43. Overwhelmed

Chapter 043
Overwhelmed

Perhaps it was because she ‘knew’ that Zorian already had a date, much like everyone else seemed to believe, or perhaps it was simply a matter of Zorian being more circumspect with his intentions this time around, but Ilsa didn’t send any girl after him in the end. Not that Zorian had stayed at Imaya’s place long enough to see that in person, of course – that could have easily left him stuck with an unplanned date for the evening again – but he had left a scrying beacon in the house so he could check up on it periodically.

A part of him was annoyed he even cared about that. In the grand scheme of things, such petty drama did not matter in the slightest… there wasn’t enough time left in the restart for the consequences of ignoring it to really catch up to him. And besides, he could hardly be blamed for not showing up on a date he had never arranged to begin with! But, well, he was curious… and it wasn’t like checking up on the house from time to time was some huge commitment on his part.

No, most of his time was spent on hovering on the edges of the invasion proper, trying to spot breakaway groups small enough to ambush. Well, that and repeatedly telling himself that he didn’t have to interfere every time he saw the invaders kill helpless civilians, since they were going to be just fine when the loop restarted. The first thing was complicated by the variety of monsters that accompanied the mages, who all had very good senses and came in great numbers. The second was complicated by the sheer brutality the invaders displayed to everyone in their path. For heaven’s sake, some of them were breaking into random houses and murdering entire families inside! Not even looting anything, just committing mindless slaughter of non-combatants for no real reason. Madness.

He knew stuff like that happened during the invasion, of course, but it was never this… personal for him. He was there this time, witnessing the behavior in detail and cold-bloodedly deciding where to engage the invaders and where to move on. And he wasn’t talking about avoiding groups that were straight-up too big for him to handle – those were easy to ignore, since he had never felt compelled to help others if doing so would cost him his own life in return. No, he was talking about groups that were entirely manageable with his current skills… except that he couldn’t figure out a way to deal with them without killing everything. And what would be the point of that? He needed Ibasan mages alive so he could read their minds – that was what this was all about. An ambush that did not result in subdued mages to interrogate was a waste of time and mana, as well as liable to summon Quatach-Ichl to dispatch him. The ancient lich always personally intervened when someone got too successful against the invading forces.

And that was without even considering the possibility that Red Robe was secretly lurking somewhere out there in the city, waiting for a big enough disturbance to clue him in that a time traveler was back in Cyoria. He didn’t think that option was very likely, what with Red Robe completely abandoning his support of the invasion lately, but it was not an option he felt completely safe discounting. No, sticking to his original plan and avoiding unnecessary engagements was definitely the right choice to make.

Maybe it was a good thing his mind kept going back to the stupid date drama – if nothing else, it gave him something to distract himself with.

Fortunately for his deteriorating mood, he soon found a duo of Ibasan mages that had strayed too far from their main group and were only lightly defended. Well, relatively speaking. They had two war trolls and twelve skeletons as bodyguards, with another six war trolls vandalizing shopfronts not too far from where they were standing, but he was confident he could deal with that if he could surprise them.

He made his way towards the group, mentally nudging the iron beak whose senses he was tapping into to fly closer to his targets so he could examine them more closely. There was something deliciously ironic about using the invaders’ own scouts against them like that, but the real reason he was using the iron beaks instead of simply scrying on the invaders was that iron beaks had much better vision than he did and could also see in the dark. Very useful, that. He had also tried to employ the same trick on the war trolls that hung around the invaders, but found their senses very hard to process. Trolls had terrible eyesight, and were colorblind to boot – their main sense was their ridiculously good sense of smell and, to a lesser extent, their hearing. Not to mention they were far less mobile than the iron beaks, and the Ibasans kept a much tighter leash on the brutes than they did on their iron beak flocks. Hmm… he wondered…

Acting on a hunch, Zorian focused on the nearest iron beak flock and tried to dominate the one flying on the tail’s end of the flock. It was surprisingly willful for an animal, but his attempt was not contested by anyone and the iron beak soon broke off from its group and made its way towards Zorian. Huh, that worked. Nobody seemed to be reacting to his actions, either. Convenient. Apparently the iron beaks were a bigger weak link of the invasion than he’d thought!

