“Myrabelle.” Gone was the cheery and pompous tone that the student council president usually sported. He was tense, guarded.
He knows. This was obvious to Myra. Or he suspects, at least. Maybe he’s trying to feel me out?
“Ben! You’re—you’re alive. And you’re okay.”
“Hm? Of course, I’m alive.”
“Where the fuck have you been? We were all worried sick about you!”
“Well, I’m very well not going to spend every month going to the same classes again, am I? I was training in the Ptolkeran Mountains this time.”
“What the hell were you doing in the—what the fuck are you talking about? What do you mean ‘the same classes again’?”
He rolled his eyes and huffed with impatience. “Please, Myrabelle. If you’re trying to play dumb, it isn’t going to work.”
She decked him in the jaw. “That’s from your younger brother, you asshole!”
She didn’t know martial arts, and she certainly didn’t know how to punch. It was kind of embarrassing, really. He stumbled back a few steps, seemingly knowing how to roll with a punch.
In fact, he seemed more confused by her words than her attempt at violence. “My brother—Nathan? What about him?”
“Your brother has been worried sick, you fuckwit! What the fuck is wrong with you, running off to the fucking Ptolkeran Mountains without saying a word to him?” She decked him again, in the stomach this time, a bit more appropriate to her height, and putting some magical force behind her swing. He doubled up, clutching his gut.
“I confess—” He gasped. “I didn’t much think about Nathan at all. It will be wiped away in an hour anyway, but you have probably guessed this already.”
“How could I have guessed something like—I—I mean—” Shit shit shit play dumb Myra. “I mean, what the fuck are you talking about?”
“Once again, you’re quite bad at this. But I understand. You must have died in the eruption, before the reset time, is that right?”
This was information. Good information, but she had forgotten to react as cluelessly as she should have. God, this was stupid.
“Fine, you got me. I didn’t know if you knew, so I played dumb.”
He smirked, having won the opening of the conversation. “I confess, I’m a little curious what you think of this situation. Did you figure out anything?”
“How would I figure out anything? Any clues were erased and you ran off! How did you know I reset like you? Did you get me involved on purpose?”
He laughed to himself, seeming to find the notion funny. “What do you think? You think I would run off like that if I got you involved on purpose?”
“I don’t know. I can’t make heads or tails of what your aim is! And stop dodging the important questions! You’ve been resetting for much longer than me, I’m sure of that much. So why’d I suddenly reset? And do I need to do whatever it was again?”
He made a series of complicated expressions as Myra spoke, though each was unreadable as the last. “Do what again?”
“Whatever I did to enter the loop.”
“To do what?—Oh.” A gear seemed to shift in his head to get what Myra was going for. I was on a track he didn’t expect…? “I didn’t think through your perspective. But you’re al—” He cut himself off suddenly, then clamped down his jaw hard.
“But I’m what?”
“I’ve probably said too much, I should—actually, no, I do need to ask this question.” He plowed straight ahead, ignoring Myra’s protests. “I assume you would have mentioned it already, but I want to make sure.”
“Why would I answer if you just said you won’t tell me anything else?”
“Did you attract anyone’s attention?”
Well, she certainly didn’t want him to find out about Shera. “I kept it all to myself if that’s what you mean.” Wait, should I have bluffed? Did I protest too much there? God, lying is hard.
“No, I mean—” He paused and glanced around, not at anything particular, just the way you do when you’re nervous. He dropped his voice. “—were you confronted? Like, by anyone odd? Probably anonymous, maybe wearing a mask?”
“A mask? Like a medical mask? Or a ninja mask?”
“Anything to obscure their identity.” He took Myra’s blank stare as an answer. “I suppose not, then.” He made a phew sound, nearly inaudible.
“Who would have confronted me wearing a mask? And why?”
“To be honest, I don’t know. I thought maybe if they had, I could learn more about them.”
“This is someone you ran into before? What did they do?”
“It doesn’t matter. That really was all I wanted to ask.”
Maybe Myra, despite everything, had been too optimistic. Maybe a part of her had thought that once she opened up, once she cast off the paranoia and lies, the two of them would begrudgingly make up and work together to stop whatever was going on. Now that Ben had a potential companion in the loop, didn’t it make sense to change his plans, whatever they had been?
