Zorian’s previous experiences with riding the train to Cyoria alongside Kirielle hadn’t been very encouraging. She always started excited and curious, staring intently at the passing landscape and comnting on anything that caught her interest, but that didn’t last very long. There just wasn’t all that much to see on the route to Cyoria, so she quickly got bored of looking through the compartnt window and turned to the only other source of entertainnt left to her – him. And he was hard-pressed to entertain her throughout the entire ride.
That was back when he had been unwilling to use his rising shaping skills to do magic on the train, though. This ti he decided he simply didn’t care about the risk of discovery. He could find no detection ward on the compartnt they were in, and even if they did catch him in the act sohow, they would probably just slap him with a small fine and a lecture. It would be annoying, but better than listening to Kirielle whine about being bored for several hours. Plus, this way he got to practice his spellcasting while inhibited by a shaping disruption ward – sothing he had already been planning to try.
That was how Zorian found himself levitating a sphere of water in front of him, a ring of pens and erasers orbiting around it in a diffuse, slowly revolving ring. It was hard, despite the seeming triviality of it all. This wasn’t just him stacking a bunch of easy beginner spells to get a neat effect – he was performing an act of unstructured magic, treating the whole thing like a very complicated shaping exercise. Between the complexity of the floating construct and the disruption ward throwing off his shaping skills, he was really struggling to maintain control over the sphere and its satellites. He was pretty sure this was his absolute limit in terms of mana shaping skills so he should probably-
“Make a frog!” Kirielle challenged.
Zorian gave Kirielle an annoyed look. She grinned at him, confident that she had won their little ga. That she had finally found his limit. He did not deliberately set out to make the complex thing floating in front of him, after all – it had started out as a much smaller sphere with a re two pens circling around it, and Zorian had fully intended for it to stay that way until Kirielle started challenging him to make it more difficult. After he emptied the entire contents of his water bottle and used up all of the pens and erasers they both had in their possessions, he was certain she would have had to concede his victory…
He broke eye contact with her and focused on the floating construct in front of him. Trying to shape the floating water into anything other than the sphere it was now would be insanely hard. Telekinetically controlling water was far, far harder than doing the sa with solid objects, and he would be hard pressed to sculpt it into complex shapes even if he was outside of a disruption ward and had no ring of small objects to serve as an additional distraction.
But he’d be damned if he was just going to roll over and admit defeat to his little sister just because of that. Over the next fifteen minutes, he slowly shaped the blob of water into a sculpture of a frog, as detailed and convincing as he could manage it… in other words, not very. He did have a burst of inspiration half-way through, though, and decided to depict the frog monster he saved the Yellow Cavern Guardians from in the previous restart instead of a normal one. Unfortunately, Kirielle didn’t think much of his efforts.
“That’s a pretty weird frog,” she declared.
“It’s a yellow cavern devil frog,” said Zorian, shalessly making things up. He had no idea how that monster was called, or if it even had an official na to begin with. “Huge, vicious things with a penchant for eating little girls.”
“That’s stupid. You’re just making things up,” she accused. “Just admit you lost.”
“Bah, you asked for a frog and I made one. It’s not my fault you are not knowledgeable enough in the diverse and fascinating world of magical amphibians. Let put this away and then I’ll tell you about Sumrak the mage and the story of how he saved a secret society of mages from one of the aforentioned devil frogs…”
Before Kirielle could complain too much, Zorian hurriedly set about dismantling the construct in front of him before his rapidly degrading control unraveled completely, letting the pens and erasers float down on the empty seat beside him and pouring the water back into its bottle. That done, he launched into a sowhat modified account of his battle against the frog monster.
Well okay, heavily modified. In Zorian’s story, the Yellow Cavern Guardians were a group of reclusive human mages that lived in the far north, practicing ‘spider magic’, and the adventurer Sumrak confronted the frog monster head on with his aweso magical might instead of resorting to traps and subterfuge. It made for a more impressive story that way. Kirielle seed skeptical of the story at first, but when Zorian started using detailed illusions to demonstrate the events he was talking about, her suspiciousness lted away and she paid rapt attention to the story.
