Mother of Learning 2 - Outside World

by nobody103

  Especially since he was starting to reach the limits of what Mind Like Fire was willing to teach him. His mental defenses were top-notch, and his ability to strike back at hostile minds was nothing to scoff at either – even Mind Like Fire admitted she actually had to take him seriously these days. She had taught him all of the simple tricks and basic techniques she dared give him access to, and he was even getting the hang of tapping into aranean senses – the Luminous Advocates were right, it went a whole lot easier after he had mastered the art of tapping into purely human senses first. If he wanted to get any benefit from her teachings, he would have to spend a few restarts practicing deep memory scans on humans first.

  Of course, that would require finding an aranea that was willing to teach him even the basics of such memory scans. Mind Like Fire's reaction to that was a firm refusal, since that would involve lowering all of her defenses and letting Zorian dive deep into her private memories. Even among themselves, the aranea considered such an act to be one of great trust and significance. It didn't help that when Mind Like Fire challenged Zorian to provide similar access to his own memories to her, he had little choice but to say no.

  He did know that the Filigree Sages were willing to play along if he let them loot the Cyoria settlement, but Zorian had been unable to find much in the way of webcraft when he searched the settlement in one of his brief forays, so he wasn't sure whether that would actually work out at all.

  Then, near the end of the last restart, something interesting happened. Zorian had gotten permission from Bridge of Moonlight to stay in the River Navigator's main settlement for a while after he helped them dig up a brand new cavern with alteration spells, and was present in the matriarch's chamber when a messenger from the Yellow Cavern Guardians arrived to plead with the River Navigators' matriarch for help.

  The Yellow Cavern Guardians, he had found, were on the verge of extinction. A few days before the start of the time loop, the caverns from which they got their name – and on which their survival and prosperity depended on – had been taken over by some huge monster from the deeper levels of the dungeon. The creature was too magic-resistant to be affected with mind magic, extremely tough, and also regenerated. Roughly a week and a half into the restart, the Yellow Cavern Guardians were starting to get desperate. In an attempt to retake their cavern, they had decided to launch an all-out attack, seeking to drive the monster off. It was an utter disaster, and the Yellow Cavern Guardians lost both their matriarch and her two successors/assistants/somethings. Now leaderless as well as desperate, the Yellow Cavern Guardians went into a panic (well, they claimed they 'deliberated things', but Zorian knew how to read between the lines) before begging for help from anyone they thought would listen.

  Sadly for them, the River Navigators had no intention of messing around with a creature capable of taking on an entire aranean web and winning. Fortunately for them, Zorian was not nearly so intimidated.

  The last time he'd offered aid, he'd been rudely refused. But last time, he'd asked at the start of the restart, when their leadership had still been alive and believed they could handle things. They had probably been more worried about him taking advantage of their momentary weakness and had not felt they needed all the help they could get. Now that their leadership was dead, however, they were not in a position to be nearly as picky.

  He didn't even have to ask – the messenger approached him with a plea for help on her own, after Bridge of Moonlight blew the messenger off and she'd realized that Zorian was there.

  After hammering out some basic agreement (which could be summarized as 'we'll agree to anything, just give us back our cavern!') Zorian recalled himself and the messenger to the recall stone he had left on the surface and then immediately teleported them to where he knew the Yellow Cavern Guardians were. The messenger seemed shocked he knew where to find them without her guidance, and a bit disoriented from the rapid succession of teleporting, but she recovered quickly and led him to what passed as leadership of their web for the moment.

  Several hours later, he found himself at the entrance to a vast cave overgrown with a fungal forest, a pair of Yellow Cavern Guardians 'guards' watching him from deeper into the access tunnel. Supposedly they were ready to intervene if he ran into trouble at any point, but he was pretty sure they were just going to stay on their asses if he got attacked and then, if he lost, mournfully report he had tragically ended up as monster chow before they could do anything. They seemed terrified even to be there.

  Zorian created a floating eye out of ectoplasm and sent it deeper into the cave to get some basic sense of its contents and layout. His recent practice with tapping into other people's senses made processing what the eye was sending him child's play, and he no longer had to close his eyes to use it.

