mol3-4.txt

Daimen made a show of looking around, even peering beneath the log he was sitting on. Zorian rolled his eyes at him.
“I left her in Cyoria, of course,” Zorian told him.
“You left her alone while you traveled to Koth?” Daimen asked flatly, sounding very unamused.
“Calm down,” Zorian told him. “It’s only for a few hours.”
“What? What do you mean ‘for a few hours’?” Daimen protested. “Traveling to Koth takes days, even with teleportation!”
“We’ll discuss that later, okay?” Zorian tried.
“No, we can’t discuss that later! This whole thing is insane and quite frankly I’m starting to question if you’re even actually Zorian!” Daimen said, giving him a heated glare. “My brother is fifteen years old and there is no way he would involve himself with something like this. In fact, even if he wanted to get involved, he doesn’t have the skills to do so! Who are you really and what did you do to Zorian?”
Zorian was silent for a moment. It was a good question, really. In truth, the real Zorian had died at the start of the month. He had stolen his body and identity, letting his soul move on to the afterlife. Daimen wasn’t actually wrong to think of him as an imposter.
If the Daimen in front of him knew the truth, would he consider him his real brother or would he do his best to avenge the real Zorian? Temporary looper Daimen felt that sacrificing his life so that Zorian could replace the original was right and proper, but this Daimen might not agree.
It was amusing, Zorian thought to himself bitterly. Years ago, he wouldn’t have given a damn about what Daimen thought of him and his choices. Now he found himself dreading his judgment, should his eldest brother ever find out the truth.
“The notebook in your hand,” said Zorian, pointing his finger at the book Daimen was tightly clutching in his hands, “is proof that things have happened which you have no memory of. Therefore, should it really surprise you that I am also not how you remember me? I could show you some skills you taught me. Minor things, but things that should be immediately obvious as your own magical insights. Would that convince you?”
“I need an explanation,” Daimen insisted, clutching the notebook in his hands so tightly his fingers turned white from blood loss.
“I’ll give you one at the end of the month,” said Zorian. “After the summer festival.”
That was amusing, too. Zorian had used this excuse so many times in the past, while he was still inside the time loop. The only difference was that, back then, this offer meant he didn’t really have to explain anything. The loop would restart before the deadline was reached.
“After this invasion of yours,” Daimen noted shrewdly.
“Yes. As I said, lives depend on it,” Zorian insisted.
“You expect me to help you out for a mere promise of an explanation after the deed is done?” Daimen asked him.
“No,” Zorian said, shaking his head. “All I want is for you to take my warning seriously and to make sure the Taramatula do the same. So long as you survive the month and protect your fiancée’s family from the invaders, I will consider this a success.”
Daimen stared at him angrily for a few seconds, before rising from his log again.
“Let’s go,” he told Zorian.
“Go where?” Zorian asked, taken aback at the statement.
“To Cyoria,” Daimen said matter-of-factly. “You’re going back there now, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” Zorian admitted. “So you want to go with me?”
“I need to confirm things personally,” Daimen said. “And check up on Kirielle, just in case. Let’s go.”
“Just like that?” Zorian asked for confirmation.
“Is there a problem?” Daimen asked, frowning at him.
“Well, aren’t your fiancée and her family going to freak out if you suddenly disappear for a few days?” Zorian told him, cocking his head sideways. “I mean, surely you want to explain things to them before we set off.”
Of course, Zorian could just get him back to Koth in a few hours, but Daimen didn’t really know he could open a Gate between continents at will…
Sure enough, Daimen’s eyes widened in sudden realization and he slapped himself in the forehead a few times.
“Focus, focus…” he mumbled to himself. “Alright, so we’re going to put the journey on hold for now. I… need to talk to a few people first.”
- break -
In the depths of the Ziggurat of the Sun taken over by the sulrothum, a strange meeting was taking place. Zach and Zorian stood before a huge stone dais that contained this tribe’s sacred fire. The high priest and his honor guard stood in front of the fire, looking down at the two arrivals. The massive bonfire writhed and crackled in a strange, somewhat ominous manner, casting light and shadows alike on the surrounding walls.
Both sides silently scrutinized each other for a full minute before the sulrothum high priest decided to break the ice.
“Welcome, guests,” the high priest said. “We have been expecting you.”
“You have?” Zorian asked curiously.
That was quite unusual, since their visit here was completely unannounced.
“The angels have informed us of your coming,” the high priest told them.
Of course. Zorian had kind of expected that, to be honest. Funnily enough, the angels were not nearly as willing to contact human organizations to help them out. For example, Zach and Zorian had been in secret talks with the Triumvirate Church representatives, and at no point did the angels contact the Church hierarchy to make the negotiations go more smoothly. But a random sulrothum tribe in the middle of the Xlotic desert merited them sending actual instruction? Just what made this tribe of devil wasps so special, anyway?
“Did they inform you why we were coming?” Zach asked them.
“You’re here to ask for help, of course,” the high priest said easily. “A great battle is about to take place, pitting the allies of heaven against an ancient evil.”
“Well… yeah, that’s what we’re here for,” Zach admitted after a second.
“We accept,” the high priest immediately said.
“Just like that?” Zach asked incredulously, arching his eyebrow.
“What more is there to say?” the high priest asked rhetorically. “Only cowards would shirk from this kind of battle. To fight and die in the name of heaven is glorious. Surely you understand this? I can sense the mark of the angels shining bright on you.”
“The mark of heaven…” Zach said sourly. “Yay. What an honor.”
The high priest’s multifaceted eyes stared at Zach for a second, antennae twitching, trying to interpret his statement.
“Children often do not understand the importance of what their parents try to teach them,” the high priest eventually remarked.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Zach asked, annoyed.
“Just a random remark,” the sulrothum high priest said, waving his hand in front of him dismissively. A very human gesture. Zorian wondered if sulrothum really did that, or if the high priest was familiar enough with human customs to mimic their habits. “I just realized you are quite young in human terms.”
“We thank you for your help from the bottom of our hearts,” Zorian quickly said, cutting Zach off from continuing the pointless argument. “If it’s all right with you, we’d like to discuss battle plans.”
“Let’s,” agreed the high priest.
- break -
In a small, out-of-the-way alley on the outskirts of Cyoria, simulacrum number two was painting a picture on a wall. It was a small, abstract picture the size of a human head, vaguely resembling an eyeball if one viewed it from the right angle.
To a casual observer, the painting would likely look like a random graffiti, the likes of which were quite common in Cyoria. The city was crawling with young mages, after all, and they often used their newly gained magic skills to vandalize the walls of nearby buildings. Painting spells were beginner stuff, and nearly every mage was capable of using them.
But the painting was more than just idle amusement. So much more. After half an hour, the simulacrum carefully connected the last two lines of the drawing, causing a faint blue sigil to momentarily flash into existence within the painting, before quickly fading away from sight.
After observing his handiwork for a few more seconds, the simulacrum placed his hand on the painting, activated the spell formula hidden within it, and then dived into it with his mind.
Almost immediately, a sea of glowing suns popped into existence inside his mind, connected by a dense web of light. His mind raced from one sun to the next, his mind sense and telepathy manifesting itself throughout the whole network. There were sigils like this one scattered throughout most of the city by now, and through them, Zorian’s mind powers could envelop nearly all of Cyoria. Every building, every street was within his reach. He could see and invade the minds of anyone and anything, from the lowest pigeon to the most high-ranking mage…
He quickly retracted his mind from the sigil, afraid he would get noticed by someone. This had to stay an absolute secret. No one, not even his closest allies, were allowed to know about the sigil network.
Taking one last look at the painting, simulacrum number two nodded to himself and wandered off to place more sigils elsewhere. Some of these paintings were bound to be found and erased by the city authorities and building owners, so it was best if he had some spares scattered around.
“99 telepathy nodes on the wall, 99 telepathy nodes… take one down, wipe it away, 98 telepathy nodes on the wall…” the simulacrum hummed to himself.
He had lots of work to do today.
- break -
In one of the empty academy classrooms, Zorian and Tinami sat facing each other, both silent.
Well, for a few moments, at least.
“Are you serious?” Tinami asked incredulously. “You can connect me with the legendary aranea?”
“I’m not sure I would call them ‘legendary’,” Zorian remarked. “They’re more common than you’d think, and a bit underwhelming once you get to know them. But yes, I can indeed do that.”
He had gotten to talk to Tinami the same way he did in the past – by answering her call to have someone help her practice her telepathy skills. Naturally, the moment she experienced his innate mental skills, she wanted to know how he got them, and that quickly led the conversation to the topic of aranea.
The point of all this, of course, was to get House Aope involved in preparations for the invasion. They had shown themselves to be quite resourceful and capable the one time he and Spear of Resolve had brought them into the whole invasion conspiracy. The awful, catastrophic outcome of that restart aside, the Aope had played their part perfectly.
Hopefully the rumors of House Aope being bad luck were just superstitious nonsense and history wouldn’t really repeat itself like that, right? After all, House Aope couldn’t have reached its current status if it was really cursed…
Paranoia aside, he was taking quite a risk by interacting with Tinami like this. Not because he thought House Aope would mess up their invasion preparations or anything like that, but because of the attention it would bring to him personally. Officially, Zorian was just connecting Tinami and House Aope with the aranea, and anything else they talked about had nothing to do with him. In practice, there was no way the leaders of House Aope would be naïve enough to swallow that story. This was equivalent to putting a giant beacon on top of his head, telling the Aope leadership that he was worth paying attention to. Not exactly conductive to his plans to lay low after this whole thing is resolved.
Still, there was no helping it. The situation was precarious enough that he needed their help if he could get it.
“You know, you’re more interesting than I thought you were,” Tinami remarked, giving him a shrewd look.
“Err, thanks,” Zorian said awkwardly.
“Not that way,” she hurriedly clarified. “What I meant was… you’re venturing into the tunnels beneath the city and taking lessons from giant sapient spiders living there. I never would have guessed you were that… driven.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Zorian said after a short pause.
“It is,” Tinami confirmed. “By the way, how come you’re missing so many classes? You know that looks pretty bad on your record, right? Even if you’re more capable than you look, you should still pay attention to your reputation.”
“Don’t lecture me. You sound like my mother,” Zorian told her. Tinami didn’t seem amused. “Anyway, I’m really busy with something right now and I can’t come to class. I already told my mentor about it and he said it was alright. I should be able to start attending classes again after the summer festival.”
Assuming he was still alive and the city remained standing, that is.
“It’s your life, I guess,” Tinami shrugged. “These meetings… we’ll continue with these, yes?”
“Sure,” Zorian said. “As long as you wish.”
“I get the feeling this is far more to my benefit than yours,” Tinami noted.
“Kind of,” Zorian agreed. “But I am learning things here, so it’s okay. This isn’t a zero sum game.”
He wasn’t even lying. Attending these practice sessions with Tinami would hopefully clue him in on what kind of skill level was considered normal among human mind mages. He had a feeling that would be crucial information in the near future.
Tinami gave him a weird look when he said that, though.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said quickly. “Nothing at all.”
- break -
In the skies above Iasku Mansion, a lone iron beak was slowly circling the surrounding forest. The huge flock of iron beaks that guarded the place had long since noticed it, and were watching it carefully, but they did feel a certain level of kinship with a fellow iron beak, even if it was a foreign one, so they did not attack it.
The iron beak was actually Zorian, who had used a potion to shapeshift into the said bird. What he was doing was crazy, but if it could work…
He slowly approached the iron beak flock, probing it with his mind and soul, looking for flock leaders and weak links. Sudomir and the invaders had these iron beaks controlled through blackmail, having seized their nests and subverted their leadership, but the flock had never submitted totally. It was intelligent enough to recognize blackmail and listen to simple orders, but also smart enough to hold a grudge and plot revenge.
For hours Zorian circled the flock, speaking to them mind-to-mind, subtly subverting the mind magic used by invaders to control iron beak leaders. If it were anyone else doing it, they would have likely made a mistake somewhere and alerted the monster handlers that something was happening and that the flock had gone out of control. But Zorian was good. Too good for the Ibasan monster controllers to detect anything.
As time went by, the iron beak flock paid more and more attention to the thoughts and images being fed into their heads. They were quiet and still, but their eyes shone with increasingly malicious glee.
Soon.
- break -
The day of the summer festival swiftly approached. Most of the preparations were complete, but there was always more that could be done and their actions got ever more frantic and desperate as the deadline loomed ever closer. Perhaps it was just Zorian’s mind playing tricks on him, but it seemed to him that even uninvolved people, like Imaya and Kirielle, could sense the heavy atmosphere and became more serious as a result.
As the end approached, Zach and Zorian evacuated most of the people close to them out of the city. Having already seen how that sort of thing could go wrong with their original plan to get everyone to Koth, they did not group everyone together at the same place like they had before. Instead they picked five different sanctuaries and distributed people among them. In addition to Xvim, Daimen also got himself involved with the evacuation, drawing on his own connections and experience to make things go more smoothly.
His brother was still not happy with the amount of secrecy Zorian presented him with, but he seemed to realize the seriousness of the situation in the end, and agreed to cooperate with them until the situation was resolved.
After the summer festival was over, however, he was going to come to Zorian for that explanation he was promised. He was quite vocal about that.
Unfortunately, the evacuation wasn’t entirely successful. While most people agreed to go into hiding when told there would be fighting in the city during the summer festival, Taiven and Rea refused to go.
In Taiven’s case, the reason was exactly what Zorian had been afraid of – she thought of it more as an opportunity to prove herself than a dangerous situation to avoid. She was a fully-qualified battlemage, after all. All she needed now was some actual field experience. Zorian understood all that, but he also understood that she was a known friend of his to their enemies, which meant they would be directing far more forces at her than her skills and reputation warranted. Her combat skills, impressive as they were for her age, were not enough.
Was he selfish for not explaining that to her? Probably. If he told her the invaders would be gunning for her because of him, that would raise all sorts of questions about why that is so, and probably lead to her either finding out everything about him or feeling betrayed and hating him forever for it.
But maybe her hating him forever was worth it if it meant she would survive the month…
As for Rea, she was fine with having her daughter and husband out of danger, but she refused to go into hiding herself. Her explanation for this was that she was confident enough in her own combat skills and had to guard their house from looting. They were a very poor family, she said, and their move to Cyoria had exhausted all of their savings. If their house ended up looted or destroyed, they would be utterly ruined.
Zorian was wracking his head about how to talk her into abandoning the house – when Rea ended up inviting him to her house on her own initiative. Zorian was quite surprised at this, as this wasn’t something Rea typically did. Did she somehow catch wind of his own involvement in all this?
When he finally arrived at her place, however, he was greeted with another surprise: there were two more people already there.
One was Haslush, the detective that taught him divination and that he had already recruited into their anti-invasion efforts. He gave Zorian a curious look, but there was no trace of recognition in his eyes. He probably did not suspect Zorian.
The other was, shockingly, Raynie. His classmate was clutching a cup of hot, steaming tea that Rea brought her with pale fingers, a blank expression on her face. She looked terrible.
It took a while for her to wrench herself out of her thoughts and notice someone had arrived, but when she did she gave him a shocked look.
“Zorian? What are you doing here?” Raynie asked.
“I invited him here,” Rea said matter-of-factly.
“Him? He’s the guy you said could help me?” Raynie asked incredulously. “But he’s just a student! What could he possibly do?”
“I have a feeling mister Kazinski here is more than just a student,” said Rea, giving Zorian a knowing look. “In any case, why don’t you tell Zorian what happened so that he knows what he’s dealing with.”
Haslush observed the situation calmly, giving Zorian a thorough look but not saying anything. Zorian was really uncomfortable at the whole situation.
Raynie stared at him questioningly for a few seconds, before she once again lowered her head and stared at her tea cup in a defeated manner.
“My brother has been kidnapped,” she quietly said.
Chapter 100
Sacrifice
Standing in Rea’s home, Zorian ignored the curious gazes leveled at him from Rea and Haslush and kept silent, calmly considering things. A million questions swam through his head. Why were these three gathered in Rea’s house, despite the fact they shouldn’t even know about each other? Why did Rea think he could help in this situation and what were their enemies even thinking when they orchestrated this kidnapping? Was this some kind of strike against him and Zach? Why not go after all of his classmates, then?
Raynie did not give him a lot of time to ponder those questions, though, and took his silence as a sign she should keep going.
“My family doesn’t live in Cyoria, so I didn’t even know it happened at first. It wasn’t until my family discovered some signs the kidnappers might have originated from Cyoria that they contacted me, several days later, and asked me for help,” Raynie explained quietly. “I was shocked. Shocked that it happened, and… umm…”
She fumbled with her words for a few seconds before falling into an awkward silence and lowering her head even further. She looked quite pitiable at the moment.
“That they asked for your help with this?” Zorian tried.
She flinched slightly and gave him a shocked look for a second. Guilt, sadness, and confusion emanated from her in an equal mix. However, she quickly schooled her expression and cleared her throat with a trace of panic.
“Y-Yes, exactly! I’m just an academy student, what can I even do?” she said hurriedly. “I want to help my little brother, of course, but this is way above me! So I… contacted the police about it… and they eventually pointed me at detective Ikzeteri here, who agreed to help. And… here we are, I guess.” She took a deep breath after finishing her explanation and gave Zorian a disbelieving, but slightly hopeful look. “No offense, Zorian, but I’m still not sure how you can help me with this.”
“Neither am I,” Zorian told her honestly.
He could help, of course. How he should go about doing that, however, was something he couldn’t decide on at the moment.
Raynie’s expression immediately dimmed after his admission, but he didn’t let that bother him. He couldn’t ruin all their plans just to assure her everything would be alright.
He glanced at Rea and she glanced back at him, completely unconcerned with whether or not she had judged him wrong. What exactly gave her the confidence that he was someone who could make a difference here? No matter how he wracked his head, he couldn’t figure it out.
“You’re pretty calm about this,” Haslush commented from the side, giving him a shrewd look.
“Panicking wouldn’t help anyone,” Zorian commented, unconcerned with the veiled accusation. That wasn’t enough to prove anything.
“That’s not how people work, but alright,” Haslush said with a light shrug. “I guess you’re just an exceptionally calm person.”
This probably wasn’t a deliberate attack on him and Zach, Zorian decided. While Raynie was one of their classmates, neither of them were very close to her in the time loop. Zorian did feel a certain kinship towards her, due to her messed up family situation, but Silverlake shouldn’t know that. Therefore, Jornak and the rest shouldn’t either.
The fact their enemies kidnapped Raynie’s brother was probably just an accident. Since Zorian sabotaged their efforts to kidnap shifter children in the city of Cyoria and its surroundings, they looked further away for suitable targets. They needed those sacrifices, after all. Without the primordial essence contained in the blood of shifter children, the primordial’s prison couldn’t be opened. In the time loop, the Sovereign Gate could serve as a substitute key, but out here in the real world that wasn’t possible.
As it turned out, Raynie’s brother was one of the children the invaders ended up targeting in their expanded search. Did they even know they were targeting the family of someone who went to class with Zach and Zorian? Then again, even if they did, they may have thought it wouldn’t matter. Raynie’s relationship with her family was not exactly the best. It wouldn’t be out of line to assume she would be glad to have her brother out of the picture.
“I have to say, though, I’m surprised to see you here,” Zorian told Raynie. “I didn’t know you and Rea knew each other.”
In fact, considering her disdain towards cat shifters, he would expect Raynie to purposely stay away from Rea.
“Err, we don’t,” Raynie said, giving Rea an unsure look. “Detective Ikzeteri is the one who brought me here. He thought she might be able to help.”
“We have received reports of a group targeting shifter children some time ago, so we have been in contact with city shifters about the issue,” Haslush clarified, idly studying some kind of metal disc in his hands, flipping it over from time to time. Zorian recognized it as one of the communication devices the cultists and Ibasans sometimes used to coordinate their actions. Apparently the detective hadn’t been sitting idly all this time. “Ms. Sashal was one of the… less adversarial contacts we established during that time. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to bring your classmate here to see if she had some insight into the situation.”
“I’m just a humble housewife, so how could I offer insight into a situation like that?” Rea said with a slight smile, shaking her head lightly. “Still, the mother in me can’t help but empathize with the pain of having your little brother stolen away by some heartless fiends. In another life, that could have been my little Nochka in his place, no?”
She gave Zorian a piercing look, but he just raised his eyebrow at her in response.
“What are you implying?” he bluntly asked after a few seconds.
“I know you are connected to the evacuation effort that has been going on recently, and that it’s not a minor connection either,” Rea told him with an exaggerated sigh. “Your scent is present on almost everyone that has come to talk to me about getting Nochka and the rest of us out of the city. You have several adult friends who all treat you with respect, and even a little deference, more like you’re their leader than a precocious teenager. You are known as a diligent and hard-working student, but you’ve been skipping all your classes for weeks now, doing gods know what.”
‘Stupid cat shifters and their superhuman sense of smell…’ Zorian grumbled internally. He was pretty sure she wouldn’t have gotten suspicious and started connecting things if there were no scent clues to attract her attention.
“Plus, when Ms. Sashal mentioned you, I couldn’t help but notice that your older brother Daimen, who is said to be in Koth, has been very active in the city lately,” Haslush added from the side. He placed the communication disc he was fiddling with in his pocket and focused his full attention on Zorian. “Almost like some kind of emergency has popped up, forcing him to drop whatever he had been doing to rush back to Eldemar, no?”
“Oh, come on. Me and my brother almost never interact with one another,” Zorian told him. “You seem to have investigated me, surely you know that much? How would I know anything about what he has been doing?”
“But you do know he’s here in Cyoria right now?” Haslush pressed.
“Of course. He dropped by to let me know he’s in the city. It’s just common courtesy. We are family, after all,” Zorian said with a shrug. He saw no point in telling an obvious lie and pretending he never saw Daimen recently.
“Do you two seriously believe Zorian is some kind of secret agent?” Raynie asked incredulously from the side, her eyes shifting between the three of them in rapid succession.
“He definitely knows more than he lets on,” Rea shrugged. “Considering the situation, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try to wring some information out of him. It’s your brother’s life on the line here.”
“It, it doesn’t have to be,” Raynie tried anxiously. “Maybe it’s just a ransom thing and they just haven’t gotten to state their demands. It’s–”
“You’re lying to yourself and you know it,” Rea said, giving her a knowing look. “When a shifter child gets kidnapped, nine times out of ten it’s because the kidnappers want their blood essence. With so much time having passed, it’s a question whether your brother is still alive at this point.”
Raynie paled at the reminder.
“Let’s not be all doom and gloom here. I’m sure her brother is still very much alive,” Haslush hurriedly assured Raynie. “The ritual they are kidnapping all these children for is only due to happen on the night of the summer festival. They need to keep her brother alive for a while yet.”
“Hm. If you say so,” Rea said. “Still, that date is just around the corner. If that’s our deadline, we don’t really have much to work with.”
“Look, what do you even expect of me?” Zorian asked Rea, frowning at her slightly. “I don’t know where any kidnapped children are being kept. Do you think I would just sit on that information if I knew?”
It wasn’t like Zach and Zorian didn’t try to sabotage the primordial release ritual by denying the invaders the needed sacrifices. The problem was that they couldn’t possibly round up every shifter child on the continent and hide them away – no matter how thorough they were, their enemies could always throw a wider net and go after some shifter community that Zach and Zorian didn’t even know about. Jornak had spent decades preparing for this. Zorian suspected the power-mad lawyer would have found the needed sacrifices no matter what they did.
Of course, if Zach and Zorian could locate the place where the shifter children were being kept, he was all for launching a rescue operation. Without the needed sacrifices, Panaxeth couldn’t get free, which would be an automatic win in a sense. It would be worth it to trigger the final battle before the summer festival if they could inflict such a critical blow on their opposition. The problem was that Zorian genuinely had no idea where Raynie’s brother could be held. It could very well be that those children were being kept on Ulquaan Ibasa, Koth or some other distant place.
They could be anywhere on the planet, so finding them was like searching for a needle in a haystack.
“I don’t know,” Rea admitted. “I know you’re involved with this somehow, but I don’t know in what way. Maybe you really can’t do anything for poor Raynie here, but I’m hoping you can. I know she thinks I’m just a scheming, skulking cat, but I really do want to help her.”
“What!?” Raynie protested. “I don’t–”
“It’s fine,” Rea said with a chuckle, gesturing with her hand towards Raynie to quiet her down. “I get it. There’s too much bad blood between our peoples to let go on a whim. And I get why Zorian here is feeling defensive and denying everything. I suppose it must feel like I led him here into some sort of ambush.”
“Didn’t you?” Zorian asked, raising his eyebrow at her.
“No… well, yes, I guess I kind of did,” Rea admitted. “But considering you’ve been less than honest with me these past few weeks, I think you should be able to stomach a little underhandedness.”
Zorian opened his mouth to defend himself but she raised her palm to stop him.
“I understand,” Rea said. “I’m not angry with you. You wanted to get your sister’s friend and her family out of danger, but you didn’t want to reveal your secrets. I would have probably made the same choice in your place. I’m just curious… was our first meeting really an accident?”
“Yes,” Zorian said easily. From a certain perspective it was true. “I’m not terribly social. If my little sister wasn’t such a giant busybody and insisted I accompany Nochka to her home, the idea would have never occurred to me. Getting Nochka’s bike out of the river so she could stop crying would be enough for me.”
“Oh, is that what really happened?” Rea laughed. “You know, Nochka later told me a bunch of mean boys were trying to take her bike away from her and you chased them off and then escorted her home in case they came back.”
Oops. He should have synchronized stories with Nochka, apparently. He didn’t think it was a big secret!
“Err, of course Nochka’s version is the correct one,” Zorian assured her. “Don’t mind my earlier ramblings, I just got confused for a moment.”
“Sure, sure,” Rea said indulgently. “It was very heroic of you to defend my precious daughter from random ruffians like that…”
For a while, Haslush and Raynie watched them curiously as they talked, not interrupting their interaction. However, while Haslush was a grown man and an experienced detective, Raynie was just a teenager and under a lot of stress at the moment. As such, she soon became impatient.
“You… Zorian, can you help me with this or not?” she loudly asked, impatience and frustration in her voice.
Zorian stared at her for a second before opening his mouth to apologize and tell her he was just an academy student and that there was nothing he could do to help her brother…
…but then he shut his mouth and started thinking about something.
It suddenly dawned on him that their enemies may have made a huge mistake when they kidnapped Raynie’s brother.
After a few seconds, he focused back on the redheaded girl staring at him expectantly and stared back straight into her eyes.
“You know what?” he told her. “I actually think there is something I can do. But I’m going to need your help.”
Haslush silently leaned forward, his lazy-looking posture shifting into one of alertness.
“Me?” she asked, taken aback. She shifted in her seat uncomfortably. “But I’m just an academy student.”
“So am I,” Zorian told her. “Here’s what we need to do…”
- break -
In the port city of Luja, there was a small abandoned warehouse. It was a dark, uninviting place – the walls were moldy and crumbling, the floors were full of rat droppings and glass shards from broken bottles, and the windows and doors were crudely barricaded with wooden boards. There were a number of such places in Luja, as it was a large port town where trading companies were starting up and going bankrupt on a regular basis. Most abandoned warehouses would eventually find a new buyer and be fixed up into useable condition, but it wasn’t unusual for places like this to stay unoccupied for months or even years as old owners tried to hold on to them in hopes of getting a better price later.
As it happened though, this particular place held a dark secret. In the back of the warehouse, shielded from view by a mountain of rotting crates and boards, there was a black egg-like object attached to the floor with a mass of root-like tendrils. Spiral lines were etched into the black oval, beginning at the bottom and reaching all the way to the tip. Perceptive individuals would note that the oval almost looked like a giant black flower bulb on the verge of unfolding into a proper flower.
Or maybe a container, patiently waiting for the day it could unleash its contents upon its oblivious surroundings.
Zach, Zorian and Alanic stood some distance away from the black oval, staring at it grimly. They dared not approach, lest they activate the hidden wards and traps strategically placed around it.
“This is the fourth one we found,” Alanic commented. “One in Cyoria, two in Korsa, and now one in Luja. Just how many wraith bombs did these people make?”
“There has to be more than one of these things in Cyoria,” Zorian commented. “There is no way they would place two in Korsa and then leave only one for Cyoria. Korsa is important, but Cyoria is a far more critical location. We just haven’t found the others.”
“There are probably a few in the capital city as well,” Zach said. “Jornak seems to have a downright personal grudge with our country’s leadership. No way would he miss the chance to strike at them at the heart of their power. Plus, considering what he said about Sulamnon and Falkrinea, there’s bound to be a few of these bombs reserved for them as well…”
“We’ll never be able to find more than a fraction of them,” Alanic commented grimly. “This is going to be a disaster. Entire city districts could end up being devoured by wraiths. The cleanup will take years.”
He glanced at Zach and Zorian unhappily, but neither of them said anything. There was nothing to say, really. They knew this as well.
“You still don’t know how to neutralize these things without triggering them?” Alanic asked with a trace of resignation in his voice. He already suspected the answer he was going to get.
Sure enough, Zach and Zorian shook their heads in denial.
“They’re superbly well made,” Zorian told him. “Jornak must have spent ages refining the design in the time loop. Any tampering I can think of will set one off, as well as alert our enemies to our actions. The only way we can deal with these is by employing the same tactics we used on the previous wraith bombs – set up a specialized ward field just outside the bomb’s defensive field and try to contain the wraiths once they’re released. It should be effective, but I obviously haven’t tested it, so…”
“I see,” Alanic said. He turned around towards the wraith bomb again, staring at it as if it that was going to suddenly provide him with some new insights. “You don’t have to waste time on that. I’ll contact the church higher ups and send them to perform another containment job here. I still say we should trigger these things the moment we find them and deal with the consequences.”
“And I still say we shouldn’t,” Zorian argued back. “These wraith bombs can be harmlessly disarmed. Jornak has a method to do so, I’m sure. I just need to rip it out of his head.”
“You really think you can do that?” Zach asked doubtfully. “We’d have to capture Jornak alive for that to happen. That seems… difficult.”
“These wraith bombs are set to collectively go off the instant Jornak dies, so we want to avoid killing him if at all possible, anyway,” Zorian pointed out. “Not to mention the other surprises he may have left for us in the case of his death. For all his megalomania, he clearly realized there’s a real chance he’s going to lose this conflict and made contingencies to account for it.”
Zach snorted derisively.
“Too many contingencies, if you ask me,” Zach said. “He put so much time into making sure everyone suffers if he loses… what does he even gain out of that? It’s just petty. Sore loser.”
“Well, we were just discussing how we should try to capture him instead of killing him outright,” Alanic noted. “So it’s not just pettiness. But yes, I get the feeling this is more than just about power for Jornak. He wants revenge.”
“Revenge?” Zach asked, surprised. “On who?”
“Everyone,” Alanic said, still staring at the black oval in front of them.
The smooth, glossy surface of the object squirmed and shuddered, as if hundreds of worms were moving just beneath the surface, before once again becoming still and quiet. Neither of the three were disturbed at the sight. Wraith bombs did that sometimes. On occasion, one could even see a faint outline of hands and faces on the surface of the oval – leering, maddened, crying, screaming, begging – as if a person was desperately trying to break out from the inside before being forcibly wrenched back into the depths of the device.
“Speaking from personal experience here, maybe?” Zach tried, giving Alanic a curious look.
Alanic didn’t say anything for a second.
“I was a very angry person when I was young,” he eventually said. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
All three stayed silent for a few seconds, and Zorian quietly considered the battle-priest’s words. Alanic had never told them about his past, and Zorian had always respected that. Truthfully, he sometimes wondered why the man was so helpful to them in the first place. Did he see them as young troublemakers that needed to be steered from a dark path, just like someone had once steered him away from one? Or was he simply so discerning that he could accurately judge them with even the slightest exposure? Whatever the answer, Zorian was grateful for the priest’s help and had no desire to open old wounds if he didn’t have to.
As for the priest’s speculation of Jornak’s motivation… well, it could be true. Jornak – the old Jornak, the one that Zorian had talked to in the time loop – was definitely bitter and resentful about having his rightful inheritance stolen away from him. He could see how that could grow and fester once he became a temporary looper and looked into the abyss of corruption and power plays that was Altazian politics.
In the end, it didn’t even matter. No matter what reasons he had, Zorian would still have to defeat him in the end.
“In somewhat unrelated news, Silverlake is gone,” Zorian suddenly spoke up, breaking the silence. “The old Silverlake, that is. She just packed up everything portable out of her hideout and disappeared one day. I don’t have the faintest idea where she went.”
“Do you think she’ll join the battle on our enemy’s side?” Zach asked, frowning.
“No, I doubt it,” Zorian said. “I think she just realized she was being heavily scrutinized by some very powerful forces and got spooked. She’s a coward. No way she would dive into this conflict unless someone arm-twisted her into it, and new Silverlake seemed like she wouldn’t support that.”
“If she’s really going to stay out of this, I’m fine with her going away,” Zach shrugged. “One less thing to worry about.”
“I’ve heard reports that several mercenary companies from the neighboring countries have taken on secretive, well-paid contracts,” Alanic said. “I’m not completely sure but I strongly suspect our enemies have bought themselves some more soldiers for the final battle.”
Zach scowled at the news, uttering a nasty curse. Zorian’s reaction was more restrained, but his face still darkened in response.
“The invaders have in general been getting restless and increasingly reckless as of late. Their preparations might be nearing their end,” Alanic continued, becoming more animated. “What are we waiting for? We should attack now and seize the initiative.”
“Well… the idea was always to be proactive and launch an attack before the day of the summer festival,” Zach said, giving Zorian a questioning look. “However, Zorian keeps stalling, saying he needs more time. So the timing depends on him, really.”
Alanic’s eyes softened a bit at the statement, his posture deflating.
“Ah, the situation with Zach, right?” he asked softly. “Did you find…?”
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t find a solution no matter where I looked,” Zorian said with a wooden voice, not a trace of emotion on his face.
“It’s fine,” Zach sighed. “I’ve already come to terms with things. I’ve already written my final will and everything.”
“Right. In any case, you’re right. There is no point in waiting anymore. We’re just giving our enemies more time. We’ll attack two days from now, the day before the summer festival. I still have one final idea I want to try,” Zorian said.
“The shifter thing?” Zach asked curiously. “You really think that will work?”
“If it does, it will be a huge success,” Zorian pointed out.
“True,” Zach agreed. “It’s worth a try.”
- break -
Just outside of Cyoria, there was a spherical ritual room made by Zorian and his simulacrums. Everything here was carefully crafted for only one purpose: to power up and enhance one particular divination spell. All of the walls were densely packed with complicated series of lines and endless rows of cryptic sigils, all made from precious metals and rare alchemical materials. The ground was etched with no less than six blood red magical circles, and in the center stood a small golden cube with a seemingly mundane pottery bowl. Hundreds of tiny white stars hung in the air, illuminating the space. These were actually tiny dimensional gates that connected the room to various places in the country and beyond.
Every place that was likely to house the kidnapped shifter children, in Zorian’s opinion.
Currently the ritual room contained Raynie, Haslush, Rea, and three of Zorian’s simulacrums. Two simulacrums were disguised as adult mages, grim and silent, and were here for the sake of pretending this was a secret government operation, rather than something Zorian set up himself. Only one of them would be necessary for the ritual itself, but having two wouldn’t hurt and it would be more realistic for something of this scale to require multiple people to execute.
The last simulacrum looked just like Zorian and pretended to be the original – his job was mostly to stay next to Haslush and Rea and pretend to be normal. Though considering the looks on their faces as they studied the ritual grounds, he felt he mostly failed at that already.
“My, mister Kazinski… I knew you couldn’t be normal, but I have to say I didn’t expect you’re connected to people like this…” Rea said quietly. For the first time since he met her, she didn’t sound confident and in control, and he instead sensed a trace of fear in her voice.
“You have no idea,” Haslush said, his voice quivering. His reaction was even more extreme than Rea’s; he seemed downright horrified by what he was seeing. “More money went into this room than my entire police department gets in a year. And it’s all meant to empower one specific spell that is only useful for this one thing! The whole thing will be useless after today! The extravagance is mind-boggling.”
Simulacrum number one shifted in place, a little uncomfortable. Zorian’s perspective on money was a little skewed, yeah. This could be a real problem in the future, but at the moment he really didn’t care. He’d pay twice this much if he thought it would help.
“You don’t even understand what this room means, do you?” Haslush asked Zorian, giving him a strange look.
“No?” the simulacrum told him uncertainly.
And he really didn’t. Sure, the room was the best thing he could make on short notice, which probably made it amazing by regular mages’ standards, but he was sure a country as big and influential as Eldemar could pull this off.
It was kind of funny, really… the original went through so much trouble to make his abilities seem more humble than they were and to attribute his achievements to some nebulous government organization. He’d even succeeded. But in the end, the mere fact he was associated with people like that was enough to alarm and awe Haslush and Rea.
He’d normally get a headache out of this, but he was just a simulacrum and wouldn’t even exist in a couple of hours, so imagining Zorian having to deal with this in the future just made him laugh.
“Ah, forget it,” Haslush sighed. “You’re still too young and inexperienced. You’re tangling with some really dangerous stuff, is all I’m going to say.”
“Don’t I know it,” the simulacrum mumbled.
Raynie, on the other hand, was currently sitting in the middle of the ritual room, next to the golden cube and the bowl, taking deep breaths to calm herself. She was chanting some sort of song to herself in a language Zorian’s simulacrum couldn’t recognize. It was probably the language of her tribe. The two disguised simulacrums were also sitting around the cube, forming a triangular formation around it together with Raynie. They were naturally far more calm and collected, and patiently waited for Raynie to psych herself for the upcoming ritual.
The pressure on her was enormous. This ritual would succeed or fail purely based on how she performed. Simulacrum number one was certain his fellow simulacrums would perform their part of the ritual flawlessly, but the core part of the divination ritual was something only Raynie could do… because it was her brother they were trying to track down with the spell.
Divination spells were more effective the more they had to work with. In case of tracking spells, the caster needed something connected to the target. A personal item, a drop of blood, things like that. They were even more effective if the caster was personally connected to the target in some way: if they had personally spoken to the target at some point, if they were friends with them, or if they were married to one another.
As far as connections go, though, there were few things more potent than being literal family: parent and child, brother and sister.
And more potent still was to use literal blood magic to form a resonance between their common bloodline.
Finally, there was the primordial essence that existed in the blood of every shifter. Raynie was already a teenager, so most of that primordial essence was gone, integrated into her body and soul. However, traces of it should remain still. Zorian had spent quite some time with the leaders of the Cult of the World Dragon, studying their method of releasing Panaxeth, and he knew how they used primordial essence to resonate with the one in the prison and act as a key. The same method could be used to fool any mortal defensive ward or anti-divination method.
Raynie and her brother were siblings. Even if they had never interacted much, the link between them was strong. Blood magic could make it even stronger. They also both had primordial essence in their blood, and that could be used to bypass any form of divination defense the invaders put up around her brother and the rest of the sacrifices.
If the ritual they were about to undertake successfully located Raynie’s brother, Zach and Zorian could liberate all the shifter children the invaders gathered during the past few weeks. Not only did that mean doing a good deed and saving a bunch of children from a gruesome death, it would also irreparably sabotage the Panaxeth release ritual. There was only one day before the summer festival. There was no way that the invaders could gather another batch of sacrifices in that short of a time.
There were a lot of ways the ritual could fail, even if they executed it flawlessly. For one thing, Zorian couldn’t blanket the entire planet with dimensional gates, no matter how small they were. Not even close. It was possible he had failed to pick the right place to search at, in which case all of this was for naught. It was also possible that the invaders were keeping all the kidnapped children separated until the final moment, in which case they will just end up saving Raynie’s brother and no one else. Their enemies also may have gathered enough spare children to form a second group, in which case they could still try to release Panaxeth as normal.
Zorian had a good feeling about this, though. This could work, he was sure of it. The only question now was whether Raynie was capable of doing her part.
The necessary blood magic itself wasn’t that difficult. Blood magic was famously easy to perform. Too easy, according to some. Additionally, blood magic tracking spells were a very common use of blood magic and there was no need for Zorian to reinvent the wheel to make one. There were plenty of tried and true methods that Raynie could use for her attempt.
It was still blood magic, however. Raynie would have to ritually cut herself during the casting, and remain clearheaded despite the resulting pain. The mana shaping requirements for successful casting were low, but Raynie was a total beginner when it came to magic, so even that may be too much for her. Finally, whether she succeeded or failed, she would be severely weakened for at least a week after the attempt, and the traces of primordial essence in her blood would be spent.
She had one try. Not one more. If she made even a single mistake, the whole ritual would be ruined, and that would be it.
So Zorian’s simulacrums patiently waited, not trying to hurry her up in any way.
Likewise, on the edge of the ritual room, Rea, Haslush and the simulacrum that actually looked like Zorian patiently waited as well.
Well, simulacrum number one patiently waited. Haslush and Rea were clearly anxious as hell about the eventual result of the ritual.
“The center of the ritual circle is protected from sounds, right?” Haslush softly asked simulacrum number one. “They can’t hear us if we talk?”
“Yes,” the simulacrum calmly said. “It’s also protected against outside mana intrusion and the like. Unless you really go out of the way to make yourself known, you shouldn’t be able to disturb them.”
Of course, simulacrum number one was always mentally connected with his fellow simulacrums and the original, but the two simulacrums participating in the ritual were too experienced and skilled to be distracted by something like that.
“What’s up with you, kid?” Haslush complained, glaring at him slightly. “Are you made of ice or something?”
“I’m just naturally stoic,” the simulacrum bragged, puffing his chest up proudly. “It’s okay, old man, you’ll learn how to be as cool as me one of these days.”
Haslush clacked his tongue at the response and no longer bothered to talk to him.
“I’ve looked into your classmate’s family situation,” Rea commented idly.
“Oh?” the simulacrum said, raising an eyebrow at her.
“It seems Raynie’s relationship with her family is… less than harmonious,” Rea said, cocking her head to the side and closing her eyes as if listening to something. “Her brother essentially replaced her as the clan heir when he was born. There are rumors that she was extremely resentful about it.”
Simulacrum number one said nothing.
“You knew,” Rea said after a while.
“Yeah,” the simulacrum admitted. “Yeah, I did.”
“You think she’s going to purposely botch the spell?” Haslush asked, frowning.
“Quite the contrary,” Rea said calmly, shaking her head. “I think she’s desperate for it to succeed. She probably wished ill on her brother a lot, and now that it finally happened she feels guilty and responsible for it. Shifter tribes have a somewhat superstitious view of curses. Wishing misfortune to someone in your head is not just harmless catharsis to a lot of them.”
“That’s true for a lot of regular people, too,” Haslush shrugged. “It’s just mages that really disdain that kind of thinking.”
Rea hummed thoughtfully, but did not respond. The whole group suddenly became silent as it became obvious that Raynie was finally ready to begin with the ritual.
The red-headed wolf shifter started chanting, softly at first but getting more confident as time went on. Her hand trembled as she raised a dagger above her palm and slashed into it once, twice, thrice… the motions were crude and she cut a little more deeply than was really necessary, but simulacrum number one supposed that was better than being too timid.
She held her bloodied hand above the simple-looking pottery bowl and dropped blood into it. The bowl promptly lit up with glowing blood red lines and diagrams, and a barely perceptible magical pulse spread out from the golden cube upon which the bowl sat. The white stars above them dimmed and brightened like a hundred tiny hearts.
Thin, hair-like streams of blood, barely visible from where simulacrum number one was standing, rose from the bowl and reached for the tiny dimensional gates above it. Raynie loudly gasped and swayed unsteadily as some of her life force left her, some of the threads reaching for the wounds on her hand like dozens of hungry leeches. Overwhelmed by the pain and vertigo, she dropped her dagger and almost collapsed face-first into the bowl in front of her, but with the support of two disguised simulacrums and her own willpower she managed to retain consciousness. Gritting her teeth, she started slowly making gestures with her healthy hand.