Zorian didn’t know whether to be amused or outraged that she was so entranced by the illusions. They were… well, not quite easy, but nothing special either. The floating ball of water and school supplies he had made earlier on her prompting had taken much more skill and effort to create. He was tempted to chalk it up to her ignorance of what a true display of magical expertise looked like, but he suspected that even if she knew how to judge the difficulty properly, she still likely wouldn’t have cared. He had noticed during previous restarts that she loved illusionism the most out of the magical disciplines he had shown her. Maybe it appealed to her inner artist?
The train announcer declared that they were arriving to Korsa, forcing Zorian to cut the story short just before Sumrak succeeded in fighting his way through the devil frog’s innurable spawn and confronted the monster in the cavernous ho to which it had cravenly fled when it lost its last bout with the adventuring mage…
…and of course Kirielle was having none of that. She was fine with waiting while people were streaming into the train and looking into compartnts to find a seat, but with everyone now settled down and the train moving again, she demanded he continue with the story. The problem was that Ibery had decided to join them in the compartnt in the anti, and Zorian felt just a tiny bit apprehensive about showcasing his abilities in front of her. An apprehension that Kirielle didn’t empathize with in the slightest.
“You can’t stop now, not when the story is so near the ending,” she complained.
“Well, so long as I refrain from using my, err, visualaids…” tried Zorian.
“Nooo!” Kirielle pleaded. “That was the best part of the story!”
Zorian threw a significant glance towards Ibery, hoping that Kirielle would take the ssage. She did, sort of, though she didn’t react to the information the way he hoped she would.
“Oh co on, the nice lady won’t snitch on you for doing magic in the train,” Kirielle declared out loud. She then turned towards the startled Ibery and gave her the most soulful puppy-eyes look she could muster. “You wouldn’t do that, would you?”
“Umm…” Ibery mumbled, fidgeting uncomfortably in her seat. “What? I though the train had counterasures to stop spellcasting?”
“It does?” asked Kirielle, surprised.
“It does,” Zorian confird. No point in playing dumb now. “They just disrupt spellcasting though, not make it impossible. You can work around it if you’re good enough.”
“And… you’re that good?” Ibery asked uncertainly.
Zorian shrugged, offering no other response. To Kirielle’s delight, he then proceeded to finish the story he had been telling, pretty illusions included. He noticed that Ibery had set aside her book to listen as well.
She also tried to discreetly cast a few simple spells when she thought he wasn’t looking, and then frowned when she failed to overco the disruption ward. She was probably just curious about the level of skill needed to overco the ward. He thought about scanning her surface thoughts to find out what she was thinking, but decided not to after giving it so thought. The risk of getting caught in the act was minimal, since Mind Like Fire had taught him how to stealthily test for presence of ntal defenses, but getting into the habit of casually invading the minds of everyone around him struck him as a bad idea. He left Ibery to her experint and focused back to Kirielle and the story he was telling.
Once he was done with the story, Ibery promptly struck up a conversation with the two of them. She admitted that she didn’t care much about the story itself, especially since she only caught the tail end of it, but she was very impressed by his ability to overco the train’s wards. Especially once she learned he was only starting his third year at the academy.
Eventually they arrived to Cyoria, however, and went their separate ways. Before they said their goodbyes, however, Ibery nervously told him to drop by the library soti in the next week in order to discuss… sothing. Well, whatever – he had intended to raid the library for more spells in this restart anyway, he might as well see what she wanted from him while he was at it.
“I think she likes you,” Kirielle said when they were alone.
“Nah, she’s head over heels for Fortov,” said Zorian.
“What?” Kirielle asked, baffled. “Her and Fortov? No way!”
“Well I didn’t say they’re together,” Zorian clarified. “Just that she has a crush on him.”
“How do you know that?” Kirielle asked suspiciously.
“Ancient magical secrets?” tried Zorian. Kirielle gave him a deadpan look. “Fine, fine… I’ll tell you later, when we arrive at our new lodgings. It’s not sothing we should discuss out in the open.”
