The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy

Prince Rehiz was already on the move as Mirian flew through the palace, sending servants and bureaucrats scattering. With enhanced detect life, she could see the a large group moving down a hallway towards the north section of the palace. The tight formation moving in synchronization around a single individual meant it was almost certainly the prince. Based on how dim the souls looked—indicating spell resistance—at least two of them were Holy Sentinels. Likely, they were making their way towards some sort of fortified room.

Several groups of guards were ahead of her in the halls and junctions. Mirian used force blast on the nearby window, sending tapestries billowing, and she flew out, bypassing the guards and moving in parallel to the fleeing group until she passed them. She cast prismatic shield, then smashed another window and flew in ahead of them.

She cast two spells simultaneously: grounding, around the prince, and greater chain lightning, coated with soul energy to pierce the Sentinel's robust resistance.

Thunder shook the palace as her lightning flashed through the hall, blinding in its radiance. They were all so tightly packed that the electricity chained through them all repeatedly, forming a ribbon of electricity. The guards didn't have time to scream. They simply dropped to the ground, smoldering. Two of the nearby tapestries caught fire. The nearby windows had all shattered. Scorch marks dotted the walls.

"Tell me the route they took," she demanded, dismissing the grounding protection that had prevented him from getting caught in the attack, as well as her own shield.

The prince looked around in horror at his dead bodyguard. He was shaking. "You… you…"

"I am one of the Chosen you fool! Or was doing the impossible not enough for you?"

He had grown pale, but he at least had recovered some of his wits. "I have your Torrviol allies hostage. If you kill me—"

"Killing them is meaningless. The way this all works isn't what you think. It's a time loop. That's how I know possible futures. The world ends soon. The Ominian needs us to stop it. All you've done is open up the possibility that the most powerful necromancer in memory gains information that could lead to the annihilation of all life on Enteria. Now tell me. Where. They. Went." She cast light of the Prophet, then conjured two orbs of raw fire in her hands.

The prince took another step back. "Promise to spare me."

"Very well."

"Straight north to Alkazaria. But you'll never—" Mirian bound his soul to recharge her repositories, then smashed the two orbs of fire into his face. She dismissed her illusion spell and replaced levitation with accelerated levitation.

She blasted back out the window, heading north.

Palendurio was closer to Alkazaria, but whether it was close to the cavalry she needed to catch depended on how far they'd gotten. Either way, taking the Gate back north would mean needing to pass through territory held by Ibrahim's armies. That might give Ibrahim or Atroxcidi the very information she was trying to prevent falling into their hands.

The accelerated spell was mana hungry, but the extra force push it incorporated meant it could break the horizontal speed limitations of the base spell, just like an airship. The wind whipped by her, sending her dark hair streaming behind her.

Since she'd emerged from the oasis, Mirian had done little with her auric mana as it had accumulated. Now, she spent it. She rocketed north.

***

The larger the Southern Range grew, the more worried Mirian became. The wind had cleared away most evidence of the riders, but detect eximontar continued to pick up on their droppings. Her prodigious mana reserves were growing low, but even with a layered lens spell, Rehiz's riders were still out of sight.

Several hours of flight had drained most of her mana. She had only brought a single mana elixir, and had consumed it an hour ago.

As she'd been flying, she'd had plenty of time to think; the vast desert was stretched out before her, and there was no civilization between her and the Southern Range. The life in the desert was scattered, but like the Endelice Mountains, a surprisingly large number of myrvites lived scattered through it.

She had started doing estimations in her head. A binding took a small quantity of soul. A force blade spell, a small quantity of mana. Using mana siphon to turn soul energy into mana took a small quantity of mana, and resulted in mana depending on the soul used and how much was siphoned. Mana was notoriously difficult to quantify, but she could quantify the mana costs of each spell as a ratio and compare that to how many minutes of accelerated levitation it would give her. For very small souls or weak souls, the ratio was obviously unfavorable. As she did the math, though, it seemed that if she spent a few minutes killing and draining the soul of a two-headed vulture, she could make that time up as long as the deviation from her route was less than around 30 degrees. The cost in time and distance deviated from her line north could be compared to each other. If she wasn't busy flying, she would have made a table, but rough estimations would do.

For something like a desert drake or manticore, the ratio was much more favorable, and both the time spent and the degrees off course she went could be increased while still letting her have an overall increase in distance covered.

Jei would be proud, she thought.

The first two-headed vulture in her path was only about a thousand feet out of her way, mostly up. She bound it, killed it, and siphoned its soul into mana without needing to pause her flight. By the time its carcass hit the ground, she was already a few thousand feet away. Detect life picked up a desert drake hiding in its dune burrow. Some sort of natural spell they used kept the sand around it from collapsing. Mirian killed it, needing to pause only briefly, then she was on her way again.

She became a flying butcher. Vultures, drakes, manticores, and dessication hounds all fell to her force blades. She left a trail of corpses behind her, all to gain just a bit more mana for a little more speed.

