The aranea needed to be warned right now, not by the end of the day. He would have to teleport directly to Cyoria. He mentally apologized to his mother and Kirielle, since they were going to have a fit when they realized he had gone missing from his locked room, and started casting.
He couldn’t teleport straight to the Aranean settlement. The araneas had actually warded most of their settlement against teleportation, and in any case the aranea lived deep underground. Teleporting underground was a bad idea — between the sheer amount of rock in the way and the magical interference created by heightened levels of ambient mana (which only got worse on a mana well like Cyoria), there was a good chance he’d end up killing himself. As much of in a hurry as Zorian was, killing himself in a teleportation accident was even worse than being late, and he had no mana to waste either. Teleporting to Cyoria’s teleport beacon was going to be hard enough on its own for a mage of his meager capabilities in the field.
Teleportation had a reputation of being dangerous among most mages. This was because, at its core, the classical teleportation spell wasn’t a pure dimensionalism spell — it had a substantial divination component that divined the exact coordinates of the location the caster was trying to reach, and if the caster set up the divination wrong… well, all sorts of weird and unpleasant things could happen. Then there was the fact that some people really didn’t like people teleporting into their home and territory and set up wards that didn’t just cause teleportation to fail, but to fail catastrophically. Such wards were illegal, but used by a certain type of people anyway.
Other than that, though, teleportation was a fairly safe and convenient method of transportation. So long as your destination wasn’t behind wards. Or underground. Or somewhere you’ve never set foot in. Yeah.
Ah, whatever, the point was that it could get him to Cyoria in mere moments. Cyoria thankfully had a teleport beacon in the city that funneled travelers into a central location and simultaneously made teleportation easier (and less mana intensive) for the mage doing the teleporting. That meant that Zorian wasn’t going to spend most of his mana on the teleport, which was a very good thing.
His world shifted unpleasantly — he still wasn’t good enough with the spell to produce a smooth transition like Ilsa could manage — and suddenly he was at Cyoria’s teleport redirection point. He promptly ran into the city proper and went about preparing himself. As tempting as it was to immediately descend into the Dungeon and seek out the aranea, he had to think of his own safety first. The aranea could be saved in some other restart, but if he got captured by the third time traveler, all would be lost. He had to wait half an hour or so until his mana reserves regenerated enough that he would feel safe descending into the Dungeon, so he set off in search of a store to buy some equipment at, as there wasn’t enough time to make his own.
Well, finding a magical store in Cyoria wasn’t too difficult. Unfortunately, their selection of spell rods legally available to someone like him had been very underwhelming. He bought a shielding bracelet and a rod of magic missiles, but everything else required permits he didn’t have.
«I hate to sound like a crazed killer or something, but don’t you have something… more lethal in your selection?» asked Zorian impatiently.
«Well sure, but I can’t really sell them to you without getting into trouble, can I?» the merchant said with a radiant smile, not at all disturbed by his question. «The mage guild keeps a close eye on the sale of spell rods and such, and I don’t really want to get into trouble for a handful of coins. Sorry.»
He then gave him a shrewd look. «But you know, if it’s lethality you’re worried about, may I suggest a somewhat… unorthodox choice?»
He reached beneath the counter and withdrew a plain wooden box, placing it on the counter. With great fanfare, he opened the box and showed its contents to Zorian.
Zorian stared at the contents for a few seconds, thinking it over. It was unorthodox yes, but…
«I’ll take it,» he said.
The man gave him a knowing smile and started to write up a bill.
He knew something was wrong the moment he approached the aranean settlement without being intercepted by the sentries. He should have been intercepted by now, especially since he had been deliberately inflating his telepathic presence to be as noticeable as possible. But no one came to confront him, and no one answered his vocal greetings. It was unnerving, and as Zorian got nearer and nearer to the Aranea settlement, an undercurrent of dread began to seep into his mind.
Was he too late? But he came here as fast as reasonably possible!
He finally encountered one of the aranea after a few minutes, followed by another one 30 seconds later. Dead, both of them. There was no sign of physical damage Zorian could see, either on the dead aranea or the environment, and he could detect no magical residue to indicate heavy spellwork. It looked eerily like the aftermath of Red Robe’s attack in the previous restart. He promptly stopped to cast 3 different protective spells on himself: non-detection to stop simple divination, invisibility to hide from sight, and a spell to increase his natural spell resistance. He didn’t know what those purple spells were, but they looked like direct effect spells rather than simple projection attacks, so spell resistance should work against them. Finally, he took out a cheap scarf he had bought back on the surface for this very purpose and wrapped it around his head to hide his identity. He was currently invisible, yes, but that was going to get disrupted the moment he cast a spell and it wasn’t something to rely on.
Then he proceeded more carefully into the settlement proper.
It was a graveyard. Everywhere he looked there were dead aranea, silent and motionless, legs curved inward and glassy black eyes staring at nothing in particular. The terrifying thing was that there was absolutely no sign of struggle anywhere he looked — no spell damage, lingering mana concentrations or groups of corpses piled together as they attempted to delay the attacker at some chokepoint. In fact, most of the aranea seemed to have simply dropped dead in the middle of some mundane activity, such as feeding on a rat corpse or making some kind of sculpture out of webbing.
After thirty minutes of trying to piece together what happened, Zorian was tempted to conclude that the third time traveler enacted some kind of wide-scale area of effect ritual that duplicated the effect of those purple beams of his and killed every aranea in the settlement in a single moment, before they even realized what was happening. The problem was not every aranea had died. Some of the males had survived whatever spell wiped out all of the females and roughly half of the males. And them being simply outside of the settlement when the spell took effect didn’t sound relevant, since the forward guards he passed earlier on the way to the settlement had also been dead and they were pretty far from the settlement proper.
After capturing several males and delving into their minds, he was starting to notice something. All of the males he captured felt… familiar to him. He had delved into their minds before, in the previous restart when he was retrieving the matriarch’s message from them.
No. It couldn’t be! The aranea weren’t time travelers so why would-
A sizzling sound accompanied by a flash of light heralded the opening of a magical portal somewhere behind him, and he immediately whirled around to confront the newcomer. Hopefully it would be Zach and-