Mother of Learning 2 - Outside World

by nobody103

  Vani had asked him whether he had found the shifter tribe, but Zorian admitted that he sort of gave up on that. He couldn't go to Raynie, as she was in Cyoria, and nobody else could direct him where to go. Or maybe they could, but didn't want to – the result was the same in either case. Besides, he was skeptical in regard to how much they could actually help with his issue.

  Finally, the day had come. Gurey had managed to get a small plaque inside Vazen's house by stuffing it inside an envelope and mailing it to the man along with some ridiculous advertisement. Zorian couldn't believe that had actually worked, but it had, and now they just had to wait for the man to go to work before he could teleport inside and search for the safe. Vazen was a 40 year old bachelor, so there no one was supposed to be in the house with him gone, but Zorian had prepared a set of concealing clothes for himself anyway (that he intended to throw away immediately after the operation) and was willing to teleport out at the first sign of trouble.

  After an hour of waiting, Vazen left the house and Zorian teleported inside. Gurey remained outside under an invisibility field, acting as a lookout – if he spotted Vazen coming back, he would press a button on the stopwatch Zorian had given him, which would cause a ring on Zorian's hand to heat up.

  The house was, thankfully, completely empty… but also completely lacking in safes, warded or otherwise. Even after he'd added an additional layer to the wards in order to exclude the inside of the house from the anti-divination ward, his spells still gave no results… probably because the safe was itself warded against divinations. Frustrating. It was obviously hidden behind something, but Zorian couldn't figure out where. There were no hollow walls, secret hatches beneath the carpet, places where the floor was scraped due to constant movement of furniture, and so on. Just as Zorian was about to give up and hit the books for an exotic divination spell that could work despite the ward, he finally found it. It was in the fireplace, of all things – if he hadn't noticed how relatively clean it was (and reminisced about how much he hated cleaning the one back home in Cirin), it would have never occurred to him to look there.

  The fireplace was not built for convenient access, so interacting with it was rather annoying – the safe was positioned to the left, making it impossible to actually see the lock without the use of a mirror. Still, that was just an inconvenience, not a real obstacle. He began casting analysis spells at the ward that protected the safe, trying to find a way past them.

  He had just enough time to register that there was a very weak, localized ward present in the fireplace before he was force to jump back and erect a shield in front of him. A deafening explosion erupted from the fireplace, enveloping the whole room in blinding, choking ash as the ward triggered the explosive trap in response to detecting his analysis spell. His shield protected him from the blast, but the ash cloud was hell on his lungs.

  He teleported out, grabbed Gurey and then teleported again – this time away from Vazen's house. The operation was a bust.

  ✦ ✧ ✦

  In the aftermath of the botched operation, the whole idea had been scrapped. Security was bound to go up now that Vazen knew there was someone after the documents, and Zorian didn't fancy going against the new and improved defenses when even the old ones nearly killed him. Gurey was, if anything, even more shaken about the whole thing than Zorian was. He apologized profusely for the whole episode and ranted about how such lethal traps were illegal and how he couldn't believe Vazen would employ such a thing, which Zorian found more than a little amusing. It helped explain why Vazen seemingly didn't bother to report the break-in to the police, though.

  Personally, Zorian was feeling pretty annoyed with himself. Despite what Gurey seemed to think, this was all on him. He really should have checked the fireplace for traps. Hell, he should have checked the whole house for those! Just because Gurey had said there were no other defenses didn't mean he should have taken it for granted. The man had even said his information was outdated…

  Well, no matter – he got some nifty spells out of the whole thing and he knew what to watch out for in subsequent restarts.

  He thought about confronting the grey hunter at the end of the restart, but then decided against it. He would have just died messily, and he'd had enough brushes with death in this particular restart.

  He went to sleep and woke up with his sister wishing him a good morning.

  Chapter 31

  Marked

  Zorian stared at the grinning face of his opponent, his own face a blank, expressionless mask. This was it. This last round would decide who the victor was, no question about it. His opponent thought he had Zorian backed into a corner, but Zorian had a secret weapon – he had already peered into the man's thoughts and knew that he had already won.

  The rules of the card game were pretty clear, after all.

  "Twelve of pumpkins," Zorian said, placing his last card on the table. The man's face instantly lost its grin. Zorian tried to keep a cool façade, but he probably smiled at least a little.

  "Motherf- How are you this lucky!?" the man cursed, slapping down his own card on top of the stack – a measly seven of oaks, not nearly enough to win – and taking a swing from the glass of hard liquor next to him. He drank way too much in Zorian's opinion, his thoughts steadily growing more and more muddied to Zorian's mental probes as time went by… and while that did make him harder to read via psychic powers, it also made him progressively worse at playing the game. He probably didn't even need to cheat to win the last two games, but cheating was kind of the whole point – he joined the card game to practice his mind reading skills in a real environment, not to win money off hapless victims.

  "Well, this is it for me," Zorian said, standing up. "It was fun and all, but I really have to get going now."

