Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

"No kidding," agreed Zorian. "I’m guessing that’s where you come in. Unless you’ve brought me here just to tell me how much I suck compared to you?"

"Hah! I admit the look on your face when you realized how awesome I am was absolutely priceless, but that’s just a bonus," said Zach.

He beckoned for Zorian to come closer and Zorian complied, allowing Zach to cast a completely unfamiliar spell on him.

Zorian felt the spell seep into his eyes, foreign mana straining against the innate magical resistance possessed by every living creature, and briefly considered snuffing the spell out before it took root. Not because he thought the spell was harmful, mind you, but out of principle. Zach just cast a spell on him without asking for permission or explaining what the spell did, which was a major breach of magical etiquette no matter how you looked at it. In the end he decided not to be that spiteful and simply reeled in his magical resistance, allowing the spell to do its work unopposed.

"You already have control over your magical resistance?" asked Zach. "Sweet! I usually have to teach people how to do that, first. Hell, I didn’t know how to do that before the reverts."

Zorian frowned, ignoring Zach’s comments in favor of trying to figure out what the spell actually did. It was concentrated in his eyes, so he should… see…

Oh.

A glowing, mind-bogglingly huge pillar rose into the sky, warping and undulating like a living being, occasionally spawning short-lived whorls of glowing matter along its length. It only took Zorian a moment to realize what he was looking at.

"That’s how the Hole looks like under mage sight?" he asked, focusing back on Zach.

"Magnificent, isn’t it?" Zach said. "Watching that huge geyser of mana rising into the sky always puts things into perspective for me."

"Mage sight shouldn’t work in Cyoria, though," remarked Zorian. "Too much ambient mana saturating everything. Why aren’t I blinded by painful glow emanating from everything in sight?"

"It’s an experimental variation that tries to filter out such noise , showing only the important stuff," said Zach. "It’s not terribly reliable, but it will do for our purposes."

"Those being?" asked Zorian.

"I’ll cast magic missile repeatedly and you’ll watch what I’m doing for a while before trying to copy me," Zach said. "I’ll be using the proper invocation this time, and go at it as slowly as I can. Try to memorize the words and gestures, because you’ll be using them instead of the rod Kyron gave you. A spell rod is more useful in combat, but for training purposes it’s better to work with actual invocations."

Zorian was completely on board with the idea – he had been trying to find invocations for combat spells for a while now, anyway. Zach was underestimating him, though. Try to memorize? Zorian might not have Zach’s absurd mana reserves, but his memory was quite good. It took only one proper casting from Zach and Zorian had already burned the casting procedure into his memory.

Unfortunately, the rest of the session was a lot less impressive. Zach kept performing the spell a few more times before instructing Zorian to give it a try, upon which he found out that performing combat magic with classical invocations wasn’t only slower than using a spell rod – it was a lot harder too. Thankfully, the fact that he actually saw how the mana was supposed to be shaped during Zach’s demonstration drastically improved his learning speed, so he managed to fire off a passable magic missile in the end. He was completely out of mana by then, however, and Zach decided that was a good time to stop for the day.

Walking back to his apartment, Zorian was lost in thought. Zach’s comment about the giant pillar of mana putting things into perspective for him seemed oddly applicable to his situation as well. Time loop or not, he would never beat Zach and people like him at their own game. Clearly Zorian couldn’t bulldoze his way through with combat magic, like Zach intended to do. No, if he was going to get out of this in a favorable manner, he had to forge his own path.

If only he knew what that path was, though. At the moment, getting to the bottom of what caused this time loop and how the damn thing worked seemed to be just about the only thing he could do to help himself. Which was unfortunate, because he just didn’t have the skills to unravel the mystery. Apparently he had to spend some time improving his magical abilities. Time, at least, he had in spades. Probably. He could never be sure the time loop would continue happening, but Zach certainly didn’t behave like it would end any time soon, and Zorian decided to follow Zach’s lead in that regard.

He really wished he had someone other than Zach to ask for advice on how to proceed in his quest to improve himself. Typically, this was what a student’s mentor was for, but he already knew what Xvim would tell him: more shaping exercises. Then he’d throw marbles at him.

Although… Ilsa did offer to take over his mentorship in a couple of restarts, didn’t she? Hmm.

Despite his desire for some additional help, Zorian delayed approaching Ilsa until he actually had a few sessions with Xvim. That would require a lengthy wait, but it would make it easier to complain about Xvim’s mentoring methods, since he wouldn’t have to explain how he knew so much about the man already. It wasn’t like he didn’t have anything to amuse himself in the meantime – Zach was, if anything, even more enthusiastic about their combat magic practice sessions than Zorian was, insisting they meet up every day after classes. After two weeks of such practice, Zorian was not only able to weave a proper homing function into the magic missile spell, but also learned how to cast shield and flamethrower spells as well. He was keenly aware that his ability to cast such spells would amount to exactly zero against a human battlemage, but he also knew they weren’t the only threats he faced. Those spells might buy him a second or two against a winter wolf or a troll, which could be the difference between life and death.

Zach returned to classes the day after their first practice session, apparently completely recovered. For a guy that lost a good chunk of his memory, he was surprisingly exuberant. Zorian admired his fellow time traveler for his ability to maintain good cheer in poor circumstances, but Zach’s attention grabbing behavior only made his inexplicable improvement in skill that much more noticeable. It was almost a repeat of the very first time he lived through this month, only instead of hanging out with Neolu and that other mystery girl, Zach was hanging out with him . Which, of course, made Zorian a target for every curious classmate that wanted to know how Zach suddenly got so good all of a sudden.

"What am I supposed to tell them?" he asked Zach. They were both in the cafeteria, and he had noticed a couple of students glancing at him a bit too often, doubtlessly waiting for the chance to talk to him when Zach left. "I can’t exactly tell them you’re a time traveler."

"Why not?" Zach asked. "Time travel. It’s what I say every time they ask me how I got this good."

"You actually tell them you’re a time traveler?" asked Zorian incredulously. He didn’t know whether to laugh or bang his head against the table.

"Yeah," confirmed Zach. "What’s the worst that could happen?"

Zorian felt a pang of phantom pain in his chest where, in another timeline, a masked assassin stabbed him through and killed him. Did Zach honestly never experience consequences like that when trying to convince people of his story? Then again, he said he tried to convince them he was a time traveler, not that he told them about the invasion. In fact, he didn’t actually tell Zorian about that either – he danced around the topic whenever Zorian tried to lead the conversation in that particular direction.