Alicia wasn't so reckless as to test the validity of the circle with her life right away; such a time could come later.

When she first engraved it, it was three months after Merry had fought and defeated the Archmage. Alicia studied it as best as she could, assembling the messy schematics with only a single written phrase for guidance: "TIME TRAVEL".

The elf was sure to leave no traces, only daring to magic away the basement floor and work in segments when Merry was outside to town and there was an unconscious patient kept in. Her elven pedigree gave her plenty of time, and she would take it as slowly as needed. The circle took three months to complete and double-checking it required another two. So many lines and runes, so many chances for a mistake. The circle was ultimately made in metal and buried in the earth, the vital parts kept in cavities for easier modification, all morphed using her Aspect.

Strangest part of it all was when she fed it some of her mana to test it, a container seemed to materialize, a cylinder of pure mythril with runes engraved all over. It steadily drained the mana of anything that touched it to power the rest of the circle. Confused, Alicia searched all over for where it could've possibly come from, eventually dismissing it as some arcane one-time function that got activated.

Only half a year later would she gather the courage to test it. The visitor that came by was a noble travelling from one city to another, out for a hunt in the forest just so he would have something to brag about when he arrived at his destination. Unfortunately, the poor fool picked a fight with Bassy, wiping out almost his entire entourage until a proper mage stepped in and threatened to carve it up. Merry intervened halfway, offering to smooth things over by healing his men and giving them lunch. That was a good time to strike, Alicia thought; she had never actually seen the witch in action, and surely with a proper mage and a few trained guards there would be a decent back and forth.

So, while they ate, Alicia slipped a note into the noble's pockets, making sure he noticed it as he was leaving. The apprentice had judged the man to be pompous enough to pick a fight, and oh he certainly did. All the guards encircled the witch while the mage kept watch, but as soon as Bassy swung over the side of the house, it was over in a matter of seconds. Merry, raising a single arm, stretched out and grabbed each and every single one of the armed men all at once, instantly snapping their spines with her healing Aspect. And the mage, who was far enough to witness it all could only fight off both Merry and a basilisk briefly before either one nicked him—for that was all it took for any mortal to fall.

When it was all over, Merry went to the crippled noble's body and gingerly pulled up the note that he was reading, and as soon as she turned around, she found a trembling Alicia crushing her own heart with magic.

"Gods help me," she mumbled, waking in her bed exactly thirty days back in time, the number of crossed-off Xs that vanished from her calendar.

The elf rolled up her long sleeve to check her shoulder, finding one of the teardrops faded. Great relief came with knowing the circle worked, and with a sigh, she told herself that she would do better next time. Not wanting to lose any more precious time, she started thinking.

Alicia didn't want to kill Merry, and it wasn’t likely possible in the first place. As twisted as the witch's rationale was, Alicia agreed it had merit; it was just that it weighed on the elf’s conscious too much for her to actively participate in it. She was fine if someone called her a hypocrite, but it was a matter of numbers. More would die without the witch, and that was enough to sway her heart.

The trouble was what to do. Merry routinely cured poisons and rebuilt entire organs, so any slow-activating methods were out the window. Thus, Alicia’s first solution was an explosive. A big one. The idea came from the lanterns as she was making an ignition strip, recalling how the first attack from Archmage Orin seemed to work, and only the first. If she had managed to shrug off a lightning bolt, then there would be no worry it was actually lethal—just hopefully dangerous enough to put an immortal temporarily out of commission.

When the noble came around for the second time, Alicia had rigged the ground where Merry stood last time when the confrontation started. They were terribly haphazard bombs that just radiated force outwards using stored mana, and they weren't very effective—their detonation didn't leave a scratch on the witch, only sending wooden chips and dirt everywhere. The result of the fight was the same, of course.

In the next loop, she tore through all the books in the house looking for information.

"What are you looking for?" Merry asked.

"I want to know how explosions work," Alicia replied.

The witch, of course, happily assisted her. She went to town and returned with a few books on the subject, half of it pertaining to Aspects applying it. Not too surprising how little convincing was required, Alicia thought, as nothing could hurt the witch. What was a paltry puff of fire going to do?

Her bombs needed fuel and oxygen, Alicia learned. The first real prototype was the size of one’s head and then some, sucking up pure oxygen so the payload could do its thing, and it required a fraction of the mana for double the results. Unfortunately, it also almost killed her during testing if it were not for her own healing Aspect. Over and over, she built, activated, and refined them until it was down to an exact formula, shrinking to fit into a hand.