Ben reached into his shoulder bag and pulled out a vial of clear liquid. Behind it, she caught sight of a bright pink syringe.
“Oh, fuck off, you—”
A burst of wind pushed her back, and she fell to the ground for the second time that evening. Bright orange leaves slammed into her face, and she could barely see Benkoten approaching her.
“—fucking—” She spat out a leaf. “—scumbag!”
She pushed back with her own wind, superheating it at the same time. It didn’t seem to bother him, either because he didn’t mind the heat or he cooled it down somehow. It didn’t matter. It was camouflage for something much hotter.
Without a hint of shame or hesitation, and no compunctions about doing this outdoors, Ben kneeled over top of her and readied the vial. That must be the drug to paralyze me.
It hadn’t exactly been easy to carry around a small lava-marble wherever she went. Instructor Yam had been pretty lax, and it was easy enough to swipe it out of the training room, but a small sphere of literal lava would have stood out if she kept it floating around at her back. Instead, she’d been navigating it through the sewers all day.
It was impossible to miss, a bright, red hot marble in the dark of the night, floating up to the surface through a sewer grate. She compelled it with all the momentum she could give it, pointed straight at Benkoten’s back.
Ben noticed it just in time, and he reached out with his own telepathic hand.
“AAUGGH!” He screeched, spraying Myra in spit, his face twisting in agony. “FUCK!” The wind, the leaves, everything he was controlling just stopped. Myra took the chance to knock him off of her, and his legs gave out. He fell to the ground, writhing in pain.
“Fuck!” he yelled again. “What the fuck was that?”
It was exactly like Instructor Yam had said. If you tried to touch something like lava telekinetically, you’d burn out your aura terminals.
“Aauhhh…”
Myra didn’t waste any time before rooting through his handbag. Besides the drugs she’d already seen—the vial (presumably the paralysis drug) and the pink syringe (purpose unknown)—there was also the blue syringe. Just like last time.
There was no mysterious artifact.
“Where the hell is it?” she demanded, pressing a foot on his chest. “There’s an artifact I have to touch, isn’t there? Something like that? Where is it? How do I go back in time?”
“Y-you… don’t—” He had trouble speaking under her foot. “—understand what’s going on. You got it… backward…”
“What the fuck does that mean?” She pressed harder, and he started choking.
“I’ve said… too…” He didn’t finish. He teleported, and her foot pressed down through empty space.
She twirled around. Backward? What was backward? Is he just spouting nonsense? She didn’t see him anywhere. Damn it! Did he give up?
She collected his things, which had all been left behind. She stashed all the drugs in his bag. She thought about taking his staff, but it would be awkward to carry around two and not particularly useful, so she snapped it in half.
She looked through the bag again in case she missed something. There was a wool cap that was probably appropriate for the Ptolkeran Mountains, and there were a handful of aura crystals that were probably useful if he was away from the rich aura distribution channels of the city. For that matter, they might be useful after the Common Library shuts down, which incidentally happened just as Myra was thinking about it.
She checked her watch. 12:39 A.M.
I should get going.
It was time to check out the event hall.
◆
The last time she’d been here, Myra had been too shell-shocked to react to anything. She had walked outside in a daze, barely processing the crime scene. This time, Myra had had plenty of time to mentally steel herself.
That didn’t make it easy.
The putrid stench of blood and guts oppressed the room, the streaks of blood smeared over the table painted a picture of barbarity, and the frozen expression of the princess, eyes wide and mouth locked open, revealed her final moments as anguish.
image [https://i.imgur.com/fLNL8Z4.png]
When not otherwise specified, the apparent cause of death is a slit throat. (Apparent cause of death is based on Myrabelle’s non-expert visual inspection.)
~~ “Neutral” mediator (who are they kidding, exactly?) ~~
1. Judge Philium Krasus (Apparent cause of death: bashed in the head)
~~ Imperial faction ~~
2. Prince Humperton Raine
3. Princess Malazhonerra Raine (Apparent cause of death: see diagram)
4. Imperial Sage of Economy - Elwyn Senserenasia
5. Imperial Sage of Magical Infrastructure - Hazel Ornobis
6. Imperial Sage of Magical Practice - Aiko Ueno
7. Imperial Sage of Engineering - Theodore Kettle
8. Imperial Sage of Forestry - Marcus Bora
9. Imperial Sage of Seafaring - Linda Zeawak
~~ Unkmire faction ~~
10. King Niwal
11. Unkmire royal staff member
12. Unkmire royal staff member
13. Unkmire royal staff member
~~ Decorative armor statues ~~
A. Usually carries a sword, found on the table (A’)
B. Usually carries a mace, found on the floor (B’)
C. Carries a shield
----------------------------------------
Myra broke out of her shock before Iwasaki did. Trying to avoid breathing in through her nose—Note to self: buy a face mask for next time, assuming there’s a next time—she took a close look at the state of the princess.