  He had to admit one thing - the cavern was simply breathtaking. It was huge, and almost entirely covered with a dizzying variety of giant mushrooms. The more familiar umbrella-mushrooms existed between ones that resembled leafless trees and long, fleshy spikes and berries. Looking over them, Zorian even spotted several that appeared to be whitish plants rather than mushrooms, complete with small flowers and atrophied leaves. The largest of them glowed with a faint blue light that suffused the entire cavern with weak, shadowy light.

  Underground forests like this one were treasure troves of information and interesting alchemical ingredients, and were highly sought after by both humans and dungeon denizens. And this one was both huge and largely unspoiled. No wonder the Yellow Cavern Guardians were so protective of it.

  His appreciation of the view was quickly interrupted, however – the monster wasn't hard to find.

  It was right in the center of the cave, sitting like a king in a small, shallow lake situated there. Well, shallow in a relative sense. Zorian could have submerged himself easily in its center, but it was barely a puddle for the monster who towered over the waters. It looked like a giant frog, albeit one whose mother had mated with a troll and which was then raised solely on muscle-growth potions from the day it was born. Knobby, dark green skin covered a creature that was at least five meters tall, even while crouching, and its limbs were thick and practically bursting at the seams from the sheer muscles it was sporting. Oh, and they ended in huge, sharp claws rather than suction cups.

  One of the frog-thing's eyes swiveled in its socket to focus on Zorian's ectoplasmic eye, noticing the intruder, but the creature remained motionless and eventually returned to its silent vigil, ignoring the sensor. The monster had knocked down all the fungus surrounding the lake, probably to give itself a better view of its new domain, and was now just standing in the lake in the center, periodically shifting in place so it could stare at the different part of the cavern.

  Zorian dismissed the sensor and turned to the two guards behind him.

  "I'm going to need a few days to prepare," he said.

  ✦ ✧ ✦

  Three days before the end of the restart, Zorian was ready to try and kill the giant frog monster that had driven the Yellow Cavern Guardians out of their home. His plan was simple: fire.

  Lots and lots of fire.

  When he finally arrived at the cavern entrance, he first made sure the frog-thing was still where he had last left it (it was) and then carefully lowered an ignition stone into the crate full of highly flammable alchemical bricks he had been levitating behind him. Once that was done, he created an illusion around the crate to make it look like an aranea and send it floating along the ground towards the monster. He trailed after the crate under the guise of invisibility, a huge, solid steel golem trailing beside him. The golem was fully visible, and mostly served as a big, visible target for the creature's ire if this whole thing went south.

  Zorian had considered a number of methods to trick the monster into eating the decoy, but none of them turned out to be necessary. It seemed that the claims of the Yellow Cavern Guardians about how the creature loved eating aranea were spot on, because the creature barely even looked at the disguised crate
before attacking. A long, ropy, blood red tongue lashed out at the crate with dizzying speed, reeling it into its wide open maw in the blink of an eye.

  The moment the frog thing's mouth snapped shut, Zorian sent a mana burst at the ignition stone in the crate, causing the whole thing to blow up in its mouth.

  The resulting scream was quite possibly the most disturbing sound he'd ever heard in his entire life. It wasn't a croak or anything even remotely froglike. It sounded like a whole herd of pigs being slaughtered messily, over and over and over again. The frog thing vomited a stream of fire, blood and bile, trying to expel the offending substance to no avail – Zorian had specifically chosen an alchemical product whose fire clung to the surface like glue, and no matter how hard it tried, it could not remove the burning gunk that covered its insides. Truthfully, its attempt to vomit out the compound was only making things worse. It would have had more luck by keeping its mouth shut and trying to starve the fire of oxygen.

  Sadly, after a few more futile attempts, the monster suddenly stopped struggling, noticed Zorian and his golem, and immediately charged towards them.

