Mother of Learning 2 - Outside World

by nobody103

  Said person being Sudomir Kandrei, the mayor of Knyazov Dveri. Because of course it was the goddamn mayor that was behind everything. No wonder that telling the police about the disappearances never went anywhere – even if somebody had seriously looked into it, they would have been told pretty quickly to drop the case by their superiors. Local governors in peripheral areas such as these were basically tiny tyrants that could do as they pleased, so long as they made sure not to piss of the wrong person or stir up trouble.

  Not that knowing who was responsible for the disappearances shed any light on the man's motives. When all was said and done, Vazen was merely the guy supplying Sudomir with various illegal materials and occasionally hiring shady people in Sudomir's place so the mayor couldn't be implicated in the deal. The merchant didn't even know about most of the disappearances as far as Zorian could see. In fact, Vazen's shady dealings with the mayor seemed to have been much more benign until about three months ago, when the man suddenly upped the game and started demanding much more risky merchandise, in far greater quantities, as well as started arranging full-blown assassinations like the one directed against him and Alanic. One could tell from the letters that Vazen was getting progressively more disturbed and annoyed at his 'customer' for escalating things like that, especially since Sudomir refused to elaborate on what had caused this sudden change. The 'deal' that Vazen made with a company in Cyoria, the one that Gurey was so interested in, was basically a bribe that Sudomir had arranged for Vazen to calm him down and keep him cooperative.

  The blueprints and recipes contained in the documents looked kind of interesting, but there was nothing there that Zorian found really notable or sinister. The names of the three businesses that provided the documentation were something he recognized, however – they were run by people that the aranea had identified as members of the Cult of Dragon.

  So. The mayor of Knyazov Dveri had some kind of connection to the Cult of the Dragon Below. Significant enough that he could arrange for them to hand over extremely valuable documentation to one of his agents for a mere pittance.

  Well, the idea that this whole thing was connected to Ibasan invaders just got a lot more credible with this, though it was not Vazen that had links to them like he originally suspected. Still, the question of why he was after the soul mages around Knyazov Dveri remained. Why bother? What did the Ibasans get by doing that? Some of these people could only loosely be described as soul mages to begin with, and most of them weren't a serious threat to the Ibasan force… or anyone really.

  He sighed. Like always, every answer he found seemed to bring up two more questions in its wake. He placed the papers on a nearby shelf carved into the walls of the cave, opting not to destroy them just yet, and then went back to his room to get some sleep.

  ✦ ✧ ✦

  After he had gotten some sleep and had a chance to think about things, he decided to put off the investigation of Sudomir's activities for some other time. No sense in stirring up the hornet's nest further when he could just wait for some future restart in which he never stole Vazen's documents and nobody knew they were even being threatened by someone.

  However, as days passed without incident and nobody ever tracked down the documents to his little forest hideout, he began to relax. He didn't restart the investigation or change any of his plans, but he figured this would be a nice, relaxing restart where nothing of real note happened. He slowly absorbed Alanic's lessons in personal soul sight, fiddled with his wood golem (version three) in his free time, and made sure to cast the marker detection spell at least once per day (no change; the spell never showed anything except two markers).

  And then, two weeks into the restart, he woke up in the middle of the night to see a black-clad figure with an obscured face and a knife in their hand standing over his bed.

  Later on, he would wonder what had tipped him off that he was in danger, but in that moment he simply reacted. Without bothering to structure the magic into any real spell, he reached out to the blanket covering him and flung it at the assassin in a crude burst of telekinetic force. The man (probably; the build suggested a man) stumbled back as the blanket collided with him, not really hurt but surprised at the maneuver and disoriented by the sudden blindness.