Even as he conversed with his little sister, Zorian paid attention to what his mind sense was telling him while they moved through the crowds. Even if he was being targeted by soone shielded from ntal detection, the absence of a mind in soone would be a huge red flag on its own. He detected no hostile intentions directed at either of them, though, and none of the suspicious people he encountered were invisible to his mind sense. After ten minutes, he breathed a sigh of relief – his fears of walking into a trap with his little sister in tow appeared to have been unfounded.
Hmm, he knew it would rain later on, but he could ward against the rain easily enough… perhaps a little sightseeing around the city to quench Kirielle’s curiosity a little?
“Hey,” Zorian said, attracting Kirielle’s attention. “Do you want to visit the main plaza of the city? They have a pretty nice fountain there that I like to watch sotis…”
She said yes, of course. He needn’t have even asked.
* * *
It had been more than four years since Zorian had started looping, and a lot of things had happened in that period. Keeping track of it all was a major challenge, despite his mage training and his own excellent mory. Being absent from Cyoria for nearly a year and a half in order to escape Red Robe’s scrutiny certainly didn’t help in this regard, and many of the minor details and specifics of how a ‘normal’ restart was supposed to go had faded from his mind during his long absence.
It should not be very surprising, then, that he’d totally forgotten what happened the last ti he tried to reach the fountain at the beginning of a restart – after all, he hadn’t tried it since that very first, fateful restart that got him included into the ti loop.
Thus, when the two of them finally stumbled upon the swarm of cranium rats blocking their path, Zorian was caught just as off-guard by it as he was the previous ti. He wasn’t as defenseless as he was back then, though, and he nearly burned them all to a crisp before he stopped himself. He was pretty sure that him killing the swarm would put him on the invaders’ radar, and therefore on Red Robe’s radar as well, so the smartest move would be to simply retreat like he did back in his first restart.
He felt the swarm testing his ntal defenses and responded by strengthening his defenses and striking back. The attacks stopped, but his counterattack did very little to the collective mind of the swarm – the group mind was thoroughly unshielded, probably because any ntal shell would interfere with its internal telepathic network, but his counterattack rely knocked out a couple of individual rats instead of doing any significant damage. He wondered-
He felt a spike of terror from Kirielle as she finally realized what she was looking at, and realized he really shouldn’t be playing around with these things – he was probably immune to anything they may dish out but she wasn’t. He fired off a weak flathrower at the closest part of the swarm to make them back off a little and then imdiately turned around, grabbed Kirielle and fled. The rats didn’t follow, much like how they didn’t follow him the first ti he encountered them. They probably didn’t want to attract attention any more than he did, though that did raise the question of what the hell they were doing blocking off one of Cyoria’s major roads in broad daylight. Sothing to look into eventually…
While they ran, he idly marveled about how fortunate it was that he’d never replicated that first eting with the cranium rats before he had t the aranea – they would have undoubtedly read his mind, and there was a good chance they would have found out about the ti loop from his thoughts. Even if they dismissed the ti travel stuff as delusion, they would have definitely been interested in him knowing about the invasion…
“Um, can we still go see the fountain?” Kirielle asked once they had retreated sufficiently and she’d had a chance to catch her breath and calm down.
“Yeah, I know an alternative route,” said Zorian, pointing towards a nearby park.
Wait, hadn’t he tried that in the first restart and encountered so kind of problem? He was pretty sure he had. What kind of- oh! The bicycle girl. He had totally forgotten about her. Oh well, that wasn’t really a problem – he would just get her bicycle out of the water really quickly and they would be on their way.
Kirielle got unusually quiet when they encountered the little crying girl and hung back while he talked to her. He got the girl’s bike out of the creek with trivial ease, simply placing his hand over the bridge and wiling the bike to rise into his grasp – it took more ti to calm the girl down a little and get her to tell him what she was upset about than it did to actually retrieve it. He used a couple of spells to dry the bike off and clean all the gri that had accumulated on it, simply because he could and saw no reason not to. He suspected the bike was cleaner now than it was before it had fallen into the creek.
“There,” said Zorian proudly. “Your bike is clean, intact and out of the creek. You can stop crying now, okay?”
