Chương 22: Atemporal Death Traps

Immediately Suria flushed with shame at her reaction. Frustrating as it was, she couldn't afford to be so uncontrolled. She knew with absolute certainty that she was trapped in a time loop now, which meant she could be targeted if anyone discovered her. Strange behavior without warning would draw attention to herself and create suspicion in anyone who suspected that time magic was in play. Fortunately - tragically - this version of Maut-mai wasn't particularly interested in Suria and soon looked away.

For all that they'd grown closer during the previous loop, Maut-mai hadn't shared much about what her concerns had been on that first day. Suddenly losing a woman who had been becoming a friend was too much for Suria and she had to get out. To shed attention, Suria sat quietly and recreated several essential talismans.

After days of working with the Darkmoon stylus, her old wedge felt clumsy, but she hadn't lost any of the skill she'd built up, so she easily produced a simple flame spell, her mana shield, and the unlocking inscription. Once Maut-mai was no longer paying any attention, Suria got up and walked by Lirngelf's body, this time picking up his mana potion.

The temporary boost wouldn't be much compared to her long term growth, but it would be a useful tool in the challenges that she now knew would face her during the term. Then she turned sharply and headed out before Shuguja could emerge from her office. Along the way she saw Rije, alive and well. She wanted to hug him, but that would be bizarre in this timeline. Maybe she could fix things this time, so she gave him a broad smile as she passed. What she needed to do was collect herself and think.

As soon as she reached a dark hallway, she leaned back against one of the cold marble walls and closed her eyes. Suria was fairly confident that nothing had killed her this time - the loop had just come to an end for no apparent reason. While it was technically possible that the stomach pain had reflected something lethal, she still felt the fading tension as the loop completed its reset.

She hadn't learned anything about the fundamentals of time magic, but her research on Hrakik the Irredeemable and other looping tyrants had established some ground rules. None of them had been able to travel through time at will: there had always been a cycle. Some of the history books implied that the length of the cycle was correlated to the strength of the ritual that had created it, which meant the most parsimonious explanation was that she'd reached the natural end of the loop.

That didn't get her closer to answers about why the loop existed at all, or how it related to the conspiracy between professors, but it completely transformed how she needed to make decisions. What she did in this loop would probably be wiped away, so all that mattered was whether those actions brought her closer to her ultimate goals. Based on what she had learned, Rije would probably die in an hour when the professors started fighting.

She could try to create a spell to knock him out, but that would only save him this loop and might draw a lot of unwanted attention. Having him alive was still preferable, if she could find a good way to do it, but she needed a method to save him permanently. That could come in the form of spells, or knowledge, or maybe even a solution to the loop itself. In any case, she had already spent far too much time in Convocation Hall. Suria opened her eyes and marched toward the western exit.

When she reached the door, Suria took a deep breath and cast the spell against the exact point where she remembered the locking glyph. The wards parted easily, now that she was using the right tool for the job instead of an inverted inscription. Just in case, to avoid consequences to everyone in the building if something distracted her, Suria took a mana lantern off the wall and set it against the door jamb.

The wards didn't do anything to force the door closed, so it would be propped open when they figured out the problem and went looking for solutions. Until she established her broader objectives, that was a good enough method. She would need to decide on a new plan for this second chance at her first term... As soon as she stepped outside, Suria realized that those plans weren't going to happen. There were three people waiting for her, all wearing university robes.

Foremost was a tall young man with broad shoulders, sandy blond hair, and an Akrashic hat. A woman about Suria's age had the skin and eyes of someone from Nau Qin Nau, but unlike the professor, she wore her hair loose and looked nervous. Finally there was a slender man with neatly combed dark hair and a thin pair of glasses much nicer than hers - based on the sash he wore over his robes, he must be from the Republic of Junn. What could she say?

Suria didn't plan to blurt out any information, but she had a terrible feeling that there was absolutely no point trying to play ignorant with this trio. She kept a hand in her satchel, holding her combat talismans, even though they seemed experienced and she doubted she could beat them.

"How many times have you been through the loop?" the man with glasses asked.

"I don't..." Suria did her best to give a puzzled look.

"I'm not sure what y-""Don't even try," the taller man said, forcefully but not unkindly.

"We've lived through this ten times before you suddenly show up. At first we thought you might be a student who just got lucky this time, but this time you got out faster, didn't you?"

"We aren't hunting for you," the young woman said more softly.

"We're all in the same boat here." Since she'd already met Lirngelf, Suria wasn't surprised that there were other loopers, and truthfully she'd been trying to ignore the knowledge ever since the krashorb tournament. She still hesitated before she responded to the assault of their questions. Since they had been waiting for her like this, they clearly had the advantage, so they could have done worse.

