Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

In truth, he thought that part of the battle was going really well. Yes, the mercenary group failed to get off all but one artillery spell and was constantly getting pushed back, but it served its job as a distraction marvelously. The sulrothum even sent another swarm of warriors at them at one point, trying to take them out sooner, which caused simulacrum number one to rant expletives at him over their soul link for a full minute or so, but was pretty convenient for the plan as a whole.

No, the problem was that the simulacrum pairs sent to infiltrate the ziggurat weren’t doing so well. Somehow the sulrothum discovered all three of them the moment they got close enough to the main structure, which probably meant there was some kind of subtle alarm ward protecting it. One of the teams then died trying to charge the front entrance, the other sacrificed itself to provide the third one a chance to punch a new entrance through one of the outer walls of the ziggurat, and the third one managed to get inside but was currently blocked in one of the corridors and would likely get swarmed by the defenders soon.

On top of that, the sulrothum figured out where the original forces first appeared and decided to send a group of warriors to check it out. That was how the outpost ended up in its current, ruined state.

"Although we haven’t found the ring, yet, it’s now or never. I’m commanding the simulacrum that managed to get inside to open a gate for us. We’re going in."

"Understood," Alanic said solemnly.

"Finally," Zach said, cracking his knuckles.

Zorian took a deep breath and waited, tapping into the soul link he had with his simulacrums and paying close attention to his simulacrum inside the ziggurat. Opening a dimensional gate was a lengthy process requiring a lot of concentration, which meant it took some time and effort for the simulacrum to find himself in the position where he was able to do so. Finally, after using up all fifteen of his remaining grenades in one massive attack and having Zach’s simulacrum charge forward and sacrifice itself to get him some space, the simulacrum managed to successfully open a dimensional passage between itself and the original.

Zorian sent his two remaining golems through the dimensional gate to clear the way, and then he, Zach and Alanic all rushed inside.

There, they found a mangled artificial body of Zorian’s simulacrum that ended up sacrificing his fleeting life to finish the spell in time. Rather than interrupt the gate-opening spell and save himself, the simulacrum chose to ignore the incoming attack from one of the sulrothum warriors and kept casting the spell till the very end.

Curiously, now that the two battle golems Zorian sent as a vanguard had cleared the entire corridor, there were no more sulrothum coming. That final grenade attack and the arrival of a new batch of invaders seemed to have caused them to temporarily withdraw and regroup.

"Let’s go," Zorian said, pointing towards the corridor on the left.

"Any particular reason to go in that direction?" Zach asked. "I mean, that seems to be the place where most of the devil wasps are coming from…"

"Yeah, it is," Zorian admitted. "I don’t know where the ring is, but I’m operating under the idea that our luck is horrible and thus our target is obviously in the most dangerous part of the ziggurat."

"Oh," Zach said. "Yeah, that does make sense."

Zorian turned to Alanic walking next to them, who was ignoring their banter in favor of scanning the walls for some reason. Probably looking for some clues as to where they are – all of the walls still retained detailed carvings of various religious scenes. Most of them were from Ikosian era, but some of them had been crudely repurposed by the sulrothum, who did their best to modify the carvings into something that fitted better with their own religious beliefs. Alanic was very unamused by their efforts, if his deepening frown was of any indication.

"Alanic, we’re going to have to rely on you. Zach and I have been using our simulacrums to fight for a while now, and we need some time to recover our mana reserves a little," Zorian told him. "Do you think you can–"

Two sulrothum warriors suddenly charged out of the corner in front of them, both of them carrying spears and decorations that looked far fancier and better constructed than what they had encountered thus far. They were probably elite warriors of the colony, and they screeched out a challenge and charged at them the moment they saw them.

Alanic’s expression didn’t change in the slightest. He simply waved his battle staff lightly and two tiny, highly compressed balls of fire flew forwards at incredible speeds. They impacted the warriors' faces, burning a hole straight through them, and the two sulrothum died on the spot.

"Don’t worry," Alanic said. "Leave it all to me."

He had barely finished speaking when a literal horde of sulrothum converged all of a sudden.

The entire corridor erupted into burning flames.

After much bitter fighting and several temporary retreats, the group finally managed to achieve its goal. One of the battle golems was rendered inert, the other was missing one of its arms and had three spears sticking out of it and slowing it down, Alanic had received a nasty-looking wound across his chest and Zach was almost out of mana.

But they had found it. They had found the imperial ring.

Unfortunately, they found it because the person wearing it decided to come to them. Apparently they caused such a commotion that the sulrothum high priest decided to confront them personally, accompanied by his highly-trained, well-equipped honor guard. He was a particularly large sulrothum, equipped with menacing-looking bone armor and holding what was unmistakably a spell staff. He was clearly a mage, and if the low-level magical aura he was emanating was of any indication, probably a soul mage to boot.

He was also decorated with an absolutely ridiculous amount of little trinkets and various jewelry, one of which was the imperial ring that he had on one of his hands. If Zorian didn’t have the marker’s function to detect pieces of the Key, he would have never spotted it among all that junk the high priest was wearing.

They couldn’t fight him. Maybe when they were in their top form, but not now. However, Zorian just couldn’t bring himself to flee without at least trying to pull off one last thing…

He summoned most of his remaining mana and launched a massive mental attack on the high priest. Just for a moment, he smashed aside his mental defenses, suppressed his will and forced him to perform one simple action.

In one smooth movement, the high priest ripped the imperial ring off his finger and threw it at Zorian, who immediately caught it in his free hand.

Then the effect was broken and the sulrothum high priest looked dumbfounded at what he had just done.

"Zach, get us out of here now!" Zorian urged him.

Just before they teleported away, leaving their poor damaged battle golem behind as a distraction, they heard a shrill, outraged scream from the high priest at the unfairness of it all.

Zorian nodded sagely in his heart. Yes, sometimes the world really was extremely unfair.

Zach and Zorian were sitting in one of the many empty rooms in the Noveda mansion. This wasn’t something that often happened. Despite this being his home, Zach didn’t like to spend too much time in the place. Very few people lived there, relative to its size, which gave the mansion an empty, almost abandoned atmosphere that Zach found uncomfortable. Even before the time loop, he liked to spend most of his day outside, visiting friends and wasting time.

Zorian kind of wondered about these friends of Zach. He had never really seen Zach interact with any of them through the restarts. From what Zach told him, though, most of them were in the same situation as Benisek – kind of friendly with pre-time loop Zach, but not really that close to him and very ill-suited for dealing with the implications of an endlessly repeating month. Much like Zorian pretty much stopped interacting with Benisek, Zach seemed to have totally stopped bothering with these casual friends he had once had. It was a bit sad, though maybe Zach intended to continue interacting with them more heavily once he was out of the time loop…