“Okay,” she sniffed, rubbing her eyes. “Um. Thank you.”
“Don’t ntion it,” Zorian said. “Well, we should get going now, so take care. I think it’s going to rain soon, so you should probably head ho as well.”
“Co on brother, don’t be an. We can’t just leave her here,” protested Kirielle suddenly. “We should get her ho ourselves, just to be sure.”
“He’s not an,” the other little girl protested, suddenly snapping out of her daze. “And I can find my way ho just fine. I’m not stupid.”
Oh, he liked this kid. It wasn’t often that soone defended him in preference to Kirielle.
“Well. I’m glad that soone is not automatically assuming the worst of ,” said Zorian, giving a sideways glance towards Kirielle. She rolled her eyes at him. “I am sure that Kirielle didn’t an anything like that, though – she was just worried for you, since you still looked pretty upset.”
“I was just… I only got the bike yesterday and mother told to be careful with it because they couldn’t afford a new one and I…”
“Hey, hey, it’s alright,” said Zorian quickly, interrupting her story. She looked like she was going to cry again. “You got it back. All’s well that ends well. But maybe we really should accompany you ho, at least until you calm down a little.”
“Yeah!” Kirielle piped in. “We can talk on the way and get to know each other. I just moved in here and it would be nice to have a friend my age. What’s your na anyway? I’m Kirielle and this guy here that got your bike out of the river is my brother Zorian.”
“Nochka,” she said. “But, um, I don’t want to make you late.”
“We were just going to see the fountain, nothing really important,” Kirielle waved her off. “We can do that any ti. Co on, show us where you live.”
The walk to Nochka’s house was a short one – she lived pretty close to the park, which was the reason her parents had let her go there all alone. Still pretty strange for parents to be so hands off about their child’s whereabouts, but Zorian’s parents were the sa with him so he didn’t pry. He didn’t say much of anything really, but that was okay because Kirielle talked plenty enough for both of them. Nochka herself was shy and nervous, constantly watching her surroundings and jumping at every unusual sound, but she did warm up to Kirielle by the ti they had reached her house. She was eight, a year younger than Kirielle, and was also fairly new to Cyoria. Her family had arrived into the city a couple of months ago, and she didn’t have any friends her age either. Great. He was pretty sure he knew where this was going…
Zorian once again tried to disengage from the whole situation once they got Nochka to her destination, but failed – Nochka’s mother saw them arriving and insisted they co inside, and he didn’t want to be impolite. He figured the woman had every right to be curious about a couple of strangers walking around with her daughter in tow, so they should at least allay her fears a little before leaving. Nochka hurriedly gave her an account of the situation the mont they were inside; though in her story the bike didn’t end up in the creek, but was instead stuck in a rope trap that happened to be in the park for… so reason. Nochka kind of glossed over that part and moved onto Zorian helping her get it down from the tree.
Yeah, Nochka was a terrible liar. Based on the way her mother was looking at her when she finished her story, Zorian was betting that she would be getting the real story out of Nochka the mont Zorian and Kirielle left the house.
Nochka’s mother, who Zorian learned was nad Rea, was honestly a little scary to Zorian. She didn’t look frightening – she had the sa jet black hair and dark brown eyes that Nochka did, and the stature and dress of an average housewife – but it took only five minutes for Zorian to decide there was more to her. Her movents were all fluid and precise, she never stuttered or wavered when she spoke, her gaze was frighteningly intense, and she gave off an air of absolute confidence and composure. Frankly, if he had been alone he would have left the place in a hurry, but Kirielle didn’t seem nearly as intimidated by the woman and insisted on telling her new friend stories. Such as the one of how they stumbled upon her in the first place.
“Ah yes, the strange brain rats,” Rea said when Kirielle told them about their encounter with the cranium rats. “I’ve seen a few hanging around the house, but never in such numbers. Disgusting things.”
Zorian frowned. Why were the cranium rats hanging around their house?
“You should be careful,” he told her. “They’re called cranium rats and they can read your mind, possibly even mories if left unmolested long enough.”
