76. Critical Blunder

Chapter 076
Critical Blunder

The evening was a pleasant one, with cool winds blowing through the streets of Cyoria and the moon shining brightly in the sky. Zorian took it all in, feeling somewhat invigorated by the evening chill, and thought about life. It was interesting, Zorian mused, that even after all these years spent in the time loop, some simple experiences had eluded him until now.

Getting thrown out of a coffee shop for disturbing the other customers, for instance, was an entirely novel experience.

He glanced to the side, where Daimen and Fortov were currently having a tense face-off, staring at each other with serious expressions. He wasn’t even angry, in all honesty. Yes, being ejected out of the building was mildly embarrassing, but it didn’t bother him all that much. What did bother him was that even after causing such a commotion, they still failed to even establish what the problem was. Honestly, these two…

“Fortov, look…” Zorian began cautiously, “I understand you being mad at Daimen but you’re only shooting yourself in the foot here. The reason Daimen sought you out is because he wants to know why you’re angry with him. If you want to get rid of him, just tell him what your problem with him is and he’ll go away. Well, probably.”

“Don’t you start,” Fortov said, giving him a suspicious frown. “You helped him set this up, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t ask you to seek me out,” Zorian pointed out calmly. “You decided that on your own. And nobody forced you to stay around and argue with Daimen, either. You already have the salve you came for, no? You could have just picked yourself up and left the moment Daimen showed up. That’s what I’d have done in your place. The fact that you stayed around means you do want Daimen to know why you’re angry after all.”

For a second, Fortov just stared at him, a stony expression on his face. It was a somewhat alien look on the normally amiable Fortov.

“I so want to punch you in the face right now, you smug asshole,” Fortov eventually said. “But I suppose there is something to that logic, so I’ll restrain myself.”

“Finally,” Daimen mumbled, just loud enough for both of them to hear him. “All this dancing around and refusing to say what’s bothering you, I almost thought you had turned into a woman while I wasn’t looking.”

Fortov glared furiously at him, to which Daimen reacted only by rolling his eyes. Thankfully, the shouting didn’t start up again. It seemed that Fortov had gotten his anger out of his system a bit.

“Right, now, just before the nice waitress asked us to leave the premises, I believe you were saying something about your problems with the academy being Daimen’s fault?” Zorian prompted. It was in his best interest to help Daimen get his answer now, or else the man would no doubt make more annoying plots like this one in upcoming restarts.

“Which is ridiculous,” Daimen butted in. “We barely even interacted with each other by the time Fortov started attending the Academy in Cyoria.”

“Yes!” Fortov said, pointing his index finger at Daimen with a stabbing motion. Then he repeated the gesture for emphasis. “Yes, that’s exactly my problem! We barely interacted at all!”

“What?” Daimen asked uncomprehendingly.

“You don’t even know what I’m talking about,” Fortov said, more as a statement of fact than a question. “I think that’s what pisses me off the most about this. You don’t even remember! You’ve completely forgotten all about your promise!”

“Wha- What promise?” Daimen fumbled.

“You were supposed to help me!” Fortov burst out, pointing at Daimen again and then hitting himself in the chest with a closed fist to indicate himself. “Remember? I came to you before enrolling here and asked you if I could count on you to support me when I run into troubles at the Academy, and you said yes… you said I could always come to you for help if I needed it and that it’s no issue, no issue at all…”

Daimen visibly winced at those words.

“Oh,” he said weakly. “That.”

“Yes, that,” Fortov said sullenly. “I was such a fool to actually trust you on that. What good is a promise like that when you’re always busy with something, always unreachable and brushing me off when you’re not? You probably forgot about that promise the moment you made it… if you ever took it seriously at all.”

“I made that promise in good faith,” Daimen protested. “It’s just that I had some professional opportunities come up afterwards that were too good to let go. Don’t you think it’s kind of unreasonable of you to expect me to sabotage my career just to help you with schoolwork? I mean, you could have always just asked Zorian for help instead and…”

Both Fortov and Zorian gave him a glare for that. Daimen considered his words for a moment and then mumbled something that was either a quick prayer to the gods or a colorful curse before dropping the idea and moving on.

