The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy

Chapter 79 - Reconnaissance

The next cycle, Mirian rushed to the site of the airship. It was empty. She set alarm wards down in the area, but by the end of that loop, they'd never triggered. Militia scouts didn't encounter it there, or in any other part of the forest near Torrviol they investigated.

"Maybe they land somewhere random each time, based on a whim. Maybe even small changes in how the spies are captured or how we word the letter to your uncle shifts things. Damn! How do I recreate the circumstances when I don't even know?" Mirian ranted one evening to Nicolus.

Nicolus didn't say anything, because he quickly learned each cycle that Mirian just liked to vent her frustration sometimes.

"I'll narrow down the possibilities. We'll try wording the letter to your uncle exactly the same next cycle, and see what kind of variations that brings. Thanks."

"Happy to help," Nicolus said, still lounging in his chair, snacking on an exotic cheese. "How's that training with Luspire going? Still extremely weird to watch the shy girl with anxiety suddenly casting spells with the big mage-man himself."

"Miserable. I never worked this hard for classes, I just thought I did. His theory is by casting a wide enough array of spells, the brain creates new conceptualizations that make casting any spell easier, because the subconscious mind is making connections, even if the conscious mind is overwhelmed by the information."

Nicolus nodded. "That's a lot of fancy words."

Mirian leaned over and punched him lightly in the shoulder. While Nicolus pretended to be grievously injured, she said, "Anyways, it means on any given day I'm casting one hundred different spells in practice cycles. The Academy scribes keep getting these looks of total dread every time Luspire walks in to tell them what he wants in my spellbook next. Or rather, my second spellbook, he filled the first one."

"Is it working?"

"I think so. Something is working. Most of my spells are measuring at 60 myr on the tri-point energy meter. That's non-fire spells, by the way, because fire spells are always measured at a higher relative output so Luspire's assistant isn't including them in the average."

"Oh. That's pretty good. What'd you start at?"

"I was topping out around 36 myr with my best spell. That was embarrassing."

Nicolus raised his eyebrows. "Wow. That's… that's a hell of an improvement. You've been at this for just over two years? That still puts you in apprentice territory, but that's what your average certified mage hits. Why the focus on power, though? It seems like a knowledge problem."

Mirian looked out the window, remembering the fleet of fishing boats packed with civilians as they crossed the lake, only to be vaporized. "Because it's the battle that I think is critical. I can stop the Akanans from destroying the Divine Monument. I just need to get on one of the airships."

She watched as Nicolus's face shifted through three different expressions. Then he said, "Ohhh! That's why you want the Eskanar lessons. The ships must take off from somewhere, right? You can sneak aboard before they do."

"Sort of. But not quite," Mirian said.

***

The first night of the battle, Mirian dipped out of the command center and walked to the gardens by the Myrvite Studies building, just south of the forward trenches. She'd already said her goodbyes to her friends, and had told Luspire she was buying him more time to get the Monument working.

Likely, the battle would go far worse this time because she wasn't helping organize the critical actions in the Underground, but it would be worth it in the end.

It was dark in the gardens, except for the occasional flash of light from the fighting. The gardens themselves were still and empty. She shed her cloak and changed clothes, the night air chilling her as she did. The Akanan uniform she put on wasn't a perfect match, as it was the work of one of the local tailors referencing an out-of-date book on military dress and Mirian's half-remembered descriptions of the uniforms she'd seen on the airship. It wouldn't hold up to close scrutiny, but it would reduce the amount of mana she'd need to use in her illusion spell, and that was key, because she was about to burn a lot of mana.

In her left hand, she held a mana elixir. In her right, the wand of levitation.

Mirian channeled, and felt that exhilarating vertigo as her feet left the ground. The wind tore at her with freezing claws. Her hands felt like they'd been dipped in ice water, but the elation overcame it as she flew up. A thousand feet up, the view of the battle was heart-stopping. All across the miles of front around Torrviol, she could see spells and shells splashing bursts of light around the battlefield.

