Chương 56: Chapter 55: Again, But Faster

Ren had never paid much attention to how quickly he recovered from the fever. The first time through, being sick had occupied most of his available attention. Later loops had come with rather more pressing concerns, such as goblins, dying, magic, dying again, and discovering entirely new categories of people interested in helping him die. Now, with Bren alive downstairs and no immediate catastrophe scheduled for the day, Ren noticed something strange. He felt fine. Not merely better. Fine.

The fever had broken sometime during the night, and after a day of being fed, carried around, and subjected to Elna's increasingly suspicious hand against his forehead, Ren's body had apparently decided it had suffered enough. He sat on the floor near the bed and flexed his toes experimentally. No weakness beyond the usual baby amount. No miserable heat behind his eyes. No heavy ache dragging at his limbs. That was new. Mara had stopped being necessary a couple loops ago.

Ren had assumed his parents were simply becoming less worried after repeatedly seeing him recover, except they had no repeated experience to draw from. To them, every loop was the first time. Which meant his grind was having an effect, and the System was helping him fight off ordinary baby fevers faster. Giving him just a bit more time each loop. Cool! The fever had once cost him days. Now it cost him less than one.

His growing Vitality, Body Conditioning, Resting, or some combination of everything he had spent several lives grinding was carrying over into recovery more strongly than he had realized. Ren made a mental note to watch it. Then he made another mental note beneath that one reminding himself that he currently had considerably more important things to think about than optimizing his one-off childhood illnesses. Importantly…

even during that day of recovery he felt fine enough to think about how to approach the situation. Clearly, the previous loop had worked. Bren had died, and Ren had been abducted and apparently murdered by excessively enthusiastic servants of the Goddess of Benevolence of all things, which made calling the loop successful feel somewhat generous. The village itself, though, had survived. And the warning worked. Hadrik believed them once he had proof. And with concrete proof, he knew how to prepare better.

And so the village prepared, Little Yara made medicine and charms. The defenders then held far longer than they ever had before, and he suspected that, even if the knights didn't arrive in time, the village would have held, if with great losses. Still, the knights arrived in the nick of time and turned what remained of the goblin attack into cleanup. The main failure had been timing. They arrived too late for Bren. Ren stopped beside the bed and rested both hands against the blanket hanging over its edge.

This time, they would not. That was the simplest part of the new plan, everything simply needed to happen faster. If Ren could squeeze even a few more days into the preparation chain, the knights ought to arrive before the goblin leader ever entered the village. Simple, doable, efficient. Well… Simple. Apart from the itty bitty little detail of the holy knight order apparently considering Ren a suspicious hole in the Divines' otherwise universal attention. That problem required a different approach.

Faster with the warning. Slower with being noticed. Ren frowned and resumed pacing, because apparently walking tiny circles around his room was now strategic planning. Moving helped him think. He needed to stay out of sight. Not completely. That was impossible unless he intended to spend the loop hiding beneath furniture and developing a deeply unhealthy relationship with dust. He needed to stay uninteresting. The village children were the largest problem.

Adults might see something strange and decide they had misunderstood it. Children saw something strange and immediately told six other children, three parents, somebody's grandmother, and possibly a chicken. Tessa was different. She was too clever not to understand the need for the quiet. And Ren trusted her completely. His parents needed to know too, there was no avoiding that, no matter how much he disliked making them worry again. They were the reason the plan had worked at all.

Trying to manipulate everything around them while pretending to be an ordinary infant had been difficult enough before he knew how much more effective they could be when they understood what he was doing. So Elna, Bren, and Tessa. Family only. And Little Yara. Ren paused. Yeah, definitely Little Yara. Stolen story; please report. He should have told his Master about the loops last time.

He had barely been able to explain himself properly when they first met, and by the time his Language and Expression improved enough to make a serious attempt, the goblin problem had already swallowed most of their attention. In this loop he had more time, better speech, and a much better understanding of what she could actually help with. Little Yara knew many things.

More importantly, Little Yara knew enough magic to recognize when Ren was doing something spectacularly stupid before Ren finished injuring himself with it. And he could explain the loops properly and see what she made of them. Assuming she believed him. Ren considered that for a moment. She had accepted a five-month-old mana prodigy as a student after approximately one conversation. His standards for what Little Yara considered plausible might need adjustment. The charms deserved another look too.

Little Yara's bombs had worked far better than Ren expected, and with more time there was no reason to settle for the same simple versions again. He remembered the flashes going off beside the barricades, the larger goblins staggering, and the defenders using those few stolen seconds to bring them down. They had discussed other options when they first discussed the charm bombs, before Little Yara settled on what she could prepare safely and quickly.

But perhaps Ren could convince her to try to make more damaging options? With more time to experiment and more time to prepare, that would hopefully lead to more unpleasant surprises waiting for the goblins when they finally arrived. What could she make with more time? His master had already demonstrated a worrying amount of competence for somebody so young. If Ren reached her earlier, explained exactly what was coming, and gave her an extra week to prepare, there might be much nastier options available.