Finally the last gesture of the spell was made and everything snapped into place. The dimensional gates floating above them shone with blinding light, forcing Haslush and Rea to shield their eyes, and a flood of information entered the minds of the three simulacrums present.
So much information. Hundreds of places, most of them completely disconnected from each other, all of them mixing together into a giant incomprehensible mess. The spell, too vast in scope, struggled to narrow down the search on its own. It passed the task to the caster of the spell. If Raynie was doing this alone, she would have outright failed here… a beginner mage simply wasn’t capable of controlling a spell of this sophistication and magnitude. But she wasn’t doing this alone. Zorian’s simulacrums were present, and they were capable. In fact, a single one of them would have sufficed. Having three of them do this together was just overkill.
After a few seconds, simulacrum number one smiled. Almost immediately afterwards, a quick message was sent to the original by all three simulacrums. It only consisted of a single word.
“Success,” simulacrum number one mumbled.
- break -
Sitting next to a table full of battle maps, surrounded by Zach, Xvim, Alanic and the rest of the members of their little conspiracy, Zorian suddenly became alert and cleared his throat to get the attention of other people in the room. They immediately stopped whatever argument they were having and turned to him.
“We found them,” Zorian said. “Start the attack.”
- break -
On a peaceful and sunny day, just one day before the summer festival, the city of Cyoria suddenly went to hell. It was around noon when, without warning, dozens of places in the city suddenly launched volleys of magical artillery projectiles to some unseen targets just outside the city. These targets, almost as if they had been expecting something like this might happen, immediately responded with an artillery barrage of their own. In a matter of minutes, the city was burning. Numerous buildings had been partially or completely destroyed, and rogue fire elementals started wandering the city, setting everything they encountered ablaze. Neither of the two sides were done yet, though, and the exchange of magical artillery continued on for quite some time.
Then the monsters came. Skeletons, war trolls, giant lizards, massive flocks of iron beaks… all of these came pouring out of the local underworld, spreading chaos as they went. A lot of these invading monsters met a grisly end, triggering hidden traps when they tried to move through upper levels of Cyoria’s underworld, almost as if someone had foreseen their invasion routes. A lot more were held back in the depths of the earth, fighting some unseen enemy beneath the city. But even the fraction of the forces that reached the surface was nothing to scoff at.
The final battle had begun. Soon, the leaders of the two opposing forces would clash as well.
























Chapter 101
The Switch
Cyoria was burning. A number of important buildings had been leveled to the ground by the initial artillery exchange, and several sections of the city were ablaze with sapient fire that deliberately sought to burn as much of the city as possible. The invading soldiers did not help matters, as they had a tendency to set buildings ablaze unless there were defending forces to stop them from running amok.
Despite this, Zorian felt the situation was actually pretty good. Based on the previous invasions he had witnessed in the time loop, he had expected the city to suffer far more than it had so far. The city leadership was extremely quick to react and organize itself, despite the fact that the city hall and main barracks got totally destroyed early on, and the defending forces were far better equipped than he remembered. This was only partially the result of Zach and Zorian's machinations – it seemed that despite the two sides’ agreement to keep things relatively secret and low-key, some awareness of what was happening still ended up trickling down to Cyoria's authorities.
That was good. Zach and Zorian had more important battles to fight, and couldn't afford to come to the aid of the city at this time. It was up to the city itself to douse the fires before they went out of control, and repulse the invaders pouring out of tunnels beneath the city.
Was it cold-hearted of them to leave Cyoria entirely to its own devices in a time like this? A little. However, Zorian firmly believed that what they were doing was the best way to minimize the number of casualties. Getting involved in the city fighting would no doubt cause Quatach-Ichl and other invasion leaders to make their own appearance there as well. It was not in the interest of Cyoria and its inhabitants to have a bunch of ultra-powerful mages duking it out in the city streets.
No, it was far better to go on the offense against the invaders and force the high-level mage fights to happen elsewhere. Somewhere where the invaders would have to worry about collateral damage.
This was why one of Zorian's simulacrums was leading a force composed of golems, Alanic's recruits, and mind-controlled monsters straight towards the Ibasan underground base. The base held the dimensional gate through which the Ibasan forces intended to retreat once their goals had been achieved, which meant it had to be held at all costs.
Thus, the moment the invaders realized there was a powerful army heading towards their retreat point, they had no choice but to redirect most of their forces to try and stop them. The defenders on the surface probably didn't realize this, but they were fighting a mere fraction of the invading enemies, because most of them were currently busy fighting Zorian's army in the tunnels below.
Well, the original Zorian was busy with other matters entirely, so it was more accurate to say they were fighting an army led by his simulacrum... but on this particular day, it hardly mattered. Zorian and his simulacrums were truly one, their minds fused together to an unprecedented degree. He felt less like a man with a couple of copies running around, and more like a single mind controlling multiple bodies. It was the culmination of all his research into the way Princess and the cephalic rat swarms functioned, and he previously did not dare use it outside of a testing chamber. He was afraid of such magic warping his personality and sense of self, especially if used on a regular basis, but desperate times called for desperate measures.
It should be safe to use it just this once.
Hopefully.
Currently, Zorian’s simulacrum body advanced confidently towards the mass of enemies blocking the nearby tunnel entrance, unintimidated by their attempt at setting up a blockade. His army, composed of several hundred golems of various sizes, almost a hundred mages that Alanic recruited for their cause, and several hundred hook goblins and other Dungeon denizens, swarmed behind him, waiting for orders.
A pair of shining projectiles, one red, one blue, came flying at him from the enemy barricade ahead. They shone so bright they were painful to look at, as their flight created a startlingly loud screaming sound as they homed in on Zorian. He did not even bother to defend himself; it would be a waste of his limited mana. The huge bodyguard golem that never left his side raised its massive hands in front of Zorian and slapped down the incoming spells like a pair of annoying flies.
They exploded into a pair of blinding explosions that somehow strengthened and reinforced each other, becoming stronger than the sum of their parts, but it simply wasn’t enough. The defensive wards of the massive bodyguard golem harmlessly neutralized the blast, leaving Zorian completely untouched.
The golem was left without so much as a scratch, as well.
Without saying anything, and before the explosion was even fully over, Zorian pointed the huge magical rifle in his hands at one of the mages that launched the attack and fired. The bullet reached the target at supersonic speeds, effortlessly punching through the defensive wards the Ibasans put on their little barricade, hitting the enemy mage in the chest before he could put up any sort of defense. It wasn’t a killing blow, but the mage was out of the fight for the foreseeable future, so it might as well have been. Zorian coldly turned his rifle towards the other mage responsible for the attack, ignoring the barrage of spells coming his way or the target’s frantic attempts to coat himself in as many shielding spells as humanly possible.
More than a dozen nearby golems suddenly turned towards Zorian’s target, pointing their own heavy rifles at him in a single, synchronized motion.
The mage’s shields blocked the first five bullets. Then the other ten or so tore into him and killed him on the spot.
As for the barrage of weak spells that was meant to distract him, it was unceremoniously blocked by a bunch of heavily-built golems that stepped up in front of him to soak them up with their tough bodies and well-made defensive wards.
Zorian gave them a thought, and a screeching swarm of hook goblins, giant centipedes, and cave lizards surged forward and charged the enemy position. The enemy responded by sending hordes of skeletons and zombies forward, and the two groups of expendable meat shields crashed against each other in the middle of the battlefield, attempting to overpower the other.
However, it quickly became obvious that the undead were losing. They may have been fearless, but they were ultimately just a mindless mob. Zorian’s monster swarm, on the other hand, was more advanced than it appeared. This wasn’t the first time Zorian used mind-controlled monsters as meat shields and shock troopers like this, and his methods had evolved greatly over time. His monsters no longer mindlessly charged forward, getting into each other’s way and spreading their attacks thin over the entire battlefield, like they did in the past. Instead, they worked together like a cephalic rat swarm, sharing senses, focusing attacks on perceived weak points, ganging up on tough opponents, and sacrificing themselves for the good of the whole if necessary.
Suddenly, Zorian sensed ten mental and soul signatures rapidly moving towards them from all sides, invisibly tunneling towards the back of his army through solid stone.
Rock worms. Zorian scoffed inwardly and telepathically ordered the rest of the army to advance forward. The golems mindlessly obeyed, of course, but some of Alanic’s human volunteers visibly flinched at the mental command, still unused to this form of communication and a little fearful of him. They did obey in the end, though, and this was all that mattered. He had avoided using them so far, both because he was trying to preserve their strength for a battle that really mattered and because he was still very uncomfortable with ordering people into battles where some of them were guaranteed to die. Unlike the mindless golems and the animal-level monsters that made up the rest of his army, the human mages and soldiers were not expendable.
The Ibasans in front of them sent out war trolls to charge out and meet them, probably hoping to capitalize on the moment of shock when the rock worms suddenly burst out of the ground and attacked them. That wouldn’t be happening, of course. Silverlake must have informed Jornak about Zorian’s potent mind magic capabilities, but either the information never trickled down to the people commanding the troops or they dismissed them as ridiculous, or else they would never dare use a ploy like this against him.
It happened in an instant. The charging line of war trolls was only moments away from crashing into the line of battle golems in front of them, perfectly synchronized with the tunneling rock worms that were just about to emerge in the middle of Zorian’s army. Whoever was commanding the situation really knew how to arrange things to deal the maximum amount of damage and confusion in an enemy, and Zorian could literally sense the glee and anticipation in the minds of Ibasan mages as they waited with bated breaths for the inevitable catastrophe to befall the enemy…
…and then Zorian suddenly reached out to the ten approaching rock worms with his mind, tearing through the Ibasan mind-control schemes like they were made of cobwebs, and commanded them to switch targets.
And so they did. Just before the golems and war trolls were about to clash, eight of the rock worms burst out of the floor and ceiling, tackling the biggest, meanest-looking trolls to the ground and breaking their momentum. When the two groups finally met, the war troll regiment immediately crumbled before the pitiless advance of metal puppets. Tougher than steel and armed with scorching hot blades specifically designed to neutralize the trolls’ natural regeneration, the golems wouldn’t have had an issue even without the rock worms’ help. With them distracting the leaders of the war trolls regiment, the war trolls had no chance.
Zorian kept advancing forward. In fact, he had never stopped doing so. As he got closer to the battle between the golems and war trolls, one of the war troll leaders stumbled in close to him, a rock worm stubbornly wrapped around him like a giant snake. The rock worm kept snapping its massive jaws at the war troll’s face, while the war troll used both hands to desperately keep it at bay. Zorian gave a command to his huge bodyguard golem, and the metal puppet reached down with one of its massive hands, grabbed the war troll by its left leg and picked it up in the air.
The rock worm immediately let go of the troll and found another target to menace, as the massive golem started to spin the war troll above its head a few times and then hurled it straight at the barricade that the Ibasans had set up in Zorian’s path.
It wouldn’t have been a very effective attack normally, but the Ibasans were a bit busy at the moment. The last two rock worms that Zorian didn’t send after the war trolls were instead pointed at the mages normally responsible for commanding them. Additionally, Zorian’s monster horde had mostly dismembered the undead chaff sent to stop them and were currently attacking every available weak point of the barricade in the attempt to break through. As such, they could do nothing but watch as their own war trolls, large even by troll standards and clad in heavy steel armor, spun through the air and physically slammed into the boxy stone cube that served as the core of the barricade’s defensive wards.
The cube shattered into hundreds of pieces, and the wards covering the fortification immediately went down with it. Without breaking his stride, Zorian retrieved the bulky grenade launcher gun from his back and fired three frost grenades straight into the biggest clumps of Ibasan mages he could see. Barely a moment afterwards, his human underlings joined him in the attack, unwilling to let such an obvious opportunity go to waste, and a wave of energy spells, bullets, and grenades came raining down on the Ibasans.
Demoralized by their repeated failures, the Ibasan forces abandoned their blockade and ran. Zorian was about to command his forces to give chase and thin down their forces when a familiar figure materialized in the air in front of him.
It was a floating humanoid wearing a scarlet red robe, his face hidden beneath a hood that masked his features under a veil of darkness.
Even after unmasking himself to them, Jornak still used his Red Robe outfit to face them.
“You were hiding your abilities when we fought earlier,” said Jornak, idly blocking a handful of bullets Zorian’s soldiers had fired at him while simultaneously firing a streak of lightning back at them.
The lightning line hit the first target in an instant, killing him on the spot, before arcing from target to target five more times, claiming three more lives and disabling two more. Zorian immediately ordered them all to withdraw. They might have held some usefulness as a distraction, but they would have to die in droves to achieve that, and he didn’t want that on his soul.
The Jornak in front of him was just a simulacrum anyway, so it wasn’t like they would accomplish much by putting him down.
“We both hid our true abilities,” Zorian told him, firing a few rounds from his rifle at the floating figure without missing a beat. Jornak blocked them just as easily as he did the bullets from before, looking completely unconcerned. Some kind of shield specialized in defending against physical attacks like bullets? “There is nothing strange or unexpected about that.”
“I really hate those things,” Jornak commented. Zorian was pretty sure he was talking about the rifle in his hands. “They caused so much grief and suffering. I wish they were never invented. I’d certainly never use one of those unless I had no choice. I believe Zach feels the same. That’s why it surprised me so much when you used one against me the first time we fought. In a way, you’re even more honorless than I am.”
Zorian did not feel like being lectured to by someone like Jornak, so he simply ordered his golems to attack and prepared to cast a spell. He didn’t think the man was really here for a philosophical discussion anyway – he probably just wanted to stall Zorian with pointless talk while the enemy forces converged together and regrouped.
Almost simultaneously, both of them hasted themselves in an attempt to catch each other off-guard and let loose three spells each. The walls of the tunnels around them instantly melted, warped, and shattered. They were both unharmed for it. A faint shockwave of the clash propagated itself to the spot where Zorian’s human army had retreated, prompting them to fearfully retreat even further.
Zorian frowned, looking at the red robed figure in front of him. Truthfully, he had known something like this would happen when he started this attack. He would have been seriously worried if someone hadn’t shown up to stop him, since he would soon be approaching the Ibasan base. Their enemies had to stop him before he could shut down the dimensional portal they used to shuffle their forces from place to place. Without it, the invasion was finished before it even began.
The trouble was, the original was already fighting elsewhere, and that fight was way more important than this one. This was also the reason why the only serious opposition their enemies had sent to stop him was one of Jornak’s simulacrums – they were already pressed elsewhere and couldn’t spare anyone else.
Truthfully, this whole operation was a bit of a deliberate distraction. He had never really expected to take the Ibasan base, because most of their forces were busy elsewhere. His main purpose was to lessen the pressure on the city and to threaten the Ibasan retreat point to the point where they would be forced to send someone important to defend it. Both of the goals had been pretty much achieved. The very fact that Jornak had been forced to send one of his simulacrums and waste his mana on this was a success. At this point, it would serve his purposes just fine to simply drag this fight out as much as possible, wasting Jornak’s mana and preventing him from fully committing elsewhere.
Or he could take a risk and try to eliminate the simulacrum for real – something that would force the enemy to shift even more resources to this conflict, but had a high chance of blowing up in his face if his simulacrum ended up being destroyed in the clash. All of the human recruits that followed him to this place would die soon afterwards, and the Ibasans would once again be free to focus their effort on the city above.
The indecision only lasted for a moment. He swiftly ordered his golem army into motion and then created a swarm of tiny projectiles around him. Each one was smaller than his thumb and glowed with bright orange light, circling around him like a river of stars. Though seemingly weak, each of the little orange stars contained the force of a fully-powered fireball. They were fast, maneuverable, and Zorian could hold them in reserve until he needed them. He immediately sent three of them at Jornak on curved, complicated trajectories and then followed them up with a lance of force aimed straight at his head.
Jornak’s reaction to the small army of golems trying to tackle him surprised Zorian, however. Rather than use magic to evade them or waste a huge amount of mana to batter their spell-resistant bodies, he simply… punched them away. The simulacrum Jornak sent here was clearly special in some way that Zorian did not understand, because he possessed downright incomprehensible physical strength. His mere punches sent man-sized golems flying away like discarded dolls, and a well-placed kick could easily snap a knee joint and render the golem useless. Worse, Jornak’s simulacrum seemed able to regenerate its ectoplasmic body with minimal effort on his part. Twice Zorian managed to severely damage him, blowing off his arm once and piercing a big hole with a force lance in his torso the other time, and in both cases the damage went away in mere seconds.
Zorian ordered his bodyguard golem to join the fray, hoping to use its size and powerful wards to simply overpower Jornak with raw strength, but this quickly backfired. Jornak took out three grenades from his pocket and threw them above his head before teleporting out of the huge golem’s reach. Before Zorian could order it to withdraw, the grenades detonated without the slightest sound. A web of hair-thin dimensional fractures flashed faintly in the air, space itself shattering before the magical grenade blast, and enveloped the golem.
As potent as the great golem’s defenses were, very few things could stand up to the cutting power of dimensional fractures. The thin black lines went through the golem’s bulk with hardly any resistance, snuffing out its animation core and cutting up its bulk into hundreds of tiny pieces.
Zorian could only helplessly watch as his creation, one which had been crucial in his coming this far so easily, fell apart in front of his eyes.
Okay, now he was kind of angry.
He launched all of the fire stars he had circling him straight at Jornak’s simulacrum, forcing him onto the defensive, and then physically charged straight at him. The enemy simulacrum hesitated for a second, no doubt wondering what had possessed Zorian to do something that stupid, before deciding this was too good of a chance to pass up. He charged as well, rushing to meet Zorian head on. Jornak’s simulacrum was clearly far more powerful up close than Zorian’s.
Just before they slammed into each other, Jornak’s whole body became shrouded in arcing red electricity that reminded Zorian of Quatach-Ichl’s favorite spell. In a blindingly fast movement, Jornak’s hand flashed forward and punched straight through the chest of Zorian’s simulacrum. Despite being made out of metal and alchemically treated materials, his body provided very little resistance before the ectoplasmic hand, which passed through him like a very sharp blade. Damaging red lightning immediately began spreading itself through the chest cavity of the simulacrum, irreparably damaging sensitive components.
Zorian ignored the damage. Instead, he reached out with both hands and firmly gripped the hand sticking out of his chest. Realizing that something was wrong, Jornak’s simulacrum tried to wrench its hand free of the grasp, but he wasn’t fast enough. Hundreds of mana threads erupted out of Zorian’s palms, burrowing themselves into Jornak’s ectoplasmic flesh.
Jornak’s simulacrum shuddered and twitched as it tried to move, but failed to wrench itself out of Zorian’s grasp. Even as Zorian’s chest started to flake off around the hand stuck in it, internal components seeping out as fine black sand, Jornak’s own form was getting blurrier and more indistinct. Moreover, the degradation of Jornak’s simulacrum was clearly progressing faster than that of Zorian’s own puppet body, more and more mana threads spreading throughout its ectoplasmic form and disrupting it on a fundamental level.
“You…” Jornak croaked incredulously, before his entire body, red cloak and all, warped and flickered like a badly-made illusion and collapsed into smoke.
Zorian’s own simulacrum body then promptly collapsed on the floor, now that Jornak’s hand was no longer keeping his body standing. His internals were far too ruined for him to move his limbs anymore, and just about the only thing he could still move was his head.
Eventually, the human soldiers under his command decided to check things out and cautiously approached the place of the battle.
“Hey,” Zorian suddenly called out from the ground, where his crumpled simulacrum body lay motionless. A bunch of people looked at themselves before the closest soldier pointed to himself curiously. “Yeah, you with the beard. Cut off my head.”
“I beg your pardon?” The man asked, shocked.
“I can’t move my body so it’s mostly just useless weight at this point. Sadly, none of my golems are too good at fine manual dexterity, so it’s up to you to cut off my head and carry it with you. You’ll be my official head carrier from now on.”
The man gave the body on the floor a strange look before sighing.
“This is not what I signed up for,” he mumbled under his breath.
- break -
At the same time, one Zorian was fighting in the tunnels beneath Cyoria, but he was also in Koth, preparing to participate in the assault on the Ibasan base there. Jornak had made a portal link to Koth earlier in the month, in order to eventually take Zorian’s friends and family hostage, and now there was a small Ibasan base hidden out there in the jungle, relatively close to the Taramatula estate.
Zorian couldn’t tell if Jornak still placed any hopes on this plan. On one hand, the base was still there and the portal connection was not shut down – surely their enemies would not have done this if they knew that Zorian had opted out of using the Taramatula estate as his sanctuary? On the other hand, the base looked pretty small and understaffed to Zorian’s eyes. Just a single regiment of war trolls and a small horde of undead, led by a handful of human mages? This was a pretty half-hearted operation.
Or that’s what he thought, anyway. Orissa and the other Taramatula around him apparently did not share his sentiments.
“What a nasty surprise these people had planned for us. This would have been a disaster if the attackers had caught us off guard,” Orissa commented.
“I’ve seen you fight,” Zorian said, frowning. “A House with several dozen mages like you should have no problems repulsing a force like this, even if the war trolls and undead are more resistant to bee attacks than most targets.”
Since most of their attention was placed elsewhere, Zorian was here only as a simulacrum. Moreover, he did not have an army of golems with him like the simulacrum beneath Cyoria did. He was here more as an advisor than anything – the Taramatula would be the ones who did all the fighting.
“You did?” Orissa asked curiously. “How strange. I don’t remember fighting anyone while you were around. Still, while I thank you for the compliments, the simple counterpoint to your claim is that our House doesn’t have several dozen mages like me. I am very much exceptional, both in talent and the amount of resources that have been spent on me. Most of the members of our House aren’t particularly good at fighting to begin with. Most of them are primarily trackers and surveyors, using their bees purely to find things and fighting only as a last resort.”
“Ah,” said Zorian, wincing a little internally. Yes, he probably shouldn’t take someone like Orissa to be the benchmark for your average member of the House. “So why did you insist on making this attack, then? Why not just defend your estate like I advised you to?”
“There is too much risk involved in that,” Orissa said. “If our main hives are damaged in the fighting, it would be a huge blow to our operations. But more importantly… the elders want that portal.”
Zorian raised his eyebrow at her. The portal… of course. The base Jornak made for this operation connected Koth directly to Altazia, bridging the vast distances between two continents with a permanent dimensional connection. The value of this was incalculable.
“And… you think you can take out this force, which you aren’t sure you could defend against effectively, in such a way that you can seize the portal intact?” Zorian asked her curiously.
“There is a chance, yes,” Orissa told him with a mysterious smile. “In a direct fight, I wouldn’t be too confident of my chances, but thanks to your information we have a chance to take them off guard. If we can sneak enough bees into their base without them noticing, then their first indication of an impending attack will consist of getting swarmed by hundreds of magical bees each.”
“You’d have to make sure to get them all or the whole thing will fail,” Zorian pointed out. “If even one survives the initial attack, he will close the portal.”
“Of course,” Orissa said. “That’s why it’s important to be patient and do this slowly. You said there was no rush, yes?”
“None,” Zorian admitted. This fight was relatively irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. If the Taramatula could really seize the portal, Zorian supposed they could send in some of their forces to the other side to assist them, but that was unlikely to be decisive in any way. “In fact, I wholly support your decision to be careful.”
“Less chance of your needing to pull us out of the fire if we flounder?” Orissa asked knowingly.
“I’m just a moderately talented teenager,” Zorian said. “I could hardly turn the tide of battle all on my own.”
“Yes, I’m sure,” Orissa said. “How many living people did you say were in the base?”
“Twenty eight,” Zorian said with barely a thought. He then quickly pointed out to her where exactly everyone currently was so her forces wouldn’t waste time scouting the base for no reason.
“You know exactly where everyone in that base is, even from this distance,” Orissa said lightly. “But you’re just a moderately talented teenager? Your brother should have taught you how to lie better.”
“It’s just a standard mind sense that all psychic people have,” Zorian protested. “Just an innate ability, nothing more.”
“I’m quite sure that Daimen couldn’t replicate what you just did, despite being way older than you,” Orissa said.
Ugh. Why was he so bad at this ‘look relatively normal’ thing? This was going to be a real problem in the future, he could already tell…
“You know what? I’m shutting up now,” Zorian sighed. “You have a surprise attack to plan, so you should get on that, and I’ll… just stand on the sidelines and let the adults handle everything from now on. Please protect me, Daimen’s fiancée. My brother will never forgive you if you get his beloved little brother killed.”
She set loose some of her bees on him for that.
- break -
Zorian was in the tunnels beneath Cyoria, he was in Koth, and he was even in the academy in Cyoria, setting up contingencies in case things failed to develop as they hoped.
But mostly he was at Iasku’s Mansion.
In fact, Zach, Xvim, Alanic, Daimen, and most of their forces were also at Iasku’s Mansion… because that’s where the Ibasans held their kidnapped shifter children.
It was a bit of an obvious choice, in retrospect. It was heavily defended, it was really far from any other civilization, and it had a gate connection to the Ibasan base beneath Cyoria.
However, there had been lots of ‘obvious choices’ when it came to the place where the Ibasans held the shifter children, and the cost of attacking Iasku Mansion was huge. It wasn’t something they would be willing to commit to unless they knew there was something of critical importance there.
Well, now they knew, and the mansion and its surroundings had become the site of a bitter battle. Zorian’s real body was here, standing on the back of Princess as the forest burned and shuddered around them. Thousands upon thousands of undead were charging at them, ranging from simple undead boars to towering mountains of stitched up flesh that could rival even the biggest of Zorian’s golems in size. Zorian’s golems took care of most of them, tearing into them with grenade throwers and dismembering them with giant blades, but there were just too many of them…
Fortunately, Princess was unafraid of the horde of the walking dead, and her eight heads were ever-vigilant. Any undead that dared approach her was immediately dealt with, without Zorian having to do anything.
Immediately behind the undead horde was a rapidly approaching mass of monsters – mostly war trolls and winter wolves, with a huge swarm of iron beaks hovering above them, cawing ominously. Some rock worms were moving invisibly beneath the surface of the earth, but their controllers were wiser than the ones beneath Cyoria and made sure the worms avoided Zorian like a plague and stayed as far away from him as possible.
And in the distance, perched on the roof of the mansion, were three dragons staring intently at them.
Three living, perfectly healthy dragons, completely unrelated to the skeletal monstrosity hidden in the depths of Iasku Mansion.
Oganj and his two students, Zorian was sure. They weren’t doing anything for now, but Zorian knew this wouldn’t last as they got closer to the mansion itself.
The attack was meant to be a surprise, but their enemies had clearly been ready for them anyway.
Well. It would have been nice to catch their enemies completely off-guard, but he had never really thought this would be an easy battle, anyway.
After some back and forth with Zach, Zorian gave a silent signal to the menacing mass of iron beaks in the sky and suddenly the whole flock swerved to the side as one, before letting loose a massive volley of knife-like feathers at a seemingly empty patch of land.
Distant screams filled the air as the mages who were moving there under the cover of invisibility suddenly came under attack by the forces they believed were on their side.
Before the enemy mages could regroup, Zorian ordered Princess to charge forward towards the mansion. She did so with relish, but not before letting loose a challenging roar from all eight of her heads at the trio of dragons in the distance. Clearly riled up by the provocation, one of the dragons shook and almost flew up in the air to intercept her, but the biggest of the dragons casually slapped him down with his tail and gave him a silent glare. Visibly chastised, the smaller dragon immediately backed down.
Zorian was impressed. Although Oganj was clearly the biggest and meanest of the trio, the other two were still adult dragons. They were not known for accepting such clearly subordinate positions lightly. Oganj must be more than just a good mage if he could convince a pair of adult dragons to follow his orders like that.
In any case, Princess was like an eight-headed train that didn’t need train tracks to get around. Her great speed and bulk meant that she could simply barrel through the undead horde with minimal resistance, trampling smaller corpses without slowing down and knocking the bigger stuff aside to continue forward.
Then Alanic and his fellow mages finished their spell and summoned a fiery twister inside the heart of the undead horde, where it began to suck in the undead towards the center and got increasingly bigger and stronger the more undead it consumed.
Zorian had seen that spell before, and now he even knew what the secret behind it was. The fire twister was actually trapping the souls of the undead it consumed and using them to power itself, which was why it seemingly never ran out of mana and only got stronger as it killed more and more undead. It was a rather dark piece of magic by church standards, almost necromantic in the way it functioned, but fighting fire with fire and all that. The fire twister would release the souls it had gathered when the spell eventually ended, letting them move on to the afterlife.
Before Zorian could celebrate too much, hundreds of red figures poured out of the mansion, flying into the sky. Zorian squinted at the sight, finding the enemies in front of him unfamiliar. They looked almost like bats, but with disturbingly humanoid bodies and faces, and snake-like tails trailing behind them. The tail had a toothy mouth at the end, Zorian eventually realized, and the tails moved around like they had a mind of their own.
[Demons,] Alanic sent to him through their telepathic link.
[Minor or major?] Zorian asked.
[There is no such thing as a minor demon,] Alanic answered him. [But I suppose these would count as ‘minor’.]
Zorian clacked his tongue. Sadly, due to the way the time loop functioned, he had no experience at all in how to fight something like this. All he knew was that demons were an incredibly diverse bunch, with many strange powers that sometimes varied from individual to individual, never mind different species. Fighting them was almost as bad as fighting a human mage. You never really knew what to expect.
[Let us handle them,] another voice demanded over the telepathic link.
Zorian didn’t argue, he gave his permission and a swarm of sulrothum suddenly rose into the sky with a terrible buzzing sound and flew off to intercept the demon bats.
For a while, Zorian busied himself with guiding several severing discs and decapitating war trolls and winter wolves while Princess trampled everything in her path, but gradually things began to bother him. Things were going pretty good, but he couldn’t help but feel that this was because the mansion defenders weren’t really giving their all to stop them. They were just sending disposable troops to buy themselves more time for… something.
The fact Oganj and his two students were just sitting there on the mansion roof and watching the battle with seemingly no intention to get involved was especially bothering him. Why were the freaking dragons not attacking!?
Hell, they hadn’t even sent the skeletal dragon into the fray!
He nervously fingered the cube given to him by the angel he summoned, wondering if he should–
No. No, this wasn’t the right time. Using it now would be a mistake. Something in the back of his mind insisted that this was true.
He put the cube back into his jacket pocket and made a quick conversation with Zach, Alanic, and everyone else.
Soon, an absolutely massive creature rose into the air in the distance before rapidly approaching. It was the Sulrothum holy beast, the massive sandworm that had given them so much trouble when they had tried to fight it. Now it was on their side. Flying on hundreds of translucent butterfly-like wings, the worm made a beeline for the three dragons.
At the same time, the others also made their own moves. Zorian projected a blast of repelling force in front of Princess, knocking aside some troublesome opponents that had halted her advance, and ordered her to head straight for the mansion and its guardian dragons, damn everything else. Meanwhile, a milky white orb suddenly rose into the air, carrying Zach, Xvim, Alanic, and Daimen towards the dragons with incredible speed and agility.
The dragons immediately realized they were being targeted, and rose into the air as one. Oganj bellowed out something to his two students and they each picked their own opponent – the left one went to intercept Zorian and Princess, the right one flew off to engage the massive sandworm in the sky above the mansion. As for Oganj, he seemed to have identified Zach’s group as the biggest danger out of them all, and thus something he should deal with personally.
Zorian was modest enough to admit the dragon mage was probably right.
In any case, once Oganj decided it was time to fight, he did not hold back in the slightest. Zach’s sphere was too fast and maneuverable for the great dragon to dodge it or breathe fire on it, so he instead reached for his magic. Waving his hands in a surprisingly human-like gesture, Oganj created an incandescent white sphere in his hand and thrust it in the opposing sphere’s general direction.
Even though the attack wasn’t aimed at him, and he was quite a distance away, Zorian could still feel his neck hairs raise at the amount of mana Oganj poured into the spell. Dragon magic was bullshit.
Thankfully, all of them were quite unusual in their own way, and Zach had three other people supporting him. Before the destructive sphere could actually get close to Zach’s sphere and detonate, space started to bend around it, like something invisible was being wrapped around it, and then the sphere seemingly winked out of existence.
Moments later, a terrifying detonation sounded in the distance. Xvim had teleported Oganj’s projectile away into a nearby region, but its detonation still sent vibrations through Zorian’s chest and lit up the sky like a second sun.
Gods… no wonder Zach had died to Oganj so many times. How were they even supposed to fight someone like this!?
“Watch out, you stupid savage!” Sudomir’s voice suddenly echoed all around the mansion, magically amplified and projected so that it could be heard clearly in the whole region. “You’re lucky they got rid of that projectile or you’d have leveled the whole mansion! Since when is this kind of magic acceptable when you’re defending a place!?”
“Shut up!” Oganj yelled back in clear human tongue, his voice just as loud as Sudomir’s, despite using no magic to amplify it. “I know what I’m doing! Go whine to your dead wife instead of bothering me when I’m fighting!”
Zorian ignored the bickering between Sudomir and Oganj, because he had more immediate issues to worry about. Oganj’s student was probably not as powerful as his master, but he was still a dragon mage and he was coming for him.
Zorian fired a force lance at the incoming dragon’s wing, hoping to ground it. Dragon flight was magical, but they still needed their wings intact if they wanted to use it, so wing membranes were a big, well-known weakness.
Too well-known, apparently. The dragon tried to swerve out of the way of the force lance, but when Zorian revealed he could make the lance pivot in the middle of flight and change directions on a whim, he found out that the dragon also erected a shield around himself just in case. The force lance hit the shield and shattered harmlessly upon it.
Visibly narrowing his eyes at Zorian and Princess, the dragon took a deep breath and launched a stream of fire-based projectiles at them. Apparently this dragon practiced magic that allowed him to shape his breath into various projectiles like exploding fireballs and fast-moving beams of flame.
He still couldn’t hit Princess. With her eight heads and her strangely-shaped body, she kind of looked like she should be clumsy and slow… but she was a divinely-enhanced beast and this impression was totally wrong. Princess was both fast and maneuverable, and not only did she skillfully dodge every projectile the young dragon mage directed at her, she even found the time to pick up various loose stones and small winter wolves that hadn’t moved away fast enough and hurl them straight at the dragon in the air. She was a pretty good shot, too.
Plus, of course, she had Zorian riding on her back. Whenever she couldn’t dodge something, he would just deflect it away while periodically annoying the dragon with simple force projectiles. He was pretty sure that this was the dragon that had wanted to fight Princess when she had bellowed out a challenge at the start of the battle, so he should be a fairly irritable sort.
Annoyingly, the dragon had placed mental shields on itself before the battle had even begun. They weren’t much, but dragons were already a pain to affect with his powers, even without dedicated mental defenses, due to their magic resistance. The mental shield, crude as it was, simply made the idea of targeting it with mind magic a complete non-starter.
Thankfully, Zorian’s hopes about the dragon’s irritability proved to be correct. After repeatedly dodging his projectiles and harassing him with force spells, the dragon had apparently had enough. He could have continued flying high, outside of Zorian’s and Princess’s effective reach, but instead he decided to descend closer to the ground so he could catch them with a more powerful attack.
It was a good attack, Zorian had to admit. The dragon created a translucent blue ball in front of him and launched it at the pair. As it got closer, it suddenly extended into a large gelatinous dome and trapped them inside it. Princess tried to bite through it, but the gelatinous barrier resisted her efforts and even glued one of her jaws shut, forcing Zorian to cut her free. Meanwhile, the dragon clearly took time powering up some kind of massive fire spell that would incinerate them both to ashes, now that they were both trapped in a small area with no way to dodge.
Unfortunately for him, Princess could teleport.
Just before the dragon could release his spell, Princess quickly curled up into a ball and disappeared from her gelatinous prison, taking Zorian with her.
Before the dragon could realize what happened, he had already launched the fire attack at the empty dome, wasting his spell and hitting nothing. Then Princess popped into existence practically next to him and Zorian quickly fired a whole bundle of severing whips at the dragon’s torso.
Being considerably tougher than a human, the dragon mage was not cut into tiny chunks by the severing whips, but they did cut into his flesh, drawing blood and wrapping too tightly around him to be easily dislodged. Especially since any struggle would just worsen his wounds. Zorian anchored the severing whips to Princess’s back and ordered her to pull.
She did. The dragon let loose an almost girlish scream and plummeted to the ground, severing whips digging ever deeper into his flesh. Before he could gather his bearings Princess was already upon him, heads biting and snarling, and they both went down in a tangle of limbs and necks. The fight quickly degenerated into a weird but vicious wrestling match, the dragon and divine hydra rolling around the ground, knocking down small trees and smashing boulders into powder.
As for Zorian, he had thankfully already jumped off Princess’s back when she went after the downed dragon, and was currently flying towards the other two dragon fights in a milky white sphere similar to the one that Zach used to confront Oganj. He felt a little bad leaving Princess to fight the dragon on her own, but he had faith she wasn’t going to get herself killed in his absence. She was a pretty tough girl.
The other two fights, he soon realized, were still ongoing. In fact, they had merged into some kind of confused combined battle, thanks to two facts. One, Oganj’s student couldn’t really stop the flying sand worm – he could keep it busy, but the sand worm was too big and massive for the relatively tiny dragon to stop it from going wherever it wished. Secondly, the iron beaks decided, on their own initiative, to pick a fight with the two dragons. Zorian had no idea how that had happened, since picking up a reason from the minds of iron beaks itself proved unhelpful – they were just very, very angry and apparently hated the three dragons from the very moment they had shown up and ‘arrogantly’ claimed the mansion’s roof like they owned the whole place.
Compared to dragons, the iron beaks were nothing. However, there were a lot of them, and they knew when to attack and when to retreat. Moreover, Zach and the others were protecting them, since they found the vicious corvids useful as a distraction.
Also, apparently Sudomir really didn’t like the fact that his mansion, which contained his beloved wife’s spirit, was in danger from all this fighting around it. As such, his voice constantly sounded from the mansion, shouting instructions at the two dragons and insults at Zach and the others. He was starting to sound increasingly incoherent as time went by, and by the time Zorian got close to the battlefield, the man had apparently had enough.
The roof of the mansion crumbled and the skeletal dragon hidden inside the top half of it started to pick itself up from the rubble.
Oganj gave the skeletal dragon, and the mansion itself, a contemptuous snort, before focusing back on his current fight.
Of course, the other combatants wouldn’t allow another powerful creature to join the fight like that, so before the skeletal dragon could launch itself into the air, Daimen suddenly materialized a giant ectoplasmic body around himself and tackled it off the roof and into the ground below. Daimen had once used this spell to tangle with Princess, back before they had realized how to take control of her, and now it was being used to restrain Sudomir’s skeletal dragon.
Sadly, Sudomir was no amateur when it came to building his artificial horrors, and the skeletal dragon wouldn’t be so easily restrained. Daimen gave it his best, but it was clear that he was losing… and none of the others could afford to turn their back on the other two dragons to give him a hand.
But Zorian, who had just arrived on the scene, could.
Before the two dragons could react, Zorian reached into the imperial orb that he carried with him and an absolutely massive golem popped into existence. It was six meters tall and fully made from gleaming, nigh-indestructible metal. The ground sank under its weight as it barreled towards the skeletal dragon being desperately pinned to the ground by Daimen’s conjured giant. Perhaps it was just Zorian’s imagination, but he could almost see an expression of pure panic in the dragon’s empty eye sockets just before the metal colossus jumped on top of it and brought down its heavy spiked fists right on top of its skull.
Sadly, the moment was slightly ruined by the fact said heavy metal fists didn’t shatter the skeletal dragon’s skull into tiny fragments with a single blow. Instead, the golem ‘just’ chipped the skull and ended any hope it had of getting into the air, where its maneuverability would make it a huge threat to everyone on his side.
Before Zorian could celebrate and focus on grinding the stupid bone dragon to dust, though, a strange ripple emanated from the mansion, causing both him and everyone else to halt in their tracks.
“I really hoped this wouldn’t be necessary…” Sudomir’s voice sounded again, this time sounding calmer and more subdued.
[Shit!] Zach suddenly swore over their telepathic connection, and then Zorian’s entire perception lurched and twisted. His vision warped, his knees buckled and bile rose to his throat, threatening to make him puke.
He immediately recognized the symptoms. It reminded him of a botched teleportation spell, except…
He quickly looked around. He was still next to Iasku Mansion, the colossus golem was still holding the skeletal dragon pinned to the ground not far from him, and the iron beaks cawed frantically in the sky above, their synchronized murder-flock wobbling chaotically in a disorganized fashion. He was impressed they hadn’t dropped from the sky when the dizziness hit them.
Beyond Iasku Mansion, though, Zorian could see a building. A familiar building. And in the distance, he could see burning fires and hear the sound of city defenders facing off against marauding war trolls and hordes of undead.
It took him only a moment to realize what had transpired. During the last planar alignment, a group of mages managed to perform an incredible feat of transplanting their city from one continent to another. What Jornak and his allies did was relatively tame in comparison.
They had simply switched Iasku Mansion and its surrounding space with a piece of Cyoria.
Zorian sighed. He gave a mental order to the colossus golem and it brought down its fist once again on the skeletal dragon’s skull, this time shattering it to pieces, causing the rest of its bony body to fall limp and lifeless.
Despite all their attempts, everything converged back in Cyoria in the end.
In the sky above, Oganj gave a bellowing roar as the battle began anew.























Chapter 102
Giants
In the middle of Cyoria, relatively close to the massive bottomless hole around which the city was built, there was an anomaly. A large mansion sat there like a lonely sentinel, surrounded by trees. No road led to it, and the surrounding forest was far too thick and wild for a city park. The area was perfectly circular, even cutting several buildings in half at the edges, as if someone had switched a portion of the northern forest with a random city district with zero care as to how it would naturally fit inside.
Which is exactly what had happened, of course. While Zorian and the others had been fighting the dragons and trying to break into Iasku Mansion, their enemies had been performing a powerful teleportation ritual to send said mansion straight into the heart of Cyoria, right next to the place where the primordial release ritual was to take place.
Zorian took a few moments to replenish his mana reserves a little and marveled at the sheer audacity of the feat. He had been curious for a while now why Quatach-Ichl, Silverlake, and Jornak weren’t helping their dragon allies defend the mansion. Now he knew. This kind of ritual spell wasn’t something that could be done on a whim, or stopped in the middle without consequences. Quatach-Ichl, Jornak, and Silverlake were probably all required to pull this off, and they absolutely couldn’t afford to get distracted for even a moment. That’s why they got the three dragon mages to guard them at this critical time. That’s why they were so defensive in general.
They should have pushed them harder, Zorian thought to himself regretfully. If they had held nothing back right from the start and tried to break into the mansion with absolutely everything at their disposal, then maybe…
He shook his head, putting such thoughts to the side. This was no time for regrets and hypotheticals. Besides, in a way, luck had been on their side. Zorian had not invested too much time studying these kinds of ritual spells, but everything he knew about them told him they had to have started the ritual a long time ago. Long before Zorian had given everyone a signal to start the attack, Jornak and his allies had started casting their spell. If they had moved any slower, it was possible the fight would have started with the mansion’s sudden teleportation in the middle of Cyoria. Now that would have been a disaster!
He observed the battleground around him, trying to figure out his next course of action.
Princess had been too far to get caught in the teleportation effect, which meant she was effectively out of the fight. It would take too much time and mana to get her to Cyoria, assuming she could even finish her fight with her draconic opponent in a timely manner. The sulrothum’s flying sandworm had also been left behind, being far, far too big for the teleportation spell.
On the bright side, both of the divine beasts had tied up one of the dragon mages through their efforts. The one Princess had been fighting was obviously too far to get teleported, and the second one had been hit by the sandworm and flung into the distance at the time the teleportation effect hit, causing it to be left behind as well. The only dragon mage left now was Oganj, who was currently fighting Zorian’s allies in the sky above the mansion.
Unfortunately, Oganj was by far the most powerful dragon mage out of the three. And they were now fighting above a highly populated city, where collateral damage was very much an issue.
