Just past 2 AM, in the small town of Cirin, a youth by the name of Zorian Kizinski slowly opened his eyes and climbed out of bed.

It was rather nice not having to be jumped on by that shadow of his little sister at the beginning of each restart anymore. These days, this event only really happened at the beginning of the greater restarts. Once fully enhanced, his body no longer required sleep and he simply woke up at the beginning of the lesser restarts well before he could ever receive Kiriellie's usual wake-up call.

Sleep was something essential for most people. It allowed the body to rest and recover from the burdens placed upon it during the day. It allowed the mind to rest and process the stimuli it had absorbed while awake, sorting through the thoughts and better integrating them into the mind for long-term use. And, it allowed the soul to rest as well. This was of vital importance when recovering from soul damage like Zach right now, but it was also necessary for anyone who was a practicing mage.

A lack of sleep could disrupt the soul and harm one's natural mana recovery. And, sleep was also necessary for the slow and gradual expansion of one's soul when they are trying to stretch their natural mana supply.

By this point, Zorian had long since mastered medical and soul magic to the point where he could easily replicate the benefits of sleep with a simple use of non-structured magic in each of those respective fields. As for mind magic, it was almost a joke to even insinuate he might not be up to the task.

Even though time was seemingly infinite to Zorian at this point, he had still decided not to waste any on sleep and wrote in a command to his mental enhancements to automatically wake him up any time he was asleep. If nothing else, it at least saved him from having to experience a bit of annoyance at the beginning of the lesser restarts.

Well then. Last restart, he took the effort to catch Zach up to speed on how the whole greater restart thing works. He had ended it early, using the switch in his marker as soon as he'd received Alanic's journal. That was the real objective of the restart anyway, so he figured he did not need to wait around for a few more hours just to watch the city get attacked. Besides, this was a way to show Zach a little bit about the real nature of the time loop.

This time, he had a different objective. He was going to spend this restart disabusing Zach of the idea that all they have to do is stop the invasion.

It's just too bad for Jornak. This restart was going to see a lot of fairly large action that he would certainly notice and react to. He couldn't have that man becoming a pain to deal with for the rest of this greater restart.

-break-

By now, infiltrating the royal treasury had become something so routine as to be almost boring. After giving the wardstone a thorough examination, it was child's play to bypass the wards on the fault and simply teleport inside.

The only thing that was even mildly inconvenient about the whole routine was the fact that one needs to actually get some degree of physical proximity to the vault before attempting this bypass. However, this was easily overcome with a simple domination spell on a few guards.

Really, the whole thing had become so routine, it might as well have been the same as a normal person putting on their clothing or brushing their teeth in the morning. For Jornak Dokochin, this was a routine he had been through dozens of times ever since he had discovered it was the hurdle one had to pass in order to obtain the Ikosian dagger. A divine artifact, and part of the key to controlling this messed up time loop the Noveda heir had gotten them into.

The dagger had the power to permanently remove a person from the time loop, giving the system which governed it an instruction not to recreate the soul of the person the dagger's magic had targeted, leaving naught but dead body at the beginning of each loop. This was also something he had become all too familiar with. After all, that husk of what was once the young Boranova heir lay dead in his guast room at the beginning of each restart. Disposing of that body before it started to smell was usually the second thing Jornak did at the beginning of each restart, right after getting his hands on the dagger.

After figuring his way through the warding scheme and using his teleportation magic to enter the treasure chamber, Jornak instantly became aware that there was something wrong. Usually, the vault should be empty when he entered it. There would be no way that there would ever be another person in the vault before him. It was not just a matter of the fact that it had never happened before. There was also the matter of how a person, even if they were involved in the time loop like Zach Noveda or someone he had included with a temporary marker, would even have the ability to sneak their way in any faster than he could. Especially without him being aware that someone was practicing theyr way through such a thing.

And yet, sitting right at the far end of the champer, on top of the metal plating that covered the ward stone, there was a young adolescent boy right around the appropriate age to be one of the Noveda heir's classmates.