Her arms had been sliced off near the shoulders, and the legs at the thighs. All four limbs were wrapped tightly in gauze bandages at the end. So the culprit kept her alive for a while… That answers one of my questions: Was arranging the body for our sake, the sake of those who would discover the scene, or was it to torture the princess? It must have been the second, if not both.
It was grotesque to imagine. Myra had her beef with the princess, but nobody deserved this. And happening again and again… At least she wouldn’t remember after the time reset.
There were footprints all over the table. They went all over the place, and clearly whoever had left them had no compunctions about walking through blood, despite—from the look of the prints—being barefoot. Strangely, there were no footprints on the floor, except what probably came from the entrance of the 13 individuals.
The princess’s pendant was in the middle of the table, between the head and neck, soaked in blood. Myra took the pendant and examined it. Should have brought gloves, too…
“What are you doing?” Iwasaki demanded, snapping out of his trance suddenly.
“I’m inspecting the scene.” God, she probably looked like a psychopath.
The pendant seemed to just be a normal pendant. It opened up to show a small portrait of a teenage Malazhonerra together with her mother, Princess Consort Madelyn Raine, who had died of a rare type of brain cancer six years ago. Myra remembered the event: it was considered particularly tragic because a treatment for the disease was suddenly developed just less than a year later. Myra had been annoyed at the newspapers because Mirkas-Ballam had made a huge breakthrough, curing a disease thought incurable, but all anyone would say was that it had been “too late.”
Anyway, the princess had indicated this pendant was some kind of keepsake for her mother, so that checked out.
“You-you shouldn’t disturb the crime scene,” Iwasaki urged. “You don’t want to get in trouble with the authorities on something as—as high-profile as this.”
“High profile.” That’s a bit of an understatement… Honestly, I think you should be a lot more worried than I am.
Myra wanted to take a look at the wristwatch, though it would be annoying to do that with Iwasaki hovering around.
“How is it possible someone could get in here?” Myra asked.
“It’s not possible.”
“So one of these thirteen must be our culprit, and they committed suicide. Who do you think it is?”
Iwasaki was speechless.
Myra bent down to get a good look at everyone’s feet. “Everybody’s wearing shoes.”
“I’m sorry?”
She gestured to the footprints on the table. “The culprit was barefoot.” Nobody was wearing shoes that looked like they could be taken off easily. The only exception was the princess, wearing heels that could slip on and off. But it would have been hard for the princess to walk around in her own blood, right?
“Oh. I see.” That was all Iwasaki said.
The next thing she wanted to inspect was the weapons, starting with the sword at the edge of the table. “Does this go with one of those armor statues?”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“Yes, it goes with the middle one, here. It’s only decorative, though. It can’t cut.”
“Oh.” Myra had assumed it had been used to cut the Princess into pieces. It was, after all, drenched in blood—wait. “Um, sir, this blade is definitely sharp.”
“What?” he snapped. “Let me see that.”
“This edge here.”
“This has been sharpened,” he insisted. “I’m certain this is the same sword. Look, this sharp bit doesn’t even run down the whole length.” He pointed to the base of the sword, near the hilt. Indeed, it seemed to dull out at the end. “And look at the table. See these little metal specks?”
He was right. Now that she looked closely, the table was covered in ground-up bits of metal.
“Is there a spell that can shave up metal like this?”
“I’m sure it’s not hard. It’s probably the easiest way to make a blade out of anything in this room.”
Hm. Myra’s eyes were drawn back to the stumps that terminated the princess’s arms and legs. “What about the gauze? Could they have gotten gauze from inside this room?”
“Gauze, like first aid?”
“Like on her stumps.”
“No, there wouldn’t have been anything like that in here.”