"Is it safe to talk about it here?" Suria asked.

"Won't the laws of Hrakik the Irredeemable...?"

"It's safe so long as you don't take excessive risks," the blond man said, then abruptly grinned and put a hand to his chest in the Akrashic greeting.

"I'm Wynchard Odinel. Pleasure to meet another student in the same trial."

"This is... a trial?"

"That's just a hypothesis," the man with glasses said.

"Wynchard is convinced that we were placed in this loop to test our character, or train us for some great purpose. But the truth is that we don't actually know. We're hoping we might be able to find out, especially if you have any new information for us."

"I see," Suria said quietly.

"And you are?"

"Jeilin Pavnn," he introduced himself.

"I'm a second year student at Darkmoon. So far every single person trapped in the time magic has been a young student."

"Usually second years or new students who were on campus early," the woman said, then smiled and gestured to herself.

"I'm Qanti, by the way." Suria thought that people from Nau Qin Nau usually had three names, but then again she knew next to nothing about that nation other than that one of the department thrones was from there. These three didn't seem so hostile after all, and her name was no secret, so Suria gave them all a polite curtsy.

"I'm Suria Northbrook," she told them.

"This is my first day at Darkmoon Academy and I very much hope it isn't always like this." Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings. Jeilin and Qanti just smiled, while Wynchard laughed freely and stepped closer.

"Pleased to meet you, Suria!" he said, loudly enough to make her nervous.

"I want to ask you about just what's been going on inside Convocation Hall, but I should wait until everyone is here."

"Wait, how many of us are there?"

"Wish I knew the exact number. We're just the three who were close enough to greet you, because a lot of people start on the other end of campus, or in their own estates." Wynchard frowned and seemed about to ask another question, but Suria saw that he could easily end up bowling over her objections.

"What's been going on outside?" Suria asked.

"Until last time, I've always died within an hour."

"That's getting into bigger issues." Wynchard stepped back and nodded to the other two.

"Listen, I'm going to gather everyone up for another meeting. Suria doesn't seem as foolish as some of the others, but get her up to speed on all the obvious mistakes, alright?" The other two murmured agreement before he strode off, leaving Suria to try to analyze their relationship. They were from different nations and didn't stand like friends, so she guessed that they had no formal relationship before the time loop began.

Most likely Wynchard acted as leader by force of personality, and possibly strength, since she thought he was an older student and he had a ranked seal on his lapel.

"Let's sit somewhere more private," Qanti said, gesturing north. As they walked, Suria nervously watched Jeilin pull out a talisman before she realized that he was casting some sort of silence or privacy spell around them. The sounds of the outside world seemed to become quieter and more distant.

"You didn't behave recklessly on your first loop out," Jeilin said, "but you know we're not invincible, right?" That placed Suria against another serious decision: whether she told them about Lirngelf. Though they seemed trustworthy, she didn't consider herself a good enough judge of character to be sure about that. Giving up information could only harm her, and fortunately the introductions had given her time to calm herself and think things through.

"I feared as much," Suria said, "and last cycle I tried to do a little research without attracting attention. Wynchard implied there were pitfalls?"

"You're smarter than most," Jeilin said with a narrow smile.

"Yes, our souls and minds are vulnerable, because that's what's sent back in time. Unfortunately, there are fairly common spells that kill the soul - advanced, but common. And since time magic like this is illegal, there are a lot of fatal errors." While they spoke they walked to the field of broken arches, which apparently was just a convenient place to sit. They found some chair-shaped stones in the remnants of a building and sat down in the shade.

Once there, Suria had figured out how she wanted to ask her next question.

"Some people have already... died? Lost their souls?"

"Multiple. I know five for certain, and I suspect it's at least six or seven. One of the most obvious errors is to immediately go asking questions about time magic. One fool actually went around asking professors and, well, we're pretty sure one of them made the obvious connection and did him in."

"That's not as bad as the Water Society noble," Qanti said with a sneer.

"She didn't seem able to handle it and ran around screaming about the cycle. Permanently killed in the second loop."

"That one was rough." Jeilin winced and shook his head at the memories.

"Cycles where the staff get suspicious there's a loop, security increases and things are even riskier. It's a little safer now that the survivors are mostly smart enough not to shout out the secret."

"Wait," Suria said, "what about the bodies? Only the soul is gone, right? Doesn't that make everyone suspicious?"

"The corpses seem to be medically ambiguous, so it doesn't make them suspicious right away. It helps that many of us start outside the school, so friends or family cover up the death."

"I see. Uh... you said there were other pitfalls to worry about?"

"One of the biggest? Don't gamble." Jeilin gave a narrow smile.