There were so many problems, she found, a thousand little things that bothered her. For one, she had to look, rotate, and find each input point to put mana into. What if she needed to use it on the go? In the middle of a fight, who would stop and turn it over and over to see how to use it? No, it needed to be standardized. The grooves and spacing of the input markers were made through trial and error, all the little kinks hammered away until it felt natural to use. Without looking, she would be able to tell a bomb's orientation through its bumps and dips.

She set a dozen underneath Merry's feet, all timed with long fuses, and upon triggering, it blew away a good chunk of the house’s front side and sent all the noble's men onto their behinds—only for the witch to pull her distorted body off the ground and snap each bone back into place.

Alicia crossed injuring Merry off the list.

Her next thought was running. It was initially written off because... well, she simply wasn't able to. No matter how hard elves try, their bodies are incapable of building enough strength and stamina to rival even the most barely fit human. It's said that four millennia ago, they had traded off stronger physical forms to better commune with the Outer Sea, leading to their flesh and bone being as capable of holding mana as well as their blood. Well if that were the case, her next conclusion was that she just had to get help!

It arrived a few months later in the form of a lively messenger, a young girl who was tasked to deliver a letter from Baron Vressin, an invitation to some festival. She was also a mage, her earth Aspect trivializing terrain navigation.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

"Please, I need your help!" Alicia begged of her. "I don't weigh much, I promise."

"Err... sorry," the messenger had replied, awkwardly rubbing the back of her neck. Before she finished talking, she was already turning away, anxious to leave. "I don't want to get on the bad side of a witch, y'know?" And without listening to another word, she sprinted away. Alicia wasn't sure at first whether or not to reattempt this encounter—it wasn't like her life was in any danger, but if this loop were to be the final one, there was no way the messenger would help out if she were to ever return.

So she reset it, the second time using force. Alicia ambushed the messenger and leapt on her back, placing a bomb against her chest.

"Are you crazy!? You're going to get us both killed!"

"Oh hush and start running before she catches on!"

The girl made platforms with each stride, boosting her forward, practically flying past trees toward the city. They went fast, and for the first time in a long while, Alicia felt free. They slipped out of the domain and made good distance before Alicia felt her grip weakening. Noticing this, the messenger decided to make an abrupt turn, throwing her assailant off and speeding away without looking back. The apprentice, who fell and rolled on the forest floor, laid there facing the sky, wondering what she else could possibly do. A minute later, Merry zipped over the trees in a blur, no doubt easily catching up very soon after.

There was another problem, Alicia discovered: no one would be willing to defy an immortal unless they were forced to. An adversarial relationship meant she could be betrayed at any moment. No, whoever she was getting help from, they couldn't be self-sufficient. The obvious answer to that was to pick any of Merry's test subjects.

By now, Alicia had already learned how to cure the plague after being taught how to keep watch on the patients. The longer it had set in, the more tedious the ordeal, so when the first mage victim came in—a middle-aged mercenary bloodied after a griffin attack—she healed him as soon as possible and they both tried to sneak away. She was careful not to say too much, but partway into leaving the domain, Merry already swooped back from town, clearly having knowledge that he escaped his room. On the second go, Alicia spilled everything, only for the mercenary to shove her away and try to venture out alone. When Alicia clung on, he threatened violence, only for Bassy to intercept and tear him to shreds.

There were too many variables, too many problems. Alicia tried over and over with each new patient, all the while refilling the circle with her own mana. It took about two months to get back a day, she had found, which was absurd; two or three weeks should've been the maximum. After an entire year of this, the elf realized its reaction was much like when she tries to carve through living material with her earth Aspect—whatever was fueling the circle was conflicting with her mana as a foreign entity. It was confirmed when she tested it with the blood drained from a freshly slain sparrow, feeding into the system with almost perfect efficiency, as little impact as it had.

Unfortunately, that was a dead end. Hunting any magical creature was dangerous work, and traversing the forest, finding them, and laying out traps was impossible for someone without any physical endurance. It was hopeless. If she were born in any other body, Alicia mused, she would've never been here. Never trapped, never bound so futilely, never owing her life to someone else.

Then, almost four years after setting up the spell circle in the basement, Cyg arrived. He was locked up at first glance, shut into the basement—but a week he had freed himself and snuck out of the room. He was caught immediately by Merry, of course, and was thrown back. Somehow, this happened not once but three whole times! In the first instance, he miraculously stole a key from Merry, in the second he picked the lock with scrap metal lying around, and in the third he pulled bits and pieces out of cabinets he shouldn't have been able to reach.

