The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy

Chapter 123 - Hunting the Phantom

In the morning, Mirian did something she hadn't done in a long, long time: she put on a Torrviol Academy uniform and headed for class.

It brought back a surge of nostalgia.

Which was funny, upon reflection. While she'd been a student, she'd constantly been stressed, tired, and panicked, in about equal measure. But now, with the gap of time, she found it was easier to reflect back on the things she'd enjoyed: chatting with Lily over food. Peaceful runs in Mage's Grove. Listening to yet another fascinating lecture.

Of course, for most people, nostalgia meant reflecting on a past that wasn't there anymore. For her, that past was still the present. She'd both moved on, and hadn't moved on at all. Her classmates hadn't moved away or settled down and had families. All her old professors were still here, teaching. Even the snow would fall exactly on its prescribed day.

The leaves will stay bare. It will always be moving to winter. A realization struck her. Will I ever see the season of spring again?

"You've grown quiet," Valen said, still walking next to her as they crossed the fields between the dorms and the Academy.

"Hmm? A lot to reflect on."

"Can't be easy moving from Akana to here for your final year of classes," Valen said, referencing her cover story. That was one thing she admired about the girl. She took her spy assignments seriously.

"Well, I always knew it was coming," she replied. She'd decided that her made-up parents in this scenario had been born in Baracuel, but raised her in Akana Praediar for several years before moving back. That would explain why she had no accent when she spoke Friian, and would explain away her flaws in speaking Eskanar. Hopefully, though, neither would come up.

Valen broke off to go to her classes. Mirian headed to the Artificer's Tower. There, she'd continue to work on various divination devices that she'd put up all over town. The upper level classes were generally small enough that the professors would recognize Micael wasn't one of their students, so her plan was to claim she'd been given special permission to continue her projects she'd been purportedly assigned in Akana Praediar and then register for classes as usual on the 7th. Then she'd have the short break before the next quarter started on the 12th. That was plenty of time to set up everything she needed to. Then, she could attend classes as a cover while she continued to monitor the situation.

With any luck, she'd have what she needed early in the cycle and could discard the farce. If not, that was the price she was willing to pay for good reconnaissance.

***

Mirian kept expecting Sulvorath to make himself known, one way or another. Before she'd fled to Cairnmouth, she'd been able to tell he'd arrived by the way guard patrols shifted and the spy network completely changed tactics. However, neither she nor Valen nor any of the professors she'd roped into the investigation reported anything she considered unusual.

What in the five hells is he playing at? she found herself thinking.

She wondered if he'd already arrived, and had somehow gotten wind of her plan already. She added more wards to Valen's room, and quickly expanded her divination device deployment. However, the Akanan spies continued to act like no one had intervened. And maybe no one has, she thought. Had she actually scared off Sulvorath?

She had thought about whether or not to use Specter's necromantic curse on the other time traveler. She could get the wands easily. She already had a charged soul repository hidden under her uniform.

It would eliminate him for a cycle. But would it eliminate him entirely?

Unfortunately, she still had no information about his initial conditions. All she knew was that he started somewhere in Akana Praediar, probably a northern city, and had easy access to fast airships. That likely meant he was associated with their military. But there was no guarantee that putting a curse and a necromancer warning mark on him would keep him incapacitated. Perhaps that mark didn't mean the same thing to the Church of the Ominian. Perhaps they'd heal him anyways. And unlike him, she didn't have easy access to airships, so she couldn't put him under the kind of time pressure he'd used to initially thwart her.

If there was any possibility he would be healed from the curse, there would be knock-on effects. She would have revealed a capability he didn't know she had, and might start investigating soul magic more deeply. If he learned soul magic, that could be much worse for her. And if he didn't feel like he had the upper hand, he would no doubt change tactics. So far, since her escape, he'd been ineffectual, but from Jei's recording of his conversation, also felt convinced he had the upper hand. That was a perfectly fine equilibrium to maintain, for now.

What she really wanted to discover was if she could find a way to eliminate him entirely. That meant when she did ambush him, there would be no recovery. There would be no learning from it. He could never be a threat to her again.

I just need to find out if it's possible, she knew.

In the meantime, when she wasn't getting instruction from Marva, she enjoyed going dueling again. She'd sold off her drakeskin jacket and fancy blade because they were too identifiable, which was a shame, and she couldn't exactly start fighting them all with Eclipse (since that would really draw attention to her), but it was nice to unwind with something familiar she hadn't done in a long time. Though the time loop had preserved her physical fitness, it had been long enough Mirian was a bit rusty, though she quickly picked her bladework back up again.

