Marcus turned, looking between the dead body and Nora. The Elf wiped her blade clean with absolute calm, raising an eyebrow. "What?"
"Why is there a corpse in the library?"
"He was asking uncomfortable questions."
He opened his mouth, closed it then sighed. "What?"
"He was quite insistent you had something to do with their inability to summon from the other planes," Nora explained, sheathing her blade. "I overheard him pressing others into cornering and interrogating you. I found this to be a disagreeable use of your time, so I followed him. Now he's dead."
Marcus half pointed at the corpse, tone more confused than anything else. "He wasn't wrong?"
"Well, yes. But you theorized that a reset degrades the artefact more than a continued loop, did you not? That means you need to keep every single one going as long as possible to ensure you get as much time to figure out how to get home."
He moved closer as Nora started to pick up the corpse, waving his hand. Two dozen telekinetic hands picked it up for her, their strength just about able to carry the load. "I find it somewhat disturbing how committed you are, to tell the truth. You are aware I can't take you with me, right? Nothing I've seen even suggests it's possible, not if you're already dead in the real world."
"I gave you my word and you gave yours. It is the best I can do to help my people, and I've seen first hand what happens to us when we take the easy path. The convenient path. The price of my labor in a reality without consequence is nothing compared to the aid you might render to my people."
"I don't think I'll ever really understand Elves."
"And Humans are shockingly incompetent yet have taken over multiple continents. Now what do we do with the corpse?"
Marcus raised an eyebrow. "You killed him."
"And you're carrying him. Not like I ever killed someone in this academy before. Hide the body?"
Hmm. "Flesh rots. Burn it?"
"To burn it clean to ashes you'd at least need arcane fire, which will draw attention. Freeze it then hide it? It doesn't need to last forever."
Well, no, he supposed not. Nora moved after he shrugged, leading him to what he could only describe as the perfect place to hide a frozen corpse. Nora ignored his questioning look, pushing the body into it and stepping back.
Marcus sighed, weaving together a heat-transfer matrix and freezing the whole space solid. It took minutes, it wasn't his specialty and this clearly wasn't the best matrix for it, but he didn't have any experience with freezing corpses to start with.
Which, of course, was when they got interrupted. Professor Mackenzie slowed as he spotted them, Nora taking a step to the side to block his view.
Marcus sighed. "Just go back to pretending I don't exist and I'll return the favor."
"I find myself pitying those who have to deal with you in the future, mister Lannoy." The professor replied, continuing his walk. He nodded to Nora, not seeming to care for the knife in her hand. "Miss Ommasi."
"Professor."
Nora didn't speak until after the man was gone, turning to him. Marcus shrugged. "He knows about the artifact and prefers to bury his head in the sand. I'm inclined to let him, honestly."
They got back to the dorm without any more interruptions, Marcus having moved into the one right next to hers after the previous occupant mysteriously vacated the space and, even more mysteriously, the door of his own dorm had moved so the only entrance to it was through hers.
He would have asked, but then decided he didn't really care about the specifics. She seemed far from in love with him, thank the Gods, and everything else was immaterial. Not like any of this was really his, anyway.
It was almost strange how he missed his old home yet preferred this one. Marcus slowed, watching Nora take out a whetstone to sharpen her knife.
People. People make it home, and back in reality I have none I truly treasure. None I even tried to befriend.
Well, that was a suitably sad realization for the end of the day. Marcus took out his latest multi-matrix exercise, which called for him to stack boxes with three telekinetic limbs simultaneously.
And unlike his proper telekinetic matrix, which linked them to his intent and created dozens with just the one spell, these were independent. Stronger for it, yes, but much harder to control. To keep active. It was like splitting his mind in three directions at once, a prospect that was only growing easier at a very slow rate.
Or maybe he was breaking through every record imaginable. Everyone who had mastered the standard defense package declined to talk about it, and Nora's offer of torture went a bit too far to satisfy his own curiosity.
Hours passed in surprisingly comfortable silence, darkness descending to give rise to midnight and the beginning of the fifteenth day of the second academy loop, and Marcus blinked.
"Quills down. I will be collecting your exams in a moment, and until I am finished you are all to remain seated."
Marcus hummed to himself, becoming almost disturbingly used to the jarring change of a reset.
