At the simplest, obtaining a class unlocks your soul’s power and then guides how your soul reacts to and structures that power.

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Time travel was an imprecise art. Jair had reverted more times than he could properly recall, and still, he had only the most general level of control over his destination.

Temporal Reversion felt like falling down a cliff. At any moment, he could reach out and snatch at a handhold. Some would crumble and he’d fall to the next, others remained sturdy. Then there were a few solid shelves he’d land on every time, unless he purposefully shoved himself away to get past.

Jair knew the metaphorical shape of his timeline intimately. His recent past held several shelves and countless handholds, but this time, he didn’t reach out to grasp any of them.

His attention remained focused inward, watching the tiny silver spark in his soul for any sign of instability. He feared his soulsword would collapse from the flawed ascension, yet it remained miraculously stable. The key to changing everything. A new factor to tip events away from their same exhausting patterns.

The years of preparation hadn’t been in vain. Even with the interruption, enough integrity remained to sustain the weapon.

The timefall ended in an abrupt jolt, reality returning in a blink. An all too familiar reality.

Jair arrived in the past one week before he reached Mount Sanctum, the start of this particular loop. He crouched in afternoon sunlight amid dry underbrush. Spindly branches snagged on his robes, dead leaves doing little to obscure his view of the army spreading out across the plain below.

He’d been on the invaders’ heels for months now, every attempt at deeper infiltration cut off before he could reach the transit platforms. Only the coming chaos of Celsin’s final resistance would give him the opening he needed.

Without conscious thought, his body was already moving to evade the blow he knew was coming, arm coming up, spell on his lips.

But, no. That wasn’t necessary any longer. This particular loop was finished. He’d reverted and the silver star of the weapon within his soul remained undispelled.

It had survived. Right?

This all could be a dream. A delusion as he lay dying.

Jair arrested his counter mid-swing, body falling still as he focused inward instead, double and triple checking that the spark of his soulsword remained.

The Letyran scout slammed his weapon into Jair’s stomach, taken aback when Jair only grinned in response to the fatal injury.

“Soulblade, manifest.”

The weapon’s silver fire blazed up at once, casting shadows across the ground as it outshone the dull daylight. Finally, he could see exactly what he had managed to create, the blade purchased with so many years of pain and loss and desperation.

“It worked! It worked. It’s still there.” He laughed aloud with the sheer relief of it, freely and unselfconsciously, tears escaping unnoticed. “You can’t imagine how difficult this was, but I’ve done it! Thank Dovak, it worked! Inspect."

─ Maelstrom

─ Type: Ascended Soulsword (3rd Form)

─ Rank: Legendary (Integrity: 10%)

Imbued with the pure energy of Mount Sanctum and the lifeblood of its creator, this blade has transcended its humble origins and become a weapon of *****?

─ Class Requirement: Mageblade

─ Bound to Jair Welburne

It took a lot to make Jair speechless, but this did the trick. He stared, hardly daring to believe what he was seeing. He’d expected Advanced and secretly hoped for Rare. Possibly Elite if he got lucky, considering the strength of Mount Sanctum’s mana forge. But Legendary! Even on an interrupted ascension?

Pointed ears lying flat against his head in unease, the invader scout withdrew his weapon in a violent slash, further tearing open Jair’s insides. Even that couldn’t dull Jair’s mirth. Though he did grunt in involuntary reaction, he wasn’t paying any attention to his physical surroundings right now.

The sword itself was wavy and uneven, lacking symmetry and elegance. The blade was too heavy, the extra starsteel and missing pearl threw off the balance, and the sword’s power resonated against his manabody in random pulses, barely contained.

The row of unknown characters was mildly troubling, normal item descriptions returned either clear text or simply ‘Unreadable’. The word Legendary pulsed and flickered, sometimes almost disappearing, sometimes half its letters twisting into unreadable chaos, and he’d never seen an integrity bar on a rank before.

Neither concern could override his relief or dim his happiness.

He gripped its handle, running a finger across the lumpy misshapen patch where his body threw things out of alignment. He couldn’t possibly have done any better. He’d threaded the needle in an impossibly precise sequence even to get the elements he had needed, and Mount Sanctum was the only manaforge capable of handling the ascension itself with that much raw power involved.

