered rather heavily with alchemy, since this was the one magical discipline that hadn’t been affected by their injuries in the slightest.

They didn’t try to inform anyone of the time loop during this time. Most of the notebooks and other gathered information had been stored in the palace orb, which they couldn’t actually access at the moment. They still interacted with many of the people they previously worked with, but mostly for the sake of fun and hanging out this time.

They spent an entire restart diligently going to class, being as helpful as humanly possible to every teacher and student they encountered. They spent a restart shapeshifting into various animals through transformation potions and explored the city and its surroundings through alien senses and perspectives. They dabbled in painting, sculpting, wood carving, drawing and various art skills. They went on a tour of Eldemar and its neighbors via train and other mundane methods.

And when the last of these relaxing restarts was drawing to a close, Zorian realized he wasn’t sorry for it all. Even though they kind of wasted their time, even though they would only have 19 iterations left once this restart was finished… he was at peace with it all.

"We really need to give it our all in the upcoming restarts," Zorian said to Zach one day. "19 restarts aren’t that much and we never know when something like this can happen again. If we had gotten this injured with only a handful of restarts left, that would have been the end of us right there. Do you think we should still mess around with Quatach-Ichl after this?"

"Hell yes," Zach said firmly. "I mean, yeah, he really got us good this time, but we still haven’t figured out a good way to break into the royal vaults without his help. And besides… while he ended up messing us up, he also showed us a really good way of taking him down with relative ease."

"Oh?" Zorian asked curiously. "And what would that be?"

"See, I think we’ve been overthinking things a little," Zach explained. "Instead of trying to lure Quatach-Ichl into a trap of flooding him with golems and enemy mages, we should be relying on our strengths to defeat him. Well, your strengths in this case. I’m talking about mind magic, of course."

"Mind magic?" Zorian said, stunned. "But with his mind blank on…"

"Xvim also had his mind blank on and it didn’t stop Quatach-Ichl," Zach quickly pointed out. "It would be tricky, but if we time things right and I get a moment to concentrate properly, I’m pretty sure I can hit the guy with a powerful enough dispel to get rid of his mind blank. Just for a moment, but that should be enough for you, right?"

"I’m quite sure that Quatach-Ichl has some measure of skill with defending his mind," Zorian said carefully. "The fact he was able to search Xvim’s mind so quickly in the heat of battle shows he’s quite proficient in mind magic. Still… I don’t think he’s psychic and the brief telepathic clash I had with him didn’t impress me much. I suppose it could work."

"It will work," Zach insisted. "Your mind magic is terrifying, and I bet it has been centuries since Quatach-Ichl has been targeted by a mind mage he couldn’t kill in under a second. So long as we can stop Quatach-Ichl from murdering you before you finish subverting his mind, I think this could work amazingly well."

"You say that like it’s such an easy thing," Zorian sighed. "But you’re right, that is an interesting idea. Certainly better than fumbling wildly for a solution like we have been doing thus far. I kind of suspect Quatach-Ichl has rigged his soul to be withdrawn back into his phylactery if his mental defenses are ever seriously breached, though. That’s what I’d do in his place."

"That still means we get to pick up the imperial crown from his abandoned skeleton, though," Zach said with a shrug. "That’s the only thing we truly need from him. Everything else is just a bonus."

Zorian supposed he was right about that.

The next restart they decided to spring back to work and get their plans back on track. Their souls were fully healed as far as they could figure out and they didn’t have too much time to waste. Thus, they quickly established a simulacrum link to Koth and Xlotic, recovered the palace orb, stole the Pearl of Aranhal, and then boarded their brand new airship and set off towards Blantyrre.

It would be a long and dangerous journey. Blantyrre was the largest of the world’s continents, but it was separated by miles and miles of open sea from the nearest human port. Just making sure they stayed on the right path was a problem, since the endless expanse of water provided few clues as to whether or not they were going the right way and neither Zach nor Zorian were proficient in this kind of navigation. On top of that, the shortest path to the continent, which they pretty much had to take, passed uncomfortably close to a large island inhabited by dragons, Hundreds upon hundreds of dragons. It was called, somewhat unimaginatively but accurately, Dragon Island.

Dragons generally weren’t fond of humanity, and the dragons of the so-called Dragon Island were especially belligerent. They not only killed any human that tried to disembark on the island itself, but actively patrolled the waters around it for any passing ships. If they spotted any, they demanded ruinous tributes in exchange for not destroying the vessel. Zach and Zorian had asked around to see what the dragons found fitting to their tastes and were prepared to pay the tribute for their safe passage, but the airship was very eye-catching and dragons were known to be capricious at the best of times. It was best to prepare for a fight just in case, and a dragon was always a headache to fight.

On top of that, some of the sea monsters were known to be able to attack aerial vessels, firing jets of water and energy attacks at things flying above them. It didn’t happen often, and the Pearl of Aranhal usually flew quite high in the air, but it meant that Zach and Zorian could never fully relax and had to be constantly on the lookout for potential problems.

Still, things were finally moving again and that was the important part. They would make the attempt at the dagger and the crown again in this restart, and they would lay down the groundwork for finding the location of the staff as well.

In the meantime, they were about to establish contact with Quatach-Ichl again. It was time to arrange for a trade…

85. Critical Mass

Zorian would be lying if he said that interacting with Quatach-Ichl again didn’t fill him with dread. Aside from the fact that the ancient lich had reached an unfathomable level of expertise in soul magic and could possibly detect residual damage on their souls, their current trade offer was fundamentally different from what they did during their last interaction with him. Before, it was Quatach-Ichl who approached them. Last time, he had blindsided them with his sudden visit. He had the initiative right from the start, which doubtlessly helped lessen the level of threat he felt from them. This time, it would be them who were going to blindside him … and Zorian was not at all sure the ancient lich could take that gracefully.

Yet, Zorian knew he had to risk it. The fact was, their current initiatives were insufficient. Even if they managed to gather all the keys together in one restart before the time ran out, that wouldn’t be enough. Not for Zorian, anyway. The problem of how he was supposed to exit the time loop still remained. His original self was still out there in the real world, so he couldn’t just order the Guardian of the Threshold to shove his soul into his real body and be done with it. The Guardian of the Threshold may be confused about his controller status, but it would surely notice there was already a soul in Zorian’s original body upon trying that. And even if that could be sidestepped somehow, there was still the matter of how to seize control of the body from his original self.

Zorian had a couple of ideas on how he could leave the time loop despite this issue, but all of them required incredibly advanced knowledge of dimensionalism and soul magic to accomplish. Quatach-Ichl had both, and it was likely that the insights he had into those two fields were impossible to find elsewhere. Zorian couldn’t afford to ignore this priceless source of information, no matter how dangerous it was.

Arranging a meeting with the ancient lich proved to be rather simple, at least. All they had to do was go to the same corner store that Quatach-Ichl had sent them to the last time they had interacted with him and ask about him. The man behind the counter acted as if they were crazy, but not long after they left, the cranium rats suddenly became a lot more interested in them and started following them around. Zorian simply kept stealing away the individual rats from the collective for a few days before Quatach-Ichl decided to contact them personally and arranged for a meeting.

At the moment, Zach, Zorian and Quatach-Ichl were sitting in a private booth of a relatively high class restaurant near the city center. Not exactly the type of institution Zorian liked to frequent, in part because just getting a seat in one of those was pretty hard for an unknown teenager like him, but Quatach-Ichl had been the one to pick the location and he was evidently in the mood to show off his wealth and influence. He was using the same face and flesh-and-blood look he did the last time they met in a public location – either this appearance was his usual persona for dealing with people or this was how he once looked before discarding his flesh for an undead existence.

"What an interesting offer," Quatach-Ichl said, playing around with his fork thoughtfully, occasionally tapping it against his glass. He had ordered an expensive meal and wine for the occasion, but did not touch any of it throughout the entire meeting. "I’m no stranger to people seeking me out for my wealth of magical secrets, but usually their offers are… hesitant. They’re leery of angering a powerful lich, they aren’t sure if I am really as good as they heard and they’re trying to pay as little as possible to get what they want. They start small, asking for relatively minor things in order to puzzle out how I think and what it would take to get what they really want…"

The ancient lich then made a dramatic pause, pointing at the small pile of divine artifacts and rare materials that Zach and Zorian brought to him as payment for his wealth of magical secrets, as he put it.

"You though?" Quatach-Ichl continued. "You’re immediately going for the kill. You want nothing less than my complete pocket dimension creation expertise – an extremely rare, almost priceless set of secrets – and you’re willing to offer no less than five divine artifacts and a plethora of extremely rare materials in return. I’m impressed by your boldness, but I can’t help but wonder… are you not worried I will cheat you or that this will end up a disappointing trade in the end? You are, after all, trading physical goods for information of uncertain value. I could easily just ignore you after pocketing the goods or play dumb and give you mere shadow of what you asked for."

Zorian mentally agreed with this, but wasn’t really worried. Although many things about the ancient lich were enigmatic, he was pretty sure he had a good read on his sense of honor. Quatach-Ichl prided himself on his sense of fairness. He would not cheat them unless he thought they were trying to cheat him first. The real challenge was to make him agree to the deal in the first place.

"Although I don’t dare claim I know you, you are as famed for your honorable behavior as you are for your great magical skill and brutality in warfare," Zorian said. Quatach-Ichl smiled idly, clearly viewing all three traits as a compliment. "We feel that if we can reach an agreement with you, you will do your best to honor it."

"Perhaps my knowledge of pocket dimensions isn’t as extensive as you think it is, though," Quatach-Ichl pointed out. "I am indeed a man of many talents, but that is quite a rare and exotic field of study. You may end up disappointed by the results of the trade."

"If so, we will accept it quietly and in good grace," Zorian shrugged. "We’re willing to take a gamble."

"Hm. Although it is not a smart thing to admit such a thing in these kinds of negotiations, I feel you are being a little too reckless here," Quatach-Ichl noted thoughtfully, giving them both a piercing look, as if trying to see through their souls. "It would have been smarter to try and do a smaller trade at first just to see if my pocket dimension skills are worth the more substantial investment."

"Well…" said Zach with a cheeky smile. "Although this is generally not a smart thing to admit in these kinds of negotiations, the fact is we’re in a bit of a hurry. Slowly feeling you out and haggling over the details would take too long. That’s why the terms we offered you were so generous, see?"

"Generous? Debatable," Quatach-Ichl scoffed. "I was merely questioning your logic just now. I said nothing about how good the deal appears to me. What you are seeking is pretty damn valuable."

"Yes, but so is our payment," Zach immediately shot back. "We realize that reaching out to you so suddenly and asking for such a heavy favor is a bit unreasonable. We also realize that, being in a bit of a hurry, we are innately in a disadvantaged position compared to you. We’re on a time limit, you aren’t. That’s why we’re willing to offer as much as we did, though – in normal circumstances, we would never consider this a reasonable trade."

Quatach-Ichl stared at them for a few seconds. Perhaps he was trying to put pressure on them through silence to see how they would react?

"You’re pretty interesting people," Quatach-Ichl said. "I think that’s why I haven’t simply told you to screw off by now. That’s what I’d normally tell people if they tried to give me this kind of deal. Are you really teenagers? You are way too calm for people that are supposed to be, what, 15 years old?"

"Why bother even asking?" Zach challenged. "We already know you’ve tried to spy on us before inviting us here, so you probably know enough about us to answer this yourself."

"I do know some basic facts about you two," Quatach-Ichl admitted. "It’s just that they don’t make much sense. How the hell did two academy students gather all this and find out how to contact me? Who are you really?"

"It’s a secret," Zorian said blandly. There was no point in trying to explain. "But since we’re asking private questions about one another, let me ask you a question of my own. How exactly did you talk no less than four cranium rat swarms into working under you? What the hell did you offer them to make them open to cooperation? I can’t even get them to talk to me, much less work for me."

"Heh. Are we including that information as part of our deal?" Quatach-Ichl asked with a grin.

"No," Zorian snorted derisively. "I was just curious."

"And also changing the subject," Quatach-Ichl noted. "But fine, I get it. If you want to keep your true identity secret, I won’t pry. But you know, if you really are as young as you appear, then we have another problem on our hands. Namely, I’m not sure if you’re even capable of learning how to perform dimensional magic on the level you are asking about. What makes you think you are qualified to learn from me?"

"That is not an issue," Zorian insisted. "We know we can perform this level of magic because we are already capable of creating pocket dimensions."

"Oh?" Quatach-Ichl said, a little incredulously.

"Yes," Zorian confirmed. They would have to be careful not to make themselves look too amazing, or else Quatach-Ichl might notice something was wrong and attack them again. But this particular bit of information was impossible to hide, considering what they were asking of him. "We are asking you for advanced guidance, not asking you to teach us the basics of the field."

Zorian then removed a bracelet from his wrist and handed it to the ancient lich, who gracelessly snatched it out of his outstretched hand and began to scrutinize it.

The bracelet was something Zorian had personally created before coming here. It served as an anchor for a miniature pocket dimension. The internal space was tiny, barely enough to store a book or two, but that wasn’t important. The important thing was that it proved that not only were they capable of creating pocket dimensions, they could create advanced ones.

Most products of pocket dimension magic came in the form of boxes, chests and other rigid containers that had their internal volume expanded beyond what their outside form would suggest. These kinds of objects were relatively easy to make, as anchoring a pocket dimension to an internal space of a hollow, inflexible object was a relatively simple task. Well, as much as any pocket dimension creation could ever be easy, anyway.

A more advanced procedure was to use dimensional magic to expand the interior of more flexible containers like bags, backpacks and pockets. Although this sounded rather convenient, fabric was relatively fragile and hard to imbue with spell formula. After a few years of use at most, such objects inevitably fell apart, sometimes causing catastrophic failures when least expected.

Finally, there were objects like the palace orb and the bracelet that Quatach-Ichl was currently holding. These objects were not containers with expanded interior at all. They were self-contained pocket worlds anchored to an object. Accessing the contents of such a self-contained space was tricky without dimensional magic, which drastically reduced the amount of people that could use them, but they were incredibly stable. They could be inflated to downright ridiculous sizes, if one had a sufficiently stable anchor object… as the palace orb amply proved. The bracelet Zorian cobbled up in the last few days was pretty underwhelming in that regard, but he was sure that Quatach-Ichl would recognize what it signified nevertheless.

After a minute or so of silent study, Quatach-Ichl handed the bracelet back to Zorian and then unceremoniously drew all the divine artifacts and exotic materials towards him with a sweep of his hand. After a few quick movements, they all disappeared into his pockets.

Neither Zach nor Zorian moved to stop him.

"Alright," Quatach-Ichl said with a small nod. "You win. I accept the deal. Since you have said you were in a hurry and I’m going to be busy with something soon, we can start tomorrow."

Busy with something… what a funny way to hide the fact he was planning an invasion of the city and the release of the primordial trapped in the Hole. Still, Zach and Zorian were pretending not to know about that in this restart, so they said nothing about that. After arranging for their next meeting place and hammering out some minor details, they turned to leave only for the lich to stop them.

"One more thing," Quatach-Ichl said. "Who messed up your souls so badly?"

Zorian couldn’t help but jolt a little at the question.

"W-What?" he asked.

"Your souls are scarred," Quatach-Ichl said matter-of-factly. "The damage is faint now, and will probably go away completely in a few years, but less than a year ago you must have been in an absolutely miserable condition. A normal person would take years recovering from something like that. Much of it would be spent comatose, too. I guess I should add soul magic to the list of things you are inexplicably proficient in?"

Damn it. So he could detect it… though it didn’t look like he recognized it as something inflicted by him in particular.

"Does it matter?" Zach challenged.

"No, I guess not," Quatach-Ichl said, frowning. "But it makes me even more certain you are not really who you present yourself as. You are fortunate I have something else occupying my attention at the moment, or else I would not be as willing to let this go so easily. Make no mistake, though – once I’ve cleared up my schedule a little, I’ll come back to visit you so we can clear some things up…"

Zorian did not outwardly react to this proclamation, but inwardly he was breathing a sigh of relief. No doubt Quatach-Ichl meant this as a veiled threat, but so long as nothing happened within the bounds of the time loop, Zorian didn’t really care about that. Provided they didn’t mess up in some other way as the restart developed, they should be fine.

Hopefully Silverlake would take his warnings not to investigate into Quatach-Ichl more seriously this time around.

Whether because Quatach-Ichl didn’t know that they were aware of the invasion this time around, or because he never discovered just how expansive their activities around the region really were, the lich didn’t seem to view them as very threatening this time around. They were kind of baffling, yes, but he had an invasion to organize and he had no idea he had a time limit when it came to figuring them out.

In regards to his obligations, he fulfilled them to the letter. The agreement called for him to provide them with instructions for two hours every day, and he was never late for the arranged time, nor did he stay so much as one minute longer than they agreed. If he withheld some of his expertise, it was in a way that neither Zach nor Zorian could tell the difference – the amount of information he had for them was enough to keep them busy for quite a while. He spoke clearly and understandably. He readily clarified his statements if he saw they did not understand him. He pointed out any obvious mistakes they did under his supervision and explained the logic behind his instructions rather than let them figure things out for themselves. He never lost patience with them or insulted them. He was, strangely enough, probably the best teacher Zorian had ever encountered.

Realizing that a soul-defiling, warmongering, thousand-year-old lich was his ideal academic instructor was a somewhat unnerving realization for Zorian.

That aside, having Quatach-Ichl’s dedicated help in understanding pocket dimension magic made Zorian suddenly aware that it wasn’t just the lack of qualified teachers and instruction manuals that was holding him and Zach back from advancing quickly in the field. Embarrassingly enough, it often happened that Quatach-Ichl was pushing ahead in his lessons and the two of them struggled to follow along. To put it bluntly, the real bottleneck to making the most out of those lessons was their own lack of talent and comprehension, not Quatach-Ichl’s unwillingness to instruct them to the best of his ability. Zorian had a feeling the ancient lich was laughing at them on the inside about that.

Zorian knew this kind of result was to be expected.

It wasn’t that Zach and Zorian were stupid, or that their work ethic was lacking… it was just that they lacked any special advantage when it came to learning something like pocket dimension magic. They had no special talent or bloodline related to the field and neither of them was the kind of genius that could easily grasp the complexities of this relatively mind-bending, unintuitive field of study. There was little that could be done to speed their learning process up, at least through traditional methods of advancement.

So Zorian turned to non-traditional methods instead. For a while now he had been hesitating about delving deeper into the field of mental enhancements he had been messing with, afraid that he would permanently mess up his own mind in the process. Now he decided to risk it and ordered his simulacrums to kick things up a few levels. Aware that time was steadily running out, they did not complain much and simply jumped at the task with enthusiasm that honestly surprised him. He supposed that since he himself had set aside his fears and resolved to tackle the issue, they inherited his determination as well… unlike in the past, where he himself had viewed the endeavor with apprehension, and thus his simulacrums had been similarly unenthused about risking themselves.

For the moment, his idea was to try and create a sort of mental calculator and internal clock, since a lot of the problems with pocket dimensions came from the inhuman timing and precision required to pull off certain stages successfully. Normally this was achieved via a complex system of divination magic, which added an extra layer of complexity to an already tricky task. If he could strip away the divination scaffolding and just do all the number-crunching, measurements and timing decisions purely in his head, the magic would get significantly easier.

Of course, it turned out to be not that easy. While Zorian knew that creating a mental calculator was very much possible, since it was one of the more common modifications aranea tinkered with, it was a tricky thing to pull off in practice. Several of his simulacrum had to be forcibly broken out of their experiments after they fell into strange mental states, endlessly counting the number of pebbles around them and such. Thankfully, none of them were so far gone that they had to be destroyed and recreated, so they were able to learn from their mistakes instead of starting from scratch and trying to guess where their predecessors made a mistake.

Additionally, he was also experimenting with hyper-focused mental states and with trying to replicate the hydra’s unity of self with his simulacrums. He had a feeling that if he could synchronize himself with a handful of his own simulacrums the way a hydra could synchronize its multiple minds into one self, many complex pieces of magic would become relatively trivial to perform.

Of course, these kind of mental enhancement were only of possible benefit to Zorian, and did not help Zach in any way. For this reason, and also because he wanted to hedge his bets, Zorian also started to look more closely into blood magic and enhancement rituals. After all, some creatures were innately good at dimensionalism in various forms. Phase spiders, for instance, were capable of instinctively creating small pocket dimensions to hide themselves in. Blink toads could teleport short distances, voidsoul deer could bend space around them to make spells and projectiles launched at them miss and the silverstripe mole was rumored to be able to perceive dimensional cracks and boundaries in some strange fashion. It might be worthwhile to try and steal those kinds of abilities for a while, just to see if they could offer them with some kind of important insight or capability.

Of course, Zorian was currently not very well versed in either blood magic or regular enhancement rituals, so he would first have to practice with something relatively simple and then slowly work his way up to what he wanted…

Alternatively, he could just hire an alchemist to make him an enhancement potion with desired ability, but such enhancement potions did not confer the sort of instinctive competence with the gained ability that a properly executed enhancement ritual did.

In any case, both the mental enhancement route and the blood magic route were long-projects. It would be at least a couple of restarts before he could make an effective use of them, maybe more. Thus, Zorian ended up turning to something more immediate to get the most out of Quatach-Ichl’s teachings – his spell formula expertise.

Zorian knew for a while now that most old, experienced diviners had specialized divination compasses they used to perform their work. Zorian himself rarely bothered with them, preferring to simply dump information straight into his mind and sort it out mentally, but he had tinkered with such devices often enough in the past. Kirma’s divination flower thingy and the spell formula crafters she referred him to were especially useful in this regard. Now he embarked on a project to create such a divination compass, one specialized in figuring out divination related to dimensionalism and pocket dimension creation.

In this, at least, he had plenty of success. Spell formula were one of the things he had focused on pretty heavily throughout his entire time in the time loop, and he had reached an extremely high level of skill when it came to them. Producing a working version of such a dimensionalism-specific divination compass took only two days, after which he rapidly improved the design, producing newer and more potent versions every couple of days. By the time the end of the restart was approaching, these divination compasses had become so good that Quatach-Ichl took notice of it and commissioned a couple of them for his own use. In exchange, he provided them with the names and locations of two secretive mages that also knew a thing or two about pocket dimension magic – information that was almost as priceless as Quatach-Ichl’s own lessons, as far as Zach and Zorian were concerned.

Gradually, the end of the restart started to approach…

While trying to deepen their understanding of pocket dimension magic consumed most of their energies in this particular restart, it was far from being the only thing they worked on. An equally critical, though far more boring task was to make sure the Pearl of Aranhal reached Blantyrre safe and intact. A mission that was thankfully far easier than they had ever hoped it would be. No sea monsters bothered them, and while no less than three dragons spotted them as they flew near the Dragon Island, they were surprisingly easy to keep at bay with flashy combat spells and a single experimental, magic-enhanced cannon that Zorian had installed on the ship. Neither the spells nor the cannon actually did any damage to the dragons in question, but they kept the beasts from simply rushing at them and rippling the hull into shreds. Perhaps because they had never seen an airship like theirs and did not know what combat abilities to expect from it, all three of the dragons limited themselves to probing attacks and flying in circles around them for a few hours to see if their response times and attentiveness would ever slip up.

It helped that each of the dragons attacked alone. Only after one of the dragons had given up on bothering them would the next one try his luck. If all three of them had united against them, Pearl of Aranhal would have been doomed without question. Thankfully for them, dragons were notoriously solitary creatures that viewed their own kind largely as competition rather than kin. They lived and hunted alone, only forming societies if pressured to do so by outside aggression. Zorian had heard there had been a few ill-considered campaigns in the past that sought to systematically wipe out dragons in a particular area, only for the dragons in question to temporarily amass themselves into massive flocks that devastated everything around them for a while before eventually breaking up again when they were certain the danger was gone. Aside from that, dragons were largely an individual threat, and dragons of Dragon Island were no exception.

Unfortunately, while their journey had not been delayed by dragons and sea monsters, their own lack of navigational skill had lengthened the journey somewhat. Additionally, while the people who made Pearl of Aranhal were world-class experts, it was still a prototype that had never really been tested or truly finished before being sent on such an ambitious journey… meaning that it had almost broken down several times along the way, almost crashing them into the sea at one point and forcing them to drastically slow down at several points along their chosen route.

But in the end they made it. Five days before the restart was about to end, the Pearl of Aranhal finally spotted the shores of Blantyrre.

Five days was not enough to really do anything, though. If they had to go through this kind of lengthy, annoying journey in every single restart, only to be left with measly five days per restart to locate the imperial staff, they were guaranteed to fail. Thus, their first and very urgent priority was to locate a Bakora Gate somewhere on the continent. Any Bakora Gate, really. That way they could reach the continent in only a handful of days with the help of Silent Doorway Adepts in subsequent restarts.

Sadly, this was not an easy task. Bakora Gates were scattered all over Blantyrre, but the continent was vast and the Gates were small. Searching for them blindly would take forever, which meant they had no choice but to seek the natives for help in finding them.

The trouble was, Blantyrre was not inhabited by humans. The steaming equatorial jungle that covered Blantyrre was home to a multitude of sapient species, but the most advanced and powerful force were the lizardmen. They lived in great stone cities along the coast and the rivers, and although they were very awfully primitive by human standards, they were more or less the only ones qualified to help Zach and Zorian locate a Bakora Gate somewhere around here. Not only were they the only species on Blantyrre that kept any sort of written records, they also regularly traded with humans from Xlotic and Altazia, which meant that some of them actually spoke a language that Zach and Zorian could understand.

Unfortunately, while the lizardmen did occasionally trade with humans, getting the location of a nearby Bakora Gate out of them was still a huge chore. For one thing, they existed as a collection of small kingdoms and quarrelling city-states that rarely shared information with one another, so unless a Bakora Gate was literally in their territory there was no chance they would know about such a strange but ultimately useless artifact. For another, only the priesthood was literate and knowledgeable of obscure places and artifacts like these, and they were not terribly fond of outsiders. Finally, while the lizardmen did occasionally trade with humans, they did so with great caution and only in a strictly regulated manner. If they wanted information, they couldn’t just walk into a lizardman city and start asking questions – they had to go through official channels and make a formal request.

Pressed for time as they were, Zach and Zorian resorted to shock and awe to get what they want. Rather than carefully approaching the local rulers and making respectful diplomatic requests for information about Bakora Gates, they brazenly flew Pearl of Aranhal straight above the nearest lizardman city, teleported themselves into the city center and then started throwing around gold, gems and some spices that they heard lizardmen liked at everyone in the vicinity until someone came to talk to them, at which point they promised great rewards for any information about the Bakora Gates. Then they moved on and repeated this process in every larger city they encountered as they flew around the coast.

The reaction was everything they hoped it would be. The lizardmen may be primitive, but they had their ways, and news of their airship and what they were seeking quickly spread to every lizardman power in the vicinity. Soon, everyone knew that two immensely powerful human mages were flying around in their fancy airship and promising fantastic rewards to anyone who could lead them to a Bakora Gate. Admittedly, this did cause a lot of the lizardmen to come forward with fabricated tales of nearby Bakora Gates, but those were easily seen through by Zorian. Lizardmen emotions were not alien enough to give Zorian’s empathy too much trouble.

Eventually, three days later, they were summoned by one of the local kings from a river city-state deeper in the continent’s interior. The emissary brought with him a very lifelike drawing of a Bakora Gate as proof that they were telling the truth, which was good enough for Zach and Zorian to immediately set out towards the place.

This was why, at the moment, the two of them were standing in a luxurious stone throne room of a lizardman king, curiously observing their surroundings while they waited for the king to actually arrive and talk to them. Lizardmen rulers seemed to be fond of mosaics made out of gems and colored stones, and this one was not an exception – the walls were dominated by some kind of epic battle scene between two lizardmen forces. One of the two sides, which Zorian presumed to represent the forces of the city they were currently in, was clearly dominating their opponents, boldly advancing forward, while the other was in the process of being pierced by spears, clubbed over the head by heavy clubs or down on their knees and begging for mercy. An absolutely giant lizardman floated in the sky above the scene, curiously observing the battle. Probably a representation of one of the lizardman gods…

Zorian’s idle musings were interrupted by the loud entrance of the lizardman king. A procession of musicians playing some kind of annoying flute-like instruments came first, playing ear-splitting whistles while a bunch of lizardmen children ran around and threw petals on the ground in front of the approaching king. The lizardman throne guards, which had been leaning on their spears and chatting amongst themselves in their incomprehensible lizardman tongue, quickly assumed a proper posture and pretended they had been alert and battle ready all this time. They also banged their spears against the floor a few times and let loose a keening wail that was probably some kind of salute.

As for Zach and Zorian, they just stared at the spectacle, not sure how to react. Perhaps because they had arrived so unexpectedly or because those rulers had not been so wealthy and powerful as this one, but this was not the way the other lizardmen kings had behaved in front of them.

"Uh, what’s the proper procedure for greeting a lizardman ruler again? Are we supposed to bow or shake hands or something?" Zach whispered to him uncertainly.

"Why are you asking me?" Zorian protested. "You’re nobility, not me. You should be the one who knows things like this."

"Please," Zach scoffed. "You’re the one who is constantly interacting with various talking monsters. This is totally your area of expertise!"

Zorian turned his attention to the approaching king. He was surprisingly short compared to the warriors scattered around his palace, though the massive gem-encrusted headdress and glittering golden jewelry hanging off of him immediately marked him as the ruler regardless. In one of his hands he carried a black staff with a large, glowing, amber stone affixed on top. Four particularly massive lizardman warriors flanked him on both sides, which made for a somewhat amusing contrast between them and their king. What was not so amusing was the look in their eyes and the emotions they were radiating. Unlike the normal palace guards, these four took their jobs very seriously and their yellow, slitted eyes followed them with a threatening intensity – if they made so much as a threatening movement, they were ready to shove a spear through their throat without warning.

Also accompanying the king was another lizardman with lots of jewelry and an elaborate headdress, although one less impressive and of slightly different type and color scheme. Zorian suspected that she (he was pretty sure it was a female lizardman) was the high priest of the city.

And though she wasn’t as overtly hostile as the king’s honor guard, she clearly did not like them. At all.

Zorian inwardly sighed. Of course nothing could ever be easy…

Zach and Zorian had already managed to claim the imperial ring from the Ziggurat of the Sun in the past. Since they now knew that it was held by the sulrothum high priest, getting it was slightly easier than it had previously been, when they had yet to even locate where it was. However, easier didn’t mean easy. The sulrothum high priest resided in the innermost, most heavily defended portion of the ziggurat. Getting to him still required a large-scale assault on the sulrothum settlement, which was… non-ideal.

Rather than organize another assault on the Ziggurat of the Sun in this restart, Zorian agreed to try something different this time around. After establishing a base near the ziggurat using Bakora Gates, they brought over a dozen or so aranean mercenaries and instructed them to spy on sulrothum guards and patrols. Although sulrothum minds were as alien to the aranea as they were to Zorian, the aranea were far more experienced with making sense of alien minds than he was. They did it all their lives, after all.

At the same time they began ambushing and killing sulrothum hunting parties and patrol groups leaving the ziggurat, in the hopes that doing this continually would eventually force the high priest to confront them directly or at least motivate to sulrothum to try and negotiate with them. After all, the colony would surely starve if they couldn’t send anyone outside without them disappearing, right?

Unfortunately, the sulrothum didn’t behave like they hoped they would. Rather than investigate the problem, they simply barricaded themselves inside and no longer tried to leave the ziggurat. It was baffling. Either the colony had sizeable stockpiles of preserved food and felt certain they could last for a while under siege or there was a Dungeon entrance somewhere below the ziggurat and they decided to brave the tunnels to feed themselves instead.

Either way, it was annoying. Thankfully, the aranea were somewhat successful in their information gathering.

"So," Zorian asked the aranea in front of him. "I don’t think the damn wasps are going to poke their heads out of their turtle shells any time soon. Do you have something useful to report?"

"I think so, yeah," Storm Dream, the aranea in question, answering him through a voice spell so Zach could hear her too. "First of all, the ring you’re after? It’s not an accident that the high priest has it on him. He knows what it does and is actively using it."

Oh.

"Now that I think about it, that does make sense," Zorian mused. "I could tell the last time we met that he’s a soul mage. That was a bit unusual, since sulrothum aren’t exactly known for their magic abilities, but I thought nothing of it at the time. Since he’s wearing a ring that grants soul sight, though, I guess it’s to be expected he became interested in that type of magic. We’re fortunate he didn’t populate the ziggurat with undead guards or something."

"Probably wouldn’t happen, even if he knew how to do that," Storm Dream said. "They’re very religious and they seem to attach great importance to being cremated upon death. Some nonsense about returning to the sun mother and whatnot."

"Well, they should be happy about all those patrols we fireballed to death recently, then," Zach said cheekily. "They got a proper burial as they died."

"Yes. Well," Storm Dream said after a second of awkward silence. "If you want to lure the high priest out of the ziggurat, I have only two ideas. One is to wait for him to come outside on his own to perform one of his periodic land blessings and reading of the signs. The next such occasion should be about two months from now and–"

"Too long," Zach immediately said, shaking his head.

"I don’t understand why you’re in such a hurry about this… the ring has been in the high priest’s hands for years now. It’s not going anywhere," Storm Dream said, with no small amount of exasperation. "But fine. The other option is to try and ally yourself with the nearby sulrothum tribe that this particular bunch has a rivalry with. I’m not entirely sure, but I think he would come out of the ziggurat and support his warriors if he thought it was a rival tribe attacking them instead of scary human mages with their unfair, mysterious magic and thunder sticks."

"Ah," nodded Zorian. The thought of seeing if the tribe had any local enemies and allying with them had honestly didn’t even occur to him. A silly mistake, in retrospect.

Zach and Zorian discussed the merits of the idea for a while, before Zorian noticed that Storm Dream was shifting in place uncomfortably and looked like she wanted to say something more.

"What?" he asked her.

"It’s… probably just a stupid coincidence, but the sulrothum high priest has the same kind of knife you do," she said.

"My knife?" Zorian asked incredulously. Since when did he even carry a kni– "Oh! Oh. You mean this?"

He tapped the knife hanging from his backpack. It was the divine artifact they had recovered from the palace orb – the one they had no idea what it did. Zorian sometimes liked to inspect it, staring at it while futilely hoping he would finally succeed in unlocking its mysteries.

"Yes, like that one," Storm Dream said. "I know you humans churn out thousands of identical objects as a matter of course, but I thought it was strange that a sulrothum high priest on another continent carries the same kind of knife like you do. Especially since their one is of immense religious importance to them and has an impressive magical ability."

"Oh? Do tell," Zach prompted. "What magical ability?"

"The high priest can use it to command a sand worm of immense size hidden beneath the sands of this place," Storm Dream said. "It could be just more superstitious nonsense, I guess, but I don’t think so. Maybe the sulrothum are overstating the worm’s real size, but they seem pretty certain of its ability to repel all intruders, so it should be pretty impressive. If your knife is the same, then… maybe you can control it too?"

Zach and Zorian were silent for a moment.

"I knew it was stupid," Storm Dream said. "Just… forget I said anything."

Zorian thought about the gigantic flying sand worm they had faced in their last assault on this place. The creature was an immense threat, only kept manageable by Zach’s incredible combat prowess and their extensive preparations before the battle. And the way its mind had completely stopped Zorian’s mental abilities like a brick wall, unlike any other mental defense he had ever seen…

"Are you thinking what I’m thinking?" Zach asked him quietly.

"I doubt our dagger can really control the sulrothum sand worm," Zorian said. "But it’s too bad that we already killed the giant hydra guarding the palace orb, I’ll say that much."

It was just a suspicion, but Zorian felt it was likely that each knife was keyed in to a different creature. Assuming that the strange flying sand worm was the divinely-enhanced guardian of the imperial ring, it made sense that a knife that the sulrothum probably found near the ring was keyed to it. By the same logic, the knife Zorian currently held in his hand was probably meant to control the hydra instead, since it normally seemed live in and guard the orb.

"Next time, then," said Zach dreamily. "I like the idea of having my own pet hydra, you know? We could pit it against the stupid sand worm while we tackle the sulrothum ourselves. Or we could throw him at Quatach-Ichl, just to see the look on that stupid bag of bones when a massive hydra starts screaming and charging at him… or just take it on a walk through Cyoria like some kind of oversized dog and just soak in the people’s reactions… lots of potential there…"

Zorian looked at the dagger in his hand and then grasped it tightly.

Next time, indeed…

As the end of the restart began to approach, Zach and Zorian turned their attention to something they had been gradually building up to throughout the entire restart – raiding the royal vaults for the dagger again. They sought out Quatach-Ichl for help again, too – partially because they still hadn’t grasped the details on the inner wards, so his help in getting inside was still critical, and partially because they still had designs on his crown.

Zorian had to admit he was more morally conflicted about betraying Quatach-Ichl this time around. After all, the ancient lich had been nothing but helpful throughout the entire restart. It felt wrong, dishonorable, to just stab him in the back like this in the end…

Then again, didn’t Quatach-Ichl indicate during that initial negotiation they had with him that he would return to interrogate them after his little invasion business was over? Perhaps he was just looking for excuses to make himself better, but seen in that light this attack could easily be viewed as pre-emptive defense on their part. Plus, the lich clearly intended to invade Cyoria as normal – a fact he sometimes cryptically alluded to during his lessons, but one which he never actually made clear to them. In a very real way, that was betrayal as well.

He supposed in the end it didn’t matter. Quatach-Ichl once again agreed to help them steal the dagger from the Eldemar’s royal vaults. They once again achieved their goal, successfully fought their way out of the capital city and then kept running from the Eldemar military until Quatach-Ichl figured out the nature of the tracking device that was used to track them. They again opened a dimensional gate to Xlotic and stepped through it…

The moment Quatach-Ichl followed after then they shut off the gate and attacked him with no warning.

There was no talking. They attacked silently and without hesitation, and Quatach-Ichl took their ambush entirely in stride. As an endless barrage of incinerating rays, impossibly sharp dimensional blades and disintegration blasts suddenly rained down on him, he quietly blocked, dodged, teleported and retaliated in return. He did not rage at their betrayal or try to talk to them to find out their reasons. Perhaps he had been expecting it. Maybe he was just that used to sudden ambushes. Whatever the case, he silently accepted their challenge and met their attack head on.

The desert quaked. Sand was melted and turned to glass over and over. Several hidden wards and traps that Zach and Zorian prepared in the area in advance activated, only to be shattered and neutralized by Quatach-Ichl. The ancient lich summoned a bunch of skeletal undead giants from some internal storage space on his person and Zorian responded by throwing his combat golems at them to keep them busy. Zach managed to shear off Quatach-Ichl’s leg with one of his attacks, but the lich simply reattached it in the next moment. Three of Zorian’s simulacrums sacrificed themselves to keep him alive when facing Quatach-Ichl’s counterattacks, their inhumanly tough metallic bodies unable to withstand the ancient lich’s attacks.

It was then, right in the middle of the heated battle, that several hidden devices revealed themselves in the distance, blanketing the whole area with small, fast-moving silver discs.

Most of the silver discs were completely mundane, meant purely to mask the real threats. Some of them were infused with specialized magic meant to stress and overload typical force shields that protected mages against physical projectiles.

And finally, a small number were special. They were infused with the same sort of soul severing magic that was once used by Kael to make the coin that ended up banishing Quatach-Ichl back to his phylactery.

In order to make sure Quatach-Ichl couldn’t simply push away all the discs with a simple wave of his hand, Zach and Zorian immediately intensified their attacks. Despite that, Quatach-Ichl took the little silver projectiles as a deadly threat, never letting a single one touch him, raising the ground as walls and pillars to keep them at bay when the shield disruptors started to eat away at his magical shields.

But the silver discs did their job of occupying his attention anyway. So busy was he with avoiding them, dealing with Zach and Zorian’s normal attacks and trying to counterattacks that he overlooked a far larger silver disc hidden in the sands nearby. This disc was also imbued with soul severing magic, and with a much more potent form of it, too.

Upon dodging one of their attacks, Quatach-Ichl ended up stepping on it and it visibly discharged a wave of white light straight into him.

For a moment, the whole battlefield stilled. Quatach-Ichl was momentarily frozen in place, a look of surprise on his face. Zach and Zorian waiting with bated breaths to see if the lich would collapse into a lifeless pile of bones in the aftermath.

And then the lich moved.

"Heh," Quatach said, speaking up for the first time since the battle had started. "You got me. But do you really think a stupid trick like that can beat me?"

Well no. He did not think that. But as a distraction, it worked better than Zorian had ever hoped it would.

The moment Quatach-Ichl had finished talking, a massive wave of dispelling energy erupted out of Zach, powered by most of Zach’s remaining mana. It washed away everything in the vicinity, completely catching Quatach-Ichl off guard. For just a moment, all of his defenses went down.

Including his mind blank.

Zorian immediately reached out with his mind and began his attack.

Quatach-Ichl’s mental defenses were impeccably made. They were thick and without any obvious flaws, and he could rebuild them in an instant, just like Xvim. Considering his endless reserves of mana, this meant that even Zorian would fail to break through them if he tried to gradually wear them down. He could never hope to win a battle of attrition against the ancient lich, not to mention that every second he failed to break through was a second that Quatach-Ichl could use to murder his fleshy body to remove the mental threat he posed. Thus, Zorian held nothing back when attacking the lich. He poured all of his mana into a quick succession of telepathic attacks.

After three such attacks, he was delighted to see some actual exploitable flaws starting to appear. Quatach-Ichl was proficient enough in fixing the aftermath of a single mental attack, but multiple ones in succession strained his defenses. As powerful as he was, the ancient lich had probably not encountered a mind mage that could meaningfully threaten him for a very, very long time. His defenses had probably once been truly flawless, but since he had not had to use them in ages, he had gotten a bit rusty.

Too rusty to stop Zorian, in any case.

With one final push, Quatach-Ichl’s mental barrier shattered into countless pieces, leaving his mind defenseless before Zorian’s telepathic might. Letting lose an ear-splitting scream of incoherent rage, Quatach-Ichl swung his skeletal hand towards Zorian, firing a jagged red ray in his general direction.

Zorian did not stop. Even when the ray hit him, severing his left arm just below the shoulder and sending waves of incredible pain throughout his whole body, he did not stop. He sank deeper and deeper into Quatach-Ichl’s mind, paralyzing his skeletal body and starting to root through his long-term memories…

Without warning, the mind Zorian was invading suddenly disappeared. The bones Quatach-Ichl had been animating fell to the ground, lifeless.

The lich had admitted defeat and fled.

"Ha! We… we did it!" yelled Zach breathlessly. "Oh man, I can’t believe we actually succeeded in beating the stupid bag of bones. We– Oh shit. Zorian, your arm!"

"Y-Yeah, I know," Zorian said, looking at the mangled stump connected to his left shoulder. "I’m… not feeling too well. I think I’m going to lie down a little."

Zach was saying something, but Zorian could no longer hear him. Everything was kind of fuzzy and eventually he just closed his eyes and let himself fall to the ground.

Two hours later, Zorian had woken up from unconsciousness only to find Zach beside him and his wound professionally bandaged. It was just something he had learned while learning medical magic, Zach explained. Apparently his teachers had insisted he learn some good old-fashioned mundane care for the injuries, and lost limbs were included in these lessons.