Fourteen days is the limit?
﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌
"See?" Marcus asked, stroking the elemental gently. The floating blob of water rippled, confusion more than anything radiating through their limited bond, and Marcus stopped before it tried to suck the moisture out of his blood. Again. "Maybe it's just you, Olive."
Nora was inching closer to cut him, one of her demonic hornets already poised to attack the druid's throat, and Marcus watched Olive exchange confused glances with his fellows.
It was early enough in the loop that few had discovered the cracks, which was a weird disconnect in apparent skill for the students, and his reasoning proved sound enough to convince his ambushers to leave. Or let Marcus leave, which amounted to the same thing.
Nora moved with him, keeping that slight bit of distance she always did at the start. Just enough to react should he turn on her. It made him sad, though more a mournful sadness than anything sharp. She had the hornet land on her finger, gently petting the thing before dismissing it back to the Hells.
She hummed when the hornet was gone. "You were quite efficient at showing me how to bypass the barrier around this reality."
He supposed he would be. The cracks in it were growing, for one, and his increased familiarity with her way of magic combined into quite the tutoring session. It also made her warm up to him more quickly than anything but violence, though the one time he'd tried to engineer a scenario for the latter she'd seen through it.
Apparently Elves only valued real fighting, not—as she'd called it—play acting.
"I've had time to practice," he replied, rolling his shoulder. "I've been here, what? Eight weeks now? Closer to nine, maybe. I don't really keep track anymore. This is the sixth loop."
"You don't really talk about what happened in the previous ones. Not that we've had much opportunity to."
No, he hadn't. Mostly because there wasn't much to tell. He'd combed through the whole school and found that any attempt to actually leave the surprisingly nice academy forced a reset. He didn't count the loop where he'd tried initially, and though he usually tried at near each reset it didn't seem the way forward.
He'd tore the whole school apart, talked to the fourteen professors and four dozen guards, but nothing. No quests, no issues, no win conditions. None of the students really cared about him, none had issues they couldn't—and often would—solve themselves. Nothing needed fixing.
Well, the School of Life needed fixing, but that was rather outside his area of expertise.
"I don't, no," Marcus said. Nora raised an eyebrow, apparently confused at the pauses. "Nothing much to report. I'm working on the standard defense package, I'll keep looking for the purpose of this loop, but either way nothing."
"I assume you have a back-up plan."
Marcus rolled his eyes. "Of course I have a back-up plan. I dislike the back-up plan, but I have one. It'll only work after I get the standard defense package down."
"Your vague answer concerns me."
"I'm waiting until the barrier keeping us here breaks down sufficiently for me to escape to the Hells," he admitted. "A trip I won't survive without the defense package."
Nora slowed, turning to him. "You won't survive it with the defense package, though I suppose a slow death can be better than a quick one for some people. More time to be saved and all that. But if we're in an artifact, we're likely just a copy. If you escape you won't have a body, and at best have to work something out with the real you."
He sometimes forgot Nora was a mage. Marcus blamed her penance for stabbing. "You have a better idea? One that isn't 'hope for the artifact to have a safety limit and eject me', that is."
"This is a training tool, yes? One that most likely runs on a certain level of time distortion. Something that powerful would normally be under observation during use, but the great artificer Balthazar would have probably built in at least some control matrices on the inside."
Marcus hummed, both not having heard Balthazar described as 'the great artificer' before and wondering why he'd never thought to check for control matrices. And he also felt bad, because he kept subconsciously writing Nora off as a relatively uneducated warrior.
He'd gained a significant amount of respect for martial weapons and those that wielded them, but it seemed true change took time. Time and the ability to admit he was wrong.
"That does seem likely," Marcus agreed. "I'll poke around, see what I can find. Let's hope the behavior modifiers don't break down before I do. It would probably be very bad if a professor were to find them before me."
The behavior modifiers. He'd coined the term, and had no real hard evidence to even prove they existed, but it was how he explained the discrepancies. How none of the students noticed the repeating library books, or how professors showed skill great enough they should have long since noticed they were in a fake reality.
Yet only professor Mackenzie had, at least so far. The others had to be pointed at it, few taking the information particularly well. Another area he wasn't going to focus on. Not with how rapidly he'd have to cycle through loops to get anything done. Another thing for the rare end-of-loop hours, which he had so few of the plan wouldn't really work regardless.
