To keep things from getting too stale, Myra decided to switch up her course schedule. She couldn’t switch out of the Mastery class since it was a hard requirement. She also chose not to switch out of her math class because she really wanted to master all the technical prerequisites for advanced elemental manipulation. She would still need to find a way to work ahead or something, but that would be easier if she was at least in the class. Also, it would give her more opportunities to interact with Shera.
However, there was no reason to repeat Biomechanical Systems or Material Science.
It took her a bit longer to get it all sorted out than she expected—the registrar was visibly annoyed at the last-minute shuffling, and it took Myra a minute to remember she had just been in here ‘yesterday’ switching her classes around. There was nothing that could be done about that at this point, of course, but it was annoying that she’d have to deal with it every month.
The new classes she picked were Practical Self-Defense and Arcane Origami. The first was for obvious reasons, and the second was a bit of a whim.
Arcane Origami was also early in the afternoon, so she had to hurry to class from the registrar’s building. It was held in a roomy lecture hall in the applied art building, taught by Professor Maeda, a short, plump guy with braided hair and a wide grin plastered on his face. Myra felt at ease with him before he even began speaking.
For the first class, he led the students to fold up a paper seagull out of a specially crafted runesheet. If done right, it resulted in runes spelled out across its wingspan, but as the wings moved around, it adjusted the script slightly. The result was a bird that flapped back and forth as it flew in set patterns that could be adjusted by writing on it appropriately.
To be honest, Myra had not expected Arcane Origami to be a particularly useful class. The sorts of problems they would tackle were more akin to puzzles. Knowing how to make a paper seagull, or knowing that the computational problem of finding the minimum number of paper folds to create a syntactically valid rune script over an arbitrary grammar was NP-hard, just didn’t seem extremely important. That’s why she had moved out of this class the first time she shuffled her classes. But right now, she didn’t care.
Because when she got the seagull flying around her desk, she felt lighter than she had the whole previous two months.
And even if it was all a bit silly… it did remind her of her earliest adventures with runecrafting.
“Papa! Papa!” Myra pulled at the hem of her father’s coat. “Give me a gold coin!”
“What’s this, now?” He ruffled Myra’s hair.
“I’ll turn it into two coins! Just like you!”
Papa raised an eyebrow, but the businessman acquiesced and allowed Myra to drag him out to the back patio to see what she had cooked up. What Myra had waiting for him was two cups upside-down over a tablecloth. Each was surrounded by a ring of pebbles, the two rings intersecting to form a ‘Venn diagram’ shape.
“Put the coin under here!” She lifted the cups up so he could see they were empty (except for the obvious rune inscriptions on the inside) and allowed him to deposit the bill underneath one of the cups. She set both down.
“See, now there’s two!” She lifted up the other cup, revealing a coin that hadn’t been there before.
“Ah, but that’s the same coin,” her father observed. “You moved it from one cup to the other, somehow.”
“No! Look!” She put the cup down and picked the first one up again. “It’s still here, see! Try it! Try it.”
Papa tried it himself, lifting one, then the other. “What if we lift both at the same time?” he said, smiling through his bushy beard.
“No!” Myra cried, slamming her hands down on both cups to stop him. “That’s cheating!”
Father obeyed. He was a good sport about it, but in fact, he was too good of a sport. Myra was waiting for him to point out that the cups were prank cups. Maybe he didn’t want to ruin Myra’s trick—he didn’t know she hadn’t completed the trick yet.
“You know what these cups are!” Myra finally exclaimed, getting impatient. She held one up to him, making sure he could see the rune inscription.
“Of course. These are the cups your uncle gave you that teleport their contents. The coin teleports between the two until you lift one of them. But what are the stones for?”
Myra puffed out her cheeks. “What do you think?”
“He stroked his chin. Well, the cup might send its contents in any direction. The stones block all the directions you don’t want.”
“But the cups don’t work!” Myra cried out. “I blocked the rune inscription, see?” She held up the cup to his face so he could see the damaged rune inscriptions inside.” For the time first, papa looked genuinely confused, not faux-surprised. “Put a coin in!”
He did so, flabbergasted when the coin rattled at the bottom, not moving anywhere.
“Papa’s theory is wrong!” She stuck her tongue out. “Papa’s theory is wrong!”
As far as illusions went, it wasn’t exactly destined for the big stage, though it had really gotten him good for a few minutes, and as an eight-year-old, she’d thought it was the height of cleverness. It was also the moment she understood how truly versatile runes could be. In this case, she had noticed that the ‘money’ symbol on an imperial coin looked exactly like part of one of the runes near the rim of the cup. She had modified the rune inscription inside the cup so it would only be “completed” if a coin was placed in exactly the right position, which had been the case when the cup was face down on the table.
Of course, professional rune scripting was usually not about cleverly arranging dynamic rune scripts based on clever physical placement. Usually, you just wrote whatever conditional you cared about into the rune script itself. Maybe that’s why the origami seagull appealed to her so much.
I should be two months into an apprenticeship at a rune forge right now, Myra lamented.
“Are you all right, Myrabelle?” Professor Maeda asked.
Myra snapped to attention. “Yes, sorry, sir. I was just lost in thought.”
He laughed a deep and hearty laugh. “You’ve nothing to worry about. Your seagull looks fantastic.”
“Thank you, professor.”
“I was disappointed when I saw that you had switched out of the class. Your previous teachers spoke about your enthusiasm for runes.” Myra blinked in surprise. I have a reputation…? “I’m glad you decided to join us after all.”
“Ah, I’m honored, professor.”
He laughed again. “If you need anything, don’t hesitate to see me.” He balled his fist in an encouraging manner, then moved on to the next student.
◆
Myra was floating when she left class, and she hoped that nobody saw her slump by several centimeters down when it was time for her to face the situation again.
Time to do… stuff…
Myra’s first stop was the security office. She half-expected that, when she went to campus security to inform them that someone had assaulted her and subverted the disruptor field in her dormitory building, Iwasaki would say something like, ‘No, that’s impossible.’ It would have made things simple. It would have meant that Iwasaki’s assessment of what was impossible couldn’t be trusted in the slightest and that his opinion of the event hall security could be dismissed.
Iwasaki didn’t say that, though. He seemed to think that subverting dorm security was entirely plausible for a malicious, advanced mage. There had been similar incidents before, even, so evidently it was a skill that could be learned. Of course, he didn’t give Myra any clues as to how that might be done. Maybe she could try asking Instructor Yam about advanced teleportation? Making a request had worked out really well last time.
◆
Myra was nervous as she climbed the astronomy tower where she expected to find Shera. It was an arduous climb, a spiral staircase spanning several stories around a tall chamber containing a beautiful orrery of the solar system. At the center of the orrery was their planet, Zyarth, surrounded by concentric rings that included the moon, the sun, and the planets. Each body was a colored glass orb, gently reflecting the moonlight through a glass roof at the top.
