Zorian had been through this whole scenario with Quatach-Ichl before. In his early days, he would have never even entertained the idea. But, by the time his skills were good enough to warrant this kind of reaction from the lich, he'd long since accepted his role in the time loop and almost instantly decided to go along with it.
Ironically, his plan the first time was simply to threaten the lich into retreating. Instead, it wound up going almost exactly how this last iteration of the conversation went. Really, the only thing that ever changed since then was the fact that Zorian showed far less hesitation now, and what little he did show was only for the sake of appearances as the lich would grow suspicious if he seemed too on-board with the idea. Each time he tried this, he perfected the balance between enthusiasm and hesitation just a little more as he sharpened his acting skills.
As he watched the lich direct his men to pull everyone back, he worked out he would permanently station one of his simulacrums on Ulquaan Ibasa. Along with this simulacrum, he would also be moving a few of his friends and family members, those he manages to convince.
This part was actually quite important, he'd discovered. For someone like him, his greatest value was the fact he could operate all around the world at once. After discovering just how versatile Zorian's simulacrum bodies were, and how complete his connection to them was, Quatach-Ichle was completely of this opinion on the matter. The value of this ability as a military asset far exceeded even his magical knowledge.
However, this ability aslo carried with it the down-side of him being hyper-mobile, and thus easily able to cut ties with any one location or allegiance. In order to settle this, Quatach-Ichl needed some kind of commitment. This came in the form of Zorian moving people he cares for along with him. Only if he commited to this would the lich agree he was showing enough commitment to justify his withdraw from Cyoria.
While withdrawl operations were in progress, Zorian reported Sudomir's well of souls to Alanic. Meanwhile, Quatach-Ichl provided some evidence on the Cult of the World Dragon members sufficient for Zorian to turn into the proper officials to result in some arrests.
Everything was timed perfectly to start going down the very moment the withdraw of Quatach-Ichl's men was complete, and in this manner all three legs of the invasion fell a week before the festival.
In Zorian's experience, this was the single most efficient method with the least loss of life to stop the invasion completely. It was his preferential method these days. He had even experimented with performing the withdraw early during the periods he was outside the lesser loop, with two months time to spare, to see which among his friends and family adjusted best to life on Ulquaan Ibasa.
Of course, convincing them in the first place never posed a problem. A little light editing of their thoughts was all it took to get anyone he wanted to come along easily.
He had successfully pulled all of this off without Zach ever being the wiser to any of it. The first hint the boy got was when the raid on Sudomir's place hit the newspapers and became the talk of the town. That was when Zach decided to ask about it one day while they were drinking together in a publ under the veil of a privacy ward.
"You did something, didn't you?" The boy asked.
"Yes, I have been doing quite a few things over the past few weeks," Zorian said. "I have certainly not been idle during this restart."
"Alright, but qhy?" Zach asked. "You mentioned that mansion and the well of souls thing once before when we were talking to that crazy priest guy. It has something to do with the invasion, right?"
"Yes," Zorian said. "I decided to show you what happens when the invasion is stopped this time. It has already been completely sabotaged in every way. There is going to be no invasion this restart."
"Son of a bitch," Zach muttered. He was quiet and seemed to hesitate about something for a moment before finally speaking up again. "You didn't have to do that though. I already know what happens. It was in that memory crystal you gave me."
"Yes, you've told me that before," Zorian said.
"You mean my past self did," Zach said bitterly.
"Yes, that is correct," Zorian said.
"So then..." Zach hesitated.
"If you are going to ask why I'm doing all this, I think you can come up with a few good answers. Mainly, it is just nicer not having to see all that death and destruction on the night of the festival, don't you think?" Zorian lied without a hint of his true feelings on the matter.
In truth, Zorian actually couldn't care less anymore whether the city burned or got to celebrate the festival in peace. The truth was, while Zach did indeed get the information on what happened when they stopped the invasion on that memory crystal, and he'd even told him what happens verbally in the last restart, past experience had shown him that nothing quite drives it in as well as seeing the reality of a restart ending without the attack even taking place.