“Hmm… good thing I kill them when I find them, then,” Rea said.
“Yes, but don’t think that makes you totally safe,” Zorian said. “They’re a telepathic hive mind, so killing one rat will not erase the information it has gathered on you. What one cranium rat knows, they all know. I really think you should report this to the city authorities and have them hunt the swarm down, but it’s your choice in the end.”
“I see,” Rea said after staring at him for a few seconds. “I’ll talk to my husband about your advice and we’ll see what we can do. I must say, you are surprisingly well inford for a fifteen-year-old, mister Kazinski.”
“Brother is really smart,” said Kirielle.
Oh hush, you flatterer.
“Right - thank you for your hospitality, Mrs. Sashal, but our landlord is expecting us and we really should get going,” Zorian said, rising from his seat and motioning for Kirielle to do the sa. From what Rea had said earlier, her husband was going to co ho from work soon, and he’d rather not get stuck in another round of explanations.
“The rain is rather heavy, though,” Rea said, glancing through the window next to her. “You should at least wait for the weather to get better before you go.”
“Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem like it’ll happen for quite so ti,” said Zorian. “But that’s okay, because I can just teleport myself and Kirielle close to our destination and shield us from the rain for the short while we’ll be caught in it.”
“Can Kirielle co over to play with so ti?” asked Nochka.
“Uh, yeah. Sure,” said Zorian. Yes, he was pretty sure Kirielle would be angry if he said no. Though he really didn’t want Kirielle in an area infested with cranium rats…
Zorian and Kirielle said their goodbyes and left in the direction of Imaya’s house.
* * *
The next day, Zorian woke up early and told Imaya he was going to the library, though in truth he did no such thing. Instead, he teleported himself to Knyazov Dveri, where he proceeded to gather crystalized mana. By now he had mapped large portions of the local underworld, and as such couldn’t actually pick up every piece of crystalized mana within a single day. He would need another two or three days to clean the place up properly. Oh, and he was also hitting the limits of his mory, it seed – he had outright forgotten about so of the minor resource locations, and it took him a while to track down others. Annoying.
He wondered what his previous self would say if he knew that in the future he would have so much wealth within reach that he would literally forget about so of it. Probably sothing rude.
He had only been back at Imaya’s place for half an hour or so before Taiven ca to speak with him.
“Let guess, you want to go into the sewers with you to recover a watch from a bunch of giant spiders,” Zorian ‘guessed’.
“What? No, I decided not to bother with that job since more lucrative ones have popped up lately,” said Taiven. She gave him a strange look. “How the hell do you know about that, anyway? I told maybe two people I was even interested in that job.”
Uh, right. The circumstances in Cyoria had changed greatly since the last ti he’d been in the city – the rcenaries he hired to confront Red Robe had been soul-killed along with the aranea, and monsters were starting to well up from the Dungeon with no aranea to keep them in check. Nothing could nor should be taken for granted – he had to keep that in mind.
Rather than try to trick her with so poor excuse, he decided to simply ignore her question and ask his own.
“If you’re not here for that, why are you here, Taiven? You don’t exactly have a habit of visiting for the hell of it…”
Taiven protested that she totally did visit him for the hell of it, and vehently denied that she had co to ask him for a favor. It was an opportunity, she insisted – an opportunity to earn big money and fa, if only he would cooperate with her.
Well. If nothing else, her new sche was a lot more tempting than her old one.
Long story short, the monster incursions he read about in the newspapers had started way earlier than Zorian had expected they would. There were a couple of bad ones on the very first day of the restart – a young couple had been heavily injured when a huge abyssal centipede crawled out of the sewers in the middle of a crowded street and a restaurant had to be evacuated when a huge yellow ooze broke into the wine cellar and started consuming everything in sight. Things got worse overnight, and there were a number of fatalities while Zorian had been busy picking up crystalized mana in Knyazov Dveri, causing the city to enact so ergency asures. One of these was issuing large bounties on confird monster kills and encouraging various dungeon delvers and rcenary groups to go as deep into Cyoria’s dungeon as they dared, and cull the monster population before they could reach the surface.