“So the culprit brought the bandages, which means this was all premeditated. But they didn’t bring their own blade? Or, like, a bone saw or whatever you use to cut off limbs? Were the participants able to bring weapons in here?”
“That would have been up to them. It was not up to me to search them or otherwise enforce what they could bring in here. I was only responsible for the building.”
Regardless of the policy, it’s pretty reasonable that one of the participants would avoid carrying in a knife. If the culprit was some intruder who snuck in, though, they’d have no reason to not bring their own flesh-cutting instrument. Does that confirm the culprit is one of the thirteen?
… And that they committed suicide afterward?
She planned to move on to inspect the judge, but at that moment, someone else burst into the event hall. Shera, covered in dust and nearly out of breath, had finally arrived.
She gave the scene a once-over and took a moment to get through her shock.
“Shera!” Myra pulled the girl into another hug. “I was worried about you.”
“I-I was worried about you. You didn’t show up—”
“Uh, stuff happened.” Actually, Myra was late even before she ran into Ben, but she didn’t mention that bit.
“Buildings collapsing is-is a lot more intense than I ever expected.” She wiped some of the dust off her. “I thought I was going to suffocate.” She shoved a piece of paper into Myra’s hand. “Here, these are all the buildings that collapsed.”
Shera’s campus map was marked with Xs over some of the buildings. Interestingly, they were all on the east side of campus, though a few of the buildings on that side still stood, like the astronomy tower. Myra quickly tried to memorize it.
“Let me see that,” Iwasaki said. He looked at the map for a second, though he didn’t comment on it in the end. “Where is everybody else? Are they making their way here?”
“Most everyone by the dorms evacuated in a different direction,” Shera explained. “They would have had to get through all this debris to get here, anyway. I didn’t see anyone outside near this part of campus.” Unspoken was the fact that anyone inside near this part of campus had probably been crushed by a caved-in roof.
Iwasaki breathed a small sigh of relief, though if that was because of the students’ apparent safety, or because it meant nobody else would come upon this scene was unclear. Myra didn’t care about this much because they were going to be drowning in lava in a matter of minutes anyway.
“Did you find any, uh—?” Myra wanted to ask about saboteurs, but it was awkward with Iwasaki.
Shera shook her head. “I did see Ben, though.”
“I had a run-in with him. What was he doing?”
“He, uh, committed suicide, I think. I just saw him appear three floors in the air, fall impassively to the ground, and crack his skull open.”
“Okay… that kind of makes sense.” He had been in a lot of pain, and he had probably been incapable of using substantial magic with his aura terminals burnt out. That he had teleported at all was pretty impressive.
“What happened with him, exactly?”
How do I even explain succinctly…? “If he’s to be believed, the time resets is at a specific time, which is soon. He seemed pretty confused by the idea that I needed to ‘do something’ to continue looping without losing my memories, but he seemed to regret giving this away, and he was really determined to not say anything about how I entered the loop in the first place. His main objective was to drug me again, and I think the only reason he talked to me at all was he wanted to find out if someone suspicious and disguising their identity had approached me. Uh, then we fought and I won, basically.”
“A student drugged you?” Iwasaki asked, hanging by a finger onto the only comprehensible element of their mad conversation.
“Uh, he tried.”
Shera and Iwasaki both wanted to inspect the drugs. Shera quickly identified the vial’s chemical as leaftac extract, a common date-rape paralysis drug, based on its smell. Iwasaki, who looked like he wanted to do anything other than look at the crime scene, did some kind of inspection spell and confirmed it was a simple organic molecule, but he couldn’t make heads or tails of the red drug or the blue drug. Iwasaki wasn’t an alchemist, though, and Myra was pretty sure his analysis spell was supposed to be paired with a data lookup into the Common Library. That meant his analysis was incomplete.
“You’re sure there’s nothing else in the leaftac?” Shera asked. “No unknown substance?”
“It had a concentration of 3%,” Iwasaki clarified. “The rest was water.”
Shera frowned. Myra could guess what she was thinking. Last loop, Ben had got her with a paralysis drug, but she had escaped before he could inject the weird unknown drugs. So if any of the drugs were responsible for putting her in the time loop, it would be the one she took—but it was just leaftac. Or at least, the one Ben had today was just leaftac, but it was probably the same one he used last time. And anyway, all signs still pointed to her looping being not intended by Ben, which ruled out the drugs as the source of the time loop, unless he had really screwed up.
