I woke up with Finn's familiar weight sprawled across my chest. The room was quiet except for his quiet breathing. I wasn’t sure how this always happened the first night, but Finn knew how to get his way with me. He is rather irresistible, even before his social Skills come into play.
As slowly as I could, I peeled myself out from underneath him, not wanting to wake the man. I spent a few minutes dressing and slowly opened the door to the room. It let out a massive squeak, and my palm rapidly found my face. Even with perfect memory, the little things always slipped past when I wasn’t paying attention
From behind me, I heard Finn stir. Looking back, he was just staring up at me with a stupid grin on his face. "Nice."
"Nice, what?" I asked, willing to play whatever game this was in exchange for waking him.
"Sixty-nine hundred and sixty-nine," was his only reply. He was giving me a look that meant I should know what the fuck he was talking about. Not that I could resist his puppy dog eyes or adorable pout.
Looking back at all the time I had spent with him, I immediately came to a realization. Resisting the urge to beat the man half to death, I yelled the only thing that came to mind, "WHY THE HELL ARE YOU KEEPING TRACK OF HOW MANY TIMES YOU'VE SLEPT WITH ME ACROSS LOOPS? WAS IT JUST FOR THIS DAMN JOKE? HOW MUCH EFFORT DID YOU PUT INTO THIS?"
His smug grin returned. Maybe the asshole is right, he is the party bard. "Yes! I’m only three hundred away from achieving the same number with Rhea! I’m so excited!" He exclaimed while rolling across the bed, his arms raised in triumph. Or at least they were until the shoe I had picked up and thrown at him hit.
"It took me fifty loops to get you to bother remembering the gods damn tutorial test, yet you waste memory on trivial shit like this," I said while grabbing his other shoe."Yeah, yeah, I know, we don’t have the luxury of your unlimited memory. I’ve got that talk stored here, maybe at sixteen different times." He moped as he got out of bed and searched for his clothes.
With a sigh, I had to ask the important question, "So what are you at with the others?" I caught a pillow thrown haphazardly as he searched. Somehow, he managed to lose his entire outfit almost every time, and I didn’t even have to hide it this time.
"Oh, now that you know I track the stats, you want the goods." He paused for a long enough time that I wondered if he was actually not going to tell me, "Amelia, you know how little fun she can be, six hundred and thirty-two. Alex is so straight, I bet he goes through roundabouts right through the middle, seventy-six."
"You’re missing one," I smirked as I came to a realization.
"Oh no, Hazel is zero. I’m convinced the girl is ace." He said, while digging his pants out from underneath the armoire on the opposite side of the room from the bed, "Did you fucking hide my clothes again? Or did it just end up here? I can never tell." He looked up at me and noticed my smirk, blood drained from his face.
"Three, she likes magic. There’s a benefit to keeping those oh-so-awful spoilers in your head like she does." I said, immediately departing from the room and slamming the door shut. From the other side, I heard him yell something about my mother. Finn was completely incapable of using magic and never bothered to learn. He explained it away as nerd shit not being his cup of tea, but I was convinced he just didn’t like how hard it was to learn basic formulas.
Snickering, I headed downstairs and grabbed whatever the siroth manning the inn had on hand to eat. I had already paid with my dreams last night. Those demons love to eat the stuff but aren’t allowed to ask. You have to offer your dreams explicitly. It took me a while to figure out I could dodge the cost of room and board with that trick. I was looking forward to a time when these memories didn’t keep coming up. I didn’t realize nostalgia could become tiresome until I was trapped in a time loop.
I snacked on a slice of spiced Ambernut bread while walking over to where Alex was staying. I’d given him the rundown yesterday, and he should have a plan for which dungeons to hit first in order to get us moving as quickly as possible. Somehow, he had a better knack for figuring that out than I did. Something about the profession he always picks makes it easier, though he was always cagey about exactly how it worked, and it’s impolite to ask about Skills.