"That's not a moral statement, I mean that it looks suspicious if you win too often. One man went down to the tracks and made a ton of money before he just... wasn't there the next cycle. We're not sure whether someone at the university was alerted, or whether it was someone else. They might even have just tried to punish him for cheating and coincidentally used a spell that also kills the soul."

"The one that shocked me was..." Qanti trailed off, frowning.

"I forget his name. That man from the Beiroe Islands. When he realized that everything reset, he started burning his savings, living a hedonistic lifestyle, I think you can imagine. Some of the others act like that too, but he must have gone too far, because the authorities took him away and then he was gone."

"I think it was the loans," Jeilin said quietly.

"It wasn't just savings; in later cycles he started taking out high-interest loans. Some people might actually ruin their lives that way, but it's still going to attract attention."

"Just don't think other people are stupid," Qanti told Suria seriously.

"They probably aren't thinking about a time loop, because that's insanely rare magic, but if you act strange enough, you'll attract attention. Most of the most obvious ways to take advantage of a loop don't actually work out so well in practice."

"Thank you for the warnings." Suria lowered her head thankfully to the two of them.

"I've been desperate to ask, though... what happened before? How many loops have you been through? Is it always the same as the last one?"

"Every single one of us has experienced the same number," Jeilin said.

"Unless someone is lying, but there's no evidence of that. When the loop starts, the wards to Convocation Hall go up, and we'd never been able to break in."

"Obviously we knew something was going on," Qanti added.

"There's some kind of explosion about an hour after the loop starts, and after that there are professors all over the place and they cover up whatever happened. Wynchard tried to break in once at the hour mark, but something killed him. Next loop he said it was some inexplicable magic, like a wave of death..."

"That's what killed me so many times," Suria told them quickly.

"But I don't actually know what causes it."

"Wynchard isn't going to like that. He's going to be all over you to try to learn more, and you could get a lot of favors out of it if you play your cards right."

"Let's not throw all that at her yet," Jeilin told her, then smiled back at Suria.

"Anyway, they usually clean things up quickly and the school term starts normally. But the results are a bit unpredictable: sometimes students or faculty survive, sometimes they don't. There's a guard who apparently protects some of them, though I don't know how he could shield anyone from that final spell." So Rije gave his life to try to save others, over and over again.

Suria's heart fell at the thought of his repeated sacrifice, and she felt a pang of guilt that she was probably leaving him to the same fate this time. Hopefully the opened door would help, but if not, she would figure out something else.

"So every loop lasts the same amount of time?" Suria asked.

"Oh no, not at all," Jeilin answered, then hesitated, glancing at Qanti. Apparently this was a harder question than expected.

"In the beginning we had absolutely no idea when a loop would end - you'd just end up where you started at random."

"You didn't feel anything?" Suria realized that this question might draw undue attention and hastened to modify it.

"I mean, nothing killed you? I was trying to figure out if I was poisoned or something at the end of the last cycle."

"Dying just skips the loop if your soul is intact," Jeilin explained.

"But what I was actually trying to say was that the loops have gotten longer. The first one was less than a day long, and since then they've extended unpredictably. They've been about a month for a while now and we don't know why." That was important information, but Suria was stuck on a smaller detail: she'd felt pain at the end of the loop, which she'd interpreted as a burgeoning mana sense. Was it possible that she was discerning the time magic itself?

She could easily be wrong, so she pushed the matter out of her mind to focus on what they were saying.

"It seems random," Qanti said, "except that the loop only gets longer. The first big theory was that it increased every time a looper died, as if there was only so much time to share between us, but the changes were too chaotic to be sure. Then one cycle no one died and it still extended, so that theory was thrown out." A chill went down Suria's spine, but she forced herself to just shake her head.

"I've gotten killed every single time," she said with only partially faked frustration.

"I'm so far behind everyone else..."

"Don't worry," Jeilin said with a smile, "you mostly lost the short cycles."

"Well, alright. How long has it been stable? Since the random extension, I mean?"

"Think it's been five cycles," Qanti said with a shrug.

"Adwyrma was hunting all over the city to see if there was another looper we didn't know about, but came up dry."

"And between you and me," Jeilin said, "I'm glad. If the cycle was actually based on the number of loopers... well, you can imagine."

"I can imagine every time I see Adwyrma looking at me." Suria nodded and smiled as if this was all just mildly interesting while she tried to steady her pounding heart. The unexplained extension of the loop sounded like it lined up with when Lirngelf had been eliminated, meaning that the first theory was likely correct. All the loopers were drawing on the power of the same loop and they could gain more time by eliminating one another.

Even if they didn't believe in the theory, some of them might decide to attack their fellow loopers just to get them out of the way. Suria had been looking forward to answers, but now going to meet with the group felt like walking directly into the dragon's den.