by nobody103
"Right," Zorian mumbled. "But wait, what other reason would a student like us have to join a monster hunter group?"
Naim shrugged. "Money. Fame. Duty."
Oh right, some people get paid to do that stuff. And aren't stuck in a time loop that made stuff like fame and duty utterly unattainable.
Before he could actually say anything, another one of their classmates suddenly decided to enter the conversation.
"Forgive me for butting in like this," said Estin Grier, suddenly speaking up from behind Zorian. "But I couldn't help but overhear your conversation. Do you mind if I comment a bit?"
There was a brief pause, as the three of them stared at the newcomer. In the end, it was Edwin that broke the awkward pause.
"We're just talking, man," Edwin huffed. "It's not a private club or anything. Go ahead and say whatever you want to say."
Zorian glanced at Estin, studying him for a bit. The boy was one of the students he once suspected might be Red Robe – well, just 'the third time traveler' back then, since he hadn't met the guy yet – since his family emigrated to Eldemar from Ulquaan Ibasa. If he was being truthful to himself, the boy's appearance had contributed to those suspicions – Estin was a tall, severe-looking fellow, with sharp facial features, dour expression, thick eyebrows, black hair and eyes of such dark brown they looked almost black too. Him being very withdrawn and rarely speaking unless prompted by someone or something did nothing to dispel the rather sinister impression he got from the boy.
But as far as Zorian was able to piece out, Estin was really just a normal, albeit extremely intimidating student. He had no links to the invaders and didn't really behave like someone aware of the time loop.
"Very well," Estin nodded seriously. "I was going to note that while most of the students didn't join the monster hunts solely in order to test and hone ourselves in the crucible of battle, they surely considered that an additional point in favor of participating. One can have multiple goals for deciding something."
"So… you also like combat magic practice?" Naim surmised.
"Yes," Estin agreed. "That is one way to interpret that. And with that, we can see that there are three of us who wish to test our combat skills and grow. Perhaps we could help each other. Have a meeting so we can trade news and personal styles, spar, and other such things."
For someone who stayed quiet most of the time, Estin sure was very verbose once he got going. Still, he was all for Estin's idea, since he'd been curious about their level of combat skills ever since he'd heard they participated in monster hunts. Naim was also interested, so after discussing it for a while, the three of them decided to ask Ilsa to let them borrow a training hall sometimes in the future. One with actual ground, because apparently Estin's magic 'didn't work well with indoor environments', whatever that meant.
Estin also asked about Edwin joining them, but he wasn't interested. Edwin didn't like to fight, and had no interest in honing his combat skills. Zorian assured the golem enthusiast that he still intended to work with him on their golem designs.
He just had to figure out a way to fit in these two new obligations into his already overloaded schedule.
✦ ✧ ✦
Finding a training hall suited to their needs turned out to have been largely a non-issue – the academy had lots of training halls, and most of them were free to use by any student. Not all of them were billed as combat magic training grounds, but they all had basic safety wards in place and could be unofficially used as such. According to Ilsa, such 'misuse' of academy resources had been rampant for quite some time already, and was accepted as normal even by the teachers these days. As such, she recommended they just commandeer whatever place they needed for a few hours instead of waiting a week for the academy to give them an official time slot that may or may not suit them, at a training hall that may or may not be what they needed. They just had to make sure they weren't interrupting a sanctioned study group or some such.
Armed with that knowledge, they toured some of the available options until they found a training hall that was really just a walled-off and warded section of academy grounds, and thus had plenty of soil and rocks that Estin apparently needed to really show off.
Estin, as it turned out, was one of those people with an innate magical ability. Specifically, he could manipulate earth, rocks and similar materials in an unstructured manner, much like how Zorian could work his mind magic. Estin was rather cagey about the specifics of how his ability worked, since it was apparently his family bloodline and they were trying to keep it semi-secret, but it apparently wasn't immediately usable in its untrained form and Estin's current abilities were a result of considerable talent and a lot of work. In the handful of mock-fights they did to familiarize themselves with each other's skills, Estin used the ability exclusively to levitate large clumps of earth and rocks around himself, interposing them between himself and incoming spells with unerring accuracy. Well, if he could see the attack coming anyway – he didn't fare so well when Zorian made his magic missile loop back and come at him from behind his back. It also took some time for him to form a sphere, and he didn't seem capable of controlling more than four at any particular time, because when Zorian launched an eight-missile swarm at him he simply surrendered and asked him to tone it down in the future.
Still, it was a pretty useful trick he had there. Blocking with the spheres didn't seem to take any attention from Estin, allowing him to focus purely on peppering his opponent with offensive spells while his spheres defended him. If he had something more dangerous than magic missile in his arsenal, or if he could actually weave a homing function into those magic missiles, he might have actually posed a problem for Zorian.
