Chapter 82 - Hunted

Mirian tried to figure out what in the Gods’ names had just happened. She’d won. She’d finally fucking won. The Divir moon had stayed in the sky another day and then—

Then Nicolus had shot her.

Only, it hadn’t been Nicolus. But then, who in the five hells had it been?

“Mirian? You okay?” came Lily’s voice.

“No,” Mirian said with a sigh. Dying was always something of a shock. When she woke up at the beginning of the cycle, she almost always made some sort of noise that her roommate picked up on.

She looked around her dorm room. Same as it ever was. She picked up her spellbook, and with a wave of her hand, she telekinetically shut off the water heater on the top floor, then used the tin under her bed as fodder for a metal plug, heating the metal until it was soft, then funneled it up through the holes until she sensed it was by the roof. Then she shaped the tin and rapidly displaced the heat so there was a nice tile there. The rest could wait until Archmage Luspire’s scribes updated her spellbook with shape wood.

Lily stared at her. “Since when can you do that?” she said, mouth agape.

“Time loop,” Mirian said, quickly dressing into her Torrviol Academy uniform. “I’ll explain later. I have to go stop a bunch of spies and then… look, I’m not crazy. I’ll talk to you later. Good luck on your exams!” It won’t matter in the end, she mentally added, and then rushed out the door.

***

Normally, she killed the first spy by pulling him off the roof, then stopped the second one as he broke into the Myrvite Studies building, then stopped the third spy four days later as he attempted to ambush and kill Professor Jei in the Underground. 

As she walked with Jei through the Torrviol Underground, Mirian gave her the usual explanation. “It’s just the one spy, and he only has the one lightning wand. Once he’s captured, the spies go into hiding, and I work with Magistrate Ada to bring about their mass arrest.” She paused outside the secret passage and lowered her voice. “Ready?”

Jei nodded.

Mirian cast a grounding ward on both of them, then opened the door. Jei strode forward while Mirian crept around to the side as she usually did, waiting for the spy Idras to launch his desperate ambush.

She only had a moment’s warning that something was wrong. She felt the tingle of arcane energy building up behind her, and then the fire ray seared through her back.

The now familiar feeling of lethal pain ran through her, and she fought through it to look around. As she did, she saw more spells flash around her. She saw the silhouettes of at least six people, hoods covering their heads. Fire and force spells went off all around the room, directed at Jei, who deflected the flame spells, but wasn’t able to stop a force slash from taking off her arm. As her mentor collapsed to the ground screaming, a cloaked figure approached her, gun raised. A spell had distorted his voice, but she could still hear the accent. “Just give up,” he said, and shot her.

***

Mirian sat up from her bed. In all her time loops, nothing like that had happened. Nothing. She was trembling, she realized, with fresh adrenaline—and fear. What was happening? What had changed?

The answer was starting to tickle the back of her mind. A thought she’d tried to dismiss as foolish. Something she didn’t want to be true because it would change everything, and she didn’t want to change everything. Everything had been going so well! She’d stopped the bloody Akanans, brought their airships down from the sky, and shattered their army. She’d saved the Divine Monument. She’d saved Torrviol!

It can’t be, she thought.

Lily said something as she dressed, and Mirian didn’t remember what she said in reply. She was too focused on what she needed to do.

She made sure the two first spies were dead and jailed respectively on the first day. She recruited Nicolus to her cause that evening, but this time, the next day she handed Sire Nurea a list of the spies to start keeping an eye on before they were arrested. “And if you have any contacts down south, I need to know how the Persaman revolt near the border is going.”

“There’s a Persaman revolt near the border on top of all that stuff you just told us?” Nicolus said.

“Yeah. And if you don’t have a trusted source, a newspaper will do. Though I never really did follow up on what you know about the Syndicates.”

Nurea and Nicolus looked at each other. Nurea raised an eyebrow. Her ward said, “I didn’t tell her about it.”

“Not in this timeline, anyways,” Mirian confirmed. Actually, it had been Nurea who’d let that nugget slip.