So now Zorian would get to experience what it was like to live with a missing arm for a few days. Lovely. The time loop was a gift that just kept on giving. In any case, they had to move fast. Quatach-Ichl was bound to be utterly furious with them, and they weren’t really sure how long it would take him to possess another body and come after them. They had learned that this time varied a lot from lich to lich while researching the topic, ranging from a few hours to several days. Considering how good Quatach-Ichl was, they should probably assume it was the shorter option.

After hurriedly breaking into the time magic research facility beneath Cyoria, they asked Guardian of the Threshold about the crown and dagger they had newly acquired. They quickly found out that they had guessed correctly – the crown gave the Controller the ability to place temporary markers on people, bringing them into the time loop for a limited time, while the dagger gave the Controller an ability to place a special kind of marker on a soul of the target, letting the time loop know it should not recreate their soul in future restarts. Soulkill, as Red Robe called it.

Just like the orb and the ring, both items also had a mundane function that even normal people could use. The crown acted as a personal mana storage, which they already knew thanks to Quatach-Ichl, but it was nice to have confirmation anyway. In particular, Quatach-Ichl’s story had not made it clear whether the amount of personal mana stored in the crown was proportional to the one using it or fixed. Now they knew it was fixed in size. For Quatach-Ichl this gave him ten times more mana reserves than he usually had, but for Zorian it would be far more since his reserves were relatively tiny in comparison. Though it would also take him forever to fully fill up the crown, as well.

As for the dagger, it had the ability to 'cut that which cannot be cut'… or to put it more plainly, it could hurt immaterial spirits. An ability that was probably far more impressive in the distant past, when spirits were around every corner and a pissed-off god could send their servants to mess you up at any time. These days, its base ability was of dubious usefulness.

Upon leaving the time magic research facility, they temporarily set the dagger aside and started feverishly tinkering with the crown, trying to figure how to activate its ability to place temporary markers while sending urgent messages to every member of their little conspiracy. Thankfully, by now they had a fair bit of experience in making imperial artifacts work, so after a few hours they succeeded in figuring out how the crown worked.

And then they got to work. By now, a whole throng of people had gathered around them. It was not just people like Alanic, Xvim, Silverlake and Daimen that were there. There were also various teachers from the academy, some of whom Zorian was familiar with (Ilsa, Nora and Kyron) and some of whom he wasn’t, but which Xvim assured him were dependable and could be counted on. Kirma, Torun and several other select members of Daimen’s team were also there, as was his fiancée Orissa and some of the members of her House. Many, many aranea were also scattered about, hailing from the Silent Doorway Adepts, Luminous Advocates, Filigree Sages and others that Zorian felt could be helpful and wouldn’t freak out. Lukav was also here, as were some other people that Alanic had vouched for.

While Zach and Zorian had been running around Blantyrre, planning how to beat Quatach-Ichl and scouting out the sulrothum in the ziggurat of the sun, their fellow conspirators had been tasked with gathering all these people and informing them about the time loop. Thus, everyone here knew what they were dealing with. They did not necessarily believe in this crazy story, but that didn’t really matter because seeing was believing.

The restart was soon going to end, and then they would experience the truth first-hand.

Zorian steeled himself a little and went out to face the crowd around them.

"Zorian… what the hell happened to your arm!?" Taiven asked him with a horrified expression.

"It doesn’t matter," he said, waving her off with his one remaining hand. "I’ll get it back soon, as good as new."

"So!" said Zach happily. "Who wants to be first?"

86. A New World

"Good morning, brother!" Kirielle screamed, her voice disgustedly shrill and cheerful. "Morning, morning, MORNING!"

Zorian sighed, stretching his arms and legs while Kirielle babbled on top of him. Another restart, another annoying wakeup call from Kirielle. He gave his little sister a silent, complex look, which caused her to hesitate for a second and ask him what’s wrong. Zorian didn’t answer. Instead he suddenly started shaking like a madman, taking advantage of that brief moment of indecision when she loosened her grip on him to push her off to the side. She fell on the floor with a soft thud and an indignant yell. She was back on her feet in a flash, though, annoying him with questions about the academy and requests to show her some magic.

In other words, she was still the same old Kirielle he had come to know over the restarts. He had thought about including her among the many people who gotten a temporary marker in the previous restart, but in the end he had decided bringing her into the time loop would be reckless and cruel. Unlike the others, Kirielle was just a child. Her personality had yet to fully form, and there was no telling how being stuck in a constantly repeating month would warp her thinking. She also couldn’t keep a secret to save her life and had no way to really contribute to their projects. Not to mention that if he failed to find the way to extend the temporary markers before the sixth restart was up, he would have to watch her forget six months' worth of memories… that would be a hard pill to swallow.

No, the idea was definitely off-limits. While he would have appreciated a chance to have more meaningful interaction with Kirielle, it wasn’t worth inflicting existential dread on a nine-year-old and dragging down everyone’s chances of survival just for that.

After a few minutes, he finally coaxed Kirielle into leaving the room. He promptly locked the door and created a single simulacrum. It was a simple ectoplasmic copy. This early in the restart, he had neither the time nor the materials to create the golem bodies necessary for the improved mechanical simulacrums he usually liked to use. However, accessibility was more important than mana efficiency in this case. He needed the simulacrum now and not later.

The moment it popped into existence, the simulacrum gave him a silent nod and then teleported away. There was no need to explain anything. The simulacrum had a simple task, planned out all the way in the previous restart and now simply put into practice. His copy was to go to Cyoria and immediately hunt down and dismantle all four cranium rat swarms lurking in the city. It would doubtlessly alarm Quatach-Ichl if he did that, but it had to be done. With all these new time loopers walking around, the swarms were too much of a threat. They needed them gone, and the sooner it was done, the better.

After dispatching the simulacrum to his task, Zorian went down into the kitchen to eat something while waiting for Ilsa to arrive. He couldn’t help but be a little nervous. While Ilsa’s visit at the beginning of the restart had long since become repetitive and routine, meeting his invocations teacher should be different this time around. She was, after all, one of the people they placed a temporary marker on. If everything went well, she had retained her memories of the previous restart.

He shook his head, trying to collect his thoughts. He was kind of annoyed at himself for being so emotional over this. Previously, when he and Zach were considering going down this road, he had imagined himself facing this scenario with a stoic attitude and cool assurance borne out of years of experiences and conflicts in the time loop… but reality was cruel and his nerves were not as steely as he imagined them to be. Would the temporary markers work as advertised? Would they work at all? Would Ilsa be able to take first-hand experience of the time loop in good grace or would she flip out and start flinging spells at him, demanding answers? He couldn’t help but worry about questions such as this as minutes ticked by. What was taking her so long, anyway? He wasn’t sure, but he thought it didn’t usually take this much time before she–

There was a knock at the door.

"I’ll get it!" said Zorian quickly, rushing for the door. Mother looked amused at this kind of reaction, but said nothing as he ran past her.

He opened the door and found Ilsa standing there. She looked… no different than she usually did at the beginning of the restart. The same clothes, the same judging look, the same stack of documents held in her hands. However, that was only outward appearance. To his empathic senses, she was practically radiating uncertainty and apprehension.

They stared at each other in silence for a while.

"May I come in?" Ilsa eventually asked.

"Hmm? Oh!" said Zorian with a small laugh, wincing inwardly at his behavior. "I guess I spaced out a little. Forgive my manners, Miss Zileti. Come in, please."

"Thank you, Mister Kazinski," she said, stepping into the house.

Although his momentary brain freeze wasn’t the most flattering way to start a meeting like this, it seemed to have put Ilsa at ease somewhat, as he felt a lot of the tension drain out of her in the aftermath.

Like usual, Mother immediately left the house when she realized who had come, taking Kirielle with her. This left Zorian alone with Ilsa to ostensibly discuss his electives and whatnot. But, well…

"Same as the last time, I suppose?" Ilsa asked, waving the academy documents in front of her. When Zorian answered yes, she simply threw the stack to the side and sighed. "Of course. You probably heard this all a hundred times by now. I don’t even know why I brought these along with me."

"Clinging to a sense of normalcy in light of a very bizarre situation," Zorian guessed. "I was the same, back when I was first dragged into the time loop. I spent quite a few loops going through the motions."

"You were a teenager who barely started learning magic, though. I am an experienced adult mage. I should be better than this," Ilsa countered, frowning slightly. She was silent for a few seconds, tapping her fingers against the table as she considered what to say next. "So this is real? We really travelled back in time?"

"It’s a little more complex than that, but yes," Zorian said. He didn’t want to get bogged down in details of how the time loop actually worked. "Did the marker we gave you work?"

"Obviously," she scoffed. "How would we be having this conversation otherwise?"

"What I meant was… did you completely retain your magic and memories?" Zorian clarified. "Any holes in your recollection or difficulty in doing magic?"

"That’s a possibility?" she asked, surprised.

"It might be. As I said in the previous restart, this is the first time we have done something like this," Zorian said.

She gave it a thought for a minute before shaking her head.

"I don’t feel there are any obvious blanks in my memories," she said. "I did forget quite a few things, but I think that’s just me being forgetful as usual. My memory is hardly flawless. As for magic, well… I’m a grown mage that has reached most of her potential years ago and a month is not that long of a time. Plus, it wasn’t like I did any real training sessions in the span of this month."

"In other words, any growth in shaping skills you may have experienced is so miniscule that you wouldn’t even notice if it was gone," Zorian surmised.

"Yes, that," Ilsa nodded. "I guess I can learn a new spell or two this time just to see if I retain them the next time the world… resets."

"I can probably just ask Kael. The effect of even one month on his shaping skills and spell knowledge should be dramatic enough to tell," pointed out Zorian.

"I suppose that’s true," said Ilsa. "Plus, now that I think about it, I’m probably going to improve my shaping skills and learn quite a few new spells just by helping you out over time. Though you never did really explain what you wanted our help with…"

"Yes, we did not explain our plans and reasons too deeply in the previous restart," admitted Zorian. "Partly because we didn’t want to overwhelm people with information, but also because we suspected you would only take us seriously after you witnessed the time loop with your own two eyes."

"Ha. Well, you’re probably right about that," Ilsa laughed. "Xvim tried to explain how the time loop worked when he was trying to convince me to accept a mysterious soul marker from my two teenage students. I confess I didn’t pay too much attention to it, since the whole idea was so crazy. I’d have probably been even less interested in what you and Zach had to say."

Well, at least she was honest.

"Do you want me to explain now?" Zorian asked.

"No," she said immediately. "I don’t think I could pay attention well enough at the moment. I’m still rather disturbed at reliving the same month all over again. You said this has been happening for a while now?"

"Yes. The time loop has repeated itself many, many times," Zorian said. "This is just your first time remembering it."

"So, before this I was just… obliviously reliving the same month over and over again? Repeated the jobs, taught the same classes and spoke the same conversations?"

"Well, sometimes me and Zach shook things up a bit and you reacted accordingly, reacting to the changes," Zorian said. "But yes. Without a marker, people do not retain continuity across restarts."

"I tried to talk to some of the people around me before coming here," Ilsa admitted. "Just to check if they really don’t remember anything. I couldn’t resist. I don’t think I revealed anything crucial, but I feel it’s only fair to let you know."

Zorian sighed. He suspected she wasn’t the only one to make such discreet tests, and that there would be more of that stuff to deal with later… but that was okay. They kind of expected that.

"I understand the need for confirmation, but please try to be responsible about this," he said. "It would be a disaster if the knowledge of the time loop reached certain people."

"And now I’m being lectured by one of my teenage students," Ilsa said, clacking her tongue. "How low the mighty have fallen. But fair enough, I do understand we have a mighty, millennia-old lich breathing down our necks. Your fight against him has left quite an impression on me, I must say…"

Zorian just made a slightly sour expression in response. Unsurprisingly, Quatach-Ichl had taken great offense at them trying to look through his memories and stealing his crown. While Zach and Zorian were placing temporary markers on people, Quatach-Ichl was burning down the Noveda estate and Imaya’s house as the first step of his revenge. Fortunately, all inhabitants of Imaya’s place had been evacuated to Koth by that point, and Zach couldn’t care less about the Noveda estate. The ancient lich remained quiet after that, probably because he couldn’t find them and still had an invasion to execute.

Then Zach and Zorian had the bright idea to bring the new loopers to Cyoria on invasion day, to show them how high the stakes really were. Despite being under a plethora of powerful divination wards and constantly moving, Quatach-Ichl somehow noticed them.

The resulting fight completely leveled the street they were fighting in.

"Though Quatach-Ichl is a huge danger, I’m pretty sure the Eldemarian government, the Triumvirate Church, powerful Noble Houses and other powers would also make problems for us if they knew," Zorian said. "So please be careful."

They spent the next half an hour discussing various things – the mechanics of the time loop, the way things usually developed if Zach and Zorian did not interfere with things, and the details behind the Ibasan invasion. Ilsa turned out to be just as interested in the invasion of Cyoria as she was in the time loop itself. Then again, that was probably not too unusual. They brought people to witness the attack for a reason.

"You don’t seem to care much for the suffering and devastation we witnessed," Ilsa eventually said, a note of condemnation in her voice.

"I’m just a little numb to it all, that’s all. I’ve seen it happen too many times, sometimes from the memories of the invaders themselves," Zorian said. "It’s impossible for me to have the same visceral reaction to it that you probably have."

"You read their memories?" she asked, surprised.

"I had to," he simply said.

"Of course you’ve dabbled in mind magic too," she said in a strange tone.

"Dabbled?" Zorian huffed. "This annoys me more than it probably should. I did not dabble in it – I’m a natural mind mage who spent years honing his skills."

She seemed to be at a loss for words upon hearing that.

"This situation is endlessly bizarre and disturbing," she finally said after a few seconds.

"Agreed," Zorian nodded. "I’ve been stuck in this time loop for nearly eight years, not counting all the time dilation chambers, and I still think that."

"Time dilation chambers?" Ilsa asked. She suddenly shook her head. "No, never mind that for now. Eight years is actually not as long as I thought it would be."

"I got included rather late into this thing," Zorian said. "Zach is the one who has spent decades inside the time loop."

"Ugh. Every answer gives me five new questions," Ilsa complained. "You know what? Let’s stop this for now. You are planning to take the train to Cyoria, right?"

"Yes, I’m taking Kirielle with me, so I need to pretend I’m somewhat normal. Of course, if you are willing to teleport us to Cyoria yourself…"

"No," she said immediately. "I’m taking a train ride with you instead."

Zorian was taken aback at the proclamation. He knew that things would be very much different now that other loopers were walking around, but he couldn’t help but get blindsided by things like this.

"Uh, why?" Zorian asked uncertainly.

"You might be used to it, but I’ve just watched the city get brutally invaded by hordes of monsters and undead," she told him. "I’d like to stay away from Cyoria for a while, and this is a convenient excuse."

"Oh," he said lamely.

Come to think of it, it had only been a few hours at most since the invasion, at least from her perspective.

"You don’t mind, do you?" she asked him.

"Not at all," he said, shaking his head. "Just watch out for Kirielle if you plan to ride in the same compartment as us. She has an intense interest in magic and anything related to it, and she’s probably going to find you absolutely fascinating."

"I don’t see a problem with that," Ilsa smiled. "It’s nice to see kids interested in my work."

Zorian didn’t bother to clarify things.

Some things were better as a surprise.

Mother did not look very surprised when Ilsa informed her she would be accompanying them to the train station. It probably seemed entirely sensible to her that Ilsa would use a train to get back to Cyoria. The two of them got along pretty well with one another, and were soon happily chatting along as they waited on the station for the train to arrive. Zorian mostly ignored the conversation, as it sounded like your typical parent-teacher discussion. Kirielle was too excited about going to Cyoria to care about the teacher that had decided to stick around for a while longer, but Fortov did feel the need to approach the group and say hi after seeing Ilsa present. That was a little new.

"You didn’t include Fortov among those who received the marker," Ilsa observed quietly.

"No," Zorian whispered back. "He’s useless and I don’t like him."

Ilsa had nothing to say in response to that, just giving him a guarded look in return.

Maybe he really was a little harsh towards Fortov. Still, he honestly couldn’t see any good reason to give the guy a temporary marker. Fortov was unreliable and had no work ethic, so including him in the time loop would be about as wise as including Kirielle.

Eventually they boarded the train and set off towards Cyoria. Kirielle became more wary of Ilsa when she realized the teacher was going to stay in the same compartment as them, but… well, it was Kirielle. Patience was never her strong suit. She barely lasted half an hour before she started bombarding Ilsa with questions.

Ilsa was a patient woman, but after an hour and a half of Kirielle’s chattiness, Zorian could feel she was starting to get rather exasperated with the whole situation. Thus, he decided to have mercy on her and distracted his little sister with a bunch of visually impressive illusions and stories.

Ilsa observed the illusionary scenes he conjured up with a surprising amount of interest. Try as he might, he just couldn’t figure out what she found so fascinating about those. Weren’t they just illusions? She was a mage at the continent’s best magical academy. Surely she had seen plenty of those in her life…

Eventually he decided to ask her. Since he didn’t want Kirielle to listen in on them, he established a mental link to her and spoke to her telepathically. She was badly startled at first, flinching at the sudden voice in her head, but she recovered quickly. Her response was swift and smooth, with no unintentional thoughts leaking through. It was clear that she had experience with this kind of communication.

[You can ignore the shaping disruption of the train wards,] Ilsa telepathically sent back through the link. [I mean, of course you can. For someone like you, doing that is a minor thing. I could do it too. However, casting such sophisticated illusions while being suppressed by the wards… that takes considerable skill. Did you say you were trying to pretend you are somewhat normal? How is this even remotely normal?]

[Err, well… it’s not like Kirielle can really tell how amazing this is,] he sent back lamely.

Truthfully, neither could he until this point. He learned these illusions pretty much solely to entertain Kirielle. They were just little tricks to him, and so was the ability to bypass the laughable disruption wards on the train. It completely slipped his mind that someone like Ilsa could figure out exactly what he was doing and how difficult it was and find it notable.

[So,] Ilsa sent. [You are good enough at combat magic to fight a thousand-year-old lich. You are a mind mage and an illusionist. You can teleport around with ease and open dimensional gates. You can create duplicates of yourself. You are an expert golem maker, with all that implies. You say you achieved all of that in, what, eight years?]

[Pretty much, yeah,] Zorian confirmed.

[Forgive me for being blunt here Mister Kazinski, but aren’t you a fairly average mage?] Ilsa asked curiously. [I never got an impression that you are some amazingly talented person from the information I was given. And trust me, people had looked into it. Whenever a world-class talent like Daimen appears, their family is always investigated in case their boons run in the blood.]

[Aside from being an innate mind mage, I am indeed pretty average,] Zorian said calmly. Ilsa’s comment might have infuriated him once, but these days he no longer cared. [I know what you’re thinking, and yes – my rapid growth as a mage is all due to the time loop. It doesn’t just give time, you know. It’s also given me nigh-limitless resources, access to restricted materials and plenty of normally unobtainable experience. It’s also put me under enormous pressure, keeping me constantly motivated in a way I otherwise wouldn’t be. I honestly think anyone could do what I did, if put in the same position. Well, provided they didn’t just break under the pressure…]

Ilsa stayed quiet for a while, but Zorian could practically feel the gears turning in her head. She was probably realizing for the first time the sort of amazing opportunity the time loop represented.

[I think I’m getting just a tiny bit jealous of you, Mister Kazinski,] Ilsa eventually concluded.

[Don’t envy me just yet,] he told her. [There is still a good chance that I will get erased in the end, and everything I have worked for will be for naught.]

[What?] she asked, startled. [What do you mean?]

With that, he started explaining the situation in detail to her. He told her about Red Robe, the uncertainty about whether they could even get out of the time loop, the problems he had to solve to survive the exit, and so on.

It took a while to go through everything. Strangely enough, Ilsa looked calmer and more reassured by the end, even though he had just told her there was a big chance they would all lose everything at the end. Then again, maybe it wasn’t so strange. She already knew that temporary markers like her own only lasted six months. Compared to that, a more distant deadline that would also destroy Zach and Zorian probably didn’t seem so intimidating. On the contrary, she may have found it reassuring that they also had the same fate waiting for them, if they failed.

[I was wondering why you decided to include so many people in this time loop, instead of just monopolizing the whole thing for yourself and Zach. Your situation is quite desperate,] she said, humming to herself audibly enough for Kirielle to hear her and give her funny looks.

[You don’t have to sound so happy about it,] Zorian groused. [But yes, we really do need your help badly.]

Ilsa was mostly included because of her connections. Though she acted a bit low key most of the time, she knew many people and was owed quite a few favors. Hopefully, she could help them convince people to go along with whatever crazy plans they came up with and smooth any ruffled feathers they caused along the way. Considering how few other members of their little conspiracy were diplomatically inclined or familiar with bureaucratic wrangling, this was a valuable skill.

Plus, she was a powerful alteration expert. Zorian wasn’t sure, but he felt she might be able to help him produce his golems faster. She couldn’t animate them, of course, but he was currently producing such a large number of them every restart that it took a while to simply create enough mechanical bodies for animation. If Ilsa was as good at alteration and material alchemy as Xvim claimed, she should be able to take over that part of the production process and free Zorian to do other things.

[Why not just hire someone to do that for you?] Ilsa asked when he told her that. [I hear from Xvim you’ve been doing that a lot already.]

[I can’t,] Zorian shook his head. [Anyone I contract will surely figure out what I intend to do with such a sophisticated metal doll, and making combat-capable golems is forbidden without a license.]

[Makes sense,] Ilsa said. [You don’t want to have random mages building themselves a private army of golems in their free time.]

[Exactly,] Zorian said. [I might be able to coax a person to build me a single puppet, but if I order a batch of twenty puppets, they’ll freak out. Nobody wants to get implicated in an attempted rebellion or whatever. I’d be lucky if they didn’t immediately report me to the government when they throw me out of the shop.]

Ilsa nodded. After some thought, she changed the subject. [You know, all this talk about golem and alteration is reminding me of something I thought of when you were explaining how the time loop works. Destroying the entire world and then recreating it out of nothing… it reminds me of a persistent ambition of mine…]

[Oh? You mean true creation?] Zorian guessed.

[You know about it?] Ilsa was surprised. [I don’t remember talking about it around you… I suppose one of my previous incarnations told you about it?]

[Yeah,] Zorian confirmed. [I sought you out quite often in the beginning to learn from you. You taught me much of what I know right now, or at least gave me a push in the right direction.]

[We’ll have to talk about that more on some other occasion,] Ilsa said with a smile. [It looks like you owe me and I don’t even know about it. How am I supposed to know to seek you out for favors if I don’t even know that I have leverage over you? But anyway, true creation… yes, in a way, the time loop is the ultimate expression of that desire of mine. A magic that creates an entire world, over and over again. Are you sure you have no idea how it is done?]

[No, sorry,] Zorian said apologetically. [That power is absolutely godlike in scope and mystery. Or rather, primordial, since the Sovereign Gate seems to be made out of one of those.]

[Considering the stories of mortal mages doing it in the past, and in light of the fact that there is a device that can repeatedly create an entire world, I am convinced it is easier than most people suspect. Maybe I’ll be able to figure something out by observing this constantly recreated world I’m in,] Ilsa said wistfully.

[Maybe,] Zorian said doubtfully. He doubted she would really get anywhere with that, but he wouldn’t stop her.

Eventually, Kirielle dozed off and the telepathic conversation died down a little, leaving both Zorian and Ilsa lost in their own thoughts.

The train continued its routine journey to Cyoria.

When Zorian, Kirielle and Ilsa arrived in Cyoria and disembarked, they found there were people already waiting for them. Zach being there was kind of expected, but he was also accompanied by Xvim, Kyron and Taiven. Most people did not react to this, of course, but Kirielle knew damn well that there was something fishy about that and kept giving everyone weird glances and got really quiet for a time. Zorian also noticed Fortov staring at him weirdly in the distance. He wasn’t sure how much his brother really knew about him, but he was probably aware that Zorian hadn’t had any real friends until recently, so having a bunch of people wait for him at the train station was beyond unusual. He did not make any move or approach, though, since nobody was attacking anyone and Zorian didn’t look like he needed help.

After dropping off Kirielle at Imaya’s place, the group found a secluded location and started talking. Kyron, their combat magic instructor, was included into the group due to his high combat skills and the fact he had connections to people in Eldemar’s military. He was the first to speak up.

"These temporary markers you placed on us to retain our memories… can they be revoked?" Kyron asked.

Of course the first thing they wanted to discuss was the markers. Zorian didn’t blame them. He knew he would have been the same if he were in their place. He was kind of mystified why they hadn’t just asked Zach about that while they were waiting instead of saving it until now, but maybe they had talked about other things, such as how the time loop worked. Or maybe they had just gathered together quite recently and hadn’t had the time to discuss anything. He knew that Zach hated waiting and had a habit of showing up late, so he probably hadn’t been at the train station for long.

"Yes," Zorian told him bluntly.

"At will?" Kyron asked next.

"Well, we need the crown that is currently in Quatach-Ichl’s possession to do it," Zorian said carefully. "So not really, no."

"Also, removing the marker only prevents you from keeping your magic and memories when the world resets next," Zach said. "It doesn’t wipe away what you achieved until that point."

"Can the marker be reapplied once it runs out or is revoked?" Xvim asked.

"I know what you’re thinking," Zach sighed. "Sadly, it’s not that easy. Yes, you can place a marker on the same person the second time, but only after twelve restarts have passed. You can’t just remove the marker and then reapply it to extend the time."

"I imagined it was something like that," Xvim admitted.

Zorian suddenly yelped in pain. After looking around, he realized Taiven had pinched his arm for no discernible reason.

"Why did you do that!?" he protested.

"I wanted to make sure your arm is really fine," she said, frowning.

Zorian suddenly realized this was the same arm that ended up getting cut off by Quatach-Ichl in the previous restart. He had pretty much been a cripple the last time that she had seen him.

Still, how the hell was it okay for her to just pinch him like that!? Huffing with indignation, Zorian stepped away from Taiven and maneuvered himself to place Ilsa between the two of them. Ilsa gave him an amused look in response.

"So what’s the plan?" Kyron said.

"We are hoping we can figure out a way to adjust the temporary markers into lasting indefinitely," Zorian said. "Admittedly, tampering with a piece of magic that probably had gods involved in its construction sounds hopeless… but we suspect that Red Robe entered the time loop through this very method. If so, it should be possible for us to do it as well."

"Right, if Red Robe could have done it, surely all of us working together should be able to work something up," Zach said.

"And if you fail?" Xvim insisted.

"We will hopefully gather the entire Key before all six restarts run out, at which point we will be able to unblock the exit," Zorian said. "If we have an exit method also ready by then, we might be able to just get you out of the time loop at that point. At which point it doesn’t really matter that your marker will run out."

"And what, you’re just going to continue in the time loop alone afterwards?" Taiven asked. "Or are you just going to create new temporary loopers once we’re gone? And then get them out too? I don’t know about the rest, but I think the world doesn’t need three different Taivens."

"Actually, we would just exit the time loop with you," Zach said. "We already got almost everything we could wish for out of the time loop. No need to risk everything by being greedy and cutting things close. If we can leave six months from now, we will."

Silence greeted this proclamation. Zorian knew that the new loopers were worried about their motives, afraid that he and Zach were trying to make use of them as much as possible before discarding them. Not an unreasonable fear. Temporary markers were pretty much designed with that in mind. Presumably the controller would place these on people without ever informing them of the time limit, allowing them to reap all the benefits of having a person work with them for six months and then conveniently forgetting everything. However, Zach and Zorian did not intend to use the temporary markers just to get a convenient workforce. They got them into the mess and they would do their best to get them out of it. Maybe they would fail in the end, but it wouldn’t be for the lack of trying.

"Well," Xvim eventually said, breaking the silence. "We’d best get to work, then."

Days passed, and the effects of the many new loopers rapidly became evident. Kael arrived in Cyoria earlier, barely a day after Zorian did. Lukav and Alanic did not need to be saved from Sudomir’s machinations. Taiven no longer bothered hunting monsters with her team. Ilsa’s classes were completely different, since she decided she would shake things up a bit. The cranium rats had been completely wiped out by Zorian’s simulacrum on the very first day of the restart, with the exception of a handful of individuals the simulacrum had saved up for study. Their usual routine of convincing Xvim, Alanic and Silverlake that the time loop was real became unnecessary, freeing up a surprisingly substantial amount of time.

Finally, not having to gain the trust of the Silent Doorway Adepts before they could use their ability to operate the Bakora Gate network meant they could access distant places from the very start of the restart.

Thus, once Zach and Zorian had sorted out the situation in Cyoria for a bit, they used a Bakora Gate to reach Koth so they could pick up the imperial orb… and maybe get themselves a pet hydra.

Before they did that, though, they decided to visit the Taramatula estate to see if everything was fine there. Daimen had assured them that the people he had picked were reliable, but Zorian knew better than anyone that Daimen said a lot of things…

When they arrived, they found the whole estate to be a hive of activity, people constantly coming and going, and there were people already waiting for them. There was no need to justify themselves or try to get them to admit Daimen was present, like they usually did the first time they contacted them in the restart. Still, while not having to wait at the door was convenient, what came later was not. Just like the new loopers back in Cyoria, the new loopers in Koth also wanted their questions answered, and what was supposed to be just a short check-up ended up being a grueling question and answer session that lasted for most of the day.

"I really hope this is a one-time thing," Zorian groused later to Daimen. "You were supposed to explain these sort of things to them, Daimen."

"I did!" Daimen protested. "They just wanted to hear things from you, I guess. Can you blame them?"

"I guess not," Zorian said. If Daimen had explained things fairly, then these people must surely know it wasn’t Daimen who was really in charge. It made sense that they wanted to talk to the people who are the source of the temporary markers and have first-hand information. "Anyway, did you get your team ready? Will the Taramatula really cooperate when you inform them you want to send their best trackers all the way to Blantyrre all of a sudden?"

This was the main reason he and Zach wanted Daimen’s cooperation, and why they allowed him to include so many people into the marked group. To put it bluntly, they needed these people to find the staff. They had managed to track down a Bakora Gate on Blantyrre in the previous restart, thanks to the help from that lizardman king, but that was just the first step. The next was to track down a tiny little staff on a giant, jungle-covered continent. To put it bluntly, this was something that he and Zach alone were utterly incapable of doing. Zorian would never say this out loud to Daimen, but he and his group were probably the most critical people to receive the temporary markers. Without them, they would probably never find the staff. This was one of the primary reasons they decided to go down this path to begin with.

"My team will listen to me, even if I tell them we’re going to Blantyrre through a dimensional gate opened up by my little brother," Daimen said proudly. "Hell, they’d probably go along with it even if I alone received the marker, but they would complain more. With Torun, Kirma and other critical members of the team also on board, though, everyone will readily fall in line. As for the Taramatula… well, I’m not sure what level of support we can get out of them, but we will definitely get something. The main problem is that we’re being a bit unreasonable and pushing for full commitment to this project without the idea being even hinted at before now. That’s not how House Taramatula usually does things, to say the least, so some tension and incredulity are to be expected."

"Will it help if I give you money and resources to throw at them?" Zorian asked. "I know House Taramatula is not poor, but I’m pretty sure me and Zach could gather enough money to finance a small state if we really try. Not to mention a large amount of priceless materials that cannot be bought on the open market."

Daimen looked at him with a strange mixture of horror and joy, his face alternating between various unusual grimaces.

"I hate you," he finally said. "You better plan to gift some of that money to your poor older brother when we get out."

"Aren’t you pretty well off?" Zorian asked, arching his eyebrow at him. "You’re even marrying into nobility."

"You can never have enough money," Daimen said. "Never. And yes, please do send all that money here if you can. Trying to flat out bribe the Taramatula directly with it wouldn’t go well, but I’m sure they would look more favorably on the plan if we agreed to pay for all the equipment and mercenaries out of our own pockets. And some completely unrelated gifts would probably be appreciated."

Zorian nodded and made a mental note to mention the matter to Zach.

And speaking of Zach, his fellow time traveler… well, one of his fellow time travelers, now… was already waiting for them at the front gate, humming to himself happily.

Zorian didn’t have to ask to know what the other boy was thinking of at the moment.

"Say," Zorian asked Daimen. "Do you know what the legality of owning a giant, magically-enhanced hydra is in Eldemar? Just asking for a friend."

87. Agents of the Crown

Deep in the jungles of Koth, in what was otherwise an unremarkable patch of rainforest, a situation was unfolding. The trees shook, the animals vacated the area in panic and the underbrush was trampled underfoot as a gigantic, furious hydra thundered through the area in pursuit of its target. Its eight heads fanned out and snapped angrily towards anything in the vicinity that failed to get out of its way, breaking low-hanging branches and killing any animal that was too slow to flee.

As for Zorian, who was its target, he simply kept running and dodging while marveling at the incredible speed with which the hydra was able to move through the thick vegetation of the rainforest. He had thought its size would make maneuvering difficult and allow him to easily keep ahead of it, but he had seriously underestimated its ability to just plow through everything in front of it without stopping. He was purposely running through the most difficult terrain he could find and he never even came close to losing it. It was constantly trailing just behind him.

A blue, translucent, ectoplasmic eye constantly trailed after Zorian, hovering above his head and staring at the hydra. It was through this eye that Zorian was able to keep track of the hydra’s movements and dodge its attacks, despite having his back turned to it. Otherwise, if he were forced to run blind or had to periodically slow down to turn around, the hydra would have grabbed him a hundred times by now. Though the spell itself was very simple, very few people would be able to process information from two different perspectives like that. The fact Zorian could look both in front of him and behind him at the same time, while maneuvering through a treacherous, obstacle-filled jungle floor was proof that his experiments with mental enhancement were bearing some fruit.

The chase led them next to a fallen, rotting log covered in moss and mushrooms. Without its main body slowing down at all, one of the hydra’s eight heads reached down and bit into it, lifting it out of the ground and launching it at Zorian. Half a dozen monstrous centipedes and one very terrified squirrel tumbled out of the rotting log as it sailed through the air, having hidden in it when they noticed the rampaging hydra approaching. Zorian reacted instantly, making a few silent movements and causing a bright red ectoplasmic hand to materialize in the air behind him and slap the log aside. It collided with the nearby tree where it exploded into a shower of rotting wood. Both Zorian and the hydra simply charged through the cloud of wooden shrapnel, one with the aid of magical shields and the other through the power of supernatural toughness and regeneration.

"Zach, what the hell are you doing there!?" Zorian yelled. "I’ve been running for ages here! Did you figure out the dagger or not!?"

Zach, who was trailing behind both of them while occasionally making funny poses and waving the dagger in his hand at the hydra, seemed to pause at the question.

"It’s hard, okay!" he yelled back.

"I’m running low on mana here!" Zorian said. "If you don’t figure it out soon, I’m calling this off."

In truth, the hydra posed very little threat to Zorian. If the situation ever got too dangerous, he could have always teleported away or simply flown away too high for the hydra to reach. However, that would leave it free to turn around and shift its attention to Zach, which would defeat the whole purpose of this setup. The point of him leading the hydra on the merry chase through the Kothic jungle was to give Zach the time he needed to figure out how to use the dagger on the hydra. Something that didn’t seem to be going too well.

Oh well. On the bright side, if Zach couldn’t figure it out by the time Zorian ran out of mana, it would be Zorian’s turn next. Zorian would actually prefer if he was the one who figured out how to use the dagger, since he and Zach had agreed that whoever succeeded at this would get to own the hydra. He had a good feeling about his chances, since, unlike Zach, he had soul perception unlocked. Surely that would–

"Hydra!" Zach suddenly shouted, dramatically pointing the dagger in the monster’s direction. "I am your master now! Kneel before me!"

No less than three of the hydra’s head glanced towards Zach, giving him a hateful, contemptuous look before returning their attention to Zorian again.

Before Zorian could say anything, Zach suddenly teleported right on top of the hydra and plunged the dagger straight into its back.

Zorian wanted to scream at his fellow time traveler for being such an idiot. Not only had Zach exposed himself to incredible danger, since the hydra’s heads could twist backwards to reach people foolish enough to climb on its back with incredible speed and ease, the boy had also invalidated all the effort Zorian invested into making sure the hydra was focused on him and him alone. Even if Zach got away from this stunt completely unscathed – and he probably would, in all honestly – the hydra would no longer ignore him from this point onward.

Indeed, the moment Zach popped into existence on top of the hydra’s back, before he even finished plunging the dagger into its flesh, the monster was already stopping its charge, all eight of its heads refocusing on this sudden new threat. However, the moment the dagger sank into its back, a strange thing happened. Instead of simply ignoring the puny wound and biting down on Zach anyway, the hydra suddenly stiffened as if paralyzed. Its many heads froze in the air, jaws still stretched wide for a lethal bite, staring at Zach with confused, uncomprehending eyes.

"No way…" Zorian complained weakly.

"Ha ha!" Zach laughed, wrenching the dagger out of the wound and quickly straightening himself up. The hydra’s back not being the most stable of grounds, he almost lost his balance upon doing that and had to spend several seconds to stabilize himself. The hydra remained completely motionless throughout all of that. Zach slapped the closest hydra head a few times playfully. "What did I tell you, eh? I really am your master now. Kneel!"

The command seemed to break the hydra out of its paralysis. Without hesitation, it dropped to the ground. Being a quadrupedal life form, it couldn’t really exactly kneel as such, so it instead just dropped on its stomach and lowered its many heads on the ground. The sudden motion completely unbalanced Zach, however, sending him tumbling down the creature’s back with a strangled cry. He hit the ground with a dull thud, landing on one of the exposed rocks, and then spent the next minute and a half rolling around in pain on the ground.

Zorian eyed the hydra for a few seconds before deciding not to approach for now. It was no longer attacking him, but he had a feeling that might change if he made any moves towards its new master.

"There is no way that was the correct command phrase to activate the dagger, is it?" he eventually asked.

"Ugh. Damn, this hurt," said Zach, laboriously rising to his feet while using the nearby hydra as a stabilizer. He did his best to dust himself off and get rid of the branches and bugs stuck in his hair. "And no, that wasn’t the command phrase. The way to activate the dagger is to first cut yourself with it to establish resonance and then cut the hydra to forge a bond with it and finalize the deal."

Zorian gave him a curious look. "How the hell did you figure that out?"

"I, err, accidentally cut myself with it while trying to mess around with it while running," Zach admitted with an awkward laugh. He turned towards the hydra, whose many eyes diligently followed his every move. "Anyway, who cares about that! It doesn’t matter how I discovered the dagger’s usage, all that matters is that the hydra is finally mine! Well ours, but you know…"

"Yeah, yeah, I know," Zorian said, clacking his tongue. He’d normally be annoyed about losing a bet like that, but it was probably better this way. There was no guarantee he would have uncovered such a curious method of activation himself.

He felt the hydra’s mind a little. He kind of expected to find the hydra resentful of being effectively enslaved like this, but he found the creature to be mostly curious instead. Confused and a little scared too, but mostly just curious. It did not seem to harbor any ill will towards Zach. Zorian had never heard of a monster control method that was that thorough and effective, and the hydra should be highly resistant to mind control due to its unique mind anyway. He had a feeling this was more than just control – in some strange way, the hydra was conditioned to regard the bond forged by the dagger as innately legitimate and did not struggle against its bindings at all.

Zorian was torn between being impressed by the maker of the dagger for pulling it off and disturbed that such a thing was possible.

In any case, the friendliness was only towards Zach. The moment Zorian tried to step closer the hydra immediately jumped to its feet and interposed itself between Zorian and its master, hissing and snapping its jaws at him menacingly.

"Oh come on," Zorian complained. "That guy doesn’t need your protection from me. If anything, I would need to be protected against him if we seriously fought…"

The hydra didn’t understand human speech, and probably wouldn’t have listened to him even if it did. It was about to lunge at Zorian when Zach placed his hand on its flank and stopped it.

"Hey, knock it off," Zach said. "That guy is our friend, okay? No eating friends."

It took a few gestures and shouting before the hydra managed to understand what its new owner was telling it, at which point it gave Zach something reminiscent of an incredulous look, as if unable to believe Zach would be friendly to someone like Zorian, who had led it on a wild-goose chase for a better part of an hour.

"I know, I know… he can be very annoying, but he’s very useful and mostly means well," Zach said sagely, patting the hydra gently on the flank.

The hydra directed one last unhappy hiss in Zorian’s direction before grudgingly standing down and indicating it would allow him to get close without attacking him. Possibly.

Zorian folded his hands over his chest and gave Zach an unamused look.

"Don’t worry, I’m sure she’ll warm up to you in time," Zach told him, grinning widely. "Princess is just a little shy."

What?

"W-What!?" Zorian blurted out.

"It’s a she," Zach said, nodding sagely. "I know, I was a little surprised myself when I felt that through the link and–"

"No, not that!" Zorian snapped. "You’re seriously naming a hydra Princess?"

"Why not?" Zach challenged. "What’s wrong with that name?"

The newly named Princess focused three of her heads on him, as if daring him to say anything.

Stupid reptile. It didn’t even understand what they were talking about but felt the need to side with Zach anyway…

"It’s a stupid name," Zorian told him bluntly.

"It’s a great name," Zach disagreed. "A royal name for a very royal girl. She’s a divinely empowered guardian of an imperial item… that’s pretty high-ranked if you ask me. Plus, you know how royals like to refer to themselves in plural? We this and we that… well, Princess here can talk about herself in plural and be completely factual! So there. It’s actually very clever and you were just too judgmental to figure it out."

"Ugh," Zorian grunted. "If that’s your logic, why not call her Queen instead?"

"Because Princess is a more ironic name for a giant hydra," Zach admitted.

Zorian spent the next fifteen minutes trying to argue the issue before giving up. It took another hour after that to coax Princess back into the imperial orb for transport – she wanted to follow around after Zach like a puppy, and was confused why he wanted to abandon her in the orb so soon after their bonding.

Zorian had to say, watching Zach awkwardly try to convince a clingy hydra that he would be back and that she should stay put was kind of amusing.

Perhaps it was a good thing that Zach ended up winning that bet after all.

After recovering the imperial orb and tentatively subduing the hydra guarding it, Zach and Zorian turned their attention towards the sulrothum at the Ziggurat of the Sun and the imperial ring in their possession. They already knew they could steal their ring if they launched a big enough attack on them, but that took a great deal of time and effort. Well, the presence of Princess on the battlefield would probably make an all-out assault a little easier this time around, but it would still be a major undertaking that would consume a lot of their time and resources that would be better spent elsewhere.

"It’s a pity Princess is too big to fit in the ziggurat corridors," lamented Zach. "Otherwise we could just climb on top of her and charge in, trampling and brushing aside any sulrothum that got in our way."

"If our attack was that unstoppable, the sulrothum would probably just pick up whatever they can and flee," pointed out Zorian. "They’d probably flee underground, and it would be an utter pain to track them down then. Not to mention they have a massive sand worm on their side. We don’t want to get in an underground battle with them, I think, even with Princess on our side."

"Hmph," Zach mumbled unhappily. "How about we just infiltrate the ziggurat through this underground connection, then? We might be able to avoid a massive battle that way."

"They have their pet sand worm constantly guarding that," Zorian pointed out, shaking his head sadly. "I bet we’re noticed instantly through whatever exotic senses that thing has… and then it collapses the whole tunnel on top of us before we can do anything. Considering the layout of their Dungeon entrance, I think it was made by the worm in the first place, so they probably have no qualms about destroying it. They can always command the sand worm to create another one later."

Zach was silent for a while.

"How about… just soul-killing the entire colony?" Zach finally asked. "I mean, it makes me a little uncomfortable to use tactics like that, but this is pretty much what the damn knife was made for."