“Maelstrom,” Jair whispered. His sword had never had a name before now, but with the tumult in his heart and the chaos of its rebirth… Yes. The name felt right.

The Letyran readied for another strike, regarding Jair warily.

Jair could imagine what he must look like, grinning down at his misshapen weapon without concern for being fatally injured, and the image only amused him more.

“No need for that. I’m done here, and I won’t be seeing you again for a very, very long time!” With a tap of two fingers to his forehead, Jair dismissed Maelstrom back into his soul.

He allowed himself to fall to his knees as his strength faded. He closed his eyes and dove back into his soulspell, still laughing as he left behind his impending death along with the future he’d fought so futilely to change.

Golden light enveloped him and he returned to timefall. He shoved himself back hard from the shelf he’d just landed on, twisted away from the preceding events, and let himself continue to drop.

He fell past the second portal incursion with a feeling of intense relief at no longer being trapped in its shadow, shoved himself back from the sorcerer-king’s final stand at Meliarn, and dropped past years of training with Eythron.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

With each event he bypassed, another layer of accumulated pressure fell away. The hopeless, stubborn, defiant, resigned shell he’d worn for so long began to fade. Shedding the metaphorical weight of decades left him light and free.

He bypassed a dozen battles, the first incursion, meeting Celanie, the expeditions north.

He hadn’t gone this far back in relative centuries. For so long, he reran each section in sequence, trying to optimize each week, each month, each year, all in service of finding some way to truly change the past.

Unmeasurable effort, finally repaid in possibility.

Through it all, Maelstrom burned bright within his soul. His soulsword stayed with him, not destroyed by the transition like everything else he’d ever tried to bring back with him.

Now he fell past things he’d long ago forgotten, but recognized immediately as they flickered by: the plague, the assassination, the kidnapped princess.

He passed things he could never forget: his sister’s disappearance, his best friend’s death.

And then he landed at the very bottom: the moment he received his class and unlocked his soulspell. This was the hard stop, the point where it all began.

The golden light of his soulspell faded. Jair stood on an elevated platform in front of half the school, exactly as he had when first initiated into the mageblade class. How many years ago, he couldn’t hope to recall.

For one frozen moment, nothing moved but the spark of silver running down his neck, to his shoulder, then his arm. His mind raced with compacted information and hazy memory. He hadn’t been back here in how many hundred lifetimes? Everything felt familiar but alien, things he recognized without knowing how he knew them.

Brilliant sunlight shone from above, refracted into a rainbow gleam by the reinforced glass overhead. Exotic greenery grew prolifically around the stage and thick grass carpeted the ground below, a vibrant contrast to the desert sand and dull shrubbery outside the oversized greenhouse. One of Astralla Mageblade Institute’s two claims to fame.

In front of and facing Jair stood a dozen teachers in white robes—sleeveless to show off their imprints and not impede any spellcasting—lined up behind Headmaster Larenok and Professor Irres. The headmaster handed out the blank soulswords with pomp and ceremony, while the resident blademaster solemnly granted each new initiate the class they’d spent years preparing for.

He stood with one hand reaching out to accept the hilt of his sword—the same sword he’d just finished ascending. Directly in front of him, Headmaster Larenok held the soulsword in one jewel-gloved hand, extended toward the ‘new’ mageblade-initiate Jair.

Last time he stood here, he'd been a very different person.

Headmaster Larenok, though, hadn’t changed at all. Years of scowling left the headmaster’s face permanently etched with an expression of disdain that his short beard did nothing to soften. He was as corrupt and greedy a bastard as anyone Jair had ever met. More than most, in his experience. It took a lot to stand out in Jair’s memory after so long, but seeing the man’s face instantly brought their mutual loathing back to sharp focus, memories resurfacing that Jair thought he’d long cast aside.

The headmaster’s casual belittlement and snide asides and constant reminders that Jair was an inherently lesser being who didn’t deserve to breathe the academy’s air were only the foundation of their animosity. Scholarship student. As if hard work could ever make up for not being born to wealthy parents.

If not for one very important thing, he’d gladly have never set foot in this place again.

He instinctively tried to turn his head to search out Raina, but for as long as the world remained frozen, Jair was frozen with it.

Only for a moment. The sword’s silver glow danced down Jair’s arm, flickering in eagerness to reunite with its physical form. Sound and movement resumed the instant they touched.