He removed a potion vial from his pocket and handed it to the dominated iron beak that had landed next to him. It took some time, but eventually he managed to telepathically convey to the magical corvid that it shouldn’t clutch the vial too tightly in its claws unless it wanted bad things to happen to it. That done, he directed it to dive bomb the Ibasan duo with the vial.

He would not have been surprised at all if his ploy had ended up as a failure. A lot of it depended on the iron beak executing everything flawlessly, since Zorian was only dominating the iron beak, not puppeteering it – a dominated creature executes orders to the best of its own ability, not the controller’s. That was nice, in the sense that there was no way Zorian could have puppeteered the bird precisely enough to pull off something this complicated. It did mean he was a bit of a helpless observer as a result, though. Oh well, even if the ploy failed it should at least act as a proper distraction for his own attack…

The iron beak exceeded his expectations. Not only did it approach the two mages from behind, entirely on its own initiative, it dropped the vial at the exact spot Zorian told it to aim at. The exact spot. That had got to be some innate magic ability at work – they were uncannily accurate with their feather attack too, come to think of it. In any case, once the vial hit the ground it exploded into a cloud of yellow gas that knocked out the two Ibasans in a matter of moments. Their bodyguards weren’t affected – the war trolls because their magically-enhanced metabolisms kept the knockout gas from working, and the skeletons because they had no metabolism to affect – but once their controllers went unconscious, it became ridiculously easy to goad the war trolls into attacking the skeletons. It took less than a minute before every skeleton was reduced into dust and splinters.

He directed his iron beak to make a few passes at the two trolls, and the bird interpreted that as ‘send a couple of feather volleys straight at their eyes (ouch), after which the two former bodyguards ran off to chase the bird in blind anger, leaving Zorian free to approach the two knocked-out mages unopposed.

This was the fifth group he ambushed tonight, and the first one where everything had gone so smoothly. He didn’t even have to personally fight in the end! He really should use iron beaks more extensively in the future.

After dragging the two unconscious bodies to some less exposed place, he took a deep breath and dived into their memories.

Memory reading, more than any other branch of mind magic, deeply resembled divination in the way it functioned. You had to decide what you wanted to look for, and if you were asking the wrong question, your answer would be worthless or misleading. In Zorian’s case, there were four main things he looked for whenever he read the minds of Ibasan mages: whether they knew about any mage in a garish red robe, where the primordial ‘summoning’ ritual was supposed to take place, what they knew about the goals of the invasion and, last but certainly not least, whether they knew anything about the time loop or time travel in general. The same thing he probed the minds of cultists about, really. He was lucky this time, in that one of the two mages lying before him was a higher ranking mage that should hopefully know more than the common grunts he had been dealing with thus far.

None of the Ibasans knew anything about a mage wearing red robes, and the two men he currently had at his mercy were no exception. Follow up questions regarding missing members which had left the group around the start of the time loop revealed that despite their inability to maintain discipline during the actual invasion, the Ibasans ran a pretty tight ship during the lead-up to it. Anyone who stepped out of line was severely punished by the Ibasan leadership, and the handful of cases where someone tried to abandon the invasion resulted in Quatach-Ichl hunting them down like dogs as an example to everyone else. Consequently, all such attempts had stopped long before the time loop had begun.

As far as Zorian was concerned, that pretty much killed the possibility of Red Robe being an Ibasan invader. He had suspected as much, considering how Quatach-Ichl treated Red Robe during that evening, but it was nice to have more confirmation. It was still possible he was connected to the Cult of the World Dragon, which didn’t (and couldn’t) exercise anywhere near the same control over its members.