She changed the angle of her wand slightly so that her flight path took her northwest, over the Akanan lines. Even in the dark sky, with the clouds hanging low, the Akanan airships stood out because of their sheer size. That, and the flashes of the guns as they came in for another bombardment. A flash of light illuminated the hull of the lead ship. Both began to curve across the sky as Mirian approached, rising fast.

She could feel her aura stripping itself bare, and popped open the stopper of her elixir and gulped it down as fast as she could. It was more difficult than she'd anticipated, and the wind splashed some of it in her face. As it did, her flight path changed as her right hand moved slightly. Mirian was relying on inertia to help her reach the airship, but it also made her flight harder to control. She adjusted as best she could, aiming to land at the rear of the second airship. Hopefully, this was the ship without Marshal Cearsia.

As she approached the deck though, Mirian realized she was coming in way too fast. Desperately, she tried to correct her course, but with her aura nearly depleted, she found it impossible to put out enough force. Panicked, she redirected the angle of the wand, but then she was flying too low. She slammed into the side of the airship—

***

—and woke up in her bed, the ceiling dripping.

The next time she tried it, she adjusted her angle, and brought along a feather landing wand, a spell that used overlapping force shields to cushion falls, and adjusted her angle. She still came in way too fast, smashing into the aft deck like an incompetent meteor. The force cushion bounced her off a wall, which let her tumble down from the second deck to the main deck, banging her shin on something metal at some point in the jumbled tumble.

Hissing in pain, she stashed the levitation wand and pulled out her minor disguise wand. She'd worked with Professor Marva to get the details on looking more Akanan right. A subtle shift in skin tone, a slight change in facial structure, and making her hair dirty blond did the trick. She checked herself in a pocket mirror, then stood and dusted herself off, just as two crew members rounded the corner.

"What's going on?" the first man said.

"Sorry. Bit embarrassing, I tripped," she said in Eskanar.

The second man looked up at the walkway. "From there? Do you need medical attention?"

"No, no, I'm fine. I got lucky, I know that could have gone a lot worse."

She expected them to interrogate her, and she'd have to deploy her story about being new to the airship, and also her family was from west Akana Praediar hence the accent, but they just told her to be more careful and went back to their duties. Either spotting or maintenance, she thought. Her nighttime flight had another advantage: most people were below decks. No one wanted to be up top where the freezing winds scoured away all the heat unless they had to. Clearly, they hadn't seen her come in. Hopefully, no one had.

Mirian's instinct was to slouch and keep her head down, but Marva had coached her to keep her head high and act like she belonged, so she tried to do that, correcting her posture when she noticed herself slipping. Mirian had no information about the airship, and Nicolus's uncle hadn't been able to get them anything, so her plan was to just figure out how it worked.

Mirian strode to the nearest stairwell and headed below decks to find out what she could.

***

Getting caught, when it didn't involve the bridge and Marshal Cearsia, usually meant being thrown in the brig. She actually preferred getting tossed overboard, because that was fast, whereas in the brig she languished for a day or two until the Akanans blew up the Monument and the airships fell from the sky. The anticipation of waiting for that death, knowing it was soon, was miserable.

Over the course of six more cycles, Mirian continued to map out the Akanan Dreadnought Class airships. Republic's Justice was the airship she usually landed on, and it had the benefit of not having Marshal Cearsia on it. The Might of Liberty was the flagship, and the crew was more alert and had better wards up. They usually caught her within hours of her landing, whereas the other ship's less disciplined crew often let her wander about for a whole day.

The process of learning the ship had sped up considerably when Mirian ate lunch with one of the engineers on the Republic's Justice who kept trying to flirt with her. Mirian managed to talk her way into having him show her a schematic of the ship, complete with neatly labeled decks.

Once she knew where to find things, she spent more time in command and control, and more time mapping out what the colossal spell engines on the ships did. She memorized glyph sequences, though at this point, she could read arcane glyphs better than she could read Eskanar. Here, a conduit sequence. There, a heat regulation ward. She learned the divisions on board, and got better at pretending to be a maintenance mage.