"It’s definitely an option," Zorian said after a short pause. "However, we probably wouldn’t be able to get all sulrothum with this and we don’t know how many of them know about the ring and its importance. If we kill most of the colony but one of the survivors takes the ring and runs, things could get really bad. Right now we know where the ring is. If a shattered group of sulrothum survivors takes the ring and spends a day or two running around in the desert or, gods forbid, the depths of the Dungeon…"

"Yeah, you’re right," Zach said. "It’s too risky. Even if we get them all, there are neighboring sulrothum tribes and other denizens of the desert to consider. If they discover the state of the ziggurat and loot the ring before we reach it, we would still have a problem on our hands."

"Speaking of the neighboring sulrothum tribes, do we still go forward with the idea of arranging an alliance with them?" Zorian asked. "The idea is nice, I admit, but it may very well take more time and effort to do it that way than to just send our own army at the ziggurat."

"Not if we use Princess!" Zach declared triumphantly.

"You want to use the damn hydra for everything these days," Zorian scoffed. "You’re like a little kid who just got himself a new toy and now wants to show it to everyone. How the hell will that thing help us convince the sulrothum faster?"

"There is no need to be jealous, Zorian," Zach chided. "You lost the bet fair and square. In any case, I think you greatly underestimate the impression of power we will project when we show up with a giant menacing hydra in tow. I bet those tribes will be tripping over themselves to stay on our good side after seeing that."

"Or they’ll be too scared to even talk to us," Zorian pointed out.

"Then we just smash them until they’re willing to listen," Zach shrugged.

"This is starting to sound a lot less like arranging an alliance and a lot more like us bullying the neighboring tribes into being our reluctant army," Zorian pointed out.

"Eh, I think of it more as an aggressive demonstration than bullying," Zach said dismissively. "We would have had to prove our strength for them to take us seriously, anyway. But really, so what if we end up cowing them into submission forcefully? We’re already attacking the ziggurat tribe without any provocation. We lost the moral high ground a long time ago, I think."

True.

"Alright," said Zorian. "Let’s try to make them willing allies if possible, though. I have another task I want to give them, and they probably won’t try very hard if our overwhelming force is all that keeps them in line."

"Oh? Something important?" Zach asked.

"Maybe," Zorian answered. "There is a magical creature called a tunneler toad, which lives deep within the Xlotic desert. They live in a series of hidden worlds left by some forgotten ancient civilization, called Ishmali Reservoirs by the ancient Ikosians, because they seem designed primarily as water reservoirs. They’re basically large caverns full of water, enclosed in their own pocket dimensions. The reservoirs are largely uninteresting, but the tunneler toads themselves have a curious ability to detect pocket dimensions and enter them with ease. In their natural habitat they use this to pass in and out of the Ishmali Reservoirs as they please, using them as a hidden nesting ground, but the ability is said to be usable on any pocket dimension they come across."

"Ah, I see, this is for that blood magic initiative you want to set up," Zach said. "Why do you need the sulrothum’s help for this, though? If the toads live only around these reservoir things, they should be easy to find. It’s not like the reservoirs can move, right?"

"They’re static but I’m afraid the records of where the reservoirs are located have all been lost in the Cataclysm, and no one had bothered to track them down again as far as I can tell," Zorian said, shaking his head. "With much of the interior now covered in desert and taken over by sulrothum tribes and worse, the reservoirs have become extremely isolated. Not to mention that most people are neither master dimensionalists nor tunneler toads, so they would be unable to track down and enter these hidden worlds even if they wanted to. Thus, if we want to find tunneler toads, we must find a desert native that has heard about strange toads that sometimes seemingly vanish into thin air, only to just as suddenly reappear later."

"Annoying," Zach remarked with a frown. "Is this really necessary? We have lots of candidates for ability theft when it comes to magical creatures with relevant abilities."

"None of them are easy to track down," Zorian pointed out. "Not only are they rare and mostly extinct near human-dominated territories, the very nature of their abilities means these creatures can hide and retreat with incredible ease. The other may very well be even more annoying to find. If you think tunneler toads are bad, wait till you hear how annoying it is to track down a phase spider without it taking the initiative to reveal itself."

"Right," Zach said, clacking his tongue unhappily. "I guess I’ll try to be a little nicer to the stupid wasps." He paused for a second. "So we’re really going to start dabbling in blood magic and enhancement rituals in this restart, then?"

"Yes. Although we should start with something relatively easy and well tested," Zorian confirmed. "Eagle Eyes enhancement, for instance. Or any of the simple physical enhancements that aim to improve the user’s strength, stamina, regeneration and so on. Well-known, straightforward things that are unlikely to go catastrophically wrong when attempted by beginners like us."

"Not really instilling me with a sense of confidence here, Zorian," Zach complained.

"What can I say?" Zorian shrugged. "Blood magic is dangerous. If it makes you feel any better, I will be going first."

"It does not," Zach said. "We both know it will be me who has to take the biggest risks in regards to this. I have way more mana to burn on permanent enhancements and I am also proficient in medical magic, so I will be able to push my limits more and understand life force manipulation way better than you."

Zorian didn’t dispute him. While he had no intention of piling most of the risk on Zach, his fellow time traveler was likely right in his prediction.

"Eh, don’t make such a grim face," Zach said dismissively. "I already agreed we should do this when we talked before, didn’t I? I didn’t change my mind."

"I kind of feel I’m pressuring you over this," Zorian admitted.

"I’m not that easy to pressure," Zach assured him. "You’ve been trying to pressure me to let you inspect my mind for a long time now, for instance, and I have never let you do it."

"I still think that’s a mistake," Zorian told him.

"And the answer is still no," Zach said, grinning. "See? Pressure ineffective. I agreed with this creepy blood magic stuff because I honestly think you’re right. We’re too slow at figuring out primordial prisons. Only distasteful, unconventional methods like this can let us find a shortcut we need."

"Fair enough," Zorian said. Personally, he did not find blood magic to be that creepy, and even viewed it as a potentially useful tool for usage outside the time loop, but he understood where Zach was coming from.

They spent two more hours discussing various ideas before they both entered the pocket dimension inside the imperial orb for a very important task.

They had to convince Princess to let Zorian examine how her mind worked without trying to bite his head off for his insolence.

It would prove to be a very challenging task.

As days went by, some curious things began to be noticed by various countries of Koth, Xlotic and Altazia. The first one was that House Taramatula suddenly organized and launched a major expedition to Blantyrre in order to find the fabled imperial staff of Ikosia, sinking a massive amount of money and manpower into the endeavor. The level of support House Taramatula had given to the project was not as extensive as Daimen had hoped, but it was still major by virtually any means, and the frantic speed with which the whole thing was organized and executed was enough to give others pause. The Taramatula seemed almost desperate to track down the staff, and nobody could figure out why. The leadership of the House declined to answer any questions regarding the matter, contributing to the air of mystery.

More importantly, the Taramatula displayed the ability to open cross-continental dimensional passages between their land and their base in Blantyrre. This was not something Zach and Zorian wanted to make known, but proved to be utterly impossible to hide, given the scale of the operation. This information soon spread around like a wildfire throughout various spy agencies, especially ones based in Koth, who were immediately consumed by an intense desire to know everything possible about the situation. Amusingly, this included trying to track down information about the imperial staff. They thought the imperial artifacts were just historical curiosities, but since the Taramatula wanted the staff so badly, there had to be something special about it. Many people suddenly wanted to get their hands on the imperial staff, or at least hoped to understand what sort of power their rivals would possess should they successfully claim the item.

Zach and Zorian intended to steal the results of all such research near the end of the restart. Who knows, maybe the combined might of all these spy agencies would find something they had overlooked.

The second thing that got people’s attention, especially in Altazia, was intricate spell formula schematics, alchemical recipes, new spell compendiums and sensitive spy reports that started to surface all over the continent. Nobody knew who was responsible for this, how they had come up with all this in complete secrecy, or what their motives were… and it was completely unknown just how many people had received this assistance, considering many people had simply accepted their gifts quietly and set out to exploit them in secret. Finally, the gifts seemed to be most heavily concentrated in Eldemar, which was a huge concern for everyone around them. This caused a frenzy of speculation and activity across the continent, as people tried to figure out what this meant and how to hopefully take advantage of it.

This was, of course, done by Zach and Zorian. They did it for a very simple reason: to muddy the waters and prevent their newly marked fellow time travelers from standing out too much. It was too much to expect all of them to behave themselves at all times or never make a blunder, especially in this first restart while they were still under heavy impression of their first repeat of the month. Introducing enough waves into their surroundings would hopefully keep most people too busy with other matters to pay attention to crazy stories of time traveling academy professors and the like.

Thus far, the idea seemed to be working, but it would remain to be seen if that would hold out until the end.

This done, Zach and Zorian turned their attention to organizing the search for the imperial staff in Blantyrre. While the bulk of the job was done by Daimen and his men, it was a necessity for Zach and Zorian to get regularly involved. For one thing, the descriptions of the imperial staff were vague and contradictory, so they were the only ones that could identify the staff with any degree of certainty, thanks to their ability to sense the presence of the Key. Additionally, they were necessary for transporting people and supplies all over Blantyrre, since they were the only ones that could easily open dimensional gates from one location to another.

Zorian had been quietly hoping that the immense amount of resources they had mobilized in the search would provide quick results, but his hopes were soon dashed upon the rocks of reality. Finding the staff turned out to be much, much harder than finding a Bakora Gate. The gates were rare and obscure, but fairly distinctive. The staff, on the other hand, was something incredibly common in Blantyrre. The lizardmen loved their staves – they were a popular symbol of authority, and virtually any lizardman ruler and priest had a staff to call their own. While this meant that the imperial staff probably hadn’t been thrown away and forgotten in some ancient treasury, it also meant that tracking it down was akin to searching for a needle in a haystack. The one saving grace was that the imperial staff was free of most decorations, being just a plain piece of dark wood, whereas the lizardmen liked to decorate their own staves with gems and feathers and whatnot. Then again, what was to stop the new owner from adding those things to the imperial staff to pretty it up? Ugh…

Influenced by such things, Zach and Zorian decided to approach Quatach-Ichl for lessons again. Originally they wondered if they should skip their interaction with him in this particular restart, due to all the new time loopers suddenly walking around, but in the end they decided they would risk it. This time, the topic they chose was tracking magic and search spells. This was a relatively safe topic to ask about, and it might help them find the staff faster. A foolish hope, probably, considering the staff was immune to normal divination, just like all the other imperial artifacts. However, Quatach-Ichl was familiar with divine energies in a way that others couldn’t match, so perhaps he knew of a way it could be done.

The topic was also potentially useful in tracking down Red Robe once they were outside the time loop, and it might give them an answer about how Quatach-Ichl had managed to detect their presence at the end of the previous restart. Zorian really wanted an answer to that last question, since he had thought his privacy wards were pretty much flawless at this point.

It was really unfortunate that he had been unable to find out anything of worth when he broke through Quatach-Ichl’s mental defenses, Zorian thought gloomily. While he was extremely proficient at performing memory probes by now, that type of magic took a long time to really get going and the ancient lich had given him very little time to work with before abandoning his body. He probably shouldn’t have tried to find out where Quatach-Ichl’s phylactery was located. That kind of information was incredibly important and was thus bound to be guarded with the greatest possible zeal. He should have gone for something fairly mundane. Maybe Quatach-Ichl would have been willing to risk things and spend more time struggling against his mental probe.

At the moment, though, Zach and Zorian were in the time magic research facility beneath Cyoria. The two of them were disguised as adult agents of the crown, and were having a private talk with Krantin Keklos, the head researcher and overseer of the facility.

Krantin was slowly turning the imperial orb in his hands, utterly fascinated with it.

"You understand that we require your complete silence about this matter, don’t you, Mister Keklos?" Zorian asked him.

The man suddenly looked up, a slightly confused look on his face. He had evidently been so absorbed in his study of the orb that he had lost track of time.

"Hm? Oh. Oh yes, I absolutely understand the need for secrecy," Krantin quickly said, nodding furiously. "I assure you, me and my team are quite used to working on top secret projects and dealing with potential leaks."

He took another long look at the orb in his hands.

"This thing… it’s absolutely amazing," he said, obvious admiration in his voice. "I cannot put into words how glad I am to be given this honor."

"I hope you remember you are not being given this orb just to satisfy your personal curiosity," Zach said gruffly. He was playing the bad guy in their fake royal agent scheme. "We have given you this honor because you are our nation’s foremost expert on Black Rooms, and we hope you can turn this pocket dimension into the largest one yet. Can you do it or not?"

"Yes, absolutely," Krantin said. "While the volume of space inside is larger than anything we have ever done, the isolation from the outside world is also unprecedented. We can definitely turn this into a temporal dilation zone. Just…"

"Just?" Zorian prompted.

"W-Well, this is a very ambitious undertaking you are proposing here," Krantin said, stumbling over the words slightly. Zorian could feel that, although Krantin was a little nervous, he was also determined to make the absolute most out of this opportunity he was presented with. "To create this thing you are proposing, we would have to considerably expand the research facility and design whole new methods of Black Room construction. While I am sure we can do it eventually, the amount of time involved is not small. We are a very small team and–"

"You want more money," Zach said bluntly, cutting him off.

"And people," Krantin nodded.

He seemed to sense this was important to them. In that case, he felt it was entirely appropriate to ask for increased commitment in terms of resources and available staff.

Zorian did not answer verbally. He just reached into his jacket and handed Krantin a promissory note from one of the local banks. He could have brought actual cash too, of course, but he knew by now that government facilities like this rarely dealt with such things and that dumping large stacks of paper money on them would be a huge mistake. It would raise all sorts of red flags in their heads.

Krantin wordlessly accepted the promissory note and glanced at it. He raised his eyebrow at the number printed on it. Zorian could tell he was appreciative, but not really impressed.

"This is just the initial sum to get you started, of course," Zorian said. "You will get further funding once things actually start moving forward, as well as additional bonuses if the project is going particularly well."

"Of course," Krantin said, slightly more impressed.

"In regards to additional staff, that is a bit more complex," Zorian said. "Due to the somewhat abrupt nature of this initiative, it will take at least a month before we can send some new people here on a permanent basis."

"That’s fine," Krantin said easily. "I can wait a month or several. Just be aware that the longer it takes for additional manpower to arrive, the more the project will stall."

"I wasn’t finished," Zorian said, shaking his head. "Although we cannot send people here officially, you will get several mages skilled in dimensionalism to help you move faster with the project."

Specifically, the man would be getting Xvim, Silverlake, Zach and Zorian. With their expertise in dimensionalism and with the research facility staff’s experience in constructing Black Rooms, the project would hopefully result in something useful after a few restarts.

Krantin didn’t seem to like the idea, however.

"I don’t like experts outside my authority coming here, telling me how to run things," he told them bluntly. "Even if they’re highly capable, they don’t know the wider context of why we do things the way we do. They would just slow things down and create confusion."

"Are you the facility overseer or not?" Zach challenged. "Are you telling me that you cannot keep a couple of new arrivals in line or bring them up to speed in a timely manner?"

Krantin frowned at him, giving him a slightly angry look.

"These people are being sent here as help," Zorian said in a conciliatory tone. "If, after talking to them, you feel they contribute nothing of worth to the project, you are free to send them away."

"Just remember that their help has already been factored into our projections on how long the project will take," Zach warned.

"Very well," Krantin said, a little unhappily. "I shall give these people a chance, at least. We will see if they are as good as you say they are."

It took them another hour to arrange everything. Zach and Zorian handed Krantin a whole stack of official documentation, which the man merely glanced at before handing it over to the rest of his staff. He evidently didn’t even consider the idea that this was all just an elaborate ruse. Zorian hoped the people actually in charge of processing the documentation would be every bit as careless as their overseer, because many of the documents wouldn’t stand up to detailed scrutiny.

"Well," Krantin eventually breathed out. "This has certainly been a productive evening. Was there anything else you wanted to talk about?"

"Actually, yes," Zorian nodded, handing the man another folder full of documents. "There’s been a change in regards to the group that is planned to take advantage of the next Black Room period."

This wasn’t how Zach and Zorian usually took over the Black Room beneath Cyoria when they wanted to use it. Normally they just disabled the true group and then showed up with bogus documents at the last possible moment, giving the facility staff little time to consider the issue. This time, however, they planned to bring an entire group with them. Thus, they had taken time to arrange things a little more thoroughly.

"Oh? The Retin’s group decided to cancel their scheduled Black Room use?" Krantin said, skimming through the folder. "Strange, they were all so enthusiastic about the whole thing…"

He gave them a knowing look. He clearly knew there was some foul play involved here, but he probably thought it was the government bullying a group into dropping their claim rather than some kind of deception.

He shook his head sadly, throwing the folder to the side.

"I’m curious," he said. "This orb, the sudden changes in resource allocations and the like… are they related to these mysterious gifts I keep hearing about through the rumor mill?"

Hah.

"We aren’t paid to ask those kind of questions, and neither are you," Zach told him grimly.

"But probably," added Zorian.

Zach gave him a warning look in response. He was a pretty good actor, all things considered. Did he used to do this sort of thing a lot during past restarts or was he just a natural?

"Alright, I understand. Forget I asked," Krantin said, rising from his seat. "I guess we should both get back to our jobs. When can I expect these experts of yours?"

"Three days from now," Zorian said. That should be enough to see if their ruse worked or not. "We will also periodically drop by to check your progress and see if you need anything."

"Give me sufficient resources and I’ll give you what you want," Krantin assured them.

Zorian had no doubt about that. The real question was whether the results would come fast enough to be of any use.

He also swore mentally that if Krantin really produced impressive results with what they’ve given him, he would find a way to reward him for it in the real world.

Somehow.

In a typical restart, Zach and Zorian had a habit of holding meetings in all sorts of different places: parks, taverns, abandoned houses, constructed houses, tiny caves in the middle of the wilderness… they usually made a choice based on pure impulse and convenience. The novelty of holding a meeting in a new location was also a welcome reprieve from the soul-crushing sameness that dominated the time loop.

Now, however, they had a lot more people participating in these kinds of meetings. This completely changed their usual dynamic. They couldn’t decide these kinds of things on a whim anymore – they now had to find a space big enough to hold all of them in relative comfort and make sure everyone could gather there in a timely manner. Public places were pretty much out of consideration – a group of a dozen people of a variety of ages and occupations, plus some giant spiders, would turn heads wherever they went. Additionally, Ilsa got angry at them when they tried to arrange for a meeting in a cold, damp cave in the middle of uninhabited wilderness. Zorian didn’t understand what the big deal was, the centipede that tried to climb up her leg was less than a finger thick and the bats didn’t bother anyone, but afterwards everyone agreed to only hold meetings in actual buildings.

Thus, the two of them eventually decided to just hold all the meetings at the Noveda Estate. The place had plenty of empty, spacious rooms and very good privacy wards already in place. Though Zach complained that was the boring choice, he agreed with Zorian that organizing meetings elsewhere was more trouble than it was worth.

Thus, at this moment, there was a huge group of people gathered in one of the larger meeting rooms in the Noveda Estate. The actual meeting was already over by this point, but the group had not disbanded for the day. Instead they had mostly broken up into smaller groups that discussed things of mutual interest between themselves.

In one corner, the emissary from the Filigree Sages was having a loud and enthusiastic discussion with Nora Boole. The female spell formula teacher did not seem to mind that she was talking to a giant spider and instead relished the chance to discuss her field of study with a kindred soul. The Filigree Sages emissary, meanwhile, seemed immensely pleased to have found a human mage that was interested in their brand of spell formula. The two of them seemed completely oblivious to their surroundings and the passage of time, so consumed they were in their discussion.

Not far from them, Alanic and Kyron had covered a table full of various maps and were staring at it in silence. Every once in a while they would point at a random spot on the map and speak a few curt words at each other before falling silent again. Zorian couldn’t figure out anything from their brief, mysterious exchanges. In all likelihood, neither could anyone else – everyone seemed to be giving them a wide berth.

In the other corner, Zach was having a loud discussion with the emissary from the Luminous Advocates. This one was less friendly than the one between Nora Boole and the Filigree Sages emissary, though. Zach seemed to be trying to convince the Luminous Advocates to tutor him in mind magic, while the emissary was stubbornly pointing out that Zach wasn’t psychic and that this would be a waste of time.

Zorian suspected Zach would get his way in the end. Luminous Advocates were a lot less prideful with them after experiencing the time loop in person, and they now knew exactly how powerful Zach was. They knew they couldn’t afford to piss him off, and Zach was unlikely to quit once he set his mind on something, so they would probably cave in eventually. Whether anything would come out of such a lesson was something Zorian was a lot less sure about.

Not too far from them, a small group consisting of Kael, Taiven, Lukav and Daimen was sorting through the various rare materials Zach and Zorian gathered and exchanging stories. The talk seemed to be pretty mundane, focusing on amusing anecdotes and such.

One of the tables was completely monopolized by Silverlake, poring over their documents related to their study of the Ibasan gate. Zorian was pretty surprised at her behavior in this restart, in all honesty. She seemed far more enthusiastic and open about helping them now. It was interesting how dramatically she changed once she experienced the time loop with her own eyes.

Finally, there was Zorian. Like Silverlake, he wasn’t really interacting with anyone at the moment. Instead, he was inspecting a table full of divine artifacts that they had stolen for study. He had never made any progress in figuring out these things, but he certainly wasn’t about to give up. Especially since Quatach-Ichl had given them definite confirmation that it was possible to at least detect divine energies with regular magic.

Eventually his solitude was broken by Xvim, who walked up to his table and sat down on the chair next to him. He looked faintly displeased.

"Problems?" Zorian asked.

"I have a newfound appreciation for the amount of patience you and Mister Noveda possess," he said blandly. "I’ve just spent the entire morning marking down a stack of student homework that was absolutely identical to what I had already done in the previous restart and realized this would happen a lot. An unpleasant realization."

"Hah," Zorian said. "You can always just ignore it."

Xvim shook his head.

"That would go against my professional pride," he said. "Just as I demand dedication from my students, I demand the same from myself. A little thing like this should not break me. I shall treat it as personal tempering, I suppose."

"I see," Zorian said, nodding. "I suppose you’d be quite a hypocrite if, after subjecting your students to such an infuriating initial treatment, you ended up losing your patience after only a handful of repeating months."

Xvim hummed in response, not giving a verbal response. He glanced at the divine artifacts Zorian was inspecting.

"You realize, I’m sure, that no one has ever managed to figure out how divine artifacts actually work?" Xvim asked.

"Of course," Zorian said. "But very few people had the opportunity to take one apart over and over again as a method of study."

"Still, I’m surprised you’re wasting time on this," Xvim remarked. "Wouldn’t it be wiser to spend more time on time loop related things?"

"I would actually classify this as very much a time loop related thing," Zorian answered. "The time loop clearly works at least partially with the help of divine energies. Who’s to say they aren’t involved with our markers?"

"Oh?" Xvim asked, suddenly more interested.

"It’s just baseless speculation," Zorian said. "But I’ve been thinking about what Red Robe could possibly have that other past Controllers didn’t that would allow him to break the limitations placed on temporary markers, and the most likely answer I’ve come up with is… Quatach-Ichl. I suspect divine energies are involved with the marker somehow, and that the reason Red Robe had been able to jailbreak it is because he had Quatach-Ichl’s help. His method of perceiving and possibly modifying divine energies may have allowed him to tamper with the marker in ways that are impossible to us… in which case our efforts to understand and modify the marker are doomed to fail right from the very start."

"I hope you are not right about that," Xvim said after a short pause. "Quatach-Ichl has been alive for centuries. Who knows how long it took him to develop such capabilities?"

Zorian had nothing to say to that.

88. Mysterious Ways

With the palace orb handed to the time magic researchers for study and experimentation, Princess had temporarily lost her home. They weren’t going to leave her in there while the researchers tinkered with the pocket dimension. That would probably end in tragedy, and they still needed her to intimidate the sulrothum tribes into allying with them, anyway.

Although Princess herself was not particularly heartbroken about being away from the orb, the situation did make moving her around a bit of a chore. She couldn’t live in the desert. While she could tolerate dry areas, she needed plenty of water to rest in. Thus, Zach and Zorian mostly kept her deep in the Kothic wilderness, where she was happily terrorizing the jungle wildlife, and used dimensional portals to move her where they needed her. Thankfully, while Princess was huge, she was also serpentine in build and very flexible. She could squeeze herself through surprisingly small openings. However, this still meant Zach and Zorian had to expand their dimensional gates to far greater sizes than they typically used, greatly increasing casting time and mana costs involved.

Princess did have her own, divinely-granted teleportation abilities. They had experimented with them somewhat, trying to see if the hydra had underutilized her gifts somehow, but they were disappointed in the end. Her teleportation powers were exactly what they appeared to be: a short-ranged teleport ability that Princess could use for entering and leaving the palace orb, as well as tactical positioning during battles. It was incapable of transporting her across large distances.

The logistics of hydra transport aside, their alliance building was moving along extremely well. The sulrothum tribes they were visiting were both less secure and less prosperous than the ziggurat tribe. Their settlements had no defensive wards, they had no guardian beast on the level of the divinely-touched sandworm and their equipment was far shoddier than what Zach and Zorian were used to. Thus, when a pair of powerful human mages came to them, riding on a gigantic eight-headed hydra and handing out gifts, none of them dared to simply snub them. Not all of them were eager to work with them, but all of them at least agreed to hear them out.

It helped that this time they had brought an actual sulrothum language specialist to translate for them. The bearded, middle-aged man had only agreed to work with them after Zach and Zorian used Neolu and her family connections to guarantee their trustworthiness, but he had been worth the trouble. Not only was he proficient in the hand language that sulrothum normally used for their communication with humans, he even understood some of their native clicking and buzzing that they used to talk to each other… though he couldn’t actually speak it, of course.

Curiously, the man was completely non-magical. Ibak, as he was called, claimed that spells were of little help to him in his job. They only put the sulrothum on edge, as many of them were wary of talking to mages. The devil wasps had great difficulty distinguishing spell chants from mundane conversations, so any time a known spellcaster started speaking they would be viewed with great suspicion.

At the moment, Zach, Zorian, Ibak and Princess were approaching another of the sulrothum tribes for recruitment. This one was particularly underwhelming, however, and Zorian privately wondered if they should even bother. The settlement was just a series of circular holes dug into a cliff, and Zorian had seen enough of such places by now to estimate the number of sulrothum living there. The tribe probably had less than a hundred members total. Since the group had done nothing to mask their approach and Princess was very eye-catching, the sulrothum scouts had long since spotted them and the entire tribe was a nervous hive of activity. This allowed Zorian to take a look at the decorations and weapons the group was sporting, and he was not impressed with what he was seeing.

"Why are all these tribes so much worse than the ziggurat one?" Zach asked out loud.

He probably did not expect an answer, but surprisingly Ibak had an answer.

"Because of the dungeon access," Ibak said.

Zach and Zorian shot him curious looks, not really understanding.

"While humans like to build their cities on top of accessible dungeon layers, most other species do not, as their less sophisticated magical expertise makes them less capable of dealing with creatures crawling out of the Dungeon on the regular basis," Ibak clarified. "The sulrothum living in the Ziggurat of the Sun are an exception, probably because of the giant sandworm you mentioned. The creature probably allowed them to reshape their local underground the same way human communities do, letting them exploit the place in relative safety. The other tribes do not have that, and thus appear underwhelming in comparison."

"Huh," Zach said thoughtfully. "I guess that sandworm is even more important than we thought. The wasps really lucked out with that thing."

Before anyone could continue the discussion, Princess released a warbling cry and pointed one of her heads towards a spot on the horizon where a group of sulrothum was flying towards them.

Zorian frowned at the sight. He wasn’t surprised that Princess had noticed them before anyone else – she had eight pairs of eyes and was intensely vigilant by nature – but the direction they were coming from and their numbers were unexpected. They were coming from their left, rather than the sulrothum settlement in front of them, and there were twelve sulrothum in the approaching group.

"An emissary from a different tribe?" Zorian guessed. He doubted the tiny settlement in front of them would send out a hunting party as large as this… and if they did, the group would first enter their home to consult with their elders before confronting them.

"Probably," Zach said. "I hope this becomes a thing in the future. This would go so much smoother if the surrounding tribes started coming to us instead of the other way around."

As they grew closer to Princess and the humans accompanying her, the sulrothum group eventually slowed down and landed in the area in front of them. The sulrothum chose a spot that was a fair distance away from their own, trying to make their entrance seem less threatening, but in the end they did effectively block their path and Princess instantly became outraged at the temerity of these newcomers. If Zach hadn’t hurriedly calmed her down, she would have already been charging at them, heads roaring a battle cry.

In the end the two groups silently agreed to meet in the middle and negotiate. Zach, Zorian and Ibak ordered Princess to stay in the back and loom over the meeting threateningly, while the apparent sulrothum leader took two bodyguards with him and ordered the rest to similarly stay in the back and look intimidating.

Zorian was kind of biased, but he felt that Princess decidedly won the aggressive posturing competition.

For the next ten minutes, Ibak and the sulrothum leader exchanged words while Zorian took the chance to study the group that sought them out. They were pretty impressive by sulrothum standards, he realized. They were all armed with iron spears and decorated with plenty of war paint, trinkets and various magical charms. The only person that wasn’t armed was their leader, who carried a plethora of metal rings and chains but no weapons. He also had a particularly large number of charm bundles hanging off of him, some of which actually looked like they might be doing something. Zorian immediately pegged him as a priest.

After a while the talking died down and Ibak turned to them awkwardly. Zorian could immediately tell that he didn’t have good news for them, though the sulrothum themselves remained non-aggressive. Curious.

"What is it?" Zach prompted.

"This group here comes from the Ziggurat of the Sun," Ibak said slowly.

Oh.

He did think those spears were kind of familiar. However, weapons like that were hardly unique to the ziggurat tribe, so he thought nothing of it.

"They know we want to attack them, huh?" Zach mused out loud.

It wasn’t that unexpected, Zorian supposed. It wasn’t like they were being low-key in their alliance building. Quite the opposite, really. With that in mind, it was probably inevitable that the ziggurat tribe would detect their plans long before the actual attack was executed. Since their goal was to lure the high priest out of the ziggurat and not to catch the sulrothum by surprise, this wasn’t something they cared much about.

Still, they hadn’t expected the ziggurat tribe to seek them out for a friendly chat. Try to ambush them, maybe, but not this.

"Yes," Ibak confirmed. "They want to know… what it would take for you to call your attack off."

"What, no threats?" Zach asked curiously.

"No," said Ibak, shaking his head. "Just questions about your motives. Not that I know much about that myself, of course."

Zach ignored the accusatory tone in Ibak’s last sentence. While he probably wouldn’t betray them to the sulrothum, it wouldn’t make them look any less crazy or mysterious if they told him they were doing all this for a magic ring.

"How do they know we don’t want to simply take away their ziggurat?" Zach asked. "Ask them that."

"That’s… are you trying to start a fight with them?" Ibak asked incredulously.

"I want to see how they react," Zach said. "Just do it."

Ibak muttered something that sounded like a curse in his native language and then started conversing with the sulrothum priest again. Interestingly, the sulrothum did not visibly react to the question at all. It wasn’t long before Ibak turned to them again.

"They say three of us are not enough for that," Ibak said. "That you would have brought an army with you if you wanted to occupy something." The sulrothum priest made another series of hand gestures. "They think you want something smaller. Something portable. They acknowledge your strength but wonder if a trade wouldn’t be preferable to bloodshed."

"What we want they would never trade away," Zorian said, shaking his head.

Should they tell them they were after the ring? No, that might make it harder to lure the high priest out of the ziggurat later… but maybe he would actually agree to hand it to them if he thought it would ward off a catastrophic attack on his tribe? The ring was important, but it wasn’t like they were asking him to hand over the sandworm control dagger or something.

"Tell them this is not something they are qualified to negotiate about," Zach suddenly said. "We want to talk to their high priest."

Zorian raised his eyebrow at Zach. Did he really think it would be that easy?

A furious exchange of hand gestures occurred between Ibak and the sulrothum priest, after which Ibak turned to them again.

"They say they are also not qualified to bring strangers before their elders," Ibak said. "They are here merely to find out what you’re after and if the conflict can be averted. After that, they will report back to their tribe and receive further orders. They say meeting the leaders of the tribe may be possible, but you have to give them something to bring back if you wish for that to happen."

Zach and Zorian looked at each other briefly. A quiet exchange of telepathic communication occurred between them and they quickly came to an agreement.

"I guess that makes sense," Zach admitted out loud.

Zorian reached into his pocket and retrieved a metal watch from it. Using a quick alteration spell, he melted the portion of the casing and shaped it into a replica of the imperial ring before handing it over to Ibak.

"Tell them to hand this over to the high priest as our response," Zorian said.

"He’ll understand," Zach added.

Ibak raised his eyebrow at them but did as he was told. The sulrothum priest hesitantly accepted the ring, turning it in his chitinous hands. He seemed rather dubious about the explanation he was given, staring at both Zach and Zorian with his large faceted eyes in a searching manner, antennae nervously twitching in all directions.

After a while, he carefully placed the replica ring in one of the many leather pouches hanging off his body and nodded to them in a very human manner. He then waved towards his bodyguards, signaling they were done here. Apparently he realized this was all he would be getting out of them. A few minutes later the entire sulrothum group lifted into the air again and rapidly flew away in the same direction they came from.

The humans silently watched their retreat for a while, before Ibak decided to speak up.

"You brats are too damn mysterious about everything," he groused. "I don’t even know why I agreed to this."

"You’re getting paid handsomely for this," Zach pointed out.

"Yet I’m still starting to regret this," Ibak said. He looked towards the sulrothum settlement in the distance. "Incidentally, there is another group of sulrothum incoming. This time for the settlement we were going to visit before we got interrupted by this one."

Zorian looked towards the settlement and noticed that Ibak was correct. The local sulrothum did not dare interrupt the ziggurat tribe emissaries while they were talking to Zorian and others, but now that they were gone, they seemed to be hurriedly assembling their own emissary group to intercept them.

"Are we still going to talk to them about allying against the ziggurat tribe?" Ibak asked.

"I don’t see why not," Zach said, shrugging. "There is no guarantee that the high priest will accept our message in good grace. If we thought it would be that simple to get what we want, we wouldn’t have started down this path to begin with. We’ll keep gathering forces, putting pressure on him while he considers what to do."

Neither Zach nor Zorian really thought the high priest would capitulate and hand them the ring without a fight. On the contrary, they felt sure it would make their task of eventually obtaining the ring far harder in this restart. However, on the off chance it did work, it would be pretty much an ideal solution to obtaining the ring in future restarts. Thus, they decided to give it a try anyway.

They didn’t expect to be approached by the same emissary group the very next day, inviting them to the ziggurat to talk with the high priest.

Ibak cautioned them against accepting the offer. It was an obvious trap, he said. However, Zach and Zorian did not care. Even if the meeting was just an excuse to ambush them, they still had to go. They were far more powerful than either Ibak or the sulrothum high priest realized, and were unlikely to die. As long as they met the high priest face-to-face and he had the ring on him, they would get what they wanted, one way or another.

Unfortunately, Ibak adamantly refused to follow them into the ziggurat, calling them suicidal fools. Zorian understood the man’s attitude. Ibak couldn’t possibly know just how capable he and Zach really were, so his concerns were well warranted. However, this didn’t make things any less frustrating and the argument was rapidly becoming heated.

The ziggurat tribe emissary calmly observed the argument for a few minutes before casting some sort of spell. Both Zach and Zorian instantly became wary, but it quickly became obvious that the sulrothum priest was casting magic on himself.

The spell was far lengthier and ritualized than what Zorian was used to when dealing with human and aranean mages, involving nearly a minute of buzzing and gesturing, and at the end of it the sulrothum priest burned a handful of scented materials as some kind of offering to the heavens. An entirely superfluous gesture as far as Zorian could tell, not impacting the spellcasting results at all.

This done, the emissary straightened himself up and faced them again.

"The fight: unnecessary," he declared with a somewhat distorted but perfectly understandable human voice. "Talk: still possible. No need to pressure companion."

Zach and Zorian stared at the sulrothum for a while before Zach spoke up again.

"You could have done this right from the start and you let us talk through a translator all this time?" he asked.

The sulrothum’s antenna twitched nervously as he tried to decipher Zach’s words.

"He clearly has only a rudimentary knowledge of Ikosian tongue," Ibak said in an exasperated manner. "It makes perfect sense for him to prefer conversing with me, using more familiar hand gestures, than bothering with this."

"My speech: poor," the emissary added. "High priest: much better. Will be enough until we reach temple."

After some more discussion, Zach and Zorian agreed to leave Ibak and followed the sulrothum back to the ziggurat. Despite their worries, they were not attacked at any point in the journey, not even when they entered the ziggurat itself. Instead the emissary dutifully led them through the empty corridors and straight into the temple, where the high priest and his honor guard waited for them.

Zorian was honestly a little surprised. The sulrothum had actually brought them in front of their high priest, just as they had promised. Sure, the room was also packed full of heavily-armed guards and several lesser priests, but it did not seem like they were walking into an ambush. The sulrothum were tense and agitated, but they did not move to attack them.

The high priest stood proudly in front of the huge sacred fire that served as the heart of the temple. Situated at the top of a large stone dais, the fire illuminated the entire place in dull orange glow. The air was uncomfortably hot and dry, even though Zach and Zorian had spent their time traveling through a scorching desert just before coming here. From his elevated position, the sulrothum high priest silently stared down on them, his multifaceted eyes unblinkingly studying their every move.

A deathly, uncomfortable silence soon descended on the scene. For several minutes, the two sides simply stood in their spots without making a move. Even Zach remained patient and unmoving, reluctant to make the first move.

Finally, the high priest seemed to reach a decision. He reached towards one of his hands and removed a familiar ring from it. He then placed in on his palm and thrust it towards them decisively.

"Take it," he said. His voice was deep and resonant, and echoed dramatically throughout the room.

"Just like that?" Zach asked curiously.

"You do not want it?" the high priest asked.

"We want it," Zach said. "I’m just a little surprised by your behavior."

"I mirror your sentiments, human," the high priest declared. "I, too, am… a little surprised by your behavior. If you wanted the ring, why did you not just come here and ask for it? Why bother with the hostilities?"

Zach looked at him like he was stupid.

"What are you talking about?" Zorian said. "Are you saying you’d have given us the ring if we had simply walked in here and asked you to?"

"Of course," the high priest said. "We are children of angels. What child dares defy its parents?"

"The angels?" repeated Zorian confusingly.

The high priest stared at them silently for a few seconds.

"As I thought," he said, lowering the hand that held the ring. "You do not know."

"No, we really don’t," Zach freely admitted. "What are you talking about?"

"Have you tried to contact the angels recently?" the high priest asked.

Zorian raised an eyebrow at him. What a ridiculous idea. As if anyone could just contact the angels to have a friendly chat of something. Besides…

"The spirit world cannot be contacted at the moment," Zorian said.

"Ah, so you do know that much at least…" the high priest said, his antennae waving in the air lazily. "Good. Just before the angels fell silent, they graced us with their presence and gave us a warning. They said that in the coming month, a powerful human mage may arrive here and ask for the ring. If that were to happen… we are to simply hand it over without struggle."

Zach and Zorian stayed silent, digesting the explanation. Angels specifically instructed the sulrothum to hand over the ring to them? Well, to the time loop controller, really. To Zach. Did that mean that angels were the ones to give Zach the marker?

It would certainly explain how Zach could have gotten a divine blessing when such things were supposed to be all but extinct in modern times…

"Why would the angels tell you to do such a thing?" Zach frowned.

"I don’t know," the high priest said, cocking his head to the side like a curious bird. "You should tell me."

"Well, did they actually give you a description of this powerful human mage?" Zach asked agitatedly. "Did they leave some kind of message for him?"

"No descriptions, no message," the high priest responded curtly. "However, they did assure us not to worry about the loss of the ring. They said… that in the end, the loss would be just a temporary matter."

Before Zach and Zorian could say anything else, the high priest threw the ring at them. Zach caught it in his hand and inspected it. However, that was largely pointless. Zorian could tell through his marker that the ring was genuine, and so could Zach.

"The heavens instruct; the children obey," the high priest stated. "You have what you came here for. You may leave now."

This was apparently the end of the meeting, because then the regular priests soon came to them, and politely but insistently ushered them out of the ziggurat.

Somewhere in the jungles of Blantyrre, not far from the coast, was an unremarkable dirt trail made by the local lizardmen. This was normally a quiet and rarely used road, but today this sleepy peace was shattered by an entire group of humans loudly and messily trudging through the region. Though sheer manpower and powerful magic, they cut down the vegetation that threatened to overgrow the path and continued inexorably towards their destination.

This was Daimen and his personal team looking for rumors about the imperial staff. This time, Zach and Zorian had decided to tag along with them for a while. It had been four days since they had managed to obtain the imperial ring from the sulrothum, and they were still somewhat under the impression of what they had heard in the ziggurat. They didn’t know what to think about the whole incident. Clearly the angels were aware that the time loop was going to be activated and took at least some precautions in regards to that… did that mean they were behind the whole thing?

Zach certainly did not remember even talking to an angel, much less receiving any sort of instructions from them. Of course, it was possible that Red Robe was responsible for that, having erased Zach’s memory of that for some reason, but then one couldn’t help but ask why they didn’t plan for that possibility and leave a message for him through one of their other servants. The ring situation proved they were both capable and willing to make such contingencies when it suited them, so why not for other things as well?

There were no easy answers for that. Even Alanic admitted that this sort of thing did not make much sense to him, though he did not seem to be too disturbed. The angels work in mysterious ways, he said, since they labor under many limitations and restrictions placed on them by the gods. Many times they simply couldn’t do the logical thing, or even tell you why they are acting the way they do. One just had to have faith that they knew what they were doing and not rely on them too much.

Well, at least this way they had a trivially easy way of recovering the imperial ring…

"See, I told you Princess was the solution!" Zach said, spinning the said ring on his finger.

"This is not how you expected things to go and we both know it," Zorian told him firmly. He looked over to the side where Kirma was fiddling with the brand new divination compass Zorian had made for her. "So? What do you think?"

She didn’t answer for a moment, opting to instead cast a quick series of divinations through the device before turning it in her hands a few more times. Like her old one, it was a flower-shaped and made of metal, but with a much denser array of spell formula. Zorian was pretty sure his work was a massive improvement on what she had been working with up until now, but high level diviners were finicky and what worked for him might not necessarily work for her.

"Very impressive," she finally concluded. "A bit bigger and heavier than I’m used to, but I can work with this. It feels a little weird to accept something this valuable for free, though."

"Free?" Torun scoffed from their side. One of the floating eyeballs that followed him swiveled towards them while Torun simply kept scanning the jungle canopy for something. He had a bad habit of not looking people in the eye while talking to them, letting his floating eyeballs maintain eye contact instead. "He’s had all of us searching an entire continent worth of jungle for a straightened piece of wood without having to pay us a single thing. It was about time he started handing out gifts."

"That’s not very fair," Kirma protested. "We’re also doing this for ourselves, not just for him."

"And I’m paying plenty of money to make this happen," Zorian pointed out.

"Fake time loop money," Torun said dismissively. "Doesn’t count."

"Also, why don’t I get a gift?" Taiven suddenly asked, having snuck up to them from behind while they were taking. "Seriously, Zorian… you’re handing out expensive gifts to strange women, but you don’t have anything for your old pal Taiven? Shame on you!"

