The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy

Mirian woke up, already feeling annoyed. "I hate having to deal with stinky bog lion hair."

"What?" said Lily groggily.

Then, she was annoyed at Lily, even though it wasn't her fault.

As she left her dorm, she muttered, "Alright, Troytin, you asked for this cycle to be extra annoying." She got to work.

***

Mirian decided the next easiest way to make money would be to use one of the noble houses. It seemed the simplest way forward, and the least likely to be preempted by the other time traveler.

Nicolus, when she told him her plan, didn't like the request.

"Nurea knows a bunch of people are trying to exploit my status as heir. If I tell her you want gold, that'll raise her hackles," he said, pacing back and forth on the little tower overlooking the lake. "And my father's worse. The money we have left is key to his plans to revive the family's fortunes."

"Yeah, and it's useless because the world ends."Nôv(el)B\\jnn

"That's a really… hard sell. I mean, I believe you, but I also sorta don't believe you, you know?"

Mirian sighed. "Oh, I know." There were some things that would be extra helpful in convincing him, she knew, but she didn't want to do something like start waving Eclipse around in front of Marduke Sacristar, someone she knew was already implicated in the conspiracy. If Troytin got word about the sword, he might start looking closer at the holy vaults of the Grand Sanctum, and that was the last thing she wanted. That damnable man, she thought. Patience. Stick to the plan.

Nicolus frowned. "Maybe you'll be able to convince him. A demonstration of… knowledge? Power?"

"I wish that worked as well as it should work. People are stubborn. And the problem is, I have to convince people to work against things they've been working on. Try to convince a merchant to stop making money, a noble to give up power, and a spy to give up secrets. They can't argue with the evidence I put forth, but as you have been so fond of telling me, people are emotional creatures. It's great when they just need a push, but impossibly annoying when you're trying to change their mind about something they have every motivation not to want to move on."

"That does sound like something I say. Said. Will say? How do all the timelines, uh, compare to each other?"

"No idea," Mirian said. "Right. Let's go over what you're going to say to Nurea. We have several days and a train ride to figure out what we'll say to your dad."

"Several days? We could leave tomorrow."

"No, I need to set up some more sabotage contingencies first. Troytin's gotten better at preventing Archmage Luspire from attacking him, but I think I can manipulate him in a way he won't see coming this cycle."

Nicolus inhaled through his teeth. "Man, you have gotten nasty. Yesterday, I'm pretty sure you had a panic attack when Professor Seneca mentioned the upcoming exam. Well, yesterday for me. How long has it been for you?"

Mirian looked at him and shook her head. "You really don't want to know."

***

On the train ride down, Mirian and Nicolus argued, while Sire Nurea mostly stayed silent, cleaning her revolver.

"Troytin is trying to corner Baracuel's money supply. He's also finally wormed his way back into the graces of the conspirators. He's going to know what the usual communications look like, which means even if your father merely changes his behavior, he'll be on the lookout. As soon as he pushes them for actual information—even tangential information because he's being subtle—Troytin's going to send his little minions down. And I'm not going to give him information on my true capacities, which means we have to run. Do you really trust him not to check with his allies? I can't tell your father about the time loop. It has to be another angle."

"He's going to know something's up."

"That's fine."

"No, it's not fine! He has to be in control. If he doesn't know all the cards on the table, he folds. And he never bluffs. Nurea, back me up on this."

"That sounds accurate," Nurea said without looking up.

"Nicolus, I don't play card games. I've never played card games."

"You've never… wait… how have you never…?"

"I know about them a little bit."

"You're the math expert! You calculate probabilities in your head all the time. You'd fucking clean up a table, sorry Nur."

"I'm not learning to play cards to make money. Gambling dens deal in pocket change compared to what I need."

"Yeah, most of them. I mean, there's probably a high stakes table… right, whatever. But you get what I mean, right? If he knows you're hiding information from him, he's not going to buy into the pot—great, now all I can think of is card analogies."

"He's looking to reestablish the family fortune. Surely I can represent something irresistible. I can demonstrate a unique scribing capability, and show him glyphs no arcanist would recognize. New technology?"

"The time of single inventors is passed—that's his view of the matter. It's about industrial capacity, not neat little innovations. Besides, the expensive applications are in the complexity of the spell engine. You know what the Akanans are making, right?"

She sighed. "I do. Alright, different tactic. I can impersonate people. Illusions that can't be detected."

