Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

He turned towards Zach and winced. He hadn’t noticed it while he had been fighting Red Robe’s simulacrum, but the other boy had a large bleeding gash across the chest.

"H-Hey…" Zach panted. "Thanks for the wakeup call back there. If you had been just a moment late, I would have probably never woken up. I, a-ah…"

His knees gave out suddenly, causing him to tip over. Zorian quickly rushed forward and caught him just before he was going to slam head-first into the floor.

"Shit…" Zorian swore, inspecting the wound. His medical magic was a joke, but he could at least assess the severity of an open wound like this one. "You lost so much blood there. How were you even standing for so long?"

"It’s not the f-first time…" Zach gasped, pressing his trembling fingers over the wound. The bleeding immediately lessened somewhat. "I’ll live."

Zorian sighed. He would live, sure… but he would be pretty much incapacitated for the next day or two, even with the best medical care in the country. This was terrible news.

"I’m glad you made it out," Zach said with a trembling voice.

[Don’t speak,] Zorian told him telepathically, picking him up like a baby. Well, he tried to, at least. Picking up another person was a little bit too much for him, so he first had to cast some spells to lighten the load, but he managed it in the end. He then immediately set off in the direction of the nearest hospital. [You’re going to aggravate your wound. Also, damn you’re heavy.]

[I’m doing you a favor,] Zach responded back. [Didn’t you say you wanted to work out more when we get out?]

[Not like this, you asshole,] Zorian grumbled.

[Wait…] Zach suddenly frowned. [You… you’re wounded too!]

Zorian gave him an incredulous look. What… oh.

[Ah, no,] Zorian said. [My mana is in chaos because the tunneler toad’s dimensional perception ability unraveled when I abandoned my body back in the time loop.]

It was scary how perceptive Zach was sometimes. Zorian didn’t even think he was showing any signs of mana instability on the outside, but clearly he was wrong.

[Oh yeah,] Zach said, immediately calming down. [Still, doesn’t that mean–]

[I’ll be held back in what I can do for at least a couple of days, yes,] Zorian confirmed.

[Damn it! Nothing ever goes right about this!] Zach raged.

[I wouldn’t say that,] Zorian said. He tracked down the nearest potion store and teleported them both towards it. It was closed at this time of day, but breaking in was a simple matter. He idly wondered whether a medical emergency like this counted as a valid reason to perform a burglary, but then decided he didn’t care. He would anonymously pay the shopkeeper back for the damages he caused. [I’m sure Red Robe is feeling pretty aggrieved right now. He almost had you, but he failed in the end. Plus, my simulacrum just stopped him from getting rid of the aranea beneath the city.]

He quickly picked up the most powerful wound closing and blood replenishing potions in the store and fed them to Zach, who immediately showed a positive reaction. His skin got back some of its color and the wound seemingly closed, though Zorian knew it was still very much present beneath the surface.

Zach immediately tried to get up on his own two feet, the idiot. He collapsed back immediately, having aggravated his wound.

"Let’s… just get you to the nearest hospital, alright?" Zorian said, face-palming at the sight.

"Zorian, listen," Zach said. "When you left through the exit and the time loop reset itself, I lingered behind for a bit. Just to see what would happen to you and Silverlake over the next few restarts, you know?"

Zorian raised his eyebrow at him. "And?"

"You were back," Zach said. "Both of you. You didn’t remember anything about the time loop but you were walking and talking as normal. You were just like any other person stuck in the time loop, unaware of the passage of time past the summer festival. Man, talking to your old self was freaky, I tell you. I all but forgot how unfriendly and sensitive you were back then. Did I tell you I’m really glad you made it out in the end?"

"You did," Zorian confirmed.

"Oh yeah… what did you do with the–" Zach started to ask, before being cut off by Zorian.

"I killed him," Zorian said curtly. "Sent his soul to the afterlife."

"I… umm… shit," Zach fumbled. "That’s kind of… brutal?"

"What was I supposed to do?" Zorian asked, uncomfortable with this line of questioning. "I don’t know how to make a new body for him. Maybe I never will. I’d have to either keep him in stasis for years and years before finally releasing him into an alien world where a stranger has usurped his life… or having him accompany me as a powerless ghost looking over my shoulder, constantly getting his face rubbed in at the fact I’m so much better than him at everything. Isn’t that a cruel and horrifying fate to inflict on someone?"

"I… don’t know," Zach admitted after a while.

"I know I’m not the same person as him by this point," Zorian said quietly, "but I would hate that with every fiber of my being. I… don’t think I’d ever get over it. Maybe I’m just a selfish monster trying to justify my crimes, but I think I’m doing him a favor. Alanic says the afterlife is still a thing, even after the gods stopped talking to people. For all his faults, I don’t think the old Zorian had done anything truly heinous in his life… there should be a good outcome waiting for him there. Something he’d never get back here with us."

There was an awkward silence for a few seconds, and then Zorian cracked his knuckles before picking Zach up again. Thank the gods for lightening spells.

"I don’t want to talk about this," Zorian admitted. "Let just get you to a hospital and call it a day. We’ll just have to leave the rest to our simulacrums. Now that I think about it, maybe Red Robe is onto something by only sending simulacrums to tackle problems and never appearing in person. Sure, it makes him more likely to fail and get beaten back, but it also makes every failure more inconsequential…"

He babbled about all sorts of things as he walked through the city. He was mostly out of mana by this point, since pretty much all his simulacrums had been tapping into them for their own purposes, so he couldn’t simply teleport to the hospital. However, it was fine – Zach had stopped bleeding by this point, so he wasn’t going to die any time soon. He should make use of this breather to make some golem simulacrums and replace the current ectoplasmic ones with them. Of course, the golem simulacrums were expensive so he would have to raid some of the Ibasan caches for money and materials. Plus, he needed a proper workshop and–

He suddenly stopped and sighed internally. So many things to do. So little time and mana to play with. The only thing that made him feel better was that Red Robe and Silverlake were probably faced with choices just as difficult as theirs.

Hopefully they had chosen their priorities better than their opponents.

When simulacrum number three arrived at the spot of Silverlake’s hideout, he found no signs of fighting or forced entry in the vicinity. However, that did not actually tell him much. For all he knew, Silverlake had some kind of secret entrance into her pocket dimension, and could simply walk in any time she pleased, wards be damned. Hell, perhaps the old Silverlake had simply let her in. It was hardly a given that the two would fight to the death once they met.

It all depended on whether the time looper Silverlake wanted to kill her old self to take her life and belongings back, or if she wanted to recruit her into her plans.

Or maybe she intended to simply ignore her old self entirely. After all, simply coming here was highly dangerous, since Zach and Zorian knew about this place, and it was an obvious place to set up an ambush for her.