by nobody103
He didn't intend to duplicate the circumstances that led to Xvim's new attitude in future restarts. While he'd definitely learned some stuff from Xvim when it came to mental combat, Xvim was ultimately an annoying teacher to learn from and nothing he wanted to teach Zorian absolutely required his help to work.
Besides, his meetings with Tinami weren't really getting anywhere. He wasn't really getting much from them himself, and Tinami basically turned his every attempt at interaction into an interrogation attempt, trying to figure out who had taught him to be as good as he was currently.
She also seemed to have blabbed about his meeting with Raynie, since everyone in class seemed to know about it when he came to the academy on Monday. Probably as revenge for refusing to answer her questions. In any case, that pretty much killed any sort of good will he may have had with Raynie – she accepted that he was not at fault when they talked later in the day, but she still didn't want to be seen anywhere near him after that. It was probably Benisek loudly congratulating him in front of the whole class that really screwed him over when it came to that.
Why did he ever think that hanging around that guy was a good idea?
Oh well, live and learn. Seeing how his social endeavors were in tatters for the rest of the restart, he focused his energies on finding the aranean treasury, his personal experiments and tracking down and interrogating the invaders. The latter two were doing just fine, but his quest for the aranean treasury stubbornly yielded no results. He resolved to take the Filigree Sages up on their offer to take them to the Cyorian settlement in exchange for their help with memory manipulation – maybe aranean explorers would be more successful than him, and more help with his memory reading skills was always welcome. He should also save the Yellow Cavern Guardians from their invader again, just in case they have something new to tell him now that he had some actual experience with mind reading under his belt.
His invasion-related activities steadily continued as weeks passed, yielding no revolutionary results or critical revelations, but his memory reading skills were getting pretty good and he had found some interesting targets that might actually know something interesting. Unfortunately, his constant attacks had made the invaders cautious and paranoid, and everyone important was always armed and under tight security – Zorian didn't feel confident going after them under such conditions. He would go after them in a future restart, when they hadn't had the forewarning that he was coming for them.
As the end of the restart approached, Zorian laid off the Cultists a little, limiting himself to raiding their caches and monitoring their activities. The caches held no crucial clue or amazing treasure, but one of them did have a whole lot of cash (which Zorian intended to put to good use in future restarts) and the potion collection he stole at the start of the restart looked promising. Kael claimed he would need another restart to finish going through them, but some of them were clearly advanced combat potions that produced clouds of acidic vapor upon breaking, doused everything in unquenchable fire and similar effects. That sounded quite compatible with Zorian's fighting style, in all honesty.
And then, several days before the summer festival, his spying effort finally gave him the alert he had been waiting for: the leadership of the Cult of the Dragon Below issued an order to one of their low-ranking groups to kidnap Nochka. It wasn't the same team as it was the last time, nor was the kidnapping scheduled to occur on the same date it had in the previous restart, but his efforts had caught the order anyway.
He ambushed them halfway to the Sashal family house, when they were still herding their giant centipedes through the sewers. His initial idea was to seize control of the centipedes and make them turn on their masters, making it look like they lost control of the beasts. Unfortunately, the mage controlling them knew what he was doing – the moment Zorian attempted to influence the minds of the monsters he clamped down on his control over the centipedes and shouted a warning to the rest of the group that they were under attack.
So Zorian used his backup plan and chucked one of the combat potions he recovered from their cache into their midst. The centipede controller, as well as three of his centipede minions, died on the spot, frozen solid when the bottle broke and the glittering blue liquid made contact with the air. Alas, that revealed his hiding spot, forcing him to shield himself from a barrage of offensive spells the three surviving cultists had started peppering him with.
Fortunately, with no more controller mage to contest his control, the last centipede was child's play to commandeer. Before his three attackers had realized what was happening, the centipede's poisonous pincers bit down on the leg of one of them, and they had to defend themselves from a danger in their own midst.