She saw Selesia watching from the benches and felt a pang of nostalgia. The fourth year student didn't pay her any attention, which was probably for the best. Selesia was now nearly ten years her junior, instead of just two. I keep changing, and they all stay the same. It had been frustrating at first, but now it brought a persistent melancholy, one tinged with a bitter edge.

Mirian threw herself into her bouts so she could lose herself, then, recognizing that was the sort of unhealthy thing she and Grandpa Irabi had just talked about, committed herself to meditating each evening.

I can't change it, so why bemoan this fate? It's let me do and see things I otherwise never would have. I have friends I'd never have otherwise met, and even if the friendship is ephemeral—isn't that the nature of life? I don't talk to my preparatory school friends anymore. Impermanence is part of the human experience, so what if mine is… different.

She worked on what she perceived as tangles or little vortices in her soul, the ones that flared up when she was feeling especially angry or wallowing in self-pity.

Mostly, she kept watch on Torrian Tower, positioning herself to study in various different buildings with a view of the entrance. She knew Specter was visiting Luspire in the guise of Adria Gavell, and unlike before Sulvorath's intervention, she finally knew what she looked like. She'd unfortunately probably never forget that face.

***

It was the 6th of Solem, around noon, when Mirian finally caught sight of Specter. She was looking out across the plaza from the second floor window of one of the buildings to the south when she finally spotted her moving to Torrian Tower. She was habitually embracing her focus and using detect life, so when she saw a woman walking by with a much dimmer soul, it immediately drew her attention.

That's the orichalcum at work. Specter was using illusion magic to walk around town, because of course she had been doing that. I wonder what made her so damn paranoid, Mirian wondered. Well, she did assassinate an Arcane Praetorian and is doing high treason. I suppose that's reason enough.

Likely, she was meeting with Archmage Luspire. She still didn't know what they talked about, only that Luspire would get very cross and very violent if he realized what Impostor Adria was doing.

Mirian waited, impatiently, for an hour, waiting for Specter to reemerge. The nice thing about Torrian Tower was there was just the one entrance, so Mirian could watch it like a hawk while she continued to work on her design.

The Holy Pages had inspired her. Not in a religious sense, but in an artificer sense. For most of the time loop, she'd been stuck using a novice's spellbook that used low-potency inks for the glyphs, was inscribed using a low-powered catalyst scribing pen, and had the most mediocre of all arcane catalysts. All of that had been impacting her spellpower and mana efficiency. But what would her perfect spellbook look like?

The pages would have to come from the holy vaults, of course. Then, there was the matter of the cover. Probably, she'd use drakeskin as the base, since that would take both glyphs and runes and was extremely durable. She'd have the usual glyph frameworks that prevented a spellbook from getting damaged by water or fire. Then, she thought about how she'd integrate both glyphs and runes to protect it from the antimagic pulses that came at the end of a cycle. She could test them at Palendurio. I could also test them inside the antimagic fields in the Labyrinth, she mused.

Ideally, she could use spiderweb-strands of mythril—she didn't find it likely she could make adamantium—to create a lightweight binding that protected the spellbook from anything that came at it, and grant herself more magic resistance.

Then, it would be worth it to buy a master's scribing pen and the most potent inks she could find.

The last thing to consider was what kind of catalyst she could use. Generally, more powerful myrvites had more efficient catalysts, though that wasn't always the case. Maybe I could kill an ice wyrm up in the frostlands. That was about as powerful a myrvite as they came. Or is there something else out there, perhaps deep in the Labyrinth?

Her design ideas were interrupted by Specter emerging from Torrian Tower.

Mirian quickly stuffed her notebook in her satchel and scrambled down the stairs, then calmly exited the building, keeping hold of her focus so she could watch Specter even through the walls. Her faint soul energy was hard to focus on, but at least it was different from all the other people moving around the Academy.

Once she caught sight of her again, moving east, Mirian started tailing her.

Specter casually changed her disguise spell in little increments, every time she passed through a spot of shade or rounded a corner where no one was looking. Her hair went from blonde to a slightly darker shade, so that after five small transformations, it looked completely different, but there was never a single change that was so dramatic as to raise eyebrows of people passing by. She did the same subtle alterations for her illusionary clothing so that by the time Specter had walked three blocks, her skirt had changed color, then design, then color again, while her coat shifted as well. Her timing, plus the way that she wove through any crowds, would have made her a nightmare to track if Mirian couldn't use detect life to isolate her.

Specter's path took her north, then back around south through the market forum, then slightly west. There, she dipped into a side door in an alley.

