very painful and disorienting. After it stopped I tried to get my bearings to respond to further attacks, but after a minute or so I realized none were coming and decided to hightail out of there. I have no idea why the attackers stopped.”

“Hmm,” Ilsa hummed. “There are lots of possibilities. Maybe, instead of walking into a deliberate ambush, you simply stumbled upon someone who didn’t want to be seen and they moved to incapacitate you so they could slip away unnoticed. Maybe someone left a spell trap in that section of the tunnels for whatever reason and you set off the trigger. Maybe you resisting two spells in a row intimidated them into leaving. We may never know, I guess.”

Yes, all valid possibilities. It certainly wasn’t giant sentient telepathic spiders, no sir!

“Oh and Zorian?” Ilsa continued. “You’re forbidden from going down in the tunnels until further notice. I get that you wanted to help a friend, but it was still a foolish thing to do.”

“Err, yes professor,” Zorian agreed. “Understood.”

10 minutes after Ilsa left the nurse came to tell him he could go home.

* * *

“This is boring!” Taiven complained.

Zorian cracked one of his eyes open so he could glare at her.

“You said you wanted to make it up to me,” he reminded.

“But I meant teaching you some kickass spells, not..” she scowled at the bowl full of marbles in front of her. “..throwing marbles over your shoulders. Shouldn’t I at least aim a couple at your forehead? I bet you’d be a lot more motivated to get it right that way.”

“If you do that, I’m going to track you down to your room and suffocate you in your sleep,” Zorian threatened heatedly. The whole reason he was having her do this was so that he could practice this stupid trick without suffering through Xvim’s methods.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. After a few seconds he felt the mana-charged marble pass in the vicinity of his face but couldn’t pinpoint over which shoulder it flew.

“Left,” he tried.

“No, right,” Taiven. “Now you’re just guessing, aren’t you? Just give it a rest for today, you’re not going to get anywhere once you get frustrated.”

“No, I just need a couple of minutes to calm down,” Zorian sighed. Taiven groaned in response and he opened both eyes so he could properly glare at her. “Why are you being so difficult about this, anyway? You know I can’t ask anyone else to do this for me, right? I don’t know anyone else who can aim their throws precisely enough, and none of them could keep charging marbles for more than half an hour without depleting their reserves.”

”I know, I know,” Taiven sighed. “And I’m glad you asked me for help. It’s the least I could do after.. well, you know. But you’re not taking advantage of me properly!”

Zorian raised an eyebrow.

“Err, that came out wrong,” Taiven chuckled nervously. “What I meant was: I can do much more than this. My accurate marble throwing skills aren’t my only gift. I know I must seem pretty pathetic for getting knocked out by a single spell but come on!”

“I never thought of you as pathetic because of that, Taiven,” Zorian sighed. “But alright. What can the great Taiven do for me?”

“Teach you how to fight, of course!” she grinned.

“The magical way, I hope,” Zorian remarked warningly.

“You should never underestimate the usefulness of a fist to the face, even in a magical duel,” Taiven grunted. “But yes, I meant the magical way. Were you telling the truth when you told the old guy who hired us you can cast magic missile, shield and flamethrower?”

“Of course,” Zorian said.

“Well, let’s see them,” Taiven said, waving towards a duo of dummies on the other side of the room.

“Err, won’t your parents mind if I wreck their training dummies?” Zorian asked.

She rolled her eyes. “The whole reason I told you to come to my place was so we could train here. The whole room is warded, and those dummies especially. You won’t even scratch them, trust me.”

Shrugging, Zorian quickly cast a magic missile, shaping it into a piercer and weaving a homing function into it so it would hit the head of the dummy. The bolt of force sped across the room and struck the dummy square in the forehead. The faceless wooden head of the dummy bent backwards with the force of the blow in a manner that would snap a real human’s neck in several places, but then promptly snapped back to its default position as if nothing was wrong.

“A decent magic missile,” Taiven praised. “I like that you can cast one without a spell focus – I thought that would be the first thing I would have to teach you.”

Her hands blurred in a dizzying display of skill, the chant spoken so softly he barely even heard it. A veritable swarm of magic missiles erupted from her hands, speeding towards the dummy with a lot more speed than Zorian’s piercer had and impacting it with enough force to lift it off its feet and smash it into the wall behind it. Though they were simply smashers, Zorian knew they were a lot more dangerous than the piercer he had produced, even individually.

