Mother of Learning. Arc 3 Incomplete

Other than the corner glyphs glowing a little, nothing happened.

Damn it. This just might be a little harder than he thought it would be.

After failing to affect the cards a few times and then overdoing it and burning down a few cards to cinders, singing his fingers in the process, Zorian finally managed to burn some blurry shapes that were clearly inspired by what was drawn on them instead of being an irregular hole burned through the center of the card. Predictably, Xvim had some very disparaging things to say about that.

Eventually, Zorian ran out of mana and had to stop. What kind of shaping exercise was so mana intensive you can actually run out as you practice? The Xvim kind, apparently. Instead of simply sending him away, though, Xvim then proceeded to lecture him about the proper way of gathering ambient mana. Apparently there was a way to assimilate ambient mana faster if you sat completely still and focused on doing absolutely nothing else. So not very useful, all things considered, but probably crucial if he intended to complete Xvim’s newest exercise in any sort of reasonable time-frame.

Then, as a parting remark, Xvim casually remarked that they were going to continue their lesson tomorrow. That tomorrow wasn’t even a school day didn’t bother Xvim in the slightest.

«Good,» Xvim concluded. «We have a whole day, then. We will need the time from what I saw today.»

It wasn’t an isolated occurrence. From that day on, Xvim insisted on practice sessions every single day, monopolizing every bit of free time Zorian had. Why did Xvim suddenly decide to do that, when he usually never interacted with him outside their assigned meeting times? Hell if Zorian knew. It was certainly annoying, though.

The aranea, on the other hand, had their own frustrations. Trying to track down the ward-breaker that hired Taiven’s group to recover the watch turned out to be fairly easy, but getting access to him was anything but. In addition to being good at breaking and analyzing wards, the man was also good at building them, and he was a very capable mage to boot. The aranea lost two of their members trying to corner him and eventually gave up on him for that particular restart, focusing on other leads for the moment.

They still did their best to counter the invaders during the summer festival, of course.

The next two restarts were much the same — the aranea gathered information about the invaders, sometimes asking Zorian to speak for them if they had to interact with someone openly, and started a limited assassination campaign among the cultists and other invasion collaborators that they managed to identify. Zorian learned combat magic, aranea mind arts, and tried to survive Xvim’s lessons without punching the man in the face. Their efforts were steadily bearing fruit, with the invasion going more and more haywire with each subsequent restart, and the matriarch hoped their mysterious third time traveler was going to show up soon.

The biggest surprise, to Zorian, was that Novelty actually remembered their interactions in previous restarts. Apparently the matriarch wasn’t monopolizing the memory transfer like Zorian thought she would, and was instead giving him memories of 6 different araneas in that memory packet of hers. Novelty, being something of Zorian’s personal trainer by now, was deemed important enough to be included in that elite company, something the young spider was very smug about.

Now, though, Zorian was feeling it was time for a change of pace. Two restarts full of Xvim were enough for him, and Taiven had taught him most of what she knew about combat magic anyway.

He knocked on the door to Ilsa’s office and waited for her to invite him in.

«Good morning, mister Kazinski,» Ilsa said with a hint of amusement. «I haven’t been expecting you until Friday. I suppose you’ve heard some stories about your mentor, then?»

«No, I already know what kind of person Xvim is. It’s not why I’m here,» Zorian said. «No, I’m here because I want to learn how to teleport.»

Ilsa blinked in surprise. «That’s… quite ambitious. Leaving aside the question as to why I should spend my time teaching you that, what makes you think you’re even capable of casting such a spell? Even the simplest of teleport spells are very difficult.»

«A fair question,» Zorian admitted. «How about a demonstration?»

«By all means,» Ilsa laughed, motioning him to go ahead. Zorian didn’t need empathy to see she didn’t think he was capable of impressing her.

Well then — challenge accepted.