by nobody103
"Oh, you're back!" Imaya exclaimed when he entered the house. "Your friend has been waiting for you for a while now. She's in the basement with Kael right now. Do you want me to call her or are you going to get her yourself?"
His friend? Her?
"Taiven?" he guessed. Imaya nodded. Huh, that was a lot earlier than he had expected to hear from her. This could be either very good or very bad. "I'll go see what she wants."
"You know, the last time your 'friend' visited you, she left the house looking like she had been crying," Imaya said casually.
"Is there a reason why you're pronouncing 'friend' like that?" Zorian asked her suspiciously.
"You're not breaking young girls' hearts, are you, mister Kazinski?"
"Ugh. There is nothing like that between me and Taiven, okay? And besides, if anyone is the heartbreaker here, it's definitely Taiven," he protested.
She gave him a curious look.
"I'd prefer not to talk about it," he said, shaking his head.
Thankfully, she didn't press the issue, so he went to the basement to talk to Taiven and see what she decided. He found her talking with Kael about the time loop, comparing notes and discussing time travel mechanics.
"So does this mean you believe me?" he asked her hopefully.
"I suppose," she said. "This still all very fantastical and unreal to me, but everything you told me seems to check out. Or at least the parts I can actually check do. And Kael here seems convinced you're telling the truth, too. So yeah, I guess I kind of believe you."
"Is there anything you can tell me that would help me convince you in future restarts?" Zorian asked.
"Kael and I talked about that for a while," she said. "I don't know. Any personal information I could give you would just creep me out if you started spouting it off all of a sudden – I'd sooner decide that you've been spying on me or that you're reading my mind than that you are a time traveler. If you just tracked me down at the start of the restart and started showing off everything you've learned inside the time loop, I'd definitely accept that something strange is going on, but I'd probably think you're a shapeshifter in disguise or possessed. It's only because I interacted with you pretty heavily for a whole week that I never doubted that you're… well, you."
"How about this then: I start the next restart the same way I did this one, joining your group and all, wait for a few days for you to get annoyed with my growth spike, and then confront you about it on my own initiative before you have a chance to get really fed up with it," Zorian tried.
Tension that he never even noticed until that moment seemed to drain from her shoulders and she sagged in relief.
"What?" he said, frowning.
"I… was afraid you'd just keep duplicating the circumstances that led me here over and over again," she admitted. "Even if I don't retain memories of it, I don't want to be repeatedly reduced to tears. It was humiliating once, thank you very much."
"Truth be told, I wasn't okay with the idea of repeatedly making you cry, either," he told her. "So that option was definitely off the table, even if you were okay with it."
She looked away, embarrassed.
Kael cleared his throat to get their attention.
"I hate to break up the moment, but we have much to talk about," he said.
"Yes," Taiven agreed, relishing the chance to change the topic. "First of all – Zorian, why haven't you contacted Zach yet? This 'Red Robe' of yours is a threat to you both, and you said yourself that you think he's at the center of all this. It only makes sense to work together. I don't understand your reluctance to talk to him."
"First of all, there is a possibility that Red Robe is monitoring Zach and tracking his movements. If so, then contacting him would mean revealing myself to Red Robe," Zorian said. "Secondly, I suspect that the moment I contact Zach, my whole schedule is getting thrown into the trash can. I have some fairly urgent things I need to do in the near future, I can't drop everything to hang out with Zach. Even assuming he is fairly understanding of my goals, he'll still probably insist on taking part in my activities. Since the things I'm doing require subtlety, which he entirely lacks, that's a problem. All in all, I just don't think it's a good idea to involve myself with him at this moment."
"So, what, you intend to avoid a potential ally just like that?" Taiven asked.
"Only until I'm done investigating the invaders and I can get the matriarch's memory packet open," Zorian said. "After that, I will probably go out and meet with him to see what he has been doing and whether we can help each other."
"Huh. Alright," she said, somewhat mollified. "That makes more sense. To be honest, I thought you'd be a lot more stubborn about this than that. Kael said you had some sort of grudge against the guy, and I know how you are with your grudges."
"Well, Kael is wrong. I don't have a grudge against Zach," he said, giving the white-haired boy an annoyed look. "But whatever. One problem solved. What else do we need to talk about?"
Kael ripped out a page out of his notebook and offered it to Zorian.
"We made a list," Kael said with a smile. "Taiven had a lot of suggestions."
Zorian accepted the piece of paper with a sigh and began to read. She really knew how to pick a day to drop this on his head, didn't she?
When it rains, it pours.
Chapter 45
Fine Structures
Zorian was starting to realize he didn't understand Taiven nearly as well as he thought he did. And it wasn't just the surprising amount of insecurity that lurked behind her seemingly endless optimism and confidence that made him think that – it was also the amount of thought and consideration she put into his time loop situation. When he told her about his situation, she actually listened to him without interruption, and even took notes, and then later came back with a list of questions and ideas. This was very atypical behavior for her. Taiven was pretty much a prime example of the 'less thinking, more action' philosophy, and she even admitted that she still wasn't entirely convinced about the whole 'time loop' thing, so he was rather baffled about her motives and thought processes.
