Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

"What?" she demanded. "What the hell is so amusing about what I said? You want to fight right now!?"

He couldn’t help it and simply burst into laughter at her.

Later on, Zorian reflected that Imaya was probably starting to think of him as some major weirdo. First it was that incident of him punching himself in the head earlier, and now there was a girl chasing him around the house and demanding that he takes it like a man and whatnot.

Zorian wasn’t sure how his friendship with Taiven was going to fare in the future, considering that he could not possibly hide the full extent of his skills forever… but at least her current visit had brightened his day somewhat.

Red Robe had chosen his targets well. Although situated on the border of Eldemar and relatively close to Cyoria, Holakor was pretty difficult to access. It had rather unfriendly relations with Eldemar – not an unusual situation in regards to states bordering their country – and it was a mountainous country with poor transport infrastructure and plenty of isolated mountain villages. Reaching their destination was quite mana expensive, requiring lots of teleportation and other magic, and orienting themselves was a chore. The whole region was swarming with Holakorian soldiers searching for the culprits and trying to control the flow of news and people in and out of the place. Additionally, Holakor’s cartographers had apparently not done a very good job, because some of the villages hit by the attacks weren’t even marked in publically available maps and records.

Still, Zach and Zorian were resourceful people, and their simulacrums inherited their skills. Thus, it took them less than two days to reach the villages Benisek had told them about and investigate the situation.

The results of the investigation were grim. Benisek had said the worst of the rumors mentioned hundreds of casualties… but it only took one glance at the first village they visited to realize this estimate was, if anything, severely understated. The village was the scene of a total bloodbath – of the 300 or so inhabitants, most of them had been killed. Only a young couple that sneaked away from the village during the night and an old hunter that decided to sleep over in the wilderness had survived the slaughter. The attackers hadn’t even bothered to loot the place – the objective appeared to have been simple, indiscriminate killing.

The other villages they visited were pretty much the same. A sudden, overwhelming attack that aimed to kill as many as possible. Accounts of the attackers were hard to come by, since most people who got caught up in it died, but it was clear the attacker was a sizeable armed group. A group that contained war trolls, various monsters, and scores of undead. A group that seemed capable of teleporting themselves all over the place, because they had hit over ten villages in the span of a single night, before seemingly disappearing into thin air.

Adding everything together, Zach and Zorian estimated the death toll reached easily into thousands. Holakorian authorities had walled off the area from the rest of the country, fearing mass panic and unrest if the true scope of the slaughter became known, which was why the reaction to the attack was rather muted at the moment. Still, those kinds of measures were just stalling for time. Zorian would be surprised if they could keep it a secret for more than a week.

At first, neither Zach nor Zorian could understand this move. What was Red Robe trying to accomplish by killing Holakorian villagers like that? Was this some sort of large-scale sacrifice? Zorian wouldn’t call himself an expert on blood magic, but he didn’t think so. The killing was too quick and disorganized, and the villages hit by the attacks weren’t arranged into discernible pattern.

In the end they went to Alanic for help. Alanic was one of the people they had decided to inform about the existence of the time loop and the invasion no matter what, since he was highly competent and already in huge danger from the invaders no matter what. Thus far he still wasn’t convinced they were telling the truth about the whole time travel business, but the information they had brought him was pretty convincing on its own. After all, the little notebook that Zorian duplicated from his memory packets was written by Alanic himself, and listed all sorts of criminal groups and hideouts they had found over the restarts. Even if Alanic thought they were lying or delusional about being time travelers, he was still holding a book written in his own handwriting, mentioning things only he should know about and listing a variety of things whose truthfulness was easy to check.

Alanic took one look at the information they had compiled about the attack on Holakorian villages and dismissed the idea it was some kind of massive demon summoning or some other piece of blood magic.

"Blood magic fueled summonings are disturbingly easy, but not this easy," Alanic said, shaking his head. "The victims would have to be herded into a central location. Their life force would have to be carefully mixed and funneled into a massive spell formula circle. The preparations would not be small and would be easily noticed and stopped. Holakor’s authorities would not miss such a thing, and you would have seen evidence of it even if they had."

"Then what is this about?" asked Zach, sounding frustrated. "Why are they killing all these people? It’s not simply bloodthirstiness, I’m sure of that. This was clearly done with the full cooperation of Quatach-Ichl and his forces. There is no way he would have agreed to this unless there was some kind of clear benefit to this."

Alanic looked at the papers in silence, shuffling them around while frowning deeply. This went on for a full minute, with Zach and Zorian quietly waiting to hear what he had to say.

"I almost want to say this is a soul-gathering operation," Alanic eventually told them. "Except… gathering souls is not such a simple business, either. In order to gather the souls of thousands of people, the attackers would need thousands of soul containers. Even if they could afford to build that many, the sheer logistics of shuffling those soul containers around to the right place and the right time and casting the necessary spells to capture the soul before it moved on to the afterlife–"

Zach and Zorian’s faces became uglier the longer Alanic continued to speak.

"Shit," Zach swore.

"What?" Alanic said, frowning. He was frowning a lot at the moment, clearly upset by the information the two of them just brought him.

"They don’t have to go through all that trouble because they have Sudomir’s Well of Souls," Zorian explained to him.

"Well of Souls?" Alanic slowly repeated. He glanced at the little book on the side of the table. "Is that inside the notebook you gave me?"

"It is," Zorian confirmed. "You must not have reached that part."

Alanic quickly flipped through it until he reached the relevant part. Zach and Zorian waited for him to finish, discussing things quietly amongst themselves.

"Well," Alanic eventually said, snapping the book in his hands shut. "Not only am I now certain this was indeed a soul gathering operation… I think I even know what they need all those souls for."

"Yes. And so do we," Zach told him grimly. "It’s pretty obvious at this point."

"Sudomir is making his wraith bomb in advance," Zorian finished for them.

Despite recent developments, Zach and Zorian decided to attend the first day of classes at the academy. There were three reasons for that. The first one was that Zach and Zorian wanted to scout out Iasku Mansion to see what they were dealing with before they commited themselves to anything substantial. The second one was that they should get access to Koth soon, which will greatly expand their capabilities and was well worth waiting for.