Jair stared at Ran. "You reverted without me. How?"

Ran stared at Jair. “Huh?”

“We were about to begin, then you…” gesturing at Ran’s pale form, “stumbled and started talking loopy.”

Ran’s expression shifted to slowly dawning horror. "Wait, you mean you don't remember any of those loops?"

"How many?"

"Eh... ten or twenty? I lost count."

"What happened? Why so many?"

"Well, things kept going wrong. First we tried a few different ways to get rid of the secretary, but she kept coming in at the wrong time. Finally you hired a couple of the younger students to lure her away. Then we triggered some extra alarms in the floor that you weren't aware of, then once we accounted for those the extra time spent disarming them meant we were in the way of a shift change for recordkeepers, and they reported us. Took a few tries to get around that one, but eventually we just waited until after the shift change."

Jair laughed. "I guess this is how you feel most of the time, huh? So we always ended up caught?"

"Yeah. Not worth continuing. I tried to let it play out at first, because I thought we could... well, that it would be less serious than it was, but when they started talking about suppression fields I got spooked."

"With good reason."

There was no way to truly stop someone from using their soulspell, but you could make it incredibly difficult. Jair would have been able to force activation easily regardless of who tried to stop him. Ran, though? Better to be safe.

"The delay meant your patsy students were already in a different class, so we had to do something else about the secretary, but Lorsit did something loud out in the yard and she ran off to investigate. We disabled the alarms, but before we could reach the vault, Professor Firdon came running in. He and Lorsit had a really dramatic duel, but we always ended up crushed in the collateral since the whole fight took place underground."

"Ohhh, I forgot to factor him in. Of course he'd be able to sense someone tampering with his maze."

"Yeah, that's... exactly what you said after the first time." Ran looked faintly uncomfortable at this admission.

"I am me, what can I say?"

"The same thing in different circumstances, apparently."

"But the way you're talking, we were both looping the whole time. What happened the last time? Why don't I remember any of this?"

Though his voice came out with its usual flippancy, Jair did find himself unsettled. Learning an alternate future version of himself had lived so many repetitions without him even being aware of it felt very strange.

But… his life had been madness since the day he first attuned his soulspell, so he pushed the concern aside. If he couldn’t take something like this in stride he’d have given up a long time ago.

"We split up,” Ran began. “You were going to set an ambush with Yast's constructs, while I waited outside to divert Firdon. I slowed him down, but he eventually brushed me off and went down in. The ground shook a few times, but no one ever came out. I waited until they kicked me off the grounds, I tried looking everywhere for you, but when you didn't show up I reverted anyway."

"So this is the same starting point as all of those loops?"

"Yes."

"Then sounds like all we need to do is come up with a distraction, disable some traps, and not get squished by the angry stone mage. And the fact that you've got some experience looping back to the same point already is good. Has it not started to crumble yet? How many more tries do we get from this spot before we need to redo all the recruitment stuff?"

"I'm.... not sure? This one's like a big spiky blob right in my face, so I would have to be trying to steer around it to get further."

"Oooh, a shelf! Nice. That'll make things very convenient."

Jair ran back over the past few days mentally, to see if he'd overlooked anything, but there wasn't a lot that could be optimized. Without Maelstrom or his class, beginning imprints would be counter-productive. They'd been doing their physical exercises faithfully, and Ran's imprints were coming along nicely.

"This is a perfect start point. Wow, I should have given you control of the loops years ago!"

Ran scowled and rubbed at his chest. "It's not fun. Getting stabbed on that thing every time hurts."

"Does it?" Jair straightened, suddenly very intent. "That's troubling."

He'd never experienced any real physical feedback from using his own soulspell. Even crashing hard onto a shelf was only metaphorically dramatic, the full experience of his timeline reversion disappearing the moment he dropped back into reality.

“And you still feel it now? This whole conversation later?”

Ran nodded.

"Does it feel like physical pain, mana pain, or soul pain?"

"I don't know the difference."

“Give me a few minutes.” Jair relaxed into himself, allowing all the muscle strain, manabody chill, and soulspell damage to reach him one by one, scanning his entire being for anything out of the ordinary.

Nothing. Nothing new, at least. He took a shaky breath as he relegated the angry screams of his body and soul back to background noise, reclaiming his usual ignoration.

“Describe it.”

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With examples of every type of damage readily to mind, Jair listened as Ran fumbled through the description of his symptoms, gradually relaxing as it failed to line up fully with anything dangerous. It most closely matched his own feeling back when he’d first returned with the ascended Maelstrom.

“Sounds like soulstrain. It should go away on its own, nothing to worry about. Because your soulspell developed so fast and jumped in power to such an extreme right away, followed by using it several times in quick succession, it’s out of sync with the rest of you, creating that unsettled dissonance.”

He did his best to project confidence, but the nature of Ran’s soulspell made him worry. It didn’t sound quite the same, so there was always the possibility that something deeper had gone amiss. That wasn't something he could diagnose at the moment, however, and there wasn't any point in fretting.

He had his own soul-deep problems to deal with and they weren't going to go away any sooner if he didn't get Maelstrom back.

"So, where do we start? Distract the receptionist, avoid the workers, disable the traps. Easy, easy, easy."

"Why are we attacking from inside at all?" Lorsit spoke up. "If we know where the marathon ends, shouldn't we be attacking the vault directly? Tunnel down?"

"Won't work," Ran and Jair said in unison.

Jair smiled and gestured for Ran to continue.

"The wards on the area to alert people in case of earthquakes or sandshifts are sensitive enough that anything attempting to tunnel through would trip them. Firdon would come investigate, and he's a little bit outside your weight class."

