by nobody103
Which was all well and good, but it still didn't explain why the man hadn't warned him what would happen when he drank that potion. Personally, Zorian suspected schadenfreude.
Aside from the whole 'potion incident' thing, there was one tiny little detail he had failed to consider when he decided to accept Alanic as his newest personal tutor.
Alanic was a priest. Priests were, generally speaking, very religious people. It stood to reason, then, that they'd be very bothered by people who don't care much about their own religion or have some gaping holes in their understanding of religious dogma. And with Zorian spending every evening in the temple, it really was too much to expect that Alanic wouldn't notice just how… lacking… Zorian's religious credentials were.
The good news was that Alanic wasn't going to get rid of him because of this. The bad news was that he took it upon himself to correct this glaring deficiency. Thus, not only did Zorian have to suffer through boring meditation sessions every evening, they were now interspersed with longwinded lectures about the gods, angels, spirits, and man's place in the natural order.
Heaven help him. Or not, he supposed. He doubted the angels would have a lot of compassion for someone in his position.
"…and thus, with the evidence that the gods have fallen silent no longer possible to ignore, and the unescapable fact that no more miracles would be forthcoming, the Holy Triumvirate decided to loosen the limitations on soul magic – a decision that did much to soften the blow of the Silence, but one that would have far-reaching negative consequences. But I can see that you are starting to lose focus so we will continue this tomorrow."
Thank the gods. Zorian quickly vacated the temple before the man could have a chance to change his mind.
He was barely out of the temple gates when he realized he was walking into an ambush.
It was a crow that tipped him off. It looked normal enough, though it was curiously brave in not fleeing at his approach. He had however gotten into a habit of automatically scanning the minds of every animal he saw as telepathic practice, and the crow in question didn't have any. That immediately raised an alarm in his head and he stopped, expanding his mind sense to maximum range.
In the next second he threw himself to the side, narrowly avoiding a hail of bullets that ripped through his previous location. Almost reflexively, he fired two force missiles in quick succession: one at the undead crow that had taken flight while he dodged – he didn't need that thing pecking his eyes out while he was busy elsewhere – and another one straight into the air, seemingly at nothing. That one was what Taiven called a 'screamer' – a missile that produced a loud, shrill scream as it flew through the air. Zorian hoped that the noise would give pause to the ambushers, at least for a moment, but the real purpose of it was to attract Alanic's attention and tell him there was a fight going on outside of his temple.
You know, just in case the gunshots weren't clear enough on that.
The first bolt collided with the crow, causing it to erupt into a shower of feathers and fleshy bits (but no blood), but the second one didn't have much effect on the attackers. Zorian was forced to immediately erect a shield in front of himself to tank a powerful beam of shining force, and was then pinned in place by a withering hail of bullets. He had to pour half of his mana reserves into strengthening the shield, but it thankfully held.
Also thankfully, the attackers had a piss poor sense of tactics – apparently the entire force wasted their ammo on the initial barrage, and thus couldn't provide any further fire to keep him pinned in place while they reloaded. Zorian promptly took advantage of this to take cover behind a nearby tree, become invisible and then vacate the area as fast as he could without breaking the optical cloak.
It was a good thing he did, because the tree he had been hiding behind soon became a target of a massive fireball that reduced the tree to charcoal and did horrible things to everything around it.
These people really didn't pull any punches, did they?
Tracking his attackers' movements with his mind sense, Zorian could tell they weren't fooled with his maneuver. They knew he wasn't dead, and they were coming after him. Whelp, time to exercise the better part of valor and teleport away to safety!
A few seconds later, he sighed in resignation. Of course they erected a teleport ward around the area. Well, if that's how they wanted to play then so be it! Closing his eyes he located the nearest gunman with his mind sense, connected with his mind and then hit him with the best telepathic attack he could manage.
He felt the target stop immediately, but apparently he'd failed to knock the man out. No matter. He disconnected from the man's mind and moved on the next one and repeated the procedure. He grinned nastily when he felt the man's mind shut down from the strain, the gunman falling unconscious.
Then he moved onto the rest of the ambushing force, attacking their minds one by one. Two thirds of them were strong enough to weather the attack, though they would likely be dazed for a while and suffer a nasty headache for the rest of the day, but a full third found Zorian's telepathic attack too much for them. Sadly, the mage that supported them figured out what was happening and shielded his own mind against the tactic. Still, even if he didn't get them all, he succeeded in taking away their momentum and slowing them down.
It cost him, though. His telepathic powers, exotic as they may be, were still magic… and like all magic, they used mana to power themselves. His empathy and mind sense didn't seem to cost him anything that he could detect, and establishing a telepathic link with another was trivial in terms of mana expenditure – even for him, it was so minute as to be unnoticeable. But these telepathic attacks he had been doing? They were incredibly cheap, especially considering their effectiveness, but he had performed a lot of them in quick succession. He was almost spent.
He sure hoped Alanic got off his ass sometime soon, preferably before the mage could rally his forces and come after him again.
