Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

Despite all of this, the scale of the invasion was vast, and Jornak had brought a large number of fresh troops into the city when he had brought Iasku Mansion into the city. Zorian’s actions were just a drop in the bucket, and it was hard to judge how much difference his actions made in the grand scheme of things.

A lot of time he could do nothing but watch as the invaders killed and torched their way through the city. He could do a lot with relatively little when he spotted an opening, but not every situation had one. Or at least, not one that he could spot. Maybe someone smarter than him could have seen some obvious solution that he had missed, but he was still only human, and a lot of the time he saw no way to help without burning through his mana an at unacceptable rate.

So instead, he did nothing. He watched people fight and die over and over, across the entire city, withholding his help because it would cost too much.

He wanted to say the experience made him sick… but the truth was that he was already somewhat numb to it. He had seen things like this happen many times over the restarts, and had even experienced some of these things from the invader’s perspective due to his memory reading. Maybe later, when the situation was over and he had time to internalize that all of this was final and irreversible and not at all like the time loop, he would be horrified by the things he had seen and his own lack of reaction to it, but now wasn’t the time for it.

It just wasn’t the time.

He eventually turned his attention to the Hole, where a fierce fight was happening. While Zorian and Jornak’s groups were trapped underneath the angel barrier, the cultists had been free to proceed towards the Hole… for a time.

There was an element that neither Zorian nor Jornak had expected. Before the cultists could even begin setting up the ritual and start sacrificing the children, they were ambushed by a large number of… small animals. Pigeons and cats, to be more precise. Instead of simply clawing or pecking at the cultists, however, these cats and pigeons employed magic spells and weapons.

As the cultists were escorting their wagon of sacrificial children near one of the bigger buildings, a handful of cats simply dropped from the roof and onto their heads. Their claws glowing white from the effects of some unknown spell, they swung towards their target’s necks and faces, slicing open arteries and permanently blinding others. One of the cultists noticed the incoming attack, but he made a mistake of meeting the eyes of a cat sitting on a nearby windowsill and was suddenly hit by a powerful bout of vertigo that sent him reeling. He never had a chance to recover, as another cat ripped his throat out a mere moment later.

Before the cultists could respond to this attack, a flock of pigeons swooped in, carrying a multitude of alchemical grenades in their claws, and all hell broke loose.

Shifters, Zorian quickly realized. Cat and pigeon shifters – the two varieties that were probably most proficient in classical spellcasting in addition to their natural shifting capabilities. And… yes, there was the police force joining the attack now.

Hmm. Apparently Raynie and Haslush had done more in this past month than Zorian thought they would. A surprise, but a welcome one.

Of course, while the cultists often seemed like the weakest part of the invasion from Zorian’s perspective, they were really not so easy to dismiss for regular people. After the initial shock, the cultists began to fight back, and they did so extremely well. After all, the leaders of the Cult of the Dragon Below were actually very powerful and capable mages. Usually they were too busy enacting Panaxeth’s ritual to help their underlings, but at the moment this wasn’t the case, so they quickly made their presence known. After some initial successes, the combined shifter-police forces began to die in droves and lose their courage.

There was no way Zorian could allow this, though, so he instructed his iron beaks to help out and started subtly and not-so-subtly directing city defenders to rush over towards the Hole and join the battle.

Interestingly, the pigeon shifters adapted really well to the iron beaks' assistance. Many of them appeared to be capable of casting certain spells purely reflexively, which meant that any of the seemingly innocuous pigeons could drop a fireball on an enemy group or summon a force barrier to defend both themselves and the iron beaks from enemy spells. Even though Zorian didn’t attempt to communicate with any of them, the pigeon shifters soon naturally fell into the role of support, following iron beaks flocks and shielding them against enemy fire so they could operate relatively unmolested in the sky.

As for the cat shifters, their animal forms were mostly useful for surprise purposes and not terribly impressive for these kind of battles, so Zorian feared they would be useless after that initial ambush… but he was wrong. The cat shifters simply switched back into their human forms and started contributing by casting spells normally. Amusingly, they were kind of similar to Zorian, in that their biggest talent seemed to lay in mind magic. Zorian supposed that, since so many of them already operated on the criminal side of things, they were less hesitant to practice mind magic than a regular mage.

Then Mrva barged into the scene, tanking enemy spell fire like it was inconsequential and crashing into the cultist ranks like a cannonball. The original may have been too busy elsewhere and couldn’t come, but there was no stopping Mrva. His presence slowly but surely started to turn the tide in the favor of Cyorian forces. The leaders of the cult were powerful, but so was Mrva.

Idly, Zorian wondered if it wouldn’t have been better for the original and his allies to simply teleport to the Hole the moment they escaped the angel barrier, and then kill the cultists as quickly as possible… but considering that the cultists still hadn’t even begun the ritual as of yet, maybe it was for the best that they hadn’t done that. Who knows how Jornak would have reacted if he knew for certain that releasing Panaxeth was impossible and that he was going to die soon. Although it may have seemed like Zorian had neatly eliminated the threat of wraith bombs with his counter-traps, the truth was he only had enough time and funds to make those for Cyoria. There were wraith bombs scattered all over Eldemar and possibly beyond, and Zorian could only thank the gods that Jornak didn’t see it fit to activate them as well out of sheer spite.

And that was just the wraith bombs. Although Zorian was sure that some of Jornak’s threats were pure bluffs, he had no doubt that the man had plenty of contingencies that would make them all suffer if he lost. Even Zach and Zorian had made a few contingencies that would go off if they didn’t survive this battle, so there was no way Jornak hadn’t done the same.

It still wasn’t the right time. All Zorian could do was wait and look for an opening.

Zorian stared at the three creatures in front of him. One was some kind of tiger-sized reptilian creature that Zorian did not recognize, the other was a floating orb surrounded by long whip-like tentacles, and the third one was a gigantic green ooze the size of a small building. His defense cube spun around him, sigils on it brightening and fading like the beat of his own heart and mechanical parts softly shifting into various combinations. For a second, everything was still, before both sprung into motion and the battle began anew.

The tentacle orb was the first, being the fastest. It hurled itself at Zorian with incredible speed, its milky white body crackling with powerful electrical magic. Zorian didn’t panic, simply jumping to the side while telekinetically enhancing his jump a little. He easily dodged out of the way of the living cannonball, and another sidestep dodged the electrified whip the creature tried to hit him with next.