Zorian looked at her, amused. He’d thought she was still busy gawking at the jungle sights, since this was the first time she had ever stepped foot in one, but apparently she had calmed down a little and decided to seek him out.

Kirma gave Taiven a less friendly look, since she apparently didn’t like being labeled a strange woman out of the blue.

"My gift to you is taking you with me to Blantyrre, even though you have no useful skills for the mission and no wilderness survival experience," Zorian told her blandly.

"Eh, I guess that’s true," she laughed nervously. "I really do appreciate it, though. Traveling to exotic lands, searching for ancient artifacts… this sort of expedition is exactly what I hoped to one day experience. It’s great! It’s just too bad I can’t put this on my job profile or something."

She was entirely too giddy about the whole thing. On one hand it was kind of annoying to have her dance around the whole group like an excited little girl, on the other hand it kind of made him glad he had agreed to bring her along, since this clearly meant so much to her.

At least she wasn’t defenseless. The one time she had walked into a patch of carnivorous plants, she burned them all to ashes before anyone had even realized what had happened. Her inexperience aside, she was a decent combat mage.

Eventually, the group soon reached their destination – a small lizardmen village where they would supposedly find a reclusive sage that knew everything about the history of the region. While the everything was almost certainly an exaggeration, there was probably some sort of basis for his reputation, right?

Right.

The village was a humble one, with tiny houses made out of mud and straw. There was a river right next to it, and most of the adult villagers were currently busy tending to their boats, which they dragged onto the shore for easier handling. The children were either shuttling tools and materials between various work groups or chasing each other and play fighting while their parents shouted something vaguely threatening at them. Probably telling them to stop messing around or demanding they get out of the way if they wouldn’t help.

Their arrival caused a small commotion in the group, but they were mostly curious rather than wary. Most lizardmen never saw a human in their entire life, Zorian had learned, so they did not know what to expect of them. Since the group was accompanied by lizardmen guides hired in the nearby city-state and no one in the group carried an obvious weapon like a spear or a club, the villagers were not particularly frightened of them.

Annoyingly, this meant that some of the braver children tried to examine them closer or even touch them. One of them specifically picked Zorian as a target, probably because he was one of the shorter humans present, and kept asking him something while poking him.

Lizardmen language sounded nothing like normal lizard hissing. It was more like a high-pitched, warbling bird song. Zorian understood none of it, but by peering into the kids mind and listening to the snickering explanation of their lizardmen guides, he managed to puzzle out that the child was asking him if he was a fairy.

He hated this village already.

In any case, the group eventually set up a small camp just outside the village, with most of the group just idling around while the leaders of the village exchanged gifts with Daimen and went through various ceremonial gestures. The whole procedure was annoyingly lengthy, but apparently necessary. The reclusive sage they wanted to talk with was normally… well, reclusive. He wouldn’t deign to meet most people, but perhaps if they could convince the village elders to put in a good word for them, he might give them a chance.

Zorian was currently sitting on one of the cut down logs on the outskirts of the village, watching some of the lizardmen children fight the animated mud person he had created out of the ground to distract them from himself. Although the mud construct had the size and strength comparable to an adult human, the truth was that humans were notably smaller and weaker than lizardmen. Their vaguely crocodilian frames were wider and larger than human ones, and their skin was covered in tough leathery scales. Thus, even though the mud construct’s enemies were mere children, it was still being gradually overpowered. This was pretty much how Zorian had intended it to be, however. He didn’t really want to hurt the little brats, even if they were loud, grabby and generally annoying.

Not far from him, some enterprising lizardman woman had come to try and peddle her crafts and trinkets to the gathered humans, trying to exchange pottery and necklaces made out of colorful stones for metal tools and fabrics. She was currently negotiating with one of the female members of the group, each of them loudly talking at one another, even though neither spoke the other’s language.

He took off his glasses and started obsessively cleaning them. Damn it, when was this damn meeting going to en–

"Why so impatient?" asked a voice beside him. "It is good to sit down from time to time and appreciate the simpler things in life."

His heart skipped a beat when the voice started talking. He turned towards the source of the voice, shocked to find that there was suddenly a strange lizardman sitting next to him. And he did mean suddenly. The lizardman did not register at all on Zorian’s mind sense and seemingly materialized out of nowhere when he started talking.

He was also very, very weird-looking. Intricate pattern of blue and white lines was painted over his whole body, and he wore what seemed to be a massive deer skull over the top of his head. A multitude of bone armbands, necklaces and ankle-bands decorated his limbs and neck. Resting horizontally on his lap was a gnarled wooden staff with a huge pearl attached on top of it.

His posture and appearance gave the impression of someone old and worn down – eyes half-closed, scales cracked and faded in places, his posture hunched and drooping – despite that, he inspired a faint feeling of terror in Zorian, who couldn’t understand how he had been able to sneak up on his so easily.

"I hear you’ve been looking for me," the lizardman said. He was speaking fluent Ikosian, which was kind of interesting but way down the list of questions Zorian wanted answered at the moment.

"What? Oh, you’re the sage we wanted to speak with," Zorian realized.

"Indeed," the lizardman said, fiddling with one of the bone armbands while watching the children play with Zorian’s mud construct. "I dislike this kind of attention, so I decided to just meet with one of you and be done with it."

Zorian looked around and realized no one seemed to be paying attention to his conversation with the weird lizardman that had showed up out of nowhere.

"Only you can see and hear me," he said casually.

This was such bullshit.

"Why did you pick me out of everyone else present?" Zorian asked with a small frown.

"I like you," he said. "You took the time to play with the children. Don’t you remember what I said earlier? It is good to sit down from time to time and appreciate the simpler things in life."

Zorian looked at him incredulously, not sure if the lizardman was being serious or not. He had only made that toy so the children would let him rest in peace.

"How did you sneak up on me?" Zorian couldn’t help but ask.

"I’m old," the lizardman said, tapping the staff in his lap with his scaly, clawed fingers. "Ancient. It’s natural to have a couple of secrets."

He did not offer to explain any further and Zorian did not press him.

The staff was probably some kind of divine artifact. Zorian checked it out with his marker, just in case it was the one they were after. It wasn’t.

"What did you seek me out for?" the lizardman asked, his half-closed eye focusing more firmly on him.

Zorian quickly described the origin and probable appearance of the staff to the old lizardman. The sage patiently listened to his explanation, saying nothing. He said nothing for nearly fifteen minutes, seemingly lost in thought. Occasionally he whistled to himself softly in the native lizardmen tongue, tapping on his various bone ornaments and drawing some kind of simple geometric diagrams in dirt.

Zorian patiently waited for the lizardman to come to his senses again, not daring to interrupt his musings. Unfortunately, when the sage finally turned to him again, he did not have a favorable answer for him.

"I cannot remember anything that would help you in your quest," the lizardman said, shaking his head sadly. The various bone necklaces hanging from his neck clinked softly at the movement.

Zorian sighed. So much for that.

"However…" the lizardman continued, "I have an idea where you might look for more knowledge on the matter, if you feel brave enough. This staff… it is a very valuable thing, yes?"

"Yes," Zorian confirmed.

"There is a particularly loathsome dragon mage terrorizing our people throughout the entire region and beyond," the sage said. "I don’t know her name, but our people refer to her as the Violet-Eyed Disaster, The Covetous One or Typhoon. For centuries she has preyed upon our communities, snatching away any item that catches her fancy and killing anyone that tried to bar her way. Many important artifacts have been lost to her. If this staff of yours is as important as it seems, she has probably tried to find it and knows a thing or two about its whereabouts. Perhaps… it may already be in her possession."

Zorian gave the lizardman an unamused look. An infamous dragon mage? There were few things in the world more dangerous than that… feeling brave indeed.

Still, the old guy’s logic was sound and the idea was worth checking out. Didn’t Zach already demonstrate the ability to kill Oganj, who was similarly an infamous dragon mage?

"So what do you–" Zorian began to speak, only to realize the old lizardman was no longer there.

He waved his hand through the air where the sage had been sitting next to him, but hit only empty space.

Groaning audibly, Zorian wandered off to find Zach and Daimen to inform them that arranging the meeting with the sage was no longer necessary.

Zorian woke up with a panicked scream as an endless deluge of ice cold water poured on top of his head as he slept. Stumbling and flailing around in panic, he tried to jump out of bed, but the wet fabric clung to him and made him trip. He tumbled awkwardly to the floor, frantically trying to rub the water out of his eyes while searching for his glasses.

When he had finally come to his senses and looked around, he found Kirielle pressed into a corner of the room by the door, a large bucket clutched tightly in her hands.

There was still water dripping from it onto the floor.

"Kirielle… what the hell are you doing!?" Zorian shouted incredulously.

"I, u-umm…" she stumbled, pacing nervously while clutching the bucket in her hands tightly. "I was trying to make you assume your true form!"

Zorian looked at her like she was crazy.

Actually, scratch that – she was crazy!

"True form!?" he asked her. "What the hell are you on about? You just dumped a bucket of cold water on my head in the middle of the night!"

"I read in the book that doppelgangers assume their true forms if you surprise them while they’re sleeping," she said. "So, um, if you dump water on them when they’re deep asleep, they’ll drop their disguise and assume their true form."

Zorian stared at her, unable to believe her explanation.

"You think I’m a face-changer?" Zorian asked her in a calm voice.

"Y-You aren’t acting like the Zorian I know," she said while staring at the ground and refusing to look at him. "You have all these friends all of a sudden, you didn’t get angry at all when Imaya asked you about Daimen and… you’re way too nice to me."

Zorian sighed and ran his hand through his wet hair to get it out of his eyes. He looked at the closed door, confused as to why the entire house hadn’t woken up by now because of all the shouting, but then he remembered he had put pretty strong privacy wards on the room.

"If you thought I was a doppelganger, you should have at least gotten someone to back you up when confronting me," Zorian told her.

He made a couple of gestures and pressed his hands against his chest, evaporating most of the water out of his clothes.

"You’re too good at magic, too," Kirielle added. "That’s another thing that’s weird. But, umm… you didn’t change forms, so I guess you really are Zorian."

Zorian debated the merits of using an illusion to seemingly morph into some kind of grotesque monster right at that moment, but immediately discarded it as too cruel. As much as he wanted to rage and get back at her, she had good reasons for pulling off this stupid stunt.

He was getting entirely too careless around her, it seemed.

"Yes, I really am Zorian," he told her in an exasperated tone. He took the bucket from her hands and lifted her up before marching back to his bed and plopping her right on top of it.

Right on top of the wet part, that is.

"Why!?" she protested, immediately jumping off the bed and inspecting her suddenly wet behind.

"Punishment," Zorian said pitilessly. "You did say I was too nice to you, no?"

She gave him an angry look but said nothing.

"Anyway," he said. "I suppose I can tell you a little bit about what’s going on and why things are so weird right now…"

Time marched on. The search for the staff in Blantyrre, the research on pocket dimensions and other points of interest, the training of people with the aid of Black Rooms and nigh-limitless resources… as the restarts started to accumulate, these and other projects started to gradually bear fruit.

Just like that, another five restarts had passed.

89. Victory

It was a peaceful summer day in the Great Northern Forest. The vegetation was vibrantly green and thriving, colorful flowers covered the forest meadows, the songbirds were seemingly competing to see which one of them was louder and shriller than the next, and strange insects were flying through the air.

While the vast expanse of trees that covered the northern portion of the Altazian continent was usually portrayed as a dark and foreboding place, crawling with dangerous monsters and hidden dangers, the truth is that the area could be quite beautiful and breathtaking. One just had to be strong enough to survive the challenges and travel the land unchecked.

Zorian, Taiven and Kael were definitely strong enough. Not just because Zorian was present in the group, either. Taiven and Kael had gone through five whole loops by now, each of which included additional time in the Black Rooms. They’d had nearly an entire year to improve their magic, backed by nearly unlimited resources and top-tier tutors. Even Kael, who spent most of that time focusing on alchemy, was now capable of at least defending himself from common threats. As for Taiven, she was a combat magic specialist to begin with. Her power was probably equal to an average professional combat mage at this point. She even had real combat experience, since she insisted on fighting the Ibasan invaders at the end of every restart and often participated in minor battles that Daimen’s team stumbled upon while exploring Blantyrre. Even if Zorian decided to stand back and let the other two fend for themselves, there was very little in the forest around them that could threaten them.

Currently, the three of them were resting on a large boulder in one of the forest clearings and playing a game of cards. It was just something to pass the time while they rested their feet. They had been wandering the forest for hours before stumbling upon the clearing, and it looked so perfect for a temporary camp they decided to take a bit of a break. They didn’t intend to stay here for very long.

As Zorian pondered his next move, he felt Taiven subtly try to take a peek at his cards with a spying spell. Zorian was proud for her for expanding her horizons beyond flashy combat magic, but that didn’t stop him from reflexively crushing her magic into nothingness before giving her a knowing smile. She pouted for a moment, before remembering she was supposed to act like she didn’t know anything and schooling her expression into one of indifference.

Kael silently observed the scene from the side before shaking his head in amusement, probably guessing what had happened. Zorian suspected Taiven had tried to use the same trick on Kael as well, though he had no idea if the morlock boy had managed to stop her, or even noticed her cheating. Then again, Kael didn’t seem to take the card game very seriously. He seemed to be playing mindlessly, uncaring of how likely he is to win. Zorian supposed this sort of attitude made perfect sense, since this was supposed to be just a nice relaxing game with no stakes, but it faintly annoyed him anyway.

Zorian himself didn’t try to cheat, of course. That would suck the joy out of the whole activity, since it would be so trivial for him to succeed. He simply immersed himself in the game while listening to the sounds of the wilderness around them. His legs throbbed in pain, unused to the level of activity he was engaging in, but he had kind of gotten used to that by now. Even with the aid of potions and mind magic, the beginning of every restart involved Zorian being in a constant state of dull pain because he lived far more actively than he had before the time loop. Hopefully that wouldn’t have any long-term mental effects on him once he was out of the time loop…

He was broken out of his thoughts by a loud crunching sound. Looking to the side, he saw Kael with a large yellow root stuffed in his mouth.

Taiven gave Kael a strange, possibly disapproving look.

"What?" Kael complained, chewing loudly. The sound it produced reminded Zorian of someone eating a raw carrot.

"How can you eat that thing?" she asked him.

"It’s really tasty," he told her matter-of-factly.

"It’s a wild root you washed in a nearby river," she protested. "That cannot possibly be safe or hygienic. Plus, I can smell it from here and it doesn’t smell like something you should be eating…"

Kael gave her a challenging look before biting into the root again and chewing even louder.

Zorian pretended to study his cards while inwardly chuckling in amusement. Personally, he wasn’t worried about Kael in the slightest. Although the morlock was the weakest of the three in terms of combat strength, he was the person who was most at home in the forest. He had been working and living in this very environment ever since he was a child, and doubtlessly knew exactly what was safe to eat and how.

Taiven had gotten relatively close to Kael after they had both received a temporary marker, since the two of them were arguably the closest in age and relative skill among the new loopers, so she probably knew that too. Thus, she simply threw her hands in the air with a huff, accidentally showing them a glimpse of the cards she was holding, and dropped the issue.

Zorian took note of her cards and changed his tactics accordingly. This wasn’t cheating, of course. Taking advantage of your opponent’s mistakes was only natural. It wasn’t his problem that he could memorize her entire hand flawlessly after seeing it for only a fraction of a second…

After another fifteen minutes of chatting, playing cards, eating roots and berries and lazing around, the three of them reluctantly decided to move on. After all, this whole expedition originated from Kael’s desire to search for rare alchemical ingredients in the depths of the Great Northern Forest. This wasn’t really some critical task that had to be done, and the three of them were mostly using it as an excuse to relax and socialize, but they did intend to seriously search for things Kael was after.

For the next half an hour or so, Zorian followed after Kael casting divination after divination and occasionally taking over the minds of forest birds in order to scout the area around them. Taiven also utilized divinations, having achieved some measure of expertise in the field over the various restarts, while Kael mostly relied on his own two eyes. Considering his extensive experience in searching for magical plants, however, he probably still saw and understood far more than Zorian and Taiven did.

Every once in a while the morlock boy would inspect some random stump or boulder, occasionally picking up some other magical plant that wasn’t on their list, but which he apparently also considered worthwhile, and occasionally just stared at them meaningfully while pondering some mysterious issue. The backpacks the three of them wore had all been made by Zorian, and were considerably larger on the inside than they appeared, but Zorian estimated Kael’s backpack was already starting to get full from the various plants, jars full of worms and beetles, and even some colorful stones that seemed pretty mundane to Zorian’s eyes. Even if they failed to find the things they were searching for, Kael certainly intended to make the most out of this expedition, that’s for sure.

Relaxing times like these had become increasingly rare in these last five restarts. Everyone was constantly busy with something, whether it was following some plan, searching for things that could help them, experimenting with exotic magics or simply training their skills. This was especially true in this particular restart, since this was the last restart for the temporary loopers. If they could not figure out a way to modify the temporary markers before the end of the restart, they would lose… well, everything.

Sure enough, eventually Kael and Taiven could not help but bring up the issue that was constantly in the back of everyone’s mind these days.

"This is the end, isn’t it?" Kael suddenly said.

The other two gave him conflicted looks. There was no need to ask him what he meant by that.

"Tell us honestly, Zorian… what are the chances we can figure out how to adjust our markers before this month runs out?" Kael continued, seeing how he had their attention.

Zorian suppressed a sigh. Temporary markers… they had spent almost a year studying them, if one factored in the time spent in Black Rooms, and in that time they had made significant progress. They managed to map the general structure of the markers and figure out what many of the pieces did. They compared these markers to the larger, more complete markers embedded in Zach and Zorian. They placed and removed temporary markers on random people to test possible modifications and see what happened. They found out that, yes, the markers really did contain components made out of divine energies… and they also found a way to deal with that. Through several ruinously expensive deals with Quatach-Ichl and innumerable destroyed divine artifacts, they managed to create methods to detect and crudely manipulate strands of divine energy inside their markers. Not enough to manipulate them as they wished, but enough to tear out some portions of the structure and change how this divine foundation interacts with more normal magic that surrounded it.

It wasn’t enough. Despite their best efforts, the solution remained frustratingly out of reach.

What bothered Zorian most about this was that he didn’t think the problem was impossible. They were making good progress. He felt they were definitely on the right track. He felt that this was something that could definitely be solved in time.

Could they figure out a way to prolong the temporary marker in one more restart? No. Not even three would be enough. But maybe if they had five or six… if their soul magic was more developed… if they had easier access to the imperial crown resting on Quatach-Ichl’s head… if they had learned how to sense divine energies sooner…

If. If, if, if…

"No," Zorian finally admitted. "There is no chance at all."

All three of them walked in silence for a while.

"I am actually not that upset," Taiven eventually said. "The idea that I could just suddenly disappear at the end of the month was terrifying at first, but I’ve gotten used to it by now. I even died in one of the restarts."

Zorian vividly remembered that one. Watching Taiven get decapitated by a war troll was strangely upsetting, even though he knew she would be fine in the next restart.

"I mean, I don’t want to disappear at the end of the month," Taiven continued, "but we’ve done everything we could and it was fun while it lasted. If this is how it has to be, then so be it."

"Indeed," Kael said. "Besides, if I understood Zorian correctly, there are only 13 more restarts left at this point. A little more than a year. We’re not losing all that much."

"Both of you talk like you think you’re dead for sure," Zorian said. "Have some faith, okay? Modifying the temporary markers is probably a failure, but the possibility of exiting the time loop still remains. This was our fallback plan if we couldn’t modify the markers, remember?"

"Oh?" Taiven perked up. "That’s still an option?"

"Of course," said Zorian. "What do you think we have been doing all this time?"

"Well I don’t know," Taiven said with a grin. "That mean old witch keeps complaining about you wasting your time on distractions and taking too many breaks from your duties, so…"

"Silverlake thinks everyone should be a tireless golem except her," Zorian said with a derisive snort. "It’s not like she never takes any breaks or tinkers with new potions that have no connection to anything urgent."

"I thought that whole project was still shrouded in uncertainty, though," Kael pointed out.

"Well yeah," Zorian reluctantly admitted. "We have yet to actually try things, so it’s all very theoretical. However, just because we are uncertain about some things doesn’t mean the attempt is bound to fail. It’s hard to put actual numbers on things, but I think there is at least a 70% chance that we could transport people’s souls into the real world, and 30% or so that we could successfully open a dimensional bridge that would let us physically step out of the time loop."

The two of them gave him complex looks that he could not interpret. It was a little hard to accurately discern their emotions these days, since they had both learned to protect their minds and emotions with unstructured mental defenses. In fact, this was something that all temporary loopers decided to invest time in, once they realized the extent of Zorian’s mental powers. Even the ones that already had some level of unstructured mental defenses promptly decided they were insufficient and needed to be strengthened as much as possible.

Zorian understood their reasoning. It was just like that old saying: trust your neighbor, but lock the door. Even if you trusted someone to be a moral and principled person, it was better not to tempt them with easy opportunities. Thus, he did not take such things against them. In fact, he encouraged it. Considering aranea explicitly considered anyone with an unshielded mind fair game for psychic invasion and that they were working closely with several groups of them, getting some level of mental protection was just plain common sense.

"If the only option to exit the time loop is to steal our original bodies from our past selves, I would rather stay here and forget everything," Kael said, shaking his head. "Additionally, I only care about physically leaving if it allows me to take Kana with me. If not, I’d rather stay with her till the end."

Zorian opened his mouth to say something, but then realized that it probably didn’t matter that Kana doesn’t have the temporary marker. If they physically left the time loop, every person was as good as any other.

Would others also want to bring family members with them? That… could get kind of complicated.

"Err, I might have gone for the soul exit if it was actually an option," Taiven said hesitantly. "I mean, I feel sorry for old Taiven but let’s get real here… she is kind of an idiot."

Zorian’s lips twitched into a beginning of a smile, but he suppressed it.

"As it is, I am not actually capable of taking this way out," Taiven said. "I’m not even good enough to survive Silverlake’s soul perception granting potion, never mind possessing my old body. So physically crossing over is the only option for me, really."

Zorian nodded slowly. Truthfully, this was true for most people. People who had zero experience with soul magic would find it impossible to get good enough at it to survive the soul transferal and successfully possess their body. People who were well versed in soul magic, even before the time loop, would probably be annihilated by the originals if they tried to possess them. Aside from Zorian, only Kael, Xvim and Lukav had a good chance of pulling that off. And Xvim, much like Kael, had already ruled out the idea stealing his own life away from himself.

"Physical exit is what we’re aiming for, anyway," Zorian said. "Transferring souls is more of a last resort than anything."

"Yes, but you admitted yourself that chances of success aren’t too high. Not even a coin toss," Taiven noted. "So yeah, there is still hope… but it’s nothing to get excited about. Hell, you’re probably putting a positive spin on things to cheer us up!"

"No, not at all," Zorian said, shaking his head. "I was actually trying to be conservative with my estimates. I really think this could work."

"There is one thing that’s been bothering me about all this," Kael said. "We’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out a way out of the time loop, but did you think about what we’re going to do if we succeed with this? If we physically step into the outside world with all our skills and knowledge?"

"Stop the invasion from destroying Cyoria?" Taiven tried, raising her eyebrow at him.

"Well, yes. But what about afterwards?" Kael asked. "You have an entire life in front of you, but there is already someone living your life for you. Are you going to avoid your friends and family and set up a new life for yourself elsewhere? Or are you going to do your best to insert yourself into your old life and damn the consequences? What if someone reports you to the authorities and they come to drag you off? How would you explain your presence and identity?"

Taiven squirmed uncomfortably.

"I don’t know," she admitted, biting her lip. "Honestly, I try not to think about things like that. I’m kind of impulsive, so even if I reach a resolution here, I will probably just break it when I actually get there. So there’s no point. I can only hope I’ll be able to figure something out when the time comes. I don’t want to ruin the other Taiven’s life, but… I don’t know. What about you two?"

"I’m fairly disconnected from most people," Kael shrugged. "So long as I have my own Kana, everything is fine. I guess I would deliver my alchemy notes to my original and then wander off to do my own thing. But I’m not sure very many of us are like that. Silverlake and Alanic, maybe. The rest? There are probably at least a few of them that would fight bitterly for a piece of their old life."

"Honestly? I don’t think I could stay away," Zorian admitted. "I’d try to reform my original into something better. Teach him a few things, nudge him into getting closer with Kirielle, things like that. A bit manipulative, but it would come along with personal magic instruction and other help so I think it could work. I wouldn’t try to steal his life away, though. If there was no place for me in my old life, I would find something else to amuse myself with."

"As I said, I’m not sure everyone would be so serene about it," Kael pointed out.

"Yeah, I know," Zorian nodded. "Zach and I purposely didn’t raise the issue to the group, since we felt there was no way to reach any kind of official agreement on this. No matter the conclusion, someone would disagree. Possibly violently. The entire group might even fragment, if someone feels very strongly about the option that was chosen or not chosen. It’s better to keep everyone focused on the immediate problem and worry about these things later."

Despite such efforts, however, they already had a couple of casualties. Two restarts ago, a pair of professors Xvim included into the group decided they couldn’t handle the existential implications of the time loop and asked for their temporary markers to be removed so they could forget everything. Additionally, one of the aranea from the Luminous Advocates became so hysterical and violent that the other aranea asked for her to be stripped of her marker and ejected from the group. Zorian wasn’t sure what had caused that, but since the other Luminous Advocates mysteriously acquired soul perception around that time, he suspected it was a product of some secret procedure they had collectively performed on themselves. In the interest of not starting a fight, though, he decided not to pursue the issue.

With this being the last restart in which the temporary markers would remain effective, the pressure on people would only increase.

Zorian really hoped nobody would crack too badly before the end.

Spells could only persist for so long. Even the most stable spell, supplied with an ample amount of mana, would fall apart in a couple of hours if not anchored to something. Thus, enhancement rituals had a problem. They aimed to place the user under a permanent magic effect or give them an innate magic ability, but that meant they had to anchor the spell to something to prevent it from decaying.

This was a great problem. Anchoring the magic to one’s flesh by inscribing sigils into the skin was ill advised. Forcing large quantities of mana to flow through living flesh, even if it was one’s personal mana, was usually unhealthy in the long term. Additionally, the resulting anchor was easy to break by physically harming the sigils, which was likely to result in dire consequences for the user. Abrupt, uncontrolled spell failures were dangerous enough in normal circumstances – when the spell was embedded into one’s very flesh and bones, the grisly result could be easily imagined.

Fortunately, there was a solution. Far in the distant past, some nameless mage had discovered how to repurpose a portion of their mana reserves into a spell anchor for the enhancement ritual. Since one’s mana reserves were kept naturally stable by the soul, any magic fashioned from them would also be kept stable. The only problem was that since the anchor was literally made out of one’s mana reserves, the caster would permanently have less mana at their disposal. The mana used in the construction of the anchor would never recover, since it was still there in the caster’s reserves, being stabilized by their soul along with the rest of it.

There was one additional issue, however. Even though an enhancement ritual could grant the user a magical ability, it was ultimately just fancy transformation magic. It never expired, it was almost impossible to dispel and the user had very fine control over it, but they would not get the same instinctive affinity with it that the base creature had.

This was where blood magic came into play. It allowed a mage to anchor the spell not only to their mana reserves, but to their life force as well. The resulting connection was deep and potent – potent enough that the user’s descendants had a chance to inherit the ability in question as a bloodline. The innate understanding of the base creature was also transferred over to the new user, allowing them to use it almost as well as someone who had been born with it right from the start.

Enhancement rituals were dangerous. Poorly executed, they could kill the user or permanently ruin them as a mage. More than one mage had completely locked down their mana reserves or transformed them into something that ripped them to shreds from the inside.

Blood magic rituals were dangerous. The user had to cut complicated patterns into their flesh and bleed themselves in order to stir up their vitality and coax their life force into appropriate structures. Unless one knew exactly what they were doing, it was very easy to die of blood loss, or worse.

Zach and Zorian combined the two anyway. They started small, but moved on quickly to more ambitious projects due to time constraints. They made mistakes, but none of them too serious… and any lingering consequences were washed away at the end of every restart. With the help of Kael, they tracked down and talked with surviving morlock blood mages scattered across the continent, seeking advice and tricks of the trade. They practiced with their new abilities and took note of which one worked best for them and why.

Now, with time running out and this restart being so critical, they decided to immediately put those skills into practice. They performed the relevant rituals at the very beginning of the restart. A week and a half later, when their mana reserves and life force mostly stabilized, they gathered Xvim, Silverlake and Daimen for a project that would test their dimensionalism skills to the limit. Something that would prove that they were capable of eventually creating the gateway out of the loop.

They were going to create a miniature copy of the palace orb.

Currently, Zach, Zorian, Silverlake, Xvim and Daimen were all standing on the edge of a massive spell formula circle, equidistant from each other. They had spent the past several hours embedding the spell circle into the ground of this place, followed by setting up several complicated wards that had to be layered just right for the whole thing to work correctly. Now they were resting and adjusting their minds for the final task in front of them.

There was a luxurious house sitting in the center of the circle, surrounded by a large garden and ornamental trees. It stood in a fairly isolated location and Zach and Zorian actually bought the entire place, so they shouldn’t be interrupted by anyone. Silverlake complained about the amount of money that had been wasted on this, when they could have simply stolen a house from someone or picked a random patch of ground, but Zach didn’t want to hear it. He wanted his own pocket mansion, and he wanted it to really be his.

In any case, the idea behind their current project was a little different than that behind other pocket dimension creation projects. Previously, Zach and Zorian had focused on isolating a patch of space with a dimensional membrane and then inflating it to desired volume. Now they would be forcibly isolating a large patch of land from the rest of the world, compressing it and then attaching it to a prepared anchor object. In this case, that was a ball of magically-reinforced glass, for maximum resemblance to the palace orb.

This was similar to the method Silverlake used to hide her home from outside scrutiny, but harder. Silverlake simply compressed an area to make it seemingly disappear, but it remained connected to the rest of the world. That made her pocket dimension immovable, but easier to actually create. What they were doing now, however, would require them to effectively tear out a piece of reality and put it into a portable box for their own use.

The house and its surrounding land were not nearly as big as the space inside the palace orb. Despite that, attempting this required all five of them to join hands and perform a group magic ritual, employing every trick and advantage they could think of… and they still weren’t sure if they could pull it off. Zorian didn’t even want to think what it took to create something like the actual palace orb.

Looking around, Zorian saw that the others were well rested and ready to start. He took a deep breath and stepped forward. Five simulacrums followed after him.

Zorian had long since cracked the method that Princess used to coordinate her eight heads as one entity, and was now capable of using it with his simulacrums. It was a fascinating thing, connecting multiple viewpoints and thought-streams into one unified perspective, but it did have an important limitation: it could only be used when Zorian and his simulacrums were broadly doing the same thing. Such as fighting the same enemy or cooperating on the same task. If he was reading books in Cyoria and his simulacrums were scattered all over the world, each doing their own thing, there would be no connecting points to bind their consciousness together and the hydra method couldn’t be used. But for the task at hand, it was just perfect.

He then activated the magic ability he had acquired through the enhancement ritual. He had acquired it from the humble tunneler toad, whose ability to perceive and navigate warped space had seemed most useful for his purposes. It wasn’t the best ability he could have gotten, but it was relatively cheap and worked well enough for Zorian’s purposes. Anchoring it to his mana reserves robbed him of roughly 8% of his maximum mana, which pained him, but did not affect him too badly.

Finally, he activated the mental enhancements he had crafted over the past year or so, helped by numerous aranea experts and even some human researchers. Many of his simulacrums paid with their short lives to test these enhancements, and the end result was appropriately impressive for something made after so much sacrifice. His thoughts immediately became clearer and more focused, his integration with his simulacrums deepened and his ability to calculate and measure things at a glance became superhuman.

Around him, he saw the others prepare themselves as well.

Zach was leaning back and forth on his feet, humming some sort of tune to himself. He looked relaxed and careless, but there was a distant look in his eyes, as if he wasn’t really all there. His choice for the creature to use an enhancement ritual on was the voidsoul deer. Zach seemed to really like its ability to alter trajectories of things in the space around it, since that meant the ability was useful in combat, as well as for things like this. It was a fairly expensive ability in terms of mana reserves, but Zach was easily able to afford it. Zorian could feel the space around Zach ripple and warp as he flexed his new ability in preparation of the task at hand.

Daimen’s presence was a bit of a surprise. Before the time loop, Daimen hadn’t even known how to cast the gate spell, never mind how to use pocket dimension magic. However, his reputation wasn’t for nothing. With a year of time and access to all the restricted material and knowledgeable tutors he could wish for, Daimen had experienced a meteoric rise in his dimensionalism skills. It reignited Zorian’s jealousy a bit to see him blaze through things so easily, given that Zorian had to try so hard to get where Daimen currently was, but objectively speaking, it was a good thing to have another capable dimensionalist on their hand. It increased their chances of success immensely.

Daimen had also chosen to dabble in enhancement rituals along with Zach and Zorian – the only one of the temporary loopers that dared to do so. He picked a phase spider that Zach and Zorian were lucky to track down in one of the restarts. Their signature ability, which was literally a power to create small pocket dimensions, was bound to be very useful today.

Silverlake had stabbed six gold-plated stakes into the ground around her and was mumbling something to herself and making some sort of strange finger gestures. They didn’t look like spellcasting gestures. It kind of reminded Zorian of Kirielle trying to perform math with the help of her fingers, except that he knew damn well that Silverlake was frighteningly good at performing calculations in her head. Her growth in skill over the past five restarts was difficult to judge, as she often did things on her own, and gave bullshit explanations when people tried to question her about it. Still, her skill at dimensionalism and soul magic made her one of the key people in the group, and little could be done about it.

Xvim simply stood on the edge of the spell formula circle, staring forward with arms crossed behind his back. He gave off a silent and stoic air, as if the problem in front of them was no big deal at all. Zorian didn’t think his magic had improved all that much in the past five restarts, but then again he had already been a highly-capable archmage before the time loop had started. At his level, every improvement took a lot of time and effort as one started hitting their personal limits and their magic plateaued.

With a silent signal, the five of them began casting.

Glowing filaments of light sprang from Zorian’s hands, and from the hands of his simulacrums, crisscrossing into a dome of light over the entire area, before seemingly sinking into thin air and disappearing. Silverlake fired pitch black beams from her fingers at seemingly random spots in the air, causing flashes of red light to burst out on the invisible boundary, while Zach and Xvim created pale white rings that spun lazily around the outer perimeter. Space warped and twisted, distorting the house and its surroundings like hot summer air and causing strange currents and whirlpools to be created in the sky.

A spatial membrane eventually sprang up around the house, transparent and spherical. Its surface rippled and undulated like it was made from water. Strands of inky blackness occasionally radiated from points on its surface, as if reality itself was cracking apart and letting everyone see the terrible void that existed beneath everything. These were hurriedly sealed by the five participants, disappearing into flashes of rainbow light before springing back anew somewhere else. A miniature cyclone whipped about in the air, kicking up dust and pelting the participants with leaves and small stones.

The process took hours and hours. Five times they had to rest to recover their strength, but thankfully the ritual was designed specifically with that in mind. They knew they would not have enough mana to finish the project in one go, so small breathers were planned in advance.

Eventually the process reached a critical point. The spatial membrane turned completely opaque and pitch black, its surface churning wildly like a pot of boiling water. Cracks spread out from the ground as the entire area was ripped out of the surrounding landscape, small tremors threatening to knock down the participants – something that would surely disrupt the casting at a critical moment and ruin everything. In the end everyone kept their balance, but the momentary distraction caused lances of spatial cracks to scythe through the area, reducing trees into chunks and utterly destroying one of Zorian’s simulacrums. He managed to compensate for the loss, however, and the casting continued.

The spherical black membrane started to repeatedly expand and then collapse inward, looking almost like a giant black heart. This process continued for several minutes, but if one observed the whole process carefully they would notice that the sphere was gradually getting smaller and smaller. It was being repeatedly compressed into an ever decreasing volume.

When the sphere had reached half of its original size, a fundamental change occurred and the whole area of space seemed to collapse inward, as if it was about to be sucked into a tiny point in the center. Zach reacted immediately, throwing a large glass ball into the center of the collapsing mass while the rest scattered sixteen stone stabilizers into the surrounding space. Each of the stones was a cube densely covered in spell formula, and they immediately floated into a dense spherical formation around the black mass.

In only a few seconds, the black mass was completely sucked into the glass ball and everything was silent and still. The strange lights and spatial distortions disappeared. The area inside the spell formula circle had completely disappeared, leaving behind a circular crater where the house and garden once stood. In the center of that crater floated an innocuous-looking glass globe, with sixteen stone cubes lazily orbiting around it.

Then, with a deafening boom, all of the stone cubes shattered and fell to the ground. The glass globe was still fine, however – the stabilizers had sacrificed themselves to give that final push for the whole process and firmly attach the newly-made pocket mansion to its portable anchor.

If one looked closely, they would be able to see a miniature, lifelike house suspended in the center of the globe. It even appeared intact, which was great. There was a nontrivial chance for everything inside the globe to end up getting wrecked by the stresses of the creation process, if they were not channeled properly.

Complete success.

Everyone gathered around the globe to gawk at it and admire their handiwork. Zach, Zorian, Silverlake and Daimen were in visibly high spirits following the success of such a difficult project. Only Xvim managed to retain his reserved attitude, though Zorian felt he still looked faintly pleased with himself.

"You know, I just realized I have no idea how you intend to power this thing," Daimen said. "Surely this thing requires a great deal of mana to keep stable."

"We placed a permanent miniature gate inside the house," Zach said. "It connects to a cavern deep in the Dungeon, sucking up mana to keep both the gate and the pocket dimension operating. It’s too tiny for the dungeon denizens to pass through, but mana can be collected just fine."

"Oh? You cracked Quatach-Ichl’s permanent gates?" Daimen asked, surprised.

Silverlake puffed herself up, looking pretty smug. Her contributions were pretty crucial in cracking the method Quatach-Ichl used to make his gate stabilization frame. Hers and, oddly enough, that of the Filigree Sages. Their method of creating spell formula anchors had some surprising similarities to the methods Quatach-Ichl used in his construction of the stabilization frames.

"Yes, we finally managed to replicate the lich’s methods," confirmed Zorian. "It has limited usefulness to us as a method of transport, though, since it takes a while to make those. It’s more convenient to just use my simulacrums as mobile gate creators."

"We have made a great deal of progress," Xvim spoke up. "This globe is a perfect representation of that. However, I wonder if that is really enough to let us make a gateway leading out of the time loop."

Everyone shared a look for a moment as they considered the issue.

"We have a chance," Zorian said.

"The chance is too low for my liking," Silverlake grumbled, before Zorian could say anything else. Her good mood seemed to deflate a little. "If we had another six months…"

"But we don’t. We won’t be able to crack the temporary markers in less than a month," Zach told her. "Why even waste time thinking about that?"

"Well it’s easy for you and Zorian to be so relaxed about that," Silverlake sneered at him. "You’ll still be there, even if this all fails, won’t you?"

"You are oversimplifying things and you know it," Zorian said, frowning. "The protections on the temporary markers are such that we won’t be able to place temporary markers on you for the next six restarts. We have no hope at all of pulling this off without you. Thus, we would be forced to wait until the very last moment to make our next attempt… and if that fails, we are lost. Do you honestly think Zach and I are comfortable with that? We are just as invested in the success of this project as you are."

"Hmph," Silverlake scoffed. " Almost as invested, I suppose. But not quite as much."

"What do you think they should have done, then?" Xvim asked, giving her a knowing look.

"They should have experimented more freely with temporary markers and people’s souls. There are plenty of people in the world that nobody cares about, and it’s not like the damage would have been permanent," Silverlake said, looking Xvim straight in the eye. Her voice was loud and clear, but perfectly calm. "They should have given Quatach-Ichl a temporary marker and recruited him into the group."

Ugh.

"Both ideas were already discussed and soundly rejected, and not just by Zach and Zorian," Xvim pointed out.

"We were already taking a huge risk by dealing with the lich as much as we did," Zorian said. "Even a minor mistake could easily burn all of our remaining restarts away."

"The old bag of bones would be more likely to ruin us than help us," Zach added. "Without us, his plan probably succeeds and Cyoria is leveled to the ground. Why would he want to risk that by helping us escape?"

"Bah!" Silverlake spat. As in, she literally spat on the ground to express her frustration. "I can see when I’m outvoted. Besides, it’s too late to change things now… though I still say our chances are too low? Surely there is something more that could be done?"

"Well, you did say we just need more time," Daimen pointed out. "If the project to turn the palace orb into a Black Room succeeds as well as expected, we should get another couple of months in a time dilation room."

"We already turned the palace room into a time dilation chamber two times by now," Silverlake pointed out. "It was impressive, but the effectiveness was little better than that of a regular Black Room. It just had larger volume. Why expect this attempt to be any different?"

"Well, if Krantin and his staff are to be believed–" began Daimen.

"I’ll believe it when I see it," Silverlake cut him off. "In the meantime, I have another idea…"

Although Silverlake could be very abrasive and unpleasant, her skill at dimensionalism was undeniable and many of her ideas were quite insightful. Some of them were even perfectly ethical and legal, shockingly enough.

Thus, the group eventually returned to Cyoria, peacefully discussing various plans along the way…

The search for the imperial staff was long and frustrating. For a long time, they didn’t have even the slightest clue how to even narrow down their search. Zorian was almost willing to write off the entire endeavor as a lost cause and focus entirely on the exit portal project. However, Daimen felt it was beneath his pride to let the expedition end in failure, and eventually found a clue.

One of their earliest leads for the staff was a dragon mage called Violet-Eyed Disaster, or just Violeteye for short. However, she was almost as hard to track down as the staff itself, and there were plenty of other candidates around, so they didn’t focus on her in particular. In time, however, a curious fact became obvious – Violeteye seemed capable of instantaneously teleporting herself across vast distances. There was simply no other way to explain how she could get around so quickly and evade pursuers. Dragons were fast flyers, but her speed was unearthly. This idea was reinforced when Daimen and his group caught sight of her and pursued, only for her to disappear when they briefly lost sight of her.

This was significant, since dragon mages had huge issues trying to use teleportation. Dimensional magic was nearly unknown among dragons, and the sort of teleportation Violeteye was performing would be shocking even in a human mage.

She was most likely using some kind of divine artifact to pull it off. And by following after her and repeatedly provoking her, Zach and Zorian eventually confirmed it was a simple, unadorned staff.

Deep in the jungles of Blantyrre, atop a small mountain, a fierce battle was raging between Zach and Zorian on one side and Violeteye the dragon mage on the other. Shattered remains of Zorian’s combat golems littered the mountainside, and several large craters lay scattered around the place. Smoke and dust covered the skies.

Roaring in outrage, Violeteye swooped down on Zach’s position, opening her jaws and breathing fire at him. The jet of flame was unnaturally hot and concentrated, even for dragon breath – a white-hot incineration beam that set nearby bushes on fire just by passing near them. Without flinching, Zach placed an opaque black shield made out of spatial forces in front of him. The incineration breath sank into the shield and harmlessly disappeared, as if it had never existed in the first place.

Moments later, he was hit by a gust of magically-enhanced wind. It looked rather ethereal, a gentle rainbow goal suffusing it, but the moment it reached Zach it caused the black shield to collapse into nothingness and almost sent him tumbling down the mountain side.

A trio of stone cylinders flew in the air towards the dragon, shining with dangerous blue light. She managed to knock them away from her before they exploded, but it disrupted her charge and allowed Zach to regain his balance.