"Bullshit," Nicolus and Nurea said simultaneously. Nicolus then gave Nurea a mock stern look and said, "Language." His knight rolled her eyes.

Mirian drew from her soul repository, creating a binding that would change her hair color, skin tone, and jawline. The latter was devilishly hard, but she couldn't exactly explain why to Nicolus. Then she forced her soul energy currents to speed up, accelerating the change.

She then handed Nicolus her spellbook. "There's a divination spell for detecting illusions. Try it."

Nicolus cast it three times, then handed the spellbook to Nurea. "You try it."

Nurea narrowed her eyes at Mirian. "How are you doing that?"

"Not really interested in telling you that one, either. Again, Troytin just launched an attack on me last cycle, and I don't want you possessing knowledge he might find useful. For all our sakes."

"Well… he's interested in getting an in with the Akanan industrialists, hence Uncle Alexus taking a trip over there. But you'd have to speak Eskanar."

"I'm fluent enough to pass," Mirian said in Eskanar.

"Oh. Wow. You have been at this a while."

She could see Nicolus doing some calculations in his head. Estimating how many hours of language lessons it would have taken. "Look, don't bother trying to guess," she said. "We could try an Akanan industrialist looking to start up factories here."

"They're, uh, usually men," Nicolus said.

"That's not a limitation," Mirian said. "I just need a bit of instruction on what to say and how to act."

***

The good news was, she avoided Troytin's net. The bad news was, Marduke Sacristar refused to be moved and excoriated his son and his knight for falling for, quote, "common parlor tricksters," then asked Nicolus if the smell of a nearby bog also caused him to dump all gold in.

"In retrospect, that was probably the worst idea," Nicolus said. "He knows more about Akanan industries than anything except maybe the family business. You'd have to really put in the work to fool him. Like, a language teacher that can help give you an Akanan accent, maybe some acting lessons, and definitely you'd need to get a better feel for what the upper crust over there looks and sounds like."

That all sounded to Mirian like it would take too long. There's a quicker path. I just need to find it. Troytin already knows about my connection to Nicolus anyways. If I continue down this road, he'll disrupt whatever I do. The only reason he didn't this time is he probably thought it was a feint.

They found a quiet place to live out the rest of the cycle. In addition to her usual exercises, Mirian researched the construction of bank vaults, then used the end of the cycle to investigate a few examples in Palendurio.

***

The next cycle, Mirian tried breaking into various vaults around Cairnmouth. With her mastery of glyphs, she could occasionally open one without triggering the alarms. However, the vaults were checked routinely, and it didn't take long for a massive manhunt to begin. That, and the heretic priests had been right about the modernization of the financial sector: there were notes with special seals, but not nearly enough physical gold. She would have to hit multiple vaults, and now Troytin would be watching them even closer so she couldn't rely on simple iterations. He was a fool, but she wasn't going to make the mistake of underestimating him.

She headed south again to wait out the cycle, hiding in a little cottage by the coast. This time, she didn't slip up in covering her tracks.

***

Mirian tried to plan a heist with the Cairnmouth Syndicate next, only to learn that they actually had signed agreements with the Allard family and several major banks not to duplicate their seals or rob their establishments. A great deal of Syndicate gold was actually deposited in secret accounts in those banks. The criminal representative firmly told Mirian that interfering with business partners was off the table.

That seemed insane to her. The higher ups running the banks knew they were helping launder money for the largest criminal organization in Baracuel? She wasn't sure how many laws everyone involved was breaking, but she also knew it didn't matter. Gods above, every stone I overturn just has more rot beneath it, she thought.

She kept detecting divination machines in Cairnmouth, so even though she'd replaced her dormitory hair with bog lion hair again, she didn't stick around.

Her attempts to measure the energy of the moonfall was a failure. There was simply no time between impact and annihilation.

***

The next cycle, she couldn't make sense of the math. "The shockwave has to be traveling through the fourth dimension," she found herself muttering to the equations on her table. "But it's not working like the current theories would predict. It should still be propagating at the same velocities seen in our three spatial dimensions, even with its special properties."

"Mirian, what are you working on?" Lily asked her.

"Ah, nothing," Mirian said, and lit the whole bundle of papers on fire, then compacted the smoke and ash into a little ball that she extracted the heat from, then dropped into the trash.

Lily stared at her. "Uh… did you just…?"