What if I can’t convince her about the loop again?
Initially, the task sounded easy—after all, why couldn’t she just do what she did last time? But there were a few problems: for one, she couldn’t remember exactly how it went, and also, everything had been somewhat the product of Shera’s curiosity due to the way Myra had interacted with Shera that same morning. But Myra had already screwed that up, reacting in a far more understated manner than she did in the previous loop. Also, their conversation last time had been spurred by Myra’s pitiable attempts to measure the date based on star movements, and she didn’t really need to do that again. If she went and did it anyway, it would just confuse Shera because she would have to explain she’d already done it, or try to obfuscate it and act clueless…
Well, she had an ace up her sleeve.
“Shera!”
“A-ah?” The girl was startled from her telescope.
“I heard you’re a big fan of the ZK-1034 neutron star!”
“W-w-wha—? How d-d-do you know something like th-that? I-I-I-I’ve never told anybody about that.”
Perfect! Now she has to believe me.
“I’m actually a time traveler,” Myra said. “I know that because you told me before I went back in time.”
“O-oh. I guess I must have told someone, and they f-forgot. But why would they t-tell you…?”
“Wait, Shera, I’m being serious.”
“Oh.”
Myra launched into her full story, while Shera listened impassively. It got increasingly awkward as she recounted their adventures only to meet no reaction at all.
When she finished, Shera inquired about what was apparently the most detail to her.
“Did you get the times? I must have insisted we collect the timings for the events.”
“Yeah, yeah, I got them.”
“What were they?”
“Does it matter right now?” Shera didn’t answer. “Well, the Common Library disappeared at 12:39. The volcano was at 1:01. I died before the reset, so—”
“W-what do you mean, 12:39? On the d-d-dot?”
“Uh, no.”
“Then what?”
“You mean like how many seconds?”
“S-surely y-you could measure it finer than s-s-seconds.”
“Okay, well, the best I got was 12:39.”
“I d-don’t believe y-you really had my help with this.”
“Well, I was in charge of the time-keeping. You were busy with this—” Myra handed her map to Shera, though the girl didn’t look at it. “You probably just, I don’t know, assumed I’d do it right.” She was getting exasperated, and she probably wasn’t hiding it well enough. The critical, nitpicking Shera she knew so well was back. Had the friendly, helpful Shera from the last month just been a fleeting aberration?
“G-guess I-I-I assumed w-wrong.”
“Yeah, I guess you did,” Myra said flatly.
Shera had a distant look about her, as if recalling all the times they’d had to work together on something and Shera had admonished her shoddy, haphazard spell construction. Please tell me she isn’t about to doubt my story because the Shera in the previous loop wasn’t overbearing enough about my timekeeping—
“O-okay,” she finally said.
Myra breathed a loud sigh at the girl’s hesitant acceptance.
“So what do you think?”
“Of what? The event hall massacre?”
“Well, anything you have thoughts on, really.”
“Hachirou Iwasaki seems kind of suspicious.”
“Why?”
“Um—” She looked at Myra incredulously. All right, that’s fair.
“Okay, yeah, we only have his word that the security was ‘impossible’ to bypass,” Myra said. “And you told him as much—” Shera looked at her blankly. Right, she doesn’t remember that. “But I dunno, like, if he was responsible, I feel like it would have been… I dunno, less self-incriminating. And there’s too much weird shit for such a simple explanation.”
“It sounds like he was really nervous.”
“Well, he’d just gotten a prince, a princess, and a king killed. He was going to be at the center of an international incident. If anything, he held up pretty well.”
“What about the fact that he opened the event hall back up in the first place?”
“There was a campus emergency. I dunno, it seemed reasonable in the moment.”
“But disabling the security would have exposed all those heads of state to the emergency. Shouldn’t he have left them safe inside?”
“It… uh… sounded like most of the security had been disrupted anyway? I don’t know how the whole spatial severance thing works, but maybe it was like… dangerous to leave that running without the rest of the failsafes?” Myra didn’t even find her own words very convincing. “Okay, fine, we should investigate Iwasaki.”
“I was actually going to say that seems pretty plausible. Spatial severance is pretty complicated.”
Myra let out a chuckle, but it was a tired one. “Okay, so we also need to learn everything we can about the event hall security.” Myra didn’t even know where to start with that one. She couldn’t imagine the security office would take kindly to her asking overly specific questions about it. Iwasaki had proved to be reasonably forthcoming after the incident, but information from Iwasaki had its own potential reliability issue; see above.
“Maybe he was bribed,” Shera added.
“Maybe,” Myra agreed. “It would maybe explain his lack of composure, at the very least.” Though I’m still not entirely sure that needs explaining. “So, do you have any thoughts on the buildings?”
“I-I don’t know what thoughts you’d expect me to have that I didn’t the last t-time.”
“Well, um, we’ve got this list of collapsed buildings now. We didn’t have that last time.”
Shera finally looked at Myra’s map, which she was still holding. “Oh, that’s what this is.” She spent some time looking over the map. She was dead silent for what felt like it must have been three or four minutes before she finally announced the results of her analysis.
“It’s all buildings on the east side.”
“Yeah, I noticed that. Maybe the, uh, saboteurs found it easier to operate on that side.”
“And they form this ‘L’ shape.” Shera traced it out on the map. “It’s such a regular geometric shape.” Myra wondered if Shera was going to go on a rant about why someone would make a perfect ‘L’ shape. “The astronomy tower isn’t marked.”
“Yeah, it didn’t fall. It’s so new, though, I thought maybe it’s just… built better?”
“Or there’s some other irregularity…” Shera muttered under her breath. “What’s up here? This shed didn’t fall.” She pointed to a small wooden shed by the sports field that held some sports equipment. Myra didn’t even know why they’d bothered putting something so inconsequential on the map.
“Oh, that? I mean… it might have fallen. I mean, you didn’t mark it or anything, but maybe you skipped that one ‘cause it’s just a tiny shed?”
“W-what?” Shera looked dumbfounded, almost offended. “Why would I skip one?”
“Or… maybe it really didn’t fall down, then.” Even though that old shed looks like it would fall down if I kicked it too hard.
“The rock-slinger fell down.” She pointed to a contraption on the other side of the same sports field. “That’s barely even a building. It’s hard to believe these targets were hand-selected.”
“Yeah, terrorists probably wouldn’t target a rock-slinger used in intramural sports.”
Shera nodded to herself, seeming to come to a resolution. “We have a lot of concrete data here. We should be able to figure out the pattern. Let’s go.” She started to put away her telescope.
“Where? Do we have something to investigate?”
“The shed. We need to know why it didn’t fall down.”
“...Right.”
They made their way into the tower interior, onto the stairway with the orrery.
“You said y-you saw the safety ratings on all the b-buildings, right? Was the astronomy t-t-tower rated higher?”
“You know, I actually think the astronomy tower wasn’t in there at all. The report I read was from around five years ago, I think. So the tower wasn’t complete yet.”