They got back to the dorm room, Marcus taking his usual seat and closing his eyes. It was still early in the loop, which meant there were few people poking around the barrier. Some confused summoners, for the most part, but they cycled through quite a few suppositions before settling on 'our reality is fake'.
It meant he had time. A few days, at least, though the continued degradation of the artifact meant people kept discovering discrepancies earlier and earlier. The library might be the breaking point, really.
People were in there essentially from the moment the loop started, and if they noticed the books were fucked the outcry would be severe. It wouldn't be a group of summoners making a ruckus, not a student-led witch-hunt. The professors would demand answers, the guards might get involved, anything could happen.
His relative peace and quiet would be gone. He might be able to hide for a while, but he had no real idea how the Marcus they were familiar with acted. Not a problem when people brushed it off, but when everyone was already suspicious?
No, sooner was better than later. And as Marcus reached down to the barrier, drawing a half-completed summoning seal to help guide him there, he narrowed his focus. Narrowed it past the point needed for any spell, all but gliding along the end of their reality.
And past it, past one of the widening cracks, was nothing. A nothing that connected to the planes, be they the Hells or elemental or other. A nothing that only summoning seals could safely traverse. Marcus stared at it, magical senses showing him things his eyes never could.
Marcus forcefully pulled himself away, finding the act one of the hardest things he'd ever done. Not for the magical strength it took, which required nothing but a small mental nudge, but rather having to gather the desire to leave in the first place. To remember his purpose in being here, lest he stare at the beckoning abyss for a glorious infinity.
Focus. Marcus kept moving, avoiding the cracks entirely. Just feeling his way around had exhausted him before, but now it was doable. Not pleasant, but doable. But also as before, there wasn't much to see. Just a barrier to keep the reality contained, existing in a space his books knew very little about.
Somewhere that wasn't his, nor any other reality, but existing all the same. An old witch he'd once talked to said the Gods lived there, a druid claimed it was empty, the diary of an unnamed 'traveller' said it was filled with entities beyond mortal comprehension.
Marcus had purged the diary with fire after the letters started moving, which admittedly lent some claim to its texts. Still, protocols existed for a reason and to the flame it went.
What's that?
He whirled around, the thought very much not belonging to himself. Marcus spotted one of the cracks, which was shivering, unable to marshal the mental energy needed to ignore it. He moved closer, hesitantly looking inside.
Marcus, him but not, looked back. Seemed just as surprised, a mirror dimension spreading through the crack and trying to reach into his reality. The only reality. But if there are two, which is real?
Pain shot through his body and he recoiled, falling backwards out of the chair he was sitting in. Nora looked up, surprised and wary, as Marcus breathed. Breathed and tried not to shiver as he scrambled upwards.
It took long, unpleasant minutes of pacing to calm down, though Nora never commented. Marcus finally sat back down, stilling the shake in his hand.
He exhaled, slowly easing himself back in. Before he did he added a time limit to the summoning seal, something which would break the connection after half an hour no matter what happened, and suppressed another shiver.
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌
The stone slammed into his shield, Marcus not even feeling a hint of the tremendous force behind it. The magical drain was rather severe, yes, but the shield barely even flickered.
The standard defense package. It had taken him months to get down, gave him a headache if he used it too long and he couldn't actually do any other magic while it was active, but he'd done it.
And the adaptive recharge matrix worked better than expected, too. A normal shield was a static thing, being able to absorb only so much punishment before collapsing. This one? It just pulled more greedily from his magic. Which could bring its own issues, but of a lesser priority than 'death by broken skull'.
Nora had gotten her hands on a bow, which he didn't see her use often, and the same shield breaking runes as those on her dagger were engraved into each arrow. Her specialty, he'd learned. Using magic to augment weapons.
Six mages had already discovered that a shield did not make them invulnerable to her arrows.
It had, admittedly, taken him quite a while to convince her to open up. To tell him about what she could actually do. She'd only done so after a particularly nasty pitched battle against the summoners, where he'd beaten three people to death with a mace, two loops ago.
Bloodthirsty Elves.