Shera looked sad, though. She was still hoping they’d figure it out.
“Here, Shera.” Myra tossed her the shoulder bag. “Touch everything in this bag, just in case.” Shera complied, even though they both knew this was almost certainly useless. Inexplicably, she put the wool cap on her head.
“Did you learn anything about the—the massacre?”
“Not a whole lot. I was about to examine the judge.”
Shera followed Myra behind the table, where the judge was dead on the ground. Shera spent a moment taking it in: the chair on the floor, the judge sprawled out on his back, his wig, the mace from the hand of the nearest suit of armor, the blood pooling from his forehead.
“Wh-what the fuck?” Shera asked. “How did he get like this?”
“The position does seem really unnatural. He was hit by the mace, right?” Myra asked.
“I’d guess so,” Shera muttered. “But how did he get here? It looks like he fell over in his chair, I-I mean, look where the wig landed, right? So—”
“—How the hell did he get all the way over to the side like this?” Myra finished the thought.
“Perhaps the blow did not kill him immediately,” Iwasaki suggested.
“Okay, so he stood up again,” Shera said, humoring the idea. “Then what? How did he fall and end up in this position?” She raised her arms out, mimicking the way the judge was sprawled out. “Look h-how s-symmetrical his pose is. I mean, I’m happy for him, but that’s w-weird, right?”
“Yeah, I don’t know,” Myra said. “I mean, someone could have moved him.”
“Move him and arrange him perfectly symmetrically? Even I wouldn’t do that just for the sake of symmetry.” Myra suspected it wasn’t ‘just for the sake of symmetry,’ but she was at a loss for other explanations. “I’m going to look for more bruises,” Shera announced.
“Hey, don’t disrupt—” He moved to stop Shera, grabbing her shoulder.
“Ah-Ah-” Shera wiggled under his grasp. “D-don’t t-touch-m-me-I-I-I-”
Thrown off by her intense reaction, Iwasaki let go, but he continued to insist. “You cannot interfere with the scene.”
“We d-d-don’t know when the au-authorities will get here—”
“Any important clues will still be here later. Let’s go back out—”
“Y-you said it was safer in here!” Shera protested.
“—out into the outer hall—”
“We don’t know that clues will be here!” Myra interrupted. “Someone already got in and out when it should have been impossible! We can vouch for the state of the room, but not if you usher us out!”
“We-we need to f-figure out why he’s s-symmetrical,” Shera said.
“We need to find a clue as to who did this and how,” Myra said, trying to find something a little more persuasive. “Otherwise, we’ll have to conclude—” She waved her hands around. She didn’t want to state it outright, the obvious suspect in this ‘impossible security’ situation. “—I dunno!”
“They’d c-c-conclude campus security sabotaged the hall,” Shera said. “It’s-it’s the obvious an-answer.” From the casual way she spoke, you wouldn’t have even known Iwasaki was in the room. It was the oblivious tactlessness that had always driven Myra up the wall in the past, but the bluntness may have been what they needed.
“Th-that’s ridiculous, of course.” He didn’t sound remotely convinced. “I understand how it looks, but I will take responsibility—” He gulped suddenly, his adam’s apple bobbing prominently. “I will—”
“Sir?”
His neck was drenched in sweat now. Oh God, it’s hitting him, isn’t it?
Because it doesn’t really matter if he’s guilty or not. A prince, a princess, and a king are dead under his watch.
Someone is going to have his head.
“I w-won’t touch him,” Shera said calmly. “But I’m going to use my e-e-extra-senses.”
“Very well,” he said reluctantly. Shera kneeled down to psychically search the corpse. Iwasaki watched her like a hawk, tapping his foot anxiously. Myra actually felt pretty bad for the old security head—this probably wasn’t his fault, but they were on a time limit, and she needed to get a move on.
You’ve only looped once, Myra, and already you think you know better than everyone else, huh?
This thought didn’t stop her from taking advantage of the situation. While Iwasaki was distracted, Myra stealthily took a look at the wristwatch off the princess’s arm, as disgusting as that was.