Shera nodded absentmindedly, mouthing the words ‘five years’ to herself. “That makes sense.”
She didn’t say anything after that. For a while, the only sounds were the footsteps as they made their way down, circumnavigating the room.
“What’d you mean?” Myra asked. “What makes sense?”
“I just meant, that would have been right after that—that g-gas explosion. That’s p-p-probably why they d-did the whole s-safety e-evaluation.”
“The what? Some kind of accident?”
Shera stopped and rested her hands on the handrail, looking inwards to the orrery. “Y-yeah, you didn’t know about it? A bunch of researchers died… I think a kid died too. The university doesn’t talk about it much, I guess.”
“I… might have heard a mention of it once.”
“It was all over the news. Oh!” Something clicked in her head. “I guess I didn’t tell you I grew up in the city here. It was local news for me.”
“Oh, that must have been a big deal, then.”
“Ah!” She held her hand to her as if she had spoken something awful. “Of course, I probably told you that on the last loop.”
“Actually, no, you didn’t.”
“Oh, I see. The whole month, y-you never asked what c-c-city I was from.”
“Yeah, we were, um, pretty occupied.” Shera didn’t seem to react, though. Myra wasn’t sure she really believed how invested she’d been in the last loop. Or at least, she hadn’t internalized it.
“Anyway,” she said, finally turning back down the stairway. “This building replaced the old one. The one that was wrecked in the explosion, I mean. This orrery is supposed to be a memorial.”
“Okay, speaking of the orrery, this is driving me nuts, Shera.”
“E-eh?”
“Why’s it have everything orbiting Zyarth instead of orbiting the sun?”
“Oh, it’s just offbeat astronomer humor.”
They made their way out of the tower and to the sports field. They passed the rock-slinger, the one that was marked as having collapsed. It looked perfectly normal. The shed was far at the other end, hard to make out in the dead of night against the backdrop of the dense woods behind it. They approached, and it was just as dilapidated as Myra remembered, with a splintery wooden exterior and flaking paint. She once again started to doubt that Shera had actually bothered to note whether the shed had fallen down, but she didn’t voice her reservations.
“Do they still use this old thing, anyway?” Myra wondered as she opened the shed, its hinged creaking. “I hope there’s no serial killer lurking in here.”
“Is-is there a light?” She fumbled around the wall for a second, looking for a light switch. “Ow—!”
“You okay?”
“Ow-ow-ow-ow-splinter-ow—”
“Hold on.” Myra swept her hand around the wall to find the gaslamp she was pretty sure was around there.
“Be c-careful.”
“Here! It’s—ow, shit—” She managed to get the lamp on, but she managed to give herself a splinter of her own in the process.
“Ow-ow—”
“Ow-fuck—damn—” Myra inspected the puncture on her palm carefully. She focused on the sharp piece of wood lodged inside her and cautiously pulled it out with her own telekinesis. “God, this place is a death trap. Here, give me your hand.”
Shera’s hand was frail and bony, with cracked nails and joints at awkward angles, and it twitched as Myra tried to gently hold it. Her splinter was in the fleshy part bridging the thumb and index finger. Oof. She held her thumb over it to get past Shera’s natural domain defenses and pulled it out.
“Thanks,” Shera said, taking the small piece of wood and pocketing it. “I-I’m no g-g-good without my staff.”
“That’s okay. It’s not easy.”
“Y-you seem adept at it.”
Myra shrugged. “I’m okay at smaller things.”
Myra shook her hand to try to relieve the lingering sensations, and she finally scanned the shed. To be blunt, it was all junk. There was a box of deflated footballs, a pile of jerseys belonging to someone nicknamed Big Wumbo, a bunch of rune tablets scripted to help arrange the field for various different sports, worryingly many rusty nails sticking out of the walls everywhere, and a tornado-grade kite that actually looked in decent shape, decorated with some ribbon awards.
“Soo…” Myra started. “You, uh, see anything out of place?”
Shera nodded. “Yeah. I think I see how this fits together.” Shere flipped the light off and immediately headed out.
“Wait, where are you going?” She’s gotta be fucking with me, right? “What did you find?”
“Let’s find the campus blueprints, and I’ll confirm it.”
◆
It seemed they would have to wait until morning before they could get the blueprints from the administrative office. Shera got really out of sorts at the idea of telling Myra whatever she’d thought of before she could confirm it, so Myra decided to let it go and wait a bit.
The next morning was her self-defense class. Myra had taken a dueling class before, but the self-defense class was supposed to be about practical self-defense, what to do if a mage is trying to do you harm. The first day was mostly about barriers. Myra had thought she had a decent grasp of barriers; by the end of the day, she knew that she sucked ass at barriers. Technically, it was progress, though it left her discouraged.
After class, she finally met Shera to get the campus blueprints from the administrative building.
“Ta-d-d-da.” Shera attempted to sing the notes. They came out the same way her words usually did.
The blueprint she had found was of the aura distribution grid, the one that supplied campus buildings with aura for their functions. She set it side-by-side with Myra’s map, the one with the buildings X’ed off. Laid out like this, it was obvious.
“It’s exactly the buildings in Sector L-4. All these buildings are part of the same distribution line going back to the city.”
“Damn,” Myra said. “It was the distribution lines after all…? I mean, the distribution lines are supplying the stabilization fields with aura… but I thought all the lines shut down.”
“The shed isn’t connected to any distribution line,” Shera pointed out.
“That’s why you wanted to check it out? You just wanted to see it had a gaslamp instead of a modern aura-powered light—”
“Y-yeah, exactly. The shed doesn’t have a stabilization field at all. But it didn’t fall down.”
“So the distribution line must have been the sabotage vector or something.” Myra took a closer look. “Hold on, the astronomy tower is in L-4, too.”
“O-oh. Yeah. I th-thought maybe the circumstances of its construction would put it on a d-different one or something.”
“Well, this is great.” She patted Shera gently on the shoulder and thought about her next steps.
If she wanted to get to the bottom of this, it was obvious that she would need to pick up her apprenticeship in Snailworth’s lab again.
Myra hadn’t even considered doing her apprenticeship the second time around. Building the aura frequency detector for Rose Tara had been a fun little mathematical exercise, but she had no desire to do it again. In fact, she was even starting to be a little doubtful of the way Ben had pushed her into that particular apprenticeship; his reasoning had been very specific: working in aura channeling would give her opportunities to work in runecrafting fundamentals. That might be true, but in the one month she’d worked with Rose Tara, she hadn’t done anything other than pretty basic applied runecrafting. She was now suspecting that Ben had chosen that selling point only because it was convincing, and because it resulted in Myra being happy and grateful for at least a month, without any care as to whether it was true.
