"A tracking agency." Jair shook his head. "I expected more from someone like Larenok."

“Miren Parsev of Vaes Primary, to be exact,” Sekir confirmed. He glanced curiously at Ran, who stood behind Jair with his soulspell active, but didn’t comment.

Using Ran to discern Sekir’s soulspell was the obvious endgame of hiring the man, but it left the question of how to provoke the right reaction. Jair hadn’t been able to discern much pattern to Sekir’s soulspell usage; he used it sparsely, but in a wide variety of situations.

“Any progress with unbinding that sword?” Jair asked casually.

Sekir smiled thinly. “You say that as if adjusting an object on the soul level were a trivial undertaking.”

Jair held his hands up in surrender. “You’re the expert.”

“Even experts need time.”

Jair’s smile turned sly. “So right now you’re not armed with a Legendary weapon. Right?”

Sekir shifted his weight ever so slightly, eyes narrowing as they flicked between Jair and Ran. “I didn’t say that.”

Jair took a step to the side, as though to block Sekir’s exit from the alley.

“What is this?” Sekir asked, voice cold.

Jair only smiled.

Sekir’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “If you know who I am, then you should know better.”

“Oh, I know you better than you’d imagine, Sekir,” Jair stalked gleefully nearer, allowing himself to revel in the moment. Once again, his adversary was the ignorant one, and Jair held all the cards. “Would-be king, master sorcerer, perpetually reborn…”

Sekir lunged, knife flashing.

Jair was ready for it. He caught the man’s wrist with both hands, dropping to the ground in the same motion, dragging Sekir off balance.

The sorcerer recovered quickly, but before he could strike again, Ran shouted and ran forward.

Sekir kicked Jair away, sending him sprawling, and turned on Ran.

One of Ran’s eyes flashed pink; Sekir’s flared purple.

Sekir’s blade slammed into Ran’s throat. Jair tackled Sekir to the ground, not fast enough.

Ran’s eyes dulled with shock, blood pouring from between the fingers held disbelievingly to his throat.

Jair wrested Sekir’s dagger away, though the intensive focus left him at the disadvantage. The weapon went clattering to the stone; Sekir's eyes remained alight, staring down into Jair's.

Jair felt sudden vertigo. He couldn’t look away, snared by Sekir’s spell. "Ran!"

Sekir’s hand pressed against Jair’s chest, an imprint on his forearm glowing. Compression slammed down, shattering Jair’s ribs and tearing apart his chest. He wouldn’t be surviving that.

He couldn’t laugh, no breath remaining to him, but he grinned in his foe’s face as Sekir cursed.

Then golden light dragged him down through time.

Ran sat down right there in the middle of the walkway between the transit arrival platform and the administration building, breathing hard.

Jair waved Yast and Lorsit to wait, but didn’t break the silence.

For a long time, neither spoke.

"So that's Sekir."

Jair nodded.

"Think his intel is good?"

Jair nodded.

Ran rubbed a hand across his throat, absently. "Echomind. His soulspell lets him observe through another's perspective. When I picked it up, it was echoing both of you."

Jair frowned. Mind reading was a dangerous power, in the hands of a dangerous man. "Sounds useful."

No wonder he tried to kill Jair any chance he got. He’d probably have done the same himself if their positions were reversed and he found out a time traveler was stalking him.

"Yeah." Ran's voice remained distant, subdued.

"Not used to dying yet?"

Ran shook himself, forced a smile. "I'm fine."

He didn’t sound fine. Jair wanted to believe it was just the effect of being assassinated, but the poorly-concealed strain in Ran’s face made it clear things were continuing to worsen.

There were other things Jair wanted to try, having such relatively easy access to Sekir this early in the timeline was an incredible opportunity.

But though Ran had stopped complaining about Temporal Reversion, his obvious reluctance to activate it at the end of each loop only grew. Ran tried to suppress his pained reactions each time they arrived back, but the backlash was clearly growing steadily worse.

While Jair's instinct was to keep going until he could figure out every possible detail about Sekir’s mission and whereabouts, he couldn't justify forcing his admittedly rather extreme methodology onto Ran when it was his friend who’d be suffering the continually-increased consequences.

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For now, retrieving Maelstrom and getting away with it was the important part. There were plenty of months to investigate in later.

Jair knew from experience how hard it would be to learn anything worth knowing.

Sekir was a very cautious man, highly observant, and didn’t hesitate to get violent. While he’d been much less aggressive during his time as advisor to King Farshen, generally playing the role of reasonable intermediary rather than trying to kill everyone in sight, trying to follow him usually ended quickly and badly.

With what they now knew about Sekir’s abilities it made sense why that would be the case. Being able to infallibly tell whether any given individual was working against him removed a lot of the guesswork from security.

Hiring other people to follow Sekir would invariably lead to them either being out-bribed, threatened into silence, or murdered.

Overall, the attempts to follow him would cost more than Jair could reasonably justify. He’d gladly accept the consequences if it were only himself, but with Ran to consider, he wouldn’t force his friend through another thirty or forty loops just to slowly piece together Sekir’s arrival route. Not when each successive reversion was clearly causing increased strain with no sign of it dying down.

"Alright, we know the agent and the tracking company he works for. For now we should go straight to their headquarters. Find where he is and what he looks like, then we'll have our target for next loop."

"What will you do next loop?"

"Whatever is necessary to put him out of commission." Jair grimaced. “It’s going to be incredibly expensive. This kind of thing isn’t easy to pull off. It’d be much easier to kill the tracker than disable, but…”

"I’d rather waste money than people’s lives,” Ran agreed. “And you trust whoever you hire not to be a problem in future?”

