Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

He then reached towards the mind of the eagle rider commander, and forced him to make a loud proclamation in that amplified voice of his. The man had no choice but to obey.

"Oganj! It’s the dragon mage!" the man shouted against his will. "Forget those small fries, we need to take him down!"

"Kill the dragon!" another eagle rider agreed, also forced to do so by Zorian.

Oganj reacted exactly as Zorian hoped he would. The dragon mage was proud and aggressive, and had clashed against Eldemar’s forces numerous times in the past. He saw nothing suspicious about a bunch of Eldemar mages making him their priority target, and he had every intention of teaching them a lesson. He gave a roar of challenge and shifted his focus to killing the eagle riders, ignoring Jornak’s loud complaints that he shouldn’t get distracted.

Zorian quietly withdrew his telepathic influence from the minds of eagle riders and ordered his platform to continue flying towards the Hole at maximum speed. Even if they wanted to continue bothering him, they had a more pressing problem on their hands now.

After a few seconds, he noticed that everyone except Zach was staring at him strangely.

"What?" he asked, frowning.

"You did that, didn’t you?" Alanic asked.

"Hmm? Oh yeah, definitely," Zorian said, only understanding after a few seconds why they reacted that way to his casual display of mind control. Sometimes he forgot that these weren’t the same people he had worked with for over a year to figure out how to leave the time loop. Those people had died forever, even their souls erased and denied afterlife.

"Are they going to be alright?" Alanic asked, frowning. He clearly didn’t like the idea that Zorian might have sent the eagle riders to fight and die against their enemies with no support.

Funnily enough, it didn’t even occur to Zorian to care for their wellbeing. He thought of them as an annoyance, and saw his actions as a form of poetic justice for impeding their mission and trying to push them around. They came looking for trouble, and they found it.

His original self, whom Zorian killed in order to be able to stand here today, would definitely be horrified at what he had become.

"They won’t all die," Zorian eventually answered. "I fought with them a few times over the various interactions of this month. They eventually retreat if the enemy inflicts enough losses on them."

"They came here to fight for Eldemar," Zach helpfully added. "They’re doing exactly that right now. If they knew what we know, they would have chosen to engage Oganj anyway, even if most of them died doing that."

"Explaining my involvement in this is going to be hell, I can already see," Alanic lamented.

"We did take basic precautions," Zach said. "We’re all wearing disguises, and the battle will destroy most of the clues and prevent normal divinations from working. Plus, we have a master mind mage that can delete memories of people who get too close to the truth."

"It doesn’t matter in my case," Alanic said. "Do you know how hard it was to mobilize all these people I recruited to fight on our side? I had to use my name and connections to make all this happen. There is no hiding this, even if you start mind-wiping people."

Well, if Zach was going to survive this evening, Zorian was definitely going to have to start mind-wiping people, and sooner than anyone in this group suspected. Thankfully, nobody was in the mood to continue this topic, both because they were now very close to the Hole, and because they were facing yet another threat.

Jornak, Silverlake, and Quatach-Ichl were rapidly approaching, using some kind of high-speed flight spell in an effort to catch up to them. They knew that everything was over if Zorian and the rest of the group could face-off against the cultists alone, and they weren’t going to let it happen.

Before Zorian and the others could really start disrupting the ritual, the battle against Jornak, Silverlake, and Quatach-Ichl began anew.

While his original body had been busy dealing with angels, demons, and eagle riders, his simulacrum bodies had not been idle. They roamed the city and processed information that Zorian constantly received from the multitude of remote sensors and recruited subordinates working with the group to repel the invasion. The primary (albeit secret) task they had was to make sure the network of glyphs he had scattered all across Cyoria remained reasonably intact. The unplanned substitution of an entire city section with Iasku Mansion and the surrounding forest had already blown a sizeable hole in his network, so he had to be extra vigilant, or parts of his remaining network would become disconnected from the network as a whole, making his entire plan useless.

While doing that, however, his simulacrums also involved themselves in the fighting here and there. These interventions were by necessity minor, since he couldn’t afford to waste too much of his mana in peripheral areas of the city. The original body had a much more critical role to play, so the majority of their mana reserves were reserved for his use. Fortunately, he had a perfect tool for the situation. His mind magic, if used thoughtfully and strategically, was perfect for making large impacts in return for minimal mana expenditures.

All around the city, strange incidents began to occur. Many of them were so subtle they could be chalked up as coincidences. A panicked group of scattered defenders suddenly surged with newfound confidence and remembered where they were all supposed to converge and regroup in event of emergency. A fleeing family received a strong hunch that the route they wanted to traverse wasn’t safe and that they should pick another way. A large, muscular man wielding an antique sword, clearly just a normal city worker without a hint of magic or military training, fended off an entire pack of winter wolves all on his lonesome, allowing a nearby military group to save both him and the people he was protecting; for some reason the winter wolves kept missing him, as if they couldn’t see him correctly. A local dog suddenly went berserk and began barking and biting at thin air, alerting a nearby mage at the presence of an invisible Ibasan battle group waiting in ambush.

Others were less mundane. All around the city, some people received sudden, supernatural visions that gave them critical information about the enemy. Enemies sometimes went crazy and started attacking their own allies for no reason, sowing chaos and discord in enemy ranks. Small animals like bats and bugs were inordinately fond of ramming themselves straight into enemy caster’s faces when they were in the middle of sensitive spellcasting. A young soldier suddenly fell into an obvious trance and started describing the enemy distribution of forces to his commander, hopefully allowing much better coordination of defending efforts in that city sector.

Meanwhile, up in the sky, iron beaks ceaselessly patrolled the city in both large and small groups. They were Zorian’s roving eyes and blades, the small groups checking out disturbances to see if anything interesting was happening, and the big ones converging on critical areas to give aerial support to whatever defenders were located in the area. Each flock carried one or more telepathic relays, allowing Zorian to both easily access their senses and occasionally take control of them to direct them to specific spots. They were smart birds, with already existing group discipline, so he only had to take control over the leaders in order to control the whole group… which was good, because there was no way he would have been able to control the iron beaks otherwise.

Convenient. No wonder Sudomir had decided to use these particular birds for the invasion.

The iron beaks were bloodthirsty and their feather volleys were extremely deadly. They were fast and agile flyers too, which allowed the flocks to simply swoop in and let loose a feather volley at the surprised enemies, before simply flying away to engage someone else. With Zorian managing their attacks, their strikes were far more strategic and selective than the iron beaks themselves would have ever done on their own – they now almost exclusively targeted mages, instead of wasting their feathers on tough targets like war trolls and other dominated monsters, usually striking when the target was exhausted or busy dealing with something else.