On the bright side, Zach and his entire group had followed Oganj to Cyoria, and they were joined by most of the iron beaks and the sulrothum. Zach and the other human mages were currently busy keeping Oganj from leveling the city, but the other two were basically unopposed. Under the leadership of their high priest, the devil wasps had thoroughly beaten the demon bats, and were currently just mopping them up. As for the iron beaks, they were quickly recovering from their sudden change in scenery and their fighting spirit didn’t seem lessened by the experience. Both groups would soon be free to join the other battlefields.
Which was good, because a flood of war trolls, various monsters, undead, and enemy mages suddenly started pouring out of Iasku Mansion.
Zorian was not surprised by this. Why else would their enemies bother transporting the entire Iasku Mansion to Cyoria unless it was filled to the brim with troops? Still, he was kind of surprised that they managed to keep so many of their forces in reserve like this. The amount of soldiers and monsters they had placed beneath Cyoria to fake the main attack wasn’t small, and they had also lost a great many of their minions trying to delay them from reaching Iasku Mansion. Jornak and Quatach-Ichl must have been far more active with recruiting than they thought. It wasn’t just the Altazian mercenary groups, either – looking at the enemy forces spreading out into the city, Zorian could see that many of them were of clear Ulquaan Ibasa origin. Quatach-Ichl must have paid a heavy price to reinforce his existing soldiers with these new ones.
This was a risky move by the ancient lich, Zorian felt. There were too many Ibasans here for them to retreat from the city in a timely manner, even with the help of a permanent dimensional gate. The plan was probably for the Ibasan forces to retreat the same way they had come in: by retreating to Iasku Mansion and then have it teleported again, this time out of the city. However, this was something that was much easier to disrupt than his original plan, which meant Quatach-Ichl risked losing a lot of forces today.
Idly, Zorian wondered how a huge loss in lives and tamed monsters here would reflect on Quatach-Ichl’s reputation back on Ulquaan Ibasa, before deciding this wasn’t the time for such thoughts. He directed the iron beaks at these new forces threatening the city, and sent a message to the Sulrothum asking them to support them. He received no response from the sulrothum high priest, but the devil wasps did start to fly towards the forces exiting Iasku Mansion, so they had clearly gotten the message.
He also sent a signal to the academy. Up until this moment, the academy staff had taken a purely defensive stance and had not gotten involved in the city fighting much, but an improvised combat force had long been gathered and organized. Now that a mass of enemies had materialized practically on their doorstep – the academy was also close to the Hole, after all – they also began pouring out and started to actively confront them.
As for Zorian, he did nothing to help their allies against the enemy forces running amok in the city. He’d done all he could for them. They would lose or triumph based on their own merits. Instead, he kept replenishing his mana and waited for-
Ah. They were finally here.
Quatach-Ichl, Silverlake, and Jornak. The three of them marched out of Iasku Mansion once the flow of troops leaving their base had slowed down to a trickle, their bearings proud and their steps never faltering. All three of them were as Zorian had come to know them. The ancient lich was in his skeletal battle form, black bones encased in gold-decorated armor and the imperial crown placed securely on top of his bony head. Sickly green light emanated from him, something that he now knew was a visible trace of a powerful ward anchored to the fancy armor he was wearing. His appearance wasn’t just for the sake of appearances and intimidation. Jornak was still dressed in that distinctive red robe he loved to wear, his face hidden in darkness. Truthfully, Zorian still often thought of him as ‘Red Robe’ in his head, even though he was completely sure of his identity by this point. Finally, Silverlake was looking the most relaxed out of the three, dressed in an expensive red dress, hands clasped behind her back as she was looking around at everything around her. Zorian couldn’t really hear her due to the distance between him and their group of three, but she seemed to be quietly humming some kind of tune as she walked. It was hard to connect the beautiful, black-haired woman in front of him with the withered old witch he had come to know in the time loop, but they were clearly one and the same.
All three were under the effect of mind blank. Of course.
Two more new arrivals also caught his attention. At the same time their three main enemies marched out of the mansion, a large procession of people in robes also left the mansion through another entrance. The lead people were dressed in the same kind of red robe that Jornak was wearing, and guarded tightly in the center of the procession was a large armored carriage that seemed to be shaking from time to time, as if someone was pounding on it from the inside. The group immediately set off in the direction of the Hole, barely glancing at the fights occurring around the mansion.
The second thing that caught his attention was… another Quatach-Ichl. This one was identical to the ancient lich that had just marched out of the mansion, except this one was holding a glowing red gem the size of a human fist, and was standing directly on top of the ruined roof of Iasku Mansion.
Quatach-Ichl was using a simulacrum? How interesting. As far as Zorian could tell, Quatach-Ichl was like Zach, in that he didn’t like using those unless he had to. He didn’t have the convenient telepathic link to his copies like Zorian did, and he probably worried about what one of his copies would do without his supervision. It was hard enough for Zorian to keep his copies in line, he couldn’t imagine how many headaches other people experienced with them.
So that probably means…
The second Quatach-Ichl raised his black, skeletal hand in the air, his palm pointed at the sky, holding the glowing red gem exposed for all to see. A complicated magic circle made out of blood red light suddenly sprang up around his position. Red streams of light emanated from the gem like many whip-like tentacles, and the air above the mansion started to twist and distort like hot summer air.
Yeah. It was time.
He reached into his jacket pocket and retrieved the angel cube. Then, he deployed the imperial orb and retrieved from it a much bigger, metal cube of his own design.
Glancing to the side, he could see Daimen approaching him. His older brother had chosen to stay still for a while after the teleportation event, rather than immediately rejoining Zach and the others in fighting Oganj. He had spent a lot of mana fighting Sudomir’s skeletal dragon until Zorian had come, so he probably felt it prudent to take a breather and recover some strength while he could.
“That thing on the roof is going to summon something,” Daimen told him, concern creeping into his voice. “Something big.”
“Demons,” Zorian said. “I know. But look at those three marching towards us. Do you think we can push through them to stop the summoning?”
Daimen looked at the ancient lich, the humming witch, and the man in the red robe. He didn’t know them like Zorian did, but he was a powerful and experienced mage, and could make a decent judgment. He then looked at the battle in the sky, where Zach, Alanic, and Xvim were fighting Oganj, and scowled. Their companions were too busy to come to their aid.
“Can you help me hold them off while I do some summoning of my own?” Zorian asked, giving Daimen a brief side-glance while focusing on the angel cube in his hands. He had never actually done a summoning like this before. He really hoped he didn’t mess things up. That would be really anti-climactic.
He swept his hands around him and invisible forces cut deep grooves in the ground around them, forming a complicated magic circle of his own. The lines and glyphs began to glow blue.
“You won’t seriously ask me to fight three master mages alone?” Daimen asked incredulously. “I think you have a very inflated view of my capabilities here, brother.”
“It’s fine,” Zorian insisted. “You just have to hold them off for a little while. Plus, you will have Mrva here as support.”
Zorian pointed at the giant hulking golem standing behind them. Daimen muttered something about Zorian having a stupid naming sense, but the reminder that he had a metal colossus on his side had obviously helped breathe additional confidence into him.
“Plus…” Zorian added, placing his hand on the other, much bigger cube. “I won’t be completely helpless.”
Keeping his hand on said cube, Zorian copied Quatach-Ichl’s gesture and raised his hand up into the air, palm facing upwards. The small angel cube greedily accepted his mana, interfacing itself with Zorian’s improvised magic circle. Hundreds of tiny golden glyphs lit up on the surface of the cube, though from a distance Zorian imagined it just looked like he was holding up a miniature sun in the palm of his hand.
A vortex of multicolored light and soft wind suddenly formed around him as the angel cube started to madly draw in ambient mana in the area. A massive, mind-boggling torrent of mana was sucked into the cube, more than Zorian could have ever provided out of his own personal mana reserves, even if he sat there and powered it for several months at the time.
This wasn’t how summoning rituals usually worked. If Zorian had tried to use ambient mana to help pay for the summoning like this in normal circumstances, he wouldn’t just suffer mana poisoning – he would explode into ash and dust before he channeled even a quarter of the mana he was handling now. However, this time he didn’t have to channel the ambient mana through himself, as with most spellcasting. The cube was somehow doing that on its own, and Zorian simply had to make sure to guide the mana across proper channels and shape the summoning spell. His mana reserves were still dropping dangerously fast, but the ritual was more taxing on his shaping skills than anything else.
Did the angel make the cube specifically to take advantage of Zorian’s high shaping skills? Because this was hard. Insanely hard! Other than maybe Xvim, Zorian didn’t think there was any person other than him that could stop all this mana from running out of control and ruining the titanic summoning ritual the cube wanted to execute.
Zorian wasn’t entirely sure he could do this himself, actually. The difficulty was still increasing. His hand shook and beads of sweat formed on his forehead as the cube in his palm shone brighter and brighter.
‘An angel’s trust is a heavy thing to bear,’ Zorian lamented in his head.
Focused as he was at his task, he was only partially aware of things happening around him, and even that was purely because his mind was fused with so many of his simulacrums. One of the simulacrums took over his body and senses while he focused on shaping the summoning spell, and in his current fused mental state, this allowed him to observe his surroundings in a way he would normally be unable to achieve without being distracted.
Almost immediately after he started his own summoning, Jornak, Quatach-Ichl, and Silverlake stopped their dramatic march and just plain rushed at him, hoping to stop the spell. If he hadn’t been distracted by the strain of the summoning, Zorian would have found the scene funny. As it was, he just watched as the enemy trio started hurling spells at him, only for them to be stopped cold by Daimen and Mrva. Quatach-Ichl did his best to hit him with a multitude of his signature red disintegration beams, Jornak was showering the entire area with blindingly bright arcs of lightning that dodged through any static shield and obstacle in the way, and Silverlake was trying to copy Zorian by launching various potion bottles at him with the aid of telekinetic spells.
Nothing worked. Daimen recklessly burned through his mana reserves to erect massive golden shields in front of them, tanking most of the damage, and occasionally dispelled incoming projectiles by hitting them with pale blue beams and invisible waves of disrupting force. Anything that got through him was stopped by Mrva, who was tough and warded enough to simply intercept incoming projectiles with his body.
Mrva also frequently went on the offensive, picking up any rocks and boulders from the craters exposed in the fighting and throwing them with surprisingly good accuracy. He also sometimes suddenly charged at them and tried to stomp them flat – a crude but effective tactic that frequently interrupted their spellcasting and forced them to dodge.
In general, the metal colossus was far faster and more agile than its looks would suggest. It was no slow, lumbering giant. It was a golem equivalent of a dragon, and Zorian was very pleased it was performing as well as he had hoped. It was just a shame he couldn’t figure out how to make Mrva fly as well.
Something to tackle when he started building version two of the colossus.
At some point, Jornak seemed to have had enough of the massive golem, and tried to get rid of Mrva the same way his simulacrum had gotten rid of Zorian’s bodyguard golem back in the tunnels underneath Cyoria. Jornak threw a bunch of bombs at the charging golem and they erupted into a web of hair-thin spatial cracks that enveloped the area. Mrva was completely submerged in the spatial cracks… but he emerged completely unscathed.
The metal colossus was a lot bigger than his bodyguard golems, and had a lot more time and money invested into him. Zorian had equipped Mrva with the finest wards he could set up, and it would take more than that to take it apart.
Surprised at the fact the golem was still whole and rushing at him, Jornak panicked for a moment and tried to cast a short-range teleport to evade the threat. That was a mistake. One of the wards Zorian placed on Mrva was a teleportation ward that could be amplified to extend a fair distance from his body. The ward was a really malicious sort, too – one that didn’t just disrupt the teleportation but also tried to do it in a way that made the spell go haywire and try to kill the caster.
Jornak’s body shuddered and lurched as his teleportation spell was violently disrupted. He was good enough to stabilize the failing spell, enough that he didn’t get himself torn to pieces by the dimensional stresses, but he wasn’t good enough to escape all consequences. Dazed and unable to react in time, he was almost stomped by Mrva’s foot before Quatach-Ichl gestured with his hand and pulled him out of the way of the charging golem.
Pity. But no matter. Quatach-Ichl and Silverlake were perfectly lined up at the moment, so Mrva thrust both of his hands towards them, causing a huge wave of wind and kinetic force to barrel towards them.
Self-casting items were largely disappointing. They could only really produce crude blasts of force, fire and the like. For some uses, however, that was enough… especially if the blast was big enough.
Quatach-Ichl was too experienced to fall for this, and the blast only caused him to be momentarily distracted as he focused on counteracting it. Silverlake, however, wasn’t that much of a fighter. The blast caught her entirely by surprise and she reacted too slowly, causing her to get knocked back into the distance.
She would be back soon, but it didn’t matter. In this kind of battle, every second counted. Silverlake was the weakest among the three enemies facing them, but still very dangerous. Having her gone for a while was great.
Sadly, Mrva and Daimen had been unable to take advantage of this opportunity because two giant spheres of black bones suddenly burst out of Iasku Mansion and came barreling down at Mrva. As they got closer, they unrolled into familiar skeletal crocodilians. Zorian had seen one of them in action when he and Zach had gone to rob Eldemar’s royal treasury with Quatach-Ichl, and knew exactly how powerful and resilient they were.
Back then, Quatach-Ichl said the crocodilian skeleton beast was his ‘pet’. Of course he actually had more than one…
The two skeleton beasts quickly pounced upon Mrva, tying him down.
“What great allies I have,” the ancient lich said, bending his skeletal neck sideways as if he was cracking his neck. His voice was amplified, allowing everyone in the vicinity to hear him. It was probably intended primarily for Jornak and Silverlake, though. “Better than nothing, I guess, but only just. You’d think literal time travelers would be better than this.”
“What?” Daimen asked, confused. He had been preparing to keep the ancient lich tied down, but Quatach-Ichl’s statement made him hesitate.
“Oh, he didn’t tell you?” Quatach-Ichl said, sounding surprised. “Aren’t you his big brother or something? Looks like family doesn’t mean what it used to these days.”
Before Daimen could say anything, two more simulacrums of Quatach-Ichl suddenly appeared right next to the original. Or at least Zorian guessed the lich they had been fighting thus far was the original. All three Quatach-Ichls immediately hasted themselves and turned into a blur. A split second later, each of them cast three spells each.
Nine red stars, each smaller than the tip of Zorian’s finger but shining bright, immediately shot towards Zorian with blinding speed.
Daimen scrambled to block them, but it was too little, too late. The first five slammed into Daimen’s golden, multi-layered barrier, blocked by it but ripping it to shreds in the process. The sixth one was stopped by Daimen himself, who retrieved a small mirror from his pocket and physically intercepted the projectile with it. His brother’s prized divine artifact lived up to its divine nature and stopped the projectile cold. Unlike the time it stopped Princess’s attack beam, it didn’t break in the process. There was a flash of light and the red star was just gone, Daimen standing unharmed behind it.
The other three stars rushed towards Zorian completely unopposed.
Up in the sky, his three allies realized he was in danger and tried to help him, but Oganj realized what was happening too and suddenly launched an entire swarm of blindingly bright white beams to intercept them and make them unable to render aid.
Although aware of the incoming attack due to his simulacrums, Zorian did nothing to evade it. He kept stabilizing the summoning spell with all his might.
However, the large metal cube he was resting his hand on wasn’t as passive. With a whirring sound of shifting metal plates and internal mechanisms coming to life, it flew in front of him, placing itself in the path of the incoming red stars.
Two of the stars swerved to the side, making sure the cube could only physically intercept one of the stars, but it didn’t help. The cube seemingly fell apart at the seams, suddenly separating itself into eight smaller cubes. They positioned themselves into a rough sphere around Zorian, and a faint blue sphere of magical force, almost invisible, encased the entire area around him. The smaller cubes didn’t even try to intercept the red stars after that, and the three projectiles slammed into the barrier completely unopposed.
The borderline invisible barrier barely even reacted. Anyone standing close to Zorian would see a handful of gentle ripples emanating from the points of impact for a fraction of a second, but these quickly subsided and left no trace of damage on the shield.
To his credit, the ancient lich wasn’t shocked by the sight. He simply launched into one spell barrage after another, burning through gods know how much mana to launch a multitude of spells at Zorian. Zorian was kind of worried for Daimen at this point, since this kind of onslaught could probably kill his older brother very easily if the lich decided it would be good idea to kill the distraction first. Thankfully, Daimen quickly realized the safest place to be right now was next to Zorian, being protected by his shield, and promptly retreated behind him so that Zorian’s cube could protect him as well.
And protect them both the cube did. The cube was not a simple spell aid or ward stone like most such tools. It was closer in nature to a golem, and was just as expensive and complicated to build as Mrva had been. Although no magic item could truly cast a spell, only maintain one indefinitely, Zorian’s cube did a pretty good job of mimicking spellcasting. A dizzying amount of protective spells were constantly maintained by the cube. By amplifying some of them and suppressing others, the cube could adjust its protections from moment to moment, creating custom shields to counter specific type of spells. It did that mostly autonomously, because Zorian had animated it in the same manner in which one would a golem. None of its operation required any mana, or even much attention from Zorian. Thus, none of Quatach-Ichl’s attacks were effective.
Projectiles slammed into the impenetrable, ever-shifting barrier created by the eight small cubes orbiting Zorian, producing no effect. Larger, slower attacks were dealt with more actively, by one of the little cubes firing marbles at them. The marbles were all charged with various spell bombs, and each cube had a pocket dimension absolutely packed with them, making it unlikely they would run out of marbles any time soon. Once the marble detonated next to an attack, it would be either dispersed or weakened enough for the barrier to negate it with ease. Attempts to send ectoplasmic constructs or animated earth at them were dealt with by Daimen, who picked them apart from the safety of the cube’s defense. The shield was sufficiently sophisticated that it would let Daimen’s attacks pass through without obstruction, even though that was not normally possible when attacking behind another mage’s shield.
Silverlake and Jornak had recovered by this point and did their best to help Quatach-Ichl, but while Mrva was being distracted by the crocodilian skeletons, he wasn’t fully tied down. As such, the two had to keep the colossal golem at bay without Quatach-Ichl’s help while trying to help him. It wasn’t very effective.
Eventually Quatach-Ichl realized this wasn’t working and that attempting to overpower Zorian in this manner was just him burning through mana for nothing. Zorian wasn’t even spending any mana on defending himself, so the lich’s attacks weren’t even wearing him out.
“Oganj!” Quatach-Ichl suddenly shouted. “Help me crack this turtle’s shell!”
“Get these idiots off me, then!” Oganj responded, trying to swat away the milky sphere flying around him out of the sky.
The ancient lich crouched and jumped, and immediately shot up into the sky like a bullet.
Daimen looked torn between pursuing the lich, even though he knew this would take him out of the safety of Zorian’s shield, and trying to put more pressure on Jornak and Silverlake. He eventually decided to try and kill Jornak.
It was probably a smart decision and Zorian fully supported it. While countering whatever Quatach-Ichl was doing would probably be more useful, it would probably result in his death. Zorian would rather face more danger than see Daimen die here. Visions of a pale and bleeding Daimen, near-death after he had sacrificed his life force to allow Zorian to save himself, momentarily flooded his mind, his control over the summoning spell slipping…
No! No, focus… focus… He pushed these thoughts to the side, just like he had pushed them aside this whole month, and focused on the matter at hand. The angel summoning. It had to work, or else the enemy was going to have a whole bunch of demons on their side, and they would have nothing to counter them with.
The battle in the air intensified. Somehow Zach and Alanic found a moment to do some spell interruption of their own and directed a barrage of projectiles at Quatach-Ichl’s simulacrum standing on the roof of Iasku Mansion, trying to interrupt his demon summoning. They failed, both because the flying Quatach-Ichl interfered on behalf of his copy and because Iasku Mansion still had reasonably intact defensive wards, despite all the fighting occurring around it.
But then, a disaster struck. Quatach-Ichl managed to distract Zach enough to let Oganj face just Alanic and Xvim for a moment. Rather than try to kill one of them – an action that could work, but would probably fail – the dragon mage decided to instead try to kill Zorian.
Zorian could see the logic of it. Dragon battle magic basically specialized in huge, mana-hungry spells that rivaled human artillery magic in power, but with none of the drawbacks that branch of magic usually had. Quatach-Ichl couldn’t overpower Zorian’s defenses by sheer number of spells, but a powerful piece of dragon magic could surely crack any kind of shield outside of dedicated building wards like the ones centered around Iasku Mansion.
Time seemed to slow down to Zorian as he watched Oganj finish his spell. The dragon’s yellow, slitted eyes seemed to radiate pride and contempt as he thrust his scaly, clawed hand towards him, and a huge ball of incandescent flame came screaming down at Zorian.
Literally screaming. Zorian didn’t know if the old dragon mage added that effect purely for the sake of surprise and intimidation, but the massive fireball created a sharp screaming sound as it flew through the air.
Zorian still didn’t move to dodge. The eight little cubes stopped orbiting around him, causing the shield around him to collapse, and flew towards the incoming fireball with great speed, quickly arranging themselves into a ring-shaped formation. Jornak and Silverlake tried to take advantage of Zorian’s momentary defenseless position to kill him before the fireball hit, but Daimen and Mrva stopped that from working. As for the fireball, it flew undaunted towards the ring of cubes flying towards it, even though Zorian was sure Oganj could control its flight and try to get it to dodge. He supposed that the dragon mage was confident his spell would overpower whatever defensive effect the cube possessed.
He was bound to be disappointed. As the fireball got close to the ring of cubes, it seemed to enter a zone of literal slowed time. A temporal dilation bubble that made time pass slower on the inside than on the outside. Oganj’s eyes widened as he tried to pull his spell out of the temporal mire, but the cubes would never allow that. The ring of cubes passed around the burning projectile and it simply… disappeared.
Then they immediately turned around and re-established the defensive field around Zorian.
It was as if the cubes pulled an invisible bag over the fireball and carried it off. Which… wasn’t that far from the truth, really. Oganj’s massive fireball was currently safely stored in the cube’s special, time dilated pocket dimension. It wasn’t quite frozen in time, but it was close. Very close.
Oganj gave him an angry, hateful look, but was in no position to do anything to him anymore. The moment Quatach-Ichl had given him had passed, and Zach was back in the fight and angrier than ever.
Besides… Zorian was almost done with his summoning. Even though he had started his spell later than Quatach-Ichl’s simulacrum, he seemed to be working faster.
Quatach-Ichl realized it too.
“You are to manage this alone for a while. I need to speed things up,” Quatach-Ichl yelled, and then flew off in the direction of his simulacrum. He soon took a place beside him, causing the demon summoning to speed up immensely.
Gritting his teeth, Zorian sent even more mana into the angel cube in his palm, causing it to suck in even more ambient mana from the environment and increasing the strain on his concentration and shaping skills to the edge of the breaking point. Even with the help of his simulacrums, his awareness constantly shrank, until the golden cube above his head became his entire world.
Suddenly, the pressure completely disappeared. The air above him warped and twisted, and there was suddenly a huge shadow looming over him.
It was the same angel he and Zach had spoken to earlier in the month. Or at least it looked the same to Zorian. A mass of black branches with orange eyes instead of leaves, wreathed in fire and light. However, this incarnation of the angel was bigger.
Much, much bigger. The angel in front of him dwarfed virtually everything around it. Even Oganj and Mrva looked like children before it. Other than the sulrothum’s flying sandworm, this was the largest creature Zorian had laid his eyes on in his life.
The angel wasn’t alone. Flying around him were what Zorian could only describe as animated balls of white wings. There were at least 20 of them, and if there was a body hidden somewhere beneath all the feathers, Zorian couldn’t see it. They looked tiny next to the titanic burning tree of eyes, but Zorian estimated they were twice as big as he was.
Another four angels, these ones twice as large as the wing things, silently floated next to the main angel. They looked bestial, reminiscent of lions with a very long, flexible body. They flew through the air without wings, their bodies undulating in a serpentine manner, and they had no head. Instead of a head, they had a ring of white masks, each with a different expression, circling above their neck.
The sudden appearance of the huge angel and its group put an immediate end to all the aerial fighting. Oganj immediately vacated the area, retreating towards Iasku Mansion and its defensive wards, while Zach, Alanic, and Xvim landed next to Zorian, grateful for a chance to take a breather and replenish their mana reserves.
When Zorian looked towards Iasku Mansion, however, he realized the angels weren’t the only new arrivals. Quatach-Ichl had apparently finished his summoning at the same time he did, because there was an army of demons arrayed in front of them.
The demons were… a diverse bunch. There were hundreds of them huddling around Iasku Mansion, divided among 30 or so different ‘species’. One group looked like man-sized black cats with blood red eyes and shark-like grins. Another consisted of large, hunched, pale-skinned humanoids with four arms, no eyes, a long tail, and quills on their back. Yet another looked like brown eggs scuttling around on long, thin, spider-like legs. A multitude of human faces danced on the surface of the ‘eggs’, most of them looking as if in pain. Isolated and given a wide berth even by the other demons, a large dark red rose towered over most of its demon brethren, supported by a multitude of thorny tentacles that probed all around it as if looking for targets. A regimen of humanoid demons stood at attention in one corner, carrying spears and covered from head to toe in black armor with way too many spikes and blade-like protrusions on it, mimicking some ancient human legion. A flock of disgusting, grub-like creatures floated from place to place, dripping saliva everywhere.
However, this multitude of demons didn’t look too impressive in Zorian’s eyes. There were a lot of them, but they were pretty small, at least compared to the angels. Zorian was leery about drawing too many conclusions from the size difference alone, but the way the demon horde subtly cowered every time they looked at the massive burning tree in the sky told Zorian it was not something to completely discount.
No, what really worried Zorian was the giant humanoid torso floating above the demon horde. This demon was big. Not as big as the burning tree above Zorian, but big enough to rival Oganj and Mrva. The torso was headless and armless, but there was a gigantic eye embedded into its torso, purple and glowing. An armor seemingly made out of various bones – some of them human, some from animals, and some from strange entities that Zorian couldn’t recognize – covered the torso, leaving little except the eye visible to the world.
The lesser demons beneath it cowered before the group of angels, but the eye in the torso looked completely unafraid, studying the scene before it with detached curiosity.
For a moment it glanced at Zorian, and Zorian made the mistake of meeting its gaze. He immediately felt his soul shake and his vision began to blur.
A massive black branch extended from the tree above, stabbing into the earth in front of Zorian and breaking the eye contact between him and the purple eye on the horizon.
Zorian’s mind immediately cleared and he quickly reinforced his soul defenses, directing a silent thanks towards the angel above. He didn’t think that would have killed him, but he really didn’t want to engage a powerful demon in a soul magic fight, no matter how minor it was.
For several seconds, the battlefield was silent, neither side wanting to make the first move.
Eventually, Jornak amplified his voice and spoke out to Zorian and the others.
“If we fight here, the city will get leveled,” he said.
“If we don’t fight here, you’ll release Panaxeth and the city will still get leveled,” Zach responded, his voice still amplified. “What’s your point?”
“I’m just foolishly hoping you will see reason,” Jornak said. “No matter what you do, the city is doomed. You are doomed. You were doomed the moment you accepted that poisonous contract with the angels. We both know they probably hoped something like this would happen and that you would end up dying at the end of the month, even if you achieve your goal. The primordial is stopped and the hero conveniently disappears at the end of the story, unable to use his godlike abilities to upset the status quo or enact any real change. You were never supposed to survive this.”
Several seconds ticked by in silence. Zorian glanced at the looming angel above him, trying to see if it would speak up to contradict him. It did not.
He had no idea what that meant. Maybe Jornak was right. Maybe the angel thought his words were not even worth responding to.
“But I… I have a chance to live through this. To change things… to change everything for the better,” Jornak continued. “Is the sacrifice of one city, a city that spit on your family’s sacrifice and robbed you of your birthright, such a heavy sacrifice?”
“You’re wasting your time,” Zach told him. He turned his head skyward, towards the angel above them. “What are you waiting for? Every moment they stall for time, the cultists and their sacrifices get closer to the Hole. Let’s finish this.”
“Not yet,” the angel said simply. Its voice rumbled all around them, deep and resonant.
“Fine,” Jornak said, sounding a bit angry. Zorian didn’t understand why… did he honestly think Zach would suddenly roll over and die if he asked nicely? They’d even summoned a huge angel and everything! “Since you’re being like this, let’s raise the stakes a little.”
He snapped his fingers, the sound amplified along with his voice, and three different detonations occurred at different spots of the city. Instead of dust and gravel, however, what erupted out of these detonations was a geyser of smoky black shapes. They were difficult to make out from this distance, but Zorian could easily puzzle out what they were.
Wraiths. Lots and lots of wraiths.
Suddenly, Zorian imitated Jornak’s actions and snapped his fingers as well. There was no explosion, but the swarms of wraiths released by the bombs suddenly all converged on several different locations of the city and disappeared. As if a hidden predator had drawn them in and swallowed them without a trace.
Jornak seemed confused at the sudden event.
“Surprised?” Zorian said out loud, amplifying his voice. “Well, you did give us plenty of forewarning about the wraith bombs. It’s only natural that we prepared countermeasures.”
“How…?” Jornak began, before suddenly stopping when he realized he was asking Zorian to explain how he countered his move. Of course he wasn’t going to tell him something like that.
In truth, it was something that Zorian had Sudomir to thank for most of all. After all, the man had already figured out how to attract and trap bodiless souls over a wide area inside his mansion. Zorian couldn’t really duplicate his grand feat, but he could make smaller versions of the soul well, adapted to trapping wraiths, and scatter them across the city.
Even then, trapping free-willed wraiths was significantly different from drawing in ordinary souls of the dead. Zorian had to draw upon his knowledge of the soulseizer chrysanthemum and its ability to suck in souls of living beings to make the device work well enough.
Fortunately, Zorian had gotten lots and lots of insight into the inner workings of the soulseizer chrysanthemum during the last six months of the time loop…
Before anyone could say something, everyone noticed a swarm of distant dots approaching the city in the distance.
Eagles. Giant eagles ridden by battlemages.
Apparently Eldemar’s military had managed to organize a response and was about to get involved. Zorian couldn’t help but feel a jolt of fear at the thought. This was entirely unplanned, and he had no idea how the soldiers riding on those eagles would react to their presence.
The burning tree floating above them, however, didn’t seem surprised.
“Now, we fight,” the angel rumbled, before surging towards the demon horde.
The demon horde roared out a challenge and rushed forth to meet them.



Chapter 103
Window of Opportunity
As Zorian watched the massive angel tree and demonic Cyclops torso barrel through the air towards one another, his thoughts inevitably took a depressing and fatalistic turn. He wasn’t deluded enough to think they could solve this crisis without the city taking massive casualties, but as he watched the impending clash of titans in front of him, he couldn’t help but conclude that Jornak was right.
The city was going to get leveled to the ground, one way or the other.
Thus far, the collateral damage from their battle had been fairly modest. They were fighting around Iasku Mansion, and a sizeable portion of the city around it had gotten replaced with a patch of forest. The trees had taken the brunt of the fighting. There was no way this would remain true for long, and it left Zorian feeling powerless and frustrated. His primary goal was admittedly rather straightforward and selfish – he wanted to ensure he and everyone he cared about survived this evening – but he had lived in this city for a literal decade, and had sunk countless hours and resources into making sure it survived this evening. He did not want to see it destroyed like this. What was their angel ally thinking? It seemed to Zorian that the angel had predicted many of the things that occurred, so why…
Almost as if they could hear his silent laments, the remaining angels sprang into action. The four lion-serpent things that were flanking the burning tree didn’t try to join the battle. Instead, they swiftly flew away from the angel tree they had been circling, as if they intended to flee, scattering in all directions. No one was fooled by their maneuver, however, and they soon slowed down and positioned themselves on the edges of the forested area, equidistant from one another. A faint yellow force field immediately enclosed the area in a cubical prison.
Though it looked extremely pale and weak, Zorian didn’t believe for a moment that it would be easily pierced.
Moments later, a barrage of spells from Jornak’s side hit the walls of the cube, confirming his suspicions. The barrier was extraordinarily tough. Not even Oganj’s spell made it weaken, and the dragon mage could basically fling artillery spells on demand.
Zorian relaxed a little, recovering his reserves more as he observed the situation and looked for an opening. Zach and the rest of the people on his side did the same, clustering close to him to take advantage of his powerful defenses. Jornak and Quatach-Ichl launched a few random spells to try to put pressure on them, but those were effortlessly stopped by his defense cube.
His precious creation was burning through its stored mana at a terrifying rate to maintain this level of power, but it was also stocked with a terrifying amount of crystalized mana so it would last for at least another four hours.
Long enough, in other words. They would either win or lose by then.
In any case, neither Jornak nor anyone else on the enemy side could devote much time to figuring out a way to get through their defenses. The angel tree and the cyclopean demon collided with terrifying force. A flood of orange flame and lightning-like bursts of purple energy erupted around them, intermingling with one another and sweeping across the entire battlefield, before being stopped by the cubical barrier.
For a while, everything was chaos. Those unfortunate enough to be close to the initial clash were either vaporized by the energies, or thrown away much like dandelion fluff picked up by the wind. Everyone else was frantically doing their best to vacate their area – a task made more complicated by the fact the two titans did not stay static, and instead moved around as they fought.
All of this was good news for Zorian and his allies, of course – there were only a handful of them, but they were all very powerful, and they had a very good defense that none of them had to spend mana to maintain. Unfortunately, the same thing was largely true for Jornak and his allies, too. They had Iasku Mansion, which had its own wards they could hide behind. Sudomir’s work was less advanced than Zorian’s, but he had an entire building to work with and literal years to slowly assemble his ward scheme. It would take more than this to break down the mansion’s defenses.
To Zorian’s joy, the stalemate between the two titans didn’t last long at all. Although the demon torso never visibly lost its composure and kept fighting fiercely, it soon became obvious it was weaker than the angel tree. It could hold its own against the angel, but it was constantly on the defensive, constantly pushed back and retreating, and utterly unable to stop the angel tree from engaging additional opponents around them.
And the angel tree ruthlessly took advantage of it.
The angel tree’s might was awe inspiring. Its branches were seemingly numberless and impossibly flexible, stretching to great distances at will and bending like rubber while losing none of their power and destructiveness. Its many eyes allowed it to take in everything around it, and it had incredible multitasking abilities. It was constantly engaging multiple targets simultaneously, slashing undead apart with casual swings of its branches, burning the war trolls to ashes with its eerie orange flames, and snatching the more resilient demons and drawing them deeper into its tangle of limbs where their ectoplasmic bodies would be ripped to pieces by attacks from all directions until they disappeared into puffs of smoke. The twenty angel wing balls that followed the angel tree helped with this task, herding enemies towards the celestial titan with powerful gusts of wind.
Even better, every once in a while the angel tree would maneuver the fight to get close to Iasku Mansion and then ruthlessly start pounding on the defensive wards of the building, causing them to visibly strain. The wing balls that followed it contributed to this in their own way, firing intensely bright, lightning-like blasts of energy at the ward scheme. Although the demon torso did everything it could to repulse them from the area, it wasn’t doing a good enough job, and eventually Quatach-Ichl and Oganj had to abandon the protection of the mansion in order to help the demon torso suppress the rampaging angels.
This was too good of an opportunity to pass up for Zorian and the others, and they decided to join the fray and help the angel tree prevail. After all, they didn’t even have to overpower their enemies – if they could simply push Oganj or Quatach-Ichl into the angel’s waiting embrace, its lethal branches would take care of the rest for them and they would have one less heavy-hitter on the enemy side to worry about.
Zorian mentally ordered the defensive barrier of his defense cube to become flatter and more tangible at the bottom, and to spread itself out over a larger area, and the cube automatically rearranged itself according to his wishes. Sigils inscribed on its surface glowed, mechanical pieces whirled and moved into alternative positions, and soon enough Zorian was standing on a large, heavily shielded, flying platform. He signaled to the others to jump on the platform, and when they did, the platform shot towards the scene of the battle with great speed.
Sadly, Mrva couldn’t fit on the platform, so Zorian could only order his beloved creation to follow after them on foot. Not that it mattered much – Mrva was all but unstoppable. He had so much weight and speed that just about anything that tried to stop him was simply shoved aside without impeding him much. A regiment of black-armored demons made the most credible attempt, using their great numbers and military-like discipline to slow him down for a time, but even they were ultimately thwarted when Mrva jumped into the air to bypass most of them.
As they approached, they had a great view of the titanic battle in front of them. With the support of Oganj and Quatach-Ichl, the demon torso had been given a chance at a comeback. It was pouring a stream of dark purple lightning at the angel tree, forcing the celestial being on the defense for the first time in the fight. Jagged rays of red light rampaged through the angel’s branches, temporarily unopposed, actually severing some of them and leaving deep gouges on its trunks. As for Oganj, he appeared to be busy fighting off the wing balls that accompanied the angel tree, which were frantically firing their blue lightning blasts at the dragon mage in an attempt to keep at least one opponent away from their leader.
Zorian would have ordered the platform to go faster if it wasn’t already flying as fast as it possibly could.
Then, disaster struck. Some of the lesser demons noticed their advance and decided to stop them. Zorian didn’t take them seriously at first, as it was just that flock of disgusting, grub-like creatures that he had noticed floating around the edges of the demon horde when it had first been summoned. He had taken them to be just one more group of minor demons brought in to fill out the numbers, but now that they were attacking him, it quickly became obvious they were one of the more dangerous demon varieties for him personally.
That stupid glowing saliva they were drooling all over the place was actually insanely damaging to force shields! The little wretches were capable of spitting globs of it over surprisingly great distances, and they were really quite fast and agile when they tried. And there were a lot of them.
As much as he didn’t want to, Zorian had to slow down his advance in order to deal with these little pests…
Mrva was still continuing forward, of course, but the demon horde had a solution for him as well, it seemed. The ground in front of the charging Mrva suddenly erupted, and a multitude of thorny, ropy tentacles shot forwards and wrapped themselves around the golem’s limbs and torso. Zorian ordered Mrva to simply charge through and use his great weight and momentum to break free, but to his surprise, this didn’t work. The thorny tentacles refused to break or lose their grip on the golem, and managed to stop its charge.
Like an ominous figure, a large rose-shaped demon rose out of the earth, tall enough to tower even over Mrva. Zorian remembered seeing it near the epicenter of that initial clash between the angel tree and the demon torso, after which it disappeared. He had thought it died back then, but apparently it simply took shelter under the ground and waited for a convenient moment to reveal itself.
Considering it could stop a charging Mrva in his tracks, the demon rose was likely quite powerful.
They had only spent a few moments engaging the grub swarm and the demon rose when Zorian received a telepathic message from a familiar voice.
[What are you doing?] the angel tree thundered in his mind. The voice was calm and collected, but the mental volume of the communication was painfully high and the tone was accusatory. [Stop wasting your time here and get out of this place. You need to stop Panaxeth from breaking free of his prison, or else all this will be irrelevant.]
[What?] Zorian protested, feeling rather wronged at the implication he was willingly wasting time. He glanced at the yellow barrier boxing them in and, sure enough, it was still very much intact. [But the barrier-]
[It’s for our enemies only,] the angel tree said. [It will not stop you.]
Ugh, and the damn tree only felt like mentioning this now? Why not at the very start of this thing, when it was first erected? This had to be deliberate. The angel had some kind of private plan that involved them staying inside this box for a while, the manipulative bastard.
[Fine,] Zorian told the angel. [I just need to get myself and my golem out of this situation and then I’ll-]
He hadn’t even finished the sentence when the air in front of the platform warped strangely, scaring everyone currently standing on it, and a massive black branch wreathed in orange flames suddenly appeared in front of them, striking down. The grubs harassing them were caught completely off guard by the sudden attack and promptly got speared, bisected, and burned. It was a total wipeout, with the handful of surviving grubs fleeing the scene immediately.
The branch continued downward without pause, aiming at the demon rose tangling with Mrva. The demon shook and swayed, impossibly agile and flexible, and managed to avoid being speared or cut by the twigs and sub-branches even once… but it could not avoid the flames. The strange orange flames separated themselves from the branch at the last moment, forming into ghostly images of snakes, claws, and jaws, and engulfed the hapless demon rose. It let out an unearthly screech, writhing in pain as it caught on fire, and then retreated underground so fast Zorian thought for a moment it simply disappeared.
Apparently the angel tree could casually warp space to strike at opponents way outside its usual range. Just how powerful was this thing?
[Go,] the angel tree urged him, and then immediately severed its contact.
There was a roar of triumph, and then the dragon mage was holding a rather thick black branch in one of his claws, its fires sputtering and fading. The angel had paid a high price for this timely assistance, it seemed.
Zorian immediately ordered the flying platform they were standing on to change directions and proceed towards the nearest barrier wall at maximum speed.
“Wait, what are you doing?” Zach asked, alarmed. “Have you gone crazy!? You’re going to ram us straight into the barrier wall!”
“It’s not going to bar our way,” Zorian hurriedly explained. “The angel just told me.”
“The angel just told you? Why didn’t it tell me? I’m the one they made a contract with, you’d think I would be their contact,” Zach grumbled.
“You’re under mind blank,” Zorian reminded him. “And besides, I’m the one controlling the platform we’re flying on. Contacting me is only common sense.”
The others silently observed their whispered bickering, but said nothing, opting to instead stare at the luminous wall of light they were rapidly hurtling towards. Though Zorian noticed that Xvim was watching it with an expression more evocative of awe and appreciation than trepidation.
“It can even selectively let things through? What a miracle of spellcasting,” Xvim said in a low voice.
Zorian sniffed disdainfully. What was so amazing about that? His defense cube did the exact same thing!
But no, he wasn’t going to be petty and defensive about this. Not right now, anyway…
In any case, there was no time for further conversation, because mere moments later, they collided with the barrier wall. The light parted before them like an airy curtain, caressing their face and skin as it moved out of the way, and then they were out of the box. Everyone except Alanic flinched at the point of impact, unconsciously expecting to get splattered against the magical barrier that had weathered so many titanic impacts from the battle inside. The scarred battle-priest’s faith and composure was apparently sufficiently strong that he could weather the impact without so much as a twitch.
Zorian glanced behind him, only to see no trace of opening where they exited the barrier. The wall of light parted before them in an instant and then closed together just as quickly.
It was also not nearly as transparent from the outside as it was from the inside. It was instead completely opaque, effectively shrouding the shielded area from curious outsiders trying to peer in.
Zorian was ecstatic, but also a little worried. With them outside of the angel barrier and their enemies trapped inside, Zach and Zorian could crush the cultists trying to conduct the Panaxeth releasing ritual inside the Hole and essentially win by default. On the other hand, Zorian’s secret plan hinged on him hitting everyone all at once with his spell, something that was impossible while Jornak and the others were holed up in Iasku Mansion, and protected by the angel barrier. He would have to get them out of there eventually before he could initiate the plan, and that worried him a little.
Of course, he voiced none of these thoughts. He silently directed their flying platform towards the Hole and prepared himself for another fight. The others didn’t need any explanation to understand what he was planning – stopping the cultists was the obvious goal.
There was, however, another problem approaching. While they had been distracted by fighting inside the angel barrier, Eldemar’s giant eagles had been approaching the city as fast as they could. Now, they were just about to arrive… and Zorian could see they were aiming straight at Zorian and his flying platform. He supposed that the glowing cubical barrier the angels erected was very eye-catching, and the fact they had just flown out of it made them obvious targets.
Zorian had no idea what the eagle mages would do. He had assumed they would recognize the angels, but the angels were busy inside the barrier and couldn’t vouch for them. Which meant they would probably do whatever came naturally to them in a situation like this. That… was not encouraging. From the perspective of Eldemar’s authorities, it all probably looked like a bunch of rogue mages fighting in the city and wrecking stuff in the process. They may very well decide to just bring the hammer down on everyone and sort things out later. Zorian had heard that was a common reaction to whenever mage disputes escalate into open battles inside a populated settlement – one side may have been entirely in the right, but Eldemar’s forces only see two troublemakers endangering innocent civilians and treat everyone as an enemy.
Zorian could only hope that the sheer scope of the fighting would give the eagle riders pause and make them a little more cautious and discerning. The sheer amount of firepower both sides used against each other should hopefully convince the royal forces they need to take a side instead of behaving like the biggest bully.
