They watched, and they waited. Twice more in the following three tedious days of waiting, Jair was called in to act as translator. He accepted both times, glad of the excuse to enter their spaces and search, but neither time did he find any evidence of Sekir.

This added to the mounting suspicion that the man was in fact the interpreter they’d brought in to interrogate Yast. With Jair present as translator, they’d not need him. If he wanted to track him, he'd need to engineer a situation where Jair's services were unavailable. Easy enough. The harder part would be ensuring he remained present at the same time, able to observe and verify his suspicions.

Why Sekir would be working as an elvish translator for the Hyperion, and how that ended up putting him in position to conquer the kingdom, Jair didn’t know.

But he very much wanted to find out.

“I think it’s time we run some tests.”

“I want to try some negotiation runs," Ran proposed. "Firdon, Larenok, maybe the other teachers, maybe external pressure from my father. So far we’ve thrown ourselves at it by force, but what if there’s a way to talk our way through?”

“Sure. Right now we don’t have any reasonable plan for our getaway. I’ll follow your lead.” He tucked the Sekir problem into the back of his mind for now, trusting his subconscious to be finding options while they worked on other things.

Ran outlined a series of scenarios to try, beginning with simple bribery, and going all the way up to full blackmail.

“I’ve never found any vulnerabilities Larenok doesn’t have contingencies for.” Jair pulled out a narrow metal rectangle, like a name card but thick enough to house a multi-layer spell construct. “Apart from this little beauty, but it’s hard to use properly.”

Ran took the object, examining it thoroughly. “This is one of the things you took from him while he was knocked out. What is it?”

“A prototype from one of his contacts. He’s supposed to be stress testing it. The fact that it’s out of his control will be a major setback.” Jair grinned. “And if we set Yast to making replicas, we could crash his credibility even further. Sure, he’ll make a big deal about being attacked and robbed, but the fact is it was in his possession and ended up on the open market. Not great for his image as a great and powerful mage.”

“You’ve done that in the past?”

“Now and then, when I need to show him I’m serious. Or, you know, just feeling particularly vindictive. It’s hard to pull off, requires a lot of layers of secrecy in order to avoid complications, and would be doubly so now that Yast seems to be under suspicion. But if you anonymously insinuate that you’ve got this prototype and are willing to go public with it if Larenok doesn’t cooperate, you’ve got a small chance of successfully steering his direction.”

“The biggest problem is how very personal our goal is.” Ran frowned thoughtfully. “If we just needed ‘a’ soulsword, we could buy one easily enough. It’s the exact, specific nature of Maelstrom’s past self that makes things complicated. Hard to narrow it down to that degree of specificity without implicating ourselves in the process.”

Jair tucked the object away, nodding. "Best to save this one for later, then."

Ran's first few attempts to bribe Larenok went about as badly as Jair had expected. The headmaster had just recovered from an attack, and was not feeling particularly forgiving of anything outside the norm. He wanted things back to normal and wanted them to stay that way. He was not in the mood to negotiate with children, however rich or powerful their families were, and he certainly wasn't about to do something that might end up with him being renounced by the community.

Larenok could be convinced to allow most anything excusable, but there were hard lines that he refused to cross. Information, fair game. Trading favors or spreading lies, he wouldn't flinch or bat an eye. But straight treason, robbing his own Institute for personal gain, that was the kind of thing he'd only risk for something far more important than anything Jair or Ran could bring to the table.

By giving Ran a soulsword for Jair, Larenok would be opening himself to the very accusations of corruption and bribeableness that he wanted very much to avoid the appearance of.

Ran Serin's word, unfortunately, would be taken over Dalin Larenok's in almost every case. If he were to agree to this kind of deal, he'd be handing Ran leverage over him.

To Larenok, this was unacceptable.

Jair could have told Ran this would be the outcome, but the way Ran was talking and acting made it quite clear that he needed to be feeling like he was doing something. His repeated failures with the sandshark, their continued inability to get Yast away safely, and the complete foreignness of everything Jair was trying to do all added up to something that Ran still struggled to come to terms with. Being able to help, even just by ruling out alternatives that wouldn't work, mattered to him.

Jair left him to his experimentation, perfectly willing to spend a few peaceful loops in negotiation. For all he knew, they may well find an actual solution. Just because he'd never been able to himself didn't mean Ran couldn't. Ran had different training, different resources, different connections.

Alas, Firdon was far less flexible than they’d hoped.

The next several loops, they tried multiple ways to use Firdon’s venal nature to their advantage. Unfortunately, even in the instances where they convinced him to allow Jair to move Maelstrom back into its physical form, he immediately confiscated said weapon the moment he saw it.

Firdon would let them into his vault on the flimsiest of briberies, happy to show off his handiwork. He was incredibly proud of his labyrinth and vault, happy to have students appreciate the artistry and mechanical genius that went into the construction, and happier still to be paid for the privilege.

It was when they tried to actually remove Maelstrom from its place that things got trickier.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Firdon may be glad to bring them in, but he was much less willing to let them out once they tipped their hand.

"I own that sword," Jair pointed out, futilely, in one such encounter. "It's bound to me."

"It came from our vault. You may have found some way to trick it into thinking you're its owner, but you can't even pick it up."

"If you'd give me the mageblade class, I could."

"But you can't. Therefore, it isn't yours. We'll figure out what you did to fake your name in the binding slot, and we'll undo it."

And once Maelstrom was in the Institute’s possession, there it stayed. Neither Firdon nor Larenok was willing to cede it back to Jair under any circumstances. Ever.

Never mind that it was bound and they couldn't use it, it was Legendary. Lock it up in a display case under the best security, no one able to touch or approach it, simply allowing its legendary glow to become another laurel for their elitist academy.