Ben’s thoughts didn’t really matter. She needed to make contacts in aura distribution so she could get to the bottom of whatever was wrong with the distribution line. This turned out to be a little more difficult than the first time because, apparently, Ben’s ability to put in a good word for her had actually meant something. Luckily, she could speak semi-intelligibly about aura channels from her previous experience, and she was able to get her foot in the door again, though it took a full week. Unfortunately, she was tasked with building the frequency detector again, something she didn’t really want to do.
Maybe if she finished it really quickly—which she was sure she could do, since she’d already done it once and worked out the hard parts—she could get some credibility and then report a problem or request access to the distribution grid or something like that. It did mean she would have to devote a lot of time to the project, though.
Cynthia, of course, wasn’t happy with Myra withdrawing herself and spending so much time on her work, so she tried to keep her company. The result was Cynthia kicking back on Myra’s bed, reading a bodice ripper, and gasping occasionally while Myra slogged through trigonometric integrals. Eventually, she decided it might be a good idea to avoid her own room as much as possible, just to make herself a bit harder for Ben to find, so she started working and sleeping in Cynthia’s room instead. Cynthia didn’t mind, of course. Despite what she’d said in the last loop, she was a good friend.
◆
There was more to do than just investigate the collapsed buildings. One of those items was to investigate Iwasaki.
How did you go about digging up someone’s background? Myra had never had to do anything like that before, and she started considering options ranging from hiring a private investigator to breaking into the employee records room at the university office. But she didn’t have the money for a private investigator, and she didn’t have the skills to break into an office.
If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.
Or did she? Maybe the incorporeal walls trick would work again? Maybe it would be something to try at the end of the month.
Meanwhile, she did learn at least a bit from Nathan, who apparently just knew how to ask around about this kind of thing and found an old article about him. Hachirou Iwasaki had been a member of the imperial navy in the anti-piracy division. He eventually retired with honors and took up the post at Ralkenon University, a less intense job where he could still use the skills he’d used to protect ships from invasion. He’d been at the university for twelve years.
At the very least, his navy background explained why Hachirou was considered trustworthy for this role. Incidentally, Myra also learned that there was precedent for using the event hall for international summits and the like, so there wasn’t anything strange in the whole setup. Perhaps the oddest thing was the fact that Iwasaki had presumably been in many life-or-death situations before, which made his lack of composure stand out a little more.
Myra was pretty sure that getting information on the event hall security was more important, but she lacked ideas on where to even start with it. At the very least, she could observe the event hall on the night of the summit, though it was a good bet that Ben would be searching her out again that night, which would be a lot of trouble if she didn’t have a plan to defend herself.
The big problem was that beating Ben twice had already taken a lot of luck, and it quite was likely he would shift to a more aggressive tactic. If Myra were in his position, she’d show up with a teleportation disruption field and a tranquilizer gun. Maybe she should work on her teleportation skills?
“Instructor Yam,” Myra started as she approached the man after class. Making a request had gone so well last time, she decided to give it another try. “Could you teach us how to teleport long-distance?” That wasn’t quite the skill she wanted, but it was still a useful one, and it would probably force her to improve her fundamentals.
The instructor looked thoughtful and scratched his goatee. “Long-distance teleportation is part of the fourth-year curriculum,” he said. “We’ll cover it next year.”
Well, that was a bust, then. The instructor’s position was pretty reasonable though. Myra knew enough about the theory behind long-range teleportation, and there were a lot of parts. The way teleportation worked, in general, was that you created something in auraspace called a spatial link, consisting of two endpoints connected by a tether. These were pretty easy to make as long as you had enough space aura to dump into the construction, so short-range teleportation was always taught early in a mage’s education.
The problem with long-range teleportation was that you had to move one of the endpoints to your destination, which by definition would be really far away. It was sort of like asking someone to throw a ball multiple kilometers. You couldn’t just do something like that with brute strength, but you could engineer a contraption to help: a trebuchet or a rocket or something like that. It was the same way in auraspace. You had to fabricate a fairly elaborate aura construct that would move your second endpoint to your destination (ideally very, very fast).
Unfortunately, Instructor Yam’s rejection left Benkoten as a looming threat.
She took her new self-defense class seriously, and she even invited Iz to join her with the hopes that it might prepare her for the duel with the princess. (It was pretty easy to convince Iz to sign up for classes since she didn’t conceptualize course loads as burdens the way most students did.) Unfortunately, she was feeling that her self-defense class wasn’t going to help her that much in a month. The class wasn’t bad or anything, but a month just wasn’t that much time for a class that only met a couple times a week.
She decided to pursue the skill from a different angle.
◆
“Hey, Zirphilia!” Myra knew how to track down the athletic girl near the lecture hall for Biomechanical Systems, even though she wasn’t taking the class herself this time.
“Yo! Myra!” Zirphilia waved cheerfully and slowed down for Myra to catch up to her. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”
“Yeah… not since that staff-design project. Hey, you’re on the rock-dodging team, right?”
“Yeah, I’m the assistant captain.” She grinned proudly, pointing a thumb at her chest. “Why, you wanna join? It’s a bit late, but—”
Myra shook her head. “No, I don’t—I don’t think I can make a commitment like that. I am interested in the sport though. Could you… show me how to get started, maybe? Sorry, I know you’re busy enough—”
“Mm… I could spare a couple evenings, I guess. Is this why you were out at the athletic field so late?”
“Huh?” Myra had to shift a gear to figure out what she was talking about. “Oh, you saw us out there?”
“Yeah, I was making sure all the equipment was in order… you gave me a bit of a fright, actually, I didn’t expect to run into anyone. I kinda stayed outta the way.”
“Oh, sorry, I guess we were being kinda… sketchy. But no, that was a, uh, scavenger hunt puzzle thing.”
“Ah, yeah, I can see the two of yinz doing something brainy like that. So when do you want to meet?”
◆
Their practice session started with a short warm-up of Zirphilia leading Myra through stretches. That is, Zirphilia, in her tight athletic clothes, showed Myra how to warp her body into complex, pathologically curved positions…
Come on, Myra, it’s creepy to stare—
No, it’s not! I need to watch her so I know what stretches to do!
The stretching session wasn’t long. “All right! Let’s get started.” Zirphilia went to activate the rock-slinger. It made a loud rumbling sound, and after a few moments, began to unleash its barrage. Rocks of all shapes and sizes, of varying velocities and trajectories, shot across the field.
Myra gulped. “Is there some kinda padding we wear, or…?”
“Nah, there’s a safety spell,” Zirphilia reassured her. “They won’t hit your head.”
“Oh, good—wait, what about the rest of me?”
Zirphilia didn’t answer, instead proceeding to her first demonstration. She stood next to the barrages, aligned orthogonally with her back facing the rock stream. She closed her eyes, bent her knees, and waited. Then, when she judged the timing right, she launched her entire body backward, perfectly avoiding every rock aimed at her through a series of flawless backflips that brought her to the other side.
What the fuck??
“God, um, I think this sport might be out of my league,” she said weakly as Zirphila approached her, crossing the stream back to Myra’s side in much the same way. “There’s no way I can look that good doing this.”
