by nobody103
What he found from their minds was encouraging. First of all, the four he'd incapacitated were the only ones that knew how to contact Quatach-Ichl. That was why the other defenders came to beg them for help in the previous restart – they weren't asking for permission to summon Quatach-Ichl, they literally didn't know how to do it themselves. The method itself consisted of a simple sending spell, though one that required a particular keystone to actually reach the ancient lich.
He had seen the keystone in question before, he realized. It was the teardrop-shaped amulet of polished black stone that high-ranking Ibasans always wore. He thought it was a purely ornamental thing to mark their station to other Ibasans, since it gave off no magic and had nothing whatsoever etched into its surface, but apparently he was wrong. Even now he could not figure out how it was supposed to work as a keystone, and he didn't dare analyze it too deeply, lest he trip some invisible tripwire and summon Quatach-Ichl to his location. He didn't feel like receiving a disintegration beam to the face at the moment.
Also, the way to enter the gate 'properly' consisted of letting a high-ranking Ibasan step through the gate first. This signaled to the wards in Iasku Mansion that everything was fine and everyone who entered after them is with them and thus also okay by association. Zorian did not know whether these specific Ibasans were keyed into the wards themselves or if the wards were detecting the presence of the keystone they all had on their person, and he didn't care. He simply pushed one of the unconscious Ibasans through the gate, amulet included, and stepped through afterwards. Just to be safe, he instructed his two surviving golems to immediately follow after him.
He breathed a sigh of relief when the wards failed to react to his presence and the gate didn't close. Success.
"Let's see what I can find before Sudomir realizes he has an intruder in his home," Zorian mumbled to himself, stepping over the unconscious body of the Ibasan he pushed through the gate.
He motioned his two golem bodyguards to follow after him and then moved deeper into Iasku Mansion.
✦ ✧ ✦
Considering it was one of the invasion points used to attack Cyoria, Iasku Mansion was surprisingly empty. Now that he didn't have to dodge undead attackers all the time, Zorian had time to explore the interior and was baffled by how seemingly ordinary it was. It was an empty, but otherwise unexceptional mansion.
He encountered neither traps nor undead until he tried to move towards the very center of the mansion, where he suspected Sudomir was located. At that point he crossed some invisible threshold and he felt the wards try to probe his soul and fail. A heavy feeling promptly settled down around him as the wards concentrated their energies around him.
Knowing that the hordes of undead inside the place were making their way towards him and no longer caring about stealth, Zorian started testing the wards to see what exactly they did. He began by throwing one of his last remaining explosives in front of him and activating it to see if it would work. It did, but that didn't necessarily mean the adjustments he'd made since last time were actually working. In the previous restart, his explosives had worked just fine at first, only to suddenly fail when he faced off against Sudomir. In all likelihood, the warding scheme only turned on its heaviest defenses when Sudomir commanded it to do so, and left them dormant otherwise to conserve mana.
Trying to scry on the dimensional gate to see if it had closed when the wards turned on him failed – nothing inside the house could be targeted by any of the divination spells he was aware of. Teleporting out didn't work, and connecting a recall tether to a stone cylinder and launching it through the window as far as it could go didn't allow him to recall himself out of the place either. The wards were also filling the entire mansion with a low-powered shaping disruption field – not enough to stop him from casting things, but definitely making his spellcasting take longer and require more concentration.
He considered simply escaping outside through the windows – a surprisingly viable option, since they were very large and could be opened easily from the inside – but decided not to. Sudomir seemed pretty talkative in the previous restart, and now that Zorian knew he had a guaranteed way out, he wanted to see what would happen if he talked to the man. Maybe Sudomir was the sort of person who liked to gloat? It was stupid, but there were people like that.
Over the next half an hour, Zorian fought against an endless stream of undead. Unlike last time, he was able to conserve his dispeller grenades and other items by relying on his golems to keep some of the animated corpses busy while he tackled the rest. He was sufficiently effective at whittling down the army of undead, in fact, that Sudomir eventually decided to withdraw his remaining forces rather than see them all destroyed. Or at least that's what Zorian assumed, since all of the undead boars and black-clad corpses turned and fled at some point.
Huh. He did not expect that. He wondered whether Sudomir would even show up without Zorian being completely exhausted by his minions. Sudomir was clearly watching him, either through divinations or via some spying function embedded into the wards, so he surely knew Zorian was still dangerous to approach.
Shrugging, Zorian started analyzing the wards with the help of the ward analysis device he took from the aranean treasury. If Sudomir decided to stay away, that just meant he could deconstruct his warding scheme at his leisure, and that was still a win in his book.
Like he suspected, the wards did not like him trying to figure them out. If he hadn't already outed himself as an intruder, he was certain that his current attempt at analysis would have branded him as such immediately. Zorian expected as much – that was why he hadn't tried that the moment he stepped through the dimensional gate. What he didn't expect was for the wards to actively fight back against his analysis. The shifting of the local ward fields around him and the repeated disrupting pulses directed his way were disturbingly adaptive, too intelligently used to come from a mindless spell construct. Was Sudomir somehow adjusting the warding scheme on the fly or were the wards themselves somehow intelligent?
