The Years of Apocalypse - A Time Loop Progression Fantasy

Professor Endresen had taught Mirian all matter of lensing spells, mostly to look at the intricacies of glyph formation. However, the same principles worked to bend light to view distant objects.

From the newspapers she'd seen, she knew Ibrahim usually started the siege with an attack early on the morning of the 8th, so she layered a lens spell with a night-vision spell, and was surprised to find it actually worked. She just had to make sure she avoided looking at the nearby glyphlamps so she didn't blind herself.

There were two train lines that moved west out of the city, one that hugged the Ibaihan River, and another that eventually split off north towards west Baracuel. A few hours before dawn, she finally caught the distinct infrared radiating off an unscheduled train heading toward the city.

With the war in Persama so close to the city, Alkazaria had never quite given up its security protocols. There were still manned gatehouses along the wall where roads and train tracks entered the city. The western gates closest to the more southern track were, unexpectedly, silent, but the gatehouse north of them wasn't. It sent up a red flare, which meant 'stop.'

The train slowed, but it didn't stop.

Mirian could just make out the faint light of warm bodies pouring out of the cars as soon as the train came through the western gate.

That gate should have been closed, or should have gotten an alarm off. So he does have an advanced force, or is able to intimidate key people through advanced messages.

They quickly organized into columns of about a hundred, each of which split off.

He has companies heading to key objectives. Each one must have detailed orders, which means he had to craft them himself.
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She directed the lens spell to watch one group. That all came from a single train car!? Ibrahim was cramming at least a hundred people, all loaded with equipment, into each car. However, there were only 20 cars, including freight cars, which was actually above what the spell engine was rated for. At most, he has 2000 troops. The rest of the army must still be marching, but if he wants a surprise attack this early, he has to give up numbers for speed.

Mirian squinted, watching as the companies fanned out. He was trying to take a capital city with a single brigade. Absolute madness. There's at least twice as many guards as he has troops right now, and that doesn't take into account the Arcane Praetorians.

It was an impressive logistical feat. More, because the majority of his army could only have been established and organized several days ago at most.

The man is relentless, she thought. If anything, Rostal had understated it. I've at least taken breaks. I wonder if he has. Though come to think of it, neither has Troytin.

The minutes ticked by. Then, at last, the distant crack of gunfire echoed from the northwest gate, and two more flares went up. Alkazaria was big enough it never quite went to sleep, so as Ibrahim's companies ran into night laborers and drunks, shouting rose up as panicked people fled from the sudden incursion of troops. Mirian stopped channeling her night-vision spell so she could better pick out the flashes.

More flashes of light erupted from the northwest gate. Someone there was giving the Persamans trouble. Then there was an explosion, and dozens of flares went up all at once; the whole area looked like a miniature lightning storm frolicking with a rainbow.

By then, scattered firefights had erupted all over the western part of the city. From what she could tell, they were targeting key crossroads and guard stations, while another group seized gatehouses along the wall. The minutes ticked by. The city guards usually dealt with criminals, not organized military units, so were getting pushed back rapidly across the city. However, a company of a hundred was ill suited to both push and hold anything. Their rapid advance had more holes in it than an unwarded telegraph cable. She could make out city guards the Persamans had accidentally bypassed behind their lines running from street to street.

Alarm bells began to ring throughout the city, the loud gongs desperately clanging.

Finally, there was a reaction from the Citadel. Mirian moved over to one of the apartment's windows where she had a better view. Lights had come on everywhere, and, she suspected, divination machines. She could just make out commotion in one of the courtyards. Then, heart pounding, she watched as two dozen Arcane Praetorians levitated up from the citadel at once, traveling in four formations. Mirian rushed back over to the balcony, fingers gripping the railing tight as she leaned forward to watch.

The Persaman advanced force had the element of surprise. Based on how many of them had dropped behind cover, they had foreknowledge of when the counter-attack would come. They had rifles, and certainly were loaded with spellpiercer ammunition. They seemed highly motivated and disciplined. It was 2000 to 24.

But there really was just no substitute for raw spellpower.

The Praetorian formations were artillery and detection rolled into one. Gunfire erupted from the flat roofs of buildings, from windows, and from alleys. She could just make out the flare of shields around the Praetorians as they swooped across the city. Then came the retaliation.