  Zorian scrambled to his feet, barely managing to get upright before the assassin succeeded in throwing the flimsy fabric off of him and lunged towards him. Three knife swipes later and Zorian was sporting a deep gash on his arm and a bleeding scratch on his cheek and knew for a fact that he had no chance against the man in a physical confrontation. He frantically searched the room with his eyes, trying to spot something to help himself with, and admitted to himself that sound-proofing the room may have been a slight mistake. Only slight, though, because even if he could scream for help he doubted anyone would be able to reach him before the assassin was done with him. No, the bigger mistake was that he opted to sleep with his rod of magic missiles and shielding bracelets in his desk drawer instead of taking them with him to sleep.

  It was official: after this battle, regardless of outcome, he was going to cast magic missile non-stop whenever he had free time and mana to make it fully reflexive. He couldn't afford to be this defenseless when deprived of his tools.

  "If I die I will blow us both up!" Zorian yelled, and meant it. The suicide necklace, at least, was always with him. Maybe he should put something other than explosives there for situations like this.

  The man hesitated for a second at the proclamation, but then moved to attack again. That second was enough, though – suddenly given a moment to concentrate, Zorian blasted the man's mind with telepathic noise. The assassin flinched, aborting his attack, but he didn't go down.

  Not yet, anyway. When Zorian took advantage of his momentary dizziness to smash a nearby paperweight into his face, though, he went down in a spray of blood and didn't get up again.

  A minute later, after he had calmed down a little (and confirmed that the assassin, while still alive, wasn't going to get up any time soon) he decided he couldn't go to the police with this. They were effectively the mayor's underlings, and Sudomir was likely the one who ordered the man bleeding on the floor of his room to kill him. Or had someone else arrange it for him, more likely, considering his behavior from Vazen's letters. The fact that the assassin apparently had a key to his room, which was how he had bypassed Zorian's intruder alarm, didn't help his paranoia any. Regardless, he only really knew one person he could go to with this.

  Already wincing at the lecture he was going to get, Zorian picked up the assassin's unconscious body and teleported to Alanic's temple.

  ✦ ✧ ✦

  Like Zorian hoped, Alanic readily accepted his explanation that the bleeding man he was carrying was an assassin sent to kill him and agreed to take him off his hands. He even gave Zorian a fast-acting healing potion to deal with the cuts and gashes the man inflicted upon him in their brief life-and-death struggle, and those weren't exactly cheap.

  Unfortunately, he also decided that Zorian was now going to move permanently into the temple with him. According to Alanic, he had been expecting something like this to happen ever since Zorian stopped his and Lukav's killings earlier in the month and this was all the proof he needed that Zorian wasn't safe out there. Who's to say the attackers won't try again and succeed? No, as far as the warrior priest was concerned, Zorian had to be under constant guard until the situation was resolved.

  Zorian really hated that idea, as it meant being effectively under house arrest for the remainder of the restart, but Alanic made it clear there was no way to blow him off without also losing his help in mastering personal soul perception. So that was that.

  Despite his misgivings, however, it turned out to be something of a blessing in disguise. Since there was not much to do in a small, boring temple, Zorian found himself spending most of his time endlessly casting magic missile in an effort to make it faster and more reflexive. He did make a promise to himself, after all. In any case, those efforts att
racted Alanic's attention, and he agreed to give Zorian advice on how to improve his combat magic. Admittedly, Alanic couldn't help him much in his self-imposed goal of making magic missile reflexive – that was just a matter of sufficient repetition. Instead, most of his help centered around squeezing the most out of fire spells, which appeared to be his specialty.

  Thus, whenever Zorian got sick of repeatedly casting magic missile, he worked on mastering the plethora of minor fire spells whose mastery Alanic claimed would increase his ability to wield fire in combat. One made a thin ring of fire around the caster, making the prospect of melee difficult for enemies unless they were willing to get burned; Alanic claimed a skilled caster could increase and decrease the radius of the ring from moment to moment, cause it to split into several weaker rings for better coverage, as well as move the center of the ring's alignment up and down along the caster's body. The second conjured a small flock of fully autonomous, sparrow-sized birds made out of fire to harass the enemy; that one was supposed to be practice for weaving animation magic into fire spells, as the usefulness of the spell depended entirely on how well animated the birds were. And so on, and on, and on. Alanic knew a lot of minor fire spells.