A quick planning session later, I was on my way to Hazel’s place. She should have met Henry and Eric during the trial last night, so I was going to have her introduce me to them so they would find it less suspicious when I asked them to join us when we left. They often ended up as competent guild mates, so I knew their capabilities inside and out.
Though that wasn’t the main reason for stopping by, I was mostly worried about her losing herself down another research hole and not taking the responsibilities she agreed to seriously. It wouldn’t be the first time that happened.
Hazel’s POV
I winced as the sun began shining in through the window of the room I had rented. I ran a small amount of Mana through the communicator that Ellie gave me and noted that the Space Mana still found no connection. I had no idea what that meant. It was like she had just fallen out of existence. Whatever the restriction that prevented her from telling me where she was headed back to was, it was like nothing I had seen in my past lives, or at least I hadn’t bothered to record it. So, I had no clue what she could be getting up to right now.
A knock on my door interrupted my fusing of a filter mechanism on the battery array I’d rigged together. The slight lapse in attention caused all the Mana bonds in the material to fail. Sighing, I threw the now junk into the bin of failures. It wasn’t like me to lose focus like that. The lack of sleep must be getting to me. I began distributing free points into Fortitude to compensate when I remembered somebody was at the door.
"Come in, it’s open!" I called out to the door.
A moment later, a flash of what was probably Time Mana seeped through the underside of the door, and I heard a groan from the other side. "Can you disable the trip mines on the door first? Those fucking hurt." Li Wei’s voice called out.
"Oh yeah, give me a minute," I replied. Well, he passed the first test, confirming that he has some kind of time-related powerset.
As I got up to do just that, I realized the communicator Ellie had given me was just sitting out on the table. I quickly cast an invisibility bubble around it, making a note to ask Ellie how she had bypassed the one I cast in the arena at some point. Then, I began disarming the mines attached to the door.Once finished, I opened the door to a rather glum-looking Li Wei. "What can I do for you?" I asked, hoping he would finish this up quickly so I could get back to my work.This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.
"I’m here to check on you, to make sure you haven’t gotten caught up in some project again. Because we have to start moving soon, and I wanted to make sure you’re ready." He replied, his eyes scanning over my inn room, "Obviously, I was right to do so. Are you trying to get item creation to work again? What happened to ‘there’s absolutely no way to recreate these. Obviously, they’re designed to be unreplicable drops from dungeons.' I’m fairly certain you have that as one of your saved notes."I did, in fact, have that quote in the memories he gave me. However, due to Ellie, I had to discard that entire section as unreliable at best. "Previous hypotheses have been proven insufficient, and problems have been resolved. However, I do have a list of materials I would like to collect, so setting out soon would be preferable."
"Alright, if you want to go down that path again, I won’t argue. Maybe you’ll even get a unique prof—" His form seemed to stutter in place as another burst of Time Mana was released. Such inefficient Mana usage, just saturating his body like that, makes my skin crawl. Ellie’s usage was so much more elegant. Refined circuits of Mana precisely channelled through her body to create the result she wanted. I lowered the prototype fire wand I had intended to fire into Li Wei’s leg and supposedly did before he reverted time. As my mind wandered to her design, I couldn’t stop a stupid grin from spreading across my face.
Li coughed, bringing me out of my recollection. "What’s the profession called then?""Inspired Apprentice Mekanist." I promptly replied, annoyed by the interruption."Huh… Inspired professions imply a revelation of some kind. What was the issue then?" He asked. "Also, what was the source of the inspiration?"
I froze and accidentally let a small squeak out. I hadn’t intended to give him any information about Ellie but accidentally implied something in my frustration. But he wanted to discuss the subject of artificiery… I realized I had started tapping my fingers together in an oh-so-familiar pattern and stopped myself, not wanting to show any signs that I was anxious. "Okay, so the information packet you gave me was rather lacking. It turns out that physics on the molecular level probably isn’t anything like we’ve previously thought, at least in this dimension. Instead of regular particle interactions, materials have Mana bonds holding them together."Getting into the discussion of material science, I managed to sidestep mentioning my Ellie. I haven’t trusted Li enough to reveal her existence to him yet. She was mine, and I intended to keep it that way. If he got his hands on her somehow…
I didn’t want to hear whatever excuse he made up for the fact that she had never appeared in the past because I definitely would have remembered her if I had met her before—even as just an experimental variable if it had been under different circumstances. Eventually, the conversation turned to the people he had asked me to save. I had completely forgotten about them.