“Third and two,” Jair provided. “I believe you’re still at high second?”

Lorsit frowned, but subsided. He didn't like his own status as a master stone mage questioned, but he couldn't be expected to fight someone like Firdon solo and escape with his life.

Firdon was on another level. His amplifiers had been set in so many years they were practically unbreakable, the power flow through his manabody perfectly focused into doing exactly one thing and do it with complete perfection.

Compared to someone with Firdon's age and experience, Lorsit had only thirty some years of life, half that of experience. He was good - very good, almost a genius - but genius only went so far.

"Let's just try this and see how it goes. Ran, you're sticking with me. If the reversion only brings both of us back if I'm within a certain physical distance, better to be cautious."

Ran nodded. "It's disconcerting knowing that everything we talked about and planned out, you've forgotten."

"You'll get used to it." He was half talking to himself too. It nagged quietly at him, wondering what he'd learned and lost.

"I know, so you say, but still. Haven't yet."

"So, starting out." Jair looked around. A class period was about to end. There would be a brief pause before the next, during which most people either meandered to their next classroom and chatted with their friends, or hurried to get personal things done in the few minutes free.

He needed to pick someone without friends or personal obligations who could be convinced to dissuade the secretary from paying attention. Hm.

He discarded the first dozen names that came to mind, since he was sure he'd have already suggested them in the past. Who would he not normally consider working with?

Eria came to mind, the wretched coward, who would gladly bully him until the moment he could stand up for himself, then run and make excuses for herself. But as much as he liked the idea of using someone who'd been such a miserable pain in his previous lifetimes as a distraction, he wouldn't try to recruit her. She was unlikely to cooperate, whatever amount he promised her.

That did bring to mind someone else who might be of use, though.

"Rhebina? Did we try with her?"

Korin Rhebina, he could threaten with revealing her brother's status to his faction - a very elite and powerful faction which their family desperately needed to stay connected to. It would be a one-time-use kind of thing, he couldn't threaten her more than the once before she started setting her fairly well-connected and murder-happy relatives on him, but she was willing to cave once so long as he promised to leave her and her brother alone thereafter.

He could also do something about Lian, who was the primary force currently using the same information against her to hold her to his faction, but she wasn't independent minded enough to want to break free without outside interference. If Jair offered her freedom, she'd probably just shrug and say it was between him and Lian.

"I don't think so..." Ran frowned, thinking back. "No, I don't remember Korin being around for any of it."

Jair nodded, mentally reviewing his oldest foggiest memories. He could remember her specific plan for every day from Jair's moment receiving his class onward, but even in his deepest back recollections he had nothing prior to that about anyone but himself, his family, and Ran. A few sharp, terrible memories from well before now, but they were worse than useless and completely irrelevant.

“Then we’ll try her next.”

'Find Korin' sounded easy, but it really wasn't. Korin Rhebina wasn't the sort to be easily found, primarily because she had every reason to avoid being noticed by anyone for any reason.

Lian Teretho, the head bully of their little gang, controlled Korin through blackmail and playing on her desire for potentially valuable future connections, while any other 'friends' she made were superficial at best. Therefore, she spent as much time as possible ignoring reality to the best of her ability.

This often took the form of reading in her apartment, or running around the track in the central dome, but just as often could be waiting early in the next classroom or even simply sitting in a corner of the hallway out of ready view.

Jair checked all her relatively-usual haunts, finding no trace of her, then returned to her house in case she'd stopped by there.

He was only halfway through his search when he heard a commotion over by the admin building.

Cursing, he ran over to see what was going on. Yast and Lorsit had been hiding out in the unkempt spare shrubs behind the building, where they should theoretically be out of sight from anyone's casual glance, but apparently it hadn't been sufficient.

By the time he reached them, Ran was in a full-blown argument with Professor Vern, who was gesturing suspiciously at the intruders with his spectacles. Hadren, the custodian, was shouting at Yast and pointing angrily, clearly displeased by the disturbance to his shrubs. Yast, not understanding a word of it, stood with a calm expression of mild curiosity.

“What’s happening here?” Jair asked, jogging up to the argument.

"Jair, please tell me you found something useful," Ran pleaded, gratefully turning away from the still-ranting Vern. "We've gone from one useless disaster to another."

"More than one, already?"

"I'll tell you once we're back." Ran gritted his teeth with a pained hiss, glancing back at the ongoing arguments, shook his head and gestured. "I need you to tell me if you have any information, just in case..." he trailed off, 'you don't return with me' left unsaid.

"Rhebina isn't in any of her usual spots. Haven't searched the hallways yet, or classrooms."

Ran nodded, then his eyes flashed gold and they were tumbling and sliding down the timeline. Ran was right, there was a shelf right there, mere hours before. Jair slammed into it, then dropped back into reality. Ran hissed and staggered, hand going to his chest.

"You alright?"

"It's getting worse."

"Maybe we should refrain from reverting again for a while. Call the whole thing off for a while."

Ran shook his head, though his voice remained strained. "Too late now, we've already attacked Larenok. There's no way we'll get in again after that, if we don't finish this now."

"Maybe this very trip, no, but we could go on the run. Evade detection and avoid everyone until we can be certain your soul's up to the strain, then come back here and do it properly."

"And I'd agree with you, except that we don't know how long that'll take, and every day that you go without Maelstrom back where it belongs the higher chance it'll dissolve before you can reclaim it. A little discomfort isn't going to stop me from saving your Legendary sword."

Jair didn't know what to say to that, so he just punched Ran in the shoulder. "I'm going to start searching for Rhebina again. Maybe hide somewhere better this time."

"I'll go back to the city and wait there. Come get us when you're ready to go."

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