As far as the location where the primordial ritual was concerned, none of the Ibasans officially knew anything about it… but it was apparently a sort of public secret among group commanders (such as the one whose mind Zorian was currently reading) that the ‘summoning’ was supposed to take place on top of the Hole, or at least as close to it as humanly possible.

Zorian felt pretty stupid when he found that out. Of course. Of course it was the Hole, the city’s biggest and most obvious landmark. He had even known that the Cult assigned special significance to the damn place, he just never… damn it. He shook his head. In his defense, the lower-ranking cultists were convinced that the ritual was going to take place in some super-secret place that nobody knows about.

As for the goals of the invasion, that was something Zorian found very easy to extract from the minds of his victims, as they knew very few actual facts about that. Only the very top of the Ibasan leadership seemed to know what they were really trying to accomplish here, and the common grunts were going along with the whole thing almost entirely because Quatach-Ichl was going along with it too. The ancient lich was held in very high regard by the Ibasans. As a thousand-year old lich, he was an almost impossibly ancient mage, and had power and skill to match his age. He was alive back when the gods still spoke to humanity, and was rumored to have been blessed by several of them. On top of all that, he had a reputation for being harsh but fair, as opposed to a lot of other Ibasan leaders who simply had a reputation for being harsh. He was something of a saint to these people, as strange as that looked to Zorian. The mindset was that if Quatach-Ichl said this was possible and worthwhile to pull off, then it was. It was just that simple.

Also, there was a general feeling among the Ibasans that Altazians were all a bunch of degenerate weaklings that would surely fall like wheat before the mighty men and women of Ulquaan Ibasa. Then again, that particular brand of rhetoric was common in Eldemar too, so he didn’t think it all that notable in the grand scheme of things.

As for time travel, his current victim knew nothing of it, just like everyone else he- wait! There was something. It wasn’t about the time loop, or time travel, but apparently Eldemar had a secret research facility deep, deep within the Dungeon, dedicated to researching time magic. Time dilation, to be more precise. The facility was heavily defended, with insanely good security measures – as they had to be, considering the sheer depth the facility was located at – so the invaders had decided to leave it alone. Some of the Ibasan leaders, notably Quatach-Ichl, were known to be unhappy about that. They felt something important had to be there, if Eldemar was willing to maintain a research facility in such a dangerous environment, and wanted to have it. Unfortunately for them, the rest of the leadership felt the number of troops and effort required to crack their defenses could not be justified with such speculative gains.

That was… interesting. Although the Ibasan mage he was memory-reading did not know the exact location of the facility, Zorian was pretty sure he did. The map left to him by the matriarch had a number of locations marked on it, two of which he had never been able to reach to check out. One was surrounded by Ibasan forward bases and patrolled too heavily for him to ever approach it successfully – Zorian presumed this was their main base. The other was ridiculously deep, and he never even tried reaching it – he did not think he could survive a journey into such depths. Frankly, he was kind of amazed the aranea managed to map the Dungeon that deep, considering even powerful mages would think twice about descending to that depth.

He had no proof, but he strongly suspected this was the time magic research facility discovered by the Ibasans. And considering the matriarch had marked it down as important, it almost certainly had some relevance to his situation.

He dived deeper into the man’s mind, looking for more information. He felt his victim’s mind quake under the severity of the probe but persisted anyway – any compunction about hurting these people had evaporated after watching them rampage around the city for several hours.

The path outlined by the matriarch wasn’t the only one, apparently, or even the main one. The government did not supply the facility through a perilous journey down the winding tunnels of the Dungeon proper – they did it by descending down through the Hole until they reached the desired depth, where they had drilled an artificial tunnel into the wall in order to connect the facility with the outside world. Of course, while that path avoided most of the dangers associated with such extreme depths, it was still insanely dangerous for anyone without authorization to be there, so that did not help him much. Maybe if he-

Oops. He pushed it too hard – overwhelmed by his (still rather crude and unsophisticated) memory probe, the man’s mind collapsed into a chaotic, undecipherable mess. He would be getting nothing more out of him. Damn it.