Unfortunately, Zorian’s hopes were in vain. With incredible speed, the eagle riders caught up to them and swooped in front of them, the giant eagles releasing ear-piercing screeches. It was a clear warning that they would attack if the platform did not stop.
“Halt, in the name of the Kingdom of Eldemar!” the lead mage said in a voice amplified and distorted by magic. “Power down your flying platform and land on the ground, now! This is your only warning!”
Zorian clacked his tongue in annoyance. He stopped the platform, but did not move to land. This was such an annoying issue. Although Zorian was sure all of them put together were more than enough to take out the eagle riders, it would take an unacceptable amount of time and mana. More importantly, Zorian wasn’t sure his allies would even agree to attack Eldemar’s forces who technically did nothing wrong. Zach doubtlessly would, but Zorian was all but certain that Alanic would refuse to help them, and he wasn’t confident about Xvim and Daimen either.
If only the makeshift flying platform was faster than the eagles… but his defense cube was ultimately designed for defense and not flight speed, and giant eagles were famously fast flyers.
Thankfully, the eagle riders did not associate Mrva with them, or didn’t think they could stop a heavily-warded giant golem, so Zorian simply ordered the massive golem to continue on towards the Hole and they let him go unimpeded. It was going be difficult to control it effectively under these circumstances, but it was better than nothing.
“Captain,” Zorian said, his voice similarly amplified and distorted, “look around the city. It’s under attack and we’re helping. We’ll gladly explain things later, but–”
“It wasn’t a request!” the man interrupted him impatiently. “I order you to land and explain yourselves or we will attack you immediately!”
The eagle riders circled around them threateningly, giving the appearance of a pack of wolves just waiting for a sign to attack.
Two things happened simultaneously, then. First, there was a commotion back at the angel barrier. Glancing in its direction, Zorian could see Oganj repeatedly impacting the barrier of light, front claws glowing with red light. Each time he slashed at the barrier he created large gashes in the wall that healed almost instantly.
Secondly, Zorian realized the eagle riders didn’t have any serious mental defenses on them. They only had a basic mental shield that couldn’t even provide a speed bump against his psychic powers. As for the eagles, they were even worse. Completely defenseless.
“This is your last–” started the eagle mage commander, but was interrupted by a draconic roar. Oganj had finally managed to tear a hole in the barrier large enough to squeeze himself through and immediately tore himself out of the containment barrier the angels erected around Iasku Mansion. The barrier quickly mended itself, but it was too late – the dragon mage was out of the box.
And riding on his back were Quatach-Ichl, Silverlake, and Jornak.
Well. So much for his worries about having to eventually lure their enemies out of the barrier.
In any case, the eagle riders were clearly surprised at the appearance of an adult dragon so close to them, and unsure what to do for a moment. In that moment, Zorian struck. He reached out into the minds of the giant eagles, every single one of them, and ordered them to attack Oganj while amplifying their anger until they were completely berserk. They let out frenzied screeches and made a beeline for the approaching dragon mage, ignoring their riders’ panicked attempts to regain control.
He then reached towards the mind of the eagle rider commander, and forced him to make a loud proclamation in that amplified voice of his. The man had no choice but to obey.
“Oganj! It’s the dragon mage!” the man shouted against his will. “Forget those small fries, we need to take him down!”
“Kill the dragon!” another eagle rider agreed, also forced to do so by Zorian.
Oganj reacted exactly as Zorian hoped he would. The dragon mage was proud and aggressive, and had clashed against Eldemar’s forces numerous times in the past. He saw nothing suspicious about a bunch of Eldemar mages making him their priority target, and he had every intention of teaching them a lesson. He gave a roar of challenge and shifted his focus to killing the eagle riders, ignoring Jornak’s loud complaints that he shouldn’t get distracted.
Zorian quietly withdrew his telepathic influence from the minds of the eagle riders and ordered his platform to continue flying towards the Hole at maximum speed. Even if they wanted to continue bothering him, they had a more pressing problem on their hands now.
After a few seconds, he noticed that everyone except Zach was staring at him strangely.
“What?” he asked, frowning.
“You did that, didn’t you?” Alanic asked.
“Hmm? Oh yeah, definitely,” Zorian said, only understanding after a few seconds why they reacted that way to his casual display of mind control. Sometimes he forgot that these weren’t the same people he had worked with for over a year to figure out how to leave the time loop. Those people had died forever, even their souls erased and denied afterlife.
“Are they going to be alright?” Alanic asked, frowning. He clearly didn’t like the idea that Zorian might have sent the eagle riders to fight and die against their enemies with no support.
Funnily enough, it didn’t even occur to Zorian to care for their wellbeing. He thought of them as an annoyance, and saw his actions as a form of poetic justice for impeding their mission and trying to push them around. They came looking for trouble, and they found it.
His original self, whom Zorian killed in order to be able to stand here today, would definitely be horrified at what he had become.
“They won’t all die,” Zorian eventually answered. “I fought with them a few times over the various iterations of this month. They eventually retreat if the enemy inflicts enough losses on them.”
“They came here to fight for Eldemar,” Zach helpfully added. “They’re doing exactly that right now. If they knew what we know, they would have chosen to engage Oganj anyway, even if most of them died doing that.”
“Explaining my involvement in this is going to be hell, I can already see,” Alanic lamented.
“We did take basic precautions,” Zach said. “We’re all wearing disguises, and the battle will destroy most of the clues and prevent normal divinations from working. Plus, we have a master mind mage that can delete memories of people who get too close to the truth.”
“It doesn’t matter in my case,” Alanic said. “Do you know how hard it was to mobilize all these people I recruited to fight on our side? I had to use my name and connections to make all this happen. There is no hiding this, even if you start mind-wiping people.”
Well, if Zach was going to survive this evening, Zorian was definitely going to have to start mind-wiping people, and sooner than anyone in this group suspected. Thankfully, nobody was in the mood to continue this topic, both because they were now very close to the Hole, and because they were facing yet another threat.
Jornak, Silverlake, and Quatach-Ichl were rapidly approaching, using some kind of high-speed flight spell in an effort to catch up to them. They knew that everything was over if Zorian and the rest of the group could face-off against the cultists alone, and they weren’t going to let it happen.
Before Zorian and the others could really start disrupting the ritual, the battle against Jornak, Silverlake, and Quatach-Ichl began anew.
- break -
While his original body had been busy dealing with angels, demons, and eagle riders, his simulacrum bodies had not been idle. They roamed the city and processed information that Zorian constantly received from the multitude of remote sensors and recruited subordinates working with the group to repel the invasion. The primary (albeit secret) task they had was to make sure the network of glyphs he had scattered all across Cyoria remained reasonably intact. The unplanned substitution of an entire city section with Iasku Mansion and the surrounding forest had already blown a sizeable hole in his network, so he had to be extra vigilant, or parts of his remaining network would become disconnected from the network as a whole, making his entire plan useless.
While doing that, however, his simulacrums also involved themselves in the fighting here and there. These interventions were by necessity minor, since he couldn’t afford to waste too much of his mana in peripheral areas of the city. The original body had a much more critical role to play, so the majority of their mana reserves were reserved for his use. Fortunately, he had a perfect tool for the situation. His mind magic, if used thoughtfully and strategically, was perfect for making large impacts in return for minimal mana expenditures.
All around the city, strange incidents began to occur. Many of them were so subtle they could be chalked up as coincidences. A panicked group of scattered defenders suddenly surged with newfound confidence and ‘remembered’ where they were all supposed to converge and regroup in event of emergency. A fleeing family received a strong hunch that the route they wanted to traverse wasn’t safe and that they should pick another way. A large, muscular man wielding an antique sword, clearly just a normal city worker without a hint of magic or military training, fended off an entire pack of winter wolves all on his lonesome, allowing a nearby military group to save both him and the people he was protecting; for some reason the winter wolves kept missing him, as if they couldn’t see him correctly. A local dog suddenly went berserk and began barking and biting at thin air, alerting a nearby mage to the presence of an invisible Ibasan battle group waiting in ambush.
Others were less mundane. All around the city, some people received sudden, supernatural visions that gave them critical information about the enemy. Enemies sometimes went crazy and started attacking their own allies for no reason, sowing chaos and discord in enemy ranks. Small animals like bats and bugs were inordinately fond of ramming themselves straight into enemy casters’ faces when they were in the middle of sensitive spellcasting. A young soldier suddenly fell into an obvious trance and started describing the enemy distribution of forces to his commander, hopefully allowing much better coordination of defending efforts in that city sector.
Meanwhile, up in the sky, iron beaks ceaselessly patrolled the city in both large and small groups. They were Zorian’s roving eyes and blades, the small groups checking out disturbances to see if anything interesting was happening, and the big ones converging on critical areas to give aerial support to whatever defenders were located in the area. Each flock carried one or more telepathic relays, allowing Zorian to both easily access their senses and occasionally take control of them to direct them to specific spots. They were smart birds, with already existing group discipline, so he only had to take control over the leaders in order to control the whole group… which was good, because there was no way he would have been able to control the iron beaks otherwise.
Convenient. No wonder Sudomir had decided to use these particular birds for the invasion.
The iron beaks were bloodthirsty and their feather volleys were extremely deadly. They were fast and agile flyers too, which allowed the flocks to simply swoop in and let loose a feather volley at the surprised enemies, before simply flying away to engage someone else. With Zorian managing their attacks, their strikes were far more strategic and selective than the iron beaks themselves would have ever been on their own – they now almost exclusively targeted mages, instead of wasting their feathers on tough targets like war trolls and other dominated monsters, usually striking when the target was exhausted or busy dealing with something else.
Despite all of this, the scale of the invasion was vast, and Jornak had brought a large number of fresh troops into the city when he had brought Iasku Mansion into the city. Zorian’s actions were just a drop in the bucket, and it was hard to judge how much difference his actions made in the grand scheme of things.
A lot of times he could do nothing but watch as the invaders killed and torched their way through the city. He could do a lot with relatively little when he spotted an opening, but not every situation had one. Or at least, not one that he could spot. Maybe someone smarter than him could have seen some obvious solution that he had missed, but he was still only human, and a lot of the time he saw no way to help without burning through his mana at an unacceptable rate.
So instead, he did nothing. He watched people fight and die over and over, across the entire city, withholding his help because it would cost too much.
He wanted to say the experience made him sick… but the truth was that he was already somewhat numb to it. He had seen things like this happen many times over the restarts, and had even experienced some of these things from the invaders’ perspective due to his memory reading. Maybe later, when the situation was over and he had time to internalize that all of this was final and irreversible and not at all like the time loop, he would be horrified by the things he had seen and his own lack of reaction to it, but now wasn’t the time for it.
It just wasn’t the time.
He eventually turned his attention to the Hole, where a fierce fight was happening. While Zorian and Jornak’s groups were trapped underneath the angel barrier, the cultists had been free to proceed towards the Hole… for a time.
There was an element that neither Zorian nor Jornak had expected. Before the cultists could even begin setting up the ritual and start sacrificing the children, they were ambushed by a large number of… small animals. Pigeons and cats, to be more precise. Instead of simply clawing or pecking at the cultists, however, these cats and pigeons employed magic spells and weapons.
As the cultists were escorting their wagon of sacrificial children near one of the bigger buildings, a handful of cats simply dropped from the roof and onto their heads. Their claws glowing white from the effects of some unknown spell, they swung towards their targets’ necks and faces, slicing open arteries and permanently blinding others. One of the cultists noticed the incoming attack, but he made the mistake of meeting the eyes of a cat sitting on a nearby windowsill and was suddenly hit by a powerful bout of vertigo that sent him reeling. He never had a chance to recover, as another cat ripped his throat out a mere moment later.
Before the cultists could respond to this attack, a flock of pigeons swooped in, carrying a multitude of alchemical grenades in their claws, and all hell broke loose.
Shifters, Zorian quickly realized. Cat and pigeon shifters – the two varieties that were probably most proficient in classical spellcasting in addition to their natural shifting capabilities. And… yes, there was the police force joining the attack now.
Hmm. Apparently Raynie and Haslush had done more in this past month than Zorian thought they would. A surprise, but a welcome one.
Of course, while the cultists often seemed like the weakest part of the invasion from Zorian’s perspective, they were really not so easy to dismiss for regular people. After the initial shock, the cultists began to fight back, and they did so extremely well. After all, the leaders of the Cult of the World Dragon were actually very powerful and capable mages. Usually they were too busy enacting Panaxeth’s ritual to help their underlings, but at the moment this wasn’t the case, so they quickly made their presence known. After some initial successes, the combined shifter-police forces began to die in droves and lose their courage.
There was no way Zorian could allow this, though, so he instructed his iron beaks to help out and started subtly and not-so-subtly directing city defenders to rush over towards the Hole and join the battle.
Interestingly, the pigeon shifters adapted really well to the iron beaks’ assistance. Many of them appeared to be capable of casting certain spells purely reflexively, which meant that any of the seemingly innocuous pigeons could drop a fireball on an enemy group or summon a force barrier to defend both themselves and the iron beaks from enemy spells. Even though Zorian didn’t attempt to communicate with any of them, the pigeon shifters soon naturally fell into the role of support, following iron beak flocks and shielding them against enemy fire so they could operate relatively unmolested in the sky.
As for the cat shifters, their animal forms were mostly useful for surprise purposes and not terribly impressive for these kind of battles, so Zorian feared they would be useless after that initial ambush… but he was wrong. The cat shifters simply switched back into their human forms and started contributing by casting spells normally. Amusingly, they were kind of similar to Zorian, in that their biggest talent seemed to lay in mind magic. Zorian supposed that, since so many of them already operated on the criminal side of things, they were less hesitant to practice mind magic than a regular mage.
Then Mrva barged into the scene, tanking enemy spell fire like it was inconsequential and crashing into the cultist ranks like a cannonball. The original may have been too busy elsewhere and couldn’t come, but there was no stopping Mrva. His presence slowly but surely started to turn the tide in the favor of Cyorian forces. The leaders of the cult were powerful, but so was Mrva.
Idly, Zorian wondered if it wouldn’t have been better for the original and his allies to simply teleport to the Hole the moment they escaped the angel barrier, and then kill the cultists as quickly as possible… but considering that the cultists still hadn’t even begun the ritual as of yet, maybe it was for the best that they hadn’t done that. Who knows how Jornak would have reacted if he knew for certain that releasing Panaxeth was impossible and that he was going to die soon. Although it may have seemed like Zorian had neatly eliminated the threat of wraith bombs with his counter-traps, the truth was he only had enough time and funds to make those for Cyoria. There were wraith bombs scattered all over Eldemar and possibly beyond, and Zorian could only thank the gods that Jornak didn’t see fit to activate them as well out of sheer spite.
And that was just the wraith bombs. Although Zorian was sure that some of Jornak’s threats were pure bluffs, he had no doubt that the man had plenty of contingencies that would make them all suffer if he lost. Even Zach and Zorian had made a few contingencies that would go off if they didn’t survive this battle, so there was no way Jornak hadn’t done the same.
It still wasn’t the right time. All Zorian could do was wait and look for an opening.
- break -
Zorian stared at the three creatures in front of him. One was some kind of tiger-sized reptilian creature that Zorian did not recognize, another was a floating orb surrounded by long whip-like tentacles, and the third one was a gigantic green ooze the size of a small building. His defense cube spun around him, sigils on it brightening and fading like the beat of his own heart and mechanical parts softly shifting into various combinations. For a second, everything was still, before both sprang into motion and the battle began anew.
The tentacle orb was the first, being the fastest. It hurled itself at Zorian with incredible speed, its milky white body crackling with powerful electrical magic. Zorian didn’t panic, simply jumping to the side while telekinetically enhancing his jump a little. He easily dodged out of the way of the living cannonball, and another sidestep dodged the electrified whip the creature tried to hit him with next.
The other two creatures weren’t that far behind, though. The blue tiger-lizard thing used the distraction created by the whip-orb to charge at him, preparing for a jump. Zorian flicked a spell marble at the thing, creating a large detonation right in its face and blowing it back with ease. The creature slammed into the already damaged road and promptly burst into liquid.
A mere moment later, the blue puddle of slime started to come together again, and a few seconds later the tiger-lizard thing was intact and once again gunning for him.
As for Zorian himself, he was too busy trying to avoid being engulfed by the house-sized blob of acid to worry about finishing the tiger-lizard thing off for good. The giant ooze was completely unlike most oozes, and moved with speed and dexterity that no natural ooze should possess, let alone one that size. It constantly sprouted pseudopods that lashed out at Zorian, leaving corroded cobblestones whenever it hit, and its great weight and power allowed it to simply smash apart buildings if they were in its way or it thought the rubble might inconvenience Zorian.
All three were working seamlessly together with one another, and showed both signs of human-level intelligence and detailed knowledge of human spellcasting. Though one might mistake them for some kind of exotic magical creature at first, Zorian knew he wasn’t looking at a natural creation. If Zorian had to guess, he would say these beings were something akin to living potions – an alchemical liquid animated by either captured souls or elemental spirits. Possibly both – a multitude of captured souls for providing abundant mana, and water elementals for actually controlling the liquid.
A grating, cackling laugh rose into the air behind the giant ooze. Silverlake seemed to be mighty pleased at how her minions were faring against Zorian.
“You shouldn’t have sent your metal toy away,” she crowed. “Maybe you’d actually have a chance against me and my lovelies if you had this ‘Mrva’ at your side.”
Zorian said nothing, simply scanning his surroundings for a way he could bypass the potion elementals and strike at Silverlake. It didn’t look like he did, but that was because he was primarily looking through the eyes of a small flock of iron beaks circling the skies above the battlefield rather than trying to use divinations in the middle of a battle.
The whip-orb tried to rush at him again, but Zorian fired a thin line of force at it that speared it right through. It immediately burst into a cloud of electrified potion droplets, causing Zorian to wince. This wasn’t a good way to hold the orb at bay, it seemed.
‘This is so frustrating,’ Zorian lamented in his head. ‘I spent a decade inside a time loop. You’d think I would have encountered every type of enemy there is!’
“I hope you realize we found out where you stashed your little sister and her cat shifter friend to keep them safe. Our forces are attacking them even as we speak,” Silverlake said, punctuating her threat with her usual annoying cackle.
Zorian narrowed his eyes at her, but did not let her distract him. This was a blatant attempt to demoralize him, and he wouldn’t fall for it.
Not that he thought she was lying. He had known for a while now that Kirielle and Nochka were being besieged in their hideouts, but there was little he could do. He could only hope that the Taramatula guards and mercenaries Daimen hired would be able to protect them, or that the miniature bodyguard golems he made for them would step up if they couldn’t.
“I hope you realize the Cult of the World Dragon hasn’t even begun their ritual,” Zorian fired back. He knew he shouldn’t talk in the middle of the battle, but her mentioning the attack on Kirielle and how he was essentially forced to ignore it struck a nerve and he couldn’t help it. “Look around us. You clearly can’t deal with me and neither can your allies deal with my allies. You won’t win anything by keeping us busy.”
As if by some cosmic joke, his statement was punctuated by a loud detonation as an ominous purple sun exploded in the sky nearby, casting the entire city in a deep purple glow for a moment. An aftershock of Quatach-Ichl’s battle against Daimen, Xvim, and Alanic.
Jornak and Zach were also having their own fight nearby, though Zorian could not see it. Jornak had used some kind of strange ability granted to him by Panaxeth to shroud an entire section of the city in thick white mist that no spell could penetrate into. Offensive spells simply sank into the mist and disappeared without a trace, and divination spells went awry when directed at the area.
Zorian wasn’t terribly worried about Zach, though. Zach had shown himself to be noticeably stronger than Jornak in their past clashes, so he doubted this move was enough to tip the scales. More likely than not, this was just Jornak stalling until Quatach-Ichl and Oganj could finish off their opponents so they can gang up on them three-on-one.
“You are such a fool, Zorian,” Silverlake said. A bunch of fire spells on parabolic trajectories came flying over the giant ooze and straight at Zorian, but he dispelled them with ease. “We could have both profited off this if you had agreed to work with me. We could have opened a small crack in Panaxeth’s prison and then immediately mended it. My oath to the primordial would have been technically fulfilled, and the city would be left standing. Hell, we could have sabotaged the whole invasion from within. Imagine how many lives that would save. Instead you insist on staying with a dead man compromised beyond all belief. Are you gay? Is this what’s going on?”
“There is no way to fix Panaxeth’s prison once it cracks,” Zorian told her, not rising to her bait. He telekinetically seized a large piece of a nearby ruined wall and hurled it at the giant ooze. It failed to punch through and instead got stuck inside the green slime that made up its body. “You’re just comforting yourself with nonsense. You took Panaxeth’s offer because you thought it was a sure thing, as opposed to our own escape plan, which would have required you to trust another human being for once in your life. Now that this ‘sure thing’ is screwing you over, you’re grasping at straws.”
“It’s still a sure thing! You think we need those shifter children for the ritual?” Silverlake cackled. “Have you forgotten these bodies me and Red Robe have are made by Panaxeth? Both of us contain enough of Panaxeth’s essence to form a link to him and crack this prison open. We kept the child sacrifice just to distract you.”
Zorian scowled. That… made a disturbing amount of sense. The shifter children collectively had only a tiny amount of primordial essence in them, so a mass sacrifice was needed to get enough material to form a key, but Jornak and Silverlake were specifically incarnated into the real world by Panaxeth to help his release. He probably had no shortage of his own essence and it was of no use to him in his prison.
Any response he might have given was postponed as a veritable rain of alchemical bombs rained down from the sky around him, forcing him to dodge and shield himself from their effects. Worse, some of the alchemical mixtures reformed themselves into tiny liquid animals soon after detonation and started attacking him. Smaller versions of the three creatures he was already dealing with, obviously. So annoying.
“You’re the one controlling the birds above us, right?” Silverlake continued. “You can see through their eyes, so I’m sure you can tell how Oganj’s battle is progressing.”
Zorian ‘glanced’ at the battle in question and sighed internally. The performance of Eldemar’s eagle mages was praiseworthy. Any compulsion Zorian might have placed on them had long since worn off, but they kept fighting Oganj regardless and they held their own admirably.
But Oganj was still a dragon mage, and one famous even among his own kind. Even as Zorian watched, Oganj pointed his claw at one of the eagle riders and an expanding ball of razor-sharp threads exploded around him. If this was the start of the battle, the eagle rider in question would have evaded or shielded himself against the attack, but by now he was too exhausted and wounded to resist effectively. The tangled mass of severing threads instantly turned both him and his giant eagle into a bloody mess. Blood and chunks of flesh began to slowly fall to the ground.
The eagle riders weren’t going to last much longer, and when they decided to cut their losses and flee, Oganj was going to come here to turn the tides of battle.
He glanced further into the distance, where the angel cube was located, but the cube was opaque from the outside and he couldn’t see anything. He had no idea what was happening inside.
“What’s your point?” Zorian asked, a spark of light entering his eyes as he finally spotted an opportunity. “You aren’t still trying to turn me to your side, are you?”
“Heavens, no,” Silverlake said. “Tell you what, though… if you give me the imperial orb, I’ll let you flee the city and pretend I couldn’t stop you.”
The old witch really had a talent for getting under people’s skin, Zorian had to give her that.
He made his move. The whip-orb and the tiger-lizard had just tried to attack him together and landed very close to each other. He exploited this ruthlessly by casting a rather obscure spell on the section of the road they were standing on, ripping it straight out of the ground and catapulting it straight into the sky and away from his current position.
Before Silverlake could react to this, he mentally activated the explosives he snuck into the chunk of the ruined wall he had flung at the giant ooze. The wall section, still floating inside the ooze, blew up in a spectacular explosion that burst the gigantic potion elemental like an overripe melon.
It didn’t actually kill it, but it didn’t have to. It was temporarily incapacitated until it could reform, and that was all that mattered.
The path was open.
He teleported in front of the surprised Silverlake. She had hurriedly shielded herself to protect herself from the chunks of her own potion elemental flying everywhere, and was currently ill suited to protect herself.
The moment Zorian blinked into existence in front of her she sneered at him with an expression of smug triumph and he detected the trap ward she placed on the area activating. She knew he was coming.
Zorian’s mind went into overdrive. Time seemed to slow down. Elsewhere, his simulacrums stopped what they were doing as the information about the ward was dissected and analyzed by multiple minds bouncing ideas and theories between each other. Before the ward had time to fully activate, Zorian had figured out what it did and where its flaws were.
Wordlessly, he stomped his foot and sent streams of non-structured magic all around him, poking and disrupting the rapidly-forming structure of the ward. Simultaneously, he fired off a simple magic missile spell at a seemingly innocuous glyph faintly carved into the nearby cobblestones, destroying it utterly.
The entire ward suddenly imploded upon itself, carved sigils burning out in a flash of blue light. Silverlake stumbled back, her mind hit by the backlash of the ward control function suddenly sending a bunch of gibberish at her. Before she could recover, Zorian was already casting spell after spell at her. Force projectiles powerful enough to turn stone to powder, fire spells hot enough to melt steel, potent disintegration beams… the attack kept coming and coming, giving Silverlake no chance to take a breath and center herself. She tried to activate some kind of recall object to teleport away but Zorian blocked it from working. Finally, her inexperience with these kinds of battles began to show, and her shields broke.
A force projectile hit her straight in the head, and half of her face instantly became a blood mist. Instead of stopping, Zorian blew up the rest of her head as well, and blew a bunch of holes in her torso for good measure as well.
For a second, the scene was quiet.
But something was wrong. Her headless, mutilated body staggered back but didn’t fall. Instead, flesh grew out of her wounds at a terrifying rate, quickly reforming her head and healing the rest of her wounds.
Zorian couldn’t help but be disturbed. Even if she had drunk a portion of troll regeneration or something, a destroyed head was still a killing strike. He tried to incinerate her just in case, engulfing her rapidly regenerating form in an intense cone of flame. Unfortunately, by now the giant ooze had managed to reform itself and launched another attack at Zorian, forcing him to break off the attack before he could fully reduce her to ash.
The moment he stopped, the charred, skeletal corpse of Silverlake again started to regenerate at a terrifying rate, regrowing muscles and skin at a speed that even trolls and hydras would find amazing. Especially considering the damage was inflicted by fire.
The half-healed body of Silverlake started to shake and gurgle, before breaking into painful coughing and spewing out blood everywhere. After a few seconds, Zorian realized this was Silverlake trying to cackle.
“See? You can’t kill me,” Silverlake said, almost completely recovered now. “It was a sure thing, and you are the fool here. This was so very worth it.”
“No one is unkillable,” Zorian said, launching a few more attack spells at her. She started defending herself again, though, so none of them actually landed on her this time. Hmm. She wouldn’t be defending herself if being hurt was inconsequential. She had a limit, somewhere. “I bet if I keep hurting you, you will eventually die for good.”
“Eventually,” she agreed, firing some spells back at him half-heartedly. The giant ooze tried to interpose itself between him and Silverlake again, but Zorian refused to let her out of his line of fire again. “But I bet it will take longer to exhaust my regeneration than it will to exhaust your mana reserves. Even with that cube acting as free defense, you still have to burn through your reserves to hurt me. And besides, Oganj will soon-”
A sound reminiscent of a ceramic plate breaking into pieces resonated somewhere in the distance. The angel cube, long silent, shattered and faded away, revealing the result of the angel-demon battle.
The angel tree was triumphant. Neither the massive demon torso nor its accompanying demon horde could be seen anywhere.
The angel had paid a heavy price for its victory. One of its main trunks was merely a stump now, and two of the others had the majority of its branches ripped and sliced off. Many of its eyes were missing, and the strange orange fires were no longer covering the whole tree, but were instead thin and faded. All but three of its accompanying wing balls were gone, and one of the surviving wing balls was clearly missing a lot of its wings and zigzagging across the sky as if drunk. Of the sinuous lion-serpent things that created the barrier, there was no trace. Maybe they used up all of their power to maintain that thing?
Regardless, the angel tree did not rest or waste time. It shook itself slightly, flexing its branches like a fighter warming himself up before the fight, and then immediately accelerated like a cannonball toward Oganj.
The dragon mage let loose a roar of frustration at all these distractions, but made no attempt to flee. He clearly had every intention of fighting the wounded angel.
Although she did not have flocks of iron beaks acting as her eyes all over the city, Silverlake must have seen the event in some way, because she immediately scowled in response.
“Don’t think you-” she began.
But Zorian wasn’t listening. Now that he knew Oganj was taken care of, there was no reason to keep this in reserve anymore. He reached into his pocket and threw a palm-sized metal ball on the ground in front of himself and Silverlake.
He then immediately withdrew to a safe distance. The contents of the pocket dimension prison inside that ball were less a controlled weapon, and more a bloodthirsty maniac you pointed at the enemy and hoped for the best.
Silverlake’s eyes widened in fear and shock when the grey hunter materialized in front of her, and all confidence seemed to drain out of her posture. She started screaming a long string of curses as she desperately fought to keep the killer spider away from her.
Zorian kept himself well back from the two combatants, somewhat unsure if he wanted to involve himself. Although he had managed to capture the grey hunter and stuff it into a pocket dimension, he did not actually control it by any measure. It was a feral magical beast released off its chain, and if he wasn’t careful, it could easily shift its attention to him instead. Thus, he mostly stayed on the sidelines and watched the battle.
Eventually, though, Silverlake started to use the giant ooze she had at her disposal to take control of the grey hunter’s movements and Zorian decided he had to intervene. As amazing as the grey spider was, the giant ooze was huge and could keep the spider away from Silverlake through sheer mass alone.
He never got the chance to involve himself, though. Before he made his move, the giant ooze suddenly froze, shuddered slightly, and then collapsed into an inert puddle of acidic slime. Well, more like a small lake, but still. It was dead.
“What!? Who are you? How do you know how to do this?” Silverlake said, looking left and right for the perpetrator while running from the grey hunter, who now had an open path forwards and wasted no time in going after her again.
The other person did not answer at first. Instead, a crude but effective warding circle suddenly sprang up around the area where Silverlake and the grey hunter were fighting, trapping her with the murder-spider.
Zorian suddenly realized what was happening. He could recognize this ward easily enough, and there was only one person he ever saw using it. He had to say, he didn’t expect this…
Soon, Zorian’s unlikely ally stepped out from the shadow of a nearby building, dropping her stealth spell in the process.
It was Silverlake. Old Silverlake. The same annoying witch that Zorian remembered from the time loop, her body slightly hunched and ravaged by old age and her face was covered in wrinkles.
“You!? What the hell do you think you’re doing!?” Young Silverlake yelled, outraged.
The old Silverlake did not answer her. She slowly began to walk around the warding circle in which she trapped her copy, tapping the borders with her staff and methodically reinforcing the ward so it was harder to break. Her expression was grave and serious. There was no cackling this time, no stupid jokes or attempt to throw her opponent out of balance with words. It was actually kind of eerie to see Silverlake behaving like this.
“Don’t you know who I am?” Young Silverlake protested. “I’m you! I’m you from the future! I know that brat over there already told you this, so why-”
“If you’re really my copy, then you know what happened the last time we made a copy of ourselves, and let it do as it pleased,” old Silverlake said calmly, not stopping her work or even glancing at her younger self.
The young Silverlake seemed to be momentarily at a loss for words and remained silent.
“Exactly,” old Silverlake concluded. “It’s only a matter of time before you come for me. My home, my connections, my life… you want it all, and you clearly outstrip me in power. This is my best opportunity to remove you as a threat. I must take it.”
“You ungrateful withered bitch!” young Silverlake screamed angrily. The grey hunter took advantage of her emotional instability and managed to sink its fangs into her forearm, pumping it full of shaping-disrupting poison… unfortunately, Silverlake reacted quickly and immediately sliced her own arm off at the shoulder with a severing spell. Her regeneration immediately started growing it back. “I should have killed you immediately after coming here!”
“Probably,” old Silverlake said, shrugging her shoulders.
Zorian took one more look at the situation, thought about it for a moment, and then decided to let the two Silverlakes deal with each other and move on to other targets. He could see that Jornak’s mist was starting to thin out and evaporate, which probably meant his battle with Zach was close to ending.
It was time.
He jumped into the air, his defense cube dutifully following after him, and used a fast flying spell to quickly reach the Hole. The cultists were still holding their own against the combined forces assaulting them, but they were exhausted and unprepared for Zorian’s arrival. He immediately started scything them down, butchering the whole group of them with a severing whip while trusting his cube to protect him from retaliation.
Simultaneously, he took closer control over Mrva again, and the golem’s attacks suddenly became a lot more accurate and strategic.
After only a handful of seconds, most of the cultists realized they stood absolutely no chance against Zorian and his golem, and their discipline fell apart. They started to panic and run, ignoring the threats their leaders spouted at them.
As Zorian suspected, his actions provoked an immediate reaction. In the distance, Oganj shouted a bunch of expletives and then separated himself from the angel he was fighting in order to rush towards the Hole. He received a deep gash in his flank for turning his back to his opponent like that, but he bore it with barely a grimace. Then, not far from where Zorian was cutting down the hapless cultists, a huge blast of magical force leveled an entire section of the city and a pitch-black skeleton suddenly flew out of it, flying at Zorian at maximum speed. Zorian quickly scanned the area Quatach-Ichl left and breathed a sigh of relief. Xvim, Alanic, and Daimen were in extremely poor shape, but they were still alive. Xvim was unconscious and Daimen was severely wounded and bleeding, but Alanic was quick to administer aid so they should both survive.
They should…
But no, he couldn’t get distracted. Oganj and Quatach-Ichl were both coming here, but the lich was closer and would be here sooner.
Although he was just a mindless golem, he couldn’t help but glance at Mrva looming above him a little sadly.
‘It was nice knowing you, Mrva…’
Being a mindless construct, Mrva did not answer him. He simply turned towards the rapidly approaching Quatach-Ichl and spread his giant arms as if offering the incoming lich a hug.
To his credit, Quatach-Ichl immediately understood that something was wrong and tried to swerve out of the way. It didn’t help him. There was no dodging this. Mrva’s chest opened up like a metal flower, exposing a complicated magical device with a glass tank acting as a centerpiece. Trapped within the glass tank was a large soulseizer chrysanthemum, which immediately woke up from its stupor and focused on the only target his current prison allowed him to perceive – Quatach-Ichl.
Normally, the flower wouldn’t have been powerful enough to threaten the ancient lich, especially from this distance, but its current housing wasn’t just a prison. It was an amplifier and a focus device, vastly increasing the flower’s range and power.
Without reservations, Mrva immediately started burning through his entire internal supplies of mana, amplifying the flower’s attack more and more. It still wasn’t enough to actually seize Quatach-Ichl’s soul and draw it into the flower, but that was okay – Zorian did not actually expect it to be able to do that. All he needed it to do was incapacitate Quatach-Ichl for a little while, just like the chrysanthemum had done to Zach and Zorian the first time they had encountered it.
The amplified soulseizer chrysanthemum did just that. Hit by the flower’s attack, Quatach-Ichl lost control over his flight spell and plowed straight into the building in front of him before unceremoniously dropping to the ground. Being an undying lich made out of magically-reinforced bones, this high-speed impact and subsequent fall did not really hurt him much. But it did make him stationary.
The defense cube behind Zorian suddenly restructured itself into a ring-shaped construct. The time-frozen spell Zorian had previously captured from Oganj was suddenly released and immediately continued its attack, this time targeting Quatach-Ichl.
The lich shakily picked himself up from the ground, fighting off the still ongoing effects of the soulseizer chrysanthemum through sheer willpower, and lifted his head just in time to see the giant incandescent projectile, equivalent in power to an artillery magic spell, hurling towards him. If he’d had only a few more seconds, he would have shrugged off the attack and dodged, shielded, or teleported away… but he didn’t have a few more seconds.
Before the projectile even reached him, the light suddenly died in his dead eye sockets and his bones started to fall back to the ground. He chose to retreat back to his phylactery on his own rather than be beaten.
Moments later, the dragon magic spell hit his remains dead-center, and the entire area was consumed by a blinding fireball that vaporized everything around it.
As for Mrva, his role in this was finished. His chest folded up again to prevent the chrysanthemum from targeting anyone else, and then he simply went limp. His internal mana reserves were gone and he could no longer move or fight.
“Contemptible thief!” Oganj shouted in outrage, getting increasingly close. The angel tree was hot on his tail. “Is your kind capable of doing anything on your own!?”
What was he talking about? Dragons were infamous for bullying everything and everyone around them for things they wanted. Besides, you would never see a dragon build a gun or a train, so there were at least a couple of things humans invented on their own.
He didn’t bother saying any of this, though. He simply teleported close to the blasted site and fired a gust of wind at it, getting rid of the smoke and dust. He was met with the sight of molten ground, still visibly burning hot, with a small crater in the middle. Only one thing survived the magical conflagration – the imperial crown that once stood on Quatach-Ichl’s head, still completely untouched.
Divine artifacts were not easy to destroy, especially ones of this caliber.
Zorian quickly produced a force whip and used it to yank the crown towards him. He was careful not to touch it at first, but it turned out to be completely cool to the touch.
He glanced to the side, where Zach and Jornak were facing off against each other. He got a little distracted while fighting Quatach-Ichl, but at some point the mist Jornak had created completely disappeared, and the two combatants reappeared. Thankfully, Zach managed to keep Jornak from interfering, so their fellow time traveler was unable to save the lich.
They both looked pretty terrible. Zach was bleeding from his forehead and limping. Whatever Jornak had done with that mist apparently did much to even the odds between them, since Zorian did not think Jornak could hurt Zach that much in a fair fight. As for Jornak, his fancy red robe was almost entirely shredded and he was gasping for breath as if he had been running for hours, but his skin was suspiciously free of any scrapes and bruises. Zorian suspected he was similar to Silverlake, and that any wound inflicted on him would heal quickly. Maybe not on the level of Silverlake, since her powers seemed to focus entirely on indestructibility, while Jornak had this weird mist thing in his arsenal, but still.
Zorian twirled Quatach-Ichl’s crown with his finger, giving Jornak a cheeky smile.
“Like that means anything,” Jornak spat angrily. He hadn’t taken his eyes off Zach for even a moment, but he had clearly seen Zorian’s gesture. Despite what he said, the emotion in his voice told Zorian that he was very much bothered by the way things were going. “This isn’t over! The crown is useless to you in the short term, anyway!”
Before Zorian could answer, he was forced to dodge a spell from Oganj, who had finally arrived to the scene. Thankfully, the shifters and police forces had already rescued the shifter children by this point, and hurriedly left the area, so he didn’t have to worry about them becoming collateral damage.
“Out of everyone here, I like you the least!” Oganj said, slicing a nearby building in half with a blue beam of force and nearly taking Zorian’s head off. “You’re a sleazy weakling who fights with tricks and schemes!”
“You’re allied with Silverlake,” Zorian countered. “You have no room to talk!”
Oganj’s response was a palm thrust that flattened the entire area he was standing on. Thankfully, by that point he had already teleported away to a nearby rooftop.
He clacked his tongue. Though he could keep the dragon mage at bay for a while, he had to say this wasn’t a good position to be in. He wasn’t a heavy hitter. He couldn’t tangle with Oganj for long.
He mentally calculated things in his head. Should he do it now? Having Oganj around was very suboptimal, but if he had to do it now… he might be able to pull it off. The dragon was busy fighting off the angel tree at the same time as fighting Zorian, so maybe…
[Angel,] Zorian told the celestial telepathically, [what are the chances of you winning against the dragon and driving him off?]
[On my own?] the angel guessed, correctly. [A coin toss.]
[How about keeping him completely busy for an hour?] Zorian tried.
[A coin toss,] the angel replied.
“Okay,” Zorian mumbled quietly.
He didn’t like those odds. He glanced at the imperial crown in his hand and suddenly remembered his conversation with Silverlake.
Why was Oganj fighting them, anyway? The Kingdom of Eldemar was his sworn enemy, yes, and he would no doubt love to see Cyoria burned to the ground, but there was no way he just teamed up with Jornak just to see the city burn. He was promised something, and it had to be big in order to move a dragon mage of his caliber to do this.
Was it bigger than a divine artifact?
Let’s find out.
[Angel, catch,] Zorian sent the celestial telepathically, before throwing the crown in the sky towards the angel and accelerating it telekinetically so it could reach the celestial high in the sky.
[This is useless to me,] the angel pointed out disapprovingly, but it humored him anyway, and quickly snatched the crown with one of its branches.
[I have an idea. Please play along,] Zorian told it, before turning towards the dragon mage that was currently busy defending himself against the angel tree.
“Dragon!” he shouted, “I have given the angel the imperial crown!”
“Why the hell would I care?” Oganj shouted back. “It can’t use it!”
“But you can!” Zorian shouted back. “If you agree to stop fighting us and leave the city, the angel will promise to give you the imperial crown at the end of the day! A genuine divine artifact that can increase your mana reserves! There is no other like this anywhere in the world!”
Oganj suddenly stopped and put some distance between himself and the angel, eyeing it speculatively. The angel hovered in place, not pursuing hostilities for the moment.
“Oganj, don’t you dare!” Jornak shouted angrily. There was a trace of panic in his voice. “You know what’s going to happen if you do this! Quatach-Ichl is going to come after you! I will come after you! And you will not receive a single god damned thing I promised you!”
But Oganj wasn’t listening. There was a shine of greed in his eyes now, and he studied Zorian with increased focus now.
“You are the one who has the imperial orb, right? The one with the portable palace inside?” Oganj suddenly asked. He didn’t wait for Zorian’s answer. “Throw that in as well and I’ll leave the city and trouble you no more.”
“Oganj, you son of a bitch!” Jornak raged.
“Done,” Zorian said. He didn’t even think twice about giving up the imperial orb. Losing it was painful, but his need of making the dragon mage go away was greater.
He could always try to recover it later.
He withdrew the imperial orb out of his pocket and threw it at the angel, accelerating it telekinetically like he did the crown. The angel caught it easily, sequestering it safely within its branches.
“I hereby make a promise, backed by the high heavens, that if you leave the city now and stay away from it for 24 hours, I will give you these two artifacts that have been entrusted to me just now,” the angel told the dragon mage. “May the high heavens strip me of my rank and strike me down should I break it.”
“Hmm,” Oganj hummed appreciatively. “I wouldn’t trust most creatures, but an angel wouldn’t lie. I accept.”
And then Oganj turned towards the northern forest in the distance and simply flew away from the city. The angel seemed to hesitate for a moment, as if it wanted to tell Zorian something, before it simply followed after the dragon mage.
Jornak was clearly fuming with anger right now, but he still wasn’t willing to quit. If anything, his attacks on Zach started getting more frenzied and reckless, his breathing harder and harder.
Zorian took a deep breath. It was time. There would never be any better time than this.
His mind blended with that of his simulacrums. The network of sigils he had scattered across the city sprang into life, giving him reach across the entire city. The multitude of aranea he had brought into the city, mostly quiet until now, established contact with his mind.
He used a short-range teleportation spell to transport himself as close as possible to the two fighters.
And then he lunged at both of them.


Chapter 104
I Win (I)
He was Zach Noveda, the last surviving member of Noble House Noveda, the chosen of the angels…
…and he had won.
He honestly never thought he would win. He wanted to win, of course. He wanted to know what kind of wonders the world beyond this month had in store for him. He wanted to rebuild his house and make his caretaker pay for what he had done to him. He wanted to have friends and lovers that would never forget him. But this wish… it was merely a wistful dream, flickering in the back of his mind and refusing to die. He didn’t seriously consider it, and not just because of the stupid angel contract and its impossible conditions. The truth was, he’d kind of given up a long time ago.
He had tried to beat the invasion so many times, attempt after attempt, idea after idea, until eventually, he became convinced this was his fate. To stay there forever, in an endlessly looping world. All this power and knowledge, all the revelations about his past life, all the insights into people around him… the time loop dangled these things over his head, but it was all meaningless because he couldn’t get out.