“Anyway, moving on,” Daimen said, coughing into his fist. “I guess I kind of did fail you there. I do admit that. However, to say that makes me responsible for your academy problems, that’s still rubbish. Let’s be honest here Fortov… me helping you out every once in a while wouldn’t have made much of a difference in the grand scheme of things.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be ‘every once in a while’, you jerk…” Fortov protested.

Zorian stood off to the side, shaking his head as the two continued to argue. As minutes ticked by, it became obvious that this promise thing meant completely different things to Fortov than it did to Daimen. Fortov, it turned out, had understood Daimen’s promise as a commitment to a much heavier form of support. Though Fortov did not phrase things that way, Zorian understood his middle brother’s explanations for what they were: an admission that he expected to be carried along throughout his entire education on Daimen’s coattails. Daimen, on the other hand, probably made that promise without much thought put into it, thinking it a mere formality. He evidently expected that Fortov would come seek him out once every few months to ask a question or two and talk about girls and life and stuff.

Amusingly enough, he ended up not even getting that in the end…

“Can’t you see you’re being completely unreasonable?” Daimen said, gesticulating wildly. “Do you even hear what you’re saying? You basically expected me to do half of your work for you. That’s completely ridiculous!”

“He’s right, it is,” added Zorian, nodding sagely.

“I was just describing an ideal case, I would have been happy with even a fraction of it,” Fortov shot back. “And it doesn’t matter because in the end I got nothing at all! You gave me a promise and then you forgot you’d ever made it. That’s a jerk thing to do, no matter how you try to spin it.”

“He’s right, it is,” added Zorian, nodding sagely.

“Shut up, Zorian!” they both said in perfect synchronization.

Zorian pretended to stagger back from the outburst and mimicked clamping his mouth shut.

As for Daimen and Fortov, the two of them shared an uncertain look between each other before quietly deciding to calm down a little and take a step back. Zorian would have liked to claim that this was his plan all along, but truthfully he was just messing with them for his own amusement.

“But seriously, you’re being kind of crazy here,” Daimen said to Fortov again, a little more sedately this time. “I get that you’re having problems with your studies, but–”

“Man, you just don’t understand,” Fortov complained, cutting him off. “This city, this academy… it’s out of my league. I know this. I’ve always known this. I know my limits. I’m not as smart as you and Zorian…”

“You’re plenty smart, Fortov,” Zorian cut in. “You’re just lazy.”

Fortov didn’t even try to refute him, but Daimen gave him a sidelong glance.

“I thought you were going to keep quiet?” Daimen asked.

“I lied,” Zorian said with a careless shrug.

“Whatever,” Fortov said, exhaling heavily. “I’m not as good as you two. Happy now?” Zorian made a circular motion with his hand, signaling him to keep going. “Anyway, my point was that I only agreed to enroll here because Daimen said he would support me. If I had known I would have to do this alone, I would have told Mother and Father to enroll me somewhere else. Somewhere less… prestigious. But they pushed hard for this, saying what an opportunity this is and I thought… well, at least I’ll have my genius older brother there to help me sort things out…”

Zorian didn’t say anything after that, quietly waiting by the side and letting the two of them talk. He didn’t feel much compassion for Fortov’s plight. Daimen may have a cause for feeling a little guilty about how things turned out, but all Zorian saw was the same old Fortov he’d known from his childhood – a lazy, shallow asshole constantly looking for ways to shift his own responsibilities onto people around him. He was darkly amused when the two of them eventually decided to just take a step back and have another meeting in a week or so… something that would never happen, and Daimen damn well knew so.

Oh well, it wasn’t really Zorian’s problem. That is, until Fortov left the scene and Daimen tried to make it his problem…

“No, Daimen, I am not going to delve into the hows and whys of Fortov’s failures and assemble a tutoring program for him,” Zorian bluntly told him.

“Why not? You do for Kirielle and even that female friend of yours,” Daimen said. “He’s your brother, Zorian.”