Well, a problem for him so long as he held back so very badly. He decided in advance that the only spells he was going to display was his mastery of magic missile and basic shield spells, and that appeared to have been a good choice because he was beating both of them pretty decisively even with that. Especially Naim. As a first generation mage with no special magic or familial history to draw on, he was limited to the same 'magic missile and shield' combination that Zorian claimed to be limited to, but without the years in the time loop to hone his skills at those two spells to near-perfection.
If he were fighting against pre-time loop Zorian, Naim would have wiped the floor with him. He had more than twice the mana reserves that old Zorian had, and had clearly known how to cast those two spells years ago and had been slowly honing them all that time. On top of that, he was highly fit and agile, and in his fight against Estin he simply dodged every projectile that the other boy sent his way. The old Zorian couldn't weave a homing function into his magic missiles, and would thus not be any more successful than Estin in that regard.
But sadly for Naim, he wasn't fighting Zorian's past self, and thus ended up overmatched in his own game. Zorian's shield was impenetrable to anything the other boy could dish out, and dodging didn't work against Zorian's attacks.
After this, Naim and Estin decided to move onto hand-to-hand combat, probably specifically to spite and one-up Zorian. Knowing he was useless in a fist fight and would just embarrass himself, Zorian immediately bowed out of that, conceding he had no chance against either of them. They were both very smug about that.
Well whatever, let them have their consolation prize. Better than being bitter at Zorian for besting them, that's for sure. In any case, the two of them had no less than five rounds of that, and it became obvious by the end that Naim was just plain better at that than Estin was, despite Estin's greater size and bulk. He would later find out that this was what Edwin had been talking about when he implied that Naim was just as obsessed with martial arts as he was with golems. He practiced martial arts religiously every single day, and was good enough to get invited to national contests in the field.
After that, they decided to share training methods and other advice – something that ended up surprisingly useful to Zorian, since both of them had found some neat little s
haping exercises that Zorian never thought to look for, but which ultimately ended up with Zorian doing most of the talking and demonstrating. He expected as much to happen, though – he was the most experienced person among them, after all.
He left the meeting pleased with how it turned out. Considering that both Naim and Estin wanted to have another meeting like that, Zorian supposed they were pleased with it too, even though Estin was throwing him some sour looks when he thought Zorian wasn't looking. When they did organize another meeting, though, it wasn't just the three of them that showed up.
Briam, Kopriva and Raynie also showed up, wondering if they could join. Naim and Estin immediately dumped the decision on him, spontaneously designating him as the group's leader. Lovely. He accepted, of course. If nothing else, he was pretty sure that sending Raynie away would not reflect too well on him and his plans to get closer to her.
The problem was that all three of them were very raw and untrained when it came to actual combat magic. Briam was admittedly already a member of the hunting group, but that was solely because he had his fire drake familiar – his spells were almost entirely centered around supporting that living flame thrower. Kopriva was in the process of becoming a member in a hunting group, but also not due to combat magic as such – she got in on the basis on providing her team with alchemical bombs and potions, and was heavily reliant on them herself. Raynie probably had some of her shifter magic to fall back on if really pressed, but she was keeping that part of her a secret and her mastery of classical combat spells was nothing to write home about.
Somehow, they still managed to make the meeting work, but it involved a lot more work and responsibility than Zorian was comfortable with. Since he was 'the leader', it mostly fell upon him to help the newcomers out.
At the end of the meeting he was sought out by Raynie, who handed him an envelope with the time and place for their meeting. It was the same restaurant she had used last time, which he supposed made sense if the owner was a personal friend of hers like Kiana claimed.
While this was happening, Zorian was in the process of finalizing his agreement with the Filigree Sages. In exchange for transporting them to Cyoria, guarding their 'salvager crews', and transporting their finds back to their home, Zorian had secured three different mind magic teachers, one of which was supposed to be an expert in memory reading and manipulation. Said memory reading expert also agreed to probe the minds of up to five prisoners that Zorian brought to him and share the findings with him. Finally, and a lot less critically, Zorian was entitled to a portion of the things the aranean salvager crews found in the settlement – only important because it gave him the excuse to closely monitor their activities, ostensibly so they wouldn't cheat him out of his due, but really just so he knew how to properly 'salvage' the place in future restarts.
Embarrassingly, it took less than two days for the Filigree Sages to do what Zorian couldn't manage in an entire restart. Apparently the solution to finding the Cyorian web's treasury was to descend down the deep vertical shaft which the Cyorian aranea used as garbage disposal, except that halfway to the bottom was a hole in the wall that led to their treasury. The hole was big enough for an aranea to comfortably pass while lugging cargo, but Zorian would have to crawl to pass through the opening and into the main chamber. The shaft actually had numerous such tunnels of various sizes branching off of it, all but one of which were dead ends, but it wasn't that hard to narrow it down once you knew what the trick was.
According to the Filigree Sages, shafts like these were the 'secret' to the ease with which the aranea could penetrate even very deep layers on the dungeon without getting slaughtered in the process. While a shaft like that did allow for some of the horrid things from lower layers to reach you easier, they were very defensible and could always be collapsed on invaders if incursions got too frequent. In cases where such shafts didn't exist, aranea were liable to create them via application of stone shaping spells.
