70. Carried Away

Chapter 070
Carried Away

Deep beneath Cyoria, in a recently excavated cavern separated from the main tunnel network, an army was being assembled. It consisted of about 200 people, about 120 of which had been gathered by Alanic through various means while the rest were mercenaries Zorian had hired for considerable amounts of money. Of course, this number did not include the many non-combat experts that would be responsible for figuring out how the Ibasan gate functioned. Nor did it take into account the many golems that Zorian had made for the occasion, about 80 of which were scattered through the area, or the 40 aranean mercenaries that were hired from the three different webs recommended by the Silent Doorway Adepts.

As far as armies went, this wasn’t much. But it was still a sizeable group, and getting it past Ibasan patrols without them noticing their passage was… difficult.

For ordinary mages, that is. Zorian could just send his simulacrum to sneak past these patrols and then just open a Gate to let the assembled forces through unmolested and unnoticed.

There was something very amusing about using dimensional gates to bypass Ibasan patrols, establishing a temporary staging ground deep in their territory, and then launching a surprise attack at their base.

Zorian was just in the process of attaching small metal cylinders to his belt, each one filled with potent alchemical mixtures, when he sensed Zach approaching him.

“You look worried,” Zach told him.

Zorian frowned. He didn’t notice it before Zach pointed it out, but yeah. He kind of was.

“A little,” Zorian admitted, continuing his preparations. “I mean, we’re risking another confrontation with Quatach-Ichl here. He’s one of the few people who has the ability to do us lasting harm. Every time we tangle with him, we’re taking a big risk.”

“Eh, it’ll be fine,” Zach said dismissively, giving him a strong pat on the back that had Zorian swaying in place for a second. He gave Zach a glare for that, but his fellow time traveler just grinned at him in response. “Besides, the annoying pile of bones isn’t nearly as dangerous as you think. I’ve fought him plenty of times, and I’m still standing. He doesn’t like to use necromancy in battle for some reason.”

Alanic, who was staring at the map of the Ibasan base along with Xvim, decided this merited a response from him.

“Most necromantic spells aren’t well suited for battle,” Alanic said, not taking his eyes off the map. “They take too much concentration and they need to overcome the target’s magic resistance to work. It’s faster and cheaper to just burn people to a crisp or cut them to pieces. The terrible necromantic spells that are sometimes bandied about in textbooks are torture spells meant to be inflicted on a subdued victim, not something you use in an even fight.”

There was a long pause as Zach and Zorian digested this. One of these days, Zorian decided, he really had to ask Alanic about his past. The old battle priest would likely refuse to talk about it at first, but maybe if he picked a right moment and was really persistent?

Well, whatever. It was a thought for some other time. He considered pointing out that a fight between them and Quatach-Ichl wasn’t exactly an even one, since the difference in power and skill between the ancient lich and any one of them was still a yawning chasm rather than anything resembling a close match-up, but he figured that would be missing the point. Alanic’s point was that Quatach-Ichl likely didn’t go for necromantic magic in a fight because it was suboptimal, and that was probably true – getting into a habit of toying with your opponents was quite stupid, and the ancient lich had been shrewd enough to survive for more than a thousand years now.

Truth be told, Zorian found those jagged disintegration beams that Quatach-Ichl liked to use to be plenty terrifying in their own way.

“You know,” Zorian suddenly said. “My past self would be horrified if he saw me right now.”

“Why?” Zach asked, arching his eyebrow in askance.

“This attack is pretty… audacious,” said Zorian. “There is no way my past self would ever consider this a reasonable risk to take. A part of me scoffs at this, dismissing it as simple cowardice, but there is another part of me that can’t help but wonder whether the time loop had eroded away my ability to recognize what is and is not appropriately cautious behavior. What if we manage to leave the time loop and deal with Red Robe, only to die two months later because we did something completely stupid out of sheer habit?”

To Zorian’s surprise, Zach actually seemed to give the question some serious thought. Zorian expected him to either dismiss his concerns or question how Zorian could possibly know what his past self would have thought of their current situation. Instead, Zach seemed to consider the issue in his head for well over a minute before responding.

“I doubt that’s going to happen,” he eventually said, his tone and mannerisms somewhat subdued. “I have… things I need to do after we get out. Social things. It will be at least a year or two before I can start picking fights with dragons or whatnot, and I don’t think you’ll start looking for trouble without me prodding you. A couple of years should be enough to let us adjust to a world without restarts, right?”

Zorian simply gave Zach a non-committal hum in response. Zach had a pretty rosy picture of Zorian in his head if he thought there was no way he could get himself into trouble on his own. Zorian still wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life if… when they got out of the time loop, but he would probably need a lot of money and rare resources. He could easily imagine getting into trouble in the process of acquiring these, or once he amassed enough that people start to take notice or once he told people what he was actually doing with all these acquisitions.

Zach’s inordinate fondness for picking fights with giant monsters was definitely dangerous, but Zorian suspected his personal ambitions could be even more dangerous than that. A mage of Zach’s caliber can usually flee from giant monsters if they find themselves overmatched against it. Make a human organization interested enough in you, though, and they will hound you till the day you die.