Stopping the invasion of Cyoria was the key. He knew this. Somehow, deep down in his soul, he knew this. But he couldn’t do it, no matter how many times he tried. It was fine while he was still learning things, becoming a better mage, and brimming with ideas… but slowly, he started to slow down. He had learned everything he possibly could about the invaders themselves. Advancing his magic became harder and harder, each new spell or training method giving ever smaller improvements. His inspiration began to dry out.
And yet he still couldn’t get out. He was as good as he realistically would ever be, and yet it wasn’t enough to stop the invasion. His best wasn’t enough. That’s when he realized he wouldn’t be getting out.
He wouldn’t ever be getting out.
And then he met Zorian. His friend was… alright. He scared him with his behavior from time to time, and he wished he was easier to talk to and more fun to hang out with, but hey. You can’t have everything. More importantly, he was driven. He had that spark to keep going that had mostly died in Zach a long time ago. He had ideas that would have never even occurred to Zach, and methods that were alien to Zach’s way of thinking. It was new and refreshing, and it reignited that spark of hope in him that refused to fully die.
A long time ago, when Zach had only begun figuring out the time loop and his skills were still growing, his pride would have bristled at the idea of just letting his new friend take the lead in how they should proceed with their escape plan or go about honing their skills. Alas, that was a long time ago. By the time Zach met Zorian, the time loop had already grounded him, and he was entirely content to simply act as support. He stepped aside and let Zorian plan their escape and set their short-term goals, trusting his new friend to get them out of their looping nightmare and simply steering him away from his more… dubious choices.
In the end, that path had led him here: locked in a deadly battle against his other time travelling companion – Red Robe. Or Jornak. Whatever. He would always be Red Robe to Zach, in all honesty. Even now he was wearing that stupid red robe of his to hide his appearance.
He had trapped Zach in some kind of strange dimensional labyrinth, at first – a mirror image of the city covered in thick mist that severely limited Zach’s vision while allowing Red Robe to move around in some strange manner that Zach found hard to understand at first. Red Robe clearly thought of him as some kind of dumb brute that wouldn’t be able to deal with this kind of environment, but Zach hadn’t spent all those years in the time loop for nothing, and his knowledge of dimensionalism had reached incredible heights while he had been working with Zorian and others to create a viable escape route into the real world.
Red Robe bragged a lot about this misty labyrinth world while he and Zach fought. An attempt to demoralize him, maybe? Maybe he couldn’t see all that well in there either, and wanted Zach to verbally respond so he could lock onto his position more securely? In any case, Red Robe said this misty world was primordial magic granted to him by Panaxeth. A place isolated from the real world, impossible to escape.
Place largely removed from the real world… impossible to escape… ha. Wasn’t that almost exactly the description of the time loop? Hadn’t Zach helped Zorian learn how to punch a hole through it so he could escape?
Red Robe thought Zach was a dumb brute, but Zach had figured his little trick out within a minute of arriving there. Just like the time loop was centered on Panaxeth, this world of mists was centered around Red Robe. There was no point looking for an exit in the environment around them. The exit was Red Robe.
The fight between them lasted a while, but eventually Zach managed to maneuver things in the right direction. He had to let one of Red Robe’s kinetic spells clip him in the leg, leaving him limping, but it was of no importance. It was a relatively light wound, and he had drunk a potion of regeneration before the battle. His leg would be fine soon enough. What was important was that he used the opportunity to hit Red Robe with a dimensional spell designed specifically to punch holes in these kind of prisons. It was literally one-of-a-kind, a product of their intense research near the end of the time loop, and Red Robe clearly had no idea how to deal with it.
Zach had expected to punch a literal hole in the misty world, but it turned out that Red Robe’s little creation was incomparable to that of Panaxeth, even if they had the same origin. The moment it was forcibly punctured, the mist started to thin and fade, until the entire world quietly disappeared at some point, shunting them back to the real world.
They came back just in time to see Zorian take out Quatach-Ichl. It filled Zach with complex feelings to see Zorian best his oldest enemy so seemingly easily. He knew that a lot of work and preparation went into this victory, and that it was not nearly as easy as it looked, but… it still made him a little jealous. Just a little bit.
Red Robe, on the other hand, was just mad. He attacked Zach with increased ferocity to vent his frustration, and Zach matched it without any reservations. Black swords made out of dimensional forces slashed at Jornak, cutting deep gouges as he dodged out of the way. Tiny incandescent suns zipped around with the speed and agility of a swallow, the ground exploded into stone spears that then exploded into thousands of needle-like shards, rays of electrified light surged forward while evading obstacles like immaterial snakes, and the air itself was whipped into a miniature tornado centered on Zach. He may have failed in a lot of areas of his life, but if there was one thing Zach Noveda felt supremely confident in, that was his combat skills. He was good at fighting, and he loved doing it. It rejuvenated him to fight worthy opponents, made him feel alive.
He looked at his opponent, his red robe long since tattered, and met the man’s eyes, trying to jog his memory. To remember the time they apparently met and became friends. Alas, nothing came to his mind. There was no memory, no instinctive knowledge, not even a feeling of déjà vu. The man was a complete stranger.
Red Robe. Jornak. The man who apparently betrayed him and tampered with his mind, leaving him even more lost inside the time loop than he already was. Zach was angry at the man for what he had done… but if he was honest with himself, not that angry. He didn’t actually remember the betrayal, and he was always a relatively easygoing guy. Even so, tracking the man down and making him pay for what he had done had been the driving force of his life for a while now. He didn’t think it was the effect of any magical compulsion or anything… he just found hating the man to be convenient. Invigorating. Focusing on Red Robe and how he messed him up gave Zach a goal in life that he had lacked for so long, so how he could not go after him?
Plus, the man was clearly a total nutcase. He wasn’t an empath like Zorian, but he didn’t need to be one to get a read on the guy. Even more than Zach himself, he was dead inside. The next round of continental wars was going to be bad enough without a guy like this throwing oil into the fire. He had to go.
Then Zorian made Oganj go away. He did it in such a hilarious way, too! Except for the part where he gave up the imperial orb to make it happen, that part was honestly awful. Hadn’t they agreed the orb would go to him after the month was over, since he got Princess? The asshole had no right to give it away! Hell, he didn’t even try to negotiate with the stupid lizard…
Oh well. Truthfully, the idea he would get to enjoy the imperial orb, or anything else for that matter, was just… a wistful dream. The angel contract hung like a sword above his head, ready to strike. Its terms were impossible to fulfill. No matter what happened, Zach only had a little time left.
Or so he thought at the time, anyway.
Without warning, Zorian teleported near the site of Zach’s battle with Red Robe. Zach remembered feeling a flash of anger in response, even if he stayed quiet. It made sense for Zorian to help bring down Red Robe as quickly as possible, but this was the final stretch of the battle and Zach was enjoying himself. This was the last fun thing he was ever going to do in his life, did Zorian really have to take it away from him?
What happened next shocked him completely. Without saying anything, Zorian simply lunged at Red Robe, rapidly entering melee range with the man while charging some kind of spell Zach didn’t recognize.
Though angry, exhausted, and focused on Zach, Red Robe reacted quickly. He instantly spun to the side to face this new opponent, drawing a knife from his belt in a smooth, practiced motion.
No, it was not just a knife, Zach realized. It was the imperial dagger. Red Robe must have quietly stolen it from the Royal Vaults at some point. It wasn’t that surprising – the man must have gotten quite proficient at it over the restarts – but he thought the dagger wasn’t that useful?
Red Robe’s expression alone told Zach that he had thought wrong. An expression of pure glee and hate shone on the man’s face, as if he hoped this very thing would happen and couldn’t believe Zorian was stupid enough to grant him this opportunity.
Zach hastily launched a fast-moving spell at the two, trying to blast them apart from each other, but he wasn’t fast enough. The dagger shone with a faint purple light as Red Robe thrust it forward towards Zorian’s face. Zorian did nothing to dodge or shield himself with magic, but that protective cube he made quietly interposed itself in the path of the knife.
Zorian’s faith in his grand creation proved to be severely misplaced, however. As great as his skills at artificing were, the dagger was a genuine divine artifact. It sliced straight through the cube like it was made of paper and stabbed forward, impaling Zorian straight through the neck.
Simultaneously, Zorian’s glowing hand slammed straight into Red Robe’s chest, blowing a massive hole straight through his chest and causing some kind of faint blue waves to resonate across the man’s entire body.
And then Zorian’s damaged defense cube detonated in a massive explosion that not only blew Zorian and Red Robe away from each other like rag dolls, but also flung Zach back into the nearby building.
Zach wasn’t really hurt. It wasn’t the first time he was flung back into a wall. He cushioned his impact with the wall with a quick magic, expertly landing on his feet. He quickly scanned the area and found Zorian lying on his back some distance away.
He rushed towards the boy to provide aid but stopped when he got close enough to really see him.
He wasn’t moving. His eyes, blank and glassy, remained open. His chest didn’t move. And the imperial dagger was still stuck up to the hilt in his neck, and his whole body was full of serrated metal bits sticking out his skin – the remains of his defense device driven deep into his flesh by the force of the explosion.
He stared at his friend for a few seconds, overcome in disbelief, before walking forwards. He cast a quick diagnostic spell and slowly, hesitantly placed his hand on him. He wasn’t that great with healing magic, but this was one of the simplest spells in that field and he had an excellent grasp on it. The spell told him what he already knew, but didn’t want to accept.
Zorian was dead.
“No,” he whispered despondently. “No! Zorian you stupid, stupid, stupid- Why!? Why would you do something so-”
‘Because this was deliberate. What don’t you understand? He chose to die so you could live.’
The thought bubbled up to his mind suddenly, unpleasant and uninvited. It hit him like a punch in the face.
“H-He wouldn’t…” Zach mumbled to himself. “He’s too selfish… he said so himself! He has friends, a family, a little sister that needs him, a whole bunch of girls that want to get in his pants. I…”
He took a deep breath and forcefully calmed himself. He… had to check something.
He got up to his feet and ran up to where Red Robe was also laying on the ground, motionless. The man was also dead, unsurprisingly. Not only did Zorian’s last attack completely destroy his heart and chest, the blue wave that accompanied the attack also did something. Ripped his soul out of his body, maybe? His medical magic was too rudimentary to figure it out, but the man was definitely dead.
He swallowed heavily and then got up again. He started to search for other people.
Everyone seemed to be unconscious, Zach soon realized. They were lying all over the place – on the streets, in public buildings, in alleyways, everywhere.
It wasn’t that they got knocked out during a fight, either. His diagnostic spells confirmed most of them were completely healthy, barring some minor scrapes and bruises that were normal for the current conditions of the city. They seemed to have just suddenly dropped unconscious all of a sudden.
He eventually found Alanic, Xvim, and… Zorian’s brother Daimen. Gods above, how was he going to explain to the man that he just let his little brother…
He shook his head and carefully approached. They were still unconscious, just like everyone he encountered so far. After a second of hesitation, he cast a memory reading spell and placed his hand on Xvim’s head.
The spell encountered no resistance. He was sure that Xvim had placed a mind blank spell on him during the battle, but there was no trace of it now. He immediately dove into the man’s memories, searching for any information regarding the time loop.
His hand soon began to tremble. The man had no idea about any time loop. More than that, however, he didn’t possess any memories of this entire month. Someone had quite literally memory wiped his entire recollection of said time period.
He repeated his check on nearby Alanic and Daimen, with the same results. They were free of any knowledge of the time loop… because they had no memory of anything that had transpired during this whole month.
He breathed out heavily.
“Zorian, you scary bastard… how did you even do this?” he said out loud.
Wait. If he could do that to others… could he do it to him as well?
Was any of this real?
The moment the thought bubbled up to his mind, it refused to leave. He could feel something inside his soul wake up and demand a check. He had to know. He had to know as badly as a starving man needed food, a compulsion so strong it was essentially irresistible.
He started casting a plethora of diagnostic divinations on himself, his surroundings, and the three unconscious people in front of him. He performed a multitude of little experiments he learned over the years to detect when illusionists messed with his surroundings.
Nothing. His mind blank was still working. His mind was not being tampered with. The environment was behaving as it should and the people in front of him were as complex as real people should be.
He started to wander the city, casting memory spells on random people he found lying in the streets. By this time some people had started to wake up, but Zach simply walked past them, ignoring them as he went about his task.
He wasn’t really searching for any specific information. He was reading people’s memories in order to find out trivial things like their favorite meals, what their mother looked like, or what the last story they’d heard was about. In other words, he was checking if they were real people.
A mind mage, no matter how good, couldn’t create a mind from scratch. Not a convincing one, in any case. A fake man would be a paper thin disguise, capable of tricking only the most inexperienced of mind mages. However, Zach had gotten to know Zorian long enough that he couldn’t discount anything. He could totally accept that Zorian could produce a convincing fake mind. The guy was just that scary.
Maybe even a pair of fake minds. Maybe a dozen.
By now he had read the memories of more than a hundred people, though. All of them felt real. All of them were complex individuals with lots of little details about their lives and tangled histories that Zach could easily lose himself in for weeks at a time if he really wanted to figure them out. He refused to believe that anyone could create so many lives out of thin air. Even someone like Zorian.
He lost track of time. He wandered around the city, checking on people. Anyone that was even slightly familiar with the time loop had lost their memories of the whole month. No exceptions. Even the aranea beneath Cyoria were missing any memory of this month. An entire colony of skilled telepaths, but Zorian had somehow managed to convince them to willingly delete their own memories.
Eventually, he accepted the truth. It was real. It was all real. Jornak was dead. Silverlake too – she was done in by her old, real world self, who lost her memories of the past month, but was otherwise unharmed.
Nobody knew anything about the time loop except for him.
He left the city. He couldn’t look at it any longer. He found a small hill just outside the city walls that he and Zorian used to sit on sometimes, discussing their plans or just wasting time, and watched the fields around him in silence.
He had no idea how long he stood there. He thought someone approached him at one point and asked him if he was alright, but he ignored them and they eventually went away. All he knew was that at some point he realized that someone was shooting fireworks into the sky.
It was the night of the summer festival. The city may have just suffered a brutal invasion, but that was no reason to halt the celebrations. Hell, if anything this just made the importance of a celebration that much greater!
And Zach… felt happy. He felt disgusted with himself for it, but he really did. Panaxeth was still sealed and the conditions of his contract had been fulfilled. He was going to live past this month.
He… had won.
He was Zach Noveda, the last surviving member of Noble House Noveda and the last surviving time looper…
…and he had won.
He fell to his knees and began to cry. Somewhere deep inside his soul, he could feel the angel contract harmlessly dissolve, finally fulfilled.
He was free, and all it cost him was the life of his best friend.


Chapter 105
I Win (II)
He was Jornak Dokochin, a humble lawyer from Cyoria, the true heir of House Denen, and the last surviving time looper…
…and he had won.
The path had been long and difficult. He still remembered that fateful day he had realized Zach was a time traveler. The boy had been making scene after scene around the city, making ‘nonsensical’ statements to the newspapers and everyone else who would listen, never once outright stating what he was, but very much hinting at it. Very few people had taken him seriously. Jornak hadn’t either, in all honesty – not until the boy had come to him one day and asked him to help him figure out some legal documents he ‘found lying around the living room’.
The documents blew Jornak’s mind away. Not because the contents were so shocking, but because of what they implied. The people they implicated in crimes were so influential and highly placed, and the evidence so damning, that Jornak simply knew that Zach must have stolen them from the very people mentioned in the documents.
Jornak knew exactly how hard that feat was. After the corrupt Eldemarian courts had taken the inheritance of House Denen away from him, he had come to understand that truth and the letter of the law were almost entirely inconsequential in the face of money, connections, and social status. He became a covert member of the Cult of the World Dragon and rubbed shoulders with many powerful people. He came to know the darker undercurrents of Eldemar society, and knew what it would take to acquire this kind of dirt on someone.
No amount of money could buy something like this, so how could Zach have possibly acquired these documents? Jornak had agonized over this question for days, dissecting every statement Zach had made, no matter how minor or nonsensical, and eventually came up with a crazy idea. The craziest idea, possibly. He confronted Zach with it, and… the boy just laughed and admitted to it easily.
Yes, he was a time traveler. In fact, he had lived through this month many, many times, and they had talked before.
Jornak believed him. He wanted to believe him. His life had been rather dreary and frustrating for several years by that point. His career wasn’t going anywhere, despite his attempts to build connections and increase his social standing. He had no success in love. His family was long dead. The inheritance of House Denen, his best chance at achieving greatness, was stolen from him. His youth was all but spent, and he felt he wasn’t going anywhere. This looping time travel thing may have been completely insane, but Jornak was willing to take a chance on it.
The two became fast friends. Zach explained that he had originally found Jornak because he’d befriended Veyers in one of the restarts, and the boy had introduced him to his lawyer friend. Zach’s story about his caretaker selling Noveda property for pocket change to his friends and then siphoning most of the money into his pockets fascinated Jornak almost as much as the time travel story itself.
He wasn’t that unique in his realization that Zach was a time traveler. Zach had been making a lot of noise during that particular restart, handing out clues to various people he was fond of, and a number of them had reached the same conclusion he had. Zach was also dating no less than two women at the time – both of them aware of the other and fine with it – and he’d outright told them the truth long before Jornak had met him. It was… a fascinating group. He’d made a lot of new friends that month.
There was a looming shadow over the whole thing, however, and it grew colder and more obvious with every passing day. Zach Noveda wasn’t a mage who invented time travel, merely a leaf caught in the storm. The mechanics of the time loop were merciless, and they would soon strike.
As the end of the month approached, some people in the group got increasingly concerned. Jornak was one of them. During one evening when they were alone, and Zach had a little too much to drink, he admitted to Jornak that he would eventually stop interacting with him altogether. It had happened repeatedly in the past: Zach would get to know someone, interact with them over and over again, get emotionally attached to them, and then decide it was too painful to be around them in the future.
The admission shook Jornak to his core. He wasn’t sure why. He wouldn’t really remember anything soon, so why did it matter that Zach would replace him with someone else in one of the future restarts? It shouldn’t have mattered, but it did. He grew increasingly desperate, constantly probing Zach for any ideas about how he can keep existing after the month was over. He recruited the other members of Zach’s group into his efforts, and eventually they managed to force an admission out of him.
There was a way. A divine artifact, held by a lich, that could confer the status of a temporary looper upon a person. It would only be for six restarts, and Zach explained again and again why he didn’t want to do it, why it was a bad idea, and so forth. It didn’t matter – not to Jornak, and not to the other people. Six months was better than nothing.
It was probably the two lovers that did most of the job of convincing Zach to play along with their request, Jornak suspected. Still, he was the one who organized the whole effort and he was very proud of it. The next six months were a great time, possibly the happiest in Jornak’s life. He did not intend to betray Zach at that time, not at all – the boy was his best friend, and Jornak had every intention of helping him out in any way he could.
But alas… six restarts had eventually passed. The second deadline started to approach. Tempers ran high. People started asking Zach for a way to prolong their time looping status, horrified that they were about to lose everything they had achieved during these past six months. Zach’s mood continually worsened, both from him being heartbroken that the people he spent the past six months with were about to become lost to him, and the fact they were constantly badgering him about a solution that didn’t exist. That he couldn’t provide.
Jornak’s friendship with Zach also started to gradually deteriorate as the end approached. Jornak was far more interested in politics of the state and in what was happening behind closed doors of their nation’s elite. He had come to know much, and he grew more disgusted with them than he ever had been. He talked to Zach often about these issues, but the boy was just a teenager at heart, and his perspective was narrow and naïve. He simply wanted to get back at his caretaker, start rebuilding his House, and have fun. He did not appreciate the knowledge Jornak had painstakingly gathered, and found his methods to be immoral and disturbing. As the end of their temporary looper status approached, they clashed more and more frequently, and Jornak made the mistake of telling Zach exactly what he would do if he were in his place. The look Zach had given him when he stopped talking… Jornak would always remember that…
Eventually Zach called for a group meeting. He swore again and again that he wasn’t hiding any methods of prolonging their looping, and that there was nothing he could do. He promised them he would make them all temporary loopers again as soon as he could.
He also privately promised Jornak he would supply his future looper with all the work he had done in those six restarts, but Jornak didn’t believe him. The boy hadn’t even read the last two reports Jornak gave him, much less memorized them. Even if he wanted to hand future Jornak the fruits of his work, how would he do it? Not to mention that he probably didn’t even want to do it. He doubted Zach would even make him a temporary looper in the future. He remembered Zach’s admission that he eventually dropped people from his social circle after interacting with them for a few restarts. He remembered the look Zach had given him not too long ago. And he decided he had to do something.
He had never planned to betray Zach. He’d wanted to work with him. To help him. When one really thought about it, Zach was the one who betrayed him.
Jornak himself was not a powerful man. His magical aptitude was entirely average, and not even the time loop could change that. But some of the people in the looper group were magically powerful, and their skills had only gotten better due to Zach’s willingness to help them grow. Getting them to side with him was tricky, but not too difficult. Desperation made people do previously unthinkable things. Contacting Quatach-Ichl and arranging a meeting with him without being immediately killed had been hard, but not nearly as hard as he had feared it would be. From that point on, everything kind of slid into place.
In the end, that path had led him here: locked in a deadly battle against his one-time best friend and fellow time travelling companion – Zach.
He had to admit, he had been pretty worried for a while. The ability he’d gotten from Panaxeth was not nearly as effective as he thought it would be. Weren’t primordials supposed to be on the level of gods? He expected more out of primordial magic, to be honest. That prison should have taken some kind of advanced, specialized magic to get out of, but Zach had an appropriate spell for breaking it already in his arsenal.
Then, when they were pulled back into Cyoria proper, it was just in time to see Zorian banish Quatach-Ichl back to his phylactery with the help of a… flower? He dimly recognized it as a soulseizer chrysanthemum. What an obscure magical creature. In any case, he was of two minds about this. On one hand, he needed the ancient lich to win this. On the other hand, it was satisfying to see the black-hearted bastard finally get knocked down a peg or two. And besides, he still had the dragon m-
Oganj left. He took the crown and the orb, and he just left! Unbelievable. Jornak had given him so much for his assistance as forward payment – materials, maps, records of draconic magic that humans had taken from other dragon mages, everything – but Oganj still chose to switch sides in exchange for two thrice-damned divine artifacts.
A familiar bitterness welled up from the back of his mind. Everyone always betrayed him. He was so fed up with everything.
He still didn’t think the situation was hopeless. He started the invasion a day before the actual deadline for releasing Panaxeth, so he had some time for another attempt. He would activate all of his contingencies and plunge the country into chaos. He would activate all of the remaining wraith bombs in other cities – he refused to believe his enemies had enough countermeasures to disable them all, or that they had even managed to track down every single one of them. He would assassinate people and mind control critical individuals into starting hostilities with every nearby country. He would sic the police and Eldemar’s military on them, their allies, friends, and family. He would descend straight into the Hole and lure the monsters lurking in the deepest layer of the dungeon back to the surface to wreak havoc on it until the city was nothing but ruins…
It was suboptimal. He wanted to rule this country, and make it better, not bring it to its knees. However, he had to be alive in order to improve things, and his opponents had forced his hand. If this was the only path they had left for him, he would not hesitate. He was-
Suddenly, that other looper, Zorian Kazinski, teleported next to them and immediately rushed towards them.
Zorian… Jornak had so many regrets in regards to the boy. He shouldn’t have panicked and fled the time loop when he realized there were other time loopers aside from him and Zach, but it made perfect sense at the time. The information he had gotten from the aranea said there was a small legion of them, which… was entirely possible. If Zach wanted to and had the crown, he could have made the entire city into temporary loopers. What if Panaxeth decided some of them would make for a better champion than him? And if Zach was creating so many loopers, he probably knew about the Sovereign Gate and how to leave the time loop. He couldn’t play around and risk things. The safest thing to do was to leave as soon as possible.
As it turned out, there was just one additional looper, and he hadn’t gotten in through Zach’s actions. He got in through some weird mistake in the time loop system. Jornak couldn’t even begin to describe how jealous he was of the boy when he heard that. He had to go through so much trouble to keep existing, and then this boy got all of that and more through a simple stroke of luck? The world was sometimes so unfair.
But no matter, this was perfect. He didn’t know what had possessed the boy to get this close to him all of a sudden, but he wasn’t going to waste a golden opportunity like this. He drew the imperial dagger out of his belt with a smooth, practiced motion, its weight and shape familiar and comforting in his hand. The dagger had long been his oldest and most reliable companion, and if he could, he always recovered it from the royal vaults, where it was just uselessly gathering dust. He had spent many years tinkering with it and learning everything it could do.
The dagger lit up with a faint purple glow as he thrust it towards Zorian. The imperial dagger was mostly known for its ability to hurt spirits easily, but it had several alternate modes, and this was one of them. The third looper arrogantly refused to dodge his strike, instead placing his defense device in front of him to ward off the blow. Jornak would be first to admit that the cube was an incredible achievement that left him in awe of Zorian’s ingenuity and skill, but it was ultimately just a mortal item. The dagger pierced through the complex, multi-layer shield projected by the cube like it didn’t exist and then stabbed right through the alchemically-reinforced metal like it was paper.
To his credit, this wasn’t enough to take the boy down. Zorian reacted quickly, telekinetically moving his body out of the way of the knife while simultaneously hurling the ruined cube into the sky. Having suffered catastrophic damage, the cube exploded above their heads moments later, showering the area with serrated metal fragments and exotic magical energies.
Jornak locked eyes with Zorian, unsurprised by the boy’s quick reactions. Though he was standing here partially due to luck, Zorian Kazinski was someone that had repeatedly shown himself to be a shrewd and decisive person. When Jornak was about to capture and interrogate him back in the time loop, he killed himself without hesitation to deny him useful information. What’s more, the action was clearly a pre-planned contingency and he had enough presence of mind as he ran to make sure Jornak would be unable to recover his body. He did not expect him to die so easily.
Still, with his best defensive tool destroyed, and with him momentarily unbalanced, Jornak decided to bet it all on one last push. This was extremely dangerous and may very well end with him killed, but it wasn’t the first time he risked his life for a chance to live, and it probably wouldn’t be the last. He wrapped his hand around a small black bottle hanging from his neck and squeezed, shattering it with ease with his supernatural strength.
Hundreds of black shapes suddenly slipped from between his fingers, expanding in size as they filled the skies above them. Vaguely humanoid, the entities looked like legless incorporeal humans in tattered pitch black cloaks.
Wraiths. The whole area immediately began to feel uncomfortably chilly as the mere presence of so many of them began to leech minute amounts of life force from the three combatants, and resonant whispers filled the air as wraiths began to babble in that usual incomprehensible nonsense they constantly spouted.
Wraiths were mysterious creatures, with unclear origins and very few methods of effectively fighting them. In many ways, they almost resembled spirits, but they were usually classified as undead due to their ability to convert human souls into more of themselves. They were difficult to control. Jornak did not actually have any ability to direct the wraith horde he had just released from his miniature wraith bomb, and he had no doubt the wraiths would see him as just as big of a target as the other two people present. However, Jornak was betting he would have a definite advantage anyway, because he had something he didn’t think either of the other two had: sophisticated, well-honed soul magic skills.
Soul magic was a sinister branch of magic, requiring a lot of cruel and unpleasant experimentation and willingness to deal and negotiate with some very loathsome people. Jornak had long accepted this, and he did not let it bother him. He had tortured entire villages of people, over and over again, to see how different soul magic methods affected the same soul over various restarts. He sold kidnapped babies and small orphans to some of the more unscrupulous witches that were willing to teach him their skills in exchange for ‘suitable material’. He spoke with demon summoners, participating in their disgusting rituals in order to prove his ‘sincerity’. His magical talents may be average, but he was confident that there were few people who could boast about having a similar level of skill when it came to soul magic. Zach certainly wasn’t one of them, and Silverlake was adamant that Zorian wasn’t that much better.
His opponents knew it too. When they saw the wraiths flood the area, the two of them tried to retreat and regroup elsewhere, but how could Jornak allow that? He stopped them. He foiled their teleportation, he wrenched them back when they tried to fly away, and when the two attacked him together and he was forced to choose between being wounded and letting them flee, he chose to get wounded. His regeneration ability was not nearly as potent as that of Silverlake, but his body was far more resilient than that of a regular person, and healed quickly. So long as he didn’t black out and could cast magic, it was fine. He would bear it. He would outlast them, outlast everyone, and win.
He had to win. All of the sacrifices, all the things he’d done… it couldn’t have been all in vain. He was close, so very close to the end…
In the end, he triumphed. His soul defenses were honed to perfection, yet even he strained to deal with so many wraiths relentlessly assaulting him. Zach and Zorian? They couldn’t compare. Maybe if they hadn’t expended so many of their resources before they decided to tackle him, they could have got themselves out of this situation, but alas. For all their power and skill, in the end, all it took was one mistake for them to fall and be devoured by wraiths. Jornak quietly thanked Zorian for deciding to join the battle when he had – if Jornak had been unable to catch both of his enemies at once in his wraith trap, this wouldn’t have worked.
The moment the two loopers fell, Jornak fled the site and waited for the wraiths to scatter before returning to check up on them. Always check the bodies to make sure your enemies were really dead, after all. This was especially true when dealing with enemies on the level of Zach and Zorian.
A minute later, he breathed a sigh of release. They were really dead. It was over.
He started to laugh. Yes. Yes! He… he knew he could do it!
Now was not the time for gloating, however. That would come later. For now, he started searching the city for his ‘partner’, Silverlake.
He eventually found her not far from where he fought Zach and Zorian. Or what was left of her, anyway. She was really just an empty bag of skin now. After cautiously kneeling down and inspecting the skin, he found two large puncture wounds in her chest and no other notable damage. Something, probably some kind of magical creature, had liquefied her insides and slurped it all out, leaving this preserved husk behind.
Jornak frowned. Silverlake was probably the weakest one from among the four of them that had managed to escape from the time loop, but she shouldn’t have been this easy to kill. In fact, despite being the weakest, Jornak suspected she was the hardest of them to kill, both because her primordial abilities were all defensive in nature and because she herself was a cowardly wretch that would no doubt flee at the first hint of actual danger. The creature that had killed her… some kind of spider, maybe? In any case, it had to be very powerful. On the level of a dragon, really. How did a creature like that get here, and where was it now? And why hadn’t Silverlake simply retreated if she had encountered something like that? Magical creatures generally had little ability to stop high-level mages from fleeing if outmatched, unless they were sapient spellcasters in their own right.
Concerning.
Still. Maybe it was better this way. Jornak hadn’t actually liked Silverlake that much. She had brought him some very useful knowledge, and for that, he would always be grateful to her, but she was also clearly playing her own game and knew too much about Jornak’s true nature for him to be comfortable with it. This way there was one less person potentially messing up his plans.
With Silverlake dead, it fell to him to fulfill their bargain with Panaxeth and set him loose upon the world. He threw himself into the task without hesitation, rallying the invader forces under his banner and gathering the surviving cultists that had scattered around the city after their defeat near the Hole. While most of the cultists had perished, their leaders and high-level members were powerful and resourceful enough to survive for the most part, and they were the most important part anyway. Jornak had them set up the ritual while the Ibasan army protected them, and used his own primordial essence in place of the shifter children that the defenders had managed to rescue and evacuate out of the city. He had thought about trying to recover them, but eventually decided that would take too long. Eldemar was already mobilizing their whole army to crush this invasion, and he had no time to lose. Using his own primordial essence was going to weaken him for a long time, and disable most of his primordial magic, but he would rather pay this price than risk dying at the end of the month because he had wasted too much time.
Imagine if that happened – he, the ultimate victor of the time loop war, ended up dying because he had failed to release Panaxeth before the Eldemar army rolled into the city and killed all his underlings. He would die wallowing in shame and embarrassment! No, he would pay the price with his own flesh and blood and do things properly. No gains without sacrifice.
The ritual went off without issue. Space cracked, the prison broke, and then Panaxeth burst into existence above the city, his fleshy limbs reaching out of his prison and burying themselves into the roads and buildings. Then, he slowly started to drag his entire bulk out of the pocket dimension that had contained him all these millennia…
Jornak immediately fled. He may have been Panaxeth’s champion, but he did not trust the primordial at all. His part of the contract was finished, in any case. Funny, he thought he would be able to feel it when the restriction lifted, but there was nothing. The death pact Panaxeth placed on him simply disappeared from his perception – one moment it was there, the next it was gone. Well… it was primordial magic, after all. Who knows how that worked. He was finally free, that was all that mattered.
The cultists, arrogant idiots that they were, stayed behind. Jornak knew that they had some kind of crazy plan that involved binding the primordial to their will and becoming gods in the process, but it was lunacy. They were like ants trying to enslave a tiger. Even weakened, Panaxeth was not something they could handle. Even a fragment of him could probably annihilate them.
The primordial let loose a deep, resonant rumble that made the whole city visibly vibrate. Some of the weaker buildings, weakened by the fires and the fighting, immediately collapsed from it. Then the rampage began. Ibasan forces were retreating now as fast as they could, but Jornak knew most of them would never make it.
He took one last look at the unraveling city and then teleported away. He wanted to be as far as possible from the area.
- break -
Eventually, Jornak made his way to Iasku Mansion. The place was thoroughly trashed, its wards broken and most of the souls that powered it set free when their prison cracked and crumbled, but the structure itself was still standing when the angel was done venting its ire on it. Probably because Sudomir placed and set smaller, but far stronger defensive wards around the ward core that housed his wife’s soul, and the angel didn’t want to spend time breaking it down when there were more important battles happening elsewhere.
The angel then dropped the barrier that had kept Iasku Mansion contained, and Sudomir enacted another long-distance teleport ritual to translocate the mansion out of the city, and then all the way to Ulquaan Ibasa. This was something that Sudomir had long since arranged with Quatach-Ichl in case things went wrong with their plan.
Sitting in one of the few intact rooms inside the mansion, Jornak had been feeling quite pleased with himself, basking in the glow of his own success, when another person entered the room.
Quatach-Ichl. The lich was in his human guise now (though Quatach-Ichl insisted this form was just as true as his ‘battle form’), and he looked as relaxed and confident as ever. Jornak wanted to make some snide comments about him getting taken out by a flower, but he refrained. More than Zach, Zorian, or anyone else, the ancient lich was the one that really terrified Jornak. He didn’t think even his fellow loopers really understood the force they were dealing with when they tangled with him.
Without Quatach-Ichl, Jornak would never have been able to make himself a permanent looper. Oh sure, Panaxeth was the one who supplied him with a method of transforming his temporary marker into a permanent one, but never in a million years would Jornak have been able to actually use the method himself. No, he had to beg Quatach-Ichl for assistance to help him perform the task. And the price for the lich’s help… even now Jornak couldn’t help but feel uneasy about it.
He had heard from Silverlake that the other looper already suspected that Quatach-Ichl had been integral in turning his temporary marker into a permanent one, but they couldn’t figure out why the lich hadn’t also made himself into a looper as well, then. The answer was simple: the method required one to make a deal with Panaxeth in order to work, and the lich wasn’t willing to make a death pact with a primordial under any circumstances. However, that didn’t mean he was willing to help Jornak without any assurances. He forced Jornak to accept something called a ’soul seed’ – a small fragment of Quatach-Ichl’s soul, somehow processed to prevent degradation and imbued with some measure of self-awareness and memory – and bound said soul fragment to Jornak’s soul, with instructions to return to the original Quatach-Ichl when Jornak successfully came back to the real world.
The soul fragment had been with Jornak for the entire duration of his stay in the time loop, and even Jornak wasn’t sure what it was up to during that time. Was it merely patiently waiting to return to its master, containing only the memories of that one Quatach-Ichl Jornak made the deal with? Or was it watching and learning the whole time, riding him like a spying parasite? He didn’t know. All he knew was that once he left the time loop and was incarnated in the real world, the soul fragment immediately left him and rejoined Quatach-Ichl.
Jornak had no need to convince the lich he was a time traveler. Quatach-Ichl already knew, and was waiting for him when Jornak came knocking.
He had no idea how much the ancient lich knew about what happened in the time loop, and it scared him.
“So,” Quatach-Ichl said, sitting down in one of the nearby chairs. “I think we can safely describe this operation as a success, yes?”
“Yes, absolutely,” Jornak agreed. “Though, if I may make an observation… the damage made by the primordial seemed to be somewhat underwhelming. Cyoria will be no more after today, that is true, but the country as a whole will survive. Aren’t you worried they will launch a punitive expedition against your homeland for this? Your involvement in this will be impossible to hide.”
“Oh no, I fully expect them to retaliate in some manner,” Quatach-Ichl said. “I welcome it. Our leaders have been very foolish lately, trying to set up trade treaties with the mainland and other such nonsense. A nice war or two will be good for us.”
Jornak nodded. This kind of attitude meshed pretty well with the lich’s attitude in their past conversations.
“What about you?” the lich asked. “Aren’t you worried?”
“Why would I be?” Jornak asked curiously. “I won.”
“It was a close thing,” Quatach-Ichl remarked.
“A win is a win,” Jornak insisted. He glared slightly at the lich. “Besides, it wouldn’t have been that close if you hadn’t stupidly got yourself killed. And by a flower, no less.”
“Soulseizers are curious creatures,” Quatach-Ichl said lightly, clearly not bothered by the swipe. Or at least not giving any visible indication that he was. The ancient lich’s poker face was too good. “I’ll have to look into them when I find the time. Alas, I suspect the next few years are going to be very busy for me indeed.”
Well, he was certainly right about that. For one thing, Jornak fully intended to start executing his plans the moment he left from here. He and the lich had completely incompatible plans for the future, and were pretty much guaranteed to start sabotaging each other’s efforts soon.
Really, Jornak wouldn’t be surprised if Quatach-Ichl tried to kill him here today. Unfortunately for him, Jornak was well aware of this possibility and had taken every possible precaution before coming here. He won’t die here. He won’t die ever.
He was only just starting, really.
“What would you have done if the invasion failed?” Quatach-Ichl asked, sounding genuinely curious.
A multitude of contingencies floated in Jornak’s mind in response to the lich’s question – explosive traps in numerous cities and buildings meant to cause mass casualties, assassination contracts that would be executed unless he called them off, documents unmasking Zach and Zorian just waiting to be discovered by the authorities… he had many ways to make his enemies regret their victory if he ever lost. Still he told none of them to Quatach-Ichl. Although he planned to dismantle all of them now, there was no reason to reveal his methods and reasoning to someone who would soon become his bitter enemy.
He quickly checked his mental defenses and found that his mind blank was still on and in perfect condition. Good. For a moment he was afraid Quatach-Ichl was trying to pick up answers straight from his surface thoughts.
Still, he felt an urge to brag a little. He started to ramble about one of his less important contingencies – a bundle of documents implicating Zorian in the events of the invasion, deliberately placed in one of the cabinets of the police building in Korsa. The cabinet was rarely used, but its owner was very dutiful and meticulous. It would take weeks for the documents to be discovered, and by that time Zach and Zorian will have likely stopped being on high alert for such things and should hopefully be caught completely by surprise. Then there was that letter he sent straight to the royal residence. It should be arriving-
He suddenly stopped talking. Why… why was he telling the lich this? Didn’t he just conclude they were going to become enemies soon and that it would be best to stay quiet? And the expression on Quatach-Ichl’s face… he was leaning forward and listening with bated breath, like this was the most interesting thing ever. What…?
“Who… who are you!?” Jornak suddenly snapped, jumping from his chair and going on full combat alert. He had spent enough time around the lich to learn some of his mannerisms and this didn’t look like him. In fact, when he really thought about it, his entire demeanor this whole time was slightly off. “You’re not Quatach-Ichl?”
“Why do you say that?” the imposter asked, feigning calm curiosity.
Jornak fired a blistering beam of red light at the imposter, who didn’t even try to dodge.
The beam went straight through his forehead without any resistance.
The man wearing Quatach-Ichl’s face sighed.
“So impersonating the lich is a lost cause,” he lamented to himself. “No matter how many times I try, I just can’t seem to portray him convincingly. It’s a shame, since he’s the one you’re most likely to really talk with about all the details. Maybe I should try Silverlake?”
W-What?
Wait…
No.
No!
“You can’t be! You can’t be him!” Jornak protested, his voice getting more and more panicked. “I killed you! I know I did! Your soul got devoured by wraiths! I… I have a mind blank on, that spell is total protection against-”
He checked his mind. He checked it again, and then a third time. Always the same result. His mind blank was still one. His mind was protected.
Except it wasn’t.
‘None of this is real…’ Jornak realized.
“Well then,” the imposter in the guise of Quatach-Ichl said. “Let’s try this again, shall we?”
Jornak’s heart went cold. How many times had he done this? How many times had he lived through this day, enjoying his triumph, making grand plans about what would come next, only to forget all about it again and again? All the while some sinister force keeps talking to him, pumping him for information, varying their approach in this or that way, to get what they wanted out of him.
His mind couldn’t help but harken back to his time in the time loop, back when he was just a humble lawyer wishing there was more to his life. Back to when he realized his life was literally an endless loop meant to exploit him. It was just like that now, but worse. Infinitely worse.
His vision began to darken. He wanted to do something, wanted to send a signal to his various contingencies in one final act of spite, but his mind was fading, fading, fading… He forgot Zorian’s words, forgot what led him to this place, forgot any of this ever happened. He found himself back in Cyoria, surrounded by corpses of Zach and Zorian, knowing only one thing:
He was Jornak Dokochin, a humble lawyer from Cyoria, the true heir of House Denen, and the last surviving time looper…
…and he had won.
Again, and again, and again.






Chapter 106
I Win (III)
He was Zorian Kazinski, the third son of a minor merchant family from Cirin, accidental time traveler, and quite possibly the most powerful human mind mage in all of Altazia…
…and he had won.
It was not an easy task to arrange all of this. Sure, he could have beaten Jornak and Silverlake, stopped the ritual, and left it at that… but that would be a very bittersweet outcome. Zach would have died at the end of the month and Zorian would have spent the rest of his future running away from Eldemarian assassins and whatnot.
Zorian did not spend all those years in the time loop just to settle for a… suboptimal outcome.
The first task, of course, was figuring out how to get past the mind blank spell. Even before he had known about Zach’s angelic contract, he’d known the boy was hiding something of critical importance that he would have to wrench out of his head. Thus, he worked with Xvim, aranea, and many others to find the solution. A way to beat the ultimate mental defense – a spell that had been providing total protection against mind magic, no exceptions, for literal centuries now.
A lot of people Zorian had worked with thought it was a fool’s task to begin with. What did Zorian have that so many other mind mages that tried to invent a workaround hadn’t? But Zorian didn’t embark upon this idea blindly. He already had an idea before he threw himself into the project.
The soulseizer chrysanthemum was a very rare and obscure magical creature. It was so dangerous and frightening to people that they had long since eradicated it in more civilized areas, not even bothering to study it properly before doing so. Who was brave enough to research a flower that would eat your soul if you made a mistake in restraining it? Not many people. It didn’t help that the plant was a very valuable component for many potions, meaning it was worth more dead than alive to begin with.
In modern times, of course, some mage or organization would have probably become interested in the soulseizer and organized a hunt so its abilities could be studied… except that the plant only lived in monster infested wilderness these days, was surprisingly good at hiding, and smart enough to pick its fights carefully. Plus, its abilities were not well known, and old descriptions found in ancient tomes did not do the creature justice. They made the chrysanthemum look like a simple plant-shaped soul eater. It just wasn’t that impressive sounding.
Zorian had experienced the flower’s attack first-hand, however. Zach hadn’t thought much about their experience, seeing it only as an embarrassing instance where they had nearly been beaten by a flower, and soon forgot about it. But Zorian had never forgotten. The way the plant’s initial stunning attack had simply bypassed all of their defenses left a deep impression on him.
If the chrysanthemum could bypass their defenses by targeting their body, mind, and soul simultaneously… could the same method be used to target someone’s mind even when it was protected by the mind blank?
Mind blank protected the mind by separating it from what the aranea called ‘the Great Web’. The mind closed in on itself, rejecting all contact. But it was still connected to the brain, and to the soul. It should be possible to target the mind by going through those two, somehow. This wasn’t a new idea, by any means, but most people who tried to make such a method work before hadn’t had the soulseizer chrysanthemum on hand to provide a working example of how such a thing would work in practice.
