Jair watched his interrogator from across the table. The man hadn’t bothered to introduce himself, simply began reading off questions in perfect Zakvari.

Jair observed closely, incredibly aware of every twitch and breath, every mannerism.

The back of his mind replayed memories of Sekir from previous timelines: the way he stood when addressing the people, the way he sat, the way he spoke.

This man had a faint Kijali accent, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Kijal was a highly populated continent. Plenty of crossover between Veor and Kijal.

Still.

This man was not the same, but neither was he different enough. He sat too still, too controlled. He didn't seem natural, his movements just that little bit more perfect than should be possible.

Jair didn't need to double check. He didn't need to pay such close attention. His instincts had known it from the start. This had to be Sekir. Even if it didn’t look like it. There was no other option.

But still he watched, cataloging, double and triple checking. What if, what if not?

Then, his interrogator broke script.

"You entertain me in a way I have not been entertained in some time," the man said, with a familiar quirk to his tone. One which Jair recognized immediately.

Jair smiled faintly and relaxed. There was no longer any doubt in his mind as to who he was dealing with. It should have been worse, knowing he sat in the room with his nemesis, but instead the certainty was a relief.

“How are they tracking Yast? Soulspell, I know, but who and where?”

“You can’t imagine I’d tell you such a thing, even if I knew it.”

Jair shrugged. “Doesn’t hurt to ask.”

“I’m the one asking questions at the moment,” Sekir said mildly, and continued to ask questions.

Jair continued to answer them. He took the time to study his adversary, memorizing every piece of his appearance. Sekir looked so very out of place in such a drab, unassuming body.

Jair never broke character, and neither did Sekir. Yet something had shifted between them. An acknowledgment of sorts. I know you know that I'm a liar, and you know that I know you’re a liar, but we still have to play by these silly rules for now.

Then the interview reached its conclusion, the report finished, the folder tucked away.

Sekir folded his hands on the desk and regarded Jair with open curiosity, his lips twitched into a smile. "Now that that's taken care of, we can get on to what's important here. Who are you really?"

"Someone who’s been looking for you for a very long time now."

"Me? What interest could someone like you have in someone like me?"

Jair leaned forward, tone dropping. "Because I know what you're planning, Sekir Lifekeeper, and I'm not going to let it happen."

Sekir’s reaction was subtle, almost imperceptible. A faint whitening of the knuckles where his hands clasped each other, the slightest twitch of tension in his shoulders, but there was no doubt. He recognized the name, and it did not please him to hear it.

"Who are you?" All playfulness had dropped from his tone.

"I’m nobody. Nobody of significance." Jair slipped seamlessly from Zakvari into Kijali, just to prove he could.

"You don't know how severely you are tempting me, ‘nobody.’” Sekir’s eyes flicked to the Hyperion officer standing by the door, who stood observing without comprehension, clearly fluent neither in Zakvari nor Kijali. “If the circumstances were different, you'd be dead."

“I know.” Now it was Jair’s turn to smile. "Under different circumstances, I would never have revealed myself. But it is more important for me to absolutely verify who you are, than to conceal myself from you."

Sekir’s expression twitched, then flattened back to neutrality almost immediately.

Jair made no effort to conceal his own grin. As much as he wanted to destroy his old nemesis, tear him apart body and soul to remove him from this world for good, there was still something invigorating about their exchanges.

Plus, at the moment, he held the upper hand. For once, it was Sekir who was off balance, unsure. Once they started interacting in loops meant to be serious, there would be no allowance for honesty or revealing himself. Jair would have to be invisible, unseen, unknown. But right now, it felt very good to sit face to face with Sekir and gleefully watch him squirm.

Jair would never admit as much, but he’d missed their ongoing battles of mysteries and secrets. He wouldn’t have thought it at the time. Living through the battles with Sekir had felt wearying and disheartening at the time, but now he could look at them with fondness.

The beastlords and vampires, for all their destructive capability, were a more tediously mundane sort of challenge. Overwhelming force was difficult to defeat, yes, but far less interesting to fight. He’d been trapped in that dead end for far too long, sure of his eventual demise.

There was never certainty when facing Sekir. Never a clear path to victory. Always a gamble. Always a game of information and deception. While Sekir nearly always came back after his defeats in one of a handful of forms that Jair would recognize, occasionally he switched things up for no clear reason.

Sekir had access to places Jair never would, so huge swaths of his maneuvering were blocked out from perusal by even the most determined of time travelers.

At least, until now. Ran’s survival unlocked a lot of doors that no amount of prodigious showing off could have accomplished.