  "Only twenty?" Alanic asked. "Come on kid, I know you can do better…"

  Zorian ignored him, patiently herding the twenty marble-sized fire orbs into gentle orbits around himself. Casting the spell itself was super-easy. Controlling the 20 conjured fire orbs simultaneously was not.

  "I don't want to tire myself out too quickly," Zorian said, testing his control over the orbs by having a couple of them fly out of formation. He had already given himself a nasty burn the last time he used the spell by accidentally slamming one of the fire orbs into the back of his hand and was not looking forward to a repeat performance. The ability to direct the orbs as you wish was an interesting advantage, but that also meant there was little in the way of safety features inherent in the spell. "I'll run out of mana too quickly if I start summoning 50 fire orbs all at once."

  "You shouldn't be casting the spell a lot anyway," Alanic said. "Sustaining the orbs is by far cheaper than constantly recreating them. The point is to take control of them, and recasting the spell doesn't help you with that. You're just letting your fear of getting burnt control you."

  "Well yeah, I don't want to accidentally burn my eyes off or something," protested Zorian.

  Alanic sighed and shook his head. "You're too tense for this. Take a break and we'll continue this tomorrow."

  Zorian immediately dropped the spell in relief. No matter what Alanic said, he did not like that spell. Still, Alanic was the fire magic expert here.

  "Can I ask you something?" asked Zorian. Alanic casually waved his hand, telling him to get on with it. "Is it true you can selectively burn targets with your spells? That is, flat out exclude people from being damaged by your fireballs and the like?"

  "Ah. I suppose Lukav told you about that," Alanic mused. Yeah, sure, let's go with that. "Yes, that is something I can do. More than that, actually. It is nothing you would care to learn, however – it is a difficult skill that requires a lot of specialized training. Years of it. Unless you intend to specialize in fire magic – and you strike me as a generalist mage, to be frank – I would not recommend worrying about it." He smiled. "Besides, by the time you mastered something like that, the 'pocket meteors' spell you are currently struggling with would be a joke to you, so it's hardly a shortcut to not getting hurt with that."

  "Figures," Zorian said. "But you know, a simple fire ward would make that spell a lot safer to practice. Why can't I use it on myself before casting the spell again?"

  "Danger sharpens the spirit," Alanic said airily. "You'll learn faster and take things more seriously with the threat of horrific burns hanging over your head. But mostly I just wanted to see how long it would take you to remember you can do that."

  "Ugh," Zorian grunted. "You're evil."

  There were no further attacks for the rest of the restart, and this particular one ended right on schedule instead of being cut short like the previous one was.

  The marker detection spell never displayed a third marker in its detection radius, despite Zorian casting it several times a day towards the end.

  ✦ ✧ ✦

  For the next three restarts, Zorian deliberately avoided making any ripples and focused on growing his skills. Not a very exciting time, but by the end of it he was finally able to cast magic missile quickly and easily without any external aid. He had also mastered personal soul sensing well enough that Alanic started teaching him his arsenal of protective soul magic. In addition to that, he learned a plethora of new fire spells, made some improvements to the wooden golem design he was exploring, and practiced the rest of his combat arsenal on the monstrous wildlife living in the wilderness.

  Unfortunately, Alanic had been becoming ever more suspicious of Zorian as his skills rose with each restart – no doubt the fact that he recognized quite a few of those skills as his own had a big hand in it – and had almost refused to teach Zorian at all in the latest restart. Zorian had eventually managed to talk the man into helping him by promising to tell him everything after the summer festival, but he suspected that pretty soon even that was not going to fly. By his estimation, he had at most two more restarts before Alanic refused to teach him anything without a damn good explanation, which he would be unable to provide.

  But that was fine – by the time that happened, Zorian would no longer be defenseless in the face of hostile soul magic so the first of his goals would be achieved. He never really expected Alanic to teach him everything, anyway.