They never stood a chance from that point on, though they had managed to kill the centipede before Zorian finished them off. His task done, he left the scene, wondering what the Cult of the Dragon Below was going to do now that its plans have been foiled. Were they going to come after Nochka again, with more resources this time? Just how important was she to them, anyway?
He supposed he would find out soon.
✦ ✧ ✦
To Zorian's surprise, Nochka was never attacked after that. Instead, the cultists attacked another family the day after that – this time a rather prominent officer serving in Eldemar's military who happened to be one of those pigeon shifters that Raynie didn't think much about. The man and his wife were unharmed, but their eight year old son was kidnapped by their unknown assailants and no ransom demand had been issued.
Unlike the cultists' attack on the Sashal family, this one garnered a great deal of attention from the newspapers and the authorities. After all, their new target wasn't just some random nobody, but a member of Eldemar's military… and they didn't bother with some flimsy 'monster attack' setup this time, choosing instead to just barge in and kidnap a kid during the night. Quite a bit more attention grabbing.
So. Clearly the cultists needed a shifter, probably a shifter child, for some purpose. Primordial 'summoning', most likely. They needed one so badly they were willing to kick over an anthill just before the invasion, exposing it to a huge risk of discovery.
But it didn't have to be Nochka, apparently.
"Hey, Zorian," Kirielle called out, distracting him from his musings.
He looked towards her and found her trying to paint a face on the next generation wooden golem he had made for her. It had a whole bunch of minor improvements over the old one, but Zorian suspected Kirielle only really cared about one of them – the new version had long, brown 'hair' attached to its head, based on her request. Apparently she decided that wasn't lifelike enough for her.
"What?" he asked.
"Who are you taking out to the dance tomorrow?" she asked.
"It's none of your business," said Zorian. Ugh, he would have to make sure to be out of the house by tomorrow evening, just in case Ilsa sent someone after him again.
"Are you going out with the red-headed girl you're dating?" she asked.
"N- Wait a minute, how do you even know about that!?" Zorian protested.
"Kael told me," she said, biting the wooden end of her paintbrush for a minute before adding some fine touches on the golem's new eyebrows.
Stupid Kael… he probably thought this was all so terribly amusing.
"I think you could use a girlfriend," Kirielle said, before turning towards her new golem. "Don't you agree, Kosjenka?"
Just as it had been made to do when presented with something that sounded like a question, the golem nodded its head gravely.
"See, even Kosjenka agre-"
"Kiri," Zorian cut her off.
"Yes?"
"Shut up."
Chapter 43
Overwhelmed
Perhaps it was because she 'knew' that Zorian already had a date, much like everyone else seemed to believe, or perhaps it was simply a matter of Zorian being more circumspect with his intentions this time around, but Ilsa didn't send any girl after him in the end. Not
that Zorian had stayed at Imaya's place long enough to see that in person, of course – that could have easily left him stuck with an unplanned date for the evening again – but he had left a scrying beacon in the house so he could check up on it periodically.
A part of him was annoyed he even cared about that. In the grand scheme of things, such petty drama did not matter in the slightest… there wasn't enough time left in the restart for the consequences of ignoring it to really catch up to him. And besides, he can hardly be blamed for not showing up on a date he had never arranged to begin with! But, well, he was curious… and it wasn't like checking up on the house from time to time was some huge commitment on his part.
No, most of his time was spent on hovering on the edges of the invasion proper, trying to spot breakaway groups small enough to ambush. Well, that and repeatedly telling himself that he didn't have to interfere every time he saw the invaders kill helpless civilians, since they were going to be just fine when the loop restarts. The first thing was complicated by the variety of monsters that accompanied the mages, who all had very good senses and came in great numbers. The second was complicated by the sheer brutality the invaders displayed to everyone in their path. For heaven's sake, some of them were breaking into random houses and murdering entire families inside! Not even looting anything, just committing mindless slaughter of non-combatants for no real reason. Madness.