Zirphilia giggled. “You’ll look great, silly.”
Wait, look? Myra realized what she’d said. “Wait, wait, I-I meant like, jump that good! There’s no way I can jump that good doing this!”
“You don’t have to jump like that. You can use whatever strategy you like. Some people prefer to take it one step at a time, it’s legit.” She gently pushed Myra to the starting position. “Rock-dodging isn’t about being flashy. It’s about sensing, projecting, and planning.”
“Okay. Okay.” Myra closed her eyes and extended her extrasenses. She tried not to think about the hundreds of heavy, sharp rocks that would be hurtling toward her so she could focus on the skill she had come to learn. The skill to sense an approaching projectile or some other attack. The skill to know where it was, to know where it would be, and most of all, to not be there.
Feeling out the rocks wasn’t that difficult. Rocks were ample in nature and one of the simplest kinds of objects to sense or manipulate. But ‘projecting’ their locations to feel where they’d be in a few seconds when she was going to be crossing, that was much harder. There were too many rocks to keep track of at once.
“Come on, don’t overthink it!”
“Hey, uh, so about that shield, you said it didn’t apply below the head—”
“Doesn’t matter, just go! You won’t learn anything if you don’t face the rocks!”
Myra took a deep breath and stepped into the barrage. Face the rocks. Immediately she was socked in the stomach by something that was either a large rock or a small boulder. Now, the thing about magically moving small boulders was that they don’t stop just because they hit someone. Myra was forced back several steps before she was able to get out of its way. She immediately stepped into a volley of small pebbles and then a shin-height rock that knocked her leg out from under her. She fell to the ground in a manner reminiscent of one of those balls slowly falling down through a grid of pins.
“Ow…”
“That was a good try!” Zirphilia cheered her on. She helped Myra crawl out from under the barrage.
“I prefer skipping rocks,” Myra muttered. “Humans are meant to dominate rocks, not the other way around.”
“You’ll get accustomed to it. Let’s go again!”
◆
The practice session was not, in fact, a sadistic hazing ritual after the first ten minutes. Zirphilia did eventually show Myra how to better predict the opportunities in the rock stream by sensing via certain coordinate transforms. It also turned out that Zirphilia wasn’t perfect herself, and there was plenty of schadenfreude to be had in watching her get walloped every once in a while. Shera even showed up to watch from the sidelines, though she didn’t join in.
“Good job,” Zirphilia finally said when they were done. She plopped to the ground, panting. Despite her role as the coach, she had shown off through increasingly elaborate paths through the rocks, and she had worked up quite a sweat as a result. She had obviously been made the assistant captain of the team for a reason.
“Time for the best part,” she said. She stripped off her tank top.
“Wha-?”
“We fix each other up. Come on.”
“R-right.” Myra took off her own shirt. She had, frankly, come out far worse than Zirphilia. Small bruises and scrapes adorned her stomach and sides, matching the throbbing and stinging that was all over. Zirphilia reached her arm out to touch Myra’s skin and gently performed a simple disinfecting and pain-relieving spell. She did this all around her torso and arms, and then Myra did the same for Zirphilia (she got to touch Zirphilia’s abs), and then they finished with back rubs.
“So you’ve been hanging out with Shera Marcrombie, huh?” Zirphilia asked from behind her.
“Yeah—o-oh! You’re friends with her, right?” Though Shera didn’t seem to have a whole lot of friends, Myra did recall occasionally seeing her hanging out with Zirphilia. She had no idea what their relationship was like—she hadn’t seen them together since the loop business had started, and they were the most opposite people imaginable.
“Yeah, our freshman dorms were next to each other. I guess she kinda imprinted on me for a while.” Bit of an odd way to put it… “But she just had no interest in most of the activities I wanted to do… so we kinda drifted apart. I mean, she’s great, don’t get me wrong.” She dug her thumb in deep near Myra’s shoulder blade. Ooooh. “She has such an interesting way of looking at the world sometimes.”
“Yeah, I guess she does.”
“Anyway! I’m glad you’ve gotten to be friends with her. I kinda worry about her sometimes.”
Myra didn’t really know what to say to that. Were they friends? There seemed to be a gap between them that there wasn’t last time. She didn’t know how to bridge it. She could try doing things the same way she had last time, but after a certain point, that would amount to telling a lot of lies, if she had to act like she was more confused and bewildered than she really was. Most of all, she didn’t want to emotionally manipulate Shera. Things had gone so badly with Nathan when she had lied to him…
“Well,” Myra finally said. “As long as I’m around, you won’t have to worry—oh, yeah, there.” Zirphilia had put pressure on another spot that sorely needed it, and as a result of Myra’s encouragement, began kneading it harder. God, I like this tradition…
After finishing up, they cleaned the field and parted ways. As Myra left, she caught Shera, who was still sitting by the sidelines.
“How’d it g-go?”
“Oh, it was great!” Myra’s memory was selective. “I can’t wait to do this again.”
“Oh, g-g-good-good.” Her stutter was flaring up again, and she was looking away nervously. “Would it b-be-be a g-g-good idea if I t-tr-trained t-t-too?”
“I guess it can’t hurt,” Myra said. “Though Ben doesn’t know you’re helping me, I think. And anyway, anything you learn will be reset at the end of this iteration.”
“Oh, r-right. I’d just g-get in the way of your t-t-training, wouldn’t I?”
“Well, technically, yeah,” Myra said. She remembered she was carrying her shirt and started to put it back on. “I mean, you can join if you really want.” It could be an opportunity to bridge our gap… But Zirphilia did say Shera’s not really into sports… “You don’t have to join just for my sake,” she clarified.
“O-okay, I-I’ll leave you to it.”
◆
In the second loop, Myra had not paid much attention to the student body or its opinion on the upcoming major event. First, she’d been rather occupied with other things, and second, Nathan hadn’t been himself, and he was Myra’s main lifeline into the student rumor mill. In this loop, however, now that Ben had decided to do the bare minimum necessary for not being the world’s shittiest older brother, the second reason no longer applied. And as the rumor mill came back into her life, Myra was reminded of something that had gone clear out of her mind. Namely, before the specifics of the imperial event had crystallized, there had been another, totally unrelated and totally wrong theory about the event.
“Sebastian thinks it’s some kind of symposium with Mirkas-Ballam.” He referred to Casire’s prominent pharmaceutical company, which was headquartered in Ralkenon.
“Ooh,” Cynthia said.
“Wait, where the hell’s this coming from?” Myra asked, suddenly interested. “Like, it’s just speculation, right? What’s the basis?”
“Dunno, they’ve been working on something big, apparently.”
“What ties that to the idea of a symposium?”
“Yeahhh, it’s probably just speculation.” Nathan shrugged.
“What’s this big thing they’re working on?” Cynthia asked. “Is it like, ‘curing a disease’ big or, like, ‘umami-flavored pills’ big?” She sounded hopeful for the latter, beyond all conceivable reason.