  In the next restart, Zorian decided to lift his self-imposed ban of snooping around Sudomir and his activities. As cautiously as possible, he tried to find out more about the man. Sudomir being a well-known and public person, it wasn't hard to get people to talk about him… but most of the information he got was either useless or highly suspect. The most interesting piece of information he found was that the man was often absent from Knyazov Dveri on various 'official errands', and that those errands have become especially frequent in the last few months. This was in line with Vazen's letters, which also claimed the man had changed his patterns radically in the last few months.

  When simple questioning failed to produce any new results, Zorian decided to be a little more bolder and investigate the link between Vazen and the mayor. He didn't want to deal with Vazen himself, but fortunately there was no need to. Vazen wasn't a one-man operation like Gurey – he had other employees, and those other employees didn't have the same paranoia and level of security that Vazen did. They brought stuff home from work to look over later, left their keys cunningly hidden behind nearby flowerpots, and rarely had any sort of magical defenses. One of them even kept a detailed daily journal with all sort of interesting tidbits and remarks. Probably the most interesting thing he found out from Vazen's employees was that he regularly sent mysterious packages to a place called 'Iasku Mansion' – a place that his employees were pretty sure didn't actually exist. The place the packages were delivered to didn't exist on the maps, save as a random section of the uninhabited forest far to the north of the city. Further into the wilderness than Zorian ever got, in any case.

  After consulting some maps, Zorian realized that he had no idea how long it would take him to reach the spot in question. Weeks? Months? Damn, those two really picked an out of the way spot for their exchanges, didn't they? This was going to be such a chore…

  He went to Lukav for help. The transformation specialist was noted to be an outdoorsman type, so he should have some advice on reaching out-of-the-way placed like that one. Maybe there was some kind of enhancement potion that could help?

  "No, I don't think enhancement potions would be of much help in this," Lukav told him while staring at the map Zorian provided. "They don't last long enough, and it would take you at least two weeks to reach the place on foot. Tricky. Maybe it's just my bias showing, but have you considered simply s
hapeshifting into a bird and flying there?"

  "I haven't," said Zorian, surprised. "The idea never occurred to me. How complicated would that be?"

  "Not complicated at all, but perhaps a bit pricy," Lukav admitted. "You would probably need to waste a potion or two to grow accustomed to flying and moving in your new form. Maybe more, depending on how fast of a learner you are. Birds are very different from humans."

  He handed Zorian his price chart, and quickly pointed out the bird section.

  "I recommend the eagle, personally," Lukav said. "Good flier, excellent eyesight, and big enough that few things will dare attack you. Plus it's an eagle, what's not to like? Not like you need to be inconspicuous where you're going."

  Zorian looked at the price tag attached to the 'eagle transformation' potion. It was… doable. He could buy a three of those if he had to, though he hated using up most of his savings like that. Even though he knew they would be back at the beginning of his next restart, it just felt wrong to fritter them away. He spent years saving that money, dammit! Besides, what if he needed those saving later in the restart for some reason?

  "I guess I could try that," Zorian said. "Incidentally, do you pay money for some rare animal that can be found deep in the forest?"

  "Ha, no. If it can be found in forests around here, I'm more than capable of getting it myself," Lukav said. "Sorry. Though if you are willing to risk your life in the local dungeon, there are a few things I would be interested in paying good money for…"

  ✦ ✧ ✦

  Gliding upward on an updraft of warm air, Zorian surveyed the landscape around him with impossibly sharp eyes. The experience was impossible to describe – everything was full of color and detail, like a veil he didn't know he labored under had been lifted off his eyes. It reminded him of the time his parents had brought him to the doctor for an eyes checkup and he was told he had to wear glasses. His father had been so disappointed about that, but the moment Zorian had donned the little pieces of glass on his face he knew he never wanted to take them off. This was just like that time, only even more extreme. If he tried, he could discern individual leaves on a tree from a mile away. The houses in the distance that would have been nothing but blurry blocks to his human self were instead rendered with perfect clarity, right down to that old tomcat hiding in the shadow of a chimney on that one house.