Massive fireballs flared out, flashing bright in the night sky. Like red flowers, they bloomed all over the western line. Some of the Praetorians sent out thin beams of fire or lightning, while others attacked with airbusts. The coordinated fire was absolutely devastating, more so because the Praetorians seemed to be using divination to identify clusters of soldiers to target. Whether their guns barked out or stayed silent, they met the same fate: massive aerial bombardment.

Everywhere, the flash of spells was continuous. As the Praetorians smashed the Persaman forces, the garrison at the Citadel advanced through the streets. Some of them moved down the hill to reinforce the Praetorians and scattered guards, while another group started moving north, aiming to secure the gates along the wall. As soon as they had the north gate, they moved along the wall, occupying the fortifications with squads.

They finally stopped by the northwest gate, which had apparently finally fallen, but the exchange of fire hardly lasted ten minutes before one of the Praetorian formations came down and ripped the Persaman company apart.

Fires spread throughout the city, and the fire sorcerers were stuck behind the line of battle. The Praetorians were ignoring the fires in favor of targeting the invaders, but by now, the streets were filling with panicked civilians running about in every direction. Most must have been sheltering in fear, but in several buildings, it wasn't an option. The situation was rapidly devolving into chaos. Alkazarian construction didn't burn easily, but there was a lot of fire. As smoke billowed out into the night, it became harder to make out the shape of the battle. Still, the screams echoed up to her. A lot of innocent people were going to die tonight.

Mirian looked out west. The train wasn't there any longer. At some point, it had started moving back, probably to pick up a new group of soldiers.

By morning, the Baracueli military had retaken the sections of the wall they'd lost. Why the surprise attack? Mirian wondered. He kills a bunch of possible defenders, but it's mostly guards and civilians. And in exchange, loses most of a brigade, and alerts the city so they'll be prepared for the larger force.

***

The answer came two nights later.

By then, rumors were abound throughout the city of a Persaman army marching on Alkazaria. All trains coming into the city were stopped well outside the city walls and inspected. Meanwhile, a crisis hit the neighborhoods outside the city walls. Several presses of panicked people trying to shove through the gates ended in people being trampled to death. Mirian wasn't sure how he'd done it, but Ibrahim had already cut communication between the nearest fort and the city. The trains running too and from Cairnmouth and Madinahr continued, now with military escort. The city garrison was deployed to protect those tracks and begin making defensive fortifications, while the Baracuel Army opened its doors to recruits and militias. At the same time, the Praetorians ripped up the southwest tracks for a mile outside the city so that the occupied train line couldn't approach too close.

Ibrahim's forces began to deploy on that second night, pushing east and north as far as they could. His deployment, though, was too far away. Even with her view from the tower balcony, she couldn't make out much in the way of force information. Likely, the Praetorians had a much better picture though.

The reason for the attack became clear in the early morning of the 11th, just as the first light of dawn was breaking the horizon. Simultaneously, several warehouses full of fossilized myrvites in the south docks were sent into exothermic cascades, creating a tremendous fire and a toxic mana plume that killed dozens of people before the flames were contained. The toxic mana lingered, though, and with no way to clear that, the area was cordoned off, and the city's crowding became worse. Evacuees poured out of the city, mostly towards Madinahr.

Meanwhile, the battle raged at the edge of the city. Ibrahim knew exactly where to strike vulnerabilities on the Baracuel lines, so every time his forces raided a trench or assaulted a position, the defenders took heavy casualties. By then, though, it wasn't just the Praetorians holding the city. The garrison positioned light artillery all along the wall and moved heavy artillery into position at the Citadel. Emergency militias patrolled everywhere, while more were quickly trained up. The Citadel contained an absolutely massive store of arms and even the old chemical powders people had used in their guns before glyphwork and fossilized myrvite charges had replaced them. The roar of guns and bombs echoed across Alkazaria day and night.

The sabotage in the city continued, causing fear and panic to sweep the city along with the fires. But for all that he had accomplished, Ibrahim was outnumbered, outgunned, and simply unable to find the perfect weakness that would create the tidal wave he needed. Instead, it became a fight of attrition, each advance by either side ground out in blood.