He smiled, then stopped. Planning magical war crimes with a teenage witch probably should not feel this wholesome. There was also the matter of candy. Ren looked toward the doorway as Tessa's voice carried faintly from downstairs. That entire operation could remain hers. He could no longer be involved, but Tessa had already proven entirely capable of turning a candy-based research assignment into a functioning miniature information network. She enjoyed it too!

Almost as much as she did preparing drills and obstacle courses for him. Ren would be a terrible little brother if he deprived her of the opportunity to organize other children for treats merely because he had developed religious enemies. So Tessa could be the mastermind behind the children shadow organization, handing out candy for work done. Preferably without teaching anyone that Ren was the actual mastermind behind it.

He still wanted to learn more about the world, but it no longer needed to occupy as much of his attention as it had in earlier loops. Ren already knew enough to save the village, and he had enough understanding of the System to keep pushing his skills forward without spending more time hunting for answers. Magic was the more immediate priority. Mana Sense and Mana Manipulation were already moving in the right direction, and safe Invocation still waited somewhere ahead of them.

If Ren could reach that, or discover some other active skill that let him actually fight the goblins himself, it would do far more for his preparations and anything unexpected happening than another pile of miscellaneous information would. Learning from Little Yara was different. His Master knew far more about magic than Ren did, and extracting useful explanations from her had already proven considerably harder than convincing her he was worth teaching in the first place. He would keep working on that.

And given enough time, Ren was confident he could wear down even Little Yara's reluctance to explain things. Ren resumed his small circuit around the room. Physical training remained important too, but while it had taken him from helpless newborn to terrifyingly mobile baby… Unfortunately, a terrifyingly mobile baby was still several developmental stages below useful combatant. Getting there had cost him enormous effort and dozens of skill levels.

He could certainly get there eventually, and he would, it's just– He did not have time for 'eventually'. Magic offered him far more leverage. Ren reached the wall, turned, and started back. Was that everything he could do? Warn his family, reach Hadrik, get proof, send for the knights, go to Yara, become her apprentice again, tell her about the loops, request more magical explosives, let Tessa run the children network, train magic, and stay quiet. Ren frowned. Something still bothered him.

The previous loop had taught him how the goblins attacked, but the loops had also taught him something else. Left alone, the goblins would not attack until roughly a month into the loop. When the village struck them earlier to get proof, the attack came about a week sooner. Ren slowed. So the goblins were out there long before they attacked, and disturbing them changed when they came. He knew their numbers now, at least roughly.

He knew the smaller goblins came first, the larger ones joined later and spread through the groups, and he knew how quickly they adapted once the fighting began. He knew the leader could change the entire battle just by entering it. What he still did not know was where any of them were before that. They had to be somewhere out there in the forest, hiding, or gathering? Ren's pacing slowed further. Earlier loops had given him very little reason to think about that.

He had been too weak, too slow, and too ignorant of what was actually coming. Wandering into the forest as a highly motivated baby would have achieved very little beyond giving the goblins an unusually early snack. But he was getting ever more capable. … What if the village never had to fight them at all? Ren stopped. If he could learn where the goblins were before the attack, then everything changed.

The village would no longer have to wait for them to arrive at the barricades, they could take the battle to the monsters. Pick them off, group by group! Even if not all of them, with Hadrik and a few others working together, if they could reduce the goblin numbers significantly before the battle… It would be a breeze! And farther ahead, once Ren was stronger, quieter, and actually capable of moving through the forest without drawing attention to himself, he could do so himself.

There might even come a loop where he did not need to warn anyone at all. But for that he would need Stealth. Actual Stealth, not Level 2 Baby Hides Badly. He would need better Athletics, better mana control, offensive magic, probably more Appraisal, and whatever other skills he could manage to get a hold of. That meant a lot of grinding. But Ren could do that! In fact, he was getting rather good at it. A familiar message appeared. [Skill Level Increased: Planning Lv. 12 -> Lv. 13] Ren blinked. … Case in point!

Ren still had mana sitting unused, which offended him on principle. He sat down before his legs could turn the planning session into accidental endurance training and started throwing Appraisal at whatever happened to be nearby. The first few attempts gave him exactly the sort of results he had come to expect from low-level Appraisal: obvious names, obvious functions, and very little that justified the mana spent learning them. But that was what the grind was all about, a lot of things were useless until trained.

And if the first milestone made Appraisal even slightly less interested in charging him mana for information available through the Super Advanced Technique of simply looking at something, the grind would be worth it. By the time he finally stopped, his mana was lower, his legs had recovered, and his mind was clear of distractions. Now he just needed to go through the unpleasant process of telling his family about the loops… again. Them not remembering that emotional reveal hurt, but… Ren smiled.

They trusted him then, and he trusted they would again. He would just have to endure, get them and Little Yara into the know, and then simply… grind. Oh yes. It was all coming together.