Mirian shrugged. "Been practicing a bit."

She left for Cairnmouth a few days later.

Her next attempt was to try to get in with the Allards. Nicolus and Sire Nurea could get her a meeting with one of the family members, and she could get Calisto to write her a letter of support. After several days of negotiations, she finally was invited to one of the Allard manors in the countryside outside Cairnmouth to discuss her proposition. She was making progress in convincing them she could use her ins to buy out the Ennecus Guild and put them under Allard family control, but then one of her wards triggered.

Nicolus and Nurea were sitting by her side when it happened.

"Airships," Mirian muttered, and reached for her spellbook.

Enrico Allard, the man negotiating with her, turned to look out the window. "Hmm?" he said.

This time, though, there wasn't an attempt to deploy a net to arrest her. The lead airship fired its main cannon directly at the meeting room.

Mirian put up a force shield and dove to the side. It was only her early warning that had saved her. The shot hadn't been a direct hit, but it had taken out a chunk of the ceiling and masonry. The stone floor from the room above had collapsed down. Nicolus had been crushed instantly, along with most of the negotiating team. The Allard family member seemed to be alive. Mirian thought she'd detected a charged ward in his clothing going off. If so, that was all that had saved him. Nurea stirred next to her; Mirian's shield had protected her from the worst of the blast. The ornate furniture had caught fire, and the second airship was on its approach.

Mirian embraced the Dusk Waves Across the Ocean form so that her reaction times would be better. The strength of the form was weakened by the bindings she had on to disguise herself, but it would still help. She quickly flipped through her spellbook, casting flame shield, readjusting her force shield, and then casting a magnetic barrier. She manifested her mythril amulet, then used an enhanced lift person to grab both Enrico Allard and Nurea and levitated them back with her as she used her levitation wand. She headed straight through the conference room doors, letting her shield smash down the door for her. She made a hard turn down the corridor, just in time to avoid the follow-up shot from the second skiff. The conference room exploded, this time having gotten a direct hit. Burning debris scattered throughout the Allard manor.

"What—?" Enrico managed.

"You've been betrayed by your Akanan allies," Mirian said. "Do you have a safe room? Arcanists to defend the family?"

"Basement," he croaked, and tried to fumble for something at his belt. That was when she saw that his hand had been mangled, though he might have been in enough shock not to notice.

Mirian flew them down a spiral staircase as another cannon shot shook the manor. "Where is it?" she asked.

The Allard man let out a wheezing cough, examining where they were. "Seco… second room. Behind book case." He gestured down the hall, then continued to paw at the something at his belt. "Need the… need…"

Mirian blew the doors off its hinges, then telekinetically yanked the bookshelf off the wall, revealing a hidden staircase. At the bottom of it was a reinforced door, warded to hell and back. She gently laid Nurea and Enrico on the ground, then found the enchanted pouch at the Allard man's side. The glyphkey inside was as intricate as any she'd seen. She opened the door with it, then levitated them both inside, dropping her protection spells.

"Nicolus…" Nurea groaned. "Where is…?"

"You'll see him again. Just, not for another month," Mirian said.

"No. No!" Nurea said, finally coming to her senses. Or at least, most of them. The knight's head was bleeding pretty badly. Mirian guessed she had a concussion. "Where is he? WHERE IS HE?"

The building shook again, then again. Above them, it sounded like another part of the structure had just collapsed. Mirian looked around the room. There was a large spell engine, an ornate display case with a spellbook and several wands in it, a shelf full of ledgers, a table, a bed, and a wall covered in cupboards.

"Sire Nurea. Do you want to stay here, or come out and fight?"

"Fight," she snarled, and pulled out her wand and pistol.

Mirian embraced her focus, gently sending healing waves through the knight's head. Some of the damage would take more time and care to fix, but it would keep her on her feet for now. She did the same to Enrico.

"Alright. Enrico Allard, can you rally reinforcements from here?"

"Y-yes. I feel well enough now… did you… but of course. I can broadcast commands. And we have a personal telegraph here for… emergencies."

Huh. Just keeping myrvites from eating the cables must cost a fortune. I wonder who else is maintaining secret telegraph lines? she wondered. "Good. I'll be back. Let your allies know not to fire on the spellcaster they can't see. Nurea, join the Allard mercenaries in trying to harry the airships if they get close. Use cover, and force shields to deal with the shockwaves from their spellfire shells."