The air in front of him shimmered in a vaguely humanoid shape, and Zorian immediately fired a force lance at the spot. The shimmer was unaffected, though, and soon solidified into a ghostly image of a familiar man. A tall, older, muscular man, dressed in an expensive brown suit. He had a huge mustache and a smiling, sunny expression on his face.
Zorian wasn't fooled, though. While Sudomir's illusionary projection tried to give off an air of happy indifference, his smile was noticeably more strained compared to how it was the last time he was seen him.
"Hi there!" Sudomir greeted him through his projection. "I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but this is a private residence. You can't just come in here and start tearing the place apart! What did I ever do to you, anyway?"
"I'm surprised you're willing to show your face so openly, Sudomir Kandrei," Zorian stated, scanning his surroundings to make sure Sudomir was not trying to distract him with his projection while setting up a surprise attack.
"Ha! A mage of your caliber doesn't stumble into a place like this accidentally," Sudomir scoffed. "Your skills, your equipment… you already knew who and what was here, I'm sure. The interesting question is, who are you? It's only polite to introduce yourself to people, don't you know?"
"Why did you help the Ibasans organize their attack on Cyoria?" Zorian asked, not interested in giving any personal information to Sudomir and not really finding the man's antics amusing. "The death toll is in the thousands, and will only grow larger by the end. What did those people ever do to you, Sudomir?"
"Ah. It's nothing personal, really," Sudomir shrugged, his smile dimming somewhat. "They're just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Politics can be brutal like that."
"Politics?" asked Zorian incredulously. "They're trying to release a primordial to rampage around the continent and you think that's somehow in your political interest!? I can understand how the Ibasans think this is a good thing for them, but what about you? Why would you want that to
happen?"
Sudomir stared at him for a second with a judging look on his face.
"So you know about that too, huh?" he said, clacking his tongue in distaste. "Well, I don't think I feel comfortable discussing my goals with you, my dear home invader. However, just between you and me, I'd wager the Ibasans are too optimistic about this primordial's supposed danger level. It's going to do a lot of damage, I'm sure, but to imagine it running around the continent, destroying things at whim? Not a chance. I give it at best a week before Eldemar gathers enough troops to kill it. And that's assuming it's not just a dumb animal that will wander into the first trap they set for it."
"That's a very reckless attitude to have about the scenario," Zorian frowned. "What if you're wrong?"
"Nothing in life comes without risk," Sudomir said in a lecturing voice.
Ugh. He was going nowhere with this conversation, and the man was blatantly stalling for time. He dispelled the projection with a wave of his hand and started walking towards the center of the mansion again, his two golem bodyguards walking in front of him. There was no point in trying to analyze the wards again, since he couldn't get through the weirdly intelligent safeguards Sudomir had put in place to prevent such things.
Another ghostly projection shimmered into existence in front of him, but he dispelled it before it had a chance to speak.
"Now that's just rude!" a disembodied voice echoed all around him. No more projection this time – just sound that followed him around wherever he went. "We were having a conversation!"
There was a locked door in his way, so Zorian chucked one of his three remaining explosive cubes at it. It failed to work when he gave it a signal to explode.
"Sorry, but no explosions in my house," Sudomir's disembodied voice declared.
Zorian frowned. Just like in the previous restart. And he had adjusted his explosive to try and counter the effect too. Worrying. By themselves, anti-explosion wards were nothing new. Every important building had them. Most of the time, though, they were just basic things that could not stand up to Zorian's craftsmanship. Sudomir's wards could not only counter his basic explosives, but also his specialized work that was expressly designed to work inside a heavily warded area.
His hand instinctively grasped one of the explosive rings he carried around his neck. His old suicide method, which he opted to still carry around just in case. He quickly took off one of the rings and threw it at the door, wanting to see if they would work. The suicide rings were his most sophisticated work, after all, designed to work no matter what the circumstances.
The ring failed to blow up. Hmm. Maybe the wards worked on some exotic principle that totally shut down all spell formula-based explosives?
To test that theory, he threw a bottle of liquid explosive, alchemically made and devoid of any fancy spellwork, at the door in question. The bottle exploded as intended, sending dust and wooden splinters everywhere.
So alchemy-based explosives still work. Good to know.
"Just how many expendables did you bring with you?" Sudomir asked him through his voice spell. "It must have cost a fortune! I'm flattered that you spent all that money on little old me, but is that really the best use of your resources?"
After that, the remaining undead in the mansion started attacking him again, trying to ambush him from nearby rooms as he tried to navigate the confusing inner layout of the mansion. They failed to actually hurt him, but they slowed his advance to a crawl and ended up being enough in the end.
He literally ran out of time – the restart ended before he could track down Sudomir and confront him.
Oh well, there was always next time.
✦ ✧ ✦
The next restart was largely similar to the previous one. He still contacted Deep Blue and the Luminous Advocates for mind magic instructions and largely spent the entire restart working on his mind magic. He did make a minor deviation at the start of the restart in order to visit the the Ghost Serpent Acolytes, though.