Still, while the list she had made with Kael's help was kind of surprising, it contained nothing particularly revolutionary, and all of the points could be boiled down to four basic questions. Why didn't he get help from more people around him than her and Kael? Why didn't he tell the government or academy authorities what was going on and get their cooperation? Why was he pursuing so many magical fields instead of properly focusing on them, one at a time? And lastly, why didn't he try harder to develop his combat magic!?
Zorian found the last one especially amusing. It was only a few days ago, after all, that Taiven was breaking down into tears over his 'incredible combat skills', yet now she was saying he should have put more effort into them.
You just couldn't satisfy some people.
Alas, Taiven didn't find her complete turnaround of opinion nearly as amusing as he did. Zorian's logic for putting combat magic practice squarely in the 'secondary goal' pile – namely, that very few of his problems could be solved through direct violence and that he just wasn't terribly suited for combat magic in the first place – had been summarily rejected by Taiven, who decreed that she would be helping to bring him up to snuff in that regard. Through sparring.
Constant, daily, dangerously serious sparring. He'd apparently had no idea what he was getting into when he'd decided to go along with her idea, because there was a huge difference between sparring with Taiven when she thought he was just a precocious amateur with a couple of tricks and sparring with her when she considered him a serious threat right from the start and wasn't afraid of hurting him. She was vicious and merciless, and he was honestly afraid she would end up killing him if he didn't give it his all, despite all the safety wards embedded into her family's training hall. It was just a bit too intense for his liking.
Maybe she was still a little bitter about him improving so much in so short a time.
"Are you ready?" sh
e asked him, twirling her combat staff playfully in her hands.
"No?" Zorian tried. He'd just finished another frustrating session with Xvim, and didn't get to rest at all before coming over to Taiven's place. The last thing he wanted to do right now was get smacked around in the name of training.
"Too bad," Taiven snorted derisively. "We're starting. Go!"
Yeah, he didn't think that would actually get him anywhere. He immediately threw himself to the side, dodging her opening shot. Which wasn't a magic missile or anything reasonable like that – no, she opened the battle with a powerful beam of force. 'Force lance', as the spell was called, was her new favorite when fighting him. He knew better than to try to shield against it this time – the beam was practically designed for cracking simple force barriers, focusing an immense amount of penetrating force on a tiny patch of the shielding surface. Some of the stronger, more advanced shields could withstand the beam, but nothing in Zorian's arsenal could truly stand up to it. He had learned that lesson very painfully in the first few spars he'd had with Taiven during the past few days, and he still had bruises all over his chest and arms to prove it. Even at their highest setting, the safety wards couldn't blunt the power of the spear-like beam completely.
No, the only realistic defense he had against that spell was moving out of its way. The good news was that beam spells like those couldn't home in on targets, so dodging them was an option. The bad news was that a beam traveled blindingly fast and was really hard to evade at the distances he and Taiven fought at. Plus, he kind of sucked at dodging.
The last few days had forced him to learn quickly, though, and in this particular case he was fast enough to move out of the beam's path.
He responded immediately with a gust of wind, trying to knock her off-balance and possibly blind her. Sadly, this was not the first time he'd tried that and she simply countered it with a weather shield before throwing a fully-powered fireball at him. Gods, she really wasn't playing around, was she? He fired off a dispelling wave to negate it, since the alternative would be to tank it with a much more expensive aegis. Besides, cost concerns aside, the spherical shield would leave him immobile while in place, and Taiven would be sure to capitalize on that.
A force lance that quickly followed the fireball told him that this was indeed her likely plan – if he had stood still and tried to tank the fireball, the force lance would have caught him flat-footed.
He threw a small swarm of magic missiles at her, all of them on a very direct trajectory towards her. They were just bait, really, intended to take advantage of a certain predictable maneuver Taiven liked to do, where she countered such attacks by firing a massive battering ram of force that not only swept the attack aside, but also acted as a counter attack at the same time. That's why he immediately followed up his barrage with a ray of electricity, which would be completely unaffected by her blast of force.
He guessed her response well this time. She had tried to respond with a force battering ram, but then caught onto his plan half-way through and dodged the beam he'd sent at her. As for himself, he used the disturbance in her attack rhythm to initiate a short-distance teleport, transporting himself behind her back. She noticed him, of course – she was probably using that mana-sensing trick she'd taught him so long ago – but she could do little else but raise a hasty aegis to shield herself against the blast of force he'd sent at her. He followed this up with a force lance, intending to give her a taste of her own medicine, but she expertly dodged that and sent an eight missile swarm at him, forcing him to fire another dispelling wave to deal with them. He kind of wondered why she still kept bunching up her projectile swarms together like that when she already knew that allowed him to take them all out with a single counter-spell. Maybe she couldn't? He knew he had better shaping skills than her, so maybe that kind of fine control over one's projectiles was beyond her.