However, if he admitted this was his reasoning to Zach, the boy would become offended and say that Zorian was treating him like a child. So, he'd chosen a story that appealed to Zach's strong sense of morality.
"Right, I guess so..." Zach said and took a long pull off his mug. He set it down and stared at the amber liquid inside for several long seconds, before finally shaking his head. "It's just... well, it just feels kind of weird, you know? I just..."
"You wanted to be part of it, right?" Zorian said.
"Yeah! Exactly!" Zach said. "Damn it, that's going to get annoying," he added in a mutter, referring to the fact that Zorian obviously had a lot of knowledge about exactly how the boy thought, perhaps better than he himself did.
Zorian chuckled. "Don't worry. Once you have recovered, you will be able to participate in all kinds of ercercises. The invaders make for pretty convenient guilt-free targets when learning new spells and techniques, and I will have a lot to teach you before we make our attempt at getting out of the lesser loop. This is just something I've somewhat gotten into the routine of doing every so often. I thought maybe you could do with a stress-free restart given your current condition."
"Do you plan to do this next time too?" Zach asked.
"Perhaps," Zorian said. "It takes a bit of setting up to do it like I did, and a lot of careful steps that might be difficult if I was not operating on my own. I might opt for slightly more... violent methods of going about it in the future."
"Wait, just what did you do anyway?" Zach asked.
"It involves bribing the leader of the invasion to simply go away. Although, the degree of what needs to be given and the way I present myself during the negotiation is not something that's going to be easy to do if it's the two of us," Zorian said, not mentioning the part that's 'not easy' about it is the fact it would take a while for Zach to get on board with the idea of providing what he had to the old lich.
Zach, for his part, practically had his jaw on the floor.
"You can do that?! Just that easy?" He asked.
"I did tell you in the last restart, he can actually be a rather reasonable sort if you approach him in a non-hostile manner. Of course, part of this means knowing how to contact him outside of the invasion. Me and the old you once spent several restarts convincing him to teach us all of his magical secrets. That was actually pretty early on, so we pretty much knew everythinig that he did after a while," Zorian said.
Zach chuckled. "I can't believe it," he said, shaking his head in disbelief. "That sounds... actually kind of awesome. I'm definitely getting you to teach me whatever you and the old me learned from him. I can't wait to see his face when I throw a bunch of his own spells right back at him."
Zorian just chuckled. "Of course. Once you have fully recovered from your soul damage. We have quite a bit of work to do in order to get you up to speed, but it will take longer if you are injured during your training. We have around ten or so years to get you good enough to survive a fight with a fragment of a primordial while maintaining a stable high-end dimensional magic spell. That's the minimum requirement for getting us out of the lesser time-loop."
"Yeah, great..." Zach muttered.
-break-
And so, a week later, the festival occurred on schedule. There was no invasion, and the partying continued long into the night.
Zach actually seemed to really enjoy the whole experience. For him, it was completely novel. For the first time in his own experience, he got to see what it was like to see the festival uniterrupted. Not having to deal with fighting off invaders and seeing people dying in the streets.
He was tense at first as the fireworks started going off, but when there was no artillery magic raining down on them it finally started to really click that there would be no fighting this time.
At the end of the night, Zach thanked him. Then, he brought the boy to his house and advised him to go to bed before two. It was something Zorian had learned since he had the luxury to experiment with it. The transition into the new loop became far less jarring if you went to sleep and simply woke up in the next one.
Of course, that wasn't quite an option for him considering the combination of Kiriellie and the mental enhancements he'd placed on himself, but he could still approximate something like it.
He teleported back to his own home just barely after two AM, put on his pajamas, dismissed all his simulacrums, and then laid down in bed. The calculation enhancement he'd given himself kept constant track of the time. And, about two minutes before the time he'd identified as the exact moment the restart ends, he closed his eyes.