“Sorry, but you can’t guilt-trip me into doing this. Mother’s antics have made me completely immune to guilt-trips,” Zorian said dispassionately. “I am sick and tired of having to pick up after Fortov’s failures time and time again. How about you do it for once in your life? You’re the one who made a promise that you failed to keep, no? Don’t you think it’s in poor taste to try fobbing this off on me so quickly after your little heart-to-heart with Fortov?”

“The restart is just about to end, when else am I going to talk to you about this if not now?” Daimen protested. “And I don’t retain memories over the restarts like you do, that’s why I can’t do it.”

“But you can leave yourself notes at the end of each restart and work on the problem that way,” Zorian countered. “You are doing that very thing in order to figure out how to get Mother and Father to accept your marriage to Orissa, so I don’t see why you can’t apply it here too.”

Daimen frowned, either because he did not like the idea or because he was reminded of how utterly he had failed in his task of convincing them thus far.

“He’s your brother, Daimen,” Zorian said, flinging his words back at him.

“Ugh,” Daimen grumbled. “You can be such a little shit sometimes… Fine, you win. I guess it has to be me. But I’ll need you to do me a small favor…”

– break –

One restart ended and a new one began. At the start of the new restart, Zach and Zorian immediately invaded Jornak’s home, knocking him out, kidnapping him and searching his home. They found Veyers dead in the guest room, just like Jornak’s story in the previous restart suggested they would. Using his brand new soul perception and a couple of soul magic forensic spells he had stolen from Sudomir’s mind (unsurprisingly, necromancers had a very developed tradition of analytic spells meant to be used on corpses), Zorian determined that Veyers was in a virtually identical situation as the soul-killed aranea beneath Cyoria.

Normally, when one’s soul was ripped out of their body, there would be subtle signs left etched into the flesh of the deceased, and these could be used to infer the method of extraction used. Neither the aranea nor Veyers showed such traces, though – it was as if they were merely flesh puppets that had never held any life to begin with.

They had expected such a result, but it was nice to have things confirmed so clearly.

After examining Veyers’ body, they moved on to Jornak. Zorian had expected the young lawyer to be absolutely livid at them, but the way they just barged into his home and brutally subdued him must have clued him in to the fact they weren’t here on behalf of regular law enforcement. Or maybe it was their age – Zorian sometimes forgot to account for that little detail, as he felt pretty old these days, but he and Zach still looked like teenagers. Jornak was thus a lot more subdued this time around, too terrified about what they wanted to do with him to put up much of a resistance. Sadly, interrogating him with the aid of truth potions and mind magic yielded very little of note. Everything was mostly as Jornak had said in the previous restart, except that Veyers was also something of an informant for the young lawyer in addition to being a ‘friend’ – he basically reported anything interesting that occurred in his House to Jornak, who then forwarded the information to the Cult of the World Dragon. Thus, Veyers was something of an unwitting low-level spy for the Cult.

Finally, Zach and Zorian sat down one day to discuss their findings and what they meant regarding the identity of Red Robe.

“So,” Zach began, “we’ve confirmed that Veyers is either Red Robe or connected to him in some fashion. His body is clearly just a meat puppet that never held a soul to begin with, just like the bodies of your aranean friends beneath the city. Either he was somehow connected to Red Robe and the man decided to use soulkill on him, or he is Red Robe and this is what happens to a controller’s body when they leave the time loop. Is that about right?”

“It is,” Zorian confirmed. “Additionally, the fact Red Robe saw fit to delete your memories of Veyers reinforces his importance. We haven’t been able to find anyone else whose entire presence had been scoured from your mind, so whatever link he has to Red Robe isn’t small.”

“He also has a reason to be bitter at the city and a link to the Invasion, however tenuous,” Zach added. “Yeah, he could totally be Red Robe. Even his height and build matches what I remember of him when he attacked me at the start of that one restart…”

“Sadly, that is not real proof of anything,” Zorian said, shaking his head. “At the level of skill we are working at, that sort of thing is trivially easy to fake. All it takes is a quick transformation spell and you could radically change your height and build.”