As far as Taiven was concerned, this was exactly what she had been waiting for. Already frustrated with the lack of chances to prove her worth, she was eager to take advantage of this new developnt to make a na for herself by aggressively pursuing bounties and putting down as many dungeon denizens as she could find.
The problem was that her group was too small for her ambitions. Three people do not make a proper hunting party.
“I’m surprised you ca to with this,” said Zorian. “This sounds like it requires decent combat skills, and I am only a third year. Surely so of your peers would have been better for this?”
“Well, the thing is, I’m not the only one recruiting… and many of the other recruiters are a lot more prestigious and well-known than little old . It should get easier once I start getting results, but that could be too late and I can’t afford to be too picky right now.”
“Can’t afford to be picky, huh?” said Zorian flatly. Before the ti loop, that phrase right there would have caused him to refuse her offer out of spite. He hated being thought of as second best, never mind a last resort. But years in the ti loop had tempered his ego, and he could admit to himself that Taiven’s judgent was spot on – considering the information she had on him.
“Okay, bad choice of words,” admitted Taiven. “But as you said yourself, you’re only a third year. How good are you at combat magic? Do you think you could pull your own weight in a team as you are now?”
Hmm, how much should he reveal here? Taiven could be shockingly oblivious about so things, but she would definitely not ignore him being way stronger than he had any right being. And she was one of the few people who knew his pre-ti loop self well enough to make such a judgent call with a fair amount of certainty.
And for that matter, did he even want to join Taiven’s group? It sounded like a huge ti sink, and he had so many other things vying for his attention… maybe it would be better if he were to pretend he was too weak and inexperienced to help her?
Oh to hell with it – he’d give it a chance this ti. If nothing else, it would give him a ready-made excuse for a lot of things he intended to do in this restart.
“Absolutely. I have been in the Dungeon before,” he admitted. “I have a decent repertoire of combat spells and I’m confident that I won’t freeze on the first sign of danger. The biggest problem is my mana reserves – at maximum, I can only cast about 20 magic missiles in a row. And that’s after I increased my reserves through constant use – I’m pretty average in terms of mana reserves magnitude.”
Taiven stared at him for a few seconds, incredulous. “You’ve been in the Dungeon before?” she finally asked. “I’m surprised you got permission for that. The Academy sure didn’t want to give one before I was well into my fourth year.”
“I didn’t say anything about asking permission,” said Zorian.
“Zorian…”
“What, like you’ve never done anything like that?” challenged Zorian.
“Well, maybe once or twice,” Taiven admitted. “But it doesn’t sound like this was an occasional occurrence for you. Getting your mana reserves that high must have involved so pretty intense practice, considering where you started from. That sounds pretty dangerous.”
“Sotis a man has to take chances,” Zorian quoted in Taiven’s voice. “I do believe you’re the one who told that, Taiven.”
“I was talking about romance and you know it,” she protested. “Why couldn’t you take my advice about that instead?”
‘I did take your advice,’ thought Zorian sourly to himself. ‘I got laughed in my face for my trouble.’
“Why are you lecturing about this? You should be overjoyed your desperate ploy had worked,” he said instead. “Do you want in your damn team or not?”
“I do, I do!” Taiven quickly assured him. She pulled out a sheet of paper from her bag and set it down on the table in front of him. “I guess you’re right, this isn’t really important right now. Why don’t you just fill out this mbership form and I’ll give you a rundown of what I had planned for tomorrow…”
* * *
Over the next couple of days Zorian went on regular forays into Cyoria’s underworld with Taiven, Urik and Oran. He quickly realized that his combat skills weren’t really the most valuable thing he brought to the whole operation – the combined might of Taiven and her two old teammates was usually enough to destroy any threat they encountered, with Zorian only called to fight when one of those three ended up low on mana and needed to rest for a while. No, the biggest benefits he brought to the table were a detailed map of a huge chunk of Cyoria’s underworld (courtesy of the matriarch’s last ssage) and a decent proficiency in divination that allowed him to scout the areas in front of them and track down any specific target they were pursuing. Without him there to direct the rest of the group, they would have probably spent most of their ti wandering aimlessly in search of sothing to fight. Those three were dangerously overspecialized for direct combat in Zorian’s opinion.