The sun set and she continued on, sacrificing a bit of valuable soul energy to buoy her stamina with the Last Breath stance. Under the light of the Luamin moon, she continued on. That night, the slaughter continued. It took hundreds of myrvites, but she was able to not just reverse the drain, but achieve net mana gain. She still had to be cautious of soul destabilization as she took in and swiftly burned the B-class mana, but she could feel her auric mana had grown.

It occurred to her that she had broken open a gate, and now that she had, there was no closing or fixing it. This type of travel would let her reach high speeds no other arcanist could reach without an airship.

All she had to do was kill myrvites by the hundreds.

As she flew, she approached another metaphorical gate.

By now, Mirian had killed a lot of people. Killing the Akanan spies and soldiers was easy. They had, after all, literally killed her first. The soldiers, even Marshal Cearsia, were deceived by the RID before they were whipped into a frenzy, but they still had no compunctions slaughtering the people of Torrviol. Her friends. Her second home.

She had no problem killing the conspirators of Palendurio. The Pure Blade mercenaries. The corrupt bishops. Corrmier and Castill. Here and there, she had killed out of convenience. She still felt a pang of guilt thinking about Everad—and yet, would she not do it again? By dying a few minutes early, he saved her an entire cycle. She still worried they might discover the cycles were limited.

Now, she had set herself to kill again. Some two hundred of Prince Rehiz's soldiers. They were following orders, as they had been trained to do. They weren't attacking her. And yet, she had to hunt them down.

For the greater good. She'd read that in a philosophy book somewhere. Pontiff Oculo had said he was working for the greater good. Too much could be justified by that.

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Her own justification rang hollow to herself. They're all dead anyways. What couldn't she justify by that thought? It was true, every time. Did that mean she was bound by no morals at all?

It still bothered her. Yes, the world ended, but these people—they were real. They died, but then again, everyone died eventually. Eventually, a time would come when even the longest lasting memory of a person, even the great Prophets, would fade from memory. All their pain would be gone, lost like so many grains of sand in this desert she flew across.

Enteria, she thought, and realized she had walked with the Ominian here. Back then, the Southern Range had been a bit higher, the peaks a bit sharper. There had been plants blooming in the desert. Perhaps it had been after one of the rare monsoons that swept across it. Did you foresee this? she asked. Is it necessary?

Another fire drake fell to her force blades, then a sun-scarab beetle lumbering across the desert, carapace bright. She cast detect eximontar and detected more of their feces along the path. There was a discarded water cask, half buried in the sand. A mile later, a dead eximontar, covered in lightning scorpions and sand writhers that were picking apart the corpse.

She was getting closer.

The Southern Range mountains were growing closer, barren enough they didn't have the same feel as the Littenord or the Casnevar ranges, even though the peaks were of comparable height. Mirian had a sudden flash of memory. She'd seen them before, at this distance, if not at this exact angle. She'd been holding someone's hand. There'd been a two-headed vulture flying in the sky, and she'd pointed at it. That was all she remembered.

Mirian flew higher. The day was cloudless, and only the faintest auroras could be seen high above. She layered several lens spells and looked around.

Far to the northwest was Rambalda. To the northeast, the East Sound. Directly north, she could just make out the easternmost fort, nestled in the pass, and beyond it, Alkazaria. Nearby, the terrain had shifted to the highlands, replacing the sands with desiccated soil, rolling hills, and the occasional rock outcropping. The desert rolled on endlessly, empty except—there. She could see the small cloud of dust kicked up by the eximontar.

Almost there.

Mirian descended as she flew forward. There was another desert drake hiding in a nearby hill. She butchered it for mana and kept going. She felt an ache inside her; so much mana had passed through her aura. What she'd just done below the oasis was nothing compared to this. This is the power of necromancy, she realized. No wonder Atroxcidi had been able to go up against multiple archmages. He had incorporated mana-siphon designs that exceeded hers in the enchantments of the bones of his minions—enchantments that siphoned mana off active spells. That wasn't even theoretically possible under the frameworks she'd been taught in Torrviol Academy.

It was both terrifying and intriguing. Not just for the personal power it could grant her, but the implications for the leylines. Could they be siphoned?

She wasn't the first arcanist to ask the question. Plenty of wizards had investigated drawing power from the leylines. But it was the difference between creating a light enchantment for a lantern and the light of the sun; the difference between a spark used to to trigger a glyph in a spell engine and a lightning bolt descending from the sky. But if anyone would know the theory…

The dust cloud grew bigger. She could hear the shouts of the riders echoing from ahead. They were wearing white robes with enchantments to reflect the harsh sun, while the eximontar had their spike-like regulator bones protruding out of their thighs, indicating they were rapidly dispersing heat. As she drew closer, she could see the rifles slung across their back and the bandoliers of wands.

Two hundred riders. They had given oaths to the prince while under the dome of the Great Madin Sanctuary, then drank from the waters of the oasis from the prince's own chalices. This was their sixth day of hard riding in his name. There would be no negotiations, no surrender.