Zorian did. And he had a whole host of experts in both soul magic and mind magic to help him figure it out.
The process of studying the chrysanthemum’s abilities had some unintended benefits. He probably would not have found a way to negate the wraith bombs in a reasonable amount of time if he hadn’t spent so much time studying the flower and its abilities, and he wouldn’t have been able to make the weapon that Mrva had used to disable Quatach-Ichl for a few moments. These were all just side benefits, however, paling in importance to the real end goal of the research: the manifold resonance spell.
The spell was not ideal by any means. First of all, the magic Zorian and his team designed could only be used through touch. Skin-to-skin contact was required to successfully cast the spell. It was also incredibly complicated and hard to control. Three whole minds were needed to execute the spell. Not an impossible requirement for someone who could make simulacrums like Zorian could, but still an issue. Finally, targets eventually acquired a resistance to it. Experiments showed that targeting the same person repeatedly with the spell made them instinctively resist it after only a handful of attempts. In the case of people with highly trained defenses like Xvim and Alanic, that meant they became resistant after only two or three attempts.
But it worked. It was complicated and inconvenient, but it did the impossible and that was all that mattered. With the spell to bypass mind blank in his arsenal, victory – actual victory – was finally possible.
In the end, that path had led him here: locked in a deadly battle against his fellow time travelers – Zach and Jornak.
When Zorian teleported next to the two combatants and lunged at them, hands glowing, he knew neither would take it lying down. Zach looked shocked at his sudden betrayal, but he was an experienced fighter and reacted immediately, firing a pair of blindingly bright white rays that nearly took Zorian’s head off. Only his defense cube saved him, by warping space around him slightly to make the beams miss. As for Jornak, he drew the imperial dagger out of his belt with a smooth, practiced motion and thrust it straight at Zorian’s face.
Zorian didn’t know much about the imperial dagger. Its main ability out of the time loop was supposed to be its ability to hurt spirits, but… why take that chance? He doubted Jornak would try to use it on him if it wasn’t uniquely useful in this situation. He jumped back a little, evading the stab at the cost of losing some momentum and giving up some of his advantage of surprise.
“Zorian, what-” Zach started saying, outrage evident in his voice.
He never got to finish it. A marble Zorian ‘accidentally’ dropped out of his pocket before he jumped back suddenly activated and instantly sucked in all the air around them, creating a sizeable area of total vacuum between them.
The surrounding air quickly rushed in to fill the void, forcefully dragging all three of them into the center of the area. Jornak and Zach were unharmed, but caught off guard. But Zorian was ready.
The moment they collided with each other he clamped down on Zach and Jornak’s hands and cast the spell.
A faint blue wave quickly rippled through them, expanding from the point of contact to envelop their whole bodies. They still had their mind blank spells on, but it didn’t matter. Their bodies went limp, insensate to the world around them.
A moment later, they were plunged into a constructed dream world over which Zorian had total control.
It was an incredible achievement, creating this thing, and this wasn’t just Zorian praising himself. The aranea were also in awe of the scale of what he created. That said, he wasn’t doing this alone. Aside from him and his simulacrums, many, many aranea were helping him control the illusionary world. On top of that, he wasn’t really conjuring people’s surroundings out of nothing. He was accessing eyes of people around the city and his iron beaks in the sky to give Zach and Jornak as convincing of an experience as he possibly could.
He had to mess with their memories slightly. Mostly to make it look like they won in a convincing manner – a process that took some trial and error, since Zorian didn’t have a perfect understanding of their capabilities and habits. Thankfully, any mistake could be covered up by simply wiping away their short-term memories and letting them relive the battle again and again until he got it right. He also had to adjust Zach’s perception of what happened to Quatach-Ichl, since his contract couldn’t be fulfilled unless the lich was seemingly dead. He made it look like his chrysanthemum weapon actually managed to suck out Quatach-Ichl soul and kill him for good, which Zach thankfully accepted as actually possible. Zorian took it as a compliment that Zach had that much faith in his artifice.
Then there was the matter of Zach going around reading people’s minds. Zorian had known that Zach would try that. After all, how else was he going to confirm that people did not know anything about the time loop? Unfortunately, the boy was right that Zorian couldn’t really create convincing fake minds. Even the dumbest, most boring person in existence had a mind more complex and intricate than anything Zorian could conjure purely from his own imagination. So he didn’t even try. Through his network of sigils around the city, Zorian was potentially connected to every person who was still alive there. He could act as a mental bridge, allowing Zach to connect to any person in the city through him. The minds he was reading were very much real.
Sadly, that also meant that when Zach checked people’s minds and saw they didn’t remember anything that had happened during this past month, this was in no way faked. They really didn’t remember anything. Zorian was forced to strip them of their mind blanks through dispelling, and wipe away their memories of the month. He had thought about being more selective about it, but he wanted things to be absolutely convincing to whatever evaluation mechanics Zach’s angel contract employed.
He had gifted people like Xvim, Alanic, and Daimen memory crystals containing their deleted memories for later perusal, but he knew that wasn’t nearly the same as having their real memories. They weren’t trained psychics like he was, so digesting their memories from such a source would be a struggle.
As for the aranea, deleting their memories of the whole month was kind of tricky, since they were helping Zorian run this whole illusion, and he needed their help right now. Obviously, them not having any memories of all this would be a bit of a problem. Thus, only the aranea that Zach actually deigned to talk to deleted their memories, and Zach was never overly fond of the giant spiders. Thus, the damage to the integrity of the illusion was minimal in the end. Even better, Zorian didn’t have to provide the aranea with anything to make them recover after this. They had their own well-developed system of storing their memories and had lots of practice of integrating stored memories into their minds later, so it shouldn’t be a big chore for them to recover quickly.
Zorian was never as thankful for Zach’s disinterest in learning about aranean society as he was at this moment. If Zach had known anything about them, he would have known that the only reliable way to make sure they forgot something was to murder them all. Which, admittedly, wouldn’t have been that hard to fake, but still. Zorian suspected the aranea would have forever borne a grudge against the boy if they had all collectively been butchered by the guy they were trying to save, even if it was understandable in their current circumstances, and done entirely in pretend fashion.
As for Jornak, the main reason he was trapped in his own private illusion was because Zorian wanted to find all the dead-man switches the guy had scattered all over the place. He knew Jornak would make them suffer from beyond the grave if they just let him die. He needed to find out what he had in store for them and how to disarm his traps and contingencies.
He tried to simply get their fellow time traveler to simply talk about his plans. It was a good thing he did. He had done a basic search of his memories, of course, but searching someone’s memories for information depended on knowing what to look for, and Zorian knew that Jornak was a lot more devious and experienced in this kind of cloak-and-dagger bullshit than he was. It only took a few conversations with Jornak, in various guises, to understand that he would have missed many, many things if he simply tried lifting things out of his mind. However, even this wasn’t enough. Jornak had no real friends. His closest emotional attachment was to the damn imperial dagger, of all things. Thus, he was understandably cagey around other people, even when Zorian prodded him with subtle suggestions and emotional manipulation to make him more talkative. Eventually Zorian resorted to messing with Jornak’s perception of time, making him believe days or weeks had passed in order to learn what he would have done, and what he expected to happen.
Meanwhile, the invasion of the city was being beaten back all over the city. All of the invasion leaders except the upper echelons of the Cult of the World Dragon were gone now, and they were unable to rally the disparate forces around their leadership. Eventually the higher echelons of the Ibasan forces found out that Quatach-Ichl was no longer present on the battlefield, and sounded a retreat. Iasku Mansion was mostly demolished, but Sudomir had somehow managed to survive the angel’s wrath by protecting the core of the mansion through particularly powerful wards. The surviving Ibasans hurriedly gathered around the ruin, after which Sudomir translocated it out of the city.
Annoyingly, Zorian had no option but to let it go. He was too busy to chase after them, his most powerful allies were incapacitated, and the other city defenders couldn’t get through the gathered Ibasan forces fast enough. He would later find out that Sudomir translocated his mansion two more times after that, eventually landing on Ulquaan Ibasa, where he was granted refuge by the natives.
Great. If Eldemar had any doubts as to who to blame for the attack, they were unambiguously sure now. Not that Quatach-Ichl, the instigator of the attack, cared about that. If Zorian had learned anything from Jornak’s mind, it was that Quatach-Ichl was likely quite happy with this outcome.
Kirielle and Kana were alive and well, despite the attack on them. Zorian breathed a big sigh of relief when he found that out. Sadly, Kosjenka joined Mrva in the hall of heroic golems by sacrificing herself to save his little sister. An event that caused many tears on Kirielle’s part and prompted Zorian to consider if he should perhaps delete her memories of the whole incident and quietly replace Kosjenka’s remains with an unharmed copy…
…but no, that was a bad idea. He shouldn’t be that casual with memory wipes. And besides, Kirielle didn’t know anything about golem theory, so she shouldn’t see anything wrong with Zorian ‘fixing’ Kosjenka into pristine condition.
Overall, things had turned out great. He had to give away the imperial orb to get rid of Oganj, Quatach-Ichl and Sudomir were still alive and would probably make moves against them in the future, and there was a high chance of another continental war brewing in the near future, but it could have been worse. His friends and family were all alive, Zach was alive, and he was alive. The only thing that kind of worried him was that he found Silverlake’s empty skin back where he left her fighting with her original self. It was clear that the spider not just killed her, but ate her as well.
Which was strange. Grey hunters primarily ate powerful magical creatures. To his knowledge, they thought humans tasted vile. The flesh wasn’t magical enough for their tastes. Why was Silverlake eaten, then? Was it because of all the primordial essence Silverlake’s body contained?
There was no trace of the grey hunter anywhere in the city, and Zorian had pretty much total coverage of everything on the surface at the moment. He had a sinking feeling the spider had fled into the local underground.
Which meant he had just let an immensely powerful magical predator – one that had recently gorged upon a great amount of primordial essence, no less – escape into the one place where there was absolutely no hope of tracking it down.
He sighed. There was no use in worrying about this now. The deadline had come and passed. Zach’s contract with the angels had harmlessly dissolved, and Jornak’s death pact claimed his life in a gruesome fashion, his own flesh turning against itself like a country in the throes of a civil war. Observing with his more magical senses, Zorian noticed that even the man’s mind and soul were seemingly tearing themselves apart. After a few seconds of disgusting writhing and convulsing, Jornak simply collapsed in a pile of unsightly goo.
Zorian opened his eyes, letting the spell finally collapse. He breathed a sigh of relief. He was beyond exhausted. He and his simulacrums had maintained a… fake illusionary world… two of them, actually… and had done that for more than a day, without rest or sleep.
He was no longer alone, however. He had moved to a secluded, secure space with Zach and Jornak in tow, but it wasn’t really secret to Daimen, Xvim, and Alanic. All three were currently watching him with grave, vaguely unfriendly expressions. Xvim was sitting on a nearby chair, a small book in his hand. Alanic was standing in the center of the room, his hands folded over his chest. And Daimen was leaning against the nearby doorway, blocking the exit and juggling the imperial dagger that Zorian had removed from Jornak’s possessions.
All three were also clutching memory crystals in one of their hands. Zorian doubted they had absorbed more than a small fraction of the memories stored in them, but they probably knew enough to understand the general situation.
“We need to talk,” Alanic said blandly.
Rather than answering, Zorian ripped out a paper from a nearby notebook and started furiously writing on it while explaining the situation to all three of them. A whole bunch of Jornak’s contingencies were about to activate relatively soon, and they had to be dealt with as soon as possible. His rushed scribblings were meant to be a reminder if they forgot some of the details he was telling them.
The three people in front of him seemed to be part annoyed and part curious about his rushed explanation, but they were polite enough to stay silent and listen while he was talking. It didn’t take long, anyway – only a handful of Jornak’s plans were so very time critical. His list of instructions done, Zorian stumbled to his feet, his limbs not working properly due to the long period of disuse, and thrust the written list straight into Alanic’s confused hands before falling to the floor, unconscious.
He was Zorian Kazinski, third son of a minor merchant family from Cirin, accidental time traveler, and quite possibly the most powerful human mind mage in all of Altazia…
…and he had won.
And now it was time to finally get some rest.






















Epilogue
Zorian’s eyes abruptly shot open as a sharp pain erupted from his stomach. His whole body convulsed, buckling against the object that fell on him, and suddenly he was wide awake, not a trace of drowsiness in his mind.
“Good morning, brother!” an annoyingly cheerful voice sounded right on top of him. “Morning, morning, MORNING!!!”
Panic. Zorian’s awakened mind felt nothing but pure, all-consuming terror. After all of his efforts, all the sacrifices he and people around him had made, it was all for naught. He was back where it all began, in his room in Cirin, about to start his third year at the academy…
…then the moment passed, and the nightmare dissolved.
The room around him was wrong. This wasn’t his room back in Cirin. He was in Cyoria, in the room he shared with Kirielle, at Imaya’s place.
And the little devil was currently still sprawled across his stomach, kicking her legs up in the air and giving him a mischievous, expectant look. His panicked reaction didn’t seem to worry her. If anything, she seemed quite pleased with herself for managing to scare him so thoroughly.
“Kirielle… why?” Zorian asked, resisting the urge to sigh.
“What do you mean?” she asked innocently. “I always wake you up like this?”
“Not with those exact words you don’t,” Zorian groused. “He put you up to this, didn’t he?”
“Zach said it was going to be funnier this way,” Kirielle admitted, propping her chin with her hands. She gave him a toothy smile.
Zorian flipped her over the edge of the bed in response, causing her to fall to the floor with a silent thud.
The little imp had expected the reaction, and made no sound in response, simply scrambling to her feet immediately afterwards.
“It’s been a month already,” Zorian grumbled. “Just when is he planning to stop with this petty revenge crap?”
It wasn’t like Zorian had wanted to deceive him like that. He’d done that to save Zach’s life, for heaven’s sake!
Well. At least he hadn’t gotten another punch in the face for that…
He chased Kirielle out of the room and got dressed, idly listening to the sounds of the house and its tenants as he did. Imaya’s place was very busy these days, nothing like the quiet household Zorian had gotten used to during the time loop. The academy dorms had suffered heavy damage during the invasion, both in the initial artillery bombardment and the fighting that had followed afterwards, which meant that a lot of students were suddenly homeless and in dire need of alternate accommodations. Since Imaya’s house had survived the invasion mostly intact, it was soon filled to capacity and even slightly beyond. Zorian didn’t really like it, but the situation was what it was, and there was nothing he could do to change it.
At least Kirielle had plenty of people to talk to these days.
After composing himself a little, he left the room and entered the kitchen, where a dozen or so people had already gathered, some of them still eating breakfast, and some of them pondering a stack of textbooks and papers arranged around them.
Most of the people gathered here were his classmates. Akoja, Raynie, Kiana, Kopriva, Kael, Naim, Edwin, and Estin were all gathered around the small table that was far too small to really accommodate them all. They immediately stopped what they were doing and turned to look at him as he entered, calling out greetings. Ilsa, who was sitting at a relatively prominent place at the table, was flipping through a stack of papers on her clipboard, and simply gave him a curt nod, before returning to her task. Nochka, Kirielle, and Kana were on the floor, playing with dolls and getting into everyone’s way from time to time. Zorian had no idea why they felt the need to play their games here, instead of somewhere more private, but nobody else was shooing them away, so he wouldn’t do it either.
As for Imaya, the landlord of this place, she was working around the kitchen while humming a happy tune to herself, looking like she was having the time of her life, despite the current overcrowded state of her home. Zorian knew she was getting paid for this, but he still couldn’t quite understand her good mood. Some people were just weird.
After a few seconds of looking around, Zorian suddenly realized there were no free chairs left anymore.
“This is what happens when you wake up late,” Kopriva helpfully explained to him.
“There should be some free chairs in the next room,” Imaya added, stirring the contents of some giant pot, not even bothering to turn around and look at him.
“You should probably grab a nightstand or a wooden board or something, just so you have a surface to write on,” Edwin told him. “The table is a little crowded right now.”
Resisting a sigh, Zorian went about securing himself a chair and then carving out a place for himself at the table. This took a considerable amount of pushing and arguing, but eventually he managed to squeeze himself between Kael and Naim. Imaya immediately plopped down a plate of food in front of him and immediately walked away, not giving Zorian a chance to tell her he wasn’t hungry.
“You really need to learn how to be more assertive in life,” Naim advised from his left.
Zorian raised his eyebrow at him.
“Weren’t you the one who just tried to chase me away from your side of the table?” Zorian asked.
“Well, yeah, you need to be more assertive towards others, not me,” Naim responded, laughing slightly.
“Whatever. Where is Zach?” Zorian asked.
“Your friend already left,” Ilsa said, glancing up from her clipboard for a moment. “He said he had a court meeting scheduled soon, and couldn’t wait for you to wake up.”
“He said you already know how to contact him,” Kael added.
Zorian nodded slowly, giving the food in front of him a tentative bite. After their victory over Jornak and the invasion, Zach had wasted no time in filing a lawsuit against his caretaker. Zorian had advised him back then to wait a little for the circumstances to calm down a little, but Zach would have none of it. This decision had both positive and negative consequences. On one hand, the spotlight was still firmly focused on the failed invasion of the city, meaning Tesen was free to try and shut the whole thing down without too much outcry from the public. On the other hand, this was probably the worst time for Tesen to be accused of something like this, considering the royals were looking for someone to publically make an example out of, due to the debacle that had happened and all.
Zorian mostly stayed out of the whole thing. He trusted Zach to know what he was doing. He claimed he didn’t need any help with this, and he had clearly been prepared for this a long time.
“Aren’t you worried, at least a little?” Akoja said, frowning. “I mean, Tesen is a powerful man, and he surely knows you and Zach are friends. What if he decides to get back at him by going after you?”
Zorian smiled slightly. He found it interesting how pretty much none of their classmates thought Zach was lying about his accusations. He had expected that at least some of them would have thought Zach was making things up, but even Akoja, who definitely wasn’t a fan of Zach, absolutely believed him when he publically stated Tesen had robbed him of his family legacy.
“I’m not worried,” Zorian said. “This is the worst time to try and attack people in Cyoria. The whole city is crawling with soldiers and investigators. Tesen would have to be mad to go after me right now.”
This was not entirely true, of course. Tesen had already tried to send people to scout Imaya’s house and see if they could ambush him when he left the place, but these people had simply vanished into thin air before their mission was done.
After that, Zach’s caretaker hadn’t bothered sending anyone else.
“Indeed,” Ilsa said. “Plus, I had the academy secure this house with additional wards, since we are effectively using it as a makeshift classroom. Anyone trying to infiltrate the place is in for an unpleasant surprise. And with that, I propose we start our usual lesson now. As you can imagine, an alteration expert like me is in high demand during this time of reconstruction, so I can only spare so much time here.”
Everyone immediately gave their assent for the idea, some more enthusiastically than others, after which Ilsa started giving short demonstrations to the gathered students. Even Kirielle, Nochka, and Kana paid close attention when Ilsa was casting spells, not having many opportunities to witness magic spells like this in their daily lives.
The academy was temporarily closed. It had been closed for a month now, ever since the failed invasion. Not only had many sections of the academy been damaged in the attack, but most of the teachers had been recruited by the city to help deal with the aftermath as well. The place was scheduled to reopen in a week or so, if only to stop angry parents from demanding the money they had paid for attendance fees back, but for now, the student body was told to simply wait.
A large number of students did just that, treating the whole thing as a sort of vacation, but not everyone was willing to simply waste a whole month or more when they had already paid to learn how to do magic. These students self-organized into study groups and continued their education on their own.
Zorian was one of the people leading the charge on such things, at least when it came to his own class. He knew there were at least a handful of people in there that were serious about becoming a proper mage, and finding a study group that was not just an excuse to play cards every other night or some egoist’s attempt to gather underlings was bound to be hard. This sort of initiative was admittedly not something Zorian was used to, and he had been absent from classes for most of the previous month, so his announcement that he was starting a study group had definitely raised some eyebrows. However, the fact that he had managed to talk Ilsa and some of the other teachers into occasionally giving demonstrations and lectures – something few others could boast about – made others more willing to trust him.
The fact Akoja had decided to give up on her own study group in favor of choosing his own probably helped too. Akoja was well known for her serious attitude and work ethic – if she was willing to join Zorian’s group, he probably wasn’t just messing around.
He even got quite a few requests from older students and students from other classes about joining the group, though Zorian had to refuse most of them due to time constraints. He didn’t want to spend most of his time teaching people and managing groups. It just wasn’t something he was seriously interested in.
“I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong with this spell,” Kael complained.
Zorian glanced at the morlock and at the open book where the spell was detailed.
“You’re not doing anything wrong,” Zorian told him. “You’re casting the spell perfectly. Your shaping skills simply aren’t good enough to pull it off. I can show you some more shaping exercises if you want.”
“Great,” Kael mumbled. “More shaping exercises. You really remind me of that Xvim guy you occasionally bring here to teach us.”
“That guy is his mentor, so it kind of makes sense,” Kopriva said. “Based on what I heard about the guy, you kind of have to go all the way with your shaping skills if you’re assigned to him.”
“As if Zorian is suffering here,” Edwin grumbled. He was, like Zorian, one of the people who had been assigned to Xvim against his will, and still hadn’t gotten over it. Probably because he really only cared about magic if it could help him with golem making, and shaping skills weren’t high on the list of requisites for that. “He’s probably the only guy in the history of our academy that likes the guy and what he’s teaching.”
“You’d be surprised to know how many people speak highly of Mr. Chao’s teaching skills,” Ilsa remarked with a teasing smile. “Though most people don’t appreciate his genius, there are always one or two students that have what it takes to thrive under his tutelage. He didn’t keep his job at the academy all these years for nothing, you know?”
“We understand he’s good at what he does, but does he really have to be so mean about it?” Kiana said, pouting. “The last time he was here he said my shaping skills are ‘completely inadequate’. I’m pretty sure my shaping skills are average at worst.”
“Actually, they’re very much above average now, and it’s almost entirely due to Xvim pushing you further and further every time he comes here,” Zorian pointed out.
“Teacher’s pet,” Kiana accused him with a huff.
He was pretty sure Kiana was coming here only because Raynie was too, not because she was honestly so dedicated to improving her magic skills… but to her credit, she really did try to keep up with the rest of the group, unwilling to be left behind. Thus, whenever Xvim criticized her and pushed her to try for more, she reluctantly did her best to rise to the challenge.
She didn’t appreciate it right now, but Zorian was sure she would eventually understand that Xvim was doing her a huge favor. Most people had to pay a fortune to get personal instructions from an archmage.
After a while, Ilsa excused herself and left. The group continued interacting and helping each other for a while after that, but eventually people started leaving and the group was becoming smaller. The table, so crowded and busy earlier in the morning, started to clear up and fall silent.
In the end, the only ones left sitting there were Zorian and Raynie. Zorian had originally wanted to leave as well, but he could see from the glances Raynie was sending him and the emotions radiating off of her that she wanted to talk to him, so he remained patient and stayed in his seat.
The invasion had been thwarted. Panaxeth remained sealed. There was no more urgent danger constantly occupying his attention. He could finally waste an hour or two of his life and not feel bad about it in the back of his head.
“I just realized it’s been a whole month, and I never thanked you for helping me find my little brother,” Raynie eventually said, her tone hesitant.
Zorian didn’t know what to say to that. Since she hadn’t mentioned any of this in all this time, he kind of figured she wanted to pretend the whole thing never happened.
“Sorry,” she said, fiddling with her hands awkwardly. “I know this is very late and-”
“I don’t hold it against you,” Zorian assured her. “I didn’t do much, really. I just put you in contact with the right people. You did the rest, by organizing the other shifters into a rescue mission.”
“You already heard about that?” she asked, surprised. Then she shook her head. “Wait, of course you heard about that, what am I even saying? After what I’ve seen that evening, it would be a bigger surprise if you didn’t know anything about what happened.”
“I hear you rescued your brother successfully,” Zorian remarked.
“The cat shifters and pigeon shifters rescued my brother successfully,” she corrected him. “I just helped the police contact them and talk them into helping me. Then I just stood by the side and waited to see if they would succeed. Though yes, the newspapers have been crediting me for the whole thing. The city police insisted I should be the public face of the whole operation. I don’t really understand it.”
What was there to understand? She was a beautiful teenage girl with an emotional story of trying to save her little brother. The police probably didn’t want to release details about what was really going on before Eldemar’s forces finished their investigation, and this was a nice way of distracting the public. Plus, it was a story with a happy ending, and Eldemar really loved pushing those to the forefront right now.
He didn’t say that out loud, of course.
“I’m pretty sure talking those two groups of shifters into cooperating wasn’t easy at all, so don’t put yourself down so much,” Zorian told her. “That aside, I get the feeling you’re not really mentioning this because you’re bothered by the newspaper exposure. What’s got you so depressed?”
“I’m not depressed, it’s just… my family has invited me to come back home,” she admitted with a sigh.
“Ah,” Zorian nodded. He paused for a second, considering. “Is this a problem? You were instrumental in saving your younger brother, no? They should give you a hero’s welcome.”
“They might,” she admitted. “Or maybe they’ll accuse me of overstepping my boundaries when I promised our tribe’s help in exchange for help in the rescue mission. I really don’t know what’s going to happen when I get there, and it scares me.”
Zorian was silent.
“I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” she admitted after a while. “It’s not like I expect you to help. You’ve done more than enough already. I guess I just wanted to complain to someone other than Kiana for a change. She’s getting a little annoyed with me lately, I think. She thinks being praised in the newspapers is great, and that I’m being a baby.”
“The newspapers are using you as a distraction and would turn on you in a second if it suited their purposes, so it’s good you’re not letting it get to your head,” Zorian remarked. “Still, I don’t think you need to worry. I bet your family also doesn’t know what’s going to happen when you get there. They probably just want to see where they stand with you, since you surprised them so badly.”
Further conversation was interrupted by a large buzzing sound from a stone disk tied around Zorian’s waist. Zorian glanced at it, somewhat annoyed. It was a communication device House Aope had given him so they could contact him, though Zorian hardly thought it deserved to be called a device. It was just a stone that vibrated when told to by a second stone the Aope were in possession of, and did nothing else. Rather than convey useful information, the stone disk merely told him that House Aope representatives wanted to see him as soon as possible. He badly wanted to make real communication stones for this kind of use – something small and discreet and capable of facilitating actual two-way telepathy between holders – but doing that would be extremely suspicious and attention grabbing.
“I’m going to have to cut this meeting short,” he told Raynie.
“The aranea?” Raynie guessed.
Zorian nodded.
“I still can’t believe that’s what you’ve been doing this past month you’ve been absent from classes,” Raynie said. “Learning mind magic from giant underground spiders…”
“There was no other way,” Zorian said. “My empathy was running out of control and they were the first ones to realize what was happening, and stepped up to help me. I’m really grateful for their help.”
Sadly, although Zach and Zorian had been successful in keeping their involvement in the invasion itself a secret, there was no way to keep Zorian’s involvement with the aranea a secret. This was because the Cyorian web had no way of hiding itself from Eldemar’s authorities in the wake of the invasion, and asked Zorian to help them broker some kind of agreement with the city authorities. A hard task, and one that had given Zorian many headaches during this past month, but thankfully they had the support of Noble House Aope in this endeavor. It would have probably been an impossible task, otherwise. Zorian might be a master mind mage, but there was no way he could compel the entire royal bureaucracy to acknowledge a group of scary telepathic spiders as an ally against their will. Nor would he want to be that forceful, even if it were within his power.
Sadly, this also meant that knowledge of Zorian’s innate mind magic was gradually becoming more common. People thought he was a complete beginner at mind magic, yes, but he had already noticed mages starting to raise their mental shields when he was around, and his empathy told him some people were scared of him on sight.
He dreaded to think what would happen if the full extent of his abilities became known.
“Well,” said Raynie. “Don’t let me keep you from your duties. I should really get going as well.”
“I guess I won’t be seeing you in our group meetings, then?” Zorian guessed.
“Yes, that was the other thing I wanted to tell you. I knew I was forgetting something,” Raynie said. “I’ll be travelling home tomorrow, and I will probably stay there until the academy reopens.”
“We’ll see each other in class, then,” Zorian said.
“Hopefully,” she agreed.
The two of them then each left their own way, and the kitchen was once again empty and quiet.
But not for long. Things were always lively at Imaya’s place these days.
- break -
Though it was awful to even think so, Akoja had to say that this invasion business was the best thing that had happened to her in quite a while.
She always felt guilty whenever the thought occurred to her. So many people had died, lost their homes, or lost their jobs when their workshops got destroyed, she should really feel sorry for them. And she did! She really did! But it was also an undeniable fact that the immediate aftermath had breathed new purpose into her life, giving her both the clarity about what she wanted in life and opportunities for advancements that she would have otherwise missed.
In the month leading up to the attack of the city, she was lost, and more than a little bitter. She was putting so much work into her studies, into being a class representative and a model student, yet she felt it was all for naught. Two years of hard work had not given her any special position or advanced opportunities, it only made other students resent her and look down on her. Sometimes, when she sat alone in her dorm room, she couldn’t help but wonder if she was just wasting her time…
Then the attack happened, and it was terrifying. She had only seen a fraction of the fighting, but what she had seen made her feel like a powerless ant, completely at the mercy of greater forces that could sweep her up without really trying. When the dust had settled and Akoja looked at the shattered remains of her old dorm, all of her belongings destroyed, she did not feel anger or despair at the money she had lost or the time and effort she would have to spend to replace it all. Instead, she felt a fire ignite within her, urging her to throw herself into her studies and make sure this kind of thing couldn’t happen ever again. When war came for her again, she wanted to be ready.
And war was definitely coming. Everyone knew it. Akoja wasn’t the most avid follower of news, but she had read enough newspaper articles and listened to enough rumors to know that Eldemar was definitely going to launch a punitive expedition at Ulquaan Ibasa in the coming months. Even though it risked leaving Eldemar vulnerable to opportunistic attacks by Falkrinea and Sulamnon, pride wouldn’t allow Eldemar to swallow its anger and let this go. The only thing people were unsure of was how big the retaliation would really be, and how far Eldemar was willing to go to avenge Cyoria.
In any case, if Akoja had been on her own, perhaps her newfound drive would have eventually petered out in the coming weeks, and she would have once again begun questioning herself. A lot of people were fleeing the city these days, especially students like her and workers who otherwise lived elsewhere and only came to Cyoria to make money. A couple of other girls from Korsa she occasionally talked to had already transferred themselves to other academies elsewhere in the kingdom, their parents having been spooked by the attack and fearful another one would follow in the wake of the first. It was, after all, still unclear how Ulquaan Ibasa had been able to strike so deep into Eldemar territory, so who was to say it couldn’t happen again?
Akoja’s parents had also wanted to transfer her elsewhere, but she had refused. Cyoria may be dangerous, but she had to stay.
Because Zorian was here.
It wasn’t just because she had a crush on him, either. She talked to people, and it was obvious that the study group he had organized was the best one currently out there. He had teachers and even outside mages occasionally coming to provide lessons, which only one other study group had managed to do, and he himself was clearly very skilled for his age. He had an uncanny ability to notice the problems people were having, and how to fix them. Akoja had compared her progress during this past month with two other girls that had paid considerable money in order to be allowed in one of the ‘better’ study groups, and was shocked to realize she was handily beating them. The comparison wasn’t even close.
She didn’t know what to think about that. One of the things she really liked about Zorian was that he was like her – a regular guy from a commoner family that tried really hard and was serious about his studies. She had always been jealous of big name students who came from noble families, or had secret magic and bloodlines that gave them an edge over the competition, so it was refreshing to see someone she could empathize with. Even though he could be a little unfriendly and tactless, she understood. She herself was often described as bitchy and joyless, so they had common ground there.
But this new Zorian made her question if she really knew the guy. He was more skilled and well-connected than she imagined him to be, and apparently even had innate mind magic ability to draw upon. So unfair. Why didn’t she have a famous older brother and a secret bloodline? How was a normal girl like her even supposed to compete with that?
But, she eventually decided, it didn’t matter. Maybe her reasons for liking him were kind of misguided, but she still liked him regardless. And he was helping her get better. So she had to stay in the city.
It would have been better if she hadn’t stated it quite like that in the letter she had sent to her parents, though, because now they wanted to meet him. She knew her father – he was definitely going to come over to Cyoria and confront Zorian on his own if she didn’t manage to defuse the situation. Hopefully her last letter had reached them in time…
Still, that was thankfully a concern for another day. Today, she was simply going shopping around the city with Kopriva and Kael. All of her possessions had gotten destroyed in the invasion, after all, and she still hadn’t had the chance to fully replenish them. Kopriva was in a similar position to her, while Kael had apparently never had much stuff to begin with, as he had previously tended to constantly move around with Kana before coming to Cyoria, meaning until recently he owned very few things.
Neither Kopriva nor Kael was someone that Akoja would have wanted to associate with before the attack. Kopriva came from a family of criminals, and Kael was a morlock. Neither were people that a lady in good standing such as her would want to be seen with. However, strange times made for strange bedfellows. She had gotten to know these two over the past month, and they were alright, she supposed.
“Wait, so Zach bought you an entire lab?” Kopriva asked incredulously, looking at Kael.
“Well, a damaged, recently abandoned building that can be repurposed into a lab. But yes,” Kael nodded happily. “Now I can finally stop scaring Miss Kuroshka with the experiments I do in her basement.”
“Honestly, you were scaring me and the other tenants as well,” Kopriva told him. “Alchemy experiments shouldn’t be done right below where other people are sleeping, even if the place is warded. Still, I’m surprised Zach was willing to shell out that kind of money for you. Even if it’s been damaged in the attack, a building in Cyoria is still bound to be expensive as hell.”
“A lot of people are selling property in Cyoria these days,” Kael noted. “Prices have dropped considerably.”
“I’m pretty sure it was Zorian who talked Zach into spending money on this,” Akoja said, sighing internally.
She didn’t like Zach. His recent reveal that his caretaker was stealing from him made Akoja feel sorry for him a little… but only a little. He was the embodiment of everything she was jealous of when it came to Eldemar’s mage elite, except he didn’t even try to make something of himself, content to live the life of a clown and a wastrel. She hoped Zorian, as his new friend, would help him clean up his act, but she wasn’t holding her breath.
“Probably,” Kael agreed. “I was surprised when people told me they only became friends over the summer holidays. They seem like they have been friends their whole lives.”
“Yeah, I first thought Zorian was just taking advantage of Zach to get at his money, but these days I kind of doubt it,” Kopriva said. “He has a serious source of cash of his own, I can tell.”
“From what?” Akoja asked curiously. How could a teenager like Zorian have ‘serious money’ unless someone gifted it to him?
“Sales,” Kopriva said. “I don’t know what he’s selling, but it must be pretty rare and profitable because people have been asking about him a lot, trying to get in contact with him.”
“You mean… in your circles?” Akoja asked worriedly.
“Yes, in ‘my circles’,” Kopriva laughed at her. “I’m sorry, but your crush isn’t as clean as you imagine him to be.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Akoja told her quickly. “We’re just colleagues.”
“Yeah, sure,” Kopriva rolled her eyes at her.
“So, I hate to interrupt your conversation,” Kael suddenly said, “but have any of you recently found a book… or a collection of notes, maybe… in your room?”
“What kind of book?” Akoja asked curiously. What was the boy even talking about?
“A book you’ve definitely never bought, and notebooks you’ve definitely never written,” Kael said. “Just… sitting there on your night stand, full of magical secrets that seem almost as if they were specifically tailored to you, and you alone…”
There was a second of silence as the two girls processed this statement.
“That seriously happened?” Kopriva asked incredulously. “You found a book and some notebooks in your room-”
“My locked room,” Kael clarified. “My locked and warded room that Ilsa later confirmed hadn’t been broken into.”
“-and they contained a gift of magic specifically tailored for you?” Kopriva finished. “You damn morlock bastard, first you have a rich guy buy you your very own alchemy lab, and now this? How are you so damn lucky!?”
“The most disturbing thing,” Kael said hesitantly, ignoring Kopriva’s outburst, “is that some of the passages use the exact same wording, codes, and symbols that I do. This happens over and over again, to the point I don’t think anyone can reasonably fake it.”
“What are you saying?” Akoja asked, not really understanding.
“It’s my writing style,” Kael said. “I have several years’ worth of alchemical and medical research, seemingly made by my hand, but no memory of writing any of it. And I don’t know what to think about that.”
The two girls stayed silent. Their first instinct was to deny the idea as completely absurd.
But these were mad times they were living in, and nothing was too absurd to fully dismiss. So they just stayed silent and filed the topic in the back of their heads, put aside but not forgotten, and went about their shopping in peace.
- break -
Elayer Inid was the special investigator sent by the crown of Eldemar to find out what exactly had happened in Cyoria on the day of the attack, and he was not happy. Not happy at all.
It wasn’t just about a foreign power having the ability to strike deep into Eldemar’s territory at their leisure. It wasn’t just about the rampant betrayal among Eldemar’s highest ranks that had allowed this attack to progress as far as it had.
It was about the fact that someone had stopped the invasion and saved the city, and it wasn’t anyone that Elayer recognized.
Regular people often talked about mysterious organizations and enigmatic hermits moving about in the shadows of polite society, but the truth was that organizations that held real power and powerful individuals didn’t spring out of nowhere. It took a lot of resources and connections to raise a top tier mage, and even more to build an organization around one. By the time these rising powers were able and willing to exert their will and influence on the world around them, people like Elayer will have already noticed them and learned who they were. When mysterious events like the one that had happened a month ago in Cyoria occurred, investigators were often unsure who exactly was behind them, especially if the perpetrators had been thorough and erased all the evidence. However, they always had an idea who could have done it, even if they had no proof or couldn’t narrow down all the possibilities to one actor.
At the moment, though, Elayer had plenty of evidence. He had witness testimonials, magical recordings, field reports from soldiers and mages that had been present when the attack took place, and even material evidence.
And all of it was telling him that this couldn’t have been done by anyone he knew about. Even more disturbingly, even after he had consulted with some of his foreign sources, he was no closer to finding a likely candidate. No one had any idea who could have done this. It was as if these ‘saviors’ had materialized straight out of thin air, and vanished just as suddenly afterwards.
Elayer stood in front of the wreckage of a large golem, hands folded behind his back. To his left, two researchers shuffled uncomfortably in place, hesitating to speak.
“Well?” he asked them impatiently. “Have you identified the maker of this thing?”
“None of the known golem makers produced this, Mister Inid,” one of the researcher said after fumbling with his clothes a little and clearing his throat. “Although the animation core has been shattered beyond recovery, enough of it survived that we have been able to make some startling discoveries. We are very sure the established golem makers would never make such a thing.”
“Hmm? Why is that?” Elayer asked, suddenly curious. Honestly, he thought the golem wreckage would bring him no answers, so this was a pleasant surprise.
“The spell formulas inscribed on the animation core are completely unprotected,” the other researcher said. “No codes, no misdirection, no attempts to shroud the method of creation at all. Usually artificers spend almost as much time trying to hide how they made something as they do making designs for it. Golem makers especially so. But there is no evidence of that here - whoever made this thing cared only about pure efficiency.”
“Are you saying we could potentially replicate this thing?” Elayer asked.
Now wouldn’t that be something… he had heard reports about how good these golems were, and it was apparently something on a whole different level from your typical combat golem. If they could duplicate one of these, then this would be a huge gain.
When Elayer saw the two researchers share a knowing look with each other, however, he knew it wouldn’t be that simple.
“The issue is that the animation core has been totally shattered, and some parts of the spell formula inscribed on it are missing. Even after we compared it with the remains of other golem wrecks we have recovered from the city, we are still missing about 10% of the design.”
Just 10%?
“And you can’t fill in the blanks?” Elayer asked curiously.
“Heavens no,” the first researcher said, bursting into laughter. “The design for this thing is one of the most complex things I’ve ever seen in my life. Everything slots together perfectly, and even the slightest mistake would make everything collapse on itself. And considering how expensive the materials for the construction of this kind of core are, experimentation would be hellishly expensive. Never mind 10%, even a 1% gap would make this design completely unviable. Unless we managed to find an intact golem, the only thing this is useful for is for serving as inspiration.”
“Alright,” Elayer said, turning away from the wreckage and walking off. The two researchers quickly followed after him. “What is this about some mysterious books that I’m hearing about?”
“Ah, you mean the mysterious gifts some people have been getting?” The second researcher asked. Elayer nodded. “We have only managed to recover a handful of them from the people they were given to. Rumors of us confiscating them have spread among people fast, as has the fact they are of no danger to the recipient, so people no longer report them to us. But from the few we have in our hands, they seem to be full of novel magic specifically tailored for the recipient.”
“If I may make a suggestion, it might be prudent to return the books we’ve confiscated to the people they were given to,” the first researcher said. “We’ve already copied the contents, and it might motivate people to let us take a look at the stuff they’re currently hiding if they see they’re eventually going to get it back.”
“I’ll think about it,” Elayer said, not thinking much of it. He didn’t like the idea of someone handing over magical secrets to people like that, not at all. Plus, he had suspicions their mysterious ‘saviors’ were behind this as well. Those ‘gifts’ were evidence and he was keeping them, at least so long as his investigation lasted.
Infuriatingly, said investigation was encountering a lot of unexpected obstacles. The Triumvirate Church had clearly been heavily involved in the battle – there was a giant angel battling a dragon mage in the skies of Cyoria, for heaven’s sake! – but they refused to let him interrogate the priesthood involved, and the crown was reluctant to offend them. The church had been spectacularly successful recently, providing valuable help and information on necromancer hideouts, demon summoner bases, and some of the more awful criminal groups. Elayer had no idea how they had gotten so much critical information about Eldemar’s criminal underbelly, but they had, and this unfortunately meant they currently had an upper hand over him and his investigation.
At the same time, Elayer was having trouble keeping the funds and manpower for the investigation going. Eldemar’s attention had been stretched very thin lately. They had an invasion of Ulquaan Ibasa to organize, complicated heavily by the fact the Ibasans had somehow managed to take over Fort Oroklo without Eldemar realizing it. They were throwing a lot of money and manpower at Cyoria in order to get the city up and running again in order to make a show of strength and lift up morale, and these efforts often clashed greatly with Elayer’s own investigation into what had transpired there. Sulamnon, Falkrinea, and even many smaller countries were stirring, trying to see just how badly the kingdom had been hurt and whether they could fish in troubled waters while Eldemar’s forces were distracted elsewhere. And finally, there was that permanent gate that linked Eldemar with the jungles of Koth, which had everyone and their mother excited about the incredible opportunities this presented. The gate was clearly related to the Ibasan invasion somehow, but Elayer and his men were not allowed to examine it closely for fear that they would destroy the precious, irreplaceable, intercontinental gate with their tampering.
Bah. And then his superiors complain he has no results. Of course he had no results! Just what did they expect when they constantly keep taking his money and resources, and don’t let him touch things or question people?
But Elayer was patient. His foes may have won this round, but he knew what to look for now, and everyone slipped up sooner or later. It may take a year, or even a decade, but they were bound to make a mistake.
And when they did, Elayer would be there, and he would be ready.
- break -
Daimen Kazinski was having a stressful, but very exciting month. From the day he had woken up in an unknown room in Cyoria with an entire month of his life missing from his memory, it had been a non-stop wild ride of crazy reveals and maddening complications. It was annoying, but truth be told, he kind of enjoyed it. A safe, boring life had never been something he coveted. He somewhat resented his little brother for wiping away a month of his life to save his friend, but he understood. He would have done the same in his place, probably.
At the very least, Daimen could safely say he had profited handsomely from this whole time loop business. Not only had Zorian gifted him a veritable treasure of research and notes he had apparently made for himself during this ‘time loop’, but he also indirectly allowed the Taramatula to seize the permanent gate linking Koth to Eldemar.