The watch had a gold frame, and the wristband was woven of golden chain links, like chainmail. It was pretty soft. It also wasn’t that heavy, so it probably wasn’t actually solid gold, but it certainly looked very nice. Its two hands showed the current time, 12:54.
And when she looked at the back, it very obviously had a secret compartment. Myra popped it open and faced a surface with a runic engraving.
The circle around the edges was difficult to read because it was so small—Myra added ‘magnifying glass’ to her list of things to bring—but it was not very complex. It didn’t do much but help the owner connect to a certain object in the Common Library. The definition of the object was given as the limit of a diagram in the center of the circle. This was, in some sense, the “address” of the object, and this was where most of the engraving’s information lay. Of course, it was totally useless with the Common Library gone. And because the diagram was so dense, there was no way for her to memorize it and check the object out herself after the reset.
“Wha…” Shera muttered to herself back from behind the table.
“What’s up?”
“Give me a sec.” She started rummaging around more furiously.
Myra obliged and moved on to the prince’s wristwatch. It seemed to be the same, with a compartment you could open from the back. Again, there was a very complex diagram inside. She compared the two, trying to see if they were the same. They did appear to be, though she certainly didn’t check the whole thing. As far as she knew, there were five symbols out of ten thousand that were personalized.
“Okay, come look at this,” Shera finally said. “First, he’s got a couple of bruises on his legs right here. I-I think. It would be easier if we could physically look under his clothes.” She gestured to his shins. “But that’s not what’s w-weird.”
“What’s weird?”
“He’s got braces in his clothes.”
“Braces?”
“There’s this wire mesh thing! Feel for yourself!”
Myra reached out with her extra-senses and felt the shape of his body, felt his clothes… and it was like there was another skeleton in there. Thin wires, up and down his arms and legs and torso. She gently nudged it, hoping nobody would notice, and found that it was completely stiff.
“Wait,” she said, “so he’s making this pose because his clothes have a wire mesh that’s locking his arms and legs into this position?”
“Yes! Though it’s still not clear how he ended up all the way over here.”
“What the fuck? We need to open his clothes up and see what's going on with this thing—”
“No,” Iwasaki said.
“But—”
“I’ve humored this enough.” He seemed to be regaining his sense of authority. “I said you can look, and now you’ve looked. Let’s—”
There was a bang, and the ground trembled.
“Oh, shit, that’s it! That’s the volcano!”
“The volcano? No—not now—” His confusion gave rise to panic. “It can’t—the—the—barriers are all down!”
“Vacuum, now!” Myra shouted.
Shera was prepared, of course, and Iwasaki didn’t need much prompting. In class, they had never manipulated lava larger than a marble, but they at least had an obvious way to defend against it. They spewed aura out around the edges of the building. It was night, so they had plenty of access to the vacuum element from the astral aura channel.
“Oh, fuck, this is draining,” Myra muttered. She barely remembered to check the time. 1:01 A.M.
“Can the building withstand a volcanic eruption?”
“Not of this magnitude,” Iwasaki said quickly. “We need to get out of here.”
“What if you re-enable the security?” Myra asked.
“That would take hours! And no, the building’s barriers were disrupted when the Common Library disappeared.”
“Wait, so the security isn’t airtight after all?” You said nobody could get in! But the Common Library disappeared several minutes before we entered the hall!
“If you mean the isolation, that has remained intact. Nobody could have entered the building.” He seemed to know exactly what Myra was thinking. “However, it will fail if the entire building and its runestones are drowned in lava.” He’s can’t possibly be lying about this, right? He’s just incriminating himself the more he says this is impossible.
Myra almost faltered in the vacuum she was supposed to be upholding. “I’ve got emergency teleports,” she said. Despite the abundance of the vacuum element at night, telekinesis could still wear you out. And the air was heating up dramatically, for obvious reasons, making the situation quite miserable.
“I want to check inside the suits,” Shera said.
“What, you think the culprit might be hiding there?” Myra asked. Oh, that’s a pretty good theory, actually.
She held out while Shera opened up the helmets of each one in turn. Unfortunately—or maybe fortunately, since Myra was in no state to confront the culprit—nobody was inside the first two.
When she got to the third—
“Wait,” Iwasaki said. “I just noticed. That visor has been moved.”
“Huh? On this one?”
“Hurry up,” Myra said through gritted teeth. She nearly faltered again.