If this were not enough of a surprise on it's own, what came afterward was the sensation of a new and unfamiliar warding scheme snapping into place around the treasury.

He immediately reached out with his mana sense to check this new warding scheme, only to find to his horror that this new scheme was infinitely more complex that the one which was naturally placed on the treasury.

He turned his baffled and now somewhat fearful eyes to the youth sitting in front of him, his eyes now drifting to the metal plating under the boy, under which was the core of the warding structure that protected this place. Under these circumstances, there was only one explanation that made any sense at all. Somehow, this young boy had set up a ward better than what could be managed by the greatest mages in the nation, and he had done so in the time it took Jornak to wake up, prepare his things, teleport to the capital, and walk the halls to the treasury in the first few hours of a new restart.

-break-

At one point, Zorian had fount it somewhat amusing to pull this sort of ambush on Jornak at the beginning of a fresh restart. There were even some restarts in the past where he'd experimented with specialized modifications to the warding scheme that would suck him into the fault as he was attempting to infiltrate, leaving the man extremely rattled upon entry.

Now, however, he'd grown tired of those games. He'd preferred instead to just tweak the already existing anti-teleportation ward on the room, add a few anti-spell wards to protect himself from Jornak's usual methods of attack should he become too agitated and start lashing out, and a buffer layer to make his new warding scheme play nice with the old one. And, just for good measure, he also disable the alarm system. It wouldn't do to have the entire royal military up in arms if Jornak threw a temper tantrum.

The man was already dressed in his red robe and his face obscured by magical darkness. So, he was unable to see the expression that Jornak was making as he realized what kind of situation he was in. However, while the man had his face obscured, his mental defenses were a joke. Zorian could easily bypass Jornak's defenses without the man even noticing his thoughts were being spied on.

Granted, by this point, Zorian didn't even need to do that much. He'd watched the thirt time looper go through this exact sequence of thoughts quite a few times and could pretty much know exactly what the man was thinking at any given second simply by watching his body language and remembering what mental pattern was associated with it at which moment in their interaction.

Zorian could easily remove the man from the time loop right here and now. He had already retrieved the dagger. All he would need to do is place the marker and that would be that.

However, while Jornak was not included in the higher order time loop, and the man was clearly a complete nutcase, he was also one of the very few people who could sympathize with Zorian's situation. This man would not be leavin gthis vault alive, and would not be around for any future interactions in this particular greater restart. So, if he wanted to have a chat with the man, it would have to be now.

"Hello Mr. Dokochin. I have to apologoze for the scare I likely gave you on your arival, but your movements tend to be a little harder to predict than others in the time loop outside of the fact that you always visit the royal treasury at the beginning of each restart. As such, I felt that waiting in ambush for you here would be the best method of reliably meeting you," Zorian said as he smoothly rose to a standing position on top of the metal plating that covered the treasury's wardstone.

"What... you... how..." Jornak stammered in his disguised voice. While his face was still obscured by magical darkness, his body language showed he was clearly rattled.

"How am I so competent and knowledgable about things I shouldn't be when I should just be a temporary looper with less than six months of knowledge and what little I should have been able to learn from Zach Noveda?" Zorian said, quickly expressing the thoughts that were probably rattling around in Jornak's head in a clear and concise manner in order to help the man focus his mind. "Well, I think you could probably come to the realization pretty quickly that most of your confusion is based on the fact that whit I just laid out is clearly a false premise to start from, and this situation should indeed not be possible if I were a mere temporary looper."

"Wait... you mean..." Jornak started.

"No, I am also not someone who made a deal with Panazeth like you did," Zorian said, cutting off and denying the second most reasonable, albeit incorrect, conclusion Jornak would arrive at.

"Then... then how?" Jornak demanded.