And then, just past two AM, in the small town of Cirin, a youth by the name of Zorian Kizinski slowly opened his eyes and climed out of bed.
The only indications he was now in the new restart instead of the previous one were the fact that his mental enhancements had to wake him up, and the fact that three sleeping minds that were not there before had suddenly appeared in the other rooms in the house.
He would be making sure they remained asleep until after he was gone. He still had to talk to Ilsa before he left since he planned to stay in Cyoria this time as well. Things got complicated if he skipped out before she paid a visit. But, that was the only thing really keeping him here right now. He had no intention to remain around here for even a moment after she left.
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-break-
Zorian teleported into the Noveda estate. It was only a matter of course that the previous Zach had shown Zorian the ward stone that held up the wards for the place, so it was without the slightest hint of difficulty that he was able to get himself directly into the building.
Zach ought to have recovered enough by now to wake up naturally, but he would still have a non-insignificant amount of damage to his body. Certainly enough to make him feel like crap if Zorian didn't help him out a bit.
It was still very early in the morning. Well before Zach should be waking up naturally. As such, he kept a small personal privacy ward around himself, erasing the sound of his footsteps and breathing as he let himself into Zach's room and took a seat next to his bed.
Once he had finished healing up his fellow time looper, it was time to start setting up a few other things. This time he planned to use a very different method to disable the invasion before it could hit. It was far more destructive and a lot less involved than the method he used last time, but the preparations for it had to be done quickly if he wanted to hit the first window where this would work.
At around the same time, one of his simulacrums returned to drop off some supplies he would need in order to get started on their golem bodies.
-break-
In te passages underneath Cyoria, Zorian walked down the now very familiar caves and tunnels with one of his simulacrum bodies.
He no longer spent as much time down here as he once did. The use of memory packets was a method capable of effectively keeping Spear of Resolve in the loop, but he had stopped doing this for the same reason that he stopped using the modified temporary markers to keep other friends and loved ones in the loop.
No matter what he did, he was simply unable to let anyone retain their memories across the greater restarts. Even his mental enhancements get reset across greater restarts, so of course things like memory packets get swept up in the effect as well. Even if he gets others out of the lesser time loop, they still loose everything when a greater restart happens.
It had become far too painful for him. Regardless of what he does, not a single person other than Zach can live any longer than twelve years at the most. And, once they are gone, they get replaced with a phantom. A blank slate that has their same face, their same mannerisms, all the same things they had the first time he met. And, he couldn't bear having to start things over from the beginning with the people he'd grown to become attached to every single time.
Even though Zach would still leave him when he grew too tired, at least he would remain around for longer. The others...
As for Spear of Resolve, he had found it easiest to simply behave toward her as though she were a tool. He kept his distance from her normally, and only approached when his current plans required her participation. This was one such time.
He took a route that would avoid the Aranea outposts, but the closer he got the more patrols were in the area. However, he did not do a single thing to conceal his approach or hide the fact that he was very purposefully walking straight to their nest.
He also made no effort to shield his mind, allowing all of the curious Aranea to reach out and connect with a mental probe in order to communicate with his surface thoughts.
Of course, it was not in the Aranean culture to all connect mentally to the random intruder at once. That is, unless the intruder is a threat they have to gang up on. Rather, it was a single Aranea mental probe that reached out to him. And, he knew from experience that one Aranea had at least a quarter of the web piggy-backing onto her mind and monitoring her thoughts which were connected to his.
Zorian made no attempt to block the mental contact, but he made sure she encountered a fake mind and went no deeper. Between his mental enhancements and his hive mind with his simulacrums, even the Aranea had a tendency to become so frightened they started giving him difficulties if they discovered the true depths of his mental abilities.
He immediately got a combination of images of webs and physical sensations that would be completely alien to a normal human. The tremor senses and the fact Aranea actually tasted with their feet are not things that integrate well with the average human mind.
This was the language of the Aranea. Every 'word' came layered with images of an experience and sensation, making the language far more nuanced than anything spoken words could communicate but also overwhelming for anyone untrained in this means of communication. It was overwhelming to the extent that an untrained mind would actually be damaged by it as though it was an attack.