"So, what have you been up to the past few months?" Jair asked, fully relaxing into casual chatter. He’d confirmed what he needed to confirm, now the rest of the loop was free to play around with. "I was surprised to hear you’d take up work as an interpreter. I always thought such a station was a bit below you. I'd assumed you would be off ruling some noble house by now."

Sekir’s face twitched again, almost a frown, the expression lingering a moment before he squelched it. He spoke lightly, though Jair could see the tension underneath. "It appears you have me at a severe disadvantage. Still not going to give me your real name?”

Jair shrugged. “What would you do with it if I did?”

“I’m not sure. Depends on what it is."

“Fair enough.” Jair stroked his chin thoughtfully. “I don’t see the harm in it. Jair Welburne, good to finally see you now.”

“Welburne…” Sekir’s brow furrowed. “Veori? Why would a local be disguised as a Zakvari elf who speaks Kijali?”

“It’s the only way I could think of to get in touch with you.”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“And now you have. What’s next?” Sekir tapped his index fingers together. “You announce your intentions to stop me, in dramatic fashion; if you wanted to hire me you wouldn’t have done that. I tend to appreciate theatrics, but you are currently a prisoner and are unlikely to change that circumstance.”

“Oh, I’ll be gone long before they find a place that can hold me. It’s been such a long time since we debated anything, when the opportunity came along, how was I to resist?”

“Yet I don’t know you. Interesting. I almost wonder…”

“You mentioned hiring you, how much would it cost for you to find information for me? I still need to know how my cousin is being followed.”

“For you? More than you can afford.”

Jair had access to what remained of Ran’s spending allowance for the month, which was a considerable sum. Even if Sekir demanded more than that, in a dead-end loop like this it didn’t matter if they had to beg Ajriol for a loan. The information was far more valuable than anything else.

There was a certain beauty to the irony of paying Sekir to do the searching for them. Assuming he agreed to do so.

“You might be surprised.”

“I’m surprised already. You intrigue me, ‘nobody’ who knows so much and brags so freely.”

“Is it bragging? I thought it was more of a declaration of intent.”

“You challenge my pride, poke at my secrecy, and then expect to hire me to do your information gathering?”

“I admit, if I’d thought it through ahead of time, that’s not the order I’d have done things in. But the chance of coming face to face with you again has been quite distracting.”

“Again, this ‘again,’ when I don’t know you.”

“That’s right, we’ve never met in this form.” Jair gestured at Sekir’s current body, looking every bit the dull muscleheaded subordinate. “I wonder how long it’ll last?”

There was no warning. Light flared as Sekir activated his soulspell, purple flaring with mesmerising suddenness.

Jair blinked and looked around for any clue of what had changed. He still didn't know what Sekir’s soulspell did. He’d seen it activated on countless occasions, but it never seemed to do anything specific.

“How do you know so much?” Sekir asked. “Why do you know my name? What do you know of the future?”

Jair smiled and shook his head. “A man has to have his secrets.”

“I thought I did.”

“Wondering where you went wrong? I suppose that’s a question that’ll just have to keep haunting you for another few days.”

Sekir frowned. He rose from his seat and paced in a circle around the room, frowning at Jair from all angles in an unusually forward display of emotion. "I am curious to see what you plan, but experience has taught me that the appearance of overconfidence can be a mask for true danger."

He moved without warning.

Jair threw himself aside in the same instant, evading the attack that he only recognized consciously after he was already moving.

Sekir had a dagger in his hand, from where Jair didn't know. The instants seemed to stretch.

The chair clattered to the ground behind him as Jair rolled and sprang to his feet. Jair screamed for help, scrambling to get away from the future conqueror, his heart racing at the unexpected turn to the encounter.

The Hyperion guard shouted for them to stop, rushing in to try to break up the fight, but they were too close. The room was too small and Sekir wasn’t playing around.

Jair’s hand deflected a blow aimed at his throat, but his body moved too slowly to keep up. Knowledge alone may have been enough against common thieves or bandits, but Sekir was a solid match on a good day, and Jair had no weapon.

Sekir's blade sliced deep into his stomach.

"Hey! You don't have authorization for that." The guard grabbed Sekir and held him by the arms to prevent him attacking Jair again, shouting for help.

Sekir did not resist. He immediately released the weapon, allowing it to clatter to the floor, and stood with the calm serenity of someone satisfied with their actions.

Jair slid to the ground, taking stock of his injury. From how it felt, it would definitely be deadly without a healer involved and fairly soon. Sekir knew what he was doing.