And so, with the usual introduction out of the way, Zorian began to explain to Jornak about the second higher-order time loop. About how he had been sucked into this time loop with Zach, but at the same time Zach also seemed to be sucked into Zorian's corresponding higher order loop. How they did not fully understand the mechanics of the higher order loop, and how the previous Zach had given up on the repeated loops after his dozenth time.

He also told Jornak about how he had been through the higher order loop enough times to now be several hundred subjective years old, placing him in the same order of age as most liches out there. Combining this with the resources and access to the magical secrets of the greatest minds in the world which he had fully plundered with the use of mind magic, this made him effectively the single most knowledgable and accomplished mage among all sentient mortal creatures on the planet, surpassing even Quatach-Ichl at this point.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

After this, he also went through a few more of the annoying regular routines he did with his first introduction to Jornak. Upon hearing this, the man always wanted to win Zorian over to his way of thinking in regards to his ambitions for remaking the world. This was quickly shot down by a simple proclamation that Zorian didn't even know when or if it would even be possible to leave the time loop at all, but that if he wanted to re-make the world it would not be challenging in the least for someone with his skill.

He had discovered that leaving things vague like that in regards to whether or not he actually intended to put such a thing into effect, followed up immediately by a rejection to any further talk on the subject, was the quickest way to get Jornak off that track and well disposed to further interactions.

"Alrigh, so..." Jornak said cautiously as he tried to think fo the next thing he should say. The man was considerably more relaxed now. At some point during the conversation, he had taken down his hood and was now showing his real face and using his real voice. Now, he related to Zirian in a manner much like how he might interact with Quatach-Ichl. Knowing the other man in the room was far more powerful than him and able to kill him at any moment, but less immediately on guard for an imminent attack.

In fact, Zorian knew for certain that Jornak's stance was incredibly similar to how he might be around the old lich. He had read it straight out of the man's mind on previous restarts, having tailed him out of curiosity on one occasion in the past.

"So, Zorian. Going by what you told me earlier, I take it to mean you sought me out for some kind of purpose. What exactly is it that you wanted from me?" Jornak asked.

"Well, I would like two things," Zorian said. "As I've said previously, the Zach I knew recently grew tired of this long series of repeated greater time loops. Last time, he decided to erase himself from the time loop. This means that the current Zach Noveda I am dealing with is a young and naive version who is a mere few decades old in subjective years, and still suffering from the damage you did to his mind. Fortunately, you made something of a back-up of the very information you made him forget in the form of reading his mind before wiping his memory. I would like to copy that information from your mind and use it to make a memory crystal. I have found in the past that memory crystals made from my thought patterns have a tendency to be too alien and complex for this younger version of Zach to process correctly."

After hearing this information, Jornak looked nervously around the room and swallowed. Zorian could feel the man once again reaching out to examine the wards that had been set around the room, and watched as the man's thoughts raced through many realizations at once as he contemplated the situation he was currently in.

He had just been lured into a trap by a man far more powerful than himself, and who knew his every move. This person had been in the time loop far longer than he had, and knew a lot more about it. In this sense, it was like a complete reversal of that time Zorian had met Jornak for the first time in the caves under Cyoria after the man had brutally soul-killed the entire Aranean web. This time, it was Zorian who held everything in the palm of his hands, and this time Zorian's preparations were far more thorough than Jornak's had ever been back then.

The man who had been starting to relax a moment ago was now growing very tense, and Zorian could feel his thoughts as he was now looking at the ancient time-traveler in front of him in an entirley new light.

"Even if I tried to resist, I wouldn't have much of a choice in this, would I?" He said in a defeated tone.

"I dare say not," Zorian responded. "Even if you were to kill yourself, I would need only teleport right into your bedroom at the beginning of the next restart before you even had the chance to wake up. Zach should be comatose right now as the result of the soul damage he has recently sustained. I delayed repairing his body to wake him up specifically so that I would not have to waste any time going through a full restart if I had to use such a tactic. I have also secured the Ikosian dagger, and will continue to do so as long as I need to. I am simply awake earlier than you are at the beginning of the restart, so there is no chance you will ever have of reaching it before me. You can see this in the fact that I had the time to not just get here ahead of you, but also to gather and bring in the materials necessary to alter the wardstone and also to inscribe the modifications before your arrival."