She sent a quick glare at Zorian, who was standing in the distance with a gun-like cylinder-launcher in his hands, before judging Zach a greater threat and smashing her tail towards him like a flail.

Zach didn’t try to dodge or put some distance between them. He merely cast another spell, causing huge hands of stone to erupt from the ground beneath her, reaching towards her.

Her eyes narrowed imperceptibly, but she continued her attack, trusting her strength and vast reserves of magic. She was justified in her confidence when trading blow for blow with a human, since they could never match a dragon in terms of toughness.

However, her attack… missed.

Her eyes widened in surprise, not understanding what had happened. This wasn’t the sort of rookie mistake she could ever make.

If one had looked really closely, though, one could have seen space itself subtly shift around Zach just before the tail slap had descended upon him…

The stone hands closed around the dragon, pulling her downward. She manifested huge ectoplasmic claws to crush them into powder, but the moment of weakness was enough for Zorian’s simulacrums, who immediately teleported into the vicinity. Just as she was about to turn her ectoplasmic claws towards the simulacrums, her mind swam in sudden vertigo and her vision grew blurry. When she finally regained her clarity of mind, she found a glittering crystalline spear flying at her, courtesy of Zach. Arcs of red light sparked dangerously on its surface, promising pain and disintegration to anything hit by the spear.

Invading the mind of a dragon was not an easy thing to do… but it was within Zorian’s capabilities, if only for a moment.

Roaring, Violeteye conjured an omnidirectional sound wave that hurled all of the simulacrums away from her like a bunch of rag dolls and destroyed all nearby obstacles. The spear continued to fly, but it was knocked off course and only glanced off her flank, tearing out a chunk of her flesh but largely leaving her intact.

She launched herself in the air and tried to flee. She didn’t teleport away like she had the first few times Zach and Zorian had tried to corner her, presumably because the staff she was using had run out of charges by now. However, she was still a dragon, and few things could catch her in flight if she fled at maximum speed.

Zach and Zorian were nearly out of mana by this point, and Zorian was starting to run out of bombs and other items, too. Even Zach, with his immense mana reserves, could not compare to the stamina of the dragon. They could chase her down, but if she kept stalling and disengaging, she would eventually wear them down and maybe even turn the tables on them. She probably knew that and was deliberately using that as a tactic. Considering that she was armed with a convenient retreat in the form of the teleportation staff, this was probably how she usually fought. Wearing down the enemy by repeatedly retreating and coming back was likely second nature to her by now.

Unfortunately for her, Zach and Zorian weren’t alone. Before she could get very far, she found Alanic, Xvim and Daimen waiting for her in the distance. A roar of frustration echoed across the entire mountain while Zach and Zorian sat down to recover their mana reserves and catch their breath.

"Ha ha, I bet she didn’t expect that," Zach said, grinning. His face was smeared with dust and there was a thin line of blood running down his left arm where a piece of shrapnel managed to get through his defenses, but he appeared to not notice it. "Now she, too, can experience what is like to be worn down by repeated attacks while her opponents take a rest every once in a while."

"Didn’t you kill Oganj, who is a famous dragon mage, all by yourself in one of the early restarts?" Zorian asked curiously. "I know he couldn’t teleport around and was less annoying to fight, but he shouldn’t be any weaker. How on earth did you manage to tackle him on your own?"

"Trial and error," Zach chuckled awkwardly. "Lots of trial and error. I honestly do not recommend it."

They fell silent after that, simply watching the battle unfold in front of them.

"We’ve done it," Zach breathed.

Laid on the ground in front of him were five objects: a glass orb, a plain metal ring, a gleaming dagger, an ornate crown and a simple staff.

All five pieces of the Key, gathered in one place.

The staff Violeteye had been using was indeed the imperial staff they were looking for. They had already brought it to the Guardian of the Threshold for inspection and found out about its powers. It had the ability to place up to six undetectable recall points and allowed the user to teleport back to their recall points… regardless of the distances involved. Each recall point could only be used once every 24 hours, but this was still a very potent ability.

That was for normal users. For the time loop controller, the staff was even more useful, since the recall points remained in place across restarts. That meant that if one began a restart with the staff in their hands, they could potentially travel anywhere on the planet in the blink of an eye.

Zach and Zorian didn’t begin their restarts with the staff in their hands, though, so the item’s usefulness was nearly nonexistent. They had to travel so long and search so far for an item that gave godlike movement capabilities to people… there was some dark humor in the situation, but Zorian didn’t feel like he could appreciate it at the moment.

In any case, at this point the whole thing didn’t matter. The staff was important because it was part of the Key needed to unbar the exit of the time loop, not because of its innate properties. Of course, by the time they acquired it, they already had the orb and the ring, so they were only missing two more items to complete the set. The dagger and the crown.

The dagger was… well, not exactly easy to acquire, but it was entirely doable at this point. They had familiarized themselves enough with the wards on the royal treasury that they could break into it and steal the dagger on their own, without any help from Quatach-Ichl. So they did just that. It caused a terrible uproar, and everyone was still searching for the thieves, but Zach and Zorian were fairly sure they had covered their tracks well enough.

Getting the crown, on the other hand, had been something they had agonized quite a bit over. They succeeded in the end, but now they had Quatach-Ichl after their heads and the restart was not even halfway over. The ancient lich had plenty of time to track them down and make them pay for what they did, which is something they never let him have in the previous restarts.

Still, with only one piece of the Key missing, how could they possibly resist the temptation to complete it? There was no way they could have waited until the end of the restart to do this. For all they knew, using the Key may give them options that hadn’t existed until now.

Numerous people crowded the space around Zach and Zorian, peering at the items on the ground. Pretty much everyone had arrived to take a look at them, even though they were nothing special in terms of appearance. Scattered whispering and quiet speculation filled the air and people speculated what would happen when they were brought before the Guardian of the Threshold.

After some quick discussion, Zach and Zorian decided to bring the Key to the Guardian of the Threshold right away to see what would happen… and they would be taking everyone with them to witness it as well.

Previously, they had already tried to bring a temporary looper into the space of the Sovereign gate and failed. The Guardian of the Threshold later confirmed that temporary loopers are unable to access the space. However, this security measure was childishly easy to bypass through a short duration soul bond that allowed the Controller to simply pull outsiders with them as they entered the Sovereign Gate. Once inside, the Guardian of the Threshold largely ignored their presence, recognizing them as temporary loopers, but completely unconcerned about the fact that Zach and Zorian were breaking the rules. Zach and Zorian had used this method to bring various people into the Sovereign Gate at multiple occasions, so they did not foresee any problems.

Thus, the whole group made way into the secret time magic research facility beneath Cyoria and, after some small preparations, entered the Sovereign Gate.

The Guardian of the Threshold soon popped into existence in front of them, just like he always did. He was still the same human-like glowing entity, his face emotionless like a sculpted statue.

"Welcome, Controller," the Guardian greeted.

"Yeah, yeah," said Zach. "I’m glad to see you too, you lovable idiot. Did you notice we’ve brought the Key to you?"

The Guardian was silent for a moment.

"One moment, please," it eventually said, before becoming silent again.

In the dark void of the Sovereign Gate space, there was only a silent glowing humanoid and a small throng of people anxiously waiting for his reaction. The Guardian of the Threshold did not appear to mind the large number of visitors, continuing his mysterious pondering with not a care in the world.

The temporary loopers around Zach and Zorian simply squirmed nervously, not saying much. They had learned by now that the Guardian of the Threshold utterly ignored temporary loopers, refusing to answer their questions or even acknowledge their existence. Watching Daimen and Silverlake getting progressively more angry as the entity ignored their comments had been rather amusing for Zorian the first time he witnessed it, but thankfully this time nobody lost their temper.

In any case, the Guardian eventually finished whatever it was doing and started speaking again.

"Everything is as it should be," it said. "They Key is valid. Do you want to claim your privileges now?"

"Privileges? Why, I love privileges," Zach said, grinning. "Yes. Give me all of those."

"Done," the entity immediately said.

"Can I unbar the gate now?" Zach asked.

"Yes," the Guardian of the Threshold confirmed. "Do you want–"

"Yes, damn it, yes!" Zach said, voice full of exasperation. "Do it now."

"As you wish," it said. It paused for a few moment, silently performing some kind of task again. "It is done. The gate is now unbar-ar-ar-ar-ar-ar-"

Zorian watched in growing horror as the Guardian of the Threshold suddenly started twitching and stuttering as if it was having some kind of seizure. His head rolled around at impossible angles, rotating a full 360 degrees, his entire torso squirming and bulging as if something was trying to burst out of it.

He had a very bad feeling about this.

"What the hell is happening?" someone asked behind him.

"I don’t know," Zach said, frowning. "This has never happened befo–"

Everything suddenly became quiet. At first Zorian thought Zach had just stopped speaking because he noticed or realized something important, but when he glanced towards him he found Zach gone.

Everyone but Zorian was gone. It was just him, a madly twitching Guardian of the Threshold and a quiet, featureless black void all around them.

He immediately tried to return to his body, but failed.

Shit… Well, at least the Guardian of the Threshold was starting to calm down. He was twitching less, and no longer twisted his head and limbs at impossible angles. Maybe–

A multitude of eyes suddenly snapped open all over Guardian of the Threshold’s body, blinking rapidly for a few moments before focusing straight at Zorian. Each one was different. Different sizes, different color, different internal structure. Some of them had multiple irises. Some of them glowed. Some of them were multifaceted, like those of an insect. Some of them made his mind feel numb just looking at them.

" Zorian Kazinski," the Guardian of the Threshold said. Was it still the Guardian of the Threshold? Freaky eyes aside, even his voice was different. It was booming and resonant, with not a trace of humanity in it. "I have a proposition for you."

"Who are you?" Zorian immediately challenged.

" You call me Panaxeth," it immediately answered.

Zorian’s mind froze for a moment. What… how…

"The primordial?" he asked numbly, his voice filled with disbelief.

" Yes," it answered.

Suddenly, some of its eyes closed and disappeared. The ones that made Zorian hurt to look at, as well as some of the freakier normal ones.

"You can talk?" Zorian asked. It was a dumb question, but he was still in shock and couldn’t help himself.

Panaxeth seemed to think so too, because he ignored the question.

" I can get you out of here," Panaxeth said. Its form changed again, additional eyes closing and his form becoming more humanlike in both color and texture. "All you have to do is make a contract with me."

A contract?

"No thanks," he said immediately, shaking his head in denial.

"You will never get out of here alive without me," it told him. Its voice acquired a human-like quality by this point, and most of the eyes were gone. "The other person didn’t either."

"Red Robe?" Zorian asked.

"I never asked his name," Panaxeth said. He looked entirely like a man by now, though his features seem to shift all the time – male and female, old and young, all kinds of skin tones and facial features… "Does it matter? We’re talking about you, now. Swear on your life you will help free me and I will incarnate you outside of this crumbling world."

"Why would I do that, though?" Zorian asked.

"You get to live?" Panaxeth asked, sounding a little mystified by his response.

His constant shifting of his appearance slowed down greatly at this point. He seemed to have settled on a female form now, tall and good-looking, with long black hair and a body to die f–

Zorian scowled. The damn thing was slowly changing its appearance to appeal to him as much as possible, didn’t it? It constantly cycled through different appearances, all the while paying attention to his body movements and facial expressions to see what evoked a good response in him.

It was showing him what it thought he wanted to see.

Suddenly, the entity shifted into a perfect copy of Kirielle.

"I just want to live and be free!" she said, her lip quivering and her voice on the verge of tears.

"You are not Kirielle!" Zorian shouted at it, his temper rising.

Panaxeth immediately changed forms again, copying Taiven. Then Zach. Then Xvim, Daimen, Ilsa, Imaya…

Some of these people… how did it even know how they looked and sounded? Was it reading his mind?

He immediately strengthened his mental defenses, even though he could detect no intrusion.

"Why are you talking to me now?" Zorian asked. "I was here plenty of times before."

"The gate was barred until now, so there was no point in speaking to you," Panaxeth answered. "I can only get people out when the way is open."

"But you could have contacted me like this all this time?" Zorian asked.

"Yes," Panaxeth confirmed. "The Sovereign Gate has been damaged over the years, some of the safeguards failing. That is why they stopped using it for a long time. However, there is no point in speaking to most people unless they are strong enough to help me and unless the way is open. I did not think you could gather the entire Key before the world crumbled, but I’m glad to be proved wrong. We can help each other, Zorian. We can even discuss additional rewards once I am out of my cage."

"But what if I fail?" Zorian asked.

"You die, of course," Panaxeth said, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. "That’s what the contract is for."

"So you get me out of here and in return I must help free you or die?" Zorian asked.

"Exactly," Panaxeth confirmed.

"I’m going to have to say no," Zorian sighed.

Panaxeth stared at him for a second. It seemed to realize it would never be able to convince Zorian to take this sort of deal, no matter what it used to entice him.

"You will regret that," it said. "This was a one-time offer. I will not bother contacting you again."

Zorian was of two minds about this. On one hand that was a bit disappointing, since he would like to have more talks with a primordial to see if he could get something substantial out of it. On the other hand, it was a freaking primordial and it seemed to be reading his mind in some way he couldn’t detect!

It was probably for the best that it never wanted to see him again.

"You gave up pretty quickly," Zorian commented. "How are you so sure there is no chance to convince me in the future?"

"It doesn’t matter anymore," Panaxeth said. "Someone else has already taken my offer."

Zorian’s eyes widened at the comment. Before he could ask Panaxeth what it meant by that, the generic female form in front of him disappeared and he was surrounded by noise again. He was once again standing next to Zach, with temporary loopers standing around him. All of them were screaming, shouting and talking at once. It was abundantly obvious that Zorian wasn’t the only one who had found himself alone, facing a terrifying primordial entity.

And after the situation had calmed down somewhat and he had done a quick headcount, a terrifying realization suddenly dawned to Zorian.

Silverlake was gone.

90. Change of Plans

It wasn’t long before the group decided to leave the Sovereign Gate space and return to their bodies outside. Partially this was because the Guardian of the Threshold was gone, leaving them on their own in the silent void. When Panaxeth ended his interaction with Zorian and others, he took the Guardian he had been possessing along with him. Or maybe he was the Guardian in the end, who could know? Regardless, with the Guardian no longer present, there was little point in them staying there either.

The second, more important reason, was that Silverlake was gone and they desperately wanted to check if she was outside, waiting for them. Although Panaxeth’s statement that someone had already taken his offer and her subsequent disappearance strongly suggested she had betrayed them, Zorian held on to the hope that she had merely left the Sovereign Gate on her own. Somehow.

It was a hope that would not last long. Whatever force Panaxeth had used to stop Zach and Zorian from returning to their body had dissipated with his disappearance, so getting out of the Sovereign Gate was done without incident. Once outside, they found Silverlake’s lifeless body lying on the floor.

She was dead. There was no evidence of struggle. No wounds, obvious or subtle. No indication of any sort of foul play from the facility staff or hidden enemies. It was as if her soul simply disappeared from her body all of a sudden, painlessly killing her.

It was the same kind of dead that they had already seen in the aranea beneath Cyoria and the other soulkilled individuals they’d come across over the restarts.

A grim atmosphere descended upon the group. Zach was so enraged he incinerated Silverlake’s body into ashes before anyone could stop him. Zorian wanted to scold him for destroying critical clues as to what happened, but Alanic placed his hand on his shoulder and shook his head, silently telling him to let it go. Maybe it was better that way. This wasn’t the time for starting arguments and they probably got all they would have gotten out of her corpse anyway.

They didn’t stay in the time magic research facility for long. They needed to talk to everyone about what they had seen and heard, about what Panaxeth had talked with them in private, but that was best done in the privacy of their base at the Noveda Estate. However, an issue suddenly rose up when they tried to leave the facility. Apparently, while the facility staff accepted their mysterious orders without complaint, they still paid close attention to everyone coming and leaving from the facility. They knew exactly how many people their group had, and they knew that Silverlake had suddenly gone missing.

That was a surprisingly thorny situation to get out of. Zach was still visibly fuming and looked like he was going to start throwing around fireballs at all these people questioning him where their companion had suddenly disappeared to, but Krantin refused to let the matter drop. Unfortunately, explaining that Silverlake was dead and that Zach had already incinerated her soulless body was not an option. In the end, Zorian had to memory edit roughly half of the facility personnel to make them forget Silverlake had ever entered the place that day and then make alterations to the physical records which also kept track of that kind of thing.

Strange as that sounded, altering physical records turned out to be a lot harder than editing memories. Those records had some very inventive protections against such tampering, whereas the minds of facility staff were largely unprotected against mental tampering.

Still, although the immediate issue was dealt with, Zorian could already see that their headaches in regards to the facility and Silverlake’s presence there were only starting. Silverlake had been one of the crucial people in regards to their project of turning the imperial orb into a better Black Room. The void left by her disappearance was going to be keenly felt in the near future.

He still had trouble believing this was actually happening, to be honest. He had fully expected their circumstances to change once they brought the key to the Guardian of the Threshold, but not like this. How could Panaxeth even contact them through the Guardian? Even if the Sovereign Gate was made from a primordial, that primordial was clearly not Panaxeth. He of the Flowing Flesh was imprisoned inside the Hole, the massive circular abyss around which Cyoria was built. He had been stuck there since the time the primordials had been sealed away, presumably. The Sovereign Gate, on the other hand, had been primarily used in northern Miasina before its current use. It didn’t make sense… how could Panaxeth infiltrate the time loop mechanism to appear before them? How could he take people out of the time loop? And what had he offered Silverlake to make her swear some kind of death pact with a godlike primordial entity that considered them useful tools at best?

He didn’t know. He hoped other people had managed to get something useful out of the primordial, unlike him.

Having finally left the facility, the group gathered in the Noveda Estate. They left people some free time to collect their thoughts and calm down, and then started discussing what happened.

The first issue, of course, was Panaxeth. Or something that claimed to be Panaxeth, anyway. They had no proof that the unknown entity was telling the truth, but then again it had no reason to lie about that ether. Identifying as Panaxeth would not set anyone at ease. In any case, talking to the rest of the group confirmed what everyone had suspected by now – Panaxeth had somehow dragged each of them into their own individual space for a private conversation.

Everyone except Zach, that is. Zach alone did not merit a meeting with the primordial, it seemed. While everyone else disappeared into their own private space, Zach was simply left alone in the darkness of the Sovereign Gate’s area. Even the Guardian of the Threshold was gone, leaving him simply floating in the silent void with no way out until Panaxeth was done with the others.

As for the others, they’d all found themselves in front of the warped, twisted Guardian of Threshold, though most did not see the same eye-covered humanoid that Zorian had. In Kyron’s case, for instance, the Guardian grew another two pairs of arms while his torso split open into a giant vertical mouth lined with predatory teeth. Nora saw the Guardian’s limbs lengthen while bone spikes erupted from its head, causing it look like it had a bony sea urchin growing out of its neck. This initial monstrous form was then gradually changed into a more inoffensive, human form through a process of constant shapeshifting reminiscent of the one Zorian experienced.

After that, though, the experiences of different people wildly diverged. Not all received the offer of making a contract with the primordial. Taiven and Nora were almost completely toyed with, for instance. Panaxeth simply shifted between different forms while occasionally spouting total non-sequiturs like I like dogs or your mother would be ashamed of you, seemingly studying their reactions. Daimen claimed that Panaxeth had never offered him anything, instead simply trying to question him about what he knew about Zorian – his likes, motives and preferences. Something that visibly infuriated his older brother, though Zorian was unsure how much of that was because Panaxeth was basically trying to get him to betray his family and how much it was the fact that Panaxeth clearly didn’t see him as important outside of being Zorian’s brother. If the situation weren’t so dire, Zorian might have been amused about that.

It also quickly became clear that, even though everyone was reunited at roughly the same time, they did not spend the same amount of time talking to Panaxeth. Some, like Zorian, only interacted with the primordial for a short while before being dismissed. Others, especially ones that pretended to actually consider its offer, spoke with the entity for quite a while before Panaxeth tired of them. The primordial employed some kind of time dilation during its interaction with people, lengthening the meeting with ones that seemed like they could be convinced, while spending only a token effort on others.

This probably explained how it managed to convince Silverlake so relatively quickly. If she showed the greatest amount of interest in its offer out of them all, the primordial would have likely extended her meeting as much as it could. Plus, considering how powerful and experienced Silverlake was, she was probably considered one of the most prioritized targets to begin with.

"Were you not worried that the primordial was reading your mind?" Zorian asked them, frowning. "I mean, it seemed capable of lifting people’s appearances straight out of my head when I talked to it. It was one of the big reasons I was so eager to get out of the meeting as much as possible."

"He did no such thing while talking to me," Xvim said, shaking his head. "Then again, Panaxeth did not try to copy any people while talking to me. He just shifted from one generic form to another throughout the entire talk."

Zorian found it a little interesting how some people, like him, referred to Panaxeth as it, while Xvim and others referred to the primordial as he. The cultists did call Panaxeth He of the Flowing Flesh, so one could indeed argue that the entity was male in some sense, but it was debatable how much normal gender applied to a monstrous shapechanger like that. The entity assumed a female form when speaking to him, male form in front of others, and an aranea form when speaking to the aranea… it clearly thought little of such things.

"I actually did ask the thing about that when it tried to shapeshift into Kana," Kael said, pausing slightly. "Well, more like I blew up at it and demanded an explanation. Sparingly, it actually gave me one. It said no mind reading was taking place… it was just watching everything we did inside the time loop and taking note of people close to us. That’s probably why it tried to convince me while looking like Kana instead of Namira, even though the latter would probably be more effective. Since my wife had died long before the start of the time loop, Panaxeth had no idea what she looked like, and thus couldn’t copy her appearance."

"Yes, that is what he said to me as well," Ilsa said. "He tried to tempt me with the secrets of true creation, and I asked how he knew about that. He said the same thing he had to Kael, but he also expanded on it a little bit. Panaxeth claims the Sovereign Gate is not made from a primordial like we thought – it is more like an attachment, or maybe a shell, which must be bonded to a specific primordial in order to work. This can potentially be any primordial, but currently it’s Panaxeth."

"That’s why he could appear in front of us like that," Zach said gloomily.

"Yes," Ilsa said, nodding. "The Sovereign Gate somehow twists the primordial in question into the time loop as we know it. In a very real sense, Panaxeth is the time loop… which means he is aware of everything that occurs inside of him."

"So Panaxeth is watching us even now?" Taiven said, sounding disturbed.

"Probably," Ilsa shrugged. She seemed to take the idea in stride. Or maybe she’d just had more time than the rest of them to come to terms with it.

Zorian was personally very disturbed by this discovery. How were they supposed to subvert the time loop mechanism in order to leave this place, if the time loop was basically a sapient being that was always watching them? It was quite likely that Panaxeth could actively sabotage any escape attempt it did not like. Perhaps it was limited by the safeguards built into the Sovereign Gate, but those safeguards probably wouldn’t protect people like him, who were trying to break the system.

No wonder Panaxeth claimed he was never leaving this place without its help. Back then, Zorian thought that meant without its help, but perhaps what Panaxeth really meant was 'without its approval'…

"If he is that all-knowing, I wonder why he had not been more effective at tempting us," Xvim mused. "One would think he would have a far better grasp on our character if it could perceive everything we did so far."

"Awareness is not necessarily total awareness," Orissa offered. "I am technically aware of everything my bees do, but if you were to ask me about one particular bee, there is only so much I could tell you."

"The various elementals we consulted did say that primordials view us all like animals, maybe even mere bugs," Zach said. "How much do you really understand the sparrows living in the city or ants digging up your garden? We may be greater than them, but they are still alien to us. Hell, Zorian can read their minds and memories, and he still has trouble leading them from place to place without using any magical coercion."

"You’re talking about that one time he tried to literally herd cats, right?" Kael said, smiling slightly. "I remember that one."

"It wasn’t a serious attempt," Zorian complained. "It was just an amusing idea I had when I was bored."

"This isn’t the time for this," Alanic said, a little annoyed. "Zach brings up a good point with primordials seeing us all as animals. You don’t discuss things with animals, you manipulate them into doing what you want. We should be wary of trusting that creature too much. Although there is probably some glimmer of truth in what it’s saying, I suspect it is willing to say anything, true or false, if it thinks doing so will increase its chances of escaping its prison."

"I don’t know. He seemed pretty honest and forthright to me," Ilsa said, looking at Alanic. "Clearly you also thought there was some value in listening to it, since you were one of the people that managed to engage it in a lengthy conversation. What did you speak about, then?"

Ultimately, only a few people managed to keep their cool and get something substantial out of Panaxeth. Alanic, Xvim, Orissa, Ilsa, Kyron and an aranea named Night Dream were the only ones that managed to interest Panaxeth enough for him to engage them in a lengthy back-and-forth. It made Zorian a little self-conscious to realize he had essentially bungled that meeting. He might have gotten some important answers out of the primordial if he had been a little better at acting.

Then again, were these people really so good at acting or were they actually somewhat tempted by Panaxeth’s offer, and the primordial could sense that in their exchange? He could tell that Ilsa, at the very least, was lying when she claimed she had only been pretending to be interested in the primordial’s offer. The others were harder to read.

In any case, Alanic did not appear in the slightest bit uncomfortable about being put on the spot like that.

"We had a big talk about faith, risk-taking and the duty of the individual towards their community," Alanic said.

Zorian raised his eyebrow at him. So did a lot of other people, from what he could say.

"And you were scolding me and Zorian for not taking things seriously just a little while ago," Kael scoffed.

"It’s the truth," Alanic said. "Rather than just refuse the creature, I asked it why I would ever agree to such a deal. The consequences would be so apocalyptic, especially for Cyoria, that I couldn’t imagine how this would be a good idea. Even if I was selfish to the extreme and only cared about myself, the primordial was a threat to all of humanity."

"Oh, I asked him the same thing," Orissa interjected. "He said he had no intention of destroying the world or menacing humanity. All he wanted, he said, was to be free and to free the rest of the imprisoned primordials as well. He would only destroy those who tried to prevent him from achieving those two goals."

"Ha. Well, it said no such thing to me," Alanic said. "Probably because it knew I would not believe that. Instead, the primordial countered my concerns by telling me that the gods had left numerous contingencies in regards to primordials, should they ever successfully escape. If I truly had faith in the gods, it said, what was the harm in setting it free? The contract would be fulfilled the moment it was out of prison, even if it died immediately afterwards. I should have faith in the divine and their works, in which case there was nothing wrong with taking the deal, releasing it out of its prison and then watching it die immediately afterwards."

"Do these contingencies of the gods truly exist?" Zorian asked. He heard nothing about that, but Alanic was a priest, so…

"I don’t know," Alanic admitted. "Even if they did, it is said the gods imprisoned primordials because they had trouble truly killing them. If the gods were incapable of dealing with them in person, I rather doubt a mere contingency could do it. Clearly this Panaxeth did not believe this either, otherwise why would it even make the offer? We then got into a lengthy philosophical discussion about what constitutes true faith and various other things. I doubt you really want to hear about that."

"Maybe later," Zach said. "Orissa, you said you also talked to Panaxeth about what he’d do once free?"

"Yes. Aside from what I already said, I think he alluded to these divine contingencies Alanic spoke about at one point," she said. "He mentioned that, in the process of tearing himself free from his cage, he would likely end up weakened and grievously wounded, and that it would take him centuries to fully recover. During that time, he would just hide somewhere and wait until he was fully healed. He was suggesting that I had no reason to care about his goals, because by the time he was ready to make his move, I would have died a long time ago."

After some more back and forth, they confirmed some details with the other members of the group. For instance, it seemed that nobody had been presented with an image of a person that had died before the time loop had begun. In fact, the primordial didn’t even bother copying living relatives, if the temporary looper hadn’t interacted with them within the bounds of the time loop. This led some credence to his claim that he couldn’t read minds and just relied on seeing everything that ever happened in the time loop.

This done, they turned to the last three people who had spoken to Panaxeth at any real length. Xvim, Kyron and Night Dream had all asked similar questions, however: they wanted to know the details of what the contract with Panaxeth actually entailed. Thankfully, this appeared to be a topic that Panaxeth was really eager to talk about.

"So if I understood you three correctly, the contract is as follows…" Zorian said. "You make a death pact with Panaxeth, swearing that you would either free him within a month or die trying. He then takes your soul and incarnates it in the outside world. That is to say, he creates a brand new copy of your body in the real world, at the start of the month, in effect physically ejecting you out of the time loop. Included in the created body is some kind of kill switch that will kill you if Panaxeth is still imprisoned at the end of the summer festival."

"Yes," Night Dream said, her magically produced voice clear and smooth. "It doesn’t matter whether you tried your best or why you failed – if Panaxeth isn’t free by the end of the deadline, the death seal activates and kills you. No excuses."

"And if Panaxeth is freed at any point before the deadline, this kill switch dissolves into nothingness and you are free to do whatever you want?" Zorian asked.

"Yes, even if Panaxeth dies, our part of the agreement is done," Xvim confirmed. "I asked several variations of that question just to be sure, and he always answered the same. We only needed to get him out, nothing more. Our original selves were not part of the agreement, either, and would not suffer if we failed in our task."

"Probably because their bodies hadn’t been created by Panaxeth, so he cannot place his death seal thingy on them," Kyron remarked. "Even if he wanted to make them die with us, he cannot."

"What stops you from taking the deal and then working against Panaxeth? Assuming you don’t mind dying in a month, of course," Alanic asked.

"When I asked a question along those lines, the shapeshifting asshole immediately ended our conversation and sent me back to the group," Kyron said. "I guess he really didn’t like that question. From what I can tell, though, the answer is nothing. Nothing stops you from doing just that."

"Then," Kael said hesitantly, "do you think that Silverlake–"

Kyron let loose a short, loud laugh.

"Boy, get real!" he told Kael. "Do you think a selfish, self-centered bitch like that would agree to sacrifice herself for our sake? For anyone’s sake!?"

Kael sighed, saying nothing.

A quiet murmur rippled throughout the entire group as they discussed the topic among themselves. Zorian listened to it with half an ear while lost in his own thoughts. Truthfully, now that he had heard about other people’s experiences with Panaxeth, her choice was… predictable. It wasn’t that they had trusted her because they had thought that she was better than this, they had just never realized making a deal like this was even an option. If Zorian had known about this before, he would have been the first one to veto any involvement with her, no matter how useful she could have been to their efforts.

And she had been very, very useful. Without any exaggeration, she was one of the pillars of the group on which their entire plan rested. Zorian wasn’t even sure if they could do this without her. Certainly, without Silverlake, their current exit plan was completely unworkable…

"I have to agree with Kyron," Alanic said solemnly. "Silverlake did not keep her attitudes hidden, so this decision should not surprise anyone here. You heard what everyone said on this meeting. The primordial offers people a guaranteed way to save their lives, as opposed to the uncertain odds of survival that we can offer her. She probably wouldn’t care if every single person in Cyoria ended up dead as a result of Panaxeth’s release, and it might be centuries before the wider consequences of his unsealing became apparent. Plus, there is no telling what kind of prize the creature offered her to entice her further."

"She was also clearly already interested in primordials even before the time loop. Including Panaxeth’s prison, specifically," Zorian said. "She might have felt more confident about being able to come out on top when dealing with one of them."

"But she’s immortal, right?" Taiven protested. "Shouldn’t she take the long view in this? Even if Panaxeth takes several centuries to start wrecking everything, she’ll still be alive by that point!"

"You have to look at it from her eyes," Zach said. He had calmed down greatly from his initial rage, and was now thinking much more rationally about the situation. "What’s the alternative? Dying immediately because you couldn’t get out of the time loop? That’s even worse."

"But if Panaxeth remains sealed, her original self can continue to live in peace indefinitely," Taiven pointed out. "She’s risking the long-term future of her original in exchange for a little more life for herself."

"I don’t think she cares about that," Zorian said, shaking his head. "That Silverlake is not her."

"Yes. Did you ever notice she never created any simulacrums? Even when it would have been very useful?" Zach pointed out. "I don’t think for a moment she was unable to learn the spell. And I don’t think she would sabotage our attempts to escape from the time loop by not creating more skilled manpower. I think she’s one of the people who can’t use them because they would freak out when they realized their lives were fleeting and do something stupid."

"Well, when you all put it like that, why did we ever agree to work with her in the first place?" Kyron suddenly demanded, throwing his hands in the air in discontent.

"Yeah!" one of Xvim’s academic friends piped in. "She was a bad idea right from the start! Whose bright idea was to include her, anyway?"

"What was the alternative?" Xvim challenged, alternating his gaze between Kyron and the other speaker. "Silverlake was brought into the group because she had critical skills that no one else possessed. The only reason we got as far as we did was because we had her working along with us. Even if she betrayed us in the end, it’s hard to say whether we would have been better off without her."

No one had anything to say to that.

"Zorian, you’re the only one Panaxeth told anything related to Silverlake," Zach said. "Can you tell us anything else?"

"All he said was that someone had already taken his offer, so convincing me didn’t matter anymore," Zorian said. He was the only one Panaxeth had felt the need to tell that. "I had no idea what that meant back then, but when I saw Silverlake was missing…"

"Yeah," Zach said, clacking his tongue. "Doesn’t take a genius to figure out what happened. So, what now? Now we have two hostile loopers to deal with once we get out of the time loop?"

Zorian had to admire Zach’s spirit sometimes. Even now, with all their plans being thrown into total disarray, he was still confident they would get out of this alive. It was nice to have someone like that, sometimes.

"Panaxeth’s statement was a little confusing, but I think that’s right. He was implying that Red Robe had also taken his offer and made a contract with him in order to leave the time loop. Presumably, this is why he spent so much time optimizing the invasion. His very life depends on its success. Presumably, once outside, Silverlake will work with him to make sure Panaxeth’s release goes off as smoothly as possible."

"Why does Silverlake accepting his offer mean there is no point in convincing you, though?" Kael asked. "You’d think Panaxeth would want as many agents as possible."

"Probably because every time he transports someone out the gate becomes barred again," Zorian said. "Remember, the whole point of gathering the Key was that the gate was inexplicably barred, even though it shouldn’t have been. The Controller has already left, Guardian of the Threshold told us. That probably means that when Panaxeth got Red Robe out of the time loop, it got stuck. The same probably happened now. Even if Panaxeth wanted to transport more than one person, he couldn’t."

"But you still have the Key," Ilsa pointed out.

"We do," Zach confirmed.

"So you can probably just unbar the gate again," Ilsa stated.

"Probably," Zach agreed.

"They’d have to be pretty stupid to take any of us into the Sovereign Gate again," Alanic said pitilessly. "I would never do so in their place."

"All of us present refused that thing’s deal," Kyron pointed out, a little incensed.

"Or maybe we were just too slow and Silverlake hammered out her deal before we had a chance to do the same," Xvim said. "I agree with Alanic. Now that Silverlake betrayed us, the pressure on remaining people is all the greater. It’s a pointless risk."

Zorian watched the argument in silence, not knowing what to say.

This was going to be a long evening…

After finding out what everyone had experienced in the Sovereign Gate, Zach and Zorian departed from the Noveda Estate and went to ransack Silverlake’s dimensional refuge for any clues. Of course, Zorian fully intended to also steal any magical secrets or notable resources he found there. Since Silverlake had betrayed them so utterly, he did not feel bad about robbing her blind in the slightest.

Unfortunately, it seemed that Silverlake’s spite and paranoia knew no bounds. When they finally managed to subvert her defenses and break into her pocket dimension, they found it utterly wrecked. It had been reduced to a smoking crater for quite some time before they arrived, most likely because some dead man’s switch had activated when she died and destroyed everything. Zorian left a couple of simulacrums to sift through the wreckage for anything of value, but he didn’t have much hope they would find anything. The destruction was quite thorough.

The only things that survived relatively intact was a curious arrangement of stones that was apparently responsible for powering her pocket dimension. He had long wondered how she was doing that, since the location itself could not support the dimensional magic she was using to isolate it from the rest of the world. Now he knew. Each of the heavy linking stones, which were build right into the walls of her hideout to disguise them better, had a matching counterpart in the deep in the underworld below her base. The underworld stones siphoned ambient mana from the Dungeon and sent it straight into Silverlake’s hideout through the paired stones in the pocket dimension.

He supposed that if he ever wanted to destroy Silverlake’s pocket dimension, he now knew a really easy way to do it. He just had to wreck the mana siphoning stones in the Dungeon below her sanctuary and the whole place would soon fall apart on its own.

In any case, with this matter currently being dealt with, Zach and Zorian turned their attention towards the next thing that had to be done as soon as possible.

They had to go back to the Sovereign Gate and talk to the Guardian of the Threshold.

There was danger in doing that, of course. However, it had to be done. They had to confirm their suspicions. First, they had to see if the Guardian would still be there at all when they came back, since it had gone missing when they had last left the Sovereign Gate. Secondly, they had to see if the gate really was barred again like they suspected. If so, a lot of their speculation would be all but confirmed.

Finally, they had to see if the Guardian could shed some light on what happened during their last visit. While it had seemed like nothing more than an automated puppet in the past, there was clearly something more complex going on in regards to that thing.

Only the two of them would be going there this time, of course. Considering Panaxeth completely ignored Zach the last time around and told Zorian he would not bother with him in the future, they probably wouldn’t be seeing him on this visit. Even if they did, though, Zorian was far less afraid of him now that he knew he couldn’t just reach into his head and start editing things. Whatever restrictions the primordial was laboring under, they clearly prevented him from coercing people into anything.

When they entered the Sovereign Gate, they were relieved to see the familiar figure of the Guardian of the Threshold floating in front of them.

"Welcome, Controller," the Guardian greeted.

"So Panaxeth didn’t break everything with his little visit," Zach commented, loudly exhaling in satisfaction. "That’s great. Finally some good news."

"Yes," Zorian agreed. He turned towards the floating humanoid of light, giving him a complex look. What was this thing really? "Guardian, is the gate still open?"

They waited for several seconds, wondering why it took the Guardian so long to answer that. Usually he was really prompt with his answers, only occasionally waiting while it looked up something in the background. As the seconds ticked by, though, they realized he wasn’t checking up on things before giving them an answer.

Instead, the Guardian ignored Zorian’s question completely.

Uh oh…

"Hey Guardian! Is the gate still open?" Zach said, repeating Zorian’s question.

"No, Controller. The gate is barred," the Guardian immediately answered.

Zach and Zorian shared a complex look with each other. On one hand, they just confirmed their speculation about what happened. This was good. It meant they were of the right track. On the other hand…

"Guardian, why did you answer his question and not mine?" Zorian asked the glowing humanoid.

But the Guardian ignored his question, just like he did the previous one. In fact, Zorian realized that, although the Guardian was facing them, he was subtly tilted towards Zach. It was like he was completely ignoring Zorian’s very existence.

Just like he had been ignoring the temporary loopers in the past.

"Guardian, why are you only responding to me and not him?" Zach asked, a bit of frustration bleeding into his voice.

"I only respond to the Controller," the Guardian stated placidly.

"I knew it," Zorian said quietly, followed by a small sigh.

Zach stared at the Guardian, getting visibly more and more upset as time went by. Zorian just felt a sinking feeling of defeat, instead. When it rained, it poured.

"This is bullshit," Zach stated angrily, pointing with his finger at Zorian. "He entered this space on his own, by activating his marker. Only a controller can do that!"

"Yes," the Guardian agreed. "He is an anomaly. Those happen sometimes. Something or someone has managed to get past the safeguards and disrupted the integrity of the mechanism. The anomaly can access Controller privileges even though he is not one. I am unable to do anything about that at the moment, but do not worry – the mistake will be corrected at the end of this cycle, when the world is recreated again."

Lovely. Zorian did not need a detailed explanation to understand what the Guardian was implying.

"But why now?" Zach demanded. "How did you figure out he was the anomaly all of a sudden? He had been coming and going here for ages now!"

"Yes. Regretful," Guardian said blandly. "However, you have presented me with the Key recently, which triggered a complete analysis of the existing situation. During this inspection, the anomaly was identified and correction procedures were scheduled to be performed at the first possible opportunity."

"Why?" Zach asked. "What is it about the Key that triggers this?"

"Activating the Key signifies that something has gone wrong with the time loop mechanism," The Guardian answered, as if that was the most obvious thing in the world. "Of course a thorough check of everything is in order."

"It does? You never mentioned this when we asked you about the Key," Zach stated accusingly.

The Guardian ignored the statement. Zorian was actually a little taken aback by this, since it meant the Guardian had probably kept them deliberately in the dark about that when they had talked to him in the past.

He supposed it made sense. The key was a security measure meant to confirm the Controller’s identity. It made sense not to discuss the details of its operation unless the Guardian felt he had to, for some reason.

"What about those privileges I claimed, then?" Zach asked. "What does that get me?"

"It affirms your status as the one true Controller and locks out all the other pretenders that may be walking about," the Guardian said.

"What!?" Zach protested incredulously. "That’s it? No new functions or abilities or anything like that?"

"As a Controller, you already have all the privileges," the Guardian told him. "You have simply ensured others do not infringe on this."

"Why can Zorian even access this place, then?" Zach demanded.

Hey!

"He is an anomaly," the Guardian said.

"These privileges are such a rip-off," Zach complained. "It doesn’t even do what it’s supposed to properly."

"I’m sorry," the Guardian said, sounding honestly apologetic. "He’s a very frustrating anomaly."

And thank the gods for that, Zorian thought.

He wasn’t panicking, strangely enough. He didn’t know why. Maybe because he already faced a very dire situation today and was rather emotionally drained at the moment, but finding out he was going to be deleted at the end of the month only brought a dull mixture of dread and determination to his mind.

So what if Silverlake had betrayed them? So what if Panaxeth was actively working against him? So what if he would get erased at the end of the month? Hadn’t they already planned to make an escape attempt in this restart?

They just had to make sure it worked.

He looked over at Zach, who had stopped arguing with the Guardian and was instead looking at Zorian like he was a dead man. A mixture of horror and guilt was etched clearly into his face.

"Don’t beat yourself over this," Zorian told Zach. His voice was so calm and even that even he was surprised how confident he sounded. "There was nothing else we could have done. You heard what the Guardian said – the moment we presented the Key to him, I was marked for erasure. It was always a given that we would do that the moment we gathered all the pieces. We should be grateful it was so difficult and took us that long to do it, or else we would have ended up in this situation at a much earlier and far less favorable restart."

"But, Zorian!" Zach protested. "You, you…"

"This just means I need to get out of here before this month ends. It’s the same situation the rest of the group is laboring under, really," Zorian said. "Don’t tell me you’ve already given up?"

"N-No… no…" Zach said slowly, taking a few deep breaths. "Damn it. I really hate this."

"Ask the Guardian if the Key still works. Can you unbar the gate again?"

He could, it turned out.

"Do you want to do it now?" the Guardian asked.

"No!" Zach shouted at it. "No. Do nothing until I tell you, you useless thing."

"As you wish," the Guardian said peacefully, completely oblivious to their emotional turmoil.

There was a few seconds of silence as neither Zach nor Zorian said anything.

"Well…" said Zorian finally. "We should probably end this for now. We need to come here later to ask more questions, but I don’t think either of us is in the right frame of mind to do so at the moment."

"Yeah, I guess," Zach gloomily agreed. "I just–"

Suddenly, the Guardian started convulsing again.

"Oh, not this shit again!" Zach protested in an exasperated tone.