"I hope you don't imagine this will stop me," he told Sekir, not trying to move from where he lay. "I'm still going to kill you and tear your soul apart as many times as it takes until you never come back again."

"Of course it won't stop you. But it will slow you down. That's all I need."

"What was that about?” the guard demanded. “What did he say?"

"Mainly threats against the future king and his court. Don’t bother trying to save him. He’s not worth it.”

Three other Hyperion guards rushed in, then, but their build was centered around killing mages, not saving them.

The nearest healer was too far away. It would take minutes to reach anyone, minutes Jair didn’t have.

But Jair was no ordinary mage. He may still be in student form, without Maelstrom, without his class, without a single spell pattern imprinted, but he still had more knowledge of magic than anyone in the world. Including some very, very terrible options that would be cripplingly stupid under ordinary circumstances, but when you were a time looper sometimes they were worth the cost.

He allowed his eyes to close, slumping to the floor, calming his body as much as physically possible. Slow the heartbeat, slow the blood loss. He pressed one hand against his stomach, slick with blood. His fingers traced the edges of the slice as he pushed hard on the connection between physical body and manabody.

If the wound were any larger, he’d never be able to pull this off in his current state, but one single deadly stab was just barely within his capabilities to handle.

Someone jostled him, there was shouting and footsteps, someone yelled irately, probably at Sekir, but Jair allowed all the background to blur into meaninglessness.

His manabody wasn’t currently capable of pushing mana out into the world, there was no way for him to cast a spell right now.

But what he was about to do wasn’t a spell. It was more akin to self-cannibalism.

The vast majority of usage of the manabody was twofold: spell patterns imprinted physically into the magical layer of your self, then burning the energy stored within the manabody through those spells and back into tangible reality.

The manabody followed the physical body, so pressing a physical finger into your physical arm also pressed your magical finger into your magical arm. But a manabody also differed from the physical in substantial ways, mainly its less complex nature as an unformed vessel. The manabody could be shaped around imprinted spells, a soulspell, construct connections, or any combination of those.

It could also be used as raw material. Overdrawing on the manabody weakened your magical self until it could recover, but every spell you cast used the manabody as either filter or fuel.

Displacing the manabody from the physical was very difficult, requiring a split attention that most people’s minds instinctively shied away from. No one wanted to walk away leaving their ability to touch magic behind, and spellcasting was much more difficult without the guidance. People who fully disconnected the two tended to either end up magicless or comatose.

Displacing it inside of itself was even harder.

Jair pressed his hand tightly against the slice, focusing past the static of pain that would have incapacitated him if he allowed himself to acknowledge it, and forcefully disconnected his physical hand from his mana hand. He reached down into himself, grasped all the power centered in his stomach area and crushed it in his fist, tearing it free of the surrounding manabody and dragging it forcefully into the physical.

Waves of sharp burning pulsed through his bodies in protest, the physical trying to reject the magical, the magical having sustained significant abrupt damage, but Jair held it together in place.

His body trembled uncontrollably, and the moment he released the power he’d continue to succumb to blood loss, but for the moment he could sustain ghostly mana patches to keep things together. Hands gripped tight, he didn’t let go.

Not the way he’d planned to spend the day, but he wasn’t going to let Sekir get away with killing him without at least retaining the memory of it. Otherwise, he’d do the same thing again, probably several times before Ran grew suspicious enough to demand to accompany him.

Jair really needed to pay better attention to the fact that he wasn’t the prime looper any more. If he was going to do something reckless in future, he’d need to have a better plan than ‘it should be fine.’

Well, he thought grimly, perhaps a few hours or days with nothing else to concentrate on but how much trouble and pain he was causing himself would be enough for the lesson to stick.

If he was going to taunt Sekir, he should do it in a controlled environment, and not when there was a chance of days before they could revert time. Being stabbed wasn’t a fun experience. Not something he’d missed.

Sekir wasn’t ordinarily so prone to personal violence. Whether this was a side effect of the form he’d taken for the moment, or simply because Jair had pushed him rather far, it was hard to guess.

By the time Jair’s awareness could leave the concentration on his survival, Sekir had been removed from the premises and a healer brought in. Said healer was very unhappy with the situation, scolding and complimenting Jair by turns for having survived but mutilated himself in the process. The physical injuries could never heal now without the mana staying, and the manabody itself would scar over and be significantly weakened for the rest of his life.

All Jair cared about was that he hadn’t started to dissolve at the soul level yet.

Once he was stabilized, they returned him to his cell, where he lay and pondered the situation for a long time until Ran finally arrived to turn back time.

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