Suddenly, just as Zorian was about to start booby-trapping the place like crazy, another group of people teleported in and his heart sank. Well that just wasn't f- wait, they were fighting the first group. Huh. It seemed Alanic had called for cavalry.
The sound of gunshots and flashes of spellfire filled the air again, but this time Zorian wasn't the target. Zorian wisely decided to sit this one out, being mostly out of mana and not wanting for one of the newcomers to confuse him for an enemy and put a bullet in his head before he had a chance to explain.
Ten minutes later, the noise quieted down and Zorian made his way back to the temple. There he found Alanic talking with a mixed group composed of a four-man group of Guild battlemages and a small contingent of Eldemar soldiers. He was questioned on his role in the battle, but the fact Alanic vouched for him kept the man in charge of the group from dragging him back to the Guild station for questioning. Apparently Alanic had quite a lot of pull with the Mage Guild.
He was worried the attackers would blab about Zorian's telepathic abilities, but apparently they were under the impression Zorian cast some kind of area-wide knockout spell rather than assaulting their minds directly. The leader of the Guild force even commended him on his restraint when faced with deadly force. Alanic gave him a severe look though. Zorian wasn't sure if he did that because he figured out there was something fishy about the whole story or because he disapproved of Zorian's 'soft' approach. He knew from previous conversations with the man that Alanic firmly believed in tough justice and striking back at threats as effectively as possible, so he might just be annoyed that Zorian had not used something more lethal.
Eventually he was given permission to leave (though warned not to leave his current accommodations in Knyazov Dveri for the foreseeable future) and beat a hasty retreat back to his room.
✦ ✧ ✦
When Zorian reached his room, he felt totally drained and wanted to do nothing more than to crawl into his bed and sleep until tomorrow. That had been… intense. He thought he'd have gotten used to having his life targ
eted and being in life-and-death situations, but he apparently wasn't anywhere near that mindset yet. The questioning that followed wasn't really pleasant either, and he suspected he had overextended his mind a bit with his last stunt because his thoughts felt slightly more sluggish and fuzzy than they should, even taking his tiredness into account.
But no, he couldn't go to sleep yet. Today was significant in that he had finally finished modifying the marker tracking spell with Alanic's help, and he wanted to test it right away. His mana reserves had recovered by now, so he was good for a try. He quickly fished out one of the wakefulness potions he had made over the last week and downed it in one go. His head cleared out almost immediately, and so he promptly started creating the ritual circle with the handful of salt and powdered quartz.
After the circle was made and triple-checked for faults, he slowly went through the ritual, mindful not to mess it up since it would take a large chunk of his mana reserves whether it succeeded or failed.
The moment he spoke the last line of the ritual, Zorian was suddenly given a sense of the location and distance of all markers within the range of the spell.
All two of them. One was in the very center of the search area – that was him, obviously – and the other was far to the south, somewhere along Eldemar's southern border.
Zorian freely admitted he had not expected that. He had expected the ritual to locate either three markers or just one (himself). How can there be just two? Was one of the other time travelers out of range? Did he misunderstand something?
He would have to repeat the ritual at different intervals to see if another marker pops up at some point. On the very beginning of the next restart, certainly. But if the number of markers remained stubbornly at two, then that would mean that at least one of the time travelers didn't have the marker. Probably Red Robe, because Zorian was sure that Zach had one. It would explain why Red Robe didn't just make a beeline for Zorian when he realized he existed, and why he felt the need to ask Zorian how many other time travelers there were and who they were.
But that would mean that Red Robe became a time looper through some other mechanism than Zorian did, wouldn't it?
"Nothing can ever be simple about this, can't it?" he sighed, rubbing his eyes.
No matter. His immediate goals remained unchanged by this new complication – learn how to protect his soul, become a better fighter, and polish his mind magic into something usable and reliable. His mind drifted to the battle he was caught in today and he nodded to himself. His performance wasn't flawless, but he got out of it alive and the growth of his skills was undeniable.
Despite all the issues he encountered, he seemed well on his way to achieving his goals.
Chapter 33
Gateways
Standing still in the empty living room inside Vazen's house, Zorian stared unhappily at the splatter of green gunk in front of him that was currently eating through the floor with an audible sizzle. One could hardly tell that, not too long ago, the acid slime in front of him used to be a stack of important documents stored in Vazen's safe. The merchant really didn't want anyone to take a look at these, it seems.
The operation started well. Everything started well. Not seeing the point of reinventing the wheel, Zorian used his past method of entering Vazen's home, then began dismantling the protections on the safe. Aside from the already familiar explosion trap, he also found a sleep trap which aimed to knock any prospective thieves unconscious the moment they touched the safe. He disabled both traps and, having found no further spellwork protecting the safe, immediately tried to remove the documents.