He fired two piercers at the unconscious mages, killing them both, and turned to leave, only to find an iron beak watching him closely from a nearby window sill. It was non-hostile, simply scrutinizing him. Zorian checked the feel of its mind, and found that it was indeed the very same iron beak he had dominated earlier, just like he suspected. His influence over it had dissolved a while ago, though, so that couldn’t be the reason why it was so docile towards him. Huh.

If nothing else, he’d expected it to resent him for overriding its will. He sensed no animosity from the bird, however – just satisfaction and schadenfreude at seeing the Ibasan mages dead. Either the iron beaks didn’t like the Ibasans much, or this particular iron beak was not a fan.

“So,” Zorian said. “How do you feel about helping me kill more of these?”

The iron beak cocked its head to the side, uncomprehending. Right, still only an animal, if a very clever and willful one. He sent the bird a telepathic impression of two of them killing more invaders.

The iron beak answered with a shrill screech and a burst of bloodlust so strong Zorian found himself taking a step back from the animal.

Hate. Grudge. Kill.

“Right,” he mumbled to himself. “I’ll take that as agreement.”

He didn’t bother to dominate the bird this time – he just instructed it to find another small group of invaders and started looking for more iron beaks to possibly subvert.

– break –

Zorian subdued two more groups after that, neither of which had anything new to teach him, before Quatach-Ichl suddenly teleported in front of him and blasted him in the face with one of those jagged red disintegration beams he loved so much. He died instantly, unable to raise any defenses in time.

Oh well, the night had been coming to a close anyway. At least he’d managed to experiment a little with the iron beaks flying around. Sadly, he had discovered that only a tiny minority of them were receptive to his control, and contacting the wrong ones invariably caused the entire flock to descend upon him like a murderous mob. The previously subverted birds also immediately switched sides back to their brethren when this happened, which he really should have expected but somehow was still taken entirely off-guard the first time it happened. In any case, the iron beaks definitely hated the invaders for some reason, but turning them against their masters was very difficult. Something kept them loyal, and the few mages whose minds he had questioned for an answer didn’t know what it was – they thought of iron beaks as dumb animals and paid no heed to their thoughts and motives.

He began the restart in the same general way he had started the last two – by scouting the state of the invasion, getting his mana crystals, helping Taiven clean up the Dungeon of monsters, and so on. Except, of course, that he was far more effective at all of those this time around. He also stole a better library card for himself immediately and recreated Kosjenka for Kirielle, among other minor additions.

The newest restart, much like the two that preceded it, showed no sign of future knowledge by the invaders. This was the third consecutive restart where Red Robe unceremoniously ditched them, and Zorian was starting to suspect this was now a normal situation rather than just a momentary whim. Most likely, Red Robe had completely lost interest in the invasion after their confrontation.

The question was – why? Why do that after he had spent all those restarts stubbornly handing out knowledge to them?

Well, perhaps a better question would be, why had he been doing that in the first place? What did helping the invaders do for him? Was it just a way to keep Zach focused on some highly visible, but ultimately irrelevant quest so he wouldn’t question things? Or perhaps a way to muddy the waters, so to speak, and hide the aftershocks of his own actions by regularly inducing a big splash at the start of every restart? Maybe. But the sheer amount of information he provided to the invaders made him think there was more to it than that. It was incredibly optimized to do as much damage to the city as possible – Red Robe must have sunk an enormous amount of time and effort to produce something like that. The outcome of the invasion mattered to him in some personal way. So why stop? What changed?

Zorian tried to think of it with a properly paranoid mindset. Red Robe thought that the aranea had brought an unknown, but large number of people into the time loop. These people were organized and also crafty enough to evade his notice for years. Not something that would be easy to hunt down and purge. Zorian had also displayed mind magic in their battle, so the one encounter Red Robe had had with these people involved one of the few types of magic that could permanently deal with him. All of this meant that the time loop got infinitely more dangerous for Red Robe all of a sudden. There was a legion of enemies plotting against him and lurking around every corner.