Zorian, however, had put in the effort to actually learn the Aranea language. Once he figured out just how much time he had on his hands with these repeated greater restarts, he had decided to dedicate the time to learning this purely mental language.
It was cumbersome to acturately translate Aranea words into human speech, but the message he was given essentially shortened down to [You are intruding upon the Cyoria web. For what purpose do you come?]
[I come with a message for Spear of Resolve Striking Straight at the Heart of the Matter. We share a mutual enemy in the form of the invaders to your tunnels. I wish to offer cooperation on an attack that should completely eliminate this enemy, killing or driving out each and every one,] Zorian sent back.
Zorian sensed hesitation and confusion from the Aranea who had contacted him. Of course, she just heard him respond to her in the Aranean language. It would not normally be strange to her if she'd simply assumed he was also an Aranea, but the patterns of his surface thoughts reflected the mind she was communicating with clearly resided within a human body. And even were that not the case, his masculine mental voice would have still given away that it would be incredibly unlikely for him to be an Aranea.
[What... are you?] Another Aranea asked him through the link she had through the guar's mind. This was usually not done when speaking with humans who used the human language, but this kind of layered piggy-backing of conversation was a lot more common when the Aranea communicated among themselves. This is something he had discovered only after he learned to use the Aranea language to communicate.
[I am a human mage, and one with great personal power and an age that greatly exceeds most of my species. A long time ago, I have interacted heavily with the Aranea. It was from your people that I got started on the path to controlling my gift,] Zorian said.
[And very well controlled it is.] The familiar voice of Spear of Resolve entered into the conversation, speaking in the human language just as he had been using the Aranean language. [I have to say, I am impressed beyond words. That any being can have such mastery over their gift, and that it happens to be a human normally not able to have any connection to the web and from a people so closed off to properly training themselves. It gives me something to possibly re-evaluate my thoughts on many things.]
[As I have said before, I am far older than most members of my species. Many times older. What mastery I have obtained is nothing special at all. It is merely the result of a slow and gradual improvement over a very very long period of time. I would be truly disappointed in myself if I had not reached at least this level with the time that I have lived.]
[Well said,] Spear of Resolve responded. [Now. You said that you wished to discuss a means by which to drive out this mutual enemy we are dealing with?]
-break-
Back at the Noveda estate, Zach was just waking up. Unlike the last two restarts, he woke up in his own room this time. His head did not hurt anymore, but when he did some of the meditations Zorian had taught him, he could tell he was still dealing with some soul damage that needed to be healed.
Figures. His new very unexpected friend and fellow time looper has probably had a lot of experience dealing with his old self having to recover from this exact condition. His assessment and time-table to his recovery, then, would not have been just a doctor's opinion from having seen similar cases in the past. Rather, he was just recounting the exact amount of time it had always taken him in the past to heal from this condition.
That being the case, this meant he had the entirety of this restart and then two more after it before he was back up to his full power. In the meantime, Zorian had said he should be able to work some low tier magic this time around.
In the last restart, Zorian said he should have been able to do some basic shaping exercises. It turned out Zorian's idea of "basic" was positively insane compared to any of his instructors up till now. The older time looper had claimed that his instructor, Xvim, would both have even higher standards and be far more brutal about his teaching methods. He'd heard a thing or two about Xvim, but somehow he doubted Zorian's assessment.
Zorian had pushed Zach straight to the very limit of any kind of reasonable shaping exercises and then broke past it. So, if his fellow time looper said he should be able to cast some 'low tier magic,' he had a sneaking suspicion this would be 'low tier' by Zorian's standards, not the sensible world's standards. And, the freaking sadist was probably going to have him practicing these so-called 'low tier' spells until he was run completely dry of mana.
But still... Zach couldn't help but smile. This guy definitely had some high-tier magical secrets up his sleeve. The likes of which he was simply not going to get from any other instructor. And besides, it was not without reason that Zorian was pushing so hard.