Depending on how the encounter in the vault turned out, Jair was either banished from the school, rescued by Ran and made a ward of the Serin family in return for leaving the school and never coming back, or arrested and sent off to Crelys.

That last one was an uncomfortable situation to be in, one of the closest to an actual failure state that they got. Thankfully Ran always reverted them before the full suppression could engage, but it was all too easy to imagine him being taken out of the picture and ending up trapped in a dead-end timeline with no way back.

Needless to say, none of these arrangements suited them. Even in the best case, Ran’s reputation suffered severely, and none of them resulted in a successful extraction of Maelstrom.

As they'd discovered the first few times, Firdon tended to get violent and quite constraintive when pushed to it.

The instant they went into 'actually steal Maelstrom' mode, Firdon would likewise switch into 'stop the thieves' mode. He'd use his earth magic against them without hesitation the moment they stepped out of line, treating them as actual enemies instead of students, with no compunctions about battering them around a bit in the process.

Eventually, they had to concede defeat. Ran's attempts were varied, interesting, and ultimately doomed. The obstacles before them were simply too stubborn to be swayed.

Even when they didn’t use him to infiltrate the vault, Yast was tracked down and captured in every instance. As Jair had half suspected would happen, but it was important to confirm.

Even bringing Ran’s considerable political weight to the table, they failed to convince anyone that Yast hadn't been behind the break-in. The Hyperion had gotten to the scene soon enough to match his afterdrift to that of someone tampering with Larenok’s wards, so they knew he'd been inside where he had no business being. Larenok had too much influence and was too furious to be deterred.

What the entire disastrous series of loops did do, however, was give Ran a much-needed break from all the fighting and monsters, a chance to instead play in the social and political arenas where he was more comfortable.

Even then, they didn’t find any combination of events along that route that could properly result in their clean escape. They found no way to talk or bribe their way out. Just many more dead ends.

"Back to thievery, then?" Jair asked at the end of one of these runs.

Ran sat beside him in a chained cart bound for Crelys, head in hands, trying to work up the courage to trigger his reversion soulspell despite its painful process. "Yes. Okay. We can do it your way."

"Moving forward with the heist, I only see two ways to get Yast out of this. We need to find how they’re tracking him and disable it, or get far enough away fast enough that it wears out on its own before they can catch up. If we go with option one, it’ll mean more infiltration and sabotage, and we'll need to stay out of reach until after their comparison sample collapses. I’d bet anything that they’ll start pulling in every elf they see, they’re uncommon enough in Veor for that to be viable. Option two, just a lot of playing runaway and evading followers. Which is harder when they have a straight line pointing to the target, but far from impossible."

“And that assumes that we get the rest in place and escape with Maelstrom ourselves.”

“We will. Though admittedly, our best chance at getting the timing down is if you took over again as our sandshark driver. I don’t suppose you’re willing to try that again yet? I think that might be our best shot."

"I really don't want to, but…” Ran huffed a disgruntled breath. “I won't deny this is incredibly frustrating."

"That's one word for it."

Ran flicked a glance at him. "Is this how you feel all the time?"

"Not all the time. Sometimes it's fun."

"But it feels impossible."

"Exactly. So keep trying things until we find one that works. When we find one that sort of works, iterate on it until it's in its ideal form. If that doesn't work, try something else."

"Is that why you spent so long throwing your head at the wall trying to rescue me from the dragon?"

"Yes. To put it bluntly, trying things haphazardly is less efficient than trying things in a dull, repetitive, and extremely dull fashion."

"You said dull twice."

"It's very dull. Though, being loopers, we can mix things up a bit whenever we really need a break from the monotony."

"Alright. If you'll come with me, I'll try the sandshark thing again. But I still think there has to be a better way."

"Oh, there are doubtless many better ways. If we had known the specifics of the breakin ahead of time, there are countless other people I could have recruited. If we had a few more hours, I could get a few professional deep tribe riders to take us. We could get a second stone mage and lure Firdon away. But, once again, we're stuck on too tight of a time limit with too few resources."

"So it's all down to me.” Ran looked torn between fear and excitement, with trepidation currently in the lead. “Either I learn how to break past the cactus in the timefall, or I learn how to drive a sandshark."

"Or, we can go on vacation, trust that Maelstrom will be fine…" Jair grimaced even as he said it, Maelstrom twinging painfully in his soul as a reminder that everything was very much not fine.

"Don't try to lie to me."

Jair held up his hands in surrender. "Alright. You win. We'll do this the hard way, and by hard way I mean you need to learn stuff. Painful and annoying stuff. Welcome to my world."

"That’s what I get for saying I wanted to overcome fear, huh?” Ran laughed hollowly. “Fair enough. Let the training begin. But you’re coming with me. None of this sending me off alone into the thick of it."

“You’re right. I should have taken this slow from the beginning. I was pushing for the next step without finishing the one we’re on.” Jair grimaced. “It’s easy to forget that you don’t know everything I do.”

“And easy to forget I do know things you don’t.”

Jair snorted. “You’re not wrong. Perceptions get… strange, the longer you repeat the same days and weeks and years. Who you are, who you have been, who you could become, they all blur together. I let the urgency of the current problem distract me from what matters. We have advantages now I never did in the past. I’m used to seeing how far people can be pushed within the confines of the current situation, but you’re going to be doing this all as many times as me, perhaps more.”

“Apology accepted.” Ran sighed, eyes flashing gold to drop them through time back to the beginning, standing at the transit platform of the Institute. “Now teach me how to do this properly so we can finally get your sword back where it belongs.”

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