He knew stuff like that happened during the invasion, of course, but it was never this… personal for him. He was there this time, witnessing the behavior in detail and cold-bloodedly deciding where to engage the invaders and where to move on. And he wasn't talking about avoiding groups that were straight-up too big for him to handle – those were easy to ignore, since he had never felt compelled to help others if doing so would cost him his own life in return. No, he was talking about groups that were entirely manageable with his current skills… except that he couldn't figure out a way to deal with them without killing everything. And what would be the point of that? He needed Ibasan mages alive so he could read their minds – that was what this was all about. An ambush that did not result in subdued mages to interrogate was a waste of time and mana, as well as liable to summon Quatach-Ichl to dispatch him. The ancient lich always personally intervened when someone got too successful against the invading forces.
And that was without even considering the possibility that Red Robe was secretly lurking somewhere out there in the city, waiting for a big enough disturbance to clue him in that a time traveler was back in Cyoria. He didn't think that option was very likely, what with Red Robe completely abandoning his support of the invasion lately, but it was not an option he felt completely safe discounting. No, sticking to his original plan and avoiding unnecessary engagements was definitely the right choice to make.
Maybe it was a good thing his mind kept going back to the stupid date drama – if nothing else, it gave him something to distract himself with.
Fortunately for his deteriorating mood, he soon found a duo of Ibasan mages that had strayed too far from their main group and were only lightly defended. Well, relatively speaking. They had two war trolls and twelve skeletons as bodyguards, with another six war trolls vandalizing shopfronts not too far from where they were standing, but he was confident he could deal with that if he could surprise them.
He made his way towards the group, mentally nudging the iron beak whose senses he was tapping into to fly closer to his targets so he could examine them more closely. There was something deliciously ironic about using the invader's own scouts against them like that, but the real reason he was using the iron beaks instead of simply scrying on the invaders was that iron beaks had much better vision than he did and could also see in the dark. Very useful, that. He had also tried to employ the same trick on the war trolls that hanged around the invaders, but found their senses very hard to process. Trolls had terrible eyesight, and were color blind to boot – their main sense was their ridiculously good sense of smell and, to a lesser extent, their hearing. Not to mention they were far less mobile than the iron beaks, and the Ibasans kept a much tighter leash on the brutes than they did on their iron beak flocks. Hmm… he wondered…
Acting on a hunch, Zorian focused on the nearest iron beak flock and tried to dominate the one flying on the tail's end of the flock. It was surprisingly willful for an animal, but his attempt was not contested by anyone and the iron beak soon broke off from its group and made its way towards Zorian. Huh, that worked. Nobody seemed to be reacting to his actions, either. Convenient. Apparently the iron beaks were a bigger weak link of the invasion than he'd thought!
He removed a potion vial from his pocket and handed it to the dominated iron beak that had landed next to him. It took some time, but eventually he managed to telepathically convey to the magical corvid that it shouldn't clutch the vial too tightly in its claws unless it wanted bad things to happen to it. That done, he directed it to dive bomb the Ibasan duo with the vial.
He would not have been at surprised at all if his ploy had ended up as a failure. A lot of it depended on the iron beak executing everything flawlessly, since Zorian was only dominating the iron beak, not puppeteering it – a dominated creature executes orders to the best of its own ability, not the controller's. That was nice, in the sense that there was no way Zorian could have puppeteered the bird precisely enough to pull off something this complicated. It did mean he was a bit of a helpless observer as a result, though. Oh well, even if the ploy failed it should at least act as a proper distraction for his own attack…
The iron beak exceeded his expectations. Not only did it approach the two mages from behind, entirely on its own initiative, it dropped the vial at the exact spot Zorian told it to aim at. The exact spot. That had got to be some innate magic ability at work – they were uncannily accurate with their feather attack too, come to think of it. In any case, once the vial hit the ground it exploded into a cloud of yellow gas that knocked out the two Ibasans in a matter of moments. Their bodyguards weren't affected – the war trolls because their magically-enhanced metabolisms kept the knockout gas from working, and the skeletons because they had no metabolism to affect – but once their controllers went unconscious, it became ridiculously easy to goad the war trolls into attacking the skeletons. It took less than a minute before every skeleton was reduced into dust and splinters.