While down in the Dungeon, he took the opportunity to scout the invaders’ underground bases that he was aware of, trying to see how they were dealing with this kind of increased activity and scrutiny of Cyoria’s underworld. Taiven’s group was far from the only one that had tried to cash in on the bounties the city was offering, and more groups were expected to get involved soon. What he found was that the invaders had retreated sowhat, abandoning several of their more exposed bases completely and leaving only token forces in many others. That was bound to have a very negative impact on the execution of the invasion…
When he wasn’t hunting down dungeon denizens with Taiven, he was tending to the multitude of his other plans and obligations. He finished harvesting crystalized mana under Knyazov Dveri and had started to slowly sell his huge stockpile off to various stores, both in Cyoria and outside. He took Kirielle to see Nochka and stayed around to watch out for any cranium rats in the area (but thankfully didn’t detect any). He ended up eting Nochka’s father this ti – a tall, jovial, bearded, muscular fellow nad Sauh who loved to laugh and talk and was completely unlike his wife, yet still terrifying in his own way. Zorian was half-convinced that the workshop Sauh insisted on showing him, the one full of hamrs and other heavy, dangerous-looking tools, was the man’s way of threatening him bodily harm should he hurt his daughter in any way. He also visited the library to see what Ibery wanted from him. To his surprise, he found out that Ibery was interested in getting magical instruction from him. She had been looking to hire soone for additional tutoring outside of the academy, but found most tutors out of her price range, and was hoping a third year like him might be anable to a spell exchange or sothing else of that nature. Though the offer was kind of interesting, he had too many things on his plate as it was – so he told her he’d get back to her after the sumr festival, if she was still interested. Perhaps in so future restart where he refused Taiven’s recruitnt pitch.
And, of course, he still had to attend classes. That was a chore, though not quite as big of a one as he had been expecting. His long absence from Cyoria had made him forget many of the details of how classes were supposed to go, and caused him to view others in a completely new perspective. The constant monster incursions into the city had also had an effect on the academy. Jade was gone from the class, pulled out of the academy by her family for safety concerns. Zach was gone too, of course, and since nobody (except Zorian) knew the real reason for his absence, most people assud he had been similarly pulled out for safety reasons and sent out of Cyoria. Kyron announced during their first lessons that he was running additional combat practice lessons during evenings and Ilsa openly encouraged anyone with significant combat ability to join one of the groups culling the monsters, offering special benefits and exceptions to anyone who did so and achieved results. She pointed out Zorian, Briam, Tinami, Naim and Estin as examples of people in the class who had already done that, thoroughly surprising Zorian – he never would have guessed so many people in his class had decided they’re good enough to get themselves involved in that. Two days later, Kopriva would join that list, while Maya and Iroro were ordered ho by their parents until the situation cald down.
With such large changes in class composition and teacher behavior, Zorian’s school experience was relatively novel compared to what he rembered of his pre-exile Cyoria days. He was sure it would all get boring and repetitive again after another restart or two, but for now it was bearable.
* * *
A few more days passed. The number and severity of monster excursions gradually dropped off, and the city stopped behaving like a kicked over anthill and settled into so semblance of normality. There was still a lot of tension in the air, forays into the Dungeon went on still, but things were finally calming down. As such, Zorian started investigating various invaders, cultists and other people related to the invasion that he still rembered from his ti with the Cyorian aranea, tracking their movents and activities but launching no attacks for the mont. The furor over the dead rcenaries and monster incursions caused so many changes to the preparations of the invasion that his mories were of limited use, and he didn’t want to move until he was reasonably sure he knew when and where to strike.
It was peculiar, though… even accounting for massive divergences due to Red Robe’s removal of aranea, the invaders were still strangely ineffective. Less inford. Before, they seed to know how to bypass certain wards or evade notice of Cyoria’s law enforcent – knowledge that they largely lacked in the current restart. He was starting to suspect that Red Robe had a habit of handing over a lot of crucial information to the invaders in previous restarts, even ones where he didn’t appear to pay much attention to them afterwards… but that in this one restart he’d chosen not to bother with that at all.