"On it," Nurea said, face contorted in anger. She started up the staircase.

"What?" Enrico asked.

"Just relay the order," Mirian said. Assessing her auric mana, she was still—fine. Her intense practice under Blooming Iron had expanded her mana reserves drastically. She cast improved camouflage, a spell she'd been working for some time to perfect. It used three layers of light refraction around a tight oval. It still wasn't perfect, especially near intense light sources, but it would make her much harder to spot, especially in a pitched battle.

Mirian took off back up the stairs, casting force shield and magnetic shield again. From a window, she started several more fires around the outside of the manor then, using several glyphs from condense smoke, improvised a spread smoke spell. She used force pull to feed the fires with green shrubs from the gardens surrounding the estate so that the smoke was more intense. Another shot shook the manor. She leapt through the window and took off flying, shooting straight up as the airship moved away.

Mirian surveyed the battle. The skiffs were flying in a circular pattern, diving low to let the spellcasters aboard pepper the manor with fireballs and ray spells. That, plus the main cannon, forced the defenders into cover, but the ship was already moving away before the defenders could meaningfully retaliate. They were exploiting the difficulty of casting a spell at a distance and the relative immobility of their opponents. The Allard's guards and trained servants were doing their best to shoot at the airships, but the airships were also running shields using their spell engines.

She could flee while they were distracted, she knew, but now that Troytin had attempted to assassinate Enrico, she also had the perfect opportunity to get information from the Allards. Worth the risk, she decided.

Hovering above the lead airship, she started moving in a circular pattern to match its route. She switched her form to that of the Lone Pine. As the first airship came through for another pass, she dropped down.

Moments before she hit, Mirian summoned Eclipse, gripping it so the blade was pointing straight down. As she hit the force shield surrounding the airship, she drove the mythril blade into it with the weight of her fall. She felt something important tearing her arms and shoulder, but the dervish stance helped blunt the impact and the pain.

Then, several things happened at once.

The shield flared with light as the kinetic force was transformed by the mythril's connection to her spell resistance. The spell engine, designed to increase its power when the shield was impacted, started burning fossilized myrvite so rapidly that Mirian felt the ambient mana change. The plume of toxic D-class mana started causing a rapid exothermic reaction as it ran into everyone's auras. Two of the arcanists closest to the spell engine dropped to the ground, burns forming all over their bodies; only the fast movement of the airship kept Mirian and the others by the front of the ship from joining them as the deadly mana was left behind.

The pilot, realizing the entire skiff was about to run out of fuel, slammed a glyph on the console to cut power to the shield, and Mirian, still camouflaged, dropped down amidst the crew and soldiers. Mirian decapitated the arcanist in front of her with a quick slash, then pivoted and cut through a rifle and then into the torso of one of the soldiers.

"What in the five—!" a Baracueli sorcerer asked, shortly before his throat was cut. That left the two gunners, an Arcane Praetorian, and the pilot.

The Praetorian wasted valuable time trying to hit Mirian directly with a disintegration spell, but with both the mythril of the blade and her amulet, the direct spell dissipated harmlessly on her. Before he could switch spells, Mirian hit him with a force blast, which sent his spellbook flying over the railing, then greater lightning, coated in soul-energy to pierce the resistance of his own orichalcum jewelry.

"What's going on?" The pilot asked. Then, getting no response, she turned, in time to see a distortion of light with a silver blade coming out of it.

"God's blood!" she said, and sent the airship into a wild tilt.

Mirian slid down the deck, then over the railing, along with the two gunners, who hadn't been ready for the maneuver either. While the others plunged to the ground, Mirian resumed levitating. However, the airship didn't recover from the tilt. With its spell engine damaged from the shield overheating, it didn't have the force to rebalance the aircraft. The ship started spinning. The centrifugal force ripped apart the engine, and it plunged into the ground and erupted in an arcane fireball as the thousands of glyphs in it shattered and erupted.

She looked at the wreckage only long enough to confirm it wouldn't be a threat, then turned her attention to the second airship. She likely had a dislocated shoulder and several torn muscles, along with burns over her skin.

The manor was full of gaping holes where artillery shots had punched through, and smoke billowed out from the fires within it. She needed to end this fight quickly to secure the safety of Enrico Allard. She dematerialized Eclipse so the blade wouldn't give her camouflage away and got ready to continue the fight.