If Zorian was in Red Robe’s place, would he immediately begin to plot against this group, laying down traps and ambushes and trying to track them down? No, definitely not. He would get away as soon as possible, not just out of Cyoria but out of the entire wider region around the city. If he began the restart somewhere in the city, he would get the hell away at the start of the restart, much like Zach seemed to be doing. He wasn’t sure how long he would stay away, but Zach had yet to stop leaving the city at the start of every restart, and he was the reckless one out of the three of them.

Maybe it wasn’t so strange that Red Robe was staying away from the city at the moment. In hindsight, that bit of misdirection by Spear of Resolve had been far shrewder than Zorian had given her credit for at the time. But how long would it be before Red Robe realized that the legions of enemy time travelers simply didn’t exist?

There was another option. If Red Robe was helping the invasion in an attempt to optimize it, so that it could be as effective as possible once the time loop ends, and if the aranea were only ejected from the time loop instead of soulkilled, as Red Robe claimed… then any further optimization attempts would be a total waste of time. Once the time loop ended, the aranea would be alive and well again, and any plan developed in their absence would give worse results than the one Red Robe had previously developed. Admittedly, Zorian mostly liked this option because it meant that the aranea were recoverable, but it would also explain a lot of things. Such as Red Robe’s reluctance to use his soulkill spell more liberally. If ‘soulkilled’ persons were only gone for the duration of the time loop, that would neatly explain why he didn’t use it on non-loopers – that would be entirely counterproductive, since he would still have to deal with them eventually, except that he wouldn’t have the option to try out different tactics against them in the time loop, and couldn’t find out what worked best.

Zorian could only hope that investigating the invaders would bring some answers to his questions. Though if everything else failed, he supposed he could always behave like Zach and simply launch an endless stream of suicidal missions aimed at breaking into the time magic research facility, since that was clearly relevant to the time loop somehow. He was bound to succeed eventually, right? If Zach was able to kill Oganj with that method then surely he could break into one measly facility.

Hmm, maybe he was thinking about this wrong – he should outright recruit Zach into the attempt. He was still a bit leery of contacting the other boy, both because that would mean revealing himself to Red Robe if he was monitoring Zach and because he was not at all sure Zach would be of any actual help to him at this point, but if he was reduced to metaphorically banging his head on the wall then he might as well involve someone who has spent gods know how many years in the time loop honing the skill at doing exactly that.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

Something to keep in mind when the time comes, anyway.

– break –

With the start of classes, Zorian decided to approach Raynie again while skipping on the mind magic training with Tinami. He still hoped to get to know the Aope heir better, but it was clear that trying to get close to both Raynie and Tinami at the same time was unfeasible, and Raynie seemed the easier one to handle. He did not recreate his initial request as closely as he had intended, but Raynie agreed to set up a meeting between them nonetheless.

Benisek had a spontaneous attack of clumsiness when he had tried to loudly congratulate Zorian and ended up sprawling on the floor of the classroom after tripping over his own two feet. It was a funny and mysterious thing, and Zorian hadn’t had absolutely anything to do with it, but it sure was nice that he’d only made a scene out of himself instead of himself and Zorian, wasn’t it?

Still, while he had high hopes that his attempt to get to know Raynie better would go better this time around, the fact was that interacting with her involved a lot of waiting time – he might as well try to get to know another one of his classmates in the meantime. And since female classmates had a high chance of producing the same kind of problems that Tinami had in the previous restart (because that was just how his luck worked, damn it), that someone should probably be a guy. Hmm, which one of his fellow male students looked interesting… oh! Edwin was really interested in golems, wasn’t he? He had both of his parents in the golem-making business and couldn’t shut up about them the last time Zorian had asked a mildly-topical question about the subject. Well… he might as well show Edwin his own golem designs and ask him what he thought. It would be interesting to see how his designs compared to ones made by someone hyper-focused on the field.