How the airship actually stayed up continued to elude her. The engine room had its own security detail overlooking it, and asking about that security protocol or how the ship worked immediately made her look suspicious.

When she got caught, she spent the time in the brig repeating what she'd learned in her mind, connecting it to previous knowledge, and then sequestering it away in that strange mental dreamscape where the Ominian's empty eyes watched over her.

***

The second spy's name was Ayland. He spoke almost no Friian or Cuelsin, so their conversation was entirely in Eskanar. Getting him to talk once he was captured took some doing. She finally found the way to do it was to start talking about her own life, and then mention her frustration with the corruption of the guard and the double-agent Impostor who was still eluding her.

"It's not just your own spy agencies," he finally said one day. "The RID has its own… problems."

Learning that the Republic Intelligence Division was just called by its acronym had gotten Mirian into hot water on the airship. There were all sorts of little details for sounding like a native speaker that she was learning. "Yeah?" she said casually, because casual was the way to go to get him to say anything.

"I found out this project is off the books, you know. Operations are supposed to have chain of command you can follow. Only, there's missing links. I sent some memos about my concerns with the operation, because it violated protocol. When I was last at RID headquarters in Vadriach, I looked for the memos. They were supposed to be in the records department. Records department had no communications coming out of Torrviol. Then I got a letter from my mom, saying some strange people had visited the house and talked about the patriotic work I was doing. I got the message."

It set the record for the most consecutive sentences Ayland had ever said to her. "Well… wait. Then who's running this operation?"

Ayland shrugged. "It was made clear to me this operation was too… delicate. So they won't tell me. A security risk if I got captured. I told Idras. He brushed me aside. I don't think he was part of it, I think he doesn't like to think about it. Makes him question too many things he believes. Specter, though, she knows."

The Imposter. Still hiding in the shadows after all this time. "Whoever she is, either the Department of Public Security doesn't know, or just won't say. But what if… what if they have their own rogue operation?"

Ayland shrugged again. He did a lot of shrugging. "Our governments work very closely. Before I was transferred here, I worked in the same building as Baracuel agents in Persama. I'd be more surprised if they didn't."

Maybe that explained why Magistrate Ada kept running into a brick wall when she tried to get the Deeps to come up and deal with the problem. They stonewalled and delayed endlessly. Maybe this had to do with what Nicolus kept talking about when he mentioned 'motivated incompetence.' If there were people in the Deeps who were also part of this, they wouldn't want any of it to see daylight. But why would they want war between the countries?

"Another layer. Always another layer," she muttered.

Ayland shrugged.

***

They were in Xipuatl's meditation chamber, with the door closed. This time, Mirian had covered the ornate chest with a small cloth as she loaded it onto the cart taking away the spies' things, then snuck it out in an over-sized satchel she'd purchased when no one was paying attention.

Xipuatl looked at the wand and three skulls with more than a little apprehension. He'd reluctantly agreed to host her efforts to understand it, but was clearly having second thoughts. "You realize these are definitely the tools of a necromancer, right Mirian?" he finally said. "And not, 'technically necromancy because the Luminates declared all forms of soul magic as necromancy after the Unification War' necromancy, but actual necromancy?"

"The Impostor is clearly using soul magic. I have to know how it works," Mirian said.

"Yeah. And if you fuck up your soul with that thing, does the time loop fix that?"

Mirian's mouth grew dry. She was pretty sure it didn't, given that her soul damage from mana elixir overuse had transferred between cycles. I have to figure it out. Too much was at stake for her to shy away from this, no matter how dangerous it might be.

Mirian closed her eyes and laid her hand gently on the strange wand. The first thing she found was that the wand had a different feel to it than Xipuatl's reliquary. If connecting to his Elder reliquary was like walking through the deep shadows of a forest, connecting to this one was like passing through a dark field in a fog.

She tried using it to connect to one of Xipuatl's myrvite plants, like she had a hundred times before with the other reliquary, but was broken out of her focus state by how intensely difficult it felt. Not only could she not reach out to the plant's soul, she could barely even perceive it.