Zorian made no moves to exit the Sovereign Gate this time. He probably couldn’t even if he wanted to, but this time he actually wanted to have a talk with Panaxeth, so he didn’t even try. Interestingly, Panaxeth did not bother to separate Zach from Zorian this time around and simply possessed the convulsing Guardian in front of them both. The glowing humanoid erupted into a forest of blood-red branches and tentacles before shuddering and contracting into a more human-like mass. It then quickly shapeshifted into the same female form that it had chosen for Zorian the last time they spoke. It did so far quicker than last time, apparently having gotten more proficient with the process.

It took a step forward, seemingly intending to walk over to them, before pausing and stopping in place.

"Hello Zorian," Panaxeth said in a pleasant female voice. "We meet again."

"I thought you said you would not bother talking to me again," Zorian immediately pointed out. "That it was a one-time offer."

"Bah, I told you it was just playing hard to get," Zach stated.

"Getting past the safeguards on this mechanism is not an easy thing to do," Panaxeth said. "It is not easy for me to appear before you like this. I meant what I said last time, but I decided you are more interesting than I first realized."

"Last time you didn’t even dare show your face in front of me," Zach said loudly in a challenging tone, folding his hands over his chest.

"As the Controller, you are especially well protected from any tampering," Panaxeth said, shifting its attention towards Zach for a moment. "And you can leave at any time. You do not require my help, nor am I able to stop you from leaving. You are of no use to me."

"But here you are, showing yourself in front of me anyway," Zach pointed out.

"I need to conserve my power," Panaxeth said. "Isolating you in a separate space is costly and unnecessary. I do not care if you hear us."

The female form Panaxeth was wearing turned its attention back to Zorian, staring at him intently.

"You still have a chance to survive this," Panaxeth said. "I have managed to stop the Guardian from rescinding all your Controller privileges. Wreck the Controller’s mind as much as you’re able, use the key to unbar the gate, and I will incarnate you in the outside world. I do not even ask that you make a contract with me. Grievously sabotaging the Controller and preventing him from exiting the time loop will be payment enough for your salvation."

Zach actually floated a few steps back when he heard that.

"You don’t want me as an agent?" Zorian asked, frowning.

"I already have two of them. That’s more than enough," Panaxeth said. "If I can ensure that the Controller dies here when the time loop collapses upon itself, it will be far more valuable to me than any additional number of agents."

Neither Zach nor Zorian said anything for a few seconds, but Zorian was furiously thinking about things. If Panaxeth was so desperate to take Zach out of the picture… that probably meant this entire time loop had been made specifically to help him find a reliable way to stop Panaxeth’s release. Even if Zach could not remember so, the two of them were mortal enemies.

"Before I helped Zach gather all the pieces of the Key, you were already winning," Zorian realized. "You had already sent one of the temporary loopers out as your agent, and Zach had mostly forgotten his mission to stop you. He only had vague feelings to guide him in what he must do. Even if he figured out how to come here, the gate was barred and he couldn’t leave."

"Yes. It would have been better for me if the Key had never been found," Panaxeth admitted readily. "However, I am the very embodiment of adaptability. I do not blame you for looking out for your best interests. I simply recruited one of you as my agent, thinking that was the best way to make use of the situation. It was only later that I found out how capable you are at mind invasion, and how the original plan could still be salvaged."

"You didn’t know that before?" Zorian asked.

"I’m always watching," Panaxeth said. "Everything, everywhere. But my consciousness is a lot like yours, in that I can’t pay attention to every little detail I see. When you observe an anthill, you perceive a lot, but can you really remember what one particular ant does at any point of time? But I remember it all with perfect clarity, and I can review it all later as I wish. Just like you can remember things with perfect clarity when you want to. See? We’re a lot more alike than you might think, Zorian."

The female shape Panaxeth was using as his avatar smiled. It was a bright, sunny smile that was probably meant to put him at ease but which Zorian found inexplicably terrifying.

"We’re both trapped in this cage, doing anything we can, even distasteful things, in order to get out," Panaxeth continued. "Do you think I want to destroy your city? Its destruction is simply an unfortunate consequence of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I never asked your kind to build a city around me. Just like you are willing to kill your outside self to live, I am willing to obliterate everything around me to get free. It is not my fault my fatality count is higher than yours."

"I will die if I don’t get out of here in time," Zorian pointed out. "You won’t."

"The cage that binds me is torture you can barely imagine," Panaxeth countered. "Imagine being entombed alive for centuries, alive, but starving and thirsting, and unable to move a finger. If that was your fate, would you not do anything in your power to get free?"

That… was a good argument, actually. Zorian had nothing to say to that.

"And then there is him," said Panaxeth, suddenly pointing towards Zach.

"Me?" Zach protested. "I’m just sitting here quietly, listening to you two talk. What about me?"

"I am heavily restricted in regards to the Controller and cannot speak about things freely, but I can tell you this – no matter what you think about that person, no matter how friendly he seems, you are ultimately enemies. In the end, one has to kill the other."

"That’s… That’s bullshit!" Zach exploded. "What the hell do you mean by that!?"

"He is good at pretending," Panaxeth said, not even bothering to look at him. "However, you should have noticed the signs by now. Don’t let your emotions overpower your reason."

Angry and ignored, Zach tried to ram himself into Panaxeth’s form, even though he knew no fighting was possible here and that this was probably a bad idea.

Panaxeth’s form simply blurred for a moment, causing Zach to harmlessly pass through it.

"I have said all I that needs to be said," Panaxeth said. "Make the right choice, Zorian. You have until the end of the restart to make a decision. I will be waiting."

Then they were outside, back in their real bodies. They hadn’t even activated the exit function in their marker – it was another thing that the primordial could apparently do on its own initiative.

"Damn it, damn it, damn it!" Zach raged, throwing around everything in the vicinity to vent his frustration. Zorian winced when one of the sensitive instruments that the facility staff user to study the Sovereign Gate impacted the nearby wall and broke apart. That was going to be a real bitch to explain to Krantin. "Damn it all to hell! Why is everything suddenly going so wrong!?"

"Zach, you really need to work on your temper," Zorian said, thrusting his hand towards another device Zach just threw across the room. It immediately ceased flying through the air, stopping just before it hit one of the cabinets.

Zach paced around the room angrily for a while, not saying anything but thankfully no longer destroying expensive equipment either. After a while he marched up to Zorian with heavy, purposeful steps and grasped him by the shoulders with both of his hands.

"Zorian," he began, "you don’t really believe that nonsense Panaxeth was spouting there at the end, do you?"

Zorian stared at him, stony-faced, for several seconds.

He knew that there was something to Panaxeth’s accusations. Zach’s mind… it clearly had been tampered with somehow. Maybe by Red Robe. Maybe by the angels, when they had given him his task. Maybe by both. Everything pointed towards that conclusion. Even if Zach was genuinely friendly and wished him nothing but good, there could be all sorts of restrictions, compulsions or contingencies placed in there, just waiting for some trigger to activate them. Perhaps once they were out of the time loop, the smiling boy in front of him would suddenly turn hostile and try to kill him for no reason. He still remembered how quickly Princess switched from seeing them as mortal enemies to following one of them like an overgrown puppy, just because they managed to scratch her a little with her control dagger.

However, he also knew it would be a mistake to say that out loud. For one thing, Zach just listened to Panaxeth telling Zorian to scramble his mind in exchange for a ticket to outside. In light of that, any argument Zorian might use to convince Zach to let him rummage inside his mind would seem very suspect.

"No," Zorian said. "I don’t believe that at all."

Zach stared at him for a second before finally letting go of his shoulders and straightening himself a little.

"Good," he said, patting Zorian on the shoulder in a friendly manner. "That’s good. We can’t let that thing divide us like that. We need to trust each other, now most of all."

"Right," Zorian said. He actually agreed with that. "And by the way? You’re the one explaining to Krantin why you totally trashed the room like that."

Zach froze for a second and then looked around him, assessing damage.

"I guess you’re right," he said with a groan. "I really do need to work on my temper."

91. A Path Paid in Blood

"This isn’t going to work."

Zorian stopped staring at the pile of blueprints and notebooks in front of him and looked at the speaker. It was Xvim. He and Alanic had snuck up to him while his attention was absorbed into his task and were currently staring at him expectantly.

Zorian tapped his pen on the table a couple of times before throwing it aside and leaning back in his chair. Perhaps it would be a good idea to take a break. His work had stalled for a while now.

"I’m not sure I understand," he told his old mentor.

"We can’t keep going like this," Xvim clarified. "This path we’re on… it’s not going to work. When we planned this out, we were counting on having Silverlake on our side. Now we don’t, and no amount of increased enthusiasm and minor adjustments is going to make up for it. I know you’re still under the impression of what Panaxeth told you, but something has to change. At this rate we’re simply blundering into an obvious failure."

Zorian stared at Xvim for a second before glancing at Alanic. However, the scarred battle priest was silent, simply staring back at him without saying a word. Clearly he agreed with Xvim’s words, then. They had probably discussed things between each other before approaching him.

He looked around the room instead of immediately answering. It gave him a way to stall and gather his thoughts, but he was also curious about people’s reactions to the conversation. They were inside one of the Noveda estate’s rooms, and there were quite a few people gathered here. Most of them pretended to be absorbed into their own work, but Zorian could tell that all of them were paying close attention to what was happening.

Well, except for Zach. His fellow time traveler was sitting cross-legged on the floor with his eyes closed, trying to sense the divine energies of his divine blessing and Controller marker. Zorian was not sure why he was doing that, to be honest. Both he and Zach had already succeeded at perceiving these divine energies, and it was unlikely he would develop the skill much in what little time they had left before the end of the restart. On top of that, they had basically given up on trying to modify the temporary markers. There was little point to that now.

He took a deep breath but resisted the urge to sigh. They had informed the whole group about their second encounter with Panaxeth and what it meant for Zorian. Strangely, the group took another bout of bad news in stride. In fact, the knowledge that Zorian now shared fates with them seemed to significantly improve the mood of the group. He was one of them now, and the fact that he didn’t panic and break down after finding out this was his last chance to live seemed to inspire them somewhat and calm their fears. They worked harder, grumbled less, and were less dubious about his motives and logic.

For a while, he thought that would be enough… that with some renewed enthusiasm and some clever workaround they would be able to make up for Silverlake’s absence and proceed as planned. However, Xvim and Alanic were right. This wasn’t going to work.

They needed a new plan.

"What are you suggesting?" Zorian asked them.

"First of all, we should tell Krantin and his team that we’re time travelers," Xvim said.

Zorian cocked his head to the side curiously. Not really what he was expecting to hear.

"Wouldn’t that be rather counterproductive?" Zorian asked. "Krantin and his team have been remarkably cooperative with us, all things considered. If they knew the truth, I imagine their enthusiasm for helping us could only plummet as a response."

"I said we should tell them we’re time travelers, not the full and total truth," Xvim said. "Truthfully, they already suspect this. The documents we are providing them with are too similar to their own existing work for that to escape their notice. They have been talking amongst themselves about our identity for a while now, and the most common theory is that we’re literally from the future. It isn’t that far from the truth, really."

"They actually hit upon such a crazy theory as the most likely one?" Zorian asked, surprised.

"They’re working in a time magic research facility," Xvim said. "Even though actual time travel is said to be impossible, the topic is likely to come up with some regularity among the staff. They are being paid to push the boundaries of time magic as much as they can, after all."

Zorian stayed quiet for a few seconds, mulling things over. He supposed the idea was workable, all things considered, and it might eliminate some of the inefficiencies they’d encountered when working with Krantin and his team. However…

"Although this would be useful, I’m not really sure it would do that much," Zorian said finally. "The facility staff is already working hard on the project of turning the imperial orb into a Black Room. Even with their limited information, they seem appreciative enough for the funding and opportunities we’ve given them. I doubt we could drive them to work harder with this."

"No, probably not," Xvim agreed, propping his elbows on the table and folding his fingers into a triangle shape in front of him. "This is merely an attempt to make them fine with the second step of the plan."

"Which is?" Zorian prompted, feeling just a little bit apprehensive all of a sudden.

"Kidnapping everyone skilled and possibly useful and forcing them to work for us," Xvim stated calmly, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

Must resist the urge to sigh. Must resist the urge to sigh. Must resist…

Zorian rubbed his chin in a frustrated manner before focusing back on the two people in front of him. Alanic was still not saying anything. They were both staring at him and waiting for a response.

"And just how–" Zorian began.

"Through any means necessary," Xvim said, cutting him off. "Blackmail. Threats of death and bodily harm. Rampant use of mind magic."

"My mind magic is not that capable," Zorian said, frowning. "The kind of work we need from them has never been done before. They would need to work with us to invent entirely new spells and rituals."

"I know," Xvim said.

"I can’t force someone to perform creative work for me with mind magic," Zorian pointed out. "I don’t think anyone can. At best we’d get a bunch of dazed zombies."

"They don’t know that, though," Xvim said. "Mind magic is terrifying, even for mages, and few people are experienced enough to guess your limits. Ignoring that, what you can do is already terrifying enough for most people. If you demonstrated your memory manipulation abilities, most people would be very intimidated. Even I’m afraid of you sometimes, and I’m both familiar with your limitations and relatively certain you will not target me with your abilities. Finally, even if someone is not intimidated by your ability, you can always use your memory modification abilities as a limited retry button for convincing people. You’ve used your powers in that manner before, I am told."

"But only on enemies," stressed Zorian.

"And I’m very grateful you retain that sense of morality and restraint in regards to your powers," Xvim said patiently. "But we’re running out of time and desperate times call for desperate measures. Don’t think we’re just selfishly asking you to discard your ideals. This is a burden we’re all willing to take upon our shoulders."

Zorian gave him a surprised look.

"Somebody will need to keep this mass of resentful, forcibly recruited mages in line and focused on their duties instead of plotting our downfall," Xvim said. "That’s going to be our job. Your job is simply to gather the people we need and intimidate them into cooperating with us, however reluctantly."

Zorian stared at the man for a while, considering what he had been told. Xvim was essentially saying that all or most of the other temporary loopers already agreed that this was an acceptable course of action. That they were just going to… kidnap random people and force them into working for them. And here Zorian was thinking he was being too carefree about reaching for the darker, unethical methods to tackle their problems.

"Well," he said. "I see we’re turning into a proper villainous organization. All we need now is a mystical artifact that will allow us to remake the world in our image and we’re set to go."

Xvim’s lips twitched slightly.

"If you really think about it," he said, "a large group of people armed with knowledge of things to come and all the things we’ve gathered in the time loop would be more than enough to–"

"Please don’t," Zorian implored him. "Just… tell me once again how this is supposed to work."

"Alright," Xvim said, reaching into his bag and handing him a map with a bunch of locations marked on it. Colorful paper notes densely filled with text were pinned next to each of the indicated locations.

"Our main problem right now is that we don’t have enough time," Xvim continued after Zorian had a chance to glance at the map. "The only way we’re going to get that is by pushing our Black Room modification project to its utter limit. Therefore, we should drop virtually everything and focus on that. However, the biggest problem the project has is the lack of qualified mages to work on it. Most of us are not really qualified to help with it. However, this facility is not the only one of its kind. There are other facilities in other countries, and though they have not gotten as far as the one in Eldemar, their staff is no less qualified than Krantin and his researchers – they just suffer from a lack of funding and opportunities."

The places on the map marked with blue upturned triangles were locations of all known Black Room projects in Altazia, Zorian realized. He knew about these, of course. They had been making use of their facilities for quite some time now. Not just in the sense that they were using them to extend their time in the restarts, either. They had long ago raided these places for any information about time magic, as well as handed them collected research notes from other facilities to see if they would come up with something novel when presented with such information. Although these initiatives were moderately successful, they had stopped yielding results by now, and so they no longer bothered with them. They simply made use of the facilities in each restart and then left them alone.

Although these places were much smaller than the time magic research facility beneath Cyoria, there was a fair number of them. If they forcibly took all their staff, that would be a lot of people. Plus, there might be some useful equipment there, now that he was thinking about it.

If they were raiding these places for people, they might as well take everything that wasn’t nailed down as well.

"So we just raid those places, taking everything and everyone in sight," Zorian said, clacking his tongue. "What about those who just won’t cooperate, no matter what carrot and stick we use? Kill them?"

"Push them through a portal to Blantyrre and strand them in the jungle for a while," Xvim said. "I think most will reconsider after a few days, but if not, they can just spend the rest of the month there."

And probably get eaten by a flying snake or something, Zorian thought, though he did not say it out loud.

"In any case, with this sudden influx of new people and with Krantin’s hopeful acceptance of our time traveler story, we can then move on to the next step," said Xvim, handing him another map.

This one was a very detailed map of the underworld beneath Cyoria, centered around the time magic research facility. However, the facility in the map Xvim gave him was larger than the one that currently existed beneath their feet. Much, much larger. It was a huge, sprawling complex that circled the Hole like a giant torus and then extended into the surrounding land through a spider web of rooms and corridors.

Zorian gave Xvim a dubious look.

"There is no way this kind of development can be hidden from the city," Zorian said dubiously. "Never mind Krantin and his reaction, this would bring the Eldemar military on our heads. Do we really have enough influence to make the city authorities overlook this sort of thing?"

"Yes, that… that is certainly a problem," Xvim tapped his fingers together and looked away uneasily for a second. "We think we have a solution for that, though."

"I’m not going to like this, am I?" Zorian asked rhetorically. "Can it really be worse than the whole mass kidnapping thing?"

"We should work with the Esoteric Order of the Celestial Dragon and its leaders," Xvim told him.

Zorian scowled at the suggestion. He had nothing but disgust and contempt for the Cult of the Dragon Below. At least Ibasans had a relatively understandable goal of sabotaging their national enemies. The cultists were traitors and seemed to operate purely on a mixture of delusion and insatiable greed for power. Most of the lower-level members didn’t even know what exactly they were fighting for. Plus, he could never quite forget the sight of the shifter children they sacrificed in order to crack open Panaxeth’s prison.

He did not like the idea of cooperating with these people in the slightest.

"You can’t be serious," Zorian told him, voice tinged with annoyance.

"I really am serious… and not just because they can help us make the city authorities look the other way while we rearrange the local underworld in our favor. With the loss of Silverlake, we have lost our expert on the primordials and their cages. Aside from Silverlake, the cult’s leaders are probably the people most qualified to help us understand Panaxeth’s prison… and how to exploit it to get out of the time loop," Xvim explained.

"We already took everything they had," Zorian pointed out.

In fact, they had been exceptionally thorough in raiding the cult for every secret they had. Zorian may have compunctions about delving into the minds of random people to steal their secrets, but he had no such compunctions about the cultists. He could not claim to have gotten every scrap of knowledge they had, since he could only look for things if he knew what to look for, but he was quite sure he got everything truly important out of them.

"What they already have, yes," Xvim said. "But not what they could have, if we teach them all we know and give them a chance to look at the problem with increased skills and perspective."

Zorian’s eyes widened in realization.

"You want to teach them!?" he asked, aghast at the idea.

"Everything, yes," Xvim confirmed, nodding. "We would not inform them about the time loop, of course, but other than that? We will bring them into our improved Black Room and teach them everything we can about divination, about dimensionalism and about the structure of the primordial prison in the Hole. We will then let them analyze the structure and either ask them to answer our questions or you can just rip the answers straight out of their minds. It depends on how cooperative they are and what is more convenient."

Zorian remained silent for a while. On one hand, he really didn’t like the idea of teaching these people anything, especially since that would involve them being close by for several months – plenty of time for things to go seriously wrong. On the other hand, he found the idea of the cultists unknowingly helping them get out of the time loop so they could sabotage their plans in the real world to be rather amusing. And Xvim was right that, other than Silverlake, these people were the ones most familiar with the primordial’s prison. They had been studying it for quite a while now in their attempt to open it, after all.

There was, of course, a small matter of why in the world would the cult leaders agree to work with them on this. However, they were already considering kidnapping people and using blackmail and intimidation to make them cooperate, so this was probably not as difficult of an issue as it appeared. They just had to point out that the invasion could not possibly succeed unless Zach and Zorian allowed it to happen, and then prove their words with a demonstration of their power.

He looked at Alanic, who had still not said anything up until now.

"I’m surprised you’re willing to entertain this idea," Zorian told him.

"I was willing to work with Silverlake, wasn’t I?" Alanic said. "She may not have done anything particularly heinous in front of you, but I assure you she has done plenty of odious deeds in the past. I understand the necessity. It would be playing with fire, but it isn’t like this is the first time we’re doing that. Isn’t it?"

"Indeed," Zorian said quietly. He paused for a moment, gathering his thoughts.

Alanic never really talked about his past with Silverlake, or of his time before he became a priest. Zorian had long figured out by now that the scarred battle-priest had been a very different man back then, and did a lot of things he later regretted, so he refrained from pushing the man on the topic. Alanic had been incredibly helpful towards him throughout all these restarts, and Zorian felt it would be ungrateful of him to dredge up painful memories and old grudges unless he really had to.

If Alanic had some information about Silverlake that he felt was important, he would have told them about it by now.

After a while, Zorian picked up a pen and threw it at Zach’s head. Though he had his eyes firmly closed, Zach immediately raised his hand and caught the pen out of the air before opening his eyes.

"How much did you hear?" Zorian asked him.

"Most of it," Zach admitted.

"And?" Zorian prompted. "What do you think?"

"I don’t have any better idea," Zach said with a shrug.

Neither did Zorian, in all honesty.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true…

"Alright," said Zorian, rising from his seat. "I guess we’re doing this, then. However, I think a slight modification is in order."

"Slight, huh?" Zach said with a grin.

"If we’re going to get the maximum amount of time out of the modified Black Room, the extra manpower is not enough," said Zorian. "We need a dimensionalism mage of the highest caliber if we’re going to get truly spectacular results."

"So? Those don’t exactly grow on trees," Zach pointed out, throwing the pen back at him. "Where are we going to find one of those?"

Zorian caught the pen flying at him with practiced ease.

"How attached are you to that crown we took from Quatach-Ichl?" Zorian asked Zach with a knowing smile.

Zach’s expression immediately fell.

"Oh, you can’t be serious…" Zach complained.

Oh, but he was. He really was.

"Come on," Zorian told him, motioning him to get up from the floor. "Let’s go talk to our favorite lich."

Somewhere in Eldemar, a field was burning.

Two masked teenagers were engaged in a vicious fight against an ancient Ibasan lich, and the landscape around them was devastated in their passing. Once this had been a wheat field in full bloom, but it was now just an ashen land covered in craters. Broken remains of undead servants and golems littered the ground, and strange rock formations rose out of the ground in places where the two sides tried to entomb each other in solid stone.

Somewhere out there, Zorian mused, a farmer was going to be very devastated when he saw what had happened to his harvest.

This was the third time he and Zach had clashed with the lich like this in the last few days. However, this was fine as far as Zorian was concerned. He considered this to be simply a part of their negotiation with Quatach-Ichl, rather than as a waste of time. They were proving to the lich that they were legitimate threats and that he should take them seriously. Earlier, when they had taken the crown from him in this restart, they had done it through an ambush and by employing something that could be dismissed as a mere trick. Through these fights, they were showing Quatach-Ichl there was more to them than that.

Quatach-Ichl had never stopped looking for them all this time, of course. He had no idea it was Zach and Zorian who had stolen his crown, since they had worn disguises when they had ambushed him and covered their tracks extremely well, but he had somehow managed to find out about the existence of their group in general. He seemed to have identified Xvim, Alanic, Ilsa and Kyron as the leaders of the group, possibly because they interacted with the authorities relatively often. He had tried to target them by ransacking their homes and such, but this hadn’t been very effective. All temporary loopers had vacated their usual homes by now, and were not that easy to catch. Plus, he couldn’t be too brazen about wrecking things or he would put his own invasion plans into danger.

This sort of situation must have been rather frustrating for the ancient lich, because he had attacked them immediately when they had shown up in front of him again. He hadn’t even given them a chance to speak! Rude.

A giant, scintillating ball of red light screamed through the air towards Zorian. He thrust his hand at it, causing a conical wave of barely visible rainbow light to wash over it. It unraveled instantly, revealing a dimmer, but much more dangerous arrow of green energies hurtling at his chest.

The simulacrum standing beside him immediately thrust his arm into the path of the arrow, sacrificing it to shield Zorian from the blow. The arm exploded at the mere touch of the magical projectile, negating the attack but showering Zorian with a rain of metal shrapnel. Zorian didn’t try to defend himself against the flying metal pieces, opting to keep casting his counterattack instead. The shrapnel was stopped by his shield, a faint honeycomb pattern momentarily becoming visible around him as it absorbed the attack, and then Zorian finished his spell.

Nothing visibly happened, but this was because his projectiles were utterly invisible – a pair of circular discs of severing force made their way towards the lich, who was currently busy dodging massive boulders and fireballs that Zach was sending his way.

Beside them, Princess released a loud roar into the air with six of her many heads, the last two being busy chewing through the throat of a giant eagle she managed to snatch straight out of the air. The great bird hung limply from her jaws, its riders nowhere to be seen. The fight had been going on for long enough that an Eldemarian response group had reached them and tried to involve themselves into the fight. Unfortunately for them, neither group had appreciated their interference. Their eagle riders had lost at least half of their numbers – one could see the charred husks of their eagles and mages mixed among the wreckage of the battlefield if one looked closely enough. The remaining eagles now circled uneasily in the sky above, keeping their distance and simply observing things.

Several sites in the distance were also smoking. These were the places where Eldemarian forces had tried to set up artillery positions to pick them off from a distance. Quatach-Ichl hadn’t liked that idea, though, and after he had finished wiping them all out, they did not bother trying a second attempt at it.

Zach shouted an order at Princess, and she roughly threw the dead eagle aside and disappeared. Well, teleported to be more exact. She reappeared instantly at Quatach-Ichl’s side, where she instantly tried biting and trampling him. Even the ancient lich had trouble putting down such a large, regenerating beast… especially when Zach and Zorian were there keeping him from being able to focus solely on dealing with her.

Distracted as he was by the hydra and Zach, Quatach-Ichl did not notice the severing discs until it was too late and ended up losing one of his arms. This, in turn, placed him on an even bigger disadvantage and forced him to burn through a lot of his mana reserves to fend them off and stabilize himself. Now that he had no imperial crown on him, his mana reserves were no longer quite as ridiculous as they once were. He could no longer just outlast them by default. Now Zach proudly wore the crown to battle, which meant it was Quatach-Ichl who had to worry about a war of attrition.

The battle continued on for another five minutes before eventually slowing down. Eventually, the two sides found themselves staring at each other over an expanse of barren land, waiting for the other to make a move. Zach and Zorian could press their advantage, of course, but that would only cause the lich to flee. There was no point to that, really.

The seconds slowly ticked by with nothing to show for it. The only sounds were occasional screeching of giant eagles circling overhead and Princess hissing at them and at Quatach-Ichl in response.

"Hey," Zach finally said, his voice magically distorted and his face hidden behind a blank white mask. He pulled the imperial crown off his head and twirled it around his finger playfully. "Are you looking for this?"

Quatach-Ichl’s response was to fire one of his signature red disintegration beams at him. However, Zach did not move a finger to dodge or block it. The beam just curved unnaturally around him and missed.

"We might be willing to give it back," Zorian pointed out, his voice also distorted.

Quatach-Ichl cocked his head to the side curiously, saying nothing.

"Or we can just continue this for another couple of days, I guess," Zach added. "I don’t know about you, but I kind of enjoy these clashes between us. A bit of excitement to spice up the day, you know?"

"So. You want to talk, huh?" Quatach-Ichl observed. He looked up at the Eldemar eagle riders circling above. "This probably isn’t the best place to do it, though."

"Pick a time and place, then," Zach said. "Just don’t keep us waiting for too long. We’re on a bit of a time limit here. You drag your feet too much and we’ll just keep the crown and be done with it."

Quatach-Ichl didn’t bother answering him. He simply picked up a rock from the ground and squeezed it in his skeletal hand. Bright orange lines burned themselves into the surface of the rock before fading away. The lich then threw the rock at their feet and then teleported away.

Zorian picked the rock up. It was still warm, and there was a time and address carved into it.

Plus a single sentence at the end.

Don’t be late.

Zorian had no intention of telling Quatach-Ichl about the time loop or trying to talk him into helping them get out. That would obviously just blow up in their faces. The ancient lich had no motivation to sabotage the plans of his original self by helping them escape into the real world. The last time he’d realized he was just a copy in a duplicate world, he’d had no compunctions whatsoever about sacrificing himself to advance the cause of his original by crippling them. A person like that wouldn’t help them just to save his own hide, and they had nothing to really offer him.

But they did not have to tell him about the time loop. They did not have to ask him to help them to escape. What they needed at the moment was more time, and to get that they needed their Black Room project to succeed.

And with Quatach-Ichl’s help, it could very well succeed spectacularly .

At the moment, they were in a private room in one of Cyoria’s many restaurants, discussing this idea with the Ibasan leader. Quatach-Ichl was in his human disguise, and Zach and Zorian had agreed to come unmasked as a show of trust.

"So let me get this straight," Quatach-Ichl said, playing around with his glass. "You want me to help you improve Eldemar’s time dilation room to a completely ridiculous rate of dilation–"

"Specifically, we need another five months," Zach said, cutting into his speech.

"–and in exchange you are going to give me my own crown back?" finished Quatach-Ichl, pretending he didn’t hear him. "Doesn’t that strike you as incredibly brazen and a foolish thing to ask for? I mean, I will get that crown back. It’s just a matter of time."

"See, that’s where you’re wrong," said Zach. "Zorian, do your thing."

Zorian nodded and started casting the gate spell. Quatach-Ichl was instantly on guard, but he only tensed imperceptibly and did not attack them or voice any protest. He watched curiously as Zorian finished casting the spell and opened a miniature dimensional gate just above his palm.

If one looked closely, they could see a featureless patch of water by looking through the gate.

"Well… done?" Quatach-Ichl said dubiously. "You can cast the gate spell. Not something many people can brag about but–"

"Scan it," Zach told him. "See where it leads."

Frowning, Quatach-Ichl did just that, casting a bunch of divinations to determine the location of the other side of the portal. After a full two minutes of tinkering, he leaned back in his chair and gave Zach a strange look.

"It’s just a random patch of the ocean, as far as I can see. Very far away from any land," he said.

"Precisely," Zach said, grinning from ear to ear. "Now… what do you think would happen if we just chucked this crown through that portal and closed it?"

Quatach-Ichl’s eyes widened in shock and realization. The truth was that the deep sea was utterly unreachable from the perspective of humanity. Even the most powerful of mages would have no hopes of finding something that had been thrown away into the middle of the ocean. Even a lich like Quatach-Ichl, who had no need to breathe and potentially lived forever, would balk at the idea of searching through the ocean floor for a needle in a haystack.

If Zach and Zorian really did pick a random spot in the ocean, far away from any land, and threw the crown there… it would be scarcely different from destroying it utterly.

"You wouldn’t," Quatach-Ichl said severely. "The value of that crown–"

"If we can’t get this Black Room to work, we’re dead," Zach said, leaning forward towards the lich. "There, I said it. We’re desperate and our lives literally depend on this working. So if we fail, this crown is utterly useless to us. Why keep it around, then? Anyone we give it to would just become a target for you. Better to throw it into the sea so you can’t have it."

"You…" said Quatach-Ichl, speechless for a moment. He shook his head. "I see. So I either get the crown back from you now or I lose it forever. Is that what you’re saying?"

"That is what we’re saying," Zach said, leaning back into his chair with a bright smile.

"Besides, don’t pretend you aren’t interested in the Black Rooms and that helping us with this is just a chore for you," Zorian pointed out. "We know for a fact that you have been interested in the time magic research facility beneath Cyoria for quite some time. Black Room projects require a great deal of funding and manpower to be developed, and Ulquaan Ibasa is probably not very abundant in either. This is a bit unfortunate since, as a place full of undead, you are the nation most able to exploit this sort of thing to its full potential. No need to worry about lifespan limits if you don’t age. And you definitely need every advantage you can get, if you are to really compete with Eldemar and other Altazian powers. Am I right?"

"Hm. Maybe," said Quatach-Ichl after a short pause. "You’re saying I would get all the information regarding the Eldemarian Black Room project?"

"How else can we expect you to help us improve it?" Zorian asked. "However, you’re thinking too small. It’s not just the Eldemarian project that you would have access to. It’s also the Sulamnon project, and the Falkrinean projects, and everyone’s project. Every Black Room project on the continent."

He took out a bright red folder out of his bag and handed it to Quatach-Ichl. It did not hold any comprehensive notes, of course, but it held enough to make it clear what kind of information Zach and Zorian had at their disposal.

Quatach-Ichl leafed through the folder, slowly at first but picking up as he saw more and more. His eyebrows also got higher and higher as he got closer to the end.

"This… how did you even get this?" he asked them. He sounded honestly impressed.

"We raided every Black Room facility on the continent and stole their notes and research data," Zorian said.

"Hmm," Quatach-Ichl hummed lightly. "I guess this really is very important to you…"

They spent the next fifteen minutes discussing the details of the proposed agreement. Though Quatach-Ichl never really agreed to anything and did his best to look uninterested, Zorian could tell they were gradually winning him over.

"So, there is one thing I’m really concerned about here," the ancient lich finally said. "If I agree to this and help you as we agreed… what motive do you have to honor your part of the deal in the end? Yes, I will admit a certain amount of interest in the information you have about Black Rooms, but the crown you stole from me is the real issue. What guarantee do I have that you’ll actually hand it over to me at the end?"

"If you agree to help us, we will hand you the crown right now," Zorian said.

Quatach-Ichl raised his eyebrow at them. He had been doing that a lot in this conversation.

"Yes, really," Zorian confirmed.

Zach had already used the Key to unbar the gate. Now the only value of the imperial items was in their basic abilities, and while the crown was extremely useful… they needed Quatach-Ichl’s help far more at the moment.

They could always steal the crown the original was wearing when they got to the real world.

"What makes you think I won’t just take the crown and walk away laughing?" Quatach-Ichl asked curiously.

"You could do that, yes," Zach said. "We don’t think you will, though. You are an honorable kind of undead."

"Huh. I don’t know whether to feel pleased my reputation is so good or look down on you for being so foolish," the lich said.

"Does that mean you agree to the deal?" Zach asked him.

"Let me ask you a question," the Ibasan leader said. "What actually made you think you could work with me on this? I mean, yes, you clearly looked into me for quite some time before making your move. You even did that without me becoming aware that someone was plotting against me, and some part of me cannot help but be impressed by that. However, it still seems very strange you feel confident enough to propose this deal. Seems very risky."

"We live a very risky life," Zach said, grinning.

"Yet you’re still alive," the lich noted with a more subdued smile of his own. "Clearly it is not just a matter of overconfidence, then."

"If we answer this question for you, will you answer one of ours?" Zorian asked him.

"Sure," Quatach-Ichl said, waving his hand in front of him carelessly. "Ask away."

"Why are you working with the Cult of the Dragon Below to release the primordial trapped in Cyoria?" Zorian asked. "I refuse to believe someone like you would be ignorant of what exactly you are tangling with. This is not some fancy summon that will go away in a few hours, nor is it just a powerful monster. This is a creature that even the gods had trouble killing. Why would you set that thing loose on the world? I can see a regular rogue mage not caring about the consequences much, but surely you do. You have a homeland you care deeply for, and you probably intend to be alive for a very long time from now."

"Forever," Quatach-Ichl said. "I intend to live forever."

"Then why?" Zorian asked. "Why release a godlike entity that could very well destroy everything in a few centuries?"

The lich looked at him for a few seconds, looking amused.

"Ha ha!" the lich laughed. "So. You do know about the whole invasion business I’m a part of."

"Yes," Zach confirmed. "We do."

"As I expected," Quatach-Ichl responded. "I guess that kind of answers my question, doesn’t it? If you know about the invasion plot, you already know I’m willing to enter into highly risky and insane deals if the benefits are big enough. But anyway, about your question… the thing is, I don’t think the primordial is going to be allowed to run free that long. Never mind centuries, I don’t think it is going to last two weeks!"

"Why?" Zach asked, frowning.

"Because I have faith in the angels," the lich said.

What?

"Sounds strange to have someone like me say that, doesn’t it?" Quatach-Ichl said, smiling knowingly. "It’s true, though. The gods may be gone, but the angels are still around and I have no doubt they would do everything in their power to either reseal or kill the primordial. Their restrictions limit their ability to meddle in the physical world, so it’s easy to underestimate them, but they have some truly awe-inspiring beings and weapons on their side. I should know; I saw them personally fighting a few times. One primordial should not be impossible for them to handle."

"So you want to free the primordial, knowing the angels would take care of it long before it becomes your problem…" Zorian said.

"Yes," the lich confirmed. "Frankly, my main worry is not that the angels will not be able to handle it… my main worry is that they will take care of it too quickly and that the damage from its release and subsequent rampage will be too limited in scope. I ordered all the temples razed to the ground at the very beginning of the invasion, but I fear it may not be enough. The angels can be surprisingly subtle and underhanded when they want to be. For all I know, they may be working against me even now."

He had no idea.

"We are actually really fortunate," Quatach-Ichl continued, sounding very smug. "It is likely that the ability of the angels to interfere with our plans is even more limited due to the recent… hmm, complications in the spiritual spheres."

"You mean the fact all communications with the spiritual world have been severed lately?" Zorian asked.

"Hmm. Very well informed, indeed," Quatach-Ichl mumbled quietly. "Yes, that. It’s rather unplanned, but not unwelcome. You could say the very heavens are helping me, ha ha!"

A small silence descended on the scene.

"So," Zach said. "Do we have a deal or not?"

"I suppose we do," the lich said. "I must be going senile in my old age, but I’ll give you a chance."

"Oh yeah, one more thing," Zorian said. "We kind of also approached the Esoteric Order of the Celestial Dragon about this and some other things. Unfortunately, they have been more unreasonable about this than you have so we have kind of ended up kidnapping them."

He threw a small painting on the table. It was very realistic, depicting a group of bound and gagged men. There was no proof that the picture was real, of course, but Quatach-Ichl frowned when he saw it and stayed silent.

"Since we’re working together now, we were hoping you could help us convince them to cooperate," Zorian said. "At the very least, we need their help to make this deal between us actually work. Otherwise, I fear we’ll be forced to subject them to our… intense cooperation techniques."

"Hmph. Of course the incompetent idiots got captured," Quatach-Ichl muttered.

He threw the picture onto the table before giving them a more cautious, speculative look. He then thrust his hand towards them, palm pointing upwards.

"The crown," he demanded, shaking his hand.

With a sigh, Zach reached towards one of his pockets and pulled out the imperial crown. He gave it a look of sad longing before slowly and carefully placing it in Quatach-Ichl’s palm.

The lich immediately placed the crown on the top of his head, a web of geometric lines immediately lighting up all over his skin and flashing dangerously. For a moment his disguise dropped and his black skeletal form became plainly visible, but then he was back to normal and his human guise was intact.

The crown was no longer visible, hidden under whatever magic Quatach-Ichl used to keep himself looking like a living being.

"Right," he said. "Take me to those clowns and I’ll talk to them. They’ll cooperate."

Things developed very quickly after that.

Zorian was honestly surprised how well things turned out. He was afraid the kidnapped mages would refuse to work or drag their feet whenever possible. He was afraid Quatach-Ichl would just take the crown and just leave them to their devices while laughing at their stupidity. He was afraid the cult leaders would sabotage everything out of spite, resentful that they had been basically arm-twisted into agreeing with their plans.

None of these things happened. The kidnapped researchers mostly chose to work with them instead of being defiant. A surprising number of them were even enthusiastic about the project, once they realized what they had been recruited to work on. It probably helped that Zach and Zorian promised them they could take all the documentation related to the project back home with them when they were finished. Though somewhat skeptical about that, the sheer scale of the project seemed to put people at ease. There was no way they would kill so many people just to shut everyone up, right?

Quatach-Ichl was a skeleton of his word. Just like he had never tried to cheat them after agreeing to teach them his magical skills, he did not attempt to get out of helping with the project once he committed to it. Which was great, because his help was insanely helpful and they would never have gotten as far as they did without him. He was more than just a replacement for Silverlake – he was vastly better than her and Zorian was honestly kind of sorry they couldn’t recruit him to work on the time loop exit project as well. With his help, their odds would have improved immensely.

Alas, the idea of informing him about the time loop was still as foolish as it always had been.

"Even if Red Robe had left the time loop thanks to a deal with Panaxeth, he still had to find a way to make his temporary marker last past the six month time limit," Zorian told Zach when they were discussing the topic at one point.

"You think it wasn’t Panaxeth who helped him modify that?" Zach asked.

"Maybe it did, but I doubt the primordial actually did any modification itself. It may have given Red Robe clues and instructions, but he still needed to find someone to do that for him."

"And you think that someone was Quatach-Ichl," Zach guessed.

"Yes," Zorian confirmed. "Yet, if Quatach-Ichl helped Red Robe acquire a permanent marker, why would he not acquire one himself?"

"Perhaps he couldn’t," offer Zach. "I mean, the fact that temporary markers do not work on people for six restarts after the previous temporary marker runs out clearly indicates it’s not the marker that does the counting. It’s the Sovereign Gate and the Guardian of the Threshold."

"So?" Zorian asked.

"So that means modifying a temporary marker has to be done before the Sovereign Gate processes it in some way. In all likelihood, that means any change to them must be made before the restart in which they gained the marker ends. We know from your example that the Guardian can only do certain things at the end of the restart, and this is probably one of them. This would also explain why we never managed to figure out a way to modify them that worked. The moment that first restart ended the chance was lost, and we never even realized it."

"Ah," Zorian said. That did make a lot of sense… "So you think Quatach-Ichl was already a temporary looper for a while before Red Robe entered?"

"I don’t know. I’m just throwing the idea out there, I guess," Zach said with a shrug. "What do you think happened?"

"I think maybe Quatach-Ichl didn’t even want to leave the time loop, even if he found out about it," Zorian said. "I mean, definitely not through a method Red Robe and Silverlake used. Entering into a death pact with a primordial? Not a chance. And physically leaving on your own is very hard. I don’t think even Quatach-Ichl could have pulled it off, considering the amount of effort we had to put into it. Perhaps he simply made a deal with Red Robe, similar to what I have with Xvim, Kael and the others. Once he gets out, he gives Quatach-Ichl a mountain of notes and other information, and in exchange he helps modify Red Robe’s marker."

"He could have still demanded a temporary marker of his own and modified that," Zach pointed out. "Just in case, you know."

"Yeah, I guess," Zorian said after a while. "I don’t know. Maybe it’s as you say, and he just couldn’t. I could see Panaxeth giving Red Robe a very specific solution tailored for him alone. It probably doesn’t want anyone getting out without making a deal with him."

Their interaction with the Cult of the Dragon Below was very adversarial at first. For one thing, they had kidnapped them and blackmailed them into working with them, so it was inevitable they were not too enthusiastic about cooperating. It also didn’t help that Zorian evacuated all the shifters out of the city and informed the cult leadership that no child sacrifice would be allowed in their attempt to free Panaxeth from his prison. That led to a lot of shouting and even a brief exchange of combat spells.

However, the cult leaders would ultimately see the light when Zach and Zorian showed them the Sovereign Gate. They did not explain to the cultists what the object exactly did, but they did tell them it was a divine artifact that contained some of the essence of Panaxeth itself… and could thus be used as a key to open Panaxeth’s prison. A much better key than the shifter blood essence they originally planned to use for the purpose, too.

