by nobody103
"Don't contact us, we'll contact you," Kiana summarized.
And then they were out of time and ended the meeting in favor of rushing to the next class. Over all, Zorian was pleased with the outcome… even if the looks and whispers of his classmates signified they had noticed the interaction and that the resulting fallout had yet to be determined.
✦ ✧ ✦
Raynie didn't seem to be in a hurry to organize a meeting with him after their talk, but Zorian didn't take it against her. It was nothing urgent, and he had plenty of things to busy himself with in the meantime.
Currently, that meant combing the aranea settlement for any hints regarding where they kept their treasury. He wasn't having much luck yet, but then again he didn't expect to be lucky so soon – it would be a pretty terrible secret treasury if all it took was a single day of dedicated searching to track it down.
Zorian wandered the tunnels of the settlement, his mind sense straining in an attempt to detect some surviving aranea hiding somewhere. He didn't find any. The aranean settlement was a silent tomb, unmoving corpses of giant spiders scattered throughout its expanse and undisturbed by scavengers due to the wards the aranea had placed on it. Occasionally his mind sense detected a mental signature, but it inevitably turned out to be some dungeon denizen trying to sneak past he wards of the settlement or one of the few surviving male aranea.
Not that the latter were wholly useless – though sub-sapient, they were still representative of what the aranea were like, and didn't have the mental defenses that female aranea did. Zorian made sure to capture each one he encountered so he could read their minds for information about the location of the treasury – more out of desire to practice his memory reading on something related to aranea than out of any real hope that they knew something.
Though he had to say the males were a lot smarter than Zorian had thought they would be, considering what he'd been told by the female aranea – they were actually closer to animals such as ravens and pigs than something dumb like a horse or a dog. Three of them even worked together in order to ambush him, and Zorian only narrowly avoided getting bitten by the one of them.
The aranea were only weakly poisonous, according to what he'd been told by them, but he would still rather not tempt fate like that.
"Damn," Zorian swore. Nothing, not even a clue as to where he should look next. "That's it, I'm done with this for today. Kael, you done with your examination yet?"
Kael shifted his attention from the curled, motionless corpse of some unfortunate aranea towards him, his mind slowly switching gears from his focused work state into something capable of holding a conversation.
"Hmm? Oh, that," Kael mumbled. "Yes, I checked them over for soul magic ages ago. I can find no traces of any soul magic being performed on them. None whatsoever, and it's honestly freaking me out. If you hadn't told me what really happened, I'd have assumed these bodies to be very sophisticated meat puppets devoid of souls to begin with, not sapient creatures whose souls have somehow been removed. I've just finished a more comprehensive medical scan, however, and there is no way these bodies are meat puppets. I'm baffled. This doesn't look like the aftermath of any soul spell I know of."
Damn. He had really been hoping Kael would be able to find something.
"You really can't tell me anything else?" Zorian urged. "Anything?"
"No. Well, maybe," Kael said, hesitating. Zorian urged him to continue. "While my medical scans show these spiders indeed died on the first day of the restart, they died somewhere after two in the morning."
"Ah, I see where you're going with that," Zorian said after a brief pause. "That implies that the time loop starts almost six hours before I wake up."
"Yes," Kael agreed. "I'm not sure how useful that is to you, but it's interesting."
"Very," Zorian agreed. "Especially if I can somehow force myself to wake up at the start of the time loop as opposed to when I usually do."
Kael nodded and before suddenly checking on his pocket watch. "Ah, I didn't even realize so much time has passed. I promised Kana I would take her to the park today, do you think we could-"
"Yes," Zorian preemptively agreed. "That's why I interrupted you in the first place. I've had enough of this place for one day. Just gather your things and I'll recall us back to the basement."
Five minutes later Kael and Zorian were teleported back to Imaya's basement – or rather, the large stone that served as an anchor for Zorian's recall spell. The recall spell was quickly becoming one of Zorian's favorites, due to its ability to cut through many forms of magical interference and anti-teleportation wards. It would be even better if maintaining a recall link with each anchor stone didn't incur a running mana cost, but you can't have everything, he supposed. He bid goodbye to Kael, who had his own duties to attend to, and went out to seek out Kirielle.
He found her in the kitchen, telling stories to Imaya and playing with the miniature golem he'd made for her. Amusingly, no one in the house seemed to realize just how much money and skill it took to create that thing – it was just a fancy magical doll to them, and they barely gave it a second's thought. To Zorian, though, that little golem was very special for one simple reason: he had created the blueprint for it in the previous restart.
Although Zorian had spent a lot of time in the restarts messing with spell formula and magic item creation, the truth was that he had been somewhat reluctant to truly sink a lot of his time into the field because he had to effectively recreate his designs purely from memory with every restart. While that was good in a sense, as it forced him to re-evaluate and refine his designs each time instead of relying on tried-and-true designs, the fact of the matter was that it slowed things down to a crawl whenever he was forced to recreate everything from scratch over and over again. He had effectively been limited to fairly simple projects, but now that he could actually transfer notebooks across restarts, he was freed of these limitations and could truly start advancing in the field.