A permanent intercontinental gate… the sheer possibilities of that thing were breathtaking to consider. Eldemar’s forces quickly moved to secure their side of the gate, but they didn’t try to push through it to monopolize the whole thing. It would be too easy for the Taramatula to simply destroy their side of gate back in Koth, and thus ruin this whole thing for everyone. Thus, the Kingdom of Eldemar and the Taramatula now found themselves in possession of a permanent dimensional link between continents. Both sides were positively salivating at the potential profits and other benefits involved, and since Daimen was closely connected to both of said parties, it was often up to him to act as a bridge and negotiator between these two sides.
And then there was Zorian… his little brother, the time traveler. Well, it wasn’t real time travel, but it may as well be, from Daimen’s point of view. He had beheld a doomed future, and then he had traveled back to their own world to stop it, and save as many people as possible in the process.
And in order to pull it off, he’d had to kill the original Zorian, and steal his body for his own uses.
Daimen would have liked to say he was conflicted about this information. Zorian was right: in a very real sense, his little brother had been murdered and replaced by an imposter. He should have been outraged. He should have been deeply disturbed by the implications, just like Zorian himself clearly was.
But he wasn’t. Maybe it was because the whole situation was so utterly ridiculous and it was hard to really know what to feel. Maybe it was because, by Zorian’s own admission, the original Zorian hated him something fierce. Or perhaps it was because he damn well knew that if he had been in Zorian’s position, he would have murdered his own original without a shred of hesitation and thought nothing of it. All he knew was that he’d simply told Zorian that everything would be fine, and that he shouldn’t worry about it. He had only done what he had to.
Maybe it was just Daimen imagining things, but he thought he’d seen a small flash of gratitude in his brother’s eyes when he said that. He hadn’t expected the big bad time traveler to actually care about his opinion that much. Interesting.
Now, here they were – every Kazinski sibling gathered together. Daimen, Zorian, Kirielle, and Fortov were all standing next to one another at Cyoria’s train station, waiting for the next train to arrive.
Their parents were coming to Cyoria.
It was kind of funny, actually. If his parents had arrived to Koth as planned, they could have been here way earlier. Daimen would have arranged for them to step through the brand new interdimensional gate linking Koth to Eldemar, and they would have been home before you knew it. Alas, they’d actually heard about the attack on Cyoria when they had almost reached their destination, and decided to immediately switch ships and turn back. As a consequence, they had spent almost an entire month in transit before they were able to return to Eldemar.
Sighing inwardly, Daimen noticed that no one except him looked actually excited about that fact. Zorian looked bored and disinterested, clearly intending to just get this over with as quickly and painlessly as possible. Fortov seemed nervous and unsure how to behave. His other younger brother had been acting strangely ever since Daimen had evacuated him from Cyoria along with Kirielle, and Daimen had no idea what was going on in his head at the moment, but he clearly wasn’t looking forward to this meeting. As for Kirielle, she was playing around with the fancy snow globe Zorian had bought for her while they had been waiting for the train to arrive, but Daimen could see she was extremely nervous under this disinterested facade.
He should have brought Orissa with him, he lamented. He had originally left her behind because he didn’t want to provoke his parents in this particular meeting, since they were bound to be extremely distraught already, but now he wondered if her presence would have been a positive thing instead.
It was too late for such regrets, however. The train soon entered the station and began to disembark; it wasn’t long before Daimen spotted their parents.
They weren’t carrying much in the way of luggage. Daimen winced internally. It made sense, since they must have dropped off most of their stuff when they had stopped by in Cirin. Still, the fact they were carrying practically nothing meant they expected this to be a very short visit. This… was probably going to get unpleasant.
Not long after Daimen had spotted their parents, they also spotted him. The two groups quickly made their way towards one another.
“For heaven’s sake, what are you children still doing in this city?” Mother complained the moment they were within earshot.
“Mother-” Daimen tried futilely.
“The whole city was under siege until recently. The academy is closed. Why aren’t you all back in Cirin already?” she continued. Father was totally silent, simply studying each of them in turn. Once he saw that all of them were unharmed, he seemed to relax a little. Most wouldn’t be able to tell, but Daimen was the closest to Father out of all the Kazinski siblings, and could read his little tics pretty well by this point. “Never mind, I’ll help you pack your bags and we’ll be home by tomorrow.”
“What? No we won’t,” Zorian simply told her in a bored tone of voice.
“Zorian, please let me handle this,” Daimen urged in a low tone of voice.
Father gave Zorian a penetrating look for his statement, a gesture that would usually instantly put Zorian on the defensive, but of course, this time traveler Zorian was not bothered by it in the slightest. Zorian didn’t talk about family all that much, but Daimen got the notion that Zorian had barely interacted with Mother and Father during the time loop. The two were practically strangers to him, and it showed in his attitude towards them.
That, more than the fact he’d had to kill his original self to be here, greatly disturbed Daimen.
“You seem to have grown some spine in the short time you’ve been here,” Father remarked, still staring intently at Zorian. He didn’t say whether this was good or bad, but Daimen knew he thought it was both. He liked when his sons had a firm, decisive attitude, but he also didn’t tolerate disrespect towards himself and Mother.
“Zorian is just dedicated to his studies,” Daimen hurriedly explained, shooting Zorian a quick look to shut him up. “Just because the academy is closed doesn’t mean we’re all doing nothing. Zorian is organizing a study group for his class so they can continue studying on their own in private. He even got some of the teachers to help him out.”
“But Kirielle-” Mother tried.
“I like it here!” Kirielle immediately exclaimed. “I have friends here and everything!”
“It’s dangerous here,” Mother said firmly. She glanced around the group for a second. “I really regret not taking her with us this time, but what’s done is done. What I don’t understand is how you could all let her stay here under the circumstances. She must be terrified after what happened here!”
“But I’m not!” Kirielle protested.
“Quiet,” Mother barked at her.
Kirielle immediately shrank back.
Out of the corner of his eye, Daimen could see Zorian’s mood immediately worsen. Out of all of them here, Kirielle was the one Zorian cared about the most. Daimen was pretty sure his little brother would be willing to make an enemy out of his whole family for Kirielle’s sake, which was more than a little disturbing. Kirielle was a cute kid, but she could be a massive brat sometimes.
“Anyway, if Zorian is as busy as you say, what about Fortov?” Mother continued. “He could have taken Kirielle back to Cirin just fine, yes?”
“Yes, he’s already a failed student wasting his time and our money here,” Father agreed. “Why not have him be useful for a change?”
“You!” Fortov protested, visibly outraged.
“Am I wrong?” Father challenged.
“Why even send me back here if that’s what you think about me!?” Fortov protested.
“Please, Father,” Daimen urged. “Look, I know Fortov had some issues with his studies lately…”
Father scoffed. Mother sighed. Fortov looked furious, and very bitter.
“…but I have been giving him some help lately, and I’m sure he’ll turn the situation around,” Daimen said.
He had promised to take care of Fortov back in the time loop, apparently. Although Daimen didn’t remember it, he had to admit Fortov needed his help. Certainly Zorian made it clear he didn’t want to do anything with the guy. Apparently, despite having lived in the same city for years, Zorian had never bothered to interact with his brother and figure out how to help him.
For all his newfound maturity, this new Zorian still had clear traces of his old self.
He sure could nurse a grudge, for instance.
“And for how long will that last?” Father challenged. “You’ll be back in Koth soon, I imagine, and then he’ll be back on his own. I doubt one month will make that much difference.”
“Actually, I’m going to be around much more often than I usually am,” Daimen said. “Haven’t you wondered how I got here before you?”
Father and Mother looked at each other.
“Well… I thought maybe you used the teleport network…” tried Mother.
Daimen shook his head with a slight smile.
“Mother, Father… I want to show you something. We can go and meet my fiancée and her family now, if you’re willing. It’s what you were travelling to Koth for, after all.”
“What? They came here with you?” Mother asked incredulously. Daimen understood her disbelief. A single individual like him could conceivably cross large distances on a whim, but a small group of people was a much bigger challenge.
“You’ll see,” Daimen said with a grin. “Things are going to change a lot in the future, I think. Who knows, maybe even your family business might profit out of this.”
Thankfully, this was sufficiently interesting that it distracted Mother and Father from further questioning. He knew that sooner or later, Mother would realize that Zorian had already started teaching Kirielle magic behind her back and that her beloved daughter had been literally attacked by assassins during the invasion – if nothing else because Kirielle was sure to blurt it out at some point – and that once she did, there would be hell to pay. For now, though, the crisis had been aver-
“Zorian! Hey! Zorian!”
Daimen looked at the person calling out to his brother and saw a chubby boy with a happy smile on his face hurrying over. An older, well-dressed man with a mustache followed behind him at a more sedate pace. Probably the boy’s father.
The funny thing about this was that the boy clearly acted like he was Zorian’s friend, but Daimen himself had never seen Zorian interact with him at all. That was interesting to say the least.
“Hey Zorian! I see you already got back, too!” the boy said once he got closer.
“I never left, Ben,” Zorian said politely.
Oh, so they did know each other. By this point the boy’s father also arrived, though he stayed silent behind the boy. He simply gave a small nod and quiet greeting to the gathered Kazinskis before waiting for his son to calm down.
“You never left? Man, you work too hard,” the chubby boy said. “I heard you got roped into being an ambassador for some giant spiders. You got to introduce me to them someday, man. Sounds like one hell of an experience.”
There was a long silence as all the Kazinski siblings looked incredibly uncomfortable.
“What?” the boy said, realizing he made some kind of mistake. “What did I say?”
“Giant… spiders?” Mother repeated.
Daimen couldn’t help it. He sighed audibly this time.
So much for averting disaster.
- break -
As he walked through the streets of the city and observed the reconstruction efforts around him, Zorian couldn’t help but feel satisfied with how things had been going lately. There were a few complications here and there, but the city was slowly beginning to recover, and neither Zach nor Zorian had been implicated in what had happened. The thanks for that partially went to Alanic, due to him running interference on their behalf in exchange for helping him clean up Eldemar of various threats, as well as Eldemar having its hands full with all kinds of problems these days, but mostly it was because they were currently complete unknowns to most people, so nobody even suspected they could have been involved. Zorian sincerely hoped that by the time they were forced to reveal some of their real skills, too much time will have passed, and people would not connect the dots linking them to the events that had taken place during the invasion.
Sadly, his quiet enjoyment of the city was marred by the fact people kept giving him curious and occasionally fearful glances as he passed them, the crowds parting in front of him like he was diseased.
Well, they probably weren’t doing that because of him, specifically. Rather, it was because of the giant telepathic spider strutting around the city beside him. Spear of Resolve seemed completely unperturbed by the reception, however, and gave no indication this sort of behavior bothered her. If anything, she seemed immensely pleased with herself that she could walk through the city of Cyoria in broad daylight without being immediately attacked, or met with screams and calls for help. This was already a victory for her and her web.
The aranea hadn’t been entirely accepted by the city authorities yet. Legally, they were still considered monsters that had no rights, and there was a portion of Eldemarian leadership that really wanted to just wipe them out or drive them out of the city. However, the aranea had quietly gathered a considerable amount of support in the city over the years, so there was also no shortage of people willing to argue on their behalf. More importantly, even the critics that considered them dangerous telepathic parasites had to admit they were instrumental in preventing the various threats from the lower reaches of the dungeon from menacing the city. Considering the amount of destruction and suffering Cyoria had suffered recently, the last thing it needed was to go through a monster invasion too because some general couldn’t tolerate the aranea living beneath the city.
The opinion of regular citizens was, from what Zorian could understand, somewhat mixed. The aranea were said to have helped fight the invaders, which won them some good will, but they were also monsters, spiders, and mind mages. None of those three sounded good to the average citizen. Accordingly, when people saw Spear of Resolve walking down the street like she always belonged there, their reactions were… mixed, to say the least.
Thankfully both Zorian and Tinami were accompanying her on this stroll to make sure no incident occurred. Zorian was certain that Spear of Resolve was resourceful enough to evade any real conflict with frightened citizens, but it was best not to risk things.
“So how are the negotiations going?” Zorian asked Spear of Resolve, not bothering to use telepathy for Tinami’s sake. The Aope had managed to secure a magic exchange with the aranea, and Tinami was a part of that, but she wasn’t psychic, and her advancement was slow. She wasn’t good enough for casual telepathy yet.
“Somewhat disappointingly,” Spear of Resolve admitted, using sound magic to speak out loud as well. “We have managed to block any initiative to have us driven out of our homes, but it’s unlikely we will get legal recognition any time soon.”
“That was always a little naïve of you to expect,” Tinami told her. The Aope usually preferred to employ older and more experienced people for these kinds of meetings, but Tinami was the designated heir of the House, and she was throwing her weight around to get personally involved in something that very much interested her. “You’re still too much of an unknown for people to trust you, regardless of your help with the invasion.”
“Oh, I know that,” Spear of Resolve assured her. “I didn’t expect a better outcome, so much as hope for it. I have already made the necessary preparations. The colony can retreat from Cyoria on a moment’s notice, if it becomes necessary.”
“Where would you go, though?” Tinami asked. “I can’t imagine there are that many places suitable for your kind.”
“We would simply assault one of the smaller webs around the area and steal their home for ourselves,” Spear of Resolve said blandly. “The aranean world is a rather brutal place, I’m afraid.”
“Oh,” Tinami lamely responded.
“I heard your academy is about to reopen soon,” Spear of Resolve said, turning slightly towards Zorian before resuming her walk.
“So I’m told,” Zorian said. He spotted Taiven and her team in the distance, trailing after a large group of other mages, and gave her a small wave. She waved back, but didn’t linger or try to talk to him, simply following after her group so she wouldn’t slow them down. She looked happy, though. In the wake of the invasion, there was an urgent demand for combat mages, so she had plenty of job offers and opportunities to prove herself. “If it doesn’t start again soon, the parents that didn’t get frightened by the attack will start pulling their children out of the academy out of concern they’re not getting taught anything.”
He looked at Tinami, somewhat curious as to how she was handling that. She had never expressed any desire to join their study group, or any study group for that matter. Was she so focused on this aranean business that she had no problems putting her education on hold for a month, or did she have some kind of alternate arrangements?
“My family has arranged private instruction for me,” Tinami admitted, somehow guessing his thoughts. “I mean no offense to your study group and your efforts, but this seemed a better idea.”
She was probably right. As good as he was, he wasn’t really a teacher and he had a whole group to deal with anyway. Tinami probably would get far better results out of private instructors. It kind of made him wonder why her family had even sent her to the academy in the first place, if they could just hire a bunch of private instructors for her. Was it too expensive? Did they just want her to socialize with people? Hmm…
“I have a favor to ask of you, then,” Spear of Resolve told Zorian. “I’ve made some arrangements with the academy to let Novelty attend a few of your classes as an observer. I’d like you to keep an eye on her and stop her from getting herself into more trouble than she can handle.”
“Hmm? Why would you do that?” Zorian frowned. “I know she wants to learn human magic, but do you have any idea how mundane and repetitive our classes are? She’ll be bored out of her skull in three days, maximum. It would be better to just have her come to me for instruction. I did promise I would teach her, after all.”
“No offense Zorian, but you’re just a beginner mage still,” Tinami said frowning. “You’re not really qualified to teach a member of a completely different species how to do magic. That kind of thing is best left for actual experts.”
“Uh, yeah, I meant I would teach her later,” Zorian fumbled slightly. “Years later, when I mature into a mage who is qualified to help her. That’s what I meant.”
Tinami gave him a really strange look.
“It’s a good thing for Novelty to receive a much-needed reality-check from time to time, so I’m not really concerned about her being bored out of her mind there,” Spear of Resolve said, ignoring their interaction. “Besides, I didn’t mean for this to become a regular thing. I just want to have the students see an aranea walking around and interact with them a bit. It’s a publicity stunt more than anything.”
“Oh, so this is kind of like what we’re doing right now,” Tinami said. After all, it wasn’t like they had to have this conversation in the middle of a street where random people could see them. They could have just as easily met in a private room inside the Noveda Estate, or even inside one of the many Aope properties, but Spear of Resolve insisted they had to do this this way.
“Yes, exactly,” Spear of Resolve said.
“I have to ask… why Novelty?” Tinami asked suddenly. “Not that I dislike her or anything, but I get the notion that you’re pushing her pretty hard, and I can’t figure out why. She is not exactly someone I would pick for an ambassador if I had to choose. Surely you have aranea that are more… solemn than her.”
“Enthusiastic Seeker of Novelty is more suited for the role than you might think,” Spear of Resolve said after a short pause. “You have to understand that the number of aranea living beneath Cyoria is… not that great. We must hunt to survive, so we can’t support large populations. Of the people I do have, many have no interest in learning how to interact with humans, or even downright look down on them.”
“Ah. The flickermind thing,” Tinami said, sniffing disdainfully.
“Yes, that. The point is that I really don’t have all that much to work with, and Novelty is one of the few aranea who is downright enthusiastic about going out into the city and meeting humans face-to-face. Besides, while her antics might not be exactly professional, I’ve noticed they put many humans at ease better than a solemn, respectful approach. They often perceive her as a harmless clown, or an innocent little girl, which never fails to amuse me. She’s an adult aranea specializing in interactions with humans. She’s far more dangerous to a human than your average, less excitable aranea.”
“Oh. I didn’t think of it like that,” Tinami admitted.
What Spear of Resolve didn’t say, but what Zorian strongly suspected, was that she was pushing Novelty partly because she knew Zorian liked her. It was clear to him that the Cyorian web was determined to build a closer relationship with him and keep him as close to them as possible, so it made sense to have Novelty talk to him.
After a few more circles around the center of the city, the three of them separated and went about their own business. Zorian never went home, however, instead choosing to continue wandering the city, lost in his own thoughts.
He picked up a couple of newspapers as he walked, and idly flipped through them. As he expected, most of the news was still dedicated to the attack on the city, even a whole month after it happened. An article about the sulrothum warriors that had helped the defenders during the attack caught his eye, if only because of the detailed drawing of a flying sandworm hovering above the city. He remembered that one… the devil wasps had refused Zorian’s offer of simply gating them back home to their ziggurat and had decided to instead have their giant flying sandworm pick them up and slowly fly them back to their continent. Some kind of power play, probably. Thankfully, no one in Eldemar had been in the mood to pick a fight with a giant flying sandworm, so they let them leave without incident.
Leafing through the articles more thoroughly, he also found subtle clues that the people who had received his ‘gifts’ had already started to make waves with the knowledge he provided them with. In all honesty, Zorian had yet to hand out even a fraction of the stuff he owed to people for their help. It would take him literal years to finish paying back his debts this way, but he would persist. In any case, he was glad people were starting to make use of the knowledge they had been given. It assured him he wasn’t doing all that in vain.
He had also started writing a book on mind magic, but that was still in its early stages, and nowhere near to completion. Publishing anything related to mind magic on a wide scale was going to be difficult, but he would find a way.
Hours passed, and the night began to fall. Zorian still continued to wander the streets of the city, restless. Though he had no real emergency to worry about, it somehow felt wrong to him to just lay around and do nothing. He had spent so much time constantly on the move, constantly tackling one crisis after another, that he felt like he had to do something with himself… even if that something was basically wandering the city with no clear aim in sight.
His mind wandered to the couple of issues he still hadn’t dealt with. For instance, Princess. The giant divinely-enhanced hydra had survived her fight with Oganj’s apprentice, and Zorian had no idea what he was going to do with her. There was no way to transfer ownership of her to Zach, so he was stuck with her. Thankfully, she was doing just fine for now, lazing around in the Great Northern Forest, but he knew that couldn’t continue forever. He had to figure out what to do with her one of these days.
Another complication was the giant iron beak flock. Zorian had simply released them into the northern wilderness when he had been checking up on Princess, thinking they would simply scatter and continue on with their own lives from now on. Instead, they decided to stick around Princess and now followed her around everywhere, helping her hunt and feeding on the remains of her prey when she had her fill. It made Princess far more noticeable and eye-catching than she would have otherwise been, and made the question of what to do with her all the more pressing.
He also didn’t know what to do about Mrva. He had managed to get the golem colossus out of Cyoria before the army could move in and confiscate him, but his precious construct was still completely non-functional and the place where he was storing him was not really as secure as he would have liked.
Annoyingly, he was probably going to have to tolerate this state of affairs for quite a long time. Restoring Mrva back into combat condition and making a properly secure place to house him in would both take a large amount of money… and money was annoyingly hard to get out of the time loop. There were no more invader caches and bank accounts to steal from, so unless he wanted to prey on innocent citizens he had to find other sources of funds... and vastly scale down his expenses.
He had a bit of a problem, in all honesty. During the time loop he'd gotten into the habit of spending money like water, and though he was mindful of it after their victory, he still struggled to keep his expenses under control. He still had a sizeable stash of funds to draw upon, but it was constantly getting smaller by the day. He had tried to get large sums of money by selling some of his creations, but that had drawn way more attention than he had thought it would, so he was forced to stop with that for the time being. The only thing he could do was, ugh... spend less.
At least until he found a convenient way to make a lot of money without it making huge waves or being traced back to him.
He stopped walking and looked at the full moon shining bright in the skies above. For some reason, the sight of the night sky, accompanied by the warm night air, helped put his mind at ease.
“Well, Zorian, you wanted a normal life,” he said out loud to himself, “Now you’re having money problems. What could be more normal than that?”
“You said it, brother!” an unknown man shouted at him from his left. It wasn’t anyone Zorian knew – it was just some drunk that happened to be close by. Drunk enough to be spouting nonsense, but sober enough to make himself understood. “I too am comp-le-tely penniless! I spent every-thing I had tonight… and there is nothing wrong with that! What could be more normal than that? Yes in-deed, yes in-deed, yes in-deed…”
Zorian sighed, and then turned in the direction of Imaya’s house. He supposed it really was time to get some sleep.
- break -
She had no name. She did not need one. She was a hunter and a mother, devoid of any higher purpose except for surviving, protecting her territory, and raising as many offspring as she could.
But that was Before. After her last feast, she had found herself imbued with greater purpose. The essence of her prey, the hated two-legs that had provoked her again and again, had proven so sweet and so powerful. It filled her up, suffusing her in a way she had never experienced before, then filtered through her and settled inside her eggs.
Her eggs were special now, she knew. The brood that would hatch out of them was going to be special too. She had always guarded her eggs and young diligently and with passion, only chasing them off when they grew too big and needy, but this time it was different. These eggs, and the young that would hatch from them, had to be guarded with her life. She would do anything to keep them safe. She would die for them if she had to.
With her special purpose and her special eggs, there came a voice, an urge. She had to go deeper. Her new children couldn’t be satisfied with the weak prey that lived on the surface, or even the more palatable things that wandered the upper tunnels of the world. No, if she wanted to raise them right, she had to go deep, deep, deep – deeper than she would ever dare go under normal circumstances. She was mighty, but some of the things that made their homes here could end her in a moment if she weren’t careful.
She was afraid. She wanted to go back, go up, return to the safety of higher hunting grounds… but the urge, her purpose was stronger.
She had to survive. She had to protect her eggs. She had to go deeper.
So despite her fears, despite what all her life experience was telling her, she stubbornly kept going deeper…
…where her destiny awaited.















Afterword
You have reached the end of the story. What follows is merely some general musings about the story and what comes next. If this doesn’t interest you, feel free to click away.
When I first started posting Mother of Learning on Fictionpress, all the way in 2011, I had no idea it would become as popular as it did. The story, as it was originally conceived, was meant to be a tool for fleshing out the fantasy setting I was building. I had noticed that diving into the setting from the perspective of an actual person living inside it really helped me notice the missing details and various inconsistencies that I would have otherwise missed or glossed over if I was just looked at it from a big picture perspective. Mother of Learning was simply going to be a way for me to visualize the daily life inside the world I was building.
I needed a plan, of course. I knew from my previous writing attempts that I wasn’t one of those people who can write a story while making things up as they go along. Rather than picking something sensible, however, I chose to make it an epic time travel plot spanning multiple continents and involving a small legion of supporting characters. Because if I’m already going to dream, might as well dream big, right?
Right. I wrote a story summary, outlining the entire novel from start to finish. I created a character document containing brief descriptions of all important characters. And then I sat down and started writing.
I wrote about eight chapters before I decided they were not good enough and just plain wrong. So I completely discarded them all and started from scratch.
I then wrote four brand new chapters. I soon discarded them as well. They were no good, either.
The third time I also wrote four chapters, but this time I actually liked the result. I liked it so much, in fact, that I decided it wouldn’t hurt to share my work with the world. I posted all four chapters on Fictionpress, thinking I would be lucky to get even a hundred regular readers. Nine years later and here we are.
Mother of Learning is finally done. I very much enjoyed writing it, but I’m glad it’s done. It was meant to end here, and being able to bring it to a completion feels good. Some parts of the original concept had to be cut out of the story as it progressed, but I feel the story is ultimately better for it. I was a very inexperienced writer when I first made the original story plan, and its sheer scope was almost unreal. It’s a miracle it served me as well as it had by the end of it.
The story is not perfect by any means. Over the years, I have seen a fair amount of criticism about my work and writing style that feels true. I am pretty sparse in my descriptions, for instance, especially of people. My characters apparently have a tendency to sound very similar to one another. My word choice can be occasionally jarring to perceptive readers, since I often use modern terms without thinking about whether or not they fit the setting. Some of the info dumps and extended explanations probably drag on a little too much. Parts of the story, especially ones towards the end of it, can feel rather hurried and poorly paced, and I’m not sure I really did them justice.
Still. I am happy with how the story turned out in the end, and I am happy to have found so many readers interested in reading this silly story of mine. My audience has been extraordinarily patient and generous to me over the years, and I thank you all from the bottom of my heart.
I hope that, having read entire story now, you find the journey to have been worth it.
>What do you intend to do now?
Well, in the short term, I intend to sit down and do some editing. I have received many, many typo reports and lists of mistakes from my readers, but I have been focusing solely on writing new chapters for a while now, so they have simply been gathering dust in my editing folder. Now that the story is over, I intend to go over each chapter and correct all the typos people found, so that new readers stumbling on the story have a less frustrating experience.
Also, while the story itself is done, I intent to continue writing more worldbuilding articles for the setting of the story as a whole. Ironically, despite starting the story to help with my worldbuilding, I have kind of been ignoring the worldbuilding side of things. That’s kind of sad, so I hope that will change now that the story is done.
>You should publish the story!
I fully intend to look into publishing options, now that the story is done. I’ve been putting this off until Mother of Learning was finished, since it’s bound to be a time-consuming and frustrating task. Since I am almost entirely ignorant of what this will involve, however, I will not make any promises in regards to this.
>Do you intend to continue writing after this?
Of course. I like writing and I have plenty of ideas for new stories after this. I’m not sure if the ideas are any good, but I certainly have no shortage of them. I’m going to have to make some story plans and write up some test chapters, but I’ll be sure to come back with another story.
>Are you going to write a sequel to Mother of Learning?
Maybe. Definitely not any time soon, but I do have some ideas about a possible sequel eventually. My current idea is that it wouldn’t be nearly as long or grand as the original, and would mostly focus on showing the aftermath of the original and what the characters do in their everyday life. A sort of extended epilogue, more slice-of-life than a grand mystery of the original.
Anyway. This is still in very rough stage, and I can’t even guarantee that it’s going to happen for sure. I guess you’ll just have to wait and see about this one.
>What was your inspiration for the story, anyway?
Various Dungeons & Dragons content, the Avernum series of games, Fullmetal Alchemist manga and anime, and time loop fanfiction.
>Anything else you want to say?
Nope. This is it. Thank you for reading and have a nice day.




Chapter 004-B
The Fourth Looper
Hidden in the shadow of a damaged building, Zorian watched Zach fight against a horde of monsters in quiet awe. Regardless of whether it was war trolls, winter wolves, or iron beaks, none of the creatures could get close to Zach. A flash of fire, a barrage of force needles, and they all fell before the boy’s magical might. The only creatures that saw any success against the boy were iron beaks, since they could launch their feathers from a considerable range and were relatively small and maneuverable. Even then, Zach dealt with most feathers by side-stepping the attack or making slight body movements, dodging the feathers with casual ease.
It was unbelievable. The magic Zach was using was leagues better than that of a normal student, which made no sense since it was completely at odds with what Zach displayed in their first two years of classes. Zorian couldn’t claim he knew Zach especially well, but the boy he knew wasn’t subtle or restrained, and didn’t strike him as someone capable of keeping this kind of secret.
And the dodging… Zorian couldn’t imagine how long he would have to practice something like this in order to be able to do it with such ease and confidence. Improbable magic skills could be explained away by great natural talent, perhaps, but this was something else. Zorian was so transfixed by the sight of Zach practically dancing through the hail of feathers like this was all just a giant theater play that he failed to notice one of the winter wolves sneaking up on him.
Zorian jumped back when he sensed danger, but it was already too late. The winter wolf was already very close, and it lunged at him too fast to avoid. The winter wolf tried to clamp its jaws around Zorian’s neck, but since Zorian managed to jump back and instinctively crossed his arms in front of him in a feeble instinctive move to ward off the attack, it didn’t quite succeed. Instead, the wolf’s maw closed around his forearms, ripping skin and tearing flesh.
Zorian screamed, his panicked wail easily heard over the sounds of fighting around them, but he was already unbalanced from his failed dodge and the winter wolf soon slammed into him with its considerable weight and knocked the air out of his lungs, shutting him up.
Zorian fell backwards on his back, and the wolf fell along with him. Thankfully, the beast failed to keep its balance as they fell. It let go of Zorian’s arms and rolled away a short distance away from him, giving Zorian a moment to gather his bearings and attempt to escape.
It wasn’t enough. Zorian’s arms were terribly injured and hurt immensely as he attempted to push himself up, his glasses were missing somewhere, and he had hit his head when he hit the ground. He had just enough time to lift his head before the wolf was already upon him again, ready to finish the job this time.
A blindingly bright bolt of force hit the winter wolf in the flank as it jumped towards Zorian, easily knocking it off-course and slamming it into the wall of a nearby house. Its entire body caved in upon impact, bones and internal organs crushed into paste by the force of the spell.
A web of cracks was created on the wall of the building where the wolf slammed into it. Although it was a silly thought, inappropriate for the severity of the situation, Zorian couldn’t help but imagine Ilsa criticizing Zach for his reckless use of combat magic and causing so much collateral damage.
His arms hurt. His arms hurt a lot and he felt a wave of dizziness and nausea assault him for a moment. Perhaps because of all the bleeding he was doing…?
“Zorian! Damn it, are you all right!?”
Zach quickly ran up to him, killing any creature that sought to bar his way, and helped him get back on his feet. With Zach’s help, they managed to lose the monster horde and found a quiet place for Zorian to calm down and recover.
Zorian winced as he looked at his arms. Winter wolves had powerful jaws, and while his arms weren’t broken or insensate, the wounds were serious. When the wolf lost its grip on Zorian in the fall, its teeth ripped out chunks of his flesh and left his forearms covered in deep gashes that kept bleeding and hurting.
The back of his head also had a painful bump on it, but that was comparatively minor in comparison.
Looking around, Zorian managed to spot his glasses lying on the ground, and was pleased to see they weren’t broken. While he moved to pick them up, Zach was busy rummaging through his belongings for something. The other boy eventually fished out a pair of potions out of a jacket pocket and gave them to Zorian.
“A blood clotting potion, and some kind of healing potion,” Zach explained. “I’m not sure what it’s called, but it should help.”
Zorian visibly winced. Drinking medical potions provided by strangers was usually not a good idea, and Zach’s explanation didn’t exactly soothe Zorian’s fears in this regard. But truthfully, Zorian didn’t doubt for a second that Zach was offering him the real deal. Zach was clearly ridiculously capable in all sorts of way. The thing was… well…
“The price of these… I can’t…” he feebly protested.
“Zorian, are you really going to bleed out here just because you’re too proud to accept an expensive gift?” Zach gave him a strange look.
Zorian didn’t bother to argue with the boy after that. He drank both potions in quick succession, and his arms recovered a little after a few minutes. They were far from fine, but he was no longer bleeding and the pain had dulled to a manageable throb.
“Thank you,” Zorian eventually said. “I would have surely died here without your help. I owe you my life. If there is anything you need in the future-”
“Yeah, yeah,” Zach grumbled, waving him off. “What the hell are you doing here, anyway?”
“Searching for Akoja,” Zorian admitted. “She left the dance a while before the attack and it’s kind of my fault.”
Zach rubbed his face in frustration. “I see. Well, let’s go find Akoja before she ends up even worse than you did. Do you know the way?”
They traveled through the burning streets of the city, leaving a trail of dead invaders behind them. Zach didn’t even try to avoid the monsters, simply plowing through them like an angry god out for vengeance. At one point they were even attacked by a horde of skeletons and an enemy mage, but Zach simply made the earth beneath their feet open up and swallow them. Zorian dutifully kept his mouth shut and never questioned Zach about his seemingly inexhaustible mana reserves or his knowledge of advanced magic that should be beyond his access level and proficiency, content to enjoy the benefits of Zach’s skill and talent. Zach had outright saved his life tonight – he was entitled to his secrets, as far as Zorian was concerned.
Eventually, they found Akoja. She had fled into one of the vacant buildings to escape a pack of winter wolves chasing after her and barricaded herself in one of the rooms on the upper floor.
She had been very, very lucky. Finding a building whose main door had been bashed in by the war trolls, long after those war trolls moved over to other targets, just in time for her to take refuge in there from a pursuing winter wolf pack… well, that whole situation had had the potential to develop very differently. The wounds on his arms throbbed a little, as if resonating with those dark musings, sending pangs of pain down his spine.
He shook his head, banishing the thought of Akoja being torn to shreds by the wolf pack. It didn’t happen and he didn’t want to think about it.
There was no trace of winter wolves around the house at the time Zach and Zorian found the girl, though. The wolves had clearly been inside the house and tried to get to her – the door behind which she hid was covered in scratches from wolf claws and frosted over. However, winter wolves were not really equipped for sieges, and the door was a sturdy thing made from quality oak. The house was very spacious and well-made in general, made by someone with lots of money to spend.
Alas, while the winter wolves were gone, Akoja was not willing to simply trust them on that claim. The winter wolves had clearly moved on to other targets, but Akoja was still fearful and refused to open the door and step outside. It took several minutes of talking to her through the closed door before Zach and Zorian convinced her it was safe to come out and that staying inside until the city guards arrive was not a good plan.
Actually, Zorian was not entirely sure why joining Akoja in her improvised shelter and waiting for things to die down was a bad move at this point. Things were bad out there, but surely the attackers couldn’t beat the entire Eldemar military, right? The royal forces would eventually restore order. They just had to survive until that happened.
However, Zach clearly didn’t agree with that sentiment, and Zorian didn’t dare contradict him. Clearly the other boy knew something Zorian didn’t. He did his best to convince Akoja to come out, and eventually it worked.
They heard the sound of furniture being dragged across the floor. Akoja had dragged virtually the entire contents of the room in front of the door to stop the wolves from getting to her if they managed to break through it, and now it took quite a bit of time and effort to clear the way before she could come out.
Zorian was certain she would blame him for causing her to leave the safety of the dance hall, so he was quite surprised when Akoja immediately latched onto him when she finally opened the door, engulfing him in a strong hug.
Surprised and in pain. This was the worst possible time for someone to squeeze his arms like that.
He screamed in pain involuntarily, causing her to immediately step back in shock.
“Wha…? Zorian, your arms! W-What happened to you!?” Akoja said, sounding horrified.
“It’s…” Zorian hesitated, not quite willing to tell her it’s nothing. She might hug him again if he did. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“I gave him a healing potion,” Zach helpfully added. “He’ll be fine, he’s just being a big baby.”
Zorian gave him an unamused look but didn’t snap at him.
“A winter wolf bit me,” Zorian told Akoja, focusing his attention back to her instead. “It hurts, but I’ll live.”
“T-Those horrible beasts…” Akoja said fearfully, visibly trembling. Seeing the bite wounds on Zorian’s arms seemed to remind her of her own experience with the wolf pack.
“Anyway,” Zach said, clapping his hand obnoxiously to snap Akoja out of her terrified daze, “I know you’re both a little shaken by all this, but it’s best if you continued this conversation back in the shelters.”
“Shelters?” Akoja asked, confused for a second. “Ah, yes! The academy shelters! But we’re so far away... how will we get there without being eaten? I really think it would be safer to just hide here until morning? Surely the owner of the house will understand…”
“Have no fear, the great Zach has a solution,” Zach said with a wide grin, lifting a spell rod of some sort into the air theatrically. Zorian found it interesting, and also more than a little disturbing, that Zach could maintain this kind of attitude in the current situation.
His thoughts were interrupted by Zach thrusting the rod towards them.
“Both of you hold on to this and it will teleport you to the shelters,” Zach said, shaking the rod up and down for emphasis.
“Teleport rod?” Zorian asked suspiciously.
“Yes,” Zach confirmed. “It will teleport anything touching it when it triggers. I’ve set it to a 30 second delay, so both of you should hold on to it before you’re left behind.”
Zorian and Akoja quickly placed a hand on the rod, but when they did, Zach immediately let go of it and stepped back.
“Wait, what about you?” Zorian asked in alarm.
“Yes, what are you doing!?” Akoja loudly protested. “You can’t possibly be planning to stay here? Don’t be an idiot!”
Ah, right. Akoja hadn’t seen Zach fighting the invaders.
“Don’t worry about me. I still have something to do here. I’ll catch up with you in no time,” Zach said, trying to wave her concerns off. He turned around and started to walk out of the house.
“Zach, this isn’t a game! These things are going to kill you!” Akoja protested, following after him. She still clutched the teleport rod in her hand as she did, and Zorian didn’t have much choice but to follow after her if he wanted to hold on to it.
Sadly, Zach ignored her complaints, not even bothering to turn back and look at her as she tried to catch up to him and shove the rod towards him.
“Look, I’m perfectly capable-” Zach began, just as they stepped through the ruined door of the house.
Zorian wasn’t sure what tipped him off, exactly – he just got a vague feeling of dread and knew he had to react immediately. He immediately let go of the teleport rod and slammed his whole body into Zach, pushing him out of the path of an incoming spell. An angry red ray surged through the air in front of them, passing right where Zach’s head was only a few moments ago, and hit the wall behind them. The jagged beam of red light bit deep into the wall, gouging a deep trench in it and shrouding the area in a cloud of fine dust.
“Crap,” Zach said. “He found me. Quick, hold the rod before-“
Zorian turned towards Akoja, only to see her standing empty-handed behind him. When Zorian let go of the rod to save Zach, she was left as the sole person holding it. Unfortunately, she either hadn’t been holding it too tightly or she let go of it in shock, being the rod was currently rolling on the ground beside her.
A moment later, it winked out of existence, having teleported away to the shelters as it was set up to do.
“Damn it, you two,” Zach complained. “Why didn’t you hold on!?”
“You’d be dead, then!” Zorian protested. He wasn’t going to let a person who saved his life and helped him find Akoja die from a stray spell if he could help it. What kind of question was that?
Besides, it was clear Zach was amazingly good combat mage. Just how much trouble… uh…
A sudden gust of air blew the dust away and a gaunt humanoid figure stepped into view. Zorian actually gasped in surprise as he took in the appearance of the thing in front of them. It was a skeleton wreathed in sickly green light. Its bones were black with a strange metallic sheen, as if they were not bones at all, but rather a facsimile of a skeleton made out of some kind of black metal. Encased in gold-decorated armor, with a scepter held tightly in one of its skeletal hands and a crown full of purple gemstones, the creature looked like some long-dead king risen from the dead.
It was a lich. It was a thrice-damned lich! Oh, they were so going to die…
The lich swept its empty eye sockets over them. As Zorian’s eyes met the black pits that once held the lich’s eyes, an uncomfortable feeling washed over him, like the lich was peering into his very soul. After less than a second, the lich lazily shifted its attention to Akoja, who visibly took a step back and made a whining sound upon being scrutinized by the creature.
The lich dismissed Akoja just as quickly as it did Zorian, however, and shifted its attention to Zach instead.
“So…” the lich spoke, its voice resonant with power, “You’re the one that has been killing my minions.”
“Zorian, Ako… you two run away while I deal with this guy,” Zach said, clutching the staff in his hand.
Without waiting for a response, Zach launched a barrage of magic missiles towards the lich, who retaliated with a trio of purple beams as it erected an aegis around itself with a single wave of its bony hand. Two of them were aimed at Zach, but sadly enough the lich saw fit to aim one towards Zorian’s retreating form. While it failed to hit Zorian directly, the beam’s impact with the nearby ground created a sizeable explosion that drove stone shrapnel into his legs. The pain was immense, and Zorian collapsed on the ground in an instant, unable to take a single step further.
Zorian gritted his teeth in pain. The new wounds were horrific, and made his legs almost useless. He tried to drag himself to safety, but with his arms already hurting and weak, he found it impossible to do so.
A spell hit the ground to the left of him a moment after, detonating into a massive explosion. Although the impact was relatively far from him, the force of the blast was strong enough that Zorian could still feel it as it passed over him.
He couldn’t take it anymore. He blacked out.
- break -
When Zorian regained consciousness, not much time had passed. He knew this because he could still hear the sounds of Zach and the lich fighting, he was still surrounded by ruined buildings, and there was Akoja crying over him.
He was no longer in the same spot where he fell. His vision was blurred, but Akoja had clearly dragged him behind some rubble to shield him from the aftershocks of the spell battle.
He took a deep breath and tried to see if she was injured. As far as he could tell, she wasn’t. He didn’t think this was because she was better at dodging than him, so that probably meant the lich hadn’t even bothered to target her in his initial spell barrage.
Why did the lich attack Zorian, but not Akoja? So unfair. Wait, was it because he had pushed Zach out of the way of that disintegration ray? That move saved Zach’s life and Zorian wasn’t sorry he’d done it, but it probably made him look like a bigger threat than he actually was.
“Please don’t die…” Akoja said quietly. “Please don’t die. We’re going to live through this. Please don’t die.”
Zorian didn’t know if she was talking to him or to herself, but he did know that she was being very stupid and he couldn’t stand it.
“You should go,” he suddenly told her. He was hurting all over, but he could still speak just fine.
“Zorian!” She said happily. She then winced, realizing she was being too loud and might be attracting attention to their hiding spot. “Thank the gods, I thought-”
“Seriously, you need to go,” Zorian told her. “Zach isn’t going to win this. He’s just buying time for us to run away, so why haven’t you done so already?”
“I… I’m not strong enough to carry you,” she protested. “It was hard to drag you over here, I don’t think I could-”
“Forget about me,” Zorian told her. “What am I to you, anyway? We’re just classmates. I ruined your evening and caused all of this anyway. I’m not going anywhere like this, but you can still make it out alive. Just go.”
She said nothing, simply shaking her head. She didn’t move.
Before he could say anything else, the sounds of fighting stopped. Zach and the lich were talking about something, but Zorian was too far away to understand what they were saying. It didn’t help that his ears were still ringing slightly from the explosion that made him black out.
Suddenly, Zorian completely lost control of his body. Some kind of alien force paralyzed him and lifted him roughly into the air. Beside him, he could see Akoja being likewise lifted into the air.
A moment later they were both hurtling through the air. After a brief but disorienting flight, Zorian slammed painfully into Zach, and then Akoja slammed into both of them. The three of them ended up in a confused pile, hurting all over but very much alive.
“It doesn’t matter if your soul can be reincarnated elsewhere if someone mutilates it beyond recognition before it gets there,” a voice suddenly said. Zorian couldn’t see anything, as he was currently squeezed between Zach and Akoja, but he recognized the voice as that of the lich. “After all, the soul may be immortal, but no one said it cannot be altered or added to.”
Zorian could hear the lich chanting in some strange language that definitely wasn’t standard Ikosian used in traditional invocations, but any curiosity about this was washed away by a wave of pain and unidentifiable wrongness that suddenly slammed into him. He opened his mouth to scream but then his world suddenly erupted into bright light before going completely black.