  "Hey, you can't just leave now," the man protested, frowning at him. "That's not how it's done! You have to give me a chance to win my money back!"

  "Orinus, you're drunk," one of the other men at the table said. The two of them dropped out three games ago, but they still stuck around to talk, drink, and act as judges and money holders. "You didn't lose anything. It's the kid who just got back the money he lost to you in the previous game. Nobody has to pay anyone anything."

  "Yeah, the last five games have basically been for nothing," the other man piped in.

  Zorian nodded. Even with mind reading on his side, some hands were just unwinnable. Besides, he purposely threw a couple of games so as to not arouse suspicions of cheating in his partners. "We're both even at this point, and I really have to get going, so it's a perfect place to stop," he said. "Still, if you're that desperate for a rematch, I can always relieve you of your money some other day. I'll be staying in the town for a whole month anyway."

  "You relieve me of my money, ha! The only reason you haven't ended up in your underwear is that you're immune to my secret technique!" Orinus half-shouted.

  The other man snorted in amusement. "Getting the newbie drunk is a secret technique, now?"

  "Hey man, don't reveal all my tricks to outsiders… what kind of friend are you?" Orinus protested.

  After a few more minutes of bickering and refused offers of alcoholic beverages, Zorian finally managed to excuse himself. Ignoring Orinus's muttered questioning of Zorian's masculinity due to his refusal to drink anything remotely alcoholic, he left the inn and started searching the streets of Knyazov Dveri for an out of the way corner he could teleport from without being seen. The game had been both unexpectantly fun and useful for his mind magic training, but he hadn't been lying when he had said he had to get going. Timing was crucial for what he intended to do.

  In the previous restart he learned that most of the soul mages on Kael's list had disappeared or died recently. That was, of course, highly suspicious – there was a good chance the whole thing was somehow connected to the time loop, which meant he had to know more about it. Sadly, during the last restart he had made the mistake of telling Vani about the disappearances, and he had raised en
ough of an alarm to have the police crawling everywhere around potential clue-sites. Consequently, Zorian had been forced to set the issue aside and wait for the next restart to conduct his own investigation.

  Which is exactly what he did, the moment he woke up in Cirin and could leave without making Mother and Kirielle throw a fit. As he suspected, virtually all of the soul mages had been already gone, even on that very first day. Whatever had happened to them had been going on for far longer than the time loop existed, it seemed. There were only two exceptions: the two mages that were confirmed dead in the previous restart were alive and well at the start of the new one. The first one, a priest named Alanic Zosk specializing in fighting undead, had simply been found dead with no obvious cause a few days into the restart. The second one was Lukav Teklo, an alchemist specializing in transformation magic. He had been killed by boars not far from his home, on the evening of the second day of the restart.

  Naturally, Zorian intended to talk with both of them, which necessitated saving their lives. The alchemist was a priority, as he died sooner and the cause of death was known and easily preventable. Thus his hurry to leave the game – if he timed things correctly, he would arrive at the man's home an hour or two before his fateful stroll outside the village. If he mistimed things or his actions somehow caused the alchemist to accelerate his schedule… well, there were always future restarts. It's not like the man would die for good.

  He could have contacted the man sooner to warn him, he supposed, but how would he explain his knowledge of the attack? He'd just make himself look suspicious. And besides, he actually wanted the attack to happen. He doubted those were regular boars that attacked him, so he wanted to examine them up close… and also, the man was bound to be a lot more helpful if he met Zorian as a savior who protected him from a vicious pack of boars than if he just showed up on the man's door with no warning.

  After teleporting just outside the man's house and making sure the alchemist was still in his house, Zorian settled in for a wait, making sure to keep out of sight of any windows. If there was anything that tiny villages like this one never had a shortage of, it was nosy old people who had nothing better to do except watch the streets for anything out of the ordinary. Honestly, some of the old women back in Cirin spent practically every waking moment glued to their window sills, making note of everyone that passed through their domain… he lost count of the number of times they got him into trouble with his parents when he had foolishly forgotten to account for their presence.

  He didn't have to wait long. Barely half an hour after he had settled in to wait, the alchemist left his house. It was a good thing he had come early, then. Zorian promptly cast an invisibility spell on himself and then started following after the man some distance away. Hopefully he remained far enough that the man would not find it suspicious when Zorian burst into the scene at the first sign of trouble, but that couldn't be helped. He didn't feel comfortable putting even more distance between the two of them, lest the man be killed before he could come to his aid. Depending on how oblivious and combat capable the man was, he could get overwhelmed in seconds.

  And the attack itself was bound to happen any moment now. The report he saw in the last restart said the man was killed just outside the village, and Lukav had immediately made a beeline towards the main road leading to the next settlement. Cautiously, Zorian drew his spell rod and strained his mind sense to the limit in order to find the attackers before they could strike.

  He found nothing out of the ordinary, and was thus just as shocked as the alchemist when a bunch of boars burst out of the tree line and charged the man. They both froze for a second, and before either could react the boars had already closed half of the distance to the alchemist.

