«What the hell is that shield of yours made of, anyway?» Taiven asked. «It took 5 missiles without breaking and it looks… different. It’s almost entirely transparent; I can see it only because I’m standing so close to you at the moment. Back when we were fighting, I didn’t even see it until my attack hit. I thought you were trying to shield yourself with your hand or something at first.»
«It’s just a shield spell, just greatly overcharged and superbly executed,» said Zorian. «I spent a lot of time practicing that spell.»
«Still wouldn’t have helped you without that stupid trick you pulled,» Taiven scoffed. «This was supposed to be a spell battle, dammit!»
«You said you wanted to see how I fight,» Zorian shrugged. «By the way, how did you know where to fire that attack of yours? You had your eyes shut pretty tight from what I could see.»
«Oh. That’s just a little trick one of my teachers taught me,» Taiven said. «I doubt it would help you much, though — it’s pretty wasteful in terms of mana usage.»
«What do you mean?» Zorian asked.
«Well, it’s a pretty simple move that involves expelling a large quantity of mana and saturating the area around you with it. You can then sort of sense your surroundings through the resulting mana cloud. The information you gain is very rudimentary, but you can easily spot concentrated mana constructs like that magic missile you threw at me. I actually didn’t know where you were, even with the aid of the mana cloud, but I figured that if I aimed in the direction from which the attack came from I’d probably catch you as well.»
That sounded… awfully familiar. Zorian was pretty sure he used the exact same thing for his secret unlocking trick, except that he focused more on using the mana cloud as an extension of his tactile sense rather than perceiving mana sources. Of course there was quite the difference in scale from flooding a lock with his mana to saturating the entire greater area around him. He simply couldn’t afford to be that wasteful with his mana.
However…
«Taiven,» he began, «let’s say for a moment that I saturate a large-ish bubble of air around my head with this method. Would I be able to sense mana-charged marbles within that volume with this method?»
Taiven blinked and gave him a curious look. «I… suppose. You’d probably have to spend some time mastering the skill to get a cloud sensitive enough to detect such low-powered sources, though.»
«But it would be easier than trying to sense mana-charged marbles with my inborn mana sense alone, right?» Zorian pressed.
«Way easier,» Taiven confirmed. «Actually, just about any method would have been easier than that. Gods, you’d have to be, I don’t know, archmage-level good or something to sense a mana source that weak with no spells or other aids.»
Zorian suddenly felt incredibly stupid. Of course Xvim’s task seemed impossibly difficult — he was doing it wrong! Xvim probably expected him to use a method like this to sense the marbles. The asshole just didn’t bother giving him proper instructions on how to go about doing it. Or any sort of instructions, for that matter.
Gods, he hated that man.
Following an argument about who won their little spar (Zorian claimed it was a draw, Taiven claimed she totally won in the end), Taiven insisted on more fights to resolve the issue, and Zorian saw no reason to refuse. He lost all subsequent fights, of course — Taiven was strong enough to simply overpower him if she so chose and he no longer had the element of surprise on his side. Still, he felt he had done well, since Taiven actually had to work to bring him down. Even she admitted that if he caught his opponent off-guard and was ruthless enough in his opening moves he could bring down even professional battlemages, though she warned that he could easily get in legal trouble that way. The mage guild looked very dimly on people who escalated fighting into the lethal realm, even in self-defense.
And anyway, finding out what exactly Xvim expected of him made the whole thing worth it all on its own. Most of the skill was already familiar to him, so it only took a few hours until he was able to create a diffuse mana cloud around his head. Granted, he couldn’t really feel mana sources as such, but a marble was a physical object as well. Thus, when Friday came around and Xvim unveiled his oh-so-clever training method to him, Zorian calmly identified where the marbles were going as they zipped around (and occasionally at) his head. Xvim wasn’t impressed, of course. He simply started throwing a quick succession of marbles at him and demanded that he sort them by magnitude of mana emissions. Which he couldn’t do, of course, since he was sensing them by more rudimentary means. Oh well, he wasn’t too concerned — now that he knew what to do, he fully expected to master the skill properly soon enough. Possibly by the end of the restart, unless Zach decided to tackle another dragon or something similarly insane.
Fortunately, Zach’s primary interest at the moment was trying to organize some kind of ‘mother of all parties’ that involved inviting the entire class to his mansion during the summer festival. Being aware of the time loop, Zorian was one of the few people who understood what Zach was doing. He was trying to get as many students as possible out of harm’s way without having to explain anything to them. Zorian had no idea what Zach planned to do with all those people when the attack started, or how he intended to deal with Ilsa and her insistence that everyone must attend the school dance.
3 days went by, and Zorian was back in the sewers. Finding aranea proved very easy, since they were expecting him this time. Any doubts about whether or not he was going to be taken seriously were wiped out when the forward scout he met took him to a familiar figure. The matriarch had decided to talk to him in person, rather than simply project her mind through one of her subordinates.
[Well, I have had time to digest the memories my… ‘other self’ sent me,] the matriarch began. [The story is… not as implausible as you might think, and the memories contained some pretty damning proof. I suppose we should ‘swap stories’ now, no? Of your experiences, I only know the basics you told your friends, and you know precious little of why I’m not scoffing at the idea of time travel.]
[I suppose that would make sense…] Zorian said carefully.
[But you want me to go first,] the matriarch surmised. [Very well. First thing you should know is that my web has been in a conflict with your so called ‘invaders’ for several months now. They were an infuriating, but manageable opponent… up until a week ago, when they suddenly developed a disturbing amount of precognition about our tactics and abilities. They had counters for secret skills that have been passed on from matriarch to matriarch for generations and have never been used within living memory up until that moment. They had counters for personal abilities that were unique to a single aranea. They even seemed to know how we were going to react in response to their increased threat and aggressive moves. In short, the amount of insight they possessed about us was downright implausible. Believe it or not, time travel was seriously discussed as a possible method they were using to obtain their information.]
[Not divinations?] Zorian asked.
[We know divinations, child,] the matriarch said. [If there is a field of magic beside the mind arts that we excel at, it is that. It is good that you mention divinations, though, because they hold a piece of the puzzle as well. You see, our web routinely tries to forecast the future with divination, with varying amount of success — highly disruptive events tend to make any future forecasts useless. What do you think happened when we tried to forecast the future during the past week?]
[It didn’t work?] guessed Zorian.
[Oh it worked. It gave wildly different results every time we repeated the forecast, no matter how little time passed between one forecast to the next, but it worked. So long as we didn’t try to extend the forecast beyond the day of the summer festival. Beyond that date, the forecast returns a blank. Each and every time. It is as if everything beyond that date simply ceases to exist.]