And speaking of maces, Marcus raised his own. The woman he was fighting flinched, clearly more a student than a warrior. Her conjured stone elemental shielded her as she ran, though she was clipped by friendly fire not seconds later.
Marcus stepped back and behind a raised wall, nodding to the squad of guards manning it. They ignored him, one of the professors barking a word of power. A new shield flickered into view, blocking the entire hallway and any further access into their part of the academy.
"This is fun," Nora said, seemingly completely in her element. She put her bow away, smiling. "Does this always happen?"
"Since the library wasn't covered in the 'ignore me' clause."
"Ignore me clause?"
"Couldn't remember the name I gave it. Point is, yes. This always happens. Luckily, this is the fourth time it has, and Mackenzie is somewhat receptive to the idea of keeping order. If the facility prepares right at the start we usually keep control over at least half the academy and its students."
"And the rest go crazy," Nora finished, glancing back. Marcus did the same, seeing a few of the more insane students banging against the hallway-sized shield. Others moved behind them, quite a few of which he recognized. "Can't say I blame them."
"No, but it is annoying. The summoners panic without their minions, figure out pretty quickly they can summon through the cracks in the barrier, and some of them investigate. Those go mad, leading to chaos, followed by someone figuring out this reality is fake. Some believe them, others don't, and then there's war."
"This is hardly a war. More a minor, if mage-filled, skirmish.
Marcus shrugged. "Considering I'm actually one of the very few here who has been in one, excluding the guards and professors, I'll take my own opinion over yours. I do have studying to do, however. The degradation of reality waits for no man."
The few people who heard scowled at him, but honestly, Marcus didn't care. With his defenses rather massively increased and a battle-happy Nora to watch his back there wasn't much that could threaten him even if they could spare the manpower.
Which they couldn't. The mad mages needed to be quarantined, the summoners contained and the panicked reassured. None of which had anything to do with little old Marcus.
They got back to the dorm, Nora locking the door behind them before carving a rune into it. One for protection, though several lines didn't make any sense to him. Unknown, new magic.
Such a shame he didn't have the time to learn them. To try and convince others to share their knowledge. Nora was telling him what she knew, yes, but everyone else? They clung to their expertise zealously, seemingly disproving his theory that 'the artifact had no new knowledge', and that aside Marcus didn't have the loops needed to get it out of them.
Because with every loop the cracks became a little larger. Every loop they grew more quickly. Which meant dragging out each loop as much as he could was a must, and wasting time on learning interesting—but temporarily irrelevant—magics was out of the question.
Marcus carved his modified summoning seal onto the table, hands going through the familiar motions. He activated it once it was ready, trusting Nora to protect him.
She'd done so for months. Months and months. She might not trust him, but he trusted her.
He sighed as his senses started exploring the barrier again, mind half occupied with other things. Hundreds of hours of practice had made this place rather less taxing to navigate, though annoyingly the controls tended to move.
But there was no win condition. Either it was so obscure as to be undetectable or the scenario never generated one, but regardless there was no way to pass. And yes, there might be a safeguard to kick him out, but the memory of his entrance—more than a year ago now—didn't install much hope.
The artifact had been malfunctioning before he'd unwillingly used it, and he didn't want to find out how it would end when it failed entirely. And who knew what happened to the last people that used it before him? Were they trapped in the artifact because it required outside manipulation to release those within? Did the loops run over and over until their minds broke? Did that cause the artifact to degrade this far in the first place? Or was it simply degrading over centuries since its creation?
And so he explored, and the fact he could hold four spell matrices at once made his search faster than any previous attempt. An almost natural consequence of that was that he found the emergency control matrix within the hour, a personal record and beating his old by nearly forty minutes.
The web of matrices filled his mind's-eye as he looked at it, hundreds of layers deep and so utterly complex it was more language than magic. That, he'd seen before. The first time he had, it had actually given him a headache just from looking at it, though that had stopped after a while.
And really, the more he played with it the more he felt he understood it. He supposed learning a language started making more and more sense as it was comprehended. It was perhaps one of the most elegant displays of magic he'd ever seen, and messing with it felt almost wrong.
But not wrong enough to hesitate, so Marcus slowly enveloped it. Let his magic settle over every matrix, feeling out their individual functions. He'd already figured out where the core was, that piece of magic which built this fake world, as well as one knot that seemed to control the people.