His sword flared up like a small sun. The blank unimprinted soulsword transformed into the final ascendant form he’d so painstakingly created. The standard thin blade broadened to its familiar reforged width, the scattered pearls and imprint of Jair’s body visible in perfect reflection of its future shape. Jair felt a soul-deep strain as material formed from nothing, manifested by sheer necessity with the strength of the sword’s power.

He swayed unsteadily, sudden weariness hitting him in a smothering wave, fighting the giddy adrenaline in a nauseating combination of conflicting sensations.

New initiates traditionally spoke some ritual words and solemnly walked across the platform, but right now Jair was far too full of energy and relief and life and ecstatic chaos energy to do any such thing. There’d be plenty of time for reasonable action in future reversions.

His eyes flicked over to one particular section of the audience, finding her immediately.

Raina Serin leaned eagerly forward, smiling ear to ear, untidy gold hair falling across her face, firegold eyes flitting between Jair and the fading glow of his sword. He could read the question in her eyes, the excitement for his achievement, curiosity over the unexpected lightshow.

Raina. His one true friend and faithful companion from those early years. Someone he hadn’t seen in a hundred lifetimes, yet whose spirit and friendship he’d never forget.

The ceremony had stalled, everyone standing around awkwardly, staring at the flaring light of Jair’s soulsword.

Concern furrowed Raina’s brow, eyes intent as she tried to puzzle out what was happening on stage. Seeing her face again stirred up long-buried pain.

Unless he successfully intervened, Raina Serin had four more days to live.

He wasn’t prepared for the intensity of the emotion that hit him, nostalgia and hope and dread and determination all jumbled together.

Things would be different this time.

His grip tightened and Maelstrom gleamed brilliantly in his hand, as though aware of its position as the bringer of new possibility.

Headmaster Larenok tried to pull the weapon back toward himself, instinctively grasping at the power within his reach.

Jair snatched it away with a sharp ring of metal on metal.

“Ah.” Larenok shook himself and completed the ritual welcome. “Having received the class of Mageblade—”

Jair didn’t wait for him to finish. He jammed Maelstrom into the ceremonial sheath he wore at his side for the occasion and ran for the audience.

Why was his heart still racing like he was in a war zone? Why did everything feel distant and unreal?

He hopped down from the stage, ignoring the height, and automatically tried to channel Lift to slow his descent. The spell didn’t activate, of course. Couldn’t have any existing spells imprinted before receiving the class. The first years of mageblade training made students eligible for the class itself, the later years would build on that blank foundation.

He crumpled into a roll as he hit the ground harder than his young and untrained body was ready for.

At this point in time he’d been fully unimprinted as well as physically weak. His years-younger manabody was blunt and unstable, a Jair-shaped block of wood uncarved, a landscape untamed. Flows of power that in the future rushed so easily through channels long imprinted now had nowhere to go and nothing to guide them.

Yeah… he’d have to do something about that in the coming weeks.

Raina was on her feet before he reached her, the other spectators baffled and murmuring as he shoved past them to her row. She hurried to meet him, concern clear on her face.

“Jair, what’s—“

He grabbed her in a hug, holding her warm and close and tight.

"Jair?" Softer now, concerned.

"You were dead." His voice choked, and with effort he pulled himself together and stepped back.

She gripped his arms, staring at him in alarm. “What do you mean, dead?”

"Not here. Too many people.” Jair couldn’t stay in the crowded dome, he needed to get away. The initiation ceremony was excruciating enough to stand through even without feeling trapped and threatened. Even now, the instinct to run, to fight, to lash out at anything in his way…

He needed to think. He needed a plan. For so long, the desperate hope of ascending his blade had been the sole focus of his existence. He hardly knew what to do now he had accomplished the impossible.

Well. Figure out how to do the next impossible thing, obviously. And for that, he needed to remind himself of what he had to work with.

He couldn’t stop looking over her face, her eyes, her hair. It all looked not quite right, he'd been gone so long. When taken as an aggregate, it was unquestionably Raina. Her energy, her spirit, her face, her body. But he'd forgotten the specifics of how she looked. The person she was lived on in his memory long after the details had dissipated. “Let’s go to the apartment.”

“But… the ceremony?”

“Doesn’t matter. Come with me."

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