He greeted Imaya, announcing his return, and then turned to his little sister.
"Hello, Kiri," he greeted. "Are you ready for your magic lesson?"
"Yes!" she agreed enthusiastically.
"So does that mean you read the first three chapters of that book I gave you?" Zorian asked.
"Err, yeah," she agreed, much less enthusiastically than before. "I, uh, may have skipped a few parts."
Zorian gave her a knowing look. He had a feeling that if he quizzed her on what she read, he would find she skipped far more than 'a few parts'.
"Alright," he said, putting a small black cube on the table in front of them. "This here is the mana absorption cube. Its function is very simple – it will absorb any mana you let out, after which the carved lines you see on its surface will begin to glow. It sounds useless, but beginner mages like yourself have trouble sensing their own mana flow, and thus cannot really determine whether their efforts are achieving any results. This will help keep you on target. Later, when you start extruding mana out of your body reliably, we can move onto purposely feeding mana into the cube in order to build greater control…"
Kirielle took the cube carefully into her hands, as if afraid it was going to bite her, and started tracing the lines carved into its surface with her fingers.
"Did you also learn using one of those things?" she asked. "I thought that was done using those one of those glass balls you brought home after your second year?"
"I did, but I discovered those things aren't really the best tool for the job," Zorian said. "They're mass produced, with an eye for price instead of maximum effectiveness. That cube you're holding in your hand is a bit better than that."
"Oh," she said, giving him a surprised look. "Was it… expensive?"
Well, technically Zorian had produced that cube on his own, but the materials he used weren't exactly cheap…
"Yes, but don't worry about it," he said dismissively. "I don't mind spending money on this, so long as you actually take your lessons seriously.
And Kirielle?"
"Yeah?" she asked curiously.
"You really need to actually read those three chapters for our next lesson, and I'd appreciate if you didn't lie to me like that in the future," he said.
At least she had the decency to blush in response.
✦ ✧ ✦
The first week of the restart was a pretty big success in Zorian's eyes. True, he never did manage to find the aranean treasury, but everything else was going along nicely.
Red Robe had once again neglected to give any information to the invaders, so they were stumbling around just as badly as they had in the previous restart. This was the second time in a row that he had done that, and that was taking into account just the restarts that Zorian knew about – it had probably started way earlier than this. Did Red Robe completely give up on supporting the invasion after their confrontation? That was more than a little strange, considering how dedicated he'd been about helping them out before. Maybe he supported the invasion primarily as a way to keep Zach busy with something and mask the aftershocks of his own actions? If so, the fact that he revealed himself to Zach would kind of make such trickery pointless…
Regardless of the reason, Red Robe's absence made things very convenient for Zorian. The moment he realized Red Robe was once again ignoring the invaders, he immediately launched a series of raids on the known invaders and their cultist allies. He found nothing new yet, but every memory dive he did made him one step closer to opening the matriarch's memory packet so he considered himself successful there regardless. He also scouted a couple of the emergency resource caches that he'd found in the last restart, and even looted a particularly badly defended one. That particular cache hold nothing except a large quantity of unlabeled potion bottles, which was slightly disappointing. He handed them off to Kael to see if he could figure out what they were and find a use of them. He'd feel bad about taking advantage of the morlock boy so much, except that Kael actually seemed enthusiastic about all the work Zorian was sending his way, so Zorian figured it was okay.
His monster hunts with Taiven were more successful this time around as well, since he had knowledge of where the monster nests and main migration routes were from his previous restarts. Taiven was ecstatic at by their results, though Zorian had noticed her giving him some strange looks when she thought he wasn't paying attention. Did she somehow realize how improbable his claim of divining the locations of the monsters was? Well, no matter – since she never actually confronted him about it, he decided to continue using his foreknowledge to improve results of the hunts and deal with the fallout when (and if) it comes.
His quest for getting himself a better library pass was also going along nicely, even though it was still in the beginning stages. The method he chose was extremely simple: he hung around the library entrance during its busiest hours and covertly scanned the minds of everyone who entered and left, looking for people with higher passes who weren't regular visitors of the library. After all, while the academy was stingy about giving higher authorizations to its students, actual holders of higher authorizations weren't exactly rare. Plenty of mages had them, and few of them were using them with any degree of regularity. If he chose his target correctly, they would never even realize their library pass had gone missing. And hopefully, the library would also never realize the holder of the card was not the same person whose name was printed on it.
The crowning achievement of this week, however, was the session with Xvim he was currently attending. Xvim was usually extremely punctual about their sessions, ending them at exactly their mandated time – no more, no less. Today, however, Zorian had been so good about meeting his ridiculous demands that Xvim decided to quietly extend their session beyond their allotted time. Zorian said nothing, simply continuing his endless repetition of the tasks Xvim gave him, but internally he was smiling. Even if Xvim retained his stony facade, the fact he decided to break off with his usual routine told Zorian that he was definitely making progress in unnerving his annoying mentor.
Unfortunately, as much as he'd like to see how long Xvim intended to keep him here if he did not complain, Zorian had other obligations to fulfil today.