He shook his head and steeled himself. Now was not the time to contemplate those topics too deeply. The opening moves of this attack were about to begin and Zorian had a crucial role to play in them. If they wanted to stop Quatach-Ichl from being alerted and summoned back to the base, someone had to sneak into the base and either assassinate or disable as many Ibasan leaders as possible before the main force of the attack hit. That someone was, of course, Zorian. Him and the aranean mercenaries he had hired for the occasion, that is.

Cloaking one’s presence thoroughly enough to avoid dedicated scrutiny was quite hard. In a contest between two equally skilled mages, one of which was trying to hide and one of which was seeking for the hidden one, the seeker would almost always come out on top. If your opponent could manipulate your very mind, however, dictating what you see, hear and remember… then even the most sophisticated detection spell could not help you find them.

Well, that was the theory, at least. Zorian was quite sure the Ibasans would catch on to their presence relatively soon. Mind magic was not exactly unknown among mages, even if few of them could manifest it as stealthily and flexibly as Zorian and his new aranean minions could. Still. They didn’t have to stay undetected forever – just long enough to track down and remove anyone who knew how to contact Quatach-Ichl.

“I’m going,” Zorian said out loud, speaking to himself as much as he was to the people around him.

“Leave a simulacrum with us,” warned Alanic.

Zorian hesitated for a moment. He had dismissed all his simulacrums before the operation began so that they wouldn’t be a drain on his mana reserves. It was annoying, because it meant he would have to rely on Daimen again to re-establish a link with Koth, but he felt this operation deserved his full focus. That said, Zorian shouldn’t be doing anything too mana intensive during the initial infiltration, so maybe leaving a simulacrum behind in the command room wouldn’t be a bad idea.

He executed a complex series of chants and gestures and then cupped his hands in front of him, causing a milky white sphere of ectoplasm to materialize in front of him. He felt the spell reach towards his soul, connecting it to the ball of ectoplasm in front of him. The moment he felt the connection snap into place, he plunged his right arm straight into the ball of ectoplasm and imposed upon it an image of himself, causing it to squirm and writhe like a living thing.

“That always looks so freaky,” Zach commented off to the side.

Zorian ignored him. This was the most sensitive part of the spell, since the caster had to keep their image firmly in mind as they manipulated the ectoplasm. If they faltered even for a second, the spell would either fail or produce a hopelessly false copy. This was because, although the spell was tapping into the caster’s soul to create the copy, it was tapping into something that described a creature of flesh and blood and trying to translate it into a form made out of magical fields and ectoplasm. A multitude of little and not-so-little sacrifices and compromises had to be made during this process, and a non-sapient spell couldn’t be trusted to prioritize things properly. The first time Zorian succeeded in producing a simulacrum, for example, he got a nearly-mindless wreck that nonetheless contained a vividly detailed internal bone structure. The spell sacrificed nearly everything else to get that one thing just right.

Of course, Zorian was now too well versed with the spell to fail like that, even with Zach distracting him with inane comments. The writhing sphere swelled in size and erupted into thin, rope-like pseudopods that formed a rough outline of a human being…

Two minutes later, a flawless-looking replica of Zorian opened its eyes and looked around. One would think that simulacrums would come into existence already aware of everything and ready to spring into action on a moment’s notice, but in practice they always seemed a little confused after being created and took about 30 seconds to gather their bearings and calm down.

“There,” Zorian said. “Anything else?”

“No,” Alanic said, shaking his head. “Go. Try not to get yourself killed, I guess.”

“I guess?” Zorian mumbled under his breath. “Thank you, Alanic, you really know how to make a motivational speech.”

And then he left. The attack on the Ibasan base beneath Cyoria had begun.

– break –

The initial stages of the infiltration went very well. Zorian used a combination of a floating invisibility sphere and clouding the minds of the Ibasan guards to smuggle himself and the aranea into the base, after which they split up into small groups to cover more ground in as little time as possible.

There were some complications. For one thing, there were some pretty insidious and powerful wards scattered around the base, arranged in no pattern that Zorian could decipher. These hadn’t been there when Zorian invaded the base in the previous restarts, which implied that Ibasans normally took those down before executing the invasion of Cyoria. Zorian was kind of baffled as to why they would tear down their own wards like that, though, even if they did intend to abandon the base after the invasion. For a moment he actually worried that they had been betrayed by some of their mercenaries, despite their precautions, and that the base security had been upgraded in response. However, the wards in question were arranged so haphazardly, the entire warding layout so full of holes, that Zorian eventually ruled out that idea. If the Ibasans had been expecting them, they would have done a better job of warding the place than this. As it was, the warding setup looked almost like a collection of individual wards, each of which had been erected by a different person without bothering to consult anyone else about what they were doing. In at least two places the wards clashed with each other so severely that they created ‘dead zones’ in the areas where they overlapped, canceling each other out.

Zorian had a rather silly urge to write a letter to Quatach-Ichl, criticizing him for not teaching his minions how to make a proper warding scheme. This sort of thing reflected badly on him too, you know, he ought to think of his reputation…

Anyway. Another problem was the Ibasans had these brown dogs that could smell the aranea coming, no matter how well cloaked, and wouldn’t stop barking. And they were either naturally mind blanked or had been made so artificially, because Zorian couldn’t detect or connect to their minds at all. He had been forced to kill and replace them with motionless ectoplasmic replicas, which took an annoying amount of time and mana on his part.