  Embarrassingly enough, the alchemist reacted first. With a practiced movement, he threw a bottle of some sort into the path of the approaching horde and immediately dropped on the ground. Lacking the alchemist's reflexes and thinking himself too far to be affected by the bomb, Zorian opted to simply drop invisibility and erect a shield in front of him as a precaution. That turned out to be a mistake, as the deafening explosion of light and sound left him dazed and blinking spots out of his vision for the next few seconds.

  When he did recover, he saw that the bomb's effect on the boars themselves had been underwhelming – they had been thrown about by the blast (as had the alchemist himself, having misjudged the distance somewhat in his panic), and the leading boar that had been caught in the center of the blast had been blown to bits, but the others were already up on their feet and converging on their target. Even the one with a broken leg was stubbornly stumbling towards the dazed, bleeding alchemist, undeterred by what should have been excruciating pain.

  They made no sounds, they were unafraid of loud sounds and bright light, and completely ignored severe injuries like they were nothing. So much for the idea that they were ordinary animals. Oh well, he kind of suspected it was something like this. Acting quickly to stop them from killing the other man, he cast a swarm of 5 magic missiles at the boars closest to the downed alchemist. Smashers instead of piercers; if he was right about what these things really were, holes in their bodies wouldn't even slow them down. The missiles were there just to knock them away from their target and give Zorian time to cast another, more unorthodox spell that he didn't put in his spell rod. Oh, and possibly shift their attention towards him instead, though he didn't think anything could make them switch targets. They were clearly sent to kill a specific man.

  The smashers hit the boars in their flanks, sending them tumbling. As he suspected, they immediately scrambled to get up as if nothing happened, and the other four kept running towards the alchemist. He had finished his spell before they could reach him, however, causing a large shining disc of force to materialize between his hands.

  The severing disc was a powerful cutting spell that was surprisingly mana efficient and allowed the caster to 'pilot' the disc, changing its flight path at will. Taiven had not thought much of it, as it was not a fire-and-forget sort of combat spell, requiring constant concentration from the mage to keep existing. And it moved pretty slowly for a magical projectile, too. According to Taiven, competent mages would dispel the disc before it could reach them or otherwise evade it, and the caster is something of a sitting duck while directing the disc.

  But the boars couldn't dispel it, and had no ranged attacks to take advantage of his lack of shields. At Zorian's direction, the disc shot forward, flying close to the ground – at the height that Zorian judged to be around knee-height for the boars.

  Zorian's fears that he had overestimated the power of the disc and that it would not be able to cut through the bones of tough animals like the boars proved completely unfounded – the disc encountered the legs of the first boar and simply passed through with no visible resistance. In its wake, the boar fell apart, its legs separated from its torso. Directed by Zorian the disc continued towards the rest of them.

  In the end, it was a close thing. On one hand, the boars didn't even try to dodge, charging in straight lines that made them easy to intercept with the disc. On the other hand, Zorian had not practiced the spell in question particularly heavily, so he missed two boars on his first pass. Thankfully, the alchemist had recovered by this point and helpfully dealt with the two stragglers by causing an arc of spear-like spikes to erupt from the ground in front of him with some kind of alteration spell. The boars were so insistent on getting to him as fast as possible that they impaled themselves on the makeshift rampart and got stuck.

  Zorian let the disc dissipate with a sigh. That was a win, yes, but he wasn't satisfied with his performance. He'd frozen at the start, and his mastery of the severing disc spell left much to be desired. But what was done was done, and at least he achieved what he came here to do. Time to face the music. He set off towards the alchemist, who was kneeling on the ground and alternating between staring at approaching Zorian and at the still twitching, legless boars not far from him.


  He frowned at them as he approached. They had no minds, he realized. That was why he didn't detect them until they attacked – as far as his mind sense was concerned, they didn't exist. Coupled with the fact they were still alive with their limbs cut off and that their wounds didn't bleed at all, and the conclusion was obvious.

  His hunch had been right: they were definitely undead. As far as he knew, the only beings that counted as 'mindless' for the purposes of mind magic were oozes, golems, creatures under the Mind Blank spell, and the so-called 'mindless undead'. The boars were clearly neither golems or oozes, and he doubted Mind Blank was involved. It would also explain why they seemed to have no blood and felt no pain or hesitation.

  "Are you alright there? You kind of took the worst of that blast," said Zorian, shifting his attention towards the man he came here to save. Now that he was close to the man, he could see that Lukav Teklo was a fairly handsome middle-aged man, sporting long black hair, a carefully sculpted beard and rather muscular physique. Zorian was a little surprised by this, as he had expected someone… wilder. After all, his fellow villagers had told him that the man disdained human contact and preferred to spend his time in the wilderness.

  "Yeah. Yeah, I'm alright," the man said, rising to his feet before swaying dangerously. Zorian quickly caught him and helped him regain his balance. "Dammit. Hoisted on my own petard, literally. Didn't even accomplish anything with it. Totally ignored my patented animal repellent. That's some compulsion they were under…"