They told him the exact same thing they had in the previous restart: the Ghost Serpent says he's bad news and that he should go away. Trying to find out why he was bad news yielded no results – the spirit the web in question worshipped refused to say what about him was 'bad news'. The very knowledge of what sort of bad news he was, was in itself bad news. He was the worst news.
Bizarre. Well, disliking someone for no reason was no crime and, short of attacking the Ghost Serpent Acolytes, there was nothing Zorian could do about the situation. And if he attacked them, then he was kind of vindicating the asshole spirit in a way, wasn't he?
His lessons with the Luminous Advocates progressed at a rapid pace. By the end of the restart, he was ready to attempt to repair the matriarch's memory packet. It worked… sort of. The packet wasn't exactly fixed, but he'd halted the degradation and bought himself another two months before it would start to decay again. That, the Luminous Advocates informed him, was the only thing that could really be done about a decaying foreign memory packet – you mentally stitch it together and it would hold for a time, but that process was in itself destructive to the packet, so there was only so many times one could repair it. Based on the size and condition of the matriarch's memory packet, the Luminous Advocates thought it could only be repaired one more time without risking its destruction.
He had two more months to get better at memory packet repairs, after which he would get one more chance to buy some time. That meant that, depending on how good the second round of repairs went, he had about four or five more restarts at most to get good enough at interpreting aranean memories to read the memories stored in the packet.
He decided he had to get some experience with reading aranean memories. Actually reading aranean memories, not doing simplified exercises with aranean tutors. Of course, neither the Luminous Advocates nor Deep Blue would agree to work with him on that, and he would bet that no other web could be talked into it either. No, that sort of things was virtually always a hostile act – something you do to your enemies.
So the solution was simple. He had to find some aranean enemies.
His first idea was to go after the Sword Divers. After all, they did try to ambush him once, and he still held a grudge about that, even if they didn't remember any of it. It even worked for a time – he managed to ambush several Sword Diver patrols and captured them for memory reading.
His first two attempts to read the aranean mind ended up about as well as his first attempt at reading human minds. That is, not well at all. He improved quickly, however, and soon found out some interesting things about Sword Divers. They had a habit of attacking vulnerable mages, it turned out – they limited themselves to mages that tried to explore the Dungeon beneath Korsa, and they were very careful about whom they targeted, but they were definitely willing to attack anyone they saw as an easy target. They also lived very deep in the Dungeon, and any time they made the wrong person 'disappear', they just retreated from the surface layers until the searches and outrage died down.
And that is what the Sword Divers did when they realized someone was targeting them – they flat out abandoned the Dungeon beneath Korsa, retreating into the depths. Having read their minds, Zorian knew it would be weeks, perhaps months before they deigned to return, and he didn't dare follow after them.
So he just looted their surface money stashes (more out of spite than because he really needed the cash) and went searching for more targets.
He asked both Deep Blue and the Luminous Advocates if they knew an aranean web they wouldn't mind targeted. Surprisingly, it was the Luminous Advocates that were more interested – he expected Deep Blue to jump to the chance, considering their neighborhood, but they were actually pretty content with their current situation. They did offer him a job, however… one that they claimed would buy him pretty much anything he wanted out of them. Basically, they wanted him to get rid of the crystal ooze that was harassing their resource gathering expeditions into the deeper parts of the Dungeon.
; Crystal oozes were virtually immune to physical damage, quite fast, absorbed most forms of magical energy, could shoot arrow-like shards of crystal at things that annoyed them, and even a tiny prickle from one of their crystal blades and shards would rapidly turn a living being into a crystal statue. They were sometimes called crystal basilisks, and they were one of those nightmare monsters that nobody actually wanted to fight unless there was no choice.
Deep Blue didn't seem very surprised when he declined their offer.
As for the Luminous Advocates, they were apparently under constant threat from a web they called 'The Demon Skin Web' or the 'Howling Ones'. Those weren't their real names, but since that particular web refused to talk to any of the other ones and simply did the telepathic equivalent of screaming whenever someone tried to talk to them, the Luminous Advocates didn't know what to call them. The Luminous Advocates indicated they wouldn't mind to see them gone, or at least thinned out a bit.
Well, by the end of the restart, Zorian had found out a lot of things about them. Such as that they called themselves Challengers of the Unspeakable, and were the so-called 'old aranea' – the magicless, original webs that got conquered, assimilated or exterminated by the newer, magic-using webs originating from underneath Cyoria. They had watched all their old neighbors fall before the tide of magic-using newcomers, either through violent conquest or through magic-using immigrants, until they were the only ones left. As far as they were concerned, it was the Luminous Advocates who were 'The Demon Skin Web'.
Tragic, but Challengers of the Unspeakable were also violent killers that actively raided their neighbors, and even nearby human communities when they could get away with it. Zorian had no qualms about raiding them back.
Finally, as the end of the restart approached, he started finalizing his preparations for another gate assault. This time his golem brigade would hopefully survive long enough to actually step into Iasku Mansion along with him, giving him solid superiority over Sudomir's undead guards.