After that, everything went perfectly for a while. Numerous Ibasan leaders were eliminated, and though the base was starting to wake up to the fact something funny was going on in their base, they were still not aware of the extent of the problem on their hands. However, there was something that Zorian had not taken into account…

The Ibasans had fought against aranea before. Before the time loop – and even during the time loop, before Red Robe erased them from the time loop – the Cyorian web had been a huge obstacle to their operations. As such, they had a multitude of countermeasures and defenses aimed specifically against the aranea. Many of these were abandoned when the local aranea mysteriously disappeared, experts in charge of manning them re-assigned to other, more productive duties… but some of them remained intact. Just in case.

When the aranea moved near the center of the base they seemed to cross some invisible line that immediately triggered a base-wide alarm. It was loud, shrill, and everyone in the base seemed to immediately realize what it meant because they immediately started layering mental protection spells on themselves and grabbing their weapons.

[Oops?] the aranea closest to Zorian said hesitantly.

[I don’t even understand what got us,] another complained. [Human magic is such bullshit…]

Zorian snorted derisively. Well, it wasn’t like this was completely unexpected. He reached out with his mind, connecting himself with the network of telepathic relays that had been densely distributed across this entire section of the underworld, and ordered the miniature monster horde he had gathered to attack the base from all directions.

From one of the tunnels, a huge red centipede surged forwards, hordes of hook goblins and cave drakes following after it. The Ibasans concentrated their fire at the centipede first, trying to bring down the biggest threat, only to see most of their spells fizzle out due to the many wards Zorian had attached to it. From another tunnel, a swarm of floating, jellyfish-like monsters came pouring in. They looked slow and weak, but when Ibasans tried to bring them down they discovered that the jellyfish had an innate shielding magic that blocked their projectiles. Worse, the jellyfish could somehow interface with one another and merge their shields into a stronger, unified barrier. From the third tunnel, a horde of phalanx toads came rushing into the base. The Ibasans killed many of them, but there were five more for each they killed and they acted with unusual organization and discipline, spontaneously forming into coherent groups and sweeping everything before them with their spear-like tongues.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Finally, the fourth group of monsters didn’t bother moving through any of the existing tunnels – the rock worms Zorian subverted simply burst into the base from down below, having dug out their own entrance into the base.

The whole plan had a high chance of falling apart at this moment, Zorian knew. Although he and the aranea had gutted a lot of their leadership, they hadn’t gotten everyone that could summon Quatach-Ichl. If the Ibasans wanted to call the ancient lich for help, they could. However, Zorian had noticed in the past that Ibasans were generally reluctant to call upon their leader. Quatach-Ichl hated getting called to deal with ‘trivial things’. He didn’t usually kill people for disappointing him in such a manner, but he was rather prone of relieving them of their positions or reducing their salary – which were horrifying enough consequences for most people.

Zorian was hoping that the Ibasans, faced with what appeared to be an aranean attack, would decide to try and tackle things on their own, rather than immediately call Quatach-Ichl to help them.

Well, he seemed to have been right about that. The Ibasans chose to fight the monster invasion on their own. The trouble is, they were winning. The centipede was intercepted by trolls and bludgeoned to death with sheer force of numbers, the jellyfish shield was visibly weakening and the phalanx toads were being pushed back with a liberal application of fire. As for the rock worms, well… the Ibasans had rock worms of their own. Zorian had counted on the monster horde getting defeated, but not this fast. He wasn’t done killing the leadership yet, dammit!

He suddenly got a message from his simulacrum that Zach wanted to help out with the assassination.

Well. The plan was already failing, so he supposed there was no harm in letting Zach wreck things for a bit before they abort the whole thing.

As quickly as possible, he synchronized with his simulacrum and opened a gate between the command room and the Ibasan base, letting Zach pass through.

Zach took a rather long look at the battlefield, taking in how the battles were progressing first-hand, and then turned to Zorian.

“Do you know where those leaders are at the moment?”

“Err, sort of?” Zorian said. “I mostly had the aranea pinpointing their location for me, but they’re kind of busy directing the monster horde at the moment.”

“But you know the general area they’re in, right?” Zach prodded.

“Oh yeah,” Zorian nodded. He pointed at a big, solidly-constructed building not far from them. “Most of the surviving ones are in that building over there. The wards are pretty tricky so it will take me some time to–”

Before Zorian could finish speaking, Zach had already fired some kind of projectile at the building. It was seemingly tiny, more of a faint red pinprick of light than a proper-looking offensive spell, but its flight path was followed with a piercing scream so loud it made Zorian’s ears hurt.

The projectile slammed into the wall of the building and then burst into crescent spatial distortions that sliced through everything in the vicinity with no visible resistance. The whole heavily warded building fell apart like an apple thrown into an industrial blender machine, burying everyone in it under several tons of rubble.

“One problem solved,” said Zach, lowering his hand. “What about the others?”