"Now, how were you able to do that?" Merry questioned. The poor thief cried as she tortured him with her magic, a sight that Alicia could hardly stomach. But, she stayed and listened, learning as his Aspect was forced out of him. The witch bemoaned, "Oh, what a waste, to see someone with a rare talent end up like this."

Alicia reset. She led the conversation as soon as he entered the second time, awkwardly trying to goad the answers out but found he was tight-lipped. Still, she succeeded in intriguing Merry enough to keep him around for longer. While the witch did most of the work that round, Alicia found the terrible, terrible truth about Cyg: he was a liar, and he lied as often as he could for absolutely no reason at all!

"Where did you come from?" Alicia wondered out loud.

"Nowhere," he replied.

“Oh come on, you’re obviously not from around here. You’re telling me a street urchin knows table manners?” she goaded.

“I’m from Murkwell—what else do you want me to say?”

Everything, even tiny little things he wouldn’t gain anything from keeping secret like his favorite foods or any hobbies. By the end of the second week, Merry had changed her mind about him for one reason or another, throwing him back into the room. Alicia eventually revealed to Cyg about the time loop, though he kept waving it away in disbelief. By the fourth go, she felt nothing but frustration toward him; it was as if she was conversing with a brick wall! She had never seen anyone so uncooperative in her entire life.

But, Alicia knew, everything had a weakness. She went at him like a shepherd coaxing a stray; she asked for nothing, only dangling the odd bit of information here and there. She plotted escape routes, made him bombs, and revealed Merry’s apparent blind spots for him to attempt on his own. And then, after all those failed attempts, she came to a conclusion she despised—she needed his cooperation in every way imaginable, and that would only be possible if he had the full advantage. He needed to be the one time travelling.

Just as how the thief never trusted her, she could not trust him. How can someone who refuses to let others know even the tiniest detail of their life be held accountable? He even broke an oath made two weeks prior, even if it was made with incomplete knowledge. Forget trust; the elf needed guarantees.

She set it up as best as she could: it was late enough that Cyg and Merry were familiar with each other, but early enough that he could still plot and escape. The elf also triple-checked if he was hiding any other Aspects, for if he could leave alone he certainly would. Then he had to be bound by the strongest moral impulse she could set up—he would be thrown to the wolves only for Alicia to rescue him at the eleventh hour, sacrificing her own security for his. As for the final nail in the coffin, she only had to wake up earlier to make sure she had complete control at the start of the loop.

When she woke up the morning after removing her own sigil, Alicia hurried right over to Cyg’s room, checking his shoulder where she would’ve placed it.

Two teardrops, she counted. Why? How?

Her heart pounded. That was five loops she wasn’t knowledgeable about. What could’ve possibly happened? Have they made any progress whatsoever? Was this a terrible mistake?

By the creek that Cyg seemed all too familiar with, Alicia sat down and listened to his summation of events. She watched carefully for any signs of deceit, but she never spotted any. She had never accomplished it in any of her own loops, as he seemed to constantly mix up his tics and pauses. It was impossible to tell if he was telling a lie or merely recalling a memory, and out of all the things about the thief that bothered her, this was easily the worst.

“...So now, we’re waiting until the end of the week when Merry leaves so we can pick off Bassy; I already have a trap planned that we can build on the day before, and with some metal shrapnel explosives coated with poison, we should be able to take a basilisk down. And failing that, we still have two more tries before I’m dead for good,” Cyg finished.

...Metal shrapnel bombs? Would that even get past Bassy’s hide? Would that sink in deep enough for poison to do anything? Wouldn’t the explosion burn away all the active ingredients? Alicia put a hand over her mouth as she ran over the details again. Cyg said “we”. He’s implying they put this plan together. Would she have agreed to such a thing? With three teardrops left, was she desperate enough to waste on something as ridiculous as killing a basilisk? Could this kill Bassy quickly enough so that they can get her blood into the circle before Merry arrives? What’s stopping Bassy from just running away if she were to be injured severely? It was sloppy, but that was because they hadn’t tested it yet. No, worse of all, why was there an entire loop missing? How could he possibly not know what happened? It had never happened to her, after all! And what the hell is going on with his personality? Why was he so upfront with his feelings all of a sudden? Plus, she saw him practicing his Aspect along the way too, far faster than she’d ever seen him use it before—could he have secretly awakened a second Aspect along the way too?

So many questions, and all too few answers.

She silently stared at him, knowing without a doubt somewhere along the way, he must have told a lie.

The question was... why?