Mother of Learning 2 - Outside World Read online

  Chapter 27

  Cast Adrift

  Zorian's eyes abruptly shot open as a sharp pain erupted from his stomach. His whole body convulsed, buckling against the object that fell on him, and suddenly he was wide awake, not a trace of drowsiness in his mind.

  "Good morning, brother!" an annoyingly cheerful voice sounded right on top of him. "Morning, morning, MORNING!"

  Relief immediately flooded his mind, closely followed by despair. He did it – he kept his soul safe from the third time traveler and survived the encounter entirely unscathed. But his allies…

  "Zorian? Are you alright?"

  Zorian stared at his sister for several long seconds, a million thoughts racing through his mind. She looked uncomfortable with his blank stare and silence, but Zorian couldn't really bring himself to care at the moment. His mind was still stuck on his desperate escape from Red Robe. On the fact that he almost got captured by a mass murdering psychotic necromancer with an untold amount of time looping experience. On the fact that said necromancer now knew there were other human time travelers running around and could be coming after him this very moment.

  On the fact that the aranea were dead. Dead and never coming back.

  He absent-mindedly pushed Kirielle off of him, put on his glasses and started pacing around the room.

  Killing a soul was impossible. They could not be destroyed, only modified. Everyone said so – the teachers, all the books he had read discussing the topic, Kael the amateur necromancer… hell, even the goddamn lich had said so in one of his offhand comments back when Zorian was first brought into the time loop. How, then, did Red Robe manage to kill the souls of the aranea?

  He supposed the simplest explanation would be that Red Robe simply found out something that normal mages hadn't. He was a necromancer with a huge amount of time and an easy way to avoid the usual consequences of various grisly experiments. Perhaps he succeeded where other necromancers had failed. Zorian didn't think this was likely – the lich seemed to be a better mage than anyone he had met thus far, Red Robe included, and he certainly considered a soul-killing spell impossible – but that just might all be wishful thinking on his part. He didn't want the aranea to be gone for good. Dammit, he had grown to like the stupid spiders! Sure they'd had their disagreements, but he had really never wished them ill and he didn't think they had wished him ill either. Novelty certainly hadn't, and she couldn't lie to save her life. If… if he was being perfectly honest with himself, he had practically thought of Novelty as a second little sister. But now she was gone, just like the rest of the aranea beneath Cyoria.

  And the worst thing? He let it happen. He had spent the whole evening gathering the matriarch's last message, oblivious and uncaring to what was really happening, while Red Robe was hunting down the aranea across the city. He had known he was dealing with another time traveler and he had never once considered that the man might have developed countermeasures against others of their kind. Gods, he felt so stupid now.

  Although it was strange… First of all, if Red Robe could permanently get rid of anyone who bothered him with a spell like that, why hadn't he used it more often? Surely the invasion would be a lot easier if he got rid of a couple of key stumbling blocks. Yet Zorian never heard of any notable people waking up dead at the start of each restart, and he had access to the extensive information network maintained by the aranea. There was an obvious answer to that, of course: there could be a significant cost associated with the spell which Red Robe was unwilling to pay. But the fact that he had gone out of the way to remove every single aranea in Cyoria made Zorian doubt that. If there was a serious cost associated with it, he would have made sure to investigate more thoroughly and soulkill only those he had to.

  Secondly, the aranea weren't actually time travelers, so the spell shouldn't have worked! Zorian was quite sure that the time loop didn't pull back every soul back in time – if that was the case, every mage would feel the difference after a dozen or so restarts as their shaping skills miraculously increased overnight. Plus, there are 'normal' necromantic killing spells that forcibly banish the soul from the body to kill people and Zorian had occasionally seen them in use during the invasion. If every person whose soul was banished from their body ended up dead at the start of the time loop, the number of inexplicable corpses showing up at the start of the time loop would have started to pile up quickly and everyone would have realized something was very wrong by the time Zorian was brought in. So all in all, clearly the souls of regular people who were not time travelers weren't affected by anything that happened to them in previous time loops. The fact that Red Robe's spell affected normal people in future time loops was strange, to say the least.

  Zorian stopped pacing and frowned, idly noting that Kirielle had left the room at some point. He was getting the feeling that Red Robe was exploiting the very nature of the time loop to somehow get the desired effect. Zorian himself had no idea how the time loop really functioned, but presumably Red Robe did. Without that knowledge, he was probably never going to figure it out. Like always, he needed more information.

  …except his main source of information – the aranea – had been utterly wiped out by the enemy, leaving him with nothing except a cryptic, incomplete dying message.

  Damn it.

  ✦ ✧ ✦

  Over the next few hours, Zorian simply went through the motions, trying to hide the frustration, shame and panic he was feeling and to appear as normal as possible. He had failed to keep his inner turmoil strictly to himself, if mother's worried questions were of any indication, but in the end she accepted his explanation of being slightly shaken from a recent nightmare and stopped bothering him so he took that as a win.