He waited until classes were over and then walked over to where Edwin and Naim were talking. Like always when he saw them together, he found it interesting how different the two of them were, both physically and in terms of personality. Edwin was a short boy, with pitch black hair and slightly darker skin tone that hinted his ancestors were relatively recent arrivals from the south, or perhaps even from Miasina. Naim was a relatively unassuming brown-haired boy of average height, distinguished only by the fact he was rather athletic and fit for your average student. Edwin was talkative and expressive, getting excited easily and often gesticulating heavily when he spoke. Naim was calm and restrained, like some sort of serene monk who had achieved enlightenment and could thus no longer be fazed by anything anymore. They were like the sun and the moon, yet somehow they’d ended up as inseparable.

He had to admit, he felt just a little bit intimidated by the prospect of approaching them. He was worried they would be suspicious of him, suddenly approaching them out of the blue like that. Zorian’s previous relationship with the two was polite, but very, very distant. They had hardly known each other. Then again, that was an accurate description of his relationship with most of his classmates bar Benisek.

But he need not have worried. Edwin was naturally a friendly sort, and only got friendlier when he found out why Zorian was talking to him. And while he did sense some exasperation from Naim, that was solely because of the topic of the conversation rather than Zorian’s presence as such. He was not as crazy about the topic as Edwin.

“That’s a nice stabilizer for the kind of small doll this is intended for,” Edwin said, tracing the relevant glyph sequences with his finger. “I don’t think it would work for something larger and heavier, like a proper, man-sized golem made out of solid steel, but it’s downright inspired for this. I’ll have to remember this. I don’t understand why you put these in, though,” he said, jabbing his finger at the trio of compressed nodes he used to fine-tune the design. “They’re inelegant and just plain unnecessary. The design works perfectly without them, and they don’t seem to do anything except randomly tweak things with no rhyme or reason.”

“Actually, the design doesn’t work without those,” Zorian said. “All of the prototypes were breaking down on me until I got sick of trying to make it work like it was supposed to and just forcibly tweaked things in the manner you’re looking at. It works fine now, but it makes altering the design a real pain. I’m hoping you can help me find the underlying issue that’s tripping me up.”

Edwin gave him an incredulous look. “Wait… so this is, like, an actual design. Not just theory work? You’ve built one of these?”

“Well, yeah,” Zorian said. “What would be the point, otherwise?”

“But isn’t that super expensive?” Edwin asked curiously.

“No, it’s just moderately expensive,” said Zorian. Though in all honesty, his sense of what was expensive and what wasn’t had probably gotten utterly skewed while he was in the time loop. “But I’m funding it out of my own pocket and no one can really stop me from spending my money on whatever I find appropriate.”

“Oh no, I’m not criticizing you,” Edwin grinned. “Hell, I wish I could do the same! You sure you don’t need an assistant or anything?”

“It’s… a possibility,” Zorian said hesitantly. He could see that Edwin was very serious about his suggestion, and it surprised him. He had thought he would have to make an effort to get him to cooperate on specific projects, and here he was proposing partnership. “How much time can you dedicate to this?”

Naim gave a short, amused laugh. He was largely content to quietly sit on the sidelines thus far, but apparently he couldn’t resist reacting to this.

“That sort of thing is all he does in his free time,” Naim said with a light smile. “The real question is just how long your patience will last before you tell him to knock it off already and go home.”

“Oh shut up, you,” Edwin complained. “Like you are any better, mister training. You have your martial arts, and I have my golems.”

“I have a lot on my plate lately, so I’m not exactly sure how much time I can dedicate to this. But I think I can spare a couple of hours every two or three days if you’re up for it.”

“I’m up for it,” said Edwin. “For a chance to see how my designs work in practice, I’d even be willing to wake up before noon during the weekend. What’s keeping you so busy anyway? The classes are only starting.”

“Ah, well, I do a lot of independent studies,” said Zorian. “The golem experiments you already know about, but I also do a lot of studying into spell formula in general, as well as alchemy, general purpose utility magic and so on. I do advanced shaping exercises and practice combat magic whenever I find the time.”