The latter was a guess, but considering how decayed it looked compared to other parts it seemed a solid one. More shapes and sections he could not decipher, aside from the fact they were woven together, and then there was the place he'd been working on last time.
The central control unit.
Well, it was probably called something else, but his senses got a firm impression of control from the thing. It seemed somewhat less complex, too, though dumbed down might be the more accurate statement.
Balthazar had probably meant for it to be used by others, considering he'd written instructions along the matrixes. Which, of course, had degraded over time. Now there was barely a legible word left.
One of them, though, said 'release'. Marcus was feeling very optimistic about that one. Unfortunately, it wasn't exactly a switch. Just another matrix he was supposed to interact with, and he was scared to death to touch the thing. Scared to touch that which quite literally controlled his entire world.
Hours passed. Hours of slowly feeling out the other controls, of getting a more complete picture, of measuring the rate of decay and trying to decipher the language.
Days passed. Days of relative quiet as the professors slowly regained control over their academy. Nora kept him updated on it as he forewent anything but sleep and food, his body growing stiff as time passed.
A week into the loop and the academy was once more a place of order. Order and suspicion. The unrest was gone, yes, but the reason for it wasn't. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, professors went about their investigations in a much more disciplined manner than freaked-out students.
More and more people started exploring the boundary of their reality, inspecting the cracks and performing experiments. Marcus couldn't hope to keep an eye on it all, let alone stop others from doing as they pleased, so he kept working.
Kept growing his understanding until the thirteenth day, Nora looking at him expectantly. "This is it, then?"
"Unfortunately," Marcus replied, studying the much larger, modified summoning seal one last time. It would strengthen his connection in exchange for any and all subtlety, but this was it. "If my calculations are correct the next loop will be the point of no return. Cracks will fuse together, the controls will degrade even more, Gods know how that will translate to the people. It has to be now."
Nora shrugged. "It changes little for me. I wish you good luck so long as you keep your promise, Human. Do your honest best to help the Elves."
"I will, and I suppose this is goodbye. I know I don't mean much to you, I know that I can't mean much to you, but thank you for being my friend."
She looked uncomfortable for a moment, smoothing it away behind a light smile. "Go make some proper friendships in the real world, Human. Take it from someone who knows. Being alone sucks."
"So I have found," he smiled humorously. "So I have found."
Marcus sat in the middle of the seal, carved into the wooden floorboards over the course of hours, and activated it. His mind was all but dragged to the barrier, several of those already there snapping around to look in his direction.
He ignored them, hunting for the controls. For the heart of this world, though either name was as accurate as the other. Everything around them was part of the artifact, after all. So Marcus hunted, finding the controls in just over an hour.
Someone else followed him. Which wasn't ideal, but he wasn't here to investigate. He wasn't here to learn and study. He'd done that. Mapped out the School of Life as best he could, created a plan, created back-up plans. He was as ready as he was ever going to be.
Marcus enveloped the controls as the other person, who by now had been joined by several more, started screaming. He ignored them, flipping the not-switch marked 'release' with a haste that seemed almost disrespectful.
Nothing happened.
He cursed, delving into the matrix below. A headache bloomed at once, pulsing and spiking and twisting, and he focused past it as best he could. Filled the matrix with power in a vain attempt to make it work, nearly breaking his concentration when it actually did something.
"Error. Error. Err- You are not authorised to interact with the Console of Operations." Marcus ignored Balthazar's booming voice, though his hunters shied back. He filled it with more power, feeling the matrix almost sucking the magic out of him. "Any attempt to alter the Console of Operations will result in immediate extraction."
Yes please.
Marcus did the mental equivalent of kicking the spell, the voice falling silent. Then a spark of power ignited deep in the heart of the artifact, doubling in power every second until Marcus realised that he maybe shouldn't be this close. The 'release' switch shuddered, flipping down several more stages than what Marcus had managed.
Then the power went from overwhelming to critical, and all he felt was pain. Pain, the sensation of movement, the feeling of sheets, and then more pain the likes of which he'd never felt before.
He opened his eyes to see a frozen servant holding a bowl of soup, his body responding to the sheer agony in his mind. Responding in the only way it knew how.
Marcus screamed.
Afterword
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