“Well, he did attack me at the very start of the restart when he was undoubtedly in a hurry and didn’t have much time to make detailed preparations. Maybe it slipped his mind? You have a better memory than I do and you saw him up close… how does the Red Robe in your mind compare to Veyers?”

Zorian considered it carefully. After a while he decided that Zach was right – Veyers did have the appropriate height and build to be the Red Robe in his memories.

“It is as you say,” Zorian said slowly. “He does kind of fit under that robe. But really, in order to get to the bottom of this, we need to find out what happens when a controller leaves the time loop. This should tell us whether Veyers is just a soulkilled victim or the very mastermind we are looking for.”

“And how are we supposed to do that?” Zach complained. “That stupid Guardian of the Threshold thing refuses to entertain hypotheticals like that. We already asked it what happens in this scenario, remember? It simply insisted that no such thing could transpire. Besides, we still don’t know what method Red Robe used to leave. If he’s a later addition to the time loop like you assume he is, he couldn’t have used the normal method to do so. He would have run into the problem of his original already having a soul, which should have led to the Guardian refusing to cooperate. Depending on what method Red Robe used to leave the time loop, the answer to the question of what would happen to his body might radically change…”

“Not necessarily,” Zorian said. “One thing that always stuck with me about Red Robe is that he honestly seemed concerned about the possibility of there being a large number of other time travelers involved in the time loop. That means that he knew of a very easy and reliable way of inducing people in the time loop and thought it was entirely plausible that someone was using it on a mass scale.”

“He did seem quite certain that there were a lot of other time travelers lurking around,” Zach said, frowning. “My memory of that time is not the best, but that did appear to be the main thing he sought answers about when he probed my mind that night…”

“Right,” Zorian said. “And this method couldn’t have been the same as what I went through, because what happened to me is highly dangerous to the marker donor and probably doesn’t give consistent results. It also couldn’t have been something that is hard to set up, or else Red Robe wouldn’t have accepted it happening so readily and on such a large scale…”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

“So what is it then?” Zach asked impatiently. “I’m guessing you have some sort of answer, or else you wouldn’t be mentioning it. Don’t try to re-enact those cheap detective novels with me, please. I always found the long reveals in those books to be really annoying…”

“Fine, I’ll be blunt,” Zorian sighed. Killjoy. “I think Red Robe was simply using a modified temporary marker to persist in the time loop. Sure, they’re supposed to last only six months, but that’s probably just an extra restriction rather than something inherent in the marker itself. And my own marker demonstrates quite clearly that these markers can be damaged. Perhaps selectively damaged, allowing people to remove some of the functions.”

“There have to be some protections against that,” Zach frowned. “I doubt that the makers of the system would just allow people to tinker with their work like that.”

“Possibly,” Zorian conceded. “Not having seen any temporary marker yet, I can offer little except baseless speculation. But still, this seems to me like the most likely and straightforward way for Red Robe to enter the time loop.”

Zach considered his words for a while before giving it a careless shrug and focusing his attention back to Zorian.

“Well… alright,” Zach shrugged. “Let’s assume you’re right. So what? How does that relate to what we were talking about?”

“Well, the temporary markers are supposed to be temporary,” Zorian said. “There is probably a clear course of action meant to be done when they run out and the person they were supporting… disappears. And this course of action will probably be performed even if the person disappears prematurely through some other method.”

“Oh!” Zach said, slapping himself in the forehead. “Of course! So if Red Robe entered the time loop through a ‘selectively damaged’ temporary marker, all we have to do to find out what would happen after he leaves… is place a temporary marker on someone and see what happens after it runs out.”

“Exactly,” Zorian nodded.

A brief silence descended on the scene.

“You know,” Zach began after a while, “I’m pretty sure we already know the answer to that question. It probably just recreates a person from its usual template, as if they were never a temporary looper to begin with. I have no proof of this, but it intuitively makes sense to me.”

“You are probably correct,” Zorian nodded. “I also have no proof, but it is consistent with the intent of the time loop as the training simulation to set things up in that fashion.”