Jornak's shoulders sagged as Zorian illustrated exaclty how outmatched he really was.

"I see," he said. "So, if you have such an advantage, why did you not simply do as you just said and ambush me in my room before I woke up?

"It is quite simple, really," Zorian said. "In this endless time loop, there are a limited few people I can really talk to. Zach is the easiest, because he is one of the few who can retain memories across the greater restarts. You are another, and then the third person I can easily talk to is Quatach-Ichl. That man may not be a time looper, but he understands what it is like to live for this long far better than anyone. I could have very easily just taken what I needed by the method you suggested. The reason why I chose this method is simply because I felt lonely."

"Do not get the wrong impression though," Zorian continued. "My feelings of affinity with you will not keep me from taking those memories. Of the three, I am the most partial to Zach, if only for the fact that his situation makes him the one who has the easiest time empathizing with me. However, it is enough to prevent me from removing someone so obviously antagonistic toward Zach from the time loop at my earliest convenience, and it also makes me inclined to at least pay you the courtesy of a conversation like this."

Jornak grew visibly alarmed when Zorian had mentioned the part about removing him from the time loop. He could see where this was going to likely become problematic if allowed to continue, so he quickly edited the man's memories and perception of his last sentence to something a little less antagonistic.

The man hardly even noticed the mental stutter. This meeting with Zorian had him under so much stress and fear, and Zorian's technique had grown so refined over the years, that the momentary brain fog created by the altered memories simply blended in with the already muddled state his thoughts were in.

"Ahh... so..." Jornak stumbled over his words as he tried to regain himself. "Uhh... you said there were two things you wanted. The other is...?"

"Ah, yes," Zorian said. "Zach seems to be operating under the mistaken impression that the only thing he needs to do in order to escape the time loop is to stop the invasion that takes place on the night of the festival. I intend to disabuse him of this notion in this restart by single handeldy stopping the invasion by the most effective methods I am capable of. Of course, with the position you are in, there would ahve been the chance of some... interference in my efforts."

"I see..." Jornak muttered. "So, you just want me to stand down for this month? That's all?" He asked.

"Oh yes, that is all I will be needing from you." Zorian lied, not even caring about the moral implications of what he was about to do. After all, the man would certianly become a lot more uncooperative if he knew he was about to be removed from the time loop. Even if he normally would have had some moreal compunctions about this sort of thing, it was all suppressed as 'irrelevant thoughts' by his mental enhancements.

"Well then, shall we begin?" Zorian asked.

-break-

Zorian laid Jornak's soul-killed corpse on the table in front of him, placing the memory crystal he had forced the man to create next to him at hip level, right next to where the finger tips would reach.

As he was working on Jornak, a simulacrum had already been hard at work healing Zach's body in order to allow him to wake up. It seemed like the sound of Zorian's banging around had roused the boy. While he was in another room, it was still quite easy to sense his mind becoming more active.

Good. He shouldn't have to occupy himself for long then.

He heard some muffled curses from the other room. It sounded a little like Zach was promising Tesen quite the beating as soon as he had fully recovered from the soul damage. Zorian couldn't help having a slight smile in response to this.

He sat in wait as he heard the sounds of the boy stumbling and staggering around, making his way down the hall to the room Zorian was in. It was the same room he had transmuted into a workshom in the last retart, so it was only to be expected that Zach would remember and return to the same place.

A moment later, he staggered in the door, holding his head in pain. "Hey, Zorian, uh..." The boy started to greet his fellow time looper, but wqs quickly stopped short as he took in the contents of the room this time around. His eyes immediately noned in on the body laid out on the table Zorian had created.

"Uhh... is that some kind of high-end golem?" He asked with a cramped smile. "Man, my heart nearly stopped when I saw it. It looks like..."