He teleported again to evade another battering ram of force and then sent his own missile swarm at her, each missile following its own exotic trajectory to make them hard to track and take out.
That battle raged like that for another couple of minutes, before Zorian was forced to concede defeat due to running out of mana. It was a good fight in his opinion, if nothing else because he didn't get any new bruises this time around. Taiven complained, of course, lecturing him about pacing himself better, but the simple truth was that she was driving him way too hard for him to be conservative with his mana use. He would rather be too frivolous with his mana use and lose due to exhausting himself than end up on the receiving end of an offensive spell again.
"You know, running out of mana like that in a real battle basically means you die," Taiven said.
"And getting speared through the lung by a force lance doesn't?" Zorian countered.
She stared at him. "Okay, yeah, you got me there."
She walked over to a nearby bench and motioned him to sit beside her.
"Have you thought about that list Kael gave you?" she asked.
Of course he had. He even discussed with her some of the points she'd brought up over the past few days, although he suspected she didn't like his answers all that much. Interpreting her question as a demand for a more long-winded, comprehensive explanation, he started telling her about the reasoning behind his decisions.
His reasons for not getting help from more people, and especially official authorities of any sort, were simple to explain. The more people he told about the time loop, the greater the chance that they would let something slip to the wrong person and lead Red Robe back to him. Unless they had something he really needed, and which he simply couldn't get by any other way, it was best to keep them ignorant of the time loop. Truthfully, even telling Taiven was probably a pointless risk. He told her about the time loop for the same reason he kept taking Kirielle with him to Cyoria, despite his little sister being nothing but a huge liability and time sink – he wanted someone familiar to talk and confide to.
He kept his mouth shut about that last detail in his explanation to Taiven, though – he doubted she would appreciate hearing that. Instead he focused on the fact that virtually no one would be willing to believe him about being a time traveler, and that convincing them would probably take weeks and could easily cause quite a stir. This was especially true in regards to her ideas about contacting the city government or academy authorities. Zach had already tried to notify them about the time loop and had never been taken seriously – there was no reason to think Zorian would be any more successful at it than Zach was.
"Didn't you say Zach is kind of an idiot?" Taiven asked curiously.
"Sort of," said Zorian. "But in this case, I think he's far more suited to the task than I am. There is no way I'd ever be as trustworthy to authority figures as Zach."
"Ah, yes, the natural mind magic thing," Taiven said.
"Well, that too, but I was actually thinking about how I'd probably never be as forthright and honest about things as Zach probably was," he admitted. "I'd hide things and people would notice and be wary of me as a result."
Taiven gave him a long, searching look. "You're not even telling me everything, aren't you?"
"I'm telling you most things," he said. "Everything I think is relevant."
She stayed silent and gave him an annoyed look.
"Anyway," he said quickly, looking to change the subject, "even ignoring that, contacting Cyoria's authorities is a particularly bad idea because there is obviously someone high in the administration that is cooperating with the invaders. I'm almost certain by now that whoever is leading the Cult of the Dragon Below also has a high position in the city government – it would explain why the members of the cult keep getting lucrative contracts from the city and exemptions from all sort of normal regulations – and it would make sense for Ibasans to also have someone in their pocket."
"I keep forgetting that part," Taiven admitted. "Which is pretty bizarre, now that I think about it. Finding out that some crazy cult has thoroughly infiltrated our city g
overnment is honestly one of the scariest parts of your story, but the part where I'll apparently get erased out of existence at the end of this month sort of drowns out everything else."
Ouch. She was still fixated on that. He did his best to move the conversation along, tackling her concerns about spreading himself thin next.
Her complaints that it would be better for him if he picked one or two things to really focus on held merit. Unfortunately, there was a reason why he was not doing that - he kept encountering various emergencies during his time in the time loop, which forced him to often drop topics or push them into background to accommodate for the newest priority that just sprung up on him. The second issue basically amounted to personal weakness – he could only focus on something for so long before he got thoroughly sick of it and had to do something else. Since he aimed to be a generalist mage anyway, he didn't think of this as some huge issue he had to work on, but he understood why a tightly-focused spellcaster like Taiven would be annoyed with him for that.
"As for not trying harder at combat magic, well… we already discussed that topic enough, I think. You already know my opinion on the matter," he told her.
"Yet you keep coming to these spars anyway," she noted. "I know I was kind of pushy about it, but it's not like I can really make you come if you decided to put your foot down."
"Well, I do want to get better at it," he shrugged. "No reason to refuse free practice. I just wish you would tone it down a little."
"Oh, come on. What are you afraid of?" Taiven scoffed. "Aren't you a big, bad time traveler that can't really die?"
"Treating death as a nuisance could easily become a habit that would kill me for real once I'm out of the time loop. Unless there is a pressing need for it, or some downright amazing opportunity, I'd like to avoid dying too much," Zorian said. "Also, you do realize that the time loop only resets when Zach dies, not when I do? If you end up killing me, you'll have to live with the consequences 'till the end of the month."
The look she gave him told him that no, she did not realize that.