Fighting a primordial. A freaking primordial. That made the old bag of bones look like a toddler by comparison. Zorian had already promised he could get to a level where he could grind the lich's bones into powder and would still struggle to even remain standing in front of the primordial. And this was exactly what Zorian was preparing him to fight against.
Well, anyway, now he had to contend with a somewhat unpleasant issue he'd been trying to avoid ever since he woke up naturally on his own. Usually, he did not experience this luxury. That bastard Tesen always came around wanting to play to his role of 'caretaker' by waking him up to make sure he had all his affairs for school in order.
There were only two possible explanations for why this had not happened, and one of them would have involved him having far more of a headache right now and probably involve him being in the back of a wagon heading to that out of town estate he'd woken up in for the last two restarts.
So, that only left one. Zorian had already been here, and he did something to Tesen. Well, not that this exactly bothered him all that much. If anything, it was actually pretty nice not having to see that harry-faced bastard first thing in the morning.
He got up from bed slowly and put on his clothes. As he walked out onto the upper mezzanine level overlooking the lower floor of his estate, he caught sight of an unpleasantly familiar blue waistcoat and gold trim vest. The clothing Tesen was always dressed in when he woke Zach up at the beginning of the restarts. Only... the man was acting extremely unusual. He was sitting in a chair off to the side... almost like a low quality servant might do.
As though responding to his thoughts, the man stood up from his chair and took several stately steps forward before stopping right at the side of the main carpet leading down from the stairs.
This highly unusual behavior from his thief of a caretaker was eerie, and somewhat unsettling. It made Zach recall something. Zorian knew mind magic. He used it on the guards Tesen hired all the time.
He'd always felt uncomfortable with that, but this time it was on an entirely new level somehow. Yes, the target was a guy he hated. Someone who he regularly used as a punching bag in the past. But now... it was just too weird.
It was failry obvious Tesen was dutifully waiting for him down on the ground floor. The man had a full bushy, albeit well groomed beard, complete with mustache and side-burns, dressed in his plumed royal blue hat and fine clothing. All of this looked distinctly out of place on a man standing there like a servant, but somehow there was something oddly satisfying about it.
Maybe he should get Zorian to make the guy shave his face and dress in butler attire next restart. But still, the mere fact his new friend could get this proud and manipulative bastard to act this far out of character was scary beyond words.
Zach walked down the stairs. Tesen remained silent as he stood there dutifully the entire time, just glancing up at him out the corner of his eye. It was only when Zach had reached the fifth stair from the bottom that the man decided to break his silence.
"Good moring master Zach," he said in a respectful tone. "Your friend Zorian was here earlier. He asked me to deliver this note.
Sure enough, Zorian. He knew it was him who was responsible for this from the beginning, but still, actually hearing it confirmed made Zach twitch a little.
He received the note from his apparent caretaker-turned-servant and opened it up.
I thought I should make it clear sooner rather than later.
I have picked up a tendency to use mind magic rather liberally with people inside the loop.
You are an exception, of course. Even if it were't for that nasty angel compulsion, the fact that you are both my friend and are also caught up in this loop along with me sort of puts you off limits.
However, you can probably expect more scenes like this in the future.
PS: You may have already noticed that Tesen is under a particularly powerful suggestion to act far more polite toward you than normal.
He is also under a sugesstion that he should not do anything to harm you regardless of what you do to him, or leave the premises if you happen to be acting violently. He will also do everything in his power to conceal that you are the culprit behind any injuries he happens to receive.
After reading the note, Zach gave Tesen a long assessing look. That bastard Zorian seriously does know all of his weaknesses. The worst part of this whole horrifying scene was that he actually did feel somehow happy with this result.
"Damn it Zorian! What the hell are you trying to get me to do?" He muttered, starting to think Zorian was every bit as alien and monstrous as the lich. "Alright, fine! Let's see just how thorough these 'suggestions' really are."