"Actually, it's one of the people involved in the invasion." Zorian corrected him.

"Oh," Zach said, and then shrugged his shoulders and walked into the room. "Huh... ya' know? I would ahve thought I might be more upset over my friend bringing a dead body home, but strangely I think I actually might have been somehow more upset if it actually was a golem. I mean, it wouldn't be a surprise to know you might have that kind of skill, but seriously. Come on. This soon into the restart?"

Zorian just chuckled. "Well, I guess once you've seen enough killing, you become a little numb to it," he said wihle privately thinking to himself whether or not he actually could create a golem with this many realistic features to it in the 8 hours since this current restart had begun. He decided not to tell Zach the fact that, indeed, he could probably create a fully functional model in that time without much of an issue assuming he dedicated at least 4 simulacrum bodies to the task. That was assuming full mobility and speech capabilities sufficient to pass for a flesh and blood person. If it were only for cosmetic purposes, it would be laughably easy.

"So, are you going to tell me why you decided to drag this particular invasion member's dead body back and lay it on a table to be the first thing I'm greeted by when I wake up?" Zach asked.

"You remember what I said on the first night of the previous restart? About how you were one of only three people I could talk to in this infinitely repeating world?" Zorian asked.

"Umm... yeaaaah...?" Zach said.

"This is Jornak Dokochin. A lawyer working peripherally with the cult of the world dragon, and the third person involved in the time loop with the ability to retain his memories across restarts. He has been using his persistent memories to help the invasion side," Zorian explained.

"What?!" Zach yelled and sprang to his feet. Now that he knew what was in front of him, he approached the table and took a good hard look at the man's face.

"You don't need to memorize his appearance," Zorian said. "He won't be coming back for the remainder of this current time loop. Remember the five artifacts I told you about? I used the dagger to permanently remove him."

"Hah," Zach said as he shuffled back from the table. "Well... serves him right, I guess. If this bastard was up to stuff like that, then having him gone should make things much easier from now on."

"Are you not curious as to why I brought him here anymore?" Zorian asked with a small bit of amusement.

"Well, yeah, sort of. I'm guessing you mean it wasn't just to brag about your accomplishments, then," Zach said.

"It is because you were the one who brought this guy into the time loop using the crown. The reason you don't remember anything about him is because he mind wiped you, removing several key pieces of information from your memory including matters related to the 5 artifacts that control the gate," Zorian explained.

Suddenly, Zach directed a look of disgust toward the body on the table. "I see..." he said.

"Fortunately, Jornak read a lot of the important information from your mind before deleting it. I forced him to produce a memory crystal containing the informaiton before I eliminated him. That is it by his hand. Don't worry, I've not looked at it, and I did not delve into Jornak's memory at any point either," Zorian said.

Zach simply sat in the chair quietly as he tried to take all of this in. Zorian had been hitting him with a lot all at once, so it was no surprise he might be a little overwhelmed.

These were some of the more difficult moments between them. It made it hard for Zorian to maintain his discipline about staying away from Zach's thoughts. Reading his surface thoughts would not trigger the angelic contract, but in this early stage the boy tended to be rather sensitive about having his mind read. Their relationship and future interactions could be severely harmed if Zorian vilated the boy's trust too far.

Even after having centuries to work on his social skils, it was still hard to find the right answer in situations like this. Well, maybe the best course of action would be a change of subject.

With a mere gesture and a bit of magic shaping, Zorian opened a gate to one of his simulacrums. Casting a gate spell with nothing but shaping would normally be impossible, even with all the skill Zorian had built up, but things were a little different if the spell was cast in 100% perfect sync from both sides at once, and there was already an existing micro gate on both sides to help direct the energies.

He pulled a potion from the small gate he'd just created and handed it to Zach.

"Here. This is your soul recovery potion for this week. You will need it in order to help you manage the spell shaping necessary to access the memories in that crystal," Zorian said.

Zach just silently accepted the potion and drank it without even uttering a word or lookiing at the person who had given it to him.