This wouldn't be like ambushing the Akanan army, when her mana was still mostly full. She couldn't let any of them escape. There was only one strategy that would work here.

Mirian started with total camouflage, and swapped from her accelerated levitation to regular levitation. Then she started casting bindings on the souls of the rearmost riders and their mounts. Likely, the riders felt a strange pressure beneath their aura. If they were trained dervishes—probably a few were—they felt it directly on their soul. But only for a moment. She cast a force blades spell, enhanced for length, drawing two blades at neck-height for the rear soldiers and head-height for the eximontar. Six riders split themselves open, and Mirian felt the soul energy flow into her. Rapidly, she began to siphon it into mana, then began to systematically cast.

Soul bind prepared their soul to siphon into her repository on death. Force blades cut them open silently. Mana siphon turned the soul energy she wasn't feeding into the next soul bind into what she needed to fuel her levitation, total camouflage, and next round of force blades. She was in the form of The Dance of the Dusk Waves Across the Ocean, so she did this all with unnatural speed. She had just practiced this sequence endlessly on her flight over. Four more riders died before some of the nearby riders noticed and shouted warning.

The riders turned, continuing to gallop as they drew wands. Fire blade mixed force and heat spells shimmered through the air, as did magnetic lightning orbs. But they couldn't see her. The spells went wide. Force shields appeared around both mount and rider. These were well-trained sorcerers. At last, someone said, "There!" Likely a wand that detected a wavelength of light her spell didn't hide.

Mirian dismissed her near-invisibility and cast prismatic shield. The more intensive spell started rapidly draining her mana as offensive spells bombarded her.

She cast cascading inferno, one of Luspire's spells, directly at the center of the riders. Eximontars and men alike screamed as the fireball erupted into more fireballs, then into pinwheeling bolts. Their shields had helped, but only a little; the high myr spell was further made difficult to block by the soul coating. Meanwhile, the mythril and adamantium in her amulet and spellbook weakened their own attacks just prior impact on the universal shield.

Even then, a normal archmage would have found themselves overwhelmed, but she was only gathering more mana and soul energy as the battle progressed. Five more riders died. When they swapped to heat shield, she changed her attack to greater chain lightning. Ten more died. When they used grounding, she swapped to magnetic detonation, targeting the ammunition they carried. Five more died. Two more. Six more.

It wasn't a close fight, and it certainly wasn't fair.

"Split up!" one of the riders called.

With the mana pouring in, Mirian switched back to accelerated levitation, rapidly overtaking the lead rider as he galloped off west, then when she was done picking them apart with force blades and disintegration beams, she moved north to cut off the second, largest group. Their souls fueled her next flight east, where the last group was aiming towards the distant East Sound.

She had taken too much power into her. Mirian grit her teeth and distortions shimmered around her soul, disrupting the flow. Light-sucking jagged black lines ran across her skin. She discharged as much as she could in a soul-coated disintegration beam, pouring as much energy as she could into it. Where the beam struck, the riders were cut apart, and the ground was seared molten.

Mirian screamed and let out the rest of the siphoned mana as raw lightning. The last rider's mount was cut out from under him by the crackling bolts. Mirian clenched her teeth and knelt down on the hot ground. She'd overtaxed herself. She'd taken in too much soul energy too quickly. The distortions in her soul were rippling outward, and what was left of her auric mana was spalling with it, releasing in flashes of light. She knelt there, letting the pain bring her focus, letting her soul and aura calm.

When she opened her eyes again, she could see the corpses still scattered before her. There were no survivors—except one woman.

Her leg had been seared off. She was slowly crawling away from her.

Mirian grunted and stood, jaw still clenched. One of the dead riders had a dagger with a jeweled hilt. It was by his belt; his head was missing, and his legs were partially melted to the eximontar he'd been riding. As she walked forward, she pulled it out of its sheath and stumbled towards the woman who'd lived.

The woman's breath was coming in ragged gasps. One of her wands had burst several glyphs while still in its sheath, and she'd probably gotten a punctured lung.

"I'm sorry," Mirian said. This is a mercy, she thought, as she knelt down next to the woman and plunged the dagger into her neck.

She suddenly had a vivid memory of being next to a corpse like this one, one with dark hair and burn marks all over her. The memory tore through her like a whirlwind, and she felt a crushing despair and a dread that threatened to cut her apart. The emotions came all at once, and then they left, leaving her feeling hollow. Mirian found herself weeping without even meaning to. She couldn't tell if it was for her dead mother who's face she couldn't remember, or for the woman that was dead before her now.

This was the path she'd been set on. This was the path she would continue on.

She looked around. Already, the sun was reddening as it sank into the distant haze of sand to the west. Yet even in this barren, harsh place, little plants clang to life. It was so beautiful.

Enteria, she thought mournfully.

For a time, she knelt there. Then, at last she stood. On the summit of a nearby hill, she sat cross-legged and meditated, calming her soul.