"Yeah, I never met them last night. I have no idea what you’re talking about." I genuinely didn’t remember three men being with me and Ellie. But I was a little distracted. Maybe there were other people there, and they were just really quiet."Okay, who did you meet last night?" he asked in an exasperated tone. "Please tell me they’re still alive as well. I know you like to test people, but nobody can survive the Titan on day one.""Nobody," I replied, trying to remove all signs from my face that I was telling a bold-faced lie."Nobody?" Li asked, clearly skeptical."Nobody," I repeated with a nod.He scanned my expression for what felt like several minutes, and I felt a bead of sweat roll down my back. Eventually, he just nodded. "Okay, well, get some sleep. You look like you need it. I’ll be back in three hours to wake you up so we can start planning. For the love of gods, don’t re-arm the trip mines."I nodded to him and debated putting them back up anyway but decided against it. I didn’t want to delay the expedition we were heading out on one minute longer than we had to. I had so many materials to gather that the scraps I could retrieve from creatures around town just weren’t enough. Direwolf bones had horrible conductivity, but they were the easiest thing to gather and mould right now.Closing the door behind him as he left, I lay down in bed, clutching the communicator.
As I allowed sleep to claim me, I tried moving Mana in ways as Ellie did, within strictly controlled channels within myself instead of through spell formulae. I was getting nowhere, though and just as I was about to drift off, the Sound Mana inside the item began to vibrate, and I realized the Space Mana had found a connection. "Hey, Hazel! It’s Ellie. I survived," echoed from the device. I couldn’t help but let out a squeal of joy before I sent a response.Li Wei’s POV
Walking away from Hazel’s house, I sighed to myself. She’s hiding something again, something big this time. I’m going to have to plan around it, but I don’t even know what it is. I felt a headache begin to come on as the list of all the things I had to do began flowing through my mind. I added one more item to the end of my mental notebook.Investigate irregularity in Hazel. Possible new information source?
Value - Likely High, Possibly Critical
Source - Unknown - Likely found during last night’s Trial.
Imp leaked information they shouldn’t have? - Unlikely but knowing the particular imp she ran into, this is a possibility.
New Player we haven’t run into with borderline game changing knowledge - Very unlikely, non-human requirement limits the possibilities to a select few, none of whom would possess the knowledge for an Inspired Class relating to item creation. It would require a new survivor to magically appear out of nowhere, which is statistically near impossible.
Third Alternative I haven’t thought of - Most likely, but I have very few leads for this conclusion. I will have to contact some people and see if any other irregularities appeared in this loop.
Given Hazel’s peculiarities, extracting information directly is unfeasible. Alternative sourcing methods will have to be used.
Methodology:
 
Check-in with a few imps and imply knowledge on Mana bonds in materials, and gauge their reactions.
 
Begin seeding trials every night to check for a potential unknown Player.
 
Contact a few information brokers who have already started running their racket. See if item creation knowledge has started to spread or if Hazel is the source.
 
Closing the notebook in my mind, I sighed. This was going to be a lot of work—setting up an information network before we left wasn’t going to be easy. Long-distance communication spells were difficult to use at the best of times. Especially without Hazel to cast them, I couldn't trust her not to hide whatever has piqued her interest. That girl can get weirdly possessive about magical knowledge.
The first order of business, though, was to execute all the troublemakers in town. Leaving pieces of shit alive just didn’t sit right with me. Even if the people here were only going to live to see the end of the year, I might as well make the end of their lives as pleasant as I could and save the few who would listen.
It shouldn’t take more than a day or two. Maybe we’ll have to delay leaving… We’ll see what happens. Maybe Hazel will be cooperative for once.
Wouldn’t that be nice?