Though their description was deceptive, the basic facts were entirely true – within the reality of the time loop, the Sovereign Gate could very much be used as a key to open Panaxeth’s prison. In fact, using the Sovereign Gate was the key part of their plan to exit the time loop. This had been true while they had Silverlake’s cooperation and it was true now.

Zorian had been a little worried that the cultists would figure out too much if given access to the Sovereign Gate, but thankfully that never happened. They were overjoyed with it, but only because it was a better, fancier key to releasing Panaxeth out of its prison. They never realized what was truly going on inside of it.

Considering it was a divine artifact, and that those were notoriously hard to figure out, Zorian probably shouldn’t have been surprised at that.

In any case, their plans went off flawlessly. Better than they could have hoped, even. They had dug up a massive underground facility, reshaped the entire local geomantic web to fuel its creation, and then surrounded the imperial orb with layers upon layers of complicated wards and barriers made out of extremely expensive materials. The cost of the whole project was enough to bankrupt a small country and would give even a major nation like Eldemar and Falkrinea pause if they had to pay for it. By the end of it, even Quatach-Ichl seemed to be getting a little uneasy at the amount of resources and effort being put into this thing.

It didn’t matter though, because he stayed true to his word and the project was finished on time. Six days before the end of the restart, the improved Black Room was done. A large throng of people – time loopers, cult leaders and the more enthusiastic of the kidnapped researchers – piled on into the imperial orb and then the time dilation was activated.

They would spend the next five months inside the imperial orb. Outside, a single day would pass.

Quatach-Ichl did not join them in the orb, despite helping them make it. This was smart of him, because Zach and Zorian would have killed him the moment the orb was isolated from the outside world and stolen his crown again. Zorian wasn’t sure whether Quatach-Ichl could have escaped back to his phylactery if he was killed inside the palace orb, but even if he could they wouldn’t care. The important thing was that he could not escape when overpowered inside the orb, and that having him inside for the full five months was too much of a risk. The cult leaders were… manageable. Someone like Quatach-Ichl wasn’t.

In any case, the next five months would consist of improving everyone’s skills so they could help with the final exit plan, manufacturing the necessary ward stones and blueprints to prepare the terrain, and so on. It would be a bit of a challenge to hide the true meaning of all the preparations from the cult leaders and the like, but Zorian was not opposed to simply killing them if they ended up revealing too much to them, so whatever.

Zorian had another thing he wanted to do, though. Something he wanted to keep hidden from most people… including Zach.

Thus, he gathered most of the aranea loopers, plus Xvim and Daimen, and brought them to one of the isolated corners of the orb dimension for a talk.

"What a strange group you have gathered," Xvim remarked. "It seems you are still not satisfied with your mind magic skills, if I am reading the situation correctly."

"Seriously?" Daimen complained. "Aren’t you good enough at that, already?"

"You can never get good enough at mind magic," one of the aranea responded.

"Indeed," Zorian said. "It’s my best skill, and it’s good to keep working on those. However, I didn’t bring you here to work on my general mind magic skills. What I want… is to figure out a way to get past the Mind Blank spell and target a person with mind magic anyway."

A look of realization entered everyone’s eyes. Even the aranea – their body language was a little hard to read but Zorian had gotten a feeling for it by now.

Then they all got to work.

The escape attempt had to happen at the end of the month, on the day of the Summer Festival. The reasoning for this was identical to the one the Ibasans and the cultists used to launch their invasion at that particular moment in time – this was the peak of the planetary alignment, when dimensionalism magic was at its strongest.

When the group left the imperial orb, only five days remained until the deadline. This was not much, but it was enough to make the necessary preparations. The time magic research facility was completely repurposed into a part of the exit ritual. Large sections of the Hole were covered in carved spell formula and embedded with strange metallic ward stones. The cultists they had spent five months training in dimensionalism and divinations had analyzed Panaxeth’s prison and shared their results with the group. They seemed honestly grateful to Zach and Zorian for the help they had given them, which made Zorian feel just a little bit guilty about intending to utterly betray them in the end. Not enough for him to do anything differently, but still.

Sadly, the final plan they had agreed upon had some unfortunate details. The original plan was to use Panaxeth’s prison as a bridge, opening a dimensional gate that would connect a spot in the time loop with the same spot in the real world. That plan was now largely unworkable. Silverlake had been the only one who knew how to interact with the primordial’s prison with sufficient finesse to make that possible. Despite their best efforts in trying to develop that skill in some of their people, they had failed to duplicate her feats. It did not help that they obviously could not experiment on the primordial prison itself while inside the imperial orb – they could only work on their general dimensionalism skills and try to guess what was necessary to interact with it properly.

Still, while the original plan was no longer possible, they did have an alternative. It was just that this plan required them to crack open Panaxeth’s prison and then sacrifice the imperial orb to serve as a bridge they needed to connect the two realities.

There were two problems with this. The first was that it required them to destabilize the primordial’s prison and make a crack in it – something that usually triggered a premature end to the restart and would allow Panaxeth to extend its influence outside the prison while they attempted to form the bridge. This would be solved by enclosing the area with multiple layers of dimensional membranes, so that even after breaching its prison, Panaxeth would not be truly free. They weren’t totally sure it would work, but it was the best idea they had and the theory was sound. Even if it worked, though, it would only stop the restart from ending immediately – it would do nothing to stop Panaxeth from rampaging about.

The other was that using the imperial orb that way meant they couldn’t take it with them to the real world. It would have to stay behind to form a path for them, which would sharply limit the amount of things they could bring with them from the time loop as well as result in the total loss of all of the research notes and blueprints Zorian had stored in its memory bank.

That was… painful, to say the least. There was no other choice, however. The imperial orb was the only pocket dimension reinforced with divine power that they knew of. It was the only thing they knew of that could withstand the dimensional stresses involved in the procedure. Everything else would break in seconds.

Deciding what to bring with them and what to leave behind was stressful and led to a lot of arguments, but somehow they managed to cut their possessions down to a manageable level.

Days passed in a flash, until there was no more time. The Summer Festival was upon them, and the invasion was about to begin. Zach and Zorian had meant to kill all the cult leaders the day before, to make sure they wouldn’t interfere with their work, but their unlikely allies surprised them by graciously agreeing to step aside of their own free will. The official reason was that they had figured out that their group planned to release the primordial too, and that thus there was no need for them to get involved. Zorian did not believe that for a second, of course. The leadership of the cult wanted to control the primordial, not just release it. Moreover, Quatach-Ichl was never very far from the cult leaders these days, making direct moves against them impossible.

Reluctantly, they decided to let the matter drop. Hopefully the lich and the cultists would be too busy fighting the city to try and sabotage their operation. They had done their best to covertly prepare the city and its defenders for the upcoming invasion so the attackers should have their hands full in that regard. They simply made the last round of preparations and then settled down to wait.

Everything was ready.

Zorian turned to Zach.

"If this fails, I’m dead," he told him.

Zach shifted uncomfortably.

"The Guardian may have been lying for some reason," he said. "Perhaps you will wake up at the start of the next restart and–"

"Maybe," said Zorian, cutting him off. He really doubted it, though. "However, it’s best to plan for things not being so convenient. Anyway, if everything fails and we all die, it’s all up to you. You’re our last and only hope."

"I… I guess," Zach sighed, looking really pained at the idea of him getting out of this thing alone. "Look, I know this probably sounds hollow… but if anything happens to you, I promise I will take care of your original self, alright?"

"That actually does make me feel somewhat better," Zorian said. "Come on. It’s starting."

The ritual was taking place inside the Hole, on a floating platform. There was a raised dais in the center, on which the Sovereign Gate stood. It struck Zorian that this was a very similar setup to the one the cult had used for their ritual. They really had ended up supplanting their role in a way, hadn’t they?

Of course, the real setup their group was using was much more extensive than what the cultists had used in the past. Though the main ritual grounds consisted of this one floating platform, the supporting mechanisms actually extended throughout the entire local underworld. Additionally, the entire space around them was enclosed in several layers of dimensional membranes that isolated the place from the outside world as much as possible. There would be no plucky trio of mages simply flying up to them in a sphere of white force to disrupt the whole thing from within, like Zach and Zorian had done to the cultists in one of the previous restarts.

The entire group arranged itself into a series of three concentric circles. Zach, Zorian, Daimen and Xvim were at the very center, surrounding the Sovereign Gate. They were the people most skilled in dimensionalism, and thus the most crucial for the effort. Around them were dozens of people who had enough skills to contribute, but not enough to take on the heavy burden that the main four were responsible for. Finally, there was the rest of the group who couldn’t really help the procedure work, and could only stay back and pray for everyone’s success. They were here only because once the area had been enclosed in dimensional membranes, no one could get in without disrupting everything and causing the ritual to fail. Thus, if they wanted to get them outside, they had to be present inside while the ritual took place.

After some shouting and pushing, everyone was in their assigned position and (hopefully) knew what to do. They started casting.

For the first five minutes, nothing much happened. The air above the platform warped and twisted like hot summer air, but nothing more than that occurred. The group had to be exceptionally careful about their spell work and timing, and that meant work was bound to be slow. Still, everything was proceeding well so f–

The walls of the Hole shook, sending dust and pebbles everywhere and causing the inscribed spell formula in the walls to flare and flicker with an ominous blue light. A deep rumbling sound emanated from somewhere in the distance, like a growl of a titanic beast.

Crap. What the hell was going on outside? What were Quatach-Ichl and the cultists doing?

"Stay focused!" Xvim warned. "We are at a critical–"

Another tremor, this one even stronger, shook the entire place and everything suddenly went to hell. The shimmering, controlled breach they were working towards quickly spun out of control, and a pitch black, irregular crack suddenly manifested itself in the air around them.

"Shit!" Zach swore. "Suppress it! Suppress it!"

But it was too late. A swarm of dark brown tentacles, ropelike and covered in thorns, rushed out of the crack and sent everyone scattering out of their positions.

The crack widened, revealing a giant, three-lobed, inhuman eye lurking behind the dimensional barrier, and more tentacles rushed out to confront them. These were thicker, and had rather human-like hands attached at the end.

Though things had gone badly, all was not lost. They had made the ritual with certain tolerances, and this was still a manageable outcome. Quickly, many of the people standing around in the third circle of the ritual rushed forwards and started fighting the tentacles. People like Kyron and Taiven had no skills with which to help the ritual itself, but they had plenty of combat power and no other duties to distract them. They fearlessly charged into the invading primordial mass, recklessly burning through their mana to keep it away from the Zorian and the others.

As for Zach and Zorian, they were busy suppressing the breach and could offer very little help. Should their attention lapse for even a second, Panaxeth would overwhelm them before they could blink. They frantically dodged the flailing tentacles, shaping and stabilizing the breach into something manageable.

Dimly, Zorian was aware that one of the hands that got severed in half by Taiven suddenly grew legs and claws and flung itself at her. Taiven ended up tackled at the ground, unable to cast much of anything. Kyron managed to blast the thing off of her, but she had to be dragged off to the side, effectively out of the fight.

She was also bleeding heavily, leaving a thick trail of blood as she was dragged to the edge of the platform. Zorian had no idea if she was going to live, and couldn’t really afford to check at the moment.

Not far from there, one of the aranea tried to block one of the thin, thorny tentacles with a force shield but found her defenses to be lacking. The tentacle punched through her shield and swiftly wrapped itself around her torso several times. That’s when they found out that the thorns weren’t just very sharp, but were also thin and bladed like a razor. The high-pitched scream of the aranea cut off quickly as the thorns effortlessly sliced through her exoskeleton and turned her into a mutilated corpse.

The tentacle then picked up the corpse and started waving it around like a bloody flail, sending blood and viscera everywhere. Some of the mages panicked or flinched when the aranean blood splattered all over them, even if no actual damage was done, and their efforts to keep the breach in check started to fail.

"Damn it," swore Zorian, reaching into his jacket pocket and removing a handful of steel spheres densely covered in spell formula. He had been hoping to save these for later. He needed them later. But if he didn’t use this now, they were done for.

He flung the spheres at the rift above and they spontaneously aligned themselves around it in a quickly a rotating ring before starting to glow. The primordial’s tentacles reacted quickly, switching directions and trying to tear the sphere formation apart, but thankfully the rest of the group immediately realized they could not let that happen. A swarm of multi-colored rays, bullets, and more exotic projectiles intercepted the tentacles, halting their charge for a moment.

A moment was enough. The spheres erupted into blinding white light, blinding everyone for a moment, and then the rift abruptly shrunk. Some of the tentacles, cut off from the source of their mass by the shrinkage, fell from the sky, crashing onto the platform with a large thud.

Their relief was short-lived, however, since the tentacles soon started twitching and bubbling like boiling water, before starting to merge into an ovoid, chrysalis-like mass.

Alanic was the first to act, sending streams of white-hot flames at the forming cocoon, and then everyone joined in. However, the structure seemed to have developed some kind of resistance to the spells they had used on the tentacles thus far, because it was stubbornly resisting attempts to eradicate it.

Deep within it, some horrible shape rapidly began to form.

And the Sovereign Gate spontaneously started glowing white, a silhouette of the familiar form of the Guardian of the Threshold forming right above it.

"Shit…" Zorian couldn’t help but mumble.

"Use the orb," Xvim said.

"But–" Daimen protested.

"We have no choice," Xvim interrupted. "We have no time. It has to be now."

After a moment of indecision, Daimen reached to his side and threw the imperial orb at the crack. Zach, Daimen, Zorian and Xvim quickly started casting layers upon layers of spells on it, trying to integrate it into Panaxeth’s prison like they had intended.

It wasn’t going well enough, so Zorian reached for more of the items he prepared for this – a collection of metal tablets, several staves made out of alchemically-treated wood, and a box of several hundred marbles, each of which contained a three-dimensional spell formula made out of metal wire. He sacrificed it all in succession and even burned some of his life force to make his spells hit harder. He was fairly sure he noticed Zach, Xvim and Daimen doing the same, burning their life to make sure the fusion worked.

They succeeded. The imperial orb pulsed three times with translucent waves of rainbow light before pulling the pitch black rift into itself. The crack in the sky disappeared, but the orb seemed to pull in the space around it still. The air warped and rippled, forming a pitch black sphere above the orb, its surface rippling like water. Around it, a smoky grey torus burst into existence, crackling with multicolored energies. Then another, and then another, until three grey tori revolved around the pitch black sphere that had suddenly grown perfectly still and featureless.

The exit. It was ready!

Unfortunately, that’s when the glowing form of the Guardian of the Threshold finished materializing. It did not speak a word, simply raising its hand at the group and releasing a thick, blinding beam of white energy at them.

The beam did not even cross half of the distance towards them before it suddenly split into more than a hundred thinner, but equally bright beams.

Zach and Zorian’s simulacrums, previously held in reserve, sprang into action. So did the combat golems Zorian made for the occasion. But the beams were fast and each one swerved and pivoted in the air like a living thing, tracking its chosen target. Hastily erected defenses did nothing to stop them, and Zorian was pained to see Ilsa, Nora, and two of the aranea killed on the spot when the beams hit them.

The exit was right there, open and ready, yet four people had died so close to their salvation.

Some people fired a counter-attack at the spectral form of the Guardian, but the entity did not attempt to dodge or shield itself from the attacks in any way. Every attack that reached it simply sank into its glowing form and disappeared. There was no indication that the Guardian had suffered any damage from the attacks, or even that it had noticed them.

Damn it, they needed to start the evacuation now! Zorian started directing his simulacrums to start the preparations, but that’s when the primordial chrysalis from before suddenly exploded, a large, vaguely humanoid beast bursting out of it. It had four arms. A three-eyed, skeletal head stood attached to its shoulders through a long, flexible neck. Its tail was extremely long and thin, and ended with a hand-like appendage. Glossy, chitinous carapace covered it, studded with thin, razor-like spikes.

It roared horribly, its sound incredibly loud and grating… and then it dropped on all six of its main limbs and charged straight at the center of the platform, where Zorian and the others were located. Anyone who tried to get in its way was flung aside like a rag doll and every spell that hit it was resisted with little to show for it.

The glowing form of the Guardian raised its hand again, another beam sparkling on its fingers.

And then, to add a final insult to it all, the entire area rocked and shook as a series of loud booms erupted from somewhere above.

Zorian’s heart sank. There was no mistaking it. Someone was attacking their ritual grounds from the outside.

Probably Quatach-Ichl and the cultists.

Damn it! How did they–

No. No, that was a silly thing to ask. He had to focus on the now. He had to–

The Guardian fired another white beam of death. It once again flowered into hundreds of smaller beams, and this time they were not capable of minimizing the effects. Zorian joined his simulacrums in blocking as many as he could, but it was not enough. He watched, horrified, as Kael tried to shield his little daughter from one of the beams with his body. The beam drilled straight through them, killing them both on the spot.

Kyron managed to block the beam, but that made him too distracted to deal with the primordial beast running up to him from behind. Its massive, clawed hand swiped across him, shattering through his hastily erected shield and cleaving him in half before continuing its relentless advance.

Another series of explosions sounded from just outside the ritual grounds and the spell formula that stabilized the exit to the time loop flickered dangerously.

A small, almost imperceptible crack appeared on the imperial orb floating just beneath the exit. It could no longer handle the strain of maintaining the bridge to the real world.

Somewhere on the edge of the platform, Zorian could feel Taiven’s soul suddenly wink out. She probably bled to death while everyone was too busy fighting for their life to tend to her wounds.

Suddenly, it dawned to Zorian that they were all going to die here. They were so close, they had practically won, and yet–

"Truthfully, I think I’d always known it would end this way," Daimen suddenly said with a small sigh.

He took a knife out of his pocket and ruthlessly slashed at his wrists.

"Daimen! What are you doing!?" Zorian screeched at him.

"You have to live," Daimen told him, his hands trembling as he went through a complicated series of gestures with them, his wrists heavily dripping blood. "It’s fine if I die, but you have to live. Don’t let it all be in vain. It can’t!"

Suddenly, he thrust his bloody hands towards the collapsing exit in the air, pouring every shred of his life force into the stabilization wards. The cracks on the imperial orb stopped spreading, the black surface of the exit calmed down into its smooth, peaceful state, and the spell formula lining the walls stopped fluctuating for the moment.

Xvim watched the scene for a moment before focusing on Zorian.

"Go," he said. "Zach and I will keep the exit stable while you pass through."

"Zach doesn’t need this, but you–" Zorian protested.

"Go!" Xvim shouted at him. "Zach cannot keep this stable by himself. Go now!"

He… could do that, yes. He could go through by himself, abandoning everyone to their fate. But that…

He glanced at the others, desperately fighting to keep the primordial beast away from them and keeping the Guardian of the Threshold busy with other targets. They knew the exit was there. They could have just dropped everything and made a mad dash at the exit in hopes that some of them would make it. Wouldn’t that be the smartest choice, individually?

Yet none of them had made that choice.

Steeling his heart, Zorian stopped focusing on the maintenance of the exit, handing over his part of the burden to Xvim and Zach, who visibly struggled under the increased strain. He then crouched and jumped, casting a quick flight spell and rushing straight at the exit.

The primordial beast screeched in anger, increasing its pace. The Guardian suddenly teleported in front of Zorian, blocking his path and forcing him to evade and block another series of white beams that chased after him, pivoting in the air and curving their trajectories to keep him in their sights. Some of the other loopers helped him out, ignoring their own safety to block some of the beams with their own spells. The ceiling shook again, this time more severely than before, but Daimen’s final sacrifice had allowed things to keep working for now.

He was only inches from the exit when the primordial beast suddenly opened its massive bestial mouth and fired some kind of serrated bony spike straight at his chest.

He was practically a spent force by this point, and could do nothing to stop the spike from slamming straight into his back and passing straight through his chest.

An explosion of blood and viscera erupted out of him, his whole chest a ruined mess. Perhaps it was just him losing all sensation as death took him, but it felt to him that everything suddenly went quiet for a moment as his flight spell failed and his body began to fall to the ground, trailing blood behind it.

His wound was too serious. He was dead for sure.

Closing his eyes, he initiated the final contingency, separating his soul from his body. A complicated soul spell he had always kept running in the background suddenly activated, allowing him to maintain consciousness in soul form. Without hesitation, he abandoned his dying form and rushed straight into the exit in front of him.

Before either the primordial beast or the Guardian of the Threshold could stop him, he was already through, following invisible paths that would lead him to the real world.

As a soul, his ability to perceive the real world was highly limited. He followed invisible lines of space and time, racing through a tunnel he could dimly perceive in front of him. Most of his ability to navigate in this place came from the fact he had absorbed the dimensional perception of the tunneler toad and gained a considerable amount of proficiency with it in the five months he had spent in the imperial orb.

Yet, that same ability was also threatening to undo everything he had accomplished. He had bound that ability to his mana reserves and his body, but his body was no more. One of the very pillars that were supposed to anchor the ability to him was gone, and his mana reserves shuddered and churned, threatening to destabilize. Should that happen, he would lose all ability to cast spells or even direct his mana. Everything would still fail in the end. He had to hold on for a little while longer. He focused tightly on keeping control over his mana reserves, even as he tried to navigate to the exit in the real world.

Dimly, he felt the tunnel start to collapse behind him. Apparently Xvim and Zach had finally lost their struggle to keep the passage open. Nobody except Zorian had gone through, as far as he could tell.

He drove himself to travel faster.

Finally he was out! He could feel the space open up around him, the tunnel ending. For a while he was disoriented, confused about what he had to do. His mind was fuzzy – he had never spent this much time in soul form, especially not with destabilizing mana reserves. However, he eventually remembered what he had to do. He had to track down his old body.

Fortunately, that was not so difficult. He had no idea where the exit had deposited him, exactly, but he and his original body shared a certain bond with each other.

It was hard to cast much as a pure soul, but Zorian could do enough to craft himself a set of ghostly hands. From that point, everything became easy. A couple of divinations to lock down on the location of his old self, a couple of quick teleports to enter his room and he was there.

His old self was sleeping, blissfully unaware of the invasion. Soul Zorian did not hesitate. His soul form plunged straight into his old self’s chest, causing the boy to gasp before all his body locked up as the two souls started to fight for the ownership of the body.

Maybe it was quick. Maybe it was slow. Zorian had never fought a soul battle or possessed someone’s body before. What he did know was that his old self never had a chance. From the moment he attacked, the ultimate outcome was never in question.

He opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling of his room.

His room. Yes. Definitely his room.

He rose into a sitting position and looked around. It was night. He thought he would maybe wake up when Kirielle came to jump on top of him, but then he remembered that the time loop technically began much earlier than that.

He placed his right palm in front of him. A ghostly orb of white light bobbed up and down just above it.

The soul of his old self.

He stared at it for a full five minutes, trying to decide what to do with it. He had considered the issue before, of course, but now that he was actually here…

After a while, he closed his palm around the soul, causing it to fade away and move on to the afterlife.

To do anything else, seemed… cruel.

Then he jumped out of bed, took a look around his dark, silent room and cracked his knuckles.

It was time to get to work.

92. The Scramble

In the months leading up to their disastrous exit from the time loop, Zorian and the other members of the group had entertained many different outcomes and how each of them would reflect on what they would have to do immediately after crossing over into the real world. This included the possibility of having to cross over in soul form, much like Zorian had ended up doing in the end. Theoretically, this meant that Zorian already knew what to do and how to arrange his priorities.

In practice, things weren’t so simple. While he had succeeded in leaving the time loop and possessing his old body, the process had a critical flaw.

Their theorizing had assumed that, if Zorian executed everything correctly, he would be at his top form upon seizing his body. After all, he would possess a body that was flawlessly matched to his soul, so there shouldn’t be any rejection issues that usually plagued possession attempts. Having crossed over as a soul meant losing all the physical resources and information storage they had planned to bring, but at least his magic would be fully intact.

In reality, he didn’t even have that.

The problem was the dimensional ability of the tunneler toad he had anchored to himself in the time loop. His body may have been perfectly matched to his soul, but it wasn’t the body to which he had anchored the ability to. Without the life force portion of the anchor, the part located in his mana reserves couldn’t persist for long, either. He was fortunate he had managed to prevent its collapse before successfully possessing his old body, or else he’d be dead right now and all the sacrifices the others had made would have been for nothing. However, once he established full control of his body, the ability anchor in his mana reserves finally gave out and unraveled completely.

Unraveling a permanent enhancement like that was not a small matter. It caused him no pain, and he would not be permanently crippled by any means, but his mana reserves would be in utter turmoil for the next four to five days.

An eternity, considering time was of the essence.

Standing completely still in the darkness of his room, Zorian closed his eyes and sensed his mana again with a more critical eye. It was bad… but not unmanageable. A regular mage would have been completely crippled by the chaotic, unruly nature of his current mana reserves, but Zorian had honed his shaping skills to virtual perfection. Plus, he had experienced something similar before, when Quatach-Ichl had inflicted grievous soul damage, so he had experience in how to handle these sorts of things.

Slowly and carefully, he waved his hands in the air in front of him, softly muttering a spell chant. After some time, a single flawless simulacrum materialized in front of him.

The simulacrum did not speak or wait for Zorian to give him a command. He knew what was asked from it. He simply walked back to the bed, lied down, closed his eyes, and focused completely on calming down the raging mana reserves they both shared.

Zorian breathed a sigh of relief as he felt his mana reserves immediately stabilize into a more manageable form. Good. So long as one of his simulacrums focused all their attention on stabilizing them, his mana reserves would remain usable. It wasn’t the same as him being in top form, but it would do for now.

His spellcasting restored to a usable condition, he immediately threw himself into the next task before him: confirming that Zach had left the time loop and waking him up before Red Robe had a chance to assassinate him in his sleep. A critical task that would normally require him to drop everything else and rush to Cyoria, but which might be achievable through faster and cheaper methods.

Quickly rummaging through his old school supplies for alchemical reagents and deconstructing a bunch of old items scattered around his room for necessary materials, Zorian constructed a simple ritual circle on the floor of his room. He then spent almost a minute performing a special long-range ritual spell… one that tapped into his marker. The same marker that he had shared with Zach.

There was no guarantee that Zach still had the marker on his soul, of course, even if he had successfully left the time loop. Unlike Zorian, Zach was supposed to leave the time loop the normal way for a Controller. That is to say, the Guardian of the Threshold would perform the transfer. For all Zorian knew, this process may have involved erasing the marker, since it was no longer necessary.

However, Zorian had a suspicion that the marker was definitely going to stay embedded in Zach’s soul. A suspicion that turned out to be correct when the ritual finished, and the information from it rushed into Zorian’s mind. He could feel the existence of the second marker in the direction of Cyoria, shining like a star in the darkness.

He breathed a sigh of relief. He had made it out. There was no reason why he wouldn’t have, but so many things had gone wrong that Zorian did not dare take anything for granted.

He then reached out to Zach over the faint connection provided by the ritual and their identical markers. His mana reserves dropped like a stone. Bridging the vast distances between Cirin and Cyoria was hard and costly, even for such a small thing. Without the two identical markers connecting them, it would have been entirely impossible.

Just before he was about to run out of mana, he succeeded in touching Zach’s soul. It was just a light brush, but it was enough. A sharp spiritual jolt shook his soul, shocking him awake.

After observing things for a second to make sure he had really succeeded, Zorian broke the connection and stood up. He couldn’t actually talk to Zach through a spell like that, so there was no point in burning through his mana to keep the link going. They would talk more once they actually met.

He waited for a while till his mana reserves recovered and then cast the simulacrum spell three more times. Like the first simulacrums, these ones did not bother speaking either. There was no point. Zorian’s connection with his simulacrum was very strong, intertwining them on both mental and spiritual levels. Though they still had their own individual minds, they were constantly exchanging thoughts with Zorian and each other, much of it on a purely unconscious level with no need to expend effort or concentration to make it happen.

Four simulacrums. This was the most he could manage at the moment while still remaining effective. He would be casting a lot of magic in the near future, so he had to keep his mana regeneration rate at acceptable levels.

He considered what to do next for a moment, mentally bouncing ideas back and forth between his simulacrums. While they talked, they silently wandered around the house and rummaged through his belongings, gathering materials. They didn’t have too much time to spend on making equipment, but some basic spell aids and disguises were a must.

The chance that Red Robe and Silverlake would target his family immediately after exiting the time loop was low, in his opinion. Those two had more pressing issues to tackle for now, and Cirin was far from Cyoria. Red Robe might not even know about Zorian and where he lived, or else he would have knocked Zorian out of the loop before leaving it. Silverlake obviously did know, but she and Red Robe presumably did not know each other before now and would struggle to establish trust.

Nonetheless, Zorian knew he couldn’t just leave his family undefended. He had to either move them to a secure place or leave a simulacrum behind to protect them.

Gathering them up and moving them to some distant area was the safest option. The most responsible option. However, that would be a lengthy and mana expensive task, and many critical tasks would have to be postponed until it was done. He couldn’t make that choice. Xvim… Alanic… all the temporary loopers that had died to keep the exit open instead of trying to save their own lives… they had made that choice because they trusted him to look after everyone’s interests once outside. He couldn’t just blow everything off in order to make sure his family was perfectly protected.

Plus, he was ultimately a bit selfish. Evacuating the house would require him to inform his parents about what was happening or use mental compulsions on them. He didn’t want to do either. He wanted some semblance of normalcy to remain between them for now. If possible, he wanted to just wait for them to leave for Koth as they normally did. In just a few days, his parents would be on a ship at sea and all but unreachable. The problem of their safety was ultimately self-solving.

It was unreasonable, perhaps, but he still held on to a tiny sliver of hope that all this could be solved without informing the whole world.

He shook his head, forcibly banishing his idle thoughts and fears for the future. It wasn’t the time. Just as it wasn’t the time to be shaken by the death of people that had been working with him on this project for more than a year. He’d worry about that later.

A little while later, all the preparations were finished and he was back in his room. He glanced at the simulacrum to his left and his copy silently nodded at him before wandering off to secure the house. Cirin was not a magically potent area, and the materials he had at his disposal left a lot to be desired, but it should be enough. He would have to appropriate a fair portion of the family silverware, though…

For a second, Zorian stared at the two remaining simulacrums in front of him. Four simulacrums, but he could really only use two of them. So inefficient. Still, one had to work with what they had, not what they wished they had. He silently told the two to get ready, and then all three of them started to cast a powerful teleportation spell. Moments afterward, they were enveloped by a ripple in space and disappeared.

Lying on the bed, the first simulacrum did not even twitch at their departure. He was wholly consumed in his task, knowing that if his attention lapsed even slightly over the next couple of hours, it could spell disaster for everything they were trying to accomplish. Having their mana reserves suddenly turn chaotic in the middle of a critical moment could kill the original or dispel one of his fellow simulacrums before they could accomplish their goals. Fortunately, Zorian’s research into mental enhancements had taught him how to assume some very useful states of mind, or else he likely wouldn’t have been able to maintain focus over such long periods of time.

The final iteration of the month had not started auspiciously, but Zorian and his simulacrums were determined to make it work anyway.

Cyoria was fairly easy to teleport to, since there was a teleport beacon placed in the middle of the city. Though the real purpose of the construction was to redirect all incoming teleportation into one specific area, so that they could be more easily monitored and policed, it also acted as a sort of lighthouse for teleportation magic. This meant that while Red Robe and Silverlake would find it very inconvenient and mana expensive to travel to a small rural town like Cirin, it was relatively easy and cheap for Zorian to teleport himself towards Cyoria.

The moment he and his two simulacrums had arrived into the city, they each split off to pursue their own tasks. For simulacrum number three, that meant checking up on Veyers. After all, there was a good chance that Red Robe was actually Veyers, in which case he would probably try to get his old self out of the line of fire as soon as possible. Probably. Whatever the case, visiting Jornak’s place to see what was happening there was of very high importance in Zorian’s mind.

The simulacrum moved rapidly through the streets of Cyoria, using his own two feet to move around instead of wasting mana on teleportation. He wore a featureless white mask over his face and his other features were hidden with heavy clothing and layers of privacy wards. The original and the other simulacrums similarly hid their identity. It was likely they would come face-to-face with Red Robe at some point, and there was no point in making things easy for him by openly identifying themselves as Zorian Kazinski. Silverlake knew who Zorian was, of course, but she was also an untrusting bitch, and it might take a while for her and Red Robe to set aside their differences and start working together. If Zorian could keep his identity secret for a few extra hours with his disguise, he would not consider this a wasted effort.

As he approached Jornak’s house, the simulacrum grew more cautious. He slowed his pace, circling the house wearily. He knew how to bypass the house wards, of course. He’d done it dozens of times, by now. However, if Red Robe was really here, he had likely modified or upgraded those just in case. It’s what Zorian himself would have done and there was no reason to assume Red Robe had been any less cautious.

His paranoia soon proved itself well-warranted. As he studied the house wards, he noticed they had been subtly changed. He was lucky, or maybe unlucky, because this was pretty damning proof of Red Robe’s activity.

Five minutes later, the simulacrum managed to get past the defenses and entered the house. What greeted him was eerie silence. The house was dark and abandoned, and it only took a few moments for the simulacrum to realize that both Veyers and Jornak were gone. Walking around the place, the simulacrum could see numerous signs of frantic activity scattered around the place: closets and cabinets flung open, drawers ripped out of their sockets, piles of clothes and small items scattered all over the floor…

It wasn’t just that Veyers and Jornak were gone – they had gathered up anything of real worth from the house before leaving. This was an evacuation, not a kidnapping.

The simulacrum cast a number of divination spells, trying to see if he could get some clues about where the two had gone, but failed to find anything. That was to be expected, though – it would have been shockingly incompetent of Red Robe to leave a trail behind him as he evacuated the place.

The simulacrum stood in the living room of the abandoned house, fiddling with a small white statuette of a dragon that he found on the floor, lost in thought for a while. Did this prove that Veyers was Red Robe? Well, not exactly… but it did prove that he was connected to him somehow. Jornak was also gone, which could mean a lot of things. Maybe the lawyer was the real Red Robe. Admittedly, the Red Robe that Zorian met in the past was roughly his own height and thus a poor match for Jornak, who was a fully grown man, but that could be accomplished easily through shapeshifting. Or maybe the time-looping Veyers just appreciated what the older man had done for his old self and so had taken him to safety as well. Whatever the case, they were all gone now, and there was little point in staying here when there were so many other things to be done.

He thought about torching the whole place out of spite, but it was better not to escalate things for now. Red Robe clearly cared a lot for these two, so burning down Jornak’s place might genuinely anger him. Sure, they were already irreconcilable enemies, but doing this would make things personal. He might go after Zorian’s friends and family sooner than he otherwise would have.

Before he moved on, the simulacrum quickly contacted the original and the other copy to find out what was happening on their end. They were both currently fighting and couldn’t talk much. Should he go help them? No… the whole point of creating so many simulacrums was to pursue many different goals simultaneously. He would just have to trust the other two would be able to complete their task on their own.

Instead he went north, towards Knyazov Dveri.

It was time to see what Silverlake was up to.

While simulacrum number three was checking out Jornak’s house, number four had rushed into the tunnels beneath Cyoria to contact the aranea living beneath the city.

Once, the Cyorian web had been his closest allies. They had taught him how to control his telepathic abilities, helped him make sense of the invasion, and provided a semblance of companionship in a world where most things were painfully short-lived. Spear of Resolve, the aranean matriarch, had intended to betray him in the end… but he was still devastated when they were all erased out of the time loop.

Part of his desire to see them as soon as possible was definitely emotional. Everything he knew about the time loop suggested they would be alive and well out here in the real world, but he had to see that with his own eyes. In his mind, he couldn’t help but draw parallels between the aranea and the temporary loopers that had sacrificed themselves so that he could cross over into the real world. He needed some good news right now.

However, there was also a practical side to his visit. Zach and Zorian were quite capable of dismantling the entire invasion in a matter of days, halting it in its tracks… but that was without Red Robe’s interference. Plus, who could forget Silverlake was also working against them? Thus, the idea of just quickly shutting down the invasion was untenable. However, this did not mean they would just sit back and do nothing about them. If they wanted to do serious damage to the invaders, the best time to do so was right now, at the very beginning of the month, before Red Robe and Silverlake had a chance to warn all their allies about the danger.

They had to move quickly, and that meant recruiting helpers… and the Cyorian aranea were one of the few powerful groups that Zorian felt they could win over to their side very quickly.

Apparently Red Robe agreed with his assessment, because when simulacrum number four arrived on the outskirts of the aranean settlement he found them locked in a desperate battle against Red Robe.

The battle had clearly been raging for quite some time. Mutilated aranean bodies and arachnoid viscera lay scattered everywhere, and several of the caves and tunnels had been collapsed by both sides in an attempt to get rid of the other. A choking cloud of dust lingered in the air, reducing visibility.

Red Robe was just as Zorian remembered him. A bright red robe covered him completely, hiding most of his features, and a patch of magical darkness obscured his face. His movements were unhurried and methodical, though instead of painlessly and instantly killing the aranea in front of him he mostly relied on various force spells to crush them and cut them apart. The sight of him fearlessly advancing forward like an invincible juggernaut and killing aranea in very brutal and bloody ways was probably very intimidating to the spiders. Zorian suspected Red Robe was trying to crush their will to fight and scatter them before he ran out of mana.

Simulacrum number four quickly realized that Red Robe in front of him was a simulacrum, just like him. It made sense, really. Much like Zorian had created a bunch of copies to perform several tasks simultaneously, Red Robe had likely done the same.

He immediately rushed into the battle, firing a powerful incineration ray at Red Robe’s back. The other simulacrum did not show any signs of surprise, as if he had fully expected the interruption. He simply turned to the side in a smooth, practiced motion, blocking both Zorian’s spell and one from a nearby aranea.

Simulacrum number four did not speak, and neither did his opponent. They simply circled each other and kept launching probing spells at one another, testing each other’s skills and spell selection. The simulacrum was a bit disappointed at Red Robe’s silence. Based on his previous experiences with the third time looper, he had expected Red Robe to try and strike up a conversation or start monologuing. That could have given Zorian an opportunity to figure something out about his opponent and his goals.

Probably why he was staying silent. Oh well.

The aranea did not interfere in their fight much. Some of the angrier ones, who had lost friends and family members to the assault, kept trying to launch surprise attacks at Red Robe whenever they spotted an opening. Many of those ended up dying, since their attacks exposed them to Red Robe’s retaliation. Zorian tried to keep Red Robe too occupied to focus on the aranea much, but there was only so much he could do. Thankfully, most of the aranea had had the common sense to pull back deeper into their settlement to regroup and recover their strength.

After a while of this sort of spell exchange, Red Robe suddenly stopped. He appeared indecisive for a moment, as if he wanted to say something, but he eventually just shook his head minutely and reached for a short spell rod on his belt. Zorian tensed and prepared for the fight to escalate, but it turned out he had misjudged the situation. The rod was a simple recall spell. The moment Red Robe touched it, his body blurred for a second and then he was gone.

Zorian’s simulacrum did not try to pursue. He was here to save the aranea and recruit them as allies, not to take out a disposable pawn that Red Robe could recreate in a couple of minutes. This was already a victory.

He relaxed and waited for the aranea to approach him, reasoning that trying to be proactive wouldn’t be a good idea at the moment. He may have saved them, but the aranea were still obviously tense and might lash out if they felt pressured.

Thankfully, he did not have to wait long. It took less than two minutes for the aranea to assemble a welcoming party that cautiously approached him. They were visibly surprised when he responded to their greetings with telepathy and fumbled in indecision when he asked to talk to Spear of Resolve. The matriarch was true to her name, however. She quickly interrupted the talks and announced she would be arriving to talk to him personally, brushing aside the outraged protests of her subordinates.

Soon he was standing in front of her again, the two guards she brought along standing behind her and giving him their best menacing looks. To most people, she would doubtlessly look like any other aranea – a giant black jumping spider, same as any other. For the simulacrum, though, the sight brought back a flood of memories rushing to his mind.

He wanted to punch her right in that big-eyed, manipulative face… but also hug her and tell her he was glad to see her. This was probably similar to how Zach had felt upon seeing him on Cyoria’s train station, so long ago.

Except that he had much better impulse control than Zach and wasn’t going to punch her.

Or hug her, for that matter.

[Greetings, friend,] Spear of Resolve said politely. [I am grateful for the help you provided us in our hour of need. We are not ungrateful people and will surely find something to reward you with, but I sense there is more to this visit than just this.]

[True,] the simulacrum sent back. [We have many things to talk about.]

The matriarch tapped her front legs against the ground curiously.

[Curious. There was a curious note of nostalgia bleeding over into your messages,] she pointed out.

[Ah. Sorry about that,] he said, wincing slightly. [I can’t help it. You don’t remember this, but we knew each other.]

[Oh? I find that very hard to believe,] the matriarch said.

[It’s true,] the copy insisted. [We worked quite closely in the past.]

The matriarch sent him a note of patronized amusement.

[I have a very good memory when it comes to people, and you seem like a very noteworthy person. I would surely remember if I’d had the fortune to meet a mage of your caliber,] she said. [In particular, the level of control you have over your Gift would immediately make you stand out in the sea of people I have met over the years.]

An entirely reasonable argument. Sadly, the simulacrum didn’t have time to take things slowly and delicately guide the matriarch to the correct conclusion. He decided to take a risk and be totally blunt.

[I come from the future,] he told her.

The matriarch was silent for a moment. Several other aranea in the vicinity shifted in place from either amusement or incredulousness. They were clearly listening in on their conversations through their link with the matriarch. Nothing out of Zorian’s expectations, really.

[That’s… quite a claim you’re making, friend,] the matriarch said. She seemed more intrigued than dismissive, which surprised Zorian a little. He supposed that, even if she did not take his claim seriously, she wanted to hear his clarification.

[Zorian Kazinski,] said the simulacrum, taking off his mask as a show of trust. If this worked, he would be working closely with these people anyway. [You can just call me Zorian.]

[Zorian, then,] the matriarch agreed. [Zorian, you surely realize that great claims like that require great proof to be taken seriously?]

Zorian no longer had the matriarch’s memory packets, which meant that the method he used to employ to get her cooperation in the past was no longer possible. However, that was okay. He had other means of catching her attention.

[Of course I do,] the simulacrum said. [I can even show you my memories of the timeline I came from.]

[Come now, Zorian,] the matriarch scolded. [Any memory you show me could be fabricated entirely. That proves nothing.]

[Not quite,] the copy responded, a small grin on his face. [If I showed you some random scene with little relation to you, then yes, it could easily be a forgery. But what if I showed you a detailed map of your inner settlement, including the insides of your secret research room and your treasury? What if I demonstrated detailed knowledge about your secret research and your trading networks – the sort of things only your most respected elders have access to? What if I told you the names of every aranea that makes up your web, described what the insides of your private rooms look like, and demonstrated I could mimic the speech patterns and personality traits of a great many of your subordinates? Such things do not necessarily prove I come from the future, but certainly prove something, no? How could I possibly know that?]

The matriarch’s legs began to twitch uncontrollably.

A small commotion broke out among the aranea surrounding them. The simulacrum could tell there was a heated discussion going on in the background.

"Enough," Spear of Resolve suddenly said, speaking up verbally for the first time since the meeting began. Obviously she wanted the simulacrum to hear this too.

"But honored matriarch!" one of the guards protested.

"I’ve decided!" she said firmly, spinning around in place to stare down the guard, who shrank back at her admonishment. She then turned back towards the simulacrum.

[I’ll open my mind to you,] the matriarch said telepathically. [Show me these memories of yours.]