He directed his iron beak to make a few passes at the two trolls, and the bird interpreted that as 'send a couple of feather volleys straight at their eyes (ouch), after which the two former bodyguards ran off to chase the bird in blind anger, leaving Zorian free to approach the two knocked-out mages unopposed.
This was the fifth group he ambushed tonight, and the first one where everything had gone so smoothly. He didn't even have to personally fight in the end! He really should use iron beaks more extensively in the future.
After dragging the two unconscious bodies to some less exposed place, he took a deep breath and dived into their memories.
Memory reading, more than any other branch of mind magic, deeply resembled divination in the way it functioned. You had to decide what you wanted to look for, and if you were asking the wrong question, your answer would be worthless or misleading. In Zorian's case, there were four main things he looked for whenever he read the minds of Ibasan mages: whether they knew about any mage in a garish red robe, where the primordial 'summoning' ritual was supposed to take place, what they knew about the goals of the invasion and, last but certainly not least, whether they knew anything about the time loop or time travel in general. The same thing he probed the minds of cultists about, really. He was lucky this time, in that one of the two mages lying before him was a higher ranking mage that should hopefully know more than the common grunts he had been dealing with thus far.
None of the Ibasans knew anything about a mage wearing red robes, and the two men he currently had at his mercy were no exception. Follow up questions regarding missing members which had left the group around the start of the t
ime loop revealed that despite their inability to maintain discipline during the actual invasion, the Ibasans ran a pretty tight ship during the lead-up to it. Anyone who stepped out of line was severely punished by the Ibasan leadership, and the handful of cases where someone tried to abandon the invasion resulted in Quatach-Ichl hunting them down like dogs as an example to everyone else. Consequently, all such attempts had stopped long before the time loop had begun.
As far as Zorian was concerned, that pretty much killed the possibility of Red Robe being an Ibasan invader. He had suspected as much, considering how Quatach-Ichl treated Red Robe during that evening, but it was nice to have more confirmation. It was still possible he was connected to the Cult of Dragon Below, which didn't (and couldn't) exercise anywhere near the same control over its members.
As far as the location where the primordial ritual was concerned, none of the Ibasans officially knew anything about it… but it was apparently a sort of public secret among group commanders (such as the one whose mind Zorian was currently reading) that the 'summoning' was supposed to take place on top of the Hole, or at least as close to it as humanly possible.
Zorian felt pretty stupid when he found that out. Of course. Of course it was the Hole, the city's biggest and most obvious landmark. He had even known that the Cult assigned special significance to the damn place, he just never… damn it. He shook his head. In his defense, the lower-ranking cultists were convinced that the ritual was going to take place in some super-secret place that nobody knows about.
As for the goals of the invasion, that was something Zorian found very easy to extract from the minds of his victims, as they knew very few actual facts about that. Only the very top of the Ibasan leadership seemed to know what they were really trying to accomplish here, and the common grunts were going along with the whole thing almost entirely because Quatach-Ichl was going along with it too. The ancient lich was held in very high regard by the Ibasans. As a thousand-year old lich, he was an almost impossibly ancient mage, and had power and skill to match his age. He was alive back when the gods still spoke to humanity, and was rumored to have been blessed by several of them. On top of all that, he had a reputation for being harsh but fair, as opposed to a lot of other Ibasan leaders who simply had a reputation for being harsh. He was something of a saint to these people, as strange as that looked to Zorian. The mindset was that if Quatach-Ichl said this was possible and worthwhile to pull off, then it was. It was just that simple.