She didn’t appear the slightest bit strained by the effort to produce the display.

“So was there any purpose for doing that, other than rubbing in how far beyond me you are?” Zorian inquired. “Firing that many magic missiles, even sequentially, would drain my reserves dry on the spot. I don’t think I’ll be repeating your feat any time soon.”

“Err, really?” Taiven asked. “I guess I kind of assumed your mana reserves are huge, like your brothers’. How many magic missiles can you cast in one sitting?”

“11,” Zorian said, pointedly ignoring her first remark. “It started out as 8, but I increased it somewhat.”

“Eight!?” Taiven gaped. “But that’s.. practically below average!”

Zorian knew nothing good would come out of blowing up at her. It was Taiven. She didn’t really think before speaking, and if you were bothered by that you had no business interacting with her.

“Does that mean you admit defeat and we should get back to the marbles?” he asked with deceptive cheer.

“No!” she shrieked. “No, I was.. I was just surprised, that’s all. I sort of wanted to teach you how to cast multiple magic missiles with one casting, but I suppose it wouldn’t do you much good with such tiny mana reserves. You should make your every spell count instead of going for quantity. Show me your shield and flamethrower while I think of something.”

After trying to burn a dummy to a crisp and failing, Zorian cast a quick shield, thinking just its existence would be enough of a proof for Taiven. Apparently not, as she immediately whipped out a spell rod out of her belt and fired a smallish purple projectile at the shield. Zorian’s eyes widened at the unexpected attack, but the attack splashed harmlessly against the semi-transparent plane of force and dissipated into a puff of purple smoke that soon disappeared without a trace entirely.

“What the hell was that!?” Zorian demanded.

“I was just checking if the shield can hold,” Taiven told him. “The spell is harmless, just a simple coloring bolt that carries some force to it.”

Zorian wanted to tell her his shield held against a hostile mage that was actually trying to kill him, but he couldn’t really do that. He settled on giving her an annoyed look.

Eventually, Taiven admitted she couldn’t think of anything at the moment and reluctantly started throwing marbles over his shoulders again. She made it clear to him, however, that she would enlist help from her parents in the coming days, and that this way of training was a onetime thing. Zorian managed to negotiate at least an hour of marble throwing each session, in addition to whatever crazy scheme she would come up with eventually.

Truthfully, combat magic was only a side interest at the moment. He was starting to realize he couldn’t keep blundering blindly through this. As much as he had wanted to advance his magical studies before finding the exit, he couldn’t simply ignore the danger posed by the possibility of a soul bond – the longer he stayed inside, the bigger the chance of the bond activating in full force and devouring his will and personality. The mental assault he recently went through simply highlighted that the time loop had its own dangers, and that it was irresponsible to take them lightly.

A rough plan was forming in his head. He needed to find out everything he could about the time loop – how it came to be, how it functioned exactly, and how he could get out of it. Also, what was the nature of his connection to Zach? And what was the deal with the invasion – it seemed too conveniently timed to be a coincidence, so what was its connection with the time loop? Finding answers to those questions would require skills in divination, information gathering, and infiltration, so that’s where the bulk of his efforts should focus on. He still intended to learn other things too, of course, but these three things were a must and a priority.

He would have to finish his semi-apprenticeship in the library and learn all the tricks of that trade he could within the constraints of the time loop. The Academy library was an incredible resource to have, and he was sure he would have to use it extensively if he was to find answers to the questions that were plaguing him. So far his attempts to use it had not yielded much in the way of results, but that was probably a consequence of insufficient authorization and lack of research skill on his part than an actual void of information on the topics in question. He needed to know how to bypass the protections on the secure sections of the library, and how to search them efficiently once he got through, and Kirithishli and Ibery were his best shot in getting there. He would apply for the job in the library first thing tomorrow morning.

And, though it was too late for that in this particular restart, he should impress Ilsa again and choose divination as his interest this time. If Ilsa’s choice was even half-way as motivated as Nora Boole was, he would have a particularly easy avenue on learning that otherwise tricky subject.

And then, as he was climbing the stairs inside his apartment building, everything went black and he woke up via Kiri jumping on him and wishing him good morning. Apparently Zach died again. Only a few days into the restart this time, too. Hopefully Zach would get the hang of whatever he was attempting very soon, because being wrenched without warning into another restart could get old really fast.

He would soon learn he should really stop tempting fate with such thoughts.