He promptly triggered a mechanical mechanism that dumped some kind of powerful acidic mixture on top of the safe's contents. The good news was that he managed to avoid getting any of the gunk on his hands – considering what the stuff was doing to the floor at the moment, it would have probably eaten right through his bones before he managed to get it off of him. The bad news was that he failed to salvage any of the safe's contents before the gunk ruined it. He managed to levitate the contents out of the safe, yes, but the gunk was almost like glue in the way it clung to the papers. He was unable to separate it from the surviving documents before it ate through them all and then happily continued to dissolve the floor beneath them.
He shuddered. He was really, really glad he managed to yank his hands in time to avoid getting any of that stuff on them.
Once again, Zorian was forced to leave Vazen's place empty-handed. He was sorely tempted to rig the entire place to explode in Vazen's face the moment he came back home as revenge, but that would be petty and stupid. A murder of such an influential man would attract a lot of attention, plus Alanic was probably paying very close attention to the man. And he had tried to rob the man after all, so he had no right to be particularly outraged anyway.
Still… Zorian was now absolutely certain that Vazen was involved in some very shady things, and he wasn't talking about tax fraud or industrial espionage. There was no way that Vazen would rig his safe to destroy things like business contracts and production blueprints in the event of discovery – the sheer amount of money he'd lost doing that must have been exorbitant. There had to be something more in there among those papers. Something incredibly illegal and incriminating, to the point where Vazen would rather lose everything than be discovered possessing it.
He was definitely coming back in the next restart. Maybe the man's misdeeds were unconnected to the Ibasan invaders gunning after Cyoria or the group targeting soul mages around Knyazov Dveri, but somehow Zorian doubted it. It cost him nothing to check, in any case.
Well, unless Vazen had even more horrifying surprises waiting for him should he overcome the second layer of his defenses. Next time he was bringing a 10-foot pole with him, because there was no way he was putting his hands into that safe anymore.
✦ ✧ ✦
The day after he had survived the failed ambush just outside Alanic's temple, Zorian arrived at his next meditation session feeling more than a little bit apprehensive. And not just about the possibility of another ambush – he did not like the looks Alanic had been giving him when he was giving his statement and Zorian was worried about what that meant for him. However, the lesson that day had been wholly unremarkable – there had been no second ambush, and Alanic gave no indication he was upset or suspicious of him. Thus, he put it out of his mind and decided to follow Alanic's example by carrying on as if nothing happened.
Now, three days later, Zorian could safely say that had been a mistake. Being dragged into the temple courtyard for a 'test of his combat skills' sounded suspiciously like punishment to his ears.
As an aside, why did a temple have a battle arena in its courtyard instead of a nice, peaceful garden or something? Between that and the dungeons in the basement he was starting to get really dubious about this building's spiritual credentials.
"Err, not that I don't appreciate your help in shoring up my modest combat capabilities, but we really should be focusing on getting my inner soul sight functioning," said Zorian, shuffling uncomfortably in place. "You told me yourself that this skill requires total focus from me to master correctly."
Alanic simply continued staring at him, silent and impassive, from his corner of the arena.
And then he gestured with his staff at Zorian and threw a fireball at him.
Zorian was not surprised at the attack. He had been expecting something like that, to be honest. What did throw him for a loop was that he chose that particular spell to open combat with. Fireball wasn't something you threw at a junior mage to test them – it was far too lethal for that! Even a stunted one was capable of killing a human on a direct hit, and a regular shield spell could not protect against it. No matter how powerful, it was still just a disc of force in front of the caster – the expanding sphere of fiery energy would just flow around it and envelop the caster behind it.
The shock lasted for but a moment, however, and then he immediately erected a dome of force around himse
lf – not just a shield, but a full-blown aegis that protected him from all sides at once. The fireball hit the dome not long after, and Zorian's view was momentarily blanked out by a blanket of fire.
When the fire cleared, he found himself standing in front of Alanic again, the priest as silent and unmoving as he had ever been. His apprehension at the situation dropped slightly. The fireball had been a very weak one. He knew because one of the retired mages he'd helped in his aimless wanderings prior to his arrival in Knyazov Dveri had taught him how to get feedback from his defensive spells, and his aegis had held strong against a spell that should have taxed it to its limit. Zorian was sure the man in front of him could have done much better than that if he had wanted to. The fact he hadn't immediately followed up on his fireball with something to finish him off enforced the idea that this really was some kind of test.
A very messed up, dangerous test, but he was kind of used to such things at this point.
He sent a single magic missile towards Alanic. He could see the man scoff as he lazily raised his arm to block the puny attack, and suppressed a smile. Though it looked like a magic missile spell, the projectile was anything but – it didn't so much smash into things as erupt into a spherical wave of force, much like fireball that used force instead of fire. A forceball, if you will. Alanic will almost certainly use a regular shield instead of a full aegis against a puny magic missile, and then the forceball will-
The space in front of Alanic suddenly warped and shimmered, and Zorian's forceball promptly winked out of existence. A dispelling wave of some sort, if he guessed correctly. Dammit. Then Alanic decided it was his turn again, and Zorian was too busy dodging bolts of fire and incineration rays to focus on internal cursing.