Then Mirian worked on a new schedule for Jei. Even with preparation, she wasn’t stopping six people who had spells and firearms—not with just the two of them. Later in the cycle, she’d have more people who would believe her about the time loop, but it was still too early. Professor Torres, for example, usually only really started believing her when all the spies were rounded up.

All her previous planning had been in service of winning the Battle of Torrviol. She hadn’t planned for—whatever this was.

As to what this was, she was still hoping she was wrong.

On the 5th of Solem, Mirian and Jei avoided the Underground entirely.

***

Mirian didn’t wake up on the 6th of Solem. She woke up on the 1st again, disoriented. She looked over to Lily, then up and the ceiling. I already fixed the ceiling leak. That’s the first thing I do, she thought, and then she realized, fuck, someone killed me in the night.

That was disturbing as hell. She hadn’t even heard anyone. And that meant…

Mirian didn’t want to think about it.

She rushed to kill the first spy, then spent a great deal of time pacing about in the garden outside the Myrvite Studies building thinking about what she needed to do.

She recruited Nicolus and Jei again, but this time, she went to Valen.

“What are you doing here?” Valen said with her usual phony disgust.

Mirian pushed her up against the wall and aggressively kissed her, then as Valen stood there, dazed, Mirian said, “There’s more where that came from, but I need your help.”

Valen tried to act casual, like her breath hadn’t just been taken away. “Yeah? What makes you think I want you hanging around me?”

Mirian locked eyes with Valen, then whispered, “I know how to make you squirm.”

The other girl let out an entirely undignified noise, then breathed, “Since when did you…”

“Time loop,” she replied, backing away from her. “Only there’s a problem. New development. I’m being… hunted. My room’s not going to be safe to sleep in anymore. I don’t know how soon he can find me, but I’m not taking any chances this time.” She looked over at the empty bed and said, “So I’m going to sleep in your room.”

Valen made a face. “You’re going to sleep one building over?”

“In disguise,” Mirian added on. “I’m a bit less of a moron than I used to be. Please don’t lecture me on spycraft, I’ve already heard it all.”

“Yeah? Let’s see it.”

Mirian opened up her spellbook and flipped to the major disguise spell she’d just finished scribing earlier in the day. Then she channeled, weaving the spell with her eyes closed as she visualized the light construct she was making and the new sound she wanted her voice to make. Magic was all horrendously complicated, and only the years of practice made it easy for her.

“Call me… Vera,” she said, voice now higher. The illusion she’d cast had a lot of small changes, and was mostly based on the Akanan disguise she’d practiced. Her skin was paler, her hair dirty blond instead of black, and her eyes faint blue instead of their usual gray. She’d also changed the structure of her face.

Valen looked her over. “Well done,” she said. “Vera,” she repeated. “And you have… a story to go with her?”

“Not really. I came up with it a few hours ago. I can be your cousin who’s visiting. Or a transfer student.”

Valen tapped her chin. “No one would believe ‘cousin.’ Transfer student, then. From…?”

“Westshire,” Mirian said. At Valen’s skeptical look, she added, “It’s a real city in Akana Praediar, and the tutor I learned Eskanar from told me a bit about it. And none of the spies skulking around Torrviol have been there.”

“Since when do you speak…? Prove it. I want to hear it.”

In Eskanar she said, “You’re a terrible little goblin-person but I’m glad I get to see you again. I don’t want you to die in battle, I want you to live. Even if you are a pain sometimes.”

Valen nodded thoughtfully. “Well, that was probably Eskanar. If you said ‘hello, my name is Vera’ really slowly I would understand it.”

Mirian smiled and held out her hand. “We have a deal, then?”

Valen took her hand. “Welcome to the Torrviol Academy, Vera,” she said. Then, licking her lips, she said, “Now, we do roommates a bit differently over here in Baracuel…”

Mirian ran a fingernail around Valen’s chin, then brought it up so it rested on her lips. “Oh, do we?” she said, smirking.