- break -
Zorian’s eyes abruptly shot open as sharp pain erupted from his stomach. His whole body convulsed, buckling against the object that fell on him, and suddenly he was wide awake, not a trace of drowsiness in his mind.
“Good morning, brother!” an annoyingly cheerful voice sounded right on top of him. “Morning, morning, MORNING!!!”
- break -
By the time Zorian arrived to Cyoria, it was becoming impossible to deny what had happened. Somehow, he had gone back in time and was currently relieving the month leading up to the summer festival. The whole thing was crazy and unbelievable, but there was no way this was an illusion.
The whole thing was most likely related to Zach. Thus, Zorian was both dreading and looking forward to meeting Zach on the first day of classes. He didn’t know how to confront his classmate about what was happening, but he had to try.
However, there was a complication. When he approached his classroom, he found Akoja standing there uneasily with her clipboard clutched tightly in front of her. The moment she saw him, her eyes widened and she seized him by the arm before dragging him off to an empty corridor.
“Zorian, please tell me I’m not crazy,” She asked him urgently.
“Crazy?” he asked.
“The summer festival. The burning city. The lich. The… everything,” she said, growing every more agitated as she went on. “We lived through this entire month already, and no one but me seems to remember it. But you remember, right? R-right? I mean, you were there when the lich…”
Zorian rubbed his forehead. Truthfully, this was not entirely unexpected. Zorian already suspected that last spell the lich had cast on the three of them had sometimes caused this. It made sense that Akoja got caught up in the whole thing too, since she was also a target.
Akoja seemed to wilt at his silence, taking it as a bad sign, so he decided to reassure her.
“Yeah,” he admitted. “Yeah, I remember.”
“You do? Thank the gods. I knew I wasn’t crazy,” Akoja said, taking a deep breath. “I don’t know what I’d do if you also couldn’t remember.”
“Is Zach here?” Zorian asked.
“No,” she shook her head fiercely. “I also want to talk to him.”
An uncomfortable silence followed for a few seconds.
“Anyway, you need to help me talk to Ilsa when she gets here,” Akoja suddenly said. “With both of us saying the same thing, she is going to have to-”
“Err, Ako? I don’t think random telling people about this is a good idea,” Zorian said hurriedly. “All of this sounds completely crazy, and if we try to prove it, we could end up imprisoned by the government.”
“You can’t be serious,” Akoja told him. “Zorian, this is far too important to keep to ourselves. Especially for such a selfish and paranoid reason – so what if we’re imprisoned and questioned, we’ve got nothing to hide.”
Zorian swallowed heavily, suddenly getting fearful of Akoja. Although a part of him was glad he wasn’t alone in this, he found Akoja’s reasoning highly disturbing.
“Ako, please, listen to me…” he said hesitantly. “I’m not saying we do nothing while the city burns, but we need to do this carefully. Can you at least wait for a few days until we have a better picture of what’s happening?”
“B-besides…” Akoja said, refusing to look him in the eye. “I already told Ilsa and some other people. They didn’t believe me, which is why I was so glad you remember things. You can back me up and people can stop saying I’m doing it all for attention.”
Zorian’s unease ratcheted up.
“You… already told Ilsa?” Zorian said, more as a shocked statement to himself rather than a serious question. “And others? What others?”
“My parents,” Akoja said, biting her lip. “A bunch of Cyoria policemen when I visited one of the local stations. Some of our classmates.”
Zorian took off his glasses with one hand and started massaging his face with the other.
He really wished someone else got caught up in that spell…



Chapter 001-B
Abyss of Time
Zorian’s eyes abruptly shot open as sharp pain erupted from his stomach. His whole body convulsed, buckling against the object that fell on him, and suddenly he was wide awake, not a trace of drowsiness in his mind.
“Good morning, brother!” an annoyingly cheerful voice sounded right on top of him. “Morning, morning, MORNING!!!”
For a moment, Zorian was confused about what was happening. However, that moment was very brief. After all, Zorian had gone through this experience many, many times.
He sent a quick telepathic command to Kirielle and she immediately slumped unconscious across his chest. He pushed her off of him and rose to his feet in a single fluid motion, and then proceeded to walk out of the door without bothering to get dressed or put on his glasses.
His hands were going through a variety of gestures even as he started descending down the stairs. The first restart was always the most annoying one. His current body and soul were deeply flawed, incapable of supporting the full breadth of his magical skills and thought. His first priority after every full restart was to reactivate his mental enhancements.
“Zorian, what are you-”
Mother couldn’t even finish her question before she also slumped unconscious. Zorian never even glanced in her direction, opting to simply keep descending down the stairs in his pajamas while casting spells. His thoughts and awareness shifted and expanded with every passing second as the mental enhancements snapped into place – automated calculation spells constantly informed him about distances and measurements in his environment, sensory filters blocked out distractions and drew his attention to details he might have otherwise missed, and irrelevant thoughts were severed and suppressed.
After a while, he stopped. He wasn’t done modifying things, but there was only so much he could do right now. It would take many, many restarts before he truly restored his peak capabilities.
But no matter – he had time. A vast, possibly infinite amount of time.
He created a simulacrum. The process was simple and quick. The moment the copy had popped into existence, Zorian’s mind reached out to it and started attaching it into his overself. This he had learned from the cephalic rats a long time ago, and then refined further with examples from other collective organisms. The copy didn’t resist the integration and remained silent throughout the whole process.
Once both of their minds were connected into a unified whole, they turned around in opposite directions and started salvaging everything of value from the house. Daimen’s old room was particularly important. It still contained a number of valuable materials and magic items. Zorian and his simulacrums gathered everything that was useful and piled them up in the kitchen to be processed and disassembled for crafting materials.
If he wanted to maintain the overself with his simulacrum over great distances, he needed a way for them to remain in contact. Once he would have been forced to maintain a network of permanent gates and telepathic relays to achieve that. But that was a long time ago, and he now had more convenient and inconspicuous methods available. Mostly he just used a micro-gate stabilized inside a small icosahedron as his method of contact. They were small enough to be turned into amulets and key chains, allowing him and his simulacrums to carry them on their person at all times.
Zorian and his simulacrum quickly made a pair of gate amulets. The materials they were working with weren’t good, so the end product was unstable. The micro-gates contained within the icosahedrons would destabilize within eight hours or so, but that was enough for Zorian’s purposes.
Each of them claimed one of the amulets and then silently got up from the table. The simulacrum telekinetically picked up Mother from where she was slumped on the floor and took her to her room. As for Zorian, he waved his hand once, turning the leftover scrap from their crafting into fine dust. He then waved his other hand, and blowing the dust away and straight into a nearby trashcan.
He then walked over to the front door and opened it. Ilsa, who was just about to knock on the door, stared at him in surprise.
Zorian immediately broke into her mind, too subtly for her to notice, and started monitoring her thoughts. He couldn’t help it – it was practically instinct at this point. Unless people specifically took steps to stop it, Zorian automatically spied on the thoughts of everyone around him, and he was good enough at it that people rarely noticed.
Ilsa’s mind told him he was still in his pajamas, and that it was kind of inappropriate to greet your teacher dressed like that. Oops.
He quickly made a handful of gestures and then pressed his palms against his chest. A wave of light washed over his body, restructuring the fabric of the pajamas into more appropriate clothes.
“What? How did you do that?” Ilsa asked, shocked.
Instead of answering, Zorian deleted the last few seconds of memory from her mind. She suddenly frowned, trying to make sense of her sudden mental stutter.
“Come in, Miss Zileti,” Zorian invited politely.
“Of course,” she nodded, stepping inside.
Zorian felt his simulacrum disappear from the house, having teleported away after tucking Mother under the covers of her bed.
“Are you alone in the house?” Ilsa asked, frowning.
“No, but Mother didn’t feel well this morning and went back to sleep,” Zorian told her.
“I see. I hope she gets better soon,” Ilsa said politely. She glanced curiously at the icosahedron hanging from his neck but didn’t say anything about it. “We shouldn’t disturb her then. I will erect a privacy ward so we can talk without bothering her with noise. Where do you want to talk?”
“We can talk in the kitchen,” Zorian said, pointing at the table behind him. “By the way, do you mind if I ask you a strange question?”
“It really depends on what the question is,” Ilsa said with a small smile.
“What would you do if you had an endless amount of time and no one to share it with?” Zorian asked her seriously, sitting down next to the kitchen table. He noticed he missed some of the dust when he was cleaning up and simply pushed it onto the floor.
“What?” Ilsa laughed. “What do you mean, Mister Kazinski? Are you asking me what I’d do if I was immortal?”
“Yes. You have an eternity to hone your skills, research mysteries, and enjoy material possessions. However, all the people are gone. They have been replaced by shadows,” Zorian explained, staring directly into her eyes as he spoke. “What would you do?”
Ilsa sighed at him.
“Mister Kazinski,” she began. “Everyone feels a little disconnected from the world around them at your age. I know you probably think no one can understand you, but we’ve all been through this at one point in our lives. Now please… let’s just get the formal stuff out of the way, and we can discuss philosophical musings afterwards.”
“Sure,” Zorian agreed easily. He knew she would never bring this topic up again, today or in the future, but no frustration or disappointment arose in his mind.
Truthfully, it was pretty pointless of him to bring up the topic to begin with. He already knew what the response would be, because he had tried this at least twelve times before. It was just something he did out of habit.
A small, nearly forgotten part of him felt he was turning into something of a shadow himself.
One of the mental adjustments he had done earlier quickly crushed that thought as pointless defeatism, and he continued pretending he was paying attention to Ilsa’s explanations, his thoughts turning tranquil once more.
- break -
While Zorian’s main body was dealing with Ilsa, his simulacrum body was walking up a small hill in rural Eldemar. Both the original and the simulacrum were still aware of each other, maintaining contact through the gate amulets hanging from their neck. There would be no need for reports or memory packet exchanges after this – his greater self was aware of everything the simulacrum was doing, and was committing his actions to memory as if they were his own.
Eventually, he reached the top of the hill. There was a Bakora gate standing there, surrounded by a remains of small research camp. Zorian ignored the camp remains, as they contained nothing useful, and placed his hand on the bars of the icosahedron.
He still didn’t understand how the Bakora gate network worked. Despite the multiple greater restarts he had spent studying gate magic, he couldn’t produce anything remotely similar to what was in front of him. He really wondered who the Bakora were.
Still, he hadn’t come here to research the Bakora gate, but to use it. As such, he concentrated and started casting a spell to contact the gate spirit – a complicated variant of the manifold resonance spell that allowed him to connect to the normally isolated entity.
Like everything else about the Bakora gates, the gate spirit was strange. Zorian wasn’t sure what it was, but it definitely wasn’t a spirit from the spiritual planes bound into an object. It did not seem to resent its duty, it had infinite patience, and generally acted as a machine more than a living being. Some kind of soul mechanism, maybe? Was it even possible to assemble a machine out of soul material? He didn’t understand souls enough, but his gut feeling was yes. For all he knew, souls could be spiritual machines to begin with.
In any case, Zorian had gotten pretty good at learning how to interact with the gate spirits. He ordered the gate spirit to open a passage to a gate in Koth, and it immediately complied.
The moment he stepped through the gate, he began teleporting towards the forgotten sinkhole where the imperial orb was located.
- break -
Zorian stepped off the train, glanced at the Cyoria’s main train station for a bit to orient himself, and then started walking in a random direction.
He had no real destination. Much like there was no real point for him to ride a train to Cyoria, there was no real point to him physically walking anywhere. The gate amulet he was wearing didn’t play well with teleportation magic, but he was so good at dimensionalism at this point that he could teleport freely anyway. However, what would be the point? He wasn’t in a hurry to get anywhere.
There was no end to this.
The train station was packed with people, and a constant stream of new minds kept entering and leaving his perception as he walked. He invaded their mind automatically as they entered his telepathic radius, some of his mental enhancements automatically assessing their thoughts for threats and interesting tidbits. It all blended together after a while, in all honesty. Just shadow people thinking shadow thoughts, over and over again.
Once upon a time, Zorian had moral compunctions about invading people’s minds without permission. He tried to limit himself and be mindful of common courtesy and ethics. A part of him felt nostalgic for those times, wanting to return to his younger, more innocent self. Alas, that was impossible. A mind, once expanded, cannot return to its simpler origins. Zorian had even invaded the minds of Kirielle and his parents, searching through their deepest memories. What sanctity could the surface thoughts of strangers possibly hold for him?
As he walked, he began cycling through a variety of gestures, mumbling chants under his breath. People around him gave him strange looks, but didn’t say anything – they just put some distance between him and themselves and went on their way. He was interacting with his marker, fixing some of the damage it suffered when it was transplanted from Zach to Zorian, while simultaneously editing some parts of it to be more to his liking.
There was a very real danger of rendering the marker inoperable when doing this kind of tampering, but Zorian hardly cared about that. Even if he was erased out of this particular time loop, he would just wake up back in Cirin and start things all over again. And considering this was the very first loop, this was arguably the best time to edit the marker like this.
He didn’t bother going to the academy to sleep in his room. A some point the rain began to fall, but the raindrops couldn’t touch him. They swerved out of his way as they fell near him, as if afraid of touching him. He kept walking through the entire night, tinkering with his marker and occasionally forming animal shapes from the raindrops around him. Eventually he made it to the outskirts of Cyoria, where he was stopped by guards.
They didn’t find him suspicious, they were just disturbed that a young teenager was out in the pouring rain, in the dead of the night, planning to leave the city. They kept asking him if he was alright and insisting they would take him home. Zorian rarely got upset about anything these days, but somehow these two guards really managed to get under his skin with their attempt to help. He mind-wiped them and left the city behind him.
He didn’t need concern from a couple of shadows.
Eventually he found himself in front of a small mansion not that far from the city. This was where Tesen Zveri, Zach’s official caretaker, kept Zach’s unconscious body while he was incapacitated by the lich’s spell in the first few restarts of every time loop. Apparently Tesen was afraid people would think he was responsible for Zach’s condition, as there was no obvious perpetrator and Tesen had a pretty good motive to get rid of Zach as far as most people were concerned, so every time he found Zach unconscious due to soul damage, he had him moved to this secret location while he investigated the thing and decided what to do. The investigation into Zach’s whereabouts was a total sham, since Tesen knew exactly where Zach was located.
The place had guards. Eight of them, in fact. However, they were picked more for their loyalty and willingness to not ask questions, rather than skill. The mansion wasn’t especially well-warded, either. Tesen was mostly relying on obscurity to keep this place secret. Zorian had no problems breaking into the mansion, after which he quickly disabled all the guards stationed there.
Once the place was secure, he went through each of the guards one by one, editing their memories, placing mental compulsions, and otherwise changing their minds into something more useful for his purposes. Once they woke up, he ordered them to go out in the city and buy a bunch of alchemical materials using their own money and bring them back to the mansion. They didn’t like this one bit, especially since Zorian instructed them to use up their savings and pawn off anything valuable from their own homes in order to get more cash, but then again, they didn’t have much of a choice.
Once they were gone, he dragged a chair from the kitchen so he could sit next to Zach’s bed. His fellow time traveler was unconscious from the aftereffects of soul damage, and would remain so for at least seven or eight more restarts. It was actually a bit unpredictable when Zach would wake up from his coma, Zorian had found.
After scanning the boy for a few minutes, Zorian created two more simulacrums and they all got to work speeding up Zach’s recovery.
Healing soul damage quickly was impossible. Even after spending centuries researching the topic, the best he could do was accelerate the soul’s natural recovery process through potions. He would have to wait for the guards to return before he could make those.
However, the damage done to Zach’s soul was not too extensive. He was unconscious mostly because his damaged soul had damaged his body when it had been shoved into his body at the start of the restart, and now he was too injured to wake up. The damage caused by soul damage was subtle and hard to deal with, but Zorian was an expert in medical magic with centuries of experience. With him and his two simulacrums working on the issue, it only took half an hour to fix Zach up.
He could have woken the boy up at the point, but didn’t. He wanted to give Zach soul recover potions the moment he regained consciousness, and those weren’t even made yet. Instead he went the most spacious room in the mansion and started creating a work space for himself, consuming the fancy furniture in order to make some sturdy tables and throwing out everything else that was taking up space.
Halfway through this process, another simulacrum teleported into the room. It was the simulacrum he had sent to Koth to retrieve the imperial orb. The simulacrum wordlessly dumped an entire bag worth of contents on a nearby table Zorian created. The imperial orb was there, as was a bunch of other divine artifacts the simulacrum had stolen from various places as it made its way back. There was a small bronze pyramid there, a black knife with a wavy pattern on the blade, a gem-encrusted box, and a small figurine of a goat made out of white marble. All of these were brought here for one simple purpose: to be taken apart for raw ingredients.
Divine magic, much like the inner mechanics of souls and the truth behind Bakora gates, were still a major mystery for Zorian. He couldn’t cast divine magic, but he could detect it. With some effort and a lot of trial and error, he was able to map out the internal workings of some divine artifacts and figure out how to crudely modify them. It involved breaking the artifacts and their corresponding divine magic mechanisms, and then combining some of the pieces into a new design.
It was akin to taking apart a train in order to make a really good horse-drawn chariot. A train engineer would be horrified at waste, but if you had no other way to get yourself a chariot that good, it might make sense to do so.
The chariot Zorian wanted was the memory bank function of the imperial orb. It allowed the user of the orb to store a basically infinite amount of information, and that information persisted across restarts. Although it was a function of the orb, the memory bank was fairly self-contained in its function, and it was possible to rip it out of the orb and attach it to something else. Your soul, for instance. For anyone else, that would be a pointless waste of a perfectly good divine artifact, but for Zorian, it was priceless.
The other divine artifacts were just there to make this transfer possible. The knife was needed because it could damage other divine artifacts. The bronze pyramid and the marble goat contained pieces of divine magic that he needed to add to the memory bank in order to let it stick to his soul better. The box could hold and stabilize the pieces of divine magic inside it, giving Zorian enough time to cobble his makeshift divine magic out of the divine artifact remains.
Before he could start the crafting process, however, he sensed Zach getting out of bed and making his way towards him.
Huh. Zorian didn’t expect him to get up for another three hours, at least.
He simulacrums quickly left the house to go gather some more materials needed to speed up Zach’s recovery, while Zorian himself remained in the work room, making further preparations for the transfer of the memory bank.
Zach stumbled into the work room before stopping to check up the situation. He looked surprised to see Zorian there, and for a while he said nothing, slowly taking in the sights and rubbing his eyes to lessen the raging headache he was no doubt having.
“Zorian?” Zach asked uncertainly.
“Yes,” Zorian confirmed. “It’s certainly me.”
“What… where are we?” Zach asked, his eyes taking in the room around him again.
“A countryside mansion on the outskirts of Cyoria. When Tesen found you unconscious from soul damage, he hid you away here so he could pretend you went missing,” Zorian explained. He knew this explanation would mean nothing to Zach, and would only create more questions, but it was impossible to explain what happened in a truly concise manner.
And besides, it was funnier to explain things this way.
“I… see…” Zach said slowly. “Do you mind if I take a seat? My head won’t stop spinning.”
“Help yourself,” Zorian told him, gesturing to the chair that had been occupied by one of his simulacrums not too long ago. Zorian himself barely glanced at Zach, opting to instead flip the bronze pyramid in one hand while holding the black knife in the other. He was wondering where to make the cut when the moment came. Even now, messing with divine magic like this was full of uncertainties, and he couldn’t guarantee he would be successful. “I sent the guard to get me some materials for soul recovery potions, so don’t be alarmed when they start coming back.”
Zach gave him a strange look.
“Soul recovery potions… you can make those?” Zach asked slowly.
“The time loop has taught me many things,” Zorian replied casually.
“You know about the t- ow.” Zach jumped to his feet in shock, then winced as his head protested the sudden movement. “Ow. Damn it, what did that pile of bones do to me? I feel terrible.”
“Soul damage is no joke,” Zorian told him. “I’m afraid it will be several restarts before you fully recover.”
“You do!” Zach exclaimed excitedly. “You do remember what happened before! Man, that is…” he suddenly halted, frowning. “But wait. Since when did you become aware of the restarts? You sound so casual about it, and you’re making complicated potions and… is this entire room made with alteration?”
“Yes,” Zorian confirmed, putting knife and the bronze pyramid aside for now so he could focus fully on Zach. “I restructured all the luxury furniture into something more useful. Tesen will no doubt be furious when he finds out, but then again… it’s not like either of us care about that man, right?”
“That… that isn’t the skill of Zorian I know,” Zach said, sounding horrified. “How long was I out? Don’t tell me I was sleeping for years!?”
“No, just a few months,” Zorian assured him.
“Oh, thank the gods,” Zach said, exhaling heavily.
Zorian couldn’t help it. He laughed.
“What?” Zach demanded.
“Why are you so relieved? Even if you were incapacitated for years, why does it matter? There is no getting off this wild ride. A few years here and there are irrelevant. You and me are here forever,” Zorian told him, mirth obvious in his voice.
“Don’t say that!” Zach told him. “There is a way out of here, I know it. We just…” He suddenly hesitated.
“We just have to stop the invasion?” Zorian finished for him, his smile widening.
The two of them kept staring at each other for a few seconds. Zach’s face was full of confusion, whereas Zorian initially looked cheerful but then gradually relaxed into an unreadable expression.
“I’m glad you’re here with me,” Zorian told him honestly, turning away from him in order to start carving glyphs into the surface of a nearby wooden board. “You, Jornak, and Quatach-Ichl are the only people I can truly talk to, and Jornak is honestly crazier than me in some ways.”
Which was quite an achievement, in Zorian’s opinion. Jornak had only been looking for a fraction of the time Zorian was. How did he get so bad in less than a hundred years?
He really wished Quatach-Ichl was also a looper. The ancient lich was a brutal opponent, but he was also surprisingly nice and insightful once you got to know him.
“I don’t understand,” Zach complained. “What the hell happened to you, Zorian?”
“It’s nothing,” Zorian tried to wave him off. He continued to carve glyphs, his mind constantly generating complicated spell formula blueprints in his head and supplying his with ideas. He rarely bothered with fixed designs anymore, preferring to adopt designs on the fly based on available materials and current needs. “Just relentless weathering of time, as our dear angelic friends would say. I’ve been doing this for way too long.”
“You said I was only out for a few months,” Zach said, frowning. “Stop being deliberately mysterious and start explaining things or I’ll punch you in the face. Don’t think a simple headache will stop me.”
“There is a second-order time loop,” Zorian told him bluntly. “Whenever we manage to escape the time loop, we are simply flung back at the beginning of the time loop. Well, the beginning of the time loop for me. Unlike this time loop, the second-order time loop seems centered on me instead.”
“What? But… I don’t remember…” Zach trained off. “Zorian, stop carving those stupid glyphs for a second and look at me when I’m talking to you! Are you saying there are parts of the time loop your remember, but I don’t?”
Zorian halted his work for a second, and then sighed. He threw the knife aside and looked at Zach again.
“I know you understand what I’m telling you, you just don’t want to accept it,” Zorian told him. “We lived through this entire time loop. We escaped. When the month was done, we were back here again. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.”
“Why don’t I remember then?” Zach demanded.
“People need to escape the current time loop cycle in order to retain their soul and memories in the next one,” Zorian told him.
Unless those people are Zorian. Zorian would still end up flung back to the start of time loop, even if he refused to leave the time loop or flat out got ejected from it. He had completely erased his own marker multiple times, and it didn’t help.
“Anyway, since you didn’t exit the time loop, your memories didn’t transfer over to this cycle,” Zorian continued. “To you, this version of the time loop is everything. As for me, I have lived through this a great many times.” His eyes glazed as select few memories came flooding back. “A great… many times.”
“What happened to me?” Zach asked in surprise. “I mean, I’m not saying I’m invincible or anything but it’s still… I don’t know, I just don’t think I would lose, okay?”
“You didn’t lose,” Zorian told him. “You just didn’t want to do this anymore. It was your twelfth time loop and you were sick of it all.”
There was a second of silence as Zach silently processed that.
“Hey… you aren’t seriously suggesting I just gave up?” Zach demanded.
Zorian was silent for a few seconds, thinking about something. Eventually, he released a small sigh.
“At the end, your old self made me promise I would keep all this this secret from you. That I would let you experience the time loop ‘normally’ without this pointless burden,” Zorian told him. “As you can see, I am a liar and a cheat, and I made a mockery out of that promise immediately. In fact, I never intended to honor that promise to begin with.”
“That’s such a stupid thing to demand of someone!” Zach exclaimed. “I don’t know anything about this ‘old self’ of mine, and to be honest I’m still leaning towards you playing some kind of trick on me. But assuming this is all true… I’m glad you broke it. I wouldn’t have honored that promise if I was in your place, either.”
Zorian said nothing.
“We’re in this together, you hear me?” Zach assured him. “You and me are going to get to the bottom of this, no matter how long it takes. I don’t know about my previous self’s reasons, but I’m never going to quit on you.”
Zorian smiled at him sadly.
That was what the old Zach had told him too.









Chapter 055-B
Predator
Zorian’s eyes abruptly shot open as sharp pain erupted from his stomach. His whole body convulsed, buckling against the object that fell on him, and suddenly he was wide awake, not a trace of drowsiness in his mind.
He reacted instantly, his body twisting and moving on its own with supernatural fluidity and precision. The heavy object that fell on him was bounced back into the air with a surprised squeal while Zorian simultaneously rolled off the bed. He landed on his feet and smoothly righted himself into a standing position, looking down at the intruder with a stony expression.
“Um,” Kirielle fumbled, sprawled on his bed in an awkward position and probably trying to comprehend what just happened. “Good morning, brother?”
“Good morning, Kiri,” Zorian told her politely. He wasn’t actually angry at her for waking him up like that. His reaction was simply instinctive.
He then continued to stare at her silently.
“Um,” Kirielle said, uncomfortably. “Mom said to wake you up.”
“That is good,” Zorian told her. “As you can see, I am very awake.”
He continued to stare.
Kirielle stared back at him for a second before righting herself into a sitting position on the edge of the bed. She gave him a big grin as she started swinging her legs back and forth.
“So…” she began excitedly, “are you excited?”
“About what? Going back to the academy?” Zorian asked her blandly.”
“Yeah!”
“Of course I am,” Zorian confirmed. “Do you want to come with me to Cyoria?”
Kirielle’s legs froze mid swing and her eyes widened slightly. She stared at him uncertainly for a full second.
He stared back at her, silent and still, not elaborating anything.
“R-Really?” she asked, hope and disbelief radiating off of her. “Why would-”
“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Yes or no?” Zorian prompted.
He knew his current approach was extremely crude and uncharacteristic for him, but he was no longer the same person he once was and he preferred to tackle problems head-on if he could help it. And he knew that Kirielle would ultimately not look too deeply into his reasons, due to plenty of previous experience.
“Yes! Definitely yes!” Kirielle said loudly. Then she frowned. “I’m just… how did you even know? Did you eavesdrop on me and Mother or something?”
“You of all people have no right to judge others for eavesdropping,” Zorian told her. Let her draw her own conclusions from his misleading words.
“What? What do you mean-”
He turned around and left the room to use the bathroom before she could finish her response.
- break -
Zorian stared at the bowl of porridge in front of him, an unhappy frown on his face. It was already cold, and porridge hadn’t been something he liked very much even before the restart, but that wasn’t why he was hesitating. Ever since his change, he found his tastes in food to be vastly different than they had been in the past.
He didn’t like dead food like this. He longed for something living. Something he could personally kill and fink his teeth into. Something vibrant in life and magic, that glowed to his new senses and made him hungry…
“Zorian…” his mother asked slowly, studying his face intently, “is there something wrong with the porridge I made you?”
If this was old Zorian, he would have sighed here, probably. A big, dramatic sigh. He used to be very fond of those. Alas, his new instincts were to stand completely still and silent most of the time. He knew it tended to disturb people, but it was hard to resist.
“There is nothing wrong,” Zorian eventually told her after a second of silence. Eating fresh prey raw was not healthy for human beings anyway, regardless of his new cravings. “I’m just not feeling hungry at the moment.”
He should count himself lucky that humans didn’t register as prey.
Not innately magical enough.
“Kirielle tells me that you offered to take her with you to Cyoria,” Mother remarked.
“I did,” Zorian confirmed. He pushed the porridge bowl to the side, ignoring the slight frown on Mother’s face as he did so. “She wants to go, I want to take her. Simple to resolve.”
“She can be quite the handful, you know?” Mother remarked.
“Mom!” Kirielle protested from the other room. She had been ‘stealthily’ eavesdropping on the entire conversation all this time, of course.
Zorian didn’t say anything. He simply turned his head and gave mother a long, blank look.
Mother waited for a few seconds, apparently expecting him to say something, before raising her eyebrows at him.
“Zorian, are you alright? You’re acting quite strangely today,” Mother told him. She sounded genuinely worried.
“I am fine,” Zorian said. He just hadn’t thought her comment merited a response. “Just lost in thought.”
She sighed. “You really need stop daydreaming so much and come down to earth a little. Especially since you’ll be taking care of your little sister from now on, too. When I was your age I…”
He tuned her out, pretending to listen in silence until he felt Ilsa arrive not far from their home.
And he really did feel her. Even though she teleported some distance from the house itself, her magical entrance was like a miniature beacon of magic to his senses. His new senses were incredibly sharp and discerning, and Zorian had enough experience with different types of magic to immediately recognize a teleportation even when it occurred in his general vicinity.
It never occurred to him until now, but why was Ilsa even able to teleport to Cirin so easily? And not far from their house, too. That meant she had been here before in the past, didn’t it?
Probably Daimen related.
“Zorian, are you even listening to me?” Mother suddenly demanded.
“Someone is coming,” Zorian simply coming.
“What do you-”
There was a knock on the door.
“See?” Zorian told her. “It’s probably someone from the Academy. I’ll go open the door.”
He knew he was acting very suspiciously, but he didn’t care. He had done this several times before, and he knew it would all work out in the end.
- break -
Zorian walked the streets of Cyoria with Kirielle skipping happily beside him. Rain was pouring, but thanks to a transparent barrier of force Zorian had erected around them, they were mostly dry. ‘Mostly’, because Kirielle insisted on periodically testing the barrier by sticking her hands and feet outside it, spraying water onto Zorian in the process. Sometimes unintentionally, and sometimes very clearly intentionally.
He didn’t react either way. It was just water. It couldn’t hurt him in any way. Even most bullets couldn’t hurt him now, nevermind some rain.
“Zorian, are you sure you’re alright?” Kirielle suddenly asked him. “You’ve been quiet and weird all day. What are you worried about? Are you secretly doing badly at your school?”
“I don’t think it’s possible for me to keep something like that a secret from Father and Mother, considering what’s going on with Fortov,” said Zorian shaking his head. “When they went to talk to the Academy about our older brother’s failures, they would have surely inquired about me as well, don’t you think?”
“Oh yeah,” she agreed. “But then, what’s up?”
“I’m just thinking,” he told her. “I have lots of things on my mind right now.”
“Like what?” Kirielle challenged.
Like being trapped in a steadily decaying copy of the real world? Struggling to stay sane in an endlessly repeating existence? Trying to come to terms with his new instincts and urges and wondering how much of him was really Zorian at this point?
But no, he shouldn’t say that. Despite his newfound fondness for bluntness and direct approach, he didn’t want to hurt Kirielle. Unlike many other people she would likely accept the truth of the situation if he insisted it was true, but what would that accomplish? She couldn’t help him, and would only worry needlessly.
His other self had no special fondness for the concept of siblings, but he was still Zorian, and Zorian cared for his little sister.
He small part of him wondered for how long that would stay true. But surely… surely there was a limit to how much he could change? Yes, there was a wide gulf between what Zorian was before and after the transformation, but wasn’t the same true of Zorian before and after the time loop? His changes made sense.
No matter what, he was still a person, and not a mindless beast.
“I’m just wondering what to do with myself once I graduate,” Zorian told her vaguely. “I thought I wanted to be a magic item crafter when I was done with the academy, but that doesn’t look that appealing anymore. So I am a bit lost.”
It wasn’t even a lie. Zorian was a bit lost about what to do with himself once he got out of the time loop. But then again, this was true for the old Zorian as well. So it wasn’t like the transformation changed much in this regard.
Kirielle didn’t seem to think much about his answer, but she didn’t press him. They kept walking towards Imaya’s place, rain pouring onto his protective rain dome.
The city glowed to his senses, a riot of colors and sensations. Not literally, of course. Rather, his composite magical sense was picking up signals from various ward schemes used by building around them, weaving them into an illusory web of sensations that his mind automatically overlayed on top of what his eyes were telling him. Cyoria was rather unique in this regard, since every second house seemed to have at least rudimentary warding scheme protecting the place – a luxury most places couldn’t afford.
Zorian liked magic. He always did, but his other half amplified this fondness several-fold. A place this awash in magic, crisscrossed by complex magical signatures like this, was instinctually and viscerally pleasing. A good place to set up a home. A good hunting ground.
His thoughts suddenly turned, as they often did these days, to food. Something living and struggling. A worthy hunt he could sink his fangs into and drink deeply from until he had his fill…
Maybe he should have eaten that porridge before leaving Cirin, despite his distaste. He really was getting kind of hungry here.
- break -
After he and Kirielle settled down a little at Imaya’s place, he left the house to seek out Zach. His fellow time traveler was not all that eager to hang out with him these days – not that Zorian blamed him much – but they still had a common enemy and goal to work towards.
He found Zach drinking alcohol in some outdoor bar on the outskirts of Cyoria. He wordlessly approached Zach and sat down at the same table.
He then silently stared at the other boy, not moving or even twitching, waiting for Zach to reach. He knew the other boy noticed him long before he approached.
Zach gave him a strange, pitying look before downing his entire mug in one gulp and smacking his lips a few times. He then twiddled his thumbs for a few seconds.
Zorian just continued staring until Zach lost his patience.
“Are you really just going to stare at me like that until I say something?” Zach soon snapped. “Gods, Zorian. I really wish I had stopped you when you set up that shifter ritual. What the hell were we thinking?”
“I’m sorry this bothers you so much, Zach. But I don’t want to go back to the way I used to be,” Zorian told him, not a hint of anger or annoyance in his voice. “There are some issues, but I’m better like this.”
“There are some issues, he says,” Zach muttered. “Not that you could turn back the clock and undue the ritual, even if you wanted to.”
“True,” Zorian agreed. He and his other self were one now – two halves of the same soul. He wasn’t a giant salamander, that he could be sliced into two halves and have one or both halves still live.
“Why did you even go for it?” Zach asked. Pleaded, maybe? He looked tired. “Looking back at it, it’s so unlike you. You’re a paranoid jerk, and you always overthink everything. It’s the most annoying, and most praiseworthy part of you. You… you must have known.”
Zorian was quiet for a moment, and this time it wasn’t because he thought no response was necessary.
“Fear,” Zorian eventually told him. “The task in front of us seemed so monumental. So much larger than either of us, but especially me. All I have is a mild talent for mind magic, and in the end I couldn’t even fix the matriarch’s memory package before it unraveled and disappeared from my mind. How could we ever do this, and how could I meaningfully contribute? I needed to be better. And now I am.”
“Damn it Zorian… I...” Zach began, before falling silent.
“Don’t be like that,” Zorian told him. “I’m not dying, not suffering. In fact, I feel better than ever. Old Zorian worried too much. Me? I know we will eventually escape this time loop thing. My skin turns spells and bullets alike, and my eyes see layers of reality I was previously blind to. I am mighty and I will win. Really, I just wish my tastes in food are not so out of line with what my body can handle.”
“No eating people,” Zach warned.
“You keep telling me this, but I tell you, humans are bad eating,” Zorian told him.
Aranea, however, were a different story. They were just magical enough that his instincts saw them as a ‘maybe’. It was really complicating his relations to the telepathic arachnids. It was hard to talk to a psychic and hide that you find them potentially delicious.
He wondered what would happen if he showed up in an aranean colony in his alternate form and tried to talk to them. They’d probably flee in terror when they realized what they were dealing with, but it could be an amusing thing to try regardless.
“Anyway, I don’t want to discuss this further,” Zorian told him. “Let’s do something fun instead of discussing heavy topics like this. Let’s go attack some invaders and cultists.”
“Hmm. Okay,” Zach nodded, rising to his feet. He smiled at him uncertainly. “This, at least, is something I really like about the new you. You have a spirit for adventure that you just didn’t have before.”
Zorian smiled back at him. A genuine smile, which were a rarity for him after his transformation. Finally, a hunt…
Strangely, his smile seem to disturb Zach. Really, some people you could never make happy.
- break -
In the tunnels below Cyoria, an Ibasan patrol was having a bad time. They were used to fighting off a aranea assassins, or an occasional group of dungeon denizens, but they were a big group accompanied by war trolls and other dominated monsters, and the dungeon wasn’t that dangerous on their patrol route. Thus, when they were suddenly attacked by a pair of disguised human attackers, they struggled to respond effectively.
But even if their response was chaotic and disorganized, they did respond nonetheless.
Zorian studied the group in front of him for notable weak spots, casually side-stepping the wild sword swings of the war troll next to him. The war troll was large and intimidating, screaming unintelligible war cries as he swung a sword almost as tall as Zorian, but it was all useless. Zorian didn’t even have to erect any defenses – the war troll was too slow, his movements trivial to predict.
And so were most enemy projectiles. Three spells were flying at him – two force spears glowing with red light and a fast-moving stone sphere – but he didn’t try to shield himself, teleport away, or negate the attacks. Instead, he simply twisted his body and jumped from side to side, expertly weaving through the spell fire without the need to expend much in the way of mana.
Using his shifter transformation did take some mana, but much like his innate mind magic, it was very efficient and cost almost nothing unless he transformed fully.
The war troll seemed incensed by Zorian’s casual dismissal of its attacks. It threw its heavy sword aside and hurled itself forward in an attempt to tackle him. However, this maneuver was just as predictable to Zorian’s senses as its earlier sword swings. The war troll spread its arms wide, covering the entire width of the dungeon corridor with its bulk, but Zorian simply jumped upward. It was seemingly just a hop, but he shot up all the way to the ceiling, easily getting out of the way of the tackle.
He flipped himself in the air to land feet-first when he hit the rock, and then immediately bounced back down with the speed and force of a cannon ball. He landed feet first on the war trolls head, and the beast immediately went limp. The troll wasn’t dead, Zorian knew – it was extremely hard to kill a troll through blunt physical trauma - but it was unconscious, and that was good enough for him. He immediately hurled himself forward, seemingly charging towards the Ibasan group.
A hail of spell fire answered him, and he dealt with it the same way he dealt with projectiles before now. By dodging them. Some of the spells had a homing function in them, but they were still unable to keep up with him. He bounced off the walls, twisted his body in the last moment with supernatural speed and flexibility, and threw small rocks into the path of projectiles to trigger them prematurely. At one point he even maneuvered himself in such a way to make two spells collide into one another mid-flight.
Nothing could touch him, and it took barely any mana to maintain this state too.
Of course, an expert mage or a coordinated group would still be able to hit him, even with his supernatural dodging skills. This group was neither, but they would get lucky eventually, provided they didn’t run out of mana. Thus, Zorian decided to start stalling.
He launched a single spell at the enemy group – a powerful force lance directed at one of the Ibasans in charge of erecting shields for the whole group. The attack seemed woefully inadequate to take down the group’s defenses, but Zorian’s magical sense allowed him to analyze magical constructs at considerable distance and he could tell this particular mage made shields with some very glaring flaws. The force lance was aimed perfectly at one of the weak spots in the man’s shield, and punched through it seemingly without resistance. It then continued on towards one of the defenders, hitting him in the shoulder and incapacitating him.
Zorian deliberately didn’t aim for the shielder. He wanted that guy to keep making his flawed defenses that Zorian could easily exploit. If he took down him, the group might assign someone actually good to make shields for them.
His plans of methodically taking down the group were suddenly interrupted by two events. First, Zach decided things were taking too long and launched a powerful attack on the group from the other side of the corridor. And secondly, someone teleported behind Zorian from the group.
The teleport was clearly meant to catch him off-guard, and was even accompanied by a renewed projectile barrage by the main group to distract him and cover for the maneuver, but Zorian’s sense couldn’t be fooled. The teleport was like a beacon in the night, and the only reason he didn’t immediately turn around and kill the ambushers is that someone in the main Ibasan group took out a rifle and aimed it at him.
Strange. Ibasans usually disdained the use of firearms.
Zorian quickly placed his arms over his heads to protect his eyes – the one place where getting hit by a bullet might actually be a problem – even as his body still instinctively dodged everything else thrown at him. The rifleman wasn’t that good at aiming, however, and the bullets he fired hit Zorian in the chest and legs. They promptly bounced off his iron-like skin, doing nothing but sting a little. However, the bullets were still very annoying, because unlike spells they didn’t register on his magic sense and were thus far more unpredictable and harder to keep track of.
No more playing around. He quickly erected a spherical shield around himself to protect him while he transformed and then reached out into his soul and initiated a full transformation.
The glowing white shield only lasted for two second under the hail of attacks, but it was enough. When it broke, a grey shadow jumped out of dissipating sphere and charged at the main group of Ibasan invaders, completely ignoring the trio of mages that teleported behind him earlier.
In his grey hunter form, Zorian’s magical senses were even more amplified, and he could clearly sense hidden bombs the three teleporting mages were carrying. They were a trap. A suicide mission designed to take him out of the fight if he took the bait.
The giant grey spider charged straight through spellfire, letting the minor spells break upon its furry, chitinous carapace with no effect while dodging the heavy attacks by bouncing off the tunnels walls in a dizzying display od acrobatics.
Before the invaders could really process what they were seeing, Zorian was already upon them. All shields shattered at his touch – a combination of brute physical force of his spider form and an ability to perceive minute (and not so minute) flaws in the spell boundaries of their defenses.
He didn’t kill them. The goal was to capture people for questioning, not indiscriminately kill people. Thankfully, his grey hunter form was absolutely great for capturing mages relatively painlessly. He just had to bite them and inject his magic disrupting poison, and they were largely neutralized as a magical threat. He proceeded to do just that as he broke through the Ibasan defenses – simply biting everything in sight as the group started panicking and breaking formation.
He really needed to figure out some way to deliver the poison at a distance. Biting people as a giant spider was satisfying and all, but trying to get into melee range was a dangerous things to do in a magical fight. Some kind of dart, maybe? He wasn’t sure how long his poison would persist outside of his spider form, however…
In any case, this fight was over. He was still learning how to use his alternate form effectively, but overall he was very pleased with results shown so far.
- break -
In his room at Imaya’s place, Zorian was tinkering with a large ward stone design while Kirielle drew various things on the floor beside him. One would think his new grey hunter half would not have any feelings towards crafting and creation, or would even disdain it. Humans often imagined wild beasts as being disdainful of civilization, living free and unbound lives in the untamed wilderness… but the grey hunter inside him recognized the idea of a home and found the idea of defending it with various creations very appealing. Perhaps grey hunters normally modified their lairs somehow, either by shaping the surrounding stone to their liking or by using their webs to create tripwires and other defenses? He had to admit he was never actually reckless enough to go an attack a grey hunter in its own home, so he had no idea what they looked like.
In any case, his new magical senses were less of a boon in something like designing a wardstone or a golem core than they were in breaking magical defenses, but still helped in being able to perceive the flow of energies so clearly. It saved time, which was an oddly important thing for someone in his situation.
He looked at Kirielle, lying on her stomach and kicking her feet in the air while she drew a pair of sparrows fighting each other over something. Once again, he was surprised by the level of detail in her drawings. The scene was very lifelike.
His little sister had been remarkably tolerant of his weird and sometimes off-putting behavior this past month. He should probably say something nice to her for a change.
“Kiri?” he called.
“Yeah?” she responded, not even turning her head to look at him.
“If I’m ever starving,” he told her, “I will eat you last.”
- break -
Here’s my impression of a very popular idea of Zorian becoming a grey hunter shifter. While this chapter only touches upon the multitude of issues and possibility such a transformation would cause in Zorian, it’s hopefully still interesting. And I certainly had fun writing it. :)