“Well, Sebastian knew about it because of his links to Precision Isomorphic. They’ve got some big contract with Mirkas-Ballam.”
Myra flinched at the name of the rune forge that had canceled her apprenticeship. “Say what? What link’s Sebastian got with Precision?”
“Oh, he got an apprenticeship there.”
Myra seethed.
“What’s a pharmaceutical company need fancy runes for?” Cynthia asked.
Nathan shrugged again. “I dunno. Surely there’s all kinds of rune-driven processes in drug production?”
“I mean, yeah, but a company like Mirkas would have its own in-house expertise, right? Drug production is their whole thing. I thought Precision Isomorphic just does weird experimental stuff.”
“They do cutting-edge experimental stuff,” Myra cut in. “And there’s all kinds of applications they could be doing! Mages have been trying to embed runes into proteins for decades. Something like that, anything with 3D runes—”
“What, you think they made progress on that?” Cynthia asked, dubious. “Protein folding ran smack into a brick wall ages ago. Nobody knows how to do shit.”
“I mean, it doesn’t have to be that. It could be some other biological molecule—”
Before anybody could stop her, Myra launched into a long overview of the challenges of molecular runecrafting. First, the runes had to be three-dimensional. Then, they had to be crisp enough to work at nanoscale. And in order to be arranged as part of a contiguous molecule, they needed to be scribed in a cursive typeface. Alone, these problems were challenging enough. Altogether, it was an enormous number of constraints—and on top of that, you needed to get an actual physical molecule into whatever shape you decided on. Proteins were a tempting substrate for rendering these shapes since they came with a natural manufacturing process, but as Cynthia had pointed out, finding proteins that fold a certain way, or even predicting the way a given protein would fold, was a seriously challenging problem.
“—So one of the most promising approaches was what they called recursive rune shaping. Basically, you would have short rune scripts that would themselves influence the way the protein folds, rather than leaving the folding entirely to quantum mechanics. Supposedly, this would make it easier to predict and engineer the protein shapes, but it required these complex rune scripts that recursively contained smaller rune scripts that set up their own shape. There was a lot of work on this, and they identified all these mathematical problems that needed to be solved. But then Kyanizev and Prikata proved an impossibility result, though I don’t really understand it at all, and that kind of led to the ‘runic protein winter’—”
Iz eventually pointed out that, if this runic protein technology ever existed, the empire would probably use it to genetically engineer a master race of mages or something, so the conversation fizzled out on a bit of a downer note. In the end, nobody had any idea what Mirkas-Ballam was making or what this contract was.
But she couldn’t help but wonder about Ben’s strange drugs.
Was it just a coincidence?
◆
Unfortunately, Myra’s ability to investigate such things took a steep dive in the back half of the month as she began to run her important experiment. After the loop, she intended to wake up earlier than 8 A.M. Her plan was twofold:
1. By the end of the loop, she would adjust her sleep schedule so she would be awake in the middle of the night and asleep during the day.
2. Just before the reset, she would take a shitton of stimulants.
It was not at all a given that either of these alterations to her body chemistry would carry over after the time reset. After all, the time loop had fixed far more severe “alterations” that she’d undergone.
But it hadn’t reverted her brain-state. So surely there was a chance that whatever alterations she made now would stick around.
Maybe one of these plans would work.
It turned out, though, that sleeping during the day and waking up at night kind of sucked. The human body responded deeply to the sunlight and to the shifts in the outer aura channels, and going against her instincts was extremely unpleasant. It wasn’t enough to just stay up all night feeling tired; she needed to trick her body so she really felt like she should be awake. Cynthia (as baffled as she was about the whole thing) let her know that there were some elixirs that could help with this—people who worked night shifts could get medicine for it, and there were also some known disorders for people who had a hard time with the distribution grid’s artificial adjustment of the ambient elemental composition—and she was able to help Myra get her hands on some.
Even with the elixir, it still sucked. She couldn’t spend time with her friends, she couldn’t go to her classes, and she couldn’t eat at restaurants that ran normal daylight hours. The only thing she could do was spend time with Shera, who, true to her word, really did seem to not ever sleep.
And Shera… Despite the massive help she continued to be, she remained a little aloof. It was hard to tell if it was Myra’s imagination or not, since of course their relationship was going to backslide as a result of Shera, well, forgetting everything… but Myra had the feeling it wasn’t progressing as quickly as last time, in spite of the nights they spent together. Shera obviously had a lot of familiarity with the nocturnal Ralkenon, and she took Myra to see many of the nice nooks she knew of, but they usually ended up in awkward silence. In one of their ‘adventures,’ Shera brought her to her favorite bar, where she made an incredibly idiosyncratic drink order, drank exactly half of it, and left immediately.
It seemed like they ought to have a lot more to talk about, but speculation about the time loop quickly became one-sided.
One of the few times she offered something up, it had to do with Ben.
“Y-you know—”
“Yeah?”
They were in the astronomy tower again, Myra keeping Shera company while she quietly enjoyed the stars.
“I was thinking about what you said Ben said. That you were thinking about something backward?”
“He did say that.”
“Well, it makes some sense, right? Because it doesn’t make any sense.”
“Umm.”
“So if it doesn’t make sense, it makes sense that you’re thinking about it wrong. You ended up looping along with Ben, yet there’s nothing that points to the reason why.”
“Right…”
“It’s only reasonable that you have some deeply wrong assumption.”
“But what?”
Shera bit her lip. “I d-don’t know. Sorry. It’s like something is on the t-tip of my t-tongue.”
Myra wasn’t annoyed at her unhelpfulness. She knew the feeling she was talking about—despite all the questions, it felt like they had a lot of circumstantial information. Still, the answer eluded her.
◆
When Myra completed her frequency detector and showed it to Rose Tara, she finally asked if she could gain access to the aura distribution tunnels.
“I’ve just been fascinated by aura distribution since I was a kid,” she tried to explain. So I always wanted to see the actual channels—”
“Really? You cared about aura channels as a kid?”
“Y-yeah?” No, she hadn’t, but it wasn’t as if it would be weird if she did.
“Right… Well, normally I wouldn’t have a problem with it. I think my contact with the city might give you a hard time right now, though. There was a big contamination in one of the sectors, so he’s got security locked tight—”
“A contamination? Wait, which sector?”
“Mm, I think it’s over on the east side of campus?”
God, I’m such an idiot.
“Sector L-4?” Myra asked.
“Yeahhh, that sounds right.” Rose seemed a little thrown off that Myra knew anything about the sector numbering system, but she didn’t press on it.
“So what’s the impact of this… contamination? What is it exactly?”
“Some kind of fungus growing in the pipes. And the impact… nothing, really. There are a large number of guards and failsafes that prevent corrupted aura from leaking.”
And I bet those guards rely on the Common Library.
“Is there someone I could talk to for more information about this?”