Shera opened up the visor to check inside, but again, they didn’t see anything, at least not on the inside of the helmet. “Let me—” She struggled to detach the entire helmet, but finally got it with the help of Iwasaki, now eager to help.
“There’s all this junk down there,” he said, a light from his palm shining down into the suit’s neck. “Wait, is that—”
“W-w-w-w-what—” Shera cried, aghast at whatever it was.
“What is it?”
Shera pulled the objects up to her hand with telekinesis. Two syringes, both empty, but their surfaces tinted faintly red and blue, betraying the colors of the liquids that had once been inside them.
Myra faltered, maybe not from exhaustion, but from shock.
Shera and Iwasaki couldn’t hold out the lava on their own. Just before the burning avalanche crashed down on their heads, she grabbed the two of them and snapped her teleport stick.
◆
Myra had ordered her emergency teleport sticks by mail from a mage supplier company outside the empire. This was necessary to get something that would actually work once the Common Library had disappeared since it turned out most of the sticks you could buy in Ralkenon just activated a routine from the Common Library that took you to some ‘safe point’ predetermined by the city. The plus side was that the stick let you configure your own destination point. Myra had chosen a spot on a hill outside the city.
Her plan was to watch the city and observe how far the eruption reached.
That didn’t work so well.
When the trio appeared, they immediately saw they were surrounded by a large number of uniformed individuals marching into the city. At first, she thought it was the imperial army, arriving to support the catastrophe.
But the uniforms were utterly unfamiliar. Then she noticed the insignia each worse on their chest, a color-inverted portrait of a frog, the symbol of the murk bogs, a mercenary group mostly operating out of Unkmire and Briktone.
The soldiers didn’t blink when Myra, Shera, and Iwasaki appeared out of nowhere. They did, however, with no hesitation, lift their guns and shoot them.
◆
Myra awoke in her bed at 8 A.M.
Well, here I am again.
The relief that she did in fact loop again was muted by her shock at the sudden way she’d died.
Mercenaries… really? I can’t even guess who their allegiance is to. She’d have to research the murk bogs later, but as far as she knew, they weren’t picky. They followed the money.
She showered and tried to reassure herself and focus on the positives. After all that worrying, she had looped again. She’d spent the month gathering information, and that had been the right call. She was frustrated that she’d died before the reset time, but she’d got the time for the Common Library’s disappearance and the volcano. And she had learned that there was a fixed reset time.
Once she was dressed, she quickly wrote down everything she remembered, and she marked up a campus map with all the buildings that would collapse.
She met up with Cynthia and Iz in the usual spots. Iz tricked Cynthia into falling into the fountain again, and Myra laughed with them about it. She sat with them for a while as they waited for class, and she waved cheerfully to Shera when she walked by. Shera waved back, looking a bit confused, but seeming a tad bit brighter when she walked on.
She went to class as usual. She really did need to figure out what to do about classes, either switch up her classes or start working ahead or just skip them entirely. Ben, again, wasn’t in class, and she assumed he must have quickly run off again.
She decided to confront a chilling thought. Why does he not ambush me before I wake up? She knew he got up at 6 A.M., a full two hours before she did. Without understanding his objective with her, it was impossible to know why he did the things he did, but it was pretty worrisome that the two-hour window existed. Who knew when things would change? If he decided to capture her before 8 A.M., she would be completely fucked.
She needed to see if she could wake up earlier. She decided that would be one of her goals this time around.
Also—she would handle the situation with Nathan better. She wouldn’t let it end up the way it did last time.
Yeah. I’ll be honest this time. That’s what she told herself as she approached the usual lunch spot to meet the group. Maybe he knows something important, and we can learn something if we put the facts together.
“Hey, Nathan, have you seen your brother around?”
“Hm? He actually darted off this morning.”
Myra blinked. “He what?”
“Yeah, he got some really sudden apprenticeship in Zaru, so he’s taking leave for the semester. He just dropped by this morning to tell me about it. It sounds like a really great opportunity, though.”
Oh. Guess Ben felt bad about leaving his brother in the dark after all.
He told a lie, but still.
“Heh, he’s probably leaving the student council in chaos.” Nathan laughed. It was a welcome sound. Yeah, this is great. “Anyway, did you all hear about that crater by the bike trail?”