“I trust them more than I trust Larenok. We’ll have to move fast, but now we have a specific name it should be easy enough to deal with.

Ran considered the plan, trying to find any flaw, but eventually nodded. "I suppose all you need me to do is keep driving the sandshark?"

"We're almost there, and then you won’t have to worry about it again."

"Well… it's not that hard once you get the hang of it."

Jair grinned. "Oh? Have you come to realize the wisdom of my vast experience?"

"Yes, yes. You were right. I'm capable of a lot more than I know."

"And don't forget it. Because what you do know is already a lot."

Ran punched him half-heartedly, but at least he was regaining a semblance of his normal humor. “Come on, let’s go spend exorbitant amounts of money.”

The convoluted path to success in this specific instance involved Jair impersonating a particular noble, raising a loud fuss at the front desk over a supposed robbery that had gone terribly wrong and not manage to trip any of the security that was supposed to be in place. He harangued the poor receptionists ceaselessly until the team heading out to report Yast’s whereabouts walked by on their way to exit the premises.

He then proceeded to grab the arm of the tracker in question, continuing his tirade while he demanded that they drop what they were doing and come to his manor immediately, and casually tagging him with a detection construct slipped into the man’s pocket.

Jair let himself be escorted away from them only with much cursing, and followed them all the way to the transit station, shouting after them maintaining his irate bumptious persona the whole way. That minor delay should suffice, and the tracker would allow his criminal contacts to hunt down the specific person properly.

His part in the affair done, he immediately transited to the trade city of Silvas where he discarded every trace of his disguise.

Everyone else’s parts in the heist went off flawlessly. Yast cleared the security, then retreated to his apartments. Lorsit broke into the vault, escaping down to the sand beneath the cliff, where Ran waited with a sandshark to slip them away to safety before Firdon could so much as catch a glimpse of them.

Back to himself, Jair arrived back at Astralla Institute in time for dinner, stopping at their team members’ rented rooms on his way to drop off Maelstrom’s soul into its body. Lorsit handed over the bundle of soulswords for Jair to transfer, and Yast, safe and not arrested at long last, agreed to keep watch over it until Jair was ready to take full possession of the sword.

For now, he was in no rush. Having the blade's soul reunited with its physical form was sufficient to stave off any potential damage, and he needed to focus his attention on the next steps.

Not much point taking Maelstrom at the moment. Until he could get his class back, having the sword with him would be more suspicious than useful.

The investigation into the break-in halted all classes and all but locked down the Institute for a few days, though many parents pulled their children out at least temporarily with concerns over the security of the facilities.

The day after the Maelstrom heist, the school was abuzz with the news. Whoever was in charge of keeping the breakin a secret had not done a very good job.

Everyone knew someone had broken in and got away with it.

Oliss kept going on about how she had predicted this, drawing clever parallels between some of her more inane visions and what did end up occurring. Jair was absolutely certain he'd heard her use those exact same examples to demonstrate she had predicted other, very different events, but he only smiled and left her to it. The more the rumors were muddied by misinformation, the better position they were in to remain utterly undetected.

Headmaster Larenok was not a happy man. Between being attacked in his house, his workplace being robbed, and the Institute’s reputation taking a severe beating, Jair had rarely seen him so tense and furious.

Ajriol and Ran had a very public shouting match when Lord Serin came to collect Ran. Ran insisted on bringing Jair with them, Larenok flatly refused to let Jair come, and Ran insisted on staying behind with him.

Jair had to admit, Ajriol’s acting was immaculate. No one guessed they’d planned this out in advance.

Aside from the direct impact on the Institute itself, there was a great deal of political fallout to Jair's whole masquerade. Larenok became convinced that the Veshin family was involved, despite evidence to the contrary and their vehement protests.

It began an interesting feud which would no doubt reshape the political landscape in ways Jair generally preferred to avoid. Without control of the loop, he couldn’t properly explore the new paradigm, which would both force caution and invalidate large sections of his political knowledge.

He could have reached a subtler outcome given sufficient time, but the more snappish Ran grew the more convinced Jair was that something was going to break if they kept pushing at the same rate that Jair was used to.

So, leaving all of political chaos to play out in the background, Ran and Jair focused on imprinting their spells, exercising their bodies, and acting the part of ordinary students.

At least, Ran worked on his imprints. Jair could only focus on strengthening his manabody as a whole, since he would never be able to take the mageblade class once he had an imprint already begun. Class requirements were rigid.

It wouldn't be a problem in the long term. Starting imprints with his manabody in its current undefined state would probably have ended up slowing his progress anyway. It just grated on his sensibilities to not be pushing toward the next advancement.

All the immediate chaos had died down, but classes had yet to resume. Jair sighed and stared at the ceiling. “Nine days.”

“Until Terluna? What about it?”

“I need to get my class back, but I don’t trust anyone here. Even Irres is apt to go to Larenok over something this unusual, and Larenok’s the paranoid sort who’ll start putting pieces together if we give him any hint of a piece to put. Someone suddenly wanting to unlock the class a couple months early? In such close proximity with another dramatic event?” Jair shook his head. “It’s not worth the risk. He’s too eager for a target, and I’m not planning to give him one.”

“So you’ll be finding someone non-local?”

“I’ve hired mageblades in the past, but I don’t actually know how many of them would be qualified to act as a class instructor. No, I have a better idea.” Jair grinned. “Come Terluna, I think it's time you meet my mentor."

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