◆
Rose hesitantly gave Myra the address of a city maintenance office, and said she could ask for a mage named Frederick Penman. The journey downtown was really unappealing given how exhausted she was from fucking around with her sleep, but she managed to make it there anyway. Frederick was happy to help after she told him she was “in Snailworth’s lab” and “worked on aura corruption detection.”
According to Frederick, the fungus had been identified by a safety sensor on the morning of Nov. 12, which was about a week after the loop started. Like Rose, he didn’t expect any problems on account of the “failsafes.” However, it would apparently take over a month to clean out the system. They didn’t know what the fungus was or how it got there.
And to Myra’s surprise, Frederick was perfectly happy to arrange for her to see the fungus herself.
The distribution channels were underground, in a series of large tunnels accessed by a secure hatch from one of the city maintenance buildings. The channels themselves were large glass pipes, glowing bright green and purple from the super-dense aura inside. Frederick led her to the problem area in Sector L-4, where the issue was self-evident. Growing on the inside along the entire tube was a greenish-grey mushroom.
“Why’s it so hard to clean?” Myra asked. She had to speak loudly to be heard over the large fans that were responsible for pushing the aura-infused air through the tubes.
“Cleaning it might be impossible,” he said, likewise speaking at a volume. “We’re going to replace the pipes wholesale. I’m sure you know that takes a while to arrange.”
“Yeah, of course.”
Myra leaned up close to the glass. The mushrooms were swaying, almost like they were breathing.
“What exactly is it, though? What would it do if its spores leaked out into the buildings that are relying on these channels?”
“We don’t know, exactly,” Frederick said. “We think it’s some kind of novel SAP, but there’s no reason it should spawn here. Aura levels are all normal, so there shouldn’t be any spontaneous phenomena. Some of us are worried this was put here as an act of sabotage, but we can’t imagine the reason. It’s only an inconvenience.”
“What if the failsafes were to, uh, fail?” Myra asked. “The ones keeping the corruption from reaching the buildings? Why don’t you just cut this area off entirely?”
“There are a lot of failsafes,” Frederick said. Myra waited expectantly for an answer to her question, and he eventually continued, a little less confident. “Well, it’s hard to say exactly until we get more analysis on it.”
“But could it be bad?”
“It could be…” He grimaced and held out his hand in a so-so gesture. “... pretty bad.” He seemed hasty to change the subject. “So there was something about the aura levels you wanted to analyze?”
“Oh, uh!” Right. She had said something like that to get access. “Actually, sorry, this setup isn’t quite what I was expecting. Um, I don’t think what I had in mind is going to work.”
Frederick looked at her oddly, and Myra had to evade a few more questions, but he eventually dropped it and led Myra back out.
“Hey, actually, I have one more question about the aura levels.”
“Of course.”
“You were skeptical it’s a spontaneous anomalous phenomenon, yeah?”
“We were skeptical that it originated here. Like I said, the aura levels were normal—”
“When were they measured though? Wouldn’t the appearance of a SAP in an oversaturated aura environment, uh, re-equilibrate everything and result in normal measurements—”
“Ah…” he nodded. “It’s theoretically possible, I suppose. The main issue is just how unlikely it would be. The tunnels are kept well-isolated to begin, and there’s no sign of a leak that would allow such a thing. Fungal SAPs would be really common out in the forest, where the nature elements are more abundant—”
“Yeah, I get it.” Myra didn’t really need much convincing—she was already ready to believe this was a direct sabotage. She just wanted to rule out that it was some kind of weird coincidental accident.
“This is what you came to analyze, right?” Frederick asked.
“Yeah, yeah, of course. Wait—the areas are well-isolated from aura leaks?”
“Ah, yes? Is there something wrong?”
“No, sorry, I was thinking out loud about something else. Got my wires crossed for a sec.” She evaded some more questions just as well as she’d evaded the rocks earlier in the month, and finally left, her mind whirring with thoughts about aura isolation.
If the event hall is as isolated as it’s claimed, that cuts off all the aura access as well. Anyone in the spatially severed building would be cut off from the ambient aura they’d usually use.
That might not be a big deal… if the culprit plans ahead, they could bring aura crystals with them to power their spells.
But, no, it is a big deal! The area is so small and keeps the aura enclosed, so if I could measure the elemental makeup of the ambient aura as soon as the room opens up, I could get an idea of what was cast—or at least, what elements were used while the room was isolated.
That’s not something I can do by the end of the month, though.
On the last day, Myra received a sternly worded note from Rose Tara asking her to meet immediately. Just in time for Myra to ignore it.
◆
Myra was too jittery, and her heart was pounding so hard she was worried she was starting to worry she would go into cardiac arrest before the end of the loop. This was all the result of the massive quantity of stimulants she had ingested as part of the try-to-wake-up-early-in-the-morning-after-the-reset plan. It was a great plan. Really. She couldn’t hold her binoculars straight in her shaking hands.
Myra had gone through the motions of the final day. She had shown up to the party, watched Iz get cut up (she looked for the princess’s toenail tunneler, but as Iz suggested, it must have been hidden in the grass), comforted her at the hospital, convinced her to teleport out, and then made for the event hall.
There, she teleported around continuously, having identified three spy-worthy locations, partially so that she could get a full view around the event hall, and partially so that it would be harder for Ben to track her down. Meanwhile, she kept her barriers up and had her extrasenses fully extended around her. Unfortunately, it was impossible to actually sense another human per se because of their domain defenses, but there were still things that could be felt. Projectiles. The fluctuations in the air when someone teleports in. Vibrations in the floor. She tried to apply what she’d learned from rock-dodging to the task while she watched.
Right now, the summit attendees were congregating outside the hall, just as they had last time. Prince Humperton was having a somewhat tense conversation with the princess’s handmaid that Myra couldn’t follow from where she was. She made a note to find a way to listen in on that next time. Eventually, the maid left, leaving just the attendees along with Iwasaki. The prince, the princess, the judge, a bunch of imperial sages whose names Myra had looked up the previous loop but who all kind of blurred together, and the Unkmire faction, most of whom she still hadn’t identified.
Eventually, they all entered the building with Iwasaki’s help, leaving only Iwasaki.
Then nothing happened.
Come on, when is some suspicious guy in a cloak gonna walk up and greet Iwasaki like an old friend? Make it easy for me.
Well, that didn’t happen. In fact, Iwasaki looked rather bored.
Myra felt a prickle of hairs on her neck as she felt an out-of-place gust behind her. “There you—”
Myra teleported to the front of the event hall. Iwasaki nearly jumped at her sudden appearance.
“Help, sir! Some weirdo is after me!” She ran behind him, putting herself between Iwasaki and the wall. She sensed the place where she had just stood, the roof of a nearby administrative building that would fall any minute now. Shit, I was right that he’d bring an anti-teleportation field. It seemed that’d gotten out just barely in time; a disruption field had gone up just after she had teleported away. Fuck.
She cowered behind Iwasaki while he questioned her.