Strange.
The arrival of Kael at Imaya’s place reminded Zorian of their deal to help Kael develop his alchemy in exchange for help with soul magic and other stuff. Unfortunately, there was a problem: Zorian had largely forgotten what the contents of Kael’s notebook were over the many, many restarts he had been absent from Cyoria. Sohow Kael managed to figure out a few things from the disjointed parts of his notes that Zorian still rembered, which helped convince him that Zorian was telling the truth, but he was essentially starting from scratch.
Zorian knew he had to find a solution to the forgetting problem if that deal was ever going to work. Without constant reinforcent in every restart, he would forget again, and the amount of information he had to morize was only going to increase with each restart, making the task harder. And that wasn’t just the issue with Kael’s potion recipes, either – he had been having trouble rembering the layout of Knyazov Dveri resource deposits, so of the minor details of previous restarts (such as his eting with Nochka) had completely slipped from his mory, and he had a feeling that rembering the vast amount of information about invaders in Cyoria he was currently gathering was going to be a major issue in the future.
He needed a better way to rember things, and he needed it soon. He would have to set aside the upcoming weekend to see if he could figure sothing out.
He knocked on Xvim’s door and dutifully waited for the man to invite him in.
“Co in,” Xvim called out from inside, and Zorian quickly entered the man’s office and sat down when instructed to do so.
“Show your basic three,” Xvim ordered.
Zorian did so – silently, efficiently and without complaint. He had decided before coming here that he would try and see how long it would take for Xvim to get unnerved by him eting all of his demands without any issue or complaint. It was a long term project, of course – he didn’t really think he could baffle the infuriating man in this particular restart – but he was determined to see it through. He would practice whatever stupid exercise Xvim threw at him every single day, restart after restart, until he got them right. Until he got them all right, if he was forced to. The man had to run out of shaping exercises at so point, right?
Xvim threw a marble at him. Zorian moved his head lightly to the left, moving out of the marble’s flight path without ever eting the man’s eyes. Another two marbles flew at him, but the result was exactly the sa.
“Close your eyes,” Xvim ordered.
Zorian did. He still dodged every marble Xvim threw at him, a cloud of diffuse mana scattered around him as a detection field. Xvim did not react, unfazed by his improbable skill, but neither did Zorian.
“You can open your eyes again. Here’s a box of marbles,” said Xvim, reaching beneath his desk to pick up a large bowl full of hated spheres of glass. They ca in a wide variety of sizes, and Zorian was silently thankful that Xvim only ever threw the small ones at him – so of the big ones looked like they could knock a man unconscious if they connected. “Levitate as many as you can. Hurry up, we haven’t got all day!”
Zorian levitated every single marble in the bowl, but alas – he was too slow. Or at least Xvim thought so, anyway. He made Zorian lift and lower the entire mass of marbles over and over again, wasting an entire hour. Zorian said nothing though, doing his best to et Xvim’s unreasonable demands.
“Levitating them like that in a giant disorganized lump is unsightly. Make it a proper sphere. A ring now. A pyramid. That doesn’t look like a pyramid to – do you need to have your glasses checked, mister Kazinski? Yes, better. But slow – you must be faster. Much faster. Start over from the sphere again. Again. Again.”
Zorian made the mass of marbles flow from one shape to another as fast as he could, but eventually a disaster struck – he lost control of the exercise and the entire mass went crashing down onto the table. Zorian winced as the marbles bounced off the table, making a huge racket and scattering all over Xvim’s office, his mask of cool detachnt breaking for a mont.
Damn it.
Several seconds passed in the aftermath as Zorian and Xvim stared at each other impassively.
“Well?” asked Xvim curiously. “What are you waiting for, mister Kazinski? Hurry up and gather the marbles into the bowl so we can continue where we left off.”
“Yes, sir,” said Zorian, unable to keep a note of sourness out of his voice. “I’ll be right on it.”
It was official: he really hated marbles.
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