A Persaman raid on the ports failed. The saboteurs the surprise attack had planted inside the city were eventually caught and dragged through the streets until their flesh was weathered away by cobblestones. The Persamans were forced to withdraw from the walls so the artillery couldn't bombard them, which only let more supplies slip into the city by train. Eventually, General Hanaran's division arrived.

Mirian watched it all, watching them fight like they were toy soldiers moving about a tabletop. Like the distant stars, she stayed above it, watching the pieces of a game board move about, contemplating how she might pluck a piece from the table to maximally distress the players.

She hated watching it. The casualties were tremendous, and as the weeks dragged on, the wounded overwhelmed the priests until the moans of the dying became as constant as the wheels of carts. But this is what I must do, to save them in the end, she told herself.

***

As the 6th of Duala approached, the battle continued on, even as the leylines began to burst apart, even as the sky danced with the surreal flames of the arcane auroras. Ibrahim made no appearance, and Troytin's minions stayed far to the west.

Mirian continued mapping out her plans, crumpling up her stupider ideas and burning them with raw fire. Too much to do. I need to be efficient. She worked backwards from what she needed, trying to map out the minimum number of days she'd need in Frostland's Gate and Palendurio. Too long. Plus, I'll need to visit a workshop somewhere to finish the final spellbook.

I need to find a way to start gathering people before I head off to Frostland's Gate. Or, I need to drastically decrease the time it takes to get in and out of the Vault.

It seemed intractable, but then again, so had the Battle of Torrviol at first. She had to believe she'd find a way.

Her next experiment was one she'd been saving until near the end of the cycle. It was a test she was reluctant to do, but was necessary.

There was a long-standing question as to how the things burrowed into the souls of the Prophets—whatever they were—worked. They transmitted all developments in the soul, including memories, mana capacity, bound objects, and curses. They also were connected to the Ominian through dreams, and to some place that seemed removed from the usual flow of time—or was just simply something she didn't understand. Finally, through both Specter and Apophagorga, she knew that severe damage to the soul, not just death, triggered an early transfer of the soul back in time.

However, she was convinced that the void must also be possible to remove.

But what was the nature of such a void?

Her revelation about multiple myrvites being able to move through four-dimensional space was just the most recent line of evidence. She'd held objects in the Labyrinth that could only have a fourth-dimensional component. It wasn't just the Divine Monument and the Ominian's Mausoleum—all of Enteria held things that regularly interacted with it.

So what if the void isn't just a void, but a hidden object within that fourth dimension, affecting the other three?

The ability to remove a hostile time traveler seemed critically necessary. And if it was possible, she needed to discover it first. The only viable test subject to explore what triggered an early reset, though, was herself.

Her work with the stone moles had been a critical first step, even if she hadn't quite realized it. With them, she had continued Jei's work of mapping out the fourth-dimensional space, and figuring out which arcane glyphs represented what positions, movements, or modifications of position. Her discoveries in the Labyrinth had led her to discover how to link arcane glyphs to celestial runes, which she had used so far mostly to show off to Calisto.

Now, she could combine those two discoveries, and map out the boundaries of the soul. The celestial runes could delve into it, and the glyphs could add a precision that the rune magic she'd seen otherwise didn't have. Likely, that was partially because she simply didn't know hundreds or perhaps thousands of runes, but she had to work with what she had.

As she had waited and watched in her tower apartment, she had scribed spell that made extensive use of tri-bonds. The result was a rune-glyph hybrid spell that could both move through the soul and produce divination results. On the last day of the cycle, Mirian finally deployed it, sending the needle-like blade of soul energy towards the boundary of the void. Carefully, she drove it in like a doctor's scalpel, trying to keep both a focused state of meditation and concentration on the complex spell.

She lost focus, and the spell sputtered out.

She tried again, then again, taking time to calm her breathing and steady her mind each time.

At last, she was getting the feel of the new spell. She brought the scalpel of soul energy to the edge of the void, and gently touched the inside boundary of it—

***

And woke in her bed, water dripping. It hadn't been painful. It had simply been over.

First boundary discovered, she thought.