***

The problem with relying on a major illusion spell was it was mana intensive. Mirian’s auric mana had grown substantially in the past four years, as had her spell power and efficiency, but there was simply no way she could maintain it all day. She settled on maintaining the spell any time she was moving out in public, then let it drop when she was inside a classroom or back in the dorm. She had a newfound respect for Professor Marva. She wasn’t sure how the illusion teacher managed to maintain complex illusions for multiple hours, especially since she knew they didn’t have enough spell power to use a spell like levitation for any length of time. Were they just that specialized? They obviously still had a lot to teach Mirian.

Lily wasn’t happy that she’d moved out, nor was she happy with Mirian’s refusal to tell her any of the details. Mirian didn’t even want to explain that it was for Lily’s protection. Whoever was hunting her had found her dorm room; they obviously knew that Lily was her roommate, and she didn’t want to give them any reason to target her.

 Since she was being hunted, she decided to lay low after the first two spies were dead and captured and wait for Nicolus to get back to her about what was going on in the south. She decided she could still probably go down into the catacombs and get the wand of levitation. She could, by now, kill the bog lion that nested down there on her own, she just needed a nice incineration ray spell in her book or something equivalent.

Mirian headed through the secret passage in Bainrose Castle. As she rounded the first corner in the catacomb, she felt the sensation of arcane energy spiking as a ward triggered—

***

“FUCK!” Mirian said, sitting up from her bed.

“Mirian? You okay?” Lily said groggily.

“No! Dammit! Five bloody hells!” She tore off the covers and paced around the room. “He set a trap. He knew! What does he know? How does he know? How long… when… dammit!”

“Are… did you have a bad dream?”

Mirian let out a breath of air like she was a steam engine. “Yeah, that must have been it. I’ll tell you about it later,” she said, and was still buttoning up her uniform’s coat as she stormed out of the room.

This time, she didn’t kill the first spy, and didn’t capture the second one. She’d lived long enough to see that someone had snuck Ayland out of prison anyways. She did warn Jei about the ambush, and did get Nurea to start investigating the spies, but she quickly found a problem: Nicolus and Nurea were being watched. Nurea could find several of the spies easily because they were observing her. They didn’t seem to care she knew it, either. It was nearly impossible to track their operation under those circumstances. Valen also noticed she was being watched as she tried to get more information from her network of rumormongers, which meant Mirian had to be more careful about her disguise. That also made meeting up with Nicolus that much harder, and she found that once Nicolus started meeting with Xipuatl, the spies marked him to watch too. Overnight, the entire network was pointing itself at her and her allies.

Without any sort of way to get Captain Mandez in jail for treason early on, he’d have no trouble breaking his agents out of the town jail either. The problem was also that these changes were happening extremely early in the cycle. They started following Sire Nurea by the 5th of Solem.

So Mirian went to class like a good student, and relied on the fact that the spies didn’t actually have anyone in the student body or among the professors.

Class was interminably boring. She’d gone from getting tutored by Archmage Luspire himself to—this. Sixth-year basics. And they were basics, she understood now. At least Viridian’s lecture would still change each day, though she felt bad that the spies were back to killing all the myrvites in the Studies building again.

On the 8th of Solem, Nicolus slipped her a newspaper on his way to go drink with his buddies to celebrate the quarter ending. It was fresh from the presses of the second capital city, Alkazaria. 

She read it back in Valen’s room. The headline read, “Catastrophic Defeat! Perfidious Persamans Ambush Army and Overrun Border Forts! Alkazaria Could Be Next!”

The article itself didn’t have any of the information someone actually planning a battle might find useful, but it was clear what had happened: The Baracuel armies by Rambalda had been ambushed and routed. Suddenly, the rebel group Dawn’s Peace had gone from being an ineffectual guerrilla group that was easily put down and nearly annihilated to an invincible army that seemed to know the Baracuel army’s every move, every weakness, and every secret.

Almost like someone leading them had foreknowledge.

Mirian crumpled up the newspaper and said, “Gods’ blood,” then stared at the wall, though her eyes didn’t see it.

 The story was so drastically different than it had been so many cycles that there was no denying it.

There were other time travelers in this loop with her. How many, she had no idea.

And at least one of them wanted her out of the picture.