Xipuatl's soul, however, blazed bright, far brighter than it usually did. When she explained this to him, he said, "I didn't know the Elder reliquaries could be different. All the ones in Tlaxhuaco are like mine."

As for the skulls, there seemed little Mirian could figure out. The runes were all unfamiliar, and they seemed to need the soul energy of something other than a plant to work. At least one of them probably helped create the strange imprinted symbols on the souls of the spies, which implied the spell also needed a human soul as a target.

That, she was profoundly uncomfortable with. Mirian had grown up listening to the sermons of the Luminate Temple, and desecration of the soul was one of the great sins.

They ended up buying a pair of chickens from the market to experiment on; one to act as the soul powering the spell, and the other to act as the target. However, this magic was completely outside Xipuatl's expertise, and with no idea how to link the energy flows of the runes on the skulls, or how to properly channel the soul energy, the chickens ended up entirely unharmed. After several frustrating hours, Mirian gave up. Trying to figure out soul magic from pure experimentation might work eventually, but it would be slow. She had the tools now, but she needed to find a proper teacher, one whose expertise went beyond plants.

***

As the 28th of Solem came, once again Mirian found herself looking over a map of the battle with General Hanaran.

Already, the Akanan attack was bogged down. "They'll try to spearhead here," Mirian said, pointing at a section in the forest. "At the same time, they'll put heavy pressure south to try and encircle our forces north."

Hanaran and her subordinates all had that look to them again, the one that radiated discomfort, skepticism, and fear all at once. Mirian had to remind herself that this was all new to them, and once again they were coming to terms with their existential crises.

Mirian looked at them, and with as much righteous fury as she could muster said, "This is the one where we win," not because she believed it, but because she'd found it helped settle their dread and focus on the battle. To one of Hanaran's officers, she said, "Do you have a levitation corps?"

The officer cleared his throat and looked to Hanaran, who nodded.

"Yes," he said. "They deployed south to hit Rambalda though."

Mirian scowled. "To fight Persama? The revolt is suppressed. It should already be won."

"So you've said," Hanaran said. "And yet, my division was almost called down before we got word of the crisis in Torrviol, and that was before Akanan forces started helping them. The reports I heard were that every garrison is hard pressed, and the enemy relentless. If we win here, my orders are to immediately send half of my division to reinforce Alkazaria."

That gave Mirian pause. She clearly remembered reading about the southern revolt being subdued, and several of the Persaman leaders executed. But that had been a public paper, right before information from the south ceased. Had it just been propaganda to assuage fears? Had there been a renewal of the attack she had never heard of? Or was she drawing enough Baracuel forces north that the southern attack became more effective? Either way, this is the critical battle. If there was still a crisis in the south when she won, she'd deal with it later. Assuming there is a later. But stopping the Divine Monument from being destroyed still seemed like the best bet for stopping whatever was happening to the leylines, and then she just had to hope that was connected to the moon.

"Am I wrong?" General Hanaran asked.

Mirian shook her head. "I may have been given inaccurate information about that. It hasn't been my focus, for obvious reasons. The magical eruptions are connected to what happens here. If we fail, they get a lot worse."

"Worse? There was a town south of Palendurio that was simply wiped off the map!" one of the officers said.

"Worse," Mirian acknowledged.

"Are there… more of these Monuments?" another asked.

"I think so. And I think one getting destroyed in Akana is what sets off the initial eruptions." It was pure speculation, but she said it confidently because projecting confidence made people trust her in other aspects. "Anyways, you can move the 34th arcanist brigade north along this route—they've left a gap in their lines—and hit a convoy of supply wagons that are undefended, then pull them back to here, where they can reinforce the 5th artillery."

She could see it all in her mind's eye. And soon enough, she'd be flying up to board the Republic's Justice again.

When there was a lull in the strategic planning, Mirian pulled aside one of the logistics assistants and asked, "How would I go about requisitioning more levitation wands?"