"A training session with someone else, you say," Xvim asked curiously. "And what, pray tell, is this training session about, to trump the meeting with your mentor in importance?"
"It's something Professor Zileti arranged for me," Zorian said, invoking the authority of another teacher. "I'm meeting another student so we can practice our mind magic together."
Xvim stared at him for a second. If Zorian had expected some kind of shock at his admission, or a request at confirmation that, yes, he indeed meant 'mind magic'… he was disappointed. Xvim just stared at him for a bit, tapped his finger on the table once, and then reached some kind of decision.
"Why have you not notified me of this sooner?" he asked.
"I meant no offense, sir," Zorian assured him smoothly. "It's just that this was our first meeting, and you immediately had me start with shaping exercises when I entered the room. I felt it would be imprudent to interrupt your lesson for such an ultimately irrelevant detail."
"Hmph. And you say you're practicing with another student? The blind teaching the blind…" Xvim said, shaking his head in disapproval. He then made a dismissive gesture with his hand, shooing him away. "Well, then. Go. I'm not going to keep you from your duties."
"Thank you, sir," Zorian said, rising from his seat. "I am to see you on next Friday, then?"
"No, come see me on Monday after classes," Xvim said. "I need to see this mind magic of yours in action before I can plan for our next session."
Huh. Now this he did not expect. Was Xvim implying he could help him develop his mind magic somehow? He did have a very good mental shield, admittedly, but was still skeptical that the man could help him in that regard. And he was also more than a little baffled that Xvim was even willing to help with that, even if it did turn out that he was some kind of mind magic expert… he thought the man was all about the shaping exercises and other basics?
Deciding he was going to have to wait till Monday to see what Xvim had in mind, Zorian left the man's office and went off to meet Tinami for their mind magic practice.
Well, he technically did not know he was meeting Tinami in particular, but considering that the setup was largely the same as it was the last time around (he told Ilsa about his mind magic and requested a practice partner), he didn't think the identity of the other student was that much of a mystery. And indeed, when he arrived at the assigned classroom, he found Tinami already there, waiting for him.
"You are the other mind mage?" Tinami asked incredulously.
[Yes,] he answered telepathically, causing her to flinch in shock. She narrowed her eyes at him in response.
"You're late," she complained.
"Sorry," he apologized. "Xvim unexpectedly decided to extend our tutoring session beyond bounds. I only managed to get out of it a few minutes ago."
"You chose Xvim as your mentor?" Tinami asked. "Why?"
"I live in Cirin," Zorian explained. "That's pretty far from Cyoria. By the time Ilsa managed to get to me, all the other mentors had filled their quotas and Xvim was the only one left."
"Is he as bad as they say?" she asked.
"He had me do shaping exercises for two hours straight today."
"Ouch. Okay, I guess that justifies being a few minutes late," she admitted. "We should probably reschedule our future meetings, just in case this keeps happening."
"Probably," Zorian agreed. Not even he knew what Xvim would choose to do next, and he had lived through this month many, many times by now. "Anything important I should know before we start?"
Just like the last time they did this, Tinami was largely interested in practicing her telepathy and ability to read surface thoughts. She was rather bad at it by Zorian's standards, but she improved rapidly under his direction. As for himself, he mostly practiced tapping into other people's senses with her. He could access th
e senses of other humans quite easily at this point, but trying to actually function while getting two sets of sensory inputs was a massive challenge. Especially if he and Tinami were looking in completely different directions and such.
Truthfully, there was very little that practicing with Tinami could offer him that he could not also do with Kirielle, Kael or some random stranger… but this way he got to talk to one of his classmates, which was one of his resolutions for this restart. It didn't hurt that cooperating with Tinami could be potentially quite useful, considering who her family was. Also quite dangerous, since they were known to dabble in mind magic and necromancy, but he was willing to take that chance. It was too bad he was essentially starting from scratch with her, though – the last time he'd done this with Tinami, he had introduced her to the aranea and they'd overshadowed him in her eyes by quite a margin. Because of that, they'd interacted very little outside their practice sessions. Then again, considering he had simply viewed her as a mind magic practice dummy back then and never even tried to get to know her, he had no right to complain. Now, though, there was no convenient nearby aranea to introduce her to, even if he wanted to… he would have to catch her attention in some other way.
"Okay, I've just got to ask – where on earth did you learn how to perform mind magic so well?" Tinami asked. "I've been learning these things for years, under some very good tutors, and you're just effortlessly one-upping me in every application of it I can think of. How come?"
"It's a secret," Zorian said bluntly. "Ask me later when we get to know each other better."
She quirked her eyebrow at him. "When, huh?"
"When, if, whatever suits your fancy. The point is that we don't know each other well enough for me to reveal something that personal to you."
"That's fair enough," she sighed, leaning back in her chair. "It's really annoying, though. I know I'm not exactly a genius in the field but-"
There was a knock on the door. Zorian and Tinami both looked at each other and shrugged, mystified about who could be knocking on an empty classroom door at this time of day.