“A weirdo? Hang on, you’re the one who reported an assailant at the beginning of the month.”
“Yeah, it’s—it’s him! Up there!” Ben had approached the edge of the roof to look down at them. He looked pissed. As soon as he saw Iwasaki looking back up at him, he teleported away.
She didn’t let her guard down, though she hoped that meant that would be it for the evening. Iwasaki apologized that he couldn’t go after the intruder, but he reported it to someone over his radio.
The usual sequence of events went off without too much of a surprise, though for the first time, she got to see Iwasaki’s reaction when the Common Library fell and the blaring alarm went off. He immediately went to check something through a control closet on the side of the building. He sucked in his breath as he examined it, then hastily began making changes, though Iwasaki was blocking the view into the panel, so Myra couldn’t see what he was doing. After the buildings started to fall and dust filled the atmosphere, he announced he was “opening up the hall.” He removed an orb from the closet that Myra had seen him messing with in previous loops.
Shera appeared while Iwasaki busied himself shutting things down. Her role had been to gather the timings of the events and observe the astronomy tower. Evidently, it had shaken dramatically, but it hadn’t fallen, so maybe it was just a matter of being a more structurally sound building after all. Also, the building had been empty of people.
“You ready?” Myra muttered under her breath.
Shera nodded. There was something they wanted to check, as soon as the event hall opened up, but it meant they would need to rush in and probably displease Iwasaki significantly. But it had to be done.
As soon as Iwasaki said he was done, the two girls plowed past him into the event hall while he shouted after them. They entered and telekinetically popped the helmets off the armor suits. The theory was that the culprit may have hidden inside the suits, then teleported out as soon as they got the hall open, so they needed to check as quickly as possible. Again, since humans couldn’t be detected through extrasenses, they couldn’t know if someone was in the armor unless they checked with their own eyes.
“What in the blazes are you all do—” Iwasaki rushed in after them, probably ready to tear them apart for assaulting an international summit. He had to stop when the state of the room.
“We saw that everybody had been massacred, and the building was isolated, so we immediately realized that the only place the culprit could have been was hiding in the suits. It seems we missed them, though.”
It took Iwasaki a minute to process that everybody in the room was dead, let alone the logic behind Myra’s bold statement.
“I-I see… that must be how they got in as well.”
“That’s possible? I thought it was impossible to get in?”
“Where did you hear that?” Iwasaki snapped. “It’s impossible to get in after the room was spatially severed. But they could have hid in the statue from the beginning.”
“You didn’t check the state was empty before closing the room?”
“Well…” He tapped his foot. “I don’t remember, but I don’t think I checked the statue, specifically, no. To be clear, there are a number of security mechanisms that would detect any human presence in the room.”
“Are they impossible to subvert?”
“... No. But the room was closed off a month ago before the subject of the event was even announced.”
But…
No, wait. If the culprit is looping, there’s no fucking way they’d spend the entire fucking month in this building.
Is there?
I mean, maybe, if they really, really hate these people.
She looked at the princess, in pieces on the table.
While Iwasaki processed the condition of the occupants, and Shera was mesmerized by Judge Krasus’s overly symmetric death pose, Myra finally took a look inside the armor suits, especially the one with the shield, where Shera had found the syringes last time.
“Uh, there’s some stuff in here,” Myra said. There were the syringes, red and blue like she’d seen last time, but that wasn’t all. The two syringes were floating in a pile of dark green sludge.
“Oh! It’s g-green g-goop,” Shera said.
“I can see that,” Myra said.
“N-no, I mean, that’s what it’s usually called.”
“Oh!” She hadn’t seen the chemical before, but from the name, the right neuron fired in Myra’s memory. ‘Green goop’ was a chemical that was really easy to transmute stuff into, and it was also really dense (low volume) and inert, so it was often a good choice for disposing of garbage, especially in industrial settings. Most so-called “vanishing spells” just transmuted matter into this chemical since true vanishing was impossible (it violated conservation of mass).
“What could they possibly want to hide so badly that they’d bother transmuting it, when they left the fucking syringes in here?”
“Whatever it is, it’s about 4.6 kilograms,” Shera said, doing some kind of simple analysis spell. “There’s something else in here.”
“What the hell are you all doing?” Iwasaki finally came to check. “What on—”
Shera pulled out the last object. It was a small disc, about the same radius as her bicep, only a centimeter thick, and it looked very rough.
“Is that diamond?” Myra asked. “Can we get a single clue that makes sense here—”
“No, I know what this is for,” Shera said. “The culprit used this to sharpen the sword.”
Myra blinked. “Oh.”
“I was thinking, after you mentioned the aura isolation, a good sharpening spell is really aura intensive. This method makes more sense.”
“They filed it by hand? With this dinky thing?” Myra didn’t buy it. “Look, the sword didn’t just need to get a little sharpened—” She grabbed it off the table. It was completely dulled, it was supposed to be decorative—”
“What the fuck are the two of you doing?” Iwasaki demanded. He knocked the sword out of Myra’s hand with a spell, and he grabbed both of them by the shoulder. He wasn’t annoyed, peeved, or baffled.
He was angry.
“How did you know this was going to happen?”
“What?”
“How did you know the sword’s been sharpened?” Shit. “How did you know this was going to happen? How—”
Myra grabbed Shera and snapped her teleport stick, careful to exclude Iwasaki.
◆
They arrived in a secluded, forested area that Myra had picked out.
“Sorry, I got careless,” Shera said. “We spoke too freely.”
“I was too. I blame these damn stimulants. I can’t think straight.”
She sat down, back against a tree, and pulled out her watch. Shera had marked the times earlier, but for the last one, Myra was the only one who could get it.
“We need to find a consistent way to handle him,” Myra muttered. She had really wanted to look over that whole wire mesh in Judge Krasus’s clothes, but that would demand a lot of uninterrupted time.
“I was about to say,” Shera went on, “they could have sharpened that sword down by spinning the diamond sharpener thing really fast.”
“With telekinesis, you mean.”
“Y-yeah. It’s hard, but it’d be a lot more aura-efficient than a dedicated sharpening spell.”
Myra nodded. “Okay. But why didn’t they just bring their own damn blade? Going through the trouble of bringing a diamond plate and sharpening the sword after they enter the room, why?”
“I don’t kn-know.”
Myra glued her eyes to her watch until the reset.
◆
Myra woke up at 8 A.M., feeling perfectly normal. 8 A.M. felt like the right time to wake up. She wasn’t jittery from taking too many stimulants.
So: that whole plan hadn’t worked.
But she had gotten all those times that Shera wanted. The numbers on the clock were still seared in her mind. She moved to write them down as soon as possible.
Guess I need to apologize to Shera.
Common Library disappears - 12:39:22
First earthquake - 12:42:53
Volcano erupts - 1:01:07
Time reset - 1:09:22
The time reset was half an hour after the disappearance of the Common Library - down to the second.