  Zorian silently motioned for his golem to meet the creature's charge with one of its own, not even questioning how the creature knew he was there. Dungeon denizens had all kinds of ridiculous abilities and senses, especially powerful ones like these. He sent a wave of force at the creature's feet, managing to trip it up a bit and allowing his golem to slam its metal fist straight into its face. Though much bigger than his creation, the creature seemed momentarily stunned at the hit and didn't have enough time to dodge when Zorian hit it with a massive fireball.

  Annoyingly, it still wasn't dead. It screamed again, scorched from both inside and outside, its eyes reduced to ruined husks by the fireball. But it still found enough strength to tear apart his golem (which he had spent ages crafting and reinforcing) in a flurry of violence. It ripped both of its arms out of their sockets, snapped the main body in half, and flung the pieces into the distance. The armless remains of the upper torso impacted the ground not far from Zorian, but he remained silent and still, hoping to avoid notice.

  It would have been nice to say that what followed next was some epic battle where he bravely strode forth to finish the monster once and for all, but in truth, he simply evaded the creature's notice and waited as it rampaged throughout the forest for a while, looking for more targets. The loss of its vision seemed to really hurt it, and it never even came close to detecting his location. At some point it simply stopped and keeled over, finally dead after having succumbed to its many wounds.

  Still - a victory was a victory, wasn't it?

  His "guards" had fled from their posts at some point of the battle, so Zorian slowly made his way towards the Yellow Cavern Guardians' temporary camp to give them the good news.

  ✦ ✧ ✦

  The two Yellow Cavern Guardians that came to check up if he was telling the truth stared silently at the charred corpse of the frog-thing that had nearly ruined them. Zorian tried to be respectful and wait for them come to terms with the fact that he had actually succeeded in killing it, but after five minutes he was really starting to get impatient. And annoyed – it wasn't that unbelievable that he'd succeeded at this, surely?

  He cleared his throat, finally getting their attention.

  "About my payment…" he began.

  ✦ ✧ ✦

  Zorian's eyes abruptly shot open as a sharp pain erupted from his stomach. His whole body convulsed, buckling against the object that fell on him, and suddenly he was wide awake, not a trace of drowsiness in his mind.

  "Good morning, brother!" an annoyingly cheerful voice sounded right on top of him. "Morning, morning, MORNING!"

  Zorian sighed. He really wished that not all of his restarts began this way.

  "Good morning to you too, Kiri," he said politely. "Mind getting off me?"

  "Hmm…" she pretended to think about it. "Nope! I think I'll stay like this for a while."

  "That's unfortunate," he said blandly.

  "You know you're going back to academy today, right?" she asked him.

  "How could I forget?" he responded. "The real question is, do you want to come with me?"

  Kirielle's eyes expanded comically, like those of a particularly startled cat. "Really!?"

  "I wouldn't have asked if I wasn't certain," Zorian said.

  Five minutes later, Zorian managed to distract an ecstatic Kirielle with an illusionary bird and get her to stop babbling and start packing her luggage.

  He, on the other hand, was ready. He had learned the basics of deep mental scanning from the Yellow Cavern Guardians last restart, he was certain that simply being in Cyoria wasn't dangerous in itself, and he had a rough plan of where to go from now on.

  It was time to visit his old Academy again.

  Chapter 38

  Return to Cyoria

  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 commenting 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 compartment window and turned to the only other source of entertainment 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 time he decided he simply didn't care about the risk of discovery. He could find no detection ward on the compartment they were in, and even if they did catch him in the act somehow, 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 – something 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 game. 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 mere 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 a sphere it was now would be insanely hard. Telekinetically controlling water was far, far harder than doing the same 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 fro
g 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, shamelessly making things up. He had no idea how that monster was called, or if it even had an official name to begin with. "Huge, vicious things with a penchant for eating little girls."

  "That's stupid. You're just making thing 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 me 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 aforementioned 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 somewhat 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 awesome magical might instead of resorting to traps and subterfuge. It made for a more impressive story that way. Kirielle seemed skeptical of the story at first, but when Zorian started using detailed illusions to demonstrate the events he was talking about, her suspiciousness melted away and she paid rapt attention to the story.