Mirian watched through the wall as her soul-glow moved to the next room, then hit a staircase and started descending. She kept part of her attention on Specter's progress while she analyzed the door. It used a glyphkey lock, but she disabled the alarm ward, leaving the lock itself vulnerable to being overpowered by raw magnetic force. Once the door was open, she quickly cast a divination spell that would locate common magical traps or alarms, then scanned the room for anything like the pit trap or other defenses she'd seen the Akanan spies set up. Seeing nothing, she cast muffle sound on her feet, then hide in shadows as she closed the door behind her. The camouflage spell would keep her well hidden in the Torrviol Underground, while her orichalcum would do just as well at defeating any spells Specter was using to monitor her back.

The second door she encountered was a false wall, but reveal iron did the trick it usually did and led her to the brick she needed to push to activate the mechanism. She cast another muffle sound on the door, but needn't have bothered; the hinges were well-oiled. Then she walked down the steps, her spell muffling not just her feet, but the vibrations they sent into the surrounding stone. She added darkvision to her actively channeled spells.

Once in the tunnels, she caught a glimpse of Specter down one of the longer halls. She'd dismissed her illusion, and was strolling quite casually through what was no-doubt her usual route. She was likely using some sort of light-modifying spell too, as she had no light spell active. With Sulvorath having yet to arrive, she clearly wasn't on the lookout for an operational breach. Nor would she know the assassination attempt on Jei had failed yet.

Mirian relaxed slightly once she recognized the section of the underground they were in. She'd helped run strike missions through it dozens of times. There's where we usually established a defensive cordon, she thought, as she passed a section where three tunnels converged. And that was the route we used for the counter-attack to encircle the trapped underground forces, she remembered as she passed a buried hall.

As they continued east through the tunnels, Mirian mentally mapped where they were beneath the city. Past the forum. Getting close to Torrviol Lake.

Specter glanced back before she rounded another corner, and Mirian froze. Her hide in shadows spell covered most infrared light as well, so she trusted in it to keep her hidden. When the woman continued on, so did Mirian.

She'd rarely gone this far east, since the battle never came out this way, and many of the tunnels were flooded beyond use. Specter stopped by an unremarkable brick wall, then looked around again, casting what Mirian guessed was a divination spell. Mirian stayed still, watching her from the shadows.

Apparently satisfied, Specter tapped three bricks in the wall in sequence, and the wall opened. Not an ancient door. A recent addition, she realized. Of course it had never shown up on the old maps.

Mirian waited for her to head inside, then waited a moment longer before approaching.

Detect life revealed no other people in Specter's lair. Reveal iron showed that the mechanism wasn't using steel, so her earlier sweeps for secret passages had never picked it up. Instead, it was using a glyph triggering mechanism to activate an attached spell engine that cast a simple move object spell on the door, but anti-divination wards meant the usual methods of detection also would have missed those.

She went through several divination spells, checking for both glyphs and runes. There was a rune-mark detector in the floor beyond that seemed standard fare for the Akanans. Mirian used her stored soul energy to disable it through the wall. Satisfied, Mirian began her preparations.

She cast shield spells against heat, magnetism, electricity, and kinetics, layering them in concentric spheres. The strain of maintaining four different shielding spells, muffle object, and her camouflage spell was intense, but that, combined with her orichalcum, would be plenty of defense. She opened up her spellbook to greater lightning, enhanced for paralysis and less lethality and prepared her charged soul repositories, ready to use the runes she'd need to pierce Specter's own enhanced spell resistance.

Mirian pressed the bricks in order, and the door softly rumbled open again.

Specter's quarters were built in an ancient ruined building that had been repaired and renovated with tasteful hanging tapestries and functional but nice wooden furniture. The stone floors were clean of dust and grime, and Specter had even taken off her boots by the front entrance. It wasn't particularly spacious, but she had several rooms to herself, including a bedroom, meeting room and office.

It was the office that she was in. Specter looked up, perhaps shocked to see a shadow silently approaching, but Mirian never gave her a chance. She cast a greater lightning bolt, coated with soul energy and enhanced for paralysis, and the woman let out a truncated scream before she collapsed to the ground, muscles seizing. Mirian dismissed the camouflage and sound muffling spells, then moved quickly to Specter. She flipped her over onto her stomach, using a knee to press down on her back. She unclasped the chain holding the imposter's spellbook, then kicked it across the room. Mirian then quickly took her wands off her. She then pulled the orichalcum torque off her, as well as the two hair pins. There was no time to adjust their resonance, so she threw them across the room as well, hissing at the burning sensation that came from touching an object attuned to another's soul.

She then used a pair of shackles to secure the other woman's wrists, then continued to search her for any weapons. She pulled a dagger from Specter's belt, and another smaller dagger from a sheath that her boots would have hidden if she hadn't just taken them off. Satisfied, she took her knee off and stepped back, finally dismissing her defensive shields.

Specter groaned.

"Got you," Mirian said.

======

The Years of Apocalypse is currently only available on RoyalRoad or Patreon. If you're reading this anywhere else, it's been stolen!