  And what a nightmare it was! Aside from losing the aranea, there was a non-negligible chance that Red Robe managed to figure out his identity and was going to assault the house at any moment now. True, he had managed to hide his face behind a scarf and had never spoken, but there were ways nonetheless…

  He didn't even think about trying to immediately leave the house in panic, though. The first and main reason for that was that if Red Robe had identified him and was coming to Cirin, then his family was in danger of being permanently killed, just like the aranea, and he wasn't willing to let that happen. Kiri had grown on him over the course of the time loop and while he didn't like his mother very much he wouldn't let some psycho murder her. No, it was bad enough that the aranea had paid the ultimate price for his mistakes - he'd be damned if he'd leave his family to save his own hide.

  The second reason was that, while it was certainly possible that his identity had been compromised, it was just that – a possibility, not a certainty. Yes, it would be easy to track him down by noting which students from Zach's class were missing and then checking them out one by one, but it was entirely possible that Red Robe wouldn't think of it. After all, as far as Red Robe was concerned, the mysterious human time traveler was associated with the aranea, not Zach. There was no reason to search for him among Zach's classmates. And while Zach probably knew that Zorian was a time traveler by now, Zorian strongly suspected he would be out of Cyoria when Red Robe came knocking. If Zach had even a smidgen of common sense (not a certainty, admittedly), he would skip town first thing in the morning upon starting a new restart. Considering Red Robe thoroughly trounced Zach during the invasion by bringing the lich as his backup, and that Zach actually remembered it happening this time, Zorian felt that even Zach wouldn't be crazy to stay where the clearly superior enemy could find him.

  That was a lot of assumptions to rely on, but what else did he have left? He was backed into a corner. All he could do was wait and hope Red Robe wasn't a master dete
ctive on top of being a scarily good necromancer and gods know what else.

  In any case, his plan was quite simple at the moment - go board the train as normal, then promptly disembark upon leaving Cirin. He had no intention of going back to Cyoria in the near future. Red Robe was bound to pay attention to Cyoria for a while, trying to catch any time travelers the aranea may have brought in, so going there so soon would be just begging for trouble. Any minor misstep could blow his cover, and he didn't trust himself to be able to lay low for multiple restarts at the time. No, best if he avoided the city for a while. He would have to return there at some point, of course, but he had to be a lot stronger and a lot better informed before he could show himself in the city again.

  Aside from his determination to avoid Cyoria at all costs, his plans were virtually nonexistent. He was feeling rather lost at the moment. All emotional attachment aside, the aranea were also his best allies in this messed up event, and losing them effectively pulled the rug from under his feet. What the hell was he supposed to do now?

  The conclusion he settled on was that he needed some time to calm down and come to terms with what happened. Think up a new way forward. He would probably end up just wandering around the country for a restart or two. Or maybe a dozen restarts. Yes, now that he thought about it some, the time loop was the perfect time for him to go on a country-wide, maybe even a continent-wide tour. Just… exploring and sight-seeing. Very relaxing. Admittedly, the matriarch's last message mentioned something about the time loop gradually decaying, but she named no concrete deadlines in the fragments he had managed to piece together and he believed she would have put greater emphasis on that part if the timetable was particularly tight. No, that statement was there just to let him know he did not have an infinite amount of time to work with – he had some fairly large, but very much finite number to look forward to, and time was steadily ticking.

  At least he hoped. He was quite doomed otherwise. 'Large but finite' he could work with, but if he had only a handful of restarts left? It didn't bear thinking about.

  "Mister Kazinski?" Ilsa said, breaking him out of his thoughts. Just as well, his thoughts had taken a dark turn again, and he was tired of feeling depressed. "Are you listening to me?"

  "I'm listening," Zorian lied. He wasn't really listening, of course, but that was because he'd had this conversation with Ilsa a million times by now.

  "Right," Ilsa said dubiously. "As I was saying, you can pick up your badge when you finish school since it's so expensive and-"

  "What if I want to pick it up now?" Zorian interrupted. His savings should be enough to fund a month of aimless wandering so he probably didn't need the badge for work, but he didn't like the idea of keeping his spellcasting abilities a secret lest some overzealous policeman report him to the guild and ultimately bring the academy in. Having a badge to prove his certification and membership would allow him to do as he pleased for the most part.

  "You can pick one up at any of the mage guild offices scattered around Eldemar," Ilsa said. "Most large cities and regional centers have one."

  Oh good. He had feared he could only pick one up at the Academy or something.

  Eventually, Ilsa left, her parting words being that she looked forward to seeing him in class. Huh, that was new. Did she suspect he intended to blow off school to do his own thing? Well whatever, even if she did, it did not matter much – the academy always had a rather anemic response to students who don't show up for class. They would send a letter to his parents informing them that he wasn't attending his classes, and that was it. And fortunately for Zorian, no one would be at home to read the mail by the time the letter arrived, since his parents were going to Koth to visit their precious Daimen.

  Satisfied that his course had been set for the moment, he picked up his things and set off towards the train station.