Zorian’s copy did just that. He tapped into the stored memories inside his head, reproducing them as best as he was able. For several hours the aranea watched in uncomfortable silence as the simulacrum laid their closely guarded secrets bare to them. He showed them his conversations with Spear of Resolve, Novelty and the various guards and ambassadors he had interacted with in the past.

By the time he was finally done, the matriarch was clearly disturbed at the amount of information he possessed. It was as the simulacrum had said - it wasn’t ironclad proof that he was from the future, but it did mean he had access to just about everything about them at some point. That was disturbing enough on its own.

[This… how could you possibly know all of this?] the matriarch asked hesitantly. She usually tried to project an air of certainty and confidence when interacting with him, even when she was secretly bothered behind the façade. There was none of that now, however. [Even if you’re from the future, even if we worked together in this future, I would never –]

[You died,] Zorian’s copy told her bluntly, cutting her off. [You all died. That cloaked man that just attacked you earlier? In the future I know… I was not strong enough.]

[Oh,] the matriarch said, deflating.

[You were supposedly allied with us, but you searched our city for anything of value the moment we died,] one of the aranea elder interjected, accusation clear in her voice.

[You would have done the same in my place,] he said, wholly unrepentant.

The aranea said nothing to that.

[I am curious,] the matriarch eventually said, picking her words carefully. [If I were to just tell you to go away and refuse to have anything to do with you… what would you do, oh mighty time traveler?]

[I would respect your decision,] the simulacrum shrugged.

[Truly?] the matriarch asked, sounding very skeptical.

[Why not? I would just go to one of the other aranean webs in the area,] Zorian’s copy said. [It’s not like you’re the only aranean web that I worked with.]

Every aranea in the room suddenly became very quiet and still.

And simulacrum number four could not help but smile smugly, for he knew he had them.

While the two simulacrums pursued their own tasks elsewhere in the city, the original had what was arguably the most important task of all – he had to check up on Zach and help him if he was in danger. He wouldn’t put it past Red Robe and Silverlake to focus on killing him as their very first priority.

It’s what Zorian would have done in their place, after all.

His fears turned out to have been only half-right. When he arrived at the Noveda estate, he found the place on fire and wracked with explosions. Destructive beams punched straight through the thick, warded walls of the building, triggering various alarms and countermeasures. Clearly an attack on Zach was already in progress. It was good that he had woken up his fellow time traveler with that ritual, or else Zach would have probably met a quick and ignoble end at the hand of his attackers.

Well… attacker, singular. When he reached the sight of the battle itself, he only found Red Robe fighting Zach. Silverlake was nowhere to be seen.

Very curious. Even if she was wary of Red Robe, she should have at least cooperated with him on this.

In any case, this Red Robe was the same as the one that had attacked the aranea in the tunnels below. It was just a simulacrum.

Once Zorian joined the fight, this second simulacrum seemed to realize the attack had failed and that persisting would just waste mana, so it just… dismissed itself.

What an underwhelming outcome. What was Red Robe doing, if he was so wary of really committing himself anywhere? He didn’t like this. He really didn’t like this…

He turned towards Zach and winced. He hadn’t noticed it while he had been fighting Red Robe’s simulacrum, but the other boy had a large bleeding gash across the chest.

"H-Hey…" Zach panted. "Thanks for the wakeup call back there. If you had been just a moment late, I would have probably never woken up. I, a-ah…"

His knees gave out suddenly, causing him to tip over. Zorian quickly rushed forward and caught him just before he was going to slam head-first into the floor.

"Shit…" Zorian swore, inspecting the wound. His medical magic was a joke, but he could at least assess the severity of an open wound like this one. "You lost so much blood there. How were you even standing for so long?"

"It’s not the f-first time…" Zach gasped, pressing his trembling fingers over the wound. The bleeding immediately lessened somewhat. "I’ll live."

Zorian sighed. He would live, sure… but he would be pretty much incapacitated for the next day or two, even with the best medical care in the country. This was terrible news.

"I’m glad you made it out," Zach said with a trembling voice.

[Don’t speak,] Zorian told him telepathically, picking him up like a baby. Well, he tried to, at least. Picking up another person was a little bit too much for him, so he first had to cast some spells to lighten the load, but he managed it in the end. He then immediately set off in the direction of the nearest hospital. [You’re going to aggravate your wound. Also, damn you’re heavy.]

[I’m doing you a favor,] Zach responded back. [Didn’t you say you wanted to work out more when we get out?]

[Not like this, you asshole,] Zorian grumbled.

[Wait…] Zach suddenly frowned. [You… you’re wounded too!]

Zorian gave him an incredulous look. What… oh.

[Ah, no,] Zorian said. [My mana is in chaos because the tunneler toad’s dimensional perception ability unraveled when I abandoned my body back in the time loop.]

It was scary how perceptive Zach was sometimes. Zorian didn’t even think he was showing any signs of mana instability on the outside, but clearly he was wrong.

[Oh yeah,] Zach said, immediately calming down. [Still, doesn’t that mean–]

[I’ll be held back in what I can do for at least a couple of days, yes,] Zorian confirmed.

[Damn it! Nothing ever goes right about this!] Zach raged.

[I wouldn’t say that,] Zorian said. He tracked down the nearest potion store and teleported them both towards it. It was closed at this time of day, but breaking in was a simple matter. He idly wondered whether a medical emergency like this counted as a valid reason to perform a burglary, but then decided he didn’t care. He would anonymously pay the shopkeeper back for the damages he caused. [I’m sure Red Robe is feeling pretty aggrieved right now. He almost had you, but he failed in the end. Plus, my simulacrum just stopped him from getting rid of the aranea beneath the city.]

He quickly picked up the most powerful wound closing and blood replenishing potions in the store and fed them to Zach, who immediately showed a positive reaction. His skin got back some of its color and the wound seemingly closed, though Zorian knew it was still very much present beneath the surface.

Zach immediately tried to get up on his own two feet, the idiot. He collapsed back immediately, having aggravated his wound.

"Let’s… just get you to the nearest hospital, alright?" Zorian said, face-palming at the sight.

"Zorian, listen," Zach said. "When you left through the exit and the time loop reset itself, I lingered behind for a bit. Just to see what would happen to you and Silverlake over the next few restarts, you know?"

Zorian raised his eyebrow at him. "And?"

"You were back," Zach said. "Both of you. You didn’t remember anything about the time loop but you were walking and talking as normal. You were just like any other person stuck in the time loop, unaware of the passage of time past the summer festival. Man, talking to your old self was freaky, I tell you. I all but forgot how unfriendly and sensitive you were back then. Did I tell you I’m really glad you made it out in the end?"

"You did," Zorian confirmed.

"Oh yeah… what did you do with the–" Zach started to ask, before being cut off by Zorian.

"I killed him," Zorian said curtly. "Sent his soul to the afterlife."

"I… umm… shit," Zach fumbled. "That’s kind of… brutal?"

"What was I supposed to do?" Zorian asked, uncomfortable with this line of questioning. "I don’t know how to make a new body for him. Maybe I never will. I’d have to either keep him in stasis for years and years before finally releasing him into an alien world where a stranger has usurped his life… or having him accompany me as a powerless ghost looking over my shoulder, constantly getting his face rubbed in at the fact I’m so much better than him at everything. Isn’t that a cruel and horrifying fate to inflict on someone?"

"I… don’t know," Zach admitted after a while.

"I know I’m not the same person as him by this point," Zorian said quietly, "but I would hate that with every fiber of my being. I… don’t think I’d ever get over it. Maybe I’m just a selfish monster trying to justify my crimes, but I think I’m doing him a favor. Alanic says the afterlife is still a thing, even after the gods stopped talking to people. For all his faults, I don’t think the old Zorian had done anything truly heinous in his life… there should be a good outcome waiting for him there. Something he’d never get back here with us."

There was an awkward silence for a few seconds, and then Zorian cracked his knuckles before picking Zach up again. Thank the gods for lightening spells.

"I don’t want to talk about this," Zorian admitted. "Let just get you to a hospital and call it a day. We’ll just have to leave the rest to our simulacrums. Now that I think about it, maybe Red Robe is onto something by only sending simulacrums to tackle problems and never appearing in person. Sure, it makes him more likely to fail and get beaten back, but it also makes every failure more inconsequential…"

He babbled about all sorts of things as he walked through the city. He was mostly out of mana by this point, since pretty much all his simulacrums had been tapping into them for their own purposes, so he couldn’t simply teleport to the hospital. However, it was fine – Zach had stopped bleeding by this point, so he wasn’t going to die any time soon. He should make use of this breather to make some golem simulacrums and replace the current ectoplasmic ones with them. Of course, the golem simulacrums were expensive so he would have to raid some of the Ibasan caches for money and materials. Plus, he needed a proper workshop and–

He suddenly stopped and sighed internally. So many things to do. So little time and mana to play with. The only thing that made him feel better was that Red Robe and Silverlake were probably faced with choices just as difficult as theirs.

Hopefully they had chosen their priorities better than their opponents.

When simulacrum number three arrived at the spot of Silverlake’s hideout, he found no signs of fighting or forced entry in the vicinity. However, that did not actually tell him much. For all he knew, Silverlake had some kind of secret entrance into her pocket dimension, and could simply walk in any time she pleased, wards be damned. Hell, perhaps the old Silverlake had simply let her in. It was hardly a given that the two would fight to the death once they met.

It all depended on whether the time looper Silverlake wanted to kill her old self to take her life and belongings back, or if she wanted to recruit her into her plans.

Or maybe she intended to simply ignore her old self entirely. After all, simply coming here was highly dangerous, since Zach and Zorian knew about this place, and it was an obvious place to set up an ambush for her.

Anyway, the first task simulacrum three currently faced was checking if the old Silverlake was still alive and inside. If she was, then he needed to know if the time looper Silverlake had already visited her and tried to recruit her.

To find that out, he could rely on slowly using exotic divination on her hideout while carefully avoiding being found out… but that would take a lot of time and mana and he didn’t want to bother. Instead he simply made an unearthly racket just out of her pocket dimension, screaming obscenities at the treacherous old witch until she decided to come out to confront him.

Which she did. She stomped out of the pocket dimension, visibly fuming and glaring at him.

The simulacrum immediately decided she probably hadn’t been visited by her time looper self. She had approached him too carelessly, like she had no idea what he was capable of. She would have been far more cautious if the other Silverlake had warned her about him.

Still, he had to make sure.

"Boy, what the hell are you shouting for!?" Silverlake shouted, stopping some distance away from him. "Coming here in the dead of the night, at three in the morning, shouting all these obscenities at a poor old woman like me… what is the world coming to these days!? Haven’t your parents taught you to respect your elders!? Bow down and apologize or I’m going to poison your whole family, you hear me!?"

"I just wanted to get your attention," the simulacrum told her honestly.

That only made her angrier.

"Listen, I’m kind of in a hurry… did you perhaps get visited lately by an ugly old crone that looks just like you?"

Silverlake raised her hand and fired a weak lightning bolt. Well, relatively speaking, since that spell could have inflicted serious damage to a normal person.

Zorian’s simulacrum, though? He simply copied his mentor Xvim and backhanded the lightning bolt to the side. Rather than char his hand, the bolt was deflected harmlessly into the nearby ground, creating a small crater in the forest soil.

Silverlake’s posture instantly changed, becoming warier and more alert.

"No, seriously… did someone who looks just like you visit you recently and try to kill you or recruit you? Someone who knows all your secrets and abilities?" he again asked.

"Who are you?" Silverlake said, her eyes narrowing suspiciously and her hands twitching with half-formed spells.

The simulacrum clacked his tongue. She was totally ignorant of everything, he was sure of it. Time looper Silverlake had not visited this place.

But why? Did she really not care about her old self, or was she just being paranoid? He hadn’t arrived here particularly quickly – if Silverlake wanted to travel here from Cyoria, she would have arrived way before he did. In all likelihood, she would have finished up before he had a chance to get here and intercept her.

"Hey! Are you deaf or something?" Silverlake shouted, kicking a nearby stone in his direction. It was surprisingly accurate, flying straight at his forehead. She had a pretty good kick. Of course, Zorian just dodged the stone with practiced ease, so it ultimately amounted to nothing.

He could kill her, he realized. Even if time looper Silverlake wanted her dead, there was no guarantee that old Silverlake would be grateful to them once they saved her. She was an incredibly cynical person, and would simply see two young fools she could exploit to her advantage. She might work with them out of a sense of self-preservation, but she would be constantly looking for an angle to exploit and probably wouldn’t want to do anything that placed her into significant danger.

What was the point of such an ally?

"Here. Catch," he said, throwing a small stone disc at her. She did not bother catching it, simply stepping back and letting it hit the ground. She then used a nearby fallen branch to suspiciously poke at it.

The simulacrum rolled his eyes at her.

"What the hell is this thing?" she asked.

"It’s an illusion stone," the simulacrum said. "I recorded a rather interesting scene in it. You can study it later in the privacy of your own abode. Oh, and by the way? You should probably change your warding scheme as soon as possible. You should also collapse any secret entrances into your place, even if you think you’re the only one who knows about them."

He turned to leave.

"Now wait just a moment here, you little brat! You’re just going to leave without explaining any of the crap you just unloaded into my lap?" Silverlake demanded.

"Yes," Zorian’s copy nodded. "I decided not to kill you. Don’t make me regret it, alright?"

Before she could respond, he teleported away.

He didn’t want to linger around Silverlake’s place. While setting up an ambush around her hideout might have seemed like a good way to get the time looping version of her, Zorian felt something wasn’t right there.

He had to make sure Alanic, Kael and Lukav were fine. Silverlake could wait.

While Zorian and the other simulacrums were teleporting around and wracking their heads to figure out what the enemy was planning, simulacrum number two was bored. His job was to secure the house and watch out for Red Robe or Silverlake staging an attack on his family. However, he had already done all he could to secure the house and no attack was happening.

The hours passed, and eventually he found himself in front of Kirielle’s room. Hmm… the morning was already here, wasn’t it? Didn’t that mean it was about time for Kirielle to wake up?

He rubbed his hands sinisterly, an evil grin on his face. It had been so long since he had a chance to wake up Kirielle. He liked to sleep in, and the time loop never really changed that, so it was usually her that woke him up.

He entered her room and crouched next to her bed. She was covered up to her neck in a blanket, with only her face visible. She was blissfully unaware of Zorian crouching next to her, a look of peace and contentment on her face.

The simulacrum considered how he should go about doing this. Jumping on her, like she liked to do to him, had an air of poetic justice on it. However, it didn’t feel right. He was too big and heavy, and it would be a bit too much for a prank.

Dropping a bucket of water on her like she had when she had thought he was a shapeshifter?

No, that would get the bed wet and mother would freak out on him.

Hmm…

Oh well, he’d just go with the classic.

"Good morning, sister!" he suddenly shouted in her ear. "Morning, morning, MORNING!"

She woke up screaming and flailing, and eventually fell out of the bed.

He laughed at her. Ah, he needed that…

"Zorian, you jerk!" she shouted at him, flailing her little arms at him like a windmill. She was like a little angry kitten, though, so it just made him laugh harder.

She eventually kicked him out of the room so she could switch out of her pajamas. Once she was out, she gave him a curious look.

"How come you’re awake?" she asked.

"I couldn’t sleep," the simulacrum said.

"Oh," she said. She looked at him hopefully. "Hey, can you show me some magic? Please?"

He spent the next half an hour entertaining Kirielle, casting various spells for her amusement, until the original contacted him and told him to stop wasting mana on frivolities like that. What a jerk. The mana drain on those illusions was totally negligible!

He watched Kirielle deflate when he told her he had to go pack and couldn’t play with her anymore. She looked like she wanted to ask him something but eventually just chickened out, staring at the floor like a kicked puppy instead.

He sighed internally. He knew what she wanted to ask, of course. She wanted him to take her to Cyoria with him. But doing that would be… irresponsible.

Short-sighted.

Stupid.

He watched Kirielle for a few more seconds, remembering all the promises he made to his little sister over the many restarts he shared with her. He promised he wouldn’t forget her. He promised he would teach her magic.

He promised he would bring her with him to Cyoria.

Just as she was about to run off, Zorian placed his hand on her shoulder, causing her to halt in her tracks and look at him in surprise. Her lip quivered slightly.

"Hey, Kirielle…" he told her with a mischievous smile. "Do you want to come with me to Cyoria?"

Simulacrum number two could practically imagine Zorian screaming at him in the near future, explaining in great detail what an idiot he was being.

He didn’t care, though.

The smile on her face when he asked her that question made it all worth it.

93. Shelter in the Storm

Sometimes he could be so stupid, Zorian lamented. He had known that his simulacrums tended to be more impulsive and whimsical than himself. It seemed to be an intrinsic trait of every one of his copies, no matter how carefully he made them or how closely they were connected to him. They may be very much like him, but they weren’t him. The moment they realized they were just a simulacrum that would not live past a few hours or days, their perspective on long-term consequences would get subtly skewed compared to his own. After all, more likely than not it wouldn’t be them who would have to deal with those when the time finally came.

He also knew that giving his simulacrums unpleasant or boring tasks had a good chance of coming back to bite him in the ass. His simulacrums did not mind dying for him, but they were not at all afraid of inconveniencing him. In fact, they often seemed to relish the idea.

Zorian wondered what it said about him that his simulacrums behaved that way, but that was a thought for another time. The point was that, despite knowing all of that, he had still left his simulacrum in charge of dashing Kirielle’s hopes of going to Cyoria. He should have known that was going to be a problem, but he thought it would be a simple matter of the simulacrum refusing Mother’s offer while Kirielle remained quiet on the sidelines. This was, after all, what usually happened when Zorian didn’t want to bring Kirielle with him. All the simulacrum had to do was just retread his steps and be on his merry way! Instead his copy got bored and actively sought Kirielle out to hang out with, wasting their precious mana on frivolous entertainment, and then got all emotional when it was time to say goodbye…

Ugh. Just like the offending simulacrum predicted, Zorian had been furious. It was a stupid, short-sighted decision! Yes, sending her off to Koth with their parents would be a massive disappointment for her, but at least she’d be out of danger! That was more important than making her momentarily happy!

The simulacrum was completely unapologetic about it, too.

"What’s done is done," his copy told him over their telepathic link. "I already gave her my word I’m taking her with me. If you have a problem with that, you can come over here and personally inform her that you’ve changed your mind and won’t be taking her with you after all…"

"You bastard!" Zorian fumed at him. "I should dismiss you for that!"

"That would leave Kirielle and the rest of the family completely defenseless until you sent a replacement," the simulacrum pointed out. "Besides, do you really think I care about that? From my very first moment, I knew my time was fleeting."

Sadly, true. Since his simulacrums were willing to die and sacrifice themselves for his sake, the thought of dying did not bother them much. Thus, threatening to unmake them was largely ineffective.

"I just don’t understand why you did that," Zorian complained. "We could have just taken Kirielle to Cyoria in a month or two, once the whole situation has hopefully been resolved and she’s back from Koth. There is no need to take her there now, when the situation there is at its most dangerous!"

"When, if not now?" the simulacrum disagreed. "Even if we can resolve everything and save the city, the consequences are bound to be immense. Even a failed invasion will make our parents perceive Cyoria as a place of unspeakable danger. You think they will let her live in the city after that? Even for a few days? Come on. This is probably the last time we can plausibly take Kirielle to Cyoria without literally kidnapping her."

Zorian frowned. He hadn’t really thought of that. It was true that no matter how the situation with the invasion was resolved, it was bound to complicate things. Plus, now that he thought about it a little, Kirielle would have to go back to school at some point soon. It wasn’t like she could visit a different city for several weeks at the time, then. Come to think of it, that was probably the reason why she was so excited to make this trip with him now. She knew this was one of her last chances to experience something like this in the near future…

He sighed internally. For all of its blessings, he sometimes worried that the time loop had damaged his thinking. For more than a decade, anything that did not resolve itself within the span of a month was largely irrelevant. He did consider the future a lot, but that was all highly theoretical and often directed at the far future rather than something only a few months later.

Still. Even with all of that in mind, bringing Kirielle to the epicenter of their clash with Red Robe and Silverlake was simply a terrible idea.

"Besides," his copy continued, "by bringing Kirielle along we actually have a legitimate excuse to rent a room at Imaya’s place. Kael is much more willing to trust us if we come along with Kirielle. And it’s not like we don’t have a plan to evacuate–"

"Those are just excuses you thought up afterwards to justify your decision," Zorian told him.

"Well… yes," the simulacrum admitted after a short pause. "Yes, I admit that. It’s still true, though, and I’m not going to go back on my word. Our word. You promised you’re not going to just forget her once we’re out there in the real world. Now you want to just stick her on a ship to Koth and put her out of your mind while you do your stuff?"

"That stuff is a matter of life and death and getting her out of danger doesn’t mean I’m going to simply forget about her afterwards!" Zorian snapped. "I just want her to be safe. She’s a prime target and I’m just a little bit busy at the moment. It’s not the time for this!"

"Forget it," his copy sighed. "I just… I won’t do it, okay? I already said it. What’s done is done. I’m not going to turn around and tell her it was all a mistake and that I changed my mind. It would kill her. If you think this is such a huge mistake, come over and do it yourself. Go tell her that her dream trip is canceled, I dare you."

The simulacrum then terminated their connection, signaling it considered the conversation over.

After taking several deep breaths and calming down somewhat, Zorian decided that the simulacrum was right about one thing: he should definitely be dealing with this problem personally. As he noted in his earlier lament, it was stupid of him to assign a task like this to a simulacrum to begin with, and only he could truly fix it. Or at least stop the problem from getting worse.

Besides, there was no need for him to stay at Cyoria at the moment. Previously, he had been worried that his simulacrum would get dispelled in the fighting and that he would need to constantly replace them… but that was far less of a concern, now. The first golem simulacrums had been placed into service by now, replacing two of his ectoplasmic simulacrums with a more mana efficient and resilient group. Golem simulacrums were very difficult to neutralize – even punching a hole through the chest or blowing off a limb would not be enough to put them down for good. That extreme resilience, all by itself, should allow his copies to clash with the invaders and Red Robe’s simulacrums without fear.

Additionally, he couldn’t really afford to start anything big while Zach was still incapacitated and vulnerable. Taking some time off to figure out what to do about his family and friends was… doable.

Thus, not long after his argument with his simulacrum, Zorian found himself back in Cirin. He told the simulacrum to make himself scarce for a while and then seamlessly took over his place.

Well, mostly seamlessly.

"Why are you staring at me like that?" Kirielle asked him suspiciously, narrowing her eyes at him. "You… you aren’t thinking on going back on your word, are you?"

She didn’t seem panicked, more outraged at the idea. She placed her hands on her hips and pouted at him in a way that was probably supposed to look angry but looked more like she had an upset stomach or something.

"No take-backs!" she declared, pointing her finger at him. "Mom says that’s not allowed! You said you’re taking me with you, and I’m going!"

Zorian clacked his tongue in distaste. All he did was stare at her a little, and she immediately started jumping at this one specific conclusion… how judgmental. Never mind that she was essentially correct here, was his old self so bad that this was a legitimate first conclusion she came up to?

…okay, yeah, he could kind of see her reasoning here.

"I didn’t say anything about not taking you," Zorian said slowly.

"Then what?" she asked curiously.

"I’m missing some of my school books," Zorian told her. "I’d appreciate it if whoever took them returned them to me before we leave the house."

"Err, yeah, I will– I mean, I’m sure they’ll turn up in your room by the time I finish packing," Kirielle fumbled, punctuating her statement with a nervous laugh.

She then gave him one final suspicious look before running off upstairs to finish her packing.

The simulacrum he had displaced had been watching the whole exchange through his senses. His copy did not comment on his actions in any way, but Zorian could feel the simulacrum’s amusement at how things turned out.

"Shut up, idiot," Zorian whispered under his breath. "This is all your fault, anyway."

He did not need to speak up verbally, of course, but it made him feel slightly better to do so. Why hadn’t he dismissed his stupid copy, again?

Oh, right. He didn’t want to waste mana and he had a task for him later.

In any case, nothing of real note happened until Ilsa knocked on their door, just like she always did at the start of the month, and Zorian volunteered to check up on that.

Sure enough, he found Ilsa waiting for him behind the door. After an appraising glance, she adjusted her glasses and guessed his identity.

"Zorian Kazinski?" she asked.

"That’s me," Zorian confirmed. "Come in, Miss Zileti."

"Oh, you know me?" she asked in mild surprise, stepping into the house.

"Err, kind of," Zorian said. "Someone pointed you out to me. You’re a teacher from the academy, right?"

"That’s right," Ilsa said. "I didn’t know I’m that famous. Hopefully you heard only nice things about me, yes?"

She gave him a small smile, and Zorian awkwardly returned it.

She didn’t remember anything. That is, of course she didn’t remember anything. He and Zach had already done a check of the various temporary loopers to see if any of them made it out in soul form like Zorian. The results were as expected as they were disappointing. They were all alone in this. Nobody else had made it out.

It was strange and more than a little painful for Zorian to see Ilsa like this. He had worked with her for nearly a year, and she had been one of the people he had been relatively close to. Now that Ilsa was dead, the new one had no idea who he was.

The same was true for Alanic, Taiven, Kael, Xvim, and so many others. They were alive again, but they were not people he had spent all those months working with. He could rebuild these relationships, but without the common goal of escaping the time loop and the limited ability to interact with people outside the group, the nature of those relationships would completely differ. In the meantime, he had to interact with all these people while constantly walking on eggshells because he subconsciously viewed them as friends and allies, and had a year worth of habits and instincts to reinforce that… while they just viewed him as some stupid teenage kid acting a little weird around them.

He’d manage. He totally would.

But damn was this making him depressed…

"Mister Kazinski? Are you alright?" Ilsa asked him, breaking him out of his self-pity.

"I’m fine," he assured her. "Just… thinking about some things. It’s nothing important."

He turned the scroll in his hands a few times before casually directing his mana to flow along the sides of the seal, causing it to pop off without resistance. He then glanced at the certificate inside for the sake of appearances and set it aside.

"That’s pretty impressive," Ilsa noted. "Although you held onto the scroll for a while, I could tell you spent most of that time distracted with other thoughts. Once you actually focused on the task of removing the seal, you did it quickly and easily. I see someone is continuing in Daimen’s footsteps."

Once, the comparison to Daimen would see him bristling inside at the slight. Now it was just a mildly exasperating statement. He would likely never be totally okay with being compared to his oldest brother like that, but these comparisons no longer had the same sting they once did.

"Only in very general terms," Zorian told her. "My brother and I are very different people."

"Of course," Ilsa smoothly agreed. "Everyone is their own person. I simply meant that you also show signs of great talent."

Their discussion proceeded in very predictable fashion. Once she heard he was taking Kirielle with him to Cyoria, she brought up the possibility of renting a room at Imaya’s place, which Zorian accepted. She also informed him that he wouldn’t get to choose his mentor like he was supposed to, and that he was simply assigned to Xvim Chao instead. Zorian pretended he knew nothing about the man and Ilsa pretended he was simply a normal, if slightly demanding teacher. He also chose his electives. They were the exact same ones he had chosen the first time he had done all this, except this time the entire process took less than a minute, since he simply told Ilsa his choices the moment she brought the topic up.

It was all so routine and familiar that he found himself quickly slipping into a sort of practiced role he had learned to play over the many restarts during which he had done this. It felt comforting and frightening at the same time. Comforting, because this was probably the first time since he had gotten out of the time loop that he felt certain he was making the right choices. Frightening, because he suddenly felt like he was in the time loop all over again. Like everything around him was unreal and illusionary. Unbidden, the notion that he was still trapped in that ever-repeating month popped into his mind and refused to go away.

He imagined himself living through this month, winning against his foes, befriending people he knew from the time loop, changing things for the better and getting emotionally invested in it all… only for the whole thing to turn to smoke in the end when the time loop inevitably reset itself and he woke up in his room in Cirin, just like he always did. It was horrifying.

It was also stupid. He was definitely out of the time loop. The aranea and the mercenaries that had been knocked out of the time loop by Red Robe were back, and Red Robe himself was again active in the world. The spirit world was also once again accessible – he and Zach had checked that already. All evidence pointed at them being out for real.

But the fear remained. Ilsa had finished her explanations and left, but Zorian’s mind remained trapped in this ominous scenario for quite a while afterwards.

Sometimes he could be so stupid, Zorian lamented.

The long train ride from Cirin to Cyoria was even more boring than it usually was. This was mostly because Zorian was not doing anything of critical importance, and thus had to refrain from tapping into his mana reserves too much. That mana was best reserved for his simulacrums, who were out there acquiring funds, making magic items, teleporting around, and fighting their enemies. Frivolous uses of magic like entertaining Kirielle on the train with illusions were simply inexcusable. He had scolded his simulacrums over these sorts of things many times in the past, so now that he was in their position it was important that he set an example for them and show them how things should be done.

Additionally, this was no longer the time loop, and he would have to deal with consequences that went beyond just this one month. It was best for him to at least pretend to be a normal student mage in front of a little tattletale like Kirielle. That meant no spellcasting at all for the moment, since students could not bypass the wards on the train.

After an hour or so, he kind of began to understand why his simulacrums were so prone to breaking the no frivolous magics rule.

Still, in the end he found ways to amuse himself and Kirielle without magic. He told her stories of some of his time looping adventures, using true stories with altered names and a few tweaks here and there. Kirielle complained the stories were too fantastical and ridiculous after a while, so they started a drawing competition instead. Zorian had actually learned how to draw reasonably well over the long course of the time loop, but he was nowhere near good enough to match Kirielle, so she always won.

His sister did not mind, though. Even though it was an unfair competition right from the start, she always wanted to keep going for another round. The little imp never got tired of winning.

"Now stopping in Korsa," a disembodied voice echoed. A crackling sound again. "I repeat, now stopping in Korsa. Thank you."

A few things happened in quick succession then. First, Ibery wandered in and peeked into the compartment to see if it was free. Zorian, being kind of bored with Kirielle’s antics, invited her in. Ibery seemed a little taken aback by his friendliness, but seeing Kirielle put her at ease, and she did claim a seat beside them after a moment of hesitation. Then Byrn, a guy he had met way back at the beginning of his time looping experience, also wandered in and asked if a seat was free in their compartment. Zorian happily invited him in, too.

Suddenly, the compartment had become a lot livelier than it used to be. Ibery was shy and quiet, and had immediately chosen to bury her nose in a book when she came in, but Byrn was friendly and talkative and immediately tried to strike up a conversation with them. Kirielle immediately started peppering him with questions about magic and the academy.

"I’m Kirielle Kazinski," Kirielle said, "and that’s my brother Zorian. Are you a student like Zorian? Can you do magic? What year are you? Is it true that you have to fight a giant spider in order to get admitted as a student? Zorian says that’s a requirement, but I think he’s lying…"

"Ha ha, umm… I don’t think I would have gotten in, if that were the case," Byrn laughed. "I don’t think I could win a fight against the other students, never mind a giant spider."

"Lots of types of giant spiders," Zorian noted. "There’s a whole bunch of them that you could easily club to death with a mundane weapon, so long as you keep your cool and don’t panic."

"Oh? You sound pretty knowledgeable about that. Did you ever fight one for real?" Byrn asked curiously.

"Yes, though not as an admission test, of course," Zorian said. "I told that to Kirielle just to mess with her a little."

"I knew it," Kirielle pouted, folding her hands over her chest and giving him a grumpy look.

"Ah, so, I hate to shift the subject, but that last name…" Byrn tried.

"Yes, Daimen Kazinski is our brother," Zorian said with a shrug. "We have very little contact with him, though. He mostly does his own thing and rarely visits."

The conversation continued for a while after that, meandering from topic to topic. Even Ibery joined in after figuring out from Bryn’s question that they were Fortov’s siblings. She did not actually bring up Fortov, however, which was probably for the best. Zorian would have been diplomatic, of course, but Kirielle disliked their middle brother as much as he did and would likely not have anything nice to say about that topic. In any case, the conversation eventually turned towards a particularly shocking event that occurred in Cyoria recently. Namely, the fact that Zach’s place had gotten utterly trashed during his fight with Red Robe, and that he himself had gone missing for several hours while people frantically searched for him all over the city.

"What? Someone actually attacked the Noveda Mansion like that? I didn’t know that," Ibery said, surprised.

"Yes, it happened really recently. The attack happened very early in the morning, just a few hours ago," Byrn said, nodding self-indulgently. He was clearly pleased to have acquired this news so soon after it occurred. Man, news sure does spread fast these days. "I hear the fighting was really fierce. Some of the support columns were damaged, and several walls got breached. I heard repairs will take weeks! It must have been a really powerful force that launched the attack – the newspapers were saying only a fully equipped mage regiment could have done so much damage so quickly."

"But that place is right there in one of the better parts of the city… and aren’t Noveda an old, influential Noble House?" Ibery asked. "How could a force of that size come and go just like that? Where were the guards during all this?"

"Well, someone was clearly fighting the attackers and fought them off in the end, so presumably the guards were not useless," Byrn shrugged. "Besides, I hear the Noveda are not the same force they once were. My father says they’re a mere shadow of their former selves. It’s still crazy that something like this can happen."

"You know, Zach Noveda is one of my classmates," Zorian said suddenly.

"Really?" Byrn said, perking up. "I don’t suppose you heard more about this, then?"

"I just know Zach is fine," Zorian said, shaking his head. "He wasn’t present in the mansion when the attack occurred. He was out drinking and dancing throughout the entire night."

Or at least that was the excuse Zach had picked for himself as an explanation as to what had happened. They modified the memory of the healer that had patched him up (after leaving him a sizeable anonymous tip for his services), so no one should be able to contradict his story. Zorian did suggest to Zach that he should pick some other excuse, since saying he had spent the entire night getting drunk and gods know what else was somewhat embarrassing, but Zach insisted this was fine.

Sure enough, Ibery responded to Zorian’s explanation by wrinkling her nose in distaste, while Bryn simply laughed awkwardly.

"I did hear rumors about the Noveda heir," Ibery said. "They say he’s not exactly a model student, if you know what I mean."

"There is nothing wrong with his magic skills," Zorian quickly said, feeling compelled to defend his friend. "He’s just a little… reckless."

"Are you friends with this Zach?" Kirielle asked curiously. "How come I don’t know anything about this?"

"Why would I say something like this to a little tattletale like you?" Zorian asked rhetorically. "You’d run off to tell Mother the moment my back was turned."

"I would not!" she huffed, swinging her legs in an attempt to hit his knees. He shifted his legs out of the way a few times and she eventually gave up on the idea.

By the time the train arrived in Cyoria, the whole group was so absorbed in their conversation that they kept together and continued conversing even when it was time to disembark. When the train began to approach Cyoria, the whole group left the compartment and went to stand by the exit… along with so many others. Usually Zorian led Kirielle with him to the exit early enough to seize a place right next to the exit, but he had lost track of time this time, and they ended up in the middle of a literal throng. Somewhat tired from socializing and put off by the throng of people pushing and shoving all around him, Zorian leaned on the nearby window and simply observed the people around them.

It had been a while since he had been stuck in a crowd like this. With his great magical skills and ability to simply teleport from place to place, he usually had no need to use normal transportation methods to get to places. A confusing, erratic mess of emotions and mental signals washed against his mind sense, but he was far too good at controlling his psychic powers these days to be bothered by that. His mind was like a rock in the sea, battered by the winds and violent waves, but solid and unmoving.

"Hey, you! You’re one of the upperclassmen, aren’t you?"

Zorian looked at the girl talking to him, curious as to what she wanted from him. She was part of the group of first years next to him, and had completely ignored him up until now. Her whole group was kind of amusing, talking excitedly amongst themselves about how they were going to start learning magic, and become famous mages, and similar stuff. He kind of wished he could see their faces when they realized the first year was all about theory and repetitive mana exercises.

"I am," he confirmed. "So?"

"Can you show us any magic?" she asked eagerly.

Wait… this sounded kind of familiar…

"He can’t!" Kirielle, who had apparently been listening in on their conversation, piped in. "The train has a magic field that stops people from doing magic."

"It’s because some of the students would set fire to the seats or etch their names and crude drawings into the walls of the train," Zorian confirmed.

"Oh," the girl said, clearly disappointed.

"I know," Kirielle agreed with, sadly. "It sucks. Some jerk always has to ruin it for the rest of us."

Yeah, this whole situation was really familiar to him for some reason.

Oh well, it probably wasn’t anything important.

Zorian became a little concerned about things after the group disembarked at Cyoria’s main train station. This was because Bryn had a habit of following after them, and Zorian had plans that would be rather inconvenienced by that. He was just debating whether it was justified to use mind magic to nudge his thoughts in the right direction, when Bryn regretfully informed them that he had to stay behind at the station for a while. Apparently his parents were disturbed enough by the recent attack on the Noveda Mansion that they had asked a friend of theirs that lived in the city to pick Bryn up from the station and escort him to his dorm. Thus, Bryn would have to stay behind and wait for the man to show up.

Zorian found it curious that Red Robe’s attack on Zach had such far-reaching consequences. Bryn wasn’t even from Cyoria, yet the attack changed the way he went through the month so quickly and radically. Zach and Zorian knew that Tesen and the city authorities would have a strong reaction to the Noveda Mansion being suddenly attacked like that, but he didn’t expect the ordinary people to care so much.

In any case, Zorian simply said goodbye to Bryn and Ibery and was on his merry way with Kirielle in tow. He did exchange contact methods with Bryn and Ibery in case they wanted to get in touch later, but he wasn’t sure if anything would come out of that. Neither of them had been particularly inclined to seek him out when they had done similar things in the time loop. With the world lasting longer than a month, though, perhaps that would change. Only time would tell.

Zorian didn’t take Kirielle immediately towards Imaya’s place, though. Instead, he took her to a familiar bridge in one of the city parks. There, a small black-haired girl was crying her eyes out over a bicycle that had fallen into the creek below.

Kirielle watched quietly from the sidelines as Zorian slowly calmed Nochka down and got her to explain why she was crying. This done, he placed his hand over the bridge and telekinetically lifted the bike out of the water. He also casually cleaned it up a little, ignoring the chorus of complaints from his simulacrums that he was being frivolous in his mana use. The jerks had been on the lookout for something like this for a while now, most likely.

"It isn’t frivolous," he told them telepathically. "What did you expect me to do, exactly?"

"You could have waded in through the muddy water on foot," a simulacrum helpfully explained.

"It’s just getting a little wet, there’s no harm in that," another one added.

"All it would take is a bit more time. Gods, why are you so impatient?" a third one scolded.

"All of you, shut up and mind your own business!" Zorian told them grumpily.

He had the worst simulacrums.

"There," Zorian told Nochka. "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."

"Well, if that’s that, I guess we should get going now," Zorian said. "Though… I think it’s going to rain soon. Do you have an umbrella?"

"N-No…" She said, shaking her head. "But, um, I’m going to be fine…"

"We should help her get home," Kirielle suddenly said. She quickly got into Nochka’s personal space and introduced herself. "Hi, I’m Kirielle! Kirielle Kazinski, and that’s my brother Zorian. What’s your name?"

After some back and forth, Nochka agreed to have them accompany her home. The walk was a short one, but Zorian paid close attention to everything around him along the way. He found no evidence of cranium rats or other invader agents along the way. Even the cranium rat swarm he usually encountered while traveling through this part of the city was not here this time – he had chosen the path that led to Nochka on purpose, not because he was trying to avoid the rats. The aranea were fighting a pretty intense war with the cranium rats at the moment, so this turn of events wasn’t particularly surprising. They were too busy to spy on people much, and could no longer move freely through most of the city.

Still, while Rea and her family seemed free of invader schemes at the moment, he knew that wouldn’t last forever. Assuming Red Robe did not find some kind of alternative method of unlocking Panaxeth’s prison, shifter children like Nochka remained a critical component of primordial’s release plans. Thus, evacuating them out of the city through means fair or foul was probably the most certain way of sabotaging the ritual at Zach and Zorian’s disposal. Shifters were not that numerous and there were only so many shifters available in the area.

Though, if he were going to be honest with himself, wanting to befriend Rea and her family wasn’t purely because of pragmatism. Rea had no special influence over her fellow shifters and would be of limited help if he wanted to talk them into going along with the evacuation. He just had a soft spot for the little girl that had befriended his little sister and the sight of her stripped naked and waiting to be drained of all blood for some messed up blood ritual was vividly burned into his mind. He had promised to himself that he would make sure Nochka survived the month out there in the real world, and he still meant that. He meant to save all the shifter children, of course, but making sure Nochka was safe had a personal dimension for him.

Since he had already thrown away his good sense and taken Kirielle to the death trap that was Cyoria, he may as well introduce her to her former and future friend. At least if they started hanging around each other, he could more easily protect the both of them without spreading himself thin.

The actual conversation with Rea was pretty mundane. Nochka’s mother was pretty friendly, and Zorian did not confront her with any heavy topics. They simply talked about who he and Kirielle were, how they had met Nochka, and where they were staying. Kirielle almost ratted out Nochka on dropping her bike in the stream, which caused the little cat shifter to panic and hurriedly shut her up… by manifesting her claws and clamping down on Kirielle’s arm. This caused Rea to freak out because Nochka almost ruined their secret and hurt a guest, but the situation was thankfully resolved in the end, and Zorian pretended not to have noticed anything strange about the incident.

Interestingly, Rea also brought up the news of Zach’s place being attacked, just like Bryn did. She didn’t have any new information for Zorian, but it did emphasize how notable the attack was for people. Zorian wondered if Red Robe even realized how eye-catching the whole thing would end up being.

"You are classmates with the Noveda heir?" Rea asked. "My, I seemed to have met an important person today."

"Not… really?" Zorian said dubiously.

"Come now, Mister Kazinski. You have a famous brother, you attend a prestigious magical academy, and one of your classmates is a scion of a Noble House," Rea pointed out.

"Two, actually," said Zorian. There was also Tinami. "I don’t think any of that makes me important."

Rea hummed loudly at him, clearly not agreeing.

"Have it your way," she shrugged. She rose from her seat and took a look at the weather outside. Things didn’t look good of course. The rain was pouring in thick sheets while the wind was blowing madly in all directions, and Zorian knew from the time loop that the storm wouldn’t be ending any time soon.

This was the main reason Zorian was less impatient about leaving Rea’s place this time around. He couldn’t just teleport to Imaya’s place or create a rain shield around himself and Kirielle. No, he would have to use an umbrella like a normal person, and they would end up wet and miserable by the time they actually reached their destination. He was in no hurry to experience that.

"What horrid weather," Rea said, frowning. "I think you’re going to have to remain here over the night."

"We can’t impose on you like that," Zorian said hurriedly, shaking his head. "We’ll just slowly make our way through the storm. A little rain won’t kill us."

"You can’t be serious," Rea said, giving him an annoyed look. "I know teenage boys can be a little reckless, and I would not have said anything if it was just you being stupid… but you’re taking your little sister along and you have to take this into account. Are you seriously thinking of taking her out there into that with just an umbrella?"

Zorian stared at Rea for a few seconds before looking at Kirielle, who was sitting on the floor with Nochka. They were both whispering something to each other and pretending they weren’t listening in on their conversation.

"Kirielle," Zorian asked her slowly. "What do you think about going?"

"Umm…" she fumbled, rubbing her hands awkwardly. "It’s raining pretty hard."

Zorian sighed, taking off his glasses and massaging the bridge of his nose. After a few seconds he gave Rea an embarrassed look. He was just about to speak up but she put a hand on his shoulder to stop him and simply nodded her head knowingly.

"I’ll go get some blankets," she said, before wandering off to do just that.