The actual treasury was… huge. A lot of space was taken up by huge spools of spider silk thread which were presumably the web's primary source of income. But there was also a lot of raw currency there, both in the form of paper notes as well as precious metals and gems. A fair amount of alchemical explosives and potions was also there, including heaps of different healing potions that the salvage crews claimed were optimized for aranean biology. They were very excited about those, and wanted Zorian's help in contacting whoever made those – they seemed very dismissive about the possibility that the Cyorian aranea produced those themselves. There were quite a few spellbooks, alchemical recipe books, or spell formula blueprint compilations - many of them highly restricted, rare or very expensive. The Filigree Sages intended to cart all of them off back home for research purposes, but they agreed to let Zorian peruse them and copy a few choice bits for his own use. That would be enough to keep him busy until the end of the restart, so he was perfectly happy with that.
Finally, the vault held a lot of stuff that was really only of interest to aranea. Leather pouches and straps that aranea used for carting things around, nutrient blocks that were the aranea equivalent of dry rations, things like that. The Filigree Sages, at least, seemed very intrigued by those, marveling at the Cyorian web's technological sophistication and ingenuity. It all looked very underwhelming to Zorian, but he supposed it wasn't easy establishing a technological society when you have no hands.
Amazingly, the treasury was only the tip of the iceberg. There was another secret part of the settlement he had never found - a secret magic research room, which could only be accessed by selectively disabling a few choice bits of the warding scheme in one of the rooms, and then passing through the newly-opened hole in the ceiling. Sadly, there was a further layer of defenses even beyond that, and neither the Filigree Sages nor Zorian had been able to crack the wards on the second door thus far. The leader of the salvagers was starting to toy with the idea of simply smashing the door, but worried that there was some kind of self-destruct mechanism inside that would destroy the contents if the entrance was forced open. That was how Filigree Sages secured their own magic research rooms, apparently.
Finally, there was a room for storing records, which Zorian hadn't noticed simply because it had never occurred to him to try and connect his mind to the one particularly lumpy wall in the back of the settlement. Apparently the bumps were 'memory stones' – magic items that could record thoughts and memories, and which were apparently the aranea's equivalent of written records. Personally, Zorian didn't think this method was nearly as convenient as written records, but the Filigree Sages claimed this was a much more natural and convenient method for them, so what did he know? The important thing was that the records room held information about most of the dealings and operations the Cyorian web had had with the humans on the surface, barring top secret ones, and that Zorian could possibly coopt some of their organization for his own purposes. The Filigree Sages had no interest in that, seeing as how they intended to simply cart off anything that wasn't nailed down rather than establish some kind of long-term presence, so they simply pointed the room to him and told him to do whatever he wanted with it.
Embarrassingly, Zorian remembered noticing the wall the first time he searched the place and thinking it's unique texture might be significant… so he dug it up with alteration spells and was disappointed when he found nothing but solid rock behind it.
It was after one of these meetings with the Filigree Sages that Zorian came back to Imaya's place and found Taiven waiting for him. Curious. They didn't have another monster hunt scheduled until tomorrow. Maybe she wanted to talk about upping their tempo? They were extremely successful this time around, thanks to Zorian making full use of his future knowledge, so maybe she wanted to strike while the iron was hot. If so, he would have to disappoint her – he had too many things on his plate to devote more time on that.
The moment he got closer and she noticed him, however, he immediately realized she wasn't here about something like
that. She was upset. She asked to speak to him in private so he led her to his room and locked the door. He had heavily warded it at the start of the restart with a permanent warding scheme, so there was no need to waste time on privacy spells.
"What's wrong?" he asked.
"What's wrong, he asks," she mumbled.
Crap, she was upset at him. He didn't remember doing anything to make her upset, though.
She took out a light blue crystal and slammed it at the desk of drawers next to his bed.
"What's that?" she demanded.
"That's a rhetorical question, surely?" Zorian asked, baffled. "It's a piece of crystalized mana, of course."
"Yes, but why do you have an entire crate of that under your bed?" she demanded.
Zorian frowned. "You've been rooting through my stuff without my permission?"
"No, your little sister was," she said. "She and Nochka were playing princesses and making crowns out of crystalized mana for the two of them, Kana and Kosjenka. I walked in on them and asked them where they got those 'pretty stones' they were using."
Damn it, Kiri!
"Okay," said Zorian, taking a big breath to calm himself down. "Putting that aside for the moment, why has this gotten you so upset? Why does it matter if I've got a crate of crystalized mana under my bed?"
She balled up her hands into fists, seething in her own frustration and… self-loathing? What?
"Because everything!" she finally shouted, slamming her fist into the nearby wall and causing him to flinch back in shock. "Everything! Everything, everything, everything!"
"Taiven, please!" shouted Zorian, frantically trying to calm her down. "Just calm down, you're not making any sense!"