  ✦ ✧ ✦

  As the train departed from Cirin and started its journey towards Cyoria, Zorian began to relax somewhat. Part of that was that train rides always made him kind of sleepy and therefore sapped the tension straight out of his body and mind, but a great deal of it came from the fact that Red Robe was nowhere to be seen. Hours had passed – enough time to prepare and mount an attack on the Kazinski household several times over for someone of Red Robe's abilities – and no hostile force had struck against him or his family, so chances were that Red Robe wasn't coming at all. That meant his identity was probably safe for now, which was a major relief. If he hadn't discovered Zorian's identity in the previous restart, he probably wouldn't discover it at all – a month was ample time to track him down if Red Robe knew where to look. He wouldn't really relax fully until several restarts passed as peacefully as this one, but this was an encouraging sign.

  He just had to make sure he didn't make any more stupid mistakes in the future.

  The train stopped for a moment and then continued onward towards Cyoria. Zorian opted to stay on the train for now, despite his initial intention of getting off the train on the very first station after Cirin. The first stop after Cirin was an even smaller village that gravitated towards Cirin and had nothing notable to recommend it to anyone. Him disembarking there would be noted and remarked upon by the inhabitants and there was a chance that someone might recognize him and report him to his family before they could leave for Koth. And that was the kind of drama he really didn't need at the moment. And besides, what the hell would he do in a tiny unfamiliar village like that? No, it was far better to wait until Nigelvar and then travel on foot to Teshingrad. Nigelvar was also a small town of little note, but it was an important enough transport junction that no one would find a traveler who disembarked there on the way particularly strange. Teshingrad was a regional capital. It couldn't hold a candle to Eldemar, Korsa or Cyoria, but it was big and influential enough that newcomers were normal.

  Teshingrad also had a mage guild office, so he could pick up his badge there.

  He disembarked at Nigelvar without complications and immediately set out towards Teshingrad. Unfortunately for him, the storm that invariably hit Cyoria on the first day of every restart was apparently a more wide-scale phenomenon than he first thought, because he found himself in the middle of a raging rainstorm halfway there. His rain shield thankfully held out long enough for him to reach one of the roadside inns and take shelter there. He ended up spending the night there, slightly annoyed at the delay despite not having any concrete plans for the restart. It did not help that the food was terrible and the people kept giving him funny looks. It was probably his clothes – the ones his mother made him wear were clearly a bit fancy and out of the price range of most commoners, and he didn't have the chance to change before entering the inn. He made sure to put a basic warding scheme on his room to deter would be thieves and attackers, but thankfully no one tried anything while he slept.

  Having survived the night at the inn without incident, Zorian departed the place early in the morning and reached Teshingrad a few hours later… only to get unpleasantly surprised when he tried to pick up his badge. As it turns out, Ilsa had not been exaggerating when she said the badge was expensive. It would cost him half of his savings to have one of those made! It was a highway robbery in Zorian's opinion, but the man he spoke with in the mage guild office wouldn't hear anything about lowering the price. Instead he pointed Zorian at a nearby wall where a job panel stood. It was similar to the job panel posted at the academy in Cyoria, only the jobs were much more reasonably priced, since the town did not have the same glut of amateur mages that Cyoria did. It would take two days for Zorian's badge to be ready for pickup, so he figured he may as well earn some money while he waited to replenish his money stash. It wasn't like he had something better to do.

  The job list was… rather more eclectic than he hoped. He was sure that 2 chickens and a bag of flour was a fair price for fixing up a broken wall, but it was of no use to him personally. And the couple of job postings that did not define any concrete payment sounded very suspicious to him. Even s
o, he still found plenty of things to occupy his time with. Thus, for the next three days, Zorian helped with a bunch of repairs, tracked down a missing goat, carried a stack of stone blocks from one end of the town to the other on one of his floating discs, helped the local alchemist harvest her herbs, and eradicated a particularly nasty rat infestation in one of the private granaries on the edge of town. None of it was particularly difficult, but Zorian would be lying if he said he didn't learn anything in the process. It was a lot different knowing a spell academically and trying to use it to solve concrete problems.

  "Well, there you go," the man behind the counter said, handing Zorian his badge. It was quite unexceptional in appearance, though Zorian could feel a complex spell formula embedded in it when his fingers touched the surface. He would have to take one of these things apart someday to see what that was about. "You can apply to any job you want with that, not just unofficial ones like the ones of the job board. Nice work, by the way. It's been a while since someone went through the town and helped out the townsfolk like that."

  "I didn't really do it out of charity," Zorian grumbled.

  "Oh, I know," the man said. "But there are a lot of mages who would consider such petty jobs to be beneath them and refuse to do them out of principle."

  "A lot of them look like something the civilians could do on their own," Zorian admitted. "And no offense, but why don't you help if it's something that so desperately needs doing? I kind of doubt the guild would place a non-mage as their representative for the area."

  "Ha!" the man laughed, not at all insulted by the accusation. "I do in fact help… when I find the time. This position is a lot busier than it appears, trust me on that. And while those jobs are admittedly not very desperate, most of them would take great efforts and a lot of time to accomplish without magic, whereas even a baby mage like yourself can solve them in less than an hour with a handful of spells. So yeah, maybe you didn't save the world in the past few days or whatever, but the people you helped are certainly glad you made their lives a little easier. The townsfolk saved some time, you got